On Slowness and the Internet

Posted 28 June, 2008 in Technology, Reading Life | 11 comments

For everyone out there (including your humble correspondent) who trembled with fear and loathing at the prospect of cellphone novels, Kit Reed has an even more disturbing announcement on the National Book Critics Circle blog: “For those of you with shortened attention spans: a friend is writing his novel on Twitter. A plot twist in every tweet.” One can only hope that he she is joking. One fears (with the kind of deep-seated, existential dread usually reserved for late-night, alcohol-induced encounters with the abyss) that he’s she’s not.

Twitter could perhaps stand as a metaphor for our hyper-connected, attention-deficit postmodern era, in which our identities are constructed in individual “tweets” alerting all and sundry to the fact that we’ve just finished our third cup of coffee of the day, or just washed the car, or just seen Wanted, and enjoyed it, or not. The brief snippets of real-time information — or “microblogging” — that it offers are the apotheosis of a culture that craves stimulus, that is no longer content with a single image on a television screen, but demands news crawls at the bottom, or picture-to-picture split-screen technology that allows us to watch several different programs simultaneously.

What it is categorically not conducive to is the reading — to say nothing of the writing — of novels. Novels by their very nature demand a kind of prolonged engagement that is simply not possible with the new technologies of Twitter and much of Web 2.0, which are all about speed and efficiency. The deep concentration and close reading that novels require are antithetical to the medium of the Internet, which encourages its users to flit from page to page, from link to link, skimming various different sites for snippets of information before moving on.

Writing in 1995, Robert K. Logan, author of The Fifth Language: Learning a Living in the Computer Age, and an early proponent of the possibilities of the Internet, defines the Web’s structure of connectivity in relation to the oral tradition of storytelling:

This structure allows users to access the information that best matches their interests and information needs, and to linger over material of particular interest or skip over irrelevant material. Linked pages using hypertext retrieves the patterns of oral storytellers. Hypertext leads from one story to another, depending on the interest of the user. In the oral tradition, the storyteller told one story after another, depending on the interest of the audience. There was no fixed order to how the episodes were related to the audience. Each performance was different and the episodes were told in a different order each time … Hypertext is like jazz. Each time the story is told, it is told as an improvisation, one dictated by the users and their needs and not by the producers or source of the information.

Fair enough, but novels do not subscribe to the same principles. They are not improvisations, nor do the consumers of novels dictate the trajectory of their stories. Hypertext may indeed by like jazz; the novel is more like a symphony. And like a symphony, it requires the patience to follow its various movements and sections, to make connections and recognize internal coherence and unity. All of which requires a slowing down rather than a speeding up.

This is one reason why I’m made vaguely uncomfortable by people who claim to read four or five novels every week. Reading at such an accelerated pace seems tantamount to those hot-dog eating contests one often sees at country fairs: it’s voracious and slightly vulgar, but there can’t possibly be any pleasure derived from it. Novel reading requires room to immerse oneself, to reflect and to lose oneself in the nuances of a text. It requires slowness.

Media critic Todd Gitlin makes this point succinctly in his book Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives:

Now, writers who deplore speed are biased. They are invested in slowness, and good at it. As sentences get shorter, reading faster, visual competition more intense and itself speedier, how can established writers not feel the onrush of obsolescence? How can journalists fail to note the speed-up in popular periodicals — Time with its weekly news snippets, the New York Times Magazine with its cheeky front-of-the-book interview fragments, Internet magazines with their punchy, semicolonless sentences. Partisans of earlier film cultures likewise deplore today’s jump-cutting pace. But for all their vested interest in relative slowness, the critics are not insincere when they deplore the pace of the plunging torrent or bemoan the spectacular funfest that competes with their work for public attention. Neither are they misguided in what they notice. For centuries, speed has dragged slowness along in its wake, hastening it. None of the naysayers has been crying wolf. While the slow protest, the fast drag them along, kicking and screaming.

