Some Notes Against Enthusiasm Jacob Silverman

22 Notes

Some Notes Against Enthusiasm

I may not be in the target demographic, but I think Molly Fischer’s follow-up to her original n+1 essay about ladyblogs is fantastic. The issues of anxiety over authority, BFF-ship, and a false air of intimacy that she describes are fairly widespread now among the newer breed of Internet culture sites.

Perhaps this, then, is what I meant: my ideal website—and we’ll call it a women’s website (what the hell) because I am a woman—would be one that didn’t make these excuses, writing off fun as “filler” or requiring the premise of friendship in order to raise weightier matters. This website would be one where the editors were willing to assume authority in and for their work, even if it meant sometimes seeming argumentative or unlikeable or wrong. It would be one where good faith could be assumed without gussying everything up in the trappings of intimacy, swaddling tricky subjects in chattiness.

There’s a version of Fischer’s critique that could be applied to the literary blogo- and twitter-spheres. The dominant sentiments are cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm (particularly on Twitter). Somehow criticism has become synonymous with offense; everything is personal—one’s affection for a book is interchangeable with one’s feelings about its author as a person. Critics gush in anticipation for books they haven’t yet read; they <3 so-and-so writer, tagging the author’s Twitter handle so that he or she knows it, too; they exhaust themselves with outbursts of praise, because that’s how you boost your follower count and affirm your place in the back-slapping community that is the literary twitter-sphere. There’s also a sense in which critics have to engage in this kind of behavior in order to appeal to average readers (whom they also hear from on Twitter); so as to connect with them, they must become them.

Some of these people have backgrounds in book-selling, publicity, or marketing, so their enthusiasms are understandable. But I’d rather have a culture in which people can establish distinct critical personas. A reviewer has to think differently from a bookseller or (lapsed) publicist, or else our practice doesn’t mean very much. More generally, we have to drain the lit-web of its personal, clubby aspect without losing the intensity it breeds. We can be excited about books, and the success of those that moved us, without devolving into fanboyism. Exacting and thoughtful criticism—especially harsh criticism—shouldn’t be taken as a personal assault or a sign of a dour personality. (Not all roads lead to snark.) Now more than ever, we perform multiple identities, and so we should be able to thoughtfully critique and debate one another—writers and critics alike—and still respect one another later, at the Housing Works party, in the blog comments, in the next essay written for a shamefully low fee.

Let’s think more and enthuse less, so that when we are over the moon about a book, our arguments carry more heft. Let’s not mistake chatty confessional writing for authentic feeling. Let’s not want so badly to be liked above all. And let’s tolerate barbed reviews, some dustups and blistering critiques, because they make our culture more interesting and because they are often more sincere reflections of our passions.