No Idea of Order at Key West

In my sudden zeal to relive the heady days as an undergraduate English major, I came across this relic in my Norton Anthology:

Here we see a long-ago incarnation of yours truly, taking notes on Wallace Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West," most likely in Intro to Poetry, circa 1985. It's clear from the flat, dutiful quality of these notes that I was recording my professor's statements as he walked us through the poem. That is to say, I had literally no idea what he, or Stevens, was talking about. The interpretation of the poem was as incomprehensible to me as the poem itself. Yes, this is auditory. Yes, this is conditional. This is spiritual language. So what? I didn't understand how any of these concepts elucidated the poem, or vice versa. Thanks in part to the New Critical practices my teachers were steeped in at the time, the whole discussion became an echo chamber of abstractions.

The final proof of how lost I was lies in the title of the next poem, "The Poems of Our Climate," where you see my younger self filling in the o's. Now, I was not normally one to engage in this activity. In fact, I recall thinking at various times in my youth that filling in o's and p's and e's in printed text was a sure sign of idiocy. Yet here I am, not only doing that very thing, but carefully shading the o's for a 3-D effect. I had completely thrown in the towel on Stevens.

Rereading the poem now, I find both more and less here than these notes suggest. I'm certainly less intimidated by it, and can sort of relate to it without being able to articulate exactly what it's "about." And that's probably because I simply have much more experience, with poetry and with life. Also I don't have to write a paper about this, which reduces the anxiety level considerably; but if I did have to write one, I would likely spend a lot more time on the poem's aesthetic qualities, and how they create an experience that doesn't necessarily represent anything beyond itself. That is, poetry happens within the poem. It is not always, or at least not solely, a pointer.

With this hindsight, it seems critical that anyone teaching such poems in high school and college remember how increasingly distant our young charges' experiences and concerns are from those of a middle-aged white poet in 1935. How might we bridge the gap?

I think we could start with the advice Dean Bakopoulos gives in this marvelous piece from the NYT. Before even beginning to wrestle with a story or poem's "meaning," whatever we're trying to get at with that, first let students select sentences or phrases or words that move them. They don't have to know why these words speak to them, only that they do on some level other than pure logic. They might like the words, in fact, because they're confusing. They present a new, unfamiliar experience.

After a while, you might begin to introduce some context, like Stevens's particular interests and concerns, and some general concerns of his time and place and class and culture. How is this individual mind interacting with external ideas and questions, as well as with physical places and experiences like hearing and seeing and feeling?

I frankly have little experience teaching poetry, and find more experimental pieces much harder to deal with than this one. But it does behoove us, when we teach, to try to put ourselves in our students' shoes, remembering how little we knew, back in the day, about the lives of those to whom this poem speaks more readily.

How Sherlock Holmes enchants the world

I'm a little behind on my Hound reading, but fortunately I have a great link to keep that Sherlockian tingle going till next time. Via Andrew Sullivan, Michael Saler says that the deep appeal of the Holmes stories is a kind of enchantment--and not the usual kind, either. Holmes goes against the grain by making enchantment an effect of reason:

Unlike many contemporary scientists and logicians who disdained the imagination, Holmes brought reason and the imagination, logic and intuition, together in a new synthesis that he called “the scientific use of the imagination.” He made critical thinking into a romantic adventure. Through his discerning eye, every detail of modern life, from newspaper advertisements to the footsteps of a giant hound, became charged with meaning, possibility, and wonder.

If this is true, and I think it is, then the Holmes stories should be taught in every school in the land. Intellect and reason are the path to enchantment, not its enemies! Understanding, not ignorance, is the source of transcendent delight! Never mind that Conan Doyle himself got pretty woo-woo in his later life, when he fell for some "photos" of fairies that make the guy in the Bigfoot film look like Bigfoot. Perhaps Holmes is the unique product of a mind that craved magic, but couldn't (or wouldn't) yet accept its actual existence. So, like our best realist fiction writers, Holmes makes magic from the everyday.

Books, ebooks, and how everything's always changing

So Jonathan Franzen has gone and said another odd thing in public, this time about ebooks and their apparent threat to civilization. Not surprisingly, I'm ambivalent about these remarks. I do wonder about the relative impermanence and mutability of ebooks (though the corollary is that ebooks won't go out of print, at least not in such a definitive manner). Personally, I have yet to read an ebook, though not for any ideological reason. It's just that I do so much reading on screens, and this reading is mostly of a scattered, nerve-jangling quality. (When I'm online, I picture my brain cells as little bubbles in a pan of simmering water.) I turn to physical books for relief from that kind of reading--for immersive reading experiences. But I doubt I'll be doing this forever. There's too much to like about the convenience of ebooks.

See? Ambivalence.

However, last night I watched this NOVA documentary about attempts to authenticate a drawing thought to be by Leonardo. As Walter Benjamin told us long ago, our definition of "artist" relies on the physical presence of a single work of art--even as technology makes those works more and more reproducible. What will it mean to authenticate written works, once they all go digital? Probably most authors these days compose on a computer, with a minimum of handwritten notes. In theory, we still have Stephen King's Wang to give us some sense of origin (although not in practice, as it turned out). But as books become less and less physical, all sloshing around together in the "cloud"--itself a metaphor for an even less physical entity--will our sense of the term "author" change, too? Will we start to seem less like physical beings who made something, and more like wisps in the cloud ourselves?

And if so, is that all bad?

Is Pynchon overrated?

So here's that much-read Slate piece about famous books that are overrated. Or at least that these particular authors never liked. Gravity's Rainbow comes up a couple of times, and that's a book I actually love. I think I love it, that is.

