Author: TC

ZNet Commentary:

His song titles are blunt and straightforward: “We’re All Immigrants,” “The Injustice System,” “Military Recruiters Lie,” etc., etc. Metaphors, poetic devices are completely absent here; his lyrics include sections like this one: Continue reading “Can You Handle Tha Truth” by Alexander Billet

“Writer of 1970s ‘Ecotopia’ Makes a Comeback in the Green Era” by Anita Weier:

It is useful to understand “liberatory” in two basic ways for literature. In the past the term in lit has been used mainly in regard to “women’s lib” of the ’60s, ’70s as far as I’m aware – I don’t recall that the lit critics of the ’30s and so on use it, though it nearly gets into the title of one of VF Calverton’s books, and maybe it is used in passing somewhere or another. More or less progressive critics of that time used words more like “revolutionary” and “proletarian” and “Marxist” or “materialist”. One broad basic sense of liberatory is in reference to about any sort of freeing or advancing or progressing phenomena of literature, especially in regard to normative issues (morals and ethics…politics and culture) and less so (secondarily or as derivative) aesthetically. So, for example, the multicultural expansion of recent decades is liberatory in this sense even when it occurs in basically a liberal and conservative or other status quo framework. In this sense, “liberatory” is a synonym for “progressive” (or “enlightened” – as in of the Enlightenment – or moving toward “ideal”) however limited or bound that progress may be. Elements of liberalism and conservatism contain some liberatory aspects also (especially in having some roots in the Enlightenment or other relation to it). All this understands liberatory in a very broad sense of the term.

The primary and most crucial sense in which we might understand liberatory is to distinguish progressive or revolutionary literature from status quo work that blocks or slows progress (let alone revolution) actively or passively, inadvertently or knowingly. Again, the term refers in this use mainly to normative respects of literature as revealed in a story’s substance, effects, functions, and consequences. Revolutionary lit, or to be more clear, liberatory revolutionary lit is the strongest sense in which the term might be used – again referring essentially to normative revolution, whether or not the aesthetics are also much revolutionized or advanced. Continue reading Liberatory Literature

The Complicit Culture

In literature, as in politics, and plenty of life, there can be a big difference between liberal and left. Literature is not somehow mystically ideology free. Don Quixote, as with many other classics, was written as propaganda. A lot of progressive views are to the left of the basic liberal views of periodicals like The Nation, n+1, The Guardian, London Review of Books, the New Yorker, etc. Substantial left views should be heard in national publications, especially since left views, as I understand them, and as polls reveal, are largely popular views. Instead, many left views are severely drowned out “even” in liberal media, as great media watch organizations like FAIR and Media Lens demonstrate. (Of course in my view conservative and reactionary views are typically as bad as or worse than liberal views.)

Obviously there are some ideological differences between basically liberal publications. There are significant differences between, say, The Nation and the New York Times, and so on. Alexander Cockburn, for example, is a left columnist for the predominantly liberal Nation magazine (though his column space was halved a few years back). The New York Times has no corresponding left columnist, though Paul Krugman occasionally comes close. The Nation is basically a liberal publication with some left tendencies, and its commentary on literature reflects its predominantly liberal emphasis, with many left views blocked out and discredited. The New Yorker, though predominantly liberal, lies to the right of the Nation. Though liberalism and its variants evince some genuine qualities, they also possess predominant and atrocious deficiencies, crucial to reveal. Continue reading Establishment Ideology – Suffocating and Oppressive

Frequent New York Times contributor and novelist Benjamin Kunkel has an article “Dystopia and the End of Politics” in the establishment journal Dissent that is the most recent in a lengthening line of State of Fiction (SoF) commentaries by various authors, picking up with James Wood’s book How Fiction Works (and related articles), tracing through a series of challenges to HFW, hopping to Zadie Smith’s “Two Paths for the Novel,” and then shifting to Kunkel’s piece with no basic new turns in the thinking of the status quo writers amid all declarations and pronouncements lavish, banal, seeking. Some parts of these essays hit the mark in noting the severe limits of various novels and their types, yet the status quo State of Fiction analysts can’t or won’t turn their heads far enough to note or to compensate for, let alone adequately address, ideological binds administered by the caging hands that feed, in academia and commerce.[1] 

