the homeric cliche

In Les Fleurs de Tarbes, Jean Paulhan’s exasperated tract (which holds a position in modern French literature similar to that held by Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise in English lit ), Paulhan puzzles over the growth, in literature, of what he calls a “terrorist” ethic – an ethic that proscribes all cliché, all “literary-ness”, that makes literature only out of renouncing literature, or hunting it down and exploding it. As he points out: “ The classic poets welcomed proverbs cliches and common sentiments from every direction. They welcomed abundance and gave it in back to those around them. But us, we who have little, we risk at every instant to lose that little.”

The “war on cliché” – to use Martin Amis’s hackneyed phrase declaring his allergy to hackneyed phrases, which as is the way of allergies is a disease of the immune system that is constructed to fight disease, a disease that turns on the immune system’s excess - was first declared in France. Independence from the commonplace, and a horrified attention to the way thinking is done through commonplaces was in a way the primary stylistic gesture of Flaubert, Baudelaire,  Bloy and Peguy – to name just four diverse writers of the time. It is as if, in the proverbs that were once considered a sort of common good, the writers discovered with these fantastic, power mad little machines who were actually thinking for us. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that each of those writers was profoundly anti-democratic, for the cliché is like the sum of votes on thought, it is elected by a majority.  And this seems profoundly wrong, for instead of the brain directing the mouth, what came out of the mouth directed the brain.

Henry James, among his other distinctions, is an essentially cosmopolitan writer – he knew Flaubert, he knew George Sand, he knew Turgenev, and he knew them as an artist knows another artist. But in his late style,  one notices that he returns to the classic style as Paulhan describes it. It is, though, a return full of ‘discriminations”, to use the Jamesian word.

I would call the note that runs through the late work the Homeric cliché. Just as the Homeric metaphor unfolds, metynomically, into a narrative, the Homeric cliché, as James uses it, takes the proverbs and cliches of the newspaper and the country club and makes them entrances to the higher impression towards which the authorial presence, and the authorial presence’s characters, strive.

Notice that even the entrance, in James, is labyrinthian – it is full of feints and false doors.  Here’s an example of what I mean. Allusions to apples, orchards, and golden fruit – all circulating around the cliché of fruit falling into one’s hand – are played out in this description, in The American Scene, of James taking a ride on the Staten Island Ferry:

“Nothing could have been more to the spectator's purpose, moreover, than the fact he was ready to hail as the most characteristic in the world, the fact that what surrounded him was a rare collection of young men of business returning, as the phrase is, and in the pride of their youth and their might, to their "homes," and that, if treasures of "type" were not here to be disengaged, the fault would be all his own.(6) It was perhaps this simple sense of treasure to be gathered in, it was doubtless this very confidence in the objective reality of impressions, so that they could deliciously be left to ripen, like golden apples, on the tree--it was all this that gave a charm to one's sitting in the orchard, gave a strange and inordinate charm both to the prospect of the Jersey shore and to every inch of the entertainment, so divinely inexpensive, by the way. The immense liberality of the Bay, the noble amplitude of the boat, the great unlocked and tumbled-out city on one hand, and the low, accessible mystery of the opposite State on the other, watching any approach, to all appearance, with so gentle and patient an eye; the gaiety of the light, the gladness of the air, and, above all (for it most came back to that), the unconscious affluence, the variety in identity, of the young men of business: these things somehow left speculation, left curiosity exciting, yet kept it beguilingly safe. And what shall I say more of all that presently followed than that it sharpened to the last pleasantness--quite draining it of fears of fatuity--that consciousness of strolling in the orchard that was all one's own to pluck, and counting, overhead, the apples of gold? I figure, I repeat, under this name those thick-growing items of the characteristic that were surely going to drop into one's hand, for vivid illustration, as soon as one could begin to hold it out.”  

