Sherman Alexie/Harlan Ellison

I was just thinking in the shower (which is where I do most of my thinking.... That's right, about 10 minutes a day) about why I don't really like Sherman Alexie's work very much, and it struck me that he and his work remind me a lot of Harlan Ellison. Both are smart-asses, both are arrogant, both excel at shorter work, both have very little faith (if any) in humanity.

Beyond this, both strike me as very "thin" writers. This is an aesthetic point, not an analytical one, but I think it is important. It's as if I want to like to them, as if I understand that they are "important" in some way, but I'd argue that neither are very interesting stylists, and more importantly that neither really has much richness or depth to what he does (or did). I might go as far as to argue that each writer's respective arrogance retards their work. That is, neither seems capable of understanding people other than themselves, and their work reflects this. They both strike me as a bit hollow at the core. I get the feeling from both of them that they are smart but not very deep thinkers, perhaps this is what bugs me about their work. Clever, yes, but kind of obvious, even cliched at times.

In June of this year, the Onion AV Club posted an interview with Ellison. This is the link to the second page of part two: http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/harlan_ellison_part_two/2 . In it you will find an anecdote of Ellison's regarding a Jesuit literary scholar's paper on an Ellison story. Ellison was in the audience and took the guy to task. This is nothing shocking for a writer to do, particularly one as irascible as Ellison. It reminds me a lot of something Alexie might do as well.

Now of course as a blossoming literary critic, you might think that my annoyance with this anecdote has to do with Ellison's attacks on academic criticism. But I am the first to admit that academic criticism is largely a load of BS (yes, mine too). Instead I want to focus on the fact that Ellison really has no idea what he's even talking about when he drops "deconstruction" in there. He hasn't even bothered to try to understand, nor to acknowledge that there are few if any Jesuit deconstructions out there (in fact, there are very few deconstructionists at all, I'd wager). Even more importantly, he totally ignores the vitally important open-endedness of literature by browbeating this scholar. Ellison wants his work to mean exactly what he wants it to mean; it's kind of the anti-Bob Dylan stance. But of course, no work does this. Let's bypass "sign/signifier" talk and just focus on interpretation. The very richness of art is that it allows, even encourages, idiosyncratic readings. Even if a work is meant to be dogmatic or pedantic, readings of it will always be unstable (NB: This is not, as it may first appear, a so-called postmodernist stance. It is, you might say, a hermeneutic stance, one that in this argument does not necessarily rely on history, and it is descriptive of what intellectuals do with intellectual traditions. Indeed, mainstream Anglo-American philosophy thrives on such a practice, cf. http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=12925). In Barthes-ian terms, I'd argue that both Ellison and Alexie dislike the idea of the "readerly" text. The problem here is two-fold. First, this makes the texts more about the authors than the texts (the thinness I mentioned above). Second, neither are particularly writerly writers in my view.

Back to the point at hand, although I have lots more to say about how these two might be very much reinforcing the culture that they critique in their literary practices, what this implies to me a lack of good faith intellectual effort, indeed a lack (dare I say it) of depth in both writers. This, I think, is the source of the thinness I find in their work.