Thank you for this thoughtful piece. There's a really interesting parallel here to be drawn, I think, with the myriad ways in which all of us have been told in the last 20 years to stand for something and/or everything all the time--in the products we buy, the music we listen to, the books we read, the politicians we support, etc. I suspect one of the reasons so many folks are allergic to reading authors who aren't shy about their ideology or politics is that society (particularly in the USA) has developed a knee-jerk reaction to any proselytizing, primarily because we all of us ourselves have become proseltyzers in our quest for Followers, without having any clear idea where we want to / are even capable of leading. When I think of Hesse & Vonnegut & Didion & Baldwin, I think, "what a relief to read authors who aren't afraid to stand for something" versus constantly shapeshifting to pander to the market.
Yes I think for the past ten years the only authors you could be certain had beliefs were those who didn't express them! So being apolitical became a kind of marker of integrity
Great point. It became cool to be at least outwardly apathetic; or at least unwilling to take a stance for fear of misconstrued. I certainly feel that when I go back to the States, it feels like regardless of the subject matter, I have to be prepared to die on a hill I didn't even want to be on.
I appreciate your footnote. My first novel was also clobbered by the agent/publishing process and had a POV like yours, and received similar feedback, among some other issues.
I also wholeheartedly agree with your statement, "The problem with contemporary fiction isn’t that so much of it has such overt politics, it’s that the politics are so silly and shallow." I read so many contemporary books and it's so rare for my mind to be blown or even challenged. Often I worry I'm the problem, that I'm simply tired of the minds of my contemporaries, or at least the sect publishing lit fiction. But then I read a statement like this and I feel a bit of hope and readerly camaraderie.
Yeah once you've gone through the grinder you realize exactly why so much contemporary fiction is so boring! It's just hard to get published! It's hard to convince people that you're good and smart and worth reading. People blame MFA programs, but in my experience the writing in MFA workshops is much, much more heterogenous than the writing that actually gets published (which is exactly what you'd expect!)
I think if you're a writer there is definitely an element of being uncharitable about one's contemporaries. I pick up books and frequently am like, "I should give this more of a chance." I know that plenty of people pick up my book and also dismiss it and are like, oh it's just another of satire, just another queer novel. But a lot of contemporary stuff is genuinely not good! And a lot of it is the opposite of what people say it is. Like a lot of contemporary stuff that's supposed to be lyrical is actually clunky and poorly written. A lot of contemporary stuff that's supposed to be nuanced is actually really judgemental and shallow. So it's hard to say!
How did things go with your book? Did it get an agent? Is it on sub? Are you revising it?
That's also been my experience with the MFA and the circuit of conference workshops: the writing within the programs is often a lot more interesting and varied than the writing that gets tapped for stardom from these same programs. Christopher Kempf touches on some of this in his recent book about the workshop in American culture where, among other things, he reflects on what becomes celebrated and not, especially in a class-based society. He uses Bourdieu's concept of cultural distinction a bit, citing examples like YETI coolers and Pendleton blankets, to illustrate how certain objects gain aesthetic status despite being common or banal. I think you would enjoy it if you haven't read it already! And I've got my fingers crossed for my next book, although I think this one might be a little too outside of the lines too. I've promised myself if this one doesn't catch, I'll play by the rules for the book AFTER this one. :)
Thoughtful and cogent piece. I'm puzzled too at the contemporary fiction that is politically one dimensional receiving accolades. Where is the literature about the grind of politics, the compromises, the moral ambiguities? I'm thinking of the literary equivalent of TV's The Wire, where we are drawn into multiple sides of wicked social problems. As I work in politics, the reality is much less combative than the news, and in some ways more interesting for it. I see the "racism exists" genre as a publishing fashion - while it has expanded from indignation to action, with titles like "What White people can do next" and "The Good Ally", the literary equivalent could be held to higher standards. As to your point on Toltoy and Christianity - George Saunders is good on this in "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain", cautioning readers against dismissing his faith whilst drawing out certain contradictions in the man himself.
1) David Simon and his writers were all grizzled local reporters in Baltimore (back in the pre-Craigslist era, when "grizzled local reporter" was a thing you could be)
2) The "prestige TV" aesthetic hadn't metastasized yet, so television that wanted critical buzz had to actually have depth instead of the illusion of it (looking at you, "The Bear" !!)
Some writers are grizzled! A lot of writers were school-teachers and reporters! I'm grizzled. I was a grizzled, err...international development consultant?
This was a wonderful read and made me very curious about The Glass Bead Game—I’m reading a novel right now that is very much operating in this abstruse life-of-the-mind space, all aesthetics no politics, and am finding it kind of claustrophobically airless. So I’d really like to read fiction that in some way critiques those kinds of worlds.
At the same time, though, I ALSO feel claustrophobic when I’m reading writing that is polemic and didactic (not a bad thing) but doesn’t really recognize the complexity of the political stances held and all the ways they can be challenged. There are quite a few novels where I agree with the politics but hate how they’re presented so simply—as if any engagement with doubt or uncertainty is intrinsically bad. Thanks for addressing both sides of this in your post!!
The book is Rosalind Brown's Practice, which is a day in the life of a young woman working on a paper about Shakespearan sonnets, for an undergraduate class. To me it feels very inspired by the kind of phenomenologically-intimate-story-about-a-young-woman's-intellectual-development approach that Claire-Louise Bennett's Checkout 19 has (and I LOVED that novel, like seriously revere it stylistically)…but Practice feels weaker in many respects, especially at the beginning.
