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Between 1986 and 1988, the jazz musician and experimental music pioneer George Lewis created the first version of Voyager. After spending some time making work that involved compositional programmes in Paris, Lewis returned to the US and began work on Voyager. His aspiration was not simply to use computers as a tool or raw material, but to create software that could take an equal improvisational role to the other (human) musicians in the performance.

The post Art in the age of digital production appeared first on OUPblog.

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If you asked many people today, they would say that one of the limitations of analytic philosophy is its narrowness. Whereas in previous centuries philosophers took on projects of broad scope, today’s philosophers typically deal with smaller issues.

The post Against narrowness in philosophy appeared first on OUPblog.

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I returned to the WROTE Podcast recently for a 2-part discussion of reading and writing queerly with Dena Hankins, SA "Baz" Collins, and moderator Vance Bastian. (Previously, I did a solo conversation there.)

The strength of the discussion is also what makes it sometimes awkward and even contentious: we all have utterly different tastes, touchstones, and experiences. I'm not a natural fit for such a conversation, as I don't think of myself as a "consumer of queer content", but rather as a reader/writer who sometimes reads/writes queer stuff. I hardly ever seek out a book only because it's about a queer topic or has queer characters, and I only ever set out to write such a thing if I'm writing for a specifically queer market, which rarely happens.

As I say in the program, if a book's not trying to do something new and different, and if it's not aesthetically interesting to me, I'm unlikely to read it. Why bother? I've got more books than I have time to read already, and I'd rather read an innovative and thought-provoking hetero book than a familiar, conventional queer book.

Barthes gets at this in The Pleasure of the Text, presenting a fairly familiar Modernist case, one that describes well my own textual pleasures and (very occasional) moments of bliss:

The New is not a fashion, it is a value, the basis of all criticism.... There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it: every old language becomes old once it is repeated. Now, encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology. Confronting it, the New is bliss (Freud: "In the adult, novelty always constitutes the condition for orgasm").

...The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions — these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning. [trans. by Richard Miller]

This is not, of course, what most readers want, and what is New to one is not New to another. My pleasure is your boredom, my bliss your pain. Nonetheless, I wish more queer writers today were more interested in finding new forms and shapes and styles. I mention in one of the episodes Dale Peck's new anthology, The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction, which is queer in that it is not heteronormative in its selections, putting Dorothy Allison, Robert Glück, and Essex Hemphill alongside Raymond Carver in a way no other anthology I'm aware of has done. What the anthology also does is show that many American queer writers were, once upon a time, interested in a truly wide range of aesthetics. Peck's anthology can only gesture toward those aesthetics, since it has to fit many different purposes between two covers, but it made me think about the ways that queer artists have for so long been the ones to embrace vanguards. (Queer Modernism is often the most interesting Modernism, for instance.) To be queer is to be outside the norm, and thus to be outside the norm's language and forms.

I ended the first episode with a point that right now seems to me the most important one: If we want to identify as a queer community (I'm not sure I do), and we really want to do something for the queer world generally, we should be advocating for queer writers from outside the U.S. and other relatively safe, progressive places. The two books I mentioned in the last moments as ones I'd be reading if I had time to read stuff other than things for my PhD are Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta and Guapa by Saleem Haddad. There are likely many others I don't know about.

If there is a value in queer reading communities, then those communities must not replicate the insularity of most American readers. If you want to be a politically and socially intentional reader, as describing yourself as a queer reader (or consumer of queer content) suggests you do, then your political and social intentions as a reader can't begin and end with you staring at a mirror.

Finally, I got into a bit of a disagreement with Baz Collins about Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, and for my perspective on that book, my initial post about it remains my most substantial declaration of love.

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Bonnie Nadzam's recent essay at Literary Hub, "What Should Fiction Do?", is well worth reading, despite the title. (The only accurate answer to the question in the title [which may not be Nadzam's] is: "Lots of stuff, including what it hasn't done yet...") What resonates for me in the essay is Nadzam's attention to the ways reality effects intersect with questions of identity — indeed, with the ways that fictional texts produce ideas about identity and reality. I especially loved Nadzam's discussion of how she teaches writing with such ideas in mind.

Nadzam starts right off with a bang:

An artistic practice that perpetually reinforces my sense of self is not, in my mind, an artistic practice. I’m not talking about rejecting memoir or characters “based on me.” What I mean is I don’t have the stomach for art that purports to “hold up a mirror to nature,” or for what this implies, philosophically, about selfhood and the world in which we live.

This is a statement that avant-gardes have been making since at least the beginning of the 20th century — it is the anti-mimetic school of art, a school at which I have long been a happy pupil. Ronald Sukenick, whose purposes are somewhat different to Nadzam's, wrote in Narralogues that "fiction is a matter of argument rather than of dramatic representation" and "it is the mutability of consciousness through time rather than representation that is the essential element of fiction." Sukenick proposes that all fiction, whether opaquely innovative or blockbuster entertainment, "raises issues, examines situations, meditates solutions, reflects on outcomes" and so is a sort of reasoning and reflection. "The question," he writes, "is only whether a story reflects thoughtfully, or robotically reflects the status quo with no illuminating angle of vision of its own."

Magritte, "The Human Condition", 1933

Sukenick, too, disparages the "mirror to reality" or "mirror to nature" idea: "Once the 'mirror of reality' argument for fiction crumbles, possibilities long submerged in our tradition open up, and in fact a new rationale for fiction becomes necessary."

Nadzam's essay provides some possibilities for remembering what has been submerged in the tradition of fiction and for creating new rationales for fiction's necessity:

I want fiction to bend, for its structure not to mirror the reality I think I see, but for its form and structure to help me peel back and question the way reality seems. The way I seem. I love working with the English language precisely because it fails. Even the most perfect word or phrase or narrative can at best shadow and haunt the phenomena of the world. Words and stories offer a way of experiencing being that is in their most perfect articulation a beat removed from direct experience. And so have I long mistrusted those works in which representation and words function without a hiccup, creating a story that is meant to be utterly believed.

Again, not at all new, but necessary because these ideas so push against dominant assumptions about fiction (and reality) today.

An example of one strain of dominant assumptions: Some readers struggle to separate characters from writers. On Twitter recently, my friend Andrew Mitchell, a writer and editor, expressed frustration with this tendency, saying: "EVERYTHING a character says/does in a story reflects EXACTLY what the writer believes, right? Based on the comments I just read: YES!" As I said to Andrew in reply, this way of thinking results from certain popular types of literary analysis and pedagogy, ones that seek Message from art, ones that want literature to be a paragon of Self Expression, with the Self either a fragile, wounded bird or an allegorical representative of All Such Selfs. It's "write what you know" taken to its logical conclusion: write only what you know about what and who you are. (Good luck writing a story about a serial killer if you're not one.) Such assumptions are anti-imagination and, ultimately, anti-art.

These dominant assumptions aren't limited to classrooms and naive readers. Consider this, from Achy Obejas's foreword to The Art of Friction (ed. Charles Blackstone & Jill Talbot):

When my first book, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like  This?, was released in 1994, my publishers were ecstatic at the starred review it received in Publishers Weekly.

But though I appreciated the applause, I was a bit dismayed.  The review referred to the seven pieces that comprise the book as “autobiographical essays.” I found this particularly alarming, since six of the seven stories were first-person narrations, mostly Puerto Rican and Mexican voices, while I am Cuban, and one was from the point of view of a white gay man named Tommy who is dying of AIDS.

I’d have thought that the reviewer might have noticed that nationality, race, and gender seemed to shift from story to story—and that is what they were, stories, not essays; fiction, not memoir—but perhaps that reviewer, like many others who followed, felt more comforted in believing that the stories were not products of the imagination but lived experiences.

Imagination is incomprehensible and terrifying. In the classroom, I see this all the time when students read anything even slightly weird — at least one will insist the writer must have been on drugs. When a person reads a work of fiction and their first impulse is to either seek out the autobiographical elements or declare the writer to be a drug addict, then we know that that reader has no experience with or understanding of imagination. For such readers, based on a true story are the five most comforting words to read.

I come back again and again to a brief passage from one of my favorites of Gayatri Spivak's books, Readings:

I am insisting that all teachers, including literary criticism teachers, are activists of the imagination. It is not a question of just producing correct descriptions, which should of course be produced, but which can always be disproved; otherwise nobody can write dissertations. There must be, at the same time, the sense of how to train the imagination, so that it can become something other than Narcissus waiting to see his own powerful image in the eyes of the other. (54)

To return to Bonnie Nadzam's essay: Another dominant force that keeps fiction from becoming too interesting, keeps readers from reading carefully, and prevents the education of literary imagination is mass media (which these days basically means visual/cinematic media). I love mass media and visual media for all sorts of reasons, but if we ignore pernicious effects then we can't adjust for them. Nadzam writes:

...I’ve noticed that with much contemporary fiction, when we read, we’re often not asked to imagine we’re reading a history, biography, diary or anything at all. Often the text doesn’t even ask the reader to be aware of the text as text. With much fiction, we seem to pretend we are watching a movie. And it is supposed to be a good thing if a novel is “cinematic.”

Much fiction today, especially fiction that achieves any level of popularity, seems to me to draw not just structurally but emotionally from television. At its best, it's The Wire (perhaps the great melodrama of our era -- and I mean that as high praise); more commonly, it's a Lifetime movie-of-the-week. TV, like pop songs, knows the emotional moves it needs to pull off to make its audience feel what the audience desires to feel -- make your audience feel something they don't desire to feel, and most of them will turn on you with hate and scorn.

The giveaway, I think, is the narrowness of the prose aesthetic in all fiction that pulls its effects from common wells of emotion, because a complex, unfamiliar prose structure will get in the way of readers drinking up the emotions they desire. Such writing may not itself be inherently rich with emotion; all it needs to do is transmit signs that signal feelings already within the reader's repertoire. Keep the prose structure and style familiar, keep the emotions within the expected range, and the writer only needs to point toward those emotions for the reader to feel them. The reader becomes Pavlov's dog, salivating not over real food, but over the expectation of it. If an identity group exists, then that identity group can train its members toward particular structures of feeling. If the structures are even minimally in place, then members in good standing of an identity group will receive the emotional payoff they desire. Fiction then becomes a confirmation of identity and emotion, not a challenge to it.

(Tangentially: The radical potential of melodrama is to trick audiences into feeling emotions they would not otherwise feel and to complicate expected emotions. This was, for instance, the great achievement of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book that is terribly written in all sorts of ways, but which mobilized -- even weaponized -- sentiment to an extraordinary degree. The same could be said for The Wire, though with significantly less social effect [Linda Williams has some thoughts on this, if I'm remembering her book correctly].)

Anyone who's taught creative writing will tell you that lots of students don't aspire to write for the sake of writing so much as they aspire to write movies on paper. Which is fine, in and of itself, but if students want to write movies, they should take screenwriting and film production courses. And if I want to watch a movie, I'll watch a movie, not read a book.

Movies, TV, and video games are the dominant narrative forms of our time, so it should be no surprise that fiction often resembles those dominant forms. Even the most blockbustery of bestselling novels can't compete for dominance (and almost every bestselling novel these days is a movie-in-a-book, anyway, so they're just contributing to the dominance). Look how excited people get when they find out their favorite book will be turned into a movie. It's like Pinocchio being turned into a real boy!

What gets lost is the literary. Not in some high-falutin' sense of the Great Books, but in the technical sense of what written texts can do that other media either can't or don't do as well. Conversely, other media have things they do that written texts don't do as well, or at all — this is what bugs me when people write about films as if they're novels, for instance, because it loses all sense of what is distinctly cinematic. But that's a topic for another time...

Nadzam discusses how she teaches fiction, and I hope at some point she writes a longer essay about this:

When I do “teach” creative writing, I point out that a work of formal realism (which I neither condemn nor condone) usually adheres to a particular formula: Exposition informs a person’s Psychology, from which arises their Character, out of which certain Motives emerge, based upon which the character takes Action, from which Plot results (EPiC MAP). And what formal realism achieved thereby was answering some of the metaphysical questions raised by Enlightenment thinkers about what the self, or character, might be—a person is a noun. A changing noun, perhaps, but a noun nonetheless—somehow separate from the flux of the world they inhabit. The students I’ve had who want to “be writers” hear about EPiC MAP and diligently set to work. The artists in the class, however—the kindred spirits with the mortal wound—they look at me skeptically. Something about that doesn’t feel right, they say. I don’t want to do it that way, they say. Can we break those rules? And each of their “stories” is a terrible, fascinating mess. Are the stories messes because these writers are breaking with habit, forcing readers to break with expectation, or is the EPiC MAP really an effective mirror? I grant that this is an impossible question to answer, but an essential question to raise. By my lights these students are trying, literally, to re-make the world.

This reminded me of Mac Wellman's longstanding practice of encouraging his playwrighting students to write "bad" plays. The New York Times describes this amusingly:

He asks students to write bad plays, to write plays with their nondominant hands, to write a play that takes five hours to perform and covers a period of seven years. Ms. Satter recalled an exercise in which she had to write a play in a language she barely knew.

“I wrote mine in extremely limited Russian,” she wrote in an email. “Then we translated them back into English and read them aloud. The results were these oddly clarified, quiveringly bizarre mini-gems.”

Mr. Wellman explained: “I’m not trying to teach them how to write a play. I’m trying to teach them to think about what kind of play they want to write.”

Further, from a 1992 interview:

Inevitably, if you start mismatching pronouns, getting your tenses wrong, writing sentences that are too long or too short, you will begin to say things that suggest a subversive political reality.

One of the most effective exercises I do with students (of all levels) is to have them make a list of "writing rules" — the things they have been told or believe to be key to "good writing". I present this to them seriously. I want them to write down what they really believe, which is often what teachers past have taught them. Then, for the next assignment, I tell them to write something in which they break all those rules. Every single one. Some students are thrilled (breaking rules is fun!), some are terrified (we're not supposed to break rules!), but again and again it leads to some fascinating insights for them. It can be liberating, because they discover the freedom of choice in writing, and do things with words that they would never have given themselves permission to do on their own. It's also educative, because they discover that some of the rules, at least for some situations, make sense to them. Then, though, they don't apply those rules ignorantly and unreflectively: when they follow those rules in the future, they do so because the rules make sense to them.

(I make them read Gertrude Stein, too. I make them try to write like Gertrude Stein, especially at her most abstract. [Tender Buttons works well.] It's harder than it looks. They scoff at Stein at first, but once they try to imitate her, they struggle, usually, and discover how wedded their minds are to a particular way of writing and particular assumptions about sense and purpose.)

(I show them Carole Maso's book Break Every Rule. I tell them it's a good motto for a writer.)

To learn new ways to write, to educate our imaginations, we need not only to think about new possibilities but to look at old models, especially the strange and somewhat forgotten ones. Writers who only read what is near at hand are starving themselves, starving their imaginations.

