Perfect for Mother's Day: the Baby Be of Use series or The Secret Language of Sleep. - - - - |
Hello reader. Below is the beginning of a long email dialogue between Jonathan Lethem and Dave Eggers, more or less conducted with the intent to publish it here, for your enjoyment and edification. It covers some things about which the two participants have been concerned. The conversation began in Brooklyn in late summer, just before a huge and quick-coming rain. It was continued in a doorway, then later via email. The first section is below. After you have read it, read Section Two, Section Three, and Section Four. Thank you. —Kevin Shay, McSweeney's Webmaster - - - - JL: The connection I failed to make when we were talking, but which struck me in reflection, is that this coping mechanism, this projection of the listener/reader/critic/whatever's fears into a rage at the artist for basically just offering up art, this angry refusal of plenitude (I want to find a name for it!), contains at its core exactly the same emotional mistake that I'd been trying to describe in our conversation about "great writers getting older and denouncing the proliferation of first novelists" — remember that? That moment when a writer becomes suddenly threatened by the wealth of unfamiliar names on the bookshelves, and decides to write that oh-so-familiar essay announcing that new writers offering their wares — I think Billmore Flumbert wrote one of these and it appeared in Harper's or the New Yorker recently — that first novelists who are humbly, earnestly, perhaps sometimes with a novice's clumsiness daring to put their efforts forward are committing some sort of crime-of-plenty against literature. As though good books could be watered down by the existence of less-good ones. Or as though anyone could say which careers deserved a chance to grow and which not (god have mercy on me if I'd been judged in some absolute way by my first novel!). Or as though anyone could be harmed by the publishing of fiction. DE: JL: DE: JL: The trick is to recognize this subjectively coping, self-protective all-too-human-but-still-kind-of-puny dismissive instinct when it garbs itself in "objective" critical postures. To know that the critic who reflexively calls Time Out Of Mind Dylan's first worthwhile album since Blood On The Tracks does so because it's just so damn relieving not to have to think about and sort through the twenty-three years worth of good, bad, and great work which lies between. Because it's just too much, you know, too exhausting, to allow the possibility that Bob Dylan did anything worth listening to between 1974 and 1997. DE: But he's also a victim, as are a lot of very productive musicians or artists, of our prejudice against prolificity. When someone releases two albums in one year — either Elvis — or a movie every year — Woody Allen — or whatever, we suspect them of something — a lack of seriousness, or gravitas, or soul. Something like that. We tune out. We have come to expect a certain rate of production from our cultural purveyors, an output that we can process, a rate which enables us to think that the cultural product has in it invested enough time, has been aged properly. Kerouac was vilified for the speed at which he wrote some of his stuff, like The Subterraneans, but then we hear that Marquez wrote 100 Years of Solitude rather quickly, and we're confused, because this is a dense and careful book, but it was written with a speed seemingly not possible. And this upsets us, because we don't want to think that art of equal quality (however we define that) can be created over greatly varying time periods. JL: Dylan is of course an interesting special case because he's constantly (or, well, he was doing this, I ought to say, in the sixties and seventies and eighties) writing and recording even more songs than he even releases. And as a proud owner of bootlegged records, I'll say there's a lot of quality there as well. So Dylan is demonstrably not one of those "everything I've ever uttered is out on the market" people — and how do we know that there aren't a dozen unpublished Joyce Carol Oates novels in her closet? DE: JL: I guess this suggests to me again how much projection is involved. How revealing it is of the listener/reader/whatever's own emotional stakes a denunciation or trashing of an artist usually is. There's a theory of Freud's — I know he's out of fashion, but the guy was really good at pointing out hidden motives, it's quite amazing — called "The Narcissism of Minor Difference". Basically saying that the parts of ourselves we love most and protect most ardently are those bits which distinguish us from others who are otherwise almost exactly like us. A useful analogy is nationalism — Canadians are obsessed with the twelve things that make them different from United States citizens, because identification is so threateningly close. Serbs and Bosnians — they hate one another for their similarity, whereas neither can be bothered to hate the Chinese — a lack of proximity and similarity make that hatred irrelevant. I read a neat book of psychobiographical criticism that ventured that Narcissism of Minor Difference explained why, for example, Nabokov professed to hate Freud. Because their views of human behavior were actually threateningly similar. The same energy can fuel, of course, over-strenuous denunciations between members of affiliated groups — The People's Front of Judea vs. The Judean People's Front. Or hatred between siblings, or lovers. And I wonder if a strong identification is necessary to fuel the rage-of-betrayal which