I'm not a fan of a lot of contemporary writing. It seems very shallow to me, and self-celebratory, though with little recognition of the sheer difficulty of being a real self. I say this because this morning I came across a very interesting essay on the current state of personal essays:
For a certain breed of personal essayist at work today, there exists a necessary and desirable trade-off between aesthetic clarity and moral complexity; a bargain premised on the depressing notion that words are always insufficient to the task at hand and so we may as well stop trying to choose the clearest or most precise ones. The adjective that best captures the conditions of this bargain is messy.… too many people writing have nothing interesting to say and no interesting way in which to say it.
Now, part of this I disagree with, but I do think it’s at least sharpening:
Part of growing up, too, is learning what objects in the world are worthy of our sustained attention. People are less original than they would like to think, and living is both less transcendent and less abject than most acts of narration would lead us to believe. Many of us move through life according to a relatively predictable set of rules and social codes that shape not only human behavior but also the kinds of art human beings produce to reflect their moral universe—the Bible, for instance, but also nineteenth-century novels, romantic comedies, and memoirs. This is a phenomenon that Gaitskill describes time and again as “mechanicalness,” and it grinds all manner of human interactions down into dirty shards of reality: rigid debates about sexual propriety and dating; the preoccupation with being cool; the idle chirping of social media. Since all this further alienates us from anything like a knowable or authentic self, the essayist’s ethical prerogative is to pay close and direct attention to this mechanicalness—to note its predictability, its self-absorption, its avoidance of painful reality: how it “cannot tolerate anything that is not happy and winning,” Gaitskill observes.
I suppose, for me, enduring work is pretty rare, and unusual, and we live in an age, and employ institutions (some of which we call "technologies," like blogs), which produce cultural norms that press us towards a pretty homogeneous way of looking at the world. This makes it harder to make work that lasts beyond the perdurance of those cultural norms.
Sometimes I worry that we live in an age in which intelligence is suspect in favor of immediacy, and truthfulness is demoted behind earnestness (even in its ironic form, the most dangerous kind of earnestness). I worry this even about the rah-rah boosterism and clickbait aesthetics that passes for most of high culture today.
I want a kind of writing that is deeply intelligent, that takes the time to educate itself on the topics on which it opines, and that wants above all to get to the truth, and is willing to be self-critical, and to invite criticism from others, to get there. I don't need it to be warmly beautiful, in fact I wouldn't mind it if it were a bit more arctic than we typically find today. I find it in a few people--Zadie Smith, Marilynne Robinson, maybe James Woods, some others. I'm going to look into Mary Gaitskill, after reading this essay. I don't know that I have many more examples, yet. What are models for me for that kind of writing?