If I may, I think Hart Crane gives us a hint towards what visionary literature looks like that is quite similar to your definition when he specifies that "the visionary company" is one of "love" in "The Broken Tower." Love here meaning something both like the Shelleyan platonic ideal of love as the true unity of all souls in friendship and brotherhood and in its earthly, sensuous form as the poet's vision must "dip / The matrix of the heart" to "lift down the eye / That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower." Crane ends with the further reconciliation of our two poles (romantic and realistic, Blake and Defoe, heaven and earth) as he sees the visionary heights of the sky finding its purpose in "Unseal[ing] her earth" and "lift[ing] love in its shower" which I take to mean as the sky makes the earth beautiful as it is, or, as you might say, the sky's showers of love transfigure the real of the earth into the beautiful and the strange (the shower image btw comes from a tercet of who else but Dante in Canto 14 of Paradiso). Furthermore, I find Crane's "crystal Word" similar to Pater's "hard, gemlike flame" the paradox of which you've emphasized before and which I assume is more or less the goal of visionary fiction: to take the singular beauty of what one sees arising beyond reality but is always fleeting and arrest it in reality.
To try and connect the two sections of your post, is love, in its visionary mode, not also the avenue of sympathetic imagination that you, myself, and Wilde all find so aesthetically interesting in the figure of Christ? The synthesis with Nietzsche being that the sympathetic internalization of the other (paradoxically?) announces the other's individuation and so everyone is an exception and unique while also still to be found within each individual (I'm also thinking, parochially perhaps, of Keats's interdependent concepts of negative capability and self-concentration). I may be off the mark here, but the whole process reminds me of Bloom's comments on Wordsworth's love of nature where "internalization and estrangement are humanely one and the same process."
Sorry if I've just mainly repeated what you've said in the post (and for turning to verse and not prose), but I'm also trying to work through some of these concepts for some projects I'm thinking through right now. There's also the very real possibility I've butchered your thoughts entirely lol and if so apologies to the maestro.
Thank you, I honestly couldn't have said it better, especially because I don't quite "get" Hart Crane! The "crystal Word" reminds me that Bloom, following his beloved fantasist David Lindsay, called Pater "Crystalman." And yes, ""internalization and estrangement are humanely one and the same process" is what people don't grasp when they denounce Wildean-Nietzschean-Bloomian individualism as merely selfish, as if the individual were not both me and you.
Regarding the comment about "Major Arcana" as a Catholic novel - yes, there's a lot of Catholicism in it, but I think the true religious feeling in the book is aesthetic, i.e. religious devotion transmuted into art as a religion. And then the Ash del Greco storyline goes even beyond this, into dizzying metaphysical realms. This also, I think, accounts for the somewhat "old-fashioned" vibe I get from the story - despite being technologically very up to date, the characters and their quests seem like something from the Romantic era or even older.
I noticed that another of your reviewers said something along the lines of "it makes the present seem so remote and far away," and I definitely got the same feeling from it.
This is fascinating, thank you! I hadn't heard or considered the term visionary fiction before, but it seems entirely appropriate and includes/illuminates the writers I've also intuitively responded to the most (Faulkner, DeLillo, Morrison, McCarthy, etc.). I wonder if Updike would also qualify. His preoccupations were also (mainly) material, but his project of "giving the mundane its beautiful due" always struck me as having a flare of the metaphysical, a hyper-examination of the ordinary in order to transcend it; perhaps? Also, someone hard at work on this today, I think, is Jesmyn Ward, who continues the Faulknerian/Morrisonian tradition but invokes the supernatural as constant companions to her protagonists' earthly plight, particularly her latest "Let Us Descend ", which just so happens to depart from the Inferno.
Yes, I definitely think Updike, generally underrated these days, is visionary in my sense. Louis Menand has a good New Yorker essay from 2014 where he argues that Updike understood writing almost literally as transubstantiation. Haven't yet read Ward, but thanks for the recommendation!
Pound tells you what he believes. The Spirit of Romance, the Limbs of Osiris, Instigations, How to Read, ABC of Reading, Guide to Kulchur, with much repetition and consistency, all spell it out.
