Back in 2002, Jonathan Safran Foer published Everything is Illuminated, a novel that immediately aroused the attention of America’s book-reviewing cabal. Foer’s novel also provoked an extraordinary amount of resentment, and The Guardian had to invent a new word—“Schadenfoer”—to describe the viciousness with which so many commentators berated the young author. Some critics—there’s no need to name names—claimed that Foer had used postmodern conventions as a means of concealing his literary ineptitude. Others—once again, there’s no need to name names—resorted to ad hominem attacks and portrayed Foer as a self-indulgent dweeb. One reviewer actually went out of his way to demonstrate—in The Atlantic, of all places—that the jokes in Foer’s novel weren’t funny.
All of this may seem uninteresting, but bear in mind that there’s nothing political, nothing contentious in Foer’s book. Despite its treatment of the Holocaust, Everything is Illuminated relegates political concerns to the background and deals instead with time, memory, and human suffering—themes that are too universal to have any recognizable political valences. It’s not immediately clear, then, why Foer’s novel stirred up so much antagonism. And it’s a bit odd that Foer—an innocuous-looking Princeton graduate who admires authors like Kafka, Borges, and García Márquez—was accused of being “corrupt and debased” in the New York Press.
The reaction to Foer’s book points to something that’s been obvious for a while—namely, that our literary intellectuals suffer from an aggression problem. Take a look, for instance, at the contemporary writing scene. We’ve got essayists who, having failed at writing novels, specialize in throwing around clever put-downs. We’ve got reviewers who, having failed at marriage, derive erotic pleasure from demolishing the writing of emerging authors. And we’ve got college students who, having failed at living cheerfully, enjoy using their hard-earned critical reading skills to demean the ideas of others. The situation is compounded by the fact that even magazines as sober as the New Yorker have to cater to the kinds of readers who, like schoolboys in a cafeteria, want to see blood. And the dogged animosity that infects the literary scene makes its way onto campus quite often. Just recall how high everyone’s blood pressure rose during the row over last year’s hunger strike.
When it comes to the contemporary intellectual scene, aggression is never too far beneath the surface, and the longing to hurt others appears in the most unlikely places. Look, for instance, at the recent quarrel between Salman Rushdie and the late John Updike. After Updike ridiculed the name of a character in one of Rushdie’s novels, Rushdie suggested that “in Las Vegas there’s probably a male prostitute called ‘John Updike.’” While the Rushdie-Updike bout is entertaining, it reflects the propensity of heavyweight intellectuals to drool with anger at the slightest hint of disrespect. Rivalries, slurs, reprisals—these sorts of things develop remarkably often among American writers, many of whom, it seems, would love nothing more than to join a fight club.
For the most part, liberal-minded thinkers are loath to appear angry and joyless, so they find all sorts of ways to disguise their aggression. Some try to mask their anger with humor—hence the popularity of semi-sarcastic insults, especially among the college crowd. Others—the slightly more imaginative ones—clothe their hostility in the garb of politics, and pretend that it’s impossible to fight for justice without discharging violent emotions. One shouldn’t be deceived, for humor has always been used to hide the teeth-clenching fury of the easily offended.
Associated with all of this is the self-serving tendency to equate aggression with sincerity. “Aggression,” the argument goes, “is the hallmark of a truthful writer, for indignation reveals courage.” This argument reeks of self-deception, and it appeals to those who hope to make their psycho-emotional problems look like virtues. In the end, aggression is a pathology, and there are plenty of healthy writers who know how to pack a rhetorical punch without spewing forth the kind of vitriol that—sooner or later—makes people miserable, impotent, and sick.
Whatever one thinks of Jonathan Safran Foer, his novel is the work of a cheerful author, one who knows how to mock people without wanting to see them suffer. The sweat-laden aggression in our literary scene suggests that—perhaps because they can’t control the flow of their own thoughts—many of our writers are not exactly at peace with themselves (and thus have some kind of repressed desire to contaminate others with their neuroses). One day, when our intellectuals become a bit more cheerful, they’ll see that it’s possible to make fun of a man without hating him. For now, though, I’ve got a little advice: Perhaps some of the thinkers in our midst should take up yoga.
Philip Petrov is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. He is the Literary and Arts Editor of The Current. Illuminated Manuscripts runs alternate Mondays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com