Rejection hurts because it questions our worth and on occasion instantly disunites us from the thing of our desire. Albeit it is in our rejected moments that we are closest to ourselves and have a dialogue with our ‘self’—about the loftier purpose of life.

Joyous moments paradoxically are more alienating than we think; which is not to say that we should get rejected on purpose. When we are joyous we usually meet more people, attend parties, and gradually get intertwined into the web of life. There is usually no time to sit or contemplate.

Whatever we desire should be sought after whole heartedly, pursued whole heartedly and hence aim success. But somewhere along if there is an encounter with rejection it should consciously be transformed into a positive patch.

It is the acceptance of rejection and grappling with it that eventually accounts for our personal growth. As long as the purpose of our intentions is constructive there is usually thin chance of rejection amongst the near and dear ones.

In the end everyone can be a winner.
To each his own,
Manjit

⁽¹⁾

I guess I'm not too unlike many Westerners in that there was a time when phrases like "oppressed women" and "backward societies in need of ideas of Western liberation" did pop into my mind when Asia was mentioned. But after having the chance to interact with individual Asians, both men and women, from many different countries, I've found myself questioning some previously strongly held ideas.

I once worked in an office with many women from China. I had previously assumed that East Asian women, including Chinese women, were less likely to work outside the home compared to American women, so I was very surprised when one of my co-workers told me how surprised she was to see 'so many housewives' in the US. We had gone for a brief excursion outside the office and she found the sight of a woman, seemingly a full-time mom, playing with her children in the neighborhood playground during work hours a very novel thing indeed. The Chinese woman then said there were many American housewives in her neighborhood, and that she had never seen such a high concentration of housewives before. I must have been subconsciously expecting Asian women to be impressed with the 'liberation' and career options of women in American society, and it really jarred me at first when my Chinese female coworker said that most Chinese women, at least in the cities, are not housewives. But I realized my coworker was not criticizing the 'homemaker' status of American women, unlike how many Americans so freely criticize Asian societies for allegedly keeping their women at home. The Chinese woman was merely wondering how families here could afford to have one spouse stay home. Apparently, the cost of living in Chinese cities is so high that having two incomes per household is almost always necessary.

Many of the Chinese women I worked with were very loud and outspoken, which led me to doubt my previous assumptions about the "downtrodden Oriental woman" as contrasted to the "liberated Western woman". Women in Asia, on the average, may be disadvantaged compared to their male counterparts when it came to job opportunities, financial mobility and responsibility for housework, but we can make the same statement about Western women. In America, at least, women are underpaid compared to males doing the same job, and women are still under-represented in higher management. Many Asian countries have already had one or more female heads of states, but the US is yet to see a woman president. Asian women may not all be treated like queens, but they are, on the average, not treated like doormats either. The same can be said for Western women.

Getting to know my Asian male coworkers more closely and seeing in person how they interacted with their families really drove home for me the irony of how the average American man lets his wife take a disproportionate share of responsibility for child care and housework, and yet we love pointing fingers at men from non-Western countries, calling them 'oppressors of women'. My male coworkers included Thais, Indians, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. I had extended conversations with many of them and visited some of them in their homes. My Thai friend worked on household projects, such as sewing curtains and cushions together with his wife, the kind of work that many of my Western male friends considered too 'sissy' for their 'macho' selves. My Indian friend would rush home everyday to take up his shift in childcare, so that his wife would have time for herself away from their young child. He made it is principle NEVER to violate his wife's free time. Other Asian male friends also helped their wives with cooking and cleaning, encouraged their wives' career advancement, and were extremely conscientious about sharing the burden of childcare.

Two Chinese men I knew quit their office jobs so they could stay home and take care of their children while their Chinese wives worked outside the home. Looking at these Chinese men's choices, I cannot help but think of the many Western males I've had to listen to whining about the 'selfish, career-minded American woman destroying the family by putting her work before her man.' Well, maybe it is time for us enlightened Western males to put our women before our work just as we expect our women to put us before their careers. It is only fair.

I am not claiming that ALL Asian men are nicer to their wives than ALL Western men. I've certainly seen Asian male attitudes towards women that the average Western man would find appalling. Most of my Korean coworkers, unfortunately, would not have changed my stereotypes of Asian male sexism if I had not have exposure to other Asian men. I have no intention of generalizing the attitudes of all Korean men, but those I've observed seemed to be honorable people who usually adhere to a system of debt and obligation (more familiar to us Westerners as 'give-and-take') with their friends, that is, their *male* friends. When it comes to female associates (who are not even girlfriends or wives), the men do not seem to abide by the same code of honor. Instead, the men take for granted that the women would do things for them without expecting anything in return. They felt entitled to ask for women's help and did not feel the least obligated to return this help when asked. I saw this in their personal dealings as well as workplace interactions. When Western women (and men) took issue with this kind of 'one-way-street' exchange, the Korean men threw a fit and some of them started crying 'racism' (I believe they were using this tactic as a 'diversion', and not because they really believed in their own accusations) though the fault was clearly theirs. The Japanese I worked with seemed equally courteous and conscientious towards both men and women alike. They were also much more open-minded and tolerant than my stereotypes of Japanese taught me to expect.

Attitudes towards women vary from country to country in Europe, and even between different social groups in the same country. The same thing is true in Asia. My Chinese and Indian friends explained that women fared better in the traditional cultures of South India and South China than the traditional cultures of North India or North China. Goddess worship is purportedly more popular in Southern India, and the place of women in southern cultures is higher. Southern Chinese men were traditionally more likely to split housework with their wives, though the north is catching up in recent years. The bride shortage meant that young Chinese women now have many spousal candidates to choose from. Young men in northern China may have found it necessary to cultivate a good attitude towards housework as a competitive advantage. One of my acquaintances, a European woman who spent some years in northern China, was impressed that young Chinese men shared housework with their wives. She contrasted the Chinese men to the men back home in her Mediterranean country, whom she said expected their wives to do all the work.

I have also watched many Asian movies directed by Asian men, and had to admit that Asian male directors, on the average, treat Asian female characters with much more respect than do Western male directors. Asian films have their fair share of bimbo characters, but so do European and American films. In many Asian films, important female characters appear in their own right - not as someone's love interest. By this, I mean the female character, even though she might appear attractive, does not end up with any male character at any point of time in the plot. She has some function other than to be a male character's trophy or motivation. In contrast, I have never seen an Asian female character who was not a man's love interest in a movie directed by a Westerner. Asian male directors also give Asian female characters a much broader range of roles than do Western male directors. Asian women in American movies are usually either unconfident and 'cute' or seductive and exotic; at any rate, non-threatening. The lack of diversity of Asian images in American or European films, we might say, is expected since there are relatively few Asian roles in Western film to start with. But for all our claims of treating women better than Asian men do, we have created less empowered images of Asian women than their 'sexist' men back home.

