Éirinn go Brách
I’ve never been to England. I’ve never been to any of what less bitter students of history call “the UK,” and I will insist until it dissolves that Northern Ireland and Scotland are occupied states. Pro-Independence parties have the majority in Scotland. Two weeks ago, Michelle O’Neill became the First Minister in Northern Ireland, marking the only time in the last hundred years where an Irish Nationalist has assumed the nation’s top position. I’m not sure what’s going on in Wales. In my imagination they have spent the 900 years since the death of the last Prince of Wales singing, which seems mainly to be true, but it also seems like support for Welsh independence has risen 32% in the last ten years— and they’re supposed to be the happy victims of English hegemony. They were the ones who spent legislative energy on changing the name of their jurisdiction from “England” to “England and Wales,” like an abused spouse asking to have their name included on the answering-machine message.
This is not my fight. I think about it a lot, even though I have never been to England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. If I’ve inherited anything from my grandmother, however, it’s a deep, let’s say distaste, for protestants. She refuses to acknowledge the existence of any Ireland above Dondalk, and I’ve carried this sentiment in my Irish blood, carried it for Patrick Quinn, my great-grand-uncle who worked alongside my great-grandfather in an English quarry, who insisted on ferrying himself back to his homeland each day after work at the job which would kill him before the age of thirty. Carried it for his brother Anthony, who returned to his home in County Westmeath after planting nine children in the US. He was just a kid when Erin’s two halves went to war, but in a struggle to retain my Irish roots I’ve chosen to bear that grudge over a hundred years later; fuck the King, fuck the Queen, Up The Ra.
When I left Roman Catholic Monroe, Connecticut for two 4-year stints in the two largest American cities, I stopped thinking about this divide. But now that I’m back in God country, religion has returned to my perception of the world, and everywhere I look, all I see is protestants. Reformed, atheistic the lot of them— but still eerily ubiquitous protestantism. Despite what I believed growing up, they really do exist, and they’re just like you and me. And while my grandma’s distaste for protestants is really a distaste for Northern Ireland, and while her distaste for Northern Ireland is really a distaste for England, her distaste of England is about something else.
This piece is not about protestants, and it’s certainly not about England. It’s about that feeling, about a very specific cultural bias called pretentiousness.
Pretension
The other night at a bar I spoke with a journalist and a rapper when pretentiousness came up. I’d like to say it did so naturally, but seeing that I’m currently reading Dan Fox’s 2016 book Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, I’m going to assume that I steered the conversation toward it. The journalist said that to her, being pretentious meant looking down on someone else’s level of intelligence. I talked about how in cable news we would present the most basic, tasty version of a story, completely devoid of nuance or words which required googling. I told her this felt like an inherent insult— like we were assuming a level of intellect of our readers that was extremely low, and in doing so might manifest that level of intelligence. I believe that people are about as smart as they’re asked to be, and that if we challenge the public with our work, they will easily rise to it. Dan Heyman calls it ‘aiming just above the head.’ The idea of giving your audience something just outside of their realm of understanding, and hoping they’ll extend their reach to grasp it. The journalist at the bar said she saw her job as doing the research no one else has the time or energy to do: learning about an event and distilling it into the simplest form possible. She would do the reaching, and then would drag the information down to the most accessible level without betraying the facts.
The rapper had a different take. He channels ideas from When Einstein Walked With Gödel and Asimov on Astronomy into boom-bap tracks overlayed with french lyrics. He believes that to label someone as pretentious is to underestimate their intelligence. It is assuming that they don’t have a full grasp on what they’re speaking of, and that they’re pretending to have more knowledge than they do. The Latin root of the word is from prae (before) and tendere (to extend). It describes the act of holding something out before you, insisting you have a firm grasp on something which you actually don’t. In this context, to be pretentious is to aspire. To call someone pretentious is to conspire against their aspiration.
What does the man who wrote the book, Dan Fox, say? It’s not clear. I haven’t read non-fiction in a while and this book, while relatively straightforward, went mostly over my head. It makes sense that Fox, an art critic, would have a tendency for highfalutin writing. Who in their right mind would purchase a book titled Pretentiousness in the first place? Certainly not me. I’ll admit, when I received the book as a gift and pulled it from its package, the P-word in bold lettering across the top made me laugh. Is my friend trying to suggest something? Is it possible that I am pretentious? Moi?? I took a sick pleasure in the book going over my head, but only just over my head, close enough for me to try and grab it.
