Tag Archives: James Wood

Noticing the detail in James Wood’s How Fiction Works

December 26, 2010 By in Briefly Noted, Fiction, Writing Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

 

Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practise on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. You have only to teach literature to realise that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things which now seem wonderful. We grow, as readers, and twenty-year-olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it. 

You only have to read How Fiction Works to realize you haven’t been as a good a noticer in life or in literature as you once thought you were. This is why I’ve reread it once a year or so since it came out in 2007, and each time I notice different things about it—like in this passage, where the adverb “serenely” is so appropriate despite the many admonishes to avoid adverbs whenever possible. We know precisely what the twenty-year-old is like, mostly like because we’ve met him and her, perhaps been him or her.

I also notice Wood’s phrase “relative virgins,” which is funny because virginity is supposed to be a binary thing: you are one or you aren’t. But in a post-Bill-Clinton age when nominal “abstinence pledges” make the parsing of the relation of act to word important to a surprisingly large number of people, virginity feels a lot more relative than it used to. Maybe I wouldn’t be as aware of this if I hadn’t read Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, which in turn cues me into the kinds of things I hear from undergrads at the University of Arizona—which may in turn feed my own fiction, in the kind of virtuous cycle Wood describes here. And since I have taught literature, I know precisely what he means about “poor noticers,” except that he should probably add that relatively few people become the kinds of dramatically good noticers who really love literary fiction as they get older: hence some of the popularity of the Dan Browns of the world.

Finally, because How Fiction Works is so delightful, one more quote: “The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it.”

What an unappealing book description looks like: Jean-Christophe Valtat’s 03

September 6, 2010 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Plot Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In an essay about Jean-Christophe Valtat’s novella 03, James Wood writes that the work is an “eight-one-page monologue, written in one unbroken paragraph, about a teenage boy’s unrequited love for a mentally handicapped girl he sees every day at the bus stop […]”

Although I can’t give a complete theory of what makes a novel unappealing, I do know that Wood’s description of 03 has many elements I might include: very little probably happens in terms of narrative, if the story occurs chiefly a bus stop. A whole book composed of a “monologue” sounds unappealing: the dialogic aspects, to use Bakhtin’s conception, of novels makes them fun and gives their stories urgency as people’s desires collide. I want plot. And “one unbroken paragraph” reads to me suspiciously like a gimmick, and, beyond seeming like a gimmick, this would make the book hard to read. The title, 03, also has the whiff of a gimmick or of existentialism.

The short description Wood offers tells me one major thing: I don’t want to read this book. I would much rather read Wood writing about this book than the book itself; he offers insights that are probably more important, in this case, than the work he’s writing about, which is never a good sign for a novel.

Various writers have raised the rally cry against writers who engage in confusing postmodern game playing for its own sake: this, more or less, describes B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto, Tom Wolfe’s “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast“, Lev Grossman’s “Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard,” and, most recently, Justin Peacock’s “The New Social Novel,” which actually isn’t new, but I’m willing to spot him the adjective in this case. Although I wouldn’t endorse everything every writer says in each of these essays, I do think they point towards a general idea: give us novels of substance, although we don’t always know what we mean by novels of substance and can’t necessarily define them.

I’m guessing 03 isn’t one, however.

What an unappealing book description looks like: Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03

September 6, 2010 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Plot Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In an essay about Jean-Christophe Valtat’s novella 03, James Wood writes that the work is an “eight-one-page monologue, written in one unbroken paragraph, about a teenage boy’s unrequited love for a mentally handicapped girl he sees every day at the bus stop […]”

Although I can’t give a complete theory of what makes a novel unappealing, I do know that Wood’s description of 03 has many elements I might include: very little probably happens in terms of narrative, if the story occurs chiefly a bus stop. A whole book composed of a “monologue” sounds unappealing: the dialogic aspects, to use Bakhtin’s conception, of novels makes them fun and gives their stories urgency as people’s desires collide. I want plot. And “one unbroken paragraph” reads to me suspiciously like a gimmick, and, beyond seeming like a gimmick, this would make the book hard to read. The title, 03, also has the whiff of a gimmick or of existentialism.

The short description Wood offers tells me one major thing: I don’t want to read this book. I would much rather read Wood writing about this book than the book itself; he offers insights that are probably more important, in this case, than the work he’s writing about, which is never a good sign for a novel.

Various writers have raised the rally cry against writers who engage in confusing postmodern game playing for its own sake: this, more or less, describes B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto, Tom Wolfe’s “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast“, Lev Grossman’s “Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard,” and, most recently, Justin Peacock’s “The New Social Novel,” which actually isn’t new, but I’m willing to spot him the adjective in this case. Although I wouldn’t endorse everything every writer says in each of these essays, I do think they point towards a general idea: give us novels of substance, although we don’t always know what we mean by novels of substance and can’t necessarily define them.

I’m guessing 03 isn’t one, however.

David Shields’ Reality Hunger and James Wood’s philosophy of fiction

July 27, 2010 By in Books, Critics, Culture, Essays, Reading Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

In describing novels from the first half of the 19th Century, David Shields writes in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto that “All the technical elements of narrative—the systematic use of the past tense and the third person, the unconditional adoption of chronological development, linear plots, the regular trajectory of the passions, the impulse of each episode toward a conclusion, etc.—tended to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal, entirely decipherable universe.”

I’m not so sure; the more interesting novels didn’t necessarily have “the unconditional adoption of chronological development” or the other features Shields ascribes to them. Caleb Williams is the most obvious example I can immediately cite: the murderers aren’t really punished in it and madness is perpetual. Gothic fiction of the 19th Century had a highly subversive quality that didn’t feature “the regular trajectory of the passions.” To my mind, the novel has always had unsettling features and an unsettling effect on society, producing change even when that change isn’t immediately measurable or apparent, or when we can’t get away from the fundamental constraints of first- or third-person narration. Maybe I should develop this thought more: but Shields doesn’t in Reality Hunger, so maybe innuendo ought to be enough for me too.

Shields is very good at making provocative arguments and less good at making those arguments hold up under scrutiny. He says, “The creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe.” Really? I believe if the author is good enough. And I construct coherence where it sometimes appears to be lacking. Although I’m aware that I can’t shake hands with David Kepesh of The Professor of Desire, he and the characters around him feel like “more than puppets” in which Roth has ceased to believe.

Shields wants something made new. Don’t we all? Don’t we all want to throw off dead convention? Alas: few of us know how to successfully, and that word “successfully” is especially important. You could write a novel that systematically eschews whatever system you think the novel imposes (this is the basic idea behind the anti-novel), but most people probably won’t like it—a point that I’ll come back to. We won’t like it because it won’t seem real. Most of us have ideas about reality that are informed by some combination of lived experience and cultural conditioning. That culture shifts over time. Shields starts Reality Hunger with a premise that is probably less contentious than much of the rest of the manifesto: “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.” I can believe this, though I suspect that artists begin getting antsy when you try to pin them down on what reality is: I would call it this thing we all appear to live in but that no one can quite represent adequately.

That includes Shields. Reality Hunger doesn’t feel as new as it should; it feels more like a list of N things. It’s frustrating even when it makes one think. Shields says, “Culture and commercial languages invade us 24/7.” But “commercial languages” only invade us because we let them: TV seems like the main purveyor, and if we turn it off, we’ll probably cut most of the advertising from our lives. If “commercial languages” are invading my life to the extent I’d choose the word “invade,” I’m not aware of it, partially because I conspicuously avoid those languages. Shields says, “I try not to watch reality TV, but it happens anyway.” This is remarkable: I’ve never met anyone who’s tried not to watch reality TV and then been forced to, or had reality TV happen to them, like a car accident or freak weather.

Still, we need to think about how we experience the world and depict it, since that helps us make sense of the world. For me, the novel is the genre that does this best, especially when it bursts its perceived bounds in particularly productive ways. I can’t define those ways with any rigor, but the novel has far more going on than its worst and best critics imagine.

