1.
I was reading a novel by David Lodge when my eye, perhaps due to the libidinous influence of his leading man, began to wander. I took up with some provocative new reading and found myself in the awkward position of juggling two books at the same time. However, as is sometimes the case, my two-timing gave me access to unexpected dovetails and useful, if confusing, lines of inquiry. Upon completing A Man of Parts and Girl Land, the new offering from Caitlin Flanagan, I know that our young girls are in extreme peril: if they are not succored by their families, they will wind up in nude animal ecstasy with H.G. Wells.
I suspect I am not alone in having a love-hate relationship with Caitlin Flanagan that verges on the indecent. Her writing is alluring and memorable. Despite her interest in the traditionally female preoccupations of hearth and home (so much Dior bedding!), she writes with a self-assurance that feels, if we give reign to our troubling gendered taxonomies of thought, masculine. Flanagan does not equivocate, and her style gives her an aesthetic leg up on some of her more mealy-penned critics. I admire her chops, even when she uses them to sound like an unusually well-spoken Rotarian. Caitlin Flanagan is role model of sorts: I sort of think she sucks, but I sort of want to be her.
H.G. Wells, like Flanagan, opined on social matters not as a result of any special training or specific professional insight, but through the confidence that an educated, intelligent, and up-to-date person with access to the press is qualified to weigh in on the questions of the day. The two of them could have had a rousing exchange in the public arena, with Wells combating priggishness and Flanagan pointing out, not inaccurately, that Wells was a pig who elevated his habit of impregnating young virgins by advocating free love. They both take rather a dim view of the most militant women’s libbers, Wells because they are sexless vegetarians; Flanagan because they represent to her a self-destructive moral relativism. Indeed there is no love lost between these two and the traditional Left of their respective days: Wells was too libertine, Flanagan too reactionary.
In Lodge’s well-researched and fantastically engaging novel, Wells, like Flanagan, shows a tendency to put forth his particular preoccupations through literary punditry. Among other things, his writing tried to open the way for his own extremely unorthodox domestic arrangements, which he conducted with difficulty imposed by the prudery of the day. Flanagan’s Girl Land, on the other hand, is a prescriptive meditation on the dangers and mysteries of teen girlhood; it is a strange, sometimes silly document that suggests a working-out of Flanagan’s thoughts about her own adolescence.
2.
Half of Girl Land is a mildly interesting, discursive, and occasionally compelling account of the evolution of the American teenage girl. This evolution is charted by changes in the approach to dating, periods, diaries, sex, and proms in the course of the 20th century. As a quick and dirty social history, Girl Land contains items of interest, even if they are not news. (And sometimes, they might not be history: proms, she says, did not draw inspiration from “the formal dances held at the country’s elite private schools, which were not called proms, and which had little in common with this new kind of event,” an assertion which anyone who has read F. Scott Fitzgerald on the attractions of the Yale Prom knows immediately to be false.)
Using an adult novel by Betty Smith and how-to guides for new brides, Flanagan documents the trauma of marriage for young women with no information about sex and no societal permission to want it. Wells himself encountered trouble in this area, describing his first wife Isabel’s views on sex in his autobiography as “nothing more than an outrage inflicted upon reluctant womankind.” Wells took a somewhat enlightened view about Isabel’s frigidity and, in Lodge’s novelization, when he met her again after marrying a second woman who happened to be uninterested in sex, he asked for another shot: “It was all my fault. I was a clumsy, impatient lover then. It would be different now. I could make up to you for those unhappy nights.” Likewise Flanagan takes aim at the claim that women don’t reach the height of their sexual awakening until their forties: “That a woman’s sexual response has to be ‘learned’ is ridiculous. What has to be ‘learned’ is a male’s sexual technique…The notion of women entering a three-decades-long sexual utopia beginning at the exact year with estrogen begins its steep, irreversible plummet is loony.”
Flanagan sensibly tells us that young women want to have sex, that they feel desire in their teenage years, and that this was in years past made manifest through early, often unhappy marriage. The randiness of women is again borne out by the experience of Wells, who seems to have been surrounded by very young women who went through great lengths and committed all manner of subterfuge to divest themselves of their virtue in his crowded bed. Among these, the affair of Amber Reeves was a scandal which almost had him (and her) hounded out of society. She became pregnant, and he couldn’t marry her on account of being already married to the Christ-like Jane, who spent her time raising her and Wells’ sons and writing kind notes to his young paramours during their confinements. Wells solved the problem by essentially trading the pregnant Amber to a young man who was willing to marry her in spite of her condition. The literary fruit of this union was Ann Veronica, a novel describing a young woman who kicks free of the traces of society and her father by having hot sex with a married man on an Alp.
Lodge, through painstaking use of original correspondence and a careful reading of the man’s innumerable publications, has done a huge service by resurrecting a writer who was also a doer, a social reformer with avenues to foreign and domestic policy at a time when a novelist’s opinion could matter in world affairs. Wells was a leonine figure in English letters, a “comet” now “passed out of sight.” For me he had only vague associations with time machines and a radio scare; shamefully, I’m always forgetting which one it was that was in Citizen Kane. Lodge strikes the perfect balance in his portrait: Wells, as befits a writer, seemed a touchy, insufferable, infuriating, philandering, selfish bastard. And, in spite of it all, a visionary and a regular old charmer.
3.
