Here Comes Everybody – And She’s Karl Kraus!

and they all want be just as individual and superior as I do, the bastards.

Nah, he thinks we don’t have the taste to want to be like him. We all want to be Jennifer Weiner.

I have to say that from what I thought I knew about Kraus, I am surprised and not surprised that Franzen admires him.

There are many delicious ironies in effect here… have been poring in and out of the Franzen book (I got an ARC from a pal this morning) and it’s not as bad as you think—but that’s not necessarily saying anything.

Lucky for Kraus, Franzen only “translates” 5 essays (or is it Reitter? Or Kehlmann?), so there is still plenty opportunity for some enterprising soul to exhume Kraus.

As for Franzen… I hope he hopes this all blows over quickly & he gets a CV notch for finally nailing, “The Kraus Project.”

What’s to complain about? Is the reading that this is some kind of Harold Bloom-esque rant about how things were better in ye olden days? Because that reading is self-evidently wrong.

Thanks for that John. As a result of following that first link I now know that

1: Someone called Amanda Hess exists and that

2: She is an idiot.

So that’s two things I’ve learned today. And it’s only eight am!

Damn. Like so many others before me, I forgot to close the blockquote. I know all true CT-ers can figure it out, but for the record: everything after beautiful is me. (And if that’s true, maybe I’m one of those folks Franzen is bitching about.)

But Franzen is less enthused about the prospect of other humans actually responding to his stories—or, God forbid, telling their own stories without the aid of Franzen’s refined literary filter.

Oh my god! A novelist who is grumpy, egocentric and slightly misanthropic – and an elitist and a luddite. I have never heard of such a thing!

How dare he not love us all equally and think his stories are better written than ours – it’s just preposterous, he should be crucified live on Twitter or something.

I wonder what they would make of Thomas Mann these days.

Franzen’s essay is fucking awful.

I haven’t read his fiction, but I’ve read a good deal of his non-fiction over the years, and all of it has the same theme: an exploration of Jonathan Franzen’s centrality in and to the world, coupled with laments about everyone else’s inability to live up to his standards, all intended to represent Franzen as one of the Last Serious Writers. A good 75% of his non-fiction is a kind of unbearably self-aware self-flagellation; just look at the quote already supplied above, with the added benefit of the first line in the immediately following paragraph:

and, the next thing you know, you’re translating The Last Days of Mankind as The Last Days of Privileging the Things I Personally Find Beautiful.

And maybe this is not such a bad thing.

There’s Franzen in a nutshell. Just self-aware enough to understand that he’s basically Grandpa Simpson, but lacking any sort of understanding that might help him avoid it, or indeed, any will to look at the world from a perspective that isn’t perpetually centered on Franzen himself. Everything he writes is like this, from his essays on organic foods to his bird preservation schtick. It’s 10% genuine concern about something and 90% posture, only that posturing makes Franzen feel kind of bad (since he’s just self-aware enough to know that it’s posture) so he takes it out on himself (and others) in excruciating detail in his writing.

The worst thing about all of this in my view is Franzen’s inability to see things in a systemic fashion. Since he’s an entirely self-centered writer, all he can see are the various things around him that he doesn’t like, but he has no sense of how those things connect to each other. There’s no explanation in him, just lists of things. And it’s true, some of those things are quite terrible, but it doesn’t take a genius to make a list of bad things on a page; it just takes some reasonable level of awareness about the world. Franzen could be using his literary gifts, such as they are, to draw connections between all these things he bemoans; instead, it seems the best he can really do is punt to a long-dead Austrian.

I haven’t read Karl Krauss, so maybe he’s totes awesome and someone ought to be working real hard to bring his writings to the masses. But I doubt that Franzen is the right someone; I actually don’t even believe he cares about Krauss at all except as a corroborating voice for his curmudgeonry, or that this project is anything other than an attempt to cloak himself in the writings of another and thereby bask in the glow of whatever halo he imagines Krauss wears. I’m sure the name is weighty enough to further cement his appointment as Our One Very Serious Writer Today, although in passing I note that his promotion of the “deliberately hard” Krauss is infinitely ironic in light of his terrible hack-job on William Gaddis.

People will surely say I am being ungenerous, and maybe that’s true. But I have yet to read anything at all in Franzen’s nonfiction that suggests to me that he’s anything other than a moderately talented prose stylist afflicted with a crippling earnestness and a desire to be thought of as a serious thinker without actually having to think serious thoughts.

When I read the Franzen essay, as an Austrian an admirer of Kraus I resented Franzen’s take on him, almost an abuse of that wonderful author. Kraus was fanatic on precise and clear usage of language, an early opponent of what Orwell would later call “doublespeak”. And Franzen claims he’s deliberately obscure as a matter of policy!

The translated passages in Franzen’s article give no real flavor of Kraus’s beautiful style in German. He really should be read in the original, where his passion, wit and love of language can be fully appreciated. Kraus and Franzen are not a good fit, as Franzen seems to admire Kraus for all the wrong reasons.

Who the eff is this Jonathan Franzen character and why should I care about him? Anyone who thinks Mac vs. PC is worth worrying about is clearly more taken by symbolism than substance. Compared to Alan Kay’s vision of what personal computers should be about, neither is worth spit.

Well, it gets better. It needs a rewrite and some serious pruning, and the Kraus translations felt wobbly to me (which may be a gross injustice, as I don’t read German). But the discussion of whether the world really is going to hell in a handcart or it’s just a perception born of middle-aged angst – and if it’s the latter, whether that invalidates it (it’s my middle-aged angst dammit!) – is pretty good.

Has anyone seen Jonathan Franzen and Russell Brand in the same room at the same time?

Russell Brand, while viscous with sleaze, has genuine sex appeal. I would say it’s the male equivalent of jolie laide, but it’s not that, because he’s a conventionally quite attractive person. It’s something like a cross between that and peacocking, though, where you think, “there is no way on God’s green earth I would fuck a man wearing those damn necklaces,” but then you suddenly have reservations, “hold up, hold up here! I don’t want to paint myself into a not-having-sex-with-Russell-Brand corner! I think I might, actually, fuck that guy. Huh. I was not expecting that, for real.” He rolled natural 20 on charisma.

Mitchell Freedman: I recommend that you do, in fact, read The Corrections, as it’s widely regarded as his most important work. After you do so I would be happy to discuss with you whether his views about women color his work in a way that makes it fatally flawed as literature. When I read Hardy I’m not inclined to protest at the fate of his female characters, who tend to be caught up in threshing-mills with yet more blades than his male characters. One is charitable when reading great works of the past. Reading works of the present day, which are not remotely great, and which set themselves up as Important Novels in a way that has only been open to Important Male Novelists of the latter 20th century, one is less charitable. Not filled with the spirit of forgiveness. Particularly when you know very well he could have known better. Just don’t write female characters or do it right, but not this other thing, not since literature has had to notice that women have interior lives that outstrip the bounds of “yes I said yes.” There is no excuse for this bullshit and women and men who are feminists are perfectly well justified in saying,”this fails as a work of art in virtue of failing as something that respects women’s human dignity.”

an insight into the way global capitalism is unfolding

Part of the way global post-capitalism (post- because everything and everybody and everything we do is now on the dark side of the moon is now exploitable for surplus) (although surplus itself…never mind) …is unfolding into “identity politics.” Your identity is now a profit center. And denying or resisting that your individuality has been commodified is also a profit center. Not your profit of course, all upward distributed. Feminism and anti-racism and libertarianism and socualism are now like the prayers and simony at Chartres. Indulgences.

The process is of course massively deflationary (of value). Heat death of the twitterverse. Franzen ain’t all that anymore, and it adds little relative value to point out
our total formal subsumption.

I liked the Franzen, but Holbo is right and none of this is at all new. Tiqqun said it better at the Millenium.

Let’s see.
√ Oversimplified ethnic pigeonholing
√ Mac vs. PC
√ hoi polloi vs. elitist hackneyism
√ Big-shot novelists shouldn’t use Twitter
√ Technology sucks but less than a typewriter
√ Lawns that kids should get off of aren’t nearly as nice as they used to be.
Etc.

While I might agree with much of what Franzen is ranting about, and for all his neue-Luddismus, this bit of echt trolling felt like Stephen den Beste once gave Mickey Kaus a column-foot for his very own guest post.

The general response to Franzen’s article saddens me. I don’t like his novels, and I found the article tedious and puzzling, but something serious and interesting is at work in it. I think Mitchel Freedman’s post make the point very well: the OP focuses on the wrong aspects of the article, and while the article has the flaws of oversharing and indulging in easy obvious predictable criticisms, all the snarky replies have the same flaws.

I didn’t like Franzen’s article, but I’m going to be wondering and thinking about it for some time–which I almost never have reason to do about newspaper opinion pieces or blog posts. I’ve almost already forgotten this blog post, for example.

I didn’t see either The Corrections or Freedom as especially marred by the author’s attitudes toward women. Not perfect, maybe marred by something or other. Nobody’s being forced to like either of them. I do think Franzen’s idea of the ideal novelist’s personality is a little peculiar. He’s free to describe himself and call that “the ideal novelist’s personality,” of course. If that’s what he’s doing.

I’ll take that information about your literary tastes, as well as your concern that I am unable to understand any matters other than sex and sexual politics under advisement, Mitchell. I’ve got a lot to think about.

The anecdote about the woman in Munich is a story about a young man who has chosen not to engage in a fling in a foreign city in order to remain faithful to his fiancée back in the US. He’s angry at himself for acting like a chump. (Note the mention of a wedding present in the next paragraph.) The author of the Toast article is either not paying attention or acting in bad faith, or both. Both, I think.

And Belle, did you read Freedom?

“Goodbye, poorly drawn female characters who exist as trophies for when the protagonists level up after a boss battle with Freudian analysis!”

Um, Belle? Patty Berglund IS the protagonist. Freedom has an old-fashioned plot about a woman who consciously makes a life as a wife and mother with a man she knows is not satisfactory for her. I thought it was a well-done traditional novel and I thought Patty Berglund was insightfully realized. Well, I’m a man. Perhaps you would disagree. But you can’t say that Patty Berglund is a trophy for the protagonist.

I think pretty much all the Important Male Novelists of the mid to late 20th-century are such sexist dillweeds that it is actually impossible to enjoy the books.

Yep, this is the kind of sentence that I wish weren’t true, that I would in fact passionately want to disprove and then… Philip Roth? Not great. Umberto Eco? One book I read was 99,9% devoid of female altogether, but seeing that the action was taking place in a medieval monastery, the author may be forgiven. The other had a very nice and complex female character and few interesting other but their impact on the plot remained negligible. So, yeah…. Haruki Murakami? Ah! Have you read any Murakami? Norwegian Wood and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman are both full of interesting complex female characters driving the plot.

Also, Freedom from some author, while a pretty bad novel all things considered, contains a quite wonderful female character.

Belle wrote:

Now, dudes, part of shared bank accounts and having children and shit like that is that you can coordinate on stuff and divide responsibilities sensibly. Am I going to sit down and read about the Fourfold Root? No, I will ask my husband, “hey peaches, what’s this with the Schopenhauer here, am I giving a f*@k or what?” Then he can answer on account of having written a dissertation about it. And he arranges for everyone to go to the dentist, and parent-teacher conferences, and guy stuff like that which I as a mother, am not really into. Similarly, as John is a busy person who doesn’t have time to read novels which are both extremely long and quite bad, I can read them on our joint behalf. No, I can also read long good books on our behalf, so I can tell John crucial stuff about Proust like when the last volume opens and it seems as if all the characters have come in fancy dress but then…

Then she closed comments so we could get into the foodfight all in 1 place.

This Division of Labor reflects, in a fun-house mirror kind of way, the one in my marriage. My wife enjoys reading literature and tells me about it; I enjoy reading, well I probably shouldn’t say, so I won’t, but I tell her about it and answer her questions about weighty matters.[1]

So I too haven’t read anything by Franzen.

Thinking about this parallel, and also thinking about how hard it was to find interesting female characters in books and movies when my daughter was little (20 years ago), Belle’s comment that the problem with so much of modern fiction is the incredible female characters therein (and I mean incredible in the most literal way) suggested to me another parallel.

The standard explanation for my problem way back when was that little boys were unwilling to read books or watch movies or pay attention to stories in which the main character was a girl, even adventure or action stories. Little girls did not have similar objections to books, movies or stories in which the lead was male. Maximizing audience or sales (or trying to keep a mixed sex group of kids quiet) meant stories (primarily) about boys. Perhaps something similar is true of modern fiction. Women do not demand (only) stuff about women. Men are not only less likely to read fiction generally, but are willing only to read stuff about men, so maximizing an audience or sales …

[Keep in mind that, like Larry Summers, I am not so much generalizing here as talking about a distribution, but unlike him, I am trying to characterize the whole distribution, not just one tail of it. Also, I am offering my observations not as wisdom but to raise the issue to hear where I am wrong. I offer an anecdote or two and ask whether they are consistent with the general pattern of the data.]

