“Experience of the text”

The condition of literary texts—their mode of existence, to use a phrase from Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature—is treated by critics and theorists alike as a non-problem. Daniel Green, for example, dismisses the problem, relying upon his “experience of the text” to see him through.

The philosopher Kendall Walton says something, in passing, that shows why the experience of the text will be an unsteady foundation for judgment, unless the critic inquires into the condition of the text:

When the entirety of a work is to be attributed to a single narrator, what he says or writes is all we have to go on. We cannot run background checks on his character or verify independently what he tells us.[1]What this breezy confidence leaves out of account is the possibility of human error.

Early in Chapter 16 of his Adventures, for example, Huck Finn says that he and Jim “talked about Cairo, and wondered whether we would know it when we got to it.” Worried that they won’t, they hit upon a plan. Huck would “paddle ashore the first time a light showed, and tell them pap was behind, and was a green hand at the business, and wanted to know how far it was to Cairo.” They smoke on it, and wait. The next paragraph begins like this: “There wasn’t nothing to do, now, but to look out sharp for the town, and not pass it without seeing it.”

What became of the plan to paddle ashore? According to Walton, falling back upon the presupposition of the integral text, its precipitate disappearance is attributed to the narrator:If it is fictional that the narrator is honest, intelligent, and knowledgable, that and the fact that fictionally he asserts such and such are likely to imply that fictionally such and such is the case. If fictionally he is confused, ignorant, or a liar, these implications may not go through. (p. 360)So the plan’s disappearance might be chalked up to his unreliability as a narrator (on his own testimony, Huck tells “stretchers”), or perhaps, in the hands of an adept interpreter, it can serve as evidence of his ambivalence over helping a slave to flee—and then the implication is that Huck tricked Jim, saying one thing and doing another.

The truth is less attractive. “This nonsense was created,” Hershel Parker points out, “when Mark Twain agreed to drop, from between the two paragraphs, the raftsman episode, which contained the reason for the decision not to ask anyone else but just to watch out for the town.”[2] Despite what Walton says, in other words, a “background check” can be run—on the condition of the text.

If the “experience of the text” is all that a critic has to go on, how can he be sure that he is not experiencing a screw-up as “literary art”?

Update: He can’t.
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[1] Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 359. Emphasis in original. Further reference in parentheses.

[2] Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1984), p. 4.

The Never-Ending Journey

“The Never-Ending Journey,” my review-essay on Lionel Trilling in the September issue of Commentary, leads the New Books list at Arts & Letters Daily this morning, and is now available in full at the magazine’s web site.

Message and technique

Explaining why Madame Bovary was a scandal to French readers in 1857 but not to moderns, Kenneth Burke says that “we demand technique where they inclined to content themselves with ‘message.’ ”[1] In recent days, I have unexpectedly found myself in sympathy with Flaubert’s contemporary French readers. My strongest literary convictions have been unsettled by the evidence of Gordon Lish’s mucking with Raymond Carver’s fiction, even though Mark McGurl says in The Program Era that the “controversy surrounding Lish’s editorship” has been “considerably overblown.”[2]

I am not sure whether McGurl means that the extent of Lish’s mucking has been overblown or that the consequences for criticism are overblown, no matter how extensive Lish’s mucking. In either case, McGurl is wrong, I think. Lish’s revisions were deep and pervasive; they were sufficient, as I have argued, to damage or destroy several of Carver’s stories.

But the consequences for criticism are what really exercise me. What Lish’s mucking calls into question is the basic presupposition of literary analysis since the rise and flowering of the New Criticism—that is, the assumption that the literary text is an integer. Even deconstructionist criticism, which seeks to demonstrate the incoherence of a text, despite the author’s best efforts to submit it to his discipline, assumes that the published text, quoted against itself by them, has an integrity of intention: the incoherences they trumpet are not accidents of the publication process, but have been inserted into the text, on purpose, by an author who wants to reduce his work to a unified whole. An incoherence that results from the cross-purposes of author and editor does nothing whatever to establish or confirm the larger deconstructive claim that literary texts are unsuccessful attempts by a powerful ideology to subdue the inconvenient facts of the world.

For three generations, academic literary critics have been trained to handle the text as a woven tissue, which is all of a piece. Sometimes the assumption makes it possible for scholars to correct errors, as when J. V. Cunningham shows that Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress is not a “succession of images,” as T. S. Eliot would have it, but a logical syllogism; or when, later in the same essay, he restores Nashe’s original wording of a line in Summer’s Last Will and Testament, which Stephen Daedalus had misread in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with “trembling joy.”[3]

More often, though, the errors are taken as established fact, because literary critics are not taught to raise questions about the provenance and authority of the texts in their hands. Everything about their professional training and status encourages them to rush to interpretation. It makes no difference to them whether Raymond Carver’s stories, in the published form with which critics are familiar, are the record of Carver’s thinking or a joint product of Carver’s drafts and Lish’s revisions. The condition of the text does not alter their responsibility to interpret it, nor does it leave critics with no option but to adopt new methods. By definition, any doubts about the condition of the text are considerably overblown.

Even when they believe themselves to be discussing a text’s meaning, then, literary critics are really examining technique, the evidence of its weaving (or its unraveling, if their allegiances are deconstructionist). Although McGurl argues that The Program Era succeeded and replaced “the Pound era” in American literature, and though he points to creative writing with its “prideful attention to ‘craft’ ” as the cause, the truth is that the demand for technique—that is, craft—is what links the program era to the Pound era. Hugh Kenner, whose 1971 magnum opus gave McGurl his name for the earlier era, wrote that modernist literary texts are “self-similar” or “scaling objects,” terms derived from Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractal geometry. That is, great texts are fractals—“works with something of interest to offer at varying scales of attention.” Their larger design is reproduced in their smallest details. The whole is implied in the parts.[4]

Here is the apotheosis of technique, the prideful attention to craft. But what if literary texts (or at least a significant number of them) are not self-similar tissues of self-consistent details, but something looser, more informal, perhaps even more extemporaneous? An endeavor not to design something, but to say something? What if a novel or even a poem is not a verbal icon, but a voluble discourse? What if the most important thing about a literary work, in short, is not its technique, but its message?

