Ticknor: Generalizations Don't Count

My colleague Mark Sarvas has attracted my attention (and inspired this post) by pointing to William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace as examples of bloat, or, as he styles, “heft equals significance.”  Now ordinarily I could let such sullies slide.  And I should preface my statement by noting that Mr. Sarvas is a good man, mischievous and delightfully jocular. But when the comparative indicator is Sheila Heti’s Ticknor, a novel that is, in this reader’s estimation, quite problematic and a tome that is without that ambition which crackles on every page and delights in every paragraph, certain allegations must be responded to.

Mark writes of “the miracle of voice that Heti pulls off,” that the book’s tone doesn’t “rely on tired platitudes.”  There are further suggestions by both Sam and Mark that the book is “darkly funny.”

As will soon be reported in various interviews, the “voice” that Heti is striving for was culled from the most lackluster of sources: namely, the dull and humorless papers of historian George Ticknor, which were reportedly copied, in some cases, almost word-for-word by Heti into this novel.  On a rudimentary level, this might be an achievement in mimesis.  If this is the case, we might very well send in a legion of cheerleaders to celebrate the work of a copyist working sixteen hour days.

But when the results are banal passages such as the below, one must call into question the labors of the endeavor:

The bathwater was cold when I pulled myself from the tub, dripping down.  I looked about me for a towel, but all of the towels were gone.  They were not hanging in the bathroom or lying on the floor.  They were in the outer room, which was filled up with smoke.  I would have to go and dry myself in there, and the bath -- a waste; the smoke sticking to my skin, stinking me up again.  (60)

This represents Ticknor’s dilemma in a nutshell.  Here is a protagonist wholly incapable of active behavior throughout Ticknor’s interminable 118 pages.  Even something as inconsequential as a towel proves to be comparable to climbing Everest.  One might have found a certain amount of pleasure in prodigious kvetching, comparable to Nicholson Baker’s quotidian obsessions in The Mezzanine or the atmosphere that reflects Leo Feldman’s incarceration in Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man, had Heti actually bothered to provide us with Ticknor’s feelings rather than the incongruous geography of inconsequential objects. But there is no underlying point to Ticknor’s negativity – nothing along the lines of the telltale cat juxtaposing Sophie Bentwood’s inner turmoil in Paula Fox’s excellent novel Desperate Characters.  Nothing that offers us a point of ambiguity, a conduit of some sort, which might connect the towels with Ticknor’s fears. 

One is more puzzled than enchanted by these details.  There is the awkward “dripping down,” appended to the opening sentence, but more of a generalized feeling of despair rather than an explicit emotion.  There is the outright wrong “I looked about me” when Ticknor knows very well where the towels are.  Heti’s mistake is to fixate on inconsequential details rather than dramatizing consequential emotions such as pain or jealousy or telling us why the towels might mean something.  Okay, so they’re laden with smoke.  We get this.  But we have no clue as to why Ticknor would place them in a room where the smoke will seep into their fiber. There is perhaps the unvoiced possibility that he expects some anonymous servant to take care of him and to give him his precious towels.  But if this were the case, why not simply say this?  If the intention here is to impute that Ticknor wants someone to pamper him, why not offer an imaginary servant?  A missing link much like Fox’s cat?

In concentrating exhaustively on the towels, Heti misses out on a “darkly funny” possibility which might have allowed a conduit between Ticknor and his towels.  The reader, as a result, fails to get inside Ticknor’s head. Catastrophically, Heti offers us not one, but two sentences describing their location.  And the result is a passage that is dull and without payoff.  We’ve all experienced moments where a crisp towel is beyond one’s reach.  But there is generally a very human reason for this: it might be indolence at failing to do the laundry or an overall sense of planning towels with one’s personal hygiene. 

How is such deliberate obfuscation in any sense “a miracle of voice?”  How are these very generalities anything less than “tired platitudes?”  It is utterly trite to mention soiled towels without so much as an indication as to the existential factors explicating why they were despoiled.  Would it not be more interesting or “darkly funny” to know why Ticknor has sabotaged his own post-bath experience?  Sadly, as is all too common throughout the novel, we are given nothing but these generalizations.  And one might argue the obverse: that skimping out on these telling details provides us with insignificance. Personally, I’ll take Vollmann charting as many details (perhaps too enthusiastically at times) of a den of whores over Heti’s inability to get to the heart of the matter.

