Weekly Readings #96 (12/04/23-12/10/23)

so strange, victory

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week I published “Ye Are Gods,” the latest chapter in my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. If this episode was an essay on magic and manifestation, then the next, coming on Wednesday, will rejoin the narrative present, more or less, and the developing friendship, or whatever it is, between Ash del Greco and the foredoomed Jacob Morrow. (I wonder if regular readers have discerned which two real-life cases I’ve “ripped from the headlines” and transfigured here—one of them, the one I’ve never mentioned before, admittedly transfigured beyond recognition.) Please subscribe today!

I’ve really enjoyed writing this serial novel, by the way. I’ve realized my teenaged dream of writing a ’90s-style Vertigo Comics maxi-series like Sandman or The Invisibles, except that I’ve done it in prose, and in ambivalent tribute and sometimes equally ambiguous rebuke to those comics themselves. What serialization brings to the novel—an advantage enjoyed by everyone from Dickens to Joyce (we often forget that A Portrait and Ulysses were also serialized, no less than their Victorian precursors, albeit in different types of organs)—is a pleasure in the chapter itself as an aesthetic object, a commitment to each chapter’s having its own literary integrity and interest. Though often indicted for crass commercialism, serial fiction may in fact offer more unhurried pleasures, more opportunities for sheer appreciation and enjoyment, than the novel designed as a single book to be torn through at once.

For today’s post, some thoughts on writers and markets and genius. The footnotes are good in this one; somebody please tell Grimes. Enjoy!

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The Breaking of the Vessels: On Genius and Publishing

Publication—is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man—
Poverty—be justifying
For so foul a thing

Possibly—but We—would rather
From Our Garret go
White—unto the White Creator—
Than invest—Our Snow—

                         —Emily Dickinson

I want to address, briefly, the relation between literary achievement and publishing, since some thoughts on the matter have gone around this week. Right here on Substack, Naomi Kanakia advocates writing for the market on the grounds that, if you don’t, you won’t be read, either now or in the future, and that this means literary talent will go to waste.

I have read the books. I swear this to you. It is true. There are great books being written every day that nobody will ever read, and the number of such books dwarfs the number that are eventually published. If you knew the quantity of unpublished greatness, you would think it was a travesty to worship Tolstoy and Austen, because, for all their talents, they are merely the winners of the lottery. The unique thing about Tolstoy and Austen is not their talent, but that someone of their talent was published and is remembered. They are the vessels that their age chose to perpetuate itself.

But you will not be that vessel. I know that you hope you will, but it won’t happen.¹

Literary talent is thick on the ground in her view, but sadly not always marketed, as the title of her post indicates: “Tolstoy and Austen aren't world-historically unique and special geniuses.”

I happen not to agree with this particular expression of Thomas Gray’s lament, in his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” that “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, / Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.” I know my “lonely at the top” argument will strike some as brutal, but it has not really been my experience that literary genius is scattered around everywhere dying for lack of exposure. I think it’s a pretty rare phenomenon. One of its components (to be fair, Naomi makes this allowance) is an obsessive visionary drive, one that won’t be deterred by any or every form of rejection, and one as likely to be curtailed as realized by a premature over-adaptation to the market. The market in culture usually favors repetition over novelty—they want last year’s hit this year—despite its reputation for melting all that is solid into air.

To take the example of Austen: even her comparably canonical contemporaries look awkward and cumbersome next to her delicate and infinitely subtle performances, her supremely entertaining reinvention of novelistic entertainment as art. I’m currently reading and even enjoying Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, but next to Austen it truly plods along, at once monstrously verbose and simplistic in theme and characterization—also true, in my experience, of Sir Walter Scott, then thought the most thrilling English-language novelist of his and Austen’s time (and equal to her in influence, probably even greater in international influence: no Waverley, no War and Peace).

