Hiatus

Due to the events of September, we have entered hiatus, with a hopeful eye toward January 2009, a new name, and attempts at regularity.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008

from the
Nobel Lecture in Literature 1970

I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes. And perhaps under such conditions we artists will be able to cultivate within ourselves a field of vision to embrace the WHOLE WORLD: in the centre observing like any other human being that which lies nearby, at the edges we shall begin to draw in that which is happening in the rest of the world. And we shall correlate, and we shall observe world proportions.

And who, if not writers, are to pass judgement - not only on their unsuccessful governments, (in some states this is the easiest way to earn one's bread, the occupation of any man who is not lazy), but also on the people themselves, in their cowardly humiliation or self-satisfed weakness? Who is to pass judgement on the light-weight sprints of youth, and on the young pirates brandishing their knives?

We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world - but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.

And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness - and violence, decrepit, will fall.

That is why, my friends, I believe that we are able to help the world in its white-hot hour. Not by making the excuse of possessing no weapons, and not by giving ourselves over to a frivolous life - but by going to war!

Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience:

ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.

And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.

Steven Moore's Upcoming History of the Novel

It's a delight to find an interview with Steven Moore here.

ST: Since it’s not yet published, could you summarize the thesis of your work in progress?

SM: It's that the experimental, artsy novel that [reviewer Dale] Peck and others feel began with Ulysses actually began thousands of years ago, and that today's experimentalists are continuing in that venerable tradition. The conventional, realistic novel that dominates the best-seller lists today is a very late development in the long history of the novel, not the novel's default setting. So I begin at the beginning—ancient Egypt, "The Tale of Sinuhe" (c. 1950 BCE)—and show that all early fiction writers were innovative, making up the rules as they went along. At early stages in every culture's history, literary theorists like Aristotle in Greece (and his counterparts in India and China) established rules and expectations for poetry and drama, but ignored prose fiction. Consequently, novelists were free to do whatever the hell they wanted, so I survey the results from around the world up to the year 1600 (right before Don Quixote, 1605). That's where my Volume 1 ends, which is circulating among publishers right now. Volume 2 will begin with Cervantes and end with the most interesting novel of 2012.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today. . .

Can it really be 20 years since DeLillo's Libra? Troy Jollimore writes in Critical Mass:


Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone, according to "Libra"? No: because no one ever does anything alone in the crazy quilt of paranoid consciousnesses, stunted consciences, and misguided intentions that composes the world of this novel. The work of history is the work of groups: loose, shady, poorly organized groups, half of whose members do not know the identities of the other half, or, when they do, know enough not to call them by their real names. And yes: because in the final analysis each consciousness is its own solipsistic world, its own "inward-spinning self." In DeLillo's universe each of us is, in the deepest sense, alone. And the gunman and perennial misfit Lee Harvey Oswald may well be the lonest of the lone.

Cognitive Science and New Journalism

Michael Ganzaniga asks Tom Wolfe in Seed Magazine:

But it's a fascinating thing to think of the role that fiction and make-believe play. Do you feel, when you create a body of fiction, that you're opening up possibilities for people to think about problems in a different way? To confront things they don't yet know about?

Too bad there's no answer forthcoming; the interest of a cognitive neuroscientist seems to trump that of a novelist in this case.

Is a novel a model?

Tyler Cowen's paper explores the notion of the novel as a model, and can be found here.

excerpts:

Novels are more like models than is commonly believed. Some novels present verbal models of reality. I interpret other novels as a kind of simulation, akin to how simulations are used in economics.

"Why don't those authors just come right out and say what they mean?" One of my economist colleagues offered this query when we were discussing the so-called "Great Books." Shortly thereafter the question came why we need the classics when we can work with formal models. Few economists today read Homer, much less work on the problems he raised. On the other side of the divide stand many individuals from the humanities. These individuals spend much of their careers reading the Great Books. They may not reject the idea of formal modeling in the social sciences, but it is distant from their concerns. These individuals believe that models are forced to oversimplify in a way that a literary text does not.

Giambattista Vico (1976 [1744]), in his New Science, struck out the extreme position that myth and “poetic wisdom” are more fundamental means of knowledge than is science. He saw politics and economics as flowing from this more primeval source of wisdom. He writes of myth as a kind of “matrix,” in which other categories of the human understanding, including science, are made intelligible. We need not accept Vico's extreme view about the primacy of story and myth, but nonetheless the two methods of communication and discovery -- model and story -- are not so neatly separable.

The emphasis here is upon economic models, but the notion is ripe for further exploration in regard to models in general.

Uh, no, but . . .

Junot Diaz in the WSJ:

So it's 2008 and the latest edition of the Grand Theft Auto franchise has come upon us like corporate lightning. The new game took in more than $500 million in world-wide sales in its first week. The critical reaction has been widespread and adulatory and in certain corners beyond over-the-top: GTA IV is better than "The Godfather," better than "The Sopranos," better than say, a novel!

Diaz goes on to rebut this, but believes it is not impossible to do so, given the proper imagination.

The Death of the Novel is Alive and Well

"Whatever the causes of its demise—technological or theoretical, overproduction or underconsumption—the putative death of the novel forms the heart of the anxiety of obsolescence. By depicting the genre as an endangered species, critics and novelists alike have built a protected space around the novel—and, not incidentally, the novelist—in which the form and its practitioners are kept safe from the encroachments of the changing contemporary world. By carefully reading the novel of obsolescence, one can begin to uncover how the representations of the novel’s “enemies” function to create that protected space, as well as how technological changes in contemporary culture serve as convenient masks for other, more threatening, social and political changes that confront the novelist. We must begin, however, by taking claims of the novel’s passing with a grain of salt; as Paul Mann points out, “perhaps the avant-garde needs its death to go on living” (38). In this, the historical avant-garde, whose nominal front-lines orientation demanded a continuous rooting out of the belated, and the novel, whose claims to newness require its repeated exhaustion, are not so different. Paraphrasing Mann, we can suggest that the postmodern novel is indeed living out its death for discourse: the death of the novel is alive and well."


from Kathleen Fitzpatrick's The Anxiety of Obsolescence.

China, again

From NPR.org:

Fu doesn't have to worry about the publishing censors. She has been writing novels exclusively for the Internet for more than a year. She now has thousands of loyal readers. They come to find her books on a Web site called Xidian.

Xidian has grown from a small coterie of literature fans to a staff of 70. Many of them are editors who sort through the thousands of novel submissions posted on the site every month. They try and figure out which writers are the best and the most popular, and move those up to the front page.

Wu Wung Xao, one of the site's founders and its general manager, says Xidian gets about 200 million page views a day and is one of China's most popular literary sites.

Thousands per month? Just one of the sites? Is this where the MFAs are going?

Why Writers Can't (?) Go It Alone

A novelist and journalist with mainstream publishing credentials, David Barnett writes in The Guardian:

But there's a sea of dross in the worlds of pop music and movies, too. Quality rises to the surface there, so if the literary industry can relax its perceived inherently snobbish attitude to the output of anything other than the established, traditional publishers, perhaps the same will happen with independent, small press and even self-published books.