Scratching my head over here . . .

(Edited for clarity)

Over at The New Republic's blog The Plank, there's a very odd post by Max Fisher on why U.S. writers have been overlooked for the Nobel Prize for Literature. After citing committee chair Horace Engdahl's contention that U.S. writers are, in essence, too provincial in their concerns to be taken seriously by the world literary community, Fisher offers up another possibility:

The committee doesn't oppose Americans--they oppose postmodernism, which has dominated American literature since the 1960s. This would explain the exclusion of not just Americans, but of prominent non-American postmodernists like Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco. It would also partly explain Engdahl's statement: Anyone can see that the U.S. participates in a "big dialogue of literature"--the issue is that it isn't a dialogue he thinks is worthwhile.

After all, the American authors who have been denied the prize have something far more significant than their nationality in common: Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and William Burroughs are all leading figures in the postmodern tradition. Postmodernism has been central to American literature for decades. David Foster Wallace, whose death last month at age 46 rocked the literary world, could not have been more postmodern.

Of course, read the whole thing.

There's plenty to argue with here, but that's part of its problem: It's almost too weird, too incoherent, to argue with, that incoherence stemming from cramming a book's worth of stuff into a post of a few hundred words. It assumes, without stating it, a definition for postmodernism and then lists writers who fit this unknown definition, apparently assuming that we'll just nod our heads in agreement at the list. Moreover, the names Fisher lists apparently are (or were, in the cases of Burroughs and Wallace) worthy of consideration by the Nobel committee, and, well, let's just say some are worthier than others. Also notable by their absence are other venerable U.S. writers--John Updike (not a favorite of mine, but your mileage may vary) and (duh) Cormac McCarthy, to name just two--but I don't think they would comfortably fit in the "postmodern tradition" (is than an oxymoronic term?) . . . but then again, a couple of novels aside, does Roth? Finally, there's the piece's starting point, Horace Engdahl's argument that U.S. literature is too insular in nature. How does one even begin to address such a claim? (UPDATE: Randall begins to do this--and does it very well, I might add--in a pot-meet-kettle-style post here.)

Anyway. This is here not because I want to set out to respond coherently to a rather chaotic post but because I thought some of you might find this interesting at some level.

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Blindness

This, contra the subject of my previous post, appears to be worth your while.

This is based on the excellent novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago. The novel is a fast--because absolutely gripping--read; I hope you'll have a chance to read it before going to see the film. The premise: an unexplained blindness suddenly strikes masses of people worldwide, and world governments quarantine the afflicted in compounds of various sorts in their attempts to halt the spread, dropping off food to them but otherwise leaving them to fend for themselves. It is not pretty, as you might imagine. There is squalor and violence as the need to survive leads to the emergence of baser instincts in some. But there is also courage and decency and love--it seems that the need to survive can also bring out our better angels.

Fans of McCarthy's The Road should like Blindness as well. Though their premises are very different and they end in different ways, they traverse much the same thematic terrain. In fact, while reading The Road I was struck by the similarity of its texture to that of Saramago's novel.

It sounds strange to say, "Go see Blindness" but, well, you should. Or at least read the novel.

UPDATE: Christopher Orr's review of the film isn't positive, but he does raise the question I did in comments of how, given film's inherently visual nature, this particular film would deal with a text most of whose characters cannot see.

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"Ideology of form"

In what sense might one promote a politics when choosing to write, say, a sonnet rather than a blank-verse poem on the same subject, or when making decisions about diction in that poem? Or when a novelist chooses odd, a-chronological arrangements of material, or multiple narrators who speak on behalf of a character who never speaks directly to the reader on his/her own behalf, instead of a conventional, single-voiced narrator relating the story's action in chronological order? Or, for that matter, choosing to write a novel at all?

Reading Hosam Aboul-Ela's intriguing book Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition raises these questions for me--or, rather, reminds me of them--via his discussion of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Along the same lines as Edouard Glissant in his book, Faulkner, Mississippi (which I first posted about here), Aboul-Ela makes the case that Faulkner might be usefully read from what he calls an Other South (roughly, a Third-World) perspective, in that, following historian C. Vann Woodward's argument, the South during Reconstruction and, depending on one's politics, maybe even beyond 1964, was in essence colonized by the United States government, economically as well as politically. Thus, Aboul-Ela argues, perhaps Faulkner's interests and agendas diverge from those of the other "high Modernist" and, for that matter, other American writers he's commonly associated with. He specifically claims that Faulkner's tendency toward novels with multiple narrators seeking to retell, from different perspectives, tales that they themselves know only piecemeal or through hearsay, is at odds with the usual Modernist stance re History but seems to have caused real resonance in later writers of the Other South--not just the Latin American writers Faulkner is usually associated with, but also Arab writers from North Africa and the Middle East, as well as writers from the Indian subcontinent. Further, some of these writers claim not to have read Faulkner before they produced their own works which seem, nevertheless, to bear certain resemblances; this presents us with the possibility that people growing up in different cultures that share broad similarities but who otherwise don't know each other may as a result of those similarities create similar sorts of (narrative) art.

Over at Domestic Issue I'll have up a wonkier post that heads in a different direction from the above; but it struck me, as I thought over that phrase "ideology of form" that most of us may wonder why a writer adopts the structure s/he does, but that we wonder, I'd assume, for broadly aesthetic reasons: What does the author gain with this approach? We're all comfortable with the idea that a work's content implies, however indirectly, some sort of politics, but I found myself wondering if those of you out there who are readers have ever wondered whether the form a work takes--the structure the writer gives it--reflects an ideology; that is, a choice of form made for a reasons other than the material presented in the work or for thematic reasons.

Some examples of what I mean:

In the early decades of the novel-as-genre's emergence in English, the cultural élite were extremely dismissive of novels. Who, after all, couldn't write prose narrative? Where was the skill in that? (Consider as well that then, as now, women soon became the primary writers and consumers of novels.) Poetry, because of its long respected tradition and elaborate rules (not just for the various closed forms but for things like the diction deemed appropriate for poetry), was regarded as the king of the literary arts.

During the Harlem Renaissance, writers had lengthy debates among themselves and in print about what form(s) African-American art should take so as to be most faithful to the experience of black people and attract and hold an audience (in those days, mostly white) without pandering to that audience. Some advocated adopting the forms and language of mainstream European poetic tradition; others argued in favor of adapting and inventing poetic forms and language to reflect African-American art forms such as the blues and jazz.

Georg Lukács, a Marxist critic, very much disliked modern novels' stylistic innovations because they represented to him the chief problem of the modern era generally: the dissolution of contemporary society and the growing isolation and even alienation of the individual from society--which, of course, Marxism sought in part to address. Lukács preferred so-called Realist novels, arguing that they adhere most closely to objective reality. On the other hand, Mikhail Bakhtin's critical writings celebrated precisely that multivoiced quality of the novel, and for the same reason Lukács disliked it: its faithful depiction of life lived in the Here and Now.

Anyway. Some stuff to chew on.

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