Inter Alia #6: DeWitt Goes Digital

I’m still working out my relationship with the blog as a critical organ… I guess, in a way, we all are. My thoughts, as visitors to this site may have noticed, tend equally toward the associative and the forensic. And yet, as a gift to you, the reader, I’d like to carve out a space in which I can share some of my less strenuously worked-out thoughts about the state of the art of fiction, and about culture more generally. (Lucky me, you’re probably thinking.)These “ideas,” if I can call them that, may turn out on closer inspection to be completely bogus. And yet I’m feeling the need sporadically to turn the power of the blog as an instrument of feedback away from such epiphenomenal questions as, “Doesn’t John Colapinto seem weirdly peevish and thin-skinned this week” and toward less sexy developments that may still have some bearing on American culture a year from now… or a decade from now. That is, I propose to engineer a column on literature here at The Millions that advances beyond “link-bait,” even as it stays brief, casual, and interactive. I want to invite other writers working online, or stuck in the cubicle farm, to pick up on and respond to my less topical provocations, here or elsewhere, just as they might respond to a public gaffe by a former child star, or a book review in The New Republic.I’d like to call this column “Inter Alia,” which is Latin for “among other things.” It will appear irregularly, like a meteor shower (or perhaps more likely, an unwanted guest). It will be about the length of what follows.Inter Alia 1: Genre MadnessI’m going to raise a few questions, by way of experiment, about the continued relevance (or irrelevance) of notions of genre. It seems to me that the canonization of Philip K. Dick by the Library of America is a healthy development, and not just because it encourages snobs like me to consider speculative fiction alongside the main body of “realism” in our reading lives. It is also (I think) a manifestation of a long trend, with younger American writers gleefully sinking their teeth into the pop tropes of what was previously dismissed as “genre fiction,” and “genre” writers like Dick being hailed for their literary merit. (Let’s set aside for the sake of argument the high-low brinksmanship of Modernists like Joyce and Borges, similar in degree but different in kind). Kelly Link’s Small Beer Press, e.g., has done a lot to remind us that the postmodern leveling of “high” and “low” culture distinctions is not just political – it can be fun. Simultaneously, “Literary Fiction,” as Gerald Howard and others have argued, is moving from being a descriptor to being a genre in and of itself, with its own generic conventions. Call it lit-fic: a label no more a guarantor (or compromiser) of literary value than is “Western,” or “Sci Fi.”Michael Chabon, it seems to me, is one of several 40-ish writers working toward a unified-field theory that harmonizes the best of lit-fic and its discontents. And yet, notwithstanding the wisdom of John Leonard, who suggested at a panel recently that getting too hung up on a book’s genre is a form of stupidity, I find myself struggling with The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. On one hand, it’s a staggering feat of imagination, and often a great read. On the other, the stylized cliffhanger chapter endings (cribbed from gumshoe novels and children’s books and Saturday matinees), the sometimes cartoony dogpile of figurative language, the comic book characterization, and the almost parodically rococo plot seem to me to obscure the promise of a brilliant premise: an alternative postwar history that turns Alaska into a Jewish homeland.This may be nigglingly small-minded, and would be a mere footnote to a longer review. Chabon clearly invested years in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and has taken significant risks, and I think he deserves a wide readership. But I want to be honest about my reading experience. If this were a children’s book, like Summerland, or a melancholy lieder, like The Final Solution, I might swallow my resistance. But Chabon wants me to take to heart the adult sufferings of his hero, Meyer Landsman, and this particular book’s generic patrimony interferes with my ability to do so. I keep feeling dismissed from the suspension of disbelief, like Adam and Eve booted from the garden. I keep feeling reminded of the book qua book. Am I just hung up in an old-fashioned need to classify, as I once accused Michiko Kakutani of being? Or are there certain compositional principles underlying the successful genre mash-up, the way a mash-up mp3 requires that two songs have affinities of key and tempo? And if so, how do writers put them into practice? How do readers evaluate a genre-straddling book by the standards of one genre without using the other as an alibi? Discuss.

