One-Way Street

On the Origins of the Novel

Sherri asks a really cool question in the comments of the Franzenfreude entry:

Just out of curiosity, what do you consider the genre's birth? I'm a bit uneducated about the whole history of the genre: novel, but I thought the first novel was written in the 1000's in Japan (The Tale of Genji)- by a woman! Maybe you mean the western/european history?

I think this is a really interesting topic, so I'd like to answer it in a blog post rather than in the comments.

There's not much agreement on the origin of the novel. As Sherri points out, The Tale of Genji (1021) has been mentioned as the first novel. So has Boccaccio's The Decameron (1353). Arguments have also been made in favor of Don Quixote (1605/1615) and The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities (1554). However, none of these works fit neatly into the most commonly accepted definition of a novel: an extended prose narrative with incidents arranged in a causal chain centering around a psychologically distinguished main character. Don Quixote, for instance, is a parody of the romance, a pre-novelistic form with medieval European roots.

Personally, I think it's best to think of the novel as having several origins. However, I would argue there is a definite origin of the novel as a genre, i.e., a literary form with a number of practitioners self-consciously working for a sustained period of time. I would point to Britain of the 1740s and 1750s as the start of the genre.

Mid-eighteenth-century Britain was the first country with a large, literature audience affluent enough to spend money on books as entertainment. Beyond these conditions I think it's important to point out that this was a time in which the definition of a person had changed. Middle class Britons lived novelistic lives. They were individuals who made free choices in realistic circumstances. In this way they achieved an autonomy of self that would have been unimaginable to, say, a medieval Englishman.

Samuel Richardson is the first creator of complex novelistic characters. His Pamela (1740/41) is generally regarded as the first fully realized English novel. Significantly, it's a marriage plot in which a young woman struggles for the right to freely choose her husband.

Henry Fielding is perhaps the first self-conscious novelist. Both Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) contain essayistic passages describing the novel as a genre. (By the way, heteroglossia, or the mixing of writing types, has also been advanced as a distinguishing characteristic of the novel.)

Finally, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (first volume 1759) is important because Sterne is explicitly playing with the genre's rules just as they are becoming codified. By the late 1750s the novel had coalesced to the point at which it could produce an anti-novel.

This account may be too Anglo-centric. It's derived from Ian Watt and Michael McKeon, two historians of British literature. On the other hand, some people--some Arabs, for example--have cited this history as ground for dismissing the novel as a purely European genre and therefore irredeemably foreign to non-Western literary traditions.

In any event, I think it's important to remember that the novel as a genre was born at the same time the middle class individual was born. I believe that the novel, more than any other narrative form, most closely resembles how middle class people actually live. That was the case in mid-eighteenth-century Britain, and it remains true now.

And thanks, Sherri, for asking such a great question.

No Fingerprints!

Blair Kamin has a nice piece on Gary Comer College Prep on Chicago's rough and tumble south side. The school was designed by Chicago architect John Ronan in a style that deliberately ignores its context, which includes a tire repair shop next door. The building attempts to replace one depressingly familiar narrative with an older, inspirational one. The school is located next to the scene in which a 17-year-old girl was shot while talking on her cellphone by a man quarreling with another on a CTA bus. The school is also near the birthplace of Gary Comer, the Lands' End founder. Comer left $20 million in his will for the construction of the school.

Comer Prep is also an interesting case study in the power of architecture to shape human behavior. For instance, the school is split into two buildings separated by a courtyard exposed to the elements. Students are forced to trudge across the courtyard in all kinds of weather, just as they would on a college campus. The principal, a Northwestern University graduate, wanted to share with his students his fond memories of walking across NU's wind-whipped campus in February. There's a lecture hall structured to resemble a college lecture hall. To represent the metaphor of learning as enlightenment, and to remind students that they're accountable for their actions, Ronan lit the hallways with skylights and demarcated them from the classrooms with glass, distractions and fingerprints be damned. (The principal claims the students obey orders not to touch the glass.) To convey a sense of safety, the building is wrapped in perforated steel.

