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[...] "[...] And strong works of fiction are what refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys. They’re everything that pop psychology is not."
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
It's healthy to adjust to reality. It's healthy, recognizing that fiction such as Proust and Faulkner wrote is doomed, to interest yourself in the victorious new technology, to fashion a niche for yourself in the new information order, to discard and then forget the values and methods of literary modernism which older readers are too distracted and demoralized to appreciate in your work and which younger readers, bred on television and educated in the new orthodoxy of identity politics and the reader's superiority to the text, are almost entirely deaf and blind to. [...] Healthy, when you discover that your graduate writing students can't distinguish between "lie" and "lay" [...]
apropos of nothing, the "lie" and "lay" thing was in Purity i think lol
[...] Not long ago, one of my former undergraduate workshop students came to visit, and I took him on a walk in my neighborhood. Jeff is a skilled, ambitious young person, gaga over Pynchon's critique of technology and capitalism, and teetering between pursuing a Ph.D in English and trying his hand at fiction. On our walk I ranted at him. I said that I too had once been seduced by critical theory's promise of a life unco-opted by the System, but that after my initial seduction I came to see that university tenure itself--the half-million-dollar TIAA-CREF account in your name, the state-of-the-art computer supplied to you at a university discount by the Apple Corporation for the composition of your "subversive" monographs--is the means by which the System co-opts the critical theorist. I said that fiction is refuge, not agency.
Then we passed a delicious trash pile, and I pulled from it a paint- and plaster-spattered wooden chair with a broken seat and found a scrap of two-by-four to knock the bigger clumps of plaster off. It was grubby work. Jeff said: "This is what my life will be like if I write fiction?"
There is no future in normalcy, in our little attempts that we make at building a home in this world from statistics and routines and habits. Our only home is each other.
Examples are easy enough to list. I ran cross-country for all four years of high school. I wasn’t good at it, I didn’t get along with my teammates, and I found almost every moment of every race or practice excruciating. (I was still a fundamentalist Baptist at that point and wondered, during races, whether the literal hell that awaited the unsaved might feel like this.) Yet I never thought of quitting. I had found the little niche where I could contribute my little tithe of unnecessary pain to the universe, and this, I somehow understood, could give me some sort of purchase on manhood that I was too small and uncoordinated to get by winning fights. I still remember the aggrieved scorn with which my cross-country teammates and I responded to the guy who did quit, after two years, for the perfectly sane and healthy reason that he preferred watching cartoons. He wasn’t on the varsity squad; his absence had no effect on our team’s standing in the state rankings. But we acted as though he’d cheated us in some way—as though he’d left us to do some terrible group project alone.
In more mainstream forms, such attempts to define whiteness as pathology often focus on the character traits that accrue to “unearned” privilege. (As soon as we say “unearned,” we have baked in the idea of meritocracy—which is some white bullshit.) The white person, especially the white man, is inescapably mediocre, as if by hereditary taint. She or he or they are entitled, neurotic, fragile, narcissistic, vain. He is named Bryce or Heath or Connor and wears shorts in the winter—so severed is he, at a basic level, from the truth of things. (Perhaps he just doesn’t care if his knees are cold.) She is named Karen unless her hair is good.
This approach, too, has a crude descriptive power. Stereotypes often do. In an extension of this process, “white” becomes a name for certain varieties of bad politics: the conservative, the nationalist, the NIMBY progressive, the can’t-we-talk-about-this-later socialist, the you-looked-at-me-so-I’m-calling-the-cops feminist. In all these cases, “white” functions as a name for a kind of secular American freedom: freedom-from that has become freedom-over. It’s the freedom of the minor aristocrat—this being the type of person who gave us far too much of the Enlightenment political thought that permeates our institutions—or the freedom of the children of the southern rich, the group that disproportionately, has given us that bizarre and misnamed American political tendency known as “libertarianism.” (The word has a far nobler meaning in European contexts.) The libertarian is, spiritually speaking, a plantation owner’s son. He wants his taxes lowered, his employees free to work for free, and—with an eye toward those employees’ daughters—his age of consent abolished. His freedom requires that no one else be free of him. But all of these are positions, not traits. Many whitened people reject them, and many people of color buy into one or another of them. Given that the forms and shapes of exploitation are likely to shift in a world that America no longer dominates, this is important to keep in mind.
The third most common response, among the people designated “white,” to the radical critique of whiteness—the most common is to dismiss the whole issue or to fly to the defense of the assailed white man—is a wholesale adoption of this way of defining it: as a kind of shared sin. Because the concept of whiteness both excuses and inspires some of the worst and longest-running crimes in human history, every person we call “white” has a terrible, Faulknerian secret, which they must publicly acknowledge, describe, and lament in classes, trainings, book clubs, personal essays, and inappropriately anguished conversations with the nearest Black acquaintance. It’s as though we developed an excellent structural account of society just so that we could turn that, too, to the task of enumerating personal flaws while the boss takes notes.
lol
I have taken to using the term “shit-eating allyism” to describe these sorts of emotional display. Shit-eating allyism has two main manifestations. On one hand, it consists of simpering declarations of deference, testaments to the oppressed groups’ superior and hitherto historically unexampled virtue, or laments about one’s own privileges, even when these have barely been enough to keep one alive. In its other form, shit-eating allyism names those occasions when a person of privilege suspends, at least rhetorically—most of the time it is only rhetorical—their own, or their family’s and community’s, claim to basic self-respect or human rights. (Consider, for example, a woman who regrets that she is bringing a white baby into the world and is willing to be quoted in Vogue to that effect.) Shit-eating allyism is often but not always associated with the more extreme forms of what Matt Bruenig calls “identitarian deference” and Olúfémi O. Táíwò calls “epistemic deference”: the idea that whiteness, maleness, or some other form of privilege has so corroded one’s ability to assess reality that any judgment marked as coming from the oppressed community in question, however outlandish, unsupported, or unrepresentative, would automatically be better than whatever judgment this person reaches after research and careful consideration.
haha yes
The scholar Noel Ignatiev had a beautifully simple and hard solution to the problem of whiteness. White workers must simply refuse to be bought off, even when this means, for example, that a union must turn down an informal “first-in, last-out” deal with management. White workers must respond to any attack on Black workers as they would to an attack on themselves. (This is harder to do if you are continually reminding yourself, as white allies are supposed to do, that you could never, ever understand the uniquely horrible pain that is being a Black person.) What white people lost by doing so, they would soon gain back, and more, when the entire working class, undivided, grew strong enough to conquer. In the world that resulted from this overturning, racial categories would dissolve and ethnic differences would assume their true proportions, or at least, different proportions. Microaggressions, since they would no longer carry the reminder of a vast interlocking system that might kill you, would become, at worst, the routine human pain of being misunderstood. Residential segregation would lose on one side its sting and on the other its point.