Weekly Readings #154 (01/13/25-01/19/25)

an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses

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

This week saw the triumphant return of The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, with “Twists and Turns,” an episode on The Odyssey, the first in a sequence on Ancient Greek literature. There I address translation controversies, our lack of knowledge about “Homer” and what esoterica can be put in its place, and the epic’s status as “first bourgeois novel” enshrining the arts of domestic peace, among other topics. Next week, we begin our study of Athenian drama with Aeschylus and The Oresteia. Thanks to my paid subscribers! If you’re not a paid subscribers, please subscribe today, not only to join us on the 2025 voyage, but to access the 2024 archive.

I was also honored to participate in Eleanor Anstruther’s 8 Questions interview series focused on authors’ experiences on Substack. I discuss what drew me to this platform and my experience serializing fiction on here, as well as my use of footnotes, my excessive consciousness of the audience, and more.

Speaking of serialized fiction, my novel Major Arcana, originally published here between March 2023 and February 2024, is forthcoming from Belt Publishing on April 22. If you want to encourage risk, daring, and ambition in American fiction, please pre-order Major Arcana here. If you can’t wait, a paid subscription purchases you access to the original Substack serial, including my audio rendition of each chapter.

Curiously, no one has yet been able to write a convincingly bad review of this epic about an American Faust. It’s almost as if Major Arcana is magically protected. The anonymous reviewer at Publishers Weekly seems not to have cared for it, for example, but could only come up, as pejorative epithets, with “digressive and morbid.” Why would it occur to anyone to read a novel that is not “digressive and morbid”? If I bought a novel and it wasn’t “digressive and morbid,” I would demand a refund! Not to mention, space being at a premium in PW reviews, that the phrase “digressive and morbid” contains more letters than are necessary to say “Dostoevskian.”¹ Others, however, are enjoying the novel enough to encourage anyone to digress on over to wherever books are sold and put in a pre-order, and I thank them for it.

For today, thoughts on irony and The Brutalist, plus the usual wide-ranging footnotes. Thanks for reading—and please enjoy!

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The Divine Breath of Irony: (Im)Permanent Parabasis from Schlegel to The Brutalist

The Brutalist trailer

I. Schlegel and the Defense of Irony

I begin with what I posted to Substack Notes this week in sympathetic response to a daring contention of Noah Kumin’s:

Several of the replies to my post recognized my argument as one reminiscent of Friedrich Schlegel, who argued in his aphorisms and fragments for irony as the essence of poetry and philosophy. I give you three of his nonconsecutive statements, the second and third slightly truncated, all translated by Peter Firchow:

Philosophy is the real homeland of irony, which one would like to define as logical beauty: for wherever philosophy appears in oral or written dialogues—and is not simply confined into rigid systems—there irony should be asked for and provided. And even the Stoics considered urbanity a virtue. Of course, there is also a rhetorical species of irony which, sparingly used, has an excellent effect, especially in polemics; but compared to the sublime urbanity of the Socratic muse, it is like the pomp of the most splendid oration set over against the noble style of an ancient tragedy. Only poetry can also reach the heights of philosophy in this way, and only poetry does not restrict itself to isolated ironical passages, as rhetoric does. There are ancient and modern poems that are pervaded by the divine breath of irony throughout and informed by a truly transcendental buffoonery. Internally: the mood that surveys everything and rises infinitely above all limitations, even above its own art, virtue, or genius; externally, in its execution: the mimic style of an averagely gifted Italian buffo.

Socratic irony is the only involuntary and yet completely deliberate dissimulation. It is equally impossible to feign it or divulge it. To a person who hasn’t got it, it will remain a riddle even after it is openly confessed. It is meant to deceive no one except those who consider it a deception and who either take pleasure in the delightful roguery of making fools of the whole world or else become angry when they get an inkling they themselves might be included. In this sort of irony, everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden. It originates in the union of savoir vivre and scientific spirit, in the conjunction of a perfectly instinctive and a perfectly conscious philosophy. It contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute arid the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. It is the freest of all licenses, for by its means one transcends oneself; and yet it is also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary. It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody…

An idea is a concept perfected to the point of irony, an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts. […] But to transport oneself arbitrarily now into this, now into that sphere, as if into another world, not merely with one's reason and imagination, but with one's whole soul; to freely relinquish first one and then another part of one’s being, and confine oneself entirely to a third; to seek and find now in this, now in that individual the be-all and end-all of existence, and intentionally forget everyone else: of this only a mind is capable that contains within itself simultaneously a plurality of minds and a whole system of persons, and in whose inner being the universe which, as they say, should germinate in every monad, has grown to fullness and maturity.

