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Three Aperçus: On DEADPOOL (2016), David Foster Wallace, and Beauty
by Joseph Suglia
Deadpool (2016) is capitalism with a smirking face.
David Foster Wallace was not even a bad writer.
Beauty is the one sin that the Average American of today cannot forgive.
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An Analysis of FIGHT CLUB (Chuck Palahniuk) by Joseph Suglia
Before discussing the form of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), I would like to reconstruct its political content.
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The thirty-year-old narrator of Fight Club feels alive only when surrounded by decrepitude and death. He attends testicular-cancer support groups in order to enhance his vitality: By distinguishing himself as much as possible from the sick, he attempts to wrest himself away from a consumerist culture that suppresses death; by exposing himself to the mortality of others (which grants him the knowledge that he also is going to die), every moment in his life becomes more valuable. One of the infinite number of go-betweens in this culture (his job is to determine the expenses of recalling lethally defective automobiles), the narrator yearns to die in an airplane crash in order to free himself from the superficiality of a world that trivializes death and immortalizes the unliving commodity (a “necrophilous” culture, as Erich Fromm would say). Only what he imagines to be a direct experience of death grants him a real and intense sense of life, and, as the novel proceeds, violence will come to be his salvation.
[Let me remark parenthetically: the word “violence,” etymologically, means “life.”]
And yet Western culture manufactures not merely inclinations and proclivities, but also aversions and forms of disgust: Particularly relevant to a discussion of Palahniuk’s novel is the aversion toward violence and mortality that the narrator attempts to unlearn.
The narrator’s desires are prefabricated. As countless others in a consumerist society, his selfhood is defined by the merchandise that he purchases: His “perfect life” is constituted by “his” Swedish furniture, “his” quilt cover set, “his” Hemlig hatboxes, and the IKEA catalogues that serve as the foundation of his “identity.” He is the member of a generation of men who identify themselves with commodities (“Everything, the lamp, the chairs, the rugs were me” [111]), commodities that, according to the Marx of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, serve as extensions of one’s personality in the capitalist world.
Enter Tyler Durden (a man who is, apparently, the same age as the narrator). Aggressive, virile, and charming, Durden represents alternative possibilities that the narrator could assume. Tyler is radically opposed to the progressive “improvement” of the self that has been so valorized by capitalist societies; he claims that the drive toward “perfection” has led to the loss of manhood and has transformed men into feminized purchasers and consumers who slave away in life-draining jobs.
By randomly destroying property (with which members of consumerist society identify), Tyler intends to explode the foundations of capitalist “identity.” Since Rousseau and Hegel, it has been assumed that the bourgeois self is divided into civil and private dimensions: the citizen and the “true” individual. Here we encounter two analogous versions of a single self: Whenever the narrator (who subserves capitalist society) falls asleep, Tyler Durden (who represents the “authentic” self) inhabits his body.
Tyler and the narrator form a masculine unit that exists apart from the feminized support groups that are populated by man-women such as Bob, an estrogen-saturated former weight-lifter who sprouts what appear to be mammary glands, as well as Marla Singer (associated, at one point, with the narrator’s mother), who appropriates the narrator’s support groups and eventually unsettles the homoerotic / homosocial bond between the two men.
Tyler founds “fight club,” an underground boxing organization and a perverse version of the support group attended by the narrator. The split between the bourgeois and authentic selves is replicated in the difference between one’s work existence and fight club: “Who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world” [49]. Fight club thus opens up a separate space, one that is divorced from the dependency and servility of the world of exchange; it posits a self-sufficient universe in which control and mastery, sovereignty and force are achieved, paradoxically, through self-destruction. The fights are not based on personal acrimony but on the exercise of power. It is the fight that is pure; it is through the fight that one’s human implications are drawn out. Norms learned from television (that mass accumulation is life’s goal, that success is equatable with financial success, that violence must be shunned)—all of these values are reversed in fight club, the sole objective of which is the reclamation of one’s manhood, which has been diminished in the feminizing world of capitalism (hence the phallic imagery that crystallizes throughout the novel).
