I. White Elephant and Termite Postures

Manny Farber’s “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” is a characteristi­cally thrilling rhetorical gesture from a critic I adore and who bewil­ders me (by disliking movies I adore). According to Farber, “The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.” Whereas: “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” Farber locates an instance of what he calls “one of the good termite performances” of John Wayne in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a film which otherwise annoys the critic: “Wayne’s acting is infected by a kind of hoboish spirit, sitting back on its haunches doing a bitter-amused counterpoint to the pale, neutral film life around him.” Then Farber generalizes: “The best examples of termite art appear in places other than films, where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsmen can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not car­ing what comes of it.” His examples range from newspaper columns to detective novels by Chandler and Ross Macdonald to, weirdly, “the TV debating of William Buckley” (I guess you had to be there).

Once Farber’s termite-elephant paradigm crawled into my ear, it never burrowed out the other side. I find it shaping my responses to nearly anything. For instance, the New York Mets outfield: Carlos Bel­trán a white elephant ballplayer, Ángel Pagán a termite. This is non­sense, of course, in terms of the outcome of the ball game. Whether Bel­trán or Pagán hits a home run, it counts the same. Similarly, if a John Irving novel alters your frame of reference, it counts as much as if the alteration is performed by, say, Charles Willeford, or Patricia Highsmith. Certainly termite vs. elephant needs to mean something deeper than Underpaid vs. Overpaid, or Underrated vs. Overrated, or it means nothing at all (and it’s unlikely John Wayne was underpaid for gnawing at the edges of Ford’s film). Yet the situation complicates in the feedback loop of an audience’s projections: Are Pagán’s options on the field of play freer than Bel­trán’s? Can he do more, as a result of termite affect?

Well, the juncture where this became personal may be obvious. Six books into avowed termitism, somewhere between accepting an award for Motherless Brooklyn and the putting across of The Fortress of Solitude, my subsequent novel, I clambered into a white elephant suit, the standard costume which, it looks to me, novelists of a certain “stature” are required to wear if they are to appear in public at all. (The other option, the infinitely seductive invisible elephant who’s anointed with silence-exile-cunning, may or may not be authentically available to anyone besides Pynchon and DeLillo anymore.) Please understand: I clambered in willingly. It’s a rare and coveted thing, an invitation to don that costume.

A writer like me (well, me specifically) had gone through an alternate-reality rehearsal for white elephant ops—on European book tour, in France especially, where the instant an American novelist of any type disem­barks he or she’s taken as a cultural ambassador on par with Susan Son­tag. When this first happened to me, trust me, no one in the United States was asking the fresh-faced author of As She Climbed Across the Table, one barely untethered from his job at the sales counter of Moe’s Books, his opinion on Roth’s chances of a Nobel, or Clinton’s Kosovo policy. Did I explain to my French or German inquisitors that no one in America would flatter me with such questions? No. I weighed in. One silly morning in Turin I woke to a large headline in an Italian newspaper: a leading U.S. novel­ist had denounced Colin Powell, and that novelist was I.

But in those days I had only to board the airplane back to JFK to regain termite freedom.

The splendor and disaster of elephant privileges were vivid to me already before I tasted them myself: the peculiar immobility that made fig­ures like Bellow, Heller, and Styron seem so dull before I’d read them (and then been sometimes surprised); the Ken Kesey escape act, which seemed to render him pitiable; the blowing-it-up-from-within of Joyce Carol Oates’s helpless over-productivity, which enraged people; the defiant, enmeshing disaster of Mailer’s talking back to the prob­lem, and his decades of faux-termite nonfiction, filmmaking, etc., before collapsing back into unwieldy elephant supreme; the woeful invisible elephantism of Salinger; and so forth, leading up to the Ago­nies of Franzen.

