Against Sceneyness

Irony, Sanctimony, and Parties

I have recently attended some hip, photogenic literary events. I usually try to avoid this kind of thing. In the interest of not being overly bitchy, I’ll avoid going into a lot of detail. Suffice it to say the general vibe of this stuff is: thin, expensive, self-conscious, social media-oriented. And this is fine. This is not new, regardless of annoying recent discourse about the supposed rise of the “literary it-girl.” Since at least the Romantics, there have been ambitious arty young people getting together to read stories and poems, and it feels kind of mean to say anything about them other than that they “put themselves out there,” offering up free entertainment to strangers. Plus, it’s absurd to judge a writer simply because they belong to a hip literary scene—just as it would be ridiculous to judge a writer because they are not part of a hip literary scene. (For my part, I don’t know whether I am or have ever been part of a literary scene, and would prefer not to be informed either way). 

A writer should be judged solely on the quality of their work, which is, in theory, a completely separate issue from that of their public persona, even if their public persona is annoying. What interests me, however, is not the fact that these scenes are often annoying. Nor is it, even, the fact that the writing is often bad (most writing is bad!). Rather, it’s the fact that specific shared characteristics and tics unite much bad sceney writing.

I want to, in other words, propose that there exists a literature of sceneyness—scene as literary genre. Sceneyness in literature can take many forms, depending on the author’s generational affiliation and location and on what happens to be swirling around in the culture when they are writing. Sceneyness can look like the opposite of itself. But in all its iterations, the core remains the same.

Type 1: Writing About Scenes

My friends and I sometimes talk about “we-were-a-band-of” writing. We change the nouns out. “We were a band of muppets, freaks, and wavy-headed hipsters,” or “We were a band of junkies, scammers, and little lads.” Etc. What we are making fun of is the most overtly sceney form of literature, which is literally about being part of a scene. This type of writing is usually nonfiction, or else highly autobiographical fiction, and it is about the writer hanging out with their cool friends, doing coke, going to parties you were not invited to (possibly because they happened a long time ago: this is a frequently nostalgic subgenre). Of course people can and do write great books about having interesting friends and going to cool parties. People write great books about pretty much anything. But—let’s be real—a lot of this writing reads as basically brand-building or even bragging, rather than as the pursuit of something genuinely entertaining or interesting. My friends are cool, I can afford enough coke to destabilize a small Latin American nation, etc. 

Sometimes, in my heart of hearts, I suspect that readers who claim to enjoy this kind of writing—at least in its more annoying expressions—are engaging in a similar kind of personal branding exercise, claiming to identify with the genre in order to imply that they also go to many exclusive parties and belong to various interesting scenes. This is probably too cynical of me, but the point is, it’s hard for me to imagine that people genuinely find this kind of society-pages literature fulfilling to read. But this kind of overt posing is only one type of sceney writing, only the most obvious manifestation of a much more expansive tupe.

Type 2: Writing From Scenes

If the explicitly sceney, “we-were-a-band-of-X-Y-Z” writing is one face of the genre, there is another face—one which is not about being in a scene, but is, instead of it. This writing is produced by people who are working hard to be part of, or else remain in, certain social-literary circles. 

Much of the writing I’ve heard at self-consciously cool events in recent months is about ironic young people having miserable sex with other ironic young people they hate, and then going on their phones, where they sort of stalk the people they have just had bad sex with, or else the exes of the people they’ve had bad sex with, or else someone else they dislike or envy in a detached, half-ironic way.

Now, that’s all fine, I guess. Having bad sex and going on your phone are certainly parts of life and are especially parts of life for people in their twenties and thirties living in large cities today. In fact, sceneyness itself combines (and renders synonymous) expectations of artistic and intellectual accomplishment with those of sexual desirability. That is precisely why it’s such a common trap for young women, and why critiquing it is also a trap—it means you run the risk of just mocking women writers, as opposed to mocking expectations that make it harder for women to write and write well. As Nina Renata Aron memorably writes, “It is, after all, one thing to write the essay for n+1, and another to show up, svelte and fuckable, to the n+1 party.” The more you are expected to care about looking svelte and fuckable at literary parties, the more your literary output will grow to resemble that of all the other attendees, who are being pushed toward the same incentives and taking the same photographs at the same parties to post on the same social networks (and I should know: I’m a fucking literary TikToker). And so, under the weight of these sexual-intellectual-social expectations, it’s unsurprising that people in youthful literary scenes would write stories about social media and sex.

But, Jesus, the stories are so boring. Sex—not to sound like some hippie sinner—is fucking fun! So is going on your phone! At the very least, these things are interesting! And yet the narrators/characters of these stories are soul-crushingly uninterested, just limply pegging one another and ghosting one another and watching their own Instagram stories. I imagine all this fucking and texting happening from a literal, physical defensive posture, as if the narrators are in a corner crouched and snarling as they tell their tale.

