This was great, and you've given me a lot of stuff to think about. I recently read my first Bernhard novel (Extinction) and will be reading more, so thanks for linking that essay. With regards to the spiritual or religious aspect of art, I think you're correct as well. One of my favorite critical ideas is Paul Schrader's idea of "transcendental style" in film, which Susan Sontag also wrote about (calling it "spiritual style"). They both see this style of filmmaking, which is expressed through form rather content, in the films of Robert Bresson. I think it exists in literature, too, but I'm not going to attempt to describe it here. My main thought is that it has something to do with slowing down time and capturing a state of consciousness akin to that of prayer or meditation. The lyrics you quote do that as well I'd say.
Just a quick aside about that Fitzgerald tweet--I can remember reading "Gatsby" in 12th grade and loving it. I didn't totally grasp it at the time (not that I should claim to now, either), but it led to me reading all of Fitzgerald's other novels. My teacher had us do a close reading of a couple of paragraphs and it was actually this experience that I remember the most, the idea that you could analyze language, study it, take it apart, read between the lines to see what it was doing, and then try to articulate this in your own language. That was a great class, now that I think about it...
Thanks! I am ironically not a huge Bernhard reader (I've read Woodcutters, Concrete, and half of Correction) but I agree with the account given of his work in Clune's essay. And it sounds like a great class!
You might've heard of or listened to this curious conversation between three Substack leaders, which (after yet one more Nietzchean debate) added comments about the digital future of fiction on the platform: https://cb.substack.com/p/jasmine-in-the-arena
Far better to be with your spiritual vision of literature (maybe any spiritual vision) than whatever Best, Suh, and Baker offering. They foreground the usefulness of status signals in selling fiction through the platform, with the obligatory mention of an N+1 tote as a sort of model. It's literature as social accessory; a book is for display on the coffee table; author's names are external of taste. Canny as it can sound for solving the subscription problems on this platform, it's disheartening to hear fiction yet again conceived as primarily potential social capital, wholly without its own value independent of that interpersonal visibility (and this from its self-proclaimed saviors in the digital age).
Baker (whom I'd previously liked as a sort of mystic-techie oddball) contributed a vision of digital fiction that relies on fake accounts on social platforms, all dependent on the social pleasures of notifications and following along as a group and a thrilled discussion of such "fictional" antics among a friend group. It's a depressing prescription, which he does he disavow as overt instruction, but I feel like it's a hemmed-in endgame of our cultural autofiction and digital addictions.
Thanks, I've heard of it but I didn't watch it. Marketing is after the fact—I've made my peace with that—but it shouldn't dominate the writing process itself. Using this platform to create a fictional imitation of the "reality TV" effect of social media isn't going to work. You can't trick the readerly mind that way. If there's not an actual person to project onto parasocially, if real-life Hegelian egirls aren't partying out there somewhere, then what's the point? It's asking fiction to be something else, a kind of game. The trick of the serialized novel should be platform independent, should follow the paradigm established in the days of Dickens: a suspenseful story with interesting characters! Experimentally making literature of online language can work, too—I like Honor Levy more than some of the people on here do—but probably not as a serial. As with the shirt in the meme that says, "stop being poor," I would say: "just write a good novel."
Fiction as a game is the trap and always has been, right? It preexisted our tools but then accelerated with their use.
Funny enough, "write a good novel" does remain exactly that simple, though I wonder if it's the engineer-mindset to determine that the problem is more complex, as a problem of perfecting the platform (rather than the writing).
As far as political complaining: there is a certain frisson from reading someone with whom one has profound disagreements* without feeling that one’s values are so divergent as to make conversation impossible, what can I say!
*my gripe would be less that you’re harsh on the dems and more that you overvalue Trump’s libertine NYC persona at this late date-it’s seemed to me since he really started relying on Claremont guys in the last year of his presidency that he’s handing us off to a rival, no less authoritarian (and much less subtle!) professional class.
PS: please do remark on the Hegelian e girls next time, that whole situation is incredible.
I have a personal terror of Walz so intense—he was a real psycho lockdowner in the 2020 period, a hicklib of Stalinist dimension—that I must recuse myself from further political commentary. But as to my general position I'll repeat what I said explicitly in 2022: for ecosystemic reasons having to do with the proper calibration of liberalism and conservatism in a system like ours, the Dems should probably lose an election good and hard so they can reform. There's never going to be a better time to do it than now, with Trump still at the top of the ticket on the other side to act as a '90s-lib drag on all the Claremont stuff. In 2028, when the Dems can more persuasively mount a freedom campaign, and the tradcaths or neocameralists or whomever have totally commandeered the GOP, then let there be a blue wave. Word on the street is that Newsom, Whitmer, Shapiro et al.—including Obama himself—are having similar thoughts, if tinged with more personal ambition, but who knows?
