The Shock of the New

"Nick owns the baseball. The Bobby Thomson home run ball. The actual object."
Sims took his time lighting the cigar.
"Nobody owns the ball."
"Somebody has to own it."
"The ball is unaccounted for," Sims said. "It got thrown decades ago. Otherwise we'd know it."
"Simeon, listen before you make pronouncements. First," Glassic said, "I found a dealer on a trip I took back east some years ago. This guy convinced me that the baseball in his possession, the ball he claimed was the Thomson home run, was in fact the authentic ball."

... "Well, I didn't buy the object for the glory and drama attached to it. It's not about Thomson hitting the homer. It's about Branca losing the pitch. It's all about losing."
"Bad luck," Glassic said, spearing a potato on my plate.
"It's about the mystery of bad luck, the mystery of loss. I don't know. I keep saying I don't know and I don't. But it's the only thing in my life that I absolutely had to own."
- Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997)

I read this book because someone on this blog, or some adjoining space, recommended it as a good Don DeLillo novel. (I had been skeptical.) I'm not especially impressed. As a writer, DeLillo has two flaws which jump out most insistently in the 825-page Epic Novel format. For one thing, he constantly resorts to freeze-frame passages full of flowery purple text, which he appears to think are some kind of sign of literary virtuosity. They are rarely so. They sound immature and overdone--but fair enough, that's an aesthetic difference. The more serious problem is that, despite his obvious desire to be open-minded and democratic and Whitmanesque, his less-important characters turn very readily into stereotypes: the hotshot ad exec, the trendy painter, the street-smart graffiti artist. When these stereotypes are negative, it's easier to forgive him; when they are positive, the result is invariably embarrassing. (The closest analogue I can think of is the Zion rave scene in The Matrix Reloaded.)

All of these defects had already occurred to me by the time I was halfway through the book. It was only when I got to the unbearable, awful, cringeworthy last 25 pages that another thing struck me: the '90s are truly over. I'm not blaming the book for being published when it was, of course. But it clearly embodies a particular aesthetic whose time has now recognizably passed. (I think Infinite Jest has aged somewhat better, even despite the gimmicky footnote thing.) What are these last 25 pages? They're a vaguely Gibsonian attempt at writing about "cyberspace," complete with a horribly malformed URL (but without the touching ingenuousness of Neuromancer). It is precisely the sloppiness in the depiction that signals the book's expiration date: the mistake is so vivid and glaring because the Internet is now such a basic, fundamental part of our lives. It's like seeing someone try to make a pop culture reference and get it wrong.

Of course, what complicates the situation is that the '90s aesthetic was all about what things would be like when the Internet (and all its brethren--globalization, the end of history, etc. etc.) will have become a basic, fundamental part of our lives. It's driven by a particular kind of post-Cold War pseudocyberpunk angst that somehow, for no apparent reason, has ceased to be relevant. Not only have these concerns today lost their coherence and their groundedness in a historical moment; it is now the Cold War period itself that seems abnormal, even exotic. (The anticipation of something like that no doubt entered into DeLillo's vision for the novel.)

In a sense, the '90s project was doomed to fail--if, indeed, it did so. By attempting to blend the anticipatory feeling of dread with a kind of prolepsis founded upon their contemporary experiences, these writers (who include the early DFW as well as, for instance, John Barth in this lackluster period of his writing) ensured that they'd never be able to capture the experience of the future. They deal with this problem in different ways; Wallace escapes it in part because he makes it deliberately goofy and off-center. DeLillo is always serious, even when he's trying to be funny, and that makes Underworld ultimately a ridiculous book.

When I was in high school I came to believe that the history of culture had ended in 2001, and in part even in 1995. (The former, of course, coincided with my freshman year.) Sure, there were trends and events and so on, but there'd never be anything like the disruption of human sociability produced by the Internet and cell phones. I still sometimes suspect I was right, even though I know I was wrong. But what I missed was the fact that the feeling of continuity was as much a constitutive kind of difference as the feeling of rupture. The '90s could not make sense of the future because, perhaps, they never really remembered the past.

