The incoherence of the literary critics

My friend sent a few text messages, asking for a pep talk. I'm excellent at these, so I told her sure, and we arranged a time to call.

—Give me the biggest, most over the top one you can possibly imagine, she said. I'm feeling pretty low.

My friend was both a genius and a loser. She was romantically unsuccessful (on the roller-coaster of hookups and situationships) and professionally unsuccessful too. She was in one of those careers that require ten years of education and apprenticeship, during which time, unless you're one of the chosen few, you're systematically squeezed out. Our friendship was based on the shared assumption that this corrupt world was rigged against talented people (like the two of us).

The most recent crisis of confidence had occurred because her mentor was being distant, uncommunicative, telling her "the job market is so hard nowadays". It was clear to me that he was trying to wave her off the runway, tell her to find other landing spots. Industry, non-profit work, a rich husband—anything but the career she'd dreamed about since she was thirteen.

—Meanwhile Lira's mentor is amazing-she put Lira up for a fellowship that's essentially fully funding her life for the next two years. No applications allowed, you need to be recommended.

—Yep, I said. Lira is anointed.¹

—How do I get anointed? Am I just delusional?

We were speaking on the phone. This friend was perhaps the only person to whom I talked on the phone. I had started out in the same field of professional endeavor, but I'd chosen the rich husband exit, which allowed me to dabble, still contributing original work and participating in conferences. But I smarted under the lash of general disinterest in my work. From the outside I looked like someone who couldn’t hack it and had left the field, but that wasn’t true! I’d left because I’d seen a way of making a career without dealing with all the ensuing financial hassle. I'd been smarter, better!

Obviously there’s no way for you, the reader, to figure out if the two of us are genuinely losers or not. We hadn't definitively failed in our ambitions, and we hadn't definitively succeeded—we were mired in the middle, and I'm sure some others below us envied us in turn. We could've just chosen to have some perspective about our lack of success, but have you ever tried just "getting some perspective?" How did you go about it? I don't think a definitive method exists.

I proceeded to give my friend an extremely good pep talk. It was absolutely over the top. I told her that she was a world-historical genius on par with the titans of Western civilization, that she was smarter by far than the losers, and that the world needed her voice.

As an aside, my friend was extremely bad at reciprocal pep talks. Whenever I complained to her, she would say some vague shit about how our field is “so hard and unfair.” It was never specifically tailored to my situation. She never called me a genius, she never said I shouldn't quit, she never said the world deserved my voice. I had the impression that she thought I was luckier than I deserved, since I was financially comfortable. I confronted her about it once, saying, I want you to tell me that you think my work is of world-class quality. She was silent—she literally ghosted on the text thread, and we never discussed it again.

---

My pep talks might’ve been OTT, but they were also serious: I actually thought my friend was a genius and deserved to take meetings with the President and get profiled by the New Yorker. And about five years later, I got my chance to do her a good turn.

One of the life's ironies is that people of middling status are often asked to stand in judgement of our betters. We serve on the awards juries and hiring committees because more successful people can't be arsed to do it. But most people of middling status are relentlessly mediocre, right down to their very essence. They sit around name-dropping, talking about the time they took a class with such-and-such, and the time they had a conference with who-zit, and what blippley-blop once said about their book. Most people of middling status got there because, unlike low-status people, they were willing to conform. They were willing to affirm the principles that had marked them as not being worthy of undue notice. They lacked any element of ressentiment, and this made them safe and useful—high-status people could trust the middling folks to keep institutions running smoothly.

My friend wasn't really in the running for the award that I was adjudicating. They were in the pile of people who were notionally eligible but who had no major institutional backing and, thus, no real chance. I have no idea why it works out this way, but year after year, it is only the people who are "supposed to win" who actually win these things, even though absolutely nothing stands in the way of someone making a spoiler pick.

In this case, I vigorously argued for her—I was absolutely uncool about it, refusing point-blank to sign off on any short-list that didn't include her. And because the panel was full of weaklings, they allowed it. Although she didn't win, her inclusion was so unexpected that it resulted in a rush of coverage. She got a permanent job in our field. Her work was given much more attention, and she began receiving invitations to speak. Her earnings potential increased. She could afford a house. A few years later, she won that same award outright. Soon her reputation far exceeded mine.

