Orchestrating Reception:
The Hierarchy of Readers in Post-modern American Fiction
by John Unsworth
Centennial Review, 34:3 (Summer 1990)
Any essay which addresses
itself to "post-modern American fiction" has at least two things to
explain at the outset: its understanding of the terminology it uses, and its
focus on the American scene. There has been considerable disagreement over the
use (and even the form) of the term "post[-]modern," but some
consensus has developed around the idea that there have already been two
generations of post[-]modernism -- an earlier one which sees itself as
extending the project of modernism, and a later one which sees itself as
rejecting modernism. I use the presence or absence of a hyphen in the term as
an artificial but logical way to distinguish between these two generations. The
earliest form of the word, "Post-modernism," has a hyphen which
privileges the modern, and this term is properly applied only to the first of
the two generations; in "postmodernism," on the other hand, the
hyphen has dropped out and the agglutinated form, in which "post"
gets top billing, implies the emergence of a new entity. This form of the word
is increasingly common, but rather than being applied indiscriminately it ought
to denote specifically that rising generation which conceives of itself as
distinct from and often opposed to modernism.
As for my focus on the
American scene, I agree with those who feel that post[-]modernism
is in many ways an international movement, but I maintain that there are
certain distinguishing features in its American manifestation. For one thing,
American post-modernism has been largely an academic phenomenon, and as such it
displays an unusual, if not historically unique, interplay between reader and writer,
each having great practical importance for the other, and each at limes
competing to supplant the other. This reciprocity between producer and consumer
has few parallels in contemporary culture, even in the mass marketplace. What I
will be describing, then, is a sort of discrete economy within the culture,
small enough to be extremely responsive, and having its own hazards and
rewards, its own channels of distribution, its own peculiarly adaptive forms
and practices.
I.
Identifying the Audience
In "The Shaping of a
Canon: American Fiction, 1960-1975," Richard Ohmann
begins the difficult but important process of quantifying the value of raw
sales, major reviews, attention from intellectuals and academics, and even
inclusion on the college syllabus in the elevation of a contemporary novel to
the canon. He notes that the last of these factors is
all but necessary: the college classroom and its counterpart, the academic
journal, have become in our society the final arbiters of literary merit, and
even of survival [for literature].[1]
On the basis of the historical
record of the period covered by his study, Ohmann
argues that both large sales and the approval of intellectuals are
preconditions for canonical status; but the facts do not logically disallow the
possibility that a few readers, properly placed in the cultural machinery,
could permit a book to bypass popular currency and arrive, slowly but perhaps
more surely, at canonical status.[2] Such is the case, I would argue, for American post-modern fiction. With
respect to this fiction, Ohmann's network of buyers
and reviewers reduces to a more specialized hierarchy of readers, consisting
for the most part of teachers and students. Of course, writers who have a
predominantly academic audience are not guaranteed admission to the canon, but
neither are they automatically threatened with oblivion: as I will later
suggest, continued interest in these writers is endangered more by restrictive
readings than by a restricted readership.
One might well ask, to begin
with, what basis there is for the assertion that American post-modern fiction
has a largely academic audience. Although publishers have sometimes included
post-paid market survey cards in the books they sell, there isn't much research
into the market for specific books -- in part because the profit margin doesn't
justify the expenditure that would be required, but largely because of the
opinion, widespread in publishing, that books can't be sold like soap, and that
works of fiction in particular are unique products without a predictable or
consistent market. On the other hand, editors with whom I have spoken are aware
that the market for post-modern fiction is "academic and big-city":
these books don't sell "in the shopping malls in the suburbs."[3]
In contrast to book
publishers, magazines do have the resources to determine the nature of their
audience, and can often describe their "average reader" in minute
detail. On the assumption that their editorial decisions would reflect this
carefully cultivated sense of audience, I reviewed the activity in various
periodicals around a group of authors who, I contend, find their audience
almost exclusively among professional academics and those they educate, and
also around a control group of authors who have both public and professional
followings. Using several on-line databases, I compared the number and nature
of citations for Gass, Hawkes,
Davenport, and Coover to those for Bellow, Updike,
and Roth in the MLA bibliography and in the popular media.
My survey of citations for
Bellow, Updike, and Roth indicates that while these writers do publish in and
receive the attention of the tastemaker periodicals, they also appear in a much
broader range of media. Philip Roth, for example, has published essays and
interviews in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of
Books, and Harper's; he has also given interviews to Mademoiselle
and Vogue, placed essays in U.S. News & World Report, and
excerpted his fiction in the glossy New York magazine. These results
bear out Ohmann's claim that the author of certified
literary merit will usually be one who has sold a lot of books but has also
been well-received in the key periodicals.
The results of my survey of
the citations for Gass, Hawkes,
Davenport, and Coover indicate that some writers do
succeed in establishing a reputation and an audience in intellectual circles
without ever achieving popular recognition or celebrity status. Compared to
Bellow, Updike, and Roth, these writers were the subject of fewer citations in
both the popular and the professional media (though the number of references in
the professional media was proportionately higher); nonetheless, the references
occurring in popular media were almost exclusively restricted to those
periodicals most often named as the "gatekeepers" of literary merit: The
New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review
of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and occasionally some more
general but still intellectually upscale magazine like Harper's.[4] What this suggests is that, although these post-modern writers clearly do
have an audience, they do not have much of a public.