Practice begins with a fairly nonspecific character (we learn it's a young woman studying literature at Oxford) and spends far too long narrating very banal things—like in the first 150 sentences, 24 are about her drinking coffee/tea, putting the kettle on, meditating on her current/ideal state of caffeination…4 sentences about urination and her bowel movements…4 sentences about her morning muesli…I actually love a very domestic novel obsessed with these minor details, but it felt very exhausting. The novel picks up a bit more when we learn a bit more about the character (and it also becomes clear that class is not a real consideration in the novel; the novel seems to exist in some mysterious zone where material considerations are all off-screen, which to me is a bit disorienting for a contemporary British novel tbh!) and we also delve into what is specifically unique about this character's way of thinking about literature.
It's a very fun novel to analyze—because it explores a space I'm fascinated by, with an approach that alienates me—but I'm only halfway through…curious if I will feel differently by the end
I think also the negative response to anything that is perceived as “serious”, “political” or “ideological” in the US is partly down to a situation in which one particular ideology has become so dominant that it doesn’t need expressing (it’s simply like air, ubiquitous, weightless and transparent), and partly down to a generalized anti-intellectualism which as always lurked around American culture.
In the case of those who are happy to expend oodles of brainpower of the philosophy of the Stoics or the pronouncements of a New-Age healer, it’s clearly not the latter.
So I think by elimination the tendency among otherwise intelligent and inquisitive people to treat “politicized” art as repulsive is a learned response, peculiar to the Anglo-American sphere.
In the non-Anglophone world, political engagement is a normal thing to have as part of the experience of art and literature. They are not separate realms where art is somehow a pure and untainted experience floating loftily above ideology.
Having an ideological substrate makes the artitistic experience crunchier, with much more texture, than the rather bland products that the Anglosphere tends to churn out. I say that as an admirer of certain authors whose politics/philosophy I abhor, but whose work really is authentic and interesting. Engaging with why that is forms part of the fascination.
I think you're right. In a world where there are strong political litmus tests--such that if you hold the wrong political opinions you can't get published--then it's impossible to endorse politicized art.
I’ve been reading “In Defence of the Imagination” by Helen Gardner, and she quotes Auden, writing about the idea that A.E. Housman is “adolescent”.
“To grow up, does not mean to outgrow either childhood or adolescence, but to make use of them in an adult way. But for the child in us we should be incapable of intellectual curiosity; but for the adolescent, of serious feeling for other individuals. I imagine a person who had outgrown both though I’ve never met one he would be a complete social official being without personal identity. All the mature man can give his child an adolescent return for what they keep giving him are humility, humour, charity, and hope. He will never teach them to despise any strong passion, however, strange and limited, or to reject a poet like Housman, who gives it utterance.”
That's a good quote! Yes, I think a lot of authors and readers (a lot of adults in general!) are somehow mad at their adolescent selves for being, you know, young and dumb and (often) having poor taste.
I can only agree. There is a vague knowledge in modern writers that heroes need to be ‘complicated’, but it seems to take the form of presenting a character others perceive as heroic and then detailing why they actually suck deep down, rather than creating a character who is genuinely admirable while also being flawed. Perhaps some combination of cringing at the idea of a genuinely good person, and the reflex to ‘problematise’ that has displaced literary criticism.
I did find The Glass Bead Game very dry, though - sort of programmatic, like it was written to a blueprint without any contingency or inspiration. Count me among those who prefer The Magic Mountain!
That's fair enough. It's shocking how little happens in the book. Although nothing happens in The Magic Mountain either--but the latter feels fuller somehow
Just when I thought I was completely saturated at Substack, Henry Oliver had to link me to this vindication of my recent attempts at reading/re-reading GBs. About a year ago, Ted Gioia rekindled my interest in Hesse (after 4 decades or so) with his literary guide to death
I re-read TGBG & really enjoyed it. About a month ago, I got about a third of the way through The Magic Mountain (which I enjoyed as a youth) and gave up.
Have you ever read Hours in the Garden? Such a beautiful poem. But what do I know? I didn’t even realize there was such anti-Hesse sentiment out there, then or now.
Never read it =] The only poetry of his that I've read are the few poems in the Glass Bead Game. Yes it seems silly to be dismissive of Hesse, but it's a definite thing. He's always been more popular than respected.
Thinking about this and about @Henry Oliver’s recent post on Mary Oliver (no relation, at least I don’t think so) and ironic detachment vs. sincerity. I’ve certainly, to some extent, internalized the idea (very nineties/2000s) that there is something inherently naive or middlebrow or simply already done about earnestness.
So about that "literature of exhaustion." I think the correct retort to the idea that making the Sixth Symphony would be embarrassing today is to ask: embarrassing *for whom* ? Yesterday I was sitting down with Nathan Hill's "Wellness," sprinting through it before I have to return it to the library, and I came across a paragraph that really stood out to me:
"Jack's inaugural stroll through the Art Institute felt wondrous: seeing his first Picasso ever, his first in-person water lily, his first Pollock drip painting, his first Rothko, his first Rembrandt, seeing van Gogh's self-portrait, seeing Grant Wood's American Gothic. All of these same paintings that seemed so exhilarating and soul-filling to Jack were, in his studio class, treated as camp, as tourist bait for the rubes coming in from the suburbs."
