Yours Sincerely: Meet James Marriott and the Millennial Intellectuals

James (millennial intellectual) Marriott 

Photo credit: The Times

 

'I am very eager to be liked, and I want people to think I'm a nice person.' 

 

I. 

 

The obsession with dividing people up into generations, just as once we used to categorise individuals by their star sign, is deeply stupid and, I suspect, it's something driven by those working in media and marketing who like to simplify and stereotype in order to target consumers and create cultural trends. 

 

The millennial, for example, is largely a fictitious figure invented by William Strauss and Neil Howe [1]. 

 

Nevertheless, there are some who take generational theory seriously and identify not by race, class, or gender, but by what era (or decade) they were born in. And there are some - proud of their ability to read serious works of literature, understand complex ideas, and who just happen to be born between 1981 and 1996 - who call themselves millennial intellectuals ...  

 

II.

 

Aged between thirty and forty-five, millennial intellectuals have been shaped by digital technology and are motivated by a wide range of social issues and cultural concerns, often allowing the work they do in a professional capacity - lecturing, writing, podcasting - to be infected by their political activism (and vice versa).    

 

Two words seem to dominate their vocabulary: authenticity and sincerity and they loathe the irony and indifference, the artifice and ambivalence, of Gen X nihilists, such as myself, who couldn't care less about their personal experience or their precious feelings.  

 

Unfortunately, judging by a number of events I've attended recently, these millennial intellectuals are in the ascendency and exerting an ever-greater influence over public discourse. 

 

 

III.

 

I don't know if he's regarded as a spokesperson for the millennial intellectuals, but James Marriott was the one who coined the term [2] and this Times columnist and reviewer is, for me, the baby-faced face of this generational grouping.   

 

Asked in an interview to say what it is that unites them, he replied: "being unafraid to talk about feelings" [3] and he then went on to contrast his generation with those intellectuals in the 1990s who were obsessed with irony in a time in which "nobody could be sincere anymore".

 

Wanting to press Marriott on this, the interviewer, Nicholas Harris, reminds him of the original New Sincerity movement - sometimes known as post-postmodernism [4] - that arose in the mid-1980s and was popularised in the following decade by David Foster Wallace.  

 

Marriott says that it wasn't sincere enough and that the sincerity of Wallace and company pales in comparison to the sincerity of the millennial intellectuals, which is so off the charts that many find it discomforting. 

 

By way of providing an example, Marriott mentions the 2018 novel by the celebrated Irish author (and fellow millennial) Sally Rooney: "'When I speak to a lot of middle-aged people about Normal People they think it was so embarrassing and overwrought.'" 

 

The book may, he says, have technical faults, but can be defended on the grounds that it is still incredibly moving and concerns itself with the lives of good people:   

 

"'Normal People is about people who are incredibly good-looking and incredibly clever and incredibly nice. But in a way that is part of the Sincerity we were talking about. A lot of writers at the end of the 20th century were ostentatiously concerned with writing about 'bad' people in a slightly showy, shallow way - that Bret Easton Ellis stuff. And I think that became a literary affectation and it was cool to write about people who were bad or morally questionable. Whereas [...] I thought it was interesting and almost revolutionary for [Rooney] to write about people who are good. Because some people are good.'" 

 

This, from someone who aspires to become a literary critic (rather than merely a book reviewer) ...! Even by his own admission, this is "'probably a really stupid attitude to literature'". Nevertheless, that's his attitude and his desire is to know about nice people, with nice feelings, leading nice lives - people just like him, in other words. 

 

And, it seems, there are plenty of readers out there who share his wanting to be moved by niceness and express their feelings in all sincerity (if hopefully not in a manner that is too cringey). But I'm not one of them: I remain a Gen X nihilist and ironic postmodernist and have no wish to re-engage with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, even when, as here, they are reduced to an insipid level of niceness. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Strauss and Howe are widely credited with coining the term millennials in 1987 and assigning them a place within their (crackpot) psycho-historical theory which associates different eras with recurring generational personas or archetypes. 

      The theory is popular with the kind of people who read Ayn Rand or Jordan Peterson and run motivational business seminars, but less so amongst those who still require things such as empirical evidence for claims made and dislike unfalsifiable theories on principle. Critics also reject the idea that vacuous generational labels might play a bigger role in shaping identity than class, race, sex, or religion.

      Readers who are nevertheless interested in Strauss and Howe's pop sociology can consult any of the numerous books they co-authored, beginning with Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (William Morrow and Company, 1991). 

 

[2] Marriott originally used the phrase millennial intellectuals to describe a group of young, female writers including Jia Tolentino, Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan, Megan Nolan, and Hera Lindsay Bird.

 

[3] James Marriott, interviewed by Nicholas Harris, Review 31 - click here. All further quotes in this post are taken from this interview. 

      Readers who may wish to know more about Marriott might like to see an interview he gave to Cosmo Adair that appears in the arts and culture magazine Wayzgoose (19 February, 2024): click here. I was interested to discover that Marriott's father was a nihilist who insisted on the material nature of existence. 

 

[4] New sincerity and post-postmodernism are perhaps not quite one and the same, but they are closely related enough to be used synonymously. Both were trends in the arts and philosophy that wished to move beyond the ruins, so to speak, but not in a good way (by which I mean that rather than tentatively build up new little habitats, they seemed to wish to return to the safety of old values and narratives and act with sincerity and conviction once more).     

 

 

Lobster Variations (I - IV)

Nobuyuki Shimamura: Fantasy Lobster (2013)

Hoki Museum Collection, Chiba, Japan 

 

I.