This multitudinous weave of a trite phrase concerning golden apples into an account of business men, the sea, the cheapness of the ticket,  and the appearance of New York creates a sort of counterpuntal music out of a cliché – and as always, there is the sexual undertone, with the “fruitiness” and the “thick growing items” playing a role that you don’t have to be Freud to find superfluously suggestive.  James has a way of continuing at it – just as you think he’s forgotten that orchard, he returns with it. The cliché is treated  hologrammatically, and instead of the narration that the Homeric metaphor unfolds, in which the comparison becomes the unfolding of an episode in a world of episodes,  we have an impression, a sort of aura around a narration, that  situates, or, because it is a matter of impression rather than precision, concentrates a narratively tending consciousness. The narrative, always, is about not losing the supreme  things – life, intelligence, the chances of attention -  and yet the loss of these things is always the fatality to which, factually, this determination falls victim. There is a certain choral mockery, then, in these cliches. Listened to closely, they reveal not the wisdom of the people, but the implacably boxed in places of their origin – one senses their evolution in the resorts of the upper classes  where they really do operate as a way of thinking or, as is mostly the case, a way of walling off any thought.  In his own way, James, too, becomes one of the writer-terrorists of Paulhan’s essay, while avoiding the logical inconsistency that Paulhan very gleefully points out, where the avoidance of the already said must either lead to the incomprehensibility of the never said or the clichéd antithesis to cliche that founds the campaign against the already thought in an ideology of originality blind to its own contradictions.

James’ Homeric cliché was not passed along to any inheritor, althoug h you do find a figure like Santayana, whose prose is less William Jamesian than Henry Jamesian, occasionaly resorting to one. 

NYT columnists Nocera and Kristof divide up the compassion-labor

At the NYT, the columnists have seemingly decided to divide up the labor of compassion. It has fallen to Nicolas Kristof to worry about the Cambodian orphan and the Thai sex worker, and it has fallen to Joe Nocera to worry about the oppressed billionaire.

Last week, Nocera was very worried about BP, which was on the verge of being plucked by no account peasants. Hasn’t the company suffered enough for killing ten men and destroying the Gulf ecology for a year? It is all on account of trial lawyers, Nocera gravely intoned. You know, if the justice system would simply secede entirely from the jury system and allowing the poor to have lawyers, we could get some things done in this country.

Today, Nocera is shedding copious tears over various Russianbillionaires, represented by Bill Browder, who made a pile in Russia during thetime that Nocera euphemistically calls the Wild West period – Yeltsin’s time, when all corruption was excusable because it was in such a good cause! – and is now trying to get the West to take revenge for the imprisonment and death of one of his partners,   Sergei Magnitsky. I am not going to deny that Magnitsky was barbarously treated by the Putin regime. Perhaps it is right for the US Congress to respond by a special act, named for Magnitsky, aiming at making his tormentors in Russia pay for his death.

But, ever the curious goof, I do wonder how it is that in the nation with the largest imprisoned population in the world, the US Congress doesn’t seem interested in passing acts in favor of US citizens.

Here’s how Magnitsky died:

Browder pleaded with Magnitsky to flee the country, as his other lawyers had done. But Magnitsky insisted on investigating — and speaking out about — the fraud that had taken place. For his troubles, he was imprisoned in 2008. By summer of 2009, he had developed pancreatitis, which went untreated despite his pleas. He died that November. Browder says that when he learned of Magnitsky’s death, it was “the worst news I had ever received in my life.”

And here, for instance, is how an Arizona prostitute died, around the same time as Magnitsky, according to the Phoenix Arizona New Times:

“The Maricopa County Attorney's Office has chosen not to prosecute Arizona Department of Corrections staff in the death of inmate Marcia Powell.

Powell, 48, died May 20, 2009, after being kept in a human cage in Goodyear's Perryville Prison for at least four hours in the blazing Arizona sun. This, despite a prison policy limiting such outside confinement to a maximum of two hours.

