The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros

In her essay on George Eliot in The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf described Middlemarch as "mature" and "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."

 I thought of this description when I read the first few pages of Leslie Fiedler's classic Love and Death in the American Novel and find him complaining that

There is a real sense in which our prose fiction is immediately distinguishable from that of Europe, though this is a fact that is difficult for Americans to confess. In this sense, our novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way, almost juvenile. The great works of American fiction are notoriously at home in the children's section of the library, their level of sentimentality precisely that of a pre-adolescent. This is part of what we mean when we talk about the incapacity of the American novelist to develop; in a compulsive way he returns to a limited world of experience, usually associated with his childhood, writing the same book over and over again until he lapses into silence of self-parody. (24)

Published in 1960, the year after Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus won the National Book Award, in the heyday of Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow¹, Fiedler's diagnosis seems both descriptive and predictive of the careers of these writers and a number of their contemporaries. Such a broad statement, however, led me to begin thinking about how much or how little American literature may have changed since 1960 in the terms he sets out.

But first, I want to compare Fiedler and Woolf's comments for a moment and note that what Fiedler takes to be a distinctively American deficiency—the lack of great novels written truly for "grown-up people"—is noted as a peculiarity of English literature as well. Woolf's line is more of a throw-away, while Fiedler's complaint is the seed of a 600-page book, so we're dealing with significantly different types of comments, not to mention the fact that I think Fiedler and Woolf have quite divergent ideas about what a book for "grown-up people" would be, but I do find the similarity of sentiment interesting, at the very least in the sense that both imagine a Continental literature which must be (almost by default) immensely more mature or adult. (Well, I suppose such a notion is not all that far-fetched; you can't really get a children's version of Balzac, much less Collette, can you?)

At any rate, a few pages later, Fiedler refines his comments to

Moreover—and the final paradox is necessary to the full complexity of the case²—our classic literature is a literature of horror for boys. Truly shocking, frankly obscene authors we do not possess; Edgar Allan Poe is our closest approximation, a child playing at what Baudelaire was to live. A Baudelaire, a Marquis de Sade, a "Monk" Lewis, even a John Cleland was inconceivable in the United States. Our flowers of evil are culled for the small girl's bouquet, our novels of terror (Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, the tales of Poe) are placed on the approved book lists of Parents' Committees who nervously fuss over the latest comic books. If such censors do not flinch at necrophilia or shudder over the book whose secret motto is "I baptise you not in the name of the Father… but of the Devil," or fear the juvenile whose hero at his greatest moment cries out, "All right, I'll go to Hell," it is only another irony of life in a land where the writers believe in hell and the official guardians of morality do not. (29-30)

In an amusing footnote following his assertion that Sade, Baudelaire, et al. are "inconceivable" in the U.S., Fiedler adds,

In recent years, the situation appears to have altered radically—perhaps, in part, because the taste of boys has changed, as 'the latency period,' which Freud thought immutable, tends to be abolished. At any rate, the line between 'pornography' and respectable literature has blurred; and certain traditional themes of American literature—the love of white and colored males, for instance, and the vilification of women—are rendered with explicit sexual detail. Indeed, such detail becomes required reading rather than forbidden as American puritanism learns to stand on its head. It is a long way from James Fenimore Cooper to James Baldwin, or from Herman Melville to Norman Mailer; but even if our dreams have become more frankly erotic, the American eros has not really changed. We continue to dream the female dead, and ourselves in the arms of our dusky male lovers.

Alright, that's a lot of Fiedler for us to chew over, and it seems to me to take us quite far afield from the titular subject of this post, but really I have very little to say about Cisneros's novel. Nevertheless, the novel helps as an example of some of the changes in American literature since 1960, and, I think, exemplifies what may not have changed.

For one thing, there is obviously going to be a rather extreme shift in what we think the "American eros" is when critics like Fiedler begin to recognize that our "classic literature" includes women (Edith Wharton, notably, is absent from the book's index, and I dare not even look to see if Zora Neale Hurston is as well). Fiedler's thesis was notoriously selective even when nobody bothered to consider whether "theories of American literature" held true for both genders, but now it looks quite patchy.

Secondly, I think we can honestly say that the days when Parents' Committees blithely approve of classic American literature being taught to their children are at a definite end. I don't know the exact history of when books started getting regularly challenged by parents, but I would imagine it was when books by non-whites and women started getting regularly assigned, and then it moved back up the chain to where Huck Finn and Catcher in the Rye started getting pulled as well. Maybe I'm wrong about that—here's the list of the ALA's 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books 1990-2000, and it's a regular grab bag in terms of authors, although there are definite themes (stories about blacks, gays, and independent-minded women show up an awful lot).

However, I think it's worth noting that, while many things definitely have changed since Fiedler's diagnosis, and have changed even on a macro- level, there are still a lot of new "classics" that could conform with some adjustments to the American literature Fiedler described, and that this holds true even within some of the broadest changes, such as who is writing and being widely read. The House on Mango Street sure isn't a horror story for boys, but it does have some gothic touches and it certainly finds a home in the pre-teen section, even if it's also as often at home on a college syllabus. If there was any validity to Fiedler's complaint, I think it is born out rather than challenged by a book like The House on Mango Street, or even by something like The Woman Warrior, despite the fact that they obviously do not share in the very white, very male worldview that makes Fiedler's study possible in the first place.³

***
¹Speaking of Bellow, Fiedler has a hilarious way of describing Henderson the Rain King as "a homoerotic Tarzan of the Apes," which strikes me as deliciously redundant.
²What an overwhelmingly Freudian phrase! [AS]
³It should be noted, however, that in many ways Fiedler was quite bold in trying to expand the canon beyond white men; I don't mean to slight such efforts on his part, but I think that Love and Death in the American Novel nonetheless is grounded in a canon and a worldview that is nowhere near as complete or inclusive as Fiedler often advocated elsewhere.

