The Reading Experience

Gone South

On the surface, Babak Lakghomi's South takes on the characteristic features of conventional allegory. Predominantly emphasizing narrative, it tells the story of a quasi-innocent protagonist (innocent in his understanding of the true dangers lurking in the world he inhabits) who undertakes a journey (in this case, to the "south") that, should he successfully complete it, will bring him good fortune (since the protagonist is a writer, the reward will be publication that will presumably bring more financial stability and help heal his troubled marriage). The novel's allegorical framework is reinforced by the cast of characters and the way they are portrayed: in the protagonist's first-person account, only his wife is given a proper name (Tara), while he is himself referred to simply as "B." All of the other characters are identified by their relationship to B. and their function in his story--"the Editor," "the Publisher," "the Assistant Cook,"-- or are described only vaguely--"the man with the deflated face." Finally, the novel's pared-back style de-emphasizes extended sensory description or other lyrical flourishes and focuses our attention resolutely on what happens, even when what is happening seems hallucinatory or surreal.

Ultimately we indeed might read South as broadly allegorical, a story about one man's confrontation with a reality more precarious than he had imagined, but it in fact winds up undermining the fundamental mechanism of allegorical narrative. A classic allegory is a narrative that proceeds on dual levels: the manifest, literal level on which the directly depicted events take place, and an impalpable, symbolic level of secondary, augmented meaning to which the first level alludes, but does not articulate. In this sort of allegory (as in, say, Pilgrim's Progress or some of the short stories of Hawthorne), that secondary level is charged with specific, relatively fixed meaning, although such meaning must be filtered through a reader's act of interpretation. But in South, the meaning is finally indeterminate, especially to the protagonist whose experience the narrative relates.

B. is a mostly unsuccessful writer whose most recent effort, an "essay about the extinction of painted storks," has failed to  be published, although he has also written a book about his father that is being considered by the Publisher. As the novel begins, he has been given an assignment by the Editor to visit an oil rig in the South and report on labor unrest reputed to be occurring there. B. is not entirely sure why he has been given the assignment (and by the end of the novel, we're not sure, either), and when he arrives at the rig, he discovers that although the powers that be have been informed of his task and are prepared to allow him access, no one, including the workers supposedly threatening to strike, welcomes his presence. He receives no cooperation, except from his bunkmate, the \Assistant Cook, a veteran rig worker who provides him witb mostly general information about the Company, owners of the rig, and about the history of the rig's operation. He is also unable to communicate directly with anyone outside the rig, compelled to instead write brief notes to Tara and the Editor that are then relayed by the Secretary through Company email. 

Gradually B.'s situation degrades from mere non-cooperation to more actively sinister actions taken against him, presumably at the behest of a white-haired man with whom B. meets several times and who seems to be the man in charge (at least on the rig). B. is held in increasing isolation, and seems also to be administered certain mind-numbing and mind-altering drugs. Most likely, B.'s increasing paranoia is an effect of these drugs, although it certainly seems to be the case that someone in the power structure is definitely after him--but by this time B. has also become an unavoidably unreliable narrator, so it becomes all but impossible for us to come to any definitive conclusion about what is actually happening. Eventually B. is able to escape the rig with the help of a woman he has managed to befriend, although it turns out she has also been an agent of the Company. Whether her assistance in enabling B to swim from the rig to a nearby island is a sincere gesture of kindness to B. or is still part of her collaboration with the Company is something neither B. nor we can decide, but B. does finally manage to get back home (to the City), where we next find him being tended by Tara.

B.'s experiences on the oil rig are prefaced by his initial account of driving to the south, in which he stops to witness a ceremony performed by locals, apparently an exorcism of wind spirits. Being haunted by the wind becomes a recurring motif  in the novel, broaching the possibility that B.'s dilemma might involve such a haunting, a fate that might, as well, have afflicted his father, a poet and activist who disappeared when B. was a small boy. (Excerpts from the father's dream journal are provided at intervals during B's narration.) The man with the white hair strongly suggests that his interest in B. is as much an interest in his father's activity as in B.'s own, which further suggests that the line between the Company and the government is thin indeed. Exactly what B.'s father might have done to warrant the government's concern remains unspecified (it is suggested that among his reputed offences could have been that he was a homosexual), and it is additionally unclear whether its interest in B. himself extends beyond the information he might provide about the father.

