Weekly Readings #132 (08/12/24-08/18/23)
that which lies on the other side of language
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I released “A Wider Blessing Than Any Other,” the latest episode—the third in a four-part series on George Eliot’s Middlemarch—for The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The Invisible College now boasts a total of 30 episodes of two hours or more, including 19 on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett (encompassing such favorites as Wordsworth, Keats, Austen, Tennyson, Dickens, Wilde, Conrad, Yeats, Woolf, and more) and eight on the works of James Joyce from Dubliners through Ulysses. After we conclude Middlemarch next week, we will turn to 16 episodes on classic American literature, beginning with the Transcendentalist prose poetry of Emerson and continuing through Thoreau, Fuller, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, James, Frost, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stevens, and Faulkner.
Considering the length, depth, breadth, and intensity of these weekly episodes, plus the lively comments sections, a paid subscription almost pays for itself. If you’re looking for in-depth introductions to some of the most influential writers of modern times, as well as guides for reading some of those more intimidating classics on your shelf, guides that don’t shy away from these books’ more disturbing contents and implications, then The Invisible College is for you. Many thanks to my current paid subscribers!
A paid subscription to this Substack will also grant you access to the initial serialization, including audio, of my new novel Major Arcana. Novels, however, are perhaps still best read in print, so I invite you as well to please pre-order the beautiful Belt Publishing edition of Major Arcana, forthcoming in April 2025. In the expansive spirit of the American novel as it used to be written in more fearless day, Major Arcana narrates the saga of a famous late-20th-century magician and comic-book writer whose disturbing work ramifies down the generations to the gender warriors and occult influencers of the present day.1 It’s been called “a fascinating and gripping piece of work,” “a Q.E.D. of the proposition that…one can write imaginatively about the present,” “the elusive great American novel for the 21st century,” and, in a word, “breathtaking.”
For this week, I repost an answer to a reader question about Shakespeare2 from my secret hidden Tumblr, with revisions and the usual requisite footnotes. Please enjoy!
Bardoclasm: The Art of Hating Shakespeare
A reader inquires: “Besides Eliot, were there any prominent writers or critics who were Shakespeare haters?” I respond:
Yes. Enlightenment-era writers, with their neoclassical aesthetics, took issue with his perceived irrationalism: Voltaire is the most famous example, charging the bard with a violation of literary decorum in mixing genres and styles, but even Dr. Johnson in England made a number of sharply critical remarks in his own work on the plays. The Romantics were mostly pro-Shakespeare, but the belatedly neoclassical Byron also dismissed Shakespeare as a vapid plagiarist in his letters, inferior in sublimity to Milton.3 In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the biggest names are Tolstoy, Shaw, and Wittgenstein. All three had some version of the same underlying complaint: his work is unrealistic, sensationalist, and puts forth no coherent, edifying worldview. It’s not that different from Eliot’s complaint that Shakespeare generated emotion in excess of an “objective correlative.” Pound, too, in ABC of Reading, preferred Chaucer as closer to political and social realities.
In all these cases, we see a reaction against the Romantics, who most valued Shakespeare for his imaginative freedom and “negative capability.” (I wrote about some of the anti-Romantic critique here,4 drawing on George Steiner’s eloquent, summative bard-skeptical essay “A Reading Against Shakespeare,” collected in No Passion Spent.) I’ve also suggested—in one of my Invisible College lectures—that Joyce is an undercover Shakespeare hater on more political grounds, anticipating feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial critiques.
I believe those are the biggest names; as I’ve said elsewhere, the list of Shakespeare haters is as distinguished as the list of anti-Stratfordians, but the Shakespeare haters are far more persuasive, precisely because they’re hating the man from Stratford in all his proto-bourgeois ingloriousness. I’m a Shakespeare lover myself, and indifferent to the political critique, but there’s something to the argument that much of his work suffers for its lack of metaphysics, of ultimate things, something that, in some moods, can make Dante or Dostoevsky feel more profound. Steiner writes a stirring passage in this vein near the end of his aforementioned essay:
Are there specific gravities of art and literature, of our experience of and response to art and literature, which arise from the felt, indeed declared pressure on art and literature of the presence or absence (in many cases, such as Dostoevsky’s or Kafka’s, absence is a more radical possibility of presence) of God? The theological-metaphysical enactment of what is gravest and most constant in human questioning, of that which lies, or may lie, on the other side of language, gives to certain texts an indispensable vulnerability and stature. The anguished patience of such questioning comes to possess us in the Oresteia; in Sophocles’ Oedipus, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus; it presses on us, almost unbearably, in Euripides’ Bacchae. We hear it in Marco Lombardo’s voice out of the purging smoke in Purgatorio XVI; in Ivan Karamazov’s prosecution of God; in the parables of Kafka. There is a very real sense in which Shakespeare does know and say everything; does he know and say anything else?
