Weekly Readings #147 (11/25/24-12/01/24)

a history of interesting mistakes

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

The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, took a holiday break for Thanksgiving, but I remind readers in this week of Americana that the first episode in the American literature sequence, “I Will Live Then from the Devil,” on Ralph Waldo Emerson, is free to all. Please offer a paid subscription to listen to the now vast archive, to the final three episodes of 2024, and to whatever I come up with for 2025. Thanks to all those who are already paid subscribers!

I also want to note with gratitude some recent notices of my new novel, Major Arcana, forthcoming from Belt Publishing in April 2025, which you can pre-order here, get from NetGalley here, and access in its original Substack serial format (including my audio rendition) as a paid subscriber here. First, an endorsement from where else but the Red Scare podcast sub-Reddit in reply to someone who wanted recommendations of long entertaining high-brow novels:

If you won’t listen to Diogenes Teufelsdroch, who will you listen to?

Next are a few reviews from early readers on Netgalley. Some of these reviews are positive. For example:

Structurally, the book is a marvel. Its layers unfurl like a tarot spread—deliberate, symbolic, and ultimately illuminating. The serialized origins of Major Arcana lend it a kind of episodic rhythm, reminiscent of 19th-century novels, yet utterly contemporary in its execution. It is both homage and innovation, bridging the gaps between old forms and new sensibilities. There's a tactile charm in its pacing, like turning over cards in a deck, each one adding to the cumulative weight of its revelations.

[…]

Pistelli has crafted something more than a novel. He’s created an experience—a layered, labyrinthine dive into the human condition as refracted through the prism of academia, art, and ambition. Read it slowly. Let it confound and seduce you. Some books are meant to be consumed; this one feels like it consumes you right back.

Some are seemingly less so: “The writing felt a bit disjointed and the plot itself was strange.” And yet. It has never even occurred to me to read—much less to write!—a novel where the plot was not strange. So I’m afraid I take that pan as praise. Finally, an impossibly generous response sent to my super-secret Tumblr:

Thank you for the treasures of the Invisible College, and also for Major Arcana. I can’t tell you how hungry it has been to wait for Major Arcana’s proof that, as Mary Jane Eyre said, the present actually has so much in it to write imaginatively about. I felt welcome shame in reading it too, mostly because it showed that all feelings of being at a cultural dead end mean nothing except that one had not eyes to see and ears to hear as you did. Thank you for illuminating the old spiritual energies (“the prison of the flesh”), and the awareness to the point of crisis of conceptional tensions in modern cornerstones such as feminism, animating so much that gets dismissed as faddish youth derangement.

For today, more on Hugh Kenner, modernism, Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and what the reader, rather than the writer, needs to know to appreciate a work of literature. Last time I wrote about this topic, and with barely a controversial political footnote, 10 people unsubscribed! I made sure to put a controversial political footnote in this one to hold your attention. Please enjoy!

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Knowledge and the Loss of Power II: What Does the Reader Need to Know?

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875)

I’m still reading The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner’s compendious reliquary of an abortive, war-slaughtered modernism that would, he claims, have been a second Renaissance—

“The 20th century’s early modernism,” we yawn respectfully or indifferently. There have been so many modernisms. That period, we feel sure, played itself out. But it never played; its energies separated, some were cancelled by lead, its synergies faded amid the roar of field guns.

—and so this will be a sequel to my last post from two weeks ago on said book. There I asked myself, inspired by Kenner’s chapters on the philological and archaeological basis of Pound’s and Joyce’s modernism, what the writer needs to know to write a great work and what kind of knowledge, conversely, might prove to block or misshape the writing. This time, inspired by Kenner’s rumination on the Romantic lineage of Eliot’s rather vaguer modernism, as well as by this new Slate article on “rawdogging Ulysses,”¹ I want to ask instead what the reader needs to know to read a great book.

In a chapter called “Words Set Free,” Kenner wonders if most poetic obscurity before the modern era originally had a definite referent known to the poet, just as archaeologists had established the “realism” of Homer by discovering places and objects corresponding to his verse. Words appear beautiful to later readers in their vagueness; this vagueness itself sets the imagination spinning. But for the poet, the words may have been perfectly quotidian ones, words heard on the street, in the pub, in the kitchen.

Kenner offers the example of a well-known Shakespearean couplet—Cymbeline’s “Golden boys and girls all must, / Like chimney sweepers, come to dust”—long celebrated for its evocative beauty and wit. But the phrase was discovered in the middle 20th century, reports Kenner, to allude to a then-still-extant Warwickshire idiom about dandelions. Shakespeare likely heard it in his boyhood and transcribed it into his late play.

