A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I released an episode of The Invisible College, free to all in its entirety, on the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The Mind Has Mountains.” There I explore the way these two devout poets linked their desire and their devotion in new forms that would alter the face of English literature. You may find it an appropriate rumination for this Easter Sunday.
Keen observers will note that I have tinkered with The Invisible College syllabus once again, but I think you will be very pleased with the changes. At first I meant only to clear up the confusion caused by my usual innumeracy—I had Wilde and Shaw scheduled as two separate episodes on the same date—but I looked over the schedule again and decided, now that I’ve been doing this for almost three months, that it would really work much better if the fall semester paralleled the spring: that is, if I surveyed American literature, as I am now surveying British literature, from Romanticism through realism to modernism. If I had it to do over again, I’d probably ignore the national border entirely—I’d go straight from Austen to Poe!—but I was still thinking in traditional academic disciplinary style when I drew up the plan.
Accordingly, I shortened the time I was planning to spend on the Transcendentalists—I don’t want to devote that much time to rereading their rather rarefied nonfictional prose anyway—to make room for Henry James, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound,1 Ernest Hemingway,2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens,3 and William Faulkner.4 I reduced Whitman and Dickinson to one day each; I’m better, because more intense, when trying to sum up a poetic oeuvre in a single lecture. I also swapped out Thoreau’s Walden for two essays that give a shorter digest of his thought without all the business about measuring the pond and cataloguing the animals. All in all, I think people will be more entertained by this extension of our study into the catastrophic 20th century.
Finally, I remind you once again that my novel, Major Arcana, is now available in print as well as in several different ebook versions both on Amazon and on this Substack (for paid subscribers). Please see this post for all links and details. And, at the risk of repeating myself: I will send a free pdf of the book to anyone who pledges to review it in a public forum. I will mail (or have Amazon ship) a free review copy of the print edition to any editor or writer who would like to review it in a prominent publication. Interested parties can contact me at johnppistelli@gmail.com or DM me here on Substack. Thanks to all who have purchased it already—I look forward to your thoughts, bad or good!
For today’s post: I am still receiving a high volume of questions5 from anonymous readers on my Tumblr. I try to answer some of them on here if I think they will be of interest to Substack readers. I give you three below, drafted rather casually over the last week: one about whether or not contemporary writers can or should try to transform the English language, one about dialogue in fiction and drama, and one about the genre of my own Major Arcana in the light of Northrop Frye’s theories. Please enjoy!
Neologismus: Literature as Linguistic Invention
A reader inquires:
Do you think we can still make up words—and not just trendy internet words, though some of these seem likely to stick around (lol), but in the way Hopkins and Joyce and indeed Shakespeare did, liquidating and reforging the language?
You might as well try. An editor may stop you, but Shakespeare, Hopkins, and Joyce didn’t have editors. (The professionalization and academicization of literature has dulled literature by causing writers always to wait around for permission.)
I thought I made up a word in Major Arcana: “susurrating,” a participle derived from the noun “susurrus.” Even my spellchecker tells me it’s misspelled, but I found out that others have in fact used the word. A search of only my illicitly acquired pdf files rather than of the whole internet shows writers as eminent as Angela Carter and Tom Paulin using it, for example. They both deployed it as an adjective, however, whereas I used it as the verb of an absolute clause. Here is Carter from her essay “Envoi, Bloomsday” in Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings:
Although American academia was especially prominent among the massed scholarship arriving in Dublin for Bloomsday Week and the VIII International James Joyce Symposium in order to get their heads down over a susurrating mass of learned papers, this question of the disestablishment of English is, of course, not an American problem.
And here is Paulin from his “Pure Primitive Divinity: The Republican Epic of John Milton” as collected in Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State:
The fricative, susurrating assonance has an oral relish that breaks down the barriers separating prose from verse...
And finally I give you Pistelli in Major Arcana:
She whispered her theory to Simon Magnus one night after they’d made love, her voice susurrating under the stained comforter in the cold room at the back of the railroad flat, and susurrating, too, under the sound of Coltrane playing on the staticky old turntable in the adjoining room, their heads buried in thick cloth redolent of sweat and sex.
Google suggests “susurrating” is a “literary” usage in which the last several generations of writers have specialized. The zeitgeist itself wanted these words! “Susurrus” was not enough! It does prove that language evolves organically—and not only at the behest of technological developments or social movements.
