The Reading Experience

The Mandate of Reviewers

The title of Phillipa K. Chong's 2020 book, Inside the Critics' Circle, juxtaposed with its subtitle, "Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times," immediately announces its foremost limitation as an account of the state of literary criticism in these "uncertain times." Casually assuming the conflation of "criticism" and "reviewing" (an assumption no doubt shared by most potential readers of a book like this), the title raises the stakes in our consideration of the scope of Chong's study: will we indeed gain some sort of clarity about the practice of criticism at this stage of history, literary and otherwise? If Chong had simply used the subtitle as her title (which is actually more accurate to her book's real focus), it is likely we would regard it as much more limited in its reach.

In fairness, however, Chong herself goes on to make the kind of distinction between criticism and reviewing I am suggesting should be made, although she still designates the different approaches to literary discussion as forms of criticism--journalistic criticism, essayistic criticism, and academic criticism--even if her description of the first clearly enough distinguishes it from the other, more exploratory, forms: "Journalistic critics traditionally write reviews for daily or weekly publications (i.e., newspapers) and have the widest mandate of the three forms of criticism: to review newly published fiction." Indeed, Chong seems to narrow the mandate of reviewers (to write for newspapers), more stringently than even I would have it, since reviews by any conventional delineation of the form could and do appear in weekly and monthly periodicals (the forum for essayistic criticism according to Chong), as well as web journals and magazines. Even more narrow, of course is the restriction to coverage of "newly published fiction," which oddly both makes the focus exclusively literary (where reviewing must be more purely a critical act) and makes the consideration of fiction by critics more like reviewing any new "product."

By the time we have gotten to the first chapter that takes us "inside the critics' circle," it is manifestly apparent that the circle is a tightly encompassed one and that to the extent Chong's sociological study of the processes of literary judgment will inform or enlighten us, it will be through a very narrow focus on the contingencies of current book reviewing (fiction only) in the United States. Moreover, the study arises from interviews only with reviewers who "had published a review in at least one of three influential review outlets," producing what she admits is an "elite bias." This makes Chong's book, on the one hand, practically useless for comprehending the broad range of reviewing practices readers might encounter in the various forms of literary discussion now available, but, on the other, very helpful, even essential, in understanding why American book reviewing at the "elite" level is in its presently dismal condition (which actually it has been in for quite a long time).

In Chong's telling, the inherent confusion that besets reviewing in prestige venues proceeds from various kinds of "uncertainty" that attends the practice. (Chong presents these uncertainties as more or less unavoidable according to established book reviewing protocols, but those protocols themselves are incoherent bordering on irrational). The first kind of uncertainty is "epistemic," which begins in the unavoidable subjectivity of judgment but extends further to the choice of books to be reviewed in the first place and the selection of "appropriate" reviewers. The subjectivity of literary judgment is indeed an intrinsic feature of all literary criticism, but both Chong and the literary establishment she surveys proceed as if it is something to deplore and avoid. It is not. Literary criticism can exist, in fact, only as the explicit exchange of subjective perspectives. If it were actually possible to arrive at objective assessment, this would presumably be a "correct" conclusion  to which all readers would willingly consent. Criticism would come to an end.

Certainly the editors Chong interviews do not seem overly concerned about "objectivity"--and certainly very little about literature--in deciding what books should be reviewed and who should review them. Although Chong's survey doesn't really reveal any new information about the procedures involved in carrying out these tasks, her account makes plain the extent to which American editors and reviewers adhere to a set of imperatives that, to say the least, are not much concerned  with ensuring that literary merit is either identified or evaluated. The books chosen are those that are "newsworthy" or that are "interesting" to the editor or reviewer involved (subjectivity doesn't seem to matter here), although not necessarily interesting for artistic reasons (interesting "ideas" will do). And of course the "big books" have to be reviewed, books by famous writers or that are already creating a "buzz." Her discussion of editorial decision-making certainly justifies Chong's declaration that "Readers may be surprised that 'quality' is not chief among the criteria guiding the culling process." 

Neither is choice of reviewer a question of securing the most critically cogent review. Here again the criterion is "interest," not quality. Editors often attempt to create an artificial kind of interest by seeking out a "good match" between book and reviewer, a match that sometimes means a critic who might bring special insight into the work under review but that at other times iis based on perceived connections (often superficial) between book and reviewers, suggested by the book's content and the reviewer's professional or personal identity. Achieving a "good match" might thus produce newsworthy commentary of a very muffled sort, but it is external to the literary value of the work considered. Still, many book review editors consider the search for the good match to be the most essential part of their job.

Many people would say, of course, that in following these procedures in the production of book review pages, both editors and most of the reviewers they select are simply carrying out the tasks assigned to the literary journalist. And if most editors and reviewers perceive themselves to be primarily literary journalists, then there is some truth in this claim, to the extent that literary journalism is mostly an effort to report on current events. But many reviewers, at least, would like to believe that both the books they review and the reviews they write have a value beyond their transitory status as cultural news item, that both might still be read by future readers for whom the urgency of the original cultural context surely will have faded. Arguably what readers would want from critical writing in such a situation is that it illuminate the work as a literary creation not dependent on the immediate circumstances attending its reception. While certainly some reviews provide solid literary analysis transcending the contingencies of their commission, the "system" by which mainstream American book reviewing operates hardly seems one that seeks out literary merit for its own sake or that values literary criticism as a self-sufficient practice.

The choices made by reviewers themselves turn out to be almost as antithetical to the integrity of criticism as the systemic biases that govern editorial decisions--perhaps more so. In what is the most discouraging chapter in her book, Chong discusses the "social uncertainties" that putatively beset reviewers in trying to conscientiously carry out the book reviewer's responsibilities. "Social" in this case means almost entirely the social situation occupied by most book reviewers, in which they must defensively guard against reprisal for negative reviews (in the form of a negative review in return), risk embarrassment at social gatherings, and avoid cultivating a reputation for dispensing harsh assessments, especially when "punching down" at younger or less successful writers. Reviewers admit to Chong that they try to avoid assignments that might provoke these social tensions and professional hazards, and some make it plain enough that they hold back on strong expressions of judgment, "play nice," in  Chong's formulation. Finally the impression Chong's survey of the practices of American book reviewers leaves is one of equivocation and evasion, when not outright dishonesty.

At times Chong herself seems on the verge of invoking such language in response to what her reviewers tell her, but instead chooses to maintain a discreet scholarly distance. In her chapter on the "institutional uncertainties" of book reviewers, she is more critical of book reviewing as a collective enterprise, noting that the reviewers she interviewed in fact had little sense of themselves as part of such an enterprise, to the point that many of them doubted that they should be called "critics." At the same time, they are quite insistent that they should be distinguished from bloggers and other "amateurs," although very little in their own self-conceptions as reviewers provides for such a separation. Writing for one of the "elite publications" acts a form of official approval, an "objectified signal of one's belonging to the wider literary community"--although not a community of critics. A critic in the more rarefied sense is occupied not so much with the valuation of a text but the exercise of critical intellect more generally, which most of the critics quoted in the book insist remain outside their purview, These reviewers ultimately can't really decide if they are simply the designated intermediaries between writers and readers, here to provide a thoughtful recommendation, or credible critical voices ready to wield an authority conveyed through deeper reading.

In my view, Chong is too hasty in making such a clear-cut distinction between the newspaper reviewing she considers in her book and the "essayistic criticism" to be found in some weekly and monthly magazines or some web journals, where she believes something closer to intellectual seriousness can be found. But while such publications (what remains of them) do publish longer and less insistently evaluative reviews and essays, many such pieces still exhibit the same features revealed in Chong's study: a focus on "subject" beyond all other considerations, a reluctance to criticize too harshly (whether through fear of retribution or a sincere desire to be considerate), and an ultimate commitment to maintaining a literary community over advocating for literary values more generally. Of course there are critics who reinforce these values at a very high level, including in newspapers (Sam Sacks comes to mind) as well as in various other publications that feature "essayistic" reviews (both The Baffler and The Point have recently become valuable sources of such criticism). But unfortunately Phillipa Chong's report on the assumptions shared by her more narrowly chosen representatives just doesn't seem that far removed from the similar assumptions widely shared by of many of those who belong to what can be designated as today's "critical establishment."

This establishment is the logical outcome of what is now decades in which general-interest literary critics have been replaced by other writers of fiction as the go-to authors of book reviews, while fewer and fewer academic critics have been willing (or able) to cross over into general-interest criticism. At the same time, the critical tenor deemed acceptable in book reviews of fiction has followed the culture in becoming literally less judgmental--when fiction is regarded primarily as a form of "expression," who's to say when someone else's expression is flawed? But judgment is not simply (or not only) an act of moral or aesthetic evaluation but is also the process of perception and analysis that precedes any such evaluation. In the current critical order, book reviewers are reluctant to invoke judgment in this latter sense, while academic critics are reluctant to engage in mere evaluation (and these days don't exercise judgment about mere literature, which is only the conduit for the analysis of culture). A kind of criticism bridging the gap between the literary focus of popular book reviewing and the analytical scrutiny of academic criticism would be beneficial to literary culture, but it is presently without a proper place in the existing literary domain.

New Issue of Unbeaten Paths

A new issue of Unbeaten Paths is now available. Includes reviews of:

Dave Fitzgerald, Troll (Whiskey Tit)

Matt Bucher, The Belan Deck (Sideshow Media Group)

Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture (Black Cat)

A Lecture is About to Begin

A brief "prologue" in Martin Riker's The Guest Lecture, informs us that the entire scene of the novel takes place in "a dark hotel room somewhere in middle America," where a man, woman, and child lie on a "single king-sized bed." The woman is awake, and "inside her head, things are busy." Indeed: "A lecture is about to begin." 

It would seem that we are being prepared to find out what is going on "inside" the protagonist's head, to encounter her in the process of thinking. And literally there is no physical action depicted in the novel outside of this character's ruminations both about the lecture she is scheduled to deliver the following morning and about the course her life has taken that has brought her to this particular moment. But we do not experience what amounts to an existential crisis the protagonist--Abby, an economics professor--is enduring as the processing of thought but instead as a fully articulated and dramatized account of the circumstances of her life, along with numerous passages in which she, for example, explicates the economic theories that have preoccupied her career. While Abby's story is not related as a chronologically continuous narrative (it develops associatively, in a way that is consistent with the movement of thought), most readers would likely find it a fairly recognizable sort of episodic first-person narrative.

Riker's purpose, then, is not to represent the operations of human thought, its "flow." Few novels, in fact, actually do manage to capture the act of thinking, at least in any consistent or sustained way. The mental phenomenon we call "thought" is, arguably, only partially verbal, and doesn't always occur in full-phrased sentences. Some writers have of course attempted to produce a version of this unprocessed cerebration in prose--most famously in the "stream of consciousness" technique whereby thought is approximated through discontinuous and unpunctuated language--but the success of this technique in leaving an impression of greater realism by introducing an internal perspective on narrated events led to the conflation of a literary strategy with the actual reality of thought. "Stream of consciousness" is unavoidably artifice, no less a device for creating specifically literary effects than any other figuration of language. Nevertheless, what was at first a modernist innovation in storytelling influenced many subsequent writers (and critics) to value psychological realism above all, leading to the widespread believe that the capacity to go inside human consciousness is one of the distinctive attributes of fiction among all other narrative arts.

Fiction may well be able to create the illusion of representing a character's mental state, but then creating illusion is one of the defining presumptions of fiction to begin with, so making the reader accept that a story's devices are providing access to "thought" is finally just one sort of illusion the writer hopes to produce. Moreover, The Guest Lecture demonstrates, it seems to me, that human thought is of value to writers for its content, not the form in which it might be expressed. To get the latter "right," even if it were possible to do so, might count as an achievement of documentary realism, but this in itself is not an achievement of literary art. Such art could indeed be made from a character's internal reflections and ruminations, but not simply by recording them. And in The Guest Lecture Martin Riker does not endeavor to record the thoughts of his insomniac protagonist, despite presenting us with a narrative situation in which thinking is precisely what she seems to be doing. The novel gives form to this thinking, but it is the aesthetic form that converts the raw materials of experience into the artfulness of literature.

Most immediately on Abby's mind is the lecture on John Meynard Keynes she has been invited to give the following morning, but this impending event seems to have brought her to a crossroads of sorts, an occasion that unavoidably compels her to contemplate where she has arrived, in both her personal and professional life, and to determine what comes next. The most immediately troubling problem she faces is that she has recently been denied tenure at her university and is uncertain if she still has--or wants--an academic career. We learn the circumstances of her plight: although she is a specialist on the life and thought of Keynes, instead of writing a conventional academic tome on her subject she wrote a more personal, general-interest book based on an essay she published online that attracted a wider audience. Not surprisingly, the senior (mostly male) faculty in her department did not regard this effort altogether kindly and declared her work unworthy of tenure. The speech she will be giving is for a popular organization, not an academic one, so that it looms, perhaps, as a portent of whatever scholarly relevance she will manage to retain following on from this debacle.

Keynes plays a larger role in the realization of Abby's story than as just the subject of her intellectual interests. The novel's formal conceit mirrors the mnemonic device that Abby uses to memorize her speech: associating each of the parts of the speech with a room in her house and then visiting each of the rooms in the appropriate order. Thus does Abby take us on a tour of her home, but accompanying her on the tour is none other than the ghost of John Meynard Keynes, who acts also as a kind of advisor to Abby as she tries to sort through not just her feelings about Keynes's legacy but also her general crisis of confidence in herself. In keeping with Abby's generally favorable view of Keynes as a historical figure, the ghostly version of him seems a rather jolly nice fellow who counsels Abby in her winter of discontent--but of course he is a projection of Abby's distressed imagination, so he is presumably fulfilling the role for which he has been invoked in the first place. As an economist, Abby is most interested in Keynes's optimistic speculations about economic prosperity in the future, perhaps reflecting her need to believe in her own future.

Abby needs a good dead of encouragement, as her sense of self-worth, while understandably damaged by her recent setback, seems always to have been fragile. Working in a male-dominated field, she has further isolated herself professionally by concentrating on Keynes as rhetorician rather than the hard date of economics (or even the economic theories for which Keynes is most remembered). She earnestly wants to belong to the world of serious intellectual discourse, but although her deliberations on various ideas (scattered throughout the novel) show that she is entirely able to hold her own in this world, she also has chosen an approach that emphasizes the direct incorporation of personal experience in academic writing. Abby struggles with these self-created dilemmas: she knows that her intellectual project is valid, but she also berates herself for failing to get official endorsement of her efforts. 

Abby's mingling of the personal and the analytical is reflected in the sleepless reverie producing the account we are reading. She interrupts her rehearsal of the presentation she is to give, and her exchanges with Keynes, to recall important episodes from her past, those which played an important role in determining her direction. Many of these episodes end in disappointment or loss, for which predictably enough Abby often blames herself. She seems relatively content in her marriage to her sleeping husband, Ed, although she confesses that part of Ed's appeal is that he is reflexively supportive of her, which in her insecurity she badly needs. These very insecurities, however, make Abby not just the victim of an unwelcoming system but  a recognizably imperfect character with whom we can all feel a vicarious sympathy. Her struggle to reconcile herself to her situation is really the only plot in the novel, but we do find ourselves compelled by her predicament: will she ultimately overcome her self-doubts and be able to move on?

It might still be accurate to say that the source of our interest in the novel's protagonist lies in the depth of her thinking, although this is not conveyed through direct exposure to it as depicted thought. Instead the author exteriorizes the substance of that thought in the form he has devised and the at times anxious but always articulate voice he has given the character. He has, in short, transformed thinking into writing. It is not the sort of writing that attempts to replicate the manner of thinking itself but instead shapes and organizes it into a manifest aesthetic order. If this gives us a first-person narrator speaking cogently to us about her life experiences, her narrative has more of the characteristics of a lucid dream than of waking reality, while at other times it blurs the distinction between narration and critical exegesis. In its way, perhaps it models the hybrid blend of imagination and intelligence that Abby will likely continue to practice in her writing as part of her new professional identity.

What a Work of Fiction is For

Rohan Maitzen has posted on her blog an extended discussion of her experience reading Martin Amis's Money with her book club. Rohan says she disliked the novel because of its morally odious narrator, but also describes the character as "memorable," with a "distinctive and unforgettable voice." She as well admits the novel is "sometimes LOL funny" and that Amis's style is at times "virtuosic."

