The ghost in the machine
September 4, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
Ghosted. Shaughessy Bishop-Stall; $32.00 cloth 978-0-679-31452-3, 394 pp., Random House Canada
Literary spirits – dead and living – haunt Shaughessy Bishop-Stall’s first novel. Charles Bukowski, Hubert Selby, Jr., Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk: echoes of each can be detected at various points throughout Ghosted, a potent story about addiction and despair that takes an unfortunate left-turn about two-thirds of the way through and never quite gets back on track.
The novel focuses on Mason Dubisee, an alcoholic, gambling addicted would-be writer who finds himself getting ever deeper in debt to his old friend Chaz, a small-time drug dealer and hoodlum. Chaz sets Mason up in an apartment, gives him money for life’s basic necessities – food, shaving equipment, and rivers of whiskey – and gets him a job as the Dogfather, a vendor selling hot dogs out of a cart called the Dogmobile: “It’s like a state-of-the-art pseudo-mafioso hotdog stand kind of thing.” It is here that Mason meets Warren, a computer programmer who has fallen in love and who offers Mason $5,000 to ghostwrite a love letter for him. Mason complies, but no sooner has he completed the assignment than Warren turns up dead. At his funeral, Warren’s sister reads Mason’s letter, which was found on his desk, and has morphed from a love missive into a suicide note.
Having struggled unsuccessfully for five years to write a novel, Mason recognizes an opportunity to put his skills as a writer to good use and simultaneously make enough money to pay down his mounting debt to Chaz. In short order, Mason has posted an advertisement online offering his services to despairing souls who plan to kill themselves and want a lovingly crafted testimonial to leave behind. Needless to say, Mason finds no shortage of people willing to pony up the cash.
All of this is narrated briskly, using a limited third-person perspective and incorporating all manner of meta-textual devices, from e-mails to notes for Mason’s failed novel to random Socratic statements from a therapist’s questionnaire (“I’d rather fold a napkin (or tablecloth) than unfold one”; “I’d rather build a bridge than write a song”). Throughout, Bishop-Stall evinces a clear eye for the city of Toronto and its often listless and wayward inhabitants:
There was a small park in the middle of Kensington Market that reminded him of Richard Scarry’s Busytown – every kind of folk doing every kind of thing – mohawked punks playing guitar, old Chinese women doing tai chi, a man on a unicycle being chased by small children, a circle of fishmongers smoking from a hookah, painters with their easels and watercolours, young Wiccans with their sticks and stones, people writing in notebooks, readers reading, singers singing, dealers dealing, drummers drumming, drinkers drinking – all together in the same small frame.
The language here has a jazzy rhythm to it, and the portrait of the city is vibrant and immediate. This is not a surprise from Bishop-Stall, whose first book, Down to This, chronicled the year the author spent living in Toronto’s notorious tent city. His affection for the homeless, mentally ill, and dispossessed is evident throughout Ghosted, and his descriptions of the people who inhabit The Cave, Chaz’s underground boozecan, have a kind of Ellroyesque quality about them:
The poker table was full – a blue, green and black monster in the centre of the felt, tumbling stacks, cards snapping, thick lines of coke on metal discs, cigarette packs, forearms with fresh tattoos still leaking blood, a card burning then turning to the river.
In all corners the shadows were full: skids, capos, trannies, nannies, boxers, traders, waiters, goths, hookers, dealers, doctors, DJs, addicts, assholes, dentists and debt collectors – Chaz’s patrons, getting blasted in the early morning.
Nor is the book devoid of humour, albeit of an extraordinarily dark hue. (Variations on Mason’s Internet ad include “So life ain’t worth living? And your writing skills suck?” and “The grey skies may never be clear, but at least your letter should be.”) And Bishop-Stall proves adept at pacing and at keeping a number of narrative balls in the air simultaneously.
Unfortunately, the author wants his protagonist to be redeemed, and his chosen method for effecting this is introducing a character who is even worse than Mason: more heinous, more callous, more reprehensible. Enter Seth Handyman, a sociopathic pedophile who discovers Mason’s online solicitation, setting the two of them on a collision course. It is with Seth’s introduction that the novel ceases to be a dark urban satire and dons the mantle of a thriller. Seth gives Mason the notebook that his therapist has ordered him to keep, in which he details a prison scalping and the abduction and rape of an eight-year-old girl, among other atrocities. None of this material is gratuitous, in the sense that it is all essential to the novel’s plot, but neither is it comfortable reading: Bishop-Stall’s relentlessly dark milieu – frequently reminiscent of the urban horrorscapes of Bret Easton Ellis – is not for everyone.
But the real problem with the novel’s final stages is the shift in emphasis away from postmodern satire to a more conventional chase narrative. There’s even the de rigueur imperilled love interest (who, in one of the novel’s most jarring moments, takes over the narrative point-of-view from Mason for two pages, before the perspective switches back again precipitously). This retreat into convention is disappointing in a novel that flouts convention so assiduously in its first half. And the various plot strands come together a bit too neatly to be entirely satisfying: in this sense, as well as in its Toronto setting, Ghosted bears a resemblance to Alissa York’s novel Fauna (both York and Bishop-Stall teach creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies).
