The Reading Experience

Easy Idealism

In the "Interchapter: A Manifesto," included in The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom asserts that "True poetic history is the story of how poets as poets have suffered other poets, just as any true biography is the story of how anyone suffered his own family--or his own displacement of family into lovers and friends." In using the word "poets" Bloom does not confine himself to those writers of lyric poetry whom we now designate with the term but certainly includes writers or fiction and drama as well, all those writers who belong to what we now call collectively "literature," and thus by "poetic history" Bloom implicitly invokes literary history as a whole. This is probably the most direct explanation of what Bloom means by the "anxiety of influence" to be found in the book, and while it might even seem somewhat flippant, unpacking this statement could perhaps help clarify the insight into the nature of literary influence that is likely to remain Bloom's most lasting contribution to literary criticism, while also suggesting a view of literary history that perhaps cuts across the grain of most current notions of writing as a literary vocation that is itself embedded in what is called a literary "community."

The "other poets" that any individual poet "suffers" are what Bloom calls "precursor poets," those poets who are in fact most important in motivating the current poet to "overcome" the influence of the precursor poet. The attempt to do this does indeed produce "anxiety," not in the poet him/herself but manifest in the poems produced in the attempt. To say the younger poet (an "ephebe," in Bloom's parlance) suffers the precursor is to say both that the ephebe feels an intense rivalry (again, not so much a personal rivalry but one rooted in the latecomer poet's anxiety about the "originality" of his/her own work) but also that there is a kind of suffering involved in the "displacement" of the precursor, who in the poet's development is as important as family is for most people. Ultimately the poet recognizes the significance of the precursor's example (although elsewhere Bloom notes Wallace Stevens's reluctance to acknowledge the influence of Whitman), but also the imperative to break free.

Literary history--at least at the level of the time-tested and canonical--is thus the history of this struggle among "strong poets," the writers whose own achievement can't finally be separated from their simultaneous dependence on and resistance to the achievements of their eminent predecessors. In short, writers who want to be taken seriously can't ignore writing from the past because writing in the present inextricably emerges from the writing of the past, giving substance to the claim that the origin of a poem is always another poem. Writers find themselves within a "tradition" they can't finally evade, although in most cases they don't wish to evade it, but instead to transform it, at least to the extent that the tradition now can accommodate their own work. According to T. S. Eliot, the tradition itself is also thus transformed, but in Bloom's analysis this is not the orderly, "organic" process Eliot described, and "tradition" is certainly not the near-devotional object some of Eliot's followers want it to be. Instead it is fraught with conflict and unacknowledged envy.

It is also, of course, a conflict that arises from intense admiration. One attempts to "overcome" an influence only because the influence is real, because the poet and the work in question has had a profound effect on the would-be poet. But would-be poets are always going to be "anxious" in their admiration because the very qualities they admire pose the greatest threat to their own projects. How can those projects succeed if "other poets" have already made all the best moves and come upon the best subjects?

While Bloom is advancing a Freudian narrative in which quasi-psychological forces are manifested in the relationship between literary works, not a direct Freudian analysis of poets themselves, surely the notion of "rivalry" among writers is neither far-fetched nor confined to the use of images and tropes within writing itself. Certainly Bloom's focus on the anxiety of influence as a material textual feature is the more interesting application of psychoanalytic theory, providing as it does a concrete interpretive tool, but isn't it likely that writers view their own contemporaries not just as colleagues (perhaps not even colleagues) but as antagonists of a sort, potential threats to their artistic visions and literary reputations? How easy is it for a writer to rise above competitive impulses that to some extent seem only natural?

These questions for me are prompted in part by a current literary culture that seems devoted to creating an impression of great collegiality among writers. The most immediate and influential form of literary criticism--book reviewing--is dominated by novelists and poets, some of whom are also perceptive critics but many of whom have been assigned to write reviews under the apparent assumption that fiction writers are best situated to judge other fiction, poets other poetry. This assumption is dubious at best, but the primary effect of this practice is that most reviews dispense abundant praise, often long on superlatives and short on real analysis.