And of course, most of these students are nineteen - far too young to be so jaded about art, or to have even seen all of those works in person. But then again, what could be more embarrassing in college than admitting you're a virgin?...
Why are art students so arrogant? It's really true everywhere--in my MFA people would talk trash when we had to read, like, Henry James or Ray Carver. They'd be like this is an old white guy. People aren't usually like that in English or Art History classes--it's something peculiar to young, practicing artists. I think it's just insecurity honestly.
Yes, Barth's statement hasn't aged well! I imagine in his day high art felt more secure and safe than it does today.
I guess what that quote is getting at is that, is that a modern musician who composes like Beethoven would be anachronistic, kitsch, refusing to move with the times or push the envelope — that his or her music would be a pastiche or a parody.
In terms of classical music, for instance, someone like Boulez argued that the western classical tradition was exhausted and that the future was atonality, serialism, and that the likes of Shostakovich were aesthetic reactionaries.
Have you ever read the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote?” It’s about exactly this idea.
Borges' character is certainly arguing that. A relevant passage:
It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Menard with that of
Cervantes. The latter, for instance, wrote (Don Quixote, Part One,
Chapter Nine)
. . . la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito
de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente,
advertencia de lo por venir.
[. . . truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the
present, and warning to the future.]
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "ingenious layman"
Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history.
Menard, on the other hand, writes:
. . . la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito
de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente,
advertencia de lo por venir.
[. . . truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the
present, and warning to the future.]
History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a
contemporary of William James, does not define history as an
investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him,
is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final
clauses - example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future
- are shamelessly pragmatic.
Equally vivid is the contrast in styles. The archaic style of Menard -
in the last analysis, a foreigner - suffers from a certain affectation.
Not so that of his precursor, who handles easily the ordinary Spanish
of his time.
(The joke, or at least part of it being that the fictitious literary critic writing this essay is interpretating the exact same text in very different ways based on its "context;" the exact same prose style is ordinary for Cervantes and affected and archaic for Menard.)
You know, you might say that about Beethoven, but I think a person who composes "like Beethoven" in 2024 - by which I mean laboring under the constraints of harmony and counterpoint and all those wonderful awful things Debussy junked - is actually doing something really, really difficult and really impressive, and there are cynical reasons you might want to denigrate something so technically demanding. I don't think anyone in a poetry MFA is writing in pentameter, either.
I like all sorts of hokey art though, so take that with a grain of salt :-)
To be clear, I’m not saying that I would necessarily agree with that criticism, just that that would probably be the discourse around it.
And, to be fair, John Williams has become the most successful and beloved film composer ever by essentially writing music like a 19th century European Romantic symphonist.
For a second I thought you meant John Williams the writer (of STONER and AUGUSTUS), who's also a pretty old-fashioned writer!
I find that most poets are actually incapable of composing in pentameter--they simply don't hear meter! At my MFA program, the professors were very into form and meter--they were renowned across academic poetry for being old fuddy-duddies. I think now that this skill has been lost, it might actually be pretty avant-garde to revive it! I'm pretty good at meter--not to boast--I finally learned to hear it, after years and years of puzzlement, from reading Chaucer.
Since Impressionism (and maybe since Wordsworth and Coleridge catalyzed was would later be called British romanticism in the 1790s) our western received cultural narrative is one of succeeding avant-garde movements. That’s how art history is taught in a survey course, for instance.
One consequence of this is that our culture (western culture, possibly global culture) puts a unique emphasis on innovation, on “pushing the envelope” as an aesthetic goal in and of itself. (And, conversely, backwards-looking art as in some sense inauthentic, CF Greenberg’a classic “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”.)
This is the context in which rhyming poetry or common practice tonality is called exhausted by intelligentsia.
Oh, yeah, total sense. But I think instead of saying "our culture" we should specify "high culture" thinks this way - a layperson isn't really thinking of artists in conversation with each other across time, are they? (Unless it's really obvious, like LHOOQ or whatever.) They think of Van Eyck and Vermeer and Van Gogh as "guys who painted nice portraits" (if they think of the three at all) and probably don't realize literal centuries (plural!) separated their lives. Chronology is a project for elites.
You don't even need to think about "fine art" or even art made before WWII to see this in action, right? Punk killed prog, is the received wisdom, but plenty of kids born after 2000 go on /mu/ and cop to loving King Crimson *and* Black Flag, in a way that would blow the minds of a mosh pit c. 1982. Or imagine a kid for whom Public Enemy, De La Soul, and Biggie are all just "rap my dad likes." I would name the equivalent of this within jazz but I could not assemble a coherent chronology of the genre without consulting Wikipedia, which proves my point!!
I guess what that quote is getting at is that, is that a modern musician who composes like Beethoven would be anachronistic, kitsch, refusing to move with the times or push the envelope — that his or her music would be a pastiche or a parody.
In terms of classical music, for instance, someone like Boulez argued that the western classical tradition was exhausted and that the future was atonality, serialism, and that the likes of Shostakovich were aesthetic reactionaries.
Have you ever read the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote?” It’s about exactly this idea.
I think what's flawed in that Boulez argument, and what conversely is exposed in the complexity of Borges' treatment of the same idea, is the either/or nature of modernity vs premodernity that it supposes.
