Perceived Vs. Actual Erudition

[Prestidigitweeze]

What does it say about perceived vs. actual literacy when Guillermo Del Toro's preface to the Penguin edition of Arthur Machen's The White People is infinitely more erudite than Dave Eggers' Shatner-friendly introduction to Infinite Jest? The first book, a collection of genre-relegated short stories by a master of macrocosmic self-restraint, is often dismissed as not being "real literature"; the second is an attempt to include as much verbal (and verbalized) consciousness as possible into a single novel by a writer who is often lauded for being both high-minded and whip-smart (insert Rawhide sound effect). Yet the generational celebrity chosen to comment on that novel is a writer who seems to me to be utterly bankrupt of any sort of critical intelligence. Everything that Eggers touches, from David Foster Wallace to Maurice Sendak, gets diluted with references to "feeling" and "heart" in look-how-humble-I-am emotional and typographical lower case (which does nothing to disguise the William Shatner element -- it's like listening to Shatner stage-mumble).

Meanwhile, Del Toro's knowledge of literature and structure becomes immediately apparent upon reading his introduction to Machen. He might conceivably tell the reader something they don't know, as opposed to Eggers' ad populum barking, in which the latter celebrates the reader's projected mediocrity in ways so slimy they stick to one's mind days later like Krazy Lobotomy Glue.

How about you, dear MR member -- are you ever annoyed by writers who are supposed to be smart and aren't -- especially after reading writers who really are smart but tend to be dismissed rather than celebrated?

I still remember the time I ran into someone who was going to Brown and thought they wanted to talk about literature. They clearly knew nothing and apologized for that, saying, "Sorry, I didn't read very much before college; I don't know a lot."

But then I pointed to a horror anthology on the shelf and, to make the person feel better, said, "Well, I'm in that book which admittedly has a silly cover."

Whereupon the person who had not known anything by or about George Eliot, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Valery, Huysmans, Borges, Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov, Pynchon or even the Beats -- let alone read a page by any of them -- began pointing to the cover and simpering, making a little too much of my attempt to make him feel less insecure. "I'd never be in a book like that," he said. "That looks so stupid."

"But have you read any of the stories in that book?" I asked. "You have no idea how good or bad they might be."

"I'd never read a book like that," he said, and walked off, having found a way to dismiss the person who asked him scary questions before.

That lack of experience with reading, coupled with an utterly cover-deep approach to content, is exactly what you find in universities all over America. Very often, the most dismal students are promoted over the thoughtful ones because they reassure their professors that, yes, indeed, the person at the lectern is the smartest person in the room. You see this piggybacking of mediocrity into the so-called literary world over and over, and that is why we're told to read books that will supposedly change our lives, only to disappoint us with their elementary wordplay, timid bohemianism and vocabularies reduced by ignorance rather than craft.

[pynch]

I would never read books who look like this.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Hilarious! That's exactly how my father's paperbacks looked -- and the authors were Faulkner, Miller, Baldwin, Celine and Aldous Huxley! Sanctuary's cover was my favorite: A mountebank sailor leering at the decolletage of a hooker under a streetlamp. The cover of Huxley's Crome Yellow was all ellipses-maximized salaciousness: "Shocking . . . erotic . . . bold!" I always imagined the original sentence read, "This book is neither shocking nor erotic, nor is it bold."

And then there's this (a novel in which one of the main characters dies, can't reconcile himself to being bodiless, and slips into permanent amnesia just as he's reborn): "Bold . . . daring . . . complete and unabridged (implying there's verbal nudity):

Overly large image [Moderator]

Spoiler:

[rkomar]

I'm not going to talk about any particular writers, but I got annoyed a long time ago at how little thinking material there is nowadays in "thought provoking" books. There's usually one main concept, two or three variations on it, and they get hammered in with example after example after example... Three hundred page books could have been published as ten page pamphlets and no ideas would be lost. Being a slow reader makes the puffed-out prose even more irritating to me.

It seems to me that this editorial policy of assuming low critical thinking skills in your readers is tied to the anti-intellectual flavour of the prose. I guess you're not going to ever get a mass market hit selling books to erudite critical thinkers.

