Weekly Readings #77 (07/24/23-07/30/23)

the time is now

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

This week I posted “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” the latest chapter of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. That episode witnessed the first meeting of Part Two’s fateful couples: a quadrangle of love, hate, ideological confrontation, and comic-book collaboration with explosive results that will eventually radiate (and have already radiated) backward and forward through the novel’s temporal architecture, rattling the very narrative walls. This Wednesday, we explore the now-renowned writer Simon Magnus’s deepening interest in the occult, with a special focus on the art of Tarot itself. Please subscribe today!

For today’s essay, I offer a broader and more personal perspective on the so-called “new fascism” in American literature.

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Untimely Meditation: Independent American Literature from Destruction to Affirmation, 2013-2023

“Fascist Avant-Garde Girl,” Craiyon

For the novelist, time is easy, because the form of the novel solves the paradox of time. On the one hand, it is a linear and progressive form; you read word by word, minute by minute, until you’re finished. This is the human, everyday experience of time. On the other hand, the novel is completed, finished, a bounded object in space capturing in its spatial architecture the wholeness of the time it narrates. From the vantage of the novel’s conclusion, from the vantage of the rereading experience, from the vantage of criticism, the reader has not the human experience of time (day-after-day) but the God experience of time: a completed structure all of whose elements are simultaneously present to the understanding.¹

The cultural critic of the present, however, is doomed by time: always too early or too late. Too early means you’re incomprehensible to the general readership (what are you even talking about?) and too late means you’ve passed the point where your intervention could have changed anything (are you still talking about this?).

It is in fact too late for me to be talking about this (it belongs to last Monday’s news cycle), but J. Arthur Boyle, identifying “The Right-Wing Avant-Garde in American Fiction,” is even more too-late than I am. He acknowledges that he’s too late in one sense: that the social scene he describes is apparently over, and that its effects are being rapidly absorbed into the mainstream.

He is also too late in a way he seemingly can’t see. For about the last decade, the special quality of thuggishness always latent in Marxist literary criticism actually scared writers again. Marxist theory terminates not in discourse but on one side or the other of a gun; this means that when Marxist critics call someone a “fascist,” they mean to strip that person of civil protection against vigilante, paramilitary, or state violence (depending on the disposition of power at any given moment). They are saying that person should be killed or at least subdued. This isn’t melodrama but an extrapolation from the givens of the theory as well as an inference from its historical implementation. Now nothing like Marxism (except perhaps in its truest but most unconscious form) threatened to come to political power in America in the last decade or so, but the commanding institutions of liberal civilization did find it useful to deploy the terrorist quality of such criticism against the populist threat—an old trick of empire, the way we used Islamic fundamentalism against the Soviets.

It is, however, too late for this tactic. The evidence everywhere suggests that many or most institutions have begun to reason otherwise about the strategic predicament of their legitimacy, have begun to suspect that turning down heat on the culture war (in which extremist criticism figured largely) will yield benefits that keeping it at a violent boil cannot.² It’s partly a matter of consolidating victories by temporarily halting one’s advance and partly a matter of suing for time by calling for a ceasefire. The net effect is to render the reproach “fascist” laughable again, just as it became after the radicalism of the 1960s went out of style. If published in 2018, Boyle’s essay might have gotten everyone it named fired; when it was published this week, it met mostly with dismissals and attacks.

The literary and podcasting subculture Boyle describes began responding to the above incentives early, before they had even fully materialized (just a little early is usually right on time). In an article I wrote for Default Friend around this time last year, I predicted that politically this subculture’s avant-gardism would come to signify not a shift of the arts to the right but a shift of the left (to which the arts in America institutionally belong) to the center—in other words, just the tactical readjustment I described in the paragraph above.³

That prediction—coming two months before a midterm election the Democrats were supposed to lose in a wipeout and didn’t quite—was too early. It may still be too early, early enough to be proved wrong considering the extraordinary number of variables (legal, medical, military, and more) that might affect the 2024 election and its apparent last stand of the uniparty gerontocracy; I believe it remains what they call “directionally accurate,” however.

