Ecstasies of Influence*

To consider the bookworm who first attempted to write novels, a fan and voracious reader, Jonathan Lethem’s writing is all about influence. The trouble with fandom is sometimes you’re going to lose your audience if the references are not appealing, necessarily, or if they are not gotten, or are cribbed in some way that smacks of calculation. Lethem’s work cycles around the idea of the reader as adept, the seduction of influences, the segregation of highbrow from lowbrow and the favoring of the underdog, populism by way of speciousness. It also manages to be inexhaustively positive in the exaltation of limitations.

Thus, The Ecstasy of Influence, a collection of essays and odd pieces.

Lethem is a self-taught intellectual, and it’s clear from his discussions about it, that this something he is proud of, feels unique in, and hopes you, the reader, will identify him as such and thus, identify with him. He has that knack of the auto-didact that prevents him, sometimes, from speaking (writing) more directly, perhaps; though such enthusiasm is hard to begrudge. Lethem is that writer who takes know thyself as a credo, and rewards those who, like him, feel no shame in being self-congratulatory about it.

It must be difficult to know ones’ influences enough to say with confidence what their writing is like, as he does in “Against “Pop” Culture,” yet Lethem seems so self-assured in pointing his out that it’s hard to deny him. You have to believe him. And yet he sounds a lot like someone boasting because he knows no one else has these same specious, even archaic and mandarin (his word) influences. Yet it makes for an intriguing personal narrative that even creeps into his novel, The Fortress of Solitude.

The essay reflects perhaps the claiming of high culture over low culture artifacts of the contemporary status quo, ie., DeLillo over Graham Greene, akin to the argument that Franzen seems to make. Some artifacts, in other words, are “out of the canon,” and it’s thus a popularity contest to make the right claim. Lethem is adamant about how he’s unique, and he’d rather you know he’s more in solidarity with the losers. And don’t even try to call him “experimental.”

Or maybe he’s just saying you’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.

The art of a writer who can convince you he’s so mercilessly assimilated his influences wouldn’t need to call attention to them, but that wouldn’t be fair in an essay like “The Ecstasy of Influence.” That would be considered plagiarism. But often the plagiarist question is the unknown influence, when the writer “claims” they don’t know how that other writer’s words got in there, or of the wink and nod variety of Lethem, or David Shields. To simply utilize another writer’s words (appropriation) isn’t a crime unless it’s unattributed; it’s considered sacrilege in a work of fiction, usually.

How to put the MacArthur into perspective? It strikes me as being well-deserved, but he might not say so, nor would he want to talk about it. The idea of it forces him to find a new way to talk about all of his obsessions, and the result is “The Ecstasy of Influence”.

There might be a kind of arrogance is Lethem criticizing a critic (James Wood); after all, the very fact that this critic is writing about Lethem's book--and not in unfavorable terms--is a magnanimous gesture. It’s less on Wood because the author seems to be crying “but you aren’t getting all of my inter-textuality!” etc.

I applaud Lethem’s productivity, on the other hand, it’s a bit churlish to engage in the dialogue as he does.

Of course there is buying into and accepting the myth of greatness, which is only a construction; so many cited for greatness get slack and never reach the level of whatever got them there in the first place. We’re always disappointed in our heroes, ultimately. But the perception is there, and if you are not one of them, you are probably making your own contribution to the myth by engaging in the conversation. The danger in honesty and frankness is that someone will always perceive it as a weakness, as something to tear down because you are not willing to construct a false fortress around your image.

I think this game or role playing is probably the one thing I always think Lethem is actively doing; though I like what he says, I’m not sure it’s not carefully choreographed. But I think most writers would not choose to present themselves so earnestly. It’s a self-protective function. Just like in life, one constructs the image which reflects most favorably on them; for writers it is: don’t engage in criticism, praise others as you would like to be praised. In other words, don’t do anything that could hurt your market, your brand.

Lethem has gotten in the backdoor, the way Rick Moody has, I would say. They’ve arrived, and there’s no threat of self-destruction or false pretence to trying to save the world, or to present themselves as so above everyone by these golden artifacts they occasion to publish every ten years or so. Lethem began largely through a genre door. Make no mistake, these authors have to produce, but what does account for the scarcity of their name-making efforts? The point is that this is all about the maintenance of the myth, and not about any real impetus to actively being a writer; you have to give Lethem credit for acknowledging it.

