Weekly Readings #78 (07/31/23-08/06/23)

literally encyclopedic

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

This week I posted my overview of the last month’s reading, July Books. It contains ongoing thoughts on the King James Bible, insightful quotations from Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed and Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael, negative verdicts on both a beloved traditional realist writer and a beloved experimental modernist writer (just to annoy everyone), and a capsule review of Madeline Cash’s inexplicably controversial and undeniably entertaining new story collection, Earth Angel.

I also published “Biblia Pauperum,” the latest chapter in my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. If that episode dramatized comic-book writer Simon Magnus’s deepening interest in occult consciousness, the next one, coming this Wednesday, will head from the East to the West Coast and will accordingly flirt with more secular forms of heightened perception: drugs, paranoia, and the creation of culture by hidden (governmental) agencies. Plus, Simon Magnus changes clothes. As I promised early on, Major Arcana will prove far more protean and capacious than your average novel; defying all classicisms, I have placed no pre-established limit on the types of novel Major Arcana could become. Please subscribe today!

For today’s post, two short pieces: the first an argument about why creative writers should read the classics and the second my list of the 10 best novels of the 21st century. Please enjoy!

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Canon Ball: Why Writers Should Read the Classics

“Many people are saying…” To talk about what you want to to talk about in a real magazine, you have to concoct a trend. This isn’t a “real magazine,” though—I hope it’s more interesting than that—but here goes anyway. I’ve noticed two things, whether trends or no: first, a pivot from at least some independent thinkers toward the classics (okay, at least two: Justin Murphy and Naomi Kanakia) as the culture war that defined the last decade seems to die down,¹ and, second, frank discussion of gaps in one’s presumed “required reading” among creative writers. I want to use these occasions, whether or not they amount to trends, to think about why creative writers should read the classics.

I’m using “classic” here in the colloquial sense of “books still in circulation long after their authors’ times,” not the more restricted sense of the ancient canon. I am also thinking primarily about classics of imaginative literature, not “great books” in general, especially, if you are a creative writer, classics in your own chosen form or genre.² While the “reading gap” conversation began with a contemporary novelist and literature professor’s apparently scandalous admission that he’d never read Borges, I was more interested in his follow-up confession-boast that he’d likewise never read Austen, Dickens, or Hardy, as well as another contemporary novelist’s almost identical admission to having neglected Austen and Dickens.

All finite beings have gaps in their education, both their official education and their self-education. The man who hadn’t read Borges (or Austen or Dickens) offered as justification his having specialized in American literature. As a dilettante-generalist rather than a specialist, I have tended to miss major books rather than major authors in their entirety. Take Hardy, for example: I can’t be said to have ignored him totally—I’ve read Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure, and a generous Norton Anthology selection’s worth of poems—but I did somehow miss his single most famous novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, for whatever reason. Similarly, I’ve read plenty of Dickens—Great Expectations and Hard Times multiple times apiece, but also Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and more—but somehow I haven’t yet managed to read what used to be a high-school staple, the only Dickens novel most Americans ever have read, A Tale of Two Cities.

For a defense of the gaps in our reading, we can turn to none other than Borges himself, a man who disliked loose, baggy novels and so probably (despite his Anglophilia) skipped a few Dickens and Hardy novels too, if not all of them. In his early encomium to Ulysses, Borges charmingly allowed that he had not read the whole thing any more than he’d walked every street in Dublin—or indeed Buenos Aires:

I confess I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes. (Selected Non-Fictions)

One critic, not intending to pay a compliment, described Borges’s vaunted erudition as “literally encyclopedic,” an assertion I once combined on Tumblr with Umberto Eco’s scholarly contention that Joyce probably never read more than a few pages of Aquinas and with Joseph Tabbi’s observation that Gaddis clipped his own source material out of general-interest magazines and newspapers (don’t ask me, by the way, if I’ve read The Recognitions):

Whether or not one believes it, it is important to be clear that, vast as Borges’s reading may have been, his erudition is “not profound: he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas” (André Maurois). Much of his culture was literally encyclopedic, that is, gleaned from encyclopedias, so he should not be mistaken for a Gianfranco Contini or an E. R. Curtius. And unqualified paeans to his learning miss precisely what is most interesting about it: its boundaries, the fact that it defines a self-contained aesthetic system. Borges’s range of reference as a reader marks out a recognizable territory as a writer.

