I really appreciate the clarity of your thinking and writing. From a certain vantage, I think both Sinykin and Lorentzen are asking what it means when someone "makes it." Here, you reify what's at stake. Making it is being read--possibly widely--and finding an exit from the horserace. Lorentzen and Sinykin use different prisms to analyze the oil coating the "anointed," but neither seems to offer satisfactory accountings of the criteria by which they were selected.
You really hit on something important in your personal ethics section as well. To some extent, who gets read and why is inscrutable. Whether it's aesthetic superiority or corporate machinations that elevate it, chosen art is exclusive. Written output is never-ending and ineluctable, so our reading decisions can't be guided by personal affinity or social bonds. Substack's dynamics really bring out the skew of "writers" to "readers." It's not difficult to see a Darwinian cast to the whole enterprise.
Anyway, maybe on some level, we see ourselves as Kafkas in search of Brods. Recognition, whether from the literati or the machine, is the carrot and the stick.
I understand Lorentzen's point but I was struck by his disdain for the sociology of literature approach. For me grappling with book as commodity is part of the process of reading deeply
Same! I just didn't get the hate for it. Another commenter said that was a reaction to the perception that "sociology of literature" had taken over the English list departments, muscling out more traditional approaches. That makes sense, but Lorentzen isn't an academic! And neither are most of the readers of Granta, or most of the commenters--I think for most of us, sociology of literature still feels very fresh!
I know! I was so horrified by the actions of that Grub Street clique during the Bad Art Friend saga. I was like...this poor woman! The lifting of her language was clearly plagiarism, but even beyond that it's just hurtful to portray her as privileged and out of touch when there was clearly kind of a big difference in terms of social class and connectedness between her and the people she was feuding with. Liked your substack post about it! It's true! Being a non-directed donor, even if it was totally for selfish and egotistical and "white savior" reasons, is objectively a much better thing than the best thing most people have done in their lives.
I have issue with this "why isn't there a new Shakespeare" thing, mostly because I think it's meaningless.
Do you mean "why isn't somebody writing modern Shakespeare plays?" It's not really possible -- the best you can do is pastiche/homage, the worst is parody. There's a guy who wrote every Star Wars movie as a Shakespeare play. I have a copy of the first one -- it's pretty good! The author is clearly a big fan of Shakespeare, and he wrote good verse, wordplay, etc. The plot isn't really any more or less complex than a Shakespeare play, and works in the same broad storytelling strokes. So it's pretty good. But it's not, you know, GOOD. It's a fun pastiche. The only way to do better would involve a time machine.
But if you mean "why isn't anyone writing anything as good as Shakespeare, just in a modern form/genre," my response ranges from "they are" to "how on Earth do you even quantify that?" I really don't think I'm being pedantic with that. HAMILTON is a genre-defining recent piece of theater. Yeah, it's become popular to make fun of it on social media, but go to Disney+ and watch it. It's very good. If we get into TV/film (which are probably the successors to theater) there's tons of fantastic stuff over the past 10-20 years. I think SUCCESSION is as good a drama as Shakespeare ("You can't make a Tomelette without breaking a few Greggs" is a Shakespeare-worthy pun and "what good is a soul anyways?" is just fantastic. Everything about Tom and Greg is Shakespeare). And while the recent release shelf at the bookstore is filled with stuff that almost certainly won't last, you have to expand the time scale a bit. Shakespeare was surrounded by decades and centuries of very little. We can all write our own lists of best books of the last 20/50/100 years. My personal lists would include Marlon James, Phillip Pullman, and others.
All that is to say, I'm more optimistic about the state of the arts, but also more pessimistic about the odds of the unpublished geniuses out there. The internet makes it easier for people to bypass the normal gatekeepers, and basically everything I've read that went this direction has been quite bad. When I do find an interesting writer who self publishes, it tends to be someone who has also already been traditionally published. And that doesn't count!
