Books I Read This Month: January 2024
Naomi Klein • David Mamet • Jacqueline Harpman • Dennis Yi Tenen
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World (Naomi Klein)
In the Digital Age, the butterfly effect travels faster. Certain public humiliations go viral in these highly algorithmic times, rapidly taking on a life of their own, amplifying the ignominy and freezing a person in their mortifying moment, a condition which may lead to calamitous unintended effects. It can be an earthquake so severe that there doesn’t seem to be any way for the object of scorn to regain their footing, to continue on the same path, convincing some of them that the only way forward is a rash, new direction. Sometimes such large-scale indignities are merited, but it’s dubious if these seismic mic drops are worth it. The most notorious example is the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when President Obama executed a richly deserved roasting of Donald Trump, the Reality TV grifter and racist Birther stalker. The QVC quisling had threatened for decades to run for the highest office in the land, a position he was woefully unsuited for intellectually, ethically and temperamentally, but he’d never made the leap. Did Obama’s scalding stand-up set push Trump over the edge and into White House as some have surmised? We’ll never really know.
Another example of a high-profile ego shredding that may have seriously altered the course of events is Naomi Wolf’s infamous live 2019 BBC radio interview in which she promoted her new nonfiction title, Outrages. In the book, she claimed to have uncovered shocking documented evidence of several dozen Victorian Era executions of gay men in Britain due to their sexual orientation, misunderstanding the antiquated legalese. Her interlocutor corrected the social critic on-air about the colossal mistake, a debunking that subsequently resulted in the volume being pulped by her publisher and Wolf becoming a literary-world pariah. Her long career as a public intellectual was left in tatters, as the epic fail careened around every corner of our unsparing culture. No matter how much she protested, the author was humiliated.
Consciously or not, Wolf started to drift into dangerous waters in search of a new topic and audience to buoy her ego.
Wolf had garnered public attention since young. She was just 28 in 1990 when her first book, The Beauty Myth, an acceptable effort for a fledgling author if a rather unoriginal regurgitation of third-wave feminist ideas, caught on with the masses, thanks in part to the author’s speaking ability and, amusingly enough, her camera-friendly looks. Determined to lean in before the phrase even existed, she became the next big thing among supply-side liberals, serving as a political advisor to Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Treasure and kings were hers. Wolf never repeated the wide success of that debut with her subsequent books, and she was sometimes accused of being a shameless self-promoter, but she remained a brand name in the feminism category and eventually branched out into other areas, claiming space as a noted commentator on the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. She’d become accustomed to being viewed as a serious person whose opinion was valued. When she was suddenly defrocked, instead of regrouping and moving forward with better work—or at the very least hiring an editor and researcher for her next book—she came undone. Consciously or not, Wolf started to drift into dangerous waters in search of a new topic and audience to buoy her ego.
Her lifeboat, from the point of view of her newly disordered thinking, arrived in the form of a global pandemic. The erstwhile sensible pundit became a nonpareil Covid conspiracy theorist, forming alliances with cable-news Kleagle, Tucker Carlson, and depraved MAGA Rasputin, Steve Bannon, delivering full-on batshit theories to their audiences and her own online one, a throng which expanded rapidly during the terrifying period. Her unhinged conjecture stated that the U.S. government was using the Covid disaster as an excuse to perpetrate a “biofascist coup,” groundlessly speculating that the state would soon take children away from anti-vaxxer parents, that the vaccinated were capable of “shedding” on the unvaccinated, and that those who’d taken the jab had developed some sort of autism-like syndrome. (As this book wisely asserts, much of the insane Covid vaccine reaction had enjoyed a lengthy dress rehearsal when crackpots like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey had spread the fraudulent guidance of Andrew Wakefield, who falsified a study to “prove” that basic childhood vaccinations caused autism.) As she pivoted, Wolf was on fringe-right media outlets incessantly, acting as one of the biggest bullhorns of the dangerous lies and slanders that reverberated through the echo chamber, becoming an almost wholly new version of herself. Mission creep ultimately took her beyond the virus, as she even became a January 6 truther. “I must say that I am sorry for believing the dominant legacy-media ‘narrative’ pretty completely from the time it was rolled out, without asking questions,” she wrote, after watching deceptively selective footage of the violent coup attempt assembled by Carlson. It’s been a wild ride, and she seems to sincerely believe every lie she’s told.
