Source of book: Borrowed from the library
I saw this book on display at City Lights in San Francisco on a recent trip there, and, while I decided to get a few other books that were harder to find anywhere else, I did make a note of this one, and borrowed it from my library when I got back.
First, this book is not to be confused with another book of the same name, the middle book of the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer. (That series is good, by the way.)
Rather than really strange science fiction, this book is non-fiction, a collection of essays by the author, many previously published in various magazines.
Chu is a critic. Not specifically a literary critic or television critic or movie critic, but perhaps a bit of all of the above. And she takes the job every bit as seriously as the great critics of the past.
The central essay, which the title is drawn from, explores the question of authority. How does the critic become an authority? Where does that authority come from? And what is the point of that authority?
The other essays are quite a mix. There are personal ones, about topics that she cares about, or herself. There are essays about books and movies and music and people and so on.
Some of these were quite fascinating to me: the one on Phantom of the Opera by itself was worth the time spent reading the book. Others were a bit foreign, being about media that I had not experienced and probably wouldn’t find that interesting. The cultural ones were superb, in my opinion. And actually, it’s all good, compelling writing, even when about topics that didn’t particularly interest me.
Chu is a transgender woman, and what she describes as a “mixed Asian” - an admittedly imperfect term for the child of an Asian-American and a white American. As a particular essay (on mixed Asian literature) notes, this is in a significant way, a culture of its own, with unique challenges given the nuances of American racial castes and the strength of Asian culture even within America.
She pulls no punches, by the way. She is not out there to make either fascist right wingers or weak-livered liberals feel good. Human rights are not debatable, and one of the main points she keeps returning to is that critics need to make moral and political judgments if they wish to have any credibility. This idea that art is separate from politics is a fantasy - and I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment.
With that, I will dive into my favorite passages and lines.
In the opening essay (new for the book), “Criticism in a Crisis,” Chu notes the bizarre time in which we find ourselves, when the state of Israel, run by a corrupt war criminal, and engaged in an obvious genocide, seems to be specially protected from criticism by those who should know better. She calls out the offenders by name, as well as those who found themselves disinvited for stating the obvious.
So there I was, trying to think about this fabled crisis in criticism, when a set of real-world crises - concerning the rights of nations and the claims of the soul - became impossible to ignore. I hope the war on Gaza will have done for my generation of writers what the Vietnam War did for earlier generations: that is, it will have shot a beam of moral clarity through a complacent intelligentsia. For what a war like this asks the left-wing critic to do is to distinguish between a political crisis with clear actors and material stakes, on the one hand, and the self-aggrandizing existential crisis that criticism is always going through, on the other.
To prove her case that this existential crisis in criticism is perennial, she first gives a whole series of quotes that sound like they were written yesterday. And then gives the attributions, which date back to Samuel Johnson in the 18th Century and span the entire time through the present. Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot, among many others, are sources.
I do care a lot about this, in no small part because some of what I do on this blog is criticism. Not all of it. And I don’t intend all of it to be that. But I do take what I do seriously, and imagine that I have something to contribute to the culture.
The author points out that the real problem facing criticism isn’t some supposed lack of authority (that never really existed anyway), but a more mundane one.
It is true that of the criticism being published today, a little is excellent, a little more is adequate, and the lion’s share is a dog’s breakfast. But bad criticism is bad not because it has been deflowered by political ideology but for all the typical reasons that writing is bad: it is poorly paid, hastily edited, and written mostly by freelancers with so little in the way of financial security, development opportunities, or access to good health care that they may go their entire careers without finding out whether or not they are genuinely untalented. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the advice lobbed their way - that the critic should write with wit, have a sense of tradition, strive to be truthful but prepare to be wrong - is basically identical to the stock advice doled out to all writers. Whatever one makes of it, I see little point in rehearsing it. Here is some better advice: pay people.
Next, she addresses this idea that politics (and thus morality) has no place in criticism.
When I say that the critic must have values, I mean this in both senses of the phrase: the critic cannot help but have moral and political beliefs, and therefore he must give serious thought to what he actually believes. Anyone who claims to have no horse in the great derby of American political life is either lying or misinformed about himself; either way, the public has a right to know which horse is his.
I hope that my readers have no doubt about which horse is mine in the context of American politics.
