Controlling Art, Controlling the Weather
On the author's place in the stories of two semi-nonfiction 2023 books
I have short fiction out this month in Asymptote Journal. Please check it out here!
This post primarily discusses:
Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism
Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief
Benjamin Labatut’s The MANIAC
As well as: Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”, Rem Koolhaas’s “Junkspace”, Paul Auster’s Timbuktu, and Ben Lerner’s "Cafe Loup". This post doesn’t assume you have read any works, and doesn’t spoil any experiences.
Once upon a time, Susan Sontag called for a re-evaluation of artistic priorities in her 1964 essay "Against Interpretation.” Sontag notes that in her contemporaries there was a default assumption "that a work of art by definition says something. (“What X is saying is…,” “What X is trying to say is…,” “What X said is…” etc., etc.)."
What we do with art that is "saying something" is interpret it: "The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really— or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?" A consequence of this is that we devalue, disregard, or ignore the form, experience, and appearance of the art. Instead of feeling fear when we watch a horror movie, we instead try to diagnose what it's saying about our society. This is alienating, it writes off things like character, texture, or feelings as too surface to matter. To rectify this, Sontag ends with a rallying cry to do less work interpreting art and more time experiencing it: "we need an erotics of art."
Sixty years later, in her 2023 book Immediacy, academic Anna Kornbluh suggests that perhaps the culture has taken Susan Sontag's concerns down a wrong path. Looking at a wide range of attitudes and art forms today, Kornbluh suggests that we have changed our dominant style away from interpretation. Perhaps, as readers of Sontag, we have now stopped trying to take a perspective on everything, to construct great theories and interpretations of every little thing we come across. But what we've replaced it with is not necessarily what Sontag had in mind; yes, it is a style more "raw" and "unfiltered" than interpretation, but less erotic and more like data.
Data is not an experience. Data has, like Junkspace in Rem Koolhaas's essay, "no form, only proliferation." There is a huge difference between taking a walk and reading the statistics from an Apple Watch from a walk. As anyone who has worked with data knows, there is often nothing less experiential. Working with large datasets, you cannot read all those rows, make sense of every column, and that’s assuming it’s small enough for you to be able to open it as a spreadsheet. Perhaps there is a surface level experience of scrolling through tons of tons of figures and parameters, something confusing and opaque (again: Rem Koolhaas says Junkspace is best enjoyed by "gawking"), but you don't really experience data unless you stick your hands in and sculpt.
Sculpting is precisely what Kornbluh notes has become a bit of a taboo. The style Kornbluh describes, the one that she notes may have replaced the "over-interpret-y" paranoid reading style of Sontag's day, she calls immediacy, partly for the synonym of "it must come now now now" but also in the sense of style that attempts not to "mediate" raw experience. Writing in a style of immediacy is to present things like data: as untampered as possible, without extraneous filters.
Culturally, there are many examples of immediate styles: writing with no shame, “pure” honesty, like how Hannah Horvath writes in Girls or how the protagonist of Fleabag unashamedly tells you, the viewer, everything on her mind. Social media's preference of authentic self-expression, quick thoughts about the everyday, and democratic quick shots from a camera, is a preference for an immediate style (this is maybe changing already… Does Instagram love authenticity while TikTok loves a production? It’s not so clean…)
Kornbluh has two great examples of writers professing their love for the immediate. One is critical theorist Bernard Harcourt, who she quotes stating a mission:
We critical theorists should no longer be speaking for others... Critical theory cannot speak for others. It must instead foster a space for everyone who shares the critical ambition to speak and be heard.
The other is memoirist Karl Ove Knausgaard:
Just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous, I reacted in a physical way … Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought, this is something someone has made up … made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world … It was a crisis … I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up. It has no value. Fictional writing has no value … The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything
These are great syntheses of valuing the immediate! No, it would be hubris for an academic to attempt to speak for others instead of making room for the data of their voice. It would be silly to make something up when instead, I can just give you the data of my life unmediated. I can't make up characters. I cannot exercise any willpower or share my perspective. I can't get my hands into the dirt of life and sculpt something interesting or beautiful or worth sharing.
The book goes on to lay out the political consequences of this being the dominant style (e.g., we need people do things, make decisions, to exercise some willpower towards achieving goals we care about, like fighting climate change or helping one another). But when it comes to writing, the thing about immediacy is that it's false. It's a style of writing, not a truth about it. If you're putting thoughts or experiences or observations into words you are making stuff up. Writing is speaking, it is not making room for others. You're not actually forgoing intervention or mediation when you write about your own life instead of characters you make up.
