<< The True Story of Ramo Samee, the Indian Juggler (w/quotes from Hazlitt) | Front Page | Virtue is of so little regard in these times that true valor is turned bear-herd >>
Friday, May 26, 2006
Jane Smiley, Michael Cunningham, Stephen Metcalf & Morris Dickstein “Group Blogging”
Call it “an occasional blog.” The conversation—which starts, in true blog style, at the bottom—addresses the article on “The Single Best Work of American Fiction Published in the Past 25 Years” Jonathan posted last week. According to Jane Smiley, the creation of the list is a “male game”:
At the same time, I did have qualms, and when Greg asked me to join the blog-session about the list, the first question I asked was about the gender break-down of the responders, and he said that 69% of the responders were men, though requests had been sent out to men and women equally. I had thought of not responding, not playing the game, as it were, so that statistic intrigued me. It does seem to me to be a male game. Here we have the final four, and here were have the champion. Maybe the women novelists who didn’t respond did feel that one novel could be chosen as “best."
Smiley admits to being “a Roth virgin.” She hadn’t read Roth since Portnoy’s Complaint, a “failure” she rectified by taking American Pastoral with her on a book tour of England. (She provides periodic impressions of AP as she moves through it.) As Metcalf notes:
A Roth virgin might not do well to start with “American Pastoral.” The gateway drug for the later Roth, in my estimation, remains the exquisite “Ghostwriter,” in which Roth pioneers the technique of Zuckerman, already his double, creating an alternate reality into which he projects himself. Roth, we should mention, is the real “winner” of the survey, with several titles winning several votes; had he not split the vote with himself, he would have won by a considerable margin.
Given how unsurprised assurance of most commenters (myself included) that Beloved deserved the top spot, the irony that Roth defeated himself doubly amuses me. He would do that, wouldn’t he?
Much of the discussion concerns issues I raised in the Crouch thread below. The difference? They discuss coherently, and with force, the issues I “dance” around.
Comments
It’s hard to be coherent, Scott. Jane Smiley says coherently what I was trying to get at in my comment: “what Morrison really wanted to do, I assume, was to re-write history — to tell Sethe’s tale in a truer way than it had ever been told before.” It was either an interview or an article—can’t remember exactly—where Morrison said that she was re-writing history as an interior story; the slave narrators of the 19thC place themselves on a public rhetorical stage, while a 20thC novelist wants to illuminate private consciousness. That’s the “truer” re-writing.
But just because she is re-writing history does not mean her novel is required to have a historical thesis, or to give us a historical understanding of something like slavery. It’s only required to have a setting consistent with that history; its real concern should be the characters’ story.
What bothers me about the Crouch piece—and I may be unfair because I’m using him as a stand-in for a lot of critics—is not that he’s negative. I tried to acknowledge that there are valid negative points to make about Morrison. What bothers me is the attitude that novels are responsible to capture history. Novels are supposed to show posterity what “the American experience” or “the African-American experience” or “the experience of slavery” or “being a soldier” was really like. No, novels tell stories with various degrees of realism or mythopooetic romanticism, but none of them capture history like that. They use history, but they are not history books.
I think many, many critics use novels as history books. A certain kind of novelist, wanting to “capture” his “times,” encourages them. Morris Dickstein diagnoses this aspect of American fiction in the article as “the Moby-Dick syndrome, the effort to sum up the whole meaning of the national experience in a single work.” Yeah. And I’d add that it’s not my cup of tea. Dickstein says _Beloved_ is one of these, but I’d argue that that is not what makes it a great novel. I suppose the notion of the novel as a representative of its times and culture has an honorable heritage, but I don’t like it. Read history to appreciate history, and novels to appreciate stories; this solves many difficulties. For instance, an ethnic or regional writer is no longer responsible to represent or typify an entire historical/cultural understanding of his/her group. Hooray! Now we can actually concentrate on what’s inside his/her book. Stephen Metcalf’s Slate piece does a better job of this, but really all of these critics can’t decide whether to judge fiction for what it offers or for whether it tells them the history (the “typical” story) they want to hear.
See? Totally incoherent. It’s hard to be coherent.
