Weekly Readings #130 (07/29/24-08/04/24)

in love with the hook upon which everyone hangs

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

This week The Invisible College’s summer session resumed—this is my series of literature courses for paid subscribers—with a free episode, “The Other Side of Silence,” the first of four on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, often considered the greatest of all English novels. Please offer a paid subscription for the rest of the Middlemarch episodes, for 19 episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, for eight episodes on the work of James Joyce, including Ulysses, and for the upcoming fall series on American literature from Emerson and Poe through Stevens and Faulkner, including Moby-Dick. For a summary of the Invisible College’s attractions, new subscribers might consult Dan Oppenheimer’s review of the earlier Brit Lit sequence, “The Drama of Thought.”¹

I also remind you that in April of 2025 the beautiful Belt Publishing edition of my new novel, Major Arcana, will be released. You can pre-order what has been called “perhaps the elusive great American novel for the 21st century” here, read comprehensive but spoiler-free reviews here and here, and read an interview with me about the book here. The success of this first Substack-serialized novel to garner a book deal will inspire more publishers to take the kinds of creative risks that Anne Trubek and Belt Publishing have so admirably taken, so pre-orders are appreciated.

For today, a coda to the war on and of literary sociology. I mainly want to bring two essays—my regular readers may already be familiar with them—to your attention in the hopes that they will help us to transcend the problem.

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The Revelation in the Garden: Art After the Social Critique of the Aesthetic

Michelangelo, The Sistine Ceiling (1508-1512)

The dramatically altered ideological character of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter (when it was implicitly progressive) and now called X (implicitly reactionary) can help us to understand how much of what goes on there is actually traceable to ideology and how much is determined by the inflammatory and resentment-laden incentives of the platform itself. For example, the following post incited the literary controversy of this week:

This post interests me because it is formally identical to the kinds of Tweet that in the 2010s period also used to incite literary controversies, down to the choice of book, i.e., a canonical classic taught to high-school students, and the type of writer who issued the statement, i.e., an identitarian activist. Under Twitter’s old regime, however, The Great Gatsby would have been indicted for the sexism and white supremacism encoded in its lyrical prose, whereas today’s poster finds the prose itself a tedious marker of what in a follow-up he implies to be the elitism of the progressive overclass who canonized the novel in the first place.

The latter argument reminds me of the ongoing controversy over literary sociology that I addressed two weeks ago. In this conservative and populist account, involuted literary forms requiring connoisseurship to appreciate or even to understand both signify and perpetuate class domination; the argument strikingly resembles the leftist “demystifying” approach first to modern aesthetics taken by Pierre Bourdieu and company.

For those invested in such a sociology, aesthetic taste can never be anything other than a contingent social formation produced by illegitimate elites, if this phrase isn’t merely redundant to the sensibility of left-wing French intellectuals. Such sociologists therefore have no real recourse when they find the works whose prestige forms the basis of their own disciplinary authority challenged—in this case not by their preferred subalterns (i.e., BIPOC, LBGTQ+, and those identifying as female) but by the subalterns they fear and despise (i.e., provincial petit-bourgeois white males).²

Once you’ve demystified the aesthetic, you can’t go back to arguing from its authority; you’ve sawed off the branch you were sitting on. It’s arbitrary and unreasonable, mere fetishism, to treat particular literary texts as the foundation of a primarily sociological or historical analysis. If that’s all these texts are, then literature departments should be eliminated. “Well, yes, The Great Gatsby³ was canonized in a postwar political atmosphere requiring non-communist but implicitly progressive criticism of American capitalism’s excesses and a postwar academic atmosphere codifying literary studies as the investigation of form and symbol, both of which elitist imperatives the novel satisfied—but it’s actually a great book, too, and you should study it to help you sharpen your critical thinking skills and develop your empathy. There’s no conflict between these two ideas.”⁴ There is, however, a conflict between these two ideas. It’s like saying, “Jesus wasn’t real, but you should worship him anyway, for the good of your health.” Please.