Maybe helpful is this section of the novel Timbuktu by Paul Auster, a novel narrated by a dog. Here, the dog Mr. Bones describes his owner Willy's attempt to make "a symphony of smells", an olfactory-based art piece that would simulate, with the dog as the audience, the experience of the dog's love of smelling things:
Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it?... [Willy] drew up plans, made lists, experimented with smells, traced diagrams, built structures out of wood, canvas, cardboard, and plastic. There were so many calculations to be made, so many tests to be run, so many daunting questions to be answered. What was the ideal sequence of smells? How long should a symphony last, and how many smells should it contain? ... For once, Mr. Bones was glad that he had not been endowed with the power of human speech. If he had, he would have been forced to tell Willy the truth, and that would have caused him much pain. For a dog, he would have said, for a dog, dear master, the fact is that the whole world is a symphony of smells.
The dog here is making fun of his owner for his attempt to mediate experience (he is in fact glad to be unable to mediate, glad to be unable to speak). You don't need to compose a symphony of smells, you don't need erotic art when you have erotic experience. The corollary to this sentiment is the rebuttal to Harcourt's "we must not speak" and Knaussgaard's "we must not write fiction": well, if you're writing, if you're making art, then you're mediating. That doesn't mean anything is wrong. It isn't bad to mediate. Even in found-object poetry, in "data-like" experimental works, the author is there, doing the work, mediating something. If you really want not to mediate, if you only want to present the world as it is, sure, let the world be. Get out of the game. Don’t write! But if you're an artist, own your box. We're 70 years since John Cage. We know that any box, no matter how thin, is still a box. We can like boxes!
A side note: Anna Kornbluh condemns autofiction as the literary style most typifying the problems of the immediate, but writers like autofiction exemplar Ben Lerner simply don't fit the accusation. The man is the least immediate. He forces himself into everything he sees, narcissistically funneling all experience through himself, constantly happily incessantly mediating. Look at his short story "Cafe Loup" in which he can't help but try to mediate his loved one's experience of his own death-- it's great! Definitely a topic for another post.
Here's how that concern around immediacy vs mediation plays out in two semi-nonfiction books released in 2023;
Michael Finkel's The Art Thief follows prolific art thief Stéphane Breitwieser across his life of crime stealing small works from museums all over Europe. The story is true, Breitwieser was caught and imprisoned in and out over the last twenty years, and Finkel has spoken at length with him in order to report this story.
Finkel's choice of POV is immediately striking. Here's an early passage:
Breitwieser steps to the dresser, lifts the plexiglass box from the base, and sets it carefully aside. He grasps the ivory sculpture, sweeps his coattails out of the way, and pushes the work partially into the waistband of his pants at the small of his back, then readjusts the roomy overcoat so the carving is covered. There’s a bit of a lump, but you’d have to be extraordinarily observant to notice.
He leaves the plexiglass box to the side—he does not want to waste precious seconds replacing it—and strides off, moving with calculation but no obvious haste. He understands that such a conspicuous theft will swiftly be spotted, triggering an emergency response. The police will arrive. The museum could be locked down, all visitors searched.
Still, he does not run. Running is for pickpockets and purse thieves. He eases outside the gallery and slinks through a nearby door he’d scouted, one reserved for employees yet neither locked nor alarmed, and emerges in the museum’s central courtyard. He glides over the pale stones and along a vine-covered wall, the sculpture knocking at his back, until he reaches another door and pops through, returning inside the museum close to the main entrance. He continues past the front desk and onto the city streets of Antwerp. Police officers are likely descending, and he consciously keeps his pace easy, shuffling in his shiny loafers until he spots Anne-Catherine and they proceed together to the quiet road where he’d parked the car.
The story is in present tense, with a tight focus on Breitwieser and the experience he had in that present tense moment. It builds moment-to-moment suspense in the details of the theft itself. Like any heist story, we feel his craft as a thief at work and share in the risk and thrills of stealing art from a museum.
This is simple prose, the kind of "in his POV" choice of style that would usually be called less mediated: not Nick reporting on Gatsby, but close to Breitwieser and leaning in and out his head, never too far from him. But since we know this is nonfiction, the mediation just jumps right to the top: real life isn't like this! Author Finkel wasn't there, breathing alongside Breitwieser as he lifted the plexiglass. This is mediated from stories he has heard from the man, narrativized. It's been ten years since Serial, we all know that the journalist has a role in the story!
