Thoughts on The Point’s Alt Lit Essay

This morning I continued reading Proust’s later essay on Flaubert in 1920, written in response to a critic of the day. As I delighted in Proust’s detailing of a Flaubert sentence (it’s imperfect tense, but it’s perfect juxtapositions) in Sentimental Education, I harkened back to my skimming of The Point’s article on Alt Lit by Sam Kriss the day before. He described writers I’ve never been much interested in, though a few shower their sentences with humor and aplomb. What I’ve struggled with for so long concerning this very loose group of writers is that they’ve mostly eschewed the teachings of the Lish school — the one most claim in their lineage. It all comes back to one idea — they are too concerned with the surface and don’t see the thing itself. Lish talked about it in an interview:

Take, by contrast, a student of mine, Jason Schwartz. I’m amazed by what Schwartz sees in the lacunae; the way he makes the lacunae brim with feeling. Writers like Roth, people say they’re about big things, not nebbish stuff like Schwartz. They’re not interested in a mote of dust falling on a table; they’re interested in the world turning. I say they don’t know shit about the world turning. But Schwartz knows about the mote of dust. He’s seen it. That’s true. That’s honest. He focuses his attention on what he knows.

“They’re not interested in a mote of dust falling on a table; they’re interested in the world turning” — this, of course, is the crisis with most writers, but I think especially those in Alt Lit. Georgio Agamben goes further in his essay: “What is the Contemporary?”:

Where is the obscurity of the present in Alt Lit? Impressionism of our moment is not simply to say that a person picked up their phone and looked at a message or social media, it’s to emote with a riven sense of sentence so that the obscurity buried in these moments might rise up and smite the reader.

I get this sense from the Jen Craigs, the Gabriel Blackwells, and the other names that are not grouped under any banner because they have none. They’re too busy thinking about the mote of dust or why Proust or Flaubert did something a certain way. They have taken T.S. Eliot’s edict so it smolders as their own: “What happens [to the poet] is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something more valuable.”