NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

In his recent piece on David Foster Wallace in the New York Review of Books, Wyatt Mason sets up Ford Madox Ford’s:

I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it…. When one discusses an affair—a long, sad affair—one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.

…spikes it with Theodore Dreiser’s "

"…this falls into the category of ‘good explanations of a bad method.’

[Doesn't Ford know...]

…that a story, once begun…should go forward in a more or less direct line, or at least that it should retain one’s uninterrupted interest. This is not the case in this book. The interlacings, the cross references, the re-re-references to all sorts of things which subsequently are told somewhere in full, irritate one to the point of one’s laying down the book."

…then saves and digs this out with David Foster Wallace’s

Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.

Pointing to Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” in The Idiot, Wallace asks:

Can you imagine, continues Mason, any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can’t is the reason he wouldn’t: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse—one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile…. People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this…who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that?

And returns it with:

More than any writer in his generation, Wallace dedicated his fiction to the asking of that question and to answering it at the aesthetic distance that modernism had imposed. That dedication may be seen in the boldness of Wallace’s answers, the dozens of daring formal solutions that sought new and—for those with the patience to take them on their terms; those for whom being “aesthetically distanced” by form wasn’t inevitably a “bad method”—revelatory ways of reframing the question with which fiction is always preoccupied: how to be in the world.

In both of Wallace’s late story collections, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion, one sees their author develop, deploy, and discard one new form after another, each of them, to my mind, as ingenious as it is human, each achieving the kind of seriousness that Wallace was reaching for and that fiction occasionally attains…

All Wallace’s formal ingenuity would have been for naught if he hadn’t been intent on using these forms to probe at the most injured parts of being. If his work does impose an aesthetic distance, it never sought to do less than bring particular persons as close as possible."

Two questions of interest here which require pondering. The fact that Marcus assigns so much importance to authorial intent. and: Does Wallace succeed in producing passionately moral, ingenious human fiction?

Why is it that Ippolit’s speech, if written today, would not be taken seriously?  Is Dostoevsky given a free pass to our connecting and being affected by his work – simply because he wrote prior to the appearance of this age’s ‘aesthetically distanced’ reader? Has an un-returnable genie escaped the bottle? Are we somehow now less capable or willing to suspend disbelief?  The struggle of current writers to ‘connect’ in face of today’s cynical knowingness is a worthy, historied one. The question, remains: how is it that today’s readers, new to The Idiot, can, nonetheless, get so much from it. Is there a double standard at play?

While reviewing and studying are different, they are not mutually exclusive. There is, contrary to what Andre suggests here: 

"If, under the supposed tyranny of academic criticism, the literary object disappeared under a mountain of methodology, nowadays it vanishes beneath the ego of the reviewer or the reviewer’s desire to create talking points. It vanishes beneath the tyranny of someone else’s pleasure"

no zero sum game. And certainly there should be no hierarchy. One activity is as important – is Hazlitt any less ‘important’ than Barthes – as the other.

I know, it’s a crow.

Recent whirligigging over at The Guardian and at Salon.com about blurbs and hyperbolic praise reminds me again of how antithetical capitalism is to honest criticism; also of how raised expectations necessarily lead to disappointment, to ebay bidder letdown. It  magnifies too, the truth that most of what is written, regardless of when it may have been written, is crap. Or as Randall Jarrell once put it, much more eloquently: "Whether we live in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth l, there is one law we can be sure of: there are only a few good poets alive. And there follows another law about critics: if a man likes a great many contemporary poets, he is, necessarily, a bad critic."

Much as Jarrell wanted to praise, much as he hated criticizing the ordinary, – feeling, in so doing, like a devilish ’spirit who denies’ -  he nonetheless held that disliking what is bad is only the opposite face of liking what is good, " and the good in poetry, is always a white blackbird, an abnormal and unlikely excellence "

The latest issue of the newly re-designed CNQ magazine contains a good piece by Ryan Bigge in which, when he isn’t carpet bombing the 2009 Giller Prize shortlist,  he presents two interesting ideas: one, borrowing from Zadie Smith, that authors mistakenly trust professional editors, and are better off recruiting the heads of ’smart strangers,’ to help improve their work, and two: that the Giller Prize would do better – as with the Turner Prize – to honor "artists on the cusp between what the art world would call "late emergent" and early mid-career", instead of putting Vincent Lam and Linden MacIntyre on the same shelf as Alice Munro and Mordecai Richler.

Here’s some of the pepper that goes with this steak:

"each non-story fizzled as fast as a room temperature bottle of Baby Duck."

"The Bishop’s Man contains 300 decent pages of novel stretched across 400."

"Ellipses…should be used…sparingly. Lest they lose…their…effectiveness."

"Neither her smart stranger, nor her editor, can effectively distinguish between black and purple ink."

"MacAdam writes as though there’s a lit firecracker taped to each finger"

Image from here.  designer: e. mcknight kauffer

Good to see The Top Ten Book Blog back in action. Here’s their Top Ten Books of the 20^th Century

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955).

