The Reading Experience

Where Are the Novelists With Their Indictments?

My first impulse in reading this essay by Henry Porter in The Observer was to take it as just another siren song about the need to combine art with politics, to toughen up the former by encouraging writers to tackle the "serious" issues of the day. It's a song that ought to be resisted, to be sure, but I was ultimately most struck by how thoroughly cacophonous Porter's version of the tune turns out to be. His argument really is quite astonishingly incoherent.

Porter begins by quoting a typically dull piece of prose written by a "policy expert" and suggests that commentary on current affairs might be more lively if it were in part written by real writers, "public intellectuals" and novelists or dramatists:

This may seem harsh, but where are the novelists with their indictments of government and society? Where are exposés of some unregarded part of the termite heap? Where are the dramatists who can barely speak for their anger? Harold Pinter opposed the war vociferously and David Hare wrote a terrific play about it called Stuff Happens, but there has been very little thinking outside that which isn't either controlled by or seeks the approval of the political parties.

It probably is true that the public discourse would be enlivened, its collective prose style invigorated, if such writers participated more regularly. However, it's really not very clear what Porter is asking them to do. It seems he wants them to "indict," "expose" and "speak," all of which are presumably forms of non-literary public expression. Yet he also endorses Hare for writing his anti-war play, and elsewhere he praises "engaged" novelists such as Nadine Gordimer and Orhan Parmuk. "This is not to say," he writes, "that writers should go on forced missions of social realism, give up their stylistic experiments or stop writing about themselves." Instead, they should be writing fiction that is as keyed to "issues" as certain TV dramas Porter evidently admires.

Novelists have just as much right to speak about public affairs as anyone else, and I have no problem with poets, fiction writers, or dramatists commenting on political and social issues outside of their work as poets, novelists, and dramatists. Indeed, their penchant for speaking forcefully and straightforwardly about such issues, free of the cant of media blowhards and the "professional" coating of putative experts, can sometimes be refreshing. However, if Porter is exhorting them to write more "political" works of literature, then he's asking them to abandon their art in favor of artistic cant and ill-concealed propaganda. I don't know why any novelist or poet would want to take Porter up on this offer. If political salience is the question--more rather than less--wouldn't it be more fruitful to speak directly about politics through essays, op-eds, and speeches than to distort one's "creative" work by bending it to the political winds?

But it's impossible to tell which approach Porter is truly advocating. On the one hand, "we desperately need the moral force of an independent-minded writer training his or her guns on a target that journalists may not have seen and politicians may not want us to see." This sounds like the writer as direct and unmediated "voice," the writer as citizen. On the other hand, Porter directs our attention to all the subjects that require "the urgent attention of a writer's sensibility." This sounds like political agitation filtered through the steadying perception of the novelist-at-work. Does Porter want "writers" to produce tracts, or creative works colored by politics? He doesn't really seem to know.

My biggest objection to the idea that writers should "say something" about current politics and social controversies is that I don't understand why they should be presumed to know anything in particular about these subjects. Ideally, what novelists and poets know is how to create compelling novels and poems. Their expertise should be in aesthetic invention. To assume that the writing of fiction and poetry is about intervening in public debates in most cases only warps and inhibits aesthetic invention. It encourages writers to be blowhards themselves rather than artists, fosters the perception that fiction or drama are just thinly-disguised varieties of polemic. I get enough partisan rhetoric in newspapers and magazines; I don't need any more in the fiction I read.

Nugatory

Commenting on Michael Berube's What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, Timothy Burke writes:

Bérubé does a good job of explaining the intellectual constitution of the humanities at present, and of critiquing the affirmative-action logic of some conservative critics. To me, the next gauntlet to throw down to the critics, at least those who come from within academia, is to sketch out a program of “conservative” scholarly and pedagogical practice in the humanities. What I largely hear from [Mark] Bauerlein, [Erin] O’Connor, [Paul] Johnson, and many others is a complaint. What I do not hear, for the most part, is what their alternative scholarly praxis might look like, or even whom their models might be. Is Helen Vendler, for example, a good practicioner of the kind of literary criticism that Bauerlein and O’Connor see as unfairly excluded from English Departments? If so, how uncommon in some generalized sense is the kind of criticism that she practices? Is it really as despised and exiled from disciplinary norms as they imply?. . .

Although she is not in any programmatic way a New Critic, Helen Vendler does indeed write literary criticism that is first and foremost an attempt to understand what is literary about the literary works (in her case almost exlusively poems) she considers. She sometimes makes strong judgments about the merits of the work she considers. She is above all a close reader concerned with the aesthetic qualities of poetry and not with its status as ideology, history, or cultural "symptom."

For these reasons, her practice as a critic is indeed extremely "uncommon," and, whether or not it is "despised" (my guess is many literary academics are mostly indifferent to it because, having never been taught how to read poetry in Vendler's way, they literally don't know what she's talking about), it is certainly "exiled" from the disciplinary journals that are used to define the normal practice (normal for the moment) of academic criticism. Almost all of Vendler's criticism appears in publications like The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, not in the discipline-defining scholarly journals. I am not aware that any of Vendler's essays in the last 10-20 years have appeared in such journals, in fact. (In the sub-discipline I know best, contemporary American literature, I am additionally not aware of any "scholarly" journal that accepts literary criticism of the sort Vendler has mastered. Luckily she already has tenure, since no one writing her sort of criticism would otherwise have any chance of receiving tenure or promotion in the current system with its protocols of evaluation and reward.)

However. In my opinion, Vendler's brand of criticism is not what conservative critics have in mind when they complain that their own are "unfairly excluded from English Departments." No political preferences or cultural diagnoses follow from or are implied by Vendler's work. She is not shilling for the established order or decrying the degradation of culture by misguided liberal projects. She is interested in the art of poetry and in discerning accomplished poetry from less accomplished poetry. What is impled by Vendler's critical practice is the autonomy of poetry, its separation from the very political debates the conservative critics of the literary academy want to drag it into. In this way these conservatives are hardly any different than the radical critics who they contend (and I would agree with them on this) have politicized literary study. They don't want to de-politicize it; they want it to embody their own politics, their own view of the way things ought to be.

