Falling Into You (Part One)

Let's talk about Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.

Author Carl Wilson's post at Powells.com probably serves as the best introduction.  Watch him go:

My book is a lab experiment in disguise, in which I was the rat, being exposed to various test conditions or stimuli that might help me understand how millions of people could be fans of Céline Dion while I and nearly everybody I'd ever met couldn't stand her. The test tubes and beakers of the experiment are, of course, tangents. It is a travelogue of sorts, as the subtitle says, "a journey to the end of taste."

It was a weird experience to spend months on end thinking about Céline Dion, but much of the time I wasn't thinking about Dion so much as about the chemical components, the relationships and accidents and outside forces, that go into liking or disliking music in the first place. The book was kind of a far-flung exercise in suspension of judgment, about putting off a thumbs-up or thumbs-down for awhile, and one of the advantages of doing that is that in the interim, you might end up somewhere else than where you bargained for.

Now, I've been looking forward to this entry in the 33 1/3 series, but I couldn't help but be a little disappointed at the finish.  And not because Wilson does a poor job--far from it.  In fact, he's charmingly earnest, intelligent, insightful, engaging--all those lovely things with which the finest jacket blurbs and pull quotes are stitched.

Yet I wanted something more than the Charmin-softness of his conclusion, which belongs to the "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" school of contemporary criticism (or perhaps somewhere between new historicism and reader response, if you like), and perhaps goes even a bit further in urging critics to reconsider voicing negative responses to--in this case--pieces of music.

Wilson journeys from loathing Céline Dion to, well, enjoying and appreciating her, if only on a limited basis.  With the scales now fallen from his eyes, he can see the appeal of Dion, and also why some people find critical darlings--such as, say, Pavement--annoying.

Which leads, ultimately, to this:

What would criticism be like if it were not foremost trying to persuade people to find the same things great? If it weren't about making cases for and against things? It wouldn't need to adopt the kind of "objective" (or self-consciously hip) tone that conceals the identity and social location of the author, the better to win you over. It might be more frank about the two-sidedness of the aesthetic encounter, and offer something more like a tour of an aesthetic experience, a travelogue, a memoir. More and more critics, in fact, are incorporating personal narrative into their work. Perhaps this is the benefit of the explosion of cultural judgment on the Internet, where millions of thumbs turn up and down daily: by rendering their traditional job of arbitration obsolete, it frees critics to find other ways of contemplating music.

When I say he reminds me of Heidi Julavits, I'm thinking of this in particular:

[S]nark is a reflexive disorder, whether those who employ it realize it or not; the pointlessness of fiction only comes back to suggest the pointlessness of its commentator. The real question then becomes: If you don’t believe in this, what do you believe in? What do you care about? What is the purpose of this destructive clear-cutting, if you don’t have anything to suggest in its place, save your own career advancement?

But it is rhetorical and useless to ask 'other people' what they believe. Maybe the only questions I have the right to ask is: What do I believe? What do I care about?

These thoughts are central to Wilson's argument, as well, and he goes on at length about cultural and social capital and the relationship between taste and power.  (No surprise to any of us, of course, that a teen punk's embrace of one kind of music or rejection of another is usually about little more than "career advancement"--aka cultural or social capital--or that we typically carry this poison on into adulthood, where it is found in LD-50-type levels in music critics.)

But I recoil from calls for soft subjectivity, wherein every critic's squishy feelings about pop music are equally valid. Or, worse, where overconsideration of the numberless factors that go into a silly pop song cause a literal paralysis of judgment.

Wilson, as you might expect, anticipates this:

You can't go on suspending judgment forever--that would be to forgo genuinely enjoying music, since you can't enjoy what you can't like.  But a more pluralistic criticism might put less stock in defending its choices and more in depicting its enjoyment, with all its messiness and private soul tremors--to show what it is like for me to like it, and invite you to compare. This kind of exchange takes place sometimes between critics on the internet, and it would be fascinating to have more dialogic criticism: here is my story, what is yours?

[...]

In these ways, the embarrassment of having a taste, the reflexive disgust of distinction, the strangeness of our strangeness to one another, might get the airing they need.

[...]

