Tipping Point of Badness

Tipping Point of Badness

Amy J. Elias

University of Tennessee

Badness in the historical novel is particularly discomfiting because the novelist makes an implicit contract with the reader for verisimilitude of his-torical context, character, or idea, and then the form itself guarantees that she can never fully deliver.

By design, historical fictions always embed a thesis about history, and their badness becomes a matter of tipping point rather than failure. Badness enters the nonparodic historical novel when an author overtly uses historically situated people, places, and cultures as mirrors, and denies their difference. It is easy to fool readers who don’t know history about how historical a novel is, and literary studies has made us believe that verisimilitude is a politically disingenuous ideal anyway, so one feels retrograde saying that in the historical novel, the tipping point of badness is a failure of dialogue, a moment when a thesis about history becomes cocksure. But there it is. It is the tipping point when an author transcribes only his own desire echoing from the past.

It happens in very good novels by very good novelists. It happens in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) when Morrison refuses fully to open her mind to seventeenth-century religious life, in The March (2005) when E. L. Doctorow rewrites historical fact to such little purpose that his thesis goes banal. It happens in Saturday (2005), an oddly historical novel of the present, when Ian McEwan implies that a good poem read well can turn the hearts of men from violence to fraternity, a wishful thesis about terror in our time. These moments of badness are moments of authorial ego when dialogism fails. But they also are slippages that instruct about our own moment: an author’s desires, the reader’s own face in the glass.

A Species of Sorryness

Dagoberto Gilb

University of Houston-Victoria

Like bad girlfriends (and boyfriends, too), there are so many categories of bad books that it’d be grue-some and pathetic to categorize the various species of that sorryness. Setting aside the intrinsically aggravating that the very coquetish author is actually stupid, or the editor who chose the manuscript is too dumb or lame or dazzled, or that the system which perpetuates both of them is as flawed as a university paying for a Glenn Beck lecture series, and omitting the writers who are really salespeople, as are their duped or complicit publishers hyping their so pretty product as though…. Wait a minute, that may be what I think is a major bad book or line of them even.

As admirable as any delusion which fuels grandeur, this kind of writing—more about the writer than the writing—not only fulfills that mirror, mirror on the wall writer, but, like political demagoguery, pumps mass appeal in (talking only literature here) skewed and depressing ways.