Weekly Readings #138 (09/23/24-09/29/24)

the riches of my Emersonian mind

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

This week I posted “The Classification of the Constituents of a Chaos,” for free in its three-hour enormity, the first of three Invisible College episodes on Moby-Dick. (The Invisible College is my series of literature courses for paid subscribers; this episode is one of my occasional free samples. Please excuse the slightly choppy audio at the beginning.) Ishmael says that to write a mighty book you need a mighty theme, and so I am sure it is with podcasts as well: I think this was a pretty good one, a sounding of the metaphysical depths as we explore what Melville mysterious calls “the old State-secret” underlying Captain Ahab’s wild war against God, abetted by his Ishmaelite narrator in his own exile from the Covenant. (The political implications, as I understand them, are two parts “woke” and one part “based”: pro-black, pro-gay, and anti-woman.) Thanks to all my paid subscribers! Please offer a paid subscription for our further adventures aboard the Pequod and for our subsequent voyage into American modernism.

I also remind you again (or I inform new readers for the first time) that my novel Major Arcana is forthcoming in April 2025; you can pre-order it here, and should do so if you want to encourage publishers to take chances on independent work, as Belt Publishing and its broad-minded captain Anne Trubek has taken a chance on me. Major Arcana is the epically intricate and intricately epic half-century saga of the passion of three American generations from the dark forests of New England to the beaches of sunny California and back again, encompassing the power of popular culture, the secrets of high and low magic, the revolutions of sex and gender, and the awful and beautiful necessity of love. Ross Barkan has called it “perhaps the elusive great American novel for the 21st century” and Bruce Wagner has said that “to read it is to hold the heart of the world in one’s hands.” You can read incisive reviews on Substack here and here; and if you can’t wait until next spring to read it, paid subscribers to this Substack can also access the original serial of the novel, complete with my audio rendition.

For today, a first approximation of an appreciation of Francis Ford Coppola’s much-maligned Megalopolis, with the usual footnotes about everything else in the known universe. (If you want to avoid spoilers for the film, the body of the text is safe, but skip the second footnote.) Please enjoy!

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Head, Hands, Heart: Why Megalopolis Is Megalopolis

Waldemar Franz Hermann Titzenthaler, Fritz Lang and His Wife Thea von Harbou in Their Berlin Apartment, in 1923 or 1924 (adjusted for color)

The young and the old, with their greater proximity to the twin voids or pleromata, are uniquely entitled to experiment artistically; only those of us nel mezzo del cammin are constrained to behave ourselves, to pay our dues, our rents, our mortgages, our taxes, our debts, our arrears.

A few weeks ago you found me defending the controversial experiments of my juniors, Madeline Cash and Honor Levy; today you will find me defending the even more controversial experiment of my senior, Francis Ford Coppola. The old especially, I think, should feel free to try whatever. If you have proved you can attain the restrained classicism of The Godfather early in your fourth decade, then you might as well turn radical Romantic in the middle of your ninth decade.¹

I’m not going to review Coppola’s Megalopolis, though I’m not sure it’s been reviewed adequately yet. I’m not going to analyze it either, because I’d have to see it again to do so. Might the screenplay have been streamlined, some of the mid-film hallucinatory sequences trimmed, the whole production usefully reduced from two hours and 20 minutes to just two hours? Yes, probably. Is the political allegory at times too obtrusive and strained? I think it can be salvaged, but I also could have done without any red hats at all in the mise en scène.² Was I somewhat flattered into watching the movie by a loyal reader who wrote me a surpassingly eloquent comment both praising the film and systematically comparing it to my own novels?³ Lecteur, I was. But I’m not even exactly going to defend Megalopolis either; I would rather attempt to explain why it is the way it is, why some of us always wish to make a work of art just like this. Like what? My aforementioned reader, David Telfer, explains:

In its textual strata, it offers a tapestry of allusions, Dostoevskian melodrama, Dickensian charactonym, Brechtian directness. In its aesthetic essence, owing much to the garish and almost primitive CGI, it demands a certain imagination and suspension of disbelief. But most importantly, on its metaphysical plane, it encapsulates the uninhibited dreams of a singular artist. It embodies the unbridled freedom of the self-published novel in the best ways possible—precisely because of its maddening impurity. Megalopolis is a film that, I must admit, is a beautiful mess.

