How to Elude the Critic
On Emily Ogden’s On Not Knowing
Maggie DohertyIn the world of literary criticism, there are few things worse than the mealymouthed mixed review. You know the kind: careful and fair, studded with caveats, animated by a vague air of disappointment. The eye stumbles on irritating qualifiers: “nonetheless,” “to be fair,” “still.” The reader finishes the piece dissatisfied and confused. This kind of review pleases no one: not the editor, who wants a provocative piece; not the author, who wants nothing but praise; and certainly not the reader, who wants the critic to be decisive above all.
Critical uncertainty is irritating because it suggests that the critic has failed to do her job. The work of literary criticism, as it’s commonly understood, is to render a firm judgment: the critic gathers up a text’s contradictions and resolves them into a coherent account of the work’s failure or success. She is decisive, knowledgeable, authoritative. The critic masters a text—one could even say dominates it—and the author, who usually has no recourse once a review has been published, must submit to the critic’s will.
What would it mean, though, for a critic to refuse this mandate and, instead, to remain undecided? Rather than demonstrating mastery, might a critic prefer to play the fool? “Offering to be a fool is often a component of care,” suggests the literary scholar Emily Ogden in On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays. The care she is referring to here is both interpersonal—how a parent cares for a child, how a therapist cares for a patient—and literary-critical: how a reader values a poem, even if, or perhaps because, she cannot offer a complete account of it. For Ogden, being a fool is both a performance—“one might know better than to be a fool, be stung by it”—and a genuine admission of the limits of one’s knowledge and abilities. In the face of an other (a child, a text), what are we if not ignorant, desiring fools?
On Not Knowing takes up ignorance and uncertainty as its central themes. Ogden is interested in a particular form of uncertainty—what she calls “unknowing”—and suggests that abiding in this state might help us cope with the social and political disasters of our current moment. “If there is a kind of unknowing that could serve now, it is not the defensiveness of willful ignorance but the defenselessness of not knowing yet,” she writes. In seventeen brief essays, on topics ranging from giving birth to seducing strange men in Greece, Ogden interleaves discussions of literary and psychoanalytic texts with reflections on her own life. Each essay has a “how to” title, as if Ogden were one of those comforting self-help authors, the kind who assure you that all would be well, if only you would think positively and wash your face.
For a person who occupies multiple positions of authority (teacher, scholar, parent), Ogden’s performance of her own unknowing is striking. She disavows her knowledge and expertise, even as she displays them in her elegant essays. But my sense is that she comes by this disavowal honestly, because its source is, for lack of a better word, objective: in the midst of civil and ecological collapse, she doesn’t know how, or why, one should raise children or teach literature. Ogden’s humility here is appealing—what a delight to encounter an academic who doesn’t have all the answers!—but it also raises questions about the nature and utility of “unknowing.” Can unknowing help us in this moment of crisis, as Ogden suggests? What is the difference between unknowing and a refusal to know? And when might we need to act anyway, despite “not knowing yet” the exact right thing to do? In other words, might we need to prod ourselves toward an uneasy mixture of uncertain knowledge and anticipatory action, despite what’s unknown?
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On Not Knowing is Ogden’s second book. Its title and subject chime with those of her first, an academic monograph on the cultural history of mesmerism in the United States. In that book, she explored the shifting, blurry line between true and false beliefs; here, she’s interested in what happens when we push our beliefs—our preconceptions and predictions—to the side. Taking her cue from Adam Phillips, who defines perversion as when we “know beforehand” what we desire from “a person, a medium, an environment,” Ogden allows herself to be surprised by the people and texts in front of her by not presuming to know them beforehand. Rather than seeking “angelic clarity,” she chooses to dwell in a state of “dimness”; she focuses on daily life as opposed to the life-defining event.