I do not claim to be an 'enlightened' Westerner. I am in the process of unlearning stereotypes myself. Just recently, I saw the Japanese movie Twilight Samurai, and I was surprised that the male characters in the story were so respectful of women even though the plot was set in Old Japan before the Imperial Restoration. The title character valued women's education and criticized language which was objectifying to women. Another male character had great respect for his sister as an independent thinker and mover. He saw her as someone who is wise and capable of taking care of herself. Then I asked myself why seeing such Japanese male characters surprised me. Perhaps I still held on to Western ideas about Japanese men. At any rate, Asian men certainly do not see themselves the way Westerners see them. The Iranian movie Baran also featured a hero who was different in every way from the Western stereotype of the sexist and oppressive Middle Eastern/West Asian/Central Asian male. In fact, I do not think I have ever seen a white Western male movie character who so unselfishly served a female love interest without asking or expecting anything in return. Our heroes, such as James Bond, are always seeking some form of reward or gratification in 'conquest' - 'getting the girl' at least on the emotional, if not the physical level.

Misogynistic men, deadbeat dads, philanderers and wife beaters exist all over the world. Of course, if we compare the worst Asian husbands against the best Western husbands, Western men will come out looking better. This tactic, however, cuts both ways. Someone might also compare the best Asian men against the worst Western men, in which case, Western men will of course appear unimpressive. In my opinion, Western media has almost always taken the first approach, creating a negative and skewed image of Asian men instead of showing Asian men as people who are more like us than unlike us; people with similar virtues and vices.

I understand many Asians and other non-Westerners may feel insulted by demeaning stereotypes that Westerners hold about them. However, I also hope they can understand that people cannot know what they have not been told. If all an individual sees is a certain kind of image in the media, he can hardly be faulted for accepting it as 'reality'. Therefore, I would like to extend an invitation to those who feel insulted and exasperated by 'stupid stereotypes' to take the constructive role of teaching others, instead of limiting their responses to scolding and blaming, which does not move anyone forward.

Originally published on Color Q World. Reproduced here with permission.

⁽⁰⁾

A favourite on Olympus was the appealing Ambrosia, culled from the regions beyond the Wandering Rocks. Ambrosia served variously as food for the gods, as an unguent, beauty cream or perfume, and, curiously, as fodder for horses.

It was often accompanied by the drink Nectar in celebrations, and indeed, nectar and ambrosia both appear in myth and literature as divine confections that were guaranteed to satisfy the hunger and thirst of any immortal resident of Mt. Olympus.

Today both nectar and ambrosia have come to mean any gourmet masterpiece, heavenly food and drink that is fit for the gods.

While we can't be entirely certain what the gods ate and drank, or what the ancient Greeks thought the gods ate and drank, we have a fair idea. These mythical snacks had some connection to a sweet treat enjoyed by mortals throughout the ages.. .. Honey.

Honey, or ambrosia, made more than just a delightful meal. There are several episodes in Greek myth in which ambrosia is used by the gods and goddesses as a sort of balm, to confer grace or even immortality (in the case of mortals) onto the recipient. One such incident that demonstrates how ambrosia was used to beautify involves Aphrodite, the beautiful goddess of love. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess prepares herself for a dalliance with the assistance of ambrosia,

"...there the Graces bathed her and anointed her with ambrosian oil such as is rubbed on deathless gods, divinely sweet, and made fragrant for her sake."

In one scene from the Iliad, the sea-nymph Thetis uses ambrosia and nectar to preserve the body of the dead warrior Patroclus. Zeus called upon Apollo to anoint another fallen hero, Sarpedon, with ambrosia. But there is a harsher side to the food of the gods.

The word 'Tantalise' comes from the plight of Tantalus, who so offended the gods that he was condemned to an eternity of hunger and thirst. It was a dreadful punishment!

He was made to stand in a pool of water in Tartarus, in the underworld. Each time he reached down for the water that beckoned to his parched lips, it drained away. Overhanging the pool were boughs laden with juicy luscious fruit. Each time he stretched to pluck one, the boughs receded from his grasp. For his crime, he was indeed tantalised. What was this great crime?

As a son of Zeus, he was invited to dinner in Olympus. There he stole nectar and ambrosia, brought them back to his people, and revealed the secrets of immortality. As Philostratus says, he was "inclined to share with his friends the immortality bestowed on him by the gods". He also cut up his own son Pelops, boiled him in a cauldron and offered him as food to Zeus and his friends.

It was said that the gods were aware of his plan for their feast, so they didn't touch the offering, only Demeter, seriously depressed by the rape and abduction of her daughter Persephone, ate of the boy's shoulder. Fate, ordered by Zeus, brought the boy to life again by collecting the parts of his body and boiling them up once more. His missing shoulder was rebuilt with an ivory replacement made by Hephaestus, and presented by the remorseful Demeter. Pelops, thus reconstituted, was brought back to life with new qualities.

The revived Pelops was then kidnapped by Poseidon and taken to Olympus to be the God's lover. The sordid tale doesn't end there, it gets progressively more sordid, and ends up as the inspiration for the Olympic Games. But that's another story.

Scholars say this tale reinforces Olympian suppression of human sacrifice, which had apparently been offered in earlier times. Perhaps it does, perhaps it reveals shamanic initiations as well. Perhaps it was used as a moral story, to teach the common people that they may not aspire to be like their Masters.

It also reveals that the ancient Greeks were very fond of honey.

Originally published in All About Myths & Legends. Reproduced here with permission.

⁽⁰⁾

2. Barter
a) To exchange
b) To drop
c) To give away
d) None of the above

3. Cataclysm
a) A Greek myth
b) A state of nervous breakdown
c) A violent upheaval
d) None of the above

4. Dispel
a) To drive off in various directions
b) To demarcate
c) Draw in
d) None of the above

5. Falsetto
a) High-heeled shoes
b) A kind of a medieval glove
c) An old weapon
d) An unnaturally high-pitched voice

6. Guffaw
a) Throwing arms in the air
b) An incidence of great foolishness
c) An unrestrained burst of laughter
d) None of the above

7. Indigent
a) Poor
b) Angry
c) Rich
d) Both b & c

8. Morbific
a) Causing fear
b) Causing disease
c) Causing envy
d) None of the above

9. Polemic
a) A conversion meeting
b) A controversial argument
c) Related to science
d) None of the above

10. Savory
a) A kind of food
b) A cooking utensil
c) Pleasant in taste or smell
d) Both a & c

Answers:
1. (c) 2. (a) 3. (c) 4. (a) 5 (d) 6 (c) 7 (a) 8 (b) 9. (b) 10 (d)

Your Score
8-10 Excellent
5-7 Good
1-4 Need improvement

⁽⁰⁾

It was easy to get caught up in the conversation and feel his energy. By the end of our talk, I was almost ready to move in with him just for the opportunity to soak up more wisdom, but his wife had other ideas. I’ll settle for re-reading Kiss Theory Goodbye, and you should too! Here’s what Bob Prosen had to say:

What was your motivation in writing this book?
I’d just sold a company and was thinking about what I wanted to do next. I knew I loved teaching, and I wanted to help business people succeed, but I wasn’t quite sure what I should help them with! Then it occurred to me that executives spend an awful lot of time planning—they try to figure out how to shape their corporate identity, how to compete, how to win customers over. But their frustration really comes in the picture when they get to the doing part: How can they get people to do things? From personnel issues to customer complaints, quality control, lack of follow-up, there are policies in place for how to deal with matters, but who teaches people how to execute those? So I spent a year developing a program based on the five attributes I mention in the book—a program that was actually tool-based, not theory-based. Suddenly I found myself running out of time; clients everywhere were asking me to come into their organization and show them how to do it. People said “You have to write a book!” “No way,” I said; “I’m no writer; I’m not interested in writing a book.” Three years later, here’s the book! As a first time author, I took a big chance by turning downa publisher from New York and putting my trust in Gold Pen Publishing—it’s part of the Greenleaf Book Group—who helped me put this book together; their expertise and help were truly invaluable!