Nadzam returns to 18th century writers, a trove of possibilities:

Fielding thought a crucial and often overlooked aspect of the theatrum mundi metaphor was the emphasis the metaphor puts on the role of the audience, and the audience’s tendency to hastily judge the character of his fellow men. We are not supposed to assume, Fielding’s narrator tells us in Tom Jones, that just because the brilliant 18th-century actor David Garrick plays the fool, Garrick himself is a fool. Nor should we assume that the fool we meet in life is actually—or always—a fool. How then is Fielding’s audience to determine the character of Fielding’s contemporary who plays the part of an actor playing the part of a ghost puppet who represents a real-life individual whose eccentric and condemnable behavior Fielding satirizes? For Fielding, there is no such thing as an un-interpreted experience; an instance of mimetic simulation cannot be considered “truth” (a clear image in a well-polished mirror) because truth itself is the very act of mimetic simulation.

Seeking out writers from before fiction's conventions were conventional helps us see new possibilities. (This is one of the values of Steven Moore's two-volume "alternative history" of the novel, which upends so many received ideas about what novels are and aren't, and when they were what they are or aren't. Also Margaret Anne Doody's The True Story of the Novel. Also so much else.)

Finally, one of the central concerns of Nadzam's essay is the way that assumptions about fiction reproduce and reify assumptions about identity:

...what is now generally accepted as “fiction” emerged out of an essentialism that is oddly consoling in its reduction of each individual to a particular set of characteristics, and the reality they inhabit a background distinct from this self. At worst, behind this form are assumptions about identity and reality that may prevent us from really knowing or loving ourselves or each other, and certainly shield us from mystery.

So much fiction seems to see people as little more than roleplaying game character sheets written in stone. Great mysteries of motivation, great changes in conviction or belief, all these too often get relegated to the realms of the "unrealistic" — and yet the true realism is the one that knows our movement from one day to the next is mostly luck and magic.

Relevant here also is a marvelous essay by Stephen Burt for Los Angeles Review of Books, partly a review of poetry by Andrew Maxwell and Kay Ryan, partly a meditation on how lyric poetry works. More fiction writers ought to learn from poetry. (More fiction reviewers ought to learn from the specificity and attention to language and form in Burt's essay, and in many essays on poetry.) Consider:

A clever resistance to semantic function, an insistence that we just don’t know, that words can turn opaque, pops up every few lines and yet never takes over a reader’s experience: that’s what you get when you try to merge aphorism (general truth) and lyric (personal truth) and Maxwell’s particular line of the North American and European avant-garde (what is truth?). It haunts, it teases, it invites me to return. By the end of the first chapbook, “Quotation or Paternity,” Maxwell has asked whether lyric identification is also escapism: “Trying to identify, it means / Trying to be mistaken / About something else.” Poetic language is, perhaps, the record of a mistake: in somebody else’s terms, we misrecognize ourselves.

And:

We can never be certain how much of our experience resembles other people’s, just as we can’t know if they see our “blue”.... Nor can we know how much of what we believe will fall apart on us next year. ... His poems understand how tough understanding yourself, or understanding anyone else, or predicting their behavior, or putting reflection into words can be, and then forgive us for doing it anyway...

We need more fiction like Stephen Burt's description of Andrew Maxwell's poems: More fiction that understands how tough understanding yourself, or understanding anyone else, or predicting their behavior, or putting reflection into words can be, and then forgives us for doing it anyway.

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The good folks at Electric Literature invited me to converse with Adrian Van Young, perhaps not knowing that Adrian and I had recently discovered we are in many ways lost brothers, and so we could go on and on and on...

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You go to the museum. Stand in line for half an hour. Pay 20 bucks. And then, you’re there, looking at the exhibited artworks, but you get nothing out of it. You try hard. You read the little annoying labels next to the artworks. Even get the audio-guide. Still nothing. What do you do? Maybe you’re just not into this specific artist. Or maybe you’re not that into paintings in general. Or art.

The post Lost in the museum appeared first on OUPblog.

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When we think of Christmas cards, we usually picture images of holly, robins, angels and candles, or snow-covered cottages with sledging children, Nativity scenes with visiting Wise Men, or benevolent Santas with sacks full of presents. Very rarely, I imagine, do we picture a summer woodland scene features lounging female figures in classical dress and a lyre-playing cherub.

The post Aesthetics and the Victorian Christmas card appeared first on OUPblog.

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What could philosophy have to do with odors and perfumes? And what could odors and perfumes have to do with Art? After all, many philosophers have considered smell the lowest and most animal of the senses and have viewed perfume as a trivial luxury.

The post Perfumes, olfactory art, and philosophy appeared first on OUPblog.

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As a little addendum to my post about the somewhat narrow aesthetics of Ben Marcus's New American Stories anthology, let me point you to Nick Mamatas's "Anti-Fragile", a story that does pretty much everything I was hoping to find somewhere in New American Stories and didn't.

On Twitter, I said:

Had enough of shallow stories told in short sentences & bite-sized paragraphs? Feast on "Anti-Fragile" by @NMamatas http://t.co/R28zqR5l2f

— Matthew Cheney (@melikhovo) July 27, 2015

And that about sums up my feelings.

Well, also: I may be partial, as I am an avowed and longstanding lover of long sentences, and this story is a wonderfully skilled, thrillingly long sentence. It's well worth reading and thinking about.

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Ben Marcus's 2004 anthology The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories is a wonderfully rich collection for a book of its type. I remember first reading it with all the excitement of discovery — even the stories I didn't like seemed somehow invigorating in the way they made me dislike them. I've used the book with a couple of classes I've taught, and I've recommended it to many people.

I was overjoyed, then, when I heard that Marcus was doing a follow up, and I got it as soon as I could: New American Stories. I started reading immediately.

Expectations can kill us. The primary emotion I felt while reading New American Stories was disappointment. It's not that the stories are bad — they aren't — but that the book as a whole felt a bit narrow, a bit repetitive. I skipped around from story to story, dashing in search of surprise, but it was rare. I tried to isolate the source of my disappointment, of my lack of surprise: Was it the subject matter? No, this isn't quite Best American Rich White People. Was it the structure of the stories? Maybe a little bit, generally, as even the handful of structurally adventurous stories here feel perfectly in line with the structurally adventurous stories of 50 years ago, and somewhat tame in comparison to the structurally adventurous stories of 80-100 years ago. But that wasn't really what was bothering me.

And then I realized: It was the style, the rhythm. The paragraphs and, especially, the sentences. It wasn't that each story had the same style as the one I'd just read, but that most (not all) of the stories felt like stylistic family members.

And then I thought: What this book really demonstrates is the deep, abiding, and highly dispersed influence of Gordon Lish. Lish's shadow stretches across the majority of tales in Marcus's book, as it did the previous book, and understandably so: not only is Lish a good candidate for the title of the most influential editor of "literary" short fiction in the US in the second half of the twentieth century ... but Marcus was nurtured by him, with Lish publishing quite a bit of his early work in The Quarterly and then publishing Marcus's first book, The Age of Wire and String. (The title of both the Anchor Book and New American Stories is a bit of a give-away, too: the subtitle of Lish's The Quarterly was "The Magazine of New American Writing".) The effect feels more repetitious in the new book, perhaps because I'm now a decade older and have all those more years of reading short stories behind me (including readings tons for the Best American Fantasy anthologies); but also, I expect, because the new book is more than 200 pages longer, and so the opportunity for repetition is greater.

It's not that either the Anchor Book or New American Stories is an anthology of stuff from the School of Lish (as Sven Birkerts called it back in the '80s). Some of Lish's students are, indeed, in these books — in the new one, I know that Sam Lipsyte, Joy Williams, Christine Schutt, and Deb Olin Unferth all studied and/or were edited by him, and Don DeLillo is a good friend and admirer of him. Plenty of the writers in the book may never have even heard of Gordon Lish. The influence is easily picked up from the writers Lish not only guided or influenced directly, but venerated by publishing them or saying good things about them to the world. Lish didn't just teach people to write in a particular way; he taught them to value particular moves in texts.

The writers in New American Stories are all different in their approaches and backgrounds, certainly, and at least a few of them are writers whose work Lish would not himself value, but there's a bit of an echo between them, the echo of the Lishian sentence (the best analysis of which is probably that of Jason Lucarelli in "The Consecution of Gordon Lish"). These are stories that (overall) value straightforward diction, relatively simple sentence constructions, and conversational tones and syntax. They prefer the concrete and the active. Many are built with odd repetitions and quirky juxtapositions.

You can feel it in the first lines — Lish famously calls first sentences the "attack sentence" and reportedly tells students, "Your attack sentence is a provoking sentence. You follow it with a series of provoking sentences."

Here are some opening sentences from New American Stories (I'll identify the writers later):

1.) Davis called, told me he was dying.
2.) "What you got there, then?"
3.) "Just let me out of here, man," said Cora Booth. "I'm sick. I'm dying."
4.) Four of them were on one side of a dim room.
5.) Like in the old days, I came out of the dry creek behind the house and did my little tap on the kitchen window.
6.) "What are you doing?" a guy asked her.
7.) It was the day before his cousin's funeral and Del ended up at the Suds washing his black jeans at midnight.
8.) Once, for about a month or two, I decided I was going to be a different kind of guy.
9.) "I don't know why I committed us to any of those things," Otto said.
10.) The day I got my period, my mother and father took me to pick my madman.
11.) I know when people will die.
12.) Root canal is one fifty, give or take, depending on who's doing it to you.

The first six of those are the entire first paragraph of the story. All of the sentences are pretty short, with the longest being #5 at 24 words. (And #3 is actually 3 sentences.) The diction is simple, with most of the words being one or two syllables, and none more than three syllables. Four of the openings are direct dialogue, with implied dialogue in others (e.g. #1). All of the openings are about people. The word guy appears more than once.

I chose these openings pretty much randomly by flipping through the book, and I only organized them to put the ones that are a paragraph unto themselves together. The 20 other stories that I have not sampled here would generally seem similar. From those 20 other stories, here are the opening sentences that, to my eyes and ears, seem most different from those above:

A.) Father comes home after many years of forgetting us, of not sending us money, of not loving us, not visiting us, not anything us, and parks in the shack, unable to move, unable to talk properly, unable to anything, vomiting and vomiting, Jesus, just vomiting and defecating on himself, and it smelling like something dead in there, dead and rotting, his body a black, terrible stick; I come in from playing Find bin Laden and he is there.

B.) Though alien to the world's ancient past, young blood runs similar circles.

C.) After they shot the body several times, they cut its throat with a scaling knife; after that, they pinched its nostrils and funneled sulfuric acid into its mouth; while some set to yanking the body's toenails out with a set of pliers, others fashioned a noose from a utility cord they had found in the trunk of their car.

A and C are longer than 1-12 (behold: semi-colons!), and B is not quite about a human being. Interestingly, they're all about bodies, bodily fluid, and, in the case of A and C, pain, death, suffering. A is notable for its lyricism, B for its weirdness, C for having the only 4-syllable word that I've noticed among any of these opening sentences ("utility"). These are, then, the most extreme and radical opening sentences in the book.

Most of the writers of all of these sentences, whether 1-12 or A-C, likely do not know Gordon Lish's commandments for writing attack sentences. But I suspect we see the influence of Lish in two ways here: first, in how Lish has influenced Marcus's taste, since the one thing we can say about all of these stories is that Ben Marcus valued them; second, in how Lish's protégés have gone on themselves to influence the perception of what is "good writing" in the lit world.

Let's look at who the writers are:

1.) Sam Lipsyte
2.) Zadie Smith
3.) Wells Tower
4.) Jesse Ball
5.) George Saunders
6.) Maureen McHugh
7.) Donald Ray Pollock
8.) Kelly Link
9.) Deborah Eisenberg
10.) Lucy Corin
11.) Deb Olin Unferth
12.) Charles Yu
A.) NoViolet Bulawayo
B.) Rachel B. Glaser
C.) Kyle Coma-Thompson

(It's amusing to note that the two writers whose opening sentences include the word "guy" are Maureen McHugh and Kelly Link — writers who admire each other, and Kelly Link's own Small Beer Press published McHugh's [excellent] story collections. There's nothing to say about this coincidence except that Ben Marcus apparently likes opening sentences that include the word guy.)

The only Lish students I know of among those writers are Lipsyte and Unferth. But sentences 1-12 seem to me more similar than different in their approach. To know how much of this is just Marcus's own taste selecting stories that have such sentences and how much is stylistic similarity between the writers generally, we would have to examine collections of each writers' stories and see if they tend to begin their stories in the same way. That work is more than I can do right now, but it would be an interesting research project.

Compared to most of the writers in New American Stories, the writers of A-C have fewer books published by major publishers and fewer awards (though NoViolet Bulawayo won the Caine Prize and her book, from which the story "Shhhh" is taken, has done very well — still, until recently she was not part of the big lit machine), and I think this matters. One of my disappointments with New American Stories is how much it reprints writers who have been published by major publishers and won major prizes. I had had hopes that the book would be more eclectic and surprising than this. For all his attempts at variety, what Marcus has given us overall is a bunch of stories that are valued by the kinds of people who give out major literary awards. And they are good stories — I don't mean anything I say here to reflect badly on any of the individual stories, many of which are extraordinary and all of which are in some way or another interesting. But the range of stories in the book is more narrow than I had hoped for.

Coming back to Lish, what's interesting is how his taste has so defined what I think of as the establishment avant-garde. We should put "avant-garde" in quotes, though, because it's not really out in front, and it's not particularly innovative anymore — indeed, it's the establishment because its structures and rhythms are passed down through writing workshops, editorial decisions, and awards committees. You can see this in the case of somebody like Gary Lutz, a Lishian who may not be well known to the general public, but who has had a significant influence on a lot of contemporary short story writers in the lit world, as well as on creative writing teachers, particularly through his essay/lecture "The Sentence Is a Lonely Place" (which I've myself recommended to some advanced writing students because it demonstrates to an overwhelming degree the depth with which one can think about sentences).

The effect of all this is to create a relatively narrow range for what is recognizable as "quality" in a short story. The familiar replicates itself. What a discourse community can perceive as good and bad, effective and ineffective, quality and kitsch depends very much on what it has previously seen as good, bad, effective, ineffective, quality, kitsch. Sometimes, that can be liberatory — Charles Yu, Maureen McHugh, and Kelly Link might be dismissed as writers of genre fiction if their tone and style was not close enough to that of the other writers in the anthology to sound familiar and thus be recognizable as part of the family of quality. I love that they're part of this book, but to understand why they fit so well in it, we don't have to speculate about the growing acceptance of genre content in the lit world, but simply note the similarity of tone, syntax, and diction to what is also here.

