Thinking About a Review of Kathleen J. Woods’s White Wedding

 I sent Ryan Chang's review Against Safe Sex: A Review of Kathleen J. Woods’s White Wedding to KH. He was not very impressed with the underlying book, and I am not sure that I am. However, the review does interest me with the ideas it presents.

My first excerpt may be a too much for a quick chewing:

Borczyk and Liu call our attention to the myriad aesthetic forms that pander to egos weakened by capitalism’s engineering of daily life. In today’s mainstream literary scenes, where novels seem readymade by corporate literary publishers to cater to a readership mesmerized by its own guilt, politics looks like consuming as many zeitgeisty novels as one can in a year. Books featured on theNew York Times or Obama’s annual end-of-year lists seem to have been written with their film and prestige TV futures in mind, the two forms resembling each other so much one might play a “treatment or novel synopsis?” drinking game. The results are performatively satisfying but ultimately, as Liu has it, “pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance.” In Stephen Mitchelmore’s assessment, the literary analogs for Goop’s instrumentalized pleasure technologies become “ideal for a form in search of a certain kind of power or a mirror, mirror on the wall.” That reflection empowers a readership whose values are repeated ad infinitum: By having raised its own awareness, by having made their psyches more acutely aware, readers reassure themselves that a good life might still be possible, as long as one consumes the right media, the right kind of content, whose political efficacy is measured by how “accurately” a work “tackles current affairs in its subject matter.” The more accurate it is, the more committed we will be to our politics, and the more our consuming becomes political. The more acutely identical the literary content is to its referents, the logic goes, the more politically efficacious the commodity is, with little regard for the structures that enable the representation of the horror it ostensibly critiques. This is how Squid Game becomes lauded as a searing indictment of neoliberal capitalism because you watched it.

First, I do not know how guilty I feel about the benefits of capitalism. Maybe because I have seen so little of them. It could be that zeitgeisty novels probably do not present much interest to me at 62. Then, too, I have thought myself a bit too contrary even when far younger to have ever been interested in zeitgeisty novels. Yet, the idea that a novel can be a self-reflective reinforcement of a satisfied status quo does interest me to the point of provocation. Nelson Algren comes to mind. So does Theodore Dreiser. I do not know we can still shock the self-satisfied as they did, but why not try? One thing KH did not suggest, as is his wont, was whether this state of affairs has to do with the MFA-industrial complex. Playing devil's advocate, I must also ask, has this not always been the state of affairs?

I just read a piece on Karl Jaspers (look for it under the label "Philosophy") which tangentially mentions authenticity in regard to existentialism, which I point out in light of this quote:

....But Woods’s efforts imbue the literary with the physical and remove us from vantages that seek to identify personality first and foremost or adopt a posture of authenticity. That’s the point: Woods’s apparently and deliberately smutty prose—what some would label “bad writing”—calls attention to how authenticity is a posture in itself.

I have problems with the last clause. Authenticity seems to me a fluid subject, dependent on context. I think of authenticity as a consistent character. Yes, I lived a life with many compartments, but I think I approached them all the same way. I was a lawyer and a rakehell and a federal prisoner and now I move boxes from a truck to a pallet. These are things I did, or do. They do not say how I do those things; they do not say what is my character. Put another way, the federal government thinks I am inauthentic in my proclivities, their evidence being my crimes and a psychological intake that had limited categories for one of my criminal record. This surprises, if it does not always produce a laugh, when explained to women who know me very well.

Let me try another example, using Bob Dylan. Which is the authentic Dylan: Bring It On Home,  Highway 61 Revisited, Nashville Skyline, Blood on the Tracks, or Slow Train Coming? I say for all they are inconsistent in sound, and often content, they are authentically Bob Dylan.

Personalities are multitudinous. I think Whitman made that point. We can lose track of that fact about ourselves, so why should it not be overlooked by others?