I agree with Elif Batuman on this issue: a particular book has to reach you at a particular time. I read GR when my father and I were driving cross country from Ohio to Berkeley, where I was about to start grad school. I read the book in strange motels in Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming, while during the day we covered vast stretches of stark landscape and listened to Paul Simon's Graceland. I was on my way to immersing myself in an acid bath of literary theory, which at the the time I was looking forward to, in the same way I looked forward to living in a place with palm trees. Nothing seemed quite real, except being with my dad, and somehow the book brought all that real unreality together. This goes back to a thought I had awhile ago, that the context of reading really is important in making literature part of your life. Reading in a class, or a library cubicle, does not always allow for that kind of rich reading experience.

But I don't know if I'd enjoy reading GR now. And I am bogging down a bit in Against the Day, after my initial enthusiasm. It's just...very...long.

Review of Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name

I got assigned to write this review a few months ago, but due to a timing issue, the publication ended up not being able to use it. This is not a timely review, except that grief is in the air for me these days. And I liked the book, so here's what I had to say about it.

---

I am starting to believe that the greatest terror life has in store for us is not death, but grief. Death has an ending, after all; it is the ending. Grief, on the other hand, may subside, but will never truly end. And one of its most awful aspects (it’s a complicated, writhing thing) is helplessness. This is the condition of both the survivor, and—if she is aware of her circumstances—the dying. The loved one pulls away, like the tide withdrawing from the shore, and all anyone can really do is watch. Though sometimes, later, the survivor can also tell the story.

In 2007, Aura Estrada, a young writer and scholar, broke her neck while bodysurfing in Oaxaca and died the next day. Her husband, novelist and journalist Francisco Goldman, wrote Say Her Name in the aftermath of that personal disaster, which was also a loss for the world of letters. The book includes excerpts from Aura’s stories and diaries, which are funny, brightly inventive, and increasingly experimental in their language. In fact, Aura’s promise as a fiction writer is one reason Goldman wrote Say Her Name as a novel: to honor her imagination.

At first, I didn’t realize it was a novel. I found out only after finishing the book and skimming the dust jacket for a hint of how to start talking about it. This was the most brutal portrait of grief I had ever read, and to “review” it—as if there were anything more to say on the subject, especially in the form of critical judgment—seemed absurd. But instead of giving me the handhold I was looking for, the synopsis, puzzlingly, called Say Her Name “the novel of Aura.” Sure enough, the bookstore sticker on the back said it belonged in the fiction section, and so did the Grove/Atlantic Web site. The question should probably not have mattered to me, but it did. What was this terrifying, exhilarating place I’d just emerged from, shaking and desperate to call my husband?

I turned to the New Yorker’s interview with Goldman, in which he discusses the genre issue in some detail. Of course, he says, the extended sections describing Aura’s childhood are fictionalized; since he wasn’t there, how could they not be? More intriguingly, he says the account of his actions as the grieving widower are not (or not all) true. The “narrator” of Say Her Name does things in his anguish that the real Goldman did not. I was relieved to hear that, since much of the narrator’s behavior is reckless and at times cruel. And yet those sections, for me, raised the story far above the finely crafted, moderately touching expression of loss that I might have expected from a grief memoir.

In the novel the bereaved Goldman gets drunk night after night and frequents strip clubs. He hallucinates. He torments himself with accusations that he caused or even desired his wife’s death. He has affairs with Aura’s friends, including a young woman named Ana Eva, at whom he unleashes this twisted, blackly funny tirade:

So take that you fucking Sméagol, you and your Latino straw man marvelous quirkiness of love, go sodomize yourself with your fucking sock puppet, you idiot pendejo!

Ana Eva gaped at me. What had set this off? [….]

She was frightened. She’d drawn back into a corner of the bed. What’s the matter? Was it her? Why was I screaming at her about some Sméagol?

Oh Ana Eva, no, no, it has nothing to do with you. I’m sorry. Something Sméagol, a book critic wrote. He gave us the evil eye on the subway. He fucking killed Aura, not me.

Grief undoes the narrator from inside out, and watching this happen made me fully trust the experience as portrayed. Goldman rejects any redemptive, golden-light-infused “process” to lay bare the reality of his emotion: It’s monstrous. Now he tells me a good portion of the story isn’t true?

Then again, how does the griever himself know what is real? “No happy memory,” Goldman jarringly writes, having already recounted many of them, “that isn’t infected. A virus strain that has jumped from death to life, moving voraciously backward through all memories, obligating me to wish none of it, my own past, had ever happened.” Aura’s death has rewritten his life, making him wish his past—all that has made him who he is—were fiction. What can happiness mean now? What even happened? What’s one more revision of his life story, if grief is the ultimate fabulist?

In the New Yorker interview, Goldman explains how the fictionalized self-portrait reveals a different kind of truth. The man most people saw, in the months and years after Aura’s death, seemed to be doing pretty well. As he mourned he wrote; he taught; he established the Aura Estrada Prize. But all that felt like a lie, he says. In the book, the narrator’s actions reveal the raw, hidden, even shameful experience of grief. He gives it a face. Maybe Goldman also wanted, by writing the fiction, to separate the griever from the person walking the earth under the name “Francisco Goldman.” But it’s equally likely that others, and even he himself, will conflate them. The point is, it really doesn’t matter. The book is very much about Goldman, but also not.