Definitely, and I've read some of those, but Surette argues that critics ignored (up to the late 20th century) the more mystical/occult element out of embarrassment; they presumed Pound treated it as mere literary artifice the way Joyce treated the Odyssey and Eliot the Grail story. I don't know how fair that is, but that's his case.
I do not wish to extend the Lolita discourse anymore than you do. I managed to skip over Lolita in my limited Nabokov reading due to various contingencies but think I should now read it at least in order to clarify to myself how others get it wrong, in the same way one should read Eichmann in Jerusalem. But in reading an essay by Becca Rothfeld on Eric Rohmer, I was pointed to the 1958 essay on Lolita by Lionel Trilling I had never read called "The Last Lover," in which he not only says the novel is about love, not sex, but makes the argument for why Nabokov had to resort to this last taboo to revive the love story in this way. Perhaps Rowling should be more accused of lifting her judgement on the book straight from Trilling than of being a moral monster. Weird that the "distinguished critic" did not realize this.
It's definitely worth reading—very entertaining at every level from pulp sensationalism to wordplay rivaling Joyce—but I sometimes resent its very existence and him for writing it: as if art and the novel needed this albatross of pedophilic rape hung around their necks! But yes, I mean it has to be read in the context I mentioned in another footnote, which is exactly the context Trilling reads it in in that essay: the whole western romantic love tradition going back at least to the Middle Ages, Troubadours, courtly love, which requires forbidden love for its effect. Of this tradition Lolita is at once a send-up and fulfillment. He was doing the 20th century Madame Bovary, ironizing every last remnant of romance even as *he himself* deliberately writes the last romance. And as Flaubert said he *was* Mme Bovary, flush with the very desires that he transcends in representing her benighted quest, so Nabokov *was* Humbert Humbert in the same position. The merely moral reading ignore all of this—understandably, I guess, since it's a disturbing idea that won't fly with normie undergrads or middlebrow literati on social media, but surely adults can discuss it among themselves.
Superb! Thanks for the jumping off point on Weil, I’ll respond in due course (I’m kinda at capacity now as we’re taught to say).
In the spirit of Nietzschean self-assertion, I will note in the meantime that I prefer to be called Mary Jane (or Mary J or MJ or M.J.E or even mje) rather than Mary (so virginal), since my nom de plume was chosen as a homage to the Alanis song and in the grand tradition of drag names glamourising drug use (the alternative was Alice Deluxe).
I should write about it someday...I think you'd like the book, though. I don't gratuitously claim that the classics are page-turners—most of them are decidedly not—but Jane Eyre really is fun, almost a beach/airplane book (in a good way).
Ah, but to buy the very first edition of Major Arcana, or to buy earlier Pistelli works in preparation for 2025 Major Arcana? What is the White Noise to your Underworld? The Outer Dark to your Suttree?
Hm...throwing modesty aside, I'd say Portraits and Ashes and Major Arcana are my big books, and pair nicely. They treat the same themes but were written a decade apart, illustrating changes in my self and society. The Class of 2000 and The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House are built on a somewhat smaller scale. The former is my version of the traditional realist literary novel, as Portraits and Arcana are not. Whatever you choose, thank you!
Save for his debut, "The Ecstasy of Michaela," I have had the supreme pleasure of reading nearly all of John's oeuvre—the mature works (one novella and three novels), most of the essays from his eponymous website, all of the Substack readings, years' worth of Tumblr posts, and, my God, my God, I've even dipped in and out of his dissertation! Should John ever go temporarily "missing," you not only have my permission but a Good Samaritan's obligation to search my basement and garage—if only to strike an obsessive like me from the list of suspects. This is to say, without exaggeration—and though it may appear daunting—read them all.
