MY CANCELLATION IS NIGH!

JUST KIDDING, I do not think I am being “cancelled,” or that I am suffering piteously, or that I am the victim of an injustice of any sort, but I do think it is odd to watch an involved “discourse” about a piece of my writing evolve on a social media platform I don’t use but clearly have no hopes of escaping. You may wonder, with excellent reason, why I left Twitter only to remain exquisitely attentive to my many haters. What a good question! The answer is that I’m human and I care about my writing and its reception, which makes me incapable of not caring what people think of my work, whether I especially like them (or their writing) or not. I will likely need to learn to outgrow this pathology to at least some extent before my books are published (and widely panned by my haters???)—but I haven’t outgrown it yet, and I’m not above responding to some of the objections to the essay, as I would if I were actually on Twitter.

There are some criticisms of the piece that I think are apt and interesting, but there some that do not seem to me to be responsive to the piece itself—or, if they are, then I have failed at expressing what I meant and will take this opportunity to clarify. The main thread I have in mind is this one:

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

There is no greater virtue signal than complaining about virtue signaling

….which continues (at length, I warn you!):

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

It's really too bad that the recent pieces lamenting literature preoccupied with being a "good person" (Oyler, Rothfeld) only take the case cynically. The literature they describe is so much more earnest than they admit.

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

Or they'll concede (or complain) that it's so earnest as to be naive—and yet! at the same time, posturing, cynicism, market angling, safe, pablum. As if what it means to be a good person isn't a real preoccupation for a generation inheriting a post-secular apocalyptic world

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

If these authors weren't invested in the question of what it means to be a "good person," they wouldn't be novelists, I don't think. They'd write think pieces, opinion pieces, or Ovels (a la Ooks vs. Books) that are essentially disavowed, NDA-compliant booklength personal essays

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

Of course the internet and social media strongly shape what people think it means to be a "good person." Being a good person usually means being good to your community, and people are very confused about what "their community" means on platforms like Twitter...

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

....where people glom together according to affinity, not region, or class, or religion, or family, or religion. People are continually prompted to ask themselves: what is my relationship to this person, these people?

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

It's so easy to complain about the tendencies of any one group to project and proselytize its conception of goodness—"Now all the eponyms read Gramsci, respect women, and recycle" (how dare!). So hard to grapple with the fact that this is an actual existential/moral concern?

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

So much easier to pretend it's all cynicism, piety, and driven by a (dark! shameful! greedy!) ulterior motive ("these people want fame! to be LOVED! not as authors but as people!"). As if those who are "good" after their own fashion do not want the same things.

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

A real tell, I think, is the snide "gotcha" of accusing people who want to be good of hypocrisy. "You say you're a communist, but it is YOU who are the beneficiary of capitalism! And saying you know it—that makes you only more contemptible!" Like, yes, OK. What?

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

Half of these books' audience is upset that the books don't narrate their way out of this bind and instruct them on how to be good. The other half holds them in contempt for even trying.

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

Can this literature "boring" or make you feel "trapped," as a reader, as Katy Waldman said? Yes! Does it describe an actual conundrum/paradox in the world? Also yes.

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

What I find disappointing is that, as critics, they tend to neglect other very interesting aspects and qualities of these novels by overemphasizing the "goodness" question. Like really, truly, you would not know from the reviews that these novels are well written.

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

Anyway, I get it, what you think is "the left" (people on Twitter) is too moralizing for you. But the breakdown of this conversation is also a product of what @omediochieng called a "vulgarization" of left theory and philosophy

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

Anyway, write a group review that doesn't include Sally Rooney challenge (and I love Sally's novels! she's a natural talent. You can't deny it, even if you dislike the characters or the milieu, which I don't)

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

I know this is a pastiche/composite, but this character does not exist in any of the novels, we can agree? It matters insofar as it's typical of how this "debate" revolves around straw, fabricated examples. Show me someone of any political stripe who thinks this is a good person:

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

She touches on the limits of sociological criticism and (para-)academic political readings that I think Marco Roth wrote about very well here:

nplusonemag.comTokens of Ruined MethodGone is the task of providing “equipment for living,” in the words of Kenneth Burke, one of Richards’s American contemporaries and soul mates. Instead, the discipline or profession of literary studies aims to produce knowledge about the literature or societies of the past, with no overt purpose beyo…

