The Intentional Fallacy

New Yorker, Oct 5, 2009.

I often find myself wondering why I read the New Yorker.  Yes, the reporting is nonpareil, and there are very few (print) magazines left that allow their writers the column space to deeply explore their subject matter.  When I was younger, I would read the magazine complete — the Talk of the Town, the humor, the poetry, the fiction, all the criticism, even the little media “Gotcha!s” occasionally at the foot of a more robust piece.  But, as I grow older, I find myself skipping more and more of the magazine.  I usually only read the introductory Talk of the Town entry; I skip the humor; I never read the poetry; and of the criticism, I only read book coverage.  I still read all the features and the fiction, though I am continually disappointed by the latter.  Perhaps it’s the New Yorker style — crystalline, chronological, every article made to fall in line.  Dan Baum, the ousted New Yorker staff writer whose account of his dismissal (on twitter, in 140 character bursts) caused some minor media shockwaves, described the New Yorker’s editing process as “deflavorizing.”  This sterilization extends to the fiction as well — the Cheevers and Updikes of yesteryear have been replaced by writers like Marisa Silver and Sam Sheperd, whose petty domestic dramas are utterly uninteresting; or big name novelists — Franzen, Ferris, Eggers — whose New Yorker output seems stunted, bowdlerized.  Though I’ve enjoyed some of these stories, I haven’t been truly affected by them; it is perhaps the case that I’ve never been truly affected by a short story, in any venue.

That is, until I read George Saunders’s “Victory Lap” in the Oct. 8 issue.  Saunders, a well-known novelist and short story writer, seems to have replaced Donald Barthelme in the New Yorker’s avant-garde slot.  He is constantly experimenting with form, with rendering human thought on the page.  “Victory Lap” begins safely ensconced in the mind of Alison, a fourteen-year-old girl preparing for a dance recital.  The third-person narration is completely dominated by her flittering, ecstatic thoughts: “On a happy whim, do front roll, hop to your feet, kiss the picture of Mom and Dad taken at Penney’s back in the Stone Ages, when you were that little cutie right there {kiss} with a hair bow bigger than all outdoors.  Sometimes, feeling happy like this, she imagined a baby deer trembling in the woods.”  Her thoughts are peppered by sing-song French phrases, by short fantasies about deer and princes and princesses, by discourses on how “good” and “happy” life is.  Is this really how a teenage girl thinks to herself?  Probably not.  But Saunders’ writing has the quality of thought, its switchbacks, its seeming non-sequiturs, its excursions into fantasy.  Of course, it’s all a setup.  Once the reader has been charmed by Alison, someone knocks at the door, “a man she did not know.  Quite huge fellow, in one of those meter-reader vests.  Something told her to step back in, slam the door.  But that seemed rude.  Instead she froze, smiled, did {eyebrow-raise} to indicate: May I help you?”

The story then switches to Alison’s neighbor Kyle Boot, a goody-two-shoes whose parents keep him on an incredibly tight leash.  He must earn various kinds of points in order to eat sweets or watch non-educational TV; there are very defined rules as to what footwear to wear in which areas of the house; and he keeps a log of traffic on his street in preparation for a (very boring) science fair project.  Again, the narration is Kyle’s free indirect discourse: “He tore of his socks.  It was absolutely verboten for him to be in the main living area barefoot.  Mom and Dad coming home to find him Tarzaning around like some sort of white-trasher would not the least fucking bit—Swearing in your head?  Dad said in his head.”  Kyle records a gray van pulling up at the Russian church across the street, he sees a man get out and go to Alison’s door, and sees him yank her out of the house and toward his car.  When Kyle goes out to the porch to see, the man brandishes a knife, and warns him to stay put.  All of these events are reported through Kyle’s eyes: “Alison’s arm [was] up behind her back.  She was making a low repetitive sound of denial…He was a kid.  There was nothing he could do.  In his chest he felt the lush release of pressure that always resulted when he submitted to a directive.  There at his feet was the geode.  He should just look at that until they were gone.”  And we scream in our heads: Are you fucking kidding?