The constituents of fight club (copy-center clerks, box boys, etc.) are Lumpenproletariate, those who labor without a productive or positive relation to work, who are estranged from their own slavery, and who are excluded from every social totality. Even those on the higher levels of the bourgeoisie, it seems, conform to the same model. Their strength is vitiated; they, too, function as the refuse of a society that refuses to acknowledge them. Dying in offices where their lives are never challenged (and therefore lacking anything with which to contrast with life), they are the mere shadows of the proletariat, deprived of access not merely to the fortunes of the capitalist world, but also to consciousness of their own oppression: They are “[g]enerations [that] have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need” [49].
Eventually, fight club transcends and operates independently of the individuals who produced it (following Tyler’s anti-individualist creed) and becomes wholly acephalic: “The new rule is that nobody should be the center of fight club” [142]. Fight club thus transmutes into Project Mayhem, a revolutionary group that begins with acts of vandalism and food contamination and eventually expands into full-blown guerilla terrorism. Its aim is regression: to reduce all of history to ground zero. Project Mayhem wants to blow the capitalist world to smithereens in order to give birth to a new form of humanity. What fight club did for selfhood and individuality (the formation of a new “identity” apart from the one mandated by capitalist society), Project Mayhem would do for capitalist society itself. In the same manner that fight club destroys capitalist “identity,” Project Mayhem aims to destroy Western civilization in order to “make something better of the world” [125]—a world in which manhood would intensify through a non-moral relation to violence.
Here we are in territory already elaborated—much more richly—by J. G. Ballard. And John Zerzan, Portland anarchist.
Washing oneself clean, returning to one’s hidden origin, primitivism, regressionism, cleansing, and sacrifice… Soap, which Freud named “the yardstick of civilization,” is here emblematic of a reduction to primal manhood. The meaning of soap is not, in this context, propriety (as Freud would have it), nor, unfortunately, the ebullitions of language (Francis Ponge), nor, following Roland Barthes, the luxury of foaminess. Soap is indissociable from sacrifice.
[Fight Club does not merely imply, but states in the most obvious manner that bare-knuckled fist-fighting makes one more virile, more masculine. Palahniuk’s jock-fascism is jockalicious.]
If Western culture, as Freud claims in Unbehagen in der Kultur, is a culture of soap (sanitizing one from the awareness of death), the accustomed meaning of saponification is here transformed into its opposite. Western culture represses the sacrifices that were its origins through a process of cleansing: Soap here would indicate a return to those repressed sources. Violence must be re-vived in order to reclaim the self, now unclean.
The dream of capitalism complements the dream of fascism: “We wanted to blast the world free of history” [124]. Their common project is dehistoricization. By attempting to destroy history, Project Mayhem pretends to break with the capitalist world but ends up mirroring it. Capitalist culture homogenizes all of its inhabitants until individuality is lost—its alternative, communism, would lead, theoretically, to the redistribution of wealth and the elimination of rank. Neither is accepted by Fight Club. Nor, for that matter, are the utopian primitivism and fascistic terrorism represented by Project Mayhem. The refusal of the capitalist / communist / fascist alternatives does not imply nihilism, either. Fight Club posits nothing other than the impossibility of a way out. This is evident in the text. When the narrator attempts to demolish the fascist version of his self, his phantom double remerges. Neither capitalism nor its double is overcome. Tragedy is not death, the liberation from all forms of the political; it is, rather, the impossibility of dying.
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A few words on the form of Fight Club (the only section of this review that will be read).
This could have been an excellent novel.
Any strong writer knows that a dead page–a dead paragraph, a dead sentence, a dead word–is unacceptable. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, every word should be electric, vibrant, vivacious. Fight Club moves in the exact opposite direction: Its prose is soul-deadening, life-negating, dull. It is a prose that neither confronts nor challenges.
Chuck Palahniuk does not have an easy way with words. The language of this book is metallic, anti-poetic, and illiterate.
The writer claims to write in the way that “people talk.”
This would be good advice if we lived in an age in which people knew how to talk.
Joseph Suglia
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Fifty Shades of Error: chuckpalahniuk’s BEAUTIFUL YOU
by Dr. Joseph Suglia
1.) “Even as Penny was attacked, the judge merely stared” [1]. Never begin a novel with a sentence written in the passive voice. This sentence, in particular, sounds as if it were transliterated from Estonian or spoken by Grimace. It contains a clumsy adverb (“merely”). It is fatiguing to read.