But we, the heirs of Mallarmé and Valery and Eliot, do not simply pass over “golden” but find it richly Shakespearean, its very indefiniteness interacting as though chemically with the other words in the poem.

This potential loss of the referent was a tragedy to artists of precision like Joyce and Pound, who labored to fill their epics with as much concrete detail as possible in patterns shaped by myth and history. As I have argued before, Joyce is hard to read not because he’s mysterious or vague or opaque, but because he is blindingly clear. He means too much. Every phoneme in Ulysses is hyperlinked to a palpable fact.

By contrast, says Kenner, Eliot belongs to a different tradition, one beginning with Keats in England and Mallarmé in France. Here the poet consciously intends to use language imprecisely to summon an air of the mysterious to the reader’s mind.

Certain remarks of Mallarmé’s, as that poetry is made not of ideas but of words, that the poem can convey “for example, the horror of the forest, or the silent thunder afloat in the leaves, not the intrinsic dense wood of the trees,” or that the things words seem to name are non-existent, since there is no thing the word “flower” names: all these seem to us now self-evident, and we read them back with profit into the work of poets who never heard of them. And certain practices of Keats, endeavoring to layer into his Odes a history of which he was largely ignorant except as he could sense its presence in language (faery, pointing to Spenser; Tempe and Arcady, names merely; Provençal song, something fine he had heard of, associated not with trobar clus but with sunburnt mirth) seem to us so normal as to be hardly worth remarking. Poems are structures of words.

Kenner pointedly contrasts two verses of Eliot’s (from The Waste Land) and Pound’s (from The Pisan Cantos) on this score, noting that Eliot pursued the vague path while Pound walked the path of knowledge, even though both verses have the power Eliot attributed to Dante’s poetry of communicating before they are understood:

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours 
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

and

Pull down thy vanity, 
                                     Paquin pull down! 
The green casque has outdone your elegance

will both communicate before they are understood, yet no knowledge about Coriolanus will lock Eliot’s lines neatly together as the information that Paquin was a Paris dressmaker will lock Pound’s. Pound omits, omits, but knows what he is omitting and can restore on demand, but behind Eliot’s resonances there is frequently nothing to restore (how centrifugal are the Notes to The Waste Land!).

Based on what I know of Kenner’s adulation of Pound and Joyce, and the skeptical account of modernist writers like Woolf and Stevens in his other criticism, I imagine he held this Romantic legacy inherited by Eliot in measured disdain.² He elsewhere concedes in The Pound Era, however, that the history of culture is a history of translation, transposition, and error.

He elaborates this thesis most dazzlingly in the chapter “The Persistent East,” where he traces the Orientalist organicism of Pound’s poetics, fixated on the philosophy implied by Pound’s and his master Ernest Fenollosa’s misunderstanding of the Chinese ideogram, back to Fenollosa’s beloved Transcendentalists; and from the Transcendentalists back to the German Romantics; and from the German Romantics back to the early modern speculative philosophy of Leibniz; and from Leibniz’s philosophy back to—Leibniz’s study of the Chinese language and reading of the Tao Te Ching! A closed circle of productive cultural misprision, “as though the east, with centuries-long deliberation, were writing the macro-history of western thought.” Kenner pauses to ask, “Is the life of the mind a history of interesting mistakes?”

If so, what does it matter if writers write and readers read to encounter not precise knowledge but refulgent mystery? Kenner thought Woolf a mere dilettante, but was she wrong when she wrote,

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

in “Modern Fiction”? Woolf consciously or unconsciously echoes the narrator’s mordant comment on Marlow’s proto-modernist storytelling technique in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

Conrad, too, was charged with an aesthetically and even politically damaging vagueness, as when F. R. Leavis arraigned Heart of Darkness for an overly portentous rhetoric unjustified by the tale itself, and when Chinua Achebe accused the same novella of racism on the grounds of its hallucinatory (rather than politically specific) African setting. Ironically, both Leavis and Achebe on Conrad echo Eliot, of all people, on Hamlet; Eliot accused Shakespeare of summoning emotions ungrounded in a persuasive “objective correlative” for those emotions in the events of the drama. “How centrifugal is Hamlet!” we might imagine Eliot crying in exasperation.

The essential problem all these critics, poets, and novelists are circling is that we often read literature to experience emotions unavailable in sufficient quantity or impolite to express in everyday life. We don’t want to be cheated out of these emotions by the writer’s mere rhetorical command that we feel them in the absence of legitimate provocation—this is what Kenner thinks is happening in Woolf and Eliot, what Eliot thinks is happening in Shakespeare, and what Leavis and Achebe think is happening in Conrad—but neither do we want that provocation to be so detailed that it impedes our ability to feel at all.

