On art and specificity.
A disclaimer here, because try as I might I haven't been able to get this into the shape I've wanted. But here we go with what I've got:
So a week or so ago I was reading Sylvia Plath's Ariel and some collected Ted Hughes (because I didn't have a strong opinion on where to start), and to my great surprise, I liked the former a lot and couldn't stand the latter. I'd always hated "Daddy"--okay, I still don't like it much; it's filled with the kind of over-jingly rhyme that Milton wrote that tirade about in the first place, it breaks Godwin's Law over and over, and it uses fucking "GOBBLEDYGOO" in a serious context. And I know that's all very carefully crafted, but GAHHHH.
So when I come across these really intense early-morning visions of her own life, with carnivorous flowers and painfully intense evening light and lots of the tiny acts of being a mother in the 60s being blown up into this edifice of unlivable life, I'm shocked to realize she's actually as good as her fame merits. And that little fragments of this stuff are insinuating themselves into my mental repertoire like all great poetry should. It's not just a suicide note, but this intense record of a particular life in a place and time that just happens to be hurtling toward the abyss, and something about that makes it all the more compelling.
Then, to set up a dialogue between the members of that particularly problematic couple, I open up some Ted Hughes, and there's not a single indication an actual human being who's lived an actual life has ever even even touched those lines. The whole thing self-conscious nature imagery and some mythology books--specifically this awful I Have Discovered The Important Archetypes kind of mythological approach, like all the worst pieces of literary modernism chopped off of any human experience whatsoever. My first thought, honestly, was "This man has no soul at all," and even if you don't acknowledge that, I still want to emphasize my feeling that his poetry is so generalized it lacks the ability to resonate with anything in the life of any conceivable reader.
And this is when it hits me: just like in my entry on economic troubles in the novel, I've come upon one of a point of obsession, one of the things that really bugs me about the state of the literary arts these days. Pick up any highly-workshopped book of poetry from someone who went to a liberal arts college, and you'll get intensely detailed descriptions of someone's ideas about desire, or a big chunk of wordplay, or a meditation on the meaning of poetry without any specificity underpinning the meta of it all. Even when detailed description happens, it seems like just an image for the hell of it, not meant to actually connect the minutiae of life to the big ideas they give rise to. Similarly, the problem with almost all bad science fiction is that somebody comes up with some idea that they think will have "universal" appeal and think human beings' reactions to a changed world are just window-dressing. Recent American novels are pretty bad at this too; even The Corrections--which I loved, and which cares more about having social engagement than most popular novels -- focuses entirely on emotional issues: family, death and sex. What about paying the bills and taking shitty jobs? But economics aside, what about having a favorite way of walking home, eating food, driving a car or taking public transportation, being suddenly interested in a movie or a book, exercising, juggling social occasions, or seeing anything in terms other than aesthetics or interpersonal relationships?
I have a problem with art that thinks life can boil down to a few generalities without specifics -- I don't need all art to be expressive of intense emotions about real-life events written with journalistic precision, or to be expressive at all of one's own personal life. But at very least I want art to be created with an attitude like Wallace Stevens, who for all his sometimes emotional coldness was shining the floodlights of his mind directly at all the philosophical problems he kept stumbling over every time he walked down the street, or watched a snowman, or heard a piece of music. I mean, he lived no soap opera, but even his most purely intellectual stuff had some real personal drama to it, that of the encounter between a mind and everything it desperately tried to understand, a task he set to with religious devotion.
What I'm talking about is something you might even call a little Marxist: a big idea completely divorced from the kinds of life it has to inhabit, from custom and culture down to economic relations, feels strangely weightless to me. Talking about the deep emotions of life without all the things it takes to achieve those emotions feels to me like the author is trying to claim authority without proving it's deserved. I talked with Kirsten the other day about the Beats--about the way they almost placed the qualities of scraping together a life on the level of religious experience, where taking an odd job for a little cash or finding an unorthodox method of shelter elevated you above normal existence because you were staking ownership over your life. Sure, it was about having sex with your friends in the bushes and going to jazz clubs and all that too, but even the shittiest Beat novels tend to have just as much about how to discover something cool in a town you've never been to as the actual cool things, not to mention the ways people supported themselves while doing it.
