The Reading Experience

On Thalia Field

Experimental fiction (or poetry) ought to be predictable only in being unpredictable. Most of Thalia Field’s books have indeed been characterized by their aesthetic ingenuity and variety. She is, in fact a writer about whom it is justified to say that her work so blurs the distinction between forms and genres that it could be regarded simply as an integrated practice of “writing.” But Personhood suggests that her audacious verbal imagination has started to become merely the available instrument for promulgating an increasingly familiar message.

From my review of Thalia Field's latest.

Book 'em, Danno

Anyone looking over my curriculum vitae will see that, while there are a fair number of items listed in the "Publications" section (currently around 140 or so), all but one of them are essays, articles, or reviews, leaving only Beyond the Blurb: On Critics and Criticism (published by Cow Eye Press) as the sole entry declaring itself a book--and even it is a collection of shorter pieces originally published elsewhere, including here on the blog. To anyone asking me if I am a frustrated writer of books who has settled for writing in the shorter forms, I would have to say no. Although shortly after graduate school I did send around a book proposal (not my dissertation) to various university presses, and was offered from one of them a contract of sorts for the exclusive rights, should I actually finish writing the thing, this project never really got off the ground and I eventually just dropped it. Otherwise, I have never actually begun a writing day thinking, "Today I will work on my book."

Occasionally what seems a pretty good idea for a book comes to me, but quickly enough I'm no longer enamored by the idea and nothing further comes of it. I don't believe this inaction is caused by some kind of a block or a lack of initiative (I'm always writing, just not books). Instead, I think my abilities as a critic--such as they are--are most fruitfully applied to the shorter form, a more circumscribed but also more concentrated space for close reading and succinct analysis. I have always believed that too many full-length works of literary criticism--especially academic books--are padded out with superfluous information and ritualized citations of authorities, although this may just be a reflection of my bias toward text-based explication and analysis rather than theory, biography, or historical critique. Good critics are able to avoid these problems in the best critical books--although many such books are also comprised of previously published essays and articles--but I'm not sure I could be one of those critics, at least while also writing something familiar enough in its form or with a wide enough appeal that it could get published.

Most of what I want to say about literature (and I do like to think that even in a 1500 word review I am reaching beyond the work at hand to connect it to a literary "issue" or to literary history), I have found I can say in the shorter forms. This does not mean that any such issue can be exhaustively examined or the history fully surveyed in 1500 (or 3,000, or 5,000) words). I have often in fact, addressed the same or similar concerns across multiple reviews or essays, hoping to sound out the topic as fully as possible from different angles. Here the advantages of a book become more apparent. However, I have ventured to collect many of the pieces on common themes in a series of free e-books available through the blog--after concluding no actual publisher would give my collected ruminations on current experimental fiction, for example, even a cursory glimpse--but I'm certain they all gained more readers in their original incarnation as individual items than they have managed to attract through these facsimiles of books. If I'd ventured to write a book about experimental fiction from scratch, it likely would have turned out to be structured much like the e-book, anyway, and surely no publisher would touch this pristine tome, either.

A propensity for the shorter form was part of my motivation for creating The Reading Experience back in 2004, although I believe this blog actually garnered a reputation for posts a little longer than those on most other blogs, at least back in the antediluvian days of literary blogging. If I had stayed strictly an academic critic, I no doubt would have inaugurated whatever book projects might have been necessary for promotion or to get a better job, or just to stay in the game, but without a game to play, I now envision writing a critical book mostly as something that might happen only when an essay suddenly gets out of hand. Then it would seem a work whose length was an organic development of an idea or analysis that simply required greater amplification.

Yet an idea for a book has been rattling around in my head for a while, nevertheless, one that would justify its length first by taking the form of an historical narrative--indeed, a history of all of American fiction, from colonial times to the present. But it would also center more narrowly on a progression of works that illustrate the book's argument that American fiction, at least as exemplified by its most accomplished writers, has always been essentially a subversive force, both culturally and formally: American writers have always subjected the country's putative democratic ideals to often harsh scrutiny, and, even more vigorously, have always transgressed against the formal conventions of fiction as those were established by the rise of the European novel (a disposition additionally manifested in the American development of the short story). It would unite my focus on experimental fiction and my longstanding interest in American literary history.

I would go ahead and write this book if I thought it could be published, but unfortunately.

Don't Take It Personally

I have sometimes considered writing "personal" criticism--the sort of criticism that embeds discussion of a book or writer in subjective circumstances (the year of reading Whitman!) or connects the work to one's own "life experiences." However, I have always hesitated after reflecting on how little I usually admire such criticism when I do occasionally venture to read it: I really don't care what you were doing the morning you read "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," and if I wanted to learn about your college years I would seek out your own memoir and not the book you are otherwise supposed to be reviewing.

(Plus, whenever I have begun a review or critical essay with autobiographical reflections, I quickly rediscover how utterly tedious most of my life has been and that I thus have little to say about it. I can sometimes muster interesting things to say about a book I've read, but not about my life.)

Arguably the turn to personal or autobiographical criticism became more evident first in academic criticism, as part of the generalized revolt over the past 50 years or so against the academic practices of the previous 50 years (among them "objectivity" and "analysis"), almost all of them ultimately consigned to the dustbin of academic and literary history. (As eventually will be, of course, the practices that came to replace to them--although whether the notion of dispassionate analysis will ever make a comeback is probably more dubious.) The increasing frequency of personal reflection in more general-interest criticism is no doubt less purposeful, the result of some combination of the rise of "creative nonfiction," the domination of reviewing by novelists and poets themselves rather than professional critics, and, of course, the internet.

It is tempting to say that the latter is the chief culprit, as it is in so many of the other appraisals of the social and cultural upheavals we are currently experiencing, but it seems to me that its primary contribution to this trend has been to provide a great increase in the number of publication sites (including journals meant to replicate print literary magazines and book reviews but also blogs and online reading diaries) for both creative and critical writing, which in turn created the conditions making it possible for more personal essays to be published and creating a need for reputable reviewers. But of course the rise of creative nonfiction, both as a category of publishing and an area of concentration in the creative writing curriculum, was a phenomenon largely independent of the development of the internet and seems explicable mostly as a phenomenon within literary culture, personal expression becoming the predominant aesthetic value. Moreover, the prevalence of creative writers themselves as authors of book reviews surely predates the absorption of book discussion by the internet, and the notion that criticism by practitioners is somehow more authoritative than criticism by those more fully oriented toward, well, criticism, is a failure of judgment by book review editors more than it is a surfeit of qualified critics.

I would not contend that critical objectivity is always fully possible, nor that literary criticism has no use for subjective impressions. It is possible, however, to describe a literary work under review or analysis with conscientious accuracy, and providing such description has always seemed to me to be one of the pressing--if not the most pressing--obligations of the critic. If evaluation is part of the task in a particular critical piece (a review, presumably), such a judgment cannot credibly be made unless the critic has shown a keen enough comprehension of the relevant features of the text at hand. This sort of attention to the tangible features of the text is what is most often missing from personal/autobiographical criticism, since evaluation still remains, just made more nebulous and subjective than usual. Conventional reviews too often settle for plot summary in place of deeper formal and stylistic explication; personal essays impersonating reviews frequently substitute strings of figurative language expressing the reviewer's readerly sensibility for even cursory plot summary. 

If readers want some sense of the personality of the reviewer--and I'm not entirely convinced they do: most readers of reviews seem to want a more thought-out kind of reading recommendation--there are ways to convey this without resorting to literal autobiography and personal confession. The reviewer should provide some sense of the standards being used to reach a critical judgment, and this can be done while acknowledging their subjective selectivity--in effect disclosing the reviewer's own aesthetic sensibility as manifested in the assumptions those standards imply. Neither the criteria used nor the application of them to the particulars of the work need to be articulated in a literal, unduly mechanical way--here are the criteria, now watch me apply them--but can be suggested more subtly and indirectly, and executed with a verbal flair and judicious insight that surely draws attention to the critic's individual quality of mind.

