The haiku is not for me

This n+1 essay, about Roberto Bolaño and his reception by American readers and critics, includes this passage (italics in original):

American critics and regular readers alike usually don't care for sweeping literary-historical arguments. And yet in recent years we have been celebrating Sebald and Bolaño as if we really do believe in some big metanarrative about the novel—one that proclaims that, even post postmodernism, the form remains in crisis. Sure, Sebald and Bolaño deal with fascism, and both died at the height of their powers. More decisive is that neither fiction writer writes as if he believes in fiction. Our canonization of these writers implies a sense, even a conviction, that you can't be a really important novelist anymore unless you can't really write novels.

In a post responding to this essay, Scott Esposito addresses this passage thus:

Of course, when the unsigned editorialist says "can't really write novels," he/she is referring to novels in the 19th century (and maybe early 20th century) sense. Sebald's and Bolano's works are certainly novels, just not in the sense that some critics would like novels to only be viewed as."

I've wondered why we insist on having the word "novel" encompass so much. Why must it be asserted that the books written by Sebald and Bolaño "are certainly" novels? Are they? What is a novel? A novel is, presumably, everything, the genre-less genre, as I've said previously. Those critics, such as perhaps James Wood, who appear to be seeking to "limit" the novel, must then emerge as the enemy. (Though even for Wood, the novel is so flexible as to be just about anything, so long as it is "real".)

I was recently reading through the archives at zunguzungu, the excellent blog written by Aaron Bady that has too late come to my attention, and I came across this post from March, about a talk given at Berkeley by Franco Moretti. Moretti made the "provocative point that the high aesthetic novel is more of an epiphenomena of a mass commodity culture than the transcendence of it", and the "major question . . . was why the Chinese novel didn't develop like the novel did in Europe" . . . there are all sorts of obvious historical factors Moretti addresses: capitalism, imperialism, China's pre-industrial development, and so on. For Bady, these sorts of questions normally bother him, because "Why shouldn't [the Chinese novel] be different?" The question for him is "why the Chinese novel even gets called a novel in the first place, why a term of art derived from the French word for 'new' under a very historically contingent set of circumstances, in Europe, would be considered appropriate (to anyone) for reference to the classic long fictive prose narratives in China." He goes on (italics his):

the intractable problem at its roots, which is whether a novel is a novel because of historical or formal characteristics. One narrative of the rise of the novel points to the historical circumstances, the social factors that produce a particular kind of textual object and invest it with particular meanings and significance. Another narrative derives it from a structural form: the novel is a fictional narrative which is long and written in prose. That these "objective" features are historically defined (what it means to be fictional, for example, requires a secular consciousness) needs to be suppressed, as does the fact that giving history a legible form requires treating unreliably contingent objective forms as if they really were objective. But while history and form define each other, and are really separable, neither do the narratives collapse into each other. Is Robinson Crusoe a novel because that's what it was called at a certain point in history, or because it achieved some essentially novelistic form? If the former, a historical paradigm, then there can be no Chinese novel at all, just something that looks superficially similar from a distance. Yet if its the latter, a formalist definition, then how can a Chinese novel be Chinese?

I remember I used to think it was strange that there were Japanese novels. In part, I'm sure this had something to do with the logographic form of writing: I had a hard time imagining such works reading as novels. (Are Japanese prose works even written logographically?) I generally dismissed this puzzlement as my own problem, but the question nagged at me on occasion, though usually it remained just out of focus. Anyway, pondering the Japanese novel, I would think about those forms we're taught in grade school that belong to this or that national culture. We would write imitations for class assigments--haiku being the example that comes most readily to mind. But clearly haiku is not a form truly available to the writer writing in English. Later I would think of older European forms--the sonnet, say--and think to myself that the sonnet is not available to the contemporary writer. I could set out to compose a sonnet, yes, but it would be at best pastiche; however well done, however beautiful (or, more likely, ugly), it would stand awkwardly in relation to literary history, imitative, inappropriate, suspect, wrong. Its form is not for me, just as I understood intuitively that the haiku is not for me.

