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Walter Kirn’s new novel The Unbinding is clearly another of those transitional hybrids to which I referred a few posts ago, and it is illustrative of my situation that I was unaware of it while it was being published serially on Slate. It sounds as structurally unsatisfactory in print as Umberto Eco’s History of Beauty, which as I pointed out in my Art Papers review, wears its origins as an interactive DVD all too uncomfortably to work well as a book.
Pre-digital, we had to turn our minds into vast searchable databases of memory, and it remains the only way to get through Thomas Pynchon, with moments of annoyance at discovering some sentence that turns on a Montenegrin curse word one didn’t learn somewhere along the way.
Post-hyperlink, though, the world’s older literature turned online into cyberversions of Norton Critical Editions. Clarification was available at the click of a mouse, though a dismaying number of the links turned out to lead to the land of 404 Not Found.
But a creative work from this mindset that both illustrates where we have come and what it has done to us --- that’s still on the way. We are certainly in the condition and fitfully aware of it, but the form that will communicate it adequately to all types and levels of consciousness simply does not exist. And as such (i.e., for “all types”) never will exist. Even now, it requires specific sorts of education to acquire the consciousness requisite for contemporary fiction, just as it does to acquire the consciousness requisite for contemporary visual art, and most people never have time to get beyond the level of semi-sophisticated entertainment in either sphere.
As why should they? most artists and writers never get beyond treating issues of corporate organization or the structure of the physical universe as anything more than a mythology in service to some political ideal, or a metaphor suitable for misleading incorporation into a work of the imagination. It is arrogance to expect other professionals to take steps comparable to the ones that artists and writers do not take.
The work that takes seriously what is required to understand and critique an enterprise in and of itself, then incorporates that realization into the structures required of a great work of the creative imagination, such that the venture informs us on a conceptual and an emotional level: well, that sort of book or artwork comes along so seldom that it defines the term “masterwork.” And it, too, gets knocked off its pedestal because it doesn’t do everything, or its basic premise is overthrown by later research, or it is so all-fired complicated that the fourteen people who have been able to get all the way through it haven’t quite understood it.
So unlike your typical book reviewer, I shall have to give a pass, out of charity, to a novel I have not read. But its very existence stimulates speculation about what could come next, not necessarily what will come next.
Pre-digital, we had to turn our minds into vast searchable databases of memory, and it remains the only way to get through Thomas Pynchon, with moments of annoyance at discovering some sentence that turns on a Montenegrin curse word one didn’t learn somewhere along the way.
Post-hyperlink, though, the world’s older literature turned online into cyberversions of Norton Critical Editions. Clarification was available at the click of a mouse, though a dismaying number of the links turned out to lead to the land of 404 Not Found.
But a creative work from this mindset that both illustrates where we have come and what it has done to us --- that’s still on the way. We are certainly in the condition and fitfully aware of it, but the form that will communicate it adequately to all types and levels of consciousness simply does not exist. And as such (i.e., for “all types”) never will exist. Even now, it requires specific sorts of education to acquire the consciousness requisite for contemporary fiction, just as it does to acquire the consciousness requisite for contemporary visual art, and most people never have time to get beyond the level of semi-sophisticated entertainment in either sphere.
As why should they? most artists and writers never get beyond treating issues of corporate organization or the structure of the physical universe as anything more than a mythology in service to some political ideal, or a metaphor suitable for misleading incorporation into a work of the imagination. It is arrogance to expect other professionals to take steps comparable to the ones that artists and writers do not take.
The work that takes seriously what is required to understand and critique an enterprise in and of itself, then incorporates that realization into the structures required of a great work of the creative imagination, such that the venture informs us on a conceptual and an emotional level: well, that sort of book or artwork comes along so seldom that it defines the term “masterwork.” And it, too, gets knocked off its pedestal because it doesn’t do everything, or its basic premise is overthrown by later research, or it is so all-fired complicated that the fourteen people who have been able to get all the way through it haven’t quite understood it.
So unlike your typical book reviewer, I shall have to give a pass, out of charity, to a novel I have not read. But its very existence stimulates speculation about what could come next, not necessarily what will come next.
