The social role of the genius

After being assigned an Upper-First ranking, Tom was eligible to matriculate at a writing program. In this program, he submitted short stories for consideration in workshop. Professors and students discussed his work, and then he gave revised versions to his advisor, who mentored him on whether the stories fulfilled the requirements of his chosen profession.

In this program, stories were discussed as aesthetic objects: their form and shape were evaluated from a disembodied standpoint, without reference to these stories’ potential social purpose within the intensely-stratified society of the 22nd century.

Tom was in a top-notch program, and his professors encouraged his ambitions, but through a series of subtle signals, he gradually became aware of the fact that within his cohort of writers there were two categories of people. The first category, the geniuses, would get financial support that allowed them to write and publish whatever they wanted. The second category, the craftsmen, would still get to publish, but they'd need to produce books that conformed to industry expectations.

For a while, Tom applied for 'genius' fellowships and residencies, but he was inevitably rejected, and, over time, Tom came to understand that although his work was considered promising, he would not be allowed to exercise his creativity to the same degree as the more favored members of his class.

He accepted this, more or less.

Of course, this whole system was built on a level of mystification. Writers were first categorized according to their merit and only afterwards allowed to publish the work that supposedly revealed this merit. Only geniuses were allowed to publish genius-style work, and this work subsequently justified their selection as geniuses.

In contrast, those with less merit could only publish work that served some other ostensible purpose, and the fact that they had tamed their talent to the market meant that they couldn't possibly be geniuses.

As an Upper First and an Approved Artist, Tom had considerably freedom, but, unlike a genius, he was required to produce work that conformed more closely to the market priorities of the publishing houses. These houses competed with each other. They sold books for money, and their intention was to make a profit by entertaining people.

Under this system, the geniuses were read by the Upper Firsts (who mostly consumed these books under social compulsion), but most books were intended to be consumed by Second-Class and Lower-First readers. And these readers generally preferred books with a meritocratic ethos. Usually, these books were about exceptional people who'd been misclassified by the system, but who (through pluck and courage and luck) somehow found themselves in alternate systems—portal worlds, spy rings, criminal underworlds, wizarding academies, underground music scenes, contemporary fashion-based subcultures, etc—where their particular skills were rewarded. Almost always, these heroes returned to the mainstream world, and their specialness, after being nurtured and developed in private, was recognized by the mainstream and rewarded by a reclassification to Upper-First.

Tom enjoyed these meritocratic fables, but he knew the world didn't really work this way. In real life, there was very little reclassification, not even in sports and the arts. In practice, because all the resources to get better at these pursuits were reserved for Upper Firsts, it was very difficult for lower-class people to really compete. But even if a Second-Class or Lower-First person did manage to acquire the skill to compete with those at the top, the people inside the system would never allow themselves to see it, because those in charge of spotting and rewarding talent would feel too psychologically threatened by the idea of talent arising in someone without the proper classification.

This wasn't like the 21st century. In the 21st-century, people released music online and it sometimes got popular, and they achieved mainstream success. That didn't happen anymore. In the 22nd-century, the algorithm was so controlled that only Firsts could really get viral traction. Strangely enough, most people pretended this wasn't true, and his friends would even deny this fact if Tom mentioned it, "What! No, there are some Seconds who become musicians!"

"Not really," Tom said. "Name one."

"What about Clementine?"

"She's a First."

"But, no...that's not true."

"It is true," Tom said. "She sings about the trailer park or whatever, but...she didn't grow up in a trailer park. Her parents were Firsts. She is a First."

"But she grew up in Alabama!"

"There are Firsts in Alabama. I don't know what to say."

This was a very perplexing phenomenon to Tom. Everyone's classification was public. This whole system depended on people believing in the classification system. The whole point of someone like Clementine was that a person who looked and sounded like her could still be recognized by the system and classified as an Upper First. She was actually a success story, of sorts, because her parents were Lower Firsts, and her grandparents were Seconds, and this was a generational trajectory that'd grown increasingly uncommon in America. But still...she herself was a product of this system—she had not subverted it.

Anyway, Tom made a decent living writing meritocratic fables about boys who were angry and lost until they found one person who believed deeply in them. He wasn't sure if he entirely disbelieved in the meritocracy. He himself was very talented and intelligent, and his ranking entitled him to exceptional things. What was nice about this system was that since people had security of a sort, they also had a sense of responsibility. Tom knew his high social status and his living was contingent on being able to write the kinds of things that were needed.

