Patriarchy and Pathology

Last night at dinner I asked Ira how one might productively analyze the Joseph Fritzl case in terms of systemic, rather than subjective, violence. (Yes, we do have dinner conversations like this. Whaddya expect? We're both PhDs in literature.) Ira's response: begin by looking at the way the Austrian State's patriarchal biases effectively enabled Fritzl to commit his crimes. The State, for instance, repeatedly ignored his daughter's attempts to run away from home, even though her father had a record as a sex offender. Ira's hypothesis is corroborated by "Joseph Fritzl's fictive forebears," a TLS essay, the gist of which is this: Symptomological analyses of Austrian literature, including Freud's case studies, suggest a systemic sociocultural tendency to indulge abusive patriarchs while disregarding patriarchy's victims, primarily women and children.

Ralph Ellison's Endless Revisions

Ralph Ellison's failure to publish a finished follow-up novel to Invisible Man during his lifetime has baffled critics and scholars of American literature. While a posthumous text, larger than Juneteenth, is imminent, the scholars who edited Ellison's volumes of writing into the forthcoming book to be published by the Modern Library suggest that Ellison's embrace of word-processing technology led Ellison to revise, repeatedly, already well-crafted sentences. Anyone fascinated as I am about how how technologies, particular the digital computer, alter the way we think and write will want to read The Invisible Manuscript, which contains something of a cautionary tale about writing with word-processing software: Computers make it easier to rework your writing, yes. But avoid the temptation to revise pepetually. Writers, particularly those with perfectionist tendencies, can get lost in syntactic detail and lose track of the larger project.

Rushdie to Be Writer in Residence at Emory

Salman Rushdie is joining the faculty at Emory University, where I earned my M.A. in English. Insofar as Rushdie will be teaching mini-seminars to Emory grad students, I'll admit to having twinges of regret at deciding to leave there so many years ago. But while UIC might lack some of the cultural capital and certainly a lot of plain ol' capital that Emory possesses (it's known around Hotlanta as Co' Cola Campus), graduate studies here have, by and large, been more to my liking for a variety of reasons, which I'll keep to myself as a matter of professional pragmatics.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Kundera on his novel:

This story is not allegory. But my book is a polyphony in which various stories mutually explain, illumine, complement each other. The basic event of the book is the story of totalitarianism, which deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children. All totalitarianisms do this. And perhaps our entire technical age does this, with its cult of the future, its cult of youth and childhood, its indifference to the past and mistrust of thought. In the midst of a relentlessly juvenile society, an adult equipped with memory and irony feels like Tamina on the isle of children.

Much to consider here, but what grabbed my attention was the analogy Kundera makes between totalitarianism and postmodern technocratic society. He sees the two forces as similar in that they work to infantilize the population by denying people a sense of history. Memory and irony are presented as two potential counterforces. I may want to bring Kundera's views - and the literary aesthetic that they imply - to bear on the American postmodernists about whom I'm writing.

First question: How durable is the link Kundera makes between totalitarianism and technocracy? At what point does the comparison break down and why?

Second question: How do Kundera's remarks about totalitarianism, made, I believe, in the mid 1980s and based on his first-hand experience of living under Soviet rule, apply to the world today: a neoliberal world order of global networks in which the U.S. is said to be the sole superpower?

Public Works

This review is supposed to be under two pages, double spaced. Obviously it needs some cutting. But where?

Christopher Grimes, Public Works. Normal, IL: FC2, 2006. 200 pp. $15.95, paper.

Our most base desire, generally speaking, is to reduce and reduce matter into quantifiable nothingness, the last digit of pi that closes the circle for instance. Reduction to our ilk is an animal’s instinct for blood. Words, pictures, sculptures, buildings and nebula are like rabbit droppings on a field of snow from which we strive to infer the meal who produced them.

The Nobel Candidate in physics who makes this observation may be right, but her interpretation-as-scatology analogy does nothing to alleviate my anxieties about writing an overly reductive review of Christopher Grimes' debut short-fiction collection. Bottom line: this is some good shit. Grimes' short fictions are always clever and often profound, and aficionados of the masters of postmodern minimalism (Kafka, Calvino, Borges, Beckett, Barthelme) and maximalism (Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, Coover, Wallace) must read Public Works. Grimes successfully fuses the maximalists' art of expansion - their will-to-master excessive amounts of information - with the minimalist's art of retraction - their sensitivity to the material signifier's tendency to short-circuit and generate surreal interference patterns.

If the great challenge facing contemporary writers is to make our globally networked systems of communication and exchange more intelligible, a project that by no means calls for a mimetic aesthetic, then Christopher Grimes promises to be an exemplary postmodernist. Although the most ambitious and successful postmodern fiction in recent years has been prodigious meganovels like Infinite Jest, Mason & Dixon, and Underworld, Grimes' fiction demonstrates that hundreds or even thousands of pages aren't required to address global complexity. Grimes brings a systems sensibility to short fiction, writing about potentially massive topics under extreme constraints. The short fictions range from about six to eighteen pages, the very short fictions from one to four pages, and even the novella is under forty pages, including extensive footnotes from Minot, North Dakota's Code of Ordinances. Rather than trying to give a gloss on a number of these stories (which would prove difficult since the tales tend to morph unexpectedly), let me comment on the way three exemplary fictions offer a vision of systemic interconnectedness that challenges the individualist ideology that dominates most political and fiction representations.

The narratees of the opening fiction, "Customs in a Developing Country: A Prefatory Story," are foreign visitors, tourists and businesspeople, who, whilst having their bags inspected by an alternately brusque and gregarious customs officer prone to puzzling digressions, receive a lecture on acculturation. The lecture is the story, and its genius resides in the way it interpellates readers as foreigners, a move that aligns Grimes with an authority figure whom we—sophisticated readers and free subjects vigilant about the need to ‘question authority’—will initially tend to regard ironically. After all, from the predominant neoliberal perspective—devoted to the efficacy of private enterprise and free-market’ initiatives, derisive of government (public works) programs, etc.—the customs officer appears as a somewhat anachronistic authority figure: a petty civil servant or a pretentious bureaucrat from a 'backwards' country.