 

Pretty clearly Rohan (and her book club colleagues) could not get past the intrinsic assumption that a fictional character is to be regarded as a person, to whom we respond in the same way as we would an actual person--we wouldn't want to know the protagonist of Money in real life, so why should we put up with him in this novel? This is an assumption I have never shared, and in this case it has led Rohan as a reader to overlook what she has herself identified as the novel's aesthetic virtues. Rohan's reaction to Amis's novel suggests to me that we have fundamentally different expectations of what a work of fiction is for.

 

For me, a work of fiction is a verbal fabrication that has as its goal the creation of artistic effects precisely like a "distinctive voice" or an act of sustained comedy. Rohan concedes that Amis wants us to dislike his narrator, so this, too, might be considered an artistic achievement in Money. If we do dislike this character, Amis has succeeded in setting up a reading experience in which we will have to wrestle with the moral complexity of reading about him, anyway.

 

I will go out on a limb here and say that works of fiction, far from being "empathy machines" by which we come to be closer to "other people," should be a space in which we discard our ordinary concerns for actual people altogether. We might instead contemplate the way in which "character" is simply another device the writer may use to take us into a verbal world not just of moral complexity but one that doesn't operate by ordinary moral principles at all. This is a world where imagination and "virtuosity" with language are the supreme values, although of course the artistic vision expressed by the writer might raise all sorts of questions that might have all sorts of moral implications when we return to the world "outside the text."

 

Rohan suggests there is an inherent difference between women readers of a writer like Amis and his more numerous male readers. But I think this again is really the difference between regarding characters in a work of fiction as persons and considering them the effects of language. I certainly don't believe only male readers such as myself (and I am no doubt in a minority of male readers in my own assumptions about reading) would want to think about literary works in this latter way. And unquestionably many male readers of Martin Amis are themselves responding to Amis's work for features beyond its implications for an aesthetic theory of fiction. (I should also say that, although I do like Money, I am not otherwise a particular enthusiast for Amis's fiction.)

 

If we should respond to fictional characters as if they are real people, what is the point of creating fictional characters at all? Just tell me about some real people you admire and maybe I will admire them too.

Distorted Dreamscapes

Mircea Cartarescu's Solenoid is a work of antirealist fiction whose very departures from verisimilar representation are really strategies for getting closer to reality through the devices available to the literary imagination. In Solenoid, these strategies contribute most of all to an hallucinatory yet undoubtedly truthful portrait of the city of Bucharest, home both to the novel's protagonist and to the author, each in their representations of the city (the protagonist through the journal that is the vehicle of Cartarescu's narrative) seemingly appalled by its degradation during the Ceausescu years but also in a kind of awe at its ancient, dilapidated grandeur. The former is frequently evoked in straightforwardly realistic descriptions of the ruinous state of Bucharest's exterior facades, but the latter is a cumulative impression emerging from the protracted reveries into which the narrator just as often falls.

During these episodes, the narrator recounts events from his own past as well as current experiences, related in obsessive detail, that can quickly veer into distorted dreamscapes. The recounted moments from the past are themselves often dreams, or at least waking visions, that the narrator is transcribing from old journals in which these visions are recorded into a new and all-encompassing journal the completion of which the narrator regards as a kind of culminating act in his own failed career as a writer. (Current happenings are also chronicled  in this journal, which serves as the novel's structural conceit, an omnibus memoir of sorts. Among the most prominent of these dream episodes are those that report on spectral visits by mysterious figures who hover around the narrator in the night. They are related as real-life hauntings by apparitions, but they nevertheless reinforce the blurring of the real and the imagined that ultimately characterizes the novel as a whole, although they also more explicitly locate the source of this drift from reality to the perceptions of the narrator himself.

We might then say that the "realism" of a novel like Solenoid is really a version of psychological realism, except that this concept wouldn't really do justice to Cartarescu's full-scale literary rejection of a boundary between what's real and what's imagined. This is apparent as well in the other two books by Cartarescu available in English translations, Nostalgia and Blinding (Book One). These books also freely blend straightforwardly realistic narratives with blatantly surreal and fantastic scenes, both approaches as with Solenoid in the service of experiences that seem autobiographical, although the autobiographical elements are themselves not the center of interest. Cartarescu seems to be using the circumstances of his own like as the means for executing a literary method that is faithful to those circumstances (just as in the depiction of Bucharest) by amplifying their routine qualities into fully fantastic scenes of grotesque fancy. 

Of the three books, Solenoid is the most formally integrated. The translated edition of Blinding is only the first part of a trilogy, while Nostalgia may be more a collection of novellas (united by an authorial presence and their setting in Bucharest) with disparate characters and stories. Although Nostalgia achieves it own kind of aesthetic unity-through-disjunction, Solenoid retains the episodic, digressive impulses animating both Nostalgia and Blinding while its unity is made visible rather than merely imminent, the novel's form a function of its point of view but for that reason more immediately present in the reader's perception of its aesthetic order. If Solenoid is less formally open-ended that the two previously translated works (and thus arguably less audacious), it is also less diffuse in its effect.

Solenoid is also more purposefully focused on character development, partly again a function of its use of the protagonist's journal as narrative vehicle, but however much the novel offers a dynamic portrayal of Bucharest, it also gives us a psychologically dense account of the narrator, still temperamentally the career writer he deliberately refused to become after experiencing initial hostility to an apprentice poem he wrote for a writing workshop during his student days. ("I have never recovered from the trauma," he tells us in introducing the incident.) Instead, he is a Romanian teacher at a run-down Bucharest high school, the drudgery of the job also depicted in the novel with an unforgiving realism that ultimately seems almost preternatural in its desolation. If Cartarescu's practice can be called "magical realism," it is a kind of magic that has his characters literally bewitched, forced to live in a kind of benumbed trance. Such conditions force the narrator into the recesses of his own mind, but "during the endless series of evenings when, as my silent room darkens, my mind rises like the moon and glows brighter and brighter" and "I see palaces and hidden worlds on its surface, things never revealed to those running inside the maze." 

Although Solenoid is set during the reign of Ceausescu in Romania (as are Nostalgia and Blinding), there are explicitly only fleeting references to the political dispensation in place at the time. Readers innocent of Cold War-era Romanian history (perhaps a sizable enough group) could read Solenoid without fully registering the oppressive reach of the Ceausescu regime, which is nevertheless tacit in the near-ruins of the urban landscape the narrator confronts and the abject resignation palpable in most of the city's residents. The oblique depiction of the specific political circumstances in which the narrator of Solenoid must operate might persuade us to think that Cartarescu intends his novel to be read as a parable of sorts, something akin to Kafka although more firmly embodied in the particularities of place, its politics only nominally suggested, not fully apparent. But Solenoid's narrative structure does not seem allegorical: Cartarescu's narrator is really interested in social and political circumstances only as backdrop to his epic-length self-interrogation.

Solenoid's protagonist is obsessed with his own life not out of narcissism or self-satisfaction but because he finds his own life as grotesque and unaccountable as the city of Bucharest itself. He conceives his journal--the book we are reading--as "a report of my anomalies," which requires the discontinuous, hallucinogenic treatment we encounter in the novel, although the narrator insists he is sticking to the facts of his life, even if these facts are but "vague flashes over the banal surface of the most banal of lives, little fissures, vague discrepancies." One could ask, however, whether the flashes the narrator provides are all that vague, the little fissures he exposes very little. In its juxtaposition of the banal and the incredible, Solenoid casts doubt on our rigid separation of the palpably real and the presumably fantastic, insinuating that each in itself is only a partial measure of the truth, which occupies the permeable border between the two. The narrator directly suggests that our perceptions of reality are inherently limited when he contemplates at length theories of a possible fourth dimension that human beings are unable--yet--to access. Signs of these limitations recur throughout the novel in the hidden spaces and labyrinthine passageways the narrator frequently encounters (including in his own home).

Finally the narrator of Solenoid is more concerned with ultimate questions such as the nature of reality and the meaning behind its surfaces, rather than more temporal cultural and political matters, and he finds a preoccupation with such larger perplexities in a semi-organized group called the Picketists, who hold demonstrations outside places like the morgue. But these are not political protests. Instead the Picketists carry signs that say such things as "Down with Death," 
"Shame on Epilepsy," and "NO to Agony!" At the first rally the narrator attends, the group's ostensible leader demands to know

Why do we live?. . .How can we exist? Who allowed this scandal, this injustice? This horror, this abomination? What monstrous imagination wrapped consciousness in flesh? What sadistic and saturnine spirit permitted consciousness to suffer like this, permitted the spirit to scream in torture? Why did we climb down into this swamp. this jungle, into these flames full of hate and anger?

It is perhaps tempting to think that the ingenuous Picketists are ultimately an object of satire or parody, but in Cartartescu's fictional world it would be more accurate to say that the usual forms of social protest, demands for sublunary justice, are the real expressions of credulity and naivete. The narrator doesn't exactly become a Picketist, but their insistence that the real world of ordinary existence is utterly senseless closely aligns with his own preoccupation with his "anomalous" life and his perception that true meaning is to be found beyond mundane reality.

Still, Solenoid nevertheless often lingers on the details of its protagonist's mundane reality. We frequently return to his far from anomalous vocation as a high school teacher, with its tedious and unsatisfying routines. The narrator is romantically involved with a fellow teacher, Irina, and their trysts are chronicled at various points in the novel. (Later we get the narrator's account of his previous failed marriage, an experience which clearly still puzzles him as another "anomaly.") These trysts are enhanced by a phenomenon whose source gives the novel its title: beneath his "boat-shaped house," he has discovered, is buried a massive solenoid, the electromagnetic effects of which create a force field of some sort that allows him and Irina to literally float above his bed during their episodes of lovemaking. There are other solenoids buried in various places around Bucharest, so that some of the extravagant, surreal goings-on related in Solenoid could be taken as the influence of these amplified solenoids, acting on a metaphorical level as a kind of fanciful conceit. The conceit is able to encompass both the novel's unsparing realism and its detours into the eerie and absurd, allowing it at once to be a visionary work of sustained surrealism and a rigorous exercise in verisimilitude.

This achievement is, of course most immediately attributable to Solenoid's narrator, who is, after all, summoning this blend of veracity and fantasy in organizing and completing his journal. Although the narrator presents himself as a failed writer, and one whose failure was provoked by his work as a poet and not a writer of fiction, the novel nonetheless unavoidably acknowledges its fictional world as artifice, the calculated manifestation of writing. But if Solenoid could be called a large-scale work of metafiction, it is not of the unabashedly self-reflexive kind that is sometimes characterized as "fiction about fiction." Instead, the metafictional elements act as an enabling device making the novel's merging of the representational and the surreal more seamless, not simply an amalgam of realism and fantasy. Ultimately Solenoid--and Cartarescu's fiction in general--makes no significant distinction between the ostensibly factual and the blatantly fictional, but this is more than an exercise in reality-bending: it is an implicit assertion of fiction's truth-telling potential beyond the prescriptions favoring narrative plausibility and literal representation.

At the end of Solenoid, the narrator begins to burn his now-completed manuscript--the last scenes describe an apocalyptic during which the city of Bucharest rises into the sky, revealing a Lovecraftian horror lying beneath--and prepares to seek a new home with Irina and their unborn child where "we will grow old together." This clearly implies a happy ending beyond the nightmarish vision the narrator's writing had evoked, but of course the narrator's action introduces a narrative dilemma: if indeed the manuscript has been destroyed, how then have we been able to read it? We could regard the text's self-immolation as the narrator's sleight-of-hand, a way of providing his story with a narrative closure that resolves his conflicted feelings about writing with an especially emphatic renunciation. Or we could accept the device as the final confirmation of the novel's metafictional presuppositions, an acknowledgement that the narrator and his baroque journal are the author's fabrication, the vehicle for an elaborate counterfactual tale depicting the author's life had he not in fact become a successful writer.

Even so, Solenoid's protagonist certainly does not exhibit diminished skills in his abilities as a writer. Indeed, we could say that the narrator of Solenoid, free of the distractions that might have come with literary success, is able to exercise his poetic gifts in their purest state, untainted by worldly concerns, especially if he knows that what he writes is destined to have no readers. His prose, as translated by Sean Cotter, is characterized by a scrupulous attention to detail, even when the objects of his attention seem unearthly, related in rhythmically propulsive sentences. (One assumes these are qualities of Cartarescu's writing that Cotter has accurately rendered in his translation--at any rate, this English version of the novel is altogether compelling in its style.) However much the narrator of Solenoid wants to affirm the value of life over writing, as the embodiment of Mircea Cartarescu's value as a writer, he is among the most dedicated of writers.

New Issue of Unbeaten Paths

The newest issue (issue 6) of my Substack book review, Unbeaten Paths, is now available. This issue focuses on several books published by Corona/Samizdat Press. 

Corona/Samizdat is a (more or less) one-man non-profit literary press founded and operated by the American expatriate writer, Rick Harsch. Physically located in Izola, Slovenia, the press publishes both new unconventional, formally adventurous fiction and out-of-print works by neglected writers--in the press's own formulation, "old works dismissed too early" (website here). This issue is dedicated to recent releases from Corona, although the first review is of a novel by Harsch himself. . . .Continue reading

 

The Sundering of the Old and the New

John Guillory's Professing Criticism is in every way an admirable book. It is deeply learned, sharp in its observations, unquestionably sincere in its effort to rehabilitate and reorganize the study of literature, and above all correct: literary study has indeed lost sight of its original, underlying purpose, has become too dispersed in its curricular organization, and has become helplessly caught in the shifting winds of every new and passing critical trend that comes along. It is poorly situated to resist all the demographic and institutional pressures that are destabilizing its intellectual foundations and probably threatening its continued existence as a university-based discipline. It badly needs to be reconceived and reorganized.

Unfortunately, Professing Literature is not likely to have much effect in bringing about such changes in the curriculum and objectives of academic literary study. For one thing, the book itself is short on practical, concrete suggestions for bringing them about. Most of its analysis is historical and diagnostic, providing a general critique of the current status of literature and literary criticism in the academic curriculum, providing lots of clarity about how the "profession" of literary study came into its present form but otherwise remaining content with vague exhortations about what "must" happen if it is to flourish in the future. Guillory doesn't take names or arrest any suspects when it comes to assigning responsibility for the increasingly marginal status of literary study in the university. (Although to some extent it shares this status with the humanities in general, as the recent discourse on the "crisis" in the academic humanities would suggest.) He does speculate that the study of literature might in the near future rend itself in two, one strand branching off into the entirely topical, present-oriented focus on identity politics and social justice, while the other, much smaller, branch might still emphasize the "older" works of British and American literature. But it isn't entirely clear whether Guillory himself favors this bifurcation or whether it's just a concession to the inevitable given current conditions on the ground.

Guillory believes that academic critics in their latest iteration overestimate the efficacy of their politically-motivated scholarship, but while offering courses that seek to "affirm" identity or promote social justice might conceivably be more fruitful in their ultimate political effect than academic scholarship inevitably read by few people (raising consciousness at least among those who take the courses), still it is hard to see how continuing with this utilitarian approach to literature is a very promising option in securing the future of literary study. Certainly courses focusing on these issues could continue to be featured in the college curriculum, but by that time they will have little to do with "literary study" per se, which will have essentially disappeared in favor of cultural therapeutics. And at that point "scholarship" on literature will either be beside the point or a thin disguise for political homiletics. Given Guillory's emphasis on the history of literary study's difficulties in establishing itself as a proper "scholarly" discipline against the skeptical attitude that it belongs in the university in the first place, surely this skepticism would only be heightened in such hyperpoliticized circumstances, its status as a "discipline" only more precarious.

Perhaps literary scholarship (in the older sense of scholarship actually about literature) would persist in the vestigial programs focusing on the older array of canonical literary works. But it seems to me that the gap between the goals of these two approaches would eventually be so wide there would be little reason to associate them as merely separate ways of studying literature. The "study" of literature would surely be more appropriately applied to this second form of inquiry, although it also seems likely that this mode of study would come to be regarded as more or less an adjunct to historical studies, something like Classics, for example, ultimately considered a form of antiquarianism. This sundering of the old and the new might further have an effect on what is taken as "literature" in the new dispensation: since such a premium would be put on the personal and the immediate, memoirs and perhaps poetry would seem to be the more fruitful forms to examine, while fiction could become less central. The reduction of fiction to its ethical and political content is already a trend in literary culture more generally, so perhaps there will be some convergence on the idea that "literature" is a vehicle for direct personal "expression."