When you get down to it, Say Her Name is about everything, where everything takes the form of Aura. We come to observe life through the lenses of her talent, ambition, astute critiques of academia, humor, Hello Kitty toaster, dresses, travels and culture shocks, and her deep and bracing loves: literature, her troubled mother, her husband. Lost in thought, she misses her subway stops. She loudly recites George Herbert, of all possible poets, when drunk. She wants to have children. She worries that her much older husband will leave her a widow too soon. She adores the beaches of Oaxaca. She wants to learn to bodysurf, but is afraid, so Goldman, who’s been doing it since childhood, shows her how.

Like everyone, and not like anyone, she’s ordinary and extraordinary. She changes Goldman, as he does her, both during her life and after; in the end, her power to transform is just as strong as grief’s. Say Her Name proves how wonderful it is to love someone so much that losing her is so completely devastating. As Goldman puts it:

One of the most common tropes and complaints in the grief books I’ve read is about the loneliness of the deep griever, because people and society seem unable, for the various reasons always listed in those books, to accommodate such pain. But what could anybody possibly do or say to help? Inconsolable does not mean that you are sometimes consolable. The way things are has seemed right to me; it’s all been as it should be, or as if it could not be any other way.

So the helplessness of grief cannot be helped. That makes sense, even if Aura’s strange and awful death does not. The rightness is a kind of consolation.

Still, we wouldn’t want to trade places with Goldman (or Aura) for even one second. Or would we?

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What we write when we write reviews

By way of reviewing the worst book review(er) ever, Robert Pinsky says that when he first started writing reviews, one newspaper gave him the following set of guidelines:

1. The review must tell what the book is about.
2. The review must tell what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.
3. The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.

Pinsky then goes on to point out that hardly any reviews these days do all three things. At most they do one or two of them. Also, those who prefer Rule 1 tend to avoid Rule 3, and vice versa.

Which raises, for me, larger questions: What are book reviews for, anyway? Are they a "Consumer Reports"-style report, as Pinsky puts it? (To buy or not to buy?) Are they criticism, and if so, what does that mean?

I like to read book reviews and have written a few in my day...but I honestly don't know the answers to these questions.

Plot and plotless

Two excellent essays were recently posted on The Millions, arguing somewhat opposite points. Michael Rowe's piece on Philip K. Dick exhorts us to stop getting hung up on Dick's "occasionally terrible" prose style. For whatever reason, Dick was never concerned about style, Rowe explains:

Dick isn’t out to crystallize a particular sentiment. He does not aim to be quotable—to be, in a word, reducible. Instead, his novels feel like labor, as though they are tabulating the results of some desperate experiment. So, it isn’t the prose style, but the plot assembly that gases up the moving parts of Dick’s fiction.

Meanwhile, another essay by Mark OConnell celebrates "plotless novels" like Oblomov, the hilarious-sounding Voyage Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre, and Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker. In Baker's novel,

[p]retty much literally nothing happens; the closest we get to action is when the narrator exhales forcefully in the direction of a paper mobile hanging from the ceiling of the baby’s room, and the paper flutters around for a while. And here’s the thing: there’s not a dull moment in the book. Baker’s brilliance as a writer lies in his ability to make the (apparently) utterly trivial utterly compelling.

So: plot or style? PKD or XdM? It's an old question, of course, and ultimately a matter of personal taste.

Re: PKD. I suspect this is why I have always really enjoyed having the plots of Dick's books told to me; yet I have never made it through a single Dick novel. (One exception was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and that possibly was only due to post-Blade-Runner-viewing momentum.) I should mention, before going any further, that Dick is occasionally quite a brilliant stylist. Especially at the beginnings of his novels, before he's racing toward his deadline, or realizing he has to make a novel out of what was in fact only a short story, or whatever happens to cause the book to collapse like a circus-tent disaster, he zaps off some of the most hilarious, spot-on condemnations of consumer culture I've ever read. Also, I haven't read many of the books people consider to be his best, so I should probably reserve judgment overall. Anyway, Rowe's essay makes me want to give old PKD another shot, and maybe, to be fair, start with the Modern Library anthology edited by Jonathan Lethem.

Still, those collapses are so disappointing--in Clans of the Alphane Moon, for example, when this brilliant premise about a bunch of mental patients governing themselves on a distant moon turns into long passages about a guy loathing his ex-wife. I guess I'm saying that confronted with a whole bookfull of Dick's prose, I'd probably gravitate instead toward a plotless novel, and cop to whatever upper-middle-class anxiety Rowe says that reveals. Style is important to me. However--and this is still something I'm trying to learn as a writer--self-conscious style is wretched. Style for the sake of showing off one's writing ability never works, and is even more off-putting than Dick's desperate scrabbling.

So how would you write a story in which nothing happens, without overwriting to make up for the lack of plot? This seems like a terrific challenge to take up. Especially for those of us whose new short story has just driven itself into a corner.

Where the real resides

From the Paris Review's interview with Ann Beattie:

The interplay between character and external world is something that realist writers always dealt with conscientiously, and it started to drop out with minimalism. Hemingway dropped it out, too, but even in his stories there tends to be a volley going on between the environment and the character. Carver won’t say what the volley is. None of us will.

I guess you might say that minimalism resides in certain omissions, in trusting, à la Beckett, that if you give the sparest sort of context—two people in a trash can, a road at night—it will be like a dreamscape for people’s projections.

This is very well said, and something I've been wondering about for quite awhile. What makes literary characters seem real to us? What forms the boundaries around character? What delineates it; what processes build it up? I've always thought the "volley" was an important component, and that squares with my being somewhat averse to minimalism. But Beattie's right; minimalists like Beckett (whom I love) trust the reader to supply the "dreamscape." To put it another way, the characters' interior depictions are strong and suggestive enough to inspire that dreamscape.