In an interview given after Omensetter's Luck had been in print for
twenty years, Gass was asked whether "what has
usually been considered as the traditional audience for the novel, that is,
middle-class women, specifically in the USA, middle-class housewives, has been replaced
by the academic community of readers?" His response is worth repeating:
There are of
course students and faculty people who read your work, but outside the academic
community the majority of readers are still women, women who happen to be
housewives and who, in one way or another, have been influenced by the
university system.[5]
In order to
disarm the question, Gass is willing to suppose an
audience of (college-educated) housewives, but even granting that Gass's audience is comprised of "the few" rather
than of "the many" it seems unlikely -- were it the audience he
describes -- that he would have enjoyed the enduring reputation he has. On the
contrary, what is demonstrated in the case of American post- modernism is that
fiction with a limited public can survive and even thrive, as long as it finds
its handful of readers among those who confer literary prestige.
Robert Boyers,
founding editor of Salmagundi, has estimated that a writer like William Gass "will be lucky to find ten thousand readers for
his book over a period of ten years," and that estimate is confirmed by
others in the publishing business.[6] The standard explanation of this circumstance, one Gass
himself has endorsed, concludes that a work like Omensetter's
Luck is too demanding for the average reader. In the words of Gass's former editor, this author's audience is
"obviously" restricted to "the highly literate reading
public."[7] But the numbers indicate that Gass's work can't
be reaching very many readers even in that rather limited group and in any case
if Boyers is correct when he calls Gass "a brilliantly accomplished and not impossibly
difficult novelist," then the restricted size of his audience is probably
due less to the challenge presented by his works than to that professionalism
which has come to dominate what Peter Burger, in his The Theory of the Avant-Garde, called "the
institution of art":
When one
refers to the function of an individual work, one generally speaks
figuratively; for the consequences that one may observe or infer are not
primarily a function of its special qualities but rather of the manner which
regulates the commerce with works of this kind in a given society or in certain
strata or classes of society.[8]
Post-modern fiction, like most
experimental art of the twentieth century, has depended on the mediation of
"interpreters and exegetes" in its commerce with the public.[9] What is new in the current American situation is not literary promotionalism itself, but rather the fact that until
recently most mediators have not been academics. The example of
nineteenth-century tastemakers like Charles Eliot Norton or James Russell
Lowell might be raised in contradiction (both men held Harvard professorships),
but though these critics may have derived some of their authority from an
academic position, they exerted their considerable cultural influence primarily
as editors of prominent periodicals (respectively, The North American Review
and The Atlantic Monthly).
In any case, neither one would
have been allowed to teach a course in the writers he promoted and published.
In fact, there was apparently no such thing as a course in the modern novel
until the very end of the nineteenth century, and it was not until the middle
of our own century that even serious contemporary fiction would have been
considered an acceptable subject for academic study. It has only been in the
last twenty years that English departments have routinely offered courses in
contemporary literature, and only in the last ten that this has established
itself as a field in its own right within the discipline.[10]
Given the traditional
animosity between the academy and experimental art, academic post-modernism
represents a noteworthy convergence -- one no less interesting for the fact
that these writers maintain the anti-academic rhetoric of the avant-garde in
the face of their practical accommodation with the institution they derogate. Gass, for example, recently drew the following distinction
between the scholarly article and the essay as practiced by Emerson (and Gass):
The essay is
obviously the opposite of that awful object, "the article," which . .
. represents itself as the latest cleverness, a novel consequence of thought,
skill, labor, and free enterprise; but never as an activity -- the process, the
working, the wondering. . . . [T]he article pretends that everything is clear,
that its argument is unassailable, that there are no soggy patches, no illicit
inferences, no illegitimate connections . . . it knows, with respect to every
subject and point of view it is ever likely to entertain, what words to use,
what form to follow, what authorities to respect; it is the careful product of
a professional . . . . and its appearance is proof of
the presence, nearby, of the Professor, the way one might, perceiving a certain
sort of speckled egg, infer that its mother was a certain sort of speckled
bird. (25)
Gass's point that scholarly writing pursues a standard of completeness not
enjoined upon the personal essay is interesting, though neither as new nor as
valid now as it was when Adorno first made it in 1958;[11] what is more remarkable is the vehemence of his anti-academicism (in which
he is joined, of course, by many if not most American academics). It is worth
noting that "Emerson and the Essay" originally appeared in The
Yale Review; and although the affiliation between Author and Professor
still goes largely unacknowledged, it does deserve to be explored -- not only
because it offers us insights into the fiction produced by academic
post-modernists and -- the manner in which their largely professorial audience
has received it, but also because it may bring us to a better understanding of
the cultural and institutional framework we share.
II. The
Hierarchy of Readers
Nowhere is criticism so
thoroughly integrated into the process of reception as it is in the case of
academic post-modernism. This may be because post-modern fiction presupposes a
reader who places a high value on formal innovation; certainly most of its
critics have been readers of this type. But one problem with this apparently
ideal arrangement is that criticism dissipates the element of novelty so
important to the formalist undertaking. As Jauss puts
it,
the
aesthetic distance with which [a work] opposes the expectations of its first
audience . . . can disappear for later readers, to the extent that the original
negativity of the work has become self-evident and has itself entered into the
horizon of future aesthetic experience, as a henceforth familiar expectation.[12]
The result
of the process of reception for readers, according to Jauss,
is that "familiar expectation" eventually overtakes even an
'avant-garde' work of literature. Post-modern authors, when they join in the
activity of mediation, help not only to form new expectations, but also to
bridge the aesthetic gap on which their claim to innovation is based.