But perhaps the more frequent kind of recourse to the personal or autobiographical in works of ostensible literary criticism is to be found in articles and essays less standardized than reviews, more discursive or exploratory, reflective or ruminative pieces in the form of an "appreciation," reconsideration, or extended critique. Here the temptation to underscore one's response to a writer's work by literally invoking personal reactions and experiences seems greatest, and I do not avow that such a move is wholly illegitimate. If you believe literature can make a difference in people's lives, the evidence from one's own life seems an obvious place to turn. But at some point such exercises become simply personal essays rather than literary criticism, and again my own history of  both writing and reading critical essays tells me it is entirely possible to convey personality and perspective without crossing this line. Close reading or analysis does not require a turgid prose style, nor does it necessarily entail endless quotations and an eye-glazing analytic detachment. The goal should be to be communicate the critic's most concentrated experience of the work, and this ought to motivate his/her most discerning and dynamic writing, not the most pedantic.

Nonfiction that includes reflections on other writers and writing but is otherwise simply an autobiographical narrative is certainly not encompassed here in my skepticism about autobiographical criticism. I am focusing on literary criticism that incorporates the personal and autobiographical as a strategy for carrying out acts of criticism, often self-reflexively acknowledging the strategy within the piece itself as if to underscore the critical intent. Sometimes the author is simply venturing an experiment with this device, but at other times it seems as though the critic is assuming an implicit assent to such a practice, on the reader's part, but also presumably editors, who may even prefer the personal approach, which is seen in turn as more appealing to readers. The phenomenon seems especially noticeable online (even if its roots lie elsewhere), and to the extent that literary criticism eventually migrates entirely online, traditional exegetical literary criticism may be increasingly shoved aside.

Since academic criticism has long since abandoned disinterested literary analysis, general-interest publications are really the only venues available (aside from personal blogs) for critics who favor this approach. Without it, we could ask whether literary criticism still exists.

New Review

My review of Peter Dimock's Daybook from Sheep Meadow is now available at Full Stop:

It really is hard to imagine a novel more devoted to a polemical, political purpose than Daybook from Sheep Meadow (except perhaps for [Dimock's previous novels] A Short History for Leaving the Family and George Anderson). So clear is the goal of highlighting American perfidy (or more precisely, the perfidy of the American ruling classes), in fact, that it can be tempting to skip over the multitude of quoted passages and the minutiae of the [protagonist's] method as increasingly superfluous, more so than even the two previous novels, which are also characterized by repetitions, quotes, and citations. . . .

New Review

My review of Mauro Javier Cardenas's Aphasia has been published in a special issue of American Book Review, on "Serious Fiction":

. . .If writers such as Marquez and Bernhard are among the writers who first challenged not just conventional narrative form or the protocols of realism but the structural and syntactical expectations of fictional discourse itself, Cárdenas is able to adapt their practice to a self-sufficient verbal strategy that uses this disrupted discourse as an available aesthetic resource.

Issue Three--Long Story Short

Issue three of Long Story Short is now available.

Includes reviews of:

Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun (Sagging Meniscus Press), by Jeff Chon

Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino (Graywolf Press), by Julian Herbert

Thick Skin (Kernpunkt Press), by N/A Oparah

Wiki of Infinite Sorrows (Kernpunkt Press), by Matthew Burnside

Meiselman (Tortoise Books), by Avner Landes

Free sign-up: https://danielgreen.substack.com/welcome

New Review

My review of Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas is now available at Full Stop:

. . .Some stories do not conform easily to a perception of Dumas as either a fabulist or a realist, although these are the twin poles between which the fictions in Echo Tree vary. Such variety, however, is part of what makes the book a charged reading experience. It surely does underscore Dumas’s talent as a writer of fiction, although at the same time reminding us that he was so barbarously prevented from fully harvesting that talent.

Subscribe to Long Story Short

Sign up to receive Long Story Short: 500-word Reviews (it's free) as a monthly newsletter. (See the post below for the contents of the most recent issue.) Reading 4-6 books (sometimes more, if I haven't read much of the author's previous work) and writing these reviews (which have been exceeding 500 words--just can't help myself) is a significant expenditure of time every month. I'm perfectly happy to spend the time, as long as I feel there's a decent audience for the effort. So far, the response has been so-so (in terms of sign-ups). If you think small press/adventurous fiction deserves more critical attention than it generally gets, help out by clicking on the link. You can even argue with me about my judgments!

Issue Two

The second issue of Long Story Short: 500-word Reviews is now available.

Includes reviews of:

    The Ancestry of Objects (Deep Vellum), by Tatiana Ryckman

   Sea Above, Sun Below (River Boat Books), by George Salis

    The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster (Sublunary Editions), by Eric Chevillard

    Ire Land (a Faery Tale) (Spuyten Duyvil), by Elisabeth Sheffield

    Fucked Up (Expat Press), by Damien Ark

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New Review

. . .However, it seems to me that this novel itself undermines the notion that its value should be attributed primarily and most importantly to its status as a vessel for a character’s immediate experience. Surely a more direct representation less dependent on artifice would be the more expedient means of relating [the protagonist's] activities and perceptions. Not only has Rawding chosen to render “experience” through a work of fiction, already a displacement of life as lived and therefore less trustworthy as a conduit to reality, but the novel she has written is formally intricate enough that it threatens to seem entirely superfluous to the goal of simply communicating the protagonist’s experience. 

My review of Loie Rawding's Tight Little Vocal Cords (Kernpunkt Press) at Full Stop.

Issue One

At long last here is the first issue of Long Story Short: 500 Word Reviews. I am still hoping to post issues on a monthly basis, but I did discover this time that, well, first of all you have to read the books before you can review them.

The books included here are:

Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede (11:11 Press), by Mike Corrao

Unidentified Man at Left of Photo (corona\samizdat), by Jeff Bursey

Ezra Slef, The Next Nobel Laureate in Literature (Tartarus Press), by Andrew Komarnyckyj

Babel (Splice), by Gabriel Blackwell

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Now on Substack

I am starting a Substack newsletter that will be a supplement to The Reading Experience and will focus on relatively brief (500 words or so) reviews of new works of adventurous fiction from mostly independent presses. It will appear monthly and probably include reviews of 4-6 books (depending on what has been recently published). Any publishers who would like to call my attention to such works should email me at the address provided at the top of the right column.

(Editors who might be interested in more full-length reviews of such fiction can contact me via this address as well, of course.)

2020 at TRE and Elsewhere

 

Here is a round-up of the reviews and essays that I published/posted in 2020.

At Full Stop, my review of The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas:

Postmodernism on Steroids  

    For readers only nominally familiar with postmodern fiction, Daniel James’s The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Mass might indeed seem offbeat, even “difficult.” With its extreme self-reflexivity — the protagonist’s name is “Daniel James,” and he is trying to write a book — its rhetorical layers — sections about Daniel James in his authorial quest, sections about the titular Ezra Maas, taken from the vestiges of the book Daniel did manage to write, commentary (in footnotes) from the unnamed “editor” who claims to have assembled the book we are actually reading, along with other inserted documents — and its hall of mirrors play with illusion and identity, the novel emphatically shouts “unconventional.” And the novel certainly avoids conventional storytelling, although it ultimately does offer a more or less linear narrative — if side trips are allowed. Read More

At Cleveland Review of Books, on Michael Martone: 

The Backward Part

    Although he is a well-known figure among other writers, widely published in literary magazines both prestigious and more obscure, and popular on what might be called the “reading circuit,” Michael Martone has during his now rather lengthy career received few reviews in the mainstream literary press. This cannot be due to the quality of his fiction—which is very high indeed—but that he is primarily a writer of novellas and shorter fictions might partly explain his absence from the most-read book pages, where novels are rewarded the majority of review coverage. Read More

At Heavy Feather Review, my review of Lance Olsen's My Red Heaven:

Graphical Variations

    In a career that now includes 14 novels and four collections of short fiction (as well as seven works of nonfiction), Lance Olsen has produced an admirable variety of experimental fictions, no one of which seems merely a repetition of any of the others. There are identifiable tendencies and gestures in his work, to be sure, all of which are designed to redirect our attention to the page itself, to the graphic embodiment of language, rather than to the “story” or “content” to which language is presumed to be pointing by many (if not most) readers of fiction, even so-called literary fiction. But the strategies by which Olsen accomplishes this larger goal are multifarious, especially in the context of such an abundant and still-accumulating body of work. Read More

At Full Stop, on Carole Maso's Ghost Dance:

Unlocked

    Carole Maso has never tried to avoid the label, “experimental writer.” Indeed, in interviews and essays she has often advocated on behalf of experimental fiction, lamenting the lack of critical attention it receives and excoriating big publishers for their commercial fixations at the expense of the literary. In her essay, “Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose," she critiques the conditions that prevail in contemporary writing:

    "Together, many novelists, now commodity makers, have agreed on a recognizable reality, which they are all too happy to impart as if it were true. Filled with hackneyed ways of perceiving, cliched, old sensibilities, they and the publishing houses create traditions which have gradually been locked into place. They take for granted: the line, the paragraph, the chapter, the story, the storyteller, character." Read More

At Music and Literature, on the writings of Roberto Bazlen:

The Residue of Achievement

    Since I came to Notes Without a Text unfamiliar with its author, Roberto Bazlan—like, presumably, most readers of this book, which marks the first translation of his writing into English—I first sought out what information I could about Bazlen (known to his friends and colleagues, I discovered, as “Bobi”). Little criticism of his writing exists—at least not in English—but that is unsurprising, since not only have Bazlen’s writings long remained untranslated, but were in fact never published at all during his lifetime. Bazlen didn’t merely choose to keep his work out of circulation (a version of Kafka, say), but actually left almost no tangible work at all. Indeed, Bazlen seems to have approached his one major creative effort, a novel called The Sea Captain, in a way that deliberately ensured it could not be completed. “It is,” writes Roberto Calasso in his introduction to Notes Without a Text, “a part—and a decisive part—of Bazlen’s work not to have produced any work.” Read More

At Splice, my review of Nicolette Polek's Imaginary Museums: 

Outbursts of the Irreal

    It may turn out that the two most influential American writers in the first two decades of the twenty-first century will be George Saunders and Aimee Bender. (The former published his first book in 1996, the latter her first in 1998.) After a prolonged period during which realism was once more the default mode in American fiction — whether in the form of the minimalist neorealism that arose in the immediate aftermath of postmodernism or just the more general kind of realism associated with writing workshop-style “craft” — Saunders and Bender again posed a challenge to its dominion. In their work, however, the challenge was expressed not through formal experiment, stylistic excess, or a broadly comic worldview, but by adopting a version of surrealism, directly posing against the presumption of lifelike representation in fiction its literal antithesis in fantasia and distortion. Read More

At TRE, on Evan Dara:

Giving Voice: On the Work of Evan Dara

    Although the term “postmodern” is still used often enough by critics as a convenient label for certain works of fiction that are considered out of the “mainstream” of current literary fiction, and descriptions of new books ladled with adjectives such as “unconventional,” “original,” or “innovative” are quite common, the era of “experimental” postmodern American fiction—when experimental fiction could be said to have any kind of real cultural salience—was in fact relatively short-lived: 10-15 years, from the mid-1960s to about 1980. This is not to say there were no formally or stylistically adventurous writers of fiction before this period, nor necessarily that no comparably adventurous writers at all have appeared in the years since. But writers willing to jettison all assumptions about the formal properties of novels and attempt building something entirely new in their place have been relatively few and far between in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two of the twenty-first. Read More

At Splice, on Jack Cox's Dodge Rose:

The Haunting

    Reading James Cox’s Dodge Rose, I was most immediately reminded of the work of Evan Dara, although the scale on which the writers work is (for now, at least) much different. Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook (1995) and The Easy Chain (2008) are meganovels, employing an episodic, loosely picaresque formal strategy — even if neither could exactly be called narratives of any kind — while Dodge Rose is much more compact and intricately constructed. Still, each writer doesn’t merely introduce some innovative formal variation but in effect ignores fictional form as it is conventionally rendered and puts in its place something that can seem like formal anarchy, if only because the novels convey the impression they are building form as they go, out of the materials at hand. Read More

At TRE, on Guillermo Stitch's Lake of Urine:

Just Weird

    Guillermo Stitch is not the sort of writer who is going to get a lot of mainstream press coverage--the very title of his novel Lake of Urine (Sagging Meniscus Press) seems an immediate thumb to the nose where the mainstream is concerned--but such discussions of his work that can be found (mostly on blogs) use such terms as "bizarro," "new weird," and "absurdist" to characterize his fiction. It is easy enough to see why such terms would suggest themselves as appropriate to a novel like Lake of Urine, but while they might apply up to a point, this novel finally doesn't very comfortably fit into any of these categories. Read More

At TRE, on S.D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid:

The Temporal Compression of Daydream Experience

    A brief synopsis of S.D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid (Coach House Books) certainly makes it sound like a work of science fiction or fantasy, or perhaps a futuristic dystopia: a man given to idleness and daydreaming, recently unemployed and occupied mostly with sleeping, meets a man who claims to be the "Ambassador of the Free Republic of Onirica," literally the land of dreams. This man, Chevauchet, recruits our narrator, after leading him on visits into other people's dreams, to join him in his mission to combat the modern plague of sleeplessness and to restore the value of reverie and dreams. Eventually the narrator begins to recruit people to go underground with him (literally) and symbolically resist society's increasing intolerance of sleep and dreams (they impede productivity, of course) by, well, sleeping. Unsurprisingly, the mission doesn't end well. Read More

At TRE, on Lee Klein's Neutral Evil))):

Based on Real Life

    The description on the back cover of Lee Klein's Neutral Evil))) (Sagging Meniscus) explicitly labels it an "autofiction." Whether the publisher intends by this to directly associate this novel (or perhaps, more accurately, novella) with the mode of fiction most prominently represented by, say, Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgard, or simply to signal that the book loosely originates in autobiographical experience (but in the process capitalizing on the current fascination with autofiction) is not altogether certain, but presumably the author consented to this characterization of his work, so inevitably our response to Neutral Evil ))) will be influenced by what we think this relatively new, (some might say trendy) conception of the relationship between art and life has to offer in reckoning with works of fiction. Read More 

At TRE, on the reprinting of Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism:

Fierce Politicalness

    You won’t learn a lot about communism from Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, but you will learn a good deal about the emotional and psychological needs that in the first half of the twentieth century brought many people to join the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and that, to judge by the testimony given by those profiled in the book, were satisfied to a remarkable extent by membership in the Party. Gornick’s title might suggest that such people were merely infatuated with the idea of communism, but the often fervent insistence that life in the CPUSA actually was their life offered by most of Gornick’s subjects belies the notion that their commitments were so tenuous. Even those voicing some regrets about their years in the Party—and this would be a majority of them—do not seem to regret having joined the Communist Party in the first place, precisely because it was belonging to it that initially awakened in them a sense of purpose in their lives. Read More

At TRE, on William Atlas, by Joshua Rothes, and Directory, by Christopher Linforth:

Brief Encounters

    It seems safe to say that more writers have access to more book publishers than at any other time in literary history. While "mainstream" publishing is still dominated by only a few big publishers, copious numbers of independent presses make available the work of writers who in previous eras likely would not have been published. Although some of this increase can be attributed to the concurrent development (at least in the United States) of university creative writing programs and their need for publication credits, surprisingly little of the work to be found through independent presses seems merely perfunctory, without discernible literary merit. Indeed, the existence of these presses has almost certainly made available to readers works of fiction (and poetry as well) that in their departures from the more constrained practices reinforced by most "literary fiction" have expanded the horizon of possibility for more venturesome writers. Read More

At Splice, my review of Catherine Lacey's Pew:

The View from Nowhere

    This might not seem to be the most pressing question to ask of Catherine Lacey’s Pew, but finally I found it to be one I couldn’t avoid asking: exactly how is this story getting told? It seems to be a straightforward enough first-person narrative, but first of all such a narrative must presumably be written (or perhaps, in some cases, spoken). While literary convention has long allowed for narratives originating in a disembodied third-person voice — either presuming the story is told from the tacitly privileged perspective of the author or has also been written down (as history or ethnography of sorts) — first-person narratives are usually framed as the product of the narrator writing: a journal, a diary, a memory. Otherwise, the ostensibly embodied voice of the narrator comes from — where? If we say that it is simply an artifact of the narrator’s consciousness, then we are pretending to believe that human consciousness unfolds in complete, grammatically-ordered sentences, that it manifests an already composed discourse. (Read More)

At TRE, on Christian TeBordo's Ghost Engine: 

Enacting the Problems of Language

    Since the mid-1990s, after the waning of postmodernism, as well as the minimalist neo-realism that succeeded it, no comparable practice has really emerged that aims to revise and reconfigure wholesale the formal and stylistic moves with which writers have been working. There has certainly been increasing emphasis on diversity and inclusion in recent American fiction, but generally this is a diversity of themes or perspective that does not privilege formal or stylistic variation, at least not for their own sake.