In addition, almost all books now come heavily "blurbed" by other writers, who often seem determined to outdo each other in the rhetorical excess with which they praise their fellow authors. The literary corners of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook liberally engage in various digital versions of handclapping for writers especially admired and frequently feature explicit appeals to "community" among writers, as if literature was a civic organization, or a team sport in which one pledges one's mutual support for teammates. Perhaps it is in this context that we can understand the controversy over "negative reviews": Some writers, and many critics, fail to fully join the team, venturing to question a team member's accomplishment and disrupting group camaraderie.

In surveying literary history, it is hard to identify another period in which serious writers expected to be, or indicated any desire to be, part of a literary community. Paris after World War I is often discussed as the setting for a gathering of like-minded modernists, but Hemingway's A Moveable Feast ought to be evidence enough that whatever friendships that might have formed at this time were laced with barely suppressed resentment and condescension, examples of writers suffering other writers. It seems to me that the push for "community" among writers is a direct function of the "program era" in American literature, the relocation of literary life to the academy, where it is administered in creative writing programs, where other writers are indeed colleagues, and where the wheels driving publication and recognition are greased by the spread of literary magazines sponsored by creative writing programs themselves and the substitution of tenure for commercial success. Under these circumstances, it becomes much easier to think of other writers as fellow members of a community (the community of creative writing teachers and students) rather than rivals, although also much easier as well to write safe but duly crafted, convention-approved fiction and poetry rather than challenge the hegemony of craft and convention by following inspiration where it leads.

Certainly at a time when literature occupies an ever-diminishing portion of public attention and offers an ever-diminishing prospect of providing a livelihood, the removal of writers to the security of academe and the rewards of community was and is understandable and perhaps inevitable. But ultimately this model makes no allowance for the more unruly impulses that kindle the imagination and that make the most profound kind of creativity possible. As Bloom says elsewhere in The Anxiety of Influence,

It does happen that one poet influences another, or more precisely, that one poet’s poems influence the poems of the other, through a generosity of the spirit, even a shared generosity. But our easy idealism is out of place here. Where generosity is involved, the poets influenced are minor or weaker; the more generosity, and the more mutual it is, the poorer the poets involved.

Today's literary culture of community doesn't much account for "misprision," or creative misinterpretation, because it doesn't really have much room for interpretation and judgment at all. All writing is taken with the same congratulatory enthusiasm, allowed to interpret itself through reviews stuffed with plot summary or overwritten superlatives. Program-era fiction gave rise to the vacuous marketing term "literary fiction," which is mostly applied to the kind of proficiently-written but uninspiring stories and novels issued by the writers within creative writing departments needing tenure or first publication. To judge by the blurbs, the tweets, and the tumblr posts these writers use to promote this work, they are reasonably satisfied with the results, but we could wonder whether some of them, perhaps among the more ambitious, don't finally feel a crippling constraint in all such enforced "generosity of spirit."

What is Sensed and Felt

In his introduction to Infinite Fictions, his new collection of the reviews he has written over the past several years, David Winters refers to the review as "trivial," even contending that "triviality is among the allures of the form." Of course, Winters surely does not really think his reviews are in fact trivial--if they were, why would he expect anyone to read them, perhaps for some a second time now that they have been bundled together in a book? Instead, his characterization speaks to a no doubt widespread perception that book reviews are utilitarian and ephemeral, good for immediate consumer guidance but without lasting value as literary criticism (to the extent literary criticism itself has lasting value).

Infinite Fictions itself certainly belies the notion that a book review cannot be a credible form of literary criticism. Far from engaging in "trivial" exercises in plot summary or facile judgment, Winters consistently provides meticulous description and analysis, dispensing praise or criticism only while also offering evidence and reasoning to support it. Perhaps in finding the review a congenial form precisely because of it "triviality," Winters is really expressing some impatience with academic criticism, which in its greater length, supposed rigor, and theoretical sophistication is more genuinely serious criticism--"real" criticism. Academic criticism in its present incarnation, while ostensibly often invoking "close reading" as an interpretive strategy, generally uses the strategy to "situate" a text within a larger theoretical, political, historical, or cultural perspective, not as a way of reckoning with a work's literary qualities per se.