The most significant consequence of assigning what we now think of as "literature" to a branch of purely historical study would be, paradoxically, the loss of "literary history" in what is still supposed to be literary study. For the inflection of genres or styles on a new literary work to be registered by readers, those readers need to have some familiarity with such genres and styles as visible historically. That history won't disappear, of course, and readers could choose to avail themselves of it, but if the current resistance to the "coverage" of literary periods in the study of literature remains (likely it will only intensify) and eventually wins out entirely in the topical approach, it won't be part of a literary education per se. Writers themselves would have less motivation to situate their work among the practices of writers of the past: why cultivate such influences when they are mostly irrelevant to the immediate needs of personal testimony and unmediated communication? (Again, this way of thinking about writing seems to me already well-advanced.) Literary history will extend back a few decades, including writers still recent enough that their work still sufficiently encompasses current concerns.

It is possible that nothing like what I am describing here will in fact come to pass. Guillory's speculation about a possible future for literary study may be wholly mistaken (although it is not without a basis in current reality), and my own conjectures may just be a reflection of a disillusioned cynicism (if not a thoroughly retrograde point of view). Surely writers would not fully welcome a cultural environment in which their work is likely to become passé even faster than it does now. Perhaps the conflicts between the ancients and the moderns in literary study will not be entirely irreconcilable. Or at least the ancients won't be banished entirely. Probably the status of both literature and literary study will persist for a while in its presently unsettled condition. The one thing I certainly do not see happening is some sort of "reform" of the currently muddled situation that leaves everyone who has contributed to the creation of the muddle very satisfied. The powers that be in the university hierarchy are likely to close the shutters on academic literary study before that happens.

Dereliction of Duty

In my previous commentary on Claire Dederer's Monsters, I did not cite the way Dederer, in two later chapters of her book, includes several women as putative "monsters" whose actions might need to be considered when placing value on the work. In one chapter, she makes a curious extended comparison between Valerie Solanis and Sylvia Plath, both of whom are said to be guilty of violence (although Plath's is the violence of her suicide), but the main source of disquiet for Dederer in contemplating questionable behavior by women is in what she characterizes as offenses against motherhood, her two primary examples being Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell.

Lessing is scrutinized for being willing to abandon two of her children (she left them behind with her ex-husband when she moved to London from Africa), while Mitchell is included because she gave up a child for adoption, allegedly to pursue her career. Dederer doesn't exactly propose that this is "monstrous behavior" comparable to the sexual abuse and child molestation of the male artists she surveys, but it is quite clear that she is bothered by the dereliction of duty by these artists, even though she knows the social expectations placed on women in their situation manifest a double standard and that it's society itself that forces women into these painful choices. She knows that committing oneself to one's art necessarily entails making such choices. Still: "When I think of Joni Mitchell, I think of her lost daughter," Dederer writes. "When I think of Doris Lessing, I think of her abandoned children." 

Dederer's inclusion of these women artists has the feel of a perfunctory gesture, as if writing a whole book that only examines the problematic behavior of male artists would seem disproportionate. But that in choosing the artists to examine she would select these women who were willing to forsake their children seems telling enough. Surely there are women artists who exemplify truly questionable character more than Lessing and Mitchell. Jean Rhys seems to have been a much more unsavory figure than Doris Lessing would ever be, and in the echelons of bad behavior among women rock stars, Mitchell must rank pretty low. The implication seems to be that deliberately neglecting the duties of motherhood is the most monstrous act a woman might commit, if not directly by Dederer herself then through the apparent assumption that many readers would find motherly neglect a shockingly unnatural thing to do.

Should an artist have greater obligations to family or to her art? Should she have to make this decision? Lessing, after all, didn't really abandon her children to the harsh winds of fate. She left them with their father. Mitchell had the option of putting her daughter up for adoption, through which she by most measures seems to have been give a perfectly comfortable life (and never mind that Mitchell has said she took this action because she was nearly destitute, not to serve her career). Were these results sufficient for us to conclude that these women's decisions to pursue their art are justified, since if they had not made them we might not have Lessing's subsequent fiction or Mitchell's music (or at least only a substantially altered version of them)? Further, is there any truly analogous choice demanded of male artists? We might deplore actions taken by male artists, past and present, that seem disrespectful to family and negligent of family responsibilities, but do we therefore wish that their art had reached us in a similarly diminished form so we can say they acted right?

"Mother" is freighted with so many cultural expectations and entails so many presumed responsibilities that perceived violations of its imperatives are nearly unforgivable. This is of course not the only cultural norm that places an inequitable burden on women, but for women artists none may pose a greater obstacle to full artistic autonomy than this one, as is demonstrated by the very emphasis Dederer gives it in her book. Elsewhere Dederer laments that the concept of artistic "genius" seems to be reserved for certain artists who are/have been granted something like an exemption from blame for their real-life flaws and limitations. Women ought to be given the same opportunities to be geniuses as men, but does Doris Lessing get this chance if her actions as an absent mother are still questioned? Will the assumption that women have a natural attribute (the instinct to "nurture") that simply can't be abrogated always interfere with the appreciation of women's art?

"Artistic autonomy" is valuable, of course, only if you think art itself has a value that makes risking moral disapproval for disregarding expectations of proper conduct worth the risk. You must believe that the art created is at least equal in value to the ethical principle you're violating, even if you agree that the principle is valid. The sort of transgression committed by Lessing and Mitchell surely is not the kind of ethical breach Dederer surveys among the male artists she includes in her book--rape, child abuse, other forms of violence--but to defy cultural norms as they did is an act of courage, unlike the unambiguously contemptible actions imputed to the men. Arguably they regarded the pursuit of artistic expression as just as indispensable to human fulfillment (and not just their own) as the other "natural" impulse they were ostensibly ignoring. Like the other geniuses, their strongest impulse was to the creativity and imagination embodied in their art. Do we think this was more blameworthy because they were women?

Fallen Artists

Claire Dederer's Monsters might seem to be an attempt to sort out the issues involved in the now resurgent debate about the relationship between an artist's behavior in "real life" and the art he/she creates, between biography and aesthetic achievement, but what turns out to be Dederer's actual subject is implicit in the book's title. She is not interested in the questions that arise when we wonder how the artist's life might clarify the art, but in the bad behavior of notorious artists (in the essay that is the ultimate source of Dederer's book she more specifically identifies "monstrous men" as her ultimate concern) and the dilemma this creates for a "fan" of any such artist. Dederer seeks to write an "autobiography of the audience," with herself and her own fandom as a stand-in.

Dederer gives particular emphasis to the controversies enveloping the careers of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, two filmmakers whose work has been important to her in the past. (Dederer was at one time a film critic.) In each case, she finds that the sexual offenses of which both men have been accused inevitably affect the way she now responds to their films, although in neither case do they entirely overshadow the purely artistic qualities the films still possess. For Dederer, the work of Polanski and Allen does not exactly lose its artistic credibility because of the filmmakers' misdeeds, but it does lose the "love" that Dederer once had for it. While surely the value placed on all of the artistic expressions Claire Dederer discusses in her book (films, visual art, music, literary works) arises also from defensible critical standards, the appeal to "art love" and the priority she gives to our emotional responses to art do indeed evoke the attitude toward art expressed by modern fan culture.

Dederer does venture outside her own personal relationship to art to look directly at fan culture in its response to the transgressions of J,K. Rowling and Michael Jackson (although she is also a fan of the latter). With Rowling, of course, the alleged wrongdoing comes not from abusive actions she has committed but from her exercise of speech--speech that has been judged to be transphobic. Dederer expresses sympathy for those of Rowling's readers whose love of her books have been marred by what they believe is a betrayal of what they took the books to be saying to them, but her analysis of the situation is really quite attenuated. She does not consider whether Rowling's words really are transphobic, whether the Harry Potter books or the films adapted from those books are actually marked by some sort of hostility or prejudice toward transgender people, or why Rowling's later publicly stated opinions are at all relevant to the aesthetic experience of those works. Indeed, the source of disappointment among Rowling's fans seems to be that the Harry Potter books are an inspiration to those who feel shunned or excluded, so that further discussion of these questions could presumably illuminate more fully the valid (or invalid) connections that can be made between an artist's public utterances and that artist's work.

If we are entitled to come to our own interpretation of a work of art without deference to the artist's perspective (his/her "intention"), then it is at the least unclear why the artist's unwelcome views on other matters should be given any additional weight, either. If one's "love" of the artwork must be extended to an unconditional acceptance of everything the artist might do or say, then that love is grounded on a shaky foundation. Dederer throughout the book maintains that responses to art are legitimately emotional, but if love of a particular artwork can't withstand the encounter with extrinsic realities such as the artist's expression of opinion, then emotion itself has prevailed over appreciation of those qualities that make the work artistically compelling. Ultimately the whole approach to art exemplified in Monsters focuses on interpretation, the audience's way of emotionally processing and placing value on the work, rather than the actual experience of an artistic creation, during which, if the experience is genuinely attentive, issues relating to the artist's opinions or behaviors in real life play no role.

Dederer would assert, of course, that these non-artistic factors can't help but intrude on aesthetic experience, especially if the artist is a "monster." This is what makes it a "dilemma." But such an intrusion doesn't just happen, unbidden. We allow it to happen. Even want it to. We are in the middle of a cultural phase in which morality takes priority over aesthetics, so that our esteem for the work must be accompanied by esteem for the life. Not only is the artist's interpretation of the work irrelevant, but the artist must be held accountable to our own interpretation: the "J.K. Rowling" who wrote Harry Potter must not be the sort of person who would make questionable remarks about transgendered people; the "Woody Allen" who created all those nebbishy characters portrayed by Allen himself must in fact be in real life a nebbish who could never be regarded as a sexual predator. It's a curious inversion of the proposition proffered by formalist critics that the artist's life be held separate from the art so that we can perceive the latter clearly. Now we must merge the artist and the art into a seamless whole.

Dederer certainly does question the validity of this separation (citing skeptically the male friends and critics who advised her she must approach Allen's films only for "the aesthetics"), although she does not take the reversal of the biographical fallacy quite so far. For the most part, her book is an attempt to think through the implications of the increased attention to the moral failings of prominent artists, not to erase all distinctions between biography and artistic performance. She is alert to the moral ambiguity in some cases and in others (Polanski) concludes that we must simply live with the tension between great art and compromised artist. The best chapter in the book "The Anti-Monster," in fact challenges the facile moralism that would condemn Vladimir Nabokov simply for writing Lolita, with its truly monstrous protagonist, as if Nabokov is projecting his own attitudes in his portrayal of Humbert Humbert. Dederer's scrupulous analysis persuasively demonstrates that in Lolita Nabokov creates a monstrous character, but this does not mean he does so as an endorsement of Humbert's attitudes and behavior. An attentive reading of Lolita reveals that the story of Lolita is the story of a young girl's devastation, actually not by a monster but by an otherwise unremarkable man (a "run of the mill child abuser") giving in to his worst impulses while concocting elaborate justifications.

Nabokov may indeed have descended into his own inner darkness to conceive a character such as Humbert Humbert, but ultimately all artists must have access to this sort of darkness or their art will be incomplete, naïve about human errancy. By the end of her book, Dederer has concluded that we are all in our way monstrous (she cites her own flawed behavior), in a way perhaps like Humbert Humbert in our capacity to wreck the potential inherent in our youthful selves. She suggests that, just as we can extend a kind of empathetic understanding to loved ones who have transgressed without forgetting the transgression, we should extend the same kind of understanding to favored artists and their faults. I myself don't really think this analogy between "art love" and love of people is altogether convincing--they seem to me completely different things, if the former is even real--but Dederer's solution to the problem that she thinks has become more urgent for her may be the only judicious one to be found.

Dederer's examination of this problem doesn't really try to resolve any properly "philosophical" issues underlying it. She mostly sticks to reflection on the emotional turbulence audiences experience trying to reconcile their attachment to the art object with their disgust at the behavior of the artist. In another recently published book, Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies, Erich Hatala Matthes explicitly does attempt to sort through the concerns about "immoral artists" from a philosophical perspective. Matthes, a moral philosopher who teaches at Wellesley College, is interested both in the moral qualities of art itself and in the implications of immoral behavior by artists, as well as whether "cancellation" is an appropriate response to such behavior. Matthes focuses more or less exclusively on the same recent controversies on which Dederer concentrates, without much if any reference to questions about the moral behavior of artists in the more distant artistic/literary past, or to any previous lines of literary or philosophical inquiry into the relationship between art and artist.

In his consideration of the proposition that an artist's immoral behavior diminishes the aesthetic value of the work, Matthes leans on the examples of r & b musician R. Kelley and Woody Allen, specifically in Manhattan. (To judge by these two books, Allen seems to be ground zero in the discourse about fallen artists, even though the relevant charges against him go back thirty years now.) Matthes's determination that a song by Kelley that seems to celebrate sexual exploitation is confirmed in its immorality by Kelley's history of sexual exploitation seems like an obvious conclusion few would dispute. On the other hand, his further contention that Allen's relationship with Soon-Yi Previn retroactively imports an "aesthetic flaw" into Manhattan  because his actions give us "reasons not to respond to the work in the prescribed way " seems to me utterly preposterous. Putting aside whether Allen's conduct with Soon-Yi was in fact immoral (Soon-Yi herself, a college student at the time, has never suggested that it was), the notion that Manhattan "prescribes" that we accept the film's portrayal of 40-something Isaac's involvement with the 17 year-old Tracy as unproblematic is absurd. The film prescribes nothing. It interjects an element of moral ambiguity into the conventional narrative progression of the romantic comedy, but we are free to resolve that ambiguity according to our own moral sensibility. Plenty of people find the central relationship compelling, while others do balk at its moral ramifications. The film doesn't require either of these responses, and to say that it does is at the very least a myopic interpretation.

Although Matthes thus does believe that we can reject the work of immoral artists both on moral and aesthetic grounds--he makes no claim that all artist immorality leads to the latter, however, nor does he think that continuing to patronize an artist's work necessarily makes one "complicit" with the artist's behavior--he doesn't feel that cancellation of individual artists is the most appropriate action to take. It won't really solve the problem, he argues, and the potential for overreach is too great. Instead, the institutions responsible for producing and curating art works should be held more responsible for creating and enforcing standards of behavior. According to Matthes, such action will minimize the number of egregious cases that now provoke cancellation.

This might seem like a reasonable proposal, but, speaking for myself, I fear such a prospect more than the occasional cancellation of this or that artist. To invest these "institutions" (publishers, museums, other arts organizations) with the ability to police the activities of artists is an invitation to interference with artistic freedom, outright censorship and the establishment of a moral autocracy in the arts. Artists are notoriously unreliable as exemplars of moral propriety. If an artist crosses a line into the clearly forbidden, put him in jail. If he merely acts in ways that you deplore, stop being a part of his audience, but don't start imposing rules for correct artist behavior. Someday you could be the one accused of  some alleged dereliction and banished into the void.

Right and Proper

It seems fair to say both that book publishers are increasingly employing “sensitivity readers” in the editing process they use and that there is an equally growing backlash against this practice. The motives for its use seem fairly obvious: to avoid giving undue offense—or, in the more currently preferred formulation, to avoid “doing harm”—to any of the various cultural groups whose claims to accurate representation have become more assertive. The reason for the backlash is perhaps equally obvious, at least on the part of writers, some of whom feel that the desire to minimize harm has been pursued with undue zeal, ultimately encroaching on their artistic freedom or their speech rights.

This backlash has recently intensified as well among readers, with a series of high-profile examples of the application of sensitivity reading to the work of “classic” authors such as Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and P.G. Wodehouse. The response to what critics have called the “bowdlerization” of these works has generally been negative, with few commentators seemingly willing to defend such outright revisions of already-existing texts, perhaps because their authors are no longer around to give their consent to them. (Or perhaps the most fervent believers in the eradication of “harm” in literary works haven’t yet fully prepared the case for sanitizing the literary past.) One writer, Imogen West-Knights (who does not seem a zealot), has, however offered a qualified defense of sensitivity reading in the Dahl and Wodehouse controversies, arguing that at least voluntary submission to sensitivity readers can be a responsible act of seeking “accuracy” in a work of fiction.

