by
Joshua Cohen
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By contrast, the techniques that Lish imposed on his own fiction, and that he advocated for decades in the notorious non-MFA writing workshops he ran after leaving Knopf (workshops in which he mentored, among others, Amy Hempel, Christine Schutt, and Diane Williams), are considerably simpler to articulate. “Recursion” is Lish’s fancy term for unfancy “repetition”; “consecution” is a catch-all concept for the ways in which the grammatical or phonic qualities of a word, or the structure of a sentence, can be brought to bear on the choice of the word or the structure of the sentence that follows; “swerve,” meanwhile, is Lish’s method for frustrating “recursion” and “consecution,” by introducing into the body of a fiction a theme, or narrative vantage, which hadn’t been used before, and is not logically, structurally, or phonically expected. This trinity of techniques is so prevalent in Lish’s work as to read like a trinity of tics. Take the fiction entitled “The Practice of Everyday Life,” in which the recursion abounds, the consecution hinges on the polysemy of “come” and the opposition of “out loud” and “aloud,” while the swerve is accomplished with the belated identification of the narrator’s audience or occasion:
WHEN WE STOPPED SAYING WE WERE GOING TO MOVE OUT OF THE CITY
When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we had: nothing to talk about at parties, nothing to talk about on the Q/N/R trains, nothing to talk about to my aunt, her mom, the pizza guy, over decent but insufferable sushi, in the movie line. When the bun place closed. The midnight-movie theater in Midtown. When the deli that did its own pastramitizing shut down too. I’d always liked that bun place. When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we became more bearable. We broke up and stayed the children we’d never have.
What Lanier calls this type of redistribution: “The humanistic information economy.”
How disappointed is this reviewer in Lanier: Enough to end our relationship, despite forfeiture of any future “nanopayments.”
lol. i feel vindicated
Zola, born in 1840, two years before Stendhal died, and one year after the appearance of the daguerreotype—the first commercially practical photographic process—referred to this impossible reproduction of a consensus reality as “idealism,” and opposed it with “naturalism,” which characterized novels that sought to expose the forces that produced that consensus. The naturalist novel, from its birth in the late nineteenth century through its disguised heyday in the twentieth, has been precisely about how reality is “made,” as distinct from what reality “is.”
Zola defined this naturalistic approach in an essay that responded to a medical text by a contemporary, the physiologist Claude Bernard, which attempted to transfer the scientific method governing experimentation in chemistry to the precincts of biology—the treatment of disease. It was Zola’s goal to diagnose French society as a doctor would a patient’s body: by analyzing its comorbid maladies one at a time, with a nib as sharp as a scalpel. Only after this diagnosis would treatment—extraliterary, political treatment—be possible.
Engels once said that he learned more about France from Balzac than from “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.” Paul Lafargue, in his Reminiscences of Marx, writes that Marx—who was born in 1818, the year Balzac decided to dedicate his life to writing—so deeply loved La Comédie humaine that if he ever finished with economics he intended to write a study of it. Though not even a sentence of that study ever appeared (rather, Marx borrowed a few of Balzac’s sentences for The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), it seems that what Marx most appreciated in Balzac’s sequence was the way in which it illustrated the processes by which an individual, while operating under the delusion that he or she was forming society, was instead being formed by it. Marx transferred the personalities and struggles of Balzac’s characters—their struggles with spouses, lovers, employers, employees, clergy, and the chaos of the Restoration and July Monarchy—to entire social classes: the newly individuated bloc of the working proletariat, which (I nearly wrote “who”) fomented a failed revolution and was left to suffer under the repressions of Napoleon III.
It doesn’t take a Žižek to point out that identifying a social problem in fiction doesn’t solve that problem in life, and that while a book can describe the processes that create a problem, that description itself becomes an integral component of the problem’s irresolution. The writer is never exempt from, or outside of, the writing, then, but remains as much a product of ideology as any of his or her characters.
