Weekly Readings #146 (11/18/24-11/24/24)

absolutely deranged

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

This week I released “Living Too Long with a Single Dream” for The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. It’s about why The Great Gatsby isn’t overrated. It’s also a pro-capitalist reading of The Great Gatsby, which you may never have encountered before; it’s about how, for Fitzgerald, style is money. Aptly, you will have to become a paid subscriber to listen to it. Many thanks to those who have subscribed already!

I also appeared this week on “Pierre Bourdieu Was Blowing Down the Street,” an episode of Joshua Doležal’s podcast at The Recovering Academic, for a wide-ranging conversation about academia, literary taste, traditional publishing vs. self-publishing, and more. We talked a lot about my new novel, Major Arcana, forthcoming from Belt Publishing in April 2025, which you can pre-order here, get from NetGalley here, and access in its original Substack serial format (including my audio rendition) as a paid subscriber here. I excerpt the part of our conversation where I describe the novel’s concept and genesis:

I’m always looking for ways to take what worked in the past and bring it in to a kind of usable present. So I thought, well, this seems to be a good platform for serializing a novel, given that the novel has always been a serial form. Even novels you wouldn’t think were serialized, like Ulysses, you know, no cliffhangers, but it was serialized. Something that was a big part of my early life was that I read comic books and graphic novels from a very young age. My father had been a fan and transferred that to me. I got away from them for a while, but then most of the classes I teach at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design are about comics and graphic novels. So I’d always wanted to do a novel that would sort of pick up where The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon left off. That kind of ended in the ’50s, but there were a lot of interesting things that happened in the comic book world after that. So I did this multi-generational saga where you have the late 20th century occultist comic book writer in the ’90s, and then you have the person—“she or whatever” ends up being her pronoun by the end of the book—she who may be his daughter and may not be, and her work as an online occult influencer in the present. So that’s the basic setup.

For this week, some requested commentary on the literary scandal du semaine with further provocation in the two footnotes. (When I produce unreadably long paragraphs, as I’ve done in those footnotes, I do so because I don’t want them to be read too hastily. At least I don’t write whole novels without paragraph breaks like the Euro-trendoids do.) Please enjoy!

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Preserved in Its Corruption: Vicissitudes of the Reprobate Genius

Susanne Wenger, The Sign of Scorpio, 1943-1945

Several people have asked me to write about—or have anticipated that I would write about—the Cormac McCarthy article in Vanity Fair from this week. I don’t know why. I’ve made my unpleasant opinion on the general question of the reprobate genius clear in a variety of venues over the years. I considered looking up old posts and linking to them, or just asking ChatGPT what I think. But I have plenty of new subscribers who don’t yet know how unpleasant I can be—and, for the longtime readers, why not play the hits? Repetition, as the one-time Nazi collaborator Paul de Man liked to say, is always repetition with a difference.

First, those of drawn to modernism are drawn to the reprobate genius. We hold at the level of impulse some theory that the highest art is a sublime affront,¹ what looks to our over-civilized eye like the ill-mannerliness of hell’s barbaric embassy. That art not bearing witness to some extremity unavailable to common sense or common experience is not really art at all, is just what they now call a “cozy read.” I was moreover educated in the era when even the “coziest” writers in the canon were mercilessly “interrogated” (this—borrowed, one assumes, from the police practice of the communist garrison states—was the favored locution) for the stubborn smutches of brimstone in the folds of their ambassadorial garb: Jane Austen, of all people, dripping from top to toe with the sweated gore of the sugar plantation. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” If a writer is not some kind of rapist or Nazi, I honestly tend to doubt I am in the presence of literary greatness. I have tended to enjoy almost collecting the sins of the great ones. In the most recent Invisible College episode, enumerating the praise Fitzgerald received for The Great Gatsby from his illustrious contemporaries, I listed the positive responses of Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, T. S. Eliot , and Gertrude Stein. “That’s three anti-Semites and one Jewish fascist sympathizer, if we’re keeping track of the problems of modernism,” I quipped. I never read the door-stopping biographies of authors, but still, I grew up in a beauty shop, and I’ve got the dirt on everybody.

I remember very early in my first year of college speaking to a friend from high school. I had gone to Pitt to study English and become a great writer; he had gone to CMU to study art and become a great painter. We were somewhere outside drifting between the two campuses on a damp, hot night late in August or early in September. (Ash del Greco and Jacob Morrow take the same walks in Major Arcana.) I earnestly told him I was worried I was too good a person to become a major writer. Perhaps, I proposed, I should begin to commit evil acts programmatically, as a course of self-improvement. You’re not that good of a person, he was kind enough to reassure me.² Later in college, with another friend, I had the conversation I recounted about the awfulness of Milton and Tolstoy in my bad review of Benjamin Moser’s intensely moralized Sontag biography. Milton, Tolstoy, and Sontag are compelling examples of the reprobate genius because they were such committed moralists themselves. The hideous impossibility of being these imperious egos’ spouses, lovers, children, friends, or servants derived from nowhere but their idealism. Shelley is another pure example, all the purer in that, as a leftist, he tends to be handled gently even today by his commentators, despite what I find to be his extravagantly monstrous behavior, especially toward his first wife. Burroughs and Mailer, sure—their biographical vileness was just truth in advertising for themselves. What can we expect from an immoralist except immorality? But Milton, Shelley, Tolstoy, and Sontag display the folly of holding the highly moral author in some sort of special regard. The moralist Christian Tolstoy can rape his wife as well as the immoralist magician Burroughs can shoot his. Mao had better intentions than Hitler. Does knowing that help you if you are butchered under the aegis of Mao?