Verisimilitudinous: Dialogue Between Transcription and Stylization
A reader inquires:
How important do you think verisimilitudinous dialogue is? Is it different in novels vs. theatre vs. whatever else? Do you think it’s a reasonable thing to have as the default setting, but it can be violated for good aesthetic reasons? etc.
It really depends. I tend not to admire the painstaking recreation of vernacular when it becomes a phonetic transcription of so-called dialect. That the novelist could offer such verisimilitude was a great discovery of the 19th-century realists, but the dialect passages in writers like Dickens, Eliot, and the Brontës are grating and patronizing in their contrast with the “proper” narrative voice and its necessarily implicit alliance to the more educated or middle-class characters. This also applies to 20th-century novelists in the same vein, whether Steinbeck or Hurston, despite the good intentions of all involved.
I prefer the method innovated by Twain in Huckleberry Finn, which is carried forward in Joyce and Faulkner, in Bellow and Morrison, where the language of the narrative subtly takes on the rhythm and intonation of the community being portrayed without obvious ploys of phonetic recreation; Morrison used to mock the latter as trying to evoke black vernacular simply by “dropping g’s” rather than recreating the whole language as a form of life. At the opposite extreme we find highly stylized dialogue of various types, whether the arch wit of Austen and Wilde or the tense staccato of Hemingway and DeLillo, even if these, too, have roots in social experience, from the queer demimonde to the immigrant underground.
Examples in the theater, which include Wilde, seem to follow the same pattern. The dialects used by Eugene O’Neill in Desire Under the Elms and The Emperor Jones (rural New England and African-American, respectively) make those plays almost unreadable and unactable today, whereas Tennessee Williams and August Wilson, like Faulkner and Morrison in fiction, capture social rhythms much more subtly. Meanwhile, Beckett, on his way to eliminating dialogue in favor of performance, follows Wilde’s (and Shaw’s)6 witty paradoxes into bleakly funny minimalism or even nihilism.
I see my own work as coming between these two tendencies of verisimilitude and stylization. My dialogue tends to be “invisible,” which is to say indistinct from the narrative voice, a vehicle for ideas more than for reportage, except in consciously bravura extended passages where I intend to parody particular social uses of language, as in the Platonic dialogue of the doomed academics in Portraits and Ashes or the YouTube monologue of the glitzy manifestation influencer in Major Arcana.
For me, “invisible” dialogue will include touches of verisimilitude, such as interjections, profanities, stammers, hesitations, and run-on sentences, but will otherwise resemble standard English. I don’t insist that my own practice should be binding on others, though, and, if I shy away from overly vernacular dialogue, I often enjoy the highly stylized version. This stylization works best in comedy, though, as the otherwise dissimilar examples of Wilde and DeLillo show.
Parabasis: Literature Between Myth and Mimesis
Finally, a reader inquires:
Speaking in the terms of Anatomy of Criticism, is your “romantic realism” idea basically an attempt to combine the modes of Romance and Low Mimetic (perhaps glued together with a little High Mimetic)? And do you thus abjure Myth and Irony, the “uncivilized” ends of the spectrum, barbarism and decadence respectively?
At some schools, they offer Ph.D.s in creative writing. I don’t know how that works, but I imagine this is what the exam questions are like!
Anyway, the short answer would be “yes,” at least to the part about combining Romance and Low Mimetic. This is hardly very original of me, since it's what they used to mean (Edmund Wilson coined the phrase when speaking of Joyce, though it applies even better to Conrad, Woolf, Faulkner) when they said modernism was the fusion of symbolism and naturalism. The later magical realists, overtly inspired by Woolf and Faulkner as well as Kafka (Borges and García Márquez cite all three; Morrison wrote her masters thesis on the first two), made the Romance part even more explicit by adding overt fantastical elements to their narratives, though this is anticipated in The Metamorphosis and Orlando—and even Conrad’s Secret Sharer and his Shadow-Line, for all his fine Euro-skepticism.
