Friday Column: Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick thinks better literary criticism will save literature. That's right, in her recent Harper's essay, "Literary Entrails," Ozick argues that with the advent of better literary criticism

for [Jonathan] Franzen and [Ben] Marcus and everyone else who worries about the neglect of the literary novel, something instinctually different might begin to hover: a hint of innate kinship, a backdrop, the white noise of the era that claims us all. In times that are made conscious of themselves--a consciousness that only a critical infrastructure can supply--the varieties of literary experience become less antagonistic than inquisitively receptive.

I think there's a better chance of a DeLillo-esque cloud of reader-enhancing pollution descending over the American public than Ozick's "white noise" getting apathetic readers to the bookstore, and I find it a little disappointing that in her essay Ozick simply accepts that a reading crisis exists in America, offering not a shred of evidence. (Can't we even get a half-hearted reference to the NEA Reading At Risk report?)

But, I am with Ozick on her call for better criticism. Unsurprisingly, she singles out James Wood as ideal critic (and, yes, in a footnote she acknowledges that he is dogmatic about realism). These, in Ozick's view, are the virtues that make his writing ideal: "elasticity, history, connectedness; the visual, the tactile, the comic." Above all, for Ozick the key is "connectedness"; Wood engages not just a single book, but sees literature as a whole, understands relationships on many levels (e.g. between authors, between structure and language, between nations, between literature and other arts).

In exalting Wood for what he does best, Ozick is, in essence, calling for us all to slow down some. Enough with the mad rush of literature where we barely have time to contemplate spring's hot titles before summer assaults us with its books. Why not linger over those spring books (and the winter ones as well), think about them a little longer, say something about them that will last past the end of the year? With any luck, this slower, more contemplative critical approach to literature would foster a "cultural infrastructure" that "stimulates a literary consciousness," creating something that Ozick calls "the novel's ghostly twin."

Although ghostly, this twin, one presumes, would be more concrete than the current critical mass, which Ozick thinks quite thin indeed. Although in assailing our critical landscape Ozick takes shots at everything from literature professors to Amazon reviews (Aside: Do we really need to keep resurrecting this straw man? He's been pummeled into submission.), the centerpiece of Ozick's assault on criticism is last spring's much-discussed New York Times list of the "Best Novels Since 1980." Brilliantly puncturing A.O. Scott's self-satisfied, less-than-critical essay that accompanied the list, Ozick writes

Scott noted that the choices gave "a rich, if partial and unscientific picture of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details." Or call it flotsam and jetsam. You could not tell, from the novels that floated to the top, and from those bubbling vigorously below, anything more than that they were all written in varieties of the American language. You could not tell what, taken all together, they intimated in the larger sense--the tone of their time. A quarter-century encompasses a generation, and a generation does have a composite feel to it. But here nothing was composite, nothing joined these disparate writers to one another only the catchall of the question itself, dipping like a fishing net into the sea of fiction and picking up what was closest to the surface, or had already prominently surfaced. All these novels had been abundantly reviewed--piecemeal. No reviewer had thought to set Beloved beside Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (both are political novels historically disguised) to catch the cross-reverberations. No reviewer had thought to investigate the possibly intermarried lineage of any of these works: what, for instance, has Nick in Delillo's Underworld absorbed from the Nick of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby? The novels that rose up to meet the Book Review's inquiry had never been suspected of being linked, whether horizontally or vertically. It was as if each one was a wolf-child reared beyond . . .

One might add that, save for a few letters, a week later the Review had all but forgotten the exercise.

In the novel 1984 George Orwell demonstrated how a loss of memory can deform a country's political culture, and the same could be said for a literary one. Most often literary essays in popular publications are treated as super-sized book reviews. They almost exclusively cover newly published works, and, with some notable exceptions, most critics fail to seriously compare a work to an author's previous novels, let alone those written by other people. (Curiously, biographical details are generally accepted as providing better "context" for a review than literary details.)

Can we really say all we need to say about a novel right when it's been published? Won't a novel look quite different 1, 5, or 10 years out? Take, for example, one of the landmarks of 20th-century literature, The Recognitions. Thoroughly tarred and misunderstood by a condescending press when it was published, this book might have been consigned to the dustbin but for the rehabilitative work of a critic who has been at the height of his profession for three decades. How many novels could use a similar revising up or down? How much could our ongoing discussion of recent, substantial novels be enhanced if critics undertook to compare them to others of the era, or to examine how they relate to books from decades past?

