Filed under: The Horrorshow of the Internet | Tags: affect theory, bad things that happen to critics, discipline, intentional fallacy, misuse of metaphor: baseball, tell me some more about how you feel, veracity of scholarship, weird new genres of books
“…perhaps clean, well-lighted subjectivity is a dead end…”
There you have it: the opening salvo of the Amazon.com review of this funny little book.
I haven’t read it, but I can’t ignore it. Perhaps, like some other young thesis-writers out there (more interested, at times, in theorizing discipline, than in engaging its ball-game from within its particular, wrought-iron fences), this is the the face that I never thought would appear: half horror, half dream, published, and yet (and this is no rarity!) so ambiguously book. Falling back on my sloppy late-high school training (Baudrillaird, and cranky anarchists in Cleveland), I’m tempted to hold up my weights and mirrors: is it real? Is it legitimate? Clearly, being is no fit standard for legitimacy–judgment, acceptance, celebration, or (perhaps the most non-moralizing of the lot?) criticism is a secondary thing, some process of extended attention that the project asks, and is always asking.
So: this Dyer guy seems to gore us on the horns of genre–he doesn’t seem (and again: I haven’t read the thing) to be making an appeal for his work’s own acceptance so much as a cranky post-modern diatribe against the laxity of a publishing/reading/writing culture that would allow such a thing as his book to exist. Immanent critique, but the joke’s on us (maybe it always was)–and Mr. Dyer, unsafe at any speed, slips out the trap door.
But do (literary) intentions matter? It’s certainly one thing to set out to write a book like Out of Sheer Rage; another to write a Lawrence biography or “academic book” on Lawrence and instead to turn in a meta-account of the difficulties of producing either that looks and feels and has the bulk of a book. (There are so many ways to put flesh on the bones…). It’s one thing to give up said end product, and quite another to submit the product (Frankenstein product?) as substitute for the intended. I suppose it all depends on the type of work we’re trying to get done… and while Dyer might shock me into a more conscientious method of criticism (learn to love yourself those iron fences), he’s certainly not the best place to go for text-y reflections on Lawrence. Seafood, maybe (or so the review would have us believe)… but even then, why would anyone trust a book with D.H. Lawrence in the title to give us anything useful about prawns?
Every time I open up one of my mother’s Alternative Health Food You Need More Ginseng magazines, I encounter yet another smear campaign between the fish-oil companies. The first thing that they say is that you want to know why what you’re getting matters. Then, of course (and this is especially delicious in the two-page spreads) they give you their brand logo, and tell you why they’re the ones who can tell you. Ergo, if they know, and if they care enough to know, surely the cod livers squeezed into their little bottles (shatterproof!) will be plumper and more brain-boosting than those of the competitors. Whether we stand to risk exposure to food-bourne illness or more misconceptions about Mr. Lawrence’s fiery, amorous philosophies, authority matters. Or at least pretensions of authority do.
Enough of the postmodern for now–it’s getting late. More soon: on trauma, memory, fish oil, and the burp as the embodied site of repetition.
