WRB—Sept. 21, 2024
Although this little newsletter (it can be called a review of books, yet without having the occasion that makes the writer and makes him a Managing Editor or the occasion that makes the reader and makes him literate) in the situation of actuality is like a fancy, a dream in the daytime, yet it is not without confidence and not without hope of fulfillment. It seeks that single individual, to whom it gives itself wholly, by whom it wishes to be received as if it had arisen in his own heart, that single individual whom we with joy and gratitude call our reader, that single individual, who willingly reads slowly, reads repeatedly, and who reads aloud—for his own sake. If it finds him, then in the remoteness of separation the understanding is complete when he keeps the newsletter and the understanding to himself in the inwardness of appropriation.
N.B.:
The next monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Can we choose our beliefs?”, will take place on Saturday, September 28. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In Vulture, Andrea Long Chu on Sally Rooney:
So in this criticism—that Rooney writes about love because readers love that sort of thing—we find an important, if largely unconscious, observation about the intersection of literature and capitalism: that the novel form and the commodity form are dialectically entwined, to the point that a given novel’s literary qualities may be impossible to distinguish from its economic ones. The funny thing is that this is precisely what Rooney writes novels about. Her young lovers are painfully aware that love, like the novel itself, may traffic in stock characters and exhausted tropes; that love, also like the novel, may easily be reduced to a source of private profit within a punishing system of exploitation and domination. Over and over, Rooney’s characters put their faith in love as a means of escape from the conventional roles assigned to them by society and by each other; no sooner have they achieved this than they are rudely confronted with inequalities of wealth, status, and power that are clearly fatal to their idealism—but not to love itself. I take this to be the modest provocation of Rooney’s novels: the idea that love is real precisely because it is a product, one created by social conventions, by market forces, by systems of violence, and, behind all of this, by human beings themselves. This is not, I admit, a Marxist theory of love. It is something more unexpected: a lover’s theory of Marxism.
[Cf. on Lorentzen/Sinykin, as linked to in WRB—Aug. 14, 2024.]
- on “a second sort of intentional fallacy”—claiming that novels are “bad on purpose”:
This reading interests me in part because I think it’s part of a broader tendency to regard the enterprise of fiction with embarrassment, to write fiction that apologizes for being fiction (ahem, Rachel Cusk) and to justify reading fiction by claiming that the fiction in question is really just a means of revealing the contrivedness of fiction in general (the above). But that’s an essay for another day. For our purposes, what matters here is that the fallacy is on display. Normal People (2018) is a good novel—because it’s a patently artificial and cheesy novel that it somehow exposes the novel as a sham, as a tissue of tired conventions.
[A couple weeks ago I did some complaining about “guilty pleasures,” and I see “bad on purpose” as a weak attempt at justifying them. Rothfeld:
Yeah, Rooney novels are pat and formulaic and trite and sentimental, because they’re about how the genre of the novel is pat and formulaic and trite and sentimental! Yeah, the characters in Rooney novels are two-dimensional, because they’re about the shallowness of personality as an idea! Okay, but the novels are still pat and formulaic and trite and sentimental and filled with two-dimensional characters.
If you write a novel that is pat and formulaic and trite and sentimental you have shown that your novel is those things; you have not shown anything about novels as a whole. It takes a certain illiteracy to think you have; Emma Bovary’s life and desires are pat and formulaic and trite and sentimental (and, if we want to do literary criticism by novel, her reading habits have turned her brain into boiled cabbage) but Madame Bovary is not. Chu writes that novels “may” be an exhausted form reduced to a commodity. Maybe so, but to write exhausted and commodified novels on the grounds that there’s nothing else to do is a failure of nerve and imagination. (If you must, have a satirical streak—a mean streak.) Stop playing around in the ashes, and try to light a fire. —Steve]
- on “a second sort of intentional fallacy”—claiming that novels are “bad on purpose”:
In Plough,
goes to a bookstore in Paraguay in search of his great-uncle’s memoirs of the 1947 revolution:At this point the cashier was at the liquor store and he called the assistant, who was sitting next to Don Brabant [the owner of the bookstore]. “He wants to know what kind?”
