The Reading Experience

A Raging Storm

I share Scott Esposito's enthusiasm for Heather McGowan's The Duchess of Nothing, although I don't exactly agree with his analysis of the novel's narrative strategy:

The premise of Heather McGowan's "Duchess of Nothing" seemingly is not the most promising material for a novel, yet McGowan has fashioned an engrossing, entertaining book. She accomplishes this not through plot but instead through a stream-of-consciousness narration that beautifully characterizes her unnamed protagonist in in a voice that is by turns tragic, farcical, pathetic, poignant and hilarious.

Later in his review Scott echoes this claim about "stream-of-consciousness narration," suggesting that McGowan presents us with an "unadorned reality filtered through an unstable mind." But The Duchess of Nothing is not really a "stream-of-consciousness" novel, at least not as the term has been used in the critical discussion of this technique that has accumulated since its introduction by novelists such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson. In the work of these writers, stream-of-consciousness is a variant on, an intensification of, third-person narration. It is more or less the culmination of the movement toward psychological realism in fiction, which might be said to have begun--at least in English language fiction--with Henry James's use of the third-person "central consciousness" approach. James's fiction helped to bring about the transformation of the omniscient narrator--knows all, sees all--into the much more limited narrator essentially restricted to the vantage point of the character whose experience is being related. But the narrator is still of the third-person variety, originating from outside that experience and telling us the story on the characters' behalf.

Stream-of-consciousness takes this a step farther and attempts to provide a window of sorts on a character's experiences as they are being processed through that character's mind. Such narration is frequently fragmentary and discontinuous, in an attempt to mimic the way such processing actually occurs, or at least to mimic it as closely as written language is able to do so--it is, like everything else in fiction, ultimately an illusion created through prose. If reality ultimately exists in the mind of the beholder, then the stream-of-consciousness method is an effort to have fiction reflect what is really real.

The Duchess of Nothing is a first-person narrative, so, however much we are made to view the world through the constructions of its protagonist, it can't really be said to consist of her stream of consciousness. While I certainly agree that McGowan portrays this character through "a voice that is by turns tragic, farcical, pathetic, poignant and hilarious," it is a voice, a garrulous and idiosyncratic one, in fact, a voice that in many ways works in a manner that precisely reverses the effect created by the stream-of-consciousness strategy:

Across the cafe Toby stands at the coffee machine gazing into a silver jug. His lips move, to some terrifying soliloquy, I imagine. Behind him well-dressed citizens sip their coffees, quietly content being Italian. If you could understand the strength it takes to sit here quietly, I tell the boy, If I had the power to describe how it feels to do exactly the opposite of what I'd like. I wish you could see the storm that rages beneath my surface. I was never meant to sit quietly, I tell the boy, This sitting quietly was never my idea. I flick my skirt idly, exposing my knee. It stares up at me, a hilly rebuke. I want to leave everything behind as soon as it is a minute past new. Every night after supper I'd like to drop the plate I'm washing, turn, never see any of it again. And yet I remain. I swallow my coffee, I remain.

Although it is Toby who is described as engaged in "some terrifying soliloquy," The Duchess of Nothing itself is an extended soliloquy, its narrator's overflowing monologue interrupted only occasionally by a word or two from "the boy" (her sole companion through most of the book). The narrator may feel there is a storm "raging" inside her, but it's really the storm of words she releases that manifests her inability to "sit quietly," her desire to "leave everything behind as soon as it is a minute past new." Whereas stream-of-consciousness tries to direct our attention to the internal drama unfolding in human consciousness, the narrative strategy in this novel externalizes everything, articulates explicitly in the narrator's own language what in s-o-c would remain half-formed and implicit. It's as if the narrator literally can't resist translating into comprehensible speech every thought that comes into her head.

