Criticism as possession

Andrea Long Chu, who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, is best known for her acerbic takedowns and politically committed reviews. Her evisceration of Hanya Yanagihara, titled “Hanya’s Boys,” is one of the highlights here. Just look at this line about the protagonist of A Little Life: “In truth, Jude is a terribly unlovable character, always lying and breaking promises, with the inner monologue of an incorrigible child. The first time he cuts himself, you are horrified; the fiftieth, you wish he would aim.” It’s a brutal line, and one that could only come from Chu. Could you imagine James Wood writing anything remotely like that? Bro went to Eton.

So I’m all for a good takedown (Wood on White Teeth, anyone? Or how about Martin Amis on Hannibal?), but the criticism I enjoy usually pays attention to both form and content. The reviews of Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson, and (to a lesser extent) Ottessa Moshfegh had me nearly grinding my teeth. Chu is at her least compelling when her disagreements with the ideas of a book develop out of her disagreements with an author’s views, and the Yanagihara review succeeds in spite of this. Also, the reviews of Joey Soloway and Bret Easton Ellis were abysmal. What, exactly, is the point of lobbing teddy bears to a pitbull? But I’m sure they did numbers on Twitter.

This highlights another issue with Chu’s views of criticism: an aloofness to her own role in the attention economy. Chu has said that of criticism that “It may be beautiful; it must be functional.” In interviews, she’s even said that her criticism should be as informative as a vacuum cleaner’s manual. But manuals are never known for their cruelty, and at most accidentally notable for their prose (I’m reminded of Lydia Davis excerpting the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary entry on the Beaufort scale as an example of crystalline prose). It’s okay to write to be read. I think that when Chu describes how Mailer ended his essay “The Prisoner of Sex” with a “smug parenthetical,” and then cheekily ends her essay with one too, she knows this. At times, however, her stylish exuberance spills over into corniness. She describes Yellowstone as a “horse-eat-horse world” and her puns seem to want to plumb the depths of the English language’s store of idioms: of criticism, she says that “the lion’s share is a dog’s breakfast,” and we get two separate meditations on the phrase “train wreck.”

Along with the takedowns, this collection mercifully includes pieces that are more positive, or more ambivalent, and use that temperament to open up onto broader questions. The review on Yellowjackets extends and complicates Parul Sehgal’s piece on the trauma plot, the piece on Octavia Butler does not let reverence stymie interrogation, and her review of the Asian-American novel makes an interesting, and to me, persuasive claim: that the category of Asian-American is incoherent, and should be understood as a category of desire. This view flows out of Chu’s interventions on gender identity and questions of identity more broadly, which is often subsumed by desire. The reframing of questions of who one is to what one wants (or as I tend to prefer, what one hopes for) is attractive to me, as a pragmatist, as someone who’s always been sympathetic to anti-foundationalism, as someone who squirms at the thought of being considered racially Asian. I found the essays “On Liking Women,” “Pink,” and “China Brain” to be compelling for this reason.

So Art, Desire, and Politics would've been a more accurate title, as the two reflexive pieces about criticism feel tacked on and slight (one of them being described as a piece of “intellectual history” that forgoes footnotes). But there’s a tension here: desire and politics are strange bedfellows. How can individual desires be reconciled with the social world of politics? Along with the vacuum cleaner manual, Chu has also compared the persuasive act of criticism to flirting, and of seeing new books by authors she’s reviewed as seeing an ex from across the street. The contrast of these romantic metaphors with Chu's functional goals displays an inherent tension.

In the first essay of this collection, “Criticism in a Crisis,” Chu concludes by saying “This is the supreme task of the critic: to restore the work of art to its original worldliness. The artist creates by removing something from the world; the critic’s job is to put it back.” I paused when I read this line. It is the natural conclusion of the argument Chu lays out in the essay, and yet it is diametrically opposed to a view that I had been mulling over for some time: the idea of criticism as possession. When I read the best works of practical criticism, such as James Wood’s review of White Teeth or Virginia Woolf on Chaucer or Euripides, I’ll admit that despite the immense pleasure, I feel a loss. Through rhetoric, through a knowledge of craft and literary history, through quotation, so persuasive is their characterization of a book that I feel that they have reached into the literary commons and taken it for themselves. Woolf now possesses Chaucer in some way, and my view of him is now bound up with her. An understanding of criticism as possession accounts for why some people, including a friend I recently talked to, avoid reading literary criticism: after reading a critic’s account of a work, they cannot encounter the text on their own terms. It is there in the title of Judith Butler’s Winter Lecture, “Who Owns Kafka?”, and in the late Harold Bloom’s fulminations against “The School of Resentment,” who successfully laid claim to the literature he used to have Possessed by Memory. You can see it in the often-misinterpreted Juilliard lecture scene in Tár, where the domineering facade of Cate Blanchett’s character comes down in a vulnerable moment when she tries to share Bach’s Prelude in C with a student, and then lashes out when she feels that (in his own way) he has taken it for himself.

Private ownership is not exactly in vogue these days. In the essay on Yellowstone, Chu describes how “John Dutton III refuses to be called rich, and he barely regards his land as a financial asset. Ownership is a legal fiction: He wants to possess.” Decolonization may not be a metaphor, but criticism by possession is. And in moments of dispossession, we must remember that the literary commons can never truly be plundered, that its works remain there for the taking. The best essays in this collection dramatize and enact that possession. So choose desire over politics, and if you want it, take it.