Back to graduate school

No, not really. But I have been doing some reading that reminds me of being in graduate school -- back when I spent a lot more time trying to understand what Derrida was talking about.

This is prompted by thinking a lot about possibilities for my second novel. (I have a goal of starting a new project shortly after the start of the year to coincide with another big change in my work schedule.) And that thinking has led me to revisiting some of the literary theory I used to spend so much time with. Or, more accurately, to the theory that wasn't in vogue then and got skipped over or very aggressively dismissed. Like people wouldn't talk to you in the hallway if they thought you were curious about the wrong stuff.

Or, even more accurately, not literary theory so much as literary criticism. I'm trying to lay my hands on good examples of close reading of literature. People spend so much time articulating and defending ways of reading, that it's hard to get to the reading itself, never mind wading through the specialist's vocabulary (presuming that the writer actually intends anything intelligible, which I think it's legitimate to wonder about sometimes.)

I'm interested in what I'll call, until I better educate myself and figure out who has already discussed this, a classical rhetorical reading of literature--an analysis of how a novel achieve it's effect on the reader. What are the moves that a novel makes to create its effects? Maybe I'm looking for more of the kind of insight I got reading James Wood's How Fiction Works, but different. His other books were too thematically oriented to satisfy this interest.

How all of this relates to any novel I may write, it's hard to describe. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

So, I have a pile of books from the library from a lot of old-timers. I'm digging I.A. Richards and Leslie Fiedler. I'm intrigued by the thesis that Andre Brink proposes about self-consciousness about language in the novel as a form, but I don't see it in the examples he draws out. I get that the novels he surveys have play with language as part of their plot or theme, but I don't see how the novels are themselves self-conscious. So, I'm not yet finding what I'm looking for. Maybe when I start this Wayne Booth book, The Rhetoric of Fiction.

Additional reading note: I've been up late reading Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me and am enjoying it a lot. It has certain superficial elements in common with my book, so I'm studying it to see he achieves his effects and what I can learn from it.

More Wells Tower and POV and envy

I'm anxious to get back to work--on the book, that is. I'm just as anxious to avoid my paying work. But I need to hold tight and give my readers a chance to give me some feedback. It's going to be a few weeks at least. urg.

I've read a couple more Wells Tower stories. Everywhere all of a sudden, isn't he? One I read last night--again I forget the title, the one about the old man in a wheelchair who goes across the road to visit his neighbor--I liked a lot. I think it's the voice of the characters in dialogue that's most interesting. The way he captures certain colorful ways of speaking. That can often be very precious--like more up-to-date versions of replacing all the g's with apostrophes--and I read an interview with him the other day where he said he guarded against that. He had in fact felt his stories were doing that and he rebuilt them to get that out of there. I think my annoyance with the first story in the book, "Brown Coast", was because I felt that precious habit in dialogue, along with the overly familiar modern-ennui-man narrator, were still in there.

And part of my annoyance is probably coming from envy. Back when I was still in the second or third draft of my book it never would have occurred to me to be jealous of a contemporary writer's success, but now that I'm getting closer to the end and imagining the improbable possibility of publication for myself, I can't help but compare, and I'm not naturally inclined to generosity. When someone near my age, with their first book out, is getting a lot of attention from reviewers, I start to look closely to see what it is in their writing that got them there. (See last month when I wrote a lot about Phillip Meyer. See next month when I'll probably be writing a lot about TBD.)

I never say to myself that I could write better--at least not with these stories by Wells Tower. It's more like I say to myself that I want to have written better. The writer in question doesn't live up to my aspirations for myself or to my yearning to see some vaguely new and fascinating thing in contemporary literature. That was my response to "Brown Coast." However, as I wrote before, I thought the title story in the collection was terrific, and I like a lot the other one mentioned above.

That brings us to the fourth story I've seen so far. (I should probably shut the hell up until I've read the whole book, shouldn't I?) "Leopard" It was in The New Yorker last November and often gets mentioned in the reviews. I've read a couple interviews with him, and the interviewer both times asked about that story and why he choose the POV he did.

