DeWitt, Rooney, Tolstoy and Gary Kemp, Is Culture Dying?, Against Re-reading, The New Sincerity, Death, World Literature 1600, Cecil the beagle, Totoro, Good Bad Taste

The irregular review of reviews vol. IX

YOUR NAME HERE BY HELEN DE WITT IS BEING PUBLISHED NEXT YEAR

Such good news.

Rooney

There are three basic errors in Ann Manov’s TLS review of Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. First is not Naomi who wears the lambswool sweater and tortoiseshell hair clip but Sylvia. This seems trivial but there is quite a distinct aesthetic between the two women which relates not only to their socio-economic status and cultural capital but which is a standard method for identifying and distinguishing romantic characters, as in Midsummer Night’s Dream and innumerable other works. Why should Rooney not use this technique?

Second a human rights lawyer would feasibly teach basic EU competition law and contract law. Peter explains that his legal practice includes equality and employment rights but also has a commercial side. From his conversations, he seems to practice judicial review, also. This is quite normal! Look at some profiles of Dublin lawyers and you’ll see human rights listed alongside other disciplines like regulation, employment, personal injury, and so on. Some human rights lawyers are former corporate lawyers. Some combine corporate law and asylum law.

Finally, and most importantly, Ivan is not a “fascist” or “incel” those are outdated misperceptions that other characters have of him. Manov is trying to expose some glaring inconsistencies in the fact that Ivan is described as a “creep” and a loser but is also seen as handsome and has girlfriends. The gross irony here is that Ivan is clearly autistic—or has autistic cognitive traits—and is often misunderstood by the normies around him who think he is “weird”. Manov has failed to read the character and has reacted to him as the normies do. Once you see this, Rooney’s narrative techniques make much more sense as well. Alas, all Manov has to say about that is to make a pointedly lame joke about it being more Yoda than Joyce. (I will be writing about this soon.)

Manov complains that Rooney’s characters make “juvenile confessions of affection” and “it will be seen as some sort of accomplishment that she writes about characters who are not literature students at, or graduates of, Trinity College.” Ordinary people do make juvenile confessions of affections! Why shouldn’t that come into literary fiction? And what obligation does Rooney have to get beyond literature graduates at Trinity College?

Manov complains about the “generic dirty talk” of the sex scenes without noting that they derive from the amatory fiction in which Sylvia is said to be a specialist (she is a literary academic). Rather than being merely cliched or trite, Rooney is writing in a mode that Manov isn’t interested in. It is perfectly acceptable to dislike that mode, but it is a weak and mean-spirited form of criticism—in theTLS!—to be so dismissive without even noting what it is you are dismissing.

Manov says Intermezzo has the form, but not the content, of a novel of ideas. A neat remark. But in truth all novels are novels of ideas, as Penelope Fitzgerald said. I would prefer to read serious criticism about that.

Is Culture Dying?

I found Olivier Roy’s book The Crisis of Culture vague and unprepossessing but Ian Leslie’s review was quite the opposite. Ian agrees with Roy and summarises him neatly.

Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another — say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.

I think that rather than de-culturing we are culture-shifting. I was in Oxford when I read Ian’s piece. Plenty of culture there! Try going to Lichfield or Dorset. Indeed, the more un-London the place you visit in the UK, the more you feel like deculturation has been resisted.

Of course, there is so much twee branding that is a pretence at culture (all those unbearable Cotswold tea-shops full of make-believe icons of the good old days of chintz), but you can still find esoteric books in the shops of Oxford, harpists in the shabbily decorated hotel restaurants of Moffat, and so on. The day I spent in Lichfield felt like being in an English culture that refuses to die, with the market, and the cafes, and the community centre in the church. I live in one of the most diverse parts of London and I see culture everywhere around me all the time. Roy is surely right that global technology is rearranging culture, but the idea that it is all being washed away and replaced by political arguments is only half the story. We all used to go to Lyons tea rooms and watch the BBC, now we go to Starbucks and look at our phones. Cultures still exist within and around that. Go to small post-industrial towns in the midlands. “Finely patterned, shared sensibilities” still exist! The Roy thesis needs integrating with the Gurri thesis.

The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children—boring stuff. That’s what normal means.

The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie. For them there is no good and evil, no right and wrong, only oppressors and oppressed. Every transaction demands their intervention to protect designated oppressed groups. “Social justice” translates neatly into “elite control.”

The conflict rolls on around the world, undecided, and it’s the elites, it seems to me, who have that frightened, desperate look.