In Dissent, the longtime cold war journal of Swiftian title, Kunkel writes like a character out of a Roberto Bolaño novel, rendering himself chaotically familiar and essentially inept. Chaotic because reasonable insight mixes with misprision leading to hapless assertions and vacuous conclusions.[2] As for content, Kunkel, focusing on all too prevalent sterile lit surrounds, looks to fly to fertile land, plunging instead into sand. Kunkel’s article stands as one of the many pinched walls and series of iron bars of the literature establishment, likewise the writings of Bolaño, at least as they function in the US, though Bolaño’s work is less familiar and less inept and contains a number of enduring qualities. (Kunkel’s writing can come across as less sophisticated or refined than that of the larger lit establishment, possibly willfully so, thus it may appear more evidently flawed to some, more bemusing to others, and so on. That the sentences in his Dissent article hang like debris clouds freeze-framed after a building collapse merely provides extra asthmatic effect. Kunkel may seem an easy or unnecessary object of criticism, but he remains an establishment outcropping, visible enough for critique.) Continue reading Kunkel, Bolaño, Ngugi, and the State of Fiction

Oh man, it was a tough day to stand by President George Bush, even for me, his main PR man, yours truly, Stan D. Garde. They threw everything they had at us today, everything but the book. They fired shoes, sure, you heard about those, size 10, truly a coward’s size, but we also ducked, dodged, and skirted random machine gun fire, rocket propelled grenades, and assorted other small arms fire attacks, half a dozen mortar rounds, and miscellaneous other missiles. Man, where’s the love, man? We liberated these ungrateful Oilans. You would think they would at least give us a pass for that gift. Not so. Instead it’s like they think we blew up their country and slaughtered their people and tried to steal their oil. Oh well, it’s probably only a minority here out to kill us. I’m sure the masses still love us. Well, it’s not like we’re too much safer on our homeland streets back in the good old US of A, you know, what with all those raging pot smokers and immigrant service workers and smart-aleck rappers we need to keep locking up in record numbers. Just what this world is coming to, I haven’t the faintest idea. Fortunately, reality this past century or so is totally optional especially now that we’ve got all the crucial propaganda safely on our side, billions and billions of dollars worth of glorious gloss in ever more righteous e-gaze and garde. Oila for the Oilans! I say. We’re all Oilans now. Continue reading Oilan Shoe to the Head

John Pilger:

One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false hope desert him and he realises the truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama? … He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded, Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: “They have nowhere else to go.”

Not yet. If there is a happy ending to the Groundhog Day of repeated wars and plunder, it may well be found in the very mass movement whose enthusiasts registered voters and knocked on doors and brought Obama to power. Will they now be satisfied as spectators to the cynicism of “continuity”? In less than three months, millions of angry Americans have been politicised by the spectacle of billions of dollars of handouts to Wall Street as they struggle to save their jobs and homes. It as if seeds have begun to sprout beneath the political snow. And history, like Groundhog Day, can repeat itself. Few predicted the epoch-making events of the 1960s and the speed with which they happened. As a beneficiary of that time, Obama should know that when the blinkers are removed, anything is possible.

From Edwin Muir’s thoughtful The Estate of Poetry (1962):

“I’ve been trying to measure the gap between the public and the poet, and to find some explanation why it is so great…. The first allegiance of any poet is to imaginative truth…but it does not mean that he should turn inward into the complex problems of poetry, or be concerned with poetry as a problem. That is something which has commonly happened in the last fifty years. There was some excuse for it after the years of experiment associated with Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound. To them, about 1910, poetry seemed to have come to a dead end, and intense thought had to be given to it. The experiments of that time and the succeeding years have become a part of literary history. As they were new and strange when they were first attempted, they were found difficult by the reader; and they seem to have left for a time in the minds of poets and critics the belief that poetry should be difficult. The experimenters have done their work, and we should be thankful to them. There have been many experimenters in English poetry: Chaucer was one; and Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Wordsworth were all experimenters. The experimenters of forty years ago did something to poetry and something for poetry. One kind of poetry was written before T.S. Eliot, and another kind after him. But the point of an experiment is that it should solve the particular problem set for it. This was done in the twenties…. There remains the temptation for poets to turn inward into poetry, to lock themselves in to a hygienic prison where they speak only to one another, and to the critic, their stern warder. In the end a poet must create his audience, and to do that he must turn outward. Even if he is conscious of having no audience, he must imagine one. That may be the way to conjure it out of the public void.” Continue reading Edwin Muir on Poetry, the Public, and Audience – in The Estate of Poetry

Milton’s republic – by Terry Eagleton, in the Guardian – “Our great dissident poet, born 400 years ago today, did more than just hymn the praises of revolt”:

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a political tract two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, arguing that all sovereignty lay with the people, who could depose and even execute a monarch if he betrayed their trust.

