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Thursday, June 05, 2008

We Agree? We Don’t?

Posted by Adam Roberts on 06/05/08 at 09:15 AM

From Michael Chabon’s new collection of essays, Maps and Legends: ‘All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.’

Chabon seems unafraid of sweeping sentences that begin with the word ‘all’. He also claims ‘all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction.’ The lead article in this week’s TLS is a review of Chabon’s book, and also of David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: the great comic-book scare and how it changed America, both of which seem kind-of interesting.

Comments

Purposefully half-wit. Meant to provoke. A heuristic. Sort of like “We Agree? We Don’t?”

A purposefully half-wit heuristic counterpart would be: All novels are original; influence is bane.

It’s a style? Is it not? Does it pretend too much to unwarranted conclusion, in a critical form? Or is it primarily imaginative? Is it not?

All heuristics are half-wit. None are.

We don’t agree? We do?

By Tony Christini on 06/05/08 at 01:03 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I wonder how much the hyperbole of statements like these just serves to cover over the banality of the observation. After all, is he saying anything but that an individual novel, as a work within the novel genre, is influenced by the fact that it is part of a genre filled with previous novels, and that this is a good thing? Whoah! Hold onto your hats, folks!

Though, that said, as a gesture it’s an interesting one. He seems to be trying to place novels that don’t try to re-invent the wheel in a position of centrality, a much more “auteur” style of novel criticism than the way we often treat with each work strictly on its own individual merits. Auteur criticism has its drawbacks of course, but it’s also true that Typee is much more interesting for having been written by that guy who wrote Moby Dick. Just like watching bad Hitchcock is better if you’ve seen good Hitchcock, placing an individual novel within a larger continuum of works makes them all more, not less, interesting.

By on 06/05/08 at 07:58 PM | Permanent link to this comment

There was an article today on Paul Pierce of the Celtics and the way in which he has accepted the burden of measure and reformulated the greatness of past players in his own way rather than trying to overshadow them – not unlike the Poundian maxim to ‘make it new’, where ‘it’ (as Lois Menand recently wrote) is history, the past artifacts of culture. Perhaps also not unlike what Chabon is saying here? An interesting little parallel, I thought.

By Daniel on 06/06/08 at 12:47 PM | Permanent link to this comment

All novels are fan fictions; also, if you examine a brain, you will notice astounding similarities with a computer. Brains have “hardware” and “software”; they have a lot of “things” that in the service of extending this questionable computer metaphor I will put in “quotes.”

Honestly, the anxiety of influence just gets really creepy when it’s presented in inverted form as bliss, and when it pseudo-authorizes a contemporary novelist of distinction to lump himself in with Virgil.

By Joseph Kugelmass on 06/06/08 at 07:11 PM | Permanent link to this comment

‘all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction.’

Spoken like someone who has absolutely no idea what contemporary fan culture is like, nor the origins of the term ‘fan fiction.’ Authors do more damage with shit like this than they realize, legitimizing the pathologies of fan culture.

By waxbanks on 06/07/08 at 02:16 PM | Permanent link to this comment

My claim that Austen’s novels are Mary Sues has been scorned. But how often does a sarcastic daughter of an improvident father get to marry a fine gentleman who loves her for her sarcasm?

By John Emerson on 06/08/08 at 12:08 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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Thursday, June 05, 2008

We Agree? We Don’t?

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