But why haven’t people kissed theory good bye a long time ago?
There’s just too much talk about it; everyone knows they should do it, but very few ever get around to it. Think of the top three objectives in an organization; what are they, and how is the organization performing on those three? If you don’t have the answer to that, what on earth are you doing? You must be working on something or other, but what could be more important than this? I did a survey of dozens of CEOs of top corporations, asking them what their biggest challenge was. Their number one response across the board was finding and retaining top talent. They’d all had to deal with performance management problems, and they’d all hired people who weren’t right for the job. So it was obvious that they needed someone to show them how to do it; not just tell them what to do. The problem is that people are not always sure how to go about solving a problem, and are caught up in a lot of trivial, everyday tasks. They lack focus, and their remedy is to continue to work even harder: But it’s not all about hard work; it’s about smart work; knowing how to actually do this.

Your book mentions the importance of measuring the things a company values. What are the consequences of failing to do that?
The organization will get out of balance. You have to measure financials, of course, but that’s not where it ends. What about employees? Who are the very best people you could possibly have; what traits would these individuals possess? That’s what you need to measure! It will let you know how well everyone on your team is doing, and who your best people are! And don’t forget customers; the people you serve:What do you want from them—to buy things from you and mention how great you are to everyone they know? How do you get that? You need to measure how well you’re serving them.

Then why is it that so few companies even measure customer satisfaction?
It’s the ostrich syndrome. It goes back to the fact that the solution to a lot of problems is moving from talking about something to actually doing it, and doing it right. Even the companies that do try to measure customer satisfaction think it’s simple and anyone can do it—but doing it right makes a big difference; a lousy survey doesn’t cut it. Everyone talks about how important it is, but no one wants to actually invest in doing it!

So what’s the cure for companies that are too bogged-down with politics and not action-oriented enough?
First and foremost, they need to decide to change. Without that, nothing happens. And you decide to change only when you realize that the pain of change is less than the pain of the status quo. People at the top need to buy into the idea; they need unyielding commitment to implementing change. What can they do? First, bring simplicity into the picture. Present solutions that are easy to understand so people are able to execute them. Complicated is not always better; sometimes we think “this solution is so simple, it can’t possibly be right.” But sometimes solutions really are that simple. Second, an accountability-based mind set is absolutely critical. Measuring performance is important, and tying it to pay will get people’s attention!

How will your book help companies coping with change?
It’s a roadmap with the tools for how to actually implement change. But remember, nothing will change unless you’re really committed to doing it. Once you’ve decided, the principles I outlined will show you how to go about it.

It’d be so much easier if this weren’t an uphill struggle though, without having people put up roadblocks every step of the way: How can a company hire people who ascribe to these principles in the first place?

Think about the superstars; the ones who make it happen and who overcome obstacles. Do they like accountability? Of course they do. It’s the people you have to push, threaten and fight who don’t like accountability. So you try to hire people who actually like accountability. After you’ve interviewed someone many times and you’re about to make them an offer, hold off and bring them in one last time, if only just for an hour: Ask them to bring a single sheet outlining what they plan to do in the first 60 days there (or for the first 6 months if this is a CEO/CFO or equivalent top-level position). Then you know what to expect: Is the list well-thought out? Does the person have a plan? Are they telling you things you hadn’t even thought about? It’s good to hire people who are smarter than you! If they bring four sheets instead of one, maybe they don’t listen very well or can’t follow directions. Is this the kind of person you ask what time it is, and they tell you how to build a clock? It’s important to know before you hire them! And maybe they actually wrote on both sides of the single sheet, so they think outside the box. If they can prioritize and focus on what matters most, then you know you have the right match!

Any final words of wisdom you’d like to leave me with?
People can accomplish anything if they’re committed to it. All you need is to surround yourself with people who can make it happen.

Biography
Books: Kiss Theory Goodbye

Originally published on Book Reviews. Reproduced here with permission.

⁽⁰⁾

Good you say,
Means doing good.
Bad indeed
The mind that says so!

Good and bad alike,
Roll them both into one ball,
Wrap it up in paper,
Then toss it out—forget it all!
—Master Bankei

Sun never rises or sets; it just is a wave or trough of our egoic mind.
—Anonymous

Practice and thought might gradually forge many an art.
—Virgil

⁽⁰⁾

It may seem like the set-up for an episode of CSI, but this mystery isn't about missing people - it's about missing bees. Strange as it may seem, a mysterious phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder is threatening bees across the United States and may be making its way into Canada.

The problem has researchers baffled. All of the adult bees in a colony will suddenly disappear without a trace, leaving behind only a small number of juveniles. The hive appears unaffected, just deserted. Remaining juveniles refuse to eat the stores of honey or pollen left behind. Other bee colonies meanwhile avoid the deserted hive - even though healthy colonies normally raid abandoned hives for leftovers.

What's going on? Scientists don't really know, but concern is high enough to have prompted a working group of researchers in the U.S. to study the problem. From what they've been able to determine so far, stress may play a key role.

Colony Collapse Disorder is hardly the first problem honeybees have encountered in North America. Bee populations are in serious trouble - suffering losses from mites, pesticides, and monoculture crops, especially in the United States. There, five species of bumblebees have disappeared in less than a decade. In fact, the dirth of natural pollinators in the United States has led to a growing industry of migrant domesticated bees. Each spring, tens of thousands of bee colonies are packed onto flatbed trucks and driven across the United States to stop at various farms and pollinate crops.

But all that travel isn't good for bees. Bees are naturally used to having a variety of food in their diets, but on these trips, they are stuck with a single food source - the crop they are expected to pollinate. They are also packed into their hives for long periods of extended driving, exposed to temperature fluctuations and high levels of carbon dioxide. In addition, this kind of large-scale movement of stressed-out insects creates ideal conditions for the spread of pathogens.

All of this adds up to bad news for bees. But researchers still don't know which of these factors, or all of them, or something else entirely, is triggering the collapse of colonies in the United States. Fortunately, we haven't seen the problem in Canada - yet. Although bees here are also declining and under tremendous pressure, we don't have such a large-scale migrant bee industry right now, which could be preventing Colony Collapse Disorder from getting a foothold on this side of the border.

Why should you care about the fate of some insects? Well, honeybees are of course important for the honey they make. But they are also one of the most effective pollinators we have. In the United States, they pollinate over $3 billion worth of fruits and vegetables every year. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 30 per cent of all American fruits and vegetables come from plants that have been pollinated by insects - especially bees.

So bees are very important indeed. Pollinators in general provide an essential service that would be extraordinarily expensive, if not impossible, to replicate in other ways. Yet, natural and domesticated pollinators are by and large considered irrelevant or "externalities" to our economic system.

If we want to ensure that this essential service is available in the future, we need to look at all the factors resulting in their declining numbers - from pesticide use, to monoculture crops and genetically modified crops, to the loss of forested areas that provide homes for wild bees, and work to reduce these pressures and keep this critical ecosystem service functioning. Colony Collapse Disorder may be the most recent and dramatic of bee mysteries, but their consistently declining numbers is just as disturbing.

