Backland

Love’s Labor’s Lost

Love’s Labor’s Lost is a very different play from any Shakespeare play I’ve read or seen. It essentially has no plot, and many of the primary characters have practically no character. The play is all about words, the words are all about play, and the whole thing is a game. Most of it is a prelude to the last scene, which takes up more than a third of the play. In that scene, which redeems the play from sheer ridiculousness, is a play that is utterly destroyed by disdainful noblemen, an encounter in which everyone is in disguise, and, at the end, a distinctly sobering turn of events. The game, in essence, has been lost by all its players.

I think of “Shakespearean” as implying high drama, depth of character, the full embrace of the most extreme of tragic and comic moments. Nothing could be less “Shakespearean” in this sense than Love’s Labor’s Lost. I therefore must modify my conception of “Shakespearean.” But how to include in one definition both this and King Lear? Perhaps “Shakespearean” should simply denote “a work of genius in which the women, on the whole, are saner than the men, who forever practice self-deception.”

Flights

Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights looks like a novel, but it’s not. It’s a collection of short stories about travel (as well as a few about the preservation of body parts) along with brief interspersed meditations on those subjects. The meditations are weaker than the stories, which are often brilliant and memorable, haunting and vivid. The book won the Man Booker International Award and received stellar reviews; while a very good book indeed, it’s no masterpiece. Tokarczuk, to her credit, doesn’t show off. But I wanted the book to be crazier, more passionate, less reasonable; I wanted it to complicate her life and mine rather than only those of her characters.

What Is Literature?

Karen and I went to see The Wife last night. It was a fun movie, with some nice plot twists. But there were a few things wrong with it, including the rather bizarre notion (spoiler alert!) that dead people are subject to libel law (or that there’s some other law that would permit a widow to sue a biographer of her late spouse for revealing the truth). Both Harry Lloyd and Jonathan Pryce are entirely unconvincing as Brooklyn-born Jews, and the clunky, melodramatic flashback scenes seem to have been shot by a different filmmaker.

After the movie, the conversation turned to the Nobel Prize in Literature, which has awarded a few prizes to writers (Svetlana Alexievich, Bob Dylan) who stretch the boundaries of what is called literature. Karen asked me what I think literature encompasses, and I replied that practically any writing can be considered literature. On the spur of the moment, I put the boundaries at street signs and advertising. Karen maintained that certain types of writing—history, philosophy, academic writing, and so on—should not be thought of as literature, and that the word be used only for fiction, poetry, essays, memoir, and drama. Being a literature professor, she was able to muster some strong arguments. Being a writer and editor of nonfiction, I was too.

This was more than a semantic debate for us. It came down to a defense of my purpose in life—as it did for Karen.

Karen is a professor of literature. Her students come into her class with the view that literature is “fluff.” History, philosophy, and journalism are not fluff, but for her students, fiction, poetry, and drama are. It is Karen’s purpose in life to teach them that literature is not fluff. The distinctions between what is literature and what is not are therefore vital to her.

As for me, I want my own work and the books I edit to have literary qualities, and those qualities should not be defined solely by the standards one sets for fiction, drama, and poetry. While lucid, clear, and limpid prose can make for good literature, that’s the minimal requirement. For me, literature is defined in large part by character. Characters can be ill-defined, stereotyped, or “cardboard” in both fiction and nonfiction. Making them come alive—making readers forget that they're reading and getting them involved in the narrative through rich character portrayal rather than through plot twists—is a very difficult art, both for fiction and nonfiction writers. In some respects, nonfiction writers have an easier task since the characters are real; the reader has less of a hurdle to jump in order to believe in them. In other respects, they have a harder task since they are limited to what has been documented about the people they write about (unless they’re writing about themselves), and they cannot invent telling details.

As for historians and philosophers, who are less interested in character, I’m afraid I don’t see why Herodotus, Plato, Kierkegaard, or Ann Douglas should have less claim to being “literature” than Kafka or Camus. They are all great writers.

Karen argued, essentially, that there are two entirely different meanings to the phrase “That’s not literature.” One is a putdown, the other is a simple statement of boundaries. Karen would never put down my writing because of its category.

But I want to be able to apply the same literary terms, devices, and fallacies to everything I read and write. I’m not in favor of removing distinctions—I like to keep fiction and nonfiction in their separate spaces, and I despise fictionalization in nonfiction books. But I believe in literature as a higher calling, I believe that there are distinctions to be made between good literature and bad literature, I believe that nonfiction can be as good as or better than fiction in every respect, I believe that the word “imaginative” can be applied to every kind of writing. In short, I’m proud of what I do, while recognizing that I’m not nearly as good at it as many others are.