Weekly Readings #145 (11/11/24-11/17/24)

knowledge not purchased with the loss of power

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

This week I posted “Don’t Get Sentimental” to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. It’s about Ernest Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises. It’s about the merits and demerits of his revolutionary minimalist style. It’s about the sentimentality of this minimalist style. (This minimalism is no less sentimental than the Victorian maximalism it supplanted.) It’s about Robert Cohn, who is the novel’s scapegoat as he is its true and secret hero. Please offer a paid subscription to hear the whole thing, and to access the almost year-long archive of two-plus hour episodes on the British and American literature of the last two centuries. Thanks to my paid subscribers!

I remind you as well that my maximalist sentimental novel, Major Arcana, is forthcoming from Belt Publishing in April 2025. You can pre-order it here, get it from NetGalley here, and access the original Substack serial (including my audio rendition) as a paid subscriber here. I direct my new subscribers to the positive reviews it’s already garnered here, here, and here. It’s about the power (for good and ill) of popular culture, the reality (for good and ill) of magic; it’s about the price of art and the need for love; it’s about the prison and paradise of the flesh; it’s about 160,000 words, but you’ll read it in less than a week.¹

For this week, a provisional thesis on the conflict between knowledge and art explored through Hugh Kenner’s brilliant disquisitions on archaeology and philology as the backgrounds of modernism in The Pound Era. Topical and polemical footnotes, too. Please enjoy!

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Knowledge and the Loss of Power: Philology, Archaeology, and the Failure of Modernism

The Mask of Agamemnon (1550-1500 BC)

How much do we need to know to act? More specifically: how much does the artist need to know to create the work of art? I have always been suspicious of the too-strenuously anti-intellectual, the many injunctions not to think offered by various avant-gardes, the belief—variously expressed by every votary of identity politics—that art could be the spontaneous effusion of the blood and the body, the soil and the self.

And yet, I also think of Anthony Burgess’s quip, in his review of Foucault’s Pendulum, about the novel’s scholar-author: “No man should know so much.” In a famous passage of his autobiographical epic The Prelude, Wordsworth, already worried that modern schooling had become too mechanical and industrial, too deracinated from experience, too deadening to the child’s nature- and fancy-reared imagination, pled, as the telos of education, for “knowledge not purchased with the loss of power.”

The phrase came to my mind this week as a gloss on modernism’s failure when I was reading critic and modernist exegete Hugh Kenner’s masterpiece, The Pound Era. (That modernism is a failure seems to be a consensus on Substack; my own reversion to “Romantic realism”² is an admission of the same, despite my ostensible on-paper fidelity to modernism.³) Kenner elaborates with his extraordinary learning and wit on modernism’s condition of possibility. His McLuhanesque thesis—modernist literature is a typewritten spatial form addressed to the eye, rather than the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries’ belatedly pen-scratched scripts for public oratory—is well known, and its implication for the age of the screen worth pursuing as the media landscape shifts again.

But The Pound Era also emphasizes the development of philology, what Kenner calls “the invention of language,” as modernism’s pre-condition, the indispensable ingredient in its macaronic poesie.

Inheriting a century’s work, young students thought no longer of fixed and authorized languages of which dialect and degenerate versions annoy the litterateur. But to think of languages in constant change means to think of people speaking them, singing them, thinking in them: one reason the Cantos resonate with so many hundred voices. It means to think also of coherence, not “correctness”: Provençal is a patterned variation from Latin, not a clot of random misspellings, and a canzone is a still more tightly patterned integrity discernible within the Provençal: sounds and words and images and affirmations unfolding, refolding, answerable to the unity of one man’s thought. Patterns of thought, moreover, have their morphologies and affinities…

The Romantic discovery of the world’s languages as branches organically grown—that is to say, grown in the live setting of active social life—from seeds whose initial root and dispersion are lost in the night of time: this sanctions Pound, Eliot, and Joyce to write prose and poetry in multiple languages as a way of patterning in their own single works the many worldviews and lifeworlds encoded in the world’s languages. The multi-linguistic work becomes the all-inclusive Aleph at the end of literature, Finnegans Wake über alles.

