On the post postmodern literary front, the
existence of the Profound in writing is still something
not much acknowledged, or therefore discussed. In fact,
since the late 1960s the very idea that there exists
written works that are much better than others, such
things as literary masterpieces deserving particular
attention and adulation above, say, the pop-up standards
of the bestseller lists, or the pablum lining the
checkout aisles of supermarkets, well, geez, come on.
Yes, deconstruction and other hip brands of literary
theory masquerading as study have assaulted literature
ferociously over the past several decades so that even in
most college classrooms today students are subjected to
stuff called "cultural texts." We are told that the worth
of works of the imagination is relative at best, and that
writers consciously and unconsciously scribble from so
many insidious hidden agendas that we should not take to
heart anything they say without scanning their stories
under an intense lense of cynicism, suspicion, even
hostility. Creative writing, then, especially fiction, is
propaganda, whether the author knows it or not. There is
nothing Profound in literature. Greatness is illusory,
political hype, bias and baloney. So a fooey and a
ho-ho-ho on the person who tries to tell us otherwise.
Such a view of recent literary history/theory may be a
tad exaggerated, but not by much. And the man or woman of
literature, the teacher who selects course assignments
from the horde of that old dragon known as the
Western Canon, is a
threatened species in the academic climate of the 21st
century. At least that's the landscape from the study of
Wulfrod Boris Bleachman, Ph.D., whose upcoming (but as
yet untitled) book tries to instruct the modern literary
milieu on how to distinguish the ambrosia from the meadow
muffins. For the reader, educator, and critic, Dr.
Bleachman has devised a handy scorecard system that can
be brought to bear upon novels and short fiction (his
volume on poetry will be out in two years), providing the
interested with a clear grade for the work read, or being
read. If the score is nine points or above, on a
ten-point scale, the piece is Profound. It's that darn
simple.
Bleachman employed his method quite freely and often
during the last fifteen years of his teaching career at a
half-dozen universities from New England to
South Florida, where he is
now semi-retired. The application became known in the
critical underground of the 90s as The Bleachman
Profundity Index. He professed the system in his classes,
both graduate and undergraduate; he expounded it at
cocktail parties, to the barks and jeers of so many
younger colleagues; and he utilized it in tens of
rejected, and hence unprinted, reviews for many major
journals. So WBB became a bit of a legend among academics
and editors, then, but a legend in the derogatory sense.
He was, on a good day, laughed at. Mostly he was
denounced and deplored, seen by hundreds of peers and a
few students as some whacked-up anachronism still
splashing about in a debase and outdated critical
wallow.
Aah, but time has a way. The pendulum of justice is
never far off. The specific gravity of Truth (as Keats
knew) is beautiful and cannot be kept down for long. For
example, pour an ounce of 151 proof Demerara rhum into a
cordial glass. Then slowly spoon over it a like amount of
clear triple sec. Don't sip it. Come back in an hour and
the liquids will have reversed themselves. The rhum will
be sitting on top of the liqueur. It's natural law.
Similarly, as those trendy faux philosophes, Marxist
morons, and radical skirts take final bows just before
the Truth Police round them up for the funny farm, the
healing orbs of literary criticism are eyeing now The
Bleachman Profundity Index for the focus and order that
has been largely absent from literature studies for over
three decades now. Now slam the cordial.
Yes, Bleachman is finishing his book. And rumors out
of the publishing world and academe say that he has three
lucrative, yet unsigned, contracts from rival publishers.
He has a choice, a situation as rare in his line of
writing as an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Sebring,
Florida. WBB is all the
buzz, or, to extend the metaphor more appropriately, rap,
rap, rap, rap! Possible titles for the study vary, and
the final selection will depend on which publisher
Bleachman signs with; but the working nomenclatures
include: Frenchies, Commies, and Femme Fatales on the
Brink — Deconstruct This, Dick! — Once Upon a
Canon — and, Literary Criticism for Idiots.
At any rate, I caught up with the warily eccentric
Wulfrod Boris Bleachman, Ph.D., recently at his
condominium in Nokomis,
Florida, a charming gulf coast hamlet just south of
Sarasota, and near the
Osprey headquarters of my
under-read ezine, The Schrapnel Satire
Sentinel
<www.schrapnel.net>.
