August Books

the human world is made of stories, not people

I continue my sabbatical from longform criticism as I write my novel, Major Arcana, which I am now serializing in both text and audio format for paid subscribers. For now, a catalogue of my last month’s reading cross-posted from johnpistelli.com. Please enjoy!

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The Song of Solomon, The Book of Isaiah
The poetry section of the King James Bible comes to its end with this famous and brief erotic song, the chronicle of a forbidden love affair, its raptures and its quotidian detail irreducible to religious allegory (as mentioned in my Manifesto! podcast appearance, Susan Sontag found the Jewish and Christian allegorization of such poetic texts to be the origin of the interpretive impulse):

The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice. My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely. Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

More pleasing to the orthodox religious sensibility is Isaiah, with which the prophecy section begins, a lengthy and thunderous denunciation of “the greed and hypocrisy of the urban elites, and what he sees as infidelity in foreign affairs,” to quote Norton Critical Edition Old Testament editor Herbert Marks. In combination with his protest against the neglect of the poor, the prophet’s vivid loathing of cosmopolitan licentiousness suggests a perennial conjunction between socialism and conservatism:

In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, the chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, the rings, and nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the vails. And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.

More consequential for the later history of religion, the prophet’s utopian image of global human redemption—

And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

—and his deployment of the figure of “the suffering servant,” probably intended (says Marks) to signify either a saving righteous remnant in Israel or a foreign monarch used by God as an instrument to save his chosen people—

Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

—creates an air of apocalyptic messianism without which, writes Marks, “Christianity would be unthinkable.” The fortuitous juxtaposition of these two Biblical books, however, invites a question: what if the imminently conquering world-religion had been based less on Isaiah’s ascetic fury and more on the Song’s luxurious lyricism?

Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover
Pretty good for a critic! Sontag angrily insisted that her novels mattered more than her essays. That will probably never be accepted by literary culture at large, for which the titanic struggle in her essayist’s soul between “Jewish moral seriousness” and “homosexual aestheticism and irony” exemplify the dilemmas of an age, but as a postmodern historical novel, this does work. (I wonder—her biographers haven’t mentioned it—if Sontag’s intense involvement in the Rushdie affair when she was president of PEN International in the 1980s inspired her to write something akin to, if less fantastical than, Rushdie’s own phantasmagorias.) The Volcano Lover dramatizes the love triangle among Sir William Hamilton, a collector, connoisseur, and British envoy to Naples aesthetically obsessed with Mt. Vesuvius; Emma Hamilton, his parvenu second wife essentially sold to him by his dissolute nephew back in England; and Horatio Nelson, British naval champion against Napoleon. Sontag uses the dramatic fact of the affair as an occasion to hallucinate marvelously over the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism. Goethe, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and William Beckford make appearances. We hear of Strawberry Hill and of the appeal of the ruin, of the emergent consumer culture of celebrity, of the difference between classical and romantic art and of the latter’s lingering effect on our own aesthetic mood:

What people admired then was an art (whose model was the classical one) that minimized the pain of pain. It showed people able to maintain decorum and composure, even in monumental suffering.

We admire, in the name of truthfulness, an art that exhibits the maximum amount of trauma, violence, physical indignity. (The question is: Do we feel it?) For us, the significant moment is the one that disturbs us most.

The opening chapters, an often discursive portrayal of the titular Sir William as aesthete and collector, a kind of pendant to Sontag’s classic saturnine meditation on Walter Benjamin, might be the most accomplished in the book. But she advances beyond her essayistic métier: she enters the minds of the other characters with authority and is persuasive in describing action. Speaking of “trauma, violence, physical indignity,” the action becomes especially brutal as she narrates the suppression of the republican revolt in Naples in which Nelson participated while carrying on his affair with Emma. This leads us to the novel’s politics, first sign of the author’s self-described liberal imperialism. The leaders of the republican revolt were enlightened elites, illuminated scions of the upper class, such as the executed poet Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, who famously gets the novel’s last word from beyond the grave on the reactionary lovers at its center: “Damn them all.” Meanwhile, the spies and torturers of the stupid, crass Bourbon monarchs are abetted in slaughtering the intelligentsia by the filthy and bloodthirsty mob. Not without rather ruefully knowing what’s doing when she abandons the revolutionary tradition for the more modest defense of human rights—

A revolution made by members of the privileged classes in the metropolis, lacking any support in the countryside or among the urban masses, now further pauperized by the exit of capital with the flight of the old regime and the loss of revenues brought in by tourism […] Such a revolution doesn’t have a chance. Indeed, it is the classic design, confected in that decade, reused many times since, for a revolution that doesn’t have a chance.