Both the worst and best critics tend to float around the concept of reality. To use Luc Sante’s description in “The Fiction of Memory,” a review of Reality Hunger:

The novel, for all the exertions of modernism, is by now as formalized and ritualized as a crop ceremony. It no longer reflects actual reality. The essay, on the other hand, is fluid. It is a container made of prose into which you can pour anything. The essay assumes the first person; the novel shies from it, insisting that personal experience be modestly draped.

I’m not sure what a “crop ceremony” is or how the novel is supposed to reflect “actual reality.” Did it ever? What is this thing called reality that the novel is attempting to mirror? Its authenticity or lack thereof has, as far as I know, always been in question. The search for realism is always a search and never a destination, even when we feel that some works are more realistic than others.

Yet Sante and Sheilds are right about the dangers of rigidity; as Andrew Potter writes in The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves, “One effect of disenchantment is that pre-existing social relations come to be recognized not as being ordained by the structure of the cosmos, but as human constructs – the product of historical contingencies, evolved power relations, and raw injustices and discriminations.”

Despite this, however, we feel realism—if none of us did, we’d probably stop using the term. Our definitions might blur when we approach a precise definition, but that doesn’t mean something isn’t there.

Sante writes, quoting Shields, that “‘Anything processed by memory is fiction,’ as is any memory shaped into literature.” Maybe: but consider these three statements, if I were to make them to you (keep in mind the context of Reality Hunger, with comments like “Try to make it real—compared to what?”):

Aliens destroyed Seattle in 2004.

I attended Clark University.

Alice said she was sad.

One of them is, to most of us, undoubtedly fiction. One of them is true. The other I made up: no doubt there is an Alice somewhere who has said she is sad, but I don’t know her and made her up for the purposes of example. The second example might be “process by memory,” but I don’t think that makes it fiction, even if I can’t give you a firm, rigorous, absolute definition of where the gap between fact and interpretation begins. Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal give it a shot in Fashionable Nonsense: “For us, as for most people, a ‘fact’ is a situation in the external world that exists irrespective of the knowledge that we have (or don’t have) of it—in particular, irrespective of any consensus or interpretation.”

They go to observe that scientists actually face some problems of definition that I see as similar to those of literature and realism:

Our answer [as to what makes science] is nuanced. First of all, there are some general (but basically negative) epistemological principles, which go back at least to the seventeenth century: to be skeptical of a priori arguments, revelation, sacred texts, and arguments from authority. Moreover, the experience accumulated during three centuries of scientific practice has given us a series of more-or-less general methodological principles—for example, to replicate experiments, to use controls, to test medicines in double-blind protocols—that can be justified by rational arguments. However, we do not claim that these principles can be codified in a definite way, nor that the list is exhaustive. In other words, there does not exist (at least present) a complete codification rationality, is always an adaptation to a new situation.

They lay out some criteria (beware of “revelation, sacred texts, and arguments from authority”) and “methodological principles” (“replicate experiments”) and then say “we do not claim that these principles can be codified in a definite way.” Neither can the principles of realism. James Wood does as good a job of exploring them as anyone. But I would posit that, despite our inability to pin down realism, either as convention or not, most of us recognize it: when I tell people that I attended Clark University, none have told me that my experience is an artifact of memory, or made up, or that there is no such thing as reality and therefore I didn’t. Such realism might merely be convention or training—or it might be real.

In the first paragraph of his review of Chang-Rae Lee’s The Surrendered, James Wood lays out the parameters of the essential question of literary development or evolution:

Does literature progress, like medicine or engineering? Nabokov seems to have thought so, and pointed out that Tolstoy, unlike Homer, was able to describe childbirth in convincing detail. Yet you could argue the opposite view; after all, no novelist strikes the modern reader as more Homeric than Tolstoy. And Homer does mention Hector’s wife getting a hot bath ready for her husband after a long day of war, and even Achilles, as a baby, spitting up on Phoenix’s shirt. Perhaps it is as absurd to talk about progress in literature as it is to talk about progress in electricity—both are natural resources awaiting different forms of activation. The novel is peculiar in this respect, because while anyone painting today exactly like Courbet, or composing music exactly like Brahms, would be accounted a fraud or a forger, much contemporary fiction borrows the codes and conventions—the basic narrative grammar—of Flaubert or Balzac without essential alteration.

I don’t think literature progresses “like medicine or engineering.” Using medical or engineering knowledge as it stood in 1900 would be extremely unwise if you’re trying to understand the genetic basis of disease or build a computer chip. Papers tend to decay within five to ten years of publication in the sciences.

But I do think literature progresses in some other, less obvious way, as we develop wider ranges of techniques and social constraints allow for wider ranges of subject matter or direct depiction: hence why Nabakov can point out that “Tolstoy, unlike Homer, was able to describe childbirth in convincing detail,” and I can point out that mainstream literature effectively couldn’t depict explicit sexuality until the 20th Century.

While that last statement can be qualified some, it is hard to miss the difference between a group of 19th Century writers like Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy (who J. Hillis Miller discusses in The Form of Victorian Fiction) and a group of 20th Century writers like D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Norman Rush, and A.S. Byatt, who are free to explicitly describe sexual relationships to the extent they see fit and famously use words like “cunt” that simply couldn’t be effectively used in the 19th Century.

In some ways I see literature as closer to math: the quadratic equation doesn’t change with time, but I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a world with only the quadratic equation. Wood gets close to this when he says that “Perhaps it is as absurd to talk about progress in literature as it is to talk about progress in electricity—both are natural resources awaiting different forms of activation.” The word “perhaps” is essential in this sentence: it gives a sense of possibility and realization that we can’t effectively answer the question, however much we might like to. But both question and answer give a sense of some useful parameters for the discussion. Most likely, literature isn’t exactly like anything else, and its development (or not) is a matter as much of the person doing the perceiving and ordering as anything intrinsic to the medium.

I have one more possible quibble with Wood’s description when he says that “the basic narrative grammar—of Flaubert or Balzac without essential alteration.” I wonder if it really hasn’t undergone “essential alteration,” and what would qualify as essential. Novelists like Elmore Leonard, George Higgins, or that Wood favorite Henry Green all feel quite different from Flaubert or Balzac because of how they use dialog to convey ideas. The characters in Tom Perrotta’s Election speak in a much more slangy, informal style than do any in Flaubert or Balzac, so far as I know. Bellow feels more erratic than the 19th Century writers and closer to the psyche, although that might be an artifact of how I’ve been trained by Bellow and writers after Bellow to perceive the novel and the idea of psychological realism. Taken together, however, the writers mentioned make me think that maybe “the basic narrative grammar” has changed for writers who want to adopt new styles. Yes, we’re still stuck with first- and third-person perspectives, but we get books that are heavier on dialog and lighter on formality than their predecessors.

Wood is a great chronicler of what it means to be real: his interrogation of this seemingly simple term runs through the essays collected in The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, and, most comprehensively, in the book How Fiction Works. Taken together, they ask how the “basic narrative grammar” of fiction works or has worked up to this point. In setting out some of the guidelines that allow literary fiction to work, Wood is asking novelists to find ways to break those guides in useful and interesting ways. In discussing Reality Hunger, Wood says, “[Shields’] complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken: it is always a good time to shred formulas.” I agree and doubt many would disagree, but the question is not merely one of “shred[ing] formulas,” but how and why those formulas should be shred. One doesn’t shred the quadratic formula: it works. But one might build on it.

