October Books

in fine frenzy

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 Books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah
The Prophets go on. They go on and on. There is some nice imagery, a few nice stories. You know them: Ezekiel’s vision of the angels—

Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.When those went, these went; and when those stood, these stood; and when those were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.

—Daniel and friends in the furnace, in the lion’s den; Daniel interpreting the writing on the wall. The rest is denunciation, destruction, an whirlwind of rhetorical ferocity so loud it becomes white noise—I cannot somehow pay any attention to the Prophets; have they considered speaking more softly?—with a basis in some local political hatreds I have not historically mastered even as I understand that they are the same local political hatreds, the same ferocities, as today, and in the same place. I asked last month if this kind of thing really needed to take up so much space in holy scripture; I ask again this month, except more urgently. The Book of Jonah, pure as a fable, pure as Ruth, as Esther—those other oases in this vast desert book—offers the only reprieve so far in the sequence. Jonah’s God has a sense of humor and detachment, as does the narrator. “The LORD spake unto the fish.” Irony, proper literary irony, alights for a moment again on the Bible: the writing on the wall admits any number of interpretations. And then there are the Book of Jonah’s last lines. Jonah asks why he had to go to so much trouble to spread God’s word of destruction in Nineveh only for God to turn around and decide not to destroy Nineveh after all. Why wind us up for the end of our world and then frustrate us with the news that the world will go on? We had almost come to long for the apocalypse. In reply to this question of reverse theodicy, the Lord, instead of laying waste the city, fondly musses Jonah’s helpless hair, inviting the question of why, since he made us such hopeless fuck-ups in the first place, he elsewhere demands on pain of death and degradation such fealty as he knows we cannot summon down here except at the cost of our every natural response:

And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

Philip Roth, Operation Shylock
I read this for obvious reasons. The first thing to say is that it’s top-tier Roth. I’ve read about two-thirds of his corpus by now, and I’d put this in the top five. Published in 1993, it directly precedes the two novels that, taken as a devil-angel pair, are said to be his masterpieces, Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral. This is not inferior to either. The division that runs between those two novels runs through this one. The conceit is simple: in Israel, during both the trial of John Demjanjuk and the First Intifada, Philip Roth meets his double. This other Philip Roth is attempting to start an anti-Zionist movement called Diasporism, with the demand that Ashkenazi Jews make their exodus from a besieged Israel back to the countries of Europe. In the voice of his doppelgänger, Roth parodies the cascading comic urgency of his own voice. He also dramatizes in this most dialogic of novels every other kind of voice: a Palestinian activist, an Israeli soldier, an anti-Semitic nurse, the real-life novelist Aharon Appelfeld, and even the several voices, the voices within voices, of the Israeli intelligence agent who might be behind the whole plot. Brief quotation cannot do justice to a torrent of speech as tempestuous as that of the Prophets but (make way for the lightning bolt) more satisfying because more consistently actuated by its author’s ironic intelligence. The metafiction and the paranoia out-Pynchon Pynchon. “You’re the Dostoevsky of disinformation,” a character exclaims to Roth—and not only of disinformation. (Is anyone in America writing on this level today? In my own lifetime, giants once walked the earth!) The novel is an argument with itself. It has nothing so simplistic as a moral. Yet, even as it dramatizes a trial, its own verdict is clear enough. Someone hands Roth—our Roth, our real fictional Roth, not our real fictional Roth’s false fictional double—the purported travel diary of Leon Klinghoffer in the novel’s final quarter, with the request that he write an introduction promoting it as the Anne Frank’s diary of our time (and therefore equating Palestinian terrorist to German genocidaire). Himself held captive, Roth reads the diary and finds in its simple prose an Israeli idyll, an Israeli pastoral, he has not been able to experience himself in that beleaguered country. Here Roth-the-writer shows himself capable of Chekhovian delicacy as well as Dostoevskean fury. Klinghoffer’s artless gratitude for the Jewish homeland moves Roth to sketch a set of notes for the requested introduction that are the novel’s most moving reflection on its obsessive theme of Jewish identity—

In idiom, interests, mental rhythms, diaries like K.’s and A.F.’s confirm the same glaring pathos: one, that Jews are ordinary; two, that they are denied ordinary lives. Ordinariness, blessed, humdrum, dazzling ordinariness, it’s there in every observation, every sentiment, every thought. The center of the Jewish dream, what feeds the fervor both of Zionism and Diasporism: the way Jews would be people if they could forget they were Jews.