Roger Kimball, one of the shrillest of the conservative critics, not long ago proclaimed that "Art has its own aesthetic canons of legitimacy and achievement; but those canons are themselves nugatory unless grounded in a measure beyond art." The "measure beyond art" comes from politics or religion or "tradition." The "aesthetic canons of legitimacy and achievement," which Helen Vendler observes and attempts to advance, are "nugatory" unless they buttress these cultural pillars. If the "measure" to be applied to poems and other works of literature comes not from within the practice of literary criticism and through the aesthetic models provided by literary history but from the pre-established dictates of the conservative worldview, then Helen Vendler is surely not the "practicioner" conservatives are looking for.

Belittling Art

I agree with Jerry Saltz that it is a mistake to think "that art is about understanding, when, like almost everything else in the everyday world, art is about experience; it's 'I experience, therefore I am.'" Unfortunately, Saltz only muddles this valuable insight when he goes on to observe that:

Art is often political when it doesn't seem political and not political when that's all it seems to be. Neither Andy Warhol nor Donald Judd made overtly political art. Yet both changed the way the world looks and the way we look at the world. That's because art creates new thought structures. Imagine all the thought structures that either would have never existed or gone undiscovered had all of Shakespeare been lost. Art does far more than only meet the eye. It is part of the biota of the world. It exists within a holistic system.

Saltz wants to wrest art away from what he calls "neo-Cartesians," those "dogmatists, ideologues, academics, and theorists who demonize and belittle art as a gratuitous, semi-mystical, merely beautiful, purely formal amusement." This is a noble enough ambition, but, unfortunately, Saltz's own language only gives the neo-Cartesians additional reasons to dismiss the "semi-mystical" descriptions of art that too often accompany the claim that art is experience rather than a means of acquiring knowledge. What exactly is a "new thought structure"? What's new about it, the thought or the structure? Shouldn't the encounter with art give us a new way of structuring experience rather than our thoughts, and isn't the emphasis on "thought structure" just another way of conceding that the Cartesian approach to art is correct--that what art provides is "ideas"?

The "biota" of the world? Is this just a way of saying that art is a "natural" or "organic" product of the human imagination, itself a biologically determined phenomenon? (Thus no artistic creation is "unnatural" in the way some dogmatists of the religious kind sometimes maintain.) If so, why the clumsily scientific term "biota"? Isn't this also just a concession to the intellectualized approach to art favored by the academics and theorists? Except that in this context the word seems emptied of all meaning, a frivolous gesture toward science that no scientist could take seriously.

As for "holistic," Saltz never really gets around to explaining what he means in using the term to illuminate works of art, aside from a concluding story about the difference between cats and dogs, through which "holistic" is also equated with "nonlinear," "indirect," and "circuitous." I can see the relationship between these latter three concepts, but how they work to create something "holistic" remains a mystery to me. All in all, Saltz's language is precisely of the vague, inconsistent, "mystical" sort that gives aestheticism (even the metaphysicalized aestheticism Saltz seems to favor) a bad name.

Saltz seems to be one of those embarrased aesthetes who appreciates beauty but who doesn't himself want to settle for the "merely beautiful" (like those literary critics who scoff at the "merely literary"). Art needs some transcendental plumping-up, even if only to protect it from the intellectuals and pedants who might trample on it otherwise. I, for one don't see the need to reassure everyone that "art is often political when it doesn't seem political," even if most present-day "theorists" can see only the political implications of whatever art or literature they deign to consider, and I can't agree that artists like Warhol and Judd "changed the way the world looks" or the way I "look at the world." Warhol marginally did change the way art looks (at least for me), but his experiments in the demystification of "Art" did nothing to affect my perception of "the world." Nor did they need to.

Making Life Beautiful

I have hesitated to comment on this Terry Teachout essay about political art because there's so much in it with which I agree. I've not seen the plays he judges to be "crude and predictable" (including The God of Hell, by Sam Shepard, whom I generally admire), but I'm pretty sure he's right. I also agree that "Turning messy fact into orderly fiction necessarily entails simplification; turning it into artful fiction demands as well that this simplification acknowledge the full complexity of human nature and human experience." And that "Any work of art that seeks to persuade an audience to take some specific form of external action, political or otherwise, tends to be bad." (Although I am more dubious about his further qualification that "it is possible to make good, even great art that is intended to serve as the persuasive instrument of an exterior purpose." Perhaps some great art has had a persuasive effect of this kind, but I doubt many artists have conceived their work primarily as "instruments" for an "exterior purpose." It's hard for me to see how one could maintain the integrity of one's "art" while focusing on the potential propaganda value of what one is creating.)

But Teachout does say some other things about the nature of art that I find puzzling:

Exactly what is it that art does? Countless books have been written to answer this question, and I can do no more in the compass of an essay than to suggest something of what they tell us. To begin with, it’s generally agreed that great art has some mysterious yet ultimately intelligible relationship to truth. The nature of that relationship was nicely described by Fairfield Porter, a major American painter who was also a gifted art critic. “When I paint,” Porter said, “I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful.” No matter who said it first, this statement points gracefully to one of the most important things that art does: it portrays the world creatively, in the process heightening our perception and awareness of things as they are. . . .

I've probably read many of the books to which Teachout is referring, but I don't recall any such general agreement that art is a way of seeking "truth." I, for one, don't agree with this at all. If Teachout means to say that art takes "life" as its subject and for that very reason winds up (at its best) disclosing something truthful about it, then this seems trivial to me. Where else would art finds its subject? If he means that truth in this context is something less tangible, something inherent to ordinary reality but not necessarily perceptible by ordinary means, then this already starts to make the pursuit of "truth" rather slippery. Whose truth are we talking about? Surely he can't mean that all artistic truths are equal, as long as they are ultimately "intelligible." One doesn't read Terry Teachout for a celebration of aesthetic relativism.