Borges was a master of inhabiting that ambiguous space where his stories and poems were at once rigorously classical and traditional, and at the same time subversive, parodic and ironic.
To me the best work made by artists and writers today tends to be in a similar space. This means that the work is always on the edge of the camp and the kitsch, and maybe even indulging in it, but still serious and engaged in something chewy and gritty, either political, philosophical or moral/spiritual.
For what it’s worth, I’m not a Boulez fan either, not really, and in his case his approach to classical music history — ie that it is teleological — is coming from his political ideology.
Excellent piece, I really need to get into Hesse. The whole discourse around politics in literature (usually saying that it shouldn't be overtly political) is strange to me, some of the best novels have been ridiculously unsubtle in their aims! Like what you said about Tolstoy. I wonder if many contemporary writers/critics steer clear of overt politics in their work because they don't actually have anything interesting to say, or they're unwilling to actually challenge their worldviews and 'test it' in a fictional world. Like you said, 'silly and shallow', and they'll stay that way as long as writers don't engage with those worldviews and fold them into their work.
There's a lot of things going on. I think amongst the people who aspire to write works of lasting importance, there's a distaste for the sort of agit-prop and posturing that can get you a reputation. But you can't really express that distaste openly without alienating your colleagues, so you just say fiction should be 'apolitical' or 'embrace ambiguity' instead. I also think a lot of people have controversial political opinions that they really couldn't get published. Like it's no accident that so many 19th-century Russian writers were more on the right-of-center side. If they'd been nihilists, the Czar's censorship office wouldn't have published them. So instead we get novel after novel decrying the nihilists and few novels by the nihilists themselves! And then, yeah, I also think a lot of people just have really boring politics--but most of the latter actually DO write political fiction. These are the #resistance writers who somehow think they're fighting Trump with their anti-racist allegory.
"The modern commercial novel is even more woolly and strange: it’s a fusion of the novel of manners, novel of sentiment, and the prose romance.
This has led to a dizzying array of conventions and expectations that, frankly, kinda get in the way of storytelling. It’s like with the reading I attended–everything about the book is so carefully “what it needs to be” that there is no room for the living impulse that is, presumably, the reason for telling this story in the first place."
I have mixed feelings on this point. On the one hand, I often think that a lot of mediocre art has resulted from the way we've distilled each art form into a science. Like, so many people have spent so much time studying the craft of writing (or film, or music, or...) that we know exactly how to structure a scene so that it moves along as a brisk pace and elicits all the right emotions at the right moments. Even Marvel movies, of all things, have this figured out. But so often there's no substance, just nothing there underneath all that "craft." So we're left with a lot of competent but utterly mediocre books/TV/film/etc (aside: this peak competence has even robbed us of the "so bad it's good movie," a category I'm afraid is never coming back). And so I kind of want some authors to come in and bust up the craft.
On the other hand, though, it's not like this craft emerged from some conspiracy. All these different types of novels merged together in a natural evolution of the art of literature, and that happened because those techniques work. They just do. And they've become what we think of as "literature." Maybe the earlier forms were just building blocks, creating what we have today. So you can throw that synthesis away, but you kind of do it at your own peril, right?
I'll admit this is really only a half-formed thought.
I don't think Hesse is "entirely artless" but then again I haven't read him since I was an adolescent! I do find it a bit unfair when critics speak of him as if he's just one step above Ayn Rand in terms of literary respectability though.
But in general, I don't know what exactly to make of the situation where literature today seems either completely divorced from the world of ideas or just parroting the shallowest arguments from the intelligentsia. Maybe the problem is me, I'm not reading the right novels or attending the right salons, or I'm too thin-skinned to take seriously something that really challenges me...
As for the other stuff, yeah sometimes I do wonder if I'm not getting it--like can people really be publishing books in 2024 that're just like "fascism is bad" or "racism is bad" or "racism exists" or "the government shouldn't bother sexual minorities". There must be more to it than that surely? I'm sure sometimes I don't give these books enough of a chance, but other times I think they're just shallow. It's hard to say--you've only got one life, and how many times are you really going to take a chance on a "brilliant, emotional, incisive" contemporary novel when you've been bored by so many others before
Great article. I read The Glass Bead Game a few years ago, on a friend’s recommendation, and it actually played a part in nudging me towards a career change.
Thinking about this and about @Henry Oliver’s recent post on Mary Oliver (no relation, at least I don’t think so) and ironic detachment vs. sincerity. I’ve certainly, to some extent, internalized the idea (very nineties/2000s) that there is something inherently naive or middlebrow or simply already done about earnestness.
Thank you for this thoughtful piece. There's a really interesting parallel here to be drawn, I think, with the myriad ways in which all of us have been told in the last 20 years to stand for something and/or everything all the time--in the products we buy, the music we listen to, the books we read, the politicians we support, etc. I suspect one of the reasons so many folks are allergic to reading authors who aren't shy about their ideology or politics is that society (particularly in the USA) has developed a knee-jerk reaction to any proselytizing, primarily because we all of us ourselves have become proseltyzers in our quest for Followers, without having any clear idea where we want to / are even capable of leading. When I think of Hesse & Vonnegut & Didion & Baldwin, I think, "what a relief to read authors who aren't afraid to stand for something" versus constantly shapeshifting to pander to the market.
