Are blogs literature?

Source:http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/ckbetas/2003/11/are_blogs_liter.html

Raquel Recuero, a blogueira colleague in Brazil, has been discussing the issue of whether blogs are literary in any sense of the word. If you read Portuguese, you can see her November 16 post at Every flower is perfect.

If we could see a typical bookstore maybe 20 years after Gutenberg, we would probably be appalled at the speed with which junk was duplicated on the primitive presses of the time. Time and chance have buried the junk, leaving us with a tiny residue of superb writing and thought.

Similarly, for every Swift and Sterne and Johnson writing in the 18th century, hundreds of dreadful writers scribbled more junk...buried under the junk of the 19th century, and so on. Many American authors of mid-century rated a portrait on the cover of Time, and are now forgotten even by desperate Ph.D. candidates in search of a dissertation subject.

So when we contemplate the geyser of writing unleashed by blogging technology, we should not feel disappointed that it's a geyser of sludge. Even if future technology permits the reading of today's blogs, no one will care. A Ph.D. just wouldn't be worth plowing through the annals of drunken college students, whiny Bush supporters, and bitter ex-spouses.

If anyone shows an interest, it will be linguists analyzing the frequency of certain terms in blog English: random, rants, musings, chaotic, meandering, raving, neurotic, and so forth—a kind of anticipatory self-excuse for lacking all sense of purpose or structure.

Of course such terms are intended ironically. But irony appears in the very late stages of a genre, and blogging is just too new for that. It's in the neonatal stage, when everything is intense and romantic and mythically larger than life. Even a dog's cute behaviour seems as significant as the Fenris Wolf or the Hound of Heaven.

So the irony, if any, is unintentional. And yet myth is still literature, romance is still literature, and blogs are literature too. Just as most literature is bad, so are most blogs.

But what's "bad"? What's "good"? We love the writing that addresses and expresses our anxieties, and we despise the writing that ignores them. Moralizing about blogs is as pointless as moralizing about the Mickey Spillane mysteries of the 1950s, or the Harlequin romances of the 1970s. Doing so may reveal much about our personal taste, or the taste of our time, but it says very little about what's really going on in blog writing.

We need a blog taxonomist: someone who can patiently record the number of descriptions of drunken college bashes, or the number of sincere laments over the death of Johnny Cash, and who can then discuss the more complex versions versus the simpler ones. And then our taxonomist can compare the Johnny Cash obituaries with those for other C&W singers, and with those for opera stars, and for aged parents...and finally for Hamlet and Gatsby.

In other words, we need to see the archetypes in blogs, the recurring symbols, images, and phrasings, just as we need to see them in Shakespeare's sonnets or Scott Fitzgerald's novels.

The difference here is that most modern bloggers lack the education that enabled Shakespeare and Fitzgerald to invoke those archetypes consciously. Most of us simply imitate the language we hear and read around us. Remember when the Web was new, and everyone felt obliged to post an "Under Construction" sign? We were all just copying the very first Web pioneers, trying to sound like them.

As blogging grows more sophisticated, some writers will become very powerful and evocative indeed; most, however, will go on describing their weekend in Houston or that great party at the Phi Kappa Psi house.

And that's fine. From Shakespeare to Dickens, English speakers had a mighty substrate of literacy in the King James Bible, giving everyone a common mythology and a magnificent rhetoric. Without that, the Shakespeares and Dickenses would have been mere mute inglorious Miltons, lacking both an audience and a language to address it in. (We have fallen so far in the past century that we must now dragoon young adults into literature classes to explain to them what any 10-year-old once understood from family conversations.)

So the substrate of blog writing, mute and inglorious though it may be, can still support more ambitious efforts. The images of frat-house orgies and cute pussycats will evolve, in some writers' hands, into Dionysian visions and tigers, tigers, burning bright. Yes, blogs are literature