The Ghost of the Author Sings in the Wires

Coming to Terms w/ David Foster Wallace

<3 Federer (from www.justjared.com)

I first encountered David Foster Wallace (DFW) shortly after Roger Federer won his 17^th Grand Slam title at Wimbledon on the 8^th of July 2012. One of my Facebook acquaintance posted a link to an article DFW wrote on the subject of Roger Federer back in 2006 (or, in Federer's more sublime terms, 9 Grand Slams previously). I was, and am, an absolute sucker for Federer, a devoted follower, an acolyte, perhaps, in different circumstances, a groupie. He is, I think, inarguably, empirically, one of the very few genuine geniuses to have been alive during my own lifetime. Little did I know, when I clicked the link on that fateful July day, that I would discover not just a pleasant victory hymn once more lionising a well-acknowledged legend, but an absolutely astounding essay, the start of a thread that has lead me, belatedly, to the appreciation of one of the other very few genuine geniuses I have shared this earth with.

One of the nicer things I can say about DFW is that he's one of those people you read sometimes who you desperately want to imitate. I think of the part in The Incredibles when Mr Incredible is followed by a kid who wants to be his sidekick, even though he has no superpowers. Realistically, if I could be DFW's sidekick, I would be very happy. Because this seems unlikely, I've mostly ended up semi-consciously speaking, writing, thinking a little more like him. I've started to overuse w/r/t and w/ rather than with respect to and with respectively. I've started to adopt all kinds of extra equivocators in my prose, extra subclauses, extra information, extra self-effacement, self-diagnosis, self-assessment; extra mixing of high- and low- brow culture (although I think this interest/addiction came earlier; it was certainly fed significantly by The Simpsons); extra brackets.  This actually-quite-interesting-but-a-little-self-contradictory article points out DFW's “attempts to ward off criticism by embedding all possible criticisms within the writing itself.” I definitely now try to do this, reminding myself of a character in one of DFW's own stories who tries to bluff his psychiatrist by anticipating and self-diagnosing his own

Mr Incredible's less incredible sidekick 
(from http://writeups.org)

neuroses. In the end, he (the character) outwits his psychiatrist, because he (the character again) is such a grotesquely shallow, manipulative shiny surface of a person that his facsimile self-exposition is all that can be analysed about his character; the psychiatrist, of course, doesn't realise that. Not just does he anticipate criticisms by explicitly stating them in his prose; the plot here seems to encapsulate the paradox within itself: the false mirage surface of the character resists analysis because it offers self-analysis which is in itself a shimmer on the horizon, precluding the very possibility of any real analysis, but totally revealing that it is aware that said real analysis is not and never could be a real possibility. Fata morgana everywhere; it gets in your eyes while you read. (Obviously, I haven't quite reached this level of meta-static all-encompassing pseudo-self-revelation, but a boy can dream; obviously, I am enacting a rehearsal of the embedding of all possible criticisms within the writing itself right now; obviously, at the moment it is a little crude.)

Which all sounds horribly postmodern and complicated and unfun. Perhaps the greatest achievement of DFW's anticipation of future critcisms is that it makes allowance for the insidious but unavoidable problems associated with postmodernism – that if the world, or at least the work of art, is all surface, and surfaces are indistinguishable or shallow or terrifying, what's the point of anything? D.T. Max's essay on DFW's biography (later expanded into the well-titled book Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, released last year) takes this as the jumping point for its central argument w/r/t/ DFW: that he managed to escape from the postmodernist mire, with a new sort of meta-sincerity. Max puts it a lot better than I do.

The whole point doesn't seem very controversial, to be honest. All you have to do is read the aforementioned and mind-blowing essay on Roger Federer. The DFW classics are all present, but the tone is not of postmodern ironic jest, but of vast admiration and sincere fandom and appreciation, the very tone that I hope to be striking right now.

Revulsion

DFW, looking friendly (from http://2.bp.blogspot.com)

Unfortunately, I think, after a few months of gestation, that I didn't quite get the right Federer-essay-tone. Rather, what I have written seems gushing, adolescent, pseudo-academic. Somehow, DFW seems to inspire it. His flexible, loquacious, elongated, subtly modulating, colloquial, conversational, equivocal tone inspires loyalty. But, more than that, it inspires fondness, an almost personal appreciation for DFW. He seems like your friend. But he seems like so much more than that, so impossible to pin down. He seems like a really really smart guy, a kind of hyper-literate polymathic role-model. He seems, most of all, kinda nice. As far as I can tell from his biography, this isn't strictly true. At the very least, he was a difficult man to live with.

