Weekly Readings #136 (09/09/24-09/15/24)

the myths we no longer understand

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

This week, my long-awaited review of Honor Levy’s My First Book, with a few remarks as well on Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel, appeared online at the Mars Review of Books, and will also appear in the forthcoming print edition. It’s subscriber-only but worth a subscription, as I attempt, in what a review of the review called a “[d]evastatingly generous review,”¹ to identify and appreciate the meaning of what Levy has done in her controversial debut. I’ll say a few more words about this below.

For The Invisible College, my series of literature course for paid subscribers, I also posted “A Hideous and Uneasy Vitality,” a comprehensive two-and-a-half-hour study of Edgar Allan Poe, encompassing his poetry, his literary theory, and his fiction in several genres (Gothic, detective, and experimental). There I demonstrate that in his globe-spanning influence on literature from pulp horror and mystery fiction to avant-garde poetry and poetics to the modernist novel of consciousness and the city, Poe was and remains the most influential (not the best, but the most influential) American writer of the 19th century. Next week, we turn to Hawthorne’s study of radical politics, The Blithedale Romance,² and in two weeks we will begin a three-week hunt for the white whale, Moby-Dick.

In his literary theory, Poe maintained that form, not meaning, was most essential to literary art. On these grounds, a review posted on Goodreads this week has cautiously praised my new and forthcoming novel Major Arcana:

Claim: great literature is a product of style and not unique plots or characters. And I don't even mean that in the archetypal sense. Many of the greatest works are literal reworkings of prior plots—all but two of Shakespeare's plays, famously—or they were contemporary satires, and with the passage of time, it is easy to misconceive of them as more innovative than they are as their historical scaffolding becomes obscured. Examples of the latter include Don Quixote, anything by Jane Austen, Dead Souls.

Major Arcana follows this same pattern. It is an ambitious novel in a stylistic sense that hearkens back to multi-viewpoint, multi-generational novels that have become much less common. It gains its verisimilitude from heavy reliance on—and often satire of—stories from the history of the 1980s comic book industry and current-day discussions of gender. I am curious how this will age. Will it be more like Austen? Will the passage of time obscure some of the more transparently uncreative elements, increasing its apparent innovativeness? Given the ambition of the piece, I can see that happening.

If you would like to find out whether my novel will age like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Austen, and Gogol, as the reviewer speculates that it very well might, I remind you to pre-order Major Arcana. The beautiful Belt Publishing edition arrives the day before Shakespeare’s birthday in 2025. Paid subscribers to this Substack can also access the original serial of the novel, complete with my audio rendition, if you can’t wait to read it until next year. On Substack Notes, my previous novel The Class of 2000 also received some attention, which I gratefully post here:³

Speaking of new novels, poet and astrologer Emmalea Russo’s brilliant debut novel Vivienne was released this week. You can find my review here and my blurb on the back of the hot-pink hardcover:⁴

Finally, I thank Naomi Kanakia for her generous recommendation of Grand Hotel Abyss at the end of her viral critique of Garth Greenwell for being “unreadable.” (I also reviewed Naomi’s superb and eminently readable novel The Default World here.)

I also want to give a Substack recommendation. I really think y’all should be reading John Pistelli’s Substack: Grand Hotel Abyss. The underappreciated thing about Pistelli, since he’s a bit sneaky about it, is that the man is a great tour-guide to the current literary discourse! Every week he does a post called “weekly readings” where he opines about the discourse du jour and gives his own take on it (which is always scintillating and original). Pistelli has his own unique aesthetic and philosophy of literature, which rapidly becomes apparent the more you read his stuff. He also does a podcast called Invisible College, where he gives lectures on classic works of English and American literature. His novel Major Arcana was serialized originally Substack—it’s very thoughtful, readable, and ambitious—and is now scheduled to come out from Belt Publishing sometime next year. Just a wonderful literary citizen and very smart commentator.

I also welcome the many new readers this recommendation has brought here, and I thank my long-time readers as well. For today, a little follow-up on a footnote from a few weeks ago about Byung-Chul Han, with more reflections on my Honor Levy review, Major Arcana, and the question of novelty and narrative in fiction. Please enjoy!

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Twice-Told Tales: Narrative and Contemporary Theory

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Reading from Homer (1885)

I ran across the philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s most recent English publication, The Crisis of Narration, by chance in a public library this week; I thought I had better read it—the work of about two hours, given its extreme brevity—since I’ve already mentioned the two most recent critiques of our thinker by DC Miller and Blake Smith.

