Reading Pleasure
Five more kvetches about Kakutani’s style of literary criticism and we’re done, boys & girls. Hold on tight.
The first I sort of mentioned in the very first post, and it’s implicit in much of what I’ve written already: to wit, she (#6) too much enjoys delivering the jeremiad. As Neil Innes sings in his “Protest Song,” “All the prophets of doom / Can always find room / In a world full of worry and fear. . . .” She’s dubs her opponents “Pollyannaish,” but she’s Jeremiah, she’s a scold: Kakutani chides the authors “techno-utopian” books, for instance, while unselfconsciously relishing her role as a self-appointed Cassandra. “Instead of reading an entire news article,” one typically dire warning runs, “watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite—never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.” The sky is falling: and just remember, you heard it from MK first.
But Cassandra, of course, was right. Whereas Kakutani is really just a sensationalist: this tendency is evident not only in the tone but in the very structure of “Texts Without Context,” as it is in much of her writing. Kakutani’s (#7) sensationalist structure—”sensational design,” Jane Tompkins might call it—front-loads her essays with breathless claims and charges at the start, bookended with outsized conclusions. Sandwiched between, in most cases, is rather more measured exposition; the body of a Kakutani essay, that is to say, rarely lives up to, or indeed supports, the urgent tone of its frame. It’s almost as if Kakutani were adapting her style to audience and metier—”the blurring of news and entertainment” she calls this, when indicting others of it.
In another rhetorical sleight-of-hand, Kakutani regularly (#8) flattens the authority of very disparate sources—as if David Shields’s Reality Hunger and Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, for instance, were similarly cogent and thoughtful explorations of their topic. Quotations feel cherry-picked, almost in the fashion she ascribes to her postmodern nemeses; writers with congruent views are described as “astute,” “nuanced,” “judicious” and “impassioned,” while those from the opposition are “nihilistic” and “shrill.” Not all of Kakutani’s authorities in “Texts Without Context” enjoy equal authority within the scholarly community; it is in her interest, however, to disguise that fact.
Most significant of all, I believe, Kakutani (#9) displays a reverence for books, but betrays a strange contempt for actual readers. Her Taste is so domineering it rules out all other taste; and because, as I suggested last time, she discounts the role of interpretation in the process of reading, her reading is The Reading. Book reviewers have long been taste makers, of course, and there’s a venerable tradition of novelists bemoaning their disproportionate influence; but typically, reviewers have at least sided with their readers, or pretended to. Kakutani claims that she’s not interested simply in the “question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace,” but “in context,” as she’d say, that claim rings false.
Indeed, the great fear that animates “Texts Without Contexts” ultimately seems to be not so much those pesky postmodern writers wielding what Jonathan Lethem has called their “promiscuous materials,” but rather an army of readers reading just what they want, wherever they want, in whatever manner they choose. She quotes with approval Steven Johnson’s prediction last year in the Wall Street Journal that the time is coming in which “we all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.” Oh, and this is supposed to be a new, and terrible, turn of events.
And most trivially of all—lest all this get too heavy—she (#10) dismisses Lady Gaga out of hand. “Lady Gaga is third-generation Madonna”: really? Is that the best you’ve got, Michiko? How long did it take you to think of that? (And, for that matter, doesn’t this sound strangely familiar? Jed Gottlieb was already writing in the Boston Herald last November of this “now-ubiquitous” comparison.)
Have you ever listened to her? You outta; you might—cringe—enjoy yourself?
Claremont Colleges’ Kevin clobbers Kakutani.
Can completed catharsis cause creature comfort?
Comme ci, comme ca . . .
Echoes of Joyce’s “Aeolus” chapter? What an erudite readership!