Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

by Cynthia Ozick

  As this wishful casting of spells may intimate, the books Marcus speaks of are not the kinds of books Franzen might champion: conventional social narratives promising pleasure sans difficulty. Ultimately Franzen’s credo, as he expressed it nine years before Marcus threw down the gauntlet, is the need to attract and please readers. A declared enemy of “audience-friendly writing,” Marcus is fearlessly on the side of difficulty: “entirely new syntactical byways,” “a poetic aim that believes in the possibility of language to create ghostly frames of sense.” Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and William Gaddis are among his older models, and these he opposes to a “narrative realist mode, which generally builds linearly on what has gone before, subscribes to cinematic verisimilitude, and, when it’s not narrating, slaps mortar into an already stable fictional world.” Accordingly, he bludgeons Franzen relentlessly: “Language is a poor medium for the kinds of mass entertainment that Franzen seems interested in.” And: “He wants literary language to function as modestly as spoken language.” And: “He seems desperately frustrated by writers who don’t actively court their audiences, who do not strive for his specific kind of clarity, and who take a little too much pleasure in language.”

  So it is a fight rather than an argument, really—a fight over complexity versus ease, a fight that mostly mimics gang war, which is not so much a vigorous instance of manly bloodletting (though it is that too) as a dustup over prestige: who has the prior right to swagger in public. It cannot be an argument these two are having—meaning a debate between fundamentally differing positions—because both Franzen and Marcus are in stringent agreement. What they are in agreement about is the necessity of having a readership. Franzen’s is large, Marcus’s is decidedly smaller—a coterie perhaps, drawn to entirely new syntactical byways and similar hurdles. Each scorns the other’s audience; each is content with his own. And both are preoccupied with the recitation of numbers—Franzen earnestly, with those bestseller millions, Marcus derisively, with something called “the Fog Index point spread.” The Fog Index, he explains, provides statistical proof that Franzen’s vocabulary beats Gaddis’s by several school grades: Franzen’s fog is even thicker than Gaddis’s! Then there is the “Lexile Framework for Reading,” according to which, Marcus points out, Gaddis’s prose in A Frolic of His Own is “just slightly more readable than the Harry Potter series,” while Franzen’s far higher readability score is on a par with the abstrusely specialized vocabulary of a manual on how to lay brick. All this recondite mathematical taunting appears in an ample footnote designed to mock Franzen’s commitment to popularity and his flaunted disdain for difficulty. Still, it is Gaddis, Marcus gloats, who, for all his simpler words and shorter sentences, remains the more complex writer. So: a punch in the eye for Franzen! The Cripps and the Bloods would feel right at home in this alley.

  Out of the alley and along the culture’s main concourse, both Franzen and Marcus have stumbled into the same deep public ditch—a nearly vacant trench in need of filler. Never mind that one believes in diversion and the other dreams of potions. If the two of them are equally touchy and contentious and competitive, what has made them so is the one great plaint they have in common: the readers are going away. Whether they are readers to be lured to Marcus’s putative avant-garde experiments, or to Franzen’s entertainments, it hardly matters. The readers are diminishing, they are going away.

  Denis Donoghue, in an essay titled “The Defeat of Poetry,” tells where they are going. An eminent literary scholar, and for thirty years a university professor, Donoghue is here speaking of American undergraduates: the newest crop of potential readers that novelists will try to harvest. “When I started teaching, at University College, Dublin many years ago,” he reports,

  I urged students to believe that the merit of reading a great poem, play, or novel consisted in the pleasure of gaining access to deeply imagined lives other than their own. Over the years, that opinion, still cogent to me, seems to have lost much of its persuasive force. Students seem to be convinced that their own lives are the primary and sufficient incentive. They report that reading literature is mainly a burden. Those students who think of themselves as writers and take classes in “creative writing” to define themselves as poets or fiction writers evidently write more than they read, and regard reading as a gross expenditure of time and energy. They are not open to the idea that one learns to write by reading good writers.