I was charmed by Lodge’s portrayal, so I read Ann Veronica, and was in turn charmed by its high-flown didacticism written in service of Wells’ libido, and its series of infinitely quotable quotes. Wells was what might crudely be called a poonhound, a characteristic that corresponded nicely with his ideals about free love and the sexual liberation of women. And even though he wrote Ann Veronica in order to justify the patently awful position in which he had placed a young woman of extremely bright prospects, it strikes many palpable hits against the Flanagans of his day (it also caused an uproar).
In common sense and the life of H.G. Wells, the wages of sin are pregnancy or disease, realities that Flanagan notes in her overview of teenage sexuality in previous decades. Bizarrely, when she arrives at the present-day state of affairs in Girl Land, the consequences of untrammeled teen sexuality are less clear. Pregnancy and disease do not enter the equation in Flanagan’s criticisms of our current sexually explicit culture; her one reference to Planned Parenthood, the traditional province of these problems, is a throw-away swipe at their website, upon which it is evidently possible to find information on the art of fellatio. (By the way, H.G. Wells might have learned this from the source — he had sex with Margaret Sanger too.)
Flanagan giggles at what she calls “Moral Panics,” the adult furor fueled by rumors of “rainbow parties,” wherein young girls are said to fellate willy-nilly, leaving unlikely rainbows of lipstick upon a squadron of teenage johnsons. Flanagan debunks the rainbow party, but assures us nonetheless that oral sex has left its previous province of the exotic (exotic, yet the novelist Violet Hunt is reported to have enthusiastically performed it upon H.G. Wells) and become totally commonplace for American teens. Still, it’s not so much of a problem for Flanagan, she writes, because she has sons, less likely to be “wounded, emotionally and spiritually, by early sexual experience, or by sexual experience entered into without romantic commitment, as are women and girls.”
More disturbing to Flanagan are rap and pornography, and their unspecified deleterious effects on the development of young women. One of her major canards is that the left, and feminists, are at great pains to valorize pornography, the same way, she tells us, they valorize “black urban America,” which is represented in Flanagan’s sketchy diorama of cultural decay by rap music. Flanagan is alone in an amoral hellscape:
I believe that we are raising children in a kind of postapocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households — individual mothers and fathers — are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment. The ‘it takes a village’ philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it.
What this all means for children is unclear, because Flanagan does not tell us. She points out that women in pornography often come from abusive childhoods, and yet she does not suggest that all of the young blowjob queens, their spirits warped by songs “in which [they are] urged to suck dick and get fucked” will venture down this path. Likewise she mentions the problems of eating disorders and cutting, yet fails to properly correlate these with her concerns about the culture at large. Rather than provide real documentation of the consequences of lewd and sexist music, she reports on the Pimps and Hos prom after-party, on the well-bred Los Angeles girls who “jostle off the party buses and onto the sidewalk, where they are regarded with surprised delight by whatever men happen to be there — homeless guys, street thugs, the club’s bouncers, wanderers — and who had not expected to get an eyeful of very young, upper-middle-class girls dressed in panties and boots.” Here Flanagan forgets her earlier chapters, echoing the spirit if not the letter of racial panic she described in the 1960s, during which time it was feared that (white) runaways would be preyed upon by men “some black, some white.”
Even as she fails to quantify in a meaningful way the consequences of a culture harmful to young girls, Flanagan exercises the nuclear option of parental judgment, arguing that the wages of permissive parenting is no less than death. In Girl Land, she supplies the example of Melanie Bellah, a 1970s liberal mother who allowed her daughter the freedom to kill herself with drugs and sex. In a recent review cum retrospective of Joan Didion that is as compelling as it is cruel, Flanagan names that author an accomplice in the death of her child. These women presumably invited Flanagan’s judgment by putting the details of their lax parenting in writing, which Flanagan herself does not do. And as her children have the virtue of being alive, there is no obvious route via which the distant reader might criticize her parental choices. Her house is of the most opaque glass.
And yet, if we are to glean what we can from the details she includes in her book, we might see how Girl Land is a working-out of something deep and personal, offering parental guidance for the daughter she doesn’t have based on her own remembered girlhood. Her early experience with the dangers of dating occurred when she was “emotionally troubled” and her parents were away, “meeting with [her] father’s publisher in the city.” Later she tells us, “At the time of my adolescence my mother was too distracted to give me everything I needed to turn out well. But 20 percent of her attention was enough, because the whole culture was supporting her.” Her melancholy epilogue describes how she left home as a young woman: “convulsively and competely, with a kind of scorched-earth finality that was the product of the particular times we grew up in and of the intensity of the family drama we were desperate to escape.” It’s as if Flanagan examines her own teenage close calls in an age where the lewdest thing she could get her hands on was Judy Blume’s Forever, compares them to a Rihanna song, and concludes that the sky is falling. This would explain why she doesn’t explore the real and particular dangers of our current moment, or introduce us to any teenagers living in it. I think a memoir would have made better sense, and better reading.
4.
Flanagan, like any person ever to be alive, believes that she is living in unprecedented times: “…the culture, as always, presses forward, and the dream has become more fraught with ugliness and threat…” It’s true that you can say things now in music that are the absolute height of vulgarity (and violence). But I’m also struck by the parallels between her censure of our moment and that of Ann Veronica père, who receives his daughter’s request to go to a dance with her neighbors, the Widgetts, with unbridled horror.
She seemed to think he was merely the paymaster, handing over the means of her freedom. And now she insisted that she MUST leave the chastened security of the Tredgold Women’s College for Russell’s unbridled classes, and wanted to go to fancy dress dances in pirate costume and spend the residue of the night with Widgett’s ramshackle girls in some indescribable hotel in Soho!