Originally published on April 27, 2007

Dr. David Takayoshi Suzuki is distinguished Canadian geneticist who has attained prominence as a science broadcaster and an environmental activist. He is also a co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

⁽⁰⁾

As we follow our unnamed protagonist and his son on their journey through a post-apocalyptic Appalachia, hunted by butchers and barely scrabbling out an existence, it’s nice to find one’s self in the country of cannibals and dead babies again. McCarthy’s literary career has been constructed of American atrocities both major and minor, and The Road closes the deal, imagining a world entirely consumed in a holocaust, a final “long shear of light.” The vegetation has been burned to ash, the cities razed, and the few remnants of humanity still straggling along have been hacked down to their basest instincts.

There isn’t much in the way of a plot to The Road. In a world this stripped down, there’s little room for such quaint preoccupations. The man and the boy head south along their unnamed road, hoping for warmer weather and drifting from one episode of naked survival to the next. The boy is sickly, always hungry, always cold; and his sole protector, his father, is coughing up blood. His mother has already committed suicide, overwhelmed by the horror of cannibalism and the grinding misery of their existence. Suicide permeates the novel — the man carries a handgun with two bullets, wondering over the sleeping body of his son whether he can do what’s necessary when they are finally caught by the cannibals roaming the road.

Even McCarthy’s prose echoes the world’s shearing. The rhetorical excesses that so delighted and maddened readers are, for the most part, gone. His usually spare punctuation has been reduced to periods and the occasional apostrophe. Nevertheless, he is no less the stylist — his honed sentences convey the careful impression of a language reduced to its indispensable elements. It’s entirely imaginable as a post-apocalyptic English: all the superfluity burned away, all flourish made irrelevant in the day-to-day business of survival.

If all this talk of apocalypse makes The Road sound like a Mad Maxish genre novel, that’s because it is — of a sort. All of McCarthy’s novels have been reconstructions of one genre or another: westerns, thrillers, Southern gothics. As David Holloway argues in The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, few authors are as dedicated to the art of pastiche as McCarthy. It’s a debt he acknowledges in the first of two interviews his agent managed to wrangle out of him: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books,” he remarks. “The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”

The Road is no exception, not only in its debt to the genres of horror and science fiction, but also in its acknowledgment of McCarthy’s influences. The most obvious is Portuguese novelist José Saramago’s similarly apocalyptic Blindness, a connection reinforced by the opening paragraph of The Road, which describes the aftermath of whatever holocaust consumed the world as “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”

McCarthy’s tendency for pastiche does more than invest his work with a literary gamesmanship. By pulling together an ever-shifting assemblage of references, he constructs the bones of his world while offering a critique of its sources. So while one may identify The Road’s preoccupation with the preference of suicide over rape and consumption by savages as one of the more virulently racist tropes of the classic “Indian-hating” western, its usage here imparts a new horror, even as it calls into question the over-arching metaphor of savagism. After all, in The Road, the savages are us. Likewise, when the title of Kris Kristofferson’s song “Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends” pops up as the man ponders the fate of his son, it conveys a new poignancy, striking the reader as a wayward remnant of the pre-apocalypse. This is the effect of many of McCarthy’s borrowings in The Road. Unlike the playful vigor imparted by his pastiche-work in former novels, here it conveys a draining of vitality, as if these rags of meaning are all that remain to cover the naked desolation of the world he’s created. It is a beautifully achieved illusion, and a testament to the seamlessness of McCarthy’s craft.

As bleak as the novel is, it’s also funnier than one might expect. Granted, it generally takes a grisly sense of humor to properly appreciate McCarthy, but that’s what makes his humor so effective. The funniest bits of The Road are found in the viciously sharp dialogue, particularly in scenes where the man and the boy encounter other stragglers on the road. The most important of these is an encounter with a wandering Melvillian prophet/madman, Ely, whom the man is coaxed into feeding by the boy. A primary source of tension in the novel is whether there are other good guys to be found on the road. The man is unwilling to hazard any exposure to find out, while the boy desires to renew some sort of social compact with other travelers. In an indirect way, the conversation with Ely resolves that tension in the boy’s favor. Even the act of conversing with an outsider infuses the novel with a new vitality, reinvigorating both man and boy. Moreover, Ely provides a much more direct answer. When the man asks him how he survives on the road, Ely responds that other travelers have been providing him food. When the man scoffs at the idea, Ely points out that he himself has done so.

To call attention to The Road’s pastiche-work and humor is not to imply that it isn’t deadly serious. In fact, both lend the novel a heft it might otherwise lack, shielding it from charges of sentimentality and providing hints to the most fruitful reading. McCarthy’s novels are all variations on similar themes, and The Road expands the central trope of its predecessor, No Country for Old Men, which hinges on Sheriff Bell’s relationship with his estranged father. It is an estrangement that is reconciled, at least in dream, when Bell envisions his father riding past him through the mountains, “carrying fire in a horn . . . and in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.” This trope of “carrying the fire” becomes central to The Road, as the man and the boy seek to establish their place in the overwhelming bleakness of their existence:

We're going to be okay, arent we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

This is what the pair are left with: the transmission of some small portion of meaning from generation to generation in a blasted world. The post-apocalyptic landscape they move through is stark and brutal, but they keep each other alive; and more, they hang onto the dignity necessary to make remaining alive worthwhile. They don’t kill, they don’t steal from the living, they help where it’s possible to do so, and, most importantly in the novel’s symbolic order, they don’t eat other people.

Of course, the road is fraught with many counterexamples. McCarthy refers to them as “roadagents,” or more succinctly, “bad guys.” They enslave the meek, they consume their children, and they torture and butcher anything that gets in their way. Theirs is the domain of survival at any cost, and they are the norm in McCarthy’s novels, as they have been the norm throughout American history. As West Texas novelist and historian, Larry McMurtry (who is often compared unfavorably to McCarthy), points out in his recent book on frontier massacre, O What a Slaughter, nearly every historical massacre has been a pre-emptive strike invoked in the name of survival. As the abattoir we’ve made of Iraq reminds us, little has changed. Whatever has consumed the world in The Road, it is linked to McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian, and the relentless, westering holocaust led by McCarthy’s avatar of Indian-hating and empire-building, judge Holden.

In a novel that speaks explicitly to the transmission of humanity between generations, it’s worth noting that this is the first of Cormac McCarthy’s books to return to the American Appalachia in nigh thirty years. The man and boy pass through Knoxville, McCarthy’s old stomping grounds and the setting of his Southern masterpiece, Suttree:

The long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk . . . The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wire . . . The only thing that moved in the streets was blowing ash. They crossed the high concrete bridge over the river. A dock below. Small pleasure boats half sunken in the gray water. Tall stacks downriver amid the soot.

This is made even more interesting when the man leads the boy to south Knoxville to show him his childhood home — where McCarthy’s own can be found on Martin Mill Pike. The house is empty, and the presence of the world that no longer exists spooks both father and son:

This is where I used to sleep. My cot was against this wall. In the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might off themselves but never the one to be. He pushed open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood things. Raw cold daylight fell through from the roof. Gray as his heart.

We should go, Papa. Can we go?
Yes. We can.
I'm scared.
I know. I'm sorry.
I'm really scared.
It's all right. We shouldnt have come.