Speaking of pretentious, Paul Graham once wrote an essay about how there is a certain type of knowledge you can only have on a topic once you’ve written about it. He believes the forming of impressions into arguments is a distinct way of knowing a topic that can’t be met by ingestation alone. According to Graham, “if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.” Why call his essay ‘pretentious?’ Because it argues that you don’t have something which, presumably, he does. You may feel that he’s right, may appreciate his argument, and yet some inner-radar in us still sounds off, still feels like Graham is a tiny bit of a dick for suggesting it.
Before reading Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, I liked pretentiousness. I felt like the state of knowledge was poor, and if perception of “smart people” needed to shift in any direction, it was towards the favorable. The label of pretentious is helpful for eras when academics are overly-trusted and over-exalted; eras when someone’s worth is measured by the amount of degrees they hold. I think of films like Kicking and Screaming (the Baumbach, not the Will Ferrell), where twenty-somethings using their education as a shield are lampooned for their idiocy, for regurgitating the ideas of their professors as they waste their lives in idleness. It is for that crowd, that era, that the word pretentious needs to exist. These trends still stand in the marketplace, but public perception of the Knowledgeable is low. Professionals and academics are commonly derided as snooty and elitist, as Over-Educated— a term which feels like it shouldn’t exist. And even if we don’t overtly subscribe to those metrics, don’t we feel a tinge of, let’s say, distaste for someone who knows more than is good for them? For someone who holds their intellect prae tendere?
(There is a classy, let’s say folksy way to hold knowledge and present it to others. It is an extremely delicate balance, and it suggests that even though I know something you don’t, it doesn’t give me any impression that I’m better than you. The ability to wield this is ninja-like in its dexterity, and it feels like one of those talents that one is born with. Or, as the pretentious might say, “one of those talents with which one is born.” It is the ability to present this information as if you came by it out of pure luck. Like you were out on a stroll through the woods when some little strands of data descended from the crown of a Mulberry and landed softly in your pocket. It requires the use of general intel rather than precise figures. Percentage points and direct quotes are to be rounded off and paraphrased. It is, if you’ve ever tried it, exhausting.)
But why should we favor the delivery of information when it is done so tactfully? If someone has facts which might elucidate an argument, what is the barrier within us which shuns them? Would we be better off if we all had a little less EQ working our social interactions? This is kinda how I imagine San Francisco working. A bunch of nerds arguing on the basis of who has access to the most information. The reality is it’s probably more like Los Angeles, where value comes from who you know. Is that a better system? It would depend on what you hold as the goal of society. Is it to create the best reality via the best, most accurate products and ideas? Is it to form a stable social hierarchy, where supposed philosopher-CEOs steer the truest course? Is it to form the tightest web of community through kindness and service? I honestly don’t know. That last one feels nice, but what if we happen to be in an era of crisis, say, an era of destabilized democracies and portentous weather? Anyways, now that I’ve ridiculed my second, third and fourth largest reader-bases— LA, SF and Northern Ireland— I can safely continue.
Saltburn
This has been an incredible year for controversial films. My favorite of 2023, Poor Things, is often seen as either a masterpiece or pure garbage. There is the Barbenheimer debate, and there is, of course, Saltburn. Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to the incisive yet glitzy Promising Young Woman is a story of class. Lower-middle Oliver Quick changes his accent and his backstory to ingratiate himself into the refined strata of the Oxford-posh. He lies about his father dying in order to score an invite to Felix Catton’s summer villa. While there, he works the family’s tendency to gush over working-class sob stories into a position of power.
If you’re in one camp, the film is visually stunning, emotionally engaging, and playfully twisted. It is a viable statement-piece. When Oliver sucks up the dregs of Felix’s cum-water, when he fucks the grave of his departed friend, half the audience felt they were experiencing the height of art-house cinema. The other half thought they were witnessing a load of pretentious shit. They saw the drapery of red-purple light as egregious and unnecessary, they saw the theme of the movie— class-mobility— as trite and lacking in nuance. Through this filter, the boldness of Barry Keoghan’s acting appears unnecessary and embarrassing. And at the center of their argument inevitably sits the director herself, daughter-of-a-famous-jeweler Emerald Fennell.