I was never really sure what precisely to think about my problem with the Japanese novel, but Bady's post zeroes in on some of what was troubling me. What is a novel? It seems to me that it's become defined down as simply "prose narrative of a certain length". Gabriel Josipovici has argued that the narrative mode of the 19th century novel became so dominant (not least because of England's--and to lesser extent France's--role as imperial power, I would add), that we expect it to hold true for very different sorts of narratives. The Bible, for example, we approach as if it should yield the same sorts of effects as would a George Eliot novel. When it does not yield these effects, we find it wanting, incomprehensible; or, we read effects into it that are not there, and could not be, an approach with numerous interpretative and affective pitfalls of its own. Why should the effects be similar? Why should we read a Japanese prose narrative as if it followed the same rules, created the same effects, as a Dickens novel? Why should contemporary prose works necessarily be treated as novels? Why do we insist that of course a given work is a novel, just not the kind of novel some readers expect? Why, indeed, should adventurous or exploratory or so-called experimental prose writing be subject to the same expectations as a novel? Why called a novel at all? (As always, I am ignoring the needs of the publishing industry.) Are Thomas Bernhard's works novels? Or might it be better to call them, simply, "prose works"? What about Blanchot's récit? Is Josipovici's Everything Passes a novel? David Markson's This Is Not A Novel was titled, so I understand, in response to what one reviewer reportedly actually wrote in dismissing Reader's Block, his previous work. But what if we just saw the title as simply accurate and then worked from there?

On Being Finished Clearing My Throat (I Hope)

I'm been clearing my throat about science fiction and genre and whatnot for some time now. All of this has been preparatory to a post about The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. That post is still forthcoming (which is not to say that I've been working on it all this time), but this post is here in part to say that I think I'm more or less through with all the genre-related posts--at least in the way that I've been approaching them. In the future, if I read an apparently "genre" book, if I write about it, I'll try to focus on what the book does or does not do rather than boring everybody with my confusing questions about what might or might not constitute genre. Unless of course I decide otherwise.

I felt the need to do the throat-clearing because I wanted any science fiction readers to know where I was coming from when I finally did write about Wolfe and his books, and because I intended to write something about what sorts of things I have been looking for at different times when I've read science fiction. I read with interest a post Dan Green wrote in January in which he said that he had been persuaded that science fiction "is inherently a kind of experimental fiction"; he thus decided to sample some science fiction

under the assumption it is a genre that seeks to provide an alternative to "realism" and other conventionally "literary" practices, not just by evoking speculative worlds and looking to the future rather than the past or present but also by creating alternative forms and experimenting with the established elements of fiction (plot, setting, point of view, etc.).

I was sort of surprised by this, because I have not come to science fiction persuaded of any such thing. No doubt unfairly, I tended to think of most science fiction as not really experimental at all. So I wasn't coming to it for this reason. And I certainly wasn't coming to it for its predictive powers. In a post on the occasion of the death of Baudrillard, k-punk wrote: "It is a commonplace that science fiction reveals more about the time it was written than it tells us about the future." I agree with this. And I'd agree that learning about "the time it was written" via science fiction could be interesting, especially as part of a kind of cultural studies, but it's also not the kind of thing I'm interested in for a reading experience, except as a byproduct.

In the end, I merely meant to be saying that what I wanted now from science fiction was, if possible, a "literary" experience--but, of course, I was anxious about appearing condescending toward the genre, or presumptuous about what such a literary effect might be. At least I meant to be clear that I did not mean that I want science fiction that finally ending up being little more than what passes for so-called "literary fiction" (damn, it really is tiresome, isn't it?). Hence, the several rounds of preliminaries.