lurks in so many critical censures. DE: I've blabbed about this before, the custom of attacking those closest to you, instead of uniting against a larger enemy, a worthy enemy or issue. The practice is widespread: young black kids killing young black kids, political in-fighting, campus witch hunts, whatever. I want to throw in another cultural figure here, one whose career illustrates this stuff in a very interesting way: Michael Moore. Here's a man who made his name with a documentary about layoffs in the auto industry, and the lack of humanity of GM and in Roger Smith and by inference in much of corporate America. Now, he managed to not only make a documentary extremely popular, but he did it with a documentary about a subject — the wretched underside of global capitalism — of what we might assume to be dubious commerical appeal. So he made a very very funny documentary that has by now been seen by countless millions around the world, and has created an awareness that a hundred issues of The Nation or Z or The Progressive, as well-intentioned as they are, couldn't hope for. For all this he was briefly lionized, then (very) shortly thereafter, it was time to look for holes in him, places to stick our fingers and see what hurts. Thus, a few twerpy media writers and pundits started, for instance, tearing into him for living on the Upper East Side and sending his kid to private school. Suddenly everything he's done — which is, let's remember, about a thousand times what his critics, even those fighting a similar fight, will ever do — becomes invalid, and henceforth he's tainted and his messages are of less interest to the media who originally helped mythologize him. After being, for a long time, one who often looked for faults in almost perfect things, I reached a point where I realized that we really have to protect, in some way, the things and people who actually do stick their necks out, and/or innovate, and/or make a difference, and I realized that to appreciate someone or something we don't necessarily have to dismantle her or him or it. There's a great Billy Bragg song, on Worker's Playtime, about the impulse: "We must resist/the temptation/to take the precious things we have apart/to see how they work/because we can never put them back together again." And now I'm quoting lyrics to buttress an argument. But anyway: Michael Moore has done an unbelievable amount of good — I mean, has anyone before or since brought that kind of anger and conscience and zeal to mainstream theaters, to prime-time TV? — and for that I honestly think he should be able to club fur seals and get away with it. I really think we need to weigh these things, weigh one's (great) contributions against their (wee) shortcomings (as we see them), and shrug off the tiny inconsistencies or missteps. Because otherwise we take people like Moore, who have taken decidedly courageous paths, and by picking nits with them, we risk discouraging them. We watch Roger and Me or The Big One and we overlook their overwhelming achievements, or just how weird it is to watch a movie like that in a theater in a mall — where I saw Roger and Me — and instead gripe about, say, the poor sound quality. Or worse is the constant search for tiny contradictions. Moore, or whomever, could spend his life freeing, say, political prisoners around the world, but then some bored reporter learns that the prisoner-freer keeps, I don't know, his family dog on a short leash. Or something ridiculous like that. We ignore 99% of the person's deeds because he had a stain on his shirt while doing them, or dismiss their speeches because we see an error in his punctuation. Remember when Ted Turner vowed to donate some enormous amount of money to the UN? First it was news. Then it was the subject of griping editorials. Then, finally, the bottom-feeders started complaining that he wasn't donating the money fast enough. Can you imagine being some 26-year-old reporter somewhere, and, without imploding from the absurdity, criticizing a man who gave $50 million to the United Nations? Because it turns out he couldn't give it all in one lump sum? We all know how it works. Here's a made-up quote from a presidential sort of speech: "Last year I signed legislation to protect 450 million acres of wetlands in the southeastern part of the country, and these 460 million acres will be a testament to this administration's commitment to our country's natural splendor." So what's the next day's headline? PRESIDENT GOOFS HIS NUMBERS Or PRESIDENT WAFFLES ON ENVIRONMENT We are obsessed with finding tiny errors, minute hypocrisies, because, quite simply, it's easier to do that than taking in, or somehow describing, the whole, bigger and much more complicated, picture. All this isn't to say that a Michael Moore doesn't expect criticism, but he shouldn't be getting clawed at by those who should be his allies, because then he finds that he's being attacked from both his should-be friends and his avowed enemies, and thus, beaten and tired, he might opt out. Then he disappears, and there's a void, and we look back and wonder why we weren't more encouraging to this man. No wonder so many people, like Moore, become reclusive. I mean, if we chase Michael Moore out of town, then we are tacitly handing the victory to the Roger Smiths of the world. Why not forget where Moore's kid goes to school and keep after Smith, a man who has, we may remember, in ruined thousands of lives in a fairly direct way? When we attack Moore we let boredom and proximity make us into cannibals.
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