Much to her consternation, Klein had acquired a doppelganger.
Surprisingly, this behavior caused great trouble for Naomi…Klein. The two women are both Jewish social critics and each has a life partner who’s a film producer named Avi, and in the reflexive world of social media these superficial similarities were enough to create utter confusion. It’s not that they were exactly twins physically, and their politics weren’t easy to confuse either as Klein is much more to the left and troubled deeply by capitalism, which has never been a deal-breaker for Wolf. Whatever. The Internet had made up its mind. Since the outset of Wolf’s descent into becoming a clout-chasing crank, Klein has been canceled numerous times online and in real life by people lazily assuming she’s lost her mind. Even before she began to closely watch the Other Naomi, as she refers to her throughout the book, she always knew when Wolf had written or said something particularly egregious, as the vitriol directed toward her seriously spiked. Much to her consternation, Klein had acquired a doppelganger.
As excruciating as the predicament has been for Klein personally, writing about the frustrations of being consistently mistaken for another person, even one untethered from reality, would have made for an interesting article but it wouldn’t have sustained a full-length book. The author wisely recognized this, and that’s not the book she’s written with her learned, illuminating 2023 volume, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. In addition to trying to understand her own discomfiting situation, she’s used the opportunity to broadly “dive into doppelganger culture,” to explore the way individuals, groups, and even nations can become reflections of one another, how identity is is fluid, constantly shifting individually and en masse, a useful exercise in a society where most have an avatar or twenty—the “doubles we perform in the digital theater,” as Klein explains the dynamic. Before looking outward, she tells some hard truths about herself, acknowledging that she, a staunch anti-capitalist, had allowed herself to become a brand, a commercial version of who she really was, after releasing her career-making 1999 book, No Logo, which analyzed the pernicious nature of branding. She would have fought you over such an accusation at the time but now realizes she was deluding herself. Even the austere No Logo cover became an easily recognizable logo. She had played the game and been played by it.
The rejection of responsibility in that dire moment was the rejection of a nation at all.
Some of the deep dives she does aren’t into uncharted waters. For example: “Hitler as a doppelganger to the colonial project” isn’t an original topic. The rise of Nazism as the even-more-evil twin of colonialism, with additional inspirations found in the U.S. eugenics movement, Manifest Destiny and slavery, is a topic written about before, but the author handles it in her customarily cerebral manner. Some other observations are fresher. Klein fairly judges U.S. society in our time as a distorted mirror image of what an actual society would look like, Covid having forced our extreme disunion out into the open. Angry rejection by a large portion of citizens of, say, masks and distancing, during the worst of the plague, she argues, wasn’t as much about chafing at government regulations as it was an extreme annoyance that “others” had to be recognized at all, anger that we “are made, and unmade, by one another,” that we’re actually a community. The rejection of responsibility in that dire moment was the rejection of a nation at all. “The Covid era forces a reckoning with all kinds of truths that many of us would rather not know—about our present economic order, and the callous ways that our elders and so many who do the most critical work are treated,” she writes.
The best chapter is “MAGA’s Plus-One,” which focuses on Wolf’s shift from solitary sideshow to being a center-ring star of the fringe right which, to be accurate, is also currently the mainstream right, with the most profound power now concentrated among those Voltairean villains who endeavor to make you believe absurdities so that they can make you commit atrocities. While she initially only listened to appearances by the Other Naomi on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, the author gradually became fully submerged in the former Trump Chief Strategist’s toxic ecosystem. This allowed an astute observer like Klein to dissect the reality-distortion specialist’s “mirror world,” in which he takes legitimate complaints directed at him from the center-right, center and left and creates a copycat story that accuses his accusers, often with very similar keywords. Bannon builds his audience by zeroing in on “neglected issues with cross-partisan appeal,” especially thriving when scaremongering about surveillance capitalism and other abuses of the technology sector, which has legitimately scary elements, even as he’s simultaneously leveraging tech tools to try to kill democracy and pushing useless cryptocurrency on his followers. The Bannon playbook also calls for the orchestration of a “theater of inclusion,” in which he targets those dispossessed from the left, whether it be Wolf or RFK Jr., and lavishes praise on them, doing what’s necessary to lure them into his cult.