West-Knight’s contention makes sense if the writer does indeed voluntarily solicit the services of a sensitivity reader, and if the work in question clearly aspires to include accuracy of representation as one of its artistic goals. But this latter ambition is actually not shared by all writers of fiction, or at least in practice it is not an ambition that can always be easily fulfilled, unless we want to insist that a certain kind of realism, in which characters are always “believable,” is now to be compulsory among all writers of fiction. Plenty of writers violate this stricture, either deliberately, by writing fiction that doesn’t require “three-dimensional” characters, or just through following their own artistic instincts, which may not depend upon “lifelike” characterization in the way some readers might prefer. (Writers of “experimental” fiction might be especially wary of the assumptions behind the call for accuracy, since experimental fiction rejects all of the customary approaches of traditional realistic fiction.) It is this perceived constriction of the writer’s vision, the threat to the integrity of that vision, that should make writers uneasy about the whole notion of a “sensitivity reader.”

Even if the writer has no wish to be insensitive to reigning social principles on matters of race, gender, or sexual preference, it remains unclear why the job of prompting the writer to be mindful of these principles is not left to the editor, who presumably wants to safeguard the interests of the writer and the publisher for whom both editor and writer are working. The rise of the sensitivity reader seems to imply a lack of confidence in editors, or perhaps this suggests that ultimately the practice isn’t really about improving the work of writers at all but is a mere cosmetic being applied to keep the publisher’s appearance up. But if the writer and editor working together can’t be relied on to maintain the integrity of the writer’s artistic conception as well as avoid giving gratuitous offense, what’s the point of the editorial process if you then try to cover up supposed imperfections with ersatz words and phrases that only call attention to their mostly feeble artifice?

In another recent article on the controversy, one experienced sensitivity reader says that “Authors and editors can. . .choose to accept her suggestions and implement changes, ignore them, or ask to discuss them further.” One wonders, however, if all readers and publishers are as flexible as this suggests. Surely the pressure on a writer to heed the sensitivity reader must be considerable, and while only a few writers have publicly complained about the process, others have presumably kept quiet for fear of alienating their publisher or causing unwanted controversy. At some point, a well-known and respected writer is going to run afoul of the sensitivity reading machinery and, unafraid of courting controversy, will call it out as the antagonist of artistic expression it can’t avoid becoming, whether explicitly if the writer is forced to submit to the machinery (which will happen, if it hasn’t already), or implicitly through intimidation (which surely has already happened).

Probably the most ominous threat sensitivity reading poses is that we will see continued efforts to deface already published literary works, extending perhaps not just to popular canonical works but to the previous work of still-living writers. No doubt many of these writers would not agree to such retroactive expurgation, but some might, and then the precedent has been set for regarding writers’ work as infinitely malleable—all fiction as fan fiction, except that the purpose is not to imaginatively extend the work beyond the boundaries of the text but to seize control of the text and make it conform to socially accepted standards. Of course this would be the negation of literature as art, the discreet creation of an individual artistic sensibility, but artistic sensibility seems to be regarded as the enemy at the moment by those trying to protect us from its unsupervised expression.

I have no doubt that the bowdlerization exemplified in the Roald Dahl case will be attempted with other writers from the literary past, writers who won’t necessarily exhibit quite the same problematic attitudes seemingly borne by Dahl but whose work will nevertheless be judged questionable (with his unrestrained comic vision, Dickens will be an inevitable target). There will be few writers whose “sensitivity” won’t be found lacking in some way, although there are certainly also writers whose insensitivity can’t be rationalized or ignored. If the preponderance of readers eventually find the racism and sexism of Ian Fleming to be intolerable, his books will no longer be read. But this is the way a writer’s work ought to fall into disfavor: through the collective judgment exercised by actual readers, not a mandate issuing from a process that usurps the authority of that judgment.

The outrage attending the publication of Dahl’s censored work may temporarily dampen the enthusiasm of the book business for outright redactions of published work, but sensitivity reading already seems an entrenched practice, and unless and until the literary moralizers begin to lose their hold on literary culture, it will probably remain in force for current and aspiring writers. Perhaps more writers will rebel and more readers will begin to resent the inherent condescension of the practice. If not, we will have conceded that artistic freedom must not be allowed to exceed the bounds of what the powers that be decide is right and proper.

Defending Judgment?

Readers casually coming upon the title of Michael W. Clune's book, A Defense of Judgment (2021), might understandably assume that it will make a case for the legitimacy of evaluation in literary criticism, the process of weighing the artistic value of a literary work. However, this title proves to be misleading in more than one way: the book has little to say about how a critic might arrive at a valid judgment, and, in the end, the method that Clune advocates and ultimately models for us is not actually judgment at all.

Clune is interested in restoring what he calls judgment to a respectable place in academic literary study, although less as a strategy for the academic critic to use than as a foundation for a revived mission of "academic education" as the justification of literary study as a discipline. Clune wants literature professors to abandon their concession to the irremediable subjectivity of judgment as valuation and freely acknowledge that some literary works (works of art in general) are better than others, more worthy of students' attention. This would entail giving up on the dogmatic insistence on equality as the supreme value of an enlightened profession and admitting that academic expertise exists and should give the views of putative experts some additional weight. Literature professors, according to Clune, should be willing to enlist their expertise in an effort to teach their students how to appreciate the distinctive value of literature,

Clune's critique of the problem academic literary study has created for itself through the demotion of "literature itself" to a secondary status (secondary to theory, historical context, or cultural politics) is astute, and seems to me almost certainly correct. To avow that all responses to works of literature are equally valid is to deny the very basis on which literary study entered the academy in the first place--if the professors in this "field" have no special standing by which their views on it carry extra weight, then what's the purpose of the field and why specialize in it? Notwithstanding all of the appeals to theoretical or cultural knowledge to which literary academics have retreated while dispensing with aesthetic analysis or the explication of ideas (to cite Clune's favored object of study), the floundering around with one new approach after another over the last 40 years of academic literary study has surely left the discipline vulnerable to the kinds of depredations inflicted on it recently--from defunding to elimination of programs to attacks on its supposed left-wing biases--such that its future is now legitimately in question. Taking stock of the purpose of literary study is certainly in order.

The solution to these problems that Clune has in mind, which he illustrates in the second half of the book, might return literary instruction back to literature, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't actually involve judgment in any noticeable way. Clune offers readings of works by Emily Dickinson, Thomas Bernhard, and Gwendolyn Brooks, apparently seeking in all of these cases the literary ideas they disclose--ideas that, we are to infer, can be discovered only through the kind of close scrutiny exemplified by Clune's analysis. The interpretations that emerge from this analysis are interesting and perceptive--Clune's contention that Bernhard's Woodcutters both accepts the "postmodern" critique of art as compromised by social relations and evades it by shedding the "social" altogether is particularly provocative--but they are interpretations. The only form of judgment at work is the initial judgment that this text is worth your attention, and the focus is almost exclusively on ferreting out the theme, the idea that Clune wants to make available to examination. If these readings are to contribute to aesthetic education, they would do so without much reference to the aesthetic as an existing property of literary works.

I am not suggesting that Clune ought to be advocating the use of the classroom as a space in which to pronounce literary judgments. I am perfectly content with interpretation as a classroom method of teaching literature, but at the least Clune's invocation of it makes these concluding chapters seem anticlimactic, the application of what turns out to be a familiar strategy in a book that initially promises a radical reorientation of a discipline desperately in need of occupational resuscitation. If Clune's method was adopted (which doesn't seem that likely), at least it would have the virtue of returning ostensible teachers of literature to literary qualities as the focus of instruction, but I don't see much evidence that today's cadre of literature professors has much interest in such a restoration. However, a reluctance to use the classroom as an opportunity to reinforce a particular judgment of quality in a literary work--lets all gather round and appreciate this text--is not inherently misguided.

Making judgments about quality is of course considered one of the appropriate goals of book reviewing, but even here, judgment is often applied. . .injudiciously. Most reviews offer value judgments, but the majority of them are blandly affirmative, as if the mere act of writing a novel or collecting a set of short stories is in itself a praiseworthy act, the substantive artistic achievement of the work notwithstanding. Many render their judgments, positive or negative, without much reference to the relevant qualities of the work that might validate the judgment, while others spend most of the allotted space summarizing, as if merely telling us what happens or identifying the characters should obviously demonstrate that the critic's verdict is justified. I myself spend a good deal of space in a review--most of it--describing the observable features of the work, but examining the formal order of the work, assessing how it is put together, is not the same thing as summary. It seeks to discover the artistry of the work (or the flaws), not reduce it to its most conventional elements.

If A Defense of Judgment does not finally provide a compelling alternative to current practice in academic literary study, it does help to make clear that the original (and still most coherent) justification for the study of literature in the university was rooted in the assumption that some kinds of imaginative writing were more worthwhile than others, and that by contemplating such works students would indeed acquire profound if intangible knowledge not available elsewhere. They would learn how to recognize great works of verbal art. This justification has been dismissed out of hand as incorrigibly elitist by most of those in the current "profession" of literary study. Given current cultural conditions, in the United States, at least, it is hard to see how that original warrant could ever be revived, even though on its current trajectory, the future of literary academe is most likely one that ushers in its demise.

 

Thunder and Illumination

Grievances against critics often stir up debate about the proper role of arts criticism, and, indeed, a recent complaint by an American actor prompted the British critic and editor Lola Seaton to contemplate this question, focusing mostly on book reviewing. In her New Statesman article, Seaton frames the issue as an inquiry into the relationship between critic and author, but her real subject is the critic's own underlying conception of reviewing itself as a literary form.

Seaton offers the critic Adam Mars-Jones as an especially rigorous exponent of the review as a  self-sufficient composition. The goal of a review, according to Mars-Jones, is to address a "potential reader" who is "being guided to pleasure or warned against disappointment" although "a reviewer isn’t paid to be right, just to make a case for or against, and to give pleasure either way." In Seaton's words, criticism "is not an unerring ranking system but a form of personal expression, and a good review is not right (or not only right) but convincing, fresh, entertaining, satisfying, perceptive." In my words: according to this view, a reviewer has autonomy in his/her judgment, separate from any consideration of the author of the work, but also can assert an autonomy separate from any ultimate consideration of the work under review, or any particular critical principles that should be applied to it. If the review is "satisfying" as a piece of writing, it has succeeded in the only requirement this notion of criticism imposes.

Seaton suggests that reserving some consideration for the author might temper the potential abuses of this approach to reviewing, but otherwise seems to accept the Mars-Jones position as an accurate accounting of the goals of criticism. She brings in other critics, such as Elizabeth Hardwick, who seem to agree with the Mars-Jones view (although Hardwick is really more concerned that the critic's autonomy result in “the communication of the delight and importance of books, ideas, culture itself”), and she quotes approvingly James Wolcott's characterization of reviews at their best as the source of "thunder and illumination." Ultimately Seaton does seem to side most with Hardwick, suggesting that the author and the critic should be a "mutually advantageous collaboration," the author and critic "reciprocally at work at shaping taste."

I am myself unsympathetic both to the idea that the critic's job is "shaping taste" and to the underlying assumption that the critic's overriding task is to "guide towards pleasure and to provide it," to act on the one hand as a judge and on the other as a performer. The latter two functions are in conflict with each other, the attempt to combine them often responsible for empty "snark" or overwrought, vacuous praise. But the alternative to a labored liveliness is not to assume the gatekeeper's role, to fancy oneself a high cultural influencer or a guardian of eternal verities. All of these roles are really an attempt to elevate the critic to a position of prominence equivalent to the writer, but I don't see why this is necessary. The writer and the critic have different jobs to do, although they certainly do converge around the literary work the writer has offered. But the writer has indeed offered us something with a claim to being a work of art, a compelling work of nonfiction, or a contribution to some intellectual discipline. At this point, the writer can't really expect to be able to control the responses to the book, and the critic provides (or ought to provide) an especially well-considered response, drawing on that critic's  presumed knowledge and experience.

In my view, the critic should be expected not to educate the reader's taste or to engage in rhetorical display but to bring to the literary work his/her fully engaged attention and be able to describe the salient features of the work that careful reading discloses. If the critic's appraisal is to have weight beyond facile judgments that treat works of literature as if they were just another consumer good (albeit of a culturally refined sort), evaluation is actually secondary, even subservient, to the depth of such description. The critic does not owe the author a positive judgment, but does owe both author and reader the application of whatever intelligence and insight that critic can summon in the attempt to more keenly discern the work's fundamental features. A particularly scrupulous exposition of the work's character can itself serve as an implicit assessment of its success or failure, without the addition of a conventional act of judgment at all. To perceive the literary work's formal and stylistic elements clearly is at the same time to recognize its achievement.

Some might regard the kind of critical approach I am advocating as too fussily "academic," but academic criticism has in fact long since abandoned interest in aesthetic evaluation as something that is  unavoidably subjective and irredeemably hierarchical. If book reviewing is to be the only remaining source of what was once known as literary criticism, and reviewing is to be regarded more as an exercise in self-expression than a focused contemplation of literature, then for me criticism has essentially ceased to exist. Of course there are critics who defy the current strictures in academic criticism against "formalism," as well as those among reviewers who resist the pressure to act as a judge or a consumer advocate, and offer astute, closely observed literary criticism. It is, however, discouraging that such critics stand out as exceptions to the general practice.

It won't be surprising if I say that I myself identify with these recalcitrant critics who persist in considering the aesthetic standing of the literary work itself to be the object of their attention, not its convenience as a cultural index or as a prompt for the critic's own discursive fancies. I have written the kind of criticism that attempts to explicate what it is like to read a work or an author while also as fully as possible approaching the work on the terms it sets up for itself. This does not entail insisting that all concerns "outside the text" are irrelevant, but it does presume that considering such concerns--cultural, historical, political, biographical--is not the immediate task the critic should perform, as has become the default assumption in most academic criticism, although they inevitably influence the "content" a work of fiction turns to its own purposes through form and style. Reducing a literary work to what it might "say," might "tell us" or "reveal" is not, in my view an act of criticism; no amount of "close reading" devised to arrive at such formulations can make this activity "critical" in any way that is adequate to the allusiveness and indirection inherent in both fiction and poetry that distinguish them from ordinary forms of expository discourse.

Admittedly I have adopted my particular critical strategy in part because I focus so much (not exclusively) on adventurous or experimental fiction, which especially requires, it seems to me, an approach emphasizing description and explication. Although in most cases I do make clear the extent to which I think an "experiment" has succeeded or not, such a judgment is really not very meaningful unless it is accompanied by evidence of careful reading. If I had more interest in covering the contemporary literary scene as a whole (which might possibly have gotten me a larger audience), perhaps I would have developed a style more agreeable to Adam Mars-Jones, but I don't think this would make me a better critic. I might have more book review assignments than I have right now, however.

 

Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction

All completed chapters of Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction can be found here in .pdf, here as a webpage, and here on its own website. More to come.

 

New Sorrentino Chapter

I have completed a new chapter of my short book, Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction, which appears below. You can also access a pdf version of this chapter here, as well as a web page version here. The previous chapters of the book can be found here:

 

Sorrentino the Craftsman

 

Aberration of Starlight

            To an extent it is understandable that an inexperienced reader of Gilbert Sorrentino’s fiction might assume that works like Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Mulligan Stew, in rejecting the conventional referentiality of realistic fiction, not only question traditional narrative form but also “craft” as the term has come to be associated with the craft of storytelling in particular. However, while both of these books surely do seem to spotlight their apparent formlessness—Mulligan Stew explicitly announces it in its title—Sorrentino’s ultimate purpose is not to dispense with form in fiction, only the ossified form in which conventional verisimilar narrative was confined. These two books represent his most radical exercises in self-reflexivity, but in undermining the assumptions of narrative transparency in fiction, they substitute structures of language that are just as deliberately crafted as the most “well-made” of conventional stories.

            If anything, the disruption in Imaginative Qualities and Mulligan Stew of the presumed aesthetic order of fiction only emphasizes the centrality of both craft and form more emphatically, not because of their absence but because that order is revealed to be nothing but the craftedness of form, that is, not identical with the customary practices of storytelling. This conception of the malleability of fictional form underlies all of Sorrentino’s fiction after Mulligan Stew: each new work seems predicated on the belief that a novel (or, in a few instances, a short story) has no fixed form to the demands of which it must comply, and thus “form” is literally reinvented from work to work. Although readers can certainly disagree about how successful these reinventions turn out to be, that every one of these works is composed with an attention to formal patterns and structures that can only be called rigorous: “craft” may actually evoke a practice that is too routine to adequately describe the care with which Sorrentino assembles his structures.