The Perils of Polyglossia

As for what is demanded of a historiographer, different people say different things about that. Some suppose that nothing more is needed than being well-read and having a firm memory, and with that a coherent frame of mind. Others think that it is impossible for someone who hasn't learned all of philosophy to write histories. But I think that just as the first is too little, so the second is too much; although both cannot be dismissed briefly, because truly a writer must read many books, both foreign and in his own language, and remember what he read. But this is still insufficient, just as a domestic person will collect many needed materials for building a house and keep them in a secure storeroom, so that, when something is required, he can take it and use it; but reason must also be applied to that, so that before starting out a determination can be made about the order of construction and the use of materials in their proper places, and without this the building will be shaky, poor, and unsettled. In the same way, good sense is needed for the writing of history, for which the science of logic is very useful. Also judgment, so that just as a builder can tell fit materials from unfit ones, rotten from healthy, so a writer of history must with assiduity ensure that he does not take legends for truth and fictions for reality, and even more guarding against prejudice, but to know scientific criticism on even the best ancient writer is not unnecessary. Third, just as every building needs decoration, so every tale needs eloquence and coherent assembly, which is taught by the science of rhetoric.
- V. N. Tatishchev, History of Russia, foreword (published 1768)

Tatishchev sure talks a good game, doesn't he? You would think from this that his History would be an eminently readable, logical, erudite, and scientifically-minded work like so many Western projects of the time. It isn't, of course. Immediately after starting out--faced with the notorious and still-debated question of who exactly the Rus' and the Varangians were--he loses himself in the scholarly jungle and never quite gets out again. He adduces authority upon authority, cites counterargument upon counterargument, and by the end we are no better off than we began. (His writing style is so poor that two separate scholars of eighteenth-century Russian intellectual history have misunderstood one of his chapters.) It doesn't help that most of his work is a direct transcription of the original chronicles, annotated at the end with a haphazard and often highly speculative set of remarks. For instance, a one-sentence reference to Prince Vladimir sending out ambassadors to learn about foreign countries gets a page-long encomium on the wonders of geography and exploration, how great it was that Vladimir patronized geographers, and so on.

There are, of course, many different kinds of bad writing, and Tatishchev's certainly has redeeming qualities. Bakhtin would call text truly a dialogic one, if we judge by the number of times the author's voice is lost among the crowd of contradictory past authorities. One chapter is even a direct transcription of Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer's original treatise on the Norman-Varangian issue, which Tatishchev by no means accepts wholeheartedly. Perhaps this "polyglossia" (to use the standard translation of Bakhtin's much less Hellenic многоголосие) is what gives the text its touchingly naive quality--with all his old-fashioned turns of phrase, Tatishchev often resembles a bearded peasant trying hard to be scholarly.

Let's pull back a little. Who was Tatishchev? He was the leading Russian secular intellectual in the first half of the eighteenth century. That isn't saying much; a case could be made that he was the only Russian secular intellectual in the first half of the eighteenth century. (Or at least the first third.) The only serious and lasting center of secular thought in Russia at the time was the Imperial Academy of Sciences, which was entirely dominated by Germans--one of whom eventually dug up the manuscripts of this History and published it. So Tatishchev had always before his eyes Western people, Western scholarship, Western books. (To help him in composing the History, he assembled a collection of one thousand volumes in various European languages, none of which, it turned out, he could read.)

The polyglot approach seems like a natural response to this situation. There was no scholarly idiom, so famously rigid in today's Russian, to support him; he had no native historiographical tradition postdating the chronicles to counterpose to his Western authorities; so he mashed them all together and attempted to refute them point by point. The result, as any reader can see, is a mess. Tatishchev's analytical mindset, although evident and well-presented in a few passages, simply cannot cope with all the material.

But there's a bright side, too. Many of the original chronicles he had used no longer survive, in part as a result of his own research (a large number apparently perished in a fire at his country estate). Sometimes this even leads people to accuse him of making them up. But that hardly seems plausible: he can barely get his own story straight. It is here, though, that polyglossia comes to the rescue. Since Tatishchev refuses, almost always, to drown out his sources, the book lets us hear the voices of textual ghosts, references without a referent. And that's not too bad.

Thinking in Public

I shall mark the anecdotes and the stories that I hear, the instructive or amusing conversations that I am present at, and the various adventures that I may have.

