Weekly Readings #113 (04/01/24-04/07/24)

the eye is the first circle

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

This week I released “The Drama of Thought,” an Invisible College lecture on the life and work of George Bernard Shaw. While I focus on one of his plays, the early Ibsenite feminist drama of prostitution Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893),¹ I use it as an occasion not only to survey his whole body of work, including the more science-fictional productions of his later career, but also to think about his brand of utopian socialist eugenics, which I argue are still very much with us in the present.

This might be my favorite of these episodes so far; it condenses a very far-reaching set of ideas into a non-monstrous length and manages, I hope, to discuss sensibly what’s true and what’s false in conspiracy theories about the type of global-socialist “new world order” Shaw and his Fabian cohort did in fact advocate.

The first 10 minutes or so are free; for the price of a paid subscription, you can listen to the whole thing, in addition to The Invisible College’s growing archive. Given that I release an episode of more than two hours every single week—episodes based in real reading and research, even if I concede that it’s never enough!—I’d say the price of a paid subscription is worth it for the return in entertainment. The next episode: Oscar Wilde. After that, we’re off to the modernist races as we advance to this summer’s rendezvous with Ulysses. Whether you’re a first-time reader of that monumental novel or a longtime admirer, you won’t want to miss it!

I doubt you’ve forgotten, but I still must remind you again about my new book Major Arcana, which Substack’s own Ross Barkan has called one of “the best novels I’ve read this year (or last).”

Major Arcana is available in print for those of you who like to touch paper, grass, and other tangible materials. But if you have made the Crimes of the Future transition to subsisting entirely on the artifices of our civilization, you can also access various electronic versions, from the Kindle ebook to the Substack serial to a pdf file of the print book (the latter two available exclusively for paid subscribers). Please also feel free to email or DM me for a free pdf of the book in exchange for a pledge to write an honest review in a public forum. I will also mail (or have Amazon ship) a print copy to any editor or writer who wishes to review the novel in a prominent publication.²

For this week, a few thoughts sparked by a recent article on ethnicity and the Great American Novel, with examples from the canon and from my own fiction. Please enjoy!

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Don’t Believe the Hyph: Ethno-Cultural Difference and Literary Greatness in the American Novel

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Consummation (1835-36)

I found an interesting Asia Times article from a few months ago about how only Gen-X Chinese-American auhors can write the next Great American Novel since they alone have the proper vantage on “maniacally unhinged” American culture in the century of China’s rise. Author Han Feizi, dismissing Gen X’s “dumb white boys” Franzen and Wallace³ as too insular—the former insulated in the Midwest, the latter in his own madness—to get the GAN job done, argues instead:

For the next 10, 20… maybe 30 years, only Chinese Americans can write the GAN. This isn’t so much a commentary on the literary merits of Chinese Americans, of which we should seriously put in more effort, but on the march of history.

Nobody else knows. Other Americans are not standing on the requisite vantage point to see clearly. They do not know that they do not know. Apologies, but that’s just the way it is.

I reached this epiphany about 20 years ago shortly after 9-11. Since then, the American zeitgeist has gone from heartbreak to anxiety to anger to maniacally unhinged. This change can only be fully understood by Chinese Americans. To be even more precise, only fully assimilated Chinese Americans of mainland birth are capable of both inhabiting America’s heartbreak and inducing its neurosis.

The interpretive powers of Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, ABCs or some other extraction of the diaspora in America will be refracted at less consequential angles. Only mainlanders can hold a looking glass above America, backlit by the white-hot ambition of 1.4 billion people on the make.

The inter-cultural or inter-ethnical sectarianism in this essay is none of my business, though it seems to me to have little to do with literature per se. It’s also implicitly the basis on which Maxine Hong Kingston—who was born in the U.S.—is excluded from the author’s consideration, even though her rollickingly ambitious neo-modernist Tripmaster Monkey is sometimes touted as a GAN candidate.⁴ I also think, if I may, that the time has passed for the casual use in ostensibly serious nonfiction of rhetoric like “dumb white boys,” the social value of such invective having prove to be about nil in the last decade.

