September Books

out of love alone shall my despising fly up

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 Jeremiah and Lamentations
Weighing in on the old Athens and Jerusalem problem, Emily Dickinson memorably lamented of the Bible, “Orpheus’ sermon captivated— / It did not condemn.” She had the whole thing in mind, but with the prophets, the condemnation reaches its peak. Go ahead, call me “Reddit,” call me “fedora,” but does holy scripture really need this quantity of sheer invective? The quality of the invective, at least, is high, as our prophet learns of Jerusalem’s well-earned destruction at the hands of Babylon, necessary to the fulfillment of God’s plan and the eventual messianic “new covenant,” even as he finds himself set apart from the doomed human community:

The word of the LORD came also unto me, saying, Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place. For thus saith the LORD concerning the sons and concerning the daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers that bare them, and concerning their fathers that begat them in this land; they shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried; but they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth: and they shall be consumed by the sword, and by famine; and their carcases shall be meat for the fowls of heaven, and for the beasts of the earth. For thus saith the LORD, Enter not into the house of mourning, neither go to lament nor bemoan them: for I have taken away my peace from this people, saith the LORD, even lovingkindness and mercies. Both the great and the small shall die in this land: they shall not be buried, neither shall men lament for them, nor cut themselves, nor make themselves bald for them: neither shall men tear themselves for them in mourning, to comfort them for the dead; neither shall men give them the cup of consolation to drink for their father or for their mother. Thou shalt not also go into the house of feasting, to sit with them to eat and to drink.

Of special interest to the literary imagination is Jeremiah’s dictating his prophecies to his scribe Baruch; the prophet is not a preacher, as we tend to imagine, but a fount of literature. Then Jeremiah writes his own book of prophecies, orders that it be read aloud by an envoy to the exilic community in Babylon, and finally that, like Prospero’s book, it be drowned—which invites the question of just what, then, we are even reading:

So Jeremiah wrote in a book all the evil that should come upon Babylon, even all these words that are written against Babylon. And Jeremiah said to Seraiah, When thou comest to Babylon, and shalt see, and shalt read all these words; then shalt thou say, O LORD, thou hast spoken against this place, to cut it off, that none shall remain in it, neither man nor beast, but that it shall be desolate for ever. And it shall be, when thou hast made an end of reading this book, that thou shalt bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of Euphrates: and thou shalt say, Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise from the evil that I will bring upon her: and they shall be weary.

Lamentations, as its name suggests, mourns, much more briefly, the same destruction. In the Tanakh, it is gathered with the poetry, alongside Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs:

I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light. Surely against me is he turned; he turneth his hand against me all the day. My flesh and my skin hath he made old; he hath broken my bones.

David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
I’m still on my David Mitchell kick. This, from 2007, is his surprise fourth novel, an autobiographical portrait of the artist after his first three mixed-genre metafictional world-spanning epics: he joked somewhere that it was about time he wrote his first novel. 13 chapters trace the round of a year from January to January in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor. In the English Midlands of 1982, Jason confronts a stammer and school bullies, learns to mistrust Mrs. Thatcher, listens to Elvis Costello and the Talking Heads, endures his parents’ divorce, enjoys his first kiss, and revels in the semi-haunted pastoral landscape. A faint air of magical realism hangs over all. Jason writes poems under a pseudonym for the parish newsletter; in the form of his first-person written narrative, prose versions of his parish poems, we attend to the burgeoning of the interior language his stammer makes it difficult to externalize as speech. The book, despite its textured period-piece realism, belongs to Mitchell’s fantastical Über-novel: Neal Brose, who has already died in Ghostwritten, appears as a school bully; Hugo Lamb, who will become an Anchorite in The Bone Clocks, appears as Jason’s glamorously evil cousin; and, most dazzlingly, most metafictionally, Jason meets Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, daughter of Vyvyan Ayrs from Cloud Atlas, and, in her solarium, she schools him in the cosmopolitan ways of serious literature:

“I mean, who are your masters? Chekhov?”

“Er…no.”

“But have you read Madame Bovary?”

(I’d never heard of her books.) “No.”

Each name climbed up the octave. “Hermann Hesse?”

“No.” Unwisely, I tried to dampen Madame Crommelynck’s disgust. “We don’t really do Europeans at school—”

“‘Europeans’? England is now drifted to the Caribbean? Are you African? Antarctican? You are European, you illiterate monkey of puberty! Thomas Mann, Rilke, Gogol! Proust, Bulgakov, Victor Hugo! This is your culture, your inheritance, your skeleton! You are ignorant even of Kafka?”

