Weekly Readings #127 (07/08/24-07/14/24)

American berserk

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

This week I posted the penultimate Ulysses episode of The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers: “The Word Known to All Men.” There, in chapters 13 through 15 of Ulysses, we closely studied Joyce’s revolution, perhaps the most successful revolution of the 20th century, in which he replaces the parents’ procreation with the poet’s “postcreation,” and replaces church, empire, and nation with the utopian “New Bloomusalem,” this to successfully “kill the priest and the king” in our minds and supplant their authority with that of the artist. This leg of The Invisible College’s intellectual adventure concludes next week as we arrive at the end of Ulysses and at our own rendezvous with Molly Bloom.

By that time, a paid subscription to this Substack will gain you access to 19 episodes of two hours or more on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and eight episodes of two hours or more on the work of Joyce. After a week’s break at the end of July, we will spend August reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch and then turn our attention in the fall to classic American literature, from the epochally incendiary essays of the Transcendentalists through the poetry of Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Pound, and Stevens, and the novels The Blithedale Romance, Moby-Dick, The Bostonians, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Sound and the Fury. An anon wrote to me at midnight (my time) last night:

I know this is still a month and a half away, but can I just say how excited I am to barrel through the imaginative beginnings of American literature with you at the same time as we (non-Americans) watch you guys tear yourselves to pieces over this election. Like if you can draw even half the parallels between this stuff and the present as you managed to for Brit Lit, then reading Whitman and Dickinson (already my two favorite poets) with you as guide in the two weeks before the election seems likely to be one of the most interesting intellectual rollercoasters of my life.

Please offer a paid subscription to find out! (You wouldn’t want to leave me with “memes without coins,” if I may cite Noah Kumin at his most suggestive.) Speaking of incendiary America and of attempts on the life of the “king,”¹ I have been imaginatively outrun by the news cycle this weekend and will necessarily keep today’s epistle light and brief. It’s about a book I’m currently reading. Please enjoy!

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Surfing the Collective Unconscious: ROAR and the Fiction of American Reality

Jasper Johns, Three Flags (1958)

In his essay “Writing American Fiction,” Philip Roth famously wrote the following perennially relevant words, over two decades before I was even born:

[T]he American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.

Believe it or not, these sentences, along with Roth’s sentence from American Pastoral about “the indigenous American berserk,” were rattling around in my head this week even before yesterday. This is because I’ve been reading—I’m still reading: it’s a long book—Bruce Wagner’s ROAR: American Master, The Oral Biography of Roger Orr (2022).

As the subtitle suggests, this substantial book is a novel in the form of a faux-oral history about a fictional celebrity: the polymathic Roger Orr, nicknamed “Roar,” a genius-level comedian, songwriter, novelist, and film director, Jewish and biracial, with a brilliant jazz singer for a biological mother, a brutal rapist Klansman for a biological father, and a hugely wealthy adopted West Coast family, a bisexual man who first becomes a transgender woman and who then transcends gender altogether, whose tumultuous life intersects with the lives of everyone who matters in American (or western!) public life from Billie Holiday and Jack Kerouac and Francis Bacon through Steven Spielberg and Philip K. Dick and Sammy Davis, Jr., to Jan Morris and Michelle Obama and Amanda Gorman, with time to spare for Ram Dass, Susan Sontag, Dave Chappelle, Donald Judd, Gore Vidal, Beverly D’Angelo, Cindy Sherman, and many, many more, all of whom offer a cascade of coruscating witness to his life and times from 1940 to 2018: “Roar was a warlock, a witch, he was both, he surfed the collective unconscious.” Dick and Roar mutually define themselves as “brothers from another Other” as our hero pursues what we are to finally understand as a spiritual quest to transcend this world:

DENZEL WASHINGTON. Roar called the world a “prison planet.” He said we got so accustomed the steel bars that we don’t see them. We think we’re free but don’t know what that word means. Like in the Kristofferson song—“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Except what it should be is “just another word for nothing left.” Maybe that’s the same thing; I ain’t gonna argue with Kris. It takes a lot of work to understand “free,” to understand what it truly means. Roar said the same thing about the word “love” too.

