Zona,

To appreciate Zona, Geoff Dyer’s twelfth book, you’ll need to watch the Andrei Tarkovsky film, Stalker, among the most treasured and troubling movies in the history of cinema. If you’ve never seen it, you’ll need to take your time with the film—it is relentlessly bewitching—before reading Dyer’s discursive exploration of its maze of meanings and its thirty years’ spell upon him. If you’ve watched this 1979 Soviet-era allegory of a post-apocalyptic, ruined homeland in which three characters travel to a nearby and differently ruined space called the Zone, you’ll find its psychic disturbances less queasy with Dyer as your guide.

Perhaps the British author’s value (the American publication of his essay collection, Otherwise Known As the Human Condition, just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism) lies in how, with rigor and play, he engages his obsessions. Recall Dyer’s stunning travail with his own reluctance to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, the lively elegy, Out of Sheer Rage (1997). His subgenre, cornered by him and few others, is the book about an icon: a song, a symphony, a painting, an author, a battle (Gettysburg), a myth (Dead Elvis). The lure of icon-brooding is to activate a relationship between the writer and the object in which the writer finds his way following his passion for the object.

Works of art, the Renaissance scholar Walter Pater wrote in 1877, have generous hearts. In Pater’s day, Richard Wagner’s operas folded together music, drama, and myth. Pater thought this total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) was nothing new. It is in the nature of the arts, he said, that they lend each other their forces: lyric teams with melody to make song; a story’s climax gives painting a narrative; and so on. In the last century, film has enterprised these shared techniques the most: music, still and moving image, spoken language, time, visual space—all interact. The cinema revs another engine which most fiction and fantasy don’t engage: a relationship with actuality. Film is about people whose photographed identity remains theirs. Age, face, self: they are themselves, whether acting or not. What’s more, film records place, its vulnerability to time and the elements. In Stalker, Tarkovsky shoots a lake twice: in the morning when its misted calm suggests a veiled peaceableness and in the afternoon when its surface scuzz, like washing-machine discharge, suggests a toxic spill. The lake and its changing condition accommodate the filmmaker’s sensibility. Almost everything in Stalker is dank, wet, or hosed down, the unceasing drip-drops like a musical score. Such saturation seems a coproduction of nature and Tarkovsky, washing the human stench away.

In addition to cinema’s matrix of the sensorium, movies involve yet another relationship: the viewer’s engagement with a director’s vision. Which is where Dyer comes in. Stalker, as Tarkovsky’s shadow, has obsessed Dyer since he first saw the work in 1981. Why? The intrigue, its visceral charge, its filmic range. In a nuclear-ruled country where people still value human desire there is a Zone, an alien place which the authorities forbid people to enter, though it draws them largely for that restriction. A man called Stalker takes people there for a fee. In the Zone is the Room where, in Dyer’s words, “what you get is not what you think you wish for but what you most deeply wish for.” To go, a person must first escape the urban ruins in which he lives (where nature has been obliterated), follow Stalker’s neurotic path and commands to the Zone (where nature is reasserting itself), and believe in the Room’s power to reinvent oneself. The film asks, Why wouldn’t you want your deepest desire to manifest? Believe in the Zone and it will reward you.

Stalker leads two men, Writer and Professor, into the Zone. The closer they get to the Room, the more their hopes are revealed to them. But those hopes are not the ones they brought; they’ve been altered by the journey, which commands most of the movie’s two hours and forty-five minutes. Film and book underscore how the truly arduous trek remakes our expectations, our faith. And isn’t it true? Voyages always produce ends we do not expect. That’s why we go.

Dyer’s narrative purpose with this book seems to come down to this: If he describes the movie in minute detail, if he comments on its tastiest morsels, and if he follows wherever those morsels take him, his tour through Stalker will push him to fathom himself in ways he had not considered possible.

The three-page opening section about the movie’s initial scene, running behind the credits, sets up his tack. It’s a bar in which Professor awaits the arrival of Stalker and Writer. Dyer first fixes on the bartender who enters and gazes at a flickering fluorescent light. His gaze mixes hope that the light will stop flashing and resignation that it’s another day of the same. Next, Dyer stops on Professor’s unobtrusive knapsack (the kind of thing we miss the first time through a movie): “There’s no way that his knapsack,” Dyer writes, “could contain a bomb, but this unremarkable action—putting a knapsack under the table in a bar—is not one that can now go unremarked, especially by someone who first saw Stalker (on Sunday, February 8, 1981) shortly after seeing Battle of Algiers.” Dyer crafts a context then inserts himself. As the book proceeds, this self-insertion develops until the author shares equal billing with the film.

And so it goes: Zona—a book about a film about a journey—becomes Dyer’s zone of discovery. A sequence emerges: a) he launches his personal turn in the middle of W.G. Sebald-like long paragraphs, which might be footnoted with just-as-lengthy excursions; b) there, Dyer unloads an idea, memory, or opinion, often about sex, his parents, Tarkovsky’s life, or the history of cinema; and c) once vented, he turns back to the film, transformed by the wildness the movie has awakened in him.

We share in this pleasure, whichever way the film pulls. Among the best meanders are these. The mystical hold the movie has on him each time he sees it. The “fury and despair” of its director, an auteur whose dedication was both feared and worshipped. Stalker’s history—how it got made, how the Soviets decried its mystery, how it compares to Tarkovsky’s other six films. The movie’s Zen passages when the camera is transfixed by bombed-out landscapes or the dirty faces and balding domes of the three main actors. A few scenes that don’t work, especially the “nap,” during which the men, who stretch out on puddles, argue about each other’s “purchased inspiration” and “psychological abysses.” The several self-mocking asides when Dyer plumbs his motivations: “What kind of writer am I, writing a summary of a film?” And his own deepest wish (one he still holds dear), an unrealized sexual fantasy, comic-cum-serious, that opens the valve of regret: why it is that when we finally get close to what we “deeply wish for,” we turn and run.

