Wikipedia Realism and the Fate of the Factoid
a response to Brandon Taylor, Rachel Kushner, and the absolute seriousness of description
In case you somehow haven’t heard, Brandon Taylor panned Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, in last week’s London Review of Books. And when I say “panned,” I mean that the review was titled “Use Your Human Mind!” and last sentence of the first paragraph reads: “Why did you even write this?”
Discourse circulated for days on whether Taylor—one of the most successful American novelists of his generation thus far—understands the difference between a character’s opinions and the author’s beliefs. And, to be fair, he earned some of these ad hominems when he asked whether Creation Lake is “a smart person’s idea of a stupid book or a stupid person’s idea of a smart book.” (Sure, he’s not technically calling Kushner “stupid,” but it’s hard to imagine he didn’t anticipate how that one would go over.) The whole thing started out nasty and got embarrassing, making everyone involved look pretty bad—except for Kushner, who famously has the good sense to stay off social media.
It seems clear to me that what Taylor’s article is less a review than an attempt to take stock of some contemporary trends in literary fiction, and to differentiate his own work from them. In the process, he bulldozes the details of the text at hand and uses it as a platform to develop his own concepts and justify his own preferences. Many such cases! And especially common among Taylor’s own greatest influences: Zola, Henry James, and other fin-de-siecle realists and naturalist. But now that the dead horse has been thoroughly beaten and the dust has cleared, it may be a good time for an autopsy of those concepts.
The paragraph from the review that circulated most widely is something of a thesis statement, a gauntlet thrown down against a form of writing that we might describe as “Wikipedia Realism”:
“A friend once described the Lehman Trilogy as ‘Wikipedia in play form’. I’ve thought of this description often, when reading recent novels which seem to confuse looking things up for erudition. I thought of it again, keenly, reading Creation Lake. The effect of ploughing through paragraph after paragraph about Neanderthals and geography and economics and evolutionary psychology was not that of encountering a great mind at work. Rather, it was as though someone had assembled some facts, given their sheaf of papers a shuffle and put them all into a novel so that some unsuspecting critic would hail it as ‘discursive’. This shoddy pseudo-thought is a blight. Shallow, rapidly swirling narrative consciousness has come to define the refugees of the Attention Span Wars, those writers whose capacity for concentration has been so compromised that they leave us not with a fragmented form—which might still ache something to offer readers—but with the fragmentation of concentration itself.”
Oof.
I don’t really care whether or not this “shoddy-pseudo thought,” confusion, and factoid-piling is attributable to Kushner herself or her characters. In any case, plenty of other “discursive” writers catch strays here: Stefano Massini (playwright of the Lehman Trilogy), Benjamin Labatut, Jenny Erpenbeck, others. But of course, realist authors have been accused of merely piling up factoids since at least Robinson Crusoe. Gyorgy Lukacs’s most famous attack on Taylor’s own beloved Zola was that Zola describes instead of narrating or dramatizing, proffering “eternal descriptions” in the place of either psychological depth of character or genuine socio-historical analysis of setting. Zola responded to such critiques by saying that in order to give anything approaching a complete account of human subjectivity—the ultimate task of the novelist—we must “interrogate all that is.”
Fair enough. But your analysis isn’t likely to get anywhere if that “all” is conceived merely as the aggregate of millions of atomic facts, rather than a finite set of functions and modes organized into coherent structures. Taylor’s beef with Kushner here seems to me to be roughly analogous to Lukacs’s critique of Zola: you give us the facts, but you give us only some of the facts (as Taylor points out, the details of how labor is carried out on the commune are curiously absent), and moreover you give us those facts without a compelling structural account of how they hang together or why they hang together in the way that they do. Cue the handwaving that Kushner “blames capitalism,” and so on. Sure she does! So did Zola, and so did Céline for that matter. But “blaming capitalism” does not amount to a structural diagnosis.
Discursive writing, factoid piling, “Wikipedia Realism,” whatever you want to call it. We’re talking about more than matters of taste here. We’re talking about the capacity of the novel to represent and interrogate the Real, about the strategies that it deploys to do so, about the mission of the novel and of the novelist in the 21st century. We are at least talking about the level at which the Real is registered by the novel: as the missing link between the aggregate of factoids. For the “hysterical realism” diagnosed by James Wood a quarter-century ago in Thomas Pynchon’s novels that Real was registered as conspiracy, a conspiracy so infinitely complex that even the principle conspirators themselves can’t grasp it. It seems we’ve fallen quite far from even that degraded epistemological confidence, which seems deeply optimistic from our decentralized vantage. Who really believes in conspiracies anymore? But what has emerged in their place?
There’s another sacred cow of contemporary literary culture who goes surprisingly unnamed in Taylor’s takedown, perhaps the most plotless and “discursive” of the bunch. I’m talking of course about W.G. Sebald. I recently reread Vertigo, Sebald’s first novel, and came across a passage that we might read as a kind of program. The unnamed narrator reflects on the few surviving works of the Quattrocento fresco painter Pisanello:
“What appealed to me was not only the highly developed realism of his art, extraordinary for the time, but the way in which he succeeded in creating the effect of the real, without suggesting a depth dimension, upon an essentially flat surface, in which every feature, the principles and the extras alike, the birds in the sky, the green forest and every single leaf of it, are all granted an equal and undiminished right to exist.”
