The People Whose Job It Is To Care About Art and Culture Are Always the First to Abandon It

what's with that

I could write a post with a title like this any week and have new examples to complain about.

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But this week (or, in fact, already last week) it’s Andrea Long Chu, the book critic, who writes:

I have thought many times in these past 12 months about the role of the literary critic in a time of war — an event that shatters any idea we may have of literature as existing separately from the world at large.

You exist in the context of all that has come before etc. etc.

Who thinks that literature “exist[s] separately from the world at large”? Who has ever thought this? Even the least reconstructed New Critics probably knew on some level that they were polemically overstating their positions. (I mean, some of them were spies.) Literature obviously doesn’t exist separately from the world at large; it just exists distinctly within it. It’s a thing people do sometimes.

The difference between literature and other things that people do sometimes is that, for some reason, literary people are constantly asking themselves whether they have any right to do their thing in a time of _____. The world will always fill in _____. Your own life will fill in _____ if the world miraculously manages to stay at peace for a minute. Maybe somewhere there is an introspective plumber who asks herself why she merely unclogs toilets in a world where shit overwhelms us. But I doubt that it’s half of what plumbers talk about when they’re gathered among themselves, and I doubt that it’s something their trade publications regularly run self-doubting articles about. I doubt that plumbing companies spent the summer of 2020 putting out statements about how plumbing practices, as we know them, are rooted in capitalism and colonialism (which they can hardly help being), how they have displaced native ways of waste management (which they have — biochar is a great idea), and questioning whether they themselves should continue to exist, and then vaguely pledging to “be better.”¹ Granted, a plumber is useful in a day-to-day way that a writer usually isn’t — but that’s part of my point. The scale of the things that artists ask themselves to fix, and then get mad at themselves for not fixing, are so great that they could equally serve as an indictment of a given plumber. Or a given anyone.

Back to Chu:

Indeed, one marvels at how often the protesters for Palestine have been treated like the freshman reader of Lolita who, lacking the niceties of the contemplative attitude, objects to all that business with the pedophile. Of course, I hope that English students will learn the difficult pleasures of interpretation; as Hammad reminds us, Said himself was first and foremost a humanist with a deep love of the novel. But I also find great wisdom in the untrained response that blithely fails to distinguish the text from the world — it is something to be cultivated, not stamped out. Especially in a time of war, we should be bad readers: not because we must abjure curiosity or knowledge but because we in the U.S. should refuse to view the war as if it were a novel — that is, a text that exists in a universe of its own, fenced off from the world where we, the readers, live. I generally try to be modest about the rewards of criticism, but if we are to stop treating the world like a novel, we might begin by learning how to treat novels less like novels. This way, when something comes along that demands more than reading, we may be more prepared.

The name “Hammad” here reminds us that this piece is officially a book review, one from which I learned next to nothing about what Hammad’s book does or why it’s valuable. Anyway. I was piqued by this bit:

Of course, I hope that English students will learn the difficult pleasures of interpretation; as Hammad reminds us, Said himself was first and foremost a humanist with a deep love of the novel.

It’s probably unjust, but my first thought on reading these sentences was: You hope they’ll learn it. But not from you. You hope they’ll learn it somewhere, for reasons you can’t or don’t want to articulate, from people who, when they appear, you’ll look down on. Elsewhere in the article Chu confirms this impression by going after Zadie Smith again — it’s amazing how much Chu hates Zadie Smith. Chu’s misreading of The Fraud, which also went viral, was comprehensive; she construed a self-comforting bourgeois fable out of Smith’s most troubling novel, the book most aware of the limits of literature and the kinds of sympathy it evokes, and of the magnitude of what novels can’t say. I wonder if that’s Chu’s problem with Smith²: That even the ever-so-literary gesture of criticizing, from within literature, the literary, also fails to put a stop to obvious political injustices or outright disasters. That leaves only the flouncier gesture of condemning literature, from within literature, and this is what Chu does, and it ends in the same place: in more literature. Because that’s where it always was. You can sense her frustration, her scrabbling against the edge of what she’s doing. But again: why scorn the making of literature in the first place? It would make sense to me if Chu said “I am abandoning my Vulture gig to serve as an aid worker, and this probably means the IDF will kill me.” But it doesn’t make sense to me to say, “I am keeping my Vulture gig but I propose that we read more badly.” Unless you have an actual, nameable plan for what you’re going to do instead — not a vague anger at yourself for being alive³ — why not do your job to the best of your ability?

