Willing suspension of cultural literacy
2 Comments Published by ginny on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 12:53 AM.
Ha. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this wonderfully curmudgeonly excoriation of contemporary fiction, or at least of several lazy prose tendencies in contemporary fiction. Of the writers Myers detests, I've only read Proulx (everything), Auster (almost everything), and the tiniest bit of McCarthy – and I liked them. (Though with Auster I only liked City of Glass, and with Proulx I only liked Shipping News and about four stories in Close Range. It's interesting that "Brokeback Mountain," easily the most famous of Proulx's short fiction endeavors, doesn't make Myers's bad list. I’m glad, since it's about my favorite short story, though I would probably have laughed anyway.)
Despite my positive feeling towards some contemporary fiction, though, it feels great to read such acerbic criticism of tendencies I've also griped about, though I tend to focus a lot more on plot and character than Myers does. (Better for him, as it makes his evidence stronger, though perhaps less universal. I really like the moment when he cites amazon.com reviews – it's a strong bit of evidence that transcends the otherwise very close-reading-focused style of his essay.) And beyond even the joy of shared annoyance (and who doesn't love a shared gripe?), I find the piece pretty gloriously funny: "But then, where would Notable New Fiction be without the willing suspension of cultural literacy," Myers asks, and I laughed out loud.
Willing suspension of cultural literacy indeed! It's gloriously, horribly true, if also more than a little ill-tempered, and perhaps vulnerable to anti-intellectualism. This is not to claim that the piece itself is anti-intellectual, but I do think Myers's final plea for a return to "the old American scorn for pretension" may miss the mark – surely the overblown, anxiously self-important prose tendencies Myers identifies are as much a reaction to "old American scorn" as they are a departure from it! Moreover, some of the writers Myers himself cites – Proulx and McCarthy among them – may themselves seem to subscribe to a certain amount of anti-intellectual feeling.
Nonetheless, Myers's irritated name-calling strikes home – there is little new about most of the empty formalism that passes for lyrical or stylistic innovation in much new fiction, and I find myself consistently irritated by stereotypically predictable characters, empty political posturing, and completely boring plots. I've just (unfortunately – sorry Jamie and Ellen!) been getting increasingly irritated with Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, which seems to fall into the trap of so much speculative fiction in assuming that a strange conceit hides the sin of shallow characterization and hackneyed turns of phrase. Where last I stopped, the main character is described thus: "The guard watches as she continues to pull at the front door even though the lock does not give…Finally the guard unlocks the door. She still doesn’t see him. He watches her stagger down the broad stone steps, about to fall any umber of times" (288). She is supposed to have gone into a complete trance because the elevator she has just inspected (the structuring conceit of this book is that elevator inspecting is very important, and some sort of metaphor for philosophy) has behaved in a way completely unpredictable by any method. The problem, besides the hackneyed images, is that both the character and the conceit are beyond belief, and Whitehead gives me virtually no reason that I should try to believe them. The prose is pushy, proud of itself, and constantly quotes a set of genres (crime, noir) that it replicates fairly poorly. It's Myers's fourth category of lazy prose, but apparently, according to the dust jacket, the San Francisco Chronicle considers it on par with The Bluest Eye.
But Myers's rosy picture of genre fiction isn't quite warranted either: last night I purchased (in a fit of melancholy in which I needed something, anything, fun to read) a novel by J.D. Robb, otherwise known as Norah Roberts, (she's a bestseller in two genres, crime/mystery, and romance), which is far from innocent of the faults either Myers or I find in "literary" fiction. In fact, by the end, I was so angry at the book's lapses in logical character behavior (an absolute necessity for a character-based mystery!) that I ripped it up and threw it in the recycling bin! My iconoclastic tendencies are undoubtedly excessive, but that doesn't change the fact that both "literary" and "genre" fiction can elicit the same anger. When it comes down to it, what I hate most of all is lazy writing. And Myers's article, at least, is far from lazy! (Whether my response is or not, with all its parentheticals, I'll leave unsaid.)
It does, however, all remind me of Sidney:
Let dainty wits cry on the sisters nine,
That bravely masked, their fancies may be told:
Or Pindar's apes, flaunt they in phrases fine,
Enam'lling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold:
Or else let them in statelier glory shine,
Ennobling new-found tropes with problems old:
Or with strange similes enrich each line,
Of herbs or bests, which Ind or Afric hold.
For me, in sooth, no muse but one I know
Phrase and problems from my reach do grow,
And strange things cost too dear for my poor sprites.
How thin Even thus: in Stella's face I read
What love and beauty be; then all my deed
But copying is, what in her nature writes.