But you won't find Finkel here directly. For the entirety of the length of the book, Finkel resists almost all editorializing, context, almost all deeper emotional interiority that cannot be described as what Breitwieser directly senses.
An example, written on the time when Breitwieser was in jail awaiting trial and trying to contact his girlfriend/accomplice Anne-Catherine:
The authorities have forbidden him to contact Anne-Catherine, even by letter, ever since he’d confessed to the canal find—communication between them, the police think, could harm the investigation—but Breitwieser believes that a note might slip through. He mails her frequently, begging forgiveness and declaring his love. As soon as he’s released from prison, he writes, he’ll find legitimate work as a salesman. Then they will buy their own place, have children, and live happily ever after. By the time he turns thirty-one, in October 2002, he’s sent her twenty letters. He doesn’t learn if any are delivered; he knows only that he never receives a reply.
Later, in desperation, he manages to borrow a contraband cell phone in jail and dials from memory her hospital number. He’s transferred to her department and asks the receptionist to page Anne-Catherine. He hears her name called, and his heart accelerates. But the receptionist returns to the line, asking who’s on the phone.
“A friend from Switzerland,” Breitwieser says. He hears whispering in the background.
“Anne-Catherine does not want to speak with you,” the receptionist says, and hangs up.
Depression swallows him again. His mother is jailed and prohibited from speaking with him. He is allowed visitors, if approved by the authorities, but his grandparents are too frail to drive up. He has no friends. All that his attic collection has ultimately done is ruin him.
This is an emotional moment, but Finkel is sparse with emotional interiority. The expectations Breitwieser has for their future, about building a home and becoming a salesman, are quoted from objective letters Finkel could find. We get one artistic flourish around his emotions: "Depression swallows him again." But overall, the prose does not communicate the desperation Breitwieser is feeling. Despite staying so close to his POV and being so immediate, Finkel refuses to give us an emotional experience.
The context here, perhaps, is Finkel's own biography: the man got in serious journalistic ethical trouble early in his career when it was discovered that he purposefully fictionalized parts of a story he wrote for The New York Times. It's not over-psychoanalyzing then, perhaps, to wonder if Finkel feels it's very important this mediation stay as far away from the facts of the story as possible.
But lines like "in desperation" (assigning motive to Breitwieser), "he hears whispering in the background" (an intimate setting detail, unverifiable, there for tension and flavor), or "all that his attic collection has ultimately done is ruin him" (an editorial judgement) are mediation. These are Finkel being in the story, making editorial choices, as any writer must. His lack of willingness to give us deeper into Breitwieser then doesn't same him from mediation, it just makes the story flatter.
Similarly is the other thing not present in the Breitwieser tale: much context. Finkel chooses a path of focusing intensely on Breitwieser, this is not a wrong or bad choice, though it would have been helped if the writing had more emotion, feeling, and artfulness. An alternative to this that could have heightened the story would have been context, to put Breitwieser into a story about people, crime, our relationship to art, or to money.
There are moments when Finkel offers some of this. There are extended sessions noting how "exceptional" Breitwieser is. To be brief, those reasons include: Breitwieser never sold any pieces, he hoarded his art and claimed to do it for pure aesthetics. Breitwieser operated for far longer as a thief without getting caught. Breitwieser defies diagnoses of kleptomania (for he does not regret his thefts). Breitwieser is not just a prolific thief, but a masterful one: in an epilogue, Finkel relates how Breitwieser stole his own laptop from under his nose.
At times, Finkel seems to even structure the story to help us side with Breitwieser and his agenda. In court, Breitwieser testifies about one of the pieces in a way that stumps an art professional in the courtroom: ah, we maybe are meant to say, perhaps he was a better keeper of the art than the art professionals were! (the scene is strangely reminiscent of the viral Facebook post about the conservative college student telling off the professor in lecture). At times, Finkel criticizes art institutions for creating sterile inhospitable places for art. Breitwieser lists out why he is a better keeper:
Everything you want to do in the presence of a compelling piece is forbidden in a museum, says Breitwieser. What you first want to do, he advises, is relax, pillowed in a sofa or armchair. Sip a drink, if you desire. Eat a snack. Reach out and caress the work whenever you wish. Then you’ll see art in a new way... So many great works of art are sexually arousing that what you’ll also want to do, Breitwieser says, is install a bed nearby, perhaps a four-poster, for when your partner is there and the timing is right.
The most egregious moment is when Finkel notes that great art institutions were often created through theft themselves: Napolean, Hitler, the British Museum, these are the players from whom Breitwieser is liberating art!