Yes, but you have a problem of scale. When Shakespeare wrote there were ten or twenty thousand people in existence who had even his level of education and literacy with the English language. That means we ought to have a Shakespeare in every moderate-sized town in America. Every high school should be incubating, if not a Shakespeare, then at least a Marlowe. Are they? For a nation of three hundred and fifty million people--all of them literate--to produce in a year as much literary genius as a nation of four million people, only a fifth of them literate to any degree, and only a hundredth of them educated up to a secondary-school level, is itself evidence of a decline.
But I would argue that the reason is that 'genius' is a socially constructed category. The population increases, but the number of 'spots' for genius doesn't increase to the same degree. It's not particularly about quality. A given time and a place will acclaim something as genius simply because they need for geniuses to exist, regardless of whether the work is truly timeless. The geniuses of some time and places are not universal and timeless; the geniuses of others are. It's only in the unique circumstance that a given culture's time-bound standards align with what is truly good and timeless that their genius endures.
This is a side point, but McGurl’s book drove me crazy. He started by talking about the subject of the book, which is the history of the writers’ workshop and how it has affected craft, but spends most of the book *not* talking about that.
I agree! If you're going to do sociology you need to actually do it! By, for instance, looking at what actually happens in workshops. Instead he just had these theories about how writing programs might affect fiction and then tried to read those traces in the fictions themselves. Was a bit of an embarrassing performance.
Having floated around some pretty prestigious places without exactly meeting a bumper crop of dazzling geniuses, I'd like to think there are a ton of totally unrecognized true geniuses out there, but I think it really depends on the medium, with literary writing being where there probably really is the greatest proportion of undiscovered talent that could do just as well as anyone if they landed the book deal and publicity apparatus. But in more immediately visceral media like music or film I tend to think probably somewhat more of the talent who are able to keep at it for a while eventually earn some recognition. I'm not sure if I buy that some unknown band not signed to a label made an album as good as Dark Side of the Moon that has stayed unknown -- even a tragic case like Big Star eventually got recognized by hipsters at least.
But don't we have as an example every genius who did indeed languish in obscurity before breaking out? Do we think there is a magic that makes people unfailingly rediscover every Melville? Moreover for the sixty years between the publication of Moby dick and it's rediscovery wasn't Melville in fact an unknown genius? The man working at the customs house quite literally was America's greatest novelist...and nobody knew it.
I do think there's oodles of undiscovered talent in literary writing that goes unrecognized, due in part to the relatively limited audience and the attention span it takes to read a novella or novel as opposed to take in a pop song or short film. Since writers don't need to master musical instruments or rent a recording studio or hire a camera crew, many more of them can fully actualize their gifts if they give it enough time, and yet stand little chance of making it in the marketplace against all the competition.
But I'm not sure the Melville example is still applicable in this day and age--it was such a different context back then, long before radio, cinema, television or smartphones offered the printed word any competition and even longer before generations of "The Big Sort" had so polarized society demographically. (Plus, Moby Dick is a really weird book! I love it, but each chapter is like eating a different decadent slice of cake and it doesn't quite all hang together as a cohesive narrative that very many Americans of any era could readily relate to. Part of the book's renown, and why it took decades to rediscover, is that it provides critics and academics so much to argue about and expound upon as opposed to the way simplified movie version, or the cable miniseries starring Patrick Stewart!)
You're not alone amongst heterodox substackers in being skeptical of the idea that there's a lot of undiscovered genius out there. Sam Kahn and Daniel Oppenheimer routinely also disagree with me on this. What I don't get is that you tend to think our institutions are corrupt, self-serving, full of incompetent careerists BUT you think those institutions generally get it right when selecting the winners and losers in the artistic game? If the latter, then can we really say the institutions are bad? Doesn't that mean they're actually rather good and healthy?
