Mark

First time I’ve dropped by in a long while - kudos on the Villette project!

I wonder, though, if we might want to begin considering an author’s “historical feelings” when historicizing his/her work.  Folks in the thread above have already mentioned the phenomenon of feeling affinities with the art of a particular generation that is not actually one’s own.  I know I identify at nearly every level with the music of 1976 to 1986 moreso than any other period (from The Modern Lovers’ first LP to, say, the C86 artists, with punk, postpunk, new wave, etc. in the middle). 

I wonder if this can be found in the work of writers.  What would it mean for a novelist today to feel such an affinity for, say, Dickens and Thackeray that what she wrote goes beyond mere pastiche or imitation?  Sure, we’d want to historicize that very affinity: what’s going on in 2009 that moves an artist to feel close to 1840?

Ian Baucom writes about historical influences that come from further back in the past than one’s immediate social context.  The common figure in pomo historical fiction of “the ghosts of history” seems to be one typical way of considering this issue.  Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair are all over this issue, seeing contemporary culture as too often a victim of lingering and unfinished business from a distant past.  Pynchon charts similar dynamics.  A novelist like Wilson Harris sees our entire hemisphere as still acting out scenes from pre-Columbian history and mythology.

I’ve never found a good way of thinking about what might be called multi-dimensional historicism.  I tried to do it in my dissertation by following certain tropes backwards from a contemporary text through different manifestations of the same ideas from past moments, charting, for example, Bharati Mukherjee’s themes of the wilderness back through Susan Howe and his work on Dickinson, back through Lowell’s dramatic version of Hawthorne’s short fiction and late-60s/early-70s American studies, back through W. C. Williams’ ideas about the American grain, back to Hawthorne, back to Rowlandson and Puritan writers, etc. 

It’s not about progression, somehow, with one set of historical conditions displacing another, with one set of literary texts conveniently fitting into the “slot” of a demarcated set of social influences.  I don’t think history (natural, personal, or social) works that way.  I think the past has long hands that tug at us from thousands of years and miles away.  A kind of synchronic, spatial historicism.

Saying that the book gives bad advice is certainly not a straw man, you’re right.  The straw man comes in distortions that Pullum (and SEK, but let’s leave him aside for now) levies against the book in order to praise it.  The part of S&W that people find most useful is the stylistic advice, and so that must be torn down ("mostly harmless”; “limp platitudes"); to do so, he pretends as though the book just makes style pronouncements unsupported by examples. “Be clear” he calls “vapid”; “Do not explain too much” is “tautologous”; “Omit needless words” is “useless.” The reasoning is that everyone knows they should be clear, it’s obvious that explaining “too much” is bad, and that “the students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction.” The problem, as Michael Leddy points out in the post that Matt linked to, is that Strunk and White provide clear illustrating examples of all of these principles, examples which Pullum entirely ignores.  When Pullum sneers that “Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them,” he is actually deceiving uninformed readers about what the book contains.

As a general point, I don’t object to critique of a beloved artifact, even if it doesn’t make me feel very good.  The point at which it gets annoying is when it becomes a fad, as in the New York Times “debate” piece I linked to above, in which five people (including Pullum) take turns attacking or downplaying the value of the book.  The image of people climbing over each other to dismiss a classic most thoroughly, especially when there’s a hint of professional jealousy, is not very dignified.

(By the way, it’s still Pullum, not Pullam.  Bill, do you mind changing it in the post so that we’re all working with the same vocabulary?)

Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That’s because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

I doubt the book causes any harm really--the advice only rarely instructs someone to do something grammatically wrong and mostly errs on the side of making writers too cautious. But any writer likely feel pinioned by S/W probably was never going to be a particularly adventurous writer to start with.

However, it is a manual that offers semantic, syntactic and stylistic advice--I fail to see how attacking that advice as wrong headed is attacking a straw man--grammatical advice is the only man in the book. To attack or praise that advice is the only way to legitimately criticize it.

I’m certainly no musicologist, but I wonder how much sampling has played into the promiscuity of eras/styles. I mean, clearly a band like Interpol or the more recent Crystal Stilts ripping their sound almost wholesale from Joy Division is a quite different thing compared to Kanye structuring his songs significantly around Ray Charles or Curtis Mayfield samples, but I wonder if that sense of permanent accessibility/permanent presence isn’t related to new attitudes about how older music can be repurposed.

