Uncertainty & Parataxis

My online acquaintance Elizabeth, from Oz, has run afoul of the expectations of readers. Namely, that she writes sometimes a kind of memoir that veers from purely factual and autobiographical to the imaginative and speculative, and does so without warning. Her offense to some readers seems to have been not that she interpolated "fact" and "fiction"—a creative nonfiction technique, after all, as familiar as the New Journalism written by Tom Wolfe and others since the 1970s—but that she did not give prior warning as to what she was doing.

I haven't got a lot of sympathy for such complaints. Anyone who reads anything other than ostensibly purely factual reporting should be aware that fact and non-fact interpolate often in writing, and that this is as old as Homer's Odyssey, which after all is a mythic retelling of probably historical incidents. (And the book to read on the subject of Homer remains Alfred Lord's The Singer of Tales, which definitively argued that epic storytelling both ancient and modern is a blend of historical elements framed and connected with literary-fictional devices.)

I read and write a lot of creative nonfiction, or literary nonfiction. I guess what I mean is that I'm not a purist. "Fact" and "fiction" are not pure categories, nor are they completely isolatable. (For that matter, neither are "poetry" and "prose.") All writing is in some way creative writing, is artifice, is invented.

With some fiction writers you come to expect an unreliable narrator, or other levels of not deception but trust: trusting to wherever you're being led, even if it turns fantastical at the hinge of the story. That's one of the pleasures of reading Borges: you never quite know what's going on. It's a delightful puzzle, and you cannot assume that any source the author cites is a real book—although the surprise is that it might be. You know with Borges, though, that where you're being led is worth the reward.

I've had arguments with some "straight fiction" writers who don't like Borges because they don't always know what's going on. I even know one writer-critic who thinks Borges is a "bad" short story writer, but that's because the writer-critic in question has completely missed the point. He has attempted to apply the laws of ordinary "realistic" fiction (think Raymond Carver, John Updike, etc.) to Borges, where Borges is meta-fiction, not "fiction" at all. It's like saying that apples are crabapples: a category error.

So I look at the complaint this way: Some readers need to have absolute logical, rational knowledge of what's going on. They need a clear, linear narrative in which everything is clear or explained. A must follow B in linear, logical narrative. Effect must follow cause. Most literature does indeed progress this way, and does typically follow these rules. (Borges rarely does.)

I can and do appreciate this attitude towards linear narrative, and cause and effect, in a mystery novel, but I also like to be led by the writer into surprises and the pleasure of not knowing where I'm going. There is no suspense where there is no mystery, no uncertainty. As has been said before, the pleasure of reading Raymond Chandler is because of his writing's mood, his characters, and his descriptions: Chandler was always rather weak on strictly linear plot. Right now I'm reading a series of SF novels by British writer Peter F. Hamilton set in his Commonwealth universe (from Pandora's Star through the Dreaming Void trilogy) and the writing is so pyrotechnically inventive and vivid that I have no clue where he's going next, but I certainly am enjoying the ride.

Life doesn't have simple beginnings, middles, and endings. Life is full of mystery. Life is chaotic—as those of us who have suffered chronic illness, personal calamity, and family deaths and sufferings in recent months all know on a very visceral level. One thing very clear to me right now, after having been very ill all this past summer, is my own mortality.

Virginia Woolf will always be one of the writers that I return to, time and again, in novels such as To the Lighthouse because she understands this. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. —Virginia Woolf

Woolf's biggest influence on me as a writer has been that I want to represent consciousness in my writing. I want to record the way the attention, the mind, the awareness, all operate. Diffuse or focused, consciousness is at the center of writing, and writing becomes too blatantly artifice if it tries too hard to fix consciousness within the borders of logical and linear statement. If I can see the scaffolding too clearly, and predict every plot twist and turn, then much of the pleasure is gone from the reading.

The pleasure of a great mystery novel is that you can't foresee the ending, can't predict the plot twists. The underlying logic of mystery novels is that crime is a disruption of the natural order, and in discovering and punishing the criminal, Order is restored to the universe—or at least to civilization. But this is hardly realistic. Such endings, with all the loose threads neatly tied together, are rare in real life. Disruptions are not always healed, or in the miracle of life's mystery, are healed in completely unpredicted ways.

