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Like the careers of reality television personalities
and the discussions on the floor of the U.S. Senate, recent literary debates
in this country have been getting less long and more stupid. It has taken
me a while to realize this. When Wolfe vs. Updike, et. al. managed to
inspire dozens of articles, I read A Man in Full to be an informed
spectator. And I was rewarded with an instructive debate about scope,
about technique, about interior and exterior detail. Three years later,
having already read The Corrections, I was ready when Franzen
vs. Oprah briefly made the editorial pages. As depressing as were the
petty acts on Jonathan Franzen, I was still gladdened to be able to eavesdrop
on a fleeting dialogue about art and democracy, about writing for a broad
readership without sacrificing one’s own aesthetics. And so when
the triennial American literary debate started to adhere this past summer
around Dale Peck vs. All, I read Hatchet Jobs, Peck’s collection
of essays on contemporary fiction. I was ready for the brouhaha. I was
ready to instruct passersby on heroes of villains. I was ready to talk.
A few reviews came out. A month passed. Peck was reportedly
slapped by one of his subjects. That made the gossip pages. Then the culture
declared Dale Peck vs. All to be the worst thing one can be nowadays:
yesterday’s news.
Yet I couldn't get Dale Peck or the little discussion
that was out of my mind. So I read Peck’s four novels, an experience
of mixed rewards. All of them, at their core, share a voice—a character—using
the force of imagination to save himself, or more. Reading them allowed
me to see how Peck’s most passionate critical essays, his most talked-about
ones, comprise a fifth novel much the same: the story of a scrappy literary
critic using his imagination to rescue contemporary literature. And therein
lies the essential irony of Hatchet Jobs: Peck’s mission
to make the discussion of serious books more passionate, more central,
more about literature, and less about playground chatter and who’s
on whose team, is undermined, almost completely, by the cast of mind evident
in his fiction and criticism, a cast of mind which makes the form of his
ideas and their author significantly more notable than the arguments themselves.
And so Peck deserves much of the blame for Dale Peck vs. All being about
the ethics, personality, and tactics of Dale Peck. It’s impossible,
on some level, to write exclusively about the ideas of Dale Peck. Yet
it seems to me that we missed an opportunity to engage Peck on his sincere
desire to write criticism about books, not authors. For literature itself
seems every day more in danger of suffering aesthetic ennui in the hearts
of its practitioners as it fails to resist the general conclusion that
it is now, as a form and a pursuit, mainly quaint. Dale Peck, through
his sometimes intelligent, sometimes commonplace, sometimes hypocritical,
and sometimes mindless essays, recognizes that fiction and criticism can
be as important as we believe they are, to those of us who care at least.
Through it all, he reminds us how rarely we argue—or maybe care—about
how literature, formally, can capture the experience of our times. So,
this past summer, by whispering back to Peck’s shouts, we lost the
chance to discuss, in the public sphere, the future of literature, the
dangers of personal criticism, and the ideas Dale Peck so passionately
espouses and so totally undercuts with his own axe.
***
Dale Peck can be a very good critic. When he angrily
scrawls, “Lies! Lies! All lies!” on the cover of Rick Moody’s
The Black Veil, it’s not right, it’s not justified,
it probably hurts the book’s resale value, but it’s good:
Dale Peck genuinely cares about fiction. He writes forcefully and directly,
without any academic fussiness and often with surprise. (One novel’s
tensionless structure is “like playing racquetball in a court with
no walls.”) Peck is enlightening about black women writers’
rise into prominence, for example, or the trap of being a cult writer
like Kurt Vonnegut. In his best essays, Peck celebrates books’ successes
and laments (without joy) their failures on clear, common, deeply-felt
criteria: their characters’ vitality and complexity, the credibility
and balance of their drama, the closeness of their observation, their
humor, their prose, their pace. Even when using his axe, Peck can reveal
insights into the novel as a form. For instance, Peck writes that Julian
Barnes “is a terribly smart man and a terribly, terribly skilled
writer, if by smart you mean a mind that has ready access to its wide
store of information and by skilled you mean a writer who can manipulate
words so that they simultaneously sound familiar and original.”