"Make everything more beautiful." Doesn't this contradict the notion that art aspires to truth? If art makes "things as they are" more beautiful, isn't this indeed a deliberate falsification? Life is something less than beautiful and art improves on it. This is a perfectly good thing for it do, but whatever "truth" emerges has to be truth about art, not about life. Again, if Teachout thinks this is where the truth in art resides, I'd happily agree, but somehow I don't think he means to suggest this. Perhaps he believes that in making everything more beautiful some "inner truth" about the world emerges, but once more the need to discriminate between artistic truths arises. "That truth is really true," the critic must say, "while that one merely masquerades as truth." Certainly some critics do engage in this sort of thing, but in my opinion it takes them outside the realm of art into morality and metaphysics.

It's hard to disagree with the notion that art "portrays the world creatively, in the process heightening our perception and awareness of things as they are," except that this seems a secondary effect of art, not its raison d'etre. According to John Dewey (to whom much of my own view of the nature and efficacy of art is indebted), art does indeed heighten perception and awareness, but what it most immediately heightens is our apprehension of what an experience can be like. The experience of art, Dewey says, is the most acute kind of experience we can have, and before we move on to the "subject" of the work we first of all clarify our perception of the art work itself, becoming aware (ideally) of the efforts the artist must have made in creating the work. To say that art primarily directs us to "things as they are" is to deny the "creative" integrity of art in favor of the representation of reality it purportedly gives us. Presumably, for Teachout it is the "truth" of this representation that is most important.

It is certainly the case that political art most insistently points us to "things as they are," and Teachout is correct in contending that political art is, usually, bad art, or at least that it's very difficult for most political art to succeed. Political artists are almost by definition more interesed in the representation of reality they convey than in the subtleties of form and expression. They are after Truth in its most unadorned manifestation. They want to heighten our awareness in no uncertain terms. But I don't think that the way to counter bad art of this kind is to delineate more intricate gradations of "truth." I think you should just commit yourself to the art and let truth take care of itself.

Consciousness Raising

In his Feb. 14 column at Moby Lives, Steve Almond gets it all exactly backward:

This country's chief signifier is our staggering capacity to isolate ourselves from the effects of our political and lifestyle choices.

This is the reason, for instance, that so many people can vote for a party that believes gays are sub–human but still watch "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy," (because fags are so darn funny!). It's also the reason liberals can drive around in SUVs, while decrying policies driven by oil–dependency.

But of course it is one of the functions of art (yes, even popular art) to call people on such bullshit, to raise people's consciousness, to awaken their capacities for compassion.

William Faulkner probably put this best in his 1951 speech, upon accepting the Nobel Prize: "The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

It seems to me that the time has come answer this call.

I don't mean to suggest that writers should begin cranking out polemics. Art resides in an argument with the self, not others.

What I am suggesting is that artists need not regard their political identities as wholly separate from their artistic ones — especially given our unique historical circumstance.

Almond is upset because a number of readers, allegedly spurred on by a particular review at The National Review, objected to what Almond himself characterizes as the "lefty diatribes" in his book Candyfreak. And while he should have known that such diatribes would alienate certain readers of his book, I don't finally blame him for protesting against such responses. This is a work of nonfiction, the structure of which ("an account of my cross–country journey to various small, independent candy bar manufacturers") almost demands the sort of informal talk (the author's ramblings while rambling) these "diatribes" seem to be. Self-styled "conservatives" could surely have determined from reviews such as the one in National Review that Almond was a "lefty" and should have restrained themselves from buying Candyfreak if the expression of lefty views was offensive to them.

But I can't see why Almond would leap from this perfectly coherent defense of revealing one's polticial views in a work of nonfiction to a polemic on behalf of political art. Candyfreak was not a work of literary "art" in the first place. It was clearly some kind of hybrid of memoir and journalism, and although such a book can certainly be artfully written, it hardly warrants such a distinction-begging declaration that artists should become politicians. Does he think that the very readers who objected to his politics when expressed in nonfiction would change their minds if they read some politicized fiction? Since these are the very people who have to be persuaded that the current state of affairs in the United States has become unacceptable, to whom, exactly, would such political fiction appeal to other than those readers who already agree with it? And what would this accomplish other than further degrading the critical atmosphere in which literary art is received and discussed?

(I especially cannot see what connection the Faulkner passage Almond quotes has to do with the need to create political art. Surely Faulkner was himself not "calling" for such a thing. The "props" and "pillars" he speaks of are decidedly not of the sort that would substitute for a political soapbox. Faulkner is speaking of the much more durable qualities of art and literature as consolation and distinctive modes of understanding, the qualities that allow art to transcend historical circumstances. If Almond means to suggest that even now art might act as such a bulwark--although I don't really think our circumstances are "unique"--against frustration and outright despair, I might agree with him, but I don't think this kind of mere consolation is what he has in mind.)

The purpose of art is not to "call people" on their political derelictions. It might be about hypocrisy, but almost never directly (where it becomes a sermon) and, it is be hoped, never about liberals' hypocrisy in their driving habits (where it becomes just boring). Similiarly, while art might in some instances "awaken" our compassionate impulses, almost always when works of art or literature take this as an explicit goal the effort fails, often devolving into didacticism or sentimentality.

Moreover, artists and writers should "regard their political identities as wholly separate from their artistic ones." As soon as artists become political commentators, to that extent they cease to be artists. I know that many, perhaps most, people who care about such things disagree with me, but I simply don't understand how art can be art unless its effects are primarily "artistic." If instead they can also be "political"--that is, if the art in question also seeks to express the artist's opinions about this or that--then we might as well agree that "art" is no longer a term with much meaning. It's just a fancier way to talk about "our political and lifestyle choices" (as Almond puts it elsewhere in his essay).

