Making Meaning

By​ ​Garth Greenwell

Against “relevance” in art

The word “relevant,” I was recently surprised to discover,
shares an etymology with the word “relieve.” This seems
obvious enough once you know it—only a few letters
separate the words—but their usages diverged so long ago
that I had never associated them before. Searching out
etymologies is an old habit, picked up in the decades when
I aspired to be a poet. Language is fossil poetry, Emerson
says, and the poem the ​Oxford English Dictionary ​lays out
in this case is remarkably moving. The common forebear
of both “relevant” and “relieve” is the French ​relever,
which meant, originally, to put back into an upright
position, to raise again, a word that twisted through time,
scattering meanings that our two modern words have
apportioned between them: to ease pain or discomfort, to
make stand out, to render prominent or distinct, to rise up
or rebel, to rebuild, to reinvigorate, to make higher, to set
free.
I looked up this history because I realized that somehow
I’d lost my sense of what we mean when we talk about
“relevance,” especially the relevance of art, and I wanted
to know whether the problem lay in my own understanding
or in some deficiency in our usage. The word is
everywhere in blurbs and reviews as a quality to admire or,
more than that, as a necessary condition; “irrelevant” has
joined “problematic” as a term of absolute dismissal,
applied not so much to books one reads and hotly debates
as to books one needn’t read at all. Artists feel the anxiety
of relevance during every season of fellowship
applications, those rituals of supplication, when we have to
make a case for ourselves in a way that feels entirely
foreign, for me at least, to the real motivations of art. Why
is this the right project for this moment? these applications
often ask. If I had a question like that on my mind as I tried
to make art, I would never write another word. This
pressure has only increased in recent years. I can still
remember the shudder I felt in early 2017 when, after
expressing my desire to review a newly translated
European novel, an editor asked me to find “a Trump
angle” to make the book relevant to his magazine’s
readers. There’s something demeaning about approaching
art from a predetermined angle, all the more so when that
angle is determined by our current president.

Part of my confusion about the meaning of relevance has

to do with a curious shift in usage. Until the middle of the
twentieth century, according to the ​OED,​ the word meant
“pertinent to a specified thing,” and it was generally
accompanied by a prepositional phrase: something was
relevant ​to​ or ​for ​a particular question or situation or
argument. A new meaning of the word made its first
appearance in the ​OED​’s citations in 1951, when it began
appearing all on its own, without a construction specifying
context. Something no longer had to be relevant ​to
something or someone in particular; it could simply be, in
a vague, hovering way, relevant. “Appropriate or
applicable in the (esp. current) context or circumstance,”
was the ​OED​’s definition for this new usage; and then,
tautologically, “having social, political, etc. relevance.”
My discomfort with our current use of “relevance” as a
term of judgment is that it conceals its criteria, and that
those criteria are not aesthetic, but social and political. I
worry that if we make such “relevance” not just one
among other judgments we might make about art, but a
condition of our interest, we have made that condition
purely about the explicit, discursive content of art, its
subject matter. In doing so, we devalue the elements of a
work that, to my thinking, properly distinguish it as art; we
deny the importance of form.

My aim is not at all to imply that the subject of a work

isn’t important, or that social and political context should
not be part of what we discuss when we discuss art. I came
of age as a literary person, more than twenty years ago
now, in an academic milieu that very much did
de-emphasize subject matter. One teacher of mine insisted
in our poetry workshop that we not discuss content at all,
that we somehow pay attention only to form. This was
interesting as pedagogy, and not a terrible way to spend a
semester, but it seemed false as a way of engaging with art.
I suspected that behind the resistance to content was
something more than a commitment to aestheticism—to art
for art’s sake. It seemed to me the academic literary
establishment’s way of responding to subject matter that it
found disturbing or discomfiting, subject matter that
seemed too assertive, too dramatic or overbearing, only
because it had for so long been excluded from the literary
canon. Much of this work drew on the experiences of
people of color and queer people, of women, of poor
people and people in rural areas—experiences deemed
irrelevant to a supposedly universal human story.