[gmw]

In fiction, I prefer my erudition well disguised. That's not to say I don't like intelligent writing, and I don't even mind when an author has some message to impart, but if they are writing fiction then I expect the story to take centre stage. If the writer wants to impress me with their learning then that had better be conveyed within the context of the story, rather than the obscurity of their text.

To try and phrase that from a practical perspective: I may often be amused, entertained, or impressed by some clever phrasing or inspiring quote within a well written book. But more often that not this is a passing, "Oh, that was neat", as I move on to whatever follows. It is the impact of the story or the characters that is more likely to have a lasting impression, that is more likely to make me think about the book after I put it down.

This distinction is related to, but I believe more than, the adage of "show don't tell". Lots of people have opinions, lots of people have interesting ideas, and quite a lot of people have a good education. If you want to show them off, put them in an essay and publish it on your blog. But if you want to prove to me that any of these have substance then you have to put it to work in the story and demonstrate it action.

[HomeInMyShoes]

I had to look up erudite.

[pynch]

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

I had to look up erudite.

Congrats, now you’re more erudite than before!

EDIT:

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

I had to look up erudite.

Me too, by the way.

[Prestidigitweeze]

The problem with the show-don't-tell edict is that it can privilege cinematic narratives over the purely verbal kind. I can see the allure of cinematic fiction in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, when movies inspired writers while replacing novels as mainstream entertainment. They must have seemed a curative for literary self-importance. Bertolucci's homage to the anarcho-critical '60s, The Dreamers, conveys the visceral excitement which so many writers felt in movie theaters (even though it's not one of his better flicks). Poets like Prevert and Desnos would absorb the energy onscreen, then dash out and fling themselves at the world.

Dennis Cooper's a rather interesting case of the writer who does both. He's well acquainted with Hemingway's iceberg method as used endlessly in film (instead of saying that a character is perturbed, show her stirring coffee in a way that conveys her perturbation). Yet he's also informed by the tell side of French cinema, particularly the Alain Resnais film, Providence, which is the structural key to nearly all of Cooper's work. Like Resnais, Cooper interrupts the show side of his own obsession-deterministic narratives to pull back the camera and reveal the author, a fictional neurotic who had been showing and not telling before stopping to express his ambivalence at his own propensity for cruelty.

That might sound as though it wouldn't be interesting, but I find it far more engaging than Hemingway's unexamined processions of action. I'm sure you know what Gertrude Stein said about him: "He looks like a modern, but he smells like a museum." In a story like Safe or Frisk, Cooper's narrator awakens from his dreams of surgical cruelty -- of physical and emotional amputations that can recall '80s Cronenberg -- to discover that the people who surround him are actually kind, and that his own ambivalence and fear have created this false continuum of tension.

You can't really write a novel like that without telling. Neither, in their own ways, could Thomas Bernhard (Concrete) or John Hawkes (Travesty).

Also: George Eliot confected a masterful mix of show and tell in Middlemarch, which is arguably the greatest novel of the Victorian period. That book is a treatise on the ideas of the period as well as an excellent story.

To gmw:

I have nothing against your preferences in fiction, and can see that critical thought and taste are involved. I also appreciated the way you expressed your ideas. But I would argue that some novelists are better off embedding their essays in the novel itself (though not Tolstoy).

Generally, I think it is a mistake to conflate rhetorical/intellectual restraint with actual humility. The novelist who tries to impress you with humility is often the biggest egotist in the room.

Besides, the novel has been with us at least since the days of Murasaki Shikibu. There are more kinds of engaging fiction than there are flavors of ice cream, and I'd hate to forgo the Saccadic leaps of John Donne for the sake of upholding an erudition-constrained ideal.

[Istvan diVega]

Originally Posted by gmw

In fiction, I prefer my erudition well disguised. That's not to say I don't like intelligent writing, and I don't even mind when an author has some message to impart, but if they are writing fiction then I expect the story to take centre stage. If the writer wants to impress me with their learning then that had better be conveyed within the context of the story, rather than the obscurity of their text.

My sentiments exactly.

[gmw]

Prestidigitweeze, I agree that some telling is necessary and appropriate. Even the popular LotR movies told us some of the background, and some of the characters issue monologues that were effectively expressions of learning and moral - rather than finding some subtle way to show it. But I come back to context again. It should be part of the story being told, or the character being revealed, it should not be there just because the writer wants to show off.

