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Friday, August 24, 2007
tomemos on Everything Studies and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude
For those of you interested in our ongoing discussion about criticism and popular culture, I recommend you check out tomemo’s outstanding new post. It responds to my last one and more significantly to Tim Burke by way of a complex and rewarding examination of Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude and John Leonard’s review of the same.
A sample:
The key to this dispute, I think—or more accurately, the key to Leonard’s misreading of Lethem’s book—is his use of the word “ephemera” to describe the kind of pop culture Lethem writes about. My take: of course it is. You would have to be extremely wide-eyed to claim that the song “Play That Funky Music, White Boy” (predictably used to torment Dylan in school) had some sort of lasting, vital effect on the larger world, and the same goes for all but a handful of the comics that Dylan, Mingus and Arthur collect, store in plastic sleeves, and eventually discard. But all of this is no more ephemeral—in fact, it’s a good deal less so—than the detail of what horse won the Gold Cup on June 16, 1904. Ephemera—cultural and otherwise—are the bulk of what make up ordinary life, particularly that of young people, and any modern novelist who tried to omit the ephemeral would be creating … something else.
The only way Leonard’s epithet would carry any sting would be if Lethem lost sight of this ephemerality, like people who talk about their role-playing characters as if they were real people. In fact, he is eminently aware of it. One example: two girls who live near Dylan are always singing lines from whatever song is popular at that part of the novel: a device that measures the passage of time by the brief, beautiful lives of radio hits.
Leonard’s misapprehension—that Lethem’s invocation of pop culture means he is convinced of its lasting importance—also manifests itself in his use of the term “New Dork” (bravo!) to describe Lethem and his contemporaries, the implication being that Lethem simply hasn’t been able to find anything to divert him but comics and thus is being hindered by them. Again, though, Lethem is aware of the difference between those who use popular culture to supplement and enrich their lives and personalities, and those who use popular culture as their personalities—who have, talk about, and think about nothing besides their pop culture interests.
Tomemos includes a brief but elegant discussion of graffiti, written in sympathy with Lethem, with implications for our other current discussion on the aesthetics of graffiti. In general, his calls for closer and more disciplined readings make a valuable contribution. His attack (again via smart readings of Lethem) on “nerd” self-fashioning is something I hope to eventually and successfully challenge.
As Smurov put it recently, what say ye?
Comments
I haven’t read the Lethem book or the Leonard criticism, so I skipped this post originally, but now I’ve read it. It’s a good post, but parts of it are problematic:
“the third modernist characteristic of the novel, and the one I want to talk about for the rest of this entry, is its use of reference: the world of the novel is supported by a mesh of references to contemporary music, movies, comic books, cultural trends, and historical moments (the Son of Sam killings, e.g.), much in the same way that The Waste Land makes reference both to classical myths and figures and to modern ones (pop songs, the Great War).”
But no, a reference to a classical myth or to the Great War is not the same kind of thing as “a device that measures the passage of time by the brief, beautiful lives of radio hits.” The ephemerality of the second is not just the ephemerality of the incident being referenced by the book, it’s the ephemerality of that incident in the minds of the readers. In another decade or two, people won’t remember which times are associated with which songs. When Eliot references pop songs, those references now fail, or at least survive only because of the universality one can imagine for them, or through the artificial life support of a critical apparatus.
“The only way Leonard’s epithet would carry any sting would be if Lethem lost sight of this ephemerality, like people who talk about their role-playing characters as if they were real people. “
And this is a bad example. tomemos, using a character from Lethem as an example, criticizes appropriation—valuing graffiti not for the aesthetics of graffiti, but because valuing graffiti is supposed to say something about yourself as a person. People who talk about their role-playing characters as if they were real people may be very strange, but it’s not at all the same kind of thing. It’s a form of fictive self-fashioning (because, after all, they are the ones creating the characters) that requires a good deal more existential commitment than the kind of self-definition by liking cool things does.
Whenever people read a book, there is a temptation to talk about the characters as if they were real people, and while it is resisted in various ways, I think that most readers would not enjoy fiction as much as they do without it. The role-playing-game example sounds worse because it is more self-centered, and because after all it’s easier to indulge the impulse to Mary Sue / Gary Stu in a role-playing game than by reading fiction. But I think that it is recognizeably connected to literaryness.