What I don't like is the kind of story, say, that thinks a few idiosyncrasies for characters and a high-concept plot are enough, or the kind of poem that thinks a few symbols from ancient or esoteric sources plus nature imagery makes for stirring reading; Murakami gets this, and his characters are always busy checking out their favorite books and records and making detailed plans to accomplish what they're interested in. They also go through more bodily functions(you know what people cook for dinner for cheap each night.) than just sex, which, while important to many people's lives, happens far less often than, say, eating (unless you're on some kind of orgiastic hunger strike) or taking a trip to the bathroom (something Joyce certainly got implicitly).
Authors who got this right (and why): Steinbeck (it's just as much about Salinas and being an Okie as it is about family drama); Faulkner (you always watch these twisted dynasties slowly put their tendrils through a town, watch the complex racial issues and the acquisitiveness of these people, which matter just as much as the incest and the intrafamilial rage), Milan Kundera (he's always aware that characters are just constructs, and he puts them into fascinating contrast with very specific real-life events), Joyce (you know how much everything costs, when people want to masturbate, when they want to chat, or think, or enjoy the urine-tinged taste of fried kidney), Octavia Butler (SF where every bizarre power relation is actually reacted to like real people would, and people only have the principles they would in real life)...and most of the 19th century, when there's often the sense that people of vastly different lives and classes exist, if only as shadowy counterexamples.
Other than Ted Hughes, probably the strongest opposite to what i'm talking about is Sex and the City, for despite whatever very clever humor it's got, life is far, far more than men and Manolos, and really very few people can actually afford to MAKE it about just those two things.
So what am I calling for? Just some awareness, just some realization on the part of otherwise intelligent writers that the questions of life are more than just about how friendly you are with whom, what you've read, and what aesthetic window-dressing you add to a life. I love ecstatic experience, and love, and lust, and talking only about ideas for hours, but portraying that stuff without context provides a really skewed vision of the world, one i find far less interesting and far less useful for adding to the repertoire of ideas and stories and images you apply to your life. Ambition often works better with a grasp of context and specificity, not worse, and I think so much lately is escapist or just unaware of these issues that it's time for the pendulum to swing a little bit back the other way.
UPDATE:
I think I've realized why this is a messy entry: I'm trying to talk about two different beefs, both of which I think deserve to be under the same category.
1) literature without any concept of how social, or economic, or political, or experiential, (or any other kind of) context works; that is, works without any apparent awareness of where its ideas and situations arise from. Sex and the City has no idea that you have to be very rich and totally without other purpose to actually go through all the aspects of that life, while Raymond Chandler is pretty damn certain that it's a particular city and a particular social strata and a particular set of life decisions that lead you into his toxic moral universe. A result of not having this awareness is a particular kind of unconscious narrowness of view --rather than a conscious focus -- that I can find very annoying.
1a)Lately, it seems that when writers do have a sense of context, of specificity, of the real mechanics of thought and experience, it always seems to be in the area either of sex or of family/social relationships. Those are totally great things to know in detail! I just wish a bit more often those things were combined with other types of observation.
2) Literature, in the widest sense possible, that seems completely divorced from any particular individual's having actually lived a life and had things they enjoyed or despised or had an interest in--that is, literature lacking a sense that the life of any human being at all went into its making. Hughes, as I said, fits this. Bad science fiction fits this because authors erroneously believe they are adding to the work's "universality." T.S. Eliot wanted his work to fit this but failed, beautifully. The reason I don't like this kind of thing, other than the boredom it gives to me, is that it often has a symbiotic relationship with #1. People who don't "get" one of these ideas seem often not to "get" the other.