And, showing or telling, it doesn't have to be subtle, humble or restrained, if it is part of the story. Orwell springs to mind. The writer can be as obvious as they want, provided it fits the story - the way it is told, the characters involved and so on. And I think this marks the difference between those that do it well from those that don't. Those that can make the story their platform rather than the page.

[Prestidigitweeze]

GMW:

I appreciate your openness and sense of balance.

It sounds as though we can agree that imposed limitations (such as show-don't tell) are best treated not as inflexible rules, but as ways of understanding and approaching the process of writing/reading fiction.

§ § § § §

I think of the rules of tonal and modal counterpoint that way. In traditional classical music, one avoids parallel fifths not because they're taboo but because they're thought to cause two individual parts to become a single part, which destroys the independence of the separate lines.

In other words, in polyphonic music, one is playing a game of multilevel chess. The point is to learn to make each level interesting in itself yet work simultaneously with the other levels; to understand how to create a texture of cooperative independence in a piece of polyphonic music, not simply to acquire an aesthetic phobia.

From the late 19th century on, one does find parallel fifths routinely in polyphonic music. That's because composers had begun working with a far wider harmonic palette, and had reached the conclusion that parallel fifths could be treated exactly like parallel thirds and sixths. See the piano sonatas and fugues of Paul Hindemith: a neo-baroque style with all of the polyphony of baroque music and none of the harmonic dogma.

§ § § § §

I would still insist on differentiating between novels which contain flawed conventional narratives and those which pursue different ideas of structure and content. Otherwise straightforward fiction which becomes overly didactic or polemical seems to me to be flawed (though not necessarily bad). However, an experimental or idiosyncratic novel might contain a great deal of material one would normally expect to find in a different form (such as an essay) without being flawed.

We've had deviations from the story-is-everything model since the novel's inception, and the previous century was a period of deliberate and drastic experimentation. I don't know that you can expect a novel by Raymond Quenau or Harry Mathews -- let alone Raymond Roussel or Robbe-Grillet -- to exemplify the modest virtues of a novel by a minimalist.

((Ironically, David Foster Wallace was categorized initially by academics as being a minimalist himself. This was just after the publication his first two books, The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair.))

I'm not arguing against your aesthetic preferences, or denying that the characteristics which you prefer are to be found in a lot of good fiction. I'm only saying that novels which don't emphasize those particular virtues might contain others of equal merit, and that writers who overemphasize the approach you prefer might sometimes achieve a different kind of distracting self-consciousness (cf. the approach as outlined in John Gardner's On Moral Fiction -- a book which I happen to despise).

[Fluribus]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

How about you, dear MR member -- are you ever annoyed by writers who are supposed to be smart and aren't -- especially after reading writers who really are smart but tend to be dismissed rather than celebrated?

No. I don't worry about what other people suppose. I met this skinny dude. Years back. He was sitting under a tree and worrying about stuff. I said, "Let it go, Buddy. Attachment ties you down."

"I'd never be in a book like that," he said. "That looks so stupid."

You're lucky you had him. I'd have said, "Astonishing! I'd never fit in there."

That lack of experience with reading, coupled with an utterly cover-deep approach to content, is exactly what you find in universities all over America. Very often, the most dismal students are promoted over the thoughtful ones because they reassure their professors that, yes, indeed, the person at the lectern is the smartest person in the room.

I'd say that it's not just ego bolstering, but also a dislike of diversity despite preaching diversity. I would say that, but it would get us chained up in the dark and dreary political dungeon.

You see this piggybacking of mediocrity into the so-called literary world over and over, and that is why we're told to read books that will supposedly change our lives, only to disappoint us with their elementary wordplay, timid bohemianism and vocabularies reduced by ignorance rather than craft.

I tend to avoid such disappointments. "This book will change your life!" is decoded by me as "Never read this book!" If it can change my life via spiritual osmosis, then kudos to the author.

[gmw]

Prestidigitweeze, I suspect we agree on a lot, but I don't mind a discussion rather than an argument. I'm not a fan of simplistic rules with regard to writing, they're only useful if you understand their intention, and if you understand that then you probably don't need the rule. (My knowledge of music is not sufficient to fully follow your example, but I can recognise that it is saying much the same thing.)

