Facile Criticism of Literary Classics

To quote from the Afterword to my edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin: "For the literary critic, the problem is simply how a book so seemingly artless, so lacking in apparent literary talent, was not only an immediate success but has endured." Th...usually Usually, I am loathe to criticize books that are part of the cannon. This is entirely different from criticizing the cannon itself, which has been the subject of plenty of legitimate criticism. But though the cannon should include more works by women and minorities, the works that are typically included are generally there for a reason. Who would I be to suggest that Shakespeare is overrated? What value would there be in me listing my ill founded complaints about Oedipus Rex or Paradise Lost? Mostly I just accept that these are great books and if I didn't fully enjoy them, it's likely that the problem is with me, not the book. I am especially loathe to criticize a canonical book that is written by a woman author. Nonetheless, here I go.

To quote from the Afterword to my edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin: "For the literary critic, the problem is simply how a book so seemingly artless, so lacking in apparent literary talent, was not only an immediate success but has endured." That is a good question, indeed.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is a melodrama written with the best of intentions. If its publication brought about the end of slavery even one minute sooner than otherwise would have been the case--and my understanding is that the book did have a significant propaganda impact--then for that I give it the highest praise I possibly can.

But it is not really suitable for modern readers except for those reading to try to understand the relationship between literature and current events. Judging solely by literary standards, the book is a failure. Characters are badly drawn, the plot depends on random coincidence, and the mood of the writing is melodramatic to unbearable degrees. Harriet Beecher Stowe's perspective, while progressive for her time, is clearly informed by her own cultural baggage that puts distance between the author and her characters. There is a reason that being called an Uncle Tom has become a insulting epithet.

Racial issues have become enormously complex, and this book no longer furthers the conversation. Get some Frederick Douglas or Toni Morrison instead.

Pants on Fire

Amy Chua got a lot of ink earlier this year for her essay about motherhood, but since I'm perpetually behind the times, I'm just getting to her 2004 book about globalization, democracy, and market-dominant minorities. Chua asks here how it came to be that in many places around the globe small ethnic minorities came to have a disproportionally large share of the wealth--and to her credit, she mostly answers this question without sounding like a huge racist. She points to market liberalization and democratization as two major forces that can cause these disparities, but also as forces that allow for indigenous backlashes against their beneficiaries. In short, market liberalization can create huge sums of wealth for those in a position to take advantage of it, while simultaneous democratization can give the general population the tools to harshly punish market-dominant minorities (the rather unwieldy term she uses throughout the book). These forces can lead to persecution--and in extreme cases, even genocide--of those minorities with disproportionally large economic presence.

The first half of the book is Chua's description of market-dominant minorities in various cultures: the Chinese in southeast Asia, lighter skinned people in Latin America, Jews in Russia, and the market dominent ethnic groups of Africa, including those still benefitting from colonialist histories. In the second half of the book, she describes some of the atrocities that have arisen in combination with free markets and democratization.

What I thought was missing was a cogent analysis of how market-dominant ethnic minorities became so prevalent beyond some vague notions about cultural work-ethic. I would have liked to hear Chua talk more about relative educational opportunity, access to resources and capital, and to see more of an emphasis on colonialist heritage. In addition, while the problems that Chua identifies are certainly real, I'm not sure what alternative to democratization there is to believe in. Clearly, a rapidly democratizing society with extreme wealth imbalance does pose risks, but it's not palatable to suggest that the status quo is acceptable either. Surely we must be able to somehow encourage democratization while also mitigating the resentment that can be directed at market-dominant minorities.

It's a complex topic, and I think Chua's book would be stronger if it were about 100 pages longer, giving her appropriate space to reflect on some of the issues she raises in greater detail.

Guilty Tortures

I'm a reader with democratic tendencies. I like all levels of brow. I like fiction, non-fiction, poetry, genre literature, academic tomes, and racquetball advice books. So while I read my share of classics, I am always on the lookout for what is called a "guilty pleasure". For me this often takes the shape of a schlocky horror novel (this is also true of my taste in films). The trouble with guilty pleasures, is that one has to read so many guilty tortures to find a real guilty pleasure. Sometimes you have to just be satisfied with a few good pages out of a whole novel. So it is in the spirit of trying to find guilty pleasures that I will occasionally review a book that you may find questionable. Usually, these books will indeed turn out be letdowns, but we'll never know until we try them. And when you do find the one that is in fact a real pleasure, well, what a great feeling that is. Here then, is my first bwiwya guilty torture post, about a sci-fi/horror novel by Dean Koontz called Midnight:

Midnight sports a lot of Koontz's usual tropes. Among them are: the good-hearted protagonist that has experienced a loss, the angelic and unrealistically mature child, the unnecessary romance between main characters in the midst of mayhem, the remorseless mad scientist, the cute dog, and the easily predictable horror/sci-fi premise. Reading Koontz is too often like reading a screenplay for a March release Hollywood film--just very little complexity or surprises.

That said, this is far from the worst Koontz book I've read. There are at least two scenes that I thought employed effective visuals--one is a tense chase scene at the opening of the book, the other a curious close-call with one of the book's creatures--a sort of werewolf--that stares into a window of a house and idly taps a finger on the windowpane while our hero crouches against the wall and hopes he isn't noticed.

But there are way too many gaffes to give Midnight any sort of recommendation. Just listen to some of this writing. From page 104: "Harry stared at the apelike countenance, thought it was leaner and uglier and more fierce and infinitely stranger than the face of an ape." This sort of writing makes me crazy. Infinitely stranger than the face of an ape? That phrase has exactly zero meaning. Or from page 108, when a cry in the distance is described as "shrill yet guttural." Koontz does this kind of thing all the time--he was tall yet short, the sound was loud yet quiet. A good writer can give a description of the uncanny without resorting to nonsense.

