Dale Peck

A retard for literature

I was inspired by John Pistelli recently to read Dale Peck’s 2004 collection of book reviews Hatchet Jobs. As the title suggests, Peck was somewhat in/famous 20 years ago as the reigning queen of mean reviews, a position that now is fought over by figures like Chu, Oyler, Manov etc (is there still a corner in the woman—identified world of letters for a sinister homosexual? and yet these women seem to spend their time complaining that they are being outrageously ‘woman’d’ by a society that… platforms their feminine literary mid-offs? It seems like it’s reviewing/publishing/writing/humanities that have been woman’d).

Peck is excitingly bad at his job, which is, ostensibly, talking about books. He compellingly stages his over-sized reactions to what might generously be called paratext, seething about dumb copy on the dusk jackets, or his idea of the author’s psychology, world-view, or totemic function as an embodiment of broad historical trends (which Peck has totally misunderstood, if not invented). And he has many confusingly jangling ‘ideas’ about what literature should be—he hates Joyce and experimental literature down to postmodernism, but also hates realism, which is boring and un-literary—we’re supposed to be doing something that he calls in the last line of the book, without explaining it, a new materialism.

The clearest, dumbest, funnest expression of these tendencies is actually in Peck’s personal writing in OUT. So before I get into the reviews in a minute, here’s Peck in 1997, having an unlookawayable meltdown about how his ex won’t talk to him, which is punctuated by feverish, fragmentary, semi-comprehensible exclamations on the nature of literature:

That middle section, especially, Wordsworth+Woolf=My Equation, leading into and it should come as no surprise that my ex-boyfriend and I have not spoken is so compellingly dumb, so thrillingly out-of-control, so deludedly in love with its unjustified sense of its own intelligence and so screamingly unwell (help me! help me! it doesn’t know that it keeps shouting) I immediately wanted to read a whole novel, Pale Fire footnotes-style, written in its voice. And then that penultimate pirouette, maybe writing is not like death after all, maybe it’s more like a tornado. I love anyone too stupid to stop and revise, who writes (at least as if) in one sitting, piling and piling instead of canceling. All the elements are such boring sophomoric cliches or sub-sophomoric self-indulgent post-breakup mewling, but we move through them with vitalizing energy—Let’s Get Retarded.

The author has to be a bit stupid, Sontag says, in order to let anything out in the first place. And Peck echoes the sentiment in one of his reviews (faulting, lol, Julian Barnes for not being stupid enough) as well as many of Sontag’s other thoughts (if you’re going to copy someone though, why not copy someone who wasn’t herself a paper-mache mock-up of a European Intellectual?). But unlike Sontag, who preached stupidity to others while remaining, at least in her essays, in constipatedly ‘intelligent’ self-control, Peck keeps staging Grand Guignol versions of his dumbass ‘personal’ responses, and then, as if panickedly, covering them over with a defensive intellectualization.

He loves to get into school-yard shit with the authors whose books he’s reviewing (the books usually disappear behind their authors), and is pathetically delighted by what he considers a sick burn. Thus:

The zingers you were saving in the icebox were so delicious and so cold.

Often his sense of ‘humor’ leads him into trouble (as it did after Hatchet Jobs on two notable occasions, in that essay attacking Pete Buttigieg—Mary Pete—for being, uh, disgustingly normal? and in that line, If I have to read another novel about the Holocaust, I’ll shoot a Jew myself. Now I love a good Holocaust joke as much as anyone except a few top Nazis, but maybe don’t put one of your own in print if you owe your career to Leon Wieseltier [and hold the Me Too jokes! keep your thoughts about Celeste Marcus’ paintings to yourself!]. Besides, is there even room for Holocaust book jokes after Joan Rivers’ [RIP] line: Everyone talks about Anne Frank this, Anne Frank that… what a bitch! Some Jewish author she is. You know I’ve written more books than her, but they never gave me any award. And she didn’t even finish hers! “The Nazis are coming up the…” Where’s the rest of the book, Anne?) such as here wishing David Foster Wallace got buttfucked:

This is somehow a response to a tedious, pontificating essay Wallace wrote about Dostoevsky (straight guys love Dostoevsky for some reason). When I don’t like someone’s essay, personally, I think about how I’d rather be getting fucked up the ass than reading it—an ass-fucking is too good a thing to wish on anyone but me.

Now you may have noticed, if you’re a regular reader of mine—that is, a reader of me—that Peck sounds a bit like yours truly, down to the reading line which I made myself a few months ago in refence to my critique of Robert Gluck. There must be such a thing as a hysterical queen style! I can only say that Janet Jackson said c. 1990 being asked about how her work compared to that of Madonna: well they’re both dance music, so they’re similar in that way… I’d say that what I do, how shall I put this, has class to it.

But obviously I resemble Peck in some ways, which I take, overall, as a good thing! I’d sign on to his defense of a personal-performative, dramaturgical style of criticism that makes exaggerated, wild responses and claims in order to see what will happen—I practice this myself, of course, and I infinitely prefer reading it to the measuring, finessing, nuancing, tarrying-in-the-ambivalences style of someone like Amia Srinivasan, trying so hard to be good and careful and take everything into account without ever a raising of voice.

