Weekly Readings #128 (07/15/24-07/21/24)

white magic for lovers

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

This week, with an episode called “Heaventree of Stars,” The Invisible College concluded its eight-week tour through the works of James Joyce, complete with six weeks devoted to Ulysses. I deliberately didn’t provide either a summary or a free preview of this final episode, because I wanted it to hit the listener’s mind without mollifying (or Molly-fying) preparation. I think I have advanced decisively beyond the centenary reading I gave of Ulysses in 2022 to understand Joyce as true successor not only to Homer and Shakespeare but to Dante as well: the maker of the poetic revolution that refounded our civilization, the 20th century’s only true revolutionary. Our civilization was a mercantile one before and after Joyce, however—“A merchant…is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?” as Stephen Dedalus chides an interlocutor immersed in “the socialism of fools”—so you will, please, have to offer a paid subscription for the details. The Invisible College is on summer vacation for the coming week; please join us at the beginning of August for a month-long sojourn in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Who knows what secrets I will discern and disclose then of this self-described “home epic”?

This weekend is another whose news cycle threatens temporarily to overwhelm the literary imagination, so I offer a brief note on fiction and form and a brief repost (if it’s not too outdated by now!) of my thoughts from earlier this week on J. D. Vance and literature. Please enjoy!

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The Art of Distance: Story and Style Now

Amrita Sher-Gil, The Storyteller (1937)

Naomi Kanakia wrote a post this week further pursuant to what we should start calling “The Male Question” in literature. But I want briefly to discuss her other essay of the week, one about literary form, which occasioned less discussion. In this other essay, Naomi argues that the contemporary novel, following on from modernism, deploys an array of literary techniques for the purposes of 1. displaying the interiority of the characters and 2. creating a limited ambiguity about the author’s own viewpoint. Taking us back to the modernist moment, Naomi contrasts Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse to identify us as inheritors of the former rather than the latter:

Take The Glass Bead Game. This is a 600 page novel about a guy living in the 25th-century who is shipped off as a child to join this order of intellectuals that studies knowledge for its own sake. They collect and categorize knowledge, but produce nothing creative and do not seek to interfere in world affairs. For hundreds of pages, this guy rises in the ranks of the order, goes through extremely minor crises and problems, and very slowly becomes disillusioned with the order’s inaction. It’s a complex book, because it clearly starts out as a sort of utopia. It’s about intellectuals who study knowledge for its own sake, without instrumentalizing it. But the book itself strains against the contours of that utopia–there’s a persistent feeling that there must be something more–there must be some way of unifying knowledge and action.

The book is about exactly what it’s about. You could read it allegorically, I suppose, and say these intellectuals represent intellect without wisdom. But in reality the meaning is pretty clear–it’s very much on the surface. And yet it’s a good book, a vibrant book, and one that hold’s a person’s interest much better than its contemporary The Magic Mountain, a book covering similar terrain, but which remains resolutely ambiguous in terms of its ultimate meaning. I really like The Magic Mountain, don’t get me wrong, but in the modern critical understanding, The Magic Mountain is an unambiguously superior novel, and I simply don’t think that’s true. Yes, I like the part as well where Hans Casthorp stares at X-rays, or the parts where he looks out at the clear mountain alps. I also like how the novelist holds both Naptha and Settembrini at a remove, and makes both of them a little incoherent and a little tedious. They are archetypes, without being ideals.

It’s not that I disagree with this exactly, but I interpret the kind of irony and ambiguity practiced by Mann (with its family resemblance to that practiced by James, Faulkner, Joyce, etc.) to encode a very strong viewpoint, indeed a civilizational viewpoint, which for summary’s sake I’ll call “liberalism.”

This style encodes and inculcates liberalism by training us to be tolerant of ambiguity, wary of overtly totalizing perspectives, able to hold contradictory thoughts in our minds, and capable of sympathetically modeling the ideas and emotions of other people for ourselves. Hesse’s work does not necessarily conflict with these values at the thematic level—though I haven’t read The Glass Bead Game yet, just some of his shorter novels, which I admire and defended from the author’s detractors here and here—but because he doesn’t encrypt it as densely as does Mann or Joyce at the formal level, he seems naive or tendentious.

