Why Viral Literary Criticism Is Very Very Bad

Mr Sara Holds All of Our Feet to the Fire

Dear Republic,

Having trained our sights on gatekeepers and the literary establishment in its different guises, we now turn the scope on ourselves and interrogate our own manic needs for adulation and attention through literary criticism, as Mr Sara does in this really thoughtful and quite-meta piece.

-ROL

WHY VIRAL LITERARY CRITICISM IS VERY VERY BAD

I was asked to write a meta-criticism on literary criticism for The Republic of Letters, but the longer I sit with my thoughts, the more complicated they become. Nuance is probably good for me as a person, but bad for the cogency of this essay, so here is my thesis in all of its authoritative clarity: online literary criticism is often hollow and exhausting.

Popular book reviews rely on haughty moralism and thinly-veiled aggression to go viral, and I do not think this bodes well for criticism as a craft. My first problem with this stance is my own hypocrisy.

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Seven months ago, when my blog had six subscribers, I posted a negative review for Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!. The review accomplished all the things I just decried above, and more than five thousand people found my words. It is my most-read piece of writing ever.

image caption: lightning in a bottle

The success of that post changed the way I approached my blog. My writing morphed from casual fragments into structured, critical essays. I suddenly had dozens of strangers reading my work, and the engagement was electrifying. It made sense to fill my blog with what my new audience ostensibly wanted: snappy arguments held up by a false projection of confidence.

When I picked up Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo one month later, I read the novel with the full understanding that I would ultimately review it. I didn’t set out to dislike the book, but I did set out to have something to say. Again, my snark attracted attention. What a rush!

image caption: lightnings in a bottle

But you can only brainstorm clickbait titles for so long before it becomes disheartening. I wasn’t actually living my life with vitriol, and yet there I was on the internet, polishing stray ideas into paragraphs of argument, presenting strong feelings where there were few or none.

My most authentic opinions on art had always unfurled slowly—criticisms that revealed themselves after growing with a work over time. So was my issue with criticism, the internet, or the inescapable convergence of both?

After I read Sheila Heti at the start of this summer, I decided to show restraint. Instead of reviewing Heti’s books, I wrote a metafictional piece about consuming pop-criticism.

I traced a network of opinionated literary critics who were known for their viral reviews of popular authors. These writers were a little like me, I thought, albeit on a much larger scale. There was something redundant and reductive about their criticisms, and while I respected their writing, I wondered if they, too, felt the invisible hand of engagement statistics guiding their passion. My post was not especially well-received.

image caption: somehow I will persist

But you never know who might encounter your blog, and when Sam from The Republic of Letters reached out to me, he referenced “Literary Critics Who Hate Literary Critics” as the basis for what you’re reading now.

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People have hated books forever, people love to hear what other people think about books, and popular culture benefits from rigorous scrutiny. I don’t blame individual readers or writers for consuming or creating this content, and everyone should think about books. Duh.

But the internet is a reactionary and iterative wasteland, and literary criticism is as prone to the internet as anything. Content is incentivized to trade nuance for sharp teeth, because hot takes get clicks, and clicks earn money. Writers want clicks because it helps their careers. What lies at stake, then, is our own capacity for consideration: how do we sit with art and let it enrich our lives—how do we find meaning in literature beyond whether it is Good or Bad?

Because I am, for better or for worse, a young person engaging in a new wave of online criticism, and my upbringing on the internet has instilled in me some core tenets: my opinions need to form quickly (lest I lose the chance to benefit from the cultural conversation), and my thoughts need to be punchy and digestible (even if it means reducing a work to some key takeaways).

I notice in myself and others the desire to stamp art with approval or distaste. Reviews that look for ways in which Bad art might reflect the artist’s compromised moral character. Criticism that wields loose political buzzwords in a one-sided attack. Gender-essentialism? Class-consciousness? Vague transphobia or a pertinent elitism that you can’t quite put your finger on but which poisons the work nonetheless? Everything is political, so nothing is—criticism reads as angry and flat as the art it seeks to condemn. I produce and I consume and I critique, ad infinitum, and you see now where my spiraling began.

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I worry that the intellectualism inherent in literary criticism makes matters worse—that because internet reading-and-writing communities are inclined to see fancy critics and popular reviews as engaging in Important Discourse, it can be easy to ignore the hollow sensationalism underscoring the criticism itself.

Do you ever see those Substack notes that are like: “Substack is such a magical place of considerate readers and writers and intellectuals who all want to listen and share their brilliant thoughts with each other”? That mentality is part of the problem.

Every writer on here has a publisher dashboard that looks just like my screenshots above, and while every writer might not be as fickle with attention as I have been, nobody benefits from the notion that certain internet channels are somehow immune to the dynamics of the internet. Substack, like Cocomelon for the literati, wants everyone to produce whatever the most people will spend the most time reading, and that is rarely measured critique.

One of my friends recently emailed a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the writer mentioned how great it was to work for a publication that didn’t share specific engagement metrics with their staff. It’s unfortunate but obvious that this ethos of The New Yorker can’t be practiced everywhere.

Established media outlets have more money, more editors, and journalistic standards, but they also have paywalls and declining relevance. I wish glossy magazines could save us, but aren’t they also increasingly incentivized to produce the most salacious work possible?

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I’ve written so many drafts of this essay because I’m aware that it will be sent to more people at once than anything I’ve ever produced. That knowledge has made me more inclined to stick close to a strong argument with bold claims, in the hopes that you will respect my convictions as a writer, in the hopes that you might click a little heart button that will make me feel like I’ve written something Good.

To have thoughts online is to implicate oneself in all the metafictions of being online. Those metafictions multiply when writing sustains your career, and I don’t see this phenomenon correcting course anytime soon. Substack will not be the thing to save criticism from clickbait.

But to read a book and have opinions? How else are we meant to read? How else are we meant to live? The best literary criticism might be happening offline, in silence, and within your own brain, but I wrote this essay for it to exist on the internet, and I’m grateful that you read it. I do not think criticism is bad, but I will title this post Why Viral Literary Criticism Is Very Very Bad.

Mr. Sara spends time thinking and writing about books, music, and living with the internet. Her New Year’s resolution is to finally read Middlemarch, but when she picked it up last week, the first chapter FELL OUT because she had broken the spine on the first twenty pages so many times. That’s a true story.

Image of Boswell and Johnson, 1700s.