The book opens with Ogden admitting to (or perhaps insisting on) her own powerlessness. The world is burning, literally and figuratively, and Ogden wonders what is to be done. The disasters that loom beyond the boundaries of her well-cultivated garden are too big to understand, too terrifying to contemplate. Though Ogden never names the threats she perceives, a reader can well imagine them: climate catastrophe, creeping fascism, an increasingly brutal carceral state. “A person can want a clear view and not get it,” she writes. “A person can believe decisive action is required and yet not know how to begin.” Accepting her inadequacy as inevitable, and her indecision as permanent, she turns her attention to small and ephemeral things: a darting minnow, a flash of memory, a child’s linguistic slip.
Ogden has no answers to the problems of the age, and she does not seek them. Instead, she analyzes experiences closer to home—gestating, child-rearing, gardening—that are common yet not often studied.
Like many essayists, Ogden proceeds associatively. In an essay called “How to Riff,” which might be read as a kind of ars poetica for Ogden’s critical method, she describes riffing as “starting with a single idea and putting it through a series of changes.” The riff is both a way of making a work of art coherent—of maintaining “sameness within change,” in her formulation—and an invitation to experiment, to play. An essay might contain an anecdote, an allusion, and a brief close reading—all linked to a central idea. The essay “How to Milk,” one of the strongest in the collection, begins with a brief reference to the movie The Matrix, then swiftly moves to Ogden’s memories of working on a dairy farm, and from there into memories of producing breast milk as a new mother. The result is an astute reflection on the awkward, even violent ways that nourishment is husbanded and harvested.
This riffing style suits her critical sensibilities. Riffing allows Ogden to associate rather than argue, to explore rather than define. An essay of hers is more likely to end with an unanswered question than with conclusions common to critical writing. This is fitting: Ogden has no answers to the problems of the age, and she does not seek them. Instead, she analyzes experiences closer to home—gestating, child-rearing, gardening—that are common yet not often studied. Riffing also grants Ogden critical freedom. Following the logic of the riff, she can yoke together observations about different genres, from different periods: one essay cites, in order, Ovid, Eileen Myles, Edgar Allen Poe, Adam Phillips, Anne Dufourmantelle, and Fellini. The essays reminded me at times of the work of the late literary scholar Lauren Berlant, who moved freely between high and low culture, though Ogden is less interested in popular culture (television, celebrities) than in children’s culture, which, appropriately, she takes seriously.
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Ogden is a keen observer of children; her twin sons provide some of the most engrossing material in the book. She’s at her best when writing about their efforts to use words to understand the world. In “How to Hold It Together,” she describes her sons’ fascination with stories about brokenness. They love hearing about how one of them was stung by a bee and about how the family dog “broke” (killed) a snake. If Ogden delays her telling, they reach their fingers into her mouth, breaking the boundary of her body in an effort to fetch the story from it. Ogden identifies the consoling function of such storytelling: “Stories suture up our parts . . . . They knit our bodies and our worlds into shapes we can use and that make sense to us, shapes that can break and be repaired in sufficiently predictable ways to allow us to live.” One could apply this same insight to the essay that follows, about Ogden’s C-section: by telling the story of being cut in two, Ogden makes herself whole once again.
Becoming a mother is ostensibly a life-defining event, but the work of mothering can be continuous, banal, without definition—a kind of background noise to the rest of life. This is a rich contradiction, one reflected in many of Ogden’s essays, which often circle back to mothering no matter where they begin. An essay on the art of listening includes an anecdote about her sons’ use of the stereo; one about animal husbandry eventually arrives at an observation about watching over young children. Childbirth, child-rearing, and miscarriage all receive sustained attention. Mothering even informs the book’s form: the essays are the kind of short pieces that one might be able to write during “moments of the pastoral meanwhile”—that is, while one’s children fill buckets with water or play with blocks.
