The Review: Obscenity, Morality, Art

A novelist's ringing defense of fiction against moralism. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. When, a few months ago, the novelist Aleksandar Hemon [slurred]( Philip Roth in The New York Times — “Roth’s steadfast commitment to the many privileges of male whiteness reliably repels me” — his dismissive righteousness already seemed dated, an artifact of a politicized program of interpretation readers were largely coming to doubt. The rapturous reception of Garth Greenwell’s recent celebration of Roth in The Yale Review, “[A Moral Education: In Praise of Filth,]( which it seemed like everyone who cares about literature was reading last week, might be taken, then, as an announcement that serious readers have finally soured on Hemon’s style of identitarian moralism. But Greenwell’s essay does not treat the defeat of such moralism as a fait accompli. Quite the contrary. “Within the small world of people who care about literature and art,” he writes, “the culture is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter, our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience construed as ever more vulnerable.” In a bravura reading of Roth’s scabrous 1995 masterpiece Sabbath’s Theater (“a novel about a rancidly obscene, sexually voracious, inveterately grieving puppeteer”), Greenwell dismantles the premises of the new moralism and insists that “representation has a fundamentally different moral and existential status from that of reality.” That insistence applies urgently to the college classroom. “When I work with students now,” Greenwell writes, “their primary mode of engagement with a text often seems to be a particular kind of moral judgment, as though before they can see anything else in stories or poems they have to sort them into piles of the righteous and the problematic.” (Anyone doubting the puritanical certainty with which students sometimes make such judgments should read University of Michigan professor Phoebe Gloeckner’s Review [essay]( about trying to teach the comic artist Robert Crumb.) SPONSOR CONTENT | London Metropolitan University [Leading with Excellence in STEM Education]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. But outside of the classroom, is the culture really as “moralistic as it has ever been”? Many zones of it surely are, but we are also witnessing a flourishing reaction against the ascendant moralism of the last decade or so. Greenwell’s essay is an especially capable entry in the burgeoning literature attacking what Sumana Roy, in our pages, has called “[moralitis]( One reason so many people are reading this long analysis of Roth’s almost-30-year-old novel is that they are completely exhausted with a creative culture in which even the sensitivity readers have sensitivity readers and in which, as Greenwell writes, “Every artist I know is conscious of a new and mounting pressure to police their work for potentially objectionable elements.” Artists now, Greenwell says, suffer from “a sense that the art they want to make will fail to speak to our moment in a way that can cut through the noise of incessant, hectoring, social-media-amplified topical debate.” Sabbath’s Theater becomes, for Greenwell, a didactic allegory whose very obscenity instructs us about how not to degrade art by reducing it to “The Discourse, with its purity tests and cancelations, its groupthink and dismissal.” That this interpretation is itself an intervention in “The Discourse” is an irony not lost on Greenwell. His defense of art’s special status is eloquent — the “moral work” art is “uniquely equipped” to do depends on the “magic circle separating the world of art from the actual world” — but it also used to be obvious. Perhaps it is becoming obvious again. Read Garth Greenwell’s “[A Moral Education.]( ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | CONVERSATION [At Many Universities, Organized Labor Is Treated With Contempt]( By Maximillian Alvarez [STORY IMAGE]( Too often, unions are stonewalled, disrespected, and dismissed. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [How to Combat Tribalism on Campus]( By Daniel Diermeier [STORY IMAGE]( Students are quick to condemn those who disagree with them. We must equip them to argue better. THE REVIEW | OPINION [Students Shouldn’t Always Choose Higher-Paying Majors]( By Zachary Bleemer [STORY IMAGE]( A focus on small differences in future-earnings statistics can lead students astray. THE REVIEW | OPINION [Why Stanford Law Students Were Right to Protest]( By Jennifer Ruth [STORY IMAGE]( The risk of appearing partisan when fighting for nonpartisan principles is not one we can run from. Recommended - On the Intercepted podcast, Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain [talk with Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad]( about his book A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War. - “There is growing political activity on campuses, most visibly left activity, but much of it unrestrained by any kind of adult political movement or party.” That’s Michael Walzer in [conversation]( with Timothy Shenk about liberalism in Dissent. - “For Taubes ... the answer to the problem of fascism and the Holocaust lies in religion, and it took him all the way back to the Gospels.” In The New York Review of Books, Susan Neiman [reviews]( Jerry Z. Muller’s biography of Jacob Taubes. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | University of Wisconsin-Madison [Great Minds Converge Here]( University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering is expanding and ready to make a bigger impact FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [The Future of Advising - Buy Now]( [The Future of Advising]( Good advising is widely seen as central to student success, but it is one of the most misunderstood and under-supported divisions on campus. [Order your copy]( to learn how university leaders can improve advising systems to help close equity gaps, and ensure students effectively navigate their path to a degree. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2023 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037