There is really nothing more important than contemplations of the historical development of modern literature that do not use the word 'stream-of-consciousness' - thank you for this.
Jane Austen, I think, fits into the schema very well, truly the peak of literary unlyricism. I think, perversely, the hollowing out of irony (which might be the same thing as the hollowing out of 'dialogue' or 'the social') is a key factor here; lyricism always signifies isolation. But really, the whole thing is incredibly mysterious and hard to explain, and this essay of yours is a wonderful starting point.
"lyricism always signifies isolation"—definitely a key point, the novel becoming less dialogic and more monologic as it becomes more stylized, as in Hemingway or Woolf or Fitzgerald, if not Joyce and Faulkner. Whereas the social novel of Austen (or Balzac, George Eliot, Wharton, etc.) is almost overtly anti-poetic, chastening and disciplining any poetic characters it has to treat. I'm really looking for some kind of synthesis, finding Austen too far in one direction, Woolf in the other—as models, I mean.
I think Lawrence's 'theme' might be the re-insertion, or more likely the re-inseminsation, of the lyrical into the social, or perhaps rather than hard shaking of the social until the lyrical falls out the bottom, though he achieves this by grossly dialogical means (heterosexuality). And Lawrence, Hardy and Conrad are, I think, no less recognisable at sentence-level than Joyce, Faulkner and Hemingway; rather, the latter three advertise their recognisability with greater desperation (which is almost to say, lyricism).
Yes, that makes sense. Not coincidentally, I'm also at a point in my reading life where I like Lawrence better than I like Austen or Woolf, which would have been unthinkable before.
I remember stumbling upon this essay in my first year of undergrad four years ago and you may be happy to know that I've returned to it often as I've attempted to come to my own thoughts around the persistent influence of Romanticism.
On a different note, despite your division between poetry and the novel in the footnotes, would you say (and apologies if this is the general subtext of the essay) that the modernist novel as described above with its intense Romantic versification of the consciousness extended to a plurality of habits and affects (characters, we might otherwise say) acts as the artistic synthesis of poetry and novel that is a potential solution to the problem of creating a counterculture that doesn't annihilate the angel in the home? For example, Woolf in To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway is both showing women progressing out of the domestic space while appreciating what these women were and the significance of their former social position, an act which is made possible through the ability of the novel form to allow for a wider range of perspectives through its community of characters (its liberalism, perhaps) combined with the sympathy involved in intensely inhabiting each character's subjectivity (or is the core of the problem that no matter what Mrs. Ramsey does have to die and can only be mourned?). I feel as if I'm more or less repeating Iris Murdoch's injunction, which you previously quoted in the 95th iteration of these weekly posts, that "A novel must be a house fit for free characters to live in" with its useful alignment of the form itself with the domestic space. But then again the whole issue is that the conundrum remains, so either the world hasn't yet caught up (this is where I admit I'm behind on the IC Ulysses lectures so I haven't yet indulged in your reading of the novel as the esoteric blueprint of our time) or we must resume our peregrinations in search of new and beauteous forms.
Thank you—yes, you've put it better than I could: "a counterculture that doesn't annihilate the angel in the home." No spoilers, but my final judgment of Ulysses is slightly more ambiguous or ambivalent than that! (I've never read Edna O'Brien, who just died, but I read her Paris Review interview today where she said that Joyce "went mad with genius." There's something to that.) I think the problem—in The Invisible College's political rather than artistic terms: how to attain the utopian aspects of Wilde's and Shaw's visions without the totalitarian potential—remains unsolved.
I admire how you hide in footnotes manifestos that could be (probably quite controversial) essays of their own. Part of me wants to say something like "this is what being counterculture is, this is why throwing away respectability was a mistake: if you win you'll manifest the culture and in fifty years we'll all be orthodox sedevacantist tradwives or whatever, but if you lose (or until you win) there's gonna be lots of nice middle class ladies calling you weirdos." Trump has never seemed entirely cognizant of whatever it was he had in 2016, but surely a part of it was that he seemed in some ways to some people *normal* compared to Hilary & the cultural moment she tried to embody, which is why embracing Vance's wing of the right was a bad idea, and disingenuously denouncing Project 2025 is a good idea for him.
