Gotham Diary:
Déjà vu?
24 March 2014

It was the strangest thing — but perhaps I’d better get used to it. Reading about Scarlett Johannson’s upcoming movie, Under the Skin, I was unnerved by the familiarity of its story. I had no recollection of the title or the author. I was almost certain that there was no such book in the blue room. The dust jackets/book covers visible at Amazon rang no bells. It’s not the sort of book that I go in for. But the Scottish setting, the hitchhikers, the surgically-altered alien — even the word ‘vodsel’ — I’d been there.

It’s still the strangest thing, because I’ve just read the book — a Kindle edition — and I can’t tell if it was for the first time or the second. The only thing that I can be sure of is that I wasn’t thinking of Scarlett Johannson the first time around — if, indeed, this was the second. But then it turned out that I wasn’t thinking of Scarlett Johansson properly. Midway through the book, I had a look at the trailer for the film. Here I’d pasted Barbara Sugarman’s head (and hair) on Isserley’s deformed body, but that was all wrong: in the movie, Isserley is called Lauren, she’s a brunette, and (no surprise) she’s not deformed. I expect that she’s still an alien, though.

Checking out the author, Michel Faber, I was piqued to read that he has been urged to take UK citizenship, so as to be eligible for the Man Booker Prize. Well-conceived as the story of Under the Skin is, I’d hate to see its sure-footed but generic prose win any awards. (The last big paragraph made me think of romance fiction.) Faber is very good at making suggestion do the work of display, and he manages to mute the nastiness. But, like all the best science fiction, Under the Skin gives new life to stock figures by inserting them in an imaginative hypothetical. The interest lies not in the characters but in their strange predicaments. Their feelings tend to be — awesome.

I’m wondering if I might have read an enthusiastic review of Under the Skin, one that divulged its set-up so fully that it created a false memory. There was a period — roughly when Under the Skin came out, in fact — when I was reading a lot of Ian Rankin, and I took a fancy to anything that promised a Highland fling. I know that I’ve forgotten or only half-remembered dozens of novels, perhaps even a hundred or two. But it’s disturbing not to be sure that I’ve read something before. As I say, I’d probably better get used to it.

In the Business Section of today’s Times — not the Arts Section — there’s a piece by David Streitfelt about Wattpad, a “storytelling app” on which unpaid writers publish serial fiction, some of it very popular.

Wattpad is a leader in this new storytelling environment, with more than two million writers producing 100,000 pieces of material a day for 20 million readers on an intricate international social network.

We’re told that Anna Todd, “a former college student” (meaning what?) has just published Chapter 278 of her ongoing opus, After. Why not. Fifteen years ago, this story might have worked me into a lather about the degradation of everything in the Age of the Internet, but I’ve been around the block a few times since then, and I’m not so excitable. The next new thing usually turns out to be something very old, in this case, pulp fiction. There have always been far more consumers of words than readers of literature. Jane Austen is not going to lose any fans to Wattpad.

Jane Austen has her own problems. She will always have to find new readers to appeal to. So will every great writer. They’ll get a lot of help from readers who cherish their work, but no authority will ever oblige future readers to do the same. At the same time, Wattpad-grade material is probably not going to constitute static interference.

***

While finishing up The Human Condition, I re-read Albert Hirschmann’s elegant, important study, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph. I pulled it down from the shelf partly because it is short (I didn’t want to be lugging a big book) and partly because I wanted to refresh my recollection of his argument, which is that it as at least as rewarding to study history’s intended but unrealized expectations as it is to expatiate on the unintended, realized ones. Samuel Johnson once quipped, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” Hirschmann’s comment is priceless:

In a sense, the triumph of capitalism, like that of many modern tyrants, owes much to the widespread refusal to take it seriously or to believe it capable of great design or achievement, a refusal so evident in Dr Johnson’s remark.