Seamus Holman

ll around, invading the senses, aggressive media solemnity just won’t let up. It’s only getting stranger during the holidays, as patriotic war dovetails with patriotic shopping. The posture of grave high-mindedness—from politicians, pundits and minor celebrities alike—is difficult to take seriously, because on September 10 these people were deeply unserious themselves. And on September 12, having plumbed the depths of their souls, the best they could come up with were exhortations to renew faith in God and money while the war machine readied itself—or else “the terrorists have already won.”

Go to the mall to revive the economy, go to church to revive the nation’s soul; the two, after all, are one and the same. Simulated gravitas is worse than straightforward triviality, and when demonstrable ignoramuses claim, overnight, to be experts on Afghan history, culture and geography, one almost longs for O.J. and Monica to come back and rescue us from the new seriousness.

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at The New Republic, got it right when he wrote: “No doubt about it, seriousness is in. So it is worth remembering that there are large swaths of American society in which seriousness was never out.” Wieseltier is not alone in chafing at the presumption and arrogance of media banality, which, desperately and pathetically, has been trying its hardest to be unbanal. Many of us, across the political spectrum, share Wieseltier’s conviction that “a thoughtful life is not premised on an experience of catastrophe, except for the exceedingly thoughtless.”

ut alas, poor Leon, the plague extends as well to you. Among the major critics, literary censoriousness has been reaching a loud and boorish pitch. For a lamentable example, see one of the stars in Wieseltier’s regular crew, the critic James Wood. Responding in London’s Guardian to an article by novelist Jay McInerney in the same newspaper, Wood seized the opportunity to cut down an obviously vain author (ever the easy target, McInerney couldn’t stop name-dropping actresses and famous friends even as lower Manhattan burned). McInerney’s dispatch was surely unfortunate, but Wood’s real target wasn’t just New York vanity—it was the entire enterprise of modern literature itself, from Don DeLillo to Zadie Smith.

Wood is usually smarter and a lot less reckless. After first announcing an obligatory weariness—“one is naturally suspicious of all the eschatological talk about how the time for trivia has ended, and how only seriousness is on people’s minds”—he almost immediately abused this disclaimer with a humorless instruction to all novelists that the time for glitter and ephemera is now over. Rushdie and babies who play air guitar? Out. Pynchon and talking dogs? Out. Infinite jests of any kind? Out, out, out!

Is it time then for retrenchment to a plain style of unadorned sentences and no-nonsense settings? Perhaps, but only if the temptations of the “Great American Social Novel” are resisted, along with any attempts to explain society. Wood argues for “the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell us not ‘how the world works’ but ‘how somebody felt about something.’ ”

Now, I love a good, contemplative, phantasm-free novel as much as the next reader. But why deny all other genres of fiction? From Wood’s screed, you’d never know that Pynchon et al. are in fact very much concerned with how humans feel and the condition of humanity in general, a fact obvious to all but the most emotionally obtuse carper. Why such hostility to different modes of thinking and writing? What’s so bad about a talking dog?

telling explanation of this mindset can be found with Wood’s main stateside editor. I cheer Wieseltier’s analyses of the superstitions of the Rev. Billy Graham and Oprah Winfrey, but he goes over the edge toward a sanctimoniousness of his own.

Here’s what I mean. In The New Yorker, John Updike described his view of the mortally wounded World Trade Center: “Smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure’s vertically corrugated surface.” And after the fall: “Amid the glittering impassivity of the many buildings across the East River, an empty spot had appeared, as if by electronic command, beneath the sky that, but for the sulfurous cloud streaming south toward the ocean, was pure blue, rendered uncannily pristine by the absence of jet trails.”

Updike’s remembrance contrasts the raw horror with eerie beauty, a nauseating juxtaposition that millions experienced as well: So why not write about it? Why not widen the perspective with sensibility? Say what you will about overly precious New Yorker writers, but Updike hit the right notes that time.

In Wieseltier’s view, however, it’s not a question of hitting the right notes, or any notes at all. When it most counts, he is against the music of prose itself. He accuses Updike of trying to make devastation pretty, as if the small miracle of finding words for experience, no matter how traumatizing, is a sin—as if, even more profanely, prettiness were the same as beauty. “I do not doubt the evidence of the writer’s eyes,” Wieseltier croaked, “the weather was indeed sadistically beautiful. But why is he writing about the weather? It was a deathscape that lay before him. There are circumstances in which beauty is an obstacle to truth.”

Wieseltier ought to know better. This major flaw in his thinking exposes a discomfort with truth itself, which, as Keats said, is indeed synonymous with beauty—which ain’t always pretty. And if Yeats had been around on that day, he might have declared that another “terrible beauty is born,” no doubt earning dour rebukes. Here is evidence of a fundamental and scary problem in the culture. A casual blindness to beauty—whether in the form of comedy or tragedy, creation or destruction, whimsy or horror—is blindness to humanity itself, including its problems.

These small but daily aversions add up. Subtly and cumulatively, they grow around one’s periphery until there is nothing left to see through but the narrowest of tunnels. A lack of beauty leads to a lack of emotional intelligence: to the point where an entire nation can be outraged that 6,000 people were murdered on September 11, but not be equally outraged that, on the very same day, 24,000 people starved to death—and continue to do so each and every day. Is mass death the price of moral philistinism? You tell me whether a culture that really valued the truth would permit that kind of daily slaughter by supply and demand.

ne of Wieseltier’s predecessors at the old, more humane New Republic, the estimable Malcolm Cowley, wrote a very satisfying little book about his adventures in Europe during the ’20s, profiling the “lost generation” of American writers. Looking back, he was acutely cognizant of, even embarrassed by, his generation’s excesses, their vanities and foibles. But he also had the maturity to see the value of taking personal or literary chances:

It seems to me now that many characters in the story, myself included, did very foolish things—but perhaps the young writers of the present age aren’t young or foolish enough. ... Moreover, there is this to say about the foolishness of writers in the 1920s, that even the worst of it caused no suffering except to the perpetrators of the foolishness and their immediate families. It wasn’t like the statesmen’s high-principle foolishness of later years, in all countries, which has left them in office while bringing the rest of us to the brink of something we aren’t prepared to face.

Cowley wrote that in 1951, when the threat of global annihilation was still new—and no matter how much the fantasy of American political life and culture tries to wish it away, that distinct possibility still has not vanished.

But while a mad world spins on lies, writers merely try to tell a story. There’s something funny about literature: If it works, it has a way of opening up new vistas of common humanity, experience and endeavor, whether that was the author’s intention or not (usually it’s not). But if the novel doesn’t work, if it rings false instead of true, it’s merely a bad novel, that’s all. A bad novel cannot be put to any use—not even as propaganda, for then it appears to everyone as doubly ridiculous. There is no equal and opposite reaction to bad literature, as there is in so much else of the universe.

We can tell ourselves stories, with nothing to lose and everything to gain, or we can tell ourselves lies, with existence itself at stake. There is a vital difference. In that spirit, In These Times offers the following six essays about five contemporary storytellers, and one from a bygone era. The approach is anything but comprehensive. The critics assembled here have some informed ideas about fiction, about what works and what doesn’t. But just remember, we’re only human.

Joe Knowles is culture editor of In These Times.

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