The Art of Appreciation

...Writers & Writitig THE ART OF APPRECIATION BY PEARL K BELL LITERARY CRITICS, with their cruel power to main and murder, are in the end only as good as the quality of their praise What matters is not their clever and devastating contempt but their appreciation of the writing they are most deeply moved by and devoted to, and their ability to make that enthusiasm both clear and contagious Two current books of criticism and literary history illustrate this axiom with peculiar cogency Fictions and Events (Dutton, 349 pp , $10 00), for all Werner Bert-hoff's immense learning and skill at formulating subtle and useful distinctions and parallels, is a suffocatingly and book, self-defeatingly resistant to approach and assent By contrast, Tony Tanner's City of Woids (Harper & Row, 463 pp , $7 95) is a vigorous and affectionate examination of recent Amencan fiction, despite an occasional tendency to stretch his thesis further than it can reasonably go The distillation of years of ardent and intelligent reading, Tanner's book has a unity of tone that stems not only from its precise histoncal boundaries?950-70 is certainly better critical turf than miscellaneous writers and periods—but also from a consistently enthusiastic engagement with literature in general that is rather difficult to discern in the Berthoff volume I do not mean to say that Berthoff, a Harvard professor, is any less committed to the importance of literature than Tanner, a lecturer at Cambridge University, only that he is distressingly indirect in communicating the value and pleasure he finds m it Indeed, his pompous and haughty mandannism does him a serious disservice How much more accessible his thinking about books would be if he could scrape away the academic detritus ot words like mythic, Active, authorial, chonc, fructifying (is nothing fruitful any more'') The first half of Fictions and Events ranges over an ambitiously wide field the connection between literature and historical events, between fiction, myth and reality One brilliant essay, the most coherently argued in the book, considers modern literature m the "condition of exile" and makes the fascinating point that "the free man of letters has become—like any other victim of modern technological and electronic civilization—a displaced person " Another essay deals astutely with the state ot the novel in a time of troubles Following the more or less theoretical pieces, Berthoff gets down to cases in rather constricted assessments of Ins Murdoch and Muriel Spark, Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, and Hart Crane, and engages in an interesting if somewhat extravagant comparison of the Autobiography of Malcolm X and Mailer's Armies of the Night as major American books of "visionary force" and "transforming authority " In his preface, that mandatory afterthought for any collection of essays written on different and distinct occasions—mainly, in this instance, academic conferences and specialized journals—Berthoff tries to impose the hindsight of a unified viewpoint on the volume's original piecework by developing the idea of his title "We inhabit a world of events The constructed event, or fiction, that constitutes 'literature' takes its place withm this lived, histoncal continuum, which it thereby augmerits In this view a shared fiction of 'literature' and its uses underlies every particular literary performance In an era of epidemic disorder and confusion the survival and reconstitution of [literature] becomes a first concern, the survival of the effective community of writers and readers in which literature practically exists and from which its special influence spreads ' I quote this statement at length not because I think it says anything truly original about the need to keep literature alive—it doesn't—but to illustrate the maddeningly gluey vagueness of Berthoff's prose, the words seem to stick together like badly cooked nee What he has to say about the lntei dependency of literature and common reality is simpler and more platitudinous than his vocabulary and diction portend Even when he answers a straightforward question ("What knowledge are we in search of when we study' literature...

...Tanner comments, "will go out of his way to show that he is using language as it has never been used before ' Thomas Pynchon, for example, borrowed "entropy" from physics and assimilated it to less distinct areas ot human experience that exhibit an irreversible degeneration into disorder Armed with these suggestive recognitions, Tanner then focuses on the superficially different but related kinds of fictional fabrication and attitude that have come to the surface in American writing since 1950 But in his readiness to see his thesis writ large m every book he considers, he frequently tends to exaggerate and distort the achievement of such incurably minor though pretentiously eccentric writers as James Purdy, Susan Son-tag, William Gass, Ken Kesey, William Gaddis, Richard Brautigan, Frederick Exley, Stephen Schneck Perhaps it is Tanner's compulsion to cover the field that accounts for City of Words' one serious flaw—his uncritical praise of almost every writer and book he brings into his net They can't all be, and they're not, all that good (Berthoff refers, in this respect, to the many "overextended jokes that pass for fiction these days ") Tanner's deficiencies of discrimination lead him to attach the same sober, even obeisant esteem to Brautigan and Bartheleme and Barth that he accords Ellison and Bellow, and it won't do Still, this fault does not mitigate the importance of his many extraordinary insights and clarifications—his discussion of the influence of science-fiction forms on the modern American novel is invaluable And though I demur from the omnivorousness of his many enthusiasms, City of Words is a book of compelling importance to anyone who cares whether Amencan fiction flourishes or decays What a pleasant change it is to find one Englishman who today admires this country and its writers...

...with uncharacteristic directness ("The great function of literature is to open the heart and increase wisdom") he buries the statement in a context of deadly abstractness, with no examples from any specific work that might make apposite and lucid his austere theoretical exposition What Berthoff obviously regards as the unique leavening he brings to more complacent academic views of literature is his adversary stance toward the political and social status quo, which he scatters throughout his essays in the form of mini-jeremiads Yet the actual content of thought and feeling behind his scornful "J'accuse'" is dry, remote and preachy His fondness for revolutionary rumblings like "singularly treacherous era,' "fragmented, immitigably exploitative society," and (in connection with Mailer's Armies) "that world of totalitarian civil power that in our lifetime has clamped down on every natural kfe-agency," seems to arise not out of any deeply experienced or imagined pertinence to the work he is discussing, but out of that fashionable articulate hysteria we associate with radical chic DESPITE BERTHOFF'S many trenchant remarks about particular books, what is so naggingly absent from his criticism is a controlling, recognizable point of view, a framework of sensibility and judgment that can breathe life into detailed literary analysis This is what Tony Tanner has so admirably devised for a better understanding of the principal tendencies and qualities of American fiction in the last two decades Berthoff remarks at one point, with typical abstractness, that "brokenness and disconnectedness" have characterized American literary history, with its "specialty of starting all over again " But Tanner's indefatigably concrete attention to particular novels and novelists is unquestionably the more rewarding approach What, Tanner asks, is the discernible pattern of similarity to be found in the work of such apparently disparate writers as William Burroughs and Saul Bellow Donald Barthelme and Bernard Malamud, John Hawkes and Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike1 Tanner meets this challenge with a profoundly illuminating description of the two contradictory but powerful forces at work in the American imagination "There is an abiding dream in American literature that an un-patterned, unconditioned life is possible and there is also an abiding American dread that someone else is patterning your lite, that there are all sorts of invisible plots afoot to rob you ot your autonomy of thought and action, that conditioning is ubiquitous " Out of the simultaneous pull of chimerical freedom and the fear of losing one's identity has come the American novelist's obsession with ingenious new ways ot asserting his unassailable self—through formal disobedience to traditional rules of fiction and through experiments with language, as Tanner points out in discussing the influence on American writers of such word-necromancers as Nabokov and Borges An American writer...