Bleachman and I had met several times over the past ten
or twelve years, and on two of those occasions even
exchanged blows over his long-standing thesis that
Thomas Pynchon is really
Joni Mitchell (for rebuttal
see my 1998 study "The Spinach Scones at Crudely's Pub
and Breakfast"). This time I surprised WBBPhD (as he
exited his Corolla in his driveway) by grinning and
brandishing a mint condition luger, one of my father's
spoils from World War II. To be brief, Bleachman suddenly
waxed charmed to see me. He invited me in to meet his
portly wife, Melodia, and to sample some of their
regionally famous mango iced tea.
As we settled in to his study, I praised and
congratulated him on his perseverance and impending
success, and assured him that I was only there for a
brief interview, and a review/sampling of The Bleachman
Profundity Index. So he smiled and hoisted a 400-page
manuscript from a desk drawer, then handed me a two-page
outline. What follows now is a clearly cursory synopsis
of the soon-to-be influential work.
Firstly, the ten-point system for the Index breaks
down into four areas: two points for Words (all or
nothing); two points for setting and character ( one
each, with possible decimal points); zero point one (0.1)
to three points for thematic matters; and zero point one
to three points for plot and narrative.
Words
Beginning with the building blocks of the written arts
— Words — Bleachman notes that a significant
number of profound works contain many key words that
average seven letters or more in length. The average size
of the usual English word is five letters, according to a
recent Writer's Digest survey. So the very good
doctor reasons that unusually good pieces of writing are
marked by a vocabulary that rises above the lexicon of a
Hemingway or a Seuss. This is not to say that great
literature if full of long words, but rather suggests
that "... Hemingway mostly blows, and should have used a
thesaurus often."
Even a light scan of a book or story, with attention
to word lengths and the degree of difficulty in the
diction (word choices), can tell a reader or critic much
about the greatness, or lack thereof, of the author. When
Bleachman picks up a book, he notes the average word
lengths and vocabulary on pages 1, 2, 69, 71, 77,
101-105, 198, 250, and the last three pages of the work,
assuming it to be approximately a 300-page novel. There
is a condensed formula for short stories, and an expanded
one for long novels. Whatever, the piece must contain 15
quality words per page surveyed to receive the
all-or-nothing two points in this category. Now, when I
asked Dr. Bleachman what he means by degree of difficulty
in diction, he replied cryptically, "Really ... it's the
difference between sly and insidious, or red and
vermillion. Really, we know when we're reading the right
word, or when the language is cretinous balderdash,
everyday clichés scooped from the linguistic
community gruel."
So there.
Characters and Setting
In this category The Bleachman Profundity Index
contains some surprising criteria, or at least ideas that
will appear to many as old fashioned or worn out. Quick
to delineate what are NOT acceptable settings for stories
thick with greatness — Antarctica, Indiana,
Luxembourg, outer space, major city sewer systems,
alternate dimensions, Dallas, a maple tree, a 1956
Chevrolet, quicksand, the Arabian desert, a restaurant, a
school, Brooklyn, Miami, a brothel, and so on — Rod
Bleachman adds that setting, the backdrop of a tale, must
be grand, sprawling, yet devoid of consistently bad
weather. It must be as gigantic as the protagonist of the
story, so Nature can respond
appropriately to the tenor of the plot, acting as a
friend or foil when necessary.
As for the protagonist (the main character) and the
antagonist (often the bad guy), "bigger than life" says
the yardstick. Not that the protagonist must be one of a
high station in society (king, queen, etc.), but the one
whom the story revolves about must be of elevated
moral/ethical stature mostly, admirable at least in some
ways, and not a drunk or chain smoker, drug addict or sex
offender, you see. Bleachman, then, likes his primary
characters clean and imposing for the most part, capable
of changing for the good, and inflicting change. Great
stories must contain a few great people, even in negative
roles. And greatness also demands that the
villain[s] be as formidable as the hero. Anything
that approaches a Snopes, though, says Bleachman, is of
dubious value and can render the book disgusting.
This may be the easiest category to score in The
Bleachman Profundity Index. You can give 0.1 to 1.0 for
characters, and the same for setting. And you can get a
fairly accurate idea of the quality of those narrative
components from something even so vitiated as
Cliffs Notes.
Theme
There is not much flexibility when it come to the
appropriate thematic material — subject, and
authorial attitude/stance toward the subject — of
Profound fiction. "Almost always," WBB observes,
"humanity's inhumanity to humankind is addressed in the
great novel. It's good versus evil in most respects, and
good — if not outright victorious — somehow
comes out looking better, even when the denouement is
strewn with corpses of both the virtuous and the
insidious." It is likely Maynard Mack who reasons that we
can come away from King Lear spiritually
bludgeoned, emotionally petered, and just feeling
generally unsexed in a metaphorical way. But we know
anyway that it is probably better to have been Cordelia
than Regan or Goneril, even though Cordelia has fewer
lines. Go figure. But that is great.
