Prompted by editing this essay about the Less Than Zero film and by fortuitously coming across a copy of the novel in a thrift store, I decided to re-read Bret Easton Ellis's debut book, Less Than Zero, which was published in 1985. I first read it as a teenager in high school, and it sort of blew my mind. I was working at Waldenbooks in the mall then, and the novel seemed to come out of nowhere; it just appeared on the shelving cart one shift as if it were my destiny to read it. It played to all of my aesthetic proclivities then, all the bad ideas I ever had as an aspiring fiction writer: Write about apathetic teens doing lots of drugs and having sex indiscriminately; dump in a lot of inscrutably allusive pop-culture references; strip the prose of all lyricism and substitute a brutalist stream of consciousness, with the trick that the consciousness you're streaming is so devoid of reflexive insight that it comes across as aleatory and affectless. This would best capture the existential reality of youth boredom, which of course, as all teenagers knew, was the most significant problem confronting society in the Reagan years.
Even as a 15-year-old, though, I had a hard time imagining any adults reading the book or taking it seriously. It seems very much a young-adult novel, dependent on the reader's fascination with and general lack of perspective on the world of haute dissipation it depicts. Lots of vicarious thrills and chills for a teen: it depicts a world in which parents are always absent, money is never an issue, drugs are always plentiful, and everyone is down for sex with everyone else. People o.d. and parents have abdicated all responsibility, but that just sets an appropriate backdrop of extremity; they don't constitute real problems. The only real problems revolve around whether or not you can really open up to a friend. For adults, it's all a bit silly. You don't envy the characters, certainly, and you don't even pity them. At best, it has the junk appeal of MTV's nano-soap-opera Undressed, which was clearly inspired by Ellis's vision.
The plot of Less Than Zero follows Clay, the narrator, a college freshman who has come home to Los Angeles for his winter break from college back east. Though it isn't spelled out, he seems to be the son of wealthy entertainment-industry figures, and his friends are drawn from the same milieu. Though cognizant of no agency of his own, Clay finds himself involved in scenes of what the author apparently regards as steadily increasing shockingness, starting with a casual homosexual tryst, moving on to heroin shooting-gallery parties, a snuff-film viewing session, some gay prostitution, and finally a kidnapping and rape of a prepubescent girl. In between these meant-to-titillate scenes are some maudlin accounts of childhood memories (including the obligatory undergrad-workshop dead grandmother) and some slice-of-ennui observational passages of teens hanging out at pool parties, snorting fat rails and club hopping, hoping to spot members of X or the Go-Go's. (My favorite is a scene in which Clay, hanging out with several of his interchangeable friends at a sushi restaurant, is told that rockabilly will be the next big thing -- "and not those limp-wristed Stray Cats either" -- and that anyone who's anyone has to read The Face. As a teenager, I took that last injunction literally and struggled to track down copies of it -- Waldenbooks did not carry it, alas.)
Though it certainly succeeds in conveying a paradoxical mood of angsty apathy, the book's writing at the sentence level is fairly uneven -- not all that surprising considering Ellis's age when he wrote it, and the eagerness to rush the novel out as some sort of unexpurgated view on youth decadence. Its frequent badness was likely regarded as a badge of its authenticity. Less Than Zero's shocking incidents are generally unconvincing, and melodramatic despite the faux detachment. They read like exploitation-fiction cliches, only told in an approximation of the style of Raymond Carver or, more obviously, Joan Didion circa Play It as It Lays. And even though all sorts of unconscionably horrible events take place, the main conflicts structuring the novel are surprisingly mundane: the narrator's mixed feelings about losing touch with his best friend and breaking up with his high school girlfriend. These are expected to carry significant emotional freight for readers even in the midst of snuff films and raped 12-year-olds. It seems extremely bizarre to say the least for Clay to walk out of a room in which his high school buddies are raping someone, snort a quarter-gram of cocaine, and then pout earnestly about his girlfriend dumping him. It makes it seem as though the depravity might be all in his head or something, weird scenes inside the gold mine that serve as projections of Clay's alienation. But such a reading seems extremely speculative, counter to the explicit intent that we take all the action literally and lament the moral turpitude.
The incongruous tonal juxtapositions foretell the way in which Ellis's later novel American Psycho shifts from gory murder scenes to dementedly positive reviews of Genesis records, but they also betoken a lack of control, or perhaps an editorial hedging against making the novel's characters repellent to the core as they were probably intended to be. I suspect Ellis's ploy was not at all different from American Psycho, whose narrator, I think, is supposed to be Clay's brother: choose a monstrous, contemptible personality type (the spoiled film brat, the Wall Street banker) and have them narrate their own vapidity while having them participate in cartoonishly evil scenarios with no sense of their own moral culpability. But it seems like he was told to leaven Less Than Zero with mawkish passages (often set entirely in italics) that imply Clay has feelings we are supposed to empathize with. It would have been a much more successful book, I think, if Clay had no redeeming interiority, if there really was no there there, especially after all of Ellis's hamfisted repetitions of slogans from billboards and snatches of conversation: "Disappear here", "People are afraid to merge", etc. In a better book, he would endorse these slogans unthinkingly rather than be unnerved by them. Or better still, he would register them without noting how appropriate they were to his condition, and then the reader would have something to do. As it stands, Ellis explicates too much, and much too implausibly.
Showing posts with label novels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novels. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Novel in a Month Backlash (5 Nov 2010)
Longtime readers of this blog (I hope there are some!) may remember that I once wrote a novel in a month in November as part of NaNoWriMo. I didn't think the experience was a waste of time, but it didn't really open up my horizons as a writer either. It was rewarding for the sake of the time spent writing, of pushing necessarily into a state of flow; in that way it was its own reward.
Laura Miller, Salon's book critic, thinks everyone participating in NaNoWriMo should find something better to do, like perhaps read books written by legitimate authors who get published by a "major" house.
Miller seems to suggest that it's wrong to encourage the idea that everybody can and should write (particularly, she argues, since writers will insist on doing it anyway), but by that logic you may as well not encourage everyone to read either. That was received wisdom of much of Miller's counterparts in the pundit class of the 18th century, when it was widely believed that dimwit readers and their vulgar tastes were leading to the destruction of the world of letters. She instead wants to extricate reading from writing, as if they weren't symbiotic pursuits, and promote the former at the expense of the latter. We should worry about getting more people to read, because their writing is basically a waste of time since there are already so many books lying around.
Isn't writing just a selfish demand for attention anyway? "Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read it?" Miller asks. Yes, shame on you; you think you deserve attention because you bothered to work on something. And worse, you might even distract literary agents from their holy endeavors: "editors and agents are already flinching in anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they'll shortly receive." Oh, no! What about the agents? No one thinks of the agents! It's not as though they chose for themselves the role in life of rejecting some people's work and trying to pick winners. Heaven forbid they should have to do their job!
Wouldn't it be a better world if only the people with the proper grooming and pedigree bothered to make things? Certainly we don't do enough as a society to discourage the artistic ambitions of ordinary people. Sapping it off in crypto-participatory co-creation branding schemes only goes so far. Miller is troubled by the possibility that books about how to write fiction could be more popular than fiction itself, but she regards that as the audience's fault rather than the authors'. It may be that the manual writers are catering to a fantasy that is currently more powerful than what fiction writers can conjure -- that people would rather vicariously be an author, a creator, imagine themselves creating, than imagine themselves in someone else's fictional world, becoming someone else, being at their mercy.
The implication seems to be that reading is rightly self-abnegating and masochistic; correspondingly, Miller derides encouraging the fantasy of readers writing for themselves as "narcissistic commerce" that prompts self-centeredness (like basically just about every other kind of consumer good in our culture, sold as part of a lifestyle package). The right thing for the nobodies to do is to efface themselves and consume more, and become "the bedrock" of literary culture (i.e. nonparticipants who fund it and fuel writer egos). Reading should teach them to never put themselves forward, to never "misplace" their creative energy by preventing them from generating it in the first place. We should as a society label their ability to consume as creativity. We should personally use our energy the way Miller's champ reader used it: "Instead of locking herself up in a room to crank out 50,000 words of crap, she learned new things and 'expanded my reading world.' " Reading should lead to more reading, nothing else. What else is there?
Anyway, on to my requisite social-media point: Considering how much quasi-fictionalizing of the self must go on in social media, it's no wonder the how-to manuals appeal -- they have real practical value. Social media reinforces the value of trying to imagine oneself as more creative, as sharing more. Whereas for novels, beyond escapism and those fleeting moments of sympathetic insight, their practical value lies mainly in the social capital that comes from being able to say you've read them and can discuss them. Miller would like us to work on enhancing that social capital and cheer the formation of more book groups (is there really a shortage of them? Are more people really participating in NaNoWriMo than in reading groups of some form or another?). I don't see why one couldn't do both -- it's not zero sum. Amateur writers and readers can all be the "real heroes." I also don't see why people couldn't get together and read one another's work, even if it is "bad" by professional standards. I have been to see enough of my friends' bands, and they have been generous enough to come see me play and certainly none of us are ever going to be putting out records on major labels. Reading and writing both are lonely, solitary activities by necessity; people often adopt them and become passionate about them because social interaction is for them far more taxing and far less rewarding. Anything that injects a hint of sociality into either process probably won't make for better writing or reading, but it might make for people who feel less isolated by their own passions.
Laura Miller, Salon's book critic, thinks everyone participating in NaNoWriMo should find something better to do, like perhaps read books written by legitimate authors who get published by a "major" house.
While there's no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant -- publication by a major house -- will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.I can't say that Miller's condescension makes me feel any sorrier for the plight of published novelists. It doesn't make me want to rush out to scour the bookstores (weirdly described by Miller as "cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading" -- really? aren't they in fact dedicated to the selfish art of selling stuff?) for more fiction to buy.
Miller seems to suggest that it's wrong to encourage the idea that everybody can and should write (particularly, she argues, since writers will insist on doing it anyway), but by that logic you may as well not encourage everyone to read either. That was received wisdom of much of Miller's counterparts in the pundit class of the 18th century, when it was widely believed that dimwit readers and their vulgar tastes were leading to the destruction of the world of letters. She instead wants to extricate reading from writing, as if they weren't symbiotic pursuits, and promote the former at the expense of the latter. We should worry about getting more people to read, because their writing is basically a waste of time since there are already so many books lying around.
Isn't writing just a selfish demand for attention anyway? "Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read it?" Miller asks. Yes, shame on you; you think you deserve attention because you bothered to work on something. And worse, you might even distract literary agents from their holy endeavors: "editors and agents are already flinching in anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they'll shortly receive." Oh, no! What about the agents? No one thinks of the agents! It's not as though they chose for themselves the role in life of rejecting some people's work and trying to pick winners. Heaven forbid they should have to do their job!
Wouldn't it be a better world if only the people with the proper grooming and pedigree bothered to make things? Certainly we don't do enough as a society to discourage the artistic ambitions of ordinary people. Sapping it off in crypto-participatory co-creation branding schemes only goes so far. Miller is troubled by the possibility that books about how to write fiction could be more popular than fiction itself, but she regards that as the audience's fault rather than the authors'. It may be that the manual writers are catering to a fantasy that is currently more powerful than what fiction writers can conjure -- that people would rather vicariously be an author, a creator, imagine themselves creating, than imagine themselves in someone else's fictional world, becoming someone else, being at their mercy.
The implication seems to be that reading is rightly self-abnegating and masochistic; correspondingly, Miller derides encouraging the fantasy of readers writing for themselves as "narcissistic commerce" that prompts self-centeredness (like basically just about every other kind of consumer good in our culture, sold as part of a lifestyle package). The right thing for the nobodies to do is to efface themselves and consume more, and become "the bedrock" of literary culture (i.e. nonparticipants who fund it and fuel writer egos). Reading should teach them to never put themselves forward, to never "misplace" their creative energy by preventing them from generating it in the first place. We should as a society label their ability to consume as creativity. We should personally use our energy the way Miller's champ reader used it: "Instead of locking herself up in a room to crank out 50,000 words of crap, she learned new things and 'expanded my reading world.' " Reading should lead to more reading, nothing else. What else is there?
Anyway, on to my requisite social-media point: Considering how much quasi-fictionalizing of the self must go on in social media, it's no wonder the how-to manuals appeal -- they have real practical value. Social media reinforces the value of trying to imagine oneself as more creative, as sharing more. Whereas for novels, beyond escapism and those fleeting moments of sympathetic insight, their practical value lies mainly in the social capital that comes from being able to say you've read them and can discuss them. Miller would like us to work on enhancing that social capital and cheer the formation of more book groups (is there really a shortage of them? Are more people really participating in NaNoWriMo than in reading groups of some form or another?). I don't see why one couldn't do both -- it's not zero sum. Amateur writers and readers can all be the "real heroes." I also don't see why people couldn't get together and read one another's work, even if it is "bad" by professional standards. I have been to see enough of my friends' bands, and they have been generous enough to come see me play and certainly none of us are ever going to be putting out records on major labels. Reading and writing both are lonely, solitary activities by necessity; people often adopt them and become passionate about them because social interaction is for them far more taxing and far less rewarding. Anything that injects a hint of sociality into either process probably won't make for better writing or reading, but it might make for people who feel less isolated by their own passions.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Swedish Crime Fiction (2 March 2010)
Via the Morning News comes this n+1 essay by Ian MacDougall about Swedish crime fiction, primarily Stieg Larsson, the author of the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and two other similarly named books. I grabbed Dragon Tattoo out of the free pile at my old job after I was in Madrid and saw dozens of different people on the subway reading it. I started in on it after I abandoned Infinite Jest in frustration. It was the perfect antidote for me; a coherent, plot-driven novel written in sturdy, easy-to-parse sentences with not a whiff of wordplay or irony. MacDougall suggests that Larsson's books are an elaborate critique of the welfare state, and that interpretation is certainly there, though arguably Larsson's condemnations are too heavy handed to be taken all that seriously as a critique. (But then again, some people actually regard The DaVinci Code as though it was the return of Feuerbach.) It is refreshing to see Larsson deploy misogyny to increase reader outrage rather than titillation -- or is he doing both? My recollection is that there was something ultimately ghastly and Patrick Bateman-like about the novel. I wanted the female hacker character to be the sole protagonist; the heroic journalist character read at times like mawkish wish fulfillment on Larsson's part.