I sometimes think that the demand for clarity and order in our reading is because people are trying to construct a universe in which they can feel safe and secure, an orderly universe in which they know the rules, and which doesn't surprise them. I find that dull, personally, but I understand the psychology behind it. As in a mystery novel, we want Order to be restored to our lives, and we want to know all the reasons why, and have a good ending. The alternatives are just too scary.

Still, I prefer writing that reflects life, that gives me an experience of life, that re-creates in me the reader an experience of living, even if it's chaotic and unpredictable. Not always knowing what's going on, or which narrator to believe, doesn't bother me. I am able to follow on, and maybe even figure it out.

Sometimes we just have to trust that the reader is smart enough to figure it out fro themselves, and doesn't need footnotes. Clarity in expression is usually a positive attribute in writing, but what we're writing about doesn't necessarily have to be clear.

I am reminded of the Tibetan Buddhist principle of learning to become comfortable with uncertainty. In this universe, the only certainty is change: everything will change, everything will decay and die, and we have no certainty about how or where or when. The usual, habitual response is to fight back by creating certainty wherever we can. Fear of uncertainty lies at the root of many social and political promises and over-reactions. The question for the individual remains, how much uncertainty can we bear in our lives? For some, no doubt they can bear more in their personal lives than they can in their intellectual and ideological lives; which is often just a matter of necessity. Becoming comfortable with uncertainty, in the long run, means letting go of clinging to certainty wherever we find it, in our lives, in our work, in our relationships. It also means to let go of expectations, and just deal with what's really there, right in front of us. It means to start where you are, and not just where you are comfortable.

I think the bottom line is that people only complain when their expectations aren't being met. Or when they think they've been deceived. Literary history is full of such moments.

But in the end, what survives is the writing.

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In discussing these complaints, or reader's failures of expectation, with Elizabeth, she made the comment:

The writer Gail Jones, another not so well known Australian, talks about 'parataxis', the way two seemingly disparate pieces of information can be placed together, one after the other, and the human mind, with its tendency to make links will find connections, however obscure.

I suspect the same thing occurs when we combine the so called factual with the fictional - new links become possible. But it's not to everyone's taste as you say for example with Borges's work.

Parataxis is, in some ways, the very root of all my more "experimental" poetry, which I've sometimes described as cinematic in style: a sequence of images placed side by side, often without verbs—often in fact without any kind of normative syntax or grammar—which like a filmstrip or film collage might create meaning in the mind of the reader. For example, my poem "a shaman's critique of pure poetry." Or many of the Book of Silence poem sequences, in a form I invented. Some of the poetic forms I have invented are strongly influenced by haiku, but haiku itself can be considered a poetic form that uses paratactic juxtaposition of imagery to create meaning, wherein the reader is required to fill in the remaining gaps from their own life-experience. Poems I occasionally write in a post-haibun form I invented are further examples of this.

Simply because we put things side by side, meaning is created, because our minds tend to find patterns and meanings even when they're not intended. In many ways or very cognition is based on pattern-making and pattern-finding. I rely on this in my poetry a great deal. Sometimes a poem, or even an essay, proceeds by using parataxis to create connections, which after all is how consciousness often operates. As both Borges and Woolf would embrace and emulate in some of their writings.

I know that I am an associative thinker, with an associative memory, often creating linkages unforeseen, and my art often reflects or recreates my consciousness. What might be unusual in my style of thinking/consciousness, that is, what makes me an artist rather than an accountant, is precisely that I think in gestalts, in puns, always making connections, always seeing things from multiple angles. Is that so extraordinary? I've been told that it is, but I think that's because our culture tells us it is, and our educational style is designed to make us think in logical, linear, rational order. (Not to mention that education in our culture is dominated by visual teaching, as opposed to kinesthetic or aural.) I don't think this style of thinking is exceptional, I think rather that it is typical of many artists. Putting things together in new ways, in ways no one had thought of or presented before, is one practical definition of art-making: revealing the world in new ways, often in ways that upset the familiar. In other words, art that changes consciousness while reflecting it.

Parataxis doesn't guarantee meanings and connections will be made, nor does it guarantee the familiar (dare one say, clichéd) connections will be made via what is juxtaposed. Sometimes uncertainty is everywhere. The question the reader must ask herself or himself at that point is, how much uncertainty are they comfortable living with? (The answer can be quite revealing of one's personal psychology. In Tibetan Buddhist practice, finding a point of mental resistance is a clue towards where one needs to work next, in one's practice of moving towards greater awakening awareness.)

