Responding to No One In Particular

A Review of My Review of Sally Rooney's Intermezzo

1. Sally Rooney, briefly

Because I have just landed in London, where for the next year I will live and subsist in the damp and grime, probably cocooning myself in the British Library as I work towards my Early Modern Masters dissertation; because I’m no longer so sleep deprived I’m hearing voices; because unlike you dour plebs I’ve actually read and reviewed the Big New Rooney¹; because of all this, I am, as we Mid-Americans used to say, “feeling my oats.” And I want to write. Goddamnit, I’m here to write.

Poor Sally Rooney. Each new book released and here the termites come, nibbling away at the edges, always inevitably trying to eat up and diminish the work she has poured her soul—and, let’s be real, the soul of a whole generation—into. This isn’t the voice of an era! This isn’t the Irish soothsayer we were promised! We wanted a wild, soaring poetess: all we’ve got instead is this far too sensible, self-effacing, practically-minded modern woman! All we’ve got are these quotidian novels about smart, pretty people who can’t get out of their own way! Though nowhere in any of her absolutely stunning and apparently effortless success has she ever promised more than this, everyone (myself included) has for 7 years now been taking her to task for all the things which people have promised, and which she has apparently failed to be.²

In many ways I envy today’s successful women, but not for this. Great Expectations indeed.

2. You People

Now, I still have yet to figure out this Substack thing. I’ve just about crossed the 300-subscriber mark, and certainly I owe a big thank you to all who have subscribed.³ And I admit that the one clearly good thing about Substack is how earnest most people are. In the comments, at least. Not on Notes. Notes is hellish.

But still—it seems to me that everyone’s prognostications about the state of the ‘Stack are continually wrong, and that no one really knows how to get people interested in what they’re writing, unless it’s about getting cracked and jacked, dating, reporting on other Substacks, or making listicles (please, Ted Gioia, put me on: no one’s a better candidate for your upcoming “14 Hot New Media Disruptors Who Just Turned 30” list than I am). My most successful post so far was one in which I stopped trying to write self-contained pieces about various works of music, film, or literature, and went on a wide-ranging tangent about several barely-connected subjects (including the Talented Mrs. Rooney herself). I wanted to see if I could nail down what the rapidly standardizing Substack style is.⁴

With each of my previous posts I had tried to dream up a new style to fit whatever I was writing, whether it was the Serious State of the Arts screed, the hip throwback album review, the hot poptimist take-a-thon, or some brief fictions which seemed to grab few readers.⁵ I have no idea how well I succeeded (though I did manage to sneak an entirely fake passage of Shakespeare into an early piece, which no one noticed, which pleased me to no end). But lo and behold, the very piece I wrote satirizing Substack pieces jumped up and hit me over the head, cartoon-style, leaving a large ridiculous welt that’s still growing—it did better than anything I’d written yet.

So perhaps what people really want is just this—this very personal, vaguely meta, vaguely essayistic thing? I hope it’s not only that. Over at The Hinternet, where I’m starting to get a bit more involved, Justin Smith-Ruiu is plotting something unique, just beginning to take shape. I feel genuine excitement about this—the chance to experiment, the sense that no one really knows exactly what’s going to happen, only that we hope it’s something different. I hope to God people have an appetite for that, for more than just takes and observations about the state of things today.

This sounds like a complaint on behalf of myself, and perhaps it is. But my bigger complaint would be: please stop writing articles about why men aren’t reading or writing fiction. Everyone knows the answer to this. The answer is that men are silly and still hungover from all their giant, murderous civilizational escapades, and women are infinitely more interesting in every possible way. You’ll get your Great Male Writers back when they start writing about things besides themselves. Right now the job for us is to help get a few more of us guys out of the trap (believe me, I fall into it, too), while admitting that at bottom what we really care about is women, and how they know so much more than we do. Also, acknowledging that men have thousands of years of artistic role models to draw on, which is both an intolerable burden and a ridiculous gift. Women are far more free to do new things because—by sheer numbers alone—they have fewer role models. This is their gift, and their curse. Somehow, from my admittedly very heterosexual viewpoint, these things very nearly balance themselves out.