In his review of the novel, Richard Eder accurately notes the protagonist's "grandiloquent self-proclamation," but I cannot agree with Eder that she is an example of an "unreliable narrator." Eder believes that her reticence in fully disclosing the particulars of her past (or even of her present arrangement with "Edmund," brother of "the boy") creates an incompleteness of context that suggests willful manipulation on the narrator's part. While it is true that the novel is somewhat short on expository detail, I would argue that this is simply the consequence of the narrative method McGowan has chosen and to which she remains faithful: no "infodumps" if that would make the narrative voice ring false. I would argue further that it is this method that otherwise invokes the somewhat misshapen world and off-kilter perspective that, to me, are a large part of this novel's appeal. For the narrator to be "unreliable," we would have to believe she is deliberately presenting us with a false account of herself, her actions, and her background (and that we would be able to tell, ultimately, that the account is false), but that she is in effect working out as she goes what she thinks about her situation does not, in my view, make her unreliable. It makes her, as Scott puts it, "by turns tragic, farcical, pathetic, poignant and hilarious."

Eder is ultimately rather contemptuous of "the woman," as he chooses to call her. She is "pitiable," guilty of "track-covering, the shame that flickers beneath the arrogance." She has a "skewed and inflated vision of herself and her life." She is "cold." And indeed the narrator does seem frustrated with her situation, unable to square her sense of her own worth with the increasingly desperate circumstances in which she finds herself. She is certainly impulsive. More than anything, however, she is instinctively unconventional and incapable of settling for "normality"--confronting the possibility of accepting a normal life at the novel's conclusion, she instead lights out for the territory: "Then I go out once more, slamming the door behind me. I like the sound so much, I open the door and slam it shut several times." I suppose one could feel contempt for a woman who doesn't behave as she ought, who turns her back so decisively on domestic bliss, but I just find her a very interesting character quite unlike most protagonists of most literary fiction. Both she and The Duchess of Nothing itself are much more convincingly "transgressive" of established norms--of female behavior and of conventional "psychological realism"--than other novels sometimes accorded that label. In short: Anyone interested in a refreshingly different kind of reading experience should read this book.

Remembering Things You'd Forgotten

I read Mary Gaitskill's Veronica hoping to have confirmed the judgment that she is "one of the most transgressive American writers working today," as one review put it. I should have known better. Words like "transgressive" and "subversive" are used so promiscuously to describe any fiction that threatens to "critique" reigning norms, just as "innovative" is used reflexively to describe any work that doesn't obediently proceed in the narrative direction prescribed by Freytag's Triangle, that normally I just disregard their invocation as so much boilerplate. Having read in a number of places, however, that Gaitskill was a truly transgressive and unconventional writer, I decided to see what Veronica had to offer.

No doubt I should not take out on Gaitskill my impatience with such critical inflation, but I don't think she's done much to discourage the idea she's a "daring" writer. As it turns out, the attempted transgressions in this novel are entirely transgressions of sexual morality or propriety. In the milieu in which its characters move--the fashion industry, AIDS-frightened New York City in the 1980s--there's lots of sex, much of it exploitative and unhealthy. Apparently we're to be taken aback by passages such as this one:

. . . Alain looked up and smiled. "Do you like [the haircut]?" I asked. He stood and said of course he liked it, it had been his idea. Then he jumped on me.

I say "jumped" because he was quick, but he wasn't rough. He was strong and excessive, like certain sweet tastes--like grocery pie. But he was also precise. It was so good that when it was over, I felt torn open. Being torn open felt like love to me; I thought it must have felt the same to him. I knew he had a girlfriend and that he lived with her. But I was still shocked when he kissed me and sent me home. . . .

Frankly, the idea that the fashion world is full of sexual predators and encourages a sadomasochistic attitude toward sex doesn't come as much of a shock to me. If you really want a disturbing portrayal of the way in which women are inculcated into a kind of reflexive sadomasochism, read Elfriede Jelinek, whose fiction truly transgresses modern myths about sex and romantic love without relying on the superficial adornments of the sociological "expose." Ultimately, all of the characters in Veronica (maybe especially the title character, who is not the novel's protagonist but whose fate is a sort of cautionary supplement to the protagonist's story) seem to have been assigned their roles in a kind of retrospective account of the hedonistic 1980s, but none of them rise above the highly schematic requirements of these roles. They're types, duly chosen to represent various attitudes and excesses of the era:

I wanted something to happen, but I didn't know what. I didn't have the ambition to be an important person or a star. My ambition was to live like music. I didn't think of it that way, but that's what I wanted; it seemed like that's what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around like they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next--songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph, each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked down the street or rode the bus.