There's a long history to the particular qualities celebrated by Marcus and most of the writers he likes, and it's a history that predates Lish — if these stories feel like they have a lot of family resemblances, then it may be because they are the stylistic grandchildren of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. (Or, to make a different comparison, the music they seem to favor is that of chamber concerts and small indie rock bands, not jazz clubs. Indeed, the echoes I couldn't hear at all in these stories are the echoes of jazzier writers like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Maybe I'm tone deaf.)

So perhaps it is best to think of New American Stories as a kind of family portrait, a reunion of the offspring (whether they know it or not) of Grandma Gertrude and Grandpapa Ernie by way of Daddy Gordon (and maybe Mama Amy Hempel), along with a couple of kids who seem to have wandered in from the neighbor's house and who are nice to have around because they liven things up.  New American Stories is a good anthology, well worth reading, full of interesting stuff. It is not, though, a broad representation of what short stories can do or be, and for all its writers' concern with tone, resonance, and rhythm, the songs they play sound more alike than not.

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Can you imagine a concert hall full of chimpanzees sitting, concentrated, and feeling 'transported' by the beauty of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? Even harder would be to imagine a chimpanzee feeling a certain pleasure when standing in front of a beautiful sculpture. The appreciation of beauty and its qualities, according to Aristotle’s definition, from his Poetics (order, symmetry, and clear delineation and definiteness), is uniquely human.

The post Beauty and the brain appeared first on OUPblog.

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It is unfortunate that, so far as I can tell, Oxford University Press has not yet released an affordable edition of Peter J. Kalliney's Commonwealth of Letters, a fascinating book that is filled with ideas and information and yet also written in an engaging, not especially academic, style. It could find a relatively large audience for a book of its type and subject matter, and yet its publisher has limited it to a very specific market.

I start with this complaint not only because I would like to be able to buy a copy for my own use that does not cost more than $50, but because one of the many things Kalliney does well is trace the ways decisions by publishers affect how books, writers, and ideas are received and distributed. A publisher's decision about the appropriate audience for a book can be a self-fulfilling prophecy (or an unmitigated disaster). OUP has clearly decided that the audience for Commonwealth of Letters is academic libraries and rich academics. That's unfortunate.

Modernism and postcolonialism have typically been seen (until recently) as separate endeavors, but Kalliney shows that, in the British context, at least, the overlap between modernist and (post)colonial writers was significant. Modernist literary institutions developed into postcolonial literary institutions, at least for a little while. (Kalliney shows also how this development was very specific to its time and places. After the early 1960s, things changed significantly, and by the early 1980s, the landscape was almost entirely different.)  Of course, writers on the history of colonial and post-colonial publishing have traced the effects of various publishing decisions (book design, marketing, etc.) before, especially with regard to how late colonial and early postcolonial writers were sold in the mid-20th century. Scholars have toiled in archives for a few decades to dig out exactly how the African Writers Series, for instance, distributed its wares. The great virtue of Kalliney's book is not that it does lots of new archival research (though there is some), but that it draws connections between other scholars' efforts, synthesizes a lot of previous scholarship, and interprets it all in often new and sometimes quite surprising ways.

Another of the virtues of the book is that though it has a central thesis, there is enough density of ideas that you could, I expect, reject the central thesis and still find value in a lot of what Kalliney presents. That primary argument is (to reduce it to its most basic form) that the high modernist insistence on aesthetic autonomy was both attractive and useful for late colonial and early postcolonial writers.

Undoubtedly, late colonial and early postcolonial writers attacked imperialism in both their creative and expository work. But this tendency to politicize their texts was complemented by the countervailing and even more potent demand to be recognized simply as artists, not as artists circumscribed by the pernicious logic of racial difference. the prospect of aesthetic autonomy — in particular, the idea that a work of art exists, and could circulate, without a specifically racialized character — would be used as a lever by late colonial and early postcolonial writers to challenge racial segregation in the fields of cultural production. (6)

Kalliney is able to develop this idea in a way that portrays colonial and postcolonial writers as thoughtful, complex people, not just dupes of the maybe-well-intentioned-but-probably-exploitive modernists. In Kalliney's portrait, writers such as Claude McKay and Ayi Kwei Armah demonstrate a sympathy for certain tenets of modernism (and its institutions) as well as the shrewdness to recognize what within modernist ideas was useful. Such shrewdness allowed them not only to get published and recognized, but also to reconfigure modernist methods for their own purposes and circumstances.

Kalliney's approach is at odds with many past histories of modernism, colonial writers, and postcolonialism, as he notes: "In the not-too-distant past, it was possible to write about white and black modernism — and white and black aesthetic traditions — as if they were completely separate, even antagonistic, ventures" (7). But attention to writers' actual practices and communication, as well as to the behavior of various publishing institutions, shows complex networks and affiliations that influenced world literatures for decades:

...late colonial and early postcolonial writers, by making a strong case for the continuing relevance of aesthetic autonomy, became some of high modernism's most faithful and innovative readers from the 1930s forward. The relative lateness of the time period in this book — the years 1930-1970 being relatively late in the modernist game — will be a significant feature of my method, for it was during this period that high modernist principles were institutionalized on a global scale. Late colonial and early postcolonial intellectuals were instrumental in this process. (10)

And it wasn't just that modernist techniques and concepts proved useful for writers from outside the (white) metropolis. The general sense among the London literati after World War II that English literature was now bereft of originality and vision opened a space for anglophone colonial writers to be, for a brief time, sought out and celebrated not merely as examples of an exotic other, but as purveyors of fresh aesthetics.

This is especially clear in Kalliney's discussion of Amos Tutuola (one of the best explorations of Tutuola's work that I've read). Tutuola's Palm Wine Drinkard was published by Faber & Faber, where T.S. Eliot was on the board, and the book's early reception in Britain — including a laudatory review by Dylan Thomas — celebrated the book as "linguistically spontaneous and imaginatively unprecedented. In short, they read his early texts as a self-standing project, quite unencumbered by literary precedents, owing little to the accomplishments of other writers" (149). This was heightened by Faber's choices in packaging and marketing the book, "reflecting a tension between the novel as an ethnographic curiosity and as a creatively original literary object" (160). They included a facsimile of a page from Tutuola's handwritten manuscript with some copyedits in the margins, which simultaneously encouraged a kind of ethnographic reading of the book and asserted the authenticity of the book's unconventional style. But they also did not provide an introduction by a famous white writer or provide any biographical information about Tutuola, and so allowed a certain autonomy for the text itself. (Later books would come with introductions and biographical information, as Faber tried to explain/control how to make sense of Tutuola's technique.)

Kalliney is skilled at setting up (admittedly schematic) comparisons to show the complexities and continuities of literary history. In some cases, his material is so well chosen and structured that he doesn't have to spell out the comparisons. For instance, by placing his chapter about Tutuola next to a chapter about the African Writers Series, Kalliney sets us up to compare the policies and proclivities of Faber & Faber with those of Heinemann, who published the AWS. Faber had no interest in "Africanness" or in anti-colonial politics, really. They didn't publish Tutuola because he was African or because his work offered opposition to colonialism — indeed, one of the persistent criticisms of Tutuola has been that his writing is too politically disengaged. Faber was attracted to Tutuola because he wasn't like any of their other writers, and so they could fit him into a general modernist critical frame that privileged novelty over all else. "Make it new" was holy writ. (What could be perceived as valuably "new" was, of course, culturally mediated, but that's a conversation for another day.) That holy writ would harm Tutuola later, though, as he wasn't seen to be developing from book to book but rather repeating himself, a cardinal sin.

The African Writers Series (AWS) was founded in 1962 by Heinemann Educational Books, and Kalliney does a fine job of showing how the AWS from its beginning relied on African teachers and schools for its success — not only were the sales figures for AWS titles until the early 1980s many times greater in Africa, and particularly Nigeria, than in Britain or the U.S., but the books themselves frequently portrayed students and schools within their narratives. Heinemann was able to expand the series by capitalizing on its already-existing infrastructure for textbooks. The effect was striking and continues to this day, even though the AWS doesn't really exist anymore and the height of its influence was forty years ago. Nonetheless, because of its unique position and resources, the AWS defined the idea of "African literature", for good or ill, and its most successful books remain the most prominent on high school and college syllabi throughout the English-speaking world, even as many of those books are now housed at different publishers.

Commonwealth of Letters begins with a discussion of "Modernist Networks and Late Colonial Intellectuals", then continues to a chapter on Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology and the place of anthologies as tools within both modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Because it ranges far and wide, this chapter is somewhat less satisfying than others, but it's a good starting place because it shows just how complex the various modernist networks were, and how distorting it can be to try to generalize about ideologies and affiliations. Kalliney begins with Cunard, then moves on to the ways Negro differs from other anthologies in its structure and content, then to modernist skepticism of anthologizing, to Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Ezra Pound. The breadth of the chapter reflects the breadth of Cunard's anthology (which is so huge it's hardly ever been reprinted in its complete form), and Kalliney does a good job of bringing the various strands back to Cunard — but an entire book could be written about the topic, so the chapter feels like an appetizer for what's to come, which in some ways it is. (It makes an interesting supplement to Jane Marcus's discussion of Cunard in Hearts of Darkness, a book that could stand as a kind of shadow companion to much that's in the first chapters of Commonwealth of Letters.)

Chapter 3 is in some ways the most provocative and eye-opening, mostly in how it re-situates F.R. Leavis. Yes, Leavis. Mr. Great Tradition. The title of the chapter is "For Continuity: FR Leavis, Kamau Braithwaite, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o", and Kalliney shares information from letters he discovered from 1953 between Kamau Brathwaite and Henry Swanzy, director of the BBC program Caribbean Voices:

Brathwaite was studying history at Cambridge, where Leavis taught most of his career, reaching perhaps the height of his influence in the years Brathwaite spent there. The young historian and aspiring poet had won an island scholarship in 1950, coincidentally going to England in the same year as George Lamming, VS Naipaul, and Sam Selvon. In the first note, Swanzy disagrees with some of Brathwaite's opinions about Caribbean literature, saying that Brathwaite's position was too derivative of IA Richards and FR Leavis.... In response to Swanzy, Brathwaite disputes the idea that Richards and Leavis could be lumped together, calling them "incompatible" figures. Apparently, Brathwaite had been supplementing his training in history by attending Leavis's lectures, going on to say, "I am Dr. Leavis' man — for the very good reason that he fell like manna to my search. Because in him I found a road to run my attitude to literature on." (76-77)

Kalliney goes on to say that we might be tempted, as he was, to write this off as youthful enthusiasm, not something that had any long-lasting effect on Brathwaite's established critical approach, an approach which may seem like a flat-out rejection of Leavisite principles. But Kalliney thinks that, though of course Brathwaite was not an uncritical follower of Leavis, the traces are clear: both shared a strong interest in the world of T.S. Eliot, for instance. But far more importantly: "Postcolonial analysis of the English department would ultimately take its cue from Leavisite ambivalence about the proper function and chronic malfunctioning of disciplinary institutions. Postcolonial literature and literary criticism inherited Leavisite attitudes about the pleasures and unpleasantness associated with English departments" (77). Further:

With important modifications, Brathwaite and Ngugi both adopt the Leavisite stance toward capitalism. More important, both accept the basic Leavisite position on the value of folk culture and a living language. ... In fact, both Brathwaite and Ngugi urge other postcolonial writers to emulate the examples of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, doing for their own languages and cultures what members of the great tradition had done for metropolitan English. If they ultimately dispute the relevance of the great tradition, it is because the English literary canon, as it was taught in actually existing universities, is not Leavisite enough — that is, not sufficiently responsive to the living languages and culture of emergent postcolonial societies. (80)

The fourth chapter, "Metropolitan Modernism and Its West Indian Interlocutors" is another chapter that ranges across so much material that the effect of reading it is vertiginous, though Kalliney does an especially fine job here of keeping markers in place and reiterating his central argument. Page after page offers insights, revelations, and revisions of received wisdom (e.g. "It is striking how often members of the 1950s literary establishment deemed West Indian intellectuals insiders, peers, and proteges rather than inferiors, hacks, or intruders" [126]). Again and again, Kalliney shows how, despite racism and colonialist assumptions, the literati felt a kind of common outsiderness (mostly aesthetic, but to some extent social as well) with writers from Africa and the Caribbean. This feeling could often be paternalistic, but it also proved quite useful to the young (post)colonial writers, especially the writers of the Windrush generation.

Despite its many valuable insights, this chapter needed more, it seems to me, on C.L.R. James. Kalliney offers a useful reading of James's cricket book, Beyond a Boundary, in the first chapter, and here in the fourth he notes the influence of James's novel Minty Alley, but there's so much more that could and, in my view, should be said about James in this particular context. But I suppose the same could be said about lots of things in any of these chapters, given the breadth of what Kalliney is discussing. But still, in a book about influences and the transition from modernism to postcolonialism, James seems to me to scream out for more attention.

Kalliney's penultimate chapter looks at the work of Jean Rhys, particularly her 1934 novel Voyage in the Dark (which she said she'd based at least partly on diaries from 20 years earlier), some of her short stories, and her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea.

There remains ... a fine difference between Rhys and other white modernists on the question of a cross-racial imagination. In Voyage in the Dark, as in Rhys's memoirs, we encounter a young white woman who sympathizes with black feelings of alienation and even wants to be black — but realizes that she cannot swap her racial identity, either in real life or in her fiction. This marks a subtle but important difference from other interwar writers such as TS Eliot or Ezra Pound, who are liable to interject black vernacular speech into their work when it suits them. On the whole, white modernist writers tend to be far less relexive than Rhys in their cross-racial fantasies and in their use of black vernacular, rarely stopping to consider how black people might respond to their minstrelsy. With Rhys, we have a protagonist who wants to be black but finds herself blocked — perhaps a more transparent and ultimately more devastating rendition of the cross-racial imagination available to white modernist writers. This difference, subtle as it may be, reminds us that the early Rhys is not quite indistinguishable from Left Bank colleagues where racial attitudes are concerned. (233)

That paragraph gives a good overview of Kalliney's view of Rhys, which is nuanced and even a bit conflicted, although that conflictedness is as much Rhys's as Kalliney's, for as he notes, her personal views of colonialism were similar to William Faulkner's views of Southern racism and segregation: a sense of horror at the injustices mixed with nostalgia for elements of the old white order, and ultimately a terror of revolution. Like Faulkner's, though, Rhys's fiction was more complex and intelligent than her own socio-political analysis, and Kalliney is mostly sensitive to the ways that her fiction transcended her personal limitations, especially later in life. It would have been interesting to see him address some of the ideas Delia Konzett offers regarding Rhys in Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation, where Rhys is read a bit more sympathetically as a writer who ethnicizes whiteness, but Kalliney does a good job of exploring a lot of the Rhys scholarship while also fitting her work into his overall argument quite effectively. (And in any case, I'm biased toward Konzett's book because she's at my university, on my Ph.D. exam committee, and discusses in some depth my favorite Rhys novel, Good Morning, Midnight.)

