Weekly Readings #116 (04/22/24-04/28/24)

for what-next books

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

The Dave Hickey Revival symposium—see my entry here—came to an end this week with “Anchored in the Bay Where All Men Ride?,” friend-of-the-blog Paul Franz’s striking rumination on Hickey and the gender of the work of art in the context of Yeats’s poetics. It’s a good prelude or postlude to this week’s Invisible College episode, “A Terrible Beauty Is Born,” on the beautiful and terrible Irish bard-mage himself, with considerations of fascism, modernism, occultism, and the poetry of myth and reality. I even give a Tarot reading for the collective and (with perhaps less success) attempt astrological and Kabbalistic interpretations of our poet: the Gemini quarrel among themselves on a flight from Kether to Malkuth even as we enter, at long last, the Age of Aquarius. A paid subscription gets you the whole (man[t]ic) episode.

Speaking of such matters, of such episodes, have I told you yet about my new novel, Major Arcana? You can get it in print here, on Kindle here, or in two separate electronic formats—serial; pdf—if you are paid subscriber to this Substack. Do you really want to miss a novel they’re talking about on the Red Scare Book Club sub-Reddit?

Thanks to my burgeoning cult. That 2015 short story is here, free to all, if you’d like a smaller sample of my fictional wares than a 700-page novel, major though it be.

Finally, for new readers, I want to repeat what I’ve been saying for the last few weeks: I am open to reviewing new and forthcoming books, both on here or for various venues, if they align with my interests. Please contact me at johnppistelli@gmail.com or DM on here to inquire about sending review copies (I prefer print). You can contact me the same way for review copies of Major Arcana (I will give free pdfs to literally anyone who wants to write a review anywhere and will send print copies to anyone who wants to write a review in a prominent publication).

In today’s post, please find a few thoughts on what “we need” in fiction today, mostly inspired by my researches for the next IC episode on D. H. Lawrence, with footnotes encompassing DeLillo, Weil, Jameson, Forster, The Plumed Serpent, and more. It’s a general point I’ve made before, I concede, but I gain new readers by the day, and nobody ever listens the first 10 or 20 times you say something anyway. So please enjoy!

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Come Together: The Novel as Prophecy

D. H. Lawrence’s Phoenix logo.

A post of mine from a few weeks ago launched friend-of-the-blog Blake Smith on a characteristically sharp and outrageous investigation of Dale Peck of Hatchet Jobs fame. I want to seize on one tiny moment in Blake’s discourse because it reminded me of what intrigued me all those years ago about Peck’s criticism in the first place—reminded me all the more for my immersion in D. H. Lawrence in advance of the next IC episode. Blake summarizes:

And [Peck] has many confusingly jangling ‘ideas’ about what literature should be—he hates Joyce and experimental literature down to postmodernism, but also hates realism, which is boring and un-literary—we’re supposed to be doing something that he calls in the last line of the book, without explaining it, a new materialism.

Without referring to the specifics of Peck’s argument, if there even was one, that straightforward realism is “boring and unliterary” seems obvious to me. If you can write like Edith Wharton, then go for it—but (to move the proverbial goalposts) writing as good as Edith Wharton’s transcends realism anyway, because writing that good is imaginatively transformative rather than merely mimetic. Hating Joyce and experimental literature is more contentious on its face. I’m not sure if one must be (per Rimbaud) absolutely modern, but can we wish the last century away? I don’t have Peck’s book to hand, but I’ve saved the offending quotation from a review of Rick Moody (remember Rick Moody?) that, when posted to the New Republic website, went whatever counted as “viral” in 2002:

In my view, the wrong turn [in modern fiction] starts around the time Stephen Dedalus goes to college in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and echoes all the way through Don DeLillo’s ponderously self-important rendering of Bobby Thompson’s shot heard round the world in the opening chapter of Underworld. […] All I’m suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid—just plain stupid—tomes of DeLillo.

To paraphrase Derrida’s theatrical self-inquiry after he block-quoted young Paul de Man on “The Jewish Element in Literature”: I’m not really going to defend this, am I?