Of the three, Stalker is the most haunted. Why is never clear. Though previously imprisoned for leading people to the Zone, he cannot stay away. Each trip is cathartic, which we know from his mania and his wife’s cracked behavior. She berates his going before he leaves, then justifies it after he returns. Perhaps it’s for his crippled daughter that he plods, in homage to or guilt for her condition. (That condition marks the film’s beguiling end.) Stalker preserves the Zone’s aura, applies what small apparatchik authority he has over those he escorts.

While Professor has his own agenda (I won’t spoil it), Writer is, for me, the one truly lost. He may shoulder the worst case of writer’s block ever filmed. In the bar, Writer tells Professor, a chemist, that both men dig for the truth. But, Writer says, “while I am digging for the truth, so much happens to it, that instead of discovering the truth, I dig up a heap of, pardon—I better not name it.” In a later soliloquy (Stalker is a film of speeches and recited poetry), Writer describes his writing as “a squeezing out of a hemorrhoid.” To counter, he hopes the Room grants him genius, which, he realizes is absurd because he’d have no desire to write; he’d lose what scant longing he still has for words. Acknowledging his ambivalence about talent is as close as he gets to his deepest desire. At the Room’s lip, he concludes a visit is unnecessary. The decision frees him but the block remains.

Geoff Dyer

All this speechifying unlocks a prime ambiguity about film and speech. What is said in cinema is secondary to what is heard and seen. What’s heard and seen is felt, first and foremost, by viewers and by characters. Words lag behind the shock of jump cuts, the awe of sound/visual textures. Think of Bergman and Goddard. Though critics call such plotless, moody, avant-garde films abstractions, we experience Breathless and Wild Strawberries nothing like Wittgenstein. How could these films be anything but visceral? “The Zone,” Tarkovsky said in an interview, “doesn’t symbolize anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is the zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through.” Film is life. In Dyer’s loving regard of this director’s world, we are reminded how cinema fixes the reality it witnesses, how cinema preserves time. And I would add the reality and time it fixes and preserves is far more actual than mythic.

Dyer follows the chronology of the film, which organizes the book and lets him chart his emotional logic. Because Tarkovsky’s images are so vivid, they are emblazoned in our mind and, thus, Dyer need not recount them. Instead, he chases after those episodes that capture and elude him. An example. When the three men are at the Room’s threshold and Stalker is ready to usher them in, Stalker lights up with a kind of neurotic ecstasy. He claims that a man, before he enters and receives his wish, should think about the past as such thoughts will make him kinder. Dyer responds.

A lovely idea, but manifestly untrue. There comes a point in your life when you realize that most of the significant experiences—aside from illness and death—lie in the past. To that extent the past is far more appealing than the future. The older you get the more time you spend thinking about the past, the things that have happened. Old people spend almost all of their time thinking about the past. But if their faces are anything to go by, this past fills them with bitterness as often as tenderness. The past becomes a source of regret; you think of hopes that were unrealized, disappointments, betrayals, failures, deceptions, all the things that led this point which could be so different . . .

            And so on.

The film’s climax, to be sure, is anticlimactic. The men’s stamina is spent, the promise of salvation lopped off at the knees. Their moccasin creep, traversing the Zone slows to a crawl until the camera stands guard inside the Room and, looking out, stares at the three men, cowered and defeated, gazing in. To wit, Dyer launches a six-page, single paragraph in which he ponders their breakdown. “Not to have to face up to the truth about oneself,” he writes, “is probably high up on anyone’s actual—as opposed to imagined—wish list. Jung claimed that ‘people will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.’”

Zona corrals a writer and a subject, who and which, astride their bubbly comradeship, invite a reviewer to do the same. I admit to (an extended) mulling (of) the film’s conundrums and Dyer’s virtuoso performance massaging them. But I, too, must stop mid-mull, more than a touch forlorn that I can’t say any more about this most Eros-driven of reading adventures, courtesy of contemporary literature’s best muller.

*Photo by Jason Oddy

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Had you not read much of Ann Beattie’s fiction—which is the case with me, just a few of The New Yorker stories—and Mrs. Nixon was your introduction to this writer, you’d think, How astonishing: she’s a collagist, an experimenter, formally fearless, analytically daring, animating with this book the most notoriously prudish of all the presidents’ wives, Thelma Catherine Pat Ryan Nixon (1912-1993), wife to Richard, vice-president under Eisenhower in the 1950s and president from 1969 until his ordering the Watergate break-in forced him to resign in 1974. “I am very happy to find myself paired with Mrs. Nixon,” Beattie announces, “a person I would have done anything to avoid—to the extent she was even part of my consciousness. As a writer, though, she interests me. My curiosity is based on how little we share in terms of personality, or upbringing, or what fate has dealt us.” Write what you don’t know.

And how much of you don’t know is here! Tantalizing, too, with Mrs. Nixon a blurred-genre hybrid—novelistic essay, imaginative nonfiction, montage fiction. Career-wise, Beattie’s a fictionalist: seven novels and seven story collections, and virtually no nonfiction, a few articles and talks, and now this venture. In its extended uncertainty about itself and its subject, we get some made-up parts—Dick stories transferred to Pat’s point of view. But more we hear the author scrutinizing herself, her writing, her literary friendships, her extensive reading, her teaching style. Of the subtitle, “novelist” invites craft talk; “imagines” promises fiction; and a “life” of a first lady, who, Beattie says, “internalized the expectations of her time and enacted them meticulously,” suggests biography. It’s all that but, I fear, the phrase is too, um, pat. I’d offer the much less shapely, Ann Beattie: A Novelist Analyzes Herself Via the Kaleidoscopic Image of Mrs. Nixon.

