Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts, and Audio Interviews from The Biblio File radio program pertaining to same by a writer, broadcaster, bibliophile.
Zadie Smith has just come out with a new collection of ‘occasional’ essays entitled Changing My Mind. (Penguin, 2009). The first, ‘Their Eyes were Watching God: What does soulful mean?’ changed my mind about her.Very much for the better. Not so much because it represents an admission, but because first it’s an extremely well written, focused, powerfully felt piece of writing; and second, it proves she’s not as rabidly, or irrationally, anti-realist as I once supposed.
Here are some of the highlights:
"I had my own ideas of "good writing." It was a category that didn’t include aphoristic or overtly "lyrical" language, mythic imagery, accurately renedered "folk speech" or the love tribulations of women."
I lost many literary battles the day I read Their Eyes were Watching God….had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power…
"She saw a dust-nearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom"
I had to admit that mythic language is startling when it is good…my resistence to dialogue (encouraged by Nabokov, whom I idolized) struggled and then tumbled beofre Hurston’s ear for black colloquial speech.
Her conversations reveal individual personalities, accurately, swiftly, as if they had no author at all…
Above all I had to let go of my objection to the love tribulations of women…the choice one makes between partners, between one man and another…is in the end a choice between values, possibilities, futures, arguments…languages and lives.
Their Eyes were Watching God…is about the discovery of self in and through another. It suggests that even the dark and terrible banality of racism can recede to a vanishing point when you understand, and are understood by, another human being. Goddammit if it doesn’t claim that love sets your free.
At fourteen, I did Zora Neale Hurston a critical disservice. I feared my "extraliterary" feelings for her. I wanted to be an objective aesthete and not a senitmental fool. I disliked the idea of "identifying: with the fiction I read: I wanted to like Hurston because she reporesented "good writing" not because she represented me.
Zora Neale Hurston – capable of expressing human vulnerability as well as its strength, lyrical without sentimental, romantic and yet rigorous and one of the few truly eloquent writers of sex – is as exceptional among black women writers as Tolstoy is among white male writers.
Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count. These forms of criticism that make black women the privileged readers of a black woman writer go against Hurston’s own grain."
At fourteen I couldn’t find words (or words I liked) for the marvelous feeling of recognition that came with these characters who had my hari, my eyes, my skin, even the ancestors of the rhythm of my speech.
…after I read this novel…the word soulful took on new weight…The culturally black meaning adds several more shades of color. First shade: soulfulness is sorrowful feeling transformed into something beautiful, creative and self-renewing…Another shade…to follow and fall in line with a feeling…Hurston…makes "culture" that slow and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance – seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise…
…when I’m reading this book, I believe it with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn’t normally. Things like : She is my sister and I love her."
My own view of statements about the “best” or “worst ever” is that they are interrogative challenges. The claims come with understood questions attached at the end:
Lolita is the greatest English-language novel written since 1880, [isn’t it? What else is, then?]”
"I think that if an audience for any art is having a good time, they are willing to suspend the need for comprehension for a while—that’s part of the pleasure. So if the poem by Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore sounds great, is amusing or engaging or spooky in a way that we like… then like the devotee of opera or rap music or rock music, we are happy to understand only gradually, over many listenings. And if it doesn’t sound good, it is boring even if we understand it. That’s the trouble with a lot of boring art: you understand the stupid cop show, or the tedious sitcom gag, too soon and too completely. Same for the stupid middlebrow poem."
Then follows up with this:
When I’m assigned to review a book, I want nothing more than to have that rare magical experience one has when reading great literature. Major understatement: It doesn’t often happen. A reasonable second place is a book with enough interesting things and evidence of serious engagement on the part of the author to make it worth the time to read. This happens fairly often. Sometimes, not that often, one encounters very little evidence of honest effort on the part of the writer (and, by extension their editors and publishers) and, moreover, next to nothing redeeming in the book. In short, you get the kind [of] "stupid" art that Pinsky’s talking about.
I couldn’t agree more. Greatness is indeed a scarce commodity, mediocrity is not; reviewers, commentators readers need to nullify feelings of guilt about not liking most writing that comes to them published and polished up in fancy looking packages, or about hurting feelings, or coming across as a negativity monger…consider the published output of some of our greatest writers and poets…consider how much of it was mediocre…perhap this message should affix itself to all negative reviews. Perhaps it would mitigate some of the hurt…and hostility.
"The senses and the imagination furnish rhythms for the poet. The rhythms of the poet translate themselves back, in the mind of the reader, into the senses and the imagination. What is it about the critic that cannot rest content with this silent transaction? Most of the time the critic is just another reader, and can put a book down, whether with appreciation or with irritation, without any wish to write something about that book. Yet certain books will not let the critic look away; they demand a fuller response, and they will not let go until another set of words, this time in the critics own prose, renders again the given of the book. Something in the book – or in a single poem – is [to use Wallace Steven's phrase] " a hatching that stared and demanded an answering look."
I’ve been fulminating in this space over the past little while about the lack of a Canadian Canon. Canadian criticism has for the most part run in the opposite direction of its evaluative responsibilities. Present though on this leveled playing field are at least two lists which lend some topography, some perspective, some/any measures of greatness. The Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and more recently the Giller, regardless of their faults, do serve a valuable purpose, especially in a land where judgment is so foreign. Telling, I suppose, that until recently, the task of identifying what has value, what is worthy of praise (at least according to the jury du jour), has been performed primarily by government. Now, the choices may all be ‘wrong,’ and largely unjustified, but at least they are out there, waiting for the brave to berate or congratulate them; to take them on, to defend or attack them at length. To get the ball rolling.
