An interview with literary scholar Steven Moore, w...
An interview with literary scholar Steven Moore, who is writing a lengthy “alternate history of the novel” and “history of the alternate novel.” Here is an interesting excerpt where he defends difficult literature:
[I]nnovative writers have always faced opposition, but 50 years ago, an educated person would have been apologetic if he had never read Ulysses; after 2000, you had people like that bog-trotter Roddy Doyle saying Joyce wasn’t worth reading, as though it showed good sense not to have read Ulysses. Instead of being embarrassed at not making it past page 25 of Gravity’s Rainbow, some people were proud to have seen through that charlatan so quickly. These conservative critics seem to hold a “family values” attitude toward literature, believing that anything outside of the mainstream of fiction should be shunned, and that if a novel couldn’t be read and appreciated by your average Joe or Jane, then it was a pretentious waste of time. Of course you don’t have to like Joyce (or Pynchon or Gaddis), they’re certainly not for everyone, but to dismiss them as pretentious frauds and to glorify simpler, more traditional fiction struck me as an example of the growing anti-intellectualism in our country, right in step with schools mandating that evolution was just a “theory” and that creationism should be taught alongside it in science classes.
(thx, stephen)
Comments (18)
That's an interesting analogy, between anti-intellectualism in lit and a 'family values' mentality. I'm not sure I totally see how it works, but I'll have to read the whole interview.
I've currently got The Recognitions (Gaddis) up and running for when I have time to totally absorb myself with a fair bit of effort, and Virtual Light by William Gibson that'll suck me in quicker and spin the wheels for me- for the train and whatnot. Not that Gibson is in any way anti-intellectual, he's totally not, but his fiction is not challenging, prose-wise, nor does it make obscure references to the history of Protestantism left and right. I'll spend some time every now and then mulling over the various beneficent properties of the heavy duty on the one hand, and the easily engaging but imaginatively powerful on the other hand. But I have a really hard time finding any contradiction in the coexistence of the two forms.
Ursula K. LeGuin had an interesting essay in Harper's recently, which I can't link to 'cause it needs a password. (Although I could send you a pdf, monk.) She starts with people lamenting the allegedly declining readership, but her thesis is that 'the readership' will level off when it includes those who read because they truly enjoy it. It might be hard for some people to imagine, but reading Pynchon, though not easy, is for some others truly pleasurable and not something done out of a sense of obligation or in order to be able to say they read it.
Indeed, I just finished reading Vineland for pleasure. I don't think anyone would care whether I had read it or not.
Now I'm reading an awesome book about the geology of the Sierra Nevada.
Yes, send me that PDF. There was also an article recently going around saying that the Internet is making us read less intelligently:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
I probably read fewer books because of the internet, but I'm also much more informed about current events (and funny videos) because of the internet.
That's where I fall short- I have non-fiction ambitions, but I'm very bad at the follow through. Clearly the geology of the sierra nevada could only be utterly fascinating. But, see, here's an interesting thing too: I was reading Blood Meridian recently, and McCarthy, I don't know what kinda research he puts into his writing, clearly some. There's an amazing amount of describing the landscapes of the southwest and northern mexico in there. When a writer can work a complex and effective metaphor out of the actual phenomena of the natural world without bending his/her observations to fit the metaphor, that's something really profound to me. Even if I have to look up 'revetment' and various other words that are new to me.
One thing Mr. Moore is off base about though is his analogy to the punk rejection of the prog. That was not a conservative move, and punk pretty quickly developed its own progressive trends anyway, and a lot of what sounds simple isn't so at all. And over the past 30-odd years, 'punk' has evolved into countless strains, and musicians now who are inspired by punk history are often making some of the most progressive and challenging music out there. Plus, punk was, in some sense and at some point, a threat. Roddy Doyle is not a threat, nor is Jonathan Franzen.
PDF on its way.
One reason I don't think we need to go back to "required reading" is that, though libraries have been big for ages, there is just so much more information available to us on a day-to-day basis than was the case 50 years ago. We're forced to make different decisions now about what to pursue, how to spend out time.