I’m not sure this is true of King Lear or The Winter’s Tale or The Tempest, but, since even these seem pagan-occult rather than concerned with the Platonic or Abrahamic God Steiner is so preoccupied by, I accept his general point.5
Maybe artists criticize each other better than actual critics can, because they can in criticizing each other complete each other. Steiner, skeptical of American literature, does not mention Melville, who thought Shakespeare wrote in the fetters of his pre-American and censorious era. Therefore in Moby-Dick Melville might be said to have brought Shakespeare into what the bard had been forced to avoid in his own life: a confrontation with God.
Mo_Diggs’s post from last week, “Make America Magical Again (MAMA),” makes for comprehensive and crucial companion reading for Major Arcana, an elaborate guide to what is now undeniably a full-fledged magic revival in our culture.
The acronym MAMA hints at a goddess-centered age, resonant with Major Arcana’s theme of maternity and domesticity vs. gnostic rebellion. These topoi remind me to make or remake some recommendations of literary critical or literary theoretical texts that might answer the “Platonic” mandate I laid out last week. I recommend most of them to myself, as three of the five are massive tomes I have only ever browsed through.
An age integrative of the feminine, as well as of the shadow, is foretold in Jung’s Answer to Job. This idea is linked to questions of literary form and genre in a work of semi-occult literary criticism like Margaret Anne Doody’s The True Story of the Novel, which I wrote a paragraph about here in the context of another semi-magical work of literary theory, Colin Wilson’s The Craft of Fiction.
(Incidentally, I read a hilariously nasty review of Doody’s massive book on JSTOR this week from the storied journal NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction by the disability studies scholar Lennard J. Davis. It’s the kind of bad review every author dreams of, the kind that sells the book:
In the body of this very long text there are only two sentences on Ian Watt, scant two on Georg Lukács, only one on Michael McKeon, one on Ruth Perry, and not a single sentence on Terry Castle, William Warner, Nancy Armstrong, John Bender, John Richetti, Raymond Williams, or J. Paul Hunter, to name only a few of the many influential writers on the origins of the novel who do not make an appearance in Doody’s work. Yet, unaccountably, menstruation, baptism, eating, genitals, and Camille Paglia are discussed more frequently than the work of any of the above scholars.
[…]
What a shame that so much scholarship finally crashes on the reef of pseudo-religion. The modus operandi of this study is not unlike that of a cult, appearing at first to be rational and helpful and ending up sucking the initiate deeper and deeper into a world of strange religious assumptions and salvations. Are we really supposed to genuflect before these ideas? The novel is a sacred text that conceals the goddess? Reading is a sacrament akin to taking the Host? Doody has created a new kind of analysis that seems to combine the insights of Shirley MacLaine, Mother Theresa, and Lucille Ball with a touch of René Girard and a smattering of The Golden Bough and Madame Blavatsky. Can monkey glands be far behind?
A bit rich for academic leftists to talk about cults—academic leftism is one of the worst cults in America! Please do note, however, the prescient disparagement of René Girard, the most consequential literary theorist of the present moment given his importance in the Catholic conversion of one of our Vice Presidential nominees. “Monkey glands” refers to the Steinach Operation, which Yeats had done in his final decade as a dying animal; he claimed it allowed him to enjoy “a second puberty.” I have heard Miss Flite’s birds in Bleak House commended as comprising the finest list in literature—Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach—but “menstruation, baptism, eating, genitals, and Camille Paglia” is good, too, if a bit short, and might also furnish names for birds. But I digress.)
To continue with my bibliography, Robert Graves’s White Goddess is also relevant to this discussion. If you can stand to listen to a pod in the “dissident right” space, friend-of-the-blog Noah Kumin discusses Graves’s book and Perennialism more generally, here (and if you disapprove of “the dissident right space” in general, please note with approval the moment when Noah chides the host not to be racist).
Rounding out our list and relevant to today’s main post is Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being by old Bluebeard himself, Ted Hughes, a book concerning another theme dear to Grand Hotel Abyss, the healing of the Protestant-Catholic schism in the imagination of western Christendom. Ted claimed that writing the book ruined his health and hastened his death; such is the divine feminine’s revenge for Sylvia and Assia, one can only assume. With apologies to my feminist readers, however, I don’t believe the Nietzschean Plath can be construed as merely a victim, any more than the feminine is all passive goodness or the masculine all active badness.
People ask me questions about Shakespeare all the time, though I am far from a specialist. I have no concrete plan for The Invisible College in 2025, but based on the questions readers submit, the biggest areas of interest right now are Shakespeare and other early modern English writers (Spenser, Marlowe, Milton), the postwar American novel (Ellison, Bellow, O’Connor, Nabokov, Pynchon, DeLillo, Morrison, etc.), and western world classics in translation from the ancient Greeks to the modern Russians.