Strictly speaking, according to various dictionaries, parataxis is the juxtaposition of phrases, words, or sentences placed side by side without the use of a conjunction. The word's origin is from the ancient Greek: to arrange side by side, with the connotation of arranging the troops for battle order. I appreciate the creative possibilities of this connotation of arrangement in battle order, since it often seems that writing anything "experimental" automatically makes one a target. Line up the words and the troops, and fire all torpedoes. I don't really mind when some reader objects that one of my more "experimental" poems has blown their mind; I don't view that as a negative. If something I have made blows your mind, or changes your consciousness some other way, I am pleased; it's one indicator, in my personal artistic lexicon, of the success of any given work of art, to succeed in changing how one perceives the world, even if only for a moment.

How do we create meaning where there is none? Sometimes simply by putting things side by side, and letting the viewer sort them out. That can be enough to change everything.

John D. McDonald: An Appreciation

When Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and the other writers who became associated with the development of the "hardboiled" detective mystery were creating their new style of story—a style which later in film became the seeds of film noir—they were in part reacting against the constraints of the English "cozy," those tightly-plotted, carefully-constructed drawing-room mysteries epitomized by Agatha Christie. They were also inventing for the first time a distinctly American style in crime fiction writing.

Often, major changes in literary style, which this was, come about because of a renewed pursuit of realism in fiction. An old mannerist style is replaced by something more reflective of the current times, in terms of what stories are now more relevant to the times, but also in the ways in which the current times are represented. We are going through a similar major literary transition right now; the symptoms of it are all around, although some are determined to ignore them. Chandler, in his desire to pursue a more realistic fiction, made some pithy observations about social problems, not least the gulf between the have and the have-nots; and in this sense Chandler's stories meet the requirements of what novelist/critic/Medievalist John Gardner termed moral fiction.

Chandler's seven novels, at least three of which in my opinion are so good as to be unbeatably archetypal of the form, are driven by character rather than by plot. In fact, Chandler's plots are often rather weak and sketchy, compared to some other writers. His great strengths are in setting mood, poetic descriptions of people, places, and events, his dialogue which seems very natural to the ear but in fact is carefully stylized, and the progression of events in his stories which often seem close to real life in their sometimes illogical and chaotic and inexplicable drama. Chandler was a keen observer, and had a gifted ear for dialogue. In some ways Chandler's style was a rebellion against the existing constraints of the existing detective novel of that era; in other ways, his style was just the way he wrote.

What we're left with from that early era of the hardboiled detective novel is some writing that is surely amongst the best of the 20th Century. The three novels of Chandler's that I think are his best—The Long Goodbye; Farewell, My Lovely; The Big Sleep—and Hammett's best novels—including The Maltese Falcon—I would put up there with anything written in the past century in mainstream literary fiction.

Not only did Chandler et al. create a distinctly American style of crime fiction, they also created a distinctive voice in which to write. It was like Walt Whitman all over again, a surprisingly American dialect emerging from an unexpected direction. Every contemporary thriller on the best-seller lists in New York City owe a debt to these writers. Most of these latter day thrillers don't have such a distinctive style, many of them are bland by comparison, lacking poetry and sheer archetypal magnitude, but the debt is still owed to Chandler, Hammett, et al.

And one or two others.

One of these is John D. McDonald.

I came late to reading McDonald. I had been referred to his writing by other writers who I've respected. Homages and avowed influences. The enthusiast's charming invocation: Hey, if you liked that, you'll love this! Some direct tributes, one or two pastiches. Unlike Hemingway, who late in life became a self-parody, McDonald is very hard to pastiche. Finally I got around to reading McDonald, figuring if that many other writers who I like to read like to read McDonald, then there must be something there. Indeed there was.

If I were to recommend a place to start reading McDonald, honestly I'd say start anywhere. He was a prolific writer, and unlike many others who have high and low points in their careers, the quality of writing is consistently high. Or you could do what I did, finally, and start reading in the Travis McGee series. I'm fairly sure that McDonald thought of himself as a hack writer, the definition of a hack being one who writes for money rather than in the service of High Art, but like Chandler he transcends.

