On the Margins

I was recently reading a book of Lionel Trilling’s literary criticism– the famous “Liberal Imagination” essays.  One which caught my attention was a critique of Sherwood Anderson.  The essay came out in the ‘forties, after Anderson was dead and all but his 1919 work “Winesburg, Ohio” forgotten.  Still, Trilling’s essay roundly defeated Anderson.  I’m conjecturing here a little, but it seems to me that ever since, the prevailing literary attitude regarding Anderson has been one of airy disapproval, an unwillingness to be “taken in.”  Everyone who reads WInesburg, Ohio enjoys it– there’s no doubt about that– but no one can get away with unabashed admiration for the book.

Why is this?  Who is Anderson and where does he fit in the literary tradition?  What should we make of him now?  I will try to answer these questions.

Anderson is a vapid sentimentalist, trilled Trilling.  He is a warm-hearted and compassionate writer, but not a good one.  He plays on our least artistically sound emotions, he makes us all into saps, and so on and so forth.  Trilling established the classic patronizing view of Anderson.  This view holds that he ought only to be read in your teenage years– when you are still young enough to have your emotional chain yanked.  Trilling has turned Anderson into another Thomas Wolfe– a writer for “serious” sixteen-year-olds with literary pretensions.  If you miss him at that age, you’ll never understand him.

Needless to say, I don’t think this view is fair.  I read Winesburg, Ohio fairly recently.  It wasn’t my first introduction to Anderon, as I’d read a few of his short stories collected elsewhere, such as “The Eggs,” “Death in the Woods,” and “I Want to Know Why.”  I haven’t read any of his novels, unless Winesburg, Ohio can be considered a sort of loosely structured novel, and I can’t say that I want to.  The longer works are mostly regarded as failures.

Who was Sherwood Anderson?  One of those unlucky writers who fit perfectly into literary history, Anderson represented the culmination of several trends in American bookery.  The 19th century– particularly it’s last few decades, and leading into the years before World War One– as beset by an incredibly strict code of morality.   American literature particularly suffered.  All literary critics were expected to gauge books on the strength of their moral uprightness and little else.  If a woman was “fallen,” she had to be really fallen.  If a character gambled or was intemperate, a bolt of lightning from heaven was in order.

All our best writers from the early twentieth century rebelled against this trend fiercely.  Three movements sprang up in tandem– American naturalism, the revolt against the small town, and the revolt against strict sexual mores.  People like Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton were all considered naturalists or realists at one time or another.  All were trying to represent life as it was actually lived– the true photographic reality of a harsh existence.  To even admit that life could be unfulfilling or tragic for some people was deemed a largely “immoral” view at the time, you must understand, so these writers were being courageous.  Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and other people dabbled in a sort of radical naturalism meant to expose social injustice.  The revolt against the small town (long held to be the perfect, idyllic unit of American life) was carried out by Sinclair Lewis, the critic H.L. Mencken, and people like Harold Frederic, who wrote “The Damnation of Theron Ware.”  Almost all these writers were also implicitly attacking sexual mores.

Anderson could be seen as taking all these movements to their necessary radical extremes.  He was, in a way, a realist.  He attacked the small town with a vengeance, and the sexual mores of such places in particular.

But then, I don’t really see Anderson as a mere product of other movements.  For one thing, his stories do not have a photographic realist quality.  In fact, they are oddly surrealistic.  His style is clipped and to-the-point, but this is not, by any means, the result of clumsiness.  It’s very deliberate, and full of a calculated naivete meant to give us the impression, as Trilling noted, that we are reading about a different universe entirely– the dark underside, the twisted roots of our own societies.  When I read Anderson, his style doesn’t remind me of any other prose writers.  The only writers who seem truly Andersonian are two American poets– Edward Arlington Robinson (see poems like “Mr. Flood’s Party,” “Richard Cory,” and “Minniver Cheevy”) and Edgar Lee Masters (see the Spoon River Anthology).  Both write about lonely, repressed, and strangely beautiful people suffering silently in small town America.  Their poems have the same dreamlike quality, and they both give me a strange thrill of American nostalgia.

Anderson more or less fulfills the same purpose.  Everything he wrote– but Winesburg, Ohio and “Death in the Woods” in particular– was written with one guiding purpose in mind: to show the inherent beauty and dignity of all people.  We are all grotesques, according to Anderson.  We are all lonely and maltreated.  None of us is truly capable of communicating or connecting with others– of breaking down the walls that surround us.  But we all have a central human essence which can’t be destroyed.

If this sounds sappy or sentimentalist, as Trilling said it was, it really isn’t.  Anderson is anything but a sentimentalist.  He tells us his stories and lets the reader draw “the lesson.”  A sentimentalist, on the other hand, is a didact who preaches his or her message to an unwilling audience.  None of that can be found in Winesburg, Ohio, which is at times a brutally unsentimental book.

In other words, I don’t feel the need to “apologize” for liking Anderson.  If he has the ability to yank our emotional chains, I think that’s a sign of a powerful writer.  It’s only when a writer fails to communicate an emotional charge that he/she becomes vapid.

In this post, I want to look at a certain myth– the myth of the “political continuum.”  This is the idea that all political ideologies can be placed on a short of spectrum from right to left, the ideologies blending one into the other.  On this scale, we have fascism, reactionary conservatism, military dictatorship, and the like on one side.  These dissolve into various kinds of centrism, which are replaced by democratic socialism on the left-hand side, and finally communism, Bolshevism, Leninism, etc. on the far end of the spectrum.