Gitlin’s comment about the Internet’s propensity to promote “punchy, semicolonless sentences” should not be glossed over; the Internet does seem to foster a terser writing style than one might find in other (read: printed) media. When he first acquired a typewriter, Nietzsche discovered that his writing changed, it became more aphoristic, the sentences became shorter and more direct, the compound sentences that allowed for the pursuit of a nuanced idea through several turns and digressions disappeared. The Internet takes this phenomenon and, as with so many other, similar phenomena, accelerates it.

What is particularly worrisome, and not just for novel readers, is that this may indeed be having a deleterious effect on our brains, changing the way we engage with texts and precluding the kind of extended concentration required to comprehend written material of any length or complexity. As an aside, one of the most frequent complaints I receive from readers of this blog is that my posts are often too long. (Those readers will no doubt have abandoned the current post long before reaching this sentence.)

In the cover article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic, titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr references Maryanne Wolf to explain the way in which the Internet is changing the way we approach written material:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking — perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

The Internet, by feeding what Aldous Huxley referred to as “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions,” may be having the unintended side-effect of reducing our capacity “to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction.” This may be one reason why there has yet to be a successful novel published online.

It is doubtless ironic to be complaining about these things on an Internet blog, and I would be a loathsome hypocrite to suggest that the online environment does not provide certain benefits for readers and writers alike. Nevertheless, as an inveterate consumer of novels, and a proponent of the kind of slowness and stillness that true novel-reading requires, it seems pertinent to sound at least a word of warning that we not proceed so far down the road of easy, speedy access to information that we wake up one morning only to realize that we have lost the capacity to appreciate the kind of patience and deliberation that careful, deep reading requires.

Kirshner on Character

Posted 28 June, 2008 in Writing | 1 comment

Toronto-based writer Lauren Kirshner, whose first novel, Where We Have to Go, is due out from McClelland & Stewart in spring 2009, has some thoughts on her blog about what makes a compelling character:

Maybe it’s the sticky air on College Street and the guys with shiny hair who stand outside the sports bars, looking like they will always be nineteen, leaning their lips into cans of Brio. Or maybe I’m just thinking of the way certain girls with bleached blonde hair look sexy and cool–read: not cheesy– in leopard print tube tops and red high heels with bows on the backs of them. Or then again, maybe I’m just thinking about what makes fictional characters live. By this I mean spring off the page like flames from brand new lighters.

In addition to displaying her own dab hand at characterization — how many writers do you know who could come up with a descriptive string of words as concisely perfect as “leaning their lips into cans of Brio”? — she evinces impeccable taste in the examples she chooses to illustrate her point: Flannery O’Connor, Denis Johnson, and Mary Gaitskill.

And, just as an aside, if you haven’t read Gaitskill’s collection, Bad Behavior, what are you waiting for?

On Aesthetic Appreciation: Two Approaches

Posted 25 June, 2008 in Literary Criticism | 1 comment

Rónán McDonald’s recent book, The Death of the Critic, which has been much on my mind recently, contains, among other things, a thumbnail tour through the history of literary criticism, which is recommended for anyone who would like a brief (and admittedly selective) overview of the trajectory of the discipline from Aristotle through to the present.

In the course of his discussion, McDonald sets in oppostition two distinct views regarding the nature and function of art. The first is that of 19th-century critic Matthew Arnold (1822-88):

Arnold deployed the quasi-religious associations of the imagination for social and moral purposes. Art had a clear function within society, especially after the scientific challenges to religion. It was an antidote to a mechanistic and materialistic world, a source of spiritual sustenance and a balm for the disenchantments of modernity. In this respect, one could say that the value of the arts was as a generator of values. It operated to keep society together, to inculcate moral awareness.

McDonald contrasts this view of art with that of Arnold’s near-contemporary, Walter Pater (1839-94):

Pater’s Renaissance created a scandal. Its embrace of sensuousness and individualism is even more explicit in its notorious conclusion. What matters is not morality or religion, but the intesity and the ecstasy of experience. Pater advises us to grasp “at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowlege that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.”