This was going to be an article about my puppyish DFW enthusiasm, but, after failing to finish it, it has transformed, several months later, into something a little different. I haven't been reading any of Dave's work in a while; what I have been doing, however, is watching videos of him on youtube. The experience is alarming, it's distancing, it's iconoclastic. Dave's aura may not be able to stand being filmed; his groovy-guidance-councillor shtick – ironically, best presented in his videoed commencement address shit, which is ripe for Facebook quotation – just doesn't stick when you can watch him actually speak. His nauseating anxiety, his greasy desire to be liked, his lofty distance, they all come across in interview. What if, in an age of internet access, people who write words – and who have a lot of control over the words they write and how they are presented – can't control their self-presentation? What if the special relationship between author and reader is violated? (What if you read about said author in gossip columns?) Since most everyone I've read for years has been dead for decades, this whole minefield is one I've only come to recently, and my relationships with any contemporary authors are being actively mediated by my now university-over-educated DFW-style hyper-self-conscious brain, and I'm starting to sort of actively repulse from them, even as I continue to be actively seduced by the Internet's promise of more and more information, and end up reading shitty interviews with Ned Beauman in the Oxford student newspaper by mistake at 2am on a weeknight.

Most professions in the public eye seem to have developed capable PR. If actors, musicians, and presidents can seem funny and human and humble through online media, why do authors struggle? I should equivocate a little here: I don't follow all authors at all times to make this statement comprehensive: rather, some authors I have followed, or tried to follow, notably David Mitchell, Ned Beauman, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Lila Azam Zanganeh, have very limited online presence. When they do appear, the medium is either hyper-controlled, like Smith's occasionally and often very good essays, or kinda lame. Never is there the sense of honesty, of glimpsing the real person behind the mask of publicity, that the best celebrities can offer. They want to make you believe that they're normal people just like the rest of us; sometimes they succeed, sometimes they seem to be trying too hard. For some reason today's literary authors don't seem that interested in that. They want to keep their distance. They only want to interact through their words, they only want to monologue at you.

I wonder if this is just a missed opportunity, an example of a fairly technophobic & PR-suspicious part of today's media landscape failing dismally to grasp new potential. Or if it reveals something a little deeper, some kind of compulsive solipsism – probably the case for Dave. Or, maybe a little more worryingly, if it's part of a kind of elitism. Intellectuals are above the Internet. The Internet, with its tweets and youtube self-parody videos and AMAs, is pop cultural; literary writers are high cultural. The place of the literary artefact is in the library, not on imgur, being mindlessly upvoted amidst dozens of gifs of cats.

Geoffrey Hill: less friendly
 (from http://24.media.tumblr.com)

This thought first crossed my head a few days ago, when I went to see the poet Geoffrey Hill speak in the lofty environs the Oxford University's exam schools. Hill at his best is capable of imbuing his poetry with a vast and deeply affecting empathy. Hill as a public speaker is curiously old-school (to be fair to him, he is now in his 80s, and probably isn't all that online). He speaks with a booming, received-pronunciation voice, with occasionally Worcestershire slippages. He emphasises raspingly; he often repeats important phrases. He sounds a bit like a BBC radio announcer from the mid-30s crossed with a cultist prophet and a thespian. He has a Gandalf-beard. One thing he said has stuck in my head. Talking about Beckett writing about Joyce (a fairly high-brow legacy), he said (I paraphrase) 'there is a kind of arrogance to Beckett's essay that I find pleasing in comparison with the mewling populism of contemporary critics.' I found this strange. Should poets and critics and novelists and commentators be arrogant? Are today's critics populist? My own problem with them is that they aren't populist enough, for the most part. They are happy with a small intellectual/academic niche, and in-field respect. Anyone must be arrogant to some extent, I think, to assert their opinions on the public, but not in Beckett's way, with long untranslated passages of Italian citation (the feature Hill approved of).

All of which brings us back to Dave. DFW was certainly, in some ways, arrogant; he was also an insecure mess. He was, self-proclaimedly, a kind of snob, a grammar-nazi, unafraid of writing essays about modern critical theory, and applying the same theories to essays about pop culture; unafraid of writing long and difficult novels. At one level, he is a good model for a combination of intellectualism and populism, maybe one of the best the literary world has produced. And yet, at the same time, he's an awful example to follow, alienating and personally unpleasant, distanced from the positive interpersonality of modern popular culture. I came to Dave through the Internet, I researched him through the Internet, and I fell in love with him through the Internet; and yet this was all, inevitably, tragically, done without any of Dave's own involvement. He wrote the words; other people, fans and afficionados, spread them for him. There's potential there, someone just needs to figure out how to use it.

