A petulant aside

Two Hundred Years of Sheila Heti?

Often when I’m working on a rough draft, especially one I’ve been putting off writing for a while (building up energy, I tell myself), I end up wasting a certain amount of time on ad hominem asides aimed at various unremarkable people who in their role as arbitrary emblems of some bad (but I suppose tempting, otherwise why would it/they bother me?) idea of life had been standing for some time already in my mental gallery of detestables.

These attacks usually have to get cut because they are, well, mean-spirited and irrelevant to the topic of the essay. But they also can generate a kind of energy I find exciting. One of the pleasures of writing for Tablet, which generally lets me be as ‘mean’ as I want to be, is that I’m allowed to take such random swipes of seethe at, among others, Garth Greenwell, Daniel Bessner, and NYRB Classics. Apparently inoffensive mediocrities—or even not-that-bad-s, we-should-be-so-lucky-as-to-have-s—but part of the wager of my performances of hatred is that we aren’t yet mad enough at what’s inadequate.

Readers—and fair enough—may take this as proof that I’m an asshole or overly reliant for writerly energy on an unbalanced adolescent antagonism against what I take to be phonies, poseurs and undeservedly successful winners of whatever game this is. It would be undignified of me to argue the contrary (“‘Dignity, always dignity,’ has been my motto…”)!

Although I could also point to all the essays and articles of mine that aren’t organized around ressentiment, I think that there’s something to be said not only for airing grievances, but also for, first, expressing them as personal attacks (because we encounter ideas embodied in people, as something lived—and because ideas matter to us insofar as they suggest to us how we ought to be living—and, too, because writing is not an impersonal exercise but a display/construction/breaking-up of self in conversation/rivalry with other candidates for Universal Attention and Immortality) and second for playing up a character of the crazed shouter, which can, at least sometimes, enact some of the usefully dis-inhibiting and enfranchising effects of other experimental prose strategies (fragmentation, parataxis, semi-fictionality, etc). What I write is not a record of what I think, even of what I was thinking at the time of writing, much less of who I am or was, but only of what was getting me to think, getting in the way of thinking, or away from thinking, the wreckage of a crash of (on the way to) thinking.

The tone of even, nuanced, careful, balanced ‘thoughtfulness’ is of course appropriate in some venues and for some purposes, but I take it that part of the point of non-academic writing, especially, is to show an existential, first-personal stake in whatever idea is being discussed. If for X holding true to the sense that a topic is ‘important’ means treating it in a calm and comprehensive way, for Y the same might pass more productively through enacting the disorientation and fear that would come were we to be really in the grip of some particular take on the topic. Making ‘too big of a deal’ about it, being ‘crazy’ (only a lunatic could be this upset about NYRB Classics, many haters said of me a year ago—just don’t read them bro!)—and then if possible, pulling back, laughing, moving on. To the extent that things actually ‘matter’ to us, they always risk having the out-of-control combination of the risky telling of long-withheld truths and massively hurtful spontaneously invented falsehoods characteristic of a fight in a crisis point of a marriage.

How stupid does it sound to say that’s the sort of relationship I want, not with, God knows, my partner, but with all ‘my own’ ideas, which ought to be, each time I want to think them, on the edge of telling me I’m just a boy they met at a party—that all along our connection has been a contingent, absurd mistake?

All this by way of introducing a fragment I wrote and cut recently from an essay on Harold Bloom, in which I address, among other things, an essay of Barbara (BD) McClay’s from a few years ago. It had been irritating me since I first read it, standing in my head for a whole complex of smug Christian (post-Christian? I don’t know the state of her faith) humanism and liberal pseudo-resignation to one’s own mortal irrelevance.

Her essay is a ‘response’ a Tweet of Jason Stanley (remember him lol?) in which he said that if his work won’t be read in 200 years, he will have been a failure (as if he weren’t a failure now). Stanley of course is ridiculous, but also tragic in that sense that the ambition to live forever in the minds of men is truly something great-souled and awesome even in its stupidest unconcealment (Tell me why I have to be a power-slave/ I’m a god, I’m a god, I have to live on! the poet demands)—while McClay offers something cozy, lame, church-y and ultimately deceitful, which I think deserves, if I’m going to take it seriously, not just dismissal or mockery and certainly not polite disagreement, but real hatred, as if she were suggesting (which in fact she is) that we all eat a box of poison. Anyway, onto the excised aside!

***

Alexandre Kojève, the brilliant interpreter of Hegel, insisted that in claiming to have arrived at Absolute Knowledge and the end of philosophy, Hegel was claiming to be God—and that he himself, in claiming to have understood Hegel, was likewise divine. However outlandish this sounds, it rightly expresses the outrageous pretension at the heart of any enterprise of explaining the world, much less one that purports to be the last and best. We should be equally alert—and grateful to Bloom for alerting us—to the grandiosity of the poet and the critic’s mission.

Polite writers may assure us that they do not care if they are read in two hundred years. We should, tipped off by Bloom, suspect that this is deceptive loser bullshit. Take for example an essay by Barbara McClay, in which the critic disclaims any desire to become immortal through her works (as a former employee of First Things she perhaps counts on getting her immortality from Jesus), and urges us to accept a meeker attitude towards literature by which we write because writing is a pleasantly meaningful activity that keeps us harmlessly occupied with belles-lettristic puffery while awaiting Heaven (yet surely there are lepers in need of sponge-baths or prayer-beads in need of counting—what could justify scribbling away when there are such images of God sufferingly astray in flesh, if not the Satanic suggestion that one’s own as yet unwritten thoughts after all “matter” much more?). She concludes:

The writer working now who I think has the best chance of being read long into the future is Sheila Heti, in point of fact. But I do think that work that is transformative, illuminating, and true comes from humbling yourself; from saying, I don’t matter. But this does. For however long it lives, it does.

To assert that one has such a grasp of the state of the literary field today—and its likely development two centuries from now—as to know the identity of the next canonized genius is as daring, as literally insane, an assertion, an exercise of an overweening will-to-power disguised as a judgment of taste, as any claim that one’s verses will be a monument more lasting than bronze. To assert that this genius is Sheila Heti, however, is simply risible.

Apparently humbling herself before her work—or before Heti’s work—the critic commands us to bow down, acceding to a vague, inhuman ‘mattering’ vibe-ily manifesting itself in writing feminine enough to set ambition in the second degree, hidden behind impersonal values. Criticism as priestcraft, botched cross of vocations, perennial ruse of un-self-knowing devils.