Tom had one friend, from his graduate program, who somehow didn't understand this. The friend kept trying to publish her short story collection. Tom loved this friend's short stories, which were lyrical and allusive and unimpeachably angry, but also enlivened by her faith in the God of the Hebrews and the awareness, imparted by that faith, of having a unique destiny (as God's Chosen) which also entailed a considerable amount of punishment and suffering.

This friend, Rebecca, was a kind of savage or throwback—she had absolutely no awareness of the truths that Tom understood about society.

"But my work is so much better than this garbage that gets published," she said. "Look at the writing in Laina’s book. It's so lazy. So full of cliches. Written in this atonal sing-song rhythm. It's an insult to literature."

"Okay," Tom said.

"And yet she's supposedly a genius," Rebecca said. "I just don't understand it."

"Well, okay...but...so what? It's not good—so what? The 'genius' designation only exists so there's something to keep everyone else in line. Yeah, nobody reads or enjoys her work, but...big deal. You should feel sorry for her! Laina is just a sacrificial victim."

"Huh, tell me more."

"The fact that we haven't been designated as geniuses—that's what pushes the rest of us to do work that people actually need and value."

"What about creating something that lasts?"

"Do you think our system can really do that?" he said. "I just think...the whole point of our system is we devalue the highest. We raise up certain people as if they're geniuses, but...once they're dead, it becomes clear that they're not, so that creates room for new geniuses! Every generation rejects the generation's previous geniuses. Art is always in crisis. Art never produces anything durable. Art is tamed."

"But look at Philip Roth—he's lasted."

"Sure. He lasted. I love Roth, so do you. He's great. Art produced two centuries ago, under a much more democratic regime, managed to last. That doesn't mean ours will do the same."

"But..."

"I don't know what to say," Tom said. "You can publish a book of short stories on your own, but who will read it? Only geniuses get read."

Rebecca self-published her book of short stories and nobody read it.

Eventually, this particular regime collapsed, due to its rigidity and its inability to adapt to the technological change being fostered by other, more dynamic societies.

One hundred years later, in a rather different society, a scholar researching the fables that'd been popular in the Meritocratic Age. This writer read a thousand of these books, and she taxonomised their various features, writing a well-received study on the subject. Later, when she was asked by a reprint press whether any of these books were actually worth reading, she said, "You know, there's this one author, Thomas Wentworth, who always seemed so ambivalent about meritocracy. It's hard to fully recommend him, because his books are so different from the usual run of this kind of book. Most of these kinds of books were about boys who truly were exceptional. But in his books, there’s always a lingering feeling that maybe they aren’t. Maybe they’re just lucky. For that reason, his characters sometimes struck contemporary readers as somewhat entitled. However that unresolved contradiction is exactly what makes them interesting."¹

One of these books was reprinted and was frequently assigned in school as an example of the kind of book that was very popular in 22nd-century America. In reality, this book itself hadn't been particularly popular at the time, but it was sufficiently similar to the popular books that it made a good teaching tool, and its dissimilarities from those books was a good way of provoking discussion in class.

Some scholars made a stab at categorizing Thomas as a genius. The designation didn't totally take. This current society saw itself as a descendent of the Meritocratic Age and was obsessed with dissecting this period and figuring out how America had lost its past glory. In that effort, Thomas's work served a valuable and life-giving function.

But in other societies, without that connection, nobody read Thomas's work. Still, compared to the vast majority of people who'd written books during his lifetime—including most of those who'd been acclaimed as geniuses—Thomas had done pretty well.

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Afterword

This story was inspired by Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer. A friend discovered Roth recently and has been on me to read him for the last year. She recommended I start with Sabbath’s Theater. I found that book to be a bit of a turnoff. I respected it didn’t enjoy it, for the usual reasons (it is shot through with some of the most physically revolting images I’ve ever read).

But I tried again with The Ghost Writer, which was incredible, certainly one of the best books I’ve read this year, and perhaps one of the best 20th-century American novels I’ve ever read.