But I’m still not convinced that it’s an internet-related development--I mean, it’s always seemed to me that growing up in Manhattan in the 80s or 90s was basically the same thing, in cultural plenitude terms, as growing up with Amazon--that obscurity was sometimes an obstacle, but not a dead end.

This seems right on the money to me, i.e. “Only the young can be wunderkinds, so they must be like me!” Factor in that Klein and Yglesias are themselves wunderkinds, I can see why the affinity would be even stronger.

without it being chalked up to some sort of imperialism or internet-fueled inter-generational appropriation.

I meant “imperialism” lightly in the title—I don’t think the kids are desperately trying to conquer my cultural stuff—but this isn’t something I’m really in a position to know about anymore because I’m old. 

“Oh jeezus, my time here could be really short. I better start doing some of those things I’ve always meant to do.”

Point taken.  Still, I have another fifteen or so years before I catch up to DFW, and yet I didn’t feel that sudden rush of mortality (likely because suicide isn’t something that befalls you) (or maybe because I already had it a few years back with the cancer).

And just to make sure I’m not a total follower, I’m staying ahead of their schedule.

I didn’t mean for this to be a criticism of cliques or clique-ish behavior, but if people were reading it out of an obligation of hip, I’d still get behind it.  Given how little fiction our pundit class reads, this strikes me as an unqualified good thing.

I read in ~98 or 99 but I don’t think it had become an institution by then.

It sort of came out of the womb that way, though.  Somewhere in my files is the mess of a timeline my friends and I scraped together back in ‘96.

I mean, *of course* it’s morbid. But death is real, and part of dealing with that reality is finding ways to be productively morbid. This strikes me as quite a good one, actually

I have another post, half-finished, in which I touch on the suicide angle: it’s not just that this is a work of genius, but it’s a work of genius by a guy who killed himself after a struggle with depression and addiction about people who are struggling with depression and addiction.  I decided to hold off on that angle because a lot of people haven’t read the book yet and I didn’t want to color their reading.

Your hypothesis about the always already available is interesting, but I think there’s a pre-Internet trend for generations to adopt formative works by people who are older than they are.

Absolutely, but doesn’t it seem a little different now?  That is, it’s one thing for there to be a New Wave revival, but another entirely for New Wave to remain in this sort of always accessible, perpetual present, so that at any moment some new band might come along and be New Wave all by their lonesome.

Yeah. I’ve always considered SoCal punk as “my music” even though I was about 8 years old when the scene actually existed. My older brother had an extensive collection and I just sort of absorbed it.

A great many people my age (dead center of “generation X") identified with Douglas Coupland in a vague sort of way even though he was a decade older than we were.

It’s been interesting seeing IJ grow into this huge intimidating icon. I read in ~98 or 99 but I don’t think it had become an institution by then.

It reminds me of Gravity’s Rainbow. I read it when I was 18 and had never heard of either it or Pynchon. If I had been aware of its outsized reputation my whole experience of the book would have been different.

I’ll confess that Infinite Summer is spurring me to read Infinite Jest—but I was totally going to read it before I even heard about Infinite Summer, going so far as to borrow The Girlfriend’s copy.  And just to make sure I’m not a total follower, I’m staying ahead of their schedule.  So… yeah, so there.

Secondly, I’m not sure inter-generational fuzziness is most importantly an internet-related question, especially since the blur is actively pursued from both sides of any generational divide, this having been the case for longer than the (commercial) internet was around. I’m not sure cultural plenitude accounts for my dad continuing to listen to Top 40 long after it stopped playing “his generation’s” music, nor does it explain all the 40-year-old hipsterish folks I see at Arcade Fire shows or whatever.

Also, a 25-year-old reading IJ and calling it “one of my own” might be a little bit of a stretch, but if he has a 30-year-old older brother or sister (or just some slightly older friends), I’m not sure it’s really that strange. In situations like that, I think age can flatten out a little bit--how many 11- or 12-year-olds were hooked on Nirvana because their 17-year-old sibling was listening to it?--without it being chalked up to some sort of imperialism or internet-fueled inter-generational appropriation.

But in regards to the morbidity of Infinite Summer, I’m not entirely certain it’s really that awful a thing to be morbid about. I think a lot of people--because DFW was thought of as being or remaining so young--were hit with a huge feeling of, “Oh jeezus, my time here could be really short. I better start doing some of those things I’ve always meant to do.” And one of the most obvious things in that category was read IJ. I guess that’s opportunistic, but I’m not sure if it’s really a bad or unseemly form of opportunism.