Take a glance, if you can stomach it, at the ‘Early Life’ section of her Wikipedia:
“Fennell was born in Hammersmith in London to a jewelry designer. Her sister, Coco Fennell, is a fashion designer. Fennell's 18th birthday, documented by British high-society magazine Tatler, was attended by socialite Poppy Delevingne, Lady Alexandra Gordon Lennox (daughter of Charles Gordon-Lennox, 11th Duke of Richmond) and Alice Rugge-Price (great-granddaughter of the 7th Rugge-Price baronet). Fennell was educated at Marlborough College, a private school in Marlborough, Wiltshire. She then studied English at Greyfriars, Oxford, where she acted in university plays. Fennell, writes journalist K.J. Yossman, ‘was part of a rarefied social set whose family names I recognized from gossip columns and history books… Balfour, Frost, von Bismarck, Guinness, Shaffer.’”
Is this the person, ask the Saltburn-haters, to make this decade’s ode to class-warfare? The person who had a literal debutante ball, attended by none other than Poppy fuckin Delevingne? Is she not the exact enemy of this film? Should we not be concerned taking notes on stratification from the stratified? And in this vein, perhaps we shouldn’t. While her background may lend credence to how that class of people truly be, it also calls into question the vilification of Oliver Quick. Is the ending, when Oliver dances through the halls of his new manor, supposed to be viewed with satisfaction that the rich have been eaten, that the ladder is not broken? Or are we supposed to recoil in horror as his dongle flicks specks of whizz on poor Saltburn’s chaise lounge? That is, after all, the same chaise lounge that Poppy sat on when she gave Mrs. Fennell advice on which jewels to include in her tiara.
Whether Fennell’s film is the perfect revenge-on-the-elites tale we need or not, it is the perfect case-study of pretentiousness, which is and has always been about class. That is why the film is perfectly set in England’s elite university backdrop, since in England, according to Fox, “class is a neurosis as much as much as a set of social conditions.” Your worth comes from your county, your county is identified by your accent, and the language is so infused with cultural signifiers that you are treated different by a shopkeeper if when ordering bacon you ask for “back” rather than “streaky.” No wonder my grandmother grew up hating protestants, meaning hating Northern Ireland. Because the Northern Irish were her own Gaelic people, and they sided with the lot who looked down upon them like a sack of potatoes. But we carried that tradition to America as surely as we did smallpox, and at the height of the Gilded Age we had taken the idea of a social hierarchy and planted it deeply into rich American soil. One hundred years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald (what did Scott Fitzgerald do to you?) wrote a searing portrait of the American elite, the same American elite which he spent his entire life striving towards and emulating, ever to be cast towards the fringe for his crime of being born in St. Paul1. The novel is about the romance between the ultra-rich protagonist, Anthony Patch, and his ultra-rich girlfriend, Gloria Gilbert, who in the novel is literally Beauty personified. In one scene, they sit in a Harlem cabaret and judge those around them:
At the next table a party of four were in process of being joined by a party of three, two men and a girl, who were evidently late — in the manner of the girl was a study in national sociology. She was meeting some new men, and she was pretending desperately. By gesture she was pretending and by words and by the scarcely perceptible motioning of her eyelids that she belonged to a class a little superior to the class with which she now had to do, that a while ago she had been, and presently would again be, in a higher, rarer air. She was almost painfully refined— she wore a last year‘s hat covered with violets no more yearningly pretentious and palpably artificial than herself. Fascinated, Anthony and Gloria watched the girl sit down and radiate the impression that she was only condescendingly present. For me, her eyes said, this is practically a slumming expedition, to be cloaked with belittling laughter and semi apologetics.
This was not the sort of place to which they were accustomed; they had dropped in because it was nearby and convenient – every party in the restaurant poured out that impression. They were forever changing class, all of them – the women often marrying above their opportunities, the men striking suddenly a magnificent opulence: a sufficiently preposterous advertising scheme, a celestialized ice cream cone.