On the other hand, I admire this essay’s brash commitment to the American novel as a form both artistically ambitious but committed to a popular address, more akin to rock than to classical music, a comparison of particular relevance, suggests our mischievous and apparently pseudonymous author, to Asian-Americans:

Because art needs to survive. Because rock and roll is the highest form of music. Because a professor once loved our essays. Because Wall Street and Silicon Valley are wastelands. Because canonization means immortality. Because only we can.

The idea of the Great American Novel as a kind of “ethno-cultural” relay in our “teeming nation of nations” is certainly fascinating, if also more than a bit dubious.

It’s obviously not true that each “ethno-culture” only gets one entrant in the category. (The ethno-cultural heritages of authors in what follows are sometimes approximate or speculative. We in America often like to leave it at “white.”) The Northeastern WASPs are several-times represented, especially in the 19th century (Hawthorne, Stowe, James, Wharton). Melville, though, was of Scottish and Dutch descent, while Hemingway was born into a WASP family displaced in the Midwest, like the poet Eliot. Pynchon descends from Northeastern WASPs, though was (we believe) raised Catholic himself. Looking south, there is Faulkner, whom I believe to be Scots-Irish, though other major Southern writers are (more unusually given the region’s demographics) Irish Catholic, like Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, while another archetypally Midwestern writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is likewise Irish Catholic. (Franzen, though, hails from Germans, and identifies with German culture.) Willa Cather, interestingly, is of Welsh descent. Jewish-American writers have had multiple cracks at the GAN (Bellow, Roth), as have African-American writers (Ellison, Morrison) and Native American (Silko, Erdrich), while the last decade’s perhaps most persuasive GAN attempt was written by the Mexican-born Valeria Luiselli. Among Asian-Americans, there is the aforementioned Maxine Hong Kingston—and, if popular literature counts, Amy Tan. Finally, among us Italian-Americans, there is Don DeLillo—and, again if popular literature counts, Mario Puzo. (Popular literature probably doesn’t count.)

That was a fun parlor game, but part of my own semi-serious commitment to the Great American Novel as a live ideal involves a belligerent universalism that is skeptical of excessive “hyphenation” among Americans, if you know what I mean. Anyone that ever went back to their ancestors’ old country does know what I mean, because regardless of your hyphenation—or even your melanation—those Europeans, Asians, and Africans are going to clock you as an American at 100 paces. That’s why I take seriously Franzen’s own partial self-disqualification for only writing about “Midwestern families.” You don’t always have to write about the crew of the Pequod necessarily—surely a great novel finds the universal in the particular; Toni Morrison, for example, often achieves her distinctive greatness by subtracting white people and thus the overt question of racial difference from the narrative (though not, I might add, in her unacknowledged greatest novel, Paradise)—but you do have to get above merely personal experience.

Take my own work (please!). My novels tend to embed a character or two of Italian-American Catholic extraction within a broader demographic survey. The Class of 2000 is actually the novel most reflective of (and limited to) my own formative milieu: not exclusively Italian but multi-ethnically lower-middle-class Catholic, to include Irish, Poles, and Germans. Thus the surnames of the main characters: not only Abandanato, but also Lydon, Grabowski, and Waltz.

The central triangle of The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House expands these parameters: my Italian is the sculptor Louise Portofino, while the nameless and hapless narrator is “generically” white American and the antagonist Arthur Brand a blue-blood WASP whose ancestors are said to have sailed with Winthrop (side characters Denise Green and Hae Wong Jeong are Jewish- and Korean-American respectively, though the former is only implied).

