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Thursday, August 16, 2007
“Damn you guys and your shoddy business practices; this shouldn’t happen, and what does it mean?
Adam Gopnik has a New Yorker piece about Philip K. Dick.
At the end of a Dick marathon, you end up admiring every one of his conceits and not a single one of his sentences. His facility is amazing. He once wrote eleven novels in a twenty-four-month stretch. But one thing you have to have done in order to write eleven novels in two years is not to have written any of them twice.
The sentence that really clunked out at me from the piece is: “Damn you guys and your shoddy business practices; this shouldn’t happen, and what does it mean?” Reminds me of our earlier discussion here.
It seems to me that Gopnik is wrong about at least one thing:
Since genre writing can support only one genius at a time—and no genre writer ever becomes just a good writer; it’s all prophet or all hack—the guy is usually resented by his peers and their partisans even as the establishment hails him. No one hates the rise of Elmore Leonard so much as a lover of Ross Macdonald.
I don’t think genre love is jealous like that. (I love Ross Macdonald and don’t really even like Elmore Leonard. It isn’t such a big deal.)
Comments
The jealousy angle is the least problematic aspect of that second quote. I have no idea where that first two chunks of the first sentence came from, but I think it’s some place dark and constricted. No thinking there at all.
“Damn you guys and your shoddy business practices; this shouldn’t happen, and what does it mean?” is a perfect sentence. Runciter has just failed to talk with his dead wife, so he’s really addressing the guardians of Hell, which in PKD’s satire have become a corporation like any other. The “guys” are plural and “shoddy business practices” are passively generalized because it’s a tired complaint about a system which, if defeated in detail, will still persist in general. “this shouldn’t happen, and what does it mean?” is the state of living with hysteria that everyone has to address at one time or another; the protest can’t be left out, but since there is no one to hear it, one must immediately turn to understanding and dealing with the event. And the halves of the sentence are spliced together because it is all one thought. That’s how people, sometimes, actually speak. A period between the halves of the sentence instead of a semicolon would indicate a pause large enough so that someone could possibly interrupt, which might mean that the rest of it never got said.
People who criticize PKD’s “sentences” seem to me to mostly be suffering from some kind of high-culture envy, in which the values of the upper class are the only truly good values, and in which literature, whether pre-modern, high modern, or postmodern, needs to have a stereotyped surface that tells people that this was made by an Artist.
If you’re looking to criticize PKD as a hack, there’s quite a lot to criticize other than his sentences. For instance, Gopnik could have mentioned that Ubik insists on describing all of its characters as wearing elaborate, ridiculous outfits of propeller beanies, mukluks, and other incongruous clothing. It’s hard to think of why PKD thought that this was a good idea, other than that he was on speed and had no real editor. Sure, it plays off the idea that clothing in the future may look odd to us, and that fashion is always weird, but people never mention it, and characters who you wouldn’t think of as being invested in fashion seem to go through a lot of effort to wear impractical clothes. In the end, I think that most people read the book while resolutely ignoring these descriptions. Having to resolutely ignore part of a book is one usual sign of a hack.
But people who have to ignore his sentences in order to get to his conceits are showing their problems of appreciation, not problems with the work itself.
"Since genre writing can support only one genius at a time—and no genre writer ever becomes just a good writer; it’s all prophet or all hack—the guy is usually resented by his peers and their partisans even as the establishment hails him. No one hates the rise of Elmore Leonard so much as a lover of Ross Macdonald.”
One genius per genre at a time? This is utter nonsense. The more accurate way of putting it is “the literary establishment, aka I, can only tolerate knowing the name of one ‘genre’ writer at a time.”
Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delaney, William Gibson, and many others were writing at the same time. Many more genre-bending writers are all doing quite well, without needing the approval of Mr. Gopnik. Is Jonathan Lethem a science-fiction writer in his view? A mainstream writer? A writer who basically didn’t exist until he wrote “Fortress of Solitude”?
That said, Dick wrote some pretty bad sentences. One wishes he had the time and financial freedom to revise his fiction. Some writers simply don’t enjoy the freedom that established literary writers do, to spend five years perfecting a novel.
Rich, I’d have to go with the Delany argument from “About 5,750 Words”—namely, that sloppy writing and sloppy content go hand in hand. With Dick, the problem is that the conceit is always more interesting than the sentences, the characters, the plot, and the execution as a whole. Even a relatively well-constructed Dick novel, such as *The Man in the High Castle*, suffers from a sloppiness of thought that is intimately tied to a sloppiness of writing.
Which is to say, I take this focus on “the sentences” as a focus on “form” in general. Dick had some interesting ideas for novels—basically, good sales pitches—but he wasn’t a very good novelist.
Like Delany, I don’t buy the whole “fear of rough edges = fear of the working class” argument. Badly formed science fiction is like badly formed art in any other genre. If you want us to ignore the writing and concentrate on “the conceit,” we might as well just read the backs of Dick’s books.