The Lord alone knows what they might do in that indescribable hotel — it’s the prom after-party with a vengeance. When Ann Veronica rebels against her father and runs off to live alone in a furnished bedsit, he reflects, “A man’s children nowadays are not his own. That’s the fact of the matter. Their minds are turned against him … Rubbishy novels and pernicious rascals. We can’t even protect them from themselves.” In a conversation with an acquaintance, he talks of the corrupting influence of the culture at large: “There ought to be a Censorship of Books. We want it badly at the present time. Even WITH the Censorship of Plays there’s hardly a decent thing to which a man can take his wife and daughters, a creeping taint of suggestion everywhere. What would it be without that safeguard?”
Flanagan writes about playing Milton Bradley’s Mystery Date, how girls of her generation secretly hoped for the sexy “dud,” “a grease monkey with a five o’clock shadow dressed in a mechanic’s uniform.” A friend of Ann Veronica’s father opines “What a girl of sixteen cares for is hair and a high color and moonlight and a tenor voice. I suppose most of our daughters would marry organ-grinders if they had a chance — at that age,” and suggests, much like Flanagan, “I think we ought to teach them more or restrain them more. One or the other. They’re too free for their innocence or too innocent for their freedom.”
Like the adults who surround and censor Ann Veronica, Flanagan seems less concerned with all the fragile residents of Girl Land, than with the girls of a certain class and upbringing. Like Wells, Flanagan runs in rarified circles. The young women with whom Wells dallied were intelligent young women with parents of means, either in the form of social or real hard capital. Rebecca West, Amber Reeves, Rosamund Bland — these are young women for whom early sexual experience was less likely to lead to ruin. Flanagan’s examples of teen or tween excursions into promiscuity are in every instance from class backgrounds where young women have the greatest prospects, even the Canoga prom-goers of the “impressive but nonheady eighty thousand dollars a year family incomes.” Yes, there are the young women who were lost in the permissive 1970s, but they are presented as extreme cautionary tales precisely because their they were from wealthy and educated families. If it can happen here, and all that.
Misogyny still reigns, and obviously there are connections to be made between wounding sexual experiences, for girls of any class, and a variety of troubles. Flanagan does not make them. If we look again to the young women of Wells’ acquaintance, we concede that an affair with the premier man of letters of the day is not experientially equivalent to giving an unreciprocated blowjob to a be-khakied stranger at a Pimps and Hos party. Still, Wells presents us with some real consequences of naive young ladies’ liberation: they might be lent money under the pretense of friendship and lured into cabinets particuliers for an almost-rape. In real life, Wells’ youngest conquests ended up with babies (and, apparently, a surprising lack of resentment). For Flanagan, the act of listening to lewd music, being ogled by street toughs while wearing fancy dress, is as much as you need to know. Vulgarity is as appalling in its own right for her as it was for Ann Veronica’s father.
(A brief digression: My high school girlfriends and I knew every last word to the song “Put it in Your Mouth,” a song that makes me blush today, a song that would have sent our parents into conniptions. We sang it in our rooms with enormous gusto. That was more than 10 years ago, and today we all appear, on the surface at least, to have muddled through, to good schools and jobs and fulfilling relationships. This was a boarding school, a fortress of privilege, and this will always have more to do with outcomes than a song about blowjobs.)
5.
It seems like Flanagan has written two books — one book is a quiet look at her own young womanhood, set against a brief history of the rearing of young women. I found her sympathetic portrait of Patty Hearst moving, and I love that Flanagan, she of the Dior bedspreads, talks blood puddles and clots as she describes the carnage of menarche. But the second part of this book is polemical and inchoate. Flanagan is good at talking about the times, just not the times we’re in, and when she turns her eye on the current scene, such as it is, and particularly when she offers her prescriptions for preserving the emotional and physical health of young women, she sounds not only hopelessly out of touch, but lacking the critical faculties her readers know her to possess.
Her recommendations for reader-parents are “Take the fifteen-minute tour,” “Make her bedroom an Internet-free zone,” “Get her father involved in her dating life,” “Remember: giving a girl limits doesn’t limit the girl,” and she ends with the half-hopeful, half-sinister promise that “Girl Land ends.” In the first of these, she instructs parents to Google “porn” and see what happens, in a manner that suggests they won’t believe what they find. This is by far the dumbest moment in Girl Land, and the fact that it represents one of the biggest bees in Flanagan’s bonnet is not good news for the book. I know that the Internet is scary, and indeed the few quick keystrokes it takes to access hardcore pornograpy is a far cry from my own painstaking teen journeys through Clan of the Cave Bear to find the nasty parts. But you don’t have to be a porn apologist to know that if Flanagan thinks her adult readers, thousands of whom read her solely on the Internet, don’t know the kinds of things they can find in its darkest recesses, she has broken with reality. At the very least, someone likely to buy a book by Caitlin Flanagan is also likely to read a newspaper, from which they will hear such tidings as the Supreme Court’s ruling on “crush videos.”
The Internet is not an artifact that struck the earth out of a clear blue sky; it is an ever-enlarging cabinet of human curiosities — awful, trivial, delightful, aspirational — built over time by people who are mostly alive today. Flanagan’s 15-minute tour is so weirdly limited, imagining her readers as a cadre of people just like her, who’ve never poked around the Internet or indeed spent vast swathes of their daily life thereon. Most adults with an Internet connection have already taken the 15-minute tour, and then some — the same dad who is meant to involve himself in his daughter’s dating life probably doesn’t need to Google “porn” to know where to find it.
