The Ecstasy of Influence
Page 1
Praise for Jonathan Lethem’s
THE
ECSTASY of
INFLUENCE
“[Lethem is] as sharp a critic as he is a novelist. This collection shows you why.”
—Austin American-Statesman
“Lethem takes a boldly different tack on the matter of mentors, gurus, fathers, shapers and sources.… He not only acknowledges his literary and psychological progenitors; he insists upon them, celebrates them, and invites the reader to join in an exhilarating if sometimes baffling deconstruction of the very idea of influence.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Lethem’s inspired miscellany is ardent and charming.… His essays are zippy and freewheeling.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Sharp and funny.”
—The Plain Dealer
“Frank and boisterous.… The Ecstasy of Influence is, more than anything, a record of Mr. Lethem’s life as a public novelist, a role for which he is obviously well suited.… Mr. Lethem has such a gift, and The Ecstasy of Influence is evidence of it.”
—The New York Observer
“This impassioned, voluble book is illuminating about much more than its author.”
—The Independent (London)
“The author invites us into the ecstasy of intertextuality, to the intertwining of thousands of words with ourselves.”
—PopMatters
“The Ecstasy of Influence is in part an attempt to discuss the things artists and writers rarely talk about—how much of their work is borrowed from other artists and how much they care about their critical reputations, among other things.”
—Salon
“Smart and rollicking.… Brilliantly dissect[s] the various sulks, funks, and paranoias of being a writer who moans about doing writerly things—not least among them writing itself.”
—The Millions
“A wide and wonderful series of subjects that are threaded together, mostly, as a kind of autobiography of a would-be writer becoming a struggling writer and then a successful writer while all the while remaining a voracious reader.”
—National Post (Canada)
“The arguments implicit in his novels are not merely explicit here, but deliriously so, ecstatically so, as if the author is shaking you by the shoulders to show you what he loves, why he loves it and why you should love it, too.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Jonathan Lethem
THE
ECSTASY of
INFLUENCE
Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lethem has also published his stories and essays in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among others.
www.jonathanlethem.com
ALSO BY JONATHAN LETHEM
NOVELS
Gun, with Occasional Music (1994)
Amnesia Moon (1995)
As She Climbed Across the Table (1997)
Girl in Landscape (1998)
Motherless Brooklyn (1999)
The Fortress of Solitude (2003)
You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007)
Chronic City (2009)
NOVELLAS
This Shape We’re In (2000)
STORY COLLECTIONS
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996)
Kafka Americana (with Carter Scholz, 1999)
Men and Cartoons (2004)
NONFICTION
The Disappointment Artist (2005)
Believeniks: The Year We Wrote a Book About the Mets (with Christopher Sorrentino, 2006)
They Live (2010)
Crazy Friend: On Philip K. Dick (2011, Italy only)
Fear of Music (2012)
AS EDITOR
The Vintage Book of Amnesia (2000)
The Year’s Best Music Writing (2002)
The Novels of Philip K. Dick (Library of America, 3 vols., 2007–2010)
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (with Pamela Jackson, 2011)
Selected Stories of Robert Sheckley (with Alex Abramovitch, 2012)
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2012
Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Lethem
Excerpt from Dissident Gardens copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Lethem.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2011.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work were previously published in the following: New and Used, Amazon.com, Rolling Stone, Brick, Crank, New York Times Book Review, The Walrus, Love Letters, Harper’s, Conjunctions, The Novelist’s Lexicon, Playboy, Shout, London Review of Books, New York Times, GQ, New York Times Sunday Magazine, McSweeney’s, Nerve, AnOther Magazine, ArtReview, a catalog of Fred Tomaselli’s paintings, Ambit, Granta, Cabinet, Mortification, Powell’s website, The Guardian, Open Letters, Black Clock, Village Voice, The Believer, Brooklyn Was Mine, Lit, Bold Type, The New Yorker, Guilt & Pleasure, Tar Magazine.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Lethem, Jonathan.
The ecstasy of influence : nonfictions, etc. / by Jonathan Lethem.—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3562.E8544E27 2011
814′.54—dc22
2011016248
eISBN: 978-0-385-53496-3
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1_r3
For Richard Parks
The Artist’s sense of truth. Regarding truths, the artist has a weaker morality than the thinker. He definitely does not want to be deprived of the splendid and profound interpretations of life, and he resists sober, simple methods and results. Apparently he fights for the higher dignity and significance of man; in truth, he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions of his art: the fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense of the symbolic, the overestimation of the person, the faith in some miraculous element in the genius. Thus he considers the continued existence of his kind of creation more important than scientific devotion to the truth in every form, however plain.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Human, All Too Human
The idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area, both logical and magical, sits heavily over the talent of every modern painter …
—MANNY FARBER, “White Elephant vs. Termite Art”
You must have made inconceivable promises, unsupportable by facts, in your ardor, and that counted for something, and were you asked to hold to them, or were you not?