“Anti-hero is a lot easier than hero,” Chaz tells Mason. Perhaps, but its also often more interesting. Mason’s transformation from a self-destructive, self-absorbed reprobate into a heroic figure arguably provides a kind of catharsis, but his redemption just doesn’t ring true. Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall knows darkness well, and has the literary skills to dramatize it. Would that he also had the confidence to see his vision through to its extreme, uncompromised end.
Salty Ink wanders into the fray
August 25, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Chad Pelley, the proprietor of the Salty Ink blog, has posted a thoughtful response to yesterday’s Afterword piece on overrated Canadian authors.
Sure, their article was harsh, and glossed over the fact that “good literature” is subjective — Ondaatje is brilliant to some and densely impenetrable to others, but those others should be able to say so, without repercussion, shouldn’t they? The point of all of this hoopla over one article is this: No one loses it over a critic calling an established writer subpar unless that writer is someone like Ondaatje. If his next book is crap his next book is crap, and a critic would say so about anyone else. If you grant an iconic writer immunity from criticism it is a disservice to what CanLit is, because what it is to me is a fresh, crisp, ever-evolving thing. But not if we are buying and awarding names over books. Not even when the author earned their reputation, because people in every profession know when to retire, and, a writer without a thick skin is in the wrong profession anyway. And, a writer who thinks s/he is great, too great for criticism, is done evolving and getting better. And is therefore done.
Amen, brother. Amen.
R.I.P. Frank Kermode
August 18, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
One of the greatest and most influential critics ever to grace the stage of English Literature, Frank Kermode has died at the age of 90. From the Guardian:
Prominent in literary criticism since the 1950s, Kermode held “virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles,” according to his former colleague John Sutherland, from King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge to Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and professor of poetry at Harvard, along with honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He was knighted in 1991.
A renowned Shakespearean, publishing Shakespeare’s Language in 2001, Kermode’s books range from works on Spenser and Donne and the memoir Not Entitled to last year’s Concerning E.M. Forster.
Equally conversant with the work of Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens, Kermode’s 2006 book The Sense of an Ending has become an essential text for students of literary criticism, and literature itself.
It is the constant presence of more or less subtle varieties of apocalyptism that makes possible the repetitive claims for uniqueness and privilege in modernist theorising about the arts. So far as I can see these claims are unjustified. The price to be paid for old-style talk about “evolving sensibility” is new-style talk about “mutation.” It is only rarely that one can say there is nothing to worry about, but in this limited respect there appears not to be. Mr. Fiedler professes alarm at the prospect of being a stranded humanist, wandering among unreadable books in a totally new world. But when sensibility had evolved that far there will be no language and no concept of form, so no books. Its possessors will all be idiots. However, it will take more than jokes, dice, random shuffling, and smoking pot to achieve this, and in fact very few people seem to be trying. Neo-modernists have examined in many ways (many more than I have talked about), various implications of traditional modernism. As a consequence, we have, not unusually, some good things, many trivial things, many jokes, much nonsense. Among other things they enable us to see more clearly that certain aspects of earlier modernism really were so revolutionary that we ought not to expect – even with everything so speeded up – to have the pains and pleasures of another comparable movement quite so soon. And by exaggerating and drawing, the neo-modernist does help us to understand rather better what the Modern now is, and has been during this century.
– “Objects, Jokes, and Art,” 1966
Hidden wildlife
August 10, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Fauna. Alissa York; $29.95 cloth 978-0-307-35789-2, 376 pp., Random House Canada.
Predation is a recurring theme in the fiction of Alissa York. Her debut novel, 2002′s Mercy, opens with a cow being slaughtered, and contains scenes involving an owl attack in a bog and a pack of feral dogs. Her follow-up, the Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted 2007 novel Effigy, has at its centre a woman named Dorrie, the fourth wife of the vicious Mormon horse breeder Erasmus Hammer, who dreams she is a crow, circling over scenes of violence and horror:
Being crow, I should make my way back to the killing field. I might have to haunt the margins for a time if the humans are still at work. On my last circuit I winged all the way back to the circled wagons. Between here and there, the dog man’s pack hunkered over the dead. They were stripping the bodies, revealing even the blue-white underskins of their feet. One yanked a glitter-string from a female’s wrist. One plucked shimmer-discs from an overskin he’d peeled away. The crow eye sparked and buzzed.
The impressionistic scene being described is that of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, an 1857 slaughter of a wagon train by a group of Utah Mormons and Paiute natives. Witnessing the grisly tableau from her crow’s-eye view, Dorrie imagines the relationship between the natural predation of the wild and the more vicious human kind:
See how the humans cache their kill, how they bow and scrape, swinging their heavy tools. Soon shallow patches have been scratched, and the dragging of bodies begins. Like weasels hoarding mice, they pile dead upon dead, dusting them with not enough earth to dissuade a fox kit. Some do even less, dumping corpses in gullies and concealing them with clumps of grass.
In her waking hours, Dorrie is much prized by her husband for her skill as a taxidermist; she takes the animals that Erasmus kills for sport and returns them to a lifelike state. At the novel’s opening, Erasmus brings Dorrie the bodies of a family of wolves he has killed. As the book progresses, a recurring leitmotif is the presence of a lone wolf scouring the Hammer homestead, trying to locate his lost pack.