Reckoning with literary qualities is something Winters does exceptionally well. Most of the books discussed in the first section of Infinite Fictions ("On Literature") are complex, unconventional works of fiction, and Winters is painstaking in attempting to describe the strategies the author at hand seems to be using, to account for the effect of reading the work as registered in Winters's own experience of it. As he says in the introduction to the book, "As a reviewer, all I can do is try to stay true to the texture of that experience. . .Strange as it sounds, each of these books briefly allowed me to subtract myself from reality. In this respect, when writing reviews, I'm less intent on making prescriptions than on exploring the space left by my subtraction." Thus Winters attends to the specificity of the reading experience itself, something academic criticism generally abjures, while also avoiding the superficial approach of the most "trivial" kind of book reviews, the kind that aim merely to "make prescriptions."

"Subtraction" from reality perhaps seems like a version of being "immersed" in a book, but I would presume Winters means something closer to what John Dewey called "pure experience," which Dewey believed becomes most accessible to us as aesthetic experience.  According to Dewey, aesthetic experience is "experience freed from the forces that impede and confuse its development as experience; freed, that is, from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself." The reader truly receptive to the kind of experience art, in this case literary art, makes available is not in some kind of mystical trance but is fully engaged in an act of what Dewey calls "recreation," perceiving the writer's conceptual and expressive moves thoroughly enough that the reader in effect replays those moves. Literary criticism then becomes in part the attempt to communicate the tenor of this reading experience through the most felicitous description and analytical insight the critic can muster.

I am not suggesting that David Winters is a proponent of the aesthetic philosophy of John Dewey, merely that Winters's account of his reading and reviewing practices seems strikingly evocative of Dewey's theory of "art as experience," which seems to me the most compelling elucidation of both the impulse to create art and the most fruitful way of responding to it. Criticism of fiction, of course, requires first of all an attentiveness to language, and Winters again proves very adept at assessing the stylistic qualities of the fiction he considers. Indeed, he gives special attention throughout the first section of the book to writers associated with the "school of Lish," such as Gary Lutz, Sam Lipsyte, Christine Schutt, and Dawn Raffel (not to mention Lish himself), writers whose work is particularly focused on intricate effects of language. His skill at "close reading" is repeatedly demonstrated in these reviews.

About Lutz's Divorcer, Winters observes that "it's as if divorce has seeped into the structure of these 'stories,' like a rot in the grain of their language: something sweetly corrupt that can't be cut out of them. It's buried deep in their syntax, motivating the phrasing that estranges the opening of any errant sentence from its end. In each of the book's seven entries, words are put to work on pulling something apart--a family, a body, a memory of bodies together--in ways that render how life's breaking points really feel when reached." A story by Lipsyte "starts with a sentence setting an initial condition. The second sentence reconfigures the first, curving or swerving back into it. The next sentence swerves harder still, and so on, always with the aim of raising the stakes, tightening the tautness." Dawn Raffel's prose "clings closely to sensory surfaces, calibrating language to the contours of a world which can't clearly be spoken of."

Winters is drawn to fiction in which language does indeed mark a limit, beyond which the real can be sensed or captured fleetingly but otherwise "can't clearly be spoken of." Writing becomes a site where such brief moments of revelation  might be afforded, but only through its implicit testimony that the effort to fully grasp a transcendent reality must fail. Thus the reviews in Infinite Fictions are focused on works that are not just stylistically but also formally adventurous, fiction that for the most part makes no pretense to be an exercise in realism, since the most realistic fiction would be that which concedes its own impossibility. Several of the books Winters discusses might even be described as subverting literature itself, working to produce a kind of anti-literature, such as Lars Iyers's Dogma, which deliberately fails to become literature as "a means of overcoming it," instead becoming "less than literature." Jason Schwartz's John the Posthumous is "impossible to synopsize" because it subverts the reading process itself: "In this respect, Schwartz's writing spins the reading process into reverse. His prose puts readers in a position where the most rudimentary aspects of reading are no longer givens . . . ." What Winters says about Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch could in some ways apply to most of the fiction he considers. Murnane's novel "begins before literature" in its refusal to take on conventional literary form. It "abandons the prearranged reading paths of realist novels, presenting instead a series of scenes set for stories that forget to occur; it progresses by means of digression and detour."