I fell out of love with Dave through the Internet too.

                                                                    ***

DFW apparently had a tattoo of his first love's name – Mary – on his arm, and when they broke up he had the name crossed out, and when he met his second love, he appended a footnote, further down his arm, and the footnote had the name of his second love.

Review: The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

I find it amusing that The Teleportation Accident nestled on this year's Booker longlist with Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies. Mantel, of course, eventually won the prize with an unashamedly Tudor novel, emphasising the importance of historical fictions in the current 'zeitgeist' – especially those which make a claim to fidelity and accuracy. I'm thinking here not just of Mantel, but everything from the ludicrous Downton Abbey to the glorious Mad Men, from Phillipa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl (historical romance endorsed by my own mother) to the Assassin's Creed video game series. And this is not even to mention the various retro-isms that periodically wash over pop music and high street fashion. History is in.

Beauman's second novel is itself a historical one, of a sort. The plot flits around interwar Berlin, Paris and Los Angeles, and demonstrates a dizzying amount of research and detail. But research and detail do not make a convincing history. The Teleportation Accident is not trying to recreate history: it is trying to demolish it.

The novel concerns itself with the impossibilities of historical fiction. Partly this decision is logical, epistemological even: stories are not really the best way to preserve, to archive, to recreate. A historical novel is just as much an accurate representation of the past as a theme park.

I suspect that Beauman also has an aesthetic agenda here, a disregard for the current vogue for historical realism, and for realism in general. And I tend to agree with him: I find something very kitsch, and very dissatisfying in the Downton-type of history. It's a stage dressing, not an insight. Characters in this kind of historical fiction still think like 21^st century people, however they think.

Beauman's characters, of course, think like 21^st century people, to they extent that they think at all. They are, to a great extent, surfaces, archetypes, bits from other novels. Beauman's recreation of history is far more reliant on novels from history than history itself. He produces the kind of historical novel you get if you try and conceive of history through literature: shifting, parodic, genre-aware, and, above all, fun as hell.

People in Downton Abbey doing their thing, whatever that is.

This use of other writers' works as props (in both sense of the word) has its downside, though. It's really the only major criticism I can offer of the novel, which is otherwise fantastic. Beauman is especially good at plotting, by which I mean not crafting rip-roaring adventures, but something rather more technical. He is great at reintroducing and recombining all of the plot elements (scenes, objects, minor characters, books; MacGuffins generally) in ingenious ways. It gives what could seem messy and overstuffed an air of economy and purpose. The tightness with which he writes is hugely admirable, joyously ecstatic, and completely self-aware, a remark about the falsity of narrative tightness.

But back to my criticism, which is, unfortunately, nagging and banal. Beauman's hyper-inter-textuality (sorry) leaves him a little stranded, a little identity-less. Reviewers seem to be incapable of writing about The Teleportation Accident without referring to who they think Beauman's influences are, coming up with a vast array of authors who have been studied, cribbed and alluded to. And Ned himself, author of The Teleportation Accident, is left, to use a grotesque cliché, without a voice of his own. I'm not really sure what this means; I think it's something to do with tone. I am convinced that great literature, the really good stuff, marks itself as unique, as the product of this particular author, this particular style, when you read it. I am being prescriptive and limited of course, but, I like to think, not completely wrong. Beauman isn't quite there yet, hasn't yet found a way to forge a vast collage of writers and sentences and styles and facts and details and history and life into a cohesive artwork. Undoubtedly, not having done so is the point, and it's terribly and grossly New-Critic-y of me to suggest otherwise. And it is. But I don't think the two are irreconcilable; a cohesive collage, a themed scrapyard, if you will, is an achievable goal. 

Making sense of the world: stories vs. TS Eliot

To generalise hugely, with no small sense of irony, it seems that people are far too keen on oversimplifications. Whether it be on a specific issue, like seeking a comprehensible trigger for a school shooting, or on a more general topic like dismissing those on benefits as skivers (or, in the interests of impartiality, dismissing the wealthiest in society as "the 1%"), we like to make sense of the world with explanations and categorisations that cannot do justice to reality.

Of course, it makes sense for us to do this. I don't know if I'm alone in being willing to confess that I rarely understand even my own motivations, but it's clear enough that across the world we often struggle to understand our closest friends and relations, never mind the vast majority of the other seven billion people in the world, or the still more complicated array of natural processes. In such a confusing and tumultuous world, any progress or decision depends on us finding shortcuts towards understanding.

It's clear, from the very very beginning, that literature and language have helped in this process. Foundational myths helped make sense of the most challenging natural phenomena, giving our ancestors a framework to understand what they were, where they came from and why they were here. Indeed even before that point the development of language marks the first step in our ordering of the universe - words work by designating multiple objects as being essentially the same - once you have a word for 'apple' you no longer have the daily challenge of understanding the round red thing in your hand which is slightly different to what you ate yesterday. 

Review: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

(via ravithekavi)

Oliver Sacks states that he wants to return the narrative to medical science – an ideal dubbed 'romantic science'. His famous 1985 pop-science book attempts to do just that. Sacks offers a series of case histories, or, if you prefer, short stories, or character sketches, or maybe even prose poems. The case histories detail a variety of bizarre, unbelievable and fascinating neurological disorders (although, as Sacks would argue, disorder itself may be too pejorative a word). The book is prefaced with this epigram: “To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.” We shall return to it in a moment.

Unfortunately, Sacks is not that effective at returning narrative to medicine. Perhaps trying to do so is foolhardy. Human life, and especially the life of the long term neurological patients described here, does not lend itself to the cleanness and clarity of narrative. Indeed, the very issues suffered by the patients – memory loss and alogia in particular – preclude narrative by their very nature. The problem Sacks constantly runs into, as a storyteller, is the fact that his patients' stories do not, and cannot end. All that is available for a chronic and incurable patient, with an untreatable, barely comprehensible condition, is death. There can be no closure here, no moment of epiphany. Many of the patients are not even capable of investing emotionally. How can you love someone if you can't remember who they are, or who you are?

Emotion, then, is usually infused into the stories my Sacks himself, as a retrospective narrator. In a sense, he is very good at this, and comes across as a profoundly empathic man and excellently caring doctor. But he is not good enough to fully humanise his subjects (note how easily they are referred to as subjects – there can be few more damning indictments!). They remain, terribly, grotesques.

An Arabian Nights' grotesque (via heritage-history.com)

Part of the problem here is the very impenetrability of the patients' mental states. How can a reader hope to comprehend, or a writer hope to describe, how the world looks to these suffers? How can we even speculate, when, fundamentally, we don't really understand what is going on in their brains?

Sacks's books is a noble attempt to address this problem warmly, without resorting to cold, clinical intellectualism. It is noble, but it is a failure. And, indeed, it suffers in trying to avoid such analysis. The reader is left desperately wanting to understand more about these people, and about the neuroscience behind their problems.

Sacks makes very little effort to describe his case histories from a scientific perspective – a strange decision for a pop-science book, and a strange decision for a doctor. He tries instead to write stories from a position of pathos. And we feel pathos. But the very strangeness of the illnesses, their fundamental incompatibility with everyday human experience, makes Sacks's case histories very alienating. And, by avoiding any attempt at contextualising their experience, Sacks makes them more alien, more grotesque, more like the fabulous case histories of the Arabian Nights.

Genre Fiction and Literary Fiction

Perhaps I was always naive, but when I was growing up I didn't really pick up on the differences between literary fiction and not literary fiction. Probably this had a lot to do with my strongly trashy reading tastes: from Anthony Horowitz to James Patterson via Jodi Picoult, I was never in much danger of accidentally bumping into a Booker Prize winner.

Two things have opened my eyes to this gap. Firstly, I very strongly considered studying Popular Literature at Trinity College Dublin. The course (which, from what I saw of it, I enthusiastically recommend) covers everything from horror to erotica (which was the case before Fifty Shades of Grey), but with the puzzling caveat that if it's something you could study in an English degree, it's probably not an option.

Secondly, my exposure to the publishing industry has backed up this division. Without leaking any details, it's striking that, even before a book is acquired, there is a keen focus on working out who it's to be targeted at. This obviously makes a great deal of sense, but it did surprise me that on more than one occasion concerns have been raised that a book will struggle because it is neither a genre book nor a literary book, but rather a blend of both. The consensus (which, I would stress, I see no reason to doubt) is that the readers of these books have very different tastes, indeed to the point they are not compatible.

Now, genre distinctions make a great deal of sense most of the time. Some readers like romances, while some readers like crime novels - we have long-established conventions in areas like titles and cover designs that enable you to quickly tell which of these categories any single book falls into. Equally, there is almost certainly a sub-genre of 'romantic crime' (or at least there will be, once the current trend for publishing fan fiction expands to include Holmes/Watson slash fiction), and this can again be compartmentalized. You might think it would be nice if we all branched out a little more, but we don't seem to want to, and that's what it is.

