The honest answer about [Authority] is that the critical essays were there. If you're moving through form with discipline and intention, then you're forced to confront it–its limitations, its shape.

TESS POLLOK: Authority is your second book, but your first of criticism. Formally, it feels entirely different from your first book, Females. Females blends theory, memoir, and criticism into a psychedelic slurry, whereas Authority is a collection of rigorous, genre-bound critical essays. I’m interested in what that transition was like for you. Why criticism?

ANDREA LONG CHU: The honest answer is that the essays were there. I’ve been working in the critical essay format for a long time, both before and after Females, and I really enjoy it. I think you can really feel that when you read the book because the essays are arranged in roughly chronological order and you start to understand the kind of shape that I tend to use for those pieces. That format and style is as much of a reflection of me as an artist as it is the reality of magazine publishing. Writing for New York Magazine, each piece went through a similar editorial process of “how-many-words” and “how-much-space-do-we-have.” Over the years, those considerations meant I ended up with a collection of essays that were all in a very similar format. Females is exciting in a way because it ignores certain conventions and limitations in literature. But it also sort of doesn’t know what it wants to be and that lends it a kind of free-wheeling and chaotic quality. It feels very fragmentary to me now, which makes sense because I was reading The Society of the Spectacle at the time and that’s a very fragmentary work, as well. I still love Females, but I’ve come to believe that genre-bending is overrated. One, it’s trivially true of everything. You can’t ever actually be in a genre and all work exists on a spectrum of comparison to other works in that respect. Two, it displays little room for craft and structure, which are two things I am convinced have great value. If you can’t write me a paragraph, then I don’t care what else you can do. I think what some people call genre-bending is just an inability to deliver.

TESS POLLOK: There’s truth to the conventional wisdom about writing that you have to know the rules to break them. I certainly see that in what you’re saying. I can also see how a first book like Females would have a lot of raw energy and excitement propelling it forward, while Authority reads as more of an exercise in self-discipline.

ANDREA LONG CHU: It’s all about knowing the limits of a particular form. If you are actually trying to move through form with discipline and intention, then you are forced to confront what the actual limitations of that form are versus limitations that are not there that you just supposed were there. When you’re moving too quickly from one thing to another, as with genre-bending, you’re allowing your assumptions about what’s possible to guide you. That form becomes a scapegoat for your given assumptions instead of allowing you to come into contact with something real, for example, things that are actually difficult about writing a novel. I love abstraction and I’m attracted to it on an aesthetic level, but maybe it should be something of a last resort for writers.

TESS POLLOK: I drew connections between Authority and a recent interview with the poet Alice Notley in The Paris Review in which she says “Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.” Do you share Notley’s perspective that writers and critics today are somewhat too self-reflective? I’m thinking about this with regards to your final point about abstraction being a method of last resort. If you’re an artist and you treat your art or your writing like a therapy session, you’re being dishonest with yourself. Paying close attention to craft is a way of becoming more honest with yourself about what it is you’re doing and tunneling towards a certain truth.

ANDREA LONG CHU: There’s a certain amount of ignorance and failed self-understanding that is going to be built into anyone’s artistic practice. I don’t necessarily know that I reject art as therapy in all cases. I can definitely think of versions of it that are stultifying. But I see my role as a critic in trying to provide, or in some cases restore, a path to self-knowledge that was not actually made available to the writer during the writing process. My criticism is my way of saying you don’t know what you’re doing, so let me tell you, or, I know this is what you think you’re doing, but here’s what you’re actually doing. Let’s bring the house lights up, let’s try and bring out some of the understanding that has been obscured for the artist when they’re writing. Criticism is my way of saying, I’ve found you.

TESS POLLOK: Are the conclusions you reach in your criticism obvious to you? I’m wondering if you find the process of disentangling a semiotic knot around a specific artist and writer its own form of self-discovery.

