Weekly Readings #72 (06/19/23-06/25/23)

labor is blossoming or dancing where?

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

This week saw the publication of “I Will Not Let Thee Go Except Thou Bless Me,” the latest chapter of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. This chapter offers the intense “origin story” of Marco Cohen, unwilling comic-book artist extraordinaire, tormented iconoclast, and man out of time. On Wednesday, we will rejoin the love story of writer Simon Magnus and editor Ellen Chandler, as Simon Magnus embarks on the brilliant, calamitous comic-book career that will define and destroy the characters’ lives.

For this week, a rumination on the relation of art to labor, with appearances from Milton, Marx, Yeats, and Wilde. As always, the footnotes—on Milton and the Muse, on Terry Eagleton and Marx, on poetry and Paul de Man, on Yeats and the Tarot, on my possibly prophetic dreams of right- and left-wing dystopia—exceed the main text in interest; as never before, the footnotes are longer than the main text. Eventually we will reach the event horizon of these Weekly Readings: the post itself will be one line long, the footnote thereto 10,000 words.¹ Until then, please enjoy!

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“Beauty Born Out of Its Own Despair”: On Art and Labor

Jack B. Yeats, The Great Tree, Coole Park Demesne

Elizabeth Ellen, editor of the controversial journal Hobart, last seen in these pages almost a year ago during the Alex Perez conflagration, recently made the following Socratic inquiry on Twitter:

define labor. is art labor? i don’t view my writing as labor any more than i view reading as labor. or having sex as labor. but as many have pointed out, myself included, that’s just me.

Karl Marx himself, especially insofar as he distinguished true art from hackwork, also didn’t quite think art was labor:

The same kind of labour may be productive or unproductive. For example Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost for £5 was an unproductive labourer. On the other hand, the writer who turns out stuff for his publisher in factory style, is a productive labourer. Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature.² (Theories of Surplus Value Part I, qtd. in John Milton's Paradise Lost: A Sourcebook)³

Labor is Adam’s curse. Art is one of the few earthly reprieves from Adam’s curse. Yeats understood this, at least intermittently, or understood at least the complexity of the dilemma involved. In the poem entitled “Adam’s Curse,” he defines beauty, definitive of both art (in the form of poetry) and sex (through its fashion-cosmetic incitement), as precisely a labor to appear unlabored:

We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,   
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.   
Better go down upon your marrow-bones   
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones   
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;   
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet   
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen   
The martyrs call the world.’
                                          And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake   
There’s many a one shall find out all heartache   
On finding that her voice is sweet and low   
Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.’
I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing   
Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.’

In the less cynical “Among School Children,” by contrast, he calls art the flower of labor, an image of what labor was before the Fall and perhaps might be again in some utopia, a Romantic vision very much in at least the early Marx’s spirit:⁴

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Art, therefore, is unalienated labor, almost the only unalienated labor a modern (postmodern, hypermodern, etc.) person may know since none us produces directly for subsistence any longer.⁵ For this very reason, it feels strange to ask anyone to pay us for our art, since this places art back inside the industrial-commodity game, the sweat-of-your-brow game, that alienates labor in the first place.

Against the last decade’s intellectually lazy and morally squalid socialist left, however, I would insist that you can’t ensure artists get paid by conspicuously avoiding this nuance, by simply insisting that art is, uncomplicatedly, labor, the same way these same activists insist, in an identical bad-faith gesture, that a deliberately de-vivifying and anodyne phrase like “sex work” exhausts the significance of prostitution.

Bagging groceries and stocking store shelves are merely labor, as is yardwork and building maintenance, to name only jobs I myself did in my younger years—socially useful labor, I hasten to add, deserving a dignified wage. But sex and art link heaven to earth—also hell to earth and hell to heaven—and cannot therefore have a price tag easily affixed, since they each in one way ought to be free to all and in another way ought to (and finally do) cost not less than absolutely everything. (Education belongs in the same category, by the way.)

