This is my second selection of columns from the Independent and, given that the paper closed in March 2016, it is likely to be my last. The first selection, Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It, was confined to pieces printed prior to 2010; most of those in this volume are more recent.
The shutting down of any serious newspaper is a small catastrophe; the closure of the Independent, which excited so many hopes for a different spirit in journalism when it first appeared in 1986, is particularly calamitous, not just because I wrote for it for eighteen years, but because its ambitions to be impartial and non-assertive made it peculiarly suited to the sort of writing continental Europeans designate as feuilletonistic – that is to say at once popular and literary, serious without solemnity, perhaps intimate in tone, sometimes taking the form of fiction, eschewing dogma, at all times assuming a shared disinterestedness in matters intellectual and stylistic, and therefore a patient leisureliness – an absence of any hunger to have their own views confirmed – on the part of readers. The end of the Independent is thus one more proof that we no longer read in the expansive, altruistically curious manner we once did.
So how do we describe the way we read now? This introduction is not the place to go into that. Several of the pieces that follow address the question, sometimes fatalistically, sometimes with resigned good humour, depending on how bad the picture looked to me at the time. My education predisposes me to see the worst. And, for reasons that we don’t need to go into here, jeremiads come naturally to me. Though for a feuilletonist of the sort I became in the course of writing for the Independent – I have to say I hadn’t thought of myself in those terms previously – any prophetic tale of woe must contain an awareness of the prophet’s absurdity. I had many an argument with the several editors who came and went between 1998 and 2016, but none ever questioned my right to hold contradictory positions simultaneously, or to make fun of myself in the very course of making fun of others.
Here is one way in which we no longer read the way we did. Asseveration is today the rage: a passion to pronounce with certainty, to aver or declare if you’re the writer; an impatience with discourse of any other sort if you’re the reader. Irony, whose methodology is often slow and covert, finds little favour in those channels of conversation which the social media have made possible. The writer, literal-mindedly meaning what he says, stands and delivers, whereupon the respondent, literal-mindedly believing him, gives the thumbs up or the thumbs down. If you happen to believe that most judgements worth making occupy a hazy, indeterminate space somewhere between ‘like’ or ‘dislike’, and are in a perpetual state of being formed and reconsidered, you will find there are few symbols on the Internet you can make use of. We still await the creation of an emoji that can suggest reluctant demurral laced with intermittent enthusiasm floating precariously on a sometimes calm, sometimes tumultuous sea of doubt.
We’ve had it, is what I’m inclined to say. Soon, all that literature understands by drama, subtlety and equivocation will be gone, and bald statement will be all we have left. But I also know that mankind has a genius for getting itself out of the worst of scrapes. So take as a valediction and a promise these effusions from a defunct paper which for a short while got the joke even when I wasn’t joking.
Howard Jacobson, 2017