The last batch

 Nyt:

The idea of the private room presented itself to the Italian imagination during the Renaissance; privacy and solitude were the prerogative of the nobleman, of the aristocrat and, later, of the gentleman. Solitude — chosen, blessed solitude — is never not a matter of hierarchy and class standing.) “In the early modern era,” the historian  Orest Ranum tells us in an essay in “A History of Private Lite,” “architects created new private spaces in the homes of the well-to-do, or,  rather, they increased the amount of private space by transforming into rooms what had previously been mere objects of furniture. ... Words such as study, cabinet, bibliothéque (shelf or library) . and écritoire (writing desk or writing room) may still refer to items of furniture, but they also designate rooms serving a particular, often private, function. ... A man who once kept a locked writing desk could now closet himself in his writing room and lock the door.” 

At one time personal identification was a novel, even revolutionary accessory of selfhood. For much of the millennium, ordinary people did without the trappings of personal identification: passports, identity cards, signatures, even surnames. 

As Europe emerged from the Dark Ages the population became more mobile, creating opportunities tor imposture. Most famous 1s the case of Martin Guerre, who returned home from battle to find that someone had usurped his identity, along with his wite, child and inhentance. Ever since, fraud and authenticity have been at war. 

The rise of modern cities multiplied the opportunities for fraud, as confidence men and swindlers, exploiting the anonymity of the urban milieu, adopted aliases or impersonated strangers. In response, criminologists have developed ever more sophisticated ways to tag the self, building archives of names, mug shots and fingerprints, 

Gopnik on Dick

There's nothing more exciting to an adolescent reader than an unknown genre writer who speaks to your condition and has something great about him. The Ace paperback cover promises mere thrills, and the writing provides real meaning. The combination of evident value and apparent secrecy makes E]more Leonard fans feel more for their hero than Borges lovers are allowed to feel for theirs. When they tell you it’s going to be good, what more can you hope for it to be? Eventually, enough of these secret fans grow up and get together, and the writer is designated a Genius, acquiring all the encumbrances of genius: fans, notes, annotated editions, and gently disparaging comprehenSive reviews. Since genre writing can support only one genius at a time—and no genre writer ever becomes just a good writer; it’s { all prophet or all hack—the guy is usually resented by his peers and their partisans even as the establishment hails him. No one hates the rise of Elmore Leon; ard so much as a lover of Ross Macdonald. Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hackto-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, Dicks m wrote thirty-six speed-fuelled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three. His reputation has risen through the two parallel operations that genre writers get when they get big. First, he has become a prime inspiration for the movies, becoming for contemporary science-fiction and fantasy movies what Raymond Chandler was for film noir: at least eight feature films, including “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and, most memorably, Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” have been adapted from Dick's books, and even more—from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” to the “Matrix” series owe a defining debt to his mixture of mordant comedy and wild metaphysics. 

But Dick has also become for our time what Edgar Allan Poe was for Gilded Age America: the doomed genius who supplies a style of horrors and frissons. (In both cases, it took the French to see it; the first good critical writing on Dick, as on Poe, came from Europe, and particularly from Paris.) Like Poe's, Dick's last big book was a work of cosmic explanation in which lightning bolts of brilliance flash over salty oceans of insanity. Poe’s explanation of everything was called “Eureka.” Dick's was “VALIS.” 

Dick's fans are not modest in their claims. Nor are they especially precise: Borges, Calvino, Kafka, Robertson Davies are cited, in the blurbs and introductions, as his peers. A note of inconsistency inflects these claims—Calvino and Robertson Davies?—but they are sincerely made and, despite all those movies and all that praise, have a slight, useful tang of hyperbolic defensiveness. One of the first things that everyone is inclined to say about Dick is that his subject and his mostly straight-to-paperback publication kept him from literary respectability, leaving him a neglected cult writer who is only now beginning to get his due. 

On the evidence of the biographers, though, this doesn’t seem quite true. While he served a fairly long apprenticeship a series of almost unreadable realist working-class novels that he wrote in the fifties are now back in print—and struggled to make money, from the time “The Man in the High Castle” won a Hugo Award, in 1963, he was famous, admired, and read. He wasn't reviewed on the front page of the Times Book Review, but so what? Reading his life either in the reflective French version, by Emmanuel Carrére, or in the thorough and intelligent American one, by Lawrence Sutin—one has a sense not of a man of thwarted ambition but, rather, of a man burning up with ideas and observations who found in a pop form the perfect vehicle for expressing them. 