Now about Myth and Irony: much as I love Frye, I am also the product of a Marxist and poststructuralist literary education. I believe, therefore, that Myth is not directly available to us, as the creation of myths rely on a different social basis to be credible, a less complex and differentiated social order than the one we occupy. We are not as “disenchanted” or secular as we think, so new myths are made in modernity, but only accidentally, out of “low” or mass-culture materials; they themselves (Sherlock Holmes, Batman, etc.) are imaginatively pretty flimsy compared to the old myths. The attempt to create new myths deliberately in a “high” way seems silly to me, hence my oft-noted discomfort with Tolkien, on the one hand, and with certain strains of identitarian or “ethnic” fiction (see here) on the other. Roberto Calasso understands modern literature as a parodistic reenactment of myth’s appeal to the divine. I like Deleuze’s remark, which I quote in my essay on DeLillo’s Libra, his study of our modern political mythology:
Literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no longer understand them, since we no longer know how to dream them or reproduce them. Literature is the competition of misinterpretations that consciousness naturally and necessarily produces on themes of the unconscious, and like every competition it has its prizes.
Literature as such comes after myth and is a commentary on or misinterpretation of myth. Because of the essayism in both Portraits and Ashes and Major Arcana, my Romantic Realism sometimes therefore becomes an explicit commentary on myth—in the former case, on the would-be new myths of the avant-garde; in the latter, on the would-be new myths of comics creators and occultists.7
As for Irony, I borrow from Friedrich Schlegel and Paul de Man the idea that irony is “permanent parabasis,” i.e., that literature qua literature, literature as precisely that which succeeds myth and therefore does not compel belief or worship, always gestures toward its own artifices of construction and its own excesses of meaning, always breaks the fourth wall—that’s what “parabasis” means: when the ancient Greek chorus would speak directly to the audience—and that therefore no literature worth the name can possibly be without irony, even if Frye is right to say that some types and schools of literature, especially variants of modernism à la Kafka and Beckett, bring this irony to the fore for an embittering effect.
(I am deliberately evading the part of the question about “barbarism” and “decadence,” because I have to banish those kinds of social judgments from my mind when I’m writing a novel. Thinking on that level is an impediment to the potential universality of the novelistic imagination. To quote Frye quoting Arnold: “culture seeks to do away with classes.” Even more to the point is King Leopold I’s warning to Queen Victoria: “[artists] are acquainted with all classes of society, and for that very reason dangerous.”)
So, in sum, Romance + Low Mimesis + Irony - Myth + Myth Criticism = Romantic Realism.
If Hopkins weds aestheticism to Christianity for one kind of synthesis of Nietzsche with the old faith, Pound provides another in his neo-medieval “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” with its brawling and tippling pagan warrior Christ for Bronze Age Pervert fans:
Oh we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine When we last made company, No capon priest was the Goodly Fere But a man o’ men was he. I ha’ seen him drive a hundred men Wi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free, That they took the high and holy house For their pawn and treasury. They’ll no’ get him a’ in a book I think Though they write it cunningly; No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere But aye loved the open sea. If they think they ha’ snared our Goodly Fere They are fools to the last degree. “I'll go to the feast,” quo’ our Goodly Fere, “Though I go to the gallows tree.” “Ye ha’ seen me heal the lame and blind, And wake the dead,” says he, “Ye shall see one thing to master all: ’Tis how a brave man dies on the tree.” A son of God was the Goodly Fere That bade us his brothers be. I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men. I have seen him upon the tree.
Hemingway: subject of this week’s social-media literary controversy. My own evaluation is mixed. A lot of middlebrow readers haven’t gotten the update, even though it aired on PBS, that he’s been readmitted to the academic canon on queer-theory grounds, thus the usual ’70s-era blather seen this week on X about “macho” etc. On the other hand, his drastic simplification of English prose, while it became authentic poetry in his adept hands, probably did prove a bad influence on the 20th century and may even have something indirectly to do with why Harvard students can’t get through The Scarlet Letter. (The latter critique strikes through Hemingway at his mentor, Gertrude Stein, whereas his detractors uphold her at his expense. I take a dim view of Stein myself, for which see here.) For me on Hemingway, in anticipation of my Invisible College episode, please see here, here, and here. And if you haven’t read him since high school, please do give The Garden of Eden a try.
I address all and sundry: if you disfavor today’s Christian feast on irreligious grounds, there’s always Stevens’s ultimate testament to atheist aestheticism, “Sunday Morning”:
She hears, upon that water without sound, A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
I added a footnote to the post containing the syllabus to explain why The Invisible College’s treatment of American modernism is exclusively white and male. To repeat the answer: I already have hours’ and hours’ worth of lectures freely available on YouTube that take the opposite approach. The white men are the only American modernists I haven’t lectured on. For my approach to Gertrude Stein, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Richard E. Kim, and more, please see here.