At a stroke, textual errors become of deeper concern, because the problem is to make certain that you are getting the author’s message straight. At the same time, however, it becomes less pressing to settle upon an authoritative text, reflecting the author’s ultimate intention, because it is no longer the perfection of technique, the scaling of design, that is at issue—but what the author is trying to say.

The controversy over Carver’s stories has begun to convince me that literary criticism took a wrong turn some time ago, and needs to start paying less attention to texts and more attention to authors, which would mean (among other things) listening to what they have to say.
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[1] Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement [1931] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 59–60.

[2] Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 446n.

[3] J. V. Cunningham, “Logic and Lyric,” in The Collected Essays (Chicago: Swallow, 1976), pp. 162–79.

[4] Hugh Kenner, “Self-Similarity, Fractals, Cantos,” in Historical Fictions (San Francisco: North Point, 1990), pp. 317–27.

Turning left

I have decided to become a Leftist. There really was no other choice. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.

If you are publicly identified as a conservative, racist remarks will be invented for you, or homophobic views will be fabricated out of thin air, should you fail to provide the necessary evidence of your own depravity. That the accusations are false is utterly beside the question—no one will ever call foul—because, after all, the invented remarks and fabricated views are perfectly congruous with the image your opponents have of you. So much more fun to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the inventors and fabricators, who can revive McCarthyism—and from the Left this time around—without cost to themselves.

Count me in, then. I am now a proud member of the Left. Since conservatives do not attribute unstated views to those they oppose, I can write with a clear conscience from now on. Only what I actually say will be held against me. To be washed clean of all my secret unspoken racism and homophobia! I feel reborn!

I recommend that anyone else who stupidly remains on the Right, knowing he cannot even propose to make a cash investment without public outcry, join me in crossing over to the ranks of the righteous and inventive. From now on you know where to find me—on the Left.

The Humbling

Philip Roth, The Humbling (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). 140 pp. $22.00.

Has Philip Roth decided that The Plot against America will be his last big ambitious novel? In the five years since it was published, he has written four small books, bidding farewell to Newark (Everyman), tying up loose ends (Exit Ghost, the last of the Zuckerman novels), and dilating on old subjects (Indignation). His latest, the twenty-sixth novel of Roth’s career, is little more than a novella—the sketch, drawn in quick strokes, of an actor who is humbled by his losses.

Sexual impotence, Roth says in The Counterlife, is “like an artist’s artistic life drying up for good.” In The Humbling, he reverses tenor and vehicle. At sixty-five, Simon Axler abruptly finds that his acting ability has deserted him; his “magic” is gone. He presses, he is wooden; no matter what the role, it feels wrong, alien. Asked to play Macbeth at the Kennedy Center, he fails appallingly; even those who do not see his performance say so. “No, they don’t even have to have been there,” Axler says, “to insult you.” Known as “the last of the best of the classical American stage actors,” he plummets into despair. His wife, a onetime ballerina, formerly Ballanchine’s favorite, leaves him; he checks himself into a psychiatric hospital for twenty-eight days. When he returns home, his agent seeks him out to tell him of an offer to play James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night. He believes that it’s a matter of confidence. “No, it’s a matter of falseness,” Axler replies, “sheer falseness so pervasive that all I can do is stand on the stage and tell the audience, ‘I’m a liar. And I can’t even lie well. I am a fraud.’ ”

Axler is not a method actor. As a young man of twenty-two he landed his first New York part before he had ever taken an acting class. On stage he riveted the attention; in class he was rotten. He was no good at exercises. “Everything I did well was coming out of instinct,” he says, but the famous “method” of Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio (“create a reality for yourself to step into,” as Axler summarizes it) made him feel ridiculous. Pretending to drink tea from a pretend teacup, he would hear

a sly voice inside me saying, “There is no teacup.” Well, that sly voice has now taken over. No matter how I prepare and what I attempt to do, once I am on the stage there is that sly voice all the time—“There is no teacup.” . . . [I]t’s over: I can no longer make a play real for people. I can no longer make a role real for myself.It never occurs to him to become a teacher. What Axler has cannot be taught. To control it by means of reflection is to destroy it. He is like Plato’s Ion, the first link in a chain of the inspired.

The Humbling is a three-act drama. Act I chronicles the disappearance of Axler’s talent “Into Thin Air.” Act II is “The Transformation.” A forty-year-old lesbian, the daughter of friends from his youth, enters his life and becomes his lover. Named after “the strong-minded barmaid” in Playboy of the Western World, Pegeen Mike Stapleford pulls him from the slough of despond. Lithe, full-breasted, “with something of the child still in her smile,” she has recently escaped a six-year liaison with a professor at Montana State who decided “to have her breasts surgically removed and become a man.” Pegeen flees to a teaching job in Vermont, and drives across the state line into rural New York one afternoon to track Axler down. When he asks why, she says, “I wanted to see if anybody was with you.” “And when you saw?” “I thought, Why not me?”

They are together for seven months. During that time, Axler transforms Pegeen from a tomboy with cropped mannish hair and the gait of a sixteen-year-old. He buys her new jewelry, flattering new clothes, luxurious lingerie; he pays to have her hair styled by an expensive hairdresser in Manhattan, giving her a “cared-for devil-may-care air of slight dishevelment.” The transformation is so complete that Axler stops asking questions about their age difference, the gulf in their sexual histories, her parents’ reaction, their future.