The story, which is about an 11-year-old boy, uses second person, and he explains in these interviews that he wanted a POV that was more authoritative and less naive than first person could be. As I wrote way back when I started this journal, that was my main concern when I decided against first person for my novel, which also features an 11-year-old boy protagonist. I went with third-person limited omniscient, but Wells Tower says that was too distant and too critical/ironic/insincere a voice for how he wanted to characterize this kid. He felt that second person was the right middle ground.

He acknowledged this was risky because of how off-putting second person can be for the reader, and I don't blame writers for continuing to experiment with the technique to see if they can make it work. But for me, it just never has yet. It didn't work when I read Bright Lights Big City as a teenager, and it doesn't work here. It is off-putting.

And it doesn't work because it doesn't actually function to get the reader closer to the consciousness of the character. As James Wood talks about in How Fiction Works, with the free indirect style form of third-person a kind of magic happens where the language and metaphor belong at once to the narrator and to the consciousness of the character described. So even though it's logically preposterous that the narrator can know these things about the character's interiority, the reader feels like they are riding along inside the character's mind. That magic never occurs with second person. And I don't agree with the premise that third-person is too distant. You might as well say that Madam Bovary and all the developments in modernist narrative are too insincere to create meaningful characters.

Well, this argument I'm making is based on a weak memory of a hasty reading of something Wells Tower probably said offhandedly anyway, so probably I've misinterpreted him and there's no argument at all. And that envy discussed earlier probably has something to do with it--this particular story, and his rational for the POV, can be taken as a referendum on how well I create the consciousness of my character, and in this case, I really really hope I've done better.

Anyway, if you're keeping score at home, that's two stories I don't like and two that I do like a lot. Check out that title story--it really pops.

Literary fueding, James Wood, continued

More context and another round fired recently in The Elegant Variation -- a long-lost list of some of James Wood's faves.

I disagree with TEV's implication that this list negates any of the criticism people might have with his stand on so-called "hysterical realism." Nobody serious is saying that he's stuck on Flaubert--that's a straw man argument. They're saying that he has rejected a category of contemporary fiction as inherently unworkable instead of evaluating to see if their particular attempts at the form have worked. And they've got specific instances in Wood's writing on which to base that interpretation.

Literary fueding, James Wood and my ongoing fence sitting

Re: my previous blogs about the nagging but undefined resistance I have to James Wood, despite having found his book How Fiction Works very helpful to my own writing.

I've discovered that a good old-fashioned critic's feud is raging out there about just some of the issues I've been mulling over. Prospect Magazine has an excellent summary of the parties and positions. Readers responses to that here.

One of those responses is from a blogger who is specifically CONTRA James Wood. He argues with a lot more conviction than myself something similar to what I have been exploring--his rejection of a younger generation of writers is apparently a categorical rejection, aesthetically limited and inconsistent at that.

The Prospect article references a question I had about Zadie Smith--why she seemed to agree with James Wood's criticism of her first book. I and others may have misunderstood what she was getting at back then, but it's clear now she doesn't agree anymore, shooting Wood dagger eyes throughout her review of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.

Right now, I'm leaning toward the position of the young Turks. For one, my own reading of Netherland was very similar to Smith's.

However, like I say, I'm feeling awfully ambiguous about that. Wood's ideas in How Fiction Works were overall really helpful to me, and while I'm annoyed with his categorical rejection of so-called "hysterical realism," overall I agree that the books he's referring to were failures.

"Hysterical realism" and Tolstoy

Still on a break from writing. I'm reading War and Peace for the first time, through steady daily effort since Christmas when I got the new Pevear translation as a gift from my sister-in-law. I'm "almost done" in percentage terms, which is to say, I have about the equivalent of a regular novel to go.

I can't get off my James Wood kick. Now, I'm really aggravated at his poke at the Young Turks for the quality that he calls "hysterical realism." There may be some categorical flaw in the kind of literature they are producing--in fact I don't like a lot of it myself--but the quality that he defines as "hysterical realism" isn't it, and it's not new. There is nothing in his description of that quality that doesn't apply perfectly to War and Peace, and in that case it works. The long passages where he quotes and argues with historians, departing from the narrative of his characters . . . it's exactly the same thing that Wallace, Zadie Smith, etc. do that Wood takes issue with. Again, I can't help reading Wood's analysis as a resentful middle-age crank trying to take the next generation down a peg simply because they are the next generation.