(Thank you by the way, for confirming a theory of mine about the ending of MA)
Thanks—I figured you'd enjoy (if you mean to say you enjoyed it!) that ending.
I'm still toying with astrological consciousness, and I think they're onto something with the total fragmentation of society and culture coming in the Age of Aquarius and thus the end of monoculture. If this election were Vance vs. Harris (and a paranoid person, not me necessarily, might say: "They" tried to make that happen, successfully in one case, but not in the other), it would be weird vs. weird, rival wings of the emergent neo-feudal technocracy, each speaking a foreign argot to the other's followers. Trump is strangely the last normal person left in politics, which is just to say the last Boomer.
Since we're talking weird vs weird I think it may not be entirely accurate to say that the enthusiasm behind Kamala is all astroturfed. Self-styled chaos magicians prepared the right for Trump before 2016; in 2024 the gays and girlies have spent enough time on Twitter and TikTok to cast a spell or two - all of which is probably irrelevant to the outcome of the election, but does give cyberspace a weird vibe (and not in a good way).
There's definitely organic enthusiasm and literal witchery, but the 2016 meme magicians didn't have legacy media institutions helping them (except indirectly by being occasionally negative about Hillary). That's an advantage, not a disadvantage, if we're thinking about electoral outcomes—I wish my literary career were a little more astroturfed!
I think it's the enthusiasm that gets to me: sure, Kamala probably has a better chance than Biden against Trump, but are we so desperate to be enthused that a wacky meme is all it takes? I already miss the days when electoral politics were widely agreed to be depressing and boring.
And those open to the spirits of genius have no need for astroturfing, not in the long run...
Yeah it confirms the theory I had about the ending, which I might connect to your recent metaphysical interpretation and part of my own personal talmudic reading of Ulysses-your book aims to succeed where Joyce crucially does not fully (because Bloom fails to get Stephen to spend the night) in joining petit bourgeois to alienated artist in a spectacle of capitalist maternity which aspires to reassemble the fragmented modernist picture of the new bloomusalem, etc. Perhaps it will.
I also like the way you sandwiched the very wild eyed broad strokes cultural reading between relatively measured "trust not in princes" lines+ the bit about Emerson-there's hope for us shitlibs yet!
Next you'll be telling me there's some other way to write a political polemic than to melodramatize a trivial cultural datum into evidence of—or the agent of!—world-historical shifts in human consciousness. (I am once again reminded that you weren't trained in a literature department in the era of cultural studies!)
Thank you for this essay. I’m broadly in agreement with the analysis. Just one thing. Though I agree with your conclusion that we’re largely in an era of forced and deadening “humour”, I fear we lack the metaphysical foundations to stop us continually subsiding into it. I hope I am wrong. Congratulations on publishing the first novel to emerge from Substack - that’s a fine achievement.
John, I'm curious, have you read Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion? I was entranced by it as a teenager, it was Kesey's bid to take Faulkner to Oregon. It was almost too ambitious for its own good, but I really loved it. When I think of romantic realism, I think of that book.
Agree that the cover is somehow same but better (pre-ordered). From your lips to God’s ears (re: footnote 6). Though I suppose politics is a shout in the tweet. I’ll show myself out…
Tell you sometime about a birthday party I attended in Brooklyn where an unfortunate young woman revealed herself as a cover design coordinator for a big 5 publishing house and most of the assembled (writer types or adjacent) gave vent upon her all their objections re: favorite writers saddled with ridiculous, inappropriate cover art.
Thanks! I'm not sure it says this anywhere in the book, but I don't think I'm strictly forbidden from stating that it's the work of David Wilson, who also did a Rust Belt Tarot deck, and who chose the MA cover colors from the color sheets John Higgins used for Watchmen:
There is really nothing more important than contemplations of the historical development of modern literature that do not use the word 'stream-of-consciousness' - thank you for this.
Jane Austen, I think, fits into the schema very well, truly the peak of literary unlyricism. I think, perversely, the hollowing out of irony (which might be the same thing as the hollowing out of 'dialogue' or 'the social') is a key factor here; lyricism always signifies isolation. But really, the whole thing is incredibly mysterious and hard to explain, and this essay of yours is a wonderful starting point.