The Critical Flame

A quick note to recommend the second issue of The Critical Flame. There are a couple of books under review which I have also covered (D. A. Powell's luminous Chronic covered here and Mark McGurl's The Program Era covered here and here), and I feel the reviews there do them great justice. Also, Scott Esposito takes a look at the "breakout" novel of last year's Nobelist, J. M. G. LeClézio. I've been meaning to get around to him…

Some other odds and ends:

• Despite feeling like he suffers from the all-new-films-are-bad-films mode of criticism, Andrew Tracy's reviews at ReverseShot are consistently engaging both on a verbal and conceptual level. His review of Public Enemies, which I saw and liked quite a bit better than he, is his latest.
• This interview (in German) with Junot Díaz and Aleksandar Hemon sounds incredibly interesting, and with my one college term's worth of the language, I might try to get some of it translated, but I doubt the results will be any good, so have fun with the link if your German's better than mine. Otherwise, have fun with Google Translate.
• Continuing a not-in-English theme, this post on Moleskine Literario has me wondering if there is a new collection of stories from Daniel Alarcón on the way: it appears that one is coming out in Peru, titled The King Is Always Above the People, "gathering all the stories not published in his first book [War by Candlelight], although many of them were published in Anglophone magazines (the one which gives its name to the collection appeared in Granta)…" I was under the impression that Alarcón writes in English and that the contents of War by Candlelight and its Spanish version were identical, so I assume all the stories which are coming out under this title in Peru could quite easily be bundled and printed in English as well. Hopefully we'll soon see that on shelves up here.
• Mark Athitakis points to a pretty interesting new feature on the National Book Awards site: they've got a line-up of all the past winners and are featuring a winner a day. It will be interesting to see how much information they can still pull on a forgotten novel like Wright Morris's The Field of Vision. Isn't Plains Song the only Morris anybody reads anymore? Mark also has an interesting brief history of the awards in his post.
  

Culture and Materialism, by Raymond Williams

A couple of days ago I was at another person's apartment and found myself looking at his bookcase. Scanning down the spines, I noticed that the bottom shelf had a number of titles by Marxist thinkers. "That's great," I said, "My bookcase is like that too! Marxists at the base, everything else is superstructure!"

The best essay in this collection is by far "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" [available here if you have access to the New Left Review], which is a remarkably clear critique of what's often called "vulgar Marxism." Very simply, Williams is able to turn the base/superstructure schema, which often seems to produce only Ptolemaic epicycles when confronted with any nugget of cultural complexity, into a concept that seems not only practical and useful, but indispensable and remarkable. Much of the book, in fact, is like that—the essay "Problems of Materialism" especially [New Left Review version here].

But this is an oddly handled salvage project; although he spends a bit of time examining how the concept of superstructure has calcified and self-corrupted through a misunderstanding of its relationship to the base, Williams is not terribly concerned with "returning to Marx." If he does return to the site of the concept's original formulation, it is not in the manner of consulting Scripture; instead, it seems clear that Williams has thought the problem through as to how it must be solved, and only looks back to Marx to, in essence, check his work.

"Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" introduces the terms residual and emergent cultures, which many theorists have found useful, and another distinction which I find really useful—that between alternative and oppositional cultures.

There is a simple theoretical distinction between alternative and oppositional, that is to say between someone who simply finds a different way to live and wishes to be left alone with it, and someone who finds a different way to live and wants to change the society in its light. This is usually the difference between individual and small-group solutions to social crisis and those solutions which properly belong to political and ultimately revolutionary practice. But it is often a very narrow line, in reality, between alternative and oppositional. A meaning or a practice may be tolerated as a deviation, and yet still be seen only as another particular way to live. But as the necessary area of effective dominance extends, the same meanings and practices can be seen by the dominant culture, not merely as disregarding or despising it, but as challenging it. (41-42)

I think the implications of this distinction are fairly obvious even to the point where such a distinction just becomes a better name for something already generally operative within our conception of cultural forms, but it is nevertheless a much better way of talking about the historical conditions which make a cultural expression either alternative or oppositional. By making use of this distinction, we can better talk about the opportunities afforded to resistance by the dominant culture: what possibilities of true opposition are created by the creative writing program, for instance, and how are impulses to opposition often pushed back across that "narrow line" toward mere alternativity?

The essay is chock-a-block with illuminating passages which equip the reader with some very solid tools for a host of similar questions, but it is also full of indirect critiques of the forms of intellectual cheating and sloppiness which often slip in ahead of any proper analysis. One singularly good example is the following passage:

