Tag Archives: Novel

Why and How to Write a Blog: Questions on Hacker News

September 8, 2009 By in Personal, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

A recent discussion on Hacker News asked, in effect, what makes a good blog, which in turn asks the question, “why write a blog?” There’s no perfect answer; as Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters indicates, people write for practically as many reasons as there are people: prestige, boredom, ego, whatever.

That being said, the best blogs focus on specific niches but often use those niches to explore the wider world. For example, Marginal Revolution is nominally an economics blog, but it also discusses foreign travel, ethnic cuisine, books, and more. The blogs I contribute to try to follow the same general principle: the one you’re reading now focuses on books (this focus can be very broad: some of my posts about keyboard reviews, for example, get a lot of traffic) and Grant Writing Confidential discusses grant writing. The latter in particular has a purpose beyond random musings: it’s there to show people how to write proposals and that we know how.

If you’re thinking about writing a blog, read Penelope Trunk’s comments, which are invaluable if not always accurate. In addition, I wrote a post called “You’re Not Going to be a Professional Blogger, Regardless of What the Wall Street Journal Tells You” that got slashdotted and ought to dissuade you from the idea you’re going to make money directly at it, at least in the short term. But if you’re looking for a means of expression and you want to write primarily because you want to write, then just roll with it.

“Without a purpose for writing, though, I don’t see how to even try writing a blog. Any suggestions?”

As others have said, don’t write a blog if you don’t have a purpose. Your purpose should come from something you care about deeply enough to know something about that you’d like to transmit to others: in my case, that means books, chiefly, but also grant writing. For many HN readers, it probably means programming. Remember too that the deep knowledge/writing/transmission process isn’t linear, but recursive: I’ve probably learned more about books by trying to sort my ideas about them out in a logical, rational way than I would if I just read a lot (this, incidentally, is why good schools require you to write a lot: writing forces you to embellish the ideas you do have and often to come up with ideas you didn’t have previously). Sometimes you don’t need a purpose in advance: you’ll find one as you start writing.

It’s been said by various writers and scholars (see, for example, Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel or Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel) that the novel is the genre that consumes all other genres—that is to say, it can contain elements of epic poems, Romance, poetry, history, philosophy, and more. By the same token, blogging is the genre that can subsume any other genre if you want it to, because blogging is more a form than a way of presenting content, and over the past 10 years we’ve hardly touched on what is possible.

Just don’t write about your cat. That’s the only rule. There are enough blogs about people’s cats.

See also Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters.

Dune — Frank Herbert

May 17, 2009 By in Books, Essays, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Unlike, say, Ray Bradbury and or Dan Simmons’ novels, the Dune series is probably best appreciated before one’s literary taste has better developed. It still offers some treats like a plot that moves worlds, which begins with a deadly test that, even if we know Paul Muad’dib will pass, still offers immediate tension reminiscent of the later His Dark Materials trilogy.

Granted, some of the motives regarding moves and action don’t stand up to great scrutiny—why go to Arrakis in the first place, again?—but writing that isn’t actively abhorrent. Dune does some things really, really well—most notably its descriptions of cognitive states, which have the subtlety and nuance absent from the many, many moments when the book drops into characters’ mind to telegraph what they’re feeling instead of letting us infer it. Thufir Hawat, one of the many guards and weapons masters, thinks:

He might be at that, Hawat thought. That witch-mother of his is giving him the deep training, certainly. I wonder what her precious school thinks of that? Maybe that’s why they sent the old Proctor here—to whip our dear Lady Jessica into line.

Somehow we need to be immersed in the world and given information about it, but this seems a clumsy and transparent way of doing it—and it persists through the novel, and most of the time it conveys that we’re not smart enough to understand the characters without their little soliloquies. We’re constantly hearing about how “This must not get out of hand” even when the need is already obvious. The Harry Potter series is guilty of the same problem, as revealing too much about characters while simultaneously making them flat, stealing the mystery that might otherwise make us interesting. Hamlet’s soliloquies make him less scrutable and more real; Hawat and Paul’s have the opposite effect.