Here we have two distinct notions about the purpose of art: the first involving the moral betterment of mankind, the second involving a kind of hedonistic, individual appreciation of pure aesthetics.

The notion of art as a mechanism for moral uplift is not specific to Arnold; critics as diverse as Wayne C. Booth, J. Hillis Miller, and John Gardner have taken it up at one time or another. Here is Terry Eagleton in the conclusion to his seminal 1983 survey of literary criticism, Literary Theory: An Introduction:

I argued earlier that any attempt to define the study of literature in terms of either its method or its object is bound to fail. But we have now begun to discuss another way of conceiving what distinguishes one kind of discourse from another, which is neither ontological or [sic] methodological but strategic. This means asking first not what the object is or how we should approach it, but why we should want to engage with it in the first place. The liberal humanist response to this question, I have suggested, is at once perfectly reasonable and, as it stands, entirely useless. Let us try to concretize it a little by asking how the reinvention of rhetoric that I have proposed (though it might equally as well be called “discourse theory” or “cultural studies” or whatever) might contribute to making us all better people. (My emphasis.)

Eagleton eschews Arnold’s specifically spiritual bent — the notion of art as a substitute for religion in a modern, secular, technological world — but his insistance that the fundamental function of discourse in an artistic (read: literary) mode involves “making us all better people” is coincident with Arnold’s broader outlook.

This approach appears radically distinct from Pater’s notion of aesthetic individualism, where, McDonald asserts, “the ’special manifestation’ of beauty will be brought to light critically … through fateful articulation of an inevitably personal, subjective appreciation.” The danger inherent in this approach is that it retreats too vigorously into subjectivity, into a kind of onanistic interiority. Although Pater insisted that the aesthetic individuality he advocated must be accompanied by an uncompromising ability to recognze artistic excellence, it is not hard to compare this vision, as did an artist friend on whom I tested these ideas, to masturbation.

However, Pater’s approach does not necessarily reduce art to masturbation. Yes, it’s hedonistic, but it implies engagement with the broader world, and the people in it, which is the polar opposite of masturbation. (As an aside, I recently looked at a book by Mikita Brottman called The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, which compares reading and masturbation — both are solitary activities, both involve the pleasure solely of the person engaging in them and the exclusion of others. I didn’t buy the book, but it’s a provocative argument.)

Pater’s vision is highly individualistic, but this proceeds from his emphasis on the aesthetics of beauty, which he rightly recognized would be different for each individual. Instead of reducing the consumption of artistic products to the realm of onanism, the real problem with Pater’s approach is that this radical individualism opens up a whole spectrum of relativism in artistic judgement. Pater’s uncompromising attitude towards quality in artistic achievement is here mitigated by a practice that can be used to avoid any kind of evaluative judgement based on a mutually agreed-upon set of aesthetic or artistic standards. If beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, than anything an eye beholds as beautiful can be asserted to be a work of enduring artistic relevance. This seems like an irreducable dilemma, at least for those of us — including McDonald himself — who advocate an evaluative approach to criticism.

By contrast, Pater’s focus on the human experience of art remains attractive, and is a welcome counterpoint to Arnold’s attempt to render art a simple substitute for religion in a modern, secular age. Although it’s absolutely true that art can touch what is ineffable in us, an experience that could be described as feeding the spirit — or the soul, if you will — a careful critical evaluation of any artistic work is arguably better addressed through discussing aesthetics as removed from any kind of religious or quasi-religious language. Arnold’s idea that art can serve as a kind of bulwark against the dehumanizing tendencies of consumerism and technology seems more than germane to the postmodern world of the early 21st century. But whether the evaluation of art proceeds from a moral imperative or not, modern criticism might be better served in attempting to separate Arnold’s ideas about the ravages of technological consumerism from the religious or quasi-religious aspect of aesthetic appreciation.

Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

Posted 25 June, 2008 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

“Do you know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?” Emina’s mother asked, looking at Jovan, who appeared to have heard this before. A small hint of a smile cracked his lips. “A pessimist says, ‘Oh, dear, things can’t possibly get any worse.’ And an optimist says, ‘Don’t be so sad. Things can always get worse.’”

