On Influence and (Un)Originality

David Coughlan (bio)
University of Limerick

A Review of Luter, Matthew. Understanding Jonathan Lethem. U of South Carolina P, 2015.

Just the second monograph published on the work of Jonathan Lethem, following James Peacock’s 2012 volume, Matthew Luter’s Understanding Jonathan Lethem is issued as part of the University of South Carolina’s Understanding Contemporary American Literature series. It provides an engaging and accessible account of Lethem’s three most high-profile novels, Motherless Brooklyn (1999), The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and Chronic City (2009), together with an analysis of selected short stories and essays. Luter’s welcome book is an enjoyable and illuminating read, and its author has a clear appreciation and enthusiasm for Lethem’s work, as can be seen in the way he burrows out the references and allusions buried in the texts. The particular strengths of the book lie in the clarity of the structure and especially in its choice of an effective and fitting approach to Lethem’s work, focusing on the writer’s “career-long interest in questioning what literary originality means in a postmodernist age” of “collage, pop art, pastiche, remixing, or sampling” (2).

The book’s introductory chapter, in addition to providing a short biography, situates Lethem in the context of three studies on literary influence: Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973), which provides a “definition of influence that Lethem has spent an entire career rejecting” (Luter 9), given its emphasis on the anxiety of the text, cultural belatedness, and “a poet’s melancholy at his lack of priority” (Bloom qtd. in Luter 9); “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) by John Barth, with whom Lethem shares an appreciation for the work of Italo Calvino; and Michael Chabon’s “Fan Fictions” (2008), in which Chabon concludes that “all novels are sequels; influence is bliss” (qtd. in Luter 12). Luter suggests that Lethem “sounds most like Chabon when he discusses his vision for himself as a writer.” He illuminates Lethem’s perspective with a detailed analysis of his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” (2007), “both a brilliant defense of creative appropriation and a call for a new, more generous understanding of copyright” (13). Luter then identifies two of the most significant influences on Lethem, sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick and American film critic Manny Farber, before moving to discuss a number of Lethem’s earlier short stories, particularly “Vanilla Dunk” from The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996), drawing attention to the ways in which Lethem recontextualizes and reuses elements from earlier texts and, therefore, providing a useful starting point for the following considerations of influence and originality in the novels.

The second chapter is about Motherless Brooklyn, a book that Luter describes as “Lethem’s breakthrough novel and a book as much about hard-boiled detective fiction as it is a hard-boiled novel” (27). Luter argues that Lethem’s adoption and adaptation of the rules of the genre as set out in Raymond Chandler’s essays “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944) and “Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story” (1948) result in a novel that is an “excellent exercise in accepting the weight of literary history without being visibly burdened by it” and an “example of purely joyful quasi-fan fiction” (29). Initially establishing its indebtedness to its precursors and their “vibrant, hostile, punning, impossible language” through the heightened style of its own language, the novel is not so much about a detective as it is about a fan of detective fiction who then becomes a detective; Lethem’s protagonist, Lionel Essrog, understands his experiences in terms of the conventions of the noir genre even as Lethem constantly invokes that genre through references and citations in his framing of Essrog’s world (Lethem qtd. in Luter 30). Throughout this chapter, Luter pays welcome and effective attention to the patterns of language both of the hard-boiled detective novel and of Essrog’s speech, which is affected by his Tourette’s syndrome, thereby addressing the question of how the influence (of a genre or of a syndrome) expresses itself and then shapes, or is shaped by, representation. Luter concludes that “this is a novel that understands and articulates clearly its own relationship to detective fiction of the past” (47). The chapter also includes discussions of surrogate families and school, the importance of music in the novel, and the role of New York City — where, if I might add to the punning language, Luter might have linked a concept of genre-ification to gentrification — and of how these feed into the characters’ sense of identity and belonging, or lack thereof. This engagement with the question of what makes us who we are is one with the novel’s relationship to a tradition of detective writing because, as Luter argues, “figuring out one’s attitude toward a complicated personal past is akin to (and sometimes directly involves) figuring out what to do with artistic influence” (46).