Not enough, however. We might recall that Black Swan Green served in an epochal review among James Wood’s exhibits of the literature the first volume of Knausgård’s My Struggle had, in its automatic-writing autofictional fury, rendered retrospectively mannered, obsolete, unreal, even at the cost of more obvious literary interest:

After a few hundred pages of this, I started to grumble: I understood that this was “My Struggle,” but did it also have to be my struggle? David Mitchell’s captivating novel “Black Swan Green” has crossed this territory (roughly: the hideousness of a Northern European adolescence in the nineteen-eighties) with greater liveliness and comedy than Knausgaard summons. […] But Knausgaard’s omnivorousness proves anything but accidental. Again, the banality is so extreme that it turns into its opposite, and becomes distinctive, curious in its radical transparency.

A decade’s worth of dead-eyed, dead-eared prose later, Mitchell’s Künstlerroman is worth another look, however. It’s halfway between Joyce and YA, and it foretells some of more recent fiction’s easy political and moral victories, to the point where Jason hectors us that “not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right,” italics (alas) in original, and yet, its liveliness and enthusiasm of invention are more than a match for the exhaustive mimesis of personal authenticity.

Anton Chekhov, The Duel
The internet sadly tempts us into talking shit on everyone, and I’ve lately been talking shit on Chekhov of all people. What did the good doctor do to deserve this? Clearly it was time to revisit his work, but what to read? The aforementioned David Mitchell, as it happens, once listed this 1891 short novel as his single favorite book, so I decided to read that. Set in a resort on the Black Sea, it dramatizes the conflict between a dissolute aristocrat, who has come to the resort to live with his married mistress, and an up-to-the-minute post-Darwinian proto-Nietzschean zoologist full of theories about who is fit to live and to propagate and who is not. (I quote from the Garnett translation.)

“The fact is that those who crucified Him were not the strong but the weak. Human culture weakens and strives to nullify the struggle for existence and natural selection; hence the rapid advancement of the weak and their predominance over the strong. Imagine that you succeeded in instilling into bees humanitarian ideas in their crude and elementary form. What would come of it? The drones who ought to be killed would remain alive, would devour the honey, would corrupt and stifle the bees, resulting in the predominance of the weak over the strong and the degeneration of the latter. The same process is taking place now with humanity; the weak are oppressing the strong. Among savages untouched by civilisation the strongest, cleverest, and most moral takes the lead; he is the chief and the master. But we civilised men have crucified Christ, and we go on crucifying Him, so there is something lacking in us. . . . And that something one ought to raise up in ourselves, or there will be no end to these errors.”

The titular duel ensues, but, as is usual in Chekhov, atmosphere and character are all. A deacon, the zoologist’s quasi-acolyte, thinks about the central conflict on the way to the duel and arrives at something like Chekhov’s own humane equanimity:

Why did he hate Laevsky and Laevsky hate him? Why were they going to fight a duel? If from their childhood they had known poverty as the deacon had; if they had been brought up among ignorant, hard-hearted, grasping, coarse and ill-mannered people who grudged you a crust of bread, who spat on the floor and hiccoughed at dinner and at prayers; if they had not been spoilt from childhood by the pleasant surroundings and the select circle of friends they lived in—how they would have rushed at each other, how readily they would have overlooked each other’s shortcomings and would have prized each other’s strong points! Why, how few even outwardly decent people there were in the world! It was true that Laevsky was flighty, dissipated, queer, but he did not steal, did not spit loudly on the floor; he did not abuse his wife and say, “You’ll eat till you burst, but you don’t want to work;” he would not beat a child with reins, or give his servants stinking meat to eat—surely this was reason enough to be indulgent to him? Besides, he was the chief sufferer from his failings, like a sick man from his sores. Instead of being led by boredom and some sort of misunderstanding to look for degeneracy, extinction, heredity, and other such incomprehensible things in each other, would they not do better to stoop a little lower and turn their hatred and anger where whole streets resounded with moanings from coarse ignorance, greed, scolding, impurity, swearing, the shrieks of women. . .