Throughout modernity,
criticism has played a decisive role in establishing the public image of an
author, and in determining the qualities for which that author's work would be
admired or despised; that fact alone might explain why authors sometimes enter
the lists on behalf of their books especially when those books are likely to
contradict "the expectations of the first audience." And in cases where
the work is aesthetically, politically, or culturally marginal, it is not
uncommon to find the way prepared by polemic.
One of the interesting things
about aesthetic polemic is that, though it is always advanced as one side of a dialectic of taste and is therefore by definition
exclusive rather than all-encompassing, once accepted it has a tendency to
reify even its most partisan points as Truth. But what is unusual about the
post-modernists with whom we are concerned is that, while they undoubtedly
share with their avant-garde ancestors the inducement of self-explanation -- or
did twenty years ago, when their books were still considered experimental --
they have acceded to respectability with unprecedented speed. This is in part
due to the nature of the contemporary culture industry, in which -- as Hans Enzensberger put it -- "what is steadily being offered
for sale is, as in other industries, next year's model."[13] The consequences of this historically unique situation are manifold and
various, but some are clearly undesirable.
Although the essentially
avant-garde rhetoric of marginalization -- the indispensable trope of all
aesthetic manifestoes -- continues to animate the self-descriptions of
post-modernism, its value is more nostalgic than descriptive at this point.
These authors may not be widely read but, as we have seen, they have gained
admittance to and recognition from the group that, perhaps more than any other, determines literary status.
In fact, when we examine
actual hierarchies of readers which have developed around post-modern fiction,
it becomes clear that they are characterized by inter-relations and
interactions even more subtle and complex than those described by Ohmann. Discussion of any such hierarchy is complicated by
the fact that people often play different roles within it. As we will see later
in this essay, the author may double as his or her own most important reader;
beyond that, readers will divide into teachers, students, critical writers, and
other authors -- all potentially overlapping groups. Still, at the heart of the
web of relations that preserves any work of post-modern fiction, one always
finds what could be called the 'properly placed' reader. That reader, by
definition, has two things: authority, according to whatever standards
currently hold sway, and an audience. In other words, the properly placed
reader must also be a writer -- and if her evaluation of an author is to shape
general opinion, then at least some of her readers must be writers as
well.
In "Contingencies of
Value," Barbara Hernstein Smith points out that
Although . .
. the evaluation of texts is not confined to the formal critical judgments
issued within the rooms of the literary academy or upon the pages of its
associated publications, the activities of the academy certainly figure
significantly in the production of literary value . . . . drawing the work into
the orbit of attention of a population of potential readers; and, by making it
more accessible to the interests of those readers (while . . . at the same time
shaping and supplying the very interests in relation to which they will
experience the work), they make it more likely both that the work will be
experienced at all and also that it will be experienced as valuable.[14]
Following
the genealogy of literary value backwards to its source, then, the taste of the
general reader develops under conditions laid down by critical judgment, which
in turn has been prepared for by the author's own evaluation of his work.
According to Smith, this last is "a prefiguration
of all the subsequent acts of evaluation of which the work will become the
subject" (24).
The activity of "critical
judgment" to which Smith refers would characterize most of what goes on in
the community of writing readers that I have in mind, but the artistic prevaluation which she describes is far less organized and
overt than that which is carried on by certain post-modern authors. In many
cases, these authors stand at the head of their hierarchy, with an audience of
critics who grant a great deal of authority to their opinions. For better or
for worse, then, authors who double effectively as First Readers can exercise a
lasting influence on the reception of their works.
Self-representation of this
sort is by no means a post-modern invention -- Henry James's prefaces to the
New York Edition of his works performed this function quite effectively -- but
it takes on new significance when the author belongs to an academy which
focuses systematic critical attention on contemporary fiction. The interaction
between author and reader which in James's case played itself
out over a period of years has lately been telescoped into an exchange that is
literally conversational: the contemporary author addresses himself to living
readers in interviews.
Given that, one might want to
know what the effects of this practice are: Is the influence of authorial
self-criticism intensified or diminished by the "spirit of competition and
cooperation"?[15] Does the professional interaction and practical interdependence of author
and critic imply a mutual loss of autonomy? Does it have consequences for the
creativity of the former or the judgment of the latter?
The interview is one place to
begin looking for answers. In replacing the preface as the platform from which
the author delivers a First Reading, the interview capitalizes on the
intensification of activity in the print medium through which aesthetic
programs reach their audience. Hans Enzensberger's
remarks about the culture industry suggest that this intensified activity is
essential to marketing aesthetic movements in a culture where "everyone
becomes aware of the process of steady advance, and this awareness, in turn,
becomes the motor that accelerates the process" (25). At this point in the
century, his contention that the arts are driven by the doctrine of progress
seems incontrovertible; in the example that follows, it will become equally
plain that the motor he posits has turned out to be that reciprocating engine,
the interview.
III.
