Jewish sin and repentance

Another Yom Kippur, another difficult fast. It never seems to get any easier. Toward the end of Avinu Malkenu yesterday, during the Neilah service with just minutes to go in the day, I had one of those brief fugitive experiences of transcendence, a chest-shuddering certainty of God’s presence, which justifies the fast. Maybe I was only dizzy.

Or maybe I was distracted most of the day and only cleared my head toward the end. Just a couple of hours before Kol Nidre on Friday afternoon I read a memoir-essay by Neal Pollack, the comical author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. Its title, “Yom Kippur for Shul-Haters,” caught my eye precisely because the essay was not written for me. I feel at home in shul. A skeptic’s view is always good, though, for concentrating the mind.

Pollack is remarkably open about his dislike for the holiest day on the Jewish calendar:

. . . I simply don’t buy what the holiday has, theologically, to offer. It’s hard to atone for your sins when you don’t believe in the concept of sin, and particularly not in the concept of sin when bundled into a mass confessional before a basically uncaring judge who decides, one day a year, whether or not you’re going to live or die. Perhaps, in a certain cultural context, that made sense once upon a time, but it doesn’t now, at least not to me.And what makes sense to him is really all that matters. As I tweeted in annoyance, Judaism is great when it agrees with him. When it doesn’t, well, you don’t really expect him to dump his personal preferences, do you?

Since Pollack was the one to bring up theology, however, it might do some good to clarify his own. In a word, his theology is confessional. Or, to be less coy about it, his thinking is not Jewish at all, but Christian. It is the Christian who demands prior belief as a condition of performing religious acts. For the Jew, things are rather different. As Arthur A. Cohen explains, “All Jewish beliefs interpret and elaborate the mystery of acts themselves, determining finally that many, even those regarded as critical, derive their justification from no rationalization, no human logic, but merely because they are the will and ordinance of God.”

For the Jew, in other words, the act is prior, and belief trails along afterwards, picking up wrappers and butts of meaning, which usually turn out to be worthless—every Jewish authority interprets the act differently—eventually concluding that it is done because Jews do it. The truth is that Jewish ritual is the enactment, the physical embodiment, of Jewish belief. You don’t have to believe in its educational benefits to read to your children; nor abandon the practice when you learn that it has none. You read to your children to create and deepen a relationship with them.

No real surprise that Pollack’s religious instincts are Christian rather than Jewish. He is a secular Jew who takes his cues from American culture rather than Jewish tradition, although he tries hard to raise a laugh about his own Jewish ignorance:It wouldn’t be fair to call me a non-observant Jew. I lead my extended family’s first-night Passover seder every year. When we light Hanukkah candles, I force my [son] to sing Maoz Tzur. I belong to Jewish cultural organizations and mailing lists and know the meaning of the phrase tikkun olam. Certain scenes in Barry Levinson’s Avalon bring me to tears. But when it comes to the High Holidays, and, in particular, Yom Kippur, I’m about as Jewish as the guy behind the counter at my neighborhood bodega.For those who don’t know, tikkun olam is a favorite phrase among Jewish social activists who hold Judaism in high esteem when it seems to vindicate their activism; less so when it doesn’t. As Hillel Halkin wrote in COMMENTARY in the definitive essay on the phrase:They represent the ultimate in that self-indulgent approach, so common in non-Orthodox Jewish circles in the United States today, that treats Jewish tradition not as a body of teachings to be learned from but as one needing to be taught what it is about by those who know better than it does what it should be about.Add Neal Pollack to their numbers. But what about the Jewish concept of sin? Is Pollack right not to buy into it? On Yom Kippur, Jewish confession is collective—he is right about that—but the reason it is collective is that the sin being confessed on Yom Kippur is collective. Pollack may be laboring under the dominion of the image of the Roman Catholic confessional. The Jewish concept of sin is much closer to the classical belief in the pollution of entire city, brought about by unspeakable crime, which Sophocles draws upon in Oedipus the King. Thus Creon reports the word of Phoebus to Thebes:An unclean thing there is, hid in our land,
Eating the soil thereof: this ye shall cast
Out, and not foster till all help be past. (vv. 110–12)And the katharsis of classical tragedy is similar to the atonement of Yom Kippur. Moderns sentimentalize katharsis into a satisfying moral belch, a relief from the mild dyspepsia of fear and pity. The ancients conceived it as a cleansing purgation of the defilement that affected the whole society.

So too the Jews. At Sinai, God promised the children of Israel that they would be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation—but if and only if they listened to his voice and guarded his covenant (Exod 19.5–6). God’s promise is conditional; Israel’s collective behavior during the rest of the year calls the if-clause into question; and Yom Kippur restores it.

When I worked out the logic of the day to my satisfaction and got his yuck-yuck prose out of my head at last, I was able to pray, and join in the atonement. Someday perhaps Neal Pollack will do the same. Next year in Jerusalem!

The regional basis of a hard heart

Last night, during the Republican presidential debate in Orlando, Florida, Governor Rick Perry defended his state’s decision to admit the children of illegal immigrants into Texas universities at in-state tuition rates. “If you say that we should not educate children who come into our state for no other reason than that they’ve been brought there through no fault of their own,” Perry concluded, “I don’t think you have a heart.”

Perry’s words have been roundly booed by the right, and even my colleagues at Commentary, who are likely to agree with Perry on the substance, winced at the comment (here and here and here).

