Who’s Adam Cadre? What’s Postromanticism?

First off, let me make it 100% clear that I am not Adam Cadre. My name is Phil Tatro of Denver, Colorado. Adam Cadre is just a very good example of a theory of mine. As I write this, it’s 3:30 AM on January 2nd, 2010. It feels like we’re in the middle of a thriving artistic period in American cultural history and Mr. Cadre exemplifies this period in a fascinating way.

We live in an age when an artist has the tools at his or her disposal to be a public intellectual. Jo Guldi, a Harvard professor with a rewarding blog about subjects as diverse as urban studies and new media, published an incisive article early last year in an online literary journal. I can’t provide a link to the article because the issue of the journal is currently not on the website due to what appears to be a technical malfunction. Fortunately, it’s in Google’s cache: http://tiny.cc/yVIKZ. It’s a great essay and you should read all of it, but she laments a lack of “public scholars of the humanities.” She also points out that “the internet has made possible a re-opening of the arcane worlds of study to the general public,” one hypothetical example she makes elsewhere is a “reading of how young women feel about nudity differently from their grandmothers, constructed from the novels of Nathanael West.” I’m a helpless bookworm, and what’s more, I enjoy reading critical interpretations of my favorite books, but since I don’t have easy access to academic libraries that can be frustrating. But I’m lucky enough to have been born so close to the internet revolution, because now? Now there’s a wealth of this kind of information for free on the internet.

Imagine you were trying to come to some understanding with the works of an artist. Imagine if a large portion of the artist’s most famous works were freely available. Imagine if this artist were alive, and writing a blog averaging about 7 entries a month, with entries as far back as 2000, save some dry patches. With resources like the Internet Archive, this is a permanent record. Cadre has made it astoundingly easy for the public to keep up with all this. In addition to his website, he has a LJ feed where people can sign up to be notified about updates. He twitters, and he has a history of posts on Usenet.

[On the occasions when Cadre deletes things from the website, in some instances they’re still available at the Internet Archive. I won’t use this space to discuss removed & recovered text, since doing criticism of a living document requires respect, ethics and decorum. Everything I discuss here will be part of the public record elsewhere. Also, I want to make it known that I love Mr. Cadre’s work. This is not a fanboy apologia—any good reader knows that no author is perfect and what I’m writing here wouldn’t be very interesting if I were blind to the flaws of the work. As they say, Even Homer nods. The upshot of this being that I’m not trying to piss the man off. I don’t want him to pay attention to me—I want him to keep working on that new novel.]

Artists who blog create a living record of authorship, but Mr. Cadre is particularly significant as his major artistic victories so far have come from an internet based gaming and art subculture focused on making “text adventures” or “interactive fiction.” During the Eighties when Mr. Cadre was a child, a handful of video game companies published text adventures—games where the player typed simple text commands in a prompt to control characters in environments solving puzzles. The first game like this was made by a spelunking computer geek with free time on his hands and access to a computer mainframe in 1975. This mainframe also happened to be the computer system for MIT, Stanford and a handful of other schools. Once university kids got hold of the game, it took off—it had the player exploring a large cave system sprinkled with fantasy elements, kind of like a game of old-school Dungeons and Dragons.

Which is kind of like the experience of playing those text adventures, especially the older ones—you explore dungeons, find treasure, fight monsters. The commercial titles brought more complexity, though most of it came in terms of using a genre outside fantasy—games like “A Mind Forever Voyaging” and “Planetfall” for two different kinds of SF crowds; “Deadline” and “Moonmist” for amateur detectives, and so forth. There were even historical fantasies like “Trinity,” and literary adaptations (Douglas Adams and James Clavell—for two different types of literary geek.) When the games were new and available in stores, Cadre bought and played “Trinity”. He was 23, if he bought the game when it was new. (He’s 35 today.) It was 6 years later when he came across a compilation of these games being sold in a computer game store that he only went to looking for a different game. He liked “A Mind Forever Voyaging” enough to buy a different compilation in 1996 after losing the original. Upon installing the new compilation disc, he was astonished to find new games written for public consumption and not a commercial audience. Mr. Cadre had found the interactive fiction subculture, which a year earlier had begun organizing a competition for new games.

Cadre would enter this competition in 1998 and win, taking first place with a stroke of genius: Photopia. Experience Photopia now at http://www.adamcadre.ac/if.html, if you have Windows, it’s a quick and painless download and if you don’t, it’s still pretty easy to find a way to look at the game/text/artwork. This is the only major IF-Comp that Cadre has entered, but most of his other games have also been given various awards by the IF community. In addition, Mr. Cadre is still considered one of the foremost luminaries of this genre despite not having made a new game since 2005’s “Mystery House Makeover,” which Mr. Cadre doesn’t seem to consider enough of a full-scale project to list on the game page above. The last game that he does list on the website is 2003’s “Narcolepsy,” a fascinating work in its own right. For the record, the works listed on Cadre’s website are also synonymous with what I consider his major works. I’ll be discussing each of them in this space in the future.

