Weekly Readings #25 (07/25/22-07/31/22)
you can begin to be a civilized person
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed. PLUS: my long-awaited review of Matthew Gasda’s play Dimes Square.
First, in case you somehow missed it, I wrote on DeLillo’s Underworld this week, that last of the Great American Novels and maybe my personal favorite of them all. You can read my piece here or here. The poll question from last week’s Weekly Readings about whether I should cross-post my literary essays from johnpistelli.com to Substack was unanimous in favor, so you can expect more of such material in your inbox from now on.
Then on my more casual and spontaneous blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, I made the following transmissions:
—I followed Joyce Carol Oates’s viral and controversial Tweet about young white male novelists being shut out of mainstream publishing with a reminder that “the modern novel was invented by upper-middle-class white women to represent their aesthetics, ethics, and political interests,” rendering the present situation, whether one likes it or not, not so unusual—or why else was Nathaniel Hawthorne complaining about the monopoly “scribbling women” held on the novel in the middle of the 19th century?
—I commented on Tomiwa Owolade’s letter to the journal Critical Quarterly in which he replied to one of those Summer 2020 “decolonize the curriculum or else” threat letters that were so of the moment; Owolade rested his case for the canon on James Joyce’s “cosmopolitan humanism,” also an interest of the journal’s editor and my old teacher, Colin MacCabe, which led me to review my own complicated history with these Joycean cosmopolitics;
—I expanded on a little joke at Elizabeth Hardwick’s expense from Justin Murphy’s recent newsletter about Flannery O’Connor, since I suspect Hardwick, while no doubt an eloquent critic, is at this point pretty overhyped, even if I haven’t read Sleepless Nights yet;
—and I appreciated a recent podcast appearance by it-playwright Matthew Gasda during which he slammed the suddenly fashionable Oxfordian position on the so-called Shakespeare question (there is no such question), which brings me to the main topic of this week’s missive.
Matthew Gasda, Dimes Square
Two months ago, I put out a call inviting readers to finance with a donation or book purchase my own purchase of the Dimes Square script so I could publicly review it. The response was ambiguous: I received no donations, and, while I did sell some books, nobody messaged me to say it was on account of Gasda. I mentioned this with some amusement on Tumblr this week, which led Gasda himself, no doubt pitying my travails, to generously email me a free pdf of the script.
Dimes Square was for a few weeks back in the spring the artistic center of journalistic controversies over the “vibe shift,” the “new right,” and the reactionary downtown New York art scene centered on the play’s titular locale. My motive in wanting to read and review Dimes Square, to quote one of my Weekly Readings entries from the end of May, is the following: “surely a critic without a political axe to grind or anxiety about being ostracized at scenester parties should lay eyes on the text of this drama.”
I have no relation besides online observation to this social set—I live half a continent away—but then a playwright of Gasda’s ambition, one who cites Shakespeare and Chekhov as his precursors, surely wants to communicate beyond the bounds of the bars and restaurants of his milieu. I never drank sack in Cheapside, but I have come to know Falstaff; and so it should be, mutatis mutandis, when it comes to doing coke in Chinatown. And one persistent question about this vibe-shifted demimonde has been whether or not it’s capable of producing serious art—art more serious, anyway, than schiz’ed-out Substacks and profane podcasts, much as we may enjoy those from time to time. Now that the hype is beginning to fade, we may be in a better position to answer this question.
Unlike those Substacks and podcasts, Dimes Square is not the succès de scandale you might have been expecting from the press coverage, or at least it’s not trying to be. Its characters do rudely evade the HR-mandated pieties of current hegemonic left-liberalism in their speech—
The idea of post-suburban beta they/thems wasting their money on shitty marketing degrees while sitting around, watching streaming channels and eating vegan ice-cream from the tub fills me with incredible contempt.
—but everybody talks like that in private. This is just verisimilitude, not the point or even really the keynote of the play. Neither are the well-known ideological peregrinations of the New-York-and-environs media class Gasda’s main concern, though there are sharply observed remarks about trendy scene girls who are “really into Catholicism lately” and tiresomely off-trend podcasters who won’t “just shut the fuck up about socialism.”
Gasda is after larger quarry than surface-level social reportage or social satire, however, and it may ever be a mistake to consider Dimes Square a contribution to the realist theater. A semi-hostile review in Vulture nevertheless paid Gasda the compliment of a Chekhov comparison, suggested by a quiet allusion in the play. But something like No Exit or Waiting for Godot, with their terrible inertia, their sealed worlds, their vastated visions of hell, might be closer to the mark.
If I were to put Gasda in any new-right context at all, not that I know anything of his practical political commitments, I would consider his play in the light of that movement’s favorite philosopher, René Girard, who posited that modern secular life was marred and would eventually be destroyed by rivalrous social emulation, our desire for what other people want and our desire to be what other people are, desires that, in their this-worldly immanence, lower our aim from higher things.