But I want to leave capital-P politics behind and focus more narrowly on the state of American literature. Is it true, as Boyle claims, that we now have a fascist avant-garde? To understand the question, we have to go back a full decade. Though its current luminaries were still in middle school at the time, the avant-garde Boyle describes has existed in something like its present form since the mid-to-late 2000s, at least, encompassing but not exclusive to the Alt Lit movement. Alex Perez, who knows more about it that I do, gives a comprehensive survey in the essay “Cringe Lit,” from the affectlessly surreal autobiographical fiction of early Tao Lin to the aggressive productions (e.g., early Blake Butler) of Tyrant Books, not to mention this diffuse movement’s 21st-century double locale of Brooklyn and “online.”

A decade ago I only knew enough of this movement to set myself against it. In 2013, I wrote a long and violently hostile review of Blake Butler’s novel Sky Saw for Rain Taxi (a journal that usually doesn’t print either long or negative reviews).⁴ There I took a stand against Butler’s avant-gardism, both literary (the novel dissolves domestic realism in oneiric grotesquery, even as Butler at the time denounced James Wood as “a bland fuckboy clinging to dead relics of A-to-B”) and political (Butler announced in all-caps in Vice magazine, “I DON’T WANT TO READ ANY MORE BOOKS ABOUT STRAIGHT WHITE PEOPLE HAVING SEX”). The book’s back cover held up for mockery a named female Amazon reviewer for not understanding Butler’s previous work and pointedly contrasts his fiction to Jonathan Franzen’s. I turned the denunciation of straights and whites back on Butler, charging that his assault on the realist novel doubled as sexist aggression against its tradition of preeminent female authorship and its predominant female readership, an attack and counter-attack that foretold the coming identitarian criticism. I concluded with this:

In the end, I must say—to quote that bland fuckboy of eighteenth-century letters, Samuel Johnson—that I concur with the common reader, even at the risk of joining her in being singled out by Butler’s publishers as just a common girl. In his Vice piece, Butler demands “art that makes me have no idea what I should do now,” no doubt because it is so unforgivingly skeptical and extreme. But Sky Saw’s relentless intensity, however eloquent, simply becomes numbing.  

Extremity carried on too long becomes its own form of complacency—an observation that may apply not only to Sky Saw but to its enabling tradition of bad-boy shock tactics from Sade to Bataille to Burroughs. The full-frontal assault on middle-class morality is, after all, as old as the middle class itself, and what do we have to show for it? Even Franzen’s Freedom contains a scat-fetish scene. There is almost nobody left to shock by the mere act of flinging shit in a novel. Instead of attempting to reanimate the bourgeois family with the realists or to liquidate it with the avant-gardists, maybe we should turn our attention to some other subject entirely, or at least place our emphasis elsewhere. To say it as bluntly as Butler himself would, I don’t want to read another novel that deconstructs novels about straight white people having sex. As various forms of insolvency continue to overtake America, we may yet recognize that Franzen’s middlebrow realism and Butler’s avant-garde nihilism are two sides of the same debased coin.

Attempting to make good on this pronouncement, as I was writing the review, I was also working on my novel Portraits and Ashes. There I tried to allow the avant-garde its insights and to circumscribe it within a holistic aesthetic able to represent both negation and affirmation. At the risk of self-indulgence, I will quote from a description in the novel of a fantastical Borgesian text written by the heroine herself:

Her book struck a compromise: she revealed her extreme and even occasionally murderous visions without inflicting them upon reality. In this, she aimed both to honor and to censure all those hard men of the twentieth century who’d mistaken their dreams for something that had to be done to the world by force.

I rehearse this history to show that I take the charge of “fascism” against the avant-garde seriously—except that I would prefer to speak of “totalitarianism.” The totalitarianism I have in mind is a left- as well as right-wing phenomenon, for one thing, and for another, Marxists opportunistically abuse the word “fascism” to assault all their enemies from anarchists through liberals to conservatives. Given this ambition of the avant-garde to totalize common life, given its hostility to the entire middle range of life and art, and given its historical variability of political identification (right-wing in Italy, left-wing in Russia), I was surprised neither by the woke nor by the anti-woke turns of the artistic vanguard. Both are well within its repertoire.