And obviously this isn't the only thing that can be bad with literature. But they bug me on a fundamental level, these days.
So a week or so ago I was reading Sylvia Plath's Ariel and some collected Ted Hughes (because I didn't have a strong opinion on where to start), and to my great surprise, I liked the former a lot and couldn't stand the latter. I'd always hated "Daddy"--okay, I still don't like it much; it's filled with the kind of over-jingly rhyme that Milton wrote that tirade about in the first place, it breaks Godwin's Law over and over, and it uses fucking "GOBBLEDYGOO" in a serious context. And I know that's all very carefully crafted, but GAHHHH.
So when I come across these really intense early-morning visions of her own life, with carnivorous flowers and painfully intense evening light and lots of the tiny acts of being a mother in the 60s being blown up into this edifice of unlivable life, I'm shocked to realize she's actually as good as her fame merits. And that little fragments of this stuff are insinuating themselves into my mental repertoire like all great poetry should. It's not just a suicide note, but this intense record of a particular life in a place and time that just happens to be hurtling toward the abyss, and something about that makes it all the more compelling.
Then, to set up a dialogue between the members of that particularly problematic couple, I open up some Ted Hughes, and there's not a single indication an actual human being who's lived an actual life has ever even even touched those lines. The whole thing self-conscious nature imagery and some mythology books--specifically this awful I Have Discovered The Important Archetypes kind of mythological approach, like all the worst pieces of literary modernism chopped off of any human experience whatsoever. My first thought, honestly, was "This man has no soul at all," and even if you don't acknowledge that, I still want to emphasize my feeling that his poetry is so generalized it lacks the ability to resonate with anything in the life of any conceivable reader.
And this is when it hits me: just like in my entry on economic troubles in the novel, I've come upon one of a point of obsession, one of the things that really bugs me about the state of the literary arts these days. Pick up any highly-workshopped book of poetry from someone who went to a liberal arts college, and you'll get intensely detailed descriptions of someone's ideas about desire, or a big chunk of wordplay, or a meditation on the meaning of poetry without any specificity underpinning the meta of it all. Even when detailed description happens, it seems like just an image for the hell of it, not meant to actually connect the minutiae of life to the big ideas they give rise to. Similarly, the problem with almost all bad science fiction is that somebody comes up with some idea that they think will have "universal" appeal and think human beings' reactions to a changed world are just window-dressing. Recent American novels are pretty bad at this too; even The Corrections--which I loved, and which cares more about having social engagement than most popular novels -- focuses entirely on emotional issues: family, death and sex. What about paying the bills and taking shitty jobs? But economics aside, what about having a favorite way of walking home, eating food, driving a car or taking public transportation, being suddenly interested in a movie or a book, exercising, juggling social occasions, or seeing anything in terms other than aesthetics or interpersonal relationships?
I have a problem with art that thinks life can boil down to a few generalities without specifics -- I don't need all art to be expressive of intense emotions about real-life events written with journalistic precision, or to be expressive at all of one's own personal life. But at very least I want art to be created with an attitude like Wallace Stevens, who for all his sometimes emotional coldness was shining the floodlights of his mind directly at all the philosophical problems he kept stumbling over every time he walked down the street, or watched a snowman, or heard a piece of music. I mean, he lived no soap opera, but even his most purely intellectual stuff had some real personal drama to it, that of the encounter between a mind and everything it desperately tried to understand, a task he set to with religious devotion.
What I'm talking about is something you might even call a little Marxist: a big idea completely divorced from the kinds of life it has to inhabit, from custom and culture down to economic relations, feels strangely weightless to me. Talking about the deep emotions of life without all the things it takes to achieve those emotions feels to me like the author is trying to claim authority without proving it's deserved. I talked with Kirsten the other day about the Beats--about the way they almost placed the qualities of scraping together a life on the level of religious experience, where taking an odd job for a little cash or finding an unorthodox method of shelter elevated you above normal existence because you were staking ownership over your life. Sure, it was about having sex with your friends in the bushes and going to jazz clubs and all that too, but even the shittiest Beat novels tend to have just as much about how to discover something cool in a town you've never been to as the actual cool things, not to mention the ways people supported themselves while doing it.