Possibly the worst legacy of Romanticism—and the most indisputably vital one in our age of the parasocial—is the conflation of the life and the work. It’s better that we know nothing of Shakespeare, that Shakespeare wrote no Prelude or song of himself. Insofar as the work and the life now are inextricable, however, at least until the AI releases us back into the pre-modern impersonality of a collective rhetoric, then the life is a matter, like the work, for reflection. It’s there to tease us out of thought, like the ambiguous frieze on the urn Keats’s speaker raptly and warily circles, with its imagery arrested somewhere between seduction and rape, the passion of ravishment momentarily suspended on the “unravished” surface of the object for the purpose of human contemplation. The peremptory wish to condemn—and for what purpose do we loudly condemn what we have already publicly agreed to be criminal activity?—interferes with such detached contemplation of the potentialities of our nature.

If we judge without contemplating, we will never really know our nature, not even for the purpose of actual remediation rather than yet more fruitless recrimination. We need not condone the relevant crime—“It is impossible that no offenses should come, but woe to him through whom they do come!”—and we do no honor to the criminal if we make their testimony the locus of our own understanding. If we honor anything at all, we honor the transcendence of raw, sordid, and chaotic experience into the intricately permanent, which the reprobate genius, unlike the rest of us reprobates, has uniquely been able to achieve. Northrop Frye, from Anatomy of Criticism:

The corruption out of which human art has been constructed will always remain in the art, but the imaginative quality of the art preserves it in its corruption, like the corpse of a saint.

There is something vile, even (yes!) criminal, it has always seemed to me, in iconoclasm itself, something at least adjacent to the other crimes under consideration here. What do we lose when we smash the icon? We are we so eager to see greatness brought down to or beneath our own level? Who is degraded but ourselves by our judgmental gossip? I have the dirt on everyone. What do I have to show for it but my own filthy hands?

1. Is the affront so sublime, however? Is it not, rather, merely squalid? Without wishing to start some kind of Blake-Smith-like feud, I note that in an essay to which I am temperamentally unsympathetic, B. D. McClay identifies McCarthy’s activities as “sin” and meditates on the banality of sin itself. She makes reference to Milton’s Satan, in whose rebellious rhetoric she does not find the heroism Blake and Shelley attributed to it. I tend to think an appreciation of this heroism is necessary to the poem, precisely so that the poem can dispel it in a wider vista of revolution than the revolutionary Satan, marred by ressentiment, has been able to command. Milton was a revolutionary and knew whereof he spoke; Satan is a corrective self-portrait, but not an entirely self-abasing one; to repeat a fanciful analogy I’ve used before, Paradise Lost is like a Stalinist teaching himself to be a Trotskyist. We don’t need to have some pedantic quarrel over Milton, however. The quarrel is rather about the status of individual aspiration in this world vis-à-vis everything we might wish to call “God.” I have always had a profound temperamental dis-affinity with Catholicism on this subject. Surely some part of God wants us to storm the heavens. The basically suburban tenor of the church in America is what sent me as a suburban teen hurtling into the arms of Nietzsche, Bloom, Paglia, Sontag, Vidal, and all the rest in the first place. Maybe it’s a “sin” that such wicked authors “groomed” me! Or maybe the world is strange, beautiful, and terrible place not always best apprehended through the lens of moral judgment about the limits of human passion. To take a Catholic sensibility as opposite to McClay’s temperament as it is to mine, consider the renegade sociologist Justin Murphy’s latest missive decrying Nietzsche in the name of John’s gospel. (I am standing at the gnostic apex of a triangle whose base is the right-to-left Catholic spectrum running from Murphy to McClay.) Murphy gives us the hackneyed old line about Nietzsche’s failed, bathetic life. This would be fair if one were comparing Nietzsche to anyone but Jesus. Jesus’s life, however, was, by the Roman standard the Catholic has sadly internalized, even more of a spectacular failure than Nietzsche’s. Here was no stolid citizen-soldier and paterfamilias but rather an itinerant magician and preacher of apocalypse, a cult-leader deliberately alienating his followers from home and family, possibly unmarried and definitely childless, with a pronounced aversion to condemning individual instances of sexual transgression, executed as a political revolutionary on the threshold of middle age. Anyone who actually worships this person, and not the insanely logical theology spun for worldly power out of his criminal example by the churches, will not lead any kind of life the world would call moral. His life cannot be squared with the rational prudence and reality-testing the Catholic thinker wishes to find in the gospel, “wishes” for the irrelevantly polemical purpose of vindicating the medieval schools against the charge of irrationalism hurled by the Enlightenment. When Nietzsche identified both himself and Dionysus with Christ, he identified archetypes with precision; Wilde, too, who slept with many more teenagers than Cormac McCarthy ever did, made the same identification in the same period. Jesus Christ is an absolute scandal. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, sometimes seems to worship pious Aeneas rather than its inconveniently Dionysian God.