So, then, to finish up with the throat-clearing exercises. In a comment to an earlier post of mine, I yet again wrote that I had a post Wolfe's books in the works (hey, maybe I'm trying to perfect the genre of the deferred blog post!). Replying to my comment, Scraps welcomed me to the "frenzy of interpretation". I take it that this means that Wolfe's series has been subjected to such a frenzy (I've read very little about it). In the event, I don't actually intend to do much "interpretation"--in this sense, the word implies to me an investigation into "what it all means", explanation of symbols, allegory, etc. I have no trouble accepting that these books are packed full of this stuff (certain Christian symbols seem hard for even me to miss), and may to some extent enhance my enjoyment of future re-readings. But I merely plan to explain why I think it's great and why I think it does provide a literary experience of the kind I felt I wanted from science fiction.

Destroys the Idea of the Novel

Ten days ago at Ready Steady Book, Mark Thwaite articulated a manifesto of sorts, "Against Establishment Literary Fiction":

When I talk to folk, especially publishers, about what kinds of books I like to feature on RSB, I often reach for the phrase Literary Fiction ... and then I quickly backtrack. Literary Fiction is one of the genres of fiction that I'm happy to feature on TBD's homepage, alongside a host of other types of books. And Literary Fiction is, undoubtedly, the genre that many of the books that have been reviewed on RSB in the past have belonged to. But, editorially -- and by that I mean, via the blog, and from my heart -- I'd actually like RSB to be seen as being anti-Literary Fiction. Indeed, what I've taken to calling Establishment Literary Fiction is, to me, the very antithesis of literature: it is hubristic, formulaic and trite; it is non- essential.

Literary Fiction is genre fiction; literature, art, is writing that deconstructs the very idea of genre. Proust's In Search of Lost Time isn't literary fiction, but a novel that destroys the idea of the novel in its very realisation. Beckett's famous lines from Worstward Ho -- Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. -- are in themselves a manifesto for writers and writing. If Literary Fiction is defined by its proud masterpieces, its smug perfections, literature should be known as a failed art that in its failing helps us to understand our own feeble inadequacies and helps us to fail better.

Mark rather pithily captures some of what I've been trying to get at here, where I've been banging away on this topic for a while now. I see The Existence Machine as, in part, engaging in this type of conversation. I, too, want to reach toward the phrase "Literary Fiction" when trying to characterize what I read and want to write about. But the term feels, aside from pretentious, false. The word "literary" is what grabs me, of course. I am interested in the literary, aesthetic qualities of fiction. I'm interested in figuring out what those are, in understanding them. I'm interested in discussion that attempts to deal with these things. But I am less and less interested in the hot "literary" titles. Certainly plenty of what I enjoy reading, and have written about, would fall under the rubric of "establishment literary fiction" (Philip Roth is surely establishment, no?). However, that some actual literature gets marketed as literary fiction is no reason to not read it. At the same time, I feel no particular need anymore to try to keep up with the latest releases. The point is not that none of this fiction is worthy, but that so much of it is as unquestioningly formulaic as the non-literary fiction genres. And all the chatter about it tends to obscure that.

One of the great things about blogs, of course, is the multitude of voices. It's useful and important to hear these voices. However, one of my personal frustrations with blogs--lit blogs in particular--is that there is so little baseline agreement on what is meant by certain ideas. For example, what is meant by "genre". Every so often a genre-fight/discussion will erupt in the comment section at this or that blog (like here, or here; see also Jonathan Lethem's much talked about piece on the alleged provincialism of science fiction, an exchange between Lethem and Ray Davis here, and Davis' longer reply here), but all too rarely, it seems to me, does the conversation build on itself. Each time the discussion appears as if anew--even as some of the participants express weariness at once again having to explain their particular point. And very few people seem to understand the word genre in the sense used by Mark, above. I've been trying to straddle that line. I've been trying to write about literature in a way that recognizes that "literary fiction" is merely another genre, but also trying to write about the more commonly understood sense of "genre"--science fiction, mystery, crime, etc.