ANDREA LONG CHU: I think that I often arrive at relatively straightforward positions, such as “Hanya Yanagihara is obsessed with gay men,” or “Rachel Cusk doesn’t respect women.” There are certain writers where you just know something is going on and it takes a lot of work to try and get to a compelling statement of what that thing is that doesn’t just feel like pure speculation or intuition. In some cases, it’s about trying to provide 4,000 words of evidence for something that you already felt already or had a nagging suspicion about, or something that gave you a general sense of anxiety as a reader. I certainly see that one of the many things I’m bringing to the table is my ability to name that quality in artists.

I’m unique as a critic in that I make arguments, which many don’t. Either because they don’t have the space, they don’t have the opportunity, or because they are just more interested in giving you an aesthetic impression of the pieces by stringing several observations together. I’m not saying that my way is the only way, I’m just saying that my ultimate goal as a critic is to state a position. I’m trying to appraise something. Getting to a point of simplicity and clarity by the end is highly desirable because I should be responsible for the argument I’m making and its logical conclusion. Part of discharging the responsibility of the critic is reaching that clarity. In aesthetic matters, clarity is hard to come by because we’re not dealing with objective material that can be shared between people. So having that shared sense of clarity through criticism, that’s sort of the holy grail of being a critic.

TESS POLLOK: What do you see as the goal of the critic? You’ve mentioned giving an aesthetic impression of the work as one example. Another example would be yourself, a critic who provides a definitive thesis and then argues towards its justification. Are there any other styles of criticism that you see in the contemporary landscape?

ANDREA LONG CHU: This is a bit of an aside, but I’ll get to how it justifies my beliefs about what the goals of a critic should be. One thing that I always avoid, and that I think every critic should always avoid, is being unaware of an argument that I’m making. That, I think, is the mind killer of criticism. I see this a lot with film reviews. It’s one thing to be genuinely providing someone with advice on whether or not seeing a certain movie is worth their money, but it’s another to be unaware that you’re advancing certain ideas or arguing implicitly with other positions or critics in doing so. As a writer and artist, I think not knowing what you’re doing can lead to moments or flashes of genius, but as a critic, I think it is truly irresponsible to imagine that you are able to move through this material without accruing meaningful ideas, intellectual positions, and engaging with various cultural debates. I would like for criticism to answer more than just the question of is it worth my money to see this movie? I will always prefer a more impressionistic approach.

TESS POLLOK: You’re approaching the critical paradox of authority that lies at the heart of criticism. Criticism, by nature, relies on the existence and name of the author to justify its existence, and yet it’s at its most effective and authoritative when the author reveals as little of themselves and their personal preferences to the reader as possible. When I think about why the collection of works in Authority have such authority, it’s partially because you engage in less of the egoic, combative language and behavior I associate with other critics who are maybe somewhat distracted by didactic agendas, personal branding, or, as you pointed out already, simply not knowing what it is they’re actually doing.

ANDREA LONG CHU: This is a question that I think about often. As you say, a work of criticism is nothing but personality because it has nothing to hold onto except the subjectivity of the critic. Increasingly, I’ve been intentionally removing myself from my criticism for a number of reasons. One is that I think when I began my career I put too much of myself into my work, both criticism and essays. Making your own self the thing that you’re trying to display to other people with criticism can become very painful over time. Interestingly, removing your self from your criticism doesn’t mean that the capital “I” of the work goes away. A great work of criticism will have that “I” implicit in every sentence, without it even having to be written. Poorly written criticism will have too many sentences that begin with “I think, comma,” and so on. But removing those clauses doesn’t mean that the “I” goes away, it just means that the “I” goes from being a straightforward declaration of one’s preferences and predilections to a sort of structural “I” that the reader has an opportunity to inhabit.

