Conversational Reading

"The paradigm of certain disappointments"

When I was in New York last week, I saw Gary Indiana read from his strange, rebarbative, yet oddly compelling new novel The Shanghai Gesture at 192 Books, and in subsequent days I read through the volume of reviews, essays, and articles that he published last year, Utopia's Debris. As I read, I found myself returning again and again to the following collectible line from its early pages:

Our representations of ourselves are even more selective and partial than our portraiture of other people.

It comes from an obituary appreciation of writer Gavin Lambert (1924-2005), and the thought is more than just an attempt at aphorism: Indiana uses it to begin to describe a type of

peculiarly modern first-person narrator who is not the principal subject of the narrative, and also the "I" who, like Proust's Marcel, performs as the author's surrogate, while the question of whether they are the same person has almost no speculative importance.

Indiana is writing there of Lambert's first book, a collection of stories of louche Hollywood types, The Slide Area (1959), but he returns to the concept in more detail later in the essay, when considering that book alongside one of Lambert's later novels, The Goodbye People (1971). Both books

invite the close identification of an unnamed "I" with the author but, more significantly, shift frequently backward and forward in time and foreground a succession of individuals as the temporary subjects of the narrative--this portmanteau effect is rarely used in literature, and even more rarely used effectively. Aside from Proust, whose work contains multiple structures and whose principal work is a single, many-chambered novel, the notable examples include Tolstoy's story "The Forged Coupon," Gide's Caves du Vatican, and some of Bunuel's late films.

Indiana is modest enough not to mention his own novels in that mode, the best of which is the stunning, and sadly neglected, Do Everything in the Dark (2003), which I would rank as one of the best novels of the past decade. As for Lambert, though I knew his name from the novel Inside Daisy Clover (1966), which was made into a film starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford, I'll admit to having never heard of his other books, for which Indiana makes a convincing case. Serpent's Tail reprinted The Slide Area in 1998--looks like a trip to my local bookstore is in order.

Utopia's Debris captures Indiana in all his voices: admiring, catty, cynical, angry, appreciative, caustic, thoughtful, and--even when he's wryly piling on viciously well-chosen adjectives--always fundamentally serious. In the preface, he writes that the pieces in the book,

in the end, reflect my own tastes, the seductions to which my own sensibilities have surrendered me, and that they do not, alas, primarily group themselves under the sign of eros, but of death. If many of the works and artists examined in these pages heighten a tonic sense of life, more often they have instilled an acute and not entirely uncomfortable reminder of my own mortality, the ephemeral nature of consciousness, and represent something of the struggle of individuals to wrest from their brief time of existence something of value.

Perhaps more important, Indiana's essays, like his novels, pulse with empathy; the following lines from a piece about artist Barbara Kruger could serve as a pithy summation of Do Everything in the Dark:

This is the subtext: The conviction that empathy can, in fact, change the world--a little at a time, and not always, and you will only improve things a little bit, anyway, but if you don't even try, the incurably ugly side of human nature has already won the war inside us all.

Do Everything in the Dark is out of print, but readily available used, Utopia's Debris new; you could certainly do worse with your book-buying budget this week than picking up the pair.

Levi Discovers an Echo Chamber

Levi gets a little disillusioned about professional book reviewing:

Much about my attitude towards the Book Review has changed since that weekend in May 2005 when I began this pursuit. For one thing, I knew none of the editors or critics who wrote for the Book Review back then, whereas by now I have met or corresponded with many of the NYTBR regulars and staffers. I was completely unaware, back then, of the hyperactive and highly competitive internal world inhabited by professional literary critics, too many of whom (I have now learned) are more concerned with impressing their peers than enriching their readers.

Not much to add to that. Sure, exceptions to the above exist, but not as many as should.

When You're Belated, Make Lemonade

I've been reading Harold Bloom's classic work The Anxiety of Influence, and I've come upon an odd quote. It's the kind of thing that sounds so right that I really want to like it, but I'm not entirely sure I understand what it means.

So, I'm throwing it out to the crowd. Anyone want to take a shot at unpacking this?

Cultural belatedness is never acceptable to a major writer, though Borges made a career out of exploiting his secondariness.

Conrad on English: Throwing Mud At A Wall

Ever since I read William H. Gass's essay in the most recent Review of Contemporary Fiction, I've wondered about a remark he made:

Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad agreed that writing in English, as contrasted with writing in French, was like throwing mud at a wall, but I think that most words are closets crammed with suits shirts socks and dresses, panties hats and gloves, and I see words dressing themselves in the wardrobes of others, first of all picking out this or that sense and then asking: will this skirt go with that blouse? does this tie match my shirt?

I'm sorry that I'm going to have to disregard the rather interesting remarks Gass makes toward the end of this sentence and stick to what he says about Ford and Conrad, that they "agreed that writing in English, as contrasted with writing in French, was like throwing mud at a wall."

