A brief history of Western civilization
One positive side-effect of spending twenty-some years in formal education is that a sense of freedom continues to roil through me in late April, early May, when the school year would have ended. Of course, now I’m in the 4HL so I have no summer vacation awaiting me. Strangely, this year what I find myself most nostalgic for isn’t the freedom of time that summer vacation once allowed, but the hundred-mile stretch of interstate that cut through the countryside connecting the city where I went to college and my parents’ house—that long drive away from it all and back to my origins.
Everyone knows that American freedom comes with asterisks and is easily rescinded. The only indisputable freedom is the feeling of a fast car on a long road without any cops around. On my drive, the flat land of the plains offered perfect visibility so I knew I wouldn’t be pulled over. I stayed in the left lane and the semis wouldn’t get in my way either. I just pressed down on the gas pedal until it felt good. You know with your whole body when you hit the right speed.
The road novel is a staple of American literature. The grad-school interpretation of this genre is that the road novel recreates Western expansion, the colonial march of white men across the country, a victory lap of the country’s conquerors. There’s something to this reading, at least as a starting point, but I’m kind of taken by Rachel Kushner’s slight reworking of the road novel in her upcoming novel, Creation Lake (definitely worth the preorder). Toward the beginning, the protagonist drives through rural, agricultural France, hollowed out by EU trade policies. At a rest station, she observes a discarded pair of women’s underwear—no doubt a prostitute’s—and she thinks, This is the real Europe. What we call European civilization—or, to press it further, the history of Western civilization—isn’t the culture, the arts, the manners, etc., but the violent unfurling of a supply chain across distances. Nothing more than that. That’s the story of the road.
You could tell my story like that. I’m the human capital passed through supply chains from deep in the countryside to the city. It wasn’t how I thought of my experience at the time and not how I think of it now. But there’s a way to tell that story, the final synthesis. And now I’m here and the closest I get to that sense of freedom is hitting two green lights in a row. Damn.
Talking lit, talking shit
Cycling between depression and manic aggression as I tapered off SSRIs, I wrote yet another draft of a post I eventually discarded, this time about The State of Literature, which is to say, about literary critics. I wouldn’t call myself a critic; my project with this blog, such as it exists, doesn’t reduce to criticism (nor is my writing literary in its aspirations). I’m just some guy going off and occasionally documenting what it means to me to live as a reader while taking seriously the possibility that literature might change my life. This is, ultimately, not the sort of belief that holds up well under depression, which really has a way of crushing your gayest thoughts about life. It can be clarifying or even salutary in small doses—a kind of reality check through negation. But depression is also tedious. It impoverishes your intellectual life for the very simple reason that you sound like everyone else on the internet. The same insights, the same tone, the same thinking patterns. We were led to believe that depression’s expansive sense of interiority would offer loam for creativity and contemplation, but when everyone’s depressed, we’re all mining the same neurological vein of human experience to total depletion.
During this period, it struck me that maybe the entire trajectory of my reading life was to lead me to The Magic Mountain and now that I’ve read it, I’m done with literature and ready to move on. To what exactly? Hard to say, but it was better to move on, even with a long list of books I had planned to read, than to keep up with literary discourse, filled with people who act like all of literary history reduces to Lolita, American Psycho, and Sabbath’s Theater and is at risk of eradication. I got what I needed from literature and managed to parlay my English Ph.D. into a non-academic day job—no need to linger.
The point I was trying to make through all my random sniping over a month is that literary history is very long and complex, and people who try to reduce it to a single meaning are usually doing so in self-serving or straight-up bad faith ways. Written literary history began in 2,100 BC with The Epic of Gilgamesh; the first (Western) novel didn’t come on the scene until 1740 AD. Imagine, then, the hubris of surveying that expanse and saying, Literature should be _____. To say that literature shouldn’t be morally dogmatic discounts most literature from the Middle Ages. To say that it shouldn’t be political neglects the fact that a half-million people in this country have carved out a hole in Atlas Shrugged so they can fuck it.
The obvious truth is that some works fail and others succeed on the same grounds. As I pointed out on Notes, Claire Keegan’s Small Things like These (2020) is indisputably moral fiction, set within a distinct political context, but it works because morality is earned and (self-)confrontational. Its protagonist’s moral courage is deeply refreshing—almost cathartic. The novella believes in the best bit of a person and breathes life into it. That’s good art, and it emanates from its moral core.
But in making these arguments about literature, I realized I had become a Know 👏Your 👏 History 👏 guy, which is just setting yourself up for failure because everyone, myself included, hates history. Idiots always win—you’ve just gotta let it go and have some grace. And I’ll be honest with you all: I take most of these arguments to be at least partially in bad faith. You can’t say that you fear that DEI is imperiling your career prospects in an already disintegrating market, so, instead, you have to argue that “wokeness” is ruining literature qua art; the latter claim, whether true or not, masks but does not negate the former claim. Isn’t the tell that such critics who lament the State of Literature seldom analyze specific texts that show its undoing?