However, “intelligence and talent in the service of a discompassionate
temperament… are precisely the opposite of what one seeks from a
novelist, or a novel.” Finally, Peck convincingly laments that his
essays, literary criticism in general, and in particular his notorious
review on Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, are too often discussed
in terms of personality and gossip. “I realized that people,”
he writes, “were less interested in what I (or the writers I reviewed)
had to say than the possibility of a brawl.”
Understanding how good Peck can be makes it difficult
to figure out how he can be as mistaken as he often is. Peck is frequently
fantastically wrong (which I’ll get to) but he’s also often
averagely wrong—incorrect, inconsistent, malicious, hypocritical—in
the way many critics, being human, occasionally are. Peck repeatedly chooses,
for instance, to draw the grandest conclusions from his subject’s
most marginal works. And in almost every essay, he reduces an attacked
book to a simplistic premise and then criticizes it for its simplicity:
“the primary issue,” in Stanley Crouch’s Don’t
the Moon Look Lonesome, is “the thesis that we are all different
yet all the same so get over it already.” (This is like tripping
someone and then criticizing him for being on the floor.) Occasionally,
Peck is an Eminem of misreading, not only ending an explication with a
sloppy conclusion but filling it with internal rhymes of error. Peck concludes
his essay on Roth’s American Pastoral, for example, with
“Roth’s pastoral is equally faked, a lost paradise that never
existed but nevertheless had to be invented so that it could be eulogized
in his novel,” astoundingly ignoring that the novel’s central
theme is the protagonist, not Roth, confronting his illusions of pastoral
peace.
Peck’s average wrongness extends to his sweeping
statements. His assertion that Kurt Vonnegut “was the first novelist
to attempt to demystify the relationship between author and the story
within his text” misses the small fact that Cervantes had Vonnegut
beat by about 350 years. And his “James Joyce was not quite a modernist”
because he “lacked the doubt in language’s ability to render
the world” would have been true had he written, say, “James
Joyce was not quite Gertrude Stein.”
We could forgive Peck all this if he weren’t so
quick to lecture his victims on their factual errors, bad writing, and
mixed metaphors. Peck has no immunity in his essays or novels to petty
errors himself (Lincoln’s relation to slavery, the number of novels
Roth has written, the city where Jack Daniels is made, the gorges where
people commit suicide in Ithaca, New York, etc.). Nor is Peck immune from
the imprecise prose against which he howls. In one of dozens of examples,
one of his characters says a “name aloud: ‘Henry.’ The
puff of air that escapes my mouth with his name sets the candle flickering,”
which would be physically possible if the lover were Pete.
Of course, if we ruled that every novelist or critic
who couldn’t write up to his ideals was worthless, we wouldn’t
have much to read. Yet Peck is also often extraordinarily, fantastically
wrong, as when he declares that, “the one group of people who don’t
seem interested in finding a new literature, or creating one, is writers,”
and most frequently, when he takes on his peers.
***
The question is why. My first guess was Peck’s
passion. Alfred Kazin once wrote, “The critic who has the equipment
to be a force, the critic who can set up standards for his age, must be
a partisan of one kind another. Like Johnson, he will be unfair to the
metaphysicals…like Henry James, to Tolstoy; like Eliot, to Shelly;
like Wilson, to Kafka; like Trilling, to Dreiser.” Given Hatchet
Jobs’ martial tone, its incessant denunciations of “recidivist
realism” and “recherché postmodernism,” it would
seem that Peck is such a partisan.
Peck’s big enemies are imprecision, polemics, pretentious
banalities, clichés, sentimentality, and flat characters. His allies
are “some sort of satisfactory narrative form” and novels
with “imagination, linguistic flair, and a raison d’être
more compelling than its author’s presumably well-intentioned intention
to write.” He praises George Eliot for her “strict moral vision”
and Jim Crace, whom he despises, for his novels’ subjects’
“variety and idiosyncrasy and audacity.” He admires plenty
of writers: Vonnegut, Orwell, Sontag, Didion, Edmund White, Rebecca Brown,
Daniel Mendelssohn, the half of Faulkner and Nabokov, one assumes, that
shouldn’t face “excision from the canon.” There are
more, and as anyone who has read any of Peck’s first three novels
understands—and those who gloss his program ignore—Peck also
likes postmodernism. (“I’ve always been interested in it myself,”
he causally drops.) Indeed, Peck’s novels, in particular Now
It’s Time to Say Goodbye, have more DeLillo-ish touches than
those of many of his peers whom he accuses of DeLilloism. Peck doesn’t
defend postmodern fiction as a necessary artistic route, to be sure. The
heart of the novel, he declares, is “a diffuse locus of ideas and
ideologies loosely tethered to a set of individual visions and personalities…a
true republic of literature composed of single votes in the form of single
writers, even single books.”