Despite this history, however, Boyle has mysteriously little to work with. His article reads like a slowly deflating balloon. What begins with a series of documented connections between the Dimes Square scene and actual right-wingers (Thiel, Yarvin, Pervert) ends with a reading of Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel that could apply word for word to DeLillo, to Joyce, to Chekhov.⁵ Boyle’s target shrinks from the avant-garde to modernism—two distinct phenomena (modernism has no totalizing design on the polis, does not aim at the wholesale destruction of middle-class life: landmark works from Ulysses to The Metamorphosis are each in their way about the persistence of this form of life).⁶ In his polemic against Cash, Boyle just reprises what Radek said against Joyce and what Lukács said against Kafka: that these writers produce a non-didactic literature open to the cruel side, the trivial side, and the grotesque side of experience.

Cash’s stories can be funny, inventive, linguistically exciting, and feel genuinely new. The brutality they trade on conjures depressingly convincing portraits of our ongoing modernity, realer than real. But the stories don't just deploy brutality, they often end up passively siding with it, resigned to preventable atrocities, making them palatable through a degree of victimhood.

And in all these cases—even in Cash’s (I am halfway through the entertaining Earth Angel)—the Marxist critic is mysteriously insensible to the very real affirmations made by the overall effect of the text, by its precise, poignant, and finally heroic effort at contemporary representation, its dance against despair.⁷

This formal resistance to nihilism—where we find form we necessarily find something—is what I miss is the avant-garde proper’s attempt to dissolve artistic form into the chaos of life, but it’s also why the main writers who have come out of this scene so far don’t meaningfully belong to the avant-garde, the political twists and turns of the podcasters and the on-the-ground scenesters notwithstanding.

Also too early to this analysis were the essays I wrote two years ago to chart my changing attitude toward Tao Lin as Lin’s own literary practice transformed from a barely sculpted and self-hating banality into an efflorescent mysticism. My review of his 2009 novella Shoplifting from American Apparel begins with something like the history Boyle narrates in miniature, and before the Dimes Square scene came to broad attention or even to my own attention. Please forgive me for quoting myself at length, but it’s relevant to our story. Since it was too early the first time around (even if it’s too late now), it may finally be understood:

I sampled some stories by Alt-Lit maven Tao Lin back when Alt Lit was the new phenomenon, and I liked them but didn’t really know what to make of them, probably because, even though Lin and I are of the same generation—he’s one year my junior—my idea of literature has never solely involved what the kids today (about whom more in a second) call vibing. I like textured imagery, long sentences, out-of-the-way vocabulary; my Millennial New Sincerity literary style icon, as I’ve said elsewhere, is not a novelist at all (unless I myself count) but rather Joanna Newsom.

Yet culture-vulturing around the stranger spaces of “online,” I recently noticed the brewing recrudescence of Alt Lit, signaled by a forthcoming work from Lin himself. His new constituency appears to be feral Zoomer youth reared on an exclusive media diet of Nick Land, anime, Internet porn, and conspiracy theories, a vanguard of vaguely anarcho-reactionary fashions now shocking but, given the pedigree of those busily adopting them, shortly to be mainstream.

Alt Lit notoriously imploded the first time around 2014 because of what the legacy media and the Democratic Party apparatus had not yet begun to exploit under the name of #MeToo before these institutions had to lock their sexual skeletons back in the closet to protect Bidens père et fils in and after an election year. I was on Tumblr at the time watching the Alt-Lit meltdown happen and thinking smugly to myself, “I’m glad I never read much of that shit!” But the fashion cycle launders everything, and here we are again.