“Peach rum. Peach.”
A minute later another call: “They are out of peach.”
“They have peach everywhere.”
“They’re out, he says.”
“Passionfruit then.” The old man turned toward me. “There was censorship that was half-hearted and ambiguous.”
“Do you think it’s ironic that people read more and writers were more important during the dictatorship than after 1989, when democracy came?”
“There were more cultural events back then for sure.”
“In a strange way,” I was fishing for a quote here, “was it better back then, to be a writer, I mean?”
“Some things were better and some things were worse.” The rum arrived. The three of us drank for the next few hours, pacifying my frustration at the lack of drama I had uncovered.
In Liberties, Rhoda Feng interviews Michel Chaouli about his recent book (Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins, February):
Feng: Is poetic criticism more inclusive or democratic than other forms of criticism?
Chaouli: It might be. Certainly, it doesn’t have the same gatekeeping mechanisms as academic criticism. But I hesitate because there are no clear methodological yardsticks that will take you there. For that reason it can feel mysterious and therefore undemocratic. Things are democratic if rules of access are made clear: you could pass this exam for your driver’s license if you fulfill these requirements. The rules are the same for everyone. This, to me, is a version of egalitarian access. This is not how criticism works, though, and in that sense, it can feel aristocratic or mandarin or exclusive. When students come to me and say, “I got a B on this paper, what do I have to do to get an A?” I cannot give an answer the way I would for the driver’s license test.
[We linked to a review in WRB—June 12, 2024.
Feng:
In an age in which critics are often exhorted to think of criticism as first and foremost an act of public service (think of shudder-inducing consumer reports disguised as reviews), it’s refreshing, even rejuvenating, to come across a work that makes an ardent case for a kind of criticism that is not a brute tool for dispensing shopping advice or deflating author egos.
I understand the impulse, but this is going too far. Criticism is an act of public service. The problem with criticism as consumer reports is its dumbing down of that service. The job of the critic is not merely to say yes or no but to serve as a guide to experiencing a work of art, both during and after—when I read this book, or watch this movie, what should I be paying attention to? How should I approach it? What are some ways I might want to conceptualize it? If this is done not as often as it should be—not to put too fine a point on it, but it requires thinking, and thinking is hard. But it’s important to do, and it’s important to do in public. If I may refer to our statement of what the WRB is about:
Morten Jensen, on a panel in 2022, made a comment to the effect that the critic is someone carrying on their education in public—the WRB is trying to be explicit about that and inviting as many people as possible along for the ride.
—Steve]
Reviews:
In The Cut, Cat Zhang reviews Tony Tulathimutte’s new collection (Rejection, September 17) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 14, 2024]:
Like the cast-offs of Rejection, I have preemptively pushed people away under the belief that I was doing them a service and reacted as though the “full complement of injustice could be concentrated in one stupid guy.” I have experienced bad depressive episodes in which I’ve become addicted to my own misery, rescued only by pharmaceutical intervention (Alison’s “friend” is right: Lexapro, Wellbutrin, and therapy are a life-changing combination). So I see, in Rejection, some really pathetic individual behavior—a raven? really?—but also evidence of societal failure. The characters have almost no emotional safety net. It’s revealed that Kant’s father, presumably one of his only male role models, died by suicide, and Kant supposedly has a few pals to whom he emails his coming-out statement, but they never appear in the text. Craig’s female friends, “who always maintained that romantic love was overrated, who said friendships were what mattered in the end,” withdraw into coupledom and intensify the myth that a person is broken without romance. A similar thing happens to Alison, whose married cousins and colleagues never attend her bar-hang birthdays. Tulathimutte is an acute chronicler of contemporary loneliness. It’s scary how precisely he re-creates a certain type of group chat, bound by gossip and witty displays of onlineness, which are only tenable if you don’t mistake the intensity of communication for proof of genuine commitment.
