Abstract
In this chapter, Alexander Starre considers the narrative, paratextual, and commercial features of short literary works published in the 2010s by Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, Jenny Offill, and Julie Otsuka. Grounding his analysis in novelist Willa Cather’s early twentieth-century minimalist poetics, Starre suggests that small novels in today’s media ecology align the dual discourses of aesthetics and economics in such a way that material shortcomings (few pages, little content) are transformed into markers of artistic merit to be appreciated by literary connoisseurs. Through an innovative blend of narrative analysis and a material text-approach to book design and paratextuality, the chapter shows how the small American novel positions itself against its presumably “great” counterpart in the twenty-first-century novel network.
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Notes
- 1.
Cather herself had a sense for the economic calculations of bookmaking, as she hinted to her publisher Alfred Knopf that A Lost Lady due to its brevity might have to be published as part of a collection. Perhaps emboldened by Knopf’s willingness to publish very short texts as stand-alone books, Cather submitted the even shorter manuscript for My Mortal Enemy to Knopf in 1925. At below 20,000 words, the novel is only about half as long as A Lost Lady. The first edition, with wide margins and decorative graphic design elements clocked in at only 122 pages. My Mortal Enemy was the first book designed for Knopf by William Addison Dwiggins, a pioneering American typographer and book designer who coined the term “graphic design.” Dwiggins crafted all parts of the book—cover, type, and decorative headpieces—a practice that would in the ensuing years further solidify Knopf’s house style. Megan Benton writes, “Books published by Alfred Knopf, for example, were as admired for their striking design as for their literary merit. Knopf’s leading designer, W. A. Dwiggins, brought a deft art deco touch to the books’ covers and title pages that was undeniably modern, yet deeply humanistic in its calligraphic flair and use of old-style, serifed letterforms” (2009: 164). On Dwiggins’s work as a precursor of current book design, see Starre (2016). On the material and typographical form of Willa Cather’s books, see also Ronning (2014).
- 2.
In approaching this tension within the commodity-form of the book, I follow Ted Striphas’s critical perspective, which mediates between the base understanding of commodities as “generic wares” and the Marxist notion of commodity fetishism (Striphas 2011: 9). This essay aligns with Striphas’s interest in scenarios in which books are “treated either as generic stuff or as hallowed objects, as well as the labor it takes to transform books from the one into the other” (9). Whenever I use the word “commodity” in connection with books, I therefore allude to this tension.
- 3.
For a succinct account of the American magazine revolution and its impact on book publishing, see Ohmann (2009).
- 4.
As Ellen Gruber Garvey points out, these shifts in the market confronted publishers with some tough questions about the product they were selling: “Discussion of how and whether to advertise books turned on an unstated question: what is a book? Is it the physical object, whether saddle-stitched pamphlet or bound in expensive leather or cloth? Or is it the text in whatever form it takes? Is it the subject matter that the text ‘contains’? Is it the literary qualities that might be addressed in a review? Is it the entertainment or education that a book supplies? Or is it the emotions and sensations felt by the reader? And where did this prestige that publishers valued reside? Would it be destroyed if the book were marketed to the wrong people?” As Garvey further holds, for the new publishers of the early twentieth century, “the physical book became secondary to its impact” (2009: 171). Of course, literary works are to this day almost exclusively thought of as immaterial goods, rather than as material objects. Nevertheless, as I would argue, the discursive overlap we find in reviews and critical writings between the big- or smallness of a codex and the respective aesthetic qualities of the literary text remains as a recalcitrant trace of the material dimension inherent in medial communication.
- 5.
For McGurl, Hemingway’s prose and his public persona congealed into an “interconnected cluster of values attached to the authorship of fiction, including, most centrally, the value of craft as represented by the practice of multiple revision” (2009: 244). This value cluster, he holds, crucially informed the practice of many American postwar writers and stretches into the present.
- 6.