By the same token, we may have this “basic narrative grammar” not because novelists are conformist slackers who don’t care about finding a new way forward: we may have it because it’s the most satisfying or useful way of conveying a story. Although I don’t think this is true, I think it might be true. Maybe most people won’t find major changes to the way we tell stories palatable. Despite modernism and postmodernism, fewer people appear to enjoy the narrative confusion and choppiness of Joyce than do enjoy the streamlined feel of the latest thriller. That doesn’t mean the latter is better than the former—by my values, it’s not—but it does mean that the overall thrust of fiction might remain where it is.

Robert McKee, in his not-very-good-but-useful book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting, gives three major kinds of plots, which blend into one another: “arch plots” that are causal in nature and finish their story lines; “mini plots,” which he says are open and “strive for simplicity and economy while retaining enough of the classical […] to satisfy the audience,” and antiplot, which are where absurdism and the like fall.

He says that as one moves “toward the far reaches of Miniplot, Antiplot, and Non-plot, the audience shrinks” (emphasis in original). From there:

The atrophy has nothing to do with quality or lack of it. All three corners of the story triangle gleam with masterworks that the world treasures, pieces of perfection for our imperfect world. Rather, the audience shrinks for this reason: Most human beings believe that life brings closed experiences of absolute, irreversible change; that their greatest sources of conflict are external to themselves; that they are the single and active protagonists of their own existence; that their existence operates through continuous time within a consistent, causally interconnected reality; and that inside this reality events happen for explainable and meaningful reasons.

The connection between this and Wood’s “basic narrative grammar” might appear tenuous, but McKee and Wood are both pointing towards the ways stories are constructed. Wood is more concerned with language; although plot and its expression (whether in language or in video) can’t be separated from one another, they can still be analyzed independently enough of one another to make a distinction.

The conventions that underlie the “arch plots,” however, can become tedious over time. This is what Wood is highlighting when he discusses Roland Barthes’ “reality effect,” which fiction can achieve: “All this silly machinery of plotting and pacing, this corsetry of chapters and paragraphs, this doxology of dialogue and characterization! Who does not want to explode it, do something truly new, and rouse the implication slumbering in the word ‘novel’?” Yet we need some kind of form to contain story; what is that form? Is there an ideal method of conveying story? If so, what if we’ve found it and are now mostly tinkering, rather than creating radical new forms? If we take out “this silly machinery of plotting and pacing” and dialog, we’re left with something closer to philosophy than to a novel.

Alternately, maybe we need the filler and coordination that so many novels consist of if those novels are to be felt true to life, which appears to be one definition of what people mean by “realistic.” This is where Wood parts with Barthes, or at least makes a distinct case:

Convention may be boring, but it is not untrue simply because it is conventional. People do lie on their beds and think with shame about all that has happened during the day (at least, I do), or order a beer and a sandwich and open their computers; they walk in and out of rooms, they talk to other people (and sometimes, indeed, feel themselves to be talking inside quotation marks); and their lives do possess more or less traditional elements of plotting and pacing, of suspense and revelation and epiphany. Probably there are more coincidences in real life than in fiction. To say “I love you” is to say something at millionth hand, but it is not, then, necessarily to lie.

“Convention may be boring, but it is not untrue simply because it is conventional,” and the parts we think of as conventional might be necessary to realism. In Umberto Eco’s Reflections on The Name of the Rose, he says that “The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently.” That is often the job of novelists dealing with the historical weight of the past and with conventions that are “not untrue simply because [they are] conventional.” Eco and Wood both use the example of love to demonstrate similar points. Wood’s is above; Eco says:

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, ‘I love you madly,’ because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.’ At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated […]

I wonder if every age thinks of itself as “an age of lost innocence,” only to be later looked on as pure, naive, or unsophisticated. Regardless, for Eco postmodernism requires that we look to the past long enough to wink and then move on with the story we’re going to tell in the manner we’re going to tell it. Perhaps Chang-Rae Lee doesn’t do so in The Surrendered, which is the topic of Wood’s essay—but like so many essays and reviews, Wood’s starts with a long and very useful consideration before coming to the putative topic of its discussion. Wood speaks of reading […] “Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel, “The Surrendered” (Riverhead; $26.95)—a book that is commendably ambitious, extremely well written, powerfully moving in places, and, alas, utterly conventional. Here the machinery of traditional, mainstream storytelling threshes efficiently.” I haven’t read The Surrendered and so can’t evaluate Wood’s assessment.

Has Wood merely overdosed on the kind of convention that Lee uses, as opposed to convention itself? If so, it’s not clear how that “machinery” could be fixed or improved on, and the image itself is telling because Wood begins his essay by asking whether literature is like technology. My taste in literature changes: as a teenager I loved Frank Herbert’s Dune and now find it almost unbearably tedious. Other revisited novels hold up poorly because I’ve overdosed on their conventions and start to crave something new—a lot of fantasy flattens over time like opened soda.

Still, I usually don’t know what “something new” entails until I read it. That’s the problem with saying that the old way is conventional or boring: that much is easier to observe than the fix. Wood knows it, and he’s unusually good at pointing to the problems of where we’ve been and pointing to places that we might go to fix it (see, for example, his recent essay on David Mitchell, who I now feel obliged to read). This, I suspect, is why he is so beloved by so many novelists, and why I spend so much time reading him, even when I don’t necessarily love what he loves. The Quickening Maze struck me as self-indulgent and lacking in urgency, despite the psychological insight Adam Foulds offers into a range of characters’ minds: a teenage girl, a madman, an unsuccessful inventor.

I wanted more plot. In How Fiction Works, Wood quotes from Adam Smith writing in the eighteenth century regarding how writers use suspense to maintain reader interest and then says that “[…] the novel [as an art form; one could also say the capital-N Novel] soon showed itself willing to surrender the essential juvenility of plot […]” Yet I want and crave this element that Wood dismisses—perhaps because of my (relatively) young age: Wood says that Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker was “published when the author was just twenty-nine,” older than I am. I like suspense and the sense of something major at stake, and that could imply that I have a weakness for weak fiction. If so, I can do little more than someone who wants chocolate over vanilla, or someone who wants chocolate despite having heard the virtues of cherries extolled.

When I hear about the versions of the real, reality, and realism that get extolled, I often begin to think about chocolate, vanilla, and cherries, and why some novelists write in such a way that I can almost taste the cocoa while others are merely cardboard colored brown. Wood is very good at explaining this, and his work taken together represents some of the best answers to the questions that we have.

Even the best answers lead us toward more questions that are likely to be answered best by artists in a work of art that makes us say, “I’ve never seen it that way before,” or, better still, “I’ve never seen it.” Suddenly we do see, and we run off to describe to our friends what we’ve seen, and they look at us and say, “I don’t get it,” and we say, “maybe you just had to see it for yourself.” Then we pass them the book or the photo or the movie and wait for them to say, “I’ve already seen this somewhere before,” while we argue that they haven’t, and neither have we. But we press on, reading, watching, thinking, hoping to come across the thing we haven’t seen before so we can share it again with our friends, who will say, like the critics do, “I’ve seen it before.”

So we have. And we’ll see it again. But I still like the sights—and the search.

The Author dies, the world yawns, and writers keep scribbling

December 1, 2008 By in Books, Critics, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This originated as an e-mail, but then I realized it was actually a blog post and edited it accordingly.

Roland Barthes begins The Death of the Author thus:

‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.’ Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

It’s a powerful and irritating introduction: powerful because it contains some truth—the speaker is, indeed, ambiguous—but irritating because it stretches that ambiguity beyond its bound. Absent other information, either an omniscient speaker is narrating or free indirect speech is allowing another character to narrate. Either way, choices like “universal wisdom” or “Romantic psychology” seem more like fanciful projections that come from the critic rather than the text. Not being familial with Balzac, I’m not sure who speaks, but someone or something does, and not every voice is destroyed. To be sure, at times we might not be sure of who speaks, but so what? Teasing out the logical bounds of who could be speaking is one of the novel’s pleasures, and James Wood shows how such literary techniques work in How Fiction Works. On page 8 of my edition, he writes:

So-called omniscience is almost impossible. AS soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking. A novelist’s omniscience soon enough becomes a kind of secret sharing; this is called free-indirect style, a term novelists have lots of different nicknames for – ‘close third person’, or ‘going into character.’

