Here’s a way of putting the problem: on one hand we want art to be free, and on the other we want it to mean. Not just to mean, but to be meaningful—to be useful for, and so maybe responsible to, other realms of life: our sense of community, say, or politics, our moral relations. As often happens when competing positions have claims to truth, the pendulum of consensus swings between them, and the pendulum has swung quite far, in recent years, toward the pole of responsibility and holding art to account. Within the small world of people who care about literature and art, the culture is as moralistic it has ever been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter, our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience construed as ever more vulnerable. We have a sense that the most important questions we can ask about a work of art are whether and to what extent it furthers extra-artistic aims, to what extent it serves a world outside itself. The idea that artists should make what they feel compelled to make, regardless of such considerations, that in fact art should be protected from responsibilities of this kind, seems part and parcel of a discredited Romantic model of the artist as exempt from workaday morality, licensed by genius to act badly, or at least to disregard the claims of others. When I work with students now, graduate or undergraduate, their primary mode of engagement with a text often seems to be a particular kind of moral judgment, as though before they can see anything else in stories or poems they have to sort them into piles of the righteous and the problematic. These responses sometimes seem to me an index of an anxiety I see more and more in my students, in my friends and myself, a kind of paranoia about our own moral status, a desire to demonstrate our personal righteousness in our response to art.
I realize this is not a popular take, especially on the weekends, which were invented for laziness and self-indulgence. The thing is, I really like eating breakfast — and, more gobsmackingly, three square meals a day. But brunch doesn't stop at screwing up the poor, Type A person's eating schedule; it is really only satisfied when it has hijacked the entire day.
Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book (2023) is a novel focused on the living, breathing world, entirely devoid of people and, as Comitta’s preface declares, “contains no words of my own.” Instead, it consists of natural descriptions from over 300 novels, composed methodically and meticulously via subtraction and collage into a meditative, lush narrative on the relationship between time and nature. With us gone, the stage is set for “animals, landforms, and weather patterns that have buttressed human drama since the beginning of the novel form,” as an earlier version of the book described it
“I recall that I am extremely forgetful,” announces the narrator of Percival Everett’s Dr No in the novel’s opening lines. “I believe I am. I think I know that I am forgetful. Though I remember having forgotten, I cannot recall what it was that I forgot or what forgetting feels like.” No sooner has the reader crossed the threshold of the narrative than it begins to reveal itself as a labyrinth of mirrors, an elaborate and joyously rickety construction of philosophical gags and structural paradoxes.
According to Denis Diderot, perhaps the most famous encyclopedist of the 18th century, the goal of an encyclopedia is “to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth.” More than 270 years later, the size of that task grows still, as new knowledge continues to be created. In “All the Knowledge in the World,” Simon Garfield offers a delightful curated sampling of what seekers before and after Diderot have tried to actualize.