Really loved this and it was somehow very heartening. You perfectly described the anxiety of, well, what is writing supposed to DO and why can’t it do enough?—and I think you’re so right that writers and artists are excessively worried that their work does nothing against the scale of major issues, even though those issues would defeat any profession with humble, ordinary tasks to do. It’s not literature’s fault that a single essay can’t stop a genocide.
Also think you very expertly summarized Chu’s critical approach here: “I wonder if that’s Chu’s problem with Smith: 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…You can sense [Chu’s] frustration, her scrabbling against the edge of what she’s doing.”
Footnotes 2 and 3 have breathed life back into me today (and obvs a full-on banger—I read the Chu and had no idea what to think about it except it felt histrionic and mostly incorrect; this helped clarify that for me!).
The "writing in a time of war" thing feels almost like an American pathology to me—anybody who does not live in a country isolated off in a continent practically all its own knows writing has always been happening during times of war.
Ursula Le Guin has a comment in an essay of hers about how only a few of her short stories are self consciously "political"* because her politics were stuff she was doing in her actual life, and it was only in a situation where she could not do that that she felt she needed to make her stories talk for her. I've thought about this a lot since reading it—like, if you want to be of use to others, there are a million practical skills you can learn. And if you want to use your position as a critic at a big magazine to highlight Palestinian writers, you can also do that instead of writing an essay that makes it excessively unclear what the person under review actually thinks or says lol.
*at the time of writing the essay, it wouldn't surprise me if her take on this changed a bit
found the le guin quote (from her introduction to The Word for World Is Forest):
"I wrote The Little Green Men (its first editor, Harlan Ellison, retitled it, with my rather morose permission) in the winter of 1968, during a year’s stay in London. All through the sixties, in my home city in the States, I had been helping organize and participating in nonviolent demonstrations, first against atomic bomb testing, then against the pursuance of the war in Vietnam. I don’t know how many times I walked down Alder Street in the rain, feeling useless, foolish, and obstinate, along with ten or twenty or a hundred other foolish and obstinate souls. There was always somebody taking pictures of us—not the press—odd-looking people with cheap cameras: John Birchers? FBI? CIA? Crackpots? No telling. I used to grin at them, or stick out my tongue. One of my fiercer friends brought a camera once and took pictures of the picture-takers. Anyhow, there was a peace movement, and I was in it, and so had a channel of action and expression for my ethical and political opinions totally separate from my writing.
In England that year, a guest and a foreigner, I had no such outlet. And 1968 was a bitter year for those who opposed the war. The lies and hypocrisies redoubled; so did the killing. Moreover, it was becoming clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and grainlands and the murder of noncombatants in the name of “peace” was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP, and the murder of the creatures of the Earth in the name of “man.” The victory of the ethic of exploitation, in all societies, seemed as inevitable as it was disastrous.
It was from such pressures, internalized, that this story resulted: forced out, in a sense, against my conscious resistance. I have said elsewhere that I never wrote a story more easily, fluently, surely—and with less pleasure."
I've known about the sentiment articulated in footnote #3. For some, nothing they actually do or say feels like it would atone them for the mortal sin of being American. It's almost as if some regard even being born a privileged American as real original sin.
I've been trying to ease out of my childhood Catholic guilt, so it's deeply unnerving to experience something like that in lefty spaces. Maybe those aren't really safe spaces.
Really loved this and it was somehow very heartening. You perfectly described the anxiety of, well, what is writing supposed to DO and why can’t it do enough?—and I think you’re so right that writers and artists are excessively worried that their work does nothing against the scale of major issues, even though those issues would defeat any profession with humble, ordinary tasks to do. It’s not literature’s fault that a single essay can’t stop a genocide.
Also think you very expertly summarized Chu’s critical approach here: “I wonder if that’s Chu’s problem with Smith: 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…You can sense [Chu’s] frustration, her scrabbling against the edge of what she’s doing.”
Footnotes 2 and 3 have breathed life back into me today (and obvs a full-on banger—I read the Chu and had no idea what to think about it except it felt histrionic and mostly incorrect; this helped clarify that for me!).
The "writing in a time of war" thing feels almost like an American pathology to me—anybody who does not live in a country isolated off in a continent practically all its own knows writing has always been happening during times of war.
Ursula Le Guin has a comment in an essay of hers about how only a few of her short stories are self consciously "political"* because her politics were stuff she was doing in her actual life, and it was only in a situation where she could not do that that she felt she needed to make her stories talk for her. I've thought about this a lot since reading it—like, if you want to be of use to others, there are a million practical skills you can learn. And if you want to use your position as a critic at a big magazine to highlight Palestinian writers, you can also do that instead of writing an essay that makes it excessively unclear what the person under review actually thinks or says lol.
*at the time of writing the essay, it wouldn't surprise me if her take on this changed a bit
found the le guin quote (from her introduction to The Word for World Is Forest):
"I wrote The Little Green Men (its first editor, Harlan Ellison, retitled it, with my rather morose permission) in the winter of 1968, during a year’s stay in London. All through the sixties, in my home city in the States, I had been helping organize and participating in nonviolent demonstrations, first against atomic bomb testing, then against the pursuance of the war in Vietnam. I don’t know how many times I walked down Alder Street in the rain, feeling useless, foolish, and obstinate, along with ten or twenty or a hundred other foolish and obstinate souls. There was always somebody taking pictures of us—not the press—odd-looking people with cheap cameras: John Birchers? FBI? CIA? Crackpots? No telling. I used to grin at them, or stick out my tongue. One of my fiercer friends brought a camera once and took pictures of the picture-takers. Anyhow, there was a peace movement, and I was in it, and so had a channel of action and expression for my ethical and political opinions totally separate from my writing.
In England that year, a guest and a foreigner, I had no such outlet. And 1968 was a bitter year for those who opposed the war. The lies and hypocrisies redoubled; so did the killing. Moreover, it was becoming clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and grainlands and the murder of noncombatants in the name of “peace” was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP, and the murder of the creatures of the Earth in the name of “man.” The victory of the ethic of exploitation, in all societies, seemed as inevitable as it was disastrous.
It was from such pressures, internalized, that this story resulted: forced out, in a sense, against my conscious resistance. I have said elsewhere that I never wrote a story more easily, fluently, surely—and with less pleasure."
Ugh yes thank you. These Chu pieces are such shameless nonsense! Everyone knows it, I assume, but seems so tedious to devote a whole post to saying so
I live to serve lol
I've known about the sentiment articulated in footnote #3. For some, nothing they actually do or say feels like it would atone them for the mortal sin of being American. It's almost as if some regard even being born a privileged American as real original sin.
I've been trying to ease out of my childhood Catholic guilt, so it's deeply unnerving to experience something like that in lefty spaces. Maybe those aren't really safe spaces.