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a fungus that grows on another fungus; a nuclear reaction fueled by the byproducts of nuclear reactions; and movies whose audiences watch an audience watching them. For this kind of derivative process, he invokes the adjective annular, which the O.E.D. defines as “ringlike” or circular, but which presumably shares some roots with “annul” – to make into nothing. Last week, reading John Freeman’s strange piece in the online Guardian (via TEV), I felt I was in the presence of annular writing: writing about writing about writing. I wade into yet another consideration of the state of book reviewing, then, at the risk of saying nothing about nothing. Nonetheless, I’m going to take this opportunity to advance a couple of propositions I’ve been thinking about lately.The first is that talk in certain quarters about crises in book reviewing, newspaper journalism, online recommendation systems, and so forth is really an extension of a conversation that’s been going on for at least decades now: one about a more general crisis of authority. Ever since the wheels of modernity set to work on the fixed stars by which we navigate our culture, we’ve been trying to figure out what to look to instead. Technology is only just catching up with us.Those attached to tradition have always tended to look at the democratization of information warily. For example, I learned in this week’s New Yorker about Walter Lippmann, whose 1922 book Public Opinion argued that the average American “lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.” According to Eric Alterman, Lippmann proposed that crucial decisions about that world be made by “intelligence bureaus,” which would be given access to all the information they needed to judge the government’s actions without concerning themselves with democratic preferences or public debate.This sounds like a nightmare, elitism reduced ad absurdam. Yet the assumption that the dispersal of the authority once held by, say, Edmund Wilson and The New York Times must, ipso facto, produce smarter decision-making doesn’t hold water either. The information superhighway may lead to enlightenment, but it offers exit-ramps to every conceivable variety of cant.For a while now, I’ve had the nagging feeling that there’s a third way we’ve been neglecting, some kind of solution to the crisis of authority. And then, in the Alterman article, I found another reason to love John Dewey. To wit:Dewey did not dispute Lippmann’s contention regarding… the public’s vulnerability to manipulation. [But] the foundation of democracy to Dewey was less information than conversation. Members of a democratic society needed to cultivate what the journalism scholar James W. Carey, in describing the debate, called “certain vital habits” of democracy – the ability to discuss, deliberate on, and debate various perspectives in a manner that would move it toward consensus.This, I think, is why book reviews play a vital, if circumscribed, role in any democracy. I’d also like to think (not coincidentally) that this is the project that we – you and I – are engaged in here at The Millions. Five years into a conversation Max started, I’m consistently impressed by the civility, acuity, and enthusiasm of those who comment on the site (as I invite you to do below). Which leads me to my second proposition: the problem with pre-modern notions of authority has always been that they’re non-consensual. For all its failings, the web is one arena where authority is earned instead of inherited. And so, on the occasion of our fifth anniversary, I’d like to thank you for granting authority, in whatever measure, to us.

A prize-winning journalist once told me this story: Early in his career, writing on spec for The Village Voice or some such organ of the alternative press, he had ventured to the set of Blazing Saddles to interview Mel Brooks. Flush with the wine of self-importance, he flourished his press pass for the security guard outside the soundstage. Inside, however, he found himself merely the youngest and least consequential member of a flock (pod? pride? murder?) of reporters. While waiting for Mr. Brooks to appear, he tried to make small talk with Kenneth Tynan of The New Yorker. “So you guys are doing a profile? Must be a tall order to crank 5,000 words out in time for the movie premiere.” I have no idea whether Tynan wore small half-glasses at that or any other point, but I picture him gazing coolly over the top of the lenses to deliver the following riposte: “We are The New Yorker. We don’t do timely.”This anecdote, in its 2005 version, was meant in part to tweak Tynan for his Olympian condescension, but there was envy in it, too: O, to write without the oppression of deadlines and “news hooks!” I thought of Kenneth Tynan and Blazing Saddles again last week, as I perused the contents of the second issue of N+1‘s new book review supplement, N1BR. Here were: Nikil Saval assessing Alex Ross‘ The Rest is Noise, a year and a half after its publication.Giles Harvey arriving six months late to the 2666 party, with a thoughtful dissent, no less.Nathan Heller offering trenchant insights on a John Updike novel from 1968.Rachel Aviv ranging over the decades-long career of Anne Rice.We are N1BR, I thought. We don’t do timely.Which is all to the good. It goes almost without saying that the current book-marketing dispensation, in which reviewers are given a brief window to render a collective judgment on, say, Tree of Smoke, has seemed more and more ludicrous the smaller that window has become – particularly as books, unlike their authors, live for hundreds of years. One of the knocks on online discourse has been that it pushes timeliness to the point of ephemerality. But as Open Letters Monthly‘s “Second Glance” column, Dan Green’s emerging side project, the brand new Second Pass site, and our Year in Reading series, not to mention our own Lydia Kiesling‘s Modern Library Revue, suggest, the departure from the economic vicissitudes of print may in fact help free us from the tyranny of the now.To be sure, one of the purposes of literary journalism is to alert readers to the new. Still, the scarcity of advertising dollars, and the attendant lack of a profit motive, do seem to open up the possibility of writing about books because they are worth writing about, rather than because they came out last week. At which point the challenge becomes to write well. Here’s hoping the folks at N1BR, and others like them, will make arriving late to the party fashionable again.