            In no other book, however, does Sorrentino apply the precepts of craft according to something like the conventional understanding of the term as in the immediate follow-up to Mulligan Stew, Aberration of Starlight. While this novel incorporates many of Sorrentino’s signature strategies and devices—lists, questions-and-answers substituting for exposition, a high degree of fragmentation and the inclusion of fashioned documents (in this case mostly letters)—and presents us with overlapping points of view that do not seem to tell a consistent story, the careful reader soon enough can discern that this lack of consistency is actually the ultimate point of the narrative, while the devices are deployed in a very consistent way that binds the discrete versions of the narrative in a tightly wrought structure.

            Aberration of Starlight does tell a story, however refracted or contingent on perception, but ultimately it is not really a narrative-driven novel. In fact, it seems more recognizably a novel at all than a work like Mulligan Stew not because it has well-defined characters and shows linear development but because finally it attempts—and succeeds—in evoking, more or less visibly and coherently, a time and a place. (Even more directly and palpably than Steelwork.) While both character and event are subject to distortion and uncertainty, due to the novel’s shifting perspectives, its setting—a summer resort and boardinghouse near the New Jersey shore in the late 1930s—emerges whole and distinct. This is achieved not despite the contingencies of character and the artificial expository devices but through these aesthetic manipulations, through Sorrentino’s formal ingenuity.

            The shifts in perspective represent the four residents of the boardinghouse, whose differing perception of essentially the same events over the course of the summer provide the novel with its basic formal structure. Sorrentino does not merely relate his characters’ thinking through conventional psychological realism (“free indirect” narration) but presents the characters both from without (we are introduced to the first character, the boy, Billy, via a carefully described photograph) and through assorted, but ultimately integrated, means, invokes their experience as filtered from within. The expository devices involved are not deployed casually or haphazardly. Indeed, the novel’s structure is strikingly symmetrical: each section is roughly the same length; each contains, in more or less the same order, a brief, objective view of the character, from a neutral narrator’s perspective; an episode rendered in dialogue; a question-and-answer passage; a fantasia of sorts; extended passages devoted to the characters’ memories or direct third-person narration of the character’s current actions.

            If the collage-like form we encounter in Aberration of Starlight seems less radical than what we find in Mulligan Stew, it is more strictly applied, although not necessarily more attentively or deliberately. Mulligan Stew may seem like a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends, shards of discourse and interpolated documents, but this is a constructed illusion, the final effect of Sorrentino’s verbal artistry. The greater restriction of formal and rhetorical strategies in Aberration of Starlight perhaps makes the appearance of craft more evident to more casual readers, and in this way the novel could most plausibly be taken not so much as Sorrentino’s effort to rein in his anarchic impulses (which do exist, but are themselves more purposeful than chaotic), but to make some gesture at being more commercially accessible after the relative success and publicity he gained with Mulligan Stew.

            That Aberration of Starlight is a blatant stab at commercial appeal is probably belied by the fact that Sorrentino had begun writing it before the publication of Mulligan Stew. (Crystal Vision as well.) And of course it would only be expected that the novel’s publisher (Random House) would attempt to capitalize on Sorrentino’s unexpected recent success through more aggressive marketing and publicity. But Aberration of Starlight does seem, fortuitously timed or not, an effort to reach readers without previous exposure to Sorrentino’s work with a novel employing his alternative methods in a more readily comprehensible way, even in the service of relatively traditional literary goals—the creation of character and setting, the evocation of a fictional world that ultimately seems recognizable as a version of ordinary reality. Readers seeking linear narrative might still balk at the effort, but those amenable to something other than the most conventional sort of plot-driven novel indeed ought to find Aberration of Starlight approachable enough.

            Some critics have indeed found the novel rather too approachable, or at least that on the heels of Mulligan Stew it is (or was) a disappointingly restrained exercise, if not exactly conventional in its strategies then venturing to use only the sorts of unorthodox methods Sorrentino had already used in his previous work, methods that, according to one such critic (John Morse) merely suggest the “techniques of modernism” and thus finally “are just as dated as the characters” in the story. Although Aberration of Starlight by no means received uniformly negative reviews, it did not really fulfill hopes that Sorrentino might reach an even wider audience, and the critical response suggested that a significant number of admirers of Mulligan Stew expected Sorrentino not to broaden his appeal by adopting a more conservative manner but to extend the radical formal experiments of Mulligan Stew even more intensively.

            Perhaps the critic expressing the greatest disappointment with Aberration of Starlight was Paul West, who in the Washington Post reproved Sorrentino for essentially writing a realist novel, and who further accused him of being “uninventive” and of lacking the “virtuosity” a truly experimental writer should exhibit. Douglas Messerli partially agreed with West’s criticisms, although as an admirer of Sorrentino’s fiction (later a publisher) Messerli ultimately attempts to redeem the novel from “its sense of ironic nostalgia that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren—those doyens of modern narrative theory—might applaud.” (I am myself not convinced that Brooks and Warren would necessarily deplore even Sorrentino’s more audacious narrative experiments, nor that satisfying the exigencies of these critics’ “narrative theory” would be undesirable or inappropriate for a writer like Sorrentino.) “It becomes apparent that what was first perceived as a bittersweet presentation of post-World War II America,” Messerli concludes in his review, “is, in the end, an indictment of the modern novel and the vision inherent in its structures” through Sorrentino’s exaggerations and distortions of these structures even as he seems to be using them.

            It is of course only a measure of how thoroughly the formal innovations of Mulligan Stew and Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things had prepared someone like Messerli to anticipate more of the same that he would be almost obliged to find something more radical in Aberration of Starlight that would explain (or explain away) its apparently more modest ambitions. But it seems to me that Messerli (not to mention West) was holding to an overly stringent commitment to literary experimentation of a certain kind—the kind that critics such as Messerli and West would acknowledge—that at best would be difficult for any writer to always satisfy. At worst, such an inherently prescriptive view of the acceptable scope of experimentation in works of literature seems to actually restrict the writer’s creative freedom to pursue fresh approaches to his/her art, even when this effort might seem to be an aesthetic step backward—for the writer such a step might not seem a retrenchment at all but in fact an experiment with an approach that writer has not previously adopted, and therefore quite literally “new.”

            None of this is to say that critics were wrong in noting the less emphatic formal daring of Aberration of Starlight, but the relevant question is whether this scaled-back quality should be attributed to a diminished interest in formal innovation (perhaps in favor of exploring more traditional narrative strategies) or is indeed simply an outright commercial gambit, an attempt at channeling Sorrentino’s iconoclastic impulses for a possibly wider audience. (A less charitable view would be to call it “selling out,” a charge Messerli comes close to making even as he attempts to recuperate the novel as a further expression of Sorrentino’s iconoclasm.) It is most likely that for Sorrentino the answer was something closer to the former, since while a larger audience would no doubt be an appealing prospect for any writer, there is little evidence in Sorrentino’s writing career before or after Aberration of Starlight that he would have been willing to seek such an audience on anything but his own challenging terms.

            That Sorrentino might have adopted a more recognizable form of “novel” only to undermine it as an “indictment” of that form seems a labored analysis of Aberration of Starlight, mostly because all of Sorrentino’s fiction can be seen as a subversion of the traditional novel as an entrenched literary form, and, relative to many of his other novels (and not just Mulligan Stew), Aberration of Starlight is a “normal” enough novel to indeed seem like an aberration in Sorrentino’s work. Perhaps, however, such an impression is inevitable when the writer wishes to emphasize traditional elements of fiction—character, setting—even if using untraditional means of doing so. (In this way, even Mulligan Stew is surely still describable as a novel, one that ultimately builds a compelling representation of the fictional character Antony Lamont.) Aberration of Starlight emphasizes both character and setting, so the impression that it is recognizably a novel becomes even harder to avoid,

            Yet Aberration of Starlight is not just a novel that evokes a time and place through other than conventional methods. Those methods themselves alter our perception of both time and place (as starlight is altered due to the velocity of earth’s orbit): the slippages in memory and attention manifest among the four characters portrayed in the novel attest to the unreliability of both when considering the past, and while the setting itself emerges intact in its historical detail, clearly, for each of the characters it takes on a different aspect. For 10 year-old Billy, the summer resort near Hackettstown is a place where he can temporarily reside in his still innocent hope that the man Tom Thebus, who is keeping company with Billy’s mother this summer, might be the replacement for the absent father for which he clearly longs. For Billy’s mother, Marie, it is an opportunity for love and a late sexual awakening as she responds with increasing favor to Tom’s advances. For Tom, it is the scene of his obviously habitual philandering and self-aggrandizement, although his behavior arguably is less hypocritical than that of Marie’s father, John. For him, the summer vacation is a time when he can fully assert his prerogatives as family patriarch, puritanically controlling his daughter’s life by obstructing her nascent romance (while himself pursuing one of the ladies frequenting the resort after the relatively recent death of his wife).

            Each character is given equal time to reveal and act on these attitudes, but that also further fragments the narrative perspective by reinforcing incommensurate versions of the events and interactions the novel recounts. Our view of each character is modified as one rendition succeeds another, and the ultimate juxtaposition of accounts, while it does provide the general contours of a discernible story, does not finally reconcile the four variants of the story so that the ultimate “truth” is made known. Is Tom Thebus a thwarted suitor, or simply a cad? Has Marie been denied the right to determine her own fate, or is she simply naïve? (Or both?) Should John be condemned as a self-righteous autocrat, or has he also to some extent been damaged by a wife who appears to have been even more monstrous? If the reader is asked to, in effect, hold all of these possibilities in suspension, is this a “creative” suspension whereby we arrive at a more complex awareness of reality, or is reality itself something that is always elusive?

            Perhaps the answer to each of the last two questions is “yes,” so that Aberration of Starlight is a novel that both offers a kind of realism by other means and subjects “reality” to a skepticism that is associated with postmodernism. Those expressing surprise or disappointment with the supposed conventionality of the novel were likely registering their doubts about the value of the former while overlooking the way the latter complicates the representational gesture. (Messerli chooses to cancel out that gesture.) Judging by the fact that Starlight did not sell out its original print run, it seems accurate to say that whatever effort was indeed involved to make Sorrentino more commercially successful did not really succeed (although sales were not disastrous), so that one could conclude—perhaps Sorrentino did—that readers still found the postmodern features in Aberration of Starlight to be more prominent than the realist novel bracketed within. (Even a muted challenge to readers’ expectations is still a challenge.) Arguably the period in Sorrentino’s career encompassing the release of Mulligan Stew and then the publication of his next few books represents the apogee of Sorrentino’s literary “fame,” but given the reluctance of American readers to countenance difference and difficulty in the fiction they read, that fame was inherently limited unless he was willing to even more fully trim his adventurous sails.

            The trajectory of the rest of Sorrentino’s career surely shows how unlikely this was always going to be. Sorrentino was a writer committed to formal invention and alternative orderings of language. To the extent that he would remain first of all a poet, such an orientation seems only proper, but a work like Aberration of Starlight does demonstrate, I would maintain, that Sorrentino is able to realize these aesthetic imperatives just as skillfully in a work of fiction that retains a recognizable structural façade of a novel (a more difficult move to pull off in a novel than it would be through a similar effort in a poem). Sorrentino does this as an exercise in craft, not to nullify the novel, as Messerli would have it, but to reanimate it, to exploit what John Barth called the “used up-ness” of literary form for the writer’s own artful purposes.

 

Crystal Vision

            Crystal Vision resembles a conventional novel less readily than Aberration of Starlight, although it is comparable to a novel such as William Gaddis’s JR (albeit less sweeping in scope), as well as to Sorrentino’s own Steelwork. Indeed, it shares with Steelwork a setting in Bay Ridge and the use of a large cast of characters representative of that neighborhood’s working-class inhabitants during the World War II era. Still, while the neighborhood itself is to some extent a center of attention in Crystal Vision, the focus of this novel is less on setting as a free-standing subject of interest but instead invokes it as an almost mythical place inhabited entirely by voices—not a “real” place at all but one rising from both memory and imagination.

            The characters in Crystal Vision do create a vivid enough impression of their Brooklyn community as they interact with each other, but they are also aware that it is actually their own creation, that they are literally bringing the neighborhood to life through their talk. Thus, unlike either Aberration of Starlight or Steelwork, Crystal Vision could not really be called a novel providing realism by other, nontraditional means. (Which is not to say it lacks authenticity, however.) Its subject is the process of its own representation, not the characters and milieu represented. Both character and setting emerge with the kind of particularity and detail that makes them memorable, but that is finally an incidental effect. Their credibility is the kind of credibility that the artistic imagination bestows, the kind that Sorrentino pursues in all of his work rather than creating the illusion that fictional characters “walk off the page” in their fidelity to life.

            Although the novel is composed almost entirely of talk (“dialogue” doesn’t really seem to accurately describe what the characters are up to), there are no quotation marks to emphasize the tangible presence of their talk. Stripped of the simulated immediacy induced by quotation, the novel’s scenes seem more like emanations from the past, voices finding themselves disembodied from their actual surroundings (although not really quite aware of this) and able to not just ignore the constraints of time and physical space (able to project themselves into manifestations of both), but to in fact summon characters and locations in the course of speaking about them. (Occasionally it is as if they are standing somewhere above and outside the scene that is the object of their observations.)

            The episodes of conversation and repartee are generally brief and self-enclosed, featuring voices that vary from episode to episode, but the scenes are ultimately comprised of a fixed, if extensive, cast of local characters. A few of them establish themselves quickly as distinctive voices—most prominently “the Arab,” who has an opinion about everything and expresses it in his semi-elevated but mostly maladroit English—but inevitably not all of the multiple voices become so individually delineated (although surely they are all singular to Sorrentino). But individuation of character in Crystal Vision is less important than their collective power to bring the neighborhood to life with their assertions and rejoinders, their descriptions of behavior among their friends and acquaintances, their sarcasm, exaggerations, and braggadocio.

            “Isabel and Berta? the drummer says” begins one chapter. “Oh God, a couple of honeys.” But this doesn’t just initiate a conversation about the two girls thus identified. It becomes clear the speaker is “seeing” them, although they are in fact not in the drummer’s presence:

   Restrict and prescribe them from your mind and its fantasies, the Arab says. They are not for you.

   I didn’t say they were. But God, how I hate to see them headed for dopey marriages with cars out on Long Island.

   Maybe Teaneck, Irish Billy says. There’s always a chance they’ll go to Jersey.

   Indeed, the Arab says. If they marry stout hearts whose noble and yearnful eyes glint and flash forever westward!

   Jokes can’t disguise those sour grapes, Arab, Irish Billy says.

   But hearken! And hark! The Arab says. What have we here?

   Willie Wapner dances and struts about in front of Isabel and Berta. Suddenly he executes a brilliant series of cartwheels and comes to rest directly before them.

   What a bore, Berta says.

   And a boor as well, Isabel says.

   Is that Willie Wapner showing off some of his stuff for the luscious lasses? the Arab says.

   It is Willie Wapner, the Drummer says. How he’s grown. The last time I saw him or even thought about him was, I can’t even remember when.

            The episode continues on to depict Willie Wapner’s rather abject attempts to gain the attention of Isabel and Berta, with ongoing remarks on the effort by the Drummer, the Arab, and Irish Billy. If at times it almost seems they are watching a film about which the characters provide a running commentary, at other times the characters simply assert they are “looking into the past” or react to a bit of narrative exposition as if actually hearing or reading it themselves. “Perhaps,” a disembodied narrative voices announces about a subsidiary character, “he is searching for a rare species of the Culex mosquito in Brooklyn and duly reported to the Bureau of Diptera Studies,” responding to which “The bureau of what? Big Duck says, shiny black bits of Nibs flying from his mouth.” It is as if Big Duck is attuned to the narrative discourse as it is created, as are all of the characters, whose role in the novel is not merely to act (or not even to act) but in discoursing about the neighborhood to awaken it into life. Perhaps this is ultimately what Sorrentino himself has to say about the gatherings at the candy stores and taverns in a place like Bay Ridge—that the essential reality of life in such places is given substance there, at least in retrospect. And Crystal Vision is, of course, very much a retrospective novel.

