McNally Robinson closes its Toronto location
December 29, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 8 Comments
They say bad news comes in threes. On August 31 of this year, one of Toronto’s beloved independent booksellers, Pages Books and Magazines, shut its doors after 30 years in business. The very next day, TYPE books closed its Danforth Street location. And today, the Toronto Star is reporting that McNally Robinson has closed its Don Mills location as part of a larger restructuring. This is, to say the least, dispiriting news capping a year in which books and booksellers seemed to have been under a sustained assault.
A note on McNally Robinson’s website attempts to put a positive spin on things:
By now you may have heard that McNally Robinson has had to close two stores, one in Toronto and the other at Polo Park. Many jobs are lost and many customers will be disappointed. This has been a heart-rending process. However, Grant Park, our flagship store, has survived, as has our Saskatoon store. In addition we continue our wholesale division, Skylight books, and our website, www.mcnallyrobinson.com. These continue to reflect the quality of bookselling that has led to 7 citations as Canadian independent Bookseller of the Year since 1996. So while the potion is bittersweet, the glass is more than half full.
While it’s clearly important for McNally Robinson to keep its corporate chin up, it’s hard not to feel depressed about the Toronto store’s demise, a scant nine months after it opened. The news comes hot on the heels of a plea for financial assistance from yet another Toronto indie, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, which needs to raise $40,000 in order to avoid closing.
For all the optimism about digital books heading into 2010, those of us who are devoted to actual, physical books need to make a concerted effort to ensure that the trend of bookstore closings doesn’t continue apace. Support your local independent bookstores, people. Let’s try to ensure a happy new year, wot?
One from the vault: On the practice of book reviewing
December 24, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
I was mucking around on the Wayback Machine and came across an old review I wrote of a book called Faint Praise, about the practice of book reviewing (one of the posts that got lost when I inadvertently napalmed TSR earlier this year.) Given the recent controversy on this site (and elsewhere) as to what constitutes proper reviewing practice, I thought I’d repost the review here, since it makes a number of points that I still consider to be valid for critics – and others – to bear in mind when writing (or reading) book reviews.
I may spend some time over the holiday trying to retrieve a few of the more substantial pieces that got lost in the great TSR debacle of 2009; in the meantime, I offer this one as a stopgap, with apologies to those of you who’ve already read it.
Hindering Horses and Shooting the Wounded (first published July 23, 2007)
Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. Gail Pool; University of Missouri Press, $21.62 paper, 174 pp., 978-0-8262-1728-8.
Pity the lowly book reviewer. Poorly paid, located at the bottom of the journalistic pecking order, where they toil in what Guy Davenport referred to as “the slum of American letters,” and routinely reviled by readers and writers alike, those who review books professionally (I hesitate to say “for a living,” since only a scant few can earn a living off of it, and they are mostly salaried employees of a newspaper or periodical) often feel that their efforts are both arduous and thankless in roughly equal measure.
“Book reviews first appeared in America at the end of the eighteenth century,” writes Gail Pool in the Introduction to her new book, and “[t]hey have been frustrating people ever since.” Chekhov called book critics “horse-flies which hinder the horses in their ploughing of the soil,” and Murray Kempton opined, “A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.” Coleridge said that book reviewers “are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could: they have tried their talents at one or at the other, and have failed.”
These disparaging remarks, coming as they do from working writers, all of whom can be assumed at one time or another to have been on the receiving end of a reviewer’s censure, are understandable, but they don’t serve as much balm to a reviewer’s fragile ego, and in any case they miss the point. In particular, the charge that book reviewers are themselves failed writers has always struck me as odd, since book reviewers use precisely the same tools as novelists and poets to achieve their effects. They are only “failed” writers if their reviews lack coherence, or persuasion, or logic; otherwise reviewers have as much claim to being writers, sans l’adjectif, as does anyone else whose primary occupation involves the manipulation of language for the purposes of edification or entertainment.
