The Dancing I

<LOOKATME!>I</LOOKATME!>

Some see blogs as poor substitute for novels because they so often seem too personal to be taken for art. One could object that the intrusive I, traditionally typical of immature or unpracticed authors, is symptomatic of the flood of amateurs who blog. But I doubt this will hold empirically. Plenty of blogs deal impersonally with external subjects. (I like to read Noam Chomsky's blog occasionally, for example). But these blogs not only seem unbloggy (debloggé?), they resemble exposition, not narrative.

Apparently, if the author or narrator doesn't get in and throw a few low punches, no one else does either.

Perhaps the Web will also decenter the notions of narrative irony that cause some of us to wrinkle our noses at blogs. Certainly the context and motivations for narrative irony must change online. Let's compare.

In criticism of novels, one associates lack of narrative irony with pompous insensitivity, lack of perspective and perception. The reasons are relatively mechanical:

A novelist enjoys a sort of deus ex machina relation with his finished work. He creates a universe. To enjoy that universe, readers accept its characteristics as at least provisionally real, or go back to the bookshelf for an alternate deus. To allow readers to conclude about elements of created universe, the creator cannot conclude. Authors practice for decades to defamiliarize their descriptions, carefully paring away, downplaying, or undercutting the persistent conclusiveness of wording things, thereby naming them (fixing them to semantic generalities) and binding them into sequence.

After all, if one's God can say "Let there be light!" and the skies light up, one might pray Him to not go around telling crude and tasteless jokes, telling horror stories, or muttering inanities.

But look at the use of various characters in drama, or various narrators in certain modern, postmodern, and contemporary novels. Is a thing true just because Hamlet says so? What about Iago, Richard III, or Pere Ubu? If readers take the word of a narrator in Faulkner narrators for granted, the following narrator or even the narrator of the following novel may contradict their notions. Consequently, Faulkner can live for a third of The Sound and the Fury inside a damaged brain, and few find Faulkner or the novel itself stupid, much as one doesn't wonder reading Huckleberry Finn why Twain has forgotten how to spell.

Because the narrator does not equal the author, the narrator can say all sorts of cockamamie things without limiting the universe of the novel.

Insofar as a blog is not nominally fiction, the blogger does not create the universe in which he or she comments or in which readers read. Thus, if a novelist writes "Jane was angry" I must accept that anger is what Jane felt, no more no less. If the character Othello calls Desdemona a strumpet, I doubt his word, but not his sincerety. And if Dooce claims some of her Utah neighbors are a little straightlaced, I may enjoy her protest whether I agree with her assessment or not. The blogger does not occupy the place of the (repeatedly, if briefly) dead or dying Author, but of a character.

Unfortunately, this whole thing changes if the blog becomes officially fiction.