Precisely because he is a petty authority not to be taken seriously, the customs officer functions as, if not exactly an author surrogate, than certainly a viable analogue for an ‘experimental’ literary writer (remember Melville) who, in an age of corporate-media conglomerates, cannot expect to be published by a commercial press and must turn to an independent press dependent upon funding: so, these fictions are literally public works. But Grimes makes it difficult to sustain our sense of ironic distance and superiority towards the customs officer. He does, after all, seem to be looking out for our best interest. And despite his severe tone and an exaggerated sense of self-importance, he provides some prudent and pragmatic travel tips designed to keep our “most private possessions” especially our (sense of) identity, safe and secure. Along with cautionary anecdotes about identity theft, polite conversation, and sexual mores, the customs officer advises us on how not to “insult the natives” as Zsa Zsa Gabor (a quintessential postmodern celebrity, a “hopelessly artificial creature,” more famous for her fame—her catchphrases, her social connections, etc.—than her talent) did during her visits by displaying a palpable “lack of interest” to her hosts and committing “countless...social blunders” whenever she spoke.

Of course, Grimes has set a trap for readers. Through the customs officer, whose lecture espouses, however obliquely, values typically regarded as progressive—the benefits of multiculturalist tolerance, the grotesqueness of celebrity culture, the necessity of remaining attentive to cross-cultural semiotic and linguistic differences, etc.—Grimes suggests that these values have become banal platitudes providing ideological cover for more systemic political and economic exploitation. His lecture repeats truisms that have become multiculturalist cliches: “embrace the common sense that a people foreign to you will live in a manner that is foreign to your sensibilities. You are somewhere new. Perhaps try to appreciate its novelty” (18). But while it’s easy to “appreciate” superficial cultural differences (blue toilet paper) or minor inconveniences (low water pressure) can we truly appreciate a culture comprised of “proud, haughty people” (18) where “prisons are used prophylactically” (17).

Advocates of Criminal Year legislation support a mandatory year of incarceration for the “young and simple-minded” (17) on the grounds that the experience will prepare the prisoners for the future by giving them a taste of reality, a reality understood to be difficult and unfair. In what these conservative advocates imagine as sort of pre-emptive strike on utopian fantasies of social change, only the prisoners who bribe the warden can expect to receive any kindness while in prison. This system of bribery will condition the prisoners to “feel what it’s like to have the infinite possibility of their dreams reduced to the singularly ugly and hard business of living” (17). Suddenly we realize that we’ve in a fascist regime, and when the officer, cast in the role of a contemporary Virgil guiding us into postmodern purgatory, remarks, “like everyone else who passes through here, there was no way to know where her [Zsa Zsa Gabors'] visit was going to lead. It’s ironic, a vicious, vicious irony that we are made to labor under. You will please keep this in mind as you strike out now amongst us,” his words sound doubly ominous. First, when we recognize the implicit threat; then when we realize that this “developing country” feels uncannily like our own homeland. A vicious irony indeed.

“The Public Sentence” is an eight-page, single-sentence story concerning a more benign civil servant, a young Doctor, the Assistant Regulator of Flowage for Bismarck, ND’s Public Works, who is struggling to respond to a bizarre environmental accident—a sewage spill and a “burgeoning turtle population” (24) that threaten the Missouri River ecosystem—for which he is partly to blame. Just how blameworthy is the multi-million-dollar question raised by this comic tale about 'agency panic' and the tragic tendency we humans, as egocentric individuals,, have for misunderstanding and misrepresenting systemic complexity. While a simple mechanical error, the Doctor’s failure to “close the outflow seals of the sedimentation lagoon” (25) directly led to the “raw sewage overwhelming the tertiary system,” assigning responsibility for the subsequent problems proves infinitely more difficult. Was the “bad advice given... by the Indian Municipal Government in Delhi,” which recommended releasing a species of turtles that “subsists on decaying matter” into the river, the “true and primary source” of the eco-catastrophe? Perhaps. But why didn’t the Emergency Advisory Committee foresee that the Midwestern Americans, unlike the Dehlians, wouldn’t keep the turtle population in check by eating them? Now, the swarms of turtles present a “collective shock to our senses matched only by how shockingly quick we are to lay blame when, truly, no one contributing factor can be blamed” (24).

I can't begin to recount the number of mini-narratives, from the Doctor's courtship and marriage of an Argentinean musician to turtle-eradication plans designed serve as “cultural events,” Grimes packs into this digressive tale. I can, however, cite for your reading pleasure the following sentence fragment which, in the growing annals of American Literature about waste and excretory systems may rank up there with Slothrop's mythical descent into the sewer in Gravity's Rainbowand the various riffs and ruminations about shit> and civilization that course through Underworld:

...each one of us now, who haven’t the vaguest notion of how our public waste is directed through a system second in complexity only to that one posteriorly balanced above it, who have, until this moment, been perched blind as bats on the great public commode without once having occasion to think past our ankles, down the wrought iron throat that connects us to the municipal digestive system, the intestines of tunnels, conduits and channels, the brick-lined bowels that release into the newly vulcanized slag tanks churning the corporate volume flowing from our homes and businesses for, individually, we are more concerned with by whom the sound of the soft scrape of toilet paper is being heard than we are with the workings of the sophisticated mechanism to which we are just then affixed...

The final story I want to discuss features a narrator who, speaking colloquially, we might say is 'full of shit.' Narrated by a self-absorbed psychotherapist perturbed by her inability to cure a client and friend exhibiting acute “automobile anxiety,” “Moving Vehicles” lampoons the presumptuousness of narrative therapy, which vulgarizes deconstructive and psychoanalytic theories concerning the way our experience of subjectivity is thoroughly mediated through language and symbols by reducing them into banal self-help slogans: the ‘healing power of narrative,’ ‘we are the stories we narrate to ourselves,’ etc.

The story begins with the therapist describing how the nomadic Kirghiz tribespeople annually cross the “wide and turbulent” Irtish River with their flocks of caribou in reach winter grazing lands. The “old and infirm” unable to make the dangerous crossing are left behind with enough provisions for a few days, but only after a ritual in which the Kirghizes express their love and say their final goodbyes. Although this poignant anecdote would seem to illustrate the sacrifices required for a pre-modern community to sustain itself, our narrator finds it a “perfectly instructive one for inclusion in the therapeutic environment,” where it serves to accommodate clients to the “ambiguous future” that characterizes neoliberal 'risk societies.' She unironically repeats the Kirghizes' story to her clients as a parable about the individual's need to make lifestyle choices. It serves, for example, “to illustrate how they must each say goodbye to things in their individual pasts—former lovers, unreasonable expectations of each other—in order to move to the other side of the river” and “to suggest how they had the option to leave their relationship behind…so they could continue on as healthy individuals."

