to smash shop windows, or cry
rachel kushner, zadie smith, jazz, and a nuanced response to a peer writer
![Henri Rousseau - Jungle with Setting Sun [c.1910] | [Kunstmu… | Flickr](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ckYt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F123f11cf-a620-4d02-8433-5d25a676d5c3_1023x632.jpeg "Henri Rousseau - Jungle with Setting Sun [c.1910] | [Kunstmu… | Flickr")
In an interview published in the most recent issue of The Drift, novelist Rachel Kushner reflected upon her writing career, which includes several novels as well as reporting from Jerusalem and the West Bank in 2016 that resulted in a stunning, heart-rending feature in the New York Times Magazine and a 2021 look-back published in n+1. Regarding the discordant calls for writers to both speak out against the war in Gaza and capture “nuance” and extend empathy to “both sides,” she responds:
At the current moment, appeals to nuance seem to be functioning as a smoke screen to distract from Gaza: what’s happening is the annihilation of a people and a culture. And the United States is directly involved in this annihilation.
But of your question, when people ask writers to speak out against the war on Gaza, do they ask them to speak out as writers, or as human beings horrified and furious about what is happening there? What makes writers’ voices especially authoritative here?
I urge you to read the whole interview, which covers a lot of ground. The Drift is one of the publications that I most admire for its expansive and incisive long-form essays alongside short fiction and poetry. A self-described “magazine of culture and politics,” The Drift does not shy away from its identification within the left-leaning intellectual milieu. In a NYT profile from February 2022, one of its founders said that the lit mag sees itself as “part of the leftist resurgence of the past few years and figuring out what’s next, post-Bernie, to people now awakening to leftist radicalism.” It’s young, critical, smart, chic, and a little out there — what I hope to embody as a writer.
It’s been over a year since I wrote the introduction to this blog, in which my “preview of what’s to come” largely included political (or political-adjacent) topics, some of which I’ve covered while others I likely won’t anytime soon. My formal training isn’t in English or creative writing, but in international relations and social sciences. I’m drawn to the essay as my preferred form of literary production, and I don’t anticipate venturing into the realm of fiction.
I ask myself why I write, and I see news articles — and, more impactful, long-form features — about Gaza, about Cop City, about white supremacy, about the militarization of the border. I see reasons, if not answers.
What makes writers’ voices particularly authoritative? It’s essential to note here that writers are rarely ever just writers. Kushner is a journalist as well as a novelist; she has a bachelor’s degree in political economy, where she focused on US foreign policy in Latin America;1 she drew upon her time in Italy, the New York art scene, and her love of motorcycles for her most well-known book The Flamethrowers (2013). Regarding one of her later novels, she describes that “I was trying to get at textures of life that I felt I had the capacity to write about, based on things I’ve experienced, people I’ve known, and political work that I was involved in at the time.” No writer exists in a vacuum.
One of the pieces that most impacted me in the last month, published in The Guardian’s long read section on August 13, was written by Omer Bartov, an Israeli genocide scholar and former IDF soldier, about the alarming trends that he witnessed during his most recent trip home in June. His expertise is in the Holocaust, and in particular the role of the German Army in perpetrating crimes against humanity. Given his experience, he is perhaps the person most qualified to comment on the role of the IDF in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. In November he asserted in the New York Times opinion section that there was no evidence of outright genocide (although war crimes likely) in Gaza — by August, and at least following the invasion of Rafah in May, he stated that it was “no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions.”
The essay is long and strikes a balance between unsparing diagnoses of the noxious culture in Israel and remarkable grace toward those who pull the wool over their own eyes, be they a group of aggressive right-wing students or Bartov’s own friends and family. Naturally, as a historian, he engages with the history of Israeli settlement and its government’s attitudes regarding Palestine over the decades, as well as the gruesome extent to which the average Israeli is conditioned to see Palestinian people as subhuman, or even sub-animal.