But Mr. Cadre does not just write interactive fiction. He’s also written a novel, which didn’t make it out of hard cover. This is a shame, because it’s a good read. The novel was marketed to a young adult audience since its cast is almost entirely teenagers. Its narrator is a bright wiseass who makes the book hilarious, all the more effectively since at the heart of the book lies darkness and violence. Its angsty teen narrator and keen observational eye earned it comparisons to Salinger, one of two authors Cadre is on the record as having once been obsessed with. The other is Nabokov. Salinger & Nabokov are two authors Eberhard Alsen has singled out as early postmodernists influenced by romanticism.

Which brings me to post-romanticism. I believe that in this country and possibly elsewhere, post-romanticism is the cultural vanguard rapidly replacing post-modernism. Though there are several relevant early influences, the late David Foster Wallace laid the most fundamental groundwork for this movement, with 1996’s “Infinite Jest” well on its way towards being recognized as the masterpiece it is. 4 years later, Dave Eggers was able to make a similar style and technique commercial gold with his hit memoir “A Heartbreaking World of Staggering Genius.” Eggers was able to parley this commercial victory into a cultural empire that would come to include Foster Wallace and many more. (DFW was in the very first issue of McSweeney’s, the quarterly literary journal of the publishing house Eggers founded.) Cadre is a perfect fit for this set, but he has not yet been discovered by this community. Part of the problem has got to be that at this point he’s most publicly active as a blogger, and a sporadic one at that.

His blog largely consists of his opinions. Many of these opinions are reviews of various art works with a big focus on movies. Mr. Cadre is a tough critic whose critical reactions are deeply personal. Let’s look at an example. Take Cadre’s reading of “Rachel Getting Married”, Jonathan Demme’s 2008 film. Demme recently purchased the rights to make an animated version of Dave Eggers’ bestselling 2009 book about Hurricane Katrina. Cadre’s review is here: http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/12824.html. He opens with a blog comment exchange between him and an old high school acquaintance, on the acquaintance’s blog. She’s now a wedding planner, and he asks her if she liked the movie anonymously. She replies she hasn’t seen it and asks what he thinks, and he says “Well, the critics’ responses to the wedding itself ranged from ‘Wouldn’t you love to attend a wedding like that?” (Ebert) to ‘a wedding one hopes is a joke but fears is not’ (Andrews). I’m the sort of person who would rather just mail in the marriage license and not have a ceremony at all, so I wondered what an expert (e.g., you) would make of it.”

Mr. Cadre begins telling us what he thinks of this movie by telling us (in a roundabout, if clever, way) that he doesn’t have much of an investment in weddings. He then confesses that he fast-forwarded through a big chunk of the movie because “watching the aftermath of a wedding in particular made me uncomfortable, because one thing this movie brought home for me was the extent to which I’ve been feeling pressured by the American and Canadian governments into submitting to an institution that I just don’t really believe in.” On the one hand, this is a fascinating and very truthful response—right here, this viewer can’t help but see the movie in a frame based on how he feels about weddings, and about families—the review goes on to say that Cadre doesn’t see the point of staying in touch with family members if you don’t get along with them. Mr. Cadre is standing up and saying that he exists in the margins vis a vis this movie, this movie makes assumptions about him and who he is and what he likes, and this is exhilarating. To me, this is what blogs are for—bringing new perspectives into the public discourse. But on the other hand, this is also a very frustrating reading. We want to know, can’t Cadre look past his own difference from the text and feel the deep and resonant emotional pain of the characters? Can’t he detect the curious, tense directorial style from a director who lately hasn’t been known for such brave, successful experiments? And what’s more, Demme directed one of Cadre’s favorite movies, the excellent “Silence of the Lambs.”

To be fair, he doesn’t ignore the text of the movie entirely. He compares Anne Hathaway’s Kym to George W. Bush, a brilliant stroke of insight I haven’t seen anywhere else. He also defends Hathaway’s haircut. But this isn’t what Heidi Julavitz would call “reading between the lines,” even if it does have Cadre asking himself “What do I believe?” and “What do I care about?” Julavitz couldn’t publish this review in her magazine, but the internet is the perfect medium for such a work. As just a personal blog, however, it does not merit what Wikipedia would call notability—so Cadre’s criticism remains unheralded. This isn’t necessarily bad—Cadre’s reviews tell us much more about him than they do about what they review, even though the reviews themselves are always sparkling writing and usually at least one if not more really sharp observations. Cadre’s best work—the work worthy of consideration by Julavitz et. al—is either out of print or in an as-of-yet ignored genre. So I suggest we start reading Mr. Cadre now. I will use this space to do this, as well as elaborate on post-romanticism. I don’t know how often I’ll be able to blog or how often I’ll have something to say, but consider it a start.