[...] Silvio Berlusconi, who took a break from his women and media companies and the media company that is Italy to arrange partial funding and take a tax break on art. [...]
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“My explicitly stated goal,” Franzen writes of himself in 1980s Berlin, “was to save the American novel—from social one-dimensionality, from critical preoccupation with the prison-house of language, from the off-putting avant-gardism of Pynchon and his kind.” Apparently, he stayed inside and smoked cigarettes and typed for twelve hours a day, and it was in reading this autobiographical stretch—in breaks from my own smoking and typing—that I came to recognize a landsman. It seemed that we were both involved in Bildung, or “cultivation,” the German-Jewish discipline that shaped my grandparents, from Cologne, and the method by which German Jewry sought to become not just accepted by an adopted homeland, but to embody its quintessence. I realized that Franzen—perhaps more than any other American novelist, and certainly more than anyone else ever raised in the Congregational Church in the Midwest—felt like a guest fighting to be loved by a host culture, yet conscious that such love can never be fought for, and that the struggle was in equal parts futile and imaginary. He let his origins oppress him, just enough for him to know how to oppress himself in the event that America didn’t exile him, or have him executed.
I’ve come to regard this as Franzen’s Jewish Problem: Denise’s overrelished Judeophilia in The Corrections, blatantly counterpointed with her mother Enid’s overrelished Judeophobia; the depiction in Freedom of Jewish neocons rallying around the Iraq War, and its ridiculous portrayal of a New York diamond-district salesman dealing rings while wearing phylacteries—which the religious wear only during prayer; and the way this book treats Kraus’s Jüdische Selbsthaß (Jewish self-hate) by the trick of letting Reitter sort it out, and the way it treats the Holocaust, by letting Kehlmann apostrophize it, leaving Franzen himself free to pontificate about Israel/Palestine with a sophistication that would barely pass muster on a local network affiliate, let alone on CNN. But I’m prepared to forgive him all this, as readers have to forgive Franzen everything, only because no one can ever hate him as much as he already hates himself. Franzen must know that he will never receive any review as cruel as the ones that, with each book and media appearance, he gives himself. It’s his awareness of all this, and his inability to restrain himself from betraying that awareness, that puts America’s foremost novelist in contention to become the world’s foremost Jewish novelist tout court—the inheritor of the crown of feathers. If only he were funnier, or cared a bit more about sex.
IT WAS ADORNO’S IDEA that capitalism had stripped philosophy of its revolutionary capacities. What was left was art, the last emancipator and partisan of truth. But Adorno was using the word “truth” (or Wahrheitsgehalt, “truth-value”) in a way that was already becoming outmoded. His “truth” always gestured toward an “essence,” a below-the-surface system of pitches, colors, or symbols that would organize an artwork and instantiate its worth; but contemporary usage was returning the word to its Enlightenment definition—quasi-scientific “factuality.” This is the position we’re in today, when most writers invoke “truth” only as a preemptive defense against those whose primary impulse is to fact-check and accuse.
LAYBILLS ARE NECESSARY ONLY INSOFAR as the art they describe is not; it is as if listeners have to be distracted from the music they’re supposed to be listening to. These programs tell us that the slow drag we’re about to hear is no ordinary funeral procession but a Trauermarsch, composed in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, under conditions of, usually, unremitting misery. Fill in the blank: The composer of this work suffered from insanity, tuberculosis, syphilis, or suicide. Go on any night to any concert hall: You will see people looking and seeing, not hearing, and the sound they make riffling pages is often louder than the pianissimos of the slowest slow movements. These notes, so opposed to musical notation, tell us the sequence of the evening’s entertainments and their stories as well, in the tradition of nineteenth-century “program music”—music that seeks associations outside of itself, aerating aural experience through reference to nature or philosophy, to literature or the visual arts. Although some metaphors provided by these notes reflect a composer’s intention, all insist on refusing music its abstraction, on transforming its absolute, mathematical quality into the emotionally relatable, the familiarly human. [...]
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