Unfortunately, we learn, our narrator hadn’t figured out how to apply the story to her friend’s Pauline’s phobia, and her musings on this “intolerable” situation eventually leads to a startling revelation: Pauline was hit by a car and will probably die. Up to this point we’ve enjoyed laughing at the therapist’s ridiculous psychobabble psychobabble, but now we see how her native commitment to of a world shaped entirely by individual acts of renarrativization and her crudely materialist view of language (which she likens at one point to kitty litter covering up, you guessed it...) render her oblivious to the real suffering and death of other. So the story closes with the therapist’s imaginary (and strangely racialized) account of Pauline’s accident, which ends abruptly as she is utterly unable to imagine the moment when Pauline presumably went unconscious. This failure of imagination, it seems, parallels the therapist's constant failure to reflect upon the ethics of her multicultural appropriations and her utilitarian approach to narrative. At the risk of sounding overly reductive, I want to suggest that Grimes' collection provides a public service by presenting readers the opportunity for serious and fun reflections on our postmodern, or neoliberal, condition.




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Not happy with the ending, and I need to fix all the typographical errors that resulted when I cut and pasted from Word to the blog, but it's getting late and I've been before a monitor for most of the past 14 hours. Ugggh.

Beckettian Elements in Pinter's Nobel Lecture

Michael Billington's report on Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture begins by noting the Beckettian aspects of Pinter's powerful performance, particularly the way Pinter appeared to literally embody the deteriorating subject found in so many of Beckett's texts. The figure of Pinter, confined to a wheelchair, legs draped with a blanket, juxtaposed with an image of himself as a younger, healthier man, reminded Billington of Hamm from Beckett's Endgame.

As Ira and I watched pre-recorded lecture (broadcast in prime time on Swedish television), we remarked on the Beckettian aura surrounding the entire event as well. We were thinking primarily of Pinter's dramatic pauses and his effective use of silence and ironic understatement to punctuate a gripping speech that made its polemical points in a measured manner. But Billington is right, I think, to find physical parallels with Beckett. The lecture, for instance, was filmed in a hospital where Pinter has been staying due to leg pains, which remind one of the suffering endured by the protagonists of Molloy. This is not, of course, to suggest that Pinter's mind has suffered the sort of deterioration that afflicts Moran and Molloy.

I wish Pinter's Nobel lecture had taken place a week earlier so I could have screened it for students in my class, who had to write their final papers on Beckettian elements in one of the postmodern novels we read.

The Alleged Failings of Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown

I've been following the reviews for Salman Rushdie's new novel, Shalimar the Clown and the bulk of them appear to be negative. Is that because it is simply mediocre work of literature, or is Rushdie being evaluated according to inflated standards that were established by the tremendous critical claim his early works, e.g., Midnight's Children received? Writing in The Nation, Lee Siegel notes that recent Rushdie reviews have presented a common narrative about Rushdie's artistic trajectory: the fall from an artistic state of grace. Siegel then proceeds to argue that the critcial consensus is correct: Rushdie has lost his subtle artistic touch and "seems to be writing novels that insisently annoate and reiterate what he believes to be a priori truths about life." And the main a priori truth that Rushdie reiterates concerns connectedness, the extent to which our lives are intertwined with others.

Unfortunately, Siegel suggests, Shalimar the Clown fails to present us with believeable characters and as a consequence never achieves the level of intimacy necessary to illuminate Rushdie's vision of the world's connectedness.

Siegel's damning judgments include the following:

"Alas, there is not a single real, intimate moment between characters in this book; not a single scene or situation unfolding according to its inner laws, away from the disheveling hurry of the novel's judgments and opinions; and barely any dialogue."

"Rushdie hastily comments on his characters and their milieus from the outside; he never gives them an inner life out of which they can act and speak for themselves."

"Max, for example, seems less a character than somebody's ego-ideal: i.e., the construction of a flawless self-image in response to feelings of humiliation and shame."

"But Rushdie himself apparently doesn't believe that we're all connected, because he portrays some of the people in this novel's world as if they lived on an alien planet."

"But so confused is this book beyond its complacent clarities, beyond its easy, all-embracing, platitudinous politics that its story finally undermines its theme. (Even the name "Noman," seemingly heavy with all kinds of significance, drifts through this mess of a novel into a portentous meaninglessness.) By attributing, as Rushdie does, the central violence in Shalimar to jealousy rather than to ideology, he is unwittingly affirming that people's stories are not alike; that whereas ideology funnels diverse thoughts and feelings into a single, pinpoint intensity, experience--for example, the experience of jealousy--shapes each person in a different way. Only tyrants delude themselves into seeing people and places as one undifferentiated mass, to be manipulated at will. Only tyrants, that is, and writers whose egos have been scarred and then inflated by the fury of tyrants."

The last remark, actually the final paragraph of the essay, interests me most, because the underlying claim presented here - that Rushdie presents us with a post-ideological vision in which people's differing beliefs about what's true or false are effectively rendered irrelevent - is one that Walter Benn Michaels makes against many 'postmodern' texts, both fictional and nonfictional.

The artistic challenge facing today's novelists, it would seem, is to write narratives that are genuinely dialogic, i.e., that present us with characters who [Internet connection acting funky; will save & follow this up later]

Recombinant Culture and Literary Remixes

In a short essay for Wired magazine, William Gibson characterizes our current historical moment as "a peculiar junction, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist," although the latter is rapidly becoming the cultural dominant. Gibson's observation and his corresponding claim that our new recombinant technologies are redefining what it means to be human are, of course, familar assertions in postmodern and media studies.

I'm archiving this piece for future use in the classroom because it concisely introduces several ideas, not all of which I agree with entirely, in no-bullshit prose: (1) Burroughs' innovative cut-up method differs from plagiarism (2) from the perspective of a recombinant artist "[m]eaning...seemed a matter of adjacent data," and (3) the notion of copyright and intellectual property that developed in the 20th-century has become obsolete, a burden to new creativity.

Thanks largely to arguments presented by Walter Benn Michaels, I've come to believe that idea #2 is wrong because it confuses intentional meaning with signifying effects (see his The Shape of the Signifier). And as Burroughs' writing about his use of the cut-up method makes clear, the juxtapositioning and arranging different texts (or data) is an intentional act that is not purely random.

Tropes and Topoi in Postmodern American Fiction (and Theory)

Dangerous Communication.
The Book of Daniel. Doctorow, E.L. (1971):
"Susan had communicated with me; just that; at if now in our lives only extreme and dangerous communication was possible, nevertheless the signal had been sent, discharged even, from the spasm of soul that was required--and that was the sense of summons I felt sneaking up over the afternoon like a blanket of burned space around my ears. And all my life I have been trying to escape from my relatives and I have been intricate in my run, but one way or another they are what you come upon around the corner, and the Lord God who is so frantic for recognition says you have to ask how they are and would they like something cool to drink, and what is it you can do for them this time" (30).