He should have asked. Act III is “The Last Act.” Pegeen’s parents disapprove of the affair; they find it “wacky and ill advised”; her father suggests that Pegeen is “starstruck” by Axler’s fame, and promises to bring pressure upon her to end things. Eventually, she does just that—but not before, like Portnoy and the Monkey in Rome, the two of them pick up another woman for a night of three-way debauchery. Unlike the Monkey, she does not accuse Axler of degrading her, but two weeks later Pegeen announces that she made a mistake; a connection with Axler is not what she wants. “I wanted so much to see if I could do it,” she confesses. If for her it was an experiment in heterosexuality, for him the love affair was, she weeps, a substitute for his acting. Disgusted at the accusation, Axler tells her to go.

The truth is rather different. Axler creates a reality for Pegeen to step into, and obligingly she does. She plays Galatea to his Pygmalion, but in the end she finds, like Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle, that she cannot prolong the charade any longer. “I’m a slave,” Eliza cries, “for all my fine clothes.” Axler wants from Pegeen pretty much the same thing that Higgins wants from Eliza: he never thinks of anything else but making something of her. He is, to use Eliza’s words again, a bully and a cruel tyrant—or, rather, the theater is. Although Axler, admitting finally that the failure was his, feels himself “impaled” upon his own “bewildering biography,” that biography is merely a list of the dramatic roles that he has played over a theatrical career of forty-three years. It has never enabled him to become a man, but only a succession of parts. When the “magic” disappears, when he is no longer a “titan” upon the stage, as his agent describes him, he is left with himself—and it is not even puny. It is non-existent. Even his breakdown seems like “an act, a bad act.” His acting ability was not a form of knowledge, but of power. And when the power dries up, so does the man.

Except for The Breast and Our Gang, anything written by Roth is worth reading. In The Humbling, he opens up new territory. He has never before, I believe, written about acting and the theater. In I Married a Communist, Eve Frame is an actress, notoriously modeled upon ex-wife Claire Bloom, but Roth does not reflect upon acting there as he does here. Axler is a sort of anti-Roth, depending on sheer energy and bluff to perform his “magic,” while Roth is a humble tradesman, writing doggedly against the end of time. As a portrait of a man of the theater, who interprets all of life, including his own, through a theatrical lens, The Humbling is brilliant and a little frightening.

Concept of the unified text

As I observed in replying to Guy Pursey’s polite skepticism toward the parodic goof by which I pretended to make meaning out of the page breaks in Lolita, literary critics treat the text as if it were the unified product of a single mind, even when it is a composite assembly. The concept of a unified text is the unspoken presupposition behind all literary criticism.

This concept links post-1970 literary theory to the New Criticism, which it otherwise sought to take down a peg or two. Even someone like Stanley Fish, “who preach[es] the instability of the text and the unavailability of determinate meanings,” falls back on the concept. Fish holds that “the meaning of an utterance would be severely constrained, not after it was heard but in the ways in which it could, in the first place, be heard.”[1] The plurality of a text’s meaning, in other words, is a consequence of the different ways in which it could possibly be read. Plural meanings do not result from a multiplicity of sources of meaning within the text itself. The unitary text yields multiple interpretations because of its different reception in different “interpretive communities.” The text, though, remains unitary.

The problem is that literary critics accept on faith the published text that sits on the desk by their left elbow as they type up their conclusions. Uncurious about how it came to assume its current form, they treat the fact of publication as authoritative. The real author, whoever he or she is, quietly disappears from view.

Their lack of curiosity about the author’s text has repeatedly tripped critics up. Perhaps the most famous instance was when F. O. Matthiessen, discussing Melville’s working methods in American Renaissance, praises an arresting image in White-Jacket:

[H]ardly anyone but Melville could have created the shudder that results from calling this frightening vagueness some “soiled fish of the sea.” The discordia concors, the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth, could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep, of the immaterial deep as well as the physical.[2]The trouble was that Melville had not created the shudder. The “unexpected linking of . . . cleanliness with filth” was a compositor’s error. Melville had written “coiled fish of the sea.”

What is the moral of the story? According to Steven Mailloux, it is not quite right to say that “responsible editing is a necessary preliminary to sound criticism”; the more accurate conclusion would be that “editing is criticism”—that is, “editing is an extension of the same rhetorical activity that results in published arguments establishing a text’s literary and historical meaning. . . .”[3] But Mailloux also confuses the published text for the authoritative text. At best, the textual editor restores an text’s original unity—and to the end, of course, of establishing a new authoritative text upon its publication. The concept of a unified text remains unchanged and in charge.

There is a fundamental distinction between a textual scholar who corrects typos and a go-to-town editor like Gordon Lish, who carves an altogether new text out of the author’s pumpkin. Whether or not you agree with Mailloux’s assumption that critics and not authors establish a text’s “literary and historical meaning,” an editor like Lish establishes the published text out of which the critics, unconcerned about problems of authorship and authority, whip up interpretations.

I have been using Raymond Carver’s early story “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” as my prooftext. Consider the last sentence of Carver’s original version when set alongside Lish’s edited version.

December, West Springs, Ill. (December 1966)	Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976)
He continued to stare, marvelling at the changes he dimly felt taking place inside him.	He turned and turned in what might have been a stupendous sleep, and he was still turning, marveling at the impossible changes he felt moving over him.

In disputing Lish’s editorial revisions with Kevin Neilson, who maintains that he is not troubled by them, I have repeatedly asked for an interpretation of the phrase impossible changes. He would not satisfy my request, but since then I have found one.