(Also, I think I wrote this on Tumblr back in the day, but I will confess: going from the suburbs in the Limbaugh era, where "liberal" was a slur, straight to the academy on the cusp of the Foucault-turned-Zizek era, where "liberal" was *also* a slur, no doubt implanted and then fortified in my soul, as its deepest political instinct, a reflexive hostility to the party of the center left. It's remarkable that I've contrarianed myself as far out of it as I have! The actual Hegelian egirls in question—the two young intellectuals, their branding and marketing aside—seem to be thinking about these things in roughly the same way I am, if I've understood their jargon. I wonder if they have similar backgrounds; I think it's about the same with Anna K, too, for example.)
I loved this phrase: “down here on earth anyway, we are only ever worshiping beautiful forms—only ever encountering divinity, I should say, in beautiful forms.” Et in saecula saeculorum, amen. It seems, however, to point to an underlying tension. Catholicism-as-Christianity would disapprove, strongly, the love of beautiful forms inculcated by Catholicism-as-Roman-paganism. Likewise, the delight you took from the (highly sensual) passage from Gatsby is opposed to the idea of art of transcendence of the ego — precisely the part of us that enjoys the senses, worships form. If the conflict, as you hint at in the comments, is between Socrates-Plato-Schopenhauer on the one hand, and Thrasymachus-Hobbes-Nietzsche on the other, the love of the beautiful for its own sake seems possible only for the latter.
Thank you, agreed on the disjunction you observe: without contraries there is no progresson! There is probably a Nietzschean Plato that can be recovered from the texts, but I'm not an expert. Also I still think it's possible to lose the ego in a transcendent encounter with a phenomenal object, possible that the senses do not actually belong to the ego, if I have my jargon in order, but then I've never studied phenomenology etc. either.
Fantastic stuff - the part about Lovecraft and the repudiation of Platonism especially resonated with me, as I've been having the niggling suspicion that the momentum on the political right lies with those who wish to save what passes for Western Civilization by demolishing what has (for good or ill) served as its foundation. Or maybe that's just the permanent position of the counter-culture (whether left-coded or right-coded): it's probably no coincidence that Murdoch decided in the late sixties to RETVRN to Plato.
Thanks! And definitely: I just saw Nick Land, crude impressions of whose philosophy inspired the Lovecraft monologue, scold a "Hegelian egirl" with "Hobbes > Hegel," which we can also extend to mean Hobbes > Plato (Thrasymachus > Socrates). It all depends what we think the foundation is, I guess, if we want to elevate Homer over Plato (your beloved Weil might say we don't have to choose) or the Yahwist over the other strands in Genesis/Exodus (as the Weil-disliking Bloom does). Hegel's mostly too hard to read, but I like the way he finds a place for everything and everyone in his thought, doesn't demolish or discard anything.
For what it's worth, I do find "Gatsby" a tad overrated. A good book, but is it really the 4th best novel of the century? (According to Time Magazine, if I remember correctly.) I think its ubiquity in high school English courses is due to two factors: 1) it's short enough to be conveniently taught in a survey course, and 2) it's a good way to handle certain important American themes, like the "American Dream" and the USA as a place where people can remake themselves. In short: it's a good but not great book that serves some purposes not necessarily connected with its quality as literature.
Also, good to see a mention of Bernhard's "Woodcutters" - I need to revisit him!
It suffers if you put it up against full-length novels like Ulysses or The Magic Mountain or something—the X guy is right that it's a novella—but in the ranks of the 20th-century novellas it's easily top five or so, great in its real domain, and better than most of what goes on in high school.
Thanks! I'm going to read more Fitz soon, but nothing I've read comes close to Gatsby. I don't actually think Gatsby is overrated at all, as long as we're clear on what it is: a short prose-poetic modern myth, not an all-encompassing novel, more Billy Budd than Moby Dick, more The Dead than Ulysses, more Death in Venice than The Magic Mountain, with the tragedy that he never got to write a book of the latter proportion.
I think the best thing he wrote aside from Gatsby is that essay on cracking up as the mark of genius, but then I haven’t read everything by him either!
What I wish Fitzgerald had exploited more was his eccentric, satirical, almost crazy side. It shows up in a big way in stories like "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," and in a smaller way in certain other stories, like "May Day." I'm not really interested in the whole Jazz Age scene, but these stories go beyond, somehow.
Interesting, thanks...have not read those, just a handful of his realistic stories ("Winter Dreams," "Babylon Revisited," "An Alcoholic Case"), but I plan to go deeper into FSF in general for my upcoming Invisible College episode.
