Weekly Readings #120 (05/20/24-05/26/24)

if it were only a symbol I’d say to hell with it

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

This week Daniel Oppenheimer¹ wrote “The Drama of Thought,” a generous review of The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, which he used to launch a rumination on what we want in a good teacher and why the conventional (political) criticism of academia misses the mark:

Listening to a lecture by John Pistelli is an aesthetic pleasure, but the aesthetic pleasure derives from listening to him—his joy in his own language, his fascination with the ideas, his frequent digressions, his expert curation of biographical info, his fluency with the broad sweep of the history and theory of the last few centuries, his humorous comments on noises that intrude from outside his home, the ways in which each lecture has a natural arc of its own while also existing in conversation with its preceding lectures. 

Dan’s recommendation coincided with the end of the first phase of the Invisible College project, a survey of modern British literature from Blake to Beckett. I made this week’s Beckett episode, “Not a Soul in Sight,” free to all. Next up: summer reading! We’ll be exploring Ulysses in June and July (with a two-episode prelude on Joyce’s pre-Ulysses books) and Middlemarch in August. Please offer a paid subscription if you’ve always been meaning to get around to these classics, if you’ve never managed to finish them, or if you already love them but want to have your interest refreshed.

Also, don’t forget to read, rate, and review my new novel, Major Arcana, available in print here, on Kindle here, or in two separate electronic formats—serial with audio posts and pdf—if you are a paid subscriber to this Substack. For more, see my conversation with Ross Barkan and this spoiler-free but comprehensive review by Mary Jane Eyre. Please contact me at johnppistelli@gmail.com or DM me on here to inquire about review copies. I will give a free pdf to literally anyone who wants to write a review anywhere; I will send a print copy to anyone who wants to write a review in a prominent publication.

For today, a ramble on the aesthetics of fiction with Fleur Jaeggy and Flannery O’Connor, including asides on the defects of trendy translated Euro-fiction and the American “CIA modernism” it’s meant to displace, and a utopian proposal to save the English department. Don’t miss the footnotes, especially my review of Ethan and Maya Hawke’s new Flannery O’Connor biopic Wildcat. Please enjoy!

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Disciplinary Century: Lineages of Contemporary Fiction

Wildcat trailer

I found Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline in a Little Free Library the other day. I loosely associated this novella, originally published in Italian in 1989, with the trend I complained about in my interview with Ross Barkan: the tendency in contemporary American literature to revere uncritically “late-modernist models of the European novel (Sebald, Houellebecq, Knausgård)…with their often blank prose styles and their…preference for the ‘I.’” We need to check our assumptions periodically, however; so, having found the book by accident—I always take accidents as signs—I read it.

I wish I could say it dashed my expectations. But no, it was just what I expected: a meditation written in a vague and associative style, like a confession to a psychoanalyst. Hardly anything is dramatized or even really seen in the fog of the narrator’s fragmentary recollections of her boarding-school crush on the elusive Frédérique. I’m not saying the subject matter demands (to cite some other boarding-school books) the flagrant adolescent melodrama of A Separate Peace, the speculative dystopia of Never Let Me Go, or the exploitative sensationalism of the inaugural yuri manga, Shiroi Heya No Futari, which I taught (more or less at their request) to my graphic novel class last semester, but here is Jaeggy giving us the novella’s climax:

I declared myself. I declared my love. More than to her I spoke to the landscape. The train looked like a toy, it left. ‘Ne sois pas triste.’ She left me a note. I had lost what was most important in my life, the sky was still blue, oblivious, everything yearned for peace and happiness, the landscape was idyllic, like idyllic, desperate adolescence. The landscape seemed to protect us, the small white houses of Appenzell, the fountain, the sign Töchterinstitut, it was as if the place hadn’t been affected by human distortions. Can one feel disorientated in an idyll? An atmosphere of catastrophe covered the landscape. The irremediable came home to me in one of the most beautiful days of the year. I had lost Frédérique. (trans. Tim Parks)

Between its obvious irony of a painful event that occurs in pleasant weather and its flat rhetorical statements about how the narrator felt, this passage is enough to remind us why “show, don’t tell” became staple advice in the first place.

“Show, don’t tell” can also become an affectation, as it did in MFA fiction: we can imagine the scene above written in the style Hemingway canonized with his iceberg theory, a style passing through Hemingway from Flaubert and Chekhov on its way to Carver and (RIP) Munro. In that mode, our nameless narrator would indicate her distress with a much more meticulously detailed description of the sky and the landscape. Given two bad choices—Jaeggy’s real European vagueness and an imagined American precision, both of them ways of paradoxically conjuring the scene by evading it—I would prefer the latter if only because the language is likely to be richer. Richest of all, however—and you can call me simple-minded if you must—would be to show us what the girls said to each other rather than maundering on about “human distortions.”

Jaeggy makes much of the the narrator’s intense conversations with Frédérique throughout the novella, but hardly gives us a single exchange. The point might be that adolescent emotions are usually in excess of their provocation, that teenaged conversations are more banal than the affect they trigger, but this is no excuse to write a vague, dull book.² I don’t know if Jaeggy’s novella is autobiographical or not, but, if it is, this inability to improve artistically upon experience—and thereby to make experience feel more real—is one of the perils of writing such fiction. The point of literature is not slavish fidelity to what actually happened; for what actually happens, we hardly need books.

In a 2021 essay on the novella, Greg Gerke traces Jaeggy’s narrative mode back to Beckett’s fiction—its elevation to prime fictional topos of the Cartesian torments of the storytelling “I” mentating upon itself while interred in the flesh—and forward to today’s Sebaldian autofiction, with an ultimate root in Proust:

This is why the experience of entering Jaeggy’s world or Sleepless Nights, or W.G. Sebald (with Proust as the distant great Alp) carries the scent of acetylene as well as a rare embroidery — the result of finding oneself in fiction. The implied narrator morphs into the reader in a risky way since the reader can quickly reject such personal intrusion into their business, their soul of secrets. The decorum, distance, and constructed characters in Flaubert, James, Mann, Faulkner, Gaddis, Gass, and Pynchon, are nearly impossible to enter in the same way.

This is the best explanation I’ve ever read of why I yawned all through Swann’s Way but have never been bored by James, despite superficial resemblances between the two authors. Distance incites and provokes our desire; forced intimacy repels it.

The replacement of the American MFA mode with the European Beckettian mode of fictional storytelling requires that we revisit the latter at its best—retrace our steps to where we made the first wrong turn, lest we wind our way deeper and deeper into the wood of error.

In that New Write pod³ I linked last week, journalist James Pogue—amusingly enough, in defense of Honor Levy⁴—gave the political version of events: the CIA set up the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with its ideology of apolitical craftsmanship to forestall une littérature engagée capable of challenging the social order.

Whatever grain of truth exists in this story—for the grain of truth, see my lectures here, here, and here about an anti-Communist Korean War novel (Richard E. Kim’s The Martyred) written at Iowa in the 1960s—gets lost, and deserves to get lost, in the greater truth that western literature at its best has always been scrupulously non-partisan since Shakespeare’s “negative capability” if not since the Iliad.⁵ Beckett’s halting lucubrations, for all their avant-gardism, also forbid political polemics.

Ironically, the first great American writer to come out of Iowa was no non-partisan but rather a devout Catholic. Her signature plot device is the shocking use of narrative violence or grotesquery intended to startle the reader into recognizing the need for God’s grace. I refer, of course, to Flannery O’Connor. She’s on my mind since I saw Ethan and Maya Hawke’s beautifully experimental biopic on the author, inexplicably titled Wildcat (obviously, it should have been Peacock).⁶

Despite her CIA-MFA provenance, then, O’Connor is a very imperfect example of the purely non-didactic writer, even the purely non-political one, though her fiction’s implied politics are not easily plotted on the left-right spectrum (she offers an inner critique of racism as penetrating as Melville’s or Faulkner’s among white American authors, but even this is in service to an Eliotic indictment of modernity at large for its spiritual deracinations).

Browsing through the Library of America’s Collected Works after watching Wildcat, I found the aesthetic antidote to Jaeggy I was looking for—

Parker was fourteen when he saw a man in a fair, tattooed from head to foot. Except for his loins which were girded with a panther hide, the man’s skin was patterned in what seemed from Parker’s distance—he was near the back of the tent, standing on a bench—a single intricate design of brilliant color. The man, who was small and sturdy, moved about on the platform, flexing his muscles so that the arabesque of men and beasts and flowers on his skin appeared to have a subtle motion of its own. Parker was filled with emotion, lifted up as some people are when the flag passes. He was a boy whose mouth habitually hung open. He was heavy and earnest, as ordinary as a loaf of bread. When the show was over, he had remained standing on the bench, staring where the tattooed man had been, until the tent was almost empty.

Parker had never before felt the least motion of wonder in himself. Until he saw the man at the fair, it did not enter his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed. Even then it did not enter his head, but a peculiar unease settled in him. It was as if a blind boy had been turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed. (“Parker’s Back”)⁷

—a fiction so precise and evocative it transcends particulars and reaches almost as high as heaven, even though it can only do so through particulars, not through an explicit discourse on the ineffability of the ineffable.⁸

But I also found a brilliant little essay from 1963 that I’ve quoted here before, “Fiction is a Subject with a History—It Should be Taught that Way.” The ending of the essay is familiar in its resonant severity and wit:

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

But her entire argument is worth rehearsing. O’Connor recommends for a middle-school English curriculum those 19th-century British and American classics now thought too difficult for Harvard undergraduates, this in place of the easy and “relevant” (i.e., politically and socially bien-pensant) contemporary literature then beginning to be assigned to students, which at the time meant Johns Hersey and Steinbeck.

Contemporary fiction, O’Connor argues, is shaped by the whole history of fiction. Modern novels and stories—I think she means modernism and after, including her own work—takes for granted a knowledge of this history when it leaves more to the reader’s imagination than previous fiction did:

Modern fiction looks simpler than the fiction which preceded it, but in reality it is more complex. A natural evolution has taken place. The author has for the most part absented himself from direct participation in the work and has left the reader to make his own way amid experience dramatically rendered and symbolically ordered. The modern novelist merges the reader in the experience; he tends to raise the passions he touches upon. If he is a good novelist, he raises them to effect by their order and clarity a new experience—the total effect—which is not in itself sensuous or simply of the moment. Unless the child has had some literary experience before, he is not going to be able to resolve the immediate passions the book arouses into some total picture.

Her own ironies, she implies, will be invisible without a prior introduction to authors with a more stably articulated point of view, such as Austen or Hawthorne. The great experimenters assumed that they would be read with the precedent of the classics in mind. (“Our quarrel is not with the classics,” Virginia Woolf insisted in one of her modernist manifestoes.) They weren’t trying to create a portable “method” or (God save us) “craft” that the budding writer would learn as a substitute for an apprenticeship in the history of the art.

Joyce said any novelist could narrate the domestic drama of Finnegans Wake straightforwardly with one hand tied behind his back, which is why he himself didn’t bother to do it that way. He presumed, however, a reader who would come to his complex text already knowing the domestic drama. O’Connor likewise implies a moral irony Hawthorne might have made explicit, but she still intends the irony. In her essay, she further rejects the idea that students should be assigned only works superficially relevant to their own time:

The fact that these works [18th- and 19th-century classics] do not present him [the student] with the realities of his own time in all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time and has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday…

So even though O’Connor had the eighth-grade curriculum in mind when she wrote the essay (she does restrict her imagined 13-year-olds’ reading to “the early James”!), she nevertheless echoes a quixotic proposal I myself once briefly mentioned for salvaging what’s left of the moribund university English department in the context of which I first quoted the 1963 article. I wrote:

My own utopian proposal for the reform of the English department would be to merge literature and creative writing as disciplines, ditch the humanly irrelevant “college essay” as the pedagogical telos of literature instruction, and have even literary-historical survey courses culminate writing-wise in the student’s composition of a creative work.

This would have the double effect of saving literature classes from scholarly dryness and saving creative writing classes from presentism and nescience. Today’s students aren’t wrong to favor creative writing over literature classes—the world may not need another word, but since words will continue to be written, let them be stories and poems rather than another thesis-driven hot take—but they are wrong if they think they can learn to be novelists and poets without reading the novelists and poets who came before, all the way back to the Iliad. Otherwise, we will be left with “methods” in their decadence, such as the MFA program’s CIA modernism produces, or else cheaply imported Euro-trends favored by the jaded metropolitan. Neither of these is capable of transfiguring tradition, though such transfiguration is all that keeps an art truly alive.

1. Readers will recall that I recently appeared on Dan’s Eminent Americans podcast with Ross Barkan to discuss the emergence of a New Romanticism in American or western culture. This week also offers a small example of that larger trend: a major publisher has re-released JF Martel’s 2015 small-press manifesto Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice as an audiobook with an introduction written and read by the usually reticent Donna Tartt. Back when Tartt first recommended this book in 2022, I re-posted to Substack the review I wrote when it came out. To quote myself from the review:

Going by Martel’s book (but not only by Martel’s book), it seems to me that the question of what is living and what is dead in postmodernism can now be answered with some precision: Romanticism is living, and Marxism is dead.

As I said in my introduction to the post: if I wrote that review today, I’d be less haughty about the book’s spiritual element, much more open to the approach taken by Martel and Phil Ford on their Weird Studies podcast. I discovered their pod, by the way, because they interviewed Victoria Nelson. She is the author of the superb books The Secret Life of Puppets and Gothika. These chart the Romantic, Gothic, neoplatonic, gnostic, occult, and esoteric dimensions of both high and low contemporary culture since this century opened, in everything from Cynthia Ozick’s novels and Lars von Trier’s films to horror cinema east and west and pop bestsellers like Twilight and The Shack. Finally, to close this footnote, let me recommend Martel’s recent essay, “Being at Sea,” on time, history, art, and death, encompassing Heraclitus, Marx, Jung, Tarkovsky, Lynch, Joyce, Mishima, and Melville.

2. There’s a metafictional component to Jaeggy’s meditation as well. The narrator tells us elliptically that Frédérique’s surname begins with a “C” and means “story.” Her last name, in other words, must be Conte, a word with a nimbus of associations from the child-like and innocent (e.g., conte de fées, or fairy tale) to the sexual and vulgar (the obscene semi-bilingual pun on conte/con/cunt that dirty-minded Flaubert supposedly exploited in titling his own triptych of novellas about two women and a saint Trois contes). Jaeggy’s is a story, therefore, about storytelling itself—and about female sexuality and desire.

3. Last week, trying not to call attention to myself, I wrote a deliberately obscure footnote about dissensions in the “Dissident Right.” I wrote at the end of the note, by way of apologizing for my obscurity: “usually when I allude to such things in brief someone writes a long and detailed exposé about a week later.” It’s been a week, and, sure enough, you can now read that exposé, written (in rather rude terms I disavow) by one Reality Spammer, here.

4. Formally, though, Honor Levy is MFA all the way, as is her immediate precursor Madeline Cash. Back to Gerke’s aforementioned essay, where he says, about the shape of Jaeggy’s paragraphs, “This is the swerve, as Gordon Lish advocates might call it…” Levy and Cash both write paragraphs that “swerve” in just the way Lish recommended—

A technique of structural consecution at the level of the sentence involves the use of a but-construction—a Douglas Glover term—to create tension at the level of the sentence. Glover defines a but-construction as “the use of the word ‘but’ or cognate to create contrast or conflict between what comes before and what comes after” (106). Lish’s name for this narrative turn is a swerve, meaning to contend with. But-constructions help formulate contrast and surprise or juxtaposition and opposition as a way of adding a surprising turn in the momentum of the narrative.

—extending the poetics of the clinamen into the next generation. There’s no need to use “but” or its cognates, though; the idea is simply to juxtapose the intuitively unrelated or opposed without explanation, a macro-level oxymoron. This montage style is so ingrained it’s hard not to reproduce for American writers under about the age of 80 or maybe 100. (Ostensibly it’s cinematic, but James Wood’s anti-Flaubert essay from The Broken Estate traces something like the technique to Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education. Cinema probably got it from Flaubert.) Perhaps my favorite of my own short stories, “Sweet Angry God,” written in too close a proximity to a reading of DeLillo, makes use of this swerve—

The cumin seeds trembled in the hot oil, and then the paprika and garlic. They yielded their aroma on billows of unctuous steam. Skins of cherry tomatoes gently dehisced to offer up red flesh. That was the tenderhearted, lyrical side of cooking dinner. Meanwhile I was bent over the sink. I wrenched the limbs of the raw chicken out of their sockets with a set of wet pops.