It’s precisely because literature matters that it’s worth being stupid about—that is, worth having strong reactions and then acting-out those reactions in hyperbolic, silly ways, in order to create powerful recognizable emblems of possible moments of thought. If there is a right view of a text, a future final interpretation that takes everything in, we’ll only arrive there through a long (and in fact never terminated) conversation, not least with the voices in our own heads, with our multiple, contradictory responses that pick up the play of voices within the text. On the way to whatever eventual dogma, but also in opposition to it, we must let ourselves become possessed by a whirling sequence of squabbling minor deities who once possessed the writer of the text we comment.

Criticism avoids being a pointless secondary discourse on more primary texts only to the extent that the critic, like the author, becomes an avatar of transpersonal energies—if not a fool for Christ, than a retard for literature.

I’m willing to be clownish, Peck, Pauline, declares:

And like, yeah, we noticed you clowning!

I do/am this sort of thing myself, when I dunk on Eve Sedgwick for being a smelly fujo loser, or say NYRB is for educated dummies with the souls of degreed white women, or that Merve Emre is a facile idiot who did an Orientalism, or that people who work at university writing centers are failures who don’t know how to write. I’m serving clownery.

And some other writers are down to clown—Jon Ganz for instance calls me a loser (one of the relatively rare requests to write something for money I have turned down was a request to do a critique of Ganz for Compact… an opportunity to think about Ganz? and critique what I understand to be his ‘Drumpf is a fascist; the Dreyfus Affair explains everything; remember the 90s?’ thesis in the service of guys who at least pretend to be fascists for their neoliberal paymasters [for who knows what end]?—pass).

Now, if there’s the life-enhancing stupidity of clownishly saying what you think, and indeed more than what you think, exaggeratedly playing a part in order to get a view across so that it can be entertained, entertaining, so that it can like a character in a fiction (because ultimately that’s what ideas are, if they’re any good) live and move and do things you didn’t expect of it, so that it can make your own life over again like a child growing up to be a resentful teen who never asked to be thought, there’s also the life-diminishing stupidity of having a boring or poorly conceived intellectual program, like Down with Joyce!

All the fun of Peck crying and throwing up and wanting to rape writers he acts like he hates is a bit spoiled on finding out its ostensible justification is a program of de-Modernization. Now I suppose critics need programs of some kind, sure, but I’d rather not hear about them. I take it people—including me—take up criticism and other oblique genres because we suspect there’s something not so interesting about either our own thoughts directly stated, or the world itself directly taken up. It all needs a bit of zhooshing up—drugs, dizzy spells, the drama of ideas. Tell it slant.

Peck, too, seems to sense this at some moments, as when he’s praising the critics he sort of admires for the fun of their prose if not the quality of their moral-political-aesthetic agendas:

It’s surely no coincidence (but I don’t know why not) that Paglia and Koestenbaum are both homos (about Hickey, of course, there is a lot to be said)—and both, to my mind, extremely annoying. Not because they’re zany and unserious, but because, in part their zanniness is always a put-off, fake-stupid, meant to be a dazzling aria of self, as if a performance of a supposedly precocious child trotted out by proud parents after dinner to wow the guests by singing the state capitals backwards through a double recorder. And for such stupid ideas! (Pace Pistelli, who appreciates Paglia, but if I wanted to listen to the free associative nonsense of a skinny deluded invert I’d open my own head) Hickey didn’t make such mistakes.

I’ve been reading, by the way, Koestenbaum’s early book on the homoerotics of male literary collaboration and besides the pain inflicted by him dumb jokes, he does have Paglia’s combination of a certain erudite ability to bring out gemlike bits of historical/textual detail and arrange them quickly into new mosaics—as well as a penchant for talking off-handedly about theorists he obviously hasn’t understood. What he says about Bakhtin or Derrida is as dumb as what she says about Foucault. It’s fine not to do the reading—in which case we can not do the talking too—but both of them have another, third [there must be several hundred] kind of stupidity that consists of not knowing the difference between talking from your expertise and talking out your ass, or between usefully playful banter and ignorantly contrarian cant.

Although maybe that form of stupidity protects Paglia and Koestenbaum from ever falling into Peck’s pathetic self-pity—they never, in their stupidity, notice that they’ve been stupid, or that their haters might have a point, while Peck, sadly, sometimes looks around him and notices that he’s made a fool of himself. Although he acts like a rowdy-bowdy bitch, a literary brawler and bully, he is—of course—also a cry-baby, who has been misjudged by the homophobic media and will now put his red pen away forever:

It comes as no surprise Peck might say, that after his theater of cruelty era he went on to restart Evergreen Review as a tenderqueer wokeish festival of abject loserdom—the dick is also the pussy, I say in my own Pagliaesque or Hickeyian contribution to the theory of gender in literature.

I don’t know that reading Peck’s criticism I learned anything about even the books he reviewed, let alone about writing—or read any prose that any decent writer would wish to have written himself. But it sure was entertaining (for me). I may circle back next week to look at what he says about gay/minoritarian writing—which is, of course, retarded.