Digital Barbarism, page 9
First, as the twenty-first-century equivalents of luftmenschen and café revolutionaries, they are capable of elevating a theory, notion, idea, or dogma above reason, fact, practicality, and experience. Given that they are able to do this even at the cost of their own destruction, when their own interests are unaffected or advanced it becomes especially easy. Fixed on the idea that the good of the people would be served by a White Sea Canal, Stalin ordered its construction, and was apparently forever undisturbed by the corpses of tens of thousands of its laborers buried unmarked on its bottom and in its banks.25 The power of ideas is not to be underestimated.
Second, as evidenced by their own testimony in their blogs and plaints, many of these people have tried their hand at writing and are perfectly content to be paid a pittance or nothing at all, and think therefore that this should be a universal condition. Were it the universal condition, everyone who wrote would be supported, like them, by a salary from some other source. The art of letters would exit even further the realm of professionalism, and thus no writer would be able to say, like Newton explaining his miraculous work on the laws of motion and the calculus, “I thought of nothing else.” And in addition to being relieved of the risk and robbed of the concentration usually associated with great works, writers would be subject to the judgment, discipline, suggestion, restraint, influence, and possibly the command of committees, boards, administrations, and overseers. This would rob them of the freedom and independence they require above all, while at the same time it nourished the mediocrity attendant to bureaucratization of every type.
And third is that which dares not speak its own name—envy. Even as a child, I was intoxicated by the greatness of the written word, and took refuge in its power as the gift and protection of God. Like music, it is a direct route to the truths that lie beyond understanding, taking those who will follow to a height from which it is possible to see something too bright to comprehend. This attitude and belief has been preserved among the Jews since the invention of writing and the advent of revelation. It is so deeply ingrained in Jewish culture and nationality—apart from religion, where it is certainly not absent—that I am controlled by it atavistically and thus can never be a modern man. When I chose my profession, which I was sure would keep me poor all my life, I did so not because I wanted to copy the existence of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Nabokov, but because I was compelled to follow the lead of the people from which I am descended, in the most rewarding and satisfying exercise I can imagine: something that, when done with great effort and an honest heart, touches upon the holy; that, even in the face of death and destruction, offers warmth, comfort, promise, and a shield.
As such, it so far exceeds envy as to preclude it absolutely. Although as I age I find that my capacity for envy has diminished almost entirely, I cannot pretend always to have been without it anymore than a mirror in Tom Cruise’s house can claim not to suffer from exhaustion. But it was never able to exist in the light of great writing, which should engender in even the most threatened soul only love and admiration. A beautiful paragraph, like a prayer or a song, should cleanse any opportunistic vice, even if only momentarily, and a great work should lodge in the heart to give strength and equanimity forever.
And yet I discovered in my naïveté as a student and teacher of literature in more universities than any human being should experience, a persistent undertone of malice and envy vis-à-vis the great works and great writers that literary scholars exist—or so I thought—to uphold. Even before the open hostility of contemporary criticism, deep anger and envy manifested themselves in a variety of ways. I was astounded by the surprisingly common claim that literary criticism is at least equal to the works it exists to illuminate. Logically, how could it be? After reading for years in both, I judged the chances of this to be as likely as a seahorse winning the Kentucky Derby.
Nonetheless, I have, from obligation and assignment, read quite a lot of literary criticism, although given my memory of it I could never prove this. An impression lingers, however, which is that no matter how virtuous or brilliant (or even necessary) it may be, it does not and cannot—except when it is literature itself—transcend the limitations of the anatomical atlas that illuminates one system per drawing; tracing, say, the course of the lymph through its net of vessels and nodes. There are many schools of literary criticism. They come and they go, supplanting each other like the generations of man. None has ever been triumphant, because none can be complete, as is a literary work no matter its deficiencies. Just as an anatomical drawing is a view from one perspective only, and keeps in darkness the fullness of the rest of the body, the complexity of its arrangement, the interrelatedness of its astonishingly choreographed systems, its very life, and the reason for its being—all of which yet can be sensed and apprehended in a glance, a touch, or a kiss—so is literary criticism inadequate to the life of a literary work due to its unavoidable failure to see it in full.
On the other hand, literary criticism, when informed and (as must be said these days especially) sane, can deepen understanding of a work immeasurably. In the case of literature that is ancient, out of or skew to fashion, from an alien culture west of Riverside Drive, or obscure for whatever reason, the work of literary criticism can provide access that would otherwise be barred by ignorance and sloth. And in the rare cases when it becomes literature, it vaults over at least one paradox and becomes an object that illuminates itself. The nature of such works and their authors, however, usually precludes them from the academy, where (were academicians of only a slightly different nature) they would be killed.