All of the above—the tolerance, the likes, the
dislikes—is pretty standard, and good, stuff. There is no ground
there for principled partisanship. Yes, structure and a corresponding
distaste for digressions are more important to Peck than to other critics,
but that isn’t talked about enough or applied consistently enough
to be the fuel of his fire. And yes, Peck repeatedly criticizes authors
whose created world depends too much on the reader’s imagination,
but he is also eloquent on how the reader’s imagination—“the
vast breadth of knowledge of how life is lived”—is necessary
to every reading experience. Peck occasionally wraps himself in the flag
of anti-elitism. Yet this is hard to swallow considering his own novels,
his love of difficult literature (T.S. Eliot was “simply the best
poet of the twentieth century”), and his slips into condescension
at, for instance, “the segment of the female population which buys
a book at the supermarket along with creamed corn and instant potatoes.”
It’s unfortunate that the passing responses to
Hatchet Jobs have been more about him than his aesthetics, but
this is so partly because there are no aesthetics to respond to. This
doesn’t mean Peck doesn’t have real opinions on novels or
that they aren’t defensible. It only means that the temporal adjectives
in the branding of his enemies as “recidivist realism” and
“recherché postmodernism” are nothing more than a politician’s
meaningless slur that his opponent’s policies are backwards looking
while his look only to the bright future.
There is another reason that the Peck’s essays
have been read less for their critical content than for their possibilities
for gossip: Peck himself, especially in his reviews of his contemporaries,
seems to read books less for their aesthetic content than for the sins,
and character, of their authors. Time and again, Peck undercuts his own
arguments by abruptly shifting a discussion away from a novel to, for
instance, a dropped line in an interview, so that he can flail his axe
(Peck is no dagger-wielder) at the writer instead of what is written.
Thus, sadly, we must engage Peck on those terms.
To Pecks’ defenders, this excessive personalizing
stems from his outsider status. To his critics, it comes from envy and
arrogance. There is something in both theories. Peck repeatedly identifies
himself as a gay man writing from outside the “in crowd,”
and it is dangerous in a Peck essay to be (unlike him) straight, and (like
him) American, born between 1955 and 1970, and white. It is lethal to
be all four. Peck’s jealousy and egotism are equally transparent,
whether in his yapping about his subjects’ sales, advances, critical
popularity, “domination of display and review space,” or in
not lonely statements like “Sometimes even I am overwhelmed by the
extent of the reevaluation I’m calling for, the sheer fucking presumptuousness
of it.” (It’s like the old schoolyard paradox of whether God
could make a rock so big that even He could not move it.)
Yet the greatest reason, I believe, for the personal,
self-defeating nature of Peck’s criticism is a cast of mind molded
by feelings about writing and the imagination, a cast of mind not unrelated
to his egotism, a cast of mind first and most evident in his fiction.
Many have made the mandatory point that Hatchet Jobs
is not Henry James on the novel. Peck has nevertheless written much genuinely
satisfying fiction, however lumpy. His first and most impressive work,
Martin and John, still feels unsettlingly fresh and absorbing
today, in large part because of the experimental conceit in which each
story repeats themes and names, accreting an oblique, complicated history
for later stories and characters. Peck’s second novel, The Law
of Enclosures, is heavy-handed, mechanistic, with a central metaphor
that, one hopes, is obvious in a Brechtian way, but yet…its alternating
sections of a couple simultaneously old and young, simultaneously beginning
and ending a marriage is beautiful, creating a real, involved engagement
with love, hatred, and death. Peck’s third novel, Now It’s
Time to Say Goodbye, is like his second, a beautiful failure, except
for the beautiful part. Every character loses his or her personality as
the book progresses, the narrative gets bogged down in plot, tricks are
repeated, Peck has no control of voice (a mortal flaw in a book with a
shifting narrator á la As I Lay Dying), and many of the
characters are afflicted with “biblicitis”, the disease of
rural Midwesterners in novels to sound as if they are reciting from Revelation.