Almond quotes from one of his "lefty diatribes":

. . .The Bush tax cut had sopped the rich and wiped out the federal surplus. The economy was in the crapper. Dubya was doing everything in his power to hand the planet to Exxon.

Two years earlier, I'd sat in front of another TV and watched him steal the Presidency in broad daylight. Then a bunch of vicious air–borne murderers had come along and scared the commonsense out of everyone. In one morning, they'd managed to bestow upon this evangelical simpleton an air of presidential dignity.

I don't much disagree with any of that. But believing such things to be true makes me want to express my beliefs directly, to convince others through real political argument to believe them as well, perhaps makes me want to become more active politically by joining groups or supporting candidates. It doesn't make me want to write a story or a novel to encapsulate my beliefs. I'm afraid that, under our admittedly dismal political circumstances, too many writers will take Almond's admonitions to heart, will try to merge their identities and produce equally dismal fiction that won't either make any difference to Bush voters or be very fun to read.

Blissfully Free of Politics

Moorish Girl's guest blogger, Randa Jarrar, recently asserted the following:

However, some writers have a responsibility, and a burden, to write politically. Someone black, or gay, or Arab, or handicapped, or HIV-positive, or Jewish, or raising a child alone, or Latina, or living on a reservation, may write a book that is not political. That book may be read as such anyway; this is true. But chances are that someone who fits those descriptions is going to have something political to say when they write fiction. Someone black, or gay, or Arab, or handicapped, or HIV-positive, or Jewish, or raising a child alone, or Latina, or living on a reservation, may write a book that is not political. -- and not only because everything they write or say is automatically, in the world we live in, considered political, but because they actually want to write activist fiction.

Now it is certainly true that some people want to write "activist fiction." They have every right to do so, and what they produce may even have some beneficial and appropriately "activist" consequences. (I am, however, rather hard pressed to think of much fiction that has had such consequences. The sort of folks on whose behalf such fiction is written themselves don't usually read it, and for those who are receptive to activist gestures--the already convinced--reading fiction is probably among the least efficacious sources of social change one can think of.)

And not only is it true that "Someone black, or gay, or Arab, or handicapped, or HIV-positive, or Jewish, or raising a child alone, or Latina, or living on a reservation, may write a book that is not political," many, many writers who could be assigned to one of these categories have indeed written non-political books. (Although looking over this list, it wouldn't seem to leave too many people who might be allowed to write non-politically: Heterosexual white men? Christian married women?) Why is it assumed that a writer "fitting these descriptions" who nevertheless wants to write a book, fiction or nonfiction, that doesn't "intervene" politically is unusual, even an aberration?

Is it really the case that "chances are" writers who can be pigeonholed into one of these categories "is going to have something political to say when they write fiction"? I understand that this a fundamental assumption of identity politics, but hasn't it really become an unexamined assumption that desperately needs to be examined? Isn't it ulimately an exclusive, not an an inclusive, view of what members of these identified groups can bring to the writing of fiction? What if someone who, given the terms of this imposed contract, ought to want to write political fiction really doesn't? Is the fiction this writer might produce then to be dismissed because it doesn't fulfill the expectations such a writer did not accept as valid in the first place? Writers like this aren't allowed to follow their bliss and write fiction blissfully free of politics?

I certainly hope it isn't true that "some writers have a responsibility, and a burden, to write politically." Or that whatever they write "may be read as such anyway." I really can't see why anyone, regardless of identity or affiliation, should be burdened with a preconceived notion of what or how he/she should write. Doesn't this make the writer into a victim of the cause, a drudge? Perhaps some writers do feel compelled to write politically some of the time, but always? Shouldn't someone who feels the compulsion to do nothing but write politically decide not to write fiction at all but instead take up "activist" nonfiction, even just become an activist? And if writers are stereotyped as political writers simply because of their perceived identity group, this is the reader's problem, not the writer's. Presumably the writer still gets satisfaction from the act of writing, from accomplishing the task at hand, despite whatever misunderstanding may ensue because of "politics." The reader who insists on misreading, on regarding everything as political even when it isn't, has only deprived himself of whatever other pleasures he might well have enjoyed.

Cultivate Your Gardens

The gloom that descended on the literary blogosphere on the day after the election could not have been heavier or more dismal. Most disquieting were the comments by various bloggers avowing, either implicitly or directly, that books and book blogging hardly seemed important after Bush's victory.

Surely in most cases this is a temporary affliction; the gloom will lift and the literary discussions will begin again. Still, I do hope that the disappointment over the election results--they've bummed me out too--will not cast a more lasting pall on the activities of literary weblogs, which have become not merely a respite from the even gloomier poltical circumstances we've been enduring for quite a while now, but have provided a real alternative to media-ized discourse on books and culture, which in my opinion only further pollutes the already foul political climate in which we are quite obviously going to have to continue to live. In my view, the endless series of rabid political books by journalists and other self-syled pundits that appeared over the past year or so only made the outcome we just witnessed all the more certain.

Books--fiction more specifically--seem trivial in comparison to politics and political awareness only if you've really invested most of your intellectual resources in the notion that political movements and ideas finally determine the degree to which serious engagement with ideas can be made at all, that everything else curious and creative people might find worthwhile must be subordinated to "political critique" or else it's just so much fluff. (That we invest a great deal of our emotional resources in particular political campaigns or outcomes certainly can't be avoided, nor the subsequent disappointment when our hopes are dashed.) It may be true that in large quarters of Bushworld books don't count for much, but it seems to me that we give in to the very attitude toward books and reading we deplore when we also declare in the wake of political disillusionment that we don't care much about them, either. If the outlook and assumptions that led to these most recent election results are really to be understood and confronted, it will only be, in my opinion, through the books--fiction and nonfiction--and the commentary about them that will appear over the course of the next four years.