This passage concerns the imperative to act that Daniel Isaacson Lewin feels in the aftermath of his sister's suicide attempt. Indeed, Susan's suicide attempt is precisely the "dangerous communication" being alluded to in this passage. Daniel has just come upon the package of "Gillette Super Stainless blades" (29) in Susan's Volvo. This tableau triggers a kind of perverse epiphany for Daniel, prompting him to recognition of sorts. At this moment, "Daniel got the picture," that is, he experiences a sense "of being summoned." Doctorow leaves it up to his readers to figure out what exactly this summoning entails and whether or not the breakthrough or epiphany that Daniel experiences is productive. I would argue that the fact that moments later Daniel will be tormenting his wife in the Volvo, possibly branding her ass, suggests that we should be skeptical of the entire premise of "dangerous communication," even though the text we are reading, Daniel's book, is being presented as something of an outgrowth of Daniel's sense that he must communicate.

The way I prefer to read this passage is to regard it as a scene of political interpellation. Daniel is hailed by Susan to acknowledge his connectedness to the relatives from whom he has "been trying to escape" (30). What makes the interpellation political is that Daniel's parents are the Isaacsons, internationally infamous Communists who were executed as atomic spies. At this moment in the novel, Daniel realizes that he cannot deny or run from his parent's political legacy, which others will always associate him with. What Daniel must confront is the fact that because he is 'always already' identified with the Isaacsons, he must choose how he will position himself in relation to their political beliefs. This confrontation is traumatic and both Susan and Daniel respond to it with violence. Susan attempts suicide and Daniel torments Phyllis, his wife. This is all to suggest, I think, that "dangerous communication" is a shorthand way of equating violence with the transmission of meaning, or, more generally, of equating force with understanding (an equation common to postmodern fiction and theory). Ultimately, I think Doctorow would have us recognize the falsity of the novel's "vicious eroticism," that is, the sadistic sex scenes in which Daniel attempts to teach Phyllis by testing her bodily limits are intended to demonstrate the error in construing learning as the transmission of experience. (See also: fantasy of transmitted experience).

Dissemination, communication as.
The Book of Daniel. Doctorow, E.L. (1971):
“Susan had communicated with me; just that; and if now in our lives only extreme and dangerous communication was possible, nevertheless the signal had been sent, discharged even, from the spasm of the soul that was required—and that was the sense of summons I felt sneaking up over the afternoon like a blanket of burned space around my ears” (30, italics mine).

This passage is one of the most important in the entire novel as it (1) establishes a link between the text’s vicious eroticism and what I take to be a typically postmodern of communication as a material act of (bodily) transmission and (2) imagines this communicative act to be foundational to a character’s sense of self-identity. The point of Daniel’s epiphany in the parking lot is not simply that he recognizes Susan’s suicide attempt to be a specific type of communication (extreme and dangerous) but also that now this is the only possible mode of communication available to the Isaacson children. By italicizing some of the peculiar words Daniel uses to describe Susan’s suicide, I’ve tried to foreground the abject, erotic and material manner in which imagines communication as dissemination. Daniel does not speak here of, say, what Susan might have meant by her suicide or the beliefs that could have contributed to her decision to take her own life. Instead, of the message, Daniel focuses on the signal, which he figures using a blatanly sexual image—it is a load of semen being ejaculated from a spasming body. (See also: dangerous communication).

End of History (or post-historicism)
Revolution at the Gates. Zizek, Slavoj.
"...the First World and the Third World can no longer be simply opposed as distinct political unities: they are developing more and more within each political unity (state, city)? So when, a decade ago, Francis Fukuyama launched his pseudo-Hegelian thesis on the 'end of history', he was right, although not in the way he thought: in so far as the proper opposite of history is nature, the 'end of history' means that the social process itself is more and more 'naturalized', experienced as a new form of 'fate', as a blind uncontrollable force" (Zizek, Revolution at the Gates).

Vineland. Pynchon, Thomas. (1990):
Frenesi and Flash living in the witness protection program in Vineland: “They had both been content to leave it that way, to go along in a government-defined history without consequences, never imagining it could end, turn out to be only another Reaganite dream on the cheap, some snoozy fantasy about kindly character actors in FBI suits staked out all night long watching over every poor scraggly sheep in the herd it was their job to run, the destined losers whose only redemption would have to come through their usefulness to the State law-enforcement apparatus, which was calling itself “America,” although somebody must have known better” (Vineland 354).

Rossett, Rasmussen & Rettberg Celebrate the ELO

Eric Rasmussen, Barney Rossett, Scott Rettberg
Originally uploaded by erasmus.

A great photo from my days with the Electronic Literature Organization, back when the ELO was in an industrial building in the Ravenswood neighborhood on Chicago's North Side. I've gotta admit that when I walk west on Montrose, past the old ELO offices, I think fondly of the many hours that Scott and I clocked in there.

Meeting Barney Rossett--the founder of Grove Press, publisher of the Evergreen Review, and the man responsible for publishing Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and other modern literary greats in the USA--was definitely the highlight of my time working for the ELO. It was inspiring to meet a literary legend like Barney in person and to get words of encouragement about our project from him.

On the night that this photo was taken, I really lucked out. John Vincler, who was doing an internship with the ELO, and I got to share a table with Barney, so we spent the evening hearing his stories, about everything from serving in the Korean War to his exchanges with Beckett to the bombing of the Evergreen Review offices by anti-Castro Cubans, who were upset that the Evergreen Review ran a piece by Che Guevara.

Later that week, we were invited to Barney's loft, which was lined with bound correspondences with all the great writers with whom he'd published. Barney even showed us his FBI files, which he'd obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

Tips on Teaching Lolita

The following remarks were originally posted on Scott Rettberg's blog in response to comments he made about teaching Lolita this semester. Scott's reflections were prompted, in part, by his reading of Mark Edmunson's essay "All Entertainment, All the Time."

Scott,

I taught Lolita last spring and experienced the same difficulty you describe: getting the students to get beyond their impulse to condemn Humbert Humbert's reprehensible behavior and to reflect upon Nabokov's artistry.

Here’s what I found worked well to overcome this obstacle.

1. Read the annotated edition. We read The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel Jr. Appel's introductory essay and his useful annotations cue students in to things such as Nabokov's intricate wordplay. This edition costs a bit more, but is worth every penny.

2. Beware the Morality Fallacy. Explaining why reading literature for a moral lesson is lame. Every semester, I typically give a lecture in which I explain what I like to call the 'morality fallacy,' which is based on the premise that art and literature differ from a sermon and that it is a critical error to evaluate art or literature as though they were merely models for right, proper or 'politically correct behavior.