Through this ending’s aperture alone can the beginning can be disclosed, since Kenner likewise identifies archaeology as a pre-condition of modernism. Archaeology re-attached the Homeric signifier, unknown to the Renaissance or Enlightenment classicist, back to the referent dug up in the unburied city, Schliemann’s famous sigh in the wastes that were Troy: “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.” Joyce’s Homer was the archaeologist’s Homer, Kenner observes, a poet of quotidian reality. Ulysses, with its detailed plans of domestic and public space, its exhaustive catalogue of the city’s byways and shopfronts, was written for the convenience of the explorer three millennia hence with pick and pith helmet and brush unearthing the ruin that was Dublin. The problem is not knowledge per se, but one’s becoming a vassal to it.⁴ Internalizing the worldview of the archaeologist, Joyce saw himself and his civilization as dead already.⁵

After the passage cited above, Kenner quotes some unreadable lines from The Cantos, lines in a jumble of five languages adding up to no one language that anybody ever has spoken or could speak. Kenner, after much research, judges it to be quite limpid, but nothing on the surface compels one to want to do the research in the first place.⁶ Anybody with enough time on his hands can make a puzzle—or solve one—but that’s not the same as writing poetry—or literary criticism.

A thing becomes its opposite: the enthusiast of a living literature, a living word, produces a dead one. By taking the living word out of the continuum of time and placing it in the museum of his would-be epic, the poet kills the word as dead as it had been for the Shakespeare who could not have known (lacking as he was the benefit of philology or archaeology) what it had referred to in the first place.⁷ Shakespeare made a new language, sometimes almost ex nihilo, rather than refining a universal knowledge of the old ones. He invented more than he knew, and probably could not have invented as much had he known more.

Kenner laments the loss of philology as a popular interest, charting the early-20th-century decline in inexpensive editions of classical and medieval poems printed with only prose trots on their facing pages for a public that evidently wanted to work on the languages themselves. This gave way, he says, to other kinds of knowledge:

The collapse of that public, its supersession by folk absorbed in introspection and politics, is an unwritten story.

I’m only a third of the way into The Pound Era. Kenner hasn’t arrived at the politics of the matter yet, though has already chided Pound en passant for what will prove to be the poet’s fateful credulity about homespun knowledge. I will therefore suspend judgment on what’s at the other end of the metonymic chain initiated by “introspection and politics.” (I.e., psychoanalysis and Marxism, i.e., “the Jews.”) There are legitimate grounds on which to criticize psychoanalysis and Marxism—see here and here—but those grounds have much in common with those on which I criticize philology in this very post: not that they uproot us from our primordial heritage, but that they debilitate us with a self-consciousness that flatters and empowers the expert at the expense of the non-expert, in this case the artist. In the matter of art, all the knowledge in the world can’t grant you the power Joyce wished rightly to appropriate, as Kenner eloquently explains, from the priest:

Whoever can give his people better stories than the ones they live in is like the priest in whose hands common bread and wine become capable of feeding the very soul, and he may think of forging in some invisible smithy the uncreated conscience of his race.

To seize this power from the priest and give it right back to the new priesthood of the intelligentsia—this seems a miscalculation, but an understandable one, one hard to think our way out of, that has deformed the arts for a century. Knowledge purchased with the loss of power indeed. The scale of the damage is just becoming visible.⁸ Archaeologists can sort through the ruins, but it’s time for artists, if we can, to walk a new trail forward.

1. If you’re a Democratic partisan with a sudden need to back gracefully out of what I tried to warn everybody half a decade ago was the dead end of the pronoun phenomenon, but without reifying gender in the conservative style, Major Arcana will also serve as a very elaborate guide. I invite DNC operatives to email me at the address in my bio so I can tell them where to send the check.

2. For those who like more topic commentary, I repost here two answers given to anonymous questions send in to my super-secret Tumblr.

The first anon inquires, “What do you think is the relationship of the new conservatism to the new Romanticism?”