To me, however, the essay is at its most powerful in its invocation of the poetry of Anahad Eldan, a 100-year-old resident of Kibbutz Be’eri who was inexplicably spared when Hamas slaughtered dozens of its residents and took 32 hostages on October 7. I’ll leave you to read the two poems, one from 1971 and one from 2016, that Bartov cites. He interprets Eldan’s work as a prayer for “reconciliation and coexistence, rather than for more cycles of bloodshed and revenge,” although he admits that others may interpret the haunting stanzas differently.
Bartov’s expertise clearly qualifies him to publish his piece in The Guardian, although like many professors and scholars, the bulk of his written output likely comprises articles in academic journals. So is Bartov a writer? His writing is undoubtedly elegant, and especially shines in its formidable effort to humanize those who, if not actively engaged in the project of genocide, are supportive of those efforts, without excusing or justifying those actions or beliefs (and indeed leveling trenchant criticism toward them). His analysis is bolstered by his research and scholarship, but enriched by a literary sensibility. To address Kushner’s question, in this case, Bartov’s decades of experience and knowledge are what lends authority to his voice, but his skill as a writer lends beauty to his work and makes it so compelling and devastating to read.
Being on Substack begs the question of what makes a writer. Does my barely-more-than-one year of publishing essays on my blog, or assorted bylines in some digital publications, make me any more of a writer than my sheepish reluctance to confidently say “I’m a writer” makes me less of one? I tend to embrace the idea that a writer is simply someone who writes. This definition is perhaps a bit self-serving, since I’d like to be able to consider myself a writer while I also use this platform as a means of discovering my voice and refining my own writing.2
Surely if everyone can be a writer simply by writing, however, writers’ voices are not all that authoritative after all. Kushner’s rhetorical question, I think, is targeted at a class of writers with proven artistic merit, making them capable of consistent literary output. Maybe we can call them authors, and their written work literature, insofar as it exemplifies and channels the authors’ artistic merit. This is not a perfect definition. Taking the example of Bartov, I would not consider his academic papers or journal publications to be literature, although I’m sure they’re very well written.
At the same time, one of the books that I discussed a year ago, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, is fundamentally an anthropology book. Alongside theory and scholarship, though, Tsing writes beautifully and weaves narrative storytelling and complex characterization into the book, which is more than worthy of being considered literature (read more below).
A few weeks ago, I read an essay on Substack that tackled similar themes to what I grapple with here regarding writing and literature. Its author, Pranay Somayajula, is also a young writer like myself who discusses how he began to call himself a writer when he began working on a novel almost three years ago.3 A novel, especially a “straightforward, up-and-down work of literary fiction,” is clear writer bona fides — easier to invoke as an answer to the dreaded “So what do you write?” follow-up question than the essays he publishes concurrently. Even though he’s taken a break from writing the novel, there’s no doubt that Pranay is an author, and a talented one at that. His depiction of his (ongoing!) literary journey resonated with me.
Pranay’s essay opens with Arundhati Roy: after writing the Booker Prize–winning novel The God of Small Things in 1997, Roy didn’t publish another novel until 20 years later. In the interim, though, she wrote many powerful essays on political themes, for which she was persecuted in her home country of India by those who were responsible for or adjacent to the atrocities she wrote about. In a lecture for PEN America in 2019, she describes how, during this time, she started to be called a “writer-activist”; to those who labeled her as such, “the fiction was not political and the essays were not literary.”
From here, Pranay describes his perception of the “literary” approach to the political essay:
There’s little doubt, of course, that the essay is a straightforwardly literary form. But it seems to me that oftentimes, when people talk about essays as a form of capital-L Literature, what they are often referring to is a particular kind of essay—the kind whose argument, if it even makes one, is filtered through a heavy layer of narrative abstraction. The defining feature of such writing is that while it engages with political subjects, it rarely, if ever, makes concrete political arguments—at least, not without fully or partially cloaking its ideological message behind an opaque aesthetic veneer.
