The Ecstasy of Influence Read online

  Praise for Jonathan Lethem’s

  THE

  ECSTASY of

  INFLUENCE

  “[Lethem is] as sharp a critic as he is a novelist. This collection shows you why.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “Lethem takes a boldly different tack on the matter of mentors, gurus, fathers, shapers and sources.… He not only acknowledges his literary and psychological progenitors; he insists upon them, celebrates them, and invites the reader to join in an exhilarating if sometimes baffling deconstruction of the very idea of influence.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Lethem’s inspired miscellany is ardent and charming.… His essays are zippy and freewheeling.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Sharp and funny.”

  —The Plain Dealer

  “Frank and boisterous.… The Ecstasy of Influence is, more than anything, a record of Mr. Lethem’s life as a public novelist, a role for which he is obviously well suited.… Mr. Lethem has such a gift, and The Ecstasy of Influence is evidence of it.”

  —The New York Observer

  “This impassioned, voluble book is illuminating about much more than its author.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “The author invites us into the ecstasy of intertextuality, to the intertwining of thousands of words with ourselves.”

  —PopMatters

  “The Ecstasy of Influence is in part an attempt to discuss the things artists and writers rarely talk about—how much of their work is borrowed from other artists and how much they care about their critical reputations, among other things.”

  —Salon

  “Smart and rollicking.… Brilliantly dissect[s] the various sulks, funks, and paranoias of being a writer who moans about doing writerly things—not least among them writing itself.”

  —The Millions

  “A wide and wonderful series of subjects that are threaded together, mostly, as a kind of autobiography of a would-be writer becoming a struggling writer and then a successful writer while all the while remaining a voracious reader.”

  —National Post (Canada)

  “The arguments implicit in his novels are not merely explicit here, but deliriously so, ecstatically so, as if the author is shaking you by the shoulders to show you what he loves, why he loves it and why you should love it, too.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  Jonathan Lethem

  THE

  ECSTASY of

  INFLUENCE

  Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lethem has also published his stories and essays in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among others.

  www.jonathanlethem.com

  ALSO BY JONATHAN LETHEM

  NOVELS

  Gun, with Occasional Music (1994)

  Amnesia Moon (1995)

  As She Climbed Across the Table (1997)

  Girl in Landscape (1998)

  Motherless Brooklyn (1999)

  The Fortress of Solitude (2003)

  You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007)

  Chronic City (2009)

  NOVELLAS

  This Shape We’re In (2000)

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996)

  Kafka Americana (with Carter Scholz, 1999)

  Men and Cartoons (2004)

  NONFICTION

  The Disappointment Artist (2005)

  Believeniks: The Year We Wrote a Book About the Mets (with Christopher Sorrentino, 2006)

  They Live (2010)

  Crazy Friend: On Philip K. Dick (2011, Italy only)

  Fear of Music (2012)

  AS EDITOR

  The Vintage Book of Amnesia (2000)

  The Year’s Best Music Writing (2002)

  The Novels of Philip K. Dick (Library of America, 3 vols., 2007–2010)

  The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (with Pamela Jackson, 2011)

  Selected Stories of Robert Sheckley (with Alex Abramovitch, 2012)

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2012

  Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Lethem

  Excerpt from Dissident Gardens copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Lethem.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2011.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this work were previously published in the following: New and Used, Amazon.com, Rolling Stone, Brick, Crank, New York Times Book Review, The Walrus, Love Letters, Harper’s, Conjunctions, The Novelist’s Lexicon, Playboy, Shout, London Review of Books, New York Times, GQ, New York Times Sunday Magazine, McSweeney’s, Nerve, AnOther Magazine, ArtReview, a catalog of Fred Tomaselli’s paintings, Ambit, Granta, Cabinet, Mortification, Powell’s website, The Guardian, Open Letters, Black Clock, Village Voice, The Believer, Brooklyn Was Mine, Lit, Bold Type, The New Yorker, Guilt & Pleasure, Tar Magazine.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:

  Lethem, Jonathan.

  The ecstasy of influence : nonfictions, etc. / by Jonathan Lethem.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3562.E8544E27 2011

  814′.54—dc22

  2011016248

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53496-3

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1_r3

  For Richard Parks

  The Artist’s sense of truth. Regarding truths, the artist has a weaker morality than the thinker. He definitely does not want to be deprived of the splendid and profound interpretations of life, and he resists sober, simple methods and results. Apparently he fights for the higher dignity and significance of man; in truth, he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions of his art: the fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense of the symbolic, the overestimation of the person, the faith in some miraculous element in the genius. Thus he considers the continued existence of his kind of creation more important than scientific devotion to the truth in every form, however plain.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Human, All Too Human

  The idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area, both logical and magical, sits heavily over the talent of every modern painter …

  —MANNY FARBER, “White Elephant vs. Termite Art”

  You must have made inconceivable promises, unsupportable by facts, in your ardor, and that counted for something, and were you asked to hold to them, or were you not?