Comments

[Sam]

Ed:

This is like the long-book lover's guide to the short novel. "Here's everything I'd throw into Ticknor to create the 800-page book I love from the 200-page book I am given." You forgot the wronged man from Ticknor's past, lurking around corner waiting to do him harm. Or the shopgirl who silently pines for him. Or the Wellsian time-traveler who will transport him to present-day New York.

No criticism is more futile that that based on the notion that there is one model to which all novels must conform. Legions of Ed Champion fans - dare I appoint myself as their leader? - will remain in blind, groping confusion until you explain yourself further.

Yrs,
Sam

[Mike]

Sam's comment is out and out correct. No slim book stands a chance when you concentrate on what could have been written instead of explicating what was written.

[derik]

I believe Ed's point is to respond to the comparison of Heti's short novel to the long novels by those mentioned in the post.

[Gwenda]

That's how I read it too, Derik.

Personally, I love a good short novel. There's a special kind of openness and depth that can be created by the kind of sparseness required in most short novels. You often see this is in the best YA fiction. But, for me, Ticknor didn't achieve that. I found the prose more or less flat and so the world and the story felt flat as well.

And we can all be right at the same time, even though we disagree. Tomato, tomahto.

[Sam]

I blame the condition of the streets. Have you seen the condition of the streets?

If only I hadn't raised the issue of long books versus short books.

I think I'll just leave my pie on the lid of a garbage can for some cats.

[ed]

Derik is right.

To clarify some of what I was getting at here (and hopefully this makes some kind of sense), I was suggesting that fiction has a duty to provide the reader with explicit connections that he might be able to unfurl. In this case, I was pointing out that Baker, Elkin and Fox have all used metaphors or environments as conduits between a character's emotions and the people or objects which influence or affect that character's emotional makeup. But Heti opts out of this, largely because (a) her book is, as pointed out by Mark, an internal monologue and (b) the book is short and strives for an economical feel in which it must cut out much of this.

So one might be able to criticize shorter novels as much as longer novels for sometimes being TOO subtle about character motivations.

However, I also believe that Mike's criticism is valid. It is quite difficult to second-guess the author. By taking apart the above passage, I had hoped to provide some clues as to why "Ticknor" skimped out on its dimensionality. But the risk of stating one's position along the lines is that one comes across as unintentionally hubristic.

[Sam]

Ok, now *I'm* going to sound really hubristic, because I still think Ticknor is, on its own terms, pretty much perfect. ;-)

First, the bath scene. I don't go in so much for "what does x symbolize" -- I don't usually read that way. But as I think about it now, I when I read Ticknor I drew a connection between the bath scene and another a few pages before, when Ticknor describes his mother's death:

"When mother died, she just made up her mind and did it. She said she had nothing to live for, then reached out her hand to touch me. She missed. I was standing too far."

What tortures Ticknor is that everything he wants from life -- a wife, friends, money, reputation -- is so near, yet just beyond his reach. He asks himself again and again, how did I end up here, while what I want is over there? And how do people get over there?

I don't want to vamp too hard on this, since I think this scene works by itself as a sad sort of slapstick, but I think a reader can also take this as a physical representation of Ticknor's awkward position in society and life.

Ed is right that the bath scene is banal. "Banal" is also a term that's been accurately applied to Toussaint's heroes. But it's to neither author's discredit. Like George Ticknor's inability to act, it's part of his nature. And indecision and paralysis are not a *feature* of the novel, they are the *subject* of the novel.

As a principle of criticism, I think it's important to distinguish between objections to the subject an artist has decided to portray, and their skill or success at portraying that subject. Personally, I rule out subject as a basis for aesthetic (vs. moral) criticism. Why should any subject not be a fit basis for art?

Finally, I don't accept Derik's point at all. I'm not sure Mark was directly comparing DFW or Vollman to Ticknor, but if he was, the only possible response is to reject the comparison as misguided and far-fetched. I give no credit for good responses to ridiculous questions. It's a policy of the house, I can't change it.;-)

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[Renee]

I applaud your criticism!
I had to read this school for a University class and I thought I was missing some hidden wisdom or underlying meaning. I'm glad to know you found the book as mind-numbing as I did.

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