1 December 2010

I wasn’t sure if Marilynne Robinson‘s Gilead would go over so well with undergraduate students.  Despite it being a Pulitzer Prize winner and bestseller, it seemed to me a book most popular among, shall we say, mature (i.e. 40 and over) readers, along with perhaps readers friendly to Christianity.

It seemed to me obvious – although, in retrospect, I find my assumptions curious – that most students would come to the text with anything ranging from negativity to hostility toward Christianity.  In other words, smart is the opposite of Christian in the secular university environment.

For the most part my assumptions were correct (though I had an interesting chat with one student after class, who “outed” himself as a Christian).  But we had quite a rich discussion about it in seminar class.  And Ms. Robinson I think would be pleased by the comment of one student – firmly in the hostile camp – who said, “As I read this, though, it occurred to me that if all Christians were like this guy [the narrator, a minister], the world might actually be a much better place.”  Struggle and doubt and wonder are at the heart of the narrator’s world view; we can all get together around these, no?

18 July 2010

Posting this a bit late, but found it rather surprising: Marilynne Robinson appeared on “The Daily Show” on July 8.

Surprising that Jon Stewart invited her (nothing particularly funny to talk about here), and surprising that she appeared (she agrees to interviews somewhat rarely). Hmm… hoping perhaps this means we’ll hear a little more from Ms. Robinson via interviews in the future.

Her new book, Absence of Mind, is about, among other things, the “unnecessary division” between science and religion. “The gladiators from both sides are inferior representatives of both sides,” she says.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Marilynne Robinson
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

30 December 2009

On impulse, I’ve just re-read Marilynne Robinson‘s Housekeeping.  It’s my third reading, the first about a decade ago.

This time around, I am struck by the complexity of the novel’s theology.  Or maybe what I mean to say is that I am struck by just how theological the novel is.  In the past I might have described the novel as “beautiful.”  This time around, I felt its brutality.  Ruthie Stone is the embodiment of a loneliness so deep and utter:  when she crosses that bridge, that harrowing journey at the end, both away from nothingness and toward nothingness, it seems to me that she crosses from loneliness as a constant companion to loneliness as her essence.  Darkness, cold, estrangement — she is swallowed whole.

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.  God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes… Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like…

…when I think back to the crossing of the bridge, one moment bulges like the belly of a lens and all the others are at the peripheries and diminished.  Was it only that the wind rose suddenly, so that we had to cower and lean against it like blind women groping their way along a wall? or did we really hear some sound too loud to be heard, some word so true we did not understand it, but merely felt it pour through our nerves like darkness or water?

I don’t know what to do with Housekeeping on this third read.  I am shaken by it.  There is a feeling that Robinson wrote the book in a kind of visionary trance; and her vision rivals Rilke’s in its terrifying (beautiful?) understanding of what it is to be a stark, lone soul in the universe.

13 September 2009

I should leave Lev Grossman’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard,” alone.  I’ve gotten into trouble on this subject before, and I learned that my thoughts on the matter of “the difficult pleasure” vs the easy one are outdated, underdeveloped, and poorly expressed.

But apparently I have a couple of things to attempt to say in response:

First, Grossman equates the “difficult pleasures” argument with an aversion to, specifically, plot.  This is simply inaccurate.  I am currently reading, for instance, the highly-plotted 2666, by Roberto Bolano and could name many examples of literary novels which are well-written, challenge the reader’s mind and soul, and also evolve around, as Grossman puts it, “crisp, dynamic, exciting” plots.

The crux of this debate has never been about storytelling or non-storytelling, but about good storytelling and bad storytelling.  The foundation of literature is language, and poor use of the language to tell a good story is where my beef begins and ends.  It seems to me Grossman makes the same error of argument that is made repeatedly by genre-defenders: that somehow hoity-toity literary writers have something against a great plot, whereas the real objection is to the idea that a good plot covers a multitude of writing sins (and Ms. Meyers is guilty of entirely too many).  Conversely, I don’t see a lot of people defending a poetically-written pile of nothing-much; all readers crave emotional and intellectual pay-off, via the thoughtfully-crafted journeys of the characters.  I just want those journeys to be told in beautiful, stunning, maybe even strange language (which is not to say fancy language) that effectively renders what John Gardner called the vivid and continuous dream. If every other description includes three adverbs and the word “sparkle”, my experience of the fictional dream is not continuous.  More aptly put by William Carlos Williams: “Organize the language right.”

Second, there is a problem with the term “difficult.” What do we mean by difficulty when we are talking about literature?  There is James Joyce difficult, and there is Toni Morrison difficult. There is William Vollman difficult, and there is Mary Gaitskill difficult.  There is Dostoevsky difficult and there is Tolstoy difficult.  There is Virginia Woolf difficult and there is Hemingway difficult.  I recently had a conversation with a Danish friend, to whom I confessed having avoided Proust for a long time, for fear of the difficulty.  ”There’s really nothing to be afraid of,” he said.  ”It’s a pretty easy read.”  Meaning, it’s long, but not hard.  Some have said the same about Bolano.