Charitably speaking, much of modern literary criticism is far more vicious and insane than most people realize. Deconstructionism, straddling the American university like a spider, stems from the minds and works of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, and thus comes with much more than just a whiff of Nazism. It, though not it alone, has relegated the great works of literature, and authorship itself, to the common grave of almost every other virtue regarded as noble in the university of not so long ago. A vast number of scholars may have moved beyond envy to hostility, but the cause of their hostility remains envy, and although they may not admit to it, the opponents of copyright, too, want to comfort themselves by flattening the unevenness of human achievement. The movement, or perhaps school, that goes by the name of “Death of the Author” (a phrase I strongly dislike) arises from exactly this fetid premise. Once you dispense with the author, it is easy to dispense with his rights. And what better way to accomplish all this than to rid the field of professionals; rid every author of control over his work; and, by means of an ever-fluid and changing mass of words floating aimlessly and subject to anyone’s agency and intervention, eliminate the rewards and distinctions that vex the dark side of any egalitarian movement.
But that may be affording too much credit to people who are sometimes unable to understand even their own language, a phenomenon that may be influential in shaping what passes for their arguments. Of this there are, unfortunately, many illustrations: the cyber mob is as productive and vast as it is irritable. One could write a Talmud in reaction to the oceans of material supplied by commentators who either deliberately or otherwise (probably otherwise) cannot grasp the meaning of a simple sentence, and who therefore must recoil from subtlety as if from a snake.
For example, “Section 1” of the Lawrence Lessig Wiki (the only way to cite it: maybe it’s a robot) concludes from my statement, “Freeing a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, The Garden Party, while the descendants [not the ancestors] of Katherine Mansfield will not,” that “Helprin turns the concept of ‘Public Good’ on its head by asserting that the ‘Public Good’ is something that can only be measured by profit…. [He] makes no mention of the ‘Public Good’ that comes from the content of a work.”26
Such a reading fails to place the sentence in context, is unable to reconcile one clause with the context of another in the sentence itself, and does not apprehend that the constructional ambiguity of the key phrase, “less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth,” is immediately clarified by what follows. And even were the resulting misinterpretation somehow correct, there is no suggestion in the passage that profit is the only measure of the public good, or, further, that it is any measure at all.
Whatever its other virtues, the wiki has no means of defense against people who, were their mental capacity their physical strength, could not wind their watches. Within a few days of the appearance of my article, one wiki alone had been altered 11,445 times by warrior ants activated by exhortations on the web such as, “To kick Helprin,” urging them to “Go make it better,”27 or to, “Write your own response to Mark Helprin’s Perpetual Copyright Op-Ed.”28 According to the New York Times, one wiki sprouted almost instantly, with “more than two dozen bullet-pointed categories under the heading ‘Other Points Against Helprin.’”29 The wiki builders were incited by pronouncements that “Helprin needs quite a history and economics lesson,” and “Helprin needs some education.”
A skein to which scores of thousands of unmindful people bring their casual or angry wool can be fantastically tangled, but by tracing a thread or two it is possible to see how errors are compounded. An early comment read, “In a recent article in The New York Times, Mark Helprin—author of Winter’s Tale—argued that intellectual property should become perpetual.”30 This was followed by “Helprin is best known for his novel ‘Winter’s Tale,’ which is loosely based on a Shakespearean work of the same name. This raises the question as to whether Helprin intends to pay royalties to Shakespeare’s descendants.”31 Winter’s Tale is not based, loosely or otherwise, on The Winter’s Tale, and even had it been, and had The Winter’s Tale been protected by copyright originally and after four hundred years, I would no more have to pay such royalties than, say, the author of one novel about a hard-boiled private detective fighting corruption in prewar Los Angeles would have to pay royalties to the thousands of other authors of previous novels about hard-boiled private detectives fighting corruption in prewar Los Angeles—assuming that the means of expression did not coincide. Nonetheless, this was followed by, “So then Halpron’s the guy who did the ‘West Side Story’ Job for Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale,”32 which was followed by, “The idea of a guy who has the nerve and swank to steal ‘Winter’s Tale,’”33 and then by my promotion to “Someone who admits he probably will never create anything of lasting value in the first place.”34
When hundreds of thousands of off-the-cuff, unchecked remarks are put instantly into wide circulation, the vapors that arise quickly become absurd. As a case study of a style and technique of disputation that is already highly influential in American life and letters and will become more so in the future as the generations educated in and addicted to this fashion rise to take their place, the following capsule tour is illustrative in showing how faulted process alone can divert a potentially productive argument into a nightmarish swamp of fractional thoughts.
