Worlds Apart
I was writing a comment in reply to Ray Davis on a previous post, and realized it might be better as a post than a comment.
Here's Ray's original comment:
Before exploring any of these ideas, here's the relevant Josipovici passage:
I said my interpretation of Modernism/SF is narcissistic or solipsistic, so perhaps autobiography will clarify how I find these two different modes to be complementary.
When I was, I think, about 12 years old, I discovered both science fiction and James Joyce. I had become a devoted reader of adult books a few years before when I discovered Stephen King and somehow got permission to take Pet Sematary out of the library. Science fiction I discovered when my mother's boss loaned me some 1986 issues of Asimov's. Somewhere in that same time-frame, I brought a copy of Catcher in the Rye while on a visit to see family in Illinois. My uncle saw me reading it and said, "Don't bother. Read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." This was crazy, brilliant advice. Who would think to recommend Joyce to a 12 year old who could barely understand Salinger? But children should not read appropriate books; it stunts their growth and imagination -- or, at least, it does if they're children like me. I was the sort of young reader who found it much more interesting to delve into what I couldn't understand than what I could. My general antipathy to YA books has been life-long -- even as a child I didn't want to read about children. I didn't want to "relate" to stories. I wanted escape, intellectual challenge, weirdness, terror, and beauty.
My uncle sensed this somehow, and his recommendation changed my life. I didn't give up my appreciation for Salinger -- we've had a love/hate relationship ever since, depending on my mood -- but that first page of Portrait changed everything. Seeing how the diction of that page then developed in the later pages was a profound lesson for me both as a reader and writer. I went to the college library and checked out a stack of books by and about Joyce, a stack I remember being nearly as tall as I was then. A friend of mine was working the circulation desk, and I still remember his bemused look, and his words: "You know, Matt, Finnegans Wake isn't really light weekend reading."
So true, and I didn't read a lot of Finnegans Wake then, nor have I since, nor will I ever, but I keep it around, and I love certain passages, even if the whole is too long and too abstract for my tastes.* It wasn't so much Ulysses itself or Finnegans Wake itself that had a profound effect on me, but rather the idea of them -- and the idea of them expressed in the various critical and exegetical works on them. The idea that fiction could be something more than just a story. That was thrilling.
Around the same time, I also encountered T.S. Eliot's poems for the first time, especially "Prufrock". It took me many years to get to the point of understanding the poem in any way, but the spell its words and structure cast was immediate. I wrote pastiches of it and homages to it; I performed it as a theatre piece a couple of times, I absorbed its rhythms into much of what I wrote. One of the first single-author collections of poetry I owned was a copy of Eliot's Complete Poems & Plays, a treasure-trove of wonders. In high school, I wrote stanzas from "The Hollow Men" on a biology test that I thought was a stupid exercise in rote memorization (this caused consternation).
I discovered Kafka, Beckett, and Virginia Woolf in high school, and it was pure love (the first pages of Mrs. Dalloway had the same effect on me as the first pages of A Portrait of the Artist). I didn't "understand" them in the sense of being able to pull a whole lot of literal meaning from their words, but I understood, in some other-than-words way built from their words, a Weltanschauung and an attitude toward the relationship between text and the world -- and thus experienced the touch to the core that Jospipovici speaks of. This would only grow stronger as I learned to understand what such writers seemed to be up to, as I developed knowledge of their place in history and literature, as I gained experiences in life that created a synergistic loop between their interpretation of the world-text and my own: my reading of such writers influenced how I saw the world and its texts; my experiences of the world and its texts influenced how I responded to those writers.
And it continued on through college and to today -- Sterne, Samuel Johnson, Kleist, Büchner, Chekhov, Faulkner, Bernhard, Borges, Gertrude Stein (sometimes, in small doses: again, the abstraction), Mac Wellman, Suzan-Lori Parks, Coetzee -- not all Modernists, certainly, but the writers who (well, along with Shakespeare) blew my brain apart and put it back together again.
