The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention

Frontiers of Narrative

by David Letzler

What is the strange appeal of big books? The mega-novel, a genre of erudite tomes with encyclopedic scope, has attracted wildly varied responses, from fanatical devotion to trenchant criticism. Looking at intimidating mega-novel masterpieces from The Making of Americans to 2666, David Letzler explores reader responses to all the seemingly random, irrelevant, pointless, and derailing elements that comprise these mega-novels, elementsthathe labels cruft after the computer science term for junk code. In The Cruft of Fiction, Letzler suggests that these books are useful tools to help us understand the relationship between reading and attention.

While mega-novel text is often intricately meaningful or experimental, sometimes it is just excessive and pointless. On the other hand, mega-novels also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, turns out to be quite important. Letzler posits that this cruft requires readers to develop a sophisticated method of attentional modulation, allowing one to subtly distinguish between text requiring focused attention and text that must be skimmed or even skipped to avoid processing failures. The Cruft of Fiction shows how the attentional maturation prompted by reading mega-novels can help manage the information overload that increasingly characterizes contemporary life.

"

Genres: Nonfiction, Criticism

318 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2017

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Cruft is junk text. It's what stuffs a novel and about which you know not what to do. It's the stuff lazy readers call upon editors to slice out. Offal, if you're in a wasteful Rabelaisian mood. It's what fattens a novel into what one might call BIG & FAT, stuffed with corn in a CAFO (maybe). It differentiates a Novel from a mere Novella. No story need be longer than, say, a page or two (book review plot=synopses demonstrate this fact). It's what translates a novella into a BIG FAT BEAUTIFULLY ASS'd novel. Proper novel. (I exagggerate).

It's what requires you to modulate your attention. Not every sentence is gold, not every word is a clue to the vault of (whatever your treasure is, where ever it lies lies also your heart).

And, no, nothing new. Joyce called it 'street furniture'. And annotations were written to help you avoid being lead by the nose down another shiny Vico Road.

Personally, it may be what in my experience differentiates the merely 'literary' from the artistic (or whatever; I usually differentiate the 'literary' novel from the novel simpliciter but it's not always the case that I can get my syntax just right, so whatev's) . The reason perhaps why Novel Explosives won't find itself on The Millions Top Ten ; but a few of you will drool over its stuffings (a page of technical descriptions of border=land armaments?)

And women stuff their novels with Cruft too (c=below).

The Dictionary
--J R
--The Making of Americans
--The Wake
The Encyclopedia
--Moby-Dick
--Bouvard and Pecuchet
--House of Leaves (and endnotes)
--Europe Central (ditto)
--Infinite Jest
Life-Writing
--The Golden Notebooks
--Pilgrimage
[KOK and Ferrante probably get filed in here ; life can't help but be stuffed to the gills with cruft]
The Menippean Satire
--The Sot-Weed Factor
--The Public Burning
--The Recognitions
Episodic Narrative
--Mason & Dixon
--Life: A User's Manual
--2666
The Epic and the Allgory
--Underworld
--The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
--Midnight's Children
--Gravity's Rainbow

So at any rate, the foregoing may count as a canon of cruft ; meaning innocently enough that if you want to know what cruft is, be conversant with the above books. Or, simply, the field from which the theory presented in this monograph springs forth and to which the theory feeds back granting some understanding about what the heck is going on and addressing issues of why these books are the way they are. There will certainly be many more novels to which the analysis of cruft extends and a few perhaps which would shed more light upon the phenomena than those under discussion here. That's just how that stuff works. At any rate, if you dig the novels up above there and have some modicum of curiosity about how they work and why they work the way they work, you'll definitely want this Cruft of Fiction.

The thing is, sometimes there is gold BURIED in the cruft (as you readers of BURIED books know ; lots of shit to pan through to get to it) or at least a key to the gold. All that verbiage in J R? You read all of that? Cuz a lot of it is just noise. You skip it? Because then you're going to miss a piece of data you'll need 300 pages later. And you people who skip the Endnotes ; you should stick with novellas pretty much.

And, if you will, a difference of perspective. Letzler relies upon a lot of science stuff (to me, 'sciency') to get at his analysis of paying attention. I myself would've preferred a phenomenological approach since I believe all the science in the world still rests upon a phenomenological basis and all questions of consciousness and attention ultimately bring us back to questions of the self-presentation of that which presents itself from itself, in its own style its own manner. But that's just a methodological issue. (the sciency stuff in here can be treated as cruft, ie, via the modulation of attention).

[Chris Via]

Video review: https://youtu.be/RumurVW3E30

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come. For now, this is a worthwhile book that, in mostly non-academic jargon, treats many novels that are called long and boring and offers reasons that explain the allegedly boring content. Good for libraries and personal libraries of those who like Pynchon, Gaddis, Lessing, Bolańo, D.F. Wallace, Perec, Danielewski, and so on.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye]

This review is not finished yet...Please come back later.

