Eisenberg On The Short Story's Special Qualities

In the middle of her recent review-essay, "The World We Live In," Deborah Eisenberg unfurls a two paragraph thesis on the philosophies girding up short form fiction. Appraising Wells Tower's story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Eisenburg argues:

One can get into a terrible snarl talking about the matter of narrative, but it's hard to avoid the subject entirely when considering a collection of short fiction, partly because the stories are likely to vary in their aims, partly because there's no overarching plot on which to hang the discussion, and partly because good stories suggest questions about what plot, or (to use the words interchangeably here) narrative, is. That is to say, a plot, of course, is an account of a sequence of events, but how are those events related— really—and why do we believe (when we do believe) that they are?

It could be said, as an expedient, that the plot of a given piece of fiction is a phantom organism—an embodiment and enactment of the author's preoccupations and obsessions—and that this organism is what allows us to experience the piece's deep pleasures: its insight, its beauty, its mystery, its power—whatever are the essential properties of the piece; that a plot, like a grammatical structure, is an expression of innate relationships in the mind. Long fiction has room to fill things in whereas short fiction, due to the stringency of selection it imposes, tends to demand a more active role from the reader, who must supply a chargeable receptivity, a medium in which compressed signals can unfold and send an associative web of sparks flying out between them. And it seems to me—to make yet another broad and possibly somewhat rickety generalization—that because a work of short fiction must so quickly and unerringly present evidence of the world that lies under its surface, the plot of a good story is likely to be a stranger, more volatile, and more evanescent sort of thing than the plot of a novel.

A Brief Interview with Colson Whitehead

Art + Seek
1 May 2009

Walton Muyumba: After using satire and comedy so affectively in your earlier novels, why did you choose to set that approach aside in Sag Harbor?




Colson Whitehead: More important than satire is humor, a sort of cockeyed view of the world. Each book has a different way of allowing me to make jokes about the world. I grew up on Richard Pryor and George Carlin, and their love of veering between the tragic and the comic. When I got to college I started reading writers like [Samuel] Beckett and [Thomas] Pynchon . . . or Ralph Ellison, I found a new way of channeling that impulse. While I am poking fun at the structures of business, racism, the government, and mass media to varying degrees in different books, I’m always trying to capture the horrible and the beautiful at once. In Sag Harbor I’m talking about a teenage boy, I’m talking about the horrible and the beautiful in his day-to-day experience. So it’s pop music, it’s a minimum wage job, hanging out with his friends, so the structure and content of the story is shaping how I’m talking about the culture.

WM:Was it difficult to shift away from the jocularity of John Henry Days and Apex Hides the Hurt to Sag Harbor’s sentimental, un-ironic celebration of 1980s culture?

CW: There’s the sort of easy pop culture reference that makes everybody laugh. And then what I’m trying to do is use ’80s pop culture to illuminate Benji’s character and a certain way of looking about the world. So when I am talking about New Coke and Bill Cosby and The Cosby Show, I’m trying to find the emotional truth in these things as opposed to an easy reference. In terms of being sentimental (it gets a bad rap), but I think that it fits the tone of the book. If you look at The Colossus of New York [Whitehead's book-length essay about New York City] that sort of strain is there in my love of the changing city, what is still here, what is gone, and what remains, and that sort of shifting palimpsest of the city street. I think that accent is brought to the fore because I’m talking about a single character, Benji Cooper, and he becomes the focus for all these things. But I think it is there in the earlier fiction, but it’s maybe not as obvious.

WM:So in Sag Harbor, location (home) and personal identity are beneficially linked?

CW: The change self, the changing home, and the interplay: the dissolving border between yourself and the place in which you live. The city is you and you are the city. Benji’s Sag Harbor and Sag Harbor is he.

WM: Do you imagine that Barak Obama’s election and presidency will affect your discussion of race and African-American culture in the future?

CW: I’m out of sync with what’s going on the world. I started Sag Harbor five years ago, and blackness in the world has changed. In terms of where the country will be in five, six, 10 years . . . who knows what I’ll work on next and how it will fit into some sort of larger conversation about what it is to be black or what it is to be American. I have no idea what I’ll do next, so I have no idea how the changes in the world will feed it, impede it, or transform [my writing]. And it is sort of refreshing not knowing what I’ll do next. I don’t have the perspective and knowledge of what I’m actually going to be doing in the future to answer that.

WM:You’ve been very successful early in your career. What motivates you as a writer? And how will you maintain that focus as you develop your next projects?

