The Reading Experience

Essayistic Thinking

David Bordwell:

Remember Web 1.0, when blogs were really logs? You know, diary-like accounts of events befalling the writer? The sense that every instant of one’s life needs preserving and broadcasting got absorbed into Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, I suppose. Today blogs are more likely to feature essayistic thinking. People slow-cook their blogs more, it seems to me, and they write in a reflective mode. Since our blog has always been, um, expansive in such ways, I welcome the Ruminative Turn.

Like most academics, we write long for a reason. You need more words to dig into a question. That’s why books exist. But mid-range is good too. The blog format suits specualtive, exploratory work and informal prose that wouldn’t show up in a journal. In this para-academic register, the aim is to spread ideas and information around. A reviewer of the book I mention below puts it well: “democratic, attainable erudition.”

Ways In Which Less Becomes More

An Introduction to Literary Minimalism:

I refute the equation that ‘less’ does indeed mean ‘less’ by suggesting ways in which less becomes more in the collections of minimalist short stories of these three writers. It is my contention that ‘more’ means a richness of effect, an interpretative polyvalency, an interactive vitality which exists because, not despite of, the ‘less’ which is minimalism’s restraint, its tendency towards reduction, its dependence upon absence for effect. My central argument is that minimalist narrative techniques create an interpretative indeterminacy which asks that the reader make a growing contribution to its meaning, culminating in an awareness of what is revealed, rather than resolved, at the short story’s ending.

Recommended Reviews

Justin St. Clair on two new books about Thomas Pynchon:

IN MANY RESPECTS, literary criticism is inherently revisionist, so it should come as little surprise that the grand old eremite of American letters should himself be undergoing something of a late-career reevaluation, even before he shoves off, gently or otherwise, into his own good night. Two recent reassessments. . .offer overlapping reconsiderations of Pynchon’s oeuvre and its politics.

David Winters on Jane Unrue's Love Hotel:

We read because we want to be somewhere else, but the best books make us realize that “elsewhere” is where we already are. So, writing can turn toward or away from the known and the knowable, aiming at either information or mystery. One direction reports, reproduces, represents; the other points elsewhere, bringing the unprecedented into presence.

The Necessity of Non-Genre Writing

Stephen Mitchelmore, "'Foreign to the resources of literature'":

The shock is a minor one and this is not a post to complain of its omission or to speculate on the competence of the judges [of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize] and instead to wonder if the failure of such novels to walk away with such a title is a sign of the necessity and vitality of non-genre writing, in which form and content struggle into existence on their own merit rather than rushing to adopt a generic mould for safe passage, and that it is only committed amateurs on the sidelines, those not on a career path or with corporate sponsors to appease, who are able to subject themselves to the full force of writing as a presence in itself.

Falling Together

Sarah Gerard's Binary Star is not a formally conventional novel, although it is an intensely realistic one. Conventional storytelling and realism are frequently conflated, as if the latter requires the former to manifest itself or the former naturally produces the latter. But neither is the case. Plot-driven fiction, to the extent it does indeed have "plot" (of the soft diagrammed by Gustav Freytag in his famous "Pyramid"), could actually be called a distortion of reality, as it falsely implies that life unfolds as a "story," complete with discernible beginnings (the exposition), middles (the rising action) and ends (the climax). "Realism" is arguably better served by a formal structure that minimizes plot, that in fact more closely achieves fidelity to real life by eliminating it altogether.

Gerard does not entirely eliminate plot in Binary Star. Things happen. The novel's twin protagonists, an anorexic woman and her alcoholic, sometimes violent boyfriend, embark on a road trip across the country, so that much of the novel takes the form of a picaresque journey, albeit one that seems headed to nowhere in particular. Even so, the narrative isn't always organized chronologically, as it moves freely into flashbacks depicting earlier episodes in the protagonists' troubled relationship, as well as the woman's experiences as a graduate student and a teacher. By the end of the novel the woman and the boyfriend, John, have apparently split, so there is some change from the circumstances obtaining at the beginning of the woman's story (she is herself the narrator), but on the other hand it certainly does not seem that the psychological or existential problems causing her anorexia have abated, as she tells us she is down to 85 pounds. "All that's left is a remnant," she declares.