This myth is useful to people on both extremes of the political question.  The far left is able to use it to put down their social democratic and democratic socialist opponents.  These are deemed “reformist.”  They are accused of being compromisers and wimps, willing and able to roll over in the face of the enemy.  This is what Leninists are always saying of their democratic critics– they just don’t have the guts, the wherewithal, to see the revolution through.  Meanwhile, right-wingers, particularly of the authoritarian brand, are more than happy to see things in light of the continuum.  It allows them to accuse social democrats of being more or less similar to Bolsheviks.  They aren’t as extreme, maybe, but give them an inch and they might just turn into communist firebrands.

The myth is useful for these two groups, so it is perpetuated.  But it’s just not true.  The difference between social democrats and Leninists is in kind, not degree.  The basic radical democrat/democratic socialist position goes something like this: first we need universal suffrage, and direct popular participation in the decisions of government.  This will pose a serious threat to inequality, authoritarianism, and oppression by its very nature.  The people make the decisions, and it becomes much harder to subject them to the yoke of injustice.  Social democrats believe therefore that popular decision making will lead to social justice by the very fact that the majority of people do not want to be oppressed.  This is the most radical political position that a person can take.  It necessarily rejects all forms of unjust power.  It makes the people the masters of their own lives and fates.  Democracy, in other words, when it is really democracy, is the most radical thing in the world.

Leninism, meanwhile, is not radical.  It is “extreme” in the way that all authoritarian ideologies are extreme, but it is also conservative and reactionary.  In other words, it rejects as a matter of absolute principle the participation of the mass of the people and replaces it with a vanguard party, a group of elites, who will supposedly subject the rest of us to progress.  The Bolsheviks, when they seized power, did not do so as a result of a popular revolution.  Their seizure of power was actually a coup d’etat organized by a totalitarian gang.  The Bolsheviks never commanded more than a quarter of the population’s support.  The other 75% almost exclusively supported some form of social democracy, as had been been established by the Provisional Government after the fall of the czar and before Lenin’s rise to power.  This makes sense– the people want to participate i n the government’s decisions.  They want some control over their lives.  Leninism offers neither.

The spectrum, therefore, really isn’t a spectrum at all.  There are actually two fundamental ideas and they are in direct opposition.  There is the democratic urge, the desire to guarantee human rights, to establish the direct participation of the people in the government, and to include all people in the democratic process, regardless of race, gender, class, etc.  This is the only truly radical view.  On the other side of the fence are the reactionaries, the authoritarians, the Leninists and totalitarians and fascists.  These ideologies share one central, guiding belief– the people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions.  Let’s not get these two categories, as different as night and day, confused.

With a province of Pakistan being handed over to Taliban insurgents recently and the Afghan government ratcheting higher and higher on the U.N.’s list of failed states, it’s fairly obvious that things are looking grim for this Central Asian nation.  The question is: what to do?

There is really only one way open to Afghanistan: radical, secular democracy.  Moreover, there are two aspects of this which are particularly necessary for stability and an acceptable human rights situation.  The Afghan people must make the political decisions of the country in a direct, informed, democratic fashion, and women, as well as all ethnic groups in the country, must participate in this process on an equal footing.  Not only would such a democracy be ideal, it is also possible and workable.

There are many obvious obstacles to achieving such a democracy, and to most people, they might seem insurmountable.  The most obvious anti-democratic force in the country is the Taliban, and related insurgent groups, with their stated fundamentalist, misogynist, and anti-democratic goals.  One thing to realize is that these insurgencies are not, for the most part, grassroots responses to the civilian death toll of the US-led invasion.  They are, instead, an attempted coup by a minority of previously privileged warlords who want to go back to the unrestrained despotism they practiced throughout the Taliban years.  So that’s obstacle one.  Obstacle two is the United States government and the regime it supports in Afghanistan.

This may seem absurd.  The typical interpretation is that the US invaded Afghanistan in order to establish democracy.  If democracy fails, therefore, it is the fault of the Afghan people.  This “realist” interpretation is gaining ground.  Some have argued that political events have proven that Afghanistan is not “ready” for democracy.  Others think that Afghanistan isn’t enough of an actual nation-state to support a democracy.

But the truth is that Afghanistan has always been more than ready for democracy, as have most countries in the Third World.  Democracy is not a mystery.  If you are a woman in Afghanistan, you understand intuitively the need to do away with the warlords who threaten you with rape and abuse.  If you are an ordinary citizen you can grasp the evils of tyranny and the wonderful possibilities of freedom.  Democracy isn’t something forced upon a backwards nation by the more enlightened United States, its an intuitive human need, as are human rights.  It’s the United States, the Soviet Union, and other foreign powers who have been holding back democracy in Afghanistan and the region at large.

Afghanistan’s neighbors, Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan– all have a history of dictatorship.  And these dictators have generally been supported by the United States.  Pakistan was ruled by such a dictator (Musharraf) until a mere six months ago.  The other “’stans” all have currently serving dictators or dubious “presidents” operating with current or former US support.  And Iran had the Shah.  As for Afghanistan, every one of its undemocratic regimes received support from foreign powers.  Its monarchs were traded back and forth between Britain and Russia.  Later on, the communist regime received Soviet support.  The United States, meanwhile, supported both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, and later, the Northern Alliance exclusively.