So who's to say which is a more realistic depiction of character or "the world"? We don't come across people in trash cans calmly discussing life every day, but for many readers and playgoers, that psychological reality is fully recognizable. Perhaps it's more so, because they're creating their own context to a larger degree.

Jess Row is getting at this same issue in his recent Boston Review piece. His point, well worth remembering, is that our sense of "realism" is culturally determined. In part, anyway. (There's quite a dust-up going on in the comments to this article. By God, people do care about literature.)

Lyrical realism vs. the avant-garde

A recent piece by Garth Risk Hallberg revisits a 2008 Zadie Smith essay, in which she compares Joseph O'Neill's Netherland to Tom McCarthy's Remainder.* I was surprised to learn that Smith came out strongly against Netherland as the type of novel she'd like to see--and write--more of. But that's a testament to how unprepared I am to wade into this debate. Not only have I not read Smith's essay, I also have not read Remainder or any of McCarthy's work. This will not, of course, stop me from commenting.

Like Smith, I've grown tired of "lyrical Realism" in contemporary fiction, and suspect that it's holding fiction back from addressing Big Questions. I don't, however, have a strong argument at hand to prove this. It's more a feeling that all the time spent "showing" the raised, doily-like pattern on the china our heroine is setting on the rough-hewn dining room table leaves less time for "telling," or asking, what all this is for. Why are we here? What is our place in the universe? What are our obligations to it? Yes, I know: these questions are all there. They are embedded in the showing of the china, and a more subtle mind than mine would appreciate them that way. I just prefer it when characters and authors wrestle with big questions explicitly, at least from time to time. And some of that wrestling could well spill over into the novel's form, making it what is loosely called "avant-garde."

On the other hand, I really liked Netherland, and I believe it's because, as Hallberg puts it, "the potentially meaningless gets redeemed by fine writing." That's no minor distinction. When the writing is that fine, that important to the story, it becomes its own meta, its own avant-garde. Of course it's extremely hard to do this well; the attempt often results in too much milky light glinting off the aforementioned china, and/or tiresome nosedives into the past. Back to "lyrical Realism" of the most lamentable kind.

Anyway, Hallberg deftly undermines both the lyrical Realist and avant-garde categories, reminding us that the point, for both writers and readers, is not to choose a side. Instead, it's up to authors to rethink and revise form *every time* they sit down to write--not for the sake of form itself, but to properly accommodate the writer's "burning."

*We have now reached the third level of meta, criticizing criticism of criticism. There's probably a point at which this must stop.

True stories about people's lives, and fiction

Still (for some reason) on the subject of David Foster Wallace, self-help, and literature, I very much enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's "Farther Away: 'Robinson Crusoe,' David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude" in the recent New Yorker.

It strikes me yet again that this is a very different kind of literary criticism than I was trained to produce as a grad student. Back in my day, literary study was an utterly sterile environment, an ICU where we hooked books up to large, wheezing theory machines and then watched them slowly die. (I'm sorry. I guess I'm still a little sad about the whole business.) There was literally no place to discuss the work in the context of lived experience. You could, by way of disclosing the position from which you spoke (i.e. your implied authority and/or biases on the subject), mention your race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, but only in the manner in which you would check these off on a form: permission to speak, plus plausible deniability. Check.

Actual personal narratives, however, had no place; and there could certainly be no discussion of the role the work in question played in your own life. Why should there be? In fact, it played no role. It was an object of study. Study was not life. As to how one was supposed to navigate one's non-studying hours--well, those hours or minutes were so brief anyway, why even wonder? One thing was clear: you would never turn to the poems or novels or treatises you were working on for solace or advice or reflection. That would be misuse, and stupid besides.

But now I'm noticing, both inside the academy and outside, a real turn toward lived experience as a central aspect of criticism. Critics are not necessarily exposing their innermost secrets with every piece (and thank god), but there's a sense of literature as part of life, as a pattern of rich threads woven throughout life's fabric. Elif Batuman's The Possessed is one example. Franzen's article is another. What we see in this kind of writing is the process of literature and life enhancing each other. We look through one at the other, and then back again, gaining new insights with every turn. We take literature with us on our journeys, not to pass the time, but to make it.

Franzen does this literally in "Farther Away," traveling to remote Masafuera Island with a copy of Robinson Crusoe and a small box of Wallace's ashes. The resulting article touches on ecology (especially birdwatching), technology, the perils of hiking in fog and rain, the history of the novel, the resonance of Robinson Crusoe today, and Wallace's complex life and cruel death. This last entails the cruelty he showed to others in killing himself, especially at home, where those he loved most would find him. The suicide is not just the delicate artist bidding adieu to the harsh world he can't handle. He added to that harshness in a big way, and his survivors have to deal with that. No wonder the pull of isolation is as strong for those left behind as it was for Wallace.

Franzen's grief expands the meaning of Robinson Crusoe, instead of reducing it, as the hermetically trained critic might fear. And vice versa: Crusoe enhances (which does not mean "worsens") the grief. Pieces like this show the most illuminating way to read cannot be in a library cubicle, surrounded by white walls and buzzing lights and the unrelenting fear of failure. Instead, we could try reading a little, walking a little, nearly falling off a rock, building a campfire, reading some more, crying, sleeping, reading, scattering ashes. Now what does the book have to say to us--and vice versa?

DFW's self-help library

Via Kate S., a really wonderful article by Maria Bustillos on David Foster Wallace's collection of self-help books, and his deep, furious engagement with them. Bustillos does us an enormous service by not just revealing Wallace's marginalia in books like Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child--although she does that extensively. She also takes on Wallace's thoughts about the books, offering her own deep engagement with his fraught self-image. I suspect he would have approved.

