Weekly Readings #105 (02/05/24-02/11/24)

the triumph of romance

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

This week I published “Romantic Realism,” the latest chapter of Major Arcana, my serialized novel for paid subscribers. Two chapters remain in Part Four, followed by an epilogue. Then one of the most original American novels of the decade (century?) will be complete. If you haven’t subscribed because you were worried I wouldn’t stick the landing, you can rest assured: I have stuck the landing. Please subscribe today!¹

Another benefit of a paid subscription: The Invisible College, my new series of literature courses. We are well embarked now on our survey of Modern British Literature from Romanticism to Modernism. This week, I released “Lost Angel of a Ruined Paradise,” a lecture on P. B. Shelley that revealed, among other things, the esoteric subtext of all western literature. Please subscribe today to travel in such realms of gold—the Keats lecture drops on Friday.

Today I will answer two questions from readers. They were submitted to my Tumblr, but the answers are exclusive to Substack. First, I speculate on the contents of a hypothetical John Pistelli Reader. Second, I discuss my favorite painters. Please enjoy!

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Said Rider to Reader: Some Problems of Having an Oeuvre

A reader inquires: “Have you ever thought about putting together a ‘John Pistelli Reader’ for new fans? If you did, what of your work would you include in it?” I reply:

Something in me (not modesty) resists the idea! I normally tell people just to read about whatever interests them in the Review Index.

I try not to be Sontag-levels of annoying about it, but I think of my fiction as my only real work, because my only truly imagined work. The nonfiction is only, as Milton said of his prose, “the work of my left hand.” The cynical sociological critic might even say I produced it as a loss leader to attract attention to the fiction. So my main advice would be to start with Portraits and Ashes and Major Arcana, my “big books.”

If that sounds like too large a commitment, try my prose poem “Iconoclasm,” my short story “Sweet Angry God,” and/or my novelette Right Between the Eyes, each a compression into the smallest possible space of my most characteristic styles and obsessions—or at least those of my first serious decade writing.² If there were such a “reader,” it might start there.

As for my nonfiction: I try not to be Sontag-levels of annoying about this either, but I’m also now at a point where some of that criticism was written almost a decade ago, in different social, cultural, and political circumstances. It was therefore done in a way I probably would not do it today.

This isn’t self-criticism; you have to move with the times to address any public at all, since the public’s ability to receive a message is radically conditioned by the times. But, for example, the somewhat strenuous immoralism of the 2015 essay on Nightwood, definitely one of my best, was needed back in the thick of burgeoning 2010s social-justice criticism and its moralistic demand for didactic art. Now, however, in the epoch of Bronze Age Pervert, such immoralism is almost certainly superfluous. We might even need a reminder of the humanistic verities.³

Similarly, the 2019 essay on The Trial of Socrates had to do an enormous amount of heavy lifting even to begin to try to nudge us off what proved to be our inevitable rendezvous at Peak Woke, from whose height we now precipitously tumble. And almost everything I wrote during the Cultural Revolution of summer of 2020, when I was privy to private academic Google docs in which graduate students explicitly justified open political violence against anyone who didn’t accede to the quite dubious propositions of that racialist moment, was necessarily written in a kind of cypher, though I trust I managed to make my meaning clear.

Since my anonymous questioner is not the only person who’s asked me something like this, or else expressed frustration with the extent of the criticism, I will nevertheless pick a baker’s dozen of favorite pieces in chronological order. These are not necessarily the essays on the best books I wrote about, though some of these books are great, but the essays that might best chart my changing tastes and attitudes, as well as some continuities of analysis and appreciation:⁴

• Charlotte Brontë, Villette

• Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

• Cynthia Ozick, Heir to the Glimmering World

• Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye

• Derek Walcott, Omeros

• Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

• Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

• Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

• Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work

• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

• Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

• James Joyce, Ulysses

• Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind⁵

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Pictures in Our Eyes to Get: My Favorite Painters

Another reader inquires, “Who are your favorite painters?” I will respond, but a disclaimer before I do. My formal study of art history has been minimal, limited to a single introductory-level survey course taught, to about 150 largely indifferent students in an auditorium, by the marvelously imperious feminist art historian Ann Sutherland Harris. This was over two decades ago—pre-9/11, in fact.

On the first day of class—have I told this story before? I ask myself in Bidenesque bewilderment—she clicked through a slideshow of western art and architecture in all periods, giving us a little quiz, working out our American ignorance. In the darkened auditorium, Chartres Cathedral reared up on the screen above her.

“Does anyone know what this is?” she asked.

A kid in a baseball cap called out, “Nohdurrdayme.”

“No, my dear,” she reproved. “‘Nohdurrdayme’ is in Indiana. This—” she lifted her hand like a priestess to indicate the Cathedral— “is Notre Dame!”

