The Reading Experience

Down Here Below the Tropopause

Each of Jeremy M. Davies's first two novels, Rose Alley (2009) and Fancy (2014), emphatically reject the notion that, in fiction, form serves content, proceeding instead as each of them do by establishing a form to which narrative content must accommodate itself. Rose Alley especially subordinates its "story" to the operation of its formal devices. According to Davies in an interview, the book's chapters "were composed with predetermined vocabularies, taken from twelve different works (sometimes nonfiction, sometimes fiction): twelve lists of twelve words that had to be used, will I or nil I—though I was allowed to use them in whatever way I liked: all at once, in one long sentence, or spread out, etc."

Fancy is less directly Oulipian in its appeal to constraints, but it is still strictly formalized, nevertheless, it's narrative premise unorthodox but rigorously carried out. Its first-person narrator, a retired librarian named Rumrill, rehearses aloud the instructions for taking care of his cats that he wishes to give to a young couple, whom Rumrill designates as the Pickles, a soliloquy that soon enough expands into the story of Rumrill's life, including his relationship with the elderly and enigmatic Brocklebank, for whom he once performed the same duty he is now entrusting to the Pickles. The novel systematically alternates paragraphs beginning "Rumrill said:" with a much briefer paragraph, an aside of sorts, beginning "He added:." In addition, an occasional entry introduced with "Brockleman writes:" provides a quote from the late Brockleman's surviving manuscripts, which lay out a philosophy of cat-fancying that also acts as a series of Wittgensteinian reflections on our experience of reality itself.

In a sense, what both novels are "about" is determined by how effectively the eventual details of the story allow the formal devices to be realized and is otherwise almost inconsequential beyond plausibly elaborating on the initial premise--in Rose Alley the recreation of the circumstances surrounding a fictional movie shot in Paris in 1968, in Fancy the successful completion of Rumrill's monologue as the means of getting his story told. Rose Alley's formal structure encompasses more than the initial imposition of constraint, as its 12 chapters (a 13th is added from the perspective of the present) are presented not in a way that would give us an account, chronological or otherwise, of the making of the film--about the English Restoration poets John Wilmot and John Dryden, and the violent 1679 attack on the latter allegedly instigated by the former--but as a series of narratives about the people involved in making the film (or involved with people involved in making the film). The novel as a whole thus moves sideways, the chapters associated by who is involved with whom. We never get a panoptic view of the film in either its nascent or completed state, and the reader unfamiliar with the Rose Alley attack on Dryden (or with Wilmot) has to wait until the penultimate chapter to get an extended explanation.

The novel's mischievous formal gestures might be more enlivening if the characters and their stories were themselves more compelling, however. It would seem that we are to take as compensation for the lack of focus on the film and its actual production the eccentric and at times sexually adventurous behavior of the characters, a fairly motley collection of failed actors, a sensationalist producer, the faux avant-garde director and his writer wife, the film's editor and designer, as well as others more tangentially connected to the film. But these characters and their circumstances are only mildly interesting at best, and at times the lengthy expository detours away from a clear connection to other characters or to the film make for rather laborious reading.

If Rose Alley suffers from a lack of immediacy and a surfeit of exposition over drama, certainly Fancy risks succumbing to a similar fate, given its reliance on a single character and his continuous monologue. But in this more recent novel its one character (aside from those who have a presence only in the speaker's discourse) seizes our attention, initially through voice and style but ultimately as well through his obsessions and idiosyncrasies. His narration is nothing if not immediate, and while there are no other characters present to literally interact with Rumrill, he nevertheless manages to invest his nondescript town and his seemingly commonplace existence as a librarian with a kind of archetypal quality, himself an Everyman grappling with fundamental questions of existence, disguised as a fascination with cats. 

Rumrill's language is consistently rather stilted, but this very quality is weirdly engaging, as we hear him attempting to explain himself as precisely as possible:

    Rumrill said: Apropos, may I say that through my open door as you stepped in I saw little clouds frisk across the morning or evening sky? Which clouds looked by no means significant enough to be responsible, down here below the tropopause, at the height of the three stone stairs that access Rumrill's house--squat in the fashion of most detached residences in our town--for having left you both so wet and weary from your walk?

    He added: Little round lucid clouds.

Not least of the reasons why Fancy is a compelling read is the undercurrent of humor running throughout, derived first of all from the implicit absurdity of Rumrill's situation, the mundane task with which he is ostensibly occupied at odds with the theatrical manner and ornate style he adopts to carry it out, his expansively developed, carefully articulated address essentially delivered into the void. Ultimately one could say that Fancy is a novel about language (that, in a sense, it is a novel in which there is only language), but it is language deployed in such a way that it becomes inextricable from character.

And yet Rumrill does not finally come off as a hopelessly absurd figure, or at least not entirely so. It is perhaps tempting to say that in his apparent loneliness he is a somewhat pitiable figure, illustrated most poignantly perhaps in his repeated references to "the woman with whom I had gone into the stacks," a fellow librarian whom Rumrill claims he often met in the stacks for a sexual assignation but who has long since left town. Eventually it becomes clear that these encounters were probably the closest thing to intimacy with another person Rumrill has experienced, and that he acutely realizes it even as he speaks of their relationship in the most impersonal terms. His relationship with Brocklebank could be described as close--he in fact cares for Brocklebank in the latter's dotage--but Brocklebank barely recognizes him most of the time, and what Rumrill really knows of Brocklebank comes from the writing reproduced throughout the text, the "system" Rumrill has adopted as his own.