3. Explain your affective reaction. I asked students to reflect carefully upon their feelings toward Humbert. In which passages did they find him most reprehensible, and where did they find themselves feeling some pity for him? After pinpointing some of these passages, including, of course, the account of the first seduction, we discussed how the narrative strategies Nabokov deployed via his unreliable, pompous, but nonetheless rhetorically savvy narrator, encouraged particular emotional or affective responses.

4. Read smart literary criticism. We read several essays from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook, edited by Ellen Pifer that do a great job of addressing issues such as (1) how the novel can be read as a romance in a parodic mode ("Parody and Authenticity in Lolita) (2) why Humbert is only partially successful in his rhetorical manipulations ("The Art of Persuasion in Lolita") and (3) how Humbert's attempts at self-exoneration lead him to denigrate America ("The Americanization of Humbert Humbert").

5. Screen both versions of the film. We watched both Stanley Kubrick's and Adrian Lyne's film versions of Lolita and discussed how the two movies approached the novel differently, particularly in the extent and manner in which each film leads us to identify with Humbert. I argued that Kubrick treated the book as a black comedy and emphasized the outrageous humor in the novel, whereas Lyne emphasized the more melodramatic aspects of the narrative. The result, as I saw it, was that Lyne's Humbert, played by Jeremy Irons, seemed more authentic and elicited more pathos from viewers, due in part to his awkwardness, whereas Kubrick's Humbert, played by James Mason, emphasized the cultivated aloof, somewhat arrogant European. I highly recommend screening both versions, in part because doing so will demonstrate how time constraints and the need for a certain cinematographic consistency require filmmakers to adhere more strictly to one genre than novelists, who are more free to vary the 'tone' of their work.

6. Discuss Lolita as a popular culture phenomenon. We also read Michael Wood's essay "Revisiting Lolita (also in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook) which was written as a response to the 1997 media controversy surrounding Adrian Lyne’s film. Wood addresses important issues including how filmic constraints are both limiting and enabling when remediating a work of fiction into a film and how the term "Lolita" has entered our vocabulary and why the colloquial use of the term signifies something vastly different from Humbert and Nabokov's use of the term.

7. Let the master have his say. Finally, before beginning the novel, I familiarized students with some of Nabokov’s views on aesthetics and literature.

• “I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere.”

• “Now if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.”

• “Let me suggest that the very term ‘everyday reality’ is utterly static since it presupposes a situation that is permanently observable, essentially objective, and universally known.”

I look forward to hearing or reading more about your students’ responses to Lolita. Good luck!

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

I'm taking the liberty of posting the following essay All Entertainment All the Time by Mark Edmunson, which pinpoints many of the challenges facing professors in the contemporary university, particularly professors who teach in the humanities.

The following essay is excerpted from Why Read? by Mark Edmunson, which was published in September by Bloomsbury.

I can date my sense that something was going badly wrong in my own teaching to a particular event. It took place on evaluation day in a class I was giving on the works of Sigmund Freud. The class met twice a week, late in the afternoon, and the students, about fifty undergraduates, tended to drag in and slump into their chairs looking slightly disconsolate, waiting for a jump start. To get the discussion moving, I often provided a joke, an anecdote, an amusing query. When you were a child, I had asked a few weeks before, were your Halloween costumes id costumes, superego costumes, or ego costumes? Were you monsters—creatures from the black lagoon, vampires and werewolves? Were you Wonder Women and Supermen? Or were you something in between? It often took this sort of thing to raise them from the habitual torpor.

But today, evaluation day, they were full of life. As I passed out the assessment forms, a buzz rose up in the room. Today they were writing their course evaluations; their evaluations of Freud, their evaluations of me. They were pitched into high gear. As I hurried from the room, I looked over my shoulder to see them scribbling away like the devil’s auditors. They were writing furiously, even the ones who struggled to squeeze out their papers and journal entries word by word.

But why was I distressed, bolting out the door of my classroom, where I usually held easy sway? Chances were that the evaluations would be much like what they had been in the past: They’d be just fine. And in fact, they were. I was commended for being “interesting,” and complimented for my relaxed and tolerant ways; my sense of humor and capacity to connect the material we were studying with contemporary culture came in for praise.

In many ways, I was grateful for the evaluations, as I always had been, just as I’m grateful for the chance to teach in an excellent university surrounded everywhere with very bright people. But as I ran from that classroom, full of anxious intimations, and then later as I sat to read the reports, I began to feel that there was something wrong. There was an undercurrent to the whole process I didn’t like. I was disturbed by the evaluation forms themselves with their number ratings (“What is your ranking of the instructor?—1, 2, 3, 4 or 5") which called to mind the sheets they circulate after a TV pilot plays to the test audience in Burbank. Nor did I like the image of myself that emerged—a figure of learned but humorous detachment, laid-back, easygoing, cool. But most of all, I was disturbed by the attitude of calm consumer expertise that pervaded the responses. I was put off by the serenely implicit belief that the function of Freud—or, as I’d seen it expressed on other forms, in other classes, the function of Shakespeare, of Wordsworth or of Blake—was diversion and entertainment. “Edmundson has done a fantastic job,” said one reviewer, “of presenting this difficult, important and controversial material in an enjoyable and approachable way.”

Enjoyable: I enjoyed the teacher. I enjoyed the reading. Enjoyed the course. It was pleasurable, diverting, part of the culture of readily accessible, manufactured bliss: the culture of Total Entertainment All the Time.

As I read the reviews, I thought of a story I’d heard about a Columbia University instructor who issued a two-part question at the end of his literature course. Part one: What book in the course did you most dislike; part two: What flaws of intellect or character does that dislike point up in you? The hand that framed those questions may have been slightly heavy. But at least it compelled the students to see intellectual work as confrontation between two people, reader and author, where the stakes mattered. The Columbia students were asked to relate the quality of an encounter, not rate the action as though it had unfolded across the big screen. A form of media connoisseurship was what my students took as their natural right.

But why exactly were they describing the Oedipus complex and the death drive as interesting and enjoyable to contemplate? Why were they staring into the abyss, as Lionel Trilling once described his own students as having done, and commending it for being a singularly dark and fascinatingly contoured abyss, one sure to survive as an object of edifying contemplation for years to come? Why is the great confrontation—the rugged battle of fate where strength is born, to recall Emerson—so conspicuously missing? Why hadn’t anyone been changed by my course?