The uneasy relationship between wildlife and the humans who prey on it reasserts itself in York’s latest novel, Fauna. The setting has shifted from 19th-century Utah to present-day Toronto, and in place of Erasmus there is Darius, a troubled young man who, calling himself “Coyote Cop,” blogs about what he perceives to be the scourge of the city’s coyote population. His blog posts, which become ever more violent and provocative, attract the attention of Stephen, an ex-soldier who suffered a heart virus while on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Stephen’s medical condition cut short his military service; he now spends his days working at Howell Auto Wreckers, a wrecking yard in the Don Valley ravine that does double duty as an ad hoc animal sanctuary.
The sanctuary serves as the gathering point for the book’s cast of human misfits: in addition to Stephen and Guy, who owns the property, there is Edal, a federal wildlife officer currently on stress leave; Lily, a homeless girl who prowls the city at night rescuing birds that have flown into the lighted buildings of the downtown core; and Kate, a worker at the Annex Canine Rehabilitation Centre.
Each of the characters bears a wound or an absence of some sort. Some wounds, like Stephen’s defective heart, are physical; others are emotional; still others, a combination of the two. Lily cuts herself to mark the days she’s been on the streets: “Tonight being her fifty-seventh night of freedom, she’s partway into a group of five. The fifth cuts are the tricky ones, slashing down across the previous four. They require a deeper breath, an extra-steady hand.” Kate is trying to recover from the death of her lover, Lou-Lou, from “a massive brain aneurysm.” Since Lou-Lou’s death, Kate, who had never been able to confess the true nature of her relationship to her conservative parents, “had entered an underwater world,” where she “was walking, sitting, lying on the ocean floor.” Kate and Lily find solace with each other, impelled by their mutual love of dogs.
The character with the most shattering home life is Darius, whose troubled mother Faye dies after a fall in the bathtub, leaving him in the custody of his grandmother and his religious zealot grandfather, who insists that an extra place be set at the dinner table for the Son of God: “Every time Grandmother stood up to clear, she took Jesus’s full plate first, carrying it in both hands and tipping the untouched portion into the garbage pail. It hardly seemed fair, given that Darius had to eat every scrap he was served.” Darius’s grandfather’s spine is defective and he needs his wife to tie a board to his back in order to stand straight, something Darius witnesses one night when he gets up to go to the bathroom.
The grandfather’s peculiar affliction and his obsession with Jesus recall the Southern grotesques of Flannery O’Connor, a writer York acknowledges as an influence on her own work. But the grandfather – who keeps a spare belt on hand for the specific purpose of beating his wife and grandson – is one of the few O’Connoresque characters in Fauna; unlike York’s previous two novels, the element of Southern Gothicism is downplayed here. This is not to suggest that Fauna is by any stretch ordinary: on the contrary, with its band of forgotten misfits, its setting in the literal hidden valleys of Toronto, and sections that are narrated from the perspective of various animals (foxes, skunks, coyotes), Fauna is passing strange, and all the more bracing because of it. Although it invokes classics of animal lore – among them The Jungle Book, Watership Down, and Wild Animals I Have Known – it is startlingly original in its approach and its execution.
York’s writing, as always, is pristine, and over the course of three novels she has developed an admirable ability to juggle multiple perspectives and plotlines. However, the novel’s resolution is too neat to be entirely satisfying. The various storylines come to conclusions that are too tidy, and when the reason for Darius’s antipathy toward coyotes finally becomes apparent, the psychology involved is too simple to be entirely credible. Moreover, a number of characters – a stripper Stephen chances upon in the park one day, the restaurateur who gives Lily a job as a “dish pig” – appear in the novel fleetingly, only to vanish again without any payoff.
Still, Fauna represents a simultaneous extension of recurring themes and an intriguing departure for York. It is structurally ambitious and the author displays a tight control over her language and patterns of metaphor. The novel falters in its final stages, but that in no way diminishes the general enjoyment the story offers. York has written a truly odd book; it is a testament to her skill as a writer that it works as well as it does.
In which I get found out
August 9, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 7 Comments
The ever-vigilant Nathan Whitlock pointed out that my essay “Fuck Books,” which appeared in Canadian Notes & Queries more than a year ago, but has been given new life thanks to a mention in a Maclean’s blog post by Paul Wells, has been tapped for Geist magazine’s Findings section. The folks at Geist have lovingly combed through the essay, in which I complain about the, er, high-falutin’ stylistic shenanigans perpetrated by CanLit icons Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels, and have extracted a list of high-falutin’ stylistic shenanigans perpetrated by yr. humble correspondent in the course of making his argument.
This is actually pretty funny, and echoes a comment made by Britt Gullick in a post over at Pickle Me This. Now, Whitlock (who really should have trademarked the term “fuck books”) always advises me, “If two or more people tell you you’re drunk, it’s time to sit down.” And so, I must admit that there is a certain irony in using frankly elevated language to critique the elevated writing of others. All I would say in my defence is that nowhere in the essay do I suggest that I am against the deployment of big words. What I’m against is the inappropriate deployment of big words: their use in an ineffective context, a condescending manner, or as a veil to disguise the fact that a writer has little of substance to say.
I’d also point out that the phrase “the oatmeal of world literature” isn’t mine, it’s Stephen Marche’s. But it’s still a good line.
