On takedowns

At the start of Spare, his much maligned memoir, Harry Windsor, formerly a member of the British royal family, quotes Faulkner in his epigraph: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” A few pages later, he returns to the citation, remarking: “When I discovered that quotation not long ago on BrainyQuote.com, I was thunderstruck.”

Harry was widely mocked for admitting that he got his epigraph off of BrainyQuote.com, but perhaps the main difference between him and most of his critics is simply that he was willing to reveal his sources. The main problem with criticism now, wrote n+1’s editorial board in a 2021 diagnostic called “Critical Attrition” is that “the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job.” Critics are mostly aspiring novelists or at least aspiring staff writers in the ever growing pool of untethered magazine wannabees. They teach or they write marketing copy or they churn out their own books to make ends meet. In order to beef up a book review into something more profitable and more likely to capture the fickle attention of literary audiences, the essay speculates, critics often end up writing about something entirely different than their ostensible subject. In an imaginary book review of a new release, “The failures, offenses, and excesses of Rooney, Lerner, and Cusk occupy the bulk of the piece — until the final fourth, which seems to be about Christopher Lasch, as well as cancel culture.” The reader walks away as unenlightened as they arrived.

The failure of criticism, in other words, is a failure of labor. Critics not only are gig workers of sorts, cobbling together their arguments piecemeal at odd hours of the day for pennies, but they are also employed by the same literary establishment they are ostensibly objectively assessing. Hence, argues n+1, the decline in negative reviews. Instead of going negative on a book that may sour future editors and defensive fellow writers on your own work, it’s easier to go negative on the culture on large. 

The n+1 piece garnered pushback, notably from Christian Lorentzen who accused it of “anti-intellectualism” for its focus on a generic everyman reader who goes on Goodreads.com. It is true that algorithmic recommendation and the cratering of print media has made criticism a kind of desperate attention grab. On review aggregate sites like Goodreads, Letterboxd, or Yelp, consumers assess products or experiences using their own unpredictable and mysterious metrics. A book is just as likely to get 2 stars for having an ugly jacket or a printing error as for being dull or confusing. A restaurant might get 2 stars for making you wait for a table, for the server failing to smile, for the food being salty and overpriced, or for there being a rat in the bathroom. On TikTok, a young woman complained (cleverly) that a book she had attempted to read had “too many words.” I have often felt the same way but I usually keep it to myself. 

It is helpful to think of say reviews of a store and reviews of a film as suffering from the same cultural malaise. A series of Google reviews complain about the bookstore where I work, calling the staff rude, the hours unpredictable, the merchandise overpriced, and the administrative procedures byzantine. Mixed in with these complaints is a more fundamental one: the books are all in French. Why, wonder some reviewers, would you have a bookstore where the books are all in a language they cannot read? How did they end up trying to bravely shop in such a place?

This complaint is not a valid one if you see the purpose of reviews as addressing a targeted audience that is already in the know. It is sort of like going to a vegan restaurant and complaining that they will not serve you steak. The problem with literary criticism is perhaps that its audience is often undefined, for reasons that have as much to do with literary culture as they have to do with labor. Reviews are written for “readers” broadly, but who are readers? Lorentzen does not want to have to bother with the ordinary reader, the one who wants a pleasant rundown of the book in order to decide whether or not to read it (no spoilers, please). But even within the cloistered space of devoted readers, there is a wide range of diets, so to speak. You could easily write a critique of Sally Rooney, as some critics have, on the grounds that her books are mundane or overly concerned with the interior lives of young Irish women or that her characters talk about Marxism too much and too vaguely. Rooney’s popularity does not discount these critiques as such, but the point is obviously subjective. Underlying this imagined review is not only a personal distaste for Rooney’s novels, but also a broader dislike of her politics, of her project, of the realist women’s fiction tradition in which she writes. It is, at least on some level, the culture war piece to which n+1 alludes.

Luckily for everyone, participating in the culture wars is the absolute easiest way to garner clicks. It can turn a mildly polemical and overwritten article in an obscure intellectual journal into a viral internet sensation, particularly if it is wrapped up with a bow of snark and cruelty. Hating is funny. It has shock value. It emboldens readers whose opinion no one would normally pay money for to let loose their own dislike, either because they actually hate something too or because they simply want to be a part of things. It is a base and libidinal form of engagement. It taps into the same frenzied pleasure that right wing pundits often draw upon. When JD Vance mocked childless women, he was tapping into a similar kind of culture war liminal space. It is one that suspends intellect and history and facts and truth to indulge infantile reasoning. Childless women seem weird and against nature, their vibes are off. The puerility of this logic, though, conceals its more robust foundation in a political project that aims at what Melinda Cooper calls “the sexual unconscious of economic life.” Underlying the warp of the culture war is not only actual culture, but also the political and economic vision to which it subscribes. There is no pure Platonic culture, no aesthetic form without ideological contamination. To believe in the primacy of an art that is unconcerned with power and the condition of human life and overly concerned with raw beauty and aesthetic pleasure is at best elitist: at worst, fascist. 

In her essay on the postwar rehabilitation of Nazi propagandist par excellence, Leni Riefenstahl, Susan Sontag wrote in 1975 that the “reason for the change in attitude towards Riefenstahl lies in a shift in taste which simply makes it impossible to reject art if it is ‘beautiful.’” Sontag describes how Riefenstahl was able to reposition herself as a defender of beauty and artistic freedom by capitalizing on a rising cultural narrative that to make art is inherently to struggle. Artists, by this logic, are repressed by the powerful hand of the state and their art represents a brave attempt to express a fundamental truth about the world in the face of adversity. 