To that question, I began to compound an answer. We Americans live in a consumer culture, and it does not stop short at the university’s walls. University culture, like American culture at large, is ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images. We Americans are six percent of the world’s population: We use a quarter of its oil; we gorge while others go hungry; we consume everything with a vengeance and then we produce movies and TV shows and ads to celebrate the whole consumer loop. We make it—or we appropriate it—we “enjoy” it and we burn it up, pretty much whatever “it” is. For someone coming of age in America now, I thought, there are few available alternatives to the consumer worldview. Students didn’t ask for it much less create it, but they brought a consumer Weltanschauung to school, where it exerted a potent influence.

The students who enter my classes on day one are generally devotees of spectatorship and of consumer-cool. Whether they’re sorority-fraternity denizens, piercer-tattooers, gay or straight, black or white, they are, nearly across the board, very, very self-contained. On good days, there’s a light, appealing glow; on bad days, shuffling disgruntlement. But there is little fire, little force of spirit or mind in evidence.

More and more, we Americans like to watch (and not to do). In fact watching is our ultimate addiction. My students were the progeny of two hundred available cable channels and omnipresent Blockbuster outlets. They grew up with their noses pressed against the window of that second spectral world that spins parallel to our own, the World Wide Web. There they met life at second or third hand, peering eagerly, taking in the passing show, but staying remote, apparently untouched by it. So conditioned, they found it almost natural to come at the rest of life with a sense of aristocratic expectation: “What have you to show me that I haven’t yet seen?”

But with this remove comes timidity, a fear of being directly confronted. There’s an anxiety at having to face life firsthand. (The way the word “like” punctuates students’ speech—“I was like really late for like class”—indicates a discomfort with immediate experience and wish to maintain distance, to live in a simulation.) These students were, I thought, inclined to be both lordly and afraid.

The classroom atmosphere they most treasured was relaxed, laid-back, cool. The teacher should never get exercised about anything, on pain of being written off as a buffoon. Nor should she create an atmosphere of vital contention, where students lost their composure, spoke out, became passionate, expressed their deeper thoughts and fears, or did anything that might cause embarrassment. Embarrassment was the worst thing that could befall one; it must be avoided at whatever cost.

Early on, I had been a reader of Marshall McLuhan, and I was reminded of his hypothesis that the media on which we as a culture have become dependent are themselves cool. TV, which seemed on the point of demise, so absurd had it become to the culture of the late sixties, rules again. To disdain TV now is bad form; it signifies that you take yourself far too seriously. TV is a tranquilizing medium, a soporific, inducing in its devotees a light narcosis. It reduces anxiety, steadies and quiets the nerves. But also deadens. Like every narcotic, it will be consumed in certain doses, produce something like a hangover, the habitual watchers’ irritable languor that persists after the TV is off. It’s been said that the illusion of knowing and control that heroin engenders isn’t entirely unlike the TV consumer’s habitual smug-torpor, and that seems about right.

Those who appeal most on TV over the long haul are low-key and nonassertive. Enthusiasm quickly looks absurd. The form of character that’s most ingratiating on the tube, that’s most in tune with the medium itself, is laid-back, tranquil, self-contained, and self-assured. The news anchor, the talk-show host, the announcer, the late-night favorite—all are prone to display a sure sense of human nature, avoidance of illusion, reliance on timing and strategy rather than on aggressiveness or inspiration. With such figures, the viewer is invited to identify. On what’s called reality TV, on game shows, quiz shows, inane contests, we see people behaving absurdly, outraging the cool medium with their firework personalities. Against such excess the audience defines itself as wordly, laid-back, and wise.

Is there also a financial side to the culture of cool? I believed that I saw as much. A cool youth culture is a marketing bonanza for producers of right products, who do all they can to enlarge that culture and keep it humming. The Internet, TV, and magazines teem with what I came to think of as persona ads, ads for Nikes and Reeboks, and Jeeps and Blazers that don’t so much endorse the powers of the product per se as show you what sort of person you’ll inevitably become once you’ve acquired it. The Jeep ad that featured hip outdoorsy kids flinging a Frisbee from mountain top to mountaintop wasn’t so much about what Jeeps can do as it was about the kind of people who own them: vast, beautiful creatures, with godlike prowess and childlike tastes. Buy a Jeep and be one with them. The ad by itself is of little consequence, but expand its message exponentially and you have the central thrust of postmillennial consumer culture: buy in order to be. Watch (coolly) so as to learn how to be worthy of being watched (while being cool).

To the young, I thought, immersion in consumer culture, immersion in cool, is simply felt as natural. They have never known a world other than the one that accosts them from every side with images of mass-marketed perfection. Ads are everywhere: on TV, on the Internet, on billboards, in magazines, sometimes plastered on the side of the school bus. The forces that could challenge the consumer style are banished to the peripheries of culture. Rare is the student who arrives at college knowing something about the legacy of Marx or Marcuse, Gandhi or Thoreau. And by the time she does encounter them, they’re presented as diverting, interesting, entertaining—or perhaps as object for rigorously dismissive analysis—surely not as goads to another kind of life.

As I saw it, the specter of the uncool was creating a subtle tyranny for my students. It’s apparently an easy standard to subscribe to, the standard of cool, but once committed to it, you discover that matters are different. You’re inhibited, except on ordained occasions, from showing feeling, stifled from trying to achieve anything original. Apparent expression of exuberance now seem to occur with dimming quotation marks around them. Kids celebrating at a football game ironically play the roles of kids celebrating at a football game, as it’s been scripted on multiple TV shows and ads. There’s always self-observation, no real letting-go. Students apparently feel that even the slightest departure from the reigning code can get you genially ostracized. This is a culture tensely committed to a laid-back norm.

In the current university environment, I saw, there was only one form of knowledge that was generally acceptable. And that was knowledge that allowed you to keep your cool. It was fine to major in economics or political science or sociology, for there you could acquire ways of knowing that didn’t compel you to reveal and risk yourself. There you could stay detached. And—what was at least as important—you could acquire skills that would stand you in good financial stead later in life. You could use your educations to make yourself rich. All of the disciples that did not traduce the canons of cool were thriving. It sometimes seemed that everyone of my first-year advisees wanted to major in economics, even when they had no independent interest in the subject. They’d never read an economics book, had no attraction to the business pages of the Times. They wanted economics because word had it that econ was the major that made you look best to Wall Street and the investment banks. “We like economics majors,” an investment banking recruiter reportedly said, “because they’re people who’re willing to sacrifice their educations to the interest of their careers.”

The subjects that might threaten consumer cool, literary study in particular, had to adapt. They could offer diversion—it seems that’s what I (and Freud) had been doing—or they could make themselves over to look more like the so-called hard, empirically based disciplines.