On the one hand, Ogden derives some of her authority from her status as a mother; there’s a reason she reminds us she is one in nearly every essay. But on the other, as she freely admits, to be a mother is to be continually humbled, to be made aware again and again of one’s own ignorance. She strives to be a “good-enough mother,” in the words of D. W. Winnicott, but she finds this goal to be as anxiety-provoking as it is reassuring. “She is to hide that she is a real person! She is to do so just enough!” Ogden writes, paraphrasing Winnicott’s theory. “Some number of lapses into personhood can be acceptable, but how many? How would one know?”
These fears return in a later essay in which Ogden describes a game in which her children ask her to play sad. She responds gamely, with fake tears and a notable pout, but even during playacting, apprehensions arise: “Do they worry that my emotions are something they must manage?” she wonders. “Did I fail to hold them together?” she asks, “Was I not … good enough?” Such questions might haunt any mother, or parent, at any historical moment, but they are particularly acute now, as a series of ongoing disasters prevent Ogden from being able to reassure her sons about matters small, larger than life, or both at once. “Am I depressed—by the end of the world, perhaps—and are they telling me to play this out in a game?” she wonders. Her question recalls a statement she makes in the book’s first essay, where she writes that this book is about “how to love, what to do, in the dim times.” How can we care for children—how can we hold them firmly, and enough—when we don’t know how to halt incoming catastrophes?
Ogden’s answer is disarming: we can’t know if we’re enough; we can only care, and worry, and try not to worry our children unduly. “We fill our arms with little cares,” she writes. She carries her children; she picks figs after dark. She describes tending to a “hobby garden” that “doubles, in my secret thoughts, as our bulwark against apocalypse.” She knows a family garden won’t mean much in the end times—her level-headed husband points out that contaminated water will be the end of them—but she continues planting trees and picking fruit and gathering up her children. She mends what can be easily repaired. The book ends with a story about imperfect holding: one of her sons, eluding his adult caretakers, falls into a pond. He is swiftly fished out by his father. Still, her son remembers the moments before he was safely grasped. “I tell him his father and I will always be near water, and we will scoop him up,” Ogden writes. “This is not true. But I’ll be his fool.”
There’s something commendable in Ogden’s willingness to play the fool, to admit to her ignorance and powerlessness. But I wondered whether this insistence on her own incapacity might be a way to evade responsibility. Protecting one’s children might not mean shielding a child from harm or eradicating a threat in its entirety. Instead, it could mean confronting injustice and modeling social engagement, showing it to be one of the many responsibilities that make a life. The writer and activist Grace Paley, in a 1976 interview, insisted that family making and collective action were not opposed, that mothers must care for their children through activism. Mothers are “important” to children, she acknowledged, but “the world is bringing them up and insofar as the world is bringing them up . . . you better pay attention to the world too.”
Are questions about children and caregiving to be answered only by individual parents? Might they be addressed by communities, or by society at large? Questions of collective power are not taken up by Ogden, except in coded references to how humans, in the aggregate, are responsible for the climate disaster. Early on in the book, humanity’s destructive power is figured as a school of minnows, each fish turning in unthinking synchronicity, together becoming something calamitous. I couldn’t help but remember these fish as I read about Ogden groping for figs by flashlight in her garden. I admired her fortitude, but I wished someone would turn on a light.
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Perhaps it’s time for some critical judgment: On Not Knowing is a good book. It is smart and funny and elegant. Ogden has a capacious intelligence and an ability to wring meaning from a wide variety of texts. I took great pleasure in the experience of reading it, and I felt at ease within her mind. But I, nevertheless, must confess to critical ambivalence, a different attitude from critical uncertainty: the book also frustrated me. In some essays, a neatness of finish gave me the sense that something dark or unruly had been elided. In others, the prose turned oblique, mystifying. How is shared domestic life at once a contest, a refuge, a scab, and a form of gilding, as Ogden suggests it is in “How to Have a Breakthrough”? And what, exactly, does it mean to be “blown about, when we are afloat over fathomless depth, when we are not yet dead,” a state that suggests, “in short,” that “things are not cut and dried”?