            The only way to represent this phenomenon is thus to enact it. The characters in Crystal Vision are not designed as “colorful” characters themselves but as conduits for the colorful attributes of the neighborhood—which do indeed include some pretty colorful characters who are talked about rather than being sources of the talk. Perhaps at least in this way Crystal Vision is comparable to Aberration of Starlight and Steelwork as an attempt to evoke both character and place via other than traditionally realistic means, but it is a reality that is subject to contingency and mutation, assembled in multiple versions so that it is the process of assembly that becomes the novel’s focus of attention. Some of Sorrentino’s fiction is more explicitly metafictional than others (generally speaking the most metafictional are the earliest works, with progressively fewer directly self-reflexive gestures thereafter), but almost all of his novels are implicitly metafictional in the way they so palpably employ methods of arrangement and assemblage as an alternative formal strategy.

            Crystal Vision employs such a method even more immediately (if not at first altogether noticeably) in its own selection and arrangement of episodes: the scenes in the novel each represent one of the 78 cards in the Tarot deck (both major and minor), giving what might otherwise seem a random assortment of such scenes an underlying formal structure that begins in a semi-Oulipian enactment of restraint that proves less constraining than conventional storytelling in allowing the development of character and situation through metaphorical elaborations that freely break from narrative continuity and surface realism. The reader already familiar with the Tarot deck and its symbology could certainly begin to see the correspondences between that symbology and the characters and situations presented in Crystal Vision quickly enough, but they are often subtle, and a reader could plausibly finish reading the book without really noticing them.

            Once alerted to the presence of this formal device, however, the reader’s appreciation of Sorrentino’s skill—which again seems an expression of craft reconstructed—is surely enhanced, although a danger lurks: the temptation to then inspect each episode for its connection to the relevant Tarot card to extract the secret “meaning” of the novel, to reduce Crystal Vision to an exercise in symbol-hunting verifying its fidelity to the Tarot deck instead of simply allowing Sorrentino  poetic license to creatively adapt Tarot imagery for his own literary purpose. It seems to me that Louis Mackey, author of the most often cited scholarly consideration of the novel, “Representation and Reflection in Crystal Vision,” unfortunately succumbs to this temptation, preferring to register the correspondences between episodes and cards as a substitute for more comprehensive literary analysis, focusing his attention on the interaction of literature and philosophy in a way that really fails to consider Crystal Vision in the context of Sorrentino’s other fiction, in particular the earlier, more conspicuously metafictional works that even more radically destabilize the boundary between fact and fiction that most interests Mackey.

            Like most of Sorrentino’s fiction, Crystal Vision certainly does call attention to its own fictionality, yet this gesture seems less central in and of itself to Sorrentino’s aesthetic goals than it does in, say, Mulligan Stew. Crystal Vision less blatantly challenges readers’ expectations of narrative transparency, even if it does not attempt to disguise its inherent artifice. Crystal Vision is not a crystalline representation of “reality,” but it does develop a surrogate reality that as imaginative projection is a concrete achievement. It does not merely subvert mimetic fidelity (although it does do that); it stands as an aesthetic creation that doesn’t just confuse fact and fiction: by asserting and cultivating its own fictionality, it becomes a new fact in the world, a work of literary art that knows itself as such. Its relevance is first of all to literature, not philosophy.

            Arguably the animating purpose of metafiction as it manifested itself in American fiction during the 1960s and 70s was not simply to expose the ultimate artifice of narrative fiction but in doing so to in effect free the writer (and reader) to the possibility of alternate strategies, to expand the range of possibilities for “art” in the art of fiction. Gilbert Sorrentino’s career could be seen as his effort to redeem these possibilities. In a sense, that fiction is an artificial construction (that narrative itself is an artificial construction) is something that is taken for granted in his work as Sorrentino tries out other devices (some more familiar, others entirely invented) that may renounce the claims to untroubled verisimilitude assumed by narrative realism but at the same time attempt to renew the potential for literary art to provoke and delight.

            The skill and consistency with which Sorrentino is able to continue fulfilling this aspiration surely must be attributed to both inspiration and craft. If Sorrentino’s work, including Crystal Vision, can plausibly be called “well-made,” it is by affirming the “made.” In Sorrentino’s works of fiction, language is not the storytelling medium but the form-producing medium. In some of Sorrentino’s later novels a story develops, but it is a story that emerges from the application of form, a secondary effect of the writer’s primary commitment to language and linguistic ingenuity. Craft of this kind is not the sort of thing to be learned from following guidelines or enrolling in a creative writing class. It requires that we regard fiction as a practice without fixed forms and approach the literary work as an opportunity to re-create form with each performance. What an aspiring writer can learn from reading Gilbert Sorrentino is that “experimental fiction” is not the opposite of craft, the rejection of “skills,” but is in fact the purest embodiment of craft as artistry.

            Sorrentino’s artistry aims not merely for proficiency but for transformation. The first character we encounter in Crystal Vision is a magician who has disguised himself as one of the characters and who returns throughout the novel, both as cloaked character and in his own guise. He is Sorrentino’s surrogate, the emblem of the writer’s role, The writer, like a magician, bends reality, add to it the potential for wonder and surprise. It is an illusion, but at its best is created by the magician-writer’s adept invocation of the tricks of the trade. Sorrentino’s tricks as a writer of fiction are more abundant and more unorthodox that what most writers have to offer, but his facility with them is no less complete

 

Blue Pastoral

            “Craft” in Blue Pastoral manifests itself in Sorrentino’s skills as a parodist. The novel might seem at first to be something like a return to the invoked anarchy of Mulligan Stew, but its apparent formal heterogeneity ultimately reveals a carefully considered purpose. “Pastoral” is not just a loose designation identifying the novel’s atmosphere or setting: Blue Pastoral is a sustained burlesque of the pastoral as literary form and aesthetic ideal. But Sorrentino doesn’t parody any one particular pastoral form or work, instead using the pastoral tradition to create his own hybrid form that transposes the imagery and conventions of pastoral to a very American setting.

            The novel follows the peregrinations of Serge Gavotte (known as Blue) and his wife, Helene, as they journey across the United States in pursuit of Serge’s dream of becoming a renowned musician by discovering the “perfect musical phrase.” Instead of playing the traditional shepherd’s pipe, however, Serge fancies himself a pianist, and he and Helene haul his piano with them in a pushcart Serge finds and refurbishes (later it has to be repaired by a pushcart repairman who just happens to show up when it breaks down). Unlike the two immediately preceding novels, in Blue Pastoral there seems to be no effort to invoke realism, either unconventionally or otherwise. Indeed, the characters are deliberate caricatures, the plot an extended farce. This novel is artifice all the way down, but while we are just as aware of its ubiquitous presence as in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things or Mulligan Stew, the artifice of Blue Pastoral includes storytelling as a more central feature of the novel’s aesthetic strategy.

            If Blue Pastoral does want to tell us a story, it is obviously not of the “well-made” variety adapted from Gustav Freytag that has come to be regarded as identical with narrative itself. Sorrentino gives his narrative a picaresque structure, but this doesn’t mean it is simply a loose sequence of adventitious events (The picaresque form is not just a depiction of aimless wandering, although the best examples of the form might provide the illusion of such.) The most persistent pastoral motif in American literature (and American culture in general) is the idealization of the American countryside, its “virgin soil” and “untamed spaces,” an impulse that Sorrentino subjects to merciless mockery in tracking Serge Gavotte’s experiences as he treks across the country. (It’s hard not to think of Kerouac’s On the Road as an additional object of Sorrentino’s parody, this time more explicitly than in The Sky Changes.) One could say the center of interest in a picaresque novel has never actually been the resolution of the picaresque tale, or even the ultimate fate of the ostensible protagonist. The journey itself, and the sorts of people who show up and the kinds of behavior they exhibit, is what makes the work compelling, and Blue Pastoral if anything accentuates this quality.

            Arguably the picaresque form is inherently a satirical form, at least as it has been practiced by mostly comic writers who use the picaresque hero (or antihero) as an opportunity to expose the protagonist to a range of human folly and to the unavoidable contingency of all human affairs. Yet the comedy this produces is not primarily an expression of mockery but an inevitable effect of the protagonist’s encounters with the world he inhabits. Serge Gavotte is perhaps an even more hapless “hero” than most such characters, so that his own actions are hardly less deserving of ridicule than any of the characters he meets—although his desire to find the perfect musical phrase is not in itself an unworthy pursuit—and thus his is not a perspective from which to register a satirical take of American culture more broadly. At best Serge himself is implicated in the novel’s mockery but finally if Blue Pastoral does inevitably lampoon some recognizable attributes of American culture, it is not in an effort to improve or renovate that culture but to nullify it.

            As in most of Sorrentino’s fiction, the comedy he employs in Blue Pastoral is a version of Bakhtin’s “absolute comedy,” which takes nothing seriously, provoking laughter even at its own procedures. Indeed, Blue Pastoral farcically disassembles not just the conventions of the pastoral genre, but the enabling conventions of the novel form in general (even more directly than Mulligan Stew). In deemphasizing plot in favor of the linear succession favored by the picaresque, Sorrentino begins by radically reducing the novel’s narrative structure to its most elemental form, but most of the other expectations we might have of narrative fiction are likewise ostensibly satisfied but ultimately subverted in the comic deflation of the novel’s parody and pastiche. The hero’s journey is neither a rogue’s adventures nor an epic quest but an absurdist exercise in futility. Serge Gavotte as protagonist is mostly a cipher, more acted upon than acting (as when he is cuckolded by Helene), and the Gavottes’ trip across the continent is radically digressive, even by the standards of the picaresque novel (and Sorrentino’s previous novels). Unsurprisingly, Serge does not end his quest with the discovery of the perfect phrase, but instead when he and Helene complete their cross-country journey at the California coastline, they. . .tumble into the Pacific Ocean.

            Probably the most conspicuous challenge to novel-writing and -reading strategies in the novel is literally its language. Serge Gavotte’s story is told in a polyglot, mock-heroic, quasi-Elizabethan pastoralese, while its episodes are interspersed with various exercises in verbal invention that draw attention to such scenes as performances of language, routines that appear to suspend Serge’s quest narrative even as they act as the sort of lateral digressions characteristic of the picaresque novel. A politician’s wife (“Lesbia Glubut”) is profiled in a news feature written in the unctuous, sycophantic tone typical of such “journalism,” while her husband, Rep. “Hal” Glubut, gives a cliché-ridden speech defending himself against charges of “moral turpitude” (having sex with sheep). Several chapters clearly enough signal in their titles the sort of discourse we are going to encounter: “Blarney Spalpeen Gives Speech on St. Patrick’s Day,” “Father Donald Debris, S.J., Gives Talk on Sex.” The most prominent display of linguistic japery is ”La Musique et les mauvaises herbes,” a lightly pornographic book Serge brings along on the journey, but which is actually a translation from French—a literal translation of French into English, preserving the French idioms, word order, etc., producing a hilarious mishmash of translation malaprops: “If I could make a sex act on this gorgeous lady for five moments, I will permit my groinal region to have a bad for a week! She is some tootsie!”

            Although such passages in Blue Pastoral surely convey a kind of mockery, they register very weakly as satirical, since the humor, although abundant, is ultimately so unsparing that its mockery seems especially caustic. All satire comes as an inherent expression of scorn, but the mockery of a novel like Blue Pastoral does not emerge from an underlying impulse of anger or sorrow; Sorrentino in his comedic routines comes as close to expressing sheer, unalloyed contempt as it is possible for a novelist to come and still justify writing novels. If all a novelist has to offer is repetitive exercises in negation, the novel form has been reduced just as much to a vehicle for “saying something” as any conventional literary novel. But of course Sorrentino explicitly rejects this conception of the writer’s task. The objects of Sorrentino’s ridicule are generally already caricatures of themselves, so in choosing such easy targets he takes advantage of their used-upness to call attention instead to the language game itself: Sorrentino has little interest in figures such as Lesbia Glubut or Father Debris (or even Serge Gavotte) as “characters,” but uses them as material for the verbal treatments that are the true measure of Sorrentino’s intentions as an artist, not the “commentary” we might want to find in his unremitting burlesque.

            This may be the most fruitful way to understand Sorrentino’s appropriation of the pastoral form as well. If Blue Pastoral is most immediately a travesty of pastoral motifs and conventions, it does not discredit those conventions themselves but invokes them for the formal and stylistic turns they make possible. Sorrentino’s approach in this novel strongly recalls John Barth’s formulation of the “literature of exhaustion,” as it attempts to create something new out of timeworn practices by conspicuously brandishing these practices so that their very loss of continued relevance can be used to direct the reader’s attention to the adaptation of them for the writer’s own unorthodox purposes. In most of the novels following Blue Pastoral, Sorrentino is more likely to treat the novel form itself as something that is used-up—unlike Barth, who adopted the strategies of “exhaustion” precisely in order to continue writing novels (albeit unconventional ones)—resulting in books still identified as novels but otherwise little resembling conventionally-written novels.

            Blue Pastoral hangs on to the vestiges of literary tradition through its incorporation of pastoral elements and a picaresque narrative structure, but they are merely the pretext for Sorrentino’s transfiguration of such conventional devices into the source of verbal vignettes in which language creates its own self-sufficient effects. Through the way Sorrentino links these vignettes in an extended exercise in parody we can identify the craft of this novel, although some readers might think its verbal display to be too self-consciously performative to be regarded as craft. Indeed it might be said that Sorrentino makes language perform, but the goal is to make language visible, not the author staging the performance. Language must be made visible as the focus of aesthetic attention (not “story” or “character” or “theme”) so that an enhanced variety of formal and stylistic possibilities might present themselves to the adventurous writer (and reader). Sorrentino himself would experiment with such possibilities in all of his fiction subsequent to Blue Pastoral.

            None of this is to deny that Sorrentino’s work, taken as a whole, expresses a jaundiced view of human nature, as well as the customs and institutions human beings create. But his fiction does not exist first of all as the means for Sorrentino to impart this view. If it does communicate a satirical message (to some readers), it is a wholly contingent sort of communication, a “something said” fortuitously produced by the writer’s full commitment to the aesthetic shaping of language. This commitment, along with Sorrentino’s innate comic vision, surely does give Sorrentino’s novels a pervasively irreverent tone (both toward the novel as a form and toward human affairs in general). But this irreverence works to, in effect, clear the ground for a fresh aesthetic space in which Sorrentino the literary artist can exercise his verbal ingenuity without obeisance to the demands of “subject.”

            One could of course say that the subject of most of Sorrentino’s fiction is the nature of fiction itself. Certainly Mulligan Stew is the fullest (and perhaps greatest) realization of this subject in Sorrentino’s career as a writer of fiction, bug after the relative success of Mulligan Stew led Sorrentino to offer modified versions of the subject in an effort to widen his reach among readers, Blue Pastoral marks a return to the more radical exploration of form introduced in the metafictions of both Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Mulligan Stew. The novels after Blue Pastoral will be, if anything, even more resolutely unconventional, as if the fairly tepid sales of Aberration of Starlight and Crystal Vision convinced Sorrentino that gesturing to the literary mainstream was a wasted effort and decided to ignore its requirements altogether.

            But this does not mean that Sorrentino would abandon “craft” as redefined in all of the fiction he had written to this point, perhaps most palpably in the three novels succeeding Mulligan Stew. If Blue Pastoral shows Sorrentino to be a skilled parodist able to make from parody a formally intricate and stylistically audacious work of fiction, the work to follow, while it might be called implicitly parodic (of the novel’s formal conventions, of “normal” reading practices), mostly seeks to replace storytelling with the artful arrangement of language as the assumed purpose of fiction. To the reader accustomed to the narrative assumptions controlling most novels, these works likely seem arbitrary, even anarchic, although they are in fact scrupulously composed. Perhaps not all of the “experiments” in form Sorrentino offers in the later novels can be counted as successful, but any failures come from flaws in conception, not lack of discipline.

            Beyond what it might tell us about the direction of Gilbert Sorrentino’s career, Blue Pastoral itself stands as one of his most deftly executed works of fiction. In addition to the dexterity of its craft, however, it is also a greatly entertaining novel, an experimental fiction that finds in its stylistic agility and its outrageous humor a self-adequate substitute for the expected diversions of “plot” and “character.” In its own way, Blue Pastoral is a pleasure to read, although these pleasures cannot simply be passively consumed as a “rollicking tale.” Blue Pastoral is a picaresque novel that takes the reader on a journey into the refashioning of its own telling.