Perhaps the offence committed by both B. and his father is simply that they are writers, naturally and therefore dangerously inquisitive. To the extent that the novel does point us toward some sort of unified allegorical meaning, this might be it: the writer's indulgence of curiosity and imagination is always a threat to the reigning powers.. Yet even this interpretation is not unambiguously supported by B.'s narrative. B., while still mostly a sympathetic character, does not always show a great sense of purpose or determination: his commitment to writing seems hesitant, and he hardly seems a stalwart defender of artistic freedom or a seeker of the truth.  Even at the novel's conclusion, when he does seem prepared to persist in writing about what he has seen, his life (not to mention his memory) has been sufficiently impaired that the reader must wonder how successful he will be. But we may also end up feeling even more disturbed about a world in which even such a tentative truth-teller as B. is considered subversive.

What is communicated most forcefully in the story of B.'s journey to the south is how elusive meaning can be, how fragile our grasp of the truth. If it is becoming clearer that we in the putatively civilized world are not invulnerable to the dissolution of democratic norms and long-held assumptions, South provides a bracing glimpse at what living in a world in which arbitrary authority prevails is like.

The Shape of His Departure

Many readers of Christina Tudor-Sideri's Schism Blue would likely find it initially to be somewhat static and abstract, perhaps even obscure. The two figures who will be the novel's characters--the only characters--are rather indistinct at first, and where such qualities as their appearance or their manner of speaking are concerned, they remain indistinct throughout. There is no story of any conventional kind, except for what could loosely be called the story of the main character recollecting (and recreating) her now dead lover, Few concrete events aside from this recollection are related in present narrative time (it could  be said that part of the main character's motivation is to, in effect, annul narrative time altogether), although eventually we are presented with brief episodes of more concrete activity occurring in the past. The novel seems to be set nowhere in particular, but wherever it is it is cold, and it seems to snow quite a lot.

These formal features are reinforced in the novel's style, which is highly metaphorical but doesn't provide a lot of close figurative description, the language more philosophical and rhetorical than lyrical:

    Between them, the night, its shadows, ambivalent as to whom to protect, him or her; the night that cannot tear itself asunder, the night that cannot offer itself to both of them; the night, its shadows in disarray, from her steps to his hesitations and back again, from the idea, no from the essence of a god, the god of this painting in reverse, this painting that shows her leaving when it was, in fact, that reality took the shape of his departure; from this essence of a god to the rest of the world, in throes, to the world immersed in petty passions and ebbing desires and folding of the senses.

This language is employed to disclose the efforts of the main character, who is a writer, to not merely remember her lover, who was a painter, but to in effect keep him alive in her continuing acts of imagination. It might be said that the novel as whole comprises this character's attempt to meld past and present through a kind of perpetual visionary projection.

Thus, while Schism Blue never does develop the drama or narrative movement of the kind readers might expect, it does acquire its own sort of fascination as a contemplative metafiction that ruminates on the process of fiction-making--or on the process of fiction-making as it unfolds within the consciousness of its main character. This character is not relating her experience in her own voice, so it as if the larger narrative voice observes these cerebral acts of creation, although it is more like this voice reports on the character's awareness as she creates, while the actual creation--the fictional character that is the lover, and the specifics of his actions (his "story")--remains unavailable to us, tucked inside the writer's desk. The "narrative" offered by the novel, is indeed the story of the storytelling, without access to the story told.

Because of this odd narrative structure (a narrative that is a supplement to another narrative that is hidden), the pleasures to be found in Blue Schism are realized in individual passages of writing rather than the architectural whole to which they nominally belong. In an extended reverie in which she summons the lover by thinking about the image of a red house (presumably an image in one of his paintings), the main character reflects: 

     A beautiful echoing, this memory now for assembling all that she has gone to assemble; a house amidst spruces; a house he made for her; a house on the beach; a house, emergent, on the highest of crests, in the deepest of caves, a house from the hands of a painter, from the mind of a writer, from a beautiful creator of tiny red houses.

     She is able to apprehend the nature of this red house. And that is happiness. That too is paradise. She is able to situate this house inside the human space of the mind. She is able to create correlation and contain absence and presence and coming-into-being inside of its redness. She is able to carry this house.

The novel is best at offering this sort of insight into the aesthetic transformation of experience, expressed metaphorically and rhapsodically, ultimately making such transformation what the novel is actually "about," acting as both the object of its discourse and the engine of that discourse. Schism Blue pushes against the tyranny of the conventions of plot, character, and setting as strongly as any novel I've read, even though I wouldn't really call it a work of experimental fiction. It is more like a prose poem than a formal or stylistic experiment.