My own argument is that the phrase is meaningless, and for two reasons: (1.) it reflects Gordon Lish’s intention rather than Raymond Carver’s, and (2.) what the philosopher John Searle calls the “intention in action” that gives meaning to a literary utterance at the moment of composition is beyond human knowing, because there is no means of recovering the intention behind Lish’s one-word insertion. There is simply not enough evidence.

But this has not stopped critics from offering interpretations. In my first post on the problem, I cited a reading by Charles E. May that is invalidated by the critic’s ignorance of the text’s composite nature. Here is the reading that I found earlier today; it is even more strained than May’s. In American Literature, Kirk Nesset quotes the sentence as edited by Lish, and remarks: “With the repetition of the gerund, Carver suggests on the level of syntax the kinds of possibility residing in the ‘impossible,’ emphasizing that the road to recovery is part of the journey, too.”[4]

One gerund belongs to one man, the other to another—but Nesset assumes they belong to the same unified text, even though there is no authority whatever for such an assumption. Having made that assumption, though, Nesset can proceed to an interpretation of Lish’s one-word insertion impossible. The meaning arises from his own presupposition, arrived at in ignorance of the story’s textual history. The phrase impossible changes has meaning if and only if a unified text is assumed, but that assumption is, as I have shown, unwarranted and unsustainable.

Fish is right, then, that the ways in which “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” can be read are always constrained, but in post-1970 literary theory, as Foucault has said, the “system of constraint . . . will no longer be the author. . . .”[5] Questions of authorship are laughed off, but only because literary critics have invested authority in a published text whose history they are not interested in.
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[1] Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 305–07.

[2] F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 392.

[3] Steven Mailloux, “Reading Typos, Reading Archives,” College English (May 1999): 586.

[4] Kirk Nesset, “ ‘This Word Love’: Sexual Politics and Silence in Early Raymond Carver,” American Literature 63 (June 1991): 310.

[5] Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 160.

The genius of page breaks

Under the pressure of Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland for raping an underage girl thirty-two years ago in Los Angeles, I have been reexamining Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. And I have been struck by the genius of the novel’s page breaks, which add a dimension of meaning and aesthetic power that critics have entirely overlooked until now.

Consider the masturbation scene relatively early in the novel, in which Humbert says that he had “stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor.” (I will pass over, with the greatest reluctance, the line break that inserts a hyphen in the word without, subtly undercutting the veracity of his claim. I am in quest of a gaudier grail.)

You will recall the scene. It is a Sunday morning in June. Humbert, in pajamas, is reading a magazine. Lolita enters the room, wearing a “pretty print dress.” As Humbert takes pains to observe, she “was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful. . .” (p. 57). But there the page breaks. A marvelous example of Derridean différance, the page break defers the satisfaction of knowledge and assigns meaning to the delay that must ensue while the page is being turned. Not only is Humbert’s pleasure drawn out, but so is the reader’s.

And the same holds true even when the page break falls on a verso instead of a recto page, a page that need not be turned. While Lolita is in his lap, wrestling him for the apple—for that is what she was holding, reader: a “beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple,” a detail that would have been disappointing without the page-turning delay, to say nothing of how the deferral of the biblical allusion serves the larger theme of his spiritual redemption—Humbert is “in a state of excitement bordering on insanity.” In order to bring his “masked lust” into contact with her “guileless limbs,” he diverts her attention while he “perform[s] the obscure adjustments necessary for the success of the trick” (p. 58).

The page breaks there. Humbert’s “obscure adjustments” are necessary for their own sake. They need not contribute to a larger “success.” The end-stop at the bottom of the page implies that, if the frolic had stopped there, Humbert would still have been proud of himself. The seduction of Lolita exists in discrete moments that are sufficient in themselves to constitute the heaven and hell of nympholepsy. They do not have to lead to anything greater, which is, in any event, merely the repetition of the pattern. It is this repetition—not the nympholepsy itself, but the endless recurrence of its self-imprisoning instants—that eventually dooms and destroys Humbert.

I could go on collecting and examining specimens. But consider the succession of page breaks after Humbert fetches Lolita from Camp Q and drives her to a nearby town for their first night together in a motel. Here they are, from p. 107 to p. 122, in order. I write them as a single sentence: “Having coy stranger and trouble positively driving fun its black examined the strange mo-protector tones.” The effect is astonishing. It is a foreshadowing of Quilty’s pursuit of them (it is he, after all, who is the “coy stranger”); not only does he spell “trouble” for Humbert, but he compels Lolita’s lover into “positively driving” to flee from him. Moreover, Quilty’s pursuit ends in “driving fun” from Humbert’s life, and what remains to him is “its black”—its evil—“examined.” From then on he must adopt “the strange mo-protector tones” (for he has replaced her mother, after all, as Lolita’s only parent: thus he is her “mo-protector”), the tones of a man who failed to protect her when he could and now is no longer able to.

A complete examination of the novel’s brilliant page breaks is beyond the scope of a blog post, but perhaps you begin to get the idea. Here is a dimension of art and meaning that remains to be explored more fully, and I only hope that I have made an initial contribution to the effort.

Müller wins Nobel

In a surprise decision, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the German-language Romanian novelist Herta Müller. I must admit that I was almost completely wrong in my prediction of the winner. (The only thing I got right is that a woman won.)

Müller may or may not belong to the international literary Left; from the available English-language sources, it is difficult to tell. And that is the point. (The other point I got wrong.) The most striking detail about her politics is her anti-Communism. She is famous in her native Romania for opposing the brutal dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, at great personal cost, whom she described as second only to Stalin in his evil. She resigned from the German chapter of PEN when it merged with its counterpart in the former East Germany.

I haven’t read her, hadn’t even heard of her prior to the Nobel, but from what I have been about to find out so far, I find her a woman to admire.