Orchestrating Reception: a case in point
Interviews vary in tenor and
tone depending on the individuals involved; nonetheless, there are certain
types of behavior which seem to characterize the encounter between author and
critic. As an example, John O'Brien's interview of Gilbert Sorrentino
-- published in the inaugural issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction
(which O'Brien edits) -- offers us an excellent opportunity to describe some of
the more typical aspects of the author-interview, and may serve as an example
of the nature and extent of post-modernist criticism's remarkable reliance on
the self-analysis of authors. The Review of Contemporary Fiction,
published out of Illinois Benedictine College, devoted its Spring,
1981 issue to Sorrentino. Establishing a pattern for
future issues, O'Brien contributed both an interview with the author and an
essay on that author's latest publication -- in this case, Mulligan Stew:
a look over the brief history of this journal shows not only that the authorial
interview and excerpts from the work in progress are fixed features of almost
every issue, but also that authors who are the subject of one issue are often
contributors to the next. The Review of Contemporary Fiction is not an
important taste-making organ like the reviews Ohmann
discusses, but it is representative of the type of criticism that contemporary
fiction has received, and O'Brien himself, as a critic who almost specializes
in the interview, is highly illustrative of the problems that confront even the
best in a field where, as some rejoice to say, "critical practitioners and
most of their subjects are alive and working at the same time" (Klinkowitz).
To begin with, the interview
is a personal encounter, and the etiquette of such encounters is naturally
somewhat different from that which governs the encounter between a critic and a
text. We would expect the interviewer to be more deferential than the critic,
even when it is the same person who plays both roles. Postures in the interview
are reflected in syntax: the interviewer questions and the author answers; the
interviewer's utterances are submitted, the author's are proffered. Add to this
the assumption, reigning since James, that the author
knows more about what he has written than any other reader, and it should not
be surprising that most of the questions asked in interviews are polite
requests for authoritative information about methods, meaning, and (artistic)
motivation.
One form of the request for
information is the invitation to self-appraisal, in which the author is asked
to step back and survey his accomplishment with the eye of a detached observer.
Like all other such solicitations, this one can be cast as a direct question --
O'B: You have now published several works of fiction and poetry. What do you
see as the relationship between the two?
GS: They're married. They're absolutely married. The whole sense of language,
the conception, the syntax, my attempt to destroy metaphor that conceals simile
and allegory, which I have done my very best to destroy because I don't think
that anything is alike. I never try to compare anything because I don't think
that anything can be compared. [16]
or presented as a statement courting affirmation --
0'B: Your distaste for using literature as a vehicle for ideas is implicit in
the first two novels and explicit in your third. In various ways you keep
reminding the reader that this is art, not life.
GS: The breaking up of the concept of reality in The Sky Changes as
well as in Imaginative Qualities has to do with my idea of what fiction
should be; it doesn't seem to me that fiction should take the place of reality.
The idea of the mirror being held up to life is a very remote one as far as my
fictional thinking goes. (7-8)
The request for information
may also take a more limited form -- for example, the interviewer might ask the
author explicit interpretive questions about his work:
O'B: [I]s the first narrator [in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things]
the moral guide in the novel or is he too being satirized?"
GS: . . . The first narrator is not the moral guide. He is also being attacked
and satirized as much as any other figure in the novel (14)
Arguably, satire hasn't worked
if you have to explain it but it is possible that O'Brien's question is simply
a statement in disguise. This sort of answer-as-question may be thought of as
an inversion of the statement courting affirmation, and can be recognized by
its phrasing:
0'B: Do you think that the primary relationship among your novels is stylistic rather
than thematic? [italics mine]
GS: I see a clear relationship . . . [that] has to do with my own sense of my prose
style, because I don't think of my prose or poetry as being conceptualized
exercises in ideas or themes.[17]
Another common form of this
occurs when an interviewer cribs his question from ideas presented by the
author at an earlier point in the conversation:
GS: The narrative line of The Sky Changes is broken and splintered. The
past, the present, the future are mixed together in order to show very clearly that
there really is no past that is worse than the present and there is no future
that will be better than the present. The mood of the book is darkness. I
wanted to create a world that was black and without hope.
O'B: The tone of The Sky Changes is hopelessly grim . . . . the story physically spans across America [sic] as a way of
paralleling the desolation of the characters with that of the country. Is the
novel as dark as I see it?
GS: As a matter of fact, it is not only as dark as you see it, it is much
darker. (9)
In addition to requesting
information, though, an interviewer may at times confront the author with some
more complex behaviors. For instance, if the interview seems to have become too
friendly, the critic may exhibit mock aggression:
O'B: The beginning of The Sky Changes seems to me quite abrupt, perhaps
artificial. (9)
In such cases, a look
backwards will usually reveal that the interviewer is
trusting his weight to ice already tested and approved by the author:
GS: I'm interested in a prose which is absolutely cold, structured, and
chaste. I think [The Sky Changes] has a numb quality about it. I hope
so. (9)
But should the interviewer
really stray from the author's side, the path back to safety will be clearly
(if not always patiently) pointed out:
O'B: I can anticipate the grimace when I ask this, but do you see any
similarity between your second novel, Steelwork, and James T. Farrell's Studs
Lonigan? You are both dealing with the concept of
"the neighborhood" and its determining effects upon its inhabitants.