Yesterday my mother called me to talk about the election. I was born and raised in a red county in a red state--a rural Missouri county of a pretty thoroughly lower-middle/working-class sort--and she still lives there. (She voted for Kerry. bless her.) She related her distress at those around her, her friends and acquaintances, who ignored all the ways in which the Bush administration had made their lives harder and less prosperous and voted instead on such issues as abortion and gay marriage. She doesn't think much of gay marriage herself, but she correctly observed that nothing would be done about these issues, anyway, and in the meantime the Iraq War would only get worse, jobs would get even scarcer, and the environment would be further degraded. She just couldn't understand how such people could so completely ignore their real political interests and vote on these cultural matters instead. (She is, of course, providing anedotal confirmation of the thesis of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas, although she hasn't read it. I suggested that she should read it, and should pass it around to her friends.)

Yet neither she nor I would say that these people who voted for Bush in the face of all the reasons why they shouldn't are bad people. They're really quite mild and unassuming in most respects. When I go back there to visit, I don't expect any of them to come after me with torches because I'm a liberal. I think it's really misguided to call them fascists and morons, words I have seen used in some places to describe these red-staters. (Yes, George W. Bush, and much of his administration, is indeed "scum," but most of the people living in St. Francois County, Missouri are not.) They need to be talked into voting for the more inclusive agenda, helped to see where their true interests lie, not called names or dismissed as hopeless. As it turned out, Bush got "only" about 53% of the vote in Missouri. A little more talking, a little more cajoling, among some of these very people might have made the difference. If they're to be persuaded the next time around, a few books might come in handy.

Politics Before Literature

Artforum alerts us to this bit of aesthetic wisdom from the editor of The American Spectator: "Outrage at obscene photos would be a little easier to take from liberal senators if they didn't have a history of financing them. Had Robert Mapplethorpe snapped the photos at Abu Ghraib, the Senate might have given him a government grant. Jesse Helms would certainly be surprised at the moral horror on display these days in the Senate. In 1989, he asked his fellow senators to stop funding degrading photography coming out of the National Endowment for the Arts. They refused. . . Who knows, perhaps the photos from Abu Ghraib will reappear as modern art at one of the museums the senators have patronized over the years. . .The Abu Ghraib scandal did not happen in a cultural vacuum. It is a reflection of the libertine pop culture the American left has long tried to impose on a military culture it considers too 'rigid'. . . ." And Rush Limbaugh apparently added: "You can see these pictures on American websites where they win awards. These kinds of pictures with these kinds of acts depicted. They win awards. They are considered progressive, they are considered enlightened. . . ."

All of this would be just too stupid for further comment, if it didn't conveniently reveal the utter bankruptcy of what has become the "conservative" philosophy of art. (Not among all conservatives, for sure. And the far left has its own problems in coming to terms with art as well.) On the one hand, when these conservatives look at the Mappelthorpe photographs, or any other kind of iconoclastic art, all they can see is a posed rearrangement of the "real"--the depravity and the obscenity of it all, whatever aesthetic effects the artist intended to create notwithstanding. On the other hand, when viewing the Abu Ghraib photos, all they can see is the posed rearrangement, the depravity and obscenity of what really happened notwithstanding. Apparently only when a photograph is an actual record of "degrading" acts can they manage to call attention to what they can then identify as the "art" in photography, "libertine" though it may be. Art becomes reality and reality art, each act of critical appraisal, of course, determined by the political ideolgy it ultimately is meant to buttress.

A less obvious, if no less telling, strategy for insinuating a conservative critique of the arts--in this case literature specifically--can be seen in Max Watman's omnibus review of recent fiction in The New Criterion. Watman makes no explicit political judgments about the fiction he reviews, relying instead on this initial remark in the form of a thesis:

I recently saw a man wearing a t-shirt that said “I bring nothing to the table.” These t-shirts should be handed out at the orientation session of every MFA program in the country. Not as a rebuke, but as celebration and encouragement. It is not always a new angle, or a new approach, or a new gimmick that your book needs. Don’t add something just for the sake of adding. That’s destructive. How about bringing nothing to the table? How about thinking inside the damn box every once in a while?

If this were simply an exhortation to take the form of fiction seriously, to avoid extraneous tricks or "gimmicks," I might agree with Watman. But I fear it's not. It's just another attack on attempts to experiment with fiction ("new angle," "new approach"), but in this case it's also an attempt literally to banish conceptual thinking from the writing of fiction. "Thinking inside the damn box" can only mean not thinking at all.

In the rest of the review, this translates to the criticism that The Confessions of Max Tivoli is too clever, The Dew Breaker too "exotic," Little Children too jokey. The current release Watman approves of most unambiguously is Stuart Dybek's I Sailed With Magellan. Presumably this is the book in which Watman finds the least "on the table." (I don't mean to criticize Dybek, rather the way in which Watman is using Dybek's book for the larger purposes of his review.) This is Watman's conclusion:

Dybek knows the rhythm of his streets and his voices. He can put them to use. His fiction is subtle, strikingly original, and brilliant. He never pushes too hard for effect, and he never lets you down.

These are elusive stories. One is not entirely sure what to think. These days, where authorial intention and opinion are so easy to spot, where writers hang little flags on the characters they use to make points, it is refreshing to see a writer so involved in the art. He is carefully, subtly putting together human emotions, not to make a point, not to disapprove or champion, not to comment, but to illustrate.

I haven't read Dybek's book, so those who have will have to decide whether these superlatives are deserved. (I'm perfectly willing to believe they are.) And if Watman means to discourage the use of fiction for polemical and political purposes, I'm with him. But I confess I don't really know what that last sentence means. How does one "subtly put together human emotions"? Doesn't a writer put together words? More importantly, what's the difference between putting these words together "to make a point" and doing so "to illustrate?" Something has to be illustrated, and it can't be just human emotions. A story full of emotions without shaping or intention or, indeed, hanging flags on the characters, is just emotional, not necessarily artistic. Subtlety is good, but it's not inherently superior in an aesthetic sense to other effects an author might want to create. Like any other strategy, it's the means to an end.

