No one could suspect that times were coming … when the man who did not gamble would lose all the time, even more surely than he who gambled.
—Charles Péguy

More than a century ago, Thorstein Veblen—American economist, sociologist and social critic—warned that the United States had developed a bizarre and debilitating network of social habits and economic institutions. Ascendant financial practices benefited a limited group at the expense of the greater society; yet paradoxically Americans deemed these practices necessary, even commendable. Far from lambasting the financiers plundering the nation’s resources, we lauded them as the finest members of society. Their instincts, wisdom and savoir faire were idealized, their avarice and chicanery promoted under the banners of patriotism and virtue.

Veblen, an inveterate reader of ethnographies, noticed a historical pattern that could illuminate America’s peculiar relationship with its economic institutions. Societies everywhere fall between two extremes. First, there are societies in which every person works, and no one is demeaned by his or her toil. In these societies, individuals pride themselves on their workmanship, and they exhibit a natural concern for the welfare of their entire community. As examples of such “productive” societies, Veblen mentions Native Americans, the Ainus of Japan, the Todas of the Nilgiri hills and the bushmen of Australia. Second, there are “barbarian” societies, in which a single dominant class (usually of warriors) seizes the wealth and produce of others through force or fraud—think ancient Vikings, Japanese shoguns and Polynesian tribesmen. Farmers labor for their livelihood and warriors expropriate the fruits of that labor. Exploitative elites take no part in the actual production of wealth; they live off the toil of others. Yet far from being judged criminal or indolent, they are revered by the rest of the community. In barbarian societies, nothing is as manly, as venerated, as envied, as the lives of warriors. Their every trait—their predatory practices, their dress, their sport, their gait, their speech—is held in high esteem by all.

Our world falls into the latter form. There remains a class that pillages, seizes and exploits in broad daylight—and with our envious approval. Who are the barbarian warriors today? According to Veblen, the modern barbarians live on Wall Street. They are the financiers summarily praised for their versatility, intelligence and courage in the face of an increasingly mysterious economy. Today a growing number of Americans feel at risk of economic despair; in a world of unsatisfying professional options and constant financial insecurity, the image of Wall Street life offers a sort of relief. It symbolizes the success possible in the modern world.

But in order to capitalize mortgage securities, expected future earnings and corporate debts, Wall Street elites must first capitalize on our personal insecurities. They make their exploits appear necessary, natural, even laudable. This is quite a feat, since in those moments when we suspend our faith in the financial sector and candidly examine its performance, we generally judge Wall Street’s behavior to be avaricious and destabilizing, immoral and imprudent. At the best of times, Wall Street provides white noise amidst entrepreneurs’ and workers’ attempts to actualize their ambitions and projects. We are still learning what happens at the worst of times.

The Myth of Finance

The myth of the financial sector goes something like this: only men and women equipped with the highest intelligence, the will to work death-defying hours and the most advanced technology can be entrusted with the sacred and mysterious task of ensuring the growth of the economy. Using complicated financial instruments, these elites (a) spread the risks involved in different ventures and (b) discipline firms to minimize costs—thus guaranteeing the best investments are extended sufficient credit. According to this myth, Wall Street is the economy’s private nutritionist, advising and assisting only the most motivated firms—and these fitter firms will provide jobs and pave the path to national prosperity. If the rest of us do not understand exactly why trading credit derivatives and commodity futures would achieve all this, this is because we are not as smart as the people working on Wall Street. Even Wall Street elites are happy to admit that they do not really know how the system works; such admissions only testify to the immensity of their noble task.

Many economists have tried to disabuse us of this myth. Twenty-five years before the recent financial crisis, Nobel Laureate James Tobin demonstrated that a very limited percent of the capital flow originating on Wall Street goes toward financing “real investments”—that is, investments in improving a firm’s production process. When large American corporations invest in new technology, they rely primarily on internal funds, not outside credit. The torrents of capital we see on Wall Street are devoted to a different purpose—speculation, gambling for capital gains. Finance’s second founding myth, that the stock market in particular is an “efficient” source for funding business ventures, simply doesn’t cohere with the history of American industrial development. When firms have needed to raise outside capital, they have generally issued debt—not stock. The stock market’s chief virtue has always been that it allows business elites to cash out of any enterprise by transferring ownership to other elites. Old owners then enjoy their new wealth, while new owners manage the same old corporation. The reality is that business elites promote the stock market far more than the stock market promotes economic growth.

Rather than foster growth, contemporary financial practices have primarily succeeded in exacerbating income inequality and creating singular forms of economic calamity. In the recent crisis, new instruments for expanding financial activity—justified at the time by reckless promises of universal homeownership—prompted a remarkable spiral of poverty, debt and downward mobility in America. The path from homeownership to homelessness, from apparent wealth and security to lack of basic shelter, is completely novel—as is the now steadily growing social group of “middle-class paupers.” (Ten percent of homeless people assisted by social service agencies last year lost their homes through bank foreclosures, according to the study “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009.”) The homeless-through-foreclosure, having been persuaded by cheap credit to aspire to homeownership, were punished for unbefitting ambitions; any future pathway out of debt will be accompanied by new insecurities about the appropriateness of their life aspirations. Also novel in recent years is the extent to which economic “booms” no longer benefit average Americans. During the last economic “expansion” (between 2002 and 2007), fully two-thirds of all income gains flowed to the wealthiest one percent of the population. In 2007, the top 50 hedge and private equity managers averaged $588 million in annual compensation. On the other hand, the median income of ordinary Americans has dropped an average of $2,197 per year since 2000.

We habitually excuse Wall Street’s disproportionate earnings out of a sense that it helps American businesses thrive—but even corporations don’t quite benefit from Wall Street’s “services.” Consider the infamous merger between Daimler-Benz and Chrysler. In 1998, Goldman Sachs claimed that this merger would result in a $3 billion revenue gain. Stock prices responded extremely positively to the merger, which won the coveted Institutional Dealers’ Digest “Deal of the Year” Award. Only two years later, because of incongruities between the European and American parties, Chrysler lost $512 million in annual income, $1 billion in shareholder value in a single quarter, and was forced to lay off 26,000 workers. With the merger acknowledged as a failure, Chrysler was sold off from Daimler-Benz in 2007. Goldman Sachs, which had already made millions in windfall fees from the original merger, then walked away with millions more for advising the equity firm which now swooped in to pillage an ailing Chrysler. Bad advice seems to do little to tarnish Goldman’s golden reputation; after all, the firm can always point to its extraordinary profits as proof of talent and success. (Goldman Sachs ought to love the “bad publicity” it attracts nowadays; the headlines that reveal the billions made shorting housing and securities markets only solidify its status as Wall Street’s elite firm—capable of turning a profit even in times of economic crisis.)

The evidence suggests that Wall Street has assumed a negative relation to the economic interests of society at large. Many investment bankers are doubtless nice, hard-working people who give a lot of money to charity; nevertheless, they constitute a distinct class with interests diverging from society’s as a whole. This past year, unemployment skyrocketed from 6.2 to 10 percent. Meanwhile, Wall Street announced stock market gains of $4.6 trillion between March and October.

One might object: surely this “diverging interests” portrait has been complicated since the Clintonian New Economy and the democratization of shareholding? After all, aren’t so many of us investors and portfolio holders today? In the past decade, new financial services promised to extend affluence to more Americans if we partook in finance’s “collective” economic vision. Broker services like E*TRADE enabled non-elite investors to enjoy increasing wealth as the background of their everyday lives. We all bore investment risks together and eventually we would share the resultant wealth. Or so we thought. Remarkably, business elites have managed to corral almost all of the recent winnings for themselves. In 2007, with the mortgage market on the eve of collapse and global economic crisis imminent, Wall Street meted out record bonuses totaling $32.9 billion. Holders of securities lost $74 billion.

The Meaning of Financial Innovation

Early on, capitalism encouraged entrepreneurs to invest in new technology, thus unleashing incredible productive potential. Yet as the hunger for profits outpaced technological innovation, the modern barbarian developed new instruments for increasing the value of his assets—without having to produce anything new. Rather than focus his energies on developing more productive ventures, he started to sell the promise of increased future revenue—which he called an “immaterial asset.” The first immaterial assets were patents and trademarks; what were formerly strategies for being more productive, the barbarian now learned to package and sell by themselves. The next step was to sell claims to these immaterial assets in the form of yet another immaterial asset: capital stock. This stock represented a promise of revenue based on other promises of revenue. Over time, more and more immaterial assets were created and sold, then listed on balance sheets as corporate bonds, credit derivatives and hybrid securities. Eventually, a corporation started to look less like a producing firm and more like a bunch of immaterial assets and liabilities. Today a corporation’s success often depends on how much credit it can raise—that is, on how successfully it can sell the promise of future success.

Salesmanship and future earnings projections have replaced productivity and innovation as the engines of our economy. The barbarian’s pursuit of financial profit now determines how a corporation employs its labor and technology—that is, whether it is valuable to be productive. Capitalism, once propelled by technological investment (classical capital), is now driven by immaterial technology that increases the value of immaterial assets (financial instruments moving modern capital). Today Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan don’t invest in the promise of producing things of use or real value. They invest in the promise of rising asset prices (or in the case of shorting stocks, the promise of falling asset prices). In their world, value is defined by gain. It used to be the other way around.

Because of the dynamic of constant financial innovation, patterns of economic boom and bust no longer follow the traditional business cycle model in which: (1) a low interest rate (meaning cheaper credit) leads to (2) increased investments and economic growth; followed by (3) a period of overheating and excess capacity; which is then balanced by (4) a re-stabilizing period and a cooling of inflationary tendencies. The “new business cycle” is determined by financial innovation, not national productivity and consumer demand. Booms are born when a new financial instrument is dreamed up, and busts occur when the conjurer’s secret is uncovered and collapses.

The most recent boom and bust (i.e. our current financial crisis) was based on this secret: “The market for subprime mortgages is not determined by the number of newly aspiring homeowners, but by the promise of profits from mortgage-based securities.” Irresponsible lending spelled profits for investment banks, so naturally they encouraged irresponsible lending. The story is familiar by now. Banks invented two kinds of risky securities that promised higher yields: collateralized debt obligations (that pay if high-interest mortgages are repaid) and credit-default swaps (that pay if they aren’t). Trading these shadow-financial (i.e. unregulated) securities generated enormous profits—both from constant trading fees and from speculation gains. But selling more subprime mortgage securities required selling more subprime mortgages. So investment banks bought mortgage-lending outfits and themselves offered subprime loans (even to individuals who qualified for better loans). As inevitable loan defaults started to pile up, the value of collateralized debts fell, and heavily invested banks couldn’t cover the swaps they sold. Wall Street’s expert salesmen had sold too many immaterial assets—too many promises of future value. The entire edifice of lending was paralyzed because it had become profitable to lend irresponsibly.

The Barbarian’s Attitude Toward Work

In barbarian societies, the warriors plunder and parade. Their homes adorned with booty from past raids, they brazenly announce their superiority to the rest of their community. Destructive and wasteful, they avoid accusations of spiritual and social infertility by defining what counts as spiritual and social wealth. As Veblen notes, “The obtaining of goods by other methods than seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate.” All throughout history, in fact, virtues of manliness track the least productive—and most esteemed—professions, hobbies and social ambitions. Fight, idle, wear ornate clothing, but suffer not touching the earth or assisting one’s fellow man.

Of course, only a select few were privileged to live the lives of warriors. Yet these elites so relentlessly honored their definitions of vigor and dignity that even the gentler non-elites accepted them. Veblen tells of a Polynesian chief who preferred to starve rather than suffer the indignity of feeding himself, as well as of a French king silently burnt alive because the servant whose duties included shifting his master’s seat away from a fireplace had taken a sick day. This “moral stamina in the observance of good form”—that is, this foolish commitment to predatory decorum—only served to strengthen the elites’ hegemony over the community; non-elites idolize the steadfastness, integrity and apparent dignity of the warrior’s way of life.

According to Veblen, every human being has both an “instinct for workmanship”—a drive to improve in his craft, to work more effectively—and a “propensity for emulation”—a drive to distinguish himself from his peers. But depending on which habits and institutions are dominant in a particular society, these two instincts appear in different forms and hierarchical relations. Today, as in all barbarian societies, the desire for esteem has eclipsed the instinct to produce. This is the legacy of modern finance. The history of Wall Street is usually told through some quasi-Darwinist narrative—bankers worked diligently to invent newer mechanisms for borrowing, lending, hedging and insuring, ones that could better survive in an ever-complicating economic world. But to understand the ways in which Wall Street has reshaped American life, one needn’t know which packaging of immaterial assets came first—corporate debt, junk bond, or mortgage derivative. The proliferation of all these assets is expressive of a more fundamental revolution, one in which America’s production processes acquired new directions, its workforce a different character, and its individual workers a new set of governing instincts.

In White Collar: The American Middle Classes, sociologist C. Wright Mills details how the rise of modern finance transformed the nature of the American workforce. With greater access to capital, large corporations increasingly crowded out small entrepreneurs. These corporations required masses of white-collar administrators, salesmen and managers to keep up with ever-proliferating bureaucratic tasks. Other social developments also contributed to the thinning of the American blue-collar: labor-intensive work was exported to cheaper labor markets, increased American wealth restructured socio-economic ambitions and financial mobility favored capital-intensive production.

The overall effect has been radical: today, fewer Americans than ever are aspiring toward the materially productive professions; meanwhile the habits, talents, language and lifestyle of manual laborers have also been displaced by their white-collar corollaries. Perhaps the most troubling feature of the white-collar mindset is that it conceives of work—not just manual work but any kind of work, and especially its own—as irksome, pointless, an interference with life’s pleasures. (Contemporary economists even model work as a “disutility,” a sacrifice made for the sake of future enjoyments.) Consider the popularity of comedies like The Office or Office Space Why are Americans so charmed by characters like Jim Halpert and Peter Gibbons? It’s because they get that work doesn’t matter anymore, that it cannot offer genuine satisfaction: work is simply something one has to do. Viewers sympathize with Halpert’s detachment from paper sales; his attitude toward work feels appropriate, even noble. On the other hand, Dwight Schrute’s zeal for office tasks seems bizarre, at times pathological. Halpert’s reluctant and instrumental attitude is no less characteristic of the Wall Street analyst slaving at his desk for 80 hours a week. The analyst knows the satisfaction is not in the work itself—what he “gets” from his job is a paycheck and the prestige that comes with it.

A fuller history of modern finance would move beyond merely cataloguing instances of financial innovation and describe the accompanying transformation of our values. It would trace a larger spiritual transformation, in which our definition of what counts as dignified work shifted away from accomplishments and toward status. Veblen attributed to man a basic drive toward productivity—a taste for usefulness and an aversion to futility. But a society’s institutions and values can divert this drive. Why would one bother producing things today, when the jobs producing nothing pay better—not only in cash, but also in prestige? Junk bond or credit-default swap traders produce no real product, all the while securing copious money and esteem. A trader can be celebrated as “masterful” or “naturally gifted,” praises that used to be reserved for artisans. Meanwhile, we ignore or denigrate the laborer that fixes our car.

In “truly productive” (i.e. non-barbarian) societies, the “instinct for workmanship” and the “propensity for emulation” act in concert—individuals emulate the artifice of their compatriots, mimicking their movements and habits in an attempt to duplicate (and eventually improve upon) overlapping projects. They compete in workmanship, which helps goad innovation and creativity. But in our world, we no longer look to workmanship as the source of profound esteem. We rarely find inherent meaning in the struggle to improve our craft; the experience of natural self-heartening once called “a sense of accomplishment” has been displaced from our horizon (or at least from our workplaces). Instead of evaluating ourselves through our projects, self-esteem comes to depend on successfully selling others an image of our value. Promotions come to those who can sell themselves as the future of a company. And in this salesmanship society, Wall Street elites are the salespersons par excellence. Their very job is to sell an image of themselves as deserving of our praise and trust.

There is, however, a cost to all this repackaging and reselling. “Elite” tastes and habits shift so often that they start looking empty. Values seem largely unanchored, purposes transient and superficial. One senses that the goals of the avaricious aren’t really their goals—can they really want those ugly mansions or gaudy cars?—but a way of not confronting their lack of goals, desires, hopes and joys. Who believes that traders are truly happy?

The Banker’s Lifestyle

There remains, of course, much that is enviable about the work of the trader; we might congratulate him for discovering a satisfying professional life—comfortable, secure, challenging but not incommensurate with his ability. Yet the many memoirs and ethnographies of Wall Street depict the job differently—less as a rewarding post for the gifted and proven, more as a petri dish of insecurities and dis-ease. Financial workers appear to be on perpetual trial membership; no individual can be sure which rules he has to follow or which mores he must embrace to remain a member. Indeed, Wall Street’s various cultural practices—its socialization rituals (the recruitment process), life routine (work hours), the structure of aspiration (chronic job-hopping and job insecurity) and self-presentation (as the smartest and savviest)—seem to steadily produce psychically split individuals. The Wall Street worker may look self-assured, comforted by personal displays of status and absorbed in professional projects. But if the memoirs are to be believed, the trader conceals both a secret detachment from his professional persona—a feeling that he either ought to be or actually is quite different from the person his work demands him to be—and a fear of being called out for his faltering commitment to the lifestyle and profession.

Culturally, this means the trader will take on every aspect of the business lifestyle—the clothing, the cars, the eating habits and the attitude toward peers, the market, and the rest of the world. Economically, it compels herd mentality on the trading floor. Without a sure grasp of future market behavior, or even of the basic dynamics that the market will exhibit in the future, speculators seek out any sort of assurance of their expertise, resort to whatever conventions they can grab hold of, and behave in ways that minimize their insecurity, isolation and confusion. One doesn’t want to be marked as lacking the right attributes for “succeeding.” In his memoir Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis writes:

Investors do not fear losing money as much as they fear solitude, by which I mean taking risks that others avoid. When they are caught losing money alone, they have no excuse for their mistake, and most investors, like most people, need excuses. They are, strangely enough, happy to stand on the edge of a precipice as long as they are joined by a few thousand others.

Stories by former brokers suggest that cultural admission into the community is more important than familiarity with the mechanisms of the economy. (Today, no one involved in the market understands how it works anyway.)

The result is a chronic insecurity which may be at the root of what some economists call the “Cassandra effect” in modern finance. Like the Greek prophetess, those with the clearest insight into the future, or into the present’s deeper truths, can never convince those most in need of being convinced. The few individuals prescient enough (or reasonable enough) to see through the unsustainability of trading practices are ignored by speculators reluctant to stray from the flock. Warnings about the effects of reckless risk-taking are discounted. Cautious or thoughtful traders are traded for their more insecure and faithful counterparts.