In his review of the novel, Benjamin Strong writes that "If Veronica has a weakness, it's that it sometimes feels more like a document of the last decade than the current one." Frankly, I'd have just as much trouble with a novel that seems to be a "document" of the current moment as with one that "documents" a previous epoch, but Strong does make a relevant point: Veronica, published in 2005, already seems dated, an evocation of a period and of characters that come off as mere historical curiosities. Francine Prose also describes Veronica as essentially a period piece--"Gaitskill may be, among contemporary authors, the one best-suited to capture, on the page, a period when the marriage of sex and death was such an extraordinarily close one"--but claims to have found reading the book unsettling, "like biting into a nightmare-inducing, virally loaded madeleine. Halfway through, you may find yourself remembering things you'd forgotten about a moment in time when half your friends were dying young, and when you feared that anyone who had ever had sex (including, of course, yourself) was doomed to a premature and hideous demise."

It's telling that for Prose what is "nightmarish" about reading Veronica involves "remembering things you'd forgotten about a moment in time. . . ." What the novel offers is an opportunity to "remember," to recollect from a perspective of relative safety a "moment in time," even if the memories are full of doom and foreboding. But the memories themselves, the effect of being transported back to this time when one realized sex and death could be so nearly aligned, are what is "nightmare-inducing" about the book. Neither its prose, its formal ingenuity, nor even its specific imagery is responsible for its allegedly profound impact. Its status as "document," as a reminder of how traumatic the "AIDS era" was for those who lived through it, remains its primary virtue.

Gaitskill is not a bad writer, but her occasional stylistic flourishes ("her eyes gave off the cold glow of an eel whipping through water") cannot bring its first-person narrator Alison to life as anything other than a stock figure (the unlucky victim of her times) or compensate for the ulitmately bland and unengaging memoir-like structure Gaitskill employs as a way of narrating Alison's life and times. Prose claims that Veronica places no. . .strain on our memory. It creates an atmosphere, provokes a response, and suffuses us with an emotion that we can easily, all too easily, summon up." She means this as a compliment and apparently believes this makes the novel "unconventional," since we are not requried to revisit the narrative, "searching for some forgotten plot turn, some event or aspect of character." I don't myself find this strategy very unconventional; if anything, it's just a way of reinforcing the cheap appeal to established iconographic images, our cultural memory of the 80s. At best, it's the kind of "newness" that, as I argued in the previous post, is more interested in the sociopolitical than the literary.

I managed to finish Veronica, but if I hadn't decided it might serve as the subject of a post discussing the use of fiction for "captur[ing], on the page, a period," I probably would not have made it through the second half of the novel, which seems especially rote and uninspired. Once I understood Veronica was mostly an excuse for summoning up its chosen "period," I expected it to unfold in a more or less predictable fashion (pun intended). It did.

Deep Inside

Recently Matt Cheney (and later Miriam Burstein) discussed the kind of narrative exposition pejoratively called the "infodump," in which "an author needs to convey a lot of information and does so by coming out and stating it. Telling vs. showing. Choosing efficiency over subtlety."

To me, Matt's most interesting musing on this point is this:

Does a foregrounding of psychology rather than action in a story reduce the challenges of exposition? If we're deep inside, for instance, Mrs. Dalloway's mind are we less concerned about expository lumps than if we're reading about Mrs. Dalloway's adventures in time and space? It could be that the tangential and associational writing associated with the representation of a mind undercuts the need or desire for straightforward exposition. But probably only if the setting and situation are ones that a general audience can be assumed to have some familiarity with. If Mrs. Dalloway were thinking about buying flowers on the planet Xsgha, where the riuGsj splort the frunktiplut, the need for some sort of exposition would increase. But would it look different as exposition because we're so deep inside Mrs. D's brain than it would were we following her from a more objective viewpoint?

