Totalitarian Kitsch and the Irrelevance of Critical Literacy

Part 6 of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) frames the narrative within a kind of embedded essay on what Kundera calls "totalitarian kitsch." Totalitarian Kitsch is a theory of politics that sees dominant ideologies as functioning not through ideas but through a certain aesthetic. Under totalitarianism, Kundera argues, life is organised around certain images that have such broad emotional appeal that they cannot be argued with. Thus a kind of totalising emotional togetherness is created by the state. The first example Kundera gives of totalitarian kitsch in practice is the May Day parade: "As a group approached the reviewing stand, even the most blasé faces would beam in dazzling smiles, as if trying to prove they were properly joyful or, to be more precise, in proper agreement" (249, Kundera's italics). Kitsch, though, is not restricted to the specifics of communist ritual; it must be rooted in symbolism with broader appeal: "It must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love" (251).

Kundera's formulation might be seen as the flip side of Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp." Whereas the camp aesthetic necessitates a certain countercultural politics and subversion of dominant ideologies, kitsch is necessarily a handmaiden of totalitarianism: "Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch" (251, Kundera's italics).

Though he doesn't quite put it in such pedagogical terms, the antidote to kitsch, in Kundera's view, is critical literacy. For example, asking questions of kitsch's desired emotional response automatically defangs it: "In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it" (254). Critical reading here is a weapon--a knife with which to cut totalitarian pretensions to pieces.  Two pages later, Kundera makes a similar point in less metaphorical terms: "As soon as kitsch is recognised for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness" (256). In both cases, the key to depriving the authoritarian state of its power is to recognise how our images and emotions are manipulated through texts like a May Day parade.

Kundera's novel is, very obviously, wrapped up in a certain historical moment: The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the aftermath for Czech intellectuals in the following decade. Read from the perspective of 2020, however, I think this faith in critical literacy might be the thing that seems most dated about the novel.

Consider the predicament of the Trump COVID-19 press conferences. Here Trump preens and parades as the wise leader who handles the crisis flawlessly and commands the respect and attention of the nation in so doing. The media, in this case, responds as Kundera suggests it ought to. It points out Trump's factual errors, his exaggerations, his attempts to rewrite the historical record, and so forth. And the result is that Trump returns more defensive, more combative, and less able to put on his performance as all-knowing leader. Any kitsch effect, any warm emotion, is destroyed, much as Kundera predicts. Even those media outlets that support Trump end up doing so out of grievance and anger, focussing on the villainy of perceived enemies more than on the evocation of fellow feeling.

The political problem, though, is that it doesn't matter. The basic response to the Trump presidency has been exceptionally high levels of critical literacy that have absolutely no affect on politics. The Trumpian bubble is burst again and again, and yet his poll numbers hardly move, he is impeached but then acquitted, the leaders of his party remain in lockstep with him. And the same might be said throughout the democratic world. Everyone knows (and openly says) that Boris Johnson lied and continues to lie about Brexit; he wins anyway. Everyone knows Kaczynski is manipulating the courts for political purposes; he wins anyway. Everyone knows Bolsonaro lies about indigenous rights; he wins anyway. The panacea of critical literacy fails. It turns out that you can use your analytical knife to slice through the totalitarian stage backdrop. But the show carries on regardless.

This is not a very cheerful conclusion. If a widely literate and educated population can see right through a leader and yet fail to remove him, then what other levers of power need to be moved? The answer is hopefully that other levers in the cultural realm still have a certain importance: not just critical literacy to burst bubbles, but the creation of alternative myths and images and so forth. Perhaps, though, the lesson is a more atavistic one: That you can learn to read and analyse all you like, but that, all along, the levers that matter have been at the levels of economics, politics, and physical force.

Elizabeth Hardwick and Writing Well

To teach high school English is to worry about how poorly students write. They have nothing to say. They say it imprecisely. Is this the fault of the assignment? Is this the fault of the teacher? Has it always been this way? These are the standard themes of conversation and complaint. Embedded in these concerns is the problem of a missing target: When students write analytically about literature, we are not entirely sure what we want them to do.