I was observing to my friend Erskine that a plan of this kind was dangerous, as a man might in the openness of his heart say many things and discover many facts that might do him great harm if the journal should fall into the hands of my enemies. Against which there is no perfect security. "Indeed," said he, "I hope there is no danger at all; for I fancy you will not set down your robberies on the highway, or the murders that you commit. As to other things there can be no harm." I laughed heartily at my friend's observation, which was so far true. I shall be upon my guard to mention nothing that can do harm. Truth shall ever be observed, and these things (if there should be any such) that require the gloss of falsehood shall be passed by in silence. At the same time I may relate things under borrowed names with safety that would otherwise do much mischief if particularly known.

In this way I shall preserve many things that would otherwise be lost in oblivion. I shall find daily employment for myself, which will save me from indolence and help to keep off the spleen, and I shall lay up a store of entertainment for my after life ... I hope it will be of use to my worthy friend Johnston, and that while he laments my personal absence, this journal may in some measure supply that defect and make him happy.
- James Boswell, London Journal 1762-1763

What is generally found appealing in Boswell's journal today is its frankness--most notably, of course, with respect to his many amorous liaisons ("I picked up a strong, jolly young damsel, and taking her under the arm I conducted her to Westminster Bridge, and then in armour complete did I engage her upon this noble edifice. The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling below us amused me much."). The story of Louisa is a perfect plot arc that reads, indeed, very true to life. But the frankness is not just sexual. Boswell is there before us, preening in this written mirror, showing all the anxious self-obsession that we ourselves never admit to. He mulls over his conversations of the day before and asks himself if he was clever or perhaps too "free." And here we can all sympathize with him, however reprehensible we might find him at other moments.

While this reading might be an attractive and useful one, it misses a central point: Boswell's journal isn't really a private document. As he says in the very beginning, he plans to send his entries on a regular basis to his friend John Johnston, and shows no compunctions at reading sections aloud to his companions. What we think of as a window into his soul is really a much more complicated kind of document, neither entirely open nor entirely deceptive. In any case, it is a "constructed" work, not an "authentic" one: it is written with literature in mind.(Not to mention that he was often writing entries weeks after the fact, which, as in the case of Louisa, allowed him to construct a nice story with the benefit of hindsight.)

Of course, to apply our own categories of public and private to Boswell's life would be misguided. We simply don't operate within the boundaries he does. His spur-of-the-moment decision to publish his own correspondence with his friend, apparently without much concern for anonymity, would be for us a much more serious matter; a casual publication of that sort would be today be regarded as "oversharing." Even the publication of famous people's letters is today conducted with much pomp and circumstance, while the London reviewers didn't seem surprised--even if they found his "genius" wanting in other ways. Boswell's "private" life in many ways is conducted in public: he is visiting people at almost every hour of the day, and "being denied" has to be resorted to constantly as a means of getting at least a little time alone.

If the text is not a private document, then what is it? Revealingly, at one point Boswell quotes Louisa as approving of Catholicism precisely because of its institution of confession. The Journal serves for him a similar function--thus maintaining a inherent tension between inwardness and disclosure. It is kept with the goal, however poorly realized or articulated, of helping Boswell reflect upon and develop more moral habits. (In this it follows the Puritan spiritual diaries of the early seventeenth century.) In the narrative, of course, this goal is constantly undermined, since at times it seems to be as much a stage for showing off as for moral improvement. But in Boswell's mind the goal of becoming sober, restrained, and, above all, socially-dignified, remains unaltered.

This process of confession, for Boswell, often takes the form of a comparison between the kind of face he would like to present to the world and the face he actually does present. This suggests yet another role for the text: it serves as a kind of glue that binds a series of haphazardly connected events into a story with a central character and a structure. But--to bring it full-circle--the self-fashioning process takes place as much in public as in private. If there is something exhilarating about Boswell's world, it is because everyone around him is playing the same kind of game.

Midwesternism

Half-dead from reading books about the economics of Imperial Russia, I rented this film from the library. (I realize that this means I'm behind the times, since it came out years ago.) The box bills it as some kind of zany-journey-of-self-discovery flick, a genre which is occasionally entertaining but rarely compelling in any serious, pointy-headed way. Fair enough, I thought: better this tapioca than something Tarkovsky-ponderous. And besides, what can be better than an old and creaky-boned Jack Nicholson?