Ultimately, I wished for clarity—the very quality that Ogden deliberately rejects. She is wary of “passion, clarity, revelation, ecstasy, discovery,” of those epiphanic moments that seem to make a life. She fears that a fixation on moments of clear meaning might constrain us, as we seek to remain “bound” to incidents of unrepeatable intensity. She would rather be open to the new, mundane as it might be. There’s much to like about this worldview. There’s much to like, too, about the writing it produces: honest, playful, open-ended, free from easy answers and pat conclusions. But at the same time, I couldn’t always square Ogden’s humility with the knowledge and expertise on display in her writing. Was she really as unknowing as she appeared to be in this collection? Was Ogden playing me for a fool?
The essay “How to Elude Your Captors” reveals something of Ogden’s aims. It begins with Ogden worrying that she is living a life “consecrated to an imbecility”: she devotes her life to poetry, which might not matter, and to her children, who may matter only to her. She spends her time on tasks that might seem superfluous. “In the shadow of catastrophe, was I rinsing out muddy socks? Was I commenting on Melville?” she muses. Rather than answering the questions that plague her—Does poetry matter? Should I be doing something else with my time?—she forestalls them. She takes her dog on walks; she watches birds; she reads poems, which evade her efforts to interpret them. “I only know how to evade the question, to keep it from arising,” she writes. And later: “Evasion is not cowardice; it is the only possibility when so much as to pose the question is to falsify the case.”
Surplus time is the first casualty of capitalism, but I don’t see literary interpretation and participation in collective politics as a zero-sum game.
When I first read that last sentence, I misread “evasion” as “aversion,” a revealing error. The aversion I was feeling, of course, was mine. I, too, live a life devoted to literary interpretation, and to caring for the people I love, and I resisted Ogden’s depiction of that life and its dilemmas. My resistance is perhaps a sign that I recognized myself in her text more than I would care to admit—a defensive rejection. Nevertheless, some of the questions that preoccupy Ogden did not seem particularly live or urgent to me. One can rinse out a sock or write an essay, and then escort someone to an abortion clinic or walk a picket line. Surplus time is the first casualty of capitalism, but I don’t see literary interpretation and participation in collective politics as a zero-sum game.
Maybe I wasn’t alone in my misgivings: perhaps Ogden had unstated aversions, too, rather than a honed capacity for deft or foolish evasions. Was she eluding her captors or simply turning away from conflict? Could she not see or comprehend the threats facing us—threats metaphorized as “Leviathans” throughout the book—or was she instead disavowing her knowledge of them? I noted the many inward turns and retreats figured in her essays, the moves away from “fathomless depths” and wide-open spaces toward small, habitable fortresses: a cave, a house, a family. Ogden is no doubt attuned to all the ways these redoubts are permeable, just as her children note how easy it is to break skin. But she doesn’t envision the way caretaking might be shared and take place in common spaces, or how, when accompanied by others, she might face Leviathan head-on.
But then Ogden doesn’t argue against conflict or caretaking, no more than she argues against taking action of any kind. Her book doesn’t tell us how to do anything but rather questions what it might mean to do one thing or another. This is a canny form of critical humility: by making her arguments hard to pin down, she also makes them difficult to critique. “Defenseless” in her unknowing, she is well defended from attack. She eludes me, her critic and captor, in my efforts to interpret the book, to make it my own.
Perhaps this is as it should be. I no more know the real meaning of Ogden’s book than I know the meaning of her life—or what her life means to her. She may be in the dark as much as I am, beholden as she is to small creatures who make inscrutable demands. As a critic, I could do worse than to follow her lead and to read her book in the same way that she tends to children and poems: I can admire its loveliness, dwell within its limits, then let it go its own way.
Jenna Hamed, To Look Is to See Is to Know (Self-Portrait in Tsohil’s Bathroom), 2022