I wanted to follow up my opening essay on Sally Rooney’s Normal People with some more informal notes.
Not Everything Is Politics
My writing about Normal People this month continues the focus I’ve had here on newer books, but I should mention that I’m actually a relative newcomer to contemporary literary fiction. I stayed away from it for a long time, and only more recently have I become more interested in what’s being written now. I want to know what’s out there, and I want to try to make sense of it the way I’ve learned how.
I like that I’m coming to it as an outsider, because it means I have no loyalty to trends, or to recent literary history. I don’t have preconceived notions. I just strolled onto Twitter saying, uh … what should I read? Is this author any good?
If you ask that question about Sally Rooney, she’s either the first great Millennial novelist, or middling food for normies, a passing fad. On the Millennial part, I liked this piece by Cody Delistraty in Vulture, which argues that she’s been designated the “Millennial whisperer … largely by non-Millennials, those in the old guard of media rushing to find and anoint the generation’s voice.” He goes on to discuss the characters’ “lack of agency” in Normal People, their sense of being “propelled by a current of politics and power dynamics that are out of our control”, and he’s insightful about the ambivalence this prompts in the reader. “Rooney has this all precisely right”, he says with some reluctance, willing to admit that she has indeed captured important aspects of Millennial experience, and then he spends the rest of the essay searching for something more dynamic than the passivity he finds in Normal People.
I relate to his reluctance about the passivity in the novel, but he puts it in political terms, which bores me. He wants a more radical politics to push Rooney’s characters beyond their shrugging acceptance of the status quo.
Does everything have to be politics? Are we allowed to respond to books on any other terms? It reminds me of frustrations I’ve had for a long time with the legacy of critical theory and the obsessive search for material causes for everything that happens in art and literature. I learned to read this way in college — seeking out the context of a book, working to discover how it was overdetermined by the economic and social and political conditions of the time in which it was written and published. I learned that “the personal is the political”, that we must always be searching for the hidden political implications of an artistic choice or a literary theme or a character’s actions. I learned too that all art is time-bound, trapped in history, and that we must become scholarly empiricists, diligent historicist detectives working to situate works of imagination in their own era.
These lessons were useful and powerful. They’re the reason Delistraty can write the way he does in that Vulture piece, moving capably between the novel and contemporary politics. But for the characters in Normal People, is politics really the problem?
Not Everything is Capital
We’ve also gotten very good at turning these ways of reading back onto ourselves as writers. You can see this at work in this essay by Mitch Therieau in the Chicago Review. It forms a theory of the contemporary “personal essay” genre, writing that blends memoir and criticism.
To write a personal essay, says Therieau, you must develop an “I” that stands for the value of your “experiential capital”, this unique experience of art you’ve had, and then you must provide it, “service-worker-like”, to the reader. The critic is a “surrogate experiencer”, who delivers the “unmediated crush of sensation” to the reader. The experience must designate the author as someone unique, and the reader must be overwhelmed with the feeling that they too have had this experience.
Pressures to write this way are created by the economic conditions of the literary market, which has found bestsellers in writers like Jia Tolentino and Ta-Nehisi Coates and their “remarkable blend” of memoir and criticism, and the appeal of this genre is unsurprising given philosophical truths about our media-saturated lives. We live in a “fallen world”, where we’ve “lost our ability to experience directly”. Criticism has become a “mood altering technology”, which works to convince us that “despite everything, meaningful aesthetic experiences are still possible”. Under these conditions, critics push their accounts of meaningful art experiences to the highest sensory extremes, striving for an experience of sublime depersonalization. Ultimately this represents a yearning for self-annihilation, for an annihilation of all “experience”, and of “personhood as we know it”. That’s the gist.
The essay is in the critical theory tradition of figures like Fredric Jameson, for whom all the world is a “text”. Arguments are intricate, ideas are linked quickly, and analogy freely drifts. There can be a thrilling freedom in its play of associative thinking, but I always want to quarrel with this kind of writing. It takes for granted the omnipotence of Capital, which it believes overdetermines our culture, and so it’s short on explanations and attempts to persuade. Instead it emphasizes the dazzling nimbleness of its discourse, how it can hop rapidly across different disciplines and media.
But when a novel, a TikTok reaction video, an intellectual movement, a tweet, a piece of furniture, or what have you, are all read as interchangeably manipulable game board pieces, equal in weight, then analogy begins to lose its force. We are struck by the unexpected patterns we’re shown, but they ripple like images on the surface of water, and easily dissipate.
But it doesn’t matter — the only thing this kind of writing believes has any force anyway is almighty Capital, and underneath that belief is a deep philosophical pessimism, a natural despair about the worth of seemingly any activity. I wonder how any of it gets written, it’s so aware of its own futility.
Maybe I’m being ungrateful. After all, doesn’t my own post on Tim O’Brien sound a bit like what Therieau is describing? I ran out of time in that essay to give a more valuable critical analysis and so fell back on the dynamics Therieau describes — I became merely a “surrogate experiencer” of art, just offering my feeble “I” service-worker-like to the reader. It’s irksome! And yet it’s misleading to narrow our sense of the I’s potential, because it can do so much more than simply be a tool for Capital — it just has to be used in service to a higher ideal.