About three weeks ago, Ellis Sharp had an interesting post in which he defended Philip K. Dick from the charge of writing awful prose:

In the case of Philip K. Dick, I don’t find the prose that bad. Yes, sometimes it’s very tired and lazy. Other times it’s dazzling. And when it comes to writing fiction, style and gleaming prose isn’t everything. Think about (for example) Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry James might well seem to be the better writer, with a massively accomplished oeuvre. But I would argue that ultimately he never wrote anything as important as what Stevenson achieved in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which manages simultaneously to be a hugely accomplished piece of writing and a brilliant exploration of the contradictory nature of human identity and a very insightful account of Victorian society and its hypocrisies. And Stevenson arrived there by way of genre writing. Interesting.

Here, of course, Ellis uses the second sense of "genre" noted above. But more on Dick:

Dick reminds me of Stevenson in some ways. He’s more than just a great storyteller. He’s very good on paranoia, alienation and the self under stress. I first discovered Dick’s work as a young teenager, when I read his early work Eye in the Sky. At one point the characters discover their genitals have vanished, replaced by nothing more than smooth skin. I found that very disturbing. Rather more disturbing than, say, Gregor Samsa waking up and discovering that he’s turned into a giant insect.

[. . .]

What I require from any piece of fiction is: does the writer’s vision engage me? If so, is it true to itself as art? And is it true to the world? In the case of Philip K Dick the answer is yes, yes, yes.

In what way might a work of "establishment literary fiction", say, be true to itself as art and be true to the world? Is working within established forms necessarily lazy? What does it mean to arrive at an effect "by way of genre"? Could a writer not arrive at that effect by way of the genre of literary fiction? Or, instead, does the work written using the apparent tropes of an established genre (including that genre of literary fiction), cease to be of that genre when the work achieves a kind of artistic truth? (Even perhaps when the author might not be aware of it?) That is, when, for example, we speak of Proust's work which, in its realization "destroys the idea of the novel"--in what sense does this include or exclude fiction that appears to merely be of a genre (science fiction, etc), but instead in its realization itself destroys the idea of the novel? Proponents of genre per se might (and do) accuse readers who stick to that which can be called "literary fiction" as not being able to see those so-called genre works that do exactly that.

Anyway, this post has rambled on long enough. I feel these questions help illustrate the confusion that occurs when different types of readers try to talk about genre. Still further confusion occurs when the question of entertainment--escapism--versus literature arises. . .

Clumsiness in the Face of a Brilliant Narrative Mind

In my last post I wondered about the quantity of bad writing readers are willing to wade through in the name of story. In light of this, and the question of genre writing (and genre "ghettoes"), I was intrigued by this review by J F Quackenbush of Philip K. Dick's Confessions of a Crap Artist, at Wet Asphalt. The following passage in particular:

Dick's prose, and hence the true problem he presents to critical appraisal, is often slapdash, sloppy, and amateurish. This clumsiness in the face of the brilliant inventive narrative mind behind it has a way of detaching the reader, and with Confessions the themes of alienation and misunderstanding that so permeate his work function on that detachment in such a way as to leave the reader alienated himself, and yet completely engrossed. Here Dick's flaws as a stylist actually serve to heighten the reader's experience, and the obvious comparison is to much more well-regarded technicians like Thomas Pynchon or William Gaddis whose prose often reflects stylistically and structurally the themes and moods of the story. From this, it is apparent that Dick is postmodern in a very unselfconscious way. Dick's postmodernism is a product of neurosis and style, and does not rely on the skillful artifice of a Pynchon or a Barth to convey the images and feelings of a postmodern world adrift in it's own hypochondria. Dick himself is a product of that world, the author himself didn't seem to understand why it was that he wasn't accepted as a more mainstream author, and had an ironic and good-humored detachment from the insanity of many of his own beliefs. Philip K. Dick is often held forth as an example of the best that Science Fiction has to offer, and in a way that's true, but at the same time it reveals some of the failings of the Sci Fi ghetto. Confessions of a Crap Artist, relying for success so heavily not just on the readers understanding of Philip K. Dick the individual, but also on the accidental brilliance of Dick's mediocre prose, is (almost) accidentally brilliant. To offer Philip K. Dick as one of the great writers of the 20th Century, as many have done, is therefore not unproblematic. Like Frank Herbert, Dick has an almost cult-like following who seem to be almost completely unaware of the many technical flaws and rough edges to the works of the respective men. Of course, Dick isn't nearly as inept as Herbert, and in that way it's an unfair comparison, at the same time the comparison is revealing as one of the reasons that Science Fiction authors have remained so long in their ghetto, and that is the overly sympathetic reading that Sci Fi authors often receive from their fan base. This is, I think, a critical distinction between the work of Literary authors and authors working in the various genre ghettoes.