Of course, we readers are usually supposed to understand that these narrators are unreliable and that the characters are depressed or assholes or both. Through this halfhearted dramatic irony, the narrator becomes a fictional human shield, blocking the writer from questions or critiques. The writer and the story are rendered unassailable, because the narrator does not care, the narrative does not care, the writer does not care—so why are you asking all these annoying questions?

In a recent semi-viral pan published in the LRB, Brandon Taylor wrote of “the difficulty presented by a character who reminds you on every page that nothing matters and nothing is real… It brings me back to the question, why did you write this? What are you exploring here?” I haven’t read the book in question, (which, for all its possible flaws, does not seem to be chiefly about Instagram). But Taylor’s description happens to capture the dragging, uninterested quality rampant in so much sceney fiction right now. I don’t know how deliberately Taylor used the word “exploring,” but it’s an apt one. Exploration—the curiosity that drives a narrative inward or outward or forward—is the single most vital thing missing from the sceney-ironic stories I’m describing.

Sex is usually driven by curiosity. So is going on Instagram to stalk your situationship. But sceneyness is an incurious mode, devoid of and indeed hostile to exploration and inquisitiveness. Nowhere do these stories ask or explore why the narrators are so disconnected, or what lies beneath that disconnection, or what’s happening outside their disconnection. The story really doesn’t ask anything at all. It does not explore ironic disconnect; it merely wields ironic disconnect to defang readers’ curiosity. It is a bored and boring type of story about a bored and boring type of person—much more bored and boring than any real person in the world.

After all, to be curious is to be vulnerable. Curiosity means asking questions, and thereby openly admitting that you do not already know everything or have the answers. That, I think, is why so much sceney writing is incurious: it exists to defend and burnish its own author, to make its author seem invulnerable, or tastefully, gracefully vulnerable. Katy Waldman lamented this while reviewing a few recent sceney books in the New Yorker, noting that their provocativeness and bravado are really just skittishness. “These books can seem to be nervously testing boundaries, feinting toward and then away from their most inflammatory arguments, seeing how far they can go before the adults lose their temper…They would like you to believe that their indecision reflects a particular attunement to ambiguity and nuance. But in truth they just won’t know where they stand until they’ve figured out where you do,” she writes. The irony-poisoned unreliable narrator is an easy crutch for writers who write in order to seem cool, or else for those who fear that their writing will reveal their vulnerability and render them uncool.

Type 3: Writing From Scenes

I have been criticizing a certain mode of ironic writing. Sincerity is often imagined as the opposite of, or antidote to, irony. The pendulum swings, it’s said: irony is trendy now.  Before, sincerity reigned. In some ways it still does, within parallel, slightly older scenes. But, if sceney writing is characterized by anxious defensiveness and incuriosity, there is a type of sincerity writing that is equally sceney, equally defensive, incurious, and focused on the strengthening of the author’s reputation. This is what I meant when I wrote earlier that sceneyness can look like its own opposite.

The critic Becca Rothfeld memorably called this variety of writing “sanctimony literature.” Rothfeld was correct that there is a type of literature populated by very sincere characters, who always behave nicely and whose political, artistic, and aesthetic commitments are perfectly inoffensive to well-heeled Brooklyn or Stoke Newington readers. Just like the irony-poisoned stories I spoke about earlier, these sanctimony fictions are wildly incurious and opposed to exploration. They are not interested in dissecting or understanding morality, only flaunting it, which is what makes them sanctimonious (this is why I actually disagree with Rothfeld’s categorization of Sally Rooney, who writes about morally admirable people but is, I think, sincerely and ardently curious about goodness and earnestness and morality. And sex, for that matter). 

At its worst, this sincere subgenre of the sceney is so opposed to exploration that it cannot tolerate even a depiction of immorality or unseemliness on the page. The most extreme examples are those instances in which writers have pulled books or faced PR crises because of negative market responses to their mere depiction of bad actors: Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert pulling a book from publication simply because it was about Russian people (!), for example. It is not surprising that, faced with this kind of puritanism, many writers retreated into an incurious sincerity; it is also not surprising that, tiring of this sanctimonious and defensive posture, a new crop of writers have tried to run away and, in a kind of cruel Oedipal twist, have wound up in the very same self-defensive incurious position, signaling via irony rather than sincerity. 

It’s the same thing, ultimately. Whether the point is to shock the reader or guilt the reader, to armor the author’s reputation by showing how little they give a shit or by showing how morally pure they are, both of these faces of sceney writing are first and foremost about making the reader and writer look good to others. This problem is inextricable from the reality of the scene itself. Social groups—groups of friends and neighbors—exist because of internal ties between their members. They love one another or hate one another or just don’t know anyone else. What makes a scene distinct from a normal social grouping is that scenes exist to make their members look cool to people outside of the scene. They function as social objects rather than collections of subjects, as bodies to be looked at, envied, speculated about from the outside. Scenes are defensive bodies, fortresses functioning to protect their members’ reputations. But defensive, inward-focused writing cannot be curious writing. And without curiosity—moral, intellectual, social, sexual, scientific, it doesn’t matter—a piece of writing is worth no reader’s or writer’s time.