There is an engulfment inherent in criticism. I once said to a friend of mine that I want my readers to feel engulfed, like they’re on a tiny little island and all they can see is the ocean. I want them to feel like I am everywhere, all around them. But in pursuit of that, I have to be everywhere and nowhere as a critic. I have to move a subjective position towards a universal experience, which is something that only exists in the mind of the reader and in my relationship to them. The authority in Authority comes from the fact that, for the next 250 pages, I’m going to dictate your own thoughts to you. So when I say, “This is the real reason that Rachel Cusk does this,” you actually hear me and think that you’re me. You feel like it’s something that you’re doing. To fully give the reader that experience, the experience of fully assuming my own subjectivity, it requires me to simultaneously step way back from them while also completely surrounding them.

TESS POLLOK: Who influences your thinking on criticism? I’m also interested in how your thinking on criticism and writing has evolved from Females to Authority.

ANDREA LONG CHU: I wrote Females when I was in graduate school. At the time, I was heavily influenced by a psychoanalytic framework, object relations, and what I had learned from my queer studies background. Those disciplines will forever be the bedrock of my thinking, even as I evolve or move on to different interests. Right now, I’m trying to be more of a materialist. I am daily becoming more Hegelian; It’s quite frightening. I’m also experimenting with becoming more of a doctrinaire Marxist, or better yet, a vulgar Marxist. It’s making me interested in this question of the thing-ness of criticism, criticism as a commodity and as a physical object in the world. Those Marxist influences came to the forefront more with Authority. I wonder, if you demystified criticism, would there be anything left of it?

TESS POLLOK: Can you elaborate on your relationship to psychoanalysis and object relations? I see more clearly how it relates to Females, but I’m curious about how you see its continued influence on Authority.

ANDREA LONG CHU: Every novel is the fulfillment of a wish. Everyone writing a novel is trying to achieve something, whether or not they’re conscious of what that specific aim or achievement might be. In fact, they’re probably mostly not conscious of what specifically it is they’re trying to achieve. So my interest in psychoanalysis has less to do with an analytic reading of specific characters or settings and more to do with psychoanalysis of the novel itself. I’m interested in the psychic formation of what constitutes a novel, or a TV show, and so on. That’s just a very esoteric way of saying that I’m interested in asking why someone wrote a specific book or TV show. I want to know what these books or shows are trying to accomplish for that person, what they’re hoping to achieve with it, what kind of new self the writer is hoping to create by publishing or producing it. Psychologizing the author is a famously bad form of criticism, but as I say in the book, it seems to me that authors are where books come from. So I don’t see anything wrong with trying to understanding them. I don’t need authors to turn out their pockets and provide documentation of every thought or feeling they’ve ever had in their personal lives, but I refuse to accept the idea that I am supposed to evaluate art as if it dropped from heaven. That’s where psychoanalysis and Marxism come together in my thinking. They’re both ways of thinking about how novels or films or art in general are taking place within a world and are helping in their small way to constitute that world. The world that art inhabits is the same world in which we are living and receiving them, not some sort of rarefied space that dispatches art to us every so often.

TESS POLLOK: I see your repudiation of the rarefied art object as a type of rebellion against publishing, against production. Or an expression of your insistence on transparency and sincerity. How else do you see your Marxist instincts manifesting themselves in your criticism?

ANDREA LONG CHU: I refuse to take things at face value. The book reviewing establishment is always going to present a book to us in a certain way and I like to look past that and get to something more real. I want to uncover the immediacy of that encounter with a certain book or TV show–which is interesting, because it’s not, almost always, an aesthetic encounter. It’s almost always something The New York Times told you to read, or something a friend told you to watch, or it’s something that’s physically sitting on your shelf at home. There are other forms of relationships that are possible to have with these items beyond their aesthetic implications, in fact, these types of relationships almost always supersede the aesthetic. Part of my responsibility as a critic and what I’m trying to do with Authority is connect all of those things together. I suppose it’s rebellious in the sense that I’m claiming an authority over relationships between us and art objects as opposed to claiming an authority over art rooted in a grand understanding of the film and literary canons. With Authority, I’m rejecting one kind of authority while claiming another.

ANDREA LONG CHU is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, critic, and author. Her latest work, Authority, is available now.

TESS POLLOK is a writer and the editor of Animal Blood. She is based in New York City and Los Angeles.