In the pursuit of “a self-contained aesthetic system,” then, the creative writer—who is not necessarily trying to out-Curtius Curtius—can justifiably not read any number of the infinitude of books in the library of Babel. (I own European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, but have I read it?) One can even put down a classic in dissatisfaction. While we’re talking about Victorian novels, I will say that I gave up on Vanity Fair after 30 pages. “I am not,” I said to myself, “going to read a 900-page novel where the narrator’s dominant attitude toward the characters and story is smug sarcasm.” Such a work doesn’t really fit into my own aesthetic system.

On the other hand, we can think we know who we are too well, raise the fortifications of the self too high—or else undermine its foundations. No one needs to undergo the famous rigors of Picasso and Joyce again, a century later: to learn realism to the point of trompe l’œil before daring to experiment with Cubism and stream-of-consciousness, to teach oneself the sanity of the 19th century before expressing the derangements of the centuries to follow, especially after Marx-Nietzsche-Freud taught us that 19th-century sanity rocked unsteadily over a black and lurid tarn of unremitting sex and violence.

And yet. You (like Rilke’s torso, I shamelessly injunct) must read Pride and Prejudice, must read Great Expectations, at least. If you have in your back pocket the classic never-to-be-equaled-in-your-own-language treatments of the romantic comedy and the bildungsroman, if you become as familiar with them as you become with a creased and pencil-margined paperback, then you can do whatever you want with them in your own work. Could Joyce, could Woolf, have made their leaps if not from the springboards of Dickens and Austen?

You may also learn that the authors of these old books aren’t nearly as naive as you think, just because they lived before Marx-Nietzsche-Freud—that they may very well have known what Marx-Nietzsche-Freud knew and just chose to do something else with the knowledge rather than exposing it in the interests of revolution—that this, too, is something people might choose to do, in fact have chosen: a fact worth knowing, as unlikely as we are to choose it ourselves.³

And, most importantly—more importantly than whether or not they’re “great books”—they’re good books. You will be lost in admiration for their design, their passion, their wit, their intelligence. Nobody has to read everything, nobody even has to read anything, but read Austen, read Dickens, read Hardy. I will even pledge, sooner rather than later, to read A Tale of Two Cities and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

Borges in Perramus: The City and Oblivion by Alberto Breccia and Juan Sasturain

Top 10: Ranking the 21st-Century Novel

About a week and a half ago, someone wrote in to Tumblr and asked for my “10 favorite novels of this century, by authors of this century,” with the caveat that I could “throw in old 20th century faves late work if necessary.” The following is my answer. What have I unjustly omitted? What have I inexcusably elevated? I did hesitate over whether or not to include Austerlitz—an obvious omission: Sebald’s an “objectively” worthy writer, just not one greatly to my taste—and did not hesitate to exclude Knausgård. I have deliberately avoided Ferrante because her books were celebrated as gritty and authentic, not as triumphs of the imagination, which latter they in fact appear to be.⁴ I’m sure you’re all about to tell me that I must read a 1000-page novel without a plot or paragraph breaks translated from the Romanian, or else, at the opposite extreme, a 1000-volume manga with five words per page, but in any case please have at it.

Franzen, The Corrections: I’m not a Franzen devotee, but when this came out—you have to understand everybody was reading it just after 9/11—it seemed like he had saved the American novel; I was 19 years old and breathless when I finished it. (Read my review of Purity, which discusses Franzen in general, here.)

Bolaño, 2666: I just read it this year—undoubtedly the novel of the century so far; it’s incomparable; one almost doesn’t want to stain the silence by speaking of it. (Read my [capsule] review here.)

Roth, The Plot Against America: It has a gimmicky conceit, but Roth wrings every drop of pathos and comedy out of it; in its madcap but sculpted fury, it’s one of his best books, less politically predictable than it seems, and a good introduction to his work since it’s a semi-sexless page-turner. (Read my review here.)