Lacking any secure grounding for his inflated status and pay, the speculator compensates with unfaltering public confidence. He feigns knowledge of the manners of the market. He imagines his job calls upon talents precious to society. This self-deception becomes the norm, a requisite for practices otherwise devoid of justification or satisfaction. But Wall Street’s elites are, as we have been told, extremely intelligent individuals; they must be aware of the exaggerated esteem afforded to them. The Wall Street worker understands that he is not yesterday’s noble captain of industry, but merely a deckhand on a ship rowing between the Scylla of unethical trading and Charybdis of financial ruin. To pass these troubled waters, someone needs to be sacrificed. On occasion, Scylla will capture a few of the crew (Madoff, Stanford), but generally, only clientele have to be handed over. Lewis describes his peculiar relief at being able to slough off financial losses:

[The client] was shouting and moaning. And that was it. That was all he could do. Shout and moan. That was the beauty of being a middleman, which I did not appreciate until that moment. The customer suffered. I didn’t. He wasn’t going to kill me. He wasn’t even going to sue me. I wasn’t going to lose my job. On the contrary, I was a minor hero at Salomon for dumping a sixty-thousand-dollar loss into someone else’s pocket.

The culture of Wall Street may have evolved since Lewis’s time but not the paradox that drives it. The networks of acknowledgement and praise run counter to the virtues articulated by its spokesmen (virtues that businessmen sometimes even believe in). Psychic relief and parochial esteem depend on performing poorly in the very activity for which one is publicly praised. Bonuses arrive. Devastated clients disappear.

The institutions and habits that distinguish financial elites as ideal economic agents—and transform recessions into opportunities for billion dollar profits—make anxiety the norm on Wall Street. It is tempting to close one’s eyes to the instability that mars Wall Street life. Who cares that the financial elites work in constant fear of downsizing? (Wall Street cut 116,000 jobs in 2001; 98,000 in 2004; 50,000 in 2006; and 150,000 in 2007.) With Wall Street salaries and bonuses, what does it matter if some traders have to stretch out their severance packages in Buenos Aires for a decade or two? When the economy was hemorrhaging jobs, they extracted record profits and continued to destabilize asset market after asset market. Isn’t it time that they suffer a few days? The irony of seeing former Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis picking up an unemployment check might be too sweet to pass up. (2008 compensation: $20.13 million). Or maybe too ironic to be sweet (another suspicious bailout). But this instinct of ressentiment is dangerous—for when the movers and shakers expect perpetual insecurities in their homes, they welcome those insecurities into everyone else’s homes as well. Wall Street’s anxieties overflow onto Main Street.

Wall Street and Main Street

Amidst nature’s unreasonable scarcity, Wall Street often seems like a refuge of reason. It promises us prosperity, so long as we submit to its values. In Karen Ho’s ethnography of Wall Street, Liquidated, she identifies the three qualities of an ideal investor—smartness, assiduousness and flexibility. Wall Street offered us these ideals in its own image, and we have accepted them as gods. “Make everything in this image; everything more efficient,” we are told. But how have we fared with this injunction? How have the idols passed down from Wall Street affected work and life on Main Street?

Not only does Wall Street’s highly selective recruitment process—restricted primarily to Ivy League graduates and the current students at the top five American business schools—reflect its idolization of ostentatious smartness, it instills this value in future financiers. These young elites are bussed en masse to extravagant recruitment parties, where they are fanned with flimsy adulation of their smartness and precocious accomplishments. Wall Street thus trains its employees in the art of performing eliteness at the same time as it protects its image as the destination of America’s elites. A Princeton alumna and former financial analyst herself, Ho writes:

The conflation of elite universities with investment banking and “the perfect lifestyle” is crucial to the recruitment process, reproducing as it does the ambience of Wall Street cocktail parties, where investment bankers “schmooze clients” in lavish, impeccably catered settings. These norms are enacted for and demonstrated to students, and … they immediately pick up on the importance of performing “smartness,” not to mention how Wall Street business success is premised on pedigree, [and] competitive consumption.

The hiring strategy of financial firms further confirms that they are not selling a product, or even a service requiring skills or experience. What they have to sell is, literally, their salesmen—whose highly publicized “intellect” and “natural talent” secure the trust of clientele despite the poor track record of their expensive advice. Ho quotes one Harvard student’s take on Wall Street recruitment:

The core competency of … an investment bank … the real value these companies bring to the world and to their shareholders is their unmatched skill at recruiting fresh-faced young students from the Ivy League. … Remember that companies that do nothing of value must obscure that fact by hiring the best people to appear dynamic and innovative while doing such meaningless work.

Financial firms aggressively promote the image of Wall Street smarts by hiring, or more precisely, by producing Ivy League analysts. Smartness pays, for Wall Street at least.

But how do Wall Street’s core values affect life on Main Street? The American college, taking its cue from finance, now trains its students primarily in the skill of performing smartness—that is, in appearing able to suavely manage diverse situations and people. This works excellently for the few who can land jobs in finance and consultancy, but it has disastrous consequences for the rest of the college educated, now unequipped with any stable skill set or reliable knowledge. Today, 62 percent of Americans aged 25 and older have college degrees. They compete for the 22 percent of American jobs that require higher education. The losers are left unemployed or consigned to drudge in the bottom echelons of the service sector.

The second virtue of Wall Street employees, according to Ho’s ethnography, is that they are assiduous. Their days are long, fraught with deadlines and taut with anxiety. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen predicted that conspicuous wastefulness and public idleness would increasingly define American life. Though his arguments about uneconomic consumption habits are borne out on Wall Street, work routines are anything but indolent. Wall Street has managed to persuade its financial footmen to sacrifice almost all of their time to the shrine of the “dynamic worker.” Perks like the 7 p.m. free dinner and the 9 p.m. car service encourage workers already yoked to their trading screens to stay in The Office just a bit longer. But the truth is that they work late for other reasons. The fact that millions of dollars can be won or lost in just a few minutes has reshaped Wall Street’s experience of “time,” investing every moment of the day with an urgency alternately exhilarating and oppressive.

Yet the consistent affirmation that Wall Street works harder and longer than anyone else makes other work environments appear wasteful by comparison—manned by idle and complacent employees. To insecure Wall Streeters repeating mantras of their own hyper-efficiency, the outside world comes to appear horribly inefficient. Disciplining corporate America through downsizing seems increasingly appropriate, even necessary. American jobs thus inherit Wall Street’s instability and compulsiveness, becoming both all-consuming and highly temporary. American workers are no longer card-carrying members of a corporate entity. They are pieces of fat to be trimmed away.

In other words, Wall Street’s cardinal virtue is flexibility—the imperative it preaches to both its workers and clients. Financial footmen are used to losing their jobs. High turnovers and chronic exposure to being downsized are accepted features of the playing field; even before the financial crisis, one’s financial team or even whole division was liable to dismissal depending on the tides of the market. Of course, Wall Street’s inflated salaries compensate for this occupational hazard—but others fare less well. American businesses, seeking to prove their flexibility to Wall Street and sustain their shareholders’ confidence, learn to shed workers when the market turns. For workers themselves, corporate flexibility has brought about lower-skilled jobs and salaries that reflect their easy substitutability. America’s two largest employers—Wal-Mart and the temp agency Manpower—provide model jobs for an economy that idolizes the flexible.

Stability, once a virtue of both the reliable laborer and the well-tested firm, now portends obsolescence, an inability to innovate. Flexibility is the new cultural imperative—and job insecurity the new background to everyday life. In the twentieth century, finance introduced an era of white-collar employment; now it ushers in an era of temporary work—a post-career era. Even full-time jobs no longer provide financial security, and the aspiration of a long-term career (with any company at all, even resigning oneself to “less fulfilling” jobs) appears increasingly whimsical.

Today, the average American will hold more than ten different jobs over the course of his lifetime. Deprived of what Richard Sennett called the “gift of organized time,” he can no longer set goals for long-term personal development. His life feels less like a narrative that he is slowly articulating than a series of discontinuous episodes largely determined by forces beyond his control. At the very least, living a good life would seem to require: (1) the ability to deepen and develop one’s personal relationships and (2) a sense of ownership over one’s existence. In the post-career era, there is little prospect for either. The average American can only play out the temporary roles the world has chosen for him—roles that feel shallow, fleeting and not his own.

Naming the Barbarians

Pick up the New York Times today, and you’re likely to read yet another article about finance’s infidelity with the general public, another violation of the (invisible) norms of propriety. It is only with immense discipline, a well-stocked inventory of financial jargon and a readiness for self-deception that one can actually distinguish these “violations” from business-as-usual. Yet despite ubiquitous references to Wall Street offenses, maybe even because of them, Americans don’t seem deeply troubled, or even all that perplexed, that this abusive sector remains largely undisturbed. Most of us can dutifully recite the scandals and statistics, but few dare to imagine life without Wall Street. For all the talk of a rapidly evolving economic environment, we treat one feature of this environment as permanent: the existence of a class of individuals who make millions by making nothing. We’re no longer surprised to see business elites divine exorbitant bonuses, paid for through record unemployment levels and unprecedented government support. This trick is getting old.

Though Wall Street consistently updates its instruments and practices, one governing rule has remained since Veblen’s time: financial propriety has nothing to do with social and economic growth. Certain rules must be followed, but the construction of those rules is absolutely distinct from considerations of general social welfare. Rather, regulations and rules are defined according to the culture’s metric of success, of value, of esteem—and that metric is money. All financial practices that increase the wealth of the sector are not merely permitted, they are required. No profitable innovation can be ignored. Destabilizing the global economy is fine. Undermining one’s firm, or jeopardizing the system of trading and speculating, is not.

Finance today is not geared toward getting entrepreneurs the credit they need to actualize their good ideas. It is riddled with archaic social forms that perpetuate barbaric status anxieties. The appeal of the Wall Street lifestyle—money, clean working conditions, (paradoxical) status as stewards of prosperity—has blighted the rest of society with its message that the best kind of work is devoid of social utility, knowledge and permanence. Nonetheless, we continue, even in the wake of economic crisis, to accept the barbarians’ rules for social and economic life. The discussion in government today revolves around minor matters of transparency and enforcement. The barbarian does not abide by rules; indeed, it is a point of pride that he knows his way around them. No matter what regulations are passed, the barbarian will figure out a way to make money from them.

Ironically, as anxiety-stricken status seekers, bankers are more vulnerable to social censure than to rules. In the past, barbarians have lost power when new moral voices rejected their predatory habits—as Nordic scholar Gwyn Jones argued, Viking practices were weakened when “under the influence of Christianity, an increasing disquietude was felt about the ownership and sale of men.” Rather than challenge bankers to develop new weaponry, we should debunk the myths that justify their predatory habits. Bankers, those chronic scavengers of affirmation, are among the least equipped to contend with public dishonor. Today, the stock market continues to climb without offering relief to national unemployment. We are assured, as always, that jobs are a “lagging indicator.” But what kind of jobs will they be when they finally come—and will they restore a sense of ownership to our lives? The answer may depend on whether we have the courage to insist that Wall Street’s recovery only impedes our own.

Over 45 years ago Susan Sontag wrote that redundancy—an experience of joblessness or irrelevance—was the chief affliction of modern life, a verdict that has yet to fall out of date. Insignificance and redundancy make special problems for a writer. Speaking generally, what a novelist aims to do is to convey or impose meaning, and meaning is what redundancy undermines—precisely why irrelevance is one of the natural and insoluble terrors of writing. If you were looking for a neat expression for the awful sense of uselessness that anyone with a commitment to the written word must feel from time to time, then Philip Larkin’s phrase would be hard to better: “Books are a load of crap.” “Depressive realism” (a clinical term) becomes an occupational hazard for the author and reader. It talks like this: you hide from life; you make it up; your claims to deeper meaning are a charade; you lie; you are stupid. Take it as given that something in the nature of the modern world—its superabundance, perhaps; the overload of information and of competing leisure options—makes it especially difficult now to write pertinent fiction. Literature is anyway a deeply confused business, based on a kind of basic fraudulence. And asking what it is for is like asking what life is for (which is to say: have your pick of answer, good luck finding any proof). Consequently, depressive realism is impossible to inoculate oneself against. It is horrible and hard, and entirely un-abstract in its horribleness. David Foster Wallace, an author who provided some of the most sensitive articulations of the impulse to communicate through fiction, wrote at length about the perils of living by the word. “I get scared and sad too,” he once said rather simply. “I think maybe it’s part of the natural price of wanting to do this kind of work.” Last year, after a catastrophic attempt to quit his antidepressants, Wallace committed suicide at the age of 46. Without wanting to be morbid merely for the sake of it, it is hard to see the silver lining to that particular storm cloud—hard to see Wallace’s death as anything except evidence, if we needed it, that all our efforts to impose meaning on life—to protect ourselves, to cope—are really just made of paper.

I sound this sour note for two reasons. The Point has taken it as an informal mission to provide a space for discussion about the modern novel, about the various challenges it faces and about what we can hope for (or expect) from the genre in the present day. This is an admirable sort of conversation to want, but we should be careful whilst having it to separate circumstantial problems from constitutive ones. It is perfectly fair—and what’s more, manifestly accurate—to say that social and cultural conditions are presently antithetical in lots of ways to creating literature that resonates with the times. A familiar way of putting it is to evoke a nefarious alliance of massively multiplied information sources and stimuli with a clustered and distracting mass culture, and the corresponding shrinkage of the average person’s attention span and willingness to isolate himself with a book. The novelist is caught in a double bind: in order to properly capture the feel of a kinetic, overloaded modern world she must pack more, and more varied, material into her work, but does so for an audience that has less and less inclination to engage with it. Alternatively, the novelist simplifies and straightens her work in order to win readers, but at the expense of representing the world as she truly perceives it to be (i.e. “selling out”). There is a concern that the novel is simply unable, structurally, to harmonize with an era where the written word has been so heavily marginalized by sound and image. Or maybe the form is exhausted—there being only so many different ways to stick words together into a coherent whole, and only so many styles to adopt and tones to take, etc., might the last three hundred years of cultural activity not have burnt up our artistic resources? These worries are valid enough, but in fact there has never been a moment where the novel really was a pure and uncomplicatedly meaningful thing. It has always been a struggle against the elements.

A second reason for caution would be that it is wrong to expect literature to be therapeutic or life-affirming qua literature. In reaction to all the conditions making it uniquely difficult to produce literature for the twenty-first century it is an easy and often-made mistake to extol the reading of Serious Novels as a type of nourishing, meditative activity—a richer and more fulfilling food contra the junk diet served up by mass culture. This is a bad tack—in principle—because it is egocentric. It tacitly equates good art with what is good for one’s health, and thereby reduces it to something that provides a service for well-being. That might sound like elitism (real art is x-and-y, whether you like it or not), but it isn’t, really. A novel would have value simply for being truthful, and the truth is under no obligation to be pleasant. Given the dreadful psychic mess that fiction is founded on (the mess that gives depression its grip), to make helpfulness a criterion of literature is to make guarantees one cannot fulfil. As enriching and comforting as they can undoubtedly be, stories are primarily expressive. What they express needn’t be healthy or positive so long as it is truthful—and the news might simply be bad.

At the beginning of his first book, not a novel but an extended essay on the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft, Houellebecq set out his premises: “No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.” Or more than a little:

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All these prodigiously refined “notations,” “situations,” anecdotes… All they do, once a book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already nourished by any one of our “real life” days.

Certainly these opening notes—those scare quotes around the words “real life”—do not promise a wonderfully appetizing read. But in fact Houellebecq’s debut is a delight. H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life is witty, sympathetic, beautifully written and accomplishes the nicest thing a piece of criticism can: it makes you want to read what you are reading about. Lovecraft, a recluse whose single happy adult relationship was wrecked by his inability to find a salary and who wrote horror stories (so Houellebecq argues) powered on virulent racial hatred, also exemplifies in his life and work one of the engines of Houellebecq’s own fiction: the refusal, or the failure, to develop into an adult. However, the claim that it is “useless … to write new realistic novels” is something Houellebecq quickly retreated from. Without exception, his novels are concerned with the revulsion and hardship of quote-unquote real life.

But what value has “realism” like that? It’s pretty easy, you might think, to adopt a manful tone of voice and say that what matters in Art is not well-being but Truth, even if the truth is brutal and distressing. But if a piece of art is not only truthful, but depressing and no good for you in its truthfulness, doesn’t that sound like an excellent reason to avoid it? I don’t mean to be coy if I say that I’m not sure how to answer that question. Right enough, Houellebecq’s characters are defined by isolation and unhappiness, and they take these to be essential rather than accidental parts of human existence. Their social relations are those of failure, determined by what they cannot relate to in others—“[It] is in failure and through failure, that the subject constitutes itself,” as one puts it, and another: “It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it is that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable”—all of which falls perilously close to navel-gazing. Whether in first or third person, the Houellebecq hero (always male) typically takes the form of a soft-bodied, aging cynic, who yearns exclusively for sex with young women and then spirals off into brooding monologues about the impossibility of living when it eludes him. The quantity of invective is high, particularly in The Possibility of an Island, easily the nastiest of the four titles. Its hero, a rich and famous comedian named Daniel, embarks on one love affair with a woman that ends after they both agree that it would be futile to pretend that he could go on wanting her deteriorating body, and then another with a 22 year old nymphomaniac with whom he falls deeply in love, whilst admitting that “[like] all very pretty young girls she was basically only good for fucking, and it would have been stupid to employ her for anything else, to see her as anything other than a luxury animal, pampered and spoiled, protected from all cares as from any difficult or painful task so as to be better able to devote herself to her exclusively sexual service.” Eventually she dumps him before running off to an orgy. Elsewhere, Daniel notes that: “The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity—which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are,” that “living alone together is hell between consenting adults,” that “legitimate disgust … seizes any normal man at the sight of a baby,” that “a child is a sort of vicious dwarf, innately cruel, who combines the worst features of the species, and from whom domestic pets keep a wise distance,” and so on.

And yet the best reason to read Houellebecq, the one I would give if I were asked, anyway, is that his work produces the scandalously rare impression of being relevant, of connecting to how life is, rather than how it might be if there were more adventures. Pessimism is unfalsifiable, of course, which is what makes it so often insipid. If someone is genuinely determined to look on the gloomy side of life there is no turning them. The “honesty” of a depressive realist is sapping and tedious in that way. All of Houellebecq’s narrators present themselves as hard-headed men willing to speak unpleasant facts (explicitly, in The Possibility of an Island, where Daniel comments: “On the intellectual level I was in reality slightly above average … I was just very honest, and therein lay my distinction; I was, in relation to the current norms of mankind, almost unbelievably honest”), but their stories would be banal if their author weren’t deft enough to make them plausible—that is, realistic.