Speaking of dads, H.G. Wells knew all about them — to them he was a Svengali. Boundaries and glowering fathers with well-oiled shotguns are well and good, but teenagers live to defy them. And the more unreasonable the parental stricture seems, the more likely the teens, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, will find a way. Ann Veronica’s father says to her:
What nonsense is this?…You have this home. You have friends, acquaintances, social standing, brothers and sisters, every advantage! Instead of which, you want to go to some mixed classes or other and cut up rabbits and dance about at nights in wild costumes with casual art student friends and God knows who. That — that isn’t living! You are beside yourself. You don’t know what you ask nor what you say. You have neither reason nor logic. I am sorry to seem to hurt you, but all I say is for your good. You MUST not, you SHALL not go. On this I am resolved. I put my foot down like—like adamant. And a time will come, Veronica, mark my words, a time will come when you will bless me for my firmness to-night. It goes to my heart to disappoint you, but this thing must not be.
When dad sets limits, what does Ann Veronica (and her real-life inspiration) do but run off in an even greater display of rebellion than was already planned. I don’t suggest that parents, knowing the extent of teenage willfulness, should avoid imposing rules altogether. I also know that Flanagan’s panic about blowjobs has more to do with very young teenagers, and not college-aged women like Ann Veronica. The parallels here are by no means exact — Ann Veronica was written 100 years before Flanagan began her fretting. But I think it is useful to consider the way that Flanagan’s rhetoric so closely echoes the hysteria that has always surrounded girls’ sexuality, hysteria she herself describes in the early chapters of her book.
6.
Teenage girls are not insensible to the world around them. They know that they are the object of speculation and worry. They want to know things about themselves, and as Flanagan herself did in adolescence, they look for any and all information. Some of them will read her book — I took Reviving Ophelia off my mother’s shelf and from it learned all about the contemporary perils by which I was alleged to be threatened. Books like these often end up being important to young women, and while Flanagan makes some very sound points on the way that spending part of your social life online can extend the pressures and anxieties of the high school day, her clear unfamiliarity with the specific nature of the online universe will make her sound ludicrous to the young people who are the subject of her concern. The Internet is full of stupidity and bullying and horrors, it is true. But it is also full of camaraderie and comfort, information and inspiration. There are unprecedented avenues to empathy in the vast digital web. But this is a luddites’ book, in which no actual teenage girls appear, and all the material seems to be taken from at least 10 years ago. (Additionally, the alarmist tone of the last pages of Girl Land belies some of Flanagan’s previous writing, in which she identifies a self-protective strain of traditionalism in girls’ enthusiasm for Glee or High School Musical.)
There is work to be done on Flanagan’s topic, but she doesn’t do it in Girl Land. And the women who do write about rape culture and get into it with virulently misogynist apes (usually online), are the kind of capital-F feminists Flanagan typically has no time for. Because Flanagan is careless with her arguments, because she assumes that it is bad enough to quote a grotesque lyric from a song, or vaguely refer to the “millions of Facebook pages” to prove that “some of the best and brightest girls have come to believe [the] poisonous message” that “women exist merely to please men,” she sounds as out of touch as Ann Veronica’s father, like any square parent from time immemorial. I know that Flanagan is right about a lot of things, but I expect her to do more than express garden-variety shock and phone in some obvious recommendations for good parenting.
Ann Veronica belongs to a sequence of H.G. Wells’ novels known as the “prig novels,” novels wherein he battled the social mores of the day. Wells was wrong about a lot of things, Lodge tells us, and he was an asshole (when a young Rebecca West gives birth to his child, he complains that it takes away from their sex life). He did not always have, even, the courage of his convictions, which could be molded according to the direction of the prevailing public or private wind. Like Caitlin Flanagan, he made some questionable pronouncements. But his way of being a public intellectual, whether through the prediction of tanks or free love, his fierce investment in public life, his accurate reading of the present even as he sometimes inaccurately predicted the future, makes Girl Land, with its lack of analytical rigor, its prim pronouncements, its dated material, its wilful ignorance about the new landscape, look like weak sauce indeed.
Image Credit: Flickr/Hannah_Vdv
Virginia Woolf took copious notes before she wrote her novels, as did Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov (his notes on index cards). William Faulkner scribbled his outline for A Fable on a wall which his wife tried to paint over. Joseph Heller created an extensive spreadsheet for the correspondences between various plots in Catch-22.
And of course there are many other points along the continuum. Italo Calvino started from an image and then expanded it. “If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it,” says Katherine Anne Porter. And writers’ processes may be regarded differently by themselves than by others. George Eliot may have been prompted by the serial format of Middlemarch to unify her novel more than it otherwise would have been, but she nevertheless considered her work more as “experiments in life” than “moralized fables, the last word of a philosophy endeavoring to teach by example,” as Henry James remarked of her work.