I build on this paradigm for my most expansive vision yet in a single novel, Major Arcana; This somewhat conscious bid for GAN status, given its half-century temporal and coast-to-coast spatial setting, includes lower-middle-class Catholics (Ellen Chandler, Diane del Greco: Irish and Italian), but also a scion of Northeastern Jewish immigration (Marco Cohen), and, again, as hero-villain, a New England WASP (Simon Magnus). The various and sundry minor characters include what I thought of as generic white Protestants (the Alterhauses, probably of Germanic extraction, though I invented the surname myself, as well as the Morrows, which surname I believe is usually Scottish) and of several different types of Jewish characters representing the personae of the comic-book industry and its critics. (Anti-)hero(ine) Ash del Greco’s lineage is as much in question as her (or whatever’s) gender, hence her pondering on Joyce’s phrase “Jewgreek is greekjew” in the final pages.

In my short fiction, I have twice featured Hispanic narrators (“Patronage,” “Sweet Angry God”) and have essayed my most ambitious Asian-American character (“Right Between the Eyes”). It’s true I have not attempted a full portrayal of an African-American character, depending on how you read the Morrisonian bid for racial illegibility in the heroine of Portraits and Ashes, whom I tend to imagine as played either by a dark-skinned Italian or Latina actress or a light-skinned black actress. I wrote all the foregoing fiction in the last decade, however, which was no time to play fast and loose with that element of the racial divide in America. The matter will require more careful thought when I come to it.

Anyway, I discovered the article about Chinese-American authors and the GAN under a Xeet from Tao Lin about how he was never interested in the identity fixations of Asian-American literature, which to his mind did not approach the prevailing existential (rather than merely social) dimension of his experience:

Hegel said much the same back in the early 19th century, arguing in his Aesthetics that social barriers based on “differences of birth” coming into conflict with the fact that “humanity has rights” cannot alone as subject matter give rise to the greatest art because the greatest art is based on the individual’s existential freedom, not the individual’s merely factitious or contingent state of marginalization or oppression.

This does not mean that marginalized or oppressed people cannot make great art, only that they (like anyone with that ambition) have to find the existential or universal dimension that exists in their experience in the first place, whether that be Bigger Thomas’s Kafka-esque confrontation with the rat at the beginning of Native Son or the narrator’s odyssey through the whole of modernity and America in Invisible Man. You can multiply your own examples, because in American literature, even when written by the most putatively privileged of putatively white putative men, the individual is always portrayed as both fatally besieged and ultimately at liberty, if only the liberty to seek the wilderness and/or death.

The Great American Novel, therefore, to be Great, to be American, and even to be a Novel, that most capacious and inclusive of forms, must ultimately rise above the author’s ethnic heritage and personal experience. “The eye is the first circle,” says Emerson in his essay on that figure, but we must go beyond it—must enter, one after another, those widening Emersonian and Morrisonian circles of dangerously transcendental truth.

1. Nobody wants to read a modern play—Hegel, to be again quoted later, says that plays should not even be printed, only performed—so let me recommend a well-acted 1972 British TV adaptation you can watch here on YouTube, which retains almost the entirety of Shaw’s dialogue.