And alongside it all, SF. At the same time I was learning to read the Modernists (and their predecessors and followers), I was learning to read SF. The two experiences informed each other. In some ways, I read Modernism as if it were SF and SF as if it were Modernism, but more than that, I read each as a kind of response to, and complexification of, reality. It why, when in high school I discovered Philip K. Dick (when I was in high school, most of Dick's books were out of print), he instantly became among my favorite authors -- he melded, it seemed to me then, Kafka, Beckett, and SF. (I'm not sure I'd say that now, but it was how I first read his books.) The Jewel-Hinged Jaw was an inspiring problem for me at the same time that Finnegans Wake was, and it made me view SF as a textual experience in the same way I viewed Modernism as a textual experience.
At the time I was first reading SF, my mother, concerned for my intellectual well-being, asked a very old-school (proudly New Critical) English professor at the college, a wonderful man who remains a friend, "Is science fiction literature?" His response: "No, it's formula fiction." I remember exactly where we were at the time he said this: In our car, driving away from our house, about to turn onto Rte. 3 from River Road. It was another life-changing moment, because it sent me on a quest to figure out what this "literature" thing was (another professor gave me a copy of the 3rd edition of Laurence Perrine's anthology Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense
, which I devoured, and which provided no good answers). Much of my life since then has been spent trying to address, avoid, or complicate my mother's question, our friend's answer, and my own response.**
I don't know what (or how) any of this means, exactly. Perhaps it has something to do with The Force.
I don't particularly believe in a thing called Literature, because I've never seen the word wielded in a useful way -- it is a word that people use to condemn, condescend, and marginalize that which they don't know how to appreciate. I spend most of my reading time with the twin loves of my youth, SF and Modernism, and with the love of my recent years, African fiction; Literature has been used against each (though to a different degree with Modernism -- strangely, it's seen by most people as Literature -- indeed, the very embodiment of High Lit -- but it's also resented, and so it has moved from being marginalized as not-Literature by the Arnold Bennetts of the world to being resented as too-Literature by the sorts of folks who most detest and/or misunderstand Josipovici).
The problem remains. And so we must keep reading and writing.
-----------------------------------------------------
*Josipovici, p. 187: "My own 'story', as I have tried to present it here, discovering what it was as I went along, is that only an art which recognizes the pitfalls inherent in both realism and abstraction will be really alive. That is why I warm to the novels of Perec and Bernhard more than to Finnegans Wake or the novels of Updike and Roth, to the pictures of Bacon and Hockney more than to Pollock or Tracey Emin, to the music of Birtwistle and Kurtág more than Cage or Shostakovitch."
**My response at the time was to send him a copy of Pat Murphy's story "Rachel in Love" and dare him to deny it to be literature. He did, though I forget the details of how -- something to do with character development. It was, however, a response that both Modernism and SF had prepared me to reject, but he was a Dickens scholar, and his idea of the ultimate fiction was the Victorian novel, a form that, to this day, I have only occasional interest in. Josipovici, p. 67: "Not having doubts is a blessed state, but it is not the same thing as having genuine authority. There is something hollow about Balzac, Dickens, and Verdi compared with Dante or Shakespeare, but even compared with their older contemporaries, Beethoven and Wordsworth. It doesn't rest on their frequent clumsiness, for that is to be found in Betthoven and Wordsworth. It rests more on the very thing that is the root of their strength as artists and their enormous success as entrepreneurs: their inability to question what it is they are doing. In that sense they are the first modern best-sellers and in their work one can see the beginnings of that split between popularity and artistic depth which is to become the hallmark of modern culture." (I'm wary of some of the implications embedded in that last sentence, but the rest seems right to me, and I do think there is a particular quality of confidence in the power of words as representational tools in fiction that finds a mass audience.)
Here's Ray's original comment:
Huh. The "problem that had long puzzled" Josipovici was precisely -- like precisely, except for some name-swapping which sharpens the point, like Joyce for Mann and Beckett for Bernhard -- what led me to start looking into science fiction in 1976. (And eventually led me here, of course.)My feelings are similar, and are one of the reasons that though my particular pleasures are different from Josipovici's, I'm sympathetic to his argument. Those feelings are also a reason why I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to arguments that pose science fiction (broadly defined) as the opposite of Modernism. (Different, sure. Opposite, nope.) That's an interpretation that doesn't work for me because it contradicts my own reading life, which is, yes, a narcissistic (solipsistic?) approach to an argument, but hey, it's what I've got. For me, science fiction and Modernism are complementary.