I see the prominence of “relevance” as a term of

assessment in our current critical language as part of a
huge and necessary correction, an assertion that these and
other supposedly marginal experiences are pertinent, as all
human experience is pertinent, to the communal endeavor
to make sense of ourselves that is the labor of art. What I
find moving in the shared etymology of “relevant” and
“relieve”—that fossil poem I began with—is the resonance
between “to make stand out, to render prominent or
distinct,” and “to give ease from pain or discomfort.” The
struggle to assert the value of a broader range of voices in
our literature has relieved an injury, the injury of
invisibility. That struggle is ongoing: just a few years ago,
in a graduate seminar at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an
author I continue to revere characterized my work as
resembling “a sociological report on the practices of a
subculture.” The fallacy of a certain idea of universality is
to imagine that any human experience is unmarked by the
accidents of geography, history, demographics—to believe
that an account of a Congregationalist minister in rural
Iowa, say, is somehow larger, more relevant to a shared
human story, than an account of sex among gay men. The
idea of universality, when used in this way, is nothing
more than a maneuver whereby a privileged social
position—which is often the position of straightness,
whiteness, and maleness—secures its own default status,
and therefore its immunity from self-awareness and
critique.
Because these battles are still being fought, I hesitate to
articulate the ways in which I think our use of the word
“relevant” is distorting our appraisals of art. But I can’t
help feeling that the current idea of “relevance”
recapitulates some of the disturbing features of
“universality,” in the way my literature professors once
applied the term. For decades now, since that change in
usage, we have not had to specify to whom or to what a
particular relevance pertains. That omission has become a
presumption, making the word a kind of unmarked term.
But relevance is never really unmarked: we generally do
mean relevant to or for something or someone; we are all,
always, addressing constituencies. The danger of
obscuring this fact is that, like a certain usage of
“universal,” it is ultimately a term of exclusion. Anytime
we praise the relevance of a particular novel, we are
positing, at least implicitly, the irrelevance of other novels;
and often enough we make this judgment explicit. We are
tired, I sometimes hear my friends say, I sometimes hear
myself say, of stories about straight, white, privileged men
contemplating adultery; we are tired of stories about
Americans abroad; we are tired of stories about
middle-class malaise. We are tired.

I often find myself perusing the shelves at Prairie Lights, a

bookstore in Iowa City, where I live, reading the jacket
copy of a recent release, sighing with friends that we don’t
have time for another story about ​x​ or ​y,​ and setting it back
on the shelf unopened. Often these judgments are framed
as jokes, though they are half in earnest. They make me
laugh sometimes; they also make me worry. The desire to
invert a structure of injustice—to inflict on those we take
to be the bearers of privilege the disregard they have
inflicted on others—is one I very much understand, one I
feel in myself. But it is always ethically suspect to speak of
any human experience as irrelevant to our common human
experience; it is always, let me go further, an act of
something like violence. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
describes what he calls the law of the conservation of
violence: that groups subjected to violence will seek to
inflict that violence on others, to pass it along. This is what
we’re doing when we dismiss the relevance of other
stories—the relevance, therefore, of other lives—and
suggest that the aesthetic value of a human experience,
such as straight-male desire, is exhaustible.

Growing up in Kentucky, and later, studying in the

academy of the 1990s, I experienced the violence of being
told that my life as a queer person, my work as a queer
artist, could stand only as an eccentric counterpoint to a
central, universal human story. But I don’t want to
conserve that violence; I want to disperse or transform it. It
seems to me that either we believe that all human
experience is valuable, that any life has the potential to
reveal something true for every life—a universality
achieved not through the effacement of difference but
through devotion to it—or we don’t. I want to encourage
the proliferation of voices and stories, not their repression.
Sometimes a brutal calculus is brought to bear against
arguments like the one I’ve just made: resources are finite;
time is finite; every book exists at the expense of another;
any book I read represents a different book I could have
read instead. We have to make tough choices, this thinking
goes, and we shouldn’t favor those who have benefited,
who continue to benefit, from structures of racial and
economic privilege. It’s hard not to acknowledge the
validity of this point: so few books get to claim a place in
the world. Maybe in the end it is indefensible to argue that
we don’t have to make these choices, that in fact it’s
imperative we don’t make them, that we think in terms of
abundance—of time, of audience, of voices—and not in
terms of scarcity. Maybe this is just a kind of cheap
mysticism, like a secularized treasury of grace—the old
theological idea that there are certain substances, such as
God’s love, that as they are spent do not diminish but
multiply. Maybe what I’m suggesting is pure fantasy,
imagining that our attention could be like the loaves and
fishes at the feeding of the five thousand. Maybe that’s
true. But maybe it’s also true that there are certain
indefensible positions we must hold because not to hold
them would be an affront to the human dignity necessary
for any world in which we should rightly wish to live.