"Why Rhys?" one might ask of Kalliney's choice to devote an entire chapter to this particular writer. Obviously, Rhys is a great bridge between modernism and post-colonialism, being a white woman born in the Caribbean, whose first literary identification was with the Left Bank of Paris in the late '20s and through the '30s. She was first championed by the über modernist Ford Maddox Ford (who named her and helped her figure out how to turn her writings into fiction), associated with various modernist circles, and then effectively disappeared — when the actress Selma Vaz Diaz wanted to adapt Good Morning, Midnight for the BBC in 1949, she had to take out a newspaper ad in search of Rhys. The legend of Jean Rhys was useful for marketing, however: "If Jean Rhys of the 1930s might appear blissfully unaware of herself as a commercial entity, Jean Rhys of the 1960s is a product of a carefully designed marketing strategy" (226-227). In Kalliney's telling, Rhys benefited significantly from the interest in postcolonial writers and postcolonial reading strategies, and Wide Sargasso Sea was especially attractive to white liberals in the metropolis who could feel perhaps more sympathy for the gently anti-imperial implications of the novel than for some of the more radical work of other, younger Caribbean writers of the era. Rhys was a cultural anti-imperialist, but not at all comfortable with nationalisms that rejected, and revolted against, the colonial order.

In many ways, the end of this chapter serves as a conclusion to Commonwealth of Letters, with the chapter that is labeled the conclusion being a kind of addendum. At the end of the chapter on Rhys, Kalliney again sums up his argument, beginning from the assertion that "postcolonial literature has been instrumental in reaffirming and redefining the status of experimentation in literature" (242). Rhys serves not only as a human link between modernism and postcolonialism, but also as beacon of changes to come. "Looking forward, the particularities of her career anticipate the institutional fracture of postwar anglophone literature" (243) — a fracture that Kalliney identifies as between politically radical work supported and published by small institutions and work that could be more easily accepted and promoted by major metropolitan institutions.

His concluding chapter offers a provocative comparison that shows the changes in the British and postcolonial literary landscape from the 1970s to now. The comparison is between the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) and the Booker Prize. The two endeavors contrast significantly, and Kalliney uses them to show the development of his main argument:

The example of CAM shows how the modernist doctrine of aesthetic autonomy — especially the idea that the arts should be relatively independent of material considerations and instrumental politics — had become, by the last decades of the century, closely associated with minority arts initiatives. By contrast, the example of the Booker Prize shows how a belated effort to affirm cultural bonds across the commonwealth could turn the racial competitiveness of literary culture to lasting commercial use. In the process, it would help attenuate the claims of autonomy so often projected by members of the literary professions at midcentury. (247)

In discussing the Booker, Kalliney looks closely John Berger's controversial acceptance speech in 1972, when Berger both stood up for aesthetic autonomy and highlighted the prize sponsors' connections to, and profits from, imperialism. This controversy, Kalliney says, strengthened the prize's public image by making it seem like something worth fighting over, and later controversies only helped to increase its apparent cultural importance and to assert the importance of London to literary culture.

Each Booker winner is immediately hailed as a national asset, every victorious novel seen to enhance the cultural prestige of the winner's place of origin. Moreover, the annual award ceremony provides a convenient platform for critics to ponder the state of metropolitan fiction. Not surprisingly, these annual meditations often rehearse arguments that have been in place for half a century or more: metropolitan writing is bland and timid, and yet there is hope that it will be reinvigorated by its encounter with the fresh, adventurous writing arriving yearly to challenge the place of the former imperial masters. (256) 

The ending of the book feels a bit rushed, because in trying to show how things have changed since the mid-20th century, Kalliney can only gesture toward the many forces affecting writing and its distribution and reception. It's too bad, for instance, that Kalliney doesn't have the space to extend his discussion to the Caine Prize for African Writing or to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, or, well, any thousand other topics. But of course that's not the purpose of the book or of this final chapter, which exists to help us see how Kalliney's argument can be extended.

Though this post has become vastly longer than I expected or intended, I have really only touched the surface of Kalliney's arguments, and have quoted from him as much as possible to try to reduce the inevitable distortion of those arguments through summary. Commonwealth of Letters seems to me to make an excellent contribution to our understanding of modernist, colonial, and postcolonial literatures. Its insistence on highlighting complexities only shows how impossible it is to encapsulate these literatures in one study; Kalliney's book can't, and shouldn't, stand alone — it needs to be read alongside such books as Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literatures by Yogita Goyal, C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain by Christian Høgsbjerg, various works by Anna Snaith, and all sorts of others.

But that's partly Kalliney's point: reducing such large, complex, contradictory history to offhand critical clichés just won't work anymore. As his own book strains against the limits of its argument, it shows the (perhaps necessary, unavoidable) dangers of imposing an argument onto the messy material of cultural history. Cultural history has been not only created, but lived, and lives are slippery. Somewhere around halfway through reading Commonwealth of Letters, I stopped trying to decide whether I agreed or disagreed with Kalliney's argument, and instead read that argument as a template, as one lens to see some of the landscape. It's a provocative, productive way of seeing, and it brings continuities into view that have not been visible before. No vantage point is omniscient; nor should we expect it to be.

My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don't, streets that are friendly, streets that aren't, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don't, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won't, and so on. 

—Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

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Mannstyle
No film director gets the sound of gunfire like Michael Mann. It's not just that he typically uses recordings of live fire; plenty of people do that. There's an alchemy he performs with his sound designers, a way of manipulating both the sound of the shots and the ambient sound to create a hyperreal effect. It's not the sound of gunfire. It's a sound that produces the effect of standing close to the sound of gunfire.


Mann is celebrated and derided for his visual style, a style so damn stylish that any Mann film is likely to get at least a few reviews saying, "All style, no substance." I can't empathize with such a view; for me, style is the substance of art, and if any object has value beyond the functional, that value is directly produced by style. (Which is not to say that Mann's style is above criticism. Not at all. But to say that it is "only" style, and that substance is something else, something that can be separated from style, seems nonsensical to me. You may prefer the style of an Eric Rohmer or Bela Tarr or a Steven Spielberg or just the general, conventionalized style of mainstream Hollywood or mainstream TV ... but it's still style, and it's still substance created and transmitted through style.)




What generally goes unnoticed about Mann's style is how the aural and the visual work together. The visuals can be so ostentatious, so determinedly symmetrical (in his early work) or abstract (in the more recent films) or supersaturated or obscuringly dark, that the strangeness of the soundtrack remains unremarked. One of the most sensitive viewers of Mann, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, noted it, though, in his review of Blackhat, pointing out the "patchy sound mixes" and "sound design [that] is deliberately erratic, rendering a good fifth of the dialogue unintelligible..."


Yes, and more: since his first abstract-expressionist film, 2006's Miami Vice, Mann has cast non-Americans as American characters for some of the leading men (Colin Farrell, Christian Bale, Chris Hemsworth) and non-native speakers of English as the leading women (Gong Li, Marion Cotillard, Tang Wei). The men do a good job with their American accents, but it creates an extra level of artificiality for them to work through, an extra way for them to distance their everyday self from their character.


The women wrestle with English well, but their tones and rhythms are noticeably different from a native speaker's, and the effect is to further make the dialogue difficult to apprehend, to distance the words spoken from their meanings and heighten their aural qualities.


The dialogue in Mann's movies, regardless of whether he's the writer, is unmistakably the dialogue of a Michael Mann movie — there is Mannspeak just as there is Mametspeak. It's clipped, jargony, declarative, pulpy. It sometimes drives critics crazy ("laughable" and "ridiculous" are words I've frequently seen used to describe the dialogue in Mann's movies). The actors tend to fall into similar rhythms from film to film, and you could play a one or two minute clip of dialogue from any of Mann's films, particularly the ones of the last decade or so, and you'd know it was dialogue from a Mann film, just as you can easily identify clips of dialogue from the movies of Robert Altman, Woody Allen, and Terrence Malick. Couple the dialogue and how the actors speak it with a recording style that is more common to amateur documentaries, and the effect is odd and, if you're able to tune into it, intoxicating.


The ways we understand and get to know characters in these movies are also very different from the techniques of conventional Hollywood cinema. Mann's always presented psychology via action, but in his most popular films — that is, his films of the 1990s — there's a pretty standard approach to psychology. That all changes with Miami Vice, where a new distance is placed between viewer and character while at the same time the filmmaking heightens the sense of our subjectivity melding with theirs.


Now, the characters thoughts, feelings, and desires no longer inhere within the character, but are, instead, expressed through the light, colors, angles, and sounds of the world as it is conveyed to us. Mann's characters are no longer characters so much as they are figures in a landscape, and the landscape is an extension of those figures' feelings.


That's why it doesn't much matter whether you can understand all the dialogue. The dialogue is just sound, and it's how that sound fits with the images (the light, the color), and how those images and sounds flow together, that matters.


Odd and even alienating as Mann's style has become, there's a profound unity to its effect. More and more, he's come to make movies that feel not so much like dreams as like insomnia.


This style is not what we might expect from someone as concerned with verisimilitude as Mann. He prefers going to locations rather than building sets; he makes his actors do months of preparation; he hires numerous consultants to get all the details right. And then, shooting and editing the film, he obscures it all, swirls it, hollows it out, fragments it into collages of drift, burst, and glimpse until all that is real feels utterly artificial. Mann's ultimate aim seems to be affect: to evoke a feeling of the hyperfake real, of the deeply flattened surface, of a world rendered into electricity jumping across a flat plane of endless night.


Blackhat
Blackhat lost a lot of money. According to Box Office Mojo, it is Mann's least financially successful film since The Keep, a movie he's mostly disavowed. Produced for a reported $70 million, Blackhat has earned only 10% of that investment back and supposedly had the 11th worst opening for a film in 2,500 or more theatres since 1982. It is likely to end up being one of 2015's biggest flops, and that's saying something (for all the talk of Jupiter Ascending being a disaster, the Wachowski's film had some success in foreign markets and looks like it's made back its production budget, at least. Blackhat cannot say the same).


This is not especially surprising. Blackhat is marketed as a techno-thriller (the trailer, while hinting at Mannstyle, is pretty exciting), and its plot is, indeed, that of a techno-thriller. But anybody who goes into the movie expecting a techno-thriller is likely to be disappointed. "Boring" is a word commonly used in viewers' responses to the film.


The thrill is not in the movie's narrative, which gets subsumed and sublimed into Mannstyle. The thrill is in the movement, sound, and editing. Mann's affinities are more with Wong Kar-Wai than with any standard action filmmaker.


We could talk about the ideas in the movie, ideas about surveillance and punishment and information and reality. It's not for nothing that there are references to Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida (The Animal That Therefore I Am) early on. But these ideas are not expressed as ideas that one can talk about and debate: they're ideas that are felt, sensed, whiffed, dreamed. They can't be separated from the mode of expression.


That's Mann's real accomplishment here. Ideas, like the books in Nick Hathaway's cell, get left behind.


The traces of those ideas, though, pulse through our circuits and burn across the night sky.

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My name is Matthew and I am a Norton Critical Edition addict.

Hardly a term has gone by without my assigning students at least one NCE, both when I was a high school teacher and especially now that I'm teaching college students. (This term, it's The Red Badge of Courage.) I have been known to change syllabi each term just to try out new NCEs with students. I have bought NCEs for myself even of books that I already owned in multiple other editions. I have all four editions of the NCE of Heart of Darkness because the changes between them fascinate me. (I've been meaning to write a blog post or essay of some sort about those changes. I'll get to it one day.)

Anton Chekhov is my favorite writer, a writer whose work I've been reading and thinking about for all of my adult life. The Norton Critical Editions of Chekhov's stories and plays published in the late 1970s remained unchanged until Laurence Senelick's Selected Plays came out in 2004, and then, finally, last year Cathy Popkin's Selected Stories. Senelick's collection is good, and probably all that the average reader needs, though I'm more partial to Senelick's true masterpiece, the Complete Plays, which is awe-inspiring.

Popkin's Selected Stories is something more again, and easily the best single-volume collection of Chekhov in English. This is the place to start if you've never read Chekhov, and it's a great resource even for seasoned Chekhovians. I'll go further than that, actually: Because of the critical apparatus, this is a great resource for anyone interested in fiction, translation, and/or writing; and it is one of the most interesting Norton Critical Editions I know, almost as impressive as my favorite NCEs, Things Fall Apart and The English Bible.

Popkin made the interesting and valuable choice to not only include stories from multiple translators (including new commissions), but to foreground the act of translation by including helpful descriptions of each translator's approach and methodology, as well as short passages from multiple stories in numerous translations for comparison:

sample of the Comparison Passages section

Further, Popkin frequently offers a perspective on the translation of an individual story in the first footnote for it, and sometimes in subsequent footnotes that point out particular choices the translator made.

The foregrounding of translation allows Popkin to bring in essays in the critical section that focus on Chekhov as a stylist, something Ralph Matlaw, editor of the previous edition, specifically avoided because he thought it made no sense to talk about "since the subtleties of Chekhov's style are lost in translation." Popkin's contention is that this no longer needs to be true, if it ever was.

What we have here, then, is not only a book of Chekhov stories plus some biographical and critical material, but a book about aesthetics and writing. One of the critical disputes that Popkin highlights, both in her introduction and in her selection of essays, is a longstanding one between critics who believe every detail in the stories has a particular purpose and function, and critics who believe that Chekhov's art (and philosophy) resides in the very extraneousness and randomness of some of his details. There is, as Popkin notes, no solution to this question, and plenty of readers (I'm one of them) believe that in a certain way both interpretations can be correct — but the value here is that Popkin is able to make the critical dispute one that is not only about Chekhov, but about writing, realism, and the reader's experience of the text. Attentive readers of this Selected Stories will thus not only gain knowledge of Chekhov's work, but will also participate in the exploration of aesthetics: the aesthetics of the stories as well as the aesthetics of translation.

Inevitably, I have one complaint and a few quibbles. The complaint is that the physical book is terribly bound — the binding of my copy broke when I opened it, and continued to break whenever I opened to anything in the middle of the book. No pages have yet fallen out, but they could soon. This is unusual for a Norton book — The English Bible is huge and only one year older than Selected Stories and its bindings (2 big volumes) are very strong; my copy of the 1979 NCE of Chekhov's stories, purchased at the earliest 15 years ago, seems unbreakable. I hope the problem with this new book is an anomaly.

My quibbles are purely those of anyone who has their own particular favorites among Chekhoviana. I detest Ronald Hingley's imperialist atrocities of translations, and though I know they're necessary for this volume because they offer such stark contrast to other translations, why why why did Popkin have to include Hingley's translation of perhaps my favorite Chekhov story, "Gusev"?! At least she could have included somebody — anybody! — else's translation alongside it. (Indeed, I think it would have been helpful for the book to choose one complete story to offer in multiple translations. "Gusev" is probably too long, but Chekhov wrote a number of quite short stories that have been translated numerous times.)

