SONYA CHUNG

18 November 2011

Something completely insane seems to be happening.  Last week, Sam Allingham wrote an analysis at The Millions of Jonathan Lethem‘s takedown of James Wood‘s review of his own novel The Fortress of Solitude (from eight years ago).  The Lethem essay was recently published at the LA Review of Books.

But that’s not quite the insane part (depending I guess on how you feel about Lethem/The Fortress of Solitude).  The comments section of Sam Allingham’s post blew up and started to get rather heated.  Then, suddenly, someone calling himself “James wood” joined the conversation, and it got even more heated.  Soon it became clear that “James wood,” who started his comments referring to “Wood” in the third person, was in fact the James Wood in question.

From a comment by someone named “Lewis,” deep into the thread:

Talk about post-modern moments. A critic writes a review of a writer. Then the writer responds to the critic. Then a blogger writes an article about the writer’s response to the critic. Then posters attack the writer for responding to the critic and other posters attack those posters for attacking the writer’s response. Then the critic responds to the posters, but no one believes he is the actual critic. The strangest/funniest part was perhaps when one poster pretending to be the critic also in response posted a link to a James Wood web site that is for James Wood the used car dealer and another asked that money be deposited in an offshore account for James Woods in the Cayman Islands, although those posts were unfortunately deleted. In any case, I do apologize if I offended you James for my sometimes gratuitous comments, although I never said that all you write about is Flaubert and you don’t write about contemporary authors. In fairness to you I have not read all of your critiques, only enough to get perhaps a biased impression. In fairness to me and Steven though, I agree that it is extraordinarily odd for a writer or critic to write about himself in the third person. Why would you expect any of us to believe you’re you when you speak of yourself as though you’re a corporation or a press agent speaking for you?

Completely apart from the issues of literary criticism and author-responses that this thread of comments addresses; what is going on here?  I feel lost and confused about how it is we are all learning/unlearning to communicate in the blogosphere; it seems scarcely human.