[1] In a weird way, this DoL has passed down to my children. Although my daughter enjoys and reads fiction, it is generally not what one refers to as literature; it is my son who enjoys literature, and indeed received his undergraduate degree in literature. However, he married a woman who is at least as well read in that way as he, and I would be mildly surprised if my daughter ends up with a man who dominates her in that regard.

“an insight into the way global capitalism is unfolding” says Mitchell Freedman.

This is what bothered me most about the article. It doesn’t bring any new insight to the table, not even for people who merely read the opinion or book columns in The Guardian. Throw in that whatever warmed up insights of others it does throw up are expressed obscurely and thus destined for little impact and it’s hard not to feel disappointed in Franzen.

“the writer must indicate that he or she is well aware that the class position of the characters implicates them in some sort of immorality. This usually feels pretty cheap.”

I know! Stay classy, class consciousness!

“What do you mean ‘important academic insight’? Is that different from a regular old important insight?”

Pretty cheap way to score a point, no? I don’t why Freedman used ‘academic,’ and I don’t know Kraus’ work at all. But I think Freedman’s right that there’s insight here. I think Franzen’s point is, on the one hand, a critical one about the psychology and context of Kraus’ style–suggesting that Kraus’ hatred *could* be inaccurate because pathologically motivated–and, on the other hand, the appreciative point that his criticisms are nonetheless often apt and beautifully made.

This seems to be the point of his oversharing about his personal life in relation to his own hatefulness toward contemporary technology and culture. He’s making the critical psychological point that his own attitudes and article are pathologically driven, a reflection of his historical place, background, and personal story and, at the same time, insisting that doesn’t disqualify them from being apt. He seems to be recommending to the reader that we take the same thoughtful critical stance towards his haterdom that he does: be on your guard, but don’t dismiss it.

I think that’s why I found the article both confusing, disatisfying, and thought provoking. It’s undecided, it’s against itself and for itself, it’s thinking in process, which we rarely see any more.

But of course I don’t think that can beat the nuance of: “These criticisms are not ex nihilo novelties in the known universe” or “kids get off the lawn!”

On a related note, I think the entire critical category of “haterdom” is incoherent, dishonest, and hypocritical. Misplaced or not, Franzen’s hatred is defensive, based in his love of threatened things: the toleration of people and things that aren’t beautiful and efficient, navel-gazing overlong books, bookstores, unfinished and meandering 120+ character thoughts, tweets from birds not phones.

He may be mistaken in thinking these things are truly threatened, or that they ought to be loved by anyone else, or that the costs of technology outweigh the benefits, but one man’s hater is another man’s lover.

Or, as Nietzsche used to say: Haters gonna call lovers of things we hate ‘haters,’ then praise each other for not being haters.

Franzen has long been a lightning rod, but the latest iteration sparked a worthy redirection and a grudging nod …

@ marcel #47: I can’t point out whether you’re wrong about the marketing, but you have touched on a social point familiar to me. When I was a child, I read stories that had male protagonists and believed that what they were doing, or striving for, was open to me. By having lucked into a family that believed that was true, and by ignoring teachers who didn’t, I managed to avoid being disillusioned on that until quite an advanced age. There were small indications in graduate school, and then the world of work made it quite clear that not all that would be open to me.

Perhaps, like Frantzen, I am becoming crankier as I get older, but Belle’s comment about the sexism of mid to late 20th century male novelists rings true to me. It’s not just the inability to write good female characters – whole novels are shot through with assumptions about things that are important or interesting that simply don’t connect with my life. It is interesting to read about others’ lives, but not so exclusively as those male authors write.

Cheryl wrote:

When I was a child, I read stories that had male protagonists and believed that what they were doing, or striving for, was open to me. By having lucked into a family that believed that was true, and by ignoring teachers who didn’t, I managed to avoid being disillusioned on that until quite an advanced age.

My daughter was a varsity athlete in HS and college, and one of things I am proudest of about our child rearing is summed up in the following anecdote. She was on the HS track team & one day during a meet when she was in 9th grade, she came over after one of the boys’ races, having noticed, apparently for the first time, that boys who were fairly mediocre runners had times that were less than those of the fastest girls in the corresponding race. Outraged, she pointed this out and asked, “Did you know about this?” I had to admit that I had, but I was thrilled that it had taken her until she was 14 for her to learn about this.

OP: his Guardian essay isn’t complaining about anything for which there aren’t already perfectly good, complaining memes

The three stages of middlebrow response to revelations of political atrocity or assaults on conventional wisdom: 1) That’s nonsense; 2) That’s exaggerated; 3) That’s old news. John, how often do you find yourself thinking that the nth+1 criticism of sexism or the war in Iraq or the National Security State is tedious and superfluous because the point has already been made? “I’ve heard this already; tell me something new!” is a response I’d expect from Maureen Dowd or some other Beltway airhead but not from you.

The flattening of consciousness by the commercialization of culture doesn’t happen in a week. It’s a long arc, centuries-long by now, and infinitely ramified. It demands persevering criticism, reformulated in every generation, from Diderot to Hazlitt to Arnold to Kraus to Lawrence to Adorno to Trilling to Mills to Mailer to Birkerts to Franzen and Rebecca Solnit. And we’ll still probably lose. But it’s urgent work, and it’s terribly discouraging to hear an intelligent person respond to it with “been there, heard that.”

I suppose it would be absurd, in a discussion of an essay about Karl Kraus, to get anyone to talk about Karl Kraus?

You could actually make the opposite argument w/r/t Freedom. There are four threads to the novel: Patty Emerson Berglund, who’s followed from childhood to middle age, in chapters that–it’s eventually revealed–are supposed to be an autobiography written on a therapist’s recommendation (these chapters have some of the same rhetorical issues as the writing about women in The Corrections, which I think are interesting and not necessarily to be condemned as “inccorrect,” but are also annoying from a purely readerly point of view, but anyway); Walter Berglund, her husband; his friend Richard, a famous rock musician; and their son, let’s call him Alex Keaton sans virginity. Arguably, on the basis of the text, Franzen knows the least about Walter’s life as an adult. When he’s forced to write about a man at work, he writes about how young professional women inevitably fall in love with their male bosses (alternating with stories about unscrupulous rich people, greedy poor people and abstract treatieses on population dynamics). Or else he makes the man an artist who doesn’t have to go to an office and does the equivalent of writing essays about his peeves all day (alternating with hot sex with groupies). Or he rewrites “All My Sons” (alternating with the need to choose between the hot rich girl who uses him and the intelligent working class girl who supports him). On the other hand, he knows lots and lots and lots about problems between husbands and wives, and the dissatisfaction of women with the options available to them, and their wish to replace their staid husbands with rock stars. The problem is that–as every reviewer has noted–Patty’s opinions about herself and her own life sound more like Franzen’s than like any woman’s.

Hidari,
What I know about Karl Kraus is this: None of us is qualified to talk about Karl Kraus.

“The flattening of consciousness by the commercialization of culture doesn’t happen in a week. It’s a long arc, centuries-long by now, and infinitely ramified. It demands persevering criticism, reformulated in every generation.”

Yes, and–in the spirit of Adorno–part of the task of criticism is to reveal that the commodification of culture is systematic, each little trivial piece adding up to a relatively inflexible, homogenous, and inescapable totality.

So in addition to reformulating these criticisms, another merit of the Franzen piece might be that it draws many small complaints–easily dismissed in isolation–together into a larger whole. I assumed that was part of the point of combining observations about seemingly silly sources of anger (the annoying Mac vs. PC commercial, techno-fads and boosterism) with bigger concerns like global capitalism and the environment–our belief that those small symptomatic pieces of the larger development are trivial or innocuous is part of the problem.

To oversimplify: the point is that if you don’t object to parts, you don’t object to the whole, that if you don’t hate the twitterverse, you don’t really hate global capitalism. And–correct or not–I don’t think that’s the same old criticism we usually hear.

I like the stuff Franzen points to on adornment/utilitarianism in technology and the links therein to Ruskin, William Morris, the applied arts and recent criticism I read just the other day that Apple has become a fashion company. I suppose one could also link adornment/ornamentation to the women-in-fictional-works undercurrent in these Franzen threads. Relatedly, Cormac McCarthy is an interesting case when it comes to female characters. He said in a Wall Street Journal interview a few years ago that he’s going to try real hard to create a great female character in one of his forthcoming books (The Passenger). As far as women and McCarthy go, I don’t believe his masterpiece Blood Meridian suffers anything for a lack of a strong, well-crafted female character.

Also, LFC, do you read and write purely in strawfeminist -ese?

No. But I prob shd bow out of this thread anyway.

I can’t really dispute the main point about recent male authors being bad at writing female characters. But I think Bloix has a point about Patty Berglund in Freedom — although folks might reasonably disagree about how well drawn a character she is, she doesn’t seem like anyone’s trophy in the novel, and she is most certainly the protagonist.

Franzen sounds like an aging character in one of his books. Not really a good thing.

Z #45: Have you read any Murakami? Norwegian Wood and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman are both full of interesting complex female characters driving the plot.

Well I haven’t read Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, but I’ve read my fair share of Murakami. And I love Murakami, but not for any “interesting complex female characters”. His women are enigmatic, beautiful, mysterious, and often unaccountably fall for the bumbling protagonist. They embody qualities rather than action. I thought Steve, who should get back to reading, got it right when he wrote of Norwegian Wood “This is a romance novel for dudes, which is to say that it’s sensitive-dude pornography.”

As I say, I love Murakami, but I’d be surprised if he has a big following among women.

I’m interested to know which (recent) male writers people think do create fully formed female characters?

Belle: It is astringently refreshing to have a novelist not care about having sex with you at all.

You know, I have a feeling many, many novelists don’t care about having sex with you at all. This is just such an odd cast to put on things — and I echo Mitchell Freedman at 26 here.

Franzen seems like the classic instance of someone who wants very much to be a great novelist – except there’s that darn awkward part where you hafta write Great Novels.

His prose just isn’t that good; his characters all seem infected by his contempt; and if I ever finish one of his novels, I’ll tell you then what I think of his plots.

… Re: Belle’s point, it is true. Even someone as painfully self-aware as DFW blew it in Infinite Jest. I don’t know what’s wrong with us.

The essay, I think, bears more and more careful reading than I have yet done. Still, it seems to me that he is objecting not to modernity, but the dominance of the most popular. If, Franzen is making arguments similar to others, still he does it with style, and that seems to me to be worth the trouble. As to his critique of technology, I look at these two sentences, “What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?”

It is a damn good question, and I wish I had an answer to it. But it is not Amazon or the internet that is shutting down such publication. I live with the office manager of a literary agent, and placing books that have no hope of become best-sellers is near-impossible these days, and was becoming so decades before the internet emerged as a force in letters. The kind of writing and reading that Franzen values always was the province of a small minority, and the people who are funding publishing are not willing to cater to the tastes of any small minority. The business model of the publishing houses has increasingly become the business model of Hollywood, and this began decades before Jeff Bezos was even a gleam in his father’s eye.

Ironically, it is likely to be publication by co-ops, by “small” presses, self-publishing even, that is likely to save the writing and audience that Franzen loves best.

(As a footnote to this, I don’t think he’s recognized that Microsoft has stolen Apple’s lead in UI design in many areas. But then, this is another small minority. In another decade, they may all be using Google devices.)

Croaks the very contrary Raven.

I’m reminded of Foster Wallace’s piece (included in “Consider the Lobster”) on Updike, which also more generally discusses the “Great Male Narcissists, hereinafter GMN” and, in discussing a particular Updike novel, features such stats as “number of lines about recent global catastrophe” and “number of lines about the protagonist’s penis and how he feels about it.”

In my view, none of Pynchon’s characters are fully formed and in the round, because that’s not what his fiction is concerned with. On the other hand, if Belle (or any other reader I respected) laid out for me how there were systematic differences between the way he depicts his male and female characters that ought to make it problematic for a 21st century reader to continue, I think I’d concede the point that I’m Pynchon’s central audience–let’s just call it “nerdy over-read fanboy” for short–and other people, possibly most women, are not.

Interestingly I had a version of this discussion when I was an undergrad 40 years ago, when my then girlfriend was explaining to me why she didn’t like John Barth, and always found it more appealing to reread Virginia Woolf. I resisted at the time, and boy am I embarrassed about that now.

Ugh Jonathan Franzen. I never even heard of the guy until I heard him trashing the fact that he’d been selected for “Oprah’s Book Club” on NPR. Okay, but he could have said “no thanks” privately, right? Then he goes on to say he felt embarrassed that dudes would be put off from reading it.

And I decided never to read anything by him because why would I want to financially support yet another sexist? Because sometimes it is about sexism (and class and exclusivity).

That said, I did click on this article and stopped halfway through because it was TOO LONG. So add “he is a crappy writer” to my knowledge of JFranz.