There were so many things, apparently, you couldn’t or shouldn’t do once you’d written a novel that succeeded in the “big” way (or even one that tried to—success being, always, in the eye of the beholder, unless your sales stacked to the moon, which mine didn’t). The worst of both worlds: the old high-modernist authority of the role was in savage decline, yet white elephants still seemed obliged to blunder around acting authoritative, scorning opportunities for playfulness and distraction, never-apologizing-never-explaining (let alone reply­ing to critics), stiffening in an encaustic of self-regard while waiting for the right young termite-wannabe-elephant to begin popping away with an elephant gun. Borges, in “Doctor Brodie’s Report,” describes the behavior of a certain tribe toward its elected king: “Immediately upon his elevation he is gelded, blinded with a fiery stick, and his hands and feet are cut off, so that the world will not distract him from wisdom . . . If there is a war, the witch doctors take him from the cavern, exhibit him to the tribe to spur the warriors’ courage, sling him over their shoulders, and carry him as though a banner or talisman into the fiercest part of the battle. When this occurs, the king generally dies within seconds under the stones hurled at him by the Apemen.”

But I exaggerate.

Anyway, I thought, in that period following The Fortress of Solitude’s gratifying ascent, that my skeptical feelings about the bogus preroga­tives invested in my role would be fun to explain, as part of the job of debunking bogus prerogatives—something to which I felt devoted, in a general way. I figured I’d had practice disappointing expectations before, by not wanting, for instance, to follow my detective characters into sequel Conrad Metcalf or Lionel Essrog adventures. But those were termite disappointments. (Termites can migrate, by Farber’s defini­tion, chewing the bounds of their own commitments.) An elephant’s maneuvers, I found, were overdetermined. And there are elephant cops. Any caprice is taken by critics as a dereliction of the novelist’s mission of grind­ing downfield with the stolid, earnest, edifying-redemptive football of the novel, a mission deemed crucial in a values-flattened, super­ficial, ironized culture. Of course, this takes for granted that we’re a values-flattened, superficial, ironized culture, one starved for stolid, earnest, edifying stuff. I don’t. My guess is that the not-too-secret secret of our times is that, behind a few self-congratulatory tokens of decadence and irony, an elephantine utilitarianism and conformism grinds at the center of our culture.

So I’ve teased, haplessly and intermittently, at disqualifying my own elephant function. Extracurricular engagements and deliberate “minor works” at least freshened my own sense of possibility, but none was really provocative enough to do more than lengthen the wait for the “next major novel.” The fact is that I waited, too, since my feeling for major novels is sin­cere and I’m proud and even amazed that people expect them from me. My bridges were left only half-burned, to the consternation of bystand­ers on both shores. But since my aesthetic methodology often involves splitting differences, it was natural for my career postures, once I real­ized I’d have to have some of those, to take that same tack. The effort was to find termite moves you can still try to bust in an elephant suit. The sad fact, though, is that a perfectly natural gesture of termitic appetite, like writing song lyrics for your friends in rock bands, may, coming from the perceived-elephant quadrant, resemble a gallery exhi­bition of Sylvester Stallone’s oil paintings.

Out of my mingled termite-elephant fate, I learned two things that really mattered.

One: Distrust self-authorizing perma-termites. This goes with my critique of the sentimental auto-marginalizing of (beloved) zones like science fiction, or Brooklyn. If my reservations about the collective ethos of Internet culture can be pinned to one description, it’s this: Internet culture flatters itself with the delusion of an infinitely renew­able termite’s license, a permanent oppositional status pardoning all guerilla actions. But one day any termite wakes up to find it is, if not an elephant, then certainly the biggest termite in the room. And with a trunk and ears. (Honesty about one’s own power is an ethical prerequisite.)

Two: We can’t deny that we’re thrust onstage holding scripts—and by “we” I don’t just mean novelists. This is the insight that gave form to much of Chronic City (as major a novel as I’ve man­aged): What counts is what freedom you can taste, and what love you can offer, from inside the role you’ve been handed. But your script exists.


II. Against “Pop Culture”

In the termite phase of my career, before Motherless Brooklyn’s Lionel Essrog began torrentially confessing his influences, and mine, to anyone who asked, the term pop culture made sense to me. It seemed an approximate cover for loose bushels of enthusiasms: rock and roll, movies, comics, science fiction and crime writing. Once I got lashed to the mast of my private canon, the word pop looked squishier and squishier to me, and lately I seem to want to blow it up whenever it’s offered.

