Bookplanet: the joys of international fiction

From Ploughshares via the incomparable, beautiful wood s lot:
Dr. Strangereader: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Suburban Novels and Love International Fiction -- by Bill Marx

In the past, readers and critics expected serious novelists to catch the spirit of the new in their fiction, to absorb the particular experiences of living and thinking in a specific time and place. The form and language of fiction evolved to fit changing times and tastes -- sometimes briskly, sometimes slowly -- to reflect or critique transformations in technology and culture, the tensions between traditional beliefs and discoveries in science and psychology, the impact of the political on the individual, the ambiguous influences of history. The novel mirrored the nips and tucks in reality, inner as well as outer, with realism mutating into miraculous metaphysical and self-reflexive directions. From the beginning, the novel was nothing if not capacious: critic Viktor Shklovsky mischievously asserted that Tristram Shandy was “the most typical novel in world literature.”

Today, the artistic virtues of plasticity are no longer paramount in the American novel. For a number of reasons, the essential links between the flexibility of the novel’s form and the fluidity of experience are dissipating, the mysterious give and take between the elasticity of words and ever-shifting realities weakening. Contemporary life calls for an imaginative renovation of the novel, but it’s a challenge our writers won’t or can’t tackle. Most new homegrown fiction is hidebound and modest, self-involved and shrewdly commercial, calculated reanimations of nostalgia. The typical American novel is content to be typical, sociologically speaking.

How can that be? In his book Reading & Writing: A Personal Account, V. S. Naipaul argues that our reliance on the novel’s past makes the form easy to teach in the classroom but inadequate before the growing complexities of modern experience. Stuck in traditional postures, fiction isn’t able to penetrate a brave new world overwhelmed by electronic media, a confused global culture that threatens “to be as full of tribal or folk movement as during the centuries of the Roman Empire”: “But the novel, still (in spite of appearances) mimicking the program of the nineteenth-century originators, still feeding off the vision they created, can subtly distort the unaccommodating new reality. As a form it is now commonplace enough, and limited enough, to be teachable. It encourages a multitude of little narcissisms, from near and far; they stand in for originality and give the form an illusion of life. It is a vanity of the age (and of commercial promotion) that the novel continues to be literature’s final and highest expression.” For Naipaul, fiction is a burnt-out case stuck in a rut, serving up a simulation of modern experience filtered through worn, self-regarding molds, missing a genuine encounter with the evolving vicissitudes of history. Notice that Naipaul doesn’t want a return to the reassurance of the old but an encounter with the new.

Adding insult to injury, a number of respected writers and critics encourage the American novel’s drift by arguing for the merits of the tried and true. Literary magazines and creative writing schools -- which should be fighting for artistic and intellectual freedom, for a renewed sense of possibility -- thumb their noses at what New Republic critic James Wood calls “the risk of thought,” choosing instead the comfort of fizzled bromides in popular genres or the suburban blues. Whether fighting for survival in a competitive market or upholding the merits of good gray realism, too many writers are swept up into a whirlwind of cultural forces that promise more (publicity, journalistic timeliness) but demand less: less artistic ambition, less intellect, less peculiarity.

The situation is reversible, though rebellion calls for stretching (or reinventing) boundaries rather than accepting them. The battle is not over shoring up the waning prestige of the novel; no matter how strenuously new fiction is celebrated, books will continue to lag behind the chic celebrity of popular music and the movies. The fight is for writers and critics to accept the necessity of redefining the form to convey shifting circumstances, the hard but honorable task of reshaping our expectations of what a novel is supposed to be. The best fiction transforms the way we picture the world, pitting itself against the leprous spread of the mundane and the bland. For the novelist, creativity’s mobility -- its chameleonic talent for dramatizing changing notions of consciousness and reality -- is crucial. The imagination should serve as an unforgiving goad in the pursuit of the more: the more difficult, the more far-reaching, the more particular. According to Italo Calvino, “literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.”