To say that I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement: About Schmidt is a tremendously sensitive and powerful film. (It is true that I may have watched it through a lens of domestic nostalgia.) Characteristically, the self-conscious "comedy" bits are not especially funny and seem rather phoned-in. Where About Schmidt truly excels, however, is in its exploration of a moral universe whose limits are very narrow--the universe in which most of us live and which is almost never touched upon in big-drama Hollywood or arthouse cinema. Schmidt's main antagonist, the waterbed salesman who wants to marry his daughter, is not a bad guy; Schmidt's failure to stop the wedding is neither a moral victory nor a moral defeat, even if might seem that way to him. Even the Tanzanian child Schmidt "adopts," who provides the only glimmer of Great Moral Redemption in the film, is clearly there only as a kind of joke. The quest for a noble purpose is stifled by banality.

This banality, which suffuses everything from the sets to the costumes, is the film's other great strength. I've said for a while that the next great hip retro aesthetic is going to be tacky mall-culture Americana, with all its pseudo-colonial decor and collectible figurines. The film, which is full of the Midwestern version of this aesthetic, has plenty of chances to ridicule it. It never does so explicitly: the viewer is simply offered an opportunity to project his own disdain onto the pastel paint and garish pioneer monuments, and by the end of the film such a projection begins to seem morally unpleasant. The Midwest in About Schmidt has a certain dignity and gravitas that comes through because, not in spite, of its poshlost'.

It is crucial that this is not simply a matter of grassroots simple-folksism. There is nothing in this film like an ideal of rural authenticity that can be contrasted to the superficiality of coastal elites. Midwestern culture here is commercialized and inauthentic through-and-through; the all-singing, all-dancing highway arch commemorating the pioneers is downright grotesque, even if its plaque seems profoundly meaningful. What the film seems to say, however, is that all these abstract considerations of authenticity are ultimately irrelevant. One looks for rootedness in the world, like Schmidt, wherever one may find it.

Boring History

[for the sake of my career, the reader is invited to mentally fill in this space with an appropriate text--or, in case she feels "meta," with the text of the post itself.]

I've spent the last week going to conference panels, where I have tried not to fall asleep, drool, or moan too audibly. I've gotten a lot of doodling done, and even more flipping through the conference program in a rude and visible way. There are, of course, some interesting papers, even if they tend to be the exception rather than the rule. On the whole, however, I have had plenty of fine opportunities to think about boredom in its historical, existential, economic, and cultural aspects. (And, naturally, to conclude that it is a fundamentally subjective phenomenon that has a lot more to do with me than with the presenter.)

A rough typology of boredom has suggested itself to me. There are, I think, three main levels or categories of boring historical papers. The first, and the most unbearable, is when a minor or obvious point is made again and again. Lacking any reason or way to engage with the argument, the listener experiences whatever evidence the presenter might adduce as a flood of undifferentiated words, each of which only drives him deeper into the abyss. This is generally the moment when one is most tempted to fall asleep--but while it is good to resist the impulse, it is vain to pretend that sleep or wakefulness makes any real difference at this moment. Words have lost all meaning anyway.

The second category is when the presenter is wrong, but does not consider any of the obvious possible objections to his claims. In contrast to the first category, the experience of this second is of an active type. As the paper is read, boredom becomes increasingly mixed with frustration, building steadily up to a peak of of idle fury. Sometimes, if you're lucky, the presenter finally deals with the objection, which can either dissipate the feeling entirely or (depending on the quality of the response) heighten it even more. Falling asleep in this situation is unlikely, and the most readily available response is to find some friends or neighbors to complain to. This can be a fun conference pastime all by itself.

The final category might be called a kind of historical nouveau roman. It occurs when the paper is neither egregiously wrong nor obvious nor irrelevant--but lacks any semblance of storytelling. Whether it is a series of numbers, a catalogue of examples, or anything else, it has no vital connecting thread that would make the listener interested (hence the feeling that these kinds of papers just go on and on). All disciplines and fields are vulnerable to this effect, and a paper given in this style rarely leaves behind any mental residue that could be useful later.

Nonetheless, it is this last type which is most valuable from a historical point of view. (In the literary context, it has been used to great effect by, for instance, Beckett.) For when we sit in that audience and listen to the endless sequence of unconnected facts, we really come to feel the futility and emptiness of history, which really becomes "one damn thing after another." This is not a healthy feeling to have all the time, but it is important to maintain it on the edges of our historical thinking. We assume all too readily that everything is connected, narrative, explicable--and a good bath in that kind of boredom reminds us that there are other possibilities.