Dick's allegiance was not to literature but to writing. 

Kimmelman:

 Even more than writers or painters, composers illustrate best the Romantic equating of nonconformity with glory. By the late 18th century, pure instrumental music — music not written for the king or the church but simply for the pleasure of an emerging bourgeoisie — was coming into its own. With the rise of a middle class, composers were beginning to think in terms of public concerts and paying crowds. Musicians like Liszt and Berlioz, both of them basing works on Byron’s poems, wrote with this new audience in mind. 

But religious music had expressed piety; court music, elegance. They reflected the goals of their subjects. What were the new symphonies supposed to celebrate? Making money? Individuality theretore became a prime criterion of artistic value, an excuse for artists entering a marketplace that many of them claimed to disdain. As Charles Rosen, the pianist and writer, has put it, during the Romantic era “the work has its own law, its own reason for existing: it is produced by the artist not for a purpose but because he must — ‘out of an inner necessity.’ ” 

So the artist now sought to make a living by, as it were, selling his soul — his individual sensibility. The more individual the sensibility, the better the artist — an idea that naturally flowed into the larger sphere of politics and public life. “Force of mind is developed only by attacking power,” was Mme. de Staél’s phrase for the concept of the underdog individual versus the dominating mass, which Byron translated as “All Talent has a propensity to attack the Strong.” 

If Byron has come to seem to us like a virtual parody of Romantic excess, it is partly because he refused to stick to any one esthetic or moral philosophy. He was a freethinker dogged by Calvinist guilt; he had stoud up for the poor but took childish pride in his aristocracy. 

The concept of self-indulgence that Byron embodied involved an elevation of private esthetics over reason. Enlightenment reason had lost much of its luster after Robespierre. As a bedrock ideology for the modern artist, the Romantic credo of individuality was to become particularly irresistible because it didn’t depend on any one view of the world to which everyone had to conform. 

Conformity became the only enemy, which helps to explain why Romanticism as a historical movement is still so poorly remembered: it Consciously resisted any one definition. The Romantic revolution was like William Morris’s description of a battle that men fight and lose: “the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat,” Morris wrote, “and when it comes, turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.” 

This also seems like a metaphor for the Romantic concept of the misunderstood genius — the individual artist of the most exceptional talent — although we ought to be careful about attributing too much, ultimately, to the Romantic age. Victor Hugo, like Byron a larger-than-life character, fooled around with scraps of lace dipped in colored ink. He signed stones that he found on the beach. But we really haven’t the slightest idea whether this meant to Hugo what it implies to us. We know only that he wasn’t a forward thinker about the art of his time. The critic Sainte-Beuve said that Hugo “spent his entire life going from one man to another, helping himself to whatever they had to offer,” which was funny coming from Sainte-Beuve, who had an affair with Hugo’s wife. Still, it was an astute statement: Hugo pointed the way ahead by looking backward, to what had already been done. 

Nyt:

INDIVIDUALISM MAY FEEL like a natural condition, but many of its aspects did not develop until the last thousand years. Surnames, for example, did not emerge until the mid-1300’s. Before then men typically were identified only by the names of their fathers — John, son of Henry; Martin, Peter’s son — and women took the names of their fathers or husbands. In eastern Europe, Jews typically did not have last names until the early 1800's, and in America, far into the 19th century, slaves were not permitted to have surnames unless given one by theit owners. As for the idea of personal space, it was not until the 1700’s in England that corridors were first included in the homes of the well-to-do. Until then, to get from room A to room E, one had to walk through all the rooms in between. 

The newest aspect of individualism is that more people can aspire to it. A rising standard of living has freed most Americans from having to spend every waking hour satisfying basic needs. Middleclass affluence has also reduced the need to rely on parents or children and has enabled many more people to go it alone. A hundred years ago, few people lived by themselves; today 1 out of 4 households contains only one person. 

Meanwhile, the character of individualism has changed. The older style, echoing Franklin and Emerson, turned on self-reliance, achievement — what sociologists call utilitarian individualism. That is still much evident. But a newer style has blossomed in recent decades, what is called expressive individualism, That is about emotional gratification, self-help, getting in touch with feelings, expressing personal needs. Utilitarian individualism is going West, on Horace Greeley’s advice, to find your fortune. Expressive individualism is going to the forest, on Robert Bly’s advice, to find your inner essence.