(Italics in original.)

From there Wood goes on to define by example what he means by free-indirect speech via example. He says he admires Barthes on the first page of How Fiction Works, and it’s worth noting that in this admiration, Wood in part refutes him—or, rather, if not refutes, then goes on a different and more productive tangent: to attempt a partial explanation of realism, rather than to try and deny its existence altogether. He says that How Fiction Works “asks a critic’s questions and offers a writer’s answers,” in contrast to critics like Barthes and Shklovsky, who “thought like writers alienated from the creative instinct.” (For another example of someone who magnificently asks critics’ questions and gives writers’ answers, see John Barth’s The Friday Book.) The description of Barthes and Shklovsky is apt: reading Barthes is frustrating because he so often seems right and then oversteps the conclusion that his premises will support.

At the start of The Rise Of The Novel: Studies In Defoe, Richardson And Fielding, Ian Watt writes:

There are still no wholly satisfactory answers to many of the general questions which anyone interested in the early eighteenth-century novelists and their works is likely to ask: Is the novel a new literary form? And if we assume, as is commonly done, that it is, and that it was begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, how does it differ from the prose fiction of the past, from that of Greece, for example, or that of the Middle Ages, or of seventeenth-century France?

Although Barthes and Watt wrote decades ago, they still seem relevant in part because the issues of perspective and representation are unlikely to ever leave us in art. We perpetually expand what it means to be real or not real or how we should see the world, but that expansion can never encompass all possibilities, or all stories. Hence the continual reshaping of not only what we read and find valuable, but also who we are.

This debate about authorship is intensified by blogs and other electronic media, where copying is easier than ever and links can, if used well, show the tentacles of other thinkers reaching into one’s own thinking. You can see aspects of the online debate in innumerable places; a small recent sampling from my own links might include Mourning Old Media’s Decline, If you’re online, are you really reading?, book blogs over search engines, and Twilight of the Books. Personally, I’m not all that worried about blogs and other forms of online media; technological innovation helped produce the novel by making reproduction of written relatively inexpensive, and the Internet is doing the same only moreso. A change in orders of magnitude in the dissemination of information will probably lead to eventual changes we haven’t even pondered yet, and I assume that change will ultimately expand the possibility of how we communicate, just as the novel helped expand the way we see consciousness. Besides, as Andrew Sullivan argues in “Why I Blog” (published in The Atlantic):

Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

“Why I Blog” rambles even more than this post, but it’s one of the more coherent explanations of blogging I’ve seen—perhaps because it doesn’t come in the form of a blog post. Most writers since before the printing press have probably also dreamed of getting paid for their writing, and it’s not obvious how that’s going to happen online. It’s an important question and one that hasn’t been answered satisfactorily: despite all the talk about the death of print, authors, and various other “traditional” or “old” forms and whatever, I’m still interesting in writing fiction and long nonfiction that’ll be published in print with my name on it, chiefly because that’s the only way to get paid for it in a real sense of the word, and it’s the best way to get professional editing (bonus points to commenters who observe typos in this post). Granted, blogs pay in non-monetary forms like social status and satisfaction. But status doesn’t cover rent or put food on the table, so it’s an imperfect system, and what kind of payment method writers will devise in the future isn’t obvious to me. Writing as a form of advertising or display mechanism for other skills is one possibility, as that’s (a small) part of what Grant Writing Confidential does, even as it provides other benefits, like increasing overall knowledge of how to write proposals, deal with bureaucracies/bureaucrats, make individuals aware of funding opportunities, and the like.

Still, blogs seem here to stay, and authors are likely to continue writing, whether their writing destroys the point of origin—whatever that means. One reason I write blog posts is because the marginal amount of extra effort is just that: marginal. I obviously spend a lot of time reading already, and I do so chiefly because I enjoy it. If I spent 5 to 25 hours on a book, spending another 1 to 3 on a post isn’t difficult, especially if the book is powerful enough to keep me thinking when I’m not reading it. And when I write, I often find that ideas emerge that I didn’t realize I had previously—which is not an experience unique to blogging, I realize, but sometimes the immediacy of the experience can help me bring them out.

As stated above, this post began as an e-mail, and I decided that I’d written enough to create a post on what I originally thought would be on authorship in the Internet age, although it’s turned out somewhat differently than I conceived it. Still, much of the idea and expression work was already done, both on my own (through the e-mail composition process) and through the writing of others (Foucault, Barthes, Wood). The question becomes, why not do the marginal amount of extra work and make whatever thoughts I have available to the rest of the world? And hence, blogging. Maybe it is a useless activity, but if so, I doubt it’s any more useless than the numerous other activities we engage in. And in writing, I realize that I had more thoughts on the subject of blogging, authorship, and incentives than I realized before I started, when I thought I was just going to dash off a quick note about the connection between a conversation in class and reading more generally. Now I’m 1,000 words in before I realize it that letters were to Keats and others might be what blog posts and e-mails are to the great writers of today whose names we don’t yet know.

I say “might” because predicting the future has always been a fool’s game, and the increasing rate of technological change only makes it moreso. But the past does offer a guide, however limited, to the future, and my betting is on cultural production changing around the nature of technology and how we use it. I doubt that will make the novel as such obsolete—perhaps the form will become still more important as a haven of deep thought amid the swells and chatter of blogging—but it might change it, and our conception of who the author is. I don’t think the change, when or as it occurs, will be as profound as some suspect.

To return to the beginning of this essay, maybe the book as an object will survive, and maybe writing fiction and criticism, like all forms of art, is naturally a self-referential activity that causes its practitioners to, in the act of creating, to speculate on why and how they do what they do. In that vein, maybe Barthes is so obsessed with the author and with realism because he cannot escape either or their perpetual pull on the novel. As such, he attacks them out of love and out of love and frustration, the latter because try as he might he can’t escape realism and still be in the novel. So he thrashes about, like someone holding his breath and thinking that doing so for as long as possible proves that one can live without oxygen, while writers (whether of blogs, books, or scholarly detritus, or whatever) continue producing the stories, just as people do to define themselves. We cannot separate the content of the stories from how we tell them or draw a perfect line between the authors we read and the text we produce, causing the endless debates about the nature of writing and expression. At times, the participants fail to see the larger, paradoxical picture of the infinite literary firmament, which is, as I said earlier, greater than any attempts to capture it.

On books, taste, and distaste

November 6, 2008 By in Books, Critics, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Jason Fisher made this astute observation in an e-mail:

One thing I will say, as now a fairly regular reader of your blog, is that you don’t seem to read very much that you actually like. You seem, in some ways, doomed to be disappointed either by your tastes or the bar you’ve set up. Do you do any reading purely for non-intellectual pleasure, I wonder? I, for instance, read Palahniuk novels, Crichton novels too, and pulpy fantasy and science fiction, and so on. I know this isn’t great literature, but because I know that, and don’t expect it to be, I can enjoy it for what it is. I suppose it’s a bit like cleansing one’s palate after watching a Masterpiece Theatre miniseries (Middlemarch, say), by tuning in to several ridiculous half-hour sit-coms. Do you do anything like that? Some people, very stuffy and high-minded people usually, like to say life’s too short to waste precious time reading anything less than the most serious, intellectually stimulating challenging works of literature, but I think this is rather missing the point: that’s not necessarily wasting time so much as just spending it in different ways. I personally cannot keep up a constant level of serious intellectual stimulation at all times; I need some pure entertainment, pure diversion. What about you?

