A Sunday afternoon ramble around the ramparts of authority
I hadn't taken much note of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur.
From the reviews and blogs, I had assumed the book was just another
liberal apologia for turning back the tide of democracy. It's been on
the fast track to the top of review pages and radio shows like Nick
Cohen, Melanie Philips, Clive James and Christopher Hitchens in recent
months. Hence his appearance on Radio 3's Arts podcast last week,
which is where I heard his creepy, Clive Barkeresque mid-Atlantic
drawl. I had assumed right. But I don't wish to counter his arguments.
One need only read James Marcus' "tiny codicil" to his LA Times review
to realise the book contains more than lazy assumptions.
Marcus himself is an argument against Keen. Do readers afford
authority to his blog because he also writes for the LA Times; does
the blog diminish the authority of the LA Times? Keen's book is a
product of this two-way question of authority. He wants to raise it
for digital media only because he's content with the authority that
has already buried the question. The book's subtitle (which Marcus
calls "faintly hysterical") is revealing: "How the Democratization of
the Digital World Is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our
Values". It reminds me of those newspaper liberals putting on a
serious face and asking: "Should we bomb Iran?". As if the decision
had anything to do with us. The use of the word is there to corral
readers into a false community. As if "culture" was in our possession.
What would it mean for it not to be in our possession? Answer: the
kind of anxiety Keen is keen to feed and exploit.
Narrowing the focus to literary culture, most books corral without
raising their voice. A book gains authority through its mere bookness.
But all writing appropriates authority. The trick it allows is
generally overlooked, taken for granted. In everyday life, this is
necessary. We don't sit around discussing newspaper articles as
newspaper articles. We discuss the subject. We discuss the article's
relation to an issue of reality. We might even question its veracity.
But when a novel is celebrated, there is a curious vaccum. If we
celebrate it for its existence as a novel - by definition, a literary
book, existing solely as itself - what exactly are we celebrating? One
can leap for the subject matter - post-apocalyptic USA for example -
and praise it for insights into current social and political issues.
But this isn't why anyone reads a novel. It's always a sop to social
progress and education. Nabokov rightly called such readings
"childish". Then there's celebrating it for being "a thumping good
read", keeping the reader from enduring the real world for a few
precious and harmless hours. But so would sleeping, having a bath or
watching Pirates of the Caribbean 3. So why put a novel on a cultural
pedestal? Instead we might tell how we luxuriated in the precision and
beauty of the novel's prose. But is this anymore culturally-refined
than a fresh pillow, the fragrance of apricot creme or Keira
Knightley's bone structure? What is it that gives a novel a unique
cultural authority?
No wonder genre fans are perplexed at the way brilliantly-orchestrated
detective novels or horror tales or SF tetralogies fail to win the
attention and respect given to Man Booker or Pulitzer winners. Last
week, Matthew Cheney made a despairing attack on those who blame the
failure on cultural commissars. He argues that there is no "literary
establishment" keeping SF in its place; there is no "literary elite"
scheming to promote Cormac McCarthy without giving similar credit to
speculative fiction; there is no "literati" and it doesn't "dictate
what books are in and out of the literary canon". All true but, by the
same token, literature doesn't exist either. The paranoia behind the
claims of Cheney's essay writer is evidence of a faith in the literary
that is unable to appreciate its uncertain status. I'm sure the same
"literary establishment" shares that faith, otherwise it wouldn't
promote as "literary" deeply conservative writers. There really isn't
a great deal of difference between genre writers and those who write
sentences like "Between Edward and Florence, nothing happened
quickly". Supreme confidence in the form is present in both. Literary
fiction, the real thing, is full of doubt and ambivalence yet still
manages to find a way to move forward.
Ellis Sharp is right to guess that I was unaware of the interview with
the author of the sentence quoted above. In it he expresses gratitude
to various US authors like Roth, Mailer and Bellow for showing "formal
ambition, real sense of engagement, not cramped by modernism, really
democratic in outlook" [sic] as opposed to Europe which "was still
stifled by modernism, a rather detached form of elitist writing". It's
always wonderful to discover writers who set one free. It's odd then
that his own novels have remained so detached and stifling.
It's got to be a genuine freedom of course. One can't jettison doubt
like an emigrant on Ellis Island leaving Europe behind. It has to be
more like the freedom of Artur Sammler. Bellow is a great example of
finding a way between the crippling self-consciousness of the exile
and the promise of animal freedom, without denying either - a great
modernist in other words. McEwan's contrast is as deceptive as his
liberalism. Significantly, he doesn't name the detached elitists of
Europe. Could he mean the great modernists still writing when he was
studying at UEA: Nabokov, Bernhard and Beckett? One wonders if he was
talking to a European journalist he'd say something different; praise
the dazzling lucidity of Handke for example (see the rear cover of the
UK hardback of Absence). The triumph of European modernism was to find
a way to speak after the cataclysms of the 20th Century. The threat of
being stifled was very high. It's no surprise that some took refuge in
detachment. But you've got to do the filtering yourself, create your
own personal canon, become your own literary establishment, form your
own literary elite and then help others to do the same. It sets you
free. There isn't much sense of community though, unless you count the
internet.
at 6:38 PM 1 comments
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