2.) “The court reporter continued to dutifully keyboard, transcribing Penny’s words” [1]. Careful novelists avoid verbs such as “to continue,” “to start,” “to try,” “to remain,” and “to begin.” Such verbs weaken sentences.
3.) “It would’ve been different if there had been other women in the courtroom, but there were none” [1]. “None” is a singular indefinite pronoun; therefore, the second independent clause should read: “there was none.”
4.) “The public sphere was devoid of women” [1]. If I wrote this sentence, I would die inside.
5.) “Otherwise, only Penny moved” [1]. Otherwise, what? chuckpalahniuk means: “Only Penny moved.”
6.) “Their professional faces slipped for a moment and became delighted smiles” [3]. To which profession do the faces belong? How could a face “become” a “delighted smile”?
7.) “The first one pointed a finger at Penny, bound and helpless, watched by every masculine eye” [3]. What makes an eye “masculine,” precisely? chuckpalahniuk confuses gender with sex.
8.) “The pair of men lifted the gurney to waist height” [4]. The word “height” is superfluous.
9.) “Her world had been perfect, more or less” [4]. “Perfection” is an absolute concept. There are no degrees of perfection. Something is either perfect, or it is not.
10.) “With apologies to Simone de Beauvoir, Penny didn’t want to be a third-wave anything” [5]. Simone de Beauvoir did not live to read or hear the term “third-wave feminism,” nor did she invent the terms “first-wave” or “second-wave feminism,” nor did she even identify herself as a “first-wave” or “second-wave feminist.”
11.) “Open bottles of Evian had been left behind so quickly that they still fizzed” [12]. Evian is mineral water, not effervescent, aerated, “sparkling” water. Therefore, Evian water does not “fizz.”
12.) “Dire as this situation seemed, Penny remained a lucky girl” [28]. It is never a good idea to use the verb “to remain” in a novel (cf. Number Two). Avoid words that are too often coupled, such as “dire” and “situation,” “copious” and “notes,” “heated” and “debate,” “stark” and “contrast,” “devastating” and “loss,” “firm” and “believer,” “pregnant” and “pause,” etc. A few days after this book was published, I went to Google and typed “dire situation” in the search window, and 1,700,000 results virtualized.
13.) “She knew she sounded pathetic” [33]. “Pathetic” is derived from the Greek pathos, which means “suffering.” Here, it is used in the stale colloquial sense: “She knew she sounded like a loser.” Generally speaking, novelists should write familiar things in an unfamiliar way, not familiar things in a familiar way.
14.) “Even to her own ears she sounded crazy ambitious” [33]. That ought to read “crazily,” of course, but who cares? No one cares about writing these days. Writing has nothing to do with writing.
15.) “The night air was warm, but Penny felt a chill down her spine, exposed by the plunging back of her Vera Wang gown” [43]. “To feel a chill down one’s spine” is, of course, a fossilized expression. In 2014, if you typed “chill down spine” into Google, 3,830,000 results appeared. The chuckies will claim, in advance, that every platitude is intentionally platitudinous. But an intentional platitude is still a platitude.
16.) “The crowd was visibly disappointed as the film star turned away” [44]. “Visibly disappointed” is yet another dreary cliché. In 2014, it registered 2,020,000 results on Google.
17.) “Like a doctor or a scientist, his fingertips gripped her as if he was testing her blood pressure” [45]. What kind of scientist would test a woman’s blood pressure? Why are there two similes that mean exactly the same thing in one sentence? And that should read: “as if he were.”
18.) “He poured in a smidgen more champagne and set the bottle aside” [46]. The word “smidgen” is properly used to describe solid objects, not liquid. Have you ever heard someone ask for a smidgen of milk?
19.) “Under his gaze, Penny felt less like a woman than like a science experiment. A guinea pig or a laboratory rat” [48]. I’ve never heard that one before.
20.) “Penny giggled, limp as a rag doll” [49]. Strong writers rescramble and defamiliarize clichés. Weak writers, such as chuckpalahniuk, repeat them brainlessly.
21.) “A torrent of animal gibberish and profanities threatened to boil out of her mouth, and the digital recorder was running” [51]. “Profanity” is a non-count noun, if one is above the age of five.