I answer: Pretty much the same as the relationship of the old conservatism to the old Romanticism: a counter-Enlightenment rejection of deadening rationalism and an elevation its place of mystic authority. Carlyle and Catholicism, then and now. With Trump as Napoleon figure, though Napoleon was a hero to the left, too. And on the more occult side, I note that Trump is also a master manifester, believing, with Blake and Blake’s disciple Neville Goddard, that “a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make[s] it so”:

Speaking of Napoleon, any potential new liberalism should get on board with the new Romanticism sooner rather than later. Part of the woke program was Romantic, but more, too much, was Marxist-Maoist, Enlightenment to the paradoxical point of madness. Purge out that element and start again. Last week, an institution I’ve been affiliated with sent out one of those post-election guides that recommends coloring books to its stressed-out constituents. But I read through the materials, and I found no mention of politics at all—I even saw a recommendation not to judge others!—and the therapeutic advice, while matronizingly phrased, consisted of harmless (and very de-politicizing) truisms: get enough sleep, get offline, don’t catastrophize, and don’t dwell too much on matters outside one’s own control. Most interesting, however, and not quite a truism, was the end of the document: it recommended that one take up “spirituality,” presumably of the gnostic-Buddhist variety. Romanticism resulted from the failure of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. Right-wing Romanticism staged a counter-revolution, but left-wing Romanticism carried the revolution into the inner life on the theory that one had to change the psyche before changing the world—not unlike taking up “spirituality” after losing an election.

The second anon asks, “You’ve been charting the new conservatism for the better part of a decade now. What’s on your radar for the next cultural zeitgeist?”

I reply: At the end of my appearance on Katherine Dee’s pod three years ago, I predicted a new patriotism would succeed the new conservatism, since both the “woke” and the “based” share a contempt for America, a distant echo of communism’s and fascism’s similar agreement about the corruptions of “Americanization” in the early and mid 20th century. I’m already seeing evidence of this new patriotism: more flags in metropolitan space, more flags on (women’s) clothes. Trump’s victory restored the right’s faith in America, and they will wave the flag in their self-conscious echo of Reaganism. But the left will wave the flag, too, in their effort to recapture the center, as already happened this summer at the DNC. I also still think we’re on course for an increasingly widespread new New Age and interest in “spirituality,” especially as people attempt to become less politically polarized and deranged. There was always occultism on the fringes in the last decade—the TikTok witches on the left, the meme magicians on the right—but I think it will arrive more and more in the mainstream, the slightly hippieish air of some wings of the Trump movement providing a high-profile example.

3. “Around Substack” because Substack is the outpost of the literary counter-elite. The literary elite, attempting to back gracefully out of the dead end of postmodernism, not unreasonably tried to revive modernism in the last decade or two, as the striking formal resemblance of The Sun Also Rises to this century’s autofiction indicates. But this revival posed many of modernism’s original problems, themselves exemplified by Hemingway’s painfully restricted emotional palette. Please note that this observation cuts across the usual political left/right or woke/anti-woke or female/male debates about the state of contemporary literature.

4. Or maybe the problem really is knowledge. It’s hard to say. I go back and forth. So does the internet. Substack delivered to me this week Celine Nguyen’s eloquent attack on self-deception. YouTube, meanwhile, gave me a powerful paean to delusion as the sine qua non of greatness, or even of minimal vitality. Flaubert and Tolstoy are in the one corner, Nietzsche and Wilde in the other. I leave the conundrum in your hands.

5. This “dead-already” state of the too-knowledgeable artist at the Hegelian end of art was already a problem for Joyce’s great precursor, Oscar Wilde, who’d studied both classics and Hegel at Oxford. I wrote about this years ago in my doctoral dissertation, if you’ll permit a self-quotation:

Since Wilde’s spokesman Gilbert asks us to dismiss the question of whether or not we agree with Dante’s convictions so that we can have a richer personal experience of the Dantean text, he effectively dismisses the criterion of truth from criticism. That this gesture has become so foundational in the wake of post-structuralism (which, to summarize crudely, views “truth” as a contingent effect of semiosis), its boldness in the historical context should not be overlooked. Wilde overturns the entirety of the critical tradition from Plato to Pater and anticipates, where he does not actually influence, the dominant theoretical tendencies of the late twentieth century.