"lyricism always signifies isolation"—definitely a key point, the novel becoming less dialogic and more monologic as it becomes more stylized, as in Hemingway or Woolf or Fitzgerald, if not Joyce and Faulkner. Whereas the social novel of Austen (or Balzac, George Eliot, Wharton, etc.) is almost overtly anti-poetic, chastening and disciplining any poetic characters it has to treat. I'm really looking for some kind of synthesis, finding Austen too far in one direction, Woolf in the other—as models, I mean.
I think Lawrence's 'theme' might be the re-insertion, or more likely the re-inseminsation, of the lyrical into the social, or perhaps rather than hard shaking of the social until the lyrical falls out the bottom, though he achieves this by grossly dialogical means (heterosexuality). And Lawrence, Hardy and Conrad are, I think, no less recognisable at sentence-level than Joyce, Faulkner and Hemingway; rather, the latter three advertise their recognisability with greater desperation (which is almost to say, lyricism).
Yes, that makes sense. Not coincidentally, I'm also at a point in my reading life where I like Lawrence better than I like Austen or Woolf, which would have been unthinkable before.
I remember stumbling upon this essay in my first year of undergrad four years ago and you may be happy to know that I've returned to it often as I've attempted to come to my own thoughts around the persistent influence of Romanticism.
On a different note, despite your division between poetry and the novel in the footnotes, would you say (and apologies if this is the general subtext of the essay) that the modernist novel as described above with its intense Romantic versification of the consciousness extended to a plurality of habits and affects (characters, we might otherwise say) acts as the artistic synthesis of poetry and novel that is a potential solution to the problem of creating a counterculture that doesn't annihilate the angel in the home? For example, Woolf in To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway is both showing women progressing out of the domestic space while appreciating what these women were and the significance of their former social position, an act which is made possible through the ability of the novel form to allow for a wider range of perspectives through its community of characters (its liberalism, perhaps) combined with the sympathy involved in intensely inhabiting each character's subjectivity (or is the core of the problem that no matter what Mrs. Ramsey does have to die and can only be mourned?). I feel as if I'm more or less repeating Iris Murdoch's injunction, which you previously quoted in the 95th iteration of these weekly posts, that "A novel must be a house fit for free characters to live in" with its useful alignment of the form itself with the domestic space. But then again the whole issue is that the conundrum remains, so either the world hasn't yet caught up (this is where I admit I'm behind on the IC Ulysses lectures so I haven't yet indulged in your reading of the novel as the esoteric blueprint of our time) or we must resume our peregrinations in search of new and beauteous forms.
Thank you—yes, you've put it better than I could: "a counterculture that doesn't annihilate the angel in the home." No spoilers, but my final judgment of Ulysses is slightly more ambiguous or ambivalent than that! (I've never read Edna O'Brien, who just died, but I read her Paris Review interview today where she said that Joyce "went mad with genius." There's something to that.) I think the problem—in The Invisible College's political rather than artistic terms: how to attain the utopian aspects of Wilde's and Shaw's visions without the totalitarian potential—remains unsolved.
I admire how you hide in footnotes manifestos that could be (probably quite controversial) essays of their own. Part of me wants to say something like "this is what being counterculture is, this is why throwing away respectability was a mistake: if you win you'll manifest the culture and in fifty years we'll all be orthodox sedevacantist tradwives or whatever, but if you lose (or until you win) there's gonna be lots of nice middle class ladies calling you weirdos." Trump has never seemed entirely cognizant of whatever it was he had in 2016, but surely a part of it was that he seemed in some ways to some people *normal* compared to Hilary & the cultural moment she tried to embody, which is why embracing Vance's wing of the right was a bad idea, and disingenuously denouncing Project 2025 is a good idea for him.
(Thank you by the way, for confirming a theory of mine about the ending of MA)
Thanks—I figured you'd enjoy (if you mean to say you enjoyed it!) that ending.
I'm still toying with astrological consciousness, and I think they're onto something with the total fragmentation of society and culture coming in the Age of Aquarius and thus the end of monoculture. If this election were Vance vs. Harris (and a paranoid person, not me necessarily, might say: "They" tried to make that happen, successfully in one case, but not in the other), it would be weird vs. weird, rival wings of the emergent neo-feudal technocracy, each speaking a foreign argot to the other's followers. Trump is strangely the last normal person left in politics, which is just to say the last Boomer.