Winters includes several reviews of translated works, which also proceed through digression and detour, through the avoidance of the usual literary devices that distort rather than illuminate. Appropriately, he does not in these reviews attempt close stylistic analysis (which would at best be misleading for a translated text) but instead emphasizes more plausibly discernible elements such as voice or setting. If these reviews are somewhat more impressionistic, Winters nevertheless conveys a vivid sense of the way these books also participate in the kind of experimentation with form that in its determination to be "less than literature" still manages to extend the possibility of literature. "The book's most unfathomably mystery lies in the way it insistently spells itself out," he writes of Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque. "As a result. . .literature is returned to the realm of experience. The novel is not a puzzle to be solved. It has always and already solved itself, bringing what was buried back to life." Similarly, Andrzej Stasiak's Dukla is "all surface, all the way down. . .In the end there is no novel, and all that's left is what is sensed and felt."

Part 2 of Infinite Fictions, "On Theory," ranges widely over several recent books of literary theory and philosophy, including Terry Eagleton's The Event of Literature, Franco Moretti's Distant Reading, and Simon Critchley's The Faith of the Faithless. Some of the books reviewed are more or less straight theory or philosophy, such as the two books on Heidegger Winters discusses, a book by Jacques Ranciere, and The Faith of the Faithless. Others are works of theory as a mode of literary criticism, and, while Winters exhibits a thorough familiarity in general with contemporary critical theory and its philosophical roots, his reviews of the latter books are the most revealing and provide the most continuity with the underlying approach to criticism (and to literature) exemplified in the first part of Infinite Fictions.

In his review of Eagleton's book, Winters appears to side with Eagleton in the latter's disapproval of theory's drift from a focus on the specificity of literature to a "culturalism" that, in Winters's words, makes literary criticism "a subfield of cultural studies." Winters describes Eagleton's attempt to renew theory as the attempt "to reassert the centrality of close literary analysis, recovering literature as a determinate object of study." Winters's ultimate lack of enthusiasm for Franco Moretti's quantitative method of "distant reading," the polar opposite of "close literary analysis," is palpable:

The life that inheres in literature seems too capacious to be captured by a particular critical method. Ironically, many of Moretti's methods rely on instrumental reason--his ideal of distance belongs to the bourgeois spirit. But criticism can't be contained by what any one critic wants of it. Indeed, criticism reveals rhythms of its own, and these are not necessarily those of science.

In his review of Mark M. Freed's Robert Musil and the Nonmodern, a book that is typical of much contemporary academic criticism in its effort to "apply" critical theory and philosophy to works of literature, Winters perhaps most directly identifies the limitations of theory as a primary mode of literary criticism: "The academic study of literature has reached a slightly strange understanding of itself, if it assumes that insights drawn from philosophy and social theory can straightforwardly account for aspects of fictional worlds, and fictional characters." Winters continues: "Until critics give some closer attention to why they're applying their theories to fictional objects, such applications might seem to rely on little more than a confusion of categories."

Theory can provide a valuable perspective on the implications and entanglements of literature, but it can't subsume it. Winters concludes this review (which really becomes a reflection on the power of Musil's The Man Without Qualities) by asserting that "There's something about The Man Without Qualities that seems to resist conclusive criticism. Something not so much unfinished as uniquely continuous; infinite. The reason the novel is unlike anything else you've ever read is because it goes on reading itself when you're finished reading it." This "something" is a something not just about this particular novel but all great works of literature. They elude our attempts to find the critical angle that will render them finite, fully fathomed. Criticism can help us begin to fathom what we read, even if a good beginning is all we might really hope for. This book shows David Winters to be a critic remarkably gifted at getting us started.

On the Fiction of Dawn Raffel

Dawn Raffel is now probably best known for her 2012 book, The Secret Life of Objects, an unorthodox memoir in which the author invokes her past through reflections prompted by various objects she still possesses. While this book succeeds on its own terms, offering a concise but affecting account of the writer's relationships with family and friends, it would be an injustice if its relative success came to overshadow the accomplishments of her fiction, which are numerous and distinctive.