Carver and authorial intention

The galleys for Carol Sklenicka’s forthcoming biography of Raymond Carver arrived yesterday. (Full disclosure: Carol and I are old friends.) After scouring the book for references to myself, I sat down to the problem that trips up anyone who takes more than a passing interest in the stories of my old teacher—namely, the problem of how much is Carver and how much is Gordon Lish, the editor who almost singlehandedly established Carver’s reputation as a “minimalist” while serving as fiction editor of Esquire from 1969 to 1976.

When I knew him, Carver was no minimalist. The first story of his that I ever read, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”—reprinted in Short Stories from the Literary Magazines (1970), an anthology that he gave me soon after I had put myself under his tutelage—had a pleasant looseness, an ambling pace. I enjoyed the fact that it opened with background information and eased into the action rather than jumping in media res and expecting the reader to make sense of things.

According to Sklenicka, Lish “raved” about the story. The two men met in Palo Alto in 1968, and almost immediately Lish started in on it. “[I]f he had been editing that story,” Sklenicka recounts his telling Carver, “Ralph Wyman wouldn’t have stayed with his wife.” The story would have had a different ending. Carver’s first wife Maryann said, “Well, that’s just the point, Gordon. It isn’t your story. You didn’t write it.”

A decade after its original publication in Curt Johnson’s little magazine December, Lish got his hands on it. Having convinced Nabokov’s publisher McGraw-Hill, a New York house better known for textbooks and trade journals, to issue a collection of Carver’s stories, Lish buckled down to work on it. Sklenicka says that he

shap[ed] the individual stories to make a distinctive collection. In most cases, he first edited photocopies of magazine versions of the stories and then reedited on typescripts made from that first editing. Carver discussed this editing with Lish and ultimately approved it, with reservations. It appears that Carver, hampered by his alcoholism and eagerness to see the book appear, made compromises with Lish.She compares Lish to a “sound recording engineer” who might “bring up one instrument and play down another. . . .”

I am not so sure. Here, for example, is a side-by-side comparison of the opening paragraph in “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” The first column is the magazine version, first drafted in 1964 and published in 1966, and the second is Lish’s version, edited in 1975 and published in 1976.

December, West Springs, Ill. (December 1966)

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976)

When he was 18 and left home for the first time, in the fall, Ralph Wyman had been advised by his father, principal of Jefferson Elementary School in Weaverville and trumpet-player in the Elks Club Auxiliary Band, that life today was a serious matter; something that required strength and direction in a young person just setting out. A difficult journey, everyone knew that, but nevertheless a comprehensible one, he believed.

When he was eighteen and left home for the first time, Ralph Wyman was counseled by his father, principal of Jefferson Elementary School and trumpet soloist in the Weaverville Elks Club Auxiliary Band, that life was a very serious matter, an enterprise insisting on strength and purpose in a young person just setting out, an arduous undertaking, everyone knew that, but nevertheless a rewarding one, Ralph Wyman’s father believed and said.

To my ear, only one of Lish’s changes is an improvement (moving Weaverville from a prepositional phrase after “Jefferson Elementary School” to modify “Elks Club Auxiliary Band”). The remainder accomplish little more than to put Lish’s stamp on Carver’s prose—to rewrite the story as Lish’s own, just as Maryann Carver feared he secretly wanted to do.

The endings are nearly unrecognizable as two versions of the same story. Lish cuts about five hundred words from the third and final section. In the original version, Ralph Wyman faces an existential crisis after returning home despite learning of his wife’s infidelity:In the kitchen he laid his head down on his arms over the table. How should a man act? How should a man act? Not just now, in this situation, for today and tomorrow, but every day on this earth. He felt suddenly there was an answer, that he somehow held the answer himself and that it was very nearly out if only he could think about it a little longer. Then he heard [his children] Robert and Dorothea stirring. He sat up slowly and tried to smile as they came into the kitchen.Lish does not quite cut the heart out of this passage, but he discards the pericardium:In the kitchen he let his head down onto his arms as he sat at the table. He did not know what to do. Not just now, he thought, not just in this, not just about this, today and tomorrow, but every day on earth. Then he heard the children stirring. He sat up and tried to smile as they came into the kitchen.In her biography, Sklenicka is generous enough to cite my speculation that Carver in his fiction is “something of an Augustinian figure. At the heart of his mystery lurks an unsayable Other, who eludes all efforts at definition.” Well, at least my speculation is appropriate to Carver’s original version of “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” It is entirely off the mark when Lish’s version is substituted for the original.

The heavy-handed editing of his early stories, which transformed Carver from an Augustinian to a minimalist, is a problem upon which all critics must break their teeth, although most would prefer not to. Despite the widespread kiss-off of authorial intention in literary study today—it derives from a misunderstanding of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “Intentional Fallacy” coupled with a sedulous cuddling up to Barthes’s “Death of the Author”—the concept is indispensable to textual criticism. The idea of an authoritative text, such as that recently released by the Library of America under the title Collected Stories, takes for granted that an author’s final intention is represented.

But who is the author of the official version of “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” When critics praise the story’s effects, what are they praising? Lish’s editorial revisions do not build upon a cumulative sentence-by-sentence effect, because that effect was painstakingly developed by the man who wrote the story sentence by sentence. Lish swooped in to pluck at the carcass of sentences he believed that he could write better.

In an essay on Carver’s fiction, Charles E. May quotes critics who characterize “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” as a “precursor” to the later minimalist stories, because more background and “authorial guidance” are provided. “However,” he goes on, “the key to the ‘impossible changes’ that Ralph feels moving over him at the end of the story cannot be attributed to any articulable understanding he has achieved, but rather the mysterious visual image he recalls of seeing his wife on the balcony of their honeymoon house in Mexico”—that is, to a characteristic minimalist effect.[1]

Yet the phrase impossible changes is Lish’s. The original version ended with Ralph’s “marvelling at the changes he dimly felt taking place inside him.” Lish altered the last sentence. In his revised version, Ralph is “marveling at the impossible changes he felt moving over him.”

