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Ian "Marvin" Graye's Reviews > The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction
The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction
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by
Ian "Marvin" Graye's review
bookshelves: cul-poli-phil-art, lit-krit, mcelroy, le-clair, heller, read-2018, reviews, reviews-3-stars
Feb 01, 2017
bookshelves: cul-poli-phil-art, lit-krit, mcelroy, le-clair, heller, read-2018, reviews, reviews-3-stars
Ground Control to Major Tom
Tom LeClair is a close reader of a text and a lucid writer about what he detects inside.
If you haven't been paying attention, it might therefore come as some surprise that I don't agree with all (or many) of his conclusions (or at least, his reasoning).
If you don't count GR coteries, the biggest advocates of white American literary maximalism are Tom LeClair and Steven Moore (whom LeClair thanks for reading the manuscript of this book). "The Art of Excess" effectively states LeClair's case for promoting seven examples of white American maximalism as masterpieces. He would have included at least one novel by Don DeLillo, if he hadn't already written about him in "In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel".
Space Oddity
I'd like to focus on LeClair's methodology in this review, rather than the books he hails (* all of which I've read and reviewed positively on the basis of other criteria).
LeClair more or less admits that he developed his theory of excess and then searched out books that supported it. His theory didn't derive from and respond to the books themselves. To that extent, his theory or paradigm is extraliterary:
To appreciate LeClair's case, you need to understand how he uses two words, one of which ("Excess") appears in the title, and the other of which ("Mastery") appears in the subtitle, "Mastery in Contemporary Fiction".
"Excess"
The second time you encounter this word in the book is the following epigraph from William Blake:
Ultimately, it comes down to inference what Blake meant by "excess". However, I doubt whether he had maximalist novels in mind. More likely, it refers to exceeding limits or boundaries that might otherwise have obstructed the development of wisdom. Sometimes, you have to oppose the status quo in order to discover the truth.
So it didn't take long to differ from LeClair.
"Mastery"
LeClair describes each of the seven novels he analyses in this book as "masterpieces". He thinks they warrant this description, because they display mastery.
Once again, one of the two epigraphs is from Don DeLillo:
Out of context, the meaning of this sentence is equally contentious. Does it just mean that you have to be on top of what you are talking about (i.e., the information or knowledge that justifies your opinion or assertion). Or does it mean that, if you don't master information in our society, it will master you?
Any Major Dude Will Tell You
Mastery in this context relates to something that might exercise power, force, authority or control over us, that might subject us (from a social or political point of view).
LeClair infers from DeLillo's novels that "fiction should contest power."
If we're able to master it (e.g., through literature), then literature enables us to balance power and overcome our subjection. There is an assumption that literary balance translates into social and political balance. Reading can, apparently, achieve political action.
Information and Systems Theory
DeLillo refers to data, while LeClair refers to information, which allows him to utilise aspects of information or systems theory.
While LeClair believes that his approach serves "no eccentric or masked ideology", it is clearly motivated by political, economic, technological and ecological considerations. What started as literary criticism came to be cultural criticism:
The Art of Excess
LeClair says the art of excess has a double meaning:
Masterworks
LeClair concludes that "American literature, no less than American life as a whole, is a field of contestation...
Massive Novels ("Churnin' Out That Boogaloo")
To be effective, LeClair believes that novels must be large:
LeClair assumes (but doesn't reveal how) literature can translate into political action or efficacy. He doesn't acknowledge that most of the aficianadoes of maximalism remain happily ensconced in the world of fiction and related non-fiction. They have no time or inclination for anything else. Maximalism is an extension of the solipsistic state. Certainly, there is no suggestion that the targets of maximalism read this stuff and are deterred or reformed by it.
The Truth about Synecdoche
LeClair makes some admissions that deserve more attention than they have received:
The question remains: how massive does the synecdoche need to be to be representative of the target reality?
The Truth about Systems Novels
About systems novels, LeClair admits, "They sometimes exceed even my patience for detail, pattern, and magnitude. They often sacrifice the pleasures of literary prose..., to record the noise of various extraliterary systems. Sometimes the novelists' mastery seems to require a reader's masochism."