Mitchell, Cloud Atlas: Talk about gimmicky conceits!⁵ Mitchell has never lived up to its promise and took the wrong lessons from its success; but it’s fun and moving if occasionally also, as any formalist structure is, tiresome—tiresome and dazzling, a new world for 21st-century fiction. (Read my review of Mitchell’s later novel, The Bone Clocks, which discusses Cloud Atlas, here.)

Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go: Ishiguro, as always, is deceptively quiet, even himself deceptively gimmicky in Mitchell’s manner, but this is on Bolaño’s level of serious inquiry into evil and complicity and the meaning of art. (Read my review here.)

Erdrich, The Plague of Doves: Like Mitchell and Franzen and for some of the same reasons, Erdrich is hit or miss for me, but this relentlessly inventive magical realist saga has it all: it’s a mystery, a western, a fantasy, a comedy, a protest, a bildungsroman—history and myth. (Read my review here.)

Ozick, Foreign Bodies: Ozick re-writes The Ambassadors after Auschwitz, a conceit—lots of gimmicks on this list—that doesn’t suggest how high-spirited and capacious and funny and moving this novel really is, as much Woolf and Forster and Bellow as James. (Read my review here.)

Moore/Burrows, Providence: If you’ll allow me a graphic novel, Moore’s Lovecraftian summa is extravagantly unsettling and nearly a theory-fiction; the back cover blurb calling it “the Watchmen of horror” has a point. (Read my review here.)

Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation: I can’t get into any of her other books, and it took me a while to get into this one, but I eventually saw what she was doing—it’s a religious testament ending on a note of terrifying sublimity—and now all the cool fascist girls write like her. (Read my [capsule] review here.)

McCarthy, The Passenger/Stella Maris: You permitted me some old masters; this old master went out on top. (Read my reviews here and here.)

1. I’ve seen debate, some of it inspired by my own work, about whether or not the culture war is dying down. The case of Richard Hanania may offer a test. (The charges; the response.) We’re now on the third day of the “Hanania scandal,” and HarperCollins still hasn’t dropped his book, even though he’s accused of writing things that would have gotten a person “canceled” not by the newfangled woke rules but just by the old liberal ones. There are no pure examples—the publisher might, for example, hesitate to take action based on a doxx, even though some of what Hanania has said recently under his own name is dubious enough (“Maybe old people shouldn’t all commit seppuku” generously begins one notorious Tweet/Xeet protesting gerontocracy)—but if he gets through this unscathed, then I’d say the culture has shifted. Entering an election year may well change things, but I suspect, if it is Trump vs. Biden, that this will be a more-than-usually substanceless election, focused on the legally and medically compromised persons of the candidates rather than their policies.

2. I don’t generally use the phrase “great books” because to me it connotes what I consider an excessive interest in philosophy, even a “philosophical supremacism” I associate rightly or wrongly not just with the University of Chicago but also with the Straussians. (This is a connotation; for the denotation it’s based on, see another piece by Kanakia.) A heuristic here might be the difference between Allan Bloom and Harold Bloom, whose divergent positions are often confused. Allan Bloom believed in an education founded on a fairly narrow range of western philosophical classics teaching reason and moderation; he tended to treat imaginative literature as either welcome illustrations of this tradition or lamentable departures from it. Harold Bloom, not especially interested in philosophy, advocated instead the pleasures and intensities of the most inventive literary works, irrespective of their implicit or explicit pedagogy. His use of “canon” instead of “great books” suggests a not-quite-avowed ambition to appoint the aesthetic to succeed exhausted religious traditions rather than to illustrate timeless philosophic wisdom. Despite his inaccurate reputation as a champion for “dead white men,” Harold Bloom’s canon is also expansive rather than restrictive, provided the candidate texts pass the “pleasurable, intense, and inventive” test in whatever ways they’re able. With the two Blooms in mind, I can imagine saying that, for example, Samuel R. Delany belongs in the “canon,” but not that his corpus has entered the rolls of the “great books.”