But all these defenses are wrong in multiple different ways. First, these are not noble missions just on the face of it. A man stealing a priceless painting to keep in his attic is hardly collective political action. It's equally farcical to say he's against Hitler because Hitler built a museum and Breitwieser steals from museums. Even if you want to defend his relationship to the art, the fact that he enjoys it in non-sterile and living environment, his theft means he is the only one who will get to do it. He’s not running a radical museum himself, he’s withholding things from a wider community. And to the idea that he was a better keeper of the art, he wasn't. He ruined and destroyed much of it.
Finkel knows this, which is why he includes rare perspectives from others. One moment discussing the social value of museums has him recognize Breitwieser as "a cancer on this public good." In a chapter that begins "What is his problem?", Finkel goes through and rejects barely-sketched talking heads' opinions of what could be wrong with him.
In a story that takes so much of Breitwieser's perspective, one of two things should be true. Either Finkel should mediate the story by offering context, prove to us why this figure is interesting because his acts represent a new way of seeing art, or a subversive take on value and the art market, or something. Or, Finkel should mediate by giving us the kinds of compelling interesting prose, characterization, deeper interiority and overall just a sense of style so that even if this man is ugly, perverse, wrong, we feel for him. Instead, immediacy keeps this story shallow. In the midst of rejecting any diagnosis for Breitwieser, Finkel quotes a psychologist who has a better summary of our POV character than anyone else. "He’s a brat."
The other book is Benjamin Labatut's The MANIAC (I wrote here about his excellent When We Cease to Understand the World). This is historical fiction that barely strays from the facts of reality; that's one of the many interesting things about it. Labatut said in an interview with the Telegraph, "Everything a writer writes is fiction." What a starkly different take on mediation than Mr. Knaussguard. That's mediation, admitted to, not stated cowardly but with full confidence, a starting point for an artistic practice. He writes fiction, now what?
The answer is to move away from just providing data, and towards something between Sontag's continuum of art that is "saying something" vs "providing an experience." The theme Labatut wants to play around is the legacy of 20th century science.
Unlike Finkel, Labatut takes on dozens of POVs in The MANIAC. Though the bulk of the book follows different contemporaries' perspectives about the titanic scientific genius John Von Neumann, we open with an extended sequence on scientist Paul Ehrenfest and end with a longer sequence about competitive Go player Lee Sedol.
All these figures are real. There are many things already written about them, nonfiction and biography and commentary. There is a counterfactual version of The MANIAC which is just a page-long bibliography, Labatut saying, "Hey, go read these ten books and then come tell me what you've learned about 20th century science."
Instead of just presenting data about their lives, or trying to unmediatedly juxtapose topics, Labatut sticks his hands in. He gives deep "only in fiction" interiority to these people, thoughts and feelings and expressions that these real life people were unlikely to have literally had. He goes even further: not every event in this book is even true. He commits the sin that Finkel got in trouble for with the New York TImes, but because he's honest about it, it's not just allowable, it's kind of brilliant.
Moreso, Labatut has style. See here an excerpt from the perspective of Richard Feynman, talking about his time on the Manhattan Project:
Wasn’t like people imagine, though. Hot New Mexico desert, yeah, but so, so beautiful. Los Alamos was high up on a mesa with tall cliffs carved in dark red earth, lots of trees and shrubs all around. The landscape was breathtaking, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Coming from New York, I’d never traveled out to the West before, so I really felt like I was in another world. In Mars or something. It had the strange energy of a sacred space, a haven far away from the civilized world, away from prying eyes, farther than God could see. The perfect spot to do the unimaginable. And it had to be like that, you know, remote and uninhabited, ’cause the lab had to be beyond the range of airplanes and bombers, so at least two hundred miles away from the coastline or any national border. We also needed fair weather year-round, so construction would never have to stop. And there weren’t really many places like that, we had to build one from scratch. An entire town from nothing.
Here's a sense of mood with the description of the setting. There's a voice that he gives Feynman, a real man with dozens of documented examples of his real style, so that Labatut can play and emulate and bring it in in its own way. How does Breitwieser speak? Not sure, but I know from this paragraph how Feynman does. Through Feynman, Labatut gives a sense of scope and stakes to the work: the "strange energy of a sacred space" and "the perfect spot to do the unimaginable." Labatut combines those cosmic religious seriousness with Feynman’s gee-shucks "'cause" and "you know." It's a unique take, something Labatut put work into making.
