New media, old anxieties

There’s a passage in one of Henry James's essays, "The New Novel," that I think is kind of uncannily apposite to a lot of the discussions that have been going on here and in class--particularly those dealing with the need for some system of filtration and mediation against a constant influx of information (see here, here, or here, to name a few), and then the semi-anxious, semi-hopeful talk about how the hell we're supposed to read, write, or analyze this hypertext stuff. So here some words from the Institution of the Novel:

The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture... Then we cease to be only instinctive and at the mercy of chance, feeling that we can ourselves take a hand in our satisfaction and provide for it, making ourselves safe against dearth, and through the door opened by that perception criticism enters, if we but give it time, as a flood, the great flood of awareness...

True to form, Hank Jimmy spins that deluge metaphor out for at least another page and a half, so I'm going to cut him off there, but the reason that James, as an author and critic, in 1914, is singing the praises of critical analysis, is that he's just as anxious about "the mass of the inconsequential" with regard to the turn of the century novel as we are over the internet, blogs, unnavigable hypertexts, et al. Like the overwhelming surge of created and accessible information that came with contemporary forms of media, the effect, James says, of "the new novel," is that "we have seen the torrent swell by extravagant cheap contribution" (I told you he doesn't let up on the water metaphor), and goes on to explain that the intent of his essay is to dispel the "deeply fallacious" comfort of "the incurable democratic suspicion of the selective and comparative principles in almost any application, and the tendency therewith to regard, and above all to treat, one manner of book, like one manner of person, as, if not absolutely as good as another, yet good enough for any democratic use."

I guess that history repeats. At least in the sense that it seems like everyone since Socrates has gotten anxious about advances in writing technology. James though, as I’m choosing to read him, does have some comfort to offer. Not only does he suggest that by learning to look at our world and its media intelligently, that is, by being able to explain—even if only to ourselves—what we like and why we like it, we get our own built in search engine, but we also get an increased capacity for assimilation--an aid against the force of forgetfulness. And this critical memory has to do with why, whether in print or in hypertext, rereading is unreading. Rereading James's critical manifesto after reading Derrida, Barthes, or Foucault, Landow or M. Joyce, means reading with a new consciousness of literary evolution, and thus unreading his words by rearranging their historical context and sequence. The young authors he treats of—Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Hugh Walpole, Compton Mackenzie, and D.H. Lawrence, amongst others—all have their place in the canon now.

James defines the “new” as “an appetite for a closer notation, a sharper specification of the signs of life, of consciousness, of the human scene and the human subject in general,” while at the same time despairing of “the new novel” because “the flood of ‘production’ has so inordinately exceeded the activity of control.” Michael Joyce writes on how hard it is to see, objectively, the place and the moment “where we are in.” McLuhan claims that artists are the only ones who can see that place and represent it to their society. So I think the question of how we can approach electronic literature critically, thoughtfully is a really productive one, and I’d love it if we could try to collect some of our thoughts on how we might do that here.