It's arguable therefore that in a world that's already plagued by an excess of information, the last thing we need is yet more excess supplied by the art of excess.
Perhaps, too, as LeClair himself speculates, "an elephant is not [necessarily] better than a butterfly."
SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)
PREVIOUSLY:
Critical Feedback
"Every system needs its negative feedback."
Tom LeClair, page 205
Esoteric Readings
"Esoteric readings are usually private obsessions imposed on a text..."
Steven Moore
Hypothesis
Two or three theories in search of seven applications or proofs.
Past Tense
"In 1989, I published a book called The Art of Excess that praised long, diffuse, and difficult books by Pynchon, Gaddis, McElroy, Coover and others. Like their excessive novels, Phone is radically deformed and influenced by contemporary science. Although not quite as old as Dr. Busner, I have reached with Phone a limit case of the Art of Excess. Self has said that as a literary novelist at the end of a tradition he wants to go out with a bang, but the intentional excesses of Phone don’t blast this reader into some new paradigm as those earlier American novels did, don’t conduct me into a profound psychogeographical mapping of contemporary life. Maybe it’s because I don’t own a smart phone. I doubt younger readers who do will have the patience for Self’s 617 pages."
http://www.full-stop.net/2018/02/13/r...
Inflated Novels: Make America Gigantic Again
"I have frequently noticed that the Americans, who generally treat of business in clear, plain language, devoid of all ornament and so extremely simple as to be often coarse, are apt to become inflated as soon as they attempt a more poetical diction.
"They then vent their pomposity from one end of a harangue to the other; and to hear them lavish imagery on every occasion, one might fancy that they never spoke of anything with simplicity....
"The authors...perpetually inflate their imaginations, and, expanding them beyond all bounds, they not infrequently abandon the great in order to reach the gigantic."
Alexis deTocqueville
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/det...
Fragments
In search of a literary movement to front, the self-proclaimed avant garde became enamoured of excess. As if to experiment is merely to write without restraint or care or respect for time or space.
In the literature of excess, where little is novel (but novels are large), the measure is volume. Quantity is transformed into quality. More means better. All is girth. Which is ironic, because the meaning of the word "volume" in terms of "bulk, mass, quantity" derives from the meaning "the bulk or size of a book":
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?t...
The literature of excess reduces fiction to data and information which can be measured in quantitative terms. However, there is a point where a plethora of information creates an implosion of meaning.
Ironically, LeClair seeks to evaluate this literature on terms other than of excess, as if, coincidentally or fortuitously, it has other merits.
To what extent is the "art" attributable to the "excess"? Can the same art be found elsewhere, without the excessive baggage? Is length or excess an illusory quality?
By what calculus is big and fat equivalent to "experimental"?
Excessive = the literary equivalent of upsizing. The value of books is measured by their weight or heft.
"I'll have a double quarter-pounder, please."
"Would you like fries with that? Perhaps you'd like to buy the annotations as well?"
Synechdoche is the illusion that the part is representative of the whole. How large does the part have to be to be representative?
"The closer you get, the less you see."
The Road of Excess: Enough! or Too Much!
What William Blake said:
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom...You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”
William Blake, "Proverbs of Hell"
* The Magnificent Seven
1. PROLOGUE: Thomas Pynchon - "Gravity’s Rainbow"
2. REDUNDANCY: Joseph Heller - "Something Happened"
3. RECURSION: William Gaddis - "J R"
4. REENACTMENT: Robert Coover - "The Public Burning"
5. REFORMULATION: Joseph McElroy - "Women and Men"
6. RESET: John Barth - "LETTERS"
7. EPILOGUE: Ursula Le Guin - "Always Coming Home"
Tom LeClair is a close reader of a text and a lucid writer about what he detects inside.
If you haven't been paying attention, it might therefore come as some surprise that I don't agree with all (or many) of his conclusions (or at least, his reasoning).
If you don't count GR coteries, the biggest advocates of white American literary maximalism are Tom LeClair and Steven Moore (whom LeClair thanks for reading the manuscript of this book). "The Art of Excess" effectively states LeClair's case for promoting seven examples of white American maximalism as masterpieces. He would have included at least one novel by Don DeLillo, if he hadn't already written about him in "In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel".
Space Oddity
I'd like to focus on LeClair's methodology in this review, rather than the books he hails (* all of which I've read and reviewed positively on the basis of other criteria).
LeClair more or less admits that he developed his theory of excess and then searched out books that supported it. His theory didn't derive from and respond to the books themselves. To that extent, his theory or paradigm is extraliterary:
"Over the last twenty years I have been gathering novels that responded to what I believed was a new paradigm, that understood the large world of information, and that transformed both conventional forms and the reader."
To appreciate LeClair's case, you need to understand how he uses two words, one of which ("Excess") appears in the title, and the other of which ("Mastery") appears in the subtitle, "Mastery in Contemporary Fiction".
"Excess"
The second time you encounter this word in the book is the following epigraph from William Blake:
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
Ultimately, it comes down to inference what Blake meant by "excess". However, I doubt whether he had maximalist novels in mind. More likely, it refers to exceeding limits or boundaries that might otherwise have obstructed the development of wisdom. Sometimes, you have to oppose the status quo in order to discover the truth.
So it didn't take long to differ from LeClair.
"Mastery"
LeClair describes each of the seven novels he analyses in this book as "masterpieces". He thinks they warrant this description, because they display mastery.
Once again, one of the two epigraphs is from Don DeLillo:
"It is essential to master the data."
Out of context, the meaning of this sentence is equally contentious. Does it just mean that you have to be on top of what you are talking about (i.e., the information or knowledge that justifies your opinion or assertion). Or does it mean that, if you don't master information in our society, it will master you?
Any Major Dude Will Tell You
Mastery in this context relates to something that might exercise power, force, authority or control over us, that might subject us (from a social or political point of view).
LeClair infers from DeLillo's novels that "fiction should contest power."
If we're able to master it (e.g., through literature), then literature enables us to balance power and overcome our subjection. There is an assumption that literary balance translates into social and political balance. Reading can, apparently, achieve political action.
Information and Systems Theory
DeLillo refers to data, while LeClair refers to information, which allows him to utilise aspects of information or systems theory.
While LeClair believes that his approach serves "no eccentric or masked ideology", it is clearly motivated by political, economic, technological and ecological considerations. What started as literary criticism came to be cultural criticism:
"I am ultimately concerned with survival value - not necessarily books that will last the ages, but books that know and show what we as people and a species need to understand in order to have a future."
The Art of Excess
LeClair says the art of excess has a double meaning:
"In a culture that seems to exceed any power that art might impose on it, the authors I treat in this book gather, represent and reform the time's excesses into fictions that exceed the time's literary conventions and thereby master the time, the methods of fiction, and the reader.
"The art of excess is ultimately an art of balance, measuring and counterbalancing cultural power."
Masterworks
LeClair concludes that "American literature, no less than American life as a whole, is a field of contestation...
"In this environment of cultural mastery, I believe, only extraordinarily knowledgeable and skilled works of literature - masterworks - have the kind of power that asserts the efficacy of literature and leads readers to contest and possibly reformulate the mastering systems they live within."
Massive Novels ("Churnin' Out That Boogaloo")
To be effective, LeClair believes that novels must be large:
"The massive novel - if profoundly informed, inventively crafted, and cunningly rhetorical - can have greater cultural significance, more authority to contest the powers in which literature exists.
"...Massiveness is related to mastery. The novels are themselves long, large and dense. Most have [the] range of reference, artistic sophistication, and desire for profound effect.
"Although systems novels are long, their excess is first a function of the density of information produced by both selection and organisation and, second, a function of their length, proportions and scale. The systems novelists' artistic mastery lies in their use of what initially seems to be noise or excess...
