Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

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