Chu then expands upon her proposal that we read worse, or that we take the naive reader more seriously, or … something.

This is why Israel’s defenders in the American media have tried to mold us into “better” readers: more cautious, more ethical, more contemplative. A good reader looks at Israel’s wars and sees a devastating picture of the human condition, a meditation on violence, or any number of other superlatives one might find in The New York Times Book Review. A bad reader sees American bombs, American jets, and billions of American dollars. She skips right to Israel’s acknowledgments page. She touches the art. “Gaza does not propel people to cool contemplation,” wrote the poet Mahmoud Darwish. “Rather she propels them to erupt and collide with the truth.”

Look, “She skips right to Israel’s acknowledgements page” is a great line. I’m gonna give Chu that much. But, one, the academic-activist habit of treating “This violence represents the human condition” and, say, “This violence is clearly intensified by US funding” as incompatible statements of opposed worldviews, entrenched as this habit is, makes no sense. It makes zero sense whatsoever. It’s a piety we all learned to mouth in grad school and never questioned. There is no conflict at all between saying that a genocide tells us something about what people in general are like and saying that we, personally, must stop funding the genocide. John Brown would have been happy enough to tell you that slavery was a result of Sin, The Fall, and other capitalized nouns, as he loaded up the guns. And to bring it back to Israel: I do in fact find it highly characteristic of human beings that one of the most hunted and criminalized ethnic/religious groups in history, after nearly being destroyed, was finally dealt out a state of its own by various guilty belligerents after a world war, and proceeded to … reenact its own history on the nearest available set of people. Sounds like the human race, doesn’t it? It’s so us. That thought does not get in the way of my also thinking “Hey, you know, a divestment campaign seemed to work against apartheid South Africa, maybe …” That thought would get in the way of me saying, or acting upon, e.g., “All Jewish Israelis must be wiped out” or “Hamas is good actually” or “October 7 was a righteous uprising against colonialism,” and maybe that’s what Chu is really worried about, I don’t know. Humanism doesn’t mean you don’t pick a side, but it does inform how you pick that side; it makes you less of a single-minded berserker. Thank God. We have enough of that type in the world. One of the worst of them is named Bibi Netanyahu.

Two, Israel’s defenders have not tried to mold us into “better” readers. To the extent that anyone defending the destruction of Gaza addresses our reading abilities at all, they tell us to pay more attention to “themes” and “tropes” than to details, and this is one definition of both bad reading and bad writing. That hilariously dishonest Howard Jacobson article from this past weekend, where he basically tells us that you can’t say the IDF is wantonly killing babies by the thousands because that’s an anti-semitic “trope,” is an instance. That’s not good reading! That’s what YA Twitter used to do! It’s also what a lot of English departments teach, in practice, because those places, too, are ashamed of literature, ashamed of reading, and this kind of fake reading seems like a shortcut to relevance. But a good reader notices things, like massively discrepant body counts.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, as usual, shows a better way. After spending several books telling Americans things that you’d think they wouldn’t want to hear, and getting lauded and feted for it, he has finally managed to piss everyone off, by writing a book that suggests in its closing chapter that just maybe, after your fifth or sixth hospital bombing, someone might want to think about yanking your funding. For this he got attacked on one of the big network TV chitchat shows, and that willing and enthusiastic servant of evil Helen Andrews wrote a viral piece for Compact suggesting that a) Israel is a utopia and b) Coates is just jealous because black people are too dumb and emotional to build a utopia. Of course, I’d have to question how utopian Israel is even for the one favored demographic slice of its one favored ethnic group — prison guards tend to hate their jobs — and it’s also a client state; it’s not hard to imagine a reasonably prosperous violent “black”-in-some-sense ethnostate arising in much the same way Israel did if for some reason a superpower saw some strategic advantage in it.⁴ And, oh God, why am I bothering to argue with someone who long ago gave whatever self she has to the purest Nietzschean power-worship anyway? The critic we’re discussing is an avowed fan of the Confederates, several fascist dictators, and generally keeping the rabble in line. Helen Andrews is to toadying what GG Allin was to punk. There’s no apologetic so debased that she won’t inflict upon her own God-given person the humiliation of mouthing it, while looking at the rest of us as though her willing self-destruction were somehow a statement about us. Aren’t we owned. One ought to pass over such a spectacle in silence.