These literary techniques have become rote, routine, and predictable, however, no longer able to offer the surprise that new art should surely provide if it wishes to be a meaningful alternative to old art. Many writers outside the mainstream are for this reason seeking stylistic alternatives, sometimes with and sometimes without a thought for the thematic consequences. In a footnote, Naomi details her struggle to get her own novel, The Default World (see my review here), published:

I originally wrote The Default World in a much more distant point of view, but it was beaten to me by rounds and rounds of agent rejections that the agents “didn’t feel connected" to the narrator. It’s not that authors don’t want to write differently—it’s simply that if you write differently it’s almost impossible to get published.

I ran into exactly the same problem when I was trying to get an agent for Portraits and Ashes over a decade ago. The agents kept saying that it was beautifully written and that they found it fascinating—but they didn’t feel close enough to the characters. This formal bias on the part of the mainstream literary world, not discrimination against men, is why I personally turned to independent publishing until this year.¹

When novels offer this sort of instant emotional gratification, however, the effect can prove fleeting, like a sugar rush. Jane Austen, who taught us to write the way we do with her systematic use of free indirect discourse, still infused her novels with enough irony to hold instant identification at bay; her heroines aren’t worthy of our identification until their novels’ end, when they have corrected their own faults of thought and feeling. This is why her work survived when other romancers with superficially similar tales to tell are no more. Images beheld at their proper distance may inspire longer-lasting attention, even awe. To move forward a century from Austen, Joyce similarly departs from the unparalleled intimacy he establishes with Stephen and Bloom in the opening episodes of Ulysses to describe them in more and more titanic and mythic (if also comic) terms as the book goes on. As Yeats wrote, and as I’ve quoted before as a durable aesthetic principle: “All that is merely personal soon rots. It must be packed in ice or salt.” He was thinking about the preservative power of formal verse, but this applies as well to the register of prose narrative.

In a 2020 review of Michael Hofmann’s translation of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas Christine Smallwood contrasts the tale-teller’s mode adopted by Kleist with our contemporary fetish for “voice”:²

There is no cult so fervent in contemporary fiction as the cult of voice. Voice is easily confused for, but importantly distinct from, style. Where style is manufactured or arch, a mask that distances, voice, despite being performed and constructed, is a tool of immediacy and intimacy. Voice is inherently contemporary, the node of an interlocking web of other contemporary values: authenticity, personality, identity, speaking one’s truth. To encounter real literary style is almost always to encounter the past, because style itself is a remove, an art of arrangement that puts the tale and the way it is told before the person telling it. To encounter style in a time of voice can be shocking: it has the authority that our age, and our literature, reject.³

What increasingly feels like the coerced intimacy of “voiced fiction” is no doubt also, in its promise to fuse author and character with reader, what encourages us to think of ourselves as literary consumers rather than as readers. Christian Lorentzen hearteningly makes a similar case in his welcome Granta denunciation of literary sociology, the crass and cynical anti-hermeneutic that took over from high theory in 21st-century academe:⁴

Year after year our culture compels people to think of and understand themselves as consumers. This dreary view of life, which advertises itself as critical or at least conscious of commerce, capitalism and complicity, quickly becomes another form of marketing, and when applied to our reading habits it amounts to a distracting narcissism, looking in the mirror when our eyes should be on the page.

For this reason, we consumers want to feel confident when we read a novel that we can both identify with and approve of the protagonist and—implicitly—the author.⁵ In turn, the author must project a political identity ambiguous enough not to come off as didactic, but still within the bounds of the bien-pensant bookstore-goer, which is to say somewhere in the vicinity of professional-class semi-progressivism. (This progressivism, having taken an illiberal turn in recent years, is not at all the same thing as the liberalism I evoked above.) Such a limitation on art and therefore on thought and feeling may advance the interests of professional-class semi-progressivism—and then again, given how limited it really is, it may not—but it’s no way to run a living literary culture.

The goal of a living literary culture should be the creation of at least some works of art capable of surviving into quite alien conditions. Life is for the living, of course, as are politics, but art is one of our modes of cheating death; it works best, therefore, when most detached from a provincial attitude to particular conditions. Such an attitude will impede our attainment of a consciousness broader than that shackled to the deathward and evanescing moment. This is probably just liberalism, too—but on the plane of metaphysics, where in this context is the only place it belongs.

