1. The imaginations foretold
So what’s my problem? Last May, I bought my copy of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer’s first book (2007), and was duly impressed with its first chapter on Walt Whitman. Two months later, I almost grabbed Imagine (2012) from the mountains of copies displayed at my favorite bookstore. But I thought I shouldn’t be so greedy. I already had Lehrer’s Proust and, on my hard drive, a PDF of his second book, How We Decide (2009). Plus, I had his blog Frontal Cortex (on Wired.com) bookmarked (“Favorites”) on my laptop. And when he moved his Cortex to The New Yorker, I promptly followed. And then boom. The final days of July saw my famous geeky angel crash and burn. Julie Bosman (The New York Times) reports that “the 31-year-old author” has “executed one of the most bewildering recent journalistic frauds.” Lehrer resigned from “his prestigious post” at The New Yorker. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Imagine’s publisher, withdrew copies from bookstores. Bosman adds: “All of its retail and wholesale accounts, the publisher said, would be asked to stop selling [the book] and return unsold copies for a full refund.”
But what about my book? How much of Proust can be trusted? How many of the quotes in Lehrer’s two other books and in his numerous magazine articles and blog posts have been, well, merely imagined? Shouldn’t I ask for a refund, too? Or should I stop acting like some spurned matron in a maudlin telenovela and just read? I know I’m overreacting. But really that’s how it feels. Like you’ve been in this steamy (but brainy) love affair and one day you find out that your lover is not who you think he is. He’s not original and honest enough about delivering the lines you have fallen for. You’ve been duped. Sure, he apologized, “saying it wouldn’t happen again.” (The quotes are from Roxane Gay of Salon.com. I’m not inventing or stealing them, so don’t sue me.) But would that apology be enough to repair all the damage to your reading soul, your bleeding heart, your frontal cortex?
Ah, just shut up and read. That’s what I told myself this morning as I opened Lehrer’s Proust one more time and risked being exposed to (or betrayed by) whatever my disgraced angel had to say in his chapter about, uh-oh, Virginia Woolf. In his “Prelude,” Lehrer explains: “This book is about artists who anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience. It is about writers and painters and composers who discovered truths about the human mind — real, tangible truths — that science is only now rediscovering. The imaginations foretold the facts of the future.” There’s a creepy ironic undertone as I read that last sentence in light of what, five years after he published this 2007 book, would get him in trouble. Imagine: How Creativity Works. Imaginations foretelling — divulging? — facts in 2012. Imaginations. Fabrications. Tangible truths. Veritable betrayals of trust. Oh, Jonah, how could you? How dare you!
Shut up and keep reading, the saner side of me barked at the telenovela diva. And so I soldiered on — a task that, I’m happy to report, turned out to be a breeze. I finished all 22 pages of Lehrer on Woolf in one gulp. It was a smooth ride. It felt like I had my smart, patient pal telling me about stuff like NCC (neural correlate of consciousness) and the literary significance (and historical accuracy) of the shell-shocked poet Septimus, the character who commits suicide in Mrs. Dalloway. Reading Lehrer, I don’t feel like I’m being lectured. He makes things simple without dumbing them down. He sprinkles the page with phrases like “experimental paradigm” and “transcendental theory,” yet I don’t see some wunderkind showing off. It’s not like I’m just being taken for a ride. This is the real deal. Or is it?
2. The raucous parliament of cells
It helps that I’m a sucker for seamless interweavings of literature and psychology. (Disclosure: I was a Psych major before I shifted to Lit.) And it helps that Lehrer is confirming what I’ve been learning these past few years. His main thesis in the chapter is that in the 1920s Virginia Woolf was already writing about what neuroscience has been figuring out only in the last few decades. He asserts that the self (or mind or consciousness) is not a unified entity with definable or detectable mechanisms of control over an individual’s behavior or thinking. Thus, there are “multiple selves” residing in each person. It’s not necessarily a psychiatric illness. It’s how the brain works. It’s how we “process” or adapt (and adapt to) reality.