So with all this crafted specific work, what is Labatut doing?
I was most moved by a section in the Von Neumann story when his wife Klara describes one of his late-in-life projects. I've heard the Manhattan Project and atom bomb and hydrogen bomb stories so many times, but I hadn't heard that in his very-modernist way of seeing the world, the man who worked on both those projects saw them as the beginning of future new possible forces.
Klara give us a story about a fight they had and follows it up with this story about the work she was doing using their massive computer (named the MANIAC):
The rest of that afternoon is a daze in my memory. I only half remember what I did and what I thought, because everything is colored by my anger and the enormous pain I felt afterward. At first, still slightly in shock, I tried to focus on my own work. I’d brought home the Monte Carlo codes I was supposed to prepare for one of the big weather calculations that were running on the MANIAC. That had been Johnny’s former obsession: numerical weather prediction was one of the most—if not the most—complex, interactive, and highly nonlinear problems that our species had ever tackled, and, precisely because of that, it was completely irresistible to him. All modern weather forecasts owe a debt to the early investigations that my Johnny prompted, but his ambitions were as hyperbolic as ever: he was not simply interested in foreseeing when and where it would rain, he was after what he called the “forever forecast,” an understanding of the weather so mathematically rigorous that we would be capable not only of predicting storms, typhoons, and hurricanes, but of actually controlling them. This possibility enticed the vultures that were always circling above his head, waiting to devour the remains of his kills.
Again, look at the style and how well crafted it is. There is an emotional story being told about Klara and Johnny's argument, her anger and pain and shock. Then there's another story happening about Johnny's ambition, "obsession" and desire for control. Then there's the reality of what he's talking about, super interesting questions about the weather. In a story that has focused so much about quantum physics, something totally unintuitive, it's a bit of a twist to move towards something natural and observable like the weather.
But Von Neumann as a character (and Labatut as a mediator) have a specific angle here. She continues:
My husband believed that whoever understood the weather would gain access to a source of power that exceeded that of the most gargantuan nuclear arsenal, because a single average-sized hurricane delivers more energy than ten thousand atomic bombs. His optimism regarding the possibility that we could accurately predict the weather was entirely based on the capabilities provided by computers such as his MANIAC: “All processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable, we shall control,” he said, and I, for one, believed him, because I’d never seen him be wrong about anything else before.
The impact of the idea of this potential weather weapon is bigger because it blends fact and fiction: that Von Neumann actually dreamed up this possibility, that he was the man who helped usher in nuclear and hydrogen bombs, that this was a real possibility to a terrifyingly brilliant man. But also, the fiction of it: Labatut's style, Labatut's blend of the ordinary facts of Klara's speech and relationship to her husband. They make this feel different.
The slight of hand Labatut does with the structure of The MANIAC is great. The weather weapon is the climax of Von Neumann's story, it comes right after all his atomic and computational successes and precedes his death without being satisfied. But while real people today are still trying to solve the Navier-Stokes equations, they have advanced on one of the other incomplete Von Neumann projects: artificial intelligence.
Because we know what the atom bomb has done, because we know what the weather weapon could do, we enter the last section of the book on artificial intelligence with completely different context.
It's a surprising end to a book about such 20th century European science: we leave America/Europe and go to Korea, we meet an entirely new set of people, neither Von Neumann nor the military are mentioned at all in this last section. And if you didn't just have hundreds of pages about those things, you might find the story of Google's AlphaGo playing board-game-Go master Lee Sedol to be a charming story, which is how it's presented in the documentary which covers almost exactly the same ground. The same events happen: Google develops an AI that can play the game Go. They challenge Lee Sedol. Sedol loses all but one of the five games, and in the game he wins, he plays a move that has a kind of intuitive brilliance that suggest a glimmer of hope.
But this isn't a documentary. It's not even a nonfiction book. It's a mediated work of prose, mediated by a Labatut who is saying: look at this and see what I see, see the weight of what others have done coming forward, see it in a way you can only see it if you experience the mindset of all these people like you have, now that you've read this far.
It ends up doing what so much great art does: offers a new way of seeing something through a contextual lens. Watch the documentary and see Google engineers breathing relief at the success of making AI. Read The MANIAC and get that this potential is based in something frightening.
How does Labtut do this? By using the literary techniques that Kornbluh notes are atypical of the immediate: "distant perspective, multiple characters, eventual plotting, quoted dialogue, and long paragraphs"
In terms of style, it's far closer to Sontag's erotics than than any “novel of ideas” deserves to be, a very incredible feat.
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