Maggie Nelson: You're so vain you think this text is about you?

The stylistic influence of the American Maggie Nelson, born in 1973, on current German-language literature cannot be overestimated: in many places there is a more or less admitted emulation and copying of her style of writing, which hardly distinguishes between novel, essay and poetry, literary historically and theoretically is heavily loaded and yet easily juggles with influences from all arts and eras, often with the aim of assuming a position of vagueness between polemical opinions.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the Feuilleton.

• Follow I follow

Reading works by Maggie Nelson means entering a web of intertextuality.

There is a risk of being trapped.

However, there is much to be learned from trying to break free.

In this volume, on Nelson's "perceived complexity of the urge for freedom in four distinct domains—sex, art, drugs, and climate," intertextual entanglement is encountered everywhere—and particularly in relation to artistic freedom.

The danger of arrogant misinterpretation

In agreement with Nelson's fundamental observation that the concept of freedom has meanwhile been so hollowed out that he also comes up with very questionable interpretations, which then curtail the freedom of others (examples from the Trump era are easy to find), the author comes to a basic movement of the arts to speak to the historical avant-garde to this day, in which the radical freedom and the aesthetics of shock, which, with Futurism, led straight to the idea of ​​“hygienic violence” (Marinetti) and war, have found their counterpart in “reparative” art , which posits that "the audience is damaged and in need of healing, help and protection".

She then demonstrates this trait in the interpretation and evaluation of art and literature.

Here, too, a reparative approach can be observed,

In the title of the book and elsewhere, "care" is translated as "devotion," although the term "mindfulness" would also be obvious.

However, the care school as applied to interpretation, like other literary and critical schools, harbors the danger of arrogant misinterpretation.

Nelson also problematizes this, based on an essay by literary scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published in 2003 with the curious title "Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, you're so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you".

The title itself is a witty reference to a Carly Simon lyric: "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you."

Literature is not a demo sign

While Nelson considers "paranoid reading" to be helpful and salutary from a social and especially feminist point of view, she finds its application to art extremely questionable.

Happily, it is not vague here, but very clear: "Because if we already know what a work of art is supposed to express or how it is supposed to work before we produce it or experience it, if its statement is also supported by a TED talk, a PowerPoint presentation, an editorial, a demo sign, or a tweet could be conveyed if its interpretation were pre-programmed and consistent, why bother with the slow work of looking, doing, reading, or thinking?”

Nelson then uses many interesting examples to reveal the "huge ironies" of the mindfulness discourse, putting his finger in the wound of a literary critic that more and more often seems unwilling to understand a literary text as an open work of art rather than an expression of opinion, and even less so ready to understand this as helpful, beyond the identificatory reading (I don't like a novel character or narrative voice, so it's evil), perhaps precisely in its deterrence.

Reading and understanding Nelson's subsequent reflections on "hurting words" and "policemen in the head" with the same attitude, even and especially if not all of it is approved, but also calls for contradiction, could be healing.

Maggie Nelson: "Freedom."

Four variations on affection and coercion.

Translated from the English by Cornelius Reiber.

Hanser Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2022. 400 p., hardcover,

€