Perhaps not surprisingly, much of the dialog clangs, whether it’s within or spoken. Early on, we’re treated to standard fantasy/sci-fi pablum about independence and caring:

“The old woman’s voice softened. “Jessica, girl, I wish I could stand in your place and take your sufferings. But each of us must make her own path.”
“I know.”
“You’re as dear to me as any of my own daughters, but I cannot let that interfere with duty.”

We could be in a Marine barracks, or a royal court, or a foreign planet, or a softball game, or any number of other places. This extends to the characters. The villains are irredeemably evil and cruel, taking obvious delight in those traits like a child with an over-sized ice cream. They’re more laughable than anything else, but they never laugh at themselves—how could they and maintain their dignity?—but no one else laughs at them either.

The entire absence of laughter makes Dune harder to take than it might have been in the past. The poignancy of its lack is most notable when references appear, like this one: “Paul held himself apart from the humor, his attention focused on the projection and the question that filled his mind.” But Paul never becomes part of the humor, and neither does the reader. We’re too busy being bombarded with relentless seriousness and nobility, like a 15th Century morality play. Destiny is so important that one can ignore life. Honor and codes are everything.

We’ve taken that 15th Century attitude and brought it forward thousands of years; Paul kills a woman’s husband and is asked by one of the many Noble Savages on Arrakis, “Do you accept Harah as woman or servant?” Maybe one should ask her. Maybe she should read The Feminine Mystique and ask herself if she should submit to cultural imperatives making her property to whichever buck has the biggest horns. But it’s not her place to grow—not in this narrative, or at least not in a meaningful way, and we’re not supposed to feel for her: we’re with Paul Muad’dib and his seductive powers, which give Dune its chief pleasures as he overcomes obstacle after obstacle, both physical mental, the two forming a dialectical cycle that, once begun, will of course break all the rules, as we would like to.

The issues I raise aren’t new ones, and their basic contours were known long before Dune was published. Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye writes:

It is… quite possible to take the alazon [which Frye says “means imposter, someone who pretends or tries to be something more than he is”] at his own valuation: this is done for instance by the creators of the inscrutable gloomy heroes in Gothic thrillers, with their wild or piercing eyes and their dark hints of interesting sins. The result as a rule is not tragedy so much as the kind of melodrama which may be defined as comedy without humor.

Alas, that’s Dune to the experienced reader: comedy without humor because the characters are too busy posturing to perceive their ridiculousness; they can’t see their own situation and so are affected by grandiose myopia. That seems common in descriptions of modern dictators as well; Mark Bowden’s Tales of the Tyrant describes Saddam Hussein as suffering from the same ailment. In Dune the heaviness of “dark hints of interesting sins,” or at least knowledge, is pervasive, though I didn’t have language in which to put the problem properly until I read Frye, giving better form to the ideas that had plagued me without resolution.

Although it’s unfair to say so, it seems that a great deal of fantasy has the humor problem, and for all its flaws one advantage of Harry Potter is that momentous prophecy is leavened with a sense of schoolyard folly. Lord of the Rings has Sam Gamgee and other hobbits to alleviate the gloom. Dune becomes ponderous by comparison, with characters’ religious roles of honor, death, need, and codes, as if the whole of 20th Century criticism and aesthetics hadn’t happened. This is, I suspect, the quality that science fiction and fantasy detractors point to when denigrating those two forms of literature, but just because the forms the genres tend to take are weak doesn’t mean the genres themselves have to be: their best practitioners avoid the Dune problems, or outgrow them. Some phrases, like the famous mantra that fear is the mind killer, have staying power.

Dune still has flair, but not the sense of inexhaustible possibility that a novel needs to endure over a lifetime or through generations. On re-reading it, the book feels exhausted, superseded, an artifact from an earlier age rather than a living story. I wish it were otherwise.

EDIT: See also this post on Dune and its laughable honor code.

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.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, and meaning in the novel

November 17, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

There are two distinct currents in the writing of novels that I would like to note in particular: the novel often described as “taut,” in which every word, sentence, paragraph, action, plot point, utterance, and the like has a central meaning utterly important to the meaning of the novel itself as a whole. Flaubert began this school in earnest, and it began somewhat after the other school, which a professor described as a “big bag of stuff,” containing a bit of everything and much that seems extraneous and wandering, though interesting. Dickens wrote such novels. The “big bag of stuff” school has never been my forte: 18th Century English novels like Clarissa and Pamela are a drag, and the hysterical realists who emulate them deserve the opprobrium they occasionally get. I generally prefer the Flaubert method of writers like Flaubert himself, Fitzgerald, Melville, and the like.