Returning to the mid-century glory days of the literary essay offer some correctives to this problem. The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, the most recent of which is now 15 years old and the earliest of which was published in 1953, are of varying interest today. Her insights into the style of letters and diaries are as close to "timeless" as any genre criticism is likely ever to be; her thoughts on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., in their interest in how religion and race overlap, must have as much force today as they ever have. Her long descriptions of the Maine countryside, on the other hand, can try the patience of the modern reader (or, at least, this particular reader who has no particular interest in Maine).

Despite some passages that have, understandably, not aged as well as others, let us stipulate that Hardwick's essays, taken as a whole, can be seen as a kind of analytical writing we might want to aim for. They are smart. They are interesting in their structure, never getting bogged down in a predictable series of claims and counter-claims. They provide evidence that is suggestive and interesting, but never hammer home an argument with quote after quote in the way of the sophomoric student paper. They are interesting and creative in their use of language, playing with sentence structure and word choice in ways we have been trained not to expect from this kind of non-fiction writing.

How does Hardwick achieve this kind of writing? The obvious answer is that she is a rare genius, and that is obviously true. There are, though, two lessons that can be learned here--lessons that can be generalised beyond Hardwick's personal skill and that fly clearly in the face of how English classes ordinarily teach and assign writing.

The first is that Hardwick's writing is evaluative. Much of her work was book reviewing and, as she amusingly points out in an early essay, a "review" would seem to strongly imply stating an opinion (64). Such evaluative writing is, if not quite a taboo, certainly discouraged in many high school (and university) classrooms. To take two driving forces behind high school curricula, neither the AP nor the IB has any place in their formal, concluding examinations for any kind of evaluation of the quality of a work, and a student who ventures such an opinion is very likely to be penalised for writing outside of the expected genre. This is a shame, because Hardwick's clear positions on the strengths and weaknesses of a writer give her essays not only some of their verve but also a kind of narrative excitement: What is she going to say about Mary McCarthy? Surely she must hate Norman Mailer as much as I do? What does the title "Militant Nudes" even mean? No "analysis," in the schoolmarm sense of the word, could carry with it that implicit suspense.

The second lesson here is the breadth of Hardwick's subject matter. The Collected Essays include the expected topics of a professional book reviewer (William James, Henry James, Edmund Wilson, Gertrude Stein, etc.) but also the riots in Watts and at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party Convention, the exploration of Brazil and a protest against Theodor Adorno. And within the traditionally literary topics, there is a great deal that is not traditional textual analysis: thoughts on the life of George Eliot's husband; the problem of being an intellectual in Washington, D.C.

The essays that leave behind strictly textual criticism are still in every important way "literary." The creativity with language is still there, as are the experiments with essay structure. Maybe most importantly, these essays bring to their subject matter a literary standard of argument: evidence is offered, but so are generalisations and impressions beyond what the historian or social scientist would allow.

To write like Hardwick would be to abandon much of what makes student writing bad. It would be to let students say "I hated this book," but also to let them abandon the book entirely and write about, say, a parade or a protest or a city they visited on vacation. That might be more than the high school English class, as currently structured, is quite ready to accept.

Nostalgia and Alienation at the Tower Bridge

After ascending the Tower Bridge in London, viewing its in-house museum, and peering vertiginously into the River Thames through sections of glass flooring, you have the option of continuing into the bridge's engine rooms to learn more, via a display of Victorian mechanics, about the bridge's historical workings. At the end of this second section of the tour, a short documentary plays on a loop. The film features archival photos over which play voice recordings of past bridge workers describing their time working on the bridge.

The film is more moving than one might expect in what is, essentially, a museum devoted to a steam engine. The workers speak of their nervousness the first time they were left in charge of raising the bridge, their devotion to the bridge in the face of long hours, and their pride at having played a small roll in the bridge's life. One worker notes the fact that, no matter where you travel in the world, you are likely soon to see an image of the Tower Bridge in one form or another. "That's my bridge," he says.

These memoirs fly in the face of a good deal of Marxist theory. The kind of work these men, by their own accounts, devoted themselves to and take enormous personal pride in having done is, more or less, the kind of work a certain kind of 19th-century radical (both Marxist and otherwise) saw as the epitome of alienated labour. Here are men employed not for themselves but by an impersonal state, men producing neither goods for use nor even goods for trade, but rather providing a service to international trade over which they have no control. While some of the men working on the bridge are trained in specific skills, none of them did work one could call artisanal. They own neither a set of skills they can call their own nor the products of their own labour. In short, this is the kind of industrial labour that, to both Marxists and less systematic dissenters like William Morris, should have alienated the workers forced to do it.