In American fiction, that expansive conception of the imagination is in danger, not so much because of the tired rhetoric about a country dumbed down, but due to the systematic shrinkwrapping of the novel’s potential by those who should know better. Part of the problem is that our writers and critics are too provincial for literature’s good: cultural nationalism takes the defensive form of the triumph of self-sufficiency. Thus one way out of this creative paralysis is for American writers to look for inspiration from fiction beyond our shores; international novels in translation offer a sense of aesthetic capacity necessary for a reinvigoration of the form.

Critical opinion-makers play it safe by hopping between chipper optimism and dank pessimism, finding lots of novels to praise while issuing generalizations about the end of fiction. These extremes fit snugly into the commercial and intellectual bubble that surrounds and isolates American fiction. Even analysts savvy about the artistic poverty of American novels are cramped by their nearsighted gloom, their fear the novel may have reached its demise in the cyber age. Naipaul isn’t the only critic who fears serious fiction has stalled, perhaps permanently.

Sven Birkerts, in a December 1999 Esquire piece titled “The Next Revolution,” laments the lack of ambition, the truckload of “mere excellence” produced by postwar authors. He frets over the disappearance of the mysterious inwardness and formal innovation found in the work of James Joyce and Thomas Mann. Birkerts, along with Naipaul, wonders if the contemporary novelist is nothing more than a pale reflection of a past he can’t budge out of the way: “Missing is some greater thrusting at ultimates, the quixote factor, as well as the implicit sense that the world is being made and that he is making it. Making it new. Now we are devolved again -- golden age to silver to bronze. Everyone is good, even brilliant, but we are self-conscious now, playing in front of the mirror. The legacy of the past seems to overpower our writers; sometimes it feels as if they’re dabbling around in the muddy footprints of giants.” Birkerts makes his argument through contradictory images: artistic narcissism versus the bullying accomplishments of history. But the modernist heroes he worships were acutely self-conscious and deeply aware of the past, and they still managed to be innovative.

Throughout the piece, Birkerts wrings his hands, hoping a replacement for a diminished modernism is on the way. Unlike Naipaul, he believes something miraculous may happen, though his flurry of rhetorical questions leads me to suspect he wouldn’t bet the farm: “Have we reached terminal saturation? I don’t want to believe that.” “I believe they are out there -- cultures generate the antibodies they need -- but where?” Birkerts’s anxiety and Naipaul’s far-ranging dismissal also reflect fashionable fears of a cultural downturn; books with threatening titles abound, from Nobrow to Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-Cultural America and The Twilight of American Culture. Instead of cutting against the grain of literary business as usual, both Naipaul and Birkerts accept the deterministic assumption that either new realities or too much self-consciousness are spoiling the future of the novel. This belittlement of the novelistic imagination, paradoxically, links these critics with those who believe, in this day and age and cutthroat market, fiction has no choice but to aim low.

Blaming the smallness of the novel on the scary ghosts of modernism or the intimidating density of contemporary life distracts us from a less glamorous but more insidiously realistic cause: commercial forces. Critic Albert Mobilio lays this scenario out in his article “The Genre Generation: Where Did the Novel Come From and Where Is It Going?” in the February 2000 issue of The Village Voice Literary Supplement. For Mobilio, a growing number of significant writers are absorbing the conventions of genre fiction; he points to a number of novels, including Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (whose detective protagonist has Tourette’s syndrome) and Richard Price’s drug thriller Clockers. After the rigors of modernism, a cerebral cool-down period is necessary, he implies. After all, a retrenchment at this time isn’t going to embarrass anyone. “Serious novelists now know that they will lose little literary cachet,” observes Mobilio, “yet gain many potential readers if they can package their romp through the uncreated consciousness as a thriller.” “In the final analysis,” the critic concludes, “socioeconomic factors, not aesthetic ones, may well be the determinant.”