If the point being made is about making a fetish of authenticity, then that seems fair game for satire. Where a person claims certain qualities as constituting their authentic selves, and they do not have those qualities, then this is called hypocrisy.

As for writing itself, the next two quotes I think have something to say:

György Lukacs in “Narrate or Describe?” distinguishes between two temporal modes in prose fiction: Whereas narrative modes parallel the reader’s experience with the protagonist’s, descriptive modes “contemporize everything” and align the reader with the experience of the narrator. Simply put, the first prioritizes the narrative in its time, and the second the time of narration, the present tense in which the narrator . . . narrates....

###

... Some readers, even you, may find such writing bad, bereft of greater significance—but Woods compels us to look, and to keep looking, and to pay attention to how we look, rather than what it should or ought to deliver, morals managed by a narrator whose commitment to its author is instrumental: didactic, pedantic, smug. Our coincidence with the narrator’s vantage offers revelations more honest and reliable than those promised by the ossified social and artistic traditions of a wedding or a novel. If not a good thing, it is an honest thing. Like the protagonist seducing the wedding guests, the book seeks to seduce us out of our egos—concepts of self which, in the social reality outside of the book, have been trained to be their own best gaslighters, to believe the fiction that we can consume our way into liberation via a premium leather kink set. That this manifestation of kink might be, actually and perversely, conservative.

The first gives me something to think about showing and telling. The second I like for prioritizing honesty, if the method is truthful then I would think it's useful.

Something from another reading, Amina Cain Writes Toward Authenticity, an interview from The Millions:

SMS: Ernaux of course is a celebrated diarist. In A Horse a Night you mention that you’ve never kept a diary. I think keeping a diary helps some people parse their own thoughts, but writing fiction can do that too—do you find when you write fiction that it, to borrow Didion’s phrase, help you find out what you’re thinking? You say in the book you don’t like to “write ‘emotionally,’” but have you ever used fiction to work out questions or ambiguities in your own life? 

AC: It’s only now that I’m beginning to do that, in the novel I’m currently writing, work out questions in my life, especially of the emotional kind. The ambiguities I’ve always been interested in, and I suppose they’ve come in all along the way in what I’ve written, but they’ve changed in that they’re more directly related to my life than they’ve been before. I’ve known for a long time that writing fiction allows me to see what’s in my mind, which is not unsimilar to what Didion said about her writing. Through fiction, I come to know on a deeper level what my preoccupations are. Even if I haven’t been writing directly about my own life in a short story or book (i.e. I’m not a character who appears there), it is in a sense my life still, and sometimes I have used it to look back on or explore experiences I’ve had. As for emotion, I don’t want to ignore it anymore, but neither do I want it to take over what I write, take over my sentences. I’m finding my way through that in this current novel-in-progress. I’d say Ernaux does quite well with writing emotion: honest and unflinching with nothing to romanticize or cloud it.

SMS: You’re sort of obsessed with the concept of authenticity. Do you think there’s a difference between what it means be an authentic person as opposed to an authentic artist—for instance, to live authentically versus to write authentically? 

AC: I want to say no, that they’re the same thing and that they can’t be separated. Yet even when I have felt my most inauthentic as a person I’ve still felt authentic in my writing. Sometimes I catch myself writing inauthentic sentences, sure, but those are easy enough to eventually see and excise, even if I don’t recognize them as such at first. I don’t think I’ve ever written a whole story or book that is inauthentic. Usually, I am getting closer to some truth when I’m writing rather than further away. My own definition of authenticity is fairly simple: that how I feel and what I say and do are aligned. It’s not that I’ve gone around lying or have been insincere, but I’ve not always expressed what is actually inside me, instead performing a certain kind of cheerfulness or politeness, not in my writing, but in my life. I realized it was destroying my relationship to who I am.

Reading this, a memory came to mind of Nietzsche writing humanity cannot survive without illusions. I will have to think more on the interplay between the desire for authenticity and the need for illusions.

sch 1/22