From what I've read of Josipovici, I suspect he arrived at different answers than myself.
Before exploring any of these ideas, here's the relevant Josipovici passage:
I wrote [What Ever Happened to Modernism?] in the first place to try to make sense of a problem that had long puzzled me: why was it that works of literature such as the poems of T S Eliot, the stories of Kafka and Borges, the novels of Proust, Mann, Claude Simon and Thomas Bernhard seemed worlds apart from those admired by the English literary establishment (works by writers such as Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan)? The first group touched me to the core, leading me into the depths of myself even as they led me out into worlds I did not know. The latter were well-written narratives that, once I'd read them, I had no wish ever to reread. Was it my fault? Was I in some way unable to enter into the spirit of these works? Or did they belong to a kind of writing that was clearly to the taste of the English public but not to mine?That is very much the problem (in the sense of a math problem, or a nagging anxiety that leads one to write criticism and blog posts -- a good problem, overall!) that made me a voracious reader, and it is the problem that has kept me returning to paraliteratures.
I said my interpretation of Modernism/SF is narcissistic or solipsistic, so perhaps autobiography will clarify how I find these two different modes to be complementary.
When I was, I think, about 12 years old, I discovered both science fiction and James Joyce. I had become a devoted reader of adult books a few years before when I discovered Stephen King and somehow got permission to take Pet Sematary out of the library. Science fiction I discovered when my mother's boss loaned me some 1986 issues of Asimov's. Somewhere in that same time-frame, I brought a copy of Catcher in the Rye while on a visit to see family in Illinois. My uncle saw me reading it and said, "Don't bother. Read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." This was crazy, brilliant advice. Who would think to recommend Joyce to a 12 year old who could barely understand Salinger? But children should not read appropriate books; it stunts their growth and imagination -- or, at least, it does if they're children like me. I was the sort of young reader who found it much more interesting to delve into what I couldn't understand than what I could. My general antipathy to YA books has been life-long -- even as a child I didn't want to read about children. I didn't want to "relate" to stories. I wanted escape, intellectual challenge, weirdness, terror, and beauty.
My uncle sensed this somehow, and his recommendation changed my life. I didn't give up my appreciation for Salinger -- we've had a love/hate relationship ever since, depending on my mood -- but that first page of Portrait changed everything. Seeing how the diction of that page then developed in the later pages was a profound lesson for me both as a reader and writer. I went to the college library and checked out a stack of books by and about Joyce, a stack I remember being nearly as tall as I was then. A friend of mine was working the circulation desk, and I still remember his bemused look, and his words: "You know, Matt, Finnegans Wake isn't really light weekend reading."
So true, and I didn't read a lot of Finnegans Wake then, nor have I since, nor will I ever, but I keep it around, and I love certain passages, even if the whole is too long and too abstract for my tastes.* It wasn't so much Ulysses itself or Finnegans Wake itself that had a profound effect on me, but rather the idea of them -- and the idea of them expressed in the various critical and exegetical works on them. The idea that fiction could be something more than just a story. That was thrilling.
Around the same time, I also encountered T.S. Eliot's poems for the first time, especially "Prufrock". It took me many years to get to the point of understanding the poem in any way, but the spell its words and structure cast was immediate. I wrote pastiches of it and homages to it; I performed it as a theatre piece a couple of times, I absorbed its rhythms into much of what I wrote. One of the first single-author collections of poetry I owned was a copy of Eliot's Complete Poems & Plays, a treasure-trove of wonders. In high school, I wrote stanzas from "The Hollow Men" on a biology test that I thought was a stupid exercise in rote memorization (this caused consternation).
I discovered Kafka, Beckett, and Virginia Woolf in high school, and it was pure love (the first pages of Mrs. Dalloway had the same effect on me as the first pages of A Portrait of the Artist). I didn't "understand" them in the sense of being able to pull a whole lot of literal meaning from their words, but I understood, in some other-than-words way built from their words, a Weltanschauung and an attitude toward the relationship between text and the world -- and thus experienced the touch to the core that Jospipovici speaks of. This would only grow stronger as I learned to understand what such writers seemed to be up to, as I developed knowledge of their place in history and literature, as I gained experiences in life that created a synergistic loop between their interpretation of the world-text and my own: my reading of such writers influenced how I saw the world and its texts; my experiences of the world and its texts influenced how I responded to those writers.
