Michiko Kakutani Marked for . . . . Um, Aspersion-Casting
I’ve realized recently that I can be something of a reactionary against “reactionaries.” I suppose I’m a left-reactionary, though reactionary against both right- and left-reactionaries. Quite a “meta-” situation, to be sure: precisely the kind of thing Michiko Kakutani loathes.
As many of my readers will be aware, Kakutani has been at it again; her most recent screed—or perhaps (following up Wen Stephenson’s argument in yesterday’s NYTimes Book Review), jeremiad—was published in that same paper the previous Sunday, March 21: “Texts Without Context.”
The sense I’m getting of my readership to this point (and the blog’s just over a month old now—props & thanks to y’all!) is that we’re a somewhat heterogenous group: culture vultures, music lovers, sofa dwellers. Thus I’m not sure how much familiarity with contemporary “literary” culture, as it’s called, I should assume. Suffice it to say, for now, that Kakutani has with some justification been called the most influential critic in the American book trade today. (I would argue that title probably goes to Oprah, but that’s a topic for another day.) Kakutani graduated from Yale in 1976, and has been at the Times since 1983; her reviews are widely influential, and she’s not afraid to parade her rather pronounced prejudices. Salman Rushdie, for one, has called her “a weird woman who seems to feel the need to alternately praise and spank.”
When I read “Texts Without Context,” I was predictably outraged: I can’t remember the last time I read one of her reviews or essays without at least annoyance. But this time—in part because her ostensible target, “appropriation art,” is so near and dear to my heart—a number of things came into sharp focus for me for the first time.
A couple of mild letters appeared in the March 28 Times—one nodding along with Kakutani’s indictment, one accusing her of practicing the very appropriation she castigates. That’s hardly sufficient response given her influence, and her knowing or unknowing distortion of important aspects of contemporary literary practice and theory.
Kakutani’s critics have tended to focus on differences of opinion: to disagree with her, for instance, over her generalized dismissal of what she would call the “postmodern” novel. (We’ll take a look at her use of that term “postmodern” in due course.) But there’s much more wrong, and much more at stake, in her literary criticism; and “Texts Without Context,” working at a higher level of generalization than most of her writing, makes those blemishes more than commonly obvious.
What I’d like to do over the course of three or four more posts, scattered over the next week or so, is to read “Texts Without Context” diagnostically. Whether by chance or owing to the mind’s delight in patterns and round numbers, I find precisely ten significant errors or logical fallacies in Kakutani’s essay—errors that, in retrospect, I believe help to explain the shape of her thought over the two decades I’ve been reading her. She is, once again, a very influential, and very opinionated, critic: those opinions, and her sometimes sloppy reasoning, have likewise been very influential.
We’ll begin, tomorrow, with that word “context” in her title. No practicing critic disputes the importance context in the work of interpretation; but as deconstruction (another of Kakutani’s bêtes noirs) has taught us, context is never a simple matter.