Rumrill's real dilemma, however, is existential. So profound is his appreciation of the tenuousness of reality, in fact, that he is loath to leave his house in the first place for fear that when he is gone it and his life in it will blink out of existence. One of the most outrageous episodes in the novel recounts Rumrill's elaborate construction of a corridor of mirrors, placed in such a way along his route when he must be away from home that he can continue to see his house and thus remain assured it abides and will be there when he returns. Brocklebank's cat-fancying system appeals to Rumrill because of the way it seems to promise order and coherence, sense from the seemingly random: "The variation of the features of a basic unit [of the system] producing all the thematic formulations which provide for fluency, contrasts, variety, logic, and unity, on the one hand, and character, mood, expression and every needed differentiation on the other."

In its focus on a character who would like to impose certainty and consistency on a recalcitrant reality, Fancy is reminiscent of Tom McCarthy's Remainder. While the narrator of Remainder continually rehearses episodes in his life in an effort to recreate them, however, Rumrill's rehearsal of his directions for the Pickles seems as likely to be the thing itself, the actual extent of his willingness to contemplate leaving the house and its cats (who may also, of course be a figment of Rumrill's discourse) in the care of Mr. and Mrs. Pickles. Rumrill speaks often of his dreams, and ultimately we have as much reason to believe that his purported recitation is one of those dreams as that he is actually performing it. Rumrill is not so much an unreliable narrator as he is an unavoidably contingent one, and part of the novel's lingering resonance comes from acknowledging this.

Fancy is more successful than Rose Alley in sustaining interest through its formal design, from which Davies has fashioned engrossing "content." If Rose Alley left me intrigued but too often impatient with its more arid stretches, Fancy leads me to now enthusiastically anticipate the author's next formally audacious work.

Forget Fiction

Lee Siegel recently opined that "fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the nonfiction writers":

You want to read a great story about American politics today, overflowing with sharp character portraits, and keen evocations of American places, and a ripping narrative? Read Mr. Remnick's book on Obama, because you won't find it in American fiction. Looking to immerse yourself in a fascinating tale of contemporary finance? Forget fiction. Pick up Michael Lewis' latest book-not to mention his earlier ones. Yearning for a saga of American money and class? Well, Dreiser is dead, and there sure isn't anyone to take his place, so go out and get T.J. Stiles' The First Tycoon, an epic telling of the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

No doubt if you think fiction ought to be "about American politics today," or provide a "fascinating tale of contemporary finance" or a "saga of American money and class," you might agree with Siegel's claim that contemporary fiction doesn't measure up. On the other hand, Siegel doesn't really establish that in the "Golden Age" of American fiction many writers did these things, either. He rattles off a list of names, but among them--"Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Malamud"--I can't identify one who will be remembered for writing novels about "American politics today" or "contemporary finance." I suppose a couple of them might be said to have written loosely about "money and class," but the best ones weren't directly considering money and class but were writing fiction in which "class" was tangentially involved. (Or if they did write directly about "money and class" --Rabbit is Rich comes to mind--this work was minor at best.) Those of us who cringe at the idea of novels about contemporary finance can only be thankful that neither these writers nor most current writers find it a fit subject for fiction regarded as literary art.

Siegel's displeasure doesn't really seem to be with fiction writers, anyway. He's lamenting that there aren't enough literary critics of the old school around, critics like Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, who focused not on art but on "questions of life and society that a particular novel evoked." Siegel is himself a critic of this sort, and I'm sure if he really put his mind to it he could take almost any work of fiction and, ignoring its aesthetic qualities, belabor these "questions of life and society" to death. I assume that either he no longer wants to do this (diminishing returns) or contemporary fiction really has moved away from the need to "say something" about political and social affairs. I myself come across enough works of fiction that pretty clearly haven't renounced the effort of saying something that I can't really agree there's no longer enough grist for the cultural critic's mill, but if the embrace of nonfiction by people like Lee Siegel means they will henceforth just leave fiction and fiction writers alone, I heartily endorse it.

I am left with a similar feeling about Terry Teachout's recent assertion that "Reading demands a greater investment of time than looking at a complicated painting, and the average reader is not prepared to invest that much time in a book, no matter what critics say about it. I feel the same way. I suppose I could get to the bottom of "Finnegans Wake" if I worked at it—but would it be worth the trouble?" As with Siegel, I think Teachout is both correct and deeply wrong. It is probably true that "the average reader" is not going to devote much time to "difficult" books, but literature-as-art necessarily isn't much interested in the "average reader." Average readers can no longer summon up much patience with Shakespeare, or with Dickens or Melville or Henry James, or most poetry. These writers, as well as Joyce in Finnegans Wake, assumed that most of their readers (or, with Shakespeare, their listeners) would make the effort needed to appreciate their work on its own terms or else leave it alone. I can't see there's anything untoward about this arrangement. That some readers might find the work excessively difficult certainly isn't an argument that writers ought to avoid alienating such readers.

If Terry Teachout thinks Finnegans Wake wouldn't reward his effort, so be it. Many others find its singular kind of difficulty especially rewards the attempt to "get to the bottom of" it (and it would be the attempt that matters, since no one will ever really get to the "bottom"--something that is true of all great literature). Should serious fiction ultimately have to do without Terry Teachout (or Lee Siegel) as audience members, I don't think their absence will be registered that keenly.

Turning Pages

Sven Birkerts has been developing a critique of "electronic media" for quite a long time, publishing The Gutenberg Elegies in 1994, well before the rise of blogs, stand-alone news sites, and critical webzines, so his cyber skepticism is not to be dismissed as simply more defensive posturing by an endangered gatekeeper. I have myself taken issue with some of Birkerts's more uninformed outbursts, but his concern for "unhurried" reading is usually expressed in an equally unhurried analysis of the act of reading (specifically reading fiction), not as the high dudgeon of a book critic protesting his imminent loss of status.

