“Our tendency to reflect on our work—the theories, the methods, the artwork—has devolved into a strained bleating about our ‘relevance’ and ‘value,”’ Namwali Serpell writes in her essay “Navel-Gazing: Criticism as ‘Crisis-ism.’” Her point in bringing up this industrial complex—where critics write criticism about criticism, thereby justifying their existence—was not meant to deny the profession’s concrete realities, but rather to reestablish criticism’s emphasis on works, not deeds. What justifies criticism is simply that there are items up for critique: “The question is not whether we should work and for how much. It’s whether we can find work that doesn’t alienate us from itself, and from each other.”
I find Serpell’s emphasis on writing as a way to stave off alienation interesting because she plays both sides of the field. An accomplished scholar and critic who publishes regularly in august publications, Serpell is also an acclaimed novelist. Her last novel, The Furroughs, centers on Cassandra, or Cee, who witnesses her brother Wayne’s death, over and over, with the crucial difference that Wayne dies in a different way each time. “I don’t want to tell you what happened,” Cee says at the beginning of each iterance. “I want to tell you how it felt.” The novel quickly reveals itself to be less about the act and more about grief’s emotional terrain.
But whose grief? Cee is biracial, and the fissures racing through her nuclear family—a white mother whose inability to accept loss reveals her as a latent Black fetishist; a Black father, more accustomed to loss than protecting his daughter, who is able to remarry and start over; a grandmother who blames Cee for her favorite grandchild’s death, speaking only what others are too embarrassed to admit out loud—converge to break through to who we, as a society, truly value. Each exercise in grief confounds and reappraises the whole. As Lauren Michele Jackson points out in her New Yorker essay on the novel, Serpell is “one of those novelists who have metabolized the quirks and the canniness of literary theory,” meaning that there are aesthetic-theoretical implications brought to bear by the author’s formal decisions. In The Boston Globe, Walton Muyumba is more explicit. In his reading, Serpell is exploring the “strong and crucial curiosity about alien modes of feeling” that she outlines in her first book, Seven Modes of Uncertainty: “The Furroughs employs several modes of uncertainty, including Cee’s repetitions which ‘destabilize meaning, event, and temporal continuity,’ thus compelling us to give ourselves over to the novel’s own ethics.” In other words, her critical work “may help us better understand why she’s challenging readers to rearrange our ethical and emotional expectations for the novel.”
I don’t mean to say that the best novelists are critics, or even to advocate for critics testing their theories against a craft reality. However, one path for criticism undiscussed in light of the criticism crisis is the potential for the novel form itself to trend toward self-conscious argumentativeness. In this formulation, “literary argument” stops being the case a writer makes about a text and becomes the conclusions a reader is forced to draw from the novelist’s cumulative forms. This is not to be confused with the novel of manners, the novel of ideas, the social novel, the systems novel, etc., though it’s not inconceivable that they would be implicated. What I hope to point out instead are instances in which the novel, as a subject of critique, becomes inextricable from the commentary its forms are trying to make about society at large.
When speaking of argumentative novels, I have to mention Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in light of our contemporary brush with authoritarianism. The titular character is indeed a fascist sympathizer; her pupil Sandy Stranger’s admission of this to the headmistress of Marcia Blane School for Girls, where Brodie teaches, is what gets her fired. And yet it isn’t necessarily fascist to maintain a fixed image of one’s students, as Brodie does with her “set.” Every one of her favored charges is known for a quality, which Brodie defines. It’s an act of control, but there’s a weakness there, a vulnerability. Brodie needs an audience and the best way of getting one is to convince those in the crowd that they are distinctive.
Brodie’s picks range from vapid to salacious; the implications of these picks, which are rendered through prolepsis at a clipped pace, are by turns startling and banal. Rose Stanley, famous for sex because she quoted a sexual bible verse, marries a businessman. After becoming a nurse, Eunice Gardiner, famous for being sporty, marries a doctor. Mary Macgregor, famous for her stupidity, dies in a hotel fire “running back and forth along the corridors.”
Sandy, famous for her vowel sounds, studies psychology and publishes a famous text only to become a Roman Catholic nun. Originally held together by school strictures, once they’re older there’s no reason why the set needs to continue visiting Miss Brodie, or each other, but they do. Most of the students, even Mary, remember her fondly, yet as James Wood notes in an appraisal of Spark’s work in The Guardian, Brodie is essentially a two-dimensional character, her cryptic aphorisms “forc[ing] us to become Brodie’s pupils.” Like them, we have no control over the novel; all we can do is search frantically to find out what happened to our classmates.
It’s a great feat that a character who says so little of substance has so much control over a novel’s proceedings. When paired next to moments of genuine care for her pupils, Brodie’s stock phrases and half-baked political philosophy render her fascist sympathies a part of her characterization rather than a defining quality. It’s a bold move: Sandy, who blows the whistle on Miss Brodie, should be a hero, and yet her conversion to the Roman Catholic Church that Brodie reviled carries with it some of the strangest pathos in English literature. At once an additional betrayal and a provocation, the narrative choice quickly reveals itself as an act of penance. Simultaneously unable to forgive herself and boxed in by an idea of herself she can’t shake, she takes on a new name and receives visitors.
Is this the banality of evil? There is certainly something nefarious about a schoolteacher preaching a fixed rather than an open consciousness. Yet Brodie’s use of the flash-forward argues convincingly against the dangers of ceding control to someone whose only interest is how you fit into their scheme.