GS: No, I don't see any similarities between the two . . . . I had no interest
in making a figure like Lonigan and telling you about
his life and times. This book sedulously avoids narrative in order to avoid
that very thing. It sedulously avoids a protagonist for the same reason. (11)
This sort of one-sided
exchange, in which the critic aims at reproducing an analysis scripted by the
First Reader, may seem harmless enough when the primary purpose is to draw the
author out (though it had the disadvantage, in this case, of restricting
conversation to themes and ideas that even in 1971, when this interview was
begun -- had little to recommend them beyond their espousal by the author, and
certainly were not blazing any new aesthetic or critical trails). Our
expectation of critical insight from the interviewer is tempered by the
awareness that civility is more likely than belligerence to induce candor in
the author -- in any case, we may remember D. H. Lawrence's warning that
"an artist is usually a damned liar," and bear in mind that the
artist's self-understanding is likely to be a partial one. Nonetheless, these
excerpts exhibit either a lack of imagination or a concerted partisanship on
the part of the interviewer; granting O'Brien the benefit of the doubt, and
given the cultural and historical context in which the interview occurs, the
latter is strongly indicated.
Post-modern fiction has been
in the difficult and unusual position of carving out its own niche in the
canon, defining itself for the future, and actively competing with literature
of other traditions for adoption and enshrinement in the academy.[18] If the critic who writes on behalf of the post-modern author were the
editor of a magazine like Pound's Little Review, clearly devoted to
promulgating the enthusiasms of a partisan few, then there would be no
confusion of role and hence no cause for concern -- but The Review of
Contemporary Fiction is, in format and in fact, an academic journal, filled
with what presents itself as academic criticism and scholarship.
If the interview were the only
place where these boundaries blur, we might consider this merely an interesting
problem in social psychology -- but O'Brien mimics Sorrentino's
First Reading in his critical essay as well. In what follows, I have arranged
excerpts from Sorrentino's interview and O'Brien's
critical essay on Mulligan Stew in parallel columns -- Sorrentino's remarks on the left, O'Brien's on the right --
an admittedly artificial device, but one which should make it easier to see how
the First Reader can set the terms critics will use to discuss his work,
establish the context in which the work will be evaluated, and even define what
it is to be a good reader.[19] On the other hand, the comparison also suggests some drawbacks associated
with the exercise of that power.
Sorrentino |
O'Brien |
[Mulligan Stew] is sealed . . . . A narrator who exists outside. . . would have given the reader a way of getting
a handle on the book, but I didn't want the reader to be able to get a handle
outside terms of the book itself. (24) |
[Mulligan Stew is] a truly enclosed world, dense . . .
and devoid of any agent [to] serve as a guide through it. (64) |
It doesn't seem to me that fiction should take the place of reality. The
idea of the mirror being held up to life is a very remote one as far as my
fictional thinking goes . . . . [Art
is] the making of something that works, if you will forgive me, in a
machinelike way. (8) |
[N]othing in the book can be used as a mirror
for the world outside . . . . The
result is a machine, a . . . contraption
of moving parts, each of which has no purpose other than to move. (63) |
Interestingly enough, I came to see that a list somehow strips all
verbosity from the usual narrative paragraph. (19) |
It seems to me that [the] interest [of writers like Rabelais and Joyce]
in [the list] is to investigate what happens when words are stripped of their
narrative padding. (79) |
Poems don't have ideas. Poems are artifacts, like sculpture. (5) |
The artifact, not the life or the man, is the source of answers for
whatever questions one may put to the work. . . The work explains itself. (76) |
Poetry has a function, and its function is to be beautiful
. . . . [It] is a medium which is as magical, precise,
and as inviolate as the music of Mozart and Beethoven. It is on this basis
that poetry should be criticized . . . the
critic [should not be] trying to tell you what the poem means. (27) |
Art has to do with beauty [and] the language of criticism
. . . should [describe] the making. The work of the critic
is to open up the world of an . . . [as] object
whose sole purpose is to
be beautiful. (74) |
[Mulligan Stew] is . . . a
reality . . . . It's as if it were in an airless box, existing
in a kind of vacuum. (25) |
[In] Gilbert Sorrentino's fiction
. . . the airless worlds of [Sterne, Flaubert, James, and
Joyce] are again confirmed as pure and inviolate conceptions of the
imagination. (79) |
Writing fiction . . . . is indeed magical. (24) |
[James pulled] the curtain on art's methods, so that the magician's act
[remained] a secret, [but] Sorrentino lifts that curtain . . . to reveal that the act is indeed
magic. (63) |
The only lies in art lie in falsification of structure. Art selects and
orders experience. It is not history. It is not what "really
happened." (13- 14) |
The artist is not a historian.... A novel cannot violate the laws of nature . . . [only] the rules established by the
author within the work. (77-78) |
Now, while the interview puts
us on our guard against subjectivity's limitations and biases, the same is not
equally true of critical analysis. On the contrary, the expectations against
which we measure this genre of writing are of arguments carefully considered,
conclusions based on demonstrable evidence, and useful understanding
independently arrived at. O'Brien's essay is so reliant on the absent text of
the interview that it gives the impression of being a rather poor example of
critical writing -- its defect, though, is not that it is derivative, but that
it misrepresents itself altogether. Rather than being criticism, it is the
advance-copy for a campaign of intellectual promotion, designed to advertise a
certain brand of fiction and establish a critical context favorable to it.
