Mikhail Bakhtin once theorized that the author of a text--namely, a novel--maintains a unique, even privileged position outside the space of the text, whereby he or she "sees and knows more" than both the characters and the readers. Such is what Bakhtin dubbed an "excess" of seeing and knowing.
Today's "excesses" are a bit different, and surely extend far beyond the bookish confines of literature. For those not convinced, a brief discursion into the recent spectacle of Lebron James--already, in my book, relegated to infamy by way of its cheesy branding as "The Decision" (one need not even look for jokes about it, since the hour-long special is in itself a joke)--and, more particularly, into the peculiar realm of what is our modern culture of celebrity ought to do the trick.
I do not know who coined the phrase "culture of celebrity" (variously "celebrity culture"). Joseph Epstein is perhaps most often credited, though I know that Jill Neimark used the phrase some ten years prior. Anyways, we should not kid ourselves into thinking that any such culture is necessarily a new phenomenon. If anything, it is a perverse epiphenomenon whose originary source dates to ancient times. Indeed, we know that the Greeks lauded their athletes and their warriors, exalting them to demigod status and composing panegyrics in their praise (Pindar, for example). The Romans, too, would emblazon the mugs of their favorites on coinage. As Neimark rightly indicates, "Celebrity in America has always given us an outlet for our imagination, just as the gods and demigods of ancient Greece and Rome once did. Celebrities are our myth bearers; carriers of the divine forces of good, evil, lust, and redemption." Yet what was once esteem approaching divinity has devolved into acclaim approaching, if not already drowning in the waters of, excess.
Martin Fennelly contributed a recent post, entitled "Lebron takes self-importance to a new level," that humorously approaches such a sentiment. However, to think that Lebron is any "different' from, say, Tiger Woods, or David Beckham, or "Brangelina," or...is a trifle naive. Even today's peculiar mix of importance bestowed upon celebrities and the importance they bestow upon themselves is not novel (think of Achilles, though not through Brad Pitt's portrayal alone). The key difference seems to me to be the utter grandiloquence attached to the culture of celebrity, which literally permeates our everyday ways of seeing and knowing.
What makes Lebron's case a bit different is that his moniker, "King James," is self-ascribed, has been since his reign in Cleveland.
At least the veritable King James--the historical figure of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most known for his Kingship of the Scots, his proclaimed Kingship of the English and Irish, his hints of severe superstition and subsequent witch hunts, his survival and unraveling of Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot, and his firm declaration of the divine right of Kings--earned his nickname as the "wisest fool in Christendom." This is not to say that Lebron does not have talent. The question is, at what cost and at whose expense?
Of course, a six-year, 110 million dollar contract (with an option to terminate after 4 years) might just make our contemporary King James the wisest fool in the NBA sitting atop the spoils of his throne.
To say that the case of Lebron is a tad perverse is an understatement. To follow Epstein into the squalor of celebrity culture as an epidemic institution and out again into the unavoidable spectacle (and, in Epstein's case, the odd denunciation of and desire for it) is, needless to say, unsatisfying. I am reminded of Roland Barthes' short treatise on the world of wrestling, which opens Mythologies. Here, Barthes elaborates on the "spectacle of excess," describing a public uninterested in the sheer frivolity and fallacious fanfare that guides an inordinate number into a wash of reckless abandon. Says Barthes: "[The public] abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees."
This certainly reframes Bakhtin's notion of an author's excess of seeing and knowing. We might ask, what it is that Lebron knows that we don't? Then again, is he the "true" author of his own story? Is he really the one exercising his kingly might, playing to the unknowing crowd of spectators, dictating the terms of his life and ours? Moreover, we might inquire into the transitory nature of the spectacle and the very culture of celebrity that drives it. To be sure, today's celebrity culture makes the question "fame" versus "celebrity" appear as mere quibbling, as itself an exercise in hype. Yet it is not altogether unsound to consider how instantaneously can our most heroic, most exalted personages fall from grace. And why? Because they are by in large brought to us as expendable. So, then, should we take account of our own investments.
I think it therefore apt to consider an excerpt from George Wither's satire, which he wrote to King James (the original).
Did I not know a great man's power and might
In spite of innocence can smother right,
Colour his villainies to get esteem,
And make the honest man the villain seem?
King James, after all, will never lose his title as the "wisest fool...," "The King" will ever be remembered as much for the cadence of his voice (let alone his pelvis) as for his consociation with codeine pills, "The King of Pop" will never be rid of either his iconic or his self-adulterated status, and then, too, there is Tiger Woods (and so, so many others). Yet we are wrong, I think, to place too much blame on any one individual (indeed, even Wither acknowledged his "country prejudice" and "thee"). A spectacle, after all, is in need of the spectacular as much as the spectator. Then again, it is in need of what Bakhtin calls "carnival uncrownings," whereby a "king's attributes are turned upside down in the clown" and the king becomes "king of a world 'turned inside out'." It remains to be seen, the fate of our present day King James, let alone who will be the clown to disrupt the very culture of his seeming sovereignty. Whether it is up to us or to him is....
Photo Credits: New York Daily News; Pier Nicola D'Amico (SLAM Magazine); biblemuseum.net
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