MAJOR ARCANA: Preface

a serialized novel by John Pistelli

A public suicide on a university campus. An occultist comic-book writer who transfigured the American superhero turned academic gender activist who transfigures the English language. An online manifestation coach who by the age of 20 has seen to the end of everything and wants desperately to prove the superiority of mind over matter. A brilliant artist who renounces art as murderous idolatry. A grieving mother who picks up a weapon to take her revenge. A child in search of a parent. A student determined to die for love. A government-synthesized drug that provides access to fifth-dimensional perception. All this and much more: with a decades-spanning but tightly-knit plot, Major Arcana canvasses America’s inner life and moral history from coast to coast and across three generations in a delirious, hilarious, and harrowing saga about art and love that reinvents the novel for our time.

Not since Portraits and Ashes have I written so rapidly, so furiously, so possessed by visions and voices. Wallace Stevens captures the experience: “Out of nothing to have come on major weather.” This is major weather. This is Major Arcana.

---

Major Arcana as a Substack Serial: Practical Matters

Major Arcana will be a weekly serial for paid Substack subscribers. Chapters will include both text and audio and will appear every Monday starting March 20. The serial will run for 50 weeks. All Major Arcana chapters can be accessed (in reverse order) from this tag. Paid subscribers will also receive access to this post containing pdfs of my three earlier novels, Portraits and Ashes, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, and The Class of 2000.

If you enjoy Major Arcana, it would help the project immensely if you’d say so in a public forum such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or the platform of your choice. I also welcome back-channel communications, such as whispering of the novel’s greatness to your powerful friends in New York or Los Angeles.

Only the chapters of Major Arcana will be paywalled on Grand Hotel Abyss; all other posts—the Weekly Readings series and any other essays or reviews—will remain free. If you have the means, however, and if you’ve enjoyed the nine years’ worth of literary and cultural material I have published and continue to publish for free online, a subscription will also subsidize this aspect of my work and encourage me not only to continue but to enlarge it and to improve upon it.

Following the novel’s serialization, I will continue to provide paid subscribers with premium—forgive the word—“content.” This won’t be another novel—I’m not Joyce Carol Oates!—but perhaps, depending on reader interest, a book club, podcast, or literature course.

Ideally, a work of art speaks for itself. We live in a period and communicate in a medium, however, both of which conspicuously erode the common cultural ground on which artist and audience supposedly met in more placid epochs. I’ve also always enjoyed the manifesto-like prefaces late-19th-century and early-20th-century writers like Hawthorne, Wilde, Conrad, and James would append to their novels. In their spirit, I provide below a few anticipatory reflections on the aesthetics and politics of Major Arcana.

---

Major Arcana: Disclaimers

I may have borrowed certain landscapes and certain institutions as settings—never named as such—but this is strictly for verisimilitude’s sake, as even imaginary stories have to take place somewhere. No reference to any real-life persons is intended; any apparent resemblance is purely coincidental.

As for today’s question of how to handle painful or inflammatory subjects, I won’t give specific “content warnings.” My novels tend toward the controversial and the catastrophic—I like books with philosophical debates and high body counts—so go in assuming you’ll encounter from the prologue forward the full panoply of human disaster, all types of language, and every sort of opinion.

The header image for all Major Arcana front-page Substack posts is a detail of Pamela Colman Smith’s Lovers card in the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck.

---

Major Arcana as a 21st-Century Novel

I take the novel’s persistent relevance for granted. I do so for local reasons: the younger generation likes to read books more than my generation does, for example. I also do so for grander reasons. “Speak and bear witness,” Rilke commands us in the Duino Elegies. Speech, however, vanishes as soon as it’s uttered, which is why, I assume, Rilke wrote. Digital discourse will also probably vanish, as technology-dependent spectacle usually does. The book—in this case, the novel—remains the most durable vehicle of witness; I will eventually publish Major Arcana in print. The novel in that sense needs no apology. We can’t go on writing the same novel year after year, decade after decade, century after century, however. We must, as the poet said, “make it new.”