In fact, modernism (and its late- or post- sequelae) encompass both horns of this dilemma. If Pound and Joyce at their most Poundian and Joycean (and Pynchon a little later) place so many facts in our path that all we feel is frustration at the blockage, then the likes of Stein and Stevens at their most Steinian and Stevensian (and Ashbery a little later) pursue the opposite course of providing only an affective verbal shell not filled by any discernible content, or what Ashbery calls “the teasing outline / Of where we would be if we were here.”

If I myself have been accused of writing strange plots and of using words that most people don’t understand, I have also been called bourgeois, middlebrow, and even Victorian. Accordingly, I attempt, with Woolf and Conrad and Eliot, and with the Joyce of Ulysses’s first half, to hold the middle ground between these modernist (and late- and post-) extremes. My favorite works tend to be just anchored enough in fact—whether this is a fact internal to the work (character, plot, setting) or one external (as in allusions to history, religion, science, or other domains of knowledge)—to ground the affective experience, but not so heavily or on so short a chain as to sink the affective experience entirely. If this is the way I aspire to write, it is also the way I prefer to read. This brings us to the question of how to read Ulysses. The “rawdoggers” propose to read the novel with no secondary-source accompaniment at all, as recounted in the Slate article linked above:

Joyce scholars could spend entire seminars debating the virtues of their preferred handbooks, but when my group embarked on our own Ulysses endeavor last month, I was surprised to hear that many of my compatriots were bucking this trend entirely. They desired no hand-holding, no plot summaries, and certainly no $35 companion indexes. In other words, they intended to rawdog the book, allowing Joyce’s cascading passages to wash over their heads, and into the ether.

They are understandably attempting to avoid the vast and impenetrable thicket of academic commentary Ulysses has generated almost since its publication, from the youthful Kenner’s own pioneering studies (according to which Joyce’s works offer a startlingly Catholic conservative critique of modernity, as if Joyce were wholly akin to Eliot and Pound and not the descendant of the radicals Blake, Shelley, and Ibsen he in fact was) to the many permutations of psychoanalytic, Marxist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist, queer readings ad infinitum.

I myself have advised not to use Don Gifford’s magisterial Ulysses Annotated on a first reading. Too many facts! I even think you can skim a little, at least in “Cyclops” and “Oxen of the Sun” and “Circe” and “Ithaca,” where Joyce’s bravura contrivances grow genuinely tiresome and extraneous. But you can’t really quite read Joyce as if he were Woolf or Faulkner, who generally dispel their own mysteries if you give them enough time. Joyce’s difficulties are sometimes internal to the text—a second reading is much clearer than the first because you have already discovered all relevant diegetic information that Joyce conveys non-linearly in a procedure also used by Woolf and Faulkner (and Morrison a little later)—but sometimes they are external and can only be grasped by a guide able to tell you what heresiarchs Stephen Dedalus is thinking about on the strand or what happened in Phoenix Park in 1882. There is such a thing as not enough fact.³

The course to chart for both writer and reader is (to use a favored Joycean trope upon Homer) between the over-intellectualized many-headed Scylla of too much knowledge and the devouring whirlpool Charybdis of ignorant chaos. Anyone who can pass through these extremities will emerge with their art and life intact.⁴

1. I am torn between a Joycean appreciation of the vernacular and a skepticism that we must repeat ad nauseam and in all contexts every new coinage of the pornographic imagination. A novel that boasts a character named Cunty Kate, as Ulysses does, need not be defended from obscenity, nor need any novel at all avoid either the vernacular or the pornographic in their proper aesthetic places. My own novels essay both with a certain frequency. I am more irritated at the way such perverse coinages immediately become clichés drained of force and novelty when over-circulated by an online literati smirkingly impressed at its own adolescent desire to shock a bourgeoisie that no longer exists. Joyce used obscenity to abrade not only polite but genuinely dominant Victorian norms, as a countercultural force. Today one wonders if decorum is not the more radical gesture.

2. Indeed, The Pound Era begins with the master (The Master) of novelistic vagueness, Henry James, whom Kenner portrays as the misty incarnation (sans Greek and Latin) of every pregnant and portentous late-19th-century London fog Pound and his classicist cohort of what Kenner calls “Renaissance II” came to dispel with their violent archeo-futurist clarity:

The devotion of Henry James was to the literary form most elaborated by the 19th century: the prose fiction, which is to say, the enigma. In his Prefaces he hugs secrets, talking round that overwhelming question, what the story may be for. Even in his Notebooks as he ponders his theme or works out his tale we detect him flushed with orgies of reticence, divulging even to himself no more than he must know to ,get on with the job. This is not his perversity, but his deepest response to the nature of the craft he practiced. Always, the “story” has been a hermetic thing.