Although Virginia Woolf's version of "psychological realism" needs to be taken as a special case--it's so pure an attempt to stay within the flow of her character's stream of thought--I would argue that most expository passages in modern fiction do in fact take place as part of the "foregrounding of psychology." We may not always be as "deep" into a character's consciousness as we are in Mrs. Dalloway, but in most ordinary "literary fiction" (by which I mean literary fiction that adopts established strategies and techniques as the markers of "craft") we are certainly at the very least being oriented to the world in which the characters move as it is inflected through their awareness of it. If anything, this makes information-laden passages of exposition, however brief, even more conspicuous and artificial: fiction in which external rather than internal realism is the goal surely has a good excuse for resorting to the infodump, since providing information is a large part of its job, but psychological realism, in theory at least, is restricted to the kind of "information" a character him/herself would regard as such. In this context, the infodump seems like the author's intrusion on what has otherwise been set up as the character's "space."

Matt is certainly correct in maintaining that "If Mrs. Dalloway were thinking about buying flowers on the planet Xsgha, where the riuGsj splort the frunktiplut, the need for some sort of exposition would increase." In fact, this very feature of much science fiction has made it difficult for me to enjoy it as much as I'd like, given my admiration for the intelligent commentary on the genre provided by critics such as Matt Cheney. I've found that the problem extends even to what are generally considered the greatest SF writers. Take, for example, this brief passage from Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:

In the miserably high-number conapt building 492 on the outskirts of Marilyn Monroe, New Jersey, Richard Hnatt ate breakfast indifferently while, with something greater than indifference, he glanced over the morning's homeopape's weather-syndrome readings of the previous day.

The key glacier, Ol' Skintop, had retreated 4.62 Grables during the last twenty-four-hour period. And the temperature, at noon in New York, had exceeded the previous day's by 1.46 Wagners. In addition the humidity, as the oceans evaporated, had increased by 16 Selkirks. So things were hotter and wetter; the great procession of nature clanked on, and toward what? Hnatt pushed the 'pape away, and picked up the mail which had been delivered before dawn. . .it had been some time since mailmen had crept out in daylight hours.

This bit of exposition doesn't necessarily originate from "deep inside" Richard Knatt's mind, but it does arise from his specific consideration of the "homeopape" and the information it conveys--information that is surely intended for the reader's edification as much as Richard's. We need to know that he lives in a world of homeopapes and Grables and Selkirks, and that the oceans are evaporating. And when Richard pushes the 'pape aside and takes up his mail, we are clearly to accept as his own rumination that "it had been some time since mailmen crept out in daylight hours."

Unfortunately, I am unable to read this whole passage, providing such specific details about a wholly nonexistent world, without finding it just a little bit silly. I don't think it's because I can't accept such imaginary worlds per se, as I frequently like SF movies, including some made from Dick novels, perfectly well. There's something about evoking such worlds in prose, burdening that prose with exotic information, that makes reading this kind of SF a chore. Indeed, a passage such as this one more or less defeats me:

Shortly, he was aboard a thermosealed interbuilding commute car, on his way to downtown New York City and P. P. Layouts, the great synthetic-cement building from which Perky Pat and all the units of her miniature world originated. The doll, he reflected, which had conquered man as man at the same time had conquered the planets of the Sol system. Perky Pat, the obsession of the colonists. What a commentary on colonial life. . .what more did one need to know about those unfortunates who, under the selective service laws of the UN, had been kicked off Earth, required to begin new, alien lives on Mars or Venus, or Ganymede or wherever else the UN bureaucrats happened to imagine they could be deposited. . .and after a fashion survive.

Probably even partisans of Philip Dick's work would concede that he is not a particularly notable stylist. From what I can tell, story in a Dick novel is more or less all. I don't necessarily have a problem with that approach (and there are SF novelists--China Mieville, for example--who could be called stylists), but the stories he tells are indeed crammed with "information," and relating this information in such an otherwise unadorned prose style only makes the limitations of this style more evident. Dick's approach also underscores the extent to which even pulp or genre fiction has absorbed the conventions of what I'm calling psychological realism. One might say that Dick attempts to portray an unreal world by realistically depicting his characters' response to living in that world. The "infodump" remains a perhaps unavoidable limitation of such an effort, one that may even call into question the aesthetic integrity of the effort in the first place.