"Hyterical realism" and digression

I finished re-reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith last night. I'm still struggling with my resistance to James Wood's critique. I know that he appreciates some things in it and that in fact my own delight and annoyance with the book probably closely tracks his, but I'm bothered by how his annoyance seems to be based on a categorical objection rather than her success or failure within that category.

The other day I was discussing this in terms of the social novel, but it's probably the quality of "digression" that is more central to the question. Smith and others that Wood labels, in The Irresponsible Self: On Laugher and the Novel, as "hysterical realism" often have digressions full of sophisticated, even expert, detail on scientific, social, historical and political topics tangentially related to the story. That and other narrative elements, often documentary in nature like signs, letters, emails, etc. supply a quality of pastiche. The other thing they often do is introduce the author--have the author talk over the disembodied narrative voice and apparently show off the author's knowledge or research skills. That's the worst-case, and I'm with Wood in his judgment of David Foster Wallace when he plays this trick. I find Wallace's writing self indulgent.

But this quality of digression is not unique to contemporary authors. It is common in Don Quixote and it's full bloom probably occurs in Moby Dick. Most people who find Moby Dick a chore to read probably feel that way because of that specific habit. If you don't like it or get it, it's an indulgence. The same quality is why its fans regard it is as transformational.

I don't remember seeing any evaluation of Moby Dick by James Wood, so I don't know how he feels about it. But he definitely doesn't include it in his critique of hysterical realism. It seems to me that he is attacking the Young Turks because they are Young Turks and not because they fail to deploy the technique of digression succesfully.

The social novel

I don't feel fully prepared to discuss this intelligently yet--just making notes. I'm starting to think of my second book in terms of the "social novel." James Wood has a lot of scorn for recent attempts at that and seems to reject the possibilities of the category entirely. (I assume I must be misinterpreting him--surely he doesn't reject Dickens' work as a legitimate artistic endeavor.)

Particularly, he beats up on recent novelists including Zadie Smith, Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen, identifying a genre of contemporary literary fiction that he labels "hysterical realism." I agree with many of the criticisms of each book, even the ones I admire like White Teeth and The Corrections. But, like I say, it feels like he is rejecting the possibilities of their endeavors at social novels entirely. Meanwhile, when I think about what is interesting in contemporary fiction that I would like to explore, I keep coming back to these same books.

So, very roughly, at this very early stage of my thinking, I'm imagining a work that deals with the inherent tensions of a social novel--timeliness vs. timelessness; characters that are illustrations of social phenomena vs. characters that are fully realized individuals. Are both possible? Desirable?

Something to ponder . . . what about On The Road? Isn't it both a document of its time and timeless? Isn't it on track to pass the hundred-year test?

The Myth of the Solid Character and James Wood

As I've noted before, I've been reading and re-reading How Fiction Works by James Wood, and right now I'm studying closely and taking heart from a few sections where he discusses what he calls "The Myth of the Solid Character." These are in sections 74-77.

A lot of interesting comment is packed in those pages, so paraphrasing as briefly as I can . . . He says it's not universally true that all great characters that readers remember and are attached to are "solid" (or "round" for that matter.) There are plenty of examples of novels that engage and move their readers with characters--main, secondary and minor--who are brushed on very lightly and about whom the reader is told very little.

To quote one passage at length, he says:

I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level . . ."

He's big on that idea of novels simultaneously telling their tales and training the readers in the particular conventions of that telling.

A few pages later, after demonstrating that Isabel in Portrait of a Lady isn't a solid character by any usual definition, he says:

So, the vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence, and even plain plausibility--let alone likeability--than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are deeply important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters. That is how readers retain in their minds a sense of the character "Isabel Archer," even if they cannot tell you what she is exactly like. We remember her in the way we remeber an obscurely significant day: something important has been enacted here.