His fictions are uncontrived yet spontaneously baroque, resisting the stifling impositions of pedestrian "craft"; they employ a thoroughly contemporary, ebullient, living language—like sunlight thawing a lost city long entombed in ice. Not that reading them is necessary preparation for "Major Arcana." Over at the Invisible College, John is assiduously building, brick by brick, a persuasive case that there is indeed a single novel in the 20th century greater than "Ulysses": Joyce's entire pre-"FW" body of work, from the first "third stroke" of "The Sisters" to the final "yes" of Molly’s soliloquy. Without assuming his intent, I imagine John envisions his oeuvre as more discursive, wandering, and riverine—where each bend beckons exploration, but without the need to trace every tributary to chart a complete map.
If memory serves, "Portrait and Ashes" is roughly 200 pages, "The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House" about 120, and "The Class of 2000" around 300. Yet these three, substantial as they are, collectively still fall short of the magnificent expanse of "Major Arcana"—if only in combined page count. Why not double your pleasure by indulging in them all? That way, in 20 years' time, you'll be able to tell a blasé shrink or a frightened janitor, “Look, I've tried to painstakingly explain this to you for 15 minutes and you still don't get it. I was among the first to read him! Imagine reading "The Bluest Eye" and "Sula" while Nixon was still in the White House!”
But then again, no—for the more you read John's work, the more you'll come to imbibe the utmost disdain we ought to hold for psychiatry, and the utmost esteem for the working poor. If I had to choose one, I'd say "Portrait and Ashes" is the minor arcana to the major deck of John's masterpiece. And if I may clumsily extend the analogy further—perhaps to aid in your preparation, given your explicit request, though I confess my knowledge of Tarot is limited—I’d liken them thus: "Portrait" is the suit of cups (divinations of emotion), "Quarantine" the suit of swords (ruminations of the mind), "Class" the suit of coins (cultivations of material), and "MA" the suit of wands (the will of art, the art of the will, and indeed, like all our most ambitious literature, striving in its own imperfect way for the man, the maelstrom, at the centre of our canon, the art of Will).
Whether you choose to read all, or some, or one (or, heaven forbid, none!) of his novels, I hope you discover as much profound delight in, and can instructively quarrel with, his works as I have over the years. We are incredibly fortunate that he generously shares the brilliance of his public commentary, destined otherwise, privately, for students and loved ones, and the luminance of his private imagination, envisioned on walks and through windows, brought forth into being, word by word, on luminous screens.
Thank you sincerely, David, for this! I may have to quote it somewhere... I am amused and heartened by your very convincing Tarot interpretation, since it pretty much all feels like cups when it's in process. Thanks again!
I liked the Covid-influenced "Quarantine of St. Sebastian House," which contains several indelible scenes and characters, and convinced me that this was an author worthy of attention. Also, it's a novella, so it won't take up too much of your time - good way to get a taster!
Proust is visionary for sure in my book-not sure they have too much else in common but he shares with DeLillo an ability to make the totally mundane, a washerwoman or a Toyota car seem like a vista of angels or the Forms in their world.
I should perhaps note that my polemics about Christianity are very much within it--I'm a weekly massgoer at an anglocatholic parish. Which is among others a reason I find little appeal in religion as literature or aesthetic (and often even as religion!)... btw reading now in part because of your mentions of him Jameson on Lewis' fascism, which is a bonkers unconvincing thesis and wonderful time prosewise...
Never got too far with Lewis and never read that book, but supposedly it's the key to the Jamesonian oeuvre, where The Political Unconscious was incubated. (He has asides throughout his work to the effect that fascism is more dignified and honorable than liberalism, since at least it's a collective and communal ideology.)
It's very much worth reading--regardless of argument, the style is brilliantly energized. And I should be so lucky as to be a piece on the critical chessboard!