I mention this unpleasantness only to introduce a provocative critical commentary on Alt Lit and New Sincerity as social styles, a critique voiced in that bastion of grad-student radicalism, The New Inquiry, by one of the young women who accused an Alt-Lit luminary (not Lin) of assaulting her, after which she contributed this analysis. Then, without retracting the substance of the original allegation, she recanted it, in the short-lived right-wing journal Jacobite, as a mere publicity exercise enabled by predatory feminism, and then she went on to be a mainstay of that shadowy, ambiguous, and increasingly trendy podcast network where the old alt-right meets the new post-left (e.g., Kantbot, Justin Murphy, The Perfume Nationalist, etc.), before apparently vanishing from the Internet.⁸

While my review of Lin’s nonfictional 2018 psychedelic tract Trip calls aspects of his awakening into question, my essay on his 2021 novel Leave Society instead applauds him for finding a form in which to cast whatever is beautiful and life-giving as well as what is annihilating in the present moment. I wrote:

Because the imagination is more beautiful and complex than reality, like a novel or other work of art in relation to the world, literature itself becomes Lin’s vehicle not only to escape society but to introduce imaginative ideas into society, ideas ramifying through other minds into new ideas in a feedback mechanism producing what the novel calls “emergent properties,” complex births of better worlds within the world. Fiction is so powerful for Lin it can even travel through time…

If this Weekly Reading has excessively traveled through time in an attempt to survey the last decade of American literature and its relation to our political upheavals, I’ve done so to explain why I find recent literary developments positive, on balance.

Unlike early Blake Butler and early Tao Lin’s attempt to liquidate all value in the face of an oppressive institutional monoculture that showed no signs of weakness, today’s younger writers—for writers, unlike models or athletes, “younger” means under 50—are trying by contrast to create new forms of beauty and order in the ruins of those institutions’ legitimacy, even as the institutions themselves find that they have no choice but to appropriate this independent creative energy.⁹ I would suggest that we are in a better place now, especially because of the technological affordances making independent creation more viable than ever, than we were in 2013.

To stigmatize the whole effort with the word “fascist,” especially where this pejorative is applied to non-didactic fiction written by politically unaffiliated writers, is to belong to the past, or to several pasts at once, whether the 1930s or the 2010s. It’s time to live in the century we’re actually living in.

1. Hence the superfluity of surface gestures meant to disrupt the linear experience of the first reading à la House of Leaves style gimmickry. The philosophical point such ergodic gestures are intended to make is already implied in the form as it is—and more subtly. On the other hand, the non-linear narrative meant nevertheless to be read sequentially, which begins at the beginning of our tradition in Homeric epic, deepens the implication of the form by emphasizing and heightening the effect of retrospective knowledge (e.g., the way the first part of The Sound and the Fury is incomprehensible on a first reading and fairly clear on subsequent readings).

2. For a large-scale legacy media example, see Adam Kotsko (of all people) writing in The Atlantic to caution against moralistic leftist criticism, this to defend a film and a filmmaker it wouldn’t be at all unreasonable to see as right-wing. At a subcultural level, I note an article on a mainstream comics news site that calls for the restoration of political diversity to the field, an unthinkable prospect in 2018, when “political diversity” would have been read as code for “platforming Nazis”—this even as the leader of the #gamergate-like #comicsgate movement on the right himself now frequently inveighs against simplistic (and indeed moralistic) anti-woke criticism. I don’t know for sure, but I do suspect that the latter example is representative of developments across many subcultures.

3. Because the piece is paywalled, I will reproduce the key paragraphs here:

With this new swing of the pendulum, the art right attacks both the dissident right and even mainstream Republicans over the reversal of Roe v. Wade, but not on feminist or civil liberties grounds. Those arguments would be too common for these incorrigible contrarians. Instead, they favor abortion rights because pro-life campaigners have only succeeded (to quote an ugly formulation from Jack Mason) in “saving Shaniqua’s fetus”—i.e., failing to limit black people’s reproduction by restricting abortion. Similarly, on recent episodes, the Red Scare hostesses have name-dropped infamous “race realist” blogger Steve Sailer as they complained about urban shoplifting and harassment. Returning the compliment, Sailer himself re-tweeted Dasha’s sarcastic suggestion that New York City should criminalize crime.

Ironically, a movement that began by rejecting the “girlboss” feminism and identity politics represented by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run now embraces the Clinton of the 1990s and 2000s: the steely first lady who demanded that “superpredators” be brought “to heel” and the populist presidential primary candidate who championed “hard-working Americans, white Americans” against Barack Obama’s more multicultural campaign. Mason and related Twitter accounts even regularly post attractive photos of Clinton in her younger years, just as their dissident-right counterparts favor Nordic women in traditional dress twirling in wheat fields.