How, then, to account for these men and their apparently heartfelt pride in their work? The condescending answer would be simple false-consciousness: These men have been so indoctrinated into state capitalism that they have learned to love their own oppression. In general terms, there is certainly something to this notion. History is not lacking for people who have defended, sometimes to the death, systems that oppose their own best interests.

That explanation, however, seems hard to apply in its full force to comfortably well-off workers in a generally liberal democracy. That is to say, these are not men denied the opportunity to learn of other possible ways of life or so impoverished that they could not have sought other jobs.

If false-consciousness doesn't fully cut it, then, there seems to me to be another, less systematised, and maybe more literary, explanation: nostalgia.

This interaction between alienation and nostalgia is maybe easiest to see in the current, crudely political case of Trumpian yearning for traditional factory jobs.

We might look at it this way: It is not immediately obvious that regimented, assembly-line jobs are a working-class utopia, and you do not need to dig very far into labour history to discover that such jobs were, in their supposed heyday, often greatly disliked; one could write a history running from the sit-down strikes in Ford plants in the 1930s through to the dens of iniquity that some GM plants were the 1980s. Yet Trump and his ideologues yearn, or at least claim to yearn, for a return to these jobs. Given the details of both the jobs in question and the history of labour organising when those jobs were dominant in the American economy, it would seem that there is less a careful theory of labour here than a knee-jerk desire for the good old days.

Surely something similar is at work in the Tower Bridge. Our smiles at these working-class recollections have as much nostalgia in them as does any Trump rally, if considerably less evil.

None of this is to deny entirely the central Marxist notion of alienation. Surely there is something to the claim that some workers are more alienated from the products of their labour than are others. However, it seems equally likely that the lived experience of that alienation involves are a fair amount of nostalgia for the conditions of the generation past. And if it seems unlikely that one could ever be nostalgic for the working conditions of the modern call centre or fast fashion sweatshop, we need only turn to Upton Sinclair's thoughts about the coal mining jobs some commentators today so desperately want back.

If alienation is 50% nostalgia, the clear problem is how far back that nostalgia runs. If I am nostalgic for the work my grandfather did (an electrician in the public service, as it happens), and he was nostalgic for the work his grandfather did, is there some end point to the regress, some moment when labour was actually experienced as non-alienating in its own moment? Or is it turtles all the way down?

The Great War and Modern Memory: A Partial Defence of the 5-Paragraph Essay

The 5-paragraph essay has a terrible reputation. It is often seen by writing instructors as a simplistic formula that teaches students to prioritise form over content or, worse, simply to avoid ideas that are too complex to be squeezed into its structure. At its very worst this avoidance becomes for students a habit of mind; good ideas become those which can be explicated in a single-sentence thesis, framed as one side of a two-sided debate, and defended with three "points," each supported by one or two pieces of direct textual evidence. Any idea that does not fit this structure is discarded before it is even considered. This critical view of the 5-paragraph essay is correct. The 5-paragraph essay is, in its dominant usage, a terrible formula.

And yet, it seems to me, there is some scapegoating going on here. Not everything bad about sophomoric writing can be blamed on an essay structure. Conversely (and maybe this is the more debatable point), plenty of good writing is possible within that structure. The key is the scope of the argument.

Consider Paul Fussell's classic work of cultural history The Great War and Modern Memory, originally published in 1975. In many ways, Fussell's book follows the book-length version of the 5-paragraph essay: It has an introduction framing the argument, followed by a number of chapters (the professional academic's body paragraphs) supporting the argument with different sub-claims and evidence, and then a conclusion. Fussell has more chapters than does the 5-paragraph essay have paragraphs, so his is technically a kind of 9-paragraph essay. But the basic structure remains the same.

Fussell's book, though, is extraordinarily good, not only brilliant in its analysis but a page-turner in its content, at turns shocking, amusing, and fascinating. The book achieves this level of excellence, I am arguing, not despite its conservative structure, but because of it.

Fussell's thesis is that World War 1 was narrated by its participants and remembered by the wider culture through the lens of irony, in Northrop Frye's sense of that word. Each chapter takes a different broad topic and explores it, providing evidence and analysis of the ways irony shapes our understanding of the war.