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” So begins the Russian master’s infamous novel about Humbert Humbert,

2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925).

Self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby, determined to win back the heart of the girl he loved and lost, emerges as an emblem for romantic yearning

3. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27).

Proust asks some of the same questions Einstein did about our notions of time and memory…time is the highway and memory the­ driver.

4. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922).

…bawdy mock-epic suggests the improbability, perhaps even the pointlessness, of heroism in the modern­ age.

5. Dubliners by James Joyce (1916).

…stories evoke themes of death, illness, and stasis, nearly all offer their characters redemption  —­ or at least momentary self-knowledge —­ through what Joyce called “epiphanies,” in which defeat or disappointment is transformed by a sudden, usually life-altering flash of awareness. 

6. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967).

…part fantasy, part social history of Colombia  seems to move backward and forward simultaneously, the forgotten and offhandedly magical village of Macondo  ­ loses its Edenic innocence as it is increasingly exposed to civilization.

7. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929).

…circles the travails of the Compson family from four different narrative perspectives. All are haunted by the figure of Caddy, the only daughter, whom Faulkner described as “a beautiful and tragic little girl.”: “theres a curse on us its not our fault is it our fault.”

8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927).

…describes the loss, love, and disagreements of family life while reaching toward the bigger question  — “What is the meaning of life?”

9. The Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1925–64).

O’Connor’s stories, with their unswerving eye for vanity and their profound sense of the sacred, feel immense.

10. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936)…racism, incest, war, fratricide, pride, and jealousy. Through the use of multiple narrators, Faulkner turns this gripping Yoknapatawpha saga into a profound and dazzling meditation on truth, memory, history, and literature itself.

Read more here. Top Ten Books of the Eighteenth Century here. Top Mysteries here.

And here I thought Marshall McLuhan had the ‘market cornered’ on brilliant, obtuse, maddeningly self-contradictory Canadian prose.

Northrop Frye’s conclusion to Literary History of Canada  (U of T Press, 1965) is every bit of this. "The book", he writes, at its end, "is a tribute to the maturity of Canadian literary scholarship and criticism, whatever one thinks of the literature. Its authors have completely outgrown the view that evaluation is the end of criticism, instead of its incidental by-product."

At the paragraph’s bottom however, he says " There is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference. Thus the metaphor of the critic as judge holds for the Canadian critic, who is never dealing with the kind of writer who judges him."

In one breath the authors have completely outgrown an evaluative approach, in the next they are all judges.

Evaluation is no "incidental by-product" of criticism. Rather it is intrinsic to the act of reading. No, it’s not an ‘end’ in itself": our primary objective I’d say is to get as much as we can from the texts we read: more insight and pleasure, education and entertainment, knowledge and engagement; exposure to new ideas, structures, novelty, the unknown or the unexplored. How do we know when we have this? Through comparison. By reading the ‘best.’ The ‘classics’, or as Frye himself puts it  in concluding his conclusion:

How then do we identify the ‘classics’ or the ‘best contemporaries’ if not through evaluation? Evaluation is not something to be outgrown. It is part of criticism’s DNA. Fully formed and essential. And contrary to what Frye says about the maturity of this book’s authors, their contributions to it contain a veritable bounty of evaluation. The writing in Literary History of Canada  is ‘mature’ precisely because it is so evaluative. I highly recommend you read it.

"Good criticism is not about “argument”, if “argument” is understood as contradiction. To say “this is not good” without giving the grounds for that evaluation is not “argument”. It’s the assertion of an opinion. when Starnino gave his opinion on Christian Bok, he distorted what the Oulipo is. as far as I’m concerned, he simply lied in order to put a negative spin on oulipean thought. he gave FALSE grounds for his opinion. when Solway dismissed a poem by Al Purdy, he presented himself as unable to understand elements in Purdy’s poem. he did this in order to suggest the poem under consideration was unworthy, but Solway is capable of great subtlety when he deals with what he likes."

with this from Carmine Starnino toward the end of his introduction to A Lover’s Quarrel, a collection of essays and reviews:

"Anger can itself be affirmative – ‘Passions face both ways’ writes William Logan – and being ‘anti’ can be an act of recovery, an effort to recapture and reanimate aspects of the tradition that have been forgotten. True, the act of repudiation plays itself out so routinely in these pieces that a reader may think I see reviewing as an easy opportunity for fisticuffs. I agree that contrariansism can be profoundly habit-forming, but in my case I simply don’t believe that unanimity, and the complacency it can breed, is always a desirable state. I’m interested, instead, in the energy that comes from argument and disputation. I believe that the most important of the critical community’s tasks is to frustrate the uncontested stattus of certain ideas which is why sympathy is something I’ve always pursued reluctantly: reviewing that seeks out those prinicples that best flatter a work of poetry forgoes its conscience and becomes a rather creepy form of collusion. I’ve always taken to heart the maxim inscribed on the wall of Montaigne’s library: ‘To any reason an equal reason can be opposed.’