In some ways Chandler's Philip Marlowe and McDonald's Travis McGee are the same type of character in two different times and settings. The lone antihero, the tarnished knight always fighting against being dragged down by the evils and horrors of the lives of those they move among. Among the differences, there are many similarities. Both are soiled knights with solid personal ethics who operate within often squalid settings, often emerging at the end of a story quite scathed. One of the main differences between Marlowe and McGee, though, is that while Marlowe succeeds, perhaps unbelievably, in never really compromising his moral standards, there are a few times that McGee does cross the line, due to the necessity of action—and hates himself afterwards for doing so. McGee is even more mortal than Marlowe, in a way. Some of the finest character moments in the McGee novels are in the epilogues, when the protagonists take a long hard look at themselves, after all the main action is done.

McDonald's setting was often Florida, or the Gulf. Several of his non-series novels are also in those settings. He had a knack for showing the reader the simultaneous layers of past and present that a native sees when looking at a beloved place going through changes—often negative changes brought on by over-development, pollution, poverty, crime, and related issues. McDonald's descriptions of locale somehow manage to make us see, from within his character's viewpoint, both what they used to love about a place, what has become soiled, and what little beauty might still peek through between the billboards. McDonald was not really cynical, he was just keenly observant.

One can expect from a McDonald novel a deeply existential tone, an awareness of the ephemerality of all of life, darkening even the sunniest day, but also lightening some of the dark nights. But this existential feeling is rarely on the surface, instead it's an underpainted layer that often explains the quiet desperation of surface action. If life has no meaning, then let's keep dancing. What makes McDonald a great writer is precisely this ability to give the reader many layers of meaning simultaneously, always subtly and without fanfare. Mainstream so-called realistic literary fiction is rarely this genuinely realistic.

McDonald had a knack for depicting the deeply absurd aspects of even the most serious scenes, and there are times when the reader is tempted to laugh and cringe at the same time. Sometimes it's just gallows humor. But often what it is, is a writer giving us a moment of very complexly mixed emotions, many things going on below the surface, very much like real life. Like those moments in real life when you stand on a cusp of change, of decision, of liminal choice. One of the most remarkable aspects of McDonald's writing style is that you can be pulled inside this emotional complexity even as the fists are flying.

McDonald's prose style is lyrical and blunt at the same time. You get poetic descriptions of people, places, and events, and then a moment of dialogue which slaps you back into paying attention. The first person internal monologue inside Travis McGee's head will wander off into a reminiscence of the old Florida, then you're back in the moment with what's going on. This sort of associative, layered thinking is again very like real life. McGee sometimes makes mistakes because he gets distracted, or lets passion overrule good sense. Sometimes there are consequences. McGee's feeling is that it's okay to mess himself up this way, but powerfully not okay to mess up with his friends and clients and loved ones. If you've ever beat yourself up repeatedly for saying or doing something you horribly regret, you know exactly what this feels like.

The dialogue is almost always more intelligent and erudite than not. That's in part because of Meyer, McGee's good friend and neighbor who is often consulted on matters both practical and philosophical. Some have suggested that Meyer was McDonald's own alter ego within the McGee novels, and that seems possible. Certainly his use as a character who provides discourse affects the viewpoint and interpretation of events, often pivotally.

McDonald is more tightly plotted than Chandler, but again a lot of the action is character-driven, and the scaffolding of plot does not show. I think there is a need for careful plotting in crime fiction, perhaps more so than in other genres, but one way to sort the grain from the chaff is by whether or not the scaffolding shows. The less it shows, the better. McDonald's plots often feel quite surprising and unpredictable in their twists and turns as they unfold before you, yet seem quite inevitable after the fact. Character does drive a lot of the twists. The seedier the character, the better, perhaps.

I'm trying to describe a writing style that cannot be taken apart like this without making of it less than it is. I feel in some sense that I betray McDonald in the act of describing what I like about his prose. I don't want to give a false impression; McDonald may be an heir to Chandler, but I don't want to unfairly overdo the comparison. McDonald is very much his own man, with his own unique and contemporary voice. I worry that I might lead the prospective reader astray, because I am clumsy where McDonald is not.

So in the end I recommend that you go read a John D. McDonald novel for yourself. Start anywhere, and dive right in. You're in for a bracing, exhilarating, memorable, and potentially life-changing reading experience.