The book is doused with confession, the author owning up to something, its self-telling focus saying it all. Beattie needs the Pacific Ocean of nonfiction, in contrast to the Lake Superior of fiction, to set sail. Another Ann-Beattie-like novel won’t cut it: Those fictions simmer a familiar stew—the precious scenes, the yuppie protagonists, the frosty intimacy. What is revealed to her bemused characters is too great a burden or annoyance to elicit any change. Typically, her figures are left stunned by the tale’s enigma and flee its embarrassing truth.

Here: enigmas are found and unfled from. Mrs. Nixon feels free, careening, even loopy. It wobbles as much on Pat and Dick as it does on Beattie with its range of snarky tweets and dense digressions about fiction’s métier. Who knew how many pieces into which the Humpty-Dumpty of one fictional persona might break. There are the omniscient re-imaginings of classic episodes, Dick’s Checkers speech and his morbid farewell. There are the cartoon-like speech balloons in Mrs. Nixon’s parodic voice. There are several amusements with Pat the Stepford Wife, penned like a Hallmark thank-you note. There are a few first-person reflections, intriguingly dangerous, by a Pat-Ann amalgam. And there are Beattie’s professorial volleys into the nature of story and truth, comprising roughly half the book and aggravated by her subject’s impenetrable nature. A few of these activate the inner hell of what (we knew) was happening to Nixon’s family as his presidency soured, a realm neither TV media nor Dick’s devoted could probe.

One of Beattie’s inspired ways into the famous person’s persona is to apply the short story’s insight into its vexed characters, in this case, to the Nixons. During their prewar courtship, Pat gave Dick two books: one by Karl Marx, the other, stories by Guy de Maupassant. Beattie assigns her subjects “The Necklace,” a story about a woman, a commoner who, to make her husband look good, borrows what she believes is an expensive necklace for an elegant party, loses it, buys a replacement whose price indebts her and her husband for ten years only to learn in the end that the original was a cheap knockoff. Beattie wonders whether the pair discussed the story and registered its effect.

“Might such a story have had experiential force, registered as a warning, or is fiction just fiction, a made-up tale? . . . The moral—in both Maupassant’s story and Mrs. Nixon’s life—is undermined by the fact that awareness comes too late, that both women have spent their lives with men who will never learn the right lessons, will never change.”

Ann Beattie

Throughout, almost punishingly, Beattie inserts her authoress self into the psychological vacuum of a woman whose epic disinterestedness was true because her kin and her handlers believed it. Such Pat Nixon selflessness is history’s myth. So deeply ingrained was her piety that Pat’s daughter, nee Julie Nixon Eisenhower, wrote a memoir about her mother, subtitled “The Untold Story,” in which what was told was how fully all those years Julie had bought the script. Of the self-silencing Pat waged, no one cared, least of all Pat, to examine. She thought, apparently, such meekness was her calling, to be a 1950s wife, a Tammy Wynette who in cement shoes stood by her husband and despised him. Everyone felt it was a ploy. But did she? Beattie argues that the vinegary look, the strict posture, the priggish dress do not lie. Indeed, the author’s prowess as a fabulist, on behalf of those sunken souls relegated to the wings, insures a kind of richness of motive to Mrs. Nixon few of us can imagine.

In a collaged text, it’s tough to achieve a book-length emotional rhythm. With scenic story, with grand biography, with redemptive memoir, such patterns of growth come with the territory. But with Beattie the unfolding of Pat’s liberation, especially for her, remains unrealized. Only late in the book and only briefly do Pat’s insights about herself (in Beattie’s mirror) emerge while prior to her awakening we endure too many spitball-like vignettes that keep Pat’s true self ducking. A freed Mrs. Nixon had the option to grow up in Beattie’s sculpting. Only problem was she didn’t. She got waylaid, fitted too strongly by Beattie’s overpowering dressage. How easy, how wise, it would have been to give Pat some gloves to fight with.

Other elements do work. One is Beattie’s commingling a literary persona out of author and subject. It may be a bookish self that emerges but Pat, paired with Ann, is spry, capable, a touch wacky, yanked away from a man, at least temporarily, she felt she must marry. I want to stress this idea, namely, that remaking the image of the famous by way of a self-nagging investigatory author epitomizes one literary channel of our age. At the core is a great attraction to life-writing and a parallel distrust of biographical and autobiographical conceits. Authors seek to represent the force of the past in the present, which requires the writer’s perspective be the shared subject of the work. Such is the relational art of authors Nicholson Baker and Geoff Dyer, of filmmakers Todd Haynes and Errol Morris, who blow up the proverbial portraiture of American and British idols via personal uncertainty and technological play.

Perhaps more germane, Mrs. Nixon’s tack challenges the epistemology of Beattie’s own fiction. This book explodes her stock in trade—the short story’s usefulness, its expressivity. Why does the short story persist? It may resemble landscape painting, the vision of another era still practiced into our own. I sense Beattie is dissatisfied with fiction’s truth claims, something David Foster Wallace and his continental drift among fiction and fact engaged on a Very Big Level. Having felt the earth move, she flags the tremor early in the book: “Let’s say the writer has a character who is based on a well-known figure—a situation increasingly common, as fiction writers struggle to remain standing in the Age of Memoir.”

Finally, when I think about the recent commercial surge of political autobiography and insider memoir, where the author impersonates or revises himself, blazes a career-path or widens his platform (think of the opportunists Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich), I remember how well our creative nonfiction writers expose, parody, upend, and demystify the franchising of these self-adoring selves. Some of the best, new nonfiction relies on muddied points-of-view, unreliable narrators, and discontinuous time to de-maze the hive mind and the cubicles we live in. I’m most heartened to see Beattie challenging her own fictional clout and joining these new voyagers who are sacrificing form for function.