There's a lot to unpack here, and I'm not going to try to do it in this post, not least because I've never read anything by Dick. But I think Quackenbush touches on points that make various online literary debates so difficult. Too often readers seem to be talking past each other. People read for different reasons, with different ends in mind, so when we all show up online, with our overlapping reading communities, confusion seems inevitable.

On a related note, Steve Mitchelmore posted today about beginning to read a thriller:

I had no expectations at all and it began well. The main character was introduced in crisp prose with a wonderful pulse. I learned of his mundanely pleasant life, his mysterious girlfriend and the suggestion of a dark cloud waiting to float over and block out the sunlight. No trouble. I've read many infinitely worse “literary” novels. Yet it was here that I put the book down. Now that a world had opened up, I wanted more. I wanted the whole book to be like this; a book of beginnings, sunlight ahead, and I knew that was not going to happen. That dark cloud scuttled over soon enough.

Fantastic. I don't mean anything like "yay, Steve! screw that genre crap!" Rather, Steve knows what kind of writing he needs, and he is able to articulate it, in his inimitable fashion. But I suspect that this post is incoherent to a lot of readers. And I don't mean that to sound condescending. I mean that, hell, I very likely would not have stopped reading a book that got off to the kind of start Steve describes, even if I think I do know what he means by "book of beginnings" (in some respects, I think Paul Auster is like this). But I'm not quite as confident about what kind of writing I need. I could say I have different needs at different times, and to some extent that's true. But it's becoming less and less true the more I read. I'm less and less interested in being up to date, or in reading a little of everything, and more interested in fulfilling some ill-defined literary desire I have. A desire I'm trying to define. I lack the discipline, in an odd way. I still feel compelled to finish a book, if it's at least passingly entertaining, even if it doesn't really address a deeper need, and even as I increasingly resent being pulled along by plot.

Mitchelmore on Genre

I left my last post a little incomplete. This is partly because, in the middle of writing it, I clicked over to This Space and saw that Steve has two new posts up about the problem of genre, making me realize I had more I wanted to say and the post had already become somewhat overlong. Steve blogs often about the ossification of the novel--how it's become a genre itself. When it first emerged, per Josipovici, "it became hugely popular [for its pretense to tell the truth], taking over as the dominant literary form. And no wonder. Here was an infinitely flexible vessel in which one could pour experience of the world." By now, though, the huge percentage of writers (talented writers) merely "fill the form", which is apparently ok by readers:

For many, the familiar comforts of genre give more pleasure than the truth at whatever cost, and they object to being labelled philistine or as lacking judgement. This occurred in Josipovici's lecture when he expressed astonishment at the ecstatic reception given to Irène Némirovsky Suite Française. At least three attendees thought it unfair to scorn a novel recovered from a literal holocaust. But Josipovici never said she was a lesser writer than the modernists to which she was compared, only that Némirovsky, like 99% of contemporary authors, were and are simply unaware of the inappropriateness of what they were and are doing. The air of authority they adopt - that given to them by the form - betrays the freedom given by the breakdown of genre.

