Walker Zupp & Olga Belsky
It’s impossible to talk about criticism without talking about interpretation. Before I do that, however, I would like to talk about logical inference. This is, quite simply, the drawing of a conclusion; the engine for truth. There are several theories of truth. The most relevant one here is the correspondence theory. The correspondence theory of truth posits that a proposition is true when it corresponds to a fact. And what is a novel, if not a series of propositions? You can’t deny that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s descriptions of cars, for example, correspond to automobiles in the real world; and the fact that automobiles exist. If we bear in mind, Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance, moreover, it doesn’t matter if one car is red and another car is blue; or if one car is a Ford and the other is a Chevrolet. Fitzgerald’s descriptions (i.e., propositions) of automobiles correspond to those in the real world, for those are the facts which we call automobiles, or cars.
How can I say that logical inference breaks down on a literary level? Am I asking the impossible? I have demonstrated, via the correspondence theory of truth, that the things propositions describe correspond to those things which are described; they exist in the real world and can be committed, via writing, to print.
What does the word ‘fiction’ correspond to? If the logic of correspondence is anything to go by, it must correspond to something. If this were a perfect world, I would say that ‘fiction’ corresponded to anything that was not non-fiction; even if non-fiction, in light of the correspondence theory, becomes redundant, like snow which is non-snow, and water which is non-water. We can quickly see a problem bubbling to the surface here; it’s obscuring our goggles and making us nervous.
Propositions are meant to correspond to the facts. But we cannot simultaneously believe that writing corresponds to the real world and that fiction, notwithstanding, is a fact. It’s useless to ask what fiction means; rather, we should ask what its use is. What is the use of the word ‘fiction’? We use it often enough in sentences, like, ‘Stephen King is the best writer of fiction.’ By using the word ‘fiction’ in this case we demarcate it from what we call ‘non-fiction’; and we use the word ‘non-fiction’, equally, to demarcate it from what we call ‘fiction’. What is the use of this kind of demarcation? Is it really impossible to utter a proposition in which I compare a fiction-writer to a non-fiction-writer?
‘Aimee Parkinson is as talented a writer as Naomi Klein,’ for example. There will doubtless be people who disagree with this; who don’t think that Aimee Parkinson is as talented a fiction-writer as Naomi Klein is a non-fiction-writer. Does my proposition cease to correspond to the real world, then? When do my tides of subjectivity begin to eat away at my logical shores? The fact remains that I describe the facts: Aimee Parkinson exists, and so does Naomi Klein.
The nature of talent, however, is like one car being blue and the other car being red. There is a family of talented, and one person’s talented may be another person’s un-talented. This is where logical inference begins to break down on a literary level. It’s more likely the case that my tides of interpretation eat away at my shores of correspondence. That is, when we disregard a proposition’s correspondence to the real world, we quickly abandon use in favour of meaning. Interpretation is a process of mystification; it runs the risk of mystification and is fed by mystification. In mystifying the proposition; in mystifying the text, we mystify ourselves and lose sight of our shores of correspondence.
This brings me onto the topic of criticism. Again, what is its use? We use criticism to see the merits and faults of an artistic or literary work. If this were a perfect world, I would say that criticism contains propositions whose contents correspond to whatever is being critiqued. If two separate propositions in two separate critiques, however, disagree about the same thing can I claim that both propositions are in fact describing the same thing? Am I asking the impossible?
Imagine two people, one with sunglasses and the other with nothing, being told to look at the same painting. The one with sunglasses says the colours are dull and the picture is dark. The other one, however, says the colours are vibrant and the picture is bright. On what grounds can I claim their propositions correspond to the same picture? I could claim that there is but one picture; but I could also claim that whilst there is one corresponding picture, there are two interpretations. Are two interpretations of one picture, however, equal to two pictures? This is mystification and the birth of criticism. The two people know they’re looking at the same picture—yet their interpretations are so radically different it would be more logical if there were, in fact, two pictures which corresponded to two separate propositions.
If criticism does not return us to whatever is being critiqued, then instead it generates something new and without correspondent form. It becomes that elusive ‘secondary text’ and goes beyond correspondence. That is the atomic weight and political value of criticism and it comes from logical inference breaking down on a literary level. A thing is what it is—unless critiqued.
