Context
Reviewing the Reviewers
Anne Burke
Given responses to my previous "Reviewing the Reviewers" (CONTEXT Issue #1), I can report that lots of people out there love the New York Times Book Review and think it’s the smartest thing going; lots of others would like me to be positive and show what good reviews should be like, as though I am responsible for what reviewers write and should provide models of critical excellence to them. All that I can say is that what I am trying to do here is review the reviewers, to hold them accountable for what they say and how they say it, and to identify what appear to be, to use the term very loosely, their aesthetic principles.
So, on with it: the April 9, 2000 issue of the New York Times Book Review and its review of Dennis Cooper’s new novel Period. Ghettoized in the "Books in Brief" section, the review spends most of its time characterizing Cooper’s penchant for the bizarre, but then we get to the last line of the review: "As they brutalize and absorb brutality, Cooper’s people communicate nothing so much as boredom and exhaustion." What does this unexplained statement, which I do not take to be a compliment, mean? To whom do they communicate the boredom and exhaustion—the reader? each other? Could not the same be said for Beckett’s characters in Godot? Since the Times allows this statement to go unexplained, I will have to guess that the reviewer does not approve. Communicating boredom and exhaustion are bad things in fiction.
* *
In contrast to this usual NYTBR response to fiction that doesn’t inspire and uplift, there is the Washington Post’s gnawingly, and equally unanalytical, review of House of Leaves (also April 9, 2000), which reads like an extended blurb. Its opening lines are: "Any fear or hope that the experimental novel was an aberration of the twentieth century is dashed by the appearance of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the first major experimental novel of the new millennium. And it’s a monster." (Does not this last line sound like a promo for a wrestling match?) The next line, that begins by mentioning e. e. cummings, ends with: " . . . this is not your typical first novel. It’s more like David Foster Wallace channeling H. P. Lovecraft for a literary counterpart to ‘The Blair Witch Project.’" The review ends with (believe me, I am not making thus up) "Right on," minus the exclamation point. This is book reviewing reduced to mindless promotion, and does more disservice to serious books than the Times’s persistent dismissiveness. The "aesthetic" principle at work here is that a good novel cannot be talked about as a thing in and of itself but is valuable only to the degree that it reminds one of other things, preferably much more popular things. And my view of the novel? It’s more like Thomas Pynchon surfing Edgar Allen Poe for a literary counterpart to "Sabrina the Teenage Witch." Or rather, it’s more like Lewis Carroll bar-hopping with Jack Kerouac in search of Jack the Ripper. Actually, it’s more like . . . .
But I have suggested that such reviews are sinister. Why are they? Embedded in them is a capitulation to the idea that the artistically difficult must be translated for readers into something familiar and simple, as though you can con someone addicted to mediocrity into reading (and enjoying) a complex novel by associating that novel with what one assumes to be the tastes of Americans (not the reviewer’s tastes, to be sure). Or perhaps the point is to con the reader of the review into buying the book unawares and thus add some bottom-line money to the publisher who will in turn be conned into publishing more books like this one. At the heart of such thinking is that Americans are stupid but the system can be manipulated by appealing to that very stupidity instead of—the way that a William Gass might—admit that the audience is small (so what? thus it ever was) but that audience should be dazzled by the intelligence and style of the reviewer who, rather than trying to pretend that the novel before him is simpler than it is, glories in its difficulties and unabashedly shows how such difficulties are the basis of aesthetic pleasure. Also at the heart of such thinking—which is where liberals and conservatives join hands with each other—is a belief that there were "better times," that people used to be more intelligent but now have irreversibly been contaminated by (pick your theme) greed, power, corporate values, entertainment, the internet or—everyone’s favorite—television. The problem that both liberals and conservatives have in this argument is history, which both readily dismiss. What percentage of the American population read Shakespeare in the 1850s? Why did Moby-Dick sell only a few hundred copies in the 1850s (and then disappear into a warehouse that then burnt down)? For that matter, what percentage of the American population in the 1850s, as compared to today, could even read, never mind what it read? And we couldn’t blame television. Oh, what the hell, let’s blame television anyway. It was television that made Melville unpopular.
The liberals and conservatives, however, part ways when figuring out how to manipulate the popular myth that there were "better, simpler times." The conservatives insist upon restoring those times via a plethora of causes—eliminate the teaching of evolution in the public schools, restore prayer, honor the flag, let people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, etc. The liberals, looking at he same myth, jump on the bandwagon and, while invoking similar uses, cynically wind up appealing to the same mentality but do so by dumbing things down and invoking populist slogans—art for everyone! basket weaving and Bach unite! social change through rap music! Danielewski is kind of like "The Blair Witch Project"! We’re all one big happy family!
When you find both liberals and conservatives longing for the 1950s, look out! Let’s not waste any print describing a country awash in racism and poverty, well-hid from the view of the middle class, and certainly let’s not remember that such literary luminaries as Joyce, Proust, and Melville were no more read then than now. The conservatives would deplore Danielewski because it represents everything that’s wrong with art as they understand it—elitist, heady, and, finally, subversive; and the liberals would deplore it for the same reasons, except for this odd cynical play on the same theme that one finds in such publications as Nation magazine or in this Washington Post review.