Bustillos, through Wallace, situates the powerful self-help streak in U.S. culture within the context of artistic creativity, by showing us the double-edged sword of individuality. The imperative to know and love and help oneself easily gives over to obsessing over and hating same. This makes creativity virtually impossible. As Bustillos puts it (referring to The Pale King),

The book Wallace was too stuck in himself to complete is one in which he was observing how we all ought to become unstuck, sadly. The realization that you have something of value to contribute to the greater world necessarily involves prying your mind off yourself for a minute. [....]

And yet our culture is obsessed with finding the causes, with talking things through, and with getting to the bottom of our problems by thinking and talking about them a lot. With solving the problem of depression. The book The Drama of the Gifted Child, suffers very much from that "self-help", inward-turned weakness. It is a good but flawed book that tells just a small part of the story of how to do family life. There is no blame to pin anywhere; there is a balance to try to achieve.

Anyway, I really recommend you read the whole article. This is one of those pieces of criticism that does full justice to a complex subject, while finding its larger implications for our cultural moment.

Another good idea (or two) from Ta-Nehisi Coates

In this post, Ta-Nehisi Coates does two great things.

First, he once again demonstrates unbridled enthusiasm for great writing--in this case, King Lear. Let's all do more of this. Let's shove great writing under our friends' (or blog readers') noses, or read it to them aloud, without any comment other than our own obvious joy.

How often do we come upon a passage that just knocks us back on our heels? That makes us just want to sit there and let the words flicker around our heads like fireflies? Nabokov called this the "telltale tingle between the shoulder blades." That's a central aspect of the experience of art; and I think it actually happens pretty frequently. Unfortunately, too often, those of us who write or talk about art (semi-)professionally tend to brush that experience aside, so we can get down to the business of criticism. The feeling is hard to articulate, which makes it seem, I don't know, less than worthwhile, possibly even silly. Yet critics who adopt a purely sober, droning voice when discussing even works they love do a disservice to potential readers, not to mention students. If these guys who are supposed to love literature can't muster anything more than formal statements of approval, why should I bother? What am I going to get out of it? Dude, you can be ecstatic! Look! Listen!

Second, Coates makes this passing suggestion: "I think it might have been better for me to enroll in college at 35, instead of 17." Agreed. Or, rather than "instead of," why not "in addition to"? I bet they do this in countries like Sweden all the time! Every (say) fifteen years, the government pays you to leave your job and get a degree in anything that interests you at the time. Or you take a bunch of different classes, if you have lots of interests, but real, college-level classes, full-time. Then, after three or four years, you go back to your job, or to a different job, refreshed, enlightened, ready to innovate.

My own little fantasy is to go back and get an undergraduate math degree. You're laughing! I am the person with the recurring nightmare that I've signed up for some high-level college calculus class, but somehow forget to go all term, only to realize that I must now take the final. But that's the point. I want to learn math outside the stakes of high school and college, when you're under pressure to figure out the thing you're good at, asap, so you can major in that thing and be that thing for the rest of your life, climbing relentlessly higher on that thing's ladder of success till you die at the very tippy top, whence you are vacuumed into heaven--and yet your math scores are telling you that at age 18, it's already too late for any of this to happen to you. Your peers will climb that ladder, growing ever smaller in your tear-blurred vision, as you watch from your refrigerator box on Skid Row or your parents' treelawn. Now I just think math is cool and I want to learn it.

Still, I doubt I will really do this. At least not until I am rich and insane, and right now I am only one of those.

Blog note: With this post, I am going to end my brief experiment of posting every day, minus weekends, federal holidays, and travel days. I am going to aim for a more manageable schedule of twice a week, say, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Collusion in the literary ghost story

The Turn of the Screw? Done! Completed! All behind us! Ah, how much we've learned about writing scary stories! Except...

Did we understand the ending?

To recap: One child, Flora, has become so traumatized by the governess's suspicions about her and the visitants that she has become physically ill. She has been whisked off to London by Mrs. Grose. That leaves the governess alone with Miles (not counting the anonymous, apparently non-interactive household staff)--and she takes the opportunity to try to pry some answers out of him at last. Specifically, she wants to know what he got him expelled from school. In the last portion of the novella, she's gone from thinking the children wholly innocent, to believing they are decidedly not. However she still loves Miles, clearly her favorite now, and her last remaining hope for understanding what has been happening. As she questions him, the specter of Peter Quint appears behind Miles in the window, and then drifts away again. And then...

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert himself again, and that movement made ME, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous author of our woe—the white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax of his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. "No more, no more, no more!" I shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to my visitant.

"Is she HERE?" Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the direction of my words. Then as his strange "she" staggered me and, with a gasp, I echoed it, "Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!" he with a sudden fury gave me back.

I seized, stupefied, his supposition—some sequel to what we had done to Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still than that. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window—straight before us. It's THERE—the coward horror, there for the last time!"

At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dog's on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. "It's HE?"

I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challenge him. "Whom do you mean by 'he'?"

"Peter Quint—you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed supplication. "WHERE?"

They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own?—what will he EVER matter? I have you," I launched at the beast, "but he has lost you forever!" Then, for the demonstration of my work, "There, THERE!" I said to Miles.

But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

Wow. I didn't remember that ending at all from my previous reading, whenever it was. I really had no idea what was going to happen, but Miles's death was a surprise even so. This time through, I think I'd come to believe (with the governess) that the children were nearly as sinister as the visitants themselves. I've possibly seen too many devil-child movies, and the sudden "ugliness" of Flora's language, when she tells Mrs. Grose how much she hates the governess, gives her a certain Linda Blair aspect. Plus, there's the word "dispossessed," in the very last line, significantly set off by commas. Google tells me "dispossessed" can mean both "exorcised" (as of a demon) and "homeless." Very interesting. As if Quint is a kind of parasite (cf Alien, Aliens, Alien3, etc.) that kills its host when removed. And it seems as if the actual parasite is love, in a perhaps unspeakable form.