    Still, there continue to be writers who challenge expectations and deviate from established norms, writers who risk confounding readers by seeking out less familiar methods and unaccustomed arrangements, whether of language or form. If there has been an approach that more than any other identifies such writers, without quite acquiring a particular nomenclature to unite a fairly disparate group of writers, it is a broad tendency to fantasia or surrealism, although in some cases the writer indeed favors outright fantasy through something close to fairy tales, as in, say, some of the stories of Aimee Bender, while in others the ultimate effect might more accurately called surrealist, or perhaps absurdist, more reminiscent of the fiction of George Saunders. Read More

At TRE, on Andrew Farkas's Big Red Herring:

Baring the Contrivance

    Whether or not readers in fact find Andrew Farkas's Big Red Herring (Kernpunkt Press) to be entertaining, there would seem to be little question that it is a novel intended to entertain. Its plot, if such a pastiche of the very concept of pastiche could be said to have one, is so blatantly silly, so undisguised in its celebration of artifice and contrivance, that we know it is all an invitation to the reader to enjoy the silliness and to take the usual narrative machinery of fiction altogether less seriously (at least this once). Moreover, the contrivances are so shamelessly deployed, so extravagant, that the novel's very excess provokes a kind of fascination in itself. Read More

At TRE, on Lincoln Michel's essay, "Let’s Stop with the Realism Versus Science Fiction and Fantasy Debate":

Where Our Stories Chart

    Lincoln Michel makes some very good points in his recent essay about the limitations of our loose way of referring to "realism" in fiction, usually when thinking about the alternatives to this practice, in particular the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Indeed,  Michel's argument is framed specifically as an effort to deconstruct the binary opposition of realism and science fiction/fantasy that so often obtains in discussions of the artistic value of the latter. (In my experience, the distinction is upheld most vehemently by the science fiction writers themselves, usually in denigration of realism as compared to the greater imagination shown in their own genre.) Read More

At Full Stop, my review of Blake Butler's Alice Knott:

The Glass of Endless Windows

    It is probably accurate to call Blake Butler a “stylist,” although what his fiction offers is not “style” of the kind usually signified in discussions of literary writing: we find little evocative sensory description, few flourishes of figurative language, not much careful balancing of sentence types and lengths to achieve a “poetic” rhythm. Although his new novel, Alice Knott, at first seems somewhat more straightforwardly expository, soon enough we begin to get the kind of serpentine prose we have come to expect in a Butler novel, as when Alice seems to overhear her own thoughts in a synesthetic rush:

    "And when I looked in search of any world that might remain, I saw the sound of all time become broken, open everywhere around, the glass of endless windows, mirrors sight on sight, which through its rupture of my perspective I could then begin to hear another kind of speaking, the loudest, thickest voice I’d ever felt, comprised from all the people I’d ever known, each of them speaking at the same time, their choir brutal and unrehearsed, spreading through me with its sick yearning. . . ." Read More

At TRE, on the Philip Guston controversy:

Going Where There's No Interpretation

    Sebastian Smee is quite right that the recent cancellation of a Philip Guston exhibition is an act of abject cowardice on the part of the four museum directors responsible for it. Apparently, a cultural institution's "responsibility to meet the very real urgencies of the moment" (as the museum directors put it in their joint statement) is to protect people from art that might offend or disturb. Most likely, the cancellation actually represents the directors' attempt to protect themselves from even the possibility of controversy, controversy that exposes them to the pitchforks of the social media mob. Read More

At TRE, on Mary Jane Jacob's Dewey for Artists:

The Experience of Experience Itself

    In her book, Dewey for Artists (University of Chicago Press, 2018) Mary Jane Jacob admirably attempts to explicate the philosophy of John Dewey--not just Art as Experience--as a useful guide for artists (and also curators and art teachers) in considering the implications of their own practices, as well as the social and cultural role of art in a democratic society. The book effectively explicates the main ideas of Art as Experience  and also provides a generally reliable (if brief) synoptic survey of Dewey's thought as a whole. However, in correctly emphasizing Dewey's abiding commitment to democracy, both political and cultural, and his equally abiding dedication to upholding human rights and achieving social justice, Jacobs misrepresents Dewey's conception of "aesthetic experience" and leaves the misleading impression that Dewey believed art was most beneficial as an aid in effecting social and political change. Read More

At Splice, my review of Hugh Fulham-McQuillan's Notes on Jackson and His Dead:

Grotesque Physicalities

    The publisher of Hugh Fulham-McQuillan’s Notes on Jackson and His Dead (Dalkey Archive) cites Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, and Edgar Allan Poe as touchstones in considering the influences on the stories collected in the book. But while Borges and Poe are plausible candidates, Barthelme doesn’t seem quite right. There are elements of the fantastic and uncanny in some of Fulham-McQuillan’s stories, yet they don’t have the casual surrealism of Barthelme’s fiction, nor his stylistic lightness of touch and colloquial directness. The prose is more ruminative, almost scholarly, and in this way indeed more reminiscent of Poe’s first-person narrators. Read More

At TRE, on Sarah Rose Etter's The Book of X:

These Are the Days of Nothing

    It could be argued that the strongest rival to autofiction as the most noteworthy tendency in current American fiction is its effective opposite: non-genre fiction that distorts reality through fantasy devices that create fabulous worlds--"fabulous" as in suggestive of fables. Some of this fiction is indeed reminiscent of fables and fairy tales, while other such works make less use of allegorical narrative while still creating worlds that are essentially surreal. If the former renews a kind of story as venerable as storytelling itself, it perhaps is most immediately rooted in the fiction of a writer like Angela Carter, who performed arresting variations on recognizable motifs and themes drawn from the fabulist tradition. The latter are essentially a recent permutation, less tied to narrative conventions, more freely imagistic and amorphous. The fiction of Blake Butler might be put into this category. Read More

At TRE, on Jess Row's critique of Gordon Lish in White Flights:

What They Refer To

    If any of the writers Jess Row cites in White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination for their enactments of "whiteness" comes close to being judged as explicitly racist (performatively in his practice, not his personal conduct), it is the editor/teacher/writer Gordon Lish. In his efforts as editor and teacher in particular (Row doesn't have much to say about Lish's own writing), Lish, in Row's analysis, embodies assumptions about style and form that have enabled white writers to avoid reckoning with the cultural legacies of whiteness in American fiction, further allowing them to presume an "innocence" in regard to these legacies that perpetuates an evasion of the responsibility to interrogate whiteness as the default perspective in American literature. Lish is not the only writer to do this--White Flights is an extended rumination on how contemporary writers find ways to carry out the mission--but Row seems to find him a particularly objectionable case. Read More

Also, a new critical compilation, Literary Pragmatism:

