The literary world has been abubble these recent days with the news that Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove,” which won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and has been published in Granta, seems to have been written by AI. The rage of a literary community that has, in the main, been united across all other ideological fronts in rejecting the use of AI for composition, development, or any other aspect of the creative process, has been tempered by a certain degree of mirth occasioned by Mr. Nazir’s (or his LLM’s—does Nazir exist? Will the world ever know?) eccentric turns of phrase. By now we all know that the character Zoongie “had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” We have heard of those famous smiles “like sunrise over a sink.” We have been laughing, as it were, to keep from crying.
I confess mine is no great authority where AI recognition is concerned. I have never used ChatGPT or Claude or any of the others, nor have I read much about AI or its tells. As I recently remarked to a friend who is both an excellent writer and a staunch, well-informed opponent of AI, the subject bores me so thoroughly that I can hardly muster the strength to care about it. (You see how blithely I abandon the ethical high ground. But sometimes the battle must be joined nonetheless.)
If I have devoted little energy to looking into AI, I have spent, over the last decade, an enormous sum of time in poring over literary journals. Print journals, mags, e-zines, rags, leaflets, broadsides, reviews, quarterlies, monthlies, dailies—I have suffered all in adherence to that universal command to the literary aspirant: Please read a few of our back issues to get a feel for the kinds of things we like to publish. And in all this discernment I have read such material as could have placed a thousand Serpents in a million Groves. Simply put, much of the writing published today is bad. Mr. Nazir’s story, to my ear, is little distinguishable from so much other writing that the literary establishment has lauded, awarded, and otherwise certified in recent years.
To be sure, many great writers are at present producing many great stories and poems, but the internet has made it easier than ever for anyone to become a published author, and I suspect that the balance of bad to good writing tips even more heavily to the former in our day than in any prior. While the ease of publication can certainly provide a confidence boost for aspiring writers, the proliferation of the bad presents considerable cultural challenges. A milieu in which writers are constantly reviewing the offerings of contemporary journals to see what of their own work might fit runs the risk of losing touch with any sort of tradition that could give shape and counsel to the present cultural moment.
A decent writer can reveal something of himself to the reader. A great writer makes the reader aware of the reader’s self in another.
The danger here is amplified by another common tenet of the litsphere—namely, its obsession with identity. Journals commonly offer special encouragement to would-be submitters of diverse ethnicity and sexuality. My purpose here is not essentially to argue the value of supporting diversity in literary representation. Rather, I suggest that one danger of such policies is that they can enforce a variety of self-obsession that is antithetical to the writerly life and to the essence of good writing. The self is indeed a marvelous thing, but it is most so by its reference to the other—to the world and its inhabitants and the one who loves them all. A decent writer can reveal something of himself to the reader. A great writer makes the reader aware of the reader’s self in another. Thus Jane Austen can show Cornel West to himself by means of Anne Elliot. Horace can reveal Patrick Leigh Fermor and Heinrich Kreipe to each other in Crete.
The present literary landscape is marked, for all its emphasis on community and diversity, by isolation, with ever more writers producing material for ever fewer readers, each author speaking more and more to himself in the void. Language dulls or gluts itself according to the dispiriting or engorging effects of disappointment and praise as we writers seek to make ourselves seem interesting. But the self in itself will always evanesce. We are not our own light. And what happens when we fail ourselves? Perhaps we give up. Perhaps we despair at the thought that we ourselves are hell, to borrow from Lowell. Or perhaps we turn to something like AI. It looks, after all, as though AI has figured out how to take home the prizes, how to certify the self for another sally after being.
There is another way of recovering the self, however, a way great writers have long shown us, and a way many good writers are presently pursuing. It lies first of all in forgetting the self. We find it in Dante, with the pilgrim-poet needing always to forget his own person in order to rise and rediscover it. We find it in Shakespeare, the man vanishing into the plays (whose plots are almost never his own invention) until we find him the more perfectly at play with us. We find it throughout a tradition that leads us out of ourselves, demands our imitation, and dares our emulation.
Recovery depends first of all on the presence of those who discern that some things are important, that some things should be preserved whatever the cost.
Presses like Wiseblood and Word on Fire’s Luminor imprint, programs like the MFAs at the University of St. Thomas and Ashland, journals like New Verse Review, Portico, Plough, and The Colosseum (to name but a few) are engaging the tradition anew, cultivating communities of writers who, looking to the work of the past, are crafting new work in conversation with each other. I’m thinking of poets like James Matthew Wilson and Ryan Wilson, novelists like Katy Carl and Randy Boyagoda, and cross-disciplinary artists like Jane Scharl and Sally Thomas. Their work is steeped in the tradition and, like all work so steeped, has a freshness that shows little sign of fading.
The writers here mentioned are also, for the most part, able critics, whose offices we badly need. Indeed, the literary landscape is marked today by exuberant praise, partly because, having abandoned much of the tradition, we no longer have grounds for criticizing writing. If we prize work principally as the expression of the author’s subjectivity, rather than as an invitation to a lofty and long-standing conversation about what is, we tend to conflate our criticisms of the art and the artist. So we shrink, we dither, we laud, we sit in envy as the prizes are awarded.
(Incidentally, I hope most fervently that the advent of AI in the literary landscape will at last allow us to be more honest with ourselves and each other about the quality of our writing. The kind of writing that today prompts cries of “This is AI” is hardly different from the writing that has been everywhere prevalent these ten years.)
The cultivation of tradition tends also to develop what St. John Paul II called the feminine genius. Not the province of women alone, this genius helps its possessor to see the other in his particularity rather than under the features of identity so feted by the literary world. Rather than classifying and dividing by gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and qualifying people accordingly, the feminine genius welcomes the irrepeatable beauty of the other and fosters greater recovery of the self.
Recovery is the order of the day. The moment is bleak. It may well be that we find ourselves on the brink of such a cataclysm as would plunge Greece into darkness for some four centuries, with Troy burning on one side and Homer arising, blind and luminous, on the other. We may be on the verge of a Babylonian captivity, with our language at the threshold of the tomb. Yet, for all there is to fear, history reveals again and again the human drive for recovery. For some two and a half millennia, Hebrew was a dead language. Today it is the native tongue of nine million people. Recovery depends first of all on the presence of those who discern that some things are important, that some things should be preserved whatever the cost.
What of the prizes? What of hallucinations and frauds? Attending to the world as it reveals itself, taking up, in community, a tradition that has not yet disappeared, seeking the words by which we might yet justify ourselves to the world—these are the means of recovery. The work may be lowly. It may draw as little recognition, in the scales of the great, as did a young girl’s yes to an angel’s invitation twenty centuries ago. But through her the Word became flesh, the Word who invites us to find those words that will lead us back to him.