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Hollow Trunks
13 January 2010Several years ago, I began writing and editing book reviews for The Revealer. As you probably know, there was a time between then and now when things slowed down on the site. I was out of touch with with it for a time. With this first post of 2010, an essay in defense of criticism, I'm resuming my role. I was abroad during Christmastime and over the New Year. While traveling I received a "Happy New Year!" email from a writer I know named Justin Jamail, who'd recently relocated to Tokyo. "It was a rough introduction to work life here. I felt like I was in one of those training scenes from the Rocky movies, except that it took place in a Hermann Miller chair in front of a computer instead of a gym." With this email, he included a longish response to James Wood's November 30, 2009 New Yorker review of the novels of Paul Auster. Justin sent this not knowing my plans to rejoin The Revealer, and was up front with me that Auster is "a personal friend." He also reminded me of a review I wrote of Auster's 2003 novel, The Book of Illusions. "I think I remember your not liking Auster's books either," he wrote, "and if so, that might make you a fair judge of this response." It's true. In 2003, I did not like The Book of Illusions. (I later admitted to another friend, "I ended up reviewing it, badly, I think, looking back.") Moving forward, The Revealer will review books and comment on the book world in the specific context of religion and the media. (In other words, what follows is not perfectly representative of what we'll be up to here.) Indeed, James Wood, a regular writer on religion, will surely come up again. What we'll be interested in posting is the kind of review Justin encourages below, which takes an author, in Dryden's words, "on the strongest side." Scott Korb ...... By Justin Jamail A Man who is resolv’d to praise an Author, with any appearance of Justice must be sure to take him on the strongest side; and where he is least liable to Exceptions. -J. Dryden I’ve got this really great running joke with my wife where I parody a bad Tom Waits song, something like “train stops and dime stores and bums playing saxophones...remind me of you....” You get the idea. The same approach and imagery could generate a certain kind of Charles Simic poem (“I was a deaf mouse living in the red stocking factory near the river...”)—a game I have often played with a friend from college. A good parody (which mine are not) is not simply about praise, about celebrating the target, the highest form of flattery. A good parody holds up the silly or uninteresting aspects of a great artist to justifiable contempt—it would not be enjoyable if the target were not talented. Even so, it is very easy and not worth doing, unless it makes your wife (or, I suppose, someone else) laugh. James Wood’s criticism of the novels of Paul Auster (by way of a review of the latest, Invisible) in a recent edition of the New Yorker begins with a parody of the sort I’ve just described. So, as a review, it begins unhelpfully. It does not improve. The review fails on several levels: it is full of conceptual gobbledygook, treats the subject capriciously, and fails to be interesting or helpful. Taking an author on his “strongest side” as Dryden recommends may be a good first step, but it is not the easiest because it is this step that is most likely to demand self-awareness and an investigation of one’s own assumptions. Following his unhelpful parody, Wood advances promisingly and manages to question whether or not Auster is in fact a post-modernist (in this, I suppose he is arguing with a book jacket blurb or something), but then ends by accusing him of being a hacky one. Can you imagine an article that begins by proving that Philip Guston was not an abstract expressionist and ends by accusing him of being a bad one? It’s as if Wood, even as he managed to question the appropriateness of his category, could not, with all his wide learning, discover another approach. And yet he feels comfortable publishing an article accusing Auster of “creative lack”! In responding to Wood’s failure, I don’t write in defense of Paul Auster, but of criticism. Good criticism is not simply a matter of intelligence and analytical talent on the one hand or good taste and sensibility on the other—of course, both are required. We read in a time dominated by poor use of the remaining venues for serious criticism and review. Consider that among the most influential poetry critics of our time are Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom, who both seem to be the sort of people who prefer the worst of Keats to the best of Byron—their considerable analytical talents can never make up for such bad taste. On the other end of the spectrum, there are coteries of web-based critics who don’t seem to have read anything that pre-dates a handful of Midwestern baby-boomers. I should also say that I don’t fault Wood for disliking Auster’s novels. Auster’s books are characterized by a distinct prose style and particular thematic concerns and there is no reason to think that these should appeal to a broad audience or any audience. In fact, the interesting review, as I will point out later, might ask how and why Auster’s novels have appealed to such a large and, at least anecdotally, sophisticated audience. I can think of some interesting answers, but Wood doesn’t even search for one. Turning now to the conceptual gobbledygook and beginning with the silliest example: “Saramago and Roth,” Wood writes, “both assemble and disassemble their stories in ways that seem fundamentally grave. Auster, despite all the games, is the least ironic of contemporary writers.” Had I read that out of context I should have thought that the first sentence was meant to disparage Saramago and Roth and the second to praise Auster. If there’s one thing popular writing suffers from it’s a surfeit of gravity and irony. I don’t know who the most ironic of contemporary writers is, but I don’t think I would enjoy reading his or her books. I am, by the way, looking forward to Wood’s forthcoming monograph explaining his method for separating those things which are merely or seemingly grave from those which are “fundamentally” grave. Moreover, I wonder what the “gravity” of assembling (or disassembling, as the case may be) stories has to do with being an ironic contemporary writer. The juxtaposition of the sentences suggests that Wood felt a logical connection between the two sentences, but I cannot find one. It’s as if he had said, “Saramago and Roth are blue. Auster, despite not speaking Chinese, is carrot-colored.” The notion that narrative “games” must have as their goal the sort of irony associated with post-war European and American post-modern writers betrays a comically limited approach. As it happens, the narrative “games” at work in Auster’s prose come directly out of nineteenth-century American writers such as Irving, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville and, though an awareness of recent European and American literature is evident, the influence of post-war writing is slight. Wood makes no attempt