Toussaint was a product of the especially modern conditions of the colonial plantation complex: he had a personal memory of bondage that would not allow for compromise with Napoleon’s attempts to recapture Saint-Domingue, and yet he was also a statesman formed in part by the ideals of the European Enlightenment, and couldn’t envisage his society developing in complete independence from a France that he viewed as “the highest state of civilization.” James did not see this as weakness on Toussaint’s part, or as a willing submission to the stultifying logics of reason and progress. His dilemma was simply borne out of the conditions in which he had to operate. For Scott, Toussaint’s vexed relationship to the Enlightenment is shared in the 21st century by third-world intellectuals, for whom “modernity” is both a blessing and a curse that can neither simply be escaped from nor endorsed.

I do not want to say, of course, that the world has no pattern, no structure, no determinate shape, no determinacy. But I do want to say that its future is not already wrapped up in its past, that it is not part of an unfolding teleological narrative, whose end is known and given in its beginning. I do not believe, in that sense, in “the laws of history.” There is no closure yet written into it. And to be absolutely honest, if you do not agree that there is a degree of openness or contingency in every historical conjuncture, you do not believe in politics, because you do not believe that anything can be done about it.

The “kind of person” Robert is—and by extension “the kind of person” anyone can be on this account of what it means to correctly read another person’s character—lies hidden behind a mass of unreliable pieces of evidence. But no matter how much sympathy this “mirage of guesswork and projection” elicits from us, the real person is nothing but the worst of his sins. And sinners don’t deserve our pity.

But even as the figure of the modern intellectual was taking shape, there was a tension pulling at the seams. Turgenev identified two kinds of writer. One, who we might call the poet, is perceptive and incandescently creative but operates at a remove from politics and communal life. The other, the critic, dives right into the scene, seeking to reflect the feeling and consciousness of the people at that moment in time. Turgenev, despite himself, belonged to the first type. Belinsky, his friend and the consummate “committed intellectual,” was the latter.

More than half a century later, Belinsky’s moral vision and rhetorical fire would make him a hero of the radicals who led the revolution. From him they learned that literature was to be taken very seriously, for in books were messages that had the power not just to change minds, but to forge them from raw material. When Trotsky defined revolutionary art as works “colored by the new consciousness arising out of the Revolution,” he was speaking as a follower of Belinsky.

[...] Gessen is a great fan of Brodsky the poet, but wishes he would be more of a critic. In a New Yorker essay from 2011, he condemned Brodsky for allowing himself to become a “propagandist for poetry.” Gessen searched Brodsky’s oeuvre in vain for an example that might undercut the unapologetic aestheticism that had “hardened into dogma.” Not unlike the judge, Gessen seemed to demand of Brodsky, How were you useful to the motherland? How could someone of Brodsky’s intelligence actually believe that aesthetics governs ethics and not the other way around?

As if cautious not to repeat the mistakes of Brodsky’s generation, Gessen has embraced his public role in his own career as an intellectual. He co-founded n+1 in 2004 with some fellow Harvard grads in New York City, and, in 2011, when a thousand protesters set up camp in Zuccotti Park, they eagerly joined the movement. Being academic types, they were less experienced than some of the other Occupiers when it came to practical matters of governance or logistics, so they contributed the way they knew how: they wrote and theorized. They published blog posts and put together a broadsheet called the Occupy! Gazette. In Occupy!, the anthology of reflections from these heady months that he co-edited with Astra Taylor and the other editors of n+1, Gessen acknowledged the split within the park between those “highly educated” organizers and intellectuals like himself, who were “mostly in their late twenties and thirties, and mostly not living in the park,” and the “kids who actually do live in the park.” This division, he suggested, is not as bad as it might seem. Some dismissed the twenty-year-olds in the camp as crust punks or anarchists, but he admired their youthful idealism. At least they were doing something. “They actually think that coming to a faraway city and living in a concrete park could lead to political change,” he marveled. “And they may be right!”