I’m still still not sure why people ask me things. I have been credited with a certain prescience, however. I was struck to see some things I was discussing in last week’s post become bigger news in the subsequent seven days: 1. the apparently frivolous information about the egirl memecoin is now part of an Elon-supported lawsuit with free-speech implications (see also the aforesaid egirls in visionary colloquy with occultist and cultural critic John David Ebert, one of whose books I briefly reviewed a few years back here); 2. I mentioned my academic advisor, who once wrote a long paper on Salomé from Oscar Wilde’s play to Alla Nazimova’s film to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, and I find that the latest episode of the Art of Darkness podcast, an interview with author Kate Hext, also addresses just these subjects; and 3. I shared my unfinished childhood novel about Donald Trump, the final line of which is, “Go to Coppola, he’s the real master of epics,” only to hear the news this week about the master’s impossible masterpiece Megalopolis (which I think sounds fun, by the way.)
Preparing this week’s Shaw episode of The Invisible College, I decided to read his self-proclaimed masterpiece, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch, a science-fiction novel in the form of an epic almost 300-page closet drama that runs from the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920. It’s really awful, labored in its attempts at wit and startlingly unimaginative as speculative fiction, which just goes to show that authors don’t always know what their true masterpieces are. Much as he influenced later science-fiction writers like Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, Shaw was at his best somewhere between Ibsen and Brecht—between naturalism and parable. But the play’s advocacy of human self-transcendence through the directed will, a theory of “creative evolution,” does enroll Shaw in the ranks of author-manifestors right alongside the Bradbury he so definitively influenced, not to mention the Blake who so decisively influenced him. This passage from the Eden section, where the Serpent explains to Eve how Lilith imagined herself out of her dilemma being (in Shaw’s telling) the lone first human, might be a rejected epigraph for my self-proclaimed masterpiece Major Arcana:
EVE. How did Lilith work this miracle?
THE SERPENT. She imagined it.
EVE. What is imagined?
THE SERPENT. She told it to me as a marvellous story of something that never happened to a Lilith that never was. She did not know then that imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
Even our flimsy new myths can furnish a “mythic method” for the contemporary writer, as Joyce used Homer and Eliot the Holy Grail. Now that Marvel is losing its hegemonic grip on our culture, we can evaluate it for what it’s really worth, bad and good. I appreciated therefore this Junot Díaz essay on Substack explaining how mythopoeia, including the Fantastic Four, can help to structure a realist novel:
(My own education on this front was mad haphazard. Everything that Toni Morrison, Borges, Cortázar, Ellison, Tolkien and García Márquez wrote; Robert Grave, The White Goddess, which along with Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, gave me two very powerful archetypes to reflect on; Alan Moore’s incredible mythopoesis across his career; C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books and his Space Trilogy; the aforementioned Toni Morrison and her deep-wake remixes of the Bible and African-American folk-tales and superstitions; the dreams and myths and spirals that structures Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and so forth).
I appreciated it more, to be honest and no offense, than the umpteenth Substack article I also read this week (no links to things I’m insulting!) about how René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire can help to structure a novel. Say what you will about Reed Richard’s passion for science, Victor von Doom’s passion for revenge, Galactus’s passion for planet-swallowing, etc., their desires—give or take Ben Grimm’s desire to go back to normal—are not primarily mimetic, hence the popular appetite for mythical fictions and their extra-mundane dimension in the first place: “Longing on a large scale is what makes history.”
Love the restructured syllabus. Sad to lose some Whitman/Dickinson and was looking forward to spending a leisurely Christmas vacation reading Moby-Dick again, but was secretly dreading that many transcendentalists tbqh, and very excited to read or reread those 20c authors.
I am with you on absolutely hating phonetically written dialogue, there's nothing worse than being jerked out of the flow of a book because you have to squint to make it out. But almost nothing gives me more pure pleasure than the great American dialogue tradition that runs through Mark Twain, Charles Portis, George V. Higgins, the Coen Brothers, Deadwood, Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success (my favorite movie) -- that unique set of regionalisms, wisecracks, tough talk, comebacks etc. Eloquence mixed with earthiness. If you ask me it's an American contribution to world culture as good as baseball or jazz.
Novel ordered, I look forward to reading.