To what, though, does the adjective impossible refer? What knowledge would make it possible to answer this question, given that Carver’s intention in writing the original sentence has been discarded and Lish’s intention is squirreled away in four small but significant verbal alterations?

In his critical essay, May scolds other critics for focusing on the sensuality of Ralph’s wife Marian on the balcony of their honeymoon house. They should be focusing instead on Carver’s words: namely, the image reminds Ralph of “something from a film, an intensely dramatic moment into which Marian could be fitted but he could not.” Again, though, this sentence belongs to Lish and not to Carver. In the magazine version, the incident “was always a little vaguely disturbing [to Ralph] for some reason.” What becomes of May’s interpretation when it turns out that the sentence upon which it rests is not the author’s?

If the success of Carver’s story depends upon Lish’s editing, in what sense can it be described as a work of art rather than a cut-and-paste composite? Were all the finicky verbal alterations necessary? And to what extent do the many changes reflect a stable, subsuming conception? What was the attitude behind them? Do they demonstrate a remarkable intuition into the state of Carver’s mind? Or do they obscure and perhaps even bastardize his original intention? And how is anyone to know which changes Carver “ultimately approved” of, even “with reservations”?

Where, in short, is the text? Why should either be described as final and authoritative? Or is one great and the other not so much? Until questions like these are at least entertained if not fully answered, there really can be no informed discussion of Raymond Carver as an important American writer. At least I need to answer them for myself—to recognize the man who was once my friend and teacher.
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[1] Charles E. May, “ ‘Do You See What I'm Saying?’ The Inadequacy of Explanation and the Uses of Story in the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver,” Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001): 43–44.

Mantel wins Booker in split vote

The historical novelist Hilary Mantel has captured the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, described by the Times as a “650-page doorstopper about political manoeuvring at the court of Henry VIII.”

The prize jury split three-to-two between Mantel’s novel and another book that James Naughtie, the jury’s foreman, declined to name. Wolf Hall beat out Sarah Waters’s Little Stranger, my own favorite, along with A. S. Byatt’s Children’s Book and J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime.

In the Guardian, Claire Armistead regrets the awarding of the prize, saying ruefully that Mantel’s loyal readers “have always regarded her as our secret.” As someone who enjoys a well-researched historical novel—a genre that often performs the job of reenacting history better than academic historiography—I have to say that the Booker has accomplished its goal of creating at least one new reader for its prize-winner.

Wolf Hall has yet to be released in this country, however.

Influence and literary history

On my showing, influence is the lasting effect upon the corporate understanding of an intellectual or literary genre or period. The truly influential novelist is not Harry Bellamann, whose Kings Row (1942) infected hundreds of other potboiler-makers with the virus that causes sex scenes, but Jane Austen, who changed the understanding of the novel for all time despite relative neglect during her own lifetime.

The job of literary history, as I understand it, would then be to reconstruct the literary context out of which the truly influential writers emerged, which includes projects like Miriam Burstein’s to recover the subgenres and movements and styles that once flourished but were lost or abandoned, because they proved not to be influential after all. Literary history—and the same would hold for the history of philosophy, I would bet—is not the same as political history or even intellectual history.

The historian is concerned only with making the past intelligible in its own terms, and thus for him a person’s contemporary influence is all that matters—even if the person is subsequently forgotten. He does not relate past events to present understanding, but the literary historian—and the historian of philosophy too, if I am right—cannot escape it. Their subjects are defined by current value in a way the historian’s is not.

Thus when writing his history of Enthusiasm (1950), Ronald Knox was obliged to devote a chapter to François Malaval, Pier Matteo Petrucci, and Michael Molinos, even though no one now is influenced by them. But Burstein cannot ignore Cardinal Newman. He is, after all, to adopt her typography, Cardinal Newman. She is obliged to include him in a history of nineteenth-century conversion novels, even though “the more Victorian Catholic fiction [she] read[s], the less significant [Newman’s novel] Loss and Gain looks.” His significance is his current value.

Influence

Originally, influence was an astrological concept. It was the ethereal fluid streaming from the stars to act upon the character and destiny of men. That at least is how Chaucer used the word. Dr. Johnson uses it repeatedly in his Lives of the Poets, but not to denote one writer’s literary power over another. The closest he comes is in his life of Sir Richard Blackmore, where he observes that, in his Satyr against Wit (1700), Blackmore “degraded himself by conferring that authority over the national taste, which he takes from the poets, upon men of high rank and wide influence, but of less wit and not greater virtue.” The word’s cognate is influenza. Is there such a thing as “swine influence”?

Just recently, Miriam Burstein permitted herself to become grumpy about the very idea of overrated novels, saying that “If the novel has influenced generations of successors, then my aesthetic objections are neither here nor there: I still have to teach the book (if it’s in my field, anyway), whether or not I want to throw it into the nearest recycling bin.” (But wouldn’t your aesthetic objections be part of your teaching?)

In a comment to her post, Brandon Watson restates Burstein’s objection: “We tend to muddle two kinds of importance together: importance in the historical network of causes and effects (extensiveness of influence) and importance relative to the full potential of the genre (comparative excellence as a thing of its kind), and you’re right that we shouldn’t.”

But his example cuts against Watson’s conclusion: “In the early modern period Norris has the best attack on scholasticism (best informed, most careful, and most extensive); but it seems to have influenced nobody (they mostly just repeated the clichés Norris rises above).” Watson is referring here to the English philosopher and poet John Norris of Bemerton (1657–1711) and his Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible Worlds (1701, 1704).