If Raffel's fiction is in danger of being overlooked, this admittedly might be due to its rather infrequent appearance. Her first book, the story collection In the Year of Long Division, came out in 1995, her first novel, Carrying the Body, was published in 2002, while a second collection of stories, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, appeared in 2010. (Raffel's author page indicates that a new book will soon be published, although it is described as a further work of nonfiction, a "cultural biography," rather than fiction). The long intervals between books apparently comes not from wavering ambition but an overabundance of care, as Raffel has spoken in interviews of taking up to a year on one of her stories, most of which are seldom more than a half-dozen pages long.

Although Raffel is a former student of Gordon Lish, and thus could loosely be grouped among those current writers influenced by his notion of "consecution" (writers such as Gary Lutz and Christine Schutt), the care that she takes is as much with the intervals and silences between sentences as it is in the construction and linking of sentences the strategies for which have been adopted by most of Lish's acolytes. Certainly Raffel takes pains over the rhythms and tonalities of her sentences, as we can plainly see in the very first story of In the Year of Long Division:

Fishing was the only sport in our town. How it was. Pick. Any house in our town was any house in our town. Any wind in our town was the wind in our town. Down was down. Queasy was a way of life. Bored to crackers, snap, kerplunk. ("We Were Our Age")

If some readers might find Raffel's prose "difficult," its difficulty arises first of all from primacy of sound over sense. The stop-and-start rhythm, the strategic repetition, the assonance modifying into outright rhyme (our-house-town-down)--these are the most immediate qualities of a passage such as this, and whatever narrative or descriptive work they also do must accommodate itself to the intonations of Raffel's language.

That language does indeed perform this other work, however, in its own unorthodox but ultimately compelling way. "Any house in our town was any house in our town" tells us almost all we need to know about this town, making any further sensory description superfluous. "Down was down," in addition to providing Raffel's signature wordplay, also clues us in on the type of wind pervading the town, the kind ensuring that "Queasy was a way of life."

But Raffel's attention to the lacunae between and among these sentences, to what needn't or perhaps even can't be said, is just as painstaking. So ruthless is she in eliminating the unnecessary, in fact, trusting in the reader to bridge the gaps and to acknowledge the unstated, that some readers might be disoriented from the lack of expository directions and situational detail. This feature of Raffel's fiction is perhaps what has encouraged the view that it is a version of "minimalism" (for example, in John Domini's review of Restless Universe reprinted in his book The Sea-God's Herb), but while Raffel's work does to some extent recall the similarly reduced fictions of Mary Robison, her stories rely even less on narrative than most minimalist fiction, in which conventional "drama" is often missing but things happen nevertheless. Raffel's stories convey something closer to a literary impressionism, a blurry but distinguishable evocation of a scene or episode, often, as in "We Were Our Age," an exercise in memory more than storytelling.

A more conventionally recognizable feature of Raffel's fiction is her extensive use of dialogue, which is in fact the dominant mode in some stories. (Perhaps reflecting the influence of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, whom Raffel has identified as among her earliest inspirations.) One of the stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, "The Myth of Drowning," is entirely a dialogue set-piece, and its development is typical, as a man and a woman before sleep talk about a story the woman had told:

"How was it that she drowned?"

"Who knows," she said. "She couldn't swim. Or cramps. Maybe undertow. The undertow was wicked"

"You know what I mean."

"No, what do you mean?"

"I mean people were there," he said. "That's how you told it. A crowd on the shore."

"That's what the myth is: Drowning is noisy. It isn't," she said.

"It isn't," she said.

"I heard you the first time."

"Tired, I said."

"Broad daylight," he said.

"And shallow," he said. "No one could see her?"

Although by the end of this brief dialogue (around two pages long) we can piece together what must be the context of the conversation (the couple have had a tense evening, the man believes the woman sees herself as the drowning woman), the absence of authorial assistance is made even more acute by the abbreviated, discontinuous nature of the dialogue itself. But that comes not from a distortion of human speech patterns but an affirmation of it, an attempt to capture the way we actually talk to each other with fidelity. As David Winters says of Raffel's dialogue, "This is speech as it is spoken in life, not in literature: shorn of explanatory apparatus, driven more by conflicting agendas than by semantics, and, in its resultant asymmetry, rife with abrupt about-faces and non sequiturs."

