Last week, I finished reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While I usually do not read books from the “Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern Life” genre, I was compelled to see what all the fuss is about. Suffice it to say that I was not impressed. But I could not quite put my finger on the source of my disdain until, several days ago, it hit me: Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator walks away learning absolutely nothing.
The fault of this particular novel might be with Moshfegh’s nihilistic outlook on life, but the problem cuts even deeper. Today, the publishing industry as a whole turns its nose up to narratives that promote objective meaning.
It is no accident that the publishing industry shies away from books that illustrate “the good life.” There’s a lot to unpack in that claim, but it is no accident that the publishing industry shies away from books that illustrate “the good life” in the Aristotelian sense. Reared on the postmodern spirit that dominates colleges and universities, publishing professionals favor ambiguous, open-ended narratives to stories with clear redemption arcs. But, at its core, literature should not only teach us to think critically but also to live our best lives.
By the 1960s, American universities had proceeded to wage a full-scale war on all aspects of morality and tradition. In 1908, New Humanist literary scholar Irving Babbitt set out to redefine classic-literature education in a collection of essays called Literature and the American College. An early literary critic, Babbitt believed that the purpose of literature was to cultivate a lasting moral imagination—that is, literature had a duty to craft readers into morally upstanding members of society. Though New Humanism’s reign was short-lived in the academy, its fundamental axiom—that the purpose of literature was to foster moral education—articulated the broader cultural tradition that has sustained the human soul for thousands of years. Literature is supposed to teach us what gives our lives meaning. After all, isn’t that why we gravitate towards literature in the first place?—to learn, by way of the particular, that which is universally true about the human condition?
Not anymore, it seems. By the 1960s, American universities had proceeded to wage a full-scale war on all aspects of morality and tradition, making way for the postmodern literary theorists who rejected the teachings of Babbitt and put forth the following postulates instead:
Meaning is relative if not entirely obsolete. In 1967, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida set out, in his famous De La Grammatologie (Of Grammatology), to attack the idea that a work of literature must contain an objective moral message. The book contains an extended condemnation of the tradition of “Western Metaphysics,” which, in Derrida’s eyes, privileged the good over the bad and light over darkness. In a nutshell, Derrida does away with the idea that we should gain objective meaning from literature and that literature must contain an objective moral message. Authorial intention is irrelevant. There have been several postmodern writings on the erasure of authorial intent, but the most famous piece comes from the French theorist Roland Barthes, in an essay called “The Death of the Author.” As its title suggests, the essay lambasts authorial intention and argues that his or her identity is entirely irrelevant to a reader’s interpretation of a given text. If an author’s intention no longer matters, then a given text belongs entirely to the reader—a death knell to the idea of the author as a moral teacher. “Grand narratives” are oppressive. In his book The Postmodern Condition, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard claims that one must be skeptical of “Universal Truths.” Overarching moral systems become oppressive, and any notion of “how to live well” reeks of the patriarchy, colonialism, et cetera.
Taught to analyze literature through these postmodern lenses, university students of literature emerge from English departments believing that literature should simply observe rather than teach. Some of these cynical young professionals then enter the publishing industry, where they insist on promoting moral relativism in the guise of fiction. It is no wonder that the publishing industry runs so heavily on identity-based readings. In the eyes of the moral relativist, a text can mean anything as long as someone feels that it means a particular thing. What is in vogue in the literary-fiction world today are books that deliberately refuse closure, painting characters who learn nothing by the end of their journey as they rebel against the very idea of meaning itself.
What is in vogue in the literary-fiction world today are books that deliberately refuse closure. Moshfegh’s narrator, for instance, learns absolutely nothing about her hedonistic, degenerate lifestyle by the novel’s close. And while Moshfegh doesn’t attempt to excuse her character, she also refuses to condemn her. She launches an attack on capitalism but does not offer an alternative; she depicts a degenerate society but does not decry its moral downfall. A critic writing for The Brooklyn Rail said it best: “What has [the narrator] learned, and what will her life look like now? Perhaps these questions don’t need answering, as the ending leaves you intentionally unsettled.”
Modern life, according to many writers of contemporary literary fiction, has no meaning whatsoever. As Moshfegh and her literary supporters would argue, that is precisely the point of the novel—there is no significance! Modern life, according to Moshfegh and many other writers of contemporary literary fiction, has no meaning whatsoever! It is sad, absurd, and pointless—and, therefore, one should hibernate through it all.
Moshfegh’s writing is the direct outgrowth of the postmodern university conviction that all morality is relative and that the writer’s duty is not to lay out morals but to indulge his or her pessimism and nihilism.
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