Would say much of the problem is how putting together, honing, and rolling out a viable product to compete in the saturated, exhausted, fragmented 21st century media marketplace tends to require a whole galaxy of skills, connections, and maneuvering that few can manage or assemble on their own. My mother has a friend who's written and illustrated the most amazingly whimsical children's books that she used to print herself, but she's an aging dreamy creative without much sensibility for business or marketing or calibrating for variegated audiences. Despite abundant talents it's not hard to see why her easily potentially more promising products didn't quite take off without anyone more savvy/cynical to help her navigate the playing field. Much of the tragedy of the status quo is that so many super talented people best equipped to approach those challenges have been too misdirected into navel-gazing and wild goose chases to apply their gifts to very much genuine nuanced problem solving.
That’s fair. I’m not philosophically opposed to studying literature in that way, I just wish there was more room for other approaches within the university.
Yes I don't know much about the inside baseball aspect. I do think there's a large degree to which a readers response to the text is socially constructed, and I wish there was more study of that phenomenon! Im not sure other peoples close readings are that fruitful anymore, at least for me. I already know how I experience the text--I would rather learn more about how the lay reader experiences it or about how it's been experienced throughout time.
I’m honestly a bit perplexed by the way the Lorentzen article has been reduced to conglomerate vs. genius (Barkan’s response did this, too). I didn’t take Lorentzen to be defending literary genius but rather a type of criticism that engages deeply with the text, which is at odds with the sociological reading Sinykin does. This is a battle that has played out in English departments over many years with Sinykin’s view becoming dominant, and I see Lorentzen’s article as a sort of cri de coeur (albeit it in his understated way) defending a certain type of reading and analysis. I appreciated this essay, too, but just wanted to comment as I’ve been feeling like I almost read a different essay than most people. Of course, my interpretation of and appreciation for the Lorentzen article is also influenced by my own experience studying English in academia and my opposition to the direction it’s taken.
I really appreciate the clarity of your thinking and writing. From a certain vantage, I think both Sinykin and Lorentzen are asking what it means when someone "makes it." Here, you reify what's at stake. Making it is being read--possibly widely--and finding an exit from the horserace. Lorentzen and Sinykin use different prisms to analyze the oil coating the "anointed," but neither seems to offer satisfactory accountings of the criteria by which they were selected.
You really hit on something important in your personal ethics section as well. To some extent, who gets read and why is inscrutable. Whether it's aesthetic superiority or corporate machinations that elevate it, chosen art is exclusive. Written output is never-ending and ineluctable, so our reading decisions can't be guided by personal affinity or social bonds. Substack's dynamics really bring out the skew of "writers" to "readers." It's not difficult to see a Darwinian cast to the whole enterprise.
Anyway, maybe on some level, we see ourselves as Kafkas in search of Brods. Recognition, whether from the literati or the machine, is the carrot and the stick.
I understand Lorentzen's point but I was struck by his disdain for the sociology of literature approach. For me grappling with book as commodity is part of the process of reading deeply
Same! I just didn't get the hate for it. Another commenter said that was a reaction to the perception that "sociology of literature" had taken over the English list departments, muscling out more traditional approaches. That makes sense, but Lorentzen isn't an academic! And neither are most of the readers of Granta, or most of the commenters--I think for most of us, sociology of literature still feels very fresh!
This was totally fascinating and I'm not sure exactly why, but the story reminded me of the bad art friend:
https://open.substack.com/pub/rajivsethi/p/kidney-donor-chains?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7wld5
(Got a very nice message from Dawn Dorland after I posted the above)
I know! I was so horrified by the actions of that Grub Street clique during the Bad Art Friend saga. I was like...this poor woman! The lifting of her language was clearly plagiarism, but even beyond that it's just hurtful to portray her as privileged and out of touch when there was clearly kind of a big difference in terms of social class and connectedness between her and the people she was feuding with. Liked your substack post about it! It's true! Being a non-directed donor, even if it was totally for selfish and egotistical and "white savior" reasons, is objectively a much better thing than the best thing most people have done in their lives.