There are some very fine and accurate observations here: I am disappointed by a lot, as a cursory examination of recent posts will show, although I would also say that some of what comes across as disappointment is analysis. For example, I liked Richard Price’s Lush Life. Even within that praise, however, I discuss the off notes:

Imperfections in Lush Life are minor: Tristan is flat, which is perhaps appropriate given his youth and the cruel environment in which he lives. Some allusions are improbable; would Eric or the third-person narrator mention the dancing of Tevye? Maybe, but despite Eric being Jewish I’m skeptical.

Occasionally I do find the excellent novel, and I had Fisher’s e-mail in mind when I took Wonder Boys from the shelf and reread it in a great gulp, like a full water bottle after a long run. The last paragraph of my post says:

This is the kind of novel that reminds me why I like to read so much, and why I find bad books disappointing out of proportion to their menial sins: because those bad books suck up the time, space, and energy, both mental and physical, that could be devoted to the wonderful and extraordinary.

Knowing how wonderful writers can be makes those who don’t rise to the challenge of their predecessors and contemporaries rather disappointing, like spending time fixing random and unimportant errors rather than focusing on systematic issues that could prevent them in the first place. Although I don’t think my taste stuffy necessarily—I like the whimsical and humorous far too much—I don’t like to waste my time on the high-, middle-, or low-brow. Faulkner’s weaker novels are of little more interest to me than The Da Vinci Code, and the hysterical realists (see more on them here, in a walled garden).

In How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, Daniel Mendelsohn says of the critic:

What motivates so many of us to write in the first place is, to begin with, a great passion for a subject (Tennessee Williams, Balanchine, jazz, the twentieth-century novel, whatever) that we find beautiful; and then, a kind of corresponding anxiety about the fragility of that beauty.

I might quibble with the words “anxiety” and “fragility,” both of which strike me as close but not precisely akin to those ephemeral qualities Mendelsohn is trying to describe, but the idea is fundamentally right: why it is that so many works of art are off just enough to cast them from the great to the good, the good to the mediocre, the mediocre to the atrocious. It’s that initial passion that propels us, and me, forward, however, and as one does move forward, one’s knowledge of what makes good and bad becomes steadily more refined and one’s taste further develops. When I began reading adult books around the time I was 11 or 12, I devoured innumerable pulpy fantasy and, to a lesser extent, science fiction novels. My taste then was much coarser, and as I’ve developed as a critic and person, I’ve become more aware of the—not fragility, exactly, but the very tight rope suspended over a wide chasm, and how difficult it is to stay on that rope and not to fall in. Now commonplaces are more apparent, patterns become clearer, and ideas that seemed vivid the first time I encountered them have become stale. The quest for novelty evolves, and the initial passion becomes more discriminating, and as it does, disappointment becomes common in a way that makes one almost in danger of enervating.

Such discrimination also makes the highs all the higher, and what I before had perceived as the difference between good and bad novels was the difference between a boy evaluating on a mound he just dug to the hole from where the dirt came versus an adult evaluating the difference between the Himalayas and the Grand Canyon. Perhaps that is somewhat overblown—the Himalayas? Really?—but it nonetheless helps express the contrasts in scale that I’m describing. The wonderful and extraordinary don’t necessarily have to be Melville or Tolstoy, and that’s where I’d distinguish Fisher’s point:

I suppose it’s a bit like cleansing one’s palate after watching a Masterpiece Theatre miniseries (Middlemarch, say), by tuning in to several ridiculous half-hour sit-coms. Do you do anything like that? Some people, very stuffy and high-minded people usually, like to say life’s too short to waste precious time reading anything less than the most serious, intellectually stimulating challenging works of literature […]

I’d count Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado among my favorite recent novels. If they have elements of being half-hour sitcoms, it’s their devotion to humor, but they are all far deeper than most sitcoms—or novels—and have a core of meaning if one wishes to find it underlying their jokes. In some ways, such novels are my favorite: they’re intellectually stimulating but lighter than a perfect souffle. The best sit-coms are like this too: some early episodes of Sex and the City had this mixture of the profound through the banal and vice-versa. But a show like Friends never seemed to have that depth, at least to judge from my relatively limited experience: it was melodrama without the drama, all surface and nothing beneath. Art like that doesn’t usually appeal to me, but I don’t think it a requirement that serious precludes being funny, or that serious is an absolute virtue to be worshiped. For more on this subject, see James Wood’s The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel.

In humor we might get at the deepest truths; I can’t remember who said it, but someone noticed that comedy is tragedy that happens to someone else. But I don’t go for empty vessels in reading or watching. In pop songs I listen to while driving, sure, but very seldom elsewhere. A corollary of that might be that I don’t like a lot of novels, or books in general.

[…] I think this is rather missing the point: that’s not necessarily wasting time so much as just spending it in different ways. I personally cannot keep up a constant level of serious intellectual stimulation at all times; I need some pure entertainment, pure diversion. What about you?

I might be driving toward the same point and might have also misrepresented Fisher’s meaning if not his exact words in responding, above. But I would say that I’m not convinced pure entertainment or pure diversions exist: art needs to have some depth (or height—I’m forced into using these relative positions to average without specifying really whether they should be up or down) sufficient to be genuinely entertaining and diverting in the first place. Failing at that task means they can’t be diverting. To me, greatness in fiction starts with entertainment and diversion, though diversion from what I’m not entirely sure. Maybe the real—whatever that is.

To summarize, Fisher is right that there are many novels I don’t like, but I would also say that those I don’t like throw those I do into sharper relief, and that there is little if any place for a mediocre novelist in this world. Different people have different standards for art and greatness, and I don’t deny those standards exist. Nonetheless, Philippa Gregory and Tom Clancy will never rise to them. The latter is writing speculative nonfiction most of the time, whether he realizes it or not, and the former doesn’t write skillfully enough to distract me from anything because her stylistic and other mistakes are so common. I’ve also noticed that I’ve tended to write more about nonfiction over the last month or two, and perhaps that’s partially because one can still derive something from bad nonfiction; bad fiction, on the other hand, might be a total deadweight loss of time, money, and thought.

I have to quote from Kundera’s The Curtain:

(Hermann Broch said it: the novel’s sole morality is knowledge; a novel that fails to reveal some hitherto unknown bit of existence is immoral […])

and, later:

Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional—thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious—is contemptible.

Kundera is perhaps overly grandiose here, but he is more right and wrong. And too many novels are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional, and I usually try to point those novels out and point out why and how they have those qualities. Sometimes I succeed better than others, and I often feel too aware of my own deficiencies in expression, which I try to remedy even as I fear that I am like a short person trying to grow by wishing for height. Fortunately, that analogy is imperfect because intellectual growth is possible, I believe, for all people who are open to it, but I’m not so sure that becoming an intellectual giant is. Nonetheless, I think there are worse quests in this world than the quest for knowledge and for representation.

The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel — James Wood

October 26, 2008 By in Books, Critics, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

James Wood’s The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel is about comedy, yes, and the meaning that stands behind comedy, and the comedy that stands behind meaning, and so on in a potentially infinite loop. Like all his work, it is also about paradox: how words can become how real, and how the interior shows the exterior and vice-versa, and others discussed below. At one point, he says, “What seems to be a fleeting triviality is actually very important—this is both Verga’s subject and his mode of writing his banalities, like those of his characters, are never unimportant.” The seemingly trivial and banal become important, and the seemingly unimportant becomes exalted and majestic. Wood asks, and makes us ask, “why?”, searching for an answer that can never be had and yet also never seems futile. It’s a neat trick—call it the paradox of criticism, to go along with the paradoxes of the novel. If what we read isn’t significant in and of itself, perhaps we imbue it with significance through the nature of our interaction with the word, the sentence, the paragraph, the character, the story. Wood does, and in the process he sees what is too often missed.