This is the book I'm reading, by the way: http://www.amazon.com/Geology-Sierra-California-Natural-History/dp/05202...
It's targeted to laypersons, not academics.
Cool- is it decently written?
Sure, it's informative and straightforward -- something a 12-year old could read. The author also spends a lot of time on history and general interest topics, which is fine by me. And it's got great pictures.
Considering the main alternative -- picking through articles of various quality on wikipedia with too much detail in some places and too little in others -- I am enjoying it. I like staring at graphics of where geological fault lines are.
I think the analogy between social conservatism and literary conservatism holds, but the guy isn't helping his case by implicitly or explicitly judging people for not liking difficult lit. Which is what he is doing in that excerpt. Like he said, Joyce (or Wallace or whoever) isn't for everyone. Not getting any pleasure out of reading Ulysses doesn't make you anti-intellectual or stupid. Also, dismissing Joyce as a pretentious fraud doesn't necessarily equal glorifying V.C. Andrews etc.
And I don't think it helps the cause of literature in general to make people feel stupid for liking books that they don't have to use a second book to understand.
I made it about fifty pages through Gravity's Rainbow on my first attempt, a hundred pages on my second. I figure if I took a running start, I could make it to page 150. If I do this six or seven more times, I'll make it all the way through.
I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.
The reason the social conservatism-literary conservatism analogy is confusing to me is that I doubt Roddy Doyle or Jonathan Franzen are in the family values camp one wink. I could be wrong because I've never read either of those authors, but I think it's a decent hunch. And then he goes and compares the diff lit rejection by Doyle or Franzen to punk rejection of increasingly complex and, by some ears, pretentious rock and roll. So by extension punks of the late 20th C. had something in common with the family values camp. That somehow doesn't tally for me. I'm not sure the basic analogy is wrong per se, I'm just not sure he illustrates it in a way that makes any sense.
Interestingly, RumorsDaily, your first and second attempts at GR mirror mine exactly, and I read it through on the third. It now stands as my favorite novel, so there's that.
This article sums up parts of the Franzen essay: http://www.slate.com/id/2128405/
From what I know about Franzen, he is a big fan of Infinite Jest, so he's not exactly against lengthy, structurally-difficult novels. However, one of my favorite things about Infinite Jest is how immensely readable it is, in much the same way as a Tom Clancy novel can be. While I have enjoyed Pynchon and Joyce, both can be difficult on a page-by-page basis (and both have moments of readable transcendence). Despite his large vocabulary, Wallace is less often difficult on a page-by-page basis -- Infinite Jest can be hard to read because of its length, and because of its slowly-revealed structure, but it's pretty easy to understand it scene-by-scene. By virtue of its popularity given its size, Infinite Jest has essentially proven that turning off readers by obfuscation is not in its agenda. Unlike Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow, I know a lot of casual readers who have made it through Infinite Jest and enjoyed it, but either couldn't make it through Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow, or ended up struggling through them. Also unlike with those two books, I know many casual readers who have chosen to reread Infinite Jest several times.
One of my favorite articles about the state of the modern novel, by the way, is David Foster Wallace's "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" essay in Consider the Lobster.
I just finished reading Finnegans Wake for pleasure. Oh wait, that is not possible.
I guess I feel the analogy holds because when I feel literary conservatism urges, my justifications for those urges mostly stem from tradition rather than any practical or intellectual argument. They're knee-jerk appeals to authority. I don't know if political conservatives actually feel that way about politics, since I have never been one, but they're certainly into tradition and authority.
The punk analogy is a little better -- I was taught that punk was originally about DIY and simplicity and lack of over-the-top bullshit like laser shows. Populist pop. Where the analogy fails IMO is that straightforward literature doesn't have to be simple or dumbed down.
Ahem: social conservatives.
You're right. I meant social conservatives, who are a subset of political conservatives. If you're not a social conservative, though, I can't see what the Republican Party of this era has to offer you.
It's been a tough decade, I admit it.
Keep in mind I came out of New York where the Republican party is much friendly to gay people and not quite so anti-abortion. The national party, though, has been problematic.