Flaws in Packaging

I don't want to seem churlish about this, but I have to say I find Levi Asher's position on "explanatory text" bewildering:

. . .I still feel strongly that back cover blurbs and review excerpts are essential to the "selection process" every reader goes through when looking at a new book. A publisher who presents a blank back cover on a novel by an unknown author, in my opinion, must not be thinking about how potential readers are going to look at this novel. The purist approach. . .sounds admirable, but I don't think it translates into reality. I am simply not going to devote my time to reading a book without some idea why I should read it. A novel needs a road map, and to fail to provide some explanatory text when publishing a new author is, in my opinion, a fatal mistake.

Does a serious reader really make a decision to read or not to read based on blurbs and "review excerpts"? Don't we all realize by now that blurbs are simply advertising tags that often bear no relation to the actual quality of the book being blurbed? In Michael Martone's Michael Martone, we are told that "Michael Martone" was once a student of John Barth's at Johns Hopkins: "During that first class John Barth also offered to give all of his students a reader's comment or 'blurb' that each could use as each made his or her way in the world. Martone's 'blurb' reads as follows: 'Among our wealth of excellent new American short-story writers, Michael Martone is one particularly worth reading.' Martone has used the quotation, with deep appreciation, on each of his books. . .and on all the acompanying promotional material. Perhaps because of the abiding affection and regard he holds for his teacher's gesture, Martone loves the genre of the 'blurb' and is very happy to write one for anyone who asks." Barth's blurb is dutifully included on the back cover of Michael Martone, an example of this book's playful charm but also clear enough warning that we should indeed take the blurb as a formulaic "genre" that ought not to be taken seriously as literary criticism.

And why settle for "review excerpts"? Ought we really accept carefully edited excerpts as substitutes for more fully articulated commentary? If knowing what other people are saying about a particular book is important (and it sometimes can be), why not seek out the full-text reviews, either print reviews or blog posts about the book? Surely this can't be that time-consuming, and it seems a much better use of (and justification for) book reviewing than as the source of "excerpts."

Frankly, I almost always ignore not only this back-cover material, but everything that's printed on a book jacket, including the flap copy. My curiosity about what I will find in a given book is going to be satisfied only by reading a few paragraphs, a few pages, enough to inform me about the book's thematic focus and aesthetic assumptions. Sometimes it won't be safisfied until I've read the whole thing. (Sometimes it will be satisfied quite quickly and I'll decide it's not a book for me. But the blurbs and the review excerpts will have had nothing to do with it.)

I understand there's a limited amount of time and a seemingly unlimited supply of books out there. But I am troubled by what seems to be Levi's entirely passive approach to book selection: Tell me "why I should read it." Entice me with baubles and come-ons. Don't readers have some role to play in determining what will be worth reading? Elsewhere in his post, Levi writes of the book that occasioned his displeasure in the first place: "I quickly concluded that nobody will read this book, since the author is not a known name and the book package presents no compelling reason to dive in, and that was the end of my review." Is this what book reviewing has become? An attempt to gauge how popular the book will be? Quick dismissal of all writers "not a known name"? An evaluation of the "book package" rather than the book? Since Levi had been sent the book for possible review, couldn't he have been one of those who gave the book a chance and then let his readers know why they should read it or not? Wouldn't some genuine literary criticism be a more suitable response than criticism of the flaws in "packaging"?

Perhaps I'm just a blinkered "purist," but I've always thought books were published to be read, not to be scrutinized for their marketing devices.