When I started Peck’s final novel, What I Lost (“based
on a true story”), I couldn’t help cracking, “Your talent.”
Yet while the first section is overwritten and undergraduate, the book
recovers (if never quite to the level of Martin and John) and
earns an emotional power and most impressively, a credibility.
The four novels all share much: a not-quite-realistic,
almost allegorical dreamworld mood, a restless and ruthless desire not
to repeat themselves in form coupled with a serious commitment to deeply
felt concerns. They also share much in the debit column: an enveloping
humorlessness; a bullying propensity to tell not show; and an awkwardness
with dialogue as profound as anyone I’ve ever read at Peck’s
general level of talent. (“Make tracks! Get lost!” a character
shouts in Martin and John).
What the four novels most share is their preoccupation
with violence and the imagination. Although the violence has decreased—on
Peck’s scale, What I Lost is as gentle as Jane Austen—Peck’s
novels are all filled with violent mothers, violent fathers, violent sons,
violence sex, violent fantasies, murders, savage drunken beatings, burning
manuscripts, burning houses, burning towns, “obscenely pretty”
bruises, and all the bodily fluids. “Remember you are an animal,”
Peck writes in The Law of Enclosures. “Hit things. Hit
what you have to, when you have to.” Peck makes clear in his work
that he is haunted by the early death of his mother and physical abuse
by his father. Add to that a view of the gay sex act as being inbuilt
with violence and a sexual coming of age at the height of AIDS in America,
and we don’t need to go far to understand Peck’s constant,
explicit conflation of violence, death, and love.
In the final chapter of Martin and John, Peck
writes in what is certainly meant to be his own voice, “Soon the
stories I imagined were as horrible as the one I lived. I found a power
in it, and that power increased as the imagined horror became more and
more like the events of my life…I tell myself that by reinventing
my life, my imagination imposes an order on things and makes them make
sense.” Throughout Peck’s novels, imagination is not only
the seat in a brain where stories come from. It’s also an active,
organizing force in so many of his characters’ lives and psychology,
as sex is in Updike, or history is in Faulkner. The writer’s imagination
is an act of life and an act of heroism. “I am your bible,”
Peck writes in The Law of Enclosures, “I turn your flesh
into words, and words have always outlasted the gods who fathered them.
I have built you up and I have torn you down, and I can do either again,
or neither, or both. Words are my wrenches, words my hammer and nails.
Words are my fists, my liquor, my food, and words are my women. With my
words I will protect you. I will save you as you have saved me. I save
you forever, and for everyone, and for eternity. Dear father, I am saving
you now.”
To me, these repeated themes in Peck’s novels (and
they are so prevalent, I think of them as more Peck’s cast of mind,
his mode of thought) explain much of the fantastic wrongness and undermining
personalization in his criticism. Hatchet Jobs is not an ironic
title. Peck imagines someone “passionately” (his
italics) sodomizing David Foster Wallace. He speculates on whether he
is man enough to separate Rick Moody from his testicles. Violence is in
the form of the essays too, most of which include jarring transitions
and a few of which include playground heckles (“ready, Sven? I’ve
been saving this one up since the end of the last section”). Half
of Peck’s harshest essays rely on a supposed knockout punch (American
Pastoral is actually “an elaborate narration of a misogynist
fantasy”) and the other half flail increasingly wildly at their
target.
Yet there are patterns to Peck’s wrongness, and
violence. Peck has left neither his imagination nor his particular view
of it in his fiction: Hatchet Jobs is the story of a hero using
his novelist’s imagination to fight against a conspiracy of powerful,
if shifting, enemies: sometimes all of contemporary literature, sometimes
his generation of writers, sometimes his straight, white, formally ambitious
male peers. “I think of myself as a kind of mother hen, not so much
of writers, but of the novel itself,” Peck announces. “Bad
writers can’t do it much damage because they’ll simply be
ignored, but a self-indulgent writer with a single compelling skill can
do incalculable harm.” “Mother hen” is a little cute
for Peck. He thinks of himself, it seems plain, as a shining knight whose
sword is his writing, his imagination, literature. Literature: “an
act of revenge that aspires to elegy.” Literature: “first
and foremost an attack on life.”