Pop music or pop art: fair enough. These seemed specific enough to matter. But pop culture seemed both password to a clubhouse (for those who identified) and a term of quarantine (for those championing what they believed remained outside—or above—the radioactive area). The snobbish grudge against pop culture was that those who cared for it cared for all of it equally, and the problem was that this grudge was too often justified in the values-suspended vale of fandom. Having admitted seeing Star Wars too many times as a thirteen-year-old, should I subsequently have to pretend I thought the movie was much good, once a decade of Kurosawa, Hawks, Kubrick, and Lang had straightened out my thinking? Couldn’t I talk about comics as an intoxicant while expressing exhaustion at the measly narrative or visual chops in the ’70s comics that had intoxicated me?

Well, I could try, but I wouldn’t necessarily be heard. The superb critic John Leonard (as much a personal hero of my teenage years as Leonard Nimoy), acting precisely in the anti–pop culture role of the “gray eminence” from David Foster Wallace’s essay on television and U.S. fiction, “E Unibus Pluram,” amid general praise, firmly spanked my cumulative life’s work in the New York Review of Books for being uncritically pegged on iconography he found trite and wearisome. The next month another man named John Leonard devoted his television column in New York magazine to defending the ’70s television program Kojak against the insult of an inferior remake. Except it was the same John Leonard. My Fetishes, Okay, Yours, Not So Okay.

Another lie pop culture embeds: pop as in “popular.” I usually preferred unpop: comics canceled for lack of readers, bands sans career, paperback-original novelists who’d filled word counts behind interchangeable covers. I began to resent on the behalf of these losers (in whose company I wishfully numbered myself) the canard that they were tainted by commerce. The science fiction writers I knew functioned like poets, mining for tribal rewards. Their names were unknown elsewhere, and they had no thought of quitting their day jobs—yet you’d still hear literary novelists slight “commercial writing.” At least poets (and literary novelists) could chase tenure. Anyway, the creators I adored tended to want to claw their way out, whether they succeeded in their lifetimes, like Chandler and Ballard, or flopped, like Highsmith and Dick. I was a tormented snob dressed in pop-cult garb because it made the nearest-to-hand defense of what I loved, but it wasn’t my defense, and vast continents of category fiction and television didn’t stir me at all. I felt dubious from all sides, in a Jews-for-Jesus or Log-Cabin-Republican kind of way. Even in the Radisson bar no one was certain where I stood, while out in the main convention hall the pop-culture revelers guiltlessly browsed Telly Savalas figurines. In this jumbled zone, the line that pop culture drew wasn’t worth the time spent erasing it.

And wasn’t the novel itself once upon a time a suspiciously “pop” form? I liked “vernacular culture” better, if only because it wasn’t automatic—it raised questions, instead of shutting them down. Just so long as you noticed that vernaculars (film, jazz, and the novel) were routinely shanghaied for ivory towers. Within a year of my discovering Philip K. Dick, his “pulp” context evaporated, overwritten by a native kinship with Franz Kafka, the Talking Heads, and Giorgio de Chirico—at least in the fantasia of my curiosity. Was this really an interest in “pop”? Couldn’t we just say “culture”?

 

Writer’s memoirs are supposed to wear you out with: And Then I Wrote. I wanted to wear you down with: And Then I Read. Certain names, though, seemed impossible to get into the conversation—was I embarrassed to say I’d rather be stuck on a desert island with the collected works of Barbara Pym than those of Thomas Pynchon? (And was I totally crazy to suspect Pynchon would say the same?) Or was it that when I pointed to certain of my enthusiasms, tape recorders broke down out of boredom? Anthony Burgess, Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, Penelope Fitzgerald, J. B. Priestley, Anita Brookner, Elizabeth Bowen, L. P. Hartley, George Gissing, Muriel Spark—for whatever reason, I’d located a century of not exactly high-modernist UK fiction that I couldn’t quit reading, and that formed my sense of what novels should feel like when I set out to write them. I felt fashionable being asked about Pynchon and DeLillo, and was awed enough when I read them that I’d gladly flatter myself to claim them as totems, but really I had already gleaned what I’d need of political paranoia from Graham Greene (as well as from Iron Curtain dystopias by Orwell, Lem, the Brothers Strugatsky), and it was Greene’s sense of form, of how a novel is proportioned and how to present a character, that seeped into my writing muscles. I first thought I never wanted to write a long novel at all; when I changed my mind, I modeled on none of the modernist or postmodernist versions of amplitude, but on Great Expectations and James Baldwin’s Another Country. I’d grooved to the postures of the Beats—what bookish-hippieish kid of my generation wouldn’t have?—but was seduced, embarrassingly enough, much more by the writing of the Angry Young Men. I still prefer Kingsley to Martin, and, if I live a while, stand a chance to be the last human to know the difference between John Wain and John Braine.

