I blame Joyce
(Filed: 09/02/2004)
The novelist Dale Peck, notorious in America for his
vitriolic book reviews, argues that the modern novel is elitist and empty.
Several years ago, the Village Voice asked me to review a novel, the second book from a writer with a convincingly authorial pedigree. The novel is somewhat hard to categorise: it's an epistolary romance of sorts, sort of, which is to say that there aren't really letters and there isn't really romance either, but a man and a woman do interact through written media, and this correspondence eventually produces a sort of emotional and sexual frisson. The man and the woman meet electronically; hence the uncertainty over genre, labels, names.
But this novel's true act of mimesis isn't its imitation of e-speak, but rather its imitation of fiction. Its words describe "characters"; its characters have detailed "histories"; these histories grow sedimentarily into "narrative"; but calling that narrative a "novel" is akin to calling a pan of flour and water, dutifully mixed together and baked, "bread". The ingredients are there, but the flavour and style, the yeast and salt of art, are not. The book lacks neither coherence nor intelligence. What it lacks is imagination, linguistic flair, a raison d'être more compelling than its author's presumably well-intentioned intention to write.
Its destiny, I'm sure, is to take up space on the shelves of America's chain bookstores, sandwiched in with the mass-produced simulacra that passes for literary fiction in this country. Because, even allowing for the fact that it takes time to separate the chaff from the wheat, the number of Stepford novels that are written, published, reviewed and read every year is completely out of control. I'm not sure if it's because the standards for literary fiction have become so lax or simply because the conventions are so inbred, but it seems that anyone can write a novel these days. Not a mystery or a thriller or a romance or any other type of acknowledged formula fiction, but a novel (file under: Literature; see also: Classics).
Don't get me wrong. I'm not blaming this particular novelist for the phenomenon. Certainly I'd rather be writing novels than working in an office any day, and if she can pull it off then it's no one's fault but the people who pay her. Rather, blame Thomas More for writing Utopia. Blame Sartre for writing "The Wall", Doris Lessing for writing The Golden Notebook, Gore Vidal for writing all those historical diatribes, blame Don DeLillo just for writing (and Jonathan Franzen, God help us, for reading him). Blame the people who publish these books; blame the people who buy them. Blame the creative writing courses and the prize committees, blame the deconstructionist literary critics or the back-patting Siamese-twinned professions of writing and reviewing fiction, blame any or all of the identity communities who read and write those ethnic- or gender-marketed booster books or blame the dead white European males who forced us to resort to literature as our Daily Aff! irmation in the first place. Blame whomever you want – but it seems to me that to summarise and evaluate yet another of these shadow fictions is to miss the point. These novels aren't bad. They just aren't novels. They aren't art.
When I think a book has let me down I get angry with it, and when I think that book has deceived me I get pissed off. Thus my sharpest barbs and most inhospitable ad hominems tend to be directed at writers I genuinely admire, or in whom I see genuine, wasted talent. This is because I see myself as a kind of mother hen, not so much of writers but of the novel itself. Fiction is like dance: it's susceptible to the egos of its practitioners. Bad writers can't do it much damage because they'll simply be ignored, but a self-indulgent writer with a single compelling skill can do incalculable harm.
It all went wrong with Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is less a Bildungsroman than the chapter by chapter unravelling of a talent which, if "The Dead" is any indication, could have been formidable, while Ulysses is nothing more than a hoax upon literature, a joint shenanigan of the author and the critical establishment predicated on two admirable, even beautiful fallacies that were hopelessly contingent upon the historical circumstances that produced them: William James's late-Victorian metaphor of the stream of consciousness, which today seems closer to phrenology than modern notions of psychology and neurology; and TS Eliot's early modern fantasy of a textual stockpile of intellectual history that would form an allusive network of bridges to the cultural triumphs of the ages, a Venice without the smell of sewage, or mustard gas.
It took an imagination as literal as Joyce's, a temperament as dogged, an ambition as lacking in nuance, to turn a book as lively as The Odyssey into a stale monument to everything that had so recently failed the world. That the book was so enthusiastically embraced represents less a return to the right path that so many wishful readers – including Virginia Woolf – hoped it would be, but rather a wilful assumption of blinkers to the ways in which a blending of the storied and historical notions of progress had led the world so recently astray.
For Joyce was not quite a modernist and then again not quite a lapsed Catholic. He lacked the doubt in language's ability to render the world that had made the stream of consciousness so attractive to early-20th-century writers in the first place, but thought instead that he was producing a mimetic account of how the mind worked; all you need then do is render a great mind – a mind as great as, say, Joyce's – and your problems would melt away. And yes, Joyce has his strengths; but it is his failings that have been most successful, most pervasive in their effect. Ulysses has served since its publication as the ideal for serious writers, and the 20th century is littered with magnum opuses that have been written under its sway, and that have marked the nadir of their various writers' careers.
