Imagine a book comprising only its own blurbs—a sequence of unfalsifiable praise. This book’s content, so to speak, would be the radical deferral of the payoff that will (never) arrive, promising to be, alternately, “brilliant,” “groundbreaking,” “refreshing,” “profound,” “awe-inspiring,” “beautiful,” “lyrical,” “magisterial,” and so on. You’ll laugh until you cry. Or the other way around.
Personally I find most blurbs, like ones on airport fiction, not especially interesting to think about. But I do think that the more rarefied domain of the blurb for high-status and serious printed matter is very interesting. Sometimes it’s aggravating. It can feel gauche, tryhard, blowhard, cliché, routine, purple—and yet sometimes the blurb can be appealing, poetic, judicious, tempting, appetite-whetting. I would be lying if I said I have never told a friend, sincerely, that I was excited they got So-and-So to blurb their forthcoming book.
What if one were to repurpose real blurbs from the backs of scholarly volumes and art monographs and make it seem like they are all for one single work? A few choice redactions could create amorphous everyblurbs out of real examples. They might give off an uncanny aura, like a ChatGPT facsimile.
Or perhaps we could write some of these ludicrous-yet-plausible blurbs from scratch, blurbs for an imaginary book, or a real book. (A fake blurb for a real book? “Moby-Dick is a tour de force and an exploration into the queer colonialist geographies of maritime worldmaking. Melville asks us what it might mean to harpoon otherwise.” You get it.)
I’m not sure if the blurb should be approached as a genre, really, but maybe as a mode. The blurb in general (or any particular blurb, as an object) crystallizes a whole economy of implicit and tacit assumptions about audience, status, and goods.
None of this is to attack the authors of the books, nor even to attack the authors of their blurbs. It’s all part of the publishing game, really. With just one exception at the end, I’m not going to mention any authors (of books or blurbs) here by name because that’s beside the point. The people are very likely all intelligent and decent and could explain what they mean with great clarity if prompted. I don’t hate the players; perhaps I hate the game a bit; but mainly I’m just trying to have a little fun with it.
The blurb is a privileged text-blob in that it can write checks it doesn’t need to cash; its presumed frame of reference distills propositions cherished by the imagined community of its public. So, for instance, if a book “probes art’s struggles to redefine itself in a globalized world in which previously discrete categories of aesthetic and social experience are ever more blurred,” only the obtuse moron (I’ll raise my hand and volunteer) might pause and wonder, are we at all certain that aesthetic and social experience were, in fact, previously discrete? Plus: a little personification is a common rhetorical tool (“art’s struggles to redefine itself”). Also: note that always, blurbs assure us, we’re in an increasingly complex, global, etc., world whose fallen condition needs—now more than ever—the pathbreaking analysis offered by the book in question. Ten, fifty, two hundred years ago: the questions just weren’t that urgent. But now? NOW IT IS URGENT. You will contribute to solving the problem by reading or at least purchasing this volume.
Of course, the obtuse moron might misunderstand and overplay his hand. Maybe my example just now isn’t that unclear after all; it’s very likely the above blurb author meant, quite reasonably, that there were specific categories of experience, some of which had been coded as “social” and some of which had been coded as “aesthetic,” which in their particular historical paths have become eventually hard to disentangle. Thus the person who wrote the blurb probably wasn’t making the more grandiose claim that aesthetic and social experience were two clearly delineated things tout court and only in this “globalized world” have they started to bleed into one another. But the language of the blurb—as a crystallizing mode of discourse—very much craves this ambiguity. It exploits it. Even the moderate or qualified opinion is best positioned so that it can fake the appearance of flair, of boldness.
And then there are statements that seem like they’d be difficult to justify. “No single book is as relevant to the present moment,” goes one rather hefty approval of a book on a topic that has a lot of competing and complementary studies. Why this book? How do we know a book is relevant to a moment, devoid of any specific audience or context or use? Anyway relevance is quite frequently a virtue but it’s also a very local and often highly transient virtue; I like to say that a q-tip is profoundly relevant to me when I need to clean my ears. The point is that a sentence like this gives very little information on its own; all the information is actually in the name beneath it.
When a book purportedly demonstrates in some depth that “people are confronting the catastrophic endgames of climate barbarism not only with acts of dissent and protest, but with regenerative infrastructures of assembly, relation, cooperation, and care that embody in their practice a multiplicity of revolutionary temporalities,” what exactly are you saying about the globe and history beyond “life goes on, and the world is a world of many contrasts”? I think this blurb really communicates a signal to others, using words that have a little crackle of extra significance—“climate barbarism,” “regenerative infrastructures,” “care”—to indicate that reading this book, or even reading about it, rolls in the reader to a kind of community, an approved community. (A barbarian, remember, was originally one who didn’t speak Greek—an outsider—and so in a way we can think of climate barbarians as those who don’t speak the argot of the bien pensant, who might prudently use word-concepts like “sustainability,” “cooperation,” and “the Anthropocene.”) Inflation, ambiguity, election, shibboleths, and passwords are features of this game.
I have on my desk a copy of Nan Z. Da’s Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (Columbia UP, 2018). I have not read it yet, but I have read a number of Da’s essays and she’s a really sophisticated and insightful thinker. The blurbs on the back, while not shy of superlatives and praise (“first great book,” “bracingly intelligent,” “beautiful,” “nothing less than a complete reimagining of the literary encounter,” et cetera), are also descriptive of the topic and the argument (“Da focuses on transnational exchanges in which not much of anything is exchanged and worlds are not transformed”) as well as the stakes (“challenges assumptions about transnationalism,” “previous assumptions about transnational literary contact have perpetuated a hermeneutic that crosses out as much as it crosses over”). The blurbs whet the appetite for what might be a superlative book (as all academic books are advertised to be) but also quickly communicate something important. It sounds like part of the point of Intransitive Encounter is that sometimes there isn’t much there—like a humanist’s null hypothesis.
The blurb wants to extrude its host from the set, foregrounding it, setting it apart from the pack, and to arrest the attention of the passerby. But what if the blurb, in describing its host, bore with it a sense of the blurb’s own negation?
Weirdly, I'm reading the new book BLURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: AN A-Z OF LITERARY PERSUASION by Louise Wilder, and assumed at first you were also reading said book and that it was the occasion for this.