“Realism” is, to say the least, a bit of a tattered banner in fiction. Part of the mythology of literature is that Serious Novels exist as a weather vane to the age, informed by and informing the mood of the times, simultaneously symptomatic and diagnostic, reflecting the particular concerns of their spot in history and in turn informing the deeper concerns of human life. The “conceptual” difficulty, so to speak, for the modern novel might as well be termed the difficulty of realism. Since at least 1919, when Virginia Woolf published “Modern Fiction,” there has been a loose but persistent consensus among “serious” writers that the world has changed in ways that make Jane Austen-type classic realism inappropriate, so that if you really wanted to be realistic you would paradoxically find the best expression in science fiction or postmodernist aesthetics, or deny the possibility of realism as an achievable or desirable aim (cf. the critic Jerome Klinkowitz: “If the world is absurd, and what passes for reality distressingly unreal, why spend time representing it?”). The reasons for this steady, though now almost itself retro, shift in feeling are much discussed but remain ghoulishly unaltered.

“The pain of consciousness, the pain of knowing, grows apace”—that is Jonathan Franzen’s phrase, and it could hardly have been said better. If one were forced on pain of injury to try and say what is characteristic of the present moment, one serviceable answer would be: We know more. Our collective awareness is tremendous; it increases. The sum total of human knowledge has long outstripped the capacities of any individual, however brilliant they might be (it being said that the last person to know everything there was to know was Leibniz, which isn’t true, but would be bad enough even if it were—he died in 1716). As a thought experiment, consider any subject (e.g. cooking) that you could claim some knowledge of. Consider how many people in the world could claim greater knowledge of that subject, how much expertise you lack. Now broaden your thought to cover all the fields of science and sport and art and language and mathematics and commerce and engineering and philosophy and history and geography and medicine. Imagine how much you don’t know, that is known. It is dizzying. The expanse of human activity and enterprise, and our consciousness of that expanse, are vital ingredients for the modern novelist’s stew. The problem being that this enormous weight of collected data—or, more accurately, the fact that we are ever more aware that this gigantic weight of data is sitting out there, collected—has rather awkward consequences for writing novels.

The first, most obvious one is this: there is so much stuff! Far too much to fit into any book, too much for any single talent—how could any lone novelist capture what the world feels like when she has such flimsy snares at her disposal? But the days when there was any broad distinction between the local and the exotic seem gone, and so the pressure mounts on the novelist to pack her work full of data and exoticism, to take her books globetrotting, evoke the sensation that there is more going on in the world faster and everywhere: the interconnected, networked, speeding, modern kaleidoscope. But the actual breadth of the world—the diversity of character and locale that you could encounter just by, say, spending an evening channel-hopping or browsing the internet—humbles the imagination, and it seems impossible to do it justice. The present isn’t so much a moving target as a multitude of twisting, slipping bodies that refuse to remain targets long enough to take aim.

A massive proportion of Western art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is, in one way or another, a reaction to the feeling of overload. But the issue isn’t simply one of scale, as though in principle, and with enough imagination and effort, one could amass a large enough quantity of information plus character and put it all inside one long book—it is also a matter of fit. In some plain respects, novels just seem like the wrong way to depict life in the information age. A linear narrative without explicit audiovisual accompaniment doesn’t rest easily in the job of conveying a time and place animated by flickering bangs and whizzes. It isn’t merely the problem already sketched, that literature must compete with all sorts of other, extremely colorful, forms of entertainment for the attention of an audience with less to give or desire to give it. It is also that literature aiming to be “realistic” would have to depict all the up-to-the-minute parts of the twenty-first century which make it difficult for novels to be that. It is as though the timely twenty-first-century fiction would have to somehow internalize those elements that make novels seem irrelevant and out of step—that is, represent (in a novel) a form of life that novels do not appear to be representative of; like pushing square pegs against round holes. What would a long story be like where the hero worked all day and then spent all his spare time on the Internet? Possibly very interesting, but also hard to imagine—as a rule of thumb, novels struggle to capture information-age paraphernalia, and very often seem wooden when they try.¹ The problem of fit is more serious by far than the problem of scale—it’s the difference between having a long and arduous job on your hands and having a job you are wrong for. A novelist who feels her medium to be out of tune with the world around her is obvious prey for the specter of irrelevance. It’s a big deal: “[For] a writer of fiction to feel that he does not really live in his own country—as represented by Life or by what he sees when he steps out the front door—must seem a serious occupational impediment,” said Philip Roth, surveying an American cultural landscape that had become unprecedentedly ill-disposed to the means and methods of written fiction. That was in 1961—and like Sontag’s remark about redundancy, it is ominously ageless (once you replace Life with Google and delete the need to leave the home).

The terrors of redundancy are part and parcel of the enterprise of fiction writing—what modern life does is amplify them. It has never been easier to feel anonymous. Houellebecq’s books, which don’t take a massive amount of interest in the world buzzing around them, manage to convey this atmosphere extremely well—the gap between real life and life as advertised, and how the sense of disappointment this generates has perversely become a bit of a cultural norm. “There are some authors who employ their talent in the delicate description of varying states of soul, character traits, etc.,” expounds the narrator of Whatever:

All that accumulation of realistic detail, with clearly differentiated characters hogging the limelight, has always seemed like pure bullshit to me. … The world is becoming more uniform before our eyes; telecommunications are improving; apartment interiors are enriched with new gadgets. Human relationships become progressively impossible, which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life. And little by little death’s countenance appears in all its glory.

•

In The Elementary Particles—the story of Bruno and Michel, two socially isolated half-brothers—tremendous glee is taken skewering neo-hippies and New Age mystics. A thwarted hedonist, the 40 year old Bruno spends a dismal fortnight holidaying in the Lieu du Changement, a semi-commune founded in 1975 with the aim of “providing a place where like-minded people could spend the summer months living according to the principles they espoused. It was intended that this haven of humanist and democratic feeling would create synergies, facilitate the meeting of minds and, in particular, as one of the founding members put it, provide an opportunity to ‘get your rocks off.’” By the time Bruno visits in the late Nineties the Lieu du Changement has become miserable, a microcosm for one of Houellebecq’s central themes—the cruelty and exclusion of the Sixties’ sexual revolution. For the clientele of the Lieu, “[as] they began to age, the cult of the body, which they had done so much to promote, simply filled them with an intensifying disgust for their own bodies—a disgust they could see mirrored in the gaze of others. … Dedicated exclusively to sexual liberation and the expression of desire, the Lieu naturally became a place of desperation and bitterness.” By the mid-Eighties the commune has become a corporate business, supplementing its promise of sexual liberty with quasi-religious workshops and esoteric disciplines—“Tantric Zen, which combined profound vanity, diffuse mysticism and sexual frottage, flourished.”

Bad luck in sex, the marginalization of anyone who fails to be erotically desirable, is the backbone of Houellebecq’s oeuvre. Whatever, the most overtly philosophical novel, is narrated by an unnamed computer technician—a job that Houellebecq held before he made his living as a writer—on a business trip training provincial civil servants how to use their new equipment. His companion is another young technician, Raphaël Tisserand. “The problem with Raphaël Tisserand—the foundation of his personality, indeed—is that he is extremely ugly. So ugly that his appearance repels women, and he never gets to sleep with them.” The two men travel from town to town, retiring to bars and nightclubs after work, where Raphaël—affluent, but a total flop as a sexual commodity—meets progressively terrible frustrations. The issue, as the narrator diagnoses, is one of simple sexual economics: his colleague cannot offer anything on the marketplace. “Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women, others with none. It’s what’s known as ‘the law of the market’… In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.” Lacking charm and resembling a toad wrapped in cellophane in his looks, Raphaël has nothing he can trade. Characters that suffer because of their biological makeup, the life sentence imposed by being undesirable, or the delayed punishment of aging, recur—sex, we are told, is life’s only real motive. If you are disqualified, or “past it,” then you will suffer unto death: “All energy is of a sexual nature, not mainly, but exclusively, and when the animal is no longer good for reproducing, it is absolutely no longer good for anything.” ²

Raphaël is killed in a car accident, driving home in the mists on Christmas Eve. At his funeral: “A few words were pronounced on the sadness of such a death and on the difficulty of driving in fog, people went back to work, and that was that.” But for the narrator, who until then had taken a cold, if not gruesomely manipulative attitude toward his partner, the news of Tisserand’s death sparks a mental breakdown. After checking himself into a psychiatric hospital, the hero is confronted by a female counselor who chastises him for speaking in overly abstract, sociological terms. His effort at self-analysis emerges: “But I don’t understand, basically, how people manage to go on living. I get the impression everybody must be unhappy; we live in such a simple world you understand. There’s a system based on domination, money and fear … there’s a … system based on seduction and sex. And that’s it. Is it really possible to live and to believe that there’s nothing else?” Afterwards, he asks the counselor if she would sleep with him. She refuses.

Although Houellebecq shoots plenty of venom at the sexual revolution, it is not that he is a reactionary writer, exactly. He never suggests that religious faith is the solution to his character’s dilemmas, for example; the books are all resolutely atheist. The only places in which traditional religion makes a significant appearance are in a subplot of Whatever—a Catholic priest, an old acquaintance of the narrator’s, loses his faith over a failed affair with a young nurse—and at the climax of Platform in the form of Islamic terrorists.³ In any case, Houellebecq’s heroes are generally no less deviant than the sad revelers of the Lieu du Changement. What the sexual revolution stands for, rather, is the triumph of philosophical materialism: the worldview that erases the supernatural, making it impossible to believe in God and—at its logical conclusion—eradicating the possibility of communion altogether. The starkest material truth, after all, seems to be that we are all ultimately alone inside our skin: “elementary particles.” In Houellebecq’s fiction, the real brutality of post-sixties sexual economics is that it is based on fact; it is, in its way, progressive. One way of putting it is that in our enlightenment we are able to see ourselves as merely creatures, rather than God’s creatures, and nature as purposeless matter, rather than divine plan. Humans are just animals, and, unsurprisingly, that knowledge gives precedence to biological impulse; to strength, health and beauty over weakness, infirmity and repulsiveness; and it makes self-interest paramount. Houellebecq’s men find themselves incapable of considering anything but themselves, but they also apprehend, with some horror, the essential unsustainability of individualism. Living with nothing other than your own desires and urges makes your frustrations, increasingly awful and unavoidable as you age, torturous—and the prospect of death unmanageable. “Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. More than at any time or in any civilization, human beings are obsessed with aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain (one can actually feel the meter ticking, and it ticks inevitably towards the end). This weighing up of pleasure and pain which, sooner or later, everyone is forced to make, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide.” It is, to paraphrase Houellebecq on a different topic, an insoluble condition, but not really a complicated one.

“Old age; there was not a new blossoming at the end of the road, but a bundle of frustrations and sufferings, at first insignificant, then very quickly unbearable…” The Possibility of an Island is probably the worst of the novels, a long and caustic monologue against a cardboard backdrop, but even it achieves a kind of demonic power thanks to the intensity of its will to communicate the slide of bodily decay, “the sadness of physical decrepitude, of the gradual loss of all that gave life meaning and joy”:

Not only did the old not have the right to fuck … rebellion was forbidden to them, rebellion too—like sexuality, like pleasure, like love—seemed reserved for the young and to have no point for other people, any cause incapable of mobilizing the interest of young people was disqualified in advance, basically, old people were in all matters treated simply as waste, to be granted only a survival that was miserable, conditional, and more and more narrowly limited.

Esther, the aging narrator’s 22 year old mistress, never strikes the reader as much like an actual person, but the hero’s desperation as their romance comes to an end—an end that he does not think he will survive—is palpable to The Point of suffocation; you want to put the book down for air. Love is very real in Houellebecq’s fiction, “immense and admirable,” the nearest thing there is to true communion, but it too is part of a game one cannot help but lose. Houellebecq is hardly above mining sentiment on this score. Indeed, the two best novels, Platform and The Elementary Particles, succeed because they approach classical romantic tragedy. Bruno’s vacation in the Lieu is saved when he meets Christiane, a 40 year old whose eyes “were blue and a little sad,” who travels to the Lieu for the sex rather than the mysticism. “The whole spiritual thing makes the pick-up lines seem less brutal,” she admits, but is unreservedly cynical about its value otherwise:

I know what the veterans of ’sixty-eight are like when they hit forty, I’m practically one myself. They have cobwebs in their cunts and they grow old alone. Talk to them for five minutes and you’ll see that they don’t believe in any of this bullshit about chakras and crystal healing and light vibrations. They force themselves to believe it, and sometimes they do for an hour or two … but then the workshop’s over and they’re still ugly, still ageing, still alone. So they cry for a bit—have you noticed? They do a lot of crying here.

In spite of his maladjustment and her damage, Bruno and Christiane find tenderness with one another. As their relationship progresses, Bruno’s bleak worldview (“second-rate Nietzscheanism,” he calls it) begins to thaw. The two fall in love. During a happy week together in Paris: “They took a taxi to Les Halles and ate in an all-night brasserie. Bruno had rollmop herrings as a starter. ‘Now,’ he thought, ‘anything is possible.’ He had hardly done so when he realized that he was wrong.” What he thinks of is not a rival lover or external interference, but rather the course of nature—the implacable reality of separation and decline. The end that Bruno and Chistiane’s affair eventually comes to, wrenching as it is, is only an accelerated version of the fate of all affairs: sooner or later the body fails. “Though the possibilities were endless in [Bruno’s] imagination… in reality his body was in a slow process of decay; Christiane’s body was too. Despite the nights when they were as one, each remained trapped in individual consciousness and separate flesh. Rollmop herrings were clearly not the solution, but then again, had he chosen sea bass with fennel it would have been no different.” The burden of materialism, and by extension atheism, is that it is less—not more—able to manage suffering and evil than religiousness. Nature is indifferent to human interest, cold and amoral without a God to make it good. What we are left with once the divine or supernatural is eliminated is not a life devoid of meaning but a life whose meaning is essentially dependent on bodily function: health, pleasure and physical ability. By nature, those things expire, and the hardships of being a vulnerable, fearful, mortal human thing are left bare. It’s no accident that once the Lieu du Changement’s business began to sag (as its customers’ bodies sagged), the Zen workshops arrived.

The lone exception to Houellebecq’s standard template for protagonists is Michel Djerzinski, Bruno’s half-brother. A scientist of genius, Michel has little in the way of normal human appetites. His work shows, “on the basis of irrefutable thermodynamic arguments, that the chromosomal separation at the moment of meosis can create haploid gametes, in themselves a source of structural instability. In other words, all species dependent on sexual reproduction are by definition mortal.” The solution to this essential fallibility is to remake human material—the epilogue of The Elementary Particles tracks an epoch-shifting transformation as Djerzinski’s genetic research lights the way to the creation of a race of sexless, benevolent, “neo-human” immortals. The book ends with a tribute to humanity: a species that finally learned enough to be able and willing to engineer its own extinction.

•

Something that David Foster Wallace made much of in his career was the idea that literature served as a comfort to loneliness, and that this was maybe its most basic virtue. If you accept that loneliness is the great existential terror that we all, in our different ways, try to escape, it isn’t hard to apprehend the fraught relationship that necessarily gives us to our own bodies, because it’s our bodies that keep us so basically and dreadfully apart. It’s interesting to note how often words used to express the value of literature (or art more generally) conjure up kinds of immaterialism: “seeing the world through different eyes,” “being transported,” forging a “psychic connection” with the author, “losing yourself” in a book—all of these are expressions that run against what seems to be the brute material truth: that we are prisoners inside our skulls. Nor is it a great challenge to draw connections between this and the spiritual immaterialism inherent in religion (think about the phrase “Giving yourself to God”). Partly, these ways of speaking may be extensions of a vague but deep-rooted sense that what is distinctive and important about being human are things that find their best expression in non-biological, non-material terms—like when someone says that intimacy is the genuinely valuable part of sex. The villainy of materialism is that it undermines such talk—for instance, when it tells us that love is only a disguise for the urge to reproduce. Along this road we lose the use of a very fundamental and comforting terminology, or at least are obliged to admit that it gives a false or misleading account of human behavior. It emerges that there is basically no getting over yourself, no escaping your skull—and the more you are led to feel this way the more you are inclined to see life as isolated and vanishing.

Houellebecq’s men don’t think about God: all they think about—all there is—are the dictates of their biology, and their diminishing capacities to meet them. It is as if to say: the facts are what they are. So long as the facts are in your favor you can be happy, but there’s nothing else to it. Not only is this position terribly lonely, it ridicules concepts of common good. Immanuel Kant, in arguing that God must be judged by the same morality as men, was saying, partly, that what is good would have to be as eternal and universal as God himself, because if what is good is only open to some—if it is dependent in any way on luck, for example—then it cannot really be good, since its contingency would be an evil. A value system like that of a hedonist, one that depends entirely on the working of the body, is akin to the kind of contingent good that Kant thought couldn’t possibly be the real thing, i.e., it is good only for whomever it is good for. So sexual liberation is a boon if you are able to enjoy it, but that “if” carries with it the reality of all those people—the Raphaël Tisserands—who are left out. Moreover, materialism entails that Tisserand’s condition is accentuated, but not unique. The picture Houellebecq paints across the nightclubs, resorts and restaurants of the West is of a society that understands the facts but won’t spell them out—where concern for the body (health, beauty, sensation, etc.) has been raised to a cultural zenith, only without any corresponding apparatus to give meaning to decline and death. This, he opines, is the bleak consequence of the ongoing march of consumer capitalism—“which, turning youth into the supremely desirable commodity, had little by little destroyed respect for tradition and the cult of the ancestors—inasmuch as it promised the indefinite preservation of this same youth, and the pleasures associated with it.”

Modern materialism has this strange kind of double effect on self-perception. On the one hand, it isolates the individual by (seemingly) dispelling various illusions of communion (the decline of religion being the paradigm example). On the other, progress in social sciences, psychology and neurology, which has seeped into the wider cultural air, encourages us to think about ourselves in various “external” fashions— as the product of genetic resources, social and economic starting position, etc. These modes of thought are uncomfortable, in that they imply that our view of things “from the inside” is illusory or distorted, and that what we experience as central and singular in our personal day-to-day are actually nothing more than instances of general truths about human behavior. To a certain extent, it is healthy to be objective about yourself (you aren’t at the center of the world, despite appearances) but at its limits it becomes dehumanizing. “Flattening” is, for me, exactly the word for describing how the materialist double effect feels when you reach these limits—subjective consciousness is squished between the material barrier separating our inner life from those of others, and the inferential awareness that this inner life is itself the product of a hardwiring that we are subjectively blind to. The deeper way in which Sontag was right when she said that redundancy was the affliction of modern life is that the ascendancy of materialism not only attacks the meaning of this very precious “immaterial” vocabulary we use to talk about what it’s like being human; it breeds biological fatalism, lending weight to the idea that our actions reduce to, and are determined by, dumb physical process—an ultimately pointless set of natural drives. Helplessness is the current running beneath all of Houellebecq’s narratives, the soul-crushing inability to either find what you want or change what you want; to avoid death or believe that death is anything except bad.

