Lennon, Brian. "Sentimental Education." Bookforum, Summer 2004: 31-34. (Editorial retitle of "Critique and No Time")

(A response to Sven Birkerts's "Critical Condition," in Bookforum's Spring 2004 issue.)

Reproduced here in the form in which I originally submitted it for publication, along with some alterations in word choice and phrasing.

Critique and No Time
Brian Lennon

In 2000, Sven Birkerts, acting as judge, chose the anonymously submitted manuscript of my City: An Essay for a genre award in "creative nonfiction"---ugly phrase that it is---given by the Associated Writing Programs, which guaranteed subsequent publication by the University of Georgia Press. Birkerts both praised the book privately and wrote a generous citation for use in jacket copy and so on---which initially surprised me, and still surprises some who come across the book, for two reasons. First, because on a first look, City might seem a textbook case of the postmodern and the academic as corruptions of literature, at least in the journalistic senses of all these buzz-words, and Birkerts has a reputation for strongly disliking such things. Secondly, because I was at the time working also (though not necessarily where he might have noticed me, or disagreed, or even cared one way or the other) as a kind of new media critic and scholar in a context where Birkerts was a favorite straw man because of his elegies for book culture. That context had almost nothing to do with my book, which I had written, so to speak, sitting at a different desk (almost---the book had begun as a hypertext, then evolved backward); yet the whole thing sharpened my discomfort at living in two separate worlds where my "work" was concerned. It embarrassed me, in a way, to have been treated with generosity when I, having wandered by chance into Birkerts's own domain, might well have been made of straw myself.

Though it has attracted by now many more serious thinkers, new media criticism for the most part interests me only in the dystopian mode in which I have always tried to practice it. And this is not because I came around to Birkerts's early position on the computerization of culture (from which he has recently distanced himself anyway). Nor is it necessarily because I can join him in the resignation with which he here treats the separate topic of the decline of belletrism and the public intellectual in American culture. I find, in fact, that while I now feel closer to Birkerts's general view of things (in so far as I've understood it) than I ever have before, that drift has come about precisely---ironically, I would say, but for his words on the subject---through that academic training which figures as one kind of bugbear in his essay, and specifically in an affinity for its wildest excess, what Birkerts calls "theory."

City was written as I passed (as a student) through a well-regarded M.F.A. program in creative writing, emerging pretty well disgusted with the fundamental lack of interest in reading demonstrated by many of my colleagues. (I mean my fellow degree candidates.) The book is an often pedantic attempt to correct the forgetting of the old literary form of the essay by blasting apart the newer commercial form of the memoir, and when I look at it now, having long since removed myself from those sources of irritation, I sometimes wonder how I could have been so taken with so petty (and obviously narcissistic) a polemic. But such embarrassingly tiny hostilities are part of the life of critique, the polemical approach that overlaps, but doesn't always coincide with aesthetic criticism. My disgust with writers who were so poorly read propelled me straight into academic training, where I have, to be sure, found scholars who are also poorly read, or who are well-read but read poorly---but with nothing like the unapologetic blankness, or the assertion of idiot savant privilege, I encountered in the writing program.

An autodidact like Birkerts in a way has the best of both worlds, though I'm sure he'd admit his position brings its own stresses. One educates oneself freely, following one's nose, high above the merely reproductive conditioning of graduate school. I can only admire Birkerts for having forced this to happen, because when I tried it myself, I found it impossible. I was in New York, which may have been most of the problem, as has occurred to me since when living in other parts of the United States. Be that as it may, I simply found it impossible to read as much as I wanted to, or to read deeply at all, while working day jobs, though my day jobs were always book-related. I certainly couldn't do it while stocking shelves after college at the Shakespeare & Company branch on the Upper West Side (long since terminated by a Barnes & Noble), since they paid only $4.25 per hour, the minimum wage, and the rent for my studio apartment at Broadway and 106th Street in 1993 was $550. And I couldn't do it in an entry-level publishing job, where, similarly long hours aside, the depressing daily grind of book economics (at a university press, just then losing its subsidies) left me wanting to do little more than watch TV at night or drink in a bar with all the other slaves of New York.

