A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I released “When We See Them Painted” a lecture on poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. This one’s essentially about how the novel killed poetry in the 19th century. Accordingly, we turn to Charles Dickens, the king of the novel, on the coming episode.
Speaking of the novel, I have decided to release the book version of my new one, Major Arcana, this week. It’s going to be as big and black as an old Bible. It arrives exactly a year after the Substack serial began: on the vernal equinox. I will make a whole post announcing the release when it’s time. Please try to prepare yourselves.
To get ready for the occasion, this week I answer a reader’s inquiry about a recent manifesto on the art of the novel. Please enjoy!
Sweet and Lenient: For a Pluralist Vision of the Novel
An anonymous reader, perhaps attentive to my attraction to the aesthetic manifesto as a form, inquires:
What do you think of James Elkins’s new literary manifesto (“Four Sour and Stringent Proposals for the Novel”)? There’s something persuasive I think about the idea that monumental, inaccessible art is the only way out of our present morass. Also sheds some interesting light on the slow-burn Arno Schmidt craze, which I’ve always been a little curious about.
I hadn’t read Elkins’s proposal before receiving this question, but I’d read his Goodreads reviews over the years and found them generally incompatible with my own approach. He seems to accept as gospel the now-dated 20th-century avant-garde idea of an anti-mimetic telos for all art.1 Compare his review of Anna Burns’s great novel Milkman to mine, for example.2 I reject this idea on grounds both intrinsic to the history of art and pertaining to its political implication; for my reasoning, please see my essay on Boris Groys’s Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, not to mention my novels Portraits and Ashes and Major Arcana. Elkins’s manifesto, anyway, is broadly in line with these avant-garde commitments. Here are its four proposals.
Novels aren’t about real life.
A novel should not be “careful, cautious, and professional.”
A novel need not provide good companionship.
A novel is complex.
I don’t disagree with everything in the essay. I even accept proposals 2 and 4 as written. We all know by now the damage professionalization has done to letters. As for “complexity,” he says it well, and I would not amend what he says but only add that this complexity can be achieved through structures and forms that superficially appear simple or even conventional. You don’t need to wage a comma-level war on the English language or spurn on principle the idea of ending the story on a comparative “up” note, still less to spurn on principle the idea of telling a story at all, to achieve this complexity.
A complex novel is one that keeps you wondering, keeps you working to understand what the author thinks they’re doing, and does not ever answer your questions. When you finish a genuinely complex novel, all the guesses you had while you were reading will be wrong, and the novel will only be like itself, and not like any other novel.
What do I disagree with, then? Proposal 1 is only true in response to the stupidest, shallowest version of the counter-claim, as made indeed on behalf of what Elkins calls “ethnic” literature and the putative importance of its positive representations or sociological reporting function, but otherwise has too narrow a definition of “real life.” Rembrandt couldn’t actually have attained what Elkins praises as his paintings’ Innerlichkeit without the provocation of the Äußerlichkeit3 he set out to capture. Roland Barthes, protecting his position in “the rear guard of the avant-garde,” also where I tend to station myself, writes in The Pleasure of the Text:
There are those who want a text (an art, a painting) without a shadow, without the “dominant ideology”; but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text (see the myth of the Woman without a Shadow). The text needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro.
All paintings are not simply waiting to become Pollocks or Rothkos, in the same way that not every novel (not even Molloy!) is simply waiting to become The Unnameable. The implied teleology here is too crushing. If it were true, why would one even bother? A major novel is a unique confluence of form, psyche, and milieu. If we reduce the novel to form, and further reduce form to iterative processes of linguistic expansion or contraction, then the bots can read and write them for us.
Plus, this walling oneself off from “real life” is fundamentally a timid and defensive position, a retreat from the idea that the novel, that “one bright book of life,” still unsurpassed by the other narrative forms, should both reflect and transfigure the real across many different dimensions of reality, from dreaming consciousness to quotidian experience. If we’re this far from Dickens and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and even Joyce, we’re losing.
Furthermore, if our vision of “ethnic” literature—I dislike this phrase, whether used by advocates or antagonists—doesn’t encompass debates that go back as far as, for example, Virginia Woolf’s censure of Arnold Bennett and Ralph Ellison’s reproof to Irving Howe, both on behalf of the idea that the novel should envision a larger and realer reality than that proposed by social realists, then we have really, if I can put it this way in the circumstances, lost the plot.
Proposal 3 is likewise, and despite cautions elsewhere in the essay against uncritically accepting the attitudes of the Frankfurt School, pledged to a historically contingent European skepticism or nihilism in the guise of sensibly warning the writer against too much mugging for the camera.
Because radical French and German writers could no longer believe in their absolutist vision of revolution and the revolutionary subject, and because reactionary ones hated the public on a principle just as politically programmatic, they retreated to an Adorno-like posture of aestheticized quietism no less moralistic for not being activist. Elkins seems to be mistaking as apolitical art an art whose politics aren’t visible to him. This has very little relevance, almost none, in America, with its at once ecstatic and pragmatic literary culture addressed to the no one and everyone of the democratic expanse. Neither Melville nor Dickinson wanted to go unread. Imagine telling any of this to Whitman, the most experimental poet of the 19th century. Even our astringent 20th-century modernists Faulkner and McCarthy tried to cut it in Hollywood, and not just for the money, as James before them tried to make a success of the popular theater. Moshfegh, though he cites her skeptically, has nevertheless succeeded in making popular art out of her private communion with her grotesque and amoral God.