Still, I wouldn't call Schism Blue "poetic" as that term is usually applied in reference to works of fiction. Its metaphorical language is used not as lyrical embellishment but as a formal pattern that  brings a unity to the novel that usually comes from plot. The novel does depict characters, even if they are less explicitly delineated than in most novels. And if the setting is also mostly nonspecific, it actually figures into the living memory the protagonist is attempting to create by serving as evocative imagery. This novel definitely blurs strict boundaries between fiction and poetry, but it works most provocatively as an unorthodox work of fiction.

No doubt some readers would find it too unorthodox, too dependent on its elaborate prose, providing too few of the usual signposts by which we navigate most works of fiction. For those who absolutely require those signposts in order not to lose their way, perhaps Schism Blue would prove too perilous. For those willing to get lost once in a while but trusting that the work itself will ultimately guide them back, the effort is fully worth the risk.

New Supplemental Site

I have put together a selection of essays and reviews of mine examining various works of literary criticism that have (mostly) appeared in the last few years. These essays cover issues in criticism that most stimulate my interest. It can be found here. (A link can also be found on the left sidebar,) This group of essays is in some ways a sequel to Beyond the Blurb. 

I also have another supplementary site gathering many of the reviews of experimental fiction I have written in the last decade, both for this blog and other publications. It can be found here.

Damaged by Reality

John Madera's collection of stories, Nervosities, is not "experimental" in that it rejects most readers' expectations of form in fiction: Most of the stories feature well-developed characters from whose relatively accessible points of view (both first-person and 3rd-person "free indirect") the events in the stories are related. Although these are not "plot-driven" stories with carefully laid-out scenes contributing to a narrative "arc," they are indeed stories; things happen to and through the characters, and these things have dramatic significance, especially in the conclusions to many of the stories. What is dramatized serves the stories' thematic purposes, which in most cases are relatively apparent, although they are not insistently accented, instead realized through setting and character interaction.

But all of these elements are mediated through Madera's dynamic style, which does take the stories out of the ordinary, marking them as separate from conventional "literary fiction." At its most adventurous, this style seems a kind of untamed amalgam of Gary Lutz and Thomas Bernhard: 

Here is my brain: a swollen sewage grate after rainfall--inkbled newprint, leafy bits, had-it twigs, mucosal drift bunging up the holes. Listing in my mind different things that fall (like petals, leaves, and pinecones; like acorns, berries, and other fruit; samaras, and seed pods; like shushing rain and silent snow; like sleet and hail, pellets, a perpetually whisked beaded curtain, clattering up the ground; like massy meteorites mussing up the mud) was, perhaps, superfluous; and thinking about how human beings (who are, in one sense, natural objects themselves, subject to all the causal laws of the physical world), if dropped from a height, will fall at a rate of thirty-two feet per second per second, until the rate of their fall reaches terminal velocity, was not an adequate replacement for the pernicious idea of the so-called great fall of man; but these thoughts, of falling things, while perhaps so much belly lint-picking, kept me from thinking about other things I should have been thinking about but did not want to think about. . . . ("Bees Build Perfect Hexagons with Their Spit")

More controlled than Bernhard's headlong expository monologues, less obsessively focused on surprising verbal devices than Lutz (although evoking each of these strategies), Madera's style isn't simply the vehicle for relating character and event, and doesn't serve as the kind of verbal decoration that often passes for "good writing." Language in most of these stories doesn't serve their conventional elements at all but instead makes manifest something like the reverse: plot, character, setting are a function of the use of language, its particular qualities invoking the illusions of plot or character in a particular way. This is actually true of all works of fiction, but Madera's stories are most unconventional in their rejection of the usual attempts to conceal the artifice of language, to make language transparent to the needs of narrative.

The book's first few stories are rather more verbally constrained than some of the later stories, which suggests a process of discovering a more audacious prose style, although these stories still do not rely on familiar sorts of characters or ordinary situations. Indeed, "Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequiturs" and "Notes Toward the Recovery of Desiderata." the first two stories, incorporate uncommon settings (not to mention story titles), the first featuring a man who has moved to an Indian city on the Ganges, where apparently he hopes to die, the second recounting the story of a Cuban girl who becomes a participant in the Mariel boatlift, a notorious mass emigration to the U.S. Both stories introduce a background of political turmoil, hints of which also recur in later stories but never really become a primary focus of the book's concerns. "Some Varieties of Being" does present us with a character whose general type--alienated both from his circumstances and from himself--recurs in later stories and whose predicament more nearly illustrates a dominant theme in the book ("Nervosities" seems a coinage particularly applicable to these characters.)