22.) “The packaging would be pink, but not obnoxiously” [62]. That ought to read: “not obnoxiously pink,” “not obnoxious,” or “not obnoxiously so.” And “obnoxious,” etymologically, means “exposing to danger,” not “irritating” or “annoying.”
23.) “She slept like a baby” [62]. A cliché is dead language, and this sentence is lifeless.
24.) “Savoring her reaction, the gloating genius waved to flag a waiter” [67]. “Savoring her reaction” is a cliché, “gloating genius” is a clunker, and “waved to flag” is a pleonasm.
25.) “It didn’t help that people expected her to be ecstatic. No one wanted to hear the problems of a disappointed Cinderella; she was supposed to live happily ever after” [70]. “Ecstatic” does not mean “happy”; it means “outside-of-oneself.”
26.) “He only wanted to test his tantric thingamajigs on her” [70]. When words fail chuckpalahniuk, and they always do, he spews garbled baby-talk. On the next page, chuckpalahniuk uses the unclever term “doohickey.” chuckpalahniuk is a lallator.
27.) “Penny wanted to believe that making love was more than just fiddling with nerve endings until harum-scarum chemicals squirted around limbic systems” [73]. chuckpalahniuk really shows his age here: “harum-scarum.” Even his slang is out of date. If he keeps using superannuated slang, mentally defective fourteen-year-old boys will no longer read him (or his books).
28.) “Penny tried to steer the conversation” [74]. In 2014, “steer the conversation” resulted in 8,080,000 hits on Google. Into what or toward what did Penny try to steer the conversation? Does chuckpalahniuk even care?
29.) “A voice near the back of the crowd called out, ‘Will it work on eggplants?'” [80]. “Near the back of the crowd” is hideously awkward, and experienced speakers and writers of English know that “eggplant” is a non-count noun.
30.) “To cut her from the pack of other mothers, he complimented her appearance” [83]. “Complimented her appearance” is a clanging bromide. To conjoin “cut” and “pack” is to mix metaphors. And isn’t this a bit too much telling and not enough showing?
31.) “Despite his icy demeanor she sensed Max’s little-boy heart was breaking” [91]. How many times in one’s life must one hear and read the phrase “icy demeanor”? There was a time when writers were admired by readers for writing sentences that readers could not write themselves. The chuckies admire the Ignoble Barnyard Yokel of Barnes and Noble for writing sentences that they COULD write themselves. Any talentless, increative imbecile could write a sentence such as the one that I cited above.
32.) “Penny followed his gaze to a girl cooling her heels on the sidewalk, her arms folded across her chest” [100]. In the year in which this book was published, “to cool one’s heels” appeared 4,730,000 times on Google.
33.) “The majority of her coworkers listened, spellbound” [133]. “The majority of” enfeebles the sentence. And “spellbound”! A few pages earlier, someone is described as “dumbfounded.” One comes to a work of literature to escape from verbal garbage, not to submerge oneself in it.
34.) “Weighing her words carefully, the Nebraska housewife said, ‘I bought you some of those Beautiful You doohickeys'” [137]. And if chuckpalahniuk had weighed his words carefully, he would have known that “to weigh one’s words carefully” is a brain-deadening cliché.
35.) “The stench was appalling” [138]. A talented writer knows how to conjure the stench of something, of anything, without flatly describing that stench as “appalling.”
36.) “The foolish lecher was already discarding his overcoat, his shirt, his pants” [141]. Genuine literary artists eschew evaluative remarks (“foolish lecher”) and let the reader do the interpreting.
37.) “Voices shouted in the hallway outside” [196]. Not inside, then?
38.) “In the stance of a sumo wrestler, she lackadaisically stroked herself with a short, knurled length of what looked like damp wood” [217]. “Lackadaisically” kills the sentence. And that should read: “the short, knurled length,” if one insists on putting the words “short,” “knurled,” and “length” together.
39.) “Leaving the fireside, she waddled across the cave’s littered floor in search of something” [217-218]. “Littered” with what? As a stand-alone adjective, “littered” is fatuous.
