Review: Authority by Andrea Long Chu

I picked this book up nearly by accident. I had been looking for Authority, Jeff VanderMeer's sci-fi novel, but the name Andrea Long Chu caught my eye. She was one of those writers to which I attach vaguely positive associations, although without a clear picture of their ideas or style. I decided to fill in these blanks (anthologies are great for getting a sense of a writer’s forest rather than just their trees) and I’m really glad I did. As a reader and writer with a background in the applied sciences rather than the humanities, I had been thinking about the respective roles of the novel and the critic in society. ALC addresses these two topics in the two new essays written for this collection (“Criticism in a Crisis” and “Authority”) by historicizing the relationships between critic, art, and the public, giving me a better understanding of the tradition of literary criticism. These topics are also implicit in the 22 republished essays, which serve as examples of the theory she presents in these two newer essays.

Reading this book helped me test some of my own ideas about criticism, art and society. That is, I found a productive mix of inspiration and interesting ideas, as well as places where the author and I diverge, helping me to solidify my understanding. At times, she can be a little floaty, bending away just before landing a broader political point to strike more narrowly on a specific artist. She can also be turned inwards and towards pessimism; I enjoyed re-reading a critique of her On Liking Women that I’d read long ago, with my newfound familiarity in my pocket.

Below, I’ve included some highlights that I found thought-provoking.

• This is the supreme task of the critic: to restore the work of art to its original worldliness. The artist creates by removing something from the world; the critic’s job is to put it back.
• That’s it: as close as Sittenfeld ever comes to laying bare her heroine’s deepest desires. In an airport memoir, this would be mere pablum; in a novel, it amounts to dereliction of duty.
• What I’m saying is not that the desire for a universal is politically defensible but, more simply, that the desire for a universal is synonymous with having a politics at all.
• It strikes me today as a vicious piece, but not a very cruel one. Viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days; cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days I aim for cruelty.
• When Arnold had made a virtue of disinterestedness, he had pictured the critic turning away from himself and toward the social whole, whereas Wilde’s critic was so disinterested that he answered to no authority but his own personality.
• But we will have to reckon with our longing for authority: our nostalgia, which is the opposite of historical sense; and our idealism, which is the opposite of the future. Nothing may be more dangerous, in criticism or in politics, than the revanchist desire to restore a form of authority that, if we are being honest, never existed in the first place. The great enemy is not the king of France, whose bloody head has been rolling through the streets for as long as anyone can remember. The enemy, my friends, is Napoleon.
• But the kind of freedom that John Dutton III truly admires, the kind that Beth Dutton embodies, is not the freedom to make decisions—that is, ethical freedom—but rather the freedom to act as if one’s decisions have all been made in advance. 
• Indeed, it is precisely because we feel that characters in novels are real that we can politically object to the way a writer treats them.
• The midcentury literary critic F. R. Leavis once wrote, in his very serious book The Great Tradition, that Austen’s genius was to take “certain problems that life compelled on her as personal ones” and impersonalize them, tracing carefully out of herself and back into the world. What Leavis admired was not that Austen had stayed in her lane; it was that she’d had the good sense to ask where it led. This is a splendid notion. It suggests that, for any novelist, there exists a small number of historical problems that, for reasons of luck and temperament, she naturally grasps as the stuff of life. The genius lies in knowing which ones they are.
• The humanist’s mistake is to suppose that politics is just lots and lots of ethics. Ethics asks us to recognize that the other has a soul; politics asks us to reject the soul as a precondition for moral interest. In this sense, fiction has always been an exercise in political consciousness. It asks me to care about people I do not know and will never meet, people who might as well not exist as far as my own life is concerned but whose destinies are nonetheless obscurely intertwined with mine.
• This was the game’s masterstroke. Form erupts into content, the player’s ludic relationship to Joel at last given narrative flesh in the person of Ellie, whose bitter determination to keep Joel alive leads to a horrific loss of innocence from which—as players of The Last of Us Part II already know—she may never recover. Here, we may rightly speak of interactivity: One may care about a character on television, but one must care for a character in a video game. In fact, The Last of Us suggested that care, by definition, means choosing to have no choice, holding on to another person so tightly their survival becomes an inescapable necessity. Of course, a TV show may treat these themes too, and the adaptation acquits itself admirably; the point is not that a video game, like other art forms, can show us something about love, but that love, at its most monstrous, can have the unyielding structure of a video game. This only a video game can teach.