I myself don’t know how to solve this problem; I suspect a politics deriving from the soot-skied 19th century is not really adequate to the task, though Marx’s heart was in the right place, namely, in the heart of a heartless world (to quote St. Silouan via Gillian Rose, “keep your mind in hell and despair not”). I know someone needs to pay for me to live while I fulfill my nature through this activity, and I decided long ago I would personally accept no substitute for a life lived in my vocation, despite the occasional pecuniary embarrassment.

Oscar Wilde envisions in his utopian manifesto, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” that machines, once properly socialized, will relieve us of drudgery:

Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man.

One dystopian prospect of this utopian dream, however, is that whoever runs the machine on the people’s behalf—since Wilde’s “all” must be incarnated in some one or some group, the shoal on which “democratic socialism” has always broken—will turn your machine off or turn the machine against you if you transgress reigning social standards, as Wilde himself so famously did.⁶

We can at least agree with Wilde’s limiting of machine labor to “unintellectual tasks,” against those who would replace the human write with the machine writer. Combining the problem of the machine writer with the problem of ideological rule, the crime novelist Kat Rosenfeld recently prompted an AI to help her with her work-in-progress and found herself being lectured about “the importance of responsible storytelling and ethical considerations,” as well as about how “crucial” it is “to promote empathy, respect, and the well-being of readers.” Evidently, and somewhat in conflict with Wilde’s preference for artifice over nature, no one programmed this artificial intelligence with Wilde’s far more “crucial” axiom from the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray,

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Even more to the point, I think of the revolutionary rapper Immortal Technique’s lines, in the slightly different (or is it?) context of mass media propaganda, but good for all cases of mechanical dominion:

A machine shouldn’t speak for men 
So shut the fuck up, you mindless drone!

On my own all-too-human behalf, I can say that I produce with the silkworm’s regularity so you won't go wrong with a free—or still more, a paid—subscription to my Substack.

1. My own love of the footnote came not from Nabokov or DFW, but straight from academe itself. I quickly learned that footnotes (or endnotes) were where academics waged war against their colleagues or made startling asides. “Everything in art is an aside,” said Ray Bradbury in that interview I linked months ago, asserting that the artist’s inadvertent revelation of personality holds more interest than the overt design of the work. This is more true of the essayistic than the novelistic imagination in my experience, which is why, as a novelist, I tend not to burden the reader with footnotes.

2. But Milton would have rejected Marx’s very age-of-Darwin materialist metaphor. He believed that poetry came not from inside his body like the silkworm’s silk but from outside, or at least from an exterior voice resounding in the soul’s interior, which is to say—vide Alice Gribbin—that poetry comes from the Muses, in his case the Greek patroness of astronomy reconceived as Christianity’s Holy Spirit:

Descend from Heaven, Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine
Following, above the Olympian hill I soar,
Above the flight of Pegasean wing!
The meaning, not the name, I call: for thou
Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top
Of old Olympus dwellest; but, heavenly-born,
Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,
Thou with eternal Wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play
In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased
With thy celestial song. (Paradise Lost, Book VII)

3. Contemplating this post last Thursday, after I saw Ellen’s Tweet, I found on Google Books the line from Marx about Milton I’d vaguely remembered and put it in the draft of what you’re now reading. Then, on Friday, Terry Eagleton’s review in the LRB of Ludovico Silva’s Marx’s Literary Style was published, titled “Be Like the Silkworm.” Eagleton recruits Marx to

an aesthetic critique of capitalism running from Schiller and John Ruskin to William Morris and Herbert Marcuse

and notes the startling closeness of Marx’s vision to Wilde’s:

The aesthete, then, possesses more of the truth than the political left generally imagines. The point is not to substitute art for life, but to convert life into art.

