A way of happening, a mouth

Say WHAT???

Ok, one last post for the night. This seriously is the most accurate description of my adult life (all three years of it) ever put down in words/hilarious comics.

[credit to my favorite GSI of all time, Chris, for showing me this (via Facebook newsfeed and thus unbeknownst to him)]

I’m sure anyone reading this blog has by now realized my attachment to n+1, so I won’t even try to defend posting yet another article from them.

Though the article starts a little slow with a description of “who’s who” in the realm of the neuronovel (McEwan, Lethem, Haddon, Powers), it specifically caught my interest around the sixth paragraph where Roth begins comparing Lionel Trilling’s fears of the pervasiveness of Freudian psychoanalytic language to an email he (Roth) received from a friend (chockfull of biochemical explanations for why a woman, named “N” in the email, will be willing to put out on the first date).

Other than these amusing comparisons and anecdotes, Roth asks a valid question about what exactly these types of novels are accomplishing; their rootedness in biological and medical explanations for human behavior shut down the possibility of readerly allegorizing. “The aesthetic sensation a reader gets from the neuronovel is not the pleasure of finding the general in the particular, but a frustration born of the defeat of the metaphoric impulse.” In perhaps the most engaging paragraph of the whole essay Rother writes,

But to ground special perceptions and heightened language in neurological anomaly ends up severely circumscribing the modernist project. The stylistic novelty and profound interiority of Ulysses or To the Lighthouse were called forth by normal protagonists—an ad salesman, a housewife—and were proposed as new ways of describing everyone and anyone from the inside out. Modernism seemed revolutionary as long as it threatened to become general; the neuronovel refashions modernism as a special case, odd language for describing odd people, different in neurological kind, not just degree, from other human beings. In this way, the “experimental” writing of neuronovelists actually props up rigid social conventions of language use. If modernism is just the language of crazy, then real men must speak like Lee Child.

Roth seems to, at one point, provide a happy ending for the story. Near the end, he explores the possibility of the neuronovel becoming a kind of meta-novel, allegorizing the plight of the novelist in a “medical-materialist world.” Ultimately though, the very rise of a form like the neuronovel is, for Roth, simply a roadsign of a reductionist trend in the novel since the 19th century. The self, like society and religion before it, has now been lost to the novelist and is ”now the property of specialists writing in the idioms of their disciplines.”

Incidentally, Roth’s article (publish September 14 of last year) prophetically touches upon a Times article from March 31st of this year, titled “The Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know that You Know.” The experiments with MRIs at Yale mentioned in the article are also currently being done by Franco Moretti at Stanford (something I briefly talked to him about when I saw him; maybe I’ll write more about this later), and is something that both fascinates me and leaves me feeling pretty skeptical. Ms. Zunshine’s idea of the satisfaction of triangulated minds fascinates me because it sounds so similar to ideas of lyric triangulation that my lyric poetry professor talked about last fall semester. However her explanation of this preference (“Perhaps the human facility with three levels is related to the intrigues of sexual mating…Do I think he is attracted to her or me? “) feels so flat to me. The impulse of triangulation in lyric poetry, usually one of sexual or romantic desire between an “I” and a “you” or “other,” seems hardly any more explained to me by saying that the presence of such a construction is due to an innate biological preference for the number three born out of an evolutionary situation identical to the ones in Sappho’s poetry or Austen’s Emma.

To close all of this, I’ll quote another one of my apparent favorites for this blog, Elif Batuman, from her response to a NY Times’ “Room for Debate” connected to the above article:

A literary theory should account for what’s special about literature — for the things literature does better than anything else. It doesn’t make sense to me that novels evolved in order to train us to have thoughts like “they don’t know that we know they know we know,” because such training is afforded by many other leisure activities (sports, newspapers, video games, the stock market).

“What’s special about literature,” a question I posed to Franco Moretti himself, and one that he so scientifically and precisely rephrased as “What’s specific about literature.” I think there’s a wrong and a right way to borrow more “objective” ways of thinking from the sciences into the practice and study of English literature. I agree with Roth that the neuronovel doesn’t seem to have it quite right yet.

A truly bizarre story and one hella interesting article. Apparently, Ezra Koenig had a correspondence with Elif before Vampire Weekend had gained any widespread popularity whatsoever. And Miss Batuman has some interesting thoughts about pop music and VW specifically.

Tomorrow I’m driving to Stanford to talk to Franco Moretti about…stuff. Basically everything in this article. Elif Batuman has a really good perspective on not only Moretti’s ideas and the English Academy, but the crazy mythology that surrounds Moretti himself.

“I happen to know,” said the second student, a bit importantly, “that he’s going to be on campus at midnight on Wednesday, to be teleported to Sweden.” Teleported to Sweden, she said, and nobody raised an eyebrow. Indeed the image glides easily before the mind’s eye: in the moonlit Stanford Quad, before the fake Spanish church, under the gigantic reproduction of Roselli’s Last Supper, Franco Moretti shimmers briefly in the ether and rematerializes, that very instant, in Uppsala.