The Dish

Ted Gioia considers the rise of the fragmented, or “polyphonic,” novel:

[A] new type of fragmentation has come to the forefront in 21st century novels such as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Geraldine Brooks’s The People of the Book (2008), Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men (2102), T.C. Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done (2011), David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011), Zadie Smith’s NW (2102), Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), and other recent works. Instead of relying on fragmentation as a means of disjunction and dissolution, as many experimental novelists had done in the past—Julio Cortázar, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Gilbert Sorrentino, etc.—the new fragmented novel is holistic and coalescent. It resists disunity, even as it appears to embody it. …

The beauty of the new fragmented novel is that writers can have it both ways. These books pay deference to complexity, that deity of the lit critic, but they are also marked by an intense devotion to plot, pacing and other elements of traditional craft. Highbrow and lowbrow elements are pleasingly blurred. Experimentation proves that it is compatible with accessibility.

(Hat tip: Page-Turner)

Richard Brody praises Thomas Nagel’s new book, Mind and Cosmos, for the value it places on human achievement:

Nagel’s thesis has … radical consequences for philosophy itself. His argument implies that consciousness—indeed, mental life, whether conscious or not—is not atomic but holistic: there is no such thing as a piece or an atom of experience, but, rather, a mind at a given moment is flooded with an incalculable number of perceptions, memories, ideas, judgments, and desires. Even enumerating them in the plural is a little silly, because it implies the ability to isolate them as singular events or things. Therefore, philosophy, in order to account for mental life, will need to turn aside from isolated experiments in logic and argumentation in favor of rough-edged, life-sized chunks—historical events and figures, works of art, artists themselves, cities, countries, languages, human dramas of all sorts, lived or imagined.

Which is to say that, though Nagel doesn’t write about art in “Mind and Cosmos,” the book’s widest implications involve art and how it helps us to understand the world. If Nagel is right, art itself would no longer be merely the scientist’s leisure-time fulfillment but would be (I think, correctly) recognized as a primary mode of coming to grips with the mental and moral essence of the universe. It would be a key source of the very definition of life. Aesthetics will be propelled to the forefront of philosophy as a crucial part of metaphysical biology, and so, the writing and practice of philosophy will come to look more like texts by Nietzsche, with their own built-in aesthetic and subjective components and emphases on historical and practical events. The very beauty of Nagel’s theory—its power to inspire imagination—counts in its favor.

Previous Dish on Nagel’s book here, here, and here.

(Photo by Flickr user ezhikoff)

Waldman doubts it:

Frankly, I’ve always been skeptical about the potential of humanoid robots. Sure, it helps us to relate to them if they look like us, but the human body has a lot of limitations. For instance, hands are great, but should a robot have only two? Why not four or six, or eleven? The more hands, the more things you can do with them. And legs are extremely useful, especially for navigating uneven environments where wheels won’t work well, like the rubble of a building that has fallen over, or the stairs in your house. But are two legs better than three or four?

Ted Chiang, in a piece we referenced recently, connects science fiction’s obsession with humanoid robots to slavery:

I think the reason for the convention was that it was a metaphor for slavery. That was the original promise and appeal of robots—that they would be slaves without the guilt. You can call them servants, but they are essentially slaves because they have no options and no real autonomy. I think that is the unexamined assumption of science fiction that depicts humanoid robots or human-like AI. These works are suggesting that it might be possible to have slavery without guilt.

Laurie Penny is impressed by “how much they have read, how creatively they think, and how curiously bullshit-resistant they are”:

Young people getting older is not, in itself, a fascinating new cultural trend. Nonetheless, the encroaching adulthood of people who grew up in a world where expanding technological access collided with the collapse of the neoliberal economic consensus is worth paying attention to. Because these kids are smart, cynical and resilient, and I don’t mind saying that they scare me a little.

Marc Bolan was wrong: the children of the revolution are depressingly easy to fool. The children of austerity, however, are not. They have grown up with the Internet, they are keyed in to the news and they understand, most importantly, that adults have no idea what they are doing.

My generation figured that one out a little bit too late, leaving us fired up with furious energy but not necessarily equipped to tackle the sudden lack of jobs, public services and education. Today’s teenagers have simply always known. They know that there’s a war on and they won’t be taken in by empty promises that hard work, good behavior and respect for one’s elders will lead to rewards by themselves.

Robin Marantz Henig describes the complicated lives of Brooke Hopkins, who suffered injuries that left him dependent on life-sustaining technology, and his wife Peggy Battin, a lifelong advocate for the right to death:

The only consistent choice Brooke has made — and he’s made it again and again every time he gives informed consent for a feeding tube or a diaphragmatic pacer, every time he permits treatment of an infection or a bedsore — is the one to stay alive. This is the often-unspoken flip side of the death-with-dignity movement that Peggy has long been a part of. Proponents generally focus on only one branch of the decision tree: the moment of choosing death. There’s much talk of living wills, D.N.R. orders, suicide, withdrawal of life support, exit strategies. Brooke’s experience has forced Peggy to step back from that moment to an earlier one: the moment of confronting one’s own horrific circumstances and choosing, at least for now, to keep on living. But the reasons for that choice are complicated too. Brooke told me that he knows Peggy is a strong person who will recover from his death and move on. But he has also expressed a desire not to abandon her. And Peggy worries that sometimes Brooke is saying he wants to keep fighting and stay alive not because that’s what he wants, but because he thinks that’s what she wants him to want. And to further complicate things, it’s not even clear what Peggy really wants him to want. Her own desires seem to shift from day to day. One thing that doesn’t change, though: She is deeply afraid of misunderstanding Brooke’s wishes in a way that can’t be undone. The worst outcome, to her, would be to think that this time he really does want to die and then to feel as if she might have been wrong.