What I don't like is the kind of story, say, that thinks a few idiosyncrasies for characters and a high-concept plot are enough, or the kind of poem that thinks a few symbols from ancient or esoteric sources plus nature imagery makes for stirring reading; Murakami gets this, and his characters are always busy checking out their favorite books and records and making detailed plans to accomplish what they're interested in. They also go through more bodily functions(you know what people cook for dinner for cheap each night.) than just sex, which, while important to many people's lives, happens far less often than, say, eating (unless you're on some kind of orgiastic hunger strike) or taking a trip to the bathroom (something Joyce certainly got implicitly).
Authors who got this right (and why): Steinbeck (it's just as much about Salinas and being an Okie as it is about family drama); Faulkner (you always watch these twisted dynasties slowly put their tendrils through a town, watch the complex racial issues and the acquisitiveness of these people, which matter just as much as the incest and the intrafamilial rage), Milan Kundera (he's always aware that characters are just constructs, and he puts them into fascinating contrast with very specific real-life events), Joyce (you know how much everything costs, when people want to masturbate, when they want to chat, or think, or enjoy the urine-tinged taste of fried kidney), Octavia Butler (SF where every bizarre power relation is actually reacted to like real people would, and people only have the principles they would in real life)...and most of the 19th century, when there's often the sense that people of vastly different lives and classes exist, if only as shadowy counterexamples.
Other than Ted Hughes, probably the strongest opposite to what i'm talking about is Sex and the City, for despite whatever very clever humor it's got, life is far, far more than men and Manolos, and really very few people can actually afford to MAKE it about just those two things.
So what am I calling for? Just some awareness, just some realization on the part of otherwise intelligent writers that the questions of life are more than just about how friendly you are with whom, what you've read, and what aesthetic window-dressing you add to a life. I love ecstatic experience, and love, and lust, and talking only about ideas for hours, but portraying that stuff without context provides a really skewed vision of the world, one i find far less interesting and far less useful for adding to the repertoire of ideas and stories and images you apply to your life. Ambition often works better with a grasp of context and specificity, not worse, and I think so much lately is escapist or just unaware of these issues that it's time for the pendulum to swing a little bit back the other way.
UPDATE:
I think I've realized why this is a messy entry: I'm trying to talk about two different beefs, both of which I think deserve to be under the same category.
1) literature without any concept of how social, or economic, or political, or experiential, (or any other kind of) context works; that is, works without any apparent awareness of where its ideas and situations arise from. Sex and the City has no idea that you have to be very rich and totally without other purpose to actually go through all the aspects of that life, while Raymond Chandler is pretty damn certain that it's a particular city and a particular social strata and a particular set of life decisions that lead you into his toxic moral universe. A result of not having this awareness is a particular kind of unconscious narrowness of view --rather than a conscious focus -- that I can find very annoying.
1a)Lately, it seems that when writers do have a sense of context, of specificity, of the real mechanics of thought and experience, it always seems to be in the area either of sex or of family/social relationships. Those are totally great things to know in detail! I just wish a bit more often those things were combined with other types of observation.
2) Literature, in the widest sense possible, that seems completely divorced from any particular individual's having actually lived a life and had things they enjoyed or despised or had an interest in--that is, literature lacking a sense that the life of any human being at all went into its making. Hughes, as I said, fits this. Bad science fiction fits this because authors erroneously believe they are adding to the work's "universality." T.S. Eliot wanted his work to fit this but failed, beautifully. The reason I don't like this kind of thing, other than the boredom it gives to me, is that it often has a symbiotic relationship with #1. People who don't "get" one of these ideas seem often not to "get" the other.
And obviously this isn't the only thing that can be bad with literature. But they bug me on a fundamental level, these days.