Unbeaten Paths

Issue 5 of Unbeaten Paths now available.

Under Review:

Emily Hall, The Longcut (Dalkey Archive)

Ansgar Allen, Wretch (Scism Neuronics), The Sick List (Boiler House Press), Plague Theatre (Equus Press)

Mark De Silva, The Logos (Splice/Clash Books)

The Novel Could Be Dead

Taken together, Mark McGurl's three books, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James, (2001), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), and Everything & Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021) read like the author's attempt to perceive the entire "literary field" of the 20th and now 21st centuries in its fully visible totality. If the modern history of literary study in the United States, with the ascension of New Criticism, essentially begins in the close analysis of individual works of literature, the dominant approaches today, in books like McGurl's and the rise of "digital humanities," embrace distance and breadth, not critical rigor but scholarly amplitude, the ability (or at least the attempt) to "see it all."

The notion that to study literature is to contemplate a "literary field" is originally attributable to the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who posited that literary activity constituted a dynamic system in which all of the participants--writers, critics, publishers--occupy a "position" in this system relative to each other, each with their own priorities, to some extent in competition with each other but also to some extent sharing the reigning assumptions, both commercial and literary, of their time and place. From the interactions of these players in the system vying for the rewards and prestige the system avails comes the literary work, and to fully understand the meaning represented by the work we have to locate it in the "field of power" from which it emerged. Literary values are not so much subsumed to commercial values as actually pitted against commercial values so that the capital at stake is not financial but artistic--"cultural capital."

I confess I have never been much able to appreciate a sociological theory of literature such as Bourdieu's. Mostly it just seems to recapitulate the obvious (in suitably academic jargon): writers are subject to the prevailing cultural forces of their era. (How could they not be?) Writing is not produced in a self-enclosed aesthetic zone scrubbed of social influences. (How could it be?) Of course Bourdieu himself as a sociologist was perfectly justified in examining the structural processes of what we so loosely call the "literary world," but his work as taken up by literary scholars has been used to ground literary study in "material" concerns and not just to dismiss the aesthetic value of literature as a hopelessly subjective interest but in general to imply that the aesthetic doesn't really exist apart from its determination by material conditions. In some cases this is accessory to (or excuse for) the politicization of literary study that is now a fait accompli, but ultimately marks the mutation of academic criticism into a sub-branch of sociology, a transformation that can only contribute to the final dissolution of academic literary study as a separate discipline. (Who needs a special focus on literature when it can easily be folded into social analysis more generally?)

McGurl does not dismiss the aesthetic value of literature, although he consistently refers to it as an "elite" preoccupation that has as much to do with status as it does with the actual experience or creation of works of art. The first book, The Novel Art, is ostensibly about the "art novel," which McGurl defines as a literary work intended as an object of art, not commerce, but this very ambition is treated with implicit suspicion, as just another form of accumulation, in this case the accumulation of prestige rather than money. In some ways, McGurl's books in fact favor the latter kind of gain over the former (especially in Everything & Less, where the prevailing tone is one of barely concealed admiration for the scale of Amazon's success, a sort of awestruck wonder at the canniness of Jeff Bezos), which at least has the virtue of being undeceived about its aims, unlike the writers and critics, who don't realize how thoroughly they are implicated in the commercial system they think they are resisting.

This attitude toward the aesthetic claims of both writers and "naïve" literary critics is not really peculiar to Mark McGurl, however. He is just participating in the discourse that current academic criticism has developed for establishing the superiority of the scholarly perspective on literary creation to the credulous assumptions of the creators and most readers. While certainly literary scholars have always been willing to display their learning and their "hermeneutic" skills, the first few contingents of academic critics by and large devoted such skills to elucidative interpretation or textual studies that assumed "new knowledge" (the traditional goal of scholarship) meant knowledge of literature as a self-sufficient object of attention, worthwhile in and of itself as a form of human expression. Gradually literature in academe has become instead the means for the scholar to assert other priorities, a convenient instrument through which to engage in various kinds of social, cultural, political, or theoretical analysis but not worth the scholar's time for mere "appreciation."

There are indications throughout McGurl's three books that he does in fact have appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of literature (or at least fiction, since discussions of poetry are completely absent from all three of the books), but even in The Program Era, in which American fiction as produced through the auspices of academic creative writing are accorded various degrees of praise for such qualities, McGurl's real focus of analysis is the creative writing system itself, which, he maintains, is something we should account for if we are to understand postwar American literature in "genuinely historical materialist terms." In his review of The Program Era, Fredric Jameson praises McGurl's account of this system, but cautions that his classification of the modes of fiction most central to the creative writing Program is somewhat unwieldy and that  "unless we somehow identify the aesthetic of production all three classifications share (their ‘autopoiesis’), the system, however useful or satisfying it may be, will risk breaking down into a series of empirical traits and characteristics."

Heaven forbid that literary criticism might retreat to the consideration of "empirical traits and characteristics"! Should it retreat far enough, critics might even find themselves focusing on the palpable traits and characteristics of individual works without regard to the system to which they putatively belong! At its most extreme, such a concession to the integrity of literary value could lead to the mere appreciation of literature, relegating literary scholars to the status of belletristic critics acting as arbiters of taste rather than learned exegetes and theorists rising above such purely subjective judgment. Or perhaps an enhanced respect for the empirical in the consideration of works of literature--the experience of the actual "traits and characteristics" a literary text offers--could begin to persuade academic critics that the interpretive frameworks assembled by most of the succeeding schools of critical thought that have emerged in literary studies over the past 50 years are themselves finally just fabrications, elaborate fictions created by professors not to aid in the interpretation of literature but to supplant it, to substitute the wisdom and insights of scholars for the incorrigibly undisciplined creative imagination.

These frameworks are just as susceptible, in turn, to the same ineluctable forces and unexamined assumptions by which literary scholars contend the expressive autonomy of works of literature is necessarily constrained. McGurl's sociological contemplations reach in Everything & Less perhaps their most intricate elaboration--although The Program Era is complex enough in the web of connections it makes between various postwar literary works and the conditions of creative writing instruction in American universities--and the book as a whole provides us less with an examination of the effect Amazon has had on the writing and distribution of books and more a phantasmagoric excursion through the generic and subgeneric wilderness Amazon has cultivated through its various self-publishing and eBook services. McGurl maintains that in surveying this scene--and no one should exactly envy his no doubt now near-encyclopedic knowledge of the terrain--he is offering the most authentic perspective on the current "literary field," since Amazon has so thoroughly colonized both publishing (through the dominance of the Kindle and through Kindle Direct Publishing) and bookselling. But McGurl as a critic seems as controlled by the prerogatives of capitalism as the fiction he discusses, confining himself to the popular, the commercially successful, the well-publicized. If much of this writing would not be called "mainstream"--either commercially or culturally--nevertheless the measure of its importance is its salience to the marketplace, not its artistic value.

Indeed, most readers whose interest in fiction has its source in the latter are not likely to find much to spark their interest in McGurl's book, aside from its sideshow qualities. It is doubtful that such readers really need to know about Dmitry Rus, author of the Play to Live series of "LitRPG" novels, or the "alpha billionaire" subgenre of romance novels, or that "there is a case to be made for self-published Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica as the quintessential Amazonian genre of literature." While I'm willing to take McGurl's word for it that these ridiculous genres exist (although I'm less willing to concede they are part of "literature") and that the Kindle platform has both made them possible and amplified their popularity, I am dubious that, absent an effort like his to do such a comprehensive survey of Amazon's book-related services, that McGurl's intended audience (people interested in contemporary literature or in book culture more generally) are likely to regard such works as worthy of the attention of serious readers. From this perspective, the elaborate scrutiny of them and their part in Amazon's annexation of the literary field in effect itself assembles these texts and genres into a coherent account that hardly exists outside of it except as the discontinuous artifacts of Amazon's digital machinery.

McGurl contends that as the visionary demiurge who called this machinery into being, Jeff Bezos could be called the author of the novel that is Amazon--or at least that is Amazon's rewriting of the premises of fiction and the reading of fiction in the electronically networked world. But this conceit is again something McGurl himself invokes, as Bezos becomes the protagonist of the novel McGurl implicitly shadows into being through using the conceit. In this novel Bezos (as represented by his company) is the larger than life figure whose mighty deeds produce both emulation and resistance, with the latter finally only resulting in an unwitting version of the former. Finally no one can evade the reach of this figure's influence, and, while the nature of this influence can't necessarily be fully characterized as benign, most of those subject to it are satisfied with the service done.

Thus the title of McGurl's book: Amazon promises to offer us everything, which in the provision of books results in the proliferation of narrative genres and reading platforms, but when some writers and readers seek alternatives to Amazon's maximalist aesthetic, such efforts are inevitably tied to this system that makes them intelligible in the first place--and are still available on Amazon, of course. Needless to say, McGurl's classification of fiction as either maximalist or minimalist (the category under which he places most "literary fiction"), "epic" and "romance," reduces the current "literary field" to simple binaries that don't remotely capture the actual range of practices to be found in contemporary fiction, especially outside the confines of literary fiction as "just another genre" in McGurl's simplistic scheme. But then neither is this classification meant to be adequate to the needs of literary criticism per se, as opposed to those of literary critics assuming the role of "cultural critic" to contemplate not mere works of literature but the cultural circumstances in which they are embedded--an orientation by which the literary works disappear into generalizations and abstractions. "Maximalism" and "minimalism" as terms employed in McGurls's analysis thus tell us nothing at all about literature, only about the ways in which such terms can be obscured beyond any practical critical value they might have.

McGurl's adaptation of the terms really offers little specific insight into the tangible influence of Amazon on publishing and bookselling, either. Readers expecting from Everything & Less an examination of Amazon's business practices, its effects on the economics of publishing (especially as related to smaller publishers), or its transformation of reading practices beyond the expansion of genre certainly won't get it. At best McGurl takes Amazon's status as a provider of "service" at face value, preferring to look more closely at the peculiar kinds of commodities it has produced rather than the process of commodification itself. Although certainly books have long been treated as commodities in the capitalist system, Amazon has surely gone the farthest in discarding any pretense that they are anything but merchandise (even if they are merchandised as autotherapy). McGurl doesn't seem much perturbed about this: if its approach has amassed for Amazon a fortune in sales, it has also supplied the sociologically inclined literary critic with an overflowing source of material suitable for his scrutiny.

For all the sophisticated critical tools and close reading skills--and McGurl certainly does a sort of critical reading that effectively maps onto the texts he examines the interpretive scheme he employs --the results of his far-flung explorations of the literary wilds Amazon has cultivated seem rather unremarkable: American fiction during the time when Amazon has come to dominate publishing would appear to be very. . .Amazonian. Not only is it unsurprising that such might be the case, but we could also grant McGurl this conclusion, yet find it trivial. That works of fiction display the signs of the circumstances in which they are created is finally banal, even tautological. How could it be otherwise? How could an alteration of circumstances as consequential as the rise of Amazon (and of the internet that made it possible) not be registered, directly or indirectly, in the writing that ensues? Everything and Less provides us with a photograph of a literary culture adapting to a cultural development that directly affects its own means of existence, but the implication the book leaves that Amazon's presence has enacted some sort of permanent transformation of writing and publishing is surely subject to doubt. If it certainly appears that literary culture has for now fully assimilated itself to the internet, its currently hybrid print/online status hardly seems immutable, and Amazon itself scarcely seems immune to further technological shifts that would make it less relevant.

McGurl's account of the sort of fiction Amazon is making possible is useful, however, in showing us what the future of fiction might be like should Amazon continue to dominate bookselling and especially the self-publishing market, or rather the future without fiction, since in this future the novel would indeed be dead. No amount of special pleading on behalf of preposterous popular genres will make them worth taking seriously. Relegating aesthetically serious fiction to its own sickly genre will do nothing but ensure that it remains sickly. Writers still interested in the idea of literature will no doubt stubbornly persist in authoring texts that might represent some synthesis of poetry and what we now call fiction, but the processes delineated by McGurl in Everything and Less if they retain their hold will so thoroughly trivialize fiction as a literary form that all claims for the novel as the predominant incarnation of "literature" will seem passingly absurd, although at that point neither will there be literary critics to contemplate its demise. 

I have released a new issue of my substack reviews newsletter, under a new title, Unbeaten Paths. In this issue I review Begat Who Begat Who Begat, by Marcus Pactor, Mannequin and Wife and Tales the Devil Told Me, by Jen Fawkes, and Grimmish, by Michael Winkler.

Disassembling Empire

.pdf version

University creative writing programs have proven to be a conservative force in literary culture, for reasons that probably could not have been avoided. Once these programs reached such a level of ubiquity that virtually all aspiring writers enrolled in writing workshops, the most ambitious pursuing an MFA degree as a matter of course (not to mention ultimately teaching in a creative program as well), it was almost inevitable that the collective “Program” would assume the task of regulating practice and enforcing norms among its graduates—who are overwhelmingly the authors of most published literary fiction, at least in the United States. Since most “little magazines”—whose numbers have proliferated at an astonishing rate over the past 20-years, particularly as these journals migrated online--exist primarily to provide a place of publication for Program writers (who need such publications to secure and maintain jobs among creative writing faculty), that “serious fiction” would reflect the assumptions of creative writing instruction should not be surprising.

It is not coincidental that from the time creative writing programs really began to expand in the 1960s and 70s to the present, the “cutting edge” in American fiction has shifted from the formally challenging work of postmodern writers such as Donald Barthelme or Gilbert Sorrentino to fiction featuring previously marginalized or unheard writers or characters, much of which tends to emphasize subject and content and is mostly conventional in form. An increasing aesthetic conservatism among students and instructors in creative writing programs cannot, of course, alone account for this movement from formal innovation toward a greater emphasis on theme. (Nor is this separation between manner and matter necessarily as stark as these generalizations might imply: some postmodernists used formal or stylistic experimentation as the best way to evoke complex subjects, while many current writers are as attentive to form as to content.) However, to the extent that the university writing program increasingly became an instrument of professionalization, the preparation of students for a career in writing and writing instruction, it was destined to exert an increasingly conservative influence.

The varieties of this influence (and they are expressed in discrete ways that seem to go unnoticed because they so integrally inform creative writing practice) can be seen in three books conveniently published at about the same time in 2021: Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping, Lisa Zeidner’s Who Says?: Mastering Point of View in Fiction, and George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. These books 2reveal the by now fixed assumptions about both workshop practice and the aesthetics of fiction that have shaped the “disciplinarity” of academic creative writing, and are likely to determine its legacy in whatever future serious fiction might still have remaining—likely outside the academy, moved aside along with all the other humanities disciplines as the university ever more obediently submits to its political and economic overlords.

The most conservative of these books is Salesses’ Craft in the Real World, even as it presents itself as something of a revolutionary manifesto. Salesses wants to transform the notion of “craft” to more properly suit the needs of a changed clientele (and a modernized faculty as well), but his effort merely replaces one set of critical precepts based on abstracted technique with another based on political and sociological doctrines derived from a generalized concept of cultural difference. If anything, the new rules Salesses lays down for the conduct of the writing workshop are even more rigid and uncompromising than the ones they are to replace: Under the old dispensation, the consequences for disobeying the rules are merely the disfavor of one’s peers and the skepticism of the marketplace; under the dominion of the new, one is likely to be regarded as morally derelict and exiled to the land of lost souls—although, given the sort of strictures Salesses’ revamped writing course would impose, it is no doubt the instructor who would be most subject to the sanctions in force.

Salesses wants to bring the writing workshop out of its fixation on mechanical details and a false claim to universality (“‘Pure Craft’ is a Lie” proclaims the title of the first chapter) and instead make it face the concerns of the “real world.” This is, of course, the world as understood by the workshop’s diverse and varied students. To adapt ourselves to this world will require a wholesale transformation of the concept of craft, since craft as we have known it until now “is part of the history of Western empire that goes back even to the Ancient Greek and Empires, upon which American democratic values are based.” Salesses’ ambitions thus are radical indeed, to help literature do its part in disassembling Empire by overturning the reign of “craft” as it has been regarded until now.

