The New Republic: Dickens's Writing "Difficult, Obscure"

Over at The New Republic, Hillary Kelly lashes out at Oprah for choosing Dickens as her next book club reading. While obviously I share some of the shock and awe at Oprah's power, Kelly lets it cloud her judgment, ranting that the average reader will have trouble unpacking "Dickens’s obscure dialectical styling and his long-lost euphemisms." Huh? Dickens's euphemisms and ironies are often painfully straightforward, and "dialectical stylings" is a phrase that confuses me, even though I just came back from a lunch spent reading Fredric Jameson. My best guess at what she's referencing here is the doubleness of "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," but honestly, it's Kelly's thoughts on Dickens, not Dickens's own writings, that are difficult to understand.

It's sad, because Kelly's sense of Oprah's ridiculousness is right, but her reasoning is actually backwards. In her fervor to protect the classics from Oprah's rapacious grasp, she perversely bashes Winfrey for "her sentimentalized view of Dickens," who was, in case anyone forgot, an author of sentimental fiction. His books are chock full of dying orphans, for Pete's--or should I say Little Nell's?--sake. Then Kelly worries about Winfrey's "ignorance of Dickens’s authorial intentions," as though those should be the cornerstone of any reading experience.

Weirdest of all, though, is when Kelly says that Dickens wrote "some of the more difficult prose to come out of the nineteenth century." In addition to being false by any standard, this claim contributes to the sense that these old books can't be read without some kind of literary guide. On this point, at least, Kelly and Oprah seem to be united: Oprah offers extensive character guides and other paraphernalia for the reading through her website, as though the literature itself is so alien that it can only be approached through some kind of spacesuit-like extra-textual apparatus. In one of the funnier parts of Kelly's piece, she quotes from the Dickens conversation going on at O's website:

A glance at the discussion boards on Oprah’s website confirms my worst fears. “I have read all the print-outs and character materials and the first two pages,” said one reader, referring to supplementary reading guides produced by the Book Club. “The first two pages are laden with political snips and I am trying to grasp what it is saying. I was able to look up cock-lane and figure that out, but where do I go to figure out the innuendos?”

If only this person would read the novel, rather than spending time trying to diagram the meaning of its every word. In a weird way, the problem with Oprah's selection is not her decision to approach a canonical classic from a popular standpoint, but her decision to approach a canonical classic as A Canonical Classic. Sentimentalizing Dickens is only appropriate, and finding your "self" in a Victorian novel, while sort of silly, isn't really at odds with what many critics claim (rightly or wrongly) was one of the functions of the novel in the first place--the creation of the reader as a "unique" "individual" subject, etc., etc.

Book clubs, whether Oprah's or not, often plunge into books with minimal context, and that's fine. It's the idea that readers need to tiptoe around the big boys, and approach them with a semblance of historical or scholarly understanding that they can't possibly attain in the time allotted, that makes this whole thing so painful. Oprah and her followers are foreigners to this particular cultural soil, but they have an embarrassingly sincere desire to show that they know how lucky they are to tread on sacred ground, so they work too hard to behave with what they conceive of as humility and cultural respect, nodding knowingly to show that they understand why This Stuff Is Important. A more candidly naive approach, one less fraught with the sense that there's some mystery Oprah & co. need to show they understand, would make the whole affair a lot less ridiculous.

The Wire and Treme: David Simon Keeps It "Real"

Every once in a while, I open to an article in the New York Review of Books that makes me feel like I've accidentally stumbled into a guest lecture at some kind of intellectual retirement home. The subject matter seems exciting and relevant, the author seems promising--then it devolves into an explanation of basic cultural phenomena to an audience assumed to be hopelessly out of touch.

That's how I felt when I read Charles Petersen's "In the World of Facebook" earlier this year. Its rants describe "the mechanics" of superficial Web-era friendships in a way that seems almost calculated to excite "why-I-never" cane-shaking among anyone still fighting the good fight against the Internet. That's also how I felt recently when reading Lorrie Moore's piece on The Wire.

I always get excited when I see writing about The Wire. That excitement comes partially from hometown pride, and partially from the fact that I think we're living in the golden age of television, and we should be talking about TV shows a lot more than we talk about, oh, Jonathan Franzen for instance. Add to that the fact that Lorrie Moore is a great writer, and you'd seem to have the perfect formula for a great article. (I don't know if Charles Petersen is great, because according to my superficial Web-era scholarship, he appears to be a deceased Danish boxer.)

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I discovered that Moore's piece more or less describes the entire series to an audience who is assumed not to have heard about it, or to have heard of it only to call out "HWAT'S THAT DEARIE?!" and turn up the volume on their hearing aids. I kept waiting for Moore's incisive account of the series to materialize, but instead I got summary sprinkled with helpful glosses that remind us that "the game" is what "the drug business is called." Thanks?

Most surprisingly, Moore never questions the blue-collar snobbery implicit in much of what The Wire thinks it's teaching us. Instead--perhaps out of guilt for her own relatively white and relatively middle-class subject matter?--she argues that the series's use of the inner city

might be seen as a quiet rebuke to its own great living novelists, Anne Tyler and John Barth, both of whose exquisitely styled prose could be accused of having turned its back on the deep inner workings of the city that executive producer David Simon, a former Baltimore reporter, and producer Ed Burns, a former Baltimore schoolteacher and cop, have excavated with such daring and success.

Well, sure, the series certainly wants to be seen that way. Its form of realism is one that denies "reality" to anyone who isn't taking part in a life-or-death struggle of some kind--which makes for great drama, but leads to characters whose three-dimensionality fades as their socio-economic status climbs higher and higher above the poverty line. As a result, there's a serious omission from the otherwise breathtaking sweep of The Wire's social survey of Baltimore: the residents of leafy neighborhoods like Guilford, Roland Park, and farther north into the county, the kinds of places where I spent my first 18 years.

