Death, Sociology, Crime, Knowledge, Jargon, Novels, Men

The irregular review of reviews, vol XIII

Bach and Death

Heartbreaking. A must-read.

Bach’s genius is ours because it demands to be reified by us. At its summit in the Chaconne, his work intimately connects us to one another, in each of our particular variations of love and loss, triumph and sorrow, confusion and uncertain resolution.

Bach whispers to us from deep in the past: “It also happened to me.”

The Chaconne also works marvellously on the piano. I favour the Hélène Grimaud version. This music is always moving, but it is all the more so after reading Evan Goldfine’s piece. My thoughts are with Evan and his family.

(The other music writer I like on Substack is Ulkar Aghayeva. She’s also a great composer.)

Crime novels

SUSAN HILL (yes, the, Susan Hill) recommends some crime writers. And here is my earlier list. Good stuff for this time of year.

Sociology of literature?

So many articles have been written about genius and scenius and all that jazz. None of them compares to this excellent discussion of Randall Collins’ A Sociology of Philosophies, by Julianne Werlin. Werlin offers an apt summary of the argument,

According to Collins, intellectual life, at its core, is conversation. No matter how solitary we think we are when we arrive at our ideas in the quiet of a monastic cell or the privacy of a study, we inevitably reproduce, reply, and react to the words of others. Language is social; so are its mental echoes, thought. In the case of philosophy, it’s not just any kind of conversation: it’s argument. Conflict, not agreement, propels ideas forward.

and a summary of what makes the book so worthwhile,

The human social world, where real conversations happen, blends seamlessly into the abstract world of philosophical argument without doing injustice to the complexity, abstraction, and autonomy of the life of the mind. It’s a sociology of intellectual life that doesn’t feel reductive.

I read A Sociology of Philosophies as part of my research for Second Act, and am intrigued by Werlin’s new project.

I’m in the early stages of thinking through a project on literary generations, in which I want to reflect precisely on the relationship between personal connections and literary change.

I based my section on literary groupings on Collaborative Circles, a splendid sociology of how groups of writers and artists begin by encouraging each other, forming new ideas and methods, before succumbing to the pressures of their group and departing to pursue their new originality. What I like about Werlin’s approach is that she makes the common reader central to the development of literature.

… there’s also something of the kind happening on Substack. There may not be another Voltaire or Diderot on here just yet. But I think we are seeing genuinely new modes of writing emerge among poets and fiction writers who are composing their posts largely for networks of others on the platform. It’s a model where there are few, or no, passive and silent lay audiences.

Read the whole thing. It’s excellent.

Knowledge and Jargon

James Marriott has been on a roll recently. First, he wrote this splendid column about the shallowness of social-media auto-didacticism.

But true curiosity is serious, not idle, and proper knowledge is almost always hard won. The real spirit of the autodidact is one of awed humility: other people know much more than me; catching up is going to be hard work.

It often strikes me that a revival of the autodidact tradition might offer a better answer to the much-discussed modern ailments of meaninglessness and lack of purpose than the gym routines, vitamin supplements and meditation schedules proposed by the gurus and hucksters of social media. After religion and family (increasingly rare consolations in our atomised, secular society), education must be one of the best available paths to fulfilment.

I think James under-rates the internet as a means of distribution and as a facilitator of networks. And people were plenty shallow enough in the nineties of my childhood. But there has undoubtedly been a diminishment of serious reading among elites, professionals, and the well-educated.

A serious society cannot tolerate for very long the idea that those who win the prizes of status and position and money do not in fact practise the life of the mind. So much of the Times is currently given over to the sort of self-help that might be better termed self-justification. I’m always pleased to see James arguing for the serious in a serious way.

This week, he follow-up with an assault on jargon.

And a command of jargon means that on finishing your expensive degree you have something concrete to show for your effort. You don’t need a BA to have an insight into George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But an easy way with words like “problematic” and “performative” is indisputable proof of one’s membership of the 21st century’s knowledge elite: the modern equivalent of knowing how to fence or how to dance a graceful quadrille.