In my view, a lot of what the NYT discussion group said was valid and interesting, and thus part of a useful exercise, but in many ways the discussion also seemed inbred and stunted, or oblivious. First, through no fault of the members of the discussion group, the narrow makeup of that group reflected the narrow makeup of the polled group, and then who could be surprised that the discussion would revolve largely around those writers featured prominently in the poll, even if partly in dissent? The main problem with the poll, as has been widely remarked, was the set-up, which the discussion group itself reflected, even as they to some extent pointed out some of the flaws in the set-up…lending an underlying bizarre flavor to the entire discussion.
Beyond that, “American” (that is U.S.) economic and social and cultural influence is so expansive that it is in significant ways strange to think of American fiction as being confined to U.S. citizens/residents (or, that is, _set apart from_ a lot of fiction abroad), let alone the small nonrepresentative group involved in the poll and the discussion both. There were many calls, rhetorical at least, from citizens of countries all around the world for the right to vote in the most recent U.S. presidential election because the quite accurate view is that what the U.S. does has often a significant or even profound and decisive impact on conditions abroad, which cannot help but include and affect literary production as well.
So think of what might have been added to the discussion if a literary figure like Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy had been involved:
Arundhati Roy with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now:
AMY GOODMAN: “I want to ask in our last 30 seconds: the role you see of the artist in a time of war?”
ARUNDHATI ROY: “Well, I think the problem is that artists are not a homogenous lot of people, and some of them are as rightwing and establishment as they can get, you know, so the role of the artist is not different from the role of any human being. You pick your side, and then you fight, you know? But in a country like India, I’m not seeing that many radical positions taken by writers or poets or artists, you know? It’s all the seduction of the market that has shut them up like a good medieval beheading never could.”
There are also a number of U.S. literary figures who make similar observations about the state of U.S. literature. During these past decades of nonstop U.S. covert and overt military action, with U.S. military installations in something like 150 countries around the globe, and hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers also spread around the globe, and U.S. weaponry even more pervasive, what are we to make of this statement by Ron Jacobs?: “Not since Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five [1969] has there been a novel for the US market that so clearly addressed war from an oppositional viewpoint.” This may be something of an overstatement but the underlying deficient reality, it seems to me, is enormously telling. Something akin to a “medieval beheading” is evident in a variety of ways in U.S. literature, in the NYT poll, and in the discussion itself.
As I’ve commented elsewhere: “In a time of state aggression and state terrorism and non-state terrorism; in a time of nuclear proliferation; in an increasingly perilous time of environmental catastrophes, those arrived and those impending, it’s long since time for skilled novelists…to get up to speed in these areas not least” in a modern and contemporary society/culture that bears more than a little resemblance, it’s surely not too difficult to imagine, to a “Good German” culture of the Nazi era…:
http://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2006/05/22/updated-barbara-kingsolver-bellwether-prize-2006-post/
Am I asking the NYT poll and discussion to do something it was not designed to do? Yes, absolutely. And, no, not at all.
rm,
Part of what you say is valid, but much of the rest is straw man. And quite coherent.
Let’s say a novelist wants to accurately and compellingly portray some sort of official psychologically justifying himself committing an official or unofficial atrocity with deep actual roots in the history of times past or of today. If the novelist inaccurately, even slightly inaccurately, or, say, weakly portrays the historical or public reality in which the character acts, then you’ve got distortion or falsification of reality potentially on both social and psychological grounds, etc (moral, emotional, intellectual...). Such psychological misunderstandings (or lies) based on social misunderstandings (or deceptions) happen in nonfiction realms all the time. See the effects of advertising, PR, propaganda, etc, of great variety, and consider an author mistaking the PR for reality and calibrating a character’s (intended) “natural” psychology accordingly, let alone otherwise evaluating it or incorporating it into further drama. In that case, it would be hard to tell what the author would be misrepresenting more, the public or private reality (probably the private reality if that’s dwelled on, dramatized at greater length). Thus, getting the public reality correct often matters greatly, if one cares much at all about more internal character realities or natures.