The epilogue makes for a jaw-dropping kicker.
Klein blames a good deal of Bannon’s success as a destroyer on the failing of our political system and its representatives for permitting a top-heavy oligarchy. “Conspiracy theories are both symptoms of confusion and powerlessness and tools of division and distraction that benefit elites,” the author writes. Klein thinks so many white Americans have fallen for these scams—or gone along with them even though they know they're being suckered—in part because of resentment over left-wing labeling which regards them as being “privileged” or “oppressors.” Maybe that’s true or maybe there have always been bad people in the country who felt like they had to behave up to certain basic standards until a vandal like Trump defaced them.
The epilogue makes for a jaw-dropping kicker. It’s not giving away too much of the story to say that the writer reveals that the two women met decades earlier, and had a brief acquaintanceship that Wolf may or may not remember, but one that was formative for Klein. They crossed paths at the University of Toronto when Klein was a student and Wolf, eight years her senior, visited the campus in support of the publication of The Beauty Myth, just before it became a best-selling sensation. The school newspaper assigned Klein to interview Wolf, and she was so impressed by the confident young woman who was clad in a leather jacket in her author photo, one who was making a career of confidently sharing her strong opinions. Wolf’s very existence made Klein see possibilities for her own life that she’d never before imagined. She wanted to be just like her.•
Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood (David Mamet)
You’d think you might hear something somewhere in our endless news cycle, a hungry monster always peckish for some new morsel, when a major playwright and filmmaker discusses having been sexually assaulted by a powerful man at the Golden Globes, but I haven’t come across a single peep in any review or news article about the disturbing story David Mamet shares in Everywhere an Oink Oink, his digressive 2023 memoir that covers his adventures in the film trade and catalogs his many embittered complaints about our supposedly woke society. Of course, Mamet himself barely mentions the episode. He casually recalls, in a few sentences, that he was talking to a “Head Dog of the outfit” at the Globes when the guy stuck his hand down Mamet’s pants. After a few frozen seconds of surprise, the prolific writer “put some daylight” between himself and the groper. It’s pretty telling psychologically that Mamet quickly brushes off the abuse in a flippant manner, making light of the unpleasant encounter in the next paragraph. At least he’s consistent. What else would you expect from a Fox News diehard and all-around far-right wing-nut who hasn’t exactly been an ally to the #MeToo movement, someone who grows spitting mad about film-intimacy coordinators and people trying to mitigate trauma through psychotherapy. He has little sympathy for himself, and even less for others.
In the cruelest passage in the entire book, the social-injustice warrior upbraids mayors who hope to “solve the homelessness problem,” rather than just hounding homeless people beyond city limits. If they can do so nicely, we’re told in a footnote, wonderful, but drive them out. Maybe Mamet could write a new adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, but this time the mob and guards terrorizing the Okies at California checkpoints can be the heroes. (“Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there…cheering them on, me and Sean Hannity, and maybe Joe Mantegna if he’s not booked to do a voice-over for The Simpsons.”) Mamet, in his self-appointed role as white-grievance counselor, serves up, in brief chapters of idiosyncratic riffs, a mélange of poisonous politics amid some diverting recollections of his storied Hollywood career, a résumé still growing despite his gripes about being canceled for going full-bore MAGA. The self-described “Santa Monica Hermit” says that he’s been “sidelined because of [his] politics (respect for the Constitution, etc.),” but Mamet recently penned the JFK assassination thriller being helmed by Barry Levinson, his Wag the Dog collaborator, which stars that no-name Al Pacino.
Mamet would be the prototypical Old Man Yelling at Clouds, but he would never do that because clouds are white.