  In class, many students are ready to talk, but they want to talk either about themselves or about large-scale public themes, independent of the books they are supposedly reading. They are happy to denounce imperialism and colonialism rather than read “Heart of Darkness,” Kim, and A Passage to India in which imperialism and colonialism are held up to complex judgment. They are voluble in giving you their opinions on race and its injustices, but they are tongue-tied when it is a question of submitting to the language of The Sound and the Fury, Things Fall Apart, and A Bend in the River. They find it arduous to engage with the styles of Hard Times and The Wings of the Dove, but easy to say what they think about industrialism, adultery, and greed.

  So is that where the readers of the next generation are going: to the perdition of egotism and moralizing politicized self-righteousness? The case can be made—Franzen surmised this almost two decades ago—that these students will never evolve into discriminating readers; or, as Marcus would have it, their Wernicke’s areas have been rendered infertile. Then where are they going, if not to Faulkner and Achebe and Naipaul? The answer is almost too hackneyed. To the movies; to television (hours and hours); to Googling obsessively (hours and hours), to tweeting and blogging and friending and texting (hours and hours); and undoubtedly also, when at the dentist’s, to People magazine, where the celebrity photos outnumber the words. While concentrating on dispraising audience-friendliness, Marcus seems to have overlooked, or thinks it not worth mentioning (as Gertrude Stein, his predecessor in autonomous art, once put it): there is no there there. The audience, or most of it, has gone the way of the typewriter and the telephone booth and fedoras and stockings with seams.

  Then what is to be done about the making, and the taking in, of literature—specifically, in our time, the serious literary novel? Is Franzen right to blame popular electronic seductions for the novelist’s problems? Is Marcus justified in rating the wizardry of language juxtaposition over the traditional novel’s long heritage of “deeply imagined lives”? Is the realist novel, as he claims, merely a degraded device whereby “language is meant to flow, predigested, like liquid down a feeding tube”? (Does this, by the way, characterize any novel by Nabokov or Bellow?) As it turns out, Marcus does not altogether denigrate realism—he pauses to laud its “deep engineering” as a “brilliant feat”—but he faults it, in furious italics, because “it has already been accomplished.” According to this thesis, nothing is worth doing unless it has never been done before. But we have heard, and from a master, that ripeness—not newness—is all. Besides, why should one literary form lust to dispossess another? Why must there be a hierarchy, Experimentalism (pushing the envelope) on top, Realism (old hat) below? Mozart and jazz, for instance, live honorably together on the same planet. Marcus describes the style of writing he admires as “free of coherence, so much more interested in forging complex bursts of meaning that are expressive rather than figurative, enigmatic rather than earthly, evasive rather than embracing.” He concludes: “I find it difficult to discover literary tradition so warmly embraced and coddled, as if artists existed merely to have flagrant intercourse with the past, guaranteed to draw a crowd, but also to cover that crowd in an old, heavy breading.” Ah, now we are back at the old gang rumble. At Marcus’s end of the alley, though, something smells stale, like old heavy breading. “Expressive rather than figurative,” “enigmatic rather than earthly,” “free of coherence,” and all the rest: it has already been accomplished. The avant-garde’s overused envelope was pushed long ago, and nothing is more exhaustedly old hat than the so-called experimental.
Hoary superannuated abstract painting, consisting chiefly of colors and planes, practiced by Mondrian, born 1872; by Kandinsky, also born 1872; by Delaunay, born 1885. Experimental music, micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure à la John Cage, born 1912. Experimental writing, as in Dadaism, a movement begun in 1916. And here comes Ben Marcus, self-styled enigmatic experimentalist innovator, born 1967.

  All the foregoing may be mesmerizing for those in the book business who are drawn to the spectacle of writerly acrobatics—to the shifting highs and lows of publicity—but it is beside the point and misleading. Except for the few preeminent novelists who have earned, via stature and money, the power to stand aloof, serious fiction writers are pressed by elements external to the imagination’s privacies, and external also to the secrets of language (including the clarinet that attends the semicolon). But in searching for the key to the Problem of the Contemporary Novel (or Novelist), there are cupboards where it is useless to look. And there are reasons that do not apply: writers vying for the highest rung of literary prestige; potential readers distracted by the multiplicity of storytelling machines. Feuds and jealousies are hardly pertinent, and the notorious decline of reading, while incontrovertible, may have less to do with the admittedly shaky situation of literary fiction than many believe.

