Phil Christman

I should be working on my novel right now, but one of my favorite writers, Michael Martone, said something the other day that just irritated the piss out of me, and I feel like I’ll be itchy until I respond to it.

Asked whether he reads blogs, Martone replies, “Are you kidding? This, this what is happening now, is revolutionary, profoundly revolutionary. The whole electronic apparatus is simply redefining who and what an `author’ is. … The author is dead, all right, but long live writing. This is the end of the Johnsonian Age, the end of the Romantic, Modernist Individual Genius. I think that blogs actually are retrograde—the last attempt of the old-fashioned author to hold on to old-fashioned authorship. I think very soon blogs might evolve to the point where most will be unsigned or the same blog will be written by several people together or separately and also posted without a name of a shared name. The blog lives but the idea that it is written by any one person or consciousness will be so over. It is nothing but net, baby. Out of many one. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.”

This is chronological snobbery in its usual disguise as liberation. Because Wikipedia and anonymous flame wars postdate Clarissa, they represent a mode of authorship “realer” or “nower” or in some other way ontologically superior to … to whatever “traditional authorship” was. (Apparently it was a chimera that involved being somehow Johnsonian, Romantic and Modernist at once.) In fact, me picking up novels written by An Author, variously conceived, is just as much a part of my contemporary experience, and thus of “contemporary experience” in the abstract, as is me reading Wikipedia.

But this kind of “What’s happening now!!!” discourse isn’t just sloppy and overly selective in the way it defines key concepts; it’s also implicitly coercive. In this case, not even implicitly: “Out of many one. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.” Why do we often hear the crudest and most bullying “We used to do that; now we must do this” sorts of schemata from the critics of linearity?

In any case, Martone’s work, thank God, is more interesting than his pronouncements would ever have led me to suspect. It’s also distinctive, consciousness-evoking, and disquietingly like something a genius would write.