But how do I get from Gatsby to Jesus? It’s a shorter trip than it seems. From one point of view, the aesthetic experience has always been parasitic on the religious or spiritual experience; from another, however, one closer to my own, the aesthetic experience is itself the fount of the spiritual or religious experience. I’m not going to beat one distinguished critic’s charge that I am “very Catholic” when I say that, down here on earth anyway, we are only ever worshiping beautiful forms—only ever encountering divinity, I should say, in beautiful forms.

I remember my first reading of The Great Gatsby. Given the Perma-Bound school edition of the old white trade paperback on a Friday toward the end of the 11th grade, I read it almost in a single sitting the subsequent Sunday afternoon. Except that I was not sitting: I was prone on the white carpet of an upstairs bedroom in my paternal grandmother’s house. It was an unseasonably warm and sunny spring day, the room like the book’s pages blindingly white, the curtains, almost like the ones in the book, swelling with the gentle wind. This was not one of the “white palaces” of East Egg but a lower-middle-class family home in a neighborhood on the ragged edge of the decaying post-industrial city, the city literally crumbling at the end of the American century.

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The experience of reading such a text seems to me to resemble closely the experience I have when I’m writing. These allow me to understand what people mean when they describe their experiences during prayer or meditation, two practices that have never done anything at all for me. It is a transcendence of the self, a supersession of the ego, an approach to a higher plane of detached understanding and universal sympathy. I’ve used lines from the songwriter I once characterized as perhaps my generation’s greatest poet to describe the feeling:⁵

And in our quiet hour, I feel I see everything
And am in love with the hook upon which everyone hangs

Not “in love with everyone”—that’s a fake and self-aggrandizing emotion, usually one people feel just before they participate in a massacre justified as undertaken for the good of “humanity.” But “in love with the hook upon which everyone hangs,” which is to say… Well, no. There is no “which is to say” or “in other words.” Just read it again. We are at the limit of language, and she has sung as much as can be said in this area.

I am reminded that when I used to teach a class meant as an introduction to literary studies for English majors, I would always end with J. M. Coetzee’s great essay, “What Is a Classic?” In tones similar to those I used describing my first encounter with The Great Gatsby, Coetzee recounts his first time hearing Bach:

One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1955, when I was fifteen years old, I was mooning around our back garden in the suburbs of Cape Town, wondering what to do, boredom being the main problem of existence in those days, when from the house next door I heard music. As long as the music lasted, I was frozen, I dared not breathe. I was being spoken to by the music as music had never spoken to me before.

How, he wonders, can he reconcile this youthful spiritual rapture with what he knows about art’s instrumentalization at the hands of classes, races, nations, and agents seeking or wielding power in general? How can he say he encountered artistic genius when he knows that he had—at however unconscious a level—a class-and-race interest in “a symbolic election…of European high culture as a way out of a social and historical dead end”? He asks:

[W]as the experience what I understood it to be—a disinterested and in a sense impersonal aesthetic experience—or was it really the masked expression of a material interest? […] Bach the classic was historically constituted, as I will remind you, constituted by identifiable historical forces and within a specific historical context. Only once we have acknowledged this point are we in a position to ask the more difficult questions: What, if any, are the limits to that historical relativization of the classic? What, if anything, is left of the classic after the classic has been historicized, that may still claim to speak across the ages?

He concludes—though he allows that this is truer of music than of literature—that it is primarily the intergenerational guild of artists who have experienced the classic, and not political actors working only for a season or a generation, who perpetuate the tradition. The tradition is therefore more than the historicist would make of it and is even also served by what he calls a “process of testing.” In this process, even harshly interrogatory criticism certifies the classic as something more than a counter in a social game of status and power by challenging it to survive this very critique.

