An Open Letter to Lydia Davis

Innumerable things, but in particular this post (courtesy of Long Sunday enthusiast Ray Davis), have led me to something like this.

Dear Lydia Davis,

What are you thinking? 

Respectfully,

Matt

ps.  Some background on the mysterious case of the kitten who posed as an uncle, and amongst other mistaken nephews, for those who might be interested:

From here:

As recently as five years ago, such a winsome, even kittenish, tone, and such graphic and typographic interventions were rare in mainstreams novels. Now they are so common almost to have become a convention; signs of a highbrow endeavour whose (possibly off-putting) serious tone is cut with doodling examples of author-graffiti and liberal doses of high irony.

From here:

Spearheaded by Dave Eggers, Neal Pollack, Lydia Davis and a handful of others and typefied by the online and print magazine McSweeney's, the "New Sincerity" stands for...well, it's hard to say exactly what it stands for, but as with many reactive artistic movements, it's easy to say what it stands against: irony. Proud standard-bearers of this curious mini-revolution are quite explicit in their distaste for dramatic irony, post-modern affect, unreliable authorship, narrative distance, and emotional or textual incongruity. They describe irony as played out, passe, the weapon of choice for cowards and the emotionally immature. Wearing their hearts far past their sleeves, dripping and beating warm in their hands, they embrace with a disturbing frankness their every emotion and passing fancy, elevating their work (which is almost universally autobiographical and diaristic) to an autojournalistic level of self-absorbtion: each recalled passion, each banal moment, each pop-cultural frippery assumes a gargantuan importance lest it be tainted with an emotion-killing layover of irony. But it's not so easy. The excesses that distance, perspective and subjectivism wrought are not dispelled with a warm smile and a charming line. The problem with irony may be that it never knows when to stop, but the problem with sincerity is that it never even gets started. As has been pointed out innumerable times, "sincere" doesn't preclude "stupid"; and as every good showman knows, the audience only indulges camp when it thinks you know better. Andy Kaufman was an evil genius: he would crush a crowd in his hands and watch their dying writhe as he sang schmaltzy pop songs, or paraded out his relatives to do Catskills schtick, or read entire chapters of novels. Why was it great when he made people squirm like this? Because he knew better. Because he didn't really like "Come Fly with Me". Because he knew it was torture watching his uncle do a soft-shoe. He never let go of the joke; in fact, he was the greatest performer ever in terms of keeping the pretense in an unbreakable stranglehold. But he still knew better. On the other hand, when David Shields talks about his crippling acne, or when Dave Eggers tells witless stories about watching Battlestar Galactica with his little brother, they're, well, they're just going on and on, and the only reason that we're supposed to pay attention is because they really, really mean it. Sorry: it doesn't work that way. Telling a stupid story because you know it's stupid and you're artificially enhancing its stupidity has a knife-blade sharpness when it's done well; but telling a stupid story and thinking it's not stupid is just telling a stupid story, no matter how much you care about what happens in the story. None of this is to say that sincerity is worthless; it's not. Before irony was allowed to get its foot in the door of our collective aesthetic, almost everything was sincere, and plenty of it was brilliant. Nor is it to say that there's no case to be made against the prepoderance of cheap, facile irony currently gunking up the culture. Nor yet again is it to say that some of the "New Sincerity" crowd isn't worth reading; Eggers and Pollack both have real talent when they allow themselves to step out from under the shadow of their personalities, Shields is often brilliant when he's not writing exclusively about himself, and one of the very first essays that called for a new sincerity was by David Foster Wallace, himself a quondam ironist and one of the best young novelists in America. It's just that the ironic outlook is universal -- one can use dramatic irony and ironic expression to contain any number of artistic expressions and circumstances -- while sincerity is, by its very nature, absolutely personal, specific and individual. And since great literature must aspire to a universal resonance, sincerity can only take you so far. That's why these talented writers have little choice, so long as they remain bound to a creed of sincerity and false rectitude, to remain glorified diarists; and that's why their work will not be remembered kindly.

Further reading here, more sequential and cinema-related here and somewhat timely and poignant here.

Comments

[YH]

Sorry, off topic again.

INITIAL CONFERENCE ALERT [FULL PROGRAMME FORTHCOMING]

‘TOWARDS A COSMOPOLITAN MARXISM’

Historical Materialism Annual Conference 2005, 4-6
November

Birkbeck College and School of Oriental and African
Studies, London, WC1

The Editorial Board of Historical Materialism:
Research in Critical Marxist Theory, in collaboration
with the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize
Committee and the Editorial Board of the Socialist
Register, is pleased to announce its annual
conference, ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Marxism’, 4-6
November 2005.