The deepest pessimism
August 3, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
My review of Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, The Year of the Flood (just out in trade paper), is online at the Canadian Notes & Queries website. A taste:
In her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of H.G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, Atwood asserts that Wells referred to his tales as “scientific romances,” but only because the specific generic classification science fiction had yet to be coined. About Doctor Moreau, Atwood writes:
There are several interpretations of the term “science.” If it implies the known and the possible, then Wells’s scientific romances are by no means scientific: he paid little attention to such boundaries. As Jules Verne remarked with displeasure, “Il invente!” (“He makes it up!”). The “science” part of these tales is embedded instead in a world-view that derived from Wells’s study of Darwinian principles under Huxley, and has to do with the grand concern that engrossed him throughout his career: the nature of man. This too may account for his veering between extreme Utopianism (if man is the result of evolution, not of Divine creation, surely he can evolve yet further?) and the deepest pessimism (if man derived from the animals and is akin to them, rather than to the angels, surely he might slide back the way he came?). The Island of Doctor Moreau belongs to the debit side of the Wellsian account book.
Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood also belong to the debit side of the account book, in that they chronicle the latter days of a species – homo sapiens – that seems hell-bent on returning to a pre-evolutionary state along a road that is ironically paved by our own ingenuity: we are involved in the wholesale pursuit of the very technologies that will serve as the instruments of our destruction. Although The Year of the Flood is ultimately a more hopeful book than its predecessor, there is nevertheless a strain of “the deepest pessimism” running through it.
Down and out
July 24, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 4 Comments
Got No Secrets. Danila Botha; $18.95 paper 978-1-926639-08-6, 144 pp., Tightrope Books.
Johannesburg-born author Danila Botha’s debut collection is the latest in a line of books by writers such as Heather O’Neill, Zoe Whittall, and Stacey May Fowles that centre on the existential anxiety of young women as filtered through their characters’ experiences with drugs, sex, and urban anomie. Not surprisingly, Botha claims both O’Neill and Whittall as influences. Equally unsurprising, Botha evinces both the best and the worst tendencies of the writers with whom she has cast her lot: on the plus side, a willingness to plumb the depths of undeniably dark material, and on the minus side, a postmodern subjectivity that veers too often into solipsism, coupled with a technique that is unrefined and choppy.
The stories in Got No Secrets cover a great deal of geographical territory – from South Africa to Toronto – but the emotional territory of the book is more proscribed. The collection’s dozen stories mostly focus on young women who attempt to escape the malaise of their lives by taking refuge in drugs or boys or television, or some combination of all three. In “My So-Called Date,” a young woman who has been raped by her ex-boyfriend tries to find a more loving relationship with a screenwriter in Toronto. “Smacked” features an advertising copywriter in New York who graduates from relatively mild drugs like MDMA to dangerous experiences with cocaine and heroin. The two roommates in “Paradox” turn their backs on school and work in favour of anonymous hook-ups and a spiralling descent into drug addiction.
“Paradox,” which opens the collection, takes its title from the first-person narrator’s tenth grade definition of the word: “every day of our lives we are one step closer to death.” This is one of the few acknowledgments of mortality in the book; more often, Botha’s characters are plagued by anxiety or panic at their situations and a yearning to escape into a better set of circumstances. The last line of “A Tiny Thud” – “I guess I have to start moving” – is emblematic of the realization that Botha’s luckier protagonists manage to work themselves up to: a recognition of the fact that a life centred around heroin and endless episodes of The Simpsons is ultimately insufficient to combat the pain and heartache that is an essential part of the human condition.
But this revelation is not itself particularly enlightening; the ground that Botha covers has been well trod by writers as diverse as Irvine Welsh, Joel Thomas Hynes, Jay McInerney, and Denis Johnson. Botha’s distaff take on the material doesn’t really add anything in the way of understanding, and too often tossed-off references to Black Flag or Family Guy are made to stand in for character development. There is an undeniable sameness to most of these stories: with the exception of the final two – “A Pregnant Man,” about a woman undergoing hormone therapy preparatory to having sex reassignment surgery who decides that her final act as a woman will be to give birth, and “Just Friends,” the only story in the collection narrated by a man – all of these stories feel as though they are being told by the same person, from the same perspective, and focusing on the same set of anxieties and dilemmas. Moreover, many of the stories are underdeveloped and consequently don’t carry the necessary force. A story like “Lucky,” which runs to a scant seven pages, feels thin on the ground, and as a result its climactic violence seems unearned.
On the level of technique, the material suffers from prose that relies too heavily on clichéd phrases and constructions. On the first page, we are told that the sun “is beating down”; several pages later, the narrator muses that if she passes a test she wrote while hung over it will be “a small miracle.” A ringing telephone beats at her brain “like a jackhammer,” and her friend Tina is described as “a speed demon.” In another story, the narrator gets so angry she “can’t see,” and in yet another the narrator imagines the way a man would “wrap his arms around [her] waist and sweep [her] up,” how she would “feel all the tension draining out of [her] body.” Elsewhere, careless writing denudes the impact of Botha’s sentences; in “The Pregnant Man,” for instance, the narrator listens as the boys in her school “talk about wanting to bang girls with envy.” (Most boys of that age would want to bang girls with vigour or with gusto, not with envy.)
Still, Botha’s evident empathy for marginalized and underclass characters does lend her stories moments of poignancy. But these moments are undercut by a succession of first-person narrators who are too self-absorbed to realize that they are the authors of their own dilemmas.