This leads me onto the topic of Olga Belsky which, in an essay about criticism, is not something which can be avoided. Belsky recently agreed to review Aimee Parkinson’s newest novel, Sister Séance, for an anonymous publication. The publication’s guidelines desired either ‘thoughtfully positive’ or ‘constructively critical’ reviews. Seeing as she didn’t particularly like the novel, Belsky opted for the constructively critical approach. After delivering her review, she was directed to the guidelines and told there was nothing in her review which would encourage people to read the book. They would not, therefore, be publishing the review and offered those words of banal wisdom which inevitably accompany any literary rejection. Belsky had, by this point, dedicated over ten hours to her review and was characteristically furious. Bearing in mind the necessary mystification of criticism, Olga Belsky’s review can be found below:
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‘Aimee Parkinson’s historical novel, Sister Séance, is set in 1865. This was a year in American history which saw the President assassinated, the Secretary of State attacked in his home; and Cornell University, the Ku Klux Klan and the U.S. Secret Service founded. Despite this terrifying year providing the historical geography for Parkinson’s novel, the book is curiously disengaged from its historical background and, by way of comparison, often resembles a performance lacking drama.
Sister Séance, first and foremost, is a book about women. Despite being overridden—or, overwritten—by the other seventeen characters, our main character is Viv Hayden, an aspiring photographer who is sent by the abolitionist, Reverend Beecher, to the Turner Family’s Twin Oaks Plantation. There, her task is to photograph the ongoing slavery which, in light of the Civil War’s conclusion, is officially illegal. In a muddled series of impenetrable happenings, one of which features a harsh, clitoris-mutilation scene, Viv ends up at Ruby Turner’s Halloween Party. Turner’s maid is an Irish girl named Kora who, allegedly, performs gymnastics in the garden. Viv’s three sisters, Aria, Belle and Grace, are guests; so too is their uncle, Michael Hayden. Florence Green presents another example of mutilation: she underwent an ovariotomy in an effort to relieve her of “female symptoms her father thought were affecting her vision”. Florence wonders why nurturing doesn’t “inspire more women to become doctors”; she believes a female doctor would never have viewed her body as an “experimental plaything”. Whether this naïveté is limited to her character, or symptomatic of the novel as a whole, is difficult to say.
Hattie Grove, meanwhile, has become pregnant with and lost the child of Major General Sampson Redlaw’s friend; she then marries Major General Sampson Redlaw; and subsequently finds kinship with Willa, probably because Willa, like the Major General, has one hand. Willa escapes the Twin Oaks Plantation after falling in love with Godfrey who, as we have seen, has fallen in love with Viv Hayden and fathered her child. After escaping the plantation, she is as “homeless as she [is] free”; a point of view I find difficult, given the hypocrisy of the Reconstruction Era, to believe.
The owner of the boardinghouse is, of course, Ruby Turner: a woman who, given the male casualties sustained during the Civil War, has turned to matchmaking. Her friends are “skeptical” of this. After all, the connection between “marriage and slavery” means that a “matchmaker is no better than a trader of enslaved women” (The master-slave dialectic between men and women, in this instance, overrides the one concerning race.)
Finally, there are the “Sisters of Séance”. Maggie and Valerie Usherwood were taught to be mediums by Henry Turner’s estranged sister, Clara. They oversee the “dumb supper” at Ruby’s Halloween Party and appear to be the source of various supernatural beasties. They are the counterpoint to Viv Hayden’s photography; they record, develop and expose “whatever evil images” they see “inside their audience”.
This leads me onto the topic of race which, in an historical novel set in 1865, is not something which can be avoided. It is no secret that certain parties merely adapted slavery during the Reconstruction Era. In his book, Slavery by Another Name (2008), Douglas Blackmon details the story of Green Cottenham, an African-American who was arrested for vagrancyand who, unable to pay the requisite fees, found himself working for the Tennesee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company. In other words, he, like many other African-Americans, was leased as cheap labour in his capacity as a prisoner. What does this have to do with Sister Séance? Parkinson’s book shifts the lens of hardship from the experience of African-Americans to the experience of Women; but given how, without slavery, the Civil War would never have materialised, I find Parkinson’s storytelling fundamentally misunderstanding what made the Civil War so insidious.