Consistent with the strategies of her prose style more generally, Raffel's dialogue calls on the reader's capacity to infer the not-said from the said, the encompassing context from the fleeting clues we do get. In asking us to read closely and carefully, she also suggests that reading fiction is not merely the registering of the words on the page but also remaining alert to their subtler intimations, the discursive and aesthetic reverberations created by the tension between what those words signify and what they leave unexpressed. The reader's experience will be incomplete without this sort of attentiveness, but this doesn't make her work difficult or inaccessible. Only readers who close themselves off to the possibility of a more expansive reading experience, expansive in the sense that reading is more than gliding along the surface of words but can be provisional and recursive, will find Raffel's fiction perplexing. Patient readers will find it enlivening.

It might seem that Raffel's aesthetic strategy would work best in short fiction (and some of her stories are short enough to be called "flash fiction"), but her only novel, Carrying the Body, is also quite good as well. It shares with Raffel's stories a focus on family relations, although where many of the stories focus on relationships between parents and children, Carrying the Body portrays family drama more broadly, beginning with a pair of estranged sisters, one of whom left home young to experience life more fully, while the older sister remained in the home to care for their debilitated father. The younger sister returns to the home with her young son and eventually leaves again, abandoning the child, who becomes increasingly ill, to the ministrations of the older sister, a job for which she is clearly not prepared. The novel traces the development of the relationship between the older sister (referred to throughout as "the aunt") and the child, using the same elliptical methods as in the stories, which prove to work perfectly well in evoking the hesitant, tentative growth of the aunt's concern for the child, as well as her increasing desperation about her own inadequacy in dealing with the situation she finds herself confronting.

Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (2010) is the most recent fiction (in book form) Raffel has published, and while the stories in this collection are generally similar in approach to those in her first book, a few of them, such as "The Air and Its Relatives," although still fragmented and conducted largely in dialogue, are arguably somewhat more conventional. The focus is even more resolutely on parent-children relationships. "The Air and Its Relatives" is a memory story about the narrator and her father, framed by a series of scenes in which the father is teaching the daughter how to drive. The fragmentation of the story serves to emphasize the episodic quality of memory, so that the story coheres in a readily perceptible way. The story's elegiac tone is consistent with many of the other stories in the book as well, and the book is further unified by a motif provided by the book's title, itself a reference to Max Born's The Restless Universe, which is explicitly identified in "The Air and Its Relatives" as a book the daughter and the father would read aloud together. We live in a "restless" universe of change and ineffable mystery, not least in the human experience of love and loss this book explores.

Further Adventures in The Restless Universe begins with an epigraph from Born that not only applies to this book but could also serve metaphorically as an apt description of Raffel's fiction as a whole: "Visible light covers only about one octave, speaking in musical terms." It is certainly appropriate to think of Raffel's work "in musical terms," even if it is a music, like that of, say, John Cage or Morton Feldman, that keenly exploits absence and quiet as part of its musical scheme. And if visible light is only one part of the spectrum, and not the largest, so too does Raffel's fiction make explicitly visible only a sampling of the world in which its characters act, talk, and subsist. With the reader's help, it manages to strongly illuminate, nonetheless.

On Steve Tomasula

My essay review of the fiction of Steve Tomasula at The Kenyon Review:

Tomasula has cited the influence on his work of such writers as Raymond Federman, Gilbert Sorrentino, and William Gass, all of whom similarly unsettle our usual way of reading—on pages with blocks of text, read sequentially from top to bottom—although none of these writers (aside from Gass in his novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife) includes pictorial elements. Tomasula’s own work is thus perhaps best understood as extending their experiments, proceeding under the fundamental assumption that the page—all of his books aside from TOC do take the printed page as fiction’s native medium—is infinitely pliable, a site where the literary artist might create aesthetic effects not confined to the usual felicities of prose style, and might also contribute to a reconception of form that includes but goes beyond reliance on traditional verbal narrative.