<< Literary Morphology and Naturalist Criticism | Front Page | Feedburner, The Valve's New RSS >>
Monday, August 28, 2006
Sententious Criticism
I get my issue of n+1 late - what with ‘we sail tonight for Singapore’ slow boat shipping being the most I’ll pay. Then I was busy when it finally showed up. Then I got around to reading it. Put it away. Just now reread bits again. I don’t mind that I disagree with everything in the "American Writing Today" symposium. It’s wide-awake enough for that to be ok.
Let’s consider Elif Batuman on "Short Story & Novel". She is glum about prospects. She is very hard on first sentences, picking on two years worth of Best New American Short Fiction, which I feel is an unfair tactic. There’s always something to hate in a first sentence. Certainly the little things are not born armored against Elif Batuman. Batuman considers this, then goes back and tests herself on Chekhov and finds his first sentences are better. I’m not sure this is a rigorous enough experimental control.
It’s certainly true there are terrible first sentences. But are there good ones, except the rest make them so? There are fancy and plain ones. And stock modes for lodging peremptory yet seemingly authoritative disapproval of both types. (I see Bérubé is revisiting his first sentences meme of yesteryear, by the by.)
Really Batuman is making the point that all the new first sentences seem fancy in the same way, hideously market-convergent, fresh-scrubbed job-applicants. Which point she puts very amusingly: "Today’s short stories all seem to bear an invisible check mark, the ghastly imprimatur of the fiction factory; the very sentences are animated by some kind of vegetable consciousness: "I worked for Kristin," they seem to say; or "Jeff thought I was fucking hilarious." Meanwhile, the ghosts of deleted paragraphs rattle their chains from the margins."
I think Batuman should have deleted the ghosts. It’s funnier with just Kristin and Jeff, fire the ghosts. (For all I know, "The guests were arriving at the dacha" seemed over-studiously simple in Chekhov’s day. You can’t discern conformism from a sample set of one conformist.)
The following seems to me very strange:
Novels, like short stories, are often about absences; but they are based on information overload. A short story says, ‘I looked for x, and didn’t find it,’ or ‘I was not looking anymore, and then I found x.’ A novel says, ‘I looked for x, and found a, b, c, g, q, r, and w.’ The novel consists of all the irrelevant garbage, the effort to redeem that garbage, to integrate it into Life itself, to redraw the boundaries of Life Itself. The novel is a fundamentally ironic form; hence its power of self-regeneration. The short story is a fundamentally unironic form, and for this reason I think it is doomed.
Novels are ironic, short stories not? That’s like ‘novels are good for writing about things that happen out of doors, short stories for things that happen in-doors.’ It’s so bafflingly orthogonal to anything that seems to me like a candidate for correct wisdom that it’s almost thought-provoking. Unless I’m missing it and Batuman has it exactly right.
I suppose I’m feeling upbeat about the short story form this week because I just reread a bunch of wonderful stuff from Conjunctions: 39 [amazon]. (And it isn’t just me being easy to please, with my juvenile sweet tooth for SF/fantasy. One of the contributors, Kelly Link, is practically the only new short fiction writer Batuman singles out for nigh unqualified praise.) For a lark, let me give you every first sentence in the book. You tell me whether you can tell good from bad. What, if anything, can you divine of a story’s overall character, by palping the skull of a sentence?
In the late 1950s the state of Indiana had its own Shakespeare festival, though not much of the world knew about it.
There was a lull in the conversation.
I got two or three weeks’ work with a firm that specialized in high and difficult access jobs in and around Halifax.
What a mystery is Little Red!
Even as I hauled his shivering body from the river and dragged it onto the pier, examining his ancient face as a numismatist might scrutinize a rare coin, I did not recognize him.
"Did you sleep well?" she asks, and you make sure that your face is fixed into a dreamy smile as you open your eyes into the morning after.
The dystopianist destroyed the world again that morning, before making any phone calls or checking his mail, before even breakfast.
The worst storm of that year piled snow on ice while I taught the last day of class before Christmas.
A witch needed to impress his client.
A railroad bull was in charge, of course, cane-tapping around the planks till he tripped the trap, feeling two-handed up the post to find the rope notch, hissing to himself like a slow leak.
The sun woke me.
I was the still voice you almost heard in the middle of the night.
Haden was in trouble again.
When Henrietta and Hiram Patterson arrived at church that Sunday, Henrietta’s arm was bound to a splint, tied up in a sling made from a blue kerchief.
My mother likes to refer to 1989 as the year I played baseball, as if she had nothing to do with it, as if nothing she did that year was worth noting.
These creatures - I hestitate to call them people - since my capture they have taken away my rights.
In the lonely house there is a faded framed LIFE magazine article from almost half a century ago, featuring a color photograph of a beautiful woman with close-cropped blonde hair and rather sly gray eyes, wide crimson-lipsticked mouth, a red-and-white striped bateau-neck shirt.
October was in the chair, so it was chilly that evening, and the leaves were red and orange and tumbled from the trees that circled the grove.
A few of them are clearly gothic - or, ironic-gothic or just plain absurd. Any stink of bad fiction factory? Are you turned on by some, turned off by others or is it, as I suspect, much too early days for that?
In case you are curious, I think the best turns out to be Peter Straub’s "Little Red’s Tango". Let me give you the whole first page.
LITTLE RED PERCEIVED AS A MYSTERY
What a mystery is Little Red! How he sustains himself, how he lives, how he gets through his days, what passes through his mind as he endures that extraordinary journey .... Is not mystery precisely that which does not yield, does not give access?
LITTLE RED, HIS WIFE, HIS PARENTS, HIS BROTHERS
Little is known of the woman he married. Little Red seldom speaks of her, except now and then to say, "My wife was half Sicilian," or "All you have to know about my wife is that she was half Sicilian." Some have speculated, though not in the presence of Little Red, that the long-vanished wife was no more than a fictional or mythic character created to lend solidity to his otherwise amorphous history. Years have been lost. Decades have been lost. (In a sense, an entire life has been lost, some might say Little Red’s.) The existence of a wife, even an anonymous one, lends a semblance of structure to the lost years.
Half of her was Sicilian, the other half may have been Irish. "People like that you don’t mess with," says Little Red. "Even when you mess with them, you don’t mess with them, know what I mean?"
The parents are likewise anonymous, though no one has ever speculated that they may have been fictional or mythic. Even anonymous parents must be of flesh and blood. Since Little Red has mentioned, in his flat, dry Long Island accent, a term in the Uniondale High School jazz ensemble, we can assume that for a substantial period his family resided in Uniondale, Long Island. There were, apparently, two brothers, both older. The three boys grew up in circumstances modest but otherwise unspecified. A lunch counter, a diner, a small mom-and-pop grocery may have been in the picture. Some connection with food, with nourishment.
Comments
I’m pretty sure Elif Batuman is a woman.
So she is! Why didn’t I bother to check? Why was I sure she was a man? I have no idea. But now I’ll go update the post.
The dystopianist destroyed the world again that morning, before making any phone calls or checking his mail, before even breakfast.
“Dystopianist” doesn’t ring true, but the rest of that sentence could open a George Saunders short.
What a mystery is Little Red!
First sentences shouldn’t end in exclamation points. Without some other mood set, they sound shrill and forced...which, from the passage below, may have been the point, I suppose. The faux-ecstasy of fundamentalist, you know?
Even as I hauled his shivering body from the river and dragged it onto the pier, examining his ancient face as a numismatist might scrutinize a rare coin, I did not recognize him.
I’m on the fence; it’s factory-produced, I’d wager, but it’s not overly clever, in that it lets the reader draw the connection between the weathered face of a Washington quarter--or, more likely, an Augustus denarius--and the unrecognizable face of the dead body. (Plus, I’ve always thought my numinist/numismatist confusion eminently exploitable...which, I think, Gaiman actually exploited at some point during The Sandman‘s run.) What bothers me about it is--and what screams MFA workshopped--is that he’s comparing his own actions to that of a numismatist.
Of course, I’m guessing here…
A railroad bull was in charge, of course, cane-tapping around the planks till he tripped the trap, feeling two-handed up the post to find the rope notch, hissing to himself like a slow leak.
My mother likes to refer to 1989 as the year I played baseball, as if she had nothing to do with it, as if nothing she did that year was worth noting.
Those are gorgeous openings. The first is straight-up golden poetry (though I liked that Nabokovian middle bit more when I misread ‘tripped’ as ‘tipped’), that last simile right out of Raymond Chandler. The second is like the opening credits to The Wonder Years: intergalactic shorthand for You Are There. The crazy boat listing hard to port as usual when mothers take the wheel.
I’m with Scott as well: I like ‘before even breakfast’ and find the numismastism overwrought.
The best opening sentence I’ve read is still the downbeat of Neuromancer, hands-down. An entire century of human devolution and misery in lucky thirteen words.
Maybe fourteen, shit I don’t know.
I think the fact that “What a mystery is Little Red!” is, in effect, a redundant repetition of the subtitle, gives it a certain charm.
My mother likes to refer to 1989 as the year I played baseball, as if she had nothing to do with it, as if nothing she did that year was worth noting.
Sounds clumsy and annoying to my ears.
"I was the still voice you almost heard in the middle of the night” sounds like a lost case. I’d be very pleased to hear it was capable of being rescued.
“A witch needed to impress a client”, though giving the impression of a short joke, has to my ear certain Raymond-Chandlerish fantasy possibilities. “Haden was in trouble again” is a joker- anything can be done with it- a solid, conservative bet. The “even breakfast” caught my eye, too.
This all brings to mind that dude--BJ Myers was his name maybe--who hatcheted away at the reputations of various venerated contemporary writers in the Atlantic a few summers back. As I recall, his approach consisted of isolating various sentences that, on their own rang strangely, or pretentious, or incoherent. But the obvious truth (ha ha) is that, as mentioned above, how we hear a note has much to do with the notes that precede and follow it, plus our memory of even farther back and our anticipation of subsequents.
Which brings to mind two things. One, exposition is ugly in the context of verse and fictional modes are . . . preening?...naive maybe? in the context of expository prose--so maybe many people like to write hatchet jobs because their form does the leg work to some extent. And two, anyone can write a pretty “fictional” sentence, or at least a clean one, so how big a deal should any sentence be all on its own, even when we come to praise?
Batuman
What happened to Batman? Instead of the endless belle-lettrist groans and snideness, classic Batman strips feature clearly -delineated characters and plots, with a certain moral but not overly-colloquial tone as well. The first two Batman movies continue that tradition. Write about what you know.
"Did you sleep well?” she asks, and you make sure that your face is fixed into a dreamy smile as you open your eyes into the morning after.
This sentence wasn’t the most eye-catching, but it was the one I lingered on the longest. It establishes the stark essentials of setting (sunlight, white bedsheets, almost recognizable enough to be a cliche) and it does the same for character (male loverboy with dreamy smile). At the same time, it introduces the subtle complication of inauthenticity, which makes me a lot more interested in the character and his relationship.
Neuromancer’s opening is brilliant because it establishes setting, and because it latches into your visual memory in a way rarely possible in literature. I have to agree on that one.
so maybe many people like to write hatchet jobs because their form does the leg work to some extent
True, it’s easy to take a quip out of the context of its notes before and after and ridicule for the clumsiness found. The process can create the desired result. (And when done to a humorous end, a much more skilled endeavor . . . . unless of course you’re talking about newsertainment. . . . but I digress.) “Call me Ishmael” has to be a classic “formulaic” opening line – if divorced from all that follows, no?
One can create the symptoms of market-convergence (I love that usage) by decontextualizing. But that doesn’t mean the disease does not exist. What is interesting is how the the stock, workshop, creative-writing-department-driven short story is creating the same symptom through the exact same manner: that is, the lead line to the story has no context. It is never tied in to the rest of the story: it simply exists as “the opening hook.” One of the many symptoms of that wonderful market-convergence that is contemporary literature.
I see the event as often and as pitifully in poetry. I was last year poaching at a colleague’s desk – one who was doing a bit of review work at the time. I picked up three random poetry books by three contemporary poets, opened to a random page in each, and successfully nailed three poems about how sad the poet was that their father was dead. All three utterly interchangeable.
The contemporary dead father poem. Ah, is there anything more ubiquitous?, or epitomously market-convergent?!
Yes, let’s defend the artists from unfair critique. But let’s also join in and point out that which does not deserve critique.
Ok. Time to go. Off my soapbox.