The county medical examiner found the cause of death to be due to complications from heat exposure. Her core body temperature upon examination was 108 degrees Fahrenheit. She suffered burns and blisters all over her body.

Witnesses say she was repeatedly denied water by corrections officers, though the c.o.'s deny this. The weather the day she collapsed from the heat (May 19 -- she died in the early morning hours of May 20) arched just above a 107 degree high.

According to a 3,000 page report released by the ADC, she pleaded to be taken back inside, but was ignored. Similarly, she was not allowed to use the restroom. When she was found unconscious, her body was covered with excrement from soiling herself.”

It is perhaps unfair to ask Nocera how the Marcia Powell bill in Congress is faring. Powell was nothing. She wasn’t even Thai or Cambodian, so in the division of compassion neither Nocera or Kristof have any reason to care about her. And yet, somehow, I find it leaves a certain, well, taste in my mouth when I see NYT liberals or neo-liberals go on about the human rights wrongs – especially against billionaires – of the Putins of the world. When Jimmy Carter started the American foreign policy shift towards human rights, there were already 450 000 americans in prison. The rate of growth since then has the look of, maybe, something not so humans rightsish – according to the ACLU:

“From 1980 to 2010, the United States prison population grew over 11 times faster than the

general population. During this time, the general population increased by 36%, while the

state and federal prison population increased by over 400%.”

Bad boys bad boys whatcha gonna do? In any case, as we all pray that the exiled billionaires from Russia get back the possessions they so cleverly stole during the “wild west days” (oh those bad boys) and can investigate the corruption of the Putin clique, we also might spare a little time, o a second, a firefly’s flicker, to such as Marcia Powell. They deserve nothing and should, of course, die on the street – but think how much it cost the taxpaper to build a cage to keep her in while she boiled to death in the Arizona sun! Really, perhaps we should charge her family for those expenses. 

Hideously kinky: the establishment's wars

Interesting duel in the Sunday NYT book section. On the one side is that indefatigable fluffer of all things Petraeus, Dexter Filkins, who gets to tell his favorite surge fairy tale all over again in his review of John A, Nagl's book. I think of Filkins as an exemplary figure, failing ever upwards in an establishment that has been astonishingly unmarked by 13 years of American foreign policy failure, which has mired the US in unwinnable and even incomprehensible wars all over the Middle East and Central Asia. The Filkins style of indirectly acknowledging this - which is the establishment style of tiptoing the graveyards that its criminality has filled - comes in the fourth graf: "The last Americans didn’t leave Iraq until 2011, after about 4,500 of them had been killed and more than 30,000 wounded. At least a hundred thousand Iraqis died, too." Notice the Iraqi casualty addendum, which is as true as saying, about the Holocaust, that "at least a million Jews died too." The establishment, especially the NYT,loves big data and columns that make statistical points using a well established science of sampling. But it appears that in the world of sampling, Iraq forms a strange exception. The lancet's sampling, which long ago showed six hundred thousand deaths, has been supplanted by the latest survey, showing nearly a million. The Filkins half truth maneuver is the answer to this persnickety question of the extent of the establishment's catastrophic policy of "humanitarian intervention." On the other corner, you have the review of Daniel Bolger's Why We Lost, which dares to deride st. Petraeus. This is reviewed by Andrew Bacevich, who is on his best behavior. One feels that he actually agrees with Bolger that Petraeus was a jerk, a showboat, and a man whose surge was designed to disguise the inevitable: the retreat of the US from Iraq. But he doesn't outright say that Bolger has an excellent argument here - he shifts the focus to the politics of the war. Here, of course, Bacevich is right. The Generals didn't lose the war - the war was pre-lost in 2001, when the Americans rallied around the dangerously negligent government that had allowed 9.11 to happen as though the incompetence had never happened, and allowed them to expand the terrain of their incompetence, which of course they happily did. 