I can’t bear the thought that art is a zero-sum game, that

we have to choose which kinds of stories are relevant,
which lives have value; I can’t bear the thought that works
of art exist only at the expense of other works of art, that
books are locked in some ferocious competition for space.
Maybe there is virtue in rejecting any reality construed
along these lines; maybe there are certain choices that so
deform our character that no claim of necessity can justify
them. Besides, the rhetoric of scarcity often turns out to be
exaggerated. Our time and attention might be more like the
loaves and fishes than we think. After all, we could always
cancel our Netflix subscriptions; we could always delete
our Twitter accounts.

When my friends and I consign new releases, on the basis

of their subject matter, to the category of irrelevant things,
we are making another kind of presumption that seems
deeply harmful to me: we are presuming to know what we
need from art. It’s as though we want to engineer an
encounter with art the way we might engineer an encounter
on a dating app, filtering by attributes we’re sure we want
in a partner: a certain age or height or race. My problem
with those apps is not just that swiping left is always a
degraded response to another person, but also that we
never know as much about our own desires as we think we
do. One of the great gifts and challenges of desire is that it
illuminates who we are in unexpected ways.

This is one of the many ways in which art and desire

resemble each other. When I use relevance as a filter for
determining what books to read, I’m failing to make
myself available for an authentic encounter with otherness,
something genuine art always offers. I’m presuming that I
can guess, from the barest plot summary, whether a book
will be useful in my life. But how can I know what I will
find relevant about a work before I have submitted myself
to the experience? I don’t think we are likely to be
transformed by art if we try to determine that encounter in
advance. Part of the vulnerability necessary for
transformation is the recognition that I am, to a great
extent, a mystery to myself. How could I know what I
need?

Not long ago, I was having lunch with a straight friend

who teaches writing at a public university in the West. He
told me how surprised he was when a colleague chastised
him for teaching Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.”
We shouldn’t teach stories like that anymore, this
colleague, who was queer, apparently said; we’ve read
enough stories about gay people with tragic endings; there
are happy queer stories now, he said, you should be
teaching those. He was making an argument about
relevance, I think; he was saying that queer stories
addressing the conditions of an earlier time are no longer
pertinent since, in certain places and for certain
populations, new possibilities have presented themselves
to queer people; he was suggesting that, moreover, such
texts might actively do harm.

This is an argument I’ve encountered often, even about my

own work, which has dismayed some readers who feel it
offers an inadequately affirmative depiction of queer life.
“Why can’t your narrator be an out and proud gay man?”
one man asked me after a reading in San Francisco, visibly
shaking with an emotion I took to be anger. I won’t go into
why I think this is a flawed assessment of my work, which
I see as aggressively assertive of the dignity of queer
people, and of my narrator, who is, as it happens, an out
and proud gay man. I’ll just note that many writers from
marginalized communities feel this pressure, the
responsibility to offer a story that supports a particular
political vision. Give us the world as we want to see it, this
pressure insists, not the world as you perceive it to be. I
don’t mean to be flippant. When people ask me whether I
think we need more queer stories with happy endings, my
answer is always yes. We need more queer stories, period.
But to believe that art is irrelevant if it fails to reflect the
life we want for ourselves and the world we want to live in
is to mistake how art works.