Here computers come in. Now that computers are everywhere, each area of inquiry in the humanities is more and more defined by the computer’s resources. Computers are splendid research tools. Good. The curriculum turns in the direction of research. Professors don’t ask students to try to write as Dickens would were he alive today. Rather, they research Dickens. They delve into his historical context; they learn what the newspapers were gossiping about on the day that the first installment of Bleak House hit the stands. We shape our tools, McLuhan said, and thereafter our tools shape us.

Many educated people in America seem persuaded that the computer is the most significant invention in human history. Those who do not master its intricacies are destined for a life of shame, poverty, and neglect. More humanities courses are becoming computer-oriented, which keeps them safely in the realm of cool, financially negotiable endeavors. A professor teaching Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper,” which depicts the exploitation of young boys whose lot is not altogether unlike the lot of many children living now in American inner cities, is likely to charge his students with using the computer to compile as much information about the poem as possible. They can find articles about chimney sweepers from 1790s newspapers; contemporary pictures and engravings that depict these unfortunate little creatures; critical articles that interpret the poem in a seemingly endless variety of ways; biographical information on Blake, with hints about events in his own boyhood that would have made chimney sweepers a special interest; portraits of the author at various stages of his life; maps of Blake’s London. Together the class might create a Blake—Chimney Sweeper Web site: www.blakesweeper.edu.

Instead of spending class time wondering what the poem means, and what application it has to present-day experience, students compile information about it. They set the poem in its historical and critical context, showing first how the poem is the product and the property of the past—and, implicitly, how it really has nothing to do with the present except as an artful curiosity; and second how, given the number of ideas about it already available, adding more thought would be superfluous.

By putting a world of facts at the end of a key-stroke, computers have made facts, their command, their manipulation, their ordering, central to what now can qualify as humanistic education. The result is to suspend reflection about the differences among wisdom, knowledge, and information. Everything that can be accessed online can seem equal to everything else, no datum more important or more profound than any other. Thus the possibility presents itself that there really is no more wisdom; there is no more knowledge; there is only information. No thought is a challenge or an affront to what one currently believes.

Am I wrong to think that the kind of education on offer in the humanities now is in some measure an education for empire? The people who administer an empire need certain very precise capacities. They need to be adept technocrats. They need the kind of training that will allow them to take up an abstract and unfelt relation to the world and its peoples—a cool relation, as it were. Otherwise, they won’t be able to squeeze forth the world’s wealth without suffering debilitating pains of conscience. And the denizen of the empire needs to be able to consume the kinds of pleasures that will augment his feeling of rightful rulership. Those pleasures must be self-inflating and not challenging; they need to confirm the current empowered state of the self and not challenge it. The easy pleasures of this nascent American empire, akin to the pleasures to be had in first-century Rome, reaffirm the right to mastery—and, correspondingly, the existence of a world teeming with potential vassals and exploitable wealth.

Immersed in preprofessionalism, swimming in entertainment, my students have been sealed off from the chance to call everything they’ve valued into question, to look at new forms of life, and to risk everything. For them, education is knowing and lordly spectatorship, never the Socratic dialogue about how one ought to live one’s life.

These thoughts of mine didn’t come with any anger at my students. For who was to blame them? They didn’t create the consumer biosphere whose air was now their purest oxygen. They weren’t the ones who should have pulled the plug on the TV or disabled the game port when they were kids. They hadn’t invited the ad flaks and money changers into their public schools. What I felt was an ongoing sense of sorrow about their foreclosed possibilities. They seemed to lack chances that I, born far poorer than most of them, but into a different world, had abundantly enjoyed.

As I read those evaluation forms and thought them over, I recalled a story. In Vienna, there was once a superb teacher of music, very old. He accepted a few students. There came to him once a young violinist whom all of Berlin was celebrating. Only fourteen, yet he played exquisitely. The young man arrived in Austria hoping to study with the master. At the audition, he played to perfection; everyone surrounding the old teacher attested to the fact. When it came time to make his decision. The old man didn’t hesitate. “I don’t want him,” he said. “But, master, why not?” asked a protégé. “He’s the most gifted young violinist we’ve ever heard.” “Maybe,” said the old man. “But he lacks something, and without this thing real development is not possible. What that young man lacks in inexperience.” It’s a precious possession, inexperience; my students have had it stolen from them.

But what about the universities themselves? Do they do all they can to fight the reign of consumer cool?

From the start, the university’s approach to students now has a solicitous, maybe even a servile tone. As soon as they enter their junior year in high school, and especially if they live in a prosperous zip code, the information materials, which is to say the advertising, come rolling in. Pictures, testimonials, videocassettes, and CD-ROMs (some hidden, some not) arrive at the door from colleges across the country, all trying to capture the students and their tuition dollars.

The freshman-to-be sees photographs of well-appointed dorm rooms; of elaborate physed facilities; of expertly maintained sports fields; of orchestras and drama troupes; of students working joyously, off by themselves. It’s a retirement spread for the young. “Colleges don’t have admissions offices anymore, they have marketing departments,” a school financial officer said to me once. Is it surprising that someone who has been approached with photos and tapes, bells and whistles, might come to college thinking that the Shakespeare and Freud courses were also going to be agreeable treats?

How did we reach this point? In part, the answer is a matter of demographics and also of money. Aided by the GI Bill, the college-going population increased dramatically after the Second World War. Then came the baby boomers, and to accommodate them colleges continued to grow. Universities expand readily enough, but with tenure locking in faculty for lifetime jobs, and with the general reluctance of administrators to eliminate their own slots, it’s not easy for a university to contract. So after the baby boomers had passed through—like a tasty lump sliding the length of a boa constrictor—the colleges turned to promotional strategies—to advertising—to fill the empty chairs. Suddenly college, except for the few highly selective establishments, became a buyers’ market. What students and their parents wanted had to be taken potently into account. That often meant creating more comfortable, less challenging environments, places where almost no one failed, everything was enjoyable, and everyone was nice.

Just as universities must compete with one another for students, so must individual departments. At a time of rank economic anxiety (and what time is not in America?), the English department and the history department have to contend for students against the more success-ensuring branches, such as the science departments, and the commerce school. In 1968, more than 21 percent of all the bachelor’s degrees conferred in America were humanities degrees; by 1993 that total had fallen to about 13 percent, and it continues to sink. The humanities now must struggle to attract students, many of whose parents devoutly wish that they would go elsewhere.

One of the ways we’ve tried to be attractive is by loosening up. We grade much more genially than our colleagues in the sciences. In English and history, we don’t give many D’s, or C’s either. (The rigors of Chem 101 may create almost as many humanities majors per year as the splendors of Shakespeare.) A professor at Stanford explained that grades were getting better because the students were getting smarter every year. Anything, I suppose, is possible.