But has craft in the definition of the term Salesses wants to use, as an assemblage of well-know guidelines used by “Western” cultural gatekeepers to enforce an insular perspective on the nature of literary writing, actually held dominion over the course of Western literary history? To say that Salesses does not provide much in the way of evidence or illustration of this central assumption of his book would be a lenient way of putting it. Aristotle and E.M. Forster are really the only examples he cites (both on plot) of historical figures formulating or perpetuating the principles of craft, but of course neither of these men would have understood their comments to have anything to do with craft, even if we were to update them on how we currently use the term. We should in fairness likely assume that Salesses is knowingly simplifying, for rhetorical convenience, the relationship of such figures to what he is calling craft, but still it is difficult to imagine Aristotle believing that what he was doing in the Poetics was providing advice to writers about how to do their job.

If there are examples of establishing craft rules in Western literary history, most of them during most of this history would apply to poetry, but Salesses doesn’t discuss poetry or the appropriate conduct of poetry workshops at all. Whether he would acknowledge that poetry does have certain canons of procedure that are more or less consistent across languages and traditions—canons that are necessary for the genre to exist in the first place—is thus uncertain, but it would seem to be a devaluation of fiction as a form to say that it does not call for the same sort of consideration of intended verbal effects as poetry, to deny that some essential features of prose narrative are recognizable to almost all humans. If Salesses is not resisting the salience of the traditional “elements of fiction”—the devices that allow for the full embodiment of narrative—but certain ritualized applications of those elements, almost their fetishization, the solution would seem to be to no longer apply them, to abandon the fetish.

But however much Salesses professes to want a different version of craft than the one putatively dominating creative writing workshops, he does not propose doing without craft as either an approach to the creative writing classroom or to the critical consideration of fiction in general. It is somewhat difficult to see why: Salesses objects to the way craft-talk excludes writers with a different understanding of fiction’s purpose and possibilities that traditional craft does not accommodate, but such writers include not only those with non-Western cultural inheritances but many writers from within the Western cultural tradition who also find the imperatives of craft confining and alienating. Many of these writers deliberately avoid the institutional machinery of the academic creative writing Program (although some are just excluded), but even those holding out for the benefits of a creative writing degree might ask of this book and its author why exchanging one set of restrictions on the writer’s creative judgment and imagination for another is necessarily an improvement.

Most of Salesses’ directives, in fact, have little to do with “technical” matters encompassing style or form. They seem designed primarily to focus the writer’s attention on content—more specifically, on the “world” to which the work points and away from the individualism of either character or author-as-artist. Thus, “whether positive or negative, fiction always says something about how we live, and not in an individual sense but a contextual one. When we write fiction, we write the world.” And, “it’s about time that individual agency stops dominating how we think about plot or even causality.” This is because “being in the world is much more about dealing with effects than with causes.” As a student himself, Salesses tells us, “story arc was always presented to me as something more like plot, something like how the character’s situation changes or fails to change. . .It might be more useful to consider instead how the world is changed or fails to be changed.” Since the purpose of Salesses’ redefinition is clearly to minimize—if not eliminate—attention to the elements of fiction that highlight instrumentalized “method,” it is at first unclear why Salesses retains such a term as “story arc” rather than just dispensing with it.

If what Salesses—and other like-minded critics of current literary education—really wants is a learning environment free of traditional craft conventions, which they believe unduly inhibits some students from fully realizing their artistic visions, he ought to declare that there are no rules the writer must learn to follow, that in fact as long as such rules continue to be assumed, it should be entirely appropriate to break them. He should insist that the very notion of “craft” entails a conception of a unitary “art of fiction” that is bound to exclude any writer who resists the officially approved practices. What better way to ensure that the aesthetic preferences of all student writers be fairly considered than to simply relinquish the idea that to “learn” the art of fiction involves adopting the right assumptions and procedures, developing a suitable facility with whatever approach the currently established authority favors? Artificial distinctions between genres and modes, including the unhelpful distinction between “mainstream” and “experimental” fiction would collapse: all efforts to write a work of fiction would be experimental, attempts to sound out the possibilities of the form without conforming to any one conception of its proper mission.

Something tells me, however, that this is not what Salesses has in mind. Too much of the work would be left to the students to read widely and discover how other writers have redeemed these possibilities. The teacher could no doubt assist in this process of discovery, but that would require suppressing narrow beliefs about the function of literary art. While many creative writing teachers would certainly be able to accomplish such a task, it seems unlikely that Salesses, for one, with his stringent view of developing writers who “think critically about how they are working with and contributing to culture” would be prepared to discard this imperative. Salesses is too committed to the transformation of the fiction workshop into a reflection of the cultural multiplicity of “the real world” to give much attention to the critical multiplicity of fiction’s aesthetic projects.

The strength of Lisa Zeidner’s Who Says? is that she does attempt to account for such multiplicity, at least in the use of point of view. Zeidner covers each of the main types of point of view, differentiating in detail both third-person omniscient and the third-person limited (“central consciousness” or “free indirect”), as well as the issues that emerge in the use of first-person (reliable vs. unreliable, the rise of the self-conscious narrator, etc.). She also devotes space to the less common (although in some cases increasingly common) exercises in point of view (second-person, the communal “we,” “whiplashing” point of view), child as well as non-human narrators, and compares the effects of point of view in fiction and film.

Zeidner also has what is essentially a thesis about the importance of point of view: point of view is the most important consideration in fiction, involving “skillful manipulations in, and motivations of, your alliance with your characters,” manipulations that are “more central and crucial than plot.” She emphasizes the centrality of point of view in an initial chapter that examines the impression created by first lines and paragraphs: “My argument is that point of view in good fiction is embedded in every choice about tone, description, and diction, even about plot and pacing, and furthermore it has to be established very quickly.” One could disagree with Zeidner about the foundational status of point of view in prose fiction (as I do: surely style, the particular way language is ordered for effect, is even more primary) while still acknowledging that Zeidner has identified and explicated more comprehensively an element of the art of fiction that is often treated more cursorily than it deserves.

Who Says? ranges widely in its choice of sample texts, especially across genres and modes. The author clearly also makes the effort to reach across “cultures” in Salesses’ sense of the term (Susan Choi, Percival Everett, Junot Diaz, among others). Point of view is an aspect of craft that Salesses actually does not much discuss at all, and it is hard to know whether it is simply an element of fiction he takes for granted without submitting it to a critique of its real-world relevance, or whether as a purely “technical” issue, it is inherently too far removed from the “real” world to which Salesses wants fiction to be faithful that it simply evades the reach of his critique. If point of view is as crucial to the way fiction works as Zeidner would have it, however, Salesses’ notion that craft in its traditional guise is wholly irrelevant (even destructive) to the present and future direction of both fiction and creative writing instruction is altogether unfounded. The sorts of choices confronting the writer of fiction in achieving the most artful effects that Zeidner surveys in fact seem the craftiest of craft decisions.

Still, because of the relatively comprehensive treatment Zeidner provides, Who Says? would be the sort of book that might be used with students in presenting them a wide spectrum of possibilities relevant not just to point of view but to the creation of effects in fiction that in general expand the writer’s (and ultimately the reader’s) focus of attention beyond plot and character (while also obviously contributing to both). Zeidner does not take any strong position on the advisability of venturing a particular effect, although she does point out how some point of view choices work better than others for producing some particular effects, and thus the book does indeed offer young or inexperienced writers an abundant selection of approaches to point of view for inspiration or emulation. However, this very impression of a kind of exhaustive sampling may actually encourage such writers not so much to perform their own variations on these models but to imitate them. This is surely not Zeidner’s intention, but may in fact accentuate an inherent limitation to the efficacy of academic creative writing instruction.

The widespread establishment of creative writing as an academic field of “study” (by its nature creative writing is really closer to a professional program than a true academic mode of inquiry) quickly enough, if predictably, developed its own hierarchy of programs (perhaps with the Iowa workshop at the top), and from there a relative uniformity of practice—eventually the instructors were usually themselves the products of creative writing programs. In such a setup, it would surprising if the long-term effect was not a substantial degree of conformity among those making their way through this system. Such conformity would indeed arise at the level of craft, since craft is something that presumably can be taught, Under the circumstances, “craft” acquires preeminent importance—so important that a writer like Matthew Salesses sees control of its operating assumptions as a compelling source of cultural power, “rethinking” its definition akin to an act of political revolution. But the successful transformation of the creative writing program in the manner Salesses envisions will change only the terms of compliance with the norms of the Program, not the reality.

Outside of its possible use in a creative writing course, Lisa Zeidner’s book on point of view certainly provides interested readers with a breadth of coverage of the various options available to the writer of fiction when thinking about the enactment of point of view, but it is not really a book that probes very deeply into the potential transmutations of point of view that can make it a source of literary innovation and originality. You can gain a great deal of valuable insight about the application of point of view to the overall configuration of works of fiction from Who Says?, but not about how a writer can disregard the standard approaches taken by the preponderance of professional writers and discover a less-travelled path to follow.

George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is essentially a craft book, pursuing “craft” more or less in the apolitical inherited understanding of the term Matthew Salesses wants to disown. But Saunders approaches teaching the principles of good writing from an unorthodox angle, offering a course (this book is a version of it) that looks closely at a few stories by the 19^th century Russian masters of the short story—Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy. Saunders moves methodically through each story, querying students about how the stories seem to be working on them. Saunders in the book often summarizes their responses, but he is more likely simply to move right to his own explication—done in an affable, humorous tone that perhaps readers expect from him. The overall impression created by Saunders’s leisurely walk through these stories is not of a teacher giving instruction but an enthusiastic reader drawing on his own experience as a writer to help us appreciate the stories’ effects.

The biggest drawback to Saunders’s admittedly engaging pedagogical strategy, at least in its implications for understanding the art of fiction, is of course that for English speakers these works are in another language. Certainly much can be learned about the structural order of fiction from the likes of Chekhov and Gogol, but inevitably the linguistic subtleties of their work remains inaccessible to those who read it only in translation, and such intricacies of structure and style is important not only in recognizing the full artistry of these Russian writers but in appreciating that form at its most fundamental level is realized through style—the writer’s particular way of shaping language. Of course, even Russian readers cannot finally learn to write “like” Chekhov or Tolstoy, but the broader sensitivity to the reverberations of language a writer’s style can provide seems like something a serious writer would want to cultivate.

The strengths and weaknesses of A Swim in the Pond in the Rain are well-displayed in the book’s first two chapters, on Chekhov’s “In the Cart” and Turgenev’s “The Singers.” The chapter on “In the Cart” is the most systematic demonstration of Saunders’s approach to teaching the Russian writers, as he moves page by page through the story, contemplating Chekhov’s technique and speculating about the effects he seems to be after. Saunders also uses the story to draw conclusions about the nature of stories and the writer’s objectives:

    We might think of a story this way: the reader is sitting in the sidecar of a motorcycle the writer is driving. In a well-told story, reader and writer are so close together that they’re one unit. My job as the writer is to keep the distance between motorcycle and sidecar small, so that when I go right, you go right. When I, at the end of the story, take the motorcycle off the cliff, you have no choice but to follow. . . .

Although Saunders is absolutely correct, here and throughout the book, to emphasize the importance of the reader’s experience of a work of fiction, the implication in this motorcycle conceit is that such experience is most intensively directed to plot, an assumption that is sustained throughout the analysis of “In the Cart,” at least insofar as the focus of attention remains on what happens. Indeed, “what happens” is very consequential in Chekhov, since our grasp of character must depend on our alert apprehension of what they say and do, usually in ordinary moments, but a consideration of what a Chekhov story has to offer an aspiring writer might also stress the way Chekhov is able to build such resonance into stories that are so minimalist in both structure and tone. This is something that happens beneath or around the narrated events themselves, not in the story as such.

Saunders’s method works somewhat better in the examination of “The Singers,” since this is a story in which what happens is clearly the focal point—although the reader may be more preoccupied by the story’s lack of action (aside from the singing contest to which the narrator’s account leads and the narrator’s approach to and exit from the scene he describes, what happens is almost literally nothing) than by contemplating the narrative. But in this case Saunders’s effort to understand the singing contest and its ramifications prompts him to compel our attention on the details of the contest (on the details in general), in turn making the story’s aftermath take on increased importance. Saunders ultimately affirms Turgenev’s emphasis on description rather than narrative, characterizing it as Turgenev’s disinclination to accommodate contemporaneous notions of “craft” emphasizing plot. (Noting here that description is a compositional mode about which Matthew Salesses again has very little to say.) He might have gone farther, in the discussions of both Turgenev and Chekhov, and reminded us that each of these writers is considered an important figure in the development of literary realism, which in its classic form is meant to expel all conceptions of craft, leaving only life.

But, as Saunders observes at the beginning of the chapter on Gogol, close reading of stories such as “In the Cart” and “The Singers” shows these ostensibly realistic stories to be “compressed and exaggerated, with crazy levels of selection and omission and shaping going on in them.” If in Turgenev and Chekov these distortions are in the service of a greater fidelity to the “feel” or ordinary life, in Gogol’s “The Nose” the distortion isn’t hidden in “selection and omission” but is a blatant artifice the reader can’t miss. Saunders is perhaps at his best in this book in the analysis of “The Nose,” but this isn’t really surprising, since Saunders as a writer of fiction is closer in spirit to the representational breaches in Gogol than the other writers examined in this book. Saunders maintains that a story such as “The Nose” should not be regarded as absurdism or fantasy, but as a work that depicts “the process of rationality fraying under duress” in a way that reveals a more essential reality going beyond “the way things seem to how they really are,” no doubt similar, Saunders would say, to the way his own fiction incorporates the surreal and absurd.

In this chapter on “The Nose,” Saunders does address the limitations of reading a writer like Gogol in translation, since in particular much of the humor in the story lies in Gogol’s use of the Russian language. But he does perhaps get as close to Gogol’s Russian prose as we are likely to get by focusing on Gogol’s invocation of the “skaz” mode of narration—featuring an unreliable narrator speaking in something closer to an oral than a written idiom—and by emphasizing Gogol’s creation of voice. The instability of the voice (half formal, half awkwardly demotic), Saunders argues, points us to an instability in the human use of language:

    Language, like algebra, usefully only operates within certain limits. It’s a tool for making representations of the world, which, unfortunately, we then go on to mistake for the world. Gogol is not making a ridiculous world; he’s showing us that we ourselves make a ridiculous world in every instant, by our thinking.

This is surely a valuable lesson about the writer’s medium for the apprentice writer to learn, and if in his course Saunders offers the kind of thorough analysis found in this book, students must indeed emerge from it more enlightened about craft as employed by these great Russian writers. A course such as the one Saunders teaches seems to me, at least, a better way of emphasizing “craft” than the entrenched workshop method. That it would not pass muster with Matthew Salesses seems like the most severe judgment on the merits of his “rethinking” of the principles of fiction and the teaching of writing.

I have an essay on the experimental fiction of William Melvin Kelley (especially Dunfords Travels Everywheres) in the new issue of Denver Quarterly. A link to the essay can also be found here.

No doubt the most pressing questions concerning the fiction of William Melvin Kelley are not about its merits, which are considerable and readily enough apparent, but have to be those related to the circumstances of its “rediscovery”: Why did Kelley publish nothing after 1970? (His first novel appeared in 1962, and Kelley died in 2017.) What accounts for the long period of neglect his work endured until recently, when all of his books were brought back into print?. . . . (Continue)

 

On David Ohle

My essay on the fiction of David Ohle is now available at Big Other:

    Readers encountering David Ohle’s work for the first time through his most recent novel, The Death of a Character (2021), will indeed find the depiction promised in its title, but those familiar with Ohle’s previous books, especially his first and eventual cult favorite, Motorman (1972), will know that the character whose dying the narrative chronicles is the protagonist of that novel as well. Called simply Moldenke, he makes additional appearances in the long-delayed follow-up to Motorman, The Age of Sinatra (2004), as well as its successors, The Pisstown Chaos (2008) and The Old Reactor (2013). (In The Pisstown Chaos, Moldenke turns up as a minor character in a story focusing on others, but The Death of a Character marks the fourth time his picaresque existence has been the focus of an Ohle novel.) Moldenke has been the principal conduit to the singularly bizarre and often grotesque world Ohle invokes in his fiction, and thus his demise seems more a consummation of that world’s creation, its full achievement perhaps, than merely the portrayal of a fictional character’s death. Continue