– The Cellist of Sarajevo, Steven Galloway

R.I.P. George Carlin

Posted 23 June, 2008 in Obituaries | 2 comments

Dead of heart failure at age seventy-one.

Carlin on language:

Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins, it’s as simple as that. The CIA doesn’t kill anybody anymore, they “neutralize” people. Or they “depopulate the area.” The government doesn’t lie, it “engages in disinformation.” The Pentagon actually measures nuclear radiation in something they call “sunshine units.” Israeli murderers are called “commandos.” Arab commandos are called “terrorists.” Contra killers are called “freedom fighters.” Well, if crime fighters fight crime, and fire fighters fight fires, what do freedom fighters fight?

The world seems like a bit meaner place today. Jesus, I could use some good news for a change.

“I Don’t Know Everybody, but I Think I Know Their Dogs”

Posted 20 June, 2008 in Writing Life, Awards, Writing | No comments

Open Book: Toronto has posted a short video of Trillium Award-winner Barbara Gowdy. In the video, shot by Ian Daffern, Gowdy discusses the genesis of her prize-winning novel, Helpless, as well as the experience of living in Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood (which gives rise to the quoted title of this post) and the setting of Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye.

Gibson Out at M&S

Posted 20 June, 2008 in Publishing | No comments

An article from today’s Globe and Mail reports that Douglas Gibson, former president and publisher of the iconic Canadian house McClelland and Stewart, is leaving to pursue a freelance career:

Gibson, the company’s publisher from 1988 to 2004 and president from 2000 to 2004, will continue to oversee print books he previously contracted for M&S. But henceforth he’s a freelancer operating from his Toronto home, his services available to publishers and writers outside the M&S ambit.

Among the authors Gibson worked with during his time at M&S are Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Robertson Davies, and Peter Gzowski.

In addition to working on an upcoming memoir, the Globe reports that Gibson will finish working on the books he has already acquired for his M&S imprint, Douglas Gibson books. These include a nonfiction book by broadcaster Michael Enright, and a new collection from Alice Munro, whose avowal that 2006’s The View from Castle Rock would be her last book was apparently premature.

The Lacuna Cabal Goes to Britain

Posted 18 June, 2008 in Book News | 7 comments

In the post today, I received a copy of The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, the UK edition of Sean Dixon’s 2007 novel, The Girls Who Saw Everything, which some of you may remember that I quite liked.

The book is published in the UK by HarperCollins, and the stunning cover design is the work of an illustrator named Becca Thorne, who won a competition held jointly by HarperCollins UK and the Saatchi Gallery.

The note in the back of the book reads in part: “The winning cover was picked from over one thousand entries and chosen by a panel of judges made up of Peter Davies, a celebrated artist whose work has shown at the Tate; David Headley of the much-admired Goldsboro Books independent booksellers; Rebecca Wilson, Saatchi Head of Online Development; and Lee Motley, HarperCollins Art Director.”

It’s a beautiful package, and its arrival gives me another opportunity to urge you, if you haven’t already, to check out one of the best books of Canadian fiction published last year.

Rebecca Rosenblum on the Enduring Appeal of the Short Story

Posted 17 June, 2008 in Short Stories | 2 comments

At a Luminato reading on Friday, I had the immense pleasure of meeting Rebecca Rosenblum, a Toronto-based short-story writer whose debut collection, Once, which is set for release in September, is already receiving astounding word of mouth. No less a stalwart figure than John Metcalf has commented that Rosenblum “is among the most talented of the writers I’ve worked with in forty years” — quite a compliment considering that this list includes Michael Winter, Caroline Adderson, Terry Griggs, Sharon English, and Russell Smith, among others.

I picked up an ARC of Once at Book Expo Canada over the weekend, which I’ve been dipping into. From my experience there, and having heard the author read her story “Route 99″ on Friday, I expect that this is a collection you’ll be hearing much more about round these parts in the run-up to September.

