Contemporary Fiction and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination

There is a lovely moment in Lionel Trilling's "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," the opening chapter of Beyond Culture (1965), in which Trilling comments on the ironies of teaching European modernism to American undergraduates. "I ask them to look into the Abyss," he writes, "and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: 'Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes materially to your being whole, or well-rounded, men.'"¹ I couldn't help thinking of Trilling's amusing meditations on the liabilities of teaching modern literature when I read Kathryn Hume's interesting study, Aggressive Fictions: Reading the Contemporary American Novel, billed by its publisher, Cornell University Press, as "a commonsense guide for the average reader who wants to better understand and appreciate books that might otherwise be difficult to enjoy." The assumptions underlying this seemingly admirable objective—that there is an "average reader" in need of such common sense; that the contemporary novels under consideration are intended to be understood and appreciated—reveal the degree to which our pedagogical mandate as literary scholars continues to be hemmed in by the limits of the liberal imagination. Adapting the language of John Durham Peters's important study, Courting the Abyss, we can understand Hume as belonging to the school of "abyss-redeemers," those who "believe that (vicariously) fathoming hell's lessons justifies the risk of the descent and trust that enlightenment will follow their forays into darkness visible."² Hume insists that contemporary American literature be redemptive, and if it's difficult for many readers to find redemption in much of the literature that she discusses, she is all the more determined to redeem it for them.

And Aggressive Fictions is for "them"—those "intelligent but nonprofessional readers who come with expectations based on more conventional fiction"—not "us," those academics who, presumably, have already been trained to derive pleasure from "difficult" literature (x). A medievalist by training, Hume bills herself as a "professional amateur" (xi) ideally positioned to bridge the gap between these readerships, to teach the average reader how to enjoy fiction which seems intended only to provoke "frustration, revulsion, irritation, discomfiture, and anxiety" (9). Hume's basic advice for these readers, handily summarized on the flyleaf, is to "learn to relax and go with the flow," in which case "the result may well be exhilaration rather than revulsion." The possibility that revulsion, pure and simple, may be the irredeemable objective of some contemporary fiction is apparently an unacceptable conclusion.

Aggressive Fictions is organized somewhat impressionistically into categories of writerly aggression, the "kinds of attack" various contemporary novels stage against their readers. The first, "Narrative Speed," is principally formal and consists of fictions that "deliberately feed us inadequate information for our interpretive techniques to work" (10). The remaining four chapters—"Modalities of Complaint," "Conjugations of the Grotesque," "Violence," and "Attacking the Reader's Ontological Assumptions"—are more thematic, organized around types of content presumably designed to shock the average reader. These "commonsense" categories generate some odd bedfellows—Philip Roth, Alice Walker, and Andrea Dworkin all appear as examples of "complaint," for example—raising questions about the very process of selection and categorization that Hume's method prevents her from directly scrutinizing.

Each chapter in turn is further subdivided into categories which feel both usefully pragmatic and suspiciously paratactic. Thus the chapter on speed is split up into sections on "multiplying elements" (Ishmael Reed and Robert Coover are principal examples), "subtracting expected material" (Fran Ross, joined by Douglas Coupland), and "rendering actions fantastic" (Coover again, now with William S. Burroughs and Mark Leyner); the effects of these techniques, according to Hume, are "satire, mystery, protest, exaltation, revolution" (17). She concedes that these categories can feel arbitrary...