Now if we go back to the cultural question in its most usual form—what are the relations between art and society, or literature and society?—in the light of the preceding discussion, we have to say first that there are no relations between literature and society in that abstracted way. The literature is there from the beginning as a practice in the society. Indeed until it and all other practices are present, the society cannot be seen as fully formed. A society is not fully available for analysis until each of its practices is included. But if we make that emphasis we must make a corresponding emphasis: that we cannot separate literature and art from other kinds of social practice, in such a way as to make them subject to quite special and distinct laws. They may have quite specific features as practices, but they cannot be separated from the general social process. Indeed one way of emphasizing this is to say, to insist, that literature is not restricted to operating in any one of the sectors I have been seeking to describe in this model. It would be easy to say, it is a familiar rhetoric, that literature operates in the emergent cultural sector, that it represents the new feelings, the new meanings, the new values. We might persuade ourselves of this theoretically, by abstract argument, but when we read much literature, over the whole range, without the sleight-of-hand of calling Literature only that which we have already selected as embodying certain meanings and values at a certain scale of intensity, we are bound to recognize that the act of writing, the practices of discourse in writing and speech, the making of novels and poems and plays and theories, all this activity takes place in all areas of the culture. (44)

The key phrase in that is, I think, "at a certain scale of intensity." Frequently critics bail themselves out of the messiness of literary fiction/genre fiction dogfights by making some variation of this argument: that literary fiction is better (or better for you) not because it has ideas and stuff and genre fiction doesn't, but because it has them in greater intensity or greater density. The ideas that literary fiction gets over on the reader are somehow sharper or bolder, both more basic and more noble. That, at any rate, often seems to be the argument to me, and the one that Williams very neatly closes down. And it is this type of argument that is often employed precisely in those kind of situations when critics want to make the claim that Literature proper belongs exclusively in emergent culture, that Literature is (or must be) always avant-garde, always breaking apart an old genre or forming a new one. The idea that Literature, in order to be Literature, is language at its most intense (or some other modernist maxim) is shown to be, I think, just part of that larger project of mystification that canon-eers like Harold Bloom attend to.

***
I'm sure it's already redly apparent, but I feel a tremendous amount of harmony between my own views on literature and Williams's. I had only read some citations of his work in other theorist's articles and books (well, and part of Marxism and Literature and part of The Country and the City), and am very glad to have pulled this book from my shelves finally. I suppose it is dangerous ever to find any thinker whose writings feel more like more articulate and better conceived confirmations of your own muddled ideas, and so I will try to read more of Williams with this danger in mind—I don't want to misinterpret him because I assume I think like him. On the other hand, it is also a tremendous inspiration to find someone so close to what I perceive my critical temperament and inclinations to be.

July's People, by Nadine Gordimer

[Wikipedia summary of plot: "The novel is set during a fictional civil war in which black South Africans have violently overturned the system of apartheid. The story follows the Smales, a liberal White South African family who were forced to flee Johannesburg to the native village of their black servant, July."]

What do we call July's People now?

In 1981, when the novel was published, it might have been called prophetic or predictive—as it was intended. Yet the specificity of the novel's vision—that of a thoroughly armed insurrection of South African blacks against the white government, aided and equipped by Soviets and Cubans—prevented it from assuming, at the moment of its publication, the quality of an allegory, of a dystopia in the sense we are used to. Instead, in one of the two reviews in The New York Times, by Anne Tyler, the novel was praised for its description of the actually existing tensions already present in the populace—the novel was, first and foremost, seen as a report on the current state of race relations, and only secondarily as a near-future nightmare. In fact, Tyler neatly brackets off the predictive aspects of the story—whites forced to flee from their homes, battles surging through the streets of suburbs and cities alike—as "a wonderful adventure story."

In the other NYT review, by Anatole Broyard, the predictive element is again subordinated to its descriptive function: "''July's People' is Nadine Gordimer's projection of what it will be like if or when the time comes for the whites to leave Johannesburg. And since she writes more knowingly about South Africa than anyone else, this may be history in the making that we are reading." What is important about the novel, it seems, is that it transmits Gordimer's knowledge of what South Africa is like; the imaginative work of thinking what might happen next is simply a product of that knowledge, no different from a "projection" of likely scenarios at the end of a policy brief or an article in The Economist.

By 1991, when Gordimer received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the situation in South Africa and neighboring countries had changed to the extent that this particular future was no longer capable of seeming like a "projection" or extrapolation of the current state of affairs. It had become a work of imagination and had begun to assume an allegorical meaning. The Nobel Prize citation actually uses the term dystopia to name the "vision" Gordimer presents in the novel's last scene: "To Maureen and what she stands for, the future appears to hold out the opposite of utopia, a dystopia. This is not Nadine Gordimer's only vision, but it is one which she has found it necessary to give expression to."

"And what she stands for"—this is allegorical language, and, in fact, the Nobel citation is full of it, full of the image of Gordimer not as reporter, but as artist, the maker of consciousnesses: "Above all, it is people, individual men and women, that have captured her and been captured by her. It is their lives, their heaven and hell, that absorb her. The outer reality is ever present, but it is through her characters that the whole historical process is crystallized."

In both the 1981 reviews and in the 1991 Nobel citation, Gordimer is recognized for her powers as both artist and reporter, but within those ten years the ordering of those two roles reversed, and I think we can see in this reversal a macrocosm of the kind of balancing act that occurs within the Nobel citation itself.

The equilibrium of these roles—reporter/activist and artist/visionary—is neatly kept throughout the Nobel citation; it assures us that "she makes visible the extremely complicated and utterly inhuman living conditions in the world of racial segregation. She feels political responsibility, and does not shy away from its consequences, but will not allow it to affect her as a writer: her texts are not agitatorial, not progandistic. Still, her works and the deep insights she offers contribute to shaping reality." This is tremendously balanced: she is political and thus her writing affects reality, but she "will not allow it to affect her as a writer"—she won't allow what political consequences her writings have dictate what she writes.