The divide exists with equal prominence in more mass market or “genre” schools. There the archetypal planner might be someone like J.K. Rowling, who extensively outlined the Harry Potter series, or John Grisham, who reportedly outlines each of his books prior to writing them. Stephen King, on the other hand, thinks it’s “dishonest” to pre-determine a plot, and William Gibson dislikes planned writing, which he considers to smack of “homework.” Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem likened his writing process to “dipping a thread in a liquid solution of sugar; after a while crystals of sugar begin to settle on the thread, and it grows thicker and thicker, it puts on flesh, so to speak,” and this is reminiscent of what fantasy author Neil Gaiman says of his novels: that they “accrete.” Lem’s description is reminiscent of what Stendhal says in his deliciously acute Love of the idealization involved in passionate love. When a twig is left in the salt mines, Stendhal writes, it eventually emerges utterly sheathed in delicate, interlacing crystals. In the same way, a person in love encloses their beloved in a seamless vestment of imagined perfections (never, however, with less ground in reality than the shape of the crystals have in the topography of the underlying twig). Perhaps writers like Lem need to idealize their work before writing it.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, love, lunacy and poetry are all related, and so of course Delphic prophecy of old is practically the picture of divine inspiration. The idea of divine madness possessing poets and prophets (and I include novelists under these grand rubrics) is an old one. Kalidasa, the Indian poet, is said to have had the sigil of inspiration painted on his tongue by the goddess, after which the waters of creativity simply poured forth. Madness and divine inspiration here are opposed to calm, clear, intellectual rationality and planning.
The planner William Faulkner said, after all, that this is precisely what he did with As I Lay Dying: “I simply imagined a group of people and subjected them to the simple universal natural catastrophes, which are flood and fire, with a simple natural motive to give direction to their progress.” And it was a book for which he claimed to know practically every word prior to writing anything down. More broadly he claimed of each of his books that “there is always a point…where the characters themselves rise up and take charge and finish the job — say somewhere about page 275.”
Dostoevsky wrote his extensive notes no doubt because his works had to illustrate complex philosophical ideas like the “positive idea of beauty” in The Idiot, or the possibility of acting beyond morality in Crime and Punishment.
Pantsing vs. planning, properly understood, is not a debate at all. Every writer I know (and I know several dozens) has their own methods. The right way is whatever works. I am mostly a pantser because, as suggested in the article, I need to tell myself the story to know its contours.
When possible, I d plan in advance, but I frequently can only predict what will happen a few chapters ahead of where I am. Then again, does that make me a secret planner? A hybrid? Might it be, not mutually exclusive choices, a continuum along which each writer finds their own place along the line?
Honest novelist search his unconscious mind and try to find out meaning for his life.All writing is write for self interest Those who write for fame and money is not honest writing. Novel must first and last satisfy to writer don’t care it satisfy to readers .
“]Proust] claims, indeed, to have possessed no imagination at all, though this remark likely ought to be taken about as seriously as Montaigne’s claims to a poor memory and and dull storytelling ability.”
On the contrary, both writers showed the acute insight into their limitations and lack of ability that the author of this piece clearly lacks.
What a woefully unoriginal and inaccurate article.
Other commenters have pointed to the false dichotomy drawn here, betraying a total lack of nuance and understanding of the complex back-forth writing process.
But moreover, the author does major injsutice to the authors cited by basically getting it wrong in most of his examples with simplistic reductionism and inaccurate portrayals by the author of each writer cited. I’m not sure the author did his research at all, and just cherrypicked quotes from each writer that seemed to fit into his broad-brushtroke depiction.
One example that immediately struck me is the lazy and inaccurate depiction of James Joyce. Biographies of James Joyce and research into Ulysses would show that Joyce planned and researched into the minutae detail of his work.
Got to this site and article through ALDaily… and won’t be visiting themillions again if this is the quality of the articles.
Oren C, surely accusing this article of reductionism is reductionist in itself. The article reports on an artistic debate, and provides evidence for both sides. Maybe Joyce planned, but he also said ‘don’t plan’. Other contradictions like this are listed in the article.
I’m surprised by the clarity of GRR Martin’s analysis of the question. He is more thoughtful and honest than King, who calls planning an immoral act. In fact, people favour the method that works for them. Whether it works for the good of the final work is for the reader to decide.
The author’s description of James Joyce rings true, How much planning does it take to produce a novel with no discernable plot, no dramatic arc, and no basic structure beyond a random walk through the English dictionary as well as Dublin. Another commentator opined that Joyce did extensive research. How so? He wrote Ulysses in Paris, without Wikipedia, and set it in Dublin. He seems to have had an extraordinary memory of the city. But, in the final analysis, the book is, in my opinion, unreadable gibberish.
” How much planning does it take to produce a novel with no discernable plot, no dramatic arc, and no basic structure beyond a random walk through the English dictionary as well as Dublin.”
I respectfully submit that what you would seem to find the best about reading “The Novel” is not what Joyce does (nor is it what he tries to do) in Ulysses. But the same could be said of any number of fine books the spiritual and intellectual godfather of which being L. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
“The Novel” is a capacious form; why should the thrilling possibilities of narrative be restricted to the good old shape of the campfire-tale? To reassure the bourgeoisie? If you enjoy reading thinly-veiled rehashes of Goldilocks/ Cinderella/ Little Red Riding Hood, that’s fine… but surely you can allow that there are other ways that appeal to other types of reader? And that not all of these readers/writers are idiots (or phoneys) simply because they don’t share your tastes?
I find, these days, that there’s a red hot strain of totalitarian intolerance, found in discussions of Art and bred by the corrosive over-confidence of the Consumer, who knows so absolutely what she/he likes but confuses that kind of knowing with knowing what is good. You’re not a professional critic, of course, so it’s no sin that you haven’t made much of a case here.
Re: “structure”: Ulysses is one of the most famously “structured” books in English; Joyce makes his über-anal acolyte Anthony Burgess (who structured his novels like sheet music) look slapdash in comparison. You need to actually *know* a book before you can get too specific in tearing it down.