Like the strange logic surrounding reviews that I described earlier, this logic about art has a curious flattening effect. All artists are suddenly on an equal plane and their desire to make art is equally worthy, whether they are workers crushed under the demands of American rentier capitalism, dissidents in authoritarian regimes documenting the stories of people written out of history, or literal propagandists for the Nazi state, trying to push the technical limits of what is possible in filmmaking with sometimes stunning results. Riefenstahl is also a victim of the Nazis, by this narrative, rather than their most shining success story. 

Casting art as inherently radical obfuscates the role it can play in propping up and sustaining oppressive systems. Art created under these conditions is usually described as struggling to free itself from the political. Contemporary assessments of Mikhail Kalatozov’s rediscovered groundbreaking agitprop film, Soy Cuba (1964), tend to juxtapose its avant-garde technical mastery with its actual subject. The cinematography is breathtaking: the cameraman was suspended from a pulley so the heavy cameras of the period could float upwards, as if they were drifting of their own accord. The lighting washes out fields of sugar cane, white, foam-capped waves, palm fronds, with the darkness of a perpetually stormy sky. Airborne shots render characters miniscule and insignificant next to huge columns and statues, the apparatus of power. Roger Ebert summed up the film as “naive and dated” in 1995 and argues that its gaze “betrays a certain interest in la dolce vita that is not entirely in keeping with the movie's revolutionary, agitprop stance.” Writing for Hyperallergic, Maggie Sivit called it “a hallucinatory, freewheeling work of communist kitsch.” Slant called its politics crude and transparent but poetically revealed.”

But the visuals of the film are neither separable from the material conditions which produced it, the government funding and collective vision which made it a worthwhile project for the USSR and Cuba, nor from the political history it undertakes to tell. It conveys “the mysterious beauty we associate with utopia,” argued Juan Antonio García Borrero earlier this year for Criterion “above all in its collective dimension. The film’s choreography puts forward its own intrinsic argument: the visual audacity communicates precisely that which is inaccessible to ordinary logic. Here reason gives way to faith, just as it did in the hearts of that motley band of revolutionaries who dreamed of transforming the world and ‘storming heaven.’”

The history of colonial Cuba, between the arrival of Columbus in 1492 and the 1959 revolution, is unjust on such a world historical scale that it is hard to fathom, let alone make art about. Writing of nearby Haiti in The Black Jacobins, CLR James described its French colonial society as “the very dregs of human civilization and moral standards.” Poetically, he envisioned a future where self-realization depends on the entire weight and progression of history being incorporated into the individual and their hopes and dreams and striving. “Freedom is creative universality, not utility.”

What is most depressing about the literary takedown as a form is its overall nihilism. It rarely has any generative power or real creative vision for what the future of literature, and by extension, the world, should look like. It defaults to cynicism because that is a way out of earnestness and a way out of solutions. Even where the critic is basically proven right by the fickle tide of public opinion (for instance, Lauren Oyler in her LRB takedown of Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino), she is almost proven right by chance. She has stumbled upon the most obvious problem with the novel, one that everyone can agree upon, and presented in the most obvious possible way to appeal to the widest number of haters. What she has failed at, philosophically, is the cause of advancing literature. What sort of novel should there be? The takedown tends to reach backwards, comfortingly, to a well-known canon. Writers used to be good at writing and novels used to be better. The problem with writers now is that they do not heed the lessons of their predecessors. This is generally an Alan Bloom argument about contemporary American literacy dressed up as a more substantive point. If arguing that everyone should write classic novels in classic forms and demonstrate their real substantiated labor is self-evidently conservative, it is also an irresistible bedrock of literary commentary. Somewhere between clickbait internet poetry, with its mind-numbing screenshottability, and the ponderous work of 19th century novel aficionado MFA graduates, there is a secret third way - but contemplating that is not a very catchy prospect. 

Even when takedowns do not yield to this kind of reactionary arc, as in the case of the very talented Andrea Long Chu’s vivisections for New York Magazine on beloved writers like Hanya Yanigihara, Zadie Smith, and Rachel Cusk, they still often default to a specific script. Rayne Fisher Quann famously wrote (after an Andrea Long Chu takedown of Ottessa Moshfegh in 2022) that women who ascend the cultural ladder tend to get “woman’d.” Her issue, Quann stressed in an article for I.D., was not with Long Chu’s very valid criticism of Moshfegh, but with the inevitable response to it. “The result is a widespread “vibes-based” hatred that frequently uses meaningful criticism as a crutch on which to hang preexisting resentment rather than as an instigator for earnest critical engagement.” 

Unfortunately, the production of criticism itself is inextricable from this response in that its raison d’etre often becomes its ability to garner this kind of mass reaction. Takedowns of this kind focus on women writers or writers of color, not simply because those writers are also flawed, but also because they seek to diverge from the liberal establishment. To take down a male writer, to accuse him of misogyny or of conservatism or of producing dull lit bro fodder, does not seem especially sophisticated these days. It tends to get an eye roll, an accusation of naivete. Surely there is something more interesting to say about a novel than that it “hates women.” The culture has processed and spat up this kind of critique. The dominant ideology has shifted. It is more significant now to say that something is not beautiful, that it is not coolly above ideology, that it is not art - if you are really going for the jugular.