The Queen's Story

Among his many accomplishments, Søren Kierkegaard was a first-rate storyteller with a gift for compelling narrative. He even knew how to tell a good joke. Here’s one from Repetition:

“When the queen had finished telling a story at a court function and all the court officials, including a deaf minister, laughed at it, the latter stood up, asked to be granted the favor of being allowed to tell a story, and then told the same story.”

I bring this up because it reminds me of how the literary blogosphere customarily operates. The queen tells a story – for instance, the endless donnybrook over traditional book reviews versus litblogs – and everyone feels compelled to retell it, usually adding nothing of consequence but spleen. This is known as under-utilization of a medium. It’s ingrown and sterile, and couldn’t possibly interest anyone outside our miniscule tribe. Of course, I understand the attraction of this approach to blogging. It’s fundamentally lazy, because you wait for someone else to say something you don’t like and then you pounce, as though your opinion were somehow important. It also feeds the bottomless human appetite for self-righteous anger.

While engaging in these pointless dust-ups, litbloggers have left uncharted vast stretches of literature. When was the last time you read anything worthwhile, online or elsewhere, about Matsuo Bashō, Edgar Bowers, Christina Stead, Benito Pérez Galdós, Patrick White, Konstantin Paustovsky, Giovanni Verga, Fulke Greville or B.S. Johnson? A red-line policy, unspoken and perhaps unconscious, seems to be enforced. Some writers come with a stamp of approval; others are banished to the Gulag of the unread. Sometimes the motive is political. Sometimes it’s mere fashion, laziness or ignorance. Another culprit is the obsession with current or recent books at the expense of those from previous millennia, an obsession often linked to a benighted faith in artistic progress.

For almost 20 months, since I started writing Anecdotal Evidence, I’ve considered several writers for the title “proto-blogger,” with Lamb, Ruskin and Thoreau chief among them. The real patriarch, however, the Big Daddy of Blogs, was Montaigne, who practiced living and writing as an endless, unprecedented, unresolved experiment. The best litblogs seem closer in spirit to personal essays than formal literary criticism, though they often contain much of the latter. They integrate life and literature, sensibility and experience. I favor blogs that paint an oblique portrait of their authors, without descending into navel-gazing. In 1578, Montaigne first applied essai to what he was doing. His biographer and translator, Donald M. Frame, tells us:

“Before Montaigne began to write of his project as a series of trials, tests, attempts, or occasionally samplings (essais), he had often used the verb essayer (in modern French, normally to try) in ways close to his project, related to experience, with the sense of trying out or testing.”

Then, in part to illustrate Montaigne’s various uses of essais, he quotes the essayist himself:

“Judgment is a tool to use on all subjects, and comes in everywhere. Therefore in the test [essais] that I make of it here, I use every sort of occasion. If it is a subject I do not understand at all, even on that I essay [essaie] my judgment, sounding the ford from a good distance; and then, finding it too deep for my height, I stick to the bank…

“For the rest, I let chance itself furnish me with subjects, since they are all equally good to me; and moreover I do not undertake to develop them completely and to the bottom of the vat. Of a thousand aspects that they each have, I take the one I please. I am prone to grasp them by some unusual and fanciful angle. I would certainly pick out richer and fuller subjects, if I had any other purpose set than the one I have.

“Every action is fit to make us known.”

That’s a blogger, living in contingency (“chance”), trusting happenstance, unafraid of accepted opinion, acknowledging his or her weaknesses, enjoying the flow of events (including books) and rendering them in artful prose for the rest of us to enjoy. For Montaigne’s “judgment” substitute literary evaluation, if you must. For our motto I suggest To try.