Living by Fiction (9 page)

This is an old lovers' quarrel, the bitterer on the writers' side because ours is the greater dependency. Lord Byron, for instance, received an extravagantly printed Bible as a gift from his publisher John Murray. Byron sent the Bible back to Murray with a single emendation. At John 18:40, where the King James Bible read “Now Barabbas was a robber,” Byron had changed the text to read “Now Barabbas was a publisher.”

W
hat effect has criticism on the direction of fiction? Is its influence conservative or innovative?

The question itself needs defending. For who in this country listens to critics? Are not the critics, off in their departmental corners, uselessly employed, changing their terms every few decades out of sheer boredom? Surely real fiction writers have no truck with academic critics, nor with any school but the school of hard knocks.

The notion of the novelist as gifted savage dies hard, even in English departments. (Perhaps it dies hard
especially
in English departments—for if Faulkner was a man of letters like thee and me, why have we not written great novels? Further, department scholars may doubt their own methods, their students, and especially their
colleagues so much that they deny that anyone ever connected with that world could produce a novel worth reading.) It breaks our American hearts to learn that Updike was an English major. We wish to forget that Thoreau, like Updike and Mailer, was graduated from Harvard, and that Walt Whitman spent his life in his room studying and rewriting, and that Willa Cather lived among the literati in Greenwich Village, and that Melville left the sea at twenty-five. The will to believe in the fiction writer as Paul Bunyan is shockingly strong; it is emotional, like the will to believe in Bigfoot, the hairy primate who stalks the Western hills, or in the Loch Ness Monster. In fact, by the time the media had worked on Hemingway, he was scarcely distinguishable from Bigfoot, or less popular—and Dylan Thomas, that sentimental favorite, was the Loch Ness Monster. The assumption that the fiction writer is any sort of person but one whose formal education actually taught him something is particularly strong in this country; our democratic anti-intellectual tradition and our media cult of personality dovetail on this point and press it home, usually with full cooperation from writers.

In opposition to all this romance, I say that academic literary criticism is very influential: students listen to critics. What student does not read fiction for one course or another? And who is writing fiction these days who has not been to college?

For years on end the future fiction writer listens to Ph.D.'s, people professionally trained to approach texts using one method or another. It stands to reason that any critical approach which dominates the graduate schools will also dominate undergraduate thinking about fiction, such as it is, and will be felt, either positively or negative
ly, in the fiction those undergraduates will eventually write. Whether all this academic influence is baleful or not is another matter; the influence is real.

Well, then, how does academic criticism influence fiction's direction? Specific critical works, of course, have less effect than critical trends, which in turn are not so important as the fact of criticism itself and the milieu of self-consciousness that fact generates. For it is the nature of all the arts in this century to exist alongside criticism: alongside critical theory and history on one hand, and formal analysis on the other.

Let us say first that criticism keeps fiction traditional in several ways. As it influences curricula it most often defends the notion of canon and keeps students reading Trollope and Fielding, Hardy and Dickens, Cooper and Hawthorne. Students also study Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf in the classroom, but they usually read Nabokov and Pynchon on their own, just as our professors a generation ago read Joyce on the sly. Further, English departments are usually stuck teaching solely literature written in English. This is so because modern language departments, in an understandable fight for their lives, may insist that students need German to read Kafka, French to read Proust, and Spanish to read Borges. English students may therefore lack genuine knowledge of European and Latin American fiction—which is far more modernist than British and American fiction—and so be graduated with a quaint and lopsided notion of the work done in this century. Finally, insofar as critical journals, as well as curricula, ignore contemporary fiction altogether, they may give the impression that anything written in our time is not interesting.

Criticism could encourage the stronghold of traditional
fiction in another, more complex way. Literary criticism, for all its changing terms and emphases, has a real continuity. Samuel Johnson's readings of Cowley and Shakespeare are still valuable; T. S. Eliot admired them enormously. And Eliot's readings of the English metaphysical poets and the French symbolist poets are still standard. Inversely, various modern critical methods work well on texts from any century—even on myth and folk tale. And when criticism does address itself to contemporary modernist fiction, it does not need a new language. A critic may intelligently apply to even the most experimental novel the same terms and methods he uses on
Pamela
. Nowhere do you find a set of critical tools appropriate only to a specific historical period.