“If Mark Twain’s copyrights were still valid,” we are told on nytimes. com, “his works could not be taught in schools because of the prohibitive cost.”35 This carefully considered assertion is decisively proved by the fact that at present and since the founding of the republic no copyrighted works are now or have been taught in schools, and explains why today’s students cannot read Maya Angelou and Salman Rushdie, whose works are copyrighted, and are burdened instead with Melville and Emily Dickinson, whose works are not. It is a tyrannical cultural imbalance, a holocaust of sorts, perpetuated by the twisted logic of copyright. Not only that, but the same injustice that forces copyrighted works into oblivion is also responsible for “forcing works by Shakespeare and Mozart out of print to make room for new work…a culturally shortsighted strategy at best.”36
The reason that the economic consequences of copyright both discourage and encourage out-of-copyright works while at the same time they discourage and encourage copyrighted works, and the reason the effect of such a process is so clearly damaging is not because of some failing by the enthusiastic authors of these statements, but because, obviously, the universe is confused. Were the universe, like them, aware of certain prime economic relations, such as, “If you sell it, its [sic] no longer art,”37 and, “‘Property’ is a relationship between freely-conversing individuals,”38 presumably it would no longer be so addled. Admittedly, it might find great difficulty in wrapping its galaxies around the idea of property as a relationship between freely conversing individuals, but with infinite time it might come to understand.
Even if many of these people may have suffered terrible traumas or be regular users of hallucinogenic drugs, their ringleaders are ensconced in prestigious universities, and these eminences (who are sometimes referred to reverentially and without irony as “himself,” as if the person so impressed had touched the hand of Obama) are intelligent, qualified, and well-schooled—it is presumed. Here is “himself” in his “blog”: “On the Helprin reply: Wow. So I posted the entry calling on people to write a reply to the Helprin piece, and then got on a plane in Boston. When I landed in Frankfurt, I got an e-mail: ‘Wow! Pretty amazing wiki article.’ And indeed it was (and is)…. I would have focused the attack in much the same way.”39 Why does this remind me of Idi Amin? I shall send people like this a bouquet in the next chapter, but since they approach this argument with the broad scope of the French encyclopedists, bringing in almost anything and everything in support of their cause, they have made themselves game in more respects than one.
A certain Professor Boyle, in either a tired technique of opprobrium or an intemperate fit of pique, mentioned my name eleven times in a very short article. I don’t believe in ad hominem attacks unless—and sometimes not even then—the target is the holder of collective or coercive power so great that his efforts are magnified and his hide made so thick that the only way to pierce it is with an oversharp arrow. In this case, however, various options remain open, although one must be civil even to crapulous professors. I don’t know how thick is his professorial hide, but something is thick enough so that a foray into the economics of publishing has led him to state that, “over 90% of works are no longer commercially available 20 years after their publication,” and that my proposal in the New York Times (which he did not accurately perceive) would “extend this cultural disaster to infinity.”40
Under current law, copyright continues for seventy years beyond the death of the author. Were I to die tomorrow, my first copyright would at its expiration have existed for 109 years. If I somehow live to a hundred (which, given the annoyance to which I have lately been subjected, I doubt) it will have continued for 149 years. I don’t know the actuarial averages for writers or the median ages at which they produce their works, but in this particular refutation one can afford to tie one’s hands behind one’s back a little. Let us say for the professor’s sake that the typical author dies the day after producing his only work, which we may hypothetically and appropriately call Hapax Legomenon. Thus, we have seventy years of protection by copyright.
If indeed it is true that nine of ten works “are no longer commercially available 20 years after their publication” (not even in used bookstores? not even on Amazon?), by which he may mean “out of print,” something quite different, how can this possibly be an effect of a copyright that, at a minimum, provides half a century more of protection? Is the argument that books that go into print while copyrighted and stay in print for twenty years while copyrighted go out of print because they are copyrighted? What magic influence comes into play to convert a condition that does not hinder publication or however many years of commercial availability into a condition that then has the opposite effect? The fact of books “disappearing” is not caused by the existence of copyright—as the vigorous sale of copyrighted books might suggest. That is, it must be something other than copyright that causes books to go out of print. Such as, Professor Boyle, absence of demand?
The fact that books go out of print is advanced as a reason for restricting or ending copyright. Saying that if something goes out of print it should move into the public domain is equivalent to saying that if a business has a loss in one of its divisions, the assets of that division should be distributed to the public. This is especially mad given that the stated purpose of removing copyright protection from a work for which there is no demand will somehow be sufficient—by eliminating the author’s share and saving all of 7.5 percent or less on the list price—to resurrect it. That is, reducing the price of a $15.00 book to $13.88 will reverse its natural death. If more than one publisher issues it, a competition will arise that may reduce the price further. But this kind of competition already exists among bookstores, which are now the overlords of 50 to 80 percent of the list price. What would be left to the publishers in terms of price reduction will remain marginal because, in essence, it (the author’s 7.5 percent royalty on paperback editions) is marginal. And of all ways to lower the price of books, excluding only their authors or the authors’ heirs from any financial benefit is surely the least justifiable and the most depraved.