Yet Eagleton also notes Marx’s neoclassical preference for a “unity of form and content,” this as against the merely formal pleasures of the commodity (or of the modernist artwork) in which the content of the worker’s labor (or the artwork’s meaning) is obscured by glaring superficiality. He likewise expresses a skepticism toward the aesthete’s pluralism, since the rigors of universal liberation may require unity in both the single laborer’s life and in the life of the populace (shades of the social conservatism + economic leftism of a Compact magazine—no surprise from a Catholic Marxist like Eagleton). If this isn’t too self-serving, and if it’s not too annoying to quote a footnote in a footnote—we may be dealing here not with commodity fetishism but with footnote fetishism—a footnote from my decade-old doctoral dissertation comes to mind:

Despite the hostility of scientific Marxism both to Aestheticism and to anarchism, the early Romantic Marx of the 1844 manuscripts strikes a proto-Wildean note in his elaboration of essential/anti-essential human nature: “An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty” (n. pag.). See Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger chapter 8, for an incisive comparison of Wilde and Marx, though one that scants the prescient subtlety of Wilde’s implicit judgment against orthodox socialism’s reliance on corporate bodies, always potentially hostile to alterity, to perpetuate itself.

For all that, I want to end this footnote with Eagleton’s (and Marx’s) useful counter-poptimist distinction between “genuinely popular culture” and mass culture, complex as the distinction can be to make in the 20th century and after (e.g., something like “auteur theory” was devised, I believe, to discriminate the “genuine” from the “mass” in the single popular work: the director’s vision inside the studio production):

Though his literary tastes were mostly highbrow, he was also deeply interested in German folk tales, chapbooks, popular ballads, legends and rhymes. He contrasted this genuinely popular culture with the pulp fiction industry in England, which in his view corrupted taste and cheapened feeling in the pursuit of profit.

4. Against the scourgers of “Cultural Marxism,” those for whom Marxism and postmodern or poststructural theory are one and the same, I note that Yeats’s Marxian vision uniting theory/praxis and labor/laborer in the single figure of the dance/dancer was Exhibit A in American deconstruction’s case against Romanticism’s organic unity of the literary work. Paul de Man’s influential essay “Semiology and Rhetoric” insisted we take Yeats’s rhetorical question literally and thereby dismantled the poem’s posited wholeness—replaced this wholeness with a holeness, if you’ll permit a bit of deconstructive punning.

Yeats’s poem “Among School Children,” ends with the famous line: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Although there are some revealing inconsistencies within the commentaries, the line is usually interpreted as stating, with the increased emphasis of a rhetorical device, the potential unity between form and experience, between creator and creation. It could be said that it denies the discrepancy between the sign and the referent from which we started out. […] It is equally possible, however, to read the last line literally rather than figuratively, as asking with some urgency the question we asked at the beginning of this talk within the context of contemporary criticism: not that sign and referent are so exquisitely fitted to each other that all difference between them is at times blotted out but, rather, since the two essentially different elements, sign and meaning, are so intricately intertwined in the imagined “presence” that the poem addresses, how can we possibly make the distinctions that would shelter us from the error of identifying what cannot be identified? […] For it turns out that the entire scheme set up by the first reading can be undermined, or deconstructed, in the terms of the second, in which the final line is read literally as meaning that, since the dancer and the dance are not the same, it might be useful, perhaps even desperately necessary—for the question can be given a ring of urgency, “Please tell me, how can I know the dancer from the dance”—to tell them apart. But this will replace the reading of each symbolic detail by a divergent interpretation. The oneness of trunk, leaf and blossom, for example, that would have appealed to Goethe, would find itself replaced by the much less reassuring Tree of Life from the Mabinogion that appears in the poem “Vacillation,” in which the fiery blossom and the earthly leaf are held together, as well as apart, by the crucified and castrated God Attis, of whose body it can hardly be said that it is “not bruised to pleasure soul.”

To repeat something I’ve said here somewhere already, Paul de Man did not use theory to dismember the poet and the poet’s figure because he was once a Nazi collaborator, but rather out of an esoteric atonement for having once been a Nazi collaborator. De Man so feared the totalitarianism to which he’d been prone, so feared that vision of an organically unified state that found its terminus in the destruction at Auschwitz of those considered “foreign bodies” to this state, that he could not tolerate organic images of unity even in visionary poetry. Considering Yeats’s politics, he probably had a point. But I believe that as long as we’ve internalized the postmodern critique—internalized, that is, the ethical exhortation not to obliterate the other—we may resume our quest for wholeness, at least poetic if not political wholeness.