Wagner in his guise as compiler and editor does not write ROAR in parodies of the 400+ real-life celebrity characters’ voices, which would be a tedious stunt, but in a timeless vernacular, obscene² and rapturous, a kind of dream-English that reminds me of DeLillo’s pleasure in seeing on the title pages of his French editions the phrase “translated from the American.”

The scale, ambition, and daring of this operatic mock-epic-in-gossip makes even my own Major Arcana look like a “wan little husk of autofiction,” but I recognize in Wagner’s literary magic-mirror some of my goals for that novel about an epochal and epochally gender-bending popular artist and his role in the American berserk. About a classic novel written by Roar, a fictionalized Joseph Heller testifies:

He was long past the adolescent raptures of Kerouac. His sights were much higher: to reach the unreachable dreams of Quixote, to out-giant Gargantua and Pantagruel. The beacon of Candide was in there too. His estimation of contemporary American literature was dismal. He’d say, “Joey? I’m going to Voltaire the New Yorker crowd a brand-new arsehole.”

Have I mentioned Wagner’s commitment to punning, one that rivals Shakespeare for paronomasial obsession? Roger Orr does make a classic horror film, anticipating George Romero’s zombified racial fable by a few years, but not one called Paronomasial Activity. That’s the kind of joke that might appear in the novel—maybe it will appear in the closing pages, as the narrative reaches the 21st century. I’ll let you know.

Anyway, two unrelated questions present themselves. First, why isn’t everyone reading this novel? Second, why am I reading this novel? If something like this had come out in the ’90s, surely it would have been the talk of the decade; even now, one imagines people screenshotting the more outrageous passages to send around on social media.

To answer the question of the novel’s general neglect, I would have to write a treatise on cultural decline, but Ross Barkan has already handled that for this week.³ So I will answer the first question instead: why me and why now? It begins with my entirely selfish observation two weeks ago that I was about to be blurb-neighbors with Wagner on Emmalea Russo’s excellent forthcoming novel Vivienne (see my review here). “Who is Bruce Wagner?” I asked myself. I remembered something vague about an issue he had with literary cancellation—the details are here—but when I looked more closely I found, startlingly, that I’d been attending to Wagner’s words almost all my conscious life.

Not only did Wagner write the now-neglected Wild Palms, a comic strip turned post-Twin Peaks surreal 1993 network miniseries produced by Oliver Stone, which I vividly remember watching when it first aired, agog, at the age of 11,⁴ but he also co-wrote A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors with Wes Craven. I first saw that around age seven or eight. Its most famous line of dialogue anticipates Wild Palms itself as a phenomenon, but it also anticipates ROAR’s racy and racing style: “Welcome to primetime, bitch!” Finally, he scripted what is maybe David Cronenberg’s finest 21st-century film qua film, Maps to the Stars, though the more uneven Crimes of the Future may be Cronenberg’s most prophetic 21st-century myth qua myth, especially if we take that narrative’s triumphant human evolution toward the consumption of plastic as a metaphor for our need to learn to live within our even-more-encompassing eternity of artifice, also a theme of ROAR’s.

Having inadvertently absorbed the highlights of the writer’s filmography over the course of almost four decades, I decided it was time to read one of Wagner’s novels: hence, my dalliance with ROAR. If you’re still looking for a pitilessly contemporary summer novel that attempts to compete with the enormous and unforgivable outrageousness of American life, a novel that resists our literature’s drift toward preciosity and smallness, let me recommend it to you in turn.

1. What to say? I am grateful for the extraordinary political heterogeneity of my audience, but sometimes I find it a bit immobilizing. If you were all of one tendency, left or right or center, I would know how to commiserate with you when commiseration is called for, and how most effectively to challenge you when a challenge is required. Moreover, as a dead-ender in the Schillerian faith that art can unite the polis above its superficial divisions, I try never to make it about my own mere political opinions, whatever those may be.

So let me say first that I have polemicized against political violence consistently for the last decade, even when doing so was professionally perilous for me. I refer to the flaming summer of 2020, which I spent in urban Minneapolis watching (not on television or on Twitter but through the window and on the street) a sequence of destructive events that helped no one at all and created nothing but waste and desolation, events you’d have to be a cruel ideology-mad sociopath to have cheered on. I renew this polemic today. I hope we may all agree on that. As for the rest—well. To quote Stephen Dedalus quoting Thomas Aquinas in Ulysses: “In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia inter multos.”

On the metaphysical plane, the YouTube astrologers I mentioned last week in the otherwise premature footnote #3 are taking their well-earned victory lap: several posted videos in the last several days or weeks anticipating danger for Trump, specifically involving his blood or his head (for example). It was apparently an easy call because Mars aligned with Uranus as well as the demon-star Algol, if I have this correctly, all of it prophesying war, especially as it crossed Trump’s own birth-chart in mid-July. Meanwhile—again if I understand—Trump’s “zodiacal releasing,” or the peak of his entire life, does not arrive until spring 2025.

Algol, Arabic for “demon head,” is the star of decapitation: it corresponds mythologically to Perseus cutting off the head of the Gorgon. In last week’s post, I linked to an earlier Weekly Reading where I discussed, as a manifestation of goddess-worship in our time, Shahzia Sikander’s sculpture NOW. Four days before the assassination attempt on our 45th President, another and similar sculpture of Sikander’s, Witness, was beheaded on the University of Houston campus. In celebration of the event, several far-right X accounts posted images of Bernini’s sculpture Perseus with the Head of Medusa.

(If you didn’t just get a chill—if you can’t see that we now are on a metaphysical plane—I don’t know what to tell you. Enjoy life in Richard Dawkins-world, I guess!)

I am no astrologer—it’s too much like math for me!—but I can interpret a symbolic narrative. It was not the afflicted head of a slain monstress that Trump heroically lifted yesterday, but his own head. Thus we see further evidence for what I have always understood to be the common misapprehension about what Trump means, a misapprehension shared between both his most avid supporters and his most avid opponents. In the riotous and heterogenous body of this 21st century figurehead are blended Perseus and Medusa.

I ask you to recall the overall theory of elite Trump-derangement I’ve advanced here at Grand Hotel Abyss: such madness is poetically related to disgust at the transgression of boundaries, to horror at miscegenation. The resolutely non-Anglo Trump, quaking with putatively irrational Teutonic and Celtic impulse, the pure and profligate product of the teeming multicultural metropolis—his every gesture and sensibility adapted from the Italian, the Latin, the Jewish, the black, the queer, the femme—is in fact profoundly a stranger to the American political elite, more so even than Obama with his maternal Mayflower lineage and WASPish “no drama” sangfroid. Pace Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trump is among our first non-white presidents, scandalously and derangingly so. (Insert as well male/female and straight/gay as relevant binaries.) That is what has driven his enemies insane, not his plainly ironical and often willfully misunderstood rhetoric or his banal if often lamentable Republican policies. The triumph of such a teeming archetype—and it has already very richly triumphed in the media spectacle—does not therefore mean what we think it means, whether we love him or hate him. (I have been pondering this matter artistically since I was nine years old.)

As for my own mere political opinions, whatever those my be, I ask only that you understand they cannot be pure. I was born and raised—in Whitehall, PA, which directly borders Bethel Park, PA, the home of yesterday’s alleged would-be assassin—into the class for which Trump appointed himself tribune and spokesman. My attempts to rise above this class have been consistently rebuffed, sometimes with overt malice and hostility, by members of the class that pledged itself to his utter destruction. Much as I disdain identity politics, when you throw ethnicity into the mix—see the last two paragraphs here—how could my personal political feelings ever have been anything but mixed? Add at last my political apprenticeship on a post-9/11 political left whose stock-in-trade was counter-hegemonic counter-histories of deep-state machination, a left that would later be subsumed into a #resistance led on social media and on cable news by literal intelligence officers in a second-time-farce rerun of Operation Mockingbird, and—well. Basta! Let art triumph over politics. We must walk the path of peace, even in defiance of the stars. God bless America and stay safe out there.

2. And I mean obscene by our standards, not by the standards of those who put Ulysses on trial. Mary Jane Eyre said in a review of Major Arcana, “it was a wise choice to not to grab hold of too many live wires at once,” considering that my novel deals extensively and elaborately with gender but not really with race. Wagner not only grabs both of these lives wires but does so in the language with which they were addressed on the streets in the 20th century. There are passages in ROAR I doubt I could even type on Substack. Wagner, after his brush with “cancel culture” in 2020, has gone with the apparently fearless Skyhorse imprint of Arcade Publishing to disseminate his word; he duly dedicated ROAR “to my publisher” for their bravery in the face of our censorious time. To give a flavor of the novel’s over-the-top Cervantine, Rabelaisian, or Voltairean events—warning for the easily offended—I will tell you that in one scene, Roar, wearing a dress and a mask, orally rapes Norman Mailer while masturbating him to completion at Truman Capote’s black-and-white ball. I don’t remember that happening in Underworld!

3. That rather unsatisfying New York Times list of this century’s best books so far might also come into it. For the record, I have read 25 of the total 100, 10 of the top 20, and five of the top 10. To give them their due, they got the real top three—2666, Never Let Me Go, and Austerlitz—into the top 10. Personally, I don’t even like Austerlitz that much, but I wouldn’t deny it its place in the canon, and we shouldn’t forget how much more richly and powerfully imagined it is compared to its weary imitators. The “authorship controversy” has always put me off the whole Elena Ferrante situation, but given that “she” has captured this ambiguous laurel maybe I’ll finally give her a try. I tend to agree with Lincoln Michel that the list signals the actual weakness of autofiction despite its critical hype, and testifies by contrast to the strength of genre-bending fiction (à la Cloud Atlas, Never Let Me Go, The Road, A Visit from the Goon Squad, etc.), a category in which Major Arcana (as well as Portraits and Ashes) among my own work easily fits. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see books I regard as artifacts of ideological fashion—mentioning no names—on the list, which isn’t the same as complaining that the list is too “woke.” Some missing “woke” works that might make my 21st-century list, or at least critical works about issues of race, gender, and/or identity, include Dark Reflections, The Translation of Dr. Apelles, The Plague of Doves, Milkman, and Lost Children Archive. One could come up with a few more genre-bending works, too: whatever one thinks of the artful potboiler Gone Girl, for example, the earlier literary thriller Dark Places is certainly the real thing. If we’re including the late work of 20th-century masters, the absence of Cynthia Ozick is a scandal: Heir to the Glimmering World and Foreign Bodies are two of her finest novels. If we’re including graphic novels, you can leave Persepolis on the middle-school social-studies syllabus and Fun Home in your NPR tote bag—though I do like Fun Home—and consider instead The Filth, Providence, Nijigahara Holograph, or The Rabbi’s Cat, along with one or another of this century’s entrants in the Alack Sinner or Obscure Cities series.

Speaking of the week’s literary controversies, I will forego comment on that “where is the sad boy literature?” article in Esquire, the one asking male novelists to write about their “vulnerability,” except to suggest that one reason for whatever decline our culture is experiencing is surely our over-indulgence, our veritable wallowing, in our own weakness. We have made it our highest badge of honor. Hence, in literary terms, the “wan little husks of autofiction.” Dante in exile had it a million times harder than almost any of us, if we are approximately middle-class writers, and he produced the poetic equivalent of a cathedral—while still writing autobiographically, mind you. (The problem with autofiction was always the style, or lack thereof, and never the subject matter.) I place every ounce of my strength into my work. My “vulnerability,” whatever such vapid and mawkish therapy-jargon even means, no doubt creeps in, but surely you will be so polite as to overlook it while I am still alive. For a discussion of strength in this context, please see my 2018 essay on The Adventures of Augie March, another novel that enlarges itself to gargantuan proportions to confront the scale and the madness of American life.

4. As an observer of the reactionary avant-garde, I also couldn’t help but notice in the same period that Costin Alamariu (AKA Bronze Age Pervert) X’d to his right-wing cult the poster for Wild Palms. (Two years older than I am, he would have been around 13 when it first aired.) No, I don’t know what it means. I wish I did.