Students absorb a sense of this critical continuity, and infer from it, as may we, that fiction as an art is proceeding along a bumpy but contiguous route to do what it has always done. This idea, in turn, devalues innovation per se, and allows respectability to older forms.

Art criticism, on the other hand, underwent a real crisis prompted by the radicality and swiftness of developments in the plastic arts. In even the most radical fiction of 1980, we have no departures so radical, in work or in theory, as the plastic arts had as long ago as 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1913, in Kandinsky, Kupka, Duchamp, and Malevich. The critical crisis was in full swing during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. In 1962, for instance, leading critic Dore Ashton wrote: “No one has developed a rhetoric for criticism of abstract painting.” Faced with the terms the painters themselves used for their methods and goals—paroxysm, delirium, orgasm, somnambulism, risk—critics could either soberly elucidate these misty nouns or go scrabbling for more nouns in the sticky
realms of quantum mechanics, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, or Jung. The old terms suitable to figurative painting did not apply—because the multiple objects which figurative artists painted, and which figurative artists today continue to paint, are not merely incidental clothing of forms but genuine iconic subject matter. And the merest leaf or numeral in the corner of a painting permits critics to discuss the work as an interpretation of nature or of culture; its absence prohibits it.

Students may infer from painting's critical disarray that painting as a whole underwent a revolution in this century. Literature did not. Painting has “before” and “after” periods; literature does not. Young painters must look forward; young writers may look around.

 

Still, there are plenty of ways in which literary criticism encourages contemporary modernism. To return to canon: no writers are more firmly canonized than the historical Modernists. There is no shortage of critical attention to Faulkner or Woolf, say, or to Yeats or Stevens. And when curricula do teach literary history, they may talk about innovation; the present overblown reputation of
Ulysses
rests on its historical innovations.

More to the point is this: any formalist textual exegesis at all, whether it be Russian formalist, New Critical, phenomenologist, or structuralist, incidentally forwards contemporary modernist virtues. Such an exegesis stresses self-reference by limiting discussion to the text; it stresses ingenuity and pattern by tracing the visible patterns of structure and detail; and it stresses structural tautness by focusing on those materials which fit the analysis at the expense of those materials which do not fit. Dickens may fret a great deal about the engaging qualities of his work:
will they like this character? Is this description vivid? Will this scene wring their hearts? But formal criticism, outside of vague and personal British appreciations, cannot and does not analyze or quantify these effects. Emotional impact and simplicity are two virtues which traditional fiction may possess but which nevertheless strike textual criticism dumb.

Markedly characteristic of contemporary modernist fiction is its awareness of criticism. Any published criticism at all fuels these fires. Self-consciousness may be a handicap or a virtue; in either case, it is nothing new for writers. In 1818, John Keats was aware of the haunting demands on the writer which criticism and the weight of literary history made; but Keats “internalized” those demands, overcame his self-consciousness, and produced work from which both the writer and the critic were absent as figures. For the contemporary modernist, however, the same self-consciousness is inescapable. Art itself is the theme, and ironic, self-aware surfaces are the method: so the writer takes no pains to conceal his jitters.

Barth's stories “Lost in the Funhouse” and “Life Story” tremble with the sense of being read critically and analyzed; their protagonists are writers almost gibbering with witty self-consciousness. So is the protagonist in Beckett's trilogy
Molloy/ Malone Dies/ The Unnamable
; when he can overcome his paralysis sufficiently to write at all, he writes his novel defensively, against a host of critical readings. Some fiction parodies the critical essay: Nabokov's
Pale Fire
, Woody Allen's “Lovborg's Women Considered,” Borges's “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.” Today's writers are conscious of literary criticism indeed, if they know it well enough to parody it. It is not unreasonable to suppose that a familiarity with
critical methods would make writers wish to produce texts which yield to, and fit, critical analysis.