Not in whole, but in part. I pretty much won’t hear a word against Faulkner or DeLillo,¹ who acquitted themselves not flawlessly, by no means flawlessly, but with tremendous energy and (literary) dignity given the scale of what they confronted—nothing less than America itself, if different “Americas” in each writer’s case. The rest, though? I read one short book by Gaddis that I didn’t like, though I concede it’s perhaps not representative of those books of his people do like; I read (even taught) some short stories by Barthelme, and they were about as far from anything I’m interested in as some short stories can possibly be; I flipped through some Hawkes and Barth, which is not the basis of a serious judgment, but still, nothing caught my eye, the way things will catch your eye if you only flip through Nabokov, Pynchon, Joyce. And I have reservations about Nabokov, reservations about Pynchon. As for the (Irish)man himself, Peck’s wrong that the trouble started when Stephen Dedalus went to college, but how sure are we that at least some trouble didn’t start when Bloom and Dedalus had one of their missed connections in the newspaper office?²

What, then, would be the alternative to realism on the one hand and experimentalism on the other, the one reducing literature to reportage, the other threatening to trivialize it as a game or a mere occasion for the academic critic’s expert discourse? Here’s a voice out of the whirlwind of modernism, one Peck doesn’t mention:

So there you have the “serious” novel, dying in a very long-drawn-out fourteen-volume death agony, and absorbedly, childishly interested in the phenomenon. “Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn't I?” asks every character in Mr. Joyce or Miss Richardson or M. Proust. “Is my aura a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed?”

[…]

If you wish to look into the past for what-next books, you can go back to the Greek philosophers. Plato’s Dialogues are queer little novels. It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again—in the novel.

I quote from D. H. Lawrence’s “Surgery for the Novel—or a Bomb.”³ Lawrence is never anything as dull as impartial or disinterested, so this Peckish rant is extremely unfair to Joyce, mostly unfair to Proust, and (if the feminist critics will forgive me) only approaching fairness in Richardson’s case.⁴

Nevertheless, doesn’t he have a point about freeing the novel from its imprisonment in mere mimesis, not with formalist bells and whistles, but rather by recognizing its potential to unite or reunite physics and metaphysics, flesh and spirit, heaven and a wildflower? If he here cites Plato’s dialogues, he elsewhere refers to the Bible as a novel. His recent biographer Frances Wilson notes that “novel” was “his term of praise for a book that contained everything,” including Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante.

And isn’t there a tradition that runs from Romanticism through modernism and postmodernism that essentially does what Lawrence asks? Isn’t it here, pace Lawrence, that we find the best of Joyce, really, the Joyce of Ulysses’s first six chapters, before the discursive gamesmanship takes over in anticipation of Nabokov’s chessboard, and this by Joyce’s own avowal to give the professors something to do for the next 100 years? And the best of Faulkner and Woolf, whose investment in consciousness is never decoupled from the soul? Aren’t Conrad and Forster in this vein? And Thomas Mann? And after modernism, who? Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, Iris Murdoch. I quote critic Leo Robson on the latter pair:

And Murdoch, though I doubt that either knew it, possessed a close mid-century companion, Saul Bellow, who was four years her senior and began publishing fiction a decade earlier. In a 1951 talk, he announced that the “great issue in fiction is the stature of characters”. Where Murdoch in 1961 called for “a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons”, Bellow the following year, in “Where Do We Go From Here? The Future of Fiction”, said that the novel “requires new ideas about humankind”.⁵

Robson elsewhere adduces Joyce Carol Oates among more recent names. We could add Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, and the aforementioned Don DeLillo. Also, for all tricks on the surface of his texts, Kazuo Ishiguro: he brings us full circle, since he cites as his main influences Charlotte Brontë and Fyodor Dostoevsky,⁶ also crucial influences on Lawrence’s prophetic conception of the novel,⁷ though Lawrence pretended to hate them, the first for her “sex in the head” and the second for his Christian servility.

We could extend the list to meaninglessness—I like to do this to lists—and in both high and low directions, recruiting some of Peck’s loathed mandarins, as I’ve already done, and then raiding the ranks of middlebrow and genre fiction in the other direction. But my entirely self-serving point is that a robust and ambitious tradition of the novel runs not so much between as beneath the tedious divide between experimentalists and realists.⁸ I’ve even heard a new entrant in this tradition was published last month, and that you’ll read it in a week! In any case, on this Lawrentian theory, what we need is not a “new materialism,” still less a new idealism, but what I have elsewhere called the new-old tradition of “Romantic Realism.”