Yet implicit in the citation is an acknowledgment that at least in terms of what she chooses to write about, Gordimer's politics are extremely consequential. She writes of a firmly historicized situation, and in order to achieve what the committee calls "wide human relevance," Gordimer must first be turned into a writer of character, not of history (again, "The outer reality is ever present, but it is through her characters that the whole historical process is crystallized"). Then, because that doesn't fully resolve the deep historicity of those characters, she must be turned into a creator of a dystopian vision. And this despite the fact that the kind of violence which Gordimer described was perhaps closer to reality in 1985-1989 than it was the year the book was published—i.e., the reality of violence in South Africa was fresher in 1991 than the book itself. And let's not even mention that, in 1991, Mandela had been released but universal suffrage was still not achieved.

And where does that leave us in 2009? Reading July's People now, the book I kept thinking of was actually Saramago's Blindness. Gordimer's construction of dialogue often leaves it completely unattributed, and this is frequently confusing, creating an effect somewhat similar to passages in Blindness where (because of the state of the characters), speakers cannot be matched up with their words. Also, the character of Maureen bears more than a passing resemblance to the ophthalmologist's wife in Blindness: I wouldn't be entirely surprised to find that Saramago was influenced by Gordimer's book.

Yet July's People crucially lacks—and never aspires to—the symbolic and referential ambiguity necessary to create and sustain a "dystopic vision." Unlike Blindness, unlike even 1984, one can't read the events, characters, or dynamics of July's People onto other historical or ideological situations; the imaginative energies which turn something like 1984 into a permanent prediction and permanent critique (of totalitarianism or absolutism in any form) are directed to other purposes in July's People. In simpler terms, the adjective 'Gordimeresque' (in the sense of 'Orwellian' or 'Kafkaesque') is impossible.

Yet because of Gordimer's Nobel, we expect her to be a writer of "wide human relevance" and so it is difficult not to read July's People in the terms we have come to associate with the widest human relevance: character/consciousness and dystopia. The increasing historical distance to apartheid, to the 1980s, to Communism, and even to Gordimer's award itself seems to require that we increase the weight of its allegorical/dystopic valence, even when this is obviously invalid.

I think reading July's People now becomes a sort of challenge to check this balancing, to re-evaluate why we even feel the need to balance the roles of artist and reporter in the first place, to understand that balancing as itself an upholding of the pre-eminent value we place on what is, in the last analysis, a narrow understanding of "wide human relevance." Because it is so difficult to add the kinds of weights and values (of character/consciousness, of allegory/dystopia) we so customarily add to any novel to balance its historicity or localized context, this balancing act requires a certain amount of conscious effort to accomplish, is laid bare, and can be resisted.

Jane Addams, "The Snare of Preparation"

Tell Me a Riddle, by Tillie Olsen

There are four stories in this very brief book: "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" "O Yes," and "Tell Me a Riddle." It is entirely my fault and not Olsen's, but all through the first three stories, I kept wishing I were reading Grace Paley once again; I missed her wit and warmth. Olsen is not terribly funny, and her warmth is less glow and more burn; there is an intensity to her stories which wrenches, building without cresting; Paley is all dynamics—building, cresting, falling, spinning, redirecting, doubling back, and most of all accelerating.

I should double back myself, however, to speak to the similarities of these two writers. Both have a completely unalienated relationship to what is simply called handiwork: sewing, ironing, cooking, even dressing. Their writing, as well as the scattered depictions of reading in their work, is not part of a different existential order or rank; it is mixed in, sometimes as an escape from, but never as a triumph over the quotidian. Activities of the mind live with and in activities of the hands.

Still, as I said, I can't read the first three stories without considerably missing Paley's charm; they are so much a part of Paley's world and its population that I can't help feeling any absence of the Paley humor to be a profound lack. The fourth story, while it does not move out of or beyond this world, nevertheless achieves everything on its own terms. Its greater length may go some way to accounting for this, or its position as the last story: perhaps I was by then relaxed into Olsen's slower rhythms of narration and dialogue. And this is clearly Olsen's intention: while I'm sure all writers of a short story collection pay attention the published order of their stories, there is a greater deliberateness to the patterning of certain ideas and even people that exceeds even the scope of the linked or related story collection. The comparison between parts of a literary work and the movements of a musical work is overdone, but there is something to be said for how Olsen creates ripples of thought which hang in the air until they are answered in the last story by a new, stronger ripple.

***
I am constantly amazed at how well John Leonard could praise a book, and the introduction he wrote to the 1994 re-printing of this book is a classic case of this ability. It's obscene for me not to quote Olsen's really fantastic prose and to quote instead Leonard's introduction, but I simply loved this passage, and find in it a sort of beatific rationale for reading:

we enter books as if into a conspiracy: for company, of course, and narrative, and romance; for advice on how to be decent and brave; for a slice of the strange, the shock of the Other, the witness not yet heard from, archaeologies forgotten, ignored, or despised; and also for radiance and transcendence, that radioactive glow of genius in the dark.

Ball of Fire (1941), directed by Howard Hawks

Watched this film last night, and while it may only be the second best film about Barbara Stanwyck conning a professor and then falling in love with him (The Lady Eve is better—no one can compare with Preston Sturges, at least from 1940-1948), it's an absolute delight. Gary Cooper may be a little awkward in his role as a brain, but Dana Andrews is (obviously) a natural as the evil gangster, the supporting cast of avuncular scholars (above, as the Seven Dwarfs) is charming and hilarious, and Barbara Stanwyck is, well, Barbara Stanwyck. The film features a ferociously, deviously brilliant script from Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett complete with all the racy cleverness that makes me sometimes think we might not be better off (script-wise, at least) going back to the Hays Code. Would Judd Apatow even be funny if innuendo were still considered an art?

