Revisiting Renata
On ethical language, summer of hate, criticism, and protest
🖊️ MENTIONED: Renata Adler’s After The Tall Timber (2015); a 2015 interview between Catherine Lacey and Adler; Adler’s “The Perils of Pauline” and “The Guard: But Ohio, Well, I Guess That’s One State They Elect to Lock and Load” (of all the essays in Timber, these two are my must-reads); .,¤°✿princess babygirl on “interesting girl” essayists; Katie Ryder’s “Against the Barricades”; Zadie Smith’s “Shibboleth”; Steve Salaita’s “Our (Your) Pitiful Ethics!”
Hardcovers are a pain in the ass to read and a greater pain in the ass to carry around. I made an exception last week for Renata Adler, lugging her 500-page tome of collected nonfiction through TSA en route to Madrid and London. I also had Gary Indiana’s Resentment, Alice Notley’s A Culture of One, and Joy Williams’s State of Grace in my suitcase. But it was Adler’s, jacket cover intact, that I stuffed into my armpit before boarding the plane. Adler is a good airplane read because in both her fiction and reportage, she is always on the go. Her body and mind are never at rest, the circumstances in media res. Even her film reviews unfurl along a thrillingly associative thread. (In her hilarious, albeit poorly-aged pan of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Adler likens the spacecraft to “a plumber's helper with a fist on the end of it, a pod that resembles a limbed washing machine” and the cinematography to “the visual equivalent of rubbing the stomach and patting the head.”)
Like most writer-journalist-public-intellectual types in the ‘60s, Adler did a lot of traveling. She went to Vietnam, Biafra, Israel, and Cuba, mostly on assignment for The New Yorker, which she joined as a staff writer at 24. That decade, she penned a series of political scene reports, parachuting into Alabama for the March on Selma, Mississippi for the Black Power March, Los Angeles for the Sunset Strip hippies, and New Jersey for an incriminating investigation into the National Guard months after the Kent State shooting. Adler stayed on staff at the magazine until 2001. Her departure was apparently prompted by an off-hand comment from David Remnick, who rebuffed her request to write about the Starr Report (related to Bill Clinton’s impeachment). By Adler’s telling, he’d told her, “Frankly Renata, I have too many Monica Lewinsky pieces.” Adler, mind you, went to Yale Law School and wrote speeches for the House Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment inquiry. She made up her mind then and there to never write for The New Yorker again. After The Tall Timber, released in 2015, chronicles three decades’ worth of essays and reportage, and includes Adler’s iconic evisceration of film critic Pauline Kael, a “takedown” that some believe led to her excommunication from the New York literati.
I was introduced to Adler last summer with Pitch Dark, a novel about an American woman who travels alone through Ireland, dwelling on her longstanding affair with a married man. Shortly afterwards, I read Speedboat, which follows a young New York journalist roaming about town; it won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best debut novel. I was surprised, then, to struggle with Adler’s polemical nonfiction in Tall Timber, which reflected her ideological streak of radical centrism — a position (or phrase) that she has since renounced. In an interview with Catherine Lacey, Adler said, “Radical Middle was a mistake … It’s particularly hard now because the positions are so false. There is no coherence to what position you hold. Some places you can have racial diversity and some places it’s not a value. And you can’t say [radical middle]. You just can’t say that.”
I suppose I was discomfited by our seeming ideological dissonance. A child of refugees with an anti-institutionalist streak, Adler is a writer who I deeply admire, respect, and relate to, in spite of how she once characterized herself as a “liberal Republican” and expressed, in the introduction to her 1970 book Towards a Radical Middle, a distaste for the strain of radicalism that emerged during the Vietnam War, a radicalism that was committed to railing against “the System” but was just as entrenched within that System. She was suspect of the performative edge to this style of radicalism, which she believed was a form of dangerous nihilism in disguise:
“To use the vocabulary of total violence, with less and less consciousness of its ingredient of metaphor, to cultivate scorched earth madness as a form of consciousness (of courage, even), to call history mad, and to dismiss every growing, improving human enterprise as a form of tokenism, an irrelevance in which one has no obligation to take part … [T]he apocalyptic sensibility [of radicalism] had moved into politics too, into every part of life. Its earmarks were clenched teeth, personal agonies, rhetoric, the single plane of atrocity view of Western man, above all, a psychoanalytic concept of moral responsibility — based, not on conscience, which is exercised in substantive action, but on guilt, which is appeased in confession, sublimation, symbolic purge…”
The first time I read this introductory essay, I thought, This has not aged well, specifically the passage where Adler denounces the “totalitarian lie at the heart of political cliché … and the simplicities of ‘imperialism,’ ‘genocide,’ ‘materialism,’ ‘police brutality,’ ‘military-industrial complex,’ ‘racism,’ tossed about as though they were interchangeable.” But perhaps this gut reaction to a piece of writing published in 1969 reveals more about me than Adler, who rejected the influence of social movements and a consistent political identity. I began reading Tall Timber again, partly because of a silly line in a certain Bookforum review — “the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot” — and I had what they call a change of heart, a reassessment of my personal expectations: What did I hope to get from Adler’s writing? It wasn’t whole-hearted agreement. I think Adler would balk at the superficial idolization of “It girl essayists,” though she was, according to Michael Wolff in his Timber introduction, “an ‘it’ girl, complete with the iconic look and memorable pictures by Richard Avedon, provocative and fashionable.”