In contrast to our own “harmonious bores”² who fulminate against irony—a tradition begun with Hegel³—Schlegel understands irony not as if it were simply sarcasm or satire, a nihilistic posture of sneering superiority,⁴ but as a rigorous ethical discipline akin to Keats’s “negative capability” or the later pluralism of Emerson and William James, not to mention Henry James’s ideal of fiction as a house with a million windows.

To be ironic not to stand above all things but to be willing to enter into all things, to become all things. A protean and flexible capacity to entertain many ideas and emotions, indispensable both to art and to thought, irony is the necessary inner equipage for living in a complex and differentiated society. But the ironist also fuses, integrates, and synthesizes, creating fractious, dialogic new forms—Schlegel idolized the novel, “the Socratic dialogues of our time”—out of what the merely harmonious would leave as mutually antagonistic, mutually destructive antitheses. Irony’s antonym is less sincerity—most ironists will own up to being ironists—than fanaticism or monomania. On the politics of irony, we might recall another of Schlegel’s aphorisms:

Poetry is republican speech: a speech which is its own law and end unto itself, and in which all the parts are free citizens and have the right to vote.

An ironic aesthetic, relativizing all parts of the artwork in relation to one another, disclaims a totalizing structure to which all elements are subordinate to one end, to one “overwhelming intention.”

Schlegel also defines irony with the paradoxical phrase “permanent parabasis.” “Parabasis” is the chorus’s direct address to the audience in Greek drama; to make parabasis permanent is to make the proverbial fourth wall porous at all points, not so much with constant obtrusive metafictional devices—these in their way can be totalizing and didactic, as in Brecht—but with what Schlegel above evokes as a light air of self-parody cast over the whole production. We seek a charming or wry glint in the artwork’s eye⁵ that permits us to take or leave it, and therefore freely and truly to love it, if we will.

II. Against The Brutalist

In canonical film criticism, Manny Farber’s emptily monumental “white elephant art” is the opposite of Schlegelian irony. Farber upheld ironic cinema, by contrast, as “termite art” for the artist’s single-minded fixation on tunneling through the possibilities of form without an excessive (implicitly social) concern to build a masterpiece.⁶

Brady Corbet has done us all the service, if that’s the word, of furnishing an example in The Brutalist of an ambitious artwork without irony. I haven’t read or seen any essay or review that has really begun to grapple with what this film is actually saying and doing. An old lady—I was in Squirrel Hill, so perhaps an old Jewish lady, possibly a relevant fact in this case—turned to her companion on the way out of the theater and said incredulously, “Now why did they make that movie?” It’s a good question, difficult to answer in a review without spoiling an almost four-hour movie. So, without discussing the plot at all, I will simply give you the movie’s ideological schematic: the narrative redefines Brutalism and a suite of related practices going back to the Bauhaus according to canons of fascist art—idealist, eternal,⁷ monumental, literally marmoreal, referentially transparent, intended to give “meaning” to “the people”—but redeems these fascist aesthetics by attributing them to a Jewish artist as his rightful anti-fascist revenge for the Holocaust. Except that our beleaguered and traumatized hero undertakes this revenge not against Germans but against provincial wealthy American Protestants of Dutch stock, who in their turn stand revealed as the actual culture-less degenerate corrupt money-grubbing queers and perverts for whom the benighted Nazis merely mistook the Jewish people.

(I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but Fredric Jameson is dead, so you’re stuck with me.)

As for the commonplace of the reviews so far—that the film treats the conflict between the artist and “capitalism”—capitalism as such is not emphasized in the narrative. We could be in an 18th-century polemic against l’ancien régime, as implied by the film’s overt or covert association of its American tycoon and his family with the sexual deviances of incest, rape, and above all homosexuality. As I once said elsewhere, the socialism of fools takes so many different forms that socialism itself may very well be a folly.