How much deculturation you see, and how much you think it is a totalising force as opposed to a rearrangement depends how normie vs elite you are, I suspect. Ian’s piece is a good example of that. He gets very normie about the monarchy for example which is one example of how Roy’s thesis might be true but is very far from being all of the truth.

Tolstoy and Gary Kemp

One of the best things I have learned recently is that Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet LOVES Tolstoy.

I found Giles talking to Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet about War and Peace next to a set of circular iron library stairs. “I started reading it when I was on tour,” said Gary. “You’ve got a lot of time on your hands on tour.”

“How did you keep up with all the different names for the same characters?” I said. “It did my head in. I gave up after four pages. Anna Karenina was alright but War and Peace? Baffling.”

“Yeah you have to plough on,” said Gary. “There’s a glossary. You can also Wikipedia the first bit just to get you through it. And in the end it’s just about two families. Anna Karenina, though,” Gary went misty-eyed. “What a book.”

I looked up 22 Old Queen Street in Pevsner, to check if I was right about its date, prompted by Esther’s question in this piece, and was surprised to find it not listed. The street is obviously mostly C18th, late Georgian, on the whole, but some building began around 1700 and No. 24 dates from 1690-1700 (with later restoration) so No. 22 may well be Queen Anne! There are some good anecdotes connected with the house, too.

Whenever there was an important Elgar premiere in London, Frankie gave a lavish dinner party at 22 Old Queen Street. Everyone who was anyone in the arts in London would be there. After the first performance of the Violin Concerto in November 1910, the menu at each of the three tables in the big music-room was headed with a theme from each of the three movements. Boult remembered Elgar saying to Claude Phillips, ‘Well, Claude, did you think that was a work of art?’ But the composer was not always so genial. It was Schuster whose influence at Covent Garden brought about the three-day festival of Elgar’s music at the Royal Opera House in 1904, a unique honour still for an English composer. (He was rewarded with the dedication of In the South, which had its first performance at the festival.) He gave the usual dinner-party, the panels in the music-room decorated with emblems referring to Elgar’s works. After Schuster had proposed Elgar’s health, the guests were surprised to see that the composer made no reply but continued talking to his neighbour as if nothing had happened. But Schuster was unlikely to have been surprised since he was accustomed to his friend’s moody behaviour, which to others appeared as bad manners. He remembered another occasion when he asked a young soprano to sing one of Elgar’s songs. He introduced her to the composer, who said curtly, ‘Well, now you have spoiled my evening for me.’ 

Against re-reading

Oscar Schwartz maintains in The Paris Review that re-reading, rather than being the essence of literary culture (because so much is forgotten, so much recurs as cliche, so much fails to live up to the standards of the past), is a mistake. Contra Nabokov and all respectable opinion, he finds re-reading diminishing, preferring to preserve the intensity of a first reading:

…to this day, when I read something that functions as a hinge in my life—a book that rearranges me internally—I won’t reread it. The Neapolitan Novels I won’t read again. Nor Swann’s Way. Nor 2666.

I am glad to hear that Schwartz has never found himself externally re-arranged by a book, which would be a sort of Borgesian or Kafkian situation that would presumably only be made worse by re-reading.

Schwartz does accept the value of the re-reading, however, he just prefers not to read like this.

As a student, I came to appreciate such granularity. Going over a text many times allowed me to fine-tune my initial intuitive judgments into something more comprehensive. There was an intellectual satisfaction in this, but I also felt, quietly, that rereading was not really reading.

This is what Samuel Johnson thought was the true aim of criticism: to turn opinion into knowledge. But because his essay is personal, not critical, Schwartz is working in the opposite manner, seeking to put aside both the knowledge and the method he has learned in favour of an impulse he first felt, he tells us, when he was ten.

Schwartz cites Barthes saying that re-reading is a form of opposing capitalism’s habits of consumerism but disagrees, referring to his childhood at Orthodox Synagogue, where the Torah was perpetually re-read, to describe re-reading therefore as “reaffirming tradition and safeguarding community.”

At this point, politics is wheeled in to give the audience something reassuring to put in opposition to this idea—conservatives.

Rereading is, when you think about it in another light, a basically conservative pursuit: it is what makes canon formation possible, and canons are what keep the base structure of a tradition or a culture intact. This is why Harold Bloom was a rereading fanatic, and why rereading evangelists are always rereading the classics.

Be a good liberal! Don’t re-read old books!