Most of the commentators seem to have read a very different essay from the one I read. Perhaps it would help (me) if I selected what I thought were the key passages.

“The concept of “cool” has been… fully co-opted by the tech industries…(and) I confess to feeling some ….disappointment … when a politically committed print magazine that I respect, N+1, denigrates print magazines as terminally “male,” celebrates the internet as “female,” and somehow neglects to consider the internet’s accelerating pauperisation of freelance writers. Or when good lefty professors who once resisted alienation – who criticised capitalism for its restless assault on every tradition and every community that gets in its way – start calling the corporatised internet “revolutionary.”

“America in 2013 is a similarly special case: another weakened empire telling itself stories of its exceptionalism while it drifts towards apocalypse of some sort, fiscal or epidemiological, climatic-environmental or thermonuclear. Our far left may hate religion and think we coddle Israel, our far right may hate illegal immigrants and think we coddle black people, and nobody may know how the economy is supposed to work now that markets have gone global, but the actual substance of our daily lives is total distraction. We can’t face the real problems; we spent a trillion dollars not really solving a problem in Iraq that wasn’t really a problem; we can’t even agree on how to keep healthcare costs from devouring the GNP. What we can all agree to do instead is to deliver ourselves to the cool new media and technologies, to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and to let them profit at our expense. Our situation looks quite a bit like Vienna’s in 1910, except that newspaper technology has been replaced by digital technology and Viennese charm by American coolness.”

“To me the most impressive thing about Kraus as a thinker may be how early and clearly he recognised the divergence of technological progress from moral and spiritual progress.”

“For Kraus, the infernal thing about newspapers was their fraudulent coupling of Enlightenment ideals with a relentless pursuit of profit and power. With technoconsumerism, a humanist rhetoric of “empowerment” and “creativity” and “freedom” and “connection” and “democracy” abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans; the new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic, and it’s far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people’s worst impulses, than newspapers ever were.”

“Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, labouring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they’re the only business hiring. And the more of the population that lives like those workers, the greater the downward pressure on book prices and the greater the squeeze on conventional booksellers, because when you’re not making much money you want your entertainment for free, and when your life is hard you want instant gratification (“Overnight free shipping!”).”

Not the most original thoughts, perhaps, but rather different from the ones that some of the commentators above have persuaded themselves that Franzen is making.

In any case, whatever intellectual sins Franzen might be accused of (and he is hardly in Kraus’s league in terms of diagnosing cultural sickness), they pale into insignificance compared to Jennifer Weiner’s witless ramblings.

94: an essay of 150 words is too long, if it’s badly written. A well-written essay can keep the reader going to the end, however long. I suggest you consider the chance that the folks here are as smart as you and accustomed to reading long and difficult works.

98: so to make sense of what Belle said, you have to make stuff up, rather than accept her statement that she finds them to be sexist dilweeds?

Do you think they aren’t sexist dilweeds, or do you think that should be no serious obstacle to Belle’s enjoying their works? Or do we really have to stick with the little woman’s attention span not being up to the challenge?

(Feminism: still news to many, apparently.)

geo:
Of course, that it’s impossible to enjoy Jane Austen because she mentions . . . money . . . and her characters sometimes reject men . . . is perfectly reasonable.

“Practically every one of the paragraphs you quote is a series of non-sequiturs.”

Really? They have no vestige of logic? Merely a string of unrelated words or sentences?

So if I was to say that a certain firm was paying its workers less and less to do more and more work, your immediate response would be “That sentence is illogical and has no meaning!”

Likewise if I was to argue that downward pressure on wages leads to less demand (as workers have less money to spend), again, your response would be that this was an illogical argument, that it had no meaning, that it violated the basic laws of logic?

Really?

I mean I get that a lot of white American members of the educated Bourgeoisie really really hate Franzen for reasons that I can’t summon up the energy to care about. I understand that. Really I do.

But many of the commentators here have simply not read the essay under discussion (indeed some boast about that very fact). Which is fine, but if you can’t be bothered to read the essay, I certainly can’t be bothered to read your comment on the essay that you can’t be bothered to read (especially if the comment is of the ‘this is the sort of thing I imagine that essay might have been about, given that I only managed to read the first paragraph. But let’s face it, it was probably sexist or something. Anyway I have TV to watch’ sort.).

Said I was out of here, but I’d like to point out that Hidari has missed a category of commenter: those who had not read the essay and who made no comment on it. B.c the thread also came to concern F’s novels since BW and others introduced the topic.

Fwiw, I have looked at the essay and I may end up agreeing w some or much of it when I have read it all properly. Franzen has a prickly personality but he can still be right about some things, e.g., the decline of independent bookstores (though some are hanging on).

Re what Anderson said above about a novelist’s contempt for characters: maybe, but not always. One case in point: V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas.
Bad politics? Check.
Contempt for characters? Check.
Sexist? Check.
A good novel? Damn right.

Contempt can be carried off, LFC – I’ve not read Naipaul, so maybe I will look at that one. But I posit that the reader IDs with someone, maybe the authorial persona.

(Again, I’m not equating the experience of literature with consuming Mike Hammer or Silhouettes. But they’re varieties of the same thing.)

I mean I get that a lot of white American members of the educated Bourgeoisie really really hate Franzen for reasons that I can’t summon up the energy to care about. I understand that. Really I do.

I’m glad you do, but given that I’m neither white nor a member of the bourgeoisie (seriously, not by a very far stretch), this understanding would seem to have little bearing in this context.

Anyway, I said that the paragraphs were composed of non-sequiturs. Taking just a first one, the concept of “cool” has very little bearing on Rushdie texting (omitted in your quote) or N+1’s piece. The characterization of print media vs. the internet as male and female respectively (which I don’t know what to make of, but I also haven’t read the piece in question), has no obvious relation to the fact that one of the effects of digital media is the pauperization of etc. This complaint against digital media at least has some obvious relation to the following sentence, but the latter is at best a grossly unfair characterization. Sure there nominal leftists who are techno-utopians; there are also lots of people on the left debunking this utopianism. And anyway, were how the former “resisting alienation”? What does that even mean?

So, yeah. Non-seq

I’m interested to know which (recent) male writers people think do create fully formed female characters?

Kim Stanley Robinson?

Ronan(rf) @ 6:17,

Infinite Jest has a number of them, and while DFW’s short stories are largely concerned with masculinity they have a bunch of fully-formed female characters (especially in, ironically, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Suffering Channel, The Ever-Changing Value of the Yen, Suicide as a Kind of Present . . . and the connected Interviews themselves have a silent female interlocutor who is sharply defined but in oblique ways)

Anderson @ 6:52,

I’d say I’d meet you in the parking lot, but I have no idea what kind of warrant you could make for grouping Infinite Jest with Belle’s complaints.

What a downer to start the day! A guy writes a thoughtful essay, and then in a classic case of “Liberal Interventionism” gets the kitchen sink thrown at him.

I work for several handfuls of employed Hollywood writers and directors who are having their own hard times of course, and it is mostly due to technological changes. Starting in about 2001 or so, I was telling them that the internet was going to revolutionize media delivery and anybody would be able to compete with the majors. (I knew this, from following desktop hardware developments since the late 80’s because I was very interested in how to make and deliver animations for my own project — click on my name.) Anyway, back then, they were all like “What the hell are you talking about — that will never happen!” A few of the thoughtful ones said, “Well maybe, but there will still be a terrible marketing problem: how will anybody get their stuff seen? People will only watch stars, and you will still need the studios to advertise and promote!”

Nowadays of course they are all writing for newbies like AMC and Netflix, and looking at what Amazon and Google might think about financing, it is all going to the same idea now, and they say, “Jeez Lee, you were right — audiences are niching, and this whole thing is blowing wide open,” and I’m saying, “No, YOU were right — everybody’s the same size on Facebook; ABC-TV is a 24/7 Disney advertising operation; look at Murdoch and Fox; and it is freaking impossible to break through the indy clutter.”

So I understand. The fact that there are a lot of bad artists out there makes good ones hope they can break through the noise. But the fact is, you are up against potentially millions of other creators, and an audience member has only 24 hours in the day to look at stuff. There are probably more novels being written than could ever be read. For some artists (new novelists in particular, I would think) the world was easier when it was being bottlenecked through just a few book publishers (and like the screen studios, they are still the only ones with advertising budgets to push their product). Now, audiences, attitudes, and intellectual/emotional appetites appear to be fractionating (is that a word?) into very small niche markets. So don’t give up your day job (if you have one).

There are probably more novels being written than could ever be read.

I suspect that there have always been more novels being written than could ever be read. Until the internet, though, there was no way for their authors to get them out to where other people could see them.

Now, not only are there as many people as ever (proportionally speaking, and in relation to about 7 billion earthlings) who want to write stories, but we all have access to them (more or less), and we all also have access to everything that’s ever been written (more or less).

Somewhere along the way I gave myself permission not to try to keep up with … anything. The canon (whose?), anyone’s else’s opinions about “must reads,” books I’ve started but am not liking, etc. Of geo’s list of male authors, I’ve read at least one book by less than half of them, and there’s only one (Pynchon) where I’ve liked the book enough to read a second one by that author. Okay, I’m a philistine compared to geo, but I’ve known that for a long time, and I don’t care. (This isn’t to say that I don’t very much enjoy geo’s contributions here. I do.)

Life is too short. That’s what I mean when I say “I don’t have time….”

I do a lot of rereading, though. A lot. (Why not? Who would ever dream of listening to a great piece of music only once?) I’m fighting against starting a list, but suffice to say that the books I reread tend answer Anderson’s question, “whom do they love?” by saying, “Everyone.”

I’m interested to know which (recent) male writers people think do create fully formed female characters?

With Dave Maier’s proviso from #112, my recent favourites have been Paula Spencer in Roddy Doyle’s “The Woman Who Walked into Doors”, Isis Whit in Iain Banks’s “Whit” (and my better half agrees on that one), and Kathy in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go.”

Ben, I am less impressed than you ( tho I’d forgotten Kate, a minor character but one into whom DFW put a good bit of himself), but I will allow female commenters here to say what they found in IJ. It might be absurd of me to pronounce on what the book’s characterization of women holds for them.

Anderson@99: Some, many, or most of the novelists I listed may be sexist dillweeds. If so, it just goes to show that sexist dillweeds can write great novels. And yes, certainly, their being sexist dillweeds would be an obstacle to enjoying their work. The point about obstacles, however, is to overcome them.

bianca @101: Precisely. I’m not sure, though, why you addressed that exquisite bit of sarcasm to me rather than to Anderson, who doesn’t seem to understand that dismissing great novels because of particular moral or ideological limitations is a bad idea.

stubydoo@118: I think Belle was employing a little hyperbole
Yes, I’m sure you’re right. But the point isn’t to snark Belle or anyone else, but to remind one another of what all of us often forget: the exasperating necessity of keeping contradictory ideas, eg. overall aesthetic success and a specific failure of moral sympathy in the same work, in mind at the same time.

It does get annoying to see a whole lot of cultural attention devoted to a book that was clearly written by a sexist dillweed
Tolstoy treated his wife pretty badly, but Anna Karenina is one of the greatest of all novels, and perhaps the greatest novel about marriage.

PS – Idk the greatest novel about marriage, but I’m sure it isn’t AK. The Rainbow, for one, is surely superior. But I’m not sure “about marriage” is reducible to a category. Levin spends much more time studying peasants than his wife … again, not unlike the author.

@Tom slee 121
I was definitely thinking k ishiguro (remains of the day, though. Haven’t read ` never let me go` yet)

Anderson: we aren’t talking about sexist people, but sexist books
Sorry, I thought your earlier comment — “Do you think they aren’t sexist dilweeds, or do you think that should be no serious obstacle to Belle’s enjoying their works?” — meant that we were talking about people. But either way, I think the point stands: a novel may have lines or scenes or characters or attitudes that are sexist or racist or elitist or otherwise objectionable and yet have a great many others that are brilliant, beautiful, wise, humane, and otherwise rewarding. It would be sad and unnecessary to dismiss or ignore or be unable to enjoy the latter on account of the former.

Why do you say that Tolstoy didn’t understand Kitty? And yes, the qualifications for “Great Novel” are always up for grabs. What would you say they are?

Yes, too, The Rainbow is a great novel, as Kate Millett argued in Sexual Politics at the same time as she arraigned its failures of sympathy with some of its female characters and over-idealization of others.

tenzing @ 122:

Dolan, in eviscerating The Corrections, says he is “dying of bitterness now”. But these are the same words one might use to describe actual psychological trauma. So we understand that Dolan isn’t really bitter (because he’s not a victim of rape, or torture, or severe parental neglect), but god help me he sounds like he most certainly IS bitter.

There’s obviously this tradition in criticizing literature and authors where opinions are allowed to be so important that any generosity of spirit towards people and authors or perspective on the importance of what we’re talking about (stories, entertainment, imagination) is forgotten in a fit of pique. Or so it seems.