I don’t doubt that this has at least a grain of truth, especially building off of Roy’s discussion of how her essays were received. Perhaps it’s self-evident that these conversations about essays do indeed take place — the piece certainly resonated with many readers. From my perspective, though, the argument here would have benefited from less abstraction itself. Instead of referring generally to these “capital-L Literature essays” and the people who talk about them as such, I couldn’t help but want an example to work with before completely embracing and moving forward with the premise.
That being said, it still provides a perfect segue into the piece that I originally planned on writing about here: Zadie Smith’s terrible New Yorker essay about the college protests surrounding the genocide in Gaza in May.
Zadie Smith is a darling of the “literary community” as much as anyone possibly can be.4 I haven’t read any of her books, but I’m familiar with the trajectory of her career; when I saw that she wrote an essay about Gaza, I went in with an open mind and honestly expected to find it insightful. I was mistaken.
While I don’t want to burden you with too many distasteful details about the immense turd that is “War in Gaza, Shibboleths on Campus,” it is unfortunately a salient case study. Smith opens with a statement: “A philosophy without a politics is common enough… But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy.” She doesn’t do much to substantiate this assertion or breathe meaning into it.5 She later offers a hypothetical, one among many: “a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone [of safety].”
While we hack through thick vines of metaphor and speculation, the death toll in Gaza has passed 40,000. A July 20 study in The Lancet states that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
Smith’s essay isn’t all bad. She calls explicitly for a ceasefire and refers to calling on the police to brutalize young people as a “moral injury to us all.” And in a remarkable feat of self-awareness, she acknowledges the potential objection that she is “behaving like a novelist” and harping on language and rhetoric while people are being ethnically cleansed. That sure doesn’t stop her from barreling right through. In the next paragraph, she commits a fatal bothsidesism, comparing two examples of things people might say to “justify bloody murder” — “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” and “Zionist colonialist state” — as if these were not collections of words, each of which have meaning, especially when strung together into phrases, some of which are more awful than others.6
On one hand, in total fairness, Smith’s essay is an archetypal example of what Pranay describes above. It engages political subjects without making a concrete argument, uses an “aesthetic veneer” of complex sentence structure and jargon, and clearly hopes that the reader may simply nod sagely as they trudge and stumble through, without thinking too critically about what they’ve read.7
On the other hand, though, Pranay later describes the “gatekeeping of literary recognition” as keeping out writing that “wears its ideology on its sleeve,” more explicitly political and likely to challenge the status quo. Giving Zadie Smith a byline in the New Yorker for this detritus may be evidence of the contrapositive (letting in writing that conforms).8 But I struggle to believe that anyone, literary establishment or not, is thinking of elevating “War in Gaza, Shibboleths on Campus” into the literary canon. The truth is that it’s not a good essay, and if you look it up, you’ll see that it’s pretty universally panned.
[And this is maybe a gauche digression, but Smith’s essay is evidence that her politics are terrible, or at best underdeveloped, tending away from solidarity in a troubling way despite professing to center humanity. She even concludes her piece saying “It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay,” even after all that about a philosophy without politics. Would she write a better, more thoughtful essay about Gaza and college protests if she abandoned the techniques of literary craft that made her essay such a miasma of verbiage and rhetoric (albeit characteristic of “capital-L Literature”)? I’m not convinced.]