What is to be wished for? As I see it,  something quite simple: passionate, intelligent, heated, civil, good-willed, good-humoured, rational exchange, with no fighting, no biting, no fibbing, no name-calling and a tiny – if only for a step or two -  bit of moccasin swapping.

As is often the case, I regret not being able to spend more time on this – unfortunate as it may be, I must work elsewhere in order to keep myself swaddled in the lifestyle luxuries I’ve become accustomed to wearing – still:

Save for the fact that his arguments are so flabby, ill-considered and peevish, André Alexis’s recent lamentation in Walrus Magazine about the poor state of Canadian literary reviewing could have yielded a pleasing irony. As it stands the piece is just laughable, exemplifying exactly the kind of ‘woeful incompetence’ and ‘unfounded’ pugnacity he sees in others.

For example:

“ ‘Consideration’, for me, [Alexis tells us] isn’t so much a matter of determining the ultimate value of a work, but rather of allowing a community to participate in the evaluation of the work.”

What is evaluation, if not the valuing of a work? And how does one ‘allow’ a ‘community’ to participate in this activity? What are communities if not groupings of individuals who, while sharing certain values (a love of literature for example), possess differing opinions about how best to incorporate them into their daily lives.

James Wood is [Alexis tells us] a limited critic, with an inability to appreciate Paul Auster or Thomas Pynchon. “ His assumption is that his judgment, a decision on whether or not such-and-such a work is “good,” is the most important aspect of criticism has led to lively enough talk, but he has not found an original perspective.”

What is so bracing and impressive about Wood’s criticism is exactly what Alexis condemns it for: He’s opinionated. He breathes new air into old texts. He tells us what he thinks is good and bad, often with a style and insight superior to that found in the works he evaluates. As for his ‘inability to appreciate,’ isn’t this just a condescending way for Alexis to say: my opinion is different…better…more sympathetic, ‘communal’…boring? Far from ‘inability’, what Wood gives us is his ‘considered’ estimate of what constitutes value, and detailed criticism of what does not. He furnishes us with a yardstick against which all works may be measured.  Note too [as Alexis does contradictorily at the end of his sloppy piece] Wood’s efforts to understand David Foster Wallace. He takes the work of those he hasn’t ‘appreciated,’ very seriously…

Northrop Frye, [Alexis tells us] was one of the catalysts for a kind of ‘populist critical rebellion’ (say what?). Frye’s work was ‘academic, specialized, and structuralist.’’

Actually, Frye, according to one who knows and studies him as well as anyone ever has, was, when it came to writing book reviews, an evaluative critic (listen here to my conversation with David Staines),

Reviews [Alexis tells us] have turned into a species of autobiography, with the book under review being a pretext for personal revelation. He blames novelist and critic John Metcalf for the current state of critical affairs, and  calls out “critics” [his quotation marks] like David Solway, Philip Marchand, and Carmine Starnino; they who apparently offer little defence of their opinions, ‘believing that none is required.’

"And so, we have come to the point where the mere fact of an opinion is more important than the basis for it."

Great criticism contains the greatest arguments, which by their nature require ample ‘consideration.’  Anyone who has read the names named above knows that, in the words of James Pollock responding to this post, they more often than not exhibit: “Well-chosen evidence, sound reasoning, insights with explanatory power, coherence, clarity, effective rhetoric, good style, passionate feeling, intellectual integrity, knowledge, experience, a fine balance of sympathy and skepticism, and so on. The same things that have made for persuasive humanistic arguments at least since the Sophists and Socrates and Plato.”

 The same things that are decidedly absent from Alexis’s hodge-podged conclusion:

“We have gone so far away from the idea of criticism, from the elaboration of a communal consideration of the books we read, that it really doesn’t matter who comments on our novels or poems or plays. One opinion is as valuable as any other, because the work is a pretext for talk about one’s opinions, or for the generation of high emotion.”

Here are some of the words used by people who called in to CBC Radio’s Cross Country Check Up program last weekend to recommend their favourite books:

"Sympathetic, simple, sticks in the mind, resonated with me, honest/funny, evocative, an honest report, closely observed, ambitious, offers a different perspective/world view"

 Terry Eagleton in the New Statesman on Christopher Hitchens (via readysteadybook):

I just turned down the offer of a public debate with him in the States. I’ve said what I want to say, and we wouldn’t have got anywhere – it would only have been a sort of bloodsport.

Even then, Christopher was mesmerised by the idea of America. He always wanted a bigger scene.

What was definitive for him, politically, was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989. I think that was the turning point. The deep Islamophobic impulse he has stems from that. But he’s still an idiosyncratic mixture of various political attitudes that don’t always go together.

And I wouldn’t for a moment underestimate his formidable eloquence and intellectual resources. I think he is a superb writer. But I think that the radical was always at war with the public school boy who wanted to succeed.