I like that he's open to criticizing other writers, but he also criticizes himself.
I tend to dislike fiction that seems to know the answer. I remember reading a quote, maybe from James Baldwin, that went something like, "When you sit down to write you have to forget you know anything." So absolutely show how society makes someone into a loser, but don't allow yourself to think, "I know how society should be set up to prevent this." When I can tell a lot about a writer's politics from their writing, I have noticed that the writing is usually bad.
Great interview. My two cents is that I wish Taylor, who seems so profoundly liberal in his energies, would stop bashing liberalism as though it's only its most superficial manifestation. The guy's such a liberal in his bones, obviously.
I laughed at this comment not because I think it's untrue but because you really nailed me. I brought a lot Stuart Mill with me to Europe this summer to get to the bottom of the whole liberalism thing. I'm very slowly filling in a lot of gaps from a lifetime of being an autodidact and having very fugitive reading tastes. I'll probably end the summer as a total convert. Well spotted, haha.
Good to hear! It was meant in the spirit of frustrated affection, one liberal to another. It's not that I think liberalism hasn't been rather wan and exhausted feeling lately. I hear the critique. I just think (which as a liberal I obviously would) that it needs revitalization from the inside rather than destruction.
I can't speak for Brandon, but I am a non-rich person from Alabama, and I have a relationship with the canon that often surprises liberals from the northeast whose whole framework for "the social" and hell, language altogether, is very different.
Yes, somehow Trilling got omitted in your account of discovering literary criticism; but it turns out his waters of liberalism run even deeper than Lukacs and Jameson.
This is great. Really interesting to read about Brandon's ideas on the "cinematic mode" and how reading Jameson and Lukács gave him ideas about "novels as novels." Also how his editors wanted him to cut the sections about going into other people's experience, or consciousness, but he wouldn't do it. There's a lot to consider about contemporary fiction here and this does a good job putting names to things that people talk about a lot but struggle to articulate clearly.
Enjoyed this interview. Did have a question about how ideology is being discussed here though. Isn’t ideology a system of beliefs, ideas and ideals within a society? People make references to overt political beliefs as the only thing ideology is, but that’s only a part of what it is. Perhaps I don’t know enough about this to enter a discussion on it, but the political can’t blanket everything within an ideology unless we decide that the spiritual doesn’t exist.
For him, ideology = worldview, in the sense that everybody has one, and it colors and drives everything that they do. In this interview he mentions how at one point he viewed all relationships as fraught or threatening in some way—that would be an example of (part of) his ideology or worldview. In the essay I linked, he gives other examples like the cynicism that pervades many millennial authors’ novels.
There are of course *formal* ideologies to which a person might consciously subscribe (e.g., Mormonism, progressivism, other -isms), but that’s not what he’s talking about.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, each of us is operating with a certain set of views. Brandon’s plea is for writers to develop an awareness of and curiosity about their own worldviews so that they might be able to create characters who don’t, by default, mimic theirs.
Reading Taylor’s mind at work is a pleasure in any context (although I have so far preferred his non-fiction to his fiction, I’m looking forward to what comes now he has read more widely in criticism and theory), and this was a brilliant interview. Not least for how Taylor reveals the premise of several of the questions - on woke, on the potential of substack, etc - to be wounded ego.
As a bona-fide philistine I have no standing here, but I think when people say "art for art's sake" what they mean--or at least the defensible purpose of what they mean--is "art that's not for the sake of any specific, short-term strategic or political goal". In science, as I'm sure Brandon knows, we'd call that "exploratory" or "curiosity-driven" science instead of, say, engineering the solution to a specific problem.
I dunno, would Brandon object to my more milquetoast version of the credo? Am I way off base?
Love the part about the similarities between science and writing. I knew Brandon is fearless and brilliant—never knew he was controversial. is fearless. And I agree as a fan of Kushner, she mailed it in on her last novel.
I like that he's open to criticizing other writers, but he also criticizes himself.