  The real trouble lies not in what is happening, but in what is not happening.

  What is not happening is literary criticism.

  But wait. Why should the novel care about that? Novels will be written, whatever the conditions that roil around them. The novel is an independent art, secretive in its gestation, a living organism subject to a hundred protean characterizations. Of all its touted representations, the most irritable is Henry James’s “loose baggy monster,” while the most insistently self-proclaiming is Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” The scholar-critic Robert Alter, if less succinct, is more suggestive: “In the novel,” he writes, “the possibility always exists, and is often exploited, to zigzag rapidly between different narrative stances, voices, styles, to improvise and jiggle with new options of narration, to flaunt the mechanisms of narration as they are deployed and invented.” He goes on to cite “the elaborately decorous omniscient narrator of Tom Jones . . . the nested first-person narrations of Wuthering Heights, the purportedly impassive narratorial manipulator of style indirect libre in Madame Bovary, the shifting verbal vaudeville of Ulysses.” (A definition as capacious as this one should go far to reconcile the boys in the alley.)

  The novel, then, in all its forms and freedoms, is not in danger; nor is the born novelist—dwindling audiences and the intrusions of pixels notwithstanding. The next Saul Bellow may at this moment be playing patty-cake in his crib—or we may have to wait another two hundred years or so for a writer equal in intellect and vivacity and breadth to turn up. It hardly matters. The “fate of the novel,” that overmasticated, flavorless wad of old chewing gum, is not in question. Novels, however they may manifest themselves, will never be lacking. What is missing is a powerfully persuasive, and pervasive, intuition for how they are connected, what they portend in the aggregate, how they comprise and color an era. A novel, it goes without saying, is an idiosyncrasy: it stands alone, it intends originality—and if it is commandeered by genius, it will shout originality. Yet the novels that crop up in any given period are like the individual nerves that make up a distinct but variegated sensation, or act in chorus to catch a face or a tone. What is missing is an undercurrent, or call it, rather (because so much rests on it), an infrastructure, of serious criticism.

  This does not mean reviews. A reviewer is not the same as a critic; a case can be made (I will try to make it) that a reviewer is, in effect, the opposite of a critic, in the way that an architect is different, not in degree but in kind, from a mason, or in the way that a string theorist is different, though both employ mathematics, from a bookkeeper. Neither masons nor bookkeepers are likely to feel disparaged by this observation. Reviewers may be stung. Reviews, after all, are the sustenance of publishing. Reviews are indispensable: a book that goes unreviewed is a dud to its publisher, and a grief to its author. Besides, reviews through their ubiquity simulate the skin of a genuine literary culture—rather like those plastic faux-alligator bags sold everywhere, which can almost pass for the real thing. In newspapers and magazines, both print and electronic, in book clubs and blogs, in television interviews and in radio format, reviews proliferate more freely than ever before. And they have the advantage of accelerating and multiplying through undreamed-of new venues open to nonprofessionals. The book clubs, for instance. Book club reviewers are characterized, by and large, by earnestness and eagerness, and by a sort of virtuous communal glow: they are “amateur” in its root meaning—they are lovers, lovers of books. Some, or perhaps many, may also be amateur in the sense of being unskilled; but they practice reviewing privately, in the secluded warmth of a living room, within a circle of friends, hence innocently. That these clubs are too often caught in a kind of Möbius spiral, or chicken-and-egg conundrum, is an ongoing curiosity: because they choose to read mainly bestsellers (e.g., The Hunger Games, or Fifty Shades of Grey, or whatever currently tops the list), they appear simultaneously to create these bestsellers.