Mobilio implies that economics and politics shape our perceptions of which works of fiction should be considered new and worthwhile. The marketplace determines what is novel in the novel rather than the imaginative achievements of writers or the clarion cries of critics. Like many reviewers, Mobilio isn’t concerned about fiction’s capitulation to small-scale projects. Citizens fried by the electronic age need a rest from demanding prose (his assumption is that these readers waded through the murky waters of modernism in the first place), so the hip writer obligingly lowers the limbo bar: “Set against the vogue for genre’s zing and flash, syntactically dense rants like William Gass’s 600-page The Tunnel may simply prove too much for remote-control-style readers. Perhaps the quick-cut grammar of visual media has so jangled our attention spans we require that stability of expectation that is genre fiction’s defining element.” Given the onrush of communication technologies, just when will our attention spans expand? It’s more likely we are in for decades of coming contractions.

Set Mobilio’s “stability of expectation,” with its patronizing bow to the techno-frazzled reader, against Naipaul’s more radical demand for serious novels. Amnesia and originality are interconnected: “What is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.” Of course, genre conventions can serve as the foundation for ecstatic imaginative flights, but only when they are beside the point, when either characters or ideas take over and a new compound is created or the genre is exploded. Unfortunately, Mobilio is accurate about today’s earthbound fictions. Most American novels are not out to astonish, either by way of style or content. The snug contours of genre cushions the reader’s nerves, providing a conservative underbelly -- often reassuring and/or moralistic -- that prefers the familiar over the surprising.

In that sense, Mobilio’s tribute to retrenchment typifies a widespread failure of artistic and critical nerve that seeks to rationalize why the bar must be lowered. Thomas Mann said all of his work could be seen as an effort to free himself from the middle class, a rebellion Lionel Trilling believed was “the chief intention of all modern literature.” The chief intention of most contemporary American novels is the opposite; suburban fiction embraces aesthetic provincialism, a narrowness of technique and subject matter that distrusts irony, playfulness, inaccessibility, and complication. Contemporary American novels want to join the middle class, paying ambivalent homage like a moth that can’t break free of the flame. This obsessed love/hate (love the comfort; hate the privilege) is trotted out in endless variations on the pieties of the suburban novel, even in the most radical-seeming feminist and multicultural fables. The irony is that novels revolving around characters struggling against the siren call of the middle class have become part of the form’s fatal attraction. What could be more neatly bourgeois than alienation?

Novelists have come up with a literary variation on how popular culture goes about renewing itself: writers reupholster the old, though it is the same lumpy sofa underneath. The rise, fall, and rebirth of the suburban novel is a representative case. In the postwar period, the genre focused on the discontent of the middle class; it dramatized the traditional clash between the individual and the collective, between human feelings and social duties. In the seventies that conflict devolved into a standoff between hyper-alienated suburbanites and an attenuated society incapable of providing satisfaction. During the eighties the genre sank into a polite nihilism aptly characterized by John W. Aldridge in his 1992 book Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction: “Over and over again in their fiction these writers tend to treat the personal life as if it were a phenomenon existing totally apart from society and without connotations that would give it meaningful relevance to a general human condition or dilemma.” By this time both sides of the seesawing duality, the individual and society, were emptied out. Novelists couldn’t stretch smug self-hatred any further -- so the genre had to snap back.

The suburban vision remains an ongoing commercial concern, but desperately needs replenishment to seem new again. The latest group of multicultural writers is pumping life into the moribund form. The tensions of middle-class existence remain front and center, but as ethnic groups struggle for their share of the good life, the synthetic hell of the ‘burbs takes a back seat to meatier issues of cultural assimilation, shifting identities, and the waning of tradition in the face of contemporary mores. Culture clashes on the turf of the affluent have become trendy literary property. The Orange Prize for Fiction, the richest literary award in Britain, is given to a book by a female novelist. Almost half the finalist novels this year contain “stories of immigration from one culture to another,” says the contest’s chairwoman, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. She adds that “after reading them all, you look at mothers begging with babies in their laps -- Romanians or whatever -- and you think, Those kids are going to write a book someday.” These children will be penning books for readers who are less interested in Eastern Europe (when was the last time you read a novel translated from the Romanian?) than in the guilt-inducing struggles of the “Other” in Western society.