For all its high-concept design touches, Ronan's school building is explicitly pedagogical in a rather old-fashioned way. Comer Prep also raises questions about the extent to which all buildings aspire to improve and uplift the people who inhabit them, however fleetingly. Ronan demands that several hundred high school students keep their hands off the glass in order to teach them a lesson in accountability. It's worth considering, I think, how often we're furtively asked to keep our fingerprints off the glass because clean glass makes us better people.

Jason Moran

 

Jason Moran, my favorite jazz musician working today, has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genuis Award. His Modernistic (2002) is a brilliant study of early twentieth-century jazz piano styles, while Same Mother (2005) does the same for the blues tradition. For a sample of how Moran invests these traditional forms of music with contemporary verve, see the video of "You've Got to Be Modernistic," performed with his ensemble The Bandwagon, perhaps the most important piano trio of the past decade. His latest album, Ten, marks the ensemble's tenth anniversary, summarizes Moran's work since Artist in Residence (2006), a period in which Moran dove into Thelonious Monk's body of work.

If your idea of a piano trio is somnolent background music to martini sipping, a live performance of the Bandwagon will quickly set you straight. The ensemble has the energy of a rock band; Tarus Mateen even plays electric bass--sitting down, oddly enough. Their performances are not to be missed.

Fun Friday: Revisiting Four Old Favorites Edition

It's the end of a crazy busy week. Not much blogging lately--or reading. Nevertheless, with autumnal weather settling in, I start to consider picking longer, more challenging books to read. Here are four new releases (except for the Giedion book) from authors I've read and enjoyed before.

Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of the Spirit: Jameson has long been a major influence on me. Like Walter Benjamin, Jameson writes confidently on a broad range of cultural texts. From time to time somebody urges me to focus this blog on one topic, and I respond by pointing to Benjamin and Jameson. I'm still waiting for Jameson to produce a follow up to his magisterial Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, but lately Jameson seems to have retreated into philosophy. Reading Hegel is rough going, but he's extremely important. It's not possible to discuss the concept of freedom, for instance, without taking into consideration Hegel's dialectic of self and other. One can't think about one's freedom until he or she acknowledges their dependence on another. Jameson will explain all of this and more.

Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis. My wife is worried about the Daniel Biss sign in our front yard even though Obama carried our home town in 2008, so it's hard to imagine taking a seat on a commuter train and opening up a book called The Communist Hypothesis, with its Leninist red cover. However, Marxism has made a bit of a comeback among economists since the collapse of the world economy in 2008, primarily because Marxism has an explanatory power and long-term perspective that its rival economic theories can’t touch. This book was inspired by Badiou's despair over Nicolas Sarkozy's victory in the 2007 presidential elections, but shares American economists' interest in Marxism as a method of critique. He argues that without Marxism the world would be stuck in an endless repetition of all the problems of capitalism. Badiou's dense and irascible style takes some getting used to, but he never ceases to be provocative.

Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Giedion was Walter Benjamin's favorite architectural historian, and Giedion is extensively quoted in the Arcades Project. For example, Giedion taught Benjamin to see the world exhibitions as Gesamtkunstwerke, or total works of art. In Space, Time and Architecture Giedion traces the history of the organization of space, beginning with the Renaissance and continuing up through Modernism.

Noel Carroll, Art in Three Dimensions. Philosophers have always been more successful when studying literature than film. I've always been ambivalent about Carroll's work. I didn't care for Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (1991), but later in the Nineties he proved to be a keen thinker about the cinema. Carroll has always been suspicious of aesthetic theories presupposing the autonomy of art, and in this book Carroll urges philosophers to look at how people interact with art under specific cultural circumstances.