My writing isn’t experimental. When I’ve nodded to the repertoire of avant-garde effects, I took it for granted that the experiments in question were conducted by others, in the past. Now they’re part of the palette. A literary critic who puts the word experimental within a mile of my stuff is either in bad faith or ill-informed about a century including Oulipo, Language poetry, and, well, surrealism.

Even lamer is the Fallacy of Contemporary Influence, in which generations of writers are said by critics to work miraculously in concert. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out that Michael Chabon and I really weren’t formative influences on each another. It’s math, literally. Look for common denominators instead.

Likely every writer with the luck of being reviewed or interviewed undergoes a similar timelost sensation, of being made by stuff that’s no longer fashionable or even legible by the time his own work emerges. Mine was aggravated by what may have been a compensatory crush on mandarin, rather than outlaw, dialects. I sometimes think that Raymond Chandler made so much sense to me because of the English boarding school diction underneath the hard-boiled slang. No wonder that when I first tried, my criticism sounded like bogus G. K. Chesterton. Much as I exalted vernacular critics like Seymour Krim and Lester Bangs, I didn’t have access to that informality—my defaults were highfalutin. I sounded a lot less hip than writers decades older than I was. For instance, John Leonard.


III. Rushmore vs. Abundance

My broadest objection to the default settings in the lit-crit conversation, though, has to do with the formulations that arise everywhere, once you begin noticing them. In truth, I’ve caught myself unthinkingly wielding them, in instances where I’ve called Thomas Berger “one of America’s three or four greatest living novelists,” or included as an aside, in a piece about Paula Fox’s republication, the phrase “the unceasing tide of new titles.”

If these are received terms (and they are), what’s being received? And who’s on the receiving end?

This may be Norman Mailer’s worst legacy: the degree to which he reified the notion of a Rushmore frieze of “greatness,” proceeding through Hemingway to himself. Not content in Advertisements for Myself merely to announce white elephant triumph as the only possible redemption for the claims of his ego, he declared it as the standard for a generation. Mailer-Bellow-Updike-Roth-ism was our reward. The paradigm, though discredited, inane, impractical, and obnoxious, is still fitted over the current life of literary culture at the drop of a certain type of long and moderately successful novel into the conversation. Let that book take a major prize, or best-sell for a month or two, and Rushmore’s under construction again—only, who’ll play Lincoln, Jefferson, and Roosevelt?

Rushmore is a founding father dream, a religious myth, and worse: it’s a lid on thinking. Screw Rushmore. Dismantle the graven image. Hemingway-Faulkner-Fitzgerald-Steinbeck begat Bellow-Mailer-Roth-Updike who begat the counterculture Rushmore of Heller-Kesey-Pynchon-Vonnegut who begat the shrinking-readership Rushmore of DeLillo-Coover-Barth-Barthleme who begat the humiliating post-stature edition and just-pick-any-four-depending-on-who’s-hot of Wallace-Moody-Chabon-Franzen-Eugenidies-Powers-Vollman-or-even-sometimes-Lethem. (Dismantle it from inside, oh you my brothers! They project our features onto that stone only to mock us for how deficient we appear there.)

The crime of Literary Rushmore, the one that anyone notices first, is that which ought to dissolve Rushmore forever in a bath of shame, but never does: the stone heads are white American men. There’s never a Cather or Ellison or Baldwin or Oates or Ozick or Morrison on that mountain, no matter how unmistakably said person may have blasted it out of the ballpark that particular year, or decade, or century. That’s the sole evidence you’d ever need that Rushmore construction is ritual authoritarian enactment, not a description of any engaged reader’s, or writer’s, context. Such groupings consist not of an argument, but of an incantation of power.

