I think this is right about how some literary critics or just people having takes online want to try and justify their liking with some of sort intellectual point instead of just liking stuff. I like that essay in The Point about Rooney that calls her novels Twilight for Marxist grad students which like…guilty! I want that! And I think it’s a lot more honest than the move you detail here.
I’d be curious to read your disagreements with Chu’s kind of rough and ready Marxist conception of literature in a longer form.
You won’t believe it but I did in fact tweet about this very issue the other day. Here are my thoughts: “so you’re telling me if I write a book and the narrator says really stupid stuff I will be praised as implicitly critiquing that narrator’s views, even if there’s absolutely no indication that I’m doing that? Ok, got it, getting to work!” The funny thing is I wasn’t even talking about Rooney! It’s a widespread problem.
it’s tricky because of course sometimes a book is unpleasant to read and yet good because of it and articulating the distinction between this sort of case and a case where a book is just bad can be hard. i have a forthcoming piece i’m working on where i hope to get into this more (about an author i find very unpleasant to read but do find valuable)
The unpleasant-to-read-yet-valuable made me think of Thomas Bernhard. I remember thinking, "Jeez, this guy's just a grump, why am I finishing this novel of his and starting another?" Although I guess that doesn't make the writing valuable, unless I believe that what I can't stop liking is "valuable." Maybe if enough people can't stop liking, say, books made of giant blocks of raving text, then the writing becomes valuable?
Definitely. There’s always the chance something deeper actually IS going on that a reader might miss, but there would usually be some indication of that, for example if the events in the novel reveal the way a narrator is misguided. But you also don’t want it to be pedantic. Tricky stuff for sure.
I read Rooney's 'Beautiful World' this summer, and between that and the discussion of her first two books in 'All Things Are Too Small' I've spent a lot of the last couple months going insane trying to parse out what's so supposedly 'Marxist' about her work (BW,WAY ends with the girls being happy in newfound romantic relationships and deciding everything will probably be fine). I don't really mind if Rooney wants to write generic beach-read romances, but I genuinely don't get what everybody is seeing in these works that makes them revolutionary in their orientation, and I think it is a sign of a genuinely confused culture that this is what passes for radical art.
All this is to say I appreciate your comments here and elsewhere about Rooney, if only because I keep feeling like an idiot for not seeing what everyone else claims to be seeing and sometimes it's nice to think that maybe it's not something I'm missing so much as something I'm refusing to impose on the work from outside, as you so eloquently put it.
Interesting. Reading this, the first book that came to mind for me was Frank Herbert's Dune. But on second consideration, I don't think that Dune really stands as an example of a book that's good 'because it's so bad'; it's rather become a classic novel in spite of its author's very serious shortcomings. (I'm happy to avoid Sally Rooney!)
"Call it, provisionally, a second sort of intentional fallacy"
In fencing, "second intention" is a tactic of deliberate failure. An attack that's meant to fail in a way that provokes a specific response that the attacker is ready to respond to in turn. It's a trap or, like, a feint but with more commitment.*
Not sure I can articulate the connection I'm seeing but it's something like, the reviewers are saying the book is the initial attack (failed) but they're giving the writer credit for the whole action anyway. Where I think a reasonable expectation would be that if a writer wants credit for both the failed attack and the follow-up, they would need to include both in the novel.
The book that comes to mind as a counter-example is No One is Talking About This. It participates in the thing its critiquing and then it does much more.
*so the whole action would be something like, attack > parry-riposte > counter-parry-counter-riposte.
Excellent article. I think you are on to something when you touch on the “broader tendency to regard the enterprise of fiction as an embarrassment”; I’m seeing a similar tendency in other forms of art. Earlier this month I went to see an adaptation of the Marriage of Figaro performed on Little Island in Manhattan. A single performer, Anthony Roth Constanzo, sang all six of the lead roles in one of the most virtuosic displays of artistic facility I’ve ever witnessed. At the same time, the performance was filled with wry, winking nods to how ridiculous the opera itself was. Some of this felt apposite, given the fact that the Opera is a comedy with some measure of seemingly intentional convulsion. But at some point this winking at the audience graded into a feeling of ridicule towards the entire enterprise of the Opera itself. It started to feel like what was being said was, how could anyone take this seriously, look how stupid and risible all this is, why are we wasting our time with this?
This ironic messaging was further undercut by Anthony’s sublime singing and the performance by the orchestra…it’s difficult to believe something is ridiculous if brings out some of the best music ever performed on stage. It felt like an inversion of what you’ve just described — a sublime work that insists on some level that it is not very good. Which feels significant to me and related, in an unclear way, to what you’ve described here.