I subsequently began reading the police-procedural novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, which are much more nuanced and subtle in their critiques and bizarrely prurient about misogyny in a slightly different way. (The Wikipedia page on the authors offers this: "Wahlöö described their goals for the series as to 'use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.' ") Several of the early books in the series hinge on female nymphomaniacs and the social trouble they cause. The authors are somewhat ambiguous with regard to whether they see nymphomania as a legitimate condition or a misogynistic pathologization of women with the temerity to express sexual desire. These novels were written in the 1960s, and ideological fallout of various liberation movements were clearly on the authors' minds. Readers are not left with a ringing, overemphatic indictment of any particular institution or attitude. But, as MacDougall claims for Larsson's books, there's a comparison to be made with the best seasons of The Wire -- you get a sense of the complexity of social conflict and sympathetic rehearsals of various rationalizations.
MacDougall thinks Larsson's books offer a fantasy solution to the social problems the Wire depicts as endemic and cyclical, and he seems to suggest this makes them superior.
I subsequently began reading the police-procedural novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, which are much more nuanced and subtle in their critiques and bizarrely prurient about misogyny in a slightly different way. (The Wikipedia page on the authors offers this: "Wahlöö described their goals for the series as to 'use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.' ") Several of the early books in the series hinge on female nymphomaniacs and the social trouble they cause. The authors are somewhat ambiguous with regard to whether they see nymphomania as a legitimate condition or a misogynistic pathologization of women with the temerity to express sexual desire. These novels were written in the 1960s, and ideological fallout of various liberation movements were clearly on the authors' minds. Readers are not left with a ringing, overemphatic indictment of any particular institution or attitude. But, as MacDougall claims for Larsson's books, there's a comparison to be made with the best seasons of The Wire -- you get a sense of the complexity of social conflict and sympathetic rehearsals of various rationalizations.
MacDougall thinks Larsson's books offer a fantasy solution to the social problems the Wire depicts as endemic and cyclical, and he seems to suggest this makes them superior.
Although there is an obvious analogy to recent American forays into the crime genre, like the HBO series The Wire, this only points to what sets Larsson apart—a particularly Scandinavian optimism that insists it’s never too late to effect real change. Larsson, unlike David Simon, doesn’t see institutional dysfunction as a tragic wheel driven around by some essential human flaw. Larsson the idealist believes that an opposing force, if applied strongly enough, can slow that wheel, if not bring it to a grinding halt.I haven't read them all, but Dragon Tattoo made me think that such optimism is precisely why they are inferior, escapist. Perhaps I have been working in publishing too long to believe that a crusading journalist can ever be plausibly taken as a idealistic force for change.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
'Twilight' and True Love-ism (18 Nov 2009)
Until I started writing this, my knowledge of the Twilight series isn't extensive: it's limited mainly to having noticed the covers of the books on the subway since they had chess pieces on them (for a brief moment of insanity I wondered whether they might be chess-related books -- maybe I had missed the birth of the hyper-hypermodern) and a brief discussion I had with a friend after seeing a giant poster of the goofy lead actor in a Target. (It seemed as though the photographer had him say "duh" to capture that perfect look of cuddly harmlessness.) I also know that it is about vampires and the author is a Mormon.
But the series' popularity can clearly reveal something significant -- does it herald something different, or is it a new bottle for old ideology?
Using this WaPo story as a point of departure, Tyler Cowen offers nine hypotheses, including this: "You know from the beginning that the plot twists will have to be extreme. Few movie makers offer up vampires who think pensively, talk inordinately, and live out ambiguous endings, sitting around in coffee shops." I actually would want to see that show, about the quotidian everyday life of vampires. Pace it like an Antonioni film. Explore the question of whether anything has meaning without death.
Cowen also makes the often overlooked point that "some of the popularity is arbitrary with respect to the vampire theme itself. There is a clustering of production in any successful cultural meme, once that meme gets underway. You might as well ask why there is so much heavy metal music today." Culture is subject to momentum, to booms and busts, cycles of overproduction. Once a particular solution for an ideological social need is devised, it can perhaps crowd out other solutions. Then "Harry Potter" or "Twilight" becomes the all-purpose answer to a shared wish for fantasy that might have drawn a variety of nuanced responses. That is to say, network effects and the rewards for individuals that come from them begin to preclude the pleasure that might derive from choosing our own fulfillment from a more diverse field of cultural products. Slate had a piece arguing that since 1960 we have always been in the midst of some sort of vampire craze or other.
But what, then, is the underlying issue that we as a culture have settled on vampires to solve? A month ago, Esquire ran this story arguing that vampires are metaphors for gay men -- fundamentally inaccessible to teen girls:
Karl Smith draws a related conclusion: "A vampire wants you, in the absolute worst possible way. And, once he has you, at best you are transformed forever, at worst you are dead. This is a clear metaphor for the most pressing issue in young teenage minds." Basically vampires are about ambivalence toward sex, and a way of processing in coded form all the mixed messages girls receive about sex.
This Salon article about adult Twilight devotees views the Twilight books as essentially romance novels with enough genre stylization to not seem as such to those who get into them. Janice Radway's Reading the Romance might be useful, then, in figuring out the appeal -- Radway argues that romance novels ameliorate the conditions of patriarchy by dignifying female roles within it. In the Salon article, this is related to the myth of true love:
In Miller's review of the books, she argues that
Miller quotes an adult reader, who describes the books' appeal like this:
(Coincidentally, this is how I interpret Just One of the Guys.) Miller's gloss on this -- "The 'underdog strange girl' who gets plucked from obscurity by 'the best guy in school' is the 21st century's version of the humble governess who captures the heart of the lord of the manor. The chief point of this story is that the couple aren't equals, that his love rescues her from herself by elevating her to a class she could not otherwise join" -- relates it straight back to the first novel in English to become a popular sensation, Samuel Richardson's Pamela. So perhaps this is proof that we haven't progressed very far ideologically; conservatives would perhaps see this as proof that certain roles and fantasies are hard-wired into humanity's circuitry. (I don't endorse those conclusions.)
But the series' popularity can clearly reveal something significant -- does it herald something different, or is it a new bottle for old ideology?
Using this WaPo story as a point of departure, Tyler Cowen offers nine hypotheses, including this: "You know from the beginning that the plot twists will have to be extreme. Few movie makers offer up vampires who think pensively, talk inordinately, and live out ambiguous endings, sitting around in coffee shops." I actually would want to see that show, about the quotidian everyday life of vampires. Pace it like an Antonioni film. Explore the question of whether anything has meaning without death.
Cowen also makes the often overlooked point that "some of the popularity is arbitrary with respect to the vampire theme itself. There is a clustering of production in any successful cultural meme, once that meme gets underway. You might as well ask why there is so much heavy metal music today." Culture is subject to momentum, to booms and busts, cycles of overproduction. Once a particular solution for an ideological social need is devised, it can perhaps crowd out other solutions. Then "Harry Potter" or "Twilight" becomes the all-purpose answer to a shared wish for fantasy that might have drawn a variety of nuanced responses. That is to say, network effects and the rewards for individuals that come from them begin to preclude the pleasure that might derive from choosing our own fulfillment from a more diverse field of cultural products. Slate had a piece arguing that since 1960 we have always been in the midst of some sort of vampire craze or other.
But what, then, is the underlying issue that we as a culture have settled on vampires to solve? A month ago, Esquire ran this story arguing that vampires are metaphors for gay men -- fundamentally inaccessible to teen girls:
Edward, the romantic hero of the Twilight series, is a sweet, screwed-up high school kid, and at the beginning of his relationship with Bella, she is attracted to him because he is strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her. This exact scenario happened several times in my high school between straight girls and gay guys who either hadn't figured out they were gay or were still in the closet.Girls not yet ready to enter fully into mature sexuality find in vampires/gay friends something both threatening and harmless at the same time.
Karl Smith draws a related conclusion: "A vampire wants you, in the absolute worst possible way. And, once he has you, at best you are transformed forever, at worst you are dead. This is a clear metaphor for the most pressing issue in young teenage minds." Basically vampires are about ambivalence toward sex, and a way of processing in coded form all the mixed messages girls receive about sex.
This Salon article about adult Twilight devotees views the Twilight books as essentially romance novels with enough genre stylization to not seem as such to those who get into them. Janice Radway's Reading the Romance might be useful, then, in figuring out the appeal -- Radway argues that romance novels ameliorate the conditions of patriarchy by dignifying female roles within it. In the Salon article, this is related to the myth of true love:
"This is what I call 'true love-ism,'" Laura Miller told me. "True love-ism is the secular religion of America, one that all of us can believe in. What's appealing about Edward is his certainty. He craves Bella monogamously. The book feeds the delusion that an erotic god could love you, and that he'd also be faithful."
In Miller's review of the books, she argues that
Even to a reader not especially susceptible to its particular scenario, Twilight succeeds at communicating the obsessive, narcotic interiority of all intense fantasy lives. Some imaginary worlds multiply, spinning themselves out into ever more elaborate constructs. Twilight retracts; it finds its voluptuousness in the hypnotic reduction of its attention to a single point: the experience of being loved by Edward Cullen.
Miller quotes an adult reader, who describes the books' appeal like this:
Twilight makes me feel like there may be a world where a perfect man does exist, where love can overcome anything, where men will fight for the women they love no matter what, where the underdog strange girl in high school with an amazing heart can snag the best guy in the school, and where we can live forever with the person we love
(Coincidentally, this is how I interpret Just One of the Guys.) Miller's gloss on this -- "The 'underdog strange girl' who gets plucked from obscurity by 'the best guy in school' is the 21st century's version of the humble governess who captures the heart of the lord of the manor. The chief point of this story is that the couple aren't equals, that his love rescues her from herself by elevating her to a class she could not otherwise join" -- relates it straight back to the first novel in English to become a popular sensation, Samuel Richardson's Pamela. So perhaps this is proof that we haven't progressed very far ideologically; conservatives would perhaps see this as proof that certain roles and fantasies are hard-wired into humanity's circuitry. (I don't endorse those conclusions.)
The Urban Haute Bourgeousie (11 Nov 2009)
At Generation Bubble, Anton Steinpilz brings up Whit Stillman's 1990 film Metropolitan, which played as a sort of fond lament for the1980s. The film is extremely enjoyable despite being borderline reactionary -- it's open to an interpretation (not a likely one, but one useful for the suspension of ideological disbelief) in which the implicit politics are meant to be foibles of the characters rather than Stillman's own, which makes it pleasantly watchable. (I'm especially fond of its weird, stilted Hal Hartley-esque quality, it's closet-drama dialogue.)
The beaus and debutantes of Stillman's hyperstylized New York were meant to be old, old money -- so old that social-capital preservation was never supposed to be a concern for them. But as Steinpilz notes, the film is shot through with melancholy at the possibility that the whole social-capital system (which the film, with its coming-out balls and stilted drawing-room conversations and Victorian concerns about moral turpitude, lovingly depicts/invents) is becoming supplanted by a raw-money culture in which manners don't matter. The unleashing of the financial sector brought about a whole new class of "vulgar rich," the sort of people that Tom Wolfe (in many ways Stillman's artistic grandfather) scorns in his work. Stillman's characters -- even the crypto-Marxist among them -- all subscribe to the primacy of social capital; they are all entranced by the same chimeras of tradition, which they take to be lineaments of an eternal and proper social order -- the inverse of the Fourierist fantasy one of them espouses. Rather than an explicit program that must be imposed, entailing all sorts of overt dislocation, the traditional order Stillman idealizes works hegemonically, which means that it has an effortless grace, the sprezzatura of the privileged. Though the character Charlie appropriates the term "bourgeoisie" for his neologism "urban haute bourgeoisie" to describe the characters in the film, they are really anachronistic petit aristocrats (which makes sense, since they are styled after the gentry from Jane Austen's novels.) The bourgeoisie, in actuality, were the ones who routed Charlie's kind in the 19th century. The bourgeois ideals -- opportunity, mobility, enlightened self-interest, economic transparency, etc. -- are what Charlie rejects; he implicitly endorses a rentier system where social betters are ensconced in a divinely ordained hierarchy.
Arnold Kling recently cited a quote from Gordon Wood that I think is relevant here:
Nowadays, the term "urban haute bourgeoisie" most likely does not conjure up debutante balls and Upper East Siders. For me, it evokes the scene on the Lower East Side, the cultural entrepreneurs and their hangers-on. It turns on cultural capital rather than old-style social capital, which has perhaps receded to an inaccessible demimonde, far away from hipsters and reality TV cameras.
The beaus and debutantes of Stillman's hyperstylized New York were meant to be old, old money -- so old that social-capital preservation was never supposed to be a concern for them. But as Steinpilz notes, the film is shot through with melancholy at the possibility that the whole social-capital system (which the film, with its coming-out balls and stilted drawing-room conversations and Victorian concerns about moral turpitude, lovingly depicts/invents) is becoming supplanted by a raw-money culture in which manners don't matter. The unleashing of the financial sector brought about a whole new class of "vulgar rich," the sort of people that Tom Wolfe (in many ways Stillman's artistic grandfather) scorns in his work. Stillman's characters -- even the crypto-Marxist among them -- all subscribe to the primacy of social capital; they are all entranced by the same chimeras of tradition, which they take to be lineaments of an eternal and proper social order -- the inverse of the Fourierist fantasy one of them espouses. Rather than an explicit program that must be imposed, entailing all sorts of overt dislocation, the traditional order Stillman idealizes works hegemonically, which means that it has an effortless grace, the sprezzatura of the privileged. Though the character Charlie appropriates the term "bourgeoisie" for his neologism "urban haute bourgeoisie" to describe the characters in the film, they are really anachronistic petit aristocrats (which makes sense, since they are styled after the gentry from Jane Austen's novels.) The bourgeoisie, in actuality, were the ones who routed Charlie's kind in the 19th century. The bourgeois ideals -- opportunity, mobility, enlightened self-interest, economic transparency, etc. -- are what Charlie rejects; he implicitly endorses a rentier system where social betters are ensconced in a divinely ordained hierarchy.
Arnold Kling recently cited a quote from Gordon Wood that I think is relevant here:
After all, wealth, compared to birth, breeding, ethnicity, family heritage, gentility, even education, is the least humiliating means by which one person can claim superiority over another; and it is the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion.That's a justification for wealth betokening meritocracy, an order to supplant the unjust aristocratic one based on inherited social capital. The virtue of hard work supposedly replaces the genetic lottery, though humanity is basically consigned to eternally squabbling over status as part of its inherent nature.