Obviously, reforming the way we talk about music is on its own no way to fix social injustice or the degradation of public life--but if we're going to be talking anyway, we could at least stop making matters worse.

Whereas Wilson seems w(e)ary of the negative critique, Julavits clears some space for it.  But it gets tricky:

To be perfectly clear—I am not espousing a feel-good, criticism-free climate, where all ambitious literary books receive special treatment, just because they’re “literary” (I acknowledge the dubiousness of the term)—I’m simply asking that we read between the lines, and see what value systems these reviews are really espousing. I imagine snarkiness has always been around, if not thriving then dormant, but I’d argue that the critics with staying power never employ it. Read Norman Podhoretz’s “A Dissent on Updike,” published in 1963, and you will see the way a controversial and rabid critical figure (a.k.a. someone not exactly known for his tact, his geniality, his loyalty, nor his consistency) upbraids Updike—yes, to a brutal and unsparing degree—but without ever slipping into pat, snarky, vacant dismissals. Wood is peevish, even occasionally mean, but never snarky. He is perpetually disappointed with “us,” (if you’re a writer, even one he’s never written about, you cannot help but feel you’ve let him down)—which is certainly better than being too jaded to be much more than dismissively irritated, too disdainful of fiction to do much more than toss clichéd disparagements around (“MFA thumbsuckers” another Sifton turn of phrase) and call it criticism. Wood makes people hopping mad, yes, but despite his grumbly excoriations there’s usually room for a dialogue with Woods, which indicates there’s something to wrangle over, i.e., his claims are based on a strongly-held (and felt) belief system, and he’s an intellectual, which means he likes to be forced to defend that belief system. The same could be said of Wilson, ditto McCarthy. Their every review, no matter how intentionally inflammatory, is underwritten by an attempt to sort out right and wrong, no matter how “wrong” they might have sometimes been, their enterprise is buttressed by an optimistic belief that fiction is still a worthwhile enterprise, even if it isn’t the cultural bigshot. The difference, I suspect, is that Podhoretz and Wilson and Wood and McCarthy and Whitehead and Mendelsohn know what they’re talking about (boy do they), thus the snark is unnecessary; snark, I suspect, is a scornful, knowing tone frequently employed to mask an actual lack of information about books.

Her rubric is problematic in that it a) venerates and excuses Public Intellectuals to an unacceptable degree--Podhoretz knows what he's talking about?!--and b) opens up a secondary industry of snark watchers, who must take it upon themselves to decide what constitutes the allowable dose of unsparing excoriation and what crosses over into snark.  This, unfortunately, leads us yet again into Wilson's personal hell, with the case-in-point being the Believer's own late, lamentable-but-not-lamented Snarkwatch, where informing on ideological undesirables was the order of the day and anti-snarkers flattened and bastardized "Be Strong and Read Hard!" principles to the point that they were practicing the same smug, exclusionary behavior that they wished to stamp out.  In other words, it became apparent, and uncomfortably so, that the Snarkwatchers' attempt to keep others from using criticism as an apparatus for exercising their own selfish ends was nothing but the selfsame exercise undertaken from their chosen vantage.

Wilson, for his part, seems to want to leave the task of shouting "I shit on Dante!" and other amateur unpleasantness to internet hacks--the internet being the sooty churning machine "where millions of thumbs turn up and down daily"--while professional critics can move on to do as he has done with A Journey to the End of Taste: closely examine, contextualize, and ultimately personalize works, with the goal of sparking dialog among critics ("here is my story, what is yours?").  Where this leaves the listener (or reader), however, is unclear and bears discussing.

This is meant to be a multi-part response to Wilson's book--which means no tidy wrap-up here, there, or anywhere, most likely--and among other things I believe it's worth addressing whether a more pluralistic, personalized criticism is going to address intellectual degradation or if, instead, it's more useful for both critics and readers of critical responses to learn how to more responsibly wield the tools of dissent and intelligently respond to dissent in its various forms.

Thus, your Tuesday ponderable is: Does snark kill people, or do people kill people?

(Also, if you're on the fence about Céline Dion, which seems unlikely, or even if you're not, do me the favor of contemplating the picture that accompanies this article.)

More to come.

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