“Directing a film is like playing chess while wrestling,” Mamet writes, which is pretty good if not up to the pithy gold standard that posits that filmmaking is like driving a car while building it, a line sometimes ascribed to Martin Scorsese, but who can tell the provenance at this point. Most of the catch-as-catch-can Mamet has done in his long career has been with parasitic producers and other money men who are empty-headed and two-faced. It’s hard to fault him for telling them to “fuck off” so often, especially the ones who took credit for his work or mangled his writing. There was the producer who didn’t recognize Mamet at a urinal and bragged to him that he’d written the screenplay for The Verdict (which Mamet had written). And film execs changing the title of his play Sexual Perversity in Chicago to About Last Night for the big-screen adaptation would have been enough to goad Gandhi into a gunfight.
Front-of-the-camera folks also get into the act, with some truly funny stories. Mamet recalls convincing Robert De Niro to do a table read of a screenplay he’d written, hopeful of enticing the A-lister to accept a meaty role. Bobby D. was clearly not overwhelmed. “I like it, but I don’t love it,” he tells Mamet. “It’s very good, but it’s just not a thing I have to do, and I’ve only got so many of them left in me.” Mamet calmly accepts the judgment, and without missing a beat De Niro entreats him to doctor the script for what he describes as the “piece of shit” he’s to begin filming on Monday. It wouldn’t be surprising if the actor has a different version of the story, but let’s hope this one is faithful.
“Diversity is all well and good,“ Mamet writes, before and after explaining ad nauseam how diversity is not at all well or at all good.
There’s some Ricky Jay—not enough, because how can there be enough Ricky Jay?—a few sterling witticisms from his actor-wife Rebecca Pidgeon (who identifies money as “shoe coupons”), and a slew of entertaining dish about some of his collaborators and friends, including Gene Hackman, Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Stanley Kubrick, John Malkovich, Danny DeVito, Don Ameche, Lauren Bacall, and the many antique character actors he befriended by the bushel. Some of it’s fun, as Mamet spins the roulette wheel in his head and lands on choice passages from his encyclopedic knowledge of film, but he’ll remind you before the next page just how miserable he can be. He would be the prototypical Old Man Yelling at Clouds, but he would never do that because clouds are white. Mamet thinks African-American actors get all the lead roles in today’s films and that contemporary casting is unfair, because while minorities can play characters unlike them, a white man playing Martin Luther King Jr. would be considered objectionable. Maybe the logic of his thinking escapes you, but logic also incessantly escapes him. (There are doodles at the end of each chapter, many of which serve as to punctuate the author’s tone-deaf political yammering, in case you missed the point the first thousand times. )
“Diversity is all well and good,“ Mamet writes, before and after explaining ad nauseam how diversity is not at all well or at all good. Also not doing well or good is Mamet himself. A 78-year-old man in 2024 still furious that “Ms.” became an acceptable, marriage-neutral term for women, and one who writes of getting thrown out of a Santa Monica Williams-Sonoma for making a tasteless crack about “illegal immigrants,” is in some sort of existential crisis. Mamet made a film about Phil Spector a decade ago and it’s easy to get that similar out-of-control vibe from him. A gun nut furious about trigger warnings, a guy constantly offended by those he believes to be constantly offended, Mamet is a crank, but he isn’t the usual crank who let his brain be colonized by Fox News. He’s a brilliant writer, one of the best at crafting dialogue and memorable one-liners that Hollywood or Broadway has ever known. Of course, you can be a great artist and a huge asshole simultaneously (see William Friedkin, comments on The Birth of a Nation).
