Spark Notes can suck it.
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]
Category: Gabbler Recommends
Gabbler Recommmends: Not Here To Make Friends
“That the question of likability even exists in literary conversations is odd. It implies we are engaging in a courtship. When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly, we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether or not we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.
…
Writers are often told a character isn’t likable as literary criticism, as if a character’s likability is directly proportional to the quality of a novel’s writing. This is particularly true for women in fiction. In literature as in life, the rules are all too often different for girls. There are many instances where an unlikable man is billed as an anti-hero, earning a special term to explain those ways in which he deviates from the norm, the traditionally likable. Beginning with Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, the list is long. An unlikable man is inscrutably interesting, dark, or tormented but ultimately compelling even when he might behave in distasteful ways. This is the only explanation I can come up with for the popularity of, say, the novels of Philip Roth who is one hell of a writer, but also a writer who practically revels in the unlikability of his men, their neuroses and self-loathing (and, of course humanity) boldly on display from one page to the next.
When women are unlikable, it becomes a point of obsession in critical conversations by professional and amateur critics alike. Why are these women daring to flaunt convention? Why aren’t they making themselves likable (and therefore acceptable) to polite society? In a Publisher’s Weekly interview with Claire Messud about her recent novel The Woman Upstairs, which features a rather “unlikable” protagonist named Nora who is bitter, bereft, and downright angry about what her life has become, the interviewer said, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.” And there we have it. A reader was here to make friends with the characters in a book and she didn’t like what she found.
Messud, for her part, had a sharp response for her interviewer. “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’
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It is a seductive position a writer puts the reader in when they create an interesting, unlikable character — they make you complicit, in ways that are both uncomfortable and intriguing.”
-Roxanne Gay, BuzzFeed Books.
Irony in the Irony
‘To begin with, Pearson admitted to using a pseudonym, and his rationale—explained in an “interview” published by Cow Eye Press—echoed Pynchon’s stance on literary fame and public figuredom. “I’ve always had a severe distaste for all the mindless biographical drivel that serves to prop up this or that writer,” said Pearson. “So much effort goes into credentialing the creator that we lose sight of the creation itself, with the consequence being that we tend to read authors instead of their works. In fact, we’d probably prefer to read a crap book by a well-known writer than a great book by a writer who may happen to be obscure.”’
[The ironic thing is, if he didn’t want his True Author Name to distract from the creation, his Fake Author Name is distracting from it. But perhaps that is the point, as I haven’t read the novel yet (the mystery being potentially so much more entertaining than any fiction right now). -The Author]
[Author-as-God, Author-as-Brand]
8) With the mock interviews and reviews, were you aiming to start a conversation about authorial identity and the problem of readers reading authors rather than books?
That would be lovely, yes. Because that’s exactly what we do: we read authors. At present I am being interviewed by the New York Times not for the quality of my writing (which, by any standard, is tremendous and perhaps even “top-notch”) but because I may or may not be Thomas Pynchon. This is unfair to my work – especially if I am not Thomas Pynchon – as well as to the many other writers out there who are being denied access to their own possible readerships on the grounds that they are not Thomas Pynchon.
[Self-published author gets interviewed and the main point isn’t that they self-published? Spoof gets treated like the real deal for NOT being the real deal? Am I in heaven?]
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]
On Poetry and Big Data:
‘This is why I don’t think his explanation is effective, ultimately, why I think [Sherman Alexie] made the wrong decision. Everyone thinks he made the wrong decision, pretty much; even he seems to think he made the wrong decision. But he couldn’t find a way to make the right one. Which is why the problem is not that a cynical and dishonest person gamed the system. The problem is that the system is already rigged, and there’s no fixing it.
At best, all canons are a necessary evil. They serve a purpose, and sometimes it’s a good one; most of the time, I would suggest, they do more harm than good. But even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that they are sometimes necessary, any list of “best of X literature” is always going to be a better device for exclusion than for adequately representing anything but the preferences of the gatekeepers. “Representation” is always subjective and arbitrary, because it’s always, also, a synonym for simplification. The map is not the territory, and the Best is not American poetry. You can aspire to produce a list that doesn’t radically misrepresent the field of whatever it is you’re trying to survey, and this is what Alexie tried very hard to do; at best, your omissions and failures might not be glaring. But that’s it, that’s the best case scenario, to fail not so badly. There’s no target to hit, here: “representation” is a mirage, because all representations are, in crucial ways, also un-representative.
It’s a huge problem that “best of” lists are mostly white males, of course, and any variation thereof. It’s a form of violence. But that’s precisely why we should not take such lists seriously. Majority groups tend to dominate “best of list,” because that’s what “best of” lists are good for. They are excellent instruments for naturalizing exclusion. It’s no surprise, then, that white males tend to really be invested in those lists, and in shibboleths like “maintaining standards.” A “best of” list creates the appearance of level playing field, by investing in the conceit that everyone’s work could be judged by the same standard—that such a thing is even possible—and, so, the entire enterprise gives ideological cover to those who would like to believe their work has been praised on its merits (and that those who have been excluded, in some sense, deserved it). But a representative “best of” list is not something to strive for, because it’s a contradiction in terms. There is no level playing field, and never has been. Because canons of all kinds presume one, they tend to make the problem worse.
In short, the fact that canons are instruments for exclusion is not a reason to try to fix them: it is a reason to abandon them.
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Here’s an alternative: what if we’re going about this all wrong? Maybe the best way to get to the promised land of objective judgement is a data-driven statistical accounting of each poem’s strengths and weaknesses, rigorously compiled by a standardized methodology. We need solid models—so a great deal of study is called for—and we need to think hard about how to find more accurate methods of evaluation. Crowd sourcing is a start, but it won’t be enough; feelings and emotions might creep in there, along with the pesky notion that cynicism and dishonesty are somehow incompatible with poetic beauty. Only will truly high-powered computing be able to sort through such noise, I think. So bring on the algorithms. Big Data will save poetry.’
Well…Let’s see if it works:
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]