This is especially true of a recent essay by Bikerts in The American Scholar, "Reading in a Digital Age." The essay is framed as yet another inquiry into the way the digital information "environment" is making serious reading harder to accomplish, but ultimately it is really a candid inquiry into his own reading habits and an attempt to generalize from his conclusions to a theory of sorts both about reading and about the nature of fiction. Much of this theory seems to me perceptive, and generally correct, but parts of it as well seem an overly roundabout way of describing our experience of fiction that would benefit from a consideration of John Dewey's own "experiential-phenomenological" analysis in Art as Experience. There is overlap between the accounts offered by Dewey and Birkerts, but finally Dewey's comes closer to doing full justice to the role of "imagination" in reading, both writer's and reader's.

Birkerts associates imagination with the mental state of "contemplation," which he in turn contrasts with "analytic thought." Contemplation is "intransitive and experiential in its nature, is for itself"; analytic thought  "is transitive, is goal directed. . .a means, its increments mainly building blocks toward some synthesis or explanation." Contemplation is, or should be, the preferred mode of reading fiction, by which "enhancement" and "deepening," end-states in themselves, are achieved. But Birkerts finds this "deepening" moving in just one direction: the purpose of fiction "is less to communicate themes or major recognitions and more to engage the mind, the sensibility, in a process that in its full realization bears upon our living as an ignition to inwardness, which has no larger end, which is the end itself."

Birkerts's insistence that the reading of fiction leads to experience and not "explanation" is wholly appropriate and does seem to coincide with Dewey's contention that art is an "enhancement" of experience. However, while Dewey might accept "sensibility" as the name for the human receptivity to art, he would not characterize our response to art and literature as primarily an opportunity "to enage the mind," especially if this means a retreat into an "inwardness" that is itself the ultimately desired state, cut off from the projected space occupied by the work instigating the experience in the first place. A Deweyan representation of the reading experience (the experience of art in general) would balance the inwardness Birkerts evokes with an outwardness that also seeks satisfaction in the perception of form and style. If "contemplation" involves the heightened awareness both of the palpable qualities of the created work and of our own awareness of those qualities, then the term might accurately capture the nature of aesthetic experience, but I think Birkerts privileges the activity of "mind."

When Birkerts writes that fiction provides "an arena of liberation. . .where mind and imagination can freely combine," he is not describing an interaction between the reader's "sensibility" and the the work as an act of imagination but is positing "mind" and "imagination" as faculties exercised by the reader. When a little later he allows that "I tend to view the author as on a continuum with his characters, their extension," it seems to me he is explicitly discounting the artistic shaping that is finally the role of "author." In merging the author and his characters, Birkerts is putting most value on fiction's ability to induce "empathy," which in his case means the opportunity to connect with another "mind": "It is the proximity to and belief in the other consciousness that matters, more than its source and location." It is presumably this proximity to the "other" as evoked in fiction that constitutes "imagination" for Bikerts, not the unencumbered immersion in aesthetic experience as a whole.

On the other hand, I do identify with Birkerts's account of the "residue" his reading experiences leave:

. . .the details of plot fall away first, and so rapidly that in a few months’ time I will only have the most general précis left. I will find myself getting nervous in party conversations if the book is mentioned, my sensible worry being that if I can’t remember what happened in a novel, how it ended, can I say in good conscience that I have read it? Indeed, if I invoke plot memory as my stricture, then I have to confess that I’ve read almost nothing at all, never mind these decades of turning pages.

What does remain is "A distinct tonal memory, a conviction of having been inside an author’s own language world, and along with that some hard-to-pinpoint understanding of his or her psyche." "Tonal memory" seems to me a good way of characterizing the lingering impression a strong work of fiction leaves, although it is a memory the work has indeed impressed upon the memory rather than the sort of mechanical effort of "recall" the recounting of plot entails. For myself, not only do I usually have trouble retrieving specific episodes from novels I have read more than a few months in the past, I often enough lose all but a general sense of the voice or behavior of the characters, in the case of minor characters sometimes forgetting their existence altogether. Yet I continue to feel a tangible connection to the "language world" I have encountered, which to me is the surest sign my experience of the text was worthwhile.

The storage model of reading thus threatens to reduce the reading experience to the acquisition of "information," which Birkerts rightly resists. But I would take Birkerts's invocation of the "language world" as the ulimate source of value in fiction even farther. Reading a work of literature should always imply the possibility, even the desirability, of re-reading. Suspension in the language-world rather than the collection of facts about the work is much more likely to encourage later re-reading, both because one wants to abide there again and because the work in its particulars hasn't already been thoroughly assimilated and duly packed away. I can read it again and still have a worthwhile literary experience. (Presumably Birkerts might think that re-reading would give him further insight into the author's "psyche" as well; I cannot accept this particular element of his theory of reading, as I cannot see how the created language-world that is the text could possibly reveal anything about the actual author's mental states, except through free-floating speculation irrelevant to the text itself, nor why I should care even if it could.)

Birkerts concludes by encapsulating his claim about "deep reading":

Serious literary work has levels. The engaged reader takes in not only the narrative premise and the craft of its realization, but also the resonance—that which the author creates, deliberately, through her use of language. It is the secondary power of good writing, often the ulterior motive of the writing. The two levels operate on a lag, with the resonance accumulating behind the sense, building a linguistic density that is the verbal equivalent of an aftertaste, or the “finish.” The reader who reads without directed concentration, who skims, or even just steps hurriedly across the surface, is missing much of the real point of the work; he is gobbling his foie gras.

While there are still assumptions here that seem to me unwarranted--why must the core element of fiction be its "narrative premise," which would only re-introduce "plot" as a barrier between the reader and the "language world"--ultimately this is a credible description of what is involved in serious reading. Unfortunatey, Birkerts seems motivated to offer this description mostly in order to bolster his conviction that this kind of reading is endangered by the transition to screen-reading. I am unconvinced, to say the least. If Birkerts were suggesting that deep reading is succumbing to the general human inclination to give in to distraction, to settle for what's easiest, he would perhaps be on firmer ground, although this weakness has always plagued us and can hardly have been induced by the presence of computers. But he clearly enough wants to insist there is something inherent in cyberspace and e-books that make them inimical to "serious literary work" and the reading it requires.