The true pathos of the creative writing programs (and this is why I think they have an inverted political value) is that they are filled with aspirants partly in flight from something---growth and profit-obsessed American business culture---without necessarily being fully in flight toward something: not toward a knowledge of literature, either low or high, historical or contemporary, and sometimes, as I've said, not even really toward reading at all. The dream, particularly in the fiction and nonfiction divisions of such programs, tends to be one or another variation on winning the lottery, on never having to work again in one's life, except in the euphemistic sense with which an actor paid millions of dollars to act in a film might refer to "my work." It is another version of the dream of rock stardom: to escape and live above it all, the measly two weeks of vacation per year, the being bossed around all your life or else having to plant a knife in someone else's back to get a leg up. It's a selfish dream, but viewed dialectically, it reveals an intense antipathy to overwork and to meaningless work in our culture. Who wouldn't want to escape? Astonished by the success of Cold Mountain, pressured intensely for unreasonable rates of return on the new literary market, and supplied with books written by bright twenty-year-olds who only rarely have any literary consciousness or sense of their heritage (though neither is required simply to write well), even literary publishing now cultivates that dream. And the writing programs, geared to literary writing, are a "cash cow" for the universities! It turns in a circle.

It's appalling how many Americans who can read, including many writers of books, seem to read mainly and merely from enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a minor form of love, of course, and there couldn't be literature at all without its elective affinities; but I'd say that while the academic study of literature tends to squash enthusiasm under intellect, the generalism defined by reaction to academia preserves the injustice while merely changing its direction: the head-heart dilemma which Americans, heir to a pragmatic and utilitarian, if also obscenely wasteful national culture, feel a deep need to resolve by valorizing one of its terms. What you have then, are academic critics reading schematically, through the complex strictures of professional and historical authority, while, true autodidacts excepted, general literary readers read laterally, according to what they like and dislike or what they hear others like and dislike. If it isn't mere happy boosterism, a critical judgment from a reader who reads, but hasn't read much, tends to be anxious and irritable, a confrontation with the inadequacy of his own reading and thus a familiar species of self-definition through rejection: I don't like realism, I don't like experimentalism, and so on. But not even the dumbest reader of the blockbuster memoirs of the 1990s, those objects of my early polemical rage, had never, ever heard of Shakespeare, and wasn't pursued even in the vaguest sense, while reading, by the discomfort of reading, which always has to do with what you haven't read yet. When I think back on my years as a failed autodidact, I remember mainly my isolation, reading at random both for pleasure and out of a dim sense of what was important, but never really why, or how I would ever feel comfortable deciding these things for myself. To be sure, the remedies for this intellectual isolation offered by academic training are often dubious; but the training itself conditions a live mind to question the training, and that is intended. I'm saying that academic training, if it succeeds (and it succeeds only sometimes) produces an autodidact.

My point is also that there is no time for reading in most non-academic American lives. I don't mean being able to get through a book a week, which even those working long hours can probably manage; I mean being able to get through a book in a day, or parts of three or four or five books in a day, if you need to. More importantly, I mean acquiring a feel for current debates in philosophy, political theory (across the spectrum), economics, and the physical and other social sciences, as well as the arts and arts criticism---and in at least one or two other major national or regional contexts (Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America) in addition to one's own. This requires toll-free access to many books and periodicals simultaneously, so that buyer's remorse and other commodity fetishes don't block reading. You need, in other words, to be able rapidly to sift through possibly useful reading material and decide whether to read it now, read it later, or not read it at all, without being restricted by what you can spend to obtain it or by the likelihood of ever finding it again. Aside from independent wealth, only a library---and almost always, only a university library---can offer this. (The Web, even as a university gateway, is still but a tiny supplement.) The point is not to achieve perfect expertise here (I certainly haven't) so much as actively to want to achieve it, to accept responsibility for it as a goal, and to work toward it gradually and consistently, by taking back one's time.