In his essay, Love emphatically endorses Cather’s minimalism as proof of her larger investment in modernist art: “What might be concluded from a close study of Cather’s craft is that she is an important and an unjustly neglected figure in the development of American literary prose style, that her critical essays on writing published in the early 1920s reveal a provocative sense of the need for new directions—modernist rather than realistic or naturalistic—[and] that her central theories of style anticipate and very closely resemble Hemingway’s theory of omission, or ‘iceberg’ principle, ….” (Love 1990: 296). With the two strongest denominators for Willa Cather’s style having been “regionalism” and “realism” for quite some time, readings that argued for her credentials as a modernist were long seen as eccentric. In light of numerous recent scholarly volumes and articles, the wholescale shift of repositioning Cather as a modernist is in full swing, validating Love’s claim.
- 7.
- 8.
To be precise, Johnson’s novel has 116 pages, DeLillo’s 117, and Otsuka’s 129. Offill’s is a thicker volume with 177 pages, but the layout of her book features the fewest words per page. In terms of the actual text, all four books are about the same length (between 30,000 and 40,000 words). The list prices of the hardcover editions are between $18 (Johnson) and $24 (DeLillo).
- 9.
This is as good a place as any for a brief theoretical interlude: the reader will note that in this paragraph as in other parts of the essay the printed book appears as the acting subject in individual sentences. This is more than a mere stylistic choice. As I have outlined at greater length elsewhere (2015: 28–66), literary scholarship has long neglected the medial form of texts as extrinsic to its disciplinary domain. If we wish to understand the function of the printed book in what this volume’s Introduction calls the “novel-network,” we must be willing to grant the book agency within the social process of communication. This entails a move away from those critical perspectives that seek to locate agency in one determining domain, such as the author’s intention, the economics of the publishing business, the social prestige of readers, or the artwork’s aesthetics. All of these may have agency in a specific scenario, but they do not preclude or explain the agency of the physical book as a literary artifact. To better grasp the actor-network that connects authors, texts, and readers, the aesthetic agency of the material codex with its typographic and visual elements should not be negated outright through terms like embellishment, gimmick, or decoration. The printed book can be seen as a form in Caroline Levine’s sense (2015), i.e., an artifact whose constraints and affordances actively shape the social contexts it enters. Aside from Levine’s work as discussed in the Introduction, some of the most cogent methodological impulses for doing network analysis in literary studies can be found in Rita Felski’s recent writings on Bruno Latour, such as her essay “Latour and Literary Studies” (2015).
- 10.
In Metamedia (2015), I explore a number of literary works published after 2000, all of which share an unprecedented degree of bibliographic reflexivity. Supplementing postmodernist metafiction with an artistic embrace of the book medium, novelists Mark Z. Danielewski, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers and others helped to shape a form of narrative I have proposed to call metamedial. In essence, metamedial narrative is context sensitive: its discursive content knows about its medial frame and freely communicates about this. As such, House of Leaves, the prototypical book fiction of the past decade, openly reflects on its own existence as a printed-and-bound codex.
- 11.
See the essays in Schaefer and Starre (2019), which map out a critical reading practice for contemporary literature at the intersection of American and comparative literary studies, book studies, and media studies.
- 12.
This was already true for the period between the Civil War and the World War I, when the idea of the great American novel first received attention in newspapers and magazines. In his study, based on his extensive review of these highly impressionistic and dispersed debates, Buell contends that size mattered to the potential for “greatness”: “To begin with negatives, a GAN cannot be tiny. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the shortest work ever seriously proposed” (Buell 2016: 29).
- 13.
For a suggestive media-ecological account of the changing cultural status of big books in Anglophone publishing with a specific focus on the trope of “monumentality,” see van de Ven (2019).
- 14.
From a media historical perspective, there is a larger argument to be made that short forms of communication, while long existing in poetry and other artistic genres like the aphorism, have drastically risen in importance in the digital era. See the chapters in Gamper and Mayer (2017) for an expansive overview of the artistic and social functions of brevity from the early modern period to today.
- 15.
Reclam ostensibly puts form before content in its strict constraint that each book in this series be exactly one hundred pages in length (which in itself has an economic advantage, as it allows for exact print production planning before authors have even submitted manuscripts). One may wonder, in the shade of this footnote, when exactly a book qualifies as short while still being a proper book. In 1950, a UNESCO conference somewhat arbitrarily—given sizing and layout varieties—held that a book was a “non-periodical literary publication containing 49 or more pages, not counting the covers” (qtd. in Haslam 2006: 9). Given the propensity for setting standards based on Western numerical systems, this clustering around major numbers—fifty in this case—makes a certain amount of sense. Based on the book series reviewed above, shortness in books today appears to denote volumes that are at least a hundred pages long but shorter than two hundred. Reclam’s decision to hit the hundred-page mark makes intuitive sense. What is more, the individual novels discussed here, from Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy to the contemporary offerings by Otsuka, Offill, DeLillo, and Johnson have all been formatted with ample margins and line spacing so as to surpass this mark.