Some Life's Life-Story

The first "chapter" of Michael Martone is headed "Contributor's Note" and informs us that

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and was educated in the public schools there. His first published work, a poem titled "Recharging Time," and a character sketch, "Tim, the Experience," about his brother, appeared in the Forum, an annual literary magazine produced by the school system featuring contributions from its students. His mother, a high school freshman English teacher at the time, in fact, wrote the poem and the character sketch, signing her son's name to the work and sending it to the editor, another English teacher at a south side junior high school who had been a sorority sister, Kappa Alpha Theta, in college. Indeed, most of his papers written for school were written by his mother. . . .

The second chapter, also a Contributor's Note (as are all but three of the book's forty-five brief chapters), tells us that

Michael Martone was born at St. Joseph's Hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1955. It is interesting to note that the attending physician was a Doctor Frank Burns, Major, United States Army, retired, and recently returned to Fort Wayne following service in the police action in Korea. . . .

Obviously, readers of this book will quickly enough conclude they have come upon a resolutely unconventional, mischievous work of fiction. Is it a collection of stories in which the stories have been replaced by (or hidden in) these parodic notes, or, given its consistent focus on "Michael Martone," the book's mock-autobiographical protagonist, is it a novel, albeit one without the kinds of narrative/structural markers we customarily use to identify the form? Perhaps we should take it as one of those boundary-crossing fictions that deliberately provokes us into reconsidering our assumptions about form, even suggests that we should be less vigilant in patrolling those boundaries?

Even if we regard Michael Martone as a kind of novel, unified by its portrayal of the life of its title character, what do we make of the reference to Frank Burns, a pre-established fictional character we are asked to believe literally brought "Michael Martone" into the world, or, indeed, of this passage from another Contributor's Note a few pages later?:

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and grew up there, leaving, at age seventeen, to work as a roustabout in the last traveling circus to winter in the state. He has held many jobs since then, including night auditor in a resort hotel, stenographer for the National Labor Relations Board, and clerk for a regional bookstore chain run by associates of the Gambino crime family. For the last twenty years Martone has been digging ditches. . . .

Beyond conflicting with a previous note informing us that "MM" currently "lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he teaches at the university" (and beyond its status as a send-up of certain kind of "school of hard knocks" contributor's note), this note makes it clear we can't accept the book's autobiographical elements at face value. Major Burns exists only on film, and Michael Martone (the corporeal author) is not a professional ditch digger. "Michael Martone" is a fictional character created by Michael Martone, and once introduced into the text, this character is bound only by the possibilities it might be made to serve within the work--in this case, possibilities revealed through variation and metamorphosis. This playfulness makes it necessary that readers relax their expectations of continuity in both character development and plot, but it is also ultimately the source of Michael Martone's considerable appeal.

But Michael Martone certainly does not fail to provide more conventional and accessible ways of engaging the reader's interest as well. For all its prankish blurring of the lines between author/character and reality/invention, the book finally does present a compelling and complete account of the life of "Michael Martone," an account that really coheres around the other character introduced in that first Contributor's Note, MM's mother, and the city of Fort Wayne. However much we should hesitate before identifying the mother as the mother of Michael Martone, the portrayal of her that emerges from this book is surely a tribute of sorts to Martone's own mother, who, if she didn't write all of his papers for him, must surely through her example have been the inspiration for his career choice. And the city of Fort Wayne, as ordinary and quintessentially Midwestern as it must be, clearly retains Martone's affection. (As does the state of Indiana, in which most of Martone's fiction continues to be set.)

Surely, too, Michael Martone explores serious enough themes: the role of representation, the permeability of fact and fiction, the effects of contingency and chance. Perhaps the most explicitly stated theme is expressed in the book's final lines:

Martone marvels at the intersection of lines, colliding and flying apart in the condensation of a cloud chamber window. Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life's life-story.

Or as that first composition published by "Michael Martone" might imply: The novelist's job frequently comes down to "recharging time."

But it must also be said that, finally, this is a very entertaining book. In my opinion, it does what the very best "experimental" fiction always manages to do. Having abandoned the tried and the true, the formulaic and the merely conventional, it substitutes an approach and uncovers devices that nevertheless capture the reader's attention, afford the reader soemthing that could be called aesthetic delight.