Genre vs. Mainstream Fiction: a critique of criticism

As genres, science fiction and mystery/suspense have suffered a great deal of adversity in this century. They have been dismissed, variously, as “trash,” as “second-class literature,” as “entertainment for juveniles and juvenile minds”; they are the victims of such base canards as “Science fiction is a lot of nonsense about rocket ships and bug-eyed monsters” and “The mystery is a mindless celebration of death and despair.” The struggle of one is the struggle of the other: to abolish these ridiculous labels, to command acceptance as serious art forms, to prove to the world-at-large that work of quality and significance can be and is being done by writers who have chosen these fields—not been forced into them because of limited talent and limited vision.

It is the writers of mystery/suspense and science fiction, of course, who best understand this common cause. While some of them in each genre may be indifferent to the work of their counterparts, there is an almost universal respect for the professional of their respective endeavors. (Good writing is good writing, after all, no matter what the subject matter, style, theme, intent, or vision. And bad writing is no more prevalent in one field than in the other; in fact, it is my opinion that, on the whole, there is less of it in science fiction and mystery/suspense than in other categories and even in the so-called “mainstream” of fiction.)

This respect and kinship between the writers of the two genres is evident in the remarkable number who work, frequently or occasionally, in BOTH fields with considerable success. Every year, prominent figures in one category publish first-rate stories and novels in the other. Some of these are wholly mystery/suspense or wholly science fiction; and some of them are an amalgam of the two—the crime story as seen through the eye of the SF writer, the SF extrapolation as envisioned by the mystery writer.
—Bill Pronzini, from the “Introduction” to Dark Sins, Dark Dreams: Crime in Science Fiction, edited by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini.

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The mystery and science fiction . . . two genres born as discrete categories in America almost a hundred years apart but from the advent of the pulp magazines following rather parallel courses. Two genres which have yet to win full academic acceptance (although they are getting closer for reasons which give no credit to the academy). but whose best practitioners—Chandler, Hammett, Woolrich, Bester, Knight, Silverberg—have always done work to equal or surpass the best work done anywhere. There are quite a few stories which are fusions of the genres, among which we hope we have found some distinguished examples.

Genre fiction by definition operates with parameters, plays by certain rules. In the mystery it is crime, in science fiction it is an extrapolated technology or social system, in both (if the work is to successfully meet the criteria of the genre) the plot must turn on these central elements. Certain writers, Raymond Chandler being the most notable example, chafed at the restrictions; others like Alfred Bester gloried in them exactly as J. S. Bach found the greatest freedom within the tightest limitations of those ancient forms, the canon and the fugue. In specificity, in rigor, is the greatest freedom perhaps: one can thus at least attempt an argument that the most important fiction of our time is being done within these two genres.
—Barry N. Malzberg, from the “Afterword” to the same anthology

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This is perhaps one of the better descriptions of the tension between “genre” writing and “mainstream” writing that I’ve ever encountered. These essays were written in 1978, but remain entirely relevant today—perhaps more so, because if anything has changed, it’s that the literary mainstream has become even more defensive and prickly as it feels itself more and more embattled. The dismissive nature of literary-critical rhetoric against the genres is if anything more vitriolic than ever, nowadays. It’s very easy, however, to try to raise oneself up by knocking others down; except that it never works.

Whenever you read a literary critic, or Critic—think of Harold Bloom, James Woods, or any number of high-profile litbloggers with academic ties—marking a rear-guard defensive position against the barbarians assaulting the gates of taste, quality, and virtue, just remember the concluding line of Constantine Cavafy’s great poem Waiting for the Barbarians, which reads: “Those people were a kind of solution.” It’s true that few things unite antagonistic opinions than finding something to disparage in common. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the saying goes. But these temporary alliances of mutual hatred, especially in a game with so little at stake as literary criticism, are fragile and cannibalistic. It takes nothing to turn on each other, once the common enemy has fled or been trounced. “Those people” are a solution only if they agree to be antagonists when you need them to be. A great deal of literary-critical gesticulating is centered on the "Us vs. Them" paradigm so common to manifesto scribes and defenders of one literary -ism or another. (Most of the rhetoric of the "post-avant" theorists in poetry is Us vs. Them, with Them being anyone they dismiss as not worthy of being Us—which is almost everybody.)