[Look: the people at The Cut don’t miss a trick. Especially not with this subject matter. Also, Zhang may be right about group chats, but in email newsletters the intensity of communication is proof of genuine commitment. I might as well be writing in blood. —Steve]
- interviews Tulathimutte:
I think writers bungle internet writing when they overrely on superficial signifiers—hashtags, acronyms, memes, discourse references—without really picking up on the cadences specific to the platform they’re writing about, or what motivates people to use it, or the different variations and subcultures endemic to it. It’s not just a problem with the internet, there’s a similar issue with fictional rock/rap lyrics and child-speak too. Sometimes you can also feel an undercurrent of contempt for the internet’s ostensible debasement of language, and attempting to make that point too strongly will only blind you to its pleasures; ironically it’s just the writer’s work that suffers as a result. (There’s no “debasing” language to begin with, there’s only missing your target.)
- interviews Tulathimutte:
In The New Criterion, James Campbell reviews a biography of Thom Gunn (Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life, by Michael Nott, June):
Other paradoxes emerged. Having rapidly achieved a modest prominence in the English literary world, Gunn made immediate plans to leave it. Rejecting conformity in sexual matters and turning his back on the middle-class norms that helped make him, he was conventional in poetic conduct and, where it mattered, everyday behavior. Gunn was anything but a goody-goody but was not apt to play the bad boy (that arrived later). When it came to writing for literary magazines—his essays occupy two volumes, with more pieces awaiting collection—he was happier in the company of the seventeenth-century Robert Herrick than the modernist Wallace Stevens. He compiled popular editions of the poems of Ben Jonson and the enigmatic Fulke Greville, who served as a statesman under Elizabeth I. His favorite novelist was Henry James, with what now seems a self-explanatory weakness for What Maisie Knew.
[We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Aug. 3, 2024.]
Two in our sister publication across the pond:
Michael Ledger-Lomas reviews a study of Emerson (Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by James Marcus, March):
The way an impersonal mind relates to other people was an even thornier problem than its relation to nature. Can a transparent eyeball have lovers, or even friends? Emerson joked in “Experience” that we should treat men and women “as if they were real: perhaps they are.” But it would be wrong to call him emotionally stunted. In 1835, he remarried and set up home with Lydia Jackson in Concord. They had three children and he became a keen if inept grower of apples and pears (horticulturalists took his garden as a case study in how not to do it). This clubbable, carnivorous man chided Thoreau for his indifference to social and bodily pleasures. After his death in 1882, Emerson’s funeral eulogy disingenuously ascribed to “one of his friends” the quip that you could no more grasp Thoreau’s arm than “the arm of an elm tree.” Yet Emerson’s acquaintances said the same of him. Jane Welsh Carlyle said he had no nature, just “a sort of theoretic geniality.” Her husband found him to be “elevated but without breadth, as a willow is, as a reed is.” When John Ruskin met him, he was sorry to find that he was “only a sort of cobweb over Carlyle.”
[We linked to a piece by Marcus on Emerson’s finances in WRB—May 4, 2024.]
Mark Ford reviews a collection of Wilfred Owen’s letters (Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jane Potter, 2023):
And yet the “soldierly spirit” that Owen here lightly mocks is also crucial to the emotional effects of his most famous poems. It is the intensity and—although it may sound an odd word in the context of trench warfare—the innocence infusing his depictions of camaraderie that charge the poems and differentiate them from the work of other soldier-poets of the First World War. Like Walt Whitman before him—whom, oddly, he seems never to have come across—Owen fashioned from battlefield carnage a homoerotic sublime. “Red lips are not so red / As the stained stones kissed by the English dead” “Greater Love” begins, and goes on to conjugate a series of parallels between dead or wounded soldiers and the poetic tropes available to an ardent lover. The irony implicit in such a conceit is obvious, but Owen’s absorption in the physical being of the soldiers, his ability to feel and express “pity,” to use his own favored term, banishes whatever satirical intent he may have had: “Heart, you were never hot / Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot.” The us and them division is to the fore in such lines, which on one level seem to present death in war as a high romantic consummation devoutly to be wished; whatever emotions a civilian in love may feel, they can never match those of a soldier making his sacrifice in accordance with John 15:13, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Sassoon playing with the words of Jesus:
Somehow I always thought you’d get done in,
Because you were so desperate keen to live:
You were all out to try and save your skin,
Well knowing how much the world had got to give.