In the meantime, Rosenblum has a terrific post on her own blog about the putative death of the short story, which was a subject of much discussion at Friday’s event:

Short stories give the intensity of single moments and incidents–a playground game, a barroom brawl, a cigarette break–that would have to be contextualized into a life in a novel, pared down into pure language in a poem. Sometimes, you just need what happened, right there, right then–he said, she said, the chandelier crashed down and I took the puppy into the street. You need every detail and dialogue tag, but maybe not the how and the why and the what happened next.

It’s always been my contention that Canadian writers excel at the short form; as long as we keep producing writers of Rosenblum’s calibre, I’m not sure we have much to worry about regarding the death of the short story.

TSR Author Interview — Charles Foran

Posted 17 June, 2008 in Author Interview | 3 comments

Charles Foran is the author of seven eight books of fiction and nonfiction. His recent book of essays and criticism, Join the Revolution, Comrade: Journeys and Essays, is published by Biblioasis.

The original title of your new essay collection, Join the Revolution, Comrade, was Dumb as a Sack of Hammers, which is the title of one of the pieces contained in it. What associations did you intend to conjure with these two titles?

As I mention in the preface, “Dumb as a Sack of Hammers” is one of my father’s favourite expressions. I like the quip, like for its own sake, and like it even more for being a fairly rare recalled instance from my childhood of verbal liveliness. The piece “Dumb as a Sack of Hammers” is sub-titled “A Southern Ontario Childhood,” and it explores the linguistic landscape, so to speak, of WASP suburban Toronto in the 1960s and ’70s — and all that implies. More exactly, the piece explores a bygone landscape from the implicit perspective of someone — i.e. myself — who is now making his adult life in language, in words, forever mindful of the nature (meek) of the bequethment (modest). In short, “dumb” is just the word to highlight in a piece about Ontario speech, especially once allowed both its literal and slang meanings. I do feel a little slow linguistically and I do sometimes feel I lack the necessary powers of speech.

In the end, though, Join the Revolution, Comrade got the nod. Mostly I wanted the chance to repeat a story I first told in an earlier book, Sketches in Winter, about a friend in Beijing who was given a small part in Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, one of the first western films allowed to shoot in the Peoples’ Republic of China. The part had a single line, spoken in English: “Join the revolution, Comrade, or else fuck off!” Though I didn’t meet the actor, now a university lecturer, until 1988, five years after the film was released, he was still delivering the line, over and over. For him, it had come to serve as a mantra of ironic detachment and despair about his life, and about China. Over time, “Join the Revolution, Comrade … ” came to settle in my own mind as an artistic and even moral challenge and rebuke.

Here’s a parallel story about titles that might help explain the effect I am after. In 1923 the great Chinese writer Lu Xun published the collection of short fiction that gave birth, more or less, to modern Chinese literature. I read the collection in translation while living in Beijing in the late 1980s, a translation done by stalwart (and/or terrified) adherents of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary aesthetics. The book I read was called, bracingly, A Call to Arms, as though Lu Xun had been summoning fellow authors to stand up and fight, damn it. Years later I learned that the story collection was more accurately rendered in English as Cheering from the Sidelines. Not quite the same, is it?

With my own title, I figure you can read it as war-like active, or nihilistically passive; as an earnest call to literary arms, or an ironic pre-emptive commentary on the futility of collections of essays preaching the difficult pleasure of, among other things, difficult books.

The first third of the essay collection focuses on your impressions of Asia, where you lived and taught for several years. What is it about this part of the world that captures your imagination?

In Asia I get to forget all about myself for long periods. I’ve always enjoyed that, longed for it, sought ways to achieve that flight from the narrow, pinched corridor of the self out into the wide expanse of the non-self, the non-personal. In short, I’m lost in Asia, at sea about how to speak (dumb, once again, in most places), what to think, how to behave, smile, eat food, bow to monks, address stray dogs in streets. In Asia I am even more a nobody than I am here, for the simple reason that the “body” that is me — i.e. the western male of certain age and background — remains a “no’”body over there, dislocated, floating.