Yes I think for the past ten years the only authors you could be certain had beliefs were those who didn't express them! So being apolitical became a kind of marker of integrity
Great point. It became cool to be at least outwardly apathetic; or at least unwilling to take a stance for fear of misconstrued. I certainly feel that when I go back to the States, it feels like regardless of the subject matter, I have to be prepared to die on a hill I didn't even want to be on.
I appreciate your footnote. My first novel was also clobbered by the agent/publishing process and had a POV like yours, and received similar feedback, among some other issues.
I also wholeheartedly agree with your statement, "The problem with contemporary fiction isn’t that so much of it has such overt politics, it’s that the politics are so silly and shallow." I read so many contemporary books and it's so rare for my mind to be blown or even challenged. Often I worry I'm the problem, that I'm simply tired of the minds of my contemporaries, or at least the sect publishing lit fiction. But then I read a statement like this and I feel a bit of hope and readerly camaraderie.
Thanks for this piece!
Yeah once you've gone through the grinder you realize exactly why so much contemporary fiction is so boring! It's just hard to get published! It's hard to convince people that you're good and smart and worth reading. People blame MFA programs, but in my experience the writing in MFA workshops is much, much more heterogenous than the writing that actually gets published (which is exactly what you'd expect!)
I think if you're a writer there is definitely an element of being uncharitable about one's contemporaries. I pick up books and frequently am like, "I should give this more of a chance." I know that plenty of people pick up my book and also dismiss it and are like, oh it's just another of satire, just another queer novel. But a lot of contemporary stuff is genuinely not good! And a lot of it is the opposite of what people say it is. Like a lot of contemporary stuff that's supposed to be lyrical is actually clunky and poorly written. A lot of contemporary stuff that's supposed to be nuanced is actually really judgemental and shallow. So it's hard to say!
How did things go with your book? Did it get an agent? Is it on sub? Are you revising it?
That's also been my experience with the MFA and the circuit of conference workshops: the writing within the programs is often a lot more interesting and varied than the writing that gets tapped for stardom from these same programs. Christopher Kempf touches on some of this in his recent book about the workshop in American culture where, among other things, he reflects on what becomes celebrated and not, especially in a class-based society. He uses Bourdieu's concept of cultural distinction a bit, citing examples like YETI coolers and Pendleton blankets, to illustrate how certain objects gain aesthetic status despite being common or banal. I think you would enjoy it if you haven't read it already! And I've got my fingers crossed for my next book, although I think this one might be a little too outside of the lines too. I've promised myself if this one doesn't catch, I'll play by the rules for the book AFTER this one. :)
Thoughtful and cogent piece. I'm puzzled too at the contemporary fiction that is politically one dimensional receiving accolades. Where is the literature about the grind of politics, the compromises, the moral ambiguities? I'm thinking of the literary equivalent of TV's The Wire, where we are drawn into multiple sides of wicked social problems. As I work in politics, the reality is much less combative than the news, and in some ways more interesting for it. I see the "racism exists" genre as a publishing fashion - while it has expanded from indignation to action, with titles like "What White people can do next" and "The Good Ally", the literary equivalent could be held to higher standards. As to your point on Toltoy and Christianity - George Saunders is good on this in "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain", cautioning readers against dismissing his faith whilst drawing out certain contradictions in the man himself.
The Wire is a good example. So much more morally complex than most fiction--not sure why either
1) David Simon and his writers were all grizzled local reporters in Baltimore (back in the pre-Craigslist era, when "grizzled local reporter" was a thing you could be)
2) The "prestige TV" aesthetic hadn't metastasized yet, so television that wanted critical buzz had to actually have depth instead of the illusion of it (looking at you, "The Bear" !!)
Some writers are grizzled! A lot of writers were school-teachers and reporters! I'm grizzled. I was a grizzled, err...international development consultant?
I would like "grizzle" to become a verb, i.e. "she grizzled at him, eyes narrowing". A blend of grim, grumble, glare, fizzled.
@Quiara "grizzled" means they did the legwork. Maybe a call to blur reportage with fiction? Field ethnography in fiction?
This was a wonderful read and made me very curious about The Glass Bead Game—I’m reading a novel right now that is very much operating in this abstruse life-of-the-mind space, all aesthetics no politics, and am finding it kind of claustrophobically airless. So I’d really like to read fiction that in some way critiques those kinds of worlds.
At the same time, though, I ALSO feel claustrophobic when I’m reading writing that is polemic and didactic (not a bad thing) but doesn’t really recognize the complexity of the political stances held and all the ways they can be challenged. There are quite a few novels where I agree with the politics but hate how they’re presented so simply—as if any engagement with doubt or uncertainty is intrinsically bad. Thanks for addressing both sides of this in your post!!
Now I want to know what this book you're reading is!
The book is Rosalind Brown's Practice, which is a day in the life of a young woman working on a paper about Shakespearan sonnets, for an undergraduate class. To me it feels very inspired by the kind of phenomenologically-intimate-story-about-a-young-woman's-intellectual-development approach that Claire-Louise Bennett's Checkout 19 has (and I LOVED that novel, like seriously revere it stylistically)…but Practice feels weaker in many respects, especially at the beginning.
