Here's to a Life Less Read?
They’re saying that Sally Rooney is having a moment.
“They” are the critics, and they’ve pronounced Rooney the first great millennial novelist. Of course “first great millennial novelist” sounds like something an impossibly old person would say.
Be that as it may, the old and young, and the establishment and non-, all seem to agree that not only is Rooney serious and good, but she is serious and good in a way that is particular to how we in our age-group are supposed to be particular.
She is telegraphic, like someone who writes online, and is frank and un-withholding, like someone who writes to intimates at a distance. She foregrounds politics, but she doesn’t pretend to have any more idea about what to do about the state of things than the rest of us.
Of course, Rooney is of the left. She is of the young-person’s left. If the young-person’s left shows some traces of the 20th-century cult of the artist as intellectual (and vice-versa), they are refreshingly insouciant and intolerant about the romanticized (and implicitly depoliticized) bullshit that sustained the cult.
Here’s a sample of the intolerance of bullshit that I mean: Rooney’s economical Marxian take on literature as commodity:
“He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. When someone mentioned the austerity protests that night in the Stag’s Head, Sadie threw her hands up and said Not politics, please! Connell’s initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance. Literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status-symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything.”
Wowow, as the kids say. I dare you to find something pithier or more provocative in the discourse about the state of literature and political commitment.
“And yet,” I hear you say “still she writes.” That she does.
Because Rooney still does choose to write, maybe we can say that in the passages like above, she is only doing a performative self-critique.
Critics have said that Rooney interjects leftist cant into her characters’ dialog, but that political dialog does little more than to show us that such characters are au courant, as in touch with the return of materialist analysis as with any other ephemeral trend that will leave our world more or less as it found it.
To me, this isn’t a failing of Rooney’s, but a recognition of just the kind of world that the 2008 generation inherited, one whose problems provoke us politically but whose solutions are well beyond what we have known as possible.
We don’t have to hear Rooney’s message as one of despair. We can rather read it as something a most un-Marxian and un-radical lesson: which is not to abandon politics in what we do, but to do immanent critique of the enterprise we’re engaged in, to know its limits, and to understand the structures in which it lives and on which it builds.
Of course there’s plenty to write about and fight for in the world, and do it meaningfully, we have got to stay wary of the solipsistic and self-aggrandizing modes of artistic-intellectual politics that have put so many people off politics altogether and left them with nothing but their books.