🟧 Bros of literary criticism

The “brodernism” meme and “difficult” literature

“Young Man Reading” (1802) by Michal Plonski (source)

Today, a dissection of a literary meme that made extremely online readers suddenly insecure about their fiction habits.

Nate Gallant: If you live on one of the few corners of the internet that argues about contemporary literature, you may have seen the term “brodernism” floating around, to various levels of enthusiasm, ire, and confusion. The cause for such a worrying conflagration of portmanteau is one Federico Perelmuter, an accomplished critic, largely of translated fiction, who, according to his website, is working on a project about the extraction of lithium from salt flats in Latin America, which sounds quite fascinating. You can, if you so chose, donate to his GoFundMe if you believe in the project.

Writing in the estimable Los Angeles Review of Books, Perelmuter levels an acerbic critique against a critical habit, skewing male and American, of promoting a fairly well-known but otherwise not inherently connected body of translated fiction as valuable for its vaguely defined sense of literary “difficulty.” His argument in “Against High Brodernism,” which comes alongside a negative review of the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krazsnahorkai’s Herscht 07769, is primarily about reception. He notices a trend among critics of fiction in America which homogenizes the many different, potentially interesting formal aspects of a work of fiction as merely difficult, particularly in translation.

Difficulty is already a kind of stylistic cliche. It describes books without paragraph breaks or periods; written in multiple languages; using strange formatting; perhaps without characters or plot, relying instead on eclectic erudition or formal experiment. “Brodernism” is an accusation of “bro-modernism,” and modernism itself is only one seeming style of “difficulty.” The stakes of defining the terms of literature’s value, however, are high, too high to be reduced to difficulty for its own sake by such bros. Perelmuter writes:

To read—and announce oneself as having read—literature in translation is to be tasteful and intelligent, a latter-day cosmopolitan in an age of blighted provincialism. I want to avoid this proclivity because the novel I’m reviewing, Herscht 07769 by Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet and published last fall by New Directions, does not have much to offer, and because there exists a tendency, even a movement, within the anemic critical sphere into which such works are breathlessly incorporated that runs counter to a critical ethos of careful evaluation and contextualization.

Perelmuter’s assertion is that such fiction, with Kraznohorkai’s latest as something of an exemplar, is at best a form of obscurantism wielded as a value and at worst confuses that difficulty with the markers of “foreignness” itself. Not all difficult literature is translated, and not all translated literature is difficult. (Check out the current vogue for Japanese “healing fiction.”)

As a translator and an erstwhile worker in the publishing industry, I agree with Perelmuter that this problem is endemic to the business of translation. The market, the panoply of actors in the publishing ecosystem, and the globalization of writing in a post-colonial world conspire to flatten literature’s cultural, linguistic, and formal differences. But this complaint isn’t particularly new; it has been argued by writers from James Baldwin to Jacques Derrida to Susan Bernofsky.

Still, Perelmuter’s argument, as pointed out by Sorokin translator Max Lawton and a few others on various online literary forums, ends up being a bit circular. I won’t reproduce in its entirety the long list of literary works that he cites, because the category of “brodernist” fiction is ostensibly of his own creation. As a sampling, he offers up William H. Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories (2005), Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (1983), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard (1999), Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), and Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men (1987). I can sort of see a theme between these books and the way they are discussed, however as a troubling “critical tendency,” I struggled to see where the critique starts and stops, and how to fix things — on whom or where to place responsibility. And if there’s no coherent body of brodernist literature outside the critique itself, the argument is more than a bit lost.

Perelmuter names no one nor cites any published criticism from the uncritical hoards who gave us this unsatisfying “zombie avant-garde” (which is a great phrase), other than an old review he wrote on Solenoid. In this sense, it is unclear how the argument connects to the stated remit of the piece, to review Herscht 07669, which he quite clearly hated. Which is fine — some reviews are just essays. But is the place of Karznohorkai’s novel as “central to the brodernist canon” just a result of the timing of the piece? His being assigned this review, to his dismay? A latent and unwelcome reminder of reviews past? Or even, potentially, Krazsnohorkai’s influence from the ambivalent reception of “difficult” books in the past, such as Musil’s The Man Without Qualities or Gravity’s Rainbow?