What has gone little remarked is that the Texas House adopted the original state law (HB 1403) in 2001 by a vote of 130 to 2, while the state Senate voted 27 to 3 in favor. How can it be that a law which won overwhelming approval from a Republican-dominated legislature has come to be almost unanimously rejected by the national party just ten years later?

If you grow up in California, Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas, you don’t grow up thinking of your Mexican-American friends and classmates as illegal immigrants or children of illegals. The cultures of the border states are shot through with Hispanic influences. Larry McMurtry says somewhere that the most interesting cities in America are those that are the most thoroughly Hispanicized. You are at home with the influences, because you are home in California, Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas.

Thus Governor Perry struck a chord with many of us when, in the first presidential debate, he spoke of “Anglos” instead of “whites.” Northern conservatives were disgusted, but I’ve always preferred the spicy ethnic term. “White” erases differences—between Catholics, Jews, and Protestants, for example—while “Anglo” acknowledges the most significant difference in the southwestern states. The counterbalancing term is chicano. Together they identify the inhabitants by their history.

My guess is that Bostonians would consider anyone heartless who wished to stigmatize their Irish classmates, and those who grew up in Buffalo would probably feel the same about their Polish friends. Heartlessness is a regional phenomenon; no one can accept without protest that the people he grew up with are somehow alien. Those from outside the region who speak of them like that—they are the ones whose voice and phrasing sound so strange.

Men and friendship

This morning I heard from a longtime friend who, like me, has recently moved from Houston to another city. “Big community here and easy to get lost,” he wrote. “The wife and kids seem to have plugged in socially, but I’m having a hard time getting excited about meeting folks.”

Me too. Is it a male thing? Or a middle-aged thing? Or both at once? My buddies are scattered around the country—Iowa, Houston, New York, Boston, D.C.—and I am apparently in no hurry to add to their number. On Sunday afternoons I watch the Texans on satellite TV with chile con queso and a beer as my only company. I’m not lonely, but I worry that maybe I should be.

At a certain point, men no longer go out of their way to cultivate friendships. For twenty years, when I arrived in College Station, I would find my heart rising to see Bedford Clark in the office across the hall. We would close the door and trade witticisms and outrages. Now at Ohio State, I have no colleagues—I don’t belong to a department—and it feels strange not even to get the looks of hostility I used to get from leftist English professors. (No one at Ohio State knows that I am a spy from the other side.) But I can’t say that I miss having colleagues. I miss Bedford.

I think men, as they age, come to value the history that they share with their friends—their friendships are repositories of memory—more than they value “shared interests” or whatever else it is that draws younger persons together. Not that men don’t look for excitement. Just not in new friendships. And many men, even when tempted by the excitement of new sexual experience, withdraw into familiarity. The prospect of developing a new history with a new wife, and uprooting and plowing under the old history, is horribly unattractive—no matter how good-looking the new woman might be.

Men aren’t lazy about friendship. They are committed to habit. Come to think of it, this also explains why male friends can go months without talking to each other, and yet neither one will feel as if the friendship has lapsed or even diminished.

Maybe not just an archive after all

So I’ve decided that A Commonplace Blog will not “continue to exist, but as an archive,” despite what I originally wrote below. I find that I have other things to say, about other things than books.

Patrick Kurp is to blame, as usual. The two of us were swapping messages this morning, because Texas A&M University suspended my email account yesterday afternoon without advance warning (after scrubbing me from the English department server last month), and I was feeling sorry for myself. Twenty years I taught at A&M, and the university can’t seem to get rid of my final traces quickly enough. “Write about it, of course,” Kurp said, “and laugh.”

So this is where I will repair to write and laugh. The model will be something like Permanent Morning, where the essayist Walter Kirn is able to write astonishing pieces like this. Perhaps everyone needs a place to reflect upon his experience without self-pity or even without always knowing the right thing to say.

LITERARY COMMENTARY

As of today, A Commonplace Blog will be succeeded by a new book blog hosted and sponsored by Commentary magazine. The new blog will be called Literary Commentary. This is its RSS feed.

Like this one, the new book blog will contain reviews of new books and reconsiderations of older books. It will contribute to Commentary magazine’s work of “tak[ing] inventory in and increase the storehouse of the best that has been thought and said.” Many of the same features will also be features of the new blog—book lists, the rediscovery of neglected writers, the careful dismantling of badly constructed literary reputations. A Commonplace Blog will continue to exist, but as an archive.

Literary Commentary will focus on the current literary scene. It will contain “news” of the book world, the publishing industry, the Republic of Letters. But more than anything, it will concentrate furiously—perhaps I should say pitilessly—on the question whether this book or that is any good.

Thank you with all my soul to the readers who have stuck with A Commonplace Blog till now. And I hope you will join me regularly in the activity of Literary Commentary. Again, you can subscribe to its RSS feed here.

UPDATE: Comments will be enabled at the Commentary site in a week or two.

UPDATE, II: Link fixed. (We didn’t like the original URL for the blog.)

#overrated

It’s the question that everyone has an answer to. What is the most overrated book of all time? The three titles most often cited are Ulysses, The Catcher in the Rye, and the Bible.

That was the case two years ago, when readers of A Commonplace Blog named their least favorites. And it was the case again yesterday, when fourteen writers and editors told Slate the books they didn’t really like. Elif Batuman and Daniel Mendelson both admitted to Ulysses, while Tom Perrotta and Jonathan Rosen came up with The Catcher in the Rye. Matt Weiland, a senior editor at Ecco, tried to be funny by offering the book of Genesis (“its style is so sloppy and varied it seems almost to have been written by committee”). Get it? Critical scholarship has changed our estimation of the Bible for all time! Ha ha.