Nowadays, the term "urban haute bourgeoisie" most likely does not conjure up debutante balls and Upper East Siders. For me, it evokes the scene on the Lower East Side, the cultural entrepreneurs and their hangers-on. It turns on cultural capital rather than old-style social capital, which has perhaps receded to an inaccessible demimonde, far away from hipsters and reality TV cameras.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Ideology and Aesthetic Pleasure (15 Sept 2009)
At the Valve, Bill Benzon was wondering about ideology and aesthetics:
First, when tastes become reflexive, consciously curated, they become predominantly signaling mechanisms: we want to project a certain identity through the tastes we choose to advertise and by managing carefully to try to conceal the tastes we think are less flattering to us. That's almost self-evident, I think. At the point when we are trying to catalog our own tastes, the sense of it being our "real" taste is gone -- one can't know one's own aesthetic response, for to think it is to destroy its spontaneity. Identity -- if there is such a thing that predates our self-fashioning -- is probably like that too; we glimpse it only by accident, only while we are trying to see something else. It's much easier and much more convincing when others tell us who we are and what we are like and even what we seem to enjoy than for us to know ourselves directly -- our self-knowledge is too distorted by wishes, secret shame, denial, grandiosity, modesty, and a variety of other expectations we are always in the process of juggling.
Our efforts to signal identity through conscious control of our tastes are shaped by ideology. We are guided by what we understand as representing the class to which we think we belong and how much we mean to struggle against that affiliation. Our skill in reading signals and assigning interpretations to them are all inflected by class habitus, which itself is thoroughly ideological -- meant to protect class boundaries and generally speaking, reproduce the existing social order and power structure. That's not to say our tastes are phony to the degree they are calculated. But taste is not ever free of all calculation, an expression of pure spontaneity and of our inner quality -- that is the most ideological position of all: My inner refinement is revealed by my altogether genuine and natural pleasure in Brahms while your innate vulgarity is inevitable and unavoidably revealed by your unthinking joy in Coldplay. We respond to what we have prepared the way for, and that often can be controlled through deliberate planning, i.e., I will read about the French New Wave filmmakers and the associated criticism so that I will understand and "really" appreciate Godard's Week-End, which in turn will make me think that I am cool. If we don't seize upon that preparation process and make it conscious, we will be signaling our contentment with being guided by coincidence, the tastes of our friends and family, marketing information, the zeitgeist, and so on. We probably won't reveal our inner taste so much as become a barometer for prevailing popular taste.
So there is no point in our trying to figure out our "real tastes" so that we can tell ourselves that we have become more authentic. We should forget all about making authenticity to ourselves a criteria for pleasure. Pleasure may or may not be spontaneous, but it is all too frequently rare, so we probably shouldn't spurn it when it comes. But we can't opt out of the ways in which our pleasures are imbricated with class snobbery. Class identity seems to be one of enabling conditions for experiencing many, many forms of pleasure (if not all of them) -- the pleasure of belonging, of excluding, of knowing where you are and what you might become, the pleasure of winning. Pleasure is not necessarily a social good. Likewise, aesthetic pleasure is not virtuous or politically innocent. When I listened to abrasive music as a teenager, it was because in part I hoped it wcould serve as a kind of nonviolent weapon as well as a nonpermanent tattoo -- marking me as a certain type and driving the wrong sort away. IO tried to elevate these desires to feelings -- incontrovertible and irreversible -- by feeling them in the music. Then I could feel as though the music carried me to where I belonged.
Anyway, what is more interesting, I think, is that the tastes we aren't entirely conscious of -- the aesthetic responses we don't guide or manufacture for ourselves, are also ideological, in a more profound and insidious way, shaping the field in which we conceive our identity projects. Eagleton's thesis is that the aesthetic is how we experience the law -- the demands of the state, or of power more generally -- spontaneously, as though it was our own desire and entirely natural, unquestionable. This does wonders for replacing coercion (what repressive socialist states needed to maintain control) with consent (what Western democracies/plutocracies make do with). The category of the aesthetic is how we come to embrace and seem to invent what was already necessary; it is how we love Big Brother while still feeling free enough to work within "free markets" and contribute to the "spontaneous order" they are held to produce. Eagleton:
This sort of logic leads to skepticism of depth psychology as a whole -- all forms of identity making -- as a kind of insidious plot to make us all slaves to an idea of ourselves that really comes from the state. Hence, a particular strain of radical counterattack, which consists of "free play" -- destabilize your identity, embrace sundry forms of anarchic behavior (free love, squatting, drifiterism), and escape into the margins. This seems a bit impractical. Also, this would entail surrendering all the pleasures and comforts of being somebody.
I’ve got a question about people’s expressed aesthetic preferences: Does it reflect their sense of immediate satisfaction with the work, a superimposed identity or ideology, or something else?This is something I've thought a lot about, for better or worse. Most of my ideas about it are derived from Bourdieu's Distinction and Eagleton's Ideology of the Aesthetic.
First, when tastes become reflexive, consciously curated, they become predominantly signaling mechanisms: we want to project a certain identity through the tastes we choose to advertise and by managing carefully to try to conceal the tastes we think are less flattering to us. That's almost self-evident, I think. At the point when we are trying to catalog our own tastes, the sense of it being our "real" taste is gone -- one can't know one's own aesthetic response, for to think it is to destroy its spontaneity. Identity -- if there is such a thing that predates our self-fashioning -- is probably like that too; we glimpse it only by accident, only while we are trying to see something else. It's much easier and much more convincing when others tell us who we are and what we are like and even what we seem to enjoy than for us to know ourselves directly -- our self-knowledge is too distorted by wishes, secret shame, denial, grandiosity, modesty, and a variety of other expectations we are always in the process of juggling.
Our efforts to signal identity through conscious control of our tastes are shaped by ideology. We are guided by what we understand as representing the class to which we think we belong and how much we mean to struggle against that affiliation. Our skill in reading signals and assigning interpretations to them are all inflected by class habitus, which itself is thoroughly ideological -- meant to protect class boundaries and generally speaking, reproduce the existing social order and power structure. That's not to say our tastes are phony to the degree they are calculated. But taste is not ever free of all calculation, an expression of pure spontaneity and of our inner quality -- that is the most ideological position of all: My inner refinement is revealed by my altogether genuine and natural pleasure in Brahms while your innate vulgarity is inevitable and unavoidably revealed by your unthinking joy in Coldplay. We respond to what we have prepared the way for, and that often can be controlled through deliberate planning, i.e., I will read about the French New Wave filmmakers and the associated criticism so that I will understand and "really" appreciate Godard's Week-End, which in turn will make me think that I am cool. If we don't seize upon that preparation process and make it conscious, we will be signaling our contentment with being guided by coincidence, the tastes of our friends and family, marketing information, the zeitgeist, and so on. We probably won't reveal our inner taste so much as become a barometer for prevailing popular taste.
So there is no point in our trying to figure out our "real tastes" so that we can tell ourselves that we have become more authentic. We should forget all about making authenticity to ourselves a criteria for pleasure. Pleasure may or may not be spontaneous, but it is all too frequently rare, so we probably shouldn't spurn it when it comes. But we can't opt out of the ways in which our pleasures are imbricated with class snobbery. Class identity seems to be one of enabling conditions for experiencing many, many forms of pleasure (if not all of them) -- the pleasure of belonging, of excluding, of knowing where you are and what you might become, the pleasure of winning. Pleasure is not necessarily a social good. Likewise, aesthetic pleasure is not virtuous or politically innocent. When I listened to abrasive music as a teenager, it was because in part I hoped it wcould serve as a kind of nonviolent weapon as well as a nonpermanent tattoo -- marking me as a certain type and driving the wrong sort away. IO tried to elevate these desires to feelings -- incontrovertible and irreversible -- by feeling them in the music. Then I could feel as though the music carried me to where I belonged.
Anyway, what is more interesting, I think, is that the tastes we aren't entirely conscious of -- the aesthetic responses we don't guide or manufacture for ourselves, are also ideological, in a more profound and insidious way, shaping the field in which we conceive our identity projects. Eagleton's thesis is that the aesthetic is how we experience the law -- the demands of the state, or of power more generally -- spontaneously, as though it was our own desire and entirely natural, unquestionable. This does wonders for replacing coercion (what repressive socialist states needed to maintain control) with consent (what Western democracies/plutocracies make do with). The category of the aesthetic is how we come to embrace and seem to invent what was already necessary; it is how we love Big Brother while still feeling free enough to work within "free markets" and contribute to the "spontaneous order" they are held to produce. Eagleton:
For power to be individually authenticated, there must be constructed with in the subject a new form of inwardness which will do the unpalatable work of the law for it, and all the more effectively since that law has now apparently evaporated.... Power is shifting its locations from centralized institutions to the silent, invisible depths of the subject itself.Later he calls the aesthetic "no more than a name for the political unconscious," "shorthand for a whole project of hegemony," and he verges close to simply equating "ideology" and "aesthetic" -- "lawfulness without a law" in Kant's formulation.
This sort of logic leads to skepticism of depth psychology as a whole -- all forms of identity making -- as a kind of insidious plot to make us all slaves to an idea of ourselves that really comes from the state. Hence, a particular strain of radical counterattack, which consists of "free play" -- destabilize your identity, embrace sundry forms of anarchic behavior (free love, squatting, drifiterism), and escape into the margins. This seems a bit impractical. Also, this would entail surrendering all the pleasures and comforts of being somebody.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Infinite Flameout (28 July 2009)
I really wanted to get with the zeitgeist and read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest this summer. But at page 236, in the middle of a unparagraphed stream-of-consciousness passage about a melodramatically veiled woman smoking crack with an improvised works, I couldn't take it anymore. I may be a victim of our short-attention-span society -- and part of why I wanted to read the long, long, novel is that it seemed to run counter to our growing preference for "the short, the sweet, and the bitty," as Tyler Cowen says -- but I kept feeling I was expending a lot of effort on the book with virtually no reward.
It's not that I don't read long books -- I'll happily plod along through Trollope's triple deckers, and in graduate school I worked mainly on the novels of Samuel Richardson, whose Clarissa clocks in at 1,500 pages in the Penguin edition. I just don't have patience for long, incoherent books. Infinite Jest seemed like pointless jigsaw puzzle; unlike Pynchon's books, in which there seems to be so much interconnection between the various threads and so many resonating levels of meaning criss-crossing through the text that it's almost overwhelming but always compelling you to work at holding it together in your mind, Wallace's book just seems to dump a bunch of confusing stuff in your lap and hope that you are too disoriented to recognize that it's not interesting. I kept wishing I was reading the Cliffs Notes version of Infinite Jest that put the action in the right order and explained what all the stupid abbreviations stood for. It didn't help that the novel is preoccupied with several things I just have little interest in reading about: high-school tennis, boarding schools, the self-defeating behavior of drug addicts, the city of Boston -- it sounds dumb, I'm sure, but I would have kept reading a little longer if it was set in Philadelphia.
Maybe I needed to follow Samuel Johnson's advice regarding Richardson: "If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." I know the plot is sort of beside the point with Infinite Jest and that wanting to have it explained is just a way of seeking the satisfying sense of an ending when the thematic closure feels elusive, requiring far more effort and patience. Still, though immersing oneself in the texture of Infinite Jest must be the appeal, but I found it off-putting to get into the finer nuances of smart, analytical people destroying themselves.
Wallace's periphrastic style, so effective in his essays, when it helps him establish a particular attitude toward his material and drives him to uncover minutia that pays surprising dividends, was totally infuriating in a novel, when the often arbitrarily dense detailing was just more crap he was making up and more stuff I was supposed to work hard to figure out because he was tauntingly withholding the explanation from me. I found myself growing extremely resentful about that, and it seemed ridiculous to be mad at a book when I could just put it down and read something else. It reminded me, too, of Wes Anderson's later movies, overloaded with detail yet at the same time claustrophobically fastidious and self-referential, precious -- gifted people obsessing over the pressures of being recognized as gifted; all the advantages of talent reduced to morbid sensitivity.
His tendency to overwrite reminded me of when I used to write college papers on a typewriter back in the 1980s. It was hard to delete anything that didn't work out once you typed it into the body of the paper, so I would generally try to write myself out of corners I'd found I'd backed myself into. Wallace is at his worst when this seeming can't-revise/won't-revise approach is combined with pretentious and showy vocabulary, awkward sentence structures (derived perhaps from spending too much time analyzing grammar) and a stream-of-consciousness structure which meanders and turns in on itself. (Who likes stream-of-consciousness? Is there anything more tiresome than an unedited regurgitation of someone else's thoughts?) I didn't think it was especially funny either, despite trying very hard to get in the spirit of the thing. It was too much like gallows humor, and Wallace's suicide, unfortunately, hangs over the book like a pall.
Still, I wish I could find the book readable. Crammed with failed people and their failed strategies for dealing with the strain of social reality, the book succeeded in making me feel like a failure. Thanks for that.
It's not that I don't read long books -- I'll happily plod along through Trollope's triple deckers, and in graduate school I worked mainly on the novels of Samuel Richardson, whose Clarissa clocks in at 1,500 pages in the Penguin edition. I just don't have patience for long, incoherent books. Infinite Jest seemed like pointless jigsaw puzzle; unlike Pynchon's books, in which there seems to be so much interconnection between the various threads and so many resonating levels of meaning criss-crossing through the text that it's almost overwhelming but always compelling you to work at holding it together in your mind, Wallace's book just seems to dump a bunch of confusing stuff in your lap and hope that you are too disoriented to recognize that it's not interesting. I kept wishing I was reading the Cliffs Notes version of Infinite Jest that put the action in the right order and explained what all the stupid abbreviations stood for. It didn't help that the novel is preoccupied with several things I just have little interest in reading about: high-school tennis, boarding schools, the self-defeating behavior of drug addicts, the city of Boston -- it sounds dumb, I'm sure, but I would have kept reading a little longer if it was set in Philadelphia.
Maybe I needed to follow Samuel Johnson's advice regarding Richardson: "If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." I know the plot is sort of beside the point with Infinite Jest and that wanting to have it explained is just a way of seeking the satisfying sense of an ending when the thematic closure feels elusive, requiring far more effort and patience. Still, though immersing oneself in the texture of Infinite Jest must be the appeal, but I found it off-putting to get into the finer nuances of smart, analytical people destroying themselves.
Wallace's periphrastic style, so effective in his essays, when it helps him establish a particular attitude toward his material and drives him to uncover minutia that pays surprising dividends, was totally infuriating in a novel, when the often arbitrarily dense detailing was just more crap he was making up and more stuff I was supposed to work hard to figure out because he was tauntingly withholding the explanation from me. I found myself growing extremely resentful about that, and it seemed ridiculous to be mad at a book when I could just put it down and read something else. It reminded me, too, of Wes Anderson's later movies, overloaded with detail yet at the same time claustrophobically fastidious and self-referential, precious -- gifted people obsessing over the pressures of being recognized as gifted; all the advantages of talent reduced to morbid sensitivity.
