In his book of literary commentary, The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner posits a very different role for art in modernity, one that turns not on the willing suspension of disbelief, but on our “embarrassment” that poems and novels exist at all. Beginning from the memorable opening words of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”—“I, too, dislike it”—Lerner observes that “the poem is always a record of failure.” He does not mean by this to discourage the reading or writing of poetry; he wants, rather, to show how this failure can become the foundation for a properly self-conscious form of literary appreciation. Indeed, he argues that the greatest poets are the ones able to most powerfully evoke our disappointment at the gap between the transcendental impulse that inspires us to write poetry, and the anticlimax of individual poems, bounded as they are by “the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.”

In spelling out the theory behind his artistic practice, however, Lerner exposes the misunderstanding in the hatred of literature’s disenchanted heart. He confuses the incapacity to suspend disbelief—the unwillingness to enter into the artwork’s imaginative world—for a mark of intellectual sophistication, when, as has always been clear to all but its most embarrassed proponents, it is a mark of imaginative destitution. “I have never been ‘disenchanted’ with language,” says the contemporary poet, critic and non-hater of literature Patricia Lockwood. “Well, except the times a businessman has talked to me.”

Literature, after all, is precisely that which is not bounded by “inflexible laws.” This does not mean it escapes those laws entirely, whether the laws of nature or the lawlike relations that govern our political and social lives. Literature is about life and thus contains everything in it that life contains—including politics, history and certainly disappointment. But when we read something that moves us to tears or laughter, pity or terror, conviction or bewilderment, it is because it reminds us that the “real” is not always disenchanted, our lives not always reducible to the conditions of their possibility. Perhaps we do live in a time, as our greatest poet of disenchantment once described it, of “specialists without spirit, and sensualists without heart.” All the more reason to resist the march toward a literary culture without love.

In his autobiography, Ninagawa recalls an incident from a couple years before his career turned to Shakespeare. A teenager called out his name and approached him outside a movie theater in Shinjuku. The kid had a question he needed to ask: “Can you name any unfulfilled aspirations?” Ninagawa smoked silently. “None worth mentioning,” Ninagawa said finally. “I don’t name aspirations.” “Oh,” the teenager said, “I’m glad,” pulling out a jackknife from his pocket and showing it to him. “I’ve been watching your plays for a while. I was going to stab you if you told me you’ve started to aspire to things, instead of doing them.” Ninagawa would write that the boy’s voice never left his mind when he directed; that if there were a thousand teenagers in the audience—a thousand eyes—they could hold a thousand knives. He had to create a theater that roused enough feeling that it would make a teen want to wield a knife for Japanese theater.

Watching Ninagawa in college, I had a single wish: that someone would clap and it would all suddenly be clear to me: the characters I transform into, what I transform from, who I am performing for. There were moments of inanity in everyday American life when I wanted to pull a Ninagawa and make things giant and absurd—drop a life-size horse on someone’s head—so that I didn’t feel obliged to be a cordial translator for “my” culture. When I watched Ninagawa, I felt a sense of security: I wanted to swallow his assurance in a stable idea of a Japanese person, who he wanted his audience to be, because I didn’t have it. Most of all, I wanted him to put a framing device on my world. After losing R, I wanted to be legible to someone again.

Dropping the taboo on treating characters as if they were real won’t tell us what questions to ask or how to go about answering them. Nor will it tell us what books we should now embrace and try to canonize. Dropping the taboo just increases our freedom to be whatever kind of critic we wish to be, to work on the kind of writing we care about, in ways that make intellectual sense to us. But such freedom can feel scary, for now we have to find our own way forward. To echo a theme in Cavell’s work: we need to “stake our own subjectivity” in our writing. This doesn’t mean that we have to become painfully private. A critic’s confessions may be fascinating, but the place to reveal them is not necessarily in an essay on Jane Austen. To stake oneself in one’s writing means, rather, to try to acknowledge, as far as possible, what our own investments in a topic are. These investments may well be intensely intellectual, but they are no less personal for all that. There is a lot to be said about this. Here and now, I’ll just explain what I want to do now that I have understood what’s at stake in the taboo.

My dad was a garbage truck mechanic on the day shift. Mom worked night shift in a factory line that filled aerosol spray cans, deodorant tubes, perfume bottles. They were trying to save enough money to buy a home of their own. In the meantime we rented a house in a campground.

Just when there was any extra money at all, my brother or I would snap a bone doing something crazy in the campground.

When my brother and I complained about having to do something we didn’t want to do, dad reminded us that the job he worked so he could feed us involved him sometimes having to crawl under a garbage truck and heat up rusted parts with a blowtorch. Oh how the maggots fell on him. We’d do our homework then. We’d clean our rooms then. Whatever we could do to avoid a life of maggots.

My parents lived paycheck to paycheck. While mom was guiding the forklift driver over to a pallet of a zillion cans of hairspray, dad opened the oven and pushed in a baking sheet filled to max capacity with frozen store-brand fish sticks.

And times got worse for my mother and father. Campbell’s soup shrunk the size of their canned creamed corn. The store-brand frozen green beans with the almond slivers vanished from the freezer section. The toaster broke and we drove around from store to store searching for a replacement, but there were no good deals. Dad bought a toaster he didn’t like at a price he didn’t like and we had peanut butter and jelly for dinner while my mom stood at a conveyor belt, missing us and counting down the minutes to her cigarette break so she could call us from the payphone and say goodnight.

Art isn’t something you should protect from yourself. Just run towards it full sprint and embrace how ridiculous your ideas are, how unguarded, how close to something a child might think up, lying on their back in a field overgrown with weeds. The sights and sounds of the rotating world revealing itself to you, or not.

Take a sip of black gas station quality coffee, take a bite of fish sandwich, write down the adventures of the day. Every day adds up. Every lunch break is something more than a lunch break.

At today’s meeting the safety man is smooth, calm, but even so, he speaks of horrors. He says to the crowd, “How many of you want to go home today with the disfigured face of a monster? Raise your hand.”

Nobody raises their hand.

“How many of you want to go home today with shattered bones in your chest and waking up for the rest of your life coughing blood and wheezing in the dark dark night?”

No hands raised for that either.

“Okay now how many of you want to go home today missing a finger? Okay two fingers. Wait, how many want to go home today missing both your hands, so you just have two stumps hanging there at the end of your wrists? Raise your hands if you want that to be you.”

“Jesus Christ,” someone says over by the drill press.

But heavy rain, and lightning too, does set down on our job site. The foreman comes out of the trailer and up onto the steel structure and he says, “Alright, everybody stop what you’re doing. Let’s go.”

We stream down the stairs, the rain slapping us. Taking two, three, four stairs at a time, sliding down the railings with our work gloves on, and boots slapping the grating, and calling each other pussies, and losers, and asswipes, and assholes, and loads, stiffs, dipshits, and fuckers. The thunder rumbling even louder than the hell of the unit we are leaving, and so earplugs ripped out and thrown onto the ground. The midday sky above is momentarily dark, shaded under gray clouds sometimes tinged with green or even purple—but then the same dark sky is suddenly full of white light. Lightning hitting something along the banks of the river. So laugh and hustle through the rain towards the trailer. Push each other, literally. Be cruel and continue to not give a shit about anything in the world, your life included, but get off the steel, because you’re not expected to work in a lightning storm. The wind picks up and the rain comes down harder. The chickens are long gone from the oak tree. They seek shelter too beneath the cars in the lot, the supervisor’s trailer, the trees on the wood line. And there are no ducks on Duck Island. Open the door of the trailer, pull off your wet shirts and say, “What the fuck is this life!” and put on a dry shirt, sit down and let the storm pass. Decks of cards come out. Magazines flop open. Boots are put up on empty chairs. Eyes are closed. The rain and wind beat against the trailer. All is well for a little while. The tree shakes. The unit hums. We hope it gets worse and worse and worse so we never have to go out there again.

Rooney and her readers hope to bask in the self-congratulatory glow of their supposed egalitarianism without ceding any of their accolades—and without acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that, even if economic inequalities were eliminated, other hierarchies would persist. Some people would still be kinder than others. Some would be better at singing. Some art would be ugly, and some would be beautiful. And, irrational creatures that we are and no doubt would remain, we would not treat everything in accordance with its true value. Some of us would continue to prefer Rooney to Baldwin. Some of us would continue to love bad people more than we love the good ones. Even under socialism, I might opt for a violent Swedish boyfriend.

But this is as it should be. Absolute equality requires absolute identity. A world in which everyone loved everyone else equally would contain no love worth mentioning. All things considered, we are lucky that when they beat you, you cease to be the best.

On page after page, Gopnik portrays liberalism as the only political perspective that is “open to the evidence of experience.” Only liberals, with their capacity for experimentation and “self-correction,” Gopnik contends, are able to perform ungainly but essential tasks like cleaning up the sewers in nineteenth-century London—an achievement he mentions several times and says saved “possibly millions” of lives—or curbing a crime wave in twentieth-century New York. And yet, even as he presses these points, Gopnik shows his incapacity to attend in any concentrated way to the mire of the actual. Most conspicuously, he neglects the most recent challenges to his story about the “triumph of liberal ideals”—from Brexit to Bolsonaro—with the justification that it is not necessary for him to discuss “obvious contemporary political issues,” since “there’s a lot of that already.” Lame as this explanation may seem on the surface, the reality is worse. Gopnik not only fails to attend to the proximate causes of the “shock” with which his book begins; he seems to want his readers to forget some of its most obvious sources. How else to explain, in a book supposedly meant for a generation that cannot remember a time when America was not at war in the Middle East, the existence of sentences like: “Liberals believe in fighting wars as hard as necessary; ending them as soon as possible; and rebuilding the defeated country as charitably as one can.” Or that, in a book meant to trumpet the achievements of modern liberalism, there are so many pages devoted to the cleaning of the sewers in London 160 years ago, and not one word about the lack of drinking water in Flint, Michigan in 2019.