Leaving aside their newfound race-baiting—banal as it is, it makes them sound less like aesthetes or contrarians than like Boomer suburban philistines—the art right’s coming full circle politically, back to the maternal bosom of the pantsuited neoliberalism they’d initially spurned, suggests that they never had a coherent politics in the first place.

4. The review only ever appeared in print. I don’t intend to reproduce the whole thing online anytime soon, because the changes in literary culture over the ensuing decade have made obsolete the quarrel I was trying to start, and in a way that means I would no longer see someone like Butler as my adversary. For one thing, given the re-erection of every type of moralism in the world of arts and letters by the 2010s left, avant-garde negation, considered purely as negation, now has a productive use it didn’t 10 years ago, though this, it should be noted, has diminishing returns.

5. In fairness to Boyle, he reads the situation as a calculated attempt to shift culture and politics where both extremist and moderate play a role, thus the warrant for catching up the likes of Madeline Cash in this net:

A group of committed protofascists make angular forays into the aesthetic Overton window. Then a group of moderate sympathizers with opportunistic bents repackage it for a wider audience. The angular forays grab attention, the wider audience provides ideological support.

The advantage of Marxism should be that it’s not a conspiracy theory but a theory of contingently convergent interests. Where he sees conspiracy, I see artists fighting for space in a suffocating culture, not “sympathizers” of “protofascists.” For whatever it’s worth, Cash describes herself as holding “middle-of-the-road Democratic views”—fascist enough for the seminar room (the Democratic Party is sort of fascist by Mussolini’s standards) but not enough for the word’s colloquial sense nor for its deliberately destructive deployment in literary criticism—and hardly relevant to the likes of Bronze Age Pervert.

6. For the distinction between modernist and avant-garde, see here. Art critic Dean Kissick argues persuasively that the true avant-garde is now anonymous and online, increasingly non-human. I believe Mars Review of Books editor Noah Kumin—also tarred with Boyle’s big fascist brush—agrees, seeing a diminution of the human element in artistic production as a re-orientation of art away from the individual and back toward the divine, where it belongs. I agree with their analyses, even as I have not yet succeeded in transcending my own individual humanness or its collaboration in the literature I write with insights from (for lack of a better term) somewhere else.

7. Though I believe he was writing to a conservative critic who demanded moralism of him, Chekhov’s reply to such reproofs as Boyle’s remains the gold standard:

You abuse me for objec­tiv­ity, call­ing it indif­fer­ence to good and evil, lack of ideas and ideals, and so on. You would have me, when I describe horse thieves, say: ‘Steal­ing horses is an evil.’ But that has been known for ages with­out my say­ing so. Let the jury judge them; it’s my job sim­ply to show what sort of peo­ple they are. I write: you are dealing with horse thieves, so let me tell you that they are not beg­gars but well-fed people, that they are peo­ple of a spe­cial cult, and that horse steal­ing is not sim­ply theft but passion. Of course it would be pleas­ant to com­bine art with a ser­mon, but for me person­ally it is impos­si­ble owing to the con­di­tions of tech­nique. You see, to depict horse thieves in 700 lines I must all the time speak and think in their tone and feel in their spirit. Oth­er­wise, the story will not be as com­pact as all short sto­ries out to be. When I write, I reckon entirely upon the reader to add for him­self the sub­jec­tive elements that are lack­ing in the story. (Letter to Aleksey Suvorin [1890])

8. What ever happened to her, by the way, and if it is still “her”? Is she writing or podcasting somewhere? (Some of you will know who I mean.)

9. Speaking of the generations: Honor Levy, whom I started reading too early, didn’t ask me for advice, but if she had, I’d have said, “Don’t let them market you like this. What seems like a generational honorific (so to speak) is actually a sell-by date. You may find it difficult—one thinks of Lena Dunham, for all that she attempted to ironize it—to remove the label. They have planned your obsolescence.”