Weekly Readings #107 (02/19/24-02/25/24)

the brave deserve the beautiful

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

This week I published “Prospero’s Apprentice,” the chapter that concludes Part Four of Major Arcana, my serialized novel for paid subscribers. While the last three chapters tied the narrative up nicely, the novel doesn’t end until Wednesday, with an epilogue to answer its final unanswered question: where did Ash del Greco’s baby come from?¹ Please subscribe to join me for the conclusion.

I also posted “The Lightning of My Being,” a Byron-focused free episode of the The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers.² All are welcome to listen to my exposition of the Byronic hero and its influence on everyone from Pushkin to Melville to Nietzsche, of the reason no one has been able to write a real epic since Milton, and more. Please offer a paid subscription for access to my forthcoming episode on Pride and Prejudice and then our turn to the Victorian era two weeks from now.

For this week, some scattered thoughts on the always vexed question of criticism as occasioned by some of the week’s news and controversies. Please enjoy!

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Create the Taste: Why and Whither Criticism?

Norman Rockwell, The Art Critic (1955)

I have obviously failed to return to literary criticism after the sabbatical I took to write Major Arcana in 2023. I haven’t even continued the monthly round-ups I was doing last year to compensate for the lack of essays. Practically speaking, I don’t have much time to read things that aren’t related to the Invisible College right now. But the terms in which I announced this sabbatical over a year ago—“I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau”—already suggested that I was ready to move on more permanently, at least for now.

While I repeat to the editors among my readership that I am more than happy to write book reviews for any learned or unlearned journal that will have me, I no longer feel an impilse to pass every single thing I read through mill of an aspirationally universal critical judgment.

In a letter, Wordsworth, quoting a remark of Coleridge, gave us the motto of the artist-critic, not to mention the secret of what Wordsworth and Coleridge were trying to do in such critical texts as the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Biographia Literaria:

every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

But I think have essentially done the job on my own behalf. To say more at this point, and about every single thing I read, would be to go over the same ground again and again.

The question came to mind this week when a book review by Rachel Cooke, one essentially espousing the “taste by which [I] am to be relished,” kicked off a typical social-media controversy. Cooke, assaying the latest work by Lauren Oyler, concluded this way:

Three years ago, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates lobbed one of her periodic stink bombs in the direction of X (then Twitter) by posting her light disappointment at the rise and rise of what she called these “wan little husks of autofiction with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer” (cue lots of younger writers holding their noses). While Oyler quotes this in her essay, she doesn’t precisely rip it apart – and in her novel she sent up the “white spaces” beloved of Jenny Offill and co.³ But she also devotes 50 long pages to the subject of autofiction, a piece of writing that by necessity means she must chew – and chew – on other people’s wan little husks.

This doesn’t strike me as very nourishing: for her, the poor little squirrel, or for the reader. Or not this reader, at any rate. Again, that feeling: an emptying out. Middlemarch, metaphorically speaking, is now as distant as the brightly shining moon. Literature – novels, criticism, all of it – seems to be draining away before our very eyes, and it makes me feel very sad and depressed.

While I wouldn’t have said it quite like that—the critic’s needlessly avowed sadness and depression is surely of a piece with the autofictionist’s self-preoccupation—I agree in substance. I also found funny and clever the associative leap from “husk” to “squirrel” to Middlemarch, though the American commentariat seemed not to have grasped the metonymic logic.⁴ Though she hit the scene as a kind of early anti-woke superstar for her celebrated critique of Jia Tolentino, Oyler predictably said the review was “sexist,” though what’s sexist about being compared by a female critic to a female novelist eludes my admittedly hyper-masculine mind. (If she thinks that’s sexist, she should try “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”!)

But did the review convince anyone, exactly? Everyone simply seemed to remain hardened in their camps. To judge from what I’ve seen on social media, a more thorough and more devastating review of the Oyler book awaits us, but the contending parties will probably remain the contending parties even so.⁵ The best we seem to do is mark our territory.