—Sontag therefore refurbishes left-liberal politics as the prudent province of the intellectually deserving elite against backward rival elites and especially against the tasteless dregs and scum of the lower orders. All in all, a startling prophecy from 1992 of what American politics would become in the second and third decades of the 21st century. As the author of the novel Major Arcana, I must note there’s even a Tarot scene: Sir William draws all four court cards in the suit of cups, along with The Fool. “What’s the difference between essays and novels?” we can hear Sontag asking. The latter are made of folly and feeling, while the former, presumably, are earthbound—under the sign of Saturn.

Joseph Epstein, The Novel, Who Needs It?
In case you missed it, my review of this essayist’s defense of the novel ran as part of a RealClearBooks symposium here.

David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
Mitchell found his characteristic formula early: it will recur with permutations in both Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. This 1999 first novel is self-consciously millennial, apocalyptic—world-encompassing and world-ending. It moves from east to west in 10 interconnected first-person stories. Each narrative has its own integrity—a bio-terrorist in Japan, a peasant woman in China, an art thief in Russia, etc.—but the panorama that gradually emerges from the novel’s innumerable tiny brushstrokes is of a cosmic battle between “noncorporeal entities” and an an artificial intelligence for control of the world’s nuclear arsenals. (Mitchell will retcon the vague magical realism here into a more formally “world-built” generic fantasy with The Bone Clocks, with its immemorial war between Horologist and Anchorite—for my taste a lamentable fall into the literal and moralistic.) There are customary first-novel weaknesses here. Mitchell wears his influences loudly: DeLillo in the Okinawa chapter, Murakami in the Tokyo chapter, Martin Amis in the Hong Kong and London chapters, etc. But the emergently numinous cumulative effect does dazzle, and all by implication rather than—again as in The Bone Clocks—explication. Mitchell is also our strongest counterargument to “write what you know,” whether we encounter this advice as the old realist MFA dogma or in its new form in the age of so-called “cultural appropriation.” Mitchell at his best is a fantasist and an exoticist. He knows it, too. I like this part of his Paris Review interview in which Mitchell at once acknowledges and dismisses the political critique coming his way:

[Conrad’s] story “Youth” has this beautiful passage about your first landfall in Asia and how it haunts you for the rest of your life—everything is downhill afterward. […] We all romanticize our youth, but when East Asia is intertwined with youth, the wistfulness and the sense of loss are amplified—for reasons which Edward Said might have scorned, and who knows, maybe justifiably. But Conrad wasn’t lying about what he felt, and neither am I, so perhaps we just have to take the flak.

The closer he gets to home turf, the crasser and more contrived he becomes. But put him in the mind of a wandering Mongolian spirit, or, in the novel’s most bravura chapter, give him the whole of 20th-century Chinese history to narrate from the purview of one old woman on one “Holy Mountain,” and he produces wonders, if wonders closer in their mode to Ray Bradbury or Neil Gaiman than to tough-minded exponents of the ruthlessly contemporary like DeLillo and Amis. The character Luisa Rey, who will later appear elsewhere in Mitchell’s self-described Übernovel, utters the fantasist’s, not the realist’s, credo: “The human world is made of stories, not people.” As with Sontag’s 1990s novel, the political keynote here is a chastened post-historical liberalism—Mitchell’s fragmentary narrative cuts a swath from China through Mongolia to Russia, and the resulting survey of communism’s ruins could not be more damning—but marked in his case by less elitist misanthropy and more world-sorrow at our common condition. The penultimate chapter, given entirely in the dialogue of a late-night call-in show, presents a New York apocalypse that two years after the novel’s publication would prove real. To those who scoff at Mitchell’s ghostly entities themselves resembling the novel’s own organizing intelligence, I rejoin: who says novelists aren’t psychic?

