It’s Lonely At the Centre of the Earth (2022) by Zoe Thorogood - Image Comics
The Books of Jacob (2021) by Olga Tokarczuk - Fitzcarraldo Editions
Hey, it’s me, been a while, hasn’t it? Maybe a year or so? I could look, should probably look but I can’t be bothered even though it would be so easy to do. That should give you enough insight as to where my brain is at the minute. To be honest I’m even surprised I’ve got the mental bandwidth to write this thing. But I’ve just finished two things I really liked, The Books of Jacob (2021) by Olga Tokarczuk and It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth (2022) by Zoe Thorogood, and I would like to try to write about them.
The two couldn’t be more different from one another. One is an epic account of a Polish religious leader, Jacob Frank, through the eyes of his contemporaries during the Enlightenment while the other, the self-proclaimed bio-graphic-novel, recounts a few months in the life of Thorogood after she suffers a breakup and attempts to understand her own mental state and health through an introspective metanarrative format. I’ve got loads to say about each of them but ironically, I have no idea where to start. You’d think that someone who has a Masters in Creative Writing and is about to submit a PhD in Creative Critical Writing might know where to begin, but the truth is I haven’t got a clue.
For instance, I’d love to write about Tokarczuk’s use of what I call indirect-narration. How her narrators and narrative respectively observe and recount the story with minimal direct engagement. While characters are present, they do so to record Jacob’s life, to uphold the larger tapestry of history in relation to Jacob. Very rarely does the text position itself behind the “protagonist” itself. Instead, Jacob’s story comes to us in pieces, or “scraps” as some sections are titled, both relevant and seemingly irrelevant. This is no intimate look at Cromwell like Wolf Hall (2009). The reader is kept at arm’s length, and as such, I felt that the text was really able to capture the history of a person. A person who was larger than life for some, perfectly alien to others, and yet intrinsically intimate to a select few. That distance lends itself to an objective stance which Tokarczuk is able to masterfully subvert, depending on the perspective she leverages, making for a read which on one hand makes it feel like you know Jacob and his life, while on the other, makes you feel like you don’t know him at all.
Now, I do like what I’ve just written. And it does a good job of laying out what I would like to talk about in relation to Tokarczuk’s text. But a part of me, the PhD side, calls out for evidence, comparison, definitions, interrogations. What is an indirect-narrator/narration? Did I make that term up and if so, what evidence do I have to support such a term? If not, where did it come from? Is it related to free-indirect prose style? What are my sources, comparative examples, mentions of experts in the field? I feel compelled to include these academic pining’s, but a majority of the time, they’re just exhausting to consider. Do they make for a more well-rounded argument and discourse? Likely. Does it inspire me and motivate me to actually write the thing? Absolutely not. And so, even though I have the ideas and know how I want to engage with them, they just don’t happen.
Maybe it’s because I want to uphold Susan Sontag’s call for “descriptive” criticism as opposed to “prescriptive” criticism. As opposed to telling you what art means, the critic tells you what art is and how it is.[1] But without meaning, does it all feel a bit shallow? Yes and no. But even in attempting to describe craft, can one do so without meaning? If I discuss an indirect-narrator/narration, does the reader want to know what that means? By describing it as a way of creating a tapestry of history, doesn’t that give it meaning or is it just a consequence of the application? Without evidence, who’s to say? Me? Who’s that guy? Why should anyone listen to him? Well, he’s got evidence. Great! Let’s see it. Naw, he’s too lazy. Doesn’t want to show you. Just take him at his word for it. Isn’t that bad literary criticism? Maybe. But it makes for good vibes. OK, I see your point, I can do vibes.
Maybe for me to really just engage with something again, even on a surface level, vibes is all I have to go on. And who’s to say that vibes can’t be literary criticism? The millions of people on book-Tok or book-gram would beg to differ. And I imagine they’ve done more for authors and the publishing industry than any academic has in the past sixty years. But maybe I’m being too harsh on academia. I guess I just find it hard when comparing “proper” criticism with things that people actually enjoy. Joy being the appropriate thing to highlight there. So, rather than talking about the multimodality that exists in Zoe Thorogood’s It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth (2022), examining how she uses a combination of comic-paneling and photography and image manipulation to illustrate a fractured state of mind, I can just say that the mixed use of illustration and photography was unexpected and compelling. It made me consider how we can see the world and ourselves in it.
Literary criticism or vibes?
I’ll be the first to tell you that I don’t really read a lot of literary criticism – academic or vibes. Outside of the academic journals I need to read for research, Brandon Taylor’s fantastic Substack newsletter, or the occasional criticism that writers deploy within a text (I see you Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary (2023) trying to get me to learn all about Keats – I won’t do it! You can’t make me!), I guess I’m admitting that my measurements as to what good criticism looks like is a bit skewed. Or maybe I’m just too overloaded with what literary criticism could be versus what it should be that it’s just a bit overwhelming. The feeling reminds me of a sequence from Annie Baker’s The Antipodes (2019).
The play is centered around a writers’ room. It’s not explicitly stated what the room is for, but I instantly recognized it as a TV writers’ room. Whether that’s due to my own perspective or Baker’s actual design is unclear, but one of the characters, Dave, has one particular moment where he attempts to categorize types of stories: ‘there are seven types of stories in the world. Rags to riches. The Quest. Killing the Monster. Voyage / and’[2] but before Dave can finish, he is interrupted. Adam, another writer in the space, then asks for a clarification, only for Dave to provide a succinct but shallow answer. The next scene then sees Danny M1 (M1 because there was a Danny M2) outline that there are in fact ‘thirty-six types of stories in the world’.[3] He then proceeds to list them, only getting to nineteen of them. Finally, in the next scene, Josh outlines that ‘there are ten types of stories in the world’.[4] Repetition followed by contradiction.
This uncertainty is often what I feel whenever I try to do any literary criticism. The age-old question of where do I even start? And is that even the right start? I make statements, or have opinions, but then when I consider a counter point, or I find some reason not to express my point of view, then I change tact. Try to placate, present an alternative. Nothing that I’ve said or thought of could be necessarily wrong – subjective isn’t it? – but I feel consistently pressured to strive for the objective within the subjective. I mean, the criticism that I do manage to get out, at least on this channel, never does as well as the more personal essays tend to. So maybe there’s something to that. Lean hard into the subjective as I present it through my personal relation to it. But then I try to consider what I need to write to get stuff out there. Like magazines or other outlets of significance. Is it dumb to say that I would want to publish something in the TLS, or LA Review of Books? That I would want to give a review or even just a small piece about an art installation or album I listened to. Don’t know.
Doing an academic degree doesn’t teach you how to do commercial criticism. It doesn’t teach you how to formulate your ideas for a wide readership. Or how to pitch your criticism to a non-academic body. It barely teaches you how to talk about your research to an academy body that comprises of people from other disciplines. Maybe I was meant to have those skills before I arrived. Maybe it was expected of me to teach myself that. To figure those things out for myself. Wouldn’t be the first time, and it likely won’t be the last. But if I really want to publish literary criticism to a wider circle, it’s probably something I need to figure out fast.
p.s. -
As I prepped this for publication today, I noted that my last post (below) was literally a year ago, to the date: September 5th, 2022. Wild.
p.s.s. -
I’ve hyperlinked all of the books I’ve mentioned with links to purchase them if you want. All except Wolfhall because, well, it’s sold loads already.
[1] Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, 1986, 10 <https://shifter-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Sontag-Against-Interpretation.pdf>.
[2] Annie Baker, The Antipodes (London: Nick Hern Books, 2019), p. 67.
[3] Baker, 2019, p. 68.
[4] p. 68.