Does the Internet Make Historians Obsolete?

A friend passed along a link to an interesting essay from last weekend’s New York Times Book Review, in which David Frum ostensibly reviews Right Star Rising, a book about American politics in the 1970s, but ultimately has a broader philosophical argument about historiography:

“The facts are accurate, the writing is clear and the point of view is not tendentious. Once upon a time, such a book might have been useful to somebody. But the question it raises—and it’s not a question about this book alone—is: What’s the point of this kind of history in the age of the Internet?”

“If I am to tell the story of the recent past, I must tell more than is instantly accessible to any moderately motivated citizen,” Frum asserts a bit later, before summarily dismissing Right Star Rising as “a diligent recapitulation of well-known events, perfectly competent and more or less unnecessary.” Now, I don’t know if he’s right about this book or not; I haven’t read it, and with everything that’s already stacked up around my desk, it doesn’t seem likely I’ll have time to read it any time soon. What I’m interested in here is Frum’s underlying argument, which privileges an interpretive model of history writing over a “purely” descriptive one. (I put “purely” in quotes there because the stance of objective description is itself an act of interpretation, though one that strives to remain invisible.) The problem with Right Star Rising, Frum seems to be suggesting, is that it doesn’t have a moral to it.

I’m not entirely convinced. First, I’d argue that the point of history is not necessarily to understand the past in terms that are relevant to us, but to understand the past on its own terms (although, now that I set those words down on the screen, I see Frum’s position might not contradict that); second, I’d argue that there is some value in sifting through the historical evidence and attempting to create a coherent descriptive narrative (which, as I said above, is in fact an interpretive narrative); third, I’d argue that historians don’t necessarily need to hit their readers over the head with the moral of the story or the “and what have we learned from all this?” chapter—subtlety can be an entertaining and pleasant thing. But I think it’s very interesting that Frum is raising the question, and I don’t even particularly care that he used a book review as a springboard for a philosophical issue which actually has little to do with the book under consideration—if the NYTBR wanted to be an middlebrow op-ed section masquerading as a book review, Frum’s essay would be a good way to go about doing it.

8 September 2010 | theory |

Read This: Freedom & Fly Away Home

There’s a passage in Lev Grossman’s Time profile of Jonathan Franzen, addressing the literary accomplishment of Freedom, that caught my eye:

“A lot of literary fiction strikes a bargain with the reader: you suck up a certain amount of difficulty, of resistance and interpretive work and even boredom, and then you get the payoff. This arrangement, which feels necessary and permanent to us, is primarily a creation of the 20th century. Freedom works on something more akin to a 19th-century model, like Dickens or Tolstoy: characters you care about, a story that hooks you. Franzen has given up trying to impress with his scintillating prose… ‘It seems all the more imperative, nowadays, to fashion books that are compelling, because there is so much more distraction they have to resist,’ he says. ‘To me, now, to do something new is not to develop a form for the novel that has never been seen on earth before. It means to try to come to terms as a person and a citizen with what’s happening in the world now and to do it in some comprehensible, coherent way.'”

I don’t happen to agree that this “arrangement” is “necessary and permanent to us;” it certainly has never felt necessary to me, although I suppose there are some academics somewhere who might believe it so. But that’s a much larger issue, and we shall set aside for the moment. Instead, let’s focus on what Grossman and Franzen agree Franzen is doing in terms of readability and accessibility. You could almost read this as a sympathetic twist on a particularly caustic criticism of Franzen Ben Marcus wrote for Harper’s back in 2005:

“Jonathan Franzen has excelled most conspicuously at worrying about literature’s potential for mass entertainment… In reviews, essays, and lately even a short story, he has taken wild swings at some unlikely culprits in literature’s decreasing dominance. In the process he has also managed to gaslight writing’s alien artisans, those poorly named experimental writers with no sales, little review coverage, a small readership, and the collective cultural pull of an ant.

“Even while popular writing has quietly glided into the realm of the culturally elite, doling out its severe judgment of fiction that has not sold well, and we have entered a time when book sales and artistic merit can be neatly equated without much of a fuss, Franzen has argued that complex writing, as practiced by writers such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and their descendants, is being forced upon readers by powerful cultural institutions… and that this less approachable literature, or at least its esteemed reputation, is doing serious damage to the commercial prospects of the literary industry.”

I submit that the thing both Grossman and Marcus are describing is a key element of Franzen’s appeal to mainstream “literary” critics—he is just experimental enough as an novelist to tip the scales in favor of being viewed as “literary” rather than “commercial,” even though he is trafficking in, broadly speaking, the same type of domestic dramas you’ll find in, say, Jennifer Weiner’s Fly Away Home. Weiner’s narrative, about the ways in which a United States Senator’s confession of an adulterous relationship affects the lives of his wife and their two daughters, is presented in an almost completely linear fashion; there is some temporal backtracking and overlapping from one chapter to the next, as Weiner shifts perspectives, but she doesn’t call attention to it. Freedom, on the other hand, tells the story of one family’s disintegration and reconciliation (by means of events, including adulterous relationships, that are inflected with both political and cultural significance) as a series of sweeping narrative arcs with prolonged immersion in various characters’ perspectives—even, in the opening and closing sections, an ethereal “community” voice in which the most important events are told to the reader secondhand. Both novels thrive because their authors tell dramatic stories in an engrossing manner; one simply chooses to be more obviously virtuosic about it… but not so virtuosic as to call too much attention to his style.

(more…)

7 September 2010 | read this |