On every continent, contemporary modernist fiction is written by educated and sophisticated writers. By no means all educated writers prefer it; but nowhere do uneducated writers produce it. (The many small biographies which Barbara Howes provides for her excellent anthology of Latin American short stories,
The Eye of the Heart
, bears out this correlation.) How could they? Borges is a library; Ronald Sukenick started out as a Wallace Stevens critic. But the charcoal burner who quits his vines and retires untutored to a garret will not invent contemporary modernism and will not like it when he sees it, any more than most undergraduates do. It is a taste acquired through cheerful familiarity with the provisional nature of literary texts and the relative nature of historical values. Of course, this degree of sophistication, like any sophistication in any field, inclines one to irony, jadedness, and cynicism with respect to received impressions on one hand, and to formalism, emotional caution, and self-consciousness with respect to personal expression on the other hand. But that's the breaks.

 

I would even like to proffer, as a spur to real investigation, the notion that awareness of criticism
created
contemporary modernist fiction. Contemporary modernist fiction arose among intellectuals in response to formalist critical ideals which have dominated the century: the ideals of the Russian formalists and the new Critics. (Phenomenologists and structuralists, heirs to this tradition, are too recent to have schooled a generation of writers.) Robert Scholes (
Structuralism in Literature
) has pointed out how the Russian formalists, who flourished 1915-1930,
anticipated the fiction of Borges and Barth, fiction whose author's presence makes his narration subject to playful irony. Their notions sound contemporary modernist, and we could make a case for their direct or indirect influence on the young Russian Nabokov. On the other hand, perhaps we need not invoke Nabokov as a human vector for carrying formalist ideas to the United States. The publicity surrounding
Ulysses
was doing a good job of it, as were developments in the other arts, especially poetry.

The New Criticism arose in America in response to Modernist poetry in English—in response to the difficult, fragmented, and self-relevant poems of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Stevens. The New Critics were themselves poets to a man: Eliot, Pound, R. P. Blackmur, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, William Empson, Kenneth Burke. They codified and bruited about the highly developed aesthetic of Modernist poetry; they introduced into the intellectual milieu, and into the classroom, the notion of texts as carefully patterned intellectual artifices. How could this not affect a generation of fiction writers? After you have performed or read a detailed analysis of Eliot's “Four Quartets” and Stevens's “Comedian as the Letter C,” why would you care to write fiction like Jack London's or Theodore Dreiser's? Contemporary fiction writers may be more influenced by Pound's criticism than by Joyce's novels, more by Stevens's poems than Kafka's stories. In style their work more closely resembles “The Waste Land” than
Herzog
; in structure it more closely resembles “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” than
The Naked and the Dead
. This strand of contemporary fiction has purified itself through the agent of criticism; it has adopted the brilliant virtues of Modernist poetry, whose bones are its beauty.

On the whole, then, criticism nudges fiction toward contemporary modernist values. Its stress on textual values and on theory, and the self-consciousness it breeds, outweigh the effect of its conservative stance toward canon.

 

Actually, the impact of criticism on literature is not nearly so great as it is on painting. For literature is not yet the special province of experts, as we have seen. Experts are not needed; we can approach any work except
Finnegans Wake
unarmed. Literary criticism is useful, but not needful. In this it is like any art. It moves along independently and harmlessly, fascinated with and despairing of its own techniques, advancing by leaps and bounds into the empyrean. As an art form criticism is more highly developed than fiction is. Its own theories are actually the most suitable objects of its intelligence.

Painting's audience needs art critics. Anything interesting on earth will occasion many words, and when the words do not immediately suggest themselves, someone will propose them. Some painters themselves, even, may need art critics, not only to aid their own careers in the marketplace, but also to articulate a set of terms with which to disagree. The literature of Abstract Expressionism, for instance, is a catalogue of the painters' acrophobia and vertigo. They knew that much of their paintings' real action occurred in the realm where terms empty, analysis stammers, and judgment gapes. If someone is doing something that cannot be put into words, what, precisely, is he doing? The press wanted to know.