It’s tempting here to discuss McCarthy’s oft-considered estrangement from his own father, as well as his dedication of The Road to his young son. However, it’s a temptation that’s best to avoid. Not only does it do a certain violence to McCarthy’s own wishes, but it may needlessly confuse one’s reading of The Road. Like few other American authors, everything needed is on the page. The intertextual nature of McCarthy’s work creates a referential constellation of meaning that makes the metaphor of carrying the fire as true a description of McCarthy’s literary sensibilities as it is of the man and the boy’s relationship with their progenitors. Besides which, there is an unbridgeable distance between generations. We are all aliens from our progenitors, as we are to our progeny:

He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy himself he was an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct the child's pleasure he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.

In No Country for Old Men, direct communication to Bell’s father figure has been ruptured, seemingly irreparably, until its final revelations. The Road progresses similarly. Early on, the man picks up a phone in an abandoned gas station and dials his father’s number, but the line is dead. Then, later, in a fit of desperation, he gives us the following: “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.”

This rings true to the reader, especially in the world McCarthy has created, where even symbols of evil are proclaimed to be of our own concoction (and are, literally, in that each evil found in The Road has been borrowed from other sources). But as the novel leads us to its final revelation, we learn that this is not entirely true, that there is a way to communicate with our progenitors. In fact, according to the novel, we must — the stories they tell us construct the world’s meaning and constitute our humanity. This is even extrapolated into divine law: “the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time.” Ultimately, The Road suggests that no matter how bleak our existence, we must live life as if it has meaning. As if our progenitors are watching; as if there is a line separating the good guys from the bad guys.

That may not seem much to some readers, and it may seem hopelessly sentimental to others, but it’s certainly more than most of us can live up to on many a day. As most parents know, we do wrong and we have wrong done to us, but that doesn’t allow us to end the narrative we wind through our generations. We continue down the road, doing the best we can because we have no other choice. As the man tells his son, “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up.”

Many recent reviewers have wondered if The Road is McCarthy’s swan song. This seems unlikely. According to a recent Vanity Fair interview, he has several other novels near completion. Here’s hoping that’s the case. In the words of Stéphane Mallarmé, “there is no explosion except a book,” and The Road is a book in the way few are. It’s beautifully written, hugely moving, and every portion of meaning that can be taken from it is as hard-won and necessary to the reader as it is to the characters. To call The Road Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece may be to do McCarthy a disservice. The Road is its own book, as different from Blood Meridian or Suttree as Moby Dick is from The Confidence Man. But it is a masterpiece, nonetheless.

The Road
By Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 2006, ISBN 0307265439, 256 Pages, Hardcover $24.00.

Originally published on The Modern Word. Reproduced here with a permission.

⁽⁰⁾

Salon, for example, eventually stopped featuring on any consistent basis the reviews of serious literary fiction that at first seemed to distinguish this "zine" from others professing to bring a "literary" sensibility to the World Wide Web; Slate relatively quickly replaced book reviews per se with E-mail book chat of a sort unfortunately interesting mostly to the two correspondents engaged in the ongoing dialogue; and Feed no longer even exists, a state of affairs all too indicative of the larger failure of the Internet to deliver on the hyped-up promise so insistently claimed for it by its partisans. Perhaps cyberspace still has the potential to provide a kind of critical middle ground between the over-theorized and super-politicized current version of academic criticism and the superficiality of what remains of "popular" criticism, a few bytes left over for those willing to give serious literary commentary another try, but these initial attempts to measure out that potential do not seem particularly auspicious, to say the least.

That contemporary literature, not to mention criticism itself, would greatly benefit from the cultivation of this middle ground cannot be denied. As academic criticism becomes more and more closely joined to sociology, and literary journalism less and less distinguishable from coverage of fashion and celebrity, some setting in which a sustained and careful, but also lively and accessible criticism might be carried out could prove indispensable to the survival of literary criticism as an identifiable practice, and perhaps of serious literature as well. Salon especially seemed alert to the general absence of this sort of literary commentary and criticism and to the possibility that a sufficiently engaged and intelligent webzine could begin to compensate for this absence (the very name "salon" evoking the cultural romance of the celebrated literary gathering-place and its accompanying atmosphere of aesthetic discrimination). Although it also covered culture and politics more widely, arguably what made Salon immediately distinctive was that, for a while at least, it could be relied on for reasonably well-informed reviews of most significant new literary fiction.

Unfortunately, many of these reviews came to seem somewhat formulaic, marked by a sameness of tone and an artificial coating of attitude that has all too often come to characterize not only web discourse but also much nonacademic writing about literature and the arts. It is as if since the institutionalizing of "close reading" within the academy all literary criticism that features careful scrutiny and interpretation of text has been stigmatized as "academic" in the worst possible sense--that is, as pedantic--and tolerated only when undertaken by professors. (This reluctance to overly indulge in critical analysis is perhaps exacerbated by the purported influence of populist values in the Internet culture.) Thus, with occasional and notable exceptions, even the best of Salon-style criticism remains detached from the real literary qualities of the works under review, an opportunity not to examine the aesthetic claims a particular work might make on the reader, nor even to describe the actual experience of reading that work, but to write about whatever tangential issues--political, social, cultural--strike the reviewer's fancy. Such issues are presumably of more interest to the "educated" readers logging on to Salon than the more frivolous pleasures afforded by the consideration of mere fiction. Although this approach does not necessarily preclude some attempt at evaluation, the measure of worth tends not to be related to the work's literary merit so much as its value as another kind of consumer item: the book as lifestyle accessory.

Precisely this sort of assumption about the status of literature would seem to be the informing principle behind the creation of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors, a print publication that ironically may be the most significant legacy of Salon's brief encounter with contemporary American fiction. The book's subtitle immediately signals that it shares with the webzine the same preference for attitude and hype over considered judgment: "An opinionated and irreverent look at the most fascinating writers of our time." Regrettably, the alphabetically arranged brief entries discussing the work of selected contemporary fiction writers are generally much too sketchy to offer more than the most glibly stated and least convincingly supported opinions, usually no more than the crude thumbs up/thumbs down variety leavened by the occasional yes/but. The advertised "irreverence," furthermore, too often takes the form of rather lame and labored jokes: "For all his time-travelling, his dream logic, his cinematic jump cuts, his erotic interludes, his postapocalyptic future worlds, Los Angeles novelist Steve Erickson is an old-fashioned guy."

Users of this reader's guide are most likely to wonder, however, at the assertion that the authors included herein are "the most fascinating" that could have been chosen. According to the book’s primary editor, Laura Miller, the criteria for inclusion were simply "our contributors' enthusiasm and curiosity" about particular writers, a standard that ensures that as an authoritative reference source on current fiction, The Salon.com Reader's Guide is from inception foreordained to disappoint. The additional claim that the contributors were asked to think of the guide's reader as an "intelligent, interested friend" whose most penetrating query is "So tell me about ----. What are his books like?” only further guarantees that, given the restricted format imposed by the editors, the entries will rely heavily on plot summary and facile commentary. "What is reading X's book like?" is a perfectly good question, especially if the critic is able to answer with suitable specificity. Apparently a more expansive form of critical writing would be too close to the "lofty, detached, authoritative approach to literature" that Miller wishes to avoid, and thus the book she has produced for the most part doesn't even succeed in answering the question put by Miller's intelligent friend, on whose behalf the project was by her own account supposedly undertaken.