In the March 23, 2000, issue of The New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma bluntly suggested the price ethnic writers pay for admittance into the middle-class novel: homogenization in the name of universality. Buruma reviews novels by Chinese-American Ha Jin and Korean-American Chang-rae Lee and concludes that “what Jin, [Kazuo] Ishiguro, and indeed Chang-rae Lee have done, given their oddly angled perspectives, is reopen subjects which most Western authors can only treat with irony: marriage, family relations, the boundaries set by social obligations.” The catch is that verbal inventiveness and forays into unfamiliar territory are not welcome in the new world fiction: “In this kind of global literature there is little room for the linguistic and cultural playfulness that breathes so much life into books such as Berlin Alexanderplatz or indeed Joyce’s Ulysses. The fact that cultural references are either not shared or deliberately rejected by writers like Ha Jin or Kazuo Ishiguro explains the lack of irony in their novels. But you can get too much of irony and in-jokes.” Fatigued by irony, Buruma wants to make an artistic virtue of unencumbered earnestness: “by stripping their stories of irony, cultural allusions, and exotic ornament, writers with complicated backgrounds can restore a classical purity to our languages, and even bring us a little closer to the ground of our shared human condition.”

Naipaul’s criticism that today’s imitative novels “subtly distort” an increasingly unruly contemporary reality has relevance here, once you notice the connections between Buruma’s plug for “classical purity” and Mobilio’s “stability of expectation.” Much like Mobilio, who accepts pouring serious fiction into genre expectations, Buruma would like multicultural writers to cater to readers weary of complication, to cleanse narratives of irony and exoticism. Notice how the terms are posited in his argument: it’s the same old story of anti-intellectual contamination, with foreign influences tagged as obstacles to classical purity. The “global writer” assimilates to the great tradition by shedding cultural particularities.

Yet the strength of literature from around the globe often lies in its revelatory local details. In the May 20, 1999, issue of The New York Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra argues for the value of Indian authors “whose identities are rooted in their regions, and who for that very reason are alert to the fine discriminations and nuances of their subject in a way a reader in the West would find difficult … In this sense, parochialism -- which Rushdie calls ‘the main vice’ of literatures in Indian languages -- is not such a bad thing.” For Buruma the parochial -- cultural material the Western reader will find baffling or extraneous -- is not a good thing. Not because he views the exotic as the “Other” to be feared or ignored by Western imperialistic culture, an argument whose power fades with the continual mixing of races and cultures in the West. But for a more dangerous critical reason: Buruma’s stripped-down requirements for novels that tap “the ground of our shared human condition” lead to a desiccated sense of fiction. The radical newness of the best fiction has been rooted in its grand peculiarity, its loyalty to the parochial. Buruma suggests that cultural allusions in novels endanger their universality. But that local density is also a way fiction eludes the spreading boutique multiculturalism of McWorld, where cultural differences come down to a matter of diet and food preparation.

Irony and parochial details are necessary tools in exploring the complexities, “the newness” of modern reality. Yet today the ironic has become as stigmatized as the exotic; increasingly the exotic is as unwelcome as the ironic. (Novels about the arrival of new groups in the suburbs have their limits -- they must not be too alien.) Some critics would argue it has always been this way, justifying their kowtowing to the whims of fashion. But should those concerned with the power of fiction to take the reader outside of him or herself into other selves, to dramatize challenging ideas, and to reinvigorate language accept this domestication? Are American novels chockablock with irony, or is it quickie-mart snickering rather than the cutting skepticism of Swift and Voltaire?

Critical enthusiasm for the exoticism of multicultural fiction is misleading because it is largely confined to literature produced by authors writing in English and living in America or Britain. According to The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, “Book production [in America and Britain] has increased fourfold in the past 50 years, but the number of translations has remained the same, representing between 2 and 4% of the annual total of books published.” One scholar of translation, Lawrence Venuti, observes with dismay that our culture is “aggressively monolingual.” It could be argued that the literary chatter about the rise of ethnic variety in American literature is an illusion -- the overall vision of American writers and writing sold around the world is the half-hearted celebration of middle-class life, fables of “classical purity” centered on whether one group or another succeeds.