The book should suffer from obvious methodological problems. It does not propose any specific method in its approach either to historical documents or to more literary texts. It is very vague in what it sees as the relationship between writers and the underlying historical facts that shape their narratives, let alone more thorny questions of the relationships between ideologies and individual consciousnesses. It does not define its scope by a particular archive; instead it ranges widely across poems, maps, military orders, soldiers' folklore, architecture, and diaries, amongst many other forms of texts. In short, it should be kind of a mess.

What holds the book together, then, is exactly its thesis-driven structure. With an argument in place for each chapter, Fussell is free to range widely, grabbing what evidence he needs from wherever he can find it, and bringing to bear whatever methods of analysis he needs to make his case. That is to say, what makes the book work is its traditional structure: Thesis, followed by evidence, followed by analysis. The rhythms of that structure allow the content to range widely, to remarkable effect.

But if the structure is so traditional, what saves the book from being the pedantic drivel opponents of the 5-paragraph essay detest? The saving grace is the nature of the theses that drive each chapter: they are invariably broad and loose, leaving space for exploration far beyond the simple proving of a legalistic case.

Take the opening paragraph of the chapter "The Troglodyte World": "The idea of 'The Trenches' has been assimilated so successfully by metaphor and myth...that it is not easy now to recover a feeling for the actualities. Entrenched, in an expression like entrenched power, has been a dead metaphor so long that we must bestir ourselves to recover its literal sense. It is time to take a tour" (39). The argument here is clear: Insufficient attention has been paid in the literature on the war to the origin of this metaphor, and this critic is going to right that wrong. The invitation, however, is not to hear the author prove the case but, rather, to take "a tour" of some of the implications of this observation.There is argument here, but also exploration and observation.

This, it seems to me, is a model of how the thesis-driven essay (if not just the 5-paragraph one) might be resuscitated in literature classes. It is not that the structure of the argumentative paper needs to be discarded, but rather that the arguments in such a paper need to be bigger, more expansive, and more generous. There needs to be room in the structure for more than just proving your own case and refuting your enemy's.

Elsewhere in the book, Fussell addresses directly this structural concern that runs throughout the text. In the chapter "Adversary Proceedings," he criticises the tendency to collapse ideas too quickly into a simplistic frame: "As it grows politically conscious, literary discourse naturally takes on the theoretical characteristics of postwar political adversary proceedings. And that is fatal for it" (118). That is to say, literary texts that simply pick a fight with an enemy are dull if not actively deadening of their readers.

One might say the same about literary criticism. The fear of the 5-paragraph essay is grounded in a fear of generally dull and often actively simplifying, stultifying argument. The structure, so the argument goes, requires students to be pedants and bores. But we might, I am suggesting, avoid this trap without discarding entirely the standard structure of argumentative academic writing. The key, at least in the context of writing about literary and cultural ideas, might be to make arguments that are not opening briefs in adversarial proceedings, but invitations to a tour.

A Bad Year for Écriture Féminine?

"And it's damned what a sensitive man is brought to," he said, talking to the swinging body, "when he's racked with women, and with beasts."

--Djuna Barnes

The fallout from the Harvey Weinstein revelations has so far been that rarest of things: a revolution with no particular downside, the presidential aspirations of Al Franken notwithstanding. But if nothing has been lost, something in feminist theory may have been settled.  

The style and structure of this revolution (or, at least of its first three months) have left no place for the kind of writing that was once in the vanguard of academic and artistic feminism: the style or mode (or experiment) called écriture féminine. Rather, this revolution has been written in a journalistic, objective mode more constrained by institutional and ideological limits than almost any other form of writing. If feminism might finally triumph in this historical moment, it looks to do so without its house style. 

Two examples might suffice to make the point. 

First, take Djuna Barne's Ryder, an experimental novel originally published in 1928. Chapter 5 of the novel is written in the mode of a sermon decrying the moral "damage" done to victims of rape and strongly implying that women too often bring sexual violence upon themselves: "A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled!" (21).  The 8-page chapter is written entirely in this fashion without any explanation of how this chapter relates to the previous one or who this sermonising narrator might be: "Who told you, Hussy, to go ramping at the Bit, and laying about you for Trouble? What thing taken from your Father's Table turned you Belly up?" (23).