There is an often-ignored twist in Peck’s most
notorious essay. After beginning that essay with “Rick Moody is
the worst writer of his generation,” Peck admits at the end that,
“Rick Moody, alone among his self-selecting generation, has something
to say and the means with which to say it.” Peck may be shooting
for the deepest insult for the broadest group, but I think he is expressing
a real, empathetic, however perversely-put recognition of a similar spirit
in two writers’ view of the therapeutic, self-mythologizing possibilities
of the literary imagination. “It’s true, what you’ve
always suspected is true,” Peck writes about himself and Moody,
“it’s ourselves we blame, ourselves we’re trying to
save. Not you.”
It’s hard at times to know how seriously to take
Peck. (For example, it’s hard to reconcile the above (or be sure
of our residency on this planet) with Peck’s later insistence, “Make
no mistake, every writer wants to save the world.”) More to the
point, Peck can’t always keep up the venom. The man who claims that
he can’t be intellectually engaged with contemporary fiction because
“I feel like I’ve been had when I do so” writes after
misreading a point made by David Foster Wallace: “It seems to me
beside the point to list contemporary writers who are engaging with serious
moral themes in their fiction, if for no other reason than that there
are just so many of them.” And in most essays, as with
the one on Moody, Peck admits that he doesn’t totally hate the writers
he totally hates. Furthermore, Peck is self-aware. Some of his caveats,
for sure, seem little more than passing hellos to deconstructionists:
“The very extremity of my views does as much to undermine my authority
as to enforce it, or at least I hope it does, because I am by no means
convinced of the hallowedness of my own ideas.” Yet some of his
admissions about his irrationality, unfairness, and clownishness are less
boilerplate.
Peck is confusing as to how we are to take his criticism.
“If you remember one thing about these essays,” he writes,
“remember that a novelist wrote them, not a critic, and that novelists
lie for a living.” Seventy-eight pages earlier, however, we find,
“The novelist doesn’t tell lies. He unmasks the truth. He
doesn’t provide sheltering illusions. He dispels them.” Then
again, “Real fiction doesn’t ‘discover’ truth,
let alone present it to readers (that’s why it’s called fiction,
duh): real fiction invents and dispenses with truth as it sees fit.”
My guess it that 95 percent of fiction writers have probably been guilty
of playing both sides of this issue for they, understandably, inescapably,
want both the freedom that comes from “lying for a living”
and the power that comes from telling the truth. Yet Peck isn’t
writing fiction in Hatchet Jobs. Pure imagination is not an acceptable
critical mode. He knows this. The proof is in the passion: his essays
are desperate to be heard and to be seen as the unmasked and discovered
truth. Unfortunately, they’re not even close. For Peck can’t
stop accidentally cutting down his own argument about books with his personal,
fictional story about people.
***
Peck is trying to rid the world of disapproved realists
and disapproved postmodernists, but the latter bear the brunt of his attacks.
“I think it’s precisely the need to sign on to a program that
kills literature,” Peck pontificates in his afterward, and the implication
is clear: his so-called postmodernist peers are part of a deadening guild.
They (Wallace, Franzen, Lethem, Antrim, Whitehead, Eggers, Eugenides,
Moody, Powers) and their editors are “heirs to a bankrupt tradition,”
which began with the “diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses”
and went through Faulkner and Nabokov, Barth, Hawkes, Gaddis, Barthelme,
Pychon, and DeLillo.
The problem is that Peck’s linear tradition, as
would be any tradition that includes a hot-penned expressionist like Faulkner
and a cold-eyed stylist like Nabokov (who famously detested Faulkner),
isn’t all that linear. Peck concludes that Infinite Jest
is “an airbrushed handjob” of Pynchon—how one airbrushes
a handjob is a question in itself—but he never mentions how different,
how more generous, accessible, and Salinger-like is that novel compared
to the works of Pynchon. Similarly, Peck simply refuses to see the nineteenth
century classics in Richard Powers, or Paula Fox and Alice Munro in Jonathan
Franzen, or the other diverse influences—hybrids of influences—in
his other peers, who are by no means buds on a single twig. Indeed, their
novels are so varied in form and theme that we have to talk about the
genealogy of individual books rather than the authors. In any case, if
the nebula of these books’ styles can be said to be moving in any
direction, it surely isn’t to the “increasingly esoteric.”