PS Here’s one version of structure in Ulysses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_schema_for_Ulysses
Perhaps I could have been clearer by stating, “I find Ulysses to be….” instead of, “in my opinion…” Correct, I am not a critic, but rather a writer who appreciates a tightly written narrative, not one that seemly tries to use every word in the English language. Many readers enjoy Joyce, good for them. I find it hard to “know” a book when my eyes glaze over ten pages in. Is it too much to ask for sentences that actually get somewhere instead of running on for pages? For some sort of point to a story? For clear prose, even if sophisticated. What is the elevator speech summarizing Ulysses? What is it about anyway? And, if Ulysses is a classic, perhaps the classic novel, why isn’t Finnegan’s Wake, which is more of the same, not? In my books, I try for an interesting, complex story line and language an educated reader can appreciate. For me, Joyce does none of this.
To each their own, of course, but I have written novels both with extensive outlines/plot lines and without, and the “pantsers” approach has yielded infinitely more creative and interesting material, for me as well as the reader. I’m of the camp that it all derives from character, and every morning I ask the question, what will these characters do and/or what will happen to them today? One can, and must, edit after the fact, but along the way, great surprises that make better stories. Cheers.
@Ed Cobleigh
Please post a link to an excerpt from your material, Ed. I’m curious.
My website is http://www.edcobleigh.com. Or you could click on my name on the original post, both will take you my site with the usual stuff and links to my books on Amazon. You might get a few grins from my blog about finding Hemingway in Paris. Feedback is always welcome, perhaps not heeded, but welcome all the same.
Ed
The atrocious right wing claptrap of your politics aside, I can see that you have a good ear for storytelling. You know how and when to deploy the unexpected, particularizing detail. But your Art is essentially oral… the Art of the campfire… transcribed to the page. There are at least a dozen right-wingers who seem to frequent the comment threads, here, who would probably enjoy your stuff immensely: to them I recommend your books.
I remember reading texts like yours in my mother’s copies of The Reader’s Digest. There was quite a market for that stuff, then, and perhaps there is one still. But the “clarity” you trumpet is merely inelegant simplicity. This matches your politics… I can see why you despise (or feel threatened by) Ulysses. I can imagine you aiming a flame-thrower at a first edition of that book with glee. Modernism… Communism… what’s the diff?
I find the intellectual/psychological divide here interesting, Ed. Also hilarious. In the little preface to one of your books, you mention how you (or “we”) tried, and failed, to “save” that part of the world from The Commies. The Commies won (against tremendous odds) and, years later, we see the dire results: Vietnam does business with the rest of the world, just like Ireland, or Norway, or Texas, or Red China (and with less corruption than Chicago).You had a proud hand in the killing of c. 2 million Vietnamese civilians in an effort to avert that “terrible” outcome….?
No, Ulysses is not for you.
Steven,
Thanks for your comments. You are correct, War for the Hell of It was written in a.coversational tone. When folks tell me the book sounds as if the reader and I are sharing drinks and tales at the Officer Club bar, I know I’ve nailed it. You are also right in that there is a market for such. The book has sold over 13,000 copies.in 8 countries, and counting.
The Pilot is something else again, a novel with a layered story. Some readers follow the plot twists, some can’t. Take the (short) time required to read it. I offer a money back garauntee, if you don’t enjoy the book, I’ll refund your costs. Is it oral art, I certainly hope so. I read every line aloud before I go final.
My politics are anything but right wing, I’m a dedicated independent. I vote for the best choice on offer at the time. This year it’ s Hilary. In the past, it has been, at times, Carter, Clinton, and Obama.
Ed
Actually, you provide a perfect little lesson in the difference between the naive Art of the campfire tale and the great ambiguities of the Higher Art embodied by a genuinely complex (and subversively funny) text like Ulysses. Ulysses functions, essentially, above the venal con of Society; Joyce’s witty and prolonged assault on the institutions that oppress us in the name of Morality (aka Money) and Order (aka Power) indicate, first of all, that he was not duped by the venal cons that keep us in line. And every great novel/ novelist works in a hierarchy that *begins above* “Society” in order to sing its Truths against Society’s age-old cons.
But your Talents (like many Writers’), Ed, work from within the Illusions of the Society Joyce preemptively anticipates and rejects. What you do, then, is: rather than supplying Propaganda’s Antidote, you amplify and disseminate it. Your Fighter-Pilot/Death Machine books have confirmed the brainwashed beliefs and aspirational feelings of 13,000 and counting. You functioned as a cog in the American Killing Machine that rolled over Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and your books relive your experiences (directly or with padding) as that cog. If these books don’t rage with shame about the horror of being this cog, they are merely propaganda and you have done your part to keep at least 13,000 readers from recoiling in disgust at what American Killing Power has done (and does) in the name of More Power. Just as your colleagues around the world write not-badly-written bilge to support the Evil Inanities of their respective Societies. Even in Russia, I’m sure.
Hilary is as right wing as they come (ditto her terrifying husband, who, among other things, destroyed Yugoslavia to boost his poll ratings; even Reagan didn’t go that far, opting for the invasion of Grenada, for his little poll bump, instead). Obama has drone-killed how many thousands of children as of this morning? That’s the beauty of propaganda: it can make you think Right is Left, Wrong is Right and War Crimes are Humanitarian Interventions. The Republicrats (or is that Demublicans?) are all Far Right. As a “dedicated independent” (sic) you’ve faithfully chosen, each time, one of the TWO (laugh) choices, between a rock and a hard place, that our masters offered. The game is rigged and Joyce knew it. You don’t appear to.