A matter of taste: revivifying CanLit criticism
July 5, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 8 Comments
Let’s begin with a premise that presumably we can all agree upon: literary criticism in Canada is struggling. Book review sections in our national press grow ever thinner, or disappear altogether; reviews get ever shorter, as a baleful capitulation to our attention-deficit culture; insult and invective stand in for reasoned argument; and the intellectual wattage of our critical discourse becomes dimmer and dimmer. The Internet allows anyone with an opinion on literary works – no matter how ill informed or poorly elucidated that opinion might be – the means by which to disseminate it. Book chat gets elevated to the status of critical thought. And enthusiastic amateurs are lauded while educated connoisseurs are pilloried as anti-democratic elitists. In short, Canadian literary criticism is withering on the vine.
This should be very bad news for anyone who takes literary culture at all seriously. Not because writers depend on literary critics to do their job; if critics were to vanish from the face of the earth tomorrow (as any number of writers doubtless wish they would) literature would not disappear along with them. On the contrary: writers would continue to write, books would continue to get published, and readers would continue to read them. However, an integral part of the literary ecology would have been lost. Critical dialogue is essential if a literary culture is to remain vibrant, for it is precisely this dialogue that emboldens innovation and progress, challenges complacency, and helps situate individual works in the context of literary tradition and history. Literary culture thrives alongside an incisive and provocative critical culture. The lack of a thriving critical culture in this country is arguably one reason why so much CanLit appears sclerotic and uninspired compared to the literature of other countries – notably Britain and America – that have more vigorous critical communities.
What factors might account for our current state of affairs?
In his influential 1968 volume Image Music Text Roland Barthes famously declared the death of the author. The author, Barthes insisted, had no claim to privilege over a text, and asserting authorial intention was an error that impinged upon the multiplicity of implications inherent in language itself. The death of the author, Barthes argued, allowed for the birth of the reader. In this sense, Barthes prefigured the democratization of critical response that the Internet unleashed. But as Rónán McDonald points out, what gets lost in the transaction is the authority to speak from a position of knowledge and expertise. The death of the author is coeval with the death of the critic, and the resultant flattening of literary discourse has a (perhaps counterintuitive) deleterious effect on the reader:
For all the supposed emancipation implicit in the pronouncement “we’re all critics now,” the loss of critical authority, of knowledgeable arbiters with some influence on public attention, actually diminishes the agency of choice of the reader. It plays into the hands of the monopolies who pedal [sic] fewer and fewer choices and whose primary interest is always the bottom line. What could be better suited to a ravenous consumer society, thriving on depthless and instant gratifications, than an ethos where judgements of cultural quality are down to everyone’s individual tastes and opinions? Like those phone-in polls so beloved of television and radio, this supposed “people power” decks out banality and uniformity in the guise of democracy and improvement.
The “wisdom of crowds” that is so valorized online is a mechanism for the promotion of herd instinct that undermines the critical impulse rather than encouraging it. As authoritative critical voices disappear, they are replaced by a populist mentality that cleaves in an unthinking way to trends and to what is being sold as the new big thing. Such a mentality is anti-intellectual and anti-critical at its core. McDonald points out that the word critic derives from the Greek word kritos, meaning “a judge.” The implication, McDonald argues, is that for criticism to have a broad public value, it must be evaluative. But on what should evaluative criticism be based? Surely not “everyone’s individual tastes and opinions”?
To say that a critic must be possessed of good taste is a highly contentious statement, for the obvious question arises: Who determines what qualifies as “good taste”? Is one person’s taste not as valid as anyone else’s? To answer in the negative is to invite accusations of elitism, but it is difficult to ignore the irrefutable truth that a lifetime devoted to reading deeply and widely, to studying the history of literature and literary theory, will have the effect of refining a person’s taste. No one who has been properly exposed to the sublimity of Henry James’s finely turned sentences can possibly read the plodding and clanging prose of James Patterson and consider them literary equals. Or, as Philip Marchand put it, “someone who reads Tolstoy and doesn’t recognize the presence of a towering genius is deficient in taste, period.”
Marchand’s comment is held up for castigation by novelist André Alexis in an article titled “The Long Decline,” which appears in this month’s issue of The Walrus magazine. Alexis complains that “Marchand’s statement is about himself, his belief in War and Peace‘s greatness. He offers no defence of his opinion, believing that none is required. And so, we have come to the point where the mere fact of an opinion is more important than the basis for it.”* Alexis decontextualizes Marchand’s remark and forces it to stand for an entire critical methodology. He uses this as an example of what he elsewhere refers to as “the written equivalent of pointing and saying, ‘There, you see?’”
But Alexis is being disingenuous. The quip about Tolstoy comes from an essay entitled “Confessions of a Book Columnist.” A few pages on in his essay, Marchand extrapolates what he means by literary taste in an extended analysis of two passages from Canadian fiction:
Let us be more specific about the tastes of the writer before you who presumes to criticize literature. The following are two paragraphs from two recently published Canadian novels, both of which have received a great deal of praise. One paragraph I loved, the other I hated.
A. “The traffic began to stagger forward in five-yard increments. Ted’s breakfast moved around in him.”
B. “Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”
Paragraph A is from Russell Smith’s How Insensitive, a satiric look at Toronto’s cultural life. Paragraph B is from Michael Ondaatje’s … The English Patient.