The common perception of book reviewers as the bottom feeders of the literary world is largely predicated upon a misapprehension as to what exactly this amorphous group of people does. Many observers begin with the notion espoused by Amanda Craig that to review fiction “[a]ll you have to do is read a couple of hundred pages of someone wanking their imagination, and write five hundred moderately clever words about it.” This is dismissive to the point of being insulting, but Craig makes a mistake when she implies that “reading a couple of hundred pages of someone wanking their imagination” – if we might, for a moment, accept this description as an accurate summation of what a fiction reviewer does – then writing five hundred words about it, “moderately clever” or otherwise, is easy work.
Close reading of the kind a solid book review requires is itself not a task undertaken lightly; it is important for a proficient book reviewer to possess the ability to discern how a work achieves its effects and to judge whether the constituent parts of a book add up to a coherent whole. This requires a certain breadth of knowledge, a refined taste, and a sensitivity to nuances of language, none of which can be developed overnight.
Moreover, it is fallacious to suggest that a reviewer who is assigned a 200-page novel will stop at reading those 200 pages. As Pool rightly points out, “if a review is to be accurate, more is generally required than simply reading the book.” If the novel is the third book in a trilogy, for instance, it will be necessary for the reviewer to go back and read (or reread) the first two volumes in order to form any kind of valid perspective on the book in question. Further, if the reviewer is assigned, say, a biography of Richard Nixon, unless that reviewer happens to be a Nixon scholar, it will be necessary to do some background reading and research in order to provide a context within which the book under consideration can be fairly judged. In Pool’s words, “A reviewer can’t become an instant expert, but he can bring an intelligent, informed perspective to a book if he has read, say, all the author’s previous work, several other biographies of the figure whose latest biography he’s reviewing, various travel accounts of whatever country is the subject of his review.”
In his essay, “Confessions of a Book Columnist,” collected in Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature, Philip Marchand sets out two prerequisites for a good book reviewer: (s)he must be well read, and (s)he must be, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “very intelligent.” If this seems somewhat vague, Pool goes further:
Ideally, reviewers should be well educated, widely read, culturally aware, endowed with good memory and, needless to say, good taste. They must be able to read critically, think lucidly, and argue logically. They must write clearly enough to be accessible, sharply enough to be entertaining, and tightly enough to turn seven hundred words into an article. They need sufficient independence of mind to form their own opinions, sufficient confidence to stand by them, and sufficient courage to see them in print.
I have argued repeatedly on this site that book reviewing is not a dilettante’s game; Pool here explains why. The qualifications that she lists as appearing on the “ideal” reviewer’s résumé I would argue are essential for anyone who wishes to practise the trade.
One reason why many book reviews – even (perhaps especially) those that are published in our major news organs – are so lacking in quality, Pool argues, is that editors too often assign books to the wrong people, and the reviews suffer accordingly. A name-brand novelist may bring a publication cachet if assigned to review a major new work of fiction, but that novelist may be utterly incapable of the kind of critical thinking necessary to do justice to a review. Nor, Pool suggests, do academics or specialists in a given field “necessarily make good reviewers”:
It’s one thing to find a William Dean Howells, who was a writer, critic, and editor. Nowadays, most of the people who are ideally qualified in terms of subject expertise and breadth of reading, in fiction as well as nonfiction, are likely to be academics, accustomed to academic writing and discourse – and as someone who has edited such writers, I know well the problems they present. In their own spheres they’ll have no need to make their points accessible to a general audience and will have had little practice in translating what they have to say into readable, let alone lively, prose.
At the other end of the spectrum are the enthusiastic amateurs who proliferate online, where the democracy of the Internet allows everyone a voice, but removes the editorial filter and does not demand that commentators attain a basic level of competence before they begin reviewing. Pool finds legitimate fault with a medium that asserts that all voices are equal and all opinions should carry equal weight, a medium that assigns equal value to the thoughtful, knowledgeable criticism of Sven Birkerts on the one hand, and the semiliterate ramblings of Harriet Klausner, Amazon.com’s top reviewer, with 6,500 reviews and counting to her credit, on the other.
The background for Pool’s analysis is a culture that actively discourages critical thinking, one that would rather have enthusiastic cheerleaders (like Oprah) than incisive critics. Although one of the persistent complaints about book critics is that they are too nasty, Pool finds that the opposite is in fact true: often, critics aren’t nasty enough. It is interesting that both Pool and Marchand make the same comment: both stand by every negative word they ever wrote, but both confess to some retrospective reservations about reviews in which they feel they treated their subjects too kindly. Pool attributes this to “weakness,” and points out that “it takes courage and confidence for a reviewer to go his own way and tell readers that the latest ‘masterpiece’ isn’t very good. Amid the waves of praise, he risks not only what all critics risk, being wrong, but being wrong alone.”