The selection of stories in this edition is almost completely superior to Matlaw's, but it's unfortunate to lose the 1886 story "Dreams", which seems to me a perfect encapsulation of Chekhov's style between his early humorous sketches and his later, longer stories ... but it's easily available elsewhere.

One significant improvement Popkin makes over Matlaw's previous edition is the inclusion of some of Chekhov's longer stories, most significantly "Ward No. 6" and "In the Ravine", two of his most important works. The book is already almost 700 pages, so obviously novellas such as "My Life" and "The Steppe" — hugely important, original, difficult, complex, breathtaking works — wouldn't fit without bumping out a lot of other worthwhile material, but still I pine. Perhaps Selected Stories will be successful enough that Norton will consider a Critical Edition called Chekhov's Novellas...

Finally, it might have been nice to include something on the adaptation of Chekhov's stories to theatre, film, and television — though of course his plays are more frequently adapted, some of the better adaptations are of the short stories, and there's been at least a little bit of critical attention to that. Adaptation is another form of translation, and it would have been interesting to consider that further within the frame that Popkin set up.

But really, these are the inevitable, unimportant quibbles of the sort that any anthology causes in a reader familiar with the territory. Popkin's edition of the Selected Stories is a book to celebrate and savor, and it gets so many things right that it is churlish to complain about any of it. Even the cover is a smart, appropriate choice: a painting by Chekhov's friend Isaac Levitan.

This book is clearly the result of lots of love for Chekhov, and as such I can only love it back.

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This past term, the course I taught was titled "Introduction to Literary Analysis". It's the one specific course that is required for all English majors, and it's also available as a general education credit for any other undergraduates. Its purpose is similar to that of any Introduction to Literature class, though at UNH it really has one primary purpose: help students strengthen their close reading skills with fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. (We're required to include all four, though the nonfiction part can be smaller than the others.)

Next term, I'm teaching an American lit survey (1865-present) and have decided to focus it on the question of canonicity. So, for instance, we'll be using the appropriate volumes of The Norton Anthology of American Literature as a core text, but not just to read the selections; instead, we'll also be looking at the book itself as an anthology: what the editors choose to include and not, how the selections are arranged and presented, etc. We'll also be reading a few other things to mess up the students' ideas of "American" and "literature". For instance, I'm pairing The Red Badge of Courage (Norton Critical Edition) with A Princess of Mars (and Junot Díaz's excellent introduction to the Library of America edition). And then Octavia Butler's Wild Seed to make it even messier and more productive.

And so it was with special interest that I read two essays this morning in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "The New Modesty in Literary Criticism" by Jeffrey J. Williams and "What We Lose If We Lose the Canon" by Arthur Krystal. The Williams seems to me about as good an overview as you could do in a short space; the Krystal seems to have been beamed in from 1982.



The Krystal essay is not really worth reading, especially if you've ever read a "Keep Shakespeare on the syllabus, you philistines!" essay before. But let's, for the fun of shooting fish in a sardine can, respond to a few of his assertions:

Starting from the premise that aesthetics were just another social construct rather than a product of universal principles, postmodernist thinkers succeeded in toppling hierarchies and nullifying the literary canon. Indeed, they were so good at unearthing the socioeconomic considerations behind canon formation that even unapologetic highbrows had to wonder if they hadn’t been bamboozled by Arnoldian acolytes and eloquent ideologues.

That heretofore inviolable ideal of art, as expostulated by Walter Pater and John Ruskin, by T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling, by the New Criticism, was shunted aside; and those emblematic qualities of modernist works—obliqueness, lyricism, dissonance, ambiguity—were relegated to a hubristic past. Although many former canonical authors continue to be taught in universities, so are many popular, commercial, and genre writers. As long as a writer accumulates sufficient readers and a decent press, respect surely follows. Any reason that George R.R. Martin shouldn’t have parity with William Faulkner? Is Maya Angelou really less important than Emily Dickinson?

Oh please.

If aesthetic ideas are not social constructs, then they are some sort of natural phenomena, something somehow instinctive in the brain. Or otherwise they're the product of God's ethereal farts. Those are pretty much the options. Me, I'm sticking with social constructs, since that's easier to study, though I expect that certain elements of our brains — the elements that notice patterns — also affect how we respond to aesthetic forms and effects, and so it's probably more accurate to say that aesthetic ideas are a combination of the capacities of our perceptions plus the weight of cultural and social forces. (I'm an atheist, so the theological interpretation is not one I'm interested in, but it's certainly a venerable tradition, and we know Krystal and his ilk do love their venerable traditions, especially since there's no arguing with God. If God sez Shakespeare is great, then, by God, Shakespeare is great!)

For a far more interesting, informative, and useful discussion of canons, see Samuel Delany's Para Doxa interview in About Writing, "Inside and Outside the Canon". (And if that's not enough, see Katha Pollitt's classic essay, "Why We Read" in her book Reasonable Creatures.)

What Krystal is really writing about is pedagogy. He sees "the canon" (whatever that is) as the textbook list. His view of the purpose of literature courses is an extremely narrow one: students should study the greatest of human cultural artifacts. To be "taught in universities" therefore means to be Respected, to be The Greatest.

There may be people who use pop culture in their courses who see that material as, indeed, The Greatest. (And this is ignoring the fact that yesterday's popcult is not prevented from being today's cult, even among the cultiest of cultmeisters — to offer the most obvious, clichéd examples: Shakespeare and Dickens.) Krystal imagines a contradiction where there isn't one: "Although many former canonical authors continue to be taught in universities, so are many popular, commercial, and genre writers." The two parts of that sentence are only at odds if you think the sole legitimate purpose of university teaching is to impart knowledge of The Greatest Works of Literature to students.

And yes, at times our courses should be about the works that have been most lauded over time, and not just because it's interesting to study the history of cultural constructions. Studying complex, old lit with people who've devoted their lives to it is one of the great privileges of a good education. But it's not the only reason to study something in a class.

I'm putting A Princess of Mars alongside The Red Badge of Courage not because I think Burroughs is as great a writer as Crane. In most of the ways we speak of a writer being "great", Burroughs is really really really not. And yet there is a lot about Burroughs, and particularly his first few novels, that makes him well worth academic attention. (Junot Díaz makes the case far better than I can in his intro.) What I want my students to see through the comparison of both books is the way that considering their canonicity — Crane's within "American Literature", Burroughs's within "Popular Culture" — can tell us something about both books and about the cultural discourses that shape our perceptions and values. I'm not even entirely sure what those lessons will be, because I prefer not to be settled in all of my ideas before I begin a class, because for me a good class discussion is one that produces ideas we didn't have before that discussion.

Krystal also works from an assumption that what he feels as a deep aesthetic experience is lesser in people who read, for instance, George R.R. Martin. This is a common assumption, but it's one I've become skeptical of. I'm skeptical first because it's not something that can be proved or disproved, and so it is a self-serving opinion. If you argue that your engagement with the Twilight novels provides you with an emotionally complex and intellectually engaging experience, it is difficult for me to say that my emotionally complex and intellectually engaging experience with Anna Karenina is greater than yours. If you're out there writing Twilight fanfic, it's entirely possible that your engagement with Twilight is actually deeper than mine with Anna Karenina.

This is basic reader-response theory. The text itself doesn't matter; what matters is the effect on the reader. Arthur Krystal may find such an idea horrifying, but it's not so different from what he's claiming for the books he values — that they produce a deeper, more satisfying, more educative effect than the books he doesn't value. But that has far less to do with the book than with the reader. What he's saying is that one reader's deep, satisfying experience of a book is deeper and more satisfying than another reader's. And the first reader in this equation is him. How convenient!

Krystal writes:

I’m not suggesting that one can’t fully enjoy James Crumley, James Lee Burke, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, and Orson Scott Card, but I’m not sure one can love them in the way that one loves Shakespeare, Keats, Chekhov, and Joyce. One can be a fan of Agatha Christie, but one can’t really be a fan of George Eliot.

There's a lot wrong with that paragraph. First, Krystal's lack of reading ability with popular lit is evident in his grouping a bunch of very dissimilar writers together and his assumption that "one can love them" in a single way and that that single way is different from the single way one loves Shakespeare et al. Second, there's the idea that being a fan is somehow different from the way that one loves Shakespeare et al. The error of that sentence would be clearer if Krystal had used not Agatha Christie but rather Jane Austen, who is not only highly canonical, but whose fans are legion, including countless fanfic writers. (Fandom's attraction to Austen rather than Eliot would be an interesting study.) It's interesting, too, the way he uses emotional language: one can, he suggests, fully enjoy [popular writers], but one loves Shakespeare et al. Elsewhere in the essay he makes the argument for big ideas and human nature and yadda yadda yadda, but it seems to me that it is here that Krystal reveals what matters most to him, which is a depth of feeling, a depth of engagement with the text — the sense of having one's world and knowledge and self expand via reading.

And yes I say yes! That's what lots of us love when reading. I just don't think the text matters as much as the reader.

As someone who, indeed, loves much of Philip K. Dick (and Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Joyce. Keats not so much), I'm not sure that I, for one, do love his best work differently from that of Shakespeare et al. I feel like I love them all very specifically — that is to say, it's true that I do not love PKD in the way I love Shakespeare; but it's true that I do not love Chekhov in the way I love Shakespeare or the way I love Joyce (well, pre-Finnegans Wake Joyce. The Wake keeps defeating me). The way that I love PKD differently from the others is not, though, part of a separate category. Further, I would say I dislike Keats in a similar way that I dislike Heinlein: their words, ideas, structures, etc. do not hold my interest, and while in both cases I can in a certain intellectual way appreciate some of what they're up to, that knowledge does not convert into the affect of literary love.

I said above that Krystal's argument is a self-serving opinion. It is self-serving because he is arguing that his way of reading, his way of teaching, his way of learning, his way of valuing is The Way. If he were arguing against his own practices and prejudices, it would be much more interesting. If, for instance, he were to say, "I'm a terrible reader because I didn't get enough training in The Canon during my college years," or if he were to say, "I wish I could get some sort of emotional and intellectual experience from great literature, but I can't, and I feel that that is a personal failing, something that holds me back from a full enjoyment of life," then perhaps we could take his argument more seriously. (This is why perhaps my favorite piece of writing on The Canon is Wallace Shawn's play The Designated Mourner.)

The limitations of Krystal's view of literary study are brought into even sharper relief by reading Jeffrey J. Williams's survey of recent approaches. It's not complete by any means — it's a quick & dirty look at a few approaches, and leaves out many that are at least as popular among scholars as the ones he cites (among my compatriots, animal studies and trauma studies are the biggies). I think Williams is right that in some ways the recent approaches look back toward approaches that were common before the Age of Theory — back toward philology, toward literary history — but that's a consequence of the realization that there is no One True Way. Literary analysis is not a zero sum game. I have no animus, really, toward my friends who do animal studies and literature, or trauma theory and literature, even though these are not my ways. (I am, unsurprisingly, interested in the intersections of aesthetics and the world, in genres as sets of readerly expectations, etc.) I would never steer a student away from working with someone whose interest was in those areas. Students should experience lots of different ways of reading and lots of different ways of valuing what they read. They should take courses with curmudgeonly canon-fetishizing fuddyduddies like Arthur Krystal, just as they should take courses with pomo popcultists who "read" nothing but sitcoms.

What teaching the Intro to Lit Analysis course taught me is that students can be really smart about their own reading, but that they've also mostly been exposed only to very limited approaches in their secondary education. They cling to what they know, and what they know tends to be a very basic sort of New Criticism plus biography (anathema to the New Critics, but common to book reports, so students fall back on it). Our job, I think, is to show them how to do complex close readings, how to bring biography and history in as useful context rather than reductive readings. Exploring why "Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' shows that she did not have a good relationship with her father" is a shallow thesis that reduces rather than expands our understanding of the poem can be mindblowing for students — and then we can talk about how knowledge of Plath's biography might be used to expand and deepen our understanding of her poetry, if that were an approach that interested us.

That, ultimately, is my test for critical approaches: Can we expand our understanding of, and our appreciation for, the text? Or are we limiting it, reducing it, simplifying it, turning it into something easily apprehended? If so, why bother?

Or, in other words: Yes, let's read Faulkner (he's my favorite American novelist; I'd never say no!). But I see nothing wrong with reading Faulkner alongside George R.R. Martin. We could learn a lot from that combination about how texts create worlds, about how separate books expand our imagining of characters, about how narrative forms develop our perceptions of characters and settings and histories. Who cares whether Faulkner is "better" than GRRM, or vice versa? (Me, I love Faulkner and find the Song of Ice and Fire books unreadable, so I'm not likely to teach such a course or write such a paper, but I'd love somebody else to do it!) What do such hierarchies get us? Literature isn't football, and we don't need fantasy leagues. We don't need lists of texts; we need to encourage varied ways of reading, and that includes reading against your own prejudices, your own knowledge, your own limitations. I am skeptical of students who don't want to read anything published before they were born, because they are limiting themselves just as Arthur Krystal is limiting himself by sticking to the canon of old white guys. If you've never worked hard to learn to appreciate an 18th Century British novel, you are a limited reader — but you are also a limited reader if you've never worked hard to appreciate a popular contemporary novel or two. This is one reason why I love David Foster Wallace's syllabus for a literary analysis class, where the texts included Jackie Collins’s Rock Star, Stephen King’s Carrie, Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, and James Elroy’s The Big Nowhere, and he warned the students:

Don’t let any potential lightweightish-looking qualities of the texts delude you into thinking that this will be a blow-off-type class. These “popular” texts will end up being harder than more conventionally “literary” works to unpack and read critically.

Arthur Krystal must fear getting an aneurysm when he looks at that syllabus, but if he were honest he'd admit that his grumpiness may be because that syllabus shows he's less of a reader than someone like DFW, someone deeply familiar with The Canon but not limited to it. Krystal should try to learn to read Philip K. Dick or one of the other writers he disparages — learn to read them in a thoughtful, appreciative way, not a dismissive one. He might actually learn something.

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For years, I've said I like novels to be x, y, or z; often that x, y, or z meant (in some way or another) unsettling, challenging, surprising... But those words feel inadequate, because inevitably there are things that are, for instance, unsettling in unproductive ways — a pulpy, detailed story of child molestation is probably unsettling and disturbing, but also plenty likely to be worthless, exploitative crap that aims primarily for the reader's gag reflex and puts the writer in the obnoxious position of nudging us endlessly with the question, "How much can you take?"

As I thought about why Damon Galgut's 1991 novel The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs worked so well for me where so many other books I've tried to read recently did not, I started to feel like I was finally moving toward some understanding of what the word disturbing, as praise, meant to me. It ties in with something Galgut himself said in an interview with Kianoosh Hashemzadeh for Web Conjunctions a few years ago:

...it seems to me, if you provide answers—the usual forms of literary catharsis are a kind of answer, things tie up and all the elements of the plot are neatly knotted at the end—you might have a good experience when you’re reading that book, but when you close the book you basically have closed any moral problems that the book raised and that’s it. Whereas if people are disturbed and unsettled, things have been raised and not resolved, people have to carry that around and work it out some way.

