If any of the writers Jess Row cites in White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination for their enactments of "whiteness" comes close to being judged as explicitly racist (performatively in his practice, not his personal conduct), it is the editor/teacher/writer Gordon Lish. In his efforts as editor and teacher in particular (Row doesn't have much to say about Lish's own writing), Lish, in Row's analysis, embodies assumptions about style and form that have enabled white writers to avoid reckoning with the cultural legacies of whiteness in American fiction, further allowing them to presume an "innocence" in regard to these legacies that perpetuates an evasion of the responsibility to interrogate whiteness as the default perspective in American literature. Lish is not the only writer to do this--White Flights is an extended rumination on how contemporary writers find ways to carry out the mission--but Row seems to find him a particularly objectionable case.
Row sees Lish as an inheritor of modernism's antagonism to "ordinary language," which finds its expression in Lish's by now familiar formulation of an approach to style that has come to be called "consecution." This style is best known in the work of acolytes such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, and Sam Lipsyte, but Row extends it to cover other writers not necessarily associated with the practice as most memorably described by Lutz in "The Sentence is a Lonely Place": Ben Marcus, Don DeLillo, and even Raymond Carver, all of whom have had some association with Lish. Indeed, the chapter in White Flights devoted to Lish's influence is framed by a consideration of Lish's editing of Carver's story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (originally titled "Beginners"), in which Row examines one particular excision (out of many, we now know) of a brief passage in the original relating an anecdote told by a character whose role is much diminished in the final, published version.
The anecdote is related to one of the characters, a doctor, by a patient named Henry Gates who, along with his wife, is in the hospital after a car accident (it is part of a more extended episode about these characters, which Lish cut from the story). It is a somewhat sentimental reminiscence of the patient's experience dancing with his wife on wintry evenings in their home in Oregon, presumably meant to add "color" to the portrayal of this character. Row interprets Lish's act of removing such color as an effort to erase this character's social status as poor white (a status shared by Carver while growing up in Yakima, Washington), and thus to eliminate the markers of whiteness in the character. Lish himself, of course, would presumably contest this interpretation vociferously, attributing the cut to the same impulse that led him to so severely pare down so many of Carver's drafts in the first place, an attempt to gain more forceful impact through subtraction of extraneous details, to achieve a kind of bleak objectivity by following the principle that less is more.
But we can't really know from Row's account what Lish hoped to accomplish in his editing of Carver because Row does not allow Lish--or anyone else who might offer a form or style-based assessment of the effect of his editorial judgment--to explain his choices. Instead he asserts the "violence" of Lish's amputation of Henry Gates from "Beginners" with little analysis of Lish's (or Carver's) motives beyond bad faith and quickly moves on to discussions of Roman Jakobson's examination of aphasia, of the genealogy of "white trash," and of other writers contemporaneous with Carver, some associated with Lish, some not; occasionally he returns to Lish and his pernicious effect on Carver (on American fiction in general), where he amplifies his original contention that Lish's editing of "Beginners" impeded Carver's development as a writer engaged in interrogating whiteness. "What was Lish doing when he struck the story of Henry and Anna Gates from 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love?'" Row asks during one of these detours back to the ostensible subject of the chapter. "He was erasing, or policing, in part, a gesture toward the particularity of Carver's own whiteness." But again this claim goes mostly unsupported, as he immediately (in the very next sentence) begins a lengthy survey of Raymond Carver's background and the turn in 1980s fiction to "a new kind of American regional writing."
Row's procedure in this chapter ostensibly on Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish is representative of his method in White Flights as a whole. It is a frustrating blend of criticism, autobiography (in this chapter Row also ponders his own background, as well as his enthusiasm for certain indie rock bands), and digressions on various writers, theorists, and scholars that perhaps provides some rhetorical variation, but also ultimately muddles the book's focus and makes tracking its argument (if if does indeed have an argument) a challenging task. This approach is especially disconcerting in the chapter on Carver and Lish, since Row makes generalizations about both writers that are entirely disputable--and in Lish's case, arguably question his integrity--but offers so little evidence the dispute can't extend beyond bald assertions. (He does this. No, he doesn't.) No doubt such an approach well serves Row's impressionistic purposes, but criticism needs more than cursory impressions.
Thus the case Row makes for the baleful influence of Gordon Lish unfolds mostly through insinuation. He does not say that Lish has dubious racial attitudes, but certainly implies as much:
While the past four decades have seen the emergence of "multicultural literature"--that ambivalent phrase, full of coded resentment--as a significant, even dominant, element of the American literary scene, Lish has operated in a parallel aesthetic universe that deals neither in culture nor multiplicity.