5. A few weeks ago, I desultorily looked inside a Little Free Library that usually contains nothing but romance novels and children’s books. It still contained romance novels and children’s books that day, but I found them strangely accompanied by The World of W. B. Yeats: Essays in Perspective on the Occasion of the W. B. Yeats Centenary Festival Held at the University of Victoria February 14 to March 16, 1965, ed. Robin Skelton and Ann Saddlemyer (1965). In the volume I discovered a three-page essay, “W. B. Yeats and the Tarot” by Gwladys V. Downes. Downes mainly expresses puzzlement that Yeats’s work doesn’t deal more with the Tarot given the poet’s association in the Golden Dawn with both A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith—hence the essay’s brevity. Yeats mainly used the Tarot in his work, Downes surmises, as a repository of resonant images rather than as a consistent occult system, just as I use it. Still, she finds the dancer of “Among School Children” perhaps the most Tarot-inflected figure in his oeuvre, recalling the central person of The World card. She quotes Paul Foster Case’s analysis of this androgynous dancer as universal all-embodiment in The Tarot, a Key to the Wisdom of the Ages:

The dancer represents the merging of self-consciousness with subconsciousness, and the blending of the two with superconsciousness…The Dancer is the All-Father and the All-Mother. She is the Bride, but she is also the Bridegroom. She is the Kingdom and the King, even as Malkuth, the Kingdom, is by Qabalists called the Bride, but has also the Divine name ADMI MLK, Adonai Melek, Lord King. (Downes’s ellipses)

Having cited this volume, I will place it in a Little Free Library to return to the dance of synchronicities that weave the world.

6. I’ve had two politically dystopian dreams this year, a right-wing and a left-wing one.

In the right-wing dystopian dream, which I had back in March, I was crossing a little square at the edge of a burning city around midnight. An old man lay dying on a bench; fallen masonry, broken glass, and uprooted trees littered the sidewalks. Across from the square, the philosopher Michael Millerman sat in a folding chair at a card table, looking harried—his white button-down shirt rumpled, his beard coming in on gaunt cheeks. He shuffled papers. An injured Soledad O’Brien, her forehead streaked with blood, limped toward him and flung herself bitterly down in the folding chair across from the card table from where he sat. “Let’s get on with it,” she said, crossing her arms. “Okay,” he said with his unfailing politeness. He asked her, “How did George Floyd die?” She jumped forward in her seat and said, “I know the answer you want—a fentanyl overdose—but…” She began to yell something, but I lost the words on the wind fanning the city’s fire. Millerman, a look of sorrow on his haggard face, wrote something on the paper in front of him; he was, I somehow knew, signing her death warrant as an incorrigible ideological rebel. Then I woke up.

In the left-wing dystopian dream, which I had earlier this month, I was in a brightly lit bank speaking to the tellers—young, pretty white women—about some problem I was having with my account. One of them disappeared into the back and then returned with a black laptop; it had a sticker on it where my name was written in purple ink, in a middle-school girl’s bubbly handwriting, a hollow dot or maybe even a heart over the “i” in “Pistelli.” She showed me that this laptop contained recordings both of my internet activities and my movements. She began to idly speed-scroll through footage of me walking down the street and said, “Don’t worry, it probably flagged something as ‘white supremacist,’ but I’m sure it’s a mistake. It happens all the time.” Then I woke up.

From this we may conclude that right-wing dystopia will regress to barbarism and brutal violence, even its bureaucratic and surveillant terrors ill-organized and un-technologized, while left-wing dystopia will swallow up the human entirely in a machine preprogrammed with its ideological correlates. Gender-wise, right-wing dystopia is male, a direct physical threat to women; left-wing dystopia is female, targeting the male to pacify him and possibly even expel him from the polis’s rights and protections but not overtly violent (only indirectly so) toward his person. They will both, however, manipulate ideologies of race to control the populace. Or so say my dreams.

I apologize to Soledad O’Brien and especially to the principled, non-violent philosopher Michael Millerman for the use my first dream made of them in illustrating these important precepts (indeed, the potential corruption of the gentle, sophisticated Millerman into a crude commissar was, I believe, a major part of my dream’s indictment of the right).