From either perspective what is always being forgotten—something William Carlos Williams never tired of ranting about—is art, that singular endeavor ignored or hated by almost everyone. When in its presence, the conservatives attack and the liberals try to explain it away: "It’s not as arty as it seems!"
*
Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post Book World strikes again. The Post has started a "Book Club," to consist of reviewers/critics orchestrating on-line discussions of various books. Yardley, apparently the first orchestra leader, chose Peter Taylor’s The Old Forest and Other Stories. To start the discussion, Yardley presents four discussion areas, and I’ll cite only one of these to give you a dose of what’s in store: "Taylor can fairly be called a writer of manners, because manners—’social conduct or rules of conduct as shown in the prevalent customs’ of a society, to quote Webster—of his Tennesseans are the framework within which his stories are constructed. How would you describe the manners of this particular society? What do you think is Taylor’s attitude toward those manners? Do the manners of Memphis and Nashville as Taylor depicts them have anything to say to people living, say, in and about Washington, D.C., in 1999?" [Oh, my God! I just had a terrifying flashback to being in Sister Mary Angelica’s freshman English class at Trinity High School for Girls, circa 1961!]
I would like to suggest a list of other questions that Yardley should ask: Do you like the name Taylor? Do you think that one of his ancestors mended men’s pants for a living? Do you like men’s pants? Do you think Taylor likes men’s pants? How do you know? Do you think that men’s pants have anything to say to us in 2000? If so, why? If not, why? Do you think that women should be allowed to wear men’s pants? Do you think that Sister Mary Angelica ever wore men’s pants? Why do you think this? Is there anything that we can learn from men’s pants that might be useful to us today in our everyday lives? Have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease? Did this disease in any way relate to men’s pants? Do you ever dream about Peter Taylor in men’s pants? Do you discuss these dreams with your therapist? Do you have any good recipes for apple pie?
The
principle at work here is that the average reader is dumb and that the
only way to engage him is to ask the kinds of questions posed to high
school students by desperate teachers in the hope that, if they can’t
deal with the texts themselves, then maybe they can be hooked by
something that the text reminds them of, namely, something that they
are really interested in.
* *
Michael Berube had a longish piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May
19, 2000), entitled "Teaching Postmodern Fiction without Being Sure
That the Genre Exists." Now, the difficulty with Berube is that one
never knows whether he is being ironic, or post-ironic, or
post-post-ironic. Nor does one know whether his only motive is to stir
controversy. I think he is winking throughout the piece and is assuming
(quite correctly) that no one at the Chronicle is smart enough to figure out what he is up to.
After having taught for years what he thought was postmodernism, Berube is now discovering that the term is nearly useless, that it excludes writers that shouldn’t be excluded, and that whatever can be attributed to the postmodern novel can also be attributed to such works as Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote.
I agree with Berube as far as he goes, but I don’t think he goes quite far enough. Let us return now to an earlier time: the modernist novel and its definitions. What is a modernist novel (I should warn you, I will not attempt an answer here)? It could be, now removed by fifty or more years from the period, everything written between, let’s say, 1915 and 1945. The term designates a time period, not an aesthetic movement, according to such a definition. But the definition of modernism was, at least once upon a time, vigorously debated; some may remember Irving Howe’s attempt at the definition, resulting in one that would include almost everything ever written. In any event, now that the dust has settled, I think that the workaday sense of the term "modernist" includes, or depends upon, such writers as Hemingway, Stein, Williams, Pound, Eliot, Fitzgerald, a very mixed bag of people to be sure. At one extreme (let’s choose Stein and Pound), one shouldn’t have too hard a time seeing that there is certainly something different about these two when compared to William Dean Howells and Edward Arlington Robinson. There is also something different about Hemingway and Fitzgerald when compared to predecessors, though not quite so obvious. Still, they all rather comfortably fit under the rubric of modernist, as useless as the term may still be. The point is that something different showed up during this period that even the man on the street could agree looked different. I suspect too that the man on the street could also look at a Hemingway novel and the later work of Joyce, and decide that something was different between the two of them.
So, how did we then get "postmodernist," after having made such a shambles of the term "modernist"? Well, I first came upon it in the early 1970s or so, and it was a term to designate "something different from" Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Faulkner. Completely different? Not if one knew how to read. But if you hold up John Hawkes’s early novels, which started to appear at the end of the 1940s, and put them next to the just-mentioned modernist writers, they were certainly different, though not so completely different as to call for the announcement that a revolution was afoot in the literary world. Only an imbecile, or an academic, could think that they were completely different; John Hawkes himself certainly wouldn’t make that claim. Then you have Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Vonnegut, and Barthelme, the darlings at the time of the academics making a career out of claiming that the novel was new, brand-new, completely new, nothing like it before, get them while they’re hot. And then came the definitions, and then came who was to be included and who wasn’t, etc. Academic careerism at its worst.
Berube suggests that any discussion of the postmodern, if the term has any meaning at all, must proceed from an international perspective as opposed to the highly parochial Americanized one that has largely characterized the discussion up until now. Indeed. My vote is to dump the term, along with the Chronicle, and to forbid any further usage of it.