Henry James’s envy of drama as the more orderly aesthetic form shaped the 20th-century novel. “Dramatize, dramatize!” was James’s battle cry. He held that a novel’s narrator must descend from the God-like pedestal of a Balzac, Tolstoy, or George Eliot and transmit the fictional events through singular characters’ distinct perspectives, fulfilling Flaubert’s earlier dictum that the novelist should disappear into the text like an immanent deity.

When these artistic priorities became routinized as creative-writing pedagogy in the middle 20th century, oversimplified into the classroom injunction, “Show, don’t tell,” they served the novel well in its rivalry with cinema—maybe too well, as a number of great fictions written across the 20th century, from writers as distinguished as Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy, whether they had MFAs or not, read almost like screenplays.

In the 21st century’s changed media environment, with cinema demoted perhaps even beneath prose fiction by a host of online forms, we can’t go on writing the 20th-century novel. The 20th century liked private lives, sometimes narrated in torrents of Joycean or Woolfean or Faulknerian prose from within, but just as often seen from the outside, from the perspective of a camera, in ways that subtly indicated the interior: what a woman’s way of cutting a rose suggests about her adulterous desire, how a man’s grip on his cigarette intimates his battlefield trauma.

We no longer live private lives in this sense, despite the clamor of our claims to trauma; Hemingway’s iceberg has run aground. The 21st century likes endless chatter, anecdotes, speculation, criticism—in social media posts, in videos, on podcasts—about scandalous lives lived as loudly as possible.

The 21st-century novel, therefore, can handle much more telling—not to the entire exclusion of showing, but as showing’s nearly equal partner. Cinema is no longer the lover from whose arms we must hope to seduce the reader; our rivals now are the video essay, the podcast biography, and the Twitter thread. We must learn to be narrators again—narrators and, yes, commentators.

An aesthetic of telling requires us to have something extraordinary and perhaps even wise to relate; a Flaubertian finickiness in verbal description will longer serve as a sufficient marker of “art.” Here I take my cue from a long and brilliant 21st-century (or 27th-century) novel I’m still reading, Roberto Bolaño’s’s 2666:

What matters is that it’s well-written, he said. No, I told him, you know that isn’t what matters. Wrong, wrong, wrong, I said, and finally he had to cede the point.

On the other hand, the way to write about the internet is to write about it, not to mimic its form with strange gimmicks. A novel is a novel, not a browser or an app. Anything uttered in a fictional video can be rendered as dialogue; any fictional picture uploaded to a social platform can be described as imagery. No need for tricks.

A note on genre: Major Arcana is a mostly realist novel. I don’t believe the novel is a research project, however, neither a doctoral dissertation freighted with footnotes and trailing a bibliography nor a feature article fact-checked and richly sourced. I always find it embarrassing when a novelist disgorges an undigested mass of hastily-acquired learning onto the page—Ian McEwan in the operating theater, to take a celebrated example from almost two decades ago—as if I were supposed to pat him on the head and say, “Aren’t you a diligent little boy?”

Toni Morrison supposedly once said, “I don’t want to imagine, I want to know,” yet a reviewer mocked her novel A Mercy for its reference to sparrows (were they sparrows? maybe they were robins) in 17th-century America, when the sparrow (or robin) had not been introduced until the next century (or whenever). I think it’s a stupid objection—she just wanted a splash of color on her canvas, a trill of birdsong in her orchestra; it’s immaterial to the book’s higher significance—but elevating “know” over “imagine” does invite this attack. I disinvite it.

I understand the realist novel to be a reverie over the present and the recent past rather than a journalistic or academic documentation of them, on the premise that reveries, too, are part of history, maybe even the best part. I’ve written some of what I know in Major Arcana, even a few things I’ve only learned in the last few months, but I also haven’t hesitated to imagine when imagination worked better or delighted me more. Anyone seeking facts in fictions can find the category error in the words themselves.

Major Arcana is also “mostly” realist because, as befits its occult title, its narrative sometimes departs from the laws of nature as presently understood—or at least this is how some of the characters interpret what they undergo. As one tells another, in the middle of the book, quoting The Winter’s Tale, “It is required you do awake your faith.”

---

The Problem of Comics in Major Arcana

Major Arcana concerns in part a famous comic-book writer (fictional) who writes mainstream superhero titles. Such subject matter will cause any novelist serious practical problems.