Democracy is a threat to foreign powers because it is unpredictable.  It serves the interests of the people rather than those of a foreign government.  Imperial influences in Afghanistan have been and continue to be opposed to democracy, as evidenced by the Karzai government.  This supposedly democratic state is actually comprised of Northern Alliance warlords, guilty of some of the worst atrocities.  The parliament includes former mujaheddin, and the governors of many provinces are actually the same strongmen who have dominated the regions in an undemocratic fashion for years.  Herat province, for example, is ruled by a “governor” who also holds a key position in Karzai’s cabinet.  However, this governor is in fact a Northern Alliance warlord who has imposed Taliban-like rule over the province.  Voter intimidation by such warlords is rampant come election time, and people within each region are encouraged to vote into power the same strongmen over and over again under threat of death.

So what hope, then, is there for democracy?  First of all, a democracy cannot be imposed by a foreign power.  Such powers only know how to make deals with dictators and warlords and are entirely unequipped to support grassroots democratizing movements.  Democracy has to come from within the population or it won’t come at all.  Is this possible?

I point to one organization I particularly admire: RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan).  A human rights organization, the group runs orphanages, schools, and training programs for Afghan refugees, while also doing political advocacy work.  It supports radical secularism, democracy, and women’s equality.  The group has been unflinching in it’s condemnation of undemocratic regimes of all kinds.  During the communist era, the group fought as a part of the resistance to the Soviet-backed regime.  However, while most of the mujaheddin (later the Taliban) fought against the new regime because it had opened schools to women as well as men, RAWA fought against it for the sake of democratic government.  Later on, RAWA was known for its radical opposition to the Taliban regime, doing perilous journalistic and documentary work under threat of death.  They amassed some of the most chilling first-hand reports of the Taliban’s atrocities.  Now they are known for their opposition to the US invasion, which they see as an act of collusion with Northern Alliance warlords.  They are also radically opposed to the remnants of the Taliban, fundamentalism in general, and the Karzai government.

RAWA and similar grassroots organizations are the key.  And if foreign governments would cease their interference, these groups might have a chance of survival and victory.

I recently finished reading Jose Saramago’s classic novel “Baltasar and Blimunda.”  Saramago is a Portuguese writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1998.  This is the second Saramago novel I’ve read– the other being Blindness, which has now become a movie.  But B and B was the first Saramago book to reach an international audience.  Even if it is now less widely known and read that some of his later works, it catapulted him onto the world scene, was translated into countless languages, and made his reputation.

The funny thing about Saramago’s novels is that they are political without being pedantic.  Yet it’s hard to see how they manage it.  I imagine Harold Bloom and other sworn enemies of political literature letting out a dismal groan if I were to describe a novel about two outcasts– a crippled working class soldier and a sorceress who’s mother is exiled by the Inquisition– as they fall in love against the backdrop of the evils of corruption, monarchical tyranny, and the cruelty of the Church.  That’s what B and B is about, by the way.  But Bloom has described Saramago as one of the best writers in the world today.  So how does Saramago avoid the charge of didacticism?  I’ll try to answer this question.

First of all, he’s absolutely genuine.  The voice of his narrator is unchanging.  it views the events from afar with a detached irony and comments on them with a flood of prose, set off with commas and almost no periods (Saramago’s lack of punctuation is a classic trait of his work).  The words and descriptions are piled on, but they never preach or sermonize.  All the narrator offers us is the occasional gem of wit and wisdom– some of which are screamingly funny, some of which are sad and thought-provoking.  The characters are not sentimentalized.  No Little Nells or Cosettes here.  They are lovable and pitiable because they are human, not because they are exaggerated caricatures of innocence.

Saramago is a master of irony, but he is also a master of compassion and pity.  They sets his irony apart from the irony of, say, Waugh, or some other hilarious but heartless comedian.  The major themes of the novel are the inherent human qualities which unite us, the personal element in political events, the cost in human life of power and corruption and inequality, etc.  In all this, Saramago appeals to something essentially human.  I feel like I understand a little more about what it means to be alive when I read his books.  They are truly universal art, and their characters stand for all people.  Baltasar and Blimunda may be unique– one is missing a hand, the other has a sort of x-ray vision– but they are all of us at the same time.  They are real people while the kings and monarchs and priests who rule over them in the novel’s pages, and who dominate the historical accounts, are not.

Saramago is not alone.  He belongs to a broad trend in world literature, which, I think, represents the best possible hope for the novel in today’s world.  The most popular term for this tendency is “magical realism,” meaning that characters who seem to inhabit our own universe and spiritual plane interact with spells, magic, and other supernatural entities which seem somewhat out of place.  Mixed up in the movement is the effort to portray entire cultures and times and places as “magical”– as existing in a state closer to the unexpected and irrational.

The most obvious examples are Latin American writers.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez, of course, comes to mind, as do Asturias, a Guatemalan writer who wrote “Men of Maize” and “El Senor Presidente,” as well as Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban author of “The Kingdom of this World,” about the Haitian revolution.  But magical realism goes beyond Latin America.  Saramago himself is an obvious European example.  Gunter Grass in Germany is another.  I’m also thinking of Karel Capek in Czechoslovakia, Mikhail Bulgakov in the Soviet Union, and many other writers, past and present.

