A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I posted “A Deeper Voice Across the Storm,” a lecture for the Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. It’s ostensibly about Alfred, Lord Tennyson, but it’s actually about the Victorian period as a whole, about rival visions of the role art should play in a technological and commercial and imperial society, about whether or not a posture of heroism remains viable for the writer today, and, finally, about the continuity of culture across aeons of upheaval. It begins with a voice reaching us across 134 years and a photograph of King Arthur.
It may be the best of these episodes yet, the one where I’ve most succeeded in my mission to break these writers out of the prison of fustiness in which even their exegetes and admirers have entombed them. Hence my unseemly glee at discovering not only the now-expected transgender Tennyson, but also the violent near-fascist Futurist Tennyson, Tennyson the forerunner of Marinetti, a Tennyson Ballard could love, imagining the world immolated by the beauty of speed.1 We’ll see what I can do with the Brownings—two writers about whom I have historically not had much to say—this week.
For today, a response to an inquiry about how to handle the immobilizing sensation of cultural belatedness. As a P. S., I add an answer to a question already posted to Tumblr about the theory of evolution.
Be Lated: Novelty at the End of Time
I am fascinated by the parasocial, so I maintain my open “Ask” box on Tumblr. It’s a new world; we’ve never related to each other quite this way before. I maintain some distance—I’m not like that one right-wing egirl who always posts nudes now (some of you will know who I mean)—but seeing what people want to know is a way of measuring the distance. So people ask me things. Strangely personal things: how much I sleep, what it was like in high school in the vanished years of the ’90s. They tell me things, too. “You should watch Dragonball,” they tell me. RIP to the man, of course, but I don’t think I will. They ask me difficult questions, ones that preoccupied many a finer mind than my own. Here’s one:
What would you say to someone who’s really feeling the weight of belatedness? It's not that I feel there’s nothing new to be done, but rather that references to the past encrust themselves so intensely around anything that resembles the old.
I guess this is the anxiety that led the modernists in many different art forms to declare war on the public, but I've always found that a childish reaction. And yet I don't know how to relate to the past, which I do want to do, without feeling in its shadow.
And here is a commonplace of the cultural historian: novelty in art was invented by the Romantics. Before they came along, artists saw themselves as adding to tradition, brick by brick, unconcerned with doing anything new. Like most commonplaces of this sort, it’s wrong in both directions.
The Romantic writers—as matriculates in The Invisible College now know—were obsessed with tradition and saw themselves as its fulfillment, throwing off newfangled 18th-century culture and calling upon what they saw as more vital precedents, whether in Ancient Greece or in medieval or Renaissance European art: Blake envisioning himself as literally possessed by the shade of Milton, Shelley writing in Dante’s terza rima, Keats brooding over what Greek myth could mean to a city boy like himself.
On the other side of the Romantic divide, we find Milton himself literally re-writing the Bible and taking what can only be described as liberties, even as Dante adds to the court of heaven some random girl he used to know, this as he dramatizes Virgil placing a crown on the head of his fictional surrogate. Shakespeare rewrites Ovid, but Ovid in the first place was a compendium of tales twice-told. Whatever the Homeric epics even are, they are the end of something, the culmination of a tradition lost to us in the mists of orature.
Novelty has never been anything more than the reinvention of tradition, and tradition has never been anything more than provender for the production of novelty.
The above is meant therapeutically: you are not alone in this struggle but in it with Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Blake, Shelley, and Keats. Good company! Knowing this may help us endure the dilemma, but we also want advice for getting through it.
I don’t want to give cheap advice. The anxiety of influence is real; rewriting “anxiety” as “ecstasy” doesn’t change that.2 We all want something new. But sometimes I have the impression that my questioners are much younger than I am. We hear about the insouciance and the irresponsibility of youth, but I actually feel more carefree about certain things the older I get, and this is one of them. A lot of problems solve themselves as long as you put your head down and do your work. I felt the weight of belatedness much more 20 years ago. So, cheap as it may sound, I first of all recommend trying not to worry about it.