The story continues, though I won’t ruin the ending, as it is the small reversals — the disappointments and triumphs — that make it worth reading.  The reason “Victory Lap” is so effective (and affective) is its clever (and maybe manipulative) use of perspective.  We are always in someone’s head — whether Alison’s, Kyle’s, or Alison’s attacker — and the events of the story are related through that character’s consciousness, in his own language.  Saunders is using types here to rev up the emotion — Alison, the happy teenage girl suddenly in a fight for her life; Kyle, the callow product of dictatorial parenting faced with a momentous decision — but the reader accepts their flatness because he has lived, if only for a short time, in their minds.

The Resurrection

Well, since I now have a disgraceful amount of time on my hands, I’ve decided to revive this little old blog here.  I’ll be writing about the same stuff as before: books, art, culture in its myriad and mysterious forms; I might even post some fiction, should I ever finish anything.

I’ve also sworn to myself that, in the spirit of Stendhal by way of Harry Mathews, I will write at least 20 lines a day, “génie ou pas.”  That means you, dear reader, can at least expect regular updates, if not the sparklingly brilliant belletristic essays for which this blog is known (or not…).

Until later,

JPC

For those who watch political commentary on television news channels without throwing up in their mouth a little and/or scoffing out loud at the TV screen like a crazy person, I salute you!

At the risk of beating a long dead horse, I’d once again like to point out the almost laughable partisanship of the news channels, MSNBC and Fox in particular. Last night, after Obama’s speech, I found myself flipping back and forth between the two aforementioned networks, comparing their post-speech commentary (which, by the way, is absolutely endless, and I end up paying attention for an hour or two longer than is necessary just to see if anyone in the long line of guest commentators will say something substantially different from what has been said prior. This of course never happens.) I thought Obama’s speech was very, very good; I don’t know if it was on the level of Kennedy’s Inauguration speech, or King’s “I have a dream…” speech. Though it certainly marked an historical moment, I wasn’t sure it was an historical oration. Perhaps the coming decades will prove me wrong.

Let’s say I was ambivalent, and looking for the experts in the electoral process, those who have followed and reported on politics for many years, to offer some context. Instead, on MSNBC, I heard Keith Olbermann basically cream his pants, along with Chris Matthews and the rest; and on Fox News, I heard Brit Hume and his cohorts treat Obama’s speech with a condescending skepticism that was so tone deaf I began cursing in disbelief. I don’t watch CNN, mostly because I find Wolf Blitzer utterly unappealing, but maybe it is the only news channel left that can even lay claim to objectivity.

Though the differences between Fox News and MSNBC are so blatant and multiple they need not enumeration, I was awed by the totality of their partisanship, even in the careful wording of their reporting.

The primary example for me was how the respective anchors chose to describe the accoutrements of the speech: the classical columns as stage background, the fireworks, the implied hubris of a hyperspacious football stadium. Olbermann used the word “show” when referring to the atmosphere; Hume used the word “spectacle.” Though my dictionary shows them to be basically synonyms, the gradations of meaning between their usages prove this to be a particularly insidious, and clever, bit of political spin. A “show” has content: though it is primarily a visual stimulus, it is not a wholly vacuous entertainment. A “spectacle,” alternatively, is exclusively visual, empty of content. It is often used pejoratively, when someone “makes a spectacle” of himself. Marxist critical theorists have latched onto the “spectacle” as the soulless condition of capitalism. On Fox News, the spectacle of the DNC undermined any sort of legitimacy; it was a dumbshow, and Brit Hume was there to make sure you didn’t fall prey to the pretty lights and stirring music.

In short, even at the level of language, in a single word, the networks were staking a position on the speech. It was amazing to me how subtle was the spin; I can only hope, naively, that viewers of either network recognize the dearth of objectivity in their reporting.