Practice begins with a fairly nonspecific character (we learn it's a young woman studying literature at Oxford) and spends far too long narrating very banal things—like in the first 150 sentences, 24 are about her drinking coffee/tea, putting the kettle on, meditating on her current/ideal state of caffeination…4 sentences about urination and her bowel movements…4 sentences about her morning muesli…I actually love a very domestic novel obsessed with these minor details, but it felt very exhausting. The novel picks up a bit more when we learn a bit more about the character (and it also becomes clear that class is not a real consideration in the novel; the novel seems to exist in some mysterious zone where material considerations are all off-screen, which to me is a bit disorienting for a contemporary British novel tbh!) and we also delve into what is specifically unique about this character's way of thinking about literature.
It's a very fun novel to analyze—because it explores a space I'm fascinated by, with an approach that alienates me—but I'm only halfway through…curious if I will feel differently by the end
Sounds kinda fascinating! Interested to see your thoughts =]
I think also the negative response to anything that is perceived as “serious”, “political” or “ideological” in the US is partly down to a situation in which one particular ideology has become so dominant that it doesn’t need expressing (it’s simply like air, ubiquitous, weightless and transparent), and partly down to a generalized anti-intellectualism which as always lurked around American culture.
In the case of those who are happy to expend oodles of brainpower of the philosophy of the Stoics or the pronouncements of a New-Age healer, it’s clearly not the latter.
So I think by elimination the tendency among otherwise intelligent and inquisitive people to treat “politicized” art as repulsive is a learned response, peculiar to the Anglo-American sphere.
In the non-Anglophone world, political engagement is a normal thing to have as part of the experience of art and literature. They are not separate realms where art is somehow a pure and untainted experience floating loftily above ideology.
Having an ideological substrate makes the artitistic experience crunchier, with much more texture, than the rather bland products that the Anglosphere tends to churn out. I say that as an admirer of certain authors whose politics/philosophy I abhor, but whose work really is authentic and interesting. Engaging with why that is forms part of the fascination.
I think you're right. In a world where there are strong political litmus tests--such that if you hold the wrong political opinions you can't get published--then it's impossible to endorse politicized art.
I’ve been reading “In Defence of the Imagination” by Helen Gardner, and she quotes Auden, writing about the idea that A.E. Housman is “adolescent”.
“To grow up, does not mean to outgrow either childhood or adolescence, but to make use of them in an adult way. But for the child in us we should be incapable of intellectual curiosity; but for the adolescent, of serious feeling for other individuals. I imagine a person who had outgrown both though I’ve never met one he would be a complete social official being without personal identity. All the mature man can give his child an adolescent return for what they keep giving him are humility, humour, charity, and hope. He will never teach them to despise any strong passion, however, strange and limited, or to reject a poet like Housman, who gives it utterance.”
That's a good quote! Yes, I think a lot of authors and readers (a lot of adults in general!) are somehow mad at their adolescent selves for being, you know, young and dumb and (often) having poor taste.
I can only agree. There is a vague knowledge in modern writers that heroes need to be ‘complicated’, but it seems to take the form of presenting a character others perceive as heroic and then detailing why they actually suck deep down, rather than creating a character who is genuinely admirable while also being flawed. Perhaps some combination of cringing at the idea of a genuinely good person, and the reflex to ‘problematise’ that has displaced literary criticism.
I did find The Glass Bead Game very dry, though - sort of programmatic, like it was written to a blueprint without any contingency or inspiration. Count me among those who prefer The Magic Mountain!
That's fair enough. It's shocking how little happens in the book. Although nothing happens in The Magic Mountain either--but the latter feels fuller somehow
Just when I thought I was completely saturated at Substack, Henry Oliver had to link me to this vindication of my recent attempts at reading/re-reading GBs. About a year ago, Ted Gioia rekindled my interest in Hesse (after 4 decades or so) with his literary guide to death
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/death-a-literary-guide
I re-read TGBG & really enjoyed it. About a month ago, I got about a third of the way through The Magic Mountain (which I enjoyed as a youth) and gave up.
Many thanks, and I look forward to subscribing!
Thanks! Lol yes, I had the same experience with Mann's Doktor Faust. I was like...maybe not this year...
Yup. And Buddenbrooks. Nice to not feel alone 🙏
Have you ever read Hours in the Garden? Such a beautiful poem. But what do I know? I didn’t even realize there was such anti-Hesse sentiment out there, then or now.
In any case, I enjoyed the essay here.
Never read it =] The only poetry of his that I've read are the few poems in the Glass Bead Game. Yes it seems silly to be dismissive of Hesse, but it's a definite thing. He's always been more popular than respected.
Thinking about this and about @Henry Oliver’s recent post on Mary Oliver (no relation, at least I don’t think so) and ironic detachment vs. sincerity. I’ve certainly, to some extent, internalized the idea (very nineties/2000s) that there is something inherently naive or middlebrow or simply already done about earnestness.
So about that "literature of exhaustion." I think the correct retort to the idea that making the Sixth Symphony would be embarrassing today is to ask: embarrassing *for whom* ? Yesterday I was sitting down with Nathan Hill's "Wellness," sprinting through it before I have to return it to the library, and I came across a paragraph that really stood out to me:
"Jack's inaugural stroll through the Art Institute felt wondrous: seeing his first Picasso ever, his first in-person water lily, his first Pollock drip painting, his first Rothko, his first Rembrandt, seeing van Gogh's self-portrait, seeing Grant Wood's American Gothic. All of these same paintings that seemed so exhilarating and soul-filling to Jack were, in his studio class, treated as camp, as tourist bait for the rubes coming in from the suburbs."