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Permit me, briefly, a naiveté. Had I thought about art and cruelty together, I would have said, yes, writers, painters, filmmakers depict a good deal of cruelty: Goya, Kafka, Tarantino, not to mention the emotionless airheads puppeteered by novelist Brett Easton Ellis or the one-night pain stands of performance artist Chris Burden, whose most memorable gig was having a friend shoot him in the arm on stage. But since such shock and shudder has such limited appeal (just because a lot of authors write transgressive fiction doesn’t mean they’re being read), I would not have guessed that any critic would insist such acts are artful. Really, there’s more to Less Than Zero than its minimalist deadpan? It seems that cruelty and art risk being too car-wreck enthralling, too Casey Anthony obsessive.

With her new book, The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson begs to differ. She is drawn to cruelty—not for cruelty’s sake but for art’s. Because she looks so intently, we owe her a debt for engaging and, at times, finding meaning in this sub-sub-culture. In her “reckoning,” suggesting not all’s right within this domain, we hear substantive discussions of the “gratified desire for effacement” in Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, and Sylvia Plath. Many other examples she details issue from performance art: the self-contradictory installations about women and race by the African American, Kara Walker; The Pillowman, a play by Martin McDonagh, linking a writer of childhood murder stories, actual childhood murders, and police interrogations that reveal the childhood sexual abuse of the players; the films of Santiago Serra who exploits poor Cubans in such pieces as 10 People Paid to Masturbate; and a campy video by a college co-ed, Do You Have Time to Kill Me Today, which features the student’s real-life neighbor slitting the student’s throat in take after take, progressively more sickening and bloody.

Readers should know that Nelson is not writing about the “art” of cruelty. Instead, it’s an overview of art made of cruelty—film, performance art, fiction, painting—and cruel-inclined artists. The book also dwells on her response to specific pieces whose ethical edges are razor sharp. Nelson relishes the complexity of gut-churning performances, hates dialectical thinking, and likes quoting what artists say about motive and irony.

A poet and memoirist, Nelson is the author of Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, about women poets of the 1950s, and a faculty member at Cal Arts near Los Angeles where she taught a class, “The Art of Cruelty,” for three years. She is mono-maniacal about why visual cruelties captivate her and seed her ambivalence. Why, she asks in her preface, does she spend so much time on this subject? What’s the relationship, she forecasts, between art and fascism, dehumanization and voyeurism, an artist’s self-punishment and our attraction/aversion?

It’s a brave yet difficult undertaking, difficult because this is a tough treatise to like. Not only is the subject matter enervating—I often put the book down, worn out by the constant knife edge of violent images—but I struggle with Nelson’s ambivalence as the end-all of her enthrallment. She offers only occasional judgments, no consensus, no classification. Sadly, the absence of any structured groundwork or conclusions about many aesthetic and cultural questions feels like a missed opportunity. What, for example, do the different audience responses to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ tell us? Is the latter better because its blood-spattering crucifixion seems true to the tale? Is the former worse because its urine is actual?

Maggie Nelson

Throughout, Nelson is catalyzed, disgusted, moved, at times enervated herself by artists and their rage. One traumatizing example is the work of Ana Mendieta. Her Rape Scene (1973) recreates a rape and murder that took place at the University of Iowa. Inviting the audience to her apartment, Mendieta dressed as the victim: “Naked, tied, up, her underwear around her ankles, her body smeared with blood and dirt and bent over a table.” As people entered, they were horrified to see the artist playing dead.

Nelson believes Mendieta’s silent terror play complicates any simple feminist outrage; it repositions, she writes, “a certain cruelty to the self” which then “quickly leaks out to the viewer” and asks us “how will we participate?” Toward Mendieta and others like her, one obvious response is, Why do we have to participate? Nelson fields this suspicion as well: Mendieta’s work “may incite horror, concern, compassion, and revulsion—in short, pity and fear—but it doesn’t offer anywhere for these feelings to go.”

Such simulated pieces crack the barrier between art and life, à la John Cage, which says that contemporary art dispenses with (most) filters so we might examine what truly confounds us. Yet the Cagean tack registers with most slices of cruel art the same slack jaw result: shock and immobility.

Perhaps the glue of cruelty’s hold is not its “art” but its performance, its visceral slap, its full-frontal assault. For Nelson, the point of performance art lies in the “unruly, inscrutable, multivalent, un-ownable” sphere. “When things are going well with art-making and art-viewing,” she notes, “art doesn’t really say or teach anything.” But what does it mean for an art, an artist, and a culture when things are “not going well?” Is this as true of a performer artist’s work as it is of Francis Bacon’s? Are there standards for art made of cruelty?

Though I understand Nelson’s style of exemplification—let the pieces and their horror speak for themselves—I was left with no broader understanding. Most of all I wanted her to pull back and provide some pragmatic analysis. What are the consequences of such violence in art, not just in her but in the culture?

Nelson writes that to appreciate women depicting violence, “One has to develop a sharper ear for dissonance, for artistic instances and tonal nuances, that do not derive their charge from making pit stops at well-trod narrative stations.” Artistic instances she ladles by the bucketful. And I agree about the tyranny of narrative. But tonal nuances? Where is subtlety in Self-Portrait/Pervert, Catherine Opie’s photo of herself, pierced by forty-six needles with the word “pervert” “freshly carved, in ornate lettering, in the skin of her chest?” My experience of Nelson’s experience of Opie’s self- and viewer-assault is that neither of us understood what our feelings—our tonalities—were, let alone where they should go.

By the book’s end, I sensed a trade-off: I was more aware of this art’s disturbing purposefulness and less willing to sit with its pummeling whether by the artist or the critic. Which may be the (double) value of her book. An education in, and a flight from, distaste.

Nelson says of Sylvia Plath that the poet “wields her scimitar of clarity without letting any air into the room.” “One may love, respect, and admire the work, but one may not always feel like hanging out in its little room, or feeling the press of its walls. One may have to be, as they say, in the mood.” A fitting description of the reader’s plight through Nelson’s ambitious, incisive, blood-boiling, duck-and-cover essay.