His tendency to overwrite reminded me of when I used to write college papers on a typewriter back in the 1980s. It was hard to delete anything that didn't work out once you typed it into the body of the paper, so I would generally try to write myself out of corners I'd found I'd backed myself into. Wallace is at his worst when this seeming can't-revise/won't-revise approach is combined with pretentious and showy vocabulary, awkward sentence structures (derived perhaps from spending too much time analyzing grammar) and a stream-of-consciousness structure which meanders and turns in on itself. (Who likes stream-of-consciousness? Is there anything more tiresome than an unedited regurgitation of someone else's thoughts?) I didn't think it was especially funny either, despite trying very hard to get in the spirit of the thing. It was too much like gallows humor, and Wallace's suicide, unfortunately, hangs over the book like a pall.
Still, I wish I could find the book readable. Crammed with failed people and their failed strategies for dealing with the strain of social reality, the book succeeded in making me feel like a failure. Thanks for that.
Maps and legends (20 July 2009)
Recently, as I mentioned before, I re-read the novel Dune, something that felt vaguely shameful to me, so shameful that I feel compelled to mention it again here as a kind of penance. While I was quickly and compulsively working my way through Muad Dib's rise to the godhead, I was too ashamed to take the book on the subway; instead I waited until I got home from work to furtively dive in. Not that the book itself is shameful; it's rightly regarded as a classic. I think my shame came from how much it remind me of myself when I was 12, when I first read it, how much I was indulging a useless nostalgia, as all the innocence was gone from my reading. Whenever I felt myself getting caught up in the story, I found myself adamantly retreating to an analytical distance, seeking in some way to ironize my own engagement.
While I was reading, I found myself frequently and needlessly recurring to the near-incomprehensible map of the planet on which most of the action takes place. It's not like the geography is confusing. But the map is more confusing than anything else, with lots of locations labeled that I don't remember ever being mentioned in the text, with hopelessly geeky names like "the Minor Erg". The glossary, on the other hand, is extremely useful and great for laughs, too. My favorite part is the Pale Fire style references to nonexistent reference works; e.g. the parenthetical in the entry for Krimskell fiber that reads "For a more detailed study, see Holjance Vohnbrook's 'The Strangler Vines of Ecaz.' " I think half the reason you write a science fiction book is to throw in stuff like that. And to produce appendixes that go into utterly gratuitous detail about the fictional universe you've invented. Reading Dune's appendixes made me wonder whether the novel was just an excuse to allow Herbert to publish the appendixes, which seemed to contain the quintessence of his inspiration, still crystalline and impenetrable and inaccessible. Novels like Dune tap into the primordial passion of naming things, or renaming familiar things in some made-up language, and drawing up maps for the sheer pleasure of naive cartography.
What started me thinking about this was a passage in Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy -- a survey of differences between oral cultures and cultures that have writing.
While I was reading, I found myself frequently and needlessly recurring to the near-incomprehensible map of the planet on which most of the action takes place. It's not like the geography is confusing. But the map is more confusing than anything else, with lots of locations labeled that I don't remember ever being mentioned in the text, with hopelessly geeky names like "the Minor Erg". The glossary, on the other hand, is extremely useful and great for laughs, too. My favorite part is the Pale Fire style references to nonexistent reference works; e.g. the parenthetical in the entry for Krimskell fiber that reads "For a more detailed study, see Holjance Vohnbrook's 'The Strangler Vines of Ecaz.' " I think half the reason you write a science fiction book is to throw in stuff like that. And to produce appendixes that go into utterly gratuitous detail about the fictional universe you've invented. Reading Dune's appendixes made me wonder whether the novel was just an excuse to allow Herbert to publish the appendixes, which seemed to contain the quintessence of his inspiration, still crystalline and impenetrable and inaccessible. Novels like Dune tap into the primordial passion of naming things, or renaming familiar things in some made-up language, and drawing up maps for the sheer pleasure of naive cartography.
What started me thinking about this was a passage in Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy -- a survey of differences between oral cultures and cultures that have writing.
For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Man is the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world. Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or 'world,' think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be 'explored.' The ancient oral world knew few 'explorers', though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers, and pilgrims.Michael Chabon's essay about childhood in the most recent New York Review of Books touches on a similar idea. Citing the mental maps he made of his neighborhood, replete with personal landmarks unique to him, Chabon claims that "Childhood is a branch of cartography." He connects this with maps in adventure stories:
People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.Combine with this Ong's argument about adventurers, and you get something like this: A certain species of books, mainly attractive to young adults, seem designed to re-stage that transition from an oral-dominated world of adventure to text-dominated (i.e. mapped) world on a small scale, in the reader's mind. An epic story unfolds on the oral-tradition model, but it's fused to a battery of maps and glossaries and appendices that engulf the narrative and sap its power away, or at least redirects that narrative's momentum and energy. That is to say, perhaps part of the drama of novels like Dune lies in having the adventuresome oral tradition evoked again for readers while allowing them reader to ultimately and triumphantly reject it in favor of textuality, literacy, maps, dictionaries, and so forth. We master the technologies of text as we're reading these otherwise unnecessarily confusing books -- consulting the maps and the glossary -- and experience ourselves transcending the universe of the story as it unfolds. We end up feeling as though we are alongside the creator of the story, in an "adult" world of total comprehension. Then we confirm it by reading the appendix. Eventually we associate with adulthood the idea that we can do away with the fiction and just stick to the facts, presented in as bare-bones a fashion as possible so we can take in more of them. We skip right to the maps in the back; the stories just get in the way.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
"A beginning is a very delicate time." (25 June 2009)
Inspired by John Hodgman's speech at the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner, in which he interrogated President Obama about the Kwisatz Haderach, I decided to read (okay, re-read) Frank Herbert's Dune. I've seen the David Lynch movie at least a dozen times, to the point where snippets of its dialogue are part of my conversational repertoire, but I haven't read the book probably since I was 12 or 13.
I was expecting it to be slightly silly -- and it is -- but it turns out that it's also surprisingly absorbing, despite, or maybe because of, its peculiar tone of haute solemnity, as if Spengler decided to try his hand at pulp sci-fi. Herbert seems to relish not only inventing superfluous terminology and casually throwing out details from the millions of years of epochal galactic history that he'd like readers to believe he has worked out in full, but he mixes in an ersatz Hegelianism, with occasional evocations of the master-slave dialectic, the ideas of totality and species being, and a grand transcendent design in history. What's brilliant about all the quasi-philosophical jargon is that Herbert doesn't try at all to use it coherently; he just seems to like the way it reads tonally. That's enough to endear the novel to me, though I suspect if I knew more about Herbert's pretensions, I'd be less seduced.
So far, a 100 or so pages in, the narrative seems preoccupied with capturing how the characters read so much out of various minute phenomena -- it's like a manual of hermeneutics rendered as fiction. Preposterous feats of intuition and prophetic dreams are blended in with painstakingly methodical deductions about other characters' emotional states and what behavior they will prompt. Strategic problems are never far from the surface, virtually no details are given without a gloss of their tactical import, or alternatively, an intimation of its mythical portent. What emerges from this is a schizophrenic view of human character that alternates between ultrarationality and supernaturalism. I can't think of anything else quite like it.
What I'm trying to resist though if reading the book as camp, though I'm not sure if this is possible, not sure if one can turn off the irony part of the brain. But it helps to regard the language not as accidentally bathetic but as a specific accomplishment of a mood through somewhat unlikely means, a fog of abstractions and interior monologues to conjure what ends up gripping readers as a kind of physical sensation -- does that make any sense? Wait, it doesn't matter, Michael Jackson might be dead...
I was expecting it to be slightly silly -- and it is -- but it turns out that it's also surprisingly absorbing, despite, or maybe because of, its peculiar tone of haute solemnity, as if Spengler decided to try his hand at pulp sci-fi. Herbert seems to relish not only inventing superfluous terminology and casually throwing out details from the millions of years of epochal galactic history that he'd like readers to believe he has worked out in full, but he mixes in an ersatz Hegelianism, with occasional evocations of the master-slave dialectic, the ideas of totality and species being, and a grand transcendent design in history. What's brilliant about all the quasi-philosophical jargon is that Herbert doesn't try at all to use it coherently; he just seems to like the way it reads tonally. That's enough to endear the novel to me, though I suspect if I knew more about Herbert's pretensions, I'd be less seduced.
So far, a 100 or so pages in, the narrative seems preoccupied with capturing how the characters read so much out of various minute phenomena -- it's like a manual of hermeneutics rendered as fiction. Preposterous feats of intuition and prophetic dreams are blended in with painstakingly methodical deductions about other characters' emotional states and what behavior they will prompt. Strategic problems are never far from the surface, virtually no details are given without a gloss of their tactical import, or alternatively, an intimation of its mythical portent. What emerges from this is a schizophrenic view of human character that alternates between ultrarationality and supernaturalism. I can't think of anything else quite like it.
What I'm trying to resist though if reading the book as camp, though I'm not sure if this is possible, not sure if one can turn off the irony part of the brain. But it helps to regard the language not as accidentally bathetic but as a specific accomplishment of a mood through somewhat unlikely means, a fog of abstractions and interior monologues to conjure what ends up gripping readers as a kind of physical sensation -- does that make any sense? Wait, it doesn't matter, Michael Jackson might be dead...
Semaphore signals (22 June 2009)
I'm currently reading George Gissing's novel New Grub Street, a thoroughly depressing look at the business of manufacturing literature, of belles lettres for sale, and all the petty personality squabbles and scrambles for pre-eminence that go along with it. Gissing seems bent on persuading us that money is all that matters in the end -- i.e., without money a person will lose all sense of propriety and poverty is sufficient to coarsen the morals of anyone -- and that of course literary merit has nothing to do with commercial viability. He denounces the "hateful spirit of literary rancour...that made people eager to believe all evil," noting that literary gossip and what we would now call snark "were enough to make all literature appear a morbid excrescence upon human life." The book's successful character has a robust social network and no illusions about the crap he cranks out; he regards the idea that literature is a calling as the same sort of sentimental claptrap as romantic love, an obstacle that one must circumvent, an illusion that must be abandoned to get along. Naturally, the failure character is just the opposite, thin-skinned, too proud to self-promote or make instrumental use of friends, and too conscious of the inferiority of his product crafted for the market rather than his muse.
Though resolutely humorless and padded out in places to itself meet the tyrannical demands of the Victorian triple-decker, New Grub Street is also chock full of cynical advice for getting along in the then-newfangled world of journalism. Milvain, the successful hack, tells his aspiring sister after reading one of her articles that "there's rather too much thought in it, perhaps. Suppose you knock out one or two of the less obvious reflections, and substitute a wholesome commonplace?" Readers, he argues, "are irritated, simply irritated by anything that isn't glaringly obvious. They hate an unusual thought." To write for the public, one must "express vulgar thought and feeling in a way that flatters the vulgar thinkers and feelers." In today's context, you might put a slightly different spin on that: writing must be simple so it can be grasped quickly, because everyone is too much in a hurry to devote precious time to any one article. They are under too much pressure to move on to the next thing. But Gissing was prescient about this as well: he has a character lament the "huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print."
Not much has changed in the publishing world as far as I can see -- who you know and how timely you file can seem far more important than how good your writing is. And also, it doesn't suit to be a prima donna about your prose until you've earned the right, then you are obliged to be one, whether or not you have any actual gripes with what editors are doing to your work. Professional journalism is often an elaborate reputation game that requires a facility with signaling and accruing social capital. Whether or not one accepts this reality and accommodates it does seem to determine how far one will get in the publishing world, and perhaps in adult life generally. (I'm often tempted to pout and wait for my precocious specialness to be noticed.)
Economist Robin Hanson makes a similar point in this post about the "shallowness" of our society's most efficacious signals -- in this case the salience of "Ivy League school" to signify a crystallized complex of bourgeois elitist traits and supplant more-nuanced proofs of ability. He concludes that shallow signals are more potent because we know that they will be widely understood beyond our immediate community. Everyone at Northwest State University may know how brilliant your work is from direct experience, but others will have to read through it to make that discovery. And those others, who have nothing invested in you yet, would much rather hear that you went to Yale and thereby take your brilliance for granted than put all that time in.
A similar logic seems to apply to all self-branding efforts, talking about what music we are into, or what books we read, or what sort of logos we have on our clothing, or what kind of car we drive, or what our vocabulary is like, and so on. Assume that it's true that the broader the swath of the population we are trying to impress, the more obvious our choice of signifiers will have to be. Because of the interconnectivity of social networks, and the tantalizing promise of internet fame, the potential audience for our performance of self is always seeming more and more broad, so our choices will be forced toward the more and more obvious, the more and more heavy-handed.
Though resolutely humorless and padded out in places to itself meet the tyrannical demands of the Victorian triple-decker, New Grub Street is also chock full of cynical advice for getting along in the then-newfangled world of journalism. Milvain, the successful hack, tells his aspiring sister after reading one of her articles that "there's rather too much thought in it, perhaps. Suppose you knock out one or two of the less obvious reflections, and substitute a wholesome commonplace?" Readers, he argues, "are irritated, simply irritated by anything that isn't glaringly obvious. They hate an unusual thought." To write for the public, one must "express vulgar thought and feeling in a way that flatters the vulgar thinkers and feelers." In today's context, you might put a slightly different spin on that: writing must be simple so it can be grasped quickly, because everyone is too much in a hurry to devote precious time to any one article. They are under too much pressure to move on to the next thing. But Gissing was prescient about this as well: he has a character lament the "huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print."
Not much has changed in the publishing world as far as I can see -- who you know and how timely you file can seem far more important than how good your writing is. And also, it doesn't suit to be a prima donna about your prose until you've earned the right, then you are obliged to be one, whether or not you have any actual gripes with what editors are doing to your work. Professional journalism is often an elaborate reputation game that requires a facility with signaling and accruing social capital. Whether or not one accepts this reality and accommodates it does seem to determine how far one will get in the publishing world, and perhaps in adult life generally. (I'm often tempted to pout and wait for my precocious specialness to be noticed.)
Economist Robin Hanson makes a similar point in this post about the "shallowness" of our society's most efficacious signals -- in this case the salience of "Ivy League school" to signify a crystallized complex of bourgeois elitist traits and supplant more-nuanced proofs of ability. He concludes that shallow signals are more potent because we know that they will be widely understood beyond our immediate community. Everyone at Northwest State University may know how brilliant your work is from direct experience, but others will have to read through it to make that discovery. And those others, who have nothing invested in you yet, would much rather hear that you went to Yale and thereby take your brilliance for granted than put all that time in.
We all want to affiliate with high status people, but since status is about common distant perceptions of quality, we often care more about what distant observers would think about our associates than about how we privately evaluate them.... Academics understand that folks primarily care about distant common signals of impressiveness, such as publications. Getting a lousy paper into a top journal usually counts for more than a fantastic paper in a low rank journal. Only in small tightly-connected academic communities can an informal perception that your low-journal paper was fantastic make it count for more than a crappy top-journal paper.