The only real surprise was Francine Prose’s choice. (Prose continually surprises. That’s one mark of a writer worth following.) Beowulf was her choice. “I felt nothing when Beowulf was killed,” she said. “Mostly, I was grateful that the poem was almost over.” Far more interesting was why she was reading the Old English poem in the first place: for a course on representations of evil. Now there’s a reading list I’d like to have.

On Twitter afterwards, I added to the confusion by challenging friends and other writers to name their most overrated novel. John Podhoretz suggested A Farewell to Arms; Max Boot, The Naked and the Dead; Rachel Abrams, Everything Is Illuminated; David Harsanyi, Infinite Jest; Sam Schulman, The Death of Virgil (a book I suspect Schulman of having invented). More than one person offered One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children (“we already said One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Schulman complained). My own choice is well-documented.

But what’s the goal of the game? I believe in pricking overinflated reputations as much as the next critic, but too often the game can edge over into mockery and envy. The goal should be to encourage readers to put down bad books and pick up better ones—books that succeed where the overrated books fail. John Podhoretz recommended Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy Put Out More Flags (1942), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961) instead of Mailer’s Naked and the Dead. Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) is a better choice than One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In the end, though, what matters is the quarreling and the debate—the partisanship for some books and against others. Down with reading circles, book clubs, and bubbling uncritical enthusiasm for the latest reads!

The tyranny of suspense

Don’t know when exactly A Commonplace Blog will move into its new digs and hang out a new shingle. In the mean time, I need to get back to regular book blogging.

A couple of days ago Jonah Lehrer had a provocative squib in the Frontal Cortex, one of Wired’s science blogs. Lehrer reported the outcome of a study by two researchers at UC San Diego, who studied the effect of “spoilers” and concluded that “almost every single story, regardless of genre, was more pleasurable when prefaced with a spoiler.” Lehrer’s title summed up the results: “Spoilers don’t spoil anything.”

Lehrer goes on interestingly to speculate about the significance of the findings, but he misses the obvious. Namely: the research exposes the phoniness of suspense stories. Literature is not a game of suspense. We don’t read to find out what happened, but how—and how it could have ended differently.

In far too much bad fiction, suspense has replaced drama as the motive force of storytelling. There is, in fact, an entire subgenre of fiction dedicated to the ignorant error—“thrillers.” Suspense, however, is the sworn enemy of good fiction.

To create suspense is to induce anxiety—that is, to cause distress. And naturally, then, the craving is for relief. You read as quickly as possible to discover what happens, to allay your uneasiness, to release the tightness in your chest. The outcome is not a literary experience—literature is the freedom to dream up other possibilities—but the unpleasant feeling of being manipulated. Anxiety has a “coercive character,” Karen Horney says. So does suspense.

Why then the widespread lust for thrillers and the obsession (as Lehrer puts it) with avoiding spoilers? My guess is this. Suspense has filled the vacuum left by the abandonment of tragedy in modern literature. Lehrer points out that, “for thousands of years,” the stories that were widely told and widely enjoyed were “incredibly predictable, from the Greek tragedy to the Shakespearean wedding to the Hollywood happy ending.” (That’s quite a jump, from Shakespeare to Hollywood, passing over the novel without a word, but Lehrer’s subject is science, not literary history.) The latest research confirms the preferences of those thousand years, Lehrer says: “We like it best when the suspense is contained by the formulaic, when we never have to really worry about the death of the protagonist or the lovers in a romantic comedy.”

While he’s right about the worry—for reasons I’ve suggested—Lehrer is wrong about the containment. In fact, it’s just the opposite. (He’s also wrong about comedy, which still performs its traditional function.) What we like best is that things might turn out differently; Oedipus might not murder his father and marry his mother, or might not recognize that he has done so; Lear might not mistake a loving daughter for a hateful one. We are afraid for them—afraid that nothing can be done to avert their terrible tragedies—and we pity them when the worst befalls them. Lehrer is right that we usually know in advance what will happen. But how it happens—the accidental errors, the blown opportunities for repair, the avoidable recognitions—plays upon our emotions. The scuffle between inevitability and possibility, between containment and spillage, is the source of what used to be called the “tragic pleasure.”

(Romantic comedy operates on the same principle. As Lehrer says, the lovers’ coming together is “incredibly predictable.” The fun lies in the obstacles that hilariously delay the inevitable.)

By contrast, the resolution of a thriller is usually both pat and far-fetched. I don’t think I’ve ever read (or watched) a suspense story without feeling let down at the end. The difference lies in the emotions. Fear and pity are compliments to human freedom, to the possibility of change and variation in human stories; suspense and anxiety are the taxes paid by an impoverished culture of reading to the literary tyrant that occupies the throne once held by tragedy.

The end of the beginning

Several people have written—friends, readers, the morbidly curious—to ask when I am coming back, if A Commonplace Blog will resume normal operations, whether there is anything wrong.

The truth is that my twin sons and I returned from our five-thousand-mile cross-country trip several days ago. Until now I have written nothing about the trip, not so much because I am no kind of travel writer (although I am not), but because the inhuman beauty of the American Southwest reduced me to silence. According to the National Park Service, the Paiute Indians told the story that the weirdly shaped “hoodoos” in Bryce Canyon were formed when the Legend People, who were not people but huge animals that looked like people, were turned to stone. But no matter how much I squinted, I could not see what the Paiutes saw. The landscape stretching from the Mojave Desert, which the boys and I crossed on the old U.S. 66, north through the Grand Canyon and up past Capitol Reef National Park, seemed the perfect setting for a science-fiction movie on another planet. At a viewpoint overlooking Bryce Canyon, eighty-three hundred feet above sea level, a Dane pointed to the town in the distance and asked if I knew its name. “I want to retire there,” he said when I told him. But I couldn’t agree. I couldn’t imagine human life there. The sheer complexity of the geological history on display swallows up any thought of work or politics, makes humanistic speculation pointless.