Despite my positive feeling towards some contemporary fiction, though, it feels great to read such acerbic criticism of tendencies I've also griped about, though I tend to focus a lot more on plot and character than Myers does. (Better for him, as it makes his evidence stronger, though perhaps less universal. I really like the moment when he cites amazon.com reviews – it's a strong bit of evidence that transcends the otherwise very close-reading-focused style of his essay.) And beyond even the joy of shared annoyance (and who doesn't love a shared gripe?), I find the piece pretty gloriously funny: "But then, where would Notable New Fiction be without the willing suspension of cultural literacy," Myers asks, and I laughed out loud.
Willing suspension of cultural literacy indeed! It's gloriously, horribly true, if also more than a little ill-tempered, and perhaps vulnerable to anti-intellectualism. This is not to claim that the piece itself is anti-intellectual, but I do think Myers's final plea for a return to "the old American scorn for pretension" may miss the mark – surely the overblown, anxiously self-important prose tendencies Myers identifies are as much a reaction to "old American scorn" as they are a departure from it! Moreover, some of the writers Myers himself cites – Proulx and McCarthy among them – may themselves seem to subscribe to a certain amount of anti-intellectual feeling.
Nonetheless, Myers's irritated name-calling strikes home – there is little new about most of the empty formalism that passes for lyrical or stylistic innovation in much new fiction, and I find myself consistently irritated by stereotypically predictable characters, empty political posturing, and completely boring plots. I've just (unfortunately – sorry Jamie and Ellen!) been getting increasingly irritated with Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, which seems to fall into the trap of so much speculative fiction in assuming that a strange conceit hides the sin of shallow characterization and hackneyed turns of phrase. Where last I stopped, the main character is described thus: "The guard watches as she continues to pull at the front door even though the lock does not give…Finally the guard unlocks the door. She still doesn’t see him. He watches her stagger down the broad stone steps, about to fall any umber of times" (288). She is supposed to have gone into a complete trance because the elevator she has just inspected (the structuring conceit of this book is that elevator inspecting is very important, and some sort of metaphor for philosophy) has behaved in a way completely unpredictable by any method. The problem, besides the hackneyed images, is that both the character and the conceit are beyond belief, and Whitehead gives me virtually no reason that I should try to believe them. The prose is pushy, proud of itself, and constantly quotes a set of genres (crime, noir) that it replicates fairly poorly. It's Myers's fourth category of lazy prose, but apparently, according to the dust jacket, the San Francisco Chronicle considers it on par with The Bluest Eye.
But Myers's rosy picture of genre fiction isn't quite warranted either: last night I purchased (in a fit of melancholy in which I needed something, anything, fun to read) a novel by J.D. Robb, otherwise known as Norah Roberts, (she's a bestseller in two genres, crime/mystery, and romance), which is far from innocent of the faults either Myers or I find in "literary" fiction. In fact, by the end, I was so angry at the book's lapses in logical character behavior (an absolute necessity for a character-based mystery!) that I ripped it up and threw it in the recycling bin! My iconoclastic tendencies are undoubtedly excessive, but that doesn't change the fact that both "literary" and "genre" fiction can elicit the same anger. When it comes down to it, what I hate most of all is lazy writing. And Myers's article, at least, is far from lazy! (Whether my response is or not, with all its parentheticals, I'll leave unsaid.)
It does, however, all remind me of Sidney:
Let dainty wits cry on the sisters nine,
That bravely masked, their fancies may be told:
Or Pindar's apes, flaunt they in phrases fine,
Enam'lling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold:
Or else let them in statelier glory shine,
Ennobling new-found tropes with problems old:
Or with strange similes enrich each line,
Of herbs or bests, which Ind or Afric hold.
For me, in sooth, no muse but one I know
Phrase and problems from my reach do grow,
And strange things cost too dear for my poor sprites.
How thin Even thus: in Stella's face I read
What love and beauty be; then all my deed
But copying is, what in her nature writes.
I loved this article - it made me laugh, too, especially the part about the rapturous murmuring of "Toyota Celica." :) No need to apologize about The Intuitionist. It was one of those books that made me feel stupid and obtuse not to understand the underlying metaphor. But I feel that way about Kafka also, so I usually assume, as the curmudgeon's benighted literary consumers do, that I am too daft to understand the literary fireworks I am reading. I also liked Snow Falling on Cedars a lot, although I didn't remember that awful bit about the scrotum slap. Ick!
I recently found this in a newspaper article. I ripped it out, folded it up, and put it in my wallet!
"Writers often introduce outlandish and ultimately dull dramatic devices because they lack the chops to make the actual interesting stuff -- the stuff of real life -- interesting."
Ha HA!