Although many of the characters in Nervosities are dissatisfied with their lives (some more consciously than others), two stories ("Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan" and "An Incommodious Vehicle") feature a protagonist who has essentially given up on conventional social existence, drifting without a fixed abode or much desire for remunerative work. In each case the character accepts temporary lodging with friends, but the events in the stories really only reinforce the protagonists' social estrangement, although in the first the character does strike up a friendship of sorts with a local homeless man, with whom at the story's conclusion he shares a convivial home-cooked meal. In some stories there are indications by story's end that the protagonist has come to a decision that might alter his/her circumstances (a man abandons his "dingy apartment," clearly an emblem for the dinginess of his life, a woman finally ends things with the boyfriend she clearly doesn't love), but in others no such decision seems possible. (In "Nature Under Constraint and Vexed," a man suffers a ruptured appendix that is going to kill him.) The characters in Nervosities inhabit an American culture that is hostile to their well-being and for which they have little affinity.

Perhaps the grimmest story in the book is "To Have Done with the Division of Moving Bodies," featuring a man, an Iraq War veteran, who has just killed his girlfriend's dog after the girlfriend has broken up with him. Although the story circles back to depict how the man (called simply "the killer") was affected by his experiences in Iraq (three deployments) and his difficulties in adjusting to life back home with the girlfriend, it nevertheless doesn't hesitate in showing the merciless brutality of the man's action. The story both maintains a clinical distance from the compromised protagonist (partly by never giving him a name) and takes us far enough into the man's mind that he doesn't become merely a brute, his behavior entirely unaccountable. There is no sentimentality in Nervosities: the stories concern characters who are damaged by reality, but they don't make excuses for the characters. They just register the damage in Madera's kinetically alert language.

Although these stories are by no means formally conservative (several feature unconventional formal devices), for the most part all of them could really be called works of a particularly disabused kind of realism, depicting a mostly broken culture. However, this realism is itself a route on the way to style, not vice-versa. Through reminding us that the reimagining of reality through the devices of language is the essence of literary art, Madera's stories both heighten our impression of the disenchanted lives they portray and challenge our passive reading habits.

The Tawdry Spectacles of Culture

In her review of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, Hilary Plum contends that the flaw in the book’s analysis of contemporary American fiction “arises out of the genre of scholarship,” suggesting that literary scholars are inclined to stick to “what scholarship is supposed to be about, which is what scholarship has already been about.” Thus Sinykin focuses his attention on the corporate book business, which is where “scholarship” can reveal the social and cultural processes at work in “literary production,” the orientation to both literature and culture that today’s scholarship is almost always “about.” The kind of non-conglomerate, non-commercial writing published by small presses, Plum points out, is more or less irrelevant to this analysis.

Plum is certainly right that by far most formally adventurous work that resists the homogenization of fiction (a state of affairs that Sinykin collapses into the broader economic concept he calls “conglomeration) is published by smaller presses—smaller than the non-profit presses Sinykin presents as the primary alternative to conglomerate publishing—and that Sinykin almost completely ignores them. I would also agree with Plum that the constricted attitude toward both writers and readers—neither of which count for much in the book’s consideration of the broader circumstances in which a “book” comes to be—in Big Fiction is a direct function of the work of literary scholarship as it is currently practiced.  But scholarship as we find it in Big Fiction is not, in its relationship to works of literature and to literary history in general, inherently the manifestation of “what scholarship is supposed to be about,” at least not simply as the extension of what it “has already been about” unless scholarship of literature came into existence only in the 1980s.

