Why Subtlety Is Overrated

I just finished reading The Grapes of Wrath. That was intensely traumatizing, but I must say, it was also oddly refreshing. I felt a great relief in being spoken to that way. What way, you ask? So directly. Straight from the heart, straight to the heart.

I tried to understand its effect on me for a long time. I realized, this kind of story is not told enough anymore, and almost never in that way. There’s a reason for this.

If you haven’t read it, or it’s been a while, it’s the story of a family losing their farm and moving west during the Dust Bowl. Notably, between each chapter, essays explain why this is happening to them. The narrator zooms out and talks about how banks, junk yards, wages, and property rights, each function. The reader is forced to understand: as long as these systems are in place, and they are, this family’s story will keep happening. It is not just a story, it’s an allegory. And it basically tells you as much.

I was curious about how this book was received at the time it was published. It turns out it is complicated. It was an instant classic, yes. Eleanor Roosevelt was a big fan. It was a shoe-in for the Pulitzer and its movie adaptation, the Oscar. A review in the NYT the year it was published perfectly describes my experience reading it today:

“It is a long and thoughtful novel as one thinks about it. It is a short and vivid scene as one feels it… As plainly as it can be put, Mr. Steinbeck puts it.”

And predicted:

“The moralist [in Steinbeck] is as important as the story-teller, may possibly outlast him.”

The New Yorker the same year started with the claim that “If only a few million overcomfortable people would read it, a revolution will take place in their minds and hearts.”

Well more than a few million have read it at this point, so what gives?

Where’s our revolution?

I learned that by the time Steinbeck received his Nobel prize in 1962, opinion of his literary merit had shifted considerably. Even the Nobel committee admitted it had been “a bad year.” Despite the 1939 rave, The New York Times now published a rebuttal to his win citing Steinbeck’s “limited talent…watered by tenth rate philosophizing.”

What happened? Well, the generation had been conditioned to a very particular standard of taste. Steinbeck himself had a great working theory as to why:

In my time, Ernest Hemingway wrote a certain kind of story better and more effectively than it had ever been done before… When his method was accepted, no other method was admired. The method or style not only conditioned the stories but the thinking of his generation. Superb as his method is, there are many things which cannot be said using it. The result of his acceptance was that writers did not write about those things which could not be said in the Hemingway manner, and gradually they did not think them either.

How does a generation of aspiring writers spontaneously and collectively grasp the same highly idiosyncratic author and devote themselves to his style? It’s not that great a style, in my opinion. But whatever I think of Hemingway, my point is: his acceptance wasn’t spontaneous nor was it scientific proof as to the objective superiority of this style. Systems have a role to play in shaping why this style—namely: spare writing about interior, as opposed to, social struggle—was taken as right and good, and still is.

One reason is that this style dovetails nicely with the political establishment moving away from the New Deal era of social welfare to a red scare, and the belief in individualism as the greatest and only good. These ideals in turn perfectly complemented the mandates of New Criticism, the mid-century dogma in the literary establishment.

New Criticism holds that a text is “autonomous” and can and should be read without its authorial or historical context. It was one of the main theories I was taught in the private schools I attended, which was convenient for the purposes of education in more ways than one.

It all sounds very scientific, for one. I remember reading the theory for the first time, and not being able to find a hole in it. It also benefitted from my confirmation bias. I have ADHD, so it was great news for me as a college student to know I could produce “close readings” of texts ad infinitum without having to do any research.

The particular idea of good taste that New Criticism helped to shape allows us to discount any text that explicitly indicts its social context. Because they shouldn’t even be bringing that up. That’s basically a faux pas.

How convenient, how convenient.

This is good news for the teachers, bound to produce (and be) the right kind of thinkers and social beings: people who could build cultural capital around their taste. If the meaning of a book is made clear, how can anyone show off or gain anything by proving they understand it?

They need to prove their understanding of art is intellectual, not emotional, to be accepted in intellectual circles. This was also good news for the artist themselves, who benefit from multiple channels, one where their work is received, another from a cottage industry where any unspoken meanings are explained.

The result is that artists may continue to talk about systems, but only through allusion, and subtly, and please, using the tone of ironic detachment that has become the disposition of the cultured class. To speak with any urgency is to be sentimental or melodramatic, the deadliest sins of all in art (and two criticisms frequently lobbed at Steinbeck). By swearing by subtlety, you can engage freely with critiques of the ruling class, without ever putting your own membership at risk.

The result is that it’s now considered unfashionable and in poor taste for artists to directly state the social problems their works address. It’s rude to outright demand an emotional reaction from an audience (in the way Steinbeck does in the Grapes of Wrath, for instance).

Take the Great Gatsby, to use another classic. We know, vaguely, that this story, is critical of the system. Certainly it’s not endorsing the society that made Tom so racist and Gatsby and Daisy so shallow. It gestures broadly to a critique of some kind. But still, most people’s lasting impression of that story is a desire to dress up and attend a party.

Likewise, today’s media landscape is awash with ‘critiques’ of the systems we live in. But I notice that they all suffer from the same problem. An unwillingness to go there. To state explicitly what they are critiquing and why. Do the creators even know?

The White Lotus was basically appointment TV in the last five years. It benefitted from its gestures, broad but ample, to a critique of wealth inequality. I didn’t feel any bite. I never felt any pain.

The concept of a five-star resort in a colonial outpost is supposed to suffice. Enough said, right? You’d be forgiven for thinking the major downside to this kind of inequality is the feeling of awkwardness it spawns. In truth, it’s a system with real victims and perpetrators. But that truth is never spoken or revealed. And I think that is intentional.

I suppose these creators think what I used to. That it would be too obvious to say it outright. That their artistry would suffer. That it’s deadly to have an agenda in fiction. Well, it wasn’t deadly to the Grapes of Wrath. It wasn’t deadly to Dickens.

Why are we so sure it would be deadly now?