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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

“Healthful Messages Wrapped in Fiction” by Tara Parker-Post at NYT: Continue reading Real effects of fiction studied: Lake Rescue

The young Milan Kundera reportedly “betrayed” a western spy, the sort New Criticism “founder” John Crowe Ransom recruited. As widely reported:

[updated, below]

Continue reading Milan Kundera, John Crowe Ransom, New Criticism, and Spies

Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel
– current entire – (PDF)

Continue reading The Establishment and the Novel

Fiction Gutted
The Establishment and the Novel 

PART ONE

As Gideon Lewis-Kraus notes, writing in the Los Angeles Times, James Wood is a writer who matters. People read him, people of the educated, monied, controlling part of the populace. That’s why it’s important that what James Wood writes does not matter – in central ways. Nowhere is this more on display than in How Fiction Works, the star critic’s most recent book, a truncated politically-charged though aesthetic appreciation of fiction that is spectacular in its misrepresentation of reality, or “the real, which is at the bottom of [Wood’s] inquiries.” Ask Wood to annotate a novel, and he provides sometimes splendid views of narrative lines by way of an at times “uncannily well-tuned ear,” as Terry Eagleton notes. He is eager to discourse at length, often with quick pith, on how to strive toward reality in fiction (or criticism), reality of the profound sort, the truth, a worthy aim. Unfortunately, HFW is resolute in not accurately representing central elements of reality in both fiction and, call it, actuality, life outside fiction. A few examples of these crucial misrepresentations show how such blindness chops understanding of fiction and life, and why it makes one safe to be a literary star of the status quo, of the establishment, of money and power. One must bury and falsify crucial reality. To that end, in How Fiction Works, James Wood has written an establishment polemic in the guise of aesthetics – a deeply partisan status quo account of the novel that is also pervasive in its misrepresentations of both reality and aesthetics.

The first dozen misrepresentations:

1 – the book; 2 – free indirect style; 3 – narrative puzzle as worth; 4 – qualities of narrative mode; 5 – the development of the novel; 6 – selectivity; 7 – the meaning of time and experience; 8 – Flaubert’s “advance”; 9 – Flaubert’s value; 10 – the visibility of the novelist; 11 – “shiny externality” and miasmic internality; 12 – “juvenility” of plot

Continue reading FG – One

Fiction Gutted
The Establishment and the Novel

PART TWO

The misrepresentations continued:

13 – “Our memories are aesthetically untalented”; 14 – preeminence of the “subtle“; 15 – plot in the novel; 16 – value of place; 17 – quality of plot; 18 – limited engagement; 19 – fiction no use; 20 – fiction no remedy; 21 – fiction “makes nothing happen”; 22 – writer as “good valet”; 23 – “No one is literally run off her feet”; 24 – the petty terrorist

Continue reading FG – Two

Fiction Gutted
The Establishment and the Novel

 

PART THREE

 

No end in sight, the misrepresentations roll on. Before we take up these next dozen, let’s consider the relationship between liberatory lit and the establishment in more detail. Despite some contrary gestures and rhetoric, despite the exalted hopes of Flaubert, “often held to be the quintessential chronicler of nothingness,” modernist and other establishment works do not lack meaning, far from it. On the contrary, such works are full of meaning, but establishment minds are naively well schooled or otherwise sense or know it is safest for their own status quo positions, and therefore preferable, and therefore all but inevitable, that in such a powerful form as the novel, meaning be not too liberatory, lest some establishment superior find excuse to filter out, censor, bar any modern liberatory perpetrator, for much besides “obscenity” or “lewdness.”

 

Continue reading FG – Three

Fiction Gutted
The Novel and the Establishment

 

PART FOUR

 

The next dozen misrepresentations:

 

25 – fiction of the present is passé; 26 – the reactionary and status quo as preeminent literary political fiction; 27 – 9-11 as rallying cry for a turn inward, and worse; 28 – Henry James, TS Eliot, the CIA, and the cultural cold war; 29 – liberatory lit attacked, buried; 30 – fiction shrunk; 31 – the partisan orthodox nature of status quo lit; 32 – basic public realities denied, distorted;  33 – the immateriality of the status quo; 34 – the public chopped from the personal; 35 – ideology in guise of aesthetics; 36 – limits on the real

 

Continue reading FG – Four

Fiction Gutted
The Establishment and the Novel

 

Hugo and Flaubert

 

Rather than Victor Hugo’s society-rocking fiction and daunting aesthetic achievement, today James Wood and many a writing circle celebrate the (by comparison) wan and dreary writing of Flaubert as seminal and essential – “Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring; it all begins again with him.” Ignored is the complex more comprehensive and profound let alone liberatory writing of Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, and other works. Flaubert instead is pushed as a central writing workshop and establishment presence – a situation again that comes close to “tragedy manifesting itself as comedy.”

 

Continue reading FG – Appendix