The default position of literary criticism, most of the time, is defensive, rather than appreciative. It tends to be the more defensive-minded critics, too, who tend to play the game of canon-making. That is, when conservation becomes preservative conservatism, and description yields to prescription in any artistic matter, not how often the tactics are identical. They are the mark of an ideology in play, rather than an open and observant mind with no particular agenda. Ideologues tend to build canons is support of their ideas. Most readers just read eclectically for pleasure, and don’t care about making lists, except perhaps personal lists of favorite books.

Why is a list of favorite books to be rejected in favor of a generated canon? Perhaps it’s the academic cloak of authority, the voice of doom speaking its pronouncements with so much heat and so little light, that it’s enough to fool the rubes.

In all this, appreciation and responsive reviewing all too often is lost, or often just rejected.. What happened to reading for pure pleasure? A well-written, idea-generating, imaginative scenario opens the door to reading pleasure no matter what style or topics are involved. This is as true of the literary avant-garde as it is of more mainstream writing. Good writing is good writing, no matter where it appears.

The influence of Modernism and its more avant-garde authors on science fiction stimulated the New Wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which brought to prominence in SF several authors whose work was as ambitious in terms of literary style as it was in terms of content. Robert Silverberg was only one of these. (This was also the first wave of SF stories that didn’t tone down overt sexuality, as was the rule in the pulp magazines, but in fact viewed sex as one more aspect of life to extrapolate upon.) One of the greatest SF anthologies of this period, Dangerous Visions, edited by literary enfant terrible Harlan Ellison, helped set the tone for the New Wave, and is a record of many successful literary SF experiments. In terms of influence, this was a generation of writers to whom Finnegan’s Wake was what had shocked their parents, not themselves; they read Joyce (and Stein and Beckett and that generation of writers who invented literary Modernism) as accepted literature, not as avant-garde. Some writers within the New Wave, notably Samuel R. Delany, went on to overtly incorporate advanced literary and philosophical critical theory into his SF and fantasy stories—which remain intensely readable, often stunningly beautiful, moving, and mind-blowing. Perhaps one ought to say, demi-monde-blowing. Other writers, such as Roger Zelazny, were lifelong fonts of imaginative exploration in which the style of the writing matched what was being written about, making reading into a visceral sensory immersive experience, rather than a cerebral parlor one.

It’s the self-appointed conservator of literary taste, in literary criticism, who is most toxic of all. This sort of critic—excuse me, Critic, especially a Critic with a Grand Theory—is often quickest to reject personal pleasure as any measure of a good read. This is de facto Puritanism, a basically anti-sensual attitude about reading: it’s supposed to be good for you, perhaps especially if you don’t actually enjoy it. It’s the castor oil school of Criticism: you don’t have to like it, but you need to read it, because it’s good for you, because you need to know about it. It is moralizing disguised as literary theory. (Zelazny for one pointedly and often hilariously parodied this critical attitude in numerous tales.) I’m sorry to say, Mr. Critic, but even though it was supposed to be hard going and hard to understand, I actually enjoyed reading Finnegan’s Wake; in fact, it made me laugh out loud a few times. (I am constantly amazed at how many opinions float about on books that the critic hasn't actually read, especially "difficult;" in my own case, if you hear me discuss a book, even a difficult one, you can be sure I've read it, unless I stipulate otherwise.)

Which is why canon-making is so fraught with disasters. The endlessly compiled lists of “great” or “best” or even “good” books will be always controversial because taste and pleasure are not as separable as some academic theorists would surmise. (The word “taste” is itself as sensory word.) In fact, the chief weakness of canon-building is that it is fraught with concealed and denied subjectivity, choices made on extra-literary matters of just plain liking the book, or what the book was about.

Don't get me wrong: what I object to is not that a canon-builder liked a work; what I object to is that simple pleasure is concealed as grand theory. Perhaps it is too easy when wielding Grand Theories to give in to the temptation to justify and rationalize matters of taste as matters of Quality; tempting, but also dishonest. When a book reviewer presents a list of books he or she enjoyed reading, there's no pressure to defend the choices made on the grounds that they are Great Art. This is by far the more honest approach to literary recommendation. It is almost always possible to discover a hidden agenda, usually a moral stance, behind the choices made in a Canon of Great Books; and the moral agenda is all too often the castor oil school of Criticism.