Since its inception, Historical Materialism has been
firmly committed to the project of creating a space of
dialogue and debate which extends across disciplinary,
linguistic and cultural borders, and promotes the
circulation, cross-fertilisation and expansion of
critical Marxist thought. For the 2005 conference we
have invited a wide range of leading figures in
European Marxist thought to discuss the terrain of a
future ‘cosmopolitan Marxism’. This will be an
exciting weekend of comradely exchange, which the
Editorial Board of Historical Materialism hopes will
grow into an important annual international event.

The conference will be organised with three plenary
sessions (Deutscher Memorial Prize Lecture, Socialist
Register and Historical Materialism plenary sessions)
and workshops dedicated to specific themes. Workshop
themes include: the philosophy of Nietzsche, the
critique of Liberalism, Gramsci, Althusser, the young
Marx, European integration, the break-up of
Yugoslavia, the interpretation of Capital, Marxism and
intellectuals, Marxism and philosophy, ‘mutations’ in
the mode of production, visions of socialism, Deleuze
and Marx, imperialism, Venezuela, the
Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism, thinking
the political, and combined and uneven development.

The Deutscher Memorial Prize Lecture, ‘The Politics of
Assumption, the Assumption of Politics’, will be
delivered by Michael Lebowitz on Friday evening, 4
November.

The Socialist Register Plenary Sessions, ‘Telling the
Truth about Class’ and ‘The State of the Third Way’,
will be held on Saturday evening, 5 November.

The Historical Materialism Plenary Session, ‘War and
Capitalism’, will conclude the conference on Sunday
afternoon, 6 November.

The language of the conference will be English with
simultaneous translation provided for a limited number
of sessions, where necessary.

Attendance is free. However, please register in
advance by email to help us to guarantee sufficient
seating:

List of Participants (in alphabestical order)

Chris Arthur (London, author of The New Dialectic and
Marx’s Capital)

Giorgio Baratta (University of Urbino, author of Le
rose e i quaderni. Il pensiero dialogico di Antonio
Gramsci)

Thomas Barfuss (Freie Universität Berlin, author of
Komformitaet und Bizarres Bewusstsein)

David Bates (Christ Church University College,
Canterbury, co-editor of Marxism, Intellectuals and
Politics)

Riccardo Bellofiore (University of Bergamo, editor of
Global Money, Capital Restructuring and the Changing
Patterns of Labour)

Tobias ten Brink (Fachhochschule Frankfurt/M, author
of VordenkerInnen der globalisierungskritischen
Bewegung: Pierre Bourdieu, Susan George, Antonio
Negri)

Alex Callinicos (King’s College London, author of
Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in
Social Theory)

Mario Candeias (University of Jena, author of
Neoliberalismus, Hochtechnologie, Hegemonie)

Paresh Chattopadhyay (Université du Quebec à Montreal,
author of The Marxian Concept of Capital and the
Soviet Experience)

Simon Clarke (University of Warwick, author of Marx,
Marginalism and Modern Sociology)

Neil Davidson (Open University, author of Discovering
the Scottish Revolution 1692-1746)

Alex Demirovic (Universities of Wuppertal, Frankfurt
am Main and Bern, author of Modelle kritischer
Gesellschaftstheorie)

Gregory Elliott (Paris, author of Althusser: The
Detour of Theory)

Roberto Finelli (University of Bari, author of Un
parricidio mancato)

Roberto Fineschi (Università degli Studi di Siena,
editor of Karl Marx: Rivisitazioni e prospettive)

Alan Freeman (University of Greenwich, co-editor of
The New Value Controversy)

Fabio Frosini (University of Urbino, author of Gramsci
e la filosofia)

Peter Gowan (London Metropolitan University, author of
The Global Gamble)

Marta Harnecker (director of the Centro de
Investigaciones Memoria Popular Latinoamericana
[MEPLA] in Havana, Cuba, author of Making the
Impossible Possible: The Left at the Threshold of the
XXIst Century)

Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Freie Universität Berlin, author
of High-Tech-Kapitalismus. Analysen zu
Produktionsweise, Arbeit, Sexualität, Krieg und
Hegemonie, editor of Das historisch-kritische
Wörterbuch des Marxismus)

Bob Jessop (University of Lancaster, author of The
Future of the Capitalist State)

Juha Koivisto (University of Helsinki, author of
Unruly Subjects)

