...has published an essay about Wikipedia in The New York Review that seems weirdly naive for such a sophisticated writer. Baker may have been seduced by the way the randomly accumulating structure of the "people's encyclopedia" mimics the sniffling pack-rat sensibility of his own fiction.
Like a lot of people, I use Wikipedia because it is convenient, and I'm often impressed by how much arcane information can be found there, but the honeymoon ended for me several years ago when I realized that key passages in the entry on the wuxia genre had been lifted without attribution from my Premiere article about Crouching Tiger. Hidden Dragon. Notes to the administrators pointing this out went unanswered, and at the time I assumed that the Wiki-hipsters were rolling their eyes over what a square I was to imagine that in the digital age there was a such thing as intellectual property any longer. What a quaint, tight-assed pre-Post notion.
Baker, I imagine, would say instead that in aiming a note up to the top of the chain I simply wasn't playing by the Wiki-rules: only a clueless newbie would fail to understand that the onus was on me to wade in and correct or delete the offending passage; even, apparently, to make sure that it was properly ascribed---which was really all I wanted. On one level I was perversely flattered that someone considered my sketchy account of a 1,000-year-old action genre to be worth pilfering. But what's the underlying proinciple at work, here, that everything is fair game as long as no one complains? Quite apart from the inherent dangers of an encyclopedia that by its very nature boils everything down to consensus positions, this brand of post-Post anti-ethics is just too subtle for me.
Despite his subtlety in ethical matters I doubt Nicholson Baker would be happy if I were to copy out this unbroken-apple-peel of a sentence from his 1990 novel Room Temperature and (would that I could) claim it as my own:
I certainly believed, rocking my daughter on this Wednesday afternoon, that with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any singe twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected; that is, that there was enough content in that single confined sequence of thoughts and events and the setting that gave rise to them to make connections that would proliferate backwards until potentially every item of autobiographical interest---every pet theory, minor observation, significant moment of shame or happiness---could be at least glancingly covered; but you had to expect that a version of the past arrived at this way would exhibit, like the unhealthily pale frog, certain telltale differences of emphasis from the past you would recount if you proceeded serially, beginning with "I was born on January 5, 1957," and letting each moment give birth naturally to the next.
Is it just me or does that "I was born" echo the opening line of every Victorian novel you've ever read? In fact, if I was going to steal this slice of Baker it might be as a lead in to a consideration of the shift that occurred in the novel when (was it with Proust or somebody even earlier?) the stream of time was abandoned in favor of the stream of consciousness as an organizing principle. I expected the book(s) I'm reading now, Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, to be classically point-A-to-point-B in their approach, but so far, barely 100 pages in, it seems instead to be the sort of work that selects a few key events in the life of its characters and then circles around them repeatedly, peering at them from several points of view, layering on more and more details. It's not even the stream of one consciousness but of several, a la Laurence Durrell, although the difference of tone could scarcely be greater. Scott's Anthony Powell-like sentences are even longer than Baker's.
UPDATE: You would think that after practicing for 32 years, by actual count, trying to learn how to write, I would be able to explain myself a little more clearly than this.
The point about Wikipedia hinges on the importance of recognition, of being acknowleged as the author of your own words, especially if you are more or less happy with them. At the time when this anonymous Wikipedia public servant confiscated my words for the good of the people and posted them as his/her own, the Premiere piece was the only mainstream synthesis that existed of academic and film festival sources on the subject of wuxia. Each time that material was read by a Wikipedia user who did not realize that I was its author, each time I was deprived of the possibility that said person would read those words and go, "Wow, this guy really knows his stuff," some measure of the value of my work was stolen from me. The apparent remedy of deleting the passage or adding the missing attribution after the fact is only apparent, because it could not reverse the effect of that original failure of recognition. Is that legalistic enough?
I would suggest further that it shouldn't take a shrink to figure out why this particular issue gets this particular writer, tipping the cup upright to savor the last dregs of his career, so exercised---an attitude I intend to stick to, in spite of the fact that it's taken me this long to figure it out for myself, or to figure myself out, or something. Isn't it amazing what 32 years of playing chopsticks can accomplish?
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