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The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books
The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Here the past, yet again, proves valuable. In 1898 Tolstoy defined art as “that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others by certain external signs the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” This is communion, which is also catharsis—art as exercise for the empathetic muscles that define us as human. If the novel has ceded ground to other entertainments, it maintains a distinct and formal advantage in the realm of communion.
The books that have had the greatest impact on my life are not the ones that entertained me the most—rather, they’re the ones I’ve had to endure. Ulysses wasn’t a “good read”—it was a project, a mission, a brief military stint undertaken by a strong-willed, idealistic youth. It was a labor to carry, it required innumerable accoutrements to be read (not just the two other texts but also a notebook and a pen, a highlighter, slips of scrap paper to mark particular pages). Even the page design was more an opponent than a partner: There were line numbers on each page. Line numbers! This book wasn’t kidding around. Reading it, you felt you were staring down the business end of Literature.
But to arrive at the end of a book like that—to complete the project of reading it—there is for me no greater satisfaction. Wracked, enlightened, tortured, exhausted, bettered, you come out the other side of a book like Ulysses feeling as though you’ve had an experience, as though you have actually, actively read. And there are, for those of us who enjoy such literature of endurance, many authors who write books like bricks you could use to build a sound shelter for the three little pigs: William Gaddis, John Barth, Doris Lessing, Thomas Pynchon, Neal Stephenson, David Foster Wallace (to mention just a few of the most recent examples). Granted, there are some big books that make you feel, as you close them, that they haven’t quite been worth the effort. For me, that’s the risk that makes the expedition all the more thrilling.
It’s possible that books are like relationships. Some people may be quite happy hopping from one book to the next, looking for easy reads in the same way you might troll the bars for easy lays. There are thousands of completely forgettable books that will amuse you for an evening or two; they seduce you with their market-tested cover art, their comfortable length (not to overwhelm commitment-phobes), even the unabashedly lewd pick-up lines that open their narratives, the lines referred to in writing workshops as “hooks”: The summer my dog died, I learned how to stop time.
I once had a relationship with William H. Gass’s The Tunnel. It was a difficult couple of months. We didn’t get along—even though on the surface it seemed we would be a perfect couple. It was certainly no Ulysses. But I stuck with it to the very end, searching for any glimmer of connection or love, so sure was I that there must be one. At the very last, however, we parted quietly, with little fanfare, a bit embarrassed at our failure to make it work.
Do I wish that book were easier to read?
No. I admire its depths, even though I was not the one meant to plumb them.
Do I wish that book were shorter?
No. I respect a book that respects itself—a book that is not ashamed of declaring itself in bold and profuse terms.
Do I regret having spent time reading it?
Not at all. What I wanted was not entertainment but an experience—and I got that experience, and it has stayed with me. I feel that The Tunnel and I accomplished something, and I am reminded of that accomplishment whenever I see the book resting, still admired and enduring, on my bookshelf.
TP: Meaning first of all that I like books that I can hold in my hand. Made of paper. I don’t need to plug them in, and I don’t have to buy batteries for them. They look different from each other, and I like that. I like looking at Bleak House and being able to tell that it embodies a different sense of life than Jesus’ Son does. I like carrying the fuckers around with me. One weighs more than the other. If you like to read your books on an Etch A Sketch, that’s fine with me. Especially if you’re reading my books. But it’s like looking at a book of paintings where Guernica is the same size as a Holbein portrait. You get no sense of the scale of things, of the nature of the artist’s ambition.
X, who left for his vacation without me, has shown no signs of life since his departure: accident? post-office strike? indifference? distancing maneuver? exercise of a passing impulse of autonomy ("His youth deafens him, he fails to hear")? or simple innocence? I grow increasingly anxious, pass through each act of the waiting-scenario. But when X reappears in one way or another, for he cannot fail to do so (a thought which should immediately dispel any anxiety), what will I say to him? Should I hide my distress—which will be over by then ("How are you?")? Release it aggressively (“That wasn’t at all nice, at least you could have . . ") or passionately (“Do you know how much worry you caused me?”)? Or let this distress of mine be delicately, discreetly understood, so that it will be discovered without having to strike down the other ("I was rather concerned . . .”)? A secondary anxiety seizes me, which is that I must determine the degree of publicity I shall give to my initial anxiety.
Accidentally, Werther’s finger touches Charlotte’s, their feet, under the table, happen to brush against each other. Werther might be engrossed by the meaning of these accidents; he might concentrate physically on these slight zones of contact and delight in this fragment of inert finger or foot, fetishistically, without concern for the response (like God—as the etymology of the word tells us—the Fetish does not reply). But in fact Werther is not perverse, he is in love: he creates meaning, always and everywhere, out of nothing, and it is meaning which thrills him: he is in the crucible of meaning. Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.
(A British lord, and subsequently a bishop, blamed Goethe for the epidemic of suicides provoked by Werther. To which Goethe replied in in strictly economic terms: “Your commercial system has claimed thousands of victims, why not grant a few to Werther?”)
[...] We might call it a proffering, which has no scientific place: I-love-you belongs neither in the realm of linguistics nor in that of semiology. Its occasion (the point of departure for speaking it) would be, rather, Music. [...]
“When you were talking to him, discussing any subject at all, X frequently seemed to be looking away, listening to something else: you broke off, discouraged; after a long silence, X would say: ‘Go on, I'm listening to you'; then you resumed as best you could the thread of a story in which you no longer believed.”