In coming to this conclusion—which I thought useful to transmit to students at the end of a course introducing them to the methods of literary criticism, including sometimes harshly interrogatory ones—Coetzee congratulates himself for “not invoking any idealist justification of ‘value in itself’ or trying to isolate some quality, some essence of the classic.” But I wonder if this secularity can finally satisfy us, can finally explain what he calls, with an unmistakable religious intonation, “[t]he revelation in the garden.”⁶ Indeed, I used to begin that class on criticism with the Phaedrus, and used as well to suggest in conclusion that Coetzee in spite of himself could not help but recall the soul’s flight and the divine frenzy of poetry evoked in that dialogue.⁷

These considerations remind me further of a great essay from more than a decade ago, Michael W. Clune’s “Bernhard’s Way.” In that ambitious piece, Clune uses Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters to exemplify an aesthetic that has “passed through the postmodern critique of art,” which he identifies with Bourdieu’s sociology, rather than just ignoring the critique or, worse, answering it on its own deadening terms (i.e., by finding a positive social function for art rather than the negative ones attributed by Bourdieu et al.). Clune writes:

Bernhard agrees with critics like Bourdieu in denouncing art’s covert parasitism on the networks of social status. But he disagrees about what to do. Bourdieu wants to jettison the ideal of the aesthetic as disinterested attention to form. This might annihilate some forms of snobbery. But it is hard to imagine that settling accounts with Kant will do much to change the social world’s basic nature as a hierarchy founded on fear and pain. Bernhard, with a deep understanding of how art has been infected by the social relations described by postmodern critics, reacts more rationally. Don’t get rid of art; get rid of social relations.

The satisfaction of the highest art for Bernhard thus defines a human space both replete with value and outside society. In this it does not look so different from the Kantian ideal of aesthetic experience. But there is a crucial difference. For Bernhard, accepting the truth of the postmodern critique means accepting that every relation between an artwork and an audience becomes enmeshed in status relations. Bernhard faces the consequences squarely. The “real satisfaction” of art can never be achieved by the audience of a work, but only and solely by its creator.

Again, the analogy with practices like prayer and meditation seem clear. We are dealing with a spiritual experience that cannot in its integrity as an experience be invalidated by all the evident corruptions of the clergy who claim to be the custodians of the faith. Whether we still need churches—or academies—is a more open question; how far does the injunction to “get rid of social relations” go? Whatever may be our answer to that question, we might still say that literature’s real satisfaction can also be achieved by the reader—but only the solitary reader, transported by the work itself out of society, elevated to the height of “the hook on which everyone hangs.”⁸

1. Dan’s title refers to my episode on George Bernard Shaw. There I described the Fabian Socialist project—explicitly eugenic, implicitly democidal—to which I became (perhaps paranoiacally) convinced during the pandemic that the center-left political parties of the west were the heirs. I’m not going to write about politics today since I’ve done so for the last few weeks. One quick point, however. Even though no one actually complained last week when, thinking of Shaw and his Fabian program, I described contemporary Democratic Party politics as “fascist” and “an imperial state managerialism of racial subgroups,” I do invite any skeptics of this assertion to peruse the following screenshots:

2. Considering that the protest against Fitzgerald comes from a conservative “genre” author, I can imagine a fancied break-up of the United States into once-constituent sovereign cultures where the place of The Great Gatsby will be taken in the curriculum by, for example, Quicksand in the formerly blue states and At the Mountains of Madness in the formerly red states, to cite only books contemporary with Gatsby. Quicksand wouldn’t be a problem, though, since Larsen’s and Fitzgerald’s aesthetics were not very different; both worked in the domain of the post-Jamesian realist social and psychological novel. And to give the feminists and multiculturalists their due, I don’t think Gatsby is, except perhaps for a few passages of indelible prose, obviously superior to Quicksand within their shared tradition. But At the Mountains of Madness—I am assuming a generalized populism takes over the once red states, not an Evangelical or Catholic theocracy—would pose more of a challenge to modern literary aesthetics. In my essay on Lovecraft’s only novel, I tried to give voice, through the device of a fictional speaker, to the idea that the pulpmeister might actually have been the early 20th century’s most significant writer, as some of his most eager champions and at least one of his most dismayed critics, has claimed. In a concession to Bourdieu et al., I will allow that this is an experiment in overcoming the social constitution of taste, probably the most far-reaching of such experiments I’ve ever tried. (Ironically, the notoriously racist Lovecraft’s reputation has been as well served by the deconstruction of modernist aesthetics as has any writer of color’s.) What would it be like to think At the Mountains of Madness was a better book than Gatsby or Quicksand?