What I’ve come to appreciate is the critical acuity that her nonfiction imparts, from which I can determine my own post-hoc perspectives on, say, the New York Times’ firing of Jayson Blair or Adler’s pro-Israel “stance” on the Six Day War. (I was more impressed by her unsparing coverage of genocide in Biafra.) Adler despises clichés so I hope she would forgive this idiomatic summary of her style: She gives it to the reader straight every time. She doesn’t write to persuade. Her writing is wise and shrewd and, most remarkably, unafraid — which has led her to admit things that were “at odds” with media institutions and culture writ large, which, I suppose, prevents certain essays from achieving a teflon sheen of timelessness. You have to read Adler with/in context, and she delights in specificity, from dialogue to characterizations.
I’ve grown to trust her as a witness, not always as an interpreter of why things are the way they are (Didion, I think, outshines her in this department), but as someone who won’t excise details or dialogue that don’t serve the “narrative arc” of a piece of reporting. Of war zones and war-torn countries, for example, she admitted that there was a mundanity to the horror, a rhythm of life that nevertheless persisted. In her dispatch from the Six Day War: “Friday, June 2nd, in Tel Aviv was listless and stiflingly dull. The city was uncrowded, but it seemed as though everyone might merely be taking a siesta.” Most of all, I appreciate her searing righteousness and authority on the page, her search for some truth at the center of events, a truth that, while muddied or “complicated” or unknowable, she aspires to convey in exacting terms.
I have been joking to friends that the “summer of hate” is upon us, a phrase cribbed from a Chris Kraus title. Hate, so I am told, is in the air, as petty and ubiquitous as the spring pollen lodged inside my nostrils. The prime example that comes to mind is the latest “rap beef” between Drake and Kendrick, the culmination of a deep-seated hatred nurtured for over a decade, stoked by the occasional chest-thumping verse that, for years, fell short of any meaningful confrontation.1
But given that beef in our contemporary literary “culture,” by which I mean the social circlejerk of the two hundred or so Twitter accounts that insert themselves into “discourse,” is basically backwash, half-formed arguments regurgitated for clout, I was itching to read something that oozed of contempt, which led me, of course, back to Adler, though it is a disservice to her brilliance to brand her as simply a takedown artist.2 Adler is a critic who “holds to an ethics of language,” writes Katie Ryder in a review of Tall Timber. She distrusted critics who had too many opinions about too many things (she lasted 14 months as a near-daily film critic at the NYT). “Her career-long fight, her barricade, is for faithful representation and fidelity to the real meanings of words, and thus against obfuscation and the ‘debasement of language.’”
Her beef with Kael was not about the latter’s critical opinions of movies, “but prose and the relation between writers and readers, and of course art.” Adler cared about honesty, accuracy, and the integrity of argument, whether that be of another critic’s work or of the political factions and movements she covered. Her writing encourages readers “to stay aboard and to maintain distinctions on every side: to get the unpolarized student to his class without having him clubbed or teargassed by a cop—who is not too good at making distinctions either.”
This distinction, too, applies to violence. Of “bombs dropping on villages, cops beating kids on the head, kids throwing bottles at cops, the violence to the spirit of the McCarthy years, the violation of human dignity in the exclusion and poverty — there is a degree of violence in them all, but a difference of degree, an extent of metaphor, and we still distinguish among literalisms, metaphors, questions of degree.” She denounces “the radicalism of rhetoric, theater, mannerism, psychodrama, air,” and the impulse to view “every human problem at a single level of atrocity.”