This is similar to things I've thought for a long time (I am, after all, a devotee of Chekhov, who famously said the job of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them), but Galgut's formulation there feels like it captures many of the qualities I value. The usual forms of literary catharsis is an interesting phrase, for instance, and makes me think of the thousand stories launched by Raymond Carver's example, stories that mistake bathos for epiphany. I think too of what Tom McCarthy called "the default mode dominating mainstream fiction and most culture in general: this kind of sentimental humanism" that wallows in "a certain set of assumptions, certain models of subjectivity – for example, the contemporary cult of the individual, the absolute authentic self who is measured through his or her absolutely authentic feeling."

(What I want in fiction: To push against those assumptions. To seek unusual forms of literary catharsis, or to abjure catharsis altogether. To stay surprising. To disturb, but not exploitatively, not in a way that produces easy emotion or predictable response — to write in a way that frustrates prediction, that lingers because it scratches you. And yet is this any different from those statements by Dickinson and Kafka that get repeated ad nauseam these days among the bookish? Dickinson: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." Kafka: "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." We put these on bookmarks and refrigerator magnets, we proclaim them to students, but I am skeptical that most people actually agree with these statements. If they did, they would read and write differently, and such works as Wallace Shawn's plays would be worshipped among the literati.)

The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs tells a simple story, if it can be said to tell a story at all: a young, white South African man named Patrick Winter had some sort of nervous breakdown during mandatory military service; he travels with his divorced mother to Namibia in late 1989 because his mother is dating a former student of hers, a black man involved in Namibia's independence struggle, which was then culminating in the country's first democratic elections. Patrick's mother and Godfrey, her boyfriend, break up because she's not particularly committed to Namibian independence, and she, Patrick, and a "I'm-not-a-racist!" racist white man they met all travel back to South Africa. The end.

While mostly accurate, such a summary pretty much misses everything that's important about the novel.

For instance, the details of Patrick's breakdown in the military: he wasn't as athletically skilled as some of the other soldiers in his unit, and he formed a friendship with another somewhat awkward guy, Lappies. Eventually, one night they had a sexual encounter with each other, something they never talked about — and then Lappies was killed a month later while out on patrol. Patrick comes undone.

The identity that most clearly defines Patrick is that of white South African man, which in many circumstances is (more than) enough. But one of the smartest moves of the book is to tease us toward a desire to pigeonhole Patrick more fully, and then, once revealing it, to frustrate that desire and illuminate its hollowness. Was Patrick's encounter with Lappies purely a matter of the circumstances — a friendship in a difficult place that, after a particularly stressful bit of warfare, blossoms into something physical — or are Patrick and Lappies gay men? We don't know, and Patrick probably doesn't know. His mother asks him, "Have you ever been in love?" and he replies, "Yes. Once. I think. I'm not sure." His mother says he never told her about it. "I don't think I knew at the time," he says. (The context clearly implies he's talking about Lappies here.) We learn no more about his sexual identity for the rest of the book.

This uncertainty of identity is important for the book's specific context, because one of the things Patrick tries to come to grips with is that some identities are social ones, and their reality is outside his ability to affect them without radical change: identities of skin color, of nationality, of gender, of class adhere to him, regardless of whether he wants them to, and their power is especially determining in South Africa and Namibia at the end of the 1980s.

What we learn in the final chapters of the book is the difficulty of escaping not just a white identity, but racist power. Patrick wants to be like a white political leader Godfrey knew who was murdered, but he knows he doesn't have it in him. He encounters both proud racists and people who are vehemently racist but won't admit it to themselves. He watches his mother spiral from anti-racist political commitment back into the comfort of her racial privilege. The last sentence is: "In front of us, empty and cold, the road travelled on toward home." By that point in the book, it is a sad, even horrifying sentence, for it is a sentence filled with a sense that home is a place of wrongness, but there is no escape from it, no hope, even: its gravity shapes and binds you. And yet there is some hope because Patrick is not his parents (his father is a wealthy capitalist in South Africa). He's not a political activist, he's not anyone who should be held up as a model, but he's not quite as bad as his parents, not quite as stuck, it seems, in acceptance of the power his skin color brings him. What will become of him in the last days of the apartheid era? We don't know, nor does Patrick, nor could Galgut when he wrote the novel (it was first published in 1991) because too much in the world, and especially South Africa, was unknown at the time, and so any clear resolution he gave to it would have rung false. He could have given us the comfort of showing Patrick coming to a political awakening, renouncing his parents, staying behind in Namibia to work with Godfrey. He could have had Patrick find a nice boy to settle down with and overcome his trauma, perhaps even a black boy, showing that unlike his mother, he, the enlightened individual, is capable of creating a good interracial romance. Conversely, Galgut could have given us pure nihilism and had Patrick killed somehow in Namibia, maybe a suicide, maybe killed in a political bombing (mistaken for an activist!). But instead, Galgut made what seems to me the right choice, the most resonant choice, to let the book exist with a kind of possibility, even if a pessimistic one. It's not a comforting ending, it's not consoling, but it's also not hopeless, and it lingers, because it forces us to think about what will become of Patrick, and why. We are disturbed, left to our own intense tumult, disorder, chaos.

The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs uses the first-person point of view to move the reader beyond an affirmation of uncomplicated individualism. Galgut could have written a book with multiple viewpoints, allowing us to see the likely very different perceptions of Patrick's mother, of Godfrey, of Dirk Blaauw (the racist who doesn't think he's a racist). That sort of copious social realism has its place, but it is not necessary here, because we can guess it all. Patrick is an observer in most of this story, and every encounter is rich with history behind it. Details are telling. Patrick's mother shows him a little glass bottle she bought in town, but Patrick knows it came from a German shop that also displayed items with swastikas on them. It's a tiny detail, and yet suddenly we know what is happening to Patrick's mother: from someone who said she was committed to anti-racist politics, she has become someone who can buy a trinket at a shop that also sells Nazi kitsch. It was a shocking moment for me, and it made me realize I had held out hope for his mother, hope that for all her messiness and confusion that she would end up okay. We don't need the complex armature of the social novel here. (Which is not to denigrate the 19th century social novel. In the hands of its greatest practitioners — Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, a few others — it could be a remarkably diverse, radical form.) Galgut can unsettle readers' assumptions and desires through the intensity of the book's focus and the power that gives to each sentence and each narrative gesture.

Galgut's prose serves his purposes well: it's bare, efficient, even cold — qualities that not only vividly convey Patrick's sense of disassociation from the world, but also guard against hyperbole and sentimentalism. The danger of such a style is that it can turn into the opposite of sentimentalism, earnest frigidity, but it doesn't feel to me that it does so. Instead, the words and sentences leave room for our own response, our own flows of emotion, whatever those flows may be.

I've been reading Steven Shaviro's new book, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, and I was especially taken with this passage (if you want the context, the chapter it's from originally appeared as the article "Self-Enjoyment and Concern: On Whitehead and Levinas"):

A philosophy of processes and events explores manners of being rather than states of being, "modes of thought" rather than any supposed essence of thought, and contingent interactions rather than unchanging substances. It focuses, you might say, on adverbs instead of nouns. It is as concerned with the way that one says things as it is with the ostensible content of what is said. Even if the facts, or data, have not themselves changed, the manner in which we entertain those facts or data may well change... (p. 18)

Shaviro goes on to explore these ideas within philosophical contexts, but I think there's something to them for fiction, too, in what such ideas suggest about fictive consciousness, identity, and subjectivity. If we want to overcome the banalities inherent in the usual forms of literary catharsis, the default mode of sentimental humanism, etc., then perhaps we need a fiction of processes, modes of thought, and contingent interactions. That's what it seems to me Galgut gives us with The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, a novel in which perceptions are in process up to the final sentence, and which, when its last page is turned, leaves readers to their own modes of thought — modes of thought that are themselves processes, and which now become processes inflected by interaction with the novel. Kafka's axe chops the frozen sea within us, but it isn't "real" ice that it is chopping, merely our perception of frozenness. The sea was never frozen; it was what it always was, despite our failed perception: in flux, like Heraclitus's river, on the banks of which stands a sign reading: Watch your step!

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I attended a screening of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1980 film Lili Marleen at the Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist series at Lincoln Center last weekend, and it was an extraordinary experience. This is one of Fassbinder's weirdest and in some ways most problematic films, a movie for which he had a relatively giant budget and got lots of publicity, but which has since become among the most hard-to-find Fassbinder films (which is really saying something!). Despite a lot of searching, I didn't come upon a reasonably-priced copy of it until I recently discovered an Australian DVD (seemingly out of print now) that was a library discard.

The story of Lili Marleen is relatively simple, and is very loosely based on the wartime experiences of Lale Andersen, whose performance of the title song was immensely popular, and whose book Der Himmel hat viele Farben is credited in the film. A mildly talented Berlin cabaret singer named Willie (Hannah Schygulla) falls in love with a Jewish musician named Robert (Giancarlo Giannini), whose father (Mel Ferrer) is head of a powerful resistance organization based in Switzerland, and who does not approve of the love affair or Robert's proposal of marriage. A Nazi officer (Karl Heinz von Hassel) hears Willie perform one night, is captivated by her, and guides her into recording the song "Lili Marleen", which unexpectedly becomes a song beloved of all soldiers everywhere on Earth. Willie becomes a rich and famous star, summoned even by Hitler himself, while Robert continues to work for the resistance and ends up marrying someone else. By the end of the war, Robert is a great musician and conductor and Willie seems mostly forgotten, many of her friends dead or imprisoned, and Robert lost to her. She had no convictions aside from her love of Robert, but that love was not enough. (I should note here that there are interesting overlaps between the film and Kurt Vonnegut's great novel Mother Night. But that's a topic for another day...)

I was surprised to find that Lincoln Center was using the German dub of the film rather than the English-language original (it was a multinational production, so English was the lingua franca, and, given the dominance of English-language film, presumably made it easier to market). It was interesting to see Lili Marleen in German, but unfortunately the print did not come subtitled, and so Lincoln Center added subtitles by apparently having someone click on prepared blocks of text. The effect was bizarre: not only were the subtitles sometimes too light to read, but they were often off from what the actors were saying, and when the subtitler would get behind, they would simply click through whole paragraphs of text to catch up. My German's not great, but I was familiar with the film and can pick up enough German to know what was going on and where the subtitles belonged, but I missed plenty of details. The effect was to render the film more dreamlike and far less coherent in terms of plot and character relations than it actually is. Not a bad experience, though, as it heightened a lot of the effects Fassbinder seemed to be going for.

Afterward, I said to my companion, "That was like watching an anti-Nazi movie made in the style of Nazi movies." I'd vaguely had a similar feeling when I first watched the DVD, but it wasn't so vivid for me as when we watched the German version with terrible subtitling — my first experience of Nazi films was of unsubtitled 16mm prints and videotapes my WWII-obsessed father watched when I was a kid.





When I got home, I started looking through some of the critical writings on the film, and came across Laura J. Heins's contribution to A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder: "Two Kinds of Excess: Fassbinder and Veit Harlan", which interestingly compares Lili Marleen to the aesthetics of one of the most prominent of Nazi filmmakers (and a relative-by-marriage of Stanley Kubrick).

Lili Marleen was controversial when it was released, not only because it is probably Fassbinder's most over-the-top melodrama, a film that defies both the expectations of good taste and of mainstream storytelling, but also because it arrived at a time when what Susan Sontag dubbed (in February 1975) "fascinating fascism" was on the wane (The Damned was 1969, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS was October 1975, as if to bring everything Sontag described to an absurd climax) while interest in earnest representations of the Nazis and the Holocaust was on the rise (Holocaust 1978, The Tin Drum 1979, The Last Metro 1980, Playing for Time 1980, Mephisto 1981, Sophie's Choice 1982, The Winds of War 1983, etc.). Lili Marleen is much closer to The Damned (a film Fassbinder loved) in its effect than to the films with similar subject matter released in the years around it, and so its contrast from the prevailing aesthetic regime was stark, leading to what seems to have been in some critics utter revulsion. It's notable that Mephisto, a film with very similar themes* and a significantly different aesthetic, could win an Oscar, but though Germany submitted Lili Marleen to the Academy, it was not nominated — and I'd bet few people were surprised it was not.

Even though it exudes the signs of a pop culture aesthetic, Lili Marleen can't actually be assimilated into the popular culture it was released into, partly because the aesthetic it's drawing from is passé and partly because it is deliberately at odds with conventional expectations. In a chapter on Lili Marleen in Fassbinder's Germany, Thomas Elsaesser writes that "coincidence and dramatic irony are presented as terrible anticlimaxes. With its asymmetries and non-equivalences, the film disturbs the formal closure of popular narrative, while still retaining all the elements of popular story-telling."



At the time of its release, there was much handwringing about the ability of works of art to create a desire or nostalgia for fascism in audiences, and Lili Marleen became Exhibit A. Heins quotes Brigitte Peucker: "One wonders whether, in Lili Marleen, Fassbinder’s parodistic style is not unrecognizable as parody to most spectators, and whether his central alienation effect, the song itself, does not instead run the danger of drawing us in." This is absurd. Fassbinder's style is parodistic, but it's also much more than that — it is multimodal in its excess — and I have about as much ability to imagine an audience member getting a good ol' nostalgic lump in the throat and tear in the eye while watching it as I have the ability to imagine someone watching Inglourious Bastards and mistaking it for Night and Fog.

Heins paraphrases Peucker as apparently thinking that "the often repeated title song may ultimately generate more sentimental affect than irritation". I can't believe that, either. For those of us who are not especially misty-eyed about the long lost days of the 1,000-year Reich, the song becomes as grating as it does for the character of Robert (Giancarlo Giannini), who gets locked in a cell with a couple lines of the song playing over and over and over again. What begins as sentimentality becomes, through repetition, torture.


The song is repeated so much that even if it doesn't irritate, it is stripped of meaning, and that's central to the point of the story, as Elsaesser describes:

When Willie says, "I only sing", she is not as politically naive or powerless as she may appear. Just as her love survives because she withdraws it from all possible objects and objectifications, so her song, through its very circularity, becomes impervious to the powers and structures in which it is implicated. Love and song are both, by the end of the film, empty signs. This is their strength, their saving grace, their redemptive innocence, allowing Fassbinder to acknowledge the degree to which his own film is inscribed within a system (of production, distribution and reception) already in place, waiting to be filled by an individual, who lends the enterprise the appearance of intentionality, design and desire for self-expression. 