In , Algis Valiunas reviews Judi Dench’s book on Shakespeare (Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, with Brendan O’Hea, April):
The usual pressure of contemporary politics on the performing artist’s mind is often deleterious, but occasionally it can provoke a startling and useful insight. When the director Trevor Nunn was asked about a 1970s Royal Shakespeare Company production whether the Macbeths were the Nixons (the epitome, no right-thinking person can doubt, of crass ambition and ruthless grasping), the shrewdness of his reply brilliantly illuminated the play: “He said, ‘No, they’re the Kennedys.’ They’re the golden couple. They adore each other. And she’ll do anything for him. If he wants to be king, it will come to pass.” Dench perceives how this conjugal perfection with its erotic glamour at the outset prepares the way for Lady Macbeth’s shattering swift descent into loneliness, madness, and suicide. “She enabled Macbeth to murder Duncan because she thought that’s all it would require. But that wasn’t enough for him, and she can’t go any further with it. So he goes on and on and on, getting more voracious and ambitious, and she remains behind—alone. All’s spent.”
“And that’s why I think she dies. Nothing exists of their marriage, which is why you have to establish how wonderful it is at the beginning.”
N.B. (cont.):
Eleven thousand words on Joey Chestnut, Takeru Kobayashi, and the history of hot dog eating contests. [I can’t really justify including this, but I had a lot of fun reading it. So here it is. Think of it as part of the running WRB affection for Old Weird America that also shows itself in mentions of, for example, Midwestern Platonists, Charles Ives, Bob Dylan, Ambrose Bierce, Ring Lardner, and so on. —Steve]
Emily Wilson on calling Odysseus a “complicated man.” [I had not made the Shaft (1971) connection before Wilson pointed it out here. The film version of the Odyssey I’m constructing in my head, with Richard Roundtree as Odysseus and a score by Isaac Hayes, is very cool. —Steve]
On the sacred rite of putting your advance copy of the new Sally Rooney [One of today’s Upcoming books!] on Instagram. [“It became the summer’s latest must-have for the literary It girl, a hot-ticket item to prove one’s reputation as both well-read and well-connected.” Set aside why this would be proof of being well-read—you know you’re going to die one day, right? —Steve]
New issue: The New Criterion Volume 43, Number 2 / October 2024
Local:
Lux Choir is celebrating its first ten years with concerts featuring the music of Eric Whitacre, Amy Beach, and others today (at the Church of the Ascension and St. Agnes at 7 p.m.) and tomorrow (at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church at 3 p.m.).
Poem:
Odes 1.5 by Horace, translated by Morrie Ryskind
Oh, Pyrrha, tell me who’s the guy,
The boob, the simp you’ve got a date with?
(Well I recall what time ’twas I
You’d tête-à-tête with!)I saw him in the barber’s chair:
His face perfumed with scented water,
And oil upon his shoes and hair—
Dressed for the slaughter!I do not know this kid whose goat
You’ve got by saying you adore him.
But, take it from this famous pote,
I’m sorry for him!The fates deal kindly with the lad!
This crush of his—how he will rue it!
He’ll call you everything that’s Bad—
Ain’t I been through it?
[I learned about this (and a collection of it and 416 other versions of the Pyrrha Ode) while looking through Patrick Kurp’s blog for an old post of his; he says that he likes “the tough-guy diction—‘the boob, the simp’—and the use of ‘tête-à-tête’ as a verb.” The speaker here is not too far off from a character in some of Ryskind’s better-known work; among other things, he co-wrote My Man Godfrey (1936) and punched up the dialogue for His Girl Friday (1940). You could put it in Cary Grant’s mouth near the start of the latter. (If poor Ralph Bellamy isn’t playing a guy, a boob, a simp, I don’t know who is.) And the linguistic pose Ryskind devises here, where the tough-guy diction is essential to the overall pose of linguistic facility—who is this who talks like a goon (“pote”) but also says “’twas” and “tête-à-tête” and can come up with the nice little pun with kid and goat?—is not too far off from Horace’s chameleonic quality, where he takes the poses the poem requires while always being himself. And, like our imagined tough guy, he is a permanent bachelor. Or so he fancies. He’s been around the block. He’ll look but not touch—or at least say so.