Also, in the two decades I’ve been travelling and living (for five years) in Asia, something fundamental has changed in the East/West dynamic. Crudely, “ism-ly,” I hereby declare colonialism long gone, orientalism shortly gone, and an era of parity, of even a pending new imbalance, emerging. If there is an East/West narrative unfolding in the 21st century, it is, or is going to be, the tale of the East incurring, destabilizing, changing the West — not the other way around. How interesting is that?

In the title essay, you write about a certain lack of culture shock inherent in your response to Chinese culture: “There was nothing inscrutable about our friends at the college. Quite the opposite: this generation of urbanites — the only Chinese we really knew — had gone about expressing their identities and ambitions in ways recognizable to a westerner.” You go on to refer to the ways in which Chinese filmmakers and authors have adopted western influences as touchstones in their work. Is this a wholly desirable phenomenon, or does it speak to the kind of flattening effect that critics of globalization often refer to?

As I suspect my previous answer hints, I pause before the political correctness of assuming that all interactions and exchanges between West and East are somehow imbalanced in favor of “us.” On the ground, this isn’t how it plays out. To assume a Chinese writer or filmmaker who is, say, influenced by Kafka or Scorsese is thereby infected or diminished is silly. Worse, it is condescending in its assumption that the Chinese artist, insecure in his/her foundations, has gone doe-eyed and weak-kneed before the mite of western culture, be it pop or high, and so is slavishly parroting “foreign” models.

How about this instead: the Chinese artist takes what he likes from other cultures, and makes it his own. The “West” is rarely more than an image, a page of prose, a TV show, a few slangy words of English, spoken for fun. It certainly isn’t a marching army of standardization and banality. Let me tell you: being Chinese is, for most, a suit of armour welded onto an individual at birth and impossible to remove, no matter how burdensome it gets. Scant chance of bursting from the suit and walking that much more lightly and freely. Lu Xun, by the way, revered Gogol above all other writers. Lu’s writing could scarcely be more Chinese.

Now, if the question is meant to be applied to specific western influences in Chinese intellectual life before, and during, the democracy movement of 1989, then, yes, there are instances were the apparent influence, either poorly understood or badly timed, ended up problematic. I am thinking, for instance, of the introduction of the statue known as the Goddess of Democracy, modelled on the Statue of Liberty, onto Tiananmen Square during the final days of the protests of April-May 1989. But those are exact instances — exact to circumstances, and individuals — of forays across the formerly vast East-West divides. As well, we’re talking twenty years ago now. Feels more like a half-century, too, some days.

In the post-9/11 essay “Why You Should Travel,” you accuse author Michel Houellebecq of “lack[ing] the patience or perhaps inclination for genuine moral complexity in his fiction” and for “declaring the actions of cartoon creeps indicative of broad cultural attitudes and behaviours.” But, Houellebecq’s novel, Platform, which is the focus of your critique, is a nihilistic satire that was actually published in France before 9/11, to say nothing of the terrorist attacks in Bali that are the subject of your essay. Houellebecq is obviously a provocateur, but is it possible to entirely dismiss his approach and arguments, given their apparent prescience?

Do I dismiss Platform in the piece? I don’t mean to. It’s a fascinating novel, well worth getting worked up about. It’s true that I think Houellebecq’s nihilistic satire, as you nicely frame it, runs out of energy long before the end. It’s also true that I often grow impatient with book-length satire, for the simple reason that the satiric energy gets prematurely exhausted or the satiric conceit ground down. Great satire, the stature, say, of Gulliver’s Travels or Catch-22, is either constantly in motion (in Swift), recasting its arguments, expanding them, even undercutting previous assertions, or else gathers surreal pitch (in Heller or Waugh’s A Handful of Dust), whereby the repetition, the not-going-anywhere, becomes the aesthetic and even moral exercise. With Houellebecq, I sensed neither of these strategies at play. I just sensed a smart and, yes, prescient, provocateur who has expelled his bile by page fifty or so — with another 300 pages left.

