[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

I'm just taking a different side of the old art-for-art's-sake discussion than you are. If you want me to consider the other side, saying I'm being juvenile is not a wise way to go IMHO.

It's interesting that, faced with a thread devoted to praising a particular book -- which the OP loves -- and providing links to product pages, you enter the thread as a troll who starts off by calling the book awful, then introduces that smelly placard-wearing braggart we call politics, only to sum by insulting the OP via the projection of his political bias.

You then raise your eyes theatrically when others point out you're behaving in a questionable fashion, selectively forgetting what you've just said and accusing others of personal attacks. Meanwhile, I used the word juvenile to characterize a particular point of view (as opposed to an actual person's character), whereas you've dismissed an entire novel based on its supposed message and attacked the OP based on what you interpret as the political arc of his posting history.

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

If you want me to consider the other side, saying I'm being juvenile is not a wise way to go IMHO.

I have no interest in compelling you to consider anything because your thoughts don't concern me apart from your participation on threads on Mobile Read. The fact you're bringing up Ayn Rand screeds on a thread about a satirical novel makes me disinclined to seek your opinions on fiction because then I'd have to listen to them. That is not a put-down of you but rather an expression of my exasperation with literary literal-mindedness.

Politics does not always, or usually, matter. It mostly depends on how political the novel is.

No fictional characters were harmed in the writing of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, nor would they be helped or improved in the writing of a different book. Nor is the value of a Serge Leone flick its illustration of the idea that bounty hunting is wrong.

It doesn't matter how political a novel might be. What does concern me is whether a novel becomes wooden and the characters flatten into kinetic placard-brandishing pieces of statuary who mouth paragraphs out of tracts. Does Chabon's book do that? Definitely not. Do Ayn Rand's novels do it? Absolutely, and to unintentionally hilarious effect. Rand's novels are awful for reasons that have nothing to do with her politics and everything to do with her lack of insight and inability to write dialogue. She's unable to think beyond the stereotypes of melodrama. She's the Sidney Sheldon of diluted Nietzsche rewritten for yuppies.

I recall that in Elizabeth Gaskill's Life of Charlotte Brontë, Gaskill relates conversations between Brontë and other still-admired English novelists where they discuss how they wish they could write something like Uncle Tom's Cabin. This wasn't because they thought Uncle Tom's Cabin worked better as a novel than Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair. It was because Uncle Tom's Cabin struck a mighty blow against slavery. They approved the politics, and judged the novel better for it. Nothing juvenile there.

1. Of course Charlotte Bronte's admiration of Uncle Tom's Cabin had to do with the merits of the book as a work of fiction and not merely its efficacy as a political corrective. The Bronte sisters had idiosyncratic perspectives on romance and class that had never included the dialect, characters and world of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Any writer who encounters work that exemplifies skills which are different from their own is likely to exclaim, "Crikey! I wish I could do that!" In fact, imitating Stowe's craft is exactly what Charlotte did in her later novel, Shirley: Expanded her knowledge of class to include new levels of dialect and character delineation, and depicted the effect of daily debasement and toil on the people who were forced to endure them. It's a kind of bridge between Jane Eyre and Middlemarch (the latter of which I consider to be the greatest novel of the Victorian period).

I would argue that being concerned with The Message in a work of ficiton is always a waste of time. If Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is important because of its effect on social reform, then it is important in ways that do not affect its status as literature. If it were badly written, it would function purely as a social corrective to be reported in history books and explored in sociological studies -- important historically without ever deserving or earning a place in school curricula.

I also think the narrator's high moral speeches in Anna Karenina could be removed wholesale without doing any damage to the structure or value of that book.

2. You're conflating your own overarching disapproval of a novel because of its politics with Bronte's admiration of a novel for various reasons. Even if you were right and those reasons were entirely political, then Bronte's interest would still have nothing to do with UTC's literary value.

Just as striking a blow against bigotry can make a novel better, going in the opposite direction can make it worse.

I completely disagree.

Let's look at some of the many writers who chose to "strike blows in the opposite direction" for bigotry, anti-Semitism, slavery and/or fascism at various times: Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot, Wyndham Lewis, Marinetti, Jean Cocteau, Sade, Lautremont, etc., etc.

Incidentally: I'm a Jew, and certain of my maternal relatives perished in the Holocaust. Yet despite my background, I would never presume to improve a work of fiction by using it to beat people's heads in with the idea that Nazis are bad. I'd rather swish Anthony Burgess's gauntlet around like a hand puppet and write a picaresque about the son of an incognito war criminal instead — that is, if the subject didn't bore me beyond human comprehension.

I believe, as Arthur Schnitzler did, that allegory is political comment enough. But that doesn't mean I discount the value of The Aesthetics of Resistance, by Peter Weiss, or Wiltod Gombrowicz's Pornografia. Those are political novels in oblique and overt senses, and that only adds to their value — not morally but in terms of their flow, their mindset, their tone. The same is true in a different way of the fiction and plays of Hélène Cixous.

I was also on the scene at 9/11 — yards away from the second tower when it collapsed — and have written about the experience more than once. An anthology containing a report of what I experienced there will be published by Autonomedia Books next year.

I don't find Chabon's novel at all offensive, but I do find it irritating when people invoke 9/11 as a sacred symbol to associate with their own intolerance of the variables of the imagination.

I know that a lot of readers did not find The Yiddish Policemen's Union to be the morality tale that I did. But if I'm right that the book is a 9/11 morality tale, it doesn't make sense to ignore the morals.

My "ignoring" a moral purpose which you (Mr. Eisenberg) choose to theorize is central to a work of fiction is one thing. Your publicly denouncing that book as bad solely because of your theory about its moral purpose is something else.

Whenever I reassess the idea that literature should have a message, I think of this quote from John Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean?:

Originally Posted by John Ciardi

W. H. Auden was once asked what advice he might give to a young man who wished to become a poet. Auden replied that he would ask the young man why he wanted to write poetry. If the answer was "because I have something important to say," Auden would conclude there was no hope for the young man as a poet. If, on the other hand, the answer was "because I like to hang around words and overhear them talking to one another," then that young man was at least interested in the poetic process itself, therefore Auden had hope for him.