As examples of books he considers not difficult, Grossman cites Dickens and Thackeray, in which “you pretty much always know who’s talking, and when, and what they’re talking about.”  So it seems to me that “difficult” in Grossman’s literary lexicon refers to a certain density or experimentalism in language and form; something that requires a person to jump out of the register of vernacular-English and conventional time and into the register of something closer to poetry or avant-garde cinema — “typographically altered, grammatically shattered, rhetorically obscure.”

Fine, but in this case, we’re really only talking about Joyce, Vollman, maybe Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, a minority of Faulkner’s novels, Beckett,  and a handful of others.

But the difficulty of writers like Morrison, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson, Marilynne Robinson, Chekhov, Annie Proulx… writers who respect the language, in every sense, whose works are not particularly “difficult” to read, strictly speaking; but whose difficulty lies in their essential visions of humanity and the ways in which the stories they tell impel us to see differently, to see better, with, as Carlyle put it, “armed eyesight” — this is a difficulty which refers to something altogether different.  Something in the realm of the moral and spiritual.  Their characters come to endings which are often not happy or neat, but real and true nonetheless; their stories take the reader to unfamiliar and unexpected places that show us a humanity not readily on display in commercial movies, or genre romances, or thrillers in which the good guy always wins.  If Grossman is taking up the cause of “easy” in this realm — then my concern is best expressed by Vaclav Havel:

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

Can difficult work, by the latter definition, be entertaining?  I think so.  Does exhilaration — like that which I feel when reading Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or Bolano’s Last Evenings on Earth or the stories of George Saunders or ZZ Packer or Flannery O’Connor — not constitute entertainment?  The “entertainment is king” argument seems to exclude even highly-plotted sexual-tension page-turners like The Age of Innocence and The Golden Bowl these days, because, well, the sentences are just too darn long and jam-packed with all those words.  How reader-unfriendly.

Mr. Grossman seems to equate meaningful with boring, and in its resemblance to a recipe for perpetual adolescence (not innocuous, in the hands of, say, future leaders in the image of the George Bush’s or Hugo Chavez’s playing power games with the lives of millions of innocents) his argument troubles me a great deal.

Next up: my thoughts on Christopher Beha’s response to Grossman’s article, from the blog at n+1.

17 August 2009

A couple of state-of-the-industry pieces on the Web:

Popular-fiction writers Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman discuss the strategy of giving their work away for free on the Internet to increase sales, buzz, and ratings (both are in favor).  Read about it (and listen to it) here.  I confess that when I first read the headline at Publisher’s Weekly, I thought it referred to EL Doctorow, and that’s what made me click over.  Now that would be something.

Literary agent-blogger Nathan Bransford declares on his blog that the age of being “just an author” (and not a promoter) is officially over.   He cites Thomas Pynchon’s lending his voice to the book trailer for Inherent Vice, and the fact that “even Cormac McCarthy went on Oprah.”  I also noticed that on Pynchon’s Web site, there is a link for a Pynchon Wiki – which is something like Cliff’s Notes on the Web, I believe?   

I’m not sure what the effect of Well, McCarthy and Pynchon are doing it is supposed to be exactly — convincing, or comforting, perhaps.  If Marilynne Robinson started blogging and making You-Tube videos, I personally would certainly take notice.  I guess for those of us who are still on and off the wagon — Analogians Anonymous — there are stages of grief; and the great-writers evidence effectively jolts us out of our denial.

23 June 2009

Boy, they really beat me up over at The Millions following my post about the dangers of genre-and-commercial-lit consumption.  As I mentioned in my June 18 post, the day “Slinging Stones…” went up on The Millions site, I was expecting some degree of push-back.  But as the days went on, and the comments piled up, it got pretty ugly.

So what did I learn from this experience?

1) beware of over-simplification via broad categories and labels

2) the essay-blog form is very, very difficult, especially when a nuanced argument is required

3) if you express a strong opinion, you will get strong reactions

4) literary populism is a serious force

5) I am an out-of-touch elitist (neither proud nor ashamed)*

I also learned that the blog-and-comment format is limited, and that it’s not terribly useful to repeatedly defend one’s position.  

I wondered throughout the commenting period if someone would change my mind.  I felt reasonably open to having my mind changed.  But that didn’t happen.  I probably feel even more strongly that gorging on pulp fiction and/or defending the literary merits of bad, empty writing is not harmless; and that much of the staunch defense of mass commercial writing is rooted in, as one commenter put it, “contempt-based faux-populism.”  

In fact, the emotional pitch of the strongest comments seemed less driven by passion about this book or that book, this author or that author (in fact, there was more agreement about what constitutes good writing and bad writing than disagreement); and more by a sub-textual conflict between constructed notions of elitism and populism.

I take to heart that my essayist’s skills require much improvement; and for that, I’ll take my punches.  But cries of elitism are starting to sound like “wolf” to me.  If I claim that Doctorow is a better writer than Koontz, Marilynne Robinson better than Stephenie Meyer, I’m supposedly an elitist.  At that point, it’s probably time to agree to disagree.

And, ultimately, disagreement is good.  I really believe this.  Mindlessness is the real enemy, and so I am encouraged when opinions — even ones I deeply oppose — are passionately, thoroughly, and intelligently defended.

 

*(“elite” is a neutral-to-positive word that’s been co-opted by the hysterical right wing; as for out-of-touch, well, that’s a relative term, depending on what one determines is worth being “in touch” with)


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