I need to add something about a serious plot hole as well. The plot of this book has most of the citizens of a small town being changed to so-called "New People" in an experiment of which they are unwilling members. These New People are animalistic in that they live for essentially food and sexual pleasure only. Some of the New People embrace their wildness and go nuts. Others are worried and perplexed about losing their emotions. But none of those that loses their emotions ever ventures outside the community to seek help. Instead, the whole town gets turned over the course of a couple weeks with no one ever saying anything. If I thought my humanity had been stolen by a local mad scientist, I would hope some equally enterprising scientist elsewhere might be able to give it back to me. But what do I know? Also, no visitors ever notice anything weird about their relatives?

I saved the best for last though. The maudlin concluding scene of the novel is unbearable. The protagonist Sam is bitter at the beginning of the novel because he has had a near death experience and didn't like what he saw on the other side. What horrible thing comes after death that Sam saw, we wonder. Tessa, his love interest, brings Sam around to the life-affirming viewpoint that all Koontz characters are required to hold by the novel's end. The big reveal is that Sam was upset to see that there is an afterlife of some kind--you see, he hated living so much that he was mad that he would keep living. If that isn't the lamest plot point you've come across, then God help you.

Anyway, now Sam is on-board again with loving being alive, and he and Tessa return to his home where Sam hopes to make amends with his estranged teenage son. How does he do this? In a virtuoso display of unintentional satire, Koontz has Sam destroy his son's rock n' roll albums. I'm not even kidding.

Hipness Unto Death

Hello. My name is Brett Hoffman. Danny and I have been friends for many years, and I'm honored that he would allow me to post occasional bits along with his superior insight. Danny will no doubt live to regret the day he opened this blog up to his idiot friends, but until he takes the keys back, I am free to use this space to do my level best to force my opinions on others. Mostly this will take the form of book reviews for books that virtually no one cares about, but it may sometimes be something else as well. Nothing drives page views like talking books.

Anyway, with Danny's review of the Blue Trees, I feel pretty liberated to talk about my own minor obsessions. I'm going to be starting on an esoteric note, with a review of Mark Crispin Miller's Boxed In: The Culture of TV.

Boxed In is a collection of essays about television advertising, films, and music. The newest essays are from 1988, and Miller went on to become quasi-famous as critic of President Bush with his books The Bush Dyslexicon and Cruel and Unusual. In this book, it's clear that Miller is part of the left from his essay on the Reagan Presidency, but most of the essays are essentially apolitical.

Easily the strongest section of the book is when Miller is focused on advertising. Miller is trained as a graduate student in English literature, meaning that he has spent a lot of time doing the "close readings" that are required by the New Criticism school of thought. He takes this technique that is normally applied to poetry and instead focuses it on television commercials with some very interesting results.

He makes explicit the racial themes that are implicit in a commercial encouraging Americans to vacation in Jamaica in the first chapter. In the second, he delves into the psycho-sexual tension involved in a soap commercial. That may sound like a joke, but it's really not.

Skip to the 1:40 mark to see the commercial.

A couple excerpts from this chapter, so you get the feel of the writing:

"He comes toward her, setting himself up for a profound humiliation by putting on a playful air of suave command. Adjusting his tie like a real man of the world, he saunters over to his wife and her flower bowl, where he plucks a dainty purple flower and lifts it to his lapel: "And," he boasts throughout all this, trying to make his voice sound even deeper, "with old J.J.'s business and my brains--""--you'll...clean up again?" Gail asks with suggestive irony, subverting his authoritative pose by leaning against him, draping one hand over his shoulder to dangle a big yellow daisy down his chest."

"Typically, it woos its female viewers--i.e., those who choose the soap in most households--with a fantasy of dominance."

"This 'man,' in fact, is actually Gail's wife: he is utterly feminized, striking a posture and displaying attributes which men have long deplored in women."

"The crucial object in the opening shot is that the flower box with its bright geraniums, which is placed directly in front of the husband's groin. This clever stroke of composition has the immediate effect of equating our hero's manhood with a bunch of flowers."

And so on. Miller's language is somewhat overwrought (all throughout the book, unfortunately) but the subtext is striking once it is pointed out. When I've brought this sort of analysis up to people, they often respond by saying something like, "Don't you think he's reading too much into this? These are just commercials, after all." This is exactly the wrong way to think about this phenomenon though. Commercials are ubiquitous and unavoidable--we are consciously and unconsciously bombarded with them, and it cannot be helped that they will penetrate our psyche. Rather than suggest that something we are surrounded by is unworthy of study, we should be all the more willing to discover what it is actually saying to us. And don't forget, the people that make national advertising are sophisticated and highly-trained. They are completely aware of everything they place in their ads.

So I think there is a great deal of value in this sort of analysis, though since this book was written in 1988, I wish there were more recent examples. Also noteworthy are Miller's chapters on Bill Cosby, Family Feud (Victory demands the absolute suppression of any wayward thought or preference, any eccentricity that might define the family apart from TV's bland reconstruction of ourselves."), and his viewer's guide to the 1984 Presidential election.

He also invents an archetype of the television ironist (David Letterman is his go-to example) that on one hand seems to say to the audience that they too smart to be watching this nonsense--say, stupid people tricks--but encouraging them to stay tuned anyway because they are in a sense, in the on the joke. That same audience is then turned over to advertisers that work on a similar principle: ads that are full of irony (you are too smart to fall for this dumb ad!) and trying to morph that irony into a desire to purchase a product.

The chapters on film and music are less compelling to me, so I won't go into detail about them. I would pair this book up with The Conquest of Cool by Thomas Frank, another interesting volume on the history of advertising.