Month: November 2008

William Deresiewicz Reviews How Fiction Works by James Wood

Is there no current liberatory criticism, no viable alternative to the status quo criticism of fiction and other literature as William Deresiewicz claims in the Nation magazine?: “The very idea of heroic criticism, like that of heroic art, is…no longer credible” given “the abandonment of the political dimension of radical critique over the past several decades” and “any sense that politics and culture are connected, or that their criticism should be connected….” 

Actually, some liberatory criticism is being produced in the academy let alone elsewhere, especially online, along with some other liberatory lit as well. Considerable progress has been made in criticism in recent decades, especially originating largely outside of commercial critical circles, given the work of Edward Said, for example, among others.

Dominant criticism is too much impoverished Deresiewicz notes but far more impoverished than he touches on. This long into the age of the internet in particular, to not look readily beyond the dominant journals and magazines for other current critical tendencies is to be remiss, at the least, to perpetuate the grip of the closeted approach to literature decried in the article, especially since about the only alternative presented is the limited too often biased or retrograde dominant criticism of decades past. Even as Deresiewicz claims James Wood’s example would lead criticism into a desert, his own article already leaves readers there, for not only does Deresiewicz bury contemporary liberatory criticism, he buries such criticism of the past, a tendency in American criticism more vital, more crucial than the bulk of the critical tradition he cites. 

He elides accomplished critic Maxwell Geismar, the increasingly progressive Geismar who wrote at the same time as the dominant critics Deresiewicz lauds (“the New York critics”), Geismar who was for a time no stranger to the pages of the Nation but has subsequently been written out of history, along with much of the roots, current realities, and possibilities of liberatory lit. Deresiewicz finds himself with Wood and the New York critics among the dominant lit dunes of their own making. Continue reading Criticism of the Parched

Some thoughtful recent posts:

A Serb’s story
The second noteworthy book reviewed in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review is The Delivery Room by Sylvia Brownrigg. Why is it noteworthy? As usual, not because of the review itself, but because of what a careful red reader can glean from it. The novel’s main character, it seems, is a Serb. Not only a Serb, but a politically and historically conscious Serb who sharply opposes the U.S./NATO breakup of Yugoslavia and the imperialists’ 1999 bombing war against her country. Dare I hope? Can it be: a fiction that rejects all the outrageous U.S. lies about Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo that have been served up to justify the Clinton administration/Pentagon/Nato criminal war of aggression? I won’t know for sure until I read it. But reading between the lines of this lukewarm and ultimately politically hostile review, hope swells. …

Joe Hill & Paul Robeson
November 19 is the anniversary of the murder of the great labor organizer and people’s singer-songwriter Joe Hill by the capitalist robber barons’ firing squad in Utah in 1915. Joe Hill’s last written words were in a letter to Big Bill Haywood: “Goodbye Bill. I die like a true rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning–organize!” …

A new James Kelman novel
I’ve read two Kelman novels: How Late It Was, How Late and You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free. I loved them both. Another, Translated Accounts, has been on my night table pile for a while. Now I’ll add this new one, Kieron Smith, Boy to the to-read list. Sunday’s NYTBR review by Marcel Theroux was lukewarm–filled with damning-with-faint-praise formulations like “Still, this isn’t a bad book”–but that doesn’t deter me at all. I’m glad for the review because it alerted me about the book and, well, that’s about the extent of its use. …

“Know Literature, Know the World“: “A team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics claim that stories and their writers can do just as much as academics and policy researchers, perhaps even more, to explain and communicate the world’s problems. Fiction, they boldly venture, can be just as useful as fact.”

The artistic efforts and social effects referred to within the article are very much within status quo parameters. Still, the article is a useful reference for rebutting the continuous claims that fiction does not and cannot effect much in the world, and other such intentional or unintentional apology for the negligent literature of the oft criminal status quo. Typically, one can only go so far toward revealing the world and its possibilities in dominant realms. The result is a negligent, complicit, shrunken, unreal or fraudulent literature, enchained when not wielding the club outright.

“A Practical Policy has an extremely bloated and yet rather dull-witted response to Zadie Smith’s recent, excellent NYRB article Two Paths for the Novel. It can be enjoyed alongside a similarly uncomprehending attempt at a rejoinder, Zadie Smith’s annoying Critique of ‘Realism’, (sic!) from Nigel Beale.” – Mark Thwaite

One might say that Mark Thwaite has an astonishingly shrunken and yet rather pinheaded response to some “uncomprehending” comments from my previous post that may be “enjoyed” at form-is-not-story-but-its-shape mainly, though the faulty parallelism would make for flawed sense, would be ironic in a post on the importance of form, would advance little of substance, and, well…one might do well not to go there.

I don’t argue that lyrical realism is not overrepresented in lit production. I’ve not expressed much opinion on the question, because it seems to me beside the point, and diversionary from the crucial issues, at least as typically discussed by the establishment. I think forms of fiction should be diverse, as my own fiction happens to be, and so too should content be greatly diverse, across the fields of fiction. Continue reading Of Form and Content

Form Is Not The Base Of Fiction                         [Of Form and Content – followup post]

It may be that the establishment scarcely flounders more than when it claims to see that it is floundering. A recent example is Zadie Smith’s article “Two Paths for the Novel.” Comments interspersed for clarity below after sequential select article excerpts: Continue reading Of “Two Paths for the Novel” by Zadie Smith

Not much in this article (authors on America after Bush), though of some skewed note, Edmund White:

“…the last great taboo in America is class. No one is allowed to mention it, not even novelists. Whereas British novelists are always beavering away defining ever more minute class differences, American writers can get a sense of contrast only by looking at the Third World. As a judge two years ago for the Granta top 20 American writers under 35 contest, the trend I most noticed is what I’d call the Peace Corps novel. Everyone is writing about India and South America and the Philippines and Vietnam – no one is writing about the big city or rural poor in America.”