I don't know what this means

Douglas Coupland is one of those pattern transmitters who lets the plot burble along so lightly that we never lose track of what the novel is really trying to tell us. Unfortunately, the manifest content sometimes becomes so perfunctory that the latent content is likely to be communicated only to those readers whose mental lives are already permeated with the questions. Everyone reads according to his or her permanent hidden prejudice. And some write to be deliberately difficult in terms of verb and adjective choice.

As I remark often, Hugh kenner observes in The Pound Era that cultural information is lost when people no longer find any way of relating it to their present interests or concerns sufficiently to deem it worth preserving. (Hence the need for duty- and rule-bound archivists and practitioners of LOCKSS.)

Ezra Pound did a decent job of refurbishing neglected bits of antiquity for the edgier subcultures of the world of 1909, and Thomas Pynchon did likewise for 1966.

The novelists and poets of 2010 seem to be in more of a literary-quality disconnect, in that large bodies of cultural information are being transmitted only by novelists and poets who will never be ranked with Pound or Pynchon. Of course, there are reams of novels and poems from all eras that mediate essential cultural information—but unfortunately in vehicles that are neither aesthetically successful or comprehensible to a reader. These become the subjects of doctoral dissertations.

Blog posts are even more unsuccessful in that the writer presupposes that the reader already shares the context that makes the cultural pattern interesting. This is so whether the cultural pattern is the particular arrangement of a kitten's face, the quest for a really good King's Cake recipe, or the question of who Truffaut's camera crew was on Day for Night (or who wrote the English subtitles on the theatrical release).

Most of my posts excel in being of interst only to someone who has asked the same question already. I seldom bother to explain what the question is. More often, I am fishing to find out if anyone else has ever asked the question that is not being articulated. I got a surprise "aha" response to one of my posts recently, though you will have to guess which one.

Another failure, too( Read more... )

Another failure( : )

[It was actually the fourth day of Christmas; trust local classical-music broadcasters to get it wrong.]

For the record, I also titled my dissertation to make it as effectively useless to keyword searchers as possible, so I have been doing this for a very long time.

I'm intrigued by the degree to which topics that forty years ago were fairly arcane have now become so commonplace as to be almost boring. Nobody needs to write essays titled "The Narrative Quality of Experience" or popularizing books called Story-Shaped World when Douglas Coupland's Generation A begins with the basic assertion that we tell stories in order to make sense of our lives, and builds on it from there. (This view, which was not original even forty years ago, had been previously expressed by many others in the intervening years, including John Crowley.)

Of course, Coupland, having long since expressed his concerns about meaning and the future of "the first generation raised without religion," was already deep in the territory explored by Sam Keen in "Reflections on a Peach-Seed Monkey: Storytelling and the Death of God," but since Keen wandered off in some troubling directions after that, one wonders where Coupland might be going. (I know, I should look at the Wikipedia entry. And I shall.)

Coupland being the sort of flat-footed writer that he is (though I have missed all of his genuinely popular books of recent years, having tuned out after Life After God), when we reach the point at which he takes his inspiration from the Decameron we—or I, anyway—fear the worst. This is not going to be the interlocking stories of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, but it is possible it is not going to be fun.

However, the storytelling moves quickly, and it turns out to parallel my preoccupations. And the preoccupations of a good many other people. As near-future sci-fi, it probably is not very good. As an imaginative extension of people's personal experience, it's faintly disturbing. Not having read JPod or Microserfs, I have no idea whether this excursion into the turf staked out forty years ago by Doris Lessing is the logical extension of Coupland's recent fiction. Can some LJ friend enlighten me? I am reminded of when all my friends were reading The Four-Gated City, for which nothing in The Golden Notebook had prepared them.

I don't think I can defend Coupland on literary grounds (as you know, I read novels for sociological reasons, even if I can produce a rigorous formal analysis on demand) but I am really, really wondering about these parallel books about stories and their discontents, or ours. (I have a much more recent book in mind that I may actually have discussed in this journal, though I can also conceive of why I might never have posted my opinions. For once, I wish I were less addicted to making my thoughts difficult to websearch except when I specifically want them to be websearched.)