The Ghost Writer is about a young Jewish writer, Nathan Zuckerman, who’s starting to get attention for his stories. He writes to an older Jewish writer, E. I. Lonoff, expressing admiration for his work, and Lonoff invites him to come visit their house in rural New England. Meanwhile, just before visiting, Zuckerman has a fight with his father over a story he’s written that the father thinks is disparaging to Jews, because it's about a Jewish family fighting over an inheritance.

The book is about Zuckerman’s social responsibility, as a writer, to the Jewish people—about his responsibility to the six million people who perished, quite recently (the book is set in 1956) in, during the Holocaust. But it’s also about being a writer of high-brow fiction in contemporary America. It’s got many funny portraits of various writers—their fans—their relationships—their social scenes. But one question hangs over the book. And this question is posed to Zuckerman by a friend of his father’s who stages an intervention over this antisemitic short story. The friend asks:

Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?

This is extremely exasperating for Zuckerman, but it’s a question that Roth takes seriously. This novel is the answer to that question. It’s such a complex answer that it took an entire novel to answer it, and I can’t fully summarize the answer here, but, as I saw it, within America in the 20th century, there was a social role for a sort of writer (the genius) who appeared to tell the unvarnished truth. And there was an audience for that sort of writer too. And that because of the trust which that audience had for that kind of writer, they were able to feel empathy for a kind of people (the Jews) that they heretofore had never felt much empathy for! And in fitting that social role, a writer could indeed help the Jews, although it might not seem that way to someone like the Judge.

Other kinds of writers do exist however. And the climax of the novel is a contrast between Zuckerman and a very different kind of writer—someone often not understood as a genius or even as an artist at all—who Roth clearly respected very much, and who I think he saw as a peer. I found the book to be extremely generous and thoughtful. Highly recommend.

The highlight is the writing. I don’t often comment on the sentence-level writing of novels I read, because I find the idolatry of style within literary circles to be a bit overbearing. Style is meaningless unless it suffuses a work. If a work has integrity, if it is honest and is the product of a singular vision that seems to flow from the same source, then it usually also has style. But if it doesn't have that integrity, then to talk about style is meaningless.

With Roth, however, the sentences are certainly worthy of comment. They are complex, so full of surprises, and so uniformly excellent. Each one of them was a pleasure to read. Here’s a random paragraph that I liked, describing Zuckerman’s letter to Lonoff:

From Quahsay I had sent Lonoff the literary quarterlies that had published my stories—four so far—along with a letter telling him how much he had meant to me when I came upon his work “some years ago” in college. In the same breath I mentioned coming upon his “kinsmen” Chekhov and Gogol, and went on to reveal in other unmistakable ways just how serious a literary fellow I was—and, hand in hand with that, how young. But then nothing I had ever written put me in such a sweat as that letter. Everything undeniably true struck me as transparently false as soon as I wrote it down, and the greater the effort to be sincere, the worse it went. I finally sent him the tenth draft and then tried to stick my arm down the throat of the mailbox to extract it.

You can see it all here. For instance, the sudden drop in sentence length and complexity, when he says “But then nothing I had ever written…”—signaling an end to the jokey, ironic tone of the first half of the paragraph. Zuckerman is able to satirize himself, signaling how ridiculous it is for a twenty-three year old to be talking about “some years ago”, and yet…he can also reach into the past and recover the sweat and effort of being a writer trying to impress a great man. Everything is revealed here, in the variations in diction, register, and syntax as we move through this single paragraph!

Very amazing. Excited to read more Roth.

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Woman of Letters is taking a break for two weeks! See you again on Tuesday, January 7th

1. The afterlife of Thomas’s book is inspired by a North Korean novel I wrote about earlier this year. We know about this book because of a Korean-American academic who made a study of North Korean fiction. He read a thousand North Korean novels, and he claimed this one book, The Friend, was the best of all the books he read. It was released on South Korea and subsequently translated into English and received a fair amount of attention in America.

I read the book, and…it's pretty good! The book has aroused considerable sociological interest: it's a portrait of both ordinary life in North Korea and of the kind of fiction that the North Korean government might allow and encourage. But…the book is also quite clearly exceptional in its humanity and artistry. So although Westerners read it as a typical example of the form, it is only readable in the first place because there is something in it that's universal. I will note that, unlike Thomas’s books, Friend was apparently extremely popular in North Korea and was read quite widely.