I won't speak of the independently wealthy, since anyway they are rarer among aspiring writers (and editors, agents, and so on) than they once were. In the United States, the world's richest nation, people work the longest hours of any industrialized population, and even in the occupations of the knowledge economy, even in its apparently marginal sectors like literary publishing, long working hours and the stress of working under demands for greater and greater return combine to kill precisely the time---not an absolute, but a relative leisure time---that reading a book requires. The dirty secret of the creative writing programs is that many who pass through them find no time to write, either, because despite the promise of time to write, they usually end up working full time in one form or combination or another. Even when they do find time to write (and some do), there's little time left for reading, and, perhaps more importantly, very little incentive to read. (Except regarding the work of one's mentors, perhaps---and sometimes not even that!)

The candidate for a doctoral degree in literature or a related humanities field, by contrast (and despite identical economic pressures), simply cannot complete that degree without presenting and defending conclusive proof of some wide-ranging, interdisciplinary and systematic habit of reading, in two forms: the comprehensive reading examination and the monograph dissertation. The substantial amount of time for reading which must somehow be shoehorned out of each passing week in order to accomplish these feats is, as I think of it, time nobly stolen, in which undoing some of one's institutional brainwashing, as well as recovering from the endless petty humiliations of life in a bureaucracy controlled by remote corporate bodies, becomes possible. This is dead private time, and it is fundamentally different from the dead public time of corporate life lived under direct or indirect surveillance, as those writing a novel "under the desk" right now, at every publishing house in New York, might agree if you asked.

Yes, there have always been those who produced literature "on the job" anyway (T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens are just three famous examples from a bygone and greater age). It's also important to see that the cost of this private dead time, in the university, is increasingly passed on to the unfunded graduate students or adjunct faculty among one's colleagues, who work longer hours---on the assembly line of remedial composition, for example---so that others have the leisure to read. The opportunity I describe here, to undergo academic training not merely in escape from, but also in active critique of excess and empty work, is merely a window of opportunity, which will shut as soon as the instrumental logic of the investor can shut it, and as such it already expresses a class conflict between professionalized and proletarianized teachers at American universities. It would be foolish, furthermore, to dispute that what Birkerts calls the "vast influence systems of academia on the one hand and entertainment media on the other" encroach equally, in a quantitative sense (if such a determination could be made) on his literature-with-a-capital-L, and that they contribute equally to Literature's decline. It's not, however, obvious that both systems operate in identical fashion, at least for the moment---or that the rise (and fall) of what Birkerts calls "theory" represents their convergence. In my view, "theory" stands for an intervention into American culture that was and is ultimately on Birkerts's side.

"Postmodern" and its variants are some of the most severely abused words in both popular and literary journalism in the United States. It's possible that the word may have been used as early as the 1870s, as a stand-in for post-Impressionism in painting, and it was in intermittent use throughout the mid-twentieth century in a variety of different contexts. But the sense of the "postmodern" in American popular and literary journalism today, as well as in quasi-academic writing, which is how Birkerts uses it, is more or less directly handed down from a particular series of debates, with which most journalists rarely seem to have any familiarity, in American universities during the 1980s.

In these debates an historical break or turn, occurring sometime in the early 1970s and marking a new phase in the development of capitalism and American business culture, was both proposed and contested. "Late" or computerized or fully mass-mediated capitalism, it was suggested, was a system of extreme flexibility and vast powers of adaptation and incorporation, whose effect on literature, among other injustices, was to close the book on the modernist culture of critique, by absorbing the effects of that critique more rapidly than ever before and effectively selling it back to itself. In the postmodern era, you cannot in earnest say something like, Make it new!, because the blandly affirmative mass culture that slogan rejects not only takes no offense, but eagerly incorporates the slogan, redeploying it on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker without further delay. The only alternative to a kind of white economy of total silence, then, lies in the ironic mode: undermining one's own sincerity in advance, so as not to be constantly parodied in it.