But I should be honest. Say that my writing here is mostly just a means to an end. I did not want to be a blogger. Yet I see that, almost inevitably, the arc of Substack bends towards the old habits of the Blogosphere. And this makes me a bit sad. I had many dreams of keeping up a sort of mystery, and a healthy non-autobiographical distance. I abhor writing about myself.⁶ My secret dream has been that the novel and the book of poetry which I am trying to publish (and all the other arcana, fictions, and oddities which have yet to spring completely from my skull) would—after I had made this name for myself as the mysterious and unknowable crafter of perfect, marble-hewn Substack pieces—be thrust like opaque jewels into the world to be picked up and read by people enchanted by the essential unknowability of the author. An author who is not a person but a name; not a figure but a created thing itself. No biography. No messy, stupid, human self.

What I’m saying, I suppose, is that if voice-of-her-generation phenom Sally Rooney cannot have all that, who am I to dream of such a spotless future? No, we must adapt. Like crabs. You see, the one really reliable guru⁷ I’ve had in my life taught me the secret: the artist’s true superpower is the ability to take every problem, every standstill or bugbear, and put it back into the art. So I would try to do that, for this Substack. Am I stuck on something? Can I not get over this one fear, this worry, the thing that drives me mad every night? That’s the new subject of the work. Not the only subject, perhaps. But it’s got to be a part of it, now.

This is why I have such an attachment to Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2. It’s too good: the man goes out to make a movie, finds he’s crippled by his own psychology and too bound by his ego—above all his cruel misuse and need for women—and decides he’ll make a film about that instead. So he’ll cast the most elegant man in the world (Marcello Mastroianni, unparalleled) as a film director over-budget and far behind deadline, hosting harems of female conquests in his head and guilt-tripping over his childhood Catholicism. A riotous circus of the psychotherapized soul. Portrait of the Artist. Aha Nisi Masa, Federico. You said it all 60 years ago and we squeamish modern men have yet to say it any better.

3. Sally Rooney, less briefly

I think I would like to know Sally Rooney, if the opportunity ever came around. She seems alarmingly sane. I think I would enjoy it more than reading her books, which I find to be mostly frustrating experiences.⁸ This is what I realized after writing my review of Intermezzo. She is so clearly smart, and interesting, and has such a delicate read on people’s motives. One of the things I didn’t get to say in my review—just given the nature of the platform, having to condense so much into 2,000 words—was how much I was thinking about Freud, and the great British essayist/psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, the whole time I read it.

If you’ve not had the chance to read Phillips, I cannot recommend him enough⁹. You can read him very quickly and you don’t even have to remember what you’ve just read. He’s like Byung-Chul Han: the pages go by quick, you understand half of what’s being said, and yet you come away feeling you’re a bit closer to understanding how little you know. Which is what freedom is, unfortunately. Phillips is sort of like if the British had a modern-day Emerson, and that Emerson was Freud. He’s infuriating in exactly the ways Sally Rooney isn’t, though their projects are not too dissimilar. At the very least, you ought to listen to him speak. The man is one of the best talkers in the English language. I would sacrifice a herd of small animals to be able to sound like him. So I take it back—he’s not Emerson. He’s Alan Watts. It doesn’t matter how brilliant he is (he could be a genius, or a shallow pond, or a wily guru), his performance as a writer or lecturer is one that squares the circle of psychological revelation, and has the remarkable quality which the best psychoanalytic writings do: it returns us to a clearer state, no longer knowing exactly what it is that we want. And that is the scariest, most freeing place to be.

Now as I wrote in my review of Intermezzo, I kept feeling dissatisfied with Rooney’s process as I watched it unfold. It’s a dirty sin to judge a book based on what you wish it would be, but I couldn’t help it. I kept wishing it would do something else, besides just intricately and minutely sifting through the endless actions and reactions of her characters. Rooney’s books are fascinating because they’re essentially about fantastical people, while also exhaustively chronicling the way they feel, the reasons they do what they do, and then having them self-analyze those very things. Like reading an exhaustive psychological guide to twenty-first century behavior.

The thing is, I really can’t stand twenty-first century behavior. I hate the social media uni-personality, the rotted Tik-Tok brain, the ultra-online idiocy, the misery and the privilege and the endless self-pity. I hate it because it’s in me, too. I want fictions that are aimed at helping us lift off the ground, that get us away from our myopia, instead of burrowing us further in. One of my goals for this site, which I began with my post on Wim Wenders’ masterpiece Until the of the World, is to highlight the works that I think have done just that, and are still doing it. Works which are aimed at genuine freedom.