Since we're talking weird vs weird I think it may not be entirely accurate to say that the enthusiasm behind Kamala is all astroturfed. Self-styled chaos magicians prepared the right for Trump before 2016; in 2024 the gays and girlies have spent enough time on Twitter and TikTok to cast a spell or two - all of which is probably irrelevant to the outcome of the election, but does give cyberspace a weird vibe (and not in a good way).
P.S. Loving the cover!
There's definitely organic enthusiasm and literal witchery, but the 2016 meme magicians didn't have legacy media institutions helping them (except indirectly by being occasionally negative about Hillary). That's an advantage, not a disadvantage, if we're thinking about electoral outcomes—I wish my literary career were a little more astroturfed!
I think it's the enthusiasm that gets to me: sure, Kamala probably has a better chance than Biden against Trump, but are we so desperate to be enthused that a wacky meme is all it takes? I already miss the days when electoral politics were widely agreed to be depressing and boring.
And those open to the spirits of genius have no need for astroturfing, not in the long run...
Yeah it confirms the theory I had about the ending, which I might connect to your recent metaphysical interpretation and part of my own personal talmudic reading of Ulysses-your book aims to succeed where Joyce crucially does not fully (because Bloom fails to get Stephen to spend the night) in joining petit bourgeois to alienated artist in a spectacle of capitalist maternity which aspires to reassemble the fragmented modernist picture of the new bloomusalem, etc. Perhaps it will.
I also like the way you sandwiched the very wild eyed broad strokes cultural reading between relatively measured "trust not in princes" lines+ the bit about Emerson-there's hope for us shitlibs yet!
Thanks—I forgot I made it capitalist too, but you're right, I did. When I write a happy ending, I write a happy ending!
Genius is in pretty bad straits if a Kamala hat is what the, it seems successful, war against it looks like!
Next you'll be telling me there's some other way to write a political polemic than to melodramatize a trivial cultural datum into evidence of—or the agent of!—world-historical shifts in human consciousness. (I am once again reminded that you weren't trained in a literature department in the era of cultural studies!)
Thank you for this essay. I’m broadly in agreement with the analysis. Just one thing. Though I agree with your conclusion that we’re largely in an era of forced and deadening “humour”, I fear we lack the metaphysical foundations to stop us continually subsiding into it. I hope I am wrong. Congratulations on publishing the first novel to emerge from Substack - that’s a fine achievement.
Yes, the connection between metaphysics and comedy is an intriguing one, I'll have to think about that. Thank you!
Wow, the cover of the Belt edition looks great! BTW, the first version had rather a large number of typos - I hope they'll fix that.
Thanks! Yes, it's received a complete re-edit.
John, I'm curious, have you read Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion? I was entranced by it as a teenager, it was Kesey's bid to take Faulkner to Oregon. It was almost too ambitious for its own good, but I really loved it. When I think of romantic realism, I think of that book.
I haven't read it, but I've heard good things in the past—thanks for the recommendation!
Agree that the cover is somehow same but better (pre-ordered). From your lips to God’s ears (re: footnote 6). Though I suppose politics is a shout in the tweet. I’ll show myself out…
Tell you sometime about a birthday party I attended in Brooklyn where an unfortunate young woman revealed herself as a cover design coordinator for a big 5 publishing house and most of the assembled (writer types or adjacent) gave vent upon her all their objections re: favorite writers saddled with ridiculous, inappropriate cover art.
Thanks! I'm not sure it says this anywhere in the book, but I don't think I'm strictly forbidden from stating that it's the work of David Wilson, who also did a Rust Belt Tarot deck, and who chose the MA cover colors from the color sheets John Higgins used for Watchmen:
https://www.workdavidwork.com/rustbeltarcana
I worry it's just a bias toward my youth, but mainstream publishing cover designs have really tanked since the '90s in my opinion.
That seems very fitting. (Kismet). Excellent.
Gorgeous cover—pre-ordered!
Thank you!
They really cut that book down to 344 pages.
Yes, and the font's not even small. Apparently it all comes down to "trim size."