I suppose the heart of my disagreement (which, at the end of the day, is pretty minor) with Pranay’s piece doesn’t lie with his assertions themselves, but the level of analysis. He writes:
Yes, we must resist the depoliticization of literature. But if we are serious about harnessing the much-vaunted ‘power of the written word’ in service of a better world, then we must also resist the deliterarization of politics. By this, I mean the tendency to privilege ideological subtlety in writing as a paramount virtue—to look down on naked political expression as unwieldy and even gauche; the sign of a lesser talent and something that can only be rendered truly ‘literary’ through the careful application of layer upon layer of metaphor and abstraction… [In] our failure to acknowledge the true literary potential of political writing, we reinforce literature’s role as a tool for the preservation of elite interests in bourgeois society…
I’m just not convinced that ideological subtlety is indeed so privileged as a paramount virtue in literature. If “naked political expression” refers to the explicit invocation of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, etc. in writing about political issues, perhaps some people’s reluctance to include that writing within the category of “literature” is because those terms are, at their core, academic and theoretical, even if they have clear real-world implications. Furthermore, if “literary” is already defined in terms of the institutions that safeguard the status quo, then isn’t it inherently impossible for radical politics to have literary potential? There’s this sort of chicken-and-egg problem that I have trouble working out, although I’ll admit I find it worthwhile to ponder.
Perhaps the answer is yes and yes; we have a responsibility to shield political writing from the evil forces of neutrality and murky analogies, and we must elevate and consider literary that which already professes naked political expression over ideological subtlety. But in reality, who are “we” in these scenarios, and how do “we” move this argument out of the abstract? I mean, let’s resist these tendencies insofar as they exist, but how far do “we” go? Do we deign to be gatekeepers in our own right? Or is it merely that we should be conscious of these tendencies in our own writing?
Pranay’s essay shines near the end, where he discusses the difference between his conceptions of nuance and subtlety, and the role of writers to “harness our command of language in service of liberation.” He quotes the Palestinian-American writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s takedown of the “sanitizing influence” of the type of Craft that is propounded by Western institutions as literary best practices in service of the status quo. These are important points for all writers to consider, whether or not their writing is expressly political. I also agree that raising readers’ attention to these techniques helps raise our collective consciousness and resistance against a status quo that oppresses and marginalizes people (and ideas).9
To this end, Pranay writes that “there is no room for any form of literary production that fails to engage with [the ‘dailiness of resistance and unrelenting struggle’],” quoting Tbakhi. This seems a bit extreme, and maybe it’s intended to be. Kushner, in her interview, quotes the narrator of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station as saying something like my poems should get people to smash shop windows. Regarding her most recent novel, and in response to a question about novels’ “radical potential,” she says that she doesn’t think it will get people to smash shop windows.
Below is one of my favorite quotes from the interview. She’s talking about novels, but if you read her 2016 feature about the Shua’fat refugee camp in East Jerusalem, you’ll get a sense of exactly what she means.
Art is separate from the sphere of the social and the sphere of politics, which, in a way, is what is political about it. The role of art, the magic of it, is to render the unseen seen. And if the reader is reading a novel and finds there an interpretation or a description or a conjuring that they recognize in an intimate way, either having to do with them or having to do with the writer, or having to do with neither, with some sense of experience or sensation, then that can be radical, but perhaps not in the way you intend in your question. It can be a radical recognition of a delicate or fragile truth. Or a crude and disturbing and vulgar truth.
Maybe part of my skepticism of the premise underlying Pranay’s thesis is that I don’t have the same experience with political writing, especially essays, as that which he describes. One of the first serious essays I read in Mr. Anderson’s AP Lang class, which I described in my introductory Substack post, was “Stranger in the Village” by James Baldwin, found in the Norton Reader. In describing his experience as the only Black person in a remote Swiss village, Baldwin doesn’t shy away from using direct language to refer to the legacy of slavery and conquest, the “white man’s naiveté,” and the “rage of the disesteemed.”