The more abstract and turbid pieces of the collection (“Postmodernism as Liberty Valance”) show no publication attribution; it seems Lethem could have used a critical editor here. Often, the circling back of logic in such convoluted sentence making had me on the boards. I called uncle. And I’m not one who easily lets interesting thoughts go.

There are quite a few instances when my inner philistine felt really small (it’s smaller than my id to begin with), and I admit the impulse to jot down the word or reference Lethem tapped to add to my own collection.

He can seem almost too self-congratulatory, as in his spinning preface; he’d almost have to have already won you over, I think, for you to venture into the essays.

Maybe the best thing about reviewing is that the “I” never comes up, or maybe shouldn’t, it’s just the learned voice hovering over the proceedings, in the background. Sometimes Lethem’s “I” gets him carried away. In the pieces where it does occur, he could use some restraint--because when it’s not there, it is hovering in the background.

His voice is most appealing in the mode of interrogating and confronting his own long held obsessions (“Izations”) with comic book heroes. Here Lethem takes on an investigative reporter’s skepticism as he becomes a man on the street drawn into something like gossip mongering.

Since the pieces are all over the place, omniscient Lethem does a deft job of curating and editorializing as he shoehorns the oddments in. There are missteps in the collection (the turgid “Donald Sutherland’s Buttocks or Sex in Movies for people Who Have Sex”), and though Lethem makes ample excuse for them in the collection, it seems to me they do nothing to enhance his oeuvre, but subtly undermine it. 

Through the inclusion of what amounts to juvenalia (two short science fiction stories) he makes a connection to that may be true, though it briefly send the reader flipping ahead to see how long they have to read until the next piece.

The Lethem of the nonfiction is in danger of being everywhere, being all things to all people, becoming tiresome through ubiquity. Yet wouldn’t any writer relish that particular soapbox? And I feel I’m only criticizing as he might expect; my immense pleasure, and respect for his work, ultimately overrides my small, philosophical quibbles.  Lethem, a fan boy himself, has proven he can inspire this in his own work; it’s a kind of infectious enthusiasm that is a model of the writer’s life well-lived, and probably well-earned.

*This title replaces the one that was so ponderous that few read the post (Synthesizing Extrainstitutional Intellectualism), which itself was somewhat meant as a joke, was part of Lethem’s response to the New York Times, in a comment on the activities of a group of unemployed New York literati.  

Memorable Nonfiction 2010

Reading feeds the desire to write, and writing in itself is often an extension of reading. This explains why I read novels above most other works. Since I read so few biographies, memoirs, essay collections, and letters, I’m more selective, though maybe I ask of these works the same thing I ask of novels: that they feed my thinking and get me motivated to write. Three non-fiction books stood out for me this year.

The best biographers give you the life complete, baggage and all, written with no distracting bones to pick with their subject. The biographer takes on the self-erasing task of subsuming themselves in the life story, and sifting through the expected mundanity in order to reveal the exceptional. This could be difficult to accomplish for anyone compelled by their subject and trying to interpret the life, yet a degree of fandom is essential, as well as restraint. One of the best literary biographies for having covered this ground, and yet not shying away from either critical assessment, or candid and sometimes difficult judgment, is Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life. Though I was mostly a casual reader of Cheever’s well-known short stories before I picked this bio up, I came to admire the conflicted writer who, at heart, made a unique and solitary venture of his fictional output over a long and sometimes troubled life. This reading sent me to Cheever’s overshadowed novels.

David Shield’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto had me riffing on its provocations. Like any good book of philosophy, this one forces a reader’s reaction. The numbered paragraphs are widely borrowed from attributed sources and compiled to construct a number of dubious arguments (the novel is dead, “sampling” is the future of literature, truth is more worthwhile than fiction). Nevertheless, the resulting compendium is provocative for the daring of the broad sampling ( a preponderance for several quotable essayists), often rewritten to make Shield’s points, which proves or at least validates that his de-contextualization experiment might just be a hybrid form of memoir-slash-manifesto. Though it also provides a convincing case that the novel is alive enough to provoke diatribes against it.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, are almost too specific, direct and intimate, like catching one side of an eavesdropped conversation, that a guilty taste of voyeurism is unavoidable. What comes through the young Beckett’s missives is a hubristic certainty, a kind of unassailable arrogance, as well as an authority tempered by doubt and perseverance, as when he declaims to his cousin Morris Sinclair: “Here I strut about, I cannot and will not do otherwise, and have no idea if God helps me or not.” One would have been honored and maybe intimidated to have received from Beckett a multi-lingual letter laced with multiple literary references. But even a partially committed Beckett completist will be curious to thumb through this first of four projected volumes for prime examples of an endangered, if not yet extinct, form of writing from a modern master.