To me, the term “Magical Realism” doesn’t quite cover it.  I can think of another literary genre that dealt with inhabitants of this world interacting with mystical, supernatural events: the fairy tale.  That’s just it, these books are modern fairy tales.  They have all the essential elements of the genre.  They are playful and colorful.  They’re characters are universal and their narration uninvolved.  The style of the whole genre reminds me forcefully of The Arabian Nights and their mental atmosphere.  The emotions experienced by the people on the page are very basic and essential human emotions.  What’s more, these magic realist novels are ironic at the expense of power.  They mock kings and dictators and tyrants and conquerors.  Just like fairy tales, they are the stories of ordinary people; they are populist literature, but they express their opposition to power behind veiled hints and winks and half-smiles.

Fairy tales were often the product of the storytelling of ordinary people in monarchies and empires and other authoritarian structures.  And today, magic realist novels seem to appear most often in the midst of dictatorship.  Bulgakov under Stalin, Asturias under a series of Guatemalan military dictators (installed by our own government), Saramago under Salazar, Grass under Hitler, Carpentier under Batista, and so on and so forth.  Fairy tales continue to be used to undermine tyrants and warlords.  They are deeply subversive simply because they are popular, amusing, and full of the life of the common people.  In countries without a history of dictatoship, like our own, there is less of a sense of solidarity between writers and ordinary people.  Writers mostly write about other writers, or about nothing at all.  We have David Foster Wallace and Georges Perec and William Gaddis and John Barth and all the other writers of “the postmodern novel”– that enormous, encyclopedic tome.  They may be excellent writers, but they are also increasingly irrelevant.  And as soon as novels become irrelelvent, they will head the way of cave painting and other defunct art forms.  But magical realism– all my hopes for the future of literature rest on this experiment.

Around the world today there are murderers and dictators and executioners running wild.  There are torture chambers and dungeons and other supposed relics of an older, less enlightened age.  Very few of us would clam that these things are good or desirable.  But in practice, almost everyone, it seems, supports their use.  Or is it everyone?  We’ll get to that.

The problem is that very few people recognize that a dictator is a dictator wherever he/she may go.  We tend instead to divide into camps.  Us and them.  Those in the west, on both sides of the political spectrum, spread the same political fiction.  I’ll quote The Economist, which recently referred to “China’s interference with Western attempts to spread prosperity and democracy.”  Mainstream liberals, centrists and right-wingers would all buy into this essential worldview.  The West, and the United States of America in particular, is engaged in a battle against dictatorship and ignorance and poverty the world over.  The idea that “we spread democracy” is rampant among intellectuals.  Even radical leftists frequently accept this concept.  And as soon as a person believes that “the West spreads democracy” then they are more or less openly condoning the abuses of the many dictators, past and present, who have carried out their atrocities with Western support.  I don’t want to list all the examples of right-wing military dictatorships and undemocratic regimes supported by the U.S. in the past.  That would take too many posts.  Besides, even those who admit those crimes now believe that we have been cured of that defect.  I’d rather give examples of dictatorships supported and condoned as of this minute by our own government.

To name just a few:  The current Tunisian government, the government of Algeria, the Dos Santos government in Angola, Dennis Sassou Nguesso in the Republic of the Congo, the Deby government in Chad, the government of Ethiopia, Biya in Cameroon (although most of his support comes from France), Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, the U.A.E., the Jordanian monarchy, and the monarchy of Kuwait.

Meanwhile, many of those who are aware of these examples turn a blind eye to the abuses of other dictatorships.  Many radicals seem to think it’s enough for the United States to criticize a dictator to make him/her a hero and freedom fighter.  Of course, sometimes the “criticism” that comes from Western governments is only hot air.  Take China for example, which is the most populous dictatorship in history.  Beyond that, it has one of the worst human rights records in the world, with innumerable executions and examples of torture reported each year, not to mention the unnamed crimes which take place behind the screen of one of the most effective and thorough systems of censorship in the world.  But China is good for business, and Western governments, if they criticize the regime at all, do so as a friendly reminder.  Even the minor nod toward human rights by Clinton on her first visit to China was a major break with the traditional glad-handing of the Chinese elite.

But those radicals I mentioned earlier are quick to support dictatorships when there are supposed “progressives” or “anti-imperialists” manning the helms.  So we have Sean Penn and his ilk defending human rights and then turning around the next minute and condoning the Cuban government.  Some communists still support China, and, by extension, the rotten regimes China condones.  Chinese foreign policy, by the way, is as supportive of dictatorship as Soviet or American Cold War policy ever was.  I don’t have to mention North Korea, Myanmar, the Bashir government in Sudan, and all the rest.

This is why it seems that just about everyone supports dictatorship, torture, murder, etc. in some circumstances.  If it’s done by “our side” we jump on the bandwagon.  But I have to remind myself that’s it’s only intellectuals and powerful people who feel the need to identify with one side or the other, “right” or “left,” both of which have tyrants and murderers aplenty.  But “right” and “left” are fictions, and the vast majority of people realize this.  There are only two real classes of people: murderers and murdered, torturers and tortured, the powerful and the people.  My own loyalties lie with no government or state or ideology, but with the eternal battle against unjust power in all its forms.

What is to be done with the boy?  The boy being me, that is.  This question ought to be answered, and I’ll attempt to do so in this post.