—ANDER MONSON, “The Essay Vanishes”
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
I: MY PLAN TO BEGIN WITH
My Plan to Begin With, Part One
The Used Bookshop Stories
The Books They Read
Going Under in Wendover
Zelig of Notoriety
Clerk
II: DICK, CALVINO, BALLARD: SF AND POSTMODERNISM
My Plan to Begin With, Part Two
Holidays
Crazy Friend (Philip K. Dick)
What I Learned at the Science-Fiction Convention
The Best of Calvino: Against Completism
Po
stmodernism as Liberty Valance
The Claim of Time (J. G. Ballard)
Give Up
III: PLAGIARISMS
The Ecstasy of Influence
The Afterlife of “Ecstasy”/Somatics of Influence
Always Crashing in the Same Car
Against “Pop” Culture
Furniture
IV: FILM AND COMICS
Supermen!: An Introduction
Top-Five Depressed Superheroes
The Epiphany
Izations
Everything Is Broken (Art of Darkness)
Godfather IV
Great Death Scene (McCabe & Mrs. Miller)
Kovacs’s Gift
Marlon Brando Breaks
Missed Opportunities
Donald Sutherland’s Buttocks
The Drew Barrymore Stories
V: WALL ART
The Collector (Fred Tomaselli)
An Almost Perfect Day (Letter to Bonn)
The Billboard Men (Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel)
Todd James
Writing and the Neighbor Arts
Live Nude Models
On a Photograph of My Father
Hazel
VI: 9/11 AND BOOK TOUR
Nine Failures of the Imagination
Further Reports in a Dead Language
To My Italian Friends
My Egyptian Cousin
Cell Phones
Proximity People
Repeating Myself
Bowels of Compassion
Stops
Advertisements for Norman Mailer
White Elephant and Termite Postures in the Life of the Twenty-first-Century Novelist
VII: DYLAN, BROWN, AND OTHERS
The Genius of James Brown
People Who Died
The Fly in the Ointment
Dancing About Architecture
Dylan Interview
Open Letter to Stacy (The Go-Betweens)
Otis Redding’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Rick James
an orchestra of light that was electric
VIII: WORKING THE ROOM
Bolaño’s 2666
Homely Doom Vibe (Paula Fox)
Ambivalent Usurpations (Thomas Berger)
Rushmore Versus Abundance
Outcastle (Shirley Jackson)
Thursday (G. K. Chesterton)
My Disappointment Critic/On Bad Faith
The American Vicarious (Nathanael West)
IX: THE MAD BROOKLYNITE
Ruckus Flatbush
Crunch Rolls
Children with Hangovers
L. J. Davis
Agee’s Brooklyn
Breakfast at Brelreck’s
The Mad Brooklynite
X: WHAT REMAINS OF MY PLAN
Micropsia
My Internet
Zeppelin Parable
What Remains of My Plan
Memorial
Things to Remember
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from Dissident Gardens
Preface
1. Undressing “Me,” Addressing “You”
Somewhere—I can’t find it now—there’s a book with a preface in which a writer of fiction admitted he couldn’t write the preface to the book “you now hold in your hands” until he’d conceived of the preface as a story about a writer of fiction writing a preface; only then could he begin. Saying this, the reader of said preface was presumably drawn into an awareness that the voices in so-called “nonfictions” were themselves artful impostures, arrangements of sentences (and of the implications residing behind the sentences) that mimicked the presence of a human being offering sincerely intended and honestly useful guidance into this or that complicated area of human thought or experience. According to this belief, even an auto manual or cookbook possessed an “implied author.”
Sure, you say, tell me something I don’t know. But let’s keep in mind that the opposite belief flourishes—i.e., that we all possess the capacity and therefore also the responsibility to testify out of some unmediatedly true self. Or, if mediation goes on, that it’s of as little importance as the jotting hand of various forgotten human scribes who happened to capture God’s words when they authored the Bible. This belief is clung to with a ferocity that suggests something immense might be at stake.
But I’ve introduced a confusion, even at the outset of this long test of your patience. That writer I mention isn’t me, or even “me.” He’s—I just remembered this—an American science-fiction writer named Robert Sheckley (1928–2005). Sheckley’s description works for me, though. I’ve never managed a routine book review, let alone an essay I thought worth reprinting, without first having to invent a character who’d be issuing the remarks the essay would subsequently record, and also figuring out what motivations this guy—call him “Lethem”—would have for working his thoughts into language. By practical necessity I’m firmly in the doubting-nonfiction-is-exactly-possible camp, Lethem typed insouciantly.