This display of “I’ll accept what is beneath me” is, to Fitzgerald, pretentiousness to a tee. Decades before the beats would glorify the lowly and down-out, Fitzgerald identified something deeply wrong. That we were all here, and yet none of us felt like we should be (hmm, what a curious pathology for an American). This was because we were chasing some faulty notion of where one ought to be, rather than appreciating that the best possible night out in 1920s New York, in perhaps the entire world at that moment, would be inside a Harlem cabaret. But the end of that quote points towards something else, something distinctly American about pretension which would serve as the basis for Fitzgerald’s next book, The Great Gatsby. Namely, that Americans can change their class.
Earlier in the novel, Anthony considers joining the government:
He tries to imagine himself in Congress, rooting around in the litter of that incredible pigsty with the narrow and porcine brows he saw pictured sometimes in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday newspapers, those glorified proletarians babbling blandly to the nation the ideas of high school seniors! Little men with copy-book ambitions by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into the lusterless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people— and the best, the dozen shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were content to lead this choir of white ties and wire collar-buttons in a discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as a proof of vice, and continued cheers for God, the Constitution, and the Rocky Mountains!
Back in his apartment the grayness returned. His cocktails had died, making him sleepy, somewhat befogged and inclined to be surly. The very thought was bitter. Anthony patch with no record of achievement, without courage, without strength to be satisfied with truth when it was given to him. Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism.
Anthony looks down upon the legislative class as ‘glorified proletarians,’ with low ideas and flimsy values adopted by whim. But they are not the pretentious ones, they are the grovelers, those with nasty aspirations and empty words, but not pretentious, just awful. It is Anthony who is pretentious, he figures, because he has all the opportunity in the world and spends it idly, slipping from the faulty precipice of his idealism. He is pretentious because his own aspirations are laughable.
It is a wonderful symptom of democracy that one is not fated to resign to the calumny of their origin. It is perhaps not as true as we love to believe, but it is truer than it has been in the last twelve hundred years of Western Culture2, and it is the fuel which keeps the engine of American excellence sputtering towards the end-times. Anthony Patch is not Oliver Quick. He does not aspire to higher ranks— he is the heir to one of the largest American fortunes, and is surrounded by Harvard-peers who “plan to spend three years abroad followed by three years in utter leisure.” His friend Maury Noble, who is anything but, believes that all Americans but for a rarified few should be “compelled to accept a rigid system of morals— Roman Catholicism, for example.” And that’s what strikes one about Fitzgerald’s take-down of ‘the American elite.’ Fitzgerald was oh so close to this elite, was practically a part of it once his first novel so wholly gripped the state of literature. But he wasn’t quite there, and this forever tainted him. He had to prove he belonged as close as he was, in order to make the final leap into the sort of wealth which builds dynasties and lasts generations, like the one built by Jay Gatsby. And he oddly does this by satirizing the exact audience he desperately wants to join3.
Aye, the label of pretentiousness may have once served as a handy weapon for the poor to lob at the rich as they rode by in their gilded carriages. But like all good weapons-of-the-poor it has been usurped by the rich, and in their hands it has shed blood in unwieldy ways on all sorts of targets. As the 1960s flipped social dynamics on their head and Culture became dominated by young and working-class rebels— lads from Liverpool who bathed in the fountains of Washington Square Park— the young and rich saw that the Bohemian was where it’s at. The alt-scene was infiltrated by the wealthy, and soon sons of business-men were wearing their hair like Jesus, and Poppy Dele-fucking-vigne is spotted in shredded overalls and a white tee like the sun just set and it’s time to head in from the fields.
So when debutante Emerald Fennell makes a film saying ‘fuck the rich,’ it is seen as a move to ingratiate herself even deeper within the rich. It is why Oliver Quick does not lie about being wealthy but about being poor, which earns him immense social value amongst the wealthy in the twisted dynamics wrought via democracy.
That shift is where a lot of the confusion around the term comes from. Is pretentiousness a look up, saying you are snobby and trite? Or is it a look down, saying you do not belong among our ranks? Is Fennell pretentious for making a glamorous but pointless film, or is Oliver Quick pretentious for pretending to belong to a class which isn’t his by birth? Is it pretentious to rap about Einstein, or pretentious to use nuance in journalism? I’m not sure the debate has been settled. And that’s why the argument behind the argument in Dan Fox’s book is that the word needs to die a swift and quiet death.
What does the Fox say?