The Devotee

Another observation of his, I think it very necessary to mention: it was a positive assertion, that there were straits and islands as far as we could see; and that to the south-east there was "A GREAT SALT WATER," with many entrances to it. I repeatedly asked the question, and could not be mistaken in the answer; and I would most willingly have stayed on the coast alone, to explore these unknown parts from tribe to tribe, until I had lost myself, or found my way to Europe through some of these cranny passages. I am aware, that I was thought a madman for it; but this madness, this enthusiastic confidence, would, I am certain, have assisted my success; nor would I have left unexplored a river of which we had such confirmed accounts, without good reason for it; for I never met with any men that would refuse assistance to one individual, who, without the means of being their enemy, was at all times in their power. Over and above all this, I declare, that I have complete confidence in a Supreme Being, who governs every thought, and inspires men of expression to secure the devotee in exploring his wisdom.

I hope that my rhapsodies will not offend my readers: they are notes penned at the instant when my feelings were most acute, and with a view of making them known to the public on a future day.
- Martin Sauer, An Account of a Geographical and Astronomical Expedition to the Northern Parts of Russia ... In the Years 1785, &c, to 1794 (1802)

One of a whole flourishing subgenre (eighteenth-century Siberian scientific travel narratives) of an even larger genre (Russian travel narratives), Martin Sauer's report on the Joseph Billings expedition to the North Pacific is--believe it or not--a fascinating document. (This episode describes a conversation with an old native man near Prince William Sound.) It is littered with moments of uncertainty like the one above, where we can't quite properly draw the line between original notes and later authorial interpolations. In one characteristic section, the author finds himself in an especially desolate area and exclaims: "Let the advocates for the rights of man come here to enjoy them; for this is the land of liberty and equality! Nor will the Directory of the Great Nation, with all their great generals, ever possess it in perfection until they have reduced their country to the independent state of this part of the globe." The scene takes place in 1787--and yet the remark, being a sarcastic reference to the French Revolution and to the Directory in particular, must have been written around 1797-1799. No shift in tone marks the shift in time; nor do we ever encounter a reference to the expedition learning about the Revolution in the first place.

This ambiguity is complemented by several others. On the one hand, the author is a classic rational eighteenth-century intellectual, diligently noting down geographical coordinates and ethnographic details; on the other, he is seized by wild yearnings to rush off into the ice like Frankenstein chasing his creature. On the one hand, he is saturated with the commercial, industrial spirit of his contemporary Britain ("industrious" is his favorite word); on the other, he is frequently fascinated--and almost never repulsed--by the culture of the local natives. (He tries to resolve this somewhat by occasionally describing them as virtuous proto-capitalists.) On the one hand, he seems to subscribe to all the traditional eighteenth-century stereotypes about Russian people: they've been rendered servile by despotism, they're mercenary, etc. On the other, most of the Russians he actually meets end up being nice and hospitable people.

Of course, culture isn't standing still either. The gap in time imposes another ambiguity, which is external, not internal, to the text. Here the temporal leap between the composition of the notes in the 1780s and their reassembly in (presumably) the late 1790s becomes very important--for this is the time of the first true flowering and popularization of romantic, Herderian ideas: national and local particularism, folkishness versus classicism, vague anti-rationalism (but not, significantly, in their Rousseauvian form). And English Romanticism, too, is coming out of its shell. In that intellectual climate, the "rhapsodies" (which are mercifully rare in the text) become much more comprehensible, and the native ethnology simply another reflection of Herderism. How easily could a set of notes written on a decade-long vacation from European culture be transformed into an up-to-date representation of that culture?

We may never know, unless we have access to Sauer's originals--and that possibility alone should be enough to head off any pseudo-poststructuralist assertions of inherent undecidability. The chance remains, however, that what the text presents as the most immediate and impulsive writerly ejaculations are actually all products of a later, culturally au courant, reinterpretation of the notes. In that case, what we have are the outlines of a codified literary genre presented as bare, boring, nonfictional scientific reporting.

But even if we don't have that, the text is still interesting: it chronicles the development of a specific personality of exploration. In the beginning, Sauer announces that he doesn't know anything about science, but he tries to "do science" anyway; by the end, he is comfortable enough on the frontier that the protective screen of numbers and barometer readings that separates him from Siberia has given way to a subtle and well-differentiated ethnographic imagination. Bildungsroman or autobiography? Maybe it doesn't even matter.