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 wrote about D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), a novel prosecuted as “a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action” in the same English court that had tried Oscar Wilde 20 years before, following which over 1000 copies of the book were seized and burned. My own verdict on Lawrence’s counter-Biblical erotic testament is implied in this comparative paragraph:
I suspect Lawrence was influenced here by two of English literature’s most celebrated outsider artists, Emily Brontë and William Blake. Just as Brontë used an impassioned, erotic family saga to chronicle the ambiguous decline of rural England from wilderness to respectability, so Lawrence takes up the story where she left it in the 1840s and gives us England’s fall into industrialism, a mechanical civilization more and more suffocated by calculating mental activity, offset only by equally false and mechanical solutions by the opening of the 20th century. And just as Blake rewrote the Hebrew Bible in an 18th-century London he reimagined as timeless Jerusalem, this to protest the Enlightenment in the name of vision and free love, so Lawrence elevates his personae to near-mythical status and chronicles their travails in work and love as if they were material for a new testament. But Brontë seamlessly occupies both her novel’s ontological levels, the real and the mythic, whereas The Rainbow, to my mind, lacks this clarity. It therefore, like the later work of Blake, often threatens to become a merely private myth.
I also consider the ever-controversial politics of modernism, both in the essay itself and in this footnote to it. Why controversial, why ever-? Because while we’re sitting around and talking about Manhattan demimondaines becoming right-wing, we forget that this isn’t the first time aesthetic bohemia has turned its back on The Revolution after an initial period of commitment.
Superficially, political leftists and avant artists share a war on the bourgeoisie; Lawrence himself wrote a (bad) poem called “How Beastly the Bourgeois Is.” But the difference between their ideas for an alternative society will inevitably tear them apart. Artists, however revolutionary, tend to settle on visionary solutions: an alteration of thought and feeling, of the very way we see and hear, to be followed by a change in politics and economics. And artists fear that doing it the other way around will only create more of the same problems of authority and alienation they set out to solve in the first place: top-down brute-force political change, complete with what the writer in particular can only regard as noxious language-policing and neologism-by-committee in place of art’s diffusively suggestive effects. Lawrence, with his occasional lapse into fascist rant, including in The Rainbow, is an impure example here—Joyce or Woolf would be better—but then on the other side of his creative personality, the one in complicated love with “birds, beasts, and flowers,” immersed in tides of language, we catch a glimpse of what I mean, the other world of art, no saccharine utopia, but no rule-bound machine either.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
I wondered why I wrote a novel in 2013 about avant-garde art and ascetic cults that nine years later appears—in ways I certainly did not intend when I wrote it—to be about the current topic of gender transition and detransition;
I speculated that Justin E. H. Smith’s assertion, “[t]here is a stratum of the human that is deeper than politics,” is basically incompatible with the political left, in support of which I offered a passage from the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson declaring his preference for Nazism over “apolitical liberalism,” on the grounds that at least the Nazi—he’s thinking of Heidegger—understood there was no exterior to politics and therefore ventured a political commitment;
I suggested, on the other hand and as a pendant to the previous post, that a viral Tweet proclaiming conservatives to be “ontologically evil” was inconsistent with left and liberal premises, and that this idea itself corresponds to what Hannah Arendt called “radical evil,” a politics of rendering human beings superfluous and therefore disposable;
I evaluated (negatively) some prize-winning racist right-wing poetry in the context of art and taboo-violation; assessed the inevitability that self-publishing (for example on SubStack) will need to be supplemented by journals, magazines, and other collaborative forms even in a post-monoculture world; and asserted yet again—because, as I said, nobody ever listens—the merit of apolitical art;
and I shared (self-indulgently) a poem I wrote when I was a teenager, called “and Aphasia and,” to which I appended an admittedly strange short memoir about being in high school during the Columbine massacre, with intermittent remarks on autofiction in the novel vs. online, Ethel Cain’s New York Times profile and song “American Teenager,” and what have you:
Two weeks later the rumor went around that somebody was going to shoot up the school on May 5, that it would be—where did rumors come from before everyone was online?—the “Cinco de Mayo Massacre.” It was supposed to happen between fifth and sixth periods. Many parents kept their kids out of school that day. (Not mine: my immigrant mother’s son was going to work for the American dream every day of the week. This is a terrible literary cliché but also the way it really happened. Some people will see what I mean.) The assistant principal came over the P.A. and in his nasal whine said they had no evidence there would be any such massacre. He pronounced “Mayo” as in “mayo,” the condiment. We took the whole thing in a spirit of solemn hilariousness; somehow this was thought to be a credible threat, by us if not by the administration, I don’t remember why. Fifth period was art class, my friends and I exchanged half-serious, half-ironic sentimentalities, what we meant to one another, just in case we went out and didn’t come back. When I got to sixth-period English, the teacher congratulated us for having survived. She passed out candy to celebrate.
Elsewhere online: if you listened to the special Default Friend episode of Grand Podcast Abyss, you may want to follow up with the most recent episode of Contain, where Barrett Avner talks to the controversial deviser of the Milady NFTs. Even if you don’t care about Miladys or NFTs or groomer-laden Discords—and I don’t really, except in a Don DeLillo type of way—it’s a remarkable dialogue of much broader significance, whose gravity is aptly described in the show notes:
The final interview w/ the mind behind the Milady project, and a cautionary look into the latent demonic alchemy inhabiting the internet. This conversation is something I hope will help people understand: that unless we address the existential questions that turn us into victim/executioner, nothing will fundamentally change.
And to return where we began—art’s conflict with the bureaucratic imagination—there is Alice Gribbin in Tablet on “The Great Debasement”:
Cultural studies analysis thinks of art not in itself but as a sort of rash brought on by culture, or a spore that a culture puts out. Art—just as billboards, contraceptive marketing, and horticulture periodicals—is considered a symptom or emissary of the society from which it emerged. Solely on the basis of what it demonstrates about its time and place is art a subject of study. Naturally, an artwork’s aesthetics are irrelevant in the cultural studies mode of critique; no one work of art is any better, or more significant, than another. In its predominant lower forms, cultural studies is a kind of supremely unrigorous social studies, practiced by people who believe all art is propaganda.
Art’s place in the modern university has always been uncomfortable, either material for training citizens or the object of a quasi-scientific investigation itself later wedded to a revolutionary political project that could find no other outlet. In such circumstances, something like the broad modernist ambition to create art that would rejoin thought and feeling, sundered sometime between Descartes and the Industrial Revolution, didn’t stand a chance, which is why we find ourselves here, outside those walls.
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