Comments on: An Advertisement for Himself

By: Leora Skolkin-Smith

Leora Skolkin-Smith — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:22:57 +0000

Well-done. This really needed to be said. Thanks.

-Leora

By: PJ

PJ — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:49:13 +0000

Thanks! Well said.

By: Andrew Seal

Andrew Seal — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:15:12 +0000

Scott,
Strangely enough, Grossman’s biography on his website states that he was in a Comparative Lit graduate program for a few years, yet his knowledge of and outlook on literature has always seemed extremely limited to Anglophone (if not just American) literature. I doubt it even occurs to him to look at someone like Puig when formulating his little histories.
PJ,
What I mean by “literature is a system, not a mood” is that literature is never as dominated by a single type of fiction as Grossman suggests: even if we’re just considering the reading habits of cultural or intellectual elites, the idea that there is a single or unquestionably preeminent standard idea about what constitutes good and proper fiction is plain bogus. There is always a network or system of cross-pollinating ideas about what good literature is, and, what’s more, that systematic nature of literature insures that no standard is ever going to be “pure” or unalloyed by other ideas and standards. Even avant-gardes incorporate ideas and standards from mass or low culture–look how profoundly affected Modernism was by the cinema.
We shouldn’t treat literature, as Grossman does, as some unified abstraction, a sort of zeitgeisty, generalized set of ideas that shapes how literature is written. Instead, we should remember that there are many different, continuously interacting processes that affect, regulate, and influence not just what writers write, but what critics praise (or damn) and readers read. It’s just not as simple as Grossman imagines it here: that this idea (or mood) called Modernism has held readers and writers in check from pursuing their more natural inclinations toward juicy plots, and now this mood is dissipating and being replaced by another mood or idea that glorifies plot and suspense and humor and (conveniently) novels like the one he’s just published.

By: PJ

PJ — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 02:55:52 +0000

“Literature is a system”? Please explain. (That is a sincere request.)

By: Scott

Scott — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:17:37 +0000

You nailed it. Then you nailed it some more. And then some more.
The biggest fallacy in Grossman’s argument is the idea that plot is the only way to sustain a reader’s interest over the course of a novel. Obviously not. Just as obviously, the Modernists worked very hard to sustain a reader’s interest, they just didn’t do it through plot.
I wonder what Grossman would make of someone like Manuel Puig, who wrote extremely robust plots but tended to tell them in ways completely alien to 19th-century realism. Could he stand the contradictions?

By: steve donoghue

steve donoghue — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:08:48 +0000

Hee. Hilarious post. Shooting fish in a barrel, but hilarious. It’s always struck me that those of us who read for a living and try, really try, to do an honest, open-minded, and intelligent job of it have more to fear from blowhard day-trippers like Grossman than we do from people who openly profess their hatred of books. Glad to have the likes of you on the watchtower, Andrew!

By: steve

steve — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:58:44 +0000

Excellent post! It’s Groundhog Day though isn’t it? I seem to have read arguments like Grossman’s several hundred times and those like yours not at all.
I read only for pleasure but I don’t like stories. So why do I feel like the freak?
Trying to argue with people like Grossman is futile. It reminds me of the passage in Sartre’s The Words:
‘At Saint Anne’s Psychiatric Clinic a patient cried out in bed: “I’m a prince! Arrest the Grand Duke!”. Someone went up to him and whispered in his ear: “Blow your nose!” and he blew his nose. He was asked: “What’s your occupation?”. He answered quietly: “Shoemaker,” and started shouting again.’

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:28:41 +0000

Excellent post! Ha ha! I seem to recall him peddling this line of thinking at BEA, too. It all has to do with reading books on cell phones, or something.
And I for one know several people who have read Twilight or The Boat – but none who have read both.