  —ANDER MONSON, “The Essay Vanishes”

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  I: MY PLAN TO BEGIN WITH

  My Plan to Begin With, Part One

  The Used Bookshop Stories

  The Books They Read

  Going Under in Wendover

  Zelig of Notoriety

  Clerk

  II: DICK, CALVINO, BALLARD: SF AND POSTMODERNISM

  My Plan to Begin With, Part Two

  Holidays

  Crazy Friend (Philip K. Dick)

  What I Learned at the Science-Fiction Convention

  The Best of Calvino: Against Completism

  Po
stmodernism as Liberty Valance

  The Claim of Time (J. G. Ballard)

  Give Up

  III: PLAGIARISMS

  The Ecstasy of Influence

  The Afterlife of “Ecstasy”/Somatics of Influence

  Always Crashing in the Same Car

  Against “Pop” Culture

  Furniture

  IV: FILM AND COMICS

  Supermen!: An Introduction

  Top-Five Depressed Superheroes

  The Epiphany

  Izations

  Everything Is Broken (Art of Darkness)

  Godfather IV

  Great Death Scene (McCabe & Mrs. Miller)

  Kovacs’s Gift

  Marlon Brando Breaks

  Missed Opportunities

  Donald Sutherland’s Buttocks

  The Drew Barrymore Stories

  V: WALL ART

  The Collector (Fred Tomaselli)

  An Almost Perfect Day (Letter to Bonn)

  The Billboard Men (Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel)

  Todd James

  Writing and the Neighbor Arts

  Live Nude Models

  On a Photograph of My Father

  Hazel

  VI: 9/11 AND BOOK TOUR

  Nine Failures of the Imagination

  Further Reports in a Dead Language

  To My Italian Friends

  My Egyptian Cousin

  Cell Phones

  Proximity People

  Repeating Myself

  Bowels of Compassion

  Stops

  Advertisements for Norman Mailer

  White Elephant and Termite Postures in the Life of the Twenty-first-Century Novelist

  VII: DYLAN, BROWN, AND OTHERS

  The Genius of James Brown

  People Who Died

  The Fly in the Ointment

  Dancing About Architecture

  Dylan Interview

  Open Letter to Stacy (The Go-Betweens)

  Otis Redding’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

  Rick James

  an orchestra of light that was electric

  VIII: WORKING THE ROOM

  Bolaño’s 2666

  Homely Doom Vibe (Paula Fox)

  Ambivalent Usurpations (Thomas Berger)

  Rushmore Versus Abundance

  Outcastle (Shirley Jackson)

  Thursday (G. K. Chesterton)

  My Disappointment Critic/On Bad Faith

  The American Vicarious (Nathanael West)

  IX: THE MAD BROOKLYNITE

  Ruckus Flatbush

  Crunch Rolls

  Children with Hangovers

  L. J. Davis

  Agee’s Brooklyn

  Breakfast at Brelreck’s

  The Mad Brooklynite

  X: WHAT REMAINS OF MY PLAN

  Micropsia

  My Internet

  Zeppelin Parable

  What Remains of My Plan

  Memorial

  Things to Remember

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from Dissident Gardens

  Preface

  1. Undressing “Me,” Addressing “You”

  Somewhere—I can’t find it now—there’s a book with a preface in which a writer of fiction admitted he couldn’t write the preface to the book “you now hold in your hands” until he’d conceived of the preface as a story about a writer of fiction writing a preface; only then could he begin. Saying this, the reader of said preface was presumably drawn into an awareness that the voices in so-called “nonfictions” were themselves artful impostures, arrangements of sentences (and of the implications residing behind the sentences) that mimicked the presence of a human being offering sincerely intended and honestly useful guidance into this or that complicated area of human thought or experience. According to this belief, even an auto manual or cookbook possessed an “implied author.”

  Sure, you say, tell me something I don’t know. But let’s keep in mind that the opposite belief flourishes—i.e., that we all possess the capacity and therefore also the responsibility to testify out of some unmediatedly true self. Or, if mediation goes on, that it’s of as little importance as the jotting hand of various forgotten human scribes who happened to capture God’s words when they authored the Bible. This belief is clung to with a ferocity that suggests something immense might be at stake.