What I like about Wood is how he doesn’t feel researched—he feels organic, inevitable, so natural that most critics and academics are closer to the harsh screams of heavy metal than to Moonlight Sonata. Not even Amis’ Wagnerian bombast compares. This organic-ness can only come, I suspect, from long and deep engagement with a narrow body of reference texts—for Wood, they seem to include Flaubert, Chekhov, Henry Green, Shakespeare, and a few others—complemented by wide breadth and an extraordinary comparative faculty. Once such conditions are in place, one has the potential for great criticism. Converting potential to actuality is hard. Few accomplish it, and few have the sight to discover what is so obviously there and yet that I have so often missed. It is a puzzle almost as significant as the many paradoxes of realism and idea in the novel itself, or in any form of representational art. The simultaneous merging and yet standing outside a character, discussed in Wood’s introduction, is one such example too long to quote at length and all the more incredible for the inability of one to slice a part out; this is a pie that can’t be cut without destroying the whole. This might be part of the organic effect I tried to describe above.

In contrast to Wood, consider a section from Geoffrey Hartman’s essay called “Christopher Smart’s ‘Magnificat:’ Toward a Theory of Representation,” which I began immediately after The Irresponsible Self. Smart writes writes:

What if someone cannot be presented [from one person to another]? The sense of distance has been thrown out of balance: either the self feels defective vis-a-vis the other, or the other appears magnified, unapproachable. The someone can be a something: certain subjects may not be introduced into discourse, certain taboos restrict or delimit the kinds of words used.
I introduce the example of words early, because word commonly help present us.

The idea Smart is trying to present is a reasonably good one: the psychology of social order, or interactions among people, and the individual voice addressing itself might be limited by our thoughts (incidentally, Paul Graham writes about both in What You Can’t Say). But the metaphor isn’t a very good one: how could a person not “be presented” to another real person? If I’m in the room with someone and wish to introduce them, there isn’t some way that such a person “can’t” be presented. If the “someone” is a “something,” that makes more sense, as some forms of social convention discourage contentious topics, although it’s also worth noting that some forms, like graduate student parties, encourage superficially contentious topics. And if we’re aware of taboo topics, or make an effort to become aware of them, then we’re no longer not mentioning them to ourselves because we’re aware of them. Notice too Hartman’s use of the term “vis-a-vis,” which seems showy and ostentatious; it’s a struggle and brings his sentence to a halt. It feels like the slash of a sword instead of the stroke of a brush: forced, not inevitable. If Smart’s essay hadn’t been assigned, I might’ve discarded it after that false note in the second paragraph, but I’ve continued, and though I might buy parts of his argument, that argument as a whole is so hard to follow that I mostly want to give up the attempt.

Now, back to Wood; in “How Shakespeare’s ‘Irresponsibility’ Saved Coleridge,” he writes:

Kant offered Coleridge a way of making the self both passive and active. One the one hand, the world was phenomenal: we gather and order the phenomena of perception. Coleridge called this the faculty of understanding, and in the Biographia it becomes, roughly, the “primary imagination.” On the other hand, said Kant, the world was noumenal: there were transcendent things-in-themselves, unknowable, and this domain is grasped by the practical reason or will. This practical reason asserts itself not by argument but by command and precept; it is how we believe in God. Coleridge bent and expanded Kant’s category, stripping it of its philosophical restraint and making it something closer to free will, and at other times closer to the decisive and controlling activity of the imagination.

Seldom have I read a better concise explanation of sophisticated, important ideas with as few sampling or compression errors. The passage moves according to its own logic, graceful as a dancer and yet purposeful, an economy of precision that Orwell could envy. Ideas I hadn’t perceived as connected I suddenly do, and in that moment something happens—a sense of distant has been thrown out of balance, maybe, but if so, it’s only to be regained better and stronger than before. And if it is a sense of distance, it is the distance between Coleridge, Shakespeare, and myself. I’ll happily be thrown out of balance by someone who knows how to pick me back up.

It’s not entirely fair to hold up these two passages, each on tremendously different topics, as comparisons, and yet I think they do demonstrate the difference between the two writers and the larger difference between Wood, who works so hard for intellectual depth and engagement, and many other critics, who sacrifice the latter in phantom pursuit of the former. Wood has a nearly perfect power curve, and even where I disagree, as with Tom Wolfe, I’m still dazzled by the clarity of his thinking and writing, to the extent those can be separated.

How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken — Daniel Mendelsohn

October 22, 2008 By in Books, Critics, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

After reading enough fiction—although how much constitutes “enough” probably varies by person—it seems natural to search for deeper meanings and connections in what you’ve read. Although I can’t pinpoint where I crossed that threshold, somewhere I did—hence Martin Amis’ The War Against Cliché, Stanislaw Lem’s Microworlds, most of James Wood’s books, including How Fiction Works, Milan Kundera’s criticism, and Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. Add to that stack Daniel Mendelsohn’s How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken. Most pieces hail from “The New York Review of Books,” and they reflect the trade-offs inherent in that magazine’s style, including lengthy introductions so elliptical relative to the main point that one can sometimes start at the first paragraph break, which is often a couple pages in, and miss something, but perhaps not much. It’s a bit like a politician whose great ideas don’t get quite entirely heard because an overly long disquisition looses his audience. Willie Stark suffered from that malady, and Barack Obama was criticized for the same tendency. Readers of criticism should and probably do have considerably longer attention spans than a voter’s, but even that can be stretched only so far. It’s not that a particular essay of Mendelsohn’s suffers from excessively from it, but rather that the overall effect is one of such relentless prep that one becomes weary by the time dinner is actually to be served. This sense of weariness is what led me to allow my subscription to lapse. But keep going through those introductions: the digging brings intellectual gold, and that goal is worth the pursuit.

This is especially true because How Beautiful It Is is tied together better than the average “New York Review of Books,” and its consistent interest in classics and their continuing interpretation and impact give it a sense of building, of constructedness, that helps alleviate the occasional sense of tediousness. As Mendelsohn says of some of the first “9/11 movies,” “The problem with all this realness is that [United 93] itself—like reality—has no structure: and without structure, without shaping, the events can have no large meaning.” So too with criticism, and his larger structure rotates around Greek and Latin classics. When Mendelsohn is on, he’s fantastic, and his impressive knowledge of classics lets him bring seemingly disparate works together, like a metaphysical poet yoking two images that at first appear opposites. They obviously play into some of the sword and sandal epics he mentions, and less obviously into say, Jeffrey Eugenides’ excellent The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. I wish he’d written more about novels and less about theater, novels being my great interest, but what he does include is richer than many longer works of criticism and helps direct my own reading; Mendelsohn’s argument against The Lovely Bones, one briefly hot book, inspires me to avoid it with more diligence than I do Mitch Albom, another sentimental, schlocky, and vastly overrated bestseller who appeals to the Hallmark card reader in all of us. The Hours, however, is now on the list; one danger of reading How Beautiful It Is and James Wood’s The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel is the perpetual extension of one’s reading list, practically giving you the tools to better perceive recent and ancient culture. And, perhaps more importantly, yourself.

Mendelsohn never abandons the critic’s ultimate purpose of judicious judgment, and one impressive thing is the way he manages to be unsparing but not mean, rooted in culture but not pedantic, and conveys his sense of joy, history, and sagacity. The three together are not easy. Some of his pieces seem like overkill, and so many words on the movies Troy, Alexander, 300, and Kill Bill seem wasted, as they’re not worth the skill Mendelsohn lavishes on them. A great critic can only reach his highest level when pitted against great works, and none of those reveal much about much of anything because they lack the depth necessary for the highest level of engagement. Still, Mendelsohn improves imperfect material, demonstrating the possibility better material gives us when he discusses writers, especially Virginia Woolf. The primary thing holding him back is the aforementioned habit of endless introduction and circling needlessly around the main point before he hits it: with James Wood’s criticism, you get the idea that every idea is essential to the argument. With Mendelsohn, you get the idea virtually every one is, but not quite every one: “Nailed!”, about the “Hatchet Jobs” of the writer Dale Peck, doesn’t nail the reader till three pages in. The habit isn’t fatal, and Mendelsohn is still worth reading, but he gets just a tad stuffy as he goes. Still, this is the worse thing I can repeat about Mendelsohn, and his essays convey so much insight that they’re worth reading even if you occasionally skim, because the wonderfully strong justify the others.