Which is to say that my relation to painting is personal and unofficial, my preferences only my preferences, less “disinterested,” to invoke the Kantian and Arnoldian ideal of aesthetic judgment, than my much more studied literary judgments. I don’t really like Wordsworth, for example, but I can tell you—I have told you—why his work is great. There are great painters, by contrast, whose names I don’t even know, and others whose rumored greatness is a total mystery to me.

Now, to get the totally obvious out of the way—another symptom of the untutored mind is perhaps a preference for what everybody already prefers—two early and ongoing favorites are Michelangelo and Picasso, the bookends of the modern tradition. Michelangelo: the early modern who blasted the gigantic human form out of its medieval shackles and out into the cosmos as the measure of all things. Picasso: the late modern who distilled this giant form in his alembic into its aggregate parts. Modernity has been alchemy in reverse: coagula first and then solve. Maybe it wasn’t the best way to do it—maybe we now must reverse this baleful process—but Michelangelo and Picasso did it best in painting anyway, like their literary counterparts, also my favorites: Shakespeare and Joyce.

Michelangelo, The Delphic Sybil (1508-1512); Picasso, The Dream (1932)

Who between Michelangelo and Picasso? I like the Baroque in the aggregate but besides Caravaggio could hardly name a painter; I also like (this is perhaps a confession one makes to a psychoanalyst) the distorted female figures of the Mannerists, their swan-necked and serpent-fingered Madonnas, the kind our own John Currin would eventually turn into a kind of ironic-scoliotic meta-pornography. The Dutch masters, though, are a little staid for me, a little (can I say this?) boring. Such a judgment is an ethical as well as an aesthetic lapse, I’m sure, of a piece with my sometime skepticism of St. Dr. Chekhov, but it is what I have to work with.

When it comes to 19th-century realists and early modernists, my painterly preferences again track my literary ones, which is to say that the Russians often do it better than the French or English. Give me Ilya Repin’s interiors or panoramas! (They Did Not Expect Him is perhaps my favorite realist painting, a 900-page novel in one image.) Give me Mikhail Vrubel’s angels and demons! (Are his Hamlet and Ophelia not definitive?) Among the English and French, though, I will say a word in favor of Burne-Jones and Moreau, two very different visionaries—as different as dream and nightmare.

Ilya Repin, They Did Not Expect Him (1888); Mikhail Vrubel, Hamlet and Ophelia (1883)

A more unexpected preference might be for Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, court painter to Marie Antoinette, who appears, incidentally, in Sontag’s Volcano Lover. I wrote a paper about her in graduate school, for a cultural-studies seminar on the Enlightenment. There I argued, foreshadowing my later work, that her “feminine” style should not be dismissed as aristocratic decadence to be swept away by the hard men of the revolution but should rather be appropriated for more emancipatory ends.⁶ I just think her pictures are pretty—and that “pretty” is a legitimate thing for pictures to be.

Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, Portrait de la comtesse Maria Theresia Bucquoi (1793)

In conclusion, two names among the living. First, let me cite, for the first time, a fellow American. Ever since I found a book of his paintings while browsing in a library a few years ago, I have admired Bo Bartlett. He has reinvigorated figurative art—sometimes thought superannuated—with his unsettling and uncanny American dreamscapes, Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth by way of David Lynch. If you ask me, it deserves to be called “Romantic Realism.” (Have you noticed I only like pictures with people in them?)

Bo Bartlett, The Triumph of Romance (2009)

Finally, and in partial defiance of my preference for figuration, let me recommend again Anselm Kiefer, after praising Wim Wenders’s recent documentary on the German painter a few weeks ago. Since I discovered it online a few years ago, his German Lineages of Salvation⁷ has become a talismanic image for me: a reminder of our need to keep the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment as close together as we can, lest (perhaps I vulgarize his intention) the former alone lead us to the sky-god’s apocalypse figured by the Biblical rainbow and the latter alone lead us down the dark river to hell.⁸ “Didactic art” should be a total oxymoron, but Kiefer’s restless inquiry into the nightmare of history makes it a live potential. His lifelong project—we can’t call such a vocational commitment anything as trivial as a “career”—also models for us how artists should live: inside their art.

Anselm Kiefer, German Lineages of Salvation (1974). The names in the rainbow are Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. The names in the river are Jung, Heidegger, Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

1. A print and ebook edition will be forthcoming later this year. Paid subscribers will receive a free pdf of the ebook.

2. I’ve been writing since I was five, but I designate The Ecstasy of Michaela, published in 2012, when I was 30 years old, as the beginning of my real work, give or take a few teenaged poems (see here and here) I still have an irrepressible affection for. Maybe they could be the overtures to the John Pistelli Reader.

3. Which isn’t to say that Nightwood doesn’t remain one of the best American novels ever, albeit for reasons larger than my locally polemical claim that it resists 2010s-style identity politics by being both a lesbian/trans novel and an ultra-right-wing novel.