David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, Cornell Woolrich and Patricia Highsmith were all writing in the 1950s.
Blackwood, Machen, Onions, MR James, Hodgson, and Shiel were all writing in the ‘00s.
I haven’t read enough Delany to really evaluate his argument, Luther. But my impression, from reading Dhalgren, is that Delany isn’t well-served by this belief of his. Here’s a random example from the book (pg.465):
“But, for a moment, he was aware that they were two entirely different temperatures; and something in his own heat was defined, resolved, released. And Denny (his shoulder hot and still powdery dry) reached across Kid’s chest, put two fingers against Lanya’s cheek (her neck against Kid’s arm cooler and softer, as though it had been recently dried after rain) and said, “You’re . . .” and stopped when she reached out and put her palm on Danny’s neck.”
This has the classic marks of overwriting: “heat released” would be a cliche, so one word becomes three and it’s defined, resolved, released. Delany can’t just tell us Kid’s reaction to feeling the two people as different temperatures; he has to repeat that Denny is hot, Lanya cool. And Delany has to get the circular touches all in to one run-on sentence, for parellelism’s sake. In short, Delany has the rare gift of making group sex seem boring. I’d much prefer a jagged PKD sentence.
And really, I’m suspicious of conclusions like “PKD wasn’t a very good novelist”. I think that you’re better off reading Lem on PKD; Lem at least has some appreciation of how PKD creates his effects.
it’s precisely the “pretty” sentences that to my mind make Delaney seem fatally literary, middlebrow, letting us know he’s too good for sci-fi.....Dick is easily the more interesting writer of novels; others may judge the smaller units of prose as they see fit.....
ps--damn Gopnik and his snobby business practices…
Rich, I agree that Delany’s own prose isn’t perfect. In his attempt to write “artistically,” he too often overwrites. I’ve also found him to be ungraceful with exposition and too often enthralled by lit-theory-style language.
Still, Delany’s bad writing doesn’t make Dick’s writing any better. Instead, it confirms, in my mind, something I wrote in a Valve comment a while back: genre literature is more often than not badly written.
I should amend this, though, to state the truism that most of what is written is badly written. That said, the sci fi that will endure will be that which is artistically powerful: Bradbury, Sturgeon, Tiptree, Bester, Le Guin, etc.
On PKD and genre: Like Poe, Wells, Roussel, Chandler and Borges before him (and like Burroughs, Gibson, Murukami, Calvino, early Lethem and Echenoz after), PKD used genre to think. Genres are like software: you run a certain application, and input then gets routed through a specifc set of constraints. PKD had so internalized the mannerisms of SF, it had become for him a kind of algorithm, designed to work through questions far exeeding dead tropes of interstellar exploration, alien invasion, near-future malaise etc. Quesitons like, What is Being? What is consciousness? What is real? appear in PKD from out of the tinsel of the traditional SF What If. In his best work--Stigmata, High Castle, Ubik, Androids, Scanner--he runs genres together, fusing SF with the police procedural, the picaresque adventure, or the espionage thriller (ie, slightly more supple algorithms). Part of the fun of a good PKD novel (there are, it should be said, very many bad ones, but Lethem’s LOA selection is right on) is the giddy oscillation between stock generic devices and bold metaphysical speculation, and this puts him --as a literary thinker, if not as a stylist--up there with Wells and Borges.
I don’t want to get into an argument about who will last, Luther, although offhand I would have picked out only one of your five names, and suggested instead Mary Shelley and Wells as counterexamples. (Not that Wells wrote badly, but he’s not known for artistic power as his primary characteristic.) Genre writing can’t be evaluated as if it is simply the literary genre’s mentally disabled cousin; PKD is going to last in part because of his energetic sentences, not in spite of them.
For someone like Delany, who is both an author and a critic, I can’t help but think that problems with his prose illustrate problems with his aesthetic theory.
I don’t think genre writing is a cousin of literary writing. I think all writing is genre writing; all writing is shaped and defined by conventions. That’s why I like Delany’s argument: there is good writing and bad writing, and you can’t have good science fiction that’s written badly any better than you can have badly written but good realist fiction or badly written but good domestic fiction. (And many good critics can be worse artists: see James Woods.)
I admit that there are different standards of quality for different purposes. So Wells’s characters aren’t as good as, say, Dickens’s, but each perfectly achieves what they set out to achieve.
I don’t think Dick achieved his own goals. His work is sloppy, not energetic. His prose is leaden, clunky, like doing the moonwalk in Dutch clogs. Compare Dick’s prose to Bull Burroughs’, two writers with similar goals and themes. Burroughs’ writing is the only beat prose that achieves the astral heights of bop and post-bop horn lines. Dick’s writing is simply unedited. It reads like anyone’s first drafts. Likewise, his ideas are sloppy, halfassed. Here’s a guy who wants to write novels of ideas but who cannot get his shit together enough to actually work those ideas out. Dick is no Diderot.
