The Yiddish Policemen's Union - $2.99

[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.

[DrNefario]

I can find it difficult to unpick a work from the author's politics if if there's any kind of tendency to preachiness (and especially if they're not the same as my politics ), but I didn't see that here at all. I have been known to miss deeper layers, but I didn't think this book was pushing any particular agenda.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

I can find it difficult to unpick a work from the author's politics if if there's any kind of tendency to preachiness. . . .

That's because the issue is not politics but the writer's loss of control. You wouldn't want them to show slides of their godson's recital in the middle of a battle scene either.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

It's interesting that, faced with a thread devoted to praising a particular book -- which the OP loves . . .

I missed that. Please reread the OP.

you enter the thread as a troll

Your post gets a bit better as it goes, but this ruined it for me.

Re your mention of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, et. al., these are mostly authors who are, rightly or wrongly, known for personal bigotry. That indeed cannot make their works, which AFAIK do not focus on particular disliked minority groups, bad. Michael Chabon may be perfectly charming face-to-face with his evangelical next door neighbor. Chabon may vote for the same people I do. That doesn't make this particular book any good.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is, in my reading, a morality tale about villainous religious Jews, evangelical Christians, and what they are plotting against Muslims. Others may focus more on it being a fantasy detective mystery. Maybe I'm right, maybe they're right, maybe we are both right. All are descriptions of a novel, not of an author.

EDIT: Am I making the mistake of thinking that just because the villain is a certain religion, that makes the book against that religion? Does this Eisenberg think that if a mystery novel has a physician-murderer, the book is against doctors? No. But if the government of the United States was portrayed in the novel as having been taken over by physicians, maybe the novel would be anti-doctor. That's closer to the situation here.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

I missed that. Please reread the OP.

Exhibit One in the case to be made that you're ducking the point: You've resorted to pointing out irrelevant exceptions instead of answering the argument in depth.

But as we're about to see, even that strategy doesn't protect you from being incorrect.

My apologies for causing you to reread the original post. My assumption was that you understood the acronym also means original poster. But since I also mentioned (in the very comment you quoted) that the OP felt a particular way, and posts, unlike posters, are unable to feel anything, I trusted you were sufficiently detail-oriented to understand the distinction.

However, I did mistake a post by a later poster as having been written by the original poster, and that was indeed an oversight on my part. (Just think: If I hadn't noticed it first, you could still bring that up in yet another red herring!)

Your post gets a bit better as it goes, but this ruined it for me.

Again, you're using specious correctness to avoid focusing on the issue.

Terribly sorry to have "ruined" my post for you by using a distasteful word. I'd try to serve your diction demands more sensitively in the future if my word choice had not in fact served you already.

Your strategy of ignoring the substance of my argument to focus on a perceived slight resembles that of your attempt to ignore the inherent literary value of Chabon's novel based on its subject and the author's political views, which you claim is a matter of "emphasis" even as you repeatedly return to the subject and tenet rather than the degree to which political views are stressed.

This brings us to Exhibit Two in your attempt to find irrelevant reasons to object to a post with which you have difficulty arguing:

Your quote, "you enter the thread as a troll," leaves out the next word who, which modifies the word troll by describing the very actions which define the trolling behavior.

Re your mention of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, et. al., these are mostly authors who are, rightly or wrongly, known for personal bigotry. That indeed cannot make their works, which AFAIK do not focus on particular disliked minority groups, bad.

You really haven't the read the modernists, et al., have you? And given your fascination with irrelevant detail, you might want to note the absence of a period after et, since the Latin for and is not abbreviated in that phrase.

Pound's Pisan Cantos not only focus on bigotry in certain passages but contain classic anti-Semitic portrayals -- and insinuations that Jews were responsible for destroying Western culture -- yet they also contain deathless poetry. T.S. Eliot was specifically and intrinsically anti-Semitic in at least six of his most important poems ("Gerontin," " "Sweeney among the Nightingales," "Burbank," The Waste Land and Four Quartets), and even those who began as his apologists have come to understand there can be no apology. This despite Pound's friendship with the Jewish-American poet Louis Zukofsky and Eliot's with Groucho.

The reason that few dispute The Waste Land's greatness is not because it is insufficiently anti-Semitic to be objectionable. Many critics, academics, fellow poets and readers respect the work despite its disgusting anti-Semitism because it is a great work of literature. It is respected for many of the same reasons as Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice: We forgive the "pound of flesh" metaphor, anti-Semitic portrayal of Shylock and the speech which begins, "the quality of mercy is not strained."

Besides which, Shake lived in a time in which anti-Semitism was more or less the house rule, and that also speaks to my point: If works of literature may be inherently bad because of their political/moral viewpoint, then what do we do with the many works by authors who wrote before anti-Semitism or a given political view was deemed immoral?

As for Wyndham Lewis, whom Kenneth Rexroth once called "the last uncivilized man since Wotan": He once wrote a biography of Hitler which praised the dictator as a man of peace!

Michael Chabon may be perfectly charming. . . . That doesn't make this particular book any good.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is, in my reading, a morality tale about villainous religious Jews, evangelical Christians, and what they are plotting against Muslims. Others may focus more on it being a fantasy detective mystery. Maybe I'm right, maybe they're right, maybe we are both right. All are descriptions of a novel, not of an author.

In point of fact, you're not describing the novel at all. You're only describing its plot.

And again, to condemn the novel as bad because of its plot is to dismiss the writing and execution in favor of the merits of your sentence-long synopsis. "Les Miserables is bad because it's about someone stealing a loaf of bread and stealing is wrong."

EDIT: Am I making the mistake of thinking that just because the villain is a certain religion, that makes the book against that religion? Does this Eisenberg think that if a mystery novel has a physician-murderer, the book is against doctors? No. But if the government of the United States was portrayed in the novel as having been taken over by physicians, maybe the novel would be anti-doctor. That's closer to the situation here.

Among the five mistakes you've just made, I'll respond to these:

First, you're ignoring the tone of the book, which is satirical. "Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' is a bad essay because it advocates eating the children!"

Second, your inference seems to be that Jews and fundamentalists are above satire but that Muslims are not.

Third, having "the government of the United States taken over by physicians" cannot not be construed as inherently "anti-physician." Unless the intent were to characterize the state of being a physician as inherently immoral, the argument would have to be that the industry, not the individual, had been corrupted.

The problem in terminology stems from certain popular conservatives' (certain politicians and talk radio hosts) appropriation of Civil Rights Movement terminology, which tends to abandon correctness and context for empty dramatic effect. Anti-black and anti-Semitic are technically correct uses of the term when the object's focus is on the evils/inferiority of a race and not the crimes of a state.

Calling Netanyahu a fascist for his ramping of non-militant Muslim casualties, and for his damage to the rights of the citizens of Israel and the peace process itself, is not an act of anti-Semitism unless the implication is that Netanyahu is a terrible leader because he happens to be Semitic.

(And as a Jew myself, I actively disagree with the idea that Judaism can be defined as a race, which seems inhumane as well as incorrect: To define us racially is to invite the idea we can be exterminated for good. To define culture as race without understanding race to be an artificial cultural construct seems a backdoor excuse for eugenics whether the argument is pro or anti.)

[SteveEisenberg]

My New Year's resolution is to, in the Deals, Freebies and Resources section of the Mobileread forums, stick to discussion of Deals, Freebies and Resources.

And now I'm going to bow out here before getting properly spanked by a moderator.