A similar logic seems to apply to all self-branding efforts, talking about what music we are into, or what books we read, or what sort of logos we have on our clothing, or what kind of car we drive, or what our vocabulary is like, and so on. Assume that it's true that the broader the swath of the population we are trying to impress, the more obvious our choice of signifiers will have to be. Because of the interconnectivity of social networks, and the tantalizing promise of internet fame, the potential audience for our performance of self is always seeming more and more broad, so our choices will be forced toward the more and more obvious, the more and more heavy-handed.
Creative writing and crippling self-consciousness (4 June 2009)
In the New Yorker, Louis Menand reviews The Program Era, a book by Mark McGurl about the institutionalization of creative-writing programs. Creative writing classes are an easy target for cynics (including me) who don't believe that "creativity" can be taught or should even be isolated and reified as a concept, yet are also skeptical of the idea of transcendent genius separating the true Wordsworthian artists from the rest of the plebes and philistines. Neither McGurl or Menand seem to be as cynical as that -- McGurl argues (and Menand agrees) that creative-writing programs as an institution are the most important development in the history of American literature since World War II, and in many ways is more significant than any particular author produced by the programs. Menand writes:
I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "serious fiction" -- I assume that means the fiction that most people don't bother to read because it doesn't conform to the expectations generated by popular genres. Though McGurl rejects this idea, creative-writing programs, perhaps, can best be understood as the attempt to standardize that heterogeneous mass of non-genre fiction, codifying it into an identifiable (if still not all that marketable) product known as "literary fiction." They also fortify the walls that separate genre fiction from the precincts of capital-L Literature. This helps protect literature from the sort of economically grounded analysis that best explains the popularity and specific features of mass-market fiction, which is clearly crafted as an entertainment product to appeal to well-delineated audiences. Literature, according to the professors sworn to defend its reputation, is above such craven pandering; it is a matter of geniuses serving the muse, of aesthetic struggle in the name of art, not commerce. But creative-writing programs, though they help stabilize the definition of literature and carry it forward into contemporaneity, seem to be primarily about commerce -- about networking and forming the connections that will allow as-yet-unknown writers to possibly make a living by writing (or teaching others how to write). This, and not a cosmically serendipitous concentration of talent, is what allowed so many renowned writers to all inhabit the same university classrooms, as Menand details.
Lots of fields are essentially networking cliques. What makes the creative-writing programs so suspect is not the networking aspect but the intense egocentricity they seemed geared toward generating. Menand highlights this aspect of McGurl's anlalysis and renders it in telling metaphors of machines and carpenter ants:
Part of this crusade for recognition involves writing and reading and commenting on literary fiction, which is perhaps the purest materialization of that personal creativity, the ore of hipster selfhood. In literary fiction, plot is often replaced with meticulous observation, a kind of careful surveillance of surfaces that are then subject to a hermeneutics of authenticity or cool. The same spirit that animates identity creation in the various online forums, mediums, and social networks is what has long animated creative writing programs, so it may be that the programs don't reflect identity-obsessed audiences so much as they have fostered them. Self-proclaimed creative writers are an elite group that teaches the rest of us and the generations that follow how to be minutely worried about the status of the self, the micromechanisms for conveying identity or computing that of the people we encounter. Creative-writing programs institute trickle-down narcissism.
The "habit of self-observation" seems to me a most unfortunate curse, an inability to escape from oneself or see past oneself and become immersed in experiences, in dialogues, conversations. Instead there is only workshops, which are rudimentary rough drafts for the sort of reciprocal "sharing" that now takes place in rolling fashion online. We are all creative writers now. Maybe those who come after us will have the lucky chance to be something else.
As McGurl points out, the university is where most serious fiction writers have been produced since the Second World War. It has also been the place where most serious fiction readers are produced: they are taught how to read in departments of literature. McGurl’s claim is simple: given that most of the fiction that Americans write and read is processed through the higher-education system, we ought to pay some attention to the way the system affects the outcome.
I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "serious fiction" -- I assume that means the fiction that most people don't bother to read because it doesn't conform to the expectations generated by popular genres. Though McGurl rejects this idea, creative-writing programs, perhaps, can best be understood as the attempt to standardize that heterogeneous mass of non-genre fiction, codifying it into an identifiable (if still not all that marketable) product known as "literary fiction." They also fortify the walls that separate genre fiction from the precincts of capital-L Literature. This helps protect literature from the sort of economically grounded analysis that best explains the popularity and specific features of mass-market fiction, which is clearly crafted as an entertainment product to appeal to well-delineated audiences. Literature, according to the professors sworn to defend its reputation, is above such craven pandering; it is a matter of geniuses serving the muse, of aesthetic struggle in the name of art, not commerce. But creative-writing programs, though they help stabilize the definition of literature and carry it forward into contemporaneity, seem to be primarily about commerce -- about networking and forming the connections that will allow as-yet-unknown writers to possibly make a living by writing (or teaching others how to write). This, and not a cosmically serendipitous concentration of talent, is what allowed so many renowned writers to all inhabit the same university classrooms, as Menand details.
Lots of fields are essentially networking cliques. What makes the creative-writing programs so suspect is not the networking aspect but the intense egocentricity they seemed geared toward generating. Menand highlights this aspect of McGurl's anlalysis and renders it in telling metaphors of machines and carpenter ants:
Writing is a technology, after all, and there is a sense in which human beings who write can be thought of as writing machines. They get tooled in certain ways, and the creative-writing program is a means of tooling. But McGurl treats creative writing as an ant farm where the ants are extremely interesting. He never reduces writers to unthinking products of a system. They are thinking products of a system. After all, few activities make people more self-conscious than participating in a writing workshop. Reflecting on yourself—your experience, your “voice,” your background, your talent or lack of it—is what writing workshops make people do.Again, fiction that comes out of creative-writing programs has an extremely limited appeal -- to those hardy few who routinely read The New Yorker, for instance. As Menand notes, "university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit—the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace." So when McGurl talks about self-conscious ants, he's really talking about a small slice of well-educated middlebrows who tend toward a certain status anxiety and are also probably prone to the peculiar kind of identity crisis that afflicts those self-selected members of the "creative class." Like the Calvinist elect, the people of the creative class are fairly certain they are destined to be creative, but can never be certain about just how creative they are. So they must seek outward signs of their blessed inner superiority, must seek or contrive recognition for their creativity whenever possible. This is that class's essential self-consciousness, and when it is acute, it becomes hipsterism.
McGurl thinks that this habit of self-observation is not restricted to writing programs. He thinks that we’re all highly self-conscious ants, because that’s what it means to be a modern person. Constant self-assessment and self-reflection are part of our program.... So the fiction that comes out of creative-writing programs may appeal to readers because it rehearses topics—“Who am I?” issues—that are already part of their inner lives.
Part of this crusade for recognition involves writing and reading and commenting on literary fiction, which is perhaps the purest materialization of that personal creativity, the ore of hipster selfhood. In literary fiction, plot is often replaced with meticulous observation, a kind of careful surveillance of surfaces that are then subject to a hermeneutics of authenticity or cool. The same spirit that animates identity creation in the various online forums, mediums, and social networks is what has long animated creative writing programs, so it may be that the programs don't reflect identity-obsessed audiences so much as they have fostered them. Self-proclaimed creative writers are an elite group that teaches the rest of us and the generations that follow how to be minutely worried about the status of the self, the micromechanisms for conveying identity or computing that of the people we encounter. Creative-writing programs institute trickle-down narcissism.
The "habit of self-observation" seems to me a most unfortunate curse, an inability to escape from oneself or see past oneself and become immersed in experiences, in dialogues, conversations. Instead there is only workshops, which are rudimentary rough drafts for the sort of reciprocal "sharing" that now takes place in rolling fashion online. We are all creative writers now. Maybe those who come after us will have the lucky chance to be something else.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
What Hitler read (4 March 2009)
In the TLS Ritchie Robertson reviews Timothy W. Ryback's Hitler's Private Library, whose subtitle promises "the books that shaped his life." Not surprisingly, these turn out to be mainly anti-Semitic screeds and pseudoscientific works of racial typology. Robertson makes special note of his apparent disinterest in imaginative fiction:
I don't know. There's a good chance you can read and enjoy Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens, or whichever author is nominated as a standard-bearer for the human spirit, and still be a fascist. The more important question is whether Hitler would have considered this literary book worth reading.
The other striking absence is literature. According to Oechsner, Hitler owned all the Wild West adventure stories by Karl May, all the detective fiction of Edgar Wallace, and many love stories by Hedwig Courths-Mahler (a German Barbara Cartland), but nothing that could send the imagination along unfamiliar tracks. Hitler’s mental world seems to have had no place for imagination. Instead, he relied on a naive conception of science, on which he claimed that National Socialism was based.This struck me as humanistic claptrap, the sort of conclusion tailor-made for literature professors who believe that teaching students to appreciate, say, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and the Brontë sisters will prevent them from becoming little Hitlers themselves. We mustn't lack the imagination to bathe ourselves in the comfortable moral truths extracted from the Great Books by tweedy pedants. The insult that reading genre fiction somehow proves one's lack of imagination is especially gallling, as though all those Harlequin romance readers running their minds along "familiar tracks" are implicitly emotional fascists. Apparently, we are to believe that there is a good kind of imaginative projection that involves novelty, linguistic games, and catering to the upper-middle class tastes, and a bad kind that sticks close-minded readers in a vicarious rut. Could there be a better put-down for someone else's tastes than, "Oh, that's the sort of thing Hitler liked"?
I don't know. There's a good chance you can read and enjoy Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens, or whichever author is nominated as a standard-bearer for the human spirit, and still be a fascist. The more important question is whether Hitler would have considered this literary book worth reading.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Trollope's The Way We Live Now (4 Dec 2008)
Trollope's The Way We Live Now, seems a novel well suited to our times. It's about what happens to a society in which speculative motives have supplanted the traditional moral codes governing economic and social behavior -- how bubble psychology plays out at the various levels of society and affects the various relations between different classes of people. Trollope unobtrusively works the theme into his different plot strands: we see speculators in the marriage market, speculators in aristocratic titles, speculators in a fictitious railroad scheme; cheats at cards, cheats at establishing literary reputation, cheats in the game of love, cheats in self-representation, and so on. Aristocrat card players issue their own illiquid commercial paper and reputational bubbles swell and burst.
In his workman-like way, Trollope take us through the thought processes of his characters, who, unlike those of so many other Victorian novelists, at least succeed in coming across as adults. In The Way We Live Now, characters are generally rationalizing their own selfishness by referring to the apparent selfishness of others -- the overriding mode of moral reasoning during a bubble. Presuming that everyone is in the midst of calculating how to press their advantage leads to an overwhelming cynicism that one adopts by default. It becomes to hard to conceive of the possibility of authenticity, of a disingenuous self-presentation. (Hetta Carbury, maybe the least tainted figure in the novel, captures this well when she says to her mother of a suitor, "He has to me that air of selfishness which is so very common with people in London -- as though what he said were all said out of surface politeness.") Genuine emotions are so routinely turn out to be vulnerable weaknesses that the characters instinctively resist them and ultimately succeed in banishing the notion of having them from their minds for the most part.
This gives the novel moments of genuine tragedy, when we recognize that the characters can't acknowledge their own natural sympathies, and the opportunity for real love and mutual understanding with others passes them by. Over and over, Trollope illustrates the alienation that stems from calculating rationality. If they sense them, they dismiss the possibility of acting on them, mainly because they are skeptical that such feelings aren't a social trap, but also because they are so habituated to scheming. They are self-centered without taking much pleasure in it, which suggest the demeanor is imposed on them by the times -- the way they had to live then. Speculation had become an end in itself -- it becomes gambling addiction, where winning is beside the point of always finding action, always having a live bet. All the characters are subsumed by variations of this compulsion.
In a world where cynicism is virtually universal, belief becomes a valuable commodity. In this regard, the interpersonal intersects with the economic, as a capitalist economy runs on trust, or at least on trust transformed by capital into its economic aspect, credit. But credit, in Trollope's novel, is a means to pervert the human relation of trust into something exploitable, into something that may easily be misrepresented since it is not a lived relation but a contracted simulacrum of a relation. Lady Carbury, the hack writer who hopes to ingratiate herself with the dubious financier Melmotte, poses this question -- the question of the age, it seems -- to one of her editors: "If a thing can be made great and beneficial, a boon to humanity, simply by creating a belief in it, does not a man become a benefactor to his race by creating that belief?" One can imagine many advertising professionals asking themselves this, as well. Nothing is real, anyway, right, so should we give people the opportunity to dream big? But the question also suits the Ponzi scheme high-finance has become in our time. As we have discovered, it is easy for the untrustworthy to secure vast amounts of credit; there are no moral tests to pass before one can pile on leverage.
So it's not surprising that this piece of analysis from financial consultant Greg Curtis (posted at Barry Ritholtz's site) seems a summation of the themes of Trollope's novel:
In his workman-like way, Trollope take us through the thought processes of his characters, who, unlike those of so many other Victorian novelists, at least succeed in coming across as adults. In The Way We Live Now, characters are generally rationalizing their own selfishness by referring to the apparent selfishness of others -- the overriding mode of moral reasoning during a bubble. Presuming that everyone is in the midst of calculating how to press their advantage leads to an overwhelming cynicism that one adopts by default. It becomes to hard to conceive of the possibility of authenticity, of a disingenuous self-presentation. (Hetta Carbury, maybe the least tainted figure in the novel, captures this well when she says to her mother of a suitor, "He has to me that air of selfishness which is so very common with people in London -- as though what he said were all said out of surface politeness.") Genuine emotions are so routinely turn out to be vulnerable weaknesses that the characters instinctively resist them and ultimately succeed in banishing the notion of having them from their minds for the most part.
This gives the novel moments of genuine tragedy, when we recognize that the characters can't acknowledge their own natural sympathies, and the opportunity for real love and mutual understanding with others passes them by. Over and over, Trollope illustrates the alienation that stems from calculating rationality. If they sense them, they dismiss the possibility of acting on them, mainly because they are skeptical that such feelings aren't a social trap, but also because they are so habituated to scheming. They are self-centered without taking much pleasure in it, which suggest the demeanor is imposed on them by the times -- the way they had to live then. Speculation had become an end in itself -- it becomes gambling addiction, where winning is beside the point of always finding action, always having a live bet. All the characters are subsumed by variations of this compulsion.