If you're wondering whether she lent me a helping hand in return, the answer is she did enough to ease her conscience. She said nice things about my work in a few interviews. But when a job was advertised at her institution, I contacted her, saying I at least wanted to be short-listed.

—But you don't need the money!

—I need a landing spot, I said. Without it, I'm limited. If I got this job, I'd make it work—my husband would move, he can work remote.

—You don't need the money though.

—I am telling you this would make a huge difference, I said.

—Well I'm not on the committee...

—But you could do something.

—I really can't.

—You could talk to someone, say something. Fight for me.

—I'll do my best.

Of course I wasn't shortlisted. I wasn’t even interviewed. I expected as much. Soon after I blocked my friend on social media.

All I want to know is whether she truly thought there was nothing she could do (false, if a superstar wants someone shortlisted, then they will be), or if she knew, but she refused, because in her opinion I simply didn't merit the position. Either way, did she retain her integrity, or did she lose it? When I gave the award to my friend, did I retain my integrity, or did I lose it?

Unclear. The underlying values are murky—you have no idea whether I or her were really deserving of what we got. Nowadays I sometimes hear about my friend's great successes, and I know that without me, she'd still be living in a shared house, calling me up in tears after yet another rejection. I'm obviously embittered by how she dropped me—I proved myself a middle-tier talent at heart, rewarding someone I knew in my heart of hearts considered herself better than me. If I have a regret, it's not that I selected her as a winner—the alternative to rewarding your friends is simply to let powerful institutions pick the winners for you, and I don't see how that's better. No, my regret is that I selected such an unworthy friend in the first place. It's not a mistake I'll make again.

Meanwhile, my true work continues, and I hope before my death to receive some measure of recognition.

---

Afterword

Earlier this year, Dan Sinykin published a book called Big Fiction, about how literary fiction has, in the last forty years, become a big business. I haven’t read it, because I don’t need to read the reality that I live! But I’m glad he wrote it! I’ve been frustrated by the degree to which literary writers don’t recognize that this is a business, and that some literary writers are making a lot of money! That immensely wealthy corporations are now in the genius business, the anointing business, and to that end they’re willing to pay a lot of money ($1.5m to Ocean Vuong or $2m to Emma Cline) to first-time novelists that they think can capture that ‘genius’ market.

A few weeks ago, Christian Lorentzen posted a review of Big Fiction and a take-down of the entire field of “the sociology of literature”. I don’t disagree with his point, which is that the sociology of literature is really not particularly concerned with the act of reading or with what people get from reading literature. And that when sociologists of literature try to do close reading or analyze books in themselves, the results are often embarrassing. I stopped reading The Program Era, another very good book, because McGurk started trying to read various novels as analogies for the workshop itself, and the whole thing was stupid. I gather that Sinykin does the same thing, trying to read the fact of corporate conglomeration into the works themselves, and that’s dumb. Writing happens prior to publication. The processes that bring a book to public attention can’t really operate on that book itself, because the book must already be written for it to be subjected to those processes! As Lorentzen writes:

Corporate publishing is the channel through which literature happens to flow at this moment in history….Those [books] that last will retain trace impurities from the conglomerate system, but the presence of the corporate taint – I mean, the colophon – won’t be the reason we continue to read them, nor was it the reason we read them in the first place.

What sociologists of literature and traditional literary critics fail to understand is that there is an immense substrate of unpublished books out there that are very good. There is a Cormac McCarthy who just doesn’t get published. There is a Cormac McCarthy who publishes their Blood Meridian, sells a thousand copies, and stops writing. There is a Cormac McCarthy who doesn’t have the imprimatur of the National Book Award, so they don’t get that big book deal later on from a big corporate publisher.

I think it is simultaneously possible to say that Cormac McCarthy is a great writer and that he is a product that was sold to us. I am happy with the product! I loved consuming the product! But he was still a product. Back when Cormac was only selling a thousand copies per book, I probably wouldn’t have known about him! I only know about him because he got a huge book deal and got foisted on me! Blood Meridian was a great book back when it was published, but if he had died at that moment instead of living to publish much more commercially successful books, I likely never would’ve read Blood Meridian! To me that’s just a fact. Cormac McCarthy’s career is an immense outlier, and implicit in the concept of an outlier is the idea that there are many people who are just like this person, but who don’t get their big break. There must be many Blood Meridian’s out there right now! I surely hope some of their authors live long enough to write an All The Pretty Horses so that they eventually rise to my attention!