It is a very large, unjustified assumption that people like Bloom are re-reading fanatics because of pre-existing ideologies. The slip from Torah to Milton is not unreasonable but it is glib. The nature-nurture question of whether the pro-canon people like Bloom re-read because they believe in the canon or believe in the canon because they re-read is not even recognised as a question. Similarly, Schwartz tries to explain children’s re-reading with reference to Freud, as if a century of empirical science had not been conducted on the development of children since then. As for the idea that we re-read books because they are good… please, that would be too simple, and present no opportunities to talk about Barthes and the conservatives.

In response to Vivian Gornick’s description of re-reading D.H. Lawrence over many decades, Schwartz writes,

I find myself wanting to argue that her first interpretations of Sons and Lovers were just as rich and true as the latter ones, and in fact, perhaps by rereading and by all this painstaking reconsideration she has lost access to that specific type of youthful wisdom and intensity we bring to bear when we read something the first time.

This argument defeats itself: of course, if the earlier interpretations are just as rich and true then both must be equally worthwhile. It is not re-reading that loses you access to the “youthful wisdom and intensity” of first reading but time, ageing, entropy, and decay. Schwartz writes as if death was not real, as if trade-offs and opportunity costs were not real.

He ends by saying, “The same fate awaits us all, whether you’ve reread Proust or not”, — but based on his own arguments, it is not the same fate. The approach to death where one has retained the vivid impressions of youth must surely be different to the approach where re-reading has replaced them all with maturer impressions. What is all that “youthful wisdom” actually for?

If re-reading only seems like a weapon against the inevitable, but in truth is not, then surely there is some wise advantage in not re-reading? But no, Schwartz ends with a comfortingly familiar cliche—“the same fate awaits us all”—which is a suitably ironic form of re-reading for his essay to end on.

Whether Schwartz re-read any of the sources he relied on for his essay, or simply quoted them from the vivid impressions of his first readings, he does not say.

What was the New Sincerity?

A very good essay by Daniel Cult that is nominally a review of Adam Kelly’s upcoming monograph, New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age but which will give you a literary history of the reaction against post-modernism’s interminable deferring of meaning and convolutions of irony (think David Foster Wallace).

I believe that so much of the modern political and economic discussion among literary people is badly informed and irrelevant both to the real political economy of the world and to a full understanding of literature. All that really happened, I submit, is that the absurdism of Becket, Artaud, and others—the absurdism of being trapped in the world—became a very subjective absurdism of being trapped in the deterministic conditions of your life, i.e. the absurdism of complaining about the system and how it affects you, which was “elevated” into a series of philosophical, economic, and political claims that make very little difference to the world beyond the literati. Waiting for Godot became Blaming Late Stage Capitalism. Auto-fiction is the final phase of this literary turn, a warped Wordsworthisn vision that owes more to ideology that life.

This essay, however, is a compelling discussion of other perspectives and elucidates many themes of modern literary culture very well.

Any full account of the New Sincerity will likely have to treat it in three waves. Kelly covers the first, culminating politically with Obama. The second will have to grapple with alt lit, autofiction, and twee, among other minor literary movements associated with Gen X and millennials. A specific current within this second wave departs from Wallace’s “anti-rebel” sensibility and the end-of-history liberalism of the first wave, and as such, it finds its political expression in Occupy, Bernie, and BLM. The third is currently emergent and can be glimpsed in weird, Very Online, bastard terms like hypersincerity and meta-irony. D i a l e c t i c a l l y , it isn’t tied to liberal/left political sensibilities and includes some stripes of reaction. (Isn’t being “based” at its heart calling sincerefags on their bluff?) In that sense, perhaps Honor Levy’s My First Book is on the frontier of something.

Well, that’s grim to think about. 

At any rate, I think such a model will prove more accurate than Kelly’s formulation that the genre turn has superseded the New Sincerity (after the latter tilled the ground for it). Certainly, the attraction of literary writers to genre fiction—Bret Easton Ellis to thriller, Sally Rooney to romance, Colson Whitehead to post-apocalypse, Junot Díaz to SciFi—is a notable trend within contemporary fiction, but perhaps it should be considered within the scope of the New Sincerity, or as an offshoot, rather than its successor.

This paragraph from the end is especially good.