In another area of the same discourse, Vice Media more or less fell this week—a fall that includes the potential disappearance of its archive, which has happened or almost happened in a number of similar cases. It seems quaint in these circumstances to argue about the merit of self-publishing or independent publishing. Until credible replacements appear for the old institutions of media and publishing that “online” has destroyed, I don’t see what choice ambitious writers, editors, and publishers have but to strike out on our own.

Friend-of-the-blog Noah Kumin offers some sage advice to such aspirants. Of his useful list of recommendations, I would quibble only with the third item:

Be chill and normal. Strangely often, people tell me they’re surprised to be dealing with someone in the arts who is chill and normal. You’re not God, you’re not a once-in-a-century genius, you’re not changing the world. You’re a craftsman, like a plumber or cultivator of bonzai, trying to create a good product. Sit down, be humble.

There are two separable claims here. Of course we should all act “chill and normal” when directly interacting with individuals or small groups either in person or online. That’s just life advice, not literary advice, and I couldn’t agree more.

Whether your online persona—or your authorial persona on the printed page—should be “chill and normal,” let alone “humble,” is another matter, however. What kind of humility is it to ask readers to submit with patience and attention to your literary vision? Emerson, Nietzsche, and Didion would like a word! I think that kind of “be humble” attitude led my mortifying generation down the cul-de-sacs of autofiction and moralistic criticism, to repudiate the imagination and make checking their privilege their full-time job. Remember when all the Millennial critics would link to their latest articles with some version of this: “So I um like kind of wrote a thing? Read it maybe?” Among all the other ways this tone represents a default of dignity, it disrespects the reader more than an overt claim to merit ever could.⁶ If you don’t take your work seriously, why should I take it seriously?

Perhaps some of my claims for my own work sound exaggerated, but I don’t see why I would want anyone else to read it, let alone to pay for it, if I didn’t think it was special—more special than the competition, anyway, which probably also means that it’s more than well-crafted, that it’s less a craft than a vision. It’s obviously not for me to say that I’m a once-in-a-century genius, but it’s also not for me to say I’m not.⁷ And lest this sound absurdly self-aggrandizing, just look at the century!

Of course, you can’t always say such things directly, so you turn to writing literary criticism and theory—to writing the Preface to Lyrical Ballads or Biographia Literaria or “A Defence of Poetry” or “Tradition and the Individual Talent” or “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” etc.—to assert what’s special about yourself indirectly, by creating a general theory of literature to which your work alone seems entirely answerable. My only question is: do I have to do this forever?

None of which is to say that there can’t be honest criticism, even if it often has to be written by the non-practitioner. A reader wrote in to speculate on the purpose of criticism, and, in the course of responding, I made the following suggestion:

The great ages of criticism in English literature are the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, nestled in the two gaps between the three explosions of the Renaissance, Romanticism, and modernism. The greatest American criticism was arguably written in the middle of the 20th century, between the high periods of modernism and postmodernism. Major criticism seems to happen in the aftermath of great creative periods as an attempt to explain what happened and to point the way forward.

I do think the late 20th century was a reasonably great period in English-language letters, to an extent we still haven’t appreciated. When I was first starting to read seriously in the late 1990s and early 2000s, “contemporary literature” did not seem at all inferior to “canonical literature”: DeLillo, Roth, Morrison, McCarthy, Byatt, and Ishiguro could, it seemed to me, more than hold their own next to Joyce, Kafka, Woolf, Nabokov, Lawrence, and Faulkner. The 2000-2020 period was less promising, and whether it even offered a criticism equal to the literature preceding it remains open to question. But enough time has passed to say in no uncertain terms that we should give creation priority over criticism once again.

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Postscriptum on the Perplexity of Influence

The same reader who was speculating on criticism above made a further venture yesterday, which I answer exclusively here on Substack:

Following my imaginative-systematic ramble, another brief thought, less certain than the rest—while the best thing a critic can do for the aesthete is sum up some aspect of a work with a crystalline explanatory phrase, the best thing a critic can do for the artist is (perhaps) to goad them towards discovering/mapping/creating something difficult (these three tend towards becoming synonyms, I suspect). As in your Hawthorne review: “But perhaps my homely contribution will be more practically persuasive: I think strong writers overcome the anxiety of influence by adopting modes that startlingly combine those of the most disparate of their major precursors...The harder it is to imagine making the combination work, the greater the literary rewards will be. Feel free to take this as a writing prompt, by the way. What if Edith Wharton wrote Paradise Lost? What if J. G. Ballard wrote Daniel Deronda? What if Zora Neale Hurston wrote Blood Meridian?” It needn’t be so direct, but this is exactly the sort of thing that sparks imagination.