While it may indeed be the case that academic literary scholarship in its current form has entrenched itself firmly enough that it seems the authentic expression of the scholarly approach to what we call literature, some of us received a literary education under entirely different circumstances, in which the object of the scholar’s attention was not (or not only) the various contexts of literary activity but literary art itself. Literary history focused on the first term, not the second: history as the means to assess the different manifestations of the literary through time, not to subsume it to historical inquiry. Historical, political, and cultural context could serve as disparate avenues of approach to the study of literature, but all of the avenues were assumed to converge on a shared destination where the distinct views offered by these different approaches might be synthesized. This unifying, if unstated, assumption no longer obtains, mainly because literary academics lost confidence in literature as a self-sustaining subject suitable to academic study. Securing literature as the center of literary study in the first place had required the displacement of interest to criticism rather that simply “literature itself,” but over the past forty years academic literary critics have inexorably excluded literature as an artistic practice or as aesthetic experience from their understanding of “criticism” so they might focus instead on more consequential concerns, as if conceding to the original resistance to literary study as something too lightweight for serious scholars.

Hilary Plum is correct in her perception that Big Fiction is quintessentially a scholarly book as literary scholarship is currently defined in that it situates an ostensibly literary subject in an external context—in this case, economic—that is of greater interest to the author than what makes the subject literary. It is true that Sinykin often enough includes extended passages of close reading, but it is close reading of the sort academic criticism has appropriated from the New Critics without including the New Critics’ insistence on the aesthetic autonomy of the literary text. Sinykin shows how the literary works he examines reflect\ the economic context that is his overriding concern. His readings do offer interpretations, but they are interpretations that reduce the fiction of several prominent writers (E.L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison) to the material conditions of their publication. If Sinykin’s readings provide an angle by which we might approach an understanding of Doctorow’s Ragtime or Morrison’s Beloved, they do so by implicitly cutting off other angles as at best naïve in their failure to appreciate the determining influence of those material circumstances.

Sinykin isn’t really hesitant to assert a very wide scope for the interpretive lens afforded by the concept of “conglomerate fiction.” The term doesn’t just denote the dominance of corporate capitalism in the acquisition and dissemination of books but should be understood to encompass the actual authorship of the fiction written in the last 50 years. So pervasive is the ethos of conglomeration and so extensive are the tentacles the big five publishers send out to all the stages of book production that the writer can be seen to serve as something like the point of origin in a process that goes well beyond the scene of writing itself—which Sinykin believes has been overly romanticized—and involves so many participants under the corporation’s command that it should be said that conglomerate publishing itself is the true author of the fiction it publishes. Although Sinykin attempts to avoid interpretive overreach by emphasizing that with writers such as Morrison and Doctorow the conglomerate outlook is indirect, manifested allegorically rather than literally, it is finally difficult to know just how seriously we are ultimately to take his conceit. As a rhetorical exaggeration used to underscore the extent to which contemporary literature is subjugated to the needs of high-stakes commerce, it perhaps has some force; as a concept that accurately captures the reality of contemporary writers’ situation, it is, of course, absurd.

Sinykin’s critique does seem more justly applied to the career of Cormac McCarthy (perhaps explaining the frequent mentions of Sinykin's  discussion of McCarthy in the initial reviews of Big Fiction). Sinykin justifiably notes that McCarthy’s first five novels (through Blood Meridian gained the writer increasing acclaim as a distinctive stylist but very meager financial rewards. When McCarthy, almost in a gesture of desperation, acquired an agent and a new publisher, both of whom encouraged McCarthy to alter both his style and his Southern settings (essentially extending the Western backdrop of Blood Meridian), McCarthy’s novels, beginning with All the Pretty Horses, broke through and achieved substantial commercial success. It could indeed plausibly be said that McCarthy’s later fiction bears the imprint of conglomerate influence, but in fact McCarthy’s case seems more an instance of capitulating to commercial imperatives—old-fashioned “selling out.” No doubt there are numerous enough writers who would be willing to sell out if the financial rewards were sufficiently reliable, and probably even more quite willing to produce conglomerate fiction entirely to order at the right price. It seems improbable that many good writers are trying to create artistically credible fiction but just can’t avoid giving over their sincerely held objectives to the all-powerful hand of the publishing conglomerates.

This imprisonment in the assumptions of conglomeration is an especially inapt way to envisage the efforts of writers whose work not merely appears in small presses but can be described as adventurous or experimental. There was a time not so long ago when academic critics took a keen interest in such fiction—it could be argued that the arrival of contemporary fiction as a reputable subject of academic inquiry coincided with the rise to prominence of such fiction (eventually called “postmodern”) in the 1960s and 1970s—but the current scholarly preoccupation with sociological and cultural criticism has led to the virtual disappearance of academic criticism of experimental fiction written during the period (1980s to present) witnessing the triumph of what Sinykin now calls conglomerate fiction.