Lehrer reflects on Woolf’s “stream of consciousness” prose, especially To the Lighthouse, and the series of short-term memories (some might call them distractions) that often fuel the brain. He says, “As the modernists [including Woolf] anticipated, the permanent-seeing self is actually an endless procession of disjointed moments.” He adds:
Even more disconcerting is the absence of any single location in the brain — a Cartesian theater, so to speak — where these severed moments get reconciled. [...] Instead, the head holds a raucous parliament of cells that endlessly debate what sensations and feelings should become conscious. These neurons are distributed all across the brain, and their firing unfolds over time. This means that the mind is not a place; it is a process. As the influential philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote, our mind is made up “of multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go.” What we call reality is merely the final draft. (Of course, the very next moment requires a whole new manuscript.)
I really like that phrase “raucous parliament of cells.” But I also really would like to check if that’s a Lehrer original or someone else has fabricated it — or if Lehrer has rehashed it from one of his blogs. Moreover, I want to verify the accuracy of that Daniel Dennett quote. Could there have been a typo, an honest mistake? Or could Lehrer have conjured up the whole Dennett Delusion?
Okay, enough. Paranoia afflicts my neurons and circuits. I have to stop suspecting that every page of his (or other authors’) books is now contaminated, each publication out there driven by his evil plot to brainwash the reading public. I can give him this much. In Proust Was a Neuroscientist, based on the two chapters I’ve read, Lehrer’s breadth of knowledge is incontestable. He quotes everyone from James Joyce to Michael Gazzaniga, from Chomsky to Nietzsche and Rimbaud. He ties up concepts and insights without making the package look too tidy or forced. And aside from breadth (any term-paper-savvy undergrad can sound profound with a bunch of quotes), Lehrer has depth. I can’t think of anything I’ve read recently that is as well-argued and penetrating as his chapter linking Virginia Woolf’s modernist style and subjects with 21st-century neuroscientists’ findings.
3. Googling goodies galore
Perhaps my Jonah Lehrer problem began even before Jonah Lehrer. Many years ago, I edited an anthology of scholarly essays about women and spirituality. Using Google, I found out that one of the contributors, a nun, had lifted paragraphs from a published work. In a detailed letter (my “editor’s notes”), I reported this to the publisher. I don’t recall exactly what happened, but the plagiarized portions were eventually deleted from the final draft. I don’t know how the publisher told the nun about my snooping (or if she told the culprit at all), but I was so disappointed. If even a nun, a scholar-nun, could do it, who’d be immune from this vice?
Recently, one of my students confessed to me that he had deliberately plagiarized parts of his History report just to find out if he could get away with it. He took pride in the fact that he got an A for his paper and that the teacher never caught him — or perhaps never bothered to Google him out. A few weeks after the Lehrer exposé, there was the Fareed Zakaria shocker. I had admired Zakaria’s work in Newsweek, and I wasn’t disappointed when he moved to Time. But again I was stunned when I read that Time and CNN had suspended him for plagiarizing someone’s essay in The New Yorker. According to ABC News (August 17, 2012), Zakaria’s suspension has been lifted (yeah, after he has lifted): “CNN and Time said . . . that each had conducted a thorough review and found Zakaria's recent ‘journalistic lapse’ to be an isolated incident.”
I will now quote something from a movie and perhaps out of context, but please don’t suspend me. A line from the ending of Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning film Ordinary People has popped into my frontal cortex. Timothy Hutton, the suicidal teenager, tells his father, Donald Sutherland, how much he admires the man for the way he has handled the family conflicts. (Oh, don’t get me started on the mom, Mary Tyler Moore.) The father chides his son: “Don’t admire people too much. They’ll disappoint you sometimes.”
I don’t know how long my disappointment or paranoia (or sense of fanboy betrayal) will last. But I think of big-time writers like Lehrer and Zakaria, those who have built lucrative brands only to find themselves humiliated in the eyes of those, such as readers, publishers, and the media, who have helped (or conspired) to sustain those brands. As a writer, I dread being accused of lifting phrases from other publications or of “self-plagiarizing” (whatever that means).