In a world where cynicism is virtually universal, belief becomes a valuable commodity. In this regard, the interpersonal intersects with the economic, as a capitalist economy runs on trust, or at least on trust transformed by capital into its economic aspect, credit. But credit, in Trollope's novel, is a means to pervert the human relation of trust into something exploitable, into something that may easily be misrepresented since it is not a lived relation but a contracted simulacrum of a relation. Lady Carbury, the hack writer who hopes to ingratiate herself with the dubious financier Melmotte, poses this question -- the question of the age, it seems -- to one of her editors: "If a thing can be made great and beneficial, a boon to humanity, simply by creating a belief in it, does not a man become a benefactor to his race by creating that belief?" One can imagine many advertising professionals asking themselves this, as well. Nothing is real, anyway, right, so should we give people the opportunity to dream big? But the question also suits the Ponzi scheme high-finance has become in our time. As we have discovered, it is easy for the untrustworthy to secure vast amounts of credit; there are no moral tests to pass before one can pile on leverage.
So it's not surprising that this piece of analysis from financial consultant Greg Curtis (posted at Barry Ritholtz's site) seems a summation of the themes of Trollope's novel:
In our view, poor risk controls, massive leverage, and the blind eye were really symptoms of a much worse disease: the root cause of the crisis was the gradual but ultimately complete collapse of ethical behavior across the financial industry. Once the financial industry came unmoored from its ethical base, financial firms were free to behave in ways that were in their – and especially their top executives’ – short-term interest without any concern about the longer term impact on the industry’s customers, on the broader American economy, or even on the firms’ own employees.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Against studying novelistic merit (12 Nov 2008)
In my former life in academia, the topic debated in these two posts at the Valve would exercise me greatly: Is artistic merit a matter for literary study? As someone who aspired to make unreadable books -- late 18th century commercial fiction -- relevant again, I certainly didn't think aesthetic quality was a prerequisite for what I study as a degree-seeker in literature, and I came to think that setting literature on a pedestal for special attention did a disservice to the more important task of understanding social history. The preachers of artistic merit, besides being paternalistic (urging unsuspecting students to "improve" themselves by teaching them literary appreciation and fostering their exposure to Great Art, the right art), tended to mistake their tastes for universal truths, which had the subtle and troubling effect of making contemporary academic tastes trans-normative while obliterating our ability to perceive the norms of earlier eras. Preserving those norms and getting inside them seemed the most important thing about studying literature to me; it gives us a palpable sense of how what Raymond Williams called "structures of feeling" -- can change over time. That gives hope that the current consumerist era we are mired in is not permanent. So I agree with Rohan Maitzen's pedagogical approach:
Dan Green's retort to Maitzen seems unduly preoccupied with a literary work's value in and of itself - - an irreducible matter of personal taste :
In short, whether or not a novel is "good" shouldn't matter to people who study them; that only matters to people who want to read them for pleasure. What would make a typical reader of a particular time choose a certain novel for pleasure, however, may be the most important question of all. To answer that, we have to disregard what we think that reader should prefer.
One of the key features of this approach is working with a text on its own terms--trying to understand how to read it so that it best fulfills its own potential. This means not holding it up to a particular, preconceived standard of excellence ("good novels do this“), whether that standard is formal or ideological. Now, depending on the occasion, there may be a second phase in which you move back from internally-generated norms and question them against external ideas; often, in teaching, this kind of questioning arises just from moving to the next book on the syllabus and discovering that its norms differ widely from--and thus, implicitly or explicitly, challenge--the ones we’ve just left behind (reading North and South right after Hard Times, or Jane Eyre soon after Pride and Prejudice, for instance, will certainly have this effect). But it’s difficult to see either a method or a reason for evaluating, say, Pride and Prejudice, as better or worse than Jane Eyre. It’s only if you have a set notion of what makes good fiction in general that you could fault either one for not measuring up.In moving from book to book, and in noticing the shifting norms, one ideally draws in work in other disciplines that can help articulate that shift and allow one to theorize its causes. A certain amount of the shift has to do with the writers themselves, but to me, that's the ineffable, ultimately inexplicable and irrelevant aspect we should strive to strain out. Those concerned with artistic merit (and who are not teaching creative writing as opposed to literature) seem to want to focus only on that individual "genius," with the effect of ultimately invalidating truly critical insight -- namely insight into what shifts social norms with regard to how readers take their entertainment, and what those modes of entertainment say about the society those readers lived in and that we have in part inherited. My suspicion is that reified entertainment -- books being one of the first instances of this -- is a crucial component of capitalist society and the nature of our enjoyment of such things has changed as capitalism has entrenched itself more deeply, in the material structure of our society and in the inner workings of our psyche as well, shaping how we discover pleasure and from what, shaping the methods by which we internalize mores and develop ambitions and aspirations. These are the inner, individual mental structures that ultimately sustain socioeconomic formations.
Dan Green's retort to Maitzen seems unduly preoccupied with a literary work's value in and of itself - - an irreducible matter of personal taste :
While it is true that a literary criticism not bound to academe might still give attention to “philosophizing,” et.al., it is hard to imagine that such criticism would so willingly apologize for aesthetically inferior work as academic criticism in its current guise is forced to do. It’s possible that literary criticism might one day free itself from the pedagogical imperatives with which the academy has burdened it. When that happens, “artistic merit” might not be as dispensable as many academic critics want to find it.This statement immediately makes me wonder who gets to decide what is "aesthetically inferior" and on what grounds. Also, I wonder whether literary criticism even exists outside of academia. Literature, as a concept, is an academic construction. Criticism that hones that definition is an academic exercise. Outside of the academy, people who write about books are reviewers, not critics.
In short, whether or not a novel is "good" shouldn't matter to people who study them; that only matters to people who want to read them for pleasure. What would make a typical reader of a particular time choose a certain novel for pleasure, however, may be the most important question of all. To answer that, we have to disregard what we think that reader should prefer.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Peyton Place and the roots of reality entertainment (8 May 2008)
For a long time, I have wanted to read Grace Metalious's Peyton Place, a notoriously lascivious book about the seamy secrets of a small town in New England. This grand ambition of mine was fueled not only by my academic interest in "commercial novels" (i.e., novels interesting primarily for their commercial success) and my fascination with Twin Peaks, which seems deeply influenced by Peyton Place's core idea, but by the line on the cover of the edition I bought at an Astoria junk store: "The best-selling paperback novel of all time." Surely something so popular would yield some sort of insight into the American reading public and the nature of the mass market of the Eisenhower era. A 2006 Vanity Fair article about Metalious's own sordid life offered this about the novel:
On the whole, the book is shoddily constructed, veering from one "shocking" event to another with apparently only a sense of how outraged people would be guiding Metalious as she proceeded. This leads her to be radically frank for her era about the reality of familial sexual abuse, but it also leads her to create such ludicrous scenes as the one where a minor character loses an arm in a carnival-ride catastrophe. Though it seems now to be populated with Main Street caricatures, Peyton Place was heralded at the time as an expose of small-town hypocrisy and breakthrough for freedom of expression about the kinds of problems that were probably pretty endemic in town life, and probably still are. And some scholars regard it as a feminist work, probably for its handling of female sexuality (though like most romances, the only woman who has a positive sexual experience has to basically be forced into it, have her animal nature awakened by a brute show of force by her mate) and its efforts to call into question domestic pieties. Mostly, though, the book seems animated by the spiteful sullenness that marks the main character, wanna-be writer Allison McKenzie, who, interestingly enough, in the novel mines small town life for material for her own frank stories. It's like the novel depicts its own creation within itself, so maybe it's a self-mythologizing postmodern classic. It is certainly chaotic enough to be postmodern, shifting registers and genres and eschewing careful development of characters in favor of lurching from mini-plot to mini-plot haphazardly like the soap operas that would come in its wake. No effort is made to explain events; they happen simply because of an evil destiny settling on the land. Unlike Twin Peaks, which with its Lodges and feints at mysticism, tried to cook up a cosmogony to explain why events unfolded and where the submerged small town evil came from, Peyton Place revels in the unexplained evil, takes superstitions as given, and offers by way of spiritual subplots an unintegrated story about a Congregationalist minister who decides to become a Catholic basically because he is Irish.
If anything unifies the hodge-podge of the novel's incidents other than their calculated potential to outrage, offend, and titillate, it's the development of Allison as writer, with her ethical quandaries worked out by the novel's form as it unfolds: basically the novel's structure seems to be in dialogue with Allison, showing her that the way to get a novel written is simply build every chapter around some secret someone wouldn't want told, whether it's secret drinking parties, oral sex, or a mother's getting off on enemas and breast feeding. Secrecy becomes the essence of what makes for plot, all other possibilities for development are foreclosed -- so there is no bildungsroman organized around Allison, or Selena Cross, the working-class girl "from the shacks." Instead, the novel just jumps in forward in time at arbitrary intervals and makes no effort to develop themes linking the two characters' development at any but the superficial ways their lives intersect. We can do the work on the novel's behalf and come up with ingenious comparisions, but that is not what was expected of the original audience for this book. That audience, as the marketing campaign detailed in the Vanity Fair article suggests, was meant to be salaciously enticed and afforded a delicious chance to wax righteously indignant while thrilling at the sexual perversity.
So the whole novel feels very cynical, mainly because it is prurient but also because none of the characters are very sympathetic from a contemporary perspective. When they are not mouthing some hypocritical idea about not wanting to be talked about, they seem like puppets contrived to act out preconceived sensationalistic tidbits. Because Metalious seems to have decided from the outset that readers would only be interested in juicy scenes full of the seemingly unsayable, she makes little attempt to supply anything else, aside from the odd awkward poetic passage.
The book pretends to reveal the secrets of small-town life as if these reflect some core truth, as if these would dispel hypocrisy, but instead it partakes of that same hypocritical spirit, the refusal to grant people their private lives, and it comes across as a gossip dump, with the effect of making the story feel unverified and exaggerated despite purporting to be fiction (and despite the fact that much of it was drawn from Metalious's life and her home town of Gilmanton, New Hampshire, apparently). And though the characters are obsessed with being talked about, as if this were their worst fear, it reads more as though its what give them an identity -- the fear of being watched seems more like a secret wish to be noticed. The idea that you become an indvidual when you are noticed, hailed by your society in the way it has settled on offering recognition -- à la Althusser's argument in the "Ideological State Apparatuses" essay: "Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ ") It's not the police who do the interpellating in Peyton Place, it's the town's network of gossip, occasionally dramatized by the chattering in the diner or on the street by various yokel characters, or by Metalious simply attributing certain views to the town, as if it were a character itself. It's out there, giving each person it notices some internal coherence in its eyes.
One can construct noble reasons for Peyton Place to have existed and become popular after the fact; one can argue for a liberating effect it may have had on its female readership and so on, but that requires a blinkered reading of the text. In the novel itself, the most palpable motive for what it exposes about small-town life is that it will boost the book's sales, the lesson Allison seems to learn in the book and a lesson proven by the novel's marketing campaign and its subsequent success across several media platforms. For though Peyton Place seems like a critique of small-town gossip's regulatory function of enforcing a moral and traditional code of conduct -- and it certainly indulges the juvenile fantasy of being the herald who broadcasts all the secrets that structure the repressive code and thus brings down the walls of Jericho -- the novel is just that gossip served up for consumption by strangers with nothing invested in the code. It doesn't destroy the code's power, it just amplifies the code so it has power on a bigger stage, transforming it at the same time so that its prohibitions become provocations. On the small town level, gossip is like a confession carried out by townsfolk that serves to solidify the individuality of its subjects, but on the level that Peyton Place as media phenomenon promises, being talked about just makes one famous and interesting, to those who have no reason to want to see you disciplined according to the local mores.
Thus the novel supports an ideological framework that has become omnipresent now: that you want to be gossiped about, as that is what makes you exist in a way that transcends friends and family. Being the subject of gossip is the pathway to fame, and media creations like Peyton Place will spread your notoriety. The novel can be seen as a guide to what sorts of behavior counts as exciting scandal, thus updating for the mid-20th century the information supplied by scandal novels since the invention of the genre. Peyton Place is a bourgeois version of Delarivière Manley's romans à clef from the early 18th century that tracked and popularized aristocratic scandals of the time, helping forge the very definition of what was to be considered scandalous. (Incidentally, her books -- The New Atalantis is the most notable -- are as unreadable as Metalious's.) Being talked about no longer individuates one simply to impose disciplinary control, instead it calls one into being for a mass audience, on a level where personality traits are irrelevant compared with the sensations one can transmit vicariously for captivated observers. In other words, one goes from being a shameful internal exile in a small town to becoming a celebrity who is beyond moral judgment.
The lesson of Peyton Place as a phenomenon is that on the level of mass popularity, being interesting trumps being moral. And a new set of values is born that applies not to communities (and is unenforceable by communities) but instead applied to individuals participating in a mass culture that isolates them from community with a promise of larger-than-life notoriety. Thus "being a slut" is bad when it is restricted to the eyes of your neighbors; on The Real World though, it is awesome. What makes you scandalous locally makes you fabulous nationally. Hence the impulse to disclose all sorts of embarrassing personal incidents are on TV that one would other wise keep private. And when they are disclosed, they are shared in the manner that Peyton Place exposes them, with a ruthless bluntness that presumes that secrets are always best exposed, for everyone's sake -- that anything less than full disclosure an exposure is some form of prudish hypocrisy. The shallowness of the novel's characters is now the shallowness we aspire to, for it seems to promise the most widespread recognition we can hope for. We can spread ourselves thin across all the media available for us to disseminate our image and maybe if we are lucky disappear into a sublime ubiquity.
Fifty years ago, Peyton Place helped create the contemporary notion of "buzz," indicted 1950s morality, and recast the concept of the soap opera, all in one big, purple-prosed book. It would spawn a sequel, a smash film nominated for nine Academy Awards, and television's first prime-time serial. A week before it hit bookstores, on September 24, 1956, it was already on the best-seller list, where it would remain for half a year. In its first month, it sold more than 100,000 copies, at a time when the average first novel sold 3,000, total. It would go on to sell 12 million more, becoming one of the most widely read novels ever published. During its heyday, it was estimated that one in 29 Americans had bought it—legions of them hiding it in drawers and closets due to its salacious content.Clearly it was widely bought, but whether it was widely read can't really be known. Having just slogged through it, I figure most readers skimmed it, looking for plot points and dirty parts.
