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News & ArtsMonday, August 31, 2009
Books Last Weekend in Literary Kerfluffles
Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 4:16 PM
Bookninja provides the only information you need on Kerfluffle # 1, in which Sebastian Faulks says that "The internet is good for quick checking or buying a pair of shoes but as a repository of deeper thought and wisdom it has some way to go.”
Kerfluffle # 2 has inspired much more blog-banging: Lev Grossman, Time magazine's book critic, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal titled "Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard."
It's not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it's something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.
Conversational Reading hit back at Grossman first, and hit hard:
I don't know if Grossman is just really unaware that the sales:pleasure ratio doesn't work the way he's describing, or if he's being purposely disingenuous, but this idea that "readers" aren't getting what they're looking for in The Boat and so they turn to Twilight is intellectually reprehensible. Grossman has imagined "the reader" as an extremely simplified consumer of pleasure, uniform in age, means, education, and taste; and the world of literature as a wholly unified, absolutely non-diversified market. Does this sound like a bookstore to you?
Dozens of other websites followed suit, but the Mumpsimus had one of the best lines:
Grossman's essay reminds me of a lot of things I've read in science fiction fanzines and blogs over the years where people want to justify their taste and pleasures against armies of straw people marching through an alternate literary history.
Faulks and Grossman are hereby found guilty of lazy internet comment baiting. Faulks gets a suspended sentence, but Grossman is a repeat offender, and so his punishment will be severe. He is sentenced to be Time magazine's book critic, which is a fate worse than death.
1
Faulkner might have had something to say, but you'd never know it from his books. He couldn't tell a story for sour owl shit.
2
I was frustrated by this section from Grossman:
"Say what you like about the works of Dickens and Thackeray, you pretty much always know who's talking, and when, and what they're talking about. The Modernists introduced us to the idea that reading could be work, and not common labor but the work of an intellectual elite, a highly trained coterie of professional aesthetic interpreters." Not knowing who's talking isn't an intellectual exercise when reading. It's a frustration. It would be like filming a movie with the lens cap on and calling it groundbreaking because the audience isn't sure who is doing what to whom.
He also misunderstands the Victorian novel:
"The orderly, complacent, optimistic Victorian novel had nothing to say to them. Worse than nothing: it felt like a lie." I...don't recognize those Victorian novels being referenced there. Not that there aren't orderly, complacent, and optimistic novels written during the Victorian era; however, the bulk of what's written in the nineteenth century is almost anything but the three adjectives you chose.
Orderly? Read Wilkie Collins. Complacent? Read Shirley. Optimistic? Read anything by Thomas Hardy or George Gissing. (Or, if I'm going to be dinged for both of those gentlemen being too far removed from the heart of the Victorian era -- and that would be a fine thing to ding me on -- I'll return that volley with Villette.) Heck, even reaching the end of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (which, I know, isn't Victorian; it is, though, nineteenth century), one isn't left feeling terribly optimistic that the marriage between Fanny and Edmund is going to be a success.
"Say what you like about the works of Dickens and Thackeray, you pretty much always know who's talking, and when, and what they're talking about. The Modernists introduced us to the idea that reading could be work, and not common labor but the work of an intellectual elite, a highly trained coterie of professional aesthetic interpreters." Not knowing who's talking isn't an intellectual exercise when reading. It's a frustration. It would be like filming a movie with the lens cap on and calling it groundbreaking because the audience isn't sure who is doing what to whom.
He also misunderstands the Victorian novel:
"The orderly, complacent, optimistic Victorian novel had nothing to say to them. Worse than nothing: it felt like a lie." I...don't recognize those Victorian novels being referenced there. Not that there aren't orderly, complacent, and optimistic novels written during the Victorian era; however, the bulk of what's written in the nineteenth century is almost anything but the three adjectives you chose.
Orderly? Read Wilkie Collins. Complacent? Read Shirley. Optimistic? Read anything by Thomas Hardy or George Gissing. (Or, if I'm going to be dinged for both of those gentlemen being too far removed from the heart of the Victorian era -- and that would be a fine thing to ding me on -- I'll return that volley with Villette.) Heck, even reaching the end of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (which, I know, isn't Victorian; it is, though, nineteenth century), one isn't left feeling terribly optimistic that the marriage between Fanny and Edmund is going to be a success.
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