That said, reading a three-year-old novel in Bali three months after the bombings by Islamic extremists of foreign-frequented bars on the island, a novel about, in part, Islamic extremists who blow up a bar frequented by foreigners on an idyllic Asian island, sat me up in astonishment at the congruencies. Houellebecq got the plot of the prophesy right. Not sure, though, he got the truth of it — or that he was even interested in looking.

In her essay, “Writing Short Stories,” Flannery O’Connor comments that “[a]n idiom characterizes a society, and when you ignore the idiom, you are very likely ignoring the whole social fabric that could make a meaningful character. You can’t cut characters off from their society and say much about them as individuals.” Several of the essays in Join the Revolution, Comrade bemoan the lack of a Canadian idiom outside of certain communities in Quebec and the Maritimes. How do we guard against cutting characters off from their society in our writing if we don’t have an individual Canadian idiom to fall back on?

I did a graduate degree in Dublin in 1983-84. On learning I was Canadian, Irish classmates and friends would sing the praises of Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, and Alice Munro — writers with titles in the local bookshops. Always, too, they would remark that, while they had known Davies and Munro were Canadian, by virtue of their settings or simply the author biographies, they had almost never thought of national identity as inflecting the work, including, obviously, anything about the prose. In this regard, these writers were nearly unmoored from place — at least they were for Irish readers, accustomed to characters in books (their own, for sure) being fiercely attached to both physical and linguistic settings.

Then they met me. They heard me talk. They absorbed, over time, how I carried myself, how I — largely, if not entirely, un-self-aware — behaved as a Canadian. Ah, the Irish said: now we get where those books are located. To be Canadian is, apparently, to be without distinct language imprint. To be Canadian is to be sort of neutral about place and self.

Is it? Of course not. But so it sounded — in Davies, say, on the page; in me, say, in the flesh — to my Irish friends. Would it have been different if I’d been a Newfoundlander in Dublin? For sure. I exaggerate the anecdote a little to make the point that for whatever reasons Canadians, outside of a few regions, speak and write grammatically preservative, idiomatically conservative English. We don’t unbutton much. We wear our language trousers rolled.

Now, to answer you directly, the tendencies I’ve been describing and, yes, quietly regretting — a private regret, above all, a sort of hair-shirt worn in dismay at my own tendencies, on page and off — haven’t kept Canadian writers from producing novels full of compelling characters and vividly imagined settings. How we are is how we are, perhaps. Or even, that neutrality, that seeming detachment from a felt sense of language, of idiom, might even be our identity, our chosen and allotted fate. Maybe I should shut up about this — at least until I can find a livelier way of expressing it.

Is it possible to locate the kind of idiom that you refer to in the work of writers such as Austin Clarke, who liberally employs a Caribbean patois in his fiction, or Russell Smith in his satirical portraits of Southern Ontario hipsters?

To carry on from the previous answer, I should make clear that I’m not advocating more Canadian fiction that is Faulkner-rich (or, indeed, Austin Clarke-rich or Dionne Brand-rich) in terms of its rendering of spoken, living speech on the page. That could be painful for all concerned. I am thinking about linguistic energy, about literary language that is alert and alive; that is, I suppose, a little reckless and wired. Too many of our novels are too functional. Too many of them aspire only to clear, transparent language — to prose-not-getting-in-the-way-of-the-story prose. Well, with a major novel the prose is the story, and the story is the prose. How does that weave, effortless and inevitable, emerge? I know how it does in James Joyce and Flann O’Brien, in Martin Amis and Jeanette Winterson, in Jonathan Franzen and Don DeLillo. Not sure how it happens in most of Canada, though — or even if it if can.

I remember passages in Noise when I sensed that Russell Smith was clearly remarking on how his hipsters spoke, and so self-defined. (After all, how we talk is, surely, quite a lot of who we are?) Muriella Pent, my favourite Smith novel, seemed less concerned with this. But I should reread it now, given his columns about language in the Globe and Mail.