JK, thanks for the nod and the kind words--I look forward to talking with you further about this.
Rich (RP?), I gave a misleading idea of my argument in the first quote you discuss. My point was not that classical myths are as ephemeral as pop songs, though I know it reads that way; since those myths been around for thousands of years, calling them “ephemeral” would be idiotic. My point, rather, was that Eliot and Pound are most known for their classical and literary allusions, but they also made use of the contemporary and the commercial. Furthermore, I think that the shelf life of these references (if not of the original source material) is longer than you claim; for instance, I’d argue that “O that Shakespeherian Rag” in The Waste Land still carries a certain amount of [what I imagine to be] its original resonance: it’s identifiable as belonging to the genre of the popular song, even if we need a footnote to confirm this.
In regards to the second example: as someone who not only roleplayed in high school and college but still has some of his game books, just in case, I definitely agree that role-playing is literary in nature. So are comic books, but there’s a difference between appreciating and contemplating the stories, and collecting them because that’s what comic fans do ("a number one’s a number one"). Similarly, those who don’t have perspective on the difference between their characters and reality are not participating more fully in the literary activity of role-playing; on the contrary, they’re missing the whole point of the activity. Wikipedia’s style guide discusses the difference between “Real-World Perspective” and “In-Universe Perspective,” and I think the problems with the latter aren’t limited to writing encyclopedia articles: those without real-world perspective are always appropriating, never appreciating.
tomemos, I still haven’t read either of the two main texts that you’re referring to, so perhaps I got the wrong idea—but it sounded like you were confusing ephemerality of event with ephemerality of reference. A classical myth may not have had any more thought or art put into its creation than a contemporary pop song, so there may have been many proto-myths or just plain stories that were an ephemeral as contemporary pop songs. The ones that survived may have survived because they were slightly better, in some artistic fashion, than the rest, or it may have been mostly accidental. Of course they don’t seem ephemeral now (by definition) because they’ve been around for thousands of years.
You write that [Lethem] “is eminently aware of it. One example: two girls who live near Dylan are always singing lines from whatever song is popular at that part of the novel: a device that measures the passage of time by the brief, beautiful lives of radio hits.” But it’s possible to register the passage of time in many ways. Lethem has chosen a method which flatters the contemporary audience, which recognizes each reference and congratulates itself for doing so. But he’s chosen to write an ephemeral work, because that device for measuring the passage of time must decay catastrophically. “O that Shakespeherian Rag” is different; both the “rag” and “Shakespeare” are more or less long-lasting signifiers.
For the second example, I am reminded that Harold Bloom is supposed to think of literary characters as, in some way, real people. It’s possible to do this kind of thing naively, as appropriation, and the context of role-playing-games with its association with adolescence encourages viewing it that way. But almost any kind of self-fashioning involves, to some extent, treating oneself as a character influenced by other characters, or by archetypes. And according to a sort of mystical Gnostic view, we are all characters. I don’t mean that people should psychopathically be unable to distinguish between a character and a real person, but there’s something wrong with the example.
"But it’s possible to register the passage of time in many ways. Lethem has chosen a method which flatters the contemporary audience, which recognizes each reference and congratulates itself for doing so. But he’s chosen to write an ephemeral work, because that device for measuring the passage of time must decay catastrophically.”
Rich, here I’d say: You gotta read the book. Lethem does “register the passage of time in many ways,” both trough Dylan’s own maturation and progress through school and life, and through references to historical events that won’t be easily forgotten (Nixon resigns, Three Mile Island breaks down). Furthermore, let’s not overstate the decay of Lethem’s references. “Tell Me Something Good” hasn’t disappeared off the face of the earth; it regularly appears on compilation CDs and (less regularly) the radio, and it’s pretty identifiable with its era. It’s even thematically linked with the events surrounding its appearance in the novel. It just doesn’t make people sing it out loud in the street like it did thirty years ago.
This is new to me--responding to comments on my blog as a visitor on a different blog. We can move the party over to my place if you like.