Along with easing up on grades, many humanities departments have relaxed major requirements. There are some good reasons for introducing more choice into the curricula and requiring fewer standard courses. But the move jibes with a tendency to serve the students instead of challenging them. Students can float in and out of classes during the first two weeks of the term without making any commitment. The common name for this span—shopping period—attests to the mentality that’s in play.

One result of the university’s widening elective leeway is to give students more power over teachers. Those who don’t like you can simply avoid you. If the students dislike you en masse, you can be left with an empty classroom. I’ve seen other professors, especially older ones, often those with the most to teach, suffer real grief at not having enough students sign up for their courses: Their grading was too tough; they demanded too much; their beliefs were too far out of line with the existing dispensation. It takes only a few such incidents to draw other professors into line.

Before students arrive, universities ply them with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotusland. When they get to campus, flattery, entertainment, and preprofessional training are theirs, if that’s what they want. The world we present them is not a world elsewhere, an ivory tower world, but one that’s fully continuous with the American entertainment and consumer culture they’ve been living in. They hardly know they’ve left home. Is it a surprise, then, that this generation of students—steeped in consumer culture before they go off to school; treated as potent customers by the university well before they arrive, then pandered to from day one—are inclined to see the books they read as a string of entertainments to be enjoyed without effort or languidly cast aside?

So I had my answer. The university had merged almost seamlessly with the consumer culture that exists beyond its gates. Universities were running like businesses, and very effective businesses at that. Now I knew why my students were greeting great works of mind and heart as consumer goods. They came looking for what they’d had in the past, Total Entertainment All the Time, and the university at large did all it could to maintain the flow. (Though where this allegiance to the Entertainment-Consumer Complex itself came from—that is a much larger question. It would take us into politics and economics, becoming, in time, a treatise in itself.)

But what about me? Now I had to look at my own place in the culture of training and entertainment. Those course evaluations made it clear enough. I was providing diversion. To some students I was offering an intellectualized midday variant of Letterman and Leno. They got good times from my classes, and maybe a few negotiable skills, because that’s what I was offering. But what was I going to do about it? I had diagnosed the problem, all right, but as yet I had nothing approaching a plan for action.

I’d like to say that I arrived at something like a breakthrough simply by delving into my own past. In my life I’ve had a string of marvelous teachers, and thinking back on them was surely a help. But some minds—mine, at times, I confess—tend to function best in opposition. So it was looking not just to the great and good whom I’ve known, but to something like an arch-antagonist, that got me thinking in fresh ways about how to teach and why.

From the book Why Read? by Mark Edmundson. Published by Bloomsbury USA.Copyright (c) 2004 by Mark Edmundson. Reprinted courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing. Available wherever books are sold.

Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. A prizewinning scholar, he has published a number of works of literary and cultural criticism, including Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida, and Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference. He has also written for such publications as the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and Harper's, where he is a contributing editor.

I Love The Unknown

On both a personal and a professional level, I'm pleased to report that The Unknown, a pioneering hypertext novel co-authored by William Gillespie, Frank Marquardt, Scott Rettberg, and Dirk Stratton, is now available as a free downloadable Zip file. I just downloaded it myself, & if I'm posting here in the next couple days it means that their hypertext didn't infect my Mac w/ some monstrous form of digital herpes.

But seriously (as Derrida said to Searle) as a friend of The Unknown, I'm glad to see that the fellas got their shit together and not only archived this beast (which, judging from recent posts on Scott's blog may be stirring yet again; will it ever be finished?) at the Open Source Books website, but managed to be the first hypertext novel to be listed in the archives. W.W. Norton loves that kinda shit. Here's hoping that the next edition of Norton's Postmodern American Fiction anthology includes The Unknown alongside Michael Joyce and J. Yellowlees Douglass. This kind of recognition is minor and as a genre comedy tends to be undervalued, but once the 'tipping point' is reached, The Unknown has a good chance of becoming a cult-classic--like 'out-there' writing by Burroughs, Ballard, Dick or Acker--that eventually gets its props in the literary mainstream.

Were I to pimp The Unknown to Paula Geyh and the other Norton editors, my argument on behalf of the work would be that it is an exemplary piece of what Deleuze dubbed "minor literature," and that the major tongue they were twisting was that of the pre-millenial literary establishment. This hypertext appeared at a time when the literati were begrudgingly shocked into acknowledging that the printed word has always been a network technology for establishing connections between readers, and The Unknown can be read as a testimonial to a joyful belief that the publishing industry, just like the music industry, was in the midst of losing its grip on the dissemination of art. Obviously, this historical moment hasn't played itself out.

The Unknown deserves to me read for more than socioeconomic or historical reasons. I think it demonstrated that metafictional irony hasn't exhausted its potential, and that self-reflexive writing was more necessary than ever in a culture where everything seems to be choreographed for a voyeurs. The also reminded those who forgot that metafiction needn't be smug and smarmy or cold and impersonal. Somewhere Donald Barthelme was laughing.

I realize that I'm using this post as a way to avoid grading final exams. But before I return to the grading, a bit more on the Deleuze... I know it's something of a cliche to talk about hypertext as an embodiment of Deleuzean concepts like the "rhizome" or "the body without organs," but in the case of The Unknown, it really makes sense. A major trope in the hypertext (in the tradition of Burroughs, Pynchon, etc.) is how intoxication can function to reinscribe disembodied information within the realm of the all-too-human.

The Unknown carry on the migratory, masculinist tradition in American Literature that Deleuze & Guattari so admire (Melville, Miller, Kerouac, etc) and in tracing their quasi-autobiographical line of flight across American (a fictional book tour), they managed to make it funnier through parodistic power riffs on intellectual tropes like the death drive, the will to power, etc. that permeate so much of literary modernism. Were Deleuze still with his, I think he'd appreciate The Unknown, though he'd probably refer the fellas to the passages in A Thousand Plateaus advocating the practice of getting high on water.

Thanks to accolades bestowed upon it by Robert Coover, The Unknown stand a decent chance of being remembered the annals of e-literary history. Not that Scott, who, when he is in his carny barker mode can make Mark Leyner appear modest, is likely to let that happen. But it takes more than a streetstoopid, self-promotional machine to spread the word. Reliable access is key, and it's good to know that (God forbid) should this gonzo crew push things too far & disappear forever into cyberspace, or some dungeon created by John Ashcroft for domestic threats to Homeland Security, The Unknown will remain available for reading.