To say that genius always finds a way just seems illogical. Genius doesn’t always find a way. Genius is actually much more common than we think it is! Genius arises and is preserved because of social conditions that are favorable to genius! That’s why in an Athens of maybe 200,000 people, we have six literary geniuses (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle). Their genius was nurtured by the polis, and then the preservation of the fruits of that genius became a part of the projection of Greek power across the Mediterranean. Sociology and genius are inextricably intertwined. Were there geniuses in other cities? Probably! It’s certainly striking that most of the early Greek philosophers came not from Athens but from Ionia—all the pre-Socratics philosophers are Ionian. We don’t have their work, why? Because their cities were conquered by Lydia and then by Persia—their genius wasn’t allied to a powerful state. But I also think certain places just cultivate genius. Athens was a uniquely democratic place, where the people were uniquely educated and cultivated. Lots of places have sacred festivals where people put on plays, but only in Athens did the people demand high literary quality from their plays. The York Mystery Plays are beautiful—mystery plays were the only theater in England for hundreds of years—but there was no demand, by the population, for literary improvisation, so they didn’t become the finely-honed literary products like the Greek dramas. Great audiences create great literature.

So while I obviously believe in talent and literature and even in the possibility of universal genius that transcends a given time and place, I do find myself ultimately thinking we should be paying more attention to the sociology of literature. Unless we view universal genius as something arising in conversation between an artist and their audience (and mediated by the processes that allow that conversation to happen) then a lot of our assumptions about literature simply don’t make sense! Without that feedback between author, audience, and culture—if it becomes merely a matter of individual vision and talent—then it becomes truly baffling why, given the unprecedented number of books currently being published, we’re not awash with Shakespeares and Platos today! Clearly it's because the processes that would give rise to that genius and bring it to our attention have in some way failed, and no account of the modern literary landscape can be complete without some insight into those processes themselves. In short, if you read a book and it's bad, then you should ask yourself not “Why is this book bad?” but rather, “Why am I not currently reading a good book?” And the answer to the latter question is invariably sociological rather than literary.²

A note on my personal ethics

Surely nobody can have read my various tales over the past six weeks and come away thinking that I’m some great moral exemplar. I’ve been on two awards juries in my life, and luckily in neither case have I come across the book of a friend of mine, but I would undoubtedly shortlist a close friend if I thought it would help them and if their book was at all a plausible candidate.

But the ethics that’ve concerned me most recently are those surrounding Substack. We are in a good time for Substack—it’s still possible to build an audience organically, through peers sharing your work, without any need for advertising or any external hook. This opportunity will eventually go away. In three or four years, the algorithms will change, and they’ll start pushing us to advertise on the platform if we want to attract new readers. Then in six to ten years, the platform will either explode or fade away, and it’ll be on to the next thing.

The challenge in this time will be to build an audience that’s big enough that you become attractive to mainstream outlets—building awards, fellowships, book deals, and credentials that give you a head start in the next medium or platform. From each such gold rush, there’ll be a few winners, and many losers. I don’t judge anyone for what they do to try and be one of the winners.

I remember back when I was starting out as a writer, there was a forum for semi-professional sci-fi writers (people who’d sold a story or two). At this forum, a group of people learned to game the voting system for the Nebula Awards, and for a while, the members of this forum dominated Nebula Awards shortlists. I definitely tried to get in on the gold rush! I sent my stories out internally for consideration! But I never got traction: maybe I wasn’t popular or assiduous enough, or maybe my work wasn’t good enough. Some of the people who got nominations from that process were able to parlay those nominations into book deals, TV, or game-writing gigs. They won the scramble!

The others, like me, are left with the regret that we participated in a sordid process. We have all the guilt and none of the rewards. It’s the same with Dimes Square—a few people won out, while everyone else will have to live forever with the things they said and did to try and attract attention.

I do not judge anyone for what they say or do to get ahead, but I, personally, am at the mid-point of my career, and I am financially stable. My main priority right now is to have fun and to preserve my creativity, so that I am productive and mentally-healthy during the thirty or forty years I have remaining to me as a writer. To that end, I wanted to make some notes about my own use of this platform.