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Vance Favors the Prepared Mind: Literature and the Election

Speaking of particular conditions, an anon inquired on the day the Republican Vice Presidential candidate was announced: “Thoughts on Trump picking a writer as VP?” I repost the answer I gave on Tumblr here with additions in the footnotes:

I haven’t read Vance’s book, so I don’t know if he’s a good writer, but I’ve heard it’s a reasonably effective memoir, written mostly before he had this level of political ambition.

I just read his personal essay about his conversion to Catholicism today. I am cautious around writing that proclaims its humility and thereby forces me to search for its will to power; this is why I proclaim my will to power and allow you, but only if you want, to discover my humility, my debility, my “male vulnerability.” Other than that, the essay is most moving and persuasive where it refutes the simplistic materialism of the likes of analytic philosophers and Sam Harris, and where he details his real spiritual experiences (I believe him). His critique of the left’s superficially compassionate but actually cruel attitude toward the poor (“like sympathy for a zoo animal”) is also exactly right. But I find it overly solemn, anxious, barely concealing the abandonment of his natal Protestantism for its plebeian or peasant quality—no less part of his desire for acceptance by an elite than was his earlier atheism. I was raised in plebeian or peasant Catholicism myself, on the other hand, which has nothing at all to do with the authorities he cites, like René Girard and St. Augustine. I look slightly askance on adult converts drawn in by the theology and morality. It has always seemed to me that the point of Catholicism—and I mean this much more religiously and much less blasphemously than it sounds—is the architecture and the incense, the barely sublimated sex and the eros of death. But I also love, as an outsider, the reckless, almost doom-seeking individualism of certain strains of Protestantism, some of them laundered as atheism. Since these seem to me to be the point of America, I am wary of overly intellectual Catholics and social democrats, their philosophies literally reeking of the over-crowded warrens of 19th-century Europe, moralistically tut-tutting about it. His second long quotation from Augustine gives me a chill, not in a good way. “[I]n his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly join him,” our theologian jeers. Yes, Bishop, that’s the American dream. Why not be a climate-doomer de-growther flinging soup in a museum with an attitude like that? The solution to poverty is abundance.

Possibly more significant for practical purposes, however, is Vance’s tie to the literary-philosophical network around the Silicon Valley dissidents: Yarvin, BAP, and their associated publications and social media presences. (This is a good time to revisit James Pogue’s Vanity Fair piece on the new right from 2022.) As Walter Kirn observed yesterday, that makes this election different from the last two. The last two were organized around the force of Trump’s personality as he tried to hold together a fraying and fracturing Republican coalition of “provincial capital” (the proverbial boat dealer), the (mostly but not entirely) white working class, and the old Reagan Republican business constituencies of defense and energy, even as finance defected to the Democrats, while entertainment, academia, and intelligence pursued total war against their almost undefended reactionary enemy. The belligerent entrance of Musk and Andreessen into this election on Trump’s side as representatives of big tech, with Vance as the political figurehead of big tech’s literary and philosophical vanguard wing, makes it a much more even and generally significant contest: a true class war between incumbent and emergent elites.⁶ Literature has played no small part in this class war, as so many now widely-read writers and thinkers, love them or hate them, have resigned from the old left-liberal consensus. I don’t mean to sound excessively neutral on the subject, but I belong to neither of the contending classes, and neither is at all democratic. I’m still not totally sure how the emergent elites’ values are connected to a downbeat puritanical Augustinian Catholicism either, but since it seems to have everything to do with the aforesaid René Girard, we are still in the realm of literary theory if not literature.⁷

In any case, the service of literature to any political faction or project should be the taming of its worser tendencies and the opening of its members to dialogue, irony, sympathy, and fresh perspectives. I will be told this is too idealistic.

1. I stood my ground with Portraits and Ashes, but my subsequent The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House uses strict first-person narration, while The Class of 2000 deploys a first-person voice whose narrator sometimes essays the third person for whole chapters in the manner of Roth’s later Zuckerman novels and their own formal precursors in Melville and Conrad. My new novel, Major Arcana (forthcoming from Belt Publishing in 2025), is written in a decidedly elevated and omniscient third-person style, one close to the style of my critical essays. The narrative is also about quasi-celebrities, however. I hoped the latter fact would make such a distantiated style easier to accept because formally akin to biography, in which genre a certain emotional remove, and a speculative quality to the exploration of inwardness, is more expected.