On the whole, the book is shoddily constructed, veering from one "shocking" event to another with apparently only a sense of how outraged people would be guiding Metalious as she proceeded. This leads her to be radically frank for her era about the reality of familial sexual abuse, but it also leads her to create such ludicrous scenes as the one where a minor character loses an arm in a carnival-ride catastrophe. Though it seems now to be populated with Main Street caricatures, Peyton Place was heralded at the time as an expose of small-town hypocrisy and breakthrough for freedom of expression about the kinds of problems that were probably pretty endemic in town life, and probably still are. And some scholars regard it as a feminist work, probably for its handling of female sexuality (though like most romances, the only woman who has a positive sexual experience has to basically be forced into it, have her animal nature awakened by a brute show of force by her mate) and its efforts to call into question domestic pieties. Mostly, though, the book seems animated by the spiteful sullenness that marks the main character, wanna-be writer Allison McKenzie, who, interestingly enough, in the novel mines small town life for material for her own frank stories. It's like the novel depicts its own creation within itself, so maybe it's a self-mythologizing postmodern classic. It is certainly chaotic enough to be postmodern, shifting registers and genres and eschewing careful development of characters in favor of lurching from mini-plot to mini-plot haphazardly like the soap operas that would come in its wake. No effort is made to explain events; they happen simply because of an evil destiny settling on the land. Unlike Twin Peaks, which with its Lodges and feints at mysticism, tried to cook up a cosmogony to explain why events unfolded and where the submerged small town evil came from, Peyton Place revels in the unexplained evil, takes superstitions as given, and offers by way of spiritual subplots an unintegrated story about a Congregationalist minister who decides to become a Catholic basically because he is Irish.
If anything unifies the hodge-podge of the novel's incidents other than their calculated potential to outrage, offend, and titillate, it's the development of Allison as writer, with her ethical quandaries worked out by the novel's form as it unfolds: basically the novel's structure seems to be in dialogue with Allison, showing her that the way to get a novel written is simply build every chapter around some secret someone wouldn't want told, whether it's secret drinking parties, oral sex, or a mother's getting off on enemas and breast feeding. Secrecy becomes the essence of what makes for plot, all other possibilities for development are foreclosed -- so there is no bildungsroman organized around Allison, or Selena Cross, the working-class girl "from the shacks." Instead, the novel just jumps in forward in time at arbitrary intervals and makes no effort to develop themes linking the two characters' development at any but the superficial ways their lives intersect. We can do the work on the novel's behalf and come up with ingenious comparisions, but that is not what was expected of the original audience for this book. That audience, as the marketing campaign detailed in the Vanity Fair article suggests, was meant to be salaciously enticed and afforded a delicious chance to wax righteously indignant while thrilling at the sexual perversity.
So the whole novel feels very cynical, mainly because it is prurient but also because none of the characters are very sympathetic from a contemporary perspective. When they are not mouthing some hypocritical idea about not wanting to be talked about, they seem like puppets contrived to act out preconceived sensationalistic tidbits. Because Metalious seems to have decided from the outset that readers would only be interested in juicy scenes full of the seemingly unsayable, she makes little attempt to supply anything else, aside from the odd awkward poetic passage.
The book pretends to reveal the secrets of small-town life as if these reflect some core truth, as if these would dispel hypocrisy, but instead it partakes of that same hypocritical spirit, the refusal to grant people their private lives, and it comes across as a gossip dump, with the effect of making the story feel unverified and exaggerated despite purporting to be fiction (and despite the fact that much of it was drawn from Metalious's life and her home town of Gilmanton, New Hampshire, apparently). And though the characters are obsessed with being talked about, as if this were their worst fear, it reads more as though its what give them an identity -- the fear of being watched seems more like a secret wish to be noticed. The idea that you become an indvidual when you are noticed, hailed by your society in the way it has settled on offering recognition -- à la Althusser's argument in the "Ideological State Apparatuses" essay: "Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ ") It's not the police who do the interpellating in Peyton Place, it's the town's network of gossip, occasionally dramatized by the chattering in the diner or on the street by various yokel characters, or by Metalious simply attributing certain views to the town, as if it were a character itself. It's out there, giving each person it notices some internal coherence in its eyes.
One can construct noble reasons for Peyton Place to have existed and become popular after the fact; one can argue for a liberating effect it may have had on its female readership and so on, but that requires a blinkered reading of the text. In the novel itself, the most palpable motive for what it exposes about small-town life is that it will boost the book's sales, the lesson Allison seems to learn in the book and a lesson proven by the novel's marketing campaign and its subsequent success across several media platforms. For though Peyton Place seems like a critique of small-town gossip's regulatory function of enforcing a moral and traditional code of conduct -- and it certainly indulges the juvenile fantasy of being the herald who broadcasts all the secrets that structure the repressive code and thus brings down the walls of Jericho -- the novel is just that gossip served up for consumption by strangers with nothing invested in the code. It doesn't destroy the code's power, it just amplifies the code so it has power on a bigger stage, transforming it at the same time so that its prohibitions become provocations. On the small town level, gossip is like a confession carried out by townsfolk that serves to solidify the individuality of its subjects, but on the level that Peyton Place as media phenomenon promises, being talked about just makes one famous and interesting, to those who have no reason to want to see you disciplined according to the local mores.
Thus the novel supports an ideological framework that has become omnipresent now: that you want to be gossiped about, as that is what makes you exist in a way that transcends friends and family. Being the subject of gossip is the pathway to fame, and media creations like Peyton Place will spread your notoriety. The novel can be seen as a guide to what sorts of behavior counts as exciting scandal, thus updating for the mid-20th century the information supplied by scandal novels since the invention of the genre. Peyton Place is a bourgeois version of Delarivière Manley's romans à clef from the early 18th century that tracked and popularized aristocratic scandals of the time, helping forge the very definition of what was to be considered scandalous. (Incidentally, her books -- The New Atalantis is the most notable -- are as unreadable as Metalious's.) Being talked about no longer individuates one simply to impose disciplinary control, instead it calls one into being for a mass audience, on a level where personality traits are irrelevant compared with the sensations one can transmit vicariously for captivated observers. In other words, one goes from being a shameful internal exile in a small town to becoming a celebrity who is beyond moral judgment.
The lesson of Peyton Place as a phenomenon is that on the level of mass popularity, being interesting trumps being moral. And a new set of values is born that applies not to communities (and is unenforceable by communities) but instead applied to individuals participating in a mass culture that isolates them from community with a promise of larger-than-life notoriety. Thus "being a slut" is bad when it is restricted to the eyes of your neighbors; on The Real World though, it is awesome. What makes you scandalous locally makes you fabulous nationally. Hence the impulse to disclose all sorts of embarrassing personal incidents are on TV that one would other wise keep private. And when they are disclosed, they are shared in the manner that Peyton Place exposes them, with a ruthless bluntness that presumes that secrets are always best exposed, for everyone's sake -- that anything less than full disclosure an exposure is some form of prudish hypocrisy. The shallowness of the novel's characters is now the shallowness we aspire to, for it seems to promise the most widespread recognition we can hope for. We can spread ourselves thin across all the media available for us to disseminate our image and maybe if we are lucky disappear into a sublime ubiquity.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Vicariousness in Trollope (22 Oct 2007)
Lately, perhaps out of some atavistic urge to feel like I'm still in graduate school, I've been reading Trollope's Palliser novels, which explore happenings in the marriage market for various peers, heiresses, and parliamentarians in the late Victorian age. Trollope is no prose stylist, and he doesn't seem to trust his readers to get anything; he has a clumsy habit of explaining with a thud what's between the lines of his dialogue, which lulls you into a laziness about thinking too hard about the action. (This does make the books considerably easier to read, it must be confessed.)
Forgive this overstatement as a kind droll irony, though, and the books become much funnier, and they are pretty humorous to begin with -- not in a laugh-out-loud way by any stretch of the imagination, but Trollope is so consistently cynical that a curmudgeon like me can take pleasure in them. The characters are almost always keeping their minds on the money and struggling to find various ways to politely pass that off. The exceptions are the female heroines, who are made dramatically compelling mainly by serving as an alternative reward to money for the muddled, dithering heroes, who invariably must choose between financial pragmatism and romance. But these heroines usually have a counterpart who struggles with the way women are shut out from the public sphere; the recurring character Glencora Palliser serves as a series-long touchstone for this theme, but each novel has its own iteration of the smart, ambitious woman who must marry to have a vicarious career. Trollope doesn't explicitly condemn this arrangement, though he usually makes these women suffer without ever seeming convinced they don't deserve it.
The vicarious behavior of the women yearning for social relevance is complemented by other strategies for power, or at least self-gratification, which are set against the backdrop of the real political power exercised by the brokers who are always just offstage. Lizzie Eustace, of The Eustace Diamonds, has her shrewdnesss warped by the lack of an outlet and her ambition redirected toward the only sphere in which she is allowed to exercise her wits, finding a lover. She seeks one with no respect for social mores, her "Corsair" whose contempt for society might allow her to feel free of it by proxy. Trollope tells us, "She had a grand idea -- this selfish, hard-fisted little woman, who could not bring herself to abandon the plunder on which she had laid her hand -- a grand idea of surrendering herself and all her possessions to a great passion." This is her way of transforming her wealth into a purchasable narrative through which she can experience the oversize emotions she has been accustomed to believing come with her rank. The marriage market, so reimagined, becomes her way of making her life into a novel, of allowing for the best kind of consumerism of all, self-consumption.
And then Trollope shows us the society scandal-mongers relishing in her tale, eagerly consuming the story that we readers are consuming too, while sustaining the plausibility of the fictional world we are trying to lose ourselves in -- what could better symbolize realism than gossip, the nuts and bolts of how we articulate social values in everyday life?
This figuring of how the novel should be consumed within the novel itself, through the eager consumption of scandal, typifies the way novels model for us how to enjoy vicariousness. Lizzie, in playing at sincerity to win lovers who she then can't property respect as she hopes to (who is not a "Corsair" capable of duping her), gets herself tripped up by the classic consumer conundrum: the inauthenticity that comes from trying to purchase authenticity. "Could she not be simple? Could she not act simplicity so well that the thing acted should be as powerful as the thing itself; -- perhaps even more powerful? Poor Lizzie Eustace! In thinking over all this, she saw a great deal." Called upon to respond naturally, simply, in order to perfect herself as an attractive object, Lizzie instead takes artifice to the next degree of complication, simulating objecthood and playing out a pretense to supply herself with a sense of her subjectivity -- of her pursuing her own desires. "To be always acting a part rather than living her own life was to be everything."
Consumerism, vicariousness, identity-construction through narratives, they all prove to be different iterations of the ever-disappointing process of willing states (pleasure, spontaneity, love, etc.) that can be experienced only as by-products. But our failed attempts, thanks to outside ideological prodding from the advertising world (which tells us the right objects can vindicate a phony self -- the fantasy prompted by consumption making an identity "as powerful as the thing itself" if not moreso) lead us only to redouble our efforts rather than conceive new goals. Lizzie thinks money can buy her the right to a "poetical temperament," but that temperament itself is clearly a calculated sham; it may as well have been derived from an advertisement. The only power she is left with is the power to conceal her own crimes, to hide the fact that thee is nothing true inside her beyond the schemes, that she has, as Trollope tells us bluntly, "no heart." Whether her angelic antithesis, Lucy, does, is another question -- she is rather lifeless, moved around like a piece of furniture and waiting eagerly to be commanded by her fiancé/boss.
Forgive this overstatement as a kind droll irony, though, and the books become much funnier, and they are pretty humorous to begin with -- not in a laugh-out-loud way by any stretch of the imagination, but Trollope is so consistently cynical that a curmudgeon like me can take pleasure in them. The characters are almost always keeping their minds on the money and struggling to find various ways to politely pass that off. The exceptions are the female heroines, who are made dramatically compelling mainly by serving as an alternative reward to money for the muddled, dithering heroes, who invariably must choose between financial pragmatism and romance. But these heroines usually have a counterpart who struggles with the way women are shut out from the public sphere; the recurring character Glencora Palliser serves as a series-long touchstone for this theme, but each novel has its own iteration of the smart, ambitious woman who must marry to have a vicarious career. Trollope doesn't explicitly condemn this arrangement, though he usually makes these women suffer without ever seeming convinced they don't deserve it.
The vicarious behavior of the women yearning for social relevance is complemented by other strategies for power, or at least self-gratification, which are set against the backdrop of the real political power exercised by the brokers who are always just offstage. Lizzie Eustace, of The Eustace Diamonds, has her shrewdnesss warped by the lack of an outlet and her ambition redirected toward the only sphere in which she is allowed to exercise her wits, finding a lover. She seeks one with no respect for social mores, her "Corsair" whose contempt for society might allow her to feel free of it by proxy. Trollope tells us, "She had a grand idea -- this selfish, hard-fisted little woman, who could not bring herself to abandon the plunder on which she had laid her hand -- a grand idea of surrendering herself and all her possessions to a great passion." This is her way of transforming her wealth into a purchasable narrative through which she can experience the oversize emotions she has been accustomed to believing come with her rank. The marriage market, so reimagined, becomes her way of making her life into a novel, of allowing for the best kind of consumerism of all, self-consumption.
And then Trollope shows us the society scandal-mongers relishing in her tale, eagerly consuming the story that we readers are consuming too, while sustaining the plausibility of the fictional world we are trying to lose ourselves in -- what could better symbolize realism than gossip, the nuts and bolts of how we articulate social values in everyday life?
This figuring of how the novel should be consumed within the novel itself, through the eager consumption of scandal, typifies the way novels model for us how to enjoy vicariousness. Lizzie, in playing at sincerity to win lovers who she then can't property respect as she hopes to (who is not a "Corsair" capable of duping her), gets herself tripped up by the classic consumer conundrum: the inauthenticity that comes from trying to purchase authenticity. "Could she not be simple? Could she not act simplicity so well that the thing acted should be as powerful as the thing itself; -- perhaps even more powerful? Poor Lizzie Eustace! In thinking over all this, she saw a great deal." Called upon to respond naturally, simply, in order to perfect herself as an attractive object, Lizzie instead takes artifice to the next degree of complication, simulating objecthood and playing out a pretense to supply herself with a sense of her subjectivity -- of her pursuing her own desires. "To be always acting a part rather than living her own life was to be everything."
