Month: November 2013

In an interview with J.C. Hallman, Walter Kirn discusses the current state of literary criticism:

JCH: Are books and literature in a state of crisis these days? If so, does that have anything to do with how we write about literature?

WK: I certainly hope they’re in a state of crisis. The moment they’re not, they’ll probably cease to matter much. Maintaining a state of crisis around matters that many people might considered settled – What is it to be a person? What is it to tell a story? – is the first job of literary art. Nothing keeps the novel livelier and more relevant than those ceaseless “Is the novel dead?” essays, for example. The markets live by the competition of fear and greed, they say, and literature lives by the struggle between hope and despair over certain fundamental concerns such as whether life can be fruitfully represented at all. Crisis and criticism go hand in hand. …

JCH: As you see it, what happened to criticism? That is, how did we move from [Matthew] Arnold and [Walter] Pater and [Oscar] Wilde to the kind of academic criticism produced in English departments?

WK: What happened to criticism is that it became a profession, even a guild, heavy on trade craft and jargon and dedicated to exclusion and self-protection. It became a way of credentialing an insider class and assuring its members of an income inside of the academy. As such, criticism took up a specialized vocabulary whose chief function, as I see it, was to signal loyalty to the executive board of the approved critical class. There are all these words in contemporary criticism – “gendered,” “hegemonic,” “interrogate,” etc. – that strike me as verbal secret handshakes. They might have been meaningful once, but more and more they feel like coded transmissions between the troops and their leaders. And they make for very ugly sentences. Critical prose of the type that includes them is singularly ugly prose, and I’m with Einstein and similar physicists in believing that elegance bears a close relation to truth. …

Writerly criticism uses a personal vocabulary, not a received or assumed one. It sounds, when read, like an actual human being thinking and feeling. It resists theoretical paraphrase. It provokes conversation rather than shutting it down through intimidating, scholastic moves. It gives pleasure. It releases more energy than it traps. And it takes responsibility for its points and statements rather than shifting responsibility to some larger body of expert thought.

Reviewing Linda Leavell’s new biography of poet Marianne Moore, Jenny McPhee finds that the book’s “greatest achievement … is [Leavell’s] nuanced, sensitive, and revelatory depiction of surely one of the most intensely destructive/productive mother-daughter relationships in literary history”:

While at Bryn Mawr, Moore discovered she was “possessed to write” and “a demon needing wild horses to drag me from the diabolical profession.” A few years after graduation, she and her mother moved to New York City, where they would live together for nearly thirty years until [Moore’s mother] Mary’s death in 1947. Everything Moore did, everything she wrote, was subject to her mother’s intense scrutiny. Mary did all she could to hinder her daughter’s healthy, prolific existence while also devoting herself to Moore’s success in body, soul, and literary vocation. She committed herself so fully to Moore’s thwarting she often became an invalid herself, suffering from “nervous exhaustion,” which forced Moore to become her nurse.

Moore’s only place to be alone was in her poetry: she relentlessly pursued syllabic meter, unsentimental topics, searing irony, quirky stanzas with odd line breaks, and an inscrutable language in an effort to keep her mother out.

“The frailest bit o’ bones that could presume to be ‘a man'” is how Mary described her daughter, and Leavell speculates that Moore’s chronic low weight — she probably suffered from anorexia — may have contributed to her total lack of sexual interest. [Ezra] Pound flirted heavily with her, as did many artists, writers, editors, and patrons both male and female; but Moore’s amorous indifference was profound and unwavering. Besides, as her poem “Marriage” suggests, for all intents and purposes she was already faithfully married to her mother and would do nothing to upset, much less betray, that formidable bond.

This mysterious, uncompromising attachment in which Mary masculinized Moore, at least on a linguistic level, became a source of great power. Throughout her life, in her subversive fashion that at once circumvented and celebrated her mother, she cultivated her own considerable power: “To be understood” is “to be no / Longer privileged.” And in “Marriage”: “men have power / and sometimes one is made to feel it.” In a book review, she wrote, “Love is more important than being in love”; and in her poem “The Paper Nautilus,” she described a mother’s love as “the only fortress / strong enough to trust to.”

(Image of Marianne Moore in 1935 via Wikimedia Commons)

Science writer John Horgan recently belittled his beat:

I’m struck … by all the “breakthroughs” and “revolutions” that have failed to live up to their hype: string theory and other supposed “theories of everything,” self-organized criticality and other theories of complexity, anti-angiogenesis drugs and other potential “cures” for cancer, drugs that can make depressed patients “better than well,” “genes for” alcoholism, homosexuality, high IQ and schizophrenia.

Gary Marcus takes offense, writing, “The problem with some of these punches is not that they are wrong, but that they are one-sided”:

When Horgan writes that “the biggest meta-story in science over the last few years—and one that caught me by surprise—is that much of the peer-reviewed scientific literature is rotten,” it’s not just that he is arguably overstating things, it’s that he’s missing half the story.

There is a crisis in replicability, as both Horgan and The Economist suggest (and as I noted last December). But there is also a huge, rapidly growing movement to address it. When I revisited the topic a few months later, I reported at least five new efforts focussed on increasing replicability. Since then, the list has continued to grow. … The wholesale shift in the culture of how scientists think about their craft is at least as significant a meta-story as the replicability crisis itself. But the prophets of doom never let their readers in on this happy secret.

