The Function of Criticism

Art as collective effort

Terrarium

The Sunday Letter #28

“What is the function of criticism,” literary heatscore Merve Emre begins her recent Vinduet lecture, referring to the current media landscape in which

“the means of producing and disseminating commentary have been partially democratized; the cultural capital of universities and media institutions has been devalued; and the styles and audiences of critical commentary have multiplied? What is the function of criticism when everyone is, or could be, a critic?”

This seems to be a recurring sticking point for a certain generation of writer and critic, illuminated in the past few months with discussions about MovieTok, which I also wrote about a few weeks ago when I argued that the panic around MovieTok is actually

“a misplaced anger at influencers for “stealing” the “traditional” critic jobs that don’t actually exist anymore in these increasingly volatile media and publishing industries. I’m not defending TikTok or the rapid-fire attention economy it’s spawned, but I do think that those who mock MovieTok are showing an elitist preference for the “good old days” where critics came streamlined through top-tier academic institutions directly into cushy New Yorker jobs. Twitter bemoaned the fact that there will never be another boho film critic like Pauline Kael, but how could there be?”

As Emre argues in her lecture, “criticism marks out a category of discourse, a set of utterances that conform to distinct conventions.” In a sense, criticism both determines the boundaries of what is worthy of critique, and pushes up against them constantly—its democratization, then, has left many traditionalists feeling like criticism has lost its value.

Emre’s lecture was delivered a few days ago, well-past the firestorm set off by the Business Insider profile of her that had Literature Twitter in a tizzy a few weeks ago (about the hullabaloo, Roxane Gay tweeted, “Who is Merve Emre?”). Twitter’s response seemed to be caused in part by Emre’s status as a somewhat obnoxious Ivy League writer, who is obviously very intelligent and maybe a little bit calculating. But something that stuck out to me in the profile was this quote from Emre:

“The easiest way to get attention is to have a kind of contrarian take about another female writer,” she said. “It is not challenging to get people not to read something. People are not reading things all the time.”

It felt like a pre-emptive, meta-commentary on the type of response the profile ended up receiving. But it stuck out, too, as a hint about where criticism seems to be going. Twitter virality is largely determined by retweets and quote tweets, and likewise, TikTok virality is often determined by “stitches,” which serve the same function: a user can embed part of another user’s video into their own response, thereby creating the same kind of feedback loop encouraged by the retweet function on Twitter. Criticism is no different, really: the pieces that go viral are the ones that stoke debate, much like the profile of Emre did, and much like every Andrea Long Chu piece does.

Vulture.

Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic whose pieces often go viral because readers know exactly what to expect: searing, brutalizing critique that you might read with your hands covering your eyes. Her piece about Ottessa Moshfegh called Moshfegh’s husband’s writing “awful,” and her piece about Hanya Yanagihara called the writer a tragedy tourist. Readers, including me, fucking love it, and maybe that’s not such a great thing.

Where Patricia Lockwood pops up twice a year with an in-depth look into the psyche of some long-dead male writer, Chu’s work for Vulture has thus far consisted of the two aforementioned viral “hit pieces.” Her most recent review covers Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, and it predictably skewers Smith’s politics, or lack thereof, ahead of the work itself.

Arguing that Smith’s writing suffers from an insecurity developed in response to an infamous, decades-old James Wood review of White Teeth, Chu seems to endeavour to write a review that can somehow eviscerate Smith’s confidence even further, suggesting that the preeminent Smith has “lost her teeth.” I’m sure Smith doesn’t need my moral support—she wrote a masterpiece at 24, which Chu also decries as “by far the best thing Smith has ever written; what bad luck to have done it by 24!”

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What is the function of critique? In Emre’s lecture, she calls back to Virginia Woolf, who wrote that

Readers and critics should «take a wider, a less personal view of modern literature,» Woolf urges, «and look indeed upon the writers as if they were engaged upon some vast building, which being built by common effort, the separate workmen may well remain anonymous.»