The "postmodernism debates" of the 1980s pitted this sociological hypothesis, in my opinion the strong one, against another and in my opinion much weaker hypothesis. If such a break or turn has occurred, says the sociological hypothesis, it likely involves linked changes in the economic and cultural realms. (These links are not necessarily deterministic in either direction.) The weak hypothesis, on the other hand, is that postmodernism is or was a profoundly good or evil new aesthetic posture, arising spontaneously as an evolution of sensibility, or an anxiety of influence in the arts, or generalized cultural decadence. This is the notion that seeped out into popular and literary journalism, in an information-drenched sector where people who write all the time nevertheless have very little time to read, and where it still lives, as the product of a seemingly never-ending game of telephone, to this day. (It has been some years, meanwhile, since anyone has published in the United States an influential academic monograph on the "postmodern" or its variants, and the debate is considered pretty well done with. In both the humanities and the social sciences, discussion of the same issues continues in a debate about "globalization," with increased emphasis on the economic.) If I had to define it myself, I would say that "postmodernism" is in fact this very tendency, itself, to reduce social change understood as both economic and cultural to a question of aesthetic choice, as though artists and humanities professors initiate great rippling shifts in a culture through the power of sheer caprice. And I would suppose that Birkerts, if he actually liked my book, and didn't merely hate it less than the rest, knew quite well that it was not an example of the "postmodern"---and that one's surprise at his choice is then deeply uncharitable.

Now, "theory"---which is not the same thing as the postmodern, but which was at the zenith of its popularity as the postmodernism debates raged---is a similarly evacuated term. But that Jacques Derrida is the first name in Birkerts's analphabetic list of invaders reflects the general and generally correct sense that theory, in Birkerts's quasi-academic use of the term, means the American reception of Derrida's philosophical writings, first in academic literary criticism and subsequently in the social sciences. To put it briefly and reductively: Derrida, building on a long line of influences of his own---and not at all coming out of nowhere, as many would prefer to believe---understood the writing of philosophy as that aspect of philosophy that philosophy cannot acknowledge, at the cost of no longer being philosophy: of being merely the most sophisticated type of personal writing, an "involuntary and unconscious personal confession," as Nietzsche put it. Derrida's attack on philosophy is nothing if not belletristic, in the common sense, in its insistence on equal emphasis and importance for style and for the effects of style on subject matter and vice versa in any and all kinds of writing, including philosophy. It is thus at one level an irony in the pre-postmodern sense of the word---a discovered, rather than manipulated incongruity between expectation and outcome---that Birkerts insists on theory as a destroyer of American belletrism. (To be fair: Birkerts does write later in his essay of flight or migration into theory, which at least preserves the image of a common cause; elsewhere and earlier, however, he understands it as encroachment or even colonization, which defines an antagonism.) Derrida's thinking was not imported as a weapon in the battle between belletristic academics or public intellectuals and a new breed of ultra-specialized academic literary critics, but rather as part of a stand taken against the spread of American business culture within the university, from within the university, at a time when Marxism, even in some of its most flexible modifications, was widely regarded as moribund. Theory was not the product of internal power struggles within the humanities disciplines, as is often supposed. Nor was it an attempt by the humanities to delegitimate the hard sciences and steal some of their greater prestige. It was, rather, as Christopher Newfield argues persuasively in a recent exchange with John Guillory in the journal Critical Inquiry, part of an attempt to defend knowledge of all kinds---humanist and scientific, generalist and specialized---from "optimization" by the newly flexible and adaptive postmodern culture of American business, the executive and managerial sectors of which had successfully outmaneuvered private-sector labor unionism, with consequences for (among other things) the average length of the American working day. The "culture wars" of that era, which at their most violent moments always mobilized those outside the academy against those within it, were fought as much over the resented leisure time of academics, their "not doing anything useful," as over the validity of universal epistemological categories.