Eventually, Bolger concludes that America's enemies in the two wars are "everybody" - of which there is no more absolute condemnation. It is Kurz at the end of his tether.  But the establishment doesn't want to swallow that. Hence, our current swollen Pentagon, our Patriot act, our eliminationist rhetoric against ISIS. It is all a very bloody farce, and will go on until we don't have that extra trillion dollars to pay for all the fun.

Please sir, more Wharton sir, please...

More notes on the House of Mirth

You can’t read the secondary literature on Edith Wharton without bumping into the ghost of Henry James. They both wrote about rich Americans, some of whom spent their time in Europe, so the critics have gathered around this obvious clue and have palpated it to death, rather like the rather dim police inspectors in Sherlock Holmes who fail to make subtle deductions from the more apparently trivial clues with which they are presented, while running off the track when big clues are, by malign design, thrown in their way..
I haven’t waded far enough into the secondary literature to see if anybody has connected Wharton to Oscar Wilde, but as I find traces of Wilde all over The House of Mirth, I think I’m going to  take up the theme and give it a good shaking.
Wharton does a rather neat trick in The House of Mirth – she manages to convincingly create a hybrid of  social comedy and melodrama. The melodrama is the natural aesthetic correlate of the overwhelming emotions, for melodrama is an excessive form,a form for deformation, and in its too muchness it brings a certain paradoxical proportion to the total flavor of those emotions  that swamp the self. These are the blood rushing emotions, the emotions that call metaphorically upon the involuntary surges of the internal organs at work within us, which is why we quickly go to the heart, and secretly go to the genitals, when imagining them. Certainly the melodrama in The House of Mirth is cued to tidal waves, coursing rivers, and all kinds of mounting water action. When Lily Bart, after the humiliation of her scene with Gus Trenor that falls almost in the middle of the book, decides that she will confide in Seldon, the phrase that describes this is perfectly in line with high water :  “the thought of confiding in him became as seductive as the river’s flow to a suicide.”  Flow just is seduction – as the novel makes clear.
But social comedy is a drying thing, and before the rivers flow and the storms crescendo, there are the brilliant setpieces at Bellomont, the most brilliant of which, in its setting, its stage props (ample use being made of cigarettes) and its at times cynical, at times lyrical dialogue, is the conversation between Lawrence Seldon and Lily Bart on the fatal Sunday when she loses her grip on the rich sap she has decided to marry, Percy Gryce. The whole thing is too much like Wilde’s essay dialogues not to be, at some calibrated distance, signifying. For instance, from what text, The House of Mirth or The Decay of Lying,  do these two phrases go? a, If we are all the raw stuff of the cosmic effects, one would rather be the fire that tempers a sword than the fish that dyes a purple cloak; and b, Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection,  which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.
Notes on Dorian Gray: It is hard to be kind to Dorian Gray. It mixes up the brilliant and the lurid, but the luridness cancels out the brilliance and the brilliance makes the luridness seem ridiculous. Yet, it has survived. It has even become a gothic archetype , partly because it is animated by a very protestant, not to say Puritanical, motif: eternal youth equates to eternal viciousness.  The same thematic adventure is, of course, central to The House of Mirth. It is Lily’s youth that is going. At several points, she looks in the mirror with the same curiosity and fear as Dorian looking at his portrait, and when she sees lines on her face, she worries.
Wilde of course was not even in the same league, as a novelist, with Wharton. Partly that is because he couldn’t foot his novel in the homosexual social circle that the book cries out for – he couldn’t, like Gide, simply seize the permission to do so.The result of  Wharton’s deep sense of the way her own comedy is footed in a social circle she knows down to the design of the wallpaper allows her to move from comedy to melodrama without upsetting the narrative balance of the story. Melodrama, of course, relies, even excessively, upon the conventional – and Lily, for all her flashes of insight, is too conventional for her own good. She is too conventional not to hunt for a rich husband, and too conventional not to reject the offer from Rosedale, the richest man she knows, because he is a Jew. Melodrama also relies on coincidence – but coincidence has an unfairly bad reputation in fiction. In good fiction, coincidence is often a measure of the degrees of the social world in which the characters move – a sort of not always reliable pi.  Without coincidence, there is no measure to that world – and thus, it ceases to act as a world.
The Wildean note in Wharton makes more sense now, when we have opened up all her sealed papers and discovered her erotica, than it might have when Wharton had to come into literature on the arm of her bachelor friend James. It is about time for her to come into literature with a more extended set of references.