The two sentences from Russell Smith, which describe the progress of a badly hung-over hero in a taxi on Highway 401, contain not a single adjective, unless you count the word “five.” In the first sentence, the emphasis is on the verb “stagger” and the noun “increments,” both of which strike me as inspired choices. “Stagger,” for example, combines the suggestions of jerkiness and stupefaction – two qualities inseparable from anyone’s experience of rush hour traffic. “Increments” reminds the reader that the five yards are supposed to add up to something – to a journey, in this case, of several miles.
The last sentence of the Ondaatje paragraph contains five adjectives. You don’t have to be Ernest Hemingway to consider that rather a lot for a sentence of no great length. What is more to the point is the abstractness of the adjectives, their inability to focus vision. As they say in creative writing classes, this kind of writing is telling, not showing. Moreover, the figures of speech contained in the excerpt hardly stand up to scrutiny. Calling the relationship of pages in a closed book “intimate” has a kind of studied inappropriateness that many readers find vaguely foreign in flavour and therefore highly sophisticated, but it is tiresome, foreign-flavoured or not. “Stalking beauty” is another figure of speech that seems to resonate with terribly profound implications, like some of the bad metaphors in Shelley. It’s the kind of verbal embroidery that is called “beautiful prose” by people who like gobs of marmalade on their toast.
Say what you like about Marchand’s assessments here, they are the very antithesis of “pointing and saying, ‘There, you see?’” They are, instead, an explication of one critic’s reactions to a pair of texts based on a literary sensibility that has been shaped not by market forces, but by wide reading and careful comparisons of traditions, authors, and texts. They are assessments based on a refined and clearly delineated literary taste.
What separates Marchand from the hundreds of Internet bloggers chattering incessantly about their favourite books of the moment is his adherence to an aesthetic that is explicable and forged out of a reasonable and logical approach to literature based on certain principles and standards. Distilled, this is what Coleridge meant when he wrote:
The ultimate end of criticism is much more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass judgement on what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible that the two could be separated. But if it be asked, by what principles the poet is to regulate his own style, if he do not adhere closely to the sort and order of words which he hears in the market, wake, high-road, or plough-field? I reply; by principles, the ignorance or neglect of which would convict him of being no poet, but a silly or presumptuous usurper of the name! By the principles of grammar, logic, psychology! In one word by such a knowledge of the facts, material and spiritual, that most appertain to his art, as, if it have been governed and applied by good sense, and rendered instinctive by habit, becomes the representative and reward of our past conscious reasonings, insights, and conclusions, and acquires the name of TASTE.
Critical taste, according to Coleridge, is forged out of an understanding that literary standards can and do exist: that it is possible to objectively assert that book X is better than book Y based on literary principles (“grammar, logic, psychology”) and “knowledge of the facts, material and spiritual, that most appertain to” the work of art under consideration.
Alexis argues that James Wood, perhaps the most widely recognized literary critic writing today, was in his early work “exemplary of the worst of criticism” because he dared to render judgment over the works he was considering. In his 2008 study, How Fiction Works, “Wood has begun to move away from judgment and toward the contemplation of ideas,” which Alexis sees as a victory for criticism.
What Alexis would appear to advocate is what Rebecca West derided in a 1914 essay titled “The Duty of Harsh Criticism”: critics who “combine the gentleness of early Christians with a promiscuous polytheism,” who “reject not even the most barbarous or most fatuous gods.” Stating that there was at the time “no criticism in England,” but “merely a chorus of weak cheers … a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger,” West called for the establishment of “a new and abusive school of criticism.” Her call to arms, made just under one century ago, is today echoed by Jeet Heer, who, in his own response to Alexis’s article, published on The Afterword blog, writes, “A strong argument could be made that Canadian reviewers are too forgiving of bad writing and our literary culture is corrupted less by rampant snark than by habitual back-scratching and tireless log-rolling.”
Indeed, Heer points out that Northrop Frye, who Alexis calls “a good practical critic” whose “respect for the literary work was … inspiring,” himself adhered to high literary standards in his criticism:
It’s worth remembering that Frye explicitly stated that he would never apply the same high standards he used to judge world literature to evaluating the fiction and poetry of Canada. Frye described himself as a “paternal critic” and believed that it was his job to nurture Canadian writers by describing and categorizing their work rather than evaluating its merit (or lack thereof). The task of evaluation, Frye once wrote, would only be “a huge debunking project, leaving Canadian literature a poor naked alouette plucked of every feather of decency and dignity.”
Frye certainly could not be considered deficient in taste. When Alexis argues that Canada could benefit from more critics of Frye’s calibre, he is right, although not for the reasons he espouses.
Navigating the shallows
June 13, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Nicholas Carr; $33.50 cloth 978-0-393-07222-8, 276 pp., W.W. Norton & Company.
In the Foreword to his 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, cultural critic Neil Postman quotes Aldous Huxley’s remark in Brave New World Revisited that “the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’” Postman died in 2003, just before Web 2.0 became the apotheosis of mankind’s almost obsessive desire for distraction. According to Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, software engineers with Google, that company’s tracking statistics indicated that as of July 25, 2008 there were more than one trillion discrete URLs on the World Wide Web. The Website Domain Tools states that today there are 120,043,671 registered domain names. The social Web is flourishing, from the almost quaintly antiquated MySpace to Facebook and Twitter, to more specialized social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Goodreads. New e-mail competes for our attention with the latest YouTube video, Google alerts, and RSS feeds. The Net offers access to a kind of Borgesian library of seemingly infinite information, all of it only a click away.