A generation or two from now, serious readers--and they will still be around--will look back at Birkerts's claims and find them deeply puzzling. They will find the notion that literary texts published on pieces of glued-together paper are somehow metaphysically superior to those published electronically difficult to comprehend. I find it hard to comprehend the idea now. I can understand continuing to find the printed book more convenient, or more comforting,  but to maintain that serious, sustained reading can take place only when enabled by print-on-paper just isn't  plausible. Birkerts is a trustworthy literary critic and a reliable authority on the pleasures of reading, but as a seer into the future of literature he will surely prove inadequate.

 

Moral Chaos

When reading Roger Scruton, one can always be sure that the ideas and sentiments expressed are being offered with utter sincerity. The extent to which he is willing to defend a view of the world and the place of humans in it that seems not simply conservative but thoroughly antique can be astonishing, but he does defend it, seriously and systematically. As a philosopher, Scruton sticks to the most fundamental questions of social and cultural value, in many instances raising questions long assumed satisfactorily answered and renewing conservative objections to the direction taken by much of modern culture.

Those who might rebut Scruton's case against modern art and popular culture are perhaps tempted to simply dismiss his invocations of such seemingly agreeable concepts as "order" and "beauty" as so much opportunistic cant. This would be a mistake, not merely because Scruton makes his arguments in an intellectually honest way but because the role of order or beauty in art ought not be denied outright. Scruton is not wrong to consider "beauty" a relevant consideration in the assessment of art. He is wrong in his conception of beauty as it manifests itself in works of art.

In a recent essay, "Beauty and Desecration," Scruton asserts that "the sacred task of art. . .is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty." Since the era of modernism, however, deliberate ugliness has usurped the place of beauty and "[a]rt increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes."

Note that is the transgression not of aesthetic standards but of "moral certainties" to which Scruton objects. Scruton rightly notes that in the 20th/21st centuries "expression" has become the underpinning of most movements in and commentary on "new" art, but rather than examine the specifically aesthetic flaws in an approach anchored in "expression," Scruton instead recoils from the moral anarchy unleashed by the modern Romantic rebel: "This emphasis on expression was a legacy of the Romantic movement; but now it was joined by the conviction that the artist is outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it, so that artistic self-expression is at the same time a transgression of ordinary moral norms."

Scruton uses as an example the widespread habit in productions of opera to alter the staging and the dramatic vision to produce a "modernized" version. He cites a particular production of Mozart's The Abduction From the Seraglio set "in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, copulating couples littered the stage, and every opportunity for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. . .The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the scenes of desecration, murder, and narcissistic sex."

Even if we accept that Scruton's description of the staging of this opera is true to its director's intent--and I would guess that many others in the audience that night did not see it in this way--his outrage is directed at its moral implications. It is "an example of something familiar in every aspect of our contemporary culture. It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction." Scruton manages to connect this sort of "re-visioning" in the high arts to the music video, which "is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos."

Scruton cannot appreciate that the operatic production he attended committed an aesthetic offense, not a moral one. I am quite willing to believe that those responsible for it thought it a clever idea to "set the opera in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes," but ultimately this is just an aesthetically vacuous attempt to "update" Mozart, to run roughshod over Mozart's original vision of his opera and establish their own overwhelmingly lame one in its place. It is a practice to be found not only in opera but in theater in general, whereby directors and producers with the aesthetic sensibilities of lizards attempt to keep the great works "relevant." One could, I suppose, call this artistic cluelessness a "moral" problem, but most of what Scruton sees as the unleashing of "moral chaos" is finally just the consequence of the aesthetic incompetence of some those entrused with the job of re-presenting the theatrical art of the past.

I suspect that Scruton does not want to examine the art he despises for its specific aesthetic failings because the very introduction of the "aesthetic" leads for him to the moral decadence he fears. "Beauty" is not to be found in the creations of artists separated from the moral universe to which they must conform:

We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.

In this view, beaty is not even a "creation" of artists. It is a discovery by artists of "harmony," of the "order" that is "already" there "in our perceptions." Artists, such as the great landscape painters, are, if they are to be artists at all, "devoted to moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things."

This harmony and order--a moralized nature--is what Scruton means by the "sacred," the capturing of which is the duty of artists. Modern art is engaged in desecration--the inversion of the sacred. In suggesting that human beings are other than "at home in the world" or that the world itself is not always "fit," modern artists mock and undermine the moral order that art should be celebrating and supporting. It is time, according to Scruton, to recover the sacred, "to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized."

Scruton's is an entirely coherent argument if you accept the underlying world view according to which the role of art is to "affirm" the deep, if not always completely visible, truth in "the scheme of things" that manifests itself in beauty. If you believe, however, that the world at times betrays an order that isn't necessarily beneficent, or that as Scruton puts it in his repugnance at another kind of "truthful" art, a human being can be reduced by life to "a lump of suffering flesh made pitiful, helpless, and disgusting," you might find Scruton's "truth" to be partial indeed. You might, in fact, find it a delusion and the idea that a great artist can't redeem "suffering flesh made pitiful" by an act of imagination (or, as Susan Sontag would have it, "will") anything but an affirmation of life.

Bending Over Backwards

According to Lionel Shriver:

Literature is not very popular these days, to put it mildly. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly half of Americans do not read books at all, and those who do average a mere six a year. You'd think literary writers would be bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves to readers -- to make their work maximally accessible, straightforward and inviting. But no.