Pisanello gives us a world of facts in a state of radical equality. Pisanello’s world is perfectly flat; it never presumes to stand-in for the real world; it does not pretend to possess the depth of perfect Renaissance perspective as rediscovered by Brunelleschi. We might say that Pisanello’s “effect of the real” is metaphysical rather than aesthetic, produced out of the perfect distinctness he accords each figure, granting them an equal sense of “reality” within the picture. This is the world as Augustine’s God might see it, the God who occupies the universe as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Each being the center of the world, treated with infinite care. In Pisanello, Sebald’s narrator finds something like a model for his own representative practice—a description that lingers with the facts, notes their connections but attempts first of all to preserve them in their crystalline distinctness, speaking them as if painting with a brush made from a single hair.
If the medievals gave us a rigid hierarchy of Being with God at the top, they also gave us a God-infused world in which to live was to live one’s appointed place in that hierarchy, and in which each place could live itself “well” and in accordance with the whole. This justified all manner of domination and atrocities, but it made all of that psychically bearable by providing a structure through one could orient oneself in the world. At least, that’s the story of the Middle Ages as it comes to us from European historians of the 19th and 20th centuries. And it’s a story that has stuck especially well with writers. Sebaldian vertigo, like Sartrean nausea, implies the loss of this justification without the loss of the immense richness of the whole and all its parts.
And perhaps this is the key difference between the Sebaldian novel and the specter of Wikipedia Realism that Taylor finds not only cynical but immoral. In the “flatness” of Sebald’s prose, we are still struck by the weight, the almost infinite gravity, of each fact—they strike us not so much as atoms or grains of sand, but as black holes. We encounter them as the narrator does, or at least we try to—he functions as a model for a certain mode of experiencing the world. We aspire to the narrator’s ecstasy upon encountering Pisanello, his hysteria when meeting two twin boys who resemble Kafka, his paranoia when running into the same two men (or are they the same men?) twice in two different cities, his despair and terror at a snippet of incoherent conversation overheard in a decaying café.
Each fact in Sebald confronts us like the Face of the Other in Lévinas, or the Address of the Thou in Martin Buber: enigmatic but irrepressible, absolute like God’s call to Abraham. And perhaps the most famous “factoid” in realist literature is to be found in Zola’s own Germinal, which Taylor cites advisedly. When Étienne Lantier sees a horse deep in the depths of the mine, he asks how the miners got it down there. He learns that the horse is brought down only once, that it goes blind in a few years, and that it is buried in the mine when it has been worked to exhaustion. We can only judge for ourselves if Kushner’s work (or Massini’s, or Labatut’s) lives up to that legacy.
So happy to see you tackle this question, which deserves much deeper thought than I've seen people give it. Loved this. (Also, hi, from twitter.) If I understand you correctly, I think I broadly agree that "But does it work?" is the central question to which we're all sort of ultimately answerable.
I have deeply disliked what I have read of Kushner's work, but I also find Taylor's own work hit and miss. I think he's right in his critique to a broad extent. What I started thinking recently, though, is that there certainly *are* settings and characters for whom this kind of pseudo-academic extensive mastubatory discursion makes sense, and even serves to highlight their detatchment, or their obsession, or something else (think of Nabokov's Ada's page-space-consuming obsession with orchids and beetles). But you have to make it work. It isn't self-justifying as a style. I do think, as Brandon says, it impresses people who have not themselves investigated the world around them deeply, but trying to impress these people seems a little sad.
I was particularly incensed by the recent Garth Greenwell offering on this, purporting to have a self-conceived-as stupid and ignorant character mulling at length over the intricacies of the modern supply chain, waxing poetical about it. "I'm stupid and have no head for this stuff, but [300 words of textbook-adjacent modern production logistics]." Which reader would be interested in this? Is Greenwell?? Who is this meant to touch deeply, or inspire, or even represent? I do think it is meant to impress the very ignorant, or very ideologically blinkered (who may never have seen that there is anything impressive in material production or the capitalist economy etc, perhaps). A sorry state of affairs, it feels to me. Just my view.
I also followed this discourse with some interest. Just a couple months ago I decided to read Kushner's first novel, Telex from Cuba, because I wanted to read something different. Prior to this I'd been reading a lot of novels written in the first person that dealt with the consciousness of the protagonist and their feelings of alienation (similar to Sebald, I imagine, although I've never read him). I chose Kushner because I like her writing in Harper's, and if I was going to read a historical novel told from a bunch of different viewpoints, I figured she could pull it off. Well, I was wrong. Everything Taylor writes about Creation Lake could, in my opinion, be said about Telex from Cuba. To me the distinction between Kushner (at least from Telex and Taylor's review) and writers like Sebald (from what I've read about him) is the difference between information and knowledge/wisdom. Telex from Cuba has a ton of information--it's clearly heavily researched--but it doesn't add up to anything. None of the characters seem able to integrate this information into their consciousness, their worldview, their being, and turn it into knowledge or wisdom. It just falls flat. Nothing stayed with me from the book. I still want to give Kushner a chance because I do think her essays in Harper's are impressive, but the ironic thing is that those essays are probably more like Sebald's "essayistic" fiction than her own novels.