CW: I want to make good art and want to help people understand the world more. I hopefully have something to contribute and in my books I can help people see and engage the world in a new way, given my perspective. I think the difficulty in finding a new project comes from learning something so different, like in Sag Harbor. I feel like I’ve done a certain kind of cultural work say in Apex Hides the Hurt or John Henry Days, and I have to find a new way of talking about how I feel about the world. So, that will come in time. If five years go by and I’m stuck, I’ll start to get distressed. But for now, I’m glad Sag Harbor is done and I’m enjoying the fact that people are getting it. You never know what’s going to happen to them once they hit the bookstores. I’m very fortunate that people seem to be responding to Sag Harbor.

Walton Muyumba

Sag Harbor: Colson Whitehead's Summer Dreams

Sag Harbor
by Colson Whitehead
Doubleday Books
273 pages

Dallas Morning News
26 May 2009

Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead’s fourth novel, is a scratched and sampled mixtape, love-letter to the Long Island town and African American summer enclave; to ‘80s culture and The Cosby Show; to hip-hop and upper middle class African American culture; to the revelations of adolescence, black homeboys, and brotherhood.

For Benji Cooper, the fifteen year-old protagonist/narrator, the summer of 1985 is the season of his discontent: childhood is demystified as a neophyte’s understandings of adulthood are ignited. Sampling W. E. B. DuBois’s conception of double consciousness (“an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body”), Whitehead makes Benji’s soul into a wrestling match among his worries about class striving, black identity, sexual desire, and definitions of masculinity.

Benji’s grappling begins with his younger brother, Reggie, and their quiet, painful separation into individual selves. The brothers, close in age and attitude, had once constituted a set: “Benji ’n’ Reggie, Reggie ’n’ Benji.” But in Sag Harbor 1985, Reggie recedes from his brother to assert his “Reggie-ness”. As with any love-letter then, beyond longing and nostalgia, there’s sorrow in Benji’s narrative -- the sadness of sibling de-coupling and emotional distance.

Whitehead has most often been read as a hip, erudite (slightly nerdy), satirist -- an artist whose jaunty, jocular early novels describe our culture’s churnings, capitalism’s manipulating forces, and the machinations of identity with such casual élan, that we’ve taken his literary temperament as an indication of his explaining that nothing’s awry in our American lives. But in all his writing, Whitehead yokes irony with lamentation as if to mark the dispiriting consequences of being hyper-aware of culture, consumption, and personal identity.

Whitehead forgoes plot in favor of Benji’s riffing, digressive narration. When it’s right, Benji’s voice surges and sings, sifting pop-culture debris down to nuggets of realization:

“The Cosby Show . . . forc[ed] us to reconsider our position. That was some version of ourselves on the screen there . . . What did it mean when millionaires said, ‘I’m going for a little bit of that Cosby thang’? Hungering for validation after all they’d accomplished. If the sitcom had this much influence, then there was nothing to make fun of . . . The box contained things of value. Where did that leave us when we looked around our own homes? The reception was terrible.”

In spots Benji reminds me of Yunior, Junot Diaz’s narrator in the exceptional novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. However, Whitehead’s novel isn’t propelled by narrative tension and the rambling style is ultimately an impediment to the kind of formal control that defines Diaz’s novel.

In fact, Sag Harbor is a much weaker work than Whitehead’s manicured and labyrinthine, The Intuitionist (1998); or his muscular tour de force, John Henry Days (2001); or his taut, sardonic disquisition, Apex Hides the Hurt (2006).

And yet, Sag Harbor illustrates the author’s artistic maturation: whereas Whitehead’s wise earlier works often resist service to our sentiments, his clever new novel stokes our emotions and intellects at once.

Walton Muyumba

The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism

Though often thought of as rivals, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka shared a range of interests, especially a passion for music. Jazz, in particular, was a decisive influence on their thinking, and, as The Shadow and the Act reveals, they drew on their insights into the creative process of improvisation to analyze race and politics in the civil rights era. In this inspired study, Walton M. Muyumba situates them as a jazz trio, demonstrating how Ellison, Baraka, and Baldwin’s individual works form a series of calls and responses with each other.

Muyumba connects their writings on jazz to the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, particularly its support for more freedom for individuals and more democratic societies. He examines the way they responded to and elaborated on that lineage, showing how they significantly broadened it by addressing the African American experience, especially its aesthetics. Ultimately, Muyumba contends, the trio enacted pragmatist principles by effectively communicating the social and political benefits of African Americans fully entering society, thereby compelling America to move closer to its democratic ideals.