Freedom and Agency

I'm glad to see that Jonathan Frazen's Freedom continues to generate serious discussion about the role of literature in American culture. Most of the conversations I've seen focus on issues of characterization and genre. Everyone agrees that Freedom is a realist novel, even a Realist one. (That's if you want to make a distinction, which I think is useful, between the intent to depict reality and Realism as a historical genre situated, in American literary history, between Romanticism and Naturalism, or between 1850 and 1890.) Opinions differ more strongly about the quality of the characters. Readers such as David Brooks and B.R. Myers complain that the characters are too small, too petty and empty to warrant our attention. Others allow that while there's no Pierre or Prince Andrei roaming through Franzen's pages, they're not appearing in contemporary American life, either.

Personally, I don't have any issues with novel on these grounds. I don't have much patience for people who complain about unlikable or petty characters. The history of Realism is the story of steadily shrinking characters. This is why Naturalism came along: to inject some larger importance and motivation to characters trying to cope with the modern world. If you want a good reference point for the crisis of ninteenth-century Realism, just take a look at the noble yet curiously passive hero of William Dean Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). The novel is stuffed with observational details--curiously absent in Freedom, by the way--yet Howells' characters have, if anything, less control over their circumstances than Franzen's. The only entity with real agency is money itself.

So far, however, what I haven't seen is an extended consideration of Franzen's title. I thought David Brooks was going to address it today. After all, freedom has become such an ideologically-loaded issue right now that I was certain Brooks would pick up on it.  Is freedom a definable set of qualities? Or is it the absence of restraints and nothing more? Is it ontologically empty? Is it a metaphor for a range of (largely hysterical) grievances?

In a consideration of Franzen's novel, perhaps a better way to approach this question is to change the term "freedom" to "agency," meaning the power to act in accordance with conscious intent to a set of material circumstances.  In the case of Freedom, those circumstances would be life in the Eastern and Mid-Western American middle classes during the George W. Bush administration.

The question of agency makes us look at external circumstances rather than internal beliefs. The question of agency centers around these two questions: What are the range of choices available to a person? Why did a person choose one option and not another? These are essentially ethical questions, and as such they concern the possibility of individual freedom.

Take, for instance, Richard Katz as a character. He's a rock musician and, therefore, the character least confined by bourgeois convention. But is that still true? Could rock stardom be just another set of conventions every bit as restrictive as bourgeois existence? Here's another question: could Patty and Walter, the married couple, be freer because their conventions are more out in the open, more recognizable as conventions and there forefore more readily flouted or not?

As soon as I finish Freedom (I'm nearly done), I'd like to take these questions. The post may not be my next one, but it will appear soon.

Franzenfreude

The high praise for Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom has, predicably, created a corresponding backlash. The controversy is so intense it's been given a name: Franzenfreude. The latest salvo comes from Slate's Meghan O'Rourke, who wonders how much praise Freedom would have gotten if it were written by a woman. O'Rourke admits she's conducting a thought experiment about the reception of the novel. (As for the novel itself, she writes, "I'm halfway through and find it artful and engaging.")

She argues there's an unconscious gender bias at work in contemorary literature. She argues that women have a more difficult time demanding the time and freedom to write because they face subtle discouragement. Also, gender bias effects public reception of books written by women. She cites a New York Times review of Heather McGowan's Schooling, which uses stream-of-consciousness and other Joycean techniques to tell the story of a precocious girl who has an affair with a teacher. The reviewer felt that the subject matter wasn't of sufficient importance to warrant the experimental technique. "By comparison [to Joyce's Ulysses], the small, private story of Catrine Evans and Mr. Gilbert at the Monstead School has no greater reach. Where is the experiment in this experimental fiction?"

These kinds of speculative arguments are hard to refute or support. Yes, Zadie Smith covers much of the ground as Franzen, and Toni Morrison has a Nobel Prize, yet neither has been credited with writing the "Book of the Century" (The Guardian on Freedom). Still, Franzen's novel arrives at a time when the novel is under assault from all directions, and it's reassuring to talk about a novel that has captured every reader's attention and, more importantly, offers evidence that the genre still has a significaant place in our culture, if only as an object under discussion in the public sphere.