Do I take back everything negative I’ve ever said about Chekhov? Not quite. I still think there’s an ineffable smugness—Sam Kahn’s word for Chekhov; I think of the proverbial arrogance of physicians—in his work even here: the characters somehow ineffably patted on their heads for the poor little errors of their poor little lives by the author’s invisible hand. I do like him better at length. At length, the characters correct each other more than the author corrects the characters. I probably prefer his drama to his fiction, though I need to read more of the plays. Before The Duel, my favorite of his fictions was also novella-length: the harrowing In the Ravine. What a pair of novellas though! And The Cherry Orchard—I read it in high school and have never forgotten it, that echo of the ax that resounds through the drama. And then there’s his oft-quoted credo:

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and lies, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.

I hope I never think myself superior to this. We can quarrel about the details, but Chekhov deserves, if not his sainthood, then his literary eminence.

Hermann Hesse, Demian and Siddhartha
I wrote about these two short novels at length in one of my Weekly Readings Substack newsletters; please read it here in case you missed it the first time.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Here is Nietzsche’s philosophical fiction, reminiscent, in a German tradition of which I remain an amateur, of Hyperion and of Faust, Part Two. (He revered both Hölderlin and Goethe.) People keep asking me about Nietzsche, so I decided to finish it. I’d started once before and then put it aside, unimpressed with its bombastic fictional elements. “Somebody just needs to Jefferson-Bible this,” I thought. Through the preachings of Zarathustra, it does develop important elements of Nietzschean thought: the “last man,” that blinking, bug-like indigene of a modernity that has satisfied every animal need; the countervailing “Übermensch,” the man of the post-modernity to come who will create his own values out of himself; and the “eternal recurrence,” the post-religious aesthetic fantasy of a life worth living eternally. Literarily, this is a systematic parody of the Gospels. Unfortunately for Zarathustra, he first spreads his gospel at the age of 30 in the marketplace, so that by the time he is old, by the end of the book, he is beset with cultists and imitators. It’s a bit like the second part of Don Quixote, when the Don and Sancho find that, wherever they go, everyone has read the first part. Considering the controversy over Nietzsche’s 20th-century reception among Nazis, Existentialists, postmodernists, and teenagers, the book becomes an anticipatory parable about the way a gospel of power, no less than one of weakness, will attract a congregation of resentful freaks and losers. Zarathustra is an influencer disgusted by his needy fandom. When he encounters his first imitator, “Zarathustra’s ape,” who inadvertently parodies his scorn in a style prophetic of every dissident-right Xitter personality, Zarathustra wonderfully reproves him because his hatred has not arisen from love, is in fact ressentiment’s most cunning guise as its disillusioned, aggressive opposite:

“Out of love alone shall my despising and my warning bird fly up, not out of the swamp.

“They call you my ape, you foaming fool; but I call you my grunting swine: with your grunting you spoil for me my praise of folly. What was it that first made you grunt? That nobody flattered you sufficiently; you sat down to this filth so as to have reason to grunt much—to have reason for much revenge. For all your foaming is revenge, you vain fool; I guessed it well.

“But your fool’s words injure me, even where you are right. And even if Zarathustra’s words were a thousand times right, still you would always do wrong with my words.”

Speaking of influencers, however, this book also suggests how much of Nietzsche has passed into the sentimental “live, laugh, love” common sense of popular culture, even, if I may, the middle-class feminine culture whose belated Christianity our anti-Christ condemned. (Writers like Hesse served, I imagine, as the conduit here.) I am supposed, I’m sure, to be above this, but as it offsets the doctrine of hate it also completes, I say, rather, “Speak your truth, sister.”

“This is my way; where is yours?”—thus I answered those who asked me “the way.” For the way—that does not exist.

I still prefer Nietzsche without the fictional elements, though translator Kaufmann suggests that there are literary subtleties I’m missing. Kaufmann, however, though he comments on much, does not comment on the allegorical scene I found most profound in the whole book:

And verily, what I saw—I had never seen the like. A young shepherd I saw, writhing, gagging, in spasms, his face distorted, and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth. Had I ever seen so much nausea and pale dread on one face? He seemed to have been asleep when the snake crawled into his throat, and there bit itself fast. My hand tore at the snake and tore in vain; it did not tear the snake out of his throat. Then it cried out of me: “Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!” Thus it cried out of me—my dread, my hatred, my nausea, my pity, all that is good and wicked in me cried out of me with a single cry.

The shepherd in the agon of consuming the serpent—what is this but the painful fusion of Christ and Satan, the laborious integration of God’s shadow, the perhaps impossible completion of the human personality that Nietzsche ambitiously attempts, and which his hateful “apes,” then and now, don’t even seem to understand is an option, let alone the absolute desideratum of all culture.

Ilya Repin, The Duel (1897)