But it isn't exactly clear. So when I finished the story I did something I'm not proud of. I consulted the introduction to the Signet collection of James's stories I happen to have. Even in my high school days, that felt like cheating. And may I say, just in passing: Why give away the ending of the story in the introduction? Does this not announce flat-out that anyone reading this stories cannot possibly be doing so for pleasure? Why not just title the Introduction "Helpful Hints to Get You Through Another School Assignment"? Perhaps an Afterword, or notes section, would provide assistance if needed, while maintaining that old books can still be read for the same reasons we read new ones?

Anyway. R. W. B. Lewis, writing in 1983, tells us that *nobody* really understands the ending (although that was nearly 30 years ago; perhaps experiments at CERN have since settled the matter). Are the ghosts real, and responsible for Miles's death, or are they just figments of the governess's deranged imagination? Lewis writes:

Henry James's histrionic genius would never settle for an either-or account of experience, especially of the kind established by many critics of "The Turn of the Screw": it is all the ghosts' wicked responsibility, or all the governess's doing. Peter Quint and the governess collaborate, by a dreadful collision of psychic energy, in the death of young Miles.

That sounds fine to me. James is a great writer, and a great ghost story would not give us pure victimization as a spectacle. Nor would it be a mere "trick" in which the narrator wakes up at the end--possibly inside a mental ward.

So here's the lesson for fiction writers today: in the literary ghost story, the events should come about through collaboration between human and ghost. That's not to say our human hero should "really" be "bad" in some way, or even directly responsible for the bad stuff. But something about their psychology, their reactions to events and/or certain secret desires should combine with the occult to drive the outcomes. This is the way to make your story truly surprising and disturbing. The hero must invite the vampire in, and get more than he or she bargained for. One thing is clear from this ending: the governess's pride in her own strength in the face of terror have backfired. When she stands up to Quint directly, shielding Miles from him, that's when Miles dies.

But was this pride the cause? Not really, or not only. We think we know what we're doing, and we don't. That is scary.

Should writers cut back on scenery?

Laura Miller's Salon column yesterday got me thinking, again, about the relationship of setting to character. This is a particular concern of mine, because I've often worried that my own fiction lacks a sufficient sense of place. But how do you work a detailed sense of place into the narrative without bringing it to a grinding halt while you describe every highway, byway, lake, lawn, and tree?

Miller argues that one of the biggest problems in literary fiction today is, in fact, the overuse of description. Using Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife as her primary example, she quotes a paragraph of scenic description, and then says,

Zdrevkov is godforsaken, but this fact is amply conveyed in the following four paragraphs describing the town itself -- most of that bit is quite good, although still a shade exhaustive. Obreht has said in an interview that she wants to write about "the influences of place on characters," but the passage above is too flatly reportorial to suggest that this woman feels anything but overheated.

By way of contrast, Miller approvingly quotes Alias Grace:

Margaret Atwood writes of a suffocating Victorian parlor, "all possible surfaces of it are upholstered; the colors are those of the inside of the body -- the maroon of kidneys, the reddish purple of hearts, the opaque blue of veins, the ivory of teeth and bones."

The distinction I believe Miller is getting at is that Atwood's description reveals both the parlor, and the state of mind of the character viewing the parlor. Grace (who will later be accused of murdering the parlor's owner and committed to an asylum) is clearly, shall we say, unsettled in this setting. The "influence of place" on this character is indeed stifling--though Atwood, I would point out, leaves open the possibility that someone else (the rich owner of the house, for instance), would see these same items very differently.

In other words, places definitely influence characters, but the reverse is also true: characters influence settings, at least in terms of how the reader sees and interprets them through their eyes. Atwood's description is singular enough that we come to see both the parlor and Grace as singular. And throughout the novel, Grace and her setting will continue to interact and shape each other in surprising (and specific) ways. It seems to me this notion is crucial--the setting doesn't just "contain" the characters, but is continuous, and contiguous, with character. Setting and character are all part of the same fabric, the space-time of the novel (to rip off both Bakhtin and Brian Greene at the same time).

Still, this is much easier to realize if you are writing in the close third-person point of view. I haven't read The Tiger's Wife, and so don't know what point of view Oberht uses overall. Miller says her style is "subtle" and her main character mostly "opaque," which suggests a more external, even omniscient point of view. If you believe in or at least want to explore the possibility of omniscience (even a sort of blocked omniscience, which can't see inside people very well), some descriptive passages would have to originate from this point of view. This would seem to preclude the red-in-tooth-and-claw type of description we get from Atwood. But does that mean that such description would always end up being "flat" and "reportorial"?

Or maybe this really means that in literature (if not in life) no setting can exist outside of perception. That perception might be a character's, or it might even be the author's--more specifically, that of the author's persona, which we might call the voice. The author may or may not create a specific narrator for the story, but there is always a presence that the voice embodies. And it would behoove us writers to always be aware of that presence, what it is doing, and what its agenda is at any given moment in the narrative. Perhaps it's even in a tug-of-war with a character, vying (quietly or not) over whose description of reality is more true. You would then see layers (or striations) of perception in the landscape, which could make the scene very rich indeed--even if those layers are subtle.

Anyway, I can't decide whether I think Miller's right in telling authors to cut back on description. Elmore Leonard's advice to take out the boring parts is, of course, always correct--whether they are descriptions of setting, or dialog, or anything else. I suspect that boredom often ensues when the reader's sense of a human presence flags.

