Specialization, Snobbery, and the School of Carver

A couple years ago, just as I was making the seemingly momentous transition from undergrad to grad student, I decided to become a more “specialized” reader. After all, I was becoming a real academic, and it seemed like the thing to do. But what would I specialize in?

I had read Ulysses, a fact which I liked to sneak into class discussions, apropos of nothing, as if summoning the fictional ghost of Leopold Bloom into any English class would somehow certify my realness, my seriousness, as a reader. But despite all my bragging, I really did love Joyce, and as far as specialties went, the Modernists seemed like the school for me: Woolf, Pound, Hemingway, Eliot, Faulkner, Stein, the whole glorious, convention-busting gang. They were eternally hip.

But then I took a class on Woolf and was introduced to the vast and intimidating body of Modernist criticism. While researching for papers on Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, I got the impression of being late to a feast where the banquet table, once a glorious spread, had been pecked down to its grim and final scraps. If I wanted to say or write anything truly new, I would have to move on.  

This brought me to the Post-Modernists, specifically the Americans of the 50s and 60s. These were the writers that had taken the formal innovations of the Modernists as a challenge: how could they move an exhausted Literature forward? How could they write shock into the complacent, stupefying systems of post-war America?

Taking these questions head-on, the Post-Modernists engaged in a lot of bracing, brainy formal experimentation, which is exactly the sort of thing that “turns me on” as a reader. The other thing that drew me to these writers - and this is probably the most important point - is that they were currently unfashionable just about everywhere. No one I knew was reading these books, and by reading them, I was entering into an exclusive, one-man literary club defined by experimentation, intellectual gamesmanship, and a certain hip attachment to irony and the darker side of human affairs.

As I tend to do with my favorite writers or musicians, I became a fan-boy, savoring the cloistered exclusivity of my affections. My Post-Modernists of choice were John Barth, William H. Gass, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover. Their books became (and remain) some of my favorites, including Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Barthelme’s Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, and Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants. Above all others, Pynchon became a sort of god to me.

All-American Badass Robert Coover

Meanwhile, my graduate English program turned out not to encourage “specialized” reading or research at all, instead opting for a widely-ranged and heavily-politicized curriculum that I found more confusing than anything else. By this time, however, my self-imposed specialization had taken hold: I was a Po-Mo junkie with a bad case of the Holier-Than-Thou Blues.

The problem was that I was turning into a smug, elitist douche. In my mind, there was a stark division between my own rarefied tastes and those of the readers and writers around me, who seemed stuck in the mire of Dirty Realism. I saw this “Dirty Realism” as a literary regression, a muck of heavily workshopped sentimentality and phony working-class formalism that was terminally sincere and, worst of all, easy to read. This was the world of Raymond Carver, a writer I had once loved in high school and my early college years, before I’d “wised up” and discovered the aloof, ironical contraptions of Coover and Barthelme.  

My resistance to the School of Carver wasn’t intended as elitism, though. It began as devotion and defense, a stern and unswerving loyalty to the Post-Modernists who were overshadowed by Carver’s 1980s coronation as The Master of the American Short Story. Carver’s novelist counterpart (and a great story writer in his own right) was Richard Ford. I came to resent both men as retrograde artists who had duped a gullible reading public, a whole nation of philistines too slow for the sophistications of a Barth or a Gass.

But then, fairly recently, I went back and actually read Carver and Ford. First came Carver’s story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which not only blew me away, but also reminded me of why I had loved Carver in the first place. There was the spare intensity of the prose; the broken dreams exposed and poked at in glistening, illuminating shards of everyday life; the hilarious and tragic whiz-bang endings; the true, crackling dialog.

All-American Badass Raymond Carver

Shortly after What We Talk About, I found a similar but totally different set of rewards in Ford’s A Multitude of Sins, a story collection that borrows just as much from Gass as it does from Chekhov. Both books were revelations.

What I discovered after reading them was that I had been ridiculous. Why shut out entire “sections” of literature if they differ from your favorite stuff? Why became a cheerleader for writers when their work can speak for itself? Why police literature or be a snob at all?

In the process, I came to think of Carver (and, to a lesser degree, Ford) as part of a never-ending avant-garde, a lineage of great fiction writers that never stops in one place, never actually settles into one school. The fact of the matter is that even envelope-pushers like John Barth and John Hawkes become Old Unfashionable Dogs at one point or another. This has no bearing on their ultimate value as artists, and it isn’t up to me to dictate their value to the American public. This thing we call “literary fiction” is doomed and blessed never to stay the same, and it certainly hasn’t since Carver’s time. This is a good thing.

I guess my point here is that “specialization,” while healthy in small doses, can also become limiting. It’s alright to play favorites, and Lord knows I’ll continue to do so, but why do it at the expense of other, potentially life-changing writers?

The funny thing about all this is that I’ve spent this entire post splitting hairs about white American men. What the hell kind of specialization is that? Moving forward, I’m trying to generalize my reading, with the one stipulation that I only read “da good shit.”

Because what other specialization does a reader need?

In Search of Furbies Past: Time Travelling with Thomas Pynchon in Bleeding Edge

Reading Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon's great novel about New York directly before and after 9/11, I found it nearly impossible to believe that this insanely allusive (and, well, elusive) detective story was actually written by a man in his 70s. The main reason for this impression, beyond the unparalleled linguistic virtuosity and the characteristically baroque plot, is Bleeding Edge’s period-perfect details, especially those that pertain to the novel's youngest characters. As a millennial who was all of nine years old in September of 2001, I was sent gliding back into my childhood on nearly every page of this book, as Pynchon, like some magnanimous wizard of Time, transformed Britney Spears, Razor Scooters, Halo, Nelly, and the once ubiquitous Furby into the stuff of postmodern myth. And while most great writers are by necessity great researchers, studying their chosen time and topic and using raw fact and historical detail to create their own realities, what Pynchon achieves in Bleeding Edge is so staggering in its sincerity, humor, and insight that it goes beyond mere research and becomes, for this reader at least, something like sorcery. Or, as one of Pynchon's own characters so eloquently puts it, "Proust, Schmoust."