We might more modestly claim that Gilbert’s anti-metaphysical, anti-epistemological approach to Dante does no more than usefully supply a plausible answer to a genuine practical question: why should the modern reader attend to older literary works whose models of reality have been invalidated by scientific investigation and sociopolitical transformation? By replying that we should go on reading Dante (or Homer or the Greek tragedians, all similarly treated in the dialogue) for the irreplaceable sensations they provide, Wilde/Gilbert is being no more than pragmatic and populist. He champions the common reader against the scholar by dismissing as irrelevant the historical supersession of the ideologies these ancient and medieval artists espoused. Though few educated modern readers can possibly believe that the universe is organized as Homer or Dante present it, translations continue to be published and readers go on reading, probably dismissing the poets’ explicit theses while finding their poems valuable for the affects they provide, just as Gilbert claims. But this admittedly practical argument about past art exacts a price from the present artist: it assumes in advance the aesthetic irrelevance of metaphysics, ethics, politics, and other truth-claims, and so bars from contemporary art the sources of authority that Homer or Dante, not to say Dickens or Eliot, claimed for themselves. Ernest intuits this at the dialogue’s conclusion when he declares that Gilbert is “an antinomian”—one, that is, who recognizes no law (1154). Nevertheless, the antinomian critic can at least revel in the productions of every era and enjoy every artistic sensation; the artist, on the other hand, remains condemned to produce mute objects whose testimony it requires the critic to extrude. In a sense, all artists become dead artists, consigned to a meaningless past even in the present.

6. Here is what separates The Cantos (as far as one can tell, anyway) from The Waste Land and Ulysses. The latter two are overwhelmingly powerful even when we don’t understand them, maybe more powerful when we don’t understand them than when we do, as Eliot claimed of Dante’s Italian. They therefore compel our understanding.

7. Ben Jonson, whom Joyce affected to prefer to Shakespeare, belittled the bard for his lack of classical languages. Kenner records that Pound censured the Greek- and Latinless Henry James for the same. A few years ago, I wrote an article for Tablet, “War on the Classics,” about the long fight within western literature, not invented by today’s “woke activists,” over whether the classics are the fount of modern literature or a dead hand constraining its possibilities. Conveniently enough, I think we need to know the stories, but not necessarily the languages. Then again, Kenner also records that Pound knew a lot of words in many languages but not the languages themselves, since he couldn’t be bothered to learn the conjugations. This is also true of me, as for Major Arcana’s (anti-)hero(ine) Ash del Greco, who (too often) speaks for me:

She’d learned a new word too: Gesamtkunstwerk. She had the internet pronounce it for her and resolved to say it as soon as she could; surely high school, the public high school she would enter in just a month, with so much time to learn freed up from the religious dogma Catholic school had inflicted on her, would give her the opportunity. She would never learn any language besides English fluently—syntax was music and novel and architecture: not for her—but she would have words from every language on earth, brain-stimulants, in her cyclopedic lexicon. Eventually, she would learn every word in the world.

8. For example:

I might also mention the police officers of the land whose thinkers first comprehensively theorized freedom of speech: they now threaten and even arrest citizens over their social media posts. Why don’t the police save themselves the time and go spit directly on the graves of John Milton and John Stuart Mill?

If you have internalized the mentality of the expert, then you always know what is right for everyone to say and think. If people say and think otherwise, they abridge your authority and even therefore seem to threaten your personhood. You identify, therefore, with the apparatus of censorship to shield your self-regard. The true artist, however, can never identify with this apparatus. True artists know the time will come when they have to make something new that the apparatus does not even yet have a category for, and what the apparatus doesn’t already have a category for it suppresses as surely as it suppressed what it has already tagged as “forbidden.” With whatever progressive alibi, the censor as such is at war with the future and therefore at war with art.