This is especially apparent in the next chapter’s reading of The Fortress of Solitude, a novel that “highlights Lethem’s career-long interests in the racial politics of popular culture as well as the joys and dangers of passionate consumption and intellectual appreciation of cultural artifacts” (48). Similar themes emerge of surrogate families, schoolyard friendships, and the “class and racial politics of gentrification” in Brooklyn in the 1970s (50). The focus of the chapter, however, like the novel’s, is on the relationship between the white Dylan Ebdus and the black Mingus Rude, who bond over the shared absence of their mothers and over comic books, graffiti tagging, music, and a magical ring. Following the two friends as they grow to adulthood allows Lethem to tackle questions of unequal opportunity, of “fetishizing blackness,” and “of cultural appropriation” (75, 54). In this context, Luter observes that “pop music is the art form most vital to Dylan’s childhood” (61). He charts the way Dylan’s “music tastes change, and the modes of racial identification attached to his listening get far more complex, personally and politically,” and explains the significance of having a record by the Specials or of wearing a leather jacket, examples of the various ways in which identity is performed, informed by life’s influences (62). The chapter ends by engaging more directly with “[i]nfluence and fandom” in a discussion of sci-fi and music communities, arguing that Dylan “has far more interest in reproducing the past than in building a new future,” so that his “attempt to come to terms with his past remains incomplete” (71, 75, 77). What this chapter lacks, however, is an extended analysis of the novel in terms of Lethem’s understanding of influence, which would have made this conclusion more meaningful. As it is, the references to Dylan’s appropriation of Mingus’s graffiti tag, to white “performances of black style,” or even to quoting, mimicking, imitating, forging, collecting, and stealing, aren’t systematically or consistently contextualized in relation to either Lethem’s theory or his practice (70). It is not, therefore, as original an analysis of the novel as it could have been.

Chapter 4 deals briefly with the short story collection Men and Cartoons (2004), the essay collection The Disappointment Artist (2005), and the novel You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007) before turning to Chronic City, “a book about fandom gone wild to the point that it becomes debilitating” (79). Luter details again the real-world analogues in the text and, dealing with the two characters Chase Insteadman and Perkus Tooth, discusses fiction and reality, fantasy and realism, virtuality and hyperreality, politics and conspiracies, and Chronic City’s post-Giuliani and post-9/11 New York. Unlike the previous chapter, this one engages in a sustained and necessary discussion on the ecstasies and anxieties of influence, especially as manifested in the “curatorial impulse” (Lethem qtd. in Luter 93). Moreover, the framing of the novel in terms of terror threats and conspiracies presents it convincingly as a work with political intent, leading Luter to conclude that the novel “works as a powerful corrective to contemporary ideologies and practices that seek to distract people from seeing the reality before their eyes” (103). The final, short chapter surveys Lethem’s They Live (2010), his short monograph on John Carpenter’s eponymous 1988 film; Fear of Music (2012), his book on the Talking Heads’ 1979 album of the same name; his short story collection Lucky Alan and Other Stories (2015); and Dissident Gardens (2013), his most recent novel and, Luter argues, his “most sophisticated” and “most overtly political work yet” (108). It is a novel, he suggests, which highlights “the considerable difficulties, not impossibilities, that people of progressive worldviews encounter in their attempts to turn their beliefs from abstractions to realities” (111).

This useful concluding chapter suggests that it might profitably have been matched by a chapter or section in the book covering Lethem’s earlier genre novels, which would have provided a basis on which to judge the ways in which Lethem remixes and riffs on genre in the later novels. By excluding these novels, Luter knowingly leaves himself open to the accusation that he is reinstating the lines between science fiction and literary fiction that Lethem seeks to trouble (despite “resistance from both sides”), as epitomized by his “chaperoning [Philip K.] Dick into the Library of America” (Lethem qtd. in Luter 20). Luter’s focus on three novels also raises other questions: in a work dedicated to understanding Lethem’s corpus, what does it mean if Luter effectively discounts four novels¹ and a novella² from the discussion — not to mention the bulk of the short stories, a coauthored, pseudonymous sports novel,³ and a co-authored graphic novel?⁴