At the most basic level,
authors influence reception by supplying the critic with language and ideas. In
the column-text, we can see Sorrentino's descriptions
of what he intended in Mulligan Stew being repeated, in the O'Brien
essay, as analysis of what that novel is. Sorrentino
says that he "didn't want the reader to be able to get a handle on the
book outside the terms of the book itself," and O'Brien calls the novel
"a truly enclosed world . . . devoid of any agent who will serve as a
guide through it" (!); Sorrentino says "the
style of Mulligan Stew is essentially the style of Lamont," and
O'Brien advises us that we should "look to Lamont" as the source of
the novel's parodies.
This comparison also makes it
clear that Sorrentino's generic and aesthetic ideas
about fiction have been adopted as the criteria according to which O'Brien
judges the success of Mulligan Stew and the stature of its author. At
the level of genre, this happens when literary traditions are re-read to
establish the legitimacy of Sorrentino's endeavors --
a process which can be observed when the language of Sorrentino's
remarks about the list resurfaces in O'Brien's generalizations about Rabelais
and Joyce. The same transfer takes place at an aesthetic level, when Sorrentino's assertion that "The idea of the mirror
being held up to life is a very remote one as far as my fictional thinking
goes" becomes O'Brien's conviction that "nothing in the book can be
used as a mirror for the world outside." Of course, the critique of
representation is not the intellectual property of either Sorrentino
or O'Brien, and my point is not that the critic in this instance is stealing an
original idea from the author but the critic is equipped for and guided
in his judgment by values and intentions the author discloses in the interview.
Ultimately, this authorial influence extends beyond the evaluation of an
individual work, and even beyond the establishment of aesthetic standards; it
defines and circumscribes the role of the critic himself. When O'Brien follows Sorrentino's rule that "[Art] is not history,"
and concludes that "the artist is not a historian," he may have done
nothing more than grant an author his donnee;
but the domain of the critic an his autonomy within
it have clearly been diminished when O'Brien fashions a professional credo --
that "the work of the critic is to open up the world of art . . . [as a
world of] objects whose sole purpose is to be beautiful" out of Sorrentino's declaration that "poetry has a function,
and its function is to be beautiful . . . . it is on
this basis that poetry should be criticized."
IV.
CONCLUSIONS
I suggested in discussing
Richard Ohmann's theories that fiction has little to
fear from a restricted audience, but that restrictive reading does pose
something of a threat; when a theoretically-inclined post-modern author commits
explication to the permanence of print, and when the criticism of post-modern
fiction validates that explication in the guise of independent assessment, the
risk is that the key meant to open aesthetic space for a work of fiction will
instead lock that work into a single function -- the illustration of theory.
This, in turn, virtually ensures that once the theory has dated -- as all
theory eventually does -- the fiction will date as well. Consider, for
instance, how obvious, unremarkable, or uninteresting seem some of the claims
which O'Brien makes on behalf of Sorrentino: how many
readers today would repeat in tones of dismissal O'Brien's laudatory
assessments -- that as an artist Sorrentino "is
not a historian," that his book "is a machine," that its
"sole purpose is to be beautiful"?
The modernist doctrine of the
autonomous art-object is an article of faith not only for Sorrentino
and O'Brien -- in the words of the latter, "the work explains itself"
(!) -- but also for Gass, Hawkes, and most of the authors of this generation.
However, a radical dependence on factors outside the fiction is indicated by
the very orchestration of reception. As we have seen, this nature of this
dependence, and the fact that it goes unacknowledged, poses certain problems in
the institutionalization of reception; this institutionalization, in turn,
poses a problem for the long-range response to the work. To be sure, the future
response to Sorrentino will involve factors beyond
authorized readings, but such readings may well continue to exert a
considerable influence, in less obvious ways.
As long as post-modern fiction
continues to find its principal audience in the classroom, and as long as the
doctrine of progress continues to drive our evaluation of contemporary
literature, then the authority exercised by the author acting as First Reader
may ultimately have the effect of promoting obsolescence, by rendering the
works themselves uninteresting to those who mediate between the author and this
audience. William Gass, speaking in general terms of
the situation in which the post-modern author finds himself, blithely admits
that
. . . increasingly he writes books that will teach well, you know.
He may be teaching books himself. He is often in classes talking about how you
write, to writing students; before you know it, his books are about writing,
and they teach splendidly because you have all these things that you can do in
the class, to point out this device, that move, and so on . . . . So there is
an interaction: the writer is writing, of course, for the audience he has; the
audience he has is also moulded by the kind of books
he writes.[20]
Gass seems completely satisfied with the state of
affairs he describes, but novels that "teach splendidly" today may
not be taught at all as the interest of the profession shifts away from
demonstrating "this device, that move, and so on."
As post-modern fiction comes
to be studied in new ways and appreciated for different reasons, it will be
necessary to find new ways to read these authors if interest in them is to be
sustained. In order to do this, we will have to start by acknowledging that
these are works which must be understood as belonging to a particular
historical and institutional context, and which must be read with an awareness
of the ways in which, within that context, our understanding of these texts has
been produced and orchestrated.
Notes
1. Richard Ohmann, "The Shaping of a Canon:
U.S. Fiction, 1960-75," Critical Inquiry 10.1 (1983): 206. This essay has
been reprinted in Ohmann's Politics of Letters
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987). Back
2. Ohmann himself cites Catch-22 and One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest as two instances in which a book achieved canonical
status without becoming a best-seller in the first few weeks of its release;
and in fact, in Ohmann's own summary of the steps
leading to canonization, "commercial success" is a notably minor
element, one which could conceivably be replaced by the oft-noted
"intangible" benefits (to pride, reputation, and recruiting) of
publishing that fiction which is widely admired but rarely read. Back
3.