If you aren't a novelist, I'm not sure you can imagine what it feels like to write such heresy. Though I normally write in the morning, I am writing this in the middle of the night like a fugitive; my hands are literally shaking as I type. Sometimes even I am overwhelmed by the extent of the re-evaluation I'm calling for, the sheer f***ing presumptuousness of it. The excision from the canon, or at least the demotion in status, of most of Joyce, half of Faulkner and Nabokov, nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, not to mention the general dumping of their contemporary heirs. And then there's that other strain, which I can hardly bear to slog through, the realists and the realists and the realists, too many to name, too many to contemplate really, their rational, utilitarian platitudes rolling out endlessly like toilet paper off a spindle. The problem is too widespread within the insular literary and publishing world to merely pick at its edges: the entire sca! b must be ripped off.
Learning to like experimental literature was, for most readers, a monumental task; unlearning it is positively Sisyphean. Yet almost anyone will admit that literature is an inherited form, that each new generation learns from its predecessors. If we can accept that we build on our predecessors' strengths, than why can't we accept that we might build on their mistakes as well? Wasn't that, after all, the premise of the modernist revolution? That 30 centuries of Western culture had led not to a pinnacle of achievement but instead to the industrialised, assembly-line slaughter of soldiers and civilians in the First World War? Certainly the postmodernists thought so when it happened again a quarter of a century later, with concentration camps thrown in as a coup de grâce.
One of the most common criticisms I've received about my book reviews, especially from friends, is that I don't say much about the strengths of the writers. And it's true, I don't. Most of the novelists I review had thousands of words devoted to their strengths long before I got around to cataloguing their weaknesses: they don't need me to point them out again. And God knows I've never aspired to anything like impartiality. If anything, I've always considered my flagrant bias to be one of the saving graces of my reviews. If they're extreme in their opinions, that stridency can always be attributed to its author rather than to some pretext of a universal standard. The very extremity of my views does as much to undermine my authority as to enforce it, or at least I hope it does, because I am by no means convinced of the hallowedness of my own ideas. And talent isn't the issue here: content is, and context. It seems to me that there are two strains of literature ! currently in vogue – what I have referred to, for lack of more authoritative terms, as recherché postmodernism and recidivist realism – and both of them, in my opinion, suck. I'm not interested in pointing out how an author works well in one mode or another, or executes one aspect of one or another mode with a greater or lesser degree of success, because I think the modes need to be thrown out entirely.
The other thing I hear a lot is that I don't offer an alternative to the writing I spend so much time panning. If this is what writers shouldn't be doing, then what should they do? My feeling here is that the last thing readers need is a writer telling them what to read (besides his or her own books, of course). And as for writers: well, if you need me to tell you how to write a novel than you probably shouldn't be writing one in the first place.
Nevertheless, there are some things I'd like to say to my peers. These reviews are, I hope, some kind of dialogue with my generation. If, in the end, I offer nothing more than a series of prohibitions, it's because I think it's precisely the need to sign on to a programme that kills literature. As soon as a writer starts writing to belong to a tradition or a school rather than to describe what's wrong with the world, he or she has gone from being, in the most hackneyed terms, part of the solution to part of the problem. Something which can be held up to a predetermined list of attributes that can be checked off one by one, so that a score of 80 per cent makes it good, 90 per cent makes it great, and 100 per cent gets it a gold star, isn't art. It's high school – and bad high school at that.
As one reads contemporary novelists, one can't shake the feeling that they write for one another rather than some more or less common reader. Their prose shares a showiness that speaks of solidarity and competition – the exaggerated panache with which teenage boys shoot hoops in their driveway while pretending they don't know their neighbour is watching from across the street. My hatred of all this teenage posing has reached such a fever pitch that I'm willing to be clownish in my denunciation of it – to spew obscenities in ostensibly literary contexts.
The plain truth is that I am less and less capable of intellectual engagement with contemporary fiction because I feel like I've been had when I do so: the very process of literary analysis legitimises a body of work that I feel is simply unworthy of such attention. My generation has inherited a tradition that has grown increasingly esoteric and exclusionary, falsely intellectual and alienating to the mass of readers, and just as falsely comforting to those in the club. In place of centuries of straightforward class discrimination, the 20th century invented an elitist rhetoric intelligible to only the most diligent and educated of readers – a club that doesn't exclude anyone per se, but makes you work very, very hard to join. It is a Pyrrhic victory, and like all such triumphs distracts us from our much greater failures. Contemporary novels have either counterfeited reality, or forfeited it. In their stead we need a new materialism.