The setting is specified—an alt-present Roman America—but, being nonsensical, is also nowhere in particular, with plentiful allusions to real times and places in a jumble that might be derided as the postmodern midden of canceled history were this simultaneity of stopped time not the ambition all art secretly wishes to achieve, Shakespeare’s timeless untimely world-theater. Borges’s Aleph, Dante’s God—the totality of all there is. We are in every empire—American, Soviet, Roman, British—and in every story where love must conquer death and in every anguished Künstlerroman where the artist flees from the community he secretly longs to be welcomed back to. The dialogue, a tissue of allusion and sermon, consequently occupies every available verbal register with no concern for verisimilitude.⁴ Every word spoken is at once funny or ironic and keeningly sincere, as if we didn’t have to choose between questioning everything and knowing for sure. (The film’s hero hails dialogue itself as the only true utopia: perhaps the best definition of liberalism⁵ anyone has ever offered in this drama that, as David also says in my comments section, refuses to be an elegy for America.) The succession of imagery sometimes floats free of logic in a pure stream of poetic association. Science grows indistinct from magic, reality from fantasy, history from story.⁶ The elite and the populace become one through the agency of the artist, as do technology and nature. Art Deco lines bend to Art Nouveau curves as we learn to live in cities made of vine and tendril and stream. The film is a fantasy of the society in which such a film could be not only made but celebrated, normative. The art itself is nature.

Coppola’s so-called farrago, his megalomaniacal mess, has done us the service that dreams always do: of baring the dreamer’s—in this case the artist’s—inmost and ownmost wish beneath all the self-protective and resentful bluster: to rebuild and reknit the riven, ruined polis, to make love (the principle of connection underlying the essentially artistic practice of metaphor) the regulating principle not of a few isolated works, of a discourse called “art” and set aside as such from the graceless and brutal quotidian, but the very substance of the slightest action in the everyday, as if every step were a dance. Or, to quote the Schillerian (and Hegelian) thesis of Megalopolis’s great almost century-old precursor, Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis: “The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.”

For reminding us of this precept, whether we find it persuasive or not, whether we find it dangerous or not, and for indiscreetly unveiling why artists ply our lonely trade, and not for fabricating some merely well-made or “quality” film, our elder artist, still experimenting at the terminal threshold of the void or the pleroma, deserves our thanks.

1. I don’t have infinite patience for directors’ eccentric or excessive passion projects, however, whether they are old or merely middle-aged. I only got partway through Inland Empire, I found Mother! unendurable, and I was positively disgusted by Beau Is Afraid. But I admired Killers of the Flower Moon and even adored Crimes of the Future. I could be wrong about any or all of these, including Megalopolis. I am neither young nor old, but I am old enough to remember the derision and incomprehension that greeted Eyes Wide Shut, now universally acclaimed as an indispensable classic. I want to see Sofia Coppola in this mode next.

2. I’ll make a brief attempt here, spoiler-filled and of interest only to those who watched the film. I saw right-wingers on X complaining that the movie is an allegory about Democrats (Cicero) and NeverTrump conservatives (Cesar) allying to defeat Trump (Clodio). But this is backward. Our social-media right-wingers are ungracious in victory in this right-wing decade when even Kamala Harris is threatening to gun down intruders, boasting of our lethal military, and posing next to the border wall. The Jan-6-looking rabble of the film is first allied with the aesthetic genius Cesar—at Crassus’s wedding banquet in the center of the narrative, for example—and is only later misled to unite with Clodio when it proves unprepared to sacrifice for Cesar’s utopian vision. At the film’s climax, the Jan-6-looking mob justly turns on Clodio and rejoins Cesar’s party. These are not MSNBC politics, they’re the politics of Red Scare: MAGA is legitimate insofar as it represents a progressive union of the artistic genius with the deprived populace, illegitimate insofar as it is only the plutocrat’s opportunistic and regressive flattery or arousal of the ignorant multitude. Clodio is not only not an artistic genius but is also a phony populist, a decadent pervert (one might credibly accuse the film of a certain transphobia) who puts on a vaguely southern drawl: more GWB than DJT. Whatever variations Coppola plays on Roman history—I’m weak on Roman history—the film’s utopian fantasy of present-day politics is a synthesis of MAGA with the liberal elite, each correcting the errors of the other, over the vanquished husk of the now-worthless old GOP, symbolized essentially by Coppola’s literal wedding of white man to black woman in a marriage of true minds, like those A.I. memes of Trump and Kamala falling in love, getting married, and having a baby. You will object that I am imposing my own utopian fantasy onto the film, but, while I admit you have my contrarian politics right, I still think (from a first viewing anyway) that it’s a legitimate interpretation of the text’s political unconscious. This gives me the chance to break out a meme I made that might anger people, an anger to which Megalopolis and Major Arcana may very well minister in this most divisive of autumns:

3. I have still not read an entire Sally Rooney novel—what I did read of Conversations with Friends and Normal People seemed too TVish for me, though maybe it works if you manage to get lost in it—so I’m going to have to pass on that whole contretemps, despite its monopolization of the literary discourse this week. I observe only friend-of-the-blog Gnocchic Apocryphon’s observation of Andrea Long Chu’s unexpected rave (we contrarians have to blindside the audience from time to time), her two if not three cheers for bourgeois ideology and The Great Tradition:

Chu used to be radical, she used to be extreme, you were never entirely sure if she wanted to be taken seriously or not, while now she’s a safe girl to love in New York panning Zadie Smith for being a liberal or complaining that Ottessa Moshfegh doesn’t believe in the revolution. All that’s stayed the same is that still somehow you're still never quite sure if she wants to be taken seriously or not. I bring all this up to sloppily conclude this overview with a point about this peculiarity of the evolution of an idea or set of ideas in light of the evolution of a thinker. How brilliant! how strange! to cite György Lukács’ Theory of the Novel in the interests of a positive evaluation of an oeuvre one imagines a scholar-critic of a different era such as Nancy Armstrong or Edward Said eviscerating.

Please see my IC episode on Jane Austen, an impassioned defense of Austen’s literary mode against the likes of Armstrong and Said, lest you think me a mere Melvillean phallocrat or whale-dick rider. Chu’s rave amusingly puts me in the same position as Rooney. When I was in the midst of Major Arcana I believed that, like Melville at sea in Moby-Dick, I was writing a “wicked book,” a radical opera of gender apocalypticism and spiritual syncretism, one that would have a consortium of TERFs, trans activists, Jews, Christians, and Thelemites descending on me, harpoons in hand, for the kill. Ironically, though, the only critical controversy the novel has aroused so far is a suspicion that it is too humanistic, bourgeois, conciliatory, 19th-century, and all-around Austenian. Friend-of-the-blog Mary Jane Eyre implies as much in a footnote to a two-part pan (here and here) of a political treatise whose title MJ abbreviates as “LAAWOL,” intending (I assume) this possible acronym-cum-cri-de-coeur to be a successor to “IJBOL” as a next-gen replacement for the Millennials’ now perceivedly Boomerish “LOL.” Politically, I suppose I undershot the Overton Window, landing on a gender ideology somewhere to the left of Brianna Wu’s. As for the religious syncretism, we knowers are probably all Thelemites now, whatever we claim to profess, certainly too much so to grow gratuitously offended on behalf of Judaism or Christianity. (Though if your flight attendant tells you to have a “blessed” day, just smile and say “thank you,” for the love of Horus.) Major Arcana did originally feature what would have been an incendiarily ambiguous Israel-Palestine passage set in Rafah, but I cut it—and deleted it entirely—about five weeks before October 7 last year. As someone says in the novel, quoting the TikTok and YouTube mystics, “Rejection is God’s protection.”

4. I am thinking here about friend-of-the-blog BP’s appreciation of Christopher Logue’s brilliant War Music, a “version” of the Iliad written with a modernist and neo-Elizabethan swagger. Years ago, I taught War Music as the first main text, alongside Anne Carson’s “versions” of Euripides, to a slightly bewildered Introduction to Literature class comprised entirely of high-school students taking it for college credit. They were bewildered at first, yes, but by the time I got them to Mrs. Dalloway at the other end of the semester, they were positively swimming in the stream of consciousness, entranced by Woolf’s drowned but still smoldering narrative. Anyway, in this footnote, it is BP’s footnote, again indicting the bourgeois literature of settled periods, that compels, chastens, and even harrows me:

Not coincidentally, both the Elizabethan poets and the modernists were obsessed with antiquity. The Victorians, with their dark satanic mills and their rain, steam, and speed, seem fusty to us now while Donne and Shakespeare remain somehow immediate. Though it should be said that when the English language is tamed it can be better harnessed into service creating characters, landscapes, minutely realized societies, as in the Victorian novel. I suspect the 21st century, with our world-shaking new social technologies and our attitude of haughty disdain towards the unenlightened past, will come to be seen similarly to the 19th. 