A Farewell To A Farewell To Arms

One of the most fun things about “reading like a writer” (as Francine Prose put it) is recognizing tics in a writer’s style. When I say “reading like a writer,” I mean the technique of stepping back from the text and consciously imagining what the writer was trying to do. When I do this, and I often forget to, I actually imagine the writer sitting at his desk, typing/writing on his typewriter/computer/legal pad, and thinking about what he wants to communicate to the reader with a particular word, gesture, or change in narrative point of view. It can be an edifying practice when you read something you really love, and wonder why it works the way it does, why it affects you so strongly.

It is a different kind of reading than most are used to. We have all heard people, when recommending a book to someone else, say “I was totally absorbed by it” or “it’s really easy to get into.” It’s a funny formulation, because it is almost the exact opposite of what they really mean. What they really mean is that the book was absorbed by them; that the words on the page were transformed into unkbroken images in their imagination. The reader is the actor, and in many senses, the creator, of the story: without him, a book is just an occasionally elegant, but more often slapdash, construction of paper, ink, and glue.

Oppositely, when reading like a writer (or maybe just like an English major in my case; that is, for certain codes and techniques), the reader must wrench the text out of his imagination, refuse the writer’s attempt to create images, and focus exclusively on the language. This is surprisingly easy to do with Hemingway, since everything is so constant. One immediately adapts to his style, and is free to let his mind wander over the cut-and-dry descriptions and blocky movements. But when he steps out from that style, the reader immediately notices, and can question Hemingway’s motives for doing so. Forthwith are a couple of examples from A Farewell to Arms where Hemingway stops being Hemingwayesque and some possible explanations why:

1) In the final chapter of Book I, before Henry is moved to the American hospital in Milan, the Major and Rinaldi come visit him in the field hospital. The three get drunk (of course), and an almost free-associative conversation ensues between them. The typography begins to reflect the drunken interlocutors: instead of new paragraph breaks for each speaker, and quotation marks for each utterance, the conversation begins mid-paragraph without quotation marks, as if hijacking Henry’s narration. At first, there are “I said”s and “said the major”s, allowing the reader to tell who’s talking, but suddenly those authorial flags drop out, and all we get are snippets of the conversation without any sort of cue as to who is speaking.

Hemingway relates this conversation in what my Joyce professor called the “tape recorder technique.” Basically, the writer is simply “recording” the conversation like a tape recorder, and like a tape recording, the only way the listener/reader can tell who’s speaking is by the way their voice sounds, or, in the case of writing, how they talk. Joyce uses it in the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of Ulysses, which is probably the most formally inventive chapter of the entire novel. In it, Joyce parodies the entirety of English literary history, from the earliest alliterative Anglo-Saxon poetry up to non-sequitur- and obscenity-laden Irish slang. The climax of the chapter is Joyce’s use of the “tape recorder technique” to relate the drunken carousing of Stephen Daedalus and his compatriots.

Obviously this particular technique is well-suited to characters getting drunk. When one gets drunk, edges blur and distinctions elide; it is a purposeful disorientation. Hemingway echoes this disorientation in the reader by omitting authorial cues, by letting his characters’ utterances blend into each other. Or, alternatively, Hemingway might have just been drunk himself when writing it.

2) By virtue of his iceberg maxim, Hemingway rarely tells the reader what Henry is thinking. Henry’s voice in the novel is itself something of a tape recorder, or maybe a video camera: he for the most part objectively reports what he sees. There are only four or five moments in the entire novel where we get a bit of inner monologue, a little stream of Henry’s consciousness, and at least two of these moments are in the second person, thereby removing them from Henry himself and foisting them on the reader. But there is one sad and moving moment where Henry actually comments, in his own voice, on an event. I’m pretty sure it’s been used as the foreword to another novel, though I can’t remember which. He and his fellow drivers are attempting to catch up to the Italian retreat on foot, and Henry leads them into the forest. They are fired upon as they walk along an embankment, and one of them, Aymo, is killed. As they leave him, Henry describes him thus: “I looked back. Aymo lay in the mud with the angle of the embankment. He was quite small and his arms were by his side, his puttee-wrapped legs and muddy boots together, his cap over his face. He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as anyone I ever knew.”