But why in the world would anyone think that writers should be "bending over backwards" to appeal to people who have no interest in reading? What bizarre conception of literature would have it intended primarily for nonreaders? The mangled logic of this view, which perversely seems to be widely shared by many who do read, seems to me so far removed from any plausible assessment of the place of "literature" in our culture as to be pretty close to insane. That "literature is not very popular" at a time when the most potent measure of popularity is American Idol ought to be seen as a sign it still offers some hope of resistance to the values of commerical culutre. Most of all it should be seen precisely as an opportunity to experiment with aesthetic strategies that challenge audiences rather than giving in to the inexorable pressure to "dumb down."

Since when have serious writers sought to be "maximally accessible, straightforward and inviting" above all? Until the 19th century, "Literature" (or what was then simply considered "poetry") could only appeal to that minority of the population who literally could read, and most writers wanted to be "maximally accessible" not to contemporaneous audiences so much as to posterity, where the final verdict on literary greatness would be rendered. It's doubtful that Spenser or Milton thought that this audience would consist of readers for whom they needed to slavishly "ingratiate" themselves in advance. Some like to point out that Shakespeare in his time appealed to a relatively popular audience, but who could carefully examine Shakespeare's texts and conclude other than that the "accessibility" of his language comes not from any attempt to be more "straightforward" but from an assumption that his audience had sufficient listening skills to invite themselves into his imaginative world?

"Literature" of course is itself a concept that develops during the 19th century and after as an umbrella term that attempts to gather "poetry" together again with its now renegade forms, fiction and drama, precisely in order to make them available to the newly literate middle class as "good for" such readers. However, even this dilution of literary value--by which literature becomes valuable not in and for itself but as a tool of education and emergent nationalism--assumed that the appreciation of works of literature was something to aspire to, that "great books" required an elevation of taste and skill, although "common readers" could indeed reach this higher level.We now appear to have reached the point where literature can be relevant only if it turns itself into just another "inviting" mass entertainment.

The larger point of Shriver's essay, about the use of quotation marks, is just puerile: "By putting the onus on the reader to determine which lines are spoken and which not, the quoteless fad feeds the widespread conviction that popular fiction is fun while literature is arduous." Forget that the "quoteless fad" has been around since at least James Joyce and William Gaddis. Forget that not just quotation marks but dialogue itself are optional in fiction--who said that novels should record speech in this way at all? Heaven forbid that any "onus" be put on the reader to recognize that fiction isn't just a prosy version of a tv drama, with some written-out bits to supplement the talking. If Lionel Shriver's version of "literature" is what it takes to move the average books read per year from six to seven, writers ought to preserve their backs and refrain from bending over too frequently.

Betraying the Novel

In this interview, William Gaddis scholar Steven Moore says of populist attacks on experimental writers that

Of course you don't have to like Joyce (or Pynchon or Gaddis), they’re certainly not for everyone, but to dismiss them as pretentious frauds and to glorify simpler, more traditional fiction struck me as an example of the growing anti-intellectualism in our country, right in step with schools mandating that evolution was just a “theory” and that creationism should be taught alongside it in science classes.

I couldn't help but detect some laziness as well; some people don't want to “work” at reading a novel (or listening to a complex opera, or watching a film with subtitles, etc). I said earlier I liked a challenge; many people obviously don’t, or not when it comes to novels. I got the sense from these critics that they feel the novel is a democratic, middle-class genre that anyone should be able to enjoy, and that these experimentalists were betraying the novel (and their readers) by trying to turn it into something (high art) it was never intended to be. . . .

I don't think I'd call the American impatience with aesthetically complex fiction "anti-intellectualism." Plenty of intellectuals themselves express the same disdain for writers like Pynchon and Gaddis, whose work can't be reduced to sociological observation or political agitation. It's more a resentment of complex art, a disinclination to give such art the sustained attention it requires. It's less "laziness" than it is a fundamental suspicion of anything that isn't useful in a readily apparent way. Critics want novels to be useful as tools of cultural analysis, while ordinary readers want novels to be entertaining, an escape from their own everyday reality.

Nor do I think that this impatience is necessarily "in step" with right-wing cultural values. The radical left can be just as impatient with art that isn't useful to their political battles as the radical right. In fact, the political left is probably more hostile to the "merely aesthetic," which is taken to be an expression of bad faith when it isn't being deconstructed and shown to be ideologically complicit with the political right. It isn't necessary to associate resistance to challenging art with politically conservative attitudes in order to account for its existence.

What may account for it, however, is precisely the assumption Moore detects in many readers and critics that "the novel is a democratic, middle-class genre that anyone should be able to enjoy, and that these experimentalists were betraying the novel." This is an assumption held not just by critics and readers, but by some writers as well, writers who shape their work so that "anyone should be able to enjoy" it, who count themselves failures if their work doesn't reach the broadest audience possible, who are willing to take on themselves the roles of marketer and publicist in order to accomplish this task. It is an assumption that counts novels as just another transitory amusement in competition for the entertainment dollar.

In his book The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt convincingly establishes that the rise of the novel and the rise of the middle class were parallel developments and that this correlation was not just incidental. Novels did pose an opportunity for this now literate social class to exercise its newly-acquired skill. But to insist that novels should (or could, considering the other entertainment options now available) continue to perform this same function 200 years later, after Flaubert, after Henry James, and after all the other writers in their wake who saw that the novel could indeed be "high art," can only be an effort to put the genie back in the bottle. To this extent, the distinction between "popular fiction" and "literary fiction" is quite sensible. Let those who prefer a "democratic" form of mass entertainment stay with the kind of books that dominate the best seller lists. Let those who prefer "challenging" fiction with claims to high art stay with the comparatively few such works that manage to get published. The two groups don't have to intermingle at all.

I don't really mind being identified with the "elitist" group. Nor do I mind that the larger group wants fiction without artistic pretensions. I only mind when writers or readers want it both ways, when they want their books to be "good reads" but also want them to be taken seriously as works of literary art. This usually involves dismissing "high art" standards as "narrow" and elevating popular standards to a place higher than high art. Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Gravity's Rainbow don't "betray" the novel. They confirm its possibilities. To deny that the novel has such possibilities is the real betrayal.