Plus, if one wants to talk about gender issues in Freedom, there's plenty to talk about beyond reviewers' gender bias. I just finished the first section of the novel, "Mistakes Were Made." Laura Miller was "especially charmed by the decision to make Patty a jock. Such characters are pretty rare in literary fiction, and Franzen gets so much out of this aspect of her life." She also praises Franzen for his depiction of the "bizarre, overwrought female friendship that often blossoms during the college years." As Miller and many others have pointed out, Freedom has an old-fashioned marriage plot, which, since the genre's birth in the 1750s, has cut both ways gender-wise.

Whether you agree with her or not, O'Rourke raises legitimate questions about gender bias in the production and reception of literature. But what's remarkable about Franzen's novel is that it's the first novel I've read in a very long time that actually lives up to the hype. I opened the book with some skepticism, but so far it's pretty great. Book of the century? Of course not. But worth talking about for certain.

The Grownups Have Left the Party

This past weekend Newt Gingrich seemed to be trotting his own eccentric version of the anti-Obama backhanded slander in vogue in conservative circles. Gingrich was quoted by the National Review Online as saying: “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

Gingrich's foray into wing nut rhetoric, and the failure of any conservative to rebuke him (at least so far), demonstrates how much the fact-free invective of Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party has been embraced by the mainstream GOP. His remarks also show how there are no more grownups in the conservative movement anymore.

Two recent books on our current fractious political landscape remind us that, once upon a time, responsible adults ran the GOP and the conservative movement.  In The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama (review here). Will Bunch recounts how establishment Republicans went to great lengths not only to distance themselves from the John Birch Society, but actively undermined it. Bunch says the reason why the movement failed to reach a wider public

because mainstream Republican politicians turned against them, even though the party was at low ebb in the Kennedy-Johnson years. Barry Goldwater, the leader of the so-called New Right movement who won the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1964, did have considerable support from the Birchers, yet not only did he not embrace them but secretly authorized the intellectual leader of 1960s conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., and his National Review to go after the organization, successfully marginalizing it and helping to keep its Richard Hofstadter-described paranoid style in the shadows, even as that decade grew more tumultuous.

Another example of a species once fairly common--the responsible conservative--comes from the re-issue of Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (originally published 1953). Alan Wolfe gives a largely critical although not entirely unsympathetic review of Nisbet's most important work. Wolfe concedes that Nisbet would have had no patience for current GOP indulgence in populist vitriol. 

The alienated, the frustrated, the paranoid, the neurotic: for Nisbet, they were the stuff of the modern condition. But for the leaders of today’s Republican Party, angry mobs susceptible to demagogic manipulation—as so many of the adherents of the Tea Party can be pithily described–are to be praised for their wisdom and virtue. Nisbet has read too much Tocqueville to ever fall for that nonsense. Not only does his thinking fall into a European rather than an American tradition, he is at heart also an elitist—in the best, that is to say the Arnoldian, sense of the term. For today’s Republicans, the best that has been said and thought in the world has been said and thought by Joe the Plumber.

To act like an adult in the public sphere would require, among other things, to take seriously the proposition that the government has a role in improving the lives of its citizens, that however paradoxical it may sound, a vital national government is critical to ensuring individual freedom. This proposition is rejected out of hand, without debate, by the  the anti-government nihilists and power-hungry charlatans who currently dominate the Republican Party. With responsibility and accountability in the public sphere, there's no telling what course partisanship will take, but it probably won't be good for any of us.

Fun Friday: INFORMATION Edition

One of the books I read to my children at night is Jean-Luc Fromental and Joelle Jolivet's 365 Penguins. The book chronicles a year in the life of a family that has a penguin delivered to their home every day. They don't know who is sending them penguins or why. At first the penguins are fun, but after a week or so the penguins become a problem. To keep themselves sane the family tries various schemes to organize them, but each one breaks down as more penguins arrive. By New Years Eve the family has been chased from their house. The penguins have completely taken over. Finally, a relative arrives to explain he's been sending the penguins as part of a plot to save the species. He takes away all of the penguins except a single blue-footed penguin, which the family adopts as a pet.

