(2020-11-09) Emre Our Love/Hate Relationship With Gimmicks

Merve Emre: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Gimmicks. What is in a word as minor as “gimmick”? For Sianne Ngai, a professor of English at the University of Chicago and the author of “Theory of the Gimmick” (Harvard), the answer is: everything, or at least everything to do with the art consumed and produced under capitalism.

When Jennifer Egan’s novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad” won the Pulitzer Prize, in 2011, much fuss was made over its penultimate chapter, which presents the diary of a twelve-year-old girl in the form of a seventy-six-page PowerPoint presentation.

critics had trouble deciding whether the PowerPoint was a dazzling, avant-garde innovation or, as one reviewer described it, “a wacky literary gimmick,” a cheap trick that diminished the over-all value of the novel.

The word “gimmick” is believed to come from “gimac,” an anagram of “magic.” The word was likely first used by magicians, gamblers, and swindlers in the nineteen-twenties to refer to the props they wielded to attract, and to misdirect, attention.

Teetering between novelty and banality, Egan’s novel manages to squeeze a drop of wonder out of a crude communication method. Yet its single-use success—no other writer could get away with repeating her trick—reminds us that the literary marketplace, as Theodor Adorno once observed of the art world, favors “work with a ‘personal touch,’ or more bluntly, a gimmick.”

The seductive wonders of Vladimir Nabokov’s mirror or Egan’s PowerPoint are harder to find in the gimmicks of the present. Recent headlines offer up a wide range of gimmicks rushed into production to contain the spread of the coronavirus (robot chefs, antiviral cars), as well as products and ideas whose sudden obsolescence (“fun” workplaces, airline miles) reveals that they were gimmicks all along

What is in a word as minor as “gimmick”?

For Sianne Ngai, a professor of English at the University of Chicago and the author of “Theory of the Gimmick” (Harvard), the answer is: everything, or at least everything to do with the art consumed and produced under capitalism.

a “capitalist lifeworld,” she writes, where art is increasingly trivial and artifice reigns supreme, where fun and fright merge to create the same arresting, alienating magic as Nabokov’s mirror.

Ngai’s first scholarly book, “Ugly Feelings,” published in 2005, examined a set of negative emotions

The passivity and inscrutability of these ugly feelings, which Ngai tracked in works from “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to “Single White Female,” offered a frustrated response to the sense of limited agency—to living and working, especially as a woman or a nonwhite person, in a “highly differentiated and totally commodified world.

Although Ngai’s books are conceptually and philosophically dense, their appeal comes from how they tap into our ordinary use of language

In a memorable moment in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Leopold Bloom recalls suggesting to his former boss, a stationer, that he could drum up business by placing in front of his store “a transparent show cart with two smart girls inside writing

For Ngai, no novelist knows this dynamic better than Helen DeWitt, who draws sexual and intellectual labor together with zany brilliance in “Lightning Rods.” DeWitt’s sleazy hero, Joe, proposes to solve the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace by founding a temp agency staffed by women who provide male employees with on-site sex, stopping them from harassing full-time employees

He also comes up with a gimmick, the Lightning Rod: a contraption that divides a woman in half, like the magician sawing his lovely assistant in two. Her front half performs intellectual labor—reading Proust, applying to law school—while her back end, Ngai explains, protrudes “through a hidden door into a bathroom stall for the male user to fuck.”

Perhaps the earliest accusation of literary gimmickry was made by Samuel Johnson. In 1775, during a meeting of the Literary Club, he attacked Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” declaring, “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.” It is telling that his criticism hinges on the idea of ease. Swift’s trick of scale let him avoid the hard work that Johnson believed was a novelist’s duty

To the narrator of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” sentimental romances, like the ones Emma imagines herself in and that Austen’s novels ironize, turn on coded letters, word games, and other vehicles “for gallantry and trick.” Both romance and realism, according to G. K. Chesterton, were “tricks and tricks alone,” and he railed against the “technical dodges” of realists such as Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert.

Gimmickier still, to Henry James, was the novelist who menaced a beautiful young woman with illness or death, “the very shortest of all cuts to the interesting state.”


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