Many of the essays in Join the Revolution, Comrade take up the theme of dreams vs. wakefulness, and the idea that the true geography of fiction is the “place where day and night and light and dark, sleep and wake and dream and undream, meet and then dissolve.” Why is this a recurring theme for you, and why do you think so many Canadian authors, steeped in a kind of conventionally naturalistic tradition, are so reluctant to navigate this territory?

I abandoned a career as a hockey player — okay, I got cut by the Young Nationals when I was seventeen — for literature because of how books rocked my suburban Toronto world. I can even pinpoint the turn. Once I opened the epochal paperback of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book purchased, largely for the allure of its pastel cover, in my local Coles in my local mall in 1977, or thereabouts, I knew I was a goner. I knew this because of how I read Marquez and, in turn, how Marquez read me.

For three days I lay atop my bed in the company of One Hundred of Solitude. For three days, too, Marquez kept the company of a Toronto teenager. What happened during the exchange? By the end, I wasn’t Spanish speaking, wasn’t a resident of Macondo, but, still, I’d been transformed. I was a little more aware of the world, and in awe of it; I was a little more aware of other people, and feeling kindly towards them/us. I’d read One Hundred Years of Solitude, for sure, but in some remarkable, magical way the novel had “read” me; the potential for engagement and wonder, for empathy.

What an experience. Better than candy or liquor, if not as quick as either. Better, for me anyways, than pharmaceuticals. No surprise, I sought it out again. And again. I couldn’t get enough.

But here was the thing: the only books that could do it, read me while I read them, were of a certain stature. Yes, the great ones, either the canon proper or the canon unfolding. Originality of voice and technique were fundamental; so was a certain intensity and breadth of vision. Often those were and are the books that, as you quote above from Join the Revolution, Comrade, seek through their structures and language ways of telling and seeing that dissolve, rightly, the artificial boundaries between wakefulness and sleep and challenge, correctly, the flimsy divides between our dreaming and undreaming selves. In other words, the wild books, the risk-takers, the ones, yikes, often declared difficult or inaccessible.

Now, for a variety of reasons these books are less and less welcome by readers, by publishers, by the culture. Martin Amis’s remark that the English novel too often seems “two-hundred-and-fifty-ages of middle-class ups and downs” is accurate to the novels being published (or, better, the novels being tossed lifesavers by the culture) in lots of places. Even novels that do step outside the dominant tradition of naturalism that I write about in the essay on Don Quixote [”The Life Quixotic: Cervantes and the Invention of Fiction”] often do so half-heartedly, or else as though they are writing — as, perhaps, they are, pace Harry Potter — for children of all ages. I think the novel form is under siege right now, and I think the measured, reasonable response — to capitulate on the page, the middle-brow slightly furrowed in worry — isn’t only lame but also a disaster for those of us who suspect that certain literary conditions need to be right for major novels to continue to be written.

Novelists who do make an attempt to write in a more challenging or idiosyncratic way that might lack mass popular appeal are often castigated for being “elitist,” an epithet that William A. Henry III has suggested “has come to rival if not outstrip ‘racist’ as the foremost catchall pejorative of our times.” How do we counteract the prevailing cultural tendency towards comfortable, staid fictional products and authors?

At this stage, there is likely no escaping charges of elitism. Simply to aspire to write not a “literary’” book or a “real” novel or any such loaded term but to write simply to the tradition, to Cervantes and Sterne, Eliot and Conrad, Virginia Woolf and Keri Hume, is to open yourself up to epithets. As I said before, it seems we don’t really want these books, these writers, any longer. We only accept, begrudgingly, the “difficult” ones that the Nobel committee or, sometimes, the Booker jury, bully onto our media bookshelf. (What a tiny, badly constructed shelf that is, too: can’t hold more than a few titles at any one time, books rated by gaudy covers and sensationalized titles, then still filed upside-down or spines-to-the-wall; all excess releases allowed to topple off the edge and tumble to the ground, there to be not even trampled on; just ignored, until covered in dust, dirt, and returned to the earth.) We no longer have the time or attention span or, possibly, the faith in the form. We’ve moved on.

What to do? Join the Revolution, Comrade, I suppose — or else …