Chapter 6, switches gears entirely and with devastating satirical effect: "In the small British country seat of Tittencote (described in the last chapter) in the year 1869, John Johannes de Grier lay dying" (30). To be clear, the town of Tittencote has not been described at all in the previous chapter. Or, at least, it has not been described in any way that would usually be labelled "description." Instead, the entire previous chapter is given over to the sermonising excerpted above. What Barnes does here is use the structure of the novel and her abrupt shifts in style to make a polemical point: All one needs to know about the village of Tittencote is that it is the kind of place that treats women as they are treated by the previous chapter's sermon; everything else about its existence can be inferred from the attitudes on display there. 

This, I think, is an example of what poststructuralist feminism means by "écriture féminine." On the level of style and structure, Barnes here displays all of the openness to interpretation, subversion of narrative conventions, humour, and raw difficulty of a writer out to subvert the phallogocentrism of, at least, the realist novel. And on the level of politics, that stylistic experiment is yoked to an expressly feminist position: the satirising of sexist stereotypes and their relationship to sexual violence.  Barnes here (and throughout Ryder) creates what many forms of feminism once imagined to be the future of anti-patriarchal writing. It is a riotous, polyglot, carnivalesque prose that uses more staid genres against themselves. This is writing aimed squarely at the heart of an Apollonian order.  

If Barnes is as good an example as any of what feminist writing was once thought to look like, the Oct. 5 New York Times story by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey that began the Harvey Weinstein era reads like its polar opposite.  

Admittedly, the article begins with a double narrative lead, one story about the actor Ashley Judd and a second about a former Weinstein Company employee named Emily Nestor. By the standards of daily reporting, this is a fairly significant departure from the "inverted pyramid" structure in that the lead does not directly summarise the key events. In the context of prose in general, however, this lead is still written in the terse, objective tone of mainstream American journalism.  

And following the lead, the story returns to the precise tone and structure expected of formal news writing: "An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Mr. Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company." Here are the hallmarks of what in some quarters was once derided as logocentric, patriarchal prose: the grammatical accuracy, the cautious and precise claims, the careful compiling of evidence to support those claims, and, of course, the reference to the institutional authority of The New York Times itself. There is not a hint here of Barnes' Bacchanal.  

But it is, obviously, the The New York Times' version of feminist writing that has created a revolution (to the extent that we are really living through a revolution). The precise, methodical collection of data and the recording of that data in blank, declarative sentences seems utterly foreign to the French feminism that once heralded a revolution in personal expression. At that level, the level of pure style, an argument may not have been won, exactly, but a question seems to have been settled: As it turns out, one need not overthrow the patriarchy's style; one need only overthrow the patriarchy itself.  

The Brexit Map

The main train station in Krakow, Poland exits directly into the Galeria Krakow, a large, relatively high-end shopping mall. On the second floor, there are two enormous maps of Europe, one above the entrance to a Carrefour grocery store and one on the facing wall. Below each is written the repeating slogan "Find your place in Europe."

Political maps generally reinforce the idea of nation states. By drawing borders, they create the visual impression that any two points within the same border, no matter how disparate in real space, are connected more to each other than they are to the outside world. (Russia might be the exception that proves the rule here; at the same time the map insists that Moscow and Vladivostok are both "Russian," the enormous distance between them on the paper quietly questions the notion of Russia as a unified country.) Political maps clarify borders, creating clean and fixed boundaries between states.  As Ken Alder points out in The Measure of All Things, his history of the creation of the metric system, the very act of measuring and charting space is tied up in the creation of nation states as unified, centrally governed blocks of space; the act of creating a national map undermines older traditions of local autonomy.

The map in Galeria Krakow works in the opposite direction, undermining nation states in favour of a purely cosmopolitan and pan-European sense of space. In so doing, it nicely clarifies a vision of European union with which so many populist and localist voters have recently expressed distain.

First, and most obviously, the Krakow map eliminates any overt reference to nations. National names and national borders are removed, and are present only implicitly in the names of national capital cities. That implication, though, is thin. Given the immediate context (a shopping mall), the sense is that these cities have been selected more for their commercial importance than for their political ones. The elimination of nations is reinforced by the slogan underneath: One's place is in Europe, not in France or Croatia. 

Second, the map establishes the city as the sole physical presence in a map of Europe. In a traditional map, the closed shape of national borders implies a kind of presence to the empty space within them, in the same way that by drawing a circle on a blank sheet of paper, you give a kind of mass to the space within the circle. Thus the empty space between, say, Paris and Lyon looks "French" because it is enclosed in the border of France, even if that space is literally blank on the map. 