4. Criticism, says Wilde, is the only civilized form of autobiography. But I waxed more autobiographical when writing about some books than others. I think my essay on Hamlet and my essay on Moby-Dick are both pretty good, for example, but those essays are 99.9% about Shakespeare and Melville and maybe 0.1% about John Pistelli, if that. Another lesson we can learn from Sontag, who once had to tell an interviewer with a certain frustration that Shakespeare was her favorite author even though she’d never written on him: sometimes it’s easier to conduct “civilized autobiography” in the presence of lesser works, because greater works will simply crowd you out. This may also be another reason for the drift of writers away from serious reading observed by Naomi Kanakia this week.

5. Quick annotations to the list: the Brontë and Ishiguro essays outline the aforementioned nihilistic aesthete’s perspective I was toying with in the mid-2010s; the Ozick essay is my very first attempt to think through the questions of magic, religion, iconoclasm, and art that find their fullest expression in Major Arcana; the Bataille essay is a digest of my oft-vented skepticism about “French extremity” in all its forms; it also joins with the essays on Grant Morrison and Umberto Eco as a triptych on radicalism and conspiracy theory (fun fact for those spinning conspiracy theories about me: I did once explain my “connection” to Michael Aquino, as alluded to re: Eco, in my first-ever podcast appearance over two years ago, which you can find behind Katherine Dee’s paywall here); the Mann essay contains all I have to say about modernism and fascism; the Walcott essay is my most hard-headed statement on the need to appreciate the “problematic” artist as problematic; the Didion, Moser, and Austen essays comprise a loose trilogy that explains my anti-feminist feminism or feminist anti-feminism; the Joyce essay is my most complete quarrel with myself about modernism; and the Stevens essay is simply my favorite thing I’ve ever written about poetry.

6. You would, let’s face it, be lying if you said you didn’t want me to quote some of that glorious grad-student prose. I give you, then, the essay’s first and last paragraphs, in photo form since I only have a hard copy of the paper and can’t bear to type it out:

7. I quote my earlier explication of this painting and the universal significance of what is “German” from this discussion of Jung:

Why, by the way, can we not understand ourselves without reading German-language thinkers of the 1792-1945 period? Modernity in its different manifestations detonated in England, France, and Germany first—as Lenin put it, summarizing Marx’s canon: English economics, French politics, and German philosophy. Germany, construing itself as modernity’s first victim, the first “colony” in the metaphysical sense indicated by words like “postcolonial” and “decolonial,” philosophized itself into either arch-resistance to or arch-fulfillment of modernity, these being the divergent paths of Jung and Freud, as in Anselm Kiefer’s schematic painting German Lineages of Salvation, a picture worth a thousand books, though it sadly and mysteriously omits Freud, who belongs in the bright rainbow with Marx and Hegel, not in the murky river with Jung and Heidegger. I’m no longer sure if this is the most relevant division today, however, in the present epistemic freefall. Of the trinity Marx-Nietzsche-Freud, it seems to me that only Nietzsche still speaks to us with undiminished relevance, whereas Marx and Freud, as materialists, the one with his implied “existence precedes essence” and the other with his overt “anatomy is destiny,” can’t deal with the vertiginous autonomy of consciousness loosed by today’s culture and technology, thus we tend, for example, to seek Freud’s Oedipus (Jung) and Marx’s Laius (Hegel) instead. In a final and deeply ironic tribute to Marx and Freud, however, this is itself something of a materialist explanation.

8. Browsing in the same library where I discovered Bartlett, I recently found a 1996 monograph on Kiefer by the Jungian analyst Rafael Lopez-Pedraza. The psychologist lauds the artist’s oeuvre as an attempt to undo the work of Hitler by integrating Germany’s shadow and recalling its anima, this as against a worse-than-useless accusatory “anti-fascism” that refuses to integrate its own shadow or recall its own anima.

Both Jung and Kiefer convey to us that consciousness of evil is no longer the prerogative of religion or the law: today, evil requires an effort of awareness and reflection.

Lopez-Pedraza then praises Kiefer’s daring engagement with the Hebrew Bible and with the poetry of Paul Celan as a further attempt to understand Judaism’s own psychological complex as well, its “psychopathic god” (the Auden quotation is mine, not the author’s) an imago as troubling in its consequence as German myth’s refusal to distinguish between gods and heroes in their apocalyptic songs of love and death. I find this persuasive, but then I would: our analyst, I can’t help but notice, is Latin American, as I am Italian-American, and the analysis ends up treating Greco-Roman civilization, with its fine distinctions among gods and men, as ethically and aesthetically normative as opposed to Gothic Kultur and Hebrew theocracy. “Physician, heal thyself.” But then Jung himself told us that only the wounded surgeon could heal the world.