For my readers, if and when you ever arrive

Unfortunately I don’t know how to enable comments on tumblr, so if you wish to comment on any facet of the blog, don’t hesitate to drop me an email (theintentionalfallacyblog@gmail.com).  I eagerly await any contact whatsover, as writing on this blog for no one is kind of like me talking to myself, at length.

Jews!

So yesterday I went to see Action/Abstraction: Pollack, De Kooning, and American Art 1940-1976 at the Jewish Museum. It was my first time there — clearly I am a reprobate Jew — and I was really impressed both with the museum itself and the curation and design of this particular exhibit.

The premise of Action/Abstraction is as far as I can tell sui generis: while the exhibit touts the two stars of intra- and postwar American art, along with a handful of their peers and progeny, the real focus of the exhibition is not the paintings themselves, but rather the criticism of those paintings. Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg were the preeminent art crtics of their era — they wrote for basically every serious mid-century journal and magazine, including the New Yorker, the Partisan Review, Commentary, ArtForum, ArtNEWS, The Nation, Vogue, Harper’s, ad nauseum. (It speaks to their canonical status that I read pieces by both of them in my Art Humanities class at Columbia.) They were the champions of abstraction, with each advancing a unique aesthetic theory to describe the work of Pollack, De Kooning, and their contemporaries: Rosenberg coined the term “action painting” to describe Pollack’s drip paintings. For Rosenberg, the process of creating this art — utterly physical, almost violent — asserted its primacy over the formal properties of the finished work; for Greenberg, all was about “flatness;” he valorized Modernism’s disavowal of three-dimensional representation, as he believed that “literal two-dimensionality…is the guarantee of painting’s independence as an art.”

Though the literature about the exhibition describes Greenberg and Rosenberg as rival critics, which, in espousing divergent theories on abstract painting, they were, their goals were the same: to promote and explicate new and difficult art that they passionately believed was valuable. And what’s more, people actually listened.

It’s maybe no surprise that I found the cultural context of the exhibition more exciting than the art itself. (There were exceptions: this was my first time seeing one of De Kooning’s women up close, and its chaotic hideousness was almost frightening; and also the first time I’d ever seen anything by Helen Frankenthaler, whose Mountains and Sea was really pretty spectacular. She invented the technique of using diluted paint to stain the canvas, which makes her abstract forms diaphanous: they seem float and fade into one another, like amoebae under a microscope.) The “context room,” which most of the other viewers skipped completely, was where I probably spent the most time. They had old issues of the aforementioned journals and magazines; video of Greenberg and Rosenberg, smoking and drinking and perorating like the quintessential New York Intellectuals they were; and letters, both angry and laudatory, from critic to artist and vice versa. (There was also a picture of Greenberg’s apartment I think in the 60’s or 70’s, with a ridiculous amount of amazing art on the walls. It paid to be the critic it seems.)

It all made me nostalgic for a time I never knew, when writing actually mattered. Perhaps it was just the self-exceptionalizing tone of the exhibition, but it seemed like Rosenberg and Greenberg weren’t just writing to their fellow New York Intellectuals, or to cultural elites on either coast, but to all of America. The letters from artists — one of which, I believe from Barnett Newman to Clement Greenberg, detailed all of the factual inaccuracies in Greenberg’s review of Newman in a pretty equable tone — epitomized the seriousness with which these critics were taken by their subjects. In our manic, media saturated world, where ill-considered opinions are vomitted onto the Internet every second, the former loci of intelligence have been greatly diminished. (I highly doubt that any exhibitions dedicated to Peter Schjeldahl and Michael Kimmelman will be going up in the future, unfortunately or fortunately.) While it is certainly indicative of a democratic impulse, and it’s almost hypocritical to criticize while I sit here and blog (though I like to think this blog is pretty much snark-free), I often wish that smart people writing smart, evenhanded but still opinionated, criticism, still had the cultural cachet of a Rosenberg or Greenberg. It seems that that time is long gone.