One novel that gets the balance nearly perfectly is Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which succeeds in being pointed and yet digressive, and its meanderings are always illustrative of the characters and related, somehow, to the central plot—or, rather idea, which in the case of Cryptonomicon I can’t explain without including the ending. It’s an exceptions; John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor is another successful hybridized novel I like, which has characteristics of the big-bag novels without many of their faults. The temptation toward big-bag novels is clear, especially because the novel lacks a required form—as the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary says, the novel is “now applied to a wide variety of writings whose only common attribute is that they are extended pieces of prose fiction. But ‘extended’ begs a number of questions,” which it then goes on to enumerate. The problem with defining the novel is that the form itself arose as an original production and one major criterion for greatness continues to be originality, which becomes steadily harder to achieve as more novels are published. One could call this “contamination, as John Barth argues in The Friday Book.

If is by its nature a contaminated genre, then one of its chief progenitors is a sterling example of this general phenomenon. Don Quixote is a pastiche, and not just of allusion, but of poems, stories that would, on their own, qualify as “short stories,” and perceived history. Its eponymous protagonist acts as if stories are histories, and vice-versa; in Chapter VIII, a typical encounter whose broad outlines are repeated occurs with traveling shepherds. Quixote assures them he is a knight, and though they assume him mad, their own reasoning processes aren’t so different from his. These shepherds make questionable assumptions and use false heuristics as well—one says, “ ‘I think, Senor Vivaldo, that we are going to be well repaid for the delay it will cost us to see this famous funeral; for famous it must surely be, judging by the strange things that these shepherds have told us of the dead man and the homicidal shepherdess.” Are “strange things” enough to make a funeral worth attending, a film worth seeing, a text worth reading? Maybe, since the speaker implies that strange things can cause fame.

Fame itself lends some measure of reality to their perception, and their perception adds some measure of reality to the proceeding, as fame itself is an agglomeration of interested parties. I read once that a person is famous to the extent that more people know him or her than he or she knows. By that definition, Don Quixote (and, in italics, Don Quixote) has become very famous indeed; but even the funeral itself, within the text, becomes more important by way of its interest to the shepherds. The shepherds are astonished at Don Quixote, and “were likewise able to perceive the peculiar nature of his madness,” and yet his madness is like theirs, only to a greater degree. To be sure, quantity has a quality all its own, as Stalin infamously said, but nonetheless the principle remains even when the order of magnitude changes.

So it is with all novels: their parts reflect the wholes, in a recursive loop, just as perception can lead to changes in reality. The process is not perfect and doesn’t have a 1:1 correspondence—whether I “perceive” my computer levitating doesn’t make it levitate, and whether Don Quixote perceives King Author to be the figure made out in tales doesn’t mean he was. Yet when I perceive my computer levitating and use such an idea in a story that in turn becomes widely read as a metaphor for how working in a field one loves can make one accomplish more, or when Don Quixote perceives King Arthur to be a historical figure and then acts accordingly, our perceptions have changed and interacted with the real world—as fiction itself does. Umberto Eco writes in Reflections on The Name of the Rose, “However you choose to look at it, I arrived at scholarship by crossing symbolic forests inhabited by unicorns and gryphons […]” In Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, different views of the reality of time affect different worlds that might or might not exist in different ways; in one such universe, “The world will end on 26 September 1907. Everyone knows it,” and they react accordingly. In another: “Suppose that people live forever.” In Don Quixote, one could have a false quote, a quote from Don Quixote in a different universe: “Suppose that Don Quixote believed himself to be a knight-errant.” He does, naturally, and its author or narrator says that details mean little, “providing that in the telling of [the story] we do not depart one iota from the truth.” One can’t depart from the truth of a made-up story.

