Weekly Readings #19 (06/13/22-06/19/22)

ineluctable modality of the readable

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

Infinite Paranoia

At the link above, my article “Infinite Paranoia”—on the unsettling new recruitment ad from the U.S. Army’s PSYOP Group and the state’s calculated incitement of fear in an already conspiratorial populace—appeared this week at Tablet’s Daily Scroll. You will want to subscribe to the Scroll right here on SubStack, not only because it’s a great aggregator of news and commentary, though that is a good reason, but also because I will write a regular column there from now on. Please subscribe to avoid the paranoid sensation that you’re missing any of my contributions to our cultural and political discourse.

At johnpistelli.com, where I post weekly to biweekly essays on classic books in all genres, I celebrated the Bloomsday of modernism’s centenary year with an essay on Ulysses. While I’ve obliquely written about Joyce’s epic on Bloomsdays past—see the Joyce tag on my site—this is my first attempt to encompass both the novel as a whole and the way my own response to it has changed with the changing times. I write:

We know by now that Joyce was no heartless artificer, that he revered Tolstoy as much as he respected Flaubert, and that he, like Tolstoy, had a message for humanity. The question confronting us, rather, is what we should make of this message now. If we take Joyce as a metonymy for several generations of artists and intellectuals he influenced or with whom he shared a general intellectual project, we might conclude that we live in Joyce’s world, in the New Bloomusalem, and we should therefore ask ourselves how or if we’re enjoying it.

I won’t lie to you: my mood has been darkening on this subject for years. When I first read Ulysses, in the spring of 2001, six months before the Towers fell, I endorsed its values completely. I defended it against its academic detractors (largely Marxist) for a decade after that, one of whom supervised my doctoral dissertation, which I completed in 2013 and which is a monument to my Joycean loyalties. The very next year, on this very website, you can watch some skepticism finally begin to penetrate my mind. In 2014, I compared the novel to Spike Jonze’s cinematic AI romance Her and argued that Ulysses, in spite of Joyce’s own humanistic intent, looks forward to the posthuman gnostic future heralded equally in the last decade, though in very different ways and terms, by the social justice movement and by the neoreactionaries who consider themselves the enemy of all things just and social. This grim and intrusive thought likewise dominated my 2019 essay on Richard Ellmann’s magisterial biography of Joyce.

The rest of the essay explains what I continue to find worthwhile and what I have learned to doubt about the 20th century’s greatest novel. The only problem with writing about Ulysses in general is—as Edmund Wilson pointed out long ago in Axel’s Castle, his pioneering study of modernism—that Joyce keeps company with the poets more than with the novelists. Every page, almost every paragraph, could sustain an essay of its own. Maybe next Bloomsday I’ll pick one sentence and write about that. Or maybe I’ll finally finish—whatever it means to finish, whatever it means even to read—Finnegans Wake.

At my daily blog, Grand Hotel Abyss,

• I replied to Ben Judah’s much-discussed Twitter call for a new age of the social-realist novel in the 19th-century mold; in brief, I am skeptical that the novel can or should play this cultural role when journalism and cinema/TV probably do it better; I also offer reasons not to lament that the once-populist art form of the novel has become the property of a coterie; and finally, I challenge Judah’s roll-call of classic social novelists with observations about the proto-modernist or proto-postmodernist qualities of even Austen and Dostoevsky;

• I footnoted my Ulysses essay as linked above with an excerpt from a bad seminar paper I wrote on the novel early in graduate school 14 years ago, mostly an exercise in Joycean amusement;

• and I answered Yale professor and Twitter celebrity Jason Stanley’s argument that thinkers should “look at the side Nazis are on and take the other one” with a somewhat depressing reflection on the mythification of Nazism which makes this seemingly simple moral approach to politics much more difficult than it looks on the surface.

Elsewhere online, and speaking of depressing, novelist Mary Gaitskill wonders “Will Literature Survive?”—survive, that is, our waning attention to the texture of experience and younger writers’ fading desire to record this texture in an unimproveable order of words, a commitment that fired such post-Joycean prose masters as Nabokov, O’Connor, and Updike.