- 16.
While there has been ample debate about the art form of the novella—especially in German literary history—the terms novelette, novella, and novel are nowadays also used to distinguish pieces of fiction by mere word count. There are no exact denominations, but derived from various online sources one can approximate that the territory of the short story ends at about 8,000 words with the novella stretching between 20,000 and 40,000 words, the intervening space made up by the novelette and anything beyond qualifying as a proper novel.
- 17.
- 18.
Through the novel itself, Hallberg shows that he is aware of these framings. Among his large cast of characters, we find the struggling young novelist Mercer Goodman. On the very first pages, the reader learns that Mercer had moved to New York due to “his searing ambition to write the Great American Novel” (Hallberg 2015: 5). Despite this ironic gesture, the novel’s promotional paratexts—on the publisher’s website as well as in the numerous blurbs included in the paperback edition—use the phrase “great American novel” no less than three times in a completely unironic manner.
- 19.
For one widely discussed intervention in this debate, see David Mikics provocative book Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (2013). Incidentally, Mikics comments on Willa Cather in one of his short readings of major American novels, calling her spare prose style “probably the most beautiful in American letters” (2013: 212).
- 20.
For an overview of the critical literature regarding DeLillo’s late phase as well as a perceptive reading of Point Omega’s play with time and space, see Bieger (2017).
- 21.
The longer passage of this review reads: “Drawing on extensive research and profoundly identifying with her characters, Otsuka crafts an intricately detailed folding screen depicting nearly five decades of change as the women painstakingly build meaningful lives, only to lose everything after Pearl Harbor. This lyrically distilled and caustically ironic story of exile, effort, and hate is entrancing, appalling, and heartbreakingly beautiful” (Seaman 2011: 32).
- 22.
As explored in his seminal book The Textual Condition, McGann draws a critical distinction between the “linguistic codes” of literary works, i.e., their textual content, and the “bibliographical codes” that determine the visual and material appearance of the printed codex form.
- 23.
One could envision a large-scale empirical study of the production and reception contexts of small novels, for example modeled on Clayton Childress’s integrative sociology of literature (2017), which would pair profitably with the analytical approach presented here.
- 24.
On the shifting position of self-described literary fiction in the contemporary entertainment marketplace, see Collins (2010).
- 25.
In his review of Train Dreams in the New York Times, the novelist Anthony Doerr stresses the crucial role that book publication still plays in the digital age. Noting that many writers, college professors, and students who have read Johnson’s work were not aware of the short story “Train Dreams,” Doerr writes: “So it is with a heaping cup of pleasure, and a tablespoon of reluctance, that I tell you this little novella is finally its own book, with its own cover, as easy to find as a national park. Someone has finally put up a sign: Here Is Something Worth Seeing.” In this metaphorical rendering of a signpost, the material book again works like a well-designed nudge. It physically elevates the short text to the status of a stand-alone work, thus asking readers to focus their attention instead of—as might happen in the pages of the Paris Review—straying to other texts close by.
- 26.
This pars pro toto figuration—an individual life story representing the state of the nation—is a staple of the Great American Novel-discourse as analyzed by Buell: “It’s always seemed permissible for the GAN to center on an individual figure, like Huckleberry Finn, but with the proviso that he or she should be in some sense socially representative. Relatedly, a GAN must not limit itself to rehearsing particular lives and events but provide at least implicitly some consequential reflection on U.S. history and culture and its defining institutions—democracy, individualism, capitalism, sectionalism, immigration, expansionism, signature landscapes, demographic mix” (Buell 2016: 29).
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Starre, A. (2020). Reading the Small American Novel: The Aesthetic Agency of the Short Book in the Modern Literary Marketplace. In: Lanzendörfer, T., Norrick-Rühl, C. (eds) The Novel as Network. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_17
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