365 Penguins can be read as a parable about information and how we deal with it. A few pieces of information is fine, but what really want is the single blue-footed piece of data that fits into our lives. Instead, we get far more information than we can handle.

The latest issue of MAS Context explores the problem--and it's mostly a problem--of information. Specifically, the contributors examine how to shape and categorize information, to visualize it and order it. In some cases, we learn that the problem of information is really some other kind of problem. Clay Shirky, for instance, points out that information overload has been with us since the invention of movable type, suggesting that a surfeit of information is essential to modernity itself. Shirky says all we need to do with information is properly filter it. Shirky's proposition makes sense, although he doesn't account for the countervailing tendency to constantly seek out new information.

Product designer Naoto Fukasawa also believes that information overload can be mastered. Fukasawa approaches information from a phenomenological perspective, defining information as "all the things that we feel naturally, like touching a table." Fukasawa believes that information-bearing objects will gradually fade into the background, while those objects that serve the body, like chairs, will remain as standalone objects.

According to Mimi Zeiger, at this point in time we're less worried about the quantity of information than we're worried about the forms in which it arrives. Marshall McLuhan held that new technologies disappear behind the content they deliver. This may have been true with mediums like television, but with digital technologies, Zeiger argues, people are focusing on content delivery vehicles to the point of fetishizing them. Zeiger says the debates about the decline of traditional media miss the point about what's really happening.

Older, recognizable formats—the newspaper, the blog post, the zine—become stand-ins for broads idea about content—news, opinions, music reviews—but also for what that medium once represented—a city-wide discourse, a citizen journalist, an alternative publishing network.

Zeiger, Fukasawa, and Shirky all believe that information is ultimately manageable, that someone will eventually come and take away all the penguins. Other contributors to the INFORMATION issue look for the beauty in untrammeled data production. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle has embarked on projects modeling extremely huge yet ephemeral objects such as a thunderstorm over the Midwest and a 50,000-year-old iceberg. He's also modeled imaginary objects puffed up to huge proportions. In the latter case Manglano-Ovalle assembled photographs from Department of Defense and CIA documents to recreate--or create for the first time--the alleged mobile biological weapons labs in the Iraqi desert before the war, in what Manglano-Ovalle describes as "a faithful representation of what was from the start a fabrication."

George Legrady's career is longer than Manglano-Ovalle's, but it has followed a similar path: moving from the reconstruction of phenomenal reality to modeling data. Currently Legrady is working on "Making Visible the Invisible," which visualizes the circulation of books checking in and out of the Seattle Public Library’s collection. Legrady had to work with the library's cranky IT department (all IT departments are cranky) to access data from the Dewey Decimal System, still the most effective means ever devised for dealing with information overload.

As elaborate as Legrady's visualizations are--his project won't be complete until 2014--he recognizes that data visualization is still in its early stages. He predicts that one day soon data visualization will inspire "the same type of highly active academic theoretical analysis that was brought to the photographic image in the 1980’s, exemplified by Roland Barthes’ articles such as 'Rhetoric of the Image.'"

Legrady may be right, but as I was working on my contribution to MAS Context's INFORMATION issue I wondered what data visualizations reveal about the world around us. Ubiquitous computing allows us to see the city like we've never be able to before. Until a couple of years ago city planners had access to data geolocated only to the level of zip code. Now they can pinpoint exactly where people congregate, allowing planners to see the effects of their designs much more precisely. Researchers are trying to make the same data sets available for individuals in order to create personal data maps of cities--in effect, to digitize the sensory overload of large urban centers. So far, however, data modeling has not yet bridged the gap between crowdsourced knowledge and one's own idiosyncratic way of interacting with a city.