“Is it really possible to live and believe that there’s nothing else?” Thinking about a question like that is like trying to swim deeper and deeper underwater; oxygen becomes scarce and the pressure pushes you back to the surface. It is a shrill, self-pitying and impractical question, sure; and of course it would be nice to dismiss it, as it would be nice to dismiss the outlook in Houellebecq’s books as so much moaning—except it’s hard to evade the conclusion that the main reason for their success is that enough people identify with them; that they put into words things that people think and want to hear, but are either unable to articulate or unwilling to admit to. This, if it’s true, is obviously kind of grim, because what Houellebecq has given voice to is such a downer—but then the curiosity of it is how the writing manages to be so powerfully invigorating. There is more life in The Elementary Particles, at least, than any number of contemporary novels—take the brilliantly banal awfulness of the scene recounting Bruno and Christiane’s visits to Parisian sex clubs, where “He could not help but feel that many of the women they met in clubs were somewhat disappointed when they saw his penis. No one ever commented; their courtesy was exemplary, and the atmosphere was always friendly and polite; but their looks couldn’t lie and slowly he realized that, from a sexual viewpoint, he just didn’t make the grade.” The combination of wit, pity and brutality is not common. But whether there’s actually an imperative in Houellebecq for would-be novelists to digest is a difficult question. One’s first instinct is to say something about the value of honesty, how maybe truthfulness is always fundamentally preferable in some way to its opposite. Certainly that is part of the appeal, and there is probably a good lesson to take in about trusting your instincts; if it feels true, it will be better writing than something that only feels like it ought to be true—literature isn’t essentially normative. The downside is that actually taking what Houellebecq expresses seriously seems self-subverting. What good are books if you are sick, alone, and unloved? They are no good. At best they are make-believe to help us disguise the facts of life—unbearable facts. When Michel Djerzinski’s lover, Annabelle, terminally ill and very frail, commits suicide, we are told that:

She was very far from accepting; life seemed to her like a bad joke, an unacceptable joke, but acceptable or not, that was what it was. In a few short weeks her illness had brought her to the feeling so common in the elderly: she didn’t want to be a burden to others. Towards the end of her adolescence, her life had speeded up, and then there had been a long dull stretch; and now, at the end, everything was speeding up again.

“Acceptable or not, that was what it was.” Life carries on regardless until the day it doesn’t—any question about what you make of it is secondary. How are you supposed to reconcile the human need to impose meaning on life, through art or other means, with the apprehension that life is arbitrary and beyond one’s control? And how does it help to be honest about it if it is so? The dark joke at the bottom of the pessimist’s project is that it ends up attacking its own grounds; ridiculing the futility of human action ultimately makes the art itself seem pointless—demonstrates the emptiness of its honesty. In Platform, the hero arrives in a Thai brothel, chancing across two other men from his package tour. One of these men, Robert, is a weary cynic. The narrator’s final judgment could be Houellebecq’s own:

I nodded to Robert to take my leave. His dour face, fixed in a bitter rictus, scanned the room—and beyond, the human race—without a hint of affability. He had made his point, at least he had had the opportunity; I sensed I was going to forget him pretty quickly. I had the impression that he didn’t even want to make love to these girls anymore. Life can be seen as a process of gradually coming to a standstill … In Robert, the process was already well advanced: he possibly still got erections, but even that wasn’t certain. It’s easy to play the smart aleck, to give the impression that you’ve understood something about life; the fact remains that life comes to an end. My fate was similar to his, we had shared the same defeat; but still I felt no active sense of solidarity. In the absence of love, nothing can be sanctified. On the inside of the eyelids patches of light merge; there are visions, there are dreams. None of this now concerns man, who waits for night; night comes. I paid the waiter two thousand baht and he escorted me to the double doors leading upstairs. [The girl] held my hand; she would, for an hour or two, try to make me happy.

It may be depressing that we live in a time where such a barren philosophy resonates; there is a tiny sliver of hope—possibly, maybe just—if at least it shows that resonance is still possible. Something is head-breakingly paradoxical about the concept of necessary illusions—but if we have them then, by definition, we cannot get on without them. Michel Houellebecq offers nothing that feels much like comfort, yet the force and the counter-intuitive vitality in his work might allow that there is some irreducible solace just in feeling as if you are really connecting with someone, even if you can’t—and even if it hurts.

2. Fair to say, Houellebecq’s books don’t shy away from what Wallace called “the bizarre and adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair.” Interestingly, that judgment was part of Wallace’s famous review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time; the same John Updike who disapprovingly quotes Houellebecq’s bit about all energy being sexual energy in the rather sniffy review of The Possibility of an Island he gave for the New Yorker.[^]

3. In 2001, French courts agreed to hear a formal case brought against Houellebecq by four French Muslim organizations on the charge of racism, after he was quoted (inaccurately, he claims) in an interview promoting Platform saying that Islam was “the most stupid of all religions.” The case was eventually dismissed, but in between the publication of Platform and his appearance in court two planes smashed into the World Trade Centre—which made Houellebecq’s eye for subject matter seem like an uncannily sharp one, whatever else.[^]

Piano’s monumental construction is not, however, a house of worship, but a museum of modern art—and the originality of the architecture only sets the stage for a more subtle innovation pertaining to the presentation of artworks inside. The galleries in the Modern Wing appear to exhibit a comprehensive selection of works from the Art Institute’s permanent collection. The third floor houses Bauhaus alumni along with the rest of European sculpture and painting from 1900-1950. On the second is Contemporary Art from 1945-1960, carefully separated from a much larger installation devoted to art from the Sixties onwards. It seems simple enough—the bulk of the collection is organized by date: 1900-1950, 1945-1960, 1960-Present. Yet these chronological groupings, with their curious overlaps, are revealing. Some, like the Times’ Roberta Smith, have read the chronology as a conservative tactic that misses out on an opportunity to disrupt “modernism’s linear thinking—falsely narrow to begin with.” But the apparent straightforwardness of the layout is part of a strategy that is far from conservative. In fact, the chronological curation does disrupt “modernism’s linear thinking”—by contextualizing it within a uniquely inclusive dialogue about what counts as “modern” art today.

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One glimpse at the floor plan tips a visitor off to an unusual—and telling—omission. Outside of the Architecture and Design exhibition, there is not a single pre-twentieth-century work on view in the Modern Wing. The reasons for this may be acutely practical ones having to do with department interest or funds, or the recent renovation and expansion of the Impressionism galleries that sit atop the Women’s Board Grand Staircase. But the consequences are nevertheless substantial, speaking to the persistent problem of how to determine what counts as “modern” when the category is populated by works created well over a century ago.

Consider for a moment what is generally considered to be included in the category. Given the canonical history of Modern Art and the institutionalization of that history in museums like MoMA, it would seem for most contemporary museumgoers to include Manet and Cézanne in the nineteenth century—whose innovations are essential for understanding the paintings of Kandinsky, Picasso, and Pollock in the twentieth. Not here. Although the Art Institute’s impressive nineteenth-century collection is easily accessible from the new museum, the Modern Wing does not include any specific artworks from the period.

So what? Why care that twentieth-century works are presented here as severed from their precedents?

In no uncertain terms, what is at stake is the framework for our understanding of the “modern.” According to the critical scaffolding erected by Clement Greenberg in the middle of the last century and propagated by his students (most notably Michael Fried), “Modernist” art consists of a set of self-critical high art practices, whose origins can be traced to the emergence of a bourgeois social order in nineteenth-century Paris—a development which liberated artistic production from the confining demands of art academies and patronage. Different from both conservative (i.e. classical or academic) art and popular culture, these practices are now executed, not in conjunction with political, economic or social conditions, but out of an exclusive concern for artistic practice itself and, specifically, the problems of medium. “The essence of Modernism” lay, as Greenberg saw it, “in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself.” (For example, painting is no longer compelled by the illusion of dimensional space but by the material conditions of the medium—that is, its flatness.) The relevant challenges were those that had been identified by prior practitioners. Solutions to these produced new problems that were, in turn, handed down to progeny. A streamlined narrative therefore connected each member of Modernism to those who had preceded and others who would later follow. For instance, in “American-Type Painting” (1955), Greenberg describes how some of the very best work by Hans Hofmann—whose “Blue Rhythm” (1950) hangs in the 1945-1960 gallery—exhibited the Late Cubist tendencies of Willem de Kooning (who also has a painting there), but that in the even better part of his career, he was fully post-Cubist. And it is precisely this linear progress that constitutes Hoffman’s achievement. “Art is continuity—among other things—and unthinkable without it,” writes Greenberg. And Manet was the first Modernist.

In order for such an evaluation to make sense, the genealogy—and the discourse of the history of art developed around it—would have to remain intact. But here, in the Modern Wing, Manet and the other nineteenth-century origins of this Modernist history are left behind. Whether or not this omission was intentional, it indicates the repudiation, in the past few decades, of the genealogical Modernist paradigm—a paradigm whose relevant narrative is strictly one of cause and effect.

In its place, contemporary curators have generally employed a far more horizontal or “postmodern” model, best exemplified by the exhibition technique at the Tate Modern in London. There, galleries are organized not by period or style but by theme, such as (currently on view) “Environment” and “Text and Language.” Broad enough to accommodate work from any period, geography or medium, such installations facilitate the seamless transfer of work between categories, taking on a kind of collage quality. At its worst, this pastiche can be read as an anachronistic embrace of the contemporary over and above the historical. But as art historian Mignon Nixon has claimed, this exhibition strategy also has the potential to “cut across old hierarchies to make the museum a more popular public place.”

The Modern Wing evidences a similar “popular” impulse with its mid-museum coffee bar and magnificent floor-to-ceiling views of Millenium Park, but it does not forego the old Modernist narrative. Instead, it puts it on display. In fact, what we as museum visitors are looking at in the 1945-1960 exhibition space is precisely that paradigm exhibited, but without any of the critical armature delineating it.

This self-contained genealogy is highlighted by the fact that the ‘45-’60 galleries break the Modern Wing’s otherwise rigorous insistence on chronology. (The emphasis on chronology is made transparent on the third floor, where the northernmost doors into the gallery space alert visitors that the “chronology begins in Gallery 391,” and so suggest visitors move down the hall and enter into the galleries through other doors.) This space re-exhibits the five years from 1945-1950 already covered in the 1900-1950 galleries on the third floor. This is a crucial period, both for Greenberg and American art. It is during this time that the epicenter of the art world relocates from Paris to New York. Here, the overlap makes this point of transition visible. (And, indeed, nearly all the work that follows is American.) But it also puts on view the set of practices that are paradigmatic of this version of Modernism. Accordingly the installation, isolated from the rest, does not refuse Greenberg’s story but acknowledges it through exhibition.

Chronology thus emerges as a productive curatorial tool. The simultaneity allowed in this instance exemplifies its ability to sustain divergent tendencies and their respective logics. The galleries do not hold discrete groupings of Modernist -isms (fauvism, cubism, surrealism, to name a few), but neither do they arrest artworks from their historical context. Instead, the chronological method generates a more flexible matrix capable of displaying the complex, and often contradictory, logic of twentieth-century art. Rather than stylistic or thematic development, it is incidental temporal progression that threads the exhibition rooms together, producing a space in which an open-ended conversation is carried out between different modes of the modern.

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There is clear precedent for rhetorically employing chronology in recent art literature. In 2005, four kingpin art historians—Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss—published Art Since 1900, which proposed a new narrative for the history of modern art. Like the Modern Wing, this history was organized strictly according to dates. Each chapter of the book was dedicated to a different year and a particular event, exhibition or publication produced during it. In the preface, the authors call attention to the “dialogical” nature of their presentation, in which the tensions between various perspectives on modern art are “dramatized” rather than “masked.” The artworks in the book are offered as the “pieces of a puzzle that can be transformed into a great variety of images.” Their method is contrasted with that of Greenberg and Fried, whose criticism, the authors claim, has represented a “manifest attempt at writing history from the perspective of victorious interests.”

In the book and at the museum, the chronological approach reproduces familiar categories, but not divorced from their historical context. Minimalism, for instance, is introduced in Art Since 1900 by way of the 1966 exhibition “Primary Structures,” held at the Jewish Museum in New York. The show, which served as something of a coming-out party for minimalism as a movement, featured work by Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Richard Artschwager and Carl Andre, among nearly forty others. Artschwager’s Table with Pink Tablecloth, shown there, is now on view in the Modern Wing, a short way across the room from Andre’s Steel-Aluminum Plain. Though the Andre sculpture, a six-foot by six-foot checkerboard that lays flat against the floor, wasn’t made until 1969, the text panel that accompanies it explains it as exemplary of the work he had been making since 1966. Articulated as such, the pairing works to invoke not just the minimalist tendency but also the exhibition event that incited it.

But this gallery also includes a shaped (rather than rectangular) Frank Stella canvas, as well as an Agnes Martin painting. While the exhibited works of Stella, Martin, Artschwager and Andre show certain formal similarities—a repetitive use of strict and straight line, for instance—these artists’ contemporaneous practices occupied very different realms within the field of 1960s art. While Fried wrote Stella into his history of modern art, Artschwager’s and Andre’s works were vehemently banned from it as “nothing more than objects.” This is where the Modern Wing’s chronology really exceeds the faculties of the textual format—not only does the exhibition incorporate divergent histories of art, it visually juxtaposes them in space, thus transgressing the categories to which they’ve been ascribed without discarding them altogether.

It is at moments like this when the chronological organization is most effective—that is, when it is used to exhibit the multiplicity of modes that have populated the history of art. Not only do they occupy adjoining spaces but also contiguous sightlines. Formal similarities are explored without their differences being collapsed. The Andre and the Artschwager visually cohere with the Martin and the Stella. Their sculptures both engage qualities characteristic of modernist painting—flatness in the case of the former, monochrome color blocks in the latter—clearly exhibited in the 1945-1960 galleries. But because this engagement betrays the properties of the sculpture medium as defined by Fried’s preferred Modernism, the Andre and the Artschwager stand in sharp contrast to the hanging canvases. So while visual resemblance is explored and thematized, it is not reduced to sameness.

Although a series of broad retroactive classifications might have made the art on view in the Modern Wing more accessible, the chronological approach preserves diversity of practice as a historical condition of art making and, arguably, reception as well. There is a particularly successful example of this in Gallery 391, the first gallery of the third floor section exhibiting painting and sculpture from 1900-1945. Here, ushering in the modern, are cubism and fauvism flanking the entryway. The concentrated, bold hues of fauvism stand out against the earthy, dull cubist ones. And the sharp edges that make up the latter’s complex surely contest the former’s undelineated color patches. Two of Braque’s paintings are on view: one, Landscape at L’Estaque (1906), grouped with the other Fauves, and the second, Little Harbor in Normandy (1909), immediately next to a Picasso. Though only a few works are exhibited as exemplary of each tendency, Braque is prominently included in both. This here and there alerts a keen-eyed viewer to a more fluid and flexible exchange between familiar genres than might be expected. Fauvism and cubism no longer appear discrete, isolated categories but rather mutually informing and constitutive ones.

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For all the advantages of the chronological curation, it is also responsible for a more problematic aspect of the installation—the stringency of the prewar/postwar divide. Twentieth-century art has often been historicized along such a split, effectively treating World War II as a kind of year zero. This has been theorized most vociferously in the German context, which was the site for immensely influential pre-war practices, most notably those in painting, dance, film, photography, design and arts education that emerged from the Bauhaus. Despite the fact that it is today regarded as increasingly misleading, this notion of a decisive breaking point continues to organize the field.

The installation betrays clear symptoms of its insufficiencies. This is most apparent towards the end of the third floor chronology, in a gallery housing Picassos, Giacomettis and Dubuffets. This cluster does good formal work, juxtaposing the gritty dimensions of paint on Dubuffet’s canvases with the sculpting techniques of Giacometti’s tall, slender figures. But upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that these paintings and sculptures were made at very different moments, Dubuffet’s in the mid-Thirties and at least one of the Giacometti’s, Walking Man II, nearly 25 years later in 1960. Similarly, the Picassos, Nude Under Pine Tree and Marquette for Richard J. Daley Center Monument, are from 1959 and 1965 respectively. It is certainly possible that the pieces were grouped in such a way to exhibit the persistence of certain aesthetic tendencies across time, but even if it does highlight these tendencies, the grouping ends up by simplifying them.

The solution would not be to pick another divisive year to arbitrarily split the collection, but to allow Giacometti and Picasso to also inhabit the postwar domain instead of relegating them to the prewar avant-garde. It was, after all, in the late Sixties that the latter decorated Chicago with The Chicago Picasso, the monumental untitled sculpture that still sits outside of the Daley Center.

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At the very same time that Picasso was carrying out Daley’s commissions, Jim Nutt was painting his surrealist-inspired Imagist pieces. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an entire room in the Museum has now been dedicated to his work. The monographic Nutt gallery is only one in a cluster of rooms on the second floor devoted to individual artists. In addition to Nutt, there is a room devoted to Gerhard Richter, another to Ellsworth Kelly, one for Bruce Nauman, and yet another for Robert Ryman. It’s an odd assortment that initially appears as an effort to flex the collection’s muscles. But, as the accompanying text panels indicate, what it affects is a skeleton of the conceptual models that have propelled art history since the Sixties.

A different line of approach is used to introduce each room’s dominant artist. Richter, whose work is represented by paintings including Mrs. Wolleh with Children (1967), which resembles a family portrait, and Woman Descending the Staircase (1965), a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s painting of a similar name, is considered in terms of his interest in history and memory. Jim Nutt’s preoccupation with mass and popular culture is emphasized through an installation of his comic book-inspired canvases. Kelly’s color-fields are considered by way of a discussion of formal strategies. And Ryman’s self-criticality is mentioned in a room next to Nauman’s experiments in perception. Taken together, historical memory, popular culture, formalism, self-criticality and experimental perception comprise many of the tools necessary for thinking about art of the past half century. It’s a remarkably clever curatorial device, one that does service both to the strongest pockets in the museum’s collection and to a visitor’s desire for terms to assess a body of art devoid of representational aspiration.

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But the museum’s curators refuse to do all the work. After being introduced to these essential terms of contemporary art, visitors are thrown into a room of Land and Process Art. There, amidst an installation of rocks and glass, another of a concrete and cast steel door, it is not terminology that imposes itself but rather tactility and the base materiality of flatness (Sol LeWitt) against sculpture (Robert Smithson). Most of this work hinges on the relationship between art and the world beyond the museum. Vito Acconci’s Estimations, for instance—a 1970/87 set of chalked photographs—was conceived by the artist as part of his effort to get “off the page and into real space.” What this meant, for Acconci, for Smithson, and for many of the others here was that the resources for production were no longer limited to those supplied by practices of self-criticism. “The poet also needs culture,” Greenberg once wrote. “He must leave New Jersey.” For Greenberg, writing in 1942, this culture—the self-critical one—could only be found in New York. For Acconci, working thirty years later, the priority was not culture but “real space.” Smithson showed in his Monuments of Passaic that New Jersey was as good as any other such space. Today, in Chicago’s Modern Wing, Greenberg’s culture is on view—but it is not the only view.

The accusation of scholasticism is disagreeable to scholars. No one likes to be told their work is pointless; academics don’t like theirs to be termed “academic.” They claim that such criticism betrays ignorance of current work and, more importantly, of the nature of philosophy itself. “Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth,” writes Timothy Williamson in The Philosophy of Philosophy. “Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans.”