I agree that writers should, in the act of composition, be alone with their vision. I always am. It does not follow, however, that the resulting text must necessarily be an abyss of meaning. Elkins writes:
There are many novels like this. It’s sink or swim with Musil, Bernhard, Stein, Perec, Beckett, Gaddis, or, for that matter, Spenser’s Faerie Queene. After reading Schmidt or Joyce, a writer like Karl-Ove Knausgaard comes across as compulsively, pathetically addicted to my attention. I can feel how much he wants me to keep reading, and what he’ll do to ensure that I don’t close the book. Most authors fill their novels with helpful cues, tempting hints, friendly reminders, entrancing set pieces, accumulating tension. But if you’re a writer, consider this alternative. You can say to yourself: I won’t be a dependable source of pleasure, I’m not a guide, I’m not there to reassure the reader. I’m here to write what I want, what I feel needs to be said, and it will only be a distraction to continuously try to picture what my reader might want.
What I feel needs to be said mostly takes the form of entrancing set pieces. I write really entrancing set pieces! My experimental ambition is to write a novel that is all entrancing set pieces. Anyway, Joyce produces an excess of meaning, as does Spenser, bizarrely cited in this context, who also only wrote set pieces. They are generous, even ebullient. Some of the other writers cited, while they’ve given me intermittent (and difficult) pleasure over the years, such as Stein, Beckett, and Bernhard, sometimes seem by contrast to be passing off a quite active spite toward the reader as unconsciousness of the reader, a gesture laden with the ressentiment of the avant-garde’s vaunted ambition épater les bourgeois.4 This is a more distorting aim in the end than is the Dickensian theatricalism that attempts to ensorcel a friendly audience5
I have no problem with monumental art, nor difficult art if its difficulties are intrinsic and organic to its conception, but one can as easily make a fetish6 of the very idea, and in service to an equally dubious social aim, as of lyrical realism or MFA professionalism. Not to mention that this style of Euro-difficulty also has an institutional base available for institutional critique: in this case, not so much “MFA” or “NYC” as “Ph.D.” Hence the vogue among the cognoscenti for translated literature as such, with its implicit academic credential, since who else but the academically trained will provide most of the translations?
Not all difficulties are difficulties of the surface, not all popular work a fraud on the public, and not all monuments inherently inaccessible.
In our age of Girardmania, I should clarify that I mean “mimesis” not in Girard’s anthropological sense of imitative desire but in Aristotle’s or Auerbach’s aesthetic sense of trying to represent reality in art.
Did I do that right? Ich spreche kein Deutsch!
I am much warier of so-called experimental fiction than I think my quondam academic status as “modernist” would suggest. On the one hand, every true novel is an experiment. On the other, most experiments fail. Bottom’s Dream sounds like an enormous pain in the ass, puns intended. Meanwhile, they’re trying to make Miss MacIntosh, My Darling happen again. God help us. This isn’t even my right-wing side talking—my right-wing side likes the hermetic poetry of Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, hermeticism being more appropriate to lyric poetry than to the novel—but rather my inner Lukács. This is as left-wing as I get, actually, which is to say: why abandon the novel’s historical mission to revolutionize the whole of society one individual at a time? I must send you back again to an emphatic sentence I wrote a year ago in reference to Bolaño: “It’s not just that writers should be permitted to descend from Kafka as well as from Dickens, it’s that Kafka also descends from Dickens.”
Please see my essay on Dave Hickey’s defense of beauty against just this style of late modernism:
To this classically emancipatory vision of social and political modernity—consider only Hickey’s roll call of the emergently enfranchised in the passage above, of whom Jews, homosexuals, and women are the paradigmatic figures—the early years of artistic modernism bore chaotic, cubistic witness. Then, after World War II, someone seized control—in this case, what Hickey labels the publicly-funded “therapeutic institution,” the state-museum-academia network of experts whose imprimatur the artwork now had to receive to be promoted or even shown to the public. Under this new church’s mandate to educate the laity on what our taste ought to be, the gaudy “pre-Raphaelite dragon” of beauty unleashed by the modern market was banished, and in its place arose an ideal of cold late-modernist formalism whose blankness only enfranchised, before an increasingly indifferent public, the institution’s own ongoing ministry.
One is sometimes attentive to even a writer of supposed nonfiction’s sensory figures. Elkins proposes that we refuse pleasure and expose ourselves instead to the sour and the stringent. In what other circumstances are we so enjoined? There are two: medicine and religious mortification. The novel on this account is either a foul-tasting purgative swallowed in an episode of distress or a spiny cilice wrapped around the tender fat of the thigh, the latter to appease a God who wishes us to remember the superiority of spirit over flesh. But I prefer to reserve unpleasant medicines for medical emergencies, and I prefer to conceive of flesh and spirit as mutually inter-animated rather than existing in a punitive hierarchy. The novel in relation to the real is a re-creation, but it is also recreation.
The philosophical monologues in Musil may be difficult in a sense, but TMWQ is full of broad comedy and Torless is a tightly-structured drama of sex and occult violence. To paint him as abstemiously refusing to entertain, in contrast to e.g. Kanusgaard, seems off the mark. Truly indifferent authors (like Stein, say) seem rarer -- perhaps for good reason.
Great stuff, especially highlighting the contradiction between the “timid and defensive position” implied by Elkin’s propositions one and three and his call for more ambitious fiction. Talking about the fetishization of difficulty and distance, it reveals a certain suspicion about the erotic potential of art ("Pornography, pornography" I can hear grandpa Cohen protest). There is indeed a fine line between persuasion, seduction and manipulation, but what makes a novel great is its ability to appeal to the reader on different levels – it can give the public what it wants and also make the thoughtful reader reflect on why we want it. The paucity of contemporary novels that can appeal to a world-weary critic is not the only problem that literature should seek to address.