The Crisis of Narration, essentially an extended (though not very extended) gloss on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Storyteller,” suggests that our date-driven society has intensified modernity’s process of disenchantment and therefore reduced our lives to a series of discrete data-points for the convenience of surveillant public and private bureaucracies.

As a result, we can no longer narrate our individual or collective lives, can no longer gather them into a continuum of elected significance, whether that of the liturgical calendar, the tale-teller’s wisdom bearing conte, or the shaped autobiography or autobiographic novel à la Proust or Sartre.

The substitute offered for narrative in our era is what Han calls “storyselling,” a dire prosthetic for narrative significance offered by the masters of data to justify their reign.

Unlike modernity, with its narratives of the future and progress—its longing for another form of life—late modernity does not have a revolutionary pathos of the new or of fresh beginnings. It lacks the spirit of departure. It is therefore declining into a mode of ‘on and on’, of absent alternatives. It loses narrative courage, the courage to create a world-changing narrative. Storytelling is now mainly a matter of commercialism and consumption. As storyselling, it does not contain the power to bring about social change.

From their evocative but minimalist book design on down—and somebody give the art director at Polity Books a raise—Han’s books, if I can generalize from this one, are very companionable: aphoristic and compressed digests of the comp-lit and theory canons, with constant and apt reference to Benjamin, Heidegger, Proust, Sartre, and Adorno, a popularization (and necessarily a moderation) of the astringent extremist insights founds in works like Minima Moralia or Poetry, Language, Thought. Han is almost courtly, very polite company. Many of his objections are themselves unobjectionable.

And yet, now that I have read The Crisis of Narration, I imagine Han marveling at my process of discovery of the book in a library, probably in a forthcoming slim volume entitled The Waning of Chance (Polity, 14 pp., $30, 2027): “We no longer encounter new ideas by chance. They come to us instead by algorithm. Under conditions of digital neoliberalism, the self no longer encounters the other. As a result, we no longer have selves, only selfies.”

Parody is a low and dishonorable style of criticism, and yet Han irresistibly tempts me to it. He can’t maintain the vatic style he adopts from Benjamin and Heidegger and often instead descends to the level of a New York Times columnist, or sounds, in his slightly loopy banality, like Kamala Harris: “It is only with narrative that the future opens up, for narrative gives us hope” (that one’s real, not my parody).

His books resemble a website like The Marginalian, entertaining and sometimes heartening, but also a reduction of an indigestible stew of rivalrous thinkers and theories into self-help for the addled aspirant intellectual. That probably goes for this very Substack, too—Han would be the first to say that the our time encourages such banalizing practices, the medium being the message, and surely we all need help, from both self and other—but I try to offer a few more shocks and discomforts than Han does, even though he extols shock and discomfort in theory:

In the age of Netflix, no one speaks of having shock experiences in connection with films. A Netflix series is nothing like a piece of art that corresponds to a pronounced danger to life and limb. Rather, it typically corresponds to binge watching. Viewers are fattened like consumer cattle. Binge watching is a paradigm for the general mode of perception in digital late modernity.

Despite his notional endorsement of “revolutionary pathos of the new” and “social change,” the popularity of Han exemplifies what I discussed last week as the creeping conservatism, the fear of the future, shown by the cognoscenti, an identification of all technological and cultural novelty with enemy forces bent on world destruction. Han anticipates this objection several times in The Crisis of Narration, identifying his preference for universalist narratives of Enlightenment progress over the exclusivist reactionary narratives or conspiracy theories of right-wing and nationalist forces.

Yet he seems insensible to areas where his denunciation of what he calls “late modernity” overlaps with the right, as when he (correctly) assails a timid and last-mannish obsession with metrics of superficial health and well-being as driving a surveillance culture and reducing us to “bare life.” No explicit alliance in this 2023 book with Giorgio Agamben on the late public-health unpleasantness is suggested, however, despite the unacknowledged borrowing of Agamben’s “bare life” formulation and the echo of his political polemic in that instance. Han prefers inclusion to exclusion in politics, but condemns the indiscriminate inclusivity of information vs. the careful curation involved in narrating. He quotes Susan Sontag approvingly in total obliviousness to the political resonance of her apothegm: “For there to be completeness, unity, coherence, there must be borders.”