Reality Hunger Refraction*

1-618.

Drawing from so many varied sources as Shields does, there is the question of, curiosity about, insistence upon, authority.

139.

Writing fiction has little to do with telling someone how to live their life, or attempting to show them how, nor in edifying. It is a compulsion for turning out a possible reality, in words. (Maybe that should be, a variation of reality, or a supposition of reality, or just, a fiction.) It seems inherently material: words are tools, words are the medium. Words are the prime medium because they are where the point is put across.

143.

In architecture school, I recognized this truth: limitations give me freedom.

182.

Plot often comes out of a work incidentally. I'm thinking of statements such as: "She was in the park watching the men cut the grass." In the narrative convention, one expects and usually gets that something comes next, a further development and detail. A built-in anticipation, a narrative, a plot, drives the telling onward.

192.

John Cheever mined exhaustively from his life for hundreds of stories, and several novels, and no one ever questioned that it was anything but fiction.

193.

Truth doesn't reside in what happened, but how we come to frame what happened.

199.

When I first saw Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, I thought it was a documentary. A voice over of a woman reading from the dispatches of an itinerant anthropologist. But it occurred to me after the second viewing that these letters were a fictional device.

261.

Fiction doesn’t condone wholesale plagiarism, which would not be called sampling, because such literature is considered a deliberated work of intellect. The simplicity of its expression means the component parts are the whole of the thing. In general, literature is a one person show (usually). A work of literature is not multi-layered, thus it is far easier to appropriate illegally, and less recognizable when it is done.

276. To put it another way: Literature has the most worked out d.i.y. ethos next to your neighbor’s garage band, but neither is your neighbor’s band going to become as big as the Beatles, nor will P. Diddy be sampling them.

283.

An interesting form could come out of, for example, “take the seventh line from the 92^nd page of the first five books on your shelf with “The” in the title.”

319.

I think plot is mostly a result of narrative. The concession I make toward plot is because it is usually demanded, and I am likely to admit, “I did not plot.” The basis of the demand is an inability to embrace something different, hybrid, open.

321.

Does story necessarily seem to say everything happens for a reason? It is questionable to take only the strictest and literalist of terms for what anything is.

324.

Plot, in the most compelling works, is almost residual. Cortazar’s Hopscotch; Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable; Bernhard’s On A Mountain; Carla Harryman’s Gardener of Stars; Bolano’s 2666.

384-397.

The closer one gets to genre, the more over-determined the prose vehicle becomes: genre=anti-art.

420.

We characterize fiction as an escape (and that this is somehow bad?), but isn’t that more an escape for the reader? Isn't there an equivalent escape for essay and memoir?

456.

I craft for myself first, for an interested reader, second.

503.

We aspire to life as art because when it’s done masterfully, that’s what it looks like.

540.

Doubting myself one day, a friend edified me with my predicament (and paid me a high compliment): “You’re a painting, man. You’re a fucking Rauschenberg.”

601.

In the naïveté of my writing apprenticeship, I assumed the goal of writing fiction was to strive to write something beautiful. I’ve come to see the goal as a combination of an artistic and aesthetic expression that aims at truth. The result will ultimately alienate some, and provide frisson, for others. So, it has more to do with truth than beauty, though that can be beautiful in itself.

NOTES:

*I’ll admit, I was prepared to despise David Shield’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Yet what’s so compelling is the ground covered in advancing an idea that I don’t in any way agree with (more or less, that “the novel is dead”). The ideas are presented in such a way that makes me think about the process of writing, and in so doing, made me manifest a bit myself (It is “a manifesto”). The book feels like a microcosm of how writing is about assimilating information and thinking on the page. Thus my review here is a reaction, a refraction, and a reflection. I have responded to a selection of the numbered segments (there are 618 in total) in the body text of Reality Hunger; the subsequent footnotes indicate the reference number and a facsimile of the text, or the complete text, whichever I found easier to crib from, in the book’s appendix. In the spirit of the book, I’m also playing fast and loose with attributions. If you want to see them in full, you will have to look at the book.