Don Quixote continually emphasizes the “truth” in a way that’s merely ostentacious rather than clever. The book contains a note referencing the fictional layers that Umberto Eco mocked at the beginning of The Name of the Rose, but aside from hyperbole, there is little if any strong sense of mockery here: “He who translated this great history from the original manuscript left by its author, Cid Hamete Benegeli, states that when he came to the chapter dealing with the adventure in the Cave of Montesinos, he found in the margin, in Hamete’s own handwriting, these words: […]” The novel lets us count the layers of narrative contamination: Don Quixote is the principal actor, who is contaminated by Cid Hamete Benegeli, who is contaminated by (potentially) the translator, who is contaminated by Cervantes himself. Given such uncertainty, the need to draw more attention to Hamete’s uncertainty doesn’t have the effect of allaying uncertainty, as the plea for “how it is impossible for me to believe that Don Quixote lied.” Rather, by calling attention to the possibly fictive nature of Quixote’s adventures, he increases their uncertainty, like someone who guiltily overexplains an absence to a lover. Indeed, the very use of “contamination” so many times and in so many subtly different ways expands it the point of near meaninglessness, like Don Quixote’s constant citation of Romance as a drive to defend his numerous acts of folly.

Furthermore, much of the nature of “truth” in Don Quixote depends on personal reputations rather than any attempt at external verification. Don Quixote is believable “since he is the truest gentleman and noblest knight of his age and would not utter a falsehood if he were to be through with arrows.” In an age with no other gentlemen and no other knights, it isn’t difficult to be the truest and noblest—or the least true and least noble, especially without external checks and balances. If I pronounced myself a Ph.D. and proclaimed myself the truest doctor of the age, and by implication my work the most correct, others would correctly look askance at me: it generally takes the verification and seal of others who represent an institution as well as a large body of work to “prove” myself the finest doctor in the land. Conceivably, however, my work could still be the best, even without the external verification, but it would be harder for others to prove. Don Quixote lacks those proofs by others, and yet in his mind, he is still following their examples—and at bottom, he is testifying for himself, and others are believing him because he of his self-created status, not because of a widely agreed upon status. Cid Hamete Benegali is one flimsy shield against such charges—so flimsy, that he will not testify on Quixote’s behalf in Chapter XXIV, despite the myriad of other far more ridiculous events than the relatively benign one described in a chapter concerning “A Thousand Trifling Matters:” “[…] I would state that if the episode has the appearance of being apocryphal, the fault is not mine, and so, without asserting that it is either false or true, I write it down.” But sophisticated readers should assume such things, and understand implicitly such contamination; it, like the many others of its kind, should be assumed by the reader, rather than stated. Instead, it’s used as a form of paralipsis in drawing attention to the fictionality of the world by arguing over or testifying about its fictionality.

Perhaps this is a reflection of the contamination of Don Quixote by history and by legend, and the standards of truth each implies, as well as the standards of translators and others whose standards might be lower still. It is hard to believe Cid Hamete Benegali if he has accepted Don Quixote’s account of himself simply by the account itself; such tautological reasoning is no more persuasive than Don Quixote’s reasoning about the truth of historical romance. Yet perhaps this is besides the point: in a contaminated narrative, what matters is that characters believe and what it causes them to do, not what they believe. Arguing whether the ghosts are real or fake in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is of less importance than what those ghosts cause the Governess to do. Although I had not previously realized it, the same general principle animates the novel I spent most of this morning editing, which is tentatively titled A Winter-Seeming Summer’s Night.

Don Quixote still believes in the Romance narrative he lives, and he can only live through misunderstanding the nature of fact and fiction. Cid Hamete Benegali seems to believe Quixote. And yet, all this is contained in a chapter entitled “A Thousand Trifling Matters,” in which Sancho Panza marvels, “ ‘Is it possible that a man who can say as many wise things as you have just said could have told the nonsensical and impossible tale that you did of the Cave of Montesinos? Well, well, we shall see.’ ” Given that Sancho Panza believes them nonsensical, as does Cid Hamete Benegali (“in Hamete’s own handwriting”), we have bookends of disbelief around an event not so different than the many other. Such sections make literal the belief in Romance and demonstrate faulty reasoning more efficiently than the LSAT—for example, a group in white going to pray for rain causes “Don Quixote [to imagine] that this must be some adventure or other” only to have him “strengthened in this belief” by further misinterpreting what he sees. In the second half, he becomes more deeply enmeshed in both the reality of his unreality and in the reality outside the novel, further straining the epistemological ropes pulling his arms in each direction. This is because Quixote doesn’t accept standard explanations for truth. Don Quixote and Don Quixote are both quite famous, and they’re famous for exemplifying and defying the epistemological models we have imposed on the past. In defying them, they nonetheless have others apparently upholding them, but neither matters half so much as the end result: Quixote’s adventures fueled by his belief, and the contaminated beliefs of others. Too bad they never infect me, as I see Quixote as irritating above everything else.