If “autofiction” and fiction written by “previously marginalized voices” do merit attention in Sinykin’s book, it is because they are assimilable in subject and theme to conglomerate expectations—both have some proven appeal to identifiable readers, and increased publication of the latter, at least, credits a degree of social conscience to the commercial publishers that softens perceptions of their otherwise mercenary business model. Innovative, challenging fiction may at one time have brought publishers a semblance of literary respectability that could be valuable, but this sort of respectability, rooted in the recognition of aesthetic complexity as a primary literary value, is now considered dispensable by mainstream publishing and dismissed by literary scholarship as irredeemably subjective and elitist.

Recognition of aesthetic achievement may indeed by subjective (although surely the concept of the “aesthetic” itself is not), but it has never been clear to me why this is perceived as problematic. While there are certainly “objective” features of literary writing and history with which the scholarly study of literature might be concerned, ultimately the purpose of a work of fiction or poetry is to engage the reader in a distinctive experience. It is entirely possible for a critic to describe the experience honestly and deliberately, but finally the experience can only be reported, not repeated among all other readers—even if we thought such a thing was desirable in the first place. This solitary nature of the reading experience (and the experience of art in general) has always caused literary scholars ambivalence: if finally a work of literature in its most essential expression doesn’t result in shareable “knowledge,” what is the point of devoting “study” to it? Even New Criticism, which was partly an attempt to meet this objection by making the method of study just as important as the texts examined, was eventually judged as too implicated in the mere aesthetic appreciation of literature, and its provisional attempt to produce something like knowledge of literature has been superseded by more radically “objective” approaches such as computational analysis and the various kinds of cultural analysis drawing on empirical description, such as Sinykin’s sociological criticism.

Given the specialized, technical, and often esoteric knowledge applied to and derived from literary texts through these approaches, it is hard to regard seriously the charge that the purely aesthetic response to works of literature is elitist. Literary academics are proficient at interrogating a literary text for its relevance to the critic’s preferred theory or extra-literary concerns, but it is clear from most “readings" by contemporary academic critics that reading closely for the qualities of artistic expression that bring literature into existence to begin with and that motivates most readers is no longer a skill much practiced, although presumably it is a skill no longer much learned (or taught) in colleges and universities.  If this is so, it can hardly be regarded as an “elite” practice.

Needless to say, the disinclination to consider the formal and stylistic features of literary texts in general would make serious inquiry into those features as they are extended and transformed in experimental fiction even less urgent. And, indeed, perhaps no change in my own perception of the priorities of academic literary studies has been as noticeable as the seeming loss of interest in the consideration of formally innovative fiction (except when the apparent innovation can be made to serve as a political gesture: challenge to literary form=challenge to the political order). When contemporary fiction started to become acceptable as an academic specialty, much if not most of the scholarly criticism that began to appear concerned the generation of experimental, postmodern writers that seemed to be offering the literary variation on the rebellion against established norms that characterized the 60s more generally. The confluence of the dissident impulses of the times and the heterodox practices of the postmodernists perhaps led to the current tendency to politicize perceived experimental strategies, but neither the first generation postmodernists nor many academic critics accentuated the political: for the writers, the political implications of their work were secondary to the work’s challenges to inherited techniques—challenges that represent an attempt to revivify literary form, not to enlist form in a political gesture. For the critics, while the parallels between the audacious breaking of rules among the insurgent postmodernists and the general disregard of conventional assumptions occurring in the 60s were tacitly acknowledged, what occupied their attention was the sheer variety of the experimental methods these writers employed and the expansion of possibilities in literary form they seemed to promise. If the immediate postwar period had featured a return to pre-modernist realism as a default expectation in American fiction, the adventurous fiction of the 1960s and 1970s augured a return to the innovative spirit of modernism.

By the time I became aware of these writers and wanted to read their work more comprehensively, they were not longer so new or notorious, and  the idea that one could devote “academic study” to the--as well as other branches of contemporary fiction, including those which came to overshadow postmodernism--was no longer so novel. I earnestly aspired to be become a scholar of postmodern American fiction, and to that end published a few scattered articles about writers I especially admired, although I fully intended to write more and made assorted plans to write various books in my “field,” but even before I could actually commit to a particular project I could tell that the trends in that field were shifting away from explication, formal analysis, or thematic surveys to a kind of critical writing whose ultimate object of interest lay “outside the text.” I was not an enemy of all forms of critical theory or cultural analysis, but keeping up with the changing fashions of academic criticism was not after all why I aspired to be an academic critic.