Emre’s point, it seems, is that writers are not themselves individuals, operating outside of a collective. The best writers, she suggests through Woolf, know that art itself is a historical, collective effort. The work is always in conversation with what came before, what will come after. Likewise, criticism should play a generative role in the chrysalis of artistic development. Criticism that centres the taste, politics, and aesthetics of the critic can do no such thing.

Chu’s main gripe with Smith is her “almost involuntary tendency to reframe all political questions as “human” ones.” This is because of Smith’s commitment to the right of the author to tell any story they desire, from any identity standpoint, as a virtue of the power of fiction to embody and thus promote empathy in the reader. And maybe that’s a bit of an outdated approach to fiction, but is it the role of the audience to tell the writer this? Plenty of recent works take a different approach, such as Emma Cline’s The Guest and Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which feature ‘unlikable’ protagonists as though to test the limits of the audience’s capacity to read from the antihero’s point of view. Ultimately, I’m not sure that it’s a bad thing that writers have oppositional takes about the role of fiction in society; rather, is this dissonance what keeps it all so interesting, as Smith would argue?

In a recent review of Tár, Smith wrote,

“Speaking for myself, I’m the one severely triggered by statements like ‘Chaucer is misogynistic’ or ‘Virginia Woolf was a racist’…Not because I can’t see that both statements are partially true, but because I am of that generation whose only real shibboleth was: ‘Is it interesting?’”

Chu considers this a “willful misunderstanding” of the decidedly Gen-Z approach to critique which often interrogates the politics of art ahead of its aesthetics. Chu writes,

“when young people rate a novel poorly because they disagree with its politics, it is more convenient to assert that they have simply abandoned the old-fashioned field of aesthetic inquiry altogether than to reckon with the possibility that aesthetic inquiry itself is being remade.”

Chu’s argument, then, is that aesthetic inquiry is no longer entirely about aesthetics. How can this be? Can the function of criticism ever be an escape from criticism itself? Is there a middle-ground between complete evisceration for its own sake, and profit-driven corporate dictatorship? Should we inhabit the mentality that everything is political and thus nothing is?

“Ethics asks us to recognize that the other has a soul; politics asks us to reject the soul as a precondition for moral interest,” Chu argues. She suggests that Smith has been political all along, and just hasn’t admitted it: “It's equally true that Smith envisions the novel as a little liberal machine for making more little liberals,” Chu writes, suggesting that Smith’s end goal is more veil of ignorance than utopian socialism. Where Smith might be asking what she can do for fiction, Chu is asking what fiction can do for us. And where’s the solution? Self-censorious writing that aims at being prescriptive can be equally dull (recent examples include Fake Accounts and Romantic Comedy, two books that felt like they’d been scrubbed for anything that could go viral in the wrong way on Twitter).

Those types of reads don’t feel particularly radical or generative, something that Garth Greenwell touched on in his Yale Review essay in praise of filth in fiction. He notes an anxious undercurrent rippling through his undergrad students who worry about ‘endorsing’ a book in which problematic things occur, even if said things were well-written and provoked a meaningful emotional response. He argues that this moral engagement with art stems from a “paranoia about our own moral status, a desire to demonstrate our personal righteousness in our response to art.” But Greenwell warns that

“a profound experience of art is an experience of something like love, which is to say of singularity; when you’ve had a profound encounter with Giovanni’s Room, say, or a portrait by Alice Neel, you can’t imagine swapping it out for something more conveniently affirming of social values we cherish.”

Maybe I’m overstating what is an otherwise typical cycle of older writers lamenting the new slang of younger ones, and vice versa. But as new generations of writers and thinkers come up, I do wonder about the kind of messaging surrounding critique that they’re receiving. Where does the function of critique go from here? What is my own role, in this tiny corner of the internet? I think I often fall on the Emre/Woolf side of the divide, which perhaps stems from my desire to be a literary leech. I read to soak up knowledge, to get better at the literary trade. Even “bad” art is inspirational, can educate in form through what it fails to do. Likewise, “good” critique should also be deliberate in its aim, which asks not what the writer can’t do, but what they have done, what they can do in the future.