1. I do not expect anyone to read or share my work (and that includes my novel) - All else equal, it is normal for fans to become friends, for friends to become fans, and for friends to help each other. If someone comes to my events, reads and shares my work, gives a good review to my novel, etc, then I’m naturally going to be well-disposed to them. I’ll look at their work, and, human nature being what it is, I will likely enjoy it. However, reading a novel is a huge time commitment. I do not expect anyone to read my book. I won’t be offended if they don’t. I, like everyone else, have limited time and interest for contemporary work, and I have hundreds of writer friends—most of their work I don’t read, and I will not read. Most of them won’t read my work either, and that’s fine.

2. If you unsubscribe, I won’t be offended—I unsubscribe to Substacks all the time, simply because I’ve stopped reading them regularly. Peoples’ time is precious, and nobody should feel compelled to read anything they don’t want to. I extend to you the same grace and understanding I extend to myself. We can still be friends, and even deepen our friendship, if the occasion arises, without you subscribing to my substack!

3. I do not expect any reciprocity in terms of commenting, sharing, or recommending - Yes, if someone comments on my blog regularly or recommends my stuff or DMs me, I often check out their stuff. But not always! Often I don’t have the time. I do Substack in the interstices of the day. Some regular commenters probably have great work, and I’ve just never thought to click through. Maybe I will someday, maybe I won’t. Similarly, if I like or restack or recommend you, there is no obligation to the same to me. I will not be offended at all if you don’t.

4. I am not expecting great things from this Substack - Yes, I love this platform, and I love this newsletter, and I am putting quite a bit of creative energy into it. I do think some writers will find great success here and will achieve mainstream literary stardom. I would definitely like to be one of them! But I do not expect to be. I’ve now failed to get traction on three or four different platforms (Medium, Wordpress and Twitter amongst them), and I just don’t think I’m hungry enough. I would love for people to like and re-stack and recommend me. But only do it if you genuinely think other people would be interested in the work. There’s no need to do it just to please me or befriend me. I really do not know at the moment what my future as a writer holds. I very much enjoying writing my tales—I’d like to develop the form and see what I can do with it. I do not know whether or not they’ll ever be something I can publish in book form, or if that book will ever get traction. Similarly, I’m happy to write for more mainstream publications if they want me, but I’m not actively pitching right now. I have my Great Books book coming out next year, and I’m working on revisions as we speak. After that, I don’t know—I might work on some novel projects, and I might not. A literary agent recently wrote on substack, “Why would you expect other people to read your work, if you’re not reading contemporary work?” The answer is I genuinely don’t know why anyone would read a contemporary novel right now. I’d like someday to write something that is so original that I can say “You should read this because there’s nothing else like it.” I think with my tales I’m starting to do that. Moreover, Substack is something I do read, so I feel okay about putting out posts for other people. But yeah…when I walk into a bookstore these days, I mostly just feel exhaustion, and I have no idea what I could possibly contribute that might stand out.

Finally, this section isn’t about anyone in particular! It really not about you, whoever you are. I’ve found Substack to be such a wonderful and affirming community, and this section is mostly a note to myself to allow it to remain that way and not try and convert it into a path to some illusory future success that (at least for me) usually never appears.

1. If you want a very deep cut from my archives, I wrote ten years ago about “being anointed”:

In commercial writing, the accepted way of advancing is to write a novel, query an agent (or find one through a referral), and then have the agent sell the novel. And that is also something that can be done within literary fiction.

But if one examines the careers of many successful writers of literary fiction, one sees that many of them did not follow this path. For instance, I recently spoke to a published writer of literary fiction who had never sent out a single agent query or submitted a single short story. Instead, while this person was a student, they submitted some chapters from their (unfinished) novel manuscript to a fellowship contest and the judge of the contest sent these chapters to their agent, who signed the writer. The writer then completed the novel and the agent sold it.

2. Ironically, Lorentzen’s own piece is more sociology than criticism, in that it devotes considerable space to asking how a book like Big Fiction came to be written and what cultural forces have caused people to pay attention to it. Generally speaking, when assessing a bad book, critics (fairly) assume it’s the product of its culture, while good books are held to be sui generis. But that simply reverses the question, no? Because if the overall culture relentlessly drives people to write and publish bad books, then in overcoming that culture, the genius necessarily is also a sociological phenomenon—we see the traces of sociology precisely in the pitfalls they’ve avoided or chosen to ignore.