The only reason anybody finds this argument controversial is because we are supposed to be democrats. But political democracy as a concept rests not on the ubiquity of artistic genius but on the universality of social reason, while democracy in culture means only the broad allowance of educational access for genius to realize itself, not the idea that everybody already is one. I don’t have to believe anyone or everyone is a genius capable of having written Anna Karenina to treat them with decency or to wish the best for them. Neither of my grandmothers could have read, much less written, Anna Karenina, but if I were able to have someone back from the dead for a shared meal and a conversation, I’d take my grandmothers over Tolstoy any day!² (Anyway, I don’t need to talk to Tolstoy; I can just reread Anna Karenina.)

As for whether or not I or you or anyone else now living will be the vessel of our age³ is by definition not for us to decide; the future makes that call; all we can do is write the books and try to get people to read them. The market is more open now than it’s ever been, as is indicated by the platform on which I am writing this and you are reading it.⁴

Starting with premises closer to my own, but arriving at conclusions just as far away, is Novelist novelist Jordan Castro’s lament on X over the state of publishing today. Richly exploiting the once 140-word platform’s current invitation to endless discourse, he writes as follows:

The problem here is that Castro’s main piece of advice—publishers should retain better editors—is next to impossible to act upon given the editorial pipeline itself, i.e., the famously declining English major, which, where it still exists, is increasingly just tutelage in theory and pop culture. Whether the avant-garde tradition out of which Castro’s own work grows would look as romantic as it does in its present marginality were it made to confront both its roots and its rivals in the canon is itself an open question, though its enemies today are so crass in their moralism⁵ that one defends it on principle.

In a quote that didn’t make it into the Free Press article from last week, I told both Alex and his editor that I don’t romanticize marginality, my own or anyone else’s, and that I would gladly take a million-dollar book deal if it were offered. But while I’m manifesting that, I write online: I try to build a cult around myself (I’m joking, sort of) and to catch the attention of people with power.

This is one of those things my famously disappointed generation didn't know, when we were young, that we would have to deal with by middle age, but the online performance has to be part of the literary repertoire now—a more substantial aesthetic task than can be summed up in the cynical phrase “self-promotion,” one that, done well, has anti-mimesis (in the Girardian sense, I presume) at its heart, and in a way that can be dulled by working with even a good publisher, because you become part of its house style and forfeit your own.

I can and sometimes do tell you that I’m writing or trying to write major work—I’ve even put the word “major” in the title of the new book!—but you’re not going to believe me if I just tell you. I have to show you on here, too.⁶ I sometimes wish it were otherwise myself, but I’m not sure what the alternative is while we’re awaiting those better editors. All the ways of getting artists paid—church, state, aristocracy, market, university—have their pitfalls. Personally, even before the million-dollar book deal, I’d like to give all of you everything I write for free after some VC guy digs in his couch cushions to give me what I’d need to be set for life, considering how very little I do need.⁷ (My famously disappointed generation, always looking for a handout...)

Until then, a paid subscription to my Substack is just a click away. I will be in touch later this month with next year’s subscriber amenities, since Major Arcana will come to its conclusion with the winter now just beginning.

1. Unlike my (anti-)hero(ine) Ash del Greco, Naomi apparently doesn’t want to be a manifestation coach! Our 45th president, himself tutored in New Thought and therefore one of the authentic sons of Emerson, though of the low-church branch, saw it differently:

2. I’m thinking of the funny moment in the new episode of Manifesto! where essayist George Scialabba reproves co-host Phil Klay’s anti-Nietzschean encomium to ordinary people by saying that the ordinary people who reared him never said an interesting word in all the time he knew them. I’d make the argument a different way. The ordinary people who raised me were Nietzschean through and through, working- and lower-middle-class Reagan Democrats, immigrant or immigrant-descended strivers, people who wanted to come out on top, and they, too, might have found Klay’s fanfare for the common man a bit sentimental. My aesthetic critique of their own not-quite-avowed aestheticism was that it had the wrong objects: money and a shallow idea of power rather than beauty and the power that comes from knowledge. My few immature years dallying with the far left aside, though, I wouldn’t criticize their will-to-power as such, nor would I pretend that only the Napoleons, Nietzsches, and Kissingers of the world possess such a will just because they were more successful than other people at realizing it. On the other hand, realizing it without also killing everybody in sight is part of my own personal and quite pacific aesthetic program—that promised reconciliation of Nietzsche with the church, or mad Hölderlin’s proposed polytheism of aesthetics and monotheism of ethics.