On Specialist Realism: Infinite Summer Post #2

When James Wood coined the term "hysterical realism," he angered or irritated a large number of readers who found his judgments tone-deaf and his tastes narrow. Yet he also clearly struck a chord with an unusual number of people. At the very least, the name stuck.

I think the received story for that essay's success goes something like this: Wood's essay was the diagnosis a lot of people were waiting to hear; (some) readers had intuited a general malady in fiction, some were even making the right connections, but "hysterical realism" put a sharp term on this plague, asserting that there was a common origin for the multitude of symptoms.

A lot depends on that name, which I've always found to be inexplicable, probably because "hysterical" has so little analytical value. "Hysterical," besides having an ignominious history as a term of contempt for "eccentric" women, is merely pejorative; it doesn't explain, it doesn't clarify, it merely accuses, shames, castigates. Wood does make a number of observations of what this type of novel does, but these strategic arguments are almost unrelated to the tactically unmatchable brilliance of a catchy name. All you're left with is a kind of neologismic abracadabra, but most people find it difficult to remember an essay-length argument, and boy, do nomothetic fallacies sell.

I think hysterical realism is a lousy name for a lazy generalization, but I do think that the fact that people obviously responded to a singular name for a "genre" encompassing writers like DFW, Pynchon, DeLillo, Rushdie, and Zadie Smith is worth following up on. Although I don't think renaming "hysterical realism" will improve anyone's ability to analyze these actually very different authors and their books, I think a new term might help the folks who really like these books talk to people who don't; it might at the very least allow us to talk about why these books might engender highly conflicting judgments and feelings.

Wood starts his harangue by sneering at "storytelling."

The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and substories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs. Indeed, vitality is storytelling, as far as these books are concerned… Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on.

I don't think anybody seriously objects to too many stories or "substories" in novels; isn't this what we praise in a television show like The Wire—the network-narrative proliferation of stories and substories? Not to mention the fact that this emergent fabulist malignancy that Wood wants to irradiate is actually a much more historically central mode for the novel than the staid alternative of well-manicured plots and coolly distanced narration: think of Boccaccio, think of Chaucer, of Rabelais, of Sterne, of the picaresque, of any series of novels—incessant proliferation of (or cycling through) micro-narratives is not a shoddy new wing—it's a cornerstone of the novel.

So storytelling is almost surely a red herring. Wood also turns to the idea that the characters in these novels are all caricatures: there aren't "people" in them. But Wood also makes clear that being unpeopled hasn't really stopped a large number of authors from finding (very enthusiastic) readers. No, what I think Wood finally gets to (more so in his review of The Corrections than in the "Hysterical Realism" piece) is the idea that too many authors know too much about stuff. "[C]ontemporary American fiction, whose characteristic products are books of great self-consciousness with no selves in them; curiously arrested books which know a thousand different things—How to make the best Indonesian fish curry! The sonics of the trombone! The drug market in Detroit! The history of strip cartoons!—but do not know a single human being." Back in "Hysterical Realism," he puts the point more simply: "Information has become the new character."

I give a little more credence to the idea that something like this is actually behind a good deal of any frustration with someone like David Foster Wallace. Wood's specific problem with the pleonastic plenitude of information in a book like Infinite Jest is mainly that it's bottom-line futile: the world's always going to have the jump on you, information-wise. I don't know how much of Bellow's occasional criticism Wood's read, but his objections sound a lot like the following passage from an encyclopedia entry Bellow wrote in 1963 for a series called The Great Ideas Today:

realistic verisimilitude (of the O’Hara sort) has become burdensome and difficult, and that it requires a degree of special knowledge which only a small number of fanatical devotees can attain. In an era of specialization such as ours, even a botanist, studying plant hormones, let us say, will not know what a colleague in plant ecology is doing. Literally to know what he is writing about would impose an impossible strain on the most dedicated realist. The most informational of novelists can no longer adequately inform us. The world is really too much for the realist to cope with.

What's highly amusing about this quote is that, nearly 25 years later, Bellow would write a novel (More Die of Heartbreak) featuring a botanist character, and would provide the reader with some semi-recondite data about botany. Time makes a self-contradiction of us all.

At any rate, what I think is important is that this objection to detail is, more specifically, a gripe about detail that has obviously been arrived at by research—as opposed to details that are the result of mere observation. In either case, a certain density is the objective, one that is meant to signal that the artist is, in some sense, a specialist, willing to undertake extensive yet minute pains and labors to get all the details right, whether that's the way light plays on a woman's hair or the way drugs affect the human physiology. The specialist realist is someone who believes heart and soul the Carlyle quote that "Genius… means the transcendent capacity of taking trouble."

But the detail arrived at by pure observation (for some strange reason) often gets a pass; lyricism and le mot juste are seen as somehow more natural to the novel than highly technical nerditude. Perhaps it's as simple as some ineradicable "two cultures" idea—a notion that science and math are inherently alien to the word world. Which is why a writer like Joseph O'Neill and a book like Netherland isn't really expected to go into much detail about a fairly substantial aspect of his protagonist's life—his career as an energy trader. O'Neill's vividly observed detail is, for many, the proper mode of novel-writing. Or, perhaps, the most famous evasion of science/technology in a novel: Henry James's absolute reticence to specify the industry and product that has made the fortunes of the family in The Ambassadors.