I’m not upset at Sally Rooney for “wasting her potential” or for having a different project than the one I’ve just described. I fear some people may take my review and misunderstand it and say that I’ve called Rooney herself a narcissist. I don’t think that at all. I think she writes about narcissists, and does it well. But as an artist, I long for other things—bigger things. Not unlike Adam Phillips, she is trying to get to the bottom of human behavior, to get to the kernel of desire and need at our center, and interrogate it, insisting that if we look harder, and are honest, we’ll start to recognize how little we know about ourselves. How mysterious we really are. That what we say we want is only a story we are telling ourselves, sometimes to obscure the reality of that want. What I don’t understand about Rooney is why she tries to do all this digging, tries to get to the truth of the stories we tell ourselves—yet isn’t herself trying to tell us a story. There are characters, there are motives. But her work has so little to do with story. Most of our contemporary fiction has so little to do with story. And it’s such an incalculable loss, I think we barely even register it. We’re so numb to the ways we’ve sacrificed story for psychology.

Now, I am certain she’s read Walter Benjamin. He is, after all, the greatest Marxist critic there ever was, probably because he was only sort of a Marxist. I imagine she’s read his Storyteller essay—almost work of literary divinity. Its lessons are infinite. And its number one lesson for me (the same lesson I take from Freud, from Jung, from Shakespeare, from Chaucer, etc. etc.) is that story is all we have and if we lose it we die. We have to confront the myths we are given, and organize our own. This is the other thing I started to say near the end of my review. Myths are all-important, and artists have a duty to protect them. In a very real, very Romantic way, artists protect the Truth from a society that is always trying to kill it. That’s why art is so inconvenient.

Psychology, as far as I can tell, is a myth. So is science. They are powerful, often beautiful, myths. I recently read the little-known critic Elizabeth Sewell’s magnificent 1960 opus The Orphic Voice, and I came away enchanted by this very sense. I hope to write a little more about that book someday. “Poetry agrees with science and not with logic,” she declares early on. In other words, poetry and science are united in their ultimate goal—the simple desire to understand the world. That they ever diverged was a sad if inevitable loss, which Sewell figures through the myth of Orpheus, his sparagmos and eventual hopeful return to Nature. For Sewell, literature and science themselves are merely more phases of Nature. They are Nature’s way of exploring itself. We’re born into a confusing mess of senses and phenomena, and from that point we must define and develop ways of searching for the truth. And the truth is simply whatever we can name, or observe to be consistent. It’s anything we can hold onto, and build on. Anything that lasts. The whole corpus of world literature is trying to create a scaffolding from which we can properly survey our lives, and science at its best is doing the same. Only, art can do what science cannot, which is gesture towards totality. Not merely breaking things down, to brief observable and repeatable instances. Instead it can give us, for a moment, a look at the whole.

This is what I mean by myth—it is any glimpse of the whole. Any story we can tell ourselves to get us there. Psychology is one such story. It says: there are things about ourselves we cannot know. There is a world of desires, instincts, needs, which are inexpressible to our conscious, waking selves. The Freudian metaphor of the Unconscious, which we all take for granted now, is just that: a metaphor. And of course, Freud was indebted to the Romantics for his idea, just as they were indebted to the German idealist philosophers. And all of these people were indebted above all to the work of William Shakespeare. Actually, there’s a hilarious sense, if you look at any of the major thinkers of the past two centuries, that all of modern psychology is just based on readings of Shakespeare. But that’s for a different piece, and a different time.

What I’m getting at, in my long-winded way, is that we are due for a reappraisal of just what exactly we’re trying to do with our fiction. The reason contemporary fiction (of which Sally Rooney is only a famous and successful case) falls so short of the task is because it can’t really see the task. It’s too caught up in repeating the psychological narratives and modernist or postmodernist stances that twentieth-century writers got so good at working with. Even the most successful artists in many differing fields seem to think they are still playing a very particular game (whether total psychological realism or “confession” or self-serving fantasy), without realizing that the game is lose-lose. Audiences keep thinking that what they want is more of their own feelings, served back to them by beautiful, enviable people. Writers keep aspiring to write because they want to be the elect who can serve that mass desire.