One of the misunderstandings that I've seen happen here (on MR) a few times is different distinctions that people place on the word "story". A guess a lot of people will interpret it as equivalent to plot, but I tend to use it in a wider (and admittedly more nebulous) sense - something like: what the book is about. That seems to be the only way to be inclusive of the huge variety of fiction.

Many books are mostly about the plot (the storyline, the sequence of events to be revealed). Some have almost no plot in the traditional sense (I sometimes have trouble with these). And some use a background plot mostly as a structure from which to hang the real story. In this latter group I think John Irving makes a good example; he usually has a plot, but I don't generally think of it as the story, it's not what the novel was about (not that Irving is usually about just one thing).

None of that is to place a value judgment on the different types of story, beyond what I personally find accessible, but it is to try and give some further definition to what I mean when I say that: "If the writer wants to impress me with their learning then that had better be conveyed within the context of the story, rather than the obscurity of their text."

The words that form the story should all be part of the story, whatever the story is. The writer's task, if they have a desire to exercise their erudition, or to pass on some message or moral, is to create a story that allows them to say these things as part of the story, rather than as an essay within a story. It should feel like a cohesive whole (... even if that cohesive whole is a demonstration that the world is not a cohesive whole - as per what I was saying about not liking simplistic rules ).

[forsooth]

in a mine many quick judgements can come from glance

(e.g. run screaming when man sized giant beetles appear)


substantial money only spent after thorough assay

with books substantial time only should be spent after thorough assay

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by gmw

Prestidigitweeze, I suspect we agree on a lot, but I don't mind a discussion rather than an argument. . . . One of the misunderstandings that I've seen happen here (on MR) a few times is different distinctions that people place on the word "story". A guess a lot of people will interpret it as equivalent to plot, but I tend to use it in a wider (and admittedly more nebulous) sense - something like: what the book is about. That seems to be the only way to be inclusive of the huge variety of fiction. . . . The words that form the story should all be part of the story, whatever the story is. The writer's task, if they have a desire to exercise their erudition, or to pass on some message or moral, is to create a story that allows them to say these things as part of the story, rather than as an essay within a story. It should feel like a cohesive whole (... even if that cohesive whole is a demonstration that the world is not a cohesive whole - as per what I was saying about not liking simplistic rules ).

First, I've never understood why people are so often compelled to respond with hostility to views which differ from their own. I often want to say to them, even if you don't share someone's views or care for their writing style, you can still have an amicable discussion. How strong is any idea which can't bear friendly scrutiny?

I'm glad you're interested in exploring the definition of story, and that you've taken the time to think about the various levels of potential unity in your own way and not simply regurgitated the Poetics or, for that matter, its horrible workshop alternatives, such as the anointed assembly line spew of Christopher Vogler. You state your ideas clearly, thoughtfully and reasonably -- a regrettably rare form of expression on forums in which people obsess about writing.

Just as some people use the word story when they mean plot, others use it where I would prefer narrative (even though the latter can be used as a synonym). For many people, story implies a set of fixed and instantly recognizable forms -- sequences of significant events which people like to reduce to equations and which we're calling the plot -- whereas narrative includes many of the other elements you're talking about.

I have no issues with the way you choose to use the word story. I'm only saying that, through no fault of yours, it has acquired a certain vagueness through overuse.

Ultimate unity is an ideal which I sometimes pursue, but the organizing principle might have nothing to do with story in the conventional sense. In music, Webern's miniatures are the purest examples I know. Every single note not only reinforces the structure but is a primary element of it -- two notes can serve as an entire development section. Talk about compression! You can't even say that about Bach.

However, part of the unity which Webern achieved was mnemonic -- it had to do with an abstract structure which wasn't necessarily dramatic or even musical.

I once wrote a short story which was organized around an original Sator Square. I wrote it as a tribute to Webern, who claimed to have based his entire musical philosophy on the economy, unity and integration of the most famous Sator Square:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

As you can see, there are only three patterns of letters used, and the square itself comprises a palindrome whether it's read backwards, forwards, horizontally or vertically. In the mirrored gardens of Webern's music, that structure finds its perfect correlate.