How Fiction Works, and how this review doesn't

June 20, 2008 By in Books, Links, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I keep citing James Wood’s How Fiction Works without writing about it directly because the book feels so whole that it lacks the typical cracks that offer handholds. It asks the right questions and, inevitably, can only offer partial answers, but those answers are far more illuminating than almost anyone else’s, and its contents are encapsulated by the epigraph: ‘There is only one recipe – to care a great deal for the cookery.’ Henry James said, and James Wood lives it.

For reasons opaque to me this book hasn’t come out in the United States yet and won’t in July, yet it seemed essential enough to buy it from the U.K., and now I perceive that decision as a wise one. How Fiction Works joins good company stretching back at least to E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, which is addressed, and it goes beyond that—the book is part how-to, part criticism, part literary theory, and part history, and all the whole is greater than their sum, offering much to almost every reader. If that weren’t enough, it also comes with potential reading list—for example, the affection Wood, along with Jane Smiley and others, shows toward Henry Green makes me realize I should read him. Some writers—like Dawn Powell and William Maxwell—seem destined to be remembered only by other writers, their secrets moving through the years with only thin strands connecting them from person to person, forgotten by teachers, academics, and other keepers of the past. I wish I had more than two short paragraphs to say, but this is the rare book that I can only recommend you read, and then perhaps you will understand why. The reviews I’ve seen so far—representative samples are here and here, though this is better—so miss their target, or at least so fail to really engage it, that I hesitate to add to clamor, rather than music. The critic whose writing is consistently music instead of bombast is too rare, and consequently, I encourage you to listen.

How Fiction Works, and how this review doesn’t

June 20, 2008 By in Books, Links, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I keep citing James Wood’s How Fiction Works without writing about it directly because the book feels so whole that it lacks the typical cracks that offer handholds. It asks the right questions and, inevitably, can only offer partial answers, but those answers are far more illuminating than almost anyone else’s, and its contents are encapsulated by the epigraph: ‘There is only one recipe – to care a great deal for the cookery.’ Henry James said, and James Wood lives it.

For reasons opaque to me this book hasn’t come out in the United States yet and won’t in July, yet it seemed essential enough to buy it from the U.K., and now I perceive that decision as a wise one. How Fiction Works joins good company stretching back at least to E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, which is addressed, and it goes beyond that—the book is part how-to, part criticism, part literary theory, and part history, and all the whole is greater than their sum, offering much to almost every reader. If that weren’t enough, it also comes with potential reading list—for example, the affection Wood, along with Jane Smiley and others, shows toward Henry Green makes me realize I should read him. Some writers—like Dawn Powell and William Maxwell—seem destined to be remembered only by other writers, their secrets moving through the years with only thin strands connecting them from person to person, forgotten by teachers, academics, and other keepers of the past. I wish I had more than two short paragraphs to say, but this is the rare book that I can only recommend you read, and then perhaps you will understand why. The reviews I’ve seen so far—representative samples are here and here, though this is better—so miss their target, or at least so fail to really engage it, that I hesitate to add to clamor, rather than music. The critic whose writing is consistently music instead of bombast is too rare, and consequently, I encourage you to listen.

Reading: Wheaties, marijuana, or boring? You decide.

June 11, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Eventually one must tire of reading the debates about reading and prefer to just read, or, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t, watch T.V., or whatever—though if you don’t like reading, I’m rather puzzled that you’re at this site. Regardless, you should read this long, worthwhile, and non-polemical look at the decline of reading from Heather Harris (hat tip Books, Inq.):

One of the great pastimes of the literati, aside from complaining about the Bush administration and attending live tapings of A Prairie Home Companion, is collective hand-wringing about the sad fact that Americans no longer read. Apparently, most of us would sooner watch Rock of Love–Bret and Ambre are so not going to make it–than pick up a novel. Enter Mikita Brottman: Maryland Institute College of Art professor, Oxford scholar, author, and patron saint of the tome-averse masses in her new book The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. Brottman is the latest in a long line of philosophers and writers to question reading’s value, and in this day of reading campaigns and self-important book clubs, the question of whether reading per se is a virtuous activity is timely.

