Weekly Readings #121 (05/27/24-06/02/24)

a nice deal

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

Loath as I am to talk about myself—we don’t do autofiction around here!—the literary news this week did involve me and therefore does demand an explanation. That will be the topic of today’s post.

As you can see above, and as you may have heard already, my latest novel, Major Arcana, has been acquired by Belt Publishing, a distinguished small press that has heretofore specialized in nonfiction with a Rust Belt focus. Belt will be publishing the novel in April 2025. I first serialized Major Arcana on Substack from March 2023 to February 2024, and I self-published it on Amazon in April 2024. Belt’s Anne Trubek explains her incredibly open-minded side of this transaction here.

This is public news rather a personal story pertaining only to my work because, unless we’ve missed something, I may be the first person to have serialized a novel on Substack that was then picked up by a traditional publisher. Accordingly, people have many questions! I will answer a few here.

First, I want to assure both my paid subscribers and those who have purchased the self-published version of the novel that you have read Major Arcana. Paid subscribers can even still read it: Belt has not acquired the rights to the original serial, so that will remain up on this site forever. The current Amazon print and Kindle books will be available until July 1, when the deal with Belt goes into effect. I have Anne’s permission to encourage you to buy it now if you want it, especially if you’re going to leave a review somewhere like Goodreads, Amazon, or your own Substack, or otherwise tell your friends and neighbors about it. The more Major Arcana is in circulation, the better it is for all involved. I will be making a final revision before I submit the file to Belt on July 1, but I won’t make any changes that would alter the novel’s tone, structure, or meaning.¹ If you’ve already read it, you’ve already read it; if you’ve already bought it, you’ve already bought it.

Second: am I selling out? I certainly hope so, but let’s define our terms. After I linked to it in a recent post, I actually went back and reread my 2022 piece on Alex Perez’s famous Hobart interview. I’d forgotten the bravado of my conclusion:

Their [i.e., official literary institutions’] irrelevance in there and our [i.e., independent writers’ and publishers’] relevance out here is the point, until out here and in there trade places. I never wanted to be marginal. The margin is no place of honor. I operate in the wilderness the better to capture the citadel in time. My motto is “the true mainstream in exile”—however long it takes. They called Melville crazy and even succeeded in expelling him from official literary culture, because the alternatives to official literary culture that exist now were almost unimaginable then. Even at that disadvantage, he won in the end. They said he ought to be locked up, but he’s the one we read now. As for them, we don’t even know their names.

I may in the last two years have become somewhat too seigneurial on this platform to strike such a rabble-rousing note these days, but my point was simply this: a confluence of commercial, political, and technological facts led too many traditional publishers in the last decade away from what should have been their mission to disseminate major literature. Whether they prioritized a doomed competition against the streaming services² or the placation of activists with an immemorially (we might say “Platonic”) anti-art agenda, they relegated an enormous amount of literary energy to the margins. This was a bad development. Its reversal will be a good development. There will always be margins and centers; we want them both to be in as good a shape as possible.

More pragmatically, I believe the place of self-published work in the overall publishing ecosystem has changed. Just consider this story about the self-published “shadow-work journal”³ or this one about the self-published terminally-ill-teen bildungsroman. Both books went viral on TikTok and were then acquired by Simon & Schuster. Obviously, it’s not going to work the same way for literary fiction of the Major Arcana variety. TikTok virality is not available (and should not be available) to the type of work meant to challenge the audience rather than to flatter it.⁴ TikTok is not a platform I plan to use myself. But there’s no reason to believe Substack couldn’t begin to function as serious literature’s equivalent to TikTok as a proving ground and recruiting pool for traditional publishers aware that the old talent pipelines have degraded.⁵

The stigma of self-publishing is probably greater for literary fiction than for any other kind of writing, due to reasons both more and less persuasive.⁶ This will have to change in the coming years, and it will change, if for no other reason than that the literary world is eventually going to internalize our insistence upon the examples of Blake, Whitman, Woolf, et al. Pretty much half or more than half of the Romantic and modernist movements were cranked out on private presses. In the meantime, though, we cannot pass up the opportunity to get our work into the hands of those who wouldn’t touch it if it didn’t come wrapped in the mantle of a traditional publisher, not to mention that a book traditionally published represents a line on one’s curriculum vitae, as a self-published book does not.