First of all, as you know by now, I “want to be a writer.”  Now a writer isn’t someone who writes.  If it is, then I’m a writer already.  A writer is someone who writes things that people read.  In the early days, I took the word “writer” to mean novelist, which was a role I felt I could easily fill.  It was only later that I discovered certain problems: 1.)  A novelist can’t just be a novelist unless (s)he wants to live in extreme poverty.  2.)  From what I hear about it, I don’t think I would like extreme poverty.  3.)  I don’t particularly enjoy writing novels.

So other opportunities began to present themselves.  In no time I was transformed into a “man of letters.”  This was my new career.  It involved the occasional novel, along with a short story here and there, literary criticism, essays, plays, etc.  And it was literary criticism which really drew me.

Now, I can think of three reasons why I ought to be a literary critic.  1.)  I love literature.  2.)  I want to be one.  3.)  Writing literary criticism makes me happy.

It sounds straightforward enough.  But I can also think of a few reasons why I shouldn’t be a literary critic.  First of all, I’ve never been able to keep up with contemporary literature.  The thought of reading a great deal of it bores me.  For some odd reason, I feel irresistibly drawn to dead literary controversies and even deader authors.  I’m not sure why this is.  Partly, I can’t make sense of the muddle that is modern literature.  I also identify with the controversies of the past because of my tendency to project myself onto the literary critics I love– Hazlitt, say, or Orwell or Shaw.

The second problem with my chosen career is the problem with all writing.  You can’t just do it.  You have to do it and sell it.  I’ve been writing literary essays for at least nine months now.  Most of them are sitting at home or on a shelf somewhere.  At one point I made a serious effort to search the web for an interested party– a magazine or other publication that could conceivably want to publish the pieces.  I gave up.  There is no “Personal Lives of the English Romantic Poets Weekly.”  No one wants to publish an essay on Agnes Grey or the historical inaccuracies of Baroness Orczy.  Or if they did, no one would believe that I had anything worthwhile to say about these things, given my refusal to study English literature in a formal setting.  And let’s say I had a bit of success and got a piece published.  I would get a small check.  Then I would attempt to publish another.  Ten or fifteen years down the line, I might have enough to fill a book.  That would go to the stores and rapidly disappear– and not because it was sold out.

But let’s ignore these problems for a second.  Suppose I could spend my life writing only about what I want to write about (which is all any writer wants, really).  So, let’s say I am free to devote myself exclusively to dead writers and dead issues.  This is what most English academics do, by the way, but I’ve explained before why it is not an option for me.  To recap: the sort of criticism they churn out in universities is not at all what I have in mind or what I like to write.  But let’s say someone publishes my ramblings about dead authors.  Then we reach the part of the story where I have to read all of the dead authors, every single one of them.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always felt an innate magnetic attraction to certain books and a repulsion from others.  Usually, this has to do with whether or not I can identify with the personality and human essence of the author.  I’ve explained before that literature should break down and dispel human loneliness.  So I have a strong desire to see myself in the people I read.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t like writers with whom I do not identify.  But it does sap my desire to write about them.  Let’s take poets, for instance.  I love to write about Shelley and Burns and Blake and the early Wordsworth because I see part of my own personality in their verses.  They feel strangely near and dear.  It’s not just a manner of enjoyment.  I get a kick out of Browning.  I enjoy Tennyson, particularly “Locksley Hall.”  I’m a fan of Housman and Hardy and Rupert Brooke.  But at the same time, all of these are strangely stuffy and distant.  I approach them as poets, not as human beings.  They are names in an anthology and little more.

When it comes to novels, there are a huge number that I look forward to reading or that attract some innate part of my personality.  I look forward to reading various novels from the extra-European world, like those of Asturias, Naipaul, Ngugi wa Thiongo, and many more.  I look forward to reading Samuel Butler, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Godwin, Goethe, Gogol, ETA Hoffmann, the rest of Victor Hugo, the rest of Ibsen, “Max Havelaar,” “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,” “Tristram Shandy,” Fielding, Smollett, Strindberg, Tolstoy, the rest of Dostoevsky, Zola, all of Chesterton’s novels, Gorky, the rest of Waugh, the rest of Jose Saramago, and many many more.  But the problem is that there are a tremendous number of other novels which I am expected to work my way through if I am to be properly educated for the task of criticism.  And I hesitate.  My mind boggles at the thought of reading a single page of Samuel Richardson, let along one of his vast, brick-like novels.  Better to use him as a doorstop.  I yawn at the prospect of working my way through Proust’s labyrinthine memories.  I have very little interest, I must admit, in his cookies and the trains of thought they engender.  I hear Trollope is worth reading, but I stare at Orley Farm and Barchester Towers and Framley Parsonage and my hand doesn’t exactly itch to pick them up.  I could go on.

I know that there are plenty of literary critics who focus solely on the authors who interest them and ignore the rest.  It’s perfectly legitimate.  I know that even Hazlitt, that eminent critic, eventually got fed up with reading new books and settled down to reread the volumes he had known and loved since his early days.  I don’t have to read Samuel Richardson to become a literary critic.  I know this.  But then there are those other problems I’ve listed.  It’s difficult.  But at least I have a blog, which will, obligingly enough, publish whatever nonsense I send its way.