The rise of multicultural fiction didn’t come about because of too much self-consciousness or narcissism; the movement was demanded by the marketplace because it revamps American suburban fiction, making issues of family, assimilation, and manners meaningful again. Ironically, critical huzzahs to the supposed diversity of American fiction end up condoning timidity and staleness while perpetuating cultural provinciality.

Given the political pizzazz of multicultural fiction and America’s lack of interest in international news, fiction from around the world garners little attention. Aside from a handful of major authors, international fiction boasts little advertising presence, critical clout, or academic charisma. The majority of our critics and literary publications don’t wander very far afield: the welcome wagon for fiction from outside our shores doesn’t roll often. The fact that many of today’s most interesting novels are foreign and available in translation turns few heads. Our reviewers and their publications would rather drool barrels of ink on the expedient homegrown flavor of the month.

International fiction is marginalized in the no-man’s-land of aficionados and specialists; in this way the literary world aids and abets the homogenization many of its writers condemn. For example, one of the most important publishing ventures in the last decade, Northwestern University Press’s Writings from an Unbound Europe -- a lineup of fiction selected from writers from such countries as Albania, Romania, and Serbia -- has gotten little notice. A series of novels from Eastern European authors, edited by Philip Roth and published by Penguin in the seventies and eighties, had star power and Cold War politics behind it. But Soviet Communism is dead, and that part of the globe isn’t fashionable anymore, no matter how brilliantly their writers reinvent the novel to reflect the problems of post-socialist society.

Meanwhile, capitalism does what it does best: it churns out product, lumping gems in with the trash. Despite the dearth of critical coverage and interest at major publishers, over the past couple of decades presses distributing distinguished fiction in translation have been growing in number: a bare sampling includes The New Press, Brookline Books, Zephyr Press, Catbird Press, Harvill Press, University of Nebraska Press, McPherson and Company, Northwestern University Press, Marsilio, Serpent’s Tail, Steerforth Press, Counterpoint, the University of Texas Press, Sun & Moon Press. Old standbys, such as New Directions and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, continue to print fiction from the corners of the world. There are quite a few disappointments, of course, with what gets imported, but the yearly crop of books in translation at least has the Darwinian distinction of being cherry-picked; someone thought it worthwhile to make a particular book available in English. A number of these novels are as rambunctious and quixotic as one could wish; modernism is extended, discarded, and blown up in rich narratives filled with history (not of much interest to the suburban novel), irony, and cerebral friskiness. Weepy critics and commercial touts haven’t convinced these writers that modernism is dead. If nothing else, international fiction proves that modernism, with its stylistic and intellectual demands, isn’t, as Birkerts claims, played out -- it is one possibility among many for the writer to draw upon.

For disillusioned souls, tired of the creaky American merry-go-round, international fiction offers an immersion into other cultures, pasts, and selves, often by way of challenging fictional techniques that, in many countries, remain vital because they communicate new realities and ideas. The perspective of many of these novels -- a playful historicism, a skepticism skeptical of itself -- reflects an alternative to the innocent diligence, the earnest navel-gazing of so much American writing. The best of international fiction treats the novel as if it were a serious tool for grasping reality on the sly, not a form weighed down by fatigue and lesson-mongering. In The Natural Order of Things, Portuguese novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes journeys through memory to warp time and space: “… looking at the window and seeing black miners all around me, likewise with glowing lamps on their foreheads and with mugs of cane liquor that yellow, like sulfuric moons, the evening mist … imagine a world of tunnels that end who knows where or why, or if they end at all, because maybe they hook up to other tunnels, maybe there are infinite branches of tunnels with echoing mine cars that nobody pushes, pickaxes no one uses, foreman’s orders that no one remembers.”