C.f. the following exchange
during my interview of 7/10/87 with Bob Bender, a fiction editor at Simon &
Schuster:
4.
JU: Without asking about numbers in
this case,
5.
another way to ask about the market for
this fiction is to
6.
ask if there is any way to characterize
the readership for
7.
writers like Coover, Gass and Hawkes. . . is their
8. readership largely academic?
9.
10.
BB: Academic and big-city, yes.
11.
12.
JU: Academic or people who have
been through the
13. academy?
14.
15.
BB: Yes. I mean those books, for
instance, if we
16.
publish . . . let's take the chains, the
bookstore chains as
17. a case in point . . . .
18.
19. JU: Waldenbooks/K-Mart?
20.
21.
BB: Waldenbooks and B. Dalton,
because they've got
22.
let's say about
800 stores. If we do those books, what will
23.
happen with the chains is that they will
take them through
24.
their A-level stores, which are their
big-city stores, and
25.
that represents
maybe one or two percent of their stores.
26.
It's very difficult, unless we can somehow
make the case
27.
that this is a big breakout book, in which
this particular
28.
author now reaches far beyond his previous
audience, those
29.
books are never going to show up in the
other Daltons and
30. Waldenbooks. So . . .
.
31.
32.
JU: Their sales will be determined
to a certain
33. extent, by what . .
. .
34.
35.
BB: By the buyers at the chain
stores, yes, who will
36.
say 'Oh, this guy doesn't sell in the
shopping malls in the
37. suburbs.'
38. An interesting sidelight: Gass and Guy Davenport
have both published in House and Garden (a Conde
Nast magazine, cousin to GQ and Vogue), indicating either the
special influence of a particular editor, or that these writers are not averse
to reaping the rewards of public notice. In another anomalous instance, Hawkes published a story in the 15 Jan. 1964 issue of Vogue.
Back
39. E. G. Diez, "The Writer's Community in the
USA: An Interview with William Gass," Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingles 8 (April 1984): 162. Incidentally, as
of late 1988 Omensetter's Luck had gone
out of print; I was not able to find out from its publisher, New American
Library, what its sales had been or why it had been discontinued. One
possibility is that this novel will now be picked up by David Godine, who has republished several of the books Gass originally published with someone else. Back
40. Robert Boyers, "The Little Magazine In Its Place: Literary Culture and Anarchy," in The
Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History 58. Boyers puts the problem in the following context:
41.
In the twenties and thirties, when Pound
and Williams were
42.
young and the little magazine seemed full
of promise, it was
43.
no doubt appealing to think of a
publication directed mainly
44. to
one's peers in the community of letters. In time one
45.
might expect to win a range of other
readers, and very few
46.
artists actually believed it might be
possible to produce
47.
important work without ever passing beyond
that original
48.
little-magazine
readership. In our time the literary
49. situation
has decidedly altered such expectations. One
50.
needn't have precise figures to know that
the wider
51.
readership earlier anticipated by the
poets does not exist;
52.
that volumes of poetry, even by
established and clearly
53.
"successful" older poets like
Stanley Kunitz, will find
54.
readers only in the tiny community which
reads and aspires
55.
to publish in this little magazine or
that; that a
56.
brilliantly accomplished and not
impossibly difficult
57.
novelist like William Gass
will be lucky to find ten
58.
thousand readers
for his book over a period of ten years.
59. (57-58)
His estimate of ten thousand
was confirmed in two of my interviews with publishers. Nan Talese
of Houghton Mifflin suggested that the high end might be a sale of 65,000
copies for a new novel by an author such as Updike, with the low end possibly
as low as 3,000 copies for a new or unknown author. In fact, she said that
sales of three to five thousand copies would be normal for a work of literary
fiction (personal interview, 10 July 1987). In Bob Bender's estimate,
"fiction, literary fiction, tends to sell in a certain quantity; one can generalize
somewhat and say these books sell 10,000 copies, maybe 12,000 copies --
something like that, depending on who we're talking about" (personal
interview, 10 July 1987). Back
60. C.f. the following exchange, in personal interview with John Herman of Weidenfeld & Nicolson (7/9/87):
61.
JU: How would you describe the
audience for these
62. books?
. . . Who do you think reads these authors? You're in
63.
a better position
to know that than . . . .
64.
65.
JH: No, frankly, there again,
though it sounds
66.
strange, one of the strange things about
publishing is that
67.
one doesn't have a very good sense
for most books of
68.
who the audience
really is. You can sort of . . . We don't
69. do any
research on it. Obviously! highly literate . . . .
70.
the highly literate reading public is the
obvious answer for
71.
these kinds of
books. Each has its own niche beyond that . .
72. . .
73. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Theory and History of
Literature 4; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984) 12. Back
74. See Elizabeth W. Bruss, Beautiful Theories:
The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1982): "ever since the advent of so-called avant-garde
literature there has been a silent army of interpreters and exegetes ready to .