I’ve spent most of my reading life buried in novels.  Poetry didn’t come my way until I was fifteen or so, and even after that, the poetry bug lay dormant.  It was Robert Burns who gave birth to it, and Shelley who gave it new life.  As for short stories and plays, these worked their way in here and there.  But it was only in the last year (my first year of college) that I’ve started reading short stories in bulk.

So it seems odd that I would have more to say about short stories and poetry than about novels.  But then again, I’ve read a range of short stories and poems– a broad range.  I’ve sampled stories from many different times and places.  I can also read them in bulk.  There are anthologies galore, and these give me a heart-palpitating sensation of racing through a number of authors whom I wouldn’t reach for years if I were exclusively reading novels.  I find it very difficult to draw broad critical conclusions from novels.  It’s not easy to stake a claim in the controversies of the genre.  Modernist or Realist or sentimentalist, I’ve sampled some of each, but not enough to say outright which I prefer.

As for the short story, my chances are somewhat improved.  Looking back over the list in the last post, I can pick out a few obvious trends.  I came up with the list just by browsing the tables of contents of a few favorite anthologies.  There was  no “critical method” to the selection– I even listed them in more or less random order.  But I can see now what I enjoy.

First of all, I realized that the only story which I had first read and encountered in school to make the cut was “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  And that story had to fight an uphill battle against my prejudices regarding English classes.  Schools tend to favor a certain type of story.  The short, ambiguous piece with one dominant symbol.  Stories like Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums” or Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants.”  These stories fail to move me.  They allow the English teacher to draw a neat equals sign between the story and some encompassing symbol.  This reduces stories to a handy yes or no question.  It’s perfect for fill-in-the-blank quizzes and multiple choice tests.

I don’t object to symbolism as such, but I need an emotional charge from a story.  If there is a symbolic subtext, I want to dimly grasp its outlines as an emotional response.  I want to feel the higher truth looming above the narrative.  But as soon as you verbalize whatever the “message” is, it’s lost for good.

Some of the stories on the list are symbolic in this respect.  “The Garden Party,” “The Other Side of the Hedge,” and a few others would fit the bill.  These stories have a symbolic meaning, but one which is communicated emotionally to the reader.  It’s a mind-meld, as all good writing should be, and not an intellectual burden.  The reader doesn’t have to “figure out” the meaning, it simply appears in a dim form.  You can’t mistake it, but you also can’t verbalize and codify it.  No fill-in-the-blank here.

Some other stories on the list, such as “How Beautiful with Shoes,” “That Evening Sun,” are also well-constructed and many-layered symbolic pieces.  I respect these stories from a distance.  I emotionally perceive the intelligence and skill involved, and the stories move me, but not as directly and thoroughly as some of the more straightforward pieces.

Looking back on the list, I’m struck by how many sci-fi, horror, and fantasy stories made the cut.  This is odd considering how little of those genres I generally read.  But I think that’s really a product of the short story form itself.  Gothic tales a la Poe and E.T.A. Hoffman are classics of the genre.  There are also the “weird stories” of Blackwood, Lovecraft, Dunsany, etc.  Works of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy have entered the short story Canon and are regarded as pieces of true literature.  In the novel, meanwhile, they are still frowned upon.  This makes my life easier, because I can enjoy the thrills and chills of the genres (which may be cheap) and still keep my intellectual self-esteem.  It’s a lame rationalization, I know, but almost all readers are subject to the need to read “clever” things.  And the first step to doing away with this prejudice is to admit it.

It seems the stories I love best are the ones which communicate an emotional response.  That’s healthy and natural, and fits in pretty well with Tolstoy’s “Universal art” theory– the theory that ordinary people, you and me, are the sole arbiters of what is good and bad to read, and not “experts.”  So I enjoy the chilling tales I’ve referred to above, as well as sad, poignant character sketches and hilarious satires. “The Apostate,” any Thurber story, “Main Currents…,” and others would fall into this second category.

But probably my absolute favorite type of story is the understated Realist character sketch.  These I find to be the most moving and poignant.  The Realist sketch has a silent narrator.  It relates people, places, and facts, but doesn’t give us a hint as to what they are feeling.  The counter-intuitive lesson that the best way to move the reader is to present him/her with a situation and remain silent, to force the reader to come to his/her own emotional conclusions– this was never grasped by the sentimentalists.  But it was grasped by Maupassant, Chekhov, Crane, and others.  Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif” is probably my all-time favorite short story.  It is the perfect example of the silent narrator.  Another Maupassant story which is fairly similar is “Mademoiselle Fifi.”  Chekhov’s “Sleepy” and “The Lady with the Dog” work in much the same way.  As does Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”– a moving war story.  I think the short story is suited to this form for two reasons.  First, the brief outlines of a character which are introduced in a short story give that character the universal touch.  Second, the Realist lack of detail gives the imagination free reign.  Just as lack of moralizing heightens the poignancy of a story, lack of detail heightens the realism.

What kinds of stories don’t I like?  I don’t like the stories of Bret Harte and O. Henry.  The whole tradition of American facetiousness and condescension, the way these two writers have of talking down to their characters, grates on me horribly.  I don’t like stories which are insoluble puzzles.  I don’t like stories which are didactic– by which I mean, they tell you what you ought to take away from the story, rather than showing it to you.  I don’t like stories which have a symbolic meaning but absolutely no emotional core or substance (such as Woolf’s “The Haunted House”).  Stories, like all art, must convey some sort of emotion to the reader.  The purpose of art is to break down the barriers of loneliness and isolation which surround us, to foster some sort of empathy and human connection in this word.  If you keep that goal in mind, you can’t go wrong.