Author photograph by Tom Atwood.

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What’s more, publishing on paper, linear thinking, literary hierarchies, metanarrative legitimacy, not to mention the humanist claims of literacy and democracy, all are being remade. Only five hundred years into movable type and the Enlightenment/Romantic/Modern culture it begat—and suddenly we are blinded by how brief our dwelling in the kingdom of print will be.

One way to situate this monumental change is to understand reading from the brain’s perspective. Two current books stand out: Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain and Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. According to Dehaene, director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, our brains were built to read, but each person has to learn how. Reading is not innate; it’s cognitive.

What’s more, humans have just begun to read and write. “The invention of reading,” he says, “is far too recent for our genome to have adapted to it.” Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University, notes that the brain integrates a series of component functions—geared for visual, auditory, and associative activity—that “light up,” or purposefully integrate, during the act of reading. A brain reading is a collage of active substrates and multi-level neuronal fireworks.

Dehaene, who is more philosophically attuned than Wolf—though Wolf is the more elegant author—unravels the chief mystery: how our brains combined spoken language with written symbols and evolved the inscription of words “to fit” our cerebral cortex. “How did humans discover,” he asks, “that their visual cortex could be turned into a text comprehension device?”

You can almost hear the answer in the question. Five thousand years ago, our brains began to shape inscription with expressive constructions like cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and Chinese ideograms. With us as toolmakers, the brain regularized these inventions, eventually universalizing them into alphabets. All this was done to (a) simplify eye-text recognition; (b) coordinate the brain’s many paths of perception, all highly participatory; and (c) push us to write, or to contemplate ideas more conscientiously for ourselves and, in the process, develop original thought.

The brain has not yet programmed reading into the species because both reading and the species are still in their childhood, in largely “modifiable” states. As our culture invents new platforms with which to read and process information, the brain, Dehaene notes, will adapt its “ancient neuronal circuits” to “new cultural objects, selected because they are useful to humans and stable enough to proliferate from brain to brain.” The brain absorbs the iPad and its protocols in a matter of weeks or months. Happily for Apple, no change in the genome is required.

Brain and text make a chummy pair. When we read words we know, we get them in a flash. Adding a new word to an invariable syntax (poetry is often an exception) may slow us down, but we adapt: We say a new word aloud, look it up, or understand it in context. By contrast, our senses (the lizard or pre-literate brain) are innate. Every generation does not “learn to smell,” but every generation does learn to read—from scratch. Or, as Noam Chomsky puts it, we “grow” into language.

There is also evidence that reading evolved to engender physical/mental pleasure in the brain. It embraced the letter’s symbolic nature, which over time humans simplified from pictographs to letters, making reading comprehensive and economical. Our twenty-six-letter phonetic alphabet (start date: Greece, 750 B.C.E.) allows for millions of combinations, though its basic representations are mere “fragments of sound and meaning.”

The alphabet’s mosaic cast reminds us that reading is experiential, an interplay: From the fragments of text-sound we encounter, we “defragment,” that is, reorganize and recombine, ideas, images, and emotions. Every time the brain connects the visual cortex to other regions where text stirs sense and memory, neuronal activity doubles or triples. Reading brings new thought, and new thought, it is believed, heightens consciousness and expands the mind. That’s why the bookish are “brainy.”

***

Wolf’s and Dehaene’s studies offer three core postulates about the brain and language. First, the brain’s organizational efficiency determined what we would read. Dehaene describes how script is composed of simple two-, three-, and four-lined shapes, which symbolize sound and image (S is snake-like and sounds itself in shhh or shiver). Alphabets are highly adaptive; they are easy to process and recall because letters are few, their sounds limited and distinct. Dehaene calls the brain’s specialized region that recognizes writing the “letterbox.” The letterbox, located in the left hemisphere, or “the seat of language,” organizes and disperses the bits of what we read to the temporal and frontal lobes where sound and meaning are encoded. There the text is deciphered, which—if it wasn’t written by Jacques Derrida—happens in one-fifth of a second.

Second, the brain integrated several brain functions to facilitate high levels of comprehension. An fMRI scan of a reader reveals visual, auditory, syntactic, and semantic areas alive with activity. Text recognition is electric, energetic, holistic, whether the content is “She sells seashells down by the seashore” or Wittgenstein’s gem, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” Words and concepts must make sense, and sense, as Dehaene puts it, “requires multiple cerebral systems to agree on an unambiguous interpretation of [the] visual input.” The fact that English contains “bear” as noun and verb, as animal and burden, is proof that the brain is encoded to receive, parse, and solve language conundrums.

Third, reading and writing combine with personal memory in the brain to produce the most lasting effect: meaning. Here’s a topic neuroscientists have only begun to explore. Meaning involves collaboration between text and reader, between reader and memory. I admire Wolf’s assertion that “the secret at the heart of reading [is] the time it frees for the brain” to develop deep thoughts; but in her study I see neither proof (how might this be tested?) nor adequate discussion that deep thought originates from the exchange between reading and contemplation. I do agree reading intensifies our engagement with the world. As a nonfiction writer, I bounce from reading others’ texts to creating my own. This bi-lateral movement is the essence of literacy. I can’t imagine one without the other.

But meaning takes time; its voyages are global. Like the brain’s plasticity, meaning is highly modifiable. Poems, paintings, films, music—all strike us differently as individuals and at different times in our lives. Meaning crosses and integrates brain functions, stimulating uncertainties language loves to field but brain science seems ill-equipped to study: How might science account for wit, irony, black humor, postmodernism in the brain? Such tropes bypass the limbic system, the pathways of emotion and memory, and register confusion. But on second thought, the tropes pass through the limbic and steam the pots of ambiguity. In “The Idea of Order in Key West,” Wallace Stevens’ recondite language sidles its way through our doubt, our curiosity, our love of wordplay and revelation, a course as much emotional as intellectual.