(One last note: the collection of translations follows Milton’s with a quote from a letter of Dorothy Sayers, where she says that “‘Neatness,’ ‘admire,’ ‘vacant,’ ‘amiable’ have all changed their meaning.” “Simp” in Ryskind’s has too, but we are lucky that the new meaning works just as well as the old. Writing a few decades later, I can add Milton’s “dank . . . weeds” to Sayers’ list; there, we’re not so lucky.) —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 24
Intermezzo
by Sally Rooney
From the publisher: Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Also out Tuesday:
W. W. Norton & Company: Playground by Richard Powers
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of Small Rain.
Critical notes:
- on the state of writing:
The main value that newspapers and publishing companies used to offer was the ability to make and distribute copies of text. Now, websites and platforms instantly generate, in effect, infinite copies, in the sense that anyone from anywhere can access them. For several decades, digital content production lagged behind traditional publications in several regards. The blogosphere was clunky and unattractive and had no reliable means to generate revenue. The buzzy new-media publications that emerged in the 2010s rode in on the back of social media and had a vested interest in dumbing down and in giving advertisers the clickbait they wanted. But that’s been changing. There has been an outpouring of low-cost, high-quality publications run by credentialed professionals that stake out digital space outside of legacy media. And there is Substack, to which a considerable number of legacy-media veterans have partially or fully decamped.
- on Twelfth Night:
This is, I think, the essence of Shakespeare. Events are transformed by “language as gesture.” It is often said that The Tempest is plotless; well, so Twelfth Night almost is, and in exactly the same manner. The plot is resolved by Sebastian crossing the island. Barber points out that the first half is largely discursive. It is largely people sitting around and talking “before the farcical complications are sprung.” The old saw, beloved of those who give out writing advice, that you should start your story as close to the end as possible was not observed in Twelfth Night. (If these so-called rules about writing were true, Twelfth Night would be a dull affair, rather than one of the most popular and important Shakespeare plays.)
Christopher Bollas, in an excerpt from his notebooks (Streams of Consciousness: Notebooks 1974–1990, September 26):
Out of the debris of our dying culture (early twentieth century) comes a new mythology and a new language. We see this early in Baudelaire who finds the symbolic inside the city; we discover it in Barthes (Mythologies) who creates a new mythology. It is godless. It is ordinary. As Barrett points out in Irrational Man, cubism is the ontologizing of the banal object, because out of the debris only objects are left.
The psychoanalytical experience is, in free association, the use of the ordinary (i.e., trivial language) to remythologize the person, to find his myth, his culture, through the debris. From the debris of his own words, which up till now he has found barren, a wasteland, he discovers meaning and then his own myth.
The analyst is the person, par excellence, who carries the person through the wasteland of the self, and who holds.
[Those notes on Eliot’s poem—the analysis, pardon the pun—are a joke, and a bad one. —Steve]
In the end this is to say something simple: what matters in an artwork is its singularity, one that is achieved qualitatively, not through categorical affirmations of novelty or tradition. Quality lies in the specificity of the artwork and its acuity of effect, whatever that effect may be. Neo-modernism and neo-premodernism are not solutions to art’s contemporary impasse; they’re fixations on how art operates temporally to the neglect of what art does, which is to facilitate experience. In listening to a four-hundred-year-old Mass by William Byrd we make it contemporary and alive by the feeling it produces in us. His melodies are not beautiful because they adhere to a tradition or because they were innovative but because he used the conditions of composition of his time to write melodies that are beautiful to hear. Human experience is infinitely rich, but its categories are finite, and art makes those qualities of experience happen anew. An artwork only needs to be new so that it doesn’t repeat the old.
[If you have to insist on novelty or tradition something has gone wrong. At a very basic level, human art contains novelty because new people keep showing up, and it contains tradition because all these new people find themselves in contexts. These are inherent to all human art. Categorical affirmations of either are the realtor trying to distract you from the cracks in the foundation. —Steve]