1.) The Garden Party by Kate Mansfield

2.) The Saint by V.S. Pritchett, an ironic look at his upbringing as a Christian Scientist

3.) The Other Side of the Hedge by E.M. Forster, a bizarre, surrealistic story– not at all typical of Forster’s style.

4.) How Beautiful with Shoes by Wilbur Daniel Steele, a weird and somewhat disturbing story about a man who escapes from an insane asylum– explores the supposed similarity between genius and insanity.

5.) The Apostate by George Milburn, a very obscure story I found in Milton Crane’s fifty great short stories anthology.  It’s a very funny look at a father’s reaction to his son’s departure for college.

6.) The Catbird Seat by Thurber, it’s Thurber– need I say more?

7.) Main Currents of American Thought by Irwin Shaw, a very funny and very depressing story about a young man trying to survive as a writer of lame radio scripts while supporting his family.

8.) Sleepy by Chekhov, a not very well known story by Chekhov about a young servant girl attempting to stay awake and watch the baby: it ends up as a subtle look at social inequality.

9.) The Lady with the Little Dog by Chekhov, a sad, poignant love story about the disappointments of adult life.

10.) The Eggs by Sherwood Anderson, a comedy which actually reveals a very sad truth about struggling to “make it” in America.

11.) The Library of Babel by Borges, a library which contains every book which has ever been and could ever be written.  Yes, it’s weird.  Yes, It’s Borges.  Yes, it’s very good.

12.) Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius by Borges

13.) The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood, an excellent horror story– my personal favorite by Blackwood who is a master of the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century genre of “weird fiction.”  It’s a creepy tale about the Candian wilderness.

14.) An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, a troubling masterpiece of Realism and a great war story.

15.) The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce

16.) Boule de Suif by Maupassant, “Butterball” in English, about the hypocrisy and cruelty of a group of bourgeois French people who sacrifice the good-natured prostitute of the story’s title to a group of invading Germans.

17.) Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane

18.)The Horla by Maupassant, an uncharacteristic story for Maupassant about madness and an shapeless horror known as the Horla.

19.) Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville, an early piece of absurdist, almost Kafka-esque fiction.

20.) A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

21.) The Conversion of the Jews by Philip Roth, a young boy refuses to accept the teachings of his Yeshiva class and causes an uproar.

22.) A Descent into the Maelstrom by Poe, my favorite Poe story.  The title says it all.  A great piece of imagination.

23.) Micromegas by Voltaire, an early classic of sci-fi and Voltaire’s most famous short story.

24.) The Man of the House by Frank O’Connor

25.) The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I think I’ve made my point about where I stand on the issues in poetry fairly clear by now.  To me, there is such a tremendous difference between pre-Romantic poetry and Romantic poetry that all other questions fall to the way-side.  There is the poetry of courtiers and the hangers-on of monarchs.  Then there is the poetry which came after the Romantic Revolution– the poetry of the people, complete with all the drama and power of real human life, love, and pity.  There’s really no contest.  You show me all of Andrew Marvell, and I’ll show you one short poem by Wordsworth that puts it to shame.

But when it comes to the sweeping changes that came about in the novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I’m not quite so sure where I stand.  The changes are not so clear-cut, so incredibly sharp.  Or if they are, the merits are more evenly distributed across all sides of the controversy.

Let me summarize the changes as I see them.  In the eighteenth century, the great novelists were people like Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett, who wrote bawdy picaresque comedies. They were written by the upper class for the upper class, as was pre-Romantic poetry.  Still, I don’t bear them any ill will, although, since I haven’t read them yet, I can’t claim to be a fan.  But they do seem like genuinely good-hearted, fun-loving attempts.  There were other novelists in the eighteenth century– the creators of the “Sentimental Novel,” say, which I also have not read, although this time I’m grateful for that fact.  There was also Samuel Richardson, but I don’t think anyone in our modern world has the time or the inclination to slog through one of his vast tomes.  In total, the eighteenth century novel was created by people who would have felt pretty comfortable writing pre-Romantic poetry.  But the need for “real life, love, and pity,” is not as strong in novels as it is in poetry, not by a long shot.  These novels (or at least some of them) did well enough without any of the three.

The only purpose of poetry, for me, is to offer some sort of profound emotional charge.  That’s why “real life, love, and pity” are so all-important.  Novels can offer that same charge, but they can do other things as well.  They can amuse us or make us wonder or question.  So my criterion for fiction isn’t quite so strict.  I need some kind of lasting impression from a book.  It has to form a pleasant corner in my mind which I can return to and romp around in every once in awhile.  Which isn’t to say books have to be “pleasant,” by any means.  The desire to return and romp can be extended to very disturbing and emotionally unsettling books as well, or even ones which are difficult to understand.

So anyways, that’s the eighteenth century.  As for the nineteenth century, it was host to an all-out profusion of novels.  I would divide them into two rough categories.  There were the comfortable, rainy-day sort of novels which flourished in the first sixty years or so of the century.  Here I would include the most famous writers of the early nineteenth century, including Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, as well as the great Victorian novelists, including Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontes, and so forth.  This I would label the Sentimental School.  They were followed by a second and very different generation– the Realists, the Naturalists, and the later Victorians, such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.  There were a few others hanging around, like Trollope and Meredith, but they are harder to categorize.

