When the New Criticism was at its height in the postwar period, a lotta intellectual energy was devoted to dispelling belles lettres and its tiresome construction of the author as the constant reference point for the work. In choosing between life and the work, the New Criticism robustly chose the work, and purged fantasies of authorial intention as much as they could. The Eliotic impersonality of the author was the ideal. What did the text say? That was the question. Not: what did the author want?
Yet, concurrently with the feverish coldness of the cult of impersonality, outside of academia, celebrity culture was moving in precisely the opposite direction. Just as the actor in a movie overshadowed the character he or she is playing (so that we often speak of Humphrey Bogart in x movie or Marilyn Monroe in y movie with little regard for the names of the characters in x or y movie), so, too, the publicity machine was rolling out countless personal facts and quirks about authors.
Joseph Roth, in 1929, was already writing about this. In an essay entitled “The Private Life”, Roth wrote: “For some years I have struggled, vainly, not to know about the private life of contemporary authors.”
For Roth, the fortress of privacy around the individual was being dissolved in the twentieth century by the medias in which we all bathe. He spots, in the discussion of authors, the kind of stereotypical motifs that introduce us to the lives of actors or politicians:
“Thus, for example, the important author Döblin, whose public influence is without doubt interesting enough, almost never introduced in regards to his books without the assertion that begins: he is a neurologist and practices in the North of Berlin. The repulsive and childish arrogance of the intrusive writing, who is so “well informed”, is everywhere unconstrained. The writer has to announce it – and even, at each occasion, with a foolish, joyful cry: aha! I knew it! A worker’s doctor in the North – thus diminishing the meaning of the author just as much as he devalues his necessary distance from the public. Compared to this barbarism, the mockable efforts of an eager Germanist to uncover superfluous trivialities out of the private life of his object of study are gestures of an aristocratic delicatesse.”
We could bookend the literary culture of modernism by putting, on one side, the impersonal artist of the New Critics, and on the other side, the Life magazine adoring portraits of authors. The Hemingways and Scott Fitzgeralds, who, in the American context, are the celebrity authors par excellence, stars in the Hollywood mold. They played themselves and they wrote. But what they wrote was only who they were.
Roth was of course concerned about literature, but not just literature. His notion was that the private life, with all its splendours and miseries, was being de-formed by being subject to the thousandfold pokings of the media, businesses, and the state. The harm in this for literature, to Roth, was self-evident: “for it has already become customary to view the writer a such a priori in terms of his private life.”
Live by the buzz, die by the buzz.
In this period, the late twenties and early thirties, Roth was withdrawing from his earlier fellow traveling sentiments and trying to find a politics to stand on against the Nazis and the Stalinists. This was his vector. Out of the loss of the private life, Roth foresaw the loss of the meaning of life entirely.;
“Nothing makes an author hotter than his quality as an “eyewitness” of the events that he is treating. Since some time, book reviewers have loved to give particular praise to those books which aren’t books – meaning: the lack of a literary quality qualifies as a plus. Then they pull out the slogan: This book is more than a novel! It is a piece of life!
What does that mean? More than a novel?
Within literature a piece of life only receives value when it has been given a worthy form. An unformed “piece of life” is not more than a novel, but less: it is nothing, it doesn’t even come into the picture. Or one begins to publish the written correspondence of paramilitary murders… They are so neat, round, juicy pieces of life! And literature has ceased to exist.”
No comments:
Post a Comment