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
This 1928 classic was Mitchell’s inspiration, as the epigraph to Ghostwritten and the recurring character of Luisa Rey attests. Again from his Paris Review interview:

We studied Our Town at school when I was fifteen. It was one of the first works of literature that moved me. It implanted a distrust of the distinction between high-, middle-, and lowbrow books. For me, the distinction between excellent and engaging and the less so is more useful. Then I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey at university. It’s a glorious thing, packed with ideas for other possible books. Wilder’s novel is an attempt to explain why a certain group of people died when a rope bridge collapsed in Peru—to locate meaning in randomness. It’s an essay in fiction about causality. Ghostwritten is a sequence of explorations on the same subject, and I named one of the characters Luisa Rey as a kind of tribute.

Mitchell alludes to critic Dwight Macdonald, who used Wilder as one of his main examples of middlebrow art—art that waters down high-culture effects for a popular audience—in his classic essay “Masscult and Midcult.” That’s sociology, but what about literary criticism? The voice of literary criticism says, “Sorry, haters, but The Bridge is a masterpiece.” Written just after Wilder earned his master’s in French literature, the novel has an august and austere tale-teller’s high style as it narrates the poignant lives of the bridge’s victims: a noblewoman obsessed with the daughter who spurns her, an orphan in mourning for his twin brother, and an aesthete who mentors an upstart actress. All are driven by love, which, the novel concludes, is all that really unites us despite our perennial refusals of and derangements by its grace. An aside on the art of literature, by way of a comment on the noblewoman’s later publicized and celebrated letters to her alienated daughter, suggests Wilder’s priority:

[T]he Conde delighted in her letters, but he thought that when he had enjoyed the style he had extracted all their richness and intention, missing (as most readers do) the whole purport of literature, which is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

The sociologist of literature will detect in this elevation of sentiment over style the true middlebrow note, except that it comes to us with deliberate irony through the gently ironic medium of Wilder’s own rigorous tone, purified as it is of all extraneous feeling. Wilder reflects of the aesthete and his beloved actress as they mount great plays for an indifferent audience, which the sociologist of art will never understand, “The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.”

Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness
One of the most beloved books on Tarot, originally published in 1980 and updated several times since, the late occultist and comic-book writer Rachel Pollack’s text focuses on three subjects: the meaning of the Major Arcana as an allegory for the awakening of the self from the mundane ego represented by The Magician’s authority over matter to the union with “super-consciousness” symbolized by the androgynous dancer of The World; the meaning of the Minor Arcana, especially in Pamela Colman Smith’s pictorial revisions thereof; and a guide to Tarot readings, including some of Pollack’s own design, such as one based on the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life. The first part will be of most interest to the common reader as Pollack eloquently pursues her goal:

In this book I have attempted to create what I call a ‘humanistic’ Tarot, derived not just from esoteric truths, but also from the insights of modern post­-Jungian psychology to give a rounded picture of who we are, how we act, and what forces shape and direct us. In such a Tarot the goal is not fixed meanings, but rather a method by which each person can gain a greater insight into life. While the analysis of each card will come partly from its use in readings, with right side up and reversed meanings, the analysis will show primarily how that card adds to our knowledge of human experience.

Accordingly, this is the book to read for those coming to Tarot from art, literature, and the humanities, as Pollack’s many-faceted reflection on this symbol-system resembles the polysemous method of literary criticism at its best rather the often deadening “allegorical” approach of more literal-minded occultists (here resembling their religious brethren, as witness my comment on the Song of Solomon above). If your brain has been damaged by the last decade’s cultural and political wars, you should either stay away from this book or prepare to take it medicinally, as it was written by a transgender woman and takes certain feminist and liberal ideals for granted while being relatively dismissive toward the materialist left and quoting as authorities figures this left would regard as “fascist,” such as Jung and Crowley. Pollack also offers her own justification of the Tarot’s divinatory use against detractors. She accuses the science-minded skeptic of being trapped in a Baconian or Newtonian mechanistic vision of science that has been discredited by the manifold uncertainties of modern physics, and she charges astrologers and other systematic occultists who think they’re above “magic tricks” with neglecting the need to artificially induce randomness (as in both the Tarot and the I Ching) to allow the direct intervention in our lives of higher intelligence. “The way to the super-conscious is through the unconscious,” she writes, and I don’t know how a novelist or poet could possibly disagree.

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782)