What Is the Point?

On critical intelligence in the imaginative position

At a dinner in London recently, Seth asked if I had listened to our mutual friend Emily Greenhouse, the editor at NYRB, being interviewed on Merve Emre’s podcast. I hadn’t. Another friend at the dinner, Caoilinn, then provided a learned exegesis. When I got back to Poughkeepsie, the town otherwise known as Paris of the East, I began listening to the podcast. I have downloaded perhaps fifteen interviews so far. The podcast is called “The Critic and Her Publics” and the whole exercise is aimed at engaging a wider public, stepping out of the confines of academe. Each interview begins with Emre asking her guest how they got from where they were as students in college to where they are now. Of course, the idea of a public is a nebulous one: is fifty a public, especially when compared to the four or five that might make a dissertation committee? Emre’s choice of guests (the most immediate sense one gets of the public is the huge impressive cast assembled for the show, some of them legendary editors and others who are famous critics) indicates that she has a more robust sense of the public, to wit, the broad reading public in the nation and the world that she would like her students to address. I’m down with that program and, as I have enjoyed giving my ear to the people interviewed, I recommend that you tune in.

At the most basic level, the show provides students a road-map to literary citizenship. That is to say, the steps you need to take or stumble through to get to practice the literary arts. This is a very useful thing for Emre to do; when you are young, you have aspirations but you have no idea what to do. But the conversations on Emre’s show also turn to deeper questions. When she asks critics to riff on anonymous texts, a secret object as it were, we see minds at work and demonstrating what they do as readers. The editors who appear on the show are asked about the choices they make and the work they do when they collaborate with their writers. In other words, what does it mean to read? And what is it that one does as a critic?

I have long advocated for a mode of literary writing that blurs the line between the creative and the critical. Even while working inside academia, I’m forever seeking escape from its air of claustrophobic mania. (As Geoff Dyer says in his hilariously exaggerated, and yet somehow accurate, way: “That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches.”) My orientation toward all this is to never sacrifice the critical impulse (to point out, as John Berger does, when reading mainstream art criticism, that this is the language of “mystification”) but to always find novel forms. And to seek pleasure. This is what David Shields has in mind when he writes in Reality Hunger: “What I love: the critical intelligence in the imaginative position—…” and he goes on to list, among others, Geoff Dyer, Wayne Kostenbaum, Anne Carson, Roland Barthes, Joan Didion, Pauline Kael, and Elizabeth Hardwick.

In an interview published in Frontline yesterday, I was asked whether there is a book that I give away as a gift to family members or friends. I was reminded of a friend of mine who had told me, back when I was in grad school, that she gave a copy of A Lover’s Discourse to the men she slept with. (I was not the recipient of such a gift, alas.) In the interview, I only mentioned the books I have recently bought for my children but last night my thoughts returned to Barthes. I was also thinking of all the interviews that I have been listening over the past three-four days. It seems to me that in each of my books, I try to present the reader with the scene of reading or the enact the drama of writing. Look at the extracts below from my novel Immigrant, Montana. It is possible I’m expressing my love of readings but what I’m also trying to do, particularly when I think of A Lover’s Discourse, is to: 1. entangle academic learning with bodily desire, i.e., put in proximity books and bodies (when my narrator asks his fellow graduate student Nina, who is not yet his lover, if she is going to register for Comp Lit 300, Nina replies “How can I not enroll in a course that appears on the transcript as CLIT 300?”) 2. protest academic obfuscation, partly by invoking The Tremulous Private Body but, more crucially, by showing how Nina, as a respondent in CLIT 300, cuts through empty flowery pronouncements made by folks around the seminar table and asks a direct, real-world question. Read below.

P.S. Please also read the footnote at the bottom of the second page. I have a dim memory of a version of that ad in the Village Voice. I think the original said: “Let’s snuggle in bed and read Spivak’s ‘Scattered Speculations on Value’ or even the missionary-position Marxist writing you so greatly admire.” You can take the author out of academia but not…