—before the diary is revealed to be a forgery of Israeli intelligence by the aforementioned secret agent. The agent then makes an endless speech hilariously denouncing speech itself, and then makes a further speech that begins, “What we have done to the Palestinians is wicked.” Roth’s double is a lunatic, but the real Roth’s intricate fiction, in which each voice answers each other, is the real argument for Diasporism, for what George Steiner has called “Our Homeland, the Text.” Give or take some of the usual sexual hijinks, here quite extraneous, Operation Shylock has not aged a day, a minute. You will hear every single argument made in its pages on social media this very second. That is depressing enough, but as depressing is the other main respect in which the novel has aged: we have no authors major enough—major in themselves and major in the eyes of the international reading public—to find themselves targeted by the type of plot Roth here hallucinates. Intelligence, in every sense, has declined. The homeland of the text has become a wasteland.

Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I turn more and more of the syllabus over to the students: Readings in the Graphic Novel. As a reader of a certain generational sensibility, I demanded only that they allow one British Invasion text of the 1980s or 1990s to be included in among their preferred manga, but, inspired by Netflix, I gave them a choice: Watchmen or Sandman? Themselves inspired by Netflix, they chose the latter. (This was the end of August. I informed them last week that they chose wrong, that Watchmen would have psychologically prepared them for their current anxiety about existing on the precipice of world war.) What, I wondered, has Neil Gaiman been doing lately? To find out, I picked up this 10-year-old book, his last novel for adults, if that’s what it is, though it disclaims the responsibility in its own pages:

I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.

Adult stories never made sense, and they were so slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn’t adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?

I would give this book to 11-year-olds and would have liked it better when I was 11. The point is to nest the sights and sounds of Gaiman’s childhood within a fantasy plot about the family of women down the titular lane. As in Sandman, we have the Triple Goddess, maiden-mother-crone, the veritable Kindly Ones, here guised as the very English Hempstocks. (Given this extensive tribute, I assume Gaiman made some kind of pact with these aspects of Hecate for his literary career, as Shakespeare makes with Morpheus in Sandman.) The novel recreates childhood terror convincingly. Gaiman was never as persuasively cosmic as his occultist comic-book peers, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, but our narrator’s soul-bath in the eponymous ocean yields some fine writing:

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me.

Everything whispered inside me. Everything spoke to everything, and I knew it all.

Is the numinous best approached so directly, however? Or does the “all” rather shine only through the particular? And is this not why adults would rather read Philip Roth than fairy tales? Gaiman almost culpably neglects some particulars of the childhood experiences he otherwise recreates—experiences arguably not his alone to disclose. Speaking of diasporas, it is the winsome Hempstock maiden of this novel’s Triple Goddess who tells the growing boy that her family came from “the old country,” by which she means what Auden would call “altogether elsewhere.” Only in one single tantalizing half-paragraph does Gaiman reveal, speaking of the Jewish diaspora in particular, that his family, too, came from the old country—

My mother’s mother would tell me off for eating like a wild animal. “You must essen, eat,” she would say, “like a person, not a chazzer, a pig. When animals eat, they fress. People essen. Eat like a person.”

—this even though my American students take him as the living avatar of pure Englishness. I was little more than a child myself when I started reading Gaiman; even then, I liked the realism in Sandman as much as the myth, maybe more. Even then, I think, I would have wanted to hear more about an actual grandmother than about a shadowy magical crone. (I can hear my own late grandmother’s voice echoing in my head: “You better eat, Big John! Mangia! Mangia!”) The magical crone is already implied; she goes without saying; just give us the real old lady; this is miracle enough.