Coming of age as a reader, I took an instinctive, coolhunter’s pleasure in defying the Rushmores presented to me: speak, to sixteen-year-old Lethem, the names Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and he’d spit back “Clifford Simak”; to the twenty-six-year-old bookstore brat, try Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc., and he’d reply “Nathanael West,” or, to Coover, Barth, etc., “Gilbert Sorrentino.” At the peak of Mailer-Roth-Bellow-Updike dominance, it seemed incredible to care about the novel and not also be reading James Salter and Robert Stone and Richard Yates. Bruce Jay Friedman’s short stories mattered as much as Carver’s—to me, more—but he’d been relegated to the comedian’s column. In the same spirit, when I called someone like Berger one of the three or four greatest living American writers, I’d add (usually in my head, less often aloud) “. . . with Steven Millhauser and Steve Erickson and Stephen Dixon.”

And all of that, let me be the first to point out, is to speak only of other white American men (so many of them named Steve). If you actually open the menu of twentieth-century writing, as anyone with a real appetite must inevitably do, the idiocy of exclusion becomes something beyond the ethical crime of rendering other discourses invisible: it’s aesthetic starvation. As a teenager I knew, with a defiance that resembled an identity politics, that Chandler, Highsmith, Dick, Delany, and Shirley Jackson had more to give than a lot of what I’d find on the respectable front shelves of the library. Small-press brain explosions included Michael Brodsky and Harry Mathews, the equivalent of a Marvel Comics reader’s discovery of the existence of R. Crumb; Iris Murdoch, Dawn Powell, Ann Beattie, Katherine Dunn, and Christina Stead were thunderbolts of my catching up to women in my twenties and thirties. At the risk of being obnoxious, it always struck me that literacy consisted precisely of this: having off-center preferences derived from a termite’s reading plan.

Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children and Baldwin’s Another Country were compasses throughout my own racial-familial mire in The Fortress of Solitude—but their two names were weirdly difficult to get into the subsequent conversation. Rushmore writers were the only comparisons allowed, apparently, even if just to say I hadn’t clobbered my way, Mailerishly, into their class. Insidious, wearisome Rushmore-ritual informs the white American novelist he needs to think only about other white American male novelists, a bunch of his contemporaries who—if he’s lucky—are constantly being asked about him.

Literary nationalism’s another Rushmore lie. I guess the word American, prefixed to anything, widens jaded eyes and moves copies, but my reading life wasn’t obedient. Did I care that Lewis Carroll or Aesop were European when they lit my fuse? The first long novel I vanished inside was called Nobody’s Boy, a translation of the classic Sans Famille, but did I, at ten, notice the French title in parentheses? Particularly in late-twentieth-century English, where Rushdie and Ishiguro and even the translated Murakami seem as hot-wired to my own vocabularies and curiosities as anyone living down the block, why should I consent to the bland imposition of the national context? It wasn’t how I embarked to where I was headed, so why should it be where I arrived when I got there?

✶

Literary competition is not a zero-sum game with a single winner, or even a ranked list of winners—that all-too-naive image of the canon in which, say, Shakespeare has first place and the gold cup, followed by Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) with the silver, in second place, Milton (1608–74) with the bronze, in third . . . The concept of literary quality is an outgrowth of a conflictual process, not a consensual one. In the enlarged democratic field, the nature of the conflict simply becomes more complex. Even among the most serious pursuers of the aesthetic, there is more than one goal; there is more than one winner. Multiple qualities and multiple achievements are valued—and have been valued throughout the history of the conflicting practices of writing making up the larger field called the literary.
 —Samuel R. Delany, “An Introduction: Emblems of Talent”

The arts are produced by overcrowding.
 —William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral

Washington Irving, in a little story called “The Mutability of Literature,” in his Sketch Book, wrote: “The inventions of paper and the press have put an end to all restraints . . . the stream of literature has expanded into a torrent—augmented into a river—expanded into a sea . . . The world will inevitably be overstocked with good books. It will soon be the employment of a lifetime merely to learn their names.” Lamenting the torrent of books is a frequently encountered modern trope (one of its greatest exponents being Jonathan Swift). For 16th- to 19th-century people of a certain cast of mind, the printing press was what their latter-day fellow travelers call the MFA program: the Death of Literature.
 —Matthew Battles, e-mail to the author

Pre-1985, we are victims of the availability heuristic—we’ve no idea whether there was vastly more fabulous culture to be created than we created because, of course, it was never created. A function of classism, racism, sexism, capitalism, totalitarianism, religion, and technology.
 —Richard Nash, e-mail to the author