But like so many vile utterances in The Discourse, Andrews’s seems provokingly “unprecedented,” to one part of my mind at least. It feels notable as an example of some new sub-basement of ugliness. Another part of me, of course, recognizes that her argument is just a restatement of Saul Bellow’s “Where is the Proust of the Papuans?” except that she’s not even civilized enough to give us a little alliteration along with all the unearned smug white self-regard. (It’s a good thing I don’t believe there’s such a thing as “whiteness”; I’d hate to have to share that condition with the people who love it most.) It was from reading Coates, I believe, that I first learned about Ralph Wiley’s riposte to that pseudo-argument: Proust is the Proust of the Papuans. We’re one species, and Proust exemplifies humanity in general far more than he exemplifies “whiteness,” which doesn’t exist, or even Frenchness, which certainly does.

Be that as it may. Coates’s book begins and ends with a charge to writers to participate in world-saving. The first charge is directed specifically to his writing students at Howard University, which, being an HBCU, must “combat” the “long shadow of slavery,” and so must the writers formed there.⁵ The book’s last words take this specific charge and make it general — the group of Palestinian writers he has been meeting with, in the final chapter, have enlarged his imagination, and made him want to hear from even more voices, “tasked, as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.” I find what Coates writes in between his big thesis statements both moving and persuasive, but sometimes his big summary moments feel not quite nuanced enough to do justice to what I just read. I don’t think — I’ll give Andrea Long Chu this much — that writers and readers are going to save the world. I think that formulation is to be resisted by workers of every sort. Whatever you’re doing, and whatever good it does, there are too many patches of unsaved world left over for it to be true, and that knocks you off your square unnecessarily. But what The Message both describes and exemplifies is communities of writers and readers — Coates’s students, Coates himself (in the Egypt chapter), English teachers in censorious states, and finally Palestinian writers — doing their jobs. Not saving the world, but definitely helping to make it.

More than his brilliance, his curiosity, his moral intelligence, and his willingness to say things that will get him disinvited from future Aspen Ideas Festivals, what I always keep returning to Coates for is his unashamed and outright nerdy enthusiasm for what he does. (One of the first interviews I saw with him after “The Case for Reparations” went viral, he was talking about verbs.) Reading and writing saved him, and he never forgets that, nor does he think that that diminishes the worth of the self that was saved, that there must be something wrong with a person who could be saved by these activities. Nothing about my childhood would stack up to his in a “who had it worse” contest, but that much I do have in common with him. It’s refreshing — both the quality, and his lack of shame about it. It makes him uniquely lovable to me within that relatively small group of writers who are, at this moment, both genuinely famous and genuinely excellent.

1. For fun, I looked at a plumbing trade publication real quick while I was writing this. It was pretty interesting! Other people’s jobs always are. In lieu of “While Anthony Blinken Plumbs the Depths of Human Depravity, I Plumb Your Sink” articles, they did have a bunch of pieces on installing lower-flow showerheads and the like. That is, in fact, how plumbers help save the world.

2. Smith wrote a dumb and noncommittal op-ed about Gaza a while ago. She also is worried about “cancel culture,” which she has as much right to be as does anyone who lives by their pen. But, sorry, her books are still good.

3. I went through this for many years. I always gave it a political inflection. It’s absolutely toxic and left-wing spaces, I’m sorry, cultivate it.

4. Coates actually arrives at this connection in the book, which is another reason why it’s puzzling that Andrews seems to think she’s discovering it for him. Well, it’s not puzzling, I guess.

5. The mixed metaphor — to me it feels like a mixed metaphor, anyway — of “combating” a “shadow” irritated me so much I almost dropped the book, but it is, after all, a Ta-Nehisi Coates book and I knew that it would get better, and it did. I had also just recently done an event where I was forced to read from my first book in public, and I heard a few of my own old clunkers for the first time. This keeps a person from getting too arrogant.