In today’s anticritical culture, it is a rare thing indeed to find a reviewer with the courage to stand out from the crowd and declare that the latest “instant classic” is actually a dud, that the emperor has no clothes. Pool’s book is a clarion call for a return to a vigorous kind of criticism, based on sound, logical thinking and the precise use of language. Her prescriptions for an ailing trade are based upon underlying premises that appear obvious, but that bear repeating:
That not only is reviewing important, but reviewers and editors need to take its importance more seriously than they do, steeling themselves against public opinion, literary snobbery, and their own self-doubt and remembering that cultural attitudes are subject to change. … That not only can reviewing, however insufficient its resources, require standards, competence, and accountability, but by demanding them – and only by demanding them – actually acquire them.
Welcome to the revolution … finally
December 22, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 2 Comments
Blogger Mark Bertils and the Association of Canadian Publisher’s Nic Boshart both have year-end posts up at the BookNet Canada blog. Bertils and Boshart agree that 2009 was the year the publishing industry finally cottoned on to the digital revolution, allowing eBooks to become an overnight sensation after only 20 years.
Boshart points out that there was no technological revolution in 2009; the revolution was in the way the publishing industry changed its attitude toward digital products:
So what did happen in 2009 to digital publishing? Well, the dead-beat older sibling of all other digital media kind-of got his act together. After a couple years of bumming around, working at the 7-11 and playing Zork in Mom and Dad’s basement, digital reading took some night courses and finally graduated high school. It was a good year for digital publishing, but I wouldn’t call it great. The biggest change this year, and why people are freaking out, is that reality is sinking in.
The reality, Boshart says, is that “[o]ur lives are digital now. Books didn’t help to make it that way, like news did, but books are expected to move along and adapt to the way people live their lives.” Here Boshart beaches himself on the rocks of a paradox. He admits that the digital environment is useful for newsgathering, since its nature is to provide fast access to constantly updated information. But this is not, he goes on, how we consume books:
The difference with publishing is that quick, easy access doesn’t matter that much for a book. A book is long-form, it’s meant to be taken in slowly. We can read snippets of it here and there, but we still are stuck with the whole thing for as long as it takes to finish it. Readers don’t want to click around for more information from a different source, they want to finish the book for the whole story. Convenience is not the issue for the book, like it is for news or music.
Because we now live digital lives, Boshart argues, books must find a way to exist in the digital sphere, regardless of whether that is an appropriate arena for them.
Bertils, meanwhile, argues that the publishing industry’s latter-day acceptance of digital technology did not make 2009 a watershed year so much as it set the stage for large strides forward in 2010:
2010 is going to be a massive year for digital publishing. … The little guys like ECW and Dundurn have been shooting the lights out with their digital activities. The big guys are working through the Kubler-Ross model but they get it now – it is life or death. The technology companies are jockeying for opportunities. The start-ups are hungry to get traction.
Crash-Boom-Pow! What’s it going to be?
What’s it going to be, indeed? One can only hope that Bertils’ “Crash-Boom-Pow” will manifest itself as a kind of generative big bang, rather than the sound of complete collapse.
Torontoist serializes seasonal story
December 17, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
The New Yorker has shitcanned eliminated its fall fiction special issue, but on this side of the 49th Parallel, the Torontoist website is going in the opposite direction. Beginning today, and continuing every day until Christmas eve, they’re serializing a story called “Just Like the Ones We Used to Know” by Robert J. Wiersema, author of the novel Before I Wake and the novella The World More Full of Weeping.
Yesterday, the books editor at the Torontoist (he of the Bukowski-baiting Lori Lansens review) posted a note about the project along with an introduction from the author, in which Wiersema lays out his rationale for producing a Christmastime ghost story:
At first glance, there’s something a little counter-intuitive about a Christmas ghost story. After all, isn’t the season all about births and rebirths (depending on which point on the Christian/Pagan trapeze you occupy)? Well, yes.