 

Such is my fascination with lobsters at the moment that I'm beginning to think that, like Prufrock, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas" [1].

 

Though of course, literary scholars are divided about the nature of the marine creature that is immortalised by Eliot in these lines: is it a lobster, is it a crab, or is it some other (perhaps entirely imaginary) denizen of the deep? 

 

Whilst I understand the arguments put forward by those who favour the crab reading - for example, it's true that the word scuttling is more suggestive of the quick movements made by crabs than the slow crawling walk of the lobster - nevertheless I opt for the lobster interpretation, as I think lobsters have a richer (and more perverse) symbolic history. 

 

Ultimately, however, we can never know and, of course, Eliot's poetic language doesn't really operate by referring us to some actual sea creature outside of the text, so this question is largely moot.            

 

 

II. 

 

Lawrence's poem 'Demiurge' [2] is one of a series of late verses that share a common objective; namely, to expose the absurdity of Plato's theory that only ideas encapsulate the true and essential nature of things, rather than physical forms existing in the material world.     

 

It's also a poem which features a rather lovely description of a lobster ...

 

They say that reality exists only in the spirit

that corporal existence is a kind of death

that pure being is bodiless

that the idea of the form precedes the form substantial.

 

But what nonsense it is!

as if any Mind could have imagined a lobster

dozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!

 

Even the mind of God can only imagine 

those things that have become themselves:

bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation

even if it is only a lobster on tip-toe.

 

 

III. 

 

More Pricks Than Kicks is a collection of ten interlocking short stories, set in Dublin, by Samuel Beckett [3]. It was first published in 1934, just a couple of years after Lawrence's Last Poems. 

 

The opening story - 'Dante and the Lobster' - concerns the reaction of the tale's protagonist (Belacqua) discovering to his horror that the lobster he has purchased for dinner with his aunt must be prepared in a particularly unpleasant manner:

 

"In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. [...] Now it was going alive into scalding water." 

 

His attempt to console himself (and us) with the fantasy that the creature's death will be a relatively quick and painless one is undermined by the narrator of the tale declaring with grim assurance: It is not.      

 

 

IV.  

 

And this brings us, finally, to David Foster Wallace's famous essay 'Consider the Lobster' [4] ...

 

Disguised as a review of the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival and originally published in the August 2004 edition of the food and wine magazine Gourmet, it's a wilful provocation which irritated many readers by primarily concerning itself with the ethics of boiling a highly intelligent and sensitive creature alive in order to enhance the consumer's (sadistic) pleasure. 

 

Keen to dispell the myth that lobsters have such simple brains that they don't really experence pain as we understand it, Wallace even includes a handy discussion of lobster neurobiology. Though, as he points out, deciding whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer isn't just determined by the complexity of their sensory hardware; we must also examine whether the animal displays behavior associated with pain. 

 

And of course, as anyone who has ever watched a lobster thrashing about in a pan of boiling water for up to 45 seconds and desperately trying to escape will tell you, it requires an impressive display of intellectual gymnastics not to view this as pain-behaviour.  

 

Arguably, however, in even raising the possibility that we might compare the treatment of lobsters at the 56th annual Maine Lobster Festival to the fate of the Jews transported to Nazi extermination camps, Wallace oversteps the mark (i.e., he's walking the lobster, as they say in 1990s urban slang) [5]. 

 

Indeed, Wallace himself nervously backs away from this line of thought, but not before wondering if the reason why such an argument seems so outrageously extreme is precisely because we still largely believe animals to have significantly less moral value than human beings.

Wallace concludes his essay by asking his readers (as fellow meat-eaters and seafood lovers) two key questions:

 

"Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)?"

 

And to those who show no desire to worry about such things or dismiss the question of animal welfare out of hand, he asks:

 

"Is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don't want to think about it? And if the latter, then why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it?" 

 

Ultimately, Wallace is right to argue that we all need to be a bit more thoughtful about what we eat and how our food is produced; all need to be a bit more attentive to the suffering not just of our fellow mammals, but birds, fish, and, indeed, crustaceans like the lobster.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] T. S. Eliot, 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock', (1915): click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Demiurge', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 603.  

[3] Samuel Beckett, 'Dante and the Lobster', in More Pricks Than Kicks, (Chatto and Windus, 1934). A more recent edition, ed. with an extensive Preface by Cassandra Nelson, was published by Faber and Faber in 2010. The story can also be read online as originally published in the literary magazine Evergreen Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1957): click here. 

[4] David Foster Wallace, 'Consider the Lobster', in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, (Little, Brown and Co., 2005). To read this essay online (in an annotated version), click here. Or, to listen to the author read his essay (audiobook style) on YouTube, click here.   

[5] It might be noted that several writers, including Jewish Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, have drawn a comparison between the treatment of animals within the industrialised food industry and the Holocaust. Animal rights groups, including PETA, also have no problem with making such a metaphysical equivalence, though there are many who find the idea that meat is murder morally obtuse and highly offensive. 

      Without wishing to get too off-topic, it might also be noted that the Nazis were greatly concerned with animal welfare; for example, they outlawed vivisection, regulated animal slaughter, gave the wolf protected status, and prohibited the boiling alive of lobsters. 

 

 

I would like to acknowledge my debt for (some of) the ideas pursued here to an article by Jonathan Greenberg; 'A Lobster Is Being Eaten' (19 May, 2019), in the Journal of the Modernist Studies Association Modernism/modernity. Click here to read online.