But of course a popular reference book such as The Salon.com Reader's Guide would never be able to really take this question seriously in the first place. To convey what reading a work of fiction is "like"--to describe the experience of reading it--would require both more critical elbowroom in which to do the job and more confidence in the value of exerting the critical effort needed than this particular volume allows. On the one hand, The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors embodies an admirable attempt to increase awareness of at least a selection of noteworthy contemporary writers. On the other, its inherent limitations, both unavoidable and assumed, make it more significant as an exercise in publicity than literary criticism.

II. The Critic as Crusader

One would expect that the more properly academic studies of contemporary fiction would at least avoid this particular hazard, however "lofty," "detached," or overly "authoritative" academic literary criticism might often be. Unfortunately, most of what goes by that name at the moment is, as Laura Miller quite rightly points out, "usually [not] about literature at all" and, if two recent surveys of late twentieth century American fiction are at all representative (and I believe they unquestionably are), academic criticism is engaged in its own kind of publicity campaign. Both Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 1970 (Oxford, 2000) by Kenneth Millard and Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists (University of Kentucky, 2001) by Robert Rebein want to publicize certain kinds of writers and certain kinds of writing, but in doing so the authors have in effect marshaled these writers and their work on behalf of a cause propagated and promoted by the critics themselves.

Millard's book has the more directly political agenda to promote, and in this effort it typifies academic criticism at the turn of the twenty-first century. Most revealingly, Millard states outright in his introduction that,

To represent late twentieth-century fiction of the United States in a single critical survey is a difficult proposition involving issues of selection which only beg more difficult questions about cultural and ideological choices. These are matters of politics because ultimately all aesthetic issues are political issues.

That "all aesthetic issues are political issues" has indeed become a commonplace notion in mainstream academic criticism, so commonplace that no doubt many people, among both critics and their readers, actually believe it. This formulation makes two distinct but related claims: the "aesthetic' as achieved in particular works of art and literature is also political in that its value is up for grabs and can by those who grab it be used (as it has been, so goes the charge) to exclude the concerns of the less visible and less privileged classes; the aesthetic as a critical category is inescapably political, always employed by individual critics to favor one kind of practice over others, one culturally constructed view of the world and of the role of its various representations over numerous equally plausible alternative views.

But of course one might just as well say that all political issues are aesthetic issues. If value and valuation are inherently subjective, relative to context and bound to the preferences of those who invoke them, then one's political choices and beliefs are every bit as much the product of individual taste and judgment as one's aesthetic views. It would seem simple enough to concede that all such absolute assertions are equally empty, useful for advocating every worthy cause except the cause of literature, and to acknowledge that both the "political" and the "aesthetic" are categories of convenience we have created as a way of identifying specific human-created values and furthering human-centered goals. That aesthetic values are relative does not mean they do not exist, nor that we are barred from speaking of them, if we wish, entirely separate from the political considerations to which they might also be attached. However, to make such an acknowledgment would give the game away, would make Millard's book seem the exercise in critical propaganda it actually is. For the author's interest in contemporary fiction is manifestly contingent on his ability to pick and choose among the multiple and diverse examples of "American fiction since 1970" those texts that lend themselves most efficaciously to the more important politically-motivated critical program his book exists to serve.

The tenor of this program is revealed both in the fiction Millard has chosen for his "survey" and in the organizational strategy of the book itself. The former include works many critics and scholars would admit into a provisional canon of postwar American fiction (Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Don DeLillo's Underworld), several more that qualify as usual suspects in the multicultural curriculum (Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Gish Jen's Typical American), a few already "classic" feminist novels (Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres), and even a few surprisingly included examples of postmodernism or "metafiction" (Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy). But even the most formally challenging or stylistically audacious of these works are examined entirely in terms of theme and content, valued for their social critique or their capacity to be politically "subversive." (The use of this word as a term of approbation by critics who think "subversion"--a word so mauled and abused by critics such as Millard as to lie now a stripped husk--to be the highest possible measure of merit has probably done more to diminish our understanding of the genuine possibilities of serious literature and to reduce the actual accomplishments of much contemporary fiction than almost any comparable effusion of critical eyewash.) The reader thus gets a hopelessly impoverished sense of what reading many of the works discussed is really like, which, unlike the mostly unavoidable failure of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to realize this goal, can only be explained as deliberate strategy. Since the primary audience for this book is the undergraduate student, it is patently a strategy designed to indoctrinate the unwary reader in the tendentious, constricted view of the aspirations of contemporary writers the book exemplifies.

This insistently polemical approach is most explicitly revealed in Millard's method of sorting through his sample texts. Organized into chapters emphasizing subject and theme ("Family Values," "Gender and History," "Consumerism, Media, Tech-nology"), the book presents contemporary American fiction as earnestly "engaged" with the immediate social and political affairs of the era in which it is produced, and as remarkably attuned to the analysis of those affairs provided by academic critical theory and the approach to the study of literature that has come to be called cultural studies. "Russell Banks's Affliction," we are told, is "a novel that uses family as means of cultural analysis, and . . . examines how individual family members are informed by economic conditions, by the deterioration of a particular community, and by the corruption and collapse of the role of the father." "The gender politics of [Bobbie Ann Mason's] In Country is dedicated to finding a way for women to make a valuable intervention in historical discourse, one by which they can find personal fulfillment but also one which is culturally underwritten and historically sanctioned." "[E. L. Doctorow's] Ragtime examines the social and political consequences of changes in the forms of capitalism for the lives of ordinary Americans, and shows how exploitation of 'the storehouse of technology' was responsible for the material conditions of Americans at that historical moment."

Statements such as these are the rule rather than the exception throughout Con-temporary American Fiction, and while some of them may even be accurate (Doctorow seems the sort of writer who might actually have intended to examine "the social and political consequences of changes in the forms of capitalism"), they otherwise amply illustrate the kind of "introduction" to contemporary fiction readers will get from this book. They will also get, perhaps unintentionally, a representative specimen of the prevailing form of academic literary analysis. "Cultural studies" as a mode of scholarly discourse has been common among British academics for several decades (Millard himself teaches at the University of Edinburgh), but it has been only in the last ten years or so that it has emerged from the detritus of the canon and cultural wars as the more or less undisputed source of orthodoxy in the English departments of American universities. Its dreary and anhedonic method of subjecting works of literature to nonliterary standards of moral purity and political utility has almost succeeded in reducing literature to mere artless rhetoric, literary criticism to occasions for sophisticated but completely ineffectual political posturing. Should Millard's survey of American fiction since 1970 become a favored text in college courses on contemporary fiction, students will be presented with just such a view of the nature of literature and with an all too exemplary model of such anti-literary literary criticism.

Millard's anti-literary agenda paradoxically enough does at least provide his book with an organizational scheme that is more satisfyingly "literary" than most scholarly books on contemporary literature, allowing him to avoid the usual mechanical arrangements by decade, by artificially designated "movements," or through the exhaustive treatment of the entire careers of individual authors or selected small groups of authors. What he has written has a shape and a clarity of purpose that justify its existence as a book, something that is not always the case with book-length studies of literature. Robert Rebein's Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists is in its own way as single-minded in its purpose as Contemporary American Fiction, but it is a single-mindedness so thoroughly motivated by the impulse to detect changes in literary and cultural fashion--as opposed to engaging in serious criticism of works of literature according to credible critical standards--that it becomes equally a form of simple-mindedness and results in a book so ill-conceived it cannot even call on the strengths of its author's convictions.