To reduce criticism to a “mood-altering technology” is to erase nearly everything it can do. It can teach you to better appreciate literature, it can assist with interpretation and analysis, it can sharpen your perceptions and refine your taste. And these effects are cumulative. Well-made criticism will augment your inner life, your ability to think and feel deeply, to reason and remember. Critical theory writing of the Jameson variety can seem like it believes this kind of cultivation simply isn’t possible, or even that it’s a sham, a misleading mystification.
We need to see the forces that limit us and call them what they are, but if we engage in a perpetual quest to discover how we’ve been overdetermined by Capital, don’t we risk becoming merely its stenographers? Deconstructing can set us free, but then what? More deconstructing … ? Is it possible for us to have any ideas or artistic expressions that aren’t already determined for us? Is there any part of us that is free from all this, free from “context”, free from social forces, free from money and power?
I know the author didn’t quite mean it this way, but I couldn’t help but take umbrage with a statement partway through:
Today’s median practitioner of criticism is at best a freelancer and at worst an elevated hobbyist: either someone who can sell their labor only sporadically and with great effort or someone who cannot sell their labor at all but who works anyway, presumably for the love of the game. (In a recent book, Leigh Claire La Berge calls this second scene one of “decommodified labor.”)
At worst an elevated hobbyist — fair enough! Final Canticle is happily “decommodified” and I offer my labor as just another writer howling into the whirlwind for free. Maybe a weird blog like mine represents something that is free from the lamented overdetermination. Maybe the spirit of the hobbyist is actually something that could alleviate these anxieties.
Not Everything Is Power
The pessimism we find in the worldview that sees Capital and politics and power as omnipotent determiners of our culture, even of our relationships and individual thoughts and feelings — that is the passivity in Normal People that needs rebelling against. The novel itself is captive to that worldview, and so applying critiques to it based on the same premises won’t yield anything interesting.
It would be easy to convince the novel’s characters that their politics should be more radical, and that that would set them free from the forces that limit them — they would accept that idea readily. It would also be easy to convince them that power and its master Capital determine everything in their lives — they can see that at work in their romantic relationships and their friendships in every scene.
With no other explanations forthcoming, power relations and the urge to control would seem to flow freely down from the structures of Capital to colonize even the characters’ unconscious. An innate instinct for dominance and exploitive sado-masochism lives within them, with no apparent cause. For Marianne, we can point to her abusive upbringing, but Connell provides the more shocking example. He has anxiety issues later in the book after the suicide of a school friend; he grows up without a father. But he’s largely happy at home, and he displays no aggressive impulses. So how can we explain the violence that seems to live so naturally in him, beneath the kind surface?Nothing we see him do anticipates the scene in which Marianne is lying in his lap, he’s looking at her face, and then:
He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him. The idea frightens him so badly that he pulls his chair back and stands up. His hands are shaking.
Is this something like “victim blaming”? Was Marianne putting out a “vibe” and Connell simply picked up on it? The TV series would seem to have taken this view, at least to some degree. In a later scene on the show, when Marianne says she likes it when Connell tells her what to do, he still reacts a little uneasily, as if this is just a quirk of hers — and hers only — that he’s simply grown used to.
But in the book, Connell is more distant from us. We have some access to his psychology through the free indirect narration, but we can’t always see through to the source of his actions and perceptions. In the above-quoted scene, the vision of violence is visited upon him, almost supernaturally, like something from an Edgar Allan Poe story. This instinct seemingly comes from the very bottom of his being, or from nowhere at all — or maybe ultimately it emanates from politics and Capital, like everything else! The book declines to explain, it refuses to give an account of its ideas concerning power, violence, and the individual urge to dominate. It simply takes their centrality for granted, and organizes the whole narrative around that assumption. The chief task for interpreting the novel, then, is to decide how to understand its obscurantism on this topic.
Is it just underdeveloped, or is there a more difficult ambiguity present that we haven’t yet accounted for? Maybe I’m kidding myself and assigning complexity that isn’t there, but this is why I attempted to bring in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady in my previous post. Even as he can seem strangely normative, there is something devious in James, a careful sense of setting a trap, with a sadistic edge. He traps both character and reader with games of perception — of limited readings or disastrously wrong ones, of wishful thinking and delusion. Is this how Rooney is too — is she a more Jamesian writer than we’ve realized? If so, how deep is her reading of James? What will it come to mean for her development as a novelist? If not, will her books suffer from not being fully aware of how much they emulate his?
James, in his perverse way, would have found Connell subtly hilarious, like Osmond from Portrait, or Basil Ransom from The Bostonians. The perfect trap — smart, handsome, obscure. Marianne, the Millennial prisoner, the trampled heroine — what does she represent, ultimately? Is she a tragedy specific to her time, a symbol of all the ways the world has gone wrong? Does Rooney accept this uncritically? Or is Marianne a subtler experiment, one that asks more self-consciously what happens to fiction when we seriously entertain the idea that we are nothing more than mere products of the power structures that make up the world? Either way, we’d like to find some way to escape!