  Less innocent is the rise of the nonprofessional reviewer on Amazon—though “rise” suggests an ascent, whereas this computerized exploitation, through commerce and cynicism, of typically unlettered exhibitionists signals a new low in public responsibility. Unlike the valued book club reviewer, who may be cozily challenged by companionable discourse, Amazon’s “customer reviewer” goes uncontested and unedited: the customer is always right. And the customer, the star of this shoddy procedure, controls the number of stars that reward or denigrate writers. Amazon’s unspoken credo is that anyone, or everyone, is well suited to make literary judgments—so that a reader of chick lit (the term defines the reader), perhaps misled by ad hype (the term defines book marketing), will howl with impatience at any serious literary fiction she may have blundered into. Here is “Peggy of Sacramento (see my other reviews)” grudgingly granting one ill-intentioned star to a demanding contemporary novel: “boring slowness, hard going, characters not even a mother could love.” Or Tim: “A thoroughly depressing book. The home life was not a pleasant atmosphere in which to raise children.” Most customer reviewers, though clearly tough customers when it comes to awarding stars, are not tough enough—or well-read enough—for tragic realism or psychological complexity. Amazon encourages naïve and unqualified readers who look for easy prose and uplifting endings to expose their insipidities to a mass audience. It is true that one can, on occasion, find on Amazon a literate, lively, penetratingly intelligent response: an artful golden minnow in a fetid sea, where both praise and blame are leveled by tsunamis of incapacity.

  (Academic theorists equipped with advanced degrees, who make up yet another species of limited reviewers, are worthy only of a parenthesis. Their confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multisyllabic pidgin, have for decades marinated literature in dogma. Of these inflated dons and doctors it is futile to speak, since unlike the hardier customer reviewers, they are destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.)

  And what of the professional reviewers? They count as writers, certainly; but few writers of fiction can be found among them. It may be that novelists wish to stick to writing novels, uninterrupted; or that competitiveness toward other people’s books engenders a sour reluctance to celebrate a rival; or simply that reviewing is a skill antithetical to the fictive talent; or, less simply, that the reviewer’s more modest stitches will not satisfy the wider ambition of the tapestry weaver who hopes to cover a wall. For all these reasons, and possibly more, most novelists, especially as they mature, tend to eschew reviewing. A good thing, too. The literary judgments even of novelists of consequence can be capricious—Virginia Woolf dismissing James Joyce, for example, or, more recently, V. S. Naipaul dissing Henry James:

  The worst writer in the world ac
tually [Naipaul told an interviewer in Britain’s Literary Review]. He never went out into the world. . . . He never risked anything. . . . He never thought he should mingle in the crowd and find out what they were there for, or how they behaved. He did it all from the top of a carriage or the top of a coach. A lot of his writing is like that. And he exalts his material because he thinks this subject matter he alighted on—the grandeur of Europe and the grandeur of new American money—is unbeatable.

  For generations of readers of The Golden Bowl and The Princess Casamassima, that Jamesian subject has been unbeatable, and is as worldly as the range of an expansively inquisitive mind can be; so it is a relief to know that Sir Vidia is not an incessant reviewer of his lowly contemporaries. And a relief also to recognize that though reviewers are, in their fashion, writers, they are not often Nobel-winning novelists.

  Frequently they are publishers. In fact, a book’s publisher is its first and perhaps most influential reviewer. How a book is “positioned”—i.e., described to the sales staff and in catalogues and flap copy—can nearly seal its fate, or at least condition its reception. In the case of a literary novel (the term intends a dangerous elitism), in-house positioning can snuff it with a word. That word is “midlist”; whoever coined it merits hanging. It emits defeatism. It promises failure. An emblem of noblesse oblige, it reminds publishers that they still owe a modicum of responsibility to the higher literary culture. But what executive editor or vice president will want to back, with dollars and fanfare, a novel tainted by the whisper of midlist? Even so, the writer privileged to be included in this doubtful category is a thousand times more fortunate than the serious literary novelist who is not likely to be published at all. A publishing house is not an eleemosynary organization: who today would publish Proust? (An inapt question, since no mainstream press was willing to publish Proust then: initially he paid out of his own pocket to get his work into print; and nowadays, with digital self-publishing readily available, it’s every writer his own Proust.) Besides, your typical publisher as first-stage reviewer is more prone to favor treacle—to treat an uplifting pedestrian fiction as a genuine literary novel—than to honor the real right thing. Or, on the other hand, to gussy up the real right thing with commerce-pleasing fakery: only imagine Pride and Prejudice hyped, in suitable shiny jacket, as a bodice ripper. Still, in crannies here and there (the golden minnow factor), and again in the larger houses, there remain editors possessed by the old calling—the bringing to light of darker worlds, heretical glimpses, adamantine art.