Anticipating that his theory of theme will register
with many contemporary men and women of literature a
perfect ten on the Corny
Scale, Wulfie B. adds, "This doesn't mean that
there aren't some good books or tales that deal with
topics like fishing, homosexuality, flowers, sleep
disorders, sociopathology, candy, and so forth; it's just
that something truly worth reading, and worthy of
thinking and writing about, has to be grand, so much
above special interest groups and fringe
livelihoods."
Here Bleachman interjects his seemingly conservative
views on the theme of love in fiction. Love is important
and beautiful, and Profound stories often contain great
loves and lovers. But the act of love, that is the blow
by blow descriptions of intimacy that have come to infest
modern fiction, is off limits. Great novelists do not
revel and/or grovel in sex scenes; they leave them behind
the proverbial closed doors where they belong. There is a
line so thin between erotica and pornography, the
Bleachmeister contends, and it appears that late 20th
century writers have more than blurred it; they have
erased it. Good and/or wild poontang is not the stuff of
great fiction, even in a sidebar position of the
narrative.
The thematic area is perhaps the most difficult one to
score in The Bleachman Profundity Index because
importance and greatness can sometime be a tad
subjective, a fact of which WBB is cautiously cognizant;
but "... if you read Eliot's ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent' six times in five days, you'll get a
better feel as to how to proceed with some degree of
legitimacy and accuracy." One scores theme 0.1 to
3.0.
Plot and Narrative
Wulfrod Boris Bleachman, Ph.D., likes to quote the
agrarian archduchess of novels, Willa Cather: "There are
only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating
themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened
before." From this he deduces that the classic archetypal
pattern of separation — initiation — return is
the best and perhaps only formula for narrative
greatness. "Adapt your tales from myth, legend, and
folklore," he instructs, "and you may rarely stumble or
flounder. It was a common practice of Shakespeare. Need I
say more?" Prominently displayed on Bleachman's huge
cherry desk, sandwiched between the bookends busts of
Carl Jung and Elizabeth Taylor, are Joseph Campbell's
The Hero With a Thousand
Faces, Vladimir Propp's riveting
Morphology of the
Folktale, John Gardner's
On Moral Fiction, and
Old Possum's Book of Practical
Cats. Thus the Emeritus prof is a hardcore,
nearly old school, structuralist of sorts, with a hint of
the feline in him.
But more specifically, one scores the plot/narrative
portion of the Index by assigning (or not) points in
three areas: one point for the clear pattern of S-I-R;
0.5 to 1.0 if the hero emerges out of chaos with a prize
that makes his/her world a better place; and 0.0 to 1.0
for the number of archetypal characters that function in
the story — hero, villain, the hero's
partner/helper[s], villain's
accomplice[s], significant other, trickster,
animal companion, guardian of the quest realm, warped
parental figure[s], and village idiot. What
constitutes one of the major players in the plot is a
loose and variable criteria. And one character could
count as multiple archetypal elements by performing
several functions. For instance, Pogo Lachlustre in
Catherine Commeaud's fantasy masterpiece,
Bard Barfwhistle's
Lizards, is protagonist Wongtern's quest
partner. But because Pogo is a bit of a trickster, in
that he is capable of sex changes, of morphing into a
Clydesdale, and occasionally uttering stupid snips of
advice that often lead into perilous interludes, he
garners 0.5 points, half of the pot, in the character
function category of the narrative pool.
Epilogue
The Bleachman Profundity Index is a controversial
critical tool. When I apply it to several well known
novels I get the following scores, some surprising, some
not.