Walter Scott’s Waverley, the intrusive narrator, and showing, not telling

October 6, 2008 By in Books, Critics, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In Walter Scott’s Waverley, a representative passage states:

Now I protest to thee, gentle reader […] and hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character. So that, if my quill display no other properties of its mother-goose than her mutability, truly I shall be well pleased; and I conceive that you, my worthy friend, will have not occasion for discontent. From the jargon, therefore, of the Highland gillies, I pass to the character of their Chief. It is an appropriate examination, and therefore, like Dogberry, we must spare no wisdom.

I would have preferred to be spared much wisdom, and perhaps all of Scott’s wisdom regarding the character of Fergus Mac-Ivor save that which is imparted through action and dialog. Among fiction writers, the cliché goes, “Show, don’t tell,” and though, like all such rules it should be broken when the need arises, Scott violates it doubly here: first he tells us that he’s going to tell us the character of Fergus, and then he tells us instead of showing us what that character is. We don’t need to pass “From the jargon […] of the Highland gillies […]” to Fergus, but for him simply to do so without announcing it, and his quill’s output doesn’t have the attributes of a goose, but of whatever use its author puts it to. By protesting that I should have no reason for discontent, Scott makes me discontent; he cannot control my content or dis-, and as such, he need merely tell the story, not tell me of its telling. Such protests are not cause for me to be well pleased, but cause for my own displeasure. To quote the advertising slogan of a national athletic apparel company, he should “just do it.” Basketball players can speak of their skill on the court as much as they wish, but the results we care about are on the scorecard, and authors can trumpet what they’ll do as much as they wish, but the results we care about are the stories, not the explanations. In sparring no wisdom, Scott spares us much of the novelistic wisdom of the last two hundred years.

In How Fiction Works, James Wood attributes the small-m modern novel to Flaubert in a passage that is worth quoting at length:

Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favours the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary […]

This is the standard by which Andrew Hook, who wrote the introduction to the Penguin edition of Waverley, probably judges the novel when he says that it “[…] may not be the best novel of the nineteenth century.” Scholarly introductions normally extol a book’s literary as well social/political merit, but in this case the first point is conceded in order to strengthen the second. Perhaps this is in part because of the kind of thing quoted above or what appears to be Scott’s direct address in the first chapter / introduction—the two have not been fully separated yet—when he writes that he tries to avoid writing what we would now call a period piece by “[…] throwing the force of my narrative upon the characters and passions of the actors; – those passions common to men in all stages of society […]” The same issue debated today, but within criticism rather than novels. In a recent New Yorker article titled “Regrets Only: Lionel Trilling and his Discontents,” Louis Menand says that “[Lionel Trilling] was a humanist who believe that works of literature can speak to us across time […]” before describing Trilling’s steady abandonment of that position, or at least that position in its strongest form. But Trilling argued it in nonfiction, not in fiction, and Menand argues about Trilling argues in nonfiction. Scott gives many of his theories within Waverley in a way that seems paternalistic to this post-Flaubert reader.

Wood probably overstates the case for Flaubert, but my quarrel with him is one of degree rather than fundamental alignment. One thing Flaubert accomplished in his endless quest for realism, which is itself a kind of artificial representation no matter how real, is to at least somewhat relegate the most odious and intrusive passages in Waverley into books like How Fiction Works, or Kundera’s The Art of the Novel, or the innumerable other works by author/critics who save their explicit theorizing for nonfiction studying fiction, rather than fiction itself. This can be avoided, as many contemporary authors do by using writers and critics as characters. Philip Roth did so in his Zuckerman novels and Michael Chabon does so in Wonder Boys. The protagonist, Grady Tripp, reads a troubled student’s first novel and says that

… like most good first novels it possessed an imperturbable, mistaken confidence that all the shocking incidents and extremes of human behavior it dished up would strike new chords of outrage and amazement in the reader. It was a brazen, ridiculous, thrilling performance, with a ballast of genuine sadness that kept the whole thing from keeling over in the gale-force winds of melodrama.

Although I’m not certain I would agree with the generalities expressed in Tripp’s commentary, it does at the very least hearken back to older novels like Don Quixote or Waverley. The difference is that in Wonder Boys, the digression is organic and part of the characterization of the novel itself, rather than a cutting and intrusive digression. The action for the characters themselves doesn’t freeze as a lecture gets dropped in, and the literary theory expressed has some resonance for the novel’s story. Tripp and his agent, Terry Crabtree, are going to decide what to do with Leer based in part on his novel, which they evaluate in part by their own aesthetic criteria. In Waverley, the didactic tone interrupts the action instead of being part of it and focuses on the reader themself, not the characters through the reader. Both are accomplished with layers—in Waverley, with the historian, and in Wonder Boys, with Tripp—but Wonder Boys has that additional facet of integration rather than separation.

Wonder Boys also assumes at least some familiarity with novels and novel theory; notice that Tripp is critical of “the gale-force winds of melodrama,” which simplifies and flattens characters in a way that strikes sophisticated readers as weak. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, 4th Edition, sneers that 19th Century melodrama “[…] produced a kind of naively sensational entertainment in which the main characters were excessively virtuous or exceptionally evil.” Waverley succumbs to this trap in part, with characters like Edward and Colonel Talbot, but also escapes from it with Fergus and Flora, as the former is willing to turn against Edward while the latter doesn’t swoon like a stereotypical maiden as soon as the light hero arrives. In this respect, Scott is being more modern than I might want to give him credit for, but he’s still a long way from the evolution of a novel like Wonder Boys, whether in terms of plot, characterization, or, as discussed here, knowledge of literary theory and ideas. Later in the same passage, Tripp approvingly notes that Leer has “largely abandoned his silly experiments with syntax and punctuation,” giving us further theory of what makes a good novel as stated by the character of the novel, who would probably not care for stylistically ostentatious writers who are ostentatious for its own sake, like Alain Robbe-Grillet, or, in some novels, Percival Everett.

It’s possible that novels simply can’t avoid commenting on the form to some extent, just as novels can’t seem to avoid some aspect of epistemology and mystery—even the basic mystery of “what happens next,” though a similar drive might propel readers of essays or other nonfiction. Elmore Leonard is the literary novelist I’m familiar with who gets furthest from the recursive structure of novelists on novels within novels, but even he succumbs to that urge in The Hot Kid. Before starting this response, these ideas were rolling around my mind, and I began editing the novel I’m working on, and found a passage that could be about the ability to read a character in the novel:

I looked over my notes from the previous night and found Cassie’s Facebook profile—she was the keg-stand girl—which had a note about her hangover. Otherwise, her profile contained a long list of favorite music and TV shows, but no books, and also had many semi-literate wall notes. Some from DGs empathized regarding hangovers.

The difference between Chabon, Leonard, and others, versus Scott, however, is the difference between a death metal band and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata: subtlety and composition.

None of this essay depreciates Scott’s historical importance to the development of the novel as a genre or of Romance, which was Hook’s initial point. Scott remains historically important, however, chiefly because of influence. Some of his sins might sins of a new form without boundary, and thus Scott might have felt the need to explain the form so that it can be properly enjoyed. Two hundred years since, however, the form is much understood, and an ocean of reading exists beyond what any mortal given present expected longevity can expect to achieve. If Scott caused anxiety in through that influence, it has long been cast off because he, like any pioneer, did not reach the maximum potential of the form he helped establish. Perhaps no artist does, but others have reached further than Scott, and now the dust of archives clings to his prose, which too often offers justification when it doesn’t need to: that his “pen can speedily change from grave to gay,” and many other passages I want to strike with my own pen and write in the margins, “We know!”