One of the things I love about Lili Marleen is that its mode is utter and obvious kitsch, undeniable kitsch. It highlights the kitschiness not only of the Nazi aesthetic (which plenty of people have done, not least, though unintentionally, the Nazis themselves), but to some extent also of many movies about the Nazis. (I kept thinking of the awful TV mini-series Holocaust while watching it this time, and Elsaesser makes that connection as well.) We love to use the Nazis and the Holocaust for sentimental purposes, and representations of the Nazis and Holocaust often unintentionally veer off into poshlost. To intentionally do so is dangerous, even as critique, because it is too easy to fall into parody and render fascism as something absurd and ridiculous, but not insidious. The genius of Lili Marleen is that the insidiousness remains. It's what nags at us afterward, what lingers beneath the occasional laughter at the excess. There is a discomfort to this film, and it's not just the discomfort of undeniable parody — it is the discomfort of realizing how easily we can be drawn in to the structures being parodied: the suspense, the action, the breathless and improbable love story, the twists and turns, the pageantry, the displays of wealth and power. Our desires are easily teased, our expectations set like booby traps, and again and again those desires and expectations are frustrated and mercilessly mocked.


It's worth thinking about the place of anti-Semitism in Lili Marleen (and Fassbinder's work generally), because this was also part of the uproar over the film, an uproar that was really a continuity of the complaints about Fassbinder's extremely controversial play Garbage, the City, and Death. While not as brazenly playing with anti-Semitic imagery and language, Lili Marleen does give us a very powerful Jewish patriarch in Robert's father, played by Mel Ferrer, a character that can be seen in a variety of ways — certainly, he is an impediment to Robert and Willie's romance (clearly wanting his son to marry a nice Jewish girl), but I also think that Ferrer's performance gives him some warmth and grace that the Nazi characters lack. Nonetheless, while Lili Marleen is very obviously an anti-Nazi film, it's not so obviously an anti-anti-Semitic film (though there is a quick shot of a concentration camp, and Willie redeems herself by sneaking evidence of the camps out of Poland). Heins writes:

It cannot, of course, be concluded that the Absent One of all of Fassbinder’s films is The Jew, or that the sense of danger created by an unseen presence is racialized or nationalized, as it is in Harlan’s film [Jud Süss]. The malevolent other of Fassbinder’s films is more properly patriarchy and the police state, acting in the service of a repressive bourgeois order. In the case of Lili Marleen, however, we must conclude that Fassbinder did fail to effectively counteract the Harlanesque paranoid delusion of total Jewish power, if only because The Jew in this film is described as capitalist patriarchy’s main representative.

That point is astute, though for me it highlight the (sometimes dangerous) complexity of Lili Marleen: by employing certain features of Nazi storytelling, by putting clichés (aesthetic, narrative, political) at the center of his technique, and by seeking to wed this to the sort of anti-capitalist, anti-normative-family ideas common to his work from the beginning, Fassbinder ends up in a bind, one that forces him to trust that the various opposing forces render all the clichés hollow enough that performing and representing them does not give them new validity or justification — that the paranoia and delusion remain legible as paranoia and delusion. I think they do, but I feel less certain of that than the certainty I feel against the old accusations of glamourizing Nazism.

In addition to the title song, Lili Marleen includes an ostentatiously schmaltzy score by Fassbinder's frequent collaborator Peer Raben. It's schmaltzy, but also very sly — as Roger Hillman points out on the Australian DVD commentary, Raben includes brief homages to composers and works that the Nazis would not have looked fondly on, such as Saint-Saëns' Samson and Delilah. This technique is similar to the film's entire strategy: to booby-trap what on the surface is an overwrought deployment of old tropes.

Finally, a note on the acting: sticking with the concept of the film as a whole, the acting is generally a bit off: sometimes wooden, sometimes unconvincingly emotional. (It's acting a la Brecht via Sirk via Fassbinder.) The more I watch it, though, the more taken I am by Hannah Schygulla's performance. On the surface, it's an appropriately "bad" performance, one redolent of the acting style of melodramas in general and Nazi melodramas in particular. And yet Schygulla's great achievement is to find nuance within that — hers is not a parodic performance, though it easily could have veered into that. Instead, while abiding by the terms of melodramatic acting, it also gives us a transformation: Willie starts out awkward, not particularly talented, a sort of country bumpkin ... and she becomes a poised, distant, sculpted icon ... and then a refugee from all she has ever known and loved. There's still a sense of possibility at the end, though, and one Schygulla's performance is vital for: a sense that Willie may reinvent herself, may find, in this newly ruined world, a path toward new life.

Elsaesser suggests that Lili Marleen can be seen within the context of some of the other films Fassbinder made around it:

the three films of the BRD trilogy — shot out of sequence — are held together by the possibility that they form sequels. If we add the film that was made between Maria Braun and Lola, namely Lili Marleen which clearly has key themes in common with the trilogy, then Lili Marleen's status in the series might be that of a "prequel" chronologically: 1938-1946 Lili Marleen, 1945-1954 Maria Braun, 1956 Veronika Voss, 1957 Lola. Four women, four love stories, four ambiguous gestures of complicity and resistance.

It could be a tagline for so many of Fassbinder's films, not the least Lili Marleen: Ambiguous gestures of complicity and resistance. For a world entering the era of Thatcher, Kohl, and (especially) Reagan, Lili Marleen was a most appropriate foil.



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*In one scene of Fassbinder's film, Willie looks through a magazine and we quickly glance a picture of Gustaf Gründgens as Mephistopheles.

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Hogarth Press first edition, cover by Vanessa Bell

Published in 1937, The Years was the last of her novels that Virginia Woolf lived to see released. Coming more than five years after the release of the poetic and, to many people, opaquely experimental The Waves, The Years seemed like the work of a totally different writer — it looked like a family novel, something along the lines of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, the sort of book a younger Woolf had scorned.  

The Years became a bestseller in both the UK and the US, and garnered some good reviews — in the New York Times, Peter Monro Jack declared it "Virginia Woolf's Richest Novel". Its fame quickly faded, however. After Woolf's death, her husband Leonard claimed he didn't think it was among her best work, though he'd been afraid, he said, to tell her that, given how long she had worked on it and how hard that work had been for her. As Woolf's reputation increased in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly among feminist academics, The Years tended to get shuffled aside in favor of the other novels and essays. Despite some advocacy from scholars and an extraordinary edition as part of the Cambridge Woolf, The Years remains relatively neglected. This is unfortunate, as it is a magnificent book.

12 April 1937, photo by Man Ray

Some of the best scholarship on The Years occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when scholars began looking at the drafts of the novel. The progress of Woolf's writing of The Years was of interest not just because it took her so long and so much effort, but because her original conception for the book was much more obviously experimental than the final version proved to be. She had conceived it as what she called an "essay-novel" titled The Pargiters (the name of the central family in the book) where essayistic chapters would alternate with novelistic chapters. At one point, she planned on the book covering the years 1880 to 2032 — yes, for a moment, Virginia Woolf planned to write a science fiction novel. But she found the structure she had planned unwieldy, and never wrote beyond the 1880 years in The Pargiters. Instead, she reconceived the book as a novel that would proceed from 1880 to a final section titled "Present Day" (early 1930s), and incorporated much of the research she had done for the essayistic sections into her book Three Guineas.

One result of the research into the early drafts of The Pargiters/The Years — and particularly the publication of The Pargiters (edited by Mitchell Leaska) in 1977 and Virginia Woolf's The Years: The Evolution of a Novel by Grace Radin in 1981 — was a growing perception of The Years as a failed novel, a failed experiment. Both Leaska and Radin seem saddened by Woolf's failure to realize her original plan for a book that alternates between essayistic and novelistic chapters, and they judge the published version of The Years to be incoherent.

But The Years is far from incoherent and far from a failure. I've spent much of the last few months researching and drafting an academic article about the book (which some of the following is part of), and the more time I spent with The Years, the more I marvelled at it.

I first encountered The Years when I took an undergraduate seminar in Woolf in the late 1990s. We didn't spend much time on the book. Nonetheless, I remember liking it, perhaps for similar reasons as some readers in the 1930s: it felt like a nice break after the challenge of The Waves. I thus always had a fondness for it, but didn't return to it until a few years ago, when Samuel Delany said somewhere that he was extraordinarily impressed by it. I returned to it then, and really fell in love with it, but also knew I needed to spend significantly more time to delve into its complexities. Thanks to a seminar this term on British Modernisms, I was able to do so.

The perception of The Years as a failure is tremendously inaccurate. The book is, indeed, a failure of Woolf's original plan, but Woolf's original plan was too schematic and awkward, as she quickly discovered. It's not that she then gave up and wrote a traditional family novel, but that she found a way to create a book that would take the form of a traditional novel while achieving most of her original goals. The Years only looks like a traditional novel — once you slide below its surface, it proves to be nearly as radically experimental as The Waves.

The challenge is to see The Years not as a novel in the traditional sense (much less a family novel) but as a text that uses our assumptions about the novel form to highlight and reconfigure our knowledge and desires. In a way, the text wants us to misperceive it as a traditional novel, but then to recognize — in an almost Brechtian way — that we must shift our perception, and that this shift is, in fact, not merely aesthetic but also ethical.

At the time of writing The Years, Woolf was deeply concerned with fascism: the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, as well as the presence of fascist groups and sentiments in Britain. Leonard was Jewish, and together they traveled through Germany and Italy in the spring of 1935, seeing the fascist states first-hand, a "letter of protection" from Prince Bismark at the London Embassy in Leonard's pocket. (It didn't end up needing to be used, even as they passed through a vehemently anti-Semitic crowd waiting for the arrival of Hermann Göring. The Germans were won over by the pet marmoset Leonard often kept on his shoulder — something that, apparently, they figured no Jew would do.) Virginia's perception of Leonard's Jewishness, and of Judaism in general, has been the topic of much writing and controversy, more than I can get into here. (Julia Briggs thoughtfully considered the question of Woolf's use of Jewish stereotypes, and Lara Trubowitz has recently provided some fascinating context to Woolf's relationship to and representations of Jewishness. Helen Carr gives a good overview of discussions of Woolf, imperialism, and racism in her chapter of the Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, "Virginia Woolf, Empire, and Race".)

But Woolf wasn't only concerned with fascism as fascism. Three Guineas makes utterly clear that to Woolf, fascism and patriarchy were linked. The challenge for Woolf was to find a kind of unity or harmony, something she often referred to throughout her writings from an early age — but not a fascist unity.

In September 1908, as she traveled in Italy and worked on the manuscript of Melymbrosia (which, revised, would become her first published novel, The Voyage Out), the 26-year-old Virginia Stephen wrote in her diary, contrasting her writing with the art of Italian painters:

I achieve a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the minds [sic] passage through the world; & achieve in the end, some kind of whole made of shivering fragments; to me this seems the natural process; the flight of the mind.

Though she had yet to publish her first novel, a central element of Woolf’s aesthetic sense had already formed. Up through The Waves, this credo served her well, but it seems that by the time she began imagining The Pargiters, she desired something more than tracing the mind’s passage through the world — or, rather, she desired to emphasize the world in a way she had not done since Night and Day (when she was not yet as practiced and skilled at tracing the mind’s passages). As so many of her books (fiction and nonfiction) are, The Years is “some kind of whole made of shivering fragments”.

What Woolf discovered in the 1930s, though, was that the aesthetic and psychological unities she had explored earlier could be developed into a more social, political, and historical unity that was not fundamentally fascist.

U.S. first edition

The Years presents ideas of unity in a variety of ways. Characters yearn for forms of unity, and the text itself unifies through its narrative voices. In The Years, the characters of Peggy and Eleanor — who approach the world in quite different ways — both yearn for a unity that will bring freedom and peace, but both fail to be able to express this desire coherently in words. Peggy tries to share her vision of “a state of being, in which there was real laughter, real happiness, and this fractured world was whole; whole and free”, but “she had broken off only a little fragment of what she meant to say”. Eleanor is the character who returns most often to ideas of wholeness, but words always fail her: “…it was impossible to find one word for the whole”. Again and again, the text demonstrates that the desired wholeness cannot be achieved only through words or only through an elite view — it requires a perspective that can see a system, a distance that delineates the movement of groups.

Each chapter of The Years begins with a kind of prelude, one that shows the world from a distance. It's useful, I think, to see the prelude narrator as a separate voice from the narrator of the main text. The prelude narrator shows that distanced perspective is key to achieving the desired unity: it brings time, space, and event together in a way that doesn’t let any one element dominate. To be more than just a distant, frozen image, though, other elements are necessary, and that's where the novel form's particular ability to represent both a multitude of consciousnesses and a multitude of material details proves useful for Woolf's purposes.

The details of people, places, and things contribute to traditional verisimilitude, but their excess is not the excess of Barthes's reality effect; instead, the details are not excessive enough. This is what causes many readers' frustration with the book — what, they wonder, is the purpose of all these random details?

The details, though, are not at all random, but are, instead, part of a very complex system, a careful pattern built from repetitions and echoes. (Critics such as Alice Van Buren Kelley, Michael Rosenthal, and Julia Briggs have delineated the pattern of echoes and repetitions that produce the book’s meanings, even if, as with Briggs, they find the results “ultimately less consistent than earlier novels”.) On one level, the details provide us information about the characters and their place within the social and material setting. But the characters and setting work in a more fluid, less individual way than they do in traditional novels. (Indeed, some readers' major complaint about the book is that it's difficult to keep the characters straight, since they flit in and out of the text. This is true, but also, I think, a desired and important effect.) The characters and setting are united in memory, both the characters' memories and the readers'. The material world melds into the personal, and vice versa.

On another level, all the details highlight the contrivance of narrative, a contrivance the characters themselves frequently run up against. During a dinner party, for instance, Martin tries to be friendly and to share stories of his life with the young woman he has been made to sit beside, but “what little piece of his vast experience could he break off and give to her, he wondered?”. Novels are too clean in their causalities and inferences, as North thinks when regarding his cousin: “She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sara Pargiter has never attracted the love of a man.” Novels, though, provide false certainty: “Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these snapshot pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow”. Then North struggles to reconcile the brute facts of Sara with her personality: “The actual words he supposed — the actual words floated together and formed a sentence in his mind — meant that she was poor; that she must earn her living, but the excitement with which she had spoken, due to wine perhaps, had created yet another person; another semblance, which one must solidify into one whole”.

These are, Woolf shows us, failed strategies, failed epistemologies. Vast experience cannot be captured by stories: it always exceeds them, and the excess pushes the honest storyteller toward silence. In a world of fascism, though, silence can too easily become consent or complicity (normalizing discourses don’t mind silence). There is an energy to people, an unpredictable excitement, that exceeds sentences and yet must be accounted for.