Other Spaces, Other Things

To some extent, I agree with Adam Kotsko that "Meta-blogging is the greatest vice yet developed by humankind." Blogging about blogging can become just another variation on navel-gazing, and the triumphalist celebration of blogs by some prominent political blogs can be especially obnoxious. But at this point in the development of the weblog as a forum for serious discourse (at least potentially), Adam is right to "wonder what exactly can be done in a blog post." In some ways, seriously-intended blogs and blog posts can be an alternative to conventional print publications, both academic and general-interest, in others they are best seen as a complement to print, but it doesn't seem likely, or even desirable, that they simply imitate the conventions of journalism or academic scholarship. Therefore, those of us who do see a place for blogging in intellectual/literary discussion ought to be making the attempt to clarify, for ourselves and our readers, the distinctive nature of its contribution, what indeed "can be done" using this medium to engage in substantive debate or commentary about literature, philosophy, or any of the other traditionally "academic" subjects.

Surely it can't be that, as Adam puts it, blog posting is "best suited to matters that can be treated conversationally," if by "conversational" Adam means "casual" or "superficial." Certainly blog posts can be casual or superficial, but I see nothing in the nature of the form that requires they be so. In his own response to Adam's post, John Holbo makes a point that I want to echo: "Blog posts are short, but obviously no one thinks there are no arguments worth making at less than a thousand words." Good arguments and, in the case of literary criticism, compelling readings can indeed be made in a "short" blog post; some arguments and analyses would greatly benefit, in fact, if they were confined to 1500 words or so and shed themselves of the formulaic padding "long" forms sometimes superfluously require. Morover, I can't see why longer essay-posts treating a topic in a more expansively developed way are inherently impossible: I've read many such posts, and one would think that readers interested in the topic at hand would be willing to read a well-thought out treatment of it whatever the medium in which it's printed. (Screen fatigue seems to me a pretty inadequate excuse for avoiding a perfectly good piece of writing simply because it's online.)

Adam's claim is similar to a remark made recently by Joshua Marshall at Talking Points Memo. In a post otherwise defending blogging against criticism by certain print snobs, Marshall suggests that "blogging is an ephemeral form of writing. It's written quickly, usually forgotten quickly. It doesn't lend itself to that sort of rigorous writing and rewriting which is often the way you discover your ideas in your own mind." But even if some bloggers in practice regard their posts as something to be "written quickly," or even if the blogsphere in general is perceived to be crammed with such posts, that doesn't mean blog writing must be practiced in this way. Is there really anything inherent in the way words appear in cyberspace as opposed to the way they appear on a piece of paper that prevents it from being a medium for "that sort of rigorous writing and rewriting which is often the way you discover your ideas in your own mind"? Isn't "rigor" of this kind a product of the kind of effort being put forth by the writer rather than a function of the form? (And on the question of discovering ideas, see this post by Dorothy W at Of Books and Bicycles, in which she affirms that blogging "about what I think makes me have better thoughts.")

In a recent essay at Bad Subjects, Jodi Dean makes a point about the deliberative potential of blogs that one would think Adam Kotsko might appreciate:

. . .The fast pace of networked communication is a prominent meme. Opinions, image, and information are said to circulate rapidly through the blogosphere, like some kind of digital ebola or influenza. For most, this rapidity is a problem, or an excuse. It explains a lack of reflection, the need to respond immediately.

But theory blogs aren’t like this. A discussion on theory blogs might spread over half a dozen or more blogs over the course of weeks, like some kind of long running seminar. So, I post something about solidarity on I Cite, picking up or reiterating themes already in play on the Weblog and Posthegemony. The blog Before the Law posts a critical rejoinder, countered from different directions in multiple posts by various authors at Long Sunday and again at the Weblog. Sometimes, someone will accumulate the links and post a general guide to the conversation (the blogger from Theoria does this from time to time). Rather than a fast paced media sphere, this exchange is like a slow seminar, focusing on one narrow question that arises on its own, and is addressed over a longer period of time, giving those who engage it opportunity to read and reflect.