The election

In the 18^th century, there was a craze for Constitutions. Rousseau wrote an outline of one for Poland, and Boswell, of all people, had influenced the Corsican constitution. And of course then came the Americans and the French, who linked constitution making to revolution.

The idea of decreeing legislation has become, since, a normal feature of streetcorner and water fountain intellectual life, at least in the States. People, such as myself, who have never successfully organized lunch or an ant farm (when I was a kid, I’d always end up either starving to death the latter or drowing the poor ants in too much sugar water), are undettered by their failures and make and proselytize revolutionary legislative suggestions all the time. Unfortunately, the organizers, if they are good, are usually on the side of the organizations, ie the status quo. There they are rewarded for profiting the heads of those organizations, or the set of them – the establishment.

Now that the dust has settled and we have an American Congress that will make the largest threat to the US – global warming – worse, while claiming the threat posed by ISIS requires major Pentagon trillions – a Congress that will gladly pass Obama’s Pacific Trade treaty, with its many and odious gifts to big business – a Congress that will, in other words, not do much – it is a good time to look back over what I think, for lack of a better name, is the Bush era, a 13 year old phenomenon. In the first phase, when Bush proper was president, it was of course reckless and negligent. However, it was politically astute – it was able to use even the worst evidence of its incompetence, for instance the highly preventable 9/11 attack, to gain more power. Most of the signal events of the Obama end of the era – the withdrawal from Iraq, the continuing and astonishing sums given to the Pentagon, the surveillance, the rescue of Wall street and the hardening of the culture of impunity that spares the rich and the powerful any punishment for whatever they do – were either hatched in the Bush era or bear the stylistic trademarks of that era. The one Obama addition, Romneycare, was hatched by the Heritage Foundation long ago as the alternative to Clinton’s healthcare bill, advocated by Newt Gingrich, and realized in Massachussetts by Romney. This is not exactly a Marxist pedigree.

The ACA, like social security and medicare, are liberal schemes that the Democratic party designed. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way these schemes were put on the shoulders of the 80 percent of the wealth and income bracket who have the fewest assets and the lowest pay. The top 20 percent, meanwhile, which owns something like 90 percent of the financial assets in this country, were massively rescued by the Bush-Obama team. It is an oddity of our politics that the neo-liberals do not at all see this, and are frankly puzzled how people can “vote against their own interests”. Myself, I don’t think they do. Before the Great recession, if a Gop hothead promised to end social security and cut taxes, the voters who elected him could be pretty sure he wasn’t going to end social security but that he would have a chance, in the compromise machine of DC, to cut taxes. Though the taxes he cut would be mainly those of the wealthy, some of the cuts would go to the 80 percent. Meanwhile, the Dems, responsibly talking about securing social security for the future, meant by that either cutting benefits or raising taxes on the 80 percent – since the not so secret secret about social security is that it is paid for by the most regressive federal tax.

The Dem establishment is firmly in the top 20 percent, households that make at least 250 thou a year. And they have designed politicies exquisitely calibrated to not disturb this group. But a liberalism that doesn’t disturb this group is no liberalism at all. Just as camels can’t go though the eye of the needle, in the Kingdom of Heaven you can’t cater to the wealthy while being totally oriented to the welfare of the rest.