Peck’s further accusations that his more successful
peers have nothing to say, that their novels are “formal exercise”
or the sum of “the lifeless carpentry of its parts,” his anachronistic
echoing of point that these writers’ literature is unable to “comment
on anything other than its own inability to comment on anything,”
are not points to debate. They are untrue. I agree with Peck in his distaste
for some of the authors (and strongly disagree on others), but each and
every one of the accused is trying, in Sven Birkerts’ phrase, to
bring “meaningful news about what it means to live in the world
of the present” and do so in a present that is unmoored, unliterary,
repetitive, wondrous, amnesiac, and intimidatingly dense.
Even when Peck allows that one of his cohort has something
to say, that something is dismissible. “It only [sic] takes one
or two of these chapters to make Whitehead’s point” in John
Henry Days, for example. Or Sven Birkerts is a petty careerist devoting
“the entirety of his fourth book, The Gutenberg Elegies,
to a series of screeds detailing how electronic media ‘threaten’
the ‘frail set of balances’ of what Birkerts calls the ‘ecology
of reading.’” It boggles the mind to understand how a person
can read Birkerts and doubt (with those quotation mark fangs) how frighteningly
sincere he is about how the accelerating pace of life is imperiling the
inner life and the act of reading. One really has to be buried, I suppose,
in one’s own fantasies that the real danger is coming from A) all
contemporary novelists or B) nine of them.
The hero-critic in Hatchet Jobs isn’t
fighting bad books, mainly, and he isn’t just fighting people “simply
unworthy of attention.” He is fighting people like his fictional
Sven Birkerts—bad people. Peck explicitly charges Stanley Crouch
and Jim Crace with bad faith. He implies it for his others victims, all
of whom are writing for each other not for readers, most of whom who are
not working towards a new, imaginative literature but “towards their
own fame.” Peck’s fantasy become chilling at times. His most
common accusation is the anti-tautology that a particular novel isn’t
really a novel. And he constantly taunts writers with accusations of “fakebook,”
“fake exegesis,” “a faker,” “faked pastoral,”
“falsely universalizing,” “counterfeit status,”
“imitation of stories,” “imitation of fiction.”
Couple this with Peck’s violent calls for a cleansing, total revolution—“the
problem is too widespread within the insular literary and publishing world
to merely pick at its edges: the entire scab must be ripped off”—and
it’s hard to keep your cool when Peck accuses his critics of being
Stalinesque.
What does Peck believe will happen if his hero (Peck
himself) doesn’t succeed? A t times, he writes as if humanity is
at stake: The Black Veil is “so bad that it’s easy
to see it as in league with the very crimes it seeks to redress”
(which are racism, homophobia, abusive American power, and genocide against
Native Americans). In Peck’s rare modest moments, only the novel
is at stake. Birkerts and his cronies “will alienate more and more
readers from all fiction,” in particular, “the members of
the educated bourgeoisie, who are sick and tired of feeling like they’ve
somehow failed the modern novel.” As I got deeper into Hatchet
Jobs, I wanted to shake Peck out of his dream. There is no cabal
sitting around scheming to sacrifice a reading public to high art. Ask
members of the educated bourgeoisie (as I did) what they think about modern
novels, and they (those who read novels anyway) will reveal how empty
Peck’s accusations are. Most readers have had predominantly good
experiences with contemporary novels. When they didn’t, they concluded
reasonably enough that an author had failed them.
“My generation,” Peck writes, “has
inherited a tradition that has grown increasingly esoteric and exclusionary,
falsely intellectual and alienating to the mass of readers, and just as
falsely comforting to those in the club.” All the fantasy, the stupidity,
the inaccuracy is there: the inverse of the truth of “increasingly”
esoteric and exclusionary; the baseless speculation that these writers
are alienating readers; the double use of falsely, which is either sinister
in its totalitarian tinge or—what would “really intellectual”
be?—meaningless.