Walter Scott's Waverley, the intrusive narrator, and showing, not telling

October 6, 2008 By in Books, Critics, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In Walter Scott’s Waverley, a representative passage states:

Now I protest to thee, gentle reader […] and hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character. So that, if my quill display no other properties of its mother-goose than her mutability, truly I shall be well pleased; and I conceive that you, my worthy friend, will have not occasion for discontent. From the jargon, therefore, of the Highland gillies, I pass to the character of their Chief. It is an appropriate examination, and therefore, like Dogberry, we must spare no wisdom.

I would have preferred to be spared much wisdom, and perhaps all of Scott’s wisdom regarding the character of Fergus Mac-Ivor save that which is imparted through action and dialog. Among fiction writers, the cliché goes, “Show, don’t tell,” and though, like all such rules it should be broken when the need arises, Scott violates it doubly here: first he tells us that he’s going to tell us the character of Fergus, and then he tells us instead of showing us what that character is. We don’t need to pass “From the jargon […] of the Highland gillies […]” to Fergus, but for him simply to do so without announcing it, and his quill’s output doesn’t have the attributes of a goose, but of whatever use its author puts it to. By protesting that I should have no reason for discontent, Scott makes me discontent; he cannot control my content or dis-, and as such, he need merely tell the story, not tell me of its telling. Such protests are not cause for me to be well pleased, but cause for my own displeasure. To quote the advertising slogan of a national athletic apparel company, he should “just do it.” Basketball players can speak of their skill on the court as much as they wish, but the results we care about are on the scorecard, and authors can trumpet what they’ll do as much as they wish, but the results we care about are the stories, not the explanations. In sparring no wisdom, Scott spares us much of the novelistic wisdom of the last two hundred years.

In How Fiction Works, James Wood attributes the small-m modern novel to Flaubert in a passage that is worth quoting at length:

Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favours the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary […]

This is the standard by which Andrew Hook, who wrote the introduction to the Penguin edition of Waverley, probably judges the novel when he says that it “[…] may not be the best novel of the nineteenth century.” Scholarly introductions normally extol a book’s literary as well social/political merit, but in this case the first point is conceded in order to strengthen the second. Perhaps this is in part because of the kind of thing quoted above or what appears to be Scott’s direct address in the first chapter / introduction—the two have not been fully separated yet—when he writes that he tries to avoid writing what we would now call a period piece by “[…] throwing the force of my narrative upon the characters and passions of the actors; – those passions common to men in all stages of society […]” The same issue debated today, but within criticism rather than novels. In a recent New Yorker article titled “Regrets Only: Lionel Trilling and his Discontents,” Louis Menand says that “[Lionel Trilling] was a humanist who believe that works of literature can speak to us across time […]” before describing Trilling’s steady abandonment of that position, or at least that position in its strongest form. But Trilling argued it in nonfiction, not in fiction, and Menand argues about Trilling argues in nonfiction. Scott gives many of his theories within Waverley in a way that seems paternalistic to this post-Flaubert reader.

Wood probably overstates the case for Flaubert, but my quarrel with him is one of degree rather than fundamental alignment. One thing Flaubert accomplished in his endless quest for realism, which is itself a kind of artificial representation no matter how real, is to at least somewhat relegate the most odious and intrusive passages in Waverley into books like How Fiction Works, or Kundera’s The Art of the Novel, or the innumerable other works by author/critics who save their explicit theorizing for nonfiction studying fiction, rather than fiction itself. This can be avoided, as many contemporary authors do by using writers and critics as characters. Philip Roth did so in his Zuckerman novels and Michael Chabon does so in Wonder Boys. The protagonist, Grady Tripp, reads a troubled student’s first novel and says that

… like most good first novels it possessed an imperturbable, mistaken confidence that all the shocking incidents and extremes of human behavior it dished up would strike new chords of outrage and amazement in the reader. It was a brazen, ridiculous, thrilling performance, with a ballast of genuine sadness that kept the whole thing from keeling over in the gale-force winds of melodrama.

Although I’m not certain I would agree with the generalities expressed in Tripp’s commentary, it does at the very least hearken back to older novels like Don Quixote or Waverley. The difference is that in Wonder Boys, the digression is organic and part of the characterization of the novel itself, rather than a cutting and intrusive digression. The action for the characters themselves doesn’t freeze as a lecture gets dropped in, and the literary theory expressed has some resonance for the novel’s story. Tripp and his agent, Terry Crabtree, are going to decide what to do with Leer based in part on his novel, which they evaluate in part by their own aesthetic criteria. In Waverley, the didactic tone interrupts the action instead of being part of it and focuses on the reader themself, not the characters through the reader. Both are accomplished with layers—in Waverley, with the historian, and in Wonder Boys, with Tripp—but Wonder Boys has that additional facet of integration rather than separation.

Wonder Boys also assumes at least some familiarity with novels and novel theory; notice that Tripp is critical of “the gale-force winds of melodrama,” which simplifies and flattens characters in a way that strikes sophisticated readers as weak. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, 4th Edition, sneers that 19th Century melodrama “[…] produced a kind of naively sensational entertainment in which the main characters were excessively virtuous or exceptionally evil.” Waverley succumbs to this trap in part, with characters like Edward and Colonel Talbot, but also escapes from it with Fergus and Flora, as the former is willing to turn against Edward while the latter doesn’t swoon like a stereotypical maiden as soon as the light hero arrives. In this respect, Scott is being more modern than I might want to give him credit for, but he’s still a long way from the evolution of a novel like Wonder Boys, whether in terms of plot, characterization, or, as discussed here, knowledge of literary theory and ideas. Later in the same passage, Tripp approvingly notes that Leer has “largely abandoned his silly experiments with syntax and punctuation,” giving us further theory of what makes a good novel as stated by the character of the novel, who would probably not care for stylistically ostentatious writers who are ostentatious for its own sake, like Alain Robbe-Grillet, or, in some novels, Percival Everett.

It’s possible that novels simply can’t avoid commenting on the form to some extent, just as novels can’t seem to avoid some aspect of epistemology and mystery—even the basic mystery of “what happens next,” though a similar drive might propel readers of essays or other nonfiction. Elmore Leonard is the literary novelist I’m familiar with who gets furthest from the recursive structure of novelists on novels within novels, but even he succumbs to that urge in The Hot Kid. Before starting this response, these ideas were rolling around my mind, and I began editing the novel I’m working on, and found a passage that could be about the ability to read a character in the novel:

I looked over my notes from the previous night and found Cassie’s Facebook profile—she was the keg-stand girl—which had a note about her hangover. Otherwise, her profile contained a long list of favorite music and TV shows, but no books, and also had many semi-literate wall notes. Some from DGs empathized regarding hangovers.

The difference between Chabon, Leonard, and others, versus Scott, however, is the difference between a death metal band and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata: subtlety and composition.

None of this essay depreciates Scott’s historical importance to the development of the novel as a genre or of Romance, which was Hook’s initial point. Scott remains historically important, however, chiefly because of influence. Some of his sins might sins of a new form without boundary, and thus Scott might have felt the need to explain the form so that it can be properly enjoyed. Two hundred years since, however, the form is much understood, and an ocean of reading exists beyond what any mortal given present expected longevity can expect to achieve. If Scott caused anxiety in through that influence, it has long been cast off because he, like any pioneer, did not reach the maximum potential of the form he helped establish. Perhaps no artist does, but others have reached further than Scott, and now the dust of archives clings to his prose, which too often offers justification when it doesn’t need to: that his “pen can speedily change from grave to gay,” and many other passages I want to strike with my own pen and write in the margins, “We know!”