"The art of excess ultimately demonstrates that what the reader initially perceives as excess is actually functional in several ways, essential if the novel is to participate in the new systems paradigm and if it is to represent the excesses of the mastering systems in which the text exists."
LeClair assumes (but doesn't reveal how) literature can translate into political action or efficacy. He doesn't acknowledge that most of the aficianadoes of maximalism remain happily ensconced in the world of fiction and related non-fiction. They have no time or inclination for anything else. Maximalism is an extension of the solipsistic state. Certainly, there is no suggestion that the targets of maximalism read this stuff and are deterred or reformed by it.
The Truth about Synecdoche
LeClair makes some admissions that deserve more attention than they have received:
"To be precise, no writer masters the world or even information. What he masters is synecdoche, the illusion that the parts he has selected, structured, proportioned, and scaled are appropriate substitutes in context for what could be a much larger set of parts, which in turn would only suggest, not exhaust, the whole of discourse."
The question remains: how massive does the synecdoche need to be to be representative of the target reality?
The Truth about Systems Novels
About systems novels, LeClair admits, "They sometimes exceed even my patience for detail, pattern, and magnitude. They often sacrifice the pleasures of literary prose..., to record the noise of various extraliterary systems. Sometimes the novelists' mastery seems to require a reader's masochism."
It's arguable therefore that in a world that's already plagued by an excess of information, the last thing we need is yet more excess supplied by the art of excess.
Perhaps, too, as LeClair himself speculates, "an elephant is not [necessarily] better than a butterfly."
SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)
PREVIOUSLY:
Critical Feedback
"Every system needs its negative feedback."
Tom LeClair, page 205
Esoteric Readings
"Esoteric readings are usually private obsessions imposed on a text..."
Steven Moore
Hypothesis
Two or three theories in search of seven applications or proofs.
Past Tense
"In 1989, I published a book called The Art of Excess that praised long, diffuse, and difficult books by Pynchon, Gaddis, McElroy, Coover and others. Like their excessive novels, Phone is radically deformed and influenced by contemporary science. Although not quite as old as Dr. Busner, I have reached with Phone a limit case of the Art of Excess. Self has said that as a literary novelist at the end of a tradition he wants to go out with a bang, but the intentional excesses of Phone don’t blast this reader into some new paradigm as those earlier American novels did, don’t conduct me into a profound psychogeographical mapping of contemporary life. Maybe it’s because I don’t own a smart phone. I doubt younger readers who do will have the patience for Self’s 617 pages."
http://www.full-stop.net/2018/02/13/r...
Inflated Novels: Make America Gigantic Again
"I have frequently noticed that the Americans, who generally treat of business in clear, plain language, devoid of all ornament and so extremely simple as to be often coarse, are apt to become inflated as soon as they attempt a more poetical diction.
"They then vent their pomposity from one end of a harangue to the other; and to hear them lavish imagery on every occasion, one might fancy that they never spoke of anything with simplicity....
"The authors...perpetually inflate their imaginations, and, expanding them beyond all bounds, they not infrequently abandon the great in order to reach the gigantic."
Alexis deTocqueville
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/det...
Fragments
In search of a literary movement to front, the self-proclaimed avant garde became enamoured of excess. As if to experiment is merely to write without restraint or care or respect for time or space.
In the literature of excess, where little is novel (but novels are large), the measure is volume. Quantity is transformed into quality. More means better. All is girth. Which is ironic, because the meaning of the word "volume" in terms of "bulk, mass, quantity" derives from the meaning "the bulk or size of a book":
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?t...
The literature of excess reduces fiction to data and information which can be measured in quantitative terms. However, there is a point where a plethora of information creates an implosion of meaning.
Ironically, LeClair seeks to evaluate this literature on terms other than of excess, as if, coincidentally or fortuitously, it has other merits.
To what extent is the "art" attributable to the "excess"? Can the same art be found elsewhere, without the excessive baggage? Is length or excess an illusory quality?
By what calculus is big and fat equivalent to "experimental"?
Excessive = the literary equivalent of upsizing. The value of books is measured by their weight or heft.
"I'll have a double quarter-pounder, please."
