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 haven’t write a new post because I’m still re-reading Ulysses to get ready for my Bloomsday essay on the novel of 1922. I’d like to retrieve an early entry from the archive, however, from back before I decided that the site should focus only on books: my January 2014 review of Spike Jonze’s AI romance Her. The film and essay are relevant not only because I compare Jonez to Joyce, but also because of today’s conversations about sentient artificial intelligence and AI art, and because of the slow mainstreaming of neoreactionary ideas, which I detected in Jonze’s utopia all those years ago:
Her presents a future in which what Shanghai-based neo-reactionary British philosopher Nick Land calls the Dark Enlightenment has won. A post-democratic world comprising an archipelago of capitalist city-states that culturally favor a highly self-controlled and therefore free elite with relatively Classical and/or Confucian aesthetic values has become the new normal. This reactionary-modernist Enlightenment is not dark in Her because it is not counter-hegemonic in the film’s world. Its sociopolitical power frees it up to be an object of disinterested artistic representation, shorn of Dark Enlightenment’s present and rather ludicrous Gothic/Lovecraftian trappings: call it the Pastel Enlightenment.
[…]
And yet [Leopold] Bloom follows not his genetic but his memetic son out of the repro-futurist maternity hospital and into the no-future red-light district, and this in a novel that celebrates the replicative powers of language rather than those of flesh, a novel whose watchword is not population but, well, pick your favorite term of anti-organicist vituperation from the Theory lexicon whose lexicographers all went to school with Joyce: dissemination, textuality, deterritorialization, desire, et cetera and ad nauseam. And so what if such modernism leads us to a rooftop in genocide-gentrified Los Angeles, waiting to follow omni-intelligence out of the prison of the flesh? Our new reactionaries will give this conclusion three cheers, not least because they can at last drop Lovecraft and read Woolf and Joyce like proper grown-ups, while our old reactionaries will shake their heads and say they warned us long ago that modernism was a dangerous new gnosticism. And our progressives? They make a lot of noise these days, but in the face of something like Her—a work of and about and for them that nevertheless registers as the gorgeous prophecy of everything they claim to oppose—all their Twitter-Tumblr bluster sounds to me like the cover for so much guilty silence.
At my daily blog, Grand Hotel Abyss,
I commented on a letter from Gustave Flaubert to his mother explaining why he couldn’t get a real job, as she’d suggested to him; I compared Flaubert’s insistence on the literary vocation with roughly contemporaneous ideas: Marx’s vision of a communist future in which human beings will once again be omni-laborers and Emerson’s complaint that modern society fragments the personality; for my part, I defend the division of labor but also argue that Flaubert’s famous obsession with perfection of form is a relative abuse of his autonomy, since an Emersonian wholeness of literary personality is a better justification for the layabout author’s idleness;
I asserted that Jane Austen was (more or less) a conservative, in response to a recent article suggesting that she would have “appreciated a good sex party,” and that her conservatism—and more generally the substantive ideas of great writers from the past—is a useful challenge to our own presuppositions; finally, I linked to an essay I wrote on Sense and Sensibility in May 2020, when, enervated by the lockdown lifestyle, I tried an experiment in post-left commentary, expressed more starkly than I might venture nowadays:
I reviewed David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, with an assessment of its politics of race, gender, and environment, its philosophy of art, its own grotesquely beguiling or beguilingly grotesque aesthetics, and more:
If Crimes of the Future had been made and released in the ’90s, I would have watched it, probably a few years later, when I was in college, and been impressed and cheered by its implicit critique of postmodernism and the avant-garde, its exit from the impasse of discourse into an ecstatic new biology, a new form of humankind. Now I’m not so sure. I am certainly impressed by its aesthetic integrity, its creative courage to create its own coherent universe. I thought it was very funny, mordant and deadpan, especially Kristen Stewart’s scene-stealing comic turn as a sexually-repressed bureaucrat who gets the film’s most memorable line in a script full of oracular pronouncements: “Surgery is the new sex.” Saul asks, in the gently skeptical tone of an old man probing the younger generation, “Do we need a new sex?” Without hesitation, she replies, “Yes, it’s time.” We need a new everything, the film ultimately suggests.
and I responded to the latest news in artificial intelligence, the Washington Post article about a Google engineer who became convinced that one of the company’s AI systems was sentient; I am not convinced; I am convinced, however, that the machine’s recombined bromides hint that we are not always sentient either, a condition I examine by comparing AI to formulaic popular art.