I wonder what my friend’s colleague would say about

James Baldwin, whether he thinks ​Giovanni’s Room​ ought
to be removed from bookshelves and syllabi. I’ve written
and spoken a great deal about the debt I owe to Baldwin, a
writerly debt and a more profound, human debt. But the
way that debt was incurred remains a mystery to me, since
it seems fair to say that ​Giovanni’s Room,​ a novel in which
every character ends up dead or devastated, is not just a
tragic narrative of queerness, but a homophobic one. The
book is horrified by effeminacy. My skin crawls every
time I read the bar scene in which queeny gay men are
compared to monkeys who eat their own feces, an image
radioactive with the tropes of American racism, though the
men being described are white. It isn’t just the narrator,
David, for whom homosexuality is a curse; the book itself
absolutely forecloses the possibility of durable love
between men. How is it, then, that this book, in which
homosexuality is only ever a closed door, for me opened
every door? When I was fourteen, I pulled ​Giovanni’s
Room​ from a bookstore shelf in Kentucky, knowing
nothing about literature, nothing about Baldwin, and the
book made life possible for me; it gave me permission to
exist. Nothing in its content explains this; the answer lies
not in what Baldwin said, but in how he said it, in what
Hilton Als has called his “high-faggot style.” The world of
Baldwin’s book, in which gay men died at one another’s
hands, had no more place for me than the world in which I
lived, where gay men died of solitude and AIDS; but his
language was its own world, a world that promised a kind
of home for me, a different scale of existence.

The way we talk about relevance suggests that it is a

quality a work possesses, something an author has
engineered or achieved, an accomplishment. This, too,
 seems wrong to me. Relevance may have more to do with
the audience; it is a quality of our reading at least as much
as an attribute of what we read. I was lucky to stumble
upon Baldwin when I did, before I knew anything about
literature; it meant that I met him without defenses, with
none of the knowingness I affect when I glance at a book
and dismiss it as irrelevant.

Our misunderstanding of relevance may come from a single

word in the ​OED​ definition: “Appropriate or applicable in the
(esp. ​current​) context.” In the age of Twitter feeds and nonstop
news, our overwhelming glut of novelty, something has
become disordered in our sense of the relationship between art
and time. I’m interested in literary projects that attempt to
write at the speed of our present moment—projects like Ali
Smith’s seasonal cycle of novels, or, somewhat differently,
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ​My Struggle.​ But a more profound
capacity of art is its ability to speak across time, and not just
time, but also across geography, language, culture, class—the
very attributes that now determine “relevance.” Literature is an
extraordinary technology for the transmission of
consciousness, which is what makes it worth devoting a life to.
It seems little less than miraculous that I can read Sappho
across millennia, Yukio Mishima across languages,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie across continents, and feel both
that I am experiencing worlds alien to me and that I am being
shown essential truths about myself.

I have been spending a lot of time lately with St. Augustine,

the North African bishop and architect of the Western world,
my first return to him since, as a graduate student and fledgling
writer, I fell passionately under the sway of his ​Confessions.
Time, place, culture, and language all separate me from
Augustine, but we are separated furthest by belief. I am
assertively, affirmatively, committedly atheist, which means
that a large part of the content of Augustine’s work seems
vacuous to me, based on an error or illusion—in a word,
irrelevant. And yet, reading ​Confessions,​ that doesn’t seem to
matter at all; few texts are as invigorating, as inspiring, few
texts give me so pungent a sense of companionship, of
intimacy, with another human.

Elizabeth Bishop had a favorite line she used to characterize

the kind of poem she aspired to write: that it would portray not
a thought but a mind thinking. This is what I value in
Augustine, what I value in all the art I love: not a set of
arguments and conclusions, not a message, but the shapes a
mind makes as it struggles to make meaning from a life.
Augustine’s ​Confessions ​are relevant because of the way he
articulates and interrogates inwardness, because of the syntax
he invents both for expressing bewilderment and for making
bewilderment itself a tool for inquiry. Reading it recently, I
noticed how much of his argument is presented as questions;
there are entire paragraphs of interrogative syntax. Augustine
takes our helplessness before the ultimate, irresolvable
questions, which we so often experience as an impasse, and
makes that very helplessness a way to move past it. That feels
relevant to me, it feels like something I need, even though in
so many other ways Augustine’s world—both the City of God
he imagined and the City of Man he knew—excludes me, is
foreign or obsolete or repugnant to me, actively seeks my
annihilation.

I want to acknowledge that everything I’ve written here has

been too simple, that there are all sorts of objections to be
made. I agree that one infringes upon the sovereignty of a
work, one falsifies it, when one pretends it can be abstracted
from its context, when one tries to meet a work on some
neutral ground free of “relevance.” And yet the way a work of
art inhabits its form is what offers me the experience I crave:
the sense of facing another person, the presence of another
human consciousness. I mentioned rejecting a certain false
idea of “universality” in art, but I ​do ​believe in the universal,
that some commonness in human experience can be
communicated across gulfs of difference, and I believe that art
can give us access to it. Art exposes us to the universal
experience of being a meaning-making animal in a universe
where meanings falter. A good definition of art, it seems to
me, might be the science of making meaning-making tools.