“While T. S. Eliot was inventing modern conservatism by half-heartedly trying to piece the ruins of tradition back together, while James Joyce was inventing postmodern nihilism by happily spraying his ejaculate over the ruins, while Virginia Woolf was inventing elite left-liberalism by nervously pretending that spiritual-but-not-religious and privileged-but-really-guilty-about-it could somehow answer for the ruins, Lovecraft threw everything—including, above all, good taste—to the wind and devised a set of images to express something of what the world would actually look like if we ever succeeded in forgetting that we had once been Platonists or Christians or humanists. And, given that he takes his literary stand at the intersection of symbolism and naturalism no less than did Joyce, he should not even be denied a share in modernism.”

[…]

“Consider how much of At the Mountains of Madness consists of Dyer’s description of the Great Old Ones’ wall friezes. A third of the novel is ekphrasis, like the book of the Iliad that describes the shield of Achilles. Consider, too, the mundanity of that ekphrasis. Lovecraft through Dyer tells us that the Great Old Ones ‘had passed through a stage of mechanised life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying,’ that last phrase redolent of advertising and popular psychology, and also goes on to detail the changing nature of their furnishings and home designs, such that we have to picture these winged mollusks as ‘they used curious tables, chairs, and couches like cylindrical frames—for they rested and slept upright with folded-down tentacles—and racks for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books,’ an image impossible to imagine without laughter. Lovecraft is too learned a critic and too conscious an artist to produce such comic effects—precisely the emotional consequence of the over-literal fantastic—without design. What, between the ekphrasis and the mundanity or near cuteness of his horrifying anti-divinities, is he trying to do? He is obviously trying to return literature to the naive concreteness of the epic, with its squabbling gods and strange journeys, its quotidian bizarrerie; he is trying to become the bard of the new age, the Homer of the scientific millennium, the de-spiritualized singer of the new gods we find on the threshold of our post-Darwinian and post-Einsteinian perceptions. It is not a question of his being better than Joyce or Eliot, but of his truly accomplishing what they only wished for and gestured toward—not the invention of a new Gothic, but rather, at long last, after the Platonic, the Christian, the humanist centuries, a cyclic poem of the universe, nothing less than the restitution of the epic to modern man.”

It occurs to me, however, that my post-neo-civil-war scenario is too optimistic in assuming that anyone will still read.

3. From a perspective informed by the metaphysics of making things happen, however illegitimate such a perspective is considered in academe, I also note Fitzgerald’s elementary magic trick of putting the work “great” in his title. Including the word “major” in your title probably helps, too, or at least I hope it does: “That’s why it’s called spelling.”

4. To be honest, I don’t know Fitzgerald criticism at all; I’m guessing this is the standard take from how I’ve seen other American Renaissance and American modernist work treated. As for whether or not Fitzgerald’s eminence should be regarded as the imposition of the white patriarchy or of the liberal elite—as I once said elsewhere, “intersectionality,” like western civilization, would be a good idea.

5. Though fairly apolitical, she is Gavin Newsom’s second cousin; I checked. One reason he can never run for president, in my opinion, is because one couldn’t bear the instrumentalization of her work in his campaign. First, Kamala was brat; next, Gavin will be the milk-eyed mender. If that prospect doesn’t make you want to get rid of social relations, I don’t know what will.

6. “Revelation in the garden” is a phrase evocative of a certain heterodoxy running from the early gnostics through the aforementioned Shaw’s Back to Methuselah according to which the serpent of Genesis was humanity’s liberating hero of gnosis against the presumptuous demiurge calling himself God. As I have suggested before, the theology of art may be therefore in league with this rebel metaphysics, not with orthodoxy of any stripe.

7. Coetzee’s recent trilogy of Jesus novels, with their many echoes of Plato, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky among others, and their suggestion that the novel itself can be saved from complicity with social power only by becoming a gospel, richly suggest that he was not satisfied by the secularity of his answer either.

8. If I were tasked with defending the continued existence of the English department in particular or the academic humanities in general, I would continue with something to the effect that the universal compassion thereby created will then flow back into society and reform it. The continued survival of the English department is no longer my problem, but I suppose I probably believe something like that in the end, if only because we aren’t going to get rid of social relations any time soon.