The general drift of Han’s critique, despite its mourning for Enlightenment progress and its bizarre lament in our overly politicized time that political action has become impossible, is toward an appreciation of bygone ages and social forms with their greater allowance for secrecy, distance, and leisure. DC Miller censures the Korean-German Han as a placeless apologist for a post-national age, but Han—and this is the source of his definite appeal but also his potential irrelevance—most readily evokes the subtext of much early 20th-century radical and reactionary thought: a nostalgia for what George Steiner has called 19th-century Europe’s “garden of liberal culture,” though sometimes guised as a nostalgia for some probably fictional pre-modern village commune.⁵

The Crisis of Narration is a fitting backdrop both for my review of Honor Levy and Madeline Cash and my own novel, Major Arcana, which has (appreciatively) been called an old-fashioned novel and a defense of the old-fashioned novel.

I admired Levy’s book more than many of my peers did precisely because it seemed to me to be an attempt to put the late-modern condition into new forms of language and narrative—even, in the collection’s finest and first story, to assimilate this condition to the immemorial form of narrative known as the love story, and thus to “make it new.” While Madeline Cash is the “born storyteller” of the review, in contrast to Levy’s greater though more fractious skill at a kind of found poetry, narrative still has a use for us as we navigate the data-stream. Even this century’s prevailing inhumanity is thereby brought back into the remit of the human via a new art, hence what I identified as Levy’s “she/it” status. Such an art, and such an analysis of such an art, seems to me more promising than the alternative, which is to scold young authors in the name of a 19th-century humanism we expect always to recur in 19th-century forms. Levy’s work at once validates and refutes Han’s claim to a crisis in narrative.

My own procedure in Major Arcana is admittedly a more conservative one. There I arranged in proliferating narratives of significance the chaos of experience, to include the experience of online living and the “becoming-it” this living demands of the human psyche. Even so, my wager was that the realist novel will alter in form without a willful effort on the author’s part simply by assimilating new social practices; I would argue that the novel’s prose, especially in its approach to proper nouns and pronouns, does just that, more Gertrude Stein than George Eliot at times.

Furthermore, to introduce a complication Han mentions but doesn’t allow to trouble his elegy, I believe with Benjamin that the novel post-dates narrative in Han’s essentially mythical sense. The novel is not a tale twice-told around the village fire but a critical commodity vended to aid the private indigene of our restless modernity, early and late, in the absence of lived myth, if anybody ever managed to live myth in the first place, which I tend to doubt. I find these nostalgic European theories—whether nostalgic for “Greece,” the Middle Ages, or the high bourgeois 19th century, or all three at once—to be bedeviled by the old enchanted-distance fallacy. (I’m still thinking about friend-of-the-blog Mary Jane Eyre’s explication of Simone Weil’s commentary on Genesis, but I’m sure it must be relevant here. Are Judaism and Christianity not, like the novel, comments on a riddling body of myth? Have we not always been modern?) As Gilles Deleuze has observed, speaking of the comp-lit and theory canons, in a formulation I’ve quoted on here before:

Literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no longer understand them, since we no longer know how to dream them or reproduce them. Literature is the competition of misinterpretations that consciousness naturally and necessarily produces on themes of the unconscious, and like every competition it has its prizes.

Similarly, Harold Bloom characterized the narrator of Gravity’s Rainbow as one

who always seems not so much to be telling his bewildering, labyrinthine story as writing a wistful commentary upon it as a story already twice-told, though it hasn’t been, and truly can’t be told at all.

Major Arcana—like some other recent novels praised in these electronic pages, such as Emmalea Russo’s aforementioned Vivienne or Bruce Wagner’s ROAR: American Master—is a novel about fictional full celebrities or semi-celebrities whose stories are “known” to the public. Such novels will gain in relevance as we all become semi-celebrities in the digital world-theater. The novel, therefore, becomes a complicating commentary on events the audience is assumed already to know, not the narrative itself but the theory of the narrative, less the novel than the theory of the novel. Theory may be, as Han argues after Hegel, the highest form of knowledge after all.