40.) “Making quick work, she prompted the nanobots in her brain and bloodstream to create the overwhelming pleasure of Tom Berenger and Richard Thomas kissing her wetly on the lips and breasts” [218]. “Making quick work” of what? To write, “making quick work” without specifying an object is idiotic. The novel takes place a few years in the future (circa 2018), and the “she” was born sometime in the 1990s. Why would a twenty-something American woman lust after superannuated actors such as Tom Berenger and Richard Thomas?
41.) Or Ron Howard?
42.) We are living in a culture in which there are more writers than there are readers.
43.) We are living in a culture in which even the slightest sign of intelligence is enough to throw a crowd into a rage, is enough to mobilize a mob. In such a culture, bacteria grow.
44.) Beautiful You resembles an ill-drawn cartoon.
45.) chuckpalahniuk and his drooling, foolish followers have murdered literature.
46.) Literature is dead.
47.) chuckpalahniuk is the least intelligent writer in America.
48.) He is a writer who does not know how to write who writes books for readers who do not know how to read.
49.) He is a contemptible, vile, low writer who pollutes bookstores, libraries, and bookshelves with his nauseating idiocy.
50.) Beautiful You is the twittering of a dimwitted twit.
Dr. Joseph Suglia
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David Foster Wallace Is a Bad Writer: Part Four: CONSIDER THE LOBSTER
by Dr. Joseph Suglia
It is said often of David Foster Wallace (or “DFW,” as his ovine fanboys have christened him, as if he were a shoe-store or an airport) that he was a genius. Would it be curmudgeonly of me to ask, “What kind of a genius was he?”? He certainly was not a literary genius. I would be willing to allow that he was, perhaps, a mathematical genius. But a literary genius? No, absolutely not.
Anyone who reads D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace will recognize that Wallace was a likable, sincere, soft-spoken person who had interludes of mean-spiritedness, and his death is an absolute loss. At some stage, however, one must put one’s sentimentality aside and examine, coldly and soberly, the assertion that his writing is great literature.
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Consider the Lobster is an agglutination of athetic “essays.” (Athetic = “lacking a thesis.”) The collection itself lacks a driving thesis, a sense of cohesion, a thread that would bind all of the pieces together. Not a single one of the “essays”—such as they are—contains an argument, sustained or otherwise.
Because the book itself is disjointed, it might be useful to pause over each individual text.
“Big Red Son”: An appraisal of the pornography industry from which we learn that this industry is “vulgar” [7] (shocking!) and that Las Vegas is “the least pretentious city in America” [4]. It is disheartening when someone who seemed to care so much about English usage abuses the word “pretentious.” “Pretentious” means “making the claim to be something that one is not.” It does not mean “upscale,” “upmarket,” or “snooty.” If we keep the proper meaning of “pretentious” in mind, it could just as easily be said that Las Vegas is the most pretentious city in America.
“Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think”: Not so much a negative review of Updike’s Toward the End of Time as a negative review of John Updike the Human Being as he appears to Wallace. From reading the first five paragraphs, one would sort of have to think that Wallace would eventually make a general statement about phallocratic American writers such as Updike, Mailer, Roth or American virility or fading masculinity, etc., but, no, the review has no implications beyond itself.
“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed”: At the beginning of this astounding lecture, Wallace makes the disarming comment that he is “direly underqualified” [60] to speak on the subject of humor in Kafka. This assertion is correct. Wallace knows nothing about Kafka or his work. If you are not qualified to speak on a subject, then why speak on it at all?
“Authority and American Usage”: An “essay” on the conflict between prescriptivism and descriptivism, ruined by ingratiatory implorations (“DO YOU LIKE ME?”; “PLEASE LIKE ME!”). I found the piece to be smarmy and bizarrely cloying, and the racist nonsense about African-Americans made me flinch.
“The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”: The most inappropriate response to the September 11, 2001, attacks ever written, with the exception of “Chuck” Palahniuk’s “The View from Smalltown, USA.” Palahniuk’s response, incidentally, is indebted to Wallace’s.
“How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”: A very strange review of the tennis star’s autobiography Beyond Center Court: My Story. Wallace seems puzzled that Tracy Austin is a skillful tennis player AND a bad writer. I am puzzled by his puzzlement.