1. Late Faulkner is supposed to be pretty bad; after Go Down, Moses I’ve only sampled. Except for its overly extensive divagations into the author’s personal life, symptomatic of current literary culture, I enjoyed this essay by Cobi Powell on learning to enjoy late DeLillo. I have resolved to reread Point Omega ASAP, as it’s the one late DeLillo book I didn’t feel I understood at all, and I say this as an admirer of The Body Artist and Cosmopolis and Falling Man and Zero K. I might like late DeLillo better than early, in fact, and still have to get to End Zone and Ratner’s Star. Still, Powell does a beautiful job evoking what is special in middle DeLillo, major DeLillo, the DeLillo that runs from The Names to Underworld:

For a while my relationship to the work was with these five novels alone. Five novels that meant more to me than most other novels for having so literarily represented a search for meaning. These novels did not wallow in cheap empathy; they evaded pithy humanism, elided snappy dialogue exchanged between melancholic nihilists. They were novelistic, writerly, beholden to and respectful of their form. They encouraged close reading: a careful attention paid to structure, an almost spatial awareness of how meaning in a text is produced imagistically and formally as much as it is through content. Despite the verbosity of DeLillo's characters, they never just stand around and say the point of the novel at one another. Meaning was not dispensed prescriptively; the work wasn’t reverse-engineered from one Big Thematic Statement. If you didn’t pay his work the respect it demanded then it could calculate as masturbatory or as centripetal and bluntly satirical. While sitting at the kitchen table with a DeLillo book spread flat and marking it up with a ballpoint pen those early years of fandom I would often think to myself: “This is meaning.” 

Do Don’s characters really never “say the point of the novel at one another,” though? (I don’t mind if they do, to be clear.) Anyway, insofar as DeLillo is some kind of crypto-Catholic mystic, let me add that this week I also appreciated Rose Lyddon’s essay on Simone Weil in the Mars Review. What I’ve read of Weil has horrified me, not entirely in a bad way, but Lyddon makes me want to read The Need for Roots, and almost to repent my use of Weil’s name as a punchline in Major Arcana, though the joke was meant to be more on Dimes Square Insta-Catholics than on our philosopher herself. Lyddon quotes Weil thusly, and I on this Sunday morning say “Amen”:

…it is only the radiance from the spiritual treasures of the past that can induce in the soul that state which is the necessary condition for receiving grace…

2. I refer to the dark turn in my centenary essay on Ulysses that begins with these paragraphs:

Yet in the novel’s seventh episode, Joyce introduces overt inorganicism into his prose. In that chapter, “Aeolus,” set in a newspaper office, Joyce regularly interpolates mock newspaper headlines into the drama, a contrivance wholly imposed from without onto the narrative. And from that point forward, such external schemata will control many of the chapters: the musical “Sirens,” for instance, is structured as a fugue; the political “Cyclops” alternates conventional narration with parodies of nationalist rhetoric and Celtic Revival mythology; half of the erotic “Nausicaa” is told as a pastiche of lowbrow women’s fiction; “Circe” is a Faust-like hallucinatory drama representing drunken revels in a brothel; and, perhaps most unforgivably, both the style and content of “Eumaeus” are boring and uninspired since the heroes are tired and hung over, while “Ithaca” is an often grindingly dull scientific catechism for no reason that I can discern.

This technological formalism—technological because it privileges technique over the needs of the story or characters—comes to its ironic climax in the tour-de-force 14th chapter, “Oxen of the Sun,” in which Bloom and Stephen’s attendance at a drinking party in a maternity hospital is narrated in successive styles of English prose from ancient incantation to modern street slang, passing through parodies of famous authors from Malory to Carlyle. In Joyce’s conceit, a fetus’s gestation echoes the development of the language.

3. This essay is sometimes called “The Future of the Novel,” but in any case it’s not online. I quote from the version under the incendiary title I gave in the main text from Lawrence’s posthumous nonfiction collection, Phoenix.