Now, it might seem puzzling that the upper 20 percent aren’t more grateful to the neo-liberal Dems. But this isn’t really surprising – the art of the deal, the code by which this group lives and dies, requires an aggressive dealer. The more concessions the other side gives, the more they can give. You don’t do a deal by compromising your side from the outset.

The US is really no different from France, or the UK, or Canada. The non-communist left, born in the Great depression, was led into the golden years by organizers who were richly rewarded for their acts. Those rewards, and the decay of labor power, brought about a brutal disconnect between the political elite and the people they were supposedly leading, the people whose side they were supposedly on. 

In the first eight years of the Bush era, the philosopher kings were the loudmouthed imperialists, the Hitchenses, the Niall Fergusons, the Weekly Standard crewe. In the next six years, under Obama, the philosopher king appears to be Cass Sunstein, whose concept of “nudgery” codifies everything about these years – the sense of noblesse oblige by the political elite, the sense that the 80 percent are too dumb to understand their own interests, and the ridiculous presentation of their case as if it is in response to the “devastating critique” of the Mommy state by libertarians. In fact, of course, nudgery exposes most people to the unchained power of the corporations, while the power that the 80 percent might have to, for instance, send an email without being snooped on by the state is, because because,. Something we really have to abridge for the near future.  Meanwhile, the 20 percent, who apparently know all about their interests, have to be  treated like the too big to fail group they are.

That is pretty much how I see this ultimately not so important election. When Obama was elected in 2008, I thought our long national nightmare was over. Now I think that the nightmare has so saturated everyday life that it isn't a nightmare anymore - it is just how we live.

the wall fell: so what?

So, the end of history, most thumbsuckers think, is itself at an end. What's the damages, bartender? Well, this summing up of what happened to the Communist countries after the fall of the wall is a pretty stunning piece of work. I'm not convinced that all information can be given by GDP growth, but still: only ten percent of the countries in the post-Communist sector have actually converged with the developed world.
Ukraine, according to Milanovic's figures, will take fifty more years to achieve the standard of living of the Communist era. Hmm. I especially like it that Milanovic, perhaps because he's a rusty remnant of the old Soviet system, actually values culture.

"Let me just focus on one often overlooked fact. It is most strikingly illustrated with respect to Russia. Russia, probably for the first time since the early 1800s, has gone through a quarter of a century without leaving any trace on the international world of arts, literature, philosophy or science. One does not need to mention Russia’s “Silver Age” of the early 1900s, nor a number of writers who, often in the opposition to the regime, produced some of the best literature of the 20th century (Akhmatova, Pasternak, Grossman, Sholokhov, Solzhenitsyn, Zinoviev); one does not need even to dwell on scientific progress, indeed limited to the military or military-used production, in the USSR, to realize that nothing similar happened in the past 25 years, which is indeed a sufficiently long period to draw conclusions. Capitalism was not kind to Russia’s arts and sciences."
I was discussing contemporary Russian lit with a Russian professor a couple of weeks ago, and he seconds this conclusion. Myself, I'd put Mikhail Shishkin up among the great writers Milanovic cites. Who else? There has been a Limonovization of Russian literature, that's true. In a round table on Russian literature in the Global context published in the estimable Russian Studies in Literature last year, the contributors were all, unanimously, glum about the fate of Russian writers in the said global context - no Nobel prize for you all! A prof from the University of Colorado I think summed up the scene in the States very well: the last Russian writer to make a stir among the readership was Vassily Grossman.Not exactly current. In one field where the Soviets ruled, linguistics, or the part of linguistics having to do with semiotics, most stuff that I read is very derivative of what went before - the University of Tartu's Sign Systems Studies, for instance, hasn't advanced beyond Lotman as far as I can see, and Russian Studies in Literature is exemplary in digging through Bakhtin, and bringing to light the literature, some of it fallen through the cracks, but new theory, or work?