What’s missing is an account of the imagination in our world. In place of a hermeneutics of self, we need an erotics of the imagination. Some bullshit like that. But really it’s much simpler, and all I’ve been banging on about in this piece, and in every other, is that it’s not gonna happen until it happens. We’re not gonna get the counter-culture we want, or the beautiful new masterpieces we want, until something comes around that looks a lot like the counter-culture, or a beautiful new masterpiece. And we can only hope that when it does we will not, like the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, waddle over to caress its smooth edges before using the inspiration to beat each other over the head.

4. You, People!

Now of course I make these claims because I want to be one of the ones to measure up to the challenge, one of those artists who foolishly tries to tackle the Big Task. Because at the end of the day I am, like so many of you, inhaling all the books and the works I can find, because I’m trying to learn how to do it myself. I see that the nature of this project may damn me. I want to be a novelist and poet—I publish a piece in a magazine criticizing another author’s book—one day I will publish my own book—then people will come for me as well. Look at all his talk. Look at him, preparing the way for himself like he was going to be some kind of prophet. We wanted a searing, world-changing epic! We wanted Moby Dick! Instead all we got are the ramblings of some hopelessly Romantic boy, pining for the old forms he should know are dead and gone! And fair enough. Fair enough.

My least sexy opinion is that the impasse facing most art forms right now is going to be very slowly overcome, mostly by behaving like real artists, the way artists used to. It’ll be faced by people who put their heads down and study the way artists used to do things, and then put those same heads up into the air and say, “Fuck it all to hell, I’m going to do that, even if everyone says the world has changed too much, I’m going to dash my head against this wall until someone sees that there is no wall there.” Everyone says our art has to evolve to meet new technologies. To answer the new questions of the day, to eschew the universal for the particular, jettison the old for the new.

But we forget how malleable and subjective the world is! If I say, “You know, actually, I am not in fact in London, I am really, at this very moment, speaking to you from the bowels of a planetary consciousness as old as time, and my minuscule fragment of a self or soul is not here, but already it is ascending into the heaven prepared for it from eternity,” then who are you to say otherwise? Go read Dante and come back to me and say, '“Yes, great, he’s good and all, but it hardly could’ve happened that way,” and I will say, “Godspeed and good luck with the rest of your unpoetic existence.” Fiction is reality pretending to be real.

And me? I’m stubborn. Damn stubborn. I may not have paid all my dues just yet but I have undergone a few ordeals and trials that have hewn my body and sense of self down to a graceless nub; I’ve reconstructed my fragile self from a basically catatonic egoless ghost; I’ve nearly been murdered (perhaps twice); I’ve felt literal demons stomping around in my mind; I’ve spent days struggling to walk from pain. And no I will probably never write about these things because I’m too stupid, sinful, and prideful. I can only be certain that I’ve suffered enough to know the one thing worth being in this life is a Fool. I’ll say it again: you have to be foolish enough to do the things everyone says are too foolish. Write about yourself when you say you’re not going to. Break your own rules. Contain multitudes. Make new myths. Criticize that book, and write your own. Assert the divine beauty of your tragic human soul.

Above all, though, learn the lesson which I believe Sally Rooney has taught me, with all the pure love she’s lavished on our graceless contemporary solipsism. That the world is bigger than the world. That we are always, at all times, forever forgetting how big and beautiful the world is. Beautiful World, Where Are You. It’s there, Sally. Just out of sight. Let’s you and I dream a little more to find it.

1. I should take a moment to shout out my wonderful editor Olivia at UnHerd, the main reason I’m writing there at all. She’s a good writer, herself, as well.

2. For my money, the best thing I’ve read on Rooney might be Becca Rothfeld’s 2020 piece in The Point. At least it’s more worth one’s time to revisit instead of reading the the new Long-Chu or Manov reviews.

3. Some of whom are writers I respect very, very much; I won’t say who, because I still have my pride, but deep inside I’m basically a giggly little boy.

4. There absolutely is a coalescent Substack style, though it feels a little unholy to me, like the website itself.

5. Beyond this, I’m still trying to figure out how to make poetry work here. Is anyone really interested in a stranger’s poems?

6. This is of course the infamous cri de coeur of all writerly egos.

7. Thanks, Bob.

8. Which it not the same as being a waste of time. I’ve genuinely learned a lot from her. And art does not have to be all about liking things.

9. This year’s On Giving Up is especially good. So is Unforbidden Pleasures.