. . mediate between the latest literary experiment and the unreadiness
of the audience" (78). Back
75. These assertions rely on Gerald Graff's book, Professing Literature
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987). Graff cites the autobiography of Yale's
William Lyon Phelps, in which Phelps claims that the modern novel course he
taught in 1895 was "the first . . . in any university in the world
confined wholly to contemporary fiction." Graff goes on to note, though,
that "Phelps may not have been so far ahead of other professors as he
implied"; Brander Matthews and Bliss Perry were also working on courses in
the modern at about the same time (124). Back
76. T. W. Adorno's "The Essay as Form" is
well worth reading; the English translation, by Bob Hullot-Kentor
& Frederic Will, can be found in New German Critique 32
(Spring-Summer 1984): 151-71. Adorno presents the
idea as follows:
77.
In the essay, concepts do not build a
continuum of
78.
operations, thought does not advance in a
single direction,
79.
rather the aspects of the argument
interweave as in a
80.
carpet. The
fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the
81.
density of this
texture. Actually, the thinker does not
82.
think, but rather transforms himself into
an arena of
83. intellectual
experience, without simplifying it. (160-61)
And in contrast to Gass's Platonism -- which, as the conclusion of his quoted
remarks demonstrates, has the effect of equating the manner of expression with
the nature of thought and thinker, Adorno extrapolates
a more genuinely postmodern account of the essay's relation to experience:
Unconsciously and far from
theory, the need arises in the
essay
as form to annul the theoretically outmoded claims of
totality
and continuity, and to do so in the concrete
procedure
of the intellect. If the essay struggles
aesthetically
against that narrow-minded method that will
leave
nothing out, it is obeying an epistemological motive.
The romantic conception of the
fragment as an artifact that
is not
complete in itself but openly striding into infinity
by way
of self-reflection, advocates this anti-idealist
motive
even in the midst of idealism. Even in its manner of
delivery
the essay refuses to behave as though it had
deduced its object
and had exhausted the topic. (164)
Finally, it is worth noting
that Adorno makes these points as part of an argument
with his academic contemporaries, who persist, he says, in "fencing up art
as a preserve for the irrational, identifying knowledge with organized science
and excluding as impure anything that does not fit this antithesis." As Adorno sees it,
The person who interprets
instead of unquestioningly
accepting
and categorizing is slapped with the charge of
intellectualizing
as if with a yellow star; his misled and
decadent
intelligence is said to subtilize and project
meaning
where there is nothing to interpret. Technician or
dreamer,
those are the alternatives. Once one lets oneself
be terrorized
by the prohibition of going beyond the
intended
meaning of a certain text, one becomes the dupe of
the
false intentionality that men and things harbor of
themselves.
Understanding then amounts to nothing more than
unwrapping
what the author wanted to say . . . .
(151-52)
84. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of
Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, Theory and
History of Literature 2 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982) 25. Back
85. Hans Enzensberger, "The Aporias
of the Avant-Garde,"
in The Consciousness Industry: On
Literature, Politics, and the Media, ed. Michael Roloff
(New York: Continuum-Seabury, 1974) 25. Subsequent references to Enzensberger will be incorporated in my text. On the preceding page, Enzensberger
observes that
86.
Eternal survival in the museum is being
bought with the
87.
prospect that henceforth the march of
history can stride
88. across
everything without extinguishing it. Everyone becomes
89.
aware of the process of steady advance,
and this awareness,
90. in
turn, becomes the motor that accelerates the process. The
91.
arts no longer find protection in their
future: it confronts
92. them as
a threat and makes them dependent on itself. Faster
93.
and faster,
history devours the works it brings to fruition.
94. Barbara Hernstein Smith, "Contingencies of
Value," Critical Inquiry 101 (1983): 25. This piece is reprinted as
the title essay in Smith's Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives
for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988). Back
95. The remark is Jerome Klinkowitz's, from his
preface to The Fiction of William Cass: The
Consolations of Language (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1985), by
Arthur M. Saltzman. Back
96. "An Interview with Gilbert Sorrentino,"
with John O'Brien, in Review of Contemporary Fiction 1.1 (Spring, 1981): 5. Subsequent references to this interview
will be incorporated in my text. Back
97. Page 5. On Sorrentino's never treating his prose
or poetry as "conceptualized exercises in ideas or themes," see page
26 of the interview, where he says,
98.
I write poetry in much the same way as I
write prose when I
99. am
working on a book like The Orangery . . . . The
100.
driving force behind the books I write is
that I have always
101.
liked to risk
falling on my face. . . . I like to create
102.
problems for
myself and see if I can solve them. . . . [In
103.
The Orangery] I wanted to see if I
could take a
104.
precious,
literary idea and make strong poems out of it. .
105.
. I
have always loved exercises and I have always tried to
106.
take the simplest literary exercises and
make literature out
107.
of them.
108.
In the Sorrentino-O'Brien
interview, for example, there is a current of hostility directed at Norman
Mailer, Saul Bellow, John Updike, James Baldwin --
authors who are in direct competition with the formalist innovators for the
attention of posterity. Back
109.
Ironically, the O'Brien
article is called "Every Man His Voice." Along with his interview of Sorrentino, it appears in Review of Contemporary Fiction
1.1 (Spring, 1981): 62-80. Subsequent references to
this essay will be incorporated in my text. Back
110.
Jared Lubarsky,
"The American Writer in Society: An Interview with William Gass," Eigo Seinen 124 [Tokyo 162, Japan (1978): 9]. Back
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