I’ve been collecting examples of quotes and articles concerning the decline of reading, as the debate about whether reading is good or bad for you seems to have been rolling around since the origins of the English novel. Other required reading on reading is Steven Johnson’s Dawn of the Digital Natives, whose perspective is closer to Brottman’s than the unnamed literati of the article.

I fall into more of the rah-rah reading crowd, both for personal and societal reasons. The argument about writing and reading changing our culture resonates with me, as even people who never read have been affected by the innumerable writers and reformers of various kinds whose work extends perpetually backwards in time. In addition, as Foucault argues, power and knowledge are inherently bound, and the most efficient way to transmit knowledge seems to be reading.

Why have we dismantled most forms of racial discrimination or many of the barriers to women in the workforce or other kinds of discrimination based on things other than ability? Why do we let atheists maintain their beliefs openly? It’s largely because some people were willing to challenge the larger culture, chiefly through writing, and enough people were interested in reading to have absorbed those principles or ideas, which now come at us through a thousand outlets. I just read in Alain Badiou’s ‘Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Wo Es War): “When Nietzsche proposes to ‘break the history of the world in two’ by exploding Christian nihilism and generalizing the great Dionysian ‘yes’ to Life […]” I thought, really? Although I don’t necessarily buy the “exploding Christian nihilism” bit (what nihilism?), count me as a late convert to the Dionysian principle. Without books, it’s doubtful that I would’ve made it there, and it’s in part my own trajectory that leads me to believe, perhaps irrationally, in the transformative value of thinking about the world through reading.

To delve into personal territory, books helped me leave the social carapace that hardened when I was 10 or 11, not create it, as Brottman says happened to her. Books were a recovery from an unhappy move and from video games and helped me articulate more of a worldview and change my behavior, and while I don’t think of books as therapy, they do have some therapeutic aspects to them. To bring the level of seriousness back to an appropriate level, consider what Richard Feynman said in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: “And Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was Von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!”

Without reading, I might lack this powerful sense of social irresponsibility and instead just have accepted accepted received wisdom instead of revising received wisdom. Let this be a lesson, by the way, to the natterers, including myself, on getting young people to read—instead of pushing reading ceaselessly like whole wheat bread, maybe it’s time to forbid it, and stock copies of Henry Miller and Bret Easton Ellis in the liquor store, thereby necessitating that teenagers get their older siblings or boyfriends or whatever to buy it for them. They might pass copies of Lost Girls around like furtive bongs at parties. I call this the “gateway drug” approach to reading, as opposed to the “whole wheat” approach.

Still, on a marginally more serious note, if no one reads, then who will write the challenges to cultural, legal, social, and technical problems? And who will read them? That, implicitly, is what many of hand-wringers worry about. Steven Johnson might argue, perhaps correctly, that those challenges will come from visual media, and that’s possible—but I doubt most visual media can match the depth of depth of text. I’m convinced that reading causes you to think—as Caleb Crain’s Twilight of the Books argues—differently and gives you the tools to argue against bad public policy, bureaucracies, and the like. To me, reading is linked to freedom itself, and I don’t think it’s mere correlation that the initial moves toward democracy coincided with the rise of what evidence we have for written languages, or that repressive governments fear and try to control books and knowledge. Thus, I see reading as important in the personal sphere for individual growth and in the societal sphere for correcting the excesses of organizations with power. And they’re fun—Feynman often criticized such organizations through his social irresponsibility, and has helped transmit that sense to others. Reading doesn’t have to be antisocial, and I usually find being social around people who read is more fun than being around people who don’t, simply because the readers get more and get it faster. Once again, the correlation/causation issue arises, but from my perspective, it doesn’t matter—I’ll take the reader over the non-reader, and many people not in positions of, say, government authority would probably do the same. Without falling prey to Godwin’s Law, I’ll note that many authoritarian regimes try to control knowledge and specific manifestations of knowledge, like books and professors. As a result, I see reading as both a public and private good, although one that, paradoxically, might be best inculcated in young people by trying to show it as dangerous, rather than good for you like Wheaties.