In other words, at his own blog and in his contributions to others, Adam has himself exemplified a kind of blog discourse and a kind of blog protocol that, while not substituting for those of academe, certainly have every claim to being taken seriously and not just dismissed as "talk," an offhand way of passing one's free time. Further, its' not just "theory blogs" that foster the kind of discussion Jodi Dean describes. Plenty of literary weblogs are focused on longer posts that are frequently part of cross-blog debates that at their best have a seminar-like feel without being pompous. (See, for example, this recent set of posts on Muriel Spark.) A similar desire to go beyond current book news and engage in more substantive commentary about current fiction underlies the Litblog Co-op's week-long discussions of selected small-press books and less-recognized writers. A number of film blogs have been participating in "blogathons" on specified topics, which generally result in lively and informative mini-essays. (A guide to the latest of these blogathons can be found here.) Whatever this kind of blog discourse may lack in conventional "rigor" is certainly balanced out by its immediacy and its enthusiasm.

But Adam seems most of all to be disillusioned by the comment threads that develop on some blogs, threads that devolve into "blogfights" and debates that "go nowhere." This has become a fairly common complaint. The blogosphere provides "scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional 'live audience' quickly conspire to create a 'perfect storm' of perpetual bickering." According to Alan Jacobs, "On many blogs the comments to a given post are 'closed' after a few days—no one is allowed to make further comments—usually because that helps to prevent the accumulation of comment spam, but also because so many threads degenerate into name-calling that the blog administrator has to shoo the belligerents along to another venue. And in any case both the blogger and the commenters have moved along to other posts, other ideas, other conversations." In general, it would seem, the comment space on weblogs has come to be seen as a place for partisan piling-on, where the converted speak to the converted, or else a kind of intellectual no-man's land, which the innocent traveller looking for disinterested debate enters at his/her peril.

I have never really understood what seems to me an obsession with comments among some bloggers. On the one hand, attracting comments is seen as a measure of a particular post's success, even of a blog's success on the whole. On the other, there is much lamentation when the comment count does indeed begin to climb but the tenor of the thread descends into vituperation and insult. I like receiving thoughtful comments on my own posts as much as anybody, but I don't consider a post a failure (whatever that might mean) if no comments ensue. Indeed, most of us are by now undoubtedly aware of this fairly consistent phenomenon: A short, trenchant if not particularly thought-out post receives numerous, equally trenchant comments, while a longer, more carefully developed post draws distressingly few. But this is really a problem only if you think "blogging" should be confined to the first kind of post and the second is something else--something that should have instead sought out those "other spaces for other things" that Adam refers to at the end of his post. Although presumably these are the very sort of blog posts that produces the "blogfights" of which Adam disapproves. Why then rule out of court the very possibility that blogs might aspire to something more substantive, even if they don't make so much use of their comment functions?

Ultimately, what "can be done in a blog post" is whatever it and its author want it to do. For now, most readers of blogs still prefer that a post remain reasonably brief and not otherwise the kind of discourse more profitably read in print. But to me this is mainly a matter of expediency: The portability of print is still an advantage, and that mode of reading that occurs in the proverbial easychair or the library nook does still have its pleasures. And these preferences may change, may already be changing. If readers do become fatigued with the "ephemeral," rapid-fire style of blogging, is the alternative simply to pronouce blogs deceased because only that style counts as blogging to begin with, or is it to explore the possibilites of a quieter, less anxious style? Perhaps not picking a blogfight is the best way to avoid it. Perhaps the real alternative to the cumbersome processes of academic publishing, which place too little value on novelty and spontaneity, and to the distance from readers imposed by print publication is not the kind of call-and-reponse weblog post that leads to the impulsive quarrels to which Adam Kotsko rightly objects but a style of webwriting that seeks to illuminate rather than provoke, that isn't defined by the number of comments it invites but remains open to critical dialogue nevertheless. (Because it does occur online, it would inevitably be subject to the commentary-through-linkage that is actually superior to the print conventions of citation and critique, precisely because of its own expediency.) If this is "conversation," so be it, but ultimately all forms of inquiry have to be conversational in this way, or they're not very scholarly in the first place.