Third, those who have already read Major Arcana might be wondering if ideology posed any challenge to the novel’s acquisition. It did not. I like to think I have reasonably good political instincts.⁷ I knew when I started writing the novel that it would seem “right-wing.”⁸ I also knew that the whole narrative, in its transcendence of our present political polarization,⁹ would be almost equally problematic for both left- and right-wing readers. Finally, I suspected the left was likelier in the end to appreciate the novel’s subtlety of representation and its ultimately anarchic worldview. (Belt’s nonfiction selections have been progressive in tendency, though I don’t believe there’s any political litmus test for their fiction.) And if anything, as I’ve documented in the last two Weekly Readings, the puritanical purity spirals are mostly found on the right rather than the left wing of the American counterculture these days. Such things go in regular and predictable cycles; I planned for Major Arcana to be, in all its untimeliness, right on time.

I don’t know what one case or anecdote proves, but the acquisition of Major Arcana suggests to me that self-publishing can be—and will increasingly be—a road into traditional publishing, even as the latter still offers advantages the underground has not yet fully replicated.

In conclusion, I want to thank again everyone who’s supported the novel so far, especially my paid subscribers, Anne Trubek, and Ross Barkan, whose generous interview with me brought the book to Anne’s attention. Let me also put in another word for Mary Jane Eyre’s beautiful first review of the novel, the best introduction if you want to know what the book’s about. We are, as they say, all going to make it.

1. I liked the idea that a self-published book would be a bit rough around the edges, but I’m now giving the book a “professional” edit. Not too professional, though. I was straightening out one particular sentence yesterday—the final sentence of the prologue if you want to know—and then thought to myself, “Wait, what the hell am I doing? This is actually the way I talk!” The insight I had when beginning Major Arcana was as follows: since people seem to like my essays so much, why not write a novel in the style of my essays rather than trying to sound like I just got off the bus from Iowa City? Never fear, I’m also fixing every time I misgendered Simon Magnus until Simon Magnus’s acceptance, in the novel’s final pages, of “he, or whatever.”

2. You could do Major Arcana in about 10 hour-long episodes, though. You’d want to alter the structure of the novel so that the narrative past and the narrative present are in regular alternation, essentially giving half of each episode to Simon Magnus in the late 20th century and half to Ash del Greco in the present. I considered structuring the novel this way at first, but I concluded that it would dissipate narrative energy in a book. A book will be read straight through, even if you serialize it first, so you want as much continuous narrative as possible. An oscillatory structure will increase narrative energy, however, on episodic television, which depends for suspense on cuts and transitions rather than straight storytelling. (Cf. McLuhan on hot and cold media, i.e., the printed book and the televised show, respectively.) I know just how it would work. Netflix, Amazon, Apple, etc.: call me!

3. There’s a comic passage about shadow work in Major Arcana—there’s a passage about everything in Major Arcana: it’s a long book—which I can’t resist quoting here:

She often liked to do this, to schedule a post she both feared and desired might prove controversial—for example, her video about her disbelief in the necessity to a successful manifestation of what Jungian therapists called shadow work—for a time when she could not be online, to allow whatever might erupt to erupt without her.

(In the case of the shadow-work video, a middle-aged yogi who delivered her own manifestation coaching in a soft voice from a bamboo balcony in Bali, often as she snaked her lean leg behind her head, toes flexed against her tanned temple, pronounced Ash del Greco a “dangerous and harmful ignoramus” from the platform of her much larger channel. This had few real consequences that Ash del Greco could detect. She later quipped that the yogi must not have sufficiently integrated her own shadow if she was hurling such imprecations from her yoga mat.)

Friendly as I have been to Jung, I am, unlike my (anti-)hero(ine) Ash del Greco, all in favor of shadow work. But surely the way to do it is to read and reflect on The Inferno and Hamlet, Crime and Punishment and Lolita, Mrs. Dalloway and Sula, not to “journal” in a vacuum. Along these lines, I want to get people in the “spiritual” community interested in Major Arcana. Sighswoon, for instance, might be into it. Please let me know in the comments if you can think of anyone else.