Between the World and Me comes to mind as a universally-acclaimed book (and one of my favorites of all time), innovative in its defiance of genre, and also clear and direct in its discussion of race and politics. It finds itself among several examples of similarly political nonfiction works such as Men We Reaped, The New Jim Crow, Say Nothing, Nickel and Dimed, and Evicted in the New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, alongside dozens of fiction books that approach and attend to politics. Even Arundhati Roy continued to receive awards and recognition for her essays in the two decades between her critically acclaimed novels, as well as the PEN Pinter prize earlier this year. All to say that maybe the problem here is overstated, even if I agree with the conclusions and believe them to be very well articulated.10
I’m not arguing that we should be totally complacent about the status of political writing in literature, nor that there are no circumstances or contexts in which dominant forces may seek to depoliticize literature or deliterarize politics. Even so, there should be room for writing that doesn’t make you want to smash shop windows, and lots of writing that makes you want to smash shop windows is actually doing alright, as it should. Somewhere in the middle, I want literature to make me smile, or cry.
Another brilliant, genre-bending piece of literature that I read within the last few months was Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1991), which combines elements of biography and criticism, channeling a jazz-inspired improvisational style in literary form. Dyer paints rich, often tragic and discomfiting portraits of notable musicians — I was transfixed. It made me listen to some new music, and put on some albums that I was familiar with so that I could appreciate them in a new light.
In the afterword, Dyer writes that “what makes jazz a vital art form is its astonishing ability to absorb the history of which it is a part”: namely, Black history in the United States. He clarifies that he is not exclusively referring to pieces like Duke Ellington’s Black, Beige, and Brown that are explicitly about race, but rather, more broadly, “the trumpet’s identification with the emergence of black American consciousness in the twentieth century.” It’s more complex than that, though; one of the characters in But Beautiful is Art Pepper, a white alto saxophonist whose story was characterized his musicianship as well as by the prison stints resulting from his heroin addiction. Jazz is pure expression, inseparable from its context.
Shortly after finishing But Beautiful, I bought a book of essays by the communist philosopher Richard Gilman-Opalsky called Imaginary Power, Real Horizons: The Practicality of Utopianism from a bookstore in Fort Greene.11 Among its expansive chapters is “Free Jazz and Other Insurrections,” which describes a subgenre of jazz that emerged in the late 1950s whose practitioners sought to break free of the conventions of bebop and embrace improvisation and sound for its own sake. Some of its pioneers, including Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra, were involved in radical politics as well and conceived of their musical output as fitting within that tradition.
Gilman-Opalsky draws from Theodor Adorno’s critique of the culture industry to write that “capitalism acculturates hostility toward the unfamiliar,” which is to say that capitalist culture prioritizes bite-sized, cookie-cutter products that people will passively consume over and over again. At the time, free jazz was considered “dangerous in the eyes of mainstream jazz culture” for its unwillingness to be put in a box; naturally, it did not reach a mainstream audience. Nowadays, coupled with a social media environment and attention economy that threatens to exhaust every minute of our “free time,” it becomes even more ambitious to seek out art, music, etc. that does not elicit immediate gratification. In response to this troubling trend, Gilman-Opalsky posits “radical listening” as a revolutionary means of engaging with art, contrary to the whims of the culture industry’s profit incentive.12
The piece conceives of radical listening as “spatial” rather than linear, encouraging the listener to immerse themselves completely rather than expecting a pre-ordained structure (a beginning and end), and “thus to raise questions rather than to settle them.” In pursuit of liberation, of imaginary power, Gilman-Opalsky exhorts us to take in and process “works that are uncomfortable and unsettling.” Dyer described that jazz in the early 1960s had been “moving toward a scream,” encompassing a sense of danger brought upon by the politics of the time, which “hauled jazz to a pitch of expressivity that has rarely been exceeded by any other art form.” Dissonant and chaotic, but beautiful.
Gilman-Opalsky writes:
Free jazz is generally understood as an emancipatory music of some kind, either immediately liberating in the moment of performance, for both players and listeners, or liberating in a prefigurative sense, pointing toward possible future liberations. Sun Ra said: “Freedom to me means the freedom to rise above a cruel planet.” It seems to me that, in all of its diversity, free jazz shares that aspiration, to move beyond the cruelty of the existing reality.