Yet many very popular books—technothrillers, historical dramas, period pieces of all kinds—are totally crammed with obviously researched detail, and so it seems strange that its presence in literary fiction would disgruntle. However, I think if we look at some specific instances of specialist knowledge present in Infinite Jest, we can get some idea of what might rankle or put off at least a few of its readers.

Specialized knowledges pervade the book—tennis, recreational drug use, optics, burglary, even punting (surely the most narrowly specialized position in football). But one of the more (in)famous elements of "research" in the novel is the filmography Wallace includes in endnote 24. In the age of IMDb, we might be apt to forget that the filmography is (or was) actually a highly specialized and intensely laborious feat of archival research, but the almost eight-and-a-half pages of James O. Incandenza's collected works should surely remind us that a filmography is actually the product of research, and not Googling.

Yet there was, of course, no research necessary for composing this "artifact"—having no basis in reality, everything in it is a pure product of imagination. Yet Wallace never seems comfortable simply acknowledging that the imagination that produced it is his own. In just about as many ways as possible, Wallace continually disrupts the filmography with secondary or tertiary commentary to let us know that he's looking at it from the outside too: I kept waiting for that click where the self-distancing irony would drop away and, as with Borges or Pynchon or Bolaño or even (especially) Auster, you get a real note of dread or mystery where the author seems to have been finally convinced of the reality of his artifice. Even in the last entry, which is about The Entertainment itself, there are three skeptical footnotes embedded.

And this type of thing occurs many times in the text: consider the phrase, "Goethe's well-known 'Bröckengespenst' phenomenon³⁸" (88). If it's so well-known, why the hell does it need to be footnoted? This feels like Wallace simply can't decide how to be authoritative: does he want to be assholically authoritative ("well-known"), learnedly authoritative (using the German term in the first place), or helpfully authoritative (sticking in a footnote)? If the confusion is simply an attempt to undermine the idea of authority in the first place, then it needs to be decisive confusion: subversion can't be done lackadaisically, and self-subversion even less so.

The perfect example of this indecisive subversion comes twenty pages before, in the first section about poor Kate Gompert: "Something was almost too overt about the pathos of the posture: this exact position was illustrated in some melancholic Watteau-era print on the frontispiece to Yevtuschenko's Field Guide to Clinical States" (68). "Something… almost… some…"—these are words that aren't even tactically indecisive—they're too quotidian really to be noticed, similar in effect to throwing in a "like" every few pages of narration. So they don't truly subvert the over-done specificities of "overt… pathos… exact… Watteau-era… frontispiece to Yevtuschenko's Field Guide to Clinical States." They don't really ironize the position of authority taken by someone who would be this specific so much as they peel Wallace away from fully occupying it. It's an approximate deconstruction of authority, and I think that approximateness pisses some people (including me, some of the time) off.

Most of Infinite Jest, I think, does not do this approximate deconstruction act; the bulk of it is what can be defined as specialist realism—which I think is actually a broadly popular mode of writing. I don't think very many people mind writerly ostentation by itself: there are simply far too many popular authors who are grossly ostentatious for this to be the case. And readers of all kinds are capable of showing enormous patience with heavily-detailed and at times rather tedious passages of questionable importance to the overall novel. "Specialist realism" is not terribly problematic to most readers, and is often even considered enjoyable. (Consider, here, Wallace's enthusiasm for Tom Clancy: there is not as great a distance between the two as one might think.) This mode of writing, however, sometimes slips into a different mode of writing that is indecisively subversive—a lukewarm irony that I think turns nearly everyone off. This is present, too, in Infinite Jest, and in order to have a conversation among people who really like the book and people who can't get through it, I think it's necessary to begin by separating this lukewarmness from the specialist realism that actually makes the novel so captivating.

Wallace may have had very well-thought-out, very theoretically smart reasons for trying to have things both (or more) ways, for trying to be indecisive, but there are lots of things which are really theoretically well-grounded which are simply annoying. I'm sure there are folks who think that the lukewarm ironical mode is really brilliant and is actually the most brilliant thing about the novel. I'd be happy to hear those arguments, but I want to make clear that I don't really find this lukewarmness all that much of an obstacle to enjoying the book. So please, don't confuse me with attacking Wallace or "hysterical realism" or any of that stuff.

"The Oxford English Dictionary defines..."

One of my biggest pet peeves in scholarly prose is the habit of advancing an argument by citation of the dictionary definition of one or more of your key terms.

Is this really all that analytically valid, or just rhetorically decorative, maybe even a little fetishistic? Maybe even a little insecure? It's a non-structural buttress in almost all cases, present merely for the appearance of greater support.

Could it be a hold-over from the older, more philological orientation of literary studies? I'm inclined to think not because it is used so rarely in that mode. One of the few adequate uses of this rhetorical device I've seen recently came in Jenny Davidson's Breeding, where she actually traces the word through a succession of dictionaries. Diachronic uses (reminding the reader of an archaic definition would be another good use) are entirely reasonable, but the synchronic is just word-dressing.

I think that the O.E.D. (it's almost always the O.E.D. that is used) is quite simply a sort of name-check authoritative reference that gets dropped in rather like a flavoring particle in German, identical in function to the frequent footnoted references you see to big-named figures that take the form "Foucault makes a similar point in regards to the panopticon…" These aren't so much ways of building up the argument as showing that your argument is neighborly with someone important. This is talismanic, not analytical.