I tend to dislike fiction that seems to know the answer. I remember reading a quote, maybe from James Baldwin, that went something like, "When you sit down to write you have to forget you know anything." So absolutely show how society makes someone into a loser, but don't allow yourself to think, "I know how society should be set up to prevent this." When I can tell a lot about a writer's politics from their writing, I have noticed that the writing is usually bad.
Great interview. My two cents is that I wish Taylor, who seems so profoundly liberal in his energies, would stop bashing liberalism as though it's only its most superficial manifestation. The guy's such a liberal in his bones, obviously.
I laughed at this comment not because I think it's untrue but because you really nailed me. I brought a lot Stuart Mill with me to Europe this summer to get to the bottom of the whole liberalism thing. I'm very slowly filling in a lot of gaps from a lifetime of being an autodidact and having very fugitive reading tastes. I'll probably end the summer as a total convert. Well spotted, haha.
Good to hear! It was meant in the spirit of frustrated affection, one liberal to another. It's not that I think liberalism hasn't been rather wan and exhausted feeling lately. I hear the critique. I just think (which as a liberal I obviously would) that it needs revitalization from the inside rather than destruction.
I can't speak for Brandon, but I am a non-rich person from Alabama, and I have a relationship with the canon that often surprises liberals from the northeast whose whole framework for "the social" and hell, language altogether, is very different.
Yes, somehow Trilling got omitted in your account of discovering literary criticism; but it turns out his waters of liberalism run even deeper than Lukacs and Jameson.
This is great. Really interesting to read about Brandon's ideas on the "cinematic mode" and how reading Jameson and Lukács gave him ideas about "novels as novels." Also how his editors wanted him to cut the sections about going into other people's experience, or consciousness, but he wouldn't do it. There's a lot to consider about contemporary fiction here and this does a good job putting names to things that people talk about a lot but struggle to articulate clearly.
Enjoyed this interview. Did have a question about how ideology is being discussed here though. Isn’t ideology a system of beliefs, ideas and ideals within a society? People make references to overt political beliefs as the only thing ideology is, but that’s only a part of what it is. Perhaps I don’t know enough about this to enter a discussion on it, but the political can’t blanket everything within an ideology unless we decide that the spiritual doesn’t exist.
Brandon wrote about ideology in fiction here: https://open.substack.com/pub/blgtylr/p/goku-vs-jesus-ideology-in-fiction?r=8n2nt&utm_medium=ios
For him, ideology = worldview, in the sense that everybody has one, and it colors and drives everything that they do. In this interview he mentions how at one point he viewed all relationships as fraught or threatening in some way—that would be an example of (part of) his ideology or worldview. In the essay I linked, he gives other examples like the cynicism that pervades many millennial authors’ novels.
There are of course *formal* ideologies to which a person might consciously subscribe (e.g., Mormonism, progressivism, other -isms), but that’s not what he’s talking about.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, each of us is operating with a certain set of views. Brandon’s plea is for writers to develop an awareness of and curiosity about their own worldviews so that they might be able to create characters who don’t, by default, mimic theirs.
Thanks, I’ll read the article you linked.
Reading Taylor’s mind at work is a pleasure in any context (although I have so far preferred his non-fiction to his fiction, I’m looking forward to what comes now he has read more widely in criticism and theory), and this was a brilliant interview. Not least for how Taylor reveals the premise of several of the questions - on woke, on the potential of substack, etc - to be wounded ego.
As a bona-fide philistine I have no standing here, but I think when people say "art for art's sake" what they mean--or at least the defensible purpose of what they mean--is "art that's not for the sake of any specific, short-term strategic or political goal". In science, as I'm sure Brandon knows, we'd call that "exploratory" or "curiosity-driven" science instead of, say, engineering the solution to a specific problem.
I dunno, would Brandon object to my more milquetoast version of the credo? Am I way off base?
Love the part about the similarities between science and writing. I knew Brandon is fearless and brilliant—never knew he was controversial. is fearless. And I agree as a fan of Kushner, she mailed it in on her last novel.
I have a question...
Excellent interview--by both parties! (And he was right about Kushner).
Wow. That was an amazing reading. How I am supposed to pick up ONE quote to restack it on Notes? Indeed, Notes sucks, now I can see that.