Intellectuals in American fiction: a plea

It's very rare that a single book review convinces me to buy a book immediately. A favorable review usually gets tossed in the "I'll have to read that someday" bin in the back of my brain, and repeated reminders are necessary for the thought to ever be retrieved and acted on.

Not so with Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City. James Wood's review in The New Yorker has convinced me that it is necessary for me to read this book as soon as possible. Some of the credit for this has to go to Wood, who is one of the most thoughtful and original reviewers out there. He does not use the book as a launching pad for rants on his own pet artistic concerns; nor does he dutifully plod through the upsides and downsides of plot, theme, character development, etc. Instead, he seeks to fully engage the work on its own terms, and he draws out the book's unique perceptions and contributions--without reducing the book to its own uniqueness. If that makes any sense.

Anyway, the reason I must read this book is its portrayal of the lives of young intellectuals in America. Describing a monologue by one of the characters, a student of literary and cultural theory, Wood says, "This is one of the very few scenes I have encountered in contemporary fiction in which critical and literary theory is not satirized, or flourished to exhibit the author’s credentials, but is simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person." This statement brought me up short, as I have certainly been guilty, in my own fiction, of satirizing. (Maybe of flourishing too, though, God, I hope not.)

Overtly intellectual characters tend to get short shrift in contemporary American fiction. Why? There's a logistical problem, first of all, of thoroughly explaining what their theories actually are--as well as the intellectual bases for the theories--without turning the novel into a theoretical treatise in itself. More important, though, is good ol' American anti-intellectualism, both real and assumed. Nobody wants to read about thinkers, right? Thinkers are not doers; they do not take action, which is both a moral failing and a liability for plot purposes. It's bad enough to be sitting and reading oneself, but to read about readers? What's the outcome of all this thinking going to be, anyway--someone finishes their dissertation?

Well, if your character is Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, or any number of Dostoevsky characters, he or she will try to live out his ideas (sometimes with disastrous consequences). In Dostoevsky, ideas are made flesh. They are not games; they are characters in themselves, in a sense--they are as real and as important to human life as food, the landscape, and one's family and friends. As Wood says, they are part of a person's "whole context."

This is true of Cole's character, Farouq, who's viewed sympathetically but ambivalently by the narrator. As Cole (and Wood and Dostoevsky) remind us, characters can legitimately care as much about ideas as they do about their children and lovers, about understanding their own pasts, or conquering mighty Everest. Intellectuals in fiction need not be *merely* bloodless, hypocritical, or ineffectual--though they can still be funny, strange, immoral, and/or difficult. In other words, ideas are the legitimate stuff of passion in literature; not distractions to be overcome or set aside in the pursuit of "true" experience. The key is to show why the characters care about their ideas so much, so that the reader will care about them too. Don't allow readers to feel simple contempt for the characters, and thus dismiss the ideas.

In fact, those of us who care about intellectual life in this country could do a lot worse than support--and write--good fiction about people who think.

Literary appreciation

In several classes I've taught, I've made a point of deriding the term "literary appreciation." My view of "appreciation" has been that it resembles checking a box. You have to take a class to do it correctly, but once you're done with the class, you've done the job. OK, I've appreciated Ulysses; now what? Appreciation seems like a form of "tolerance," a nod toward a particular piece of art's right to exist (which one might have denied before the appreciation set in), and a general sense of its value (to others, if not to oneself). The term also seems directed more at the appreciator than the thing being appreciated. One wishes to be a person who appreciates Ulysses, so one takes a class and is certified as such.

I can't say whether I've taken an appreciation course myself--is the usual required Great Books course for freshman an appreciation course? Or is this more of a university-extension thing, a back-of-the-NYT-book-review-CD-series thing--meaning it's a kind of leisure activity, though a more high-minded one than most? Have I been teaching appreciation all along, and not known it?

Anyway, I've recently come to think of "appreciation" in the sense of gratitude, as in, I appreciate your help. This occurred to me in thinking further about Beautiful Children and why it has stuck with me, despite my strong resistance to pretty much every aspect of the novel. I've found I'm grateful for the way the book challenged me, how it worked to overcome my suspicions of its subject matter and style. I feel I've become more open to the world in some small but significant way from having read it.

I guess what I'm saying is that I most appreciate--am most grateful for--books that make me more open. That's hard work for a book to do, much harder than confirming my preexisting beliefs and desires. The risk is much greater that I'll put the book down; but if I don't, it becomes a true friend.

So were I to teach "appreciation" now, I would present it as a way of seeking openness through art, and being grateful when it happens.

Beautiful Children

My piece on Charles Bock's Beautiful Children is up at The Rumpus.

White Noise revisited

I finally replaced my lost copy of Don DeLillo's White Noise, which I lent to a friend, oh, fifteen years ago. (You know who you are, Friend.) I suppose one reason I did not replace it sooner was that I came to think of it as an artifact of the 80s. When I first read it, way back then, I was thrilled to discover that a mere fiction writer knew what the coolest literary critics knew, about simulacra, the omnipresence of television (television!) and data, and the bland toxicity of American life. Somehow that stuff no longer seems so compelling, though it's obvious that we now live amid white noise multiplied by a googol (get it?). We should probably be more alarmed.

Anyway, as I'm rereading the book, I do keep thinking 80s, 80s, 80s. But why should that past be any more off-putting than other eras? I read books from other decades and centuries without thinking of them as relics of their time. Is the problem that I have come to take all the book's concerns in stride? Was the 80s the last time it was even possible to notice media and other toxins as still potentially separate from daily existence? Have I surrendered to white noise?