Because really, how often is the precise articulation of the denotative essence of a word a revelation? Aren't we as readers usually capable of evaluating whether a scholar is using her terms in a manner consonant with standard definitions? If there is a specific aspect of the word's definition which needs highlighting, can't the scholar simply define her own terms, and then we as readers can figure out if she's using it legitimately? If the term is itself so vexed that an O.E.D. citation is "required" to pin it down in univocal terms, maybe the scholar should actually talk through that complexity rather than pre-empting it by citation.

Actually, I think it's just a case of scholars being too tentative, feeling like they can't begin working with specific terms unless they're drawing them from somewhere else—they need someone else to say all the words they want to work with before they can begin working with them. You come up with a set of terms that you want to play with throughout your article or your monograph, and you need some way to introduce them, and you feel awkward just saying "Here's what I'm going to do with 'empire'" and letting the reader decide if you're making sense.

Sorry, I was just flipping through an introduction to a book that I'm really eager to read, and the author feels it necessary to use the O.E.D. to define two of the words in the title in order to draw out an opposition or a paradox that could simply have been stated flatly. As I said, it's a pet peeve—I don't disagree with the definitions, or the paradox the author foregrounds between them; I just don't find it necessary to wield the O.E.D. in such a way, and a little insulting to both of our intellects.

The Culture of the New Capitalism, by Richard Sennett

Scott McLemee has described Richard Sennett in the following terms, which I think are accurate and to the point: "Sennett’s work, if not Marxist, is at the very least grounded in some notion of mankind as the species that creates itself through the labor process."

I think this specification of what Sennett (minimally) owes to Marx is valuable because, although it is relatively simple, this notion of self-creation-through-labor is often what seems to go missing when people go hunting for Marxism or Marxian ideas around the Left, looking for ammunition either to smear leftists or to reinvigorate them.

The idea that humankind creates itself through the labor process is not, I suppose, a terribly radical notion, and for that reason, perhaps, it is not very central to many of the most illustrious Marxist or Marxian projects of our day. It disappears behind "fidelity to the event" within Badiou, and gets constantly screened out by Žižek's Lacanianism. I haven't read enough of Negri/Hardt to say for sure, but their conception of the multitude, from what I understand of it, seems to focus on autonomy in a way that very well may be antithetical to this notion.

I think Sennett addresses this fact obliquely within his own personal history: he begins these lectures (the material of the book was originally presented as The Castle Lectures at Yale) by reflecting on his eager participation in the New Left, and notes that the principles espoused most concretely in the Port Huron Statement have, in a sense, been fulfilled, but with results quite opposite to those wished.

The goal for rulers today, as for radicals fifty years ago, is to take apart rigid bureaucracy.
The insurgents of my youth believed that by dismantling institutions they could produce communities: face-to-face relations of trust and solidarity, relations constantly negotiated and renewed, a communal realm in which people became sensitive to one another's needs. This certainly hasn't happened. The fragmenting of big instititutions has left many people's lives in a fragmented state: the places they work more resembling train stations than villages, as family life is disoriented by the demands of work. Migration is the icon of the global age, moving on rather than settling in. Taking institutions apart has not produced more community. (2)

Sennett doesn't press too hard on this point—the New Left's values foreshadowing those of the New Capitalism—though he uses very similar terms to those above in conclusion, returning to this historical irony. (Some of the work of making this irony more concrete is provided by Thomas Frank in The Baffler¹ and The Conquest of Cool, although I wonder if Sennett might see the congruence of the New Left and New Capitalism on this question to be less collusive than Frank tends to paint it.)

At any rate, I think it is important to keep in mind that Sennett is using the New Left as a point for pushing off; these lectures are, in part, arguing that what the New Left failed to account for in their critique of bureaucracy is precisely what must be salvaged—the value of narrative (as in personal narrative), usefulness, and craftsmanship. It is these three values which he believes are most threatened by the new capitalism, as they are being purposely driven out of the workplace under three challenges:

The first concerns time: how to manage short-term relationships, and oneself, while migrating from task to task, job to job, place to place. If institutions no longer provide a long-term frame, the individual may have to improvise his or her life-narrative, or even do without any sustained sense of self.
The second challenge concerns talent: how to develop new skills, how to mine potential abilities, as reality's demands shift… The emerging social order militates against the ideal of craftsmanship, that is, learning to do just one thing really well; such commitment can often prove economically destructive. In place of craftsmanship, modern culture advances an idea of meritocracy which celebrates potential ability rather than past achievement.
The third challenge follows from this. It concerns surrender; that is, how to let go of the past. The head of a dynamic company recently asserted that no one owns their place in her organization, that past service in particular earns no employee a guaranteed place. How could one respond to that assertion positively? A peculiar trait of personality is needed to do so, one which discounts the experiences a human being has already had. This trait of personality resembles more the consumer ever avid for new things, discarding old if perfectly serviceable goods, rather than the owner who jealously guards what he or she already possesses. [I'd say it more resembles a fantasy baseball manager—or an armchair stockbroker.]
What I want to show is how society goes about searching for this ideal man or woman… A self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability, willing to abandon past experience is—to put a kindly face on the matter—an unusual sort of human being. Most people are not like this; they need a sustaining life narrative, they take pride in being good at something specific, and they value the experiences they've lived through. The cultural ideal required in new institutions thus damages many of the people who inhabit them. (4, 5)

That (long) passage acts as a very good prospectus for the rest of the book; Sennett bears down on this question in an extremely orderly manner, and takes his time filling in the picture of this culture. At times, much of what he says is extremely familiar—both in the way of description and in the way of critique. Yet it is not over-familiar, and it is so well-stated and so well-organized that the value becomes not so much the insight as the articulation—the book is indispensable because it accumulates all the stray thoughts and angles and observations, seeing clearly the larger shape which each one partially illuminates.