“The camera sees only what you instruct it to see,” Mamet writes at one point, but so does the human mind if you want to keep it small and closed, refusing to accept the passage of time or acknowledge the need for metamorphosis. The world lurches forward, and other talented people who aren’t like you hopefully receive opportunities, get the chance to build the type of careers that were long denied them because of prejudice. And those who’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted may insist on an avenue to speak up about the abuse of power, if they don’t feel like brushing the whole thing off and burying the emotions that attend such mistreatment. If you dream of a society always remaining the way it was when it favored you, you’ll likely become terribly disenchanted. To borrow the title of a delightful movie Mamet directed in 1988, things change.•
I Who Have Never Known Men (Jacqueline Harpman)
A philosophical sci-fi novel reminiscent of Beckett and Borges, Jacqueline Harpman’s 1995 narrative tells the story of thirty-nine women and one girl mysteriously trapped in a prison cell together in a bunker far below ground level. The women have no idea why they were rounded up and incarcerated a dozen or so years earlier—time and details have become fuzzy. Some believe they may have been drugged to erase most memories of their pre-prison lives, or perhaps the torpor of the long years of their confinement has just gradually eroded their ability to recall. Provided with basic food rations daily, the captives are constantly monitored by male guards, who prevent them from making noise, having any physical contact with one another or committing suicide. They are to be kept alive, if barely, for reasons none of the prisoners can comprehend, and there’s even some doubt whether the jailers themselves know why this absurd ballet is taking place. The women aren’t even sure if they’re on Earth or an alien planet. Whatever the answers are, whatever the cause of the seeming apocalypse that has laid them low, the prisoners pass the days listlessly, awaiting a natural death as the overhead lights that never go out force them to constantly be aware of their predicament.
We learn at the outset that this book is the first-person account of the girl among them, now elderly and approaching the end of her life, which means something must’ve happened beyond the languorous opening which presents the women, who completely lack privacy and agency, passing their days as little more than statues. In her early years, the child—the only name the others gave her—was likely mistakenly placed in the cage with the grown women. She was, maybe, two at the time, and now is around 14 or 16, and doesn’t fit in with her fellow inmates. There’s definitely a generation gap, but it’s not only her age and lack of life experience that separates the child from them; she is, in many ways, a new type of female, one who doesn’t want to return to a patriarchal world she never experienced but who hopes to carve a new path. “I had only known the absurd,” she acknowledges, of having grown up in a cage, realizing that what makes her tragic might also make her surprisingly bold. The unschooled, but resourceful child, is clearly in possession of a native intelligence that hasn’t been extinguished despite a lack of nurturing. She restores to the women some degree of control when she begins counting her pulsebeat all day long to regain a sense of time. “I’d created the only new thing possible in our static lives,” she says of her discovery that the guards have them, for some reason, living on 16-hour days. This shred of knowledge is all the progress she can muster, however, until a “major event” shockingly liberates them.
Whether this is the home planet or an alien one, there seems to be nothing.
As the guards are opening the cell hatch to deliver food one day, a siren suddenly blares at a deafening level, a sound that’s never been heard before in all the years in the bunker. The jailers immediately stop and frantically evacuate the premises, leaving the women behind. What they’ve also left in their wake is the key protruding from the lock. After the shock of the frenzy wears off, the child springs to the door and opens it. The rest of the inmates eventually follow her out of the cell and up the stairs to discover what lies above, which is nothing but rocky terrain as far as the eye can see, no buildings or automobiles or people. Even the escaping guards appear to have vaporized. Whether this is the home planet or an alien one, there seems to be nothing. Liberty has finally arrived, but with even more peril than usually accompanies it.
After stocking up on food and supplies from the prison storeroom, the women set out to explore, but for weeks all they find is more and more terrain as barren as Mars. Eventually they happen upon another bunker prison and find dead women piled up in a prison cell, fellow prisoners who clearly were not lucky enough to have keys left in the lock at just the right moment. The women decide to set up camp and build a group of log cabins for shelter, regularly replenishing their larder by seeking out new bunkers, where they inevitably find forty dead women or forty dead men inside a cell. They may be the only living inhabitants left on whatever planet they’re occupying, and while they have all the material staples they need, their lives don’t have meaning.
It’s only when the final older woman dies, when our narrator believes herself to be the last human alive, that she goes on a years-long hike hoping to discover the answers.
The girl is young and wants to explore but instead spends many years with the older women, learning the rudiments of math, reading and writing, acquiring “perfectly useless knowledge” from an older woman named Anthea, who becomes a mother figure—sort of. It’s not exactly an excessively affectionate relationship. Because she was never held or played with as a child, the narrator can’t bear being touched, and there’s definitely an emotional remoteness to her. The coldness comes in handy when she becomes an adult, though, as she’s the only one among the women able to stomach performing mercy killings for the elderly among the group who develop painful cancers and wish to have their misery ended prematurely. She carries out the unusual surrogate filial responsibilities with a finely whetted knife. It’s only when the final older woman dies, when our narrator believes herself to be the last human alive, that she goes on a years-long hike hoping to discover answers to great mysteries.