1. Someone on Substack Notes recently said that Substack writers are too interested in the “meta” of writing: writing about writing, or writing on Substack about writing on Substack. Hence the review of the review, a blurb for a review that itself might serve as a blurb. “We no longer view but only review,” as I am sure Byung-Chul Han will observe in his probably forthcoming The Meta of Writing (Polity, 13 pp., $27, 2025). On the meta of writing and Substack, see Ross Barkan’s piece of this week, “At the Center of Things,” which argues that Substack has largely replaced the literary journal as the place for writing. (It’s surpassed most literary journals in that people get paid to write on Substack, whereas literary journals increasingly charge fees for submission and provide no pay upon acceptance.) This echoes my own experience. I decided at the beginning of this decade that I would stop submitting, pitching, etc. and just disseminate my writing myself, whether book or essay, fiction or non-. (I’d had mixed luck before. I’ve documented my trouble getting novels published, but I got every short story I ever wrote published in literary journals. I just stopped writing short stories.) Everything you’ve read by me in this decade under someone else’s banner was invited. As the manifestation girlies say, “I don’t chase, I attract.” Byung-Chul Han will no doubt write, “Digital neoliberalism encourages us to no longer submit our work but rather demand others to submit to it,” in his probably forthcoming The Decline of Submission (Polity, 11 pp., $29, 2027).

2. In a little under two months, we will examine The Bostonians, Henry James’s unofficial sequel to The Blithdale Romance, a novel about how, to quote Honor Levy, “We’re at war. Culture war,” and always have been. Friend-of-the-blog Gnocchic Apochryphon anticipates this episode with a recent post partly on James’s novel and its potentially reactionary meaning. Hawthorne’s novel has also been read in a similar way, and in the Poe episode, I identify the Gothic schlock-maestro as veritably the inventor of a certain style in American reaction. I would ultimately place James in the camp of “queer liberalism” as defined by friend-of-the-blog Blake Smith in his searching critique of Judith Butler’s totalitarian turn:

If philosophy were animated by the attempt to articulate a comprehensive logical system, it could become the faith of potentially oppressive political activists. If philosophy, however, were seen as a way of life by which individuals learn to play with ideas in a skeptical, nondogmatic, open-ended manner, it could curb political zealotry.

This sounds, perhaps, like the background for what we might call a queer liberalism, one that accepts a range of variation in personal belief and self-expression as the natural epistemic and ethical consequences of our perverse existence. Butler, in her work throughout the ’80s, seemed to wish to be such a queer liberal.

Queer liberalism, as indicated by the anti-totalitarian genealogy Smith provides, will necessarily involve a critique of the radical left in its aspiration toward a totalizing reading of Hegel and the consequent total state, the only possible state that can force everyone to desire correctly. There is, then, a certain neoconservatism built into queer liberalism, which liberalism tout court must absorb for its own stability. (I still draw the line at Dick Cheney, however.) In theory, this would be the explanation for the perennial prevalence of “a certain neoconservatism” in the canon of American literature from Hawthorne to Honor Levy.

3. For better or worse, The Class of 2000 is the novel of mine that most resembles in form and content mainstream literary fiction and might be a good place to start if you are unfamiliar with my work. It was intended as a valediction to the novel of suburban realism and to such realism’s torrid family romances, something in the vein of Rabbit Redux or The World According to Garp or American Pastoral or Freedom or even (though I didn’t read this until after I wrote it) Revolutionary Road. You can read a sample chapter here. The rest of my novels are somewhat more…let’s say oneiric.

4. Yes, I’m promoting my blurbs, blurbing my blurbs, as it were. (As Byung-Chul Han will lament, “We once blurbed books. Now we blurb blurbs. These blurbs replace the book itself. The act of writing has become an act of wrurbing.” This will probably be in his forthcoming The Tower of Blurble [Polity, eight pp., $35, 2028].) I’ve had a named blurb on a book before, but not the back cover; it was on the inside pages of the paperback of William Giraldi’s Hold the Dark, from this review. I’ve had a back-cover blurb before, on Fantagraphics’s translation of the Oesterheld and Breccia Che Guevara graphic bio, from this review of their earlier Mort Cinder, but it was attributed only to the venue for which I wrote, not to me by name.

5. To use a dire academic formulation, and despite his exaltation of theory as “offer[ing] us the highest form of knowledge,” Han’s work seriously under-theorizes the relation between the “modernity” he champions and the “late modernity” he decries. When did everything go so wrong? If Benjamin and Heidegger are so authoritative on the problems besetting us a century later, did not their own age of modernity incubate or inaugurate the whole disaster? If so, then either the works of modernity (Kant, Marx, Proust, Sartre, to use Han’s examples) should fall under similar scrutiny as the works of late modernity or the solutions found by great modern artists and thinkers imply that great late modern artists and thinkers might administer a similar therapy, thus obviating the need for such an apocalyptic-sounding criticism as Han’s. As the poet told the philosopher, “Where the danger grows, there the saving power also grows.”