Which is not to say that Sennett's insights aren't powerful and frequently new; I think that his chapter on politics as consumption adds some particularly original ideas to that general idea, and some of them have become much more interesting (and ambiguous) after the last election.

I like this book a lot; I think it is tremendously instructive, and is as purely illuminative of some extraordinarily complex formations as you're ever likely to find.

***
¹Speaking of The Baffler, Twitter tells me that it's being revived!

"I am in here." Infinite Summer Post #1

I know virtually nothing more about holography than what Wikipedia tells me. (Yes, pun intended.) It comes up twice, though, within the first ten pages of Infinite Jest: once in the title of one of the "nine separate application essays, some of which of nearly monograph-length" ("The Implications of Post-Fourier Transformations¹ for a Holographically Mimetic Cinema," p. 7) and once in reference to Dennis Gabor, the inventor of holography, whom Hal says he believes "may very well have been the Antichrist" (p. 12).

I think this paragraph from Wikipedia is the most relevant to what follows:

Though holography is often referred to as 3D photography, this is a misconception. A better analogy is sound recording where the sound field is encoded in such a way that it can later be reproduced. In holography, some of the light scattered from an object or a set of objects falls on the recording medium. A second light beam, known as the reference beam, also illuminates the recording medium, so that interference occurs between the two beams. The resulting light field is an apparently random pattern of varying intensity which is the hologram. It can be shown that if the hologram is illuminated by the original reference beam, a light field is diffracted by the reference beam which is identical to the light field which was scattered by the object or objects. Thus, someone looking into the hologram 'sees' the objects even though it may no longer be present. There are a variety of recording materials which can be used, including photographic film.

There are two other notable repetitions within this first section: Hal uses the word "lately" (intentionally homophonous to Gately, no doubt) on the very first page, and he asserts "I am in here" on both p. 3 and p. 13. Well, on p. 13, he says, "I'm in here."

I think what is being expressed is a certain fear of the mediation of existence, a feel of being antecedent to (and trapped behind) an after-image or reconstruction of the self. Hal feels that he is "no longer present" at or in the moment he is perceived, which is why "lately" is repeated and why he needs to assert that he is "in here"—he is in the hologram that the deans are seeing and interacting with.

I don't want to get ahead of myself here, but in some notable ways I think this fear is linked to the concerns Wallace expressed in his essay on television and U.S. culture, "E Unibus Pluram" [pdf]. In particular, I wonder if we can't think of irony itself as a sort of holographic image of culture, at least it is used in those manners which Wallace critiques.

This post is meant more as a sort of opening up of one line of thought I believe I'll be returning to over the course of my reading, rather than as a full exploration of this idea. Clearly, we're not very far into the novel, so doing more than remarking on a theme which may recur would be premature. GatelyErdedy's obsession over the cartridges of the Interlace viewer and his answering machine's message in the next section already return to a certain paranoia about the nature and consequences of recording. Obviously, there will be others.

What about you—first thoughts, anyone?

***
¹I'm pretty certain that should be "post-Fourier transforms," right? I mean, that's more common/more standard.

Søren Kierkegaard, "The Rotation Method"

Starting from a principle is affirmed by people of experience to be a very reasonable procedure; I am willing to humor them, and so begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

I sort of think of Kanye West ("We all self-conscious / I'm just the first to admit it") as the Kierkegaard of hip hop. And I've always wanted to extend this analogy to other artists, but nothing ever really comes to mind.

At any rate, I'd like to take advantage of one of Google Books's new features and begin a feature on this blog that I'll try to keep up every Sunday, taking its title from part of the Catholic Mass. Here's this week's Liturgy of the Word:



Unfortunately, some of the crucial passages at the very end are cruelly hidden (that is, those passages after page 239—those not displayed before then aren't really of great importance, and are actually generally misogynistic). I have a slightly different translation on hand, but here is the rest of it:

At every opportunity he was ready with a little philosophical lecture, a very tiresome harangue. Almost in despair, I suddenly discovered that he perspired copiously when talking. I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose, and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body. From the moment of making this discovery, all was changed. I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, merely to observe the perspiration on his brow and at the end of his nose.
The poet Baggesen says somewhere of someone that he was doubtless a good man, but that there was one insuperable objection against him, that there was no word that rhymed with his name. It is extremely wholesome thus to let the realities of life split upon an arbitrary interest. You transform something accidental into the absolute, and as such, into the object of your admiration. This has an excellent effect, especially when one is excited. This method is an excellent stimulus for many persons. You look at everything in life from the standpoint of a wager, and so forth. The more rigidly consistent you are in holding fast to your arbitrariness, the more amusing the ensuing combinations will be. The degree of consistency shows whether you are an artist or a bungler; for to a certain extent all men do the same. The eye with which you look at reality must constantly be changed…
The arbitrariness in oneself corresponds to the accidental in the external world. One should therefore always have an eye open for the accidental, always be expeditus if anything should offer. The so-called social pleasures for which we prepare a week or two in advance amount to so little; on the other hand, even the most insignificant thing may accidentally offer rich material for amusement. It is impossible here to go into detail, for no theory can adequately embrace the concrete. Even the most completely developed theory is poverty-stricken compared with the fullness which the man of genius easily discovers in his ubiquity.

By the way, just because I've labeled this a liturgy, don't think I also take it as gospel.