And yet …
There’s a long history of ghosts and Christmas. One need look no further than what is perhaps the best known Christmas tale, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which has not one but four ghosts (don’t forget poor Marley.) And on the other end of the spectrum one of the best known ghost stories – Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw – which is deliberately framed as “gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be.”
Literary algebra: The commercial + the literary = the not-quite
December 16, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 2 Comments
Ever since commercial fiction has outsold its literary counterpart (which, for those who are unsure, means always), people have argued about what exactly constitutes “literary” fiction. How esoteric/highbrow/impenetrable does a work of fiction have to be to qualify as a “literary” novel? My colleague and buddy Nathan Whitlock has charged into this minefield with characteristic abandon in a recent column for Maisonneuve magazine. Whitlock kicks off his argument by pointing to a review of Lori Lansens’ novel The Wife’s Tale, commissioned by yours truly for Quill & Quire (where Whitlock and yr. humble correspondent share a pod-like cubicle) and written by James Grainger.
Now, I consider Grainger to be one of the sharpest critics in this country, but his review – which was generally positive – nevertheless roused the ire of Lansens’ agent, Denise Bukowski, who accused the reviewer of getting his facts wrong (the review erroneously stated that Oprah Winfrey had optioned the film rights to Lansens’ first novel, Rush Home Road)* and, more egregiously, of committing what Whitlock refers to as the “Sin of Distinction”: “after listing some of the authors who had been picked either for Oprah’s Book Club or … the U.K.’s Richard and Judy Book Club, Bukowski fought back against Grainger’s ‘patronizing’ notion that Lansens was working within chosen boundaries.” Whitlock summarizes the whole farrago this way:
This dust-up was a visible manifestation of a larger problem dogging Canadian publishing: the semi-utopian belief that literature is a garden that not only welcomes all comers (true enough), but contains no hedges or fences, is equally accessible from corner to corner, is blind to difference and immune to personal bias. Authors of all stripes mingle freely, and woe to him who suggests there are fundamental differences between what they write and for whom it’s intended.
The temptation to conflate various kinds of novels that are in fact distinct in execution and intended audience, Whitlock contends, should be avoided; critics need to “be more discerning” in “understanding (or perhaps admitting) that fiction comes in many forms” and they must be “unequivocal about what a given book is, and … catholic enough in their professional tastes to fairly assess diverse authorial intentions.” By describing the commercial aspects of Lansens’ novel, Grainger was simply performing one aspect of the critic’s job: situating the work within a particular category or tradition. Where Bukowski erred was in assuming that this implied any kind of value judgment.
Whitlock puts his finger on the reason a certain kind of middlebrow novel holds sway over CanLit these days: the dominant trend favours a kind of hybrid novel – what he refers to as the “Not-Quite Novel” – the literary equivalent of Dr. Moreau’s man-beasts: books that are “too thorny and/or sober to entertain, yet too conventional and broad to last.” The result of this artificial generic enjambment is novels like The Book of Negroes: ambitious tales about weighty subjects told in a manner that is straightforward and unchallenging. By refusing to completely embrace one aspect or the other – the commercial or the literary – the novel ends up doing justice to neither.
If I have any difficulty with Whitlock’s argument, it would reside in my feeling that he goes too far in pursuing an overly rigid dichotomy between “commercial” novels – those “big-plot, lots-o’-story books” – and “literary” ones (by which I take it he means difficult, more stylistically adventurous books that eschew story in favour of character development and syntactical pyrotechnics). The implication seems to be that “thorny and/or sober” books can’t entertain, while “conventional and broad” books don’t endure. What, then, is one to do with Dickens (who has been called the Shakespeare of the novel), whose writing was enormously commercial in the author’s own day, yet endures down to the present? (Whitlock covers himself here, referring at one point to “the strange things that time and distance can do to artistic categories,” but this admission seems to take a bit of the sting out of his argument.) How does one account for a book like Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, an Oprah pick that is unequivocally a “big-plot, lots-o’-story” novel, but seems to have a certain amount of staying power (first released in 1996, this month it was selected as one of the five contenders for the 2010 edition of Canada Reads)? And since Whitlock himself brings up Steven Galloway, how are we to categorize that author’s 2008 novel The Cellist of Sarajevo? It’s a story-driven book, but it also has frankly “literary” properties: a weighty subject (the Siege of Sarajevo), well-drawn characters, and evident attention to the prose on a line-by-line basis. (Whitlock might characterize this as a hybrid, or a Not-Quite Novel, but I consider it to be generally better than that.)