Late to the party: taking shots at Franzen on Wharton

I’ve been on a bit of an Edith Wharton kick lately, reading her and reading about her. This is how I came late to Jonathan Franzen’s essay about Wharton in the New Yorker which evoked a storm of counterblasts from the likes of Roxana Robinson  (who yields to the intense anger that Franzen’s condescending tone seems to beg for), Victoria Patterson in the LA review of books , and Autumn Whitefield-Madrono in the New Inquiry. All made good solid points, but I have some other points to make about how truly abysmal Franzen’s essay is. Though it is two years old, I figure that there is something to be gotten out of unloading on it some more, since I think the essay signals the sad level of the state of reading in America, at least among a group, like Franzen, who were in college in the theory period in the humanities and now think they are beyond all that.

Franzen begins with a truly barflyish gesture. You know that New Critical idea of the impersonality of the author? All horseshit. In addition to the author being mirrored in the work, the reader, too, wants to crowd into that mirror. What happens when we read is that we root for. We are reader fans, in other words:

“But sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader’s direct identification with a fictional character. It can also be driven by, say, my admiration of a character who is long on virtues I am short on (the moral courage of Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of Alyosha Karamazov), or, most interestingly, by my wish to be a character who is unlike me in ways I don’t admire or even like. One of the great perplexities of fiction—and the quality that makes the novel the quintessentially liberal art form—is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn’t like in real life. Becky Sharp may be a soulless social climber, Tom Ripley may be a sociopath, the Jackal may want to assassinate the French President, Mickey Sabbath may be a disgustingly self-involved old goat, and Raskolnikov may want to get away with murder, but I find myself rooting for each of them.” 

What it means to “root” for these people is puzzling. Certainly rooting and sympathizing are not synonyms.  How do I root for Raskolnikov, for instance? Do I hope he goes on to bigger and less messier heists?

The “root for” phrase comes from sports – we root for a team. We might even root for a player, in games like tennis. But is a character in a novel really like a tennis player or a team? No. Nor is the author like a team. Its an odd trick to identify  rooting with sympathizing. Sympathizing might seem to, well, feminine for Franzen, but rooting just won’t do. The closest it comes is the situation in which  I watch a game in which two teams that I have no interest in – no sympathy for -  are contending. Then, in my own case, I root for the game to be a good one - an elegant game. I have always been a little shocked, actually, when people who root for a particular team are happy when the opposite team makes an error, fumbles the execution of a play, or in general subverts itself. To my mind, one wants the highest level of play.

I bring some such desire to novels, this is true. And there are novels in which I can say I root for a character – thrillers for instance. But the one-time-onlyness  of such novels – the fact that I don’t re-read them – is precisely connected to the root-for incentive.  I know, even before I start a thriller or watch one, that the hero is going to survive – that is so tied into the conventions of the thriller that we read it into the very physical mass of the thriller – I knew, for instance, in Gone Girl that the wife couldn’t have been killed by the husband by the fact that, at the point at which there was some doubt, the movie still had an hour more to run. Thus, I am rooting for the game to be tough and the agent I am pushed to identify with to win.  But this experience doesn’t strike me as very pertinent to reading Crime and Punishment, or The House of Mirth, where the stakes are not so conventionally laid out, and where the trajectories of the characters may comment about the environment in which they are etched - which is much different from, say, a football game. There is no such thing as a meta football game. Football, however much it has been used as a metaphor to say something about America, is never played in such a way that it intentionally makes a statement about America. The goals, here, are set, the score is summed up in one dimension. 

Raskolnikov, or Lily Bart, are difficult to root for because they pursue their purposes with a divided consciousness.  That is, uh, the point.  Rooting, here, is a rather silly extrapolation of a fan’s – and I am very tempted to say fanboy’s – perspective.

Proceeding from these shaky premises, Franzen considers Wharton. She was rich, which somehow is a strike against her. Her marriage was unsuccessful, which was somehow her fault.  How can we like this author, then, whose mirror image we are seeking in her works.

Well, there is the fact that she was a dog.