On Tumblr, I replied to Gaitskill’s lament—self-servingly, it’s true—with an excerpt from my novel, Portraits and Ashes. The scene, in which an artist explains to his model why he continues to paint figuratively, provides, I hope, a justification for writers to continue to try to capture in language what a beloved pop-Joycean called “the sensual world.” At the risk of continued self-service, I place the passage here as well:

“Can I ask you something that might annoy you?” she said.

The artist now smiled broadly with his old-world courtliness and said, “Yes, of course, but if you are too annoying I will not answer.”

“Isn’t painting finished?” she said. “Museums, galleries, and art schools are all about installations, performance, multimedia, various kinds of street art, new forms of interactive art. There have even been defenses on these grounds of The Last Café.”

He grunted in disgust at her allusion.

“Then there’s film, video, photography, the Internet. Whatever technological function the canvas served as a way of producing images has been entirely superseded. But even leaving that aside, didn’t art considered in and of itself run its course? Didn’t artists themselves bring it to an end with abstraction and pastiche and collage and blank canvases and soup cans and all of that? They took it to its logical conclusion. There’s not another development anyone can imagine. What reason is there to go on making pictures of people and things after that?”

He nodded as she spoke, his chin bouncing off the top of every word, no doubt because he had already heard every word before, probably in more than one language. Then he painted in silence for long enough to discomfort her. The hairs of the brush scratched against the canvas like a whisper that echoed under the high ceiling of the church.

“The answer is very simple,” he finally said. “I do it only so that it will not be finished. What you say seems as if it is true, but if I am doing it, how can it be finished? Logical conclusion, you say, but we do not live in logic. There is a way of being, of meeting, in this act that does not exist in these others that you mention. On this canvas comes together myself, yourself, this church. All are touching, which cannot happen in the machine, not even in photographs, where the apparatus comes between the mind and the mark and does its work by itself, no human touch. The apparatus itself is some other man’s creation. My rival, so to say. But here is no rival, only my hand, my tool, my mind, your body, your mind, this room, this hour. All touching. This way of things coming together I do not want to see finished, so I do it if nobody else will.” 

“And if nobody sees it?”

“You see it, I see it. Are we nothing? You and I are not nothing.”

I had Gaitskill’s essay in my mind as I read Andrea Long Chu’s celebrated takedown of Ottessa Moshfegh. Chu is certainly always witty, but I thought her critique of Moshfegh was both predictable and pointless. She writes:

For her, the threat to the novel is posed not by murderous corporations, which are merely window-dressing here, but by a sinister “political agenda” found, like all political agendas, in the swarming tweets of strangers. The substance of that agenda is easy to guess—social justice, both real and imagined—but what Moshfegh really means is what most successful artists mean when they speak vaguely about the value of art: the absolute indignity of being told what to do.

Beneath all the bluster, the only political enemies Moshfegh openly acknowledges are commercialism and agitprop—that is, the desecration of art by money and power.

Here is the perennial complaint of the progressive intelligentsia: the most interesting American writers are individualists on some kind of divine vision quest and don’t care very much for state and society. At an earlier moment in history, this progressive intelligentsia could perhaps comfort itself with the argument that such Romanticism was only the white man’s way, the predictable selfishness of such melanin-deficient dick-swingers as Emerson or Melville, but at this late date in history, such a thesis is no longer tenable, as Moshfegh is only the latest example to prove (consider also the quotation from Zora Neale Hurston in this very newsletter last week). As the man said, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”

Personally, I’ve been amused and heartened by every interview with and profile on Moshfegh I’ve ever read. And yet I’ve started most of Moshfegh’s novels and finished none. What’s missing? Not the correct political views, as Chu demands. No, I missed just what Gaitskill mourned in her own essay: a thickness of reality and corresponding roughness of language to keep my eye grounded on the page. When the prose is too smooth, the eye slides off.

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