    Preface

    The following essays do not make a sustained argument on behalf of the efficacy of an approach to literature and literary criticism I am calling “literary pragmatism.” They do attempt to show how such an approach can be grounded in the aesthetic philosophy propounded by John Dewey and can be developed in a more particular way by focusing specifically on literature than Dewey’s own synoptic focus on all the manifestations of art in Art as Experience allows. Perhaps this entails taking the pragmatic view of art in a different direction than Dewey himself might  have done, or questioning the views expressed by others influenced by Dewey, but I believe that my explication of a pragmatic form of criticism remains true to the underlying principle Dewey wanted to advance—that art is indeed a singular human activity, valuable for its own sake beyond the multifarious uses to which it might be put, but that its value is to be found not in the particularity of the art object—its tangible “beauty”—but in the existential event of expanded consciousness by which the work of art makes itself known. Read More

What They Refer To

If any of the writers Jess Row cites in White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination for their enactments of "whiteness" comes close to being judged as explicitly racist (performatively in his practice, not his personal conduct), it is the editor/teacher/writer Gordon Lish. In his efforts as editor and teacher in particular (Row doesn't have much to say about Lish's own writing), Lish, in Row's analysis, embodies assumptions about style and form that have enabled white writers to avoid reckoning with the cultural legacies of whiteness in American fiction, further allowing them to presume an "innocence" in regard to these legacies that perpetuates an evasion of the responsibility to interrogate whiteness as the default perspective in American literature. Lish is not the only writer to do this--White Flights is an extended rumination on how contemporary writers find ways to carry out the mission--but Row seems to find him a particularly objectionable case.

Row sees Lish as an inheritor of modernism's antagonism to "ordinary language," which finds its expression in Lish's by now familiar formulation of an approach to style that has come to be called "consecution." This style is best known in the work of acolytes such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, and Sam Lipsyte, but Row extends it to cover other writers not necessarily associated with the practice as most memorably described by Lutz in "The Sentence is a Lonely Place": Ben Marcus, Don DeLillo, and even Raymond Carver, all of whom have had some association with Lish. Indeed, the chapter in White Flights devoted to Lish's influence is framed by a consideration of Lish's editing of Carver's story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (originally titled "Beginners"), in which Row examines one particular excision (out of many, we now know) of a brief passage in the original relating an anecdote told by a character whose role is much diminished in the final, published version.

The anecdote is related to one of the characters, a doctor, by a patient named Henry Gates who, along with his wife, is in the hospital after a car accident (it is part of a more extended episode about these characters, which Lish cut from the story). It is a somewhat sentimental reminiscence of the patient's experience dancing with his wife on wintry evenings in their home in Oregon, presumably meant to add "color" to the portrayal of this character. Row interprets Lish's act of removing such color as an effort to erase this character's social status as poor white (a status shared by Carver while growing up in Yakima, Washington), and thus to eliminate the markers of whiteness in the character. Lish himself, of course, would presumably contest this interpretation vociferously, attributing the cut to the same impulse that led him to so severely pare down so many of Carver's drafts in the first place, an attempt to gain more forceful impact through subtraction of extraneous details, to achieve a kind of bleak objectivity by following the principle that less is more.

But we can't really know from Row's account what Lish hoped to accomplish in his editing of Carver because Row does not allow Lish--or anyone else who might offer a form or style-based assessment of the effect of his editorial judgment--to explain his choices. Instead he asserts the "violence" of Lish's amputation of Henry Gates from "Beginners" with little analysis of Lish's (or Carver's) motives beyond bad faith and quickly moves on to discussions of Roman Jakobson's examination of aphasia, of the genealogy of "white trash," and of other writers contemporaneous with Carver, some associated with Lish, some not; occasionally he returns to Lish and his pernicious effect on Carver (on American fiction in general), where he amplifies his original contention that Lish's editing of "Beginners" impeded Carver's development as a writer engaged in interrogating whiteness. "What was Lish doing when he struck the story of Henry and Anna Gates from 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love?'" Row asks during one of these detours back to the ostensible subject of the chapter. "He was erasing, or policing, in part, a gesture toward the particularity of Carver's own whiteness." But again this claim goes mostly unsupported, as he immediately (in the very next sentence) begins a lengthy survey of Raymond Carver's background and the turn in 1980s fiction to "a new kind of American regional writing."

Row's procedure in this chapter ostensibly on Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish is representative of his method in White Flights as a whole. It is a frustrating blend of criticism, autobiography (in this chapter Row also ponders his own background, as well as his enthusiasm for certain indie rock bands), and digressions on various writers, theorists, and scholars that perhaps provides some rhetorical variation, but also ultimately muddles the book's focus and makes tracking its argument (if if does indeed have an argument) a challenging task. This approach is especially disconcerting in the chapter on Carver and Lish, since Row makes generalizations about both writers that are entirely disputable--and in Lish's case, arguably question his integrity--but offers so little evidence the dispute can't extend beyond bald assertions. (He does this. No, he doesn't.) No doubt such an approach well serves Row's impressionistic purposes, but criticism needs more than cursory impressions.

Thus the case Row makes for the baleful influence of Gordon Lish unfolds mostly through insinuation. He does not say that Lish has dubious racial attitudes, but certainly implies as much: 

While the past four decades have seen the emergence of "multicultural literature"--that ambivalent phrase, full of coded resentment--as a significant, even dominant, element of the American literary scene, Lish has operated in a parallel aesthetic universe that deals neither in culture nor multiplicity.

"Whether Lish deliberately avoided working with nonwhite writers is a significant question for his biographers," Row additionally avers, but, conveniently enough, claims this is not the question he wants to pursue. (Presumably just the intimation will do--again without any evidence to suggest such a charge might be true.) Lish's baneful influence resides in the way his aesthetic permeated writing workshops, where white writers (including Row himself) learned to absorb "a radical practice of shame."

I confess that this is the element of Row's critique of whiteness in contemporary fiction that I find hardest to understand. It seems to be rooted primarily in Lish's editing of Carver's fiction, but Row also draws on Mark McGurl's analysis in The Program Era, which applies the concept of inherent shame to minimalism more broadly: "If the modern world is a world of risk, a 'Risk Society.'" according to McGurl, "then minimalism is an aesthetic of risk management, a way of being beautifully careful." Presumably this hyper-carefulness represents a reluctance to indulge in emotion, which is prompted less by an aesthetic preference for understatement (resulting in a "beautiful" surface) than a fear of emotional exposure, which in this context is interpreted (by McGurl) as "shame." 

Although it seems just as likely that such emotional reticence reveals a desire to avoid sentimentality in art rather than emotion per se, it is at least possible to construe the restrained "cool" of minimalist fiction as a fear of emotional disclosure (although in most cases it is really a fear expressed by the characters in the fiction rather than by the author). But Row wants to transform this restraint more broadly into a kind of embarrassment about "identity," using Don DeLillo (whose association with minimalism is, to, say the least, rather obscure) as his quite puzzling example. While it has been claimed that DeLillo's work shows few signs of his Italian-American heritage, Row claims to the contrary that Underworld, for one, "vibrates with an ethnic consciousness that may be suppressed by historical and cultural forces, but is not extinguished and is all the more powerful for being so powerfully repressed, not only in one narrative, but throughout DeLillo's early career. Yet to say so surrounds the book, its characters, and DeLillo himself with radiating waves of shame."

I find this interpretation literally unfathomable. Is this shame about being Italian-American? About being white? I must say I find the first possibility extremely implausible, and I don't understand how the second would have any bearing on our reading of Underworld. Further, what possible connection could any of this have to the initial kind of shame attributed to Raymond Carver? Row seems to be positing an extraordinarily dispersed "shame" among white writers, so dispersed it becomes a shame without an object--or at least without a purpose that would explain why we should consider it in interpreting their work. When Row also invokes the concept to describe the "shaming voice" of critics who once warned him off of overly tendentious or sentimental writers, the term has been extended beyond any useful meaning as a tool of analysis.

Even if we accepted that something like shame subliminally influences some writers' choice of subject or representational strategy, by the time we have gotten to the end of this chapter and its summative conclusion about shame--"White writing is a covenant, a shared understanding, about what is sayable and what is unsayable and not allowed"--we have come a long way from the opening gambit adducing Gordon Lish's editing of Raymond Carver as an episode in need of explication. Along the way, much mischief has been attributed to Lish, an outsize authority bestowed upon him, with very little in the way of credible evidence to support either. To be sure, anyone not previously much familiar with Lish's career would probably from Row's account adjudge him to be a nefarious figure nevertheless, responsible for perpetuating very retrograde attitudes among American writers.