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

and to assume that people who fought against Trump, against sex and gender discrimination, or economic exploitation, or racism or and the police, did to so to accrue virtue to themselves above all else--is to assume (almost exclusively) an audience of white opportunists

I don’t think Tortorici likes me very much, but I like her writing and respect her thinking. With that said, however, I am a bit confused by this critique. For one thing, I don’t think it’s fair to Oyler: in her excellent essay about goodness in fiction, she is quite clear that some of the books she mentions are interesting and good. For another thing, both Oyler and I have written elsewhere, in largely aesthetic terms, about the novelists we discuss. Oyler has written on Rooney, on Moshfegh, on Heti, and on Offill (several of whom she unambiguously likes); I’ve written on Rooney, on Lerner novels I like, and on The Topeka School. Admittedly, I don’t like Rooney’s fiction very much, though I do devote quite a number of words to its aesthetic qualities, but I literally say of The Topeka School, “Still, Mr. Lerner’s prose is too rich to stoop to sanctimony for long” (and I love his first two novels). It’s true that Oyler and I don’t rehash all of our other pieces in the essays Tortorici dislikes, and of course Tortorici is under no obligation to hunt down all of our other work, but nonetheless, life being what it is, a person can’t accomplish everything in one essay with a word limit. For my part, I chose to focus examples I’d discussed in detail elsewhere because I knew I would not have space to develop all of my arguments and offer a compelling reading of an entirely new work of fiction. I would bet that Oyler was probably thinking along the same lines.

Moreover, I would argue that both Oyler and I are asking after the aesthetics of the novels we discuss (even if no critic in any essay with a word limit is ever asking after every aesthetic issue a novel raises): in particular, we are arguing that their sanctimoniousness (though perhaps Oyler would use a different word) constitutes an aesthetic demerit, and we both make a case for this claim. You can disagree with our arguments, and you can disagree with our readings or assessments of the books in question, but I don’t think it makes much sense to say either of us is ignoring the aesthetic aspects of the books. As I put it in the piece, “Sanctimony literature is aesthetically wanting…because its language and moral outlook are juvenile.” And as I put it later in my piece, “a novel lacking a certain sort of moral complexity might therefore suffer artistically.” And as I put it one more time in the piece, “ethical failings, it turns out, are not irrelevant to the genre’s enormous aesthetic deficiencies.”

Now, speaking for myself only (though perhaps Oyler would agree?), I did not intend my essay to condemn all fiction concerned with morality or goodness, and I don’t think I’m particularly cynical about attempts to be good. On the contrary! I think it’s obligatory to work towards goodness. I thought my very earnest commitment to morality was fairly clear in the essay; after all, I wrote,“even in the realm of the novel, concern with morality is not misplaced. If sanctimony literature is soporific, it is not because it portrays people who strive to live ethically. Trying to be good is an important — if not the only important and not always the most important — part of being a person, and nothing that is human can be alien to literature.” (I often wonder if people are talking about the same pieces of writing as I am, and the feeling is more crazy-making when the piece of writing is mine. As Oyler would say, “I feel that I am being made crazy by the distortion.”)

All of this is to say, I did my best to argue not that it’s uncool to care about ethics, nor that ethics and aesthetics are rigidly insulated from one another, but that fiction is aesthetically good to the extent that it displays a certain sort of goodness. My problem with sanctimonious novels (whether or not the novels I call sanctimonious are in fact sanctimonious is another question) is that they are immoral: I think failing to display “moral realism”—condescending to/infantalizing your reader, failing to interrogate your assumptions, demonizing all of your enemies rather than making any effort to understand them, and subscribing to a generally Manichean worldview—is not ethical. I also don’t think it’s great politically, or aesthetically. My problem with sanctimony literature is therefore not, and has never been, that it is hypocritical, but rather that it is dogmatic and patronizing. You can of course disagree with me about what being an ethical person requires, but I think and hope it is at least clear that the piece is not dismissive of attempts to be good or attempts to parse goodness in fiction.

I like Sam Sacks’s work a great, great deal, but I found this frustrating:

Sam Sacks @Sam_Sacks

I agree with a lot of this thread. Seems to me that this particular debate is becoming, in the way of punditry, narrow and casuistic. I hate facile moralizing, too, but writing books or criticism against it is itself a form of moralizing.