Michael R. Krätke (University of Amsterdam, author of
Geschichte der Weltwirtschaft)

Michael Kustow (theatre producer and writer, author of
theatre@risk)

Rocco Lacorte (University of Chicago, co-editor of a
forthcoming anthology on Gramsci, Language and
Translation)

Miko Lahtinen (University of Tampere, author of
Niccolò Machiavelli ja aleatorinen materialismi. Louis
Althusser ja Machiavellin konjunktuurit / Niccolo
Machiavelli and aleatory materialism. Louis Althusser
and Machiavelli's conjunctures)

Michael Lebowitz (Professor Emeritus of Economics at
Simon Fraser University, author of Beyond Capital)

Colin Leys (Queen's University, Canada, author of
Market-Driven Politics, co-editor, the Socialist
Register)

Domenico Losurdo (University of Urbino, author of
Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns)

Giacomo Marramao (Università di Roma III, author of
Passaggio a occidente. Filosofia e globalizzazione)

David Miller (Strathclyde University, editor of Tell
Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack
on Iraq)

Rastko Mocnik (University of Ljubljana, author of How
Much Fascism? Essays on post-communist politics)

Vittorio Morfino (University of Milano-Bicocca, author
of Il tempo e l’occasione. L’incontro Spinoza
Machiavelli)

Oliver Nachtway (University of Göttingen, author of
Weltmarkt und Imperialismus. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte
der klassischen marxistischen Imperialismustheorie)

Peter Osborne (Middlesex University, author of The
Politics of Time)

Ozren Pupovac (Open University, editor of the journal
Prelom)

Joost Ploeger (University of Amsterdam, author of
Killing Two Birds With One Euro: A Marxist Analysis of
the Attack on Labor and the Dollar)

Jason Read (University of Southern Maine, author of
The Micro-politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory
of the Present)

Jan Rehmann (Freie Universität Berlin, author of
Postmoderner Links-Nietzscheanismus: Deleuze und
Foucault, eine Dekonstruktion)

Geert Reuten (University of Amsterdam, co-author of
Value-Form and the State)

Alfredo Saad-Filho (SOAS, editor of Anti-Capitalism: A
Marxist Introduction)

G. M. Tamás (Central European University, author of On
Post-fascism)

Martin Thomas (London, author of Three Traditions:
Marxism and the USSR)

Massimiliano Tomba (University of Padova, author of
Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer. Kategorien des
Politischen im nachhegelschen Denken)

Nick Thoburn (University of Manchester, author of
Deleuze, Marx and Politics)

Elisa Van Waeyenberge (SOAS, co-author of Correcting
Stiglitz: From Information to Power in the World of
Development)

Carlo Vercellone (University of Paris I, editor of La
fin du capitalisme industriel?)

Nicolas Vieillescazes (Paris, author of essay on Fredric
Jameson, A Singular Modernity. Essay on the Ontology
of the Present)

Frieder Otto Wolf (Freie Universität Berlin, author of
Radikale Philosophie).

I was with you up until pretty much the end, and I'm certainly not an apologist for sincerity, new or otherwise, but you lost me with the claim that the ironic outlook is universal. I'm not sure what that claim would mean, but it definitely strikes me as incorrect.

The thing that offends me about sincerity is that it is in bad faith, in that it pretends that its manner of self-presentation directly reveals the truth, but this is not (and cannot be) the case.

[Matt]

Maybe irony makes claims to the 'universal' in a similar way that sincerity makes claims to the 'personal' (but also: the personal as at once universal!) Perhaps finally the universal can only be hinted at indirectly or negatively, or by a 'critique in the service of some ideal' yet to come, and anything else is, well, nothing short of bad faith?

[Matt]

In any case it's too bad that Lydia Davis, whose translations of Blanchot especially are to be admired, has stooped to this sort of thing, as renumerative as may be.

[Matt]

Still, the picture deserves to be complicated; anyone seeking to "break out" as a writer today is immediately weighed in this scale with DFW's "call for a new sincerity" etched on the sides...Personally I think there are more deserving heirs (or as Shklovsky would have it, "nephews") than Dave Eggers, et al.

http://www.spikemagazine.com/splinters/2005/09/knights-move-by-viktor-shklovsky.php

http://observer.com/thecity_newyorkersdiary2.asp

[Emmanuel]

The phrase "Irony is America" deserves an update, no?

http://counago-and-spaves.blogspot.com/2005/09/why-irony-doesnt-work-in-america.html