4. If only I understood “that beastly Kant” better, I could explain why an aesthetic judgment is not merely an expression of personal taste but is rather a universal proposition. Since we’re mired in subjectivity without Kant, I will just say this: I only got one-and-a-half volumes each into Proust’s Recherche and Richardson’s Pilgrimage because, Lawrence-wise, I found them dull, especially (sorry again, feminists!) the latter. Ulysses, though, even when I didn’t understand it, and even when it’s obnoxious (and it is obnoxious), has, if you catch its rhythm, a mesmeric fascination, with every word a portal to elsewhere. It appears to be a mere mimesis of consciousness, or of the body, but it’s something else entirely, a different route to Lawrence’s proposed synthesis of soul and body, and no less than Lawrence a child of Blake.

5. Robson has not swallowed the Grand Hotel Abyss pill or joined the Pistelli cult, however, considering that a recent essay finds him admiring Fredric Jameson, a bête noire around here. In fairness, Robson spends the whole essay defending Jameson from prominent straw-man arguments against him made by “post-critical” critics who don’t grasp that the Marxist maven’s Olympian detachment mandates a fusion of aesthetic appreciation with ideological critique rather than the destruction of the former by the latter. That Jameson’s Marxism is a type of aestheticism is by contrast the very substance of my own charge against him: in addition to being able to appreciate an admirably broad spectrum of great poets and painters and filmmakers, he also aestheticizes violence and terror.

6. Of DFW, Blake Smith quips, “straight guys love Dostoevsky for some reason.” Guilty as charged, but one more excerpt from critic Robson while I’m at it, since he noted that Angela Carter long ago force-femmed our Russian master, not to mention Lawrence herself, though that seems the more obvious move for a male novelist always looking up at the columnar phallus and bunched buttocks of the heroes through the heroines’ rapt and appalled eyes:

But when Angela Carter was asked to identify her favourite woman writer, she cursed herself for naming Emily Brontë (“who’s pure butch”) because, as she told a friend, “if one is talking about these qualities of sensitivity, vulnerability and perception traditionally ascribed by male critics to female novelists”, Dostoevsky was “the greatest feminine writer who’s ever lived”. (In this context, Lawrence was “infinitely more feminine than Jane Austen”; she later wrote that he made Colette look like Cassius Clay.)

7. I take “prophetic” from Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. He cites Lawrence himself as an example of prophetic fiction, as well as his and Lawrence’s beloved Melville, and then Dostoevsky and Brontë—albeit Emily in this case, rather than Charlotte. Charlotte gets a raw deal because people don’t read Villette, whose narrative, in fact, plays for Richardson’s Pointed Roofs something like the role The Odyssey plays for Ulysses. (Forster did read Villette but didn’t like it—thought it an example, speaking of divergent gay/straight tastes, of trivial feminine romance, as opposed to the more spiritually serious homoerotic idealism of Conrad’s Lord Jim. See here.)

8. Any novel anywhere near contention for serious stature has realist and experimental elements in some dynamic tension, as Lawrence’s eminently do, with their fierce contemporaneity rendered into an ever-evolving mythology of the present in a prose of thunderous approximation. His novels change under his hand and under our eyes; a scorner of the Flaubertian hauteur that elevates world-weary author over small-souled character, he would disdain to smooth out their rough and living surfaces to achieve any artistic virtue as minor as consistency.

All of the above remarks are inspired by my having just finished The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence’s notoriously “fascist” and notoriously “boring” novel. Reader, we have been lied to by the notorists! I found it neither fascist nor boring. (Well, somewhat fascist, but in a self-undermining way.) I admire it as much as I admire Women in Love. Its fascist uprising is portrayed with total ambivalence, its racialism wavers on every page with Lawrence’s anguished sympathies, and it projects a hallucinatory atmosphere I found continuously, enviably absorbing. In its ambiguous epic of a indigenous desert uprising witnessed through the mournful eyes of a displaced metropolitan, it is like Dune if Dune had dispensed with all the nerdy world-building and just focused on the psychedelia. I personally can’t think of higher praise, even if Lawrence’s self-stranded and male-beset heroine could have used some Bene Gesserit support.