I returned to Adler’s “Radical Middle” essay after reading Zadie Smith in The New Yorker on, ironically, the ethics of language, a piece that grossly equates rhetoric with genocidal violence: “In the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.” The essay begins by contending with this abstract notion of “philosophy” and “politics” — empty, diffident words that, in Smith’s attempts to intellectualize “the ethics” behind the campus protests, coalesce into a worthless piece of punditry, without Smith ever stepping foot, or even thinking to cite reports or interviews with protesters, onto any campus to support her case. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Smith is abetting genocide (though I, for the most part, agree with Steve Salaita’s line-by-line analysis of the essay’s failures). What I take issue with is Smith’s sanctimonious leveling of atrocity, a discursive privilege afforded by “liberal” citizens of the democratic West, whose tax dollars are used by our governments to fund out-of-state military operations and proxy wars for national benefit, while maintaining the facade of peace at home by sending in hordes of cops to suppress “disturbances” on campus, i.e. beating and shooting at student protesters, who dare to express dissent.
From my essay on the photographer An-My Lê, “Americans (and most of the West) are more familiar with images of war than the realities of it, shielded as we are from the prospect of ground invasion and overnight annexation, the fear of loose shrapnel, the shrill of rockets and bombs. Rather, images (moving and still) have come to define our relationship to war, as an abstract event, a televised simulation, that occurs beyond our national borders. This abstract “understanding” of war breeds a sense of doomed complicity … [and] the illusion of peace only engenders a false sense of security. Peace is a fiction, a narrative that seeks to insulate us from the horrors of armed conflict abroad.”
Our subjectivities are, quite frankly and thankfully, not fucked up by war, which is, as my dad likes to remind me, a simple matter of survival or death. Not life. College-educated Americans have been protected from such horrors our whole lives, and so in our “culture wars” (a cringeworthy term we should retire), the tendency is to abstract “violence” into the realm of rhetoric, a tactic which the Left and Right have both wielded, though such fixations on “ethics” or “rhetoric” ultimately distract from the actual violence of war wielded against Palestinian citizens and children. I’ve always been disturbed by “free speech” advocates — free speech, unsurprisingly, being the singular issue that the American pundit class is willing to defend, though I can’t recall the last time a domestic columnist (not a reporter) was arrested, jailed, or killed for holding “controversial” opinions — who take eager euphemistic laps around issues where lives are at stake.
On the plane home to the US, I read Adler’s 1969 “Letter from Biafra,” and was horrified by her descriptions of how Biafran civilians were contending with genocide, as it reminded me of the dispatches from Palestine: “Genocide comes up again and again, and Biafrans will talk about a friend, a relative, a town, a personal flight from a mob before or in the war with a precise attention to dates and the most gruesome detail … One thing one hardly sees in Biafra is cemeteries. The dead are buried all over the third of the country that remains.”
I, for one, have been living for this beef. I am on Genius close-reading every metatextual slight. I am on corners of Male YouTube cackling at the top comments of reaction videos. The conniving, performative cruelty (the photos of Drake’s prescriptions, the screenshot of Drake’s home with the sex offender symbols) puts Mean Girls (both 2024 and 2004) to shame. This is peak Male Gossip between two self-employed elder Millennial fathers who don’t know how to sit down, and I can’t look away!
One studio took out an ad in the New York Times during Adler’s 14-month stint as a film critic (at the young age of 29)! Among film buffs and the industry, she was derided and denounced for her brazen pans, but I don’t think of Adler as an all-around hater. She was, for the most part, a hard-to-please critic. She hated Pauline Kael and saw her as a symptom of what was rotten about literary culture. There’s no shade of envy in her hatred; I heard Adler talk about the Kael debacle on the Longform podcast and her contempt for it all has yet to dissipate. I recently tweeted about the conflation of criticism (a skill that can be honed) with hate (an intensely rare, supercharged feeling) and hate with envy (a more common albeit equally intense, supercharged feeling that people often try to deny or disguise in criticism), though good critics (and criticism) are capable of distinguishing between the three and plow their hatred as fuel for criticism, without letting this odium flow unchecked. Adler never liked producing rapid-pace criticism (what we now call “hot takes”), which leads me to say: Gary Indiana is a better model for a critic-as-hater. In Gawker, Paul McAdory writes of Indiana: “A self-described fan of ‘well-honed malice,’ [he] doesn’t merely love to hate. He hates to love. His work presupposes that we all should. Not disdain love and loving, but actually use vitriol and resentment in order that we might better, and more intimately, or at minimum more freely, love our favored objects.” It’s a beautiful defense of hating, really.
Great commentary on the Zadie Smith controversy. Looking to build on similar ideas as well.