Examined Life is certainly not boring. Astra Taylor, the director, selects eight thinkers and gives them each ten minutes to talk philosophy in various choice locations, from the Bergdorf Goodman luxury department store on 5th Avenue—also used as a location for Sex and the City 2—to the Chicago lakefront. As they speak the camera wanders inquisitively, almost distractedly, as if to emphasize the spontaneity of the conversations and the fragility of human concentration.

In Cornel West, Examined Life has a star. Film suits West. Cooped up in the back of Taylor’s car as she drives across New York, he jabbers like a jack-in-the-box, all staccato spurts, bobbing back and forth, half Pentecostal preacher, half Shakespearean fool, veering wildly across topics and epochs, his register shifting with his whims. He does make some substantive points, warning us for example against the disappointments dictated by a Romantic conception of time as productive only of loss and never of gain, and neatly defining philosophy as “a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism and wrestling with democracy … in the face of structures of domination.” But overall West makes us want to behold his presence, to sit at his feet, to take his every eccentricity as evidence of genius. Taylor seems to share this yearning, splitting his interview in three and punctuating the film with the rhythm and urgency of his diction, letting it begin with him invoking Socrates and end with him crossing a busy Manhattan intersection. It scarcely comes as a surprise when, just as the last shot seems settled, an awestruck blonde comes from nowhere to shake his hand: a philosopher with a Facebook fan page, West is nothing if not popular.

Most academic philosophers will cringe at the alliteration in West’s definition of philosophy, worrying with Williamson that “shoddy work is sometimes masked by pretentiousness, allusiveness, gnomic concision, or winning informality.” Charismatic rhetoric may make you popular, but it proves nothing; in the end, debate will expose bad arguments. With this in mind, it is a shame that Examined Life keeps its subjects apart. Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler, walking around Chicago and San Francisco respectively, both deplore mistreatment of the disabled, so it would be natural for the viewer to assume they make common purpose. In fact, they have a history of bad blood. Ten years ago, Nussbaum mounted a very public and personal attack on Butler, denigrating her brand of feminism as “hip quietism” and accusing her of willful obscurity: “Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes criticism because it makes few definite claims.” A rematch over disability would be amusing at the very least. As it happens, Examined Life shows Butler in fairly lucid and insightful form; the literary theorist Avital Ronell might have been a better target for Nussbaum’s ire this time round. Weighing her paces as only those with profound inner lives can, Ronell confides that it is “very hard to keep things in the tensional structure of the openness, whether it’s ecstatic or not, of non-meaning.” But this is just false modesty—for the difficulty of achieving non-meaning is one that Ronell overcomes with no little flair just moments later: “The minute you think you know the Other you’re ready to kill them.”

Naturally, argumentative structure is not always clear in an edited interview; rigor will never be the strength of philosophy on film. The most successful parts of Examined Life therefore harness the force of a philosopher’s personality in order to make troubling thoughts linger longer in the mind. Watching Slavoj Zizek is like being in an elevator with a stand-up comedian: it’s great but you hope it won’t last forever. The ecological movement, he claims, assumes the earth would be a stable and benign system if it weren’t for our intervention; this is simply not true. If it’s stability we want, shouldn’t we be trying to move further away from nature? Kwame Anthony Appiah, the very model of cultivated urbanity in a Toronto airport departure lounge, notes that although morality evolved when humans lived in small groups, today we sometimes see more people in an hour than our ancestors saw in their whole lives. How should we understand moral obligation in such a global context? Peter Singer is the Puritan you wish you hadn’t invited round for Christmas. Just as your beloved tears the wrapping on her present and the Bergdorf Goodman logo peeks out, he fixes you with an earnest eye and asks: if you had to ruin your expensive shoes to save a drowning child, would you? Why yes, you reply, of course. Well then, he continues, turning his gaze to the gift, why would you buy those shoes in the first place when you could give the money to Oxfam?

When Singer is on camera, the thought occurs that in philosophy questions are more important than answers, and that the most serious work a philosopher can do is to persuade people to question themselves. Any film would fall short of Williamson’s “long haul of technical reflection,” since only the broadest contours of an argument can be sketched; however elevated their subject matter, documentaries are essentially aimed at those with short attention spans. So Examined Life cannot be a model for the serious yet popular philosophy we crave. But perhaps its most successful moments point to someone who can.

It is Socrates who gives the film its title. “The unExamined Life is not worth living for men,” he said. He believed that “it is the greatest good for a man to discuss excellence every day,” which is why he used to walk around Athens looking for conversation. Oh, he says, bumping into a friend, I see you’re off to court to sue your father for impiety. By the way, what is piety? What distinguishes Socrates from most philosophers is that he claims to have no answers, only questions. Told that the Oracle at Delphi had deemed him the wisest man in Athens, Socrates took it to mean that he alone knew that he did not know: his wisdom lay in being open to questioning his assumptions. Although he did want to find answers, he considered discussion a good in itself. We might therefore think of him as a missionary for the Examined Life.

Was Socrates a popularizer, then? Following Stanley Cavell’s remarks in the foreword to Must We Mean What We Say?, we should note that the meaning of “popularize” varies. To popularize science is to take something which in itself has no necessary audience outside the research community and to simplify it for public consumption. Socrates was not a popularizer in this sense. He had no results to simplify; in fact, he treated the desire for results as itself an evasion of philosophy. On top of that, his philosophy was intrinsically aimed at an audience. In that sense, it was already essentially “popular”: Socrates could never be accused of scholasticism, since questions like “what is piety?” arose in everyday life and he discussed them with everybody. Nonetheless, he was not a “popular” philosopher in the way that West or de Botton are: like Singer, Socrates was irritating to most people, so much so that his fellow Athenians put him to death. We might therefore call him “popular” but not “populist.” Both great art and populist trash are aimed at the public, and in this sense popular as opposed to scholastic. The difference is that great art does not pander to the public; it challenges us to be worthy of it. Yet despite being defiantly non-populist, both great art and Socratic philosophy can be “popularized”—but then the goal is not so much to simplify as “to widen the audience for the genuine article,” in Cavell’s words. Since Socrates refused to write—apparently on the grounds that writing encouraged the transmission of mere facts rather than the teaching of wisdom—what is to be popularized is reflection itself.

•

Philosophy has changed since Socrates: for one thing, philosophers now write; for another, they dwell in universities. Williamson, described by Julian Baggini as “without doubt the pre-eminent [British] philosopher of his generation,” believes that writing philosophy and communicating with non-philosophers are two separate tasks, even if they can sometimes be done by the same person. “Popularization has its place, in philosophy as in physics, but should not be confused with the primary activity.” As is evident, Williamson’s distinction depends on his belief that philosophy is a kind of science, capable of regularly and reliably producing knowledge by means of a secure methodology. The arguments he gives for this view in The Philosophy of Philosophy are flawed in many respects, as P.M.S. Hacker noted in a sadistic but ultimately accurate review.² But even if we take Williamson as proving that, for instance, metaphysics is an “armchair science” that proceeds via thought experiments and formal logic to counterfactual truths, a fundamental problem remains. Despite Williamson’s many mantras on patience and rigor—”the fear of boring oneself or one’s readers is a great enemy of truth”—he makes no attempt whatsoever to take account of areas of philosophy beyond his own, such as ethics or aesthetics. “The Philosophy of Philosophy is no easier than the philosophy of science. And like the philosophy of science, it can only be done well by those with some respect for what they are studying,” he proclaims. And then, in the very next sentence:

The book makes no claim to comprehensiveness. For example, it does not engage in detail with critics of analytic philosophy who do not engage with it in detail. I preferred to follow a few lines of thought that I found more rewarding. I hope that philosophy as I have presented it seems worth doing and not impossibly difficult. At any rate, I enjoy it.

That the secure path of science so quickly gives way to the rambling of personal preference is important, for it constitutes an evasion of the very question that hangs over Williamson’s project: Can there even be a comprehensive philosophy of philosophy?

The Philosophy of Philosophy has been central to philosophy ever since Plato distinguished his activity from sophistry and thereby inaugurated the (still thriving) tradition of dismissing opponents as non-philosophers. But why assume there must be one feature that unites philosophy? What do Frege’s The Foundations of Arithmetic and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra have in common? Well, they were both written by Germans in the 1880s. Such examples make it plausible to suppose that philosophy is in fact what Wittgenstein calls a “family resemblance” concept, one whose instances (like the faces of a family) are held together not by one single feature common to all but by “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing.” Even if sub-disciplines like metaphysics and epistemology are as scientific as Williamson thinks—which is doubtful—there is no reason to assume the rest of philosophy will be.

Bernard Williams was perhaps the most widely respected moral philosopher of the late twentieth century. At its best—in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, for instance—his writing is so extraordinarily subtle, so finely poised and compressed, that it begins to exert a strange erotic pull, as if the reader is being invited to march in step with reason itself. The Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle described conversing with Williams, 29 years his junior: “He understands what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you’ve got to the end of your sentence.” It must surely be of interest, then, that Williams passionately rejected the idea that philosophical ethics ought to imitate science.

Williams argued that science has two characteristics that ethical discourse does not. First, the ideal of giving an “absolute conception of the world,” i.e. “a representation of it which is to the largest possible extent independent of the local perspectives or idiosyncrasies of enquirers.” Second, the possibility of giving a “vindicatory” history of developments in a given field, in such a way that a later outlook “makes sense of itself, and of the earlier outlook, and of the transition from the earlier to the later, in such terms that both parties (the holders of the earlier outlook, and the holders of the later) have reason to recognize the transition as an improvement.” Neither possibility obtains in ethical discourse. To describe the world “absolutely” is to leave out the ethical, since in making ethical judgments we must use not only so-called “thin” concepts like “ought” and “good” but also “thick” ones like “treachery,” “brutality,” “courage” and “gratitude,” which are essentially bound up with particular cultures. And although we tend to presume our “thick concepts” are superior to those of past societies, it is extremely hard to construct a narrative of their genesis that vindicates them as products of a collective learning process. When women were finally allowed access to education, was it really that those we now call “misogynists” woke up one day and suddenly saw the force of an argument Plato had made more than two millennia earlier? Were misogynists really in a debate with feminists over the best way to realize female potential? Any reasonable explanation of the women’s rights movement would have to invoke some extra-moral and historically specific factors like industrialization and urban development. It is therefore hard to see how a putative ethical science could ever converge on a theory that would both yield “a general test for the correctness of basic ethical beliefs and principles” and be accepted by every reasonable person of every creed and culture.

For Williams, the goal of ethical thought is “to construct a world that will be our world, one in which we have a social, cultural and personal life.” To do this it must be addressed to us, to people in our particular historical situation. So it’s not some kind of unfortunate limitation on ethics that it can never produce a systematic theory that tells us what to do “from the point of view of the universe”—it shouldn’t even aspire to that.

Theory looks characteristically for considerations that are very general and have as little distinctive content as possible, because it is trying to systematize and because it wants to represent as many reasons as possible as applications of other reasons. But critical reflection should seek for as much shared understanding as it can find on any issue, and use any ethical material that, in the context of the reflective discussion, makes some sense and commands some loyalty. Of course that will take things for granted, but as serious reflection it must know it will do that. The only serious enterprise is living, and we have to live after the reflection; moreover (though the distinction of theory and practice encourages us to forget it), we have to live during it as well.

The critical reflection that Williams calls for would be intrinsically aimed at an audience beyond the academy, no matter how narrow; it would be popular if not populist. But although we might understand Williams’ Shame and Necessity and Truth and Truthfulness as instances of serious popular philosophy, his last essays reveal a man disillusioned with his academic career, which had “consisted largely of reminding moral philosophers of truths about human life which are very well known to virtually all adult human beings except moral philosophers.” It was, he owned, “less than clear that this was the most useful way in which to spend one’s life, as a kind of flying mission to a small group isolated from humanity in the intellectual Himalaya.”

•

The difficulty for philosophers who share Williams’ belief that ethical thought is critical reflection on one’s own time, a kind of cultural criticism, is how to produce such work within the academy. Most academics build careers on doctoral dissertations that fill gaps in the scholarly literature on a given micro-topic; they then publish them in journals read by other academics who want to keep abreast of advances in order to measure their own interventions; their job prospects are shaped by how many articles they get into which journals and how many citations those receive. Such a structure encourages an ever-increasing division of labor, since it takes so long just to stay on top of the literature in a given sub-field; it also encourages scholars to focus attention on problems bequeathed by others. This makes sense insofar as progress in a discipline is cumulative: an invisible hand guides academic entrepreneurs to correct others’ mistakes and hence increase the body of knowledge. The assumption of cumulative progress seems to hold in the natural sciences for the most part and in the social sciences to a lesser degree. But how would it work in the humanities? In what respects do we understand King Lear better now than we did fifty years ago? Scholarship must have been cumulative as regards the historical background of the play, its subsequent influence, the different manuscripts and so on—but these are essentially social-scientific questions. If literature departments were merely branches of the social sciences, what would justify them attending to good literature? Surely bad works could provide just as much evidence about social, historical and psychological structures? To put the point another way: suppose all the social-scientific questions about King Lear had somehow been answered. Would we then be able to move on? If not, why not?

Excellence is the word we’re looking for. Shakespeare wrote an excellent play and part of the reason is that in considering it we necessarily reflect on our own lives. (How long can unenforceable commitments last? What is the relation between outward expressions and the inner life? How ought we to grow old?) Furthermore, contemplating exactly why it is a great play gets us thinking about what plays are for, what role they have in the cultural economy and in our lives more generally, and so engenders reflection on the wider culture and its institutions. This rationale for the humanities brings us back to Socrates: “It is the greatest good for a man to discuss excellence every day.” That should be our motto as we institute a new model for the humanities.

Examined Life has its failings, as philosophy on film must, but it should be understood as an invitation to philosophers to take their place in public life by writing work that is popular in the Socratic sense, that is, aimed at an audience beyond academia. This is partly a question of style: we will write differently once we give up trying to be scientists. The Socratic ethos seeks to keep a question alive and so encourages dialogues, letters and essays rather than treatises, since these forms embody the fragility of human conversation as much as writing can. When we no longer aspire to the last word, we will drop the pretense that qualifications and counter-examples are, as Williams puts it, “the philosophical equivalent of a biochemical protocol.” But there is also the question of subject matter. Rather than taking their topics from library shelves, humanists ought to write about puzzles that come up in their own lives. For all her faults, we might see Judith Butler’s contribution to Examined Life as an example of how to do this. Rather than arriving on the scene with a theory in her back pocket, awkwardly scouring her surroundings for illustrative examples, she seems truly open to conversation and to her surroundings. Not that she’s a blank slate—just that she draws reflection out of experience at a natural pace, managing not to sacrifice its essential spontaneity. Humanist writers can do likewise, as essayists from Montaigne to Mencken have shown us over the ages. Of course life experience can motivate works that go far beyond essayistic explorations—systematic studies of King Lear, for instance, or even of the stars. The point is only that they be genuinely motivated. But this makes a difference: studies sparked by our own lives will most likely end up traversing disciplinary boundaries, since life’s problems do not come neatly divided into “history,” “philosophy” and “literature.” It might turn out better, then, to consider the humanities as one large discipline with various sub-disciplines, so that ignorance of literature and history would be as inexcusable for a moral philosopher as inability to teach logic currently is to a metaphysician. The critical reflections that spring from such a mega-discipline may turn out to be complex and dense, and they may well bore those with short attention spans—but they will never be scholastic, and that is not nothing. Because for those with the courage and humility to truly and truthfully examine their lives, Socrates was there as model and friend. And for those who care to look, he still is.

1. One might add John Gray, Colin McGinn, Bryan Magee, Mark Rowlands, Robert Rowland Smith, Martin Cohen, Roger Scruton, Julian Baggini, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton to that list. I don’t know what to make of the fact that every single one of the writers in question is (like me) British. [^]

2. The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 59, No. 235. Williamson’s argument depends heavily on a dubious reduction of conceptual truths, a category which includes examples such as “it is impossible to feel ardent love or hope for one second only” (cf. Philosophical Investigations, 583) to analytic ones like “Vixens are female foxes,” straightforwardly true in virtue of the meaning of their constituent parts. In general, he conflates logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy, imputing to both the belief that conceptual investigation can tell us nothing about the world, a view which is contrary to that expressed by, for instance, J.L. Austin in “A Plea For Excuses” and Stanley Cavell in “Must We Mean What We Say?” [^]

“Body horror” was the term coined to contextualize Cronenberg’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, the period of his career when he worked almost exclusively in the science fiction/horror genre. Like all such phrases, it’s a shortcut: there’s more to understand than just an obsession with mutation and organs falling off. Cronenberg’s great concern has always been the body—he calls it “the first fact of human existence”—but his films differ substantially from the other horror cinema of their era in exploring our anatomies from the inside out. Limbs are rarely under threat from chainsaws in his films—they are more likely to atrophy or multiply or go the way of an arthropod.

Even when he has reached across to other genres—as in his most recent picture, the London mob drama Eastern Promises (2007)—there’s a lingering interest in the totemic importance of physique. Every wound or scar stands as an entry on these gangsters’ curricula vitae. It’s notable that the film’s most heralded set piece is a knife fight in the chambers of a Turkish bath house, in which Viggo Mortensen’s hero combats two assailants while stark naked, a statuesque male nude contorted into a dance of death. Meanwhile, the ritual of gaining star tattoos, prized status symbols within the ranks of the Vory v Zakone, draws Cronenberg’s attention as an eroticized spectacle in itself, not just a cultural pointer. All this—Naked Lunch (1991) and M. Butterfly (1993) too—and he isn’t even gay.

Eastern Promises may be conceptually one of Cronenberg’s least ambitious films, but it has a kinky, perverse quality no other director could quite have approximated. No one else is quite like Cronenberg—not even his exact contemporary David Lynch, another freakshow auteur of passing resemblance but utterly distinct sensibility, or Atom Egoyan, another cerebral, bespectacled Canadian who has used a few of the same actors (Elias Koteas, Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Don McKellar) in projects which do share a certain warped carnality with his compatriot’s. Cronenberg, like Lynch but not like Egoyan, has carved out his own genre. As he learned his craft throughout the 1970s and 1980s, developing greater skill and subtlety with actors, his films seemed to inform each other, even repeat each other, allowing roughly sketched ideas to evolve and gain emotional weight on increasingly broad canvases.