This week’s recommendations

This week, I finished Canadian writer Claudia Dey’s newest novel, Daughter, out this week from Penguin Random House (thank you PRH for the gifted copy). Daughter was extremely up my alley—it features a young playwright whose father, a famous writer, betrays the women in his family with continuous affairs and tests of loyalty. The prose was elegant, the sprawling cast of characters not unlike Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth. I also relished Dey’s exploration of a father/daughter literary rivalship; if you know of other books with a similar dynamic, please let me know!

The rise of the M.B.A. novelist.

Sheena Patel, the author of my recent-fave read, I’m a Fan, in conversation with Ottessa Moshfegh for BOMB: “memes are art.”

Lately, TikTok users have been announcing that the rise of “girl dinner” means the end of patriarchy, which is interesting to observe alongside an increasingly vitriolic and misogynistic undercurrent online that seems to get worse every year. The latest target of this particular brand of targeted misogyny is actress Sophie Turner, soon-to-be-ex-wife of boyband singer Joe Jonas. But something interesting is happening amidst Jonas’ sly attempts to paint Turner as an unfit mother: people are smelling right through it and calling it out a lot faster than usual—and by “usual,” I mean how every few years society decides to retroactively forgive a woman previously maligned in the press, such as Britney Spears, Monica Lewinsky, Janet Jackson, and on, and on, and on. Will be interesting to see whether the tides really are turning:

“Having given birth, there’s an expectation for women to fully surrender all former parts of themselves for motherhood, to emerge postnatal as mothers (TM), forfeiting their desires and autonomy.”

Speaking of motherhood and autonomy, I really enjoyed this piece from

Wendy Syfret

on the experiences of artists who become mothers.

This week in Annie Ernaux news—loved this review in Bookforum of her upcoming novella, The Young Man, which I can’t wait to pick up. The writer aptly touches on the power of Ernaux’s frankness to dismantle sexual shame as a device weaponized against women:

“Orgasm itself, though, proves a malleable condition across Ernaux’s corpus, the place where her ongoing projects of self-making and writing become knotted together…”

Watching: “Every few years, I'll fall down an Iliad hyperfixation. In another life, I would have loved to study the classics as an academic. I'm directing a Harvard production of Medea next semester, so in many ways, the Greeks and their tragedies are still very prominent in this life too. I rewatched Netflix's Troy: Fall of a City over the holiday weekend; it is my favorite retelling of The Iliad to date. I appreciate how the series took its time and breathed new, necessary life into these tales. I will always mourn not getting a Joseph Mawle-led Odyssey follow-up.”

Reading: “I'm making my way through my library loans. I'm in a transitional stage of my life—between the Hollywood strikes and starting graduate school—so I've been rereading old favorites and new titles. I read The Westing Game when I was in elementary school and remember devouring it; revisiting it was just as sweet. I'm making my way through The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, which I would highly recommend to fans of Daisy Jones & The Six. Everything else I'm tracking on my Goodreads!”

Listening: “I love my sad girl playlists. As it gets colder, I'm listening to a lot of Bon Iver (specifically Towers and Hinnom), The Band CAMINO, and old school Kelly Clarkson. But on the other side, I've also really gotten into UK drill. I listen to Doja by Central Cee at least a couple times a day.”

Life, etc: “I would be amiss if I didn't plug Heretics Club, the literary salon for creative writers that I'm launching. If you're seeking an intimate, artistic community with tailored programming, you're in great company.”

P.S. You can find Sara on Instagram and here on Substack @

Sara Jin Li

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New word of the week: jejune (je·june) — adjective — naive, simplistic, and superficial. Courtesy of Hunter Harris’ recent Glossier piece.