This was great, and you've given me a lot of stuff to think about. I recently read my first Bernhard novel (Extinction) and will be reading more, so thanks for linking that essay. With regards to the spiritual or religious aspect of art, I think you're correct as well. One of my favorite critical ideas is Paul Schrader's idea of "transcendental style" in film, which Susan Sontag also wrote about (calling it "spiritual style"). They both see this style of filmmaking, which is expressed through form rather content, in the films of Robert Bresson. I think it exists in literature, too, but I'm not going to attempt to describe it here. My main thought is that it has something to do with slowing down time and capturing a state of consciousness akin to that of prayer or meditation. The lyrics you quote do that as well I'd say.
Just a quick aside about that Fitzgerald tweet--I can remember reading "Gatsby" in 12th grade and loving it. I didn't totally grasp it at the time (not that I should claim to now, either), but it led to me reading all of Fitzgerald's other novels. My teacher had us do a close reading of a couple of paragraphs and it was actually this experience that I remember the most, the idea that you could analyze language, study it, take it apart, read between the lines to see what it was doing, and then try to articulate this in your own language. That was a great class, now that I think about it...
Thanks! I am ironically not a huge Bernhard reader (I've read Woodcutters, Concrete, and half of Correction) but I agree with the account given of his work in Clune's essay. And it sounds like a great class!
You might've heard of or listened to this curious conversation between three Substack leaders, which (after yet one more Nietzchean debate) added comments about the digital future of fiction on the platform: https://cb.substack.com/p/jasmine-in-the-arena
Far better to be with your spiritual vision of literature (maybe any spiritual vision) than whatever Best, Suh, and Baker offering. They foreground the usefulness of status signals in selling fiction through the platform, with the obligatory mention of an N+1 tote as a sort of model. It's literature as social accessory; a book is for display on the coffee table; author's names are external of taste. Canny as it can sound for solving the subscription problems on this platform, it's disheartening to hear fiction yet again conceived as primarily potential social capital, wholly without its own value independent of that interpersonal visibility (and this from its self-proclaimed saviors in the digital age).
Baker (whom I'd previously liked as a sort of mystic-techie oddball) contributed a vision of digital fiction that relies on fake accounts on social platforms, all dependent on the social pleasures of notifications and following along as a group and a thrilled discussion of such "fictional" antics among a friend group. It's a depressing prescription, which he does he disavow as overt instruction, but I feel like it's a hemmed-in endgame of our cultural autofiction and digital addictions.
Thanks, I've heard of it but I didn't watch it. Marketing is after the fact—I've made my peace with that—but it shouldn't dominate the writing process itself. Using this platform to create a fictional imitation of the "reality TV" effect of social media isn't going to work. You can't trick the readerly mind that way. If there's not an actual person to project onto parasocially, if real-life Hegelian egirls aren't partying out there somewhere, then what's the point? It's asking fiction to be something else, a kind of game. The trick of the serialized novel should be platform independent, should follow the paradigm established in the days of Dickens: a suspenseful story with interesting characters! Experimentally making literature of online language can work, too—I like Honor Levy more than some of the people on here do—but probably not as a serial. As with the shirt in the meme that says, "stop being poor," I would say: "just write a good novel."
Fiction as a game is the trap and always has been, right? It preexisted our tools but then accelerated with their use.
Funny enough, "write a good novel" does remain exactly that simple, though I wonder if it's the engineer-mindset to determine that the problem is more complex, as a problem of perfecting the platform (rather than the writing).
As far as political complaining: there is a certain frisson from reading someone with whom one has profound disagreements* without feeling that one’s values are so divergent as to make conversation impossible, what can I say!
*my gripe would be less that you’re harsh on the dems and more that you overvalue Trump’s libertine NYC persona at this late date-it’s seemed to me since he really started relying on Claremont guys in the last year of his presidency that he’s handing us off to a rival, no less authoritarian (and much less subtle!) professional class.
PS: please do remark on the Hegelian e girls next time, that whole situation is incredible.
I have a personal terror of Walz so intense—he was a real psycho lockdowner in the 2020 period, a hicklib of Stalinist dimension—that I must recuse myself from further political commentary. But as to my general position I'll repeat what I said explicitly in 2022: for ecosystemic reasons having to do with the proper calibration of liberalism and conservatism in a system like ours, the Dems should probably lose an election good and hard so they can reform. There's never going to be a better time to do it than now, with Trump still at the top of the ticket on the other side to act as a '90s-lib drag on all the Claremont stuff. In 2028, when the Dems can more persuasively mount a freedom campaign, and the tradcaths or neocameralists or whomever have totally commandeered the GOP, then let there be a blue wave. Word on the street is that Newsom, Whitmer, Shapiro et al.—including Obama himself—are having similar thoughts, if tinged with more personal ambition, but who knows?