To date, neuroscientists have scanned the brains only of text/book readers, those raised on stable forms like the Bible or the short story. How will new text-digitizing devices, the big cloud of hypertext, and the “field” display of Web pages and phone screens reinvent reading? Will screens alter content, redirect meaning? Will they, despite allowing more people to read, make reading (and us) superficial? And if we don’t read as immersively as we did before, does that mean we’ll be less “brainy”?

***

This is the noisy debate we get from Nicholas Carr and Kevin Kelly, a pair of cultural and lexical polemicists. Carr’s overview, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a book about the Net and its distractions, is rife with worry: “Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” That something is his reading composure, dislocated by the Net just in the last three years.

Online today, Carr can’t sit still—the Internet’s disruptiveness begets suffering. “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Ditto for most everyone online, he says. As a knowledge base, print has fallen into fourth place, behind TV, computer, and radio. Carr cites colleagues who have abandoned books and long articles entirely in favor of blips of text, or text sculpted into acoustic and visual space. Some believe this a boon: one former magazine writer says the Net has made him smarter: “More connections to documents, artifacts, and people mean more external influences on my thinking and thus on my writing.”

Reading a Web page is unlike reading print. Call the former “digital immersion,” which drops linearity in favor of diversion as readers scan and scroll over one page and skip to other pages. Such users are online hunters, not rapt readers. Studies show that only one-sixth of the text on a Web page is actually read. Carr says the Net’s cognitive meddling and rewiring is making us stupider, and his scientific evidence is impressive. (Though he doesn’t seem any stupider for writing his book, despite being a good example of an online hunter.)

The Shallows’ major flaw is that Carr does not distinguish types of readers: The devourer of books is the only type offered. There’s little—from any of these books—about the different goals readers have when they approach text and hypertext; indeed, many digital enthusiasts are becalmed by the Web’s total access. I, for one, am glad that the dizzying microfiche reader has gone the way of the dodo.

Here are three easily deflatable assumptions about the Reader: that a person becomes a “deep” reader only via “high” literature; that an individual’s online and offline reading are measurably equivalent; and that textual immersion leads to intelligence. The knowingness of athletes, jazz musicians, and birders are wildly different from one another—and none relies much on the skill of reading.

For Kelly, a founding editor of Wired, interacting with screens (already some 4.5 billion are up) will, like the printing press, change the way we read and write for the better. The “interconnected cool, thin displays” of screens have “launched an epidemic of writing that continues to swell.” Since Web pages privilege text—still the dominant form of communication, in part because text is easy to store and requires comparatively little bandwidth—they are now proliferating at the rate of several million a day. Screens are “very visual, merging words with moving images.” Though our eyes are taxed, our bodies are engaged. Fingers, hands, voice, brain, all are enlivened by the sensorium of a finely hypertexted page.

Building on the bi-directionality of the Internet, screens will soon “follow our eyes” and attach us to “where we gaze.” The screen and its links will absorb us more—and will absorb more of us—as we scroll, glance, read. What’s more, Kelly states, “books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking.” If contemplation recalls deep reading, utilitarian reading is driven, like a Geiger counter, to find the glowing chunks. New modes of reading means our minds are indexing info in real time. The benefit for Kelly: “In books we find a revealed truth; on the screen we assemble our own truth from pieces.”

As yet we don’t know the cognitive differences between a concentrating reader of the page and an indexing reader of the screen. It may be that the traditional written/oral narrative evolved as a structure, which the brain selected for and directed back at its users, in essence, to test the brain’s linear processing ability across multiple cognitive levels. Such forms are not innate; they are the brain’s evolved strategy for stabilizing attention, and publishers’ accustomed way of delivering economically viable structures to audiences.

Carr and Kelly agree on one thing that the academics Wolf and Dehaene mostly avoid: Reading has civilized us. But I’m not so sure I agree with them, especially when I recall those Brahms-loving guards at Auschwitz. Better put, I think our wiring allows just enough plasticity to ensure brain, as opposed to human, progress.

“When a new cultural invention finds its neuronal niche,” Dehaene writes, “it can multiply rapidly and invade an entire human group.” As for civilization, minds will believe anything they read or hear or see because variability, our evolutionary necessity to be altered, is innate; on the other hand, our ability to detect the deceptions of the worst of people is—how shall I put this?—less innate. It seems our so-called civilizing traits are both learned and unlearned.

A final thought: If the brain adapted the inscription of words on tablets into a reading system that we learned with exponential quickness and ever-deepening comprehension, then why won’t the brain adapt the frenzy of the Net into a sensory system that we will learn with equally exponential quickness and ever-deepening comprehension?

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Recently, I chanced upon David Propson’s problematic review of Douglas Coupland’s new freewheeling critical/personal biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! Coupland and McLuhan, though of successive generations, are blood brothers—both Canadians and both writers and artists of New Media. Right off, Propson is snarky, declaring that McLuhan—it’s inarguable that he’s one of the greatest thinkers about media, the man who invented media studies—has exerted much influence over “certain adolescent minds.” But McLuhan did not influence adolescents—he influenced the media builders, those who sell electronic technology to the young because they adapt the quickest.

Next, Propson characterizes McLuhan as “old-fashioned to the point of medievalism,” which is again ludicrous. As anyone who’s read The Gutenberg Galaxy or Understanding Media knows, McLuhan feasted on modernism, particularly James Joyce. Sadly, Propson calls McLuhan a “lazy researcher”; so, too, is Coupland, he thinks. But McLuhan saw that a return to, and a nostalgia for, pre-print orality is one of the primary themes of the previous five hundred years of literature.

