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The Times has a reputation all its own when it comes to editorializing pivotal events in the way of the Monday morning quarterback, of shouting Eureka! when the facts are already plain. It works quite simply:
—People generally feel X about the life and death of Y, and its meaning for the completion of Y’s cultural significance.
—Ergo, take the contrarian view of X, sensationalize and throw some vacuous and pseudo-Enlightened shoring beneath, and live to be fashionably-liberal another day.
—Eureka!
Just so, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s deplorably titled op-ed “Raise High the P.R. Blitz,” chimes in about J.D. Salinger’s reclusiveness in light of his recent passing:
[...] “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” Mr. Salinger told The Times in 1974. “Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy…. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
As a teacher of writing, I frequently hear young authors echo Mr. Salinger’s words, that they’re writing primarily to satisfy themselves. It’s hard to disagree with that on the surface; writing can be great fun. But to create fiction — or nonfiction, for that matter — without any thought of a reader seems creepy to me, the ultimate exercise in self-indulgence. [...]
That last sentence is of particular interest, because while Mr. Boylan argues for the media saturation of popular authors, such engagement is somehow not the highest example itself of authorial self-indulgence. Self-indulgence, such as, say, opportunistically seizing on the death of an author for the sake of one’s worn-out iconoclasm.
There is something askew with Mr. Boylan’s editorial—besides the hyperventilating use of ‘I,’ me,’ and ‘my’—in that it it attempts to take the reclusiveness of certain authors and turn it back upon them. While the polarizing narcissism of the media and the critical community are often the driving forces of their reclusiveness, Mr. Boylan somehow sees such reclusiveness as its own form of narcissism. But with regard to more public authors, he sees their narcissism as mandatory, pleasurable, and neutral. Never mind the works of Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Franz Kafka, or historically-pseudonymous authors in their thousands—that old pack of vain, unqualified baboons!! (Well, perhaps McCarthy is a newly-christened exception. I enjoyed his release into the media wilderness primarily because his interview revealed the shallowness of the media—a fact which Mr. McCarthy prodded mockingly for a good hour or so, on, of all personality-cult programming, The Oprah Winfrey Show.)
Like I said, there’s something amiss here, and it has to do with 1) the reciprocation of media narcissism from social illness into some normative and ubiquitous value, 2) that this insulated, Post-gender, Post-privacy, Post-everything rhetoric gains its loftiness only by appealing to the very norms of authenticity it claims to interrogate, and lastly, that 3) as Don Delillo’s Mao II explored, the cult of the reclusive author is informed more by cultural mythos than reality, albeit a myth with a violently obsessive face.
So I don’t know why, but Boylan’s conceited brand of grandstanding has become strikingly characteristic of liberal and Post-_____ authors in general. Subsequently, readers of these pieces must suffer through the usual caustic beltshots at constituencies by whom they feel threatened, yet somehow they are granted a pass for the arrogance contained therein, even while their actual letters are equally-poor tomes which read more like psychiatric evaluations of the structure of modern ressentiment.
But who knows? I suppose I’m just being self-indulgent…
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