***
It becomes exhausting after a while to catalog all the
misreadings in Hatchet Jobs because Hatchet Jobs is
a long piece of fiction, a novel of characters, not one of ideas. It is
the story of a writer who once used his imagination to rescue himself
from the legacy of violence and the haunting of AIDS now using that imagination
to rescue the novel from those doing it incalculable harm. But what do
you do when the last act of that story is so silly? What do you do when
a critic, who writes experimental fiction himself, says, “Learning
to like experimental literature was, for most readers, a monumental task,
unlearning it positively Sisyphean” and then insists that we do
it? What do you do with a critic who calls for a new type of literature,
a “new materialism,” but refuses or is unable to describe
what type of literature that would be?
All this is sad because Peck can do better. And because
Peck is on to something. After laying out again his dichotomy of recherché
postmodernism and recidivist realism, Peck writes, “I’m not
interested in pointing out how an author works well in one mode or another,
or executes one aspect of one or another mode with greater or lesser degree
of success, because I think the modes need to be thrown out entirely.
Not as tools for a writer sitting down to a blank page, but rather as
the two poles they feel they must choose between, and against which they
are judged.” The first sentence is Peck’s hero-critic nonsense.
The second sentence is important. For Peck is correct, at least in my
experience. A novelist with a blank page stares, tempted, at the poles
of realism and postmodernism and, I would add, classic modernism. Or,
to put it less categorically, a serious novelist today is faced with a
choice in every book: use a traditional, realistic form to not distract
you (or the reader) from your story and characters as you strive for the
Tolstoyan heights; or use an experimental form, with all its burdens,
but with all its possibilities for something new. This choice is complicated
by trying to figure out how one makes it when the world is bigger, faster,
more complex than it was for George Eliot, when the possibilities of true
originality are narrower than they were before Mrs. Dalloway,
before Pale Fire, before Infinite Jest.
So how do you do it? I’m not sure, and that’s
why I look to critics. The passages of Hatchet Jobs that aggravated
me the most were the ones in which Peck refuses to talk about normative
aesthetics: “My feeling here is that the last thing readers need
is a writer telling them what to read (besides his or her own books, of
course). And as for writers: well, if you need me to tell you how to write
a novel then you probably shouldn’t be writing one in the first
place.” Most readers, if you ask them, are starving to be told what
to read. And as for writers, I think almost all of them would disagree
with Peck and with E.M. Forster who denied the old view of critics as
“handmaidens to beauty.” I’ve learned what I know about
novels from other novels, yes, but also from James Wood, from Lionel Trilling,
from Alfred Kazin, from the critical writings of Saul Bellow, John Updike,
Cynthia Ozick, Henry James and countless others including, just a little
bit, Dale Peck. With the choices facing every writer today, the choices
between realism, postmodernism, and modernism, the choices that cannot
be thrown out by declaring them backward-looking, we need great critics
more than ever.
Critics, that is, who write what Dale Peck thinks he’s
writing—criticism of works of literature—not what Peck (and
many of the people writing about Peck) actually are: criticism of people.
Peck seems trapped into doing this because of his cast of mind. The rest
of us, I hope, aren’t—except in discussions of Dale Peck.
Of course, when we criticize or praise a work, we must discuss the author
too, and her morality, and her talent, and her times. Yet a work of literature
isn’t an effusion of a writer, it is something made by her, in a
hard fight, following aesthetic choices. If we write, and argue, about
those choices, we can have a productive, enlivening discussion of how
we can continue to try to make a literature that is relevant, absorbing,
original—and read. “Art,” Henry James wrote, “lives
upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt,
upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there
is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular
to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference,
though they may be times of honour, are not times of development—are
times, possibly even, a little of dullness.” We don’t need
to talk about Dale Peck forever, but when the opportunity presents itself,
we should take a Dale Peck on the terms of his intentions and his actions.
Or else we will hasten the day, I fear, when literary discussion is as
quaint and as dull as much of America thinks it is and, truly and finally,
yesterday’s news.
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Comment & Culture - February, 2005