Cronenberg’s 1969 black and white featurette Stereo, made with funding obtained from the Canada Council under the pretense of writing a novel, is remarkable both in itself and as a testing ground for many of his key motifs. Though several shorts precede Stereo, he considers it his first finished, complete and autonomous film. There is the use of imposingly institutional modernist architecture—the movie was shot on the brutalist campus of the University of Toronto’s Scarborough College, a concrete prison which puts the small cast of characters on display, its dehumanizing bulk somehow exoticizing their every personal urge. They are test subjects, with Scarborough doubling as the Canadian Academy for Erotic Enquiry, a prototype for the scientific or medical institutions in Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981). In all these subsequent films, the organizations fail, often cataclysmically, in their attempts to impose order on the human species. The more benign idea in Stereo, which feels like an experiment of Cronenberg’s own creation, is that the endowment of these volunteers with telepathic abilities will break down the heteronormative tyranny of the “obsolescent” family unit, encouraging them to fool around and form omnivorous sexual groupings.

The whole film is basically a pansexual orgy waiting to happen, its chances increased by the choice of lead actor, the dapper, overtly gay Ron Mlodzik, whose debonair gait in a black cloak, and expansive facial manner, are its funniest and most idiosyncratic assets.

Starting with Mlodzik, who reappeared in Cronenberg’s follow-up Crimes of the Future (1970), you can trace a line through the director’s male protagonists to see them consistently positioned as outsider figures, uncanny presences and the lodes of an alien sexuality which isn’t necessarily homosexual (but can be). Cronenberg’s men are both emotionally impenetrable, and all too often literally penetrated—like James Woods as the gutter-trawling TV exec Max Renn in Videodrome (1983), whose torso grows a vaginal slot into which videotapes or even firearms can be inserted, and Jude Law’s poor security guard Ted Pikul in eXistenZ (1997), who is queasy enough about having a game port installed in his lower spine before various organic appendages get lubricated and shoved up it. Jeff Goldblum, in the early stages of transformation in The Fly (1986), gains a bristling hormonal potency which makes him a demon in bed—in a good way, at least until his fingernails and ears start falling off. Meanwhile, the erotic possibilities in Naked Lunch and Crash (1996) proliferate, Stereo-like, between every cast member, not just along exclusively gay or straight lines: Holly Hunter + Rosanna Arquette + James Spader + Elias Koteas = six one-on-one copulations. There’s certainly an argument to be made that Cronenberg has done fuller justice to the permutations—the options—of how and who we fuck than any other living filmmaker, including such queer-cinema heroes as Haynes and Almodóvar. He is his own Academy for Erotic Inquiry.
Stereo is a manifesto for the style question, too. Cronenberg took the plunge into 35mm with this film (not the cheaper 16mm, a natural choice for less ambitious student filmmaking) and made it entirely without recorded sound. This had a practical explanation—the Arriflex camera he was using made a lot of noise—but he exploited it superbly. The subjects seem walled off, their methods of communication entirely non-verbal. The voiceover he added late in production, laden with psychological jargon, gives the film a flavor that is portentous and satirical at the same time. A sample:

The proper use of psychic aphrodisiacs is not to increase sexual potency or fertility, but to demolish the walls of psychological restraint and social inhibition which restrict persons to a monosexuality or to a stunted bisexual form of omnisexuality…

Cronenberg’s care with screen space, his rectilinear frames, gliding camera, hard cuts and preference for a sound design dominated by ghostly quiet all announce themselves in this film.

By the time of Scanners, he had succeeded in surrounding himself with a sympathetic cadre of collaborators who have remained, by and large, in place through his entire subsequent career: editor Ronald Sanders, production designer Carol Spier, composer Howard Shore. Cinematographer Mark Irwin stayed with him until The Fly, but a conflict of commitments led to his replacement by Peter Suschitzky (The Empire Strikes Back), who has shot everything since. With either of them, and with either Shore or Michael Kamen, who provided a memorably rich one-off score for Cronenberg’s first Hollywood studio project, The Dead Zone (1983), this is one of the most reliable creative teams in the history of commercial filmmaking. Like the great novelists who can be recognized and appreciated for their quality of their sentences, the cinema of Cronenberg and his crew has reached a plateau of auteurist achievement through sheer, shot-by-shot concentration of technique. Everything that makes A History of Violence (2005) jolting and resonant is a matter of formal architecture, down to the level of shot selection, location choices, music and cutting. By this point in his career, Cronenberg knows exactly how to fill the frame, how to get actors to fill it and which actors he needs. There’s a wizardry in his process: it just works.

Though Cronenberg has sometimes described himself as a thwarted novelist, he has only been the originator of about half his material, and from Naked Lunch onwards has worked, with the sole exception of eXistenZ, from other people’s books or scripts. That said, his attraction to “unfilmable” novels necessarily entails a very personal process of adaptation—there is much in both Naked Lunch and Crash that is pure Cronenberg, for all the serious attempts to honor their sources. Perhaps there’s less of this driving directorial personality in The Dead Zone, adapted from an early novel by Stephen King, though it is an elegant and haunting achievement, and Christopher Walken’s spectral charisma has rarely been put to better use.

Cronenberg’s first great film, The Brood, has the intensity of theme and structure that distinguishes all his most feverishly apt projects, and marks an important foray into the psychoanalytical, beginning as it does with a public confessional between a disturbed patient and an experimental therapist, Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), who is monopolizing the role of father-confessor by literally calling himself “Daddy.” Raglan’s clinic, which looks a little like an Alpine spa, is called the Somafree Institute for Psychoplasmics. Here patients such as Nola (Samantha Eggar) have committed themselves in the hope of healing their psychic wounds through a drastic process of self-exposure, as explained by Raglan in his self-penned book on the subject, The Shape of Rage. The idea is that these troubled souls externalize their own traumas by developing psychosomatic symptoms, like ulcers on the skin. Though that same satirical edge from Stereo is present from the very first scene, as Raglan goes in for his Daddy-hug with a subject who burns with hate for his own father, the film can’t be reduced to a crude attack on quack therapy, because Raglan’s methods end up being anything but the Emperor’s New Clothes. They work too well—ulcers and boils turn out to be the least alarming shape that rage might take, though it’s left to our assessment where any of the movie’s swelling prosthetic outgrowths leave the afflicted on their road to recovery.

Because the dramatic spine of the movie is a custody battle between Eggar’s Nola and her estranged husband (Art Hindle), who’s nominally the hero, Cronenberg had a great gag in store on The Brood’s release—he could refer to it forevermore as his own version of that year’s Oscar winner, Kramer vs. Kramer. Consider what that might mean. Robert Benton’s movie is a quintessential example of what Hollywood, in this transitional period between the auteur radicalism of the 1970s and the Spielbergian family values of the 1980s, considered a classily-made, well-acted film about an Important Social Issue. It was even a trend film, at least as far as the Academy Awards were concerned—it’s hard to find a sequence of Best Picture winners which leaned more heavily towards conservative (i.e. proto-Reaganite) morality than the one started by The Deer Hunter (1978) and continued with Benton’s picture (1979), Ordinary People (1980) and Chariots of Fire (1981). (This is clearer still when you think that the likes of Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull and Reds (!) were widely considered robbed of those very trophies.) Nothing, we imagine, could be less Cronenbergy than Kramer vs. Kramer, with its lachrymose courtroom monologues and beige, civilized emotional investment in a dead marriage. This is why the joke works.

But it isn’t only a joke, because The Brood has more to tell us on the subject of ruptured relationships, the role of blame and the mortification of physical intimacy than any traditional take on the divorce drama could ever bespeak. Nola’s anger is directed towards all of those (husband, mother, father, love rival) she perceives as having obstructed her personal happiness—virtually everyone, in other words. But unlike Meryl Streep’s put-upon Joanna Kramer, who must first fess up to her failings as a mother and wife on the witness stand before redemptively acquiescing to her ex-husband’s custody pleas, Nola strikes back. Her instrument of attack, to inflict crushing pain on those Raglan has helped her define as enemies, is the natural one for an embittered woman who is soon to be a newly-empowered divorcée: she wields her children. And what peculiar, homicidal freaks the titular brood are. Cronenberg intends them as literally the progeny of rage—mutant dwarfs, born in fleshy sacs outside Nola’s womb, which grow to do her bidding by clobbering her adversaries. Crucially, they have no father, or at least not in the ordinary way, though Dr. Raglan could be perceived as symbolically their “Daddy.” They are immaculately conceived minions of the Id, not so much deformed, with their brutish, angular features, as perfect expressions of their biological purpose, which is to hate and kill, thereby salving the hurt of their broodmare. Raglan’s treatment has literally taken on a life of its own, in that the standard therapeutic mechanism of blame has evolved, thanks to these vicious little tykes, into elimination of the blamed. Not that we can imagine Columbia letting Cronenberg within ten miles of the set, but if he’d applied this idea to the literal scenario of Kramer vs. Kramer, Dustin Hoffman wouldn’t get to forgive Streep for her wayward parenting because he wouldn’t get the chance. She’d send her psycho-dwarf legion in to bash his brains out.

By allowing the core emotion of fury to drive his story, and to drive it essentially off a cliff, there’s a strong argument that Cronenberg’s picture does fuller justice to the psychic “drama” of divorce than the sort of contained, whitewashed theatrics that win acting awards. Structurally, the equivalent scene in The Brood to Streep’s surrender—the scene where the mother shows her true colours—is both its ickiest set piece and firmest rejoinder to the other film’s neo-patriarchal, Papa Knows Best agenda. Hindle’s Frank confronts Nola in her quarters at Somafree, a scene Eggar plays seated, as with all of her others. She proudly bares herself to show us the pulsating sac by her midriff, with its new brood-foetus inside. It hatches, and Nola licks it clean. Cronenberg was highly aggrieved by cuts made to this scene by the UK’s film classification board, and for good reason.

I had a long and loving close-up of [Eggar] licking the foetus … when the censors, those animals, cut it out, the result was that a lot of people thought she was eating her baby. That’s much worse than I was suggesting.

Not only is it worse, but it seriously damages one of the film’s key ideas, about the mother-child relationship evolving into a state of perfect self-sufficiency and implicit loyalty. If the fate of the father in this equation needed further underlining, what the brood are about to do to Raglan when he wakes them up makes it fairly clear he’s not a desirable presence. It isn’t pretty.

Though it’s often bracketed as the third in an unofficial trilogy with Shivers and Rabid, The Brood really belongs with Cronenberg’s two other overtly Freudian melodramas of sex and death, Dead Ringers (1988) and Spider (2002), both films about boys—whether twin gynecologists or Oedipal headcases—who can’t stop crawling back into the womb. His vision of motherhood is undeniably disturbing, but only because it’s asking us to consider the bonds within the family unit as psychically umbilical—if you sever them, they spurt. It’s a curious anomaly that this kind of metaphorical reading lives side by side in his work with the seething, tactile reality of what’s happening—his cinema is both unbreakably corporeal and figuratively adaptable, or perhaps it posits an alternate reality of more or less equal validity to our own, like the sensory mirror-worlds in Videodrome and eXistenZ. In any case, it’s both the corporeality and the gift for metaphor that sets Cronenberg apart, because, by extrapolating beyond the “normal,” he can reach right down into the marrow of a subject, as he does in The Brood, while more cautious filmmakers continue to prod politely at its epidermis.

On top of this carnal honesty, the absence of any spiritual component in Cronenberg’s worldview is crucial to his appeal, because what meaning his characters derive from life resides entirely in what they do with their own minds and bodies. As an artist who wants his own work to have meaning, metaphorical or otherwise, it’s not surprising that he feels this imperative particularly acutely, and it leads to a relationship between the corporeal and the creative in his pictures that’s actively—often graphically—symbiotic.  Elias Koteas’s Vaughan in Crash, arranging road-side pile-ups and fucking the victims, would consider himself an artist. Bill Lee (Peter Weller) in Naked Lunch is a surrogate for Burroughs himself, and his typewriter is a fragile organism which he must caress almost sexually. Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the game designer in eXistenZ, is the Salman Rushdie-like victim of a fatwa from anti-gaming fundamentalists, and her life’s work is a quivering, fetal pod whose health she constantly attends to. Cronenberg’s gynecologists are artists too: the instruments Jeremy Irons’ twins have devised for operating on “mutant women” in Dead Ringers are exhibited as sculptural curios. Sex is art in Cronenberg, and because sex is everything, everything is art.

Even turning into a fly, or using rage as a new type of reproductive organ, is presented as a way to procreate and self-exhibit, proof in each case of a radical (if horrifying) scientific breakthrough. Cronenberg goes where few other filmmakers dare in seeing us, like every other living creature, as essentially mutants, freaks of evolution—and what’s to say we can’t evolve or mutate further? Why limit our biological destiny? He is able to enfold the specific human dramas of illness, divorce, psychosis, sex addiction or whatever, into the question of what further states of being might be implied or unlocked by these conditions. For Cronenberg, if no one else, a disease-of-the-week movie is ripe with potential—imagine if sickness, rather than just a grim fact of existence, could be seen as a kind of reproductive activity between our own cells and those of a hungry alien life form. Where might this take us? Other filmmakers, backing away into uncontentious but basically conservative notions of being and staying human, make his willingness to float such hypotheses quite special.

Our make-up can be a dull given in movies, a stock template for storytelling of whatever type, but Cronenberg, an anthropologist of the possible, wants to poke it, experiment with it and change the template. He can’t help himself. Filmmaking, with the options it gives him to fabricate illusions of change—of adaptation achieved through cosmetics and prosthetics, with close-ups ringing those changes and a Shore score giving them eerie weight—feels more like his toolbox than his religion, a means to his art rather than the end of it. The paradox is that “disembodied” nails Cronenberg’s technique well enough, but his intent not at all, because the effects he’s chasing demand something close to its opposite: speculative sculpture in the medium of the flesh.

So the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail—the endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications and quibbles—stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole. I suffer from recurrent bouts of nausea in the face of this densely woven tissue of “arguments,” most of which are nothing but blinds for something else altogether, generally something unsavory; and I feel an urgent need to exit from it altogether. Unsurprisingly, Plato had a name for people like me when I am in this mood: misovlogos, a hater of reasoning. I comfort myself for being on the wrong side of Plato by thinking that I am also, at any rate, never unaware of the potentially questionable nature of this desire. One might be inherently suspicious of what is clearly the luxury complaint of someone who occupies what is in effect a very privileged position in a rich society; those suffering from debilitating diseases, struggling to get access to clean water, trying desperately to avoid the systematic attentions of a repressive state-apparatus, or enduring the more or less random violence of armed gangs in regions where public order has broken down might well be thought to have more pressing concerns. To that extent perhaps my reaction does not throw a morally flattering light on me. That does not, however, exhaust the objective disquiet my impulse causes me.

A world utterly without “why” can have one or the other of two very different aspects. It can seem a deeply contemplative, even if not necessarily thoroughly pleasant, place, as in the poem by the seventeenth-century mystic Angelus Silesius:

Die Ros’ is ohn’ Warum; sie blühet weil sie blühet.
Sie acht’ nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht ob man sie siehet.

 

The rose is without why; she blossoms because she blossoms.
She pays no attention to herself, does not ask if anyone sees her.

The rose may have a thorn and her self-less insouciance will perhaps be barely distinguishable from cold indifference; still, this vision of reality as freed completely from the subordination of any of its parts to purpose or functionality might have some aesthetic appeal. The other, potentially diabolical, aspect of this construction is the one which presented itself to Primo Levi when he realized that in Auschwitz there was no “why.” Levi’s experience, of course, was not really of a place in which there was no “why” at all. The SS officers with whom he came into contact had a variety of reasons for what they did and what they allowed to happen. Some of these reasons, to be sure, were unreflective and conflicting, some perhaps fantastic and delusional, and many were deeply malicious—but that is a different thing. It was not in fact that an extermination camp had no “why” whatever, but that those in control of Levi’s fate were in no way required or inclined to give him any reasons for anything that occurred. Nevertheless, a world in which reason was utterly inaccessible to the individual is at least an approximation of one possible form of a “world without why.”

“Anywhere outside this world” was Baudelaire’s plea. But our networks of institutionally anchored universal ratiocination are hard to escape. How in fact could one get out, assuming one wanted to? Offhand, I can think of three possible ways. First, one could be clever enough to turn the why-game against itself from within. This has been the dream of any number of philosophers including, most notably, Hegel and Heidegger. This way out does not recommend itself to me because I am not clever enough to tread this path successfully, but also because even if I were successful, who would notice? The second possibility is action. One deed is worth any number of words. A deed can cut through—I always think of this with the French word trancher—the spider’s web of bogus rationalizations and create not merely new words, but new facts. Unfortunately, this second course of action requires very significant amounts of courage and practical skills of various kinds—neither of which I possess. The courage in question, by the way, is not merely personal fearlessness in the face of threats to oneself, but also the moral courage to face the possibility that one’s actions—which, if they are going to be effective at all, will certainly be almost completely out of one’s own control as far as their actual consequences are concerned—may turn out to inflict great suffering on the wrong people (even assuming one were to know for certain who these are).

The third possibility is the invitation—in particular the invitation to observe, look at or consider something. One kind of thing one can be invited to consider is a juxtaposition: masses of anonymous people storming the Winter Palace and two stone lions standing up on their pedestals, or the Prime Minister oleaginously addressing the House of Commons and a pile of bodies in a ditch in Iraq. By putting two (or more) separate “things” next to each other and inviting people to look at them together, one is not necessarily asking or trying to answer the question “why.” A poem may cause someone to ask a question or to initiate a line of reflection, or even to develop some hypothesis or theory, but then a clap of thunder or a sudden pain in the chest may do the same—that does not make either the pain or the poem a theory or a “line of argument.” A word in a good poem is not a concept. Since neither a picture nor a poem is an argument, neither is a suitable object for counterargument. Paul Éluard’s La terre est bleue comme une orange [The earth is blue like an orange] is not best understood as “asserting a proposition.” Neither is

Der Nordost wehet,
Der liebste unter den Winden
Mir, weil er feurigen Geist
Und gute Fahrt verheisset den Schiffern.

 

The northwest wind blows,
the dearest of the winds
to me because he promise
fiery spirits and good passage to sailors

Nor finally even:

Ver erat, et morbo Romae languebat inerti
Orbilius.

 

It was spring and in Rome Orbilius was suffering
from a debilitating sickness

You can’t refute an invitation (although you can refuse it, closing your mind and heart to it): it makes no claim. At the end of all the talk, the poem, if it is good enough, is still standing there, waiting. An invitation has neither the direct constructive or coercive power of action, nor the indirect coercive power of ratiocination—Habermas’s “peculiarly uncoercive coercion of the better argument.” If one is lucky enough to live in a society in which a sphere of “free” artistic activity is permitted to exist, no one is forced to look at one’s picture, listen to one’s poem or read one’s novel. Still the work of art need not be without effect on those who accept its invitation.

Simple juxtaposition of external objects, persons or events not usually seen together has a number of variants which are perhaps no less interesting and “compelling” (to use the peculiar expression that seems natural here). Rather than allowing the sewing machine to encounter an umbrella on the dissecting table, one can invite the reader to pay attention to something usually overlooked or taken for granted, which seems to have a unity that upon inspection dissolves. The world can occasionally turn itself inside out or upside down. No one who lived even in complete personal security through the period of the Vietnam War could thereafter ever hear the sound of a helicopter in exactly the same way again. Is a “sand-pit” a child’s playground, a Roman arena or the abstract space within which military experts plan thermonuclear war? I invite you to consider this.