Here is a good reason not to worry about it: you will transform whatever you are lifting out of the tradition into something new whether you want to or not. You will do this simply because you are you (and not anyone else) and belong to your age (and not to another). You couldn’t just replicate the old and the bygone if you wanted to. You could rewrite an old book word for word, and it would be completely different. This is the lesson of Borges’s Pierre Menard:
It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Menard with that of Cervantes. The latter, for instance, wrote (Don Quixote, Part One, Chapter Nine):
…truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “ingenious layman” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
…truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.
History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final clauses—example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future—are shamelessly pragmatic.
Borges was a son of Emerson and Whitman and indeed of William James, a child of the New World, not a European miserabilist. I’ve always taken his eerie infinities, his alephs and Babel libraries, to be somewhat comforting. They guarantee there will always be something more, something else, as Walt told us:
There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
So you can’t avoid creating the new. The zeitgeist will lean over your shoulder and guide your hand and create it for you even if you don’t make any conscious effort. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that it works both ways. I invite you to imagine me writing Major Arcana. I was, I admit, pretty pleased with myself as I wrote all the sequences set in the past decade, as I wrote about addictive Tumblr feeds and neopronouns and nonbinary teens considering nullo surgery and based trad egirls and CIA drugs that haven’t even been synthesized yet. “I’m one of the first people,” I told myself, “to get all this into a novel—or at least a good novel!” Novelty with a vengeance!
Then I read Mary Jane Eyre’s brilliant review and discovered that I had written a coherent religious allegory, “an imaginative retelling of Judeo-Christian myths,” in Mary’s words. Well, of course I did—and part of me is happy to hear I’ve achieved any coherence at all—but I didn’t do it deliberately. Deliberately, I was trying to capture what it feels like to live right now. The Judeo-Christian allegory spun itself into being beneath my awareness. The old stories, it seems, insist upon being retold; they ride us like horses, as in the original meaning of “meme” as an idea that uses us to replicate itself.3
But why exactly should this be bad news? If you write something that interests people, then people attuned to novelty will find novelty in it, and people attuned to tradition will find tradition in it. And it’s good that your work contains both, because a pure repetition can be dismissed as redundant, while pure novelty will not even be intelligible.
The problem of belatedness is ultimately one of those conundrums that can’t be solved in theory, can’t be solved by thinking about it, but only in practice, only by plunging into the difficulty and making something. If you fight through the anxiety and make something real, then the problem will solve itself. You will find in your hands a beautiful object, plucked dripping and steaming from the ocean of time, made equally of the past and the future: made of absolutely everything.
Postscriptum Darwinium: A Point of Madness
Speaking of repetition and novelty, a reader inquired on my Tumblr, “How persuasive do you find the evidence for evolution through natural selection?” Since it’s relevant to the Victorian era and to our Invisible College topics, I repost the answer here:
It’s a fine theory as far as theories go. I don’t know about the evidence; I never studied biology beyond the high school level. I also never got into all the Inherit the Wind controversies over it in American political life. In Catholic middle school, they told us Darwin was correct in his description of material reality, but to keep in mind that God was behind it all. While that raises some questions of theodicy, it also seems like a reasonable compromise between sacred and secular. Now if I understand Darwin’s move from natural to sexual selection as explanatory frameworks, however, and please keep in mind that I am relying on the Origin and Descent excerpts in my beloved Norton Anthology rather than any extensive study of evolution,4 it implies the autonomy of culture and therefore obviates reductive “evolutionary psychology” type of arguments. That is, sexual selection inaugurates the world of errant desire molded by artifice and takes us out of the realm of pure kill-or-be-killed natural selection. As friend-of-the-blog Nancy Armstrong writes:
What I want to take away from Darwin’s failure to resist an attraction he considered biologically disadvantageous to his offspring is that the power of attraction, as he depicts it in personal as well as scientific examples, has no long-term goal in mind—including even the survival of the species. What replenishes the force field of attractions that Darwin proposes in his later works is its capacity to produce ever new and captivating variations. In thus liberating the concept of attraction from the reproductive imperative, Darwin grants the orchid’s power of variation priority over the masculine principle of natural selection. He does so, moreover, without infusing the wasp with phallic masculinity, as Deleuze and Guattari do. Neither masculine nor feminine, the later conception of nature’s force that shaped Darwin’s orchid-wasp looks ahead not only to the vitalism that drives Deleuze and Guattari’s biological machine but also to Deleuze’s concept of “charm,” which he compares—rightly, to my mind—with literary style. “Charm,” in Deleuze’s words, “is the source of life just as style is the source of writing. […] But the charm is not the person. It is what makes [it possible for] people [to] be grasped as so many combinations and so many unique chances from which such a combination has been drawn.” It is “[t]hrough each fragile combination [that] a power of life is affirmed with a strength, an obstinacy, an unequalled persistence in the being” (Dialogues 5). Charm, as Deleuze came to see it near the end of his life, is akin to a concept of friendship in which each of us seizes on some aspect of another that is actually a departure from the type, a point of madness, if you will, that offers each the possibility of becoming someone else in combination with another.5
As in the comic book excerpted above, I suspect reality is stranger than these 19th-century materialist theories tell us, and that some kind of latent intelligence of matter or enmeshment of matter within fields of consciousness should be considered.