It’s confusing to me because it seems that people are feeling real emotions about novels and authors. From my experience, such intensity of concern over “culture” masks an inability to genuinely confront difficult aspects of authentic experience: relationships (with actual people, such as oneself).

We allow language for the real world where dying of bitterness is visceral and requires compassion, and another language for the salon where dying of bitterness is a put on. But if its a put on, I swear the critics have lost themselves in the act and are actually upset.

That’s weird, right?

(Wrote my comment before JH’s had appeared. Great minds, etc.)

The Mac-PC stuff is tired Charlie Booker did it so much better. Worse, it’s an example of sloppy language leading to sloppy thinking.

Franzen says

when you’re working on some clunky, utilitarian PC, the only thing to enjoy is the quality of your work itself. As Kraus says of Germanic life, the PC “sobers” what you’re doing; it allows you to see it unadorned

But “clunky” and “utilitarian” don’t go together. The whole point of the anti-PC case is that the need to stop all the time to deal with a clunky operating system distracts you from the quality of your work itself. Franzen would be better off with a 1980s-style diatribe against amateur fontography.

Compare Booker, after a non-apology for 900 words of sweeping generalizations about Mac owners

that’s what we PC owners are like – unreliable, idiosyncratic and gleefully unfair. And if you’ll excuse me now, I feel an unexpected crash coming.

Like JWM, I liked The 27th City. It’s the only book of Franzen’s I’ve read.

” Of course there are plenty of cases in which we can say ‘the characters were poorly drawn, yet the novel was strangely brilliant …’ ”

Dickens.

But since when did literary works become simply a matter of “characters” that “we” can sympathize or identify with, or, alternatively, who the author putatively wants to f*ck?

Is there no “autonomy” to literary works, independent of both author’s and reader’s intentions?

One of my favorite Karl Kraus quotes: “Politics is what a man does to conceal himself, and what he does not know”.

Perhaps with literature, it’s the other way around.

there’s a reason anyway why Mrs Dalloway is the most popular Woolf novel even tho not her best.

Agreed. (With the rest of the comment too. Not sure where that leaves me with my Pynchon fandom….)

@130 ‘ It is genuinely a problem, then, if these Krausian insights look like retreads of laments the internet is actually quite good at making, in a concise and witty (albeit can haz cheezburger) sort of way. ‘

In other words you are making the claim that Franzen “is a symptom of the disease of which he claims to the cure” (Kraus).

Which is fine. But as geo pointed out one of the most cliched ways of dealing with arguments that the commentator can’t be bothered to read or understand is to argue

1: We’ve heard all this before….and

2: …in any case it’s not true.

(Paul Ormerod makes this specific point in the introduction to The Death of Economics if anyone cares).

It’s quite one thing to argue that

1: Franzen is right, and his essay is a mess because this view has been expressed better by others (a view I have a lot of sympathy with)….

but quite another, indeed the opposite, to argue

2: Franzen is wrong, and his essay is a mess because of this wrongness.

These arguments are antonymical. Most of the commentators to this post don’t really know whether or not they agree with the essay, so they flip-flop between both of these arguments without acknowledging it (remember hardly anyone has mentioned Karl Kraus. Whatever one think of the original essay, it is Kraus’s argument, essentially, not Franzen’s. To repeat, you can argue that Kraus said it better but that says nothing about whether or not Kraus was right). Or else they pretend he made arguments that he did not in fact make (he’s a reactionary, he’s an elitist, he’s ‘sexist’ etc. etc. etc.).

Here’s a thought experiment, incidentally. Imagine an essay quite as bad as this was published by Franzen in which he argued that the Twitterz is da bomb, and that Facebook reelly rulez. Do you think it would be being attacked with the same degree of virulence? Would anyone even have noticed it?

(Just a note: this isn’t anything to do with Franzen’s essay, which I thought was middling, or his novels, which I haven’t read. I am quite prepared to believe they are as bad as some commentators claim they are).

“This is a superficial and, frankly, somewhat stupid way of looking at literature.”

This is a superficial, frankly stupid, interpretation of Geo’s post, which was perfectly compatible with–indeed, has to be presupposed to find any sense in–the sort of literary holism Holbo describes in the very next post.

A literary work is wholly sexist when…well, of course, *never*, since a work is never *entirely* anything. But it’s *generally* sexist if the greater degree of the views and attitudes presented and promoted by the book are sexist.

What does that holism consist of? Parts, of course! What are the parts of a novel? They are, to quote Geo: “lines or scenes or characters or attitudes.” It may well be true as you and Holbo say that a book can be ruined when the majority of its parts are sexist, but that’s begging the question. I thought Geo’s point was precisely that the confident dismissal of and general refusal to read major writers and entire epochs of literature suggests they’re failing to see that the preponderance of the parts are better than the objectionable ones.

Or, to make this crystal clear: isn’t Geo implying that its his *opponents* who are failing to read holistically, it’s atomistic reading that’s preventing them from seeing the whole of the work?

In real reading, we don’t calculate the holistic tone of a book, we feel it, often inaccurately at first. To say, with an ease as if stating the obvious “This book (which I didn’t read or read quickly because it’s bad because its sexist) is bad because it’s sexist” sounds, to use Holbo’s criticism, like something someone who has never read a book would say. Real reading is an encounter and conversation with many different characters whose motives and views are revealed to us and hidden from us in different ways, whose relationship to each other and the author is never totally clear, leaving us with a very imprecise, and again, often initially false, sense of the overall “position” of the book.

In contrast, when I say easily and casually the book as a whole is sexist, it implies I’ve approached it both atomistically and mathematically: I added up the good and bad lines, good and bad characters, did the math and, voila, determined it’s holistically bad. And, in the specific comments under discussion, I supposedly did this with 50 years of writing *that I refuse to read*.

“But who is supposed to be doing all this confident dismissing?”

Belle. Pretty confident in her dismissing.

Because when asked which of the two it is:

“Franzen is right, and his essay is a mess because this view has been expressed better by others (a view I have a lot of sympathy with)….

but quite another, indeed the opposite, to argue

2: Franzen is wrong, and his essay is a mess because of this wrongness.”

you replied thus:

“Franzen is right insofar as he thinks through various right thoughts to the point of realizing that maybe he’s, personally, guilty of shouting at the kids to get off his lawn. … He’s wrong insofar as he then seems inclined to reward himself for his cleverness”

i.e., that Franzen is right (or wrong) about Franzen things. You didn’t even acknowledge, let alone engage with, any other things he’s right (or wrong) about. Even though it was pretty clear that Hidari, whom you were replying to, was referring primarily to such points, and not to self-references in the essay.

The post was about “the confident dismissal of and general refusal to read major writers and entire epochs of literature …” Confident dismissal and general refusal are two separate things. John asked who confidently dismissed. The answer is Belle and the proof is the passage quoted by Dave Maier.

geo,
It seemed like an acceptable response at the time. If you didn’t hear it that way, I apologize.

You’ll get my WH Auden when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers (or you would if I had a book of Auden), but it surprises me how seriously some people take that sentiment.

geo sez:

Tolstoy treated his wife pretty badly, but Anna Karenina is one of the greatest of all novels, and perhaps the greatest novel about marriage.

i seem to recall holbo himself referring to john crowley’s Little, Big as the best depiction of a long marriage that he’d ever read. certainly that was the thread of the book that’s never let go of me. i never got through AK, but i was a freshman when i tried. so.

“a great many of which she doesn’t like, and probably perfectly well knew she wouldn’t like even before she started. But did she finish? Oh yes.”

I’m compulsive about finishing books, but also good at avoiding starting to read anything I’m likely to hate, so this is a higher tolerance for unenjoyment in reading than I can relate to. On the other hand, I can relate to reading some things I dislike, since there is a kind of intellectual pleasure to be had in figuring out what’s detestable in them. But again, I have my limits. I don’t enjoy most of the Important Novelists of the last few decades, so I tend to try one and quit on the author afterwards.

But I do try to try. I worry that the overall tone of the comments in this thread is “don’t even try to try”–that these authors are so egregiously bad, whether in style or in moral standing, that to even critically engage them is a mistake. And I think that’s a mistake, certainly for those who haven’t read much of them yet, but probably also for the others.

“You are not my wife!”

Can you prove that? I’m posting anonymously after all. Perhaps Belle’s tolerance for unenjoyable reading goes so far as to post and incite posts against her own…

I worry that the overall tone of the comments in this thread is “don’t even try to try”–that these authors are so egregiously bad, whether in style or in moral standing, that to even critically engage them is a mistake.

Maybe I’m missing specific comments, but it seems to me the only author flatly rejected is Franzen himself. (Not without reason.) And as Dave Maier pointed out, Belle specifically denied enjoying them; she didn’t reject “critical engagement.”

A few dots to connect:

— In the country music thread the other day William Timberman wrote, I never liked country music for the same reason that Jews don’t like Wagner — it was always playing in the background when I was being tortured.

— Anderson wrote, the qualifications for “Great Novel” may be up for grabs here.

— geo wrote, Thus it would be foolish for a socialist to dismiss… and There will almost certainly (as with people) be shortcomings, but to allow them to obscure the merits is faulty criticism.

*****

It’s interesting to note that although a few people suggested mildly that WT might consider rethinking his position, his comment didn’t generate an entire library of mischaracterizations and objections about how “foolish” it was to “dismiss” Wagner, or country music.

JH and Dave Maier have already pointed out that Belle’s comment was explicitly about her enjoyment, or lack thereof. Taking off from that, I keep coming back to the question of why it causes some people so much consternation to find out that we don’t all enjoy the same things. Next to Anderson’s question about the qualifications of a great novel, I would put this one – “Why do we read at all, and one thing rather than another?”

I’m not going to try to answer either question as such, but WT’s comment about country music is a version of the answer I’d give if I were being berated (as I am, by implication) for not spending a lot of time with the Great Male Writers of the 20th (and early 21st) Century: If someone is whacking me on the arm all day long, then even if it’s not a very hard whacking, and even if the whacker has lots of stellar qualities mixed in with the urge to whack me all the time, I think it’s perfectly justified to get out of the way of the whacking and go do something else.

Because you know, bottom line, it’s not as if there isn’t plenty else to read — which is what I was trying to get at last night when I wrote that “life is short” and “I don’t have time.”

And even if there weren’t plenty else to read (thousands of lifetimes’ worth), there’s also plenty else to do (although I’ve surely spent more of my life reading books than doing any other single thing). Listen to music. Make music! Take a walk. Go to a play, or the beach. Play basketball. Grow vegetables! And that’s to say nothing of (as Anderson pointed out) work and family life.

I wonder how many of the people who are so concerned about the “dismissal” of “great” male writers give equal time to great female writers. Or is it that there just aren’t very many of those?

I do wonder what the criteria for categorizing a novel as sexist are?

So far it seems what we have come up with are badly drawn or unsympathetically treated female characters. But that surely can’t be enough to be a threshold as I have come across many, many male characters who are treated in the same fashion by male (and female) writers.

Writing from a male perspective? That in itself doesn’t cut it either since most writers write best about what they know (and if they’re honest with themselves that sometimes just isn’t pretty or PC – and honesty rules).

Sexist male characters? Not sufficient, it depends on how the authorial voice treats them, they might be put there as objects of ridicule etc.

That leaves us with an openly sexist authorial voice, but I really haven’t come across many of those, let alone would regard the latter half of 20th century as dominated by them.

Ok and now you can tell me how one of my favourite books of that period

“1982, Janine” by Alasdair Gray

fits into all of this – good luck.

A great deal of male talking about women’s perceptions and how they are defective.

Again.

I find the same flaw in some of the discussion above that makes those dillweeds’ books so unenjoyable: a far too limited viewpoint projected onto the entire universe. It comes across to me as self-indulgent, much the way Franzen’s essay reads. And a little of that goes a very long way indeed. As someone noted above, identification is part of reading a novel, and it’s very hard for me to identify with an author whose overwhelming preoccupation is his sexual orientation to the world. In what I would consider a sexist novel, that preoccupation is accompanied by a coercive implication that one must agree that that orientation is of great import.

I suspect this could be considered part of a writer’s moral imagination.

To clarify in an attempt to forestall certain objections: “whacking” is standing in for a bunch of phenomena, like disappearing, marginalizing, caricaturing, objectifying, etc. And as Anderson says there are degrees,so there’s always a balancing act going on: how much whacking weighed against how many wonderful qualities weighed against how many other unenjoyable or unsavory qualities….etc.

GBS is a good example. He screwed up sometimes. He was a self-aggrandizing idiot sometimes! But he wrote so much that gives me pleasure and makes me think harder that on balance, he stays on my rereading list.

“The point about obstacles, however, is to overcome them.”

Yes, as my freshman-comp students said when I objected to their grammar, spelling, thesis, structure, and argumentation.

All of which, like sexism, are evidently supposed to be character-building.

… 183, I agree re: Shaw – wasn’t suggesting not reading him, so much as taking some of his critical judgments with a grain of salt. Shaw was a Slate contrarian avant la lettre.

Three conversations between women without mentioning boyfriends, as I recall. I nominate the Japanese/Finnish “Kamome Diner” (sometimes called “Seagull Café”), 2006, about a Japanese woman who opens a diner in Helsinki.

I really liked Shaw once and would still say he’s worth reading but my enthusiasm has probably diminished over the years. On one of the topics at hand, sexism, it’s pretty hard to accuse him of that, what w/ plays in which women boss men around (Candida, Major Barbara) or pursue them (Man and Superman). True, he did write something called ‘The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism’ but one must keep in mind when he lived. Btw there’s at least one book (by Sally Peters) that examines Shaw’s own sexuality, reaching interesting if somewhat hard-to-prove conclusions.

Mao, it’s called the Bechdel test, and you can find said rankings here.

187: Naoko Ogigami has made six other movies, and all are recommended. “Rent-a-Cat” is compassionate and whimsical.

In anime, neither Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Girls und Panzers essentially have any males in them, either as actors or as objects of discussion. A little in PM3, but he’s no good, and an irrelevancy. Azumanga Daoih, the Aria series, oh why go on.

Americans, of all genders, ethnicities, or political persuasions, just like to fight and find reasons to fight.

Thank you for linking to Franzen’s essay. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I have also enjoyed the discussion in comments (particular William Timberman’s and Hidari’s), which have already articulated much of what I have to say . The original posts above, and on Slate, Toast, etc., not so much. All of their takes on the essay strike me as superficial at best. In fairness to the hosts, John Holbo’s post is self-consciously so, and Belle Waring’s own commentary, as opposed to her unfortunately approving quotation of the Toast post, appears to be directed more at Franzen’s previous work, which I haven’t read, than this particular essay, which, as I mentioned, I liked a lot.

“Given the vast gulf between assembly language for the 80×86 and the 680×0 microprocessor worlds, it was also about as fully PC as possible for its time. And the author himself was a contributor to PC World. ‘Nuff said.”

I wouldn’t know: I’d never read a book where EBCDIC is not even mentioned. A man’s gotta have standards.

@167 “If you didn’t hear it that way, I apologize.” Does anyone else dislike this kind of faux apology?
I remember Pastor Ted Haggard: “I am very sorry if I have been the occasion for you to have taken offence…”
At best we have an expression of (mild) regret that someone is so careless/obtuse/confused as to think you have in fact done anything deserves a real apology. And then we have the “if” insinuation which suggests that the person receiving the condescending faux apology is anyway dissembling themselves.
Truly ugly.

Thanks for the King pointer, MG. hadn’t heard of that. And that cat IS creepy.

Tony Lynch #199. That’s some weird reading of bianca steele’s comment. I don’t think I could read that ungenerously if I tried.

Tom Slee @ 200: I’ve never heard anyone describe the Bechdel test as separating “wheat from chaff” or being a marker of acceptable vs. not acceptable.

At least one person, albeit fictional, has done so: The character who gives the rule in the original Dykes to Watch Out For strip only goes to movies that pass.

When Edward Said indicted Mansfield Park for political insensitivity because Austen failed to point out that Sir Thomas’ estate in the Caribbean probably had slaves, it was a license for every literature graduate student in America to go cruising through every work in the canon looking for ideological shortcomings.

Women, black people, queer people, all those Others–they are not ideological. They exist. Their humanity is not up for debate. It’s okay if they want to enjoy art that doesn’t erase, belittle, or dehumanize them. Characterizing that desire as nit-picking, as “cruising” on a mission to search out niggling little “shortcomings” is unfair, and makes you seem silly. Try to be intellectually honest, would you?

To see Mao satirizing Socialist Realism (if that’s what 210 is doing) is … interesting.

John: You devoted #135 to disagreeing with my main argument in #131, which you now quote again but describe (if I understand you) as too obvious to disagree with.

I’ll try again. A novel is a work of art, and succeeds or fails on aesthetic grounds, some of which I mentioned above (#152): “the structural integrity and ingenuity of the narrative, the moral/psychological depth of the characters, the subtlety and intricacy of the symbolic architecture, the vividness and fullness of the atmosphere and environment, the quality of the wit, the force of the rhetoric, the richness of the prose style.” On these grounds, Bellow, Roth, Mailer, Cheever, Updike, Malamud, and the other Important Male Novelists I mentioned in #98 are successful, in fact great or near-great artists.

Novels also have attitudes and assumptions (the latter often simply imbibed from the air they breathe) about politics, sex, race, and other vitally important matters. These may be offensive, even appalling, but they’re secondary in judging artistic merit. You might not want Bellow to be Secretary of Human Services or anything else that allowed him coercive power over women’s lives (I certainly wouldn’t), but not to be able to acknowledge that Herzog or Humboldt’s Gift or Augie March are great novels, or to enjoy them despite their flaws, is sad and unnecessary.

In your latest, you avoid the word “enjoy” and instead use “appreciate.” Well, OK. But if someone says, “I can see that this is a brilliant novel (ie, appreciate it), but I can’t enjoy it because the novelist has a bad attitude, crackpot ideas, or other ideological flaws” (which is what I took Belle to be saying, though a bit more dismissively), I don’t think it’s aggressive or presumptuous to put in a word for the autonomy of the aesthetic.

Saurs: I’ll get back to you. It’s 2am here.

Novels also have attitudes and assumptions (the latter often simply imbibed from the air they breathe) about politics, sex, race, and other vitally important matters. These may be offensive, even appalling, but they’re secondary in judging artistic merit.

geo,

You really don’t think that these “attitudes and assumptions” might have some bearing on, umm, “the moral/psychological depth of the characters”? That they might not thereby affect the “artistic merit” of the novel and so not be “secondary” at all? That if a writer can’t inhabit the mind of a female character, it wouldn’t at all affect the “the vividness and fullness of the atmosphere” or “the quality of the wit”?

Look, let’s try this a different way. On CB’s Gram Parsons thread I mentioned that I don’t “get” country music and this may well have something to do with me being brown and the “whiteness” of country—I could’ve used “enjoy” instead. I got some very mild pushback from Belle, …and that was it. Here, Belle and a few others mention that they don’t enjoy Important Male Novelists because of the “maleness” of the novels (I hope that’s a fair characterization) and all hell breaks loose. Now it may well be the case that the objective social value of Bellow is much greater than that of Willie Nelson so that failing to enjoy the former is, well, a much greater failing. Is that your argument? (Which would be a bit odd given other things you’ve said about objective values on previous CT threads.)

Even if all this were true, though, the enjoy/appreciate contrast doesn’t work the way you want it to. The autonomy of the aesthetic cannot by itself elicit enjoyment. Assuming the contrast holds, the most you can ask on its behalf is indeed appreciation.

It might be easier to enjoy or simply appreciate the occasional sexist Great Author, if it didn’t seem a strong pattern. At some point, it’s no longer a seperate issue, and you have to wonder whether sexist dillweedism is a requirement (or at least an advantage) to become socially accepted as a Great Author.

For geo, 2+2=8?

Also,

put in a word for the autonomy of the aesthetic.

That presupposes a pretty peculiar definition of aesthetic that is, decidedly, not universal. Are you sure this isn’t about your toys?

Saurs: PREACH!

Thanks for the recommendations btw Ben. T lynch sorry for the snark

Saurs @ 224, thanks for summing up the thread so aptly. Seriously people, read what Belle wrote before sounding off. It’s not hard to understand.

Geo, let me suggest a more productive use of your time: organising Great Film appreciation night at the local synagogue. First week’s feature can be Triumph of the Will.

Anon.: it was completely clear from the context that I was talking about a particular canon of “Important Novels of the Latter Half of the 20th Century,” for it is precisely this canon that Franzen wants so desperately to enter. My specific reference to Philip Roth is quite clear in that respect as well. The capitalization of the Novelists makes this extra, blindingly, distinct to a reader who knows the canon, does it not? Does this strike you as the words of someone seeking comity: “To say, with an ease as if stating the obvious “This book (which I didn’t read or read quickly because it’s bad because its sexist) is bad because it’s sexist” sounds, to use Holbo’s criticism, like something someone who has never read a book would say.”? This, perhaps, is full of charity? “in contrast, when I say easily and casually the book as a whole is sexist, it implies I’ve approached it both atomistically and mathematically: I added up the good and bad lines, good and bad characters, did the math and, voila, determined it’s holistically bad. And, in the specific comments under discussion, I supposedly did this with 50 years of writing *that I refuse to read*.” These do not sound to me at all like the words of a person who is willing to extend even a tiny bit of his hand over the gulf. I expressed a personal distaste for a canon of novels (Roth, Updike, Bellow, Gaddis, Pynchon et a very few al.). This dislike of a number of authors was acquired by my having read the books in question (astonishing, I realize.) Rather than consider that I might just be a person like you who had likes and dislikes, various tastes, and expressed them after reading novels, you insinuated–no came right out and claimed–that I refused to read any of the novels in question. Not just hadn’t read. Not just hadn’t read and was pretending to have read. Refused to read. This isn’t uncharitable, Anon., it is deeply rude and unpleasant. If you would like to apologize I am certainly willing to accept it, and I will go ahead and say that I was a little high-handed up there about your lack of native faculties to criticize art. If you fail to see why you provoked me, however, I don’t really know what else to say to you.

I want to go back to what I was trying to say in 230, starting with a more complete version of what I quoted from geo @215:

not to be able to acknowledge that Herzog or Humboldt’s Gift or Augie March are great novels, or to enjoy them despite their flaws, is sad and unnecessary.

It’s one thing to make a strong and cogent argument for the greatness of these novels, and to revel out loud in one’s own enjoyment of them.

It’s quite another to insist repeatedly that it’s sad and wrong for other people not to agree about the greatness. If you make an argument, and other people don’t agree with you, and your response is to patronize them with judgments like “sad and unnecessary,” that’s one level of unpleasantness.

But the unpleasantness crosses over (shockingly to me, and, okay, sadly, given how much I usually admire geo’s comments) into something quite offensive when you start to pass judgments on what other people do and do not enjoy.

Sometimes when I watch my own reactions to other people’s opinions and enjoyments, I am forced to realize that my disapointment is a form of loneliness. It would be so nice to know some kindred spirits….etc. That makes me wonder if I’m misreading geo’s “sad and unecessary” when I characterize it as a judgment on Belle. But it’s framed as if there’s some objective truth here about greatness, and people who don’t see the greatness are just … wrong.

An old friend of mine used to say, “Different is worse, Jane, different is worse,” meaning that that’s how people often/usually react to the fact that other people are, in fact, other.

That’s what’s sad, in the end.

Belle,

I think part of the confusion is that I entered this debate secondarily and indirectly. I initially objected to the OP’s take on the Franzen article, and hadn’t really been interested in the critique of sexism in Franzen and others’ books.

I entered the fray to support what I took to be a reasonable post by geo on how great artworks often contain flaws that are compensated by greater virtues, and overattention to the flaws can make us miss them. I jumped in because I think it’s an important and true point, one which has repeatedly been lost in the conversation, where artistic categories and judgments seem to have been reduced too quickly to good/bad, in/out.

I also jumped in because I thought the response to his post was somewhat offensive. One poster simply called it stupid, while Holbo’s more careful response still struck me as rude: that’s a view that would only make sense if you’ve never read a book.

Now, I should have reread the relevant post before switching topics, and for that I apologize. All I remembered was the Famous Dillweed Comment, not the context. And so that led to my misinterpretation of the statement. And that’s where I tried to be charitable: Holbo corrected me, I corrected the interpretation and adjusted my criticism. Your quoted examples of my lack of charity seems particularly uncharitable because *they are the view I that corrected immediately when shown it was false*.

@168 I revised my interpretation, objecting only to “confident dismissal” rather than “refusing to read.” I tried to hint that we should all be nicer, by admitting I got your view wrong, but also implying that Holbo’s comment about Geo’s post seemed too harsh. In another quote you mention, I threw that comment back at Holbo not to be uncharitable, but again as an attempt to quietly suggest we be nicer, that we’re all vulnerable to such arguments. I should have been clearer.

Holbo @169 responds quite charitably, indicating in a friendly way that my criticism is based on a misunderstanding. So, I apologize for implying there was no charity at all on the other side.

@173: here I really did try to go out of my way to make nice, so I’m disappointed that your examples of my failed charity didn’t include this post. In this post, I accepted further correction: I accept that I’ve misunderstood your claim–that you haven’t casually or without reading dismissed these authors–and once again adjust my criticism. And I think the new version is rather modest, hardly provocative or offensive:

“I worry that the overall tone of the comments in this thread is ‘don’t even try to try’–that these authors are so egregiously bad, whether in style or in moral standing, that to even critically engage them is a mistake. And I think that’s a mistake, certainly for those who haven’t read much of them yet, but probably also for the others.”