My problem is more with the concept of literary fiction as a distinct genre in it's own right, and the implication that if something is 'crime' (or romance, or horror...) it by definition isn't literary. This kind of distinction might look loosely appropriate from a distance, but up close it is both illogical and counter-productive.

To start with, literary books throughout history obviously do have genres. We need only look to Shakespeare, who wrote comedies, histories and tragedies. Even if we follow more recent genre distinctions the same point is true: Hilary Mantel's novels are indisputably historical fiction; Toni Morrison's Beloved is a family saga (with horror elements). The supposed distinction doesn't work.

But the bigger problem is the implication that goes with this mistaken assumption. A typical argument would be that genre fiction is about people doing, and literary fiction is about people being. Genre fiction, you could argue, is all about following through a particular situation, obeying convention and producing a satisfactory conclusion. Everything is predictable, even (in the case of spy thrillers, for example) the necessity of it being unpredictable. It is left to literary fiction, then, to explore big questions. Most readers aren't interested, of course, they just want their weekly dose of angsty romance, masterful sleuthing or kinky sex.

The problem is that all of the best bits of literature lie in the gaps between these two categories. It's all well and good that we have deep-but-inpenetrable literary fiction furthering the minds of the pretentious elite, and that the vast majority of us are reading happily away. But wouldn't it be better if our best, most interesting writers were targeting the mass market - able to lure in thriller readers with a gripping plot that also had time to reflect on the infinite complexity of human life?

This, of course, is what many great writers do - just this week we reviewed Justin Cronin's The Twelve, which is both indisputably apocalyptic sci-fi horror, but simultaneously in many senses a literary book in its grasp of character. But this might well be more true if the book industry desegmentalised itself a touch, which of course is contingent on readers being willing to push themselves from time to time, rather than reaching for the book with the most similar cover to their last read.

Review: The Twelve by Justin Cronin

The Passage, the book which precedes The Twelve, had more fanfare attached to its release than any non-JK Rowling book I've seen. Waterstones not only had huge piles of it at the front of their shop in Reading, they also produced a free booklet including the opening chapter and heaps of positive reviews. I was persuaded to purchase it, and loved the book so much it leaped to the top of my all-time favourites list.  Needless to say, I was keenly anticipating the sequel.

Of course, sequels have a tendency to struggle, not least when they are the second book in a planned trilogy, as is the case here. The Passage ultimately ends with the death of Babcock, the first of the Twelve - my worry here was that this follow-up could only repeat the same story as its predecessor over and over and over, or would have to sacrifice the sense of difficulty which made that first triumph so sweet. Refreshingly, Cronin takes the decision to go in a very different direction - I believe I read somewhere that Cronin compared the first novel to a travel book, and the second to a spy thriller, and the distinction in tone is clear.

That being said, the opening takes us right back to The Passage, in more ways than one. The first chapter is a godsend to those who haven't re-read the former novel in a while, as it recounts the events to date in a quasi-biblical fashion. This tantalising hint at the far-future is one of many tantalising strands you hope will be explained by the end of the series. From here we plunge back into 'Year Zero', when the 'virals' are rampaging across America. The Passage made a habit of investing in characters and then abandoning them - here we abandon our entire cast to pick up a whole new cast, although connections slowly become apparent. The sense of fear builds slowly, but the cumulative effect is still chilling.

The Bookshelf is being reassembled...

Apologies the recent lack of posts here at The Bookshelf.  Tim is beginning a Masters Degree, while I (Joel) has just started a new job working for Quercus, the UK publisher - part of the excitement of moving to the big city is coping without internet while the good people of Tesco Broadband fight the good fight to set it up.

To give you a flavour of what you can look forward to when we're back in business, there's the promised analysis of the politics of JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy (check out our review here).  A lot of attention has focused on the novel's perceived left-wing politics, which so displeased the Daily Mail, but I'm inclined to think it's actually a lot more complicated than that - check back in a week or three for more.

We're also very excited about the upcoming release of The Twelve, by Justin Cronin.  The novel is the second in an anticipated trilogy, which began with The Passage - a wonderful book which fused apocalyptic vampires with literary fiction.  Look out for a review of The Passage, as well as Cronin's award-winning earlier novel The Summer Guest, which might well be the best book I've read this year.  Of course, once The Twelve is released it'll be read and reviewed as quickly as professional life makes possible.

Finally, while the professional world is hampering my reading time, it's also giving me more of an insight into the world of publishing. I won't be leaking any trade secrets, but hopefully I'll be able to share some interesting news about what's going on in the book world.

Happy October!