2. A good postmodern stunt would be for me to imagine and then to produce excerpts of various prominent critics’ and venues’ reviews of the novel. Luckily for you, I would never do such a thing. I would never imagine, for example, James Wood’s admiration in the New Yorker for the novel’s closely observed realist texture combined with his censure of its magical preoccupation and indeed magical events, as these threaten to undermine fiction’s secular ethical basis of sympathetic imagination, which should be magic enough for us. I wouldn’t dare imagine Christian Lorentzen’s wary approval in the Financial Times for the book’s ambitious scope and DeLillo-esque episodes of gritty paranoia and vertiginous present-day Futurism, nor his rebuke of its culminating Millennial sincerity. Why would I imagine Ryan Ruby in the New Left Review holding up as specimens of failure the novel’s less ambitious sentences on his way to a wholesale indictment of its “neoliberal” conception of a world (or at least an America) where we must save ourselves through magic means or otherwise, since no one else is coming to save us? Or Valerie Stivers in Compact, with her appreciation of the novel’s metaphysical ambition and warm-hearted humanism, even as she balks at its credulity in the face of the occult and its final unwillingness to dismiss the charlatan magician in favor of the authentic priest? Or Andrea Long Chu in New York repudiating every last inch of the novel, from its superannuated realism of form to its obscurantist fantasy of content, from its “centrist” hesitation before the final frontier of gender medicine to its (again!) “neoliberal” skepticism about state and society as redemptive agencies? I wouldn’t dream of the way Parul Sehgal in the New York Times nervously credits the novel’s unfashionable ambition, complexity of plot, and depth of characterization, even as she wonder where it finally does come down on the question of gender it so urgently raises and what implication this has for our polarized political culture in an election year. Why imagine Zero HP Lovecraft in his debut as a Mars Review of Books author appreciating the novel’s several passages of cosmic horror but finally dismissing the whole thing as a sickening woke farrago ridiculously sympathetic to its hysterical heroines and utterly feminized male protagonists? No, I’d imagine no such thing—we all know serious authors never dream of publicity!

3. Wallace was technically a Boomer, I know, but became disaffected Gen X’s spiritual leader among the literati, as he likewise became the Great Satan of the viciously sincere Millennial activist-terrorists who propose to condemn books on the basis of their authors’ personal lives (I have some bad news about Oscar Wilde for you in a couple of days), not that Wallace wasn’t asking for it with his own tedious neo-Tolstoyan moralism. I am entirely allergic to Wallace’s repellent neurotic prose and unimpressed with his left-conservative social vision, but neither do I think his worst sins need to be raised every single time his name is mentioned—and I certainly don’t believe these should be the basis of his literary dismissal.

I should mention that I write these words the week after a fairly insubstantial #MeToo allegation on social media—so far the worst that can be proved is some definitely ill-advised but not even especially erotic badinage on Instagram with one teenager who appears to have initiated the interaction in the first place—led first to the total cancelation and then to the suicide of prominent Pittsburgh comics creator Ed Piskor, all of this inflamed by the tiny set of Red Guard-style activists in the comics community (such untiring and pitiless figures were seemingly installed in every community after about 2012) who have been behind all the cancellations of the cancel era in the field, whether legitimate, illegitimate, or ambiguous. (Piskor took the rather daring step of naming them outright in his incendiary suicide note.)

It is long past time to reevaluate the practices 1. of bringing unsubstantiated charges before the baying mob, as if such an act (as opposed to private communication, civil legal action, the involvement of law enforcement, etc.) were an obviously salubrious activity with no perverse incentives attached to it in our attention economy; 2. of hastily acting against individuals on the basis of such public charges alone, as if there weren’t (proverbially) two sides to every story; and 3. of behaving as if such charges (proven or not) are the only relevant facts about significant artists, living or dead.

I refer you also to Alanna Schubach’s wise Compact essay on “a forgotten campus scandal.” It recounts a time, not long ago, when a much more adult sensibility pertained even among the young about the ethical complexities of human existence, before today’s histrionic early-adolescent attitude, with even 50-year-old men in charge of major institutions behaving like 13-year-olds who have discovered for the first time that adults aren’t perfect and are sometimes hypocritical, took over our society and replaced culture entirely with morality. I’m not so Nietzschean/Paglian that I believe culture and morality to be absolute antitheses, but there is some tension between them; critics of Major Arcana’s mostly happy ending are right to remind me of that!

4. I never did finish Tripmaster Monkey—its diffusive and carnivalesque form seemed not to demand reading every page, just as Ulysses doesn’t—but I was impressed by the energetic and omni-intelligent prose of what I did read and would recommend it (among other things, per the last footnote, a female and feminist author’s sympathetic if not approving portrayal of a rather randy man) to anyone for whom Kingston is only the author of the perhaps (let’s face it) more expected anthology piece “No Name Woman.”