If historical importance is judged by “extensiveness of influence”—what might be called the Citation Index standard—then the repetition of the “clichés Norris rises above” is more important than Norris. Watson names no one who repeats the clichés, however, because they are not important to the history of philosophy. And why? Philosophy is not just anything that is written on philosophical questions or in philosophical language, but the best (“best attack,” “best informed”) and most (“most careful,” “most extensive”).

Isn’t Norris’s historical importance precisely his greatness as a philosopher despite his contemporary neglect? If his excellence as a philosopher is compared to the extensiveness of his influence, wouldn’t Norris be correctly described as an underrated philosopher? “How do we define ‘overrated’?” Burstein asks. But isn’t this how? A writer is overrated if his historical influence is inflated when compared to his true excellence, “aesthetic” or otherwise. And I do mean true.

Like many careful and serious thinkers, Burstein and Watson are terribly suspicious of value terms, which strike them as amateurish approximations that resist demonstration and proof. Theirs is an attitude expressed most memorably (and most snarkily) by the great classicist Basil Gildersleeve. He wished to put literary study, which then passed by the name philology, upon a rigorous scientific footing. The difference between natural science and what he called “historico-philol­ogical sci­ence” was not to be located in their methods, because each relied upon experimen­ta­tion, the verification of research, the certainty of results, and the exclu­sion of error:

“The differ­ence,” Gildersleeve said, “is simply in the material.” Natural science is the exact study of natural phe­nom­ena; histor­ico-philological science is the exact study of the works of man. For Gilder­sleeve the crucial differ­ence was between those who studied the same literary material in two different ways: littérateurs (in his sneer­ing term) versus philologists. The first were florists; the second were botanists. The “florist’s conception of literature,” Gilder­sleeve said, is that “aes­the­tic charm” is the prime deter­minant, the value that qualifies a text for classifi­ca­tion as litera­ture. In truth, how­ever, “aesthetic charm is beside the question.”[1]But I want to reassure Miriam Burstein that she will not be transformed after uneasy dreams into a littérateur if she admits aesthetic considerations into her literary history. Or, if not aesthetic considerations, for I am not convinced that aesthetics are of much use in literary study, then value terms. After all, to speak of a writer’s influence is to assert a value—a historical value, but a value nevertheless. It is, however, an objective value. You can demonstrate that a writer’s influence objectively exists. It has nothing whatever to do with my subjective feelings about him—with, that is, my “aesthetic objections” to his writing.

But nearly thirty years ago Hilary Putnam argued that “at least some value terms stand for properties of the things they are applied to, and not just for feelings of the person who uses the terms.”[2] His examples are the “cognitive virtues” of coherence and functional simplicity, which make scientific thinking rationally acceptable. Literary texts may also display coherence and functional simplicity. They may even be said to have a value that is not “aesthetic” (for lack of a mutally agreeable term), but historical. They may be described as being “leaps and bounds beyond . . . just about every other nineteenth-century conversion novel” or as the “best informed, most careful, and most extensive” work of its kind. They may have value, that is, in comparison to other texts. And perhaps that might even be characterized as their influence.

Perhaps historical influence should be reconceived, not as an infection that is measured by how many come down with it, but as star-fired power and authority that are exercised over other books and writers by reducing them in comparative importance. A writer is influential if he continues to be read—if he continues to display cognitive virtues—long after the clichés that he once rose above have ceased to be repeated.
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[1] Quoted in The Elephants Teach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 26.

[2] Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 135.

Come, sons of summer

by whose toil
We are the lords of wine and oil:
By whose tough labours, and rough hands,
We rip up first, then reap our lands.
Crowned with the ears of corn, now come,
And to the pipe sing harvest home.
Come forth, my lord, and see the cart
Dressed up with all the country art. . . .

Not a cart, in the Jews’ case, but a hut. Like the ones the Israelites dwelled in while they crossed the desert.

A Commonplace Blog will be offline for the hag of Sukkot until Sunday evening at the earliest.

The link also rises

Speaking of depressing novels, Natasha Wimmer in the Nation nominates Mercè Rodoreda’s Time of the Doves (1962), part of the “small canon of coming-of-age novels by Catalan women.”

I tried to intensify the flavor of 21st century fiction by reducing it to five titles, but the opposite approach is pursued at the Millions, where one hundred and twenty books are said to be among the century’s best. Or, in other words, you can quit your other reading and concentrate only on the fiction of the last decade and you still won’t be done till some time next year. Daniel Green is properly aloof, sniffing that such exercises as these “assume that anything remotely useful can be accomplished by making lists and choosing up sides.”

Miriam Burstein, continuing to demonstrate how a book blog might be used to advance literary scholarship, attends to a work of “anti-Anglo-Catholic fiction”—Elizabeth Jane Whately’s Maude (1869). As she says elsewhere, Burstein reads these books so that you and I don’t have to. A blessing on her head!

Observing that “Knowledge is a form of attentiveness,” Patrick Kurp reflects on the literary attitude that unites Elizabeth Bishop and Dawn Powell.

Oscar Wilde’s “groundbreaking work of criticism” Intentions (1905), recently reprinted by the Cornell University Library, is exposited generously at Hungry Like the Woolf.

Open Letters Monthly is out with its bestseller issue, including reviews of Russo’s That Old Cape Magic, Pat Conroy’s South of Broad, and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson.

The Scotsman surveys the literary history of Edinburgh, “the world’s first official city of literature.”

The last word that ever need be written on Lionel Trilling.

If only because of the reaction it will provoke on the literary Left, you’ve got to appreciate this book jacket.

Finally, if you have not yet read William Kristol’s eulogy to his late father Irving Kristol, you owe it to yourself to do so. That a father could inspire such a tribute from a son is deeply moving, no matter what your politics.