A Normative Conclusion

In his recent post on his Think Again blog about the misappropriation of deconstruction by American academics, Stanley Fish writes:

. . .No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown — can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one.

Among literary scholars, there are many who regard works of literature as a kind of social construction. In this view, a given work cannot be granted a special status as "art" separated from history or culture, since it is permeated with both. For literary study in its historicist and cultural studies incarnations, literature gives us access to the historical/cultural forces that worked through the writer to author the work, the exposure of which forces is the most important work of academic criticism. Literary art as an autonomous accomplishment that deserves consideration in its own right is not just shunted aside, but is dismissed outright as a delusion.

Behind this rejection of the "literary" as anything other than a window on culture and beyond that mostly an imposition by overweening writers claiming an exalted power they don't ultimately possesses is an attitude that might indeed be described as "normative conclusion" as Fish uses the term. Writers are inevitably responding to the social conditions of their time; they can't escape the historical contingencies that inform their assumptions about the world; their works might help us understand how culturally-bound beliefs get circulated around and through all culturally-inscribed modes of expression, but they certainly can't be considered as distinctive aesthetic objects produced by the play of human imagination. The notion that a work of literature might, in its encounter with particular readers, transcend the conditions, contingencies, and cultural presuppositions of its creation, at least for the moment of the reader's experience, just can't be countenanced. No text can escape the confines of its social construction.

Thus all literary works are "just" social constructions. And this conclusion has become the basis of the most widely-practiced forms of academic criticism, whereby poems and stories and novels (particularly the latter) are scrutinized for their socially-constructed representations, as if they were being punished for being found complicit with all the evils with which "culture" can be charged. But, as Fish points out, a specific work can be criticized for advancing a particular socially constructed vision that might be found objectionable (which in most cases means it has failed at being art in the first place), but it can hardly be criticized for being a social construction to one degree or another. Writers are human beings, not members of some alien species, so they cannot finally escape their circumstances as human beings, their being alive at a certain time, in a certain place, with all the attendant assumptions and perspectives that time and place embody.

Thus, to say that a work of literature is inescapably a social construction is precisely to say nothing. Of course it is. How could it be otherwise? That it can also be a work of art, "art" being defined not as something insulated from history and culture, outside of time and place, but as we human beings in all our socially constructed atttitudes and expectations choose to define it as we go along, seems to me not only possible but indispensable. Sometimes writers manage to raise themselves to an awareness of the social constructedness of aesthetic conventions and conventional discourse and compel their readers to rise to such an awareness as well. Sometimes they even work toward the dissolution of certain especially noxious social constructions. They don't always succeed in these efforts to confront social constructions, because they can't. We remain blind to some of them, especially if they're constructions of which we approve or which otherwise help us get our work done. But this is no reason to hold all of literature responsible for this unavoidable human failing.

The Burden of Criticality

Johanna Drucker sums up her argument in her book, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as follows:

. . .the critical frameworks inherited from the avant-garde and passed through the academic discourses of current art history are constrained by the expectation of negativity. Fine art should not have to bear the burden of criticality nor can it assume superiority as if operating outside of the ideologies it has long presumed to critique. Fine art, artists, and critics exist within a condition of complicity with the institutions and values of contemporary culture. (247)

According to Drucker, artists of the 2000s (representatives of which her book discusses in some detail), no longer see "complicity" with mass culture as an evil to be avoided. These artists use mass culture to create dynamic, visually arresting works the ultimate ambition of which is to be aesthetically pleasing. No requirement of "criticality" is necessary for ideological correctness: the purpose of art is to be aesthetic, and contemporary artists are exploiting the aesthetic possibilities of mass culture to create "fine art" that doesn't pretend to an inherent "superiority" over that culture. Complicity is ok, as is taking sensory pleasure in art.

I'm ultimately fine with this argument, although it's unfortunate that a defense of aesthetic value in art has to in effect make common cause with mass culture in order to ensure that "art" survives as a viable endeavor to begin with. (It's the devil's bargain that's unfortunate, not popular culture, or at least particular productions of popular culture, some of which I enjoy just as much as the next guy.) And why is it necessary to equate autonomy in art with a claim of "superiority"? Earlier in the book, Drucker tells us that the high modernist view of art as in its separate sphere actually did damage to the aesthetic claims of art:

By appearing to be entirely aesthetic (its forms and expressions entirely contained in the visual appeal to the senses and lacking in any prescribed or circumscribed purpose), fine art sustains the concept of value as a notion by pretending to be autonomous. The "value" of a work of art is never to be accounted for in the costs of materials and labor or in the investments in production. Fine art appears to be far from the crass worlds of commerce and remote from the real of factory production. Fine art distances itself from the systems that in turn exploit these myths to advantage. Art is not a shell game or a poker bluff, but an assertion of the symbolic basis of value production. . . .

It seems that Drucker is reciting the oft-told story of how modernist art took itself to be free of complicity, innocent of ulterior "purpose," by "appearing to be entirely aesthetic" and "pretending to be autonomous" but really wasn't after all, blather, blather, blather. It's an article of faith that academic criticism clings to like piranhas: art can't assert autonomy or singularity, can't carve out an aesthetic space beside the "crass worlds of commerce," because all expressions are socially or culturally or historically determined. Works of art can be studied alongside tv shows and pop albums because they're just as inevitably a part of "culture" as any other commodifed object.

I say this is an article of faith because although it is true that all human beings creating works of art are subject to the prevailing assumptions of time and place, this does not seem to me to be a very profound observation. It amounts to saying that living artists are, well, alive rather than dead. (Or that deceased artists lived on this planet rather than on one in some adjacent solar system.) Yet is is held as an unassailable truth in post-New Critical academic criticism that literature must be historicized, that the unavoidable fact that writers put the fruits of their influences into "circulation" means that culture authors texts to the extent that the notion of aesthetic autonomy is just a nefarious illusion.