Now that I am back home, though, I have a lot of work to do—reviews of Roland Merullo’s novel The Talk-Funny Girl, which I have been enthusiastically recommending to friends and family, in person and tweets, Ron Hansen’s retelling of the Snyder murder case, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, which disappointed me, and a stack of new novels by women—Jean Thompson, Ann Patchett, Dana Spiotta—to get to.

I have not been writing about them here, because next week A Commonplace Blog is migrating to a new host, a new venue. Although I can’t say anything more about the move right now, I am excited about it and the opportunities it will give me to reach a wider audience. Lecteurs fidèles! Just a few more days!

Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues

This evening marks the beginning of the two-day Jewish holiday of Shavuot, the “forgotten festival,” as Michael Carasik describes it at Jewish Ideas Daily. Early the next morning, I am loading my twin eight-year-old sons into the car for a month-long cross-country excursion (California beaches, Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon). Despite my better judgment, I have loaded up my Kindle with new novels. I’m traveling light. My blog will be in hibernation for the duration.

In July, when regular book-blogging resumes, you can expect a major announcement about the future and provenance of A Commonplace Blog. Until then, a short summer reading list of recent American and British fiction:

• David Bezmozgis, The Free World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, March). I am not convinced that Bezmozgis is nearly as promising a writer as his publicity would lead you to believe, but his first novel—part of a new wave of immigrant fiction in America—is readable and intrinsically interesting. The inter-generational friction between an old Communist Party official and his son, trained by Western culture to pursue sensual adventure, is nicely done. The Jewish stuff, not so much. A good “case,” though.

• Jim Krusoe, Toward You (Tin House Books, March). For those who read Charles Willeford’s Shark-Infested Custard on my recommendation and liked it, another memorable amoralist with an unforgettable voice. The death of a stray dog leads a man to confront his mistakes (not that he cares).

• Linda Grant, We Had It So Good (Scribner, April). The author of When I Lived in Modern Times returns with her fifth novel. In the same vein as Zoë Heller’s Believers, Grant’s energetically written novel follows the lives of a couple from the Flower Generation as they age into a realistic appraisal of their times.

• Bharati Mukherjee, Miss New India (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May). Mukherjee’s eighth novel is not her best, by any means. (Jasmine [1989] holds that honor.) But her latest returns to the theme that Mukherjee has copyrighted—the bloody cultural crossroads between traditional and new India. Here she takes on the rise of the great Anglophone country to which America “outsources” so many of its customer-service jobs that the very idea has become the source of humor. Mukherjee does not play for laughs, although her touch is light and humorous.

• Francine Prose, My New American Life (Harper Collins, May). Like her fifth novel, Household Saints (1981), her latest is completely foreign to Prose’s personal experience. This time around she tells the story of an Albanian immigrant. Her ventriloquy does not make for her best writing, but anything by Francine Prose is better than almost anything by almost any other American novelist now writing.

Enjoy your summer, everyone! Talk to you again in July.

Memorial Day is not victims’ day

Over at Contentions, I reflect upon Memorial Day by contrasting Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” to Robert Lowell’s thirty-years-later “For the Union Dead.” Twenty years in the South elevated Tate above Lowell in my estimation.

The books we never abandon

Cross-posted from Contentions.

“[T]he end of the physical book may be coming hard upon us faster than anyone ever anticipated,” John Podhoretz warns, reporting the news that Amazon now sells more digitalized Kindle-friendly texts than hardbacks and paperbacks combined.

I remain skeptical that the codex, the paper-and-binding book, will disappear completely. For two reasons. First, there is a distinction between books that are consumed and never returned to—consumer books—and books that are collected, treasured, preserved from destruction. If nothing else, there is the Bible. For someone like me, who taught for two decades in the South, it is hard to imagine Christians abandoning their favorite Bible—the one they read at night, the one they carry to church—for an electronic copy. For many Christians, the first Bible is a major event in their lives. (For Jewish children, the equivalent is receiving their first siddur or prayerbook.) The book is often presented to them in a public ceremony, engraved in gold with their name. (Can you even inscribe a Kindle copy?)

But not only Bibles. Every reader has books that are special to him. Randall Jarrell used to say that he owned several copies of Christina Stead’s Man Who Loved Children (1940), because he so loved the novel that he pressed it upon friends (and friends never return books). Books to be used up and discarded—bestselling fiction, self-improvement guides, popular biographies, books on current affairs—belong nowhere else but on the Kindle. There is, however, another class of books altogether.

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and far more often) worth reading at the age of fifty,” C. S. Lewis said. And that brings me to my second reason for doubting the final disappearance of the “physical book.” Namely, children don’t learn to read on the Kindle, but from the pages that they turn excitedly with their parents. “Talk to it, Daddy,” my son Saul used to say when I opened a book to start reading aloud. When he grew older, he began to acquire his own first books—fine printed editions of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The House at Pooh Corner—which he would proudly take to preschool with him, even though he could not even read them.

“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only,” Lewis also said. I am willing to grant that “literary” readers have always been and will remain a minority, but trained in childhood to love the physical qualities of print on paper, the minority will always insist on a few bound books.