This self-characterization is actually the final expression of the metaphor evoked in the novel's title and that is extended throughout the novel as a kind of structural conceit. The narrator and John are associated with binary stars:

A binary star is a system containing two stars that orbit their common center of mass.

Binary stars are gravitationally bound.

Gravity is the way we fall together.

The narrator is a graduate student in astronomy, so the facts we are offered about  the nature of the binary star system reflect her own awareness that her relationship with John can be figuratively captured in this binary star metaphor, to which she returns so insistently that it becomes a conceit that really provides the novel with its primary formal strategy. While this might seem to bring an underlying "poetic" quality to the novel's aesthetic scheme, the device is employed so explicitly, with so little effort to conceal its pertinence to the novel's two main characters, that really it serves mainly as another way of exposing us to the narrator's perceived world, of making as realistic as possible what it's like to live in the world of the anorexic.

It does seem to me that depicting the narrator/protagonist's experience of the world as realistically--as close to the truth of the situation--as possible is the fundamental ambition of Binary Star. The novel's reluctance to impose a conventional plot on its main characters' experience, to offer us a familiar narrative of redemption, is one way of achieving its realism, but the style Gerard has her narrator employ also contributes to the overall impression we receive that we are being immersed in the narrator's reality. The prose is the very definition of spare and restrained, paragraphs are attenuated, often no more than a sentence or two. Many passages consist of extended dialogue, which is presented without quotation marks, as if observing this convention might require too much energy. Thus the narrator's account of her increasingly desperate condition mirrors that condition, reinforcing the story of her plight through the very way she tells the story.

Binary Star succeeds on its own terms, effectively depicting the circumstances in which someone with an eating disorder must struggle to cope with a situation she clearly can't control. If the characters are not especially memorable as characters (although the extremity of their situation is), they are believable, and that seems their primary purpose in the novel--to believably illustrate the damage done by eating disorders and addiction. This is a novel whose subject is its most important element, and all others--plot, character, point of view, style--are subordinate to it, valuable for bringing the subject to life, not for their own sake. The novel has aesthetic interest, but to read the novel for its aesthetic features is ultimately to miss the point.

None of this is problematic if you believe that the objective of a work of fiction is precisely to make us believe in its world (in this case, an approximation of the "real" world), so that we might share the perspective of one or more of its characters and in so doing "empathize" with that character. This is a common expectation of fiction, an expectation whose importance for some readers I do not discount. For me, however, it doesn't often enter into my reading experiences. There are some novels in which being lured into a character's perspective is a crucial part of the aesthetic effect, as in one using an unreliable narrator, for example. But I am generally drawn to fiction in which advancing literary art is a purpose sufficient unto itself, not a tool for producing empathy or identification. Binary Star is in many ways admirable, although more in the way of a good deed performed well than as a flash of artistic brilliance.

A Different and Less Comfortable Plot

There is no inherent reason why what is called "academic criticism" cannot be of interest to non-academic readers. Certainly the formalist approach of New Criticism, which offers the reader a more focused perspective on the way a work of literature produces its effects, as well as an older-style historical criticism, which offers a view of the work's affiliations with other writing of the period and with the ideas and assumptions characteristic of the period itself, could be of interest to the general reader, although even when these critical methods were ascendant, academic critics were often enough perceived as too far removed from ordinary readers's concerns. Whether or not this perception was in some cases justified, certainly the strategy of "close reading" associated with the New Critics has persisted as a valid critical principle even among general-interest book reviewers, and if current literary culture can't be called rigorous in its adherence to shared critical standards, it does retain at least some residual allegiance to the idea that works of literature, including new works, deserve, and can withstand, some degree of conscientious explication and analysis.