One reason subject matter has become central to discussions of

art in this era of hot takes and think pieces is that viewing art
as subject matter, especially political subject matter, makes it
voluble, productive of discourse. When I consider the subject
matter of a work of art, or its political or social context, I want
to talk; when I consider its form, I want to contemplate. But
commentary about art that says nothing about form is nearly
useless; it almost always misses the point, because form is the
distinctive feature of art, its defining property. Aesthetic form
is charged with affective and intellectual significance, with
human intention, in a way that non-aesthetic forms are not.
This is what makes a poem or a novel different from a
newspaper article or an encyclopedia entry.

There is a painting on the wall of my studio, a work by a

young American artist named Slater Bradley. I’ve learned a
few things about Bradley over the past year, but I first
encountered this painting in a state of perfect innocence, when
I saw it hanging in a gallery in Lisbon, where I was teaching at
a writers’ conference. I was accompanying another writer, who
wanted to see the work of a photographer she liked, and we
were both struck by an exhibition of Bradley’s canvases in the
gallery’s main space. The paintings were large, some broken
into geometrical shapes, gold and silver and black, some
simple fields of a single color. They contained an elaborate
symbolism, a mix of astrology and Eastern metaphysics, which
immediately aroused my skepticism and still has yet to catch
my interest. But the paintings were beautiful, and one of them,
the smallest, grabbed hold of me in a way I’ve felt only a few
times in my life. It’s a block of blue on a surface mounted on a
white mat, the whole enclosed in a brass frame. From across
the gallery, a warehouselike space with cement floors and
white walls, lit through a strip of high windows by Lisbon’s
extraordinary summer sun, it looked like undifferentiated
color, a weirdly textured and captivating blue. Then the room
darkened dramatically—a cloud passed in front of the
sun—and the painting transformed: it brightened and became
luminous, an effect I have become familiar with but not
accustomed to, and which I have no way of explaining. The
painting communicated a sense of stillness infused with
vibrancy—a quality I find in much of the art I love, something
I’ve characterized elsewhere as being like “a flame submerged
in glass.” It’s a stillness that reminds me that ​stasis​ was also
the Greek word for sedition, for that decidedly unplacid
political stalemate that can erupt in civil war.

Up close, the stillness dissolves, or is troubled: the painting

consists of thousands of small hatch marks, short vertical
strokes made in horizontal bands, applied in what the artist has
described as a kind of meditative discipline. The experience I
had viewing it was something like love, what the French call a
coup de foudre,​ a thunderbolt, and I knew that I wanted to feel
its effect again and again; I knew that it was something that
would be, in some way I didn’t fully understand, ​useful ​to me.
And so, thanks to haggling, a drawn-out schedule of payments
generously accepted by the gallery, and the forbearance of my
partner, it now hangs behind my desk, where I can feel it
almost buzzing as I work.

It would be difficult for me to say anything about the social

and political relevance of Bradley’s work, though of course the
work is embedded in social and political contexts, the
arrangements of the world that made it possible for Bradley to
create it and for me to hang it in my writing room. It would be
difficult to make the work voluble in ways intelligible to the
idea of relevance I find inadequate. And yet, when I think of
the real relevance of art, I think of this painting, which reminds
me of that oldest sense of ​relever,​ the shared parent of relevant
and relieve, and of its physical, bodily meaning: to put back
into an upright position. That was what I felt at the gallery in
Lisbon, and it’s what I feel now, writing these words with the
painting at my back: that I am being restored, set upright,
reminded of a frequency I need to tune myself to catch. This is
the real relevance of art, I think, this lifting up, this challenge
to lift myself up. It helps me to do my work, this mystery
hanging at my back; it helps me to live my life.

Garth Greenwell​ is the author of the novels ​What Belongs to You​ and
Cleanness.​ His most recent essay for ​Harper’s Magazine,​ “Bringing It Home,”
appeared in the June 2019 issue.