Since my reader quotes my footnote on influence, I’d like to add, as a bonus for devoted Major Arcana readers, that a similar idea inspired me in writing the novel, even if in the present it sounds a bit like an AI prompt, or what Coleridge called “fancy.”

The general conceit governing Major Arcana is as follows: “What if the metaphysical vision informing the counterculture-occult comics I grew up reading were presented in the very different temporal-ethical idiom of the realist-domestic novel whose great tradition I was later inducted into?” In other words: “What if Alan Moore or Grant Morrison wrote Sense and Sensibility or Middlemarch?” I would like to think I’ve done something imaginative, and not merely fanciful, with the premise.

This is nothing new for me, though. In this hour of Millennial media’s total collapse, as indicated by the Vice news above, and with some saying Lena Dunham’s Girls will be the only survivor of that generational moment, I remember describing Portraits and Ashes over a decade ago (and perhaps even to literary agents who wanted novels to be TV shows) as “Girls meets Blindness.”

1. American Affairs has published an intriguing essay on gender politics by Ginevra Davis. It’s rare to see a survey of “enemy” political thought on the right that is emotionally literate enough to explain why anyone sane or well-meaning ever believed the ideology under investigation in the first place. For example, without LibsOfTikTok-style pointing and sputtering, Davis ably summarizes, if you can forgive her brusque phrasing, why Judith Butler seemed persuasive to humanities academe given the rival worldviews on the scene:

But in 1990, Butler’s vision of a post-sex utopia would have been a welcome break for the whiny, “lived-experience”-based feminism that dominated the previous dec­ade—a grab‑bag of rape victims and desperate housewives. Butler moved the window of debate from something rigid—bodies, their limitations—to a space of infinite play, of possibility and self-creation. Gender is fun. Gender sounds like freedom.

I link to the essay because Davis’s overall thesis about the drift of Butler from she to they, while it will strike some in my ideologically mixed audience as offensive, chimes well with what is (disinterestedly) portrayed in Major Arcana, particularly Part Three—even in minute details, such as the incapacity of western medicine to treat what ails the female body and the persistent conception of cultural greatness in exclusively masculine terms. If my (anti-)hero(ine) Ash del Greco ever wrote a learned essay for a right-wing journal explaining her own journey from she to they to it and back again, and she very well might, this would be that essay.

2. As I look ahead 10 months, I am contemplating one more change to the syllabus. I may drop The Scarlet Letter in favor of The Blithedale Romance in the fall American Renaissance course. Like my swap of Lawrence for Eliot, this change is based on my sense that I’ve already said all I have to say on a certain topic: my essay on The Scarlet Letter is pretty comprehensive considering the brevity of the text, and I don’t just want to repeat it in the spoken word. I also selfishly want to reread The Blithedale Romance, which I’ve only read once, whereas I’ve probably read The Scarlet Letter 10 times by now. Finally, given its social and political theme of a utopian commune’s failure, The Blithedale Romance may be more immediate to contemporary readers. I’m probably going to make this switch unless anyone strenuously objects in the comments below. I feel the same way about Heart of Darkness vis-à-vis The Secret Agent seven weeks hence, but I don’t want to try your patience beyond endurance! Still, if you have any thoughts on that, please let me know below.

3. If you want to see me in my now quasi-disavowed “hanging judge” critical mode, here is my almost seven-year-old review of Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. I attempted to deliver the coup de grâce in the mode of bone-dry irony: “Dept. of Speculation is a superb instance of the kind of novel that it is.” Like Cooke’s, my peroration decries autofiction more generally, the last line a direct quotation from the novel itself:

What if we are personal because we are too timid to venture the universal? What if we are fragmentary because we are not energetic enough to create wholes? What if we collect facts because we cannot attain visions? What if we insist that life does not cohere only because we are no longer even willing to try to make sense? Do we think the world will judge us kindly, or forget to judge us at all, if we make ourselves inconspicuous? I suspect it’s time to speculate more boldly. “You’re free, remember?”