On the other hand, academic criticism in its current form, the form dominant in most academic journals and the most prestigious academic presses, is not likely to be of interest or use to readers interested in how criticism might help to sharpen the reading experience. While academic critics still often profess to be offering a "close reading" of a text, it is usually not a reading intended to illuminate the work in such a way that readers might approach it more fruitfully. Not only is the interest the critic takes in the work likely to be from a narrow perspective centered on politics, history, or social context, but the political considerations won't simply concern the political background of the author or subject, and the historical and social analysis won't primarily situate the work in its time to assist understanding or clarify themes and implicit assumptions, all of which could still contribute to a more informed reading experience. Instead, the political agenda will the critic's own, as a part of which critical analysis is intended, while historical, social, and cultural forces will themselves be the critic's ultimate focus, not the way these forces shape the aesthetic character of a poem, a novel, or a writer's work as a whole.  "Literary theory" may be offered, but there won't be much that's literary about it.

Of course, very little that is actually offered to general readers in book reviews, magazines, or trade publishing could be called academic criticism. Via the latter, the only attention given to literature is through biographies of writers, which in turn become the prompt for what passes as literary criticism in periodicals such as the New York Review of Books, noodling essays in which the reviewer makes sweeping statements about a writer's work, often simply repeating the conventional wisdom, while otherwise mostly recapitulating whatever biography is under review. In this context, Michael Gorra's Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Massterpiece is a welcome and potentially important book. The title suggests the book will be a work of criticism elucidating the first of James's "major" novels, Portrait of a Lady, but in elucidating the novel Gorra draws on James's life experiences as well, so that the book could be described as criticism informed by biography or as the rare kind of biography that is also credible as literary criticism.

For the most part, Gorra focuses on the years during which James is working on Portrait, but he also ranges throughout James's life, considering episodes and events that informed the development of James's sense of himself as a writer, culminating in Portrait of a Lady, the book most critics and scholars have long identified as the first truly "Jamesian" of his novels, as well as the direction of James's life and work following Portrait,  including discussions of his final novels, which in many ways show the techniques and concerns found in the earlier novel extended even more radically and exhaustively. Gorra also chronicles James's relationships with important people in his life, such as brother William and friend Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose romantic feelings for James went unrequited. Gorra judiciously handles the question of James's sexuality, allowing that circumstantial evidence suggests James's sexual desires were likely homoerotic, while also acknowledging there is no actual evidence that he ever acted on those desires (or that he ever acted on any sexual desires at all).

Readers interested in a biography of James should get enough emphasis on the life to satisfy their curiosity, perhaps thus making Gorra's exposition of the genesis of Portrait of a Lady and extended analysis of the text itself more palatable, especially as Gorra does about as good a job as it's possible to do in showing how biography can help us at times to appreciate a writer's work. James's experiences as a voluntary exile in Europe can clarify his development of the "international theme," the portrayal of Americans encountering the "old world" of Europe, while learning that Portrait of a Lady's protagonist, Isabel Archer, is in part based on James's "favorite" cousin, Minny Temple, might help explain why he chose to focus on a female protagonist in this first really complex treatment of the theme and perhaps provide insight into the perceived authorial attitude toward Isabel.

Still, Gorra implicitly recognizes the limitations of biographical criticism in making his book not about Henry James but his novel, one which Gorra believes is among the best and most significant novels in American literature. Ultimately his goal is to enhance our appreciation of this novel (and indirectly of Henry James as a fiction writer), in the most old-fashioned sense to account for its greatness. What Gorra has really produced in Portrait of a Novel is a work of critical eclecticism. He borrows from a number of critical approaches, including some of those currently ascendant in academic criticism, as well as more traditional "scholarly" concerns, and in the process demonstrates how criticism can draw on a variety of ways of thinking about literature as a phenomenon of human expression and culture in order to satisfy the ultimate goal of providing a clarifying perspective on a morally and aesthetically complex work of literature.