Belletrists and public intellectuals were never excluded positions here, except through the degeneration of this gesture---accomplished partly by theory's own bad practice, and partly in the counterattack of belletrists both inside and outside the academy, who mistook attacks on an instrumental logic stressing utility for attacks on the timeless categories---humanity, moral seriousness, and so on---through which they justified their own quite gloriously "useless" undertakings. The anti-humanist emphasis in theory, which was meant to get around the revolving binary of nature versus culture, is in my view by far its least consequential aspect. To the extent that by and large, theory became a fashion, and provoked bitter denunciations from suddenly unfashionable humanists, sparking a kind of sectarian intellectual warfare, the outcome of the whole thing, and its afterlife as it is still with us, is in some ways only to be regretted. It is nevertheless one of the shortcomings of the belletristic approach that it resists, and ever more strenuously under the pressure of theory treated merely as insidious fashion, a vision of precisely that "whole systemic ecology of things" to which Birkerts refers, and thus sees an enemy in its potential ally and advocate.

This brings me to the question of reviewing, Birkerts's central concern here. I won't comment on the British tradition of the hatchet job, about which I'm simply not well informed---but which I can only imagine would bear both similarities and differences to its American version as it appears in the controversy over Dale Peck's attack reviews. The idea that even literary publishing is, in the common sense of the term, a business is one thing, and within the frame of my argument here it can be accepted without controversy. The idea that publishing must be a business driven by a particular vision of business, that is, business whose prime or even only objective is profit-driven growth and expansion, is another thing altogether. I myself reviewed new fiction (and, later and less often, volumes of poetry) monthly in The Boston Book Review, Boston Review, and similar venues, along with a few newspapers and trade journals, roughly from 1996 to 2000. I emulated the older essayistic (if not necessarily therefore belletristic) mode which I admired then, and which I still both admire and attempt to practice, and of which Birkerts's reviews are also models. Yet from all those reviews, both the generous and the splenetic (forty in four years), aside from a few thank-yous (which wasn't at all the point of writing them) absolutely nothing, really, has ever come. I felt (I still feel) as Birkerts does now. No one cared. We had lost the center. For the most part, writers I reviewed didn't respond to anything I wrote about them, good or bad. I can't recall, either, ever reviewing a book by anyone who was also an active reviewer known to me. I'd heard of writers who never read their reviews, as George W. Bush never reads newspapers; I had the sense that the writer was out there somewhere, but mostly worried, if worried at all, over whether the review would be good or bad, with possible consequences for sales or reputation, and not why or how it might be good or bad, with consequences for the state of the art or the general culture in which he or she had made this offer of participation, this book. Did anyone really read the review then? Did even my own editor read it? Did the marketing reps who blurbed the reviews (and misspelled my name underneath) read them? Did only rival book reviewers (whoever they might have been) read them? In the end, book reviewing didn't seem part of anything I could really call "work," in either sense of the private and cumulative or the public and collaborative. Book reviewing was another monologue in the literary life, no different from writing the books themselves, but with far less prestige. It was time which I withdrew from my life, without any chance of ever getting it back---the way that you do get it back, in a way, when someone talks back to you, even a little. No one was even moved to respond to my occasional, lonely outburst of "snark."

I mean there was absolutely no evidence, even negative evidence, of a collective project, no sign of a public dialogue or debate, in any sense I could understand as familiar to me. I found that collective project and that public debate only later, in the academy---though I can picture those whose minds are made up shaking their heads already. For me it was as though the world had been turned inside out. Academic training is training in both wide reading and considered response, and it takes place in a context where responsibility and reciprocity are both expected and enforced. Not to have read the responses to one's article in a journal, or the reviews of one's book---and not either to defend oneself against attack, or to concede the attack's merits---is regarded (and punished) as a failure of responsibility, not affirmed as the protection of one's precious writing talent. Is every academic project, every such debate, so awake and alive? No. Is it often faked, fabricated, superfluous, irrelevant, ivory-tower? Yes. But academics do read, and they do read each other, and respond to one other's writing. They are not, most of them, writing all the time, or talking about writing, or being interviewed about their feelings about writing, or about what kinds of writing implements they use, and they are not teaching writing, which consists of still more sitting around talking about writing. (Though I do believe more attention to writing might usefully corporealize "hard" academic culture, just as more academic training among writers might intellectualize "soft" writerly culture.) Most of the academic job is reading. A review of a scholarly book in a scholarly journal is the beginning of a discussion of that book, rather than a notice of its publication or an attempt to boost or damage its sales, because in all likelihood, the book has already sold as many copies as it ever will---to libraries (another category of institution under assault for its "profligacy").