How can you illuminate any reader’s consciousness if you’re so deeply duped yourself? Joyce would have listened to five minutes of any (H or B) Clinton speech and laughed until vomiting. Well at least he would have pitied that poor dupe Carter.
But my larger point is: the possibilities of The Spooky Art are much greater than the often-reactionary pleasures of the Campfire Tale. The possibilities inherent in all Great Art are, in fact, Radical in the fundamental (and etymological) sense of the word. And, again: your aversion to Joyce’s great (and deeply radical) work is telling.
If you think “plot twists” are a measure of literary complexity, try to find a copy of Weldon Thornton’s mammoth “Allusions in Ulysses: A line-by-line reference to Joyce’s complex symbolism”.
You are playing less than patball to Joyce’s champion game (not to flatter you with this allusion or anything…. laugh).
Reading list:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html
http://literarylondon.org/the-literary-london-journal/archive-of-the-literary-london-journal/issue-3-1/london-language-and-empire-in-oxen-of-the-sun-of-james-joyces-ulysses/
My only thought is never study books on how to write unless they are by a well known highly published writer, and as my major influence always said, “Whatever it takes to get the coon.”
Dear Steven Augustine,
Just wanted to let you know that you are a patronizing moron since you’re so obviously incapable of seeing how you come across with your ludicrous verbosity, or of recognizing the obvious stupidity of your positions.
There are many canonical writers who held conservative views. Your insane idea that aesthetic superiority is somehow tied to looking at the world like your obvious master and arch-moron Chomsky, is truly deranged as well as fundamentally stupid.
I don’t know anything about Ed other than what’s written here but you seem to intimate he is a Vietnam vet. Far better men than you gave their lives to preserve our freedoms. And no, Vietnam is not Chicago. I have been there and it is still a Communist hellhole but I don’t expect a Chomskyite Pol Pot-loving denialist like you to even begin to understand.
Good day.
“Far better men than you gave their lives to preserve our freedoms.”
Nice! I haven’t heard a line like that (without a laugh-track) since Nixon was in office! Your “freedoms” to cheer on your Gubmint as it serial-blitzkriegs defenseless nations to acquire and/or protect corporate markets and assets? Or your “freedoms” to inhale deep-fried Snickers? Because, like, you were afraid the Vietcong (like the Iraqis) had long-distance canoes…? (gets out map of Earth)
“Your insane idea that aesthetic superiority is somehow tied to looking at the world like your…”
Nah, I implied that aesthetic *competence* is tied to elegant, inventive, cliché-free writing. The right wing claptrap was addressed as a separate issue, you big old cuddly flag-wavin’ thang! You aren’t sharp but you do sparkle!
Um, but what I really want to know is how you feel about “Ulysses”…? I take you for more of a “Portrait of the Artist…” fan, though. Close…?
“The right wing claptrap was addressed as a separate issue, ”
Um. No it wasn’t. Maybe you should read your own claptrap.
“Joyce would have listened to five minutes of any (H or B) Clinton speech and laughed until vomiting.”
You know that how?
I repeat. There are many great canonical novelists who held conservative, even ultra-conservative views.
You were trying to conflate aesthetic appreciation for Joyce with a left-wing worldview. It’s asinine. Just admit you’re wrong and that you feel superior to the vet.
By freedoms I mean those that do not exist in Vietnam or Cuba or North Korea, such as the righto to freedom of expression, the right to freedom of assembly, the right to a vote. The right–this ones for you, sparkly–to be openly gay.
Since I have lived in both Vietnam and Cuba, I know what I’m talking about. You?
The better men than you are the ones who fought the wars that brought the expansionist Soviet bloc and its allies down in the end, thus freeing half a billion people from brutal tyranny (see above). Same goes for those who fought Hitler and Hirohito.
Too bad they failed in Vietnam. And it wasn’t canoes. Once the VC took over it was boat people, it was death camps. But you don’t want to see that side of the equation.
Ulysses, actually, by far. Dubliners a distant second.
J-Babe:
The distinction I was making was between a minor writer who swallows boilerplate nationalist propaganda and regurgitates it as commercial prose, and the other species of writer capable of seeing through the fog and creating prose useful in leading the reader out of society’s labyrinth of seductions, double-think and outright lies. I wasn’t, therefore, arguing that a less-conservative writer will write better, or more fancy prose: I was arguing that a clued-in writer (eg Joyce) will help to create clued-in readers. Sorry I didn’t make that clearer for you, chum. Hope it’s clear now. I can type more slowly if you prefer.
“Since I have lived in both Vietnam and Cuba, I know what I’m talking about. You?”
And Ohio is full of closeted members of the Klan; should I trust their appraisals of the pros and cons of living in Ohio? Laugh.
One of my friends, Khue, was born in Berlin, of Vietnamese parents. She’s been going to Vietnam, on vacations, roughly once every two years or so since she was fairly young. Her chief complaint was always about how difficult it was, for her (as a German, essentially) to relate to most of her Vietnamese relatives there (especially when she’s over there for longer spells). She never mentioned it being a “hell-hole”… she often said it was “Gorgeous”… whereas, on the other hand, I *know* Chicago is a hell-hole, and I haven’t been there in 20 years!
So maybe the Vietcong should have saved the US from the inhuman depredations of Late Phase Capitalism? I mean, as long as we’re granting governments carte blanche to use carpet-bombing as a tool of social engineering.
Or is there only *one* government that’s so special that we allow them to get away with war crimes like that….?
Which passage in Ulysses is your fave? The part where Joyce heaps praise on men who order the mass-murder of innocent women, men and children for political gain… or the part where he praises the Dupes of such men?