This is crucial to Franzen’s argument. The breathless stupidity of this approach was righteously attacked by anyone with any knowledge of Wharton’s biography. And the fact that Franzen was playing “hot or not” with Edith Wharton, as Victoria Patterson points out, was a slap in the face to all female writers. These are all things I think are true.

And yet, here is where I feel something is missing. If we were talking about Toulouse Latrec, the fact that he was so short might have some relevance to his work. And we would look for contemporary accounts and photos to see that he was, indeed, short.

But Edith Wharton? Apparently, she is not Franzen’s type. But there is no, none, zippo evidence that her contemporaries thought she was a dog. To the contrary: when Wharton’s first engagement was broken off, the gossip sheet Town Topics, wrote that, “‘an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride’ caused the engagement to be broken off.”

Bingo. I mean, it isn’t enough that Franzen takes the barfly bullshitter’s approach to literature, but he also seems to have done zero research and have zero instinct for historical contextualization. The mirror here is dominated by Franzen – Edith doesn’t enter into it.

This is of importance, since Franzen’s bizarre thesis is that Wharton’s novels are the revenge of an ugly girl on beautiful girls – for instance, Lily Barton. If Wharton didn’t consider herself ugly, and if nobody else around her considered her ugly, than the thesis is basically, I, Jonathan Franzen, think she is a dog, so everybody else musta. This is like reviewing King Lear by saying I, Jonathan Franzen, am totally opposed to rule by royalty, yucko, so Shakespeare musta been too – which is why Lear’s life is such a bitch!

I think that Town Topics item is important as an indicator of the expectations of the society that is shown in The House of Mirth – it can be contrasted with Lily Bart’s flaw, which is her intelligence. All the irony, all the hinderances to “rooting” for her, come out of that intelligence and its consequences. Intelligence, here, in the sense that she actually conceives, to an extent, the social conditions that make her own striving for a wealthy husband seem both necessary and valuable even as she sees the sterility of the lives of her “set” of wealthy heirs. She’s a divided soul in the classic American sense: she wants to compromise her freedom to attain success, the enjoyment of which rests in the freedom it theoretically offers. But the pattern of sacrifices necessary to attain success offer no compromise, so that when success is attained, it is enjoyed with exactly the sterile triviality that Bart sees around her. Seeing the sterility of her set too clearly stands athwart the simple minded pursuit of her simple minded target, and not seeing that her imagined transformation of the goal, once she attains it, would demand an ability to buck the norm that she has never displayed, is exactly what makes Lily interesting and, in a sense, tortured. In the crucial chapter 6, in which Lily takes a walk with the inappropriate man, Selden. Instead of pursuing the rich heir, Gryce, Wharton makes both the duality and deficit in Bart’s vision of life clear:

“Lily dropped down on the rock, glowing with her long climb. She sat quiet, her lips parted by the stress of the ascent, her eyes wandering peacefully over the broken ranges of the landscape. Selden stretched himself on the grass at her feet, tilting his hat against the level sun-rays, and clasping his hands behind his head, which rested against the side of the rock. He had no wish to make her talk; her quick-breathing silence seemed a part of the general hush and harmony of things. In his own mind there was only a lazy sense of pleasure, veiling the sharp edges of sensation as the September haze veiled the scene at their feet. But Lily, though her attitude was as calm as his, was throbbing inwardly with a rush of thoughts. There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight.”

As to why Lily Bart, or any protagonist, is handsome or beautiful, well, let me refer you to Hollywood, from 1900-2014, or to the Odyssey or the Iliad. If the writer of the gospel had attributed ugliness to Jesus, given him a hump like Richard III, history would be different today. Franzen’s idea here is not only not rooted in any sense of the author, but any sense of archetypes in literature period. This is dumbness piled on top of dumbassedness, and it makes me cringe and question again whether The Corrections was that good. I'm not, however, inclined to go back and check.