I am less sceptical of jargon: precise terminology makes it easier for professionals to communicate, and often sounds like nonsense to the outsider. But there certainly is a lot of cant in modern life. James is really arguing against that. We should all remember Johnson’s injunction every day. Clear your mind of cant! Not talking in corporate cant requires a persistent effort. And, in my experience, you will be rewarded, about half the time by someone translating what you said into the usual cant, as if they were the same.

Ours, indeed, is an age of jargon. As has often been noted, the language of the boardroom is now almost as impenetrable as that of the high table. Business is a world of “key deliverables”, “actionable items” and “cross-silo leadership”. Even morality is now cast in jargon terms: “oppression”, “privilege”, “appropriation”, “intersectionality”. The proliferation of esoteric language is not difficult to explain. To a credential-obsessed and highly educated population the use of jargon words is a natural way to signal one’s status. And in an anxious and competitive economy, raising the linguistic barriers of entry to one’s profession or social class is a useful way to keep out the competition.

All of these words have some valid meaning, of course, but James is right that they are too often used as substitutes for thought, rather than expressions of it. And this,

You will have noticed that the less effective government becomes, the more abundantly it generates pointless language.

Here is my interview with James. And here he is talking to Ian Leslie.

And here is Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) writing about “verbs against the machine”.

If the dominant pattern in a certain genre of text — maddening business consultant memos, say — involves the liberal deliberate use of evasive nominalizations, LLMs would generate similar nominalizations as pattern transformations. What incentive is there for an LLM to generate more direct, active language? To use verbs?

Why the novel matters

Not only is this entirely written to the existing audience of novel readers in order to make them feel better about their relative status in society, it makes no real arguments. Sentences like this “The novel matters because it does not have to be clear or obscure” do not in fact mean very much. This clever-waffle continues throughout.

To speak in the language of AI, the novel has supreme coding capabilities. When I start writing a novel, I discover there is no such thing as freedom and it does have rules, even if the writer is making them up.

Is that the language of AI? Is this supposed to equate the novel with the LLM or the novelist? What does freedom mean if it doesn’t mean freedom to make up the rules? The whole thing is so personal that it makes very little actual case for fiction: “A novel matters when I am seduced by its language.” Levy quotes Murdoch without discussing the Platonic implications. The vague sense of mystery is enough, it seems. There is much that could be said on these issues, but it was not said here.

Beyond the usual argument that novels put us imaginatively in the place of others, nothing is really added. “The novels that travel with us for a lifetime endure because they have imagined something that is truthful and real.” Try saying that to someone who doesn’t read novels and see how far you get! If we honestly believe that it is necessary and important for non-readers to become readers, we can surely do better than this. How interested are we really in talking to those who find us obscure and irrelevant?

It is hard, frankly, to persuasively argue that the novel matters as much today as it ever did. Look around! And yet, Levy quotes no-one from before the modernist movement. A few names are mentioned, but the ideas and authors are all modern, all part of a particular political perspective. Little wonder this was a speech at the Southbank reprinted in the New Statesman.

Lord, help me see life through the perspective of others, just not anyone who holds the wrong political views or doesn’t already admire Gertrude Stein.

Literary Men

A similar piece was published in the New York Times at the same time. Is it something about advent that I don’t understand? This is a masterclass in how studying literature doesn’t just not teach you critical thinking, but in fact can train you in the art of reasoning without logic.

In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent. This disparity surely translates to a drop-off in the number of novels young men read, as they descend deeper into video games and pornography. Young men who still exhibit curiosity about the world too often seek intellectual stimulation through figures of the “manosphere” such as Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan.

Surely? Surely? And the solution to this?

The question for me is: What will become of literature — and indeed, of society — if men are no longer involved in reading and writing? The fortunes of men and women are intertwined. This is why, for example, I make sure that my male students read “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s not just their edification that matters; women also benefit from the existence of better men.

This just isn’t serious. At some point, if the literary establishment wants to be taken seriously by people who don’t understand them, they need to stop being so myopic and learn from their opponents. This is quite easily one of the worst-reasoned op-eds I have seen for some time. If you want young men to read literature, you do not start with The Handmaid’s Tale. Are we allowed to give them Atlas Shrugged or The Lord of the Rings? Ah, there we reach the hard question: do we want readers, or do we want readers of a particular politics?