Propson can’t stand the “incongruous interpolations” and the “idiosyncratic digressions” of Coupland’s biography. OK. But he doesn’t try to understand why Coupland is writing such a hybrid book. Coupland’s book, like hundreds of other form-stretching texts of our time, is nontraditional. It’s a fusion of postmodern elements: formal irony, textual innovation, collage. McLuhan, Propson writes, predicted the “end of the book”—which he didn’t—and Coupland is doing his best “to kill it.”

Douglas Coupland

Coupland isn’t killing anything. What he is attempting in Marshall McLuhan is to activate his own intimacy and distance, critical and personal, as he unpacks McLuhan’s life and ideas. Certainly this is a departure from traditional biography, and so I need to present the criteria by which I’ll judge its newness.

First criterion: What is the author’s reason to deviate from a given form? (This question is apt because Coupland’s book first appeared in Canada, in 2009, as part of a series, “Extraordinary Canadians.”) Two big biographies, published in 1989 and 1997, have covered the “objective” life—the facts—about McLuhan. Coupland wants to connect personally to this other Canadian culture hero, perhaps, because he’s part of the McLuhan cell line. In 1991, Coupland published Generation X, which satirizes a lost generation of consumers much as McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride did with his send-up and putdown of advertising in 1951.

Here, Coupland includes Amazon notices for copies of McLuhan’s out-of-print books, quoting a few of those “everyman” reviews. There’s something—dare I say McLuhanesque—about these inclusions that subvert the bio-form. Such subversion echoes McLuhan’s line, “the medium is the message.” The medium of books and their physical form is that which writers continue to worry. These Amazon ads in Coupland’s biography feel archeological: the printed, bound book is already a relic, much as McLuhan said it would be.

Second criterion: Does the writer develop the non-traditional form he or she adopts? Here, I fault Coupland: He fails to fully bridge the adventurousness of collage and the gravity of the subject. McLuhan loved what he termed “acoustic space,” the resonant medium of the electric age where dialogue and orality once again rules. In his multi-illustrated texts, McLuhan lifted the silent (the silenced?) voice of print off the page by hybridizing book design and a fragmentary presentation of ideas. This was McLuhan’s content, pushing the medium to the foreground of our thinking.

Coupland does well discussing McLuhan as our first “metacritic.” He invented interdisciplinary studies with his media-focused seminars, convening at the University of Toronto in the 1950s with a range of colleagues who explored how electronic media was transforming not only their disciplines but also creating a new umbrella field: Communications. As a metacritic, McLuhan reified acoustic space (which would birth virtual space)—parallel electronic geographies where people live with less visual and more tactile participation.

These are fine statements, but I wanted more performative collaging from Coupland and more contemplation of his (as opposed to McLuhan’s) point of view. Coupland misses an opportunity with McLuhan’s notion of the media’s “mutational powers”—that is, whatever the electronic world touches, it transforms.

Marshall McLuhan

How about applying this to literature, Coupland’s bailiwick? For a novelist and nonfictionist of more than twenty books and a collage artist himself, Coupland is silent on McLuhan’s belief that literature is being decentered in Western culture. What books have said so well seems lost in the maelstrom of New Media. What’s more, McLuhan believed that, in the electronic age, content matters far less than form; it’s critical that we see content as an exposé of form. McLuhan, like the postmodernists after him, wanted us to get beyond our “narcissistic hypnosis” for the Jane Austen narrative. In fact, what is dynamic and new about the novel is its ability to translate the content of other media, exploring, as one example, pattern recognition from the visual arts. Like a gospel preacher, McLuhan practices this via the noisy mix of many ideas, each fragment barely explicated. McLuhan’s writing embodies the very interconnectivity he isolated and studied in media. Coupland rarely notices (and fails to apply in a significant way) how McLuhan changed the very mode Coupland continues to work in.

The last criterion for a new work is its emotional bent: Does an author’s passion for writing a formally different (even daring) book bring us emotionally closer to the subject? In this regard, Coupland shines. McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media that “any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue.” The last idea is crucial, for in making biography dialogical, we inhabit the shape-shifting writer’s approach: Coupland wants to share with his fellow Canadian some of their befuddlement, wonder, and wit about the electronic grid they are a part of.

I love this element of writers getting close to their culture heroes, in the way that Geoff Dyer probes his fascination with D. H. Lawrence in Out of Sheer Rage. Coupland plays with his position vis-à-vis McLuhan by opposing two short sections: “Writing a biography is cruel” and “Writing a biography is divine.” It’s a matter of perspective, of how the shaper turns these tonal contrasts toward his subject. Coupland wants to relax in the McLuhan universe, not let mountain ranges of data become the enemy. He writes that with the Internet “I . . . note that most people seem to be enjoying, and having fun with, more stories and pictures and words and ideas than anyone could ever have dreamed of.” Could a kind of tribal, primal joy embody the goal of New Media, an end run around wisdom and meaning that we associate with the romance of literature? Might we find more value in letting go of our anger at the book-displacing media and regard the “eternal now” of cyberspace as a place whose lack of historical determinism and fracture of prescribed art forms is a good thing?

In his time, McLuhan said “yes” to this newness, and for now Coupland concurs. But he’s a tad more timid, formally. Though Coupland may aspire to the oracle’s fearlessness, he wishes most for McLuhan’s Zen way of mixing being with writing: The more McLuhan collaborated, the better his ideas emerged. The less he revised his work, the more enigmas he wrought. This is the hardest part of the creative craft: to make the creative a craft.

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Initially, I was attracted to Elif Batuman’s The Possessed because I hoped it would be an oar-dipping voyage into a memoir sub-genre I have come to admire: a confession about how a writer has been bewitched by an author (Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, a meditation on his inability to write about D. H. Lawrence) or by the act of reading (Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Ruined by Reading).