If I may, I think Hart Crane gives us a hint towards what visionary literature looks like that is quite similar to your definition when he specifies that "the visionary company" is one of "love" in "The Broken Tower." Love here meaning something both like the Shelleyan platonic ideal of love as the true unity of all souls in friendship and brotherhood and in its earthly, sensuous form as the poet's vision must "dip / The matrix of the heart" to "lift down the eye / That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower." Crane ends with the further reconciliation of our two poles (romantic and realistic, Blake and Defoe, heaven and earth) as he sees the visionary heights of the sky finding its purpose in "Unseal[ing] her earth" and "lift[ing] love in its shower" which I take to mean as the sky makes the earth beautiful as it is, or, as you might say, the sky's showers of love transfigure the real of the earth into the beautiful and the strange (the shower image btw comes from a tercet of who else but Dante in Canto 14 of Paradiso). Furthermore, I find Crane's "crystal Word" similar to Pater's "hard, gemlike flame" the paradox of which you've emphasized before and which I assume is more or less the goal of visionary fiction: to take the singular beauty of what one sees arising beyond reality but is always fleeting and arrest it in reality.
To try and connect the two sections of your post, is love, in its visionary mode, not also the avenue of sympathetic imagination that you, myself, and Wilde all find so aesthetically interesting in the figure of Christ? The synthesis with Nietzsche being that the sympathetic internalization of the other (paradoxically?) announces the other's individuation and so everyone is an exception and unique while also still to be found within each individual (I'm also thinking, parochially perhaps, of Keats's interdependent concepts of negative capability and self-concentration). I may be off the mark here, but the whole process reminds me of Bloom's comments on Wordsworth's love of nature where "internalization and estrangement are humanely one and the same process."
Sorry if I've just mainly repeated what you've said in the post (and for turning to verse and not prose), but I'm also trying to work through some of these concepts for some projects I'm thinking through right now. There's also the very real possibility I've butchered your thoughts entirely lol and if so apologies to the maestro.
Thank you, I honestly couldn't have said it better, especially because I don't quite "get" Hart Crane! The "crystal Word" reminds me that Bloom, following his beloved fantasist David Lindsay, called Pater "Crystalman." And yes, ""internalization and estrangement are humanely one and the same process" is what people don't grasp when they denounce Wildean-Nietzschean-Bloomian individualism as merely selfish, as if the individual were not both me and you.
I think you are right and admire this reading of Broken Tower here
Regarding the comment about "Major Arcana" as a Catholic novel - yes, there's a lot of Catholicism in it, but I think the true religious feeling in the book is aesthetic, i.e. religious devotion transmuted into art as a religion. And then the Ash del Greco storyline goes even beyond this, into dizzying metaphysical realms. This also, I think, accounts for the somewhat "old-fashioned" vibe I get from the story - despite being technologically very up to date, the characters and their quests seem like something from the Romantic era or even older.
I noticed that another of your reviewers said something along the lines of "it makes the present seem so remote and far away," and I definitely got the same feeling from it.
Thank you! As I said, I'll leave others to judge, but maybe the answer is that Catholicism shaped my sense of what the aesthetic even is.
This is fascinating, thank you! I hadn't heard or considered the term visionary fiction before, but it seems entirely appropriate and includes/illuminates the writers I've also intuitively responded to the most (Faulkner, DeLillo, Morrison, McCarthy, etc.). I wonder if Updike would also qualify. His preoccupations were also (mainly) material, but his project of "giving the mundane its beautiful due" always struck me as having a flare of the metaphysical, a hyper-examination of the ordinary in order to transcend it; perhaps? Also, someone hard at work on this today, I think, is Jesmyn Ward, who continues the Faulknerian/Morrisonian tradition but invokes the supernatural as constant companions to her protagonists' earthly plight, particularly her latest "Let Us Descend ", which just so happens to depart from the Inferno.
Yes, I definitely think Updike, generally underrated these days, is visionary in my sense. Louis Menand has a good New Yorker essay from 2014 where he argues that Updike understood writing almost literally as transubstantiation. Haven't yet read Ward, but thanks for the recommendation!
I love your writing and your questions and will be buying your novel asap.
Thank you very much!
Pound tells you what he believes. The Spirit of Romance, the Limbs of Osiris, Instigations, How to Read, ABC of Reading, Guide to Kulchur, with much repetition and consistency, all spell it out.
Definitely, and I've read some of those, but Surette argues that critics ignored (up to the late 20th century) the more mystical/occult element out of embarrassment; they presumed Pound treated it as mere literary artifice the way Joyce treated the Odyssey and Eliot the Grail story. I don't know how fair that is, but that's his case.