Some of these would have lent themselves easily to Luter’s overall argument, especially Omega the Unknown, which reworks and self-consciously paraphrases the original 1970s series by Steve Gerber and others. This represents something of a missed opportunity, and it reflects other instances in which Luter’s book doesn’t pick up on the kinds of creative repetitions that relate to Lethem’s interests in (un)originality: for example, in Motherless Brooklyn, Essrog describes his verbal tics as “echolalia . . . I was doing impressions,” but Luter doesn’t connect this to other impressionists, like Dylan or his father, or Lethem himself (qtd. in Luter 32). In fact, a weakness of Luter’s book is a certain lack of consistency in its explication of what influence means in and for Lethem or, more specifically, what the stakes are when it comes to the question of originality. For example, the final page of the introduction includes the observations that, in “Vanilla Dunk,” “Lethem argues that originality is still available to the artist who seeks it and values it,” that the three major novels are “all quite original books in their own ways,” and also that some might accuse Lethem of “merely unoriginal borrowing or pastiche” (26). But to what extent would it matter to Lethem if he were “quite original” or even “merely unoriginal” if, as Luter later asserts, he “has so dispensed with the idea of originality as valuable (or even possible) in ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’ that it seems a nonissue now” (92)? Luter’s hesitancy over how a non-traditional concept of originality might inform his readings leads to some contradictory-seeming, or at least un-nuanced, statements: for example, Dylan’s “imitation is … far removed from the sort of creative appropriation Lethem will celebrate in ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’” and yet, “to a lesser extent perhaps, Dylan and Mingus work to shape their own world in their acts of creation” (71, 78). Similar inconsistencies occur in the discussion of Perkus, “a creative appropriator and collage artist, working in a manner comparable to Lethem himself in ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’” (91), but one whose “old creative form now seems hopelessly uncreative” (92).⁵ A greater engagement with the debates around postmodern artistic practice would likely have enabled Luter to fine-tune his position and to build on the introduction’s discussion of influence rather than using it simply to label examples later on (91). A greater engagement with the debates around postmodernism itself — say Fredric Jameson’s “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979), given Lethem’s imagined “Manhattan Reification Society” (qtd. in Luter 100) — would have enabled Luter to make the claim that Chronic City “is reminiscent of the Marxist critiques of popular culture launched by Frankfurt School cultural critics” more convincingly, especially when he so often characterizes Lethem as a nostalgic curator of popular culture up to this point (103).

That last example is, I think, an instance when Luter tries to force a neater conclusion than might be available, but it is also symptomatic of a tendency to defer to Lethem (Luter makes far more use of Conversations with Jonathan Lethem than he does of existing criticism on Lethem). When, in Chronic City, Chase takes a copy of Obstinate Dust by Ralph Warden Meeker, evoking Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and throws it into a pit to rid himself of its “asymmetrical sink-weight” (Lethem qtd. in Luter 85), Luter rather generously asks:

What better way for Lethem to reject thoroughly the anxiety of influence than to have his protagonist buy a copy of (something clearly quite analogous to) the book to which his own novel might be reasonably compared, only to have said protagonist then throw that book into an actual abyss. (85)

Luter concludes his study by saying that Lethem is “[u]ninterested in viewing these influences as a weighty past,” and yet here is the influence as “sink-weight” and Luter doesn’t press the point (113). His book is understandably tasked with understanding Lethem, but it could also have more explicitly questioned Lethem and specifically what he means by ecstatic influence and how he seeks to embody it in his writing. That said, this insightful and instructive book unquestionably provides an excellent introduction to the key works, opens new avenues for exploration, and contributes much to Lethem studies.

Footnotes

1. Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), briefly discussed in Chapter 2; Amnesia Moon (1995); As She Climbed across the Table (1997); and Girl in Landscape (1998), briefly considered in the introduction.

2. This Shape We’re In (2000).

3. Believeniks! (2006), with Christopher Sorrentino.

4. Omega the Unknown (2007–08), written with Karl Rusnak, with art by Farel Dalrymple and Paul Hornschemeier.

5. Luter further describes how Perkus turns to “work as a curatorial impulse” (Lethem qtd. in Luter 93), but curating creates only “a solipsistic monument” (Luter 93); Perkus “discovers the use value of art” (95), but “the solipsism is still there” (96); he “is remixing another artwork he likes … but he is doing it badly” (96); and for him, “to live is to interpret” (96), but “he has walled himself off from more experiences than he will ever realize” (97). In the end, it is not entirely clear how Luter wants us to interpret Perkus’s relationship to art.