I understand this will not be cheering to those who hope for great writers to espouse humane sentiments or the correct politics. But I am more interested in the literary canon as a contest of titanic passions, real passions, than as a repository of moral truths, if there are moral truths. And as we saw last week with Austen, humane sentiments can be a cover for a politics no less consecrated to domination or empire than Tennyson’s, or can at least be read that way by a skeptical critic schooled in Nietzsche and Foucault.
For one thing, Bloom didn’t mean that this “anxiety” was a psychological state felt consciously by the writer, and he even enjoys maliciously quoting writers who insist they feel no anxiety at all. A good Freudian, he meant that it manifested itself unconsciously in the poem, as the dreamer’s repressed anxiety manifests itself in the dream.
I can’t find it, and it’s probably good that I can’t, but I’m imagining that meme (in the new-fashioned sense) where Jesus is guiding Trump at the resolute desk except that Jesus has been replaced by Lana Del Rey. Someone should please drop it in the comments.
For some reason they never forced me to read more Darwin than that for cultural-studies purposes in grad school, though this was common practice in the English department. I remember a colleague discussing his book list for his orals with my own advisor. He said, in complete earnestness, “I’m thinking of adding Darwin. Just selections, though.” Without even the barest hint of a pause, she replied, “Naturally.”
When I said off-handedly in my Jane Austen episode that Armstrong had become warmer in her tone toward the arts since her Marxist-Foucauldian criticism of the 1980s typified by Desire and Domestic Fiction, I was thinking of an essay like the one quoted here: a vaguely queer-theoretical defense of the aesthetic, even of the beautiful itself, as a form of attraction that can create emancipatory and unpredictable novelty rather than just an apologia for oppression. (Also, to hark back to last week’s Dune: Part Two review, “a point of madness” is a good phrase for what I find missing in much of Villeneuve’s cinema, and much of Nolan’s too, with the exceptions of The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer.) My Leavis-heads might be interested in this one, too, which finally bestows the radical critic’s blessing on Austen and the great tradition, even at the risk of indulging a slightly WEFish rhetoric to bestow a blessing also on techno-empire:
As we see it, Austen succeeds in winning the hearts of readers because her narratives inject the risk of romance into ordinary life. But she succeeds in winning over the critics, canonizers, and other moralizers for managing that risk with such precision and aplomb. To show what Austen did with the network form, we have conceptualized the novel as a network in its own right, one that brought Austen into relation with Brockden Brown, as well as Walpole, Radcliffe, Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding. In seeing her household as a hub enabling multiple narrative possibilities, we have also established a line of inquiry to connect her work productively with that of Charles Dickens and all the other Victorian novelists who saw the household as a provincial hub in a giant network enabling British people to circulate between metropolitan centers and locations across the globe. In addition to reclaiming “the Jewish parts” of Daniel Deronda, this way of reading the English novel will place Dickens squarely within the great tradition