PASS AUF!

Cruft: Purposelessness with What Purpose (or Is Purpose Obsolete in a Pointless World)?

In the words of the author:

"This junk text, simultaneously too excessive and too vacuous to be worth anyone's attention, can be found in "Infinite Jest', but is not unique to it. In fact, it may be the characteristic text of encyclopaedic novels...Given its ubiquity, we ought to name this phenomenon. I suggest we use 'cruft', after the half-slang/half-technical term from computer programming...Cruft is 'Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded code' and 'poorly built, possibly over-complex'.(1) Cruft is not wrong per se, but it is excessive to no clear purpose, simultaneously too much and too little...

"Nonetheless, excessiveness is exactly what draws many readers to [encyclopaedic] novels...[Their] cruft seems often to achieve a state of near-objective pointlessness, combining both excess and emptiness, redundancy with wild innovation...To handle such passages, we must find some way to articulate how this purposelessness may still have a purpose for readers, some cognitive benefit to processing material that appears to have minimal relevance as information. To invert Kant, we need to understand how it may have purposivelessness with purpose...

"One of 'The Pale King's examiners concludes that the only essential ability in the modern world is 'the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be in a word, unborable...It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.' To develop this ability, though, one must seek out pointless text and learn one's way through it - which is precisely what the encyclopaedic novel's cruft forces one to do...

"How we develop methods for doing so, though - deciding what text deserves closer attention (2) and what does not, how long to spend with any given text, when to abandon it, when to follow new paths it suggests, when to return back to the point from which we started, etc. - is incredibly complicated...However, the encyclopaedic novel helps us develop ways to do so, serving as a kind of all-purpose gymnasium for mental filtering skills. It's expansive, messy, heteroglossic, and yet at least partly coherent structures test and pressure our systems for ordering and retrieving data...

"The line between a novel about the experience of pointlessness and a pointless novel, however, can be a thin one..."

Encyclopaedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: 'Infinite Jest's Endnotes - David Letzler

What Happens When Form Imitates Its Subject Matter?

The last remark about pointless novels and pointlessness reminds me of Yvor Winters' fallacy of imitative form:

"To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to 'express' the loose and sprawling American continent. In fact, all feeling, if one gives oneself (that is, one's form) up to it, is a way of disintegration; poetic form is by definition a means to arrest the disintegration and order the feeling; and in so far as any poetry tends toward the formless, it fails to be expressive of anything."

Mind you, while I'm not sure whether I agree with Winters' prescriptiveness, I agree with the implication that there is more than one way to write about disintegration or pointlessness.

Upsize Me with That Novel, Lord!

So then, is cruft merely the unlimited fries and bottomless soda of mega-fiction that targets the smorgasbored consumer?

Is it simply a one-kilo steak challenge, in which we try to digest it without regurgitating it all over our friends?

Is it just the fill for the hole, or the filler tracks on the album? Wasted words whose only purpose is to waste our time and attention?

In mining terms, is it the mullock we must sift through in the vein/vain hope that we might find a few flecks of gold?

Is it the typing that makes the rest of the book look like writing (in comparison)? The illusion that is supposed to convince us that the emperor is wearing new clothes? Or the ruse that persuades readers they are "unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent?"

Poisoned with Words

"They are spoon feeding Casanova to get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence after poisoning him with words"

Bob Dylan, Desolation Row"

"Now, I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you, dear lady, from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge"

Bob Dylan, "Tombstone Blues"

Another Music in a Different KItchen

My review of "The Pale King" discusses the concepts of boredom and interest in the novel.

FOOTNOTES:

(1) Wikipedia Cruft Policies

Wikipedia:Discussing cruft

Fancruft

Listcruft

Vanispamcruftisement

(2) Attention

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atten...

[Tauan Tinti · Rating 4 out of 5]

O "conceito" de cruft é ótimo - já os capítulos sobre romances específicos são bem menos que ótimos.

[Bobby Vanderbilt]

I haven’t read this yet, but the concept of “cruft” slides so snugly into my critical vocabulary (which is, confessedly, magpie) that it’s high on the literature-about-literature TBR. I want to record some preliminary thoughts here to revisit, and as an offering in gratitude to the other sharp goodreaders.

For me, as "Marvin," the concept of “cruft” immediately brings to mind the grumpy poet-critic Yvor Winters’ “fallacy of imitative form.” It was created in response to a certain kind of poetry, but has had a long afterlife with conservative critics. (Winters’ own criticism of novels mainly focused on chastising certain novelists for determinism, which is a whole separate argument.) You can find his own definition pretty easy, but my brisker summary is: a chaotic literary form does not express a chaotic subject matter, it merely produces chaos that obscures its subject matter. [1] Winters, like most, has trouble thinking in degree, but the principle for me seems basically right as a principle.

