Mark Sarvas over at The Elegant Variation calls it “the essay heard ’round the blogosphere.” In the latest issue of The American Scholar, Melvin Jules Bukiet takes on writers Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Alice Sebold, and just about everything their books stand for:
Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness. … [But your] father is dead, or your mother, and so are most of the Jews of Europe, and the World Trade Center’s gone, and racism prevails, and sex murders occur. What is, is. The real is the true, and anything that suggests otherwise, no matter how artfully constructed, is a violation of human experience.
Back when the poetry wars were at their fever pitch, TMR would occasionally use magazine space to publish polemics on the state of the craft. It was a kind of public service, meant to provoke thought among the readership, or at least provide a mantelpiece for the gossip over who it was, exactly, that was going around and destroying all the damned art. These kinds of aesthetic discourses—academically speaking, the closest some writers come to brandishing a gun—have long since taken a backseat in the grand scheme of things, only sometimes raising their heads to snipe at things like workshop culture and the cruelly-coined “McStory.” Yet Bukiet’s polemic may be the early sign of a backlash against the new trend he stops just short of calling the culture of the cute. Bukiet asks: Is the new literature too fresh, too exuberant? Too unique?
Making us reply: is that even possible?
Challenging questions, and ones I believe will keep surfacing, as the debate has now extended beyond literature. In a recent Atlantic Monthly article Michael Hirschorn levels aim at Wes Anderson and Ira Glass, two giants in the wondrousness business, by accusing them of kitsch. “We’re drowning in quirk,” Hirshorn declares. The complaint: the new stuff is all flash, no thunder. Further accusations of superficiality over substance fly. Milan Kundera gets paraphrased with abandon. The kids are called self-indulgent. Oh, I forgot to mention—
“[Quirk] is the ruling sensibility of today’s Gen-X indie culture,” Hirschorn writes. “They’re young,” Bukiet corroborates.
Ah, yes; it’s the kids. The books under indictment—prominent contemporary works such as Everything is Illuminated and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—exude a certain joie de vivre so popular with young writers and young readers that at points it’s going to be hard to tell if all the opprobrium is legit lit criticism or just thinly veiled ageism. Are our young authors really not big enough sufferers? Should Chabon actually be channeling Dostoyevsky?
It will be interesting to see where the debate goes if it continues. Personally, I’m a big fan of the polemic, and since my friends love the very books Bukiet attacks, perhaps it’s high time we hoisted the black flag, spat on our hands, and burned all the Dostoyevsky.
Outraged? Maybe you should be.
6 responses so far ↓
1
John Hendel
// Oct 22, 2007 at 2:33 pm
I love the final reference to Mencken, but personally (perhaps because I’m just writing an honors thesis on him at the moment) I’d strongly, strongly advise against burning the Dostoevsky.
2
Tim Hayes
// Oct 22, 2007 at 6:21 pm
“What is, is. The real is the true, and anything that suggests otherwise, no matter how artfully constructed, is a violation of human experience.”
To this rather tautological argument, I would reply with Borges:
“We accept the real so readily only because we sense that reality does not exist.”
For that matter, anything within the realm of human experience (which includes the realm of the imagination) cannot be “a violation of human experience.” What would it mean for an experience to be a violation of experience?
In general, this argument strikes me as being rather reductionistic in its notion of experience and about seventy years out of date in its appeals to some sort of unitary “reality.”
3
Matt Pearce
// Oct 23, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Tim, to be fair to Bukiet, I think the meat of his argument is not really a question of metaphysics, but morality.
He takes a cue from Kundera, who defines kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit.” Kundera equated kitsch with the art of totalitarian regimes looking to create complacency in their subjects. You brought up a similar topic in one of your posts (http://www.missourireview.com/tmr-blog/archives/439) about totalitarian regimes wanting to quash expressive poetry because it threatened their moral ideology.
For Bukiet, the “Brooklyn Books of Wonder” might be like a sort of capitalist kitsch, one that eschews pain and self-confrontation, etc., for some kind of moral status quo.
I take issue with Bukiet’s essay many, many reasons, but I do understand where he’s coming from.
4
Tim Hayes
// Oct 23, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Fair enough, though I don’t think morality is quite so easily separable from metaphysics. With Nietzsche, I tend to think that “if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he) aim?” (BGE) So I would say that a basically metaphysical claim (like “what is, is. The real is the true” for instance) has its moral correlate Bukiet’s ethical critique of “kitsch” (which is, in his view, a violation of the true — a stylish falsehood). To deviate from “the real” (which is the true) is cast as being ethically reprehensible, so ethics and metaphysics are closely intertwined.
But this term “reality” is slippery in the article.
Elsewhere he says ” Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality.” This seems like a possible response to my contention above: not all imaginative literature is kitsch (some of it is “serious”). But I’m not clear on how a realist metaphysical framework (”what is, is”) can make room for serious “imaginative” or “fabulist” literature of any kind. The imagination deals primarily in “what is not.” But part of Bukiet’s critique of “kitsch” is that it avoids “what is” in favor of “what is not” (thus violating “human experience” through escapism, etc.) This seems like it’s equally true of fabulist and imaginative literature in general, but elsewhere he mentions the likes of Borges and Calvino as “important antecedents”.
So what separates the imaginative or the fabulist from the kitsch? Is it simply “self-indulgence” that separates the two? And in that case what does it mean to “indulge” as an author and why is that reprehensible? Is this a kind of closet asceticism? Must the true, serious author know how to suffer? But Bukiet elsewhere asserts that
“pain is tautological. The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.”
I wonder about all of this. As you suggest, “it’s going to be hard to tell if all the opprobrium is legit lit criticism or just thinly veiled ageism.” From what I’ve seen so far, it seems more like the latter than the former (though he does manage to level some valid criticism against Eggers and company). It doesn’t seem like the conceptual underpinnings of the article actually hold up to scrutiny, so I’m inclined to think that the philosophical framework is a kind of mise en scene intended to reinforce the authority of the piece (rather than a serious critical tool).
But I’m open to being wrong. Tell me what you think.
5
Matt Pearce
// Oct 24, 2007 at 12:41 am
No, I definitely agree with your assessment, and had many of the same thoughts. My point was that the new stuff potentially invites criticism in this spirit; I was just expecting it to be a bit more organized.
6
AlexStreiff
// Oct 24, 2007 at 7:15 am
I have to say that I kind of have a strong resentment for new writers along the lines of Foer–I can’t hide that. In recent literature there seems to be this push towards fabulism that is pushed over the edge of the line between fabulism and simplistic catologues of post-modern techniques. And I am saying this as an avid reader of fabulist literature. The likes of Coover and Calvino and Vittorini and Pynchon perfected fabulism–and it grew, but today it seems consumed by gluttony of and the strange, and the need to be the most fabulous, the most non-sensical, and the most simply ridiculous. The likes of Foer and his followers and the young hip-scene-writers of today, I feel, are suffering from being overhyped and overanalyzed–because really, does “Everything Is Illuminated” need to be critiqued as more than pop-lit?
Really, Foer and Eggers and Chabon seem to me to be pseudo-intellectuals playing to the hipster crowd.
Sorry for the rant, and ciao to everyone at the Review from Italy.
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