Any old ink jockey can look at a decade-old Top 40 chart and drop Britney Spears hits into his book, hoping for a certain historical effect. But Pynchon's allusions in Bleeding Edge (and, of course, in every one of his novels going back to V.) do so much more than lazy name- or title-dropping. For one thing, Pynchon's constant pop references simulate the inescapable white noise of "late capitalism," an ominous term that runs throughout Bleeding Edge and whose academic ring does little to mute its menace. Pynchon's characters, like us, are inundated in a world of cheap, often disposable pleasures, whether it's music videos, junk food, or Hollywood inventions for which "inane" would be too kind a word. In this sense, there's something Patrick Bateman-esque about Bleeding Edge’s third-person narrator and his comical focus on cultural signifiers, although the similarities thankfully end at an encyclopedic appreciation for all things pop.

The real impression one gets from all these zany invocations, however, is that Pynchon actually enjoys - nay, treasures - the great American culture machine, profoundly stupid and even pernicious though it may be. This affection (especially for the wilder, woolier byproducts of the pop culture beast, the stuff that hits from the margins) is a big part of what makes Bleeding Edge so beautiful and so sad. At the same time, Pynchon uses his allusions (as Tony Wonder sez) to tell us more about his characters - their tastes, their desires, and their dreams.

One of the novel’s more lyrically allusive moments is a sweeping montage of Ziggy and Otis Loeffler’s Midwestern summer vacation, a seasonal escape from New York into the arcades, ice-cream parlors, and endless wheat fields of their father’s youth. Ziggy and Otis are major characters in the novel, but they’re not exactly major players, appearing only in passing while the focus remains firmly on their mother, the very badass protagonist Maxine Tarnow. But Pynchon is clearly “up to something” with Ziggy and Otis, who bookend the novel and who seem to populate its most piercing and poignant moments. Speaking of which, here’s ‘at Midwestern montage:

They ate at malls all across Iowa, at Villa Pizza and Bishop’s Buffet, and Horst introduced them to Maid-Rites as well as to local variations on the Louisville Hot Brown. Further into the summer and days to the west, they watched the wind in different wheat fields and waited through the county-wide silences when it grows dark in the middle of the afternoon and lightning appears at the horizon. They went looking for arcade games, in derelict shopping plazas, in riverside pool halls, in college-town hangouts, in ice-cream parlors tucked into midblock micromalls. Horst couldn’t help noticing how the places had, most of them, grown more ragged since his time, floors less swept, air-conditioning not as intense, smoke thicker than in the midwestern summers of long ago...They played Arkanoid in Ames and Zaxxon in Sioux City. They played Road Blasters and Galaga and Galaga 88, Tempest and Rampage and Robotron 2084, which Horst believes to be the greatest arcade game of all time. Mostly, wherever they could find it, they seemed to be playing Time Crisis 2. (p. 290)

What moves me about this passage is actually a combination of things, most of them personal and serendipitous and of interest probably only to me (such is the blogger’s burden). But the first thing that hits me after re-reading this singing, sentimental chokehold of a passage is that in the summer described here, the summer of 2001, my brother and I made our very own Midwestern pilgrimage, heading northwards from Memphis through our parents’ agrarian homeland and all the way up to northern Wisconsin, where we would attend our first summer of camp. I remember this road-trip vividly, especially all the fields and the gas stations and those out-of-nowhere storms Pynchon describes so well. I also remember the occasional arcade stop, our mother being patient with our burgeoning video-game addictions, which would not be indulged or even acknowledged in our impending seven-week nature-dose of camping, canoes, and absolute digital celibacy.

Which brings us to those arcade games. Pynchon’s list of games is a funny little marvel in itself, a practical micro-history of gaming that connects a father to his sons on two levels, both geographically and through the games themselves. In the process, Ames becomes the land of Arkanoid, and Dad gets to show off his joystick chops.

It makes sense, though, that Time Crisis would be Ziggy and Otis’ favorite. I, for one, loved this game, and the hours I spent playing it were a clear forerunner to my later addictions to Halo and Halo 2. Ziggy and Otis love it, I gather in a flash of self-recognition, because it’s so immersive, so very nearly real. You hold the plastic handgun, you point it, and you shoot at the bad guys, whose badness is never ambiguous. And despite any prudish parental or even Congressional objections, games like Time Crisis were perfectly innocent, especially in the fading summer of 2001. It’s what comes after the summer, the events of 11 September, that will introduce a new and frightening ambiguity to Ziggy and Otis’ world.

But as Pynchon shows, and as I can attest myself, Ziggy and Otis and kids like them are better prepared for that ambiguity than any parent could ever realize. We were raised in this weird digital world, and we know, somehow, in a way that isn’t quite instinct, how to navigate it. Pynchon’s recognition of this is both moving and uncanny. It also confirms, as if I needed any further reassurance, that Pynchon is Great with a capital G.  

There’s so much more I could write about Bleeding Edge, but, like, Time being of the essence, I fear I must move on. Forgive the cheez, but we’re all in the midst of a Time Crisis, and there are other books I gotta plumb the depths of. In the meantime, after having finished Pynchon’s eighth novel, I can only be thankful to this septuagenarian whose books have changed the way I see the world. Here’s to a book or two more.

Buy Bleeding Edge here, or better yet, pick up a copy at a local bookstore (most good ones carry paperbacks of Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge these days).