As I mentioned, many of the things mentioned in these essays are not things I have read or are familiar with. Chu is a millennial, and a younger one. (Born 1992) She also came of age in a different subculture than I did - at once more literary and less fundamentalist - and her subsequent experience as a transgender person of color is certainly different than my cishet white Evangelical experience.
The first essay is all about the books of Hanya Yanagihara, who I had never heard of, and, after this essay, have zero desire to read. Definitely not my vibe.
However, there is a line so excellent in this essay, that it crystalized a complaint my wife and I have had about a certain genre of modern literary fiction that we had called “trauma fiction.”
Chu calls this the “trauma plot” - “fiction that uses a traumatic backstory as a shortcut to narrative.”
Hell yes. Exactly. Who needs a good narrative? Who needs nuanced characters? Just traumatize the hell out of everyone instead!
Later in the essay, she describes the way the author keeps a character alive for 800 pages before killing him: “This is not sadism; it is Munchausen by proxy.”
Damn, that’s a great way to put it.
I mentioned how much I loved “The Opera Ghost.” I both like Phantom for its music while acknowledging its rather inane plot. And Chu explores why that is, from Lloyd Webber’s determination to return musical supremacy over plot to the opera genre (see: Cosi Fan Tutti) to the way blockbuster musicals are marketed.
Thus, the essay covers a tremendous amount of ground, from classical opera to Rodgers and Hammerstein, to Sondheim, to the present. It’s just fantastic. (Also great is the Terry Pratchett spoof of Phantom that I read on the same trip as this book.)
One of the best passages is about Richard Rodgers, who had two great collaborations: first with Lorenz Hart, then with Oscar Hammerstein II.
In his earlier partnership with lyricist Lorenz Hart, Rodgers had written the melodies first, crafting sparkling tunes for forgettable plays, whereas with Hammerstein, the words had come first, requiring a more mature Rodgers to compose music with a clear dramatic purpose in mind. The former duo produced classic songs; only the latter produced classic musicals.
To be clear, I love a lot of Rodgers and Hart songs. But nobody does their musicals anymore.
There are a number of essays that talk about the experience of being a transgender woman, and a lesbian woman. I thought these were fascinating both because of the thoughtful discussion and the great stories of Chu in her youth, when she was seen as an effeminate boy. “On Liking Woman” talks about everything from TERFs to the classic man-hating political-lesbian manifesto by Valerie Solanas. (I haven’t read it yet, but unlike Andrea Dworkin, Solanas genuinely hated men - that’s the real “man-hating feminist” OG.)
Anyway, my favorite part is her discussion of the fact that desire and love cannot be forced into political boxes.
Political lesbianism is founded on the belief that even desire becomes pliable at high enough temperatures. For Jeffreys and her comrades, lesbianism was not an innate identity, but an act of political will. This was a world in which biology was not destiny, a world where being a lesbian was about what got you woke, not wet.
…
That trans lesbians should be pedestaled as some kind of feminist vanguard is a notion as untenable as it is attractive. In defending it, I would be neglecting what I take to be the true lesson of political lesbianism as a failed project: that nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle. You could sooner give a cat a bath.
I will say, I found the various essays on TV shows and television generally to be fun and often amusing.
In “Bad TV,” there is a snarky bit about how the popularity of television took off in the 50s and 60s.
By the midsixties, Herbert Marcuse was suggesting that the masses would rather chance nuclear annihilation than be deprived of television.
I watch very little TV, so I never got this vibe, but clearly my grandparents’ generation was like this, with the TV constantly on.
Another part of this essay looks at the near-universal horribleness of men in showbusiness, particularly on television.
It’s a twist we should have seen from miles away. It turns out that the men on TV act like the men on TV.
“China Brain” is mostly about the author’s attempts to cure a depressive episode using TMS. It is told in a weird third-person manner, but is also pretty funny. Chu has a great sense of humor about it.
I won’t get into all of it, but the description of the Chinese Room thought experiment is so spot-on when it comes to the myth (and deceptive marketing) of “Artificial Intelligence” - something that may be artificial but is certainly not intelligence, and will never be in its current form as a predictive text machine.