2. Not to anticipate my forthcoming and eagerly awaited review of My First Book, but the very best that can be said for Honor Levy’s work—and I’m being sincere, not ironic, when I say this—is that we do not hear a human voice anywhere in it. Inhuman voices wake us—precisely so that we do not drown in our 21st-century conditions.

3. Those attuned to literary theory will hear an echo of Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” with its radical-reactionary (necessarily anti-liberal) lament over the demise of the tribe’s or community’s rootedly impersonal and thus universal tale-teller and the concomitant rise of a deracinating capitalist culture that supplants his authority:

Seen in this way, the storyteller joins the ranks of the teachers and sages. He has counsel—not for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many, like the sage. For it is granted to him to reach back to a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own experience but no little of the experience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to his own). His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to tell his entire life. The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparable aura about the storyteller, in Leskov as in Hauff, in Poe as in Stevenson. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.

4. Lorentzen’s proximal target is sociological literary critic Dan Sinykin with his resentful dismissal of “the romance of individual genius.” (Somebody—other than Nietzsche, I mean—has to say it to one of these types: just because you’re not doesn’t mean nobody is!) Lorentzen quite rightly pronounces this attitude both “disgusting” and—turnabout being fair play for the Bourdieu-addled—little better than a ploy in service to “academic careerism.” I’ve written a number of critiques of the sociology of literature, but, if only for the benefit of Substack’s own great Julianne Werlin, I will concede that it can be done with the requisite tact and sensitivity by a critic who doesn’t reduce the human being to a status-seeking automaton. I will let this footnote from my doctoral dissertation stand for all my polemics—

Having invoked Bourdieu in the context of Pater’s Platonic preoccupations, I cannot fail to recall the sociologist’s somewhat chilling defense of his own anti-aesthetic stance: “the sociologist—close in this respect to the philosopher according to Plato—stands opposed to ‘the friend of beautiful spectacles and voices’ that the writer also is: the ‘reality’ that he tracks cannot be reduced to the immediate data of the sensory experience in which it is revealed; he aims not to offer (in)sight, or feeling, but to construct systems of intelligible relations capable of making sense of sentient data” (The Rules of Art xviii). In other words, the social scientist in modernity takes over from the philosopher-king in antiquity, dispelling the enchantments of language wielded by poets and sophists, who would, under the cover of sensual beauty, aggrandize themselves at the expense of the immaterial truth behind material relations.

—but you might also consult my post on Merve Emre, my review of Matthew Gasda’s Dimes Square, and my essay on Franco Moretti’s Far Country. See also my little summary of how sociology succeeded high theory in literary academe.

5. Thus the formal solution to the problem of authorial honesty about masculine subjectivity and its unacceptable appetites Naomi discusses in her other essay: depict it (and them) at a further remove of narrative style than is now in fashion. Both the first-person and the restricted third-person, when applied to the putative pervert, demand too much intimacy and therefore complicity of the right-thinking (or rather left-thinking) reader-consumer with her fear of a contaminated product. So, speaking not only of men but also of Mann, back to something like Death in Venice and its Olympian essayistic style we will have to go.

6. Realistically, the techno-accelerationism and the social conservatism are going to come into conflict. Which do you think will win? Ask a cynical sociologist, who should be writing not about literature but about politics anyway: in America, as we used to say in the same Western PA suburbs where last week’s would-be assassin came from, “money talks and bullshit walks.” And to comfort my liberal readers, let me paste in an example of what an actual member of the far right thinks is going on these days; it’s close to my own interpretation, except that the poster thinks it’s bad—so bad that Trump is the literal anti-Christ!—while I think it is, if not good exactly, at least better than several plausible alternative scenarios.

7. As I argued in my essay on Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard is the right-wing version of the same phenomenon of which Bourdieu et al. are the left-wing version. These are schoolmarm sociologies and priestly anthropologies that chide and scold us for any attempt at secular self-transcendence, of which attempts art is our highest. So high, in fact, that it may not actually be secular—but this is all the more reason not to leave it in the hands of sociologists and anthropologists! If I prefer Girard to Bourdieu, it is because he shows some awareness that “up” is a possible direction.