Every generation of intellectuals finds a way of coming to terms with the limits of their agency. Brodsky’s chose poetry; mine and Gessen’s took the train downtown. It’s not a strict binary, of course: these two tendencies can coexist in the same individual and express themselves in different ways. But we might consider that switching off, for Brodsky, was a way of performing his social responsibility, not shirking it. In Brodsky’s view, politics was one level of human existence, but it was a low rung. The business of poetry, he thought, is to “indicate something more … the size of the whole ladder.” He held that “art is not a better, but an alternative existence … not an attempt to escape reality but the opposite, an attempt to animate it.” What compels a poet to write is less “a concern for one’s perishable flesh” than “the urge to spare certain things of one’s world—of one’s personal civilization—one’s own non-semantic continuum.”

I think this was his answer to Gessen’s challenge. When there is scarce room for political maneuvering, when the prevailing cultural values are sucked of all significance, making art that rejects tired tropes and social themes may not be simply an expression of personal freedom, the luxury of the secure and uninvested. It can model independent thought and attentiveness, preserving not just the integrity of the self but also that of the culture one sees being degraded before one’s eyes.

This is not art for art’s sake; it needn’t be quietist or resigned. We can believe in the power of art and defend it vigorously without indulging in fantasies of its social utility. In times like these, we need critics. But we also need poets, who can transmute experience into art and sniff out platitudes. Those who search for possibilities in foregone conclusions and hearts in fiery motors.

The end of history, Fukuyama wrote, was not the end of historical events, but the end of ideological conflict. But once the end of history has been revoked, a renewal of the possibilities of ideology to enhance narrative should not be far behind. Reality under the Trump administration truly is hysterical, and any meaningful literary response to it should probably take into account how we—that nebula of left-leaning literary types to which Batuman and I and everyone who reviewed or cares about reviews of The Idiot belong—put up with so many patently mediocre fictions for so long. This isn’t to suggest that novelists should dive headfirst into professions of socialist faith. Certain authors have already shown the limits of such an approach. It is not a question of advocating one belief or another, but of examining their implications through the vessel of dramatic narrative. It’s not to discount the existence of types of novels other than the ideological, nor to overlook the gifted fiction writers who already know how to fuel their narratives with zealous idiocy, self-centered or otherwise. Junot Díaz, Tao Lin, Adelle Waldman, Alexandra Kleeman and Paul Beatty have all demonstrated how foolish true believers can push novels forward onto territory that blatant author surrogates, burdened by intelligent inaction, could never reach.

These are unsettling times. Tensions and pressures formerly pacified by the prospect of endless growth now draw force from a state of permanent stagnation. Established institutions tremble with the resentful energies of dishonored promises; each crisis barely averted sows the seeds for more inevitable confrontation. Yet if literary history is any indication, an era of collapsing order offers fertile ground for novelists. Shaken by events out of inertia and conformity, they waken to a world teeming with open inquiries and untested solutions; whether facing the window, the mirror or the other, certainties dissolve. The pressing question is no longer how to fit in with the given, but how much must be changed. The temptation to wager one’s existence on an unrealized social ideal grows ever more alluring. So, too, grows the inclination to review one’s ideals and imagine their implications writ large. The unique quality of the novel catalyzed by ideology is its range, its capacity to simultaneously circumscribe the horizons of belief, exercise the full freedom to maneuver in society, and gauge its potential to foster individual maturity. It’s the best, if not the only, instrument left to us to understand what we are becoming.

[...] In the Amazon bookstore, taste has been crowd-sourced. The books on the shelves are each accompanied by a printed card that lists a rating on Amazon, the number of reviews, and a sample quote from an online review. So instead of some nerd from the Fake News Sunday Book Review telling us what to like, here’s “Kyle” or “Utah Mom” observing that this book is “written with superb attention to detail” or is “surprisingly relatable” or “full of age-old wisdom.” The verdict on James Joyce’s Dubliners: “Each story is a gem”—which, with all due respect to “Brandon” (who I’m guessing didn’t sign up for this limelight), is as funny and daft and obscene as all those Yelp reviews that people take the trouble to write recommending, you know, the Grand Canyon, or the Louvre.