I still think this is a fair critical assessment. Note that in this post I’ve recanted my direction of the criticism to you, Belle. I’ve admitted that properly interpreted my worry doesn’t apply to your comments. I’ve instead made the case that the problem is in the overall tone of the comments, a holistic claim, rather than an atomistic one. And I emphasize that the worry is not you and your reading habits, but the impact the thread’s tone might have on others, who aren’t quick, voracious readers.

I apologize that I didn’t make that clearer: in shifting the criticism, I should have been more explicit that I was no longer criticizing your comments. The irony here is that my worry in the corrected, modified criticism was that the tone of the thread might encourage people to do what you accused me of: judging what they haven’t read, refusing to look at the ugliness before declaring it. (As I think may be the case with all the major general positions in this thread, the opposing sides are on the same side, but just don’t want the other on their side. The OP quote may have been an uncanny prediction: “Many share my views but I don’t share them with them.”)

So, I screwed up my interpretation many times, but I tried to correct it each time, and I tried to be kinder and less combative each time. It’s probably not your fault that you didn’t see it, since a comment thread disperses the comments, so it’s hard to see the whole. Ironically, it is forced atomistic reading.

I accept some responsibility for the misunderstanding, but I do think there’s more to go around. I still can’t read The Infamous Dillweed Comment without thinking that–even with the context–it invites misinterpretation. It also seems that it might depend on misinterpretation for its bite: if we interpret in the narrow sense you mean, then it’s obviously true, but if we interpret as a stronger claim, then you can say we’ve misinterpreted. I’m not saying that was your intent, but that your supporters in the thread sometimes seem to use it that way, taking the strong reading when convenient.

Anyway, I enjoyed the thread, misunderstandings and charitable failings and all. I still suspect there are no really substantial disagreements here in the end.

Thanks, geo.

I’d say that Shakespeare is a great dramatist nevertheless, because he’s a wonderful craftsman, a brilliant wordsmith, and extremely astute psychologically. But he’s not in the same league as Tolstoy or George Eliot.

Well, at least we know Geo is not Harold Bloom. (Also, he hasn’t called anyone “dear.”)

240: Hm. Geo *may* be Shaw, who would prove much more long-lived than we’d suspected.

But srsly, hatin’ on Shakespeare tells us more about the hater than about Sh’re. Might as well put Homer and Dante in their places while they’re at it. You know Homer’s problem? Repetitive and unoriginal. How many times can a guy write “rosy-fingered dawn” without noticing? It’s like he was giving dictation or something.

I’m sorry, “no accounting for taste and “you like tomahto, I like tomaeto” just ain’t gonna make it here. It isn’t make a sad.

if Belle saysd “it’s misogynist as hell” and I say “hell yes, it’s misogynist, that’s why I like it” I suspect our social relationship might be slightly damaged. Similarly, if I devote all my Saturdays to reading the Protocols and watching Birth of a Nation, I wonder if janiem will like me quite as much, a shade less than not at all.

Of course it never was just simply, “I can’t enjoy Mailer, your mileage may differ. It won’t matter to me a whit.” We know better.

It always had, if not a moral, then a social dimension.

And all the revelations of individual tastes and preferences above had a social meaning and intent within this thread and in this community.

Why else would anybody ask “Is X ok? X isn’t very sexist, is he?”

Although of course sometimes the intent may have been anti-social.

Anderson: at least we know Geo is not Harold Bloom
How do you know that?

Substance: Thanks for the link. That was good fun.

Janie: Thanks for exploring this delicate question seriously and civilly. Here’s an attempt to explain what I meant by “sad.”

Many people who seem to know what they’re talking about say that (late) Schoenberg, Ligeti, and Cage are great composers. I wouldn’t deny it, even though I don’t enjoy any of their music. I just assume that I don’t have the necessary knowledge or critical vocabulary or patience to judge of it. I hate Waugh’s snobbery, rancor, and contempt for the ideals of solidarity and rationality that I cherish. But of course I enjoy reading him, and of course I recognize his literary greatness. I enjoy Tolkein, dislike his ideas, and have mixed feelings about his literary merits. We can have all kinds of reactions to any cultural product, or anything at all.

If I couldn’t enjoy Waugh or Tolkein (or Shakespeare), or bring myself to acknowledge their aesthetic merits, because they all have ideals of conduct and beliefs about natural hierarchy and Original Sin that I strongly reject, I think that would be too bad — a loss for me and anyone I might influence. That’s what I meant by “sad.”

JanieM and geo,

I hope you don’t mind my interrupting your conversation. But may I suggest an analogy with something more mundane and maybe less touchy than literature? My wife hates cilantro, so she’s less able to appreciate any dishes that use it. Many of my favorite Vietnamese foods have too much of it for her to enjoy. This makes me “sad”–not because I have contempt for her taste, or because I think she “ought” to like it–but because I feel like she’s missing out on a real pleasure. In the end, it’s not really all that sad, since there are plenty of wonderful foods she can enjoy. So the feeling may be mistaken: there’s no good reason to be sad for her. But it is a feeling based in good will, not in judgment or disapproval.

Consider another, maybe more sensitive analogy. I love music, and so when I encounter someone who is deaf, I can’t help but feel a bit sad for them. I can’t imagine life without hearing, and there are so many pleasures I take from it that I feel it’s unfair that they don’t get to share them. Again, this may be a mistake: there are so many other pleasures to be had through our other senses, it may not be truly “sad.” But the feeling is based, again, in good will, a desire to share good things, not condemnation or contempt.

JanieM,

I was struck by your comment: “Sometimes when I watch my own reactions to other people’s opinions and enjoyments, I am forced to realize that my disapointment is a form of loneliness. It would be so nice to know some kindred spirits.”

This rings very true, and I wonder if the sadness as issue is the flip side of that. That disappointment and not liking something others like is based in a sociable desire for company and recognition. The disappointment in others not something I like may be based in a similar need.

And then we have Anon using a deafness analogy to carefully, gentle explain why Belle Waring’s opinions are wrong and sad and that she’s… missing out… on the books… she’s already read?

But it’s not your fault, Belle! You’re just inadequate! Just born that way! If only there was a way you could force yourself to find pleasure in reading books about how woman are stupid / base / sexual play-things / non-entities / castrating bitches! If only, if only.

PS- I don’t claim any particular level of raised consciousness – to the contrary, I was a good and conscientious freshman and generally I didn’t have any ideas that the professors didn’t want me to have.

Nope. Just the person what wrote it. The person, apparently, appointing themselves arbiter of book critiques, he who Takes Issues with Difficult Matters. Funnily enough, no where has Belle asked for assistance in drawing her own opinions, so the matter isn’t so difficult, after all. Belle doesn’t have to square her methodology for criticism by you. I know, it smarts. Again, too bad.

I’ll say it for the last time, because the gallows’ humor here is growing a bit thin, a bit too morbid: when a woman says no, I don’t care for that, she’s not asking you to convince her otherwise, to tell her to try it again, babe, you might like it this way, this time. I hope my meaning is clear.

The deafness analogy isn’t well-chosen in the context of the thread; it’s precisely because someone’s ability to perceive is acute that the OP is what it is, and in that case the composers of the works under consideration are tone-deaf.

Saurs,

You bolded this sentence of geo’s “I just assume that I don’t have the necessary knowledge or critical vocabulary or patience to judge of it.” But his next two sentences were: “I hate Waugh’s snobbery, rancor, and contempt for the ideals of solidarity and rationality that I cherish. But of course I enjoy reading him, and of course I recognize his literary greatness.”

It seems that geo is saying there are many reasons one might not enjoy a work of art. One reason might be lack of necessary knowledge (geo’s reason for not enjoying Schoenberg). Another reason might be one’s strong distaste (indeed, hate) for an artist’s ugly, immoral, unethical attitudes towards things one considers important, worthy, valuable (geo’s reason for disliking, though not to the point that it prevents his enjoyment of, Waugh).

Clearly Belle has the necessary knowledge to judge the Great Novelists (I submit this is clear even to geo). As I read his comment, geo is saying that it is Belle’s distaste for the GN’s sexism, a distaste geo shares, that is causing her lack of enjoyment, a lack of enjoyment geo doesn’t share, and that it’s unfortunate that this distaste leads to lack of enjoyment in Belle’s case.

This is borne out in his final para: “If I couldn’t enjoy Waugh or Tolkein (or Shakespeare), or bring myself to acknowledge their aesthetic merits, because they all have ideals of conduct and beliefs about natural hierarchy and Original Sin that I strongly reject, I think that would be too bad — a loss for me and anyone I might influence. That’s what I meant by ‘sad.'”

My reading of him is more charitable than yours and better supported by his comment. It shows comity between Belle’s and his judgment of the GNs (both think their work exhibits sexism) but divergence in their enjoyments, and his sadness is over this divergence.

If your reading were true, one would expect something of the sort “in order that she may better enjoy the GNs, Belle ought to gain some relevant necessary knowledge”, and that’s precisely what we don’t see.

Actually, Jerry, sex is not an important part of people’s daily lives. It is an important part of people’s private lives. When we are accomplishing something important for society, the sex is what brings us down. It is what trivializes the accomplishment. And that is because sex often causes us to be reckless or dumb about our lives. It brings us back to our adolescence when it was important in our daily lives.

Wow, what a sad view of human life. One you’re entitled to, I suppose, but not one I personally find appealing, or one that I think makes for great literature.

PS – I think I see what Belle meant: ie, from 90, If someone simply zips along until he/she finds some sufficiently irritating bit, then stops. Anderson immediately (92) challenged “then stops,” and I tried to make clear in 98 that I didn’t mean literally “stops” but “stops reading with a literary-critical open mind,” which I thought the only explanation for an inability to enjoy any of the dozens of important male novelists I immediately listed. I never doubted that Belle has read all the novels she’s ever expressed an opinion about, and indeed twice (or ten times) as many novels as I have. It’s only dawned on me this moment that anyone could have supposed I did doubt it. If any carelessness in my own expression is responsible for the misunderstanding, I apologize.

The interesting question all along, to my mind, has been: does even a lot of sexism, racism, elitism, etc in a novel mean that it’s an artistic failure? Of course Belle didn’t say that such a novel couldn’t have worthwhile features, or that no one else could enjoy it without being a sexist, racist, elitist, etc. But there was just enough ambiguity in the original post and subsequent commentary that it seemed worthwhile raising the more general issue: What makes a novel an artistic success or failure? This question doesn’t seem to have gotten much traction in this thread or the following one, which is fair enough. But the idea that it’s all about (or in any degree about) whether Belle is lying or delusional never crossed my mind. What an idea!

Whoops. First para is a quote from geo.

Well, I like the Coase joke– though I’m not convinced it’s just a joke, I think it may work as an analogy, though perhaps a fairly wonky analogy. Trying to think it through, I don’t see how firming it up could add anything that you might get just by thinking about words as a product, sold by firms of various sizes… (that might seem an odd way of looking at an internet where much of the verbiage is gratis or close to it, but I would guess it’s salvageable by thinking in terms of some return that’s not precisely monetary– free market libertarian doctrine often relies on some sort of contorted thinking like this, e.g. it’s easier to get “self-interest” to cover more territory if you use an expansive definition of “self”).

I proposed, in two or three comments, in both threads, a long list of other criteria

Sure, but those criteria seem to be obviously question-begging* in this context. This is what I was trying to get at in my earlier comment @217. And your comment about “crude, reductive” characterizations/attitudes frankly doesn’t cut it. When the notion of “artistic merit” and what makes for it is a large part of the issue, you can’t impose a list of criteria and demand that those disagreeing with you abide by it. That’s question-begging in the truest sense.

*In the sense of taking for granted what’s at issue. I know you know this, but given that the phrase has a kind of weird alternative meaning now, I figured I’d make this clear.

This kind of stuff gets me thinking, god I miss David Foster Wallace! He’d be so great to have around right now.

Incidentally, to any and all on this thread:

Is there an impartial bystander who might be willing to put in a good word for me–for the fact that I’m trying, even if badly, to argue in good faith? Someone who maybe sees better if and how we’re talking past one another, and might be able to fruitfully moderate? I’d greatly appreciate one small kind or supportive word from someone, even if it’s kind criticism.

#263 Jerry, I have a “sad” view of life? Seriously, Jerry, do we study, listen and revere Beethoven’s symphonies because he had sex? Do we read Stephen Hawking because we want to know how he has sex?

If that’s the best you got, then you ain’t got nuttin’.

I always tell students to cut out the “I think” and “it seems to me” clauses, partly because it’s SOP in academia (not unproblematically, but that’s another story) but mainly because they’re a waste of words – surely, every damn thing I ever say or write is what I think about the way it seems to me. I certainly lack any powers to make my words binding on others (even, or especially, as a teacher).