Why am I drawn to these writers? I think of Craig Seligman’s Opposites Attract Me, a three-way tryst with himself, Pauline Kael, and Susan Sontag (he relied, for much of his essay, on his close friendship with Kael); Seligman is smitten, to be sure, and he seeks to understand how these two critics have enraptured him. For some authors, reading is a means to match insights with, or better, to stay in the spell of, another author, largely because it feels so good to be bedeviled by the relationship long after the book ends.

Enter the authorial fascination of Elif Batuman and her set of carnivalesque essays about things literary and Russian. In her mid-20s, Batuman, a Turkish-American, is a graduate student at Stanford. She’s something of a polyglot savant—knowing English and Turkish, she picks up Russian and Uzbek with ease. A fledgling scholar, she gives a paper at a Tolstoy conference in Russia and helps host one on Isaac Babel at home. Batuman portrays the comic absurdity of her “profession” and renders the scholar’s velvet cage with farcical insouciance.

Elif Batuman

In Don Quixote, Batuman finds a narrator who measures his life by the chivalric romances he reads and then acts upon: “He had lived life and read books; he lived life through books, generating an even better book.” A scholarly Don Quixote, Batuman wants to write a differently turned work of literary criticism. “The method of the novel has typically been imitation: the characters try to resemble the characters in the books they find meaningful,” she writes—but “what if you tried study instead of imitation, and metonymy instead of metaphor?” In other words, if one’s life is one’s reading, why not write about what one has lived?

In The Possessed, there’s more on display than just her love of Russian books. In several tales, she is drawn to those who are drawn to Pushkin and Tolstoy, Chekhov and Babel, authors she’s gobbled up already. She next sidles over to study, for a summer, Uzbekistani literature and its greats, Ahkmad Yugnakiy and Alisher Navoi, as well as the Uzbek language, a Turkic-based tongue that has more than one hundred verbs for “to cry.” Batuman’s strength lies in her chummy proximity to those with whose wacky or lost wandering through scholarship she empathizes. She loves these unlikely protagonists—the obscure, the obscurant—with a stylist’s flair, her own complex prose and narrative twists revealing a consummate literary performer:

Some Russian people are skeptical or even offended when foreigners claim an interest in Russian literature. I still remember the passport control officer who stamped my first student visa. He suggested to me that there might be some American writers, “Jack London for example,” whom I could study in America: “the language would be easier and you wouldn’t need a visa.” The resistance can be especially high when it comes to Babel, who wrote in an idiosyncratic Russian-Jewish Odessa vernacular—a language and humor that Russian-Jewish Odessans earned the hard way. While it’s true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can’t do that, what’s it good for?

The brilliance of the passage includes a dissonant note we don’t pick up on first reading. Why would a people be protective of their literature? One idea is that a translation cannot render the whole sense of a work in its original language. Another suggestion is that learning Slavic or Turkic languages is too difficult, especially for women. What Batuman seems to be saying is that such protectiveness should not keep her or anyone from discovering the “unhappiness” literature is so adept at presenting, especially in the great family dramas of the 19th-century Russian novelists.

Other times, Batuman’s arch view of the strange personalities she hangs out with takes over. The book often sparks to life via an incident, focused on the irreverent and the irrelevant, such as this scene in which she is invited to a translation workshop by her Uzbek teacher:

The workshop was taught by a wiry, manic, mosquito-like American in his thirties, with a goatee and wearing the single oldest and most tattered T-shirt I have ever seen being used as clothing. The class was collaborating on an Uzbek translation of a terrible English translation of Maupassant’s “Le Petit.” When the cuckolded widow erupts at the nursemaid, “Dehors, va-t’en!” this had been rendered into the great living English language as “Done with you.”

Nine Uzbek graduate students debated for half an hour how to translate the English phrase “Done with you?”

“But that’s not an English phrase,” I finally objected.

“The text we have is the text we have,” the teacher replied, glancing at me a bit irritably, and I noticed dark circles under his eyes.

Leo Tolstoy

Like barkers on the midway, such nuggety vignettes populate The Possessed. In fact, they tend to overrun the book. After a number of these dazzling mini-portraits, the books, places, parties, people, and author began to feel undifferentiated, all of it viewed microscopically rather than with the telescope’s breadth. The larger story of the psychology of a people and their literature is largely untouched.

Batuman characterizes nearly all the bookish sorts she encounters by their quirks and flaws. They sleep in their clothes. They don’t change their underwear. They yammer on at conferences without notes for hours. Isaac Babel’s second wife is mesmerized by a little Eeyore toy that hangs from Batuman’s rearview mirror. Still, I wondered, midway through, why Batuman is so attracted to this world, a world teeming with mountebanks and peculiarities. Her observations on language and literature are filled with a vintner’s love of variety and verve, while her descriptions of people are one-dimensional, deformed, overrefined. The more eccentric the persona, the more her sketchpad fills.

Is this a problem? Not if you find such eccentricity funny or daring or clever. But if you want to know what’s at stake for the author, The Possessed can feel evasive. All its intimacy is in Batuman’s style, in her affair with language. While she studies in Uzbekistan, there’s a guy named Eric who shares her bed. But he’s no more than an ornament, a boyfriend manqué: there’s no attraction between them, no sex, no touching, no reason why they’re together. (He’s summarily dumped in a later chapter.) In this way, most of the characters within Batuman’s reach remain ornamental; her book is so focused on strangeness that she never uses it as a tool to see her own misadventure.

“If I didn’t resist the circumstances that pushed me to Uzbekistan that summer, it was because I believed that out-of-the-way places and literatures are never wasted on writers,” Batuman writes. But this insight arrives only after she’s come home. Rather than proving its thesis that, by viewing various literatures and their scholars with cynical suspicion, one can achieve a kind of self-possession, The Possessed instead demonstrates that in charting the peccadilloes of academics and pedants, Batuman has become one of them.

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