Feuds welcome. The Christian-artists-versus-Christian-audience is definitely the thorniest, saddest feud that has been borne out over history. But I don’t know if it should be avoided, since I don’t think that Christians should create only house-trained work. Certainly, we need to be in the church and love her, but we shouldn’t be only its stooge. Untamed Christian vision for artists, the way Christ and His apostles modeled?
And in the spirit of feuds, as generously as we talk to each other, I can’t disagree more with the example of Wolfe as a propulsive force in American letters. Your mention of Pynchon is instructive: his work transformed fiction without the resort to publicity and gossip-mongering. Wolfe (from both Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons) is too tabloid-ish and overwrought in his fiction - too much like the crudest instincts of the American public, too thrilled to give us heaping helpings of what we want at our worst. As to the feud, which is enthralling the way gossip can be: he didn’t challenge the leading lights of the literary world (Pynchon, Roth, Ishiguro, Heaney, DeLillo, to name several other male writers alive and famous at the time), he only challenged those who had slighted him. Irving and Mailer were hardly the best of their generation. That to me seems more like score-settling and bickering than advancement.
Wolfe . . . is gonna be Wolfe, that's all I can say. It is notable that he has not, as far as I know, been cited by any writers in the past few decades as being an influence. Perhaps this is because he was in fact just settling scores and everyone knew it. I do believe he expresses several important points in "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," and his general philosophical framework is worth sustained study. But he does come across in "My Three Stooges" as rather snarky. However, that's very on-brand for him. He is one of the authors of whom I would most love to have been able to see their unguarded self; Tom credited his wife Sheila as being a vital resource for his journalistic endeavors—what did their discussions look like, over coffee in the morning or after climbing into bed before the lights were turned off?
Jonathan Franzen published a long critical-theoretical piece in Harper's in 1996 which tackled some of Wolfe's points, but I haven't read it yet.
That Wolfe did Wolfe (and that we can still say it now) is a testament to his work, his persona, and his voice, I have to admit. But I have to measure his fiction by its offerings: I just find his novels insufferably inexact and anti-implication at all turns, more puffery than actual passion in the way Dostoevsky managed in his own exclamations, pulp-framings, and thriller literature.
I'm curious, since I'm not as familiar with his sense of literary theory: which points from "Billion-Footed Beast" would you study further?
His claims that literature should encompass the whole panoply of the American lived experience and not just the interests of the academic / literary world. Of course, he was cherrypicking his examples and counter-examples. I know you're not fond of Franzen but I found "Crossroads" exemplary in this mode; that book almost reads like Wolfe on sedatives, or Wolfe after a long country vacation once the Manhattan has leached out of his system.
Also (and I can't remember if he mentioned this in "Billion-Footed Beast" or not) I like his approach of writing serially, like Dickens, Dostoevsky, etc. used to do. That's how he originally published "The Bonfire of the Vanities"—serial installments in Rolling Stone magazine over the course of two years. I'd be interested in knowing if anyone has done a similar experiment since then. Substack doesn't count because on your own publication you can always just dispense with the deadlines.
Okay, I'm with Wolfe on "the whole panoply of the American lived experience" rendered as literature and treated with critical seriousness. But how does this compare with similar broadsides against the literary establishment becoming too narrow and precious? I ask because such criticisms (which we've read in the last 5-10 years) tend to underrate or mask the work happening with or without critical attention, which ironically implies that the critics themselves are more important than the fuller corpus of novels usually argued for. (Also, curious note about Franzen! I expect that's a sibling inheritance of realist novelists.)
Serialization, sure. I've not been the proponent nor practitioner of that style like a few other voices on Substack (Elle Griffin and S.E. Reid), since it doesn't quite serve me as a reader nor tickle me as a writer. It is a good economic model for writers though, since it pays for multiple publications under the same work.
Where does John Updike fit into this discussion? The Rabbit quartet is certainly “American lived experience” (from a certain perspective) made literature.
I'd place him beside Mailer and Irving: in the New Yorker-gallery group of novelists deemed Important in New York (the ones Wolfe opposed), but not the best of his generation. Like Mailer and Irving, Updike had attacked Wolfe as unserious. And so when he responded in kind, Wolfe was playing an elite-status game garbed in literary criticism (as were his opponents).
For the Rabbit quartet, I wonder if that's the American slice of life Wolfe would have favored. Middle-class despair in fiction had been a well-trod area of literary culture before and throughout the quartet (see Revolutionary Road alongside the first novel and the stories of John Cheever alongside its sequels — for the record, I love Cheever's stories). Those were the stories considered serious in their mannered, muted "lives of desperation," compared to the more raucous and full-scope societal novels Wolfe himself wrote (in the Dickensian-Twainish vein, which was a sticking point in this feud).
It is a stain on our current literary landscape, an utter embarrassment; it makes us all sick to our stomachs, and some of us have even abandoned literacy as a result of reading their sordid squabblings.
ugh so sad if only Sowden wasn't a part of it. Dobrenko is a hero and winner and probably the susan sontag of his time but Sowden is a stain on the t-shirt of literary life
I think debates about aesthetics are vitally important. Unfortunately, they always seem to devolve into "lol there are no rules in art I can do whatever I want thx". Nobody wants to engage seriously with foundational issues. For example --
I couldn't possibly love this more: Paglia on Sontag, "she's dull, she's boring, she knows nothing about contemporary culture, she's not a very good writer anymore,"
Also just generally a good post about types of literary feuds
Feuds welcome. The Christian-artists-versus-Christian-audience is definitely the thorniest, saddest feud that has been borne out over history. But I don’t know if it should be avoided, since I don’t think that Christians should create only house-trained work. Certainly, we need to be in the church and love her, but we shouldn’t be only its stooge. Untamed Christian vision for artists, the way Christ and His apostles modeled?