5. I hate that you people have gotten me into Chappell Roan (talk about audience capture!), but here we are, so let me make a few remarks about her recent witch-burning at the hands of the chronically righteous. Granted that she erred in responding at all to the illegitimate demand placed on her to endorse the Democratic candidate (frankly, if I may, writers, artists, and anyone else who relies on robust free-speech protections should think twice before endorsing a party as censorship-happy as the Democrats have become, which is not at all to exonerate Republicans on similar issues), and granted that her responses were a confused mix of the unimpeachable (“I will always question those in power and those making decisions over other people,” she admirably avers) and the incoherent (“Palestine!” she exclaims at one point, as if this single word implied an obvious solution to a so-far intractable problem; both parties having pledged their support for Israel, it’s possible that Trump, with his greater frankness and familiarity with the current Israeli leadership, as well as his acute sensitivity to media perception, would, in an only-Nixon-can-go-to-China or Tory-men-and-Whig-measures way, be better for the human rights situation; not being an expert in this area, though, I am also prepared to eat these words, and offer them only as an illustration that the remedy may not be as obvious as we think, that history is contingent and ironic and not readily answerable to supposedly self-evident moral binarisms), but the popular hounding of this artist is noxious.

It betrays a dangerous lack of sophistication about the relation between politics and art—a mistake that the late Fredric Jameson himself, for all that he and I disagreed about many things, would not have made. Jameson understood the work of art to be not a political blueprint, not a question of what candidate the artist qua citizen does or does not “endorse”—imagine caring about this—but as a repository of humanity’s utopian longing for a world without alienation, without mastery and servitude, without a slavish obedience to brute necessity, without the infliction of suffering upon the powerless by the powerful. Jameson’s intensely “collectivist” vision of such a world radically diverged from my more individualistic one—heaven to him would be hell to me, as Keats said of Milton—but the basic idea about aesthetics here is correct, as encapsulated in the epigraph from Lenin to one of Jameson’s books that to the effect that an intelligent idealism is superior even from a Marxist point of view to an unintelligent materialism.

(Someone asked me for my immediate response to Jameson’s death; I answered here, with two links to my earlier criticism of his theory. Someone else asked me to keep an eye out for good obits and elegies. Honestly, I think the finest elegy, though it appeared back in January, is Leo Robson’s warm and surprising defense in the New Left Review of Jameson as aesthete. Alex Ross, in his brief eulogy, quoted Jameson on Wagner:

He once wrote that the ending of the Ring “is paradigmatic of all great art in the way in which it foregrounds not this or that solution (bound in any case to be ideological), but rather the contradiction itself.”

Which sounds very bourgeois, very 19th-century, very humanistic. Maybe dialogue is the true utopia after all. We are all Thelemites; we are all liberals. Jane, Sally, Andrea, and I are happy, I’m sure, to welcome Fred to the club/cult. Marilynne Robinson, however, is not invited.)

The artist is advised in such circumstances to practice a certain elusiveness around these subjects, no matter what the audience may infer from (to take another star as example) the artist’s recent marriage to an unvaxxed alligator-wrangler. If you think that you are ever going to be able to turn the artist’s inherent utopianism, this politics-without-a-politics, this “poet’s politics…in a poet’s world” or “Italy of the mind” (as Stevens, thinking of Shelley, called it), this apolitical permanent revolution, into a party platform or a party endorsement that has the power to bring this utopian horizon to the foreground today, if you think you are going to immanentize this eschaton by self-righteously tormenting a chanteuse—well, as the poet said, “Good luck, babe.”

6. My favorite line of dialogue comes in the meet-cute between Cesar and Julia when this erudite party-girl presents her credentials to work with the genius before he realizes that she harbors a genius equal to his own. He exclaims, “You think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Emersonian mind?” LAAWOL!