Thinking About Integrity as Concerns A. V. Marraccini’s We the Parasites
Apropos of my essay on the possible paths for literary criticism
If you’ve already read my essay Two Roads for the Literary Critical Elite published in the Metropolitan Review what follows below can be viewed as an addendum. If you haven’t yet read it (and I hope you will), what follows below will serve as a kind of preface.
Integrity, specifically intellectual integrity, is an issue that is implicit, but not fully expressed in my essay since the words would have veered off in a different direction from the title’s promise of examining the different paths for literary criticism today. Yet, the issue is germane to the essay and deserves some discussion.1
My guess is that most people reading A. V. Marraccini’s We the Parasites have no inkling that the metaphor her book is based upon—the parasite—was introduced and thoroughly explored nearly fifty years ago by the French philosopher Michel Serres in his book The Parasite.2 Nor would they learn this from Ryan Ruby’s essay in which he holds her book up “as fine an example of criticism that is both creative in method and in outcome”.3
While Marraccini does mention Serres in passing she does not cite his influence, and dismisses his work by calling him an “intellectual.” That’s the last we hear of him. This blithe disregard for a predecessor’s work rankles because Marraccini employs Serres’ philosophical construct as the basis of her work yet doesn’t give him credit.
To my way of thinking, the right thing to do would have been to follow in some fashion the example set by Vincenzo Latronico. His novel, Perfection, was published earlier this year (and has been short-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize). It depicts the lives of Anna and Tom, a couple who epitomize the global nomadic digital class.
The characters, the tone, the style, and the story-line of Perfection are deeply indebted to Georges Perec’s novel: Things: A Story of the Sixties (Les choses) published in 1965. Both books meticulously depict the psychological atmosphere of a generation though their interactions with our materialistic consumer culture. Perec’s Jérôme and Sylvie, and Latronico’s Anna and Tom, are practically interchangeable. “Latronico’s conceit is clever and will delight anyone familiar with his source material, but his execution is ingenious” Alice Gregory pointed out in the New Yorker.
Latronico’s “source material” is Things, and what he borrows from Perec is exquisitely executed, but you don’t have to have read Things in order to understand Perfection. If you don’t know about Perec’s novel and haven’t read it—and my guess is many folks haven’t—it doesn’t affect your comprehension of or appreciation for Perfection. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of the story, in the acknowledgements, Latronico tells us: “This novel came about as a tribute to Things: A story of the Sixties, by Georges Perec; anything good in it owes a lot to him.”
While not a legal requirement, ethically and aesthetically it was the right thing for Latronico to publicly recognize his predecessor’s influence, having copied the structure, tone, and conceptual design of Perec’s sixty-year-old novel. Furthermore, the nature of his acknowledgment is both gracious and generous.
Marraccini’s We the Parasites is as indebted to Serres’ The Parasite as Latronico’s Perfection is to Perec’s Things—to such an extent that it is practically unimaginable without it. Serres pioneered the use of the technical-conceptual metaphor parasite. His methodology compresses multiple registers and braids together criticism, theory, myth, fables, and philosophical provocation—all of which Marraccini mimics in her writing—in addition to using his metaphoric innovation of the parasite as a transformative force as the foundation of her book.
I’ll conclude with this: while not necessary, it would have been nice, as a simple matter of intellectual integrity, to mention her book’s honest debt to Serres’ work forthrightly, saying, at minimum, something like Latronico’s acknowledgement: anything good in it owes a lot to him.
I don’t want to beat a dead horse. No one does. I elucidate and expand on this issue because, quite simply, I think it’s important. Michel Serres produced brilliant and original work and it shouldn’t be dimmed or ignored in the service of another thinker’s attempt to further their career by generating an aura of having created something original. The volume of critical discourse continues to increase (even on this site it has multiplied tremendously), making it harder for readers to determine what is innovative/original and what is derivative, especially when a work lacks attributions and acknowledgements. As the internet expands, and we are confronted with more and more slop, and chat GPT's auto-regressive language model collects and reproduces our thoughts and then presents them to us as if they were something new, we need to call out and protect what really is original.
The Parasite (Le Parasite) was published in 1980. Serres is renowned for his development of the metaphor parasite as an explanatory tool, and his book can be applied to language systems theory, politics, media, and literary criticism. In Serres’ metaphysic, the disruption caused by the parasite when it “interferes” with a subject gives birth to a new system that both includes it and rises above it. Which is what a work of criticism does when it takes up (ingests or feeds upon) a text, a novel or poem or any artwork, and creates a new work from its base material. The philosopher, or critic burrows into systems of thought or creative texts, creates new thought or criticism and transforms the system from within. Criticism as interference but a generative, positive parasitic act. It is a brilliant insight.
As a matter of curiosity, one does wonder if Ruby read The Parasite. An astute critic, with a degree in philosophy, he should have easily spotted the “influence” of Serres’ work upon Marraccini, which, theoretically, might have led him to temper his outsized claims about her book. However, neither in the body of his essay nor among the thirty-six references he provides, does the name Serres appear. This is to note since it is not obvious how he could write that We the Parasites “represents a genuine breakthrough in our understanding of what criticism is and how it can be written” if he had indeed read Serres. Because it is all in Serres.
Even if Ruby wanted to argue that it was not worth mentioning Serres’ work because Marraccini provides a new, totally different take on Serres’ thinking, or makes it, say, more intimate or personal, or provides a feminist-aesthetic re-reading, or that it carries forward Susan Sontag’s ideas in Against Interpretation, as he suggests, that does not mitigate the fact that hers is a derivative work and not a “genuine breakthrough” in criticism since, again, the central philosophical premise of her book is not hers. This does not stop Ruby from making astonishing pronouncements about her book:
“By complicating a misleadingly cognitive picture of interpretation as transferring a meaning, via written signs, from art object, to critic, to reader, with a more corporeal picture of a relay of effects in a feedback loop between material art objects and material beings, Marraccini is able to give a compelling answer to the question of why making and consuming art and making and consuming interpretations of art matter in ways that critics operating in institutional settings sometimes are at a loss to do.”
His words whip up an aura of importance using the most convoluted, academic-speak language, reminiscent of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s obfuscatory style of writing that, along with his old-school use of the word “complicating,” gives critics a bad name. And I’m sorry, but what he is saying is twaddle. To be clear, Marraccini gives neither “a compelling answer” nor any answer at all to the question about why consuming art or the interpretation of art matters to critics in academia—or to anyone.
Bravo!