4. Don’t let such a thing happen to you! Sign up for The Invisible College—we’re reading Middlemarch this summer.

5. It was from chatter in this area that I discovered how Oyler offers her hatred of narratives that end happily as evidence of her own sophistication in her new book. That’s why I had this paragraph from Hegel at the ready when someone coincidentally asked me if I didn’t think the happy ending of the film Altered States was a cop-out given the darkness that precedes it:

Much as poets present to us the bare downfall of particular people they are also able to treat the similar contingency of the development of events in such a way, that, though the circumstances in all other respects would appear to give them little enough support, a happy issue of such conditions, and characters is secured, in which they elicit our interest. No doubt the favour of such a destiny of events has at least an equal claim upon us as the disfavour. And so far as the question merely concerns the nature of this difference, I must admit that I prefer a happy conclusion. How could it be otherwise? I can myself discover no better ground for the preference of misfortune, simply on its own account as such, to a happy resolution than that of a certain condition of fine sensibility, which is devoted to pain and suffering, and experiences more interest in their presence than in painless situations such as it meets with every day. If therefore the interests are of such a nature, that it is not really worth the trouble to sacrifice the men or women concerned on their altar, it being possible for them, either to surrender their objects, without making such surrender as is equivalent to a surrender of their individuality, or to mutually come to an agreement in respect thereof, there is no reason why the conclusion should be tragic. The tragic aspect of the conflicts and their resolution ought in principle merely to be enforced in the cases where it is actually necessary in order to satisfy the claim of a superior point of view. (Lectures on Fine Art, trans. Osmaston, qtd. in Hegel on Tragedy)

I’ll confess to a certain defensiveness here re: Major Arcana. No spoilers, but I’m not going to ask people to read a 160K-word novel that leaves them feeling worse about the world than when they started. Anyway, by Hegel’s stricture, one of my characters does sacrifice himself for a higher principle. That’s the tragedy with which Major Arcana begins. It ends somewhere else: with his survivors attempting to live rather than to die for this principle.

6. Such a tone is also not actually humble. To simper so grotesquely is to expect a deference you are actually too proud to solicit as such—a posture of aristocratic condescension, as if to say that you are above plebeian assertions of self and attainment. The tech founder’s proverbial hoodie and flip-flops represent a similar gesture, as does, for example, John Fetterman’s prole masquerade in the Senate, as if any working-class person I ever met wouldn’t have told him, born as he was to wealth, to get himself a goddamn suit already.

7. To quote our original American sage on the matter, from his epochal “American Scholar,” and please bear in mind that he didn’t know he would later be called “the mind of America” or be remembered as one of the major writers of his time when he wrote this:

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

We could produce many examples of past writers who refused any summons to humility. We all know about Nabokov’s “strong opinions,” which I’ve quarreled with on the merits—but I don’t quarrel with our chessmaster for issuing them. Then there’s Hemingway with his pugilistic boast that he’d beaten Shakespeare, Cervantes, Turgenev, and Maupassant in “the ring”—everyone but Tolstoy. As for the Count himself, Tolstoy thought he was better than Shakespeare, while Woolf thought she was better than Joyce, which Lawrence also thought, just as Charlotte Brontë thought she was better than Austen, and Blake thought he was better than Pope. Asked what book she’d take to a desert island, Toni Morrison said she’d take paper and pencil instead: “I’d like to write the book I’d like to read.” (The full anecdote is even better. She said it onstage with Chinua Achebe after he said he’d take Beloved to the desert island. She couldn’t even bring herself, in the interests of politeness, to say Things Fall Apart. I love it.) In the annals of literature, the humble have always been in blessedly short supply. The meek may inherit the earth, but the bold get the literary canon. Only the brave deserve the beautiful.