First, I am not permitted to make extensive use of DC and Marvel Comics’s existing intellectual property. To avoid violating copyright law when I describe my fictional writer’s work, I also have to invent a fictional comic-book industry with a fictional roster of superheroes. In other words, I have to show my protagonist writing about Ratman and Overman rather than about—well, the actual characters corresponding to Ratman and Overman.

Second, the professional world of mainstream superhero comics has long been a very small and very gossip-ridden one. To write fiction about it at all invites speculation about what real-life writers, artists, and editors you’ve disguised in your story. Personally, as someone who doesn’t work in this industry but has only observed it from afar (albeit since the age of about six), I have no interest in writing a roman à clef.

I judged What We Can Know About Thunderman, Alan Moore’s unboundedly vicious roman à clef about DC and Marvel published last year, to be an ethical disaster, amounting almost to libel of some still-living figures. To avoid a similar pitfall, I either had to elide or to reinvent mainstream superhero comics’ cast of professional characters, just as I had to do with the superheroes themselves.

Both of these strictures sit oddly in an otherwise (mostly) realistic novel, even in small matters of characterization. I can say that one character admires Joyce’s Ulysses and another character aspires to paint like Marc Chagall, but, because I’m avoiding real superheroes and their real creators, I can’t say that a third character admires Frank Miller’s work on Batman.

For lack of any better solution, I simply submitted to the strangeness of these restrictions. Major Arcana focusses on my somewhat alienated writer to the exclusion of the broader comics scene. To make certain fictional dates align properly, I also took poetic license with the timeline of superhero comics’s development: I pushed the advent of superheroes’ so-called Dark Age forward by about a decade (from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s) and made my fictional American writer its main architect, thus sidelining comics’ real-world British Invasion.

In my defense, the British Invasion’s own captain, Alan Moore, also had to adjust the comics timeline in What We Can Know About Thunderman, despite his book’s closer tie to reality; for example, Moore shows characters loosely based on the likes of Denny O’Neil and Archie Goodwin, men who died years ago, as the leading mainstream comics writers of 2021. If readers can accept this from Moore for the sake of his broader artistic purpose, then they can accept my own fictionalization for the same reason.

These restrictions have an added benefit: readers won’t need any more than the most basic knowledge of superheroes to enjoy the novel. In the end, I treat the world of superhero comics the way Hawthorne said he treated the Brook Farm commune in the Preface to The Blithedale Romance, as

a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of [my] brain may play their phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives.

---

The Question of Gender in Major Arcana

Major Arcana explores the complexity of what Coleridge and Woolf acclaimed as the artist’s androgynous soul, as well as this soul’s material display over the last half century, without confining itself to the increasingly rigid dogma of both sides in the culture war.

The type of “a man’s a man, a woman’s a woman, and that’s that” essentialism often favored by the political right (and some elements of the feminist left) has never fared well at the hands of the literary imagination, not even in marmoreal classics like Sophocles and Ovid, Spenser and Shakespeare, Hawthorne and Eliot. This may go without saying, but it won’t fare well in Major Arcana either.

On the other hand, Major Arcana has not passed and will not pass under the eye of the sensitivity reader. I don’t write for a party or a cause. I will unapologetically portray characters and describe scenes that call into question the left’s pieties as well—or, more precisely, the pieties of the expert and activist classes, to whom I as an artist will never cede imaginative authority, not least because their claim to speak on behalf of the oppressed is often so self-serving and so delusional. I don’t speak on anyone’s behalf, nor do I claim to; fiction is relevant to those who find themselves in it and irrelevant to the rest. Still, radical social changes, linguistic innovations, and even medical interventions that have barely existed for a decade must be open to the intellectual and emotional probing the virtuality of fiction allows.

Satire is a low, mean, and loveless mode, however, and I will say at the outset that I intend no (or at least very little) satire with Major Arcana.

Life and those of us who have to live it are far more complex than any of the labels and protocols in which administrative bodies, however well-intentioned, try to confine us. We need art to tell this truth.

---

L’Envoi

Beyond that, all I can do is launch my book and say, to you and to it, “Bon voyage.”