The cruel and bizarre carceral status of the women isn’t a surprising literary creation coming from Harpman, whose Belgian family, including her Jewish father, escaped the Nazis and their concentration camps when she was a child. What’s most interesting to ponder in the aftermath of reading the book is what type of society the women existed in before they found themselves ensnared in their penal nightmare. There’s no indication the narrative’s a counterfactual story where most of the feminist movement never occurred, so it must be a futuristic one, and it would appear to be likely that there was a patriarchal system run amok. We have some telling clues. When Anthea and some of the other women try to share with the child stories of the past that they half-remember, they emphasize the emptiness of living each day without men (except for the whip-brandishing guards, of course). Even after their liberation, when some of them pair off in lesbian couples, Anthea speaks of these relationships condescendingly as women doing the best they can without men. They seem brainwashed, apart from the child who was never a product of whatever conditioning they’d experienced. The novel’s never just a political story, though, nor is it a simple parable about the human condition with all the strings tied neatly at the end. More than anything, it’s a narrative about a person, who, much like the rest of us, lacks vital information as she attempts to make her way through a scary world, hoping and struggling to locate some truth and purpose.•
Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (Dennis Yi Tenen)
Deep into this 2024 nonfiction book which reflects on the hundreds of years of analog and digital experimentation that delivered us, for better or worse, to this moment of chatbots, the author Dennis Yi Tenen, a literature professor and former software engineer, declares that he’s “suspicious of all metaphors ascribing human cognitive aspects to artificial intelligence,” though he himself uses such language more than once, including at the very outset. “Computers love to read” is his opening sentence but, of course, computers don’t love to read or do anything else. He also writes that “Markov chains were hungry for observed probabilities,” though Andrei Markov’s stochastic model, an essential AI building block introduced in 1906, isn’t capable of cravings. In both cases, the writer is clearly utilizing poetic license to anthropomorphize artificial intelligence, to make machines seem like pets or children, rather than venturing any willfully provocative predictions about the Singularity.
Time, of course, will tell who is the master and the parent, but interestingly enough, when he’s discussing the malign effects of AI, which he does so way too sparingly, the author is more ambivalent, using quote marks around words that suggest machines possess agency. As in: “Not so cleverly, a computer that ‘learns’ from biased language—everything ever written—may continue to spread abuse or racism it learned from humans.” Why does he, likely subconsciously, treat computers that behave well as if they were autonomous but those that misbehave as dumb puppets of humans? What does it mean? That even a hugely intelligent person like the author, who’s thought deeply about AI, still isn’t capable of completely balancing the dynamics of the human-machine relationship. There are always wires underfoot, always the risk of tripping. It’s a very complex topic.
Chatbots may be getting all the buzz right now, but they haven’t been an overnight sensation.
The celebrated 18th-century automaton, the Mechanical Turk, was supposedly a chess-playing machine of genius capabilities, but within its cabinet hid a masterful human player who actually did the lightning-fast calculations and made the dazzling moves. It was fully a fraud. Despite the deceit, the Turk is actually a decent way to understand the nature of Artificial Intelligence, as it’s explained by Tenen. In a brief volume that’s not a textbook but is perhaps more academic than a casual reader will appreciate, he tries to demystify AI, explaining that every time we use something even as simple as spell-check, there are hundreds of coders, designers, engineers, etc., inside the machine, if not literally. “[The] next time you hear the words ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ imagine not just a tangle of wires but also the whole mess of complicity: people, practices, bureaucracies, and institutions involved at a distance,” he writes. Even something like Deep Learning, in which computers can suss out answers on their own, requires masses of humans “teaching” machines how to walk before they can run. It’s all very collaborative.