Of each of James’s novels, we might in fact say, “The plot itself was strange,” or so Kenner implies. We might also contrast two recent Invisible College novelists, each a son of James in his own way, on the precision or vagueness question: Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Hemingway, with his iceberg method, knew with Poundian exactitude what he omitted from his fiction, as when he discussed in interviews the precise nature of Jake Barnes’s war wound, which is in no way specified in The Sun Also Rises. Fitzgerald, meanwhile, avowedly descending from Keats, confessed that he himself did not know how Gatsby earned his wealth; he allowed the reader’s mystery to be his own.

3. I generally recommend for the first-time Ulysses reader a slim handbook of the sort that provides summaries of each chapter and its major Homeric allusions—Joyce himself sponsored and guided the first such book, Stuart Gilbert’s Ulysses: A Study, as the Slate article mentions—alongside online annotations that can be perused at leisure for the more stubborn facts. One online source that can fulfill both functions is my six-week sequence on Ulysses in The Invisible College, in which I not only guide you through the text with what I judge to be a first-time reader’s most relevant information but also provide an original and even disturbing interpretation of the novel. The first episode is freely available here, while the rest require a paid subscription.

4. By “life” I do not intend merely a flourish. The custodians of expert knowledge in our own time wax murderous. George Bernard Shaw’s plan—discussed here—to require citizens to plead their state-expensed lives to boards of public hygiene grows more actual by the day. It transpires that the expert class intends, or, more charitably, is led by technocratic logic, to exploit a genuine problem—mechanistic western medicine’s fruitless ability to keep the suffering terminal patient nominally alive long after any possibility of eudaemonia has fled—to cull the depressed, the poor, and other “burdens” on the supposedly strapped state. Libertarian critiques of socialism and social democracy I would have dismissed as inflammatory propaganda before 2020 seem more and more compelling to me. Two essays from this week to read on the question are Rose Lyddon’s poignant and brilliant reflection, “Never Kill Yourself,” right here on Substack—

There have been several points over the last fourteen years when, if given the option, I would have gladly opted for assisted suicide. Nor would this decision have seemed incomprehensible from the point of view of those who’ve known me and the various services tasked with keeping me alive. At times, I’ve been completely unable to function independently. I’ve been homeless, reliant on disability benefits, considered too high-risk to mental health services, considered untreatable. I would never have believed limp platitudes like ‘it gets better’ or ‘it won’t be like this forever.’ When I got the BPD diagnosis, I was told that it was incurable and that my best hope was of managing it, day in day out, for the rest of my life, probably while on antipsychotics. Now the only medication I’m on is for ADHD and I no longer meet the criteria for BPD. I don’t use any mental health services and I’ve learnt to manage my moods, which are still difficult, through lifestyle changes. I’m so grateful that none of the suicide attempts stuck before I realised that a good life was possible.

—and Ashley Frawley’s important polemic, “Assisted Dying Isn’t Freedom,” in Compact—

Far from being the triumph of the liberal progressive project that began in the 18th and 19th centuries, the rise and expansion of assisted dying marks its defeat. It isn’t about expanding self-determination, but about seeing the ongoing destruction of liberal subjectivity through to the end of life. Today, people are not encouraged to be autonomous. Our society invites people at every turn to doubt their capacity to decide for themselves. We are constantly told that human beings are weak, irrational, and vulnerable. Good citizens learn to see the exercise of their own free will without the careful consultation of expertise as a risk to themselves and others. The guiding ethos of our time assumes that most of the problems that face us are caused by the unruliness of human behavior. If people could just be made to think, feel, and thus behave in the correct ways, we would not have larger problems like economic crises, climate change, or even wars. While assisted dying isn’t about autonomy, it is about control. It is about control of the dangerous and unruly process of dying and thus the smooth and efficient functioning of the great administrative machine.

—which reminds us that a liberal project deracinated from a heroic metaphysics is likely to become its opposite in a totalizing and finally killing bureaucracy, a state that seeks to heal itself by extirpating its wounded human constituents tout court. I note in passing both Lyddon’s and Frawley’s implication that “therapy” as we have it today is not an innocent institution but is in fact, in its self-serving portrait of the human person as endemically debilitated by an originary trauma requiring the therapist’s endless expert remediation, an accomplice of this deadly state cult. It turns out, as implied by Lyddon’s ludically heroic ethos of altering one’s life before abandoning it to a negatively exalted sense of one’s own woundedness, that there are worse things in the world than “sentimental great men kitsch.”