“Up, Simba”: Painful-to-read meanders through John McCain’s doomed campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination. Completely irrelevant since McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. Incidentally, did you know that Palahniuk considers “meander” to be a “gay” word?
“Consider the Lobster”: From which you will learn, among other things, that the lobster and the cockroach (for instance) are cousins. I thought that everyone already knew that. The “essay” is nothing more than a catalogue of facts and is devoid of anything like an organizing thought. Unless “lobsters exist” is an organizing thought. As Hegel reminds us in the preface to Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, factual knowledge is not genuine knowledge at all. It is possible to memorize facts Jeopardy-style without ever understanding anything.
“Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky”: Wallace did not have a background in classical or modern literature. He read the postmodernists, and that was the extent of his knowledge of the literary arts. His solipsism is painfully evident in the Dostoevsky essay. He doesn’t even seem very interested in Dostoevsky’s work, except to the degree that it affects American readers and writers: “The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we—here, today—cannot or do not permit ourselves” [271]. A Russian writer is significant only insofar as he has an impact on an American writer or reader, then. Is America the epicenter of the universe? Of the multiverse? Wallace’s solipsism reminds me of the obituaries of J. G. Ballard. I paraphrase: “Ballard’s short story ‘The Sound-Sweep’ inspired the Buggles’ song ‘Video Killed the Radio Star,’ which became the first music video ever to be broadcast on MTV.”
“Host”: The editorial, annotative remarks will seem original to anyone who has not read Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
Consider the Lobster is superficial, not radical. I intend “radical” in its strict etymological sense of the word: “to the root.” Wallace never even attempts to get at the root, the radix, the core, the heart of the subjects that he pretends to analyze.
But who cares? No one cares about logic these days. No one cares about language these days. No one cares about logos these days. No one cares about writing these days.
The blind, slavish, uncritical worship of David Foster Wallace represents one of the dangers of ad-hominem “thinking.” An ad-hominem attack attacks the musician instead of the music, the philosopher instead of the philosophy, the artist instead of the art, the sociologist instead of the sociology. But the reverse is also the case: Ad-hominem praise praises the musician at the expense of the music, the philosopher at the expense of the philosophy, the artist at the expense of the art, the sociologist at the expense of the sociology, the writer at the expense of the writing.
David Foster Wallace’s fanboys worship the ghost of the bandana-wearing writer, not the writing that he generated.
A DFW follower once explained his worship of the Dear Leader in these terms: “He is a genius, but he says, ‘like’ and ‘whatever.’” He was a down-to-Earth genius, then. An interactive genius. A nice genius. A friendly genius. If the Friendly Genius attends your wedding, your son’s bar mitzvah, your daughter’s Quinceanera, your son’s confirmation, etc., well, then, he is a good writer. If he brings a casserole, then he is an especially good writer. The Friendly Genius smiles at you. The Friendly Genius smiles at you because he likes you. If the Friendly Genius likes you, then maybe YOU are a genius, too. Fanatic-boys like writers who are nice and friendly and hip. Accommodating and accessible.
[For a nice discussion of the competitiveness behind DFW’s ‘niceness,’ see Rivka Galchen’s review of the Wallace biography.]
The Cult of Genius has no interest in the letter. The Cult of Genius is not interested in writing at all. The Cult of Genius is obsessed with the appearance and personality of the author, not the extent to which he or she knows how to write. Fanboys are preoccupied with Writers, not with Writing. And they want to become Writers themselves, without bothering very much about Writing. They don’t want their unwritten books to be published and read; THEY want to be published.
A genuine author, however, loves writing for the sake of writing. This is one the things that Nietzsche might have intended when he wrote, in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister: Der beste Autor wird der sein, welcher sich schämt, Schriftsteller zu werden: “The best author will be the one who is ashamed of becoming a writer.”
Dr. Joseph Suglia
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A Critique of OUTLIERS (Malcolm Gladwell) by Dr. Joseph Suglia
According to Nietzsche, Kant writes what the common man believes in a language that the common man cannot understand. Malcolm Gladwell, it must be said, vigorously reaffirms what the common man believes in a language that the common man CAN understand, thus flattering the common man and “making him happy.” “To be made happy”: a Gladwellism for “to be satisfied with a consumer item, such as a book by Malcolm Gladwell.”