The only way to continue practicing the kind of criticism to which I was most naturally inclined was to acknowledge that it would no longer pass muster in the academic journals devoted to contemporary literature. To me it seemed that contemporary literature would not continue to be afforded the kind of critical elucidation given by modern literary study to all previous periods of literary history, at least by academic critics. It would at best be exploited for its utility in advancing other causes. It would not be allowed to advance its own cause: its value as verbal works of art. This might be still accomplished, but not through academic programs of literary study. Academic criticism had a more or less guaranteed audience, however small and confined mostly to other academic critics, although the jargon and deference to certain rites of scholarly decorum that make most current academic criticism unappealing to most readers were not then so pervasive, and much of the critical work still useful. If I was to continue to be a literary critic, and to extend my interest in experimental fiction, I would need to find a different audience,

In my subsequent efforts to do this, I have found that, first of all, interest in pushing against the limits of acceptable practice as illustrated in most seriously-minded fiction—what has come to be called “literary fiction”—by writers themselves is still quite keen. The postmodernists provided a template for literary exploration that has continued to inspire subsequent writers who are not content merely to apply the inherited methods of “craft,” but wish to modify the concept of craft to mean the artful transformation of form or style in fiction –art is not to be found in the skillful repetition of known strategies, but the discovery of alternate strategies employed with equal skill. Indeed, there might be more writers attempting this latter approach than in the immediate wake of the original postmodern era, although the very success of the earlier writers in offering new variations on fictional form requires the critic to recognize when these later writers are themselves contributing something new or inventive, or are merely reiterating an innovative move made by their experimental predecessors. Such moves can easily enough become as standardized as the conventional devices experimental writers ostensibly want to question, and, while I certainly do not set myself up as the judge of all that is worthily experimental in experimental fiction, I have increasingly focused my critical attention on assessing works of unconventional and adventurous fiction with the underlying assumption that these works are the continuation of the project to open up the art of fiction to perpetual invention and re-invention.

There do seem to be readers interested as well in critical engagement with this project (if not always my own expression of it), and there is certainly an audience for critical engagement with fiction published by smaller independent presses in general, which by necessity are the primary publishers of experimental fiction but of course do not restrict themselves to this single mode (although there are several estimable publishers whose lists are weighed more heavily toward experimental fiction than otherwise). Neither the writers nor most readers of the work supported by these presses, I would argue, are prompted by the concerns that Sinykin seems to suggest motivate those who choose conglomerate fiction. They want from literature a stimulating aesthetic experience, not bland entertainment or therapeutic comfort. They expect criticism to be of some assistance in reflecting on this experience, not be preoccupied with analyzing the commercial machinations of big publishers as emblems of the capitalist system. They are interested in literature, not the tawdry spectacles of culture.

Although Hilary Plum is entirely persuasive in her assessment of the limitations of Sinykin’s book, even she wants finally to frame these limitations as a failure of sociopolitical diagnosis. Sinykin doesn’t see (or want to see) the existence of this dissident corner of publishing as the noncommercial resistance to commercial dominance. It is that, but the real alternative these indie presses provide is not to the profit-driven motives of capitalism but to the non-literary (even anti-literary) attitude toward writing and reading that permeates conglomerate fiction as it has totally surrendered to the imperatives of the bureaucratic corporate system. Considerations of art or knowledge no longer play a role in this system at all (except when someone within it consciously ignores its strictures).These are the considerations that still influence what is published and discussed in the milieu surrounding small presses, and, for me, at least, they loom largest in the discussion of experimental fiction, the kind of writing that stands in the starkest contrast to conglomerate fiction.

Just how mercenary conglomerate fiction has become is made clear not just in Sinykin’s book but also very plainly in a recent essay that closely examines the court proceedings in the antitrust case brought against Penguin in its attempt to purchase Simon & Schuster (Elle Griffin, “No one buys books.”) The impression that emerges from this scrutiny of the testimony is of a corporate publishing business that both yokes itself to the logic of finance capitalism and demonstrates the utter insanity of that logic when applied to the writing of books. Why anyone who takes writing seriously would conclude that this business is worth the time and effort to “study” it escapes my comprehension. If it is necessary to regard this appalling entity as the co-creator of current literary work in order to understand culture more broadly, then I’d prefer to discount culture altogether and stick to literature. Even now, I know where to look for that.