Recent years have seen a retreat from the kind of obscurantist anti-novel that began in the Modernist era and found its apogee in the French nouveau roman as practiced by authors like Alain Robbe-Grillet. In its stead, we are witnessing a resurgence – and newfound critical acceptance – of novels that privilege story over technical experiment – witness the critical accolades being heaped upon Stephen King’s latest novel, Under the Dome. King is a self-admitted commercial writer, and it’s unlikely the broad spectrum of his readers would be entertained by, say, the prolix digressions and postmodern approach of David Foster Wallace (despite the fact that, to a certain sensibility, Wallace is giddily entertaining). This, of course, is Whitlock’s point: different writers employ different styles and appeal to different audiences. But I wonder whether the broad categories he sets out may in fact be somewhat more permeable than he seems to suggest they are.
*It was Whoopi Goldberg. What idiot was in charge of fact checking that? … Oh. My bad.
The intelligence of the senses
December 11, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 3 Comments
The Painted Word. Tom Wolfe; Picador, $15.50 paper, 106 pp., 978-0-312-42758-0.
The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal, 1941–1960. Roald Nasgaard and Ray Ellenwood; $60.00 cloth, 156 pp., 978-1-55365-356-1.
Tom Wolfe doesn’t much like Abstract Expressionism. The movement, which swept the avant-garde New York art scene in the postwar period, borrowed from the European schools of Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism, and displaced the Social Realist style that dominated American art during the Great Depression (and that featured the kind of figurative, representative mode of which Wolfe generally approves). Like Modernism, the term Abstract Expressionism is a bit of a catch-all, an umbrella appellation used to identify a group of artists who are quite stylistically distinct: Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline among them. What they share in common, however, is a general retreat away from naturalism, from the still lives, landscapes, and figurative painting that preceded them. Even the Surrealists, who were another influence on the postwar Abstract Expressionists, often resorted to representation in their work (think of the melting clocks in Dalì’s Persistence of Memory).
But the Abstract Expressionists, says Wolfe, faced a dilemma: if they were to continue in a straight line from the geometrical abstraction practised by Piet Mondrian, how would they inject a corresponding welter of emotion (the likes of which could be felt while viewing a realist painting) into their work? Wolfe’s answer: they would take refuge in theory.
“At a certain moment,” said critic Harold Rosenberg, who, along with Clement Greenberg, was largely responsible for bringing Abstract Expressionism into the public consciousness, “the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Greenberg’s theoretical approach inculcated a new idea of painting – Action Painting – which Wolfe neatly eviscerates in the central section of his short 1975 polemic The Painted Word:
The vision that Rosenberg inspired caught the public imagination for a time (the actual public!) as well as that of more painters, professional and amateur, than one is likely to want to recall. It was of Action Painter … a Promethean artist gorged with emotion and overloaded with paint, hurling himself and his brushes at the canvas as if in hand-to-hand combat with Fate. There! … there! … there in those furious swipes of the brush on canvas, in those splatters of unchained id, one could see the artist’s emotion itself – still alive! – in the finished product.
What one could not see, and what catches Wolfe up short, is anything resembling an object from the natural world – a horse or an apple or a water lily. Pure emotion, Wolfe suggests, results in something incomprehensible unless viewed through the prism of an artistic theory developed by the aesthetic elites who peopled Tenth Avenue’s new bohemia in the late 1940s and ’50s. They understood what the Abstract Expressionists were trying to do, and they would explain it to the uncomprehending masses who, for a time, whether because of the movement’s novelty or its air of sophisticated connection with the salons of Paris or maybe – who knows? – because they actually liked what they saw, paid attention.
