On the Cult of Craftism
The urge to diagnose the present cultural moment—in art, music, or literature—is always fraught for a critic. Especially during a time when it appears the culture is at an impasse—when the cultural objects we produce appear unable to provide, in some form, that unexpected epiphany, or the fleeting, emancipatory feeling of freedom from Ixion’s wheel. There is a pressing need to address this situation which has chiefly been brought about by what I’m calling craftism.
If I myself remain a little wary of the term it’s because something feels fraudulent in speaking about “craft.” As Zadie Smith noted in her 2008 lecture “That Crafty Feeling,” talk of craft carries about it “a whiff of snake oil.” “Craft,” in Smith’s words, is at once “too grand and foreign a word” to describe what should be intuitive to a writer. But craftism is not just craft. If craft is a writer’s fundamental heartbeat, then craftisim is hypertension. That’s why it’s pernicious.
A definition of craftism might be: a focus on style over substance, a fetishization of sentences themselves, a striving to put words in just the right order, rewriting and rewriting until the prose is perfectly crafted. And it’s had deleterious consequences for contemporary writers and literary production.
In the last year, some critics have made alternative (and not necessarily incompatible) diagnoses of Anglo-American writing. In his in Bookforum, announced that, “More than realism or its rivals, the dominant literary style in America is careerism.” Shortly thereafter, , claimed to see a shift in sensibility from the “writing of the voice” to what he called the “writing of the pose”: “The writing