The trick is not to read the critics
I do not wish to extend the Lolita discourse anymore than you do. I managed to skip over Lolita in my limited Nabokov reading due to various contingencies but think I should now read it at least in order to clarify to myself how others get it wrong, in the same way one should read Eichmann in Jerusalem. But in reading an essay by Becca Rothfeld on Eric Rohmer, I was pointed to the 1958 essay on Lolita by Lionel Trilling I had never read called "The Last Lover," in which he not only says the novel is about love, not sex, but makes the argument for why Nabokov had to resort to this last taboo to revive the love story in this way. Perhaps Rowling should be more accused of lifting her judgement on the book straight from Trilling than of being a moral monster. Weird that the "distinguished critic" did not realize this.
It's definitely worth reading—very entertaining at every level from pulp sensationalism to wordplay rivaling Joyce—but I sometimes resent its very existence and him for writing it: as if art and the novel needed this albatross of pedophilic rape hung around their necks! But yes, I mean it has to be read in the context I mentioned in another footnote, which is exactly the context Trilling reads it in in that essay: the whole western romantic love tradition going back at least to the Middle Ages, Troubadours, courtly love, which requires forbidden love for its effect. Of this tradition Lolita is at once a send-up and fulfillment. He was doing the 20th century Madame Bovary, ironizing every last remnant of romance even as *he himself* deliberately writes the last romance. And as Flaubert said he *was* Mme Bovary, flush with the very desires that he transcends in representing her benighted quest, so Nabokov *was* Humbert Humbert in the same position. The merely moral reading ignore all of this—understandably, I guess, since it's a disturbing idea that won't fly with normie undergrads or middlebrow literati on social media, but surely adults can discuss it among themselves.
Superb! Thanks for the jumping off point on Weil, I’ll respond in due course (I’m kinda at capacity now as we’re taught to say).
In the spirit of Nietzschean self-assertion, I will note in the meantime that I prefer to be called Mary Jane (or Mary J or MJ or M.J.E or even mje) rather than Mary (so virginal), since my nom de plume was chosen as a homage to the Alanis song and in the grand tradition of drag names glamourising drug use (the alternative was Alice Deluxe).
Thanks for the clarification! Was mentally separating the "Mary" from the "Jane Eyre," sorry. As a child of the 90s, I appreciate the Alanis homage.
No need to apologise, it’s my karma for pretending to have read Jane Eyre. Although I’d probably prefer the John Pistelli synopsis.
I should write about it someday...I think you'd like the book, though. I don't gratuitously claim that the classics are page-turners—most of them are decidedly not—but Jane Eyre really is fun, almost a beach/airplane book (in a good way).
Ah, but to buy the very first edition of Major Arcana, or to buy earlier Pistelli works in preparation for 2025 Major Arcana? What is the White Noise to your Underworld? The Outer Dark to your Suttree?
Hm...throwing modesty aside, I'd say Portraits and Ashes and Major Arcana are my big books, and pair nicely. They treat the same themes but were written a decade apart, illustrating changes in my self and society. The Class of 2000 and The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House are built on a somewhat smaller scale. The former is my version of the traditional realist literary novel, as Portraits and Arcana are not. Whatever you choose, thank you!
Save for his debut, "The Ecstasy of Michaela," I have had the supreme pleasure of reading nearly all of John's oeuvre—the mature works (one novella and three novels), most of the essays from his eponymous website, all of the Substack readings, years' worth of Tumblr posts, and, my God, my God, I've even dipped in and out of his dissertation! Should John ever go temporarily "missing," you not only have my permission but a Good Samaritan's obligation to search my basement and garage—if only to strike an obsessive like me from the list of suspects. This is to say, without exaggeration—and though it may appear daunting—read them all.