Update: The three-way debate on the question “That ebooks spell the end for ‘physical books’ ” was carried on much of the day on Twitter with John Podhoretz and Terry Teachout for the affirmative and me for the negative. Teachout believes the ebook will have entirely replaced the codex in five years, by which time paper-and-binding volumes will be, in Podhoretz’s words, “luxury items.” God willing, we will all live, as Teachout says, to see who’s right.

The Contentions post above started the free-for-all. I’d like to add only one thing to it. As a literary scholar, I too subscribe to the electronic textualists’ motto “Search Is Everything,” and it is undeniable that etexts are easy to search, but I am not convinced that the gain in speed and convenience is not overbalanced by another kind of loss.

Here is a small example of what I mean. Searching for the quotation from Lewis with which I end the post above, I stumbled upon the earlier sentence about books read at ten and again at fifty. Far more elegantly than I, Lewis makes my point about the books a person returns to again and again; and those books, I remain convinced, will be in tangible form for a long time to come.

Using a search-and-find function on an extext, I would have found the one Lewis quotation and not the other. Because I had to thumb an old copy of Of Other Worlds on my bookshelves, I accidentally found a sentence that deepened my own thought. In a single anecdote, that for me is the advantage of the codex over the extext.

Update, II: John Steele Gordon, another COMMENTARY contributor, weighs in here. On my side, more or less.

Black discs and retrieval machines

Even my conservative friends are enamored of the argument that books are going the way of the vinyl LP. (True, the vinyl LP was introduced in 1926 and largely replaced by the compact disc in the mid to late ’eighties—a history of sixty years—while the codex appeared in the first century C.E., giving it a history of two thousand years. But, hey, technology marches on!)

Replying to my argument that the “physical book” (as he prefers to call it) will not be entirely replaced by digitalized texts for the Kindle and iPad, John Podhoretz alludes to the size of my own personal library, and reassures me: “Don’t worry; the fact that new books will no longer be printed except in the way that, say, new vinyl records are still released for high-end stereo fans will make your own collection far more valuable over time.”

Terry Teachout joins in. He says that John is right. “One generation from now,” he predicts, “the physical book will be for antique collectors only—like black discs.” In a later tweet, he adds: “[T]he same pattern of technological adoption has taken place repeatedly over the past quarter-century.” My problem, he says, is that I am “confusing the container with the thing contained.”

I don’t think so. Several years ago, in an essay on Holocaust writing in Comparative Literature, I began by contesting a bedrock presupposition of serious and thoughtful readers like Teachout:

The study of literature is widely presupposed to be the interpretation of texts. As an object a book can sit around for years, resting comfortably on a library shelf, but as a text it does not exist at all unless it is read, interpreted, understood. A book is printed and bound; a text is worded and meant. The problem, then, is to discover the meaning beneath the words.What Holocaust writing teaches us, I argued in dissent, is that a “literary text makes a claim on its readers that is logically prior to meaning.” And what is that claim? The claim of a person.

Much mischief is caused by disembodying a text from the person who created it. And something similar, I think, is happening among those who prematurely celebrate the “end of books.” The mistake in both cases is to disregard the materiality of reading.

Although I have advanced this argument before, I have been hesitant to make it the centerpiece of my case against electronic texts, because it relies upon empirical research—and not enough research has been conducted into the effect of different reading platforms upon understanding, retention, the ability to immerse oneself in a text. What research there is, however, suggests that print enjoys certain advantages over electronic media. Anne Mangen, a reading researcher at Norway’s University of Stavanger, has found that the “phenomenology of reading intangible text” suffers by comparison to reading from a printed-and-bound book. She writes:The tactility of a mouse click, of touch screen page turning or of a click with the e-book page turner bar, is very different from that of flicking through the print pages of a book. The feeling of literally being in touch with the text is lost when your actions—clicking with the mouse, pointing on touch screens or scrolling with keys or on touch pads—take place at a distance from the digital text, which is, somehow, somewhere inside the computer, the e-book, or the mobile phone.Because the printed text is tangible, “physically, tactiley graspable,” as Mangen puts it, the difference in reading is enormous. While we scan the text on a screen, we read a paper-and-binding book with our hands and fingers in addition to our eyes. Reading, Mangen observes, requires manual dexterity. It is not merely an activity of mind.[1]

Every parent knows this. Children fall in love with books as physical objects long before they experience them as meaningful texts. As I have noticed before, children’s books celebrate their materiality: there are board books, touch-and-feel books, lift-the-flap books, pop-up books, musical-sound books. These are not the precursors to hypertext; they are early training in the handling of books. Or, as Mangen says with rather more scholarly rigor, they are reminders that reading is a multi-sensory experience.

Older readers know this too. Reading a book requires intense concentration, but it also leaves a physical memory. We recall a passage as falling on a left- or right-hand page, at the top or bottom or in the middle. We thumb the remaining pages and place an incident or argument in a spatial context, not just in time. The multi-sensory aspect of reading a book is an aid to memory, just as language instructors (who teach their students to write and read and speak and listen and pick up objects while translating their name) have always suspected.

And not merely “older readers” in the sense of having grown up in pre-Kindle days. In a recent survey by the Book Industry Group, nearly seventy-five percent of college students—the same youngsters who started using cell phones and iPods from an early age—said they prefer to study textbooks in print rather than on a screen. They too must share the intuition that reading a “physical book” gives them a better chance to understand, retain, and immerse themselves in their reading.