I must say I also find it somewhat strange that critics with conservative political leanings would embrace an approach to fiction (loosely, "urban realism") that has traditionally been used most often indeed to "make points," and in fact has been associated with left-leaning writers. (I've read other reviews in conservative publications where realism has been embraced in this way as well.) Have these critics come so strongly to detest the unconventional approaches associated with modernism/postmodernism that any fiction that seems content with traditional realism gets their support? As long it's not "degrading" or "obscene"?

Confessions of an Aesthete

The latest burst of debate about the relationship between politics and art is wending its way around the literary blogosphere. (Perhaps the locus of the current debate is this post by Mark Sarvas--itself a well-expressed bit of reflection.) This is of course a highly charged subject, one that frequently applies a heavy jolt to those who touch it, since it quickly gets to the core assumptions many readers bring to the act of reading works of literature. Better in most cases not to question these assumptions too strongly, rather than risk embroiling literature in the very dispute over politics that I, for one, always want to avoid in the first place.

In the present round of commentary, however, one claim in particular requires some response. Scribbling Woman makes the following assertion:

. . .all writing — all human endeavour — is political in one way or another. It could not be anything but, as we are all political creatures who exist in the world. The absolute disdain for politics of the aesthete is in itself a political choice. Of course, to a large extent when we are talking about artistic products, given our culture's continuing Romantic hangover, the inherent politics are not always overt or even conscious. But that does not mean that they are not there.

My criticism is not directed primarily at the author of this passage. Unfortunately, she repeats what has become a mantra chanted incessantly by many current academic critics, an invocation of "politics" so all-encompassing as to make any disagreement with it almost literally impossible (anything you say is "political") and so final in its judgment as to safely keep anyone who wishes to study literature rather than its political exploitation decidedly in his/her marginal place.

I'm perfectly willing to accept the label of "aesthete," although I know it's meant to be a term of horrible abuse. Speaking as one of these aberrant creatures, I will state categorically that my expectation that art will be "aesthetic" has no political content at all. None. It's not a disdain for politics, just a recognition that politics and aesthetics aren't the same thing. I have political views about politics and aesthetic views about art. You can mix the two if you wish, but don't tell me that in refusing to do so I'm doing it anyway. And I don't have any political views that are covert or unconscious. They're all out in the open (in the appropriate forum), and I happen to feel strongly about them. The assertion that they must be unconscious is just Freudianism smuggled into politics.

This totalizing view of the scope of the political is itself finally just a choice, a preference for politics over art, a way of maintaining that politics is the most important subject with which a serious person ought to occupy him/herself. It's a view that's now pandemic in the academy. If we are all "political creatures who exist in the world," are we not also "sociological creatures," "historical creatures," "cultural creatures," "economic creatures"? Such abstractions are so cosmically extended as to be meaningless. And to say that politics is everything, of course, is ultimately to say that politics is nothing in particular. If by saying everyone is "political" we mean everyone has his/her interests all well and good, but this is not the way "political" is used in the argument that all art is political art.

Frequently various "thinkers" are here invoked as authorities who have supposedly "established" that politics pervades everything (Marx or Baudrillard or Althusser or whomever). I've read these writers too, and to the extent they say that art is always political they don't know what they're talking about. They trivialize art and politics alike, and collapsing the distinction between the two is actually a way of avoiding thinking. (Although it's often the uninformed distortions of these thinkers that are really to blame.) No matter how many such thinkers are piled atop one another, the belief that "all writing is political in one way or another" is just a way of justifying one's own preference for politics and polemics over literature. I understand why some people prefer these things (although most can't seem to understand why I don't), but simply repeating the formula that all writing is political doesn't make it so.

There's nothing "Romantic" about my status as as aesthete. I think in fact that it's quite pragmatic. There's art and there's politics. "Political art" does exist, but it's not all art. Sometimes when we read works of literature we have an "aesthetic" experience, sometimes we can limit this experience to whatever political implications we can squeeze out of it. I think this latter is a very impoverished concept of reading, but I would. To say finally that all human endeavor is political (including the effort to create art) would be a pretty sad commentary on human potential, if it were true.

Politics and the Blogosphere

I have tried to keep explicitly political commentary and analysis out of this blog--except to point out the political uses to which literature is so often put these days--and while political bias almost always seeps out of any kind of "cultural" commentary eventually, I believe I have mostly succeeded. This underlying intention was one of the reasons I called The Reading Experience a "literary literary weblog" in the first place. (As well as a way of signalling I would probably not focus much on "pop culture" or personal confession).

I of course have my political views, and they are strongly held views, but it did and does seem to me that there are plenty of other blogs purveying political opinions and analysis, many of them expressing political views close to mine but otherwise better informed than I could be. Further, there are lots--lots--of purportedly "cultural" blogs that also offer up plenty of political rhetoric, but few, at least in my reading, that simply examine art, literature, and culture as if they were pursuits with value separate from ongoing political discourse. Perhaps there would be room for at least one that proceeded according to that assumption.

It has occurred to me to voice all of this explicitly as I have lately been doing a kind of wide-ranging sweep of the "blogosphere" to get a sense of what's actually being done in as many of its quarters as I could find. I have especially been looking for other blogs that appear to focus on the arts and culture at least to some significant extent. I will not name names, but I would like to give a report of sorts about what I have been finding.

If anything, my sense that in the current cultural climate "politics is everything" in discussions of art and literature has been reinforced. In fact, the dismaying impression I get from much blog commentary is that, at least implicitly, politics is more important than art and literature. (I am for now putting aside the self-styled literary weblogs, the usual suspects listed by the Complete Review on its "Links to Literary Weblogs" page, although even here political postings often enough interrupt the flow of more purely literary news.)