We might take The Brutalist as the high-art complement to Inglorious Basterds, superficially another excursion into a Jewish-branded fascist anti-fascism, except that Tarantino is rigorously ironic at the level of form and therefore manages to satisfy various criteria for “art after Auschwitz,” most of them leaning implicitly on a strong theory of irony to forestall the erection of a killing Gesamtkunstwerk. In lieu of formal irony, Corbet provides the opposite of irony, accomplished (ironically!) via metafiction: the implied equation of the film itself with its central work of architecture. This metafiction, rather than ironizing the film’s thesis (baldly stated at the conclusion⁸), only reinforces it, just as in Brutalist architecture the structure is equivalent to the materials. About those materials, however, Corbet makes Carrara marble—obviously not part of the Brutalist program to use cheap material “as found”—central to the plot, and to the superficial “anti-fascist” theme, an only apparent irony that twists all the way back around to the sincerity of a timeless architecture: Brutalism as an epic neoclassicism, what Corbet has elsewhere glossed as his attraction to a maximalist minimalism.⁹

Because he has to work with such unpropitious material as characters and performers, the latter of whom need Oscars, Corbet does also proffer some lachrymose, stereotypical, or outlandish psychologizing, pseudo-neo-Shakespeare, which, by articulating the bathos of the heroic artist and his family’s self-sacrifice, also amplifies the message rather than interfering with it. Guy Pearce’s charmingly aristocratic camping and Felicity Jones’s winsomely daemonic eros burn through the film’s mannered grandiosity at times, but other than that, what we have here is a classic case of “white elephant art”: a dead dream of faded grandeur.

The film’s drubbingly magisterial texture is in fact the formal corollary of its theme. Corbet leaves us no remainder, not a scrap, nothing for the audience to play with. As our hero rhetorically inquires, “Is there a better description of a cube than its own construction?” Form and content, signifier and signified, are wholly at one, and irony, its necessary reminder of the inherent disjunction between mind and world, nowhere to be seen in all the massive structure.¹⁰

1. It’s unsporting to dispute a negative review, but I must briefly take exception to this critic’s implication that only people who already love comic books will enjoy the novel. No prior knowledge about comics is needed to appreciate the book—all you need to know is explained in its pages—and, on the thematic level, the book stages an aesthetical-ethical dispute between the novel and the graphic novel as forms of narrative art where the latter does not really come out on top. It would be an exaggeration to say Major Arcana is intended to complete the work begun by Watchmen of making the superhero comic book unthinkable as a species of adult entertainment—but only a slight exaggeration.

2. I have in mind David Foster Wallace, author of such unfortunately unironic epigrams (if that’s not an oxymoron) as “fiction is about what it means to be a fucking human being.” Another moralist (like DFW) undone by his own circumstantial immorality is Neil Gaiman. I have nothing to add to my original verdict on this author, bard and laureate of my adolescence. Oliver Bateman’s judgment, “Neil Gaiman Was Always Awful,” is probably just, but I find Gaiman’s case slightly more tragic than Bateman would allow. The author of Sandman could have gone on to write greater things, but he chose to court, to seduce, and finally to trespass upon the public instead. If he’d written greater things and behaved just as badly, we would be left with the familiar and by now rather tedious conundrum of the reprobate genius. Now we have just the reprobate. Relatedly, I was perusing the new Penguin Classics anthology of René Girard’s writings. In a striking essay on Nietzsche, Girard applies his theory of the scapegoat’s sacrifice and deification to the process of canon-formation. We moderns, Girard argues, require the genius to be wicked so that we may immolate him as our social scapegoat only to recoup him later as culture-hero poète maudit. Nietzsche, says Girard, explicitly understood this process before anyone else, thus his setting himself so willfully apart from society as a shocking contrarian-provocateur, safe in the knowledge that he would be posthumously idolized for these very transgressions. Like all cynical theories of canonization—here the right-wing Catholic Girard is really at one with the Marxists and Foucauldians on the left—this underrates the intrinsic merit of the work required for the poet to enter the pantheon. Any idiot off the street can be maudit, but if the poésie isn’t actually great, then forget it. So I suspect it will prove with Gaiman.

3. See Hegel’s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics for his denunciation of “the so-called Irony” which leads artists to regard “every possible thing [as] a mere dead creature, to which the free creator, knowing himself to be wholly unattached, feels himself in no way bound, seeing that he can annihilate it as well as create it.” This seems to me to be a philosopher’s typical underrating of the sheer passion that goes into the artist’s disinterested power of universal identification. Schlegel, by the way, for all the new Romantics around here, first named and theorized Romanticism as such, which I discuss, along with his concept of Romantic irony, in the Invisible College episode on S. T. Coleridge.