The concept of radical listening, which centers the intentionality behind attending to auditory art that rejects popular understandings of form and tonality, brings me back to the “crude and disturbing and vulgar” truths that Kushner described. She referred to novels, and the process of a reader discovering something dark and intimate in those pages, but she mentions novels merely as one form of art, her art. Good art has the power to “render the unseen seen,” but the other half of the equation is that we as readers and listeners also have to receive it.
As writers, too, we have a responsibility to drink deeply from various wells of artistic expression in order to access the truths that only they can illuminate. As I mentioned before, both Bartov’s essay and Anna Tsing’s book, though heavily based in reportage and scholarship respectively, are heavily influenced by and make use of poetry not just to further their arguments, but as an integral part of the literary works themselves. In the case of Kushner and Roy, their novelistic pursuits are inseparable from their essays and reporting, and vice versa. Because, as Kushner noted, art is separate from the sphere of politics, it has all the more transcendent richness to offer to the political essayist.
Earlier in his book, Gilman-Opalsky declared that “what’s great about art” is the way it is “disruptive yet joyful,” a characteristic that is shared by many popular revolts and uprisings. As I discussed in May, music was an integral part of the labor movement in the late 19th century, both in terms of articulating the laborers’ demands and dreams in a lyrical way, and in bringing people together to revel as they rebel. This, to me, is an essential part of what — to quote Pranay’s invocation of Toni Cade Bambara in the title of his piece — serves “to make revolution irresistible.”
Part of what is so heartbreaking about But Beautiful is the unsparing description of how harsh the lives of some of the most beloved musicians ever were. As the free jazz bassist and band leader William Parker said: “The situation of the artist is a reflection of America’s whole attitude towards life and creativity.” The precarity of artistic production is at odds with its necessity for a functional society. Furthermore, Gilman-Opalsky writes that “radical political art is a desperate act, which tries and often fails to transform anyone or anything.” Nonetheless, we respond to the imperative to move beyond an exploitative and oppressive status quo that alienates us from each other, and instead to collectively think about what is possible and desirable. Art provides us the language to do so.
Much of Gilman-Opalsky’s existing scholarship has to do with revolt and what he refers to as a “riotous epistemology” — uprising as thought, art as upheaval — which is to say that he likely embraces art that makes people want to break shop windows. Even he acknowledges that the revolutionary music he writes about can also be a “healing force,” using free jazz musician Albert Ayler’s words, and that perhaps not all listeners are “thinking about radical listening and capitalism.” That’s okay too. We can joyfully attend to the radical facets of the art to which we attend — whether they be radical in their political assertions or radical in the delicate and fragile truths that they allow us to recognize. Then we write.
Some art to radically attend to!
Last time I said I’d add a regular section to give some recommendations on some media I’ve enjoyed recently, loosely related to the theme of the essay. This one has been on the longer side (so if you’ve made it this far, THANK YOU) so I’ll keep it relatively brief!
The best literary fiction book I read this year, probably, is Wellness (2023) by Nathan Hill. It’s insanely well researched and ambitious in its scope, covering art and psychology and media, etc., while the plot itself centers the tension between youthful revolutionary ambitions and the pragmatism of raising a family and settling into capitalist conformity. It rivals Jonathan Franzen in terms of how hard its descriptions of guilt and shame can punch you in the gut.
In terms of music that challenges genre and provides for a radical listening experience, I direct you to Fishmans’ Long Season (1996), an album that comprises one single 35-minute song. It contains symphonic structural elements as well as noise and polyrhythm — I hadn’t listened to anything like it before.
I also want to direct you to another one of Pranay’s essays that I sincerely enjoyed, about the revolutionary elements of abstract expressionism, focusing on Mark Rothko. They transport you to the Rothko Room in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., which is one of my favorite museums in the world. I’ve included a link below where you can read it and also subscribe to Culture Shock, which I highly suggest you do!