(Also, I think I wrote this on Tumblr back in the day, but I will confess: going from the suburbs in the Limbaugh era, where "liberal" was a slur, straight to the academy on the cusp of the Foucault-turned-Zizek era, where "liberal" was *also* a slur, no doubt implanted and then fortified in my soul, as its deepest political instinct, a reflexive hostility to the party of the center left. It's remarkable that I've contrarianed myself as far out of it as I have! The actual Hegelian egirls in question—the two young intellectuals, their branding and marketing aside—seem to be thinking about these things in roughly the same way I am, if I've understood their jargon. I wonder if they have similar backgrounds; I think it's about the same with Anna K, too, for example.)
I loved this phrase: “down here on earth anyway, we are only ever worshiping beautiful forms—only ever encountering divinity, I should say, in beautiful forms.” Et in saecula saeculorum, amen. It seems, however, to point to an underlying tension. Catholicism-as-Christianity would disapprove, strongly, the love of beautiful forms inculcated by Catholicism-as-Roman-paganism. Likewise, the delight you took from the (highly sensual) passage from Gatsby is opposed to the idea of art of transcendence of the ego — precisely the part of us that enjoys the senses, worships form. If the conflict, as you hint at in the comments, is between Socrates-Plato-Schopenhauer on the one hand, and Thrasymachus-Hobbes-Nietzsche on the other, the love of the beautiful for its own sake seems possible only for the latter.
Thank you, agreed on the disjunction you observe: without contraries there is no progresson! There is probably a Nietzschean Plato that can be recovered from the texts, but I'm not an expert. Also I still think it's possible to lose the ego in a transcendent encounter with a phenomenal object, possible that the senses do not actually belong to the ego, if I have my jargon in order, but then I've never studied phenomenology etc. either.
Fantastic stuff - the part about Lovecraft and the repudiation of Platonism especially resonated with me, as I've been having the niggling suspicion that the momentum on the political right lies with those who wish to save what passes for Western Civilization by demolishing what has (for good or ill) served as its foundation. Or maybe that's just the permanent position of the counter-culture (whether left-coded or right-coded): it's probably no coincidence that Murdoch decided in the late sixties to RETVRN to Plato.
Thanks! And definitely: I just saw Nick Land, crude impressions of whose philosophy inspired the Lovecraft monologue, scold a "Hegelian egirl" with "Hobbes > Hegel," which we can also extend to mean Hobbes > Plato (Thrasymachus > Socrates). It all depends what we think the foundation is, I guess, if we want to elevate Homer over Plato (your beloved Weil might say we don't have to choose) or the Yahwist over the other strands in Genesis/Exodus (as the Weil-disliking Bloom does). Hegel's mostly too hard to read, but I like the way he finds a place for everything and everyone in his thought, doesn't demolish or discard anything.
For what it's worth, I do find "Gatsby" a tad overrated. A good book, but is it really the 4th best novel of the century? (According to Time Magazine, if I remember correctly.) I think its ubiquity in high school English courses is due to two factors: 1) it's short enough to be conveniently taught in a survey course, and 2) it's a good way to handle certain important American themes, like the "American Dream" and the USA as a place where people can remake themselves. In short: it's a good but not great book that serves some purposes not necessarily connected with its quality as literature.
Also, good to see a mention of Bernhard's "Woodcutters" - I need to revisit him!
It suffers if you put it up against full-length novels like Ulysses or The Magic Mountain or something—the X guy is right that it's a novella—but in the ranks of the 20th-century novellas it's easily top five or so, great in its real domain, and better than most of what goes on in high school.
Thanks! I'm going to read more Fitz soon, but nothing I've read comes close to Gatsby. I don't actually think Gatsby is overrated at all, as long as we're clear on what it is: a short prose-poetic modern myth, not an all-encompassing novel, more Billy Budd than Moby Dick, more The Dead than Ulysses, more Death in Venice than The Magic Mountain, with the tragedy that he never got to write a book of the latter proportion.
I think the best thing he wrote aside from Gatsby is that essay on cracking up as the mark of genius, but then I haven’t read everything by him either!
What I wish Fitzgerald had exploited more was his eccentric, satirical, almost crazy side. It shows up in a big way in stories like "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," and in a smaller way in certain other stories, like "May Day." I'm not really interested in the whole Jazz Age scene, but these stories go beyond, somehow.
Interesting, thanks...have not read those, just a handful of his realistic stories ("Winter Dreams," "Babylon Revisited," "An Alcoholic Case"), but I plan to go deeper into FSF in general for my upcoming Invisible College episode.