Weekly Readings #9 (04/03/22-04/10/22)
from now on I believe the personal will forever be at war with the public
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
At johnpistelli.com, where I post weekly to biweekly essays on classic books in all genres, I didn’t get a chance to post this week, but, as a preface to my short essay on Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 Dune adaptation below, my long essay on Frank Herbert’s novel of 1965 might be worth revisiting. Even if you haven’t read the book, I have a lot to say there about science fiction, popular/cult fiction, and multiculturalism in general. A sample:
At this moment in the essay, I am supposed to denounce Herbert righteously for his “cultural appropriation,” since his Fremen are a melange (if you will) of existing cultures, histories, and languages, mainly Arabic and Native American. But the idea that culture is “owned” is itself only coherent if we accept the dubious reduction of culture to ethnos. I don’t find Herbert’s Orientalism any more—or, more to the point, any less—ethically and politically questionable than Puzo’s conscious exotification of his “own” Italian milieu. And how different is Dune, really, from the major multicultural novels of the subsequent two decades in American literature, such as Mumbo Jumbo, Ceremony, Song of Solomon, Love Medicine, or The Joy Luck Club? It’s nearly the same story in each case—redemption through a return to some more rooted way of life—and in each case, the more relevant political issue, whatever the “race” of the author, is that we find middle-class artist-intellectuals bored and disgusted with the contemporary and offering us a highly aestheticized “ethnic” substitute in novel form.
I enjoy reading such stories as much as anybody else, but I also think it’s a doubtful gambit, both when the ethnicities of author and character don’t align and when they do. Herbert’s many cautions throughout the novel that we are reading a tragedy and not a heroic epic honorably offset the atavist tendency, as do the sophisticated and more exquisitely literary metafictions of Reed, Silko, Morrison, et al. No great novel, nor even a very good one, can pose for long as the untrammeled expression of what Herbert calls “race consciousness,” because great art is the product of the individual imagination, not some organic collective.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
as aforementioned, I reviewed Villeneuve’s Dune (2021), with a focus on the film’s strangest ideological choice, casting a black woman as the character Herbert intended (according to this informative essay by Daniel Immerwahr) to represent the arrogance of white male scientism and imperialism, a puzzle I think I managed to solve;
I noted one source of so-called “wokeness” in the spread of modern literary critical techniques—what has been call “the hermeneutics of suspicion”: the harshly interrogative probing of subtext based on the social and psychological theories of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—far outside the realm of literary studies;
I observed how Laura Kipnis’s essay in Liberties journal on the gender controversy embodies her generation of academic leftism’s internal contradiction between Marxist humanism and Foucauldian anti-humanism;
I revisited what I call “The New Conservatism” (AKA “the vibe shift”) with a look at a party write-up right here on SubStack by Michael Crumplar and a new poem by Honor Levy, including reflections on theory, masculinity, pronouns, etc., all topics of interest to listeners of Grand Podcast Abyss episode 11, “Shock Jocks”;
I discussed the provenance and destiny of “queer” (“as much the antonym to gay as to straight, to trans as to cis”) in response to River Page’s Compact magazine essay “Fake Gay History”;
and I wrote a wide-ranging reflection on war in response to the aforementioned Daniel Immerwahr’s review in the Atlantic of a revisionist World War II history, recasting the conflict not as an epic battle of good vs. evil but rather as an imperial scramble: I touch on the importance of the idea that World War II was “the good war” to the liberal world order, Hilary Mantel’s hatchet job on Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and the flaws in Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, and then I quote from my great uncle’s private memoir of his own wartime experience, when he was grievously wounded behind enemy lines and taken prisoner by the Nazis.
Elsewhere online, in addition to the wealth of links in the blog posts above, Alex Perez pays tribute to Raymond Carver and the “dirty realists” in The Spectator:
The form is successful at mining the human experience because, as Buford noted, “it is not fiction devoted to making the large statement,” unlike contemporary fiction, which is mostly about the sociopolitical obsessions of elite progressives. […] The irony is that the “large statement” novels cater to a small, elite audience, while a working-class genre concerned with, as Faulkner called them, “the old verities” would have far more universal appeal.
For more on Carver, please see my essay on his collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and my lecture on his short story “Cathedral,” both of which focus on his infamous relationship to the interventionist editor Gordon Lish. The conflict between Carver and Lish defines how experimental or traditional dirty realism really is.
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