This is especially true of weblogs that identify themselves as "conservative," or that ally themselves with other conservative commentators. I had expected--honestly had hoped--that I might find in such blogs an impatience with politicized arts criticism similar to my own. I thought that perhaps the honest desire to "conserve" artistic and literary accomplishment both from the past and in the present would manifest itself in conservative culture blogs through non-ideological analysis of the work of noteworthy artists, writers, or composers. I haven't found much of this at all. Most of these blogs seem to me relentlessy ideological. (It should go without saying that there are exceptions. I am necessarily making generalizations that individual examples will bely.) There seems to be an assumption that almost all modern art and literature is part of the broader liberal conspiracy against mainstream America, and certainly that almost all attempts at what used to be called "higher criticism" are the work of pointy-heads.

Yet in a broader sense these blogs want to lay claim to high culture as part of their domain. It's just that from this perspective it's not the actual achievement in works of art that's important. "Appreciation" of it is just another way for conservative bloggers to distinguish themselves from the barbarian liberals trying to bring down Western Civilization, at times a tool with which to bash these liberals on the noggin.

(The extent to which many such conservatives in fact avoid real engagement with serious art and literature was really brought home to me when I ran across this rather astonishing admission in a conservative blog: "I suppose the truth is that I don't like literature very much. I admire it. I realise that it matters, and I want to at least experience the occasional literary masterpiece, just to know how that feels. But the process of ploughing through hundreds of pages of prose while trying nevertheless to keep in mind exactly who all these people are and what they have all been doing is beyond me.")

"Liberals" themselves unwittingly conspire in this process. For the most part admitted liberal bloggers simply ignore art and literature. This is their way of acknowledging that only politics is worth a serious person's attention. When they do take up such topics it's almost always a way to substantiate their own political claims and assumptions. The fact of the matter is, however, there are few if any defenses of the arts from a liberal perspective, leaving the field wide open for the kind of expropriation of culture by the political right I have discussed.

But then I'm not sure I'd want that there be such. The literary weblogs are ultimately by far the most reliably non-biased web-based sources of debate on current art and literature, although again their political allegiances do come through at times, and those allegiances are frequently and fairly obviously "liberal." (Mine are too.) Speaking just for myself, however, my fondest hope for these weblogs might be that they offer a genuinely credible alternative both to the bad-faith usurpations of the right and the apathy and irresponsibility of the left. This might in itself be seen as an assertion of "political" principle, but it would be one in opposition to the real corruption of both politics and literature my tour of the blogosphere revealed to me.

Meanwhile. . .

An excellent account of a special 92nd St. Y Hawthorne celebration/reading at beatrice.

A brief but very good discussion of Emily Dickinson at the weblog Reading & Writing.

At a website with which I was until now unfamiliar, a "call for more political poetry."

Although in several previous posts I have complained about the politicization of both literature and literary criticism, I can't say I really object to the kind of "policital" poetry Michael Silverstein describes here. In general, I don't really have a problem with either "political poetry" or "political fiction," as long as everyone involved understands that such writing is essentially what ought to be called "occasional" writing--composed in response to a particular event or some other immediate provocation--and that this kind of writing does not come close to exhausting the possibilities of either poetry or fiction.

Some great political poems have indeed been written--Yeats's poem on the Easter uprising, Cummings's "i sing of olaf," even The Waste Land. All three of these poems in fact have transcended the "political" circumstances in which they were written and continue to work powerfully on their readers because they express emotions and ideas that could be called "universal" even if political; in effect they tap into feelings that could superficially be considered political but that really have their roots in the deeper responses we have to ongoing events that make them seem important to us. They get at the "conditions of possibility" of a political response. (The same thing is true of great political fiction, such as Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, or Robert Coover's The Public Burning.)

Of course, none of the poems I've named would have been printed on the Op-Ed page, either.

I do think Silverstein is confused when he writes, "On the poets' side, we need a lot less of the postmodern, endlessly introspective, culture for the cognoscenti, self-consciously unstructured work. . . ." "Postmodern" and "endlessly introspective" are not the same thing--not by a long shot; few poets have much use for the "cognoscenti," and very little contemporary poetry is "self-consciously unstructured." Much of it is actually quite intricately structured, which is one reason why some people do complain that it's "postmodern."

Politics and the Novel

There's an interesting interview with Scottish writers Alasdair Gray and James Kelman in the newest issue of the journal Contemporary Literature--interesting in large part for the way in which the interviewer (described as "a research assistant in the departments of literary theory and English literature at the Catholic University of Brussels, and a Ph.D candidate at the Catholic University of Leuven") keeps pressing the two writers to identify their work as essentially political writing, an invitation both writers consistently reject.

Before discussing further the particulars of the interview, a few words about Contemporary Literature. Like almost all "academic journals," CL does not make its issues available online. Archived articles from such journals sometimes make their way into cyber print, but even then getting access to them is frequently so difficult that indeed only the scholar squirrels among us would be tempted to try. Not that these journals, including Contemporary Literature, print that much of interest to ordinary readers--they're not even intended for "specialists" anymore, since all academic literary scholars are now taught to specialize in the same mind-numbing chants of formula and cliche--but occasionally a useful interview or interesting book review still does appear. It would be in everyone's interest for this material to be more available online.

(It is particularly ironic that CL has become as preoccupied with the politicized platitudes of academic criticism as any other journal, since it and other journals focused on contemporary literature were once viewed with condescension in the academy, contemporary literature itself not being worth any serious person's attention. Unfortunately, Contemporary Literature has now situated itself securely in the mainstream of useless scholarship.)

The interview with Gray and Kelman clearly enough has been included not because both are accomplished writers of worthwhile books (as they are, in my view Gray especially so), but because as members of an oppressed nationality they can perhaps plausibly be examined under the aegis of "colonial" or "postcolonial" studies. Certainly the political situation obtaining in Scotland plays an inevitable role in their fiction, but both Kelman and Gray try to make it clear that this situation is not uppermost in their minds when they're writing their books. Says Kelman, "It's important to get out of the way a possible misunderstanding. . .My politics is really irrelevant to my work; there's no place for it. If you are committed to a certain political thing anyway, I believe also that you can relax as a writer, even if you feel that events are so oppressing in the world that there's no time to sit back and write stories and you have to be political or something." Gray says much the same: "I became a writer who wanted to draw attention to myself by being an entertainer, by pleasing people. I became a writer for the same reason I became a reader: I read to be entertained, to be shifted into a rather different world from that which I occupied, or to get a view of the world I occupied that made me feel free of it."

