Christian Lorentzen doesn't think much of "epiphany-monger" Alice Munro:
There’s something confusing about the consensus around Alice Munro. It has to do with the way her critics begin by asserting her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered shortcomings. So she writes only short stories, but the stories are richer than most novels. Over a career now in its sixth decade, she’s rehearsed the same themes again and again, but that’s because she’s a master of variation.It gets worse:
It might be too much to call her an anti-modernist, rather than someone on whom modernism didn’t leave much of an impression, but her conventionality—a writer "of the old school" in Anne Tyler’s phrase—won’t quite do. For her admirers it needs to be offset by some kind of innovation. They usually point to her manipulation of time – her tic of adding a coda to a story, marked usually by the words "years later"—as if she were the Doctor Who of upmarket short story writing.And worse:
Reading ten of her collections in a row has induced in me not a glow of admiration but a state of mental torpor that spread into the rest of my life. I became sad, like her characters, and like them I got sadder.
6 comments:
"Rose observes something, then experiences something else herself, and years later another thing happens that connects the two incidents and imbues them with meaning."
This is the recipe for most good literature. It's infinitely variable and mysterious. That the reviewer thinks it's a dud approach is very strange. It may be a symptom of the torpor that overcame him from of reading ten Munro books in a row. I wouldn't read ten Munro stories in a row, never mind ten books. I wouldn't drink ten double whiskies in rapid succession either, unless I was trying to prove what a bad ass I was.
I agree that anyone reading 10 books by the same author in a row is likely to feel decimated, cynical, bored, irritated, etc. But I don't think that the formulation is "the recipe for most good literature," because I don't think, for example with poetry, that one needs to be enlightened in any particular way, or presented with an epiphany, in order for it to be good literature. Nor in fiction, with the sense implied here that the passing of time and the presence of uncanny return and connection between incidents should create meaning.
Hi, Nyla,
I generally find the experience of reading work that is not informed by a search of some kind--i.e., engaged in finding "a" meaning, in answering a question, or in recreating a particular experience-- to be an empty one. That doesn't mean that the writing can't be fascinating. In fact, writing that is unconcerned with meaning frees itself up to concentrate wholly on style. As such it often gives the appearance of having revolutionary technique, brilliant surface, etc. This kind of writing, however, is mostly of interest to other writers and its prevalence in the current context may be one of the reasons that poetry has lost most of its general readers. I remember the excitement I felt when I first read Ashbery. It lasted exactly until I figured out what he was doing. The only writings by Ashbery that engage me now are those in which “meaning” floats to the surface as a natural part of his process. All this doesn’t meant that I am against experiment, the so called avant garde, etc. All approaches to poetry are grist for the mill. But the main job of the mill is to create meaning from experience, to makes sense, offer a momentary stay against confusion, enlighten, instruct, etc., etc. I remember one time reading a piece in which a well-known English poet (sorry I can’t remember who it was) was asked why modernism had failed to have much of an impact of English poetry. His answer, if I remember correctly, was that by the forties the Auden generation had taken pretty much everything that was useful in modernism to reinvigorate traditional approaches to poetry. All this isn't to say that a refusal to make meaning can’t be meaningful.
Best,
Pat
Hi Pat,
I understand what you mean about Ashbery. I can't say that I had exactly "figured out" what he was doing, but a certain boredom set in when it seemed line after line elided any kind of meaning. On the other hand, "meaning" doesn't necessarily have to include, for example, some moment of clarity about one's past, or one's awareness of one's subjective views as they sit in the universe. I think there is meaning to be found in Ashbery's use of language-e.g., word juxtapositions or the floating suggestiveness of sounds together. There is meaning in the poet's and reader's enjoyment of language for its own sake (and I never think of that as avant-garde, even if the avant-gardists would like to claim that as their purview).
But yes, all approaches are grist for the mill.
I sometimes wonder too about the experience of beauty, because often I will just take that, in the absence of what many might think of as a "stay against confusion"--and it is a kind of solace, or escape from a particular reality or circumstance. So it has meaning.
I had this experience reading Ange Mlinko's book "Starred Wire" recently.
I do think what is great about poetry (and why I can't--or won't--write fiction) is the quality of the understanding, which need not be the same as narrative understandings and meanings--those particular epiphanies about a subject in the world with particular circumstances. My own work can be abstract, in the Modernist sense of the locus of meaning being found in the style itself, not in a straight pictorial representation of circumstance or even idea. But I wouldn't characterize it as avant-garde.
That is interesting about the Auden generation, and the absence of modernist aesthetics (apparently) perceived by that poet.
Thanks very much for your ideas!
Nyla
Nyla,
I agree that there is meaning to be found in the juxtapositions and floating suggestiveness of sounds together. But language sounds alone don't hold my attention for long when they are not playing against or in the service of the something meaningful. Style can be a source of meaning, but again I think it has to be in the service of something else. Revolutions in style happen because language has become stale and no longer has the power to capture something as old fashioned as truth. I think of Frederick Seidel in the current context, how his style has allowed him to write a credible public poetry, one that really takes on the values of our time. I guess--in the universe of my head, at least--sounds do not exist in isolation. They call out, draw images, ideas and memories to them. If I refuse to engage with what they summon, then I have passed up on a chance to engage with the world, to try and synthesize from the mass of sensory information and ideas some vision that at once anchors me and takes me beyond simplistic formulations of myself and reality. There is also beauty, as you say, though I don't know if beauty as an escape is ultimately meaningful. I'll have to think about it. Beauty as synthesis, yes. Beauty as complexity presented with grace, yes. Thank you for the reference to Mlinko's book, "Starred Wire." I'll look it up.
All the best,
Pat
If you do read Mlinko's book, tell me what you think. I found it baffling in many ways, but not without meaning.
I agree style must be a source of meaning, it's just that my point was that "meaning" might be something intensely introspective, not necessarily the large political ironies that Seidel has manufactured or teased out of the culture, nor the way you used the word truth, if by that you meant universality.
I am not sure aesthetics has addressed that universality since before Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, though maybe English poetry with its English insistence on the empirical, always will.
Beauty as you say is a multivalent concept--perhaps it's true it can't be meaningful as merely escape.
Yes, sounds and juxtapositions should point to something more than themselves, I just meant perhaps that poetry offers a dialogic that is not just truths as generally understood but maybe as the poet's microcosm. It may be insubstantial, though. That is a danger. Maybe the Mlinko book is...
I think the crux of this is to know what we each mean by the word "meaningful."
cheers,
Nyla
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