"Whether Lish deliberately avoided working with nonwhite writers is a significant question for his biographers," Row additionally avers, but, conveniently enough, claims this is not the question he wants to pursue. (Presumably just the intimation will do--again without any evidence to suggest such a charge might be true.) Lish's baneful influence resides in the way his aesthetic permeated writing workshops, where white writers (including Row himself) learned to absorb "a radical practice of shame."
I confess that this is the element of Row's critique of whiteness in contemporary fiction that I find hardest to understand. It seems to be rooted primarily in Lish's editing of Carver's fiction, but Row also draws on Mark McGurl's analysis in The Program Era, which applies the concept of inherent shame to minimalism more broadly: "If the modern world is a world of risk, a 'Risk Society.'" according to McGurl, "then minimalism is an aesthetic of risk management, a way of being beautifully careful." Presumably this hyper-carefulness represents a reluctance to indulge in emotion, which is prompted less by an aesthetic preference for understatement (resulting in a "beautiful" surface) than a fear of emotional exposure, which in this context is interpreted (by McGurl) as "shame."
Although it seems just as likely that such emotional reticence reveals a desire to avoid sentimentality in art rather than emotion per se, it is at least possible to construe the restrained "cool" of minimalist fiction as a fear of emotional disclosure (although in most cases it is really a fear expressed by the characters in the fiction rather than by the author). But Row wants to transform this restraint more broadly into a kind of embarrassment about "identity," using Don DeLillo (whose association with minimalism is, to, say the least, rather obscure) as his quite puzzling example. While it has been claimed that DeLillo's work shows few signs of his Italian-American heritage, Row claims to the contrary that Underworld, for one, "vibrates with an ethnic consciousness that may be suppressed by historical and cultural forces, but is not extinguished and is all the more powerful for being so powerfully repressed, not only in one narrative, but throughout DeLillo's early career. Yet to say so surrounds the book, its characters, and DeLillo himself with radiating waves of shame."
I find this interpretation literally unfathomable. Is this shame about being Italian-American? About being white? I must say I find the first possibility extremely implausible, and I don't understand how the second would have any bearing on our reading of Underworld. Further, what possible connection could any of this have to the initial kind of shame attributed to Raymond Carver? Row seems to be positing an extraordinarily dispersed "shame" among white writers, so dispersed it becomes a shame without an object--or at least without a purpose that would explain why we should consider it in interpreting their work. When Row also invokes the concept to describe the "shaming voice" of critics who once warned him off of overly tendentious or sentimental writers, the term has been extended beyond any useful meaning as a tool of analysis.
Even if we accepted that something like shame subliminally influences some writers' choice of subject or representational strategy, by the time we have gotten to the end of this chapter and its summative conclusion about shame--"White writing is a covenant, a shared understanding, about what is sayable and what is unsayable and not allowed"--we have come a long way from the opening gambit adducing Gordon Lish's editing of Raymond Carver as an episode in need of explication. Along the way, much mischief has been attributed to Lish, an outsize authority bestowed upon him, with very little in the way of credible evidence to support either. To be sure, anyone not previously much familiar with Lish's career would probably from Row's account adjudge him to be a nefarious figure nevertheless, responsible for perpetuating very retrograde attitudes among American writers.
It is likely, however, that the real object of Row's disdain is not Gordon Lish himself but what he represents, that antipathy for "ordinary language," his belief in the literary as artifice. As Row also puts it:
The faith Lish professes--and it's clearly a faith--has to do with an immanent quality of words and sentences, a kind of radical non-instrumentalism, which insists on treating words not as dependent on what they refer to but as entirely self-sufficient and beautiful in themselves.
While I would not go so far as to say that Row presents Lish as a postmodernist, a proponent of the formally unorthodox in fiction, he does here cast him as an aesthete, someone more interested in the beauty to be made of language when cultivated for its own sake in literary works than in its objects of representation. Aestheticism is highly out of favor in today's literary/critical climate, its self-imposed detachment from social realities possible only as a move unavailable to writers and readers entangled in those realities. Lish is someone indifferent to such readers (and writers who want to reach them), who doesn't appreciate that sentences are not self-sufficient but need to be sent "out of their loneliness and back into the world where they belong."
Is a concern for the aesthetic qualities of literature--the belief that literary art is first of all art--inherently an insular, protected outlook that allows indifference to "the world" and its injustices--and therefore available only to white writers? Aren't Gordon Lish's attempts to transform "ordinary language" actually the same attempts, in principle if not in their particulars, made by all writers, fiction writers and poets alike, in their shaping and figuration of language beyond the straightforward effort to "communicate"? Aren't these sorts of transformations the very essence of literature? If Jess Row wants American fiction in the future to be "reparative," I can't see at all how asking writers to abandon literature contributes to the cause.
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