3. The political vessel of Austen’s age, and even into Tolstoy’s to a point, was of course Napoleon. I note here that I highly enjoyed the film. Ridley Scott dramatizes Napoleon’s engulfment at once by the Eternal Feminine and the Eternal Anglo—call it Austen’s revenge—as embodied in the principal performances, Joaquin Phoenix’s neurotic-autistic vacuity as the Emperor vs. the supreme erotic and martial charisma, respectively, of Vanessa Kirby’s Joséphine and Rupert Everett’s Wellington. This would be an irrelevant aside except that the idea of Napoleon passed out of politics and into art and therefore has something to do with our idea of artistic genius as discussed above. Here, for example, is Gertrude Stein writing about Picasso:

If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.

But, less obscurely than that, there is the transition, mediated by Nietzsche, from Julien Sorel to Stephen Dedalus, with Raskolnikov in the middle as our most vivid warning to take our will-to-power out on the page or on the canvas, not on people. That this Napoleonic concept of genius is anti-feminine and anti-English—is anti-Austen, despite her own genius—we can read in the late Seamus Deane’s chastening essay, “Joyce and Stephen: The Provincial Intellectual” (thanks to friend-of-the-blog

Paul Franz

for recently reminding me how much I like Deane’s book Celtic Revivals from which that essay comes):

It is, I believe, easier to understand Joyce’s achievement in this respect by looking to the Continental tradition of the novel. There the theme of intellectual vocation was much more deeply rooted and was treated with a subtlety quite foreign to the evangelical, female puritan spirit which so dominated the sentimental English novel. Perhaps Middlemarch more than any other single work shows how the innate provincialism of the English novel deprived it of a consciousness of itself as a part of a greater European culture. This is something conspicuously present in the French and, even more, in the Russian novel of the nineteenth century. One could not imagine Crime and Punishment or Le Rouge et le Noir without the idea of Europe, especially Christian Europe, as a living force in them, in their traditions, and in the minds of their creators. But Emma and Great Expectations and Middlemarch survive happily, and more modestly, apart from that idea. Not until an American, Henry James, arrived on the scene was the novel in English Europeanized, and the Irishman Joyce countered this achievement by anglicizing the European novel.

While well said, this is to underestimate the mind of George Eliot, who translated Spinoza, and to overestimate the mind of Dostoevsky, who was influenced by Ann Radcliffe. I see equality, not hierarchy, among the great novelists Deane names, whether English, Irish, American, French, or Russian. I continue to believe that some synthesis in these matters remains possible—some permanent marriage or alchemical wedding, if only in heaven, of the Emperor and the Empress—but that is a conundrum for my fiction to work out, not my criticism, such as it is. In conclusion, and in deference to the Eternal Feminine, I believe I’ve already warned you that with me there’s always a Tori Amos song:

4. It’s still a small club, and I’m still just barely in it. I learned yesterday that one of the higher-ups at Substack is the brother of the professor under whose auspices as department chair, though probably not at whose explicit direction, I was dismissed in 2021 from my adjunct teaching position at the University of Minnesota for (among other reasons given) not adding to the diversity of the cohort. I learned this curious fact when I saw the aforesaid brother mocking the adjacency of today’s academic concept of “diversity” to anti-Semitism. Irony never sleeps.

5. I refer to the controversy caused by this, though I have no desire to elaborate—as the extra-institutional literati are now decisively post-woke, the feminist critics were very quickly shouted down anyway—except to remind you that I once scrutinized the author in question for his decade-old proposed moratorium on “BOOKS ABOUT STRAIGHT WHITE PEOPLE HAVING SEX,” his all-caps. Irony never etc.

6. In adolescence, I said to my father, “I’m, like, a genius.” He replied, “You’re like a genius...”

7. The aforementioned Noah Kumin and I once discussed the possibility of Grimes’s becoming my patron, especially following my attempt to wed her science-fictionally derived AI utopianism to the Jamesian novel of character. My offer—can one offer to be patronized?—remains open, especially given recent evidence that great minds think alike: