Weekly Readings #118 (05/06/24-05/12/24)

for anybody

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

This week’s episode of The Invisible College, “I Have Had My Vision,” is an intense immersion into the worlds of Virginia Woolf. The Invisible College seems to have two modes: “fun” and “intense.” It depends on how counter-intuitively negative my reading of an author is. It’s fun to look on the bright side of D. H. Lawrence or George Bernard Shaw, since the other side is so obvious, and their influence, anyway, has waned. By contrast, it’s intense to gaze upon the dark side of Oscar Wilde or Virginia Woolf, whose imaginative world is primarily the one we still inhabit. In the episode on Woolf, I plunge beneath the superficial left-wing rhetorical cover of her feminist polemics, and, at the dark heart of a novel-elegy like To the Lighthouse, I find no less of a “billions-must-die” fasho-nihilism than one can much more easily detect in a Lawrence or a Yeats. Modernism is modernism. But to discover such secrets of the literary canon for yourself, you must, please, offer a paid subscription!

Speaking of self-promotion, I must remind you that my new novel Major Arcana remains available, and thanks to all of you who have purchased and are continuing to purchase it. I avoided the recent “nobody buys books” controversy, but if the average book sells only 50 copies—that was one of the shocking statistics being bandied around—I am above average. For an introduction to the novel, please see my conversation with Ross Barkan (about whom more in a moment) and, though I forgot to mention it last week, this beautiful and spoiler-free first review, by no means uncritical (I would hate to be read uncritically), by Mary Jane Eyre. You can get Major Arcana in print here, on Kindle here, or in two separate electronic formats—serial with audio posts; pdf—if you are a paid subscriber to this Substack. Please contact me at johnppistelli@gmail.com or DM on here to inquire about review copies: 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.

For today, speaking of modernism and “billions-must-die” fasho-nihilism in literature, a wide-ranging reflection on men, women, and the novel. Please enjoy!

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Widows Wince: Men, Women, and the Ends of the Novel

The Woolfs’ printing press, via The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain

I’m gaining new readers every day, so I hope my longtime readers will indulge me if I repeat myself, even at the risk of dulling a provocation through re-statement. Modernism in English-language literature was, among other things, a hostile takeover of the novel: men of all sorts and conditions, in collaboration with New Women and queer women, most of them political extremists of one sort or another, seized the novel from domestic woman, whose sentimental model of the form, centered on family values, dominated the liberal-Christian 19th century. Hence my occasional and unseemly emphasis on the fact that many feminist favorites of the modernist canon (Stein, Cather, Barnes, Hurston, Loy, Moore) tended to have been right-wingers more hostile to sentimentalism and domestic realism even than their male peers and that left-wingers like Woolf aren’t as different from them as they appear in their surface political rhetoric.

Modernism’s agenda was (to quote Thomas Mann’s satanic modernist composer of Doctor Faustus) the “revocation” of the 19th century and its sentimental Christian liberalism. Its method was a targeted decapitation strike on the domestic hearth and the Angel in the House who presided over its humane ethic.¹ Other than Woolf’s boast in “Professions for Women” that she “strangled the Angel in the House,” this is encapsulated nowhere better in short form than in Wallace Stevens’s poetic rebuke to his titular “High-Toned Old Christian Woman”:

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

I know it’s Mother’s Day here in America, but I emphasize again: modernism wanted its supreme fictions to relativize the moral law, judging it by aesthetic standards alone, and thereby to make Christian widows wince. One way to make these widows wince was to seize their preferred literary form, a popular and moral art, and to turn it into a high and amoral (if not immoral) art. I quote from a 2018 report on the researches of digital humanists in the Guardian:

“Women go from representing almost half the authors of fiction to barely a quarter. If this trend is real, it is an important fact about literary history that ought to be foregrounded even, say, in anthology introductions. But the story has not been widely publicised,” they write. “It appears that scholars of each period are able to see the possibility that female authorship was declining in their own period. But no one has been willing to advance the dismal suggestion that the whole story from 1800 to 1960 was a story of decline.”

The academics speculate that one reason for the drop of female authors, which reversed around 1970, could be the “gentrification” of the novel. In the mid-19th century, novel-writing was not a “high-status career”, but as it increasingly became so, it became more desirable to male writers.

The above overstatement is the context in which I would frame “From Misogyny to No Man’s Land,” Ross Barkan’s recent essay on the early 21st century’s complex revenge for this ugly bit of early-20th-century business: the elimination of (largely straight) men as both readers and writers of fiction. Ross’s very comprehensive and thoughtful reflection considers most of the possible reasons for this development, and I simply urge you to read his piece.²

Some of the more assertive readers in Ross’s replies suggests that he might have neglected how deliberately a hostile environment for males was created in elite culture circa 2012, when the 2010s social justice movement was kicking off in all its vicious bellicosity.³ How quickly we forget the #killallmen trending tag and its defenses in the precincts of bien pensance (“maybe scaring them just a little is okay”), for example, or the general prohibitions on questioning the tactics of “the oppressed” (“the oppressed” in this case were usually people who attended Phillips Exeter and the like: such incendiary radical rhetoric, especially when it bears an identitarian emphasis, is a persistent indiscretion of the upper classes seeking to redirect populist anger at economic arrangements away from themselves). This was itself a periodic resurgence of faux-militant spectacular politics in America; in the early 1970s, Joan Didion, to name another right-wing woman with a high-modernist style, wrote about identical trends in her notorious essay “The Women’s Movement.” There she identified this apotheosis of “the oppressed” as a jejune and life-disfiguring scam then being imported proximally from the tactics of Mao’s openly politicidal Cultural Revolution, albeit one with homegrown roots in 19th-century Transcendentalism and its deliquesced Calvinist theology.

But these social-justice politics probably only hastened what might have been an inevitable decline in or of the novel. If my previous paragraph sounded a masculinist note, let me now make a feminist point (I contain multitudes, as I’ll shortly explain): the powers and principalities that be tend to allow women to dominate institutions only after these institutions’ social power has gone into decline.⁴ Male novelists were pushed off a sinking ship. Is that really a crime? So we might consider the novel’s decline before we consider men’s decline as readers and writers of novels.

Ross considers what might be competing with fiction for men’s attention; he judges video games the likeliest culprit. There’s no doubt something to this. But I also suspect that men who already have intellectual and literary ambitions are probably now drawn to writing nonfiction, particularly theory and philosophy of various sorts, rather than fiction. Though the universities are increasingly also dominated by women, as Ross documents, and though this goes double for departments like English, it’s still the case that universities since about the 1980s have explicitly or implicitly conveyed the impression that theorists are more powerful and important than novelists. If this weren’t the case, then why would you sit around in your lit classes using the ideas of theorists to evaluate novels? The implied hierarchy is clear. Even considering only the she/they set, Harriet Beecher Stowe might have started the Civil War, but Judith Butler started the gender war. I remember someone saying back in about 2004, “Theory is the new novel.” Men with literary and intellectual ambitions today almost certainly dream of being the next Mark Fisher or Nick Land,⁵ not the next Saul Bellow or Philip Roth. Or, to carry us back to the period when I’m suggesting this particular battle of the sexes started, they want to be the next Nietzsche—“Land was our Nietzsche,” as Fisher sighed—not the next Joyce.⁶

You might be wondering about me, then: if you’re so smart, why aren’t you writing theory? Leaving aside how clear I’ve tried to make it that literature isn’t about being smart, it’s because I share Ross’s quixotic faith that the novel, even if doomed—and I think it’s premature to say it is doomed—is nevertheless irreplaceable. Theory is a circle; the novel is a sphere:

The novel matters because there is still no artform that more thoroughly plumbs human consciousness. Artificial intelligence can write lousy novels or plagiarized novels, but not those that speak to what it means, in a passing moment, to be alive. Novels offer ambition on a range not plausible in the land of screens because there is no budget required, no gimmick or technological mastery—it is raw imagination, the greatest achievement of humankind, and it’s the print books that will outlast us, not an internet vulnerable to revision, corrosion, and collapse.

My own role in these gender wars has been ambiguous, however, as you can see from my rapid switch from masculinist to feminist critique between paragraphs above. Deliberately ambiguous, yes, but also inevitably. In one of the first posts on this Substack ever to be widely read, I gave critical support to Alex Perez after his controversial 2022 Hobart interview with its complaint, to my mind just, about the white upper-middle-class female monoculture in traditional publishing.

But I’ve never pretended to write a “masculine” alternative to today’s overly “feminine” fiction. I would be a poor mascot for this cause. As I’ve alliterated before, I never went to the war or the whale ship. I don’t even really know what men do when they’re alone with each other, to be honest. Both Ross and Alex have baseball backgrounds, whereas I once struck out at kickball in elementary school—it was gym class; we were playing outdoors, in the garden of the rectory; the gym teacher remarked cooly that she’d never seen anyone strike out at kickball before; a white stone statue of the Virgin looked on with open-armed compassion—and I have never played or even watched any sport. As I’ve also already said on here somewhere before: from my mother’s beauty shop⁷ where I spent my childhood summers to the 75% female English departments of the early 2010s where I earned my Ph.D., I have spent my life for better or for worse in women’s institutions. While I unabashedly appreciate my fair share of masculinist or even misogynist writers as long as they’re great writers—Cormac McCarthy, for instance, or Saul Bellow—I don’t think my critical tastes or my fiction itself are particularly male-coded.⁸

My fiction, therefore, tends to aim at the androgynous ideal asserted by Woolf in her war against those angels of the hearth. It’s never occurred to me to divide my readership up by gender, nor, if I can say this in a non-special-pleading or non-feminist⁹ way, that women, if they read my novels, would be displeased by them just because they were written by a man.¹⁰ In corollary, though the independent-publishing arena is now full of open appeals to male readers, I have not sought to market myself that way, to set myself up as a denizen of Man’s World, to cite the name a new right-wing little magazine. (Men, however, I hope it goes without saying, will also enjoy my books, as any sensitive and intelligent readers will.)

As Gertrude Stein said, one writes for oneself and for strangers. I don’t write for everybody—no one, not even the most devotedly commercial writer on earth, can write for everybody—but I do write for anybody. Anybody who might like it, anybody who might be fascinated by it, anybody who might see something of their own past experiences in it, anybody who might see some experiences they’d like to have in the future in it.

To link the first half of this post to the second half, I don’t believe any solution to this dilemma, for those of us who care about the future of the novel, will be found in a counter-identity politics, male grievance countering female in a tit-for-dick race to the bottom of ressentiment. I also suspect the focus on personal identity is overdone in general; I like novels to be windows, not mirrors. You can see yourself in a window, in a vague way, and there’s no shame in that, but mainly you’re trying to see out.

The modernists played hard and they played dirty when they stole the novel as if pulling the hearth-rug out from under domestic woman, but they weren’t wrong when they argued that her version of the form had become insufficiently universal, insufficiently alive to the needs of a new age, its new thoughts and new personae.

I will leave it to others to consider how we might out-compete video games for young men’s attention, but I believe that if we want to out-compete the theorists we will have to write fiction able to think through the present in all its opportunities, identities, agonies, and complexities. My work, despite its lack of overt gender address, seeks to answer this mandate for the novel now.

1. For more on this history, including quotations from relevant scholars, please see the full Invisible College episodes on Austen, Dickens, and Woolf. That modernism nevertheless eventually overwhelmed the anti-domestic New Woman feminist agenda with which it had initially partnered, consider how Ezra Pound turned Dora Marsden’s radical political magazine The Freewoman into his avant-garde literary magazine The Egoist.

2. Ross refers to this history in the context of Jewish intellectuals’ midcentury masculinization of American fiction, as discussed in Ronnie A. Grinberg’s new book, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals. These midcentury writers were following, quite consciously, such earlier modernist precursors as Hemingway, Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence.

3. Why this happened in the first place—why the Atlantic decided, pretty much criminally in my opinion, that it would be a good time to restart the Civil War, for example—is, as we used to say in academe, beyond the scope of this piece. For my somewhat pacific critique of Civil War nostalgia among 2010s social-justice left-liberals—remember all those tender-hearted urbanites with John Brown Twitter avis?—I must direct you, perhaps surprisingly, to a footnote in my negative review of Marilynne Robinson’s beloved Gilead. Nobody on Substack clicks links—I’m sorry you had to find out this way that I’m surveilling you with Substack stats data, dear reader—so I’ll just paste it in here:

When the novel [Gilead] was published [in 2004], fanaticism for freedom leading to emancipatory war would have been associated in the minds of the liberal literati with George W. Bush’s destruction of Mesopotamia, hence the political need for Robinson’s irony about the quixotic abolitionists. It was only during the Obama administration that the myth of the good war was redeemed for liberalism by a shift in the focus of historical memory from World War II, tarnished by its constant rhetorical use as a war-justification from the 1980s through the 2000s, to the American Civil War, understood as the second American Revolution and absolute sine qua non of African-American freedom. One need not hedge about the justice of defeating both the Nazis and the Confederacy, however, to allow that the question of whether democracy can or should be brought to recalcitrant territories at the point of a gun remains open.

4. I’m too lazy to search the archive for a specific reference, but this was a point originally made by The Last Psychiatrist, formerly Anna Khachiyan’s favorite blogger before she decided it would be more illuminating to discuss “human biodiversity” and golf course landscape architecture with Steve Sailer.

5. “Read some Nick Land,” Honor Levy exhorts us at one point in her shortly forthcoming and self-styled First Book. Let me remind you, please, that I’m writing a review of said book for a prominent publication. Watch the skies.

6. The terrain of the gender war has probably already moved from fiction to theory, with the female theorists gaining, if they’ve not wholly gained, on the male. While it has something to do with my filter bubble, it doesn’t have everything to do with it: I must have encountered a link to “Hyperreal Individualism” about five separate times in five separate places in the last couple of weeks. I admire this essay, by the way. Given my Major Arcana researches, author Princess Babygirl, who would probably disdain the quiescent cultural politics of the present essay, had me at the mention of Florence Scovel Shinn in the second sentence.

7. Ross suggests that contemporary novels should sympathetically explore the interiority of male Trump voters. Ironically, Major Arcana’s resident Trump voters are, like the staff and clientele of those largely Trump-voting lower-middle-class suburban beauty shops, white women. (I know I only stated outright in the narrative that Ellen Chandler voted Republican by middle age; I thought I so clearly implied the same in Diane del Greco’s case that there was no need for me to spell it out.)

8. This “coded” locution is getting a little out of hand, though. Around the holidays, I saw someone on BookTube refer to A Christmas Carol as “Dickens-coded.” They had to work overtime at Bletchley Park decrypting that one!

9. For authority in eschewing the “feminist” or any other such ideological label, I quote from Zia Jaffrey, “The Salon Interview - Toni Morrison,” dated 1998:

“Paradise” has been called a “feminist” novel. Would you agree with that?

Not at all. I would never write any “ist.” I don’t write “ist” novels.

Why distance oneself from feminism?

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed. Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book—leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity. I detest and loathe [those categories]. I think it’s off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I’m involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don’t subscribe to patriarchy, and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it’s a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.

“I would never write any ‘ist’”—put that on my tombstone. Please bear this in mind if you’re trying to include me on one of those “Zionist author” hit lists.

10. In less politicized days, Neil Gaiman used to say he thought of his individual books as having genders. He divided up the Sandman story arcs this way, for example, seeking to broaden the comics audience to women, with male-centric hero’s-journey narratives (Preludes and Nocturnes, Season of Mists, Brief Lives, etc.) followed in a deliberate pattern by fictions focused on women and narrated more concentrically than linearly (The Doll’s House, A Game of You, The Kindly Ones, etc.), all tending toward the oppressive male hero’s paradoxical self-destruction at the hands of the female Furies. My books could plausibly also be divided in just this fashion: Portraits and Ashes and Major Arcana, narrated in the third person with a preponderance of female characters, being “women’s books,” and The Class of 2000 and The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, with their first-person male narrators, being “men’s.”