This technological cornucopia comes with a price, however. In a recent New York Times article, Matt Richtel points to the downside of information glut and constantly divided attention that too much time spent online promotes: “Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.” The Net’s constant encouragement to refresh that Twitter page, to check for new e-mail, to download a song or a video, or to converse with a buddy over Skype or instant messaging is liable to have an effect on the way humans think and interact. “This,” says Richtel, “is your brain on computers.”
What is ironic about Richtel’s argument is that the online version of his article is peppered with hyperlinks, each of which prods a reader to navigate away from the piece and engage with ancillary material: an abstract about dopamine, a slide show, an interactive game that (again, ironically) tests the degree to which a person can filter out distractions. Richtel’s article is fairly long, but the links embedded within it operate counter to the impulse to immerse oneself deeply in the content; rather, they break the blocks of text into discrete units and offer potential sidetracks for a reader’s attention.
These hypertextual sidetracks may go largely unremarked or unnoticed, but they affect a reader’s experience in ways that are not entirely beneficial. In his lucid and persuasive new book, technology writer Nicholas Carr refers to a study conducted by Erping Zhu to determine the effect that hyperlinks have on a reader’s comprehension:
She had groups of people read the same piece of online writing, but she varied the number of links included in the passage. She then tested the readers’ comprehension by asking them to write a summary of what they had read and complete a multiple-choice test. She found that comprehension declined as the number of links increased. Readers were forced to devote more and more of their attention and brain power to evaluating the links and deciding whether to click on them. That left less attention and fewer cognitive resources to devote to understanding what they were reading.
Elsewhere, Carr points out that although links act as the online equivalent of citations and notes in books and academic articles, they nevertheless alter our reading experience by encouraging us to disengage with a single text and jump from one text to another. “Hyperlinks,” Carr writes, “are designed to grab our attention. Their value as navigational tools is inextricable from the distraction they cause.”
Of course, hyperlinks are only one of the Net’s elements of distraction, and arguably one of the most benign. Writer Cory Doctorow refers to the Internet as an “ecosystem of interruption technologies”; such an ecosystem, Carr argues, is antithetical to the kind of careful attention and deep, sustained thought that has been responsible for most of civilization’s great advances to date.
Invoking Marshall McLuhan, Carr takes issue with the tech evangelists who assume that the Internet is a morally neutral technology, insisting instead that the tools we use have the power to change us and are therefore fraught with ethical considerations. “Our conventional response to all media,” McLuhan wrote, “namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.” Postman echoes McLuhan in his assertion that media technologies are inseparable from the ideology that undergirds them:
[W]hat is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.
Carr has assimilated that point thoroughly and argues that the ideology of the Internet, which privileges efficiency over deliberation and concentration, marks the advent of a “new intellectual ethic,” one that is actually having physiological effects on the way our brains are wired.
Beginning his book with an examination of recent advances in neuroscience, which have highlighted the plasticity of the human brain, Carr goes on to illustrate the ways in which the Internet fosters a kind of mental hyperactivity that has deleterious effects on our memory and our ability to comprehend a complex or nuanced argument. No brooding Cassandra, Carr acknowledges the power of the Net as a research tool and the extent to which it has enriched our lives, but warns, “The mental skills we sacrifice may be as valuable, or even more valuable than the ones we gain. When it comes to the quality of our thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely indifferent. The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.”
The intellectual decay that the Internet promotes is tied into its mechanisms for distraction, and the concomitant tendency toward brevity, speed, and simplicity. Carr quotes digital maven Clay Shirky as saying that the demise of deep reading is not something to be mourned because it was never that great in the first place: “‘No one reads War and Peace,’ [Shirky] wrote, singling out Tolstoy’s epic as the quintessence of high literary achievement. ‘It’s too long, and not so interesting.’” The brain that has had its synapses rerouted by prolonged exposure to the rapidity and heterogeneousness of the Internet will likely agree with Shirky that Tolstoy’s novel is “too long, and not so interesting.” This is indicative, Carr asserts, of someone who lacks “the time, the interest, or the facility to inhabit a literary work,” a characterization that applies well to heavy users of digital media online.
Dedicated Netizens will no doubt take umbrage with Carr’s ideas, but he marshals a great deal of evidence to back up his assertions, and his key thesis – that the intellectual ethic of the Internet is pushing us toward a new mode of thought that is actually reflective of the technology itself, and that this may not be an entirely positive development – seems irrefutable. “McLuhan’s point,” Carr writes, “was that an honest appraisal of any new technology, or of progress in general, requires a sensitivity to what’s lost as well as what’s gained. We shouldn’t allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we’ve numbed an essential part of our self.”
If Carr is to be faulted at all, it would be in the relative lack of prescriptive solutions to our current technological dilemma; on the final page of the book, all the author can manage to offer up is the (perhaps vain) “hope that we won’t go gently into the future our computer engineers and software programmers are scripting for us.” But The Shallows is more of a warning bell than anything else, a clarion call to remain cognizant of the way our technology shapes us and to stay vigilant so that we don’t lose more than we gain by adopting it. In arguing for the merits of quiet contemplation and serious thought as against the fragmented, distracted intellectual currency of the Internet, Carr is swimming against the prevailing cultural tide. But his plea that we not sacrifice wisdom on the altar of efficiency is one that needs to be heard. If we’re lucky, it’s not too late to turn back the tide.