Yet the interviewer keeps pressing them to admit to the centrality of politics, as if he can't believe Kelman and Gray would say such things. It all speaks multiple volumes about the mindset among "literary" academics, who have almost come around, one is pushed to say, to the condescending view of the frivolity of trying to seriously study "contemporary literature" once expressed by the snootier of the tweedy academics convinced it was better to stay with the tried and the true, to stay burrowed in the past. Current academics are less inclined to live in the past, but they certainly occupy their own kind of burrow.

Preceding Essence

A review of Bernard Henri-Levy's Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century (unfortunately featured at Arts & Letters Daily) that couldn't be more wrong about Sartre.

The reviewer, Brian C. Anderson, offers up this thesis: "What Sartre actually offers us is a paradigmatic example of the leftist mind, in all its dodgy enthusiasms." Putting aside for the moment that Anderson's own account of Sartre's career belies this statement, Sartre was not "paradigmatic" of anything except his own thinking and writing. He's become a handy tool to use in bashing left-of-center thinkers, writers, and ideas (even just poor tepid liberalism), and this to a significant extent through his own mistakes: his later Marxist and Maoist phase was indeed "dodgy," his actions and statements frequently obnoxious and just plain stupid.

But his fiction up to the 1950s, as well as at least Being and Nothingness among his philosophical works, remain essential reading. Even Anderson admits to the value of this work, although his praise is grudging enough. (He is wrong to say that the fiction and drama of this earlier period should be read as "a description not of a permanent truth of man’s fate but of the predicament of a certain kind of modern man." These works precisely describe a "permanent truth of man's fate.") No one who reads Nausea shorn of the preexisting animus expressed by Anderson could say it does not remain a readable and affecting novel.

Moreover, the idea that Sartre's misguided politics were somehow an intrinsic feature of his philosophy is simply incorrect. There's nothing inherently leftist, much less Marxist, about existentialism. If there was, such concerted efforts to hold up Camus as a cold-warrior alternative to Sartre as have been made would not be possible. Nausea and Being and Nothingness were not the products of the "leftist mind." The review's biographical sketch of Sartre itself shows that his leftism was something Sartre came to embrace, not something latent in the earlier books. One could argue that Sartre willfully distorted these early ideas in order to justify his politics, but this was a weakness in the man, not in the ideas.

Anderson doesn't really bother to seriously critique Sartre's work, anyway. He contents himself with ad hominem attacks against both Sartre and Henri-Levy, along with a heavy barrage of adjectival bombast--"nihilistic,""nasty,""relativistic," "atheist." I'd be willing to bet that, despite the attempt by those like this reviewer to bury Sartre, his work will still be read well into the future and he will be considered an original thinker and important writer--both in philosophy and in literature. Perhaps Henri-Levy's biography will help to hasten this process, although one suspects that the possibility it might do so is one reason this review has appeared.

One of the things the review also points up is the inadequacy of using biographies of writers as a way of assessing that writer's body of work. Inevitably the focus of such reviews returns to the limitations and foibles of the man or woman in question, and the work becomes a way of exemplifying these "character" traits. Sartre may have been, at various times, maybe even most of the time, an unpleasant man, but this says nothing about the abiding merits of his best books.

Wrong Right Thinking

Roddy Doyle thinks James Joyce is overrated. Terry Teachout thinks the same of Virginia Woolf. Doyle's comments can be taken as the know-nothing envy of a mediocre writer in the shadows of another writer of infinitely greater accomplishment. Teachout, however, joins the ranks of other conservative authors and commentators who have recently been expressing their disdain for "modern" art and literature--going back several years to Jacques Barzun and including in the last year or so Paul Johnson and Charles Murray.

I have always considered this conservative scorn for modern art rather peculiar. (I should make it clear that I am myself not a political conservative. Most conservatives would no doubt find many of my political, as opposed to aesthetic, views considerably to the left.) To take literature specifically, a number of great modern writers--Yeats, Eliot, Wyndam Lewis--have themselves been conservatives (certainly not left-wing radicals, although one such radical, John Dos Possos, later became a political conservative in a very prominent way), while others--Joyce, Faulkner, Proust--were at worst apolitical. Indeed, the literary darling of the modern right, Evelyn Waugh, wrote novels that were in no way aesthetically conservative. Moreover, it is precisely the traditional and the representational forms of art (the sort of art these conservatives would prefer, one has to assume) that have most been exploited for left-wing political purposes over the course of the twentieth century--the "proletarian" writers of the thirties, "socialist realism," etc.

To take this point even further, the disdain Dale Peck has now famously declared for writers like Joyce and Faulkner stems from the fact that these writers are not political, not "engaged" sufficiently, but instead players of literary games. One would think that conservatives would value an approach to literature that keeps the emphasis on its literary qualities, on its capacity to reinvigorate the aesthetic impulse, to exemplify imaginative "human accomplishment," to use Murray's phrase. In my mind a truly conservative approach to art would seek to preserve the Western tradition of artistic skill and innovation to which writers like Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf decidedly belong.

Perhaps conservative critics are still reacting to the attempt made in the 1950s and the 1960s to unite radical politics and modernism. This attempt failed, however, if the contempt for high art to be found among left wing academic critics is any measure. These conservatives excoriate such left-wing academic literary critics for their excesses--their politicization of literature that drains it of its aesthetic value. If we take Teachout, Murray, and Johnson as representative of "conservative" criticism of the arts, however, one suspects their real complaint about left-wing political dominance in the academy is that it's not a right-wing dominance. Their views are equally blinkered by politics.