Makes me think that it doesn’t matter what a work is about if the execution bores me into not wanting to read it. All of a sudden, it doesn’t matter if the author was intentionally making a work that is full of 2D characters I can’t care about as a sort of performance art about people not enjoying 2D characters. It doesn’t matter if I didn’t #GetIt and then stopped reading, somehow proving the purpose of the performance art, because now I’m too bored to care about if it even is performance art in the first place.
I would be interested in reading a not-trite novel full of 3D characters that somehow proves the same point without forcing me to be bored to tears. I’d even be willing to have follow up conversations about a novel, any novel, being allowed to be trite and 2D either on purpose or on accident if I at least got an entertaining read out of the source material in the first place.
I recall similar arguments being employed in defense of DFW's interminable THE PALE KING; though I think there, it was clear that Wallace was intentionally (and far too successfully) employing the representation-of-tedium trope ...
I had similar thoughts about punk music many years ago. I would read well-written pieces about why it was great, what it represented, why it was needed, etc., and although I got all that, at the end of the day it was just bad. (Musically--lyrically is a separate discussion.)
This feels like a wilder claim than the points made about Sally Rooney! Punk music has certain aesthetic features and people making that music will enact those features. Like why is it bad to have a song with just two chords, a simple fast drum groove etc? I don’t think it is inherently!
Fair point and for the record (pardon the word choice) I was all about post-punk (The Fall et al.): Same aesthetic but more interesting musically, at least for my taste. Cheers, mate.
"This reading interests me in part because I think it’s part of a broader tendency to regard the enterprise of fiction with embarassment, to write fiction that apologizes for being fiction (ahem, Rachel Cusk) and to justify reading fiction by claiming that the fiction in question is really just a means of revealing the contrivedness of fiction in general (the above)."
What's interesting is I don't think Rooney's work is embarrassed by the enterprise of fiction, and (if I had to guess) critics are responding emotionally to this fact, but then using Rooney's avowed Marxism to justify the type of reading you describe, all so they can distance themselves from their own emotional investment in (and embarrassment about) fiction that has very basic, human concerns.
I don't really like her very much but I'm also the first to admit that I haven't really given the matter much thought and don't have an especially thoughtful opinion! my friend barbara, who loves her, has many smart takes about her over here: https://notebook.substack.com/
I think this is right about how some literary critics or just people having takes online want to try and justify their liking with some of sort intellectual point instead of just liking stuff. I like that essay in The Point about Rooney that calls her novels Twilight for Marxist grad students which like…guilty! I want that! And I think it’s a lot more honest than the move you detail here.
I’d be curious to read your disagreements with Chu’s kind of rough and ready Marxist conception of literature in a longer form.
(you do know that i wrote that essay, right?)
(your honesty is refreshing!)
Oh no I didn’t! Whoops!
glad you liked it tho, lololol!
You won’t believe it but I did in fact tweet about this very issue the other day. Here are my thoughts: “so you’re telling me if I write a book and the narrator says really stupid stuff I will be praised as implicitly critiquing that narrator’s views, even if there’s absolutely no indication that I’m doing that? Ok, got it, getting to work!” The funny thing is I wasn’t even talking about Rooney! It’s a widespread problem.
it’s tricky because of course sometimes a book is unpleasant to read and yet good because of it and articulating the distinction between this sort of case and a case where a book is just bad can be hard. i have a forthcoming piece i’m working on where i hope to get into this more (about an author i find very unpleasant to read but do find valuable)
The unpleasant-to-read-yet-valuable made me think of Thomas Bernhard. I remember thinking, "Jeez, this guy's just a grump, why am I finishing this novel of his and starting another?" Although I guess that doesn't make the writing valuable, unless I believe that what I can't stop liking is "valuable." Maybe if enough people can't stop liking, say, books made of giant blocks of raving text, then the writing becomes valuable?
Definitely. There’s always the chance something deeper actually IS going on that a reader might miss, but there would usually be some indication of that, for example if the events in the novel reveal the way a narrator is misguided. But you also don’t want it to be pedantic. Tricky stuff for sure.
I read Rooney's 'Beautiful World' this summer, and between that and the discussion of her first two books in 'All Things Are Too Small' I've spent a lot of the last couple months going insane trying to parse out what's so supposedly 'Marxist' about her work (BW,WAY ends with the girls being happy in newfound romantic relationships and deciding everything will probably be fine). I don't really mind if Rooney wants to write generic beach-read romances, but I genuinely don't get what everybody is seeing in these works that makes them revolutionary in their orientation, and I think it is a sign of a genuinely confused culture that this is what passes for radical art.
All this is to say I appreciate your comments here and elsewhere about Rooney, if only because I keep feeling like an idiot for not seeing what everyone else claims to be seeing and sometimes it's nice to think that maybe it's not something I'm missing so much as something I'm refusing to impose on the work from outside, as you so eloquently put it.