This argument might not matter, since surveys keep appearing that claim people read less and less, but like any believer, I’m still convinced of the faith’s importance. I’m not as much a proselytizer as someone who thinks others should come to it on their volition—I’m less of a Christian missionary and more of a Buddhist monk. Or maybe I’ve just got an economic interest in reading, since I spend an enormous amount of time writing. I think it’s deeper than that, although I won’t be so ridiculously grandiose as to say things like, “The future depends on it!” like a character from a bad superhero movie, I will say that reading still matters as a component of free thought and free life, and it doesn’t have to come at the expense of sociability. It can be good for you but shouldn’t necessarily be pitched that way. The culture, however, will move in whatever way it does, and I suspect those in the debate will be increasingly on the margins of the culture as a whole.

EDIT: Added last paragraph on 6/11/08.

More on-line sanctioned ignorance: in defense of Tom Wolfe and others

May 27, 2008 By in Books, Life, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

James Wood wrote a typically fascinating piece to Nigel Beale defending “lifeness,” or sophisticated realism. As mentioned in my recent link post, it’s worth reading in full. I have to quote at length to set up my response:

It is perfectly possible to agree with Roland Barthes that realism is a set of codes and conventions (for all writing is a set of such codes, after all) and still try to defend that element in fiction — what I call “lifeness” — that eludes the nerveless grip of code. This is a defence both of that evanescence called ‘reality’ and of the artifice that makes it — and makes it up — and there is no contradiction in this doubleness: we read fiction with two eyes, as it were, one world-directed and one text-directed.

The review I just wrote about Joseph O’Neill’s superb novel,”Netherland,” in “The New Yorker,” praises the novel both for its deep and wise interest in life and lives, and for its high degree of artifice and style. That doubleness is entirely in keeping with my attacks on people like Tom Wolfe, John Irving, the more formulaic elements of John Updike, and so on, and in keeping with my praise, in essays and reviews, of writers like Cormac McCarthy (when he is not trying to write a genre thriller like “No Country for Old Men”), Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolano, Muriel Spark, Jose Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Philip Roth, Alan Hollinghurst, Milan Kundera, Norman Rush, V.S. Naipaul, Edward P. Jones, Michel Houellebecq, Anne Enright, David Means, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Bohumil Hrabal, Harold Brodkey (I was an early and pretty isolated English champion of Brodkey’s), not to mention earlier writers like Henry Green, Italo Svevo, Giovanni Verga, Knut Hamsun, J.F. Powers, and many others.

(Link added by me).

I see this in part as a facet of the long-running debate between whether one should understand the exterior world as reflective of the interior or whether the interior is perpetually hidden and most revealed through its own, psychological terms. This tension manifests itself in literary periods: the exterior world was more popular in the 18th Century with writers like Pope and Swift, and naturally lends itself to satire, while the Romantics brought acute focus back to the interior world through their poetry, while many of the modernists tried to reflect this shift to the inside through the shape of their prose itself. Some contemporary novelists think they’re doing one when they’re actually doing the other; although I hadn’t realized this at the time I wrote my review, it’s a malady Bridge of Sighs suffers from. And the greatest novels can go one way (Ulysses, I would argue, is radically interior) or find a middle path, as I think Bellow often does, but even he often veers interior, as in Henderson and Herzog, as opposed to the exterior-focused world of The Adventures of Augie March; I’m not sure where Ravelstein fits, but I take that subject up again later.

To be sure, some of these generalizations are overly broad, as they almost must be when describing grant literary trends. But some writers—like Tom Wolfe—can subvert the code they appear to be hewing to, and at his best in The Bonfire of the Vanities Wolfe accomplishes this and is a more sophisticated and better writer than many critics assume through his use of examining how the exterior reflects the interior. Being just slightly off makes him misfire completely: I Am Charlotte Simmons is a bad novel that parodies itself, and Wolfe’s symbolic and social purposes are utterly transparent, some of his details are wrong, and the whole effect falls apart. Wolfe has more lifeness than Wood credits him with, though perhaps not so much as some of the later writers on his list.