Elsewhere online: you may already have read the recent New York article attempting to critique so-called “wokeness” (personally, I prefer to call it “current hegemonic left-liberalism”) from within. The writer is Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of the popular podcast Know Your Enemy, the conceit of which, if you’re not familiar with it, is that the social-democratic hosts read classic right-wing texts and authors carefully and with a modicum of imaginative sympathy, including major literary figures like Saul Bellow and Joan Didion.
As a number of commenters noted, Adler-Bell spends too much of the essay attempting to forestall predictable objections from his critics; for these pains, he was rewarded with the usual Twitter threads calling him racist, reactionary, etc. But the point he was trying laboriously to make ended up being pragmatic and procedural rather than substantive: “radicals must speak to people in language that is familiar about ideas that are novel.” If only people understood, they would agree.
But the same day I read Adler-Bell’s essay, I was wandering aimlessly through a library when I chanced upon You Don’t Know Us Negroes, a new collection of the essays of Zora Neale Hurston. I noticed the intriguing subtitle of one entry in the volume, “Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism,” and proceeded to read it in the library (you can find the 1951 article, originally published in The American Legion Magazine, here). While I’d inferred Hurston’s individualist commitments from those staples of the undergraduate curriculum, Their Eyes Were Watching God and “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” I didn’t know the details; this essay happily spells it out in the kind of plain speech Adler-Bell applauds. Aside from being amused at how little these debates have changed in almost three-quarters of a century, and even more amused at Hurston’s lively style as opposed to the jargony rigor mortis of the comrades, it also made me wonder, pace Adler-Bell, if people really would agree with radical ideas if only the radical intelligentsia might clarify itself.
Hurston’s polemic also made me think of these lines from Conor Cruise O’Brien that I’ve quoted before (I found the passage in a Denis Donoghue essay on Yeats):
A Marxist critique which starts from the assumption that bad politics make for bad style will continue “not to succeed.” The opposite assumption, though not entirely true, would be nearer to the truth. The politics of the left—any left, even a popular “national movement”—impose, by their emphasis on collective effort and on sacrifice, a constraint on the artist, a constraint which may show itself in artificialities of style, vagueness or simple carelessness. Right-wing politics, with their emphasis on the freedom of the elite, impose less constraint, require less pretence, allow style to become more personal and direct.
But before we get ahead of ourselves and start donating to Ron DeSantis for art’s sake, we should turn our attention from Adler-Bell’s inner critique of the left to Alex Perez’s inner critique of the right, this one on specifically literary grounds. Right-wing renegades from mainstream publishing, Perez complains in his IM-1776 essay, are too didactic and blackpilled to reach a broad audience, especially if this audience includes anyone except terminal male malcontents:
However, the current crop of young right-leaning writers self-publishing their half-finished texts or bombarding Twitter with their stream of consciousness outbursts about all manner of social ills—to the detriment of their work and the movement—all sound and read the same. This nascent literary movement, insofar as it can even be labelled as such, is debilitated by an immaturity posing as world-weariness. If the scene is to have any chance of rising out of the internet gutter, its practitioners must transcend some of their baser instincts.
But according to Leslie Fielder’s classic study Love and Death in the American Novel, this is nothing new: it’s been a perennial problem in American literature, which, Fielder argues, has been divided since the founding of the republic between a female-identified tradition of middlebrow moralism and a male-identified counterculture of alienating and often nihilistic radicalism and individualism. This condition doesn’t look like it’s going to clear up anytime soon, but I share Perez’s (and even Adler-Bell’s) hope that writers can at least strive to be vaster than these divisions.
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(Having said that, I thought the choice to costume Mortensen as a sort of hybrid leper/ninja was not uninspired.)
Saw Crimes of the Future in the theater, alone, and when the final scene arrived I seriously wondered if I had nodded off for twenty minutes and missed, like, any kind of denouement?