What they didn’t do was pay money for the paintings themselves:
In fact, the press was so attentive that Harold Rosenberg, as well as Pollack, wondered why so little Abstract Expressionism was being bought. “Considering the degree to which it is publicized and feted,” Rosenberg said, “vanguard painting is hardly bought at all.” Here Rosenberg was merely betraying the art world’s blindness toward its own strategies. He seemed to believe that there was an art public in the same sense that there was a reading public and that, consequently, there should be some sort of public demand for the latest art objects. He was doing the usual, in other words. First you do everything possible to make sure your world is antibourgeois, that it defies bourgeois tastes, that it mystifies the mob, the public, that it outdistances the insensible middle-class multitudes by light-years of subtlety and intellect – and then, having succeeded admirably, you ask with a sense of See-what-I-mean? outrage: look they don’t even buy our products! (Usually referred to as “quality art.”)
History has proven Wolfe’s analysis to be dreadfully short-sighted: in 2006, Pollock’s painting No. 5, 1948 sold for $140 million. That’s a sizable payday, which renders Wolfe’s splenetic satirical jibes somewhat stale in retrospect. Greenberg’s comment that “all profoundly original art looks ugly at first” may indeed be accurate; Wolfe discovers in this quip what he characterizes as “a kind of Turbulence Theorem”: “If a work of art of a new style disturbed you, it was probably good work. If you hated it – it was probably great.” While Wolfe clearly intends this to be deprecatory, it may be possible to argue the validity of at least the first half of the equation. (Those who are able to appreciate, say, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music might even be able to find agreement with the second half.)
Still, regardless of whether the sting of Wolfe’s satire has dated, the general premise of his book – that the American art of the postwar years was so disdainful of easy comprehension that art theory itself became an art form and its proponents (not the actual consumers of the work) became the tastemakers who decided what qualified as high artistic achievement – is a provocative one. The closer art came to the “flatness” that Wolfe suggests Greenberg prized, the more it retreated up its own fundament. The fact that Wolfe seems more approving of the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein (they are, after all, at least figurative painters, even if the figure happens to be a can of Campbell’s tomato soup) than he does of Pollock or de Kooning should not surprise anyone who has read the essay “My Three Stooges,” from the 2000 collection Hooking Up, in which Wolfe is more laudatory of mediocre realists like Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis than of a sublime aesthete like Henry James.
The impassioned cri de coeur that Wolfe ascribes to Pollack – “If I’m so terrific, why ain’t I rich?” – conflates the notions of art and commerce in the same way conservatives of all stripes tend to: art, and artists, should be self-sufficient, which necessitates being accessible to a large portion of the public. Above all, artists must not alienate the public, they must give the public what it wants. Bob Dylan sneering “Play it fucking loud” over a chorus of boos at Royal Albert Hall in 1966 would not sit well with Wolfe, if one can possibly imagine him in the audience for that show (he would likely be the one shouting, “Judas!”).
But great art often arises out of precisely this kind of reaction to popular tastes, which tend to be conformist and bland. The notion that art should be disturbing confounds Wolfe; any artist who wishes to create something truly new will of necessity disturb the public’s complacency, and must therefore resign herself (in the short term, at least) to a kind of marginalization.
This was not lost on the Automatistes, a group of artists, dancers, poets, and playwrights that sprung up in postwar Montreal. On August 9, 1948, the group, under the auspices of its leader, Paul-Émile Borduas, published its manifesto, entitled Refus Global (Total Refusal), which “was a call to the individual conscience, an admonition to break completely with all of society’s conventions and ‘its utilitarian spirit.’” So writes Roald Nasgaard in his comprehensive and illuminating essay “The Automatiste Revolution in Painting,” which accompanies the astonishing new volume The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941–1960.
Wolfe makes no mention of Refus Global or of the Automatistes (of whom the most internationally famous was probably Jean-Paul Riopelle), but one can only imagine the fits of high dudgeon the manifesto would drive him to. As Nasgaard summarizes:
Only when “rational effort” had been put “in its proper place” could “our passions [shape] the future spontaneously, unpredictably, compulsively.” In this better future, men and women would be free to “realize their full, individual potential according to the unpredictable, necessary order of spontaneity – in splendid anarchy.” Or as Borduas had otherwise phrased it in a letter he sent to Leduc in Paris on January 6, 1948: “Intention must be pushed into the background, along with reason. Make way for the intelligence of the senses.”