I once heard the poet Lyn Hejinian speak of her intellectually formative years in the San Francisco of the 1970s, a time when, as she told it, she and her circle of fellow writers and editors in the small press "explosion" of that era found it comparatively easy to scrape by working part time jobs, without other sources of funding (few, if any, had academic affiliations then, though many have accepted them since) and to use their free time not only to write, and to edit their own journals and publish their own books, but also to read widely in literary and political theory, the Russian Formalist poetics of Viktor Shklovsky and the Marxist cultural theory of Nicos Poulantzas becoming particularly strong influences. I recall her describing the urgency with which the mention of a contemporary thinker she hadn't yet read spurred her to get hold of the work immediately and see for herself what it had to say---and the sense of a collective intellectual as well as creative project embodied in this urgency.

It's possible, of course, that these were idealized recollections. I nevertheless remember thinking at the time (this was 1997 or 1998) that such a life can't be lived today in San Francisco and certainly not in New York, unless possibly in the fringe squatter communities of work and rent refusal. And when the small press and poetry renaissance of the 1990s started attracting commentary on the state of the art, around the turn of the millennium, Hejinian's anecdotes returned to me. Were the new small press autonomists, I wondered, taking positions on the future of democracy, liberalism, and socialism, and on the place of the United States in the world, as well as on the stakes of their own aesthetic heritage? Did they read Negri and Hardt? Laclau and Mouffe? Balibar, Agamben, Zizek? Butler, Fraser, Cornell? Nussbaum? West, Dawson, Crouch, Gates, Carter? Patricia Williams? Huntington and Fukuyama? Spivak and Said? Would they at least be equipped to dispute the claim that these are (some of) the key public intellectuals of our moment---some of them American, some of them merely read in America? Did they have time to read? Given that there will always be autodidacts, who avoid the university out of political will or simply because they can teach themselves better, I still wonder how many of them can be left out there, these days. And we can locate the major fault line in the contemporary scene by watching who merely rolls her eyes at this point and pronounces my sentence "name-dropping"---which of course it must be if what these names represent remains inaccessible.

My belletristic book reviews never started a discussion that I'm aware of. That may be no one's fault but my own, on myriad grounds. Perhaps I wrote in too academic a style---though this is merely more irony. Perhaps I wasn't reviewing where I would be widely read. I certainly wasn't well-connected, and I was definitely lazy about trying to bark my way into the papers of record. When I wrote a hatchet job, very early on, it was out of a sense, which came from my own relative marginalization, that what I had to evaluate was not only the success of the writing on its own terms---as much as I could see them---but also this particular book's desserts to Big Publishing, to the potential distribution and promotion power (if it choose to be invoked) of a New York publisher. Bad writing should yield to good on the shelves, it seemed to me, not because bad writing shouldn't exist at all, there being nothing intrinsically wrong with bad writing. Bad writing should yield space on the shelves, rather, because the shelves are so short, and this is because they hold only books that, it is hoped, will grow rapidly, preferably instantaneously, and generate a certain level of profit which can be reinvested elsewhere immediately. It was unfair that bad writing win in competition, for such artificially restricted resources, with good. And there was a vanishing point there, eventually, where the history of this restriction of resources grew more interesting in itself than all but a very few novels and books of poems I might be asked to review.

