Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold

Posted 30 July, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Book Reviewing |

In this corner, wearing the blue trunks and gradually greying, Sven Birkerts, writing in the Boston Globe on behalf of traditional print reviewers:

The implicit immediacy and ephemerality of “post” and “update,” the deeply embedded assumption of referentiality (linkage being part of the point of blogging), not to mention a new of-the-moment ethos among so many of the bloggers (especially the younger ones) favors a less formal, less linear, and essentially unedited mode of argument. While more traditional print-based standards are still in place on sites like Slate and the online offerings of numerous print magazines, many of the blogs venture a more idiosyncratic, off-the-cuff style, a kind of “I’ve been thinking . . .” approach. At some level it’s the difference between amateur and professional. What we gain in independence and freshness we lose in authority and accountability.

And in the other corner, wearing the red trunks, and delicately plucking occasional grey hairs from his beard, Ed Champion, writing online in defence of the litblogosphere:

What’s not to suggest that the litbloggers — who might just present a more comforting anarchy than a “self-constituted group of those who have made it their purpose to do so” — can’t “matter” in the way that Birkerts describes? If the norms of print culture have refused to shift over the past twenty-five years, as Pat Holt has suggested, maybe it’s high time for these norms to be shaken up. Maybe the centrifugal proliferation that Birkerts bemoans is the very impetus that will “define, or prompt, or inspire, or at least intuit” in that way that Cynthia Ozick pined for. (And if Birkerts can twist Ozick’s argument to suit his purposes, then I suppose I’m entitled to do the same.)

Is it just me, or is this whole debate becoming almost unbearably tedious? The arguments on both sides — a lack of editorial oversight and authority on the one hand; an elitist, hierarchical, and monolithic vision of culture on the other — are so predictable that it’s hardly necessary even to read these pieces anymore to divine their contents.

Equally predictable is the call-and-response pattern: a print journalist, observing the shrinking space devoted to books and book reviews in traditional print media, will write a piece bemoaning the loss of editorial standards and authoritative commentary in the online miasma of book chat; and litbloggers, feeling slighted, will respond by charging said print journalist with elitism and obsolescence. (It took less than twenty-four hours for one blogger to trot out the “elitist” accusation against Birkerts, while failing to mention that Birkerts applies the term to himself in his Globe piece, which kind of denudes the sting, if you ask me.)

While it would be foolish and hypocritical of me to denounce the evident virtues of the blogosphere out of hand, I must confess a sympathy for Birkerts’ advocacy of some kind of editorial standards in book reviewing (or any other kind of criticism, for that matter). And I’m not so sure that the “anarchy” Ed points to in the litblogosphere is all that “comforting”: a medium that accords equal weight to thoughtful, knowledgeable, well-written criticism and semiliterate doggerel seems deficient in at least one respect.

Having said that, I do wonder why print journalists and litbloggers constantly have to react to each other like opposite poles of a magnet. Would it not be more advantageous to dispense with the knee-jerk adversarial reactions on both sides and try to find some common ground, some way of living, and working, together? The garden of literature is surely vibrant enough to allow for numerous gardeners tilling and planting and fertilizing it. In this respect, Ed’s comment about online book critics crossing over to print reviews is well taken, and is a reminder that at our core, we’re really not all that different.

I would write more on this subject, but I’ve got a deadline. As it happens, I’ve been contracted to write a print review for a Canadian newspaper. Funny that.

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