More here and here. I'll return to this later.

(By the way, in reference to my "Satisfying" post below, Steve clarified something from his post on the Gabriel Josipovici talk. It was not Josipovici, but rather a member of the audience, who suggested John Updike as a writer aware of the kinds of problems Josipovici was talking about.)

Genre

Last week, Ed Champion posted a "field report" from Richard Grayson, who attended the NBCC panel discussion, The Mandarin at the Minimart: What We Talk about When We Talk about Mass Market Fiction. In the discussion it appears (as conveyed by Grayson) that the panel-members are talking past each other, that no one seems to share any definitions or expectations. In many respects, it is reduced to publishing and reviewing decisions (admittedly, the basic topic of the panel is the question of why "genre" or "popular" books are treated differently than "literary" books by reviewers and review pages). Book A is marketed as Science Fiction or Mystery, so it gets ignored, or shunted off to a genre review page. Book B is marketed as "literary fiction", etc. Panel-member Walter Mosley says that the "smartest writers wrote science fiction". Another, Louise Ermilino of Publishers Weekly, says that "good writing is good writing" no matter where it appears, and later asserts that "a hundred years from now, people are more likely going to be reading Stephen King than Philip Roth". Everyone seems to agree that it's all about story, and good stories can be found anywhere.

Ok, I have no desire to rehash the entire thing, but some points interest me, particularly in the context of my last couple of posts. First of all, I agree that "good writing is good writing". I see no reason why a nominally "genre" book could not be great art or great literature. The key word, though, is "nominally". If they are great literature, they cease to be "genre". In case it's not clear, I think the same is true of most so-called "literary fiction".

One thing said in the panel, which I've seen said elsewhere, is that "literary" writers "borrow" from genre, and get treated with more respect:

Cormac McCarthy wrote a genre novel [presumably The Road, which I gather is set in a post-apocalypse, like many dystopian SF novels; but what about Blood Meridian? Is not "western" a genre?] [...] Philip Roth can do alternate history in The Plot Against America and literary reviewers who don’t know that genre actually give Roth credit for inventing that kind of book, as if he were the first one to do it...

I think these kinds of comments are revealing. While it's probably true that many reviewers did give Philip Roth all kinds of credit for "inventing" alternate history (and more generally true that literary writers get more respect than genre writers when they "borrow"), this is because most reviewers don't know what they're talking about. The best parts of The Plot Against America (which, incidentally, I thought was wildly overpraised) were those that were the most typically Rothian. Roth, it seemed clear to me, chose his setting as an interesting way to explore certain ongoing fictional concerns of his. Whenever he had to move the plot of the alternate history along, it became less interesting and often felt rushed. As a result, this aspect of the book was unquestionably "unsatisfying". But I doubt he cared whether it was conventionally satisfying. No doubt several SF writers would have handled it better, made the facts of the alternate world more convincing, but it would have been quite beside the point; they wouldn't have been Philip Roth. Same with Cormac McCarthy. It's pointless to say that he "wrote a genre novel".

Then there's Ermilino's comment, quoted above, that "a hundred years from now, people are more likely going to be reading Stephen King than Philip Roth". No, they're not. Stephen King is popular entertainment. Philip Roth is a great writer. I see this kind of thing said all the time. This inability, or refusal, to tell the difference is depressing. But, then, what does she mean by "people"? "People" don't read Roth now, if we mean people in the huge kinds of numbers who read Stephen King. A hundred years from now, the people that read Roth will be the same kinds of people who read Henry James now, broadly speaking. Some other popular writer will be in King's place. I don't see why it should be offensive to say this. King gets routinely compared to Dickens and to Shakespeare--not their abilities as writers, of course, but their apparent popularity, as if this is any kind of useful indicator. People read Dickens and Shakespeare now, don't they?, these people observe, ergo they will be reading King a hundred years hence. And if you don't think so you must be a snob, looking down on other people's "tastes".

More later.