"Giller Prize juries make the best they can of an impossible task, anointing one book as best of the year. It’s ridiculous in a way, but it’s also useful. Like the university canon of Canadian literature, the Giller Prize choices give us a starting point to talk about Canadian books. In a world where we’re flooded with novels, we need a list of books to argue over and compare. We need a shared conversation about Canadian literature. For helping to stimulate that conversation, the Giller Prize deserves thanks."
More ink, or whatever – computer screen characters? -, on The Millions’ Millennium list over at Contra James Wood, where the anti-capitalist harangue continues, (legitimately in this instance), blaming the tight scope of titles selected upon limits imposed by corporate American publishing. The Canadian Giller Prize has long been subjected to the same criticism. Basically, a marketing tool for the big houses. Perhaps it might be worthwhile to engage in another list exercise, this time excluding the big publishers, reading and embracing only the independents? In fact, this might be easily achieved on paper with the existing statistics.
Over at The Millions, regular contributors and 48 favoured writers, editors and critics were asked “What are the best books of fiction of the millennium, so far?” Here are the results:
I’m not averse to this kind of exercise, not to the extent Steve Crowe is at least. Lists are great, so long as they are rooted in decent argument. Criticism involves just this; great works are those which are able to stand up over time to attacks and scrutiny, I see The Millions’ effort as simply an early start on the canonization process. What’s predictable, and a bit depressing from the standpoint of the authors, is that, if we grant that ‘greatness’ appears perhaps once a decade or so, then in 50 or 100 years only one or two of these twenty titles will be remembered let alone read or revered.
Forty some years ago, George Woodcock criticized the latest book on Canadian literary history for containing commentary, but little or no real literary criticism. His comments are echoed by W.J. Keith in a University of Toronto Quarterly review of W.H. New’s A History of Canadian Literature. Second Edition. (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2004) here:
"New’s general approach favours facts, social and political issues, and artistic trends. Subheadings in the new chapter include (if I may be allowed a list myself) ‘Demography, politics, technology’; ‘Changing perceptions’; ‘Continuities’; ‘Rethinking society’; ‘Literature and aboriginality’; ‘From laughter to violence’; ‘Recuperative paradigms of identity’; ‘Ethnicity and sexuality’; ‘Living in print and performance’; ‘Reconstructing history’; and ‘The play of storytelling.’ The sociological thumb, one might say, is heavy on the scale. There is little room in such a scheme for detailed consideration of stylistic issues, let alone illustration of verbal dexterity.
In short, this book offers a possibly useful (though by no means objective) account of the backgrounds out of which Canadian literature emerged, but readers interested in literature as art, who wish to be informed about its most distinguished practitioners, are likely to be disappointed. At best, they will gain some information about what individuals wrote but little or nothing about how they wrote. Literature as academic study is covered in scholarly fashion; literature as enjoyment, as intellectual stimulation, as a dance of words, is sadly absent."
Canada and its literature needs a Harold Bloom to write a book called The Canadian Canon.
George Woodcock in 1955: (from ‘Views of Canadian Criticism’ , Dalhousie Review, 1955, in Odysseus Ever Returning, M&S, 1970):
"Of criticism which, in the full sense, seeks to evaluate Canadian writing in a creative manner and to relate it, not only to Canadian experience, but also to a universal criterion, there is almost none. Reviewers exist in plenty, making ad hoc judgments of individual Canadian books – judgments which are rarely more than superficial. And there is also a team of industrious expositors who have produced books on Canadian writing which are informative, after the manner of literary histories, but which slide into easy generalization as soon as they turn towards critical judgment. These studies provide some of the factual raw material with which the genuine critic can work, but they lack both the analytic approach and the philosophically creative insight which make criticism something more active than mere commentary."
George Woodcock in 1966 (from ‘Views of Canadian Criticism’ , Introduction to a Choice of Critics, ed. George Woodcock, 1966, in Odysseus Ever Returning, M&S, 1970):
"…when I search for purely analytical or purely aesthetic Canadian critics, I find it impossible to offer a single name of any significance."
Forty plus years on: Can anybody name one critic who has provided us with a comprehensive evaluative judgment of Canadian literature? Who has identified and ranked, based on a ‘universal’ aesthetic criterion, those works considered to be the best?
The only one I can think of who comes close is….George Woodcock.
"I wanted to thank you for your many generous and intelligent words about my new book (and other stuff)...I get great pleasure from reading your blog."
Critic, James Wood, The New Yorker.
"You can find very bad writing and sloppy impressionism in literary blogs, but also incisive, fresh, thoughtful criticism from voices unencumbered by the politics of Grub St". I would put your blog in the latter category, which is why I’m responding here…Congratulations on a very fine blog."
Scholar, Dr. Ronan McDonald.
"You ask the most brilliant, thoughtful questions, it's really a pleasure to do an interview where someone actually wants to talk about writing and literature in general."
Novelist Margot Livesey.
""The happy result of all this (the Salon des Refuses experience) from my own perspective was my discovery of the wonderful "Note Bene," which I added to my "favourites" early in the summer and which I have read --- and listened to --- with great pleasure ever since."
Novelist Jane Urquhart.
"I spent a bit of time last night perusing, as I often do, Nigel Beale's Nota Bene. My suggestion is that you do the same. It is truly a remarkable site."