He explains further, and it’s the crux of his book, that you need to look retrospectively many centuries to truly understand just how many cultures and peoples contributed to this moment, with chatbots and such having been assembled from the “workbench of history.” He writes that “search engine technology was built out of parts found in library science, philology, and linguistics, using techniques like text alignment, indexing, cataloging, term frequency comparison, and citation analysis.” Chatbots may be getting all the buzz right now, but they clearly haven’t been an overnight sensation. In wanting to assign the credit for AI to a collective effort, Tenen repeatedly describes the Great Man (and Woman) Theory as rubbish. When not busy debunking that theory, he spends a lot of time focusing on the great men and women who were instrumental in the development of the discipline, who did the theoretical and analog paper demonstrations of computing, particularly in regards to text generation, long before the materials and know-how were available to manufacture the hardware and software.
“Templates support the labor of ordinary intellect everywhere.”
From ninth-century Persian polymath Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, who put the al in algorithms, to 13th-century Spanish logician and Memory Wheel inventor Ramon Llull, to 19th-century Analytical Engine co-creator Ada Lovelace—a degenerate gambler who used the first proposed computer to make mathematically sound bets on horses—humans have been for ages tinkering with ideas, processes and “smart” pre-digital devices that anticipated, and contributed to, the evolution of machine writing. The 17th-century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher created a wooden teaching box called the Mathematical Organ, that allowed users to arrange a system of slates that would assist them in composing poetry or completing calculations; it came replete with guidebooks the inventor actually referred to as “applications.” Quirinus Kuhlmann wrote “technical sonnets,” using combinatorics to suggest possible prose permutations. Margaret Masterman’s 19th-century Universal Thesaurus moved machine translation forward, eventually proving a great aid to search engines. And at the heart of it all was Leibniz, who was involved in almost everything and still remains so. In the 17th-century, he developed the concept of “characteristica universalis,” an attempt at a formal language that could convert all of human knowledge into a scientific system, which, among other things, gifted the world with the principles of binary computers.
For a comparative literature professor, Tenen can come across hostile to great writing, possessing a clear animus toward what he terms “exceptional authors,” which seems like egalitarian posturing. Rather than focusing on writers who’ve made “novel contributions,” whom he feels have gotten far too much attention, he’s besotted with the devices that have allowed anyone to write acceptably, something he terms “template culture,” the development of which supports the “labor of ordinary intellect everywhere.” Templates, of course, have been a hallmark of computer architecture, a key to creating a standard that’s fairly simple and utterly repeatable. Templates originally became culturally ubiquitous during the Industrial Age, guiding building in numerous ways, and when it comes to what we would broadly call writing culture, there have been templates for more than a century that have purported to be able to transform weak writers into winning ones, suggesting story foundations and plot variations. Two examples, Plotto (from 1928) and the Plot Genie (1935), offered “fully fleshed-out algorithmic text-generation systems in book format.” Tenen’s very excited about templates and in our time he’s clearly not the only one. You can see their imprint in the memes people send via social media, when users employ variations on the same sentence structures in the pursuit of wit. “People consume more literature than ever,” he tells us early in the book, not overly concerned with the quality of what’s being read. There certainly is a huge quantity of writing, but any line of a Dickinson or Yeats poem is more beautiful than all the mundane copy created by templates.
While Literary Theory for Robots is mostly a history and an interesting one, it occasionally does look forward. Tenen rightly worries that if text generators end up doing much of the writing at some point, we may lose a lot of literary innovation since they’re working only off of copy from the past. But he doesn’t seem to have any great fears about machine learning, doesn’t believe we’re riding technology toward either a utopia or dystopia, paying scant attention to the many terrible outcomes AI can promote. Nor does he really examine whether a greater downside would exist if chatbots become competent or if they remain deeply flawed. Despite all the hoopla about Chat GPT—including some journalists treating the system like it’s the second coming of HAL 9000—Open AI’s product is currently pretty lacking. Being able to instantaneously produce paragraphs full of bland copy riddled with factual mistakes might be an advance as far as large language models are concerned, but Chat GPT and its competitors are going to need to “love to read” a lot more if they aren’t going to be a danger, endlessly dumping errors into the ether. In one passage, Tenen writes a sentence about the nature of corporations that can also be applied directly to these chatbots: “Fictions have real effects on the world.”•