The economic problem is acknowledged in Birkerts's essay, but it is implicitly less important than the bad free choice made by those fleeing into theory, ostensibly as a way of avoiding the problem. Birkerts senses quite correctly that there's a deeper connection there. But he seems reluctant to grant that the economic problem is entwined with the cultural problem to a extent that might require (or even just invite) some specialized training to evaluate in its systemic or ecological dimensions, some synthesis of literature and literary criticism with sociology, economics, and political theory, and that that synthesis might violate the stylistic and methodical norms of belletrism for good as well as bad reasons. Under the obligation to respond, which for better or worse has migrated to the academy, belletristic criticism has the option also to become critique, one mode of which is polemic. The contemporary attack review is a contamination---be it accidental, or the product of sabotage---of the promotional idiom by polemic: a kind of leakage of political talk into the discourse of consumer choice. And polemic has a long tradition, albeit one manifestly unfamiliar to Americans, in the sociological analysis of culture. The fantastic talent for verbal abuse that makes a hatchet job prevents those hypnotized by its excesses from seeing that negativity serves a kind of symbolic justice, when it succeeds, by pointing up the laziness of established authors who become fixtures in a system of artificially restricted wealth.

Objections to gratuitously negative reviews might be one form of this hypnosis, a weak response to the poisonous wit and histrionic rage of polemic, especially when it is applied thoughtfully, with a project or dialogue in mind, and backed up by wide reading and hard thinking---all of which is highly intimidating. They might on the other hand be strong statements of exhaustion with polemic, with the futility of policing access to Big Publishing resources, or of ever changing the system's terms, or of changing them soon enough to do any good. When such objections are made by those who have tried in good faith to create alternatives to Big Publishing, and especially where they have succeeded (though the question isn't automatically closed there), I think they're valid and deserve to be taken seriously. Attack reviews can deflate promotion that isn't deserved, and punish an already highly rewarded author for complacency, for hogging scant resources when there are so many hungry barbarians at the gates---and they can help to punish a publisher for continuing to bank on someone who really doesn't intend to work hard anymore. In the current system, however, in which literary publishing houses come under direction by media conglomerates, it's not at all clear that this punitive deflation goes to the source. Even if attack reviews help an undeservingly heavily promoted book to flop, and its publisher to suffer financial loss there, the publisher, under no less coercion than before, is more likely to look to recoup the loss in a quick flash---through even more vigorous promotion for the author's next, equally mediocre book, or through the "discovery" of an untainted new prodigy with whom to bulldoze the market (thus instigating more attack reviews)---than it is likely, as it were, to "come to its senses." There are larger forces at work here. The book reviewer is more or less helpless against them.

All of which, in reasoning on both sides of the issue, is not at all a polemical, but is rather a wishy-washy, liberal thing to say: and I've perhaps wandered afield of what either Birkerts or Dale Peck might understand as his own project. I do think we need a renaissance in American letters, along precisely the lines Birkerts imagines. I don't think American novelists will forge it on their own, since in the United States, in marked contrast with most of the rest of the world, the novelist understands herself instinctively and exclusively as an entertainer---our favorite word is "storyteller"---and not as an intellectual, not even at the same time as she might be an entertainer. I don't think that what remains of American belletrism (in which I would include our contemporary poetry, the low commercial appeal of which makes poets less hostile to teaching, if not to theory) can do it, either, since it remains locked in silent combat with specters of theory and the academy, and demonstrably ignorant of the furious debate about specialization and generalism inside it. If it comes, I think the next generation of public intellectuals will have to be breakouts from the academy, or even just those who pass through it on their way somewhere else, rather than those whose identity is formed on rejecting it. Many, if certainly not all writers' objections to the rampages of the Bush administration thus far---to take a broader view of the problem---lack teeth, because they lack both the political vision and the intellectual will that comes from wide reading, which, apart from independent wealth, only academic training can now (and but temporarily) offer in a world of no time. At best, they reproduce the carnival element of street protest, raising consciousness and getting the crowd engaged---all of which is important and necessary. But for a writer of books, who might reasonably be expected also to read books---and not just some books, books like her own, but potentially all books---and to bring the insights of that infinity of books to her situation in the world, this is self-infantilization. Belletristic attacks on "theory" serve only to reinforce our easy American preference for doing over thinking, for doing the dancing, instead of watching the dance---because we're so free.

--end--