And it continued on through college and to today -- Sterne, Samuel Johnson, Kleist, Büchner, Chekhov, Faulkner, Bernhard, Borges, Gertrude Stein (sometimes, in small doses: again, the abstraction), Mac Wellman, Suzan-Lori Parks, Coetzee -- not all Modernists, certainly, but the writers who (well, along with Shakespeare) blew my brain apart and put it back together again.
And alongside it all, SF. At the same time I was learning to read the Modernists (and their predecessors and followers), I was learning to read SF. The two experiences informed each other. In some ways, I read Modernism as if it were SF and SF as if it were Modernism, but more than that, I read each as a kind of response to, and complexification of, reality. It why, when in high school I discovered Philip K. Dick (when I was in high school, most of Dick's books were out of print), he instantly became among my favorite authors -- he melded, it seemed to me then, Kafka, Beckett, and SF. (I'm not sure I'd say that now, but it was how I first read his books.) The Jewel-Hinged Jaw was an inspiring problem for me at the same time that Finnegans Wake was, and it made me view SF as a textual experience in the same way I viewed Modernism as a textual experience.
At the time I was first reading SF, my mother, concerned for my intellectual well-being, asked a very old-school (proudly New Critical) English professor at the college, a wonderful man who remains a friend, "Is science fiction literature?" His response: "No, it's formula fiction." I remember exactly where we were at the time he said this: In our car, driving away from our house, about to turn onto Rte. 3 from River Road. It was another life-changing moment, because it sent me on a quest to figure out what this "literature" thing was (another professor gave me a copy of the 3rd edition of Laurence Perrine's anthology Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense
, which I devoured, and which provided no good answers). Much of my life since then has been spent trying to address, avoid, or complicate my mother's question, our friend's answer, and my own response.**I don't know what (or how) any of this means, exactly. Perhaps it has something to do with The Force.
I don't particularly believe in a thing called Literature, because I've never seen the word wielded in a useful way -- it is a word that people use to condemn, condescend, and marginalize that which they don't know how to appreciate. I spend most of my reading time with the twin loves of my youth, SF and Modernism, and with the love of my recent years, African fiction; Literature has been used against each (though to a different degree with Modernism -- strangely, it's seen by most people as Literature -- indeed, the very embodiment of High Lit -- but it's also resented, and so it has moved from being marginalized as not-Literature by the Arnold Bennetts of the world to being resented as too-Literature by the sorts of folks who most detest and/or misunderstand Josipovici).
The problem remains. And so we must keep reading and writing.
-----------------------------------------------------
*Josipovici, p. 187: "My own 'story', as I have tried to present it here, discovering what it was as I went along, is that only an art which recognizes the pitfalls inherent in both realism and abstraction will be really alive. That is why I warm to the novels of Perec and Bernhard more than to Finnegans Wake or the novels of Updike and Roth, to the pictures of Bacon and Hockney more than to Pollock or Tracey Emin, to the music of Birtwistle and Kurtág more than Cage or Shostakovitch."
**My response at the time was to send him a copy of Pat Murphy's story "Rachel in Love" and dare him to deny it to be literature. He did, though I forget the details of how -- something to do with character development. It was, however, a response that both Modernism and SF had prepared me to reject, but he was a Dickens scholar, and his idea of the ultimate fiction was the Victorian novel, a form that, to this day, I have only occasional interest in. Josipovici, p. 67: "Not having doubts is a blessed state, but it is not the same thing as having genuine authority. There is something hollow about Balzac, Dickens, and Verdi compared with Dante or Shakespeare, but even compared with their older contemporaries, Beethoven and Wordsworth. It doesn't rest on their frequent clumsiness, for that is to be found in Betthoven and Wordsworth. It rests more on the very thing that is the root of their strength as artists and their enormous success as entrepreneurs: their inability to question what it is they are doing. In that sense they are the first modern best-sellers and in their work one can see the beginnings of that split between popularity and artistic depth which is to become the hallmark of modern culture." (I'm wary of some of the implications embedded in that last sentence, but the rest seems right to me, and I do think there is a particular quality of confidence in the power of words as representational tools in fiction that finds a mass audience.)
