Behind the Essay: Garth Greenwell

Writing about morality, sex, and discomfort—plus a few words of advice

In 2023, The Yale Review published Garth Greenwell’s “A Moral Education,” an essay on Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater and the kind of moral work that art can do—by drawing us into discomfort and ambivalence. In our summer issue, out this week, we published a new piece, “Taking Offense,” which offers a close (or “slow,” as Garth prefers) reading of a scene from Miranda July’s All Fours, and which is a sort of continuation of that earlier line of inquiry. We asked Garth how the two essays connect, what larger project they’re part of, and how, for him, an essay begins to take shape.

—The Editors

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The Yale Review: Both essays push back against the idea that art can be inherently harmful, while still taking seriously the impact it may have. Has there ever been a point, for you, when a work’s offense becomes disqualifying—not just difficult, but ethically or aesthetically untenable? Was it still legible to you as art?

Garth Greenwell: With the possible exception of students in my seminars (and really not even then), I never want to make anybody read something they don’t want to read. I think it’s fine to put down a book that seems to you failed or offensive in some way. And I don’t think that needs to be an agonized choice; as the kids say (or used to say), it doesn’t always have to be that serious. Sometimes you’re just not in the mood for something. Last year, in a burst of pre-Oscars enthusiasm, I started watching Coralie Fargeat’s film The Substance. About 45 minutes or so in (around when Margaret Qualley pulled the chicken leg out of her navel), I decided it wasn’t an experience that I wanted to keep having. This wasn’t a moral or even a critical response—there were things about the film I admired very much. (Its ferocity; Demi Moore.) I just didn’t want to keep watching it.

I think that’s fine; I also think it’s good to be open to the possibility that on another day you might have a different response. Moods are important, and they change. Certainly, I would love for a friend whose aesthetic sense I trust to convince me to give it another go. One real service criticism can provide—and this is something I try to do in the Miranda July essay—is to make the case for a value in a work that may not be immediately legible. I found a value in this potentially upsetting scene from All Fours that some readers didn’t find; I wanted to make the best case for it I could.

Two other thoughts: First, I think that, when we feel alienated or repulsed by a work of art, it’s often helpful to reach for technical / aesthetic terms of evaluation before moral ones. Both the Roth and the July essays are in large part expressions of a resistance to the impulse (in myself above all) to moral vanity: to use one’s critical response to a work of art as a way of establishing one’s own moral (or political) bona fides. Often this turns into a weird kind of power play: one senses in certain critics a desire to establish their superiority to a work of art, even to humiliate the artist who made it. I don’t think that can ever be good for our souls.

And my final thought: however fierce my response against a work of art might be, however much it might offend or repulse me, I try very hard to resist the desire for a work of art not to exist. I always want to cultivate a productive response—an essay, another work of art—as against a repressive one. If you find yourself advocating for books or paintings to be banned or burned, something has gone badly wrong in your moral and aesthetic thinking.

In “Taking Offense,” you write about what it means to dwell in bad feeling. In “A Moral Education,” you write about finding mystery in the grotesque. Do you see these as different modes of attention? How are they related?

That’s an interesting question. I do think that they are both modes of attention, and it seems to me that attention—attention to the particular, to the individual—is where all moral relation starts. To make an abstraction of a human being is to embark on something it makes sense to me to think of as evil. Evil may be necessary: we can’t live without abstraction. Politics, it seems to me, is always, necessarily, a compromise with evil understood in this sense. (This is in no way to suggest that politics can’t also be noble, oriented toward service; even if one believes politics is always compromised, the question of what constitutes a better or worse politics is always urgent.) Art, as I understand it, is the great expression of devotion to the particular; and so it is a way of preserving something—preserving reality—against that compromise. In art, access to the abstract (the epiphanic, the transcendent) depends on devotion to the particular, and it carries the particular with it. (Art doesn’t arrive at the universal or epiphanic by leaving the particular behind; the particular is the vehicle for the universal.)

Art is always bigger than anything we can say about it; grand statements about art, like those above, are always absurd.

In both essays, I’m interested in the kind of moral relations, the kind of thinking, the mode of existence, that can happen when we try to cultivate interest instead of judgment. I’m intrigued by what happens when we resist certainty, especially the certainty of apparently self-authorizing responses like outrage or disgust.

There’s a clear continuity between these two essays—the concern with moral response, with how we read through discomfort, with the stakes of aesthetic judgment. Are these part of a larger project? Can you share what else that includes?