Although Ozick is right to note how The New York Times book list demonstrates the disconnectedness of criticism, it also points to another problem with book discussion these days: the unspoken assumptions that underlie the culture. The Times's selections for best books were unremarkable and obvious partly because they were picked by people who, when asked to think of the best books they could, thought of unremarkable and obvious ones.

The same culture that generated the Times's list tells us that your average book review is the most discussion a book should get. It's tells us that Kakutani is a celebrated reviewer, that authors should be put on radio shows for interviews with people who haven't read the book, that Oprah (for all the good she's done) is our number one literary tastemaker.

This is what we're dealing with, and to bring about the better criticism that Ozick longs for there will have to be a lot of mind-changing as to what constitutes in-depth criticism for a lay audience. In a recent column, critic J. Peder Zane mentioned that The New York Review of Books is a middlebrow publication that's considered highbrow. This is precisely it--if everyone already thinks that New York Review is a bit too intellectual for a general readership, then who will ever try to outdo it?

But to take this all back to the question of how better criticism will promote reading. Ozick takes the question animating Franzen v. Marcus--who will read?--and replaces it with a different one: why read? The implicit answer, apparently, is: to join this great culture of literary scholarship! Better criticism, according to Ozick's argument, will teach people how to be better readers which will make them read more. One problem here: if people aren't reading books to begin with, why would they read all this great criticism that's supposed to get them reading? If you think that The Corrections is a big weight to get off your shoulder, why in God's name would you want to add a number of critical essays on top?

Why read? It's a good question and it has a very simple answer: read for yourself.

This answer is demonstrated by a professor quoted by Ozick who gives his non-reading students a good lashing:

I urged students to believe that the merit of reading a great poem, play, or novel consisted in the pleasure of gaining access to deeply imagined lives other than their own. Over the years, that opinion, still cogent to me, seems to have lost much of its persuasive force. Students seem to be convinced that their own lives are the primary and sufficient incentive. They report that reading literature is mainly a burden. Those students who think of themselves as writers and take classes in "creative writing" to define themselves as poets or fiction writers evidently write more than they read, and regard reading as a gross expenditure of time and energy. They are not open to the idea that one learns to write by reading good writers.

"They report that reading literature is a burden." These are people who do not read for themselves. You do not characterize things that you do for yourself as burdens. You describe as "burdens" things that you have to do because they are part of that obstacle course called life. This is the viewpoint that sees books as homework assignments, as things that have to be dealt with, as, perhaps, at best, ways of absorbing knowledge.

People who view reading as a burden don't need better criticism. They need someone to help them understand that the pleasure to be found in reading a book is found in reading a book.

for those of us who have already figured this out, though, Ozick's better criticism would be very welcome. It would add another reason to read, a further way to engage a book once it had been closed and to continually re-think and re-evaluate books that have been around for a while. This might not bring any new readers into the fold, but it might make better readers out of those who already do so. Over time, I think that would make books better for everyone.

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Comments

[R J Keefe]

I mulled over "Literary Entrails" for about a month before writing about it. What's so interesting is that the Siddhartha Deb piece about Robert Bolaño in the same issue of Harper's answers Ms Ozick's request for literary criticism, while James Wood's review in the NYTBR really doesn't, not quite.

Getting out Wood's "The Broken Estate" and reading his essay about Woolf's mysticism, I've been directed to the short stories of Chekhov, to find out what Woolf might have learned from him. I wonder if I will see it.

[Steven Augustine]

"Getting out Wood's "The Broken Estate" and reading his essay about Woolf's mysticism, I've been directed to the short stories of Chekhov, to find out what Woolf might have learned from him. I wonder if I will see it."

Let's not forget that almost any point can be made convincing, and any connection drawn or illumination provided, by a persuasive writer, regardless of the actual "truth" of the interpretation...which is the very "magic" of writing. In other words: it ain't a science, and James Wood is as much of a literary performer as the writers whose performances he handles.

"People who view reading as a burden don't need better criticism. They need someone to help them understand that the pleasure to be found in reading a book is found in reading a book."

Most of all they should be discouraged from writing.