2. While I have “more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in,” and while I have committed the common run of sins, I’m sure, I never did pledge myself to the willful enactment of evil. I never violated the Mann Act, for example. What, then, do I make of the charge against McCarthy? I accept as principle the ban on a 42-year-old man sleeping with a 17-year-old girl. I accept, even, the Platonic argument from the Phaedrus that such a coupling is a fundamental misdirection and therefore betrayal of the pedagogic impulse. There is something putrid and repulsive in McCarthy’s dirty letters to a teenage girl, which even his lover, who mocks and derides with the cynical laugh of an anti-woke activist the idea that he was a “groomer,” even seems to feel herself. But I don’t know if it would make a difference if the girl were a boy, or if the boy were 18 and not 17, or if the man were 48 and not 42. I am deliberately and mischievously describing Bachardy and Isherwood, of course, a tryst they made a romantic documentary about, a documentary in which Bachardy’s earnest expressions of life-long love are not called into question, as McCarthy’s still-faithful paramour’s are. (The personal may be the political, but the people who get too excited when they say that tend to want to replace your personal life with their politics.) The question isn’t about a double standard for gay men; it’s about our differing regard for men and women per se. That girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, while boys are made of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails, is a remarkably obdurate presumption of our culture. There are advantages and disadvantages on both sides; this is why, given the chance, so many boys want to be girls and girls want to be boys now. It’s painful when you’re not allowed to be hard, and it’s just as painful when you’re not allowed to be soft. Everyone wants it all, and rightly so. (And as for the Mann Act, I reflect on the 20th century as the century of pedophilia in my essay on Death in Venice.) I accept, as I say, the ban on McCarthy’s sex act in principle. Principle and perforce law are no great help to novelists or essayists, though, who, if they are any good, concern themselves with the complexity of individual experiences. I think McCarthy did a basically wrong thing, but his lover, now over two decades my own senior, claims otherwise. The very superior literary world, subliminally judging her a MAGA type of person, doesn’t believe her. I don’t know her well enough to believe her or not; I don’t know her at all; all I know, and all you know, is gossip. And, while the archive may hold darker secrets or may not, the fact that McCarthy loved her well into her middle age suggests that we aren’t dealing here with a pedophilic pathology as such. Back to his dirty letters: the literary crime of which McCarthy and the Vanity Fair writer now both stand accused is kitsch. Friend-of-the-blog Secret Squirrel enlarges this into a broader theory of the late-20th-century novel of historic violence qua kitsch, one also encompassing Coetzee and Vargas Llosa, which I almost find persuasive. The theory applies word for word (except maybe for the part about Werner Herzog) to Toni Morrison’s Beloved as well, but the mystique of collective racial consciousness deliberately generated by that novel prevents us from reading it in such terms, somehow makes such a judgment seem veritably obscene. (Toni Morrison, by the way, once wrote that we infantilize women if we don’t consider their complicity in their own rape and abuse. Of the potential that women provoke such trespasses, Morrison summarily writes, “It does matter what she does,” in her introduction to her edited volume, Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case. I told you I have the dirt on everyone.) Personally, I admire the novels of Morrison and McCarthy and Coetzee (I still need to read Vargas Llosa’s) and think they build enough buttressing irony into their intellectual artifices of brutality to avoid the charge of outright bad faith. Rather, they invite us to wonder why intellectuals should walk, even if only in their minds, down such bloody alleys at all. As for the Vanity Fair article, its lyrical ambitions certainly fall short on occasion, but the poppy and besotted prose is more to my taste than the nasty smirking voyeur style of the New Yorker. It was fun to read. Is that a crime? Why are literary people today such miserable little complainers about every single thing on earth? Darias without wit. It’s unendurable. And now I’m complaining about their complaints—it never ends! Whatever one thinks of the other viral article of the week, Dean Kissick’s update on Tom Wolfe in Harper’s deriding the identitarian and small-souled political fixations of the art world, I cheerfully endorse its amoral, psychedelic conclusion:

All four of these artists have committed themselves to their very weird, singular visions, which are rendered with a palpable intensity that fills their crowded images from edge to edge. They create strange, dark fantasy scenes of violence, terror, lust, and perversity—the kinds of repressed and unspoken human desires that have appeared in art for thousands of years, but which are, for the most part, no longer welcome in the galleries. You can tell by looking at their works that they are searching for the something else.

[…]

Art is often best when it’s absolutely deranged. We are irrational, incoherent beings, and artists and writers should embrace this once more. If you believe that artworks cast spells, you should use that magic for greater causes than propagating a polite, liberal American sensibility or evading the effects of modern technology. You are free to dream anything. To build different worlds, to whisper enticements in many ears, to try to destroy reality; these are prospects that artists have dreamed of for centuries. There is still so much to imagine.