Books are nothing like vinyl LP’s. In reality, the black discs differ only marginally from compact discs or even MP3 files. What Podhoretz and Teachout overlook in their joyful analogy is that the different media simply require different retrieval machines. The hardware has changed—from “high-end stereo equipment” to CD players to iPods and iTunes—but the fundamental mechanism of playback is unaltered.

Indeed, technological progress has made retrieval of the music on the earlier formats increasingly burdensome. I own about a hundred vinyl LP’s that have never been rereleased in another format, but I no longer own a turntable. Without the right machine, I have no way of getting to that music. (I wonder too if Teachout himself has not confused the music with the performance. I’d be eager to learn how scores are being treated in the electronic age.)

At all events, this is a problem that I have worried about when it comes to ebooks, and despite reassurances, I remain worried. Perhaps it is only my personal experience—I am an Orthodox Jew who cannot use electronic devices on Saturday, and I lived through Hurricane Ike and the sixteen-day power outage that followed—but I don’t think it is outside possibility that the loss of a retrieval machine could mean the permanent loss of a text.

But a paper-and-binding book requires no retrieval machine beyond a human being, who reads it with his whole person. The end of mankind’s two-thousand-year adventure with books might be of concern, then, to more than book collectors.
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[1] Ann Mangen, “Hypertext Fiction Reading: Haptics and Immersion,” Journal of Research in Reading 31 (2008): 404–19.

Philip Roth and the politics of literary prizes

Cross-posted from Contentions.

The American novelist Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International Prize, a British award handed out every other year for a writer’s entire body of work. Now, literary prizes are nothing more than a means to sell books; only fools confuse them with the recognition of literary merit. There is no shortage of fools in the Republic of Letters, however.

Plans are under way in Australia, for example, to engender a down-under version of Britain’s Orange Prize for fiction by women. Not that the prize itself should be sneered at. The Orange Prize has done what it was intended to do, bringing attention to terrific novels like Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Marilynne Robinson’s Home, and Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times. Perhaps the Australian prize will have similar good luck.

No, what is foolish are the reasons given for the prize. “What we are concerned with is the systemic exclusion of women writers over several decades,” the novelist Sophie Cunningham told the Guardian. The very idea that the literary marketplace is capable of a system of any kind is crack-brained. Nor is it immediately obvious why publishers would tolerate the “systemic exclusion” of books that appeal to at least half the reading public (and probably, given women’s reading habits, far more than half). Nevertheless, Cunningham went on to say that the new Australian women’s prize would not be needed “if writing by women was rewarded and valued on its own terms, with equal merit to the way that work written by men is.”

All the women’s prizes in the world will not change the fact that literary merit is not equal, nor is it assigned by sex. Those who seem to be calling for a Title IX regime in literature, where praise and prizes and even book recommendations must be split 50-50 between men and women, are not really interested in literature. For them, literature is merely the jurisdiction in which they happen to seek power and privilege.

Such a person is Carmen Callil, the British publisher who founded Virago Press in 1973. Declaring that she does not “rate him as a writer at all,” Callil quit the Man Booker International Prize jury in a huff when it became clear that the other two judges would not bend to her will and award the prize to someone else than Philip Roth. “Emperor’s clothes,” she sniffed. “In 20 years’ time will anyone read him?”

Whether anyone reads Roth in 20 years will not be decided by a literary prize. Perhaps what will decide the question—and perhaps what her colleagues wished to honor Roth for—is the very commitment to literature that Callil rejects so bitterly. In a career that began 53-and-a-half years ago with the story “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” in COMMENTARY, Roth has exemplified what I have elsewhere called the moral obligation to write well, which distinguishes the great writer.

Not the end of books

Over at Contentions John Podhoretz warns that “the end of the physical book may be coming hard upon us faster than anyone ever anticipated.” I don’t think so.

Defending Philip Roth

Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International Prize, and a judge on the prize jury has quit in a huff. “Emperor’s clothes,” says Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago Press. “In 20 years’ time will anyone read him?”

I try to answer her question here.

The paradoxical politics of creative writing

Note: Blogger went down some time on Thursday, May 12th, taking down everything posted since the previous evening along with it. To date the missing posts have not been restored. So I am republishing my little essay on the politics of creative writing. And I’ve used the occasion to add a sentence or two.

It took him eight months, but Wednesday in the Los Angeles Review of Books Mark McGurl finally replied in print to Elif Batuman’s widely read onslaught against academic creative writing, “Get a Real Degree,” which appeared in last September’s London Review of Books. As McGurl puts it, Batuman “unloads as many charges against the discipline of creative writing as one can easily pack into 8000-plus words. . . .” But he isn’t particularly exercised by her critique. After all, Batuman writes from the perspective, he says, of a “cultural conservative, reanimating a whole herd of dead horses from the 1980s Culture Wars, when the right began a long, twilight struggle against the ‘tenured radicals’ of the university.”

I’m not at all sure that any such description of Batuman is accurate, and I am more than sure that she herself would find it off-target. One minute McGurl is criticizing her “snarky slurs” against Beloved, the very next minute he is calling her literary journalism’s Ann Coulter. Snark is, like, acceptable only when it comes from one side of the political aisle? When an academic wishes to dismiss a writer from serious consideration, he calls her a right-winger.

Over at The Suburban Ecstasies, Seth Abramson does a good job of exposing McGurl’s errors “great and small” (and says some nice things about me), but he merely hints at the political incoherence of McGurl’s critique.