For novelists who want to have much range at all, and depth too, it helps to know the world and to be able to convey significant chunks of it perceptively, accurately, often factually. Could there be a greater understatement? Not that it’s not possible to screw up (misrepresent, falsify an understanding of the world) “magnificently,” which happens quite a bit, for a wide variety of reasons.
If an author or reader doesn’t care about reality (or if the story is meant to be fantastical) then one might think, no matter. Maybe no matter in certain ways, and this wouldn’t automatically strip the story or novel of value, but it would certainly unnecessarily delimit it in a variety of ways, including those aspects of character that some non-socially oriented readers cherish in particular.
The larger point is that just as private (or subjective) realities can be quite specifically portrayed in “fiction,” so too can public (or objective) realities – a few facts or more, or “stylish” marshalling of evidence, do not necessarily hurt any story let alone novel, quite the contrary—and public realities can be knowledgeably and skillfully portrayed in extensive (and dramatic) detail to a greater or lesser degree within or without the quite influential and compelling contexts of private situations. No small matter when calibrating varieties of power, meaning, and expression both private and public, that is, personal, in art.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the personal is the private and public both—the individual and the group, the subjective and the objective. The fullest development of the personal would seem to me to often require a strong grasp and delineation of both these realities, in fiction generally, let alone in purposefully partisan or political, overt or didactic fiction – all of which has made for great literature and great art over the years.
rm, just for the record, I think you said that very well and find Tony’s strawman remark perplexing.
I love Arundhati, but she rilly oughta stop saying “you know” like that. (Apparently in her youth she was a hippy chick in Goa, God bless her heart).
It’s funny—while Roth is my own favorite contemporary novelist (because he’s a funny, grumpy, left-wing old man with no prejudice against much younger women) I wouldn’t call him the greatest or best. Perhaps the panel is a little skewed.
"rm, just for the record, I think you said that very well and find Tony’s strawman remark perplexing.”
See the second half of rm’s post below in quotes with my comments interspersed:
“What bothers me is the attitude that novels are responsible to capture history.”
Interesting. What bothers rm is the “attitude” of certain novelists and critics as he makes clear below. What does the “attitude” of anyone have to do with anything?, when the point rm is challenging is about the technical capacity of novels. Here we begin to see that my comment that rm’s post is “coherent” is meant in the sense that it’s rather clear that what rm is objecting to is what “bothers” _him_—as much or far more than what is technically possible.
“Novels are supposed to show posterity what “the American experience” or “the African-American experience” or “the experience of slavery” or “being a soldier” was really like.”
Straw man, especially visible here, in this implication that pervades the post. As it is widely acknowledged, one of the most highly thought of novels of the last century is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in which, as it is widely acknowledged he vividly portrays _an_ “American experience” or _an_ “African-American experience” (that is _a_ human experience, not _the_ fill-in-the-blank experience, that is, not the totalizing straw many of rm’s imagination that is set up here for the easy criticism that I carefully dismantled in the vast bulk of my post that, Laura, you have taken no issue with. I don’t mean to be especially critical of rm, individually, here. The reason I said rm’s post was so coherent is that in certain broad circles it is a widely accepted, utterly common platitude or sensibility that novels can’t give great insight into history or the contemporary times. As I’ve detailed, nothing could be further from the truth. What rm is asserting is perfectly clear. That it doesn’t hold up is another matter that has nothing to do with the coherency of a typical platitude—in which the point is clear, while any support may likely be nowhere to be found or, if summoned, goes little or nowhere.
“No, novels tell stories with various degrees of realism or mythopoetic romanticism, but none of them capture history like that.”
Of course not. So why argue that obvious?—that novels do not totalize, unlike the straw assertion.
And just as novels may “tell stories with various degrees of realism or mythopoetic romanticism” so to may they well “capture history” in various amounts—again, as I made clear in my previous post—and delineate history past and present in “various degrees of realism or mythopoetic romanticism” and in many other ways, too.
“They use history, but they are not history books.”
Combination straw man and begging the question. Precisely the extent to which novels may be historically revealing is what is under question here. And the implication that “many, many critics” and novelists see novels as utter stand ins (let alone totalizing ones) for history texts is the straw man argument here.