“This is an extraordinary book. Walton Muyumba’s pathbreaking account of Ellison, Baraka, and Baldwin’s aesthetic theories and the connection between those theories and African American politics is creative and convincing.”

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Princeton University

“Walton Muyumba’s compelling book shows how Ellison, Baldwin, and Baraka drew upon ‘the music’ as they rethought the contours of blackness and recast the pragmatist pursuit of democracy in ways that were beholden to African American experiences and aesthetics. By doing so, The Shadow and the Act helps us to better understand the profound ways that jazz, as an intellectual as well as a creative practice, shaped African American letters and its gendered politics during the second half of the twentieth century.”

Eric Porter, University of California, Santa Cruz

This volume will be published on 1 July 2009. Pre-order your copy today from any of these fine booksellers:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Powell's Books

University of Chicago Press

Walton Muyumba

Intellectual Stimulus Package

Sunday Commentary
Dallas Morning News
8 February 2009

For enthusiasts of American literature, word of John Updike's sudden death was quickly accompanied by the sour news that The Washington Post has decided to shutter its Sunday pullout book section, Book World, in favor of a less-expensive online version.
I'm not nostalgic about some mystical set of "good old days" when all Americans read books and were smarter, nor do I wish to suggest that there are no longer writers devoting time and energy to producing excellent criticism in print. While space for literary criticism is dwindling in newspapers, there are still great outlets for engaging reviews in magazines like The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.

In the current issue of one of these remaining outlets, Book Forum , Walter Benn Michaels argues that American literary novelists must begin writing works that interpret and challenge the economic status quo. Michaels, an American literature scholar at the University of Illinois-Chicago, has been suggesting for more than a decade that American literature is rife with artists interested only in affirming identity (be it ethnic, racial or gender) rather than addressing the real American problem, class inequality.

Specifically, because novelists like Philip Roth and Toni Morrison – two contemporaries of Updike – have been concerned with producing works that narrate the rise of their particular groups into the American prosperity game, they've ignored the fact that market economic systems have maintained pernicious, insurmountable socio-political obstacles more significant than articulating Jewish, black or feminine identities.

I would argue, however, that artists like Roth and Morrison are important because they write beautiful sentences and tell powerful stories, while remaining suspicious of both identity politics and American market mythologies. (See Roth's American Pastoral or Morrison's Paradise.) Even Updike – who, to my mind, was the chief novelist-chronicler of 20th-century middle-class mores and upward mobility – seems to link Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's death in Rabbit at Rest (the ending of his masterful tetralogy of Rabbit novels) to the artery-clogged, depressed, indulgent, overweight state of American society at the end of the 1980s.

Whether you read Michaels' analysis of the relationship (or lack thereof) between American literature and the American market economy as wise or misleading, it is clear to me that now, more than ever, we need an intellectual stimulus package. That is, we need our best artists, our most agile arts critics and our arts aficionados to initiate the reinvigoration of American imagination. While Michaels' essay has appeared in one of our best literary journals, he's writing to a small, coterie audience compared with those of newspapers.

When run with skill, enthusiasm and panache, newspaper sections like Book World have been the traditional weekly spaces for these discussions. They have acted as communal zones where readers could find intellect-charging arguments about history, art, music, literature and pop culture from critics who introduced new, significant authors, reminded us of the old, masterful minds and modeled for us fine analytical habits.

As the economy rapidly withers and the newspaper industry heaves in declining health, a consequence is that the common, accessible printed pages for initiating discussions that Michaels wants about class inequalities or how to invent alternative systems of commerce have been scuttled.

Perhaps a bailout for artists and critics, and even book reviews, would be best served by funding the development of the percolating but unpolished forums for serious intellectual/literary critique growing online. Through newspaper or magazine portals – or working independent of those structures – editors and writers could use funds to construct challenging yet practical discussion about economics and history, the arts and sciences.

At this point in the decade, it seems high time to refigure our minds with powerful literary narratives; smart, experimental ways of describing our various identities; learning to use elegant, poetic language for describing, prizing and sharing more democratic freedoms. Arts criticism seems one place to get that stuff while holding market-driven gangsterism at bay. Which reminds me: Updike seems important, sitting slightly apart from his literary generation, not because he was a good novelist or a master of the short story form, but because he was a great critic of literature, art and American culture.

The best tribute to Updike is not any obituary, whether his or Book World's, but a discussion of how we can engineer this significant reinvention of our intellectual and literary spaces