It is likely, however, that the real object of Row's disdain is not Gordon Lish himself but what he represents, that antipathy for "ordinary language," his belief in the literary as artifice. As Row also puts it:

The faith Lish professes--and it's clearly a faith--has to do with an immanent quality of words and sentences, a kind of radical non-instrumentalism, which insists on treating words not as dependent on what they refer to but as entirely self-sufficient and beautiful in themselves.

While I would not go so far as to say that Row presents Lish as a postmodernist, a proponent of the formally unorthodox in fiction, he does here cast him as an aesthete, someone more interested in the beauty to be made of language when cultivated for its own sake in literary works than in its objects of representation. Aestheticism is highly out of favor in today's literary/critical climate, its self-imposed detachment from social realities possible only as a move unavailable to writers and readers entangled in those realities. Lish is someone indifferent to such readers (and writers who want to reach them), who doesn't appreciate that sentences are not self-sufficient but need to be sent "out of their loneliness and back into the world where they belong."

Is a concern for the aesthetic qualities of literature--the belief that literary art is first of all art--inherently an insular, protected outlook that allows indifference to "the world" and its injustices--and therefore available only to white writers? Aren't Gordon Lish's attempts to transform "ordinary language" actually the same attempts, in principle if not in their particulars, made by all writers, fiction writers and poets alike, in their shaping and figuration of language beyond the straightforward effort to "communicate"? Aren't these sorts of transformations the very essence of literature? If Jess Row wants American fiction in the future to be "reparative," I can't see at all how asking writers to abandon literature contributes to the cause.

These Are the Days of Nothing

It could be argued that the strongest rival to autofiction as the most noteworthy tendency in current American fiction is its effective opposite: non-genre fiction that distorts reality through fantasy devices that create fabulous worlds--"fabulous" as in suggestive of fables. Some of this fiction is indeed reminiscent of fables and fairy tales, while other such works make less use of allegorical narrative while still creating worlds that are essentially surreal. If the former renews a kind of story as venerable as storytelling itself, it perhaps is most immediately rooted in the fiction of a writer like Angela Carter, who performed arresting variations on recognizable motifs and themes drawn from the fabulist tradition. The latter are essentially a recent permutation, less tied to narrative conventions, more freely imagistic and amorphous. The fiction of Blake Butler might be put into this category.

Sarah Rose Etter's The Book of X more appropriately belongs to the first category. It takes place in a make-believe world (although retaining enough similarity to our own that it doesn't cross over into a purely hallucinatory surrealism) in which it is possible for a girl to be born with a torso tied in a knot (as had her mother and grandmother) and for her family to be in the meat business--meat they harvest from underground chambers where it grows on the wall. The narrative seems to follow a trajectory by which the girl, Cassie, after a life spent struggling with the hardships her condition unavoidably imposes, seems ultimately to face the possibility of redemption, of a happy ending to her story, but even after undergoing an operation that undoes her knot and offers her the possibility of a more "normal" life, contentment continues to elude her, and the novel ends with Cassie's apparent suicide. Thus while we are perhaps led to expect the sort of happy ending that usually concludes a fairy tale, The Book of X  subverts those expectations, to the extent that some readers might find it shocking (certainly distressing).

But this deviation from presumed narrative direction is actually the novel's most important move. Not only does it work to avoid the sentimentality that might accompany an unqualified fidelity to the conventions of the fairy tale narrative--indeed acting instead as a useful corrective to those conventions--a happy ending would likely diminish the book's thematic resonance, suggesting that the  hardships and suffering experienced by the protagonist can be mitigated easily enough, that the harm done to her is ephemeral and not a necessary source of her identity. Because of her circumstances, Cassie can be seen as emblematic in several different ways, most obviously as a disabled person but also as a young girl struggling with socially imposed "body issues," as a young woman succumbing to depression, and a "fairy tale ending" to her story would seem to rob her character of its evocative associations, if not actually defeat the purpose behind the plot and character devices employed for most of the novel.

Although the method by which Cassie tells her story is unorthodox--highly fragmented (with attention given to the spatial arrangement of the fragments), interspersed with "visions" in which, generally speaking, Cassie imagines an alternative to the life she is actually living--the story itself proceeds (in the present tense) chronologically through Cassie's life. In its broadest outlines, her life is relatively uneventful, if often melancholy and full of disappointment--most of the narrative's interest lies in Cassie's psychological turmoil and in the vividness of the surreal fantasia of many of the visions. (In one episode, she visits a "Man Store," where she buys half of a man (top half) because it is all she can afford, hoping to buy the other half later.) The first third of the book chronicles Cassie's youth, the second her attempt to build a life for herself after moving to the city, and the final third her relocation to an isolated cabin in the mountains in the aftermath of her operation.

Cassie's parents are depicted as more or less familiar sorts of parental figures, despite their ostensibly bizarre circumstances. Her mother suffers the same affliction as the daughter, but seems to have accepted her lot and raises Cassie to do so as well, although Cassie frequently expresses frustration with her exacting expectations. Her father at first seems distant and damaged, but it is the father to whom Cassie ultimately seems most strongly connected, and it is his death near the novel's conclusion that leads her to what seems her final unhappy act. While seeking out her independence in the city, Cassie as well maintains a basically ordinary existence working a routine office job, although she does acquire the habit of picking up men in bars. While some of them are indeed taken aback by Cassie's knot (one leaves her apartment immediately), nothing particularly untoward happens, just more discouragement and disappointment. After moving to the cabin she does fall in love with a married man named Henry, but her passion dissipates when her father dies.

Thus Cassie's apparent suicide--she takes some "white pills," and in the novel's concluding sentence tells us that "My eyes fail and my eyes widen, all pain finally gone" as she confronts "the wide bright mouth of death"--for the attentive reader does not exactly come from nowhere. Her experiences have left her vulnerable to despair after her father dies, and it is as if she recognizes that  the apparent realization of her quest for conventional happiness is inauthentic, romanticized wish fulfillment, in comparison to the grief she feels, a grief that is all too real. She falls into what is quite clearly an incapacitating depression:

These are the days of nothing: slow motion, under water, distant from other bodies, other thoughts, other humans. I stop wanting and become very still. I want to cut my life off at the legs.

That Cassie succumbs to this depression is surely disturbing, but it seems clear enough throughout the novel that she is, in the words of David Foster Wallace, a "depressed person."

It would seem, then, that Etter refuses to conclude a chronicle of depression with a happy outcome even more than the story about overcoming adversity the novel superficially evokes. Yet in most ways The Book of X still performs the same sort of signifying function we associate with fables and  fairy tales. To ultimately subvert narrative conventions is not to dispense with them entirely--they still condition our response to the story's development. And the surreal elements, particularly the fantastic transfiguration of the protagonist's body, are quite clearly designed more for their metaphorical  than for their tonal effect or creation of character (although Cassie is nevertheless a memorable and convincing character). We might even say there is a "moral" to Cassie's story, if a sobering one: things don't always work out.

I must say that of the two kinds of non-realist fiction described above, I am usually more impressed with works of the second kind, as the narrative-driven fabulist fiction often veers closely to didacticism, of using fiction as a means to "say something." This is unavoidably the case with The Book of X as well, although I would not say that it is overtly didactic. The impression it leaves most firmly is that of a skillfully directed act of imagination that is itself still the most important point.

New Review

My review of Hugh Fulham-McQuillan's Notes on Jackson and his Dead is now available at Splice: 

Ultimately, Notes on Jackson and His Dead doesn’t quite fit readily into prevailing dichotomous categories — conventional vs. experimental, realist vs. fabulist — but this is a strength, as the book pushes against convention by reinvigorating aesthetic strategies that remain recognisable.