But why does the fact that any artistic work can be seen to one degree or another as illustrative of cultural forces rule out the possibility it might also be granted a kind of autonomy? If your goal is to show that all cultural expressions are subject to the historical mediation demanded by a properly Marxist view of culture, you can certainly do so, and arguments about the "autonomy" of certain excluded expressions would correctly be dismissed as incoherent. But they would be incoherent only when considered from within this interpretive framework, which is being posited as the only acceptable way of making sense of works of art or literature.

However, if this particular way of making sense of artistic and cultural expression has the virtue of being "true"--albeit in the trivial sense I have indicated--it can hardly claim exclusive rights to truth since its own investment in it rests on the underlying assumption that truth is relative. If literary texts cannot claim to embody universal or unmediated or noncontingent truth because everything is an artifact of incidental human activity, I cannot see any logically disallowed reason why one such activity could not be the study of literary texts for their posited "literary" qualities conceived as separate from their status as cultural representations, congeries of historical forces, conduits of sociological information, or whatever else works of literature can be considered good for. To object that such an approach to literary study (or the study of any of the arts) presumes itself "outside of the ideologies" is either irrelevant--since all critical approaches must scramble to the "outside" in order to speak authoritatively about the "inside"--or just wrong. The "autonomy" game does not presuppose itself outside the rules of relativism; it simply solicits recognition as one game among the others. "Pretending to be autonomous" is good enough for those who think this particular aesthetic game yields interesting insights. "Appearing to be aesthetic" is, in fact, to be aesthetic.

Thus the real question at issue is not whether autonomy is a valid concept in art/literary criticism but which concepts are to be accorded primacy in academic criticism. If the notion of the "autonomous object" is accompanied by close and accurate reading that results in a coherent account of a text or work of art , it can hardly be dismissed as fallacious. It can be assigned a lesser significance in the critical heirarchy, deemed less "serious" in an environment in which the merely literary and the merely aesthetic are identified with a dandy-ish formalism and can be marginalized safely enough while real scholars get on with the business of interpreting history, explaining culture, and intervening in politics. It can be made the scapegoat for all the shortcomings of the previous generation's critical assumptions and duly assigned its own historicized place in the critical, and curricular, past. In the struggle for dominance in that small part of academe originally (if reluctantly) set aside for "literature," the proposition that poems, stories, and novels are best regarded as wholly unlike other, more transparently discursive verbal texts, self-enclosed, formally intricate, autonomous, and that the critic's job is to advance ways of reading such textd that enhance the reader's experience of them, has clearly lost out. It is unlikely to make a comeback, although periodic efforts like Drucker's to defend aesthetic pleasure will no doubt still persist.

Although it does seem to me that a debate about terminology, about the conventionality of the critical lexicon, is still in order: When the powers that be in literary study want to show they have not entirely abandoned the old critical order, they like to point out that much current academic criticism is underpinned by what they want to still call "close reading." But this term has become so overstretched through misuse that, at best, it now merely means "paying attention" and at worse means "interrogating" the text vigorously enough that you finally do find there what you wanted to find. "Close reading" for the New Critics was a reading adjusted to the contours of the text, a reading that seeks to conform itself to the demands made by the text itself and doesn't demand that the text conform to the critic's preconceptions. It does so by, indeed, assuming the work's autonomy.

"Literary criticism" is still identified as the task undertaken by academics who study and write about literature. But academic criticism often seems to have little use for the "literary" as a subject of inquiry except when it can be shown to be illusory, or elitist, or a prop supporting various evil hegemonies. Since it is clear enough that many academic critics would rather be engaged in cultural criticism, ideological criticism, or sociological analysis--anything but the lowly explication of literary texts--perhaps the term "literary criticism" could be turned back to those who do have an interest in exploring, even "appreciating" the possibilities of the literary when considered as an autonomous practice. I'm really not sure why cultural studies scholars and historicists would want to hold on to the designation, anyway.

Then there are terms such as those used by Drucker: "negativity"; "complicity." By the first, Drucker seems to mean the incorporation of images, motifs, and sensibilities from mass culture only to "subvert" these references by using them to implicitly critique the insipidity of mass culture. This has been a common response to the encroachment of mass culture on high art, and Drucker is right to suggest that sometimes high art simply borrows from popular culture and that such borrowing is not always an attempt by the artist or the writer to "say something" about culture. That this move attributing "criticality" to works is so familiar only reinforces (for me) the extent to which criticism of art and literature has become wholly fixated on the something said at the expense of the forms of saying (and how form itself mutates straightforward "saying"), but I'm not sure why she needs to use "complicity" as a description of the act of avoiding negativity.

The term only reinforces the notion that artists and writers must be judged by the sociopolitical consequences of their work. Drucker wants it to be acceptable for them to refuse the "burden of criticality," but to be inevitably "complicit" with cultural practices and attitudes expressing sometimes dubious "values" can't help but suggest there is a lack of integrity in the art work found complicit, a lack of purity that makes art and literature questionable allies in the fight against temporal Power.

For me, that they are weapons of questionable efficacy in this ideological skirmish is the mark of their most indispensable value. In their excesses and frequent ungainliness, their refusal to submit to the expectations of ordinary discourse, works of art and literature manifest an a-temporal power that compels succeeding viewers and readers to consider them anew (sometimes to enlist them in ideological skirmishes), to regard them as representations informed by their origins in historical circumstance but not bound by them, however culturally complicit they ulimately must be. If this is not quite metaphysical "autonomy," it's also not an illusion.