Here, the effect is much different. The non-city space is rendered as pure absence. There is no difference between the space of rural France and the space of the North Sea; both are equally absent and irrelevant to this vision of Europe. Thus rural Europe is not just de-emphasized (a perhaps justifiable decision in a map of economic or population centres), but erased. One must find one's place in this transnational Europe in a city; nowhere else exists. 

Third, the language of this borderless, rural-less Europe is English. The city names on the map are in Polish (Praga is Prague, Warszawa is Warsaw, etc.). However, the imperative slogan is in English: Find Your Place in Europe. Just as, spatially, everything about the nation except its cosmopolitan cities is erased, so too are its national languages. The very command to find yourself within this transnational capitalist space is rendered in the default language of transnational capitalism. 

Here, then, is encapsulated something of the worldview Brexit and its populist cousins reject, a Europe in which the rural and the national are erased in favour of a network of interchangeable commercial nodes.

S-Town and the Comforts of Aesthetic Hierarchy

There was a moment there when podcasts threatened to do something different.

It is early days yet for this medium and, as in the early days of cinema and radio, genre lines and corresponding prestige seemed, at least for a few years, to be shifting rapidly beneath our feet. There have of course been, almost since the podcast's inception, the longform magazine-y shows that have perfected a fairly familiar form of narrative journalism: This American Life, Radiolab, and, more recently, Invisibilia. Brilliant though these often are, they mostly produce work familiar in its structure and subject matter and, generally speaking, work of the kinds already suited to Pulitzer Prizes and other such forms of institutional acclaim. That is to say, these magazine-y podcasts win the kind of praise granted to excellent magazine journalism.

But with the advent in 2014 of Serial, the This American Life offshoot, a kind of anarchy threatened to reign alongside these more staid versions of nonfiction podcasting. Season 1 of Serial resurrected the most exceedingly fun form of lowbrow crime reporting, granted it a kind of Paul Auster reflexive gloss, and won plaudits from every sector of cultural criticism in the process. Suddenly it seemed critical praise was due not just to the standard magazine fair, but to a genre usually the province of grocery store paperbacks. Serial Season 2 may have missed the mark in many respects, but it continued to upend aesthetic hierarchies in its willingness to make the true crime cliffhanger the dominant plot structure of critically-praised podcasting.

2017, however, has witnessed two events that have quickly put the usual aesthetic hierarchies back in place. First came the release of the widely panned Missing Richard Simmons. If true crime always threatens to veer into tabloid invention, Missing Richard Simmons made clear that podcast true crime was no exception to the rule. The once-a-week release schedule meant a series of breathy cliffhangers, each more disappointing than the next, and the narrative payoff was about as poor as could be: an emotional appeal to the show's titular missing person that hoped to hide behind pathos the fact that the show's investigate reporting revealed, more or less, nothing.

Second came S-Town, a story that returned longform podcasting to realist terrain, narrativised the abandonment of true crime, and was praised far and wide for doing just those two things. S-Town begins with the overt promise of true crime in its soapiest form: a murder and police coverup set in the gothic environs of a poor, racist, southern town. But, by the end of episode 2, the true crime genre is entirely abandoned. The murder turns out not to have happened, and the remaining 5 episodes turn to an exploration of the ersatz tipster's character. The remaining hours are essentially a form of realism: a careful study of the interaction between setting and character, replete with symbolism and nicely embedded in the larger cultural history of America. If a podcast can be Henry Jamesian, then this is a Jamesian podcast.

The confluence of Missing Richard Simmons' failure and S-Town's triumph have quickly restored true crime and realism to their usual aesthetic relationship: the former degraded, the latter exulted. This is in some ways disappointing. One of the exciting possibilities of Serial was that, through the new medium of podcasting, the lowbrow genre of true crime might be reinvented in highbrow terms in a way not really attempted since the era of New Journalism (beginning with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and ending with Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song). But the historical accident of Missing Richard Simmons and S-Town being released in rapid succession has meant that the critical appraisals of both genres have been returned to their comfortable norm. Missing Richard Simmons, though a single text, stands in for the failures of the entire true crime genre; S-Town, a particularly fine example of realism, proves the case that realism has always been a more important artistic mode.