Hegel, for example, revered Shakespeare as the poet who advanced the art of tragedy by recreating it as the art of freedom, by writing characters who are “free artists of themselves” in line with Romantic hopes for humanity, for what Schlegel called “progressive universal poetry.” I hope that is license enough for the following digression.
In footnote last week, I provided some commentary (at a reader’s request) on the “Hegelian egirl” situation. I regret to inform you that this project has since collapsed in a heap of recantation, recrimination, and rectification—alas, no sublation. What one regretful participant labelled a “psyop” that was also “evil” and a “fascism pressure cooker,” the project’s main proponent characterized, by contrast, as a doomed attempt to use “culture” to change “metaphysics.” With another erstwhile participant, I reject this binary; in fact, once again exhibiting my apparently “very Catholic” tendency, I don’t even find this binary intelligible. We do not encounter metaphysics except through culture. Isn’t this why people used to see fairies and now see aliens? Back to the gossip, I’m not sure what our regretfully electronic girls are even regretful for, so abstract is their verbiage. Abstract and portentous: they almost make it sound like they got up to some Secret History-type behavior, but I gather the worst sin they committed was a fancied or proposed solicitation of tech money for their philosophy “scene” on the Dimes Square model.
When confronted with language as abstract as Hegel favored, and as abstract as these young intellectuals use in his wake, we might be tempted to say that such people need to be confronted, perhaps brutally, with concrete exigency. You need to get a real job! You need to get laid! You need to organize! Men are told that they should join the army, women that they should have babies. In other words, these intellectuals’ elevation of metaphysics above culture tempts us to eject them from the realm of culture itself—a distasteful habit of reaction against hypertrophic intellect shared between the vulgar conservative and the vulgar Marxist. By contrast, I argue against suffocatingly abstract metaphysics not on the level of personal life but on the level of culture: by all means, devote your life to writing and thinking, but why not try to write something a little more concrete or grounded? A lyric, perhaps, or a narrative or a drama, even a commentary on events past or present. A haiku might be a good start. The universal is found only in the particular; a grain of sand is the only glimpse of eternity we ever get. As for their scholarship, can we think of a single young philosophy obsessive of any gender or of any philosophical school—these Dorotheas turned premature Casaubons!—whose souls wouldn’t be both becalmed and enlarged by reading Middlemarch? “I tried to generate a world-destroying miracle,” the ex-egirl reflects, but I prefer creative to destructive miracles, what George Eliot called “the growing good of the world.”
Such young cosmopolites were once renowned if not mocked for their excessive reading of Joan Didion. (Now the other J. D., who likely hasn’t been a girl, e- or otherwise, since law school, is reading everyone’s favorite old New Journalist. I wonder if he’s also listening to my lecture on her status as a conservative writer.) Here is what Joan Didion wrote about Hegel in a recollection I might recast as an injunction:
I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor.
I can’t believe this essay is 10 years old. Culture became “stuck”—forcibly stalled by powers and principalities in response to the populist threat, as I see it—right after it was published, which is why it reads more like something from 2022 than from 2014. I do believe we are finally ready to move past the point I was making there, however much it needed to be made at the time, hence my cautious recent steps beyond aestheticism toward a more cosmic appreciation of art.
Lurking behind Steiner’s objection, if not that of the others, is a disdain for popular art, of which Shakespeare’s plays are an example. It would be preferable for intellectuals to demand better popular art than to dismiss the whole idea out of hand in the name either of Steinerian high art or Tolstoyan folk art, but making such demands is a disappointing way to spend your time. Even the green shoots of a potentially formidable popular art are often trampled or torn out by the money-men and replaced with plastic turf. Truly imaginative movies like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant—broadly appealing but also strange and challenging narrative spectacles in genuine conversation with our artistic, religious, and philosophical tradition—sadly give way to mindless slasher-in-space fan-service schlock like Alien: Romulus. Please consider that your movie review for the weekend.
That Colin Wilson book ("The Craft of the Novel") is a gem of what one might call enlightened amateur criticism: non-academic and plain-spoken, but intelligent and a little eccentric. I learned a lot from it when I read it, many years ago. (And yes, I do in fact like "A Voyage to Arcturus").
I've been chewing on the theme of "healing of the Protestant-Catholic schism in the imagination of western Christendom". I'm not sure what that would solve exactly, but it seems like a step in the right direction. The far bigger schism to be healed is surely the one between gnosis and belief. The more I think about it, the more I see the "Platonic" mandate as an exploration of the development of consciousness, about which neither neuroscientists nor white shamans waving at quantum mechanics have had much of interest to say.