Serbian writer David Albahari does not hedge his artistic bets to fit genre expectations; his short story collection Words Are Something Else blends philosophical meditation and delicate lyricism: “The damp is probably getting into the clockworks, springs, probably slowing down the hands. It is hard to say what is time and what weather -- all of it is nature, everything constantly repeats, there is no end, no beginning, no distinctions.” Irony transforms and invigorates the imagination in such authors as Albahari and Antunes, Jose Saramago, W. G. Sebald, Aleksandar Tisma, Norman Manea, Rosa Chacel, Juan Goytisolo, Naiyer Masud, Breyten Breytenbach, Botho Strauss, Viktor Pelevin, and Felix de Az˙a. Major reconsiderations of the novel by admirably eccentric talents -- Andrey Platonov, Juan Carlos Onetti, Anna Maria Ortese, Osman Lins, Danilo Kis, S.Y. Agnon, and Raymond Queneau among them -- are still coming into English. Oxford University Press’s Library of Latin America series and the University of Nebraska Press’s European Women Writers series are indispensable eye-openers onto different terrain.

“The translator is not just building a bridge from one language to another,” argues Dutch writer Adriaan van Dis in his Leopard IV: Bearing Witness essay “Stolen Languages,” “he is also a herald, broadcasting the words of a small language into the wider world, enriching a small country with the literature of a large one. The translator can put a country back on the map, rescue a civilization from isolation, and help it rediscover its pride and identity.” American fiction and criticism is too drunk with the sound of its own monotonous drone to hear the music of foreign voices.

The mainstream literary press ignores these sounds, but its indifference should not discourage those who demand more. The highbrow gatekeeper has fallen victim to identity politics, editorial cowardice, and intellectual leveling. The waning of centralized authority offers opportunities: cultural dialogue is trivialized but critical voices are equalized. Wised-up readers must become enterprising hunters, searching for prose works that excite rather than sedate.

Of course, fiction in translation poses hazards. Politics, as often as aesthetic merit, decrees what’s translated into English. Marketing trends, economics, and editorial whim dictate what writing reaches the West: Eastern Europe was hot in the seventies; fiction from Communist China has become trendy of late. And international material can be perceived as too unfamiliar, so deeply mired in the particulars of culture it risks losing the reader in enigmatic curlicues. Translation is an art few of its practitioners can master; some books don’t translate well no matter how painstaking the effort.

Difficult as it is, however, the linguistic transaction is vital for cultural enrichment and survival. Modernism was largely imported to America from European countries; the black humorists and experimentalists of the sixties were influenced by writings from Latin America and Eastern Europe. Over the years the exchange between us and global outsiders has been healthy, but the increasingly insulated mentality of Anglo-American culture has set limits on the impact of foreign literatures.

American writers and critics need to go on vacation, though not on the packaged tour where the tourist guides insist the passengers sit back and enjoy the best of both worlds. Ambitious souls will break away and search for singular experiences and fantastical dives, delve into the linguistic jungles for rare plants and creepy crawlies. For the scientist, rare specimens provide cures for diseases and clues to genetic therapies; for those who care about the art of the novel, international fiction in translation has similar medicinal value as a crucial alternative, an imaginative salve, to the commercial drone of the lit-biz and the predictable shudders of the prophets.

Thomas Mann is dead; many of us can’t seem to get over it. Freud might conjecture that the melancholy of Birkerts and Naipaul reflects an inability to mourn, to overcome a debilitating sense of belatedness. Unlike Naipaul, Birkerts strikes me as pining not just for Mann redux, but for the good old days of the critic-as-kingmaker. Once, giants of journalistic reviewing, such as Irving Howe and Edmund Wilson, explicated the work of difficult international writers to the literate public. The task remains worthwhile but forsaken by most editors and reviewers. The attenuation of critical authority has made such uphill literary leadership problematic in a country largely indifferent to news from around the world. Is anybody going to listen? International fiction has become a hard sell in a culture that believes it has nothing to learn from those outside of its borders.

Against the deadening mechanics of habit, Freud placed the survival value of mobility, the yen to escape from the everyday, to free-associate one’s way to the new. American novelists and critics, as well as the reader unscrambled by the latest technology, need not make do grudgingly with what is blurbed in plain view. The exhilarating, if risky, alternative is to rebel and strike out for dreams tucked in nooks and crannies, poke around the world for the unexpected volume, become aesthetic researchers on a quest for the sometimes startling discoveries that small presses and university publishers bring within our reach. Searchers will be propelled by an imperiled conviction: that the essence of the novel is rooted in the pleasures of the idiosyncratic.