to consider what it might mean for a contemporary writer to be so strongly connected to such nineteenth-century American writers (or, indeed, to those early and mid-twentieth century journalists and fiction writers whose influence is also felt in Auster). Complaining about Auster’s failure to live up to the standards of Saramago or Roth is like complaining that Chesterton doesn’t write like Dreiser: it’s as boring as a tautology and half as useful. Wood also writes, “[Auster] wants both the emotional credibility of conventional realism and a frisson of postmodern wordplay. What Auster gets instead is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism.” I’m not sure what he means by “conventional realism.” In the context of a New Yorker article, I suppose Wood means something like The Prince of Tides or Atonement or White Teeth or The Bridges of Madison County. If that is what he meant, my response is to query whether such things have emotional credibility. As for “frisson of postmodern wordplay,” contrary to the attitude taken by critics born in the 60s, wordplay was not invented by John Barth. It is both ignorant and unfair to identify something as “wordplay” and then criticize it for being superficially “postmodern” when there is no evidence that the wordplay in question was particularly of the postmodern variety. In Auster’s case, for example, the wordplay usually strikes me as kin to the Hawthorne and Melville variety, which themselves are comic variations on the Bunyan (or Cotton Mather) variety. Also, why does the second sentence suddenly introduce the concept of skepticism? And what is “fake” realism? Another head-scratcher: “Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises are intricately bound up with modern and postmodern literature. For Flaubert, the cliché and the received idea are beasts to be toyed with and then slain. ‘Madame Bovary’ actually italicizes examples of foolish or sentimental phrasing.” Can we linger for a second on the inherent humor in an article that in many ways is designed for people who consider themselves sophisticated going out of its way to tell us what “actually” happens in Madame Bovary? Before long Wood is dropping names like Maurice Blanchot and Ihab Hassan as if he were an 18-year-old Yale pre-frosh fresh out of St. Ann’s, but here he’s letting us know what “actually” happens in Madame Bovary? The more important point of course in this passage—and it is borne out by the rest of the paragraph, in which he lists a bunch of other writers who “employed and impaled cliché in their work”—is that this reviewer seems blind to the possibility of actually celebrating cliché, something which many great writers do successfully. Are we to understand that because Flaubert thought clichés “beasts to be toyed with and then slain,” this is the only artistic approach? Has Wood never experienced creepy, moving, poignant, confusing, adorable, or joyful uses of cliché? It’s hard to see how, holding such a view, Wood could have appreciated half of post-war painting and poetry, a great deal of modern and contemporary music, or some of the best American, Japanese, and European films of the last thirty years. To the extent that they are each concerned with the mystery of shared values, art and politics comprise a single discipline—the truth is that cliché, whether in art or politics, plays neither the least interesting nor the least versatile part in that mystery. Wood proceeds to complain at length that the decisions and feelings of Auster’s characters are not believable—this contributes to the “fakeness” of the realism. He then discovers that “the reason Auster is not a realist writer, of course, is that his larger narrative games are anti-realist or surrealist.” This entire train of thought reminds me of a simple-minded graduate student who once took up a great deal of time in a seminar complaining that the motivations of Aylmer in “The Birth-Mark” were not credible. Also, the use of the word “reason” is a mistake. It’s like saying, “The reason Picasso is not a newspaper cartoonist, of course, is that his oil paints and college material are incompatible with newspaper printing machines.” “The reason the Yankees are a terrible basketball team, of course, is that their larger bat and ball games are incompatible with hand and hoop games.” “The reason Cheney is not a liberal, of course, is that his policies are anti-liberal or conservative.” How can one say that the reason a person is not a realist writer is because of the formal qualities of the writing he produces? It begs the question it pretends to answer. A more comprehensible expression might have been: “The reason Mr. X is not a realist writer is because of his preoccupation with y theme, which is best explored in work that has α, β, γ, and other elements associated with surrealism.” All such small moments of inanity on Wood’s part should not distract us from his principal failing in the essay, his failing at the job of critic. It doesn’t ever help anyone to complain that a book or set of books is insufficiently like the kinds of books that the critic appreciates. If Wood had wanted to write an essay about an author he dislikes, the useful approach would still have demanded that he approach the work on its own terms. Instead, Wood approaches Auster with demands for either a beautifully written prose poem of a novel a la William Gaddis or a domestic, “realist” soap opera such as one finds in The Corrections or Death of a Salesman. These demands may not be satisfied by Paul Auster’s novels, but neither are they the only reasons one might read a novel. Yes, the action in these books is often kicked off by peremptory statements about a character—often an accident. This device reminds me of Irving’s stories and other “there once was a man who” fables. In fact the introduction of many characteristics of fables or parables among characters who might otherwise be in a mid-twentieth-century snatch of journalism or suspense film, often provokes pleasant surprise in this reader. Sometimes these novels provoke fruitful reflection on the relationship between one’s idea of American society and one’s experience of it. Other times, one more profitably reflects on the amusing tension among characteristic American modes of art and philosophy with those of England and continental Europe. (Consider, for example, a comparison of the American and French reactions to Poe or Whitman—or indeed to Paul Auster. Beckett is another good example, as Americans typically miss the wonderful silliness in his work and instead discover a funereal solemnity and portentousness that may baffle other readers.) I am somewhat sensitive to Wood’s taste here—I too would rather read Thomas Browne than Ring Lardner (though I have no sympathy for the other half of Wood’s preferences—his praise of “realism” and its supposed “emotional credibility”). But by no means am I ignorant of Lardner’s strengths as a serious writer, and I should hope that were I called on to review an edition of his work I would judge it not by my own preferences but on its own terms. Justin Jamail is a lawyer living in Tokyo.
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