His conclusion:

The most careful scientists, and the best science journalists, realize that all science is provisional. There will always be things that we haven’t figured out yet, and even some that we get wrong. But science is not just about conclusions, which are occasionally incorrect. It’s about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before. You can both love science and question it.

Recent Dish on the subject here.

Beyond the straightforward theme of sending young people to fight and die in war, Alexander Huls reads the new film as a partial defense of Generation Y, with Ender saving the world at the request of condescending and ungrateful Boomers:

Boomers tend to represent Gen Y’s virtues simultaneously as faults (Millennials are great at tech! Millennials are narcissistic and distracted workers because of tech!) but the film understands the impulses behind them. Technology is presented not as an indulgence, but a highly useful tool Ender wields to achieve productive results and self-exploration—not narcissism. When Ender feels outraged that Graff revokes his email privileges, the movie presents the hero’s anger not as lost entitled access to technology. He’s upset that he’s lost what he uses the technology for: meaningfully connecting with people he cares about.

Millennials will likely be happy with the portrayal. They, after all, played a major part in propelling Ender’s Game to its canonical status. This adaptation honors the text they grew up with while heightening the generational conflicts in it, going even rougher on the adults.

Andrew O’Hehir reads into a historical analogy probably not intended by author Orson Scott Card or the filmmakers:

“Ender’s Game” can definitely be read as an allegorical treatment of the other American original sin, besides slavery: the destruction and replacement of Native American society, which stood in the way of our nation’s manifest destiny. The sentimental idea that whites who killed or uprooted the Indians became infused with their spiritual or moral essence did not begin with New Agers in the 1960s. It goes clear back to the invented legend of the first Thanksgiving feast and the apocryphal peace treaty between William Penn and the Lenape chief Tamanend (aka Tammany) in 1683.

Harris O’Malley, who stubbornly refuses to see the film due to Card’s history of homophobia, points out that the book preaches a message of tolerance:

[F]or someone who seems consumed by hate, he has produced what is, in many ways, his own counter-argument. …

Ender’s ultimate strength isn’t his willingness to win at any cost, it’s his empathy. To quote Ender: “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.” Ender’s own horror at the realization that he has committed xenocide is born out of that empathy; in the end, he realizes that the “buggers” were never truly the threat that everybody thought them to be.

It’s a shame that Card seems incapable of equal understanding, instead of grumpily complaining about the intolerant reception of his own intolerance.

Rany Jazayerli, a long-time fan of Card’s writing who grew increasingly pained by the author’s hateful rhetoric in real life, grapples with further complexities:

We all feel alienated at some point, but the book’s message resonates even deeper with those who really stick out from the crowd. The empathy extends to the reader. There are no gay characters, but that is presumably because most of the characters are prepubescent children. (Ender is essentially asexual.) But there are girls at Battle School who play important roles; there are characters who are dismissed by other kids because they’re too short; there are Jewish kids who get mocked for the size of their noses.

I am neither gay, nor a girl, nor short. I am, however, a Muslim who grew up in Kansas in the 1980s, and I struggle to think of a more perfect recipe for creating a sense of isolation in an American teenager. … It was in the context of trying to find my place in the world, of struggling to reconcile my faith with my country when I had no role models to show me the way, that I encountered the following passage about Ender and his Battle School classmate Alai. It stopped me cold:

“I don’t want to go,” he said.

Alai hugged him back. “I understand them, Ender. You are the best of us. Maybe they’re in a hurry to teach you everything.”

“They don’t want to teach me everything,” Ender said. “I wanted to learn what it was like to have a friend.”

Alai nodded soberly. “Always my friend, always the best of my friends,” he said. Then he grinned. “Go slice up the buggers.”

“Yeah.” Ender smiled back. Alai suddenly kissed Ender on the cheek and whispered in his ear, “Salaam.” Then, red-faced, he turned away and walked to his own bed at the back of the barracks. Ender guessed that the kiss and the word were somehow forbidden. A suppressed religion, perhaps. Or maybe the word had some private and powerful meaning for Alai alone. Whatever it meant to Alai, Ender knew that it was sacred; that he had uncovered himself for Ender, as once Ender’s mother had done, when he was very young, before they put the monitor in his neck, and she had put her hands on his head when she thought he was asleep, and prayed over him. Ender had never spoken of that to anyone, not even to Mother, but had kept it as a memory of holiness, of how his mother loved him when she thought that no one, not even he, could see or hear. That was what Alai had given him; a gift so sacred that even Ender could not be allowed to understand what it meant.

If you don’t see the importance of this passage, I envy you. Alai is clearly a Muslim, and in the 1980s, Muslims were portrayed in American popular culture as one of three categories, if they were portrayed at all: crazy ayatollahs, greasy lecherous oil sheikhs, or bomb-wielding hijackers. Ender’s Game was literally the first time I had encountered a positive portrayal of a Muslim character in American fiction. It floored me. I finally saw a positive image of myself in print, and it came not from a fellow Muslim but from a wildly popular Christian author who could trace his American lineage for generations.

Previous Dish on the film and the controversy over Card here, here, and here.