Oz favored for Nobel

The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced next Thursday. The Israeli novelist Amos Oz is a four-to-one favorite to win—with the French-language feminist Assia Djebar, an Algerian Arab expatriate teaching at New York University, and the wholly improbable Joyce Carol Oates running behind at five to one (h/t: Michael Schaub). A contest between a post-colonialist Arab and an Israeli, even one as dovish and anti-settlement as Oz, is no contest. Besides, Oz blamed Hamas for the war in Gaza and initially supported Israeli military action there.

As for Oates. I was astonished recently to find Malcolm Bradbury praising her in his Modern American Novel (new edition, 1992). Locating her in the Gothic tradition and calling her “multitalented,” Bradbury says that Oates has “constructed an enormously varied fictional world, at times highly literary and allusive, but also distinctively hers—marked by her preoccupation with estrangement and horror, with the dynastic contemporary success-driven and violent American present.” Although the quality of her work varies tremendously, and though she is “apt to use sensation for its own sake” (you think?), Bradbury concluded that she is a “writer of great importance.” Color me flabbergasted.

The greatest living American novelist has no better than a seven-to-one chance to win the Nobel, according to oddsmakers. Although an American has not taken home the prize since 1993, when Toni Morrison was named, English-language writers have won four of the last ten. There is little to no chance of an American’s winning in 2009, and an even smaller chance that the winner will be Philip Roth.

Five months ago I predicted that the Peruvian poet Carmen Ollé would be given the nod, and I am standing by that prediction. Although Djebar has the right ethnic and political credentials, she is handicapped by writing in French, the same language as last year’s winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. The last time that the prize went in consecutive years to writers in the same language was also 1993, when Morrison succeeded Derek Walcott, who himself followed Nadine Gordimer. A South American writer has not been honored since 1982, when Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia was singled out. Another possible laureate is Cristina Peri Rossi, an expatriate Uruguayan poet and novelist living in Barcelona, who writes sexually charged stuff from a feminist viewpoint.

Anyone who thinks the Nobel Prize in Literature has anything to do with literature is deluding himself.

Top ten depressing novels

Over at the American Book Exchange—the only place I buy used books any more—Scott Laming has compiled a list of the top ten depressing novels of all time:

( 1.) Cormac McCarthy, The Road
( 2.) Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
( 3.) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
( 4.) George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
( 5.) Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
( 6.) John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
( 7.) Elie Wiesel, Night
( 8.) Nevil Shute, On the Beach
( 9.) Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
(10.) William Golding, Lord of the Flies

A good list—but some essential titles for the bitter and pessimistic have been left off.

What about Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and the other novels from the ’thirties, that noir decade? I am thinking of Appointment in Samarra, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Butterfield 8, Call It Sleep, and if you include novels written during the ’thirties, though published later, Native Son and The Ox Bow Incident.

After the boom times of the ’fifties, unrelieved grimness came back into style. Flannery O’Connor’s Violent Bear It Away (1960) is depressing unless thoughts of the Apocalypse cheer you. E. L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times, published the same year, is an “anti-Western” without anyone to stand up to the cruel men who rape and murder. Revolutionary Road (1961) put paid to any hope for happiness in suburbia. Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel The Painted Bird is a carefully detailed chronicle of human pitilessness and blank suffering. James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) is terrifying in addition to grim, and then ends on a note of hopelessness.

My favorite feel-bad novel of all time is Charles Willeford’s delightfully amoral Shark-Infested Custard (1993). The novel follows a group of four friends, swinging bachelors in Miami, who start their career by dumping the corpse of an underage pickup and end by facing the same problem—with one of their own number. [Update: More than a year after compiling this list, I finally got around to a full-length discussion of The Shark-Infested Custard.] Willeford is among the most underrated novelists in American literature. His better known “Hoke Moseley” mysteries, although they are not mysteries, uphold a vision best captured in the title of the second book in the series: New Hope for the Dead. No hope at all, in other words.

I am sure I have forgotten some significant entries.

Shakespeare is the problem

James Atherton, a British educator, is not sure what to make of the core terms that I hold every student at a nearby private school should know by the time they “graduate and head off to college.”

Atherton wonders whether the list of terms is “idiosyncratic? Just one scholar’s way of distilling the essential of his discipline? Or is this kind of list routine?” One thing for sure: “despite all of this being (potentially) about literature, it is totally non-prescriptive about literature itself.”

I am grateful that at least one critic, unacquainted with my thought as a whole, gets its major premise right. Literature, as I have said on more than one occasion, is simply good writing—where “good,” by definition, yields no fixed definition. “From which it follows,” I argue, “that literature is not a body of poems, stories, novels, plays, memoirs, etc., but the act of judgment by which such things come to be named as literature. Literature is the worry of literary criticism.”

Or, in other words, literature (more properly, literary criticism) is a discipline of knowledge, a distinct and autonomous way of blinking at things—human experience sub specie textum. My list of core terms is an attempt to boil down the discipline of literary criticism to manageable college-prepatory proportions.

But literary criticism is not the only discipline of literary study. J. V. Cunningham once listed the four disciplines of graduate study in literature: bibliography, textual criticism, philology, and literary history. Of these the most important for beginning students is literary history. And if I were to contract English literary history to an irreducible minimum it would have to be Shakespeare.

When the department at Texas A&M University did away with its Shakespeare requirement for English majors some time ago, the more conservative scholars objected. “Shakespeare is the problem,” a more radical scholar replied. This is everything that is the case: the problem of English education on the secondary level is that Shakespeare is a problem on the next level.

High school students should learn the core terms of literary criticism, on my view, in order to be prepared for college classes in which the literary tradition has been abandoned. But they should also learn the outlines of that tradition, starting with Shakespeare, in order to make their way in a literate culture where Shakespeare and other great writers are not a problem, but a source of reference and wisdom.