One way of avoiding the interior and exterior problem is to have a narrator observing someone else, thus allowing one to see the interiority of the narrator and the exteriority of the person being observed. I want to write a dissertation on what I call the nominal object or nominal subject, in which you have a first-person narrator observing another person who is the nominal object or subject of the story: think Ishmael and Ahab in Moby Dick, Carraway and Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, or Jack Burden and Willie Stark in All the King’s Men. All three novels exhibit what I think Wood means by “lifeness,” and although they don’t achieve exclusively that effect through this technique, it can, when used well, give a sense of interiority from the narrator and exteriority in the object. Ravelstein has the same technique, alone as far as I know in Bellow’s novels.

Which is right, the interior or exterior focus? I haven’t the slightest idea and suspect the answer is “neither,” but the debate’s terms are so often manifested in specific examples but not often stated in more general form. To me, novels that elude codes, ideologies, formulas, and other kinds of algorithmic writing—the ones that are truly novel—are the ones most worth reading, provided that they don’t try to evade codes merely to evade codes, but rather as a way of advancing the story, expanding our understanding of reality, and the like. This is the distinction I draw between someone like Bellow and someone like Alain Robbe-Grillet, who seemed interested in difference only for the sake of being different.

Life: Flight edition

May 13, 2008 By in Life Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“And at a height of three miles, sitting above the clouds, I felt like an airborne seed. From the cracks in the earth the rivers pinched back at the sun. They shone out like smelters’ puddles, and then they took a crust and were covered over. As for the vegetable kingdom, it hardly existed from the air; it looked to me no more than an inch in height. And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.”

—Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

(Notice James Wood’s remark in How Fiction Works: “Bellow had a habit of writing repeatedly about flying partly, I guess, because it was the great obvious advantage he had over his dead competitors, those writers who had never seen the world from above the clouds: Melville, Tolstoy, Proust.”)

… And here he is

March 7, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Two days ago I asked for an example of who championed the supposedly airless literary novel, and now Stephen Marche writes in Salon with an answer for me:*

[Alain Robbe-Grillet] was a great champion for the innovative novel, so in a way I owe him: I’m a novelist, and while I would be loath to call myself avant-garde, my first book did have marginalia all the way through and my second was a literary anthology of an invented country. But the truth is, Robbe-Grillet was a disaster for innovative novels. After him, literary innovation, experiment with form or anything mildly unconventional came to be seen as pretentious and dry, the proper domain of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and nobody else.

[…]

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter. He represented, through his status as cultural icon of the avant-garde, an entire generation that turned literary experimentation into self-involved blandness.

I’ve heard of Robbe-Grillet but never read him and appear not to be alone in this. Yet I’m skeptical of a single novelist’s ability to have so great an effect on culture**, especially because literary culture still produces all kinds of novels, and, even if it didn’t, old novels are still available. In financial terms, this is one problem with being a current novelist: you still have to compete with The Great Gatsby and All the King’s Men, but Honda is not too worried about people choosing cars made in the first half of the twentieth century usurping current sales. Obviously there can be currents and trends within a literary culture, but it seems to me that literary culture and literature are so big as to give us whatever we want.

Fortunately, I wrote all this before Marche came to his conclusion:

The two strands of postwar literary fiction, the ultraradical and the willfully archaic, are both antithetical to the spirit of the novel itself, which is polyglot and unpredictable. Novels are supposed to be messy. They are written to express ideals and to make money; they steal from everything and everyone, high, middle and low, belonging to everyone and no one in the same moment. They don’t fit anyone’s conception. That’s why we love them.

Though I hate to descend into high school argot, I have to say: duh. So why does the bulk of this essay deal with questionable generalizations that Marche then throws down?

* I see no reason not to assume a causal connection.

** Except Joyce, as virtually everything written in English after him has felt his touch, whether the writer wants to feel it or not. But even Joyce had a little-known forerunner named Edouard Dujardin, who wrote Les Lauriers sont coupés. In Modernism, Peter Gay writes that “Dujardin […] later reported that his experiment sold just a few hundred copies […] But among its few readers was James Joyce, [who later] signed a copy of Ulysses to Dujardin, calling himself ‘an impenitent thief.’ “