Listen now | This went from a reasonably straightforward review of a book I did not like — Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This — to a whole… thing. A manifesto? In any event, an episode that was going to be me talking about how one lousy novel indicated some of the problems with contemporary English-language letters has turned into a longer spiel as I try to explain what I think is wrong, why, and what alternatives might look like. In my observation, critical podcasts — not just literary criticism but film and tv criticism, “cultural criticism” more broadly, which tips into political discourse which has the same issue — lays out a few broad lines of agreement, usually shared enemies, and expects the producers’ twitter following to get what it all means through social context. Well, I haven’t got a twitter. So I need to explain it all.
Thanks for this. The idea that the work continues to need to be done… that’s an important idea, I think. Much more elegant than my attempt at a conclusion! And hopeful, in its way, too, without being pollyannaish. I’m looking into that Branson book- he’s one of the E1 guys.
At the height of my Chapo fandom, when it was new, I listened to a few episodes. He and his brother(?) would do these podcasts in character, first episodes of failed podcasts about random obscurities, made-up lore around weird hobbies or preoccupations. Sometimes funny, but almost always too long, too in the weeds for me. I downloaded the book- I’m curious about it.
I’ve been listening to this in sections. You were hovering around the novel from various angles trying to drill into it, and I really like the point you made about the role of education in earlier eras of literature. You described that education as fulfilling a need to protect against competition from other bourgeoise and to protect against the unwashed masses, and the power of literature to reveal both the shortcomings and the necessity of education, to seek out higher values within it by ridiculing or bewailing its failings. (Including, as you said, quality tv like Curb Your Enthusiasm, basically episodic comedies of manners.) I think we should be invoking the Bildungsroman into this discussion so that we can trace that back a little farther in time and wider in economic strata. Buddenbrooks is about a bourgeoise family being rich and boring, but the sense of striving is urgent and underlies all their activities including the very construction of the family as a collective idea. And I’m sure more widely read people than me could cite other examples.
In contrast, some novels strike fear into our hearts about what it means to have a lack of education. Alex Branson’s “Into The Hills, Young Master” is about a man who self-educated on Internet forums and there’s an equal urgency that we as readers sense when we realize that the narrator we’re hearing from unreliable because of his lack of anything resembling Bildung. The book is fairly short but as the narrator shifts aimlessly from event to event without even realizing that he is not gaining from his experiences, there is a sense that his short, mortal life is being wasted and even a kind of Lovecraftian horror upon realizing that his autodidactic anti-Bildung has made him inhuman. (I don’t know who Branson is but I think he is connected to Chapo Trap House in some way.)
So perhaps what’s dissatisfying in No One is Talking About This is the lack of realization that even in the present day, in our horrid post-Fukuyama BoBo utopia/dystopia, there is still work to be done. Heidegger considers anxiety the beginning of humanity; what does it mean when our discourse of global warming or “polycrisis” or whatever the fuck implies that our anxiety is no longer an impulse to Bildung but merely a helpless reaction to the systemic, unchangeable “state of the world” and can only be overcome with smug, self-aware irony? Is there no alternative? Branson’s book is kind of a sledgehammer aimed at Lockwood’s thesis, by making us uncomfortable with our identification with the protagonist.
edit: I was going to make some additional comments about how "The Hate U Give" provides a more optimistic view of 21st century Bildung, but I've forgotten my point already! Well, I'm glad I was able to write down one thought today.
Thanks for this. The idea that the work continues to need to be done… that’s an important idea, I think. Much more elegant than my attempt at a conclusion! And hopeful, in its way, too, without being pollyannaish. I’m looking into that Branson book- he’s one of the E1 guys.
At the height of my Chapo fandom, when it was new, I listened to a few episodes. He and his brother(?) would do these podcasts in character, first episodes of failed podcasts about random obscurities, made-up lore around weird hobbies or preoccupations. Sometimes funny, but almost always too long, too in the weeds for me. I downloaded the book- I’m curious about it.
I’ve been listening to this in sections. You were hovering around the novel from various angles trying to drill into it, and I really like the point you made about the role of education in earlier eras of literature. You described that education as fulfilling a need to protect against competition from other bourgeoise and to protect against the unwashed masses, and the power of literature to reveal both the shortcomings and the necessity of education, to seek out higher values within it by ridiculing or bewailing its failings. (Including, as you said, quality tv like Curb Your Enthusiasm, basically episodic comedies of manners.) I think we should be invoking the Bildungsroman into this discussion so that we can trace that back a little farther in time and wider in economic strata. Buddenbrooks is about a bourgeoise family being rich and boring, but the sense of striving is urgent and underlies all their activities including the very construction of the family as a collective idea. And I’m sure more widely read people than me could cite other examples.
In contrast, some novels strike fear into our hearts about what it means to have a lack of education. Alex Branson’s “Into The Hills, Young Master” is about a man who self-educated on Internet forums and there’s an equal urgency that we as readers sense when we realize that the narrator we’re hearing from unreliable because of his lack of anything resembling Bildung. The book is fairly short but as the narrator shifts aimlessly from event to event without even realizing that he is not gaining from his experiences, there is a sense that his short, mortal life is being wasted and even a kind of Lovecraftian horror upon realizing that his autodidactic anti-Bildung has made him inhuman. (I don’t know who Branson is but I think he is connected to Chapo Trap House in some way.)
So perhaps what’s dissatisfying in No One is Talking About This is the lack of realization that even in the present day, in our horrid post-Fukuyama BoBo utopia/dystopia, there is still work to be done. Heidegger considers anxiety the beginning of humanity; what does it mean when our discourse of global warming or “polycrisis” or whatever the fuck implies that our anxiety is no longer an impulse to Bildung but merely a helpless reaction to the systemic, unchangeable “state of the world” and can only be overcome with smug, self-aware irony? Is there no alternative? Branson’s book is kind of a sledgehammer aimed at Lockwood’s thesis, by making us uncomfortable with our identification with the protagonist.
edit: I was going to make some additional comments about how "The Hate U Give" provides a more optimistic view of 21st century Bildung, but I've forgotten my point already! Well, I'm glad I was able to write down one thought today.