Interesting. Reading this, the first book that came to mind for me was Frank Herbert's Dune. But on second consideration, I don't think that Dune really stands as an example of a book that's good 'because it's so bad'; it's rather become a classic novel in spite of its author's very serious shortcomings. (I'm happy to avoid Sally Rooney!)
"Call it, provisionally, a second sort of intentional fallacy"
In fencing, "second intention" is a tactic of deliberate failure. An attack that's meant to fail in a way that provokes a specific response that the attacker is ready to respond to in turn. It's a trap or, like, a feint but with more commitment.*
Not sure I can articulate the connection I'm seeing but it's something like, the reviewers are saying the book is the initial attack (failed) but they're giving the writer credit for the whole action anyway. Where I think a reasonable expectation would be that if a writer wants credit for both the failed attack and the follow-up, they would need to include both in the novel.
The book that comes to mind as a counter-example is No One is Talking About This. It participates in the thing its critiquing and then it does much more.
*so the whole action would be something like, attack > parry-riposte > counter-parry-counter-riposte.
Excellent article. I think you are on to something when you touch on the “broader tendency to regard the enterprise of fiction as an embarrassment”; I’m seeing a similar tendency in other forms of art. Earlier this month I went to see an adaptation of the Marriage of Figaro performed on Little Island in Manhattan. A single performer, Anthony Roth Constanzo, sang all six of the lead roles in one of the most virtuosic displays of artistic facility I’ve ever witnessed. At the same time, the performance was filled with wry, winking nods to how ridiculous the opera itself was. Some of this felt apposite, given the fact that the Opera is a comedy with some measure of seemingly intentional convulsion. But at some point this winking at the audience graded into a feeling of ridicule towards the entire enterprise of the Opera itself. It started to feel like what was being said was, how could anyone take this seriously, look how stupid and risible all this is, why are we wasting our time with this?
This ironic messaging was further undercut by Anthony’s sublime singing and the performance by the orchestra…it’s difficult to believe something is ridiculous if brings out some of the best music ever performed on stage. It felt like an inversion of what you’ve just described — a sublime work that insists on some level that it is not very good. Which feels significant to me and related, in an unclear way, to what you’ve described here.
Makes me think that it doesn’t matter what a work is about if the execution bores me into not wanting to read it. All of a sudden, it doesn’t matter if the author was intentionally making a work that is full of 2D characters I can’t care about as a sort of performance art about people not enjoying 2D characters. It doesn’t matter if I didn’t #GetIt and then stopped reading, somehow proving the purpose of the performance art, because now I’m too bored to care about if it even is performance art in the first place.
I would be interested in reading a not-trite novel full of 3D characters that somehow proves the same point without forcing me to be bored to tears. I’d even be willing to have follow up conversations about a novel, any novel, being allowed to be trite and 2D either on purpose or on accident if I at least got an entertaining read out of the source material in the first place.
I recall similar arguments being employed in defense of DFW's interminable THE PALE KING; though I think there, it was clear that Wallace was intentionally (and far too successfully) employing the representation-of-tedium trope ...
Really
I had similar thoughts about punk music many years ago. I would read well-written pieces about why it was great, what it represented, why it was needed, etc., and although I got all that, at the end of the day it was just bad. (Musically--lyrically is a separate discussion.)
This feels like a wilder claim than the points made about Sally Rooney! Punk music has certain aesthetic features and people making that music will enact those features. Like why is it bad to have a song with just two chords, a simple fast drum groove etc? I don’t think it is inherently!
Fair point and for the record (pardon the word choice) I was all about post-punk (The Fall et al.): Same aesthetic but more interesting musically, at least for my taste. Cheers, mate.
Great piece. This point especially stood out:
"This reading interests me in part because I think it’s part of a broader tendency to regard the enterprise of fiction with embarassment, to write fiction that apologizes for being fiction (ahem, Rachel Cusk) and to justify reading fiction by claiming that the fiction in question is really just a means of revealing the contrivedness of fiction in general (the above)."
What's interesting is I don't think Rooney's work is embarrassed by the enterprise of fiction, and (if I had to guess) critics are responding emotionally to this fact, but then using Rooney's avowed Marxism to justify the type of reading you describe, all so they can distance themselves from their own emotional investment in (and embarrassment about) fiction that has very basic, human concerns.
Curious to hear your take on Taylor Swift, another critic’s darling. I cannot understand her popularity…
I don't really like her very much but I'm also the first to admit that I haven't really given the matter much thought and don't have an especially thoughtful opinion! my friend barbara, who loves her, has many smart takes about her over here: https://notebook.substack.com/
I got the hell off Twitter too. Smart move.