We are not used to such revolutionary sentiments in our poets. When he left Cambridge, Milton refused to take holy orders and, in his first great poem Lycidas, he mounted a blistering assault on the corruption of the clergy. He was a champion of Puritanism at a time when that meant rejecting a church in cahoots with a brutally authoritarian state.

His political dissidence, however, had its limits: he defended the notion of private property, unlike the more communistic wing of the parliamentary forces. As for sexual politics, Adam in Paradise Lost is a priggish patriarch. Yet Milton was also an early advocate of divorce, claiming that a lack of love and companionship was a more important ground for separation than adultery.

At the heart of Milton’s political vision lay a belief in liberty and self-government. Pressed to an extreme, this doctrine could appear anarchic: grace freed humanity from law and authority. He thus came to reject the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in the name of personal freedom. One of his most magnificent pamphlets, Areopagitica, inveighed against the state censorship of books. He denounced the censorship of works before publication as a strangling of free inquiry. “Almost kill a man as kill a good book,” he observed. If truth were to be established, an open marketplace of opinions was indispensable. “So truth be in the field,” Milton insisted, “we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worst, in a free and open encounter?” Continue reading Terry Eagleton and John Milton

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.”

Junot Diaz by far the most insightful voice in the article, “Hopes for a happy ending: Literary voices on the American Election” by John Freeman:

“The horrific violence of our current economic system, which kills more people daily than our wars,” says Díaz, who won a Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, “will not change one jot under an Obama administration. Right now these elections are all about who plays the music at the party. Doesn’t change the fact that there’s a massacre going on. No US election is going to change that. And any writer worth a damn might be in the party but what he’s really listening to, bearing witness to, in small ways, in elliptical ways or flat-out head on, is the violence and terror and inhumanity that reign beyond the party’s walls.”

Of course the wars are a big part of the economic system and vice versa.

“It took an artistic director in Los Angeles,” Hare says, “Gordon Davidson at the Mark Taper Forum, who did it as the last play of his 35-year tenure as artistic director, and said, ‘I can only do this play because I’m leaving after I do it.’ The fact that it sells out wherever it’s performed,” Hare continues, “doesn’t seem to sway minds at all. People would rather have empty theatres where people are passing crumpets to each other than full theatres with plays about contemporary events. I don’t know why.” -from Theatre: Stuff Happens and war ensues, thanks to W., Rummy and Condi by Peter Birnie, Vancouver Sun: Continue reading Stuff Happens by David Hare

[Science fiction novelist Joe] Haldeman [experienced] “the dislocating effect of warfare”…firsthand. Like the soldiers in Haldeman’s book, Vietnam veterans came home to a society that had changed rapidly in their absence. “Soldiers find out they’re not fighting for their own culture,” he said. Continue reading Joe Haldeman’s Forever War

Misrepresentation 36 – limits on the real: The more that James Wood carries the term “realism” or “real” or “reality” the less water it holds. “…we are likely to think of the desire to be truthful about life – the desire to produce art that accurately sees ‘the way things are’– as a universal literary motive and project, the broad central language of the novel and drama…” Here we see (a repeat of) “the way things are” as “reality” that stories “bring…to mind” – never “possibilities” that stories bring to mind, or even “real possibilities,” which is the language not of the status quo. Fiction may reveal reality and possibility, both, in exploring the nature of the human condition achieved and potential – or what is the imagination for?

Victor Hugo:

“The human mind – an important thing to say at this minute – has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real.

“It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.”

Below are some brief excerpts from Victor Hugo’s book, William Shakespeare (1864), which is less about Shakespeare and more an exposition of Hugo’s views on art:

To work for the people, – that is the great and urgent necessity.

The human mind – an important thing to say at this minute – has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real.

Continue reading Victor Hugo on the ideal and the real