  But I’ve introduced a confusion, even at the outset of this long test of your patience. That writer I mention isn’t me, or even “me.” He’s—I just remembered this—an American science-fiction writer named Robert Sheckley (1928–2005). Sheckley’s description works for me, though. I’ve never managed a routine book review, let alone an essay I thought worth reprinting, without first having to invent a character who’d be issuing the remarks the essay would subsequently record, and also figuring out what motivations this guy—call him “Lethem”—would have for working his thoughts into language. By practical necessity I’m firmly in the doubting-nonfiction-is-exactly-possible camp, Lethem typed insouciantly.

  The reader of the preface is a fiction, too. No, no, wait, I don’t for crissakes mean you, dear fleshly friend, semi-loyal eyeball. Hey, I clasp your hand. (“A knowledge that people live close by is, / I think, enough. And even if only first names are ever exchanged / The people who own them seem rock-true and marvelously self-sufficient.”—John Ashbery, “The Ongoing Story”) I’m not looking to try to persuade you that you’re a cyborg, mosaic, site, interface, or any other post-human thing. My point is more that you’re prehuman, actually: I’m addressing you before you’ve been quite willing to appear, pretending you’ve arrived in order to have someone to gab with until you get here, painting your portrait to find out what you look like—only sometimes, often, you won’t sit still.

  Example: The odd fact is that naming Sheckley as a science-fiction writer cost me some discomfort, but an extremely familiar and tolerable form of discomfort, one I routinely self-inflict for the useful friction it generates in the conversation into which I’ve tossed the term. You, postulated readers: Aren’t you now divided into two teams, those appalled with me for being dodgy about Sheckley and his affiliations, and those disgruntled because they didn’t know, or want to know, his name? Have a look at yourselves, on either side of the room, like tweens at a dance party: Shouldn’t one or the other gender be exiting the floor about now? But stay.

  Please do stay.

  2. Self-Consciousness, Objections To

  No one is obligated to care that writers sometimes, or often, think such self-conscious stuff as the above. There’re onslaughts of evidence that mention of these matters annoy the hell out of some readers. Many people prefer artists to make statements along the lines of: “I don’t know what I’m doing, I just go into a small, badly furnished room and out come these stories,” “The songs write themselves,” “The paint tells me where it wants to go,” etc. Even readers with an appetite for the dynamic curlicues of intellection so typical of the prose of forthrightly self-conscious, ontology-obsessed writers (John Barth being a perfect example) can suddenly grow nauseated by a disproportion of the stuff over time (hence Barth’s terrifying decline in popularity). David Foster Wallace deserves to be remembered as a great writer not because he was capable of doing PhD-level philosophical speculation as well as shunting fictional characters (slowly) through a well-described room but because he mastered a certain area of human sensation totally: intricate self-conscious remorse at the fact of self-consciousness. Wallace’s way of loading up this indistinct area with scrupulous depiction made a lot of people feel less lonely; meanwhile, the possibility that being the depicter made Wallace feel more lonely has become a widely circulated armchair-shrink’s allegory for the non-usefulness of self-consciousness. Because it doesn’t help. Doesn’t help the depressed person feel undepressed, doesn’t help the storyteller tell the story. Just Do It!: the top-to-bottom scream of our culture, and a good anthem for skippers not only of prefaces to books but of entire collections of occasional pieces by those w
ho ought to have the grace to stick to storytelling. Never mind where that slippery slope might get you, or how the attitude shears toward the same anti-intellectual currents in American life that would shovel reading novels per se into a trench along with a lot of other things you hold dear, if you’re still with me at this point. Bias spoiler alert: I think I’m an intellectual, and I think you are, too, whether you like it or not. I can’t help thinking so.

  All of these thoughts fall into the category of things I can’t help thinking, despite having sometimes tried not to, thinking it was my duty to do so. It turns out I can’t help being the self-conscious kind of artist, one who pits himself compulsively against bogus valorizing of notions of originality, authenticity, or naturalism in the arts. This is where a certain political implication comes out of hiding, and it’s a political implication very dear to me. For if we consent that what appears natural in art is actually constructed from a series of hidden postures, decisions, and influences, etc., we make ourselves eligible to weigh the notion that what’s taken as natural in our experience of everyday life could actually be a construction as well.

  That’s to say, if we pass time getting dreamy by reading stories about things that didn’t really happen, set in worlds that aren’t precisely our own, while acknowledging that such self-into-elsewhere dreams are enacted by conscious means, by acts of intention and craft (on the part of the readers as well as by the writers), it might suggest an analogous getting-from-here-to-there process: from this world, to a different one. Dreams of making real alterations in our relations to our selves and others (as well as to the systems that everywhere instill in us a dreadful foreboding that such alterations are highly unlikely) are for many people embarrassing, even rude to mention. Others grow enraged. To comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable: what presumption, on the part of the storyteller, taking this assignment!

  Yet I’ve got no choice, for I am the disturbed I seek to comfort, and also the comfortable I seek to disturb.