All of that gets classed as "Leave-It-to-Beaver Land" in the phrase from The Wire that Moore admires, but I keep asking myself what to make of that exclusion, and what it means for The Wire's ability to accurately represent the kinds of social and economic transactions that lead to urban problems like Baltimore's. In Simon's work, the upper classes are offstage presences who serve alternatively to mark social immobility (like when D'Angelo Barksdale looks despairingly around the Prime Rib in season 1) or to initiate and benefit from the misery of "real" Baltimoreans (like when Nick Sobotka heckles Carcetti's conversion of the waterfront into condos, or bemoans the re-classification of his family's rowhouse as a "Federal Hill" property). The politics of what counts as real in The Wire is one of the most insistent and problematic parts of its social vision, and it's disappointing to watch Moore let it pass with nothing but a polite golf clap.

Compare Moore's largely congratulatory descriptions of The Wire with Nicholas Lemann's take on Simon's latest project, Treme. Lemann's analysis appeared only a week earlier, but his descriptions of what goes right, and wrong, with Treme are wonderful. He recognizes the series's insecurity about proving itself as a "real" depiction of New Orleans, and the awkwardness that results as Treme repetitively flashes its street cred to audiences. Lemann also rightly identifies Simon's inability to portray wealthy families clearly. He makes a mistake, however, in assuming that issues of reality and authenticity weren't a problem for The Wire, where Simon and his writers could more easily access a local perspective. The issues are there, but they're muffled by their alignment with the typical conflation of the low with the real.

There is, in other words, a big portion of society--in fact, the portion that used to be called Society--that never really makes it into Simon's view of the world. You have to wonder how that impairs his ability, and his projects' ability, to tackle the issues they claim to depict so accurately. It's a weird reverse ghettoization: wealthy North Baltimoreans see the origins of social ills in the form of the occasional member of the underclass who comes into their neighborhoods to steal from them; advocates of the underclass see the origins of social ills in the form of the wealthy who come into their neighborhoods to steal from them. Simon is a master of the second version of the narrative, and he does it beautifully, powerfully, and unforgettably. But at some point it seems as if maybe, to effect any real kind of change, we need a new story.

Computers...taking over...must...make...soulful art...

I've been thinking a lot about this recent op-ed by Jaron Lanier, which claims that we commit a "devaluation of human thought" when we treat computers like minds.

Lanier gets a number of the facts right: the artificial intelligence spin is a sure boost to any technological story, and the analogies between computer "intelligence" and human intelligence are largely overblown in order to win press coverage. He's also right that it's dangerous to imagine that we'll ever know for sure if it's possible to download human minds into software; any tests we can devise to "make sure" that consciousness has been effectively digitized will be the exact tests that programmers and designers are building systems to satisfy. (We all know that it's possible to train kids to ace a test without educating them; the same risk exists in the design of computer intelligence systems.)

For the most part, I side with N. Katherine Hayles, whose book How We Became Posthuman explains how we came to believe in the idea of a machine intelligence that could be equal to or greater than our own. Hayles has serious doubts about that possibility, namely because it depends upon a belief that the nature of human (or even animal) intelligence could be divorced from its material structure. The mind, she points out, doesn't operate on simple binary principles; until we can create structures that exactly mimic the material workings of the human brain--and to do that, they must be incorporated into a nervous system and "body" that closely parallels our own--we won't ever create an intelligence that works like ours, but better.

That said, I think Lanier has overly simplistic and idealistic images of the bottomless wonder of human intelligence and creativity. He wants to preserve our gasping admiration of "personhood," and feels threatened by the possibility that we may "begin to think of people more and more as computers."

This concern--that human individualism is under fire--has been around for about as long as the idea of human individualism, and I don't see what's compelling or new about Lanier's concern about A.I. It could just as easily be Lanier panicking about the Industrial Revolution turning people into machine parts, about capitalism turning people into "the bottom line"--hell, he could be panicking about how the invention of writing devalues the presence of human teachers, advisors, and memory. His worries that people are passively letting computers mechanically determine their aesthetic choices through Netflix or Amazon is particularly offensive, since it imagines that

(1.) anyone is actually mindlessly doing such a thing [!?] and that
(2.) the aesthetic is the realm of individual expression and taste, which--prior to the existence of evil mechanical algorithms--was some sort of sacred realm in which untarnished individuality blossomed.

I guess those of us who study the arts should be grateful for this bone being tossed our way by a member of one of the more "practical," "sensible" fields. But this is what scientists and engineers always do--they make pleas for the arts and the aesthetic by turning art into a wonderful world that defies logic and keeps us grounded, soulful, human. If this is the price to be paid to get public respect for students and producers of the arts--if we're allowed to be kept around only as the infantilized and inexplicably necessary darlings of scientists, as their extracurricular activities, toddlers and lap dogs--I think most of us would rather be put down.

Let me offer my grounded, soulful, human rebuttal to Lanier's paranoia. Any useful technological breakthrough acts as an extension or distribution of mental processing, so it does work as part of a mind--one that includes human minds in its circuit. It's ridiculous to imagine that the human mind is somehow separate from these systems--as if it weren't altered by the use of a technology like language or writing. All these technologies interact with human minds in reciprocal ways. Recognizing the importance of the human brain in this system is crucial, but we should also recognize that the line between "active mind" and "passive tool" is more arbitrary than someone like Lanier--who wants us to think of computers as "inert, passive tools" to keep his idea of the ineffable human intact--is willing to admit.