As I thought.
You don’t actually know what you’re talking about. You’ve never lived under communism nor probably even visited a communist regime.German pals notwithstanding, you’re just another provincial American.
What’s really amusing–no, sad–is that you praise cliche-free writing but you’re whole spiel on here with its am-I-typing-slow-enough and it’s look-at-me-I’m-so-much-clever-than-you-are nonsense is the antithesis of honest, hard thinking on the issues you raise.
You’re all cliche, all pose, far more so than the vet with his campfire yarns. You’re just repeating Chomskyite agitprop of the kind you can hear recited by the legions of drones in any undergrad dorm, expressed in an obvious and unfortunate attempt to mimic Vidal.
I think your tired combination of patronizing superiority and abysmal ignorance plus a measure of cruelty is far more likely to have made Joyce throw up than any speech by Hillary. (Not to mention the overtly political and reductionist reading of his own text!)
Meanwhile in Tehran they just hanged a few more people for the crime of being gay. Meanwhile in Hanoi my friend, uh, who lives there and is, uh, actually Vietnamese, and who can’t vote and has no right to say what she wants and lost half her family to communist labour camps, well she just woke up at 4 am and put her whole family on a scooter to get to work, including her 11 year old who has to sell trinkets all day because school’s not in the cards for him. In the worker’s paradise. But hey, your German pals says all’s “gorgeous” there so life’s got to be great under the red star . . . pass the barf bag.
But at least it’s good to see that you’ve rethought and appear to be retracting your idiotic position that great novelists are all left wing ideologues. Because they’re really not.
War crimes? From a certain moral perspective all war is a crime. But if great literature teaches us anything it’s that hard choices have to be made in an imperfect world.
“A hesitating soul, taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.”
J-Babe:
Well, you clearly don’t like me but I like you a lot. I love how one eye of yours is that much bigger than the other (giving you a visionary appearance)… and, also, that vein that bulges in your forehead (all the time). But, to get to your philosophically heavy investigation of Life…
Indeed, J, the world is not a Disney ride. It’s not a Disney ride in Chicago, it’s not a Disney ride in Detroit, it’s not a Disney ride in the Appalachians or across a sizeable chunk (if not the overwhelming majority) of the US of A, just as it’s not a Disney ride in Tehran (um, is Tehran run by “Commies” now, J?). Yes, J, an 11-year-old in Vietnam has to sell trinkets (much like an 11-year-old in Compton has to sell drugs)… isn’t that pretty much Capitalism at work?
Which is why I left the US in 1990. I fled for a Social Democracy. Much more civilized than living in a full-on Capitalist Gulag. University educations are essentially free, here… not so in the US. Generous maternity leave, long holidays, socialized health care (and not only did my Wife and I get excellent, high-tech, prenatal care for the nine months before our Daughter arrived, but we also had doctor and two midwives AND a birthing suite to ourselves on the big day and a follow-up house-call from the doctor… I think we paid the equivalent of 200 bucks, in total)… all thanks to the lingering spirit of Socialism!
I’m suspicious of the bourgeois-underpinnings of most so-called “Communists”, you know, but Social Democracy has been very good to me. Even when YOU aren’t supposedly living in Vietnam and Cuba (why didn’t you throw Beijing in, while you were at it?) and “reading Ulysses”, you live in the Third World, in comparison. Where you are “free” to go homeless at any minute.
Speaking of which, I’m more on the Parenti “functionalist” (AND “structuralist”) side of the debate than a Chomskyite “structuralist”. Parenti’s lectures on the age-old struggle between “the few” and “the many” are eye-opening. You, J… you’re a member of “the many” who has been trained, like a little dog, to yappingly “protect” the interests of “the few”.
“Meanwhile in Tehran they just hanged a few more people for the crime of being gay.”
Nice to see you’ve evolved somewhat since the previous message during which you sneeringly implied that I’m Gay, J! Or were you flirting? But my Wife (a ferner!) is very pretty, J. So forget it (though I’m sure there are some who are into your type). And if I *were* Gay you’d probably be too… you know. “Dinky”.
“War crimes? From a certain moral perspective all war is a crime.”
Logically speaking, therefore, the country waging the most Wars (technically speaking they’re blitzkriegs/ invasions, since a “war” is between two nations with actual armies) at any given time is the biggest criminal, no? Go on, J. Put two and two together. I’ll wait for you. I know you can do it…
(or maybe not)
See ya! Peace, Babe!
PS What are you wearing right now? Are you even wearing pants?
Actually, Faulkner outlined ‘A Fable’ on SEVERAL walls.
There is a parallel between the West & East. Western paintings traditionally were carefully planned & executed; Japanese & Chinese painting were spontaneous and followed Zen principles (in addition to archery and swordsmanship, painting is also a traditional Zen discipline).
The idea continues into such things as microscopes: the critical aspect of a microscope is the lens. The Germans and Japanese dominate the market. The Germans make lenses very carefully and expensively, and reject few; the Japanese make many lenses quickly and cheaply, test them, and reject most of them.
What is interesting, the resulting quality and price of the microscopes are about the same…
I liked this article. Anytime you categorize, of course, you can argue things aren’t so black and white. Still, it’s fun to know which authors outline and know an ending before starting, and which don’t.
I don’t know much about writing, so I found this article very interesting. It displays several different approaches. Starting with a plan means to first draw a sketch, then fill in the details. But you can also start drawing from a chosen point without any sketch, complete the work part by part, then polish the result. To me, the second approach is more fun, but will often lead to dead ends.