Dayna Tortorici @dtortorici

There is no greater virtue signal than complaining about virtue signaling

…because I love to moralize! Yes, my piece is moralizing! It makes a moral argument! I am a moral philosopher! This I do not and would not deny.

I think something many likely object to is the thought that some aspects of goodness are separable from politics; that’s fair enough, because I do claim that we have obligations that aren’t political (though I don’t deny that we have political obligations, and I don’t deny that fiction is political). What I mean by this is that even if you are a socialist, even if you are committed to feminism and anti-racism, even if you voted for Bernie (yes, I did this, and no, I don’t think all Bernie supporters are “Bernie bros”), you might still be morally imperfect, if you are just an asshole. I think some people might class “being an asshole” as political; if you’re one of those people, then we agree that ethics is all political.

The next issue, then, is whether my point is supposed to be that leftism is stupid, or whether I think it’s stupid or uncool to have been concerned about Trump, or whether I scoff at people who read Gramsci, respect women, and recycle. Well, I would hope not, because I identify as a leftist (more on this below), I respect women (I am one, after all), and I recycle (sometimes—probably could do better). I don’t especially like Gramsci, but I have read the dude several times. I commend people who fought against the scary injustices Trump visited on so many; I tried, in my own small and doubtless ineffectual ways (joining the DSA, phonebanking, donating bits of what money I had, and so on), to fight against these injustices too; I’ve argued in this very newsletter that that I side with those who regard Trump as a proto-fascist precisely because I think it is important to take him and his evils seriously. I do not assume that people who went to great and sometimes even heroic lengths to defeat Trump and protect the vulnerable did so for performative reasons (where does my essay say this?!), and, to the best of my knowledge, I did not join the DSA and attempt to phonebank, however ineptly, for performative reasons. “Sanctimony Literature” is not an essay about real leftists and their motivations, nor is it an essay about leftism in general. It’s an essay about leftism as it manifests in a particular set of books that I don’t think do a very good job of representing leftism—books that I criticize for being too simplistic. Tortorici is right: what I am writing about is a “vulgarization” of leftism. As I wrote in the essay, my target is fiction that takes its cues from “the crudest, most online leftists.” Maybe I’m wrong in accusing Lerner or Rooney of doing this, but I think and hope it’s clear the piece is not an indictment of leftism itself.

It’s obviously possible to write an essay that isn’t a critique of leftism even if you aren’t a leftist. But I am a leftist, I think, so perhaps it would be helpful for me to clarify my politics—in part because I want to set the record straight, in part because I’ve also seen my essay celebrated as a rebuke to “wokeness,” which it is very much not. I don’t really know what “wokeness” is; many views that are lumped under the “woke” umbrella clash in some iterations, e.g., liberal “pussy hat” feminism is likely incompatible with Marxism. Given that I have no idea what “wokeness” is, I have no idea if I’m woke or anti-. I believe a jumble of things, some fashionable, some unfashionable. Here are some of them: I believe that capitalism in its present iteration is unjust; I believe that American labor law is unforgivably unfavorable to unions; I believe that unions are the future and should be supported!; I believe that people who have done bad things should not be punished, socially or materially, forever; I believe that even bad people deserve housing security and medical treatment; I believe that America is not great and has never been great, and that racism has been baked into its institutions in various ways since its founding; I believe that it is possible to talk about art without talking about politics, sometimes, which isn’t the same as believing that art is “not political;” I believe that certain aspects of human nature have been constant throughout time; I believe that it is good to treat one’s ideological opponents with respect; etc. I consider myself a socialist, though my reasons are Rawlsian and not Marxian. Maybe this makes me right-wing (????), but I would imagine that the Marxists and I can work together for the moment, since we both think that universal healthcare and the PRO act are goods in the immediate future.

All of this to say: my critiques of sanctimony literature aren’t critiques of leftism, OR of novels written by those with leftist politics, OR of leftist novels, OR of novels featuring good (or trying-to-be-good) people, OR of novels that aim to instantiate or inspire goodness, and my argument is definitely NOT that only books with mean protagonists are good. My critique is only of what I take to be a simplistic and therefore itself morally misguided presentation of moral goodness.

!!!