Dan is the latter sort of pretentious, a middle-class upstart aspiring to higher things. This, incidentally, is my particular brand of pretentiousness. It is the sort of pretentiousness which might lift one out of Monroe, Connecticut and into the realm of the ultra-rich of New York. It is the pretentiousness of small-town dreamers, who don’t really know what the larger world is but want to be a part of it. I have a churning fear of the label because that is exactly the sort of journey I am trying to take. And that is why I have yet to ‘come out’ as a writer to my parents: because my dad brags about never having read a book in its entirety, and my mom has never personally known someone who makes money writing. It is a pretentious, foolish aspiration, and the sort of tricks I have learned in my quarter-of-a-million dollar education are the exact ones I have to side-pocket when I’m back home.
This performance brings to mind the time where I worked for two separate landscapers, and when one of my bosses met the other he asked about me, “what is that guy, an asshole?” “No,” replied the other, “he’s just too smart for his own good.” I recall visiting home one Christmas Eve when I was still in college, when I slipped the ideas of Jacques Laçan into a conversation about accents. I was met with blank stares, suggesting that even if those ideas are true, what use are they? I couldn’t understand not being open to them, not basking in the game of them. What is the value, I wondered, of this self-inflicted labeling? Of considering a member of your own class foolish for wanting to transcend it? It is tribalism at its most basic, and says to he who aspires beyond his origins that once you enter that higher echelon, we will have the same distaste for you as we have for them.
Dan Fox thinks both versions of the term are harmful. That to lob the weapon upwards is to restrict access to the higher rungs, and to lob it down is to discourage climbing. He tries to reframe the debate, asking if “what’s pretentious for one person is enthralling for another, is debating pretentiousness simply another way of talking about taste?” But this doesn’t quite usurp the acidity of the word. That “taste” is a socially prescribed taste. The rich can enjoy their post-modern art and suck for doing so. The rest of us should stick to hard truths, should turn up our noses at the snooty, the same way they turn theirs down at us.
We all play chess with our social roles, working them against their own preconceived perceptions. A West Virginian journalist insists that her job is to funnel ideas into the accessible. A rapper uses french in his lyrics. Oliver Quick fakes low to go high, Felix fakes sympathy to retain status. In the ultimate act of ouroboros, Dan Fox defines the term so wholly so that at the end of the day, there is no proper way to use it. He does not rebuild the barn he’s burnt down, does not infuse the word with a new meaning so that its legacy can live on. Without saying so, he hints that the word, for lack of a non-destructive usage, should simply disappear.
So why the intro about the UK? I included it because it is the social issue I think of most often, and because there are QR codes promoting this blog in Belfast, and I just have to make it clear where I stand. But atop all that is the realization that my condescension towards the Brits is really just a tat for the tit of their condescension on my own people. And it’s time for me to recognize that, apart from some heinous colonialism, my distaste for the lot of them is really just a lob against pretentiousness, the same pretentiousness which allowed me the dream of becoming a writer, a dream which has kept me fulfilled for the ten years I’ve held it. That’s why I love pretentiousness, and why I should probably refine that distaste.
J.D. Salinger had it worse. The bulk of his neuroses came from the fact that he was born on the Upper West, rather than the Upper East side of Manhattan. That and, of course, World War II.
David Graebner would suggest that this sentiment lacks “political imagination.” That just because something is true under the Judeo-Christian tradition of Feudal-Capitalism, it completely ignores that this is a bed we have made, and that maybe the bulk of societies throughout history did include the potential for social mobility, or perhaps the need to mobilize at all, being that the classes were not rewarded so brutally differently. You’ll notice here that I try to only quote anarchists in footnotes.
In calling out the poor stranger’s hat being out of fashion, Fitzgerald is using pretentious language to describe people who fear being pretentious. This is a strange condition of the author who chooses as his target his own generation. He must tear down the facade, while being entirely within the facade himself. Perhaps later-on this was executed perfectly via Holden Caulfield, but in Fitzgerald’s time the only thing which kept him from coming off as incredibly pretentious himself is a detached irony, is by placing himself above those he is describing, even though the reader can absolutely assume that he was the one in that cabaret making the same observations as Anthony. This is the same brand of irony which would later become the weapon of choice for post-modernists before being singled out as derogatory by the likes of David Foster Wallace.
I get your Saltburn take now, thank you. The rest of this is great btw