Yet Woolf is not Samuel Beckett. Failure and silence are present, but they are not the end point. We must remember the prelude narrator. Without that narrative voice, it would be more difficult to make sense or meaning of the many scattered moments that make up The Years. The prelude narrator does not simply stand (or hover) at a distance, looking down on the unindividualized people below, but rather has the freedom to dart from perspective to perspective, fact to fact, moment to moment — and even genre to genre. While traditional novelistic form totalizes, absorbing into it all other genres and forms,  The Years allows the pieces autonomy within the whole. Its pieces have pieces, its whole is never whole.

We return to the sky at the end of the novel, when the prelude narrator becomes the epilogue narrator: “The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace”. By now, the narrative has taught us some of what is in the houses, and so the word “houses” possesses an extraordinary resonance, as we have observed life and conversation in houses of many sorts across the city and across the years. There is no simple answer to any of the questions the novel raises, any of the possibilities it explores. The houses possess memories of nightmares and dreams. The oppressive power of their walls is undeniable. It is, perhaps, not the houses that we should look to, but the sky, for the possibility of peace resides there, in simple beauty. The novel seems to understand, as Virginia Woolf certainly understood, that that sky might quickly become clouded, its possibilities wiped out by Stukas, bombs, and fire.

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As I was writing a comment over at Adam Roberts's blog (about which more in a moment), I realized I had various items of the last few days swirling through my head, and it all needed a bit of an outlet that wasn't a muddled comment on Adam's blog, but rather a potentially-even-more-muddled post here.

I don't have a whole lot to say about these things, and I certainly have no coherent argument to make, but they've congealed together in my mind, so here they are, with a few lines of annotation from me. Most of these things have gotten a lot of notice, but they haven't gotten a lot of notice together.


First, Jonathan Franzen is once again reprising his role as Grumpy Old Man With Fist Raised In The Air Complaining About The Kids These Days. I read half of it and couldn't keep going because, ugh, Jonathan Franzen. Really, I wish he'd just donate his millions to charity, take a vow of poverty, and go wander through the world and revel in his saintliness. And preferably never write anything ever again. But that's just me. As the deluded sheeple on the Twitter say, YMMV.

It's not that I don't think we're doomed and our culture insipid. I do. But it's been that way for a long time, especially in the United States. We're very good at being insipid and creating doom. Those are perhaps our greatest national talents. As Ta-Nehisi Coates recently said in a completely different context: "I expect the worst of everyone to win--and take humanity down with them. I get sad about that sometimes, but I am mostly resolved." That could be my credo. The way we live now is a J.G. Ballard novel.

Then there was Christopher Beha's blog post, reprinted by Slate, about how the New York Times Book Review should only cover "Holy Crap" books (hehehehe he wants them to write about crap hehehehe). Pretty much all of his assumptions are wrong, as Nick Mamatas gleefully pointed out, and his blazingly ignorant idea that fascinating writing about genrefied books is impossible can be disproved by such things as, for instance, some of the reviews at Strange Horizons, some of the reviews and writing at LA Review of Books, academic articles at such places as Science Fiction Studies, etc. etc. — but I basically agree with him in a more general sense, which is: it's nice to read long, thoughtful, insightful writing about challenging books, books that are hard to get a handle on at first glance. Which is one reason why I don't regularly go running to the New York Times Book Review for my litchat. It's a book review, the last one standing at a newspaper. If even a specialty publication like Bookforum has had to add shorter reviews, more media and political coverage, etc. to help maintain even a small audience, the NYTBR sure isn't going to follow Beha's advice — because his advice to the NYTBR is to commit suicide. They'd be better off putting a Jennifer Weiner novel on the cover.

Which brings us to Adam Roberts, who has a really provocative (well, to me) post up at his blog titled "On YA", but only partly about YA. My comment on the post gets to my disagreement with most everything I read him as saying. I am convinced I must be misinterpreting his ideas terribly, and I honestly look forward to him correcting me, because it looks to me like the Adam Roberts who caused a row about the mediocrity of the Hugo Awards in 2009 has now seen the light and found the Jesus of Popularity! Is! All! This cannot be true. I must be misreading him.

One of Adam Roberts's points is the counter opposite of Christopher Beha's — that the "genius of the age" in literature right now exists in the realm of genrefied fiction and, especially, YA. (Things get murky in the post because "genius of the age" seems to then get conflated with "popular". But, again, I must be misreading.) This is not a claim I can really discuss in an informed way, because I only occasionally read YA novels, and though some, like M.T. Anderson's first Octavian Nothing novel, seem to me among the great literature of our time, the field itself is really not my thing. Kameron Hurley explained well why she doesn't write or often read YA, and my feelings are similar: the sorts of things that typically fit a book into the YA market, and that are desired by YA readers, are not the sorts of things that make me want to read a novel. Inevitably, then, I will miss reading some extraordinary fiction, but we will all miss reading lots of extraordinary fiction because there is more extraordinary fiction out there than any of us have time to read. That is the curse of the reader. If Roberts is right and YA is the genius of our age, then the curse of our culture may be that it aspires to be a 16-year-old.

Roberts's whole argument seems to me to confuse cultural history, cultural analysis, and aesthetics. I'm not an art-for-art's-sake aesthetic puritan; I am completely convinced that how we interpret and value art is determined by other social and cultural values, but I do think there is a distinction — a valuable distinction — between the ways that we value a cultural product and the ways that a cultural product has power within a culture. Here's an example: I've spent the last year and a half or so watching, reading about, thinking about, and trying to write about American action movies from the 1980s. I think they're immensely culturally and politically important and can tell us a lot about the era. I don't think any of them are particularly good movies, though some have certain virtues, quite a few are fascinating to think about and analyze, and some are entertaining even after multiple viewings. They did, in fact, embody a certain genius of their age, the same sort of genius possessed by Ronald Reagan, although overall I think that genius was a pernicious one. But it was effective and we're still feeling the ripples in our culture and politics. That's no argument for the Oscar to have gone to Rambo II, though. Certainly, Rambo II is a far better exemplar of its time than any of the actual winners, but that's just because, as usual, the awards went to a bunch of ostentatiously mediocre movies. This was the year of Ran, Shoah, Brazil, and Come and See — masterpieces that mostly escaped Oscar's notice. But the point of the Academy Awards is not to hail masterpieces or find the movies that most embody the era: it's to congratulate Hollywood for being Hollywood. We look to the Oscars to see how Hollywood perceives itself. To ask for more is to misperceive how those awards work. Similarly, popularity (Rambo II, etc.) primarily shows us what masses of people consider potentially entertaining enough to spend money on. Movies like Ran, Shoah, Brazil, Come and See exist outside both lenses, as do the great books and music of whatever year. And by "great" I mean the socially-constructed-but-nonetheless-perceivable-across-multiple-eras-and-geographies complexity and individuality that distinguish, say, Kafka from the bestselling novels in the U.S. in 1924.



I thought of these three writings by these three writers (Franzen, Beha, and Roberts) together because there seems to be some sort of conversation to be had among them and their respondents about how we value culture and what we get from it, particularly either cult or elite art — which may be the same things, a cult being a kind of elite and an elite being a kind of cult. Being me, I would also want to add in more about cultural capital, and seek out areas of agreement while also asserting that, of course, we are doomed ... but really I'm just indulging in a fantasy: what if our three boys were stuck on a stage together in front of an audience? What might they talk about? Or, even better, what if we put them in a room with some YA novelists, crime and romance and SF writers, people published by FC2 and Dalkey Archive, former jury members of various awards, VIDA members, members of the Carl Brandon Society, some high school English teachers, at least a few librarians, passionate David Eddings readers, a couple of anarcho-communists, some radical queers, and a few random people off the street ... what directions might the conversation take then...?

My brain begins to melt just thinking about it.

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Dear Dwight Allen:

Thank you for letting me know about your Stephen King problem (henceforth, SKP). Many people let these problems go, thinking they're not particularly important or, ultimately, relevant to anyone other than themselves, but  the science shows that letting these problems linger encourages them to fester, and once they fester they can then lead to all sorts of complications and an endless array of other problems (most commonly, J.K. Rowling problems and J.R.R. Tolkien problems, which themselves can lead to entire textbooks of other problems.) Such suffering becomes an infinite sprawl of frustration, guilt, pain, and, often, anti-social behavior and anal warts.

To assess your treatment needs, let's analyze some of your history and symptoms.



Failure to quarantine. It is clear from your history that you remained healthy after occasional contacts with contagions (most notably in New York City [notable site of contagions of all sorts] in the company of a publishing employee [notable purveyors of marketing-induced illnesses] whilst "possibly" drinking "too much bad beer" [do you think there is such a thing as "enough" bad beer?]. You note that your infected friend had alleviated or at least hidden some of his symptoms with regular infusions of Pynchon, Nabokov, and Gass, but as you now must know, these are not effective medicines against SKP any more than a breath of filtered air is a remedy for the carcinogenic effects of smoking a cigarette). You health after said contact was, though (as is obvious now) relative, because had you truly been healthy, you would not now have a problem. I hope this will be a lesson to you in the future.

It is absolutely essential to quarantine bad influences at the moment you begin to suspect their healthfulness. It is always better to be safe than problematized. First, the contagion infiltrated your brain. Then, like an insect laying eggs beneath your skin, it incubated, eventually bursting through to present as full SKP.

You identify your own failure clearly, even if you don't acknowledge it as such: "During my college and graduate school years and then in my post-graduate working life, I’d read, in addition to much commercially successful literary fiction, a fair amount of genre fiction." It is good that you have separated the healthy ("literary fiction") from the somewhat contaminated ("commercially successful literary fiction") and from the pure contagion ("genre fiction"). But exposing yourself to the contagion in any form is, for roughly 75% of the population, eventually fatal. To be honest, your middle category is an illusion, like being only somewhat pregnant. There really is no middle ground. (As we will discuss later, it is very important to maintain only 2 categories for any sort of healthy judgment.)

Notice how many times you return to the contagion once you have encountered it fully. First, Christine, then Pet Sematary, then (saying, "I thought I’d try another King novel, a later one, to see if his writing had changed over the years") The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and 11/22/63. You know, of course, that such exposure is dangerous, and you're now fully aware of the effect, but it's important to be absolutely honest about the steps along the way. Remember, too, that contagion and addiction often present similar symptomatic profiles.

A side note: According to your account, one contagion you did manage to avoid was hipness. You write: "Strangely enough, I’d developed my taste for crime fi

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Yesterday, I posted a mocking attack on Prometheus that also linked to other attacks. I hated the movie, and so did plenty of other people.

But I don't want to give the impression that it is Friday the 13th Part XXVI: Jason vs. Maximus Prime. (Actually, that movie could be awesome!) Plenty of perfectly intelligent moviegoers have not merely enjoyed Prometheus, but embraced it. Adored it. Gone to see it more than once.

So, for some balance, here are four quotes from reviews and comments on the film that view it more positively than I or the people I quoted yesterday:

Roger Ebert:

Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" is a magnificent science-fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn't have the answers. It's in the classic tradition of golden age sci-fi, echoing Scott's "Alien" (1979), but creating a world of its own. I'm a pushover for material like this; it's a seamless blend of story, special effects and pitch-perfect casting, filmed in sane, effective 3-D that doesn't distract.

Andrew O'Hehir:

...“Prometheus” damn near lives up to the unsustainable hype, at least at the level of cinematography, production design, special effects and pure wow factor. This tale of a deep-space mission late in the 21st century, several decades before Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo will discover an abandoned alien spacecraft and its sinister cargo, is a sleek, shimmering, gorgeous and often haunting visual mood piece. No other recent science-fiction film, with the sole exception of “Avatar,” has created such a textured, detailed and colorful vision of the human space-traveling future, and indeed it’s reasonable to assume that Scott conceives of “Prometheus” as a pessimistic counter-argument to James Cameron’s eco-parable on various levels.

Caitlín R. Kiernan:

And, lest charges of sexism arise, Kane is the first of the crew "raped" – a man – then Brett – also male – and then the ship's captain, Dallas – also male. Now, turning to charges of sexism in Prometheus (which I am seeing) as regards "rape" by the alien: What? The first person infected is Holloway, who unintentionally impregnates Shaw through consensual sex. Then we see Milburn mouth-fucked by a proto-facehugger. That's two men impregnated (though you might argue Holloway is, rather, infected) to one woman (the presumably male "engineers" not included). So, charges of a sexual bias towards women are simply baseless.

Glenn Kenny:

I've said before that I tend to measure certain genre pictures by the number, and quality, of what I call (if you'll excuse the phrase) Holy Crap! Moments. (I don't call them that, exactly, but what I actually call them can't be printed here.) In any event, in the notes I took for this film, on one page, in big block letters taking up pretty much two thirds of the page, I indeed wrote that phrase in the middle of one particular scene. You'll know it when you see it, and it is insane, one of the most perfectly perver

2 Comments on Pro-metheus, last added: 6/13/2012

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C.B. James said, on 6/13/2012 12:21:00 PM

Okay, but this is what people said about Bladerunner, too. ;-) I haven't seen the movie yet. I loved Bladerunner, was impressed but not overwhelmed by Alien. I'll probably see this one on streaming someday.

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I must admit some surprise that the best book I've read about judgement, taste, and aesthetics is a book about Céline Dion. Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste is not only thoughtful and well-informed, it is also compelling in every sense of the word. (It's part of the ever-surprising and wonderfully odd 33 1/3 series from Continuum Books.)

I don't know where I first heard about Wilson's book -- probably via Bookforum -- but it's gotten plenty of press, including a mention by James Franco at the Oscars and an interview of Wilson by Stephen Colbert. The concept of the book is seductive: Wilson, a Canadian music critic and avowed Céline-hater, spends a year trying to figure out why she is so popular and what his hatred of her says about himself. I kept away from the book for a little while because I thought it couldn't possibly live up to its premise, and that in all likelihood it was more stunt than analysis. Nonetheless, the premise kept attracting me, because I am fascinated by the concept of taste and I, too, find Dion's music to be the sonic equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting.

What makes Wilson's approach so effective and insightful is that it avoids the fanboy defensiveness marring everything from internet discussions to scholarly studies such as Peter Swirski's From Lowbrow to Nobrow. Wilson isn't grinding axes or settling scores; he's more interested in exploration than proclamation, more inclined toward maps than manifestos. The result is one of the few books I know that is as likely to expand its readers' view of the world as it is to provide the choir with an appealing sermon.

By focusing on Céline Dion, Wilson is able to discuss a wide range of topics: the details of Dion's career, of course, but also the history of popular music, the globalization of certain styles and tastes, the power of local cultures, the role of class and aspiration in forming and policing personal taste, the demonization of sentimentality and excess, the promotion of irony and transgression, etc. Wilson also provides a good, basic overview of histories and traditions of aesthetic philosophy, showing that even the most eminent thinkers and critics tend to do little more than construct elaborate sleight-of-hand routines. Because his goal is not to debunk so much as it is to explore, Wilson is able to use the best of what he encounters -- most fruitfully in his clear-eyed application of ideas from Pierre Bourdieu's 3 Comments on Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson, last added: 12/9/2009