Which is not to say that he has none. Rebein's agenda is indicated clearly enough in his subtitle's claim to the subject of “American Fiction After Postmodernism," although it takes the book's first chapter, also called "After Postmodernism," to make it abundantly plain that Rebein's overriding goal is to discredit "postmodernism" as thoroughly as possible. Like Dale Peck, who in the July 1, 2002 issue of The New Republic used an excoriating attack on the writing of Rick Moody to additionally condemn the entire tradition of "high canonical postmodernism" (defined very broadly to include Joyce and Faulkner as well as Barth and Pynchon), Rebein means to bring down the house that postmodernism built, once and for all. By "postmodern" Rebein has in mind essentially the same approach to fiction as Peck's "tradition that has turned the construction of a novel into a purely formal exercise, judged either by the inscrutable floribundity of its prose or the lifeless carpentry of its parts," a tradition Rebein believes should be repudiated in favor of the more appropriately American tradition of "realism." "In the pages that immediately follow," writes Rebein, "I want to . . . clear the air for a discussion of what I take to be the most significant development in late twentieth-century American literature--namely, the revitalization of realism, the renewed importance of the concept of place, and the expansion of our traditional ideas of authorship to include those who in the past would have appeared in our literature only as characters, and stereotypes at that."

The last item in this announcement affirms one of the familiar tenets of academic multiculturalism/cultural studies, but in Rebein's case this gesture is merely perfunctory, a genuflection before the altar of Inclusion. Although Rebein cites the work of some of "those who in the past," etc., he does so primarily because these authors (e.g., Dorothy Allison, Louis Erdrich) provide examples of a revitalized realism emphasizing the "importance of the concept of place." In short, Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists is a manifesto of sorts defending the practices of "late twentieth century" American fiction writers, among whom the author discerns a commonality of approach that deliberately rejects the now moribund postmodern aesthetic, to be replaced by that which the book promotes, the "next new thing” in American letters. This kind of trendspotting has unfortunately become a staple of academic writing about contemporary literature, stretching all the way back to the establishment of "contemporary literature" as a respectable (semirespectable) subject of academic scholarship. “Postmodern” American fiction, to be sure, itself profited from just such boosterism, and it was always inevitable that it would eventually suffer a backlash from those in need of a new movement on which to fasten. Academe, as I have said, does trade in its own kind of publicity.

Since postmodernism in fiction has been declared dead or dying for at least twenty years, however, Rebein is forced into some preliminary revisionism. The first post-postmodern movement to catch the fancy of readers and critics (mostly the latter) was what came to be called "minimalism," a designation attached most conspicuously to the work of Raymond Carver, who probably remains its most highly regarded practitioner. Although minimalism seems notable first of all as precisely a return to more conventional narrative strategies and to the assumption that realism of character and place is an indispensable element of literary fiction, Rebein considers it too obviously a reaction to postmodernism rather than an outright repudiation. Minimalism's self-imposed "minimalist" limitations--primarily of plot and style--amount, in this view, to an adaptation of realism to what might be termed a postmodern environment while implicitly continuing to call into question the suitability of traditional realism to the needs, present and future, of an artistically credible American fiction. Rebein included even Carver in his indictment, writing that although "Carver and the minimalists provided a much needed alternative route to that traveled by the postmodernists, . . . by limiting themselves to such a meager repertoire of techniques" they "too often lack both a coherent and compelling view of the world. . . ." "Read today," he concludes, "the work often seems shallow and dated . . . a mere step toward better work to come."

Although the fiction Rebein goes on to highlight as 'better work" does not exhibit sufficiently similar characteristics to allow him to coin any single jazzy term to capture it, falling back instead on tags formulated by others ("Hick Chic," "Dirty Realism"), it is a selection not much different from that presented by Millard. Chosen for reasons of literary rather than cultural politics, these novels and writers are again invoked for their superior "insights," their portrayal of the right groups of people, and their correctness of attitude. Never mind that a reader of both of these books could easily enough conclude that current American fiction seems strangely anemic, averse to risk, completely incurious about the possibilities of formal invention except in the service of tediously familiar thematic obsessions: for Rebein, at least, late twentieth-century fiction brings realism back to its ill-used readers, and this makes it collectively worthy of celebration. And yet. Not only does Rebein fail to explain in a satisfactory way exactly why realism is preferable as a literary mode to other more experimental approaches, simply sharing the assumption with Millard, it would seem, that literature exists as a rhetorical device for scoring political points and providing other kinds of indirect commentary and that realism is the most direct and effective means of carrying out these tasks. Finally he doesn't really seem to have much confidence in the relevancy of a renewed realism after all.

After endeavoring in his discussions of contemporary novels to elevate as a superior quality their "topicality," Rebein in his conclusion develops some reservations on this issue. Is it enough for fiction to evoke 'a particular location or place" and to be "of current interest, contemporary"? Couldn’t what is topical today be 'shallow and dated" tomorrow? Might the writers Rebein most admires meet the fate of Wright Morris, a realist featured in Marcus Klein's After Alienation (1965), a previous era's version of Rebein's own book, a writer now mostly forgotten? (Rebein cites this case specifically.) Rebein thinks not, but his final plea on behalf of the artistry of post-postmodern fiction is not very convincing. The characters in this fiction "seemingly come out of nowhere, but to follow their separate lives is to learn something new about human beings and their relationships with each other and the lands they inhabit." But "new" really only amounts to "unfamiliar" in the examples Rebein cites--e.g. Vietnamese immigrants in Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent--and the unfamiliar will eventually seem recognizable enough. Amazingly, Rebein turns instead to formal/technical innovations and a general allusiveness as his benchmarks, both of them so closely associated with postmodernism one marvels he can tolerate the incongruity. Unfortunately the only real structural experimentation Rebein can locate among the writers he's discussed is the emphasis "on the story collection as a unified work of art," which even Rebein concedes is not all that innovative, with well-known antecedents in the work of writers like Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson.

Most astonishingly, in a search for writers "of current interest" who also challenge formal and technical conventions, Rebein includes in his brief list, among others, David Foster Wallace, Steven Millhauser, Stanley Elkin and Don DeLillo, all writers indisputably outside the tradition of realism and all arguably postmodern. One finishes Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists actually wondering if the handful of writers Rebein (and Peck) explicitly name as postmodernists are really so baneful an influence and so overwhelmingly a presence as he would have us believe. They are surely just available bogeymen for critics acting from their own various but convergently self-interested motives.

III. Class Dismissed

One might have thought that the transformation of literature into a subject of university study and of criticism into almost exclusively an academic project might have taken works of literature and literary criticism outside the arena of polemical disputation and partisan advocacy. Indeed, it is generally perceived that the New Criticism, which finally secured literary study as part of the academic curriculum, was essentially an attempt to perform this service, to remove literature from the realm of subjective, ill-informed judgments and make it the focus of an objective scrutiny sympathetic to the fundamental aesthetic intentions of poets and novelists. But the New Critics had a partisan agenda of their own--at the very least to discredit all conceptions of the nature of literature and the role of criticism other than their own, but even more significantly to endow their quasi-religious conception of Literature with the kind of enhanced status afforded by the then more exclusive academy. Further, their most destructive legacy has been, unfortunately, to have set into motion the very process of establishing/overturning a critical orthodoxy that has come to overshadow the actual study of literature in any really objective sense and that has resulted in books like those written by Millard and Rebein.