In this way, Portrait of a Novel is at least as important for what it represents as a work of criticism as it as a specific commentary on Henry James's novel. Which is not say the commentary on the novel Gorra provides isn't insightful, in some ways definitive, offering a reading of Portrait of a Lady that situates it in its time and place and in it's author's body of work, and that explicates its formal and thematic particulars in a style that does justice to the novel's complexity and could appeal to dedicated Jamesians, while also making the analysis accessible to more casual readers of James. In a typically pellucid passage, Gorra considers Isabel's decision to turn down the marriage proposal offered by Lord Warburton:

When Warburton proposes, Isabel recognizes that she has stepped into a scene she has read too many times before. She may not yet understand just what she wants, but she does recognize that this scene's very familiarity stands in itself as a reason to say no. She rejects the plot that other people might write for her, and insists instead that she must be free to choose, free to make her own mistakes. Her choice here may even be the right one, though that doesn't mean it will lead to happiness. For Isabel cannot escape the fate she seems to crave, the fate that waits to test her in the book's 500 remaining pages. Nor can we. However much we may want to live on in the world of green lawns, we have to recognize that James has made a different and less comfortable plot around this particular woman. . . .

If this account provides insight into Isabel's character, and thus into the "500 remaining pages" of the novel for which she serves as protagonist, it also exemplifies a certain kind of critical discourse, focused on "the text itself," which it is intended to illuminate, but free of acadamese and external agenda, accessible to any serious reader while foregoing the effort to popularize Henry James for a "broader" audience that probably doesn't exist. James is indisputably a sometimes difficult writer (Portrait of a Lady somewhat less so than, say, The Golden Bowl), and it is a difficulty that astute criticism can help to ameliorate, but James is never going to appeal to all readers, nor does criticism to be worthwhile need to make works of literature equally valuable to all.

Gorra also abstains from personalizing his consideration of Portrait of a Lady, from providing "more Gorra" as this reviewer bizarrely wanted him to do. If biography has replaced criticism as the most widely available form of engagement with literature and literary history, the aimlessly subjective focus on the critic's random thoughts and vague impressions has become increasingly more conspicuous in the only remaining form of periodical criticism, the book review. While the emphasis on subjective response is consistent enough with an egocentric American culture, it reduces criticism to the means of recording the critic's idiosyncratic (and often opaque) expressions of "feeling." That Michael Gorra admires Portrait of Lady greatly, that it has had a profound effect on the way he thinks about both life and literature, is perfectly evident, but he translates his personal admiration into a critical language that is descriptive rather than emotional, that registers the novel's palpable effects, not his own intangible fancies.

Our current literary culture could certainly benefit from more books like Portrait of Novel, books that avoid both the intellectual trendiness and abstraction of academic criticism and the undisciplined impressionism of popular criticism. We need popular criticism to be more than biographies overstuffed with trivial details of writers' lives at the expense of greater understanding of their work, an understanding conventional biographies simply can't provide. We need the sort of "in-between" criticism Gorra provides in this book, which could serve as a model for critics who are willing to indulge some of our apparent need for biographical context while keeping the focus on the art the writer made from his/her life. One innovative book does not a trend make, but anyone following up on Gorra's lead would be taking another step toward reviving literary criticism.

Tom McCarthy Review

My review of Tom McCarthy's Satin Island is now available at Full Stop:

The most obvious explanation for the way McCarthy’s books have been received, at least in Great Britain, is that British fiction largely skipped over the phase in 20^th century fiction generally labeled “postmodern,” instead renewing after World War II the British tradition of social and psychological realism (the latter supplementing the former as the only really lasting legacy of modernism). With a few notable exceptions — B.S. Johnson, arguably the early Ian McEwan, most recently Gabriel Josipovici — postwar British fiction has offered little in the way of “experimental” or “innovative” fiction of the sort associated with postmodernism in the United States (or, in a different way, continental Europe). . . .