The simple pleasure principle of enjoying reading is underrated, it seems to me, by most serious literary critics. The Harry Potter books have brought so many children back to the pleasures of reading precisely because they’re fun, they’re fizzy, and they contain deeper, darker truths under the fizzy surface. What literary merit they might have, if any, is secondary to the fact that they inspired an entire generation of kids raised on TV and computers to discover anew the simple pleasures of reading a book. Yet can you imagine Harold Bloom admitting that he actually enjoyed reading a Harry Potter novel? (Assuming he ever would.) When one wears the mantle of literary-critical authority, self-appointed or otherwise, one must never reveal that the man behind the curtain is no wizard, but a snake oil salesman. So it's not pleasure in reading that I object to, it's the hardcore-adult notion that one mustn't admit to it.

Hardcore adults, who have forgotten that once too were children (at least theoretically they were), and have forgotten how to play, often reject the uses of pleasure. if you encounter a Serious Critic with a list of pronouncements in hand, you can be sure most of them will be Serious, rather than playful. How dreadfully dull.

Reading is supposed to be fun.

Malzberg concludes his “Introduction” with:

But not to be pompous. This is a genre book, a category book if your will; it will go into bookstores and libraries, it will go out of print, but ten or twenty years from now someone will have been reached by this book just as I was reached by genre or category hardcover books which were mine to behold a quarter of a century ago. . . .

And that’s the only true test of literature—keeping in mind that “mainstream fiction” can be categorized as just another genre, with its own inherent rules and limits—which is the test of time, of endurance, of resonance down the years to keep re-exciting another new generation into the pleasures and perils of reading.

Raymond Chandler: An Appreciation

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
—opening paragraph from The Big Sleep

I was browsing in the local thrift store yesterday, in between bouts of hacking cough and sneezing, and stumbled across a re-issue hardcover edition of The Big Sleep. Raymond Chandler's first novel, from 1939, I read it all again yesterday, with the same pleasure I always have had, reading it before, and again.

Chandler was not the Great Literary Writer that wrote the Great American Novel—assuming anyone has actually done that yet. He wrote "genre fiction" rather than mainstream fiction—oh, let's call it what the mainstream fiction writers actually would like to call it, but never do: fine art fiction.

Chandler was a populist writer, rather than a "fine art" writer, a prickly person, hard to get along with, opinionated and surly and often self-defeating. He struggled his entire life to make ends meet, did not always treat his wife well, though he professed to love her dearly; and I believe him, because the effect her death had on him was devastating. He was not a perfect man. He no doubt drank too much. Born in Chicago, educated in England, settled in Southern California—which he both loved and hated, for its exquisite beauty and decadent tawdriness. I've been to Chandler's Hollywood, if 60 years late: it's still the same landmarks, the same streets, as shiny and tawdry now as back then. I can walk or drive those streets and feel as if I'm in the car with Marlowe, thinking his thoughts.

I've read every word Chandler ever wrote at least three times, including the sketches and unfinished pieces, whatever I have been able to find. Some of the novels, like The Long Goodbye, I've read more often than that. Chandler's plots were not his strong point: sometimes the plots don't actually make sense, or tie themselves up in tight knots with no loose ends. But then, life is more like that, than it's like an English drawing-room mystery (Christie and her ilk), wherein all the loose ends make sense at the end.

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
—Raymond Chandler

In fact, although Chandler has been attacked by literary critics on the weakness of his plots, I wonder if he wasn't slyly commenting via his non-linear plot-schemas on the artificial contrivances of narrative plot within his own genre, the murder mystery. It seems certain that he knew the famous Virginia Woolf quote about why she wrote the way she did: Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