And here I am, making more of it.

That said, I am really enjoying the book. It is funny as hell. And nobody does dialog quite like DeLillo. The writer's workshop guidelines on dialog are: Dialog is something characters do to each other. Dialog should do more than one thing at a time. Dialog should characterize. DeLillo follows these guidelines and violates them at the same time.

"It's going to rain tonight."
"It's raining now," I said.
"The radio said tonight."
[...]
"Look at the windshield," I said. "Is that rain or isn't it?"
"I'm only telling you what they said."

The conversation goes on in this vein, sounding very much like a real conversation, but also making the act of conversation itself seem absurd. The son resists his father's appeal to what seems to be an obvious reality, but not because of some problem in their relationship, as would be the case in a more conventional story. DeLillo is less interested in these characters as human beings than in their roles as walking containers of white noise. Everyone's brain is a porous, swirling mass of electrified sounds and imagery; there is only a slight variance in how this condition gets expressed.

Still, what the father, and also the son, really seek here is contact, in a world in which real contact seems impossible. They keep talking past each other; the son spins theories about why what we see before us may not be reality (and therefore not contactable), etc. The important thing, we begin to understand, is that they keep talking. Despite the fact that these characters are barely individuated, we can feel their human yearning for connection. DeLillo makes us sympathize not with individual characters, but with humanity as a whole--which is really cool, if you ask me.

I do love this new cover:


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More good news for Russian literature fans...

Gregory Freidin, a professor at Stanford and one of the people Elif Batuman writes about in The Possessed, has published a new book: The Enigma of Isaac Babel. This is the first examination of Babel's life and art since the fall of Communism and the opening of Soviet archives.

Read more about the book here.

(h/t Amanda Z.)


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On Moon

This Rumpus piece on Moon is a great read. It's a glowing review, followed by an interview with the director, Duncan Jones. I especially like the line, "He's like a cuddly David Bowie." Being a cuddly David Bowie is an achievement in itself.

We saw Moon on DVD about a month ago, and my first reaction was, you know, it's pretty good. Better than average. Plus it has Sam Rockwell, who makes everything he's in at least better than average. I would watch him in anything; I would watch him leaf through wallpaper swatches. For hours.

But I have to say, I didn't really get the movie. There were a lot of obvious quotes of famous science fiction movies--most obviously 2001, but also Silent Running, Alien, and others. These moments seemed intended to be obvious--because the ripoffs were just so blatant, they would otherwise seem almost criminal--but they didn't do much for me at the time. They stuck out, and thus "kicked me out" of the story, as we sometimes say in writing workshop. Also the lunar vehicles were clearly miniatures. In reality they were no less artificial-looking than CG effects, but in a different way. The fact that I saw the miniatures as more obviously fake just tells me that CG is now the custom in science fiction movies, and I've trained myself to look past (somewhat) the excessive smoothness of those images. The currently accepted convention has a better chance of disappearing. This is also true, I'd say, in literature, but that is for another post. Anyway, the miniatures also kicked me out.

In short, I wasn't bowled over. Then we watched the Bonus Features, which included several interviews with Jones. He said pretty much the same things as in the Rumpus interview, the upshot being that Moon is a manifesto of sorts for returning to classic science-fiction filmmaking. Silent Running and the rest represent the kind of films Jones wants to make, which are focused on character rather than effects. The miniature aesthetic is a feature of those types of films. Miniatures and human actors (some, anyway) are both cheaper than massive CG effects. But the cheapness is ultimately a bonus of that approach, rather than its cause. In other words, Jones would rather make films about people anyway, and the cost savings just happens to be a perk. (For his next film, he'll likely get a lot more money, so we'll see if he sticks with this aesthetic. I hope so.)

After watching these interviews, I came to think of Moon as brilliant. Now that I've recognized its "manifesto" aspect, I see it as a (please bear with me) post-post-modern work of art. Like po-mo, it points out its own tropes, but unlike that exhausted style, it then reaffirms those tropes instead of blowing them up. The quotes aren't ironic, but a way for the film to include its own history as a film. You could say the movie has a backstory, just like a character. This makes the movie itself seem alive. And so the film's been lingering with me these past weeks, in the way that only a few truly special works have done.

Yet. I have often complained when authors (on Oprah, say, or in a foreword) tell readers how their books are supposed to be read. A work of art should stand on its own, I've said. Also, I've said, once you publish it, it's ours, or at least no longer yours as such. If you didn't convey what you intended, that's your problem. Let us find our own way through the work. I will leave aside the real possibility that I was not smart enough to get what Jones was doing on my own. (And that is a sad commentary, for I am a fully trained and certified post-modern critic, albeit one who has abandoned the trade for the even more lucrative field of fiction writing.) The question is--does some art need to be accompanied by critical commentary, either by authors or others--in order to function, as it were, properly?

I'd now say the answer is a qualified yes. There's a difference between explaining what you meant (because you didn't get it across) and providing a cultural or historical context for understanding a work. We weren't all born with the ability to get, say, Gravity's Rainbow, and the world would be poorer without it. There is a crucial role for critics and teachers, which is to clear space for diverse forms of art not only to appear, but thrive. So now I say to creators of difficult works*--and their interpreters--get out there and tell us how to read! Don't be shy! We'll complain, but we'll thank you for it later!

Hey, I think I just wrote a manifesto for literary and cultural studies.

*Moon is not so difficult as Gravity's Rainbow. At least I don't think so. In this case the problem was really me and my cinematic naivete. But then again, I feel it bears more consideration...another sign that this movie is great.