The Amphibium, pt. 7
This is Vol. 7 of the Amphibium.
One of these things, maybe.
In my last missive, I wrote a bit about what I called a “crisis of confidence” among fiction writers, and I included a few quotes in which prominent novelists expressed their growing suspicion of “making things up.” Soon after I sent that message, I read a very interesting interview with Sally Rooney.
Many of you will know who that is, but for this who don’t: Sally Rooney is an Irish writer who is still in her twenties but has already written two very good and widely acclaimed novels. The first, Conversations With Friends, was a huge deal within the insular circle of devoted literary readers that I inhabit, but her second, Normal People, has been a much more mainstream success—a legitimate bestseller; repped by celebrities in magazines and on Instagram; on its way to being a streaming TV show.
In addition to being very talented, Rooney is very smart and very thoughtful, which is a rare combination. (Even the latter two don’t go together as often as people think, and there seems to be no real correlation between those two and the first.) Like many smart, thoughtful people of her generation, she is quite politically engaged, and her politics tend toward the radical, i.e., she is a Marxist, a fact which she talks about quite a bit.
This creates an interesting tension, not in the banal sense that all radical art must exist within the very system it critiques, but in a much deeper way, because there is actually nothing radical about Rooney's work. This is not at all meant as a judgment, just a description. Rooney’s novels are traditional both in form (she writes a highly elevated but fairly straightforward brand of social realism) and in content (they are essentially comedies of manners about the Irish middle class). Some of her characters are from working class backgrounds, but they are all college educated; she doesn’t write about people on the margins of Irish society or the margins of the global economy. Many of her characters are themselves Marxists, but this seems to be just a matter of verisimilitude; her characters have the politics that people in the milieu Rooney is depicting tend actually to have. There is very little about her work that enacts or even really promotes her political commitments.
In a recent interview on the literary website Hazlitt, Rooney was asked about the ways in which her politics and her writing interact, and her answer was that they don’t, particularly. Though she has always been politically engaged—“In my normal life, completely away from my work, I do normal stuff like going to rallies, that I always did, going to marches and stuff like that”—she says she's not particularly interested in using her new-found literary celebrity, let alone her writing itself, as a platform for political activism.
Those of you who have read a few of my emails will have guessed that I find this attitude refreshing. It’s not that I think that every writer should feel this way, but that any writer should be allowed to feel this way. It has become something of a liberal shibboleth that all art is necessarily political. In this view, putting up a barrier between your politics and your art is itself a political gesture, and an especially reactionary one. Those who decry the politicization of art tend to be conservatives who just don’t like the fact that all the good artists are lefties.
So it is tonic to read an outspoken person of the left acknowledge that her artistic impulses and her political impulses spring from different sources and do not have a strong relationship with each other.
The interviewer then asks the very sensible broader question of what potential Rooney thinks literature might have for “shaping political ideas,” to which Rooney responds that she is “skeptical” that it has any such potential at all. She goes on:
But I also think that there have to be parts of life that are not…I don’t think anything is completely separate from politics, I think everything we do is captured by one system or another, we’re never totally free of it. But I also think there have to be parts of our lives that make it worth going on with the struggle. And obviously one big part of that is our intimate lives, and that’s what I write about. I think that our personal relationships with other people give us a reason to keep living. And I think for a lot of people, or let’s say for a small number of people, the novel is another reason to keep going, to keep feeling like the struggle is actually worth engaging in, like there’s something worth protecting about human civilization. And for some people that’s the novel. And for other people that’s like, sports or other forms of the arts. There are loads of other things that are of course part of these broad political systems but that bring us a joy or a pleasure that we can salvage that isn’t totally just transactional in its nature. And I think that the novel is one of those things, maybe. That’s obviously not to say it’s fenced off from political concerns, but that there’s maybe something in it that transcends the transaction of simply paying for a book and owning it as a commodity. I would hope so.
At first glance, this is a fine expression of the meaning and purpose of great art. But if you read a little closer, there is something very odd going on here. The point of human civilization is to instill in us the feeling that there is something about human civilization worth preserving, so that we will be willing to persist in the political fight of preserving it?
The ellipses in that first sentence is in the original, and there's something almost poignant about Rooney’s pause and redirection here. She comes very close to saying that there are in fact some private spheres of life, spheres that are truly autonomous, that these are the things that life is or ought to be about, and that the political struggle is really a struggle to protect these things and to make this private flourishing available to as many people as possible. But she can't bring herself to believe this, so she changes track: of course everything must be subsumed under the political; at the end of the day, there is only the struggle. But we need things like personal relationships and novels about personal relationships to give us the strength to keep struggling.
I want to add quickly here that this was a spoken interview, and I don't want to give too close a reading to off-the-cuff remarks, but it seemed to me when I read these lines that these were the words of a person whose personal experience with the transcendence of art has come up against her ideological commitment to the idea that there is no such thing as transcendence, that transcendence is a bourgeois illusion. And it also seemed to me that, though Rooney is trying to make a positive case for the novel here, this case was in many ways a clearer expression of the "crisis of confidence" than any of the more explicit ones I quoted last month.
There is a famous exchange between Flannery O'Connor and Mary McCarthy, which O'Connor recounts in The Habit of Being:
Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the 'most portable' person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, 'Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.' That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable."
If it's not already clear, I am a big fan of Rooney's novels, and though I've never met her, everything I've read makes me admire her as a person as well. But when I read her defense of the novel, I thought: "Well, if that's all it is, to hell with it."
A much more frivolous side note that you can just skip if this already feels like too much
Another thought Rooney prompts: it’s always interesting to watch a writer who is already literary-writer famous become famous-writer famous. As a member of the aforementioned insular circle of devoted literary readers, you believe that Sally Rooney or Colson Whitehead or Jennifer Egan or George Saunders is already as famous as it is possible for writers of their sort to become. They get nominated for the big prizes; they get written about everywhere it is possible for literary novelists to get written about. Everyone you talk about books with has heard of them, probably read them, has an opinion either way. Then all of a sudden you realize that beyond your insular circle there is an outer ring that also reads a lot, but with whom you rarely talk about books, because they don't seem to read the same stuff you read, and now those people are reading Normal People or The Underground Railroad or Lincoln in the Bardo and having excited conversations with you about them, now Barack Obama and Taylor Swift are reading these books, and you realize that being read by those people is what it actually means for a writer to be famous.
I am not even literary-writer famous and, though it is obviously poisonous for writers to even have these kinds of aspirations, when I allow myself to dream of writerly fame, it is literary-writer fame I dream about--the kind of fame where polling a random sampling of M.F.A. students would prove that the majority had heard of you. Being human, I sometimes envy writers who have this kind of fame. But it doesn't even occur to me to aspire to the other kind of writer fame, or to envy writers who have it.
N.B., we’re still only talking about “writer famous” here; beyond that outer ring is a much larger outer outer ring that reads nothing at all, and still will not have heard of Sally Rooney after they’ve binged the entire run of the Normal People TV show; and beyond that is a further ring--the vast majority of people--who won’t even watch prestige streaming TV because it feels too much like reading a book. True fame is being known to this outermost ring, and that is a fame enjoyed by maybe three novelists, none of whom the insular circle would touch with an eight-foot rolling library ladder.
A couple of other things
A few vols. ago, I wrote about the list of favorite books I put together for Image Journal. That list is now online here.
This month's issue of Harper's Magazine has a very good but thorny essay by Marilynne Robinson. It is not an easy read, so I joined Harper's web editor, Violet Lucca, on the magazine's podcast to talk it over.
If you’re new around here, a bit more about me.