A lot of people seem to think Kriss is a good writer, and you can see why here. He writes with panache, brio, and a lot of entertaining venom. But I’ve been encountering his writing off and on for the past decade, and the subject-beneath-the-subject is always the same: the scintillating brilliance of Sam Kriss.
He reminds me a bit of Edward Norton. I don’t mean in the sense that he’s one of the more talented practitioners of his craft among his generation, although you could argue for it. I’m thinking more of Norton as the narrator in Fight Club, particularly the famous scene where he viciously beats himself up in his boss’s office. In Kriss’s case, though, it’s more like he’s making an equally-shocking spectacle of sucking himself off.
I’m sorry to be crude, but I’m not sure how else to convey the carnal intensity of his self-importance. Look how brash this prose is! Look how full it is of blood and personality and righteous anger, anger directed at everyone from academia to the media to the individual voyeurs who gleefully enjoyed Arday’s fall from grace, pathetic small souls one and all, incapable of appreciating the greatness of his Promethean soul! But of course, this Promethean Arday is every bit as much a caricature of the man as the ones Kriss furiously condemns; it just happens to be one that’s useful as a prop in the neverending story of Sam’s brilliance. So, yes, I stand in disbelief as I watch him turn rhetorical somersaults through glass coffee tables and careen into bookcases, his head vigorously bobbing between his legs all the while.
The amusement fades when one asks what, beneath all the verbal vim and vigor, he is actually arguing. He plainly wants to condemn the public exposure and humiliation of Arday. There is a perfectly coherent argument available to him. One could say that the evidence of fraud and plagiarism deserved investigation; that journalists were justified in reporting it; that Cambridge had an obligation to enforce academic standards; and that none of this justified turning a human being’s collapse into mass entertainment. Wrongdoers retain a claim to humane treatment. Mobs are ugly. Cruelty does not become virtuous merely because its target has done something wrong.
But this argument is apparently too pedestrian for Kriss. It smells of bourgeois morality. One can imagine a clergyman or Rotarian saying it. He therefore has to find a more glamorous basis for objecting to what happened. Hence his attempt to transform Arday from compulsive fabulist into something like a trickster demigod whose lies represented imaginative largeness, self-creation, and resistance to the tedious literalism of modern life. This is where the essay begins gobbling its own knob.
A genuine prankster or performance artist stands, at least imaginatively, outside the social rules he violates. If Arday’s death was connected to the humiliation surrounding his exposure, that makes the romantic trickster interpretation harder to sustain. It suggests that the judgments of the supposedly-dreary bourgeois world mattered to him greatly. He was not serenely laughing at the bean counters. He appears to have been trapped inside the consequences of a public identity whose collapse he found unbearable. That makes him more tragic and more human, but also makes him less useful to Kriss.
Kriss accuses everyone else of turning Arday into a symbol. Cambridge made him the Inspirational Black Academic. The anti-DEI right made him the Fraudulent DEI Academic. Journalists and online spectators made him an object of fascination and ridicule. Kriss’s own sin turns out to be comparatively refined: he consumed too many articles, but more in sorrow and fascination than in vulgar voyeurism. He alone seems to have recognized what the others missed — that Arday was a gift, a figure of imaginative excess in a cramped world. The faux-collective confession thus leaves Kriss occupying his usual privileged location: inside humanity sufficiently to diagnose its sins, but outside it sufficiently not to share them in any vulgar form.
But he too needs Arday to be a symbol. His Arday is the Magnificent Fabulist, the chancer whose extravagant self-invention exposes the spiritual poverty of everyone who insists upon such dull concepts as factual accuracy. If Cambridge saw racial progress and the right saw DEI corruption, Kriss sees evidence that Sam Kriss possesses a more capacious imagination than the literal-minded plebs.
One way to see this is to notice the questions he is not interested enough to ponder. What did Arday’s family know? Did they believe his claims? Did anyone close to him tell him to stop? Did he tell different versions of his self-made myth to different people? Were people worried that something medically or psychologically was wrong? Banal normie that I am, my first instinct upon seeing a loved one accruing fame based on fabulism would be to stage an intervention. Did Arday have anyone like that in his life?
We don’t know the answers. That’s precisely the point. Anyone chiefly interested in the what and how would want to know them. They are the ordinary questions from which causal understanding is built. But banality is fatal to Kriss’s aesthetic. Perhaps there was no Promethean rebellion. Perhaps there was just family denial, financial incentive, self-deception, ordinary dishonesty, or mental illness. Perhaps Arday was neither saint nor trickster nor emblem, but a deeply flawed man caught in a web partly of his own making and partly maintained by people who found the web useful. But that would not furnish Kriss with an elevated platform from which to sneer at everyone else. His real subject, as usual, is not Jason Arday. It is Sam Kriss being less naïve, less literal, less provincial, less blinkered than everybody else.
In some versions of the myth, Narcissus drowns in his own reflection. I fear that Kriss may eventually succumb to, well, a more literal variant of autoerotic asphyxiation.