Another essay that I thought was fantastic was “Psycho Analysis,” which is all about dickwad author Brett Easton Ellis. And no, I haven’t read American Psycho, and have zero interest in doing so.
But god Ellis is due for a takedown, and the more brutal the better. He seems to embody the worst of white male boomerhood, toxic masculinity, and rape culture all in one. And his self-absorbed memoir, White sounds like a steaming pile of shit.
For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist, and these things are true; but like most things that are true of Bret Easton Ellis, they are also very boring.
The thesis of White is that American culture has entered a period of steep, perhaps irreversible decline, and social media and millennials are to blame. This is ridiculous, not because social media hasn’t changed things tremendously, but because such claims are invariably rooted in a childish nostalgia for an uncomplicated mode of human communication that has never, in fact, existed. One supposes that the last freethinking men of ancient Sumer, lamenting that cuneiform had ruined their political discourse, must have longed for the good old days of throwing rocks at each other’s heads.
And yes, this is exactly how I feel about white Boomer nostalgia for something that never existed - they just didn’t have to look outside their own navels and see how other people experienced life, because they were (and to some degree still are) cocooned in their own privilege.
Oh, and don’t think only men get their comeuppance in this book. Joey Soloway also gets an epic takedown. How about this as an opening?
As a lightweight behind-the-scenes look at a critically acclaimed television series, Joey Soloway’s new memoir, She Wants It: Desire, Power and Toppling the Patriarchy is just south of worth purchasing at the airport.
Ouch.
As a book about desire, power, or toppling the patriarchy, it is incompetent, defensive, and astonishingly clueless.
Ah, this seems promising.
It is an unwitting portrait of a rich Los Angeles creative type with a child’s knack for exploiting the sympathies of others, a person whose deep fear of doing the wrong thing was regularly outmatched by an even deeper distaste for doing the right thing. The nicest thing that can be said of this oblivious, self-absorbed, unimportant book is that it proves, once and for all, that trans people are fully, regrettably human.
Yeah, that’s just the start… Another gem:
If the circumstances of their shiny new gender are, shall we say, suspect - the cisgender creator of a television show about trans issues, long criticized for presuming to speak for trans people, comes out as trans themselves - all we need remember is that being trans because you want the attention doesn’t make you “not really” trans; it just makes you annoying.
The essay, “Authority,” is placed in the middle of the book, perhaps an indication of its centrality to the collection. And it really is a doozy - one of the best things on criticism I have ever read, honestly. It covers centuries of history, philosophy, and literature. I can’t even summarize it, but there are some lines…
We may also ask the critic for charisma, for sophistication, for a fine way with words, and above all for the ability to make art intelligible while preserving its integrity. She must be able to turn the meaning of a whole Hitchcock picture into a tiny reel of microfilm that we may slip furtively into our pockets. At the same time, we are not content to let the critic offer her mere opinion, since we are perfectly capable of those ourselves, nor do we wish for her to reminisce, however artfully, on her impressions of the work. We are not asking for another aesthetic experience; we are asking for a judgment. Here is where the trouble starts. For the critic may be witty or insightful or engaging or well-read or widely admired or a true virtuoso - but what she will never be is decidedly right. It is not possible, we are forced to admit, to prove the excellence of a novel or a painting through empirical evidence or logical argument; if it were, we could leave the business of evaluating art to the art historians and neuroscientists and politicians. (God knows they are eager to weigh in!)
One of the writers Chu cites is Kant, who has a rather fascinating take on the issue:
“Always assume that beauty has a rational explanation, but never pretend to know what it is.”
That sounds about right.
And this bit is also great, talking about John Crowe Ransome:
“A poem is, so to speak, a democratic state,” he wrote in an 1941 essay, “whereas a prose discourse - mathematical, scientific, ethical, or practical and vernacular - is a totalitarian state.” By this he meant that the ostensible content of a poem could easily be paraphrased into assertive prose, which was totalitarian because it had no goal but to maximize efficiency. (One imagines Hamlet beginning his famous soliloquy by announcing, “I am considering suicide.”)