So I’m puzzled by a lot of these comments. When I say “this is wrong”, or “your interpretation of X is wrong”, or “you don’t understand what’s good about X”, or “your reading of X is lacking”, doesn’t that immediately – and, as it were, harmlessly – unpack as “it seems to me that your account misses something important in X” and “I think there are virtues in X that you’re overlooking”? Why should my or anyone’s opinion of someone else’s reading be translated as “I pronounce by the power vested in me that your opinion is invalid and shall not be heard”, and “I hereby decree that you are personally deficient for saying such a thing”? And if somebody did seem to be saying that, why – given that nobody has any power vested in them – should that part of what they were saying be taken seriously enough to even get angry about?

Case in point: Adam Mars-Jones’s review of Kate Atkinson’s latest book, Life after Life. He hated it; he thought the central conceit was shallow and uninteresting & the writing was slack and sentimental. I loved it, & I think he totally failed to “get” something important about the central conceit – and, interestingly, something about the style of the writing (although I haven’t tried to articulate either of these thoughts at any length). I love AM-J’s criticism & I was really disappointed in this review – I’m sad that he didn’t engage with the book in the right way.

Now, obviously(?) “the right way” is “what I consider to be the right way”, and I may be missing something myself; I may re-read the review and/or the book and decide that his criticisms were valid & the thing I thought I’d got wasn’t really there. But here and now it’s my position that AM-J missed something, and I’m sorry about that. If I were to discover tomorrow that he didn’t get on with any of Kate Atkinson’s work, and perhaps that he didn’t much like Kazuo Ishiguro either, I’d be really sorry about that – I’d start to think of him as somebody with an important (to me) blank spot on his cultural radar, like somebody who can’t stand curries or can’t listen to jazz. And as such he’d be missing out in a big way (in my opinion) and I’d be sorry for him. But this would only ever be the opinion of one person about another person, stated at a point in time and subject to revision (I might go off Kate Atkinson myself). Other people (just to complete the picture) could be equally sorry for me – I know I’ve got big blank spots that I’m not particularly bothered about (opera, C+W), and there are probably others I don’t even know about. Wouldn’t mean anyone was saying anyone else was a bad person -f and even if it did there’s no reason why the ‘anyone else’ should take any account of it.

JanieM,

Thanks for responding. Yes, our views about “sad” disagreements are very different in that respect–I suspect others realized that too.

My alternate take might better fit with the kind of disagreement Geo and Belle are having, since I think they both believe there is a question of superior or inferior aesthetic judgment.

Do you believe that any judgment about the inferiority of another’s perception or ability must be patronizing or insulting? I don’t believe that’s so. For example, if I’m skilled in a game that only gets really enjoyable the more skilled you become, I might reasonably feel sorry for the less skilled player in good will: they’re playing the game, they like it, it would be nice if they could enjoy it to the fullest.

I realize there’s a worry that this is an arrogant kind of “feeling sorry” or “pity”–but I’d insist on the phrasing I used: “misguided generosity.” It may be mistaken, but it’s motivated by generosity, and I suspect it’s a basic feature of human nature: if I enjoy something, I want to share it. If the other doesn’t enjoy it, my sadness and disappointment is basically grounded in that desire to share. It even applies to a desire to share in disenjoyment. If I taste some dish and it’s awful, my first instinct might be turn to another and say, “Oh, this is bad–taste it!”

You say “it would be more fun to share something,” but you also seem to depict sharing as a one way relationship *in the respect that* you say you only feel sad for yourself if you don’t get to share. But if sharing is a two way relationship, doesn’t it make sense that we would feel sad both for ourselves and the other when we cannot share? Isn’t the sadness of not sharing reasonably a *shared sadness*? Maybe we should recognize that’s a bit presumptuous (for me to believe, possibly falsely, that you’re missing out), so it could be misguided generosity, but still generosity.

On your other comments. Blogs are rough and tumble places, but sometimes the roughing falls primarily one one side, and all the tumbling on the other. You say I’m trying to “police” the tone by “asking people to treat [me] in a certain way”. But asking is not policing. Policing means trying to force. In discussion, this is usually psychological: abusive language, insults, etc. I’ve used the latter, but less than my critics have. And as you say, some degree of rough and tumble forcefulness is just an inevitable part of blog discussion.

I’d add that I think all conversation is performatively a request to be treated a certain way, an ethical act, a request to be listened to, interpreted charitably, respected.

I don’t think any policing is happening, just occasional excessive roughness. But if you do think things like asking to be reinterpreted or chiding someone for caricaturing my position counts as policing, wouldn’t that mean that others are policing too, on your criteria? Belle is “asking” for us to more accurately interpret her original comment, but that’s not policing. Saurs “chided” me for perceived insults, but that’s not policing.

I disagree that I’m asking to be taken as I see myself–isn’t the willingness to correct and alter my views a sign of being attentive to how others see me? There is a question of power balance here: ideally we all mutually correct each others’ self-image and understanding, but in practice, there are some who are granted more authority to tell others who they are and what they really mean. It’s not intentional, but there’s been a degree of that in this thread.

I’m primarily begging to be allowed to speak on my own behalf, to have people respond to my words rather than inferring what they believe are the real, hidden intentions behind them. And again, to request this is not to police or to force. And it’s *not* to beg: because it is to request what is every speaker’s right.

Thanks again for the reply.

Ronan, you’re probably all too right about this: “you and geo have said that Belle and John do know what they’re talking about, so whats they problem?”

The main disagreement is resolved for me now that I see what Belle meant: of the literature in question that I’ve read, I suspect Belle is right. (I can’t speak for geo’s current position on that.)

The problem is that this change in position–which I have mentioned in many posts–has understandably lead to confusion, and so we’re still fighting the war long after it’s over.

“is the argument you’re making that its idiotic/wrong to not be able to enjoy a novel because it has poorly drawn female characters ?”

Again, I can’t speak for geo, but I don’t think so. I think the original debate–which I wasn’t part of–was whether or not poorly drawn characters alone make for a bad book, and to what degree the characters at issue were poorly drawn. The question is how serious is a particular artistic flaw, and in the whole work how much do they mar the enjoyment of the whole?

And I would disagree with the linking of “idiotic/wrong.” I’ve watched movies that I didn’t enjoy due to an artistic flaw. Then others have pointed out virtues that I didn’t notice, thanks to the annoying flaw. Then I’ve rewatched those movies and noticed the flaws less and enjoyed them more. The flaws make them artistically worse, but in such cases it might be fair to say I was mistaken–*not* “idiotic”!–in my non-enjoyment, as weird as that sounds. Again, I don’t think Belle is mistaken, so the question here is a new one: whether one can be mistaken in enjoyment and non-enjoyment.

“That, to me, is how your argument is coming across, that anyone making arguments about not being able to enjoy novels because of poorly written female characters doesnt know what they’re talking about).”

Ironically, this is how the opposing argument *originally* (pre-corrected interpretation!) came across to me: anyone who enjoys a large number of novels in a certain category doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

To be fair, it was an aesthetic debate from the start: a claim about the artistic flaws of novels. So both sides were saying that the other was making a mistaken judgment. But that doesn’t amount to calling “idiotic” or saying they “don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Thanks for the reply, Ronan.

In a discussion on Franzen I had with a (female) friend of mine a while back, she said something that I think pertains to the discussion. We were sharing our disappointment at being unable to enjoy “Freedom”, a book that had been reviewed favorably and seemed popular with our peers. She said something akin to: “Some authors, I believe, win acclaim not because they’re better at writing, or because their writing contains insights new to ‘ordinary people’, nor even because they evoke novel experiences in the reader. They win acclaim because their work makes readers’ ‘ordinary’, normative thoughts, complaints and experiences ‘literature-worthy’ simply because a book now exists wherein those things are portrayed.”

I think this pertains to the discussion, both of the original essay (where Franzen makes an argument that has been made by many people before, and around, him, and where this point has been raised in this thread both as a reason to dismiss the essay or to acknowledge it) and of the subsequent derail into sexism in literatute. When you’re not a member of the same generation, gender, class, ethnicity, nationality or whatever other aspect that separates you from the Great Novelist whose book you’re reading, you miss out on that recognition factor, the boost in self esteem that comes with reading about someone having thoughts, feelings and life experiences similar to yours – making your own life somehow “literature-worthy”.

I think the quality of a novel can be directly related to how much it alienates readers belonging to groups that the author percieves as “other”; how much it centers the experiences of a particular way of being in the world and how it creates this sense of “literature-worthiness” in certain groups of readers but not others. I write “how much” knowing that this is probably not a correct term, since this is most likely unquantifiable. Certainly, these aren’t the only factors that determine quality, but for some readers, and some books, it may be the ones that determine how much enjoyment one will get out of reading it.

Geo is too gracious. Vile Bodies and The Love One are among the funniest books I’ve read. Why should I care about author’s snobbery, his attitude towards solidarity, or whether he’s the Satan Himself?

Oh, I forgot to respond to your other points. Yes, I completely understand and agree that the context supported your interpretation of the deafness analogy. In Ye Old Apology List, I included that, so I won’t add additional layers to my World Apology Tour.

I didn’t intend to agree to geo’s points about you, but what I took to be a distinct secondary debate he was having with JanieM, I believe?–the debate about whether feeling sad for someone who doesn’t like an artwork necessarily includes contempt or pity, etc.

On another note, I just didn’t read geo’s comments the way you did. And I’m wary of a form of argument that you and others have used, which involves rephrasing a comment to reveal it’s supposedly true intention.

For example: “geo is saying, ‘I too have serious moral beliefs, just as pitiable feminists do; it’s only that I have the keen aesthetic sense that doesn’t let those beliefs interfere with my enjoyment of Art. Would that some *cough*Belle*cough were the same’.”

It’s possible that’s what he really thinks, but since it’s impossible to verify motives, and since it’s common to misinterpret motives, and since it involved drawing attention away from his actual words or a reframing them with something he doesn’t actually say, isn’t this a bit unfair as a way of proceeding? I suppose if he’s trolling, the case could be made that it’s the only option: trolls obstruct fruitful argument. But I’m not so sure.

MG,

Do you think “I am sorry you can’t enjoy this” this is always a putdown, or just often? Because I agree that it can be, but not that it must be.

One issue is what counts as “imposing” your taste. Most tastes come from outside of me in one way or another–my tastes in food and art and music are deeply influenced by my family, my friends, my culture, my upbringing. So just to try to influence someone’s tastes isn’t necessarily an imposition.

In addition, one reason our tastes change is because we have new experiences and influences, above all, because we have a larger framework of comparison. So this raises a second question: do you reject the possibility that some people have “superior taste”?

I think that since there’s an element of learning and knowledge involved in taste, one can have–in a narrow sense–“better” and “worse” taste in the sense of drawing on a greater range of examples when comparing. For example, I watch lots of film and have a lot of film knowledge, but there are friends and professional critics who have much greater knowledge than me about film, and I do give their views extra weight, but that doesn’t mean they impose their taste on me. Another way one can have “better” taste is rather mechanical, in the way someone can be a better piano player or mechanic: they carefully attend to all the elements of the work, they consider the relation of the elements to the whole, etc. I can be careless or inattentive to a work, leading to poor judgments about taste.

Finally, I think there’s another issue that hasn’t been raised: what is the real value of artistic taste? Is having inferior taste a bad thing? It may be that having superior artistic taste is no more intrinsically valuable than, say, being a superior badminton player. It could be that it could even be disvaluable, like being a superior thief or skillful advertiser.

I do think that good taste is a nice thing to have, but I don’t see why we should assume it’s normatively good, and that to lack it is normatively bad or that to say someone lacks it is *necessarily* a putdown (you *ought* to improve your taste).

#263 Jerry, I have a “sad” view of life? Seriously, Jerry, do we study, listen and revere Beethoven’s symphonies because he had sex? Do we read Stephen Hawking because we want to know how he has sex?

If that’s the best you got, then you ain’t got nuttin’.

When we are accomplishing something important for society, the sex is what brings us down. It is what trivializes the accomplishment.

I don’t know what to say except to just quote your own words back at you. I don’t know if you’re just role-playing “generic left-wing puritan” online or what; I’m just weirded out by what I think is a generally bizarre and unhealthy view about sex, as if it was somehow peripheral to people’s lives. And that’s not irrelevant to the general conversation, since you seem to believe that honest discussions or depictions of people’s sexual lives are somehow in opposition to good art. Whether we accomplish something “important for society” or not is pretty irrelevant to that question. If some subset of literature is attempting to portray something real and true about human life, then excising sex from those portrayals is pointless and arbitrary.

Jerry Vinokurov,

Tolstoy had the very view about sex that you refer to above, yet no one would deny he’s a great writer.

‘Do you reject the possibility that some people have “superior taste”? I think that since there’s an element of learning and knowledge involved in taste, one can have–in a narrow sense–”better” and “worse” taste’.

Good points Anon, however, ‘taste’ feels a bit snobbish as a concept. ‘Enjoyment’ is, perhaps, a less polemical term.