New Critical Compilation

Preface

            The following essays do not make a sustained argument on behalf of the efficacy of an approach to literature and literary criticism I am calling “literary pragmatism.” They do attempt to show how such an approach can be grounded in the aesthetic philosophy propounded by John Dewey and can be developed in a more particular way by focusing specifically on literature than Dewey’s own synoptic focus on all the manifestations of art in Art as Experience allows. Perhaps this entails taking the pragmatic view of art in a different direction than Dewey himself might  have done, or questioning the views expressed by others influenced by Dewey, but I believe that my explication of a pragmatic form of criticism remains true to the underlying principle Dewey wanted to advance—that art is indeed a singular human activity, valuable for its own sake beyond the multifarious uses to which it might be put, but that its value is to be found not in the particularity of the art object—its tangible “beauty”—but in the existential event of expanded consciousness by which the work of art makes itself known.

            The first section, “John Dewey and Literary Criticism” explicates Dewey’s theory of art at length, more or less chapter by chapter. Here I am less interested in subsuming Dewey’s book to the selectivity and shapeliness of a critical essay and more concerned to elucidate the progression of Dewey’s thinking on a granular level. In this section I also attempt to show how a pragmatic conception of criticism might function as a corrective to some of the less tenable assumptions of New Criticism.

            “Dewey’s Disciples” focuses on perhaps the two most important exponents of Dewey’s thought, Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish—in Rorty’s case, surely the most important philosopher to adopt (and extend) Dewey’s conception of pragmatism in the post-World War II era, while Fish formulated probably the most significant critical approach drawing on Dewey’s emphasis on the role of reader/audience in the acts of perception and interpretation—his famous “reader response” theory. In the Rorty essay, I take some exception to his somewhat superficial dismissal of “aestheticism” as it applies to the work of Vladimir Nabokov.

            In “Pragmatic Applications,” I attempt to pull away even more fully from a purely explicative approach to the particulars of Art as Experience in exploring some of the implications of thinking about literature from a pragmatic perspective, first as literature might provide a beneficial model for thinking about politics (“Liberalism and Literature”) and then in a critique of what I find to be seriously deficient thinking about literature by Steven Pinker in his book, The Blank Slate. In a third essay on Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature, I discuss Attridge’s experience-based approach to teaching and reading literature in all of its “singularity” as a phenomenon of consciousness, but ultimately as well attempt to reconcile this singular raw experience as Attridge evokes it with the needs of literary criticism to describe and analyze a work of literature as an “object.”

            The final essay is a response to Mary Jane Jacob’s book, Dewey for Artists, published in 2018. I have used the essay (not quite a review) to both recapitulate the core principles of Dewey’s philosophy of art as delineated in the first section and to address the misperceptions specifically of Art as Experience that I feel a book like Jacob’s could encourage. Dewey for Artists is assuredly a well-intentioned book, but its exposition of Dewey’s concept of “aesthetic experience” falls short of capturing what he really means by “aesthetic.”

            Most of these essays originally appeared on my literary blog, The Reading Experience, or as articles/reviews in other publications. They are the product of my own integrated thinking about the application of pragmatism as manifested in Art as Experience to literature and literary criticism, but they, and the collection as a whole, do not possess the sort of structural rigor associated with academic criticism. Probably the content expressed in the essays would be similar if I were still an academic critic, but the presentation is necessarily more various.

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The Experience of Experience Itself

In her book, Dewey for Artists (University of Chicago Press, 2018) Mary Jane Jacob admirably attempts to explicate the philosophy of John Dewey--not just Art as Experience--as a useful guide for artists (and also curators and art teachers) in considering the implications of their own practices, as well as the social and cultural role of art in a democratic society. The book effectively explicates the main ideas of Art as Experience  and also provides a generally reliable (if brief) synoptic survey of Dewey's thought as a whole. However, in correctly emphasizing Dewey's abiding commitment to democracy, both political and cultural, and his equally abiding dedication to upholding human rights and achieving social justice, Jacobs misrepresents Dewey's conception of "aesthetic experience" and leaves the misleading impression that Dewey believed art was most beneficial as an aid in effecting social and political change.

Jacobs appropriately devotes her first two chapters to "Making" and "Experiencing," Dewey's twinned activities that when bound together through an act of perception is the realization of art. Jacobs is right to emphasize the extent to which Dewey wanted to challenge then-standing distinctions between "high" and "practical" art, which he did by defining "art" not as the product of certain long-established forms but as a process. In the maker's case, the process is one of heightened care for the very act of making, a fully engaged attention to the act in and for itself--any human creation most immediately carried out not to accomplish a utilitarian purpose but to validate its own creative integrity (by, in Dewey's terms, becoming an "integrated" experience) can be regarded as art. Activities that might have been considered merely "artisinal" rather than "artistic" can be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities (as long as the artisan was him/herself preoccupied first of all by aesthetic quality) just as readily as the greatest masterpieces of traditional art history. There are still differences between these kinds of artistic practice, but one of Dewey's ambitions in Art as Experience is to establish that the making of art is not confined to the chosen few but is something that is available to all, in whatever medium they might work.

To this extent, the "democratization" of art is certainly one of Dewey's aspirations as expressed in his writing about the aesthetic, but it is a misreading of Art as Experience to maintain that "democracy" in art entails that all artistic activity is inherently equal simply because it is available to everyone. Effort and attention are required in both the making and experiencing of art, and rendering each of these in the way that Dewey prescribes is an exacting task that some people are not willing to undertake. Dewey indeed believed the satisfactions of creativity and aesthetic experience were widely attainable human aspirations, and that existing social arrangements too often impeded their fulfillment, but even if those arrangements were altered (something Dewey tried diligently to effect in both his public activism and his other writing), obstacles to the creation and the vibrant reception of art might remain.

These obstacles would arise from individual human imperfections, not from social constraints. When every citizen is finally free to cultivate whatever kind of artistic inclination he/she might possess (or perhaps acquire), some will succeed less readily than others. Some will not succeed at all, although not necessarily because of lack of the requisite "talent" as conventionally understood. "Sensitivity to a medium as a medium is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception," Dewey writes in Chapter 9 of Art as Experience ("The Common Substance of the Arts"), and here is the explanation of the potential for failure. By "sensitivity to a medium as a medium," Dewey does not mean some sort of exquisitely calibrated sense of "taste," but the ability to achieve something like a pure state of attention. Attention to "medium" entails not just appreciation of the particular raw material of the artist's chosen form but a kind of a radical attention in itself, a state of being rather than an artistic act per se.

There will always be failures of attention. On the artist's part, such failures could originate in cliched or rote execution, a lack of insight into the possibilities of the medium, but also in devoting disproportionate attention to the subject of the art work, the "message" or "statement" to be taken from it. Efforts to treat art as "communication" and "expression" can also misdirect the artist's interest, replacing concern for the "medium as a medium" with  the opportunity to "say" something or convey "inner feelings." Dewey would not deny that art can communicate or express, but these are done indirectly, as the secondary effects of "making," giving order to emotions and integrating message and means. In this way, the making of art, a general human capability, remains a rigorous act, or else it would not be the source of such profound value of the sort Dewey ascribes to it.

This value inheres in the experience of art as well, thus a focus on medium in and for itself is also a prerequisite for "esthetic perception." If the making of art requires diligent attention by the artist, so too does aesthetic experience if such experience is to redeem its full potential, both for aesthetic appreciation and for the consummation of experience itself. And, since for Dewey "art" takes on substance only in the meeting of a perceiving consciousness and the artist's effort as manifested in the work, art is, most immediately and unavoidably, an existentially particular phenomenon, an individual encounter not a social project. Indeed, Dewey describes it as an almost inescapably personal abandonment of inhibition: "I do not think it can be denied that an element of reverie, of approach to a state of dream, enters into the creation of art, nor that the experience of the work when it is intense often throws one into a similar state" (Art as Experience, Ch. 12).