—but I tried as hard as I could not to rely on it too much in Major Arcana. I wanted to produce a contemporary prose whose emotional effect comes from the sentences’ subtle interrelation, not their showy disjunction. We’ve had enough solve; it’s time for coagula.

5. I’ve quoted the following before, but I’ll keep quoting it until we all have it memorized. Northrop Frye on the Iliad, from The Anatomy of Criticism:

It is hardly possible to overstate the importance for Western literature of the Iliad’s demonstration that the fall of an enemy, no less than of a friend or leader, is tragic and not comic. With the Iliad, once and for all, an objective and disinterested element enters into the poet’s vision of human life. Without this element, poetry is merely instrumental to various social aims, to propaganda, to amusement, to devotion, to instruction: with it, it acquires the authority that since the Iliad it has never lost, an authority based, like the authority of science, on the vision of nature as an impersonal order.

See also Judge Richard A. Posner’s “Against Ethical Criticism” for the politics of an apolitical literature:

The insistence, in short, is on the separation of the moral from the aesthetic—but with two qualifications. Some literature has little interest or value apart from the didactic and for it the proper criticism is didactic. And the separation of moral from aesthetic values is not a rejection of the former. The aesthetic outlook is a moral outlook, one that stresses the values of openness, detachment, hedonism, curiosity, tolerance, the cultivation of the self, and the preservation of a private sphere—in short, the values of liberal individualism.

6. Wildcat has received mixed reviews, mostly because its narrative experimentalism makes few allowances to viewers who don’t already know O’Connor’s life and work. This is a fair complaint in a “consumer reporting” way—it’s simply not a movie for everybody—but I appreciate Ethan Hawke’s unwillingness to take the potentially staid form of the biopic for granted and the extraordinary range and maturity of Maya Hawke’s performance as O’Connor from flirtatious sarcasm to bitter disgust to crippling illness to religious ecstasy.

The film probably tries to do too much in too short a running time in too kaleidoscopic and non-linear a manner—dramatizing O’Connor’s literary struggles, religious longings, physical illness, abortive romance with Robert Lowell, and fraught relationship with her mother, all while adapting five of her short stories, in under two hours—but I admire the ambition, and the results are often as visionary as O’Connor’s own work.

Wildcat accurately captures how those of us who don’t write directly autobiographical fiction turn life into art. It’s also an especially subtle but acute portrayal of the experience the artist undergoes in moving from the province to the metropole. As we’ve seen on here before, some amateur sociologists oppose the “hicklib” to the “metrocon,” but these are often the same person, as it was in O’Connor’s case (and perhaps my own): a liberal when forced to dwell with the bigots of the provinces, but a conservative when confronted with the preening, frivolous “sophistication” of the gentry left in the university or the city. Robert Lowell (fairly) and Elizabeth Hardwick (less fairly) are Wildcat’s avatars of this elite left. Hawke even has O’Connor make her famous remark on transubstantiation and the Eucharist—“If it were only a symbol I’d say to hell with it”—in reproof to an airily agnostic Hardwick, though I think she actually said it to Mary McCarthy.

All in all, a good movie: a harrowing and heartening portrait of the artist in search of grace. Speaking of synchronicities, there’s a Beckett biopic out too, but I haven’t seen it.

7. I quote this at length to demonstrate that O’Connor does plenty of “telling,” but she’s telling about what she has already very convincingly “shown.” Great fiction is “show and tell.” And yes, I deliberately chose to quote a story that stages the conflict between iconic and aniconic orientations to worship, for the literary implications of which see the next footnote.

8. Beckett was Protestant as Joyce was Catholic. O’Connor was of course also a Catholic. I surmise from Sweet Days of Discipline that Jaeggy’s Swiss upbringing was primarily Protestant, but I don’t know for sure. Still, the basic distinction—approaching God through the world or leaping to God out of the world—has an obvious bearing on literary aesthetics.