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The Overwhelming Question
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14988 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1988 |
3,075 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Wolfe
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In a special issue of the New Criterion dedicated to surveying the arts in America since World War II, the journal's literary editor, Bruce Bawer, contributed an essay on the novel entitled "Diminishing Fictions." As the title indicates, Bawer believes that contemporary American novelists have retreated from the broad and open territory of the human heart into little hermetically sealed empires of art. The most vivid part of the vigorously argued essay is a critique of the new literary minimalism. The minimalists are known for their flat descriptions of the lives of punishingly ordinary, obscure people. Much of this description, according to Bawer, consists of catalogs of the brand names of products used in the home, along with the names of the television shows and ads that drone on in the background--punctuated by the insipid staccato dialogue of nearly moronic characters.
Like most critics of the American literary establishment, however, Bawer is better at marshaling empirical evidence than at diagnosing the root causes of our cultural malaise. Neoconservative critics of the arts rightly point to a crucial loss of confidence among artists, affecting the scope and form of their art, but his crisis of confidence is understood primarily in political terms, as a rejection of bourgeois democracy by disaffected radicals. There are two crippling problems with this kind of argument. First, by confining themselves largely to the political plane, the neoconservatives leave themselves open to the charge that their positions are also politically motivated--that they are, in fact, the toadies of the capitalists. The pages of the New Criterion and Nation (to pick a couple of obvious antagonists) are filled with this circular type of name-calling.
The second and more important weakness in the neoconservative critique is simply that it does not go far enough. The self-doubt of our novelists does not stem from a petulant refusal to support the bourgeois order (though it often includes this) but from a more radical doubt about the intelligibility of the world. In short, the crisis of confidence in the West has theological and philosophical roots. The belief that our knowledge of the world is either relative or mere delusion has had an inevitable impact on narrative fiction. From the huge, expansive novels of the nineteenth century, with their affirmations and "real-ism," we have moved to works that self-consciously call attention to their fictional machinery. If the novelist cannot provide a window onto reality, then he must ultimately write about himself, and his technique, politics, or personal problems come to the forefront of his work. Like the post-modernist Pompidou Center in Paris, with its exposed pipes, wires, and elevators, the postmodern novel refuses the hidden artistry of the realistic tradition in order to flaunt its bag of tricks. The minimalist may appear to be more objective, but their world is so enervate that their affirmations are almost nonexistent. With the minimalists, less is . . . less.
Exploration Of The Heart
In what may be one of the most perceptive tributes to Larry Woiwode's fiction, the late novelist and critic John Gardner suggested that the value of Woiwode's work lies precisely in its rejection of the diminished world of the self-conscious writer in favor of an expansive exploration of the human heart. Unlike the modern Prufrockian writers, who prefer to avoid the overwhelming question about the mystery of our existence, Woiwode has always faced up to the problems of love and death,
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