Borduas’s notion of “splendid anarchy,” building as it does on the work of the Surrealists, and in particular the ideas of André Breton, is somewhat disingenuous, given the evident underlying control that the Automatiste painters evinced in their work (the quality that puts immediate lie to the oft-repeated cavil, “My kid could paint that”). Nasgaard points out, for instance, that Riopelle’s paintings are predicated upon a “strategy of overlaying his densely packed and intensely multicoloured carpet of taches with a network of spurts and rays of paint in the form of fine lines, sometimes laid down freehand, sometimes as if drawn with a ruler.” Borduas himself was a consummate stylist, whose Les Arènes de Lutèce, for example, is “ordered … (without going geometric) with an almost Mondrianesque precision.” More theory, perhaps – but it does not take a theoretician to see these things first-hand on the canvases themselves.
“A painting should compel the viewer to see it for what it is: a certain arrangement of colors and forms on a canvas,” writes Wolfe of the new modern aesthetic; he, of course, sees this as a step backward from the representational art that preceded it. In Wolfe’s eyes, dispensing with representation means that art is no longer about anything other than itself. But the Automatistes rightly realized that a carefully structured synthesis of colour and form could call forth an emotional reaction every bit as powerful as a work of Social Realism. It is the deep structure that saves a work such as Riopelle’s Sans titre 1952 from being unforgivably solipsistic on the one hand or just an accretion of blobs of paint on the other, and it is this deep structure that allows for the work’s emotional resonance.
Automatism was an artistic movement, not a political one, but it is impossible to separate the Refus Global from the context in which it was written and published: that of Maurice Duplessis’s Quebec. By calling for a definitive break with accepted societal structures, the Automatistes set themselves in opposition to the dominant mood in Quebec at the time, which was conservative, authoritative, and dominated by Catholic dogma. It is probably not an exaggeration to suggest that in so doing, they helped lay the groundwork for the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.
It is not necessary to know any of this to appreciate the work of the Automatiste painters, which is liberally reproduced in The Automatiste Revolution. The 62 full-colour plates, featuring paintings by Borduas, Riopelle, Fernand Leduc, Pierre Gavreau, and others, provide a sumptuous overview of the movement, and Nasgaard’s essay (along with one by Ray Ellenwood, entitled “Automatisme Beyond ‘The Barracks of Plastic Arts,’” about the other disciplines that got swept up in the revolution) provides a detailed historical background that helps situate the group in the context of European and North American art at the time.
Wolfe’s disdainful antipathy toward Abstract Expressionism proves bracingly funny, even 34 years after his little polemic was first published. But The Automatiste Revolution – a visually sumptuous, intellectually challenging volume – provides a welcome corrective to his windy biliousness.
Two views of human development
December 4, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 8 Comments
Guess which one yr. humble correspondent subscribes to.
Once people begin to buy their first adult permanent furniture, that’s when they’ve locked into their final personality. – Douglas Coupland
vs.
The process of maturation never ceases in interesting persons so long as they remain interesting. – John Berryman
Some shameless self-promotion
December 4, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
My review of Lawrence Hill’s 2009 Canada Reads winner, The Book of Negroes, is online at the Canadian Notes and Queries site, for anyone who’s interested. Here’s a taste:
When The Book of Negroes won the 2009 edition of Canada Reads, CBC Radio’s annual Survivor-like literary elimination contest, broadcaster Avi Lewis, who was championing the book, referred to author Lawrence Hill’s “titanic task” in taking on the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century and refracting it through the life of one woman, Aminata Diallo, an African girl who is kidnapped as a child and shipped to the Thirteen Colonies where she is sold into slavery. It is likely that Lewis didn’t intend the obvious pop cultural association that accrues to his particular choice of words in this instance, but in fact Hill’s book shares much in common with James Cameron’s Academy Award-winning film about the great twentieth-century nautical disaster. The Book of Negroes and Titanic both view historical events through a fictional lens, employing a panoramic background, and filtering their respective narratives through the personal journeys of specific, individual characters. But more importantly, both cleave to a populist sensibility, avoiding difficult moral questions in favour of stock figures and situations, and providing a fictional experience that, notwithstanding the tragic nature of their historical backdrops, is comfortably familiar to a mass audience.