I have issue with this "why isn't there a new Shakespeare" thing, mostly because I think it's meaningless.
Do you mean "why isn't somebody writing modern Shakespeare plays?" It's not really possible -- the best you can do is pastiche/homage, the worst is parody. There's a guy who wrote every Star Wars movie as a Shakespeare play. I have a copy of the first one -- it's pretty good! The author is clearly a big fan of Shakespeare, and he wrote good verse, wordplay, etc. The plot isn't really any more or less complex than a Shakespeare play, and works in the same broad storytelling strokes. So it's pretty good. But it's not, you know, GOOD. It's a fun pastiche. The only way to do better would involve a time machine.
But if you mean "why isn't anyone writing anything as good as Shakespeare, just in a modern form/genre," my response ranges from "they are" to "how on Earth do you even quantify that?" I really don't think I'm being pedantic with that. HAMILTON is a genre-defining recent piece of theater. Yeah, it's become popular to make fun of it on social media, but go to Disney+ and watch it. It's very good. If we get into TV/film (which are probably the successors to theater) there's tons of fantastic stuff over the past 10-20 years. I think SUCCESSION is as good a drama as Shakespeare ("You can't make a Tomelette without breaking a few Greggs" is a Shakespeare-worthy pun and "what good is a soul anyways?" is just fantastic. Everything about Tom and Greg is Shakespeare). And while the recent release shelf at the bookstore is filled with stuff that almost certainly won't last, you have to expand the time scale a bit. Shakespeare was surrounded by decades and centuries of very little. We can all write our own lists of best books of the last 20/50/100 years. My personal lists would include Marlon James, Phillip Pullman, and others.
All that is to say, I'm more optimistic about the state of the arts, but also more pessimistic about the odds of the unpublished geniuses out there. The internet makes it easier for people to bypass the normal gatekeepers, and basically everything I've read that went this direction has been quite bad. When I do find an interesting writer who self publishes, it tends to be someone who has also already been traditionally published. And that doesn't count!
Yes, but you have a problem of scale. When Shakespeare wrote there were ten or twenty thousand people in existence who had even his level of education and literacy with the English language. That means we ought to have a Shakespeare in every moderate-sized town in America. Every high school should be incubating, if not a Shakespeare, then at least a Marlowe. Are they? For a nation of three hundred and fifty million people--all of them literate--to produce in a year as much literary genius as a nation of four million people, only a fifth of them literate to any degree, and only a hundredth of them educated up to a secondary-school level, is itself evidence of a decline.
But I would argue that the reason is that 'genius' is a socially constructed category. The population increases, but the number of 'spots' for genius doesn't increase to the same degree. It's not particularly about quality. A given time and a place will acclaim something as genius simply because they need for geniuses to exist, regardless of whether the work is truly timeless. The geniuses of some time and places are not universal and timeless; the geniuses of others are. It's only in the unique circumstance that a given culture's time-bound standards align with what is truly good and timeless that their genius endures.
This is a side point, but McGurl’s book drove me crazy. He started by talking about the subject of the book, which is the history of the writers’ workshop and how it has affected craft, but spends most of the book *not* talking about that.
I agree! If you're going to do sociology you need to actually do it! By, for instance, looking at what actually happens in workshops. Instead he just had these theories about how writing programs might affect fiction and then tried to read those traces in the fictions themselves. Was a bit of an embarrassing performance.
Having floated around some pretty prestigious places without exactly meeting a bumper crop of dazzling geniuses, I'd like to think there are a ton of totally unrecognized true geniuses out there, but I think it really depends on the medium, with literary writing being where there probably really is the greatest proportion of undiscovered talent that could do just as well as anyone if they landed the book deal and publicity apparatus. But in more immediately visceral media like music or film I tend to think probably somewhat more of the talent who are able to keep at it for a while eventually earn some recognition. I'm not sure if I buy that some unknown band not signed to a label made an album as good as Dark Side of the Moon that has stayed unknown -- even a tragic case like Big Star eventually got recognized by hipsters at least.