Classical painting is representational and music is a kind of abstract rhetoric, or syntax; Goethe called architecture frozen music; when I think of frozen music, I picture Nude Descending a Staircase.

Writing, however, is simultaneously representational and syntactically/rhythmically abstract, which might be why Virginia Woolf said that "style is rhythm."

Style is the concordance of concrete narrative and abstract rhythmic momentum. When used as the central principle in fiction, it can become the nonrepresentational approach to structure -- the interdisciplinary pun -- that has resulted in projects like the Oulipo Society. N + 7 is not necessarily part of the story (though the story plays with the idea of Perec's self-imposed limitation); George Perec's (La Disparition; in English, A Void) uses an organizing principle that has nothing to do with story at all: the avoidance of a common letter of the alphabet. One can argue that the story works as a story despite, not because of, that discipline, but Perec's view is that the choices the writer has to make because of that limitation become part of the story. Still, few people who read La Disparition do so because of the story itself.

Also: If everything must be part of the narrative, or story, then why can the use of narrative disjunction be so effective? John Hawkes famously dropped characters and storylines on purpose; was the resulting effect of frisson or sloppiness? And what about John Dos Passos's collages -- do they add to the effect of the novel or not? I'd say that they create a sense of texture which conjures the world of the novel in a way that might have everything or nothing to do with the actual plot. Those who love reading late Joyce are often drawn into the texture of language and allusion in ways that make the structure seem simultaneously imposed and mnemonic. I'd be hard pressed to say that those aspects of Joyce are part of the story.

I can agree with this in the mystical sense:

A guess a lot of people will interpret [story] as equivalent to plot, but I tend to use it in a wider (and admittedly more nebulous) sense - something like: what the book is about. That seems to be the only way to be inclusive of the huge variety of fiction. . . . The words that form the story should all be part of the story, whatever the story is.

But I don't feel that these two ideas are always true:

The writer's task, if they have a desire to exercise their erudition, or to pass on some message or moral, is to create a story that allows them to say these things as part of the story, rather than as an essay within a story. It should feel like a cohesive whole. . . .

First, exercising his erudition is exactly what Joyce did. It worked for him because he was incredibly talented, and because he could do so in terms of the craft, even if it meant creating his own kind of craft. "Passing on a message or moral" is an entirely different process and carries its own set of problems -- specifically the degree to which it becomes reflexive (and therefore unexamined) and/or manipulative (and therefore ineffective -- making the reader feel they're being manipulated is the fiction writer's parallel fifth).

Second, like music, a novel exists in time and may do so satisfyingly whether it is cohesive or not. Some of the most effective fiction writers are more interested in contrast than cohesion, but they tend to plummet or career toward those points of contrast. The problem in a lot of television writing is that it droops toward its points of disjunction: The longer the series, the more likely the climax -- a snowball of circumstances and boardroom compromises -- will disappoint.

To sum, I reiterate:

The approach you advocate is well stated. I expect it works well for you and it has certainly worked for a number of other writers whether they stated it as you do or not. I can also see that your approach accounts for a lot of good writing which mercenary workshop teachers frequently cannot.

However, it still leaves out a lot of fiction which doesn't emphasize or follow the idea of story as you understand it -- not because you've been intolerant or anything less than open, but simply because it can't be described technically or artistically in those terms.

Such anomalous and occasionally unclassifiable books are worth recognizing. It could be that, like Harry Mathews, Raymond Roussel and Thomas Bernhard, I respond to mnemonic or imposed ideas of structure partly because I have a background in classical music (and when I say respond, I don't simply mean intellectually; I mean viscerally). Most readers/writers don't have that specific orientation.

The other distinction we should make is one between commercial and non-commercial fiction. Dr. Johnson couldn't fathom why anyone would write if not for money, and that's a worthy consideration -- but not for me. I personally can't fathom why anyone who feels compelled to write would care about money at all except to buy more time to write.

One last development: I quoted the OP on my Facebook page the other day and was asked by a professor friend if I minded whether he read that post to his students. Talk about poetic irony!

By the way, I love this:

Originally Posted by forsooth

(e.g. run screaming when man sized giant beetles appear)