I take heart from this passage because all through the drafting and rewriting of my story I've been hearing in the back of my head the advice from many creative writing texts about "knowing" your characters and having them act from my own some deep sense and understanding of them--the necessity of building up the reader's sense of the character. One, that isn't an aspect of this work that comes naturally to me. But, fine. If that's important, I'll have to concentrate especially hard on that part of the job.

But, two, as I do so it has felt very forced and I don't have a lot of confidence in it. What does feel natural is something I've had trouble putting my finger on until I read this particular passage from Wood. I think when I'm in the zone, the mortaring and layering on of plaster and the sanding and prime coats and the multiple coats of paint I've been putting on have been about building up an awareness that something important and profound is at stake. And for me that has been easier to do by watching my character move around and brooding over him without spelling out in depth, or even knowing clearly for myself, what he is like--without excavating his interiority. I'm not sure how he feels about what's happening to him, and the imperative to figure that out and to show/not tell it has been disruptive. Something about that hasn't felt authentic, and right now I'm wondering if the imperative is incorrect--based on a myth, as Wood identifies it.

Well, this might all be a giant excuse for avoiding some hard work that after all is necessary, but I'm intrigued by the possibility, and it's causing me to work much more consciously on any section that is "characterizing" my character. I probably won't be able to grapple fully with this question until the revision process, but it's stewing for now.

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

I've had this around since it first came out about a year and a half ago. At the time, dipping into the first chapter, I wasn't grabbed by it and put it away. This time, I was drawn to it like a potboiler, which goes to show how much mood and mindset of the reader has to do with things. Books have to find readers at the right time.

I picked it up again because she is married to James Wood, who as I say in earlier posts, I've been reading very carefully lately--both his most recent book and an older one and all the older essays in magazines and papers that I can find. (I have a complete dusty collection of unread New Yorkers from the last several years that I have trouble keeping up with.) Naturally, I wanted to read her book by the standards of his, a perverse and unfair but inevitable way to go about things.

I'm habituated to my own standards, though, and for four days I built up a sleep deficit getting through this book without thinking about her husband's at all. In the end, I have to say I think the book failed, but it was a kind of failure I don't mind at all. I enjoy it nevertheless. And think about it the next day, missing the characters. Expecting much more than that, I know, is a pretty high bar.

For one thing, there are places where I'm suddenly brought to the surface to become aware of myself and of the writer and the seams in the work. The most disappointing place was in the payoff scene where we witness along with a couple key characters the events of 9/11. For some reason the writing right there goes very flabby. It's like having a spell broken.

I can speculate why, but I wouldn't argue this point without having a dialogue with the author, but I have a feeling that she pulled her punches there because of a reluctance to be sentimental or emotional about obviously emotional topics. Such a reluctance would surprise me given that that attitude--a critique of ironic distance--is one of the themes of the book.

I was bothered by some loose ends. Did Seeley intend to publish the essay? (Was he going to betray his wife?) I never got clear on his perspective--lots of people are suspicious of him, but the suspicions are never confirmed or denied, so I don't understand if he's as big a butthole as they want to think he is. The story raises the question of his motivation for marrying Marina and if he has some twisted attraction to Murray, but it never satisfies that question. The mauling of Julius is gross--potentially the kind of "supernova" that Richard Ford talks about, but it has no consequence for theme, character or plot, so it ends up feeling like mere spectacle.

Well, this isn't a critique with a strong commitment to it. I'd have to read the book carefully again to talk clearly why it didn't work for me, and this blog doesn't have the sponsorship to support a second reading. Despite my beating up on it a little here, I enjoyed a ton of other qualities in it, including the momentum of the tale the suspense, and the exploration of the "emperor has no clothes" story. I encourage people to read it.

Detail and realism

I continue to look at things differently based on what I'm reading in the James Wood book How Fiction Works. Last night I was re-reading the chapter on detail where he discusses the custom in modernist narrative to have a surplus of unnecessary or "off duty" detail to help build a sense of realism. Reading my own work that this morning, I noticed how much I did that, which I have often felt a lack of confidence in. At times the unnecessariness of it stands out very clearly. In that case, quite the opposite of a sense of realism, what you get is a sense of the artist at work and all his preciousness.