But don't we have as an example every genius who did indeed languish in obscurity before breaking out? Do we think there is a magic that makes people unfailingly rediscover every Melville? Moreover for the sixty years between the publication of Moby dick and it's rediscovery wasn't Melville in fact an unknown genius? The man working at the customs house quite literally was America's greatest novelist...and nobody knew it.
I do think there's oodles of undiscovered talent in literary writing that goes unrecognized, due in part to the relatively limited audience and the attention span it takes to read a novella or novel as opposed to take in a pop song or short film. Since writers don't need to master musical instruments or rent a recording studio or hire a camera crew, many more of them can fully actualize their gifts if they give it enough time, and yet stand little chance of making it in the marketplace against all the competition.
But I'm not sure the Melville example is still applicable in this day and age--it was such a different context back then, long before radio, cinema, television or smartphones offered the printed word any competition and even longer before generations of "The Big Sort" had so polarized society demographically. (Plus, Moby Dick is a really weird book! I love it, but each chapter is like eating a different decadent slice of cake and it doesn't quite all hang together as a cohesive narrative that very many Americans of any era could readily relate to. Part of the book's renown, and why it took decades to rediscover, is that it provides critics and academics so much to argue about and expound upon as opposed to the way simplified movie version, or the cable miniseries starring Patrick Stewart!)
You're not alone amongst heterodox substackers in being skeptical of the idea that there's a lot of undiscovered genius out there. Sam Kahn and Daniel Oppenheimer routinely also disagree with me on this. What I don't get is that you tend to think our institutions are corrupt, self-serving, full of incompetent careerists BUT you think those institutions generally get it right when selecting the winners and losers in the artistic game? If the latter, then can we really say the institutions are bad? Doesn't that mean they're actually rather good and healthy?
Would say much of the problem is how putting together, honing, and rolling out a viable product to compete in the saturated, exhausted, fragmented 21st century media marketplace tends to require a whole galaxy of skills, connections, and maneuvering that few can manage or assemble on their own. My mother has a friend who's written and illustrated the most amazingly whimsical children's books that she used to print herself, but she's an aging dreamy creative without much sensibility for business or marketing or calibrating for variegated audiences. Despite abundant talents it's not hard to see why her easily potentially more promising products didn't quite take off without anyone more savvy/cynical to help her navigate the playing field. Much of the tragedy of the status quo is that so many super talented people best equipped to approach those challenges have been too misdirected into navel-gazing and wild goose chases to apply their gifts to very much genuine nuanced problem solving.
That’s fair. I’m not philosophically opposed to studying literature in that way, I just wish there was more room for other approaches within the university.
Yes I don't know much about the inside baseball aspect. I do think there's a large degree to which a readers response to the text is socially constructed, and I wish there was more study of that phenomenon! Im not sure other peoples close readings are that fruitful anymore, at least for me. I already know how I experience the text--I would rather learn more about how the lay reader experiences it or about how it's been experienced throughout time.
I’m honestly a bit perplexed by the way the Lorentzen article has been reduced to conglomerate vs. genius (Barkan’s response did this, too). I didn’t take Lorentzen to be defending literary genius but rather a type of criticism that engages deeply with the text, which is at odds with the sociological reading Sinykin does. This is a battle that has played out in English departments over many years with Sinykin’s view becoming dominant, and I see Lorentzen’s article as a sort of cri de coeur (albeit it in his understated way) defending a certain type of reading and analysis. I appreciated this essay, too, but just wanted to comment as I’ve been feeling like I almost read a different essay than most people. Of course, my interpretation of and appreciation for the Lorentzen article is also influenced by my own experience studying English in academia and my opposition to the direction it’s taken.
I understand what Lorentzen wants. I just think that what sociology of literature is more valuable than he gives it credit for.
Very perceptive, and very good natured. Keep up the good work!