Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘Manifesto’ of the week—this one on dueling ways of understanding value in literature. At
Joshua Dolezal is writing on the show Alive and the survivalist mentality.Best,
Sam
WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR IN LITERATURE
I spend so much time complaining about what literature is not that I feel like to need to explain what I want literature to be.
And I guess this is a little tricky because I seem to have two competing ideas that are equally prominent in my mind. One is my initial idea of literature, which is snobbish, derived from something like the Norton Critical Editions and the layout on the shelves of old Labyrinth Books. It’s the feeling of there being a very, very small club of writers strung out through the ages and talking to one another and with this feeling that nothing else (and probably by extension nobody else) really matters. As I got older this perspective seemed to be codified in an Anglo-American context by Harold Bloom and then by these unbelievably arrogant Russians (with Nabokov as probably the social chair) who evidently felt that there were only like three or four people ever who were worth taking seriously. And I did understand that and got what they were talking about, which wasn’t just snobbishness — the idea was that there were only a few writers who broke through some or other psychological block in themselves and wrote both uninhibitedly and with grace passing through them so that it felt as if they never made a false step. The feeling was that what these people did was so dramatic as to establish some whole new era in world history, some new domain of discourse. The most famous way that this was delineated was through adjectives — Chekhovian, Kafkan, Bellovian, etc — the premise being that certain people created an entire gravitational field around themselves; and that the way literature worked was that these gravitational fields created such intense pressure that whole generations could be subsumed by them and then through tremendous struggle or concerted rebellion somebody would break out and generate the next turn of the wheel. So I really sympathized with Chaim Potok or Joan Didion copying out Hemingway for hours a day — taking the master into their system and with the hope that if they were cognizant enough of the overpowering influence working on them that sooner or later they would be able to break free and write in their own way.
And the other idea, equally prominent in my mind, was that that whole thing was silly, that literature should be a broad church, as broad as life is broad, and that anybody could access creativity in themselves, and that the criteria for excellence had nothing to do with communication with some enduring tradition but with simply being at least somewhat truthful towards one’s particular experience.
The linchpin for me — and connective tissue between both ideas — was Whitman. Whitman represented the broad church, a Romantic vision that would later be picked up on by on the Beats, and which really was democratic in the truest sense, in which all forms were dismantled and everything really was about expression, idiosyncratic and, nearly, haphazard. “There are so many mansions!” wrote Whitman in a sentence that I take to encompass everything that’s important in literary criticism — an idea that there are so many ways to be excellent and that they do not run though any sort of thoroughfare, are distinct and completely personal. But there is another strain that runs through Whitman, which is a sort of messianic elitism, a feeling that he had cracked something, that he had become the spirit of his age and that the difficulties he encountered would be rectified by an Answerer, a Christ-like poet figure with whom he was in correspondence all through his work.
And so if Whitman couldn’t work out these contradictions in his own mind I was unlikely to either. What I’ve come away with is a particular synthesis. On the one hand, it’s ‘what did I love,’ an attempt to have an attitude of pure positivity towards anything I read, especially if it’s by a friend of mine or anybody ‘unknown.’ “All of them,” said Nicholson Baker, when asked to name his favorite contemporary writers, in what may be my second favorite piece of literary criticism ever. “They’re all underrated. It’s hard to finish a book.” From that perspective, all writing if it is completed (or maybe even if not) is admirable. Julia Cameron and Elizabeth Gilbert, as the deacons of this broad church, are particularly inspiring. Everything is treated as sacred. And, particularly under Cameron’s aegis, art becomes an extension of the modern-day church of AA, a method of removing oneself from the addictions of society-at-large and being true, and true only, to the voice within.
This is the church that I would very much like to be part of and find myself frequently proselytizing for. It is non-conformist and its true adherents are found everywhere, in anybody who does their daily pages or just talks about them, in the vast artist underclass, with not even a sliver of connection to the publishing or artistic industry but with an abiding sense of creativity and belief in the intrinsic value of their expression.
But, speaking honestly, I am moved and impressed much less often than I would like to be by the work produced from this milieu. The people I find myself obsessing over tend to celebrated by the publishing industry or at least canonized by word-of-mouth. They are predictable enough — J.M. Coetzee, Alan Hollinghurst, Michel Houellebecq, Annie Baker, Nicholson Baker, Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, and a handful of others. They all seem to be tapped into something that’s timeless and connected to Bloom’s vision. And what’s more infuriating about it is that they lose it all the time — Moshfegh, Houellebecq, even Coetzee seem to have only one truly great work in them and just drive everybody crazy the rest of the time (Coetzee being nicer than the other two). And much of my criticism ends up being an accumulated frustration with that cohort for not keeping to that standard and for just about everyone else for not coming anywhere close.
So is there any way out of this conundrum? Well, in the role I’m playing as a critic it’s easy enough: to just tweak and criticize the publishing industry constantly. I do try to read the hip books with a relatively open mind and really am genuinely shocked at the majority of what’s being disseminated and straight-facedly promoted. The critique of this is easy enough to make — most of the fiction that I find myself reading is progressive political orthodoxy that, through a somewhat mysterious process, has combined itself with a very cynical profit motive, the publishing industry cranking out politically-safe middlebrow work and pretending it’s edgy.
But as somebody interested in the long game of literature it would be nice to do more than just critique. In the end, my belief, simply put, is that — if writers are able to steer clear of clichés, of ‘right-think,’ of overpowering influences — then good writing across a wide literary community is not as unattainable as it sometimes seems to be. When I’m feeling low about the quality of what’s being churned out, I find myself visiting these literary hotspots — Germany in the 1920s, the Soviet Union in the 1960s— in which, in very difficult political climates, a certain clarity seemed to come through the literary community, a bracing realism combined with fantastical self-expression, political attunement trumped at the same time by an underlying belief in aesthetics. And, when I’m feeling particularly low and disconnected from literature—in particular because the Anglo-American tradition has never quite had a moment of truth like that in Russia and Central Europe during the 20th century — I find myself listening to a lot of basically very silly pop: Lana Del Rey, Bronski Beat, Billy Idol. The feeling I sometimes get is that the high-brow hasn’t exactly worked in the Anglo-American world, there simply haven’t been strenuous enough circumstances for that kind of intense expression to connect to the cultural substratum. But it does happen, miraculously enough, in rock and pop. And if that music — which I love so much — can be accused of being fairly contentless, it also has heart. And that seems to be as much of a guide as I can come up with to the literature I’m looking for — very personal, very unembarrassed, and always at the top of its lungs.
i always wondered whether you had heard of adam phillips... he (maybe unjustly) appears to me to have a seemingly similar vision to yours (albeit a very different style).so, well, ill just put a link here to something i liked: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n14/adam-phillips/getting-ready-to-exist
Glad I'm not the only one who has these concerns about the nature of literature today. But while for some authors it's not a crime to have a concentrated interest from which to produce a lot of good novels - Milan Kundera being one example - it's true that a lot of contemporary authors come off as one-hit wonders or one-trick ponies.
Wonder if they're trying to cater to an audience that wants the same thing, but then their fixation on a certain formula or form of self-expression limits them.