The reader of the preface is a fiction, too. No, no, wait, I don’t for crissakes mean you, dear fleshly friend, semi-loyal eyeball. Hey, I clasp your hand. (“A knowledge that people live close by is, / I think, enough. And even if only first names are ever exchanged / The people who own them seem rock-true and marvelously self-sufficient.”—John Ashbery, “The Ongoing Story”) I’m not looking to try to persuade you that you’re a cyborg, mosaic, site, interface, or any other post-human thing. My point is more that you’re prehuman, actually: I’m addressing you before you’ve been quite willing to appear, pretending you’ve arrived in order to have someone to gab with until you get here, painting your portrait to find out what you look like—only sometimes, often, you won’t sit still.
Example: The odd fact is that naming Sheckley as a science-fiction writer cost me some discomfort, but an extremely familiar and tolerable form of discomfort, one I routinely self-inflict for the useful friction it generates in the conversation into which I’ve tossed the term. You, postulated readers: Aren’t you now divided into two teams, those appalled with me for being dodgy about Sheckley and his affiliations, and those disgruntled because they didn’t know, or want to know, his name? Have a look at yourselves, on either side of the room, like tweens at a dance party: Shouldn’t one or the other gender be exiting the floor about now? But stay.
Please do stay.
2. Self-Consciousness, Objections To
No one is obligated to care that writers sometimes, or often, think such self-conscious stuff as the above. There’re onslaughts of evidence that mention of these matters annoy the hell out of some readers. Many people prefer artists to make statements along the lines of: “I don’t know what I’m doing, I just go into a small, badly furnished room and out come these stories,” “The songs write themselves,” “The paint tells me where it wants to go,” etc. Even readers with an appetite for the dynamic curlicues of intellection so typical of the prose of forthrightly self-conscious, ontology-obsessed writers (John Barth being a perfect example) can suddenly grow nauseated by a disproportion of the stuff over time (hence Barth’s terrifying decline in popularity). David Foster Wallace deserves to be remembered as a great writer not because he was capable of doing PhD-level philosophical speculation as well as shunting fictional characters (slowly) through a well-described room but because he mastered a certain area of human sensation totally: intricate self-conscious remorse at the fact of self-consciousness. Wallace’s way of loading up this indistinct area with scrupulous depiction made a lot of people feel less lonely; meanwhile, the possibility that being the depicter made Wallace feel more lonely has become a widely circulated armchair-shrink’s allegory for the non-usefulness of self-consciousness. Because it doesn’t help. Doesn’t help the depressed person feel undepressed, doesn’t help the storyteller tell the story. Just Do It!: the top-to-bottom scream of our culture, and a good anthem for skippers not only of prefaces to books but of entire collections of occasional pieces by those w
ho ought to have the grace to stick to storytelling. Never mind where that slippery slope might get you, or how the attitude shears toward the same anti-intellectual currents in American life that would shovel reading novels per se into a trench along with a lot of other things you hold dear, if you’re still with me at this point. Bias spoiler alert: I think I’m an intellectual, and I think you are, too, whether you like it or not. I can’t help thinking so.
All of these thoughts fall into the category of things I can’t help thinking, despite having sometimes tried not to, thinking it was my duty to do so. It turns out I can’t help being the self-conscious kind of artist, one who pits himself compulsively against bogus valorizing of notions of originality, authenticity, or naturalism in the arts. This is where a certain political implication comes out of hiding, and it’s a political implication very dear to me. For if we consent that what appears natural in art is actually constructed from a series of hidden postures, decisions, and influences, etc., we make ourselves eligible to weigh the notion that what’s taken as natural in our experience of everyday life could actually be a construction as well.
That’s to say, if we pass time getting dreamy by reading stories about things that didn’t really happen, set in worlds that aren’t precisely our own, while acknowledging that such self-into-elsewhere dreams are enacted by conscious means, by acts of intention and craft (on the part of the readers as well as by the writers), it might suggest an analogous getting-from-here-to-there process: from this world, to a different one. Dreams of making real alterations in our relations to our selves and others (as well as to the systems that everywhere instill in us a dreadful foreboding that such alterations are highly unlikely) are for many people embarrassing, even rude to mention. Others grow enraged. To comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable: what presumption, on the part of the storyteller, taking this assignment!
Yet I’ve got no choice, for I am the disturbed I seek to comfort, and also the comfortable I seek to disturb.