31 Days of Stories 2010, Day 31: “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
May 31, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
From Hawthorne’s Short Stories
We started this month with one of the American progenitors of the short story form; it seems appropriate that we should end with one, also. Of Hawthorne’s influence on the development of the short fiction genre, National Book Award–winning critic Newton Arvin writes:
In any other period they might well have taken quite a different literary form – fabulous, visionary, legendary, poetic (in the limited sense), and even dramatic – and if they took the form of “short stories,” it was because, at the moment Hawthorne began to write, that mold was a natural and almost handy one. This does not meant that it was long-established; on the contrary, it was in its primitive or experimental stage, especially in English, and if it was handy, it was only in the sense in which the history play was so for the young Shakespeare. The Italian novella, the French conte, the realistic-moral English tale – these were ancient types, but they were nothing to the purpose of Hawthorne and his contemporaries: they were not “inward,” they were not meditative or musing, they were not a matter of tone and lighting and harmony. It was only latterly that short pieces of prose fiction had begun to take on qualities such as these, and Hawthorne was as much the creator as the inheritor of the form.
Hawthorne’s stories, like Poe’s, were inward and musing, and were very much a matter of tone and lighting and harmony. Unlike Poe, Hawthorne was a symbolic writer with a resolutely spiritual, not to say religious, fervour underpinning his fictions. In its suspicion of science as a replacement for the divine, in its excoriation of human hubris, in its critique of an attempt by a human to usurp the place of God, “The Birthmark” occupies the same corner of the literary landscape as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Hawthorne’s story centres on the character of Aylmer, a man who “had devoted himself … too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any second passion.” Nevertheless, he has “made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one”: he has fallen in love with Georgiana, whom he subsequently marries. Having sealed the matrimonial bond, however, Aylmer becomes increasingly obsessed by his wife’s one physical imperfection: a small crimson birthmark on her left cheek, which appears to take on the shape of a tiny human hand. Aylmer succumbs to a state of high agitation with regard to this blemish on his wife’s otherwise spotless face:
With the morning twilight Aylmer opened his eyes upon his wife’s face and recognized the symbol of imperfection; and when they sat together at the evening hearth his eyes wandered stealthily to her cheek, and beheld, flickering with the blaze of the wood fire, the spectral hand that wrote mortality where he would fain have worshipped. Georgiana soon learned to shudder at his gaze. It needed but a glance with the peculiar expression that his face often wore to change the roses of her cheek into a deathlike paleness, amid which the crimson hand was brought strongly out, like a bas-relief of ruby on the whitest marble.
Despite her reservations, Georgiana agrees to allow her husband to perform experimental treatments on her to remove the birthmark. As Aylmer’s obsession deepens, Georgiana herself begins to find the blemish repulsive and encourages her husband in his quest to discover a solution that will eradicate it forever.
From the outset, Hawthorne insists on a dichotomy between divine creation and human ingenuity; the quest for human perfection, we come to understand, is not only hubristic but a refutation of the divine laws of nature. Aylmer’s drive to recreate his wife in a way that will conform to his own idea of perfect beauty has an unavoidably modern resonance: it is at once a condemnation of a particularly patriarchal impulse demanding that woman adhere to a masculine standard of attractiveness and a prescient critique of our Botox and silicone addicted pursuit of physical perfection at all costs.
If there was any question as to where Hawthorne’s sympathies lie, it should be put to rest by the scene in which Georgiana makes an incursion into Aylmer’s laboratory:
The first thing that struck her eye was the furnace, that hot and feverish worker, with the intense glow of its fire, which by the quantities of soot clustered above it seemed to have been burning for ages. There was a distilling apparatus in full operation. Around the room were resorts, tubes, cylinders, crucibles, and other apparatus of chemical research. An electrical machine stood ready for immediate use. The atmosphere felt oppressively close, and was tainted with gaseous odors which had been tormented forth by the processes of science.
The “oppressively close” atmosphere “tainted with gaseous odors which had been tormented forth by the processes of science” is bad enough, but the image of the furnace, “with the intense glow of its fire,” bears with it an unmistakably hellish connotation. It is no accident that the next thing that Georgiana’s eye alights on is her husband, “pale as death” and perched over the furnace “as if it depended upon his utmost watchfulness whether the liquid which it was distilling should be the draught of immortal happiness or misery.” The explicit connection between the scientist and the furnace, burning with its devilish fires, advances Hawthorne’s implication that the unchecked progress of science at the expense of a recognition of divine creation can only lead to catastrophe.
In Hawthorne’s story, catastrophe does indeed ensue. Aylmer achieves his goal and discovers a serum that eradicates Georgiana’s birthmark, but in the process it takes her life:
The fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union with a mortal frame. As the last crimson tint of the birthmark – that sole token of human imperfection – faded from her cheek, the parting breath of the now perfect woman passed into the atmosphere, and her soul, lingering a moment near her husband, took its heavenward flight.
By attempting to improve over nature, Hawthorne suggests, Aylmer destroyed the one thing he truly loved. There is an explicitly religious aspect to this allegory, but absent the religious undertones it nevertheless remains a potent parable about humanity’s vain pursuit of an elusive perfection, and the terrible toll that such pursuit can end up taking.