INVITATION

 

Shall we go to the sand-pits?
Yes, let’s go to the sand-pits.

 

Will the air be fresh and clear
over the sand-pits?
Depending on the season, the time
of day, and the weather
the air will be cool, sultry, or mild
over the sand-pits.

 

Shall we whistle and get a drink
at the sand-pits?
Whistling and drinking are de rigueur
at the sand-pits.

 

Will there be a crowd
at the sand-pits?
There is almost invariably a crowd
at the sand-pits.

 

Shall we take our whips
to the sand-pits?
In what tree have you parked
your brain, imbecile?
Without whips what would be the point
of the sand-pits?

The reader hoping to gain insight into Chicago will be disappointed by Granta’s special issue; more disappointing still will be her insight into the condition of the contemporary narrative arts. There are 20 articles in the Granta Chicago issue, most involving some combination of narrative and reportage, although one comprises primarily photographs and a few short works are classified with headings such as: “Winter” and “The View from the South Side, 1970.” Each story has its own title page, but Granta offers no category headings. Surprisingly, this becomes a problem. The articles are so casually constructed and “realistic” that readers will find themselves unable to determine whether many of them are fiction, journalism, or memoir. Aleksander Hemon’s opening piece about the narrator’s discovery of a multi-ethnic soccer game on the west side may well be a story, or it may be memoir—it is impossible to tell. The same can be said for Thom Jones’s short account of a teenager working in a General Mills cereal plant. Ditto for Bei Dao’s story about the Zhou brothers, two Chinese artists living in Bridgeport, as well as Tony D’Souza’s “Mr. Harris,” which describes a suburban boy’s run-in with a black man from the West Side.

One gets the impression from Granta that contemporary narrative art can be delivered only in a generic, digestible formula made up of two parts memoir and one part short story. From the memoir Granta’s contributors borrow a colloquial style and an earnest, first-person voice: “I came to this fine country from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzogovina, in the winter of 1992” (Hemon); “When I first came to America in the autumn of 1988, I met the Zhou brothers in Chicago” (Dao); “Once when I was sixteen I went down to the North Avenue Beach to hook up with two West Side Hispanic girls I’d met at a rave” (D’Souza). From the twentieth-century short story they borrow a structure: the beginning in medias res, the end an epiphany set off by flourishes of vague or portentous language: “Then it was just me and the big cool dark and no wind near at all, as still, as small and safe and warm as the place where I laid as a small sick child” (Nelson Algren); “So this, gentlemen, is what this little narrative is about… the moment arising from the chaos of the game, when all your teammates occupy the ideal position on the field; the moment when the universe seems to be arranged by a meaningful will that is not yours” (Hemon).

The blurring of genres reflects Granta’s underlying assumption that its readers will follow only a certain kind of story told by a certain kind of narrator. A nascent sentimentalism hangs over the whole collection, which eschews complex language, themes and emotions. In place of challenging ideas or feelings, Granta’s authors substitute liberal platitudes regarding tolerance and cross-cultural understanding. As will be discernible from even the brief quotations above, the primary subject of Granta’s Chicago issue is ethnicity; its primary ambition, diversity.

Within the stories, diversity seems to be good because privileged white people should be forced out of their comfort zones, but also because minorities should be able to stay in theirs. This means a multi-ethnic soccer game is good, because it allows foreigners from lots of different countries to separate themselves from white Americans, while a car accident involving a black man can be good and enlightening for a suburban white boy (even though the black man blackmails him) since it brings him out of his suburban bubble, where nothing interesting happens because there is no diversity. Dao’s story, “Once Upon a Time the Zhou Brothers,” is about how good it is that there are two established Chinese artists in Bridgeport, since they provide food and comfort for other Chinese artists, who might otherwise feel alienated or lost in Chicago. Neil Steinberg’s character study of an old-style Irish politician, “Driving with Ed McElroy,” is distracted by details such as the fact that blacks are now allowed in an Irish bar in Bridgeport (good), yet still eyed warily by the Irish owner of the bar (bad).

That Granta fetishizes cultural diversity in its Chicago issue does not make it unique. In this respect the issue mirrors the majority of what today passes for serious literature. Anyone who has been in a college English class or keeps up with the New Yorker’s weekly fiction knows that contemporary narrative has become the art valued for granting everyone a voice and introducing its consumers to a panoply of exotic characters and experiences. This means that if one is going to do a collection of stories about Chicago, one must have portraits of Irish politicians, feminist reformers, black musicians, Chinese artists and Mexican mothers. This is what is of interest about Chicago, or any city, to the contemporary fiction writer, and Granta has all of it, and more.

As such, it is fruitful to ask what such a collection hopes to accomplish, remembering that Granta, an expensive literary journal (mine cost $17), addresses a predominantly white, educated readership. Granta’s editors and writers seem to assume it is important for this readership to be challenged by the stories of minorities and foreigners who have it harder than themselves. It is important for them to know about the difficulties of emigrating to the United States and it is naturally important for such people—in relation to the city of Chicago—to be exposed to the plight of poor black people living in urban ghettos. Such stories are told in the Chicago issue via a series of photographs by Camilo José Vergara (“The Projects”) and an essay by Alex Kotlowitz (“Khalid”). These aim to supply Granta’s readers with approximately the same thrill as a commissioned tour through the slums of New Delhi or Rio de Janeiro—tours not available for our American ghettos, except through the kind of literature that conflates itself with tourism.

What this kind of literature—let’s call it “touristic literature”—should not be mistaken for is an old and accomplished genre called “travel literature” (practiced admirably by artists like V.S. Naipaul, Jan Morris and Paul Theroux), just like contemporary tourism should not be mistaken for an older activity called traveling. The traveler is precisely not interested in a guided “tour” of her chosen destination; moreover it is impossible for her to conceive of her activity without any risk or challenge to herself. Likewise, the travel writer knows there is a point to observing alien practices, which is to judge and compare them with one’s own (the risk being not physical but intellectual). But tourism, like the fetishization of the alien in fiction, ascribes value to simply seeing the exotic thing—which observation it makes simple and easy. The tourist and the reader of touristic literature have this in common: they are never compelled to examine themselves.

This leads us to an interesting omission in Granta’s Chicago issue. Granta, which suggests that the flavor of Chicago resides in its various subcultures, does not introduce its educated white readers to one subculture: that of educated white people. This despite the fact that perhaps the most striking development in Chicago’s recent past has been the steady colonization of the old ethnic neighborhoods by an alliance of post-collegiate professionals intent on remaking the city in the dueling (but mutually dependent) images of the campus coffee shop and the Big 10 fraternity quad. We learn nothing about that subculture in Granta’s Chicago issue, nor do we ever come across phrases such as: “Gold Coast,” “One Mag Mile,” “Lincoln Park,” “River West,” “Wicker Park,” “Evanston,” or “Rush Street.” Bellow’s intellectuals are nowhere to be found in Granta’s Chicago issue, which also excludes advertising executives, futures traders and real estate moguls. I am not claiming such types should be represented for the sake of fairness. The point is only that Granta, which wants to convey to its readers a feel for Chicago, ignores the people who might actually resemble its readers—and who, for better or worse, today make virtually everything happen in Chicago. So Granta fails as tourism too. Or, Granta reproduces the failures of the kind of tourism which elicits appreciation and pity, but never self-reflection.

Granta’s Chicago issue nevertheless delivers one excellent story. Another of the pieces which blurs the line between memoir and fiction, Dinaw Mengetsu’s “Big Money” is well-written, moving, and about something other than diversity. Mengetsu’s narrator is an Ethiopian boy who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, but the story is not about him being Ethiopian. The story is about what happens when the boy, after moving to Brooklyn to be a writer, is called back to Chicago to manage his sick father’s delivery business. Mengetsu has something to say regarding the task of being a young person with artistic aspirations in Chicago. Beyond that, he probes the criteria we use to distinguish a real life from a false one—a mental task virtually omnipresent in the modern city. Is it more “authentic” or admirable to be involved in the daily grind of commerce and production, or is it better to hold oneself aloof from what can seem from a distance to be various illusions of importance?

Perhaps I liked “Big Money” because it was about a life I could “identify” with (I’m a young person in Chicago who once had artistic aspirations), although the narrator and I share nothing according to the rubrics of ethnicity or class. The story works, though, precisely because it creatively addresses problems familiar to Granta’s readers—defined not by ethnicity but in terms of shared aspiration, social practice and perspective. It was the only story in the collection that made me re-think my attitude toward a phenomenon of urban life, including the half-conscious biases at the foundation of that attitude. Its success points toward the flawed premise behind so much contemporary literature—the premise that liberal, educated readers will actually be forced from their comfort zones by stories of ghettoized children, lost boys, displaced families or destitute Asian peasants. Said readers are the same people who studied abroad in college and now travel the world at great expense in search of whatever is most foreign, exotic or “other.”

A truly relevant literature would recognize that an educated western reader is still more challenged by The Great Gatsby than she is by Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, or Dave Eggers’s What Is the What. Or Granta’s Chicago Issue. This does not mean such books are useless—they can have a social function, just like tourism can. But just like tourism denotes a specific mode of interaction excluding genuine risk or entanglement, so touristic literature addresses its readers in a manner which excludes a truly challenging encounter.

•

It is probably perverse, mean-spirited or indulgent to be so hard on Granta’s Chicago issue. After all, it was an innovative marketing idea, and an act of generosity toward a city which garners too little literary attention. The publication is no worse than dozens of others which churn out rosters of mediocre fiction and reporting, often many times a year. This is why it is necessary to take a stand somewhere. It is not good enough for fiction to imitate tourism or journalism, and even worse when it does so badly. Good literature either communicates original feelings or challenges its readers, including their unstated prejudices and habits of thought. Yet Mengetsu’s story aside, Granta’s Chicago issue offers its readers the familiar pleasures of affirmation and pity. Surely in this difficult time we should support print publications like Granta, since there are fewer and fewer of them, and they are courageous and important enterprises. But we should also demand that they be courageous and important.

While this attention is welcome, it nonetheless helps reinforce some timeworn stereotypes about the city’s theater. As epitomized by Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Letts is an ensemble member), Chicago stages play host to gritty, naturalistic, actor-driven drama. Even the highly stylized work of David Mamet, the scene’s ultimate success story, eschews the cerebral traditions of modern European theater—Pirandello, Ionesco, or for that matter Tom Stoppard—in favor of profane confrontations among street-smart, physically active loudmouths.
But another strand of Chicago’s theatrical tradition, more aesthetically adventurous, blends the populist energy of the storefront scene with the kind of sardonic and omnivorous intellectuality associated with such University of Chicago offshoots as the Compass Theater and Second City. Moving nomadically from loft space to café a step or two ahead of the onslaught of gentrification, this fringe tradition has given rise to a number of redoubtable troupes and gifted performers. Few companies, though, can boast the record of accomplishment and lunatic invention enjoyed by Theater Oobleck, initially formed by fellow students at the University of Michigan and notable for its egalitarian no-director policy and longtime practice of pay-what-you-can pricing. Oobleck is now in its twenty-first year of producing adaptations of Lacan (2006’s The Purloined Letter), scabrous satires of the Committee on Social Thought (last summer’s Strauss at Midnight) and the prolix, teasing work of Mickle Maher, one of the finest playwrights at work anywhere today.

Audiences last fall had the rare opportunity of seeing Maher’s 1999 An Apology for the Course & Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening in a tenth anniversary production. The piece, a monologue delivered by the legendary doctor under the titular circumstances and witnessed by a silently malevolent Mephistopheles, displays many of the hallmarks of Maher’s writing. Blending lyrical melancholy with sharply absurdist wit, the play hunts avidly after the conditions of significant action and utterance even as it toys with the possibility that none exist. The play’s central conceit concerns the diary that Faustus has kept during the decades of his infernal bargain; madly, in order to thwart the demon’s interest in reading his most intimate thoughts, the doctor has resorted to inscribing nothing but random groupings of hatch-marks in his book. In the course of simultaneously justifying and decrying his innovative solution, Faustus recounts the clownish interactions between himself and Mephistopheles, meditates on the nature of evil and memory, and dreamily recollects the strange vistas that his contract has afforded him:

Back a hundred millennia. When language was ridiculously complex, when it still hadn’t stripped itself down to the bland, serviceable thing it’s become in our centuries. When tribes in imitation of the slowly advancing glaciers surrounding them spoke a language of only one word, a million syllables long, whose utterance began at birth, improvisationally, with the first syllables and ended at death with the last. A whole lifetime huddled on the ice, speaking—just once—a meaningless word. Meaningless: there was only the one word, no others to define it. And if there had been a definition, who could’ve lived long enough to speak it? Faustus was there. He heard nonsense spoken as a life-duty. A commitment to nonsense one million syllables long.

One can see encapsulated in this passage not only Maher’s passionate engagement with language at diverse levels—from the rhetorical mastery of syntax and cadence to the semantic wizardry of words, their ability to conjure habitable worlds out of bare ice and air—but also two of the issues that drive Maher throughout his various theatrical follies. There is the idea of the impossible or meaningless project as not just an intellectual limit or an aesthetic curiosity, but an ethical necessity: a “life-duty.” And there is the sense of inescapable loneliness heightened by the attempt to communicate, as though the fundamental ethical task is to make one’s own singularity intelligible and thereby transcend it—a task which in Maher’s universe seems inevitably doomed to failure.

The atmosphere of eccentric urgency that suffuses Faustus’s monologue is only intensified in the recent production by the masterful performance of Colm O’Reilly as Faustus, ably and unnervingly supported by David Shapiro’s silent Mephistopheles. Sad-eyed and broad-shouldered, O’Reilly has the uncanny ability to suggest clouds of thought separating himself from his own words, not to mention the ever-receding audience. His oddly cadenced diction is reminiscent in its slurred precision of a young Orson Welles crossed with the murkily heartfelt remove of The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Both his voice and his seemingly casual yet indelible gestures manage that elusive theatrical trick of achieving maximal expressiveness even as the meaning and the man behind the expressions remain veiled.

The intimate familiarity with which O’Reilly handles Maher’s text reflects the close working relationship that the pair have developed over the past decade. The protean actor has appeared in virtually all of Maher’s Oobleck productions. He played Quasimodo in 2001’s The Hunchback Variations and eerily impersonated PBS anchor Jim Lehrer for The Strangerer in 2007. Each of these recent plays continue and intensify Maher’s tactic of high/low juxtaposition even as they replace Faustus’s monologue format with such quasi-theatrical genres as the press conference. In Hunchback, Beethoven and Quasimodo hold forth in a series of blackout scenes on their failed attempt to produce the sound called for in Chekhov’s directions for The Cherry Orchard, while The Strangerer—inspired by Camus’ The Stranger—details George Bush’s repeated attempts to murder Jim Lehrer during a 2004 presidential debate.

In the latter play, Oobleck regular Guy Massey portrayed Bush as an uncanny blend of homicidal drive, tangled syntax and haunting loneliness. Massey also took the lead in what is perhaps Maher’s most accomplished piece, Spirits to Enforce (2003). The initial production of this play, a fundraising telethon featuring phonebanking superheroes that gradually morphs into an exquisite staging of The Tempest, assembled a clutch of the city’s fringe talent: joining O’Reilly, Maher and Massey were writers and performers including David Isaacson, Dave Buchen and Kat McJimsey, all of whom have long-standing ties to Oobleck. The play’s technical complexity and wit are immediately apparent. Featuring triple roles for each of its performers—superhero, secret identity and Tempest character—Spirits to Enforce unfolds as a series of overlapping one-sided phone conversations, from which it emerges that these heroes display a bemusing range of powers. Craig Cale, a.k.a. the Pleaser, avers that there is “no corrective more effective than a pleasant conversation”; the Bad Map, constantly tripping over her dead cat, subjects others to her pervasive fog of confusion; the Snow Heavy Branch, played by Maher, presents a haiku come to life as he bemoans the unpopularity of his gondola.

Though cobbled out of comic-book scenarios and Shakespearian quotations, the play attains a mysterious, heart-stopping beauty. In its climactic moments, the heroes recollect the performance of their Tempest before an audience of super-villains, led by the dastardly Professor Caliban, who takes on the most villainous role of all: theater critic. In the course of their recollections, the performance almost miraculously shifts from one remembered to one enacted before our eyes and ears. The moment epitomizes Maher’s work in two ways. It plays powerfully on the dubious temporality of theater, thematizing the status of its events as both imagined and present, here and far away. And it reflects his constant awareness of theater as an art form still willing, despite and perhaps even because of its cultural marginalization, to make the largest possible emotional and intellectual claims. Forcibly freed from the distorting effects of financial and cultural capital, fringe theater accrues an imaginative freedom that allows it to puncture contemporary façades of respectability. In effect, Maher melds the deflationary tactics of classical satire with the defamiliarizations of literary modernism, simultaneously exposing the arbitrariness of social convention and hinting at the potent strangeness of the reality thereby concealed. When O’Reilly’s delightfully odd Jim Lehrer, for instance, natters on as imperturbably about his extensive collection of hunting knives as about the elaborate framework of a presidential debate, it ironically exposes the kabuki rituals of our politics and interrupts our settled sense of the world.

Part of what enables Maher to create a theater that successfully functions at a vertiginous ontological level even as it remains simply and irresistibly entertaining is his acute attention to discourse and sound. From the extended riffs of Faustus to the intricate group counterpoint of Spirits to Enforce, his plays often work as quasi-musical compositions, busying themselves with the sonic quality of language. He has an unerring ear for the evasions and hiccups of consciousness folding back on itself, whether in Faustus’s intimate confessions or the estranged soundstage territory of The Strangerer. George Bush, as one can imagine, yields ample material, and yet what is striking about this piece is how empathetically Maher depicts a man lost in language:

There is a way to kill people that does make, will make the whole world cheer. Here in the air. I believe I saw a theatric-causation of that method last night. Here in this great city of, uh, ruined city. DO YOU KNOW THE FEELING OF WHICH I AM IN POSSESSION OF? BELIEVING IN SOMETHING WHICH IS SECRET TO MYSELF EVEN?

This attention to the fundamental elements of stagecraft extends to the question of the audience, ever present in a dramaturgy that generally avoids the fourth wall approach of classical drama through such direct-address modes as the monologue, the press conference and the debate. Toward the end of Faustus, we learn that this performance has been conjured by Mephistopheles for Faustus’s benefit: that his final wish before dying is to explain himself to us, “a few random people.” It’s another moment which transmutes the fictionality of the scenario into a living transaction—this time involving a group of strangers gathered in a shadowy basement, facing one another in rows of straightback chairs. Faustus ends the play by walking offstage; Mephistopheles follows him, switching lights off one by one. The silence that ensues has the kind of depth that drowns.