One might also assume that of all the books devoted to the informed consideration of contemporary fiction it would be the historical anthology that would provide the most accurate, impartial, and trustworthy guide to the overall practice of contemporary writers. However, given the self-perpetuating system of critical ax-grinding that is the natural outcome of a discipline-based professionalization of literary study, even the classroom anthology has to be approached with suspicion. For example, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction clearly shares the pro-realism/anti-postmodern bias of the Millard-Rebein school of criticism. The book presents itself as a selection of "North American stories since 1970" (only two of the authors included are Canadian, however), but the vast majority of the stories are by writers who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, only two by writers who could be considered postmodern (John Barth and Donald Barthelme), despite the fact that a case could be made that the high tide of American literary postmodernism occurred during the 1970s, a period the book claims to represent. Thus no one who wishes to know about the full range of American fiction over the past thirty years will be able to accomplish the task by consulting The Scribner Anthology. More importantly, students will be given a distorted if not entirely false picture both of American writing during this period and of the more general character of serious fiction over the whole span of the twentieth century.

Can anyone who bothers to honestly examine the direction twentieth-century fiction has taken maintain at all credibly that it has been toward a greater realism--at least the kind of earnest and attenuated realism Millard and Rebein seem to prefer? What writers from the earlier parts of the century who were committed to the kind of political contestation Millard wants to celebrate are now still widely esteemed, indeed, are even still read except by politicized academics? Students who took the thematically repetitive and formally reductive stories in The Scribner Anthology as indicative of the tendency to which English language fiction (but also continental European and Latin American fiction) reached a culmination in the last decades of the century would be making a lamentable error; apprentice writers who made this mistake would surely doom their own work to the same kind of obsolescence ultimately suffered by the Marxist writers of the 1930s, most of the political and protest writing emerging from the 1960s, and that will undoubtedly await most of the writers featured in this anthology. To the extent that it does represent the strongest current in post-60s American fiction (and I think it finally does not), The Scribner Anthology may be of interest to future scholars as an artifact of an artistically impoverished stretch of American literary history.

Such students would be better served should they encounter the Oxford University Press anthology American Short Stories Since 1945 (edited by John G. Parker), but unfortunately even this book, which makes some effort at being historically representative, still leaves the impression that American fiction has advanced toward its consummation in politically correct neorealism. Arranged into three chronologically sequenced sections, the book does include important postwar writers not to be found in Scribner--e.g. James Purdy, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, William H. Gass, T. C. Boyle--but nevertheless devotes more space to the third section ("1980s and 1990s: Centers and Margins") than to the other two sections combined, and the section's contents are virtually indistinguishable from those of The Scribner Anthology. It is certainly not the case that all of the selections in either of these anthologies are of dubious literary merit. Each include writers, even neorealist writers, whose work is well worth reading for perfectly good reasons, including aesthetic reasons: writers such as Mary Robison, Tobias Wolff, Tim O'Brien, Richard Ford, Lorrie Moore, Louise Erdrich, and John Edgar Wideman. But no one looking over the contents of these two books could convincingly deny that the criteria for inclusion have more to do with multicultural "coverage" and political acceptability than with manifest literary distinction.

A plausible argument could be made that an anthology of "contemporary" fiction--or even a fiction anthology in general--ought to highlight very recent work, both because such work often stands in particular need of the attention anthologies provide and because it has a fair claim to make as the currently appropriate measure of what is to be counted as "literature" in the first place. Indeed, I believe a compelling case could be made on Deweyan pragmatist grounds that only present work should be considered when determining what we mean in using the word "literature." Regardless of what writers of the past believed themselves to be doing, and certainly regardless of what university professors want the term to designate, for works of literature to resonate with their readers they must do so according to currently understood standards and assumptions. (That these standards would be influenced by those passed down by previous readers and writers is of course both true and unavoidable.) Should these assumptions change, perhaps in response to changing practices among writers themselves, I can see no reason to object that "literature," or that "serious" literature is really something else, something fixed in place by "tradition."

Consequently, should the editors of classroom anthologies choose to reflect, or at least attempt to reflect, the current understanding of what gives works of fiction appropriate "literary" qualities, I can see no reason to deplore the effort per se. However, there is every reason to dispute these editors' (as well as Millard's and Rebein's) perception of the most representative qualities shared by the best of recent American fiction. Certainly it is possible to dispute that the stories they have chosen represent the best this fiction has to offer. Despite the hostility to "postmodernism" that can be found in all of the books surveyed here, many notable writers have continued to explore the formal possibilities of fiction, to expand rather than contract its thematic concerns, to extend the efforts made by modernists and postmodernists alike to create works of fiction that are inventive, surprising, calling for and capable of eliciting an aesthetically complex response from readers unwilling to settle for the facile and the artless. There is neither the time nor the space to discuss specific writers or specific works in detail, but those who fit this description include Richard Powers, Steven Millhauser, A.M. Homes, Gilbert Sorrentino, Curtis White, Steve Stern, Kathryn Davis, Walter Abish, David Foster Wallace, Max Apple, and David Markson, all of whom have published most of their significant work since 1970 and all of whom receive little or no attention in the books I have here examined.

Why is the fiction of such writers ignored in these books? To include them would, of course, disrupt the agenda the authors and editors want to follow. But the impatience with the work of these writers, as well as that of Barth and Barthelme, Elkin, Gass, Gaddis, Hawkes, and Coover, goes much further and can only be explained as a symptom of the broader crisis in literary study and literary criticism each of the books under consideration only confirms. What is disparaged as "postmodern" is, in fact, fiction that seeks to build on the past, not return to it, that is engaged and forward-looking, but whose engagement is with the qualities of fiction that transform it into art and that looks forward to renewing and reaffirming the potential for writers so engaged to produce fresh forms of literary art in fiction's future. One is led to believe by reading their work that writers of this fiction love literature and wish to discover all of its unexplored possibilities--the possibilities of writing itself--while one can only sadly conclude that Millard, Rebein, and company do not. The novels and stories they value serve their purposes, but those purposes have little to do with understanding, interpreting, or creating works of literature.

The various forms of a diminished and myopic realism featured in books like Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists and The Scribner Anthology have established themselves as neoorthodox techniques, I believe, because literary criticism, especially in its academic variety, has itself become diminished and myopic. The more adventurous practices of the writers I have named require a style of criticism sympathetic to the conception of literature at stake and attentive to the formal and stylistic exertions these practices involve, much like the way in which the New Criticism was alive to the aspirations of modernism. Such a criticism would encompass a reinvigorated commitment to the underlying principles of formalism, especially to the belief that the critic's job is to take stock of what the text at hand actually does, without the accompanying disposition to allow these principles to harden into dogma. Above all, it would reject the notion that the most beneficial objective of this kind of critical attention is to enlist works of literature in one's own political crusades. Neither of these developments is likely to occur within the disciplinary boundaries of academic criticism, sad to say. But perhaps literature--understood as the ongoing work of actually existing writers as well as those works of the past that still engage our interest--would itself benefit most if it were to be relinquished altogether by its academic schoolmasters, who now only serve to inflict their miseries behind the thick walls of their suffocating scholastic prisons.

Originally published on Center for Book Culture. Reproduced with permission.

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