Borges once said that aesthetic enjoyment is independent of knowledge. He provided the example of this verse: ‘and his legacy is the bloody moon’. Is it more enjoyable once we know that it refers to one time when the Duke of Osuna pillaged a little Muslim town which happened to have a red moon on its flag?

Enjoyment is even independent of learning and technical skill and expertise on the subject matter. You can be Debussy and still find Beethoven to be an artistic midget.

Tolstoy had the very view about sex that you refer to above, yet no one would deny he’s a great writer.

Yes, there’s this thing called gradation, and the fact that a writer doesn’t necessarily do one thing well doesn’t mean they don’t a lot of other things well. I’m just saying: excluding a particular sphere of human activity from the ambit of literature is pointless and arbitrary.

Cleanthes: “‘Enjoyment’ is, perhaps, a less polemical term.”

True, but I think there’s a helpful distinction to be made between our intellectual judgments about art and our experiential enjoyment of it. So, I think we need an additional term. I’d suggest “experience,” as in, “Joe has a more experienced appreciation of film than I do,” rather than the more snobby “Joe has better taste.” However, that term downplays the element of conscious learning and judgment. Maybe it’s best just to say: “more knowledgeable” about this or that form of art. Then I imply there may be more reason to give Joe’s judgments some weight, without assuming he has superior taste or that his judgments will be correct.

I’m sympathetic to the Borges’ view that aesthetic enjoyment is independent of knowledge. But I think artistic appreciation can include more than just aesthetic enjoyment, if that’s just the immediate experience of the phrase, its sound and rhythm. So I can find that phrase immediately pleasing and beautiful, but upon learning the rest, I may find it more meaningful, moving, enlightening and be inclined to find it artistically superior to just the aesthetic experience.

Anon: To be fair, it was an aesthetic debate from the start: a claim about the artistic flaws of novels

Actually, no one denies that Roth’s, Bellow’s et al superficial or mean-spirited portrayals of some of their women character are flaws. The questions are: 1) Are they aesthetic or moral flaws, and for that matter, what are the boundaries between aesthetic and moral judgments? 2) If we do decide that sexism is an aesthetic flaw, how should it affect our overall judgment of a novel that has a number of outstanding aesthetic virtues?

Belle @286: this is really, truly, deeply insulting to me. geo is saying, “I too have serious moral beliefs, just as pitiable feminists do; it’s only that I have the keen aesthetic sense that doesn’t let those beliefs interfere with my enjoyment of Art. Would that some *cough*Belle*cough were the same.” … I have not seen anywhere that you have apologized to me in the slightest.

No apology is needed for saying — without a single disparaging epithet throughout two long threads, as far as I can remember, or any personal comment at all except to express admiration — to someone: “I don’t agree with your literary judgments, and I don’t think you’re going about forming them in the right way.” This is trolling?

#300 – you bring up Triumph of the Will. I think a modern viewer could find Triumph of the Will emotionally moving in a way that he or she will find disturbing – because the artistry of the movie-making is not undercut by anything vile or repulsive in the images themselves. So we can still respond to the artistic vision of Leni Reifenstahl, regardless of our revulsion at Nazism.

But what about, say, Jud Süss? I don’t think a modern viewer could respond emotionally to that film in a way that the film-makers intended. The content simply overwhelms any possible appreciation of any artistry.

And where is the tipping point? I don’t mind the lightly disguised anti-Semitism in much of Trollope, but I don’t remotely feel the terror and disgust that Dickens wants me to feel in his descriptions of Fagan the Jew. To the contrary, they make me hate Dickens, an author I otherwise enjoy.

geo @303:

Right, I was aiming for that with this part of the post: “The question is how serious is a particular artistic flaw, and in the whole work how much do they mar the enjoyment of the whole?” Agreement on flaws, disagreement on what the final judgment of the whole.

There’s an added level that I still don’t feel sure I know you or Belle’s position on: the relation of artistic judgment and enjoyment. If I do judge a work overall as artistically good despite flaws, but the flaw makes me incapable of enjoying it, is this some kind of a mistake? Should I try to “learn to like” it?

Because I can certainly understand saying, no: why force myself to like it despite its flaws if I don’t. On the other hand, so much of pleasure is “learning to like,” so one might also answer by saying: “why not?” There’s no strong reason not to give it another shot–except that the time might be better spent on things you do like.

On the other hand, so much of pleasure is “learning to like,” so one might also answer by saying: “why not?” There’s no strong reason not to give it another shot–except that the time might be better spent on things you do like.

“You, reader, are not worth my time” is going to be an insurmountable hurdle for a lot of people. And while you can knowingly exclude people from your audience, it seems like a notable failure in a novel meant to be read to exclude/ignore half the smart people because they have different stuff down there. Surely what wisdom there is in novelist A can be supplied by novelist B who might be less of a dick.

PS to 303: To avoid misunderstanding (of which there’s been a certain amount on these two threads): “I disagree with your literary judgments” should have read “I disagree with a few of your literary judgments.”

Bloix @305): they make me hate Dickens

This seems worth going into. Fagin is a hateful character, but does that mean it was hateful of Dickens to draw that portrait? Was it inaccurate (ie, were there very few Jews in the London underworld in the mid-19th century?), gratuitous (did it have no function in the novel except as a racial smear?), likely to endanger vulnerable people (there was certainly significant anti-Semitism in Victorian England, but Disraeli became Prime Minister thirty years after Oliver Twist was published)? It’s painful to read the Fagin episodes now, since they inevitably bring to mind the horrific crimes against Jews in the 20th century, whose perpetrators claimed, in effect, that Fagin was the type of all Jews. But how responsible is Dickens for such hysterical and dishonest misappropriation of his work?

Anon @308: How “bad” (morally) does Triumph of the Will have to be to be “bad” artistically?

I don’t know, but Susan Sontag wrote an essay on the topic, “Fascinating Fascism,” reprinted in Under the Sign of Saturn. Worth looking at.

Anon@307: the relation of artistic judgment and enjoyment. If I do judge a work overall as artistically good despite flaws, but the flaw makes me incapable of enjoying it, is this some kind of a mistake? Should I try to “learn to like” it? … I can certainly understand saying, no: why force myself to like it despite its flaws if I don’t. On the other hand, so much of pleasure is “learning to like,” so one might also answer by saying: “why not?” There’s no strong reason not to give it another shot–except that the time might be better spent on things you do like.

Yes, this seems like Americans of a certain age would call the $64K question. No, I don’t think it’s necessarily a mistake. Appreciation/esteem isn’t exactly the same as enjoyment. I’d definitely be up for discussing their relation, if I weren’t a little exhausted by now. I hope others will.

And getting down to practicalities: you can’t, of course, force yourself to like anything. I’d say there’s no reason for reconsidering a negative first reaction unless you (or those you respect and have learned from in the past) strongly suspect that you might be missing something important if you don’t. As you (wasn’t it you?) said elsewhere, life is short and there’s just too much else to read, see, hear, do.

Or maybe even better.

I no longer will watch anything, movies or tv, with a soundtrack in the English language.
No Breaking Bad, no Mad Men, no Wire.

Do you think I have a problem?

It’s all good everyone. Let’s have differing aesthetic tastes and some of us will enjoy varying works of art and that will be fun. OK? Great! Anon.: I guess I really didn’t see you say, “I’m sorry Belle, I didn’t mean to imply you were a moron.” I thought if I asked you you’d just link to the comment instead of handwaving at the tone of the thread. But honestly I didn’t read the whole thing very carefully because it was so long, so I probably just missed it. geo: I get it. It only seemed like you were trolling me when you were actually talking about completely different topics with various other commenters in the thread, as why should you not? my bad.

Closely related and nearly parallel but not identical? Insofar as they made no reference whatsoever as to my reading habits, particularly, in any way, at any time, hmm, OK?

Consider the fact that Finnegans Wake (“Here comes Everybody”) is the most advanced work of literature in the 20th century, one of the high points of any 20th century art, yet almost no one who considers herself or himself to be a discriminating reader will read it, much less recommend it! Joyce decided to tell a story of one person’s moral/emotional change, in terms of a great guilty dream that ensues after a daytime event that is carefully hinted at, in which the dreamer reaches the collective unconscious (which Joyce invented parallel to Jung, although simply as a literary conceit) and so reinvents in the dream the process of language creation and historical reportage, in order to make sure that there is no real reportage at all!–because he wants to deny the reality of his own personal failure. A dream of denial. It breaks up the language yet applies a strict set of alphabetical rules for new form and meaning. Along the way Joyce relates the story of the two dream sons to the psychologies of archetypes which plague the modern world (dirty radical poets and officious prudish bureacrats as two sides of the same yin/yang coin), and the whole thing ends in a stunning monologue in which the real female who has been transgressed in the daytime is imagined by the dreamer as a river taking the dirt of the city (her husband), out to be lost in the sea her own father. It is what she would say, if she knew… Perhaps the first proto-environmental/feminist work, though Joyce would have disavowed either appellation. So here is something which is sort of like cubism, applied to a single mental state told from various aspects, it happens in a single instant of time, yet stretches over all of history, in which the author has found a way to explore an immense and deep erudition and intellectual reflection that makes Pynchon a mere bounder, while relating a real character story to events in the world. It is a stunning concept that no one else has come near to formulating, much less carried out. It has passages of astonishing aural beauty, it is endlessly funny, yet it ends in a note of bitter resignation that places any of our current cynical writers in the kindergarten sandbox. But no one reads it! It is “too hard”!

I got a book that has a chapter from that alongside the first, preundecipherablized, draft, and the latter is quite readable. I wonder if there’s any more of that available. I would have never bothered with Joyce if I hadn’t happened upon Dubliners 1st.

Funny enough, I don’t much like Ulysses. And I only got a hundred pages into Gravity’s Rainbow. I tried it twice, but i’ll never read it, I guess. I could however tell that Gravity’s Rainbow is written like a “film treatment”, a very specific writing format that is a short prospectus for a pitch meeting or a full script: 1st, 2nd, 3rd person present tense. It’s an imagined war movie. Tyrone “Slothrop” is inverse of Tyrone “Power”. Maybe Pynchon books will turn into good movies. We are about to find out, with one of the best directors out there. (Inherent Vice — and “The Master” dazzled me.) In Finnegans Wake, Joyce will do a narrative structure like that for two pages, but then go to something else. And there are no markers. Some pages have a dozen character voices. Some pages have laundry lists of attributes. No scenery is anchored — like a dream, it always floats into something else. Also it has to be read aloud, it’s a dual art. It is a dream, and true to a dream, some parts are light and fairly accessible, and other parts are so dense that no one understands what is going on (I have read most of the criticism, except for the new books in the last few years). So Finnegans Wake may be partly an artistic failure, from Joyce being entirely true to his conception. Finnegans Wake is a single interior monologue, but the dreamer is generating hundreds of character voices. Maybe someday actors who can do emotions will explicate various parts for the rest of us.

There was a time when I wanted FW more than anything in the world, after Mann and Proust and Gide.

I just kinda stared at FW, an hour a day for two years, some of the time on the cliffs and redwoods around Santa Cruz. That was about ten pages a day, so who knows how many times I cycled through it. I had yellow pad paper filled with some of the outlines available. It just takes time, patience, and a suspension of understanding and analysis. I would watch myself reading, seeing why I broke focus or got irritated or annoyed by the confusion, and try to see it was me and the expectations about reading and texts that I took into the book rather than the text. The tendency is to fight it. A meditation thing.

Of course I would focus on a section or go through the secondary literature, but not while I was in the book.

The patterns and rhythms just emerge after a while. What’s it about? Everything. Is it beautiful? Yes, Joyce was. Yes he and his world were beautiful.

Theory: As masturbation = narcissism = Romanticism = sterility in Ulyssses, so fellatio is to FW. Alp blows drunken HCE to avoid pregnancy in “Mamalujo” Search for “seagulls gullet”. (This is also liebestod of Tristan and Isolde, never mind)
Then, the way it works, remember back to the chicken pecking middenheap.

So oral aggression (talk talk) expunges history and forecloses possibility. TV talk and blog comment sections.

Oh, and it’s a very funny book.

solicitous bussness by kissing and looking into a mirror.”

All the ‘s’s and the mirror indicate (to me) the daughter around here somewhere

Belle: But can I read Finnegan’s Wake? No. I’m not really that ashamed to say, I can’t figure out what the fuck even.

Me neither. I signed up for a course at the CUNY grad ctr. on the Wake (Edmund Epstein, RIP), went to the first class, and then decided that if I were going to spend a whole semester reading a single book, *that* was not the book I would pick. Much better the Phenomenology of Spirit!

(Which had kicked my ass during my next-but-one previous grad school foray … I had never read anything before where I could read a paragraph and then go “I have no idea what that just said.” Even the Critique of Pure Reason was a beach novel by comparison. Yow.)