Luther, if you think (as I do) that all writing is genre writing, then the concept of there being a universal binary between “good writing” and “bad writing” collapses. Delany seems to me to be applying standards of the literary genre to PKD’s SF work. Of course, you say this in your second paragraph, but it seems like you’re unwilling to apply it in this case.
And I think that your comparison of PKD and Burroughs indicates where you’re going wrong—I don’t think that they do have similar goals. It’s the difference between opium and speed, really. To quote PKD, as quoted in Gopnik’s article:
“The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It’s not just ‘What if’—it’s ‘My God; what if’—in frenzy and hysteria.”
SF is, to a great extent, the literature of hysteria. You see people making all the same kinds of complaints about, say, H.P. Lovecraft, not understanding that his writing is suited to his goals. PKD’s ideas are not well-worked-out because he simply wasn’t writing about worlds with well-worked-out ideas; I can’t envision a PKD book that does not preserve the fundamental confusion of the lumpenprotagonist, who never really determines exactly what is going on but who can’t ignore events.
Luther, if you think (as I do) that all writing is genre writing, then the concept of there being a universal binary between “good writing” and “bad writing” collapses.
Yes. I tend to think of writing (and all art) as falling into something like “quantum” levels. The work within each quantum level can range from 0 to 10 (or whatever) on a quality scale. But making quality comparisons between quantum levels is a very tricky business. In the easiest case, how do you compare good children’s literature with fully adult fare? What about stuff for 5-year olds with stuff for 12-year olds? There’s good and bad in each quantuum level.
Delany’s an interesting case because he clearly moved from one quantuum level to another. His very early work, e.g. Jewels of Aptor, is very different from his late work, such as Dhalgren. I think I’ve read all the early and middle work, or most of it. And I’ve read some of the late work as well, including D. But it got to a point where I just gave up on it. It seemed just terrible at whatever it was trying to do.
And when John Barth gave forth with Letters . . . Yuck!
Rich, I don’t buy the heroine v. speed reading. Burroughs’ writing is more hepped-up, even if he was on smack, than PKD’s, more paranoid, more hyperactive, more schizoid. You’re description of the plight of PKD’s lumpenprotagonists is dead-on for Burroughs’s, and B’s characters are far more truly lumpen than the often professional class characters of PKD. (Actually, Jameson would say that postmodernity is the moment when this confused subject takes center stage in all art.)
But Burroughs gets it right—and so is the better writer—insofar as his novels eschew all ideas at the level of content. PKD is still trying to write some form of wisdom literature, and that’s where I see nearly all the faults: it’s wisdom literature without any wisdom, totally content-heavy even as the content is poorly thought out. (And I don’t buy the “PKD is trying to create a world in which ideas are poorly worked out” argument. The man thought he was full of brilliant ideas; he had a nearly religious respect for the ideas he thought were being channeled through him. Again, compare with, say, Jack Spicer, who did this better because he did it at the level of form rather than idea.)
As far as genre and quality goes, I’d say this: while every type of art needs to be evaluated on its own criteria, I don’t think these criteria are all that different from genre to genre. Something in the art must be powerful. I don’t see anything particularly striking in Dick’s work other than his conceits. Also, I think “high art criteria” will always trump the lowest common denominator of genre criteria. For example, take erotica. The purpose of erotica is to turn me on. So sure, it need not have deep characters or complex plots, but it needs to turn me on. And the only way it’s going to do that is through effective language. Or consider the difference between someone like Dita Von Teese and your average city stripper. Von Teese has the style, the originality, and that makes her far sexier, far more alluring and tempting, than the girl on the pole.
We cannot compare the style of Von Teese with the style of Hemingway, except insofar as each is a reaction to an environment, an attempt to master some experience, give it form, and communicate it to the audience. The boxer who wins with grace, the baller who shoots with style, the poet who writes with power: it’s all style. The particular aspects of the style vary, but the need for an individual formal reaction that strikes the receiver with the intended effect remains the same.
I think that Burrough’s characters are more often knowing members of some underclass subculture. Their world is fragmented, but it’s fragmented in relation to the ordinary world, which they don’t live in and which is assumed to have no real knowledge of them. (For instance, the beginning of Naked Lunch is full of helpful little asides to the reader explaining this or that element of junkie slang.) His characters have no use for wisdom. PKD’s can’t give up the attempt to find it, even when the process is more or less doomed, because there is no ordinary mainstream culture that they can exist in relation to. (Although A Scanner Darkly is a partial exception. If anyone wanted to look at this comparison more, that might be where to start.)
Other than that, I don’t really know how to demonstrate that there is something in PKD that you aren’t getting. It’s a cop-out to fall back on the combination of popularity and critical reception, but in the short term, it does indicate that some people are seeing something in the work. And it’s not “conceits”; that’s a Gopnik term. Perhaps it’s that PKD took Jameson’s confused subject and universalized it through the concretized metaphors of SF.