4. I enjoyed Vincenzo Barney’s spirited report from the Red Scare Dean Kissick Harper’s event on contemporary art. There are whispers that New Atheism might come back, and Barney’s citations of Hitchens and Russell, and his antagonism toward postmodernism, support that surmise. I think this is and always was a dead end, no matter how sick we all get of the Christian moralizing that’s replaced wokeness in some quarters of intellectual and artistic life. Somebody, not me, probably Mary Jane, should write a full-scale defense of that most maligned position, “spiritual but not religious.” (I put this footnote here so I could venture the following proposition: Anna is a satirist; Dasha is an ironist. But this post is already too long for me to elaborate.) Anyway, here is my favorite part of Barney’s piece:

I am, like Nabokov (if I may try to appear kindred for just a moment), only interested in individual genius. And I am prepared to argue that unseduceable posterity takes the same enlightened prejudice. And that individuals of various identities, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, have all produced works of non-identity-politic genius and will continue to. But political art is for major satirists and minor artists. As a sole and primary impetus it is for hacks and dies from memory unlamented. The American dustbin is full of once oppressively lauded novels and plays and poems of supposed socio-political import that did nothing but prove the credulity and bad taste of America’s endless cycles of Puritan publics. (For the record, these works to which I refer span the gamut of our inadequate political spectrum.)

5. Noah, who knows more about it than I do, will recognize in this exaltation of self-parody his beloved Roberto Calasso’s criterion for “absolute literature” in Literature and the Gods.

6. And the foremost termite artist, David Lynch, has left us. I have nothing to add to the tributes. His influence has been so pervasive—speaking of insects, he is really the Kafka of our time: the artist who delineated an entirely new sensibility, one which, after its disclosure, came to seem universal and unavoidable in its very strangeness—that we might now honor him by trying as hard as we can not to be Lynchian. (My tribute to his strangeness is to admit I didn’t always see what he was going for.) He has been eulogized, veritably memeified, as an artist of uncommon sincerity, indeed hailed as not ironic, and this is true inasmuch as he wasn’t a satirist, not of Hollywood or the suburbs or small towns or anything else, but his work does triumphantly answer Schlegel’s criteria of permanent parabasis, of a self-parody fully consistent with passion, as dramatized, for example, here.

7. Art should be eternal, but it shouldn’t be timeless. It should be always untimely, which irony guarantees.

8. A footnote for pedantic quibblers. Leftists who like this movie claim the ending to be ironic, but nothing about the cinematic rhetoric of the epilogue implies irony. The dissolves between Zsófia’s opening interrogation and culminating lecture move from dominated to dominating discourse, from the onset of a defensive muteness to her triumphant finding of voice, even as her lecture, like the wrap-up explanation in a mystery, tells us the literal meaning of what we have seen. The ending could not be explanatory if it were ironic. Rather, the film would only be ironic—because we wouldn’t know the significance of the construction; it would remain a teasing mystery, like the box in Mulholland Drive—without the ending. The Venetian monuments the camera surveys on its way to the Biennale, weathered but not defeated by time, testify to the legitimacy of László’s architectural mission to build what will last, underlining the theme of “The Presence of the Past.” What in the film demands I not read the memorable last line as the story’s earnest moral, sealing narrative process into semiotic finality, converting the time of the viewing experience into the space of the finished film as timeless monument? (Schlegel’s theory of irony requires that we recognize the importance of the journey and the destination.) The leftist critics judge the ending ironic because they can’t believe anyone intelligent thinks anything other than what they think, so even didactic art made by the opposing side has to be read as if it were a snide teen’s sarcasm. But no, The Brutalist, like all bad art, is sincere. See also Corbet’s previous film, Vox Lux, a pleasantly eerie explanation of how female pop stars preaching empowerment are literally minions of Satan. Natalie Portman’s poignantly layered performance in the lead saves the film from this thesis, which, by the way, Willem Dafoe’s smug voiceover associates with the rise of Trump—perhaps proving my controversial and longstanding thesis that Trump derangement has been the real conservatism all along.

9. Whereas I generally don’t like minimalism at all. You know what they say: less is morbid.

10. The last lines of my first draft were too much, but I’ll bury them down here for anyone who may be amused by them: And do we really need a Europhile nostalgic’s boring and high-handed lecture about how America is “rotten”? As the poet said: if you don’t like it, you can beat it, beat it, baby.