Goodness and Functionality

In this essay called "Our Creed and Our Character," Terry Teachout notes:

No less deeply rooted in the national religious past, one might add, is our distrust of art for art’s sake. Over much of the country’s history, many artists, like most of their countrymen, have favored an art that exists not autonomously but in the service of some cause whose goodness or functionality justifies its existence. In the 19th century, that cause was usually religious; nowadays, it is far more often political. But in both cases, it is hard to escape the conclusion that something in the American national character is inimical to the uncomplicated enjoyment of beauty. We prefer our art to be earnest, and that preference is another survival of American Puritanism.

One might expect Teachout, who has been known in his own criticism to take pleasure in beauty, to point out the way in which this Puritan distrust of the aesthetic and accompanying demand for "functionality" distorts and marginalizes American art (not so much among artists as among critics and audiences), but instead he seems to accept David Gelernter's mawkish notion that there is such a thing as "Americanism," essentially religious in nature, of which American art is, or should be, an expression. "Secular-minded historians who fail to acknowledge this fact—and like-minded aesthetes who believe only in the gospel of art for art’s sake," writes Teachout, "are incapable of seeing either America or its earnest, achieving, incurably idealistic, and wildly gifted people as they really are."

So those of us who are "secular-minded" or who do profess "an uncomplicated enjoyment of beauty," or both, are not real Americans, are irreparably distant from Americans "as they really are"? Only those who accept "Americanism" in all its anhedonic glory need apply for citizenship, a precondition for which is knowledge of Gelernter's "sacralized reading of American history"? Only paintings of kittens or poems about Thomas Edison can really capture "earnest, achieving, incurably idealistic America," an endorsement of which is the true test of art?

Teachout almost says as much when he asserts that "one learns surprisingly little about American religiosity from modern American art," as if this does indeed disqualify it from being considered art, disqualifies it from even being accepted as truly "American," since "religiosity" defines us. "Though some of our major novelists, most notably Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, have been preoccupied with religious matters," he continues, "it is far more common for American writers either to ignore religion altogether or to portray it as a destructive feature of American life. Similarly, few of our major composers have produced religious compositions of any significance—there is no American counterpart to Verdi’s Requiem or to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s G Minor Mass—and even fewer of our major painters have made use of Judeo-Christian iconography except as a kind of cultural local color."

Is Terry Teachout proposing "earnestness" (understood mostly as an expression of "religiosity") as the primary standard for judging works of art? Is indifference to religion among artists a crippling flaw? I realize that this is a view very commonly advanced by certain "conservative" cultural commentators, but I always thought Teachout managed to avoid such a narrow, agenda-driven (indeed, thoroughgoingly "political") approach to art in most of his better criticism. I'm disappointed to find him vouching for it here.

UPDATE Terry Teachout responds.

Tethered to the World

I stopped watching Saturday Night Live a number of years ago. I did so primarily because I no longer found it very funny, but I was also able to determine exactly why I didn't find it funny: Since I had little familiarity with the pop cultural referents--the tv shows, the pop bands, the reigning celebrities of the day--I almost literally couldn't get the jokes. It wasn't that the current version of the show (which was roughly the latter days of the Will Ferrell-era cast) had suddenly become dependent on popular culture and thus required the viewer's "knowingness"; this had always been the case, going all the way back to the golden era of Aykroyd, Belushi, and Radner. But then I had been knowing. I knew the names, the styles, the programs. The jokes seemed pertinent to the world in which I was immersed, and thus I found them funny (sometimes).

(I realize that SNL is also know for its occasional "political" sketches, but even these I always considered part of the focus on popular culture--politicians as another kind of celebrity who was famous through being on tv.)

In the previous post, I defined literary satire as "corrective, a way of using laughter to mock attitudes and behaviors the author wishes to reform." Satire is a form of commentary on human misbehavior and social stupidity, usually anchored in a particular time and place. Daniel Septimus puts it this way: "satire must be tethered to the real world in some way. It must reference a reality we know in order to enlighten us with its absurdist twists." Satire points us to "a reality we know" in order to highlight its implicit if concealed deficiencies, which are mocked. Like SNL's Weekend Update, it is news with a "twist."

Septimus believes that satire without such a "tether" to the world it presumes to mock becomes merely "cartoonish." I think there's something to be said for cartoonish comedy, although I agree that if it is indeed presented as satire its satiric edge is blunted. Catch-22, it seems to me, is cartoonish comedy that is not primarily satirical. It presents us with a world that has itself become cartoonish; it can't be mocked because it can't ultimately be escaped. The comedy in Catch-22 penetrates all the way down because its "reality" is itself absurd, not merely in need of improvement. The fiction of, say, George Saunders is, on the other hand, cartoonish but also clearly meant as satire. In my opinion, the result is a brand of surrealistic comedy without sufficient roots in the "real world" to be anything other than silly. Its humor is whimsical at best and it doesn't really engage the world we live in firmly enough to be effective as satire.

But I digress. Saturday Night Live qualifies as satire, in my view, but the "world" it surveys is circumscribed by the narrow measurements of American popular culture. Those who enjoy the show inhabit that world, and presumably wish to continue living there, and thus the mockery of its manifestations and assumptions remain usefully "corrective," reminding them that it can all be quite ridiculous. SNL, of course, occupies its own fairly prominent place in that world, so its humor ultimately can reach only so far. "TV" is an open target for ridicule, but not to the point that we'd want to see it smashed up altogether. And SNL's own role in maintaining pop culture's hold on us couldn't be questioned. As I also said in the previous post, the satirist doesn't willingly satirize him/herself.

Those of us who no longer pay much attention to the world as rendered through tv and other forms of mass media (and perhaps wonder why we ever did) thus are outside the circle within which the humor of SNL and other tv comedy shows seems humorous. This isn't to say that the objects of this humor don't deserve to be mocked. It's just that they generally seem to survive such mockery perfectly well.