His fictions are uncontrived yet spontaneously baroque, resisting the stifling impositions of pedestrian "craft"; they employ a thoroughly contemporary, ebullient, living language—like sunlight thawing a lost city long entombed in ice. Not that reading them is necessary preparation for "Major Arcana." Over at the Invisible College, John is assiduously building, brick by brick, a persuasive case that there is indeed a single novel in the 20th century greater than "Ulysses": Joyce's entire pre-"FW" body of work, from the first "third stroke" of "The Sisters" to the final "yes" of Molly’s soliloquy. Without assuming his intent, I imagine John envisions his oeuvre as more discursive, wandering, and riverine—where each bend beckons exploration, but without the need to trace every tributary to chart a complete map.
If memory serves, "Portrait and Ashes" is roughly 200 pages, "The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House" about 120, and "The Class of 2000" around 300. Yet these three, substantial as they are, collectively still fall short of the magnificent expanse of "Major Arcana"—if only in combined page count. Why not double your pleasure by indulging in them all? That way, in 20 years' time, you'll be able to tell a blasé shrink or a frightened janitor, “Look, I've tried to painstakingly explain this to you for 15 minutes and you still don't get it. I was among the first to read him! Imagine reading "The Bluest Eye" and "Sula" while Nixon was still in the White House!”
But then again, no—for the more you read John's work, the more you'll come to imbibe the utmost disdain we ought to hold for psychiatry, and the utmost esteem for the working poor. If I had to choose one, I'd say "Portrait and Ashes" is the minor arcana to the major deck of John's masterpiece. And if I may clumsily extend the analogy further—perhaps to aid in your preparation, given your explicit request, though I confess my knowledge of Tarot is limited—I’d liken them thus: "Portrait" is the suit of cups (divinations of emotion), "Quarantine" the suit of swords (ruminations of the mind), "Class" the suit of coins (cultivations of material), and "MA" the suit of wands (the will of art, the art of the will, and indeed, like all our most ambitious literature, striving in its own imperfect way for the man, the maelstrom, at the centre of our canon, the art of Will).
Whether you choose to read all, or some, or one (or, heaven forbid, none!) of his novels, I hope you discover as much profound delight in, and can instructively quarrel with, his works as I have over the years. We are incredibly fortunate that he generously shares the brilliance of his public commentary, destined otherwise, privately, for students and loved ones, and the luminance of his private imagination, envisioned on walks and through windows, brought forth into being, word by word, on luminous screens.
Thank you sincerely, David, for this! I may have to quote it somewhere... I am amused and heartened by your very convincing Tarot interpretation, since it pretty much all feels like cups when it's in process. Thanks again!
I liked the Covid-influenced "Quarantine of St. Sebastian House," which contains several indelible scenes and characters, and convinced me that this was an author worthy of attention. Also, it's a novella, so it won't take up too much of your time - good way to get a taster!
Proust is visionary for sure in my book-not sure they have too much else in common but he shares with DeLillo an ability to make the totally mundane, a washerwoman or a Toyota car seem like a vista of angels or the Forms in their world.
Yes, my occasional skepticism aside, I could detect the visionary strain!
I should perhaps note that my polemics about Christianity are very much within it--I'm a weekly massgoer at an anglocatholic parish. Which is among others a reason I find little appeal in religion as literature or aesthetic (and often even as religion!)... btw reading now in part because of your mentions of him Jameson on Lewis' fascism, which is a bonkers unconvincing thesis and wonderful time prosewise...
Yes, sorry to use your paragraph as a piece on my chessboard; I should have also linked to something contextualizing like this, which I'll link now:
https://blakeesmith.substack.com/p/the-pride-flag-vs-the-church-gays
Never got too far with Lewis and never read that book, but supposedly it's the key to the Jamesonian oeuvre, where The Political Unconscious was incubated. (He has asides throughout his work to the effect that fascism is more dignified and honorable than liberalism, since at least it's a collective and communal ideology.)
It's very much worth reading--regardless of argument, the style is brilliantly energized. And I should be so lucky as to be a piece on the critical chessboard!
Bought! Looking forward to reading it.
Thanks—hope you enjoy it!
Recommended by Samuél Lopez Barrantes, and we’re all watching the voyage from Substack to trad pub pick up with real interest.