4. For such a challenging work, please see the review I posted this week of Udith Dematagoda’s new release, Agonist. I will be reviewing more new and forthcoming books all summer.

5. Authors will necessarily have to fashion themselves as works of art equivalent to their fictions if they want to make the new circumstances work for them, however. The kind of attitude on display in that Esquire article about how hard it is to sell first novels today—

When Kyle Dillon Hertz published his debut, The Lookback Window, which The New York Times called “gripping and savagely beautiful,” he got the impression that because he “wrote a very gay, very queer, very explicit book,” he says, his publicity team believed that he “would know the people to whom the publicist or marketer should connect.” But he didn’t. “I’m a writer; I’m not a BookTok person,” he adds. “I don’t have that set of knowledge.”

—will have to be left in the last century, when publishers did everything for their authors, to include employing editors able to assemble writers’ alcoholic disjecta into coherent manuscripts. Why are writers so nostalgic for this bathetic dependence? I have not, however, hired a publicist. If you’re sick of hearing about me, you have only me to blame.

6. Persuasive is the long association of self-publishing with cranks and pornographers. Less persuasive is the conversion over the last century of literary writing into a profession, complete with courses of undergraduate and graduate study and regular career milestones. People who operate outside this system come to seem to those operating within it as suspect as doctors or lawyers who try to practice without their professions’ licenses. But half the literary canon is made up of cranks and pornographers; if you exclude them, you exclude literature itself. Relatedly: there’s a recurring debate about whether or not people with Ph.D.s should demand to be addressed as “doctor.” The average person seems to think it high-handed and pretentious. Some Ph.D.s, however, argue that we should insist upon our titles both to preserve the honor of our disciplines and because an increasing proportion of female Ph.D.-holders or Ph.D.-holders of color will be the victims of their expertise’s devaluation at the moment of their accession to it. I do grasp the latter argument, but still: you can just call me John. I am a writer and cannot rest on a credential. I earn whatever authority I have the same way any other writer earns it: one word at a time.

7. In a profoundly victimological Christian culture that always posits a truth higher than the mere law, I wouldn’t make my political opponent a legal martyr, for example. I thought everybody had read René Girard in the last few years, but apparently not. Incidentally, I saw a good typo the other day: “Renée Girard.” Please give this name to the heroine of your next social novel about learning to transcend mimetic desire. If you don’t, I might.

8. As I’ve mentioned before, Coetzee’s (admittedly much shorter!) Disgrace was a structural model: that novel begins as a 1990s satire of campus political correctness just as Major Arcana begins as a 2020s satire of campus wokeness, but neither remains in such a comfortable narrative place. Both become gnostic gospels in the end.

9. A battle rages on X even as I type over whether or not literature is or can be apolitical, a battle sparked by two writers I’ve mentioned before on here:

It’s a harder question than it looks. I wrote an entire doctoral dissertation devoted to it. Much of The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, has also been pledged to the question. People who don’t realize it’s a difficult question are offering Joyce and Beckett, against Gwyn, as obvious examples of the political artist. Yes, Beckett fought in the French Resistance—but he also longed to free literature, as music and painting had been freed before it, from the burden of representation and therefore of social engagement. Yes, Joyce wrote against the British Empire—but he also wrote against Irish nationalism’s instrumentalization of culture for political ends and wrote to his brother, on the eve of the Second World War, “For God’s sake don’t talk politics. I’m not interested in politics. The only thing that interests me is style.” No one was more political than Percy Bysshe Shelley, but his final work concluded that there was no political solution to the problems of human life, that “God made irreconcilable / good and the means of good.” Mary Shelley, meanwhile, invented science fiction to warn against Promethean politics, to defend the private life. Like Blake before them, the Shelleys understood that a political revolution without an apolitical spiritual revolution of the kind only art could effect would empower no one but the Napoleons and the Stalins of this world. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf: each in their way advocated for the circulation of a consciousness and an affect transcending the merely political if the political itself was ever really to be reformed. For these examples and more, and for a nuanced approach to this difficult subject, please consider a paid subscription to The Invisible College. We’re about to begin our summer reading of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s Middlemarch—you won’t want to miss it.