So let me just Google “goodies galore” from my first paragraph above to check if I’m not culpable of any “journalistic lapse.” Oops. There you go. Mea culpa. My Google search yielded (to plagiarize Daniel Dennett’s quaint phrase) “parallel pandemoniums” of doppelgangers such as goodiesgalore (the title of a WordPress blog), goodiesgalore.multiply.com (“Shop Home Garden — MJ’s Goodies Galore!”), a Goodies Galore bakery, a Goodies Galore store for Betty Boop collectibles, and . . . Oh, I give up. I’m not the creative writer that I have deluded myself to be. I have no right to proclaim myself Holier-Than-Lehrer. Who knows which parts of this essay have been recycled by my stream of consciousness from other essays I have mishmashed before. Like my fallen angel with his Bob Dylan blunder, I am bound to be discredited for my unoriginal phrases and made-up lines.
4. Doing the necessary due diligence
How do I prevent my multiple selves from robbing one another’s catchphrases and mindsets? For consolation, I turn to John McQuaid’s essay at Forbes.com, “Where Jonah Lehrer Went Astray.” His assessment is one of the most acute and least hysterical pieces on the matter. He offers a concise, sober wake-up call to writers and readers alike: “One key to Lehrer’s success is he offers big ideas to explain big questions that everybody wonders about. Everyone is looking for an explanation. Not just an explanation, but an entertaining, catchy explanation that appears to make sense of a complex world in flux.”
What’s wrong with that? McQuaid believes that such catchy explanations can turn into “fungible commodities” that can be sold as “ideas” to “media and corporate audiences.” Still, so what? If rights to a novel can be peddled to Hollywood and the use of intellectual property is often paid for, what’s so bad about writers selling their ideas to anyone? In his conclusion, McQuaid alludes to that other demigod of the “big ideas, catchy explanations” genre, Malcolm Gladwell:
Call it “Gladwellization.” It’s not just lucrative, but powerful: your ideas (or rather, the ideas you’ve turned into compelling anecdotes for a popular audience) can influence everything from editorial choices across the publishing world to corporate management and branding strategies.But with this comes mounting demands to produce, and to recycle. You have to be prolific, churning out longer pieces that give your insights some ballast, and brilliant, bite-sized items. And yet you can’t be too new either: people want to hear what you’re already famous for. In this cauldron of congratulation and pressure for more and more, it’s not hard to see how standards might erode, how the “ideas” might become more important than doing the necessary due diligence to make sure they sync with reality. Book publishers don’t do fact-checks, so there’s no fail-safe, just the conscience of the writer. Reach that point, and all is lost.
I agree, Mr. McQuaid. To do “the necessary due diligence to make sure [those ideas] sync with reality” — that is something worth doing whether you’re Virginia Woolf, a neuroscientist, a scholarly nun, a high school student, a fallen angel, or a paranoid blogger. Yes, there are “mounting demands to produce,” to keep writing — and writing well. And to cite your sources. To not invent quotes. And to keep reading. To actively engage the text. To ask where this writer’s ideas are coming from and how far you want to go with them. To remember that not everything catchy is worth getting caught up in.
I’ve got six more chapters to go with Proust Was a Neuroscientist — plus a “Coda” and Lehrer’s diligently compiled (let’s hope he wasn’t just making these up) footnotes and bibliography. I want to give his Proust the benefit of the doubt. I want to keep flying, ruminating, with my angel. But first, Michael Moynihan has some words of caution. He’s the journalist who tracked down Lehrer’s “deceptions” in Imagine. He says he checked “a few other chapters” there and in Lehrer’s earlier book, How We Decide, and “found fake interviews, quotes that can't be located, and plagiarism.” Uh-oh, the ride goes on.
Meanwhile, there are many related issues (yeah, goodies galore) to nourish my raucous parliament of brain cells. For instance, it’s time to be more wary of media-hyped “ideas.” Time to ask — why all the fuss to find the next big brand, the next record-breaking trilogy? My Lehrer problem may just be one symptom of a more pervasive malady. The question remains: why he and others — why we — plagiarize lines, fabricate quotes, or tolerate (even reward) the unoriginal. Is it the need to succeed or to get by or get along? Is it the pressure to keep performing well and producing more? Is it because we forget or choose to ignore what journalism and scholarship are all about? Or is it because sometimes we, as writers and readers, just get lazy and lack imagination?
[Photo: Thank you, mrbsemporium.com.]
No comments:
Post a Comment