Numerous aspects of Gatz can be invoked to explain its profound power, primary among them the accomplishment of Fitzgerald’s storytelling and hypnotically crafted prose and the creative energy with which Elevator Repair Service exploits the mundane setting to evoke the mansions and deadly autos of West Egg. The company marshals a remarkable blend of improvisatory, lo-fi wit and artistic discipline to make the piece consistently engrossing; despite its length, Gatz hardly tests its audience’s endurance. Yet it demands a response that goes beyond surface observations. What accounts for the sense that Gatz opens up genuinely new—if potentially disquieting—possibilities for the theater? When we say that the piece transforms our understanding of Fitzgerald’s novel, what are we trying to say? As members of Gatz’s audience, how do we locate ourselves?

•

Elevator Repair Service has been a presence in New York’s downtown theater scene since it was founded by artistic director John Collins and a group of actors in 1991. Collins had previously served as the sound director for the seminal avant-garde Wooster Group, with which Scott Shepherd also performs. Elevator Repair Service shares many of Wooster Group’s preoccupations, including a fascination with found text and objects and a disregard for the naturalistic conventions of the theater. Pieces staged throughout the 1990s featured scripts adapted from industrial documentaries and radio horror shows, while characters included thermoses and dot-matrix printers; in a version of Euripides’s Bacchae, Cadmus was represented by a pole in the performance area with googly-eyes attached. All along, the company has explicitly grappled in rehearsal and performance with the question, “What is theater?” The interest in found objects is not incidental to this question; by incorporating seemingly arbitrary, anti-theatrical elements, the company at once tests and reconfigures the boundaries of its artistic medium.

This refusal to fall back on inherited conventions is recognizable as an inheritance of romanticism, and in particular of its late iteration, modernism. Discussing modern music, Stanley Cavell observes: “Convention as a whole is now looked upon not as a firm inheritance of the past, but as a continuing improvisation in the face of problems we no longer understand.” In the theater, such a self-conscious dedication to the reinvention of conventions, the re-imagination of the medium itself, is perhaps most closely associated with the names of Brecht and Artaud, each of whom located the inadequacies of the theatrical tradition in its persistent illusionism: specifically, the illusory divide between the audience and the player. In view of this modernist inheritance, the company’s decision to incorporate one of the landmarks of literary modernism, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, as a monumental chunk of found text, appears both inevitable and inspired. The attempt makes Gatz a kind of limit case of the practices of textual appropriation pervasive in the contemporary arts: can the piece incorporate the entirety of one of the twentieth century’s most familiar and sophisticated texts and yet remain something entirely itself?

A past Elevator Repair Service project centered on the life of Andy Kaufman, whose comic readings of Gatsby have been cited as an inspiration for Gatz. Kaufman, who might fairly be said to have “modernized” stand-up comedy, developed a skit in which he undertook to read Fitzgerald’s novel in its entirety, going on until he had emptied out the room. Like much of Kaufman’s work, culminating in his elaborate and unnerving involvement with professional wrestling, the act stands uneasily between put-on and genuine event. In undertaking Gatz, the company ventures an artistic risk akin to Kaufman’s, though perhaps less personally hazardous: while the comedian ultimately tried to make his own life a sort of found object, an occasion for playing out ever more baroque improvisations, Elevator Repair Service’s success depends upon its ability to present Fitzgerald’s novel straight and in quotation marks at the same time. It is a seemingly impossible tightrope act of the type described by those existentialists who defined authenticity as combining a full engagement with one’s life with awareness of its character as a performance: the thematic resonances with Gatsby itself, however vertiginous, are certainly no accident.

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But how do they pull it off? The first step to appreciating how Gatz works is recognizing that the play, strictly speaking, has no characters or setting. To be more precise, setting and character operate on three different and incompatible levels simultaneously: the world of the novel, the world of the office and the world of the performers. The only one that enjoys real specificity is that continuous with the actual world, the world in which Scott Shepherd, Susie Sokol, Gary Wilmes and the other performers rehearsed what became Gatz in an office space in New York’s Performing Garage, a rehearsal process whose traces are omnipresent both in stage design and performance. (The continuity is underscored by having Ben Williams run sound onstage, occasionally stepping from his table to take part in the action.) The piece that evolved has these performers playing anonymous office drones in a workplace whose only defining characteristic is its failure to function: a setting which, from its inception in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” has been archetypal in American literature—especially in its failure of capitalism department (a department whose dispatches, of course, have particular resonance during our grim moment).

And while these performers eventually come to enact the scenes that make up the plot of Gatsby, their performances almost universally hover between full-fledged characterizations and readings: they are portraying the act of reading the book as much as they are playing out its story. This duplicity emerges most clearly in the sense that the performers resist fully inhabiting their characters. For instance, Tory Vazquez’s coolly brittle and understated affect and Gary Wilmes’s seventies-era moustache serve to explicitly distance those performers from the characters they play: Daisy and Tom Buchanan. The effect is to suggest a fundamental arbitrariness in the assignment of roles, even as events on stage conspire to make these assignments seem fated: of course Jim Fletcher, occupying the desk next to Shepherd’s, would come to be Gatsby; of course the golf-magazine-reading Susie Sokol will be Jordan Baker. An uncanny, twinned sense of necessity and chance grants the whole proceedings the quality of evanescence that so haunts Mr. James Gatz of North Dakota, even as it heightens the narrative’s tragic trajectory. The strategy owes something to Brecht’s famous Verfremdungseffekt—the distance between performer and character intended to activate the audience’s critical intelligence—but here the effect is intermittent, competing with an absorption in the more traditional pleasures of Fitzgerald’s narrative. The alternation between alienation and absorption, however, appropriately thematizes crucial concerns of the novel itself. In effect, the more the production seems to aim at drawing one’s attention away from the story, the more surely it shows the way back in.

There is, however, one performer who comes to inhabit his role seamlessly. This exception is underscored when Shepherd, playing Gatsby’s narrator, Nick Carraway, literally goes off book and recites the last sections of the novel from memory. The thrill of this moment goes deep, and its depth reveals a good deal about Gatz. On the one hand, there’s the sheer virtuosity of Shepherd’s measured delivery: he really becomes the narrator he’s been playing all along. But the move also reveals the unique suitability of the company’s method for exploring Fitzgerald’s text, since it dramatizes one of the enduring cruxes of Gatsby interpretation: Nick Carraway’s passivity has, after all, been cause for complaint since the novel’s initial publication. Furthermore, in choosing this passivity as the one occasion for wholehearted identification, Gatz quietly and disquietingly implicates the audience. Oddly enough, Shepherd’s transition works most saliently to strip away our already unsteady sense of location: abandoning his office-worker persona, he effectively transforms the office setting into a bare scenic stage design, and the performance into a staged reading. Even as events continue to be enacted in this theatrical nowhere, the sudden shift prompts the realization that we, like Nick, have been rather contentedly entertained by the terribly sad spectacle of Gatsby and the Buchanans, and even if that entertainment has turned painful at times, we even more than he have been utterly bereft of the ability to do anything about it. After six hours, it’s become part of our lives, too, but like Nick, we don’t quite know what to do about that.

This gentle insistence on the most unsettling aspect of Fitzgerald’s novel, that it ultimately leaves open the question of whether the kind of reflective contemplation characteristic of art can amount to anything more than passive acquiescence in the face of private and social horror, acquires a further resonance because of the book’s almost numbing familiarity. Paul David Young, in one of the few extended considerations of Elevator Repair Service’s work, upbraids them for their safe choice of canonical works. The criticism is as superficial as it is condescending. To be sure, Gatsby is the quintessential book that every American knows, ubiquitous on high school curricula and civic reading lists. But the achievement of Gatz is to defamiliarize the work, reawakening its beauties and its almost unbearable pains. Further, the production exposes how the culture has deadened its passionate critique by enshrining it. In its own disarming way, Gatz offers a model of theater as edification. Re-imagining Fitzgerald’s novel and revealing its strange depths—simultaneously the depths of our shared and private experience—it offers, however fleetingly, the possibility of a future from which we might not be ceaselessly borne back.

Slackerdom is an attitude more than a given set of actions (or inactions). Take Peter (Ron Livingston) from Office Space; he works nine-to-five, but is an undeniable slacker. He does his job reluctantly and perfunctorily and, when asked what he would do if he had a million dollars and didn’t have to work, he replies, “Nothing. I would relax … I would sit on my ass all day … I would do nothing.” But, when you watch Office Space, you still want to hang out with a slacker like Peter—sometimes even sleep with him—because, when it comes down to it, he seems like an alright guy.

The tradition of slackerdom is a long and varied one. For the nineteenth century, there was Charles Baudelaire’s flaneur, the urban man-about-town who expressed his bohemian values by wandering the streets and waxing poetic and philosophic. The flaneur is the father of all Andrew Bujalski slackers: white, educated, directionless males thinking deep thoughts about life, the arts and themselves. As an unproductive member of society, the flaneur combines the stigmatized or marginalized existence of the beggar with the superior hauteur of the artist.

Also of this era was The Idler (1892-1911), a magazine founded by Robert Barr and co-edited by humorist Jerome K. Jerome, which bespoke the mod (hip, if you will) nature of the idle intellectual reader (who, like most slackers, was necessarily male). Barr’s title referred to his reader. It was inspired by Samuel Johnson’s The Idler (1758-1760), which had introduced writing itself as a form of idleness: something to do if (1) you have nothing better to do or (2) have something better to do but need an activity with which to procrastinate. (Let it also be known that Johnson started The Idler to avoid his more dignified projects.) But I digress … Idleness in early modernity is slacking today.

The flaneuse (“flaneur” in the feminine) appeared only later, when department stores provided an acceptable place for women to do their own aimless walking. The emergence of the flaneuse coincided with the emergence of women as consumers and shopping as a distinctly feminine pastime. Since money is always implied in the consumer equation, the beginning of women’s social and consumer currency was marked by advertising that represented women as cosmopolitans.

The evolution of the flaneuse forked in two different directions: one toward the socialite shopaholics, like the pre-Simple Life Paris Hiltons and the wealthy housewives who do little besides spend daddy’s or hubby’s money, and the other toward successful women, the progenitors of Samantha and Miranda from Sex and the City, who use their purchases to express their power and independence. Of course, the nineteenth-century flaneuse was stigmatized for reasons hardly specific to slackerdom (i.e., vanity, spending too much money, etc.). She did not need to be characterized by aloofness. Just being a woman—out on the town and asserting economic influence—was troubling enough.

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There’s hardly a decent, hard-working person among the pilgrims of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, but the Wife of Bath may be the female slacker’s oldest English ancestor. She connives her way from one husband to another, collecting property and wealth along the way without ever having to work a job. Chaucer uses the same raunchy sense of humor for the Wife of Bath as he does for all of his characters. And her whole Prologue consists of a defense against the judgment she anticipates from her fellow pilgrims. Lack of acceptance from society is a critical problem that female slackers still face today.

The Wife of Bath also raises the problem of feminine slacker sexuality. She is famous for her sexual licentiousness, or to put it bluntly, being a slut. She epitomizes the female slacker of yesteryear as a vagina on legs. How different is the Wife of Bath from Desperate Housewives‘ Gabrielle Solis, whose original M.O. was to kill time until the lawnboy showed up?

The Wife of Bath tells a fable built around the question of what women want, which has two answers. The first is given by the Wife directly during a digression from the story: she says that women want to be secretive. The second is given as the moral of her story: women want to choose their own fates. Consequently, in her everyday life as described in her Prologue, the Wife has to trick her various husbands into thinking that her desires are theirs. And in the Tale, the woman who teaches the knight the answer to the question becomes the most mainstream woman possible: beautiful and well-behaved. Neither the Wife of Bath nor the woman in the story she tells becomes a female slacker accepted and legitimized by her culture.

Chaucer’s male slackers are similarly licentious, but they never have to hide it. Consider that in the same poem that denigrates the Wife’s lasciviousness, “hende Nicholas,” a slacker Oxford student, is the hero of his tale for cuckolding his industrious landlord. Consider also today’s quintessential male slackers: Peter, Ben, The Dude. All get laid and all, except Peter, father children. And it is far from a crisis for any of them.

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Contemporary female slackers, like the Wife of Bath, always end up having to give up or cover up their slackerdom in order to be accepted. In all cases, though, the problem of unacceptance twists the purer past-times of male slackers (having fun, writing poetry, starting a web site of naked movie stars) into the contrived schemes female slackers fall into to gain legitimacy, which generally prove too burdensome to maintain for long. The history of the female slacker is a tragic one; at the last second, pure slackerdom is always compromised for those traditional female virtues: domesticity, popularity, the responsibilities of family and/or work. Which is why we’re still looking for the first legitimate female slacker.

Despite their supposedly progressive bent, many of the recent romantic comedies express outdated prejudices about women and humor. In his New York Times review of the Apatow-produced Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), A.O. Scott identified the prevailing ethos of the genre: “Girls, ideally, should have a sense of humor—mainly so they can laugh at those [men's] jokes—but for the most part they should look good in a bikini and like sex (though not too much and not anything too weird).” This is a different dimension of the problem for female slackers. What happens when they don’t particularly like sex? If they’re ambivalent, indifferent or outright repulsed?

More schemes are employed to cover up women’s real desire (or lack thereof), like “The Penis Song” from The Sweetest Thing. Three ladies sit down to dinner and ask, “How was he?” Answer: average. Which raises the million-dollar question, “So what did you tell him?” Little by little, they break into song and dance and everyone at the restaurant joins in. With lines like, “You’re too big to fit in here,” this musical number is all about the flattery women deploy when faced with cocks and sex of equally mediocre appeal. Since women are supposed to live up to the ideal Scott describes, they need a lie like this to cover up their real feelings and gain legitimacy and acceptance. But in the biggest cover-up of all, “The Penis Song” was cut from the U.S. theatrical release of the film; apparently, the gross sexual honesty so natural to the mainstream male slacker was not even presentable from the standpoint of his female counterpart.

Indeed, a large part of why The Sweetest Thing tanked in the box office was its bawdy and gross sense of humor, according to reviewers. The movie was seen as a flop, grossing just under $25 million domestic (the budget was $43 million), and was largely panned for being “too raunchy.” Due to Cameron Diaz’s presence, reviewers claimed that Sweetest unsuccessfully recycled the jokes from There’s Something About Mary ($176 million domestic). Regardless of whether anything was ripped off (nothing was), Mary’s gross-out and sexual humor was acceptable because it was told from a straight guy’s perspective. The same kinds of jokes were unsuccessful in Sweetest because they were told by women.

Speaking of, let’s recall another Apatow moment from Superbad. The young Seth (Jonah Hill) intends to hijack some beer from a party, but not before a hot older chick grinds him through a song on the stereo. As he tries to make his exit with the lifted beer, a couple of older guys tease him about a stain on his pants. No, he didn’t spill the beer: Hot Chick was on her period and ground the blood onto poor Seth’s jeans, drawing a good laugh from the teasing guys and audiences alike. What this joke proves is that even feminine fluids are funny … as long as they’re exploited for laughs by men. Unequal access to slacker-comedy is part of the challenge faced by the female slacker.

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We’ve only recently encountered characters like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Sweet Dee (Kaitlin Olson) and Arrested Development’s Lindsay Bluth Fünke (Portia de Rossi). These women begin to set a precedent for a future female slacker, but not the kind that will satisfy O’Rourke or me. Dee and Lindsay are always looking for the easy way out, generally in this week’s get-rich-quick scheme: a staple slacker pastime. But both women are decidedly bad people of the unprincipled, unrelatable sort.

Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) from Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha (2002) comes closer, being herself a relatable and sympathetic chararacter. She works a temp job and lives a life so transient that she can hop in her friend’s van on a moment’s notice just to see where it will take her. But she’s also the only character that writes a self-improvement to-do list with points like: drink less. Moreover, she’s the only character in the movie who, in Bujalski’s opinion, needs to improve herself.

Marnie also pines after Alex (Christian Rudder), who is less a character than a collection of hipster clichés. The audience is supposed to believe Alex works a successful job (which we never see him do), yet he dresses and behaves like he’s threadbare, unemployed and going nowhere in life. The penultimate scene of the movie provides the best side-by-side comparison of the two: a self-improved Marnie, almost out of breath from working so hard at her new (permanent) job as a research assistant, happens upon the heroically unchanged Alex. But for some reason, Marnie is played as disheveled and taken aback by calm and carefree Alex. Marnie is denied, by herself, by Alex, and by the audience, the one thing that straight-white-male slackers are automatically granted: acceptance. This is why Marnie’s whole story is pitched as a crisis, breaking with a cardinal rule of slackerdom: slacking is never a crisis, it’s living the dream.

While Sweet Dee, Lindsay and Marnie don’t have what it takes to fill the bill as legitimate female slackers, they are close enough to show us what it might take. Another step closer to acceptance, legitimacy, and access to the brand of humor male slackers take for granted is Taco Bell’s “Bacon Club Chalupa” (2008) commercial. There they are: two attractive young women sitting down at a bar preparing to have a good time. The blonde, unable to believe what she’s smelling, sniffs bacon in the air. Her friend reveals a Bacon Club Chalupa in her purse as well as her plan to use it as man-bait. The blonde may smell bacon, but I smell slacker. An integral part of slackerdom is that there’s never any motivation to work hard, unless it involves a shortcut. The brunette’s looking to pick up a hot guy tonight, but she’s not interested in putting in the work for the pick-up. She doesn’t even have the patience to demurely sit on her slacker-ass and wait for one of them to pick her up (impatience being another common slacker trait). She opts to lure ‘em in with delicious fast food. Again, her blonde friend doesn’t quite believe this scheme will work. But before you can say Taco Supreme, three hot young men appear out of nowhere. If her friend had trouble believing what she was seeing before, she’s a believer now. The licentiousness and scheming are still present, but for the first time they are being used as part of a corporation’s strategy for success—to gain widespread appeal and acceptance … at least for Chalupas.

When O’Rourke says what Knocked Up’s women want is “the luxury of not having to be relentlessly responsible,” she’s putting her finger on a privilege—a luxury—that all underrepresented individuals look for in depictions of themselves. That Apatow’s straight-white-male slackers are lovable and acceptable means people accept that straight white men are individuals whose personalities vary greatly; one male slacker doesn’t doom all men to reputations as slackers. The less privileged the group is, the less slackerdom is permitted. It’s much easier for a depiction of a minority slacker to be seen as a detriment to their group by members and non-members alike (“Stop making us look bad” and “This is why you’re in this position”).

But more is at stake here than cultural privilege; there’s also financial privilege—namely, profit. In using the cute young trickster to sell their new Bacon Club Chalupa, Taco Bell sees the female slacker as a profitable commodity. Of course commodification opens up the potential for exploitation, but that’s not enough to make me want to turn back. I accept, and expect, that there will be bad and exploitative depictions of the female slacker. But these would likely take their cue from the successful ones. That is why even our recent female slacker failures give me some hope for a future when we can get past the oppression of the stereotype, identified by O’Rourke, that the female slacker … slackens.