Another great passage:
Why do we ask the critic to have authority? It is not out of a romantic desire to improve our understanding of art; nor is it because we wish to be subjected to the tyranny of someone else’s opinion. It is because we are inheritors of a history, one in which the critic has consistently been understood as embodying a key political figure: in the eighteenth century, an enlightened king; in the nineteenth, a free citizen; in the twentieth, a state bureaucrat. Implicit in this scheme is a belief that there is something inescapably political about what the critic does - that every act of judgment tests one’s ability as a member of society to submit voluntarily to the authority of the law.
The ending is worth quoting as well.
This is good news: if authority has always been at risk of disappearing from criticism, then we shall not have much to miss. But we will have to reckon with our longing for authority: our nostalgia, which is the opposite of historical sense; and our idealism, which is the opposite of the future. Nothing may be more dangerous, in criticism or in politics, than the revanchist desire to restore a form of authority that, if we are being honest, never existed in the first place. The great enemy is not the king of France, whose bloody head has been rolling through the streets for as long as anyone can remember. The enemy, my friends, is Napoleon.
Next up is “Holier Than Thou,” which is mostly about a very weird short story by Ottessa Moshfegh, about a feudal lord who thought that the divine light shined from his rectum. The story itself sounds darkly funny, but the phenomenon in real life is anything but. (Butt?) The opening of the essay captures it all:
If you have ever worked with one, you’ll know that assholes don’t respond well to input.
Isn’t that the truth?
There is more, however. The essay looks at and challenges the idea that art exists in some sort of vacuum, and that it is a moral good in and of itself to have morally problematic characters in books. Mind you, this is not an argument for censorship, but instead a note that art too can be evaluated on a moral basis.
In reality, it is very easy to oppose the banning of a book like Lolita while also pointing out that the author of American Psycho is a sundowning reactionary.
And Chu calls out Moshfegh for seeing the threat of censorship coming, not from murderous corporations or right wing politicians, but some vague “political agenda” embodied in online criticism.
The substance of that agenda is easy to guess - social justice, both real and imagined - but what Moshfegh really means is what most successful artists mean when they speak vaguely about the value of art: the absolute indignity of being told what to do.
I haven’t watched any of Yellowstone, but I have to say that the essay about it was really interesting. I wrote down a couple of lines from it, because they seem to me to be useful and helpful.
First is the passage where Beth, who is essentially the most amoral character. And she ends up misquoting and misunderstanding Nietzsche and his ideas about good and evil.
I wrote a bit about Nietzsche and his villainization in the Fundie subculture I grew up in, and how like many philosophers, he can function as an inkblot test - what you see in him says a lot about you.
Chu gives the gist and the actual quote, and they have had me thinking a lot about this. My parents and so many others who follow religious and political charlatans perfectly embody what Nietzsche called “slave morality.” They have chosen to outsource their morality, and end up embracing tribalism as the only moral value that matters.
Aside from being terrible dialogue, this is a basic misunderstanding of Nietzsche. For that philosopher, good and evil were labels created by people who, too weak to form their own values, define themselves by condemning the values of others.
Hell yes. That is exactly my experience with Fundamentalism.
“While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says NO to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself.”
That is exactly it. My parents’ “morality” seems these days to consist entirely of tribalism - people, ideas, culture, art that is not “us” is considered “evil.” Even when that includes their own children and grandchildren.
Another line also caught my eye.
The truly maddening thing about Yellowstone is the endless pantomime of inherited necessity, as if generations of attempted land theft have purified the ranchers into historical automata. Of course, the Duttons can make choices; they just choose not to. But the kind of freedom that John Dutton III truly admires, the kind that Beth Dutton embodies, is not the freedom to make decisions - that is, ethical freedom - but rather the freedom to act as if one’s decisions have all been made in advance. There are no nobler savages than the Duttons, whom their gods have not saddled with the inconvenience of a psychology. They are titanic nothings; they are ideas with guns.
Sigh. Yep. My parents. MAGA. The entire right-wing disaster. Nobody wants the terrible burden of owning their own decisions. They just have their ideology and some guns, and everyone else gets to suffer.
There is so much more in this book - I skipped over at least three quarters of the essays. I am considering adding it to my own library collection, because I think I may want to reference it at times.
It is definitely worth picking up, particularly if you care about art, literature, ethics, culture, or even just want to see what the young people are thinking about. Chu writes superbly - including proper and creative use of colons and semicolons, which always warms my heart - and has a clarity of thought that is refreshing.
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