Consumerism, vicariousness, identity-construction through narratives, they all prove to be different iterations of the ever-disappointing process of willing states (pleasure, spontaneity, love, etc.) that can be experienced only as by-products. But our failed attempts, thanks to outside ideological prodding from the advertising world (which tells us the right objects can vindicate a phony self -- the fantasy prompted by consumption making an identity "as powerful as the thing itself" if not moreso) lead us only to redouble our efforts rather than conceive new goals. Lizzie thinks money can buy her the right to a "poetical temperament," but that temperament itself is clearly a calculated sham; it may as well have been derived from an advertisement. The only power she is left with is the power to conceal her own crimes, to hide the fact that thee is nothing true inside her beyond the schemes, that she has, as Trollope tells us bluntly, "no heart." Whether her angelic antithesis, Lucy, does, is another question -- she is rather lifeless, moved around like a piece of furniture and waiting eagerly to be commanded by her fiancé/boss.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Silas Lapham and self-interest (3 November 2006)
I finished reading The Rise of Silas Lapham, which didn't quite deliver on the exploration of "the capitalist ethos of the American Gilded Age" as promised on the back of the Oxford World Classics paperback. The analysis amounted to titular character, a mineral-paint magnate, confronting ruinous competition cheerfully, without holding anything against his rivals -- West Virginian brothers -- who through sheer good fortune will be able to undersell him and reduce him to a niche producer: "A strange, not ignoble friendliness existed between Lapham and the three brothers; they had used him fairly; it was their facilities that had conquered him, not their ill-will; and he recognized in them without enmity the necessity to which he had yielded." It was nothing personal, just capitalism, which is here presented as an indifferent force of nature that uses mere mortals as its playthings.
Lapham had also been victimized by a series of poor investments in "wild-cat stocks" and an unfortunate case of eminent domain in which the railroad seizes his property for a pittance. The justice of this is much questioned; they are just introduced as the workings of malevolent fate, and possibly the nefarious meddling of Rogers, Lapham's onetime financier. Howells wants to stress Lapham's able business capabilities and differentiate them from the issues of finance, which he associates with the scheming Rogers, who is ever on the watch for people to dupe (yet strangely never manages to accumulate anything for his wiles). The inexplicable perplexity of finance does Lapham in, for it's a realm in which his virtues -- diligence, hard work, honesty, genuine enthusiasm for his product -- do him no good.
Much of that story is told belatedly and quickly, in the last few chapters, after Howells apparently grew bored of the romance he meticulously set up between Corey, the wealthy heir, and Lapham's two daughters, one pretty and simple (Irene), the other smart and "dark" (Penelope). Howells invents a book within a book suddenly -- the sentimental "Tears, Idle Tears" -- as the romantic plot comes to a head seemingly in order to mock his own plot line. We are brought to invest ourselves in the outcome of this misbegotten love triangle only to be encouraged to see it as so much foolishness. The Laphams believe Corey wants to marry Irene, and they all encourage her to love him, but then he goes and proposes to Penelope, who has been far more interesting all along. Penelope feels obliged to reject him, for her sister's sake. Silas tells his daughters' trouble to a minister, who then fulminates against the "false ideal of self-sacrifice" and "the novels that befool and debauch almost every intelligence in some degree" -- see, I knew there was a reason I stopped reading them.
But though this rejection of self-sacrifice has to do with the love story, it seems like its really about the economics story, as enlightened self-interest, the opposite of frivolous self-sacrifice and a hallmark capitalist ethic, is presumably the engine that has fueled Lapham's rise, along with the rest of the wealthy Boston society we are shown, and the whole of American industry in general. And yet Lapham himself turns his back on self-interest and refuses to knowingly and legally defraud others to save himself. Presumably he is a model of how capitalists are supposed to behave, even absent any checks to their self-interest. Perhaps Howells lampoons the sentimental novels because he believes more novels should be written like his own, which hurriedly models appropriate ethical behavior for fat cats.
The other aspect of the novel is the conflict between the old money Coreys and the nouveau riche Laphams -- this feels anticlimactic, in that the Coreys simply decide to hold their nose and tolerate the Laphams, not out of economic dependency but out of their pretensions of gentility. So their ability to rise above what might be construed as self-interest (preventing a son from marrying beneath him) seems to be depicted not as noble sacrifice but a warped pride. So I'm tempted to conclude that the novel wants to advocate self-interested behavior across the board and sees Lapham as a hero only ironically -- he's a relic, and in the end Howells devotes a lot of space to describing him as moribund.
The novel ends with the minister saying it's too complicated to figure out what's responsible for "evil" in the moral world, even in that diabolical case of failed businesses. "Its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatsoever." Translation: when people get cheated out of money or economic disadvantages are leveraged against the less fortunate, no one is at fault, really. Certainly it's not capitalism's fault anymore than it's nature's fault if your house gets struck by lightning and catches on fire. "Your fear of having possibly behaved selfishly ... kept you on your guard and strengthened you when you were brought face to face with a greater...emergency," the minister suggests to Lapham, in consolation for having lost his riches. Lapham reiterates his inability to be anything but a straight dealer and declares he has no regrets. I can't be the only one to regard this as stubborn pride. We have to wonder, as he struggles in his rural shack with no heat, just how much Howells is endorsing his choices. So either I'm far too cynical (likely) or Howells is being a tad more ironic than you'd think in his title.
Lapham had also been victimized by a series of poor investments in "wild-cat stocks" and an unfortunate case of eminent domain in which the railroad seizes his property for a pittance. The justice of this is much questioned; they are just introduced as the workings of malevolent fate, and possibly the nefarious meddling of Rogers, Lapham's onetime financier. Howells wants to stress Lapham's able business capabilities and differentiate them from the issues of finance, which he associates with the scheming Rogers, who is ever on the watch for people to dupe (yet strangely never manages to accumulate anything for his wiles). The inexplicable perplexity of finance does Lapham in, for it's a realm in which his virtues -- diligence, hard work, honesty, genuine enthusiasm for his product -- do him no good.
Much of that story is told belatedly and quickly, in the last few chapters, after Howells apparently grew bored of the romance he meticulously set up between Corey, the wealthy heir, and Lapham's two daughters, one pretty and simple (Irene), the other smart and "dark" (Penelope). Howells invents a book within a book suddenly -- the sentimental "Tears, Idle Tears" -- as the romantic plot comes to a head seemingly in order to mock his own plot line. We are brought to invest ourselves in the outcome of this misbegotten love triangle only to be encouraged to see it as so much foolishness. The Laphams believe Corey wants to marry Irene, and they all encourage her to love him, but then he goes and proposes to Penelope, who has been far more interesting all along. Penelope feels obliged to reject him, for her sister's sake. Silas tells his daughters' trouble to a minister, who then fulminates against the "false ideal of self-sacrifice" and "the novels that befool and debauch almost every intelligence in some degree" -- see, I knew there was a reason I stopped reading them.
But though this rejection of self-sacrifice has to do with the love story, it seems like its really about the economics story, as enlightened self-interest, the opposite of frivolous self-sacrifice and a hallmark capitalist ethic, is presumably the engine that has fueled Lapham's rise, along with the rest of the wealthy Boston society we are shown, and the whole of American industry in general. And yet Lapham himself turns his back on self-interest and refuses to knowingly and legally defraud others to save himself. Presumably he is a model of how capitalists are supposed to behave, even absent any checks to their self-interest. Perhaps Howells lampoons the sentimental novels because he believes more novels should be written like his own, which hurriedly models appropriate ethical behavior for fat cats.
The other aspect of the novel is the conflict between the old money Coreys and the nouveau riche Laphams -- this feels anticlimactic, in that the Coreys simply decide to hold their nose and tolerate the Laphams, not out of economic dependency but out of their pretensions of gentility. So their ability to rise above what might be construed as self-interest (preventing a son from marrying beneath him) seems to be depicted not as noble sacrifice but a warped pride. So I'm tempted to conclude that the novel wants to advocate self-interested behavior across the board and sees Lapham as a hero only ironically -- he's a relic, and in the end Howells devotes a lot of space to describing him as moribund.
The novel ends with the minister saying it's too complicated to figure out what's responsible for "evil" in the moral world, even in that diabolical case of failed businesses. "Its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatsoever." Translation: when people get cheated out of money or economic disadvantages are leveraged against the less fortunate, no one is at fault, really. Certainly it's not capitalism's fault anymore than it's nature's fault if your house gets struck by lightning and catches on fire. "Your fear of having possibly behaved selfishly ... kept you on your guard and strengthened you when you were brought face to face with a greater...emergency," the minister suggests to Lapham, in consolation for having lost his riches. Lapham reiterates his inability to be anything but a straight dealer and declares he has no regrets. I can't be the only one to regard this as stubborn pride. We have to wonder, as he struggles in his rural shack with no heat, just how much Howells is endorsing his choices. So either I'm far too cynical (likely) or Howells is being a tad more ironic than you'd think in his title.
Connoisseurs of emotion (27 October 2006)
Via BPS Digest (and Marginal Revolution) comes this report that claims reading novels will make a person more empathetic. In the test the researchers conducted, "The more authors of fiction that a participant recognised, the higher they tended to score on measures of social awareness and tests of empathy – for example being able to recognise a person’s emotions from a picture showing their eyes only, or being able to take another person’s perspective. Recognising more non-fiction authors showed the opposite association."
The BPS Digest also notes of the study: "However, a weakness of the study is that the direction of causation has not been established – it might simply be that more-empathic people prefer reading novels." Having recently turned away from fiction to read nonfiction almost exclusively, I wonder if this means I've become more callous, and my disgruntlement with fiction is indicative of empathy fatigue or something -- novels are a means to try to experience empathy on an artificial, preplanned basis. Or perhaps my turn to nonfiction, if I really thought about it, is a potentially pathological means to blunt emotional connection I'm subconsciously trying to ward off. Maybe I'm using the arid world of facts -- the dry, detached prose of The Economist, for instance -- as a buffer from the warmth of human contact, which, frankly, can often seem like a hassle and a threat and a call to action when I'm much more comfortable planted on my couch reading.
That's not a good thing. So as a therapeutic measure, I've stayed planted on the couch, and started to read The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells. Something Walter Benn Michaels wrote about it in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism stuck with me -- something about how Howells is trying to figure a return to a precapitalist mode of relationships and how the novel delineates zero-sum social status games. (Even when I'm picking novels, I need some hyperpragmatic reason to read them.) I'm about halfway through it, and I can't say I feel any more empathic, but I'm trying to pay special attention to how the novelist wants to keep my attention focused on minute shiftings of his characters' attitude, and the means he uses to describe them. What novels do obviously -- the raison d'etre, probably for the study -- is teach readers ways to think the emotion of others, put it into words that can serve as a comprehensible substitute for something we can never access directly. Our own emotion is often inarticulate, too immediate, and we often don't bother to analyze it and think it rather than experience it. One of the reasons novels of past centuries continue to be read is that they provide tools for verbalizing emotion and for modeling its recognition.
This line of thinking would seem to run counter to the evolutionary psychologists' beliefs that apprehension of emotion is inborn and immediate (a la Darwin's study of facial expressions, for instance). From this point of view emotional comprehension is hard-wired and verges on instinct -- one psychologist even argues that changing your expression can change your mood to suit it. But what novels want to do is slow down the instantaneous instinctual process of reaction to others' emotional expressions and make it a subject for gratifying intellectual mastery. We derive a grammar of emotion and learn to experience tracing its fine movements as a species of pleasure. We are encouraged to become connoisseurs in emotion -- the way Sterne's narrator is in A Sentimental Journey.
Does this then objectify emotion, trivialize it, or commodify it? Is it wrong to perceive the feelings of others as a kind of delicacy, like a rare cheese or bottle of port? Is being overly concerned with the emotions others are experiencing simply a way of consuming other people? Novels serve to commercialize otherwise intangible emotional experiences; in the process they likely make empathy into something more akin to a shopper's discernment.
The question of whether altruism exists comes into play in this as well -- what motives are ultimately served in our efforts to feel another's pain? It seems a pertinent question to ask, because perhaps a deeper empathy can be achieved once the more self-serving level is interrogated a bit. Ultimately, I guess I would need to know more about how the study measure empathy to know whether there might be differences between that kind of empathy and some other preferable kind that isn't instrumentalized through entertainment product. Until then I'll keep reading Howells and hope things work out for "sly" Penelope.
The BPS Digest also notes of the study: "However, a weakness of the study is that the direction of causation has not been established – it might simply be that more-empathic people prefer reading novels." Having recently turned away from fiction to read nonfiction almost exclusively, I wonder if this means I've become more callous, and my disgruntlement with fiction is indicative of empathy fatigue or something -- novels are a means to try to experience empathy on an artificial, preplanned basis. Or perhaps my turn to nonfiction, if I really thought about it, is a potentially pathological means to blunt emotional connection I'm subconsciously trying to ward off. Maybe I'm using the arid world of facts -- the dry, detached prose of The Economist, for instance -- as a buffer from the warmth of human contact, which, frankly, can often seem like a hassle and a threat and a call to action when I'm much more comfortable planted on my couch reading.
That's not a good thing. So as a therapeutic measure, I've stayed planted on the couch, and started to read The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells. Something Walter Benn Michaels wrote about it in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism stuck with me -- something about how Howells is trying to figure a return to a precapitalist mode of relationships and how the novel delineates zero-sum social status games. (Even when I'm picking novels, I need some hyperpragmatic reason to read them.) I'm about halfway through it, and I can't say I feel any more empathic, but I'm trying to pay special attention to how the novelist wants to keep my attention focused on minute shiftings of his characters' attitude, and the means he uses to describe them. What novels do obviously -- the raison d'etre, probably for the study -- is teach readers ways to think the emotion of others, put it into words that can serve as a comprehensible substitute for something we can never access directly. Our own emotion is often inarticulate, too immediate, and we often don't bother to analyze it and think it rather than experience it. One of the reasons novels of past centuries continue to be read is that they provide tools for verbalizing emotion and for modeling its recognition.
This line of thinking would seem to run counter to the evolutionary psychologists' beliefs that apprehension of emotion is inborn and immediate (a la Darwin's study of facial expressions, for instance). From this point of view emotional comprehension is hard-wired and verges on instinct -- one psychologist even argues that changing your expression can change your mood to suit it. But what novels want to do is slow down the instantaneous instinctual process of reaction to others' emotional expressions and make it a subject for gratifying intellectual mastery. We derive a grammar of emotion and learn to experience tracing its fine movements as a species of pleasure. We are encouraged to become connoisseurs in emotion -- the way Sterne's narrator is in A Sentimental Journey.
Does this then objectify emotion, trivialize it, or commodify it? Is it wrong to perceive the feelings of others as a kind of delicacy, like a rare cheese or bottle of port? Is being overly concerned with the emotions others are experiencing simply a way of consuming other people? Novels serve to commercialize otherwise intangible emotional experiences; in the process they likely make empathy into something more akin to a shopper's discernment.
The question of whether altruism exists comes into play in this as well -- what motives are ultimately served in our efforts to feel another's pain? It seems a pertinent question to ask, because perhaps a deeper empathy can be achieved once the more self-serving level is interrogated a bit. Ultimately, I guess I would need to know more about how the study measure empathy to know whether there might be differences between that kind of empathy and some other preferable kind that isn't instrumentalized through entertainment product. Until then I'll keep reading Howells and hope things work out for "sly" Penelope.
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