3. I am thinking of that passage from Chesterton that always circulates online whenever the Catholics are fighting with the Nietzscheans:

Turn up the last act of Shakespeare’s Richard III and you will find not only all that Nietzsche had to say put into two lines, but you will find it put in the very words of Nietzsche. Richard Crookback says to his nobles:

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

Shakespeare had thought of Nietzsche and the Master Morality; but he weighed it at its proper value and put it in its proper place. Its proper place is the mouth of a half-insane hunchback on the eve of defeat. This rage against the weak is only possible in a man morbidly brave but fundamentally sick; a man like Richard, a man like Nietzsche. This case alone ought to destroy the absurd fancy that these modern philosophies are modern in the sense that the great men of the past did not think of them. They thought of them; only they did not think much of them. It was not that Shakespeare did not see the Nietzsche idea; he saw it, and he saw through it.

While this is too reductive a reading of Nietzsche—Chesterton’s own sometimes shallowly witty sanity can be positively galling—it’s correct to say that Austen and Dickens, like Shakespeare, knew plenty about sex, property, and power. This brings me to an illicit reason to read older books. In our own time of imperial traumatology, what I might call their moral harshness can be usefully bracing. They assumed a standard of ethical self-command, no matter the circumstances. Even if mommy didn’t love you enough, you still have to behave with minimal decency and dignity. Dickens’s Pip doesn’t think his deprived childhood excuses his adult derelictions. As for Austen, is there anything in (for example) Kafka quite as shocking as this aside in Persuasion?

The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before.

You can go too far in this direction—Austen does, for my taste; I want Kafka to give me the poor kid’s side of the story, as he perhaps does in Amerika, itself based on Dickens—but you can go too far in the other as well, and we may have.

4. Which is to say that her books, while not autofictional in form, rode the autofiction wave as a cri de coeur of working-class womanhood. But “Elena Ferrante,” whoever she is, appears to be either not working-class or not a woman. This wouldn’t be a problem except for the prior celebration; it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, the taste of 2010s identity politics, and of the ongoing metastasis of oppression masquerades in elite life. On the other hand, to refer to writers who are on my list, I suspect we wouldn’t care very much if David Mitchell or Kazuo Ishiguro turned out to be women or Peruvians or landed aristocrats or whatever, since they both write from any and all perspectives, in any and all genres, staking the worth of their work not on the authenticity of their “lived experiences” but on the authority of their imaginative visions. (As I do, for whatever it’s worth.) This isn’t a universal standard: neither Erdrich’s nor Ozick’s reputations would survive if they were revealed as non-Ojibwe or non-Jewish, since these are cultural, political, and spiritual determinants underlying their fiction (in a way that Ishiguro’s Japanese national origin is really not in his work); but here the question is less authenticity to individual experience and more fidelity to collective tradition. Anyway, I will relent and read Ferrante if people still love her in a decade or so; such things are forgivable when the books are strong enough to overcome them. I explored the general question in my essay on Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, a brilliantly deranged novel written at the intersection of decadent pornography and Holocaust testimony; it was widely assumed to be autobiographical—and marketed as such, with cover copy comparing Kosinski to Anne Frank—but was in fact mostly invented. And yet, as art, if art of a strikingly unwholesome variety, Kosinski’s invention remains indelible.

5. Since so many novels now apply the Cloud Atlas formula—combining historical fiction, science fiction, and contemporary fiction in one book—I once speculated on how this happened on Tumblr and even discussed it a bit here on Substack back when my readership here was only in the double digits. Since you probably missed it, then, I will paste my thoughts down here for your edification, at the risk of stretching the art of the footnote beyond tolerable boundaries:

How did Cloud Atlas go from a novel to a genre? One would have thought the gesture, like a bee’s sting, was unrepeatable. About a decade ago, Ted Gioia assimilated Cloud Atlas and some early imitators like A Visit from the Goon Squad to the broader genre of what he called the fragmented novel and persuasively attributed it to a mix of developments over the course of the 20th century, including serious nonfiction’s move from treatise to aphorism, the decreasing pop-cultural attention span, and the desire to fuse experimental with popular and genre fiction, especially in the academic context of creative writing instruction. 

