Weekly Readings #155 (01/20/25-01/26/25)

publicists and purists

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

This week, for The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, I posted “We Must Suffer into Truth,” first in a sequence on Athenian drama. It concerns Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy The Oresteia, and its fable of the emergence of solar masculