"Frenzied tract or self-indulgent hobbyhorse"

Reading this Bookslut interview with Cynthia Ozick the other day (the interview is from December; I don't remember where I found the link, sorry), I was interested in her remarks about politics and the novel. The interviewer, Paul Morton, is trying to press her about what he perceives as her lack of engagement with the present, a premise to which she objects. He tries to clarify his question:

I may not have been as precise in what I’m criticizing. There’s a scene in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost that takes place on the 2004 election night. I haven’t seen any writer or journalist depict that night better than Roth does in those 10 pages or so.

I remember it very well. And I remember my reaction to it very well. Notwithstanding my hot admiration for Roth, both in part and as an astonishing whole, this scene struck me as the weakest point in the novel, because -- agree with Roth’s views or not -- it leaped out of the disbelief-suspending frame of the novel to become topical political rage and topical political advocacy. Nothing will kill a novel more than when it falls away from serious irony and veers into frenzied tract or self-indulgent hobbyhorse. Twenty years from now, maybe ten, maybe even five, that scene is going to be as stale and dead and ludicrous on the page as Herbert Hoover’s chicken-in-every-pot oration. It won’t survive even as comedy, though it might as self-indicting cartoon. Still, it goes without saying that Roth’s power and repute will outlast the occasional sermonic glitch.

But think of a book like Fathers and Sons which is filled with conversations that were contemporary to 1861 Russia.

But in Turgenev’s novel, one of my favorites, both sides of the political argument are lived out and imagined from the inside. Turgenev doesn’t sneer, he empathizes, he dramatizes. It’s not mere polemical advocacy thrown down out of animus. You can feel the force of history, and of torn human passions, and the troubled bewilderment of parents, and the draw of family love. For me, the greatest political novel of the twentieth century is A Passage to India, a wonderful case in point of how a novel can transcend its topical politics when the issues themselves have become obsolete. India has been an independent sovereign state for many decades. Its unhappy period as the possession of a foreign power is long over and done with, and today it has a bristling, fruitful international economy. Yet that novel lives beyond the British imperial circumstances of its moment, and why? Because of Aziz, because of Professor Godbole and Mrs. Moore, because of Adela, because of the Marabar Caves, because of a dominating uncanny mystical echo. A beautiful and amazing novel despite its dead political element and yes, the political impulse that may have partly motivated it.

It so happens that I read Exit Ghost just last week. In case you haven't read the book, our man Nathan Zuckerman has returned to New York after several years in self-imposed exile, has entered into an agreement to allow a couple to occupy, for a year, his cabin in the Berkshires in exchange for their apartment in Manhattan. In the scene referred to in the interview, Zuckerman is in the apartment with the couple, who have invited him to celebrate with them what they are sure will be a Democratic victory that night, in the 2004 presidential election, before they officially move out to the cabin. Zuckerman, intentionally, has no knowledge of or interest in what's going on, having stopped following politics years prior, though it seems clear his sympathies are not with the Republicans. His young friends are sure of a Kerry victory, sure of the evil of the Republicans, and just as sure that the latter have destroyed a great thing. They are, of course, disappointed in the event and spend much time denouncing the evil of Bush and Cheney and despairing the direction of this great nation.

A few things interest me about this and Ozick's response to it. First is her assumption that Roth, her hero, in writing this scene, necessarily has failed as a novelist, allowing "frenzied tract or self-indulgent hobbyhorse" to overtake him. Assuming, that is, that inclusion of such a scene can only be Roth taking time to either lecture the reader, or to make his own feelings known, which are otherwise irrelevant. And yet, it is a note-perfect rendition of the kinds of scenes that happened in real life, in true-blue liberal households across the land. Is it relevant to the rest of the book? I think it is, but I'm not going to go to great lengths to argue the point.

Second is her appraisal of the two older novels. She claims that in Fathers and Sons "both sides of the political argument are lived out and imagined from the inside. Turgenev doesn't sneer, he empathizes, he dramatizes. It’s not mere polemical advocacy thrown down out of animus." Note that she refers to both sides of the argument, as if there were only two, as if Turgenev had not selected his two sides to dramatize. In doing so, she fails to notice that two sides are indeed presented in Exit Ghost, that of the politically committed young couple and of the indifferent Zuckerman. And Ozick seems to accept at face value that the only sides involved in the 2004 election, or in any other presidential election, are the Democrats and the Republicans and their respective supporters. But the novel doesn't include any Nader voters, nor any others who might be capable, unlike this couple or Ozick apparently, of recognizing that, awful as they were, the Bush gang did not destroy a "great" thing but were rather implementing an extreme version of basic policies which enjoyed bipartisan support for decades, nor should it necessarily have included such characters. The book is not about the election or about politics. It is, however, largely about the risks of commitment, of life, of involvement, and the attraction of removing oneself from it all, whether for art or security or otherwise. In which case the two "sides" presented are indeed relevant to the novel.

A Passage to India, Ozick claims, is "a wonderful case in point of how a novel can transcend its topical politics when the issues themselves have become obsolete." Apparently, then, it's just fine for a novel to be about politics if those politics don't matter, as long as characters are memorable and place is well enough evoked. How convenient. Is it possible that decades from now Exit Ghost might be able to "transcend its topical politics"? Ozick doesn't say either way, but she implies that the political scenes in the novel are bad by definition. It seems to me that Ozick has allowed her a priori conviction that politics is always detrimental to fiction to determine her take on this particular scene. She claims that it is the weakest part of the book because "agree with Roth’s views or not -- it leaped out of the disbelief-suspending frame of the novel to become topical political rage and topical political advocacy". I'm curious at her assumption that the scene is anything like "political advocacy". What are Roth's views? Are they Zuckerman's or those of the young, politically attuned couple? Both? Neither? It's probably safe to say that Roth strongly identifies with the opinions expressed by the young couple. He is on record as having been appalled by the Bush Administration ("Bush is too horrendous to be forgotten", he says in the linked interview). And yet one can easily see him making common cause with Zuckerman, a sort of "this too shall pass" attitude. So, it could be argued, Roth splits his own attitude on the then-current situation. Possibly, yet it seems to me that this kind of speculation is quite beside the point. I make no great claims for Exit Ghost; it's a perfectly worthy, if sort of slight--in the way that Roth's recent books have managed to somehow be both slight and fascinating--coda to the numerous Zuckerman books. But the question of politics and fiction is important and too often dismissed out of hand by critics like Ozick who find the political novel anathema to aesthetic success, while many who desire the political in their art seem to me to be all too reductive.

I hope to return to these matters in the near future. But before finishing up here, I'd like to hint towards the nature of my problem with the overly reductive approach. I was struck a while back by a comment by jane dark at Ads Without Products, which Ads drew attention to in an excellent post the other day about Lars von Trier's new film, Antichrist:

The most compelling approach to "truth" in the novel is probably Jameson's account of "the real of history" in Political Unconscious and it is exactly what can't be inserted via choosing to do so, as both Ballard and the bourgeois novelists would have us do.

I'd like to meditate on this, and on that which is "exactly what can't be inserted via choosing to do so". . .

Needed: More Criticism

A lot of people have linked to Susan Sontag's previously unpublished mini-essay that appeared in the Guardian last week, but so far few have commented on it. Scott Esposito posted about it yesterday, and Ted at myrtias the other day. Ted calls the essay "essential reading". I disagree. I found it sort of rambling and pointless. She starts to say something interesting in the middle of the piece:

"The modern" is an idea, a very radical idea, that continues to evolve. We are now in a second phase of the ideology of the modern (which has been given the presumptuous name of "the postmodern"). This beginning of "the modern" in literature took place in the 1850s. A century and a half is a long time. Many of the attitudes and scruples and refusals associated with "the modern" in literature - as well as in the other arts - have begun to seem conventional or even sterile. And, to some extent, this judgment is justified. Every notion of literature, even the most exacting and liberating, can become a form of spiritual complacency or self-congratulation.

Most notions about literature are reactive - in the hands of lesser talents, merely reactive. But what is happening in the repudiations advanced in the current debate about the novel goes far beyond the usual process whereby new talents need to repudiate older ideas of literary excellence.

In North America and in Europe, we are living now, I think it fair to say, in a period of reaction. In the arts, it takes the form of a bullying reaction against the high modernist achievement, which is thought to be too difficult, too demanding of audiences, not accessible (or "user-friendly") enough. And in politics, it takes the form of a dismissal of all attempts to measure public life by what are disparaged as mere ideals.

In the modern era, the call for a return to realism in the arts often goes hand in hand with the strengthening of cynical realism in political discourse.

Unfortunately, she doesn't do much with this. She goes off on a weird, somewhat dated digression about the "hyper-novel", before finally locating the problem with today's fiction with television. Then she spends several paragraphs on broad generalizations about the differences between the novel and television. I found very little of value in this section, very little that hasn't been said before. By the end it's clear that she is making an ethical argument in favor of the novel; she is saying that reading novels is good for us. It's not immediately evident to me what the purpose of such a piece is. If it weren't a posthumously published piece from Susan Sontag, I don't think anyone would care.

Meanwhile, in the April issue of Harper's, Cynthia Ozick calls for more literary criticism to redress the problems currently besetting literary fiction. This article ("Literary Entrails") was similarly disappointing, though I certainly agree that we need more criticism. She begins by rehearsing the arguments made by Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus in two previous Harper's articles: Franzen's 1996 manifesto fretting about the lack of societal impact of literary fiction and calling for more socially engaged literature, and Ben Marcus' 2005 article, which defended experimental literature, largely from Franzen, by replying in part to Franzen's manifesto, but more to Franzen's notorious (and whiny) New Yorker essay from 2002 about William Gaddis titled "Mr Difficult".

Ozick argues that the kinds of manifestos and polemics made by Franzen and Marcus have nothing to do with the health of literature. They are bickering over readers who are increasingly not there to be bickered over. She says that what's needed is more literary criticism, the kind of literary criticism that "explains, both ancestrally and contemporaneously, not only how literature evolves but how literature influences and alters the workings of human imagination." She proceeds to single out James Wood as exactly the kind of critic we need, one who sees the "indebtedness" and "connectedness" between writers past and present. What we need, Ozick argues, are more James Woods (she actually says "What is needed is a thicket--a forest--of Woods"). Then she approvingly quotes several passages from Wood's criticism--this is a critical mind at work, she says. She mentions some others who provide "inklings" of a "potential critical aggregate", but that she includes Christopher Hitchens in this list is not encouraging (that she includes Wyatt Mason is, I think, encouraging). Again, I agree that more and better criticism is necessary, and I don't object to the idea that Wood is an interesting critic. But I think that one problem with literature today, in the absence of any sort of critical body of knowledge, is that everything is so uselessly contentious. People argue about their tastes, about their favorite authors, with very little general acceptance of the terms being argued over. People line up, as well, to argue about their favorite or hated critics, with James Wood often at the center of such disputes. As such, I don't think his role is positive.

Ozick admits in a footnote that Wood seems to have a blindspot with his partiality to "realism" (and against his bugaboo "hysterical realism"), but she contends that "a critic is nothing without an authoritative posture, or standard, or even prejudice, against which an opposing outlook or proposition can be tested." This sounds reasonable, but compare it with something Northrop Frye wrote in the "Polemical Introduction" to his Anatomy of Criticism (published in 1957). Frye is arguing that criticism should be developed scientifically, into a systematic study of literature, a body of knowledge. He writes:

There are no definite positions to be taken in chemistry or philology, and if there are any to be taken in criticism, criticism is not a field of genuine learning. For in any field of genuine learning, the only sensible response to the challenge "stand" is Falstaff's "so I do, against my will." One's "definite position" is one's weakness, the source of one's liability to error and prejudice, and to gain adherents to a definite position is only to multiply one's weakness like an infection.

Frye would, I think, see James Wood as more of a "public critic" who "tends to episodic forms like the lecture and the familiar essay", whose "work is not a science, but another kind of literary art." Frye wanted a criticism that has "a clear notion of progress" by which a critic could "become anything better than a monument of contemporary taste, with all its limitations and prejudices." What Ozick is calling for seems very different than Frye's scientific ideal. Using his terminology (and noting the names she listed aside from Wood), it appears that she would like to see a broader infrastructure of such public critics, all duking it out over literary taste, essentially. Ultimately Ozick's article disappointed not because she identified a problem in this lack of literary criticism, but because she does almost nothing with it except praise--and quote--James Wood, who is already the most visible critic working today anyway, so hardly in need of the attention.

I haven't yet made it incredibly far into Anatomy of Criticism (I'm about halfway through the first the four main essays), but I wonder if he allows that a "definite" critical position can be held that can't be reduced to mere taste. I wonder, too, how someone like Gabriel Josipovici would fit in with this kind of schematic. It seems to me that he has a definite position, but can it simply be reduced to a matter of taste? Given his talk about Modernists, and present-day novelists writing in bad faith, some could argue (and did, in some of the comments, here and elsewhere) what if you just don't like the Modernists? I'm interested in reading in more detail what he has to say about such things (to that end, I ordered two of his books: The Book of God and On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion, each of which were like $1.00 via Amazon. Alas, his earlier Lessons of Modernism is nowhere available for under $50, as far as I can tell, and the recent The Singer on the Shore collection is still relatively pricey); I will no doubt be reporting some of what I find here, as well as more from Frye's book.