I thought that was a beautiful sentiment, not least because it seems to say so much, but what exactly does it say?

Well, in quoting from an essay Guy Davenport wrote on Joseph Conrad, Wyatt Mason might have given me my answer:

English words, Joseph Conrad complained, say more than you want them to say. Oaken, for instance, has overtones which force one to say in remarking that a table is de chene, that it is also solid and British. Brazen and standing waters are not phrases that a stylist, poet, or prose writer would consider without making certain that he wanted to overtones as well.

As Mason notes, this essay comes from Davenport's collection of literary criticism The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays.

Related Posts

• Basking in Hell: Returning to William H. Gass's The Tunnel
• Gass Flays Sentences
• Overcoming Your James Wood Habit
• On The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Post-Colonial Criticism: Cherry-Picking Evidence?

At The Valve they're discussing whether post-colonial criticism "assumes its conclusions even before it begins."

The responses so far seem to amount to "yeah, so what?" But lots of interesting variants of that. Several, for instance, are making the valid point that this is what all criticism (and in fact all scholarship) does. There's also the point that:

If *all* postcolonial criticism means is to locate effects of imperialism in culture, then we clearly have no conclusions to begin with.  We simply have objects of study.  I don’t think it’s a controversial idea to be open to possible connections between a major historical process and the art that emerged during that process.

As a worthwhile offshoot of this conversation, Andrew Seal discusses Said's reading of Austen, from a postcolonial perspective:

It's curious to read Persuasion in the light of the (in)famous Said reading of Mansfield Park in his Culture and Imperialism. Said pointed out the Bertram family's Antigua plantation was a sort of enabling fiction, sustaining the family's fortunes and thus making the action of the novel possible in a very real way. Said focused in particular on a casual exchange between Fanny Price and Sir Thomas about the plantation, drawing some fairly broad conclusions. A number of critics (and likely a number of readers) have taken issue with Said's rough handling of Austen and with the implication that Austen was just one more lackey of the slave trade and British imperial oppression more generally.

Pro Close Reading

The blogosphere is fun for lots and lots of reasons. But one of the best is that occasionally, by virtue of some monkey-pounding-typewriter law of probability, you will encounter two posts on the same day that are almost perfect complements.

Thus, Wyatt Mason opines (quite correctly):

Criticism that doesn’t read closely isn’t literary criticism. If it’s anything, it’s personal essay—a perfectly admirable category of thing, and a perfectly reasonable form in which a writer can write about reading as an experience—but not literary criticism.

And the the Literary Saloon rages (equally correctly):

We like our reviews to be ... well, reviews of the books ostensibly under review. Too often, however, in certain periodicals, they tend not to be, especially when they are 'reviews' of non-fiction titles. In fact, it's pretty common practise, so perhaps it's unfair to pick on a specific example (pretty much any edition of The New York Review of Books would yield several ...), but Anthony Gottlieb's ... review of The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh (see our review-overview) in The New Yorker really annoyed us. Gottlieb offers his take on the subject matter, rather than on how Waugh deals with it and presents it, leaving the reader none the wiser whether or not Waugh's book has anything to it to recommend it. . . .

Rather than Gottlieb's alternate/condensed version of Wittgenstein-history we would have preferred a review of the book.

To all this I can only add my affirmation and my great hopes that reviewers, no matter if they're writing for the local paper or The New Yorker, actually practice the art of reviewing in their reviews.

Related Posts

• NBCC Panel Is Against Close Reading
• Overcoming Your James Wood Habit
• A Critical Experience

Women's Writing

In The New York Times, Katie Roiphe offers a good review of Elaine Showalter's new historio-critical volume of women American writers, A Jury of Her Peers.

Roiphe seems concerned that Showalter is a little too caught up in categorizing over critiquing, and she makes some worthwhile points along the way:

As Elizabeth Bishop put it, “art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc. into two sexes is to emphasize values that are not art.” Showalter handles these rebels by corralling them into special subchapters with titles like “Dissenters.” One of the dissenters, Cynthia Ozick, argued against expecting “artists who are women . . . to deliver ‘women’s art,’ as if 10,000 other possibilities, preoccupations, obsessions, were inauthentic, for women, or invalid, or worse yet, lyingly evasive.”

Though she refers to “A Jury of Her Peers” as literary history, Showalter is less attentive to artistic merit, to what separates good fiction from bad, than to cultural significance; she is less concerned with the nuances of style or art than with the political ramifications of a book, or the spirited or adventurous behavior of its lady characters. She is not interested in whether the writers she discusses are good, or in the question of how their best writing works, but in whether they are exploring feminist themes. And so she ends up rooting through novels and poems for messages and meanings about women’s position in society, for plots that criticize domesticity or that expound on the narrowness of women’s lives. (She once coined the term “gynocritic” for critics freed “from the linear absolutes of male literary history.”) This exploration of subversive plots and spunky heroines is fruitful from a purely historical point of view, but it doesn’t always feel like literary criticism at its most sophisticated. One thinks of Joan Didion’s line about feminists: “That fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur to these women, nor should it have, for fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology.”