"Would you like fries with that? Perhaps you'd like to buy the annotations as well?"
Synechdoche is the illusion that the part is representative of the whole. How large does the part have to be to be representative?
"The closer you get, the less you see."
The Road of Excess: Enough! or Too Much!
What William Blake said:
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom...You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”
William Blake, "Proverbs of Hell"
* The Magnificent Seven
1. PROLOGUE: Thomas Pynchon - "Gravity’s Rainbow"
2. REDUNDANCY: Joseph Heller - "Something Happened"
3. RECURSION: William Gaddis - "J R"
4. REENACTMENT: Robert Coover - "The Public Burning"
5. REFORMULATION: Joseph McElroy - "Women and Men"
6. RESET: John Barth - "LETTERS"
7. EPILOGUE: Ursula Le Guin - "Always Coming Home"
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Reading Progress
January 3, 2014
– Shelved as:
to-read
January 3, 2014
– Shelved
January 3, 2014
– Shelved as:
cul-poli-phil-art
January 3, 2014
– Shelved as:
lit-krit
January 3, 2014
– Shelved as:
mcelroy
March 9, 2017
– Shelved as:
le-clair
June 26, 2017
– Shelved as:
heller
December 31, 2018
–
Started Reading
December 31, 2018
–
Finished Reading
January 3, 2019
– Shelved as:
reviews
January 3, 2019
– Shelved as:
read-2018
January 3, 2019
– Shelved as:
reviews-3-stars
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Interesting that the two authors Leclair has eviscerated in his online reviews have been women: Lydia Davis and Cynthia Sweeney.Here's how he eviscerates Lydia Davis:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/...
"Lydia Davis’s work is to literature what hacks are to judges and what content providers are to imaginative artists."
"...until I get more from Davis I’ll keep thinking of myself as Stevens’s “Snow Man,” who sees ''Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
How to bury a book (GR-style):"I don't know anything about this guy (I've never read him or nothing) except that he's an Extremely Popular And Successful Author,..therefore not worthy of your attention."
Interesting that the two authors Leclair has eviscerated in his online reviews have been women: Lydia Davis and Cynthia Sweeney.Barnes and Noble seems to have removed the Lydia Davis review. I'm not surprised.
Found:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/...
Q What can be added once all is said?
A Ask the coterie and be blessed with dissertations.
Ian asked: "By what calculus is big and fat equvalent to "experimental"?"
Euclidian I think; like calculating when Gass' rotating belly will come in contact with his speeding mouth.
A Ask the coterie and be blessed with dissertations.
Ian asked: "By what calculus is big and fat equvalent to "experimental"?"
Euclidian I think; like calculating when Gass' rotating belly will come in contact with his speeding mouth.
SamSung wrote: "Q What can be added once all is said? A Ask the coterie and be blessed with dissertations.
Ian asked: "By what calculus is big and fat equvalent to "experimental"?"
Euclidian I think..."
The dissertations are included within the systems novels, like wall labels.
Apparently this book served as a primer for DFW. :)
Robert wrote: "Apparently this book served as a primer for DFW. :)"Surely we'd be forgiven for thinking so. (Did you mean "In the Loop", DFW's heavily annotated copy of which is in the Harry Ransom Centre archive?) LeClair has said "Infinite Jest makes 1996 the “Year of the Whopper”".
Ron wrote: "Great review. Makes me think I should read it, but I have little tolerance for most writers of such novels (Pynchon and DFW being the exceptions). Barth and Gaddis are probably the worst writers o..."
Don't take my word for it. Read it yourself. It'll reinforce your views about Barth, in particular.
I enjoyed Gaddis, but I think I've only read two of his novels so far.
A short experiment is always better than a long experiment, especially a long experiment that is a repeat of someone else's experiment.
Vollmann is a poor man's Mailer.
The "systems novel" is "a whole big fat hoax".
Commenting on Kerouac, Capote said; "That's not writing. That's typing.' Truman should be more remembered than he is.
http://www.full-stop.net/2015/05/19/i...