And of course, most of these students are nineteen - far too young to be so jaded about art, or to have even seen all of those works in person. But then again, what could be more embarrassing in college than admitting you're a virgin?...
Why are art students so arrogant? It's really true everywhere--in my MFA people would talk trash when we had to read, like, Henry James or Ray Carver. They'd be like this is an old white guy. People aren't usually like that in English or Art History classes--it's something peculiar to young, practicing artists. I think it's just insecurity honestly.
Yes, Barth's statement hasn't aged well! I imagine in his day high art felt more secure and safe than it does today.
It’s funny — the cliche of “MFA fiction” is that it’s all dreary Raymond Carver imitations.
Carver was definitely more popular w my classmates than Henry James =]
James is certainly an acquired taste.
It’s funny — the cliche of “MFA fiction” is that it’s all dreary Raymond Carver imitations.
I guess what that quote is getting at is that, is that a modern musician who composes like Beethoven would be anachronistic, kitsch, refusing to move with the times or push the envelope — that his or her music would be a pastiche or a parody.
In terms of classical music, for instance, someone like Boulez argued that the western classical tradition was exhausted and that the future was atonality, serialism, and that the likes of Shostakovich were aesthetic reactionaries.
Have you ever read the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote?” It’s about exactly this idea.
I have! But isn't Borges arguing that it would be _more_ inventive and profound if someone who wasn't a 17th-century Spaniard composed DON QUIXOTE?
Borges' character is certainly arguing that. A relevant passage:
It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Menard with that of
Cervantes. The latter, for instance, wrote (Don Quixote, Part One,
Chapter Nine)
. . . la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito
de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente,
advertencia de lo por venir.
[. . . truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the
present, and warning to the future.]
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "ingenious layman"
Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history.
Menard, on the other hand, writes:
. . . la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito
de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente,
advertencia de lo por venir.
[. . . truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the
present, and warning to the future.]
History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a
contemporary of William James, does not define history as an
investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him,
is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final
clauses - example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future
- are shamelessly pragmatic.
Equally vivid is the contrast in styles. The archaic style of Menard -
in the last analysis, a foreigner - suffers from a certain affectation.
Not so that of his precursor, who handles easily the ordinary Spanish
of his time.
(The joke, or at least part of it being that the fictitious literary critic writing this essay is interpretating the exact same text in very different ways based on its "context;" the exact same prose style is ordinary for Cervantes and affected and archaic for Menard.)
You know, you might say that about Beethoven, but I think a person who composes "like Beethoven" in 2024 - by which I mean laboring under the constraints of harmony and counterpoint and all those wonderful awful things Debussy junked - is actually doing something really, really difficult and really impressive, and there are cynical reasons you might want to denigrate something so technically demanding. I don't think anyone in a poetry MFA is writing in pentameter, either.
I like all sorts of hokey art though, so take that with a grain of salt :-)
To be clear, I’m not saying that I would necessarily agree with that criticism, just that that would probably be the discourse around it.
And, to be fair, John Williams has become the most successful and beloved film composer ever by essentially writing music like a 19th century European Romantic symphonist.
LMAO, I was just going to say "explain John Williams, Mr. MFA!!"
For a second I thought you meant John Williams the writer (of STONER and AUGUSTUS), who's also a pretty old-fashioned writer!
I find that most poets are actually incapable of composing in pentameter--they simply don't hear meter! At my MFA program, the professors were very into form and meter--they were renowned across academic poetry for being old fuddy-duddies. I think now that this skill has been lost, it might actually be pretty avant-garde to revive it! I'm pretty good at meter--not to boast--I finally learned to hear it, after years and years of puzzlement, from reading Chaucer.
I am so, so charmed that your mind is more likely to jump to "Stoner" than to "Star Wars" :')
I guess what I was really getting at is this:
Since Impressionism (and maybe since Wordsworth and Coleridge catalyzed was would later be called British romanticism in the 1790s) our western received cultural narrative is one of succeeding avant-garde movements. That’s how art history is taught in a survey course, for instance.
One consequence of this is that our culture (western culture, possibly global culture) puts a unique emphasis on innovation, on “pushing the envelope” as an aesthetic goal in and of itself. (And, conversely, backwards-looking art as in some sense inauthentic, CF Greenberg’a classic “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”.)
This is the context in which rhyming poetry or common practice tonality is called exhausted by intelligentsia.
Does that make sense?
Oh, yeah, total sense. But I think instead of saying "our culture" we should specify "high culture" thinks this way - a layperson isn't really thinking of artists in conversation with each other across time, are they? (Unless it's really obvious, like LHOOQ or whatever.) They think of Van Eyck and Vermeer and Van Gogh as "guys who painted nice portraits" (if they think of the three at all) and probably don't realize literal centuries (plural!) separated their lives. Chronology is a project for elites.
You don't even need to think about "fine art" or even art made before WWII to see this in action, right? Punk killed prog, is the received wisdom, but plenty of kids born after 2000 go on /mu/ and cop to loving King Crimson *and* Black Flag, in a way that would blow the minds of a mosh pit c. 1982. Or imagine a kid for whom Public Enemy, De La Soul, and Biggie are all just "rap my dad likes." I would name the equivalent of this within jazz but I could not assemble a coherent chronology of the genre without consulting Wikipedia, which proves my point!!