The African-American experience in the novel seems to be relegated to the one-handed Willa (whose child-related revelation towards the end serves to further nullify the topic of race) and the monstrous Valerie and Maggie Usherwood. But there is also the mixed-race characterization of Mason and Godfrey Turner, whose father decides that Mason shall be free and Godfrey enslaved. This has potential and, given Mason’s presence at the Halloween Party, provides an adequate foundation for a discussion of race. “I’m a former slaveholder,” Mason says. “I’m not proud of my inheritance or what my family has done.” But the Halloween Party’s microcosm never answers to the outer world. We never get the denouement which reminds us that the American Civil War, once again, proved that the United States was a country whose legislative victories profoundly outshone any significant change in attitude or spiritual orientation within the general population.
Does the thread of Spiritualism in the novel represent that lack of change, or potential for change, in the population—or, at least, within the characters of the novel? We learn that “Spiritualism provided a way” for mourning family members to “reconnect with loved ones they had lost” during the Civil War. We learn that Clara Turner taught the Sisters of Séance that “death was not a separation” and that the “dead could still speak”. We see, if briefly, the tension between Spiritualism and established religion. (“What bothers me,” Michael Hayden says, “is the connection between Spiritualism and the occult.”) Parkinson reminds her readers that, the novel’s conclusion notwithstanding, the Halloween Party represents the potential for Spiritualism as a “welcome distraction” from the long march that was the Reconstruction Era. There is, moreover, the fascinating argument that Spiritualism has merely become a new form of prostitution; that a woman can be exploited “in the name of a spirit” that is not her own. Then finally, there is the hopeful note that, above all else, Spiritualism reminds people that marriage does not “end in death”. What of the gulf between American citizens and the legal standards their actions are held to? What of the gulf between the constitutional consciousness that all men are created equal, and the status quo’s belief in something altogether different, or contradictory, even? These are questions which in Sister Séance, despite its flashes of stylistic ingenuity, are curiously unasked and regrettably unanswered. This is not a malicious novel; rather, it seeks to baffle when it would do better to clarify.’
- Olga Belsky
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A thing is what it is—unless it is critiqued. Do I intend to critique the review and create something as new and without correspondent form as the review I’m analysing? Belsky frustrates this because she doesn’t limit the atomic weight and political value of criticism to her review; rather, Belsky’s argument is that Sister Séance is just as new and without correspondent form as her own review of Sister Séance. There are, in other words, two ‘secondary texts’: the novel-text which, as far as Belsky is concerned, does not correspond to reality; and the review-text which points out this lack of correspondence.
Imagine two people, one with sunglasses and the other with nothing, being told to look at the same painting—but the painting is not there. The one with sunglasses imagines a painting. But what can the other person do apart from comment upon the imagination of the imaginer? I can’t claim that their propositions correspond to the same painting because the painting is imaginary. But imagination and the imaginary is part and parcel of that safe and, ultimately, inaccurate understanding of literature as being ‘made up’. The correspondence theory vetoes this understanding and shows how everything supposedly ‘imagined’ corresponds to something in the real world. But this says more about the futility of my painting analogy than it does about Belsky’s review. What irritates Belsky, on the other hand, is how her critique has been preceded by the very mystification that criticism depends upon. Am I asking the impossible? asks Belsky. Can I mystify the mystified
Realizing that she cannot mystify the mystified, however, Belsky opts to describe Sister Séance. And through her description of how Parkinson’s book ‘shifts the lens of hardship from the experience of African-Americans to the experience of Women’ and how this fundamentally misunderstands ‘what made the Civil War so insidious’, for example, Belsky finds herself describing a fiction. Earlier I remarked that by using the word ‘fiction’ we demarcate it from what we call ‘non-fiction’; and we use the word ‘non-fiction’, equally, to demarcate it from what we call ‘fiction’. We see, in Belsky’s review, the use of this kind of demarcation. And we see how Sister Séance becomes redundant, like snow which is non-snow; and water which is non-water. For, when something is not non-fiction—where is reality? And why shouldn’t we care?