139. “In the end, I missed the pleasure of a fully imagined work in which the impulse to shape experience seems as strong as the impulse to reveal it.”

143. The notation refers to the Dogme 95 manifesto, which Shields quotes at length.

182. “For example, in Proust, who is to me at base an essayist, nothing ever happens. The only obstacles are that someone might rebuff someone else or someone might get sick or grow old, and even these are usually hypothetical obstacles. People get educations, travel, buy paintings, go on diplomatic missions, but the events are for the most part meetings between various people (or simply sightings of one person by another, sometimes thanks to a stroll or a ride in a carriage) and what these meetings being out on a psychological level, about life itself. How can a work be considered fiction when there's no plot? Philosophy, perhaps, or criticism, but not fiction.”

192. “The line between fact and fiction [...]” Raban

193. “[...] Just what is the relation of your memoir to the truth? It is as close as it can be. The moment you put pen to paper and begin to shape a story, the essential nature of life--that one damn thing after another--is lost.” Dorothy Gallagher, “Recognizing the Book That Needs to Be Written,” New York Times.

199. "[...] The border line between documentaries and feature films is blurred; in fact, it doesn't exist." Werner Herzog

261. Art is theft

276. Sampling, how rappers get the MC name.

283. A literary equivalent of sampling.

321. “Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.” Shields.

324. “The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.”

384-397. Various annotations on genre

420. “[...] I most admire those books that not only enable me to endure life but show me how they got there [...]”

503. “Everything in life, turned sideways, can look like--can be--art. Art suddenly looks and is more interesting, and life, astonishingly enough, starts to be livable.” Shields.

540. “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics.” Rauschenberg.

601. "Beautiful Illusion."

Reality Hunger's Discontent

The death warrant for the novel always seems to be a celebration. Literary forms grow and transform over time; undeniably, the novel may be the most open, enigmatic and constantly challenging of forms. Why would there be a need to pronounce the novel dead if it wasn’t in fact alive and well? One rarely hears novelists proclaiming the end of the memoir, or the end of poetry.

In fact, so often people have a vehement dislike for and anger towards “the novel”--to which I often think: what did the novel ever do to you? Because it is a difficult form that defeats. Maybe what ultimately defeats is a lack of commercial success.

The benchmark of commercial viability is difficult to come by. Only a few books make it to the darling list. One of the results of this is the attempt to invent a new form. Another is to go meta.

Because the form has existed for so long, so effectively, and in light of technology, it seems viable to question the novel’s means and methods are no longer relevant or somehow wanting. Experimental writers take this up as a badge of honor, subverting narrative in the “traditional” sense (The failure to play the commercial game is to buck tradition, to deny what a marketing machine expects and searches for).

To identify a benchmark as baseline is usually the best most writers can wish for; then, to remain undaunted in the long haul of writing a novel, to say nothing of writing one of originality, is a meager dream. This might explain the proliferation of that type of novel that people supposedly want to read, the block buster, which is usually anti-original, formulaic, genre work.

To imagine that anyone is so in love with “reality” or aching for it, we have reality TV programming. But don’t imagine that those reality narratives aren’t shaped into some from of drama in the editing room (to lesser or greater effect--I’m willing to bet that among the writers on those programs is a novelist or two).

Without the anointment of commercial success, and having failed to live up to the demands of the form, so called re-invention is necessary. This is also known as a good career move.

David Shield’s Reality Hunger appropriates samples, sound bites, other writer’s pithy phrases out of context, and re-contextualizes them. He is utilizing the plagiaristic taboo writ large. This is the nature of the web having its influence on publishing. As with blogs, there is so much work to reference and draw from, to lead the reader to more and more information. One has to get read. The present horizon of the mobile text (the ephemeral written word on the web) means the writer can’t count on anyone getting that far into any one particular book. Yet Reality Hunger is a book, not an online text.

Reality Hunger as a text is a great idea. The style is a gimmick that provokes, seizing on the controversial aspects of recent memoir scandal (the appropriating element), as well as wrecking the house on the way out the door (the death of the novel element). But I won’t call it art.

Providing an antidote to an imagined problem is a proven marketing ploy, its effectiveness is a foregone conclusion once the publisher rallies behind it. Whatever the form of Reality Hunger is, it will never replace the novel.