Part of the problem might be, in his estimation, reviewers not knowing the languages of the books they review in translation, to which he traces some his own past errors. This can, at its extreme, result in the confusion of difficulty and some kind of cultural, national, or linguistic boundary. I admire the self-exculpation, and yet there is an ongoing and quite interesting discussion about this problem, which also goes unreferenced. Translator and novelist Lily Meyer has written widely about the matter. There is the recurring debate on Han Kang’s English language works, which stems from Tim Parkes’ (an Italian to English translator and writer) original review of The Vegetarian. (Parkes complains that the translation is bad; still, the book became very popular; Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature) One can find citations of this issue even among translators themselves, who struggle with the linguistic, cultural, and formal multiplicity within both the original and target contexts between which they work, in both Asymptote and Words Without Borders.

Translation Studies, a now decades long sustained dialogue on these very questions is now a defined field within and beyond the North American academy. Primers and collected works can be downloaded or purchased, and have themselves been the subject of many reviews, which for what it’s worth, read as their own, self-forming Borgesian list — with people fighting over everything from Eurocentrism in the Dictionary of Untranslatables to grammatical errors in the English language versions of Walter Benjamin essays. In other words, there’s plenty of meta-criticism of translation already.

Perelmuter’s critique of Krazsnohorkai’s novel itself as stinking of “over-written realism” feels close, potentially, to the critique of “hysterical realism” famously levied by the critic James Wood at a strain of fiction popular in the 2000s (Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie). The hypertrophy of reference, the overstuffed erudition, the crowded sentences overrun with details that make the story feel both too real and unreal, yet never effectively “uncanny,” could perhaps apply to some of the works Perelmuter cites.

Perhaps the trouble with difficulty could be said to stem from some of the styles of modernism itself, which is plenty historical, with precedents from Lukacs’s anger over Baudelaire’s confusing sentence structure, to the legal backlash over the encyclopedic novels of Joyce, or the longstanding formal experiments of the Oulipo movement (those French writers who did things like write novels excluding specific letters). Yet criticism and scholarship have been dealing with that for the better part of a century, so complaining about the cultures of its reception seems a bit hidebound. The portmanteau, while catchy, is misleading to start, but it lends the heft of literary theory to the essay’s polemic. “Brodernism” is less a feasible critical category than an attempt to troll the literary-adjacent bro at whom Perelmuter aims his diatribe — the person who picks up the latest NYRB translated reissue or New Directions novella for clout, a prop at the bar, or an Instagram photo. Anecdotally, I have heard such people are ruining lots of Hinge dates in Brooklyn, but I’m not entirely sure they exist at such levels as to shape literary criticism.

To borrow from Carly Simon, maybe it’s me, having myself recommended Herscht 07769 on this very newsletter, though I can’t say I feel particularly called out by Perelmuter’s ire. The novel is not my favorite of Kraznohorkai’s books, but delivers on the stylistic promise of his novels and forms a coherent part of his fictive project — which is to, among other things, disorient us to the cyclical return of the 20th century’s most toxic political narratives. Perelmuter seemed to have someone very particular in mind, but by neither naming them nor offering any specific instance of this set of critical gestures, I was hard-pressed to see how this criticism does not itself replicate the homogenizing effect of speaking about “difficult” literature as a monolithic category.

These days, criticism can feel like either a vibes or a virtue-signaling game. You either hit a tonal note to reverberate an external anxiety or trending topic, or play gotcha with the potential for ambiguity in language to find the presence or absence of certain politics. Perelmuter did succeed in creating a potent meme, and memes are not subject to holistic criticism. In this sense, I agree with the critical intent, but not so much the logic.

The culture industry does work in a problematically impersonal manner. General market forces are cited by anonymous editors over email, whose choices are reinforced by economically squeezed critics, who are themselves edited by anxious media workers, producing content about authors trying desperately to break free of every manner of inherited imperialist idiom of identity and difference. I am upset about this, too. The fault, however, probably does not rest with a bunch of nameless bros.

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