In Outliers (2008), Gladwell argues, in essence: “It is better to be mediocre than it is to be brilliant!” Perhaps that is too blunt of a truncation, but the book seems to welcome such simplicity.
We are introduced to Chris Langen, “the public face of genius in American life” [70], who nonetheless works in construction and “despairs of ever getting published in a scholarly journal” [95]. Langen fails because he was raised in abject squalor, and his mother “missed a deadline for his financial aid” [98]. By contrast, Robert Oppenheimer, a “success” for his complicity in the atomization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was “raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan” [108]. Other actors within the community-theater proscenium include Marita, a twelve-year-old from an impoverished family who gives up her evenings, weekends, and friends to slave away in one of New York City’s most rigorous and competitive middle schools. She will succeed, Gladwell suggests, because she “works hard” and is given a “chance.” Indeed, Bill Gates was a “success” because he was given unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal at the age of thirteen. The Beatles were a “success” because they forced themselves to perform eight-hour concerts in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962. Along the way, the reader is pepper-sprayed with anecdotes about Korean aviation and Kentuckian aggression that have no apparent relevance to the thesis of the book, except to “demonstrate” that one’s “cultural legacy” sometimes has to be jettisoned in order for one to become “successful.”
Gladwell is arguing, in nuce, that success–euphemistic for “financial prosperity”–corresponds not to one’s intelligence, but rather to opportunity and social savoir-faire. The thesis isn’t so much false as it is banal. Of course, one must have social skills and opportunity to be “successful.” And yet I would contend, pace Gladwell, that even social skills and opportunity are not enough, by themselves, for an individual to succeed financially. Life never brooks such easy recipes (or follows such “predictable courses” [267], to use Gladwell’s language).
What, precisely, does Gladwell mean by “intelligence”? The author hypostatizes the Intelligence Quotient Test and thus subscribes to the false supposition that intelligence can be quantified and measured. If you receive 180 on the Intelligence Quotient Test, in other words, then you are a super-genius. Now, I did score [number redacted] on the I. Q. Test, but that, in itself, is no guarantor of my genius. Intelligence is an impalpable thing, and there is no necessary relationship whatsoever between one’s intelligence and the I. Q. examination, just as, following Gladwell, there is no necessary relationship between one’s I. Q. score and “success.”
Moreover, Gladwell ignores the temporal differences that separate his stories. Oppenheimer lived in an America that was less intimidated by, and envious of, intelligence than the America of the twenty-first century. I differ from Gladwell, and my counter-thesis is the following: Even if Langen possessed superior social skills, it is very likely that he still would have failed in life.
Why? Because the culture has become a home for Swiftian Lilliputians, ever-ready to manacle down any Gulliver who comes their way. Yes, Gladwell is correct in suggesting that geniuses almost always fail and the mediocre almost always triumph, but he completely misses the reasons. You cannot possibly succeed if you are a genius unless you camouflage, to a certain extent, your intelligence. We are living a culture that, instead of lionizing intelligence, disdains it. Those who possess a higher intellect than the multitude are looked upon with acrimony and mistrust. Such is the “leveling-off” or equalization of all distinction to which polymaths and geniuses have long since grown accustomed.
Similarly, there is the impulse in this book to anathematize genius, as if genius were some kind of cancerous polyp that should be excised. It is not difficult to detect a certain defensiveness in Gladwell’s anti-intellectualist posturing, not merely as if the myth that genius equals success needed to be debunked, but as if genius, in itself, were something intrinsically negative, threatening–damaging, even. Gladwell, non-genius, is content to attack genius in Outliers with the same vehemence with which he attacked critical thinking in Blink. And for exactly the same affective reason: Gladwell is as intimidated by genius as he is cowed by critical thought, for which he substitutes anecdotes lifted, quite uncritically, from single sources: books by John Ed Pierce, Richard E. Niebett and Dov Cohen, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin…
Gladwell’s most ardent admirers–non-brilliant readers who want reassurance that their non-brilliance is a formula for success–sigh plaintively and bleat. And the mediocre shall inherit the Earth.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Niccolo Machiavelli argued that the expansion of power comes from opportunity in the early sixteenth century. But he qualified: from opportunity and through cleverness (virtù in Italian).
Joseph Suglia
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