He's Not That Into It

It's been a while since we've had a long-form book review/essay from Wyatt Mason, so it's good to see him in the current New York Review ($$$) with Toni Morrison's A Mercy.

The piece is the sort of close reading/deep interpretory analysis that I've grown accustomed to reading from Mason, but unfortunately his general boredom with the book he reviewed is apparent:

Naturally, the story of a country has many more meanings than a fable can reasonably contain. Morrison's A Mercy seeks that vaster quarry. Like Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, Morrison employs a range of reporters to cover a focal event from multiple viewpoints. Any one of these reports tells much of the story, but only in concert is a full understanding of events and implications attained. As in Faulkner, the event is a journey, but where his delivers a dying woman to her grave, Morrison's would keep a dying woman from reaching hers.

Instead of a perfunctory review of the new Morrison (which, frankly, didn't seem to generate much interest from any corners), it would have been nice to see the oddly reticent Mason crackling on about a book he was truly motivated to discuss, which of course is what he often does on his blog.

What The Da Vinci Code Can Teach Publishers

I'm eager to read Ted Striphas’s book, The Late Age of Print, and so I was please to find that the author also has a blog with the same name.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that I can get with his latest posting, on what The Da Vinci Code chapter lengths can teach publishers:

In saying that The Da Vinci Code’s success is attributable in part to the brevity of its chapters, I should be clear that I am absolutely not suggesting that people’s attention spans are waning, or that we have lost our ability to process long, slowly developing arguments or narratives. Nevertheless, ours unquestionably is an age of myriad distractions — electronic or otherwise (a crying baby, a loud truck rolling by, the incessant drone of leaf blowers) — that make it more difficut [sic] to spend protracted periods of time with protracted amounts of text.

My suggestion that books might be better served with smaller chapters, à la The Da Vinci Code, thus is a pragmatic rather than a moral one. Essentially I’m asking book publishers and authors to attune their sensitivities better to the fine-grain of everyday life, where reading happens, and to refashion their books accordingly.

Sorry to say it, but contrary to Striphas's assurances, his argument sounds exactly like a the waning-attention-span argument we've grown over-accustomed to.

I know that white space and short paragraphs have uses (for instance, communicating discrete packets of information quickly and effectively (e.g. Powerpoint)), but I don't see why "practical" publishers need to follow this practice in order to facilitate the lives of their readers. Certainly Richard Nash, whose presses had very successful years in 2008, would be surprised to learn this. So would, I imagine, Margo Baldwin and Alan Kornblum, and many other publishers who did just fine with long paragraphs.

I'm intrigued to hear more of Striphs's defense of his argument, although I hope he explains why we want books to conform to these detested, distraction-filled lives that we all obviously lead now. Maybe with luck we've be able to eliminate every last refuge from leaf blowers, crying babies, etc.

A Jury of Her Peers by Elaine Showalter

The Economist has a useful summary of Elaine Showalter's massive new overview of women authors in America, A Jury of Her Peers:

Ms Showalter does not attempt to unravel the intractable moral and legal conundrums raised by this unsettling parable, but she uses it as a metaphor to ask questions about literary judgment. Certainly, in the early 20th century, when literature was being defined as an academic subject, establishment male critics who wanted to make American literature “more energetic and masculine” actively attempted to exclude female writers from the canon. In the 1970s, when Ms Showalter herself started writing about women’s literature, many critics thought they had to counter this trend with feminist polemic. In this book, however, Ms Showalter’s admirable aim is less pugnacious: to rescue forgotten works for a general audience, but not to shirk from making judgments (robustly dispensed, for example, towards the “unreadable, self-indulgent and excruciatingly boring” Gertrude Stein). All the writers discussed here are interesting from an historical viewpoint, but only some reach the peaks of genius.

One perennial factor for women writers, according to Ms Showalter, is “how they reconciled their public selves with their private lives”. Unlike more abstract forms of criticism, which seem to place the work of art in a vacuum, Ms Showalter’s is grounded in the lived lives of her subjects, for whom she provides vibrant biographical sketches. This serves to counter Romantic (and, some would say, ultimately male) myths about the self-sufficiency of art, thus offering a subtle statement of her own feminist aesthetic.

I suppose I can't knock Showalter's critique of Stein until I've read it, but I'm far from finding Three Lives unreadable or boring. Self-indulgent, yes, and thank God Stein indulged herself.