You neek, you

So, not to be all whatsit about this, because the Divine knows there is little in life more tedious than a blogger quoting other blogs in an attempt to restate what he's been hocking about for months, particularly when the quoted note is no longer new, but here's a quote out of context from Robert V.S. Redick over at Random House's Suvudu, in a note called Beating My Head on the Genre Wall:

A great danger of approaching any novel through the genre door is that it tempts us to see the book first as an example of something, as a part of an aggregate, rather what it truly is: a unique creation, a novel.

What I'm on about in a nutshell is that this view seems to Your Humble Blogger to be exactly wrong. Precisely, perversely, almost perfectly wrong. There's a wonderful aspect to its wrongness, a seductive magnificence to it, a wild beauty to it. The kind of wrongness that can only come from being completely correct, and yet utterly wrong.

Look, of course, every novel is unique. And I would assume that every writer goes into the activity of writing a novel to write a new novel, a unique artifact of his own unique soul, a book that could not have been written by any other person at any other time, or in any other place. And every completed novel is exactly that, a unique creation of a unique person. So. Fine. It is that. The mistake is thinking that's all it is.

Or that's all you are. Because you are, you unique person you (and Jon Carroll, who asks Taken Your Survey Yet? may be the uniquest, but neither is he any uniquier than you) both the single instance of yourself and an example of a larger group. Of many larger groups. Possibly an infinite number of larger groups, although that cannot be determined at this time, and isn't the point anyway. The point is that your novel is a novel like all the other novels, is a vampire novel like all the other vampire novels, a coming of age story like all the other coming of age stories, an academic satire like all the other satires, while at the same time being a unique artifact of your unique soul, like all the other unique artifacts of all those other unique souls just like yours.

Paint a portrait. It's unique. It's part of the history of portraiture. It's a drop in a stream. Not only does it exist in relation to the Mona Lisa, but the Mona Lisa exists in relation to it. It's Outsider Art. Unless you went to Art School, in which case it's the product of a School. No examination of Portraiture in Early Twenty-First Century America is truly complete without including it. Unless you aren't in America, in which case it is necessary for comparative study. Is it a child? Is it a woman? A full-length study or just a face? Or is it an abstraction? Did you use color? Pencil? Paper or pixels? You made all those decisions yourself, but you certainly didn't make them independently of your surroundings, your resources and the other portraits you've seen.

Now, look at that portrait you made. Can we deduce the importance of clothing in our culture from this one work? No, of course not, that would be silly. Could that painting, put together with a bunch of other paintings, help us deduce some things about the importance of clothing in our culture? If so, and it is so, then the painting is part of an aggregate, an example of something.

And here's the real point. I know I said the other thing was the point, but it was just a preparatory point, a point manque, falling short of the real point, which is this: it's a Good Thing to be part of the aggregate. I mean, you are, whether it's good or no, so there's that. But there's a kind of American dream about independence and individuality that is not only false as a model of the universe but is incredibly harmful. It's harmful artistically, largely because it leads to a whole bunch of other myths, including the idea of the Genius, hard-drinking, free-spirited and undomesticated, uninfluenced by lesser artists and lesser concerns, and all of that is unutterable crap which ruins people's lives and makes terrible movies that I wind up watching and grousing about to my Best Reader.

But that idea of your book being a unique creation rather than part of an aggregate makes us perpetuate our cultural missteps, because after all, we can't look at my book as part of the aggregate problem (of absence of representation of minorities, of absence of strong female characters, of absence of issues of social and economic justice) because my book is a unique creation, responsible only to the artistic needs between its own covers. To which, of course, it is responsible, but it is also responsible to the aggregate, because it is part of the aggregate.

And there's even more—now how much would you pay? Because this is part of the same issue of people overestimating their individual responses to a whole variety of things in the public realm, which are (in some ways) even more important than novels and paintings and songs. There is a tremendous emphasis on holding individual opinions on political policy, as if it was a mistake to look at opinions in the aggregate, too. This is more fundamental a problem, of course, since political opinions are simply not matters of individual judgment; policy opinions belong to groups, and individuals join those opinion groups based on a variety of influences. A broad understanding of that makes democracy work a lot better.

Arlen Specter does not hold policy preferences that are special to him, unique to his own soul. He holds a combination of policy preferences in aggregate with our nation. Bernie Sanders is an Independent, but he isn't any more independent in his thinking than Harry Reid or Mitch McConnell—and to the extent that he is, that's a bad thing. And your decision to vote for a Democrat or a Republican or a Green or a Libertarian is not the private expression of your unique soul. Or it is, but that's the minor aspect that doesn't in the end matter very much. The important thing is that it's a decision in the aggregate, that you have jumped into the public ocean where you are swimming around with the flotsam and jetsam, and the coral and clownfish, and the tides. The important thing is that after you have voted, it is counted along with all the other votes. The important thing is that after you have written your novel, it is read along with all the other novels. People get focused on their own novels, their own votes, their own inde

This is why I get worked up about it, why I write about it again and again. Because we have a broad cultural tendency to say that I've done my job, that what I have said isn't offensive when it's properly understood, that I can't be blamed for this and the other, that I'm writing a book or supporting a candidate or buying a car based on my own individual situation and my own individual response to it. And that's not true. It just isn't. It's not. Get your head around that.

A book is, first, part of an aggregate, or rather part of many aggregates. First. Later, in its specifics, it's a unique creation. But it never escapes the aggregate, thank the Divine, nor do any of us at any time.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.