Some “history books” also have great narrative qualities, telling a strong story in the marshalling of fact and evidence, just as some novels have quite insightful historical qualities, quite telling and compelling, also by way of thoughtful use of fact and evidence, and other means and standards common to quality histories, and novels (just as some novels often have quite strong qualities of philosophy and poetry, etc, as well...).
“I think many, many critics use novels as history books.”
Straw man. Or perhaps simply a rather vague and therefore overreaching assertion, with strong straw man implication. One implication here may be that critics are foolishly flipping through novels to find out with certainty what happened when. Obviously, in standard history texts there is far more room to establish facts and present evidence and conduct analysis of the many historical realities of the world. No novel or novelist could attempt to rival historians in this regard exactly, though oftentimes confusion may arise from the fact that some novels provide far more perceptive historical commentary or insight, if only in passing, than any number of _ideologically skewed_ history texts—and vice versa. The same can be said for the satiric/comic TV news shows as compared to the regular TV news programs, and so on. Oftentimes, entertainers and entertainer/educators get history, etc, correct, while media, scholarly, and government officials get it wrong—and, again, vice versa—either on purpose, by way of negligence, or by some form of mistake.
The point is, novelists may well attempt to call into question or may assert any variety of historical views, sometimes at great detailed length, often quite skillfully in terms of narrative and history, past and present, both—a not uncommon historical feature, call it, of novels that critics would very appropriately address themselves too and consider on historical/social and narrative grounds both. Novels, as is widely understood, are made up of a great mix of genres and fields of study, including the historical—and that’s all part of what makes them so fascinating, and so valuable in so many ways, the historical not least.
rm frowns upon this “attitude”—“the attitude that novels are responsible to capture history.” Responsible, not necessarily, but the larger point, as I’ve said, is that the novel form is certainly free to do so, capable of doing so to large extents, should novelists so choose and have great enough knowledge and skill to organize historical/social details in enlightening and compelling ways, as history and narrative both.
“A certain kind of novelist, wanting to “capture” his “times,” encourages them [critics]. Morris Dickstein diagnoses this aspect of American fiction in the article as “the Moby-Dick syndrome, the effort to sum up the whole meaning of the national experience in a single work.” Yeah.”
Here it is again—straw man—at least as rm contextualizes it—totalizing, overreaching, making for an easy, that is, nonexistent, target: ‘ THE Moby-Dick syndrome, THE effort to sum up THE whole meaning of THE national experience in a single work. ‘
“And I’d add that it’s not my cup of tea. Dickstein says _Beloved_ is one of these, but I’d argue that that is not what makes it a great novel. I suppose the notion of the novel as a representative of its times and culture has an honorable heritage, but I don’t like it.”
Here, rm shifts back to what is usually the issue behind any straw man bashing, (rm’s) preference (or ideology)—thus the shift away from argument. And, curiously, rm also ostensibly lauds ("honorable heritage") that which rm has just caricatured and which rm now flatly asserts rm “doesn’t like.” Would that be the “honor” or the “heritage” exactly?
“Read history to appreciate history, and novels to appreciate stories; this solves many difficulties.”
It certainly does. So does a lobotomy. Or, say, “a good medieval beheading.”
“For instance, an ethnic or regional writer is no longer responsible to represent or typify an entire historical/cultural understanding of his/her group. Hooray!”
Hooray, indeed—no longer “responsible” to be a straw man.
“Now we can actually concentrate on what’s inside his/her book.”
Excellent. Why don’t we?
“Stephen Metcalf’s Slate piece does a better job of this...”
Haven’t seen it, but am hardly provoked to seek it out, given the qualities of the commentary here.
“but really all of these critics can’t decide whether to judge fiction for what it offers or for whether it tells them the history (the “typical” story) they want to hear.”
Somebody apparently wants to hear a “ ‘typical’ “ story, but it is far from clear that it is the much maligned “all of these critics”.
“See? Totally incoherent. It’s hard to be coherent.”
On the contrary, it seems rather clear. Not so difficult after all—once the stuffed scarecrows and bogeymen of rhetorical garb or—call it, ideology, or not so conventional wisdom—have been removed from the field.
I read that three times and still don’t understand it.
Anyone else confused?
Now we’re in the Straw Menagerie.