And in the spirit of feuds, as generously as we talk to each other, I can’t disagree more with the example of Wolfe as a propulsive force in American letters. Your mention of Pynchon is instructive: his work transformed fiction without the resort to publicity and gossip-mongering. Wolfe (from both Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons) is too tabloid-ish and overwrought in his fiction - too much like the crudest instincts of the American public, too thrilled to give us heaping helpings of what we want at our worst. As to the feud, which is enthralling the way gossip can be: he didn’t challenge the leading lights of the literary world (Pynchon, Roth, Ishiguro, Heaney, DeLillo, to name several other male writers alive and famous at the time), he only challenged those who had slighted him. Irving and Mailer were hardly the best of their generation. That to me seems more like score-settling and bickering than advancement.
100% agree on the first paragraph.
Wolfe . . . is gonna be Wolfe, that's all I can say. It is notable that he has not, as far as I know, been cited by any writers in the past few decades as being an influence. Perhaps this is because he was in fact just settling scores and everyone knew it. I do believe he expresses several important points in "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," and his general philosophical framework is worth sustained study. But he does come across in "My Three Stooges" as rather snarky. However, that's very on-brand for him. He is one of the authors of whom I would most love to have been able to see their unguarded self; Tom credited his wife Sheila as being a vital resource for his journalistic endeavors—what did their discussions look like, over coffee in the morning or after climbing into bed before the lights were turned off?
Jonathan Franzen published a long critical-theoretical piece in Harper's in 1996 which tackled some of Wolfe's points, but I haven't read it yet.
That Wolfe did Wolfe (and that we can still say it now) is a testament to his work, his persona, and his voice, I have to admit. But I have to measure his fiction by its offerings: I just find his novels insufferably inexact and anti-implication at all turns, more puffery than actual passion in the way Dostoevsky managed in his own exclamations, pulp-framings, and thriller literature.
I'm curious, since I'm not as familiar with his sense of literary theory: which points from "Billion-Footed Beast" would you study further?
His claims that literature should encompass the whole panoply of the American lived experience and not just the interests of the academic / literary world. Of course, he was cherrypicking his examples and counter-examples. I know you're not fond of Franzen but I found "Crossroads" exemplary in this mode; that book almost reads like Wolfe on sedatives, or Wolfe after a long country vacation once the Manhattan has leached out of his system.
Also (and I can't remember if he mentioned this in "Billion-Footed Beast" or not) I like his approach of writing serially, like Dickens, Dostoevsky, etc. used to do. That's how he originally published "The Bonfire of the Vanities"—serial installments in Rolling Stone magazine over the course of two years. I'd be interested in knowing if anyone has done a similar experiment since then. Substack doesn't count because on your own publication you can always just dispense with the deadlines.
Okay, I'm with Wolfe on "the whole panoply of the American lived experience" rendered as literature and treated with critical seriousness. But how does this compare with similar broadsides against the literary establishment becoming too narrow and precious? I ask because such criticisms (which we've read in the last 5-10 years) tend to underrate or mask the work happening with or without critical attention, which ironically implies that the critics themselves are more important than the fuller corpus of novels usually argued for. (Also, curious note about Franzen! I expect that's a sibling inheritance of realist novelists.)
Serialization, sure. I've not been the proponent nor practitioner of that style like a few other voices on Substack (Elle Griffin and S.E. Reid), since it doesn't quite serve me as a reader nor tickle me as a writer. It is a good economic model for writers though, since it pays for multiple publications under the same work.
Where does John Updike fit into this discussion? The Rabbit quartet is certainly “American lived experience” (from a certain perspective) made literature.
I'd place him beside Mailer and Irving: in the New Yorker-gallery group of novelists deemed Important in New York (the ones Wolfe opposed), but not the best of his generation. Like Mailer and Irving, Updike had attacked Wolfe as unserious. And so when he responded in kind, Wolfe was playing an elite-status game garbed in literary criticism (as were his opponents).
For the Rabbit quartet, I wonder if that's the American slice of life Wolfe would have favored. Middle-class despair in fiction had been a well-trod area of literary culture before and throughout the quartet (see Revolutionary Road alongside the first novel and the stories of John Cheever alongside its sequels — for the record, I love Cheever's stories). Those were the stories considered serious in their mannered, muted "lives of desperation," compared to the more raucous and full-scope societal novels Wolfe himself wrote (in the Dickensian-Twainish vein, which was a sticking point in this feud).
where dos the dobrenko v sowden feud fall here?
It is a stain on our current literary landscape, an utter embarrassment; it makes us all sick to our stomachs, and some of us have even abandoned literacy as a result of reading their sordid squabblings.
ugh so sad if only Sowden wasn't a part of it. Dobrenko is a hero and winner and probably the susan sontag of his time but Sowden is a stain on the t-shirt of literary life
I think debates about aesthetics are vitally important. Unfortunately, they always seem to devolve into "lol there are no rules in art I can do whatever I want thx". Nobody wants to engage seriously with foundational issues. For example --
https://fatrabbitiron.substack.com/p/be-prose
I couldn't possibly love this more: Paglia on Sontag, "she's dull, she's boring, she knows nothing about contemporary culture, she's not a very good writer anymore,"
Also just generally a good post about types of literary feuds
I suppose it has become a tradition, of sorts. Philosophers were always taking shots at each other too.