The surest sign of a failing economy is that nobody puts their money where their mouth is. Why would you?
The dilemma
The problem with literature—and hence literary criticism—is that it’s really hard to define its purpose. On the one hand, the need to declare its use-value, we could say, follows from a capitalist impulse to resist useless things. Indeed, some do claim, rather lazily, that art should be useless, defined by undefinable aesthetic criteria. On the other hand, this position, while easier to maintain than any other, isn’t very satisfying—just a bitchy Oscar Wildism. I’m not sure it convinces any serious reader. We know that literature does something to you. Or can.
But no explanation holds up universally. Consider: if the purpose of literature is to “build empathy,” then the fact that I’m a total dick means that I’m either a bad reader or autistic or this argument is false (all three plausible). If literature has “revolutionary potential,” then yikes. Some defend literature for conveying truth better than facts and data—Pod Save America’s new publishing imprint promises books that “break down issues”—but this reduces literature to a tool for communicating to simpletons. (“Climate change bad. Sun scary!”) The sociological thesis that literature is a form of cultural capital that sorts people into hierarchies continues to falter as the sphere in which that hierarchy is relevant dramatically shrinks. Even seemingly non-instrumental explanations—literature “adds meaning to life”—are hardly different from CEO mindset shit, e.g., you must always have a “why” for what you do and literature can help you discover your why. If literature is just a form of entertainment, then it’s one of the shittier ones—like, have you seen King of the Hill? And you think I should read The Recognitions instead??
Etc., etc.
None of these answers is particularly persuasive to me. As I’ve said before, I think that literature is fundamentally quietist and that this is only an unsatisfying answer if you don’t believe in something like the soul.
Which I guess I do.
Comic relief
Wife: When my husband gets lost, he never looks at a map or asks for directions haha
Husband: *unlearned imperialism, the violence of the map, white male entitlement over space; refuses to appropriate Indigenous knowledge(s); healthy skin and cholesterol levels*
The heart of the matter
It might be worth the cost of the premium subscription to have ChatGPT rewrite The Myth of Sisyphus but centered on the question, Why not just goon? Isn’t that question, really, at the heart of The State of Literature and contemporary life more broadly? Gooning lacks glamor, sure, and it prompts moral outrage, maybe not toward masturbation but toward the social/personal irresponsibility it implies. But that’s just a bourgeois attitude and not really an answer to the question, which is the existential question of our day. Neural pathways carrying dopamine are mere extensions of the supply chain we call Western civilization. Why not reap its rewards?
“It’s so hollow.” Bro, what kind of rich, complex, and fulfilling life were you living otherwise?? Did you think The Goldfinch was going to help?
Neither here nor there, but I will add that
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) has aged terribly through no fault of its own. Though written before its advent, it’s impossible to read his book now as anything other than a commentary on the internet/social media, which distracts from the fact that, pre-internet, we were also amusing ourselves to death but in far lamer ways.
Rough landing
I can’t seem to end this post, which isn’t a surprise because I also struggled to write it and have expurgated so much that it barely coheres. Not even the tone is consistent. Ah well. It’s past nine p.m.—let’s end on a pensive note, not quite vulnerable but close, though completely at odds with all the mocking and hysteria that came before it.
I keep turning over a question that thematized parts of my dissertation: whether one should hold onto a lost cause, past the point of hope in its realization, or give it up: submit to the status quo or just move on. That, I felt, was key to certain works from the New Sincerity movement, particularly those by leftist writers (Lerner, Kushner) who bristled at the end-of-history liberalism that shaped DFW’s thought. (Žižek, conveniently, wrote a book about this topic, which I didn’t read. I’m intellectually lazy—that’s why I have a blog and not an editor.) Does commitment to the lost cause keep an ember alive for a future when its impossibility isn’t necessarily as certain? Or is commitment to a lost cause just bad faith—a delusion that one isn’t, at the end of the day, a compliant participant in the status quo? Or perhaps a lost cause keeps you from facing facts; doing so wouldn’t be a form of despair but a way of overcoming despair by coming to terms with reality.
I see this dilemma as the animating tension of political culture, literature, and in some regards, contemporary life, hence all these people with monkish aims of opting out of it. I think, to riff on an old Red Scare tweet, it’s good to square one’s aspirations with one’s prospects. But there’s something I admire too about committing to a lost cause, believing in its necessity even more than in the hope for its realization.
PS: I’m at 188 pounds—cutting when I hit 190. OHP is the only thing that hasn’t been letting me down. Pray for me.