Moby-Dick — 9.3 — Profound
The
Scarlet Letter
— 8.6 — good
Vanity Fair — 7.2 — slightly below
average
Clarissa — 5.7 — failure
Huckleberry Finn — 7.5 — average
Ulysses — 9.0 — Profound (but
barely)
The Shipping News — 6.6 — poor
The Bridges of Madison County — 2.7 —
frigging abysmal
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone — 8.8
— good
A Clockwork
Orange — 6.7 — poor
Lord of the Flies — 5.8 — failure
Beloved — 6.8 — poor
Gravity's
Rainbow
— 7.5 — average
The Valley of the Dolls — 4.8 — definite
failure
What's wrong with these grades? Well, perhaps a lot;
maybe nothing. The Bleachman Profundity Index does seem
to have a 1.3 percent margin of error. But again, I'm
just learning the damn thing. As for the rest of the
literary world, it's wait-and-see time. The book, which
is due out by Christmas 2003 no matter who gets to
publish it, will no doubt get reviewed by major
periodicals and newspapers. It will not get glowing
reports across the board, I'm certain, because our
criticism climate presently encompasses diverse — if
not dysfunctional — platoons of pundits and
professionals. Expect the New York Times to thrash
and trash Bleachman because his standards are too
hardline canonical, and therefore not friendly fire for
their bestseller list. The New
York Review of Books
may seem to like Bleachman, especially if they
commission a member of the jurassic
Association of Literary Scholars
and Critics to review his book. Whatever.
From the perspective of one of the more reviled
members of the critical underground stranded here in
Florida, I relish the
publication of The Bleachman Profundity Index. For
contrary to what some literary folks say about me (and
us), I applaud work which insists that the teaching of
literature should evolve from convictions about what is
good, and what is not so good. I value comparison and
contrast, and the opinions of major players in the
profession, dead or alive. And I especially cherish
lively volleys of support or dissent, provided they
originate from articulate, sound, and enthusiastic minds,
then mouths. My gut feeling about Wulfrod Boris Bleachman
is that he is an admirable genius nutcase who deserves
your ear. Right or wrong, he loves what he does, even
after having been driven out of teaching by members of
what Harold Bloom calls The Schools of Resentment.
God bless Boris Bleachman, and god bless Captain
Vere!
Cleopatra's Basket
...
I think there's a lot of subjectivity that goes into
using the Bleachman index. It's not a simple matter of
information and mathematics. In the hands of some people
it can tell you more about the person using it than it
does about the book the person is using it on. For
instance, when I look at the low scores you gave some of
the novels on your list it's clear that you are a racist,
an antifeminist, and an uncompromising old fart. —
Enron Watts, Harvard University
What's going on in
Florida? Why are people like
you and Wulf Bleachman flocking to the sunshine state to
write your inflammatory, half-baked tomes which
misrepresent the current literary scene? My guess is that
Florida is so corrupt and
infested with borderline idiots and pseudo-intellectual
carpetbaggers that there are few around who really care
about truth, justice, and the American way. Obviously
there's a criminal political element (largely Republican)
in control of the state, so God knows how low the
educational/academic situation will go before it slips
down off the scale. Florida
used to be a great place for writers, and still is for
some. But the state of literary criticism there is sad
and sophomoric. You prove that almost every month with
the things you put on the internet and in magazines.
— Milton F. Davis, Macon, GA
Anyone who badmouths Nobel Prize winning authors like
Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrisson
ought to be run out of the classroom. That's probably why
clowns like Bleachman and you no longer have teaching
jobs. Yes, the pendulum of justice does come around in
time. — Judith Carlissimo, South Bend, IN
Thank God there are few people left like you and Dr.
Bleachman. When I was an English major at a university in
California, my love for poetry and good books that was
nurtured in high school was temporarily squashed by
supposed professors who saw perverse politics, prejudice,
and penises in everything from Shakespeare to Rita Dove.
I changed my major and now hold down a six-figure
position with a software maker. During my three months of
paid vacation a year I read what I like and visit the
homelands of famous authors. What I mean is, some books
are absolutely a hell of a lot better than others, and
you can't trust most English teachers nowadays to be able
to help you know the difference. That's why things like
The Bleachman Profundity Index, and sometimes your
essays, are so impotant. — Jean Rather-Gladd,
Aptos, CA
You have a brain of dung! Since you, or someone as bad
as you, claim in the introduction to your Clan of
the Flapdragon that the stupid thing can be read
as an epistolary novel, I put it to the test with The
Bleachman Profundity Index. Here you are: Words — 2
(pure luck); Characters and Settings — 1 (Let's face
it, your brain and mouth are not much of a setting.);
Theme — 1.5 (I only had to read Eliot's crap once to
see that you don't have much of a clue.); Plot and
Narrative — 1 (You got almost no plot there,
jackass!). You don't need an advanced degree in
mathematics to see that your book rates a 5.5, a clear
failure, even worse than
Clarissa, which I
give an 8.1. I've said for years, as did my late father
whom I suspect you murdered in cold blood, that you just
stink. What beautiful irony that you have supplied me
with the apparatus and documentation to confirm the
stench. — Mercutio "Brad" Peebles, Wulfteat, MN