For Dimes Square may appear as aimless as the drinking, coke-snorting, and faithless fucking among writers, filmmakers, musicians, and hangers-on that it dramatizes, but it rigorously examines its characters’ inability to love and to make great art due to their envious desires to outdo or to become one another. This is explicit in the case of the masculinist artistic and erotic rivalry between the novelist Stefan and the filmmaker Terry at the center of the drama, with their mutual behind-the-back accusations that each is a pretentious manipulator. But it can be read, too, for example, in the very different thrust-and-parry of the play’s young women, who may at times be the designated prey of its men, but who seek to outdo one another as well:
ASHLEY How comes you haven’t made a move on me?
ROSIE Paralysis of the will.
ASHLEY Oh.
ROSIE I’m all talk.
ASHLEY Damn.
ROSIE Yeaaaah.
ASHLEY Ah.
ROSIE Why don’t you make a move on me?
ASHLEY I don’t know how. I’m a baby.
ROSIE I think that’s a front.
ASHLEY Could be....
ROSIE You’re like me: you know exactly what you’re doing.
Even the character of Klay, a journalist and failed fiction writer, whom one intelligent commentator reads as the drama’s moral center, freely confesses to a woman he’s unsuccessfully trying to seduce, “Being a good guy or whatever is my grift,” to which she acutely replies, “We’ve all got a thing.”
The play’s overt conservatism—most of the characters give voice to some severe judgment of the present’s lowered standards—is a decoy, then, for a more sophisticated argument about our failure to reproduce a living culture. When the Gen-X literary editor Chris expectorates his stern artistic credo at the cast of Millennial mediocrities—
People don’t care about all the books that were almost as good as Ulysses; they don’t read them, they read Ulysses. You don't read ‘almost-genius’; you don’t give a shit about ‘well-made’; you don’t tell your kids about meeting ‘relatively clever’ at a party. No. Hell no. You get hard for shit that will survive over time, that is the product of real existential blood and tears, or you don’t get your dick sucked at all—you stay soft. Period.
—we are almost supposed to agree, except that the crass fantasy of fellatio exposes this version of literary greatness as yet another stalking-horse for the social and sexual will-to-power that dominates the drama without relief. There is no way out of this nightmare apartment, no Shakespearean green world where relations can be transfigured and redeemed. But Gasda shapes the outline of authentic values in their absence: art and love consummated for themselves, not for power over others and the aggrandizement of self.
Gasda has cited Harold Bloom as an inspiration. Bloom’s model of influence—an intergenerational contest of great writers for imaginative primacy in time rather than sociopolitical or sexual priority in space—overtly recalls Jacob’s wrestling with the angel. Similarly, Girard counsels, instead of the “deviated transcendency” of social envy and rivalry, the true transcendence of a relationship with the divine, or perhaps what we might more ecumenically call the numinous. Gasda, an avowed Rousseauist, might rather speak of nature. Whatever label we attach or tradition we follow, neither true poetry nor true love can exist in the play; but they are implied in the space left by the illusions the play dispels.
Ironically, Gasda’s negativity at least superficially mirrors that of his milieu’s critics, the Marxist critique of his moment’s spiritual yearning, whether John Ganz with his Bourdieu-inflected sociology—Bourdieu, who exemplifies Wilde’s definition of a cynic: one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing—or Mike Crumplar, with his somehow both prankish and preening moral superiority. Not that such critics never pointed out real flaws in this strenuously self-conscious avant-garde—in a just world we might have been spared the sedevacantism—but they strike through them (as Gasda, in my reading, does not) to target any real attempt at transcendence such as any artist of any real ambition might naturally pursue. What Karl Kraus famously said of psychoanalysis is still truer of materialist cultural critique: it is the disease for which it claims to be the cure, in this case, the reduction of the soul to manageable and manipulable matter actuated solely by power.
Gasda also sent me his most recent drama, Berlin Story, which he considers a companion piece to Dimes Square. A different city but a not dissimilar male rivalry and a not dissimilar set of destructive sexual relations. It all culminates this time, more explicitly than Dimes Square, in what we might almost take to be a properly Chekhovian epiphany:
If you think about other peoples’ suffering for long enough—to the point where you can actually feel it—you can begin to make sense of your own...but not until then. If your own suffering is purely abstract, purely a product of your own mind, not connected to anything else, then it’s not only meaningless, but absurd. But once you do—once you have that wider sense of things—then you can begin to be a civilized person: a person with dignity.
It’s too soon to judge what is or isn’t major, permanent artistic work. But Gasda’s concerns are too urgent—and his way of at once excavating and burying them in these sometimes abrasive plays too subtle—to be dismissed as mere reactionary complaint or opportunistic position-taking. I only wonder if this apophatic aesthetic, this affirmation only by negation, these almost unrelievedly scabrous dialogues, will ever flower into a more present and palpable beauty.
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