An "intense" aesthetic experience is not something that suddenly happens but again, as in the making of art,  requires concerted concentration. Jane Jacob acknowledges the requisite effort involved in this process, noting that "Dewey was clear that perception involves hard work" and quoting his warning that "the one who is too lazy, idle, or indurated in convention to perform this work will not see or hear." Yet at times in Dewey for Artists she seems to deny Dewey's admonition in favor of a more comfortable appeal to "real life" as source of art's attraction, both for artist and perceiver. She takes Dewey's insistence that both the creation of art and the ability to appreciate are natural impulses continuous with other forms of human experience to mean that the practice of art should make explicit connections to the "everyday," as if "life experience" itself somehow needs to be made art's explicit subject, so that we don't forget that life and art are inseparable.

The work of art offered by the artist and our attentive experience of that work are continuous with "life" simply because they proceed from the activity of what Dewey calls a "living creature"--a human being. When Dewey maintains that art and life are not separate, he is trying to extricate art from the ossified carapace  of its "classic status" that has accumulated over time and to return it to "the human conditions under which it was brought into being" and "the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience" (Art as Experience, p.1). I think Dewey would have it that all art is connected to the "everyday" as long as it is an honest response by the artist to his/her experience of the world that is transformed through the "ordering" the artist provides. There is always "a direct transmission of experience at an aesthetic level" in  successful art, notwithstanding that Jacob seems to think this is some special accomplishment of what she calls "social practice art." What else would the artist be transmitting?

According to Jacob, Dewey is urging us to accept that "When we have an aesthetic experience, we experience the world in a revitalized way," but it is difficult to know whether she is saying that after an aesthetic experience we are more open to heightened experience in general (which certainly could happen), whether during the aesthetic experience we are somehow encountering "the world" as depicted in the work of art, or whether she is speaking not of art at all but of the aesthetic response we can have to elements of the "real" world. Since she makes this statement while discussing "socially engaged art" that "goes directly to the source--to life itself--drawing out the aesthetic experiences that the everyday affords and bringing life for a time into the frame of art," it is likely the second, but the assertions she is making verge on incoherence: Why go to everyday life for its sort of "aesthetic experiences" that are then reproduced in a work of art? Why is the art needed if life itself has already provided the experience? And what can it mean that the socially engaged artist "goes directly to the source--to life itself?" Where are all the other artists going for subjects or inspiration? Somewhere other than life?

One of the examples of this socially engaged art that Jacob cites is Future Library, by Katie Paterson, an installation employing "a forest of spruce trees and library of books." This work "is not an avant-garde gesture but. . .a reinvestment in the world around us through art. . .The duration required to grow a forest suggests it is worth investing in the future, expressing the hope that humanity will survive another hundred years and more. . . ." Everything about Jacob's description here suggests that this art work is making a political statement, that it exists in order to advance that statement, not to offer an aesthetic experience of the kind Dewey describes in Art as Experience.  One could very well agree with the statement, even find the installation itself inspiring, but also consider it to be something other than art, unless it does in fact invite the viewer to consider it first only as a work of art--at which point its status as "a reinvestment in the world around us" becomes irrelevant. If instead a work's primary ambition is to "express the hope" that we make such a reinvestment, it is not in that aspiration functioning as art.

Nothing in my reading of Art as Experience suggests to me that Dewey thought the goal of art is to "revitalize" or "invest" in the world, or to "express hope" (or despair). These are all gestures, pronouncements made by the artist through the art but seem to have little room for the perceiving consciousness that must complete the process by which art comes to be. It certainly might happen that an ancillary effect of the experience of a work of art would be to further think about the work's subject or theme, even to be energized by a presumed "message." But if these are the only felt effects, then the point of art has been lost. Although Jacob goes beyond "making" and "experiencing" as topics in Dewey for Artists, providing a rather wide-ranging (especially for a fairly short book) discussion of Dewey's thought as she believes it might apply to art practice and curation, these are the crucial concepts underlying his theory of art as articulated in Art as Experience, his most thorough and most essential inquiry into the subject. In my view, Jacob distorts this book's careful delineation of the nature of aesthetic experience by overemphasizing John Dewey's concern with social context and underemphasizes his recognition that art is first a phenomenon of human awareness that can become aesthetic only when the social drops away in the experience of experience itself.

Going Where There's No Intepretation

Sebastian Smee is quite right that the recent cancellation of a Philip Guston exhibition is an act of abject cowardice on the part of the four museum directors responsible for it. Apparently, a cultural institution's "responsibility to meet the very real urgencies of the moment" (as the museum directors put it in their joint statement) is to protect people from art that might offend or disturb. Most likely, the cancellation actually represents the directors' attempt to protect themselves from even the possibility of controversy, controversy that exposes them to the pitchforks of the social media mob.

Smee is certainly correct that the directors' assertion that the Guston exhibition should wait until "his work can be more clearly interpreted” betrays an assumption that is "utterly antithetical to what art is about," but I think that such a demand is not really so much for "clear" interpretation as it is for no interpretation. If a work of art has been "clearly" interpreted, its "meaning" has been fully assimilated, presumably because it was always obvious. The work was not intended to be interpreted--it offers no resistance to understanding and communicates its purpose (usually an easily discernible "message") quite directly and transparently. The artist speaks, the audience listens.

We appear to be quite rapidly becoming a culture that wants its art delivered in this way. The act of interpretation, it would seem, is too likely to lead to messy areas of ambivalence and ambiguity. Interpretation means the work's significance requires the participation of viewers (or readers or listeners) to be deduced, and they might differ about it, both among themselves and with the artist. Better to go with "clarity." But if there is no interpretation, there is no art, only declarations, decrees, and lectures. Yet this seems to be the order of the day.

Artists are actually very poor choices to act as founts of wisdom and virtue. Historically speaking, only the most benighted or deluded have claimed to be sages (and usually they're very poor artists, anyway). Artists can be plenty self-absorbed, but that's because they're preoccupied with the materials of their art, of shaping those materials so as to realize a vision of what the form of art they practice can be made to do. This sort of preoccupation can make artists seem disconnected from ordinary concerns (which they often are), but this is the price to be paid for the attention that must be given to making art that is true to that vision. It is not a particularly expedient place from which to make pronouncements about how to live or what to believe.

I have little doubt that Philip Guston fits this profile quite readily. Certainly the intensity of focus on the structure of painting itself is reflected in the major shifts or phases in his career, from the early social realism to the abstraction of his middle phase (for which he initially became well known ) to the final return to something like figuration (though surreal and fragmented). Paradoxically, his paintings in the first and third phases frequently incorporate images that can be taken as forms of political commentary (satirical, anti-racist, and generally anti-establishment) of the sort that ought to be welcome to the progressive contingent that the directors seem most concerned about, but it is these very images that have driven the museum directors to terminate the exhibition (at least for now). Perhaps Guston's own contention that "painting is 'impure,'" that "It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity" helps account for the disquiet Guston's work has caused these directors. Guston's use of these impudent images still needs to be interpreted: their impurities provoke, but they don't explain.

In his statement of support for the museum directors' action, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker asserted that "the context in the US has fundamentally, profoundly changed on issues of incendiary and toxic racial imagery in art, regardless of the virtue or intention of the artist who created it." Apparently Walker doesn't agree with the museum directors that Guston's work is too ambiguous. He has determined that it is "incendiary and toxic," a pretty clear interpretation. Perhaps it is incendiary, since it irritated both those who thought it had become too obviously political (Robert Hughes, among others) and now those who think it isn't political in exactly the right way. But if it is "toxic," it is for reasons that have little to do with the paintings themselves. It should be the purpose of a museum exhibition to make this point clear, to help viewers to, indeed, interpret complex works of art more fruitfully. Museums should not just abandon interpretation altogether.

Review of Alice Knott

My review of Blake Butler's Alice Knott is now available at Full Stop:

. . .But it is here, at the intersection of Butler’s style and the heterodox psychological realism he invokes, where the most severe problem with both The 300,000,000 and Alice Knott. Butler’s treatment so strenuously seeks to evoke the erratic awareness of the characters with its sinuously articulate language that, at the length at which such episodes of streaming memories and distorted perceptions are presented, Butler’s prose simply becomes wearisome.

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