There’s this essay by Zadie Smith inThe New Yorker
Until next time!
I also have a bachelor’s degree in political economy, during which time I focused primarily on US foreign policy in Latin America. Go figure.
As this past month’s Substack Discourse proved, many writers on here are sore about the mere implication that there is “bad” writing, or, at the very least, unoriginal writing. This is referring to Emily Sundberg’s essay entitled “The machine in the garden,” which I enjoyed. For my readers who are not active on Substack as a platform, it’s a meta-essay about the kind of writing that does well on Substack, and the incentives that encourage fledgling writers (or, worse, experienced writers) to post easily-consumable content, like listicles, that often glom onto aesthetic trends and lead to an over-saturation of very similar stuff. The social-mediafication of Substack has exacerbated this issue. And at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly hater, a decent amount of popular content on here is not particularly good or well-thought-out.
It’s worth noting that the essay that everyone was up in arms about is careful to refer to all of those Substack users, even those who monetize altogether mediocre content, as writers! And I’m all for democratizing the term “writer,” but you start to lose me if you suggest that the mere act of posting on Substack makes you a good writer. Sundberg didn’t even take it that far, if we’re being honest, so I’ll say it — it’s my right to consider some content mediocre and unoriginal just as it’s your right to consider my content mediocre and unoriginal.
I had already encountered their writing in The Drift, actually, a connection that I didn’t make until I was researching for this piece.
Pranay writes that “the ‘literary community’ (to the extent that such a thing can be said to exist) has long been dominated by a fairly narrow set of institutions, publications, and individuals who function both as gatekeepers and tastemakers, and who have a vested structural interest in ensuring that the world of ‘high’ literature remains first and foremost a playground for a privileged elite—or at least, for those who are comfortable with allowing the interests of said elite to remain unchallenged.” I agree with their assessment. I consider it to be an essential caveat here, though, that the mere existence of a/the “literary community” is dubious. Pranay later gives “a New Yorker byline” as emblematic of “the upper strata of the so-called ‘literary world,’” so if it’s going to be a kind of tautological definition (which, again, I’m not totally mad at), at least it’s consistent.
I don’t even think a philosophy without a politics is common at all, or even totally possible, but I think that’s besides the point (if there is a point).
On the subject of the piece’s title, and some of its substance (if we can call it that), I have to refer you to people who are more knowledgeable than me on Biblical history, because I didn’t know anything about the word “shibboleth” before reading. I read this essay by a professor of Jewish thought a few weeks after reading Smith’s piece and I can’t recommend it more highly. I also can’t adequately condense it in a way that does it justice. Forgive me.
And to this point, we get my favorite of their phrases: “One might say that this kind of writing is characterized first and foremost by the sheer number of elephants that it allows to remain comfortably in the room.”
Also, it’s Zadie Smith. Maybe in the hypothetical circumstance in which an author with a similar profile to Zadie Smith also submitted an article that took a more expressly political stance, and the New Yorker rejected it or defanged the shit out of it, we’d have a story. Or, to use Pranay’s words, “the refusal to recognize explicitly political writing as ‘real’ literature is itself a form of depoliticization.” Which, big if true, but I just don’t see exactly where this refusal is happening, and therefore who is depoliticizing what.
Communicating this overall point was my original intent when I decided to write about Zadie Smith’s essay on Substack rather than just tweeting furiously about it in May, but Pranay beat me to the punch.
Then again, as I mentioned before, we writers do not live in a vacuum — our experiences are fundamentally different, and our perspectives can coexist harmoniously.
Because of course it was a bookstore in Brooklyn.
Please indulge me in plugging my essay from last year again; I’m proud of it and it relates explicitly to what I discuss here. I referred to Tsing’s book about mushrooms and “arts of noticing” as well as Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, in which she also considered attending to our surroundings as a revolutionary act against the capitalist forces that seek to co-opt our attention.
Great essay!