Dealing with the massive amounts of data we're bombarded with every day is one of the central cultural challenges of our time, and Iker Gil and the editorial staff at MAS Context have hit upon a vitally important subject. The contributors all address, in one way or another, our ambivalent relationship towards information: we always want more, and yet we also long for the man to come and take it all away, leaving us with the one essential piece of information that will tie everything else together--to leave us with the one blue-footed penguin.

Information

All my time is being sucked up by a huge project due next Wednesday, so it doesn't look like I will be able to comment at length until then. In the meantime, though, I urge you all to read the latest issue of MAS Context: Information. I contributed an essay called "The Data City," which looks at how pervasive computing is changing the way we see cities.

More soon.

Leslie Lyons and the Analogue Aesthetic

Walter Benjamin argued that art was changed forever when the invention of photography made possible the mechanical reproduction of images. For the first time an image could be reproduced exactly and endlessly. The image is ripped from its original and unique context, then placed in any number of different contexts in order to generate new meanings. For Benjamin, this meant the production of images, and thus the production of meaning, was no longer the exclusive province of the empowered classes.

But if mass-produced images have lost their aura, their uniqueness, then how does one construct authentic expression out of mass-produced objects? It's no coincidence, Benjamin would have pointed out, that questions of authenticity have become more pressing with the advent of digital reproduction.

Photographer Leslie Lyons has spent her career exploring the interplay between the individual and the mass produced object. Her latest exhibition, "Instant Messaging: an analogue collection, examines tee shirt culture. Lyons found her subjects in New York City, New Orleans, Austin, Los Angeles and Louisville. She photographed hundreds of people wearing their tee shirts, asking each subject to explain the message and why he or she chose it. Some tee shirts express collective, conventionally political messages, such as an Iranian-American woman a shirt emblazoned with “Iran” and, below that, “I come in peace” in Arabic.

The positions of other subjects are more ambiguous, more expressive of Americans' troubled relationship with mass culture. Take, for instance, the woman at left. Her tee shirt wields unadorned text against mass culture, Barbara Kruger style. The woman's facial expression reflects the prickly message of her shirt--or is it the other way around? What came first--the sentiment or the message? Is the woman expressing some sort of enduring personal conviction, or is her choice of messages just as contingent and transient as any other consumer choice?

Whatever narratives we construct from Lyons' portraits, her tee shirt images all share a sense of intimacy. She places her subjects against a black background, the light barely strong enough to distinguish them from the dark that threatens to envelope them. It's as if her subjects have stepped forward to deliver a single message before disappearing into nothingness. We can only achieve authenticity in isolated moments, Lyons seems to be saying, and photography is the ideal medium to capture it.

Issues of authenticity and mass culture also appear in Lyons' photographs of indie rock bands. Rock star publicity photos fall into well-defined genres, but Lyons puts her own stamp on her photographs. Her sessions with the Strokes, her first series of musician photos, resemble Mark Hayward's photographs of the early Rolling Stones, with their subjects looking at once louche and Byronic, surrounded by the bric-a-brac of rock stardom. Lyons produced excellent photographs, and it's little wonder that her photos of the band were widely circulated. However, Lyons wouldn't develop her personal style until she started working with performers like Nada Surf, Sonic Youth, Jose Gonzalez, the Mooney Suzuki and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. These are all highly successful acts in the age of digital music, yet Lyons' style recalls the intimate glamor of analogue music era, when musicians appeared radiant with popular success yet introspective enough to maintain artistic credibility.

Lyons works in a variety of genres, from wedding photography to portraiture. Her photographs are unified by an analogue aesthetic from a time when the production of photographic images was slower and more labor-intensive. Her photograph of a masked woman wearing a tee short emblazoned with the words "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Arabic is representative of her best work: you are confronted with an enigmatic message delivered by a stranger you will never see again, yet you sense the message is somehow solely for you.