For that matter, the entire hard-boiled detective fiction genre, whose most famous representatives are Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain, shares this tendency towards having plots more messily life-like than neatly logical. Many characters in these novels, even the good guys, are morally ambiguous. The whole film noir genre in film, famously dependent on hard-boiled pulp fiction for its plots and stories and mood, and even its lighting if you get right down to it, sometimes rewrote the endings of the novels, to make them tie up more neatly. That was not always a good choice, because a pat and tidy ending to a story is not always as emotionally resonant an ending that leaves an ambiguous feeling in the reader or viewer. I've never liked the "happy ending" of the Bogart-Bacall version of The Big Sleep, although the rest of the movie is fine, because it reverses the novel's ending for essentially Hollywood star reasons. Hollywood likes happy endings, so it tends to do that sort of thing, which is why real writers don't like it much. Heck, Hollywood even changed the ending of the film version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town to make it a happier ending; so, nothing's sacred, nothing's safe from meddling. The only thing that saves that revised ending in The Big Sleep from ruining the rest of the film is that it features Bogart and Bacall. The remake of The Big Sleep some decades later, set in England and starring Robert Mitchum, preserves the novel's original plot much better, and as a result is a more satisfying movie—even though moving the novel's setting from Los Angeles to London bothered some critics. It doesn't bother me, because otherwise that movie version sticks close to the strengths of the novel itself.

Robert Mitchum, by the way, is the actor who lives indelibly in my own mind as the ultimate Philip Marlowe. I hear his voice in my head whenever I re-read Farewell, My Lovely. I almost always hear his voice as Marlowe's; the only exception being that I can sometimes hear Marlowe's voice in The Big Sleep as Bogart's.

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
—Raymond Chandler

The strong points of Chandler's writing are his sense of character, motivation, and mood. No-one describes the mood of Los Angeles' many parts better than Chandler. No one had his turn of phrase. He made the rules, and he broke the mold. Post-Chandler Los Angeles writing always evokes Chandler's voice, in echo if not in fact.

Chandler only wrote seven novels, some short stories, a bit of genuinely insightful non-fiction, and a few screenplays. But his mark on the art of writing in unforgettable, his voice like no one else's.

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.
—Raymond Chandler

Let me get back to that fine art fiction idea I just came up with. There is a certain snottiness to it, the idea that some fiction is artistic while the rest is not. Of course, in cinema, we have "art-house films" and the rest; so maybe the analogy is apt. Poetry too has become increasingly polarized between populist poetry and "professional" poetry, without a lot of middle ground; the poles there can be exemplified by Maya Angelou writing verse for Hallmark Cards on the one end, and academic professor-poets who write poems no-one but other professor-poets reads, or wants to read. The sort of thing poet-critics and literary-theorists read, and no-one else wants to.

But this is why crappy writing in so-called mainstream fiction ends up on the best-seller lists while much better writing in so-called genre fiction never does: it's already been ghettoized. Even when the quality of the writing in genre fiction is light years better than anything in fine-art-fiction, it gets ignored by the literary critics. Most of the novels that people will recommend to you—because they're fine-art-fiction that has made it to the best-seller list—are not very good reads. Most are written in that bland and boring "no-style" style perfected by journalists and applied to thriller fiction. The ones that are written in more experimental styles, or structures, or formats—fiction that self-consciously wants to be thought of as fine-art-fiction—is in fact mainstream plot with special effects. Very Hollywood; very shallow.

By comparison, the writing in a Chandler novel is so memorable that I want to read it over and over again, every few years, just to relish the turn pithy of phrase, the inventive description, the unusual blend of contemplation and action. Marlowe often pauses for a moment of reflection, even in the midst of action, to make an aside; it could even be a literary aside, or about chess. It is often existential with a hard-boiled post-Camus lyricism unlike anyhting else in literature.

It got darker. The glare of the red neon sign spread farther and farther across the ceiling. I sat up on the bed and put my feet on the floor and rubbed the back of my neck.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
—Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

Marlowe the detective is a thoughtful thug, a genuinely honest man trying to make a small difference in a corrupt world, and willing to do anything to protect his clients; which also means, as an honest man, that he is often broke, because he refuses dishonest jobs for dishonest clients.

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
—from Red Wind (1938)

I want to re-read the Chandler novels for the pure pleasure of the writing. It doesn't matter that I already know the ending—unlike most murder mysteries, wherein knowing who did it, knowing how it all comes out, means you're done, the puzzle is solved, and there's no interest in re-reading the book as literature. So, I read Chandler again, already knowing whodunit, and not caring. The pleasure is in keeping Marlowe's company, hearing him think, hearing him crack wise to another character. This is reading for the pure pleasure of reading good writing.

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Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
—Raymond Chandler

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
—Raymond Chandler

The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution form the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.
—Raymond Chandler

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
—Raymond Chandler

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
—Raymond Chandler

The Raymond Chandler Quote of the Week.