I make these contentions strictly as a literary historian. As a reader, I have no real attachment to the New Sincerity as a project and agree that something feels passé about it. I think the rising interest in modernist techniques and storytelling among contemporary writers globally—as in Jon Fosse’s Septology, Rooney’s Intermezzo, Anna Burns’s Milkman, and Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid—is more intriguing, even as I find the vague modernism that so-called heterodox literary critics seem (often unknowingly) to wield against “corporate literature” to be limp and self-flattering. (We need something genuinely new to disrupt the sameness saturating contemporary culture, they declare. Bitch, “newness” has been done before! What do you think modernism was??) But even if it isn’t newness as such, maybe there is something within the increasingly discredited modernist project that’s worth returning to and, indeed, taking sincerely.

I agree very much about the parochial attachment so many modern critics have to modernism. I am often left wondering why modernism was so new and impressive but we don’t talk about Tolkien? Why the enormous flourishing of what we might call the New Romance in the twentieth century and beyond isn’t just as fascinating a topic of literary history? Pluaralism is the essence of literature! The great works are often about good and evil! Sorry it doesn’t fit with the narrow political project of post-modern literary theory! The world is what it is!

Anyway, enough ranting for one day, but do read this informative piece. I subscribed right away.

Black Death

I enjoy everything Saloni Dattani writes but I found this particularly interesting. Why don’t we have better estimates for how many people were killed by the Black Death? Estimates range from 30-60% or higher. Two important things we don’t know much about are: how the Black Death affected women and children, and the average household size and composition. It is also likely that the Black Death itself affected record keeping! The whole essay is a good reminder of just how much we don’t know about history.

Since 1580, researchers believe that we’ve faced between 10 and 28 separate flu pandemics, but without further historical research and genomic sampling, it’s hard to be confident. Global mortality estimates have only been made for a handful of these flu pandemics. This includes the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, whose estimated death toll ranges between 50 and 100 million deaths worldwide.

World literature, 1600

Try reading this without immediately making yourself a reading list… global literary culture, the flow of silver from the New World to Asia, the rise of the novel, the pros and cons of literary canons, and all in one brief, readable, highly informative essay!

Only a fraction of the New World silver that swept through Europe remained there. In Spain, precious metals lined the coffers of a few generations of grandees before leaving the country, and the continent, for good. In general, they went east. As in the late medieval period, in the Renaissance, vast quantities of bullion made their way to China along luxury trade routes. In fact, thanks to recent isotope testing, we now know that most of the riches extracted from the mines of Peru, including the contents of Potosí, never touched Europe at all: they were taken directly to China via Pacific trade routes. In other words, the impact of New World silver isn’t just a European story. In fact, it’s not even primarily a European story: it’s a global one. And that holds not only for economic, but also for literary history.

Cecil the beagle

What a splendid book review. I enjoyed it very much both for its own sake and as an example of what good reviewing should be like. Here’s one fine paragraph.

If the woman ruling the country might be said to occupy a rather peripheral place in this account, it is in line with Cecil’s view of his own importance. This is an abiding difficulty with the kind of history that focuses on the machinations of state and the workings of administration. In more recent times, we have the phenomenon of political biographies which seem to insist that the cabinet secretary or special adviser in question was the most important player in the political process. Historians have their own version of this, where the achievements of Thomas Wolsey or Thomas Cromwell, for example, are lauded to such an extent that Henry VIII barely makes the frame. Elizabeth herself recognised her dependence on men like the Cecils, and – despite a disinclination to give lavish rewards – gave them the wealth and nobility they had earned. The responsibility of government, however, ultimately lay with her. Towards the end of her reign, she described herself as a candle made of wax, whose job it was ‘to waste myself and spend my life that I might give light and comfort to those that live under me’. Both Cecils were illuminated by their closeness to the queen; the source of illumination should not be left out of the picture.

Totoro

An interview with Kazuo Oga, who produced the background animations for Totoro.

Oga: To begin with, I was delighted that the subject matter I was painting was the suburbs of the 1950s. It was also my first time working with a director who made demands about the [background] art, such as, “I want you to paint things like rural landscapes, trees and flowers, while paying close attention to them.” I did that myself and, from around the halfway point, I began to consider flowers and trees as the equals of Totoro [the character]. I painted them with that in mind.

Good bad taste

I found this whole thing to be in excellent taste.

9. Everyone you know is writing the same blog posts about taste. They are all reading Rick Rubin and W. David Marx; they are all shopping SSENSE sales and buying Matisse posters to put up on their walls. For You Pages are out; taking screenshots of Substack posts is in. Stanley Cups are out—too Midwestern-suburb-core—but $200 electric kettles are in. This all still feels to you like a kind of yuppie class signaling—conspicuous consumption, rebranded again—but maybe this thought, too, is gatekeeping?