I guess what that quote is getting at is that, is that a modern musician who composes like Beethoven would be anachronistic, kitsch, refusing to move with the times or push the envelope — that his or her music would be a pastiche or a parody.
In terms of classical music, for instance, someone like Boulez argued that the western classical tradition was exhausted and that the future was atonality, serialism, and that the likes of Shostakovich were aesthetic reactionaries.
Have you ever read the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote?” It’s about exactly this idea.
I think what's flawed in that Boulez argument, and what conversely is exposed in the complexity of Borges' treatment of the same idea, is the either/or nature of modernity vs premodernity that it supposes.
Borges was a master of inhabiting that ambiguous space where his stories and poems were at once rigorously classical and traditional, and at the same time subversive, parodic and ironic.
To me the best work made by artists and writers today tends to be in a similar space. This means that the work is always on the edge of the camp and the kitsch, and maybe even indulging in it, but still serious and engaged in something chewy and gritty, either political, philosophical or moral/spiritual.
For what it’s worth, I’m not a Boulez fan either, not really, and in his case his approach to classical music history — ie that it is teleological — is coming from his political ideology.
Excellent piece, I really need to get into Hesse. The whole discourse around politics in literature (usually saying that it shouldn't be overtly political) is strange to me, some of the best novels have been ridiculously unsubtle in their aims! Like what you said about Tolstoy. I wonder if many contemporary writers/critics steer clear of overt politics in their work because they don't actually have anything interesting to say, or they're unwilling to actually challenge their worldviews and 'test it' in a fictional world. Like you said, 'silly and shallow', and they'll stay that way as long as writers don't engage with those worldviews and fold them into their work.
There's a lot of things going on. I think amongst the people who aspire to write works of lasting importance, there's a distaste for the sort of agit-prop and posturing that can get you a reputation. But you can't really express that distaste openly without alienating your colleagues, so you just say fiction should be 'apolitical' or 'embrace ambiguity' instead. I also think a lot of people have controversial political opinions that they really couldn't get published. Like it's no accident that so many 19th-century Russian writers were more on the right-of-center side. If they'd been nihilists, the Czar's censorship office wouldn't have published them. So instead we get novel after novel decrying the nihilists and few novels by the nihilists themselves! And then, yeah, I also think a lot of people just have really boring politics--but most of the latter actually DO write political fiction. These are the #resistance writers who somehow think they're fighting Trump with their anti-racist allegory.
"The modern commercial novel is even more woolly and strange: it’s a fusion of the novel of manners, novel of sentiment, and the prose romance.
This has led to a dizzying array of conventions and expectations that, frankly, kinda get in the way of storytelling. It’s like with the reading I attended–everything about the book is so carefully “what it needs to be” that there is no room for the living impulse that is, presumably, the reason for telling this story in the first place."
I have mixed feelings on this point. On the one hand, I often think that a lot of mediocre art has resulted from the way we've distilled each art form into a science. Like, so many people have spent so much time studying the craft of writing (or film, or music, or...) that we know exactly how to structure a scene so that it moves along as a brisk pace and elicits all the right emotions at the right moments. Even Marvel movies, of all things, have this figured out. But so often there's no substance, just nothing there underneath all that "craft." So we're left with a lot of competent but utterly mediocre books/TV/film/etc (aside: this peak competence has even robbed us of the "so bad it's good movie," a category I'm afraid is never coming back). And so I kind of want some authors to come in and bust up the craft.
On the other hand, though, it's not like this craft emerged from some conspiracy. All these different types of novels merged together in a natural evolution of the art of literature, and that happened because those techniques work. They just do. And they've become what we think of as "literature." Maybe the earlier forms were just building blocks, creating what we have today. So you can throw that synthesis away, but you kind of do it at your own peril, right?
I'll admit this is really only a half-formed thought.
I don't think Hesse is "entirely artless" but then again I haven't read him since I was an adolescent! I do find it a bit unfair when critics speak of him as if he's just one step above Ayn Rand in terms of literary respectability though.
But in general, I don't know what exactly to make of the situation where literature today seems either completely divorced from the world of ideas or just parroting the shallowest arguments from the intelligentsia. Maybe the problem is me, I'm not reading the right novels or attending the right salons, or I'm too thin-skinned to take seriously something that really challenges me...
As for the other stuff, yeah sometimes I do wonder if I'm not getting it--like can people really be publishing books in 2024 that're just like "fascism is bad" or "racism is bad" or "racism exists" or "the government shouldn't bother sexual minorities". There must be more to it than that surely? I'm sure sometimes I don't give these books enough of a chance, but other times I think they're just shallow. It's hard to say--you've only got one life, and how many times are you really going to take a chance on a "brilliant, emotional, incisive" contemporary novel when you've been bored by so many others before
Oh yeah I realized that adjective was confusing. I meant it as a compliment. The book is art, but it doesn't seem like it's trying to be art
Great article. I read The Glass Bead Game a few years ago, on a friend’s recommendation, and it actually played a part in nudging me towards a career change.
Thinking about this and about @Henry Oliver’s recent post on Mary Oliver (no relation, at least I don’t think so) and ironic detachment vs. sincerity. I’ve certainly, to some extent, internalized the idea (very nineties/2000s) that there is something inherently naive or middlebrow or simply already done about earnestness.