Also, for anyone who’s interested, yr. humble correspondent is scheduled to appear on Mary Ito’s Fresh Air radio program on CBC Radio One tomorrow morning at 7:30 to talk about the year in books. Normally I wouldn’t be up at such a godforsaken hour on a Saturday morning, but they asked so nicely I couldn’t refuse.
Canada Reads announces its 2010 contenders
December 1, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 11 Comments
The contenders for the 2010 edition of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads – the annual literary elimination contest now entering its ninth year – were revealed in Toronto today. The list of panelists is fairly interesting (it includes an Olympian, a hip-hop artist, and the executive director of War Child Canada) and the books they’re defending are … well, let’s just say they’re largely known quantities, including one Giller nominee, one Oprah pick (!), and one book with a title so ubiquitous it has worked its way into the cultural lexicon (and even has an entry in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary).
The five books in contention are:
- Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald, defended by Perdita Felicien
- Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland, defended by Roland Pemberton aka Cadence Weapon
- Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott, defended by Simi Sara
- The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy, defended by Samantha Nutt
- Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner, trans. by Lazer Lederhendler, defended by Michel Vézina
Now, given that the annual CBC contest is meant to settle on one book that the panel would like the whole country to read, if you’re like me, the first question you’re prone to ask yourself is this: Are there any committed readers in Canada who haven’t already read Fall on Your Knees or Generation X? I’d wager even most casual readers in this country will have at least a passing familiarity with these two titles. And many readers have been exposed to Marina Endicott’s novel as a result of it being shortlisted for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize. When The Book of Negroes won the contest last year, my feeling was they should have changed the name to Canada Rereads, given the number of people who had already consumed Lawrence Hill’s novel prior to its appearance on the CBC broadcast. This year, three fifths of the entire list could reasonably fall into that category.
It’s not that the titles are unworthy, but they are already on the nation’s radar, so to speak, which represents something of a missed opportunity for bringing attention to titles that might otherwise have gone overlooked. There is no Fruit on this year’s list, no Icefields – lesser-known books from smaller publishers that broke out of obscurity as a result of their appearance on the CBC broadcast.
Moreover – with one notable exception – they all fall within what Victoria Glendinning famously referred to as the “muddy middle range” of CanLit. The exception, of course, is Nikolski, a strange, idiosyncratic novel out of Quebec, which I thought was the best unheralded book of 2008. The fact that it’s about to gain a much larger English-language audience is heartening; the fact that it is the likeliest to be eliminated early in the competition is a foregone conclusion.
But the majority of the novels on this year’s list have an undeniable sameness about them. Indeed, three of them are family dramas: one a multigenerational saga with Gothic overtones (Fall on Your Knees), one a Carol Shields-like domestic narrative (Good to a Fault), and one a novel about the immigrant experience in Canada (The Jade Peony). That leaves only Generation X, which has now become so ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist it has lost whatever edge it might once have had, and Nikolski, the only authentic outsider on the list.
Add to this the fact that the oldest of the five titles – Generation X – was published in 1991; there is no Rockbound or Next Episode (both of which went on to win in their respective years) to be discovered by a new generation of readers. That may have something to do with this year’s panelists, who skew younger than in previous years, but it results in a certain narrowness of focus in the current roster of books.
At the announcement ceremony today, much was made of the so-called “Canada Reads effect,” the boost that being on the CBC program gives to a particular title. In the wake of last year’s victory, The Book of Negroes – which Avi Lewis, who was championing it, admitted had already been read by tens of thousands of people – went on to become an even bigger bestseller, scored a movie deal (a movie the CBC will be co-producing, not incidentally), and has just been released in a deluxe, illustrated edition. No doubt the Canada Reads effect exists. One can hope that this year, it will prompt readers to rediscover Endicott’s first novel, Open Arms, or to dip into some of Coupland’s lesser known (but better) mid-career novels such as Miss Wyoming or Hey, Nostradamus!
In the meantime, readers can get down to reading (or rereading, as the case may be) the five books that will feature in the debates on CBC Radio One during the week of March 8–12, 2010.