But the Cloud Atlas novel is distinct from related forms like the polyphonic novel, the story suite, etc. Ray Bradbury may have invented The Martian Chronicles by imagining Winesburg, Ohio, in space—that is, by cleverly applying an innovation in realist fiction to science fiction—but the Cloud Atlas idea is to have Winesburg, Ohio, and The Martian Chronicles in a single novel, and, often, to add historical fiction to the mix as well: to begin in a temporal setting before the author’s and reader’s births and to end well after their deaths. The ambition is to encompass historical fiction, realist fiction, and science fiction, sometimes with fantasy and magical realist elements, this to create what Mitchell calls his oeuvre as a whole: the “Über-novel.”

So what accounts for the rise of this new genre in the 21st century, besides Gioia’s convincing argument about the desire to fuse commerce and experiment and the fall of the wall between realism and other genres? 

First, I think, is an overcompensation for the novel’s perceived diminishment in the face of rival narrative media: a competitive upping of the stakes, a “see what we can do?” or an “anything you can do, I can do better!” Like a lot of extravagant boasting, it strikes a note of insecurity. 

Second is the pressure on novelists to turn pundit. Cloud Atlas ends, let’s not forget, with a literal left-liberal sermon—a very beautiful one, too. The contemporary novelist is supposed to opine (correctly!) on every fashionable political topic, to have appropriately enlightened opinion about history, technology, and the future—is America inherently racist? will we survive climate change? what will follow capitalism? etc.—so why not put it all into one mega-novel that runs straight from 1619 to the 22nd century climate plague?

Third, beyond the superficial op-ed politics, is the deeper or esoteric politics of the form itself. We can express this political unconscious in a skeptical register—where behind its “postcolonial multiplicity lurks a neocon assurance of the smallness of the world and the fundamental Westernness of all who live in it”—or an ecstatic one—in which “such novels participate in an international effort to imagine life after the family as both livable and dignified” and “a move from the model of mankind as an aggregate of individuals to what it promotes as a more comprehensive model of man as a living being or species”—but these are probably the same idea stated in different vocabularies: a World Economic Forum brochure about a future where the individual, previously the novel-as-form’s raison d’être, is subsumed into a biotechnological metatext of aggregated interlinked information monitored by the higher global intelligence embodied, in this case, by the new novel’s own self-aware structure. 

How does such a (please forgive me) Great Reset look on the individual level, the level where, after all, we each still live as ourselves and no one else? Not so compelling, I’m afraid. I think of Christopher Isherwood, an English writer of an earlier generation with a sensibility rather like Mitchell’s, and who, having written an excellent fragmentary novel of his own (Goodbye to Berlin), duly recognized the merit of The Martian Chronicles. In his autobiographical novella Prater Violet, his narrator laments:

Perhaps I had traveled too much, left my heart in too many places. I knew what I was supposed to feel, what it was fashionable for my generation to feel. We cared about everything: fascism in Germany and Italy, the seizure of Manchuria, Indian nationalism, the Irish question, the workers, the Negroes, the Jews. We had spread our feelings over the whole world; and I knew that mine were spread very thin. I cared—oh yes, I certainly cared—about the Austrian socialists. But did I care as much as I said I did, tried to imagine I did? No, not nearly as much.

Would I ever write one of these novels? No. I don’t even want to read them, and I mostly haven’t. (Though I may yet read To Paradise; the reviewers hate it so much there must be something to it.) Cloud Atlas itself was a pleasure, but the postmodern stylistic pastiche was what made it, and the historical sections (“The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” “Letters from Zedelghem”) were conspicuously better than the rest, just as Mitchell’s finest novel (of the fiveish I’ve read out of his eight) is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a fairly straightforward if marvelously stylized historical romance. 

It’s pain and glory enough to tell one story at a time. They say individualism is selfish, but they never tell you the other side of it: much as we want to leave our hearts everywhere, we care about places and times and above all other people only one by one—as individuals.