The Roth essay is part of a forthcoming essay collection, which attempts to examine three concepts I think are central to current conversations about art, and whose use in those conversations seems to me distorted or mistaken: “relevance”; “morality” or “moral education”; and “affirmation.” Understood more properly, more amply, I think those terms can help point toward values central to artmaking. I’ve written the essays to try to clarify, for myself above all, what that more proper or more ample understanding might be.

I’m not sure if the Miranda July essay will be part of that book. It’s the second essay I’ve written on the sex writing in All Fours (the first appeared on my Substack), and yes, I do think it’s clearly connected to the essay on Roth. In some sense this new essay, which does a close—or, as I prefer to call it, a “slow”—reading of a single scene, is an attempt to demonstrate, in a more concrete way, some of the processes of moral education I suggest are at play in Sabbath’s Theater. I think there’s a Rothian energy in July’s book, as I note in the essay; but July also seems to me more hopeful than Roth is. The narrator of All Fours isn’t Mickey Sabbath: she’s more concerned for others; she undergoes a more demonstrable (if still partial) education.

This isn’t to make any claim that the narrator of All Fours finds some kind of “redemption”: some grand, dramatic, final moral realization. I think the novel stays firmly in a middle ground of complicated, compromised moral relations. But what interests me in the scene is how July shows her narrator putting bad feelings to use—by which I mean using bad feelings to find some at least marginally better (more humane, more pleasurable) way of living, if only for a few hours, with another.

What’s a popular piece of writing advice that you don’t agree with? What’s a piece of writing advice that you stand by?

Ah, but I don’t believe in advice, really. Every artist’s path is an individual path; nobody else can follow it. Nobody knows how anything works: nobody knows how to write a novel or an essay or a poem. We’re all of us always feeling it out. The only advice I believe in is a kind of life advice: be adventurous. Strive to be interested in more things, try to love more things. And even that won’t be right for everyone.

There is one piece of advice I believe to be true for almost all young artists: Live cheaply.

Where does an essay begin for you—how does it crystallize from thought to form?

Most commonly, an essay begins with enthusiasm. This is especially true of the pieces I write for my Substack newsletter, which often take a particular work or fragment of art—a sentence, a poem, a painting, a piece of music—and attempt to understand what in it I find so compelling. This is totally self-serving; it’s the form my own aesthetic education takes.

Also fairly often, a question won’t let me go; I need to think through it at length. An example: in an essay that should be published later this year, I try to think about what is maybe my most profound, most difficult relationship with a book: Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. The more I’ve read and talked about that book over the decades, the more I’ve become convinced that it is built on a fundamentally homophobic logic: that it presents a world in which durable love between men is impossible—not for historically contingent reasons, but because durable love between men is a logical absurdity. So how is it that, when I read the novel as a fourteen-year-old queer kid in the pre-Internet American South, I felt that it saved my life? I’ve been wrestling with that essay for years. (I wrote a Substack about the process back in September 2023: “On Being Discouraged.”) I don’t think I’ve really answered the question to my own (or anybody else’s) satisfaction in the essay I was able to write. But I think I’ve come closer than I have before.

Finally, least commonly, sometimes an essay comes from an irritation. The last essay I have to write for my forthcoming book will take on the idea of “autofiction,” which I think is vague and useless—worse than useless. Even in a case like that, though, my irritation needs to somehow attach itself to an enthusiasm: more than I want (though I do want) to discredit the idea of “autofiction,” I want to suggest a richer, more ample way of thinking about certain literary traditions and practices.

What are three things you've learned over the years about essay writing—whether mistakes not to make, aspects of process, or revision strategies?

I’m sorry to be annoying, but I don’t think one learns things in this way—or only trivial (though maybe helpful) things. I’ve learned how to set up my notebooks in ways that feel congenial to me; I’ve learned how to take notes; I’ve learned how I like to name my files to keep revisions organized. But about writing? I don’t believe in tips, strategies; all meaningful writing for me, whether fiction or nonfiction, comes from a place of bewilderment. Bewilderment before an artwork, before a question, before a dilemma; meaningful writing happens in a space of not-knowing, of non-understanding. Certainly it starts from such a space, and I don’t think it ever leaves it fully behind. In some paradoxical way, art lets us make meaning out of bewilderment without resolving bewilderment—indeed, often it makes meaning by deepening or magnifying bewilderment. I’m drawn to the essay form because it makes space for a kind of thinking that isn’t, or doesn’t need to be, instrumentalized: a kind of thinking that can be meaningful even if it doesn’t resolve anything or arrive anywhere. It’s radically un-optimized, radically inefficient; and so it accommodates kinds of thinking, kinds of being, that are elsewhere (in our ever-more optimized, ever-more efficient age) harried nearly out of existence.

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