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I reread this comedy for the first time since my teens to better appreciate Gaiman’s celebrated recreation thereof in the award-winning Sandman #19. I won’t do Shakespeare the injustice of discussing him briefly. I will say only that this fantasy forms a loose trilogy united by a perfected and fluid lyricism with Richard II and Romeo and Juliet. It’s the first summit of Shakespeare’s art.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

If he had only written these plays, we might still revere him. We can’t quite extrapolate from these, though, to Hamlet, to King Lear, to The Winter’s Tale, to everything we find on the other side of lyricism once we have passed all the way through lyricism’s pleasures and dangers. It’s as if Poe or Pushkin had survived to write Moby-Dick or The Brothers Karamazov; it’s as if Keats had lived another 25 years.

Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters
In case you missed it, I wrote about the 30th-anniversary edition of this classic of art criticism here.

Inio Asano, Goodnight Punpun
After Sandman, I told the class we could read anything at all they wanted. We held three rounds of voting. The first of the seven Goodnight Punpun omnibuses won out. This manga series, originally published from 2007 to 2013, has an underground fame, among those attuned to such things, as one of the major artworks of the 21st century. Students began recommending it to me almost 10 years ago, before it was officially translated and published in the west. “Read it,” they said, “though a part of your soul will die.” With this effect of soul-death, it resembles on the levels of manga and youth culture the other dark masterpieces of its time for other and older audiences, such as the filmography of Lynch and the fiction of McCarthy and Bolaño. I would describe Goodnight Punpun as a long, slow slide into degradation, but then an image of one little girl torturing another child can be found on the second or third page. The ending returns us to the beginning. We don’t have far to fall.

I read the first volume slowly and carefully for teaching purposes and then speed-read the rest, mostly in pirated online versions; I doubt I’d want to read its 3000 pages again or any more slowly. The governing visual conceit almost communicates the whole. Asano’s art is famously meticulous, impossibly detailed, and immersive—an effect achieved by his painstaking pen-adjustments to digital photography. Into this extraordinarily dense visual realism he inserts an antihero depicted (at first) as an iconic cartoon bird, little more than a doodle. He subjects this person, this Punpun, from childhood through adulthood, to a world of unrelenting nihilism—of inability to connect, of inability to feel—a world of desperate cults and desperate disease and desperate sex and eventually desperate murder. There is not even the afterimage on the retina of divine or secular hope one glimpses in Lynch, McCarthy, and Bolaño. To refer to the TikTok generation’s other favorite piece of Japanese nihilism, it’s like No Longer Human at maximalist length, volume, and density.

As in Asano’s other work (e.g., The Girl on the Shore), as in so much of the manga milieu, an air of pedophilic degradation, indulged in the quasi-pornographic artwork, almost justifies itself in juxtaposition with moments of lyrical grace and tenderness. Almost. I also almost wanted to tear up the book. Or—this would be less satisfying—to drag the pirated pdf to the trash icon. (In the mid-20th century, the French government—and here the Communists and the Catholics were able to agree—banned the import of American comic books on the grounds that they would corrupt French youth. It’s too late for us to ban the import of manga into the United States.)

Punpun himself, qua little bird, is what they call kawaii. At the point in the semester when I wanted to demonstrate how one might use critical theory to frame an interpretation of a work of art, I introduced the first volume to my students along with Sianne Ngai’s famous essay, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde.” Ngai recasts the aesthetic of cuteness, Adorno-style, as a quiet negation of our damaged life, hence the interest in cuteness of avant-garde artists from Gertrude Stein to Takashi Murakami. Does Punpun function the same way in his story? Asano preaches to the masses, however, like the cult leader in this series, not to the cognoscenti. How Ngai’s redemptive reading of cuteness survives the image of sexually degraded female neoteny Asano presents here and elsewhere, over and over again, I’m not sure. Academic arguments often fail to survive the mean streets, the mean sheets.

“Girls are scary,” a porn-addled boy says early in these many volumes, and this seems to be, if not Asano’s message, then his motive. At first I thought, unkindly, that this was 2666 for weebs, but it turns out to be the reverse: not The Part about the Murders but, on a psychic level, the murders themselves. Cuteness is what existed before sex, before woman, and so woman, to be reduced back to cuteness, has to be extinguished in and through sex. Art can’t be nihilistic, exactly, or there would be no point in the artist’s having bothered in the first place with the artifice, especially artifice as consistently inventive, as heroically laborious, as Asano’s. Art almost redeems all. Almost.