At first glance, it might seem like my need for “real life, love and pity,” is a sentimental impulse.  I need drama and emotion, I want to blot the ink on the page with my tears.  But then again, there’s that word “real.”  I find Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, Southey, Burns, etc. to be real.  But the nature of sentimentalism is that it is not real.  It’s sham emotion and it grates on me.

The problem with sentimentalism is not easy to define.  The whole school is easy to mock (”It would require a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell” as Wilde put it).  But the smarmy-ness of the whole genre isn’t what gets to me.  I think the real problem with the sentimental novelists is that they were terrified of human beings.  They refused to accept what we know to be basic human jealousies or imperfections.  They were convinced that They had to pull their characters around on strings.  If they misbehaved or did something inconsistent with the strictest virtue, a lightning bolt from heaven was in order, or something along those lines.  They set up that wretched contraption known as the “Victorian plot” and set it off on its interminable clockwork.  Characters might develop a mind and personality of their own if they weren’t constantly being jerked along by wills from dead relatives, sudden windfalls, marriage proposals, or any of the other things which seem to spring upon them ever ten pages or so.  The great thing about the Realists, the Flauberts and Zolas and Maupassants and all the rest, was their willingness to be honest about human motivations and human behavior.  This, at least, helps break down some of the loneliness which surrounds us all.  It is wonderful to see people like ourselves on the page– more wonderful by far than the insipid angels that crowd the pages of the sentimentalists.

Not that I’m attacking Dickens, the Brontes, Gaskell, and the rest.  I admire all of these writers.  But they still suffer from the problems I’ve listed above.  So here I am– a Realist in my principles, totally opposed to sentimentalism, but I can’t shake my love of these writers, the great Victorians.

For a long time, I was one of those reflexively left-wing people who feel a guilty affinity with supposedly “progressive” undemocratic regimes.  Castro claimed to be a socialist, and so did I.  The same was true of Mao and Chavez and all the rest.  Even though, intellectually, I believed whole-heartedly in political democracy, I still felt an inexplicable tug toward these dictators, and, in arguments, frequently wound up defending them, almost against my will.  Yes, they were dictators, yes they did this, that, and the other, these I readily admitted.  Never did I try to defend these particular attributes.  But I did make such dubious assertions as: “Mao’s regime may have been undemocratic, but at least it provided universal education, etc.”  Similar things could and were said about Castro.  I didn’t ever defend the Soviets, I’m proud to say.  That particular regime was so rotten that I realized the best thing to do was to keep my distance.

I guess all of this stemmed from an assumption that poverty, drudgery, etc. were the worst fates that could befall human beings.  And of course, socialism promised the demise of these evils.  So I was on the side of the people, the masses, and all the rest of it.  But I was still bothered by a certain fundamental paradox: how could undemocratic socialist and communist regimes be on the side of the people?  It was a contradiction of terms.  How could anyone be on the side of the masses if they denied the masses the right to vote, to organize, to make decisions and control their own lives?  My heroes were Robert Burns and Shelley and Orwell and Hazlitt and countless other champions of the people.  Writers like these spoke with a love of justice and a hatred of tyranny that resonated with me.  And as a good leftist, I tried to feel the same way about Lenin and Trotsky.  I couldn’t do it.  The cold, calculating totalitarians filled me with innate disgust, even when I tried to feel otherwise.

Then one day, it hit me.  The worst fate a human being could suffer was to be denied democracy.  To lose the ability to control one’s life and make decisions and have a fair say in one’s own government.  If we could somehow secure genuine democracy the world over, then those other problems, poverty, drudgery, and so forth, would disappear.  The victims of poverty and drudgery, the masses of human beings, would decide for themselves how to solve these problems.  Give them the ability to make decisions and everything would fall into place.  This was the ultimate unification of socialism and democracy for me.  I favored a socialist platform as a means to end social ills.  But this platform and the solution to these ills could only be and would only be reached through genuine democracy (and I don’t just mean a government of elected representatives but genuine, direct democracy).

This gave me a level of clarity I’d never felt before.  The clouds rolled back and the angels started to sing.  Never again would I be haunted by the Stalinist work-camps and the Ukrainian famine.  I had bid adieu to all totalitarians and pointed my boat towards the sunny shores of radical democracy.

Today I am a radical democrat as well as a socialist.  This is the first time I’ve ever felt completely free from guilt in my political life.  I can attack right-wing military dictatorships without having to say good things about left-wing ones.  I can assail a U.S. foreign policy which supports tyrants while showing equal distaste for the foreign policy of China.  Tyrants the world over, left-wing or right-wing, fear me!  Or rather, fear your own people!

I should also address the neocons, who, of course, claim to be “spreading democracy.”  But to impose democracy is not democratic, and I should also add, spreading democracy is anything but the real goal of this coterie.  A democratic world would be the neocon’s worst nightmare.  Reactionaries love dictators and always will, becuase dictators are predictable and can be bought and sold.  Don’t confuse my desire to spread democracy across the globe with messianic Bush-ism.  I believe that ordinary people around the world innately desire democracy and loathe tyranny.  And, if you look at history, it’s fairly clear that, in almost ever case, it’s been Western governments which have stubbornly prevented democracy in what would otherwise be a flourishing democratic Third World.