I also think of Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee’s novel about post-Apartheid South Africa, told from the perspective of David Lurie, an aging Afrikaner. From the beginning of the novel, when Lurie begins his relationship with his student Melanie Isaacs, each of Lurie’s actions are flush with meaning. The coerced affair, which Lurie describes as “not quite” rape, serves as a metaphor for old South Africa corrupting the future with its lack of scruples. Hence Lurie’s disciplinary hearing at his university becoming a stand-in for the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which proves eerily prescient on matters of the dominant class’s bewilderment and anger in the face of changing social norms. Yet Coetzee, nothing if not formally quarrelsome, turns the theme of sexual defilement on its head. Lurie’s daughter, Lucy, is robbed and gang-raped by three Black men while Lurie is staying with her. Rather than reporting the rape, Lucy instead considers her silence an act of reparations: “What if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too.”
Through a twenty-first century lens, the conceit shines like track lights at a Trump rally. But the point is that a free society should be able to encompass individuals opting both in and out of representational strictures. One can ascribe meaning to anything; to do so requires a belief in order that arguably apes the mechanisms of one’s purported oppressors. Even within his aura of refinement, Lurie benefits from representing everything that is “right” about South Africa; without that allegorical privilege, he is simply declining, like the regime that granted that privilege to him.
At least he accepts it, though for a brief instant toward the end of the novel we witness a fragile peace cracking. When Lurie, walking the family’s bulldog, witnesses an adolescent boy peeping in on Lucy while she is in the shower, he attacks him and the dog follows suit. Like the other assaults, the exchange is shot through with Lurie’s desire to defend the honor of his daughter, and by extension, his country. In this formulation, the personal is never political for the sake of recouperation, only as an excuse to lash out. Reading Lurie’s thoughts on the incident, it is easy to draw parallels to our own country’s desire to put things back the way they used to be:
In Coetzee’s novel, the psychological fear of being overrun renders blackness, even in a desegregated society, a contagion—something to be kept at bay. In contrast, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is a documentation of blackness discovering itself, breaking through. The novel is quite overt with its intentions, and this, in combination with its fame and inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club, have given it a perception of slightness. But in addition to providing an allegorical framework for Black life from the antebellum era through today, Whitehead subverts traditional narratives around race in America in a few essential ways. For starters, unlike many other slave narratives, its atrocities aren’t dramatized to drum up sympathy. Rather, their accumulation, told with a detached, matter-of-fact tone, establishes slavery as a system so pervasive that abuse is happenstance. Take, as an example, the fate of Randall, a runaway slave who was captured and returned:
This is the atmosphere that Cora, the novel’s main character, is escaping from, though if you asked her opinion on it, you wouldn’t get much of a response early on. One of the more heart-wrenching aspects of the novel is the development of Cora’s interiority. The further she gets from the plantation, the more thoughts she begins to develop about her condition. During the railroad’s stop in South Carolina—a significantly better situation than her stint in Georgia—Cora discovers, amid the standard-issue indignities (human zoos, the use of private currency by company owners to keep freed slaves under their control), that the community has decided to sterilize Black women in light of an increasing Black population. (The men, for their part, are being given placebos and syphilis in place of treatments and tests.) While getting a consultation, Cora runs over the implications in her mind:
This is only one side of the coin, however. Other than the slavecatcher, Ridgeway (whose grandiose pronouncements about the established order are reduced to “just a man talking” by a thoroughly conscious Cora toward the novel’s end), much of the novel’s energy concerns the social and financial costs of whites taking up abolition. Lumbly, a station agent, wears “a shirt of porous cloth that did not hide his skeletal appearance;” Sam, his colleague from South Carolina with his “thick red shirt that had suffered roughly at the washboard,” has a stooped posture from fieldwork. The Underground Railroad seems greatly concerned in locating the approximate point that sympathetic whites will go in order to help black Americans find freedom. Contrasted with the aspirational, almost clerical nature of Ridgeway, or the quit-if-you-dare opulence of the plantation that Cora hails from, it reads as a figurative tallying of the cost that a white person incurs buying (or not buying) into the slave economy at its peak—a conversation that whiteness is actively having with itself.
Now, a novel’s success does not rest on its function as polemics or a jeremiad, but to a large extent it does rest on its logic. And since novels exist in the world, it’s not a stretch to say that novels have a large stake in articulating societal illogics—whether that be fascism, white supremacy, economic collapse, or anything in between. The crisis afflicting critical inquiry is real; the critic as martyr, solemnly performing self-autopsies, is not. I think of T. S. Eliot admonishing Matthew Arnold’s obsession with philistines in The Sacred Wood, insisting that they would always make up the majority. I think too of Lionel Trilling’s observation in “The Function of the Little Magazine,” that the periods throughout history in which literature exists outside of a coterie are scarce. “Generally speaking literature has always been carried on within small limits and under great difficulties,” he wrote. Tonally, the undercurrent of disdain informing the one seems disparate next to the cautious communal faith informing the other, yet the subtext of both is literature drowned out. Look around, in our time, and count the ways in which you are told the humanities are irrelevant. Look further, amongst friendlier confines, and count how many of humanity’s stewards believe it.
What is the actual crisis? What do we choose to see?
J. Howard Rosier’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, The Nation, Art in America, 4Columns, Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a curator at Exhibit B, a Chicago-based performance series that pushes artists to develop new ways to bring their work into the world, and the associate director of editorial at the University of Illinois Chicago.
This essay is part of our “Staging Style” series. This quarterly craft series, edited by NER’s Leslie Sainz, presents innovative writers, translators, and critics articulating the influences and impulses that have sharpened their thinking and writing minds.