And here’s the thing that makes The Cruft of Fiction attractive to me: this study seems to refute the contemporary conservative applicators of that principle, the people who look to the weighty volumes of Delillo, Pynchon, Gaddis, Gass, Wallace, Vollman, and see chaos. (Frankly, I have been one of those people.) This seems to be a refutation: in this best of this sort of thing, there’s a subtle internal modulation of importance going on that contemporary readers are invited to learn about when they are reading in this Tradition. I expect in reading it I’ll be offered a more or less able taxonomy of modulation keys, nods to things like the Homeric catalog of ships, the Arabian Nights, etc.

Winters makes a strong argument for the meaning-making powers of accentual-syllabic verse. Like a system of cruft, accentual syllabic verse has to be learned. The eye has to be trained to pick up the iamb. [2] The beat of the iamb, just like the repetition of certain formal elements, in bad works would be totally monotonous. In good works, it is varied from enough to keep the work fresh, or serves as a kind of hypnotic rhythm in the places where that sort of thing is appropriate. The iamb and its departures, cruft and non-cruft, serve to create meaning by creating difference. That which isn’t cruft stands out like a trochee. If there is an identifiable difference between the cruft and the non-cruft then, strictly speaking, the form isn’t chaotic. It is actually an apprehension of the potentially chaotic. That's provided the cruft is actually related to the topic somehow and isn't just inserted arbitrarily. [3]

The difficulty may not lie in the form, as it has often been claimed to, but in the subject matter of the crufty novel. The Arabian Nights, or some of Rushdie, for example. These are things essentially about tale-telling, about the imagination. There is a storytelling that is inherently long-winded, diversionary: that is its purpose and pleasure. The 900 page story is not there to be scaled, but to be swum and floated through. Play has no limit. The problem is people don't see these books as play.

That quote, or manifesto, from Bolano also comes to mind:

“Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”

Novels that take a bloody chunk life, rather than some biopsy of life, as their subject demand a vastness, an ability to bring together many seemingly unrelated and trivial things into a unifying significance or texture. Otherwise they are like narrow arguments supporting vast conclusions, and the effect is sophomoric, comic. 'My girlfriend left me: romance is a sham.'

However, we can all name 200 page novels that deal with what Bolano calls “that something that terrifies us.” That vastness doesn’t have to be crufty. If I want to be clever I would say there’s actually two kinds of writers: writers who supply the cruft, and writers who leave space for the cruft to be inserted. Ironies, ambiguities, and things on a larger narrative scale, jumps in time, for example, suggestive parallels between characters, these are all invitations for readers to supply materials, interpretations. The less there is, the more it can mean. Maybe the crufty writer just wants to be more precise than the selective writer on the same large themes? [4]

I’ll have to read more of Mr. N.R’s “cruft=canon” before I get to this book properly, but I look forward to seeing how my speculations play out. (I am, confessedly, more of a bookish pharmacist than a savage detective.)

[1] There is a lot of to-do in Winters about the morality of this and the philosophical implications when it comes to choice, but Winters’ leaves a back door by saying that clear-seeing is moral.
[2] We may actually be instinctively more adept at picking up cruft than iambs, hence the rejection of these works by the general populace as mere cruft, since Pynchon, et al, haven’t had the principles and pleasures of the works properly advocated to them, instead of the works being advertised as a kind of intellectual alps to climb.
[3] See Yvor Winters in his book In Defense of Reason on Allen Tate's sonnet, The Subway.
[4] "The seed of the trouble lies in what most people find the least problematic aspect of the Imagist aesthetic: the insistence on “the perfect word,” le mot juste. This seems a promise to get language up to the level of experience: artifice and verbiage are shorn away, and words point directly to the objects they name. Language becomes transparent; we experience the world itself. “When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish,” Pound wrote in 1915. This is a correspondence theory of language with a vengeance. We might doubt the promise by noting that in ordinary speech we repeat, retract, contradict, embellish, and digress continually in order to make our meaning more precise. No one likes to be required to answer a question yes or no, because things are never that simple. This is not because individual words are too weak; it’s because they are too powerful. They can mean too many things. (“Palace in smoky light”: could this be Buckingham Palace in the fog?) So we add more words, and embed our clauses in more clauses, in order to mute language, modify it, and reduce it to the modesty of our intentions." This is Louis Menand in his article "The Pound Error" in the New Yorker.

[David]

A rarity in academic writing, a book that holds the interest for its entire length. Letzler proposes that a great deal of what happens in "mega-length" novels is the equivalent of programming "cruft" which (over-simplified) is material that is part of the programming but tangential to the main function. Helped by my having read just about every mega-novel he discusses!

[A L]

I liked the insights on individual mega-novels more than the overarching arguments and conclusions.