The incoherence comes through most clearly when McGurl interrogates Batuman’s claim that “Literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical.” In reply, McGurl repeats the word democracy several times, as if that will do the trick. Creative writing’s ambition to establish an “aesthetic democracy” can sometimes seem like a “sentimental gesture,” he allows, but it really is a noble ambition. While her elitism would confine most Americans who might otherwise prefer the writing life to “working at the register,” Batuman is not troubled by such economic conditions. According to McGurl, she feels “only contempt for those who have dared to think and act otherwise, in case a more democratic culture turns out to be possible.” (By contrast, his own contempt for commerce is so deeply embedded into his thinking that he barely notices it.) Still, the two of them have something in common:

As even Batuman concedes, creative writing represents something “wonderful about America,” though I don’t think, as she does, that it’s the idea that that “all forms and conditions can be reinvented from scratch.” That sounds good, but in practice it is so often a sadistic or self-loathing desire. Rather, I think the best thing about America is the idea of democracy upon which it was imperfectly founded, and I’m happy to see any signs, however conflicted, that we can still imagine, and even facilitate, greater social access to the high pleasures of excellent writing.McGurl is a canny and profoundly learned scholar; I’m a bit embarrassed for him that he would carelessly repeat such phrases without any recognition of their historical provenance. (It also never occurs to him that the difference between them on what is most wonderful about this country may owe more to differences in personal circumstance than politics: Batuman is the daughter of Turkish immigrants, who must have reinvented themselves from scratch in America.) Nevertheless, the politics on display here derives from the same source as creative writing itself. Both are classic expressions of American progressivism.

Although he knows it very well, McGurl did not write The Elephants Teach; I did. He can’t be expected to overhear the echoes of creative writing’s progressive origins, which I detail in Chapter 5 (“The Sudden Adoption of Creative Work”), as readily as I do. Hughes Mearns, a progressive educator who founded it as a school subject, conceived of creative writing as a progressive reform along the same political lines as the enactment of child-labor laws and the uprooting of municipal corruption. His plan was to democratize literary culture—to make it more responsive to more people—because Mearns was every inch the anti-elitist. In an article written for the Saturday Evening Post in 1912, Mearns ridiculed the elitist attitude toward culture:Culture is an incommunicable communion with Nature; it is clean hands and a pure collar; it is the possession of great-grandparents—white, Christian pre­ferred; it is the achievement of tolerance; it is the proper use of “shall” and “will”; it is a knowledge of Hegelian philosophy; it is Greek; it is Latin; it is a five-foot shelf of books; it is twenty thousand a year; it is a sight of truth and a draught of wisdom; it is a frock coat and pearl gloves. . . . No one ever saw it; it cannot be measured or chemically analyzed; the fellow that claims it loudest never has had it; the chap that really has it never mentions the matter; and it can be obtained only by a studious cultivation of one kind of education—my kind!As I have pointed out before, scholars routinely get creative writing wrong through ignorance or neglect of its original conception as a progressive school reform. To treat it as an epiphenomenon of American higher education—as even Batuman does—is to grab a shovel to hammer a board.

Progressivism is encoded in creative writing’s DNA. What is more, this progressive legacy also explains what is at issue in the debate between McGurl and Batuman, and why neither has achieved a victory over the other. Both democracy and elitism belong to the progressive inheritance—their mismatch, as Peter Berkowitz wrote recently in a brilliant analysis in the Policy Review, “reflects an enduring paradox with deep roots in the progressive tradition.” On the one hand, American progressives espoused democratic reforms; on the other hand, these reforms were formulated and installed by an undemocratic elite—the progressive reformers themselves—sometimes against the will of the people. Berkowitz goes further:The paradox of American progressivism, old and new, is rooted in the gap between its professed devotion to democracy, or the idea that the people legitimately rule, and its belief that democracy consists in a set of policies independent of what the people want. The paradox may not inhere in every single progressive utterance or program, but it typifies progressivism as a whole. It certainly receives expression in the disjunction between official progressive aims. On the one hand, progressives proclaim their intention to democratize American politics by making it more responsive to the will of the people and giving the people greater say in government. On the other hand, progressives favor the steady enlargement of the national government’s responsibilities, which increases the distance between the people and government, while supporting the expansion of an educated administrative elite, which reduces government’s accountability to the people.This account will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has eavesdropped on the debates over creative writing. The positions have changed little over the years. As I described them fifteen years ago:On one side are those who blame [creative writing] for an astonishing array of ills: the collapse of literary standards; an overproduction of homogeneously bad writing, the decadence of the age. . . . On the other side are those who defend creative writing as a democratization of culture and a happy awakening of interest in literature and the literary life.If, however, creative writing is recognized as an institutional representation of the paradoxical politics of progressivism, the debates begin to seem beside the question. Suddenly metaphors like Donald Justice’s “pyramid scheme” (quoted in my book) or McGurl’s “Ponzi scheme” begin to seem shrugging guesses; the expansion of an educated administrative elite, enlarging its turf from coast to coast, accounts for the amazing boom in graduate writers workshops over the past half century. And except when they are advanced to justify what Batuman calls “writing being produced in a knowledge vacuum”—progressive aims explain the knowledge vacuum—the democratic slogans of the nationalized bureaucracy that staffs America’s creative writing programs can be seen for what they are. Namely, rhetorical cover for their own privilege.

Literary writing may or may not be inherently elitist, but the creative writing faculty sure is.

When I Lived in Modern Times

The British novelist Linda Grant is in the States today to tout her new novel We Had It So Good, but with her royal-wedding tweets still chirping in my ears (see here and here and here and here and here and here), I returned to the novel that first caused me to fall in love with the sound of her voice. When I Lived in Modern Times (London: Granta, 2000) was Grant’s second novel (she has now written five). It won the Orange Prize in 2001 for the best work of fiction by a woman, which is the only reason that it came to my attention. I was teaching my annual course on the contemporary novel at Texas A&M University. Every year I would assign the previous year’s award winners. The reading list for spring semester 2002 included Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Pulitzer Prize), Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin (Man Booker Prize), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (James Tait Black Memorial Prize), Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (Governor General’s Award), Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (Whitbread Prize), and Philip Roth’s Human Stain (PEN/Faulkner Award). I later included three of those titles on my roll of the decade’s best English-language fiction, but my favorite was When I Lived in Modern Times.

Grant’s subject is the “great transformation” that occurs in the months after the end of the Second World War—“the world itself,” she writes, “was metamorphosing into something else. . . .” Evelyn Sert, the twenty-year-old daughter of a single Jewish mother—her grandparents emigrated to Great Britain from Latvia—decides to journey to British Mandate Palestine. She is filled with the spirit of Zionism (“Only the birth of our own country can avenge the death of six million,” she cries. “That’s the resurrection”). But the truth is that her mother’s death leaves her feeling even more homeless than before:

Inside my head the kings and queens of England were stacked like pancakes in chronological order going back to the Wars of the Roses but no one I was related to had ever set foot on English soil until forty-five years ago. What could an immigrant child be, except an impersonator? I felt like a double agent, a fifth columnist. And I knew that as long as I lived in this country it would always be the same. I walked among them and they thought they knew me, but they understood nothing at all. It was me that understood, the spy in their midst.Perhaps if she had been a third-generation Jew in America, where everyone feels like a double agent—these days, even the WASP’s—Evelyn might not have felt so out of place. But she knows better. “I was a Jewish child in a country where, unlike America, there was no contribution I could make to the forging of the national identity,” she sighs. “It was fixed already, centuries ago.”

And so to Palestine. Evelyn enters the country illegally, lying to a customs agent that she is a Christian tourist, not a Jewish settler. Her surname is “odd” because her father was from “the Outer Hebrides.” At the Jewish Agency, Evelyn is less successful at passing herself off as something she is not. She has come to build the new Jewish state, she announces; but she has neither military nor agricultural experience; nor has she studied engineering, nor architecture. She is not totally useless, she protests. She is a hairdresser! She gets a laugh and is packed off to a kibbutz.

On the kibbutz she is introduced to sex and hard labor, but she remains a city girl at heart. She misses the chaos of urban life. After a few weeks she leaves for the “white city” of Tel Aviv—“a new Berlin,” as a German Jew later says to her, “a city for the masses and for the intellectuals, where we would build a modern life for ourselves.” Evelyn arrives on the back of a motorcycle belonging to a demobilized British soldier, a native-born Jerusalemite named Levi Aharoni. “But since your Hebrew isn’t so good, and we’re going to be talking in English,” he says, “you can call me Johnny.” He joined the British army to fight fascism, but now that the British have become the enemy of Jewish immigration, Johnny has joined the Irgun, the military wing of the Revionist Zionist movement.

Before she learns this much about him, Evelyn becomes Johnny’s lover. In the mean time, she finds an apartment and a job as a hairdresser, introducing the wives of British colonial officers to the newest styles. Recognized by one of them as the Christian tourist who came over with her on the same boat, Evelyn dyes her hair blonde and takes on a new identity. She becomes Priscilla Jones, married to a soldier posted to Tiberias. As a British policeman complains to her about Palestine, “It’s the worst bloody place for getting people’s identities straight.” Johnny sees her value as a “spy in their midst,” and manufactures a false passport in the name of Priscilla Jones. Information that she passes on enables the Irgun to kidnap a British official.

Thus she enters “the dark center of our struggle against the colonial masters.” The Irgun bombs the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. And Evelyn is whisked to safety underground before the British can arrest her. Johnny is not so lucky. Implicated in the deaths of twenty, he is arrested and quickly convicted and sentenced to death—one of the olei hagardom to be hanged under British rule. Evelyn is suddenly not so excited to be “moving through history.” As the British begin to withdraw from Palestine, she realizes that “Priscilla Jones would have to be folded up and put away,” but with the arrest of Johnny, she realizes that she has no clear and distinct Palestinian individuality either. “The British imperial identity was disintegrating in front of us, the new Jewish one was being born,” she says, “but I was nameless and invisible and my little ego couldn’t bear it.”

Just days before Johnny’s arrest, she had resolved:Whatever happened, I would never leave Palestine, this strange, violent, mixed-up place where things were not always pleasant, indeed rarely so. Where people’s manners were bad and they spoke roughly, but to the point. Where everyone came from somewhere else and everyone had a story to tell and these stories were not always inspiring or lovely. Where life was chaotic, because that is what life is. Where the past was murky and tragic and the future had to be grasped by the throat. Where Europe ended and the East began and people tried to live inside that particular, crazy contradiction.But in the end, she is unable to do so. Evelyn is swept up in the British counter-exodus and borne back to the country of her birth. She leaves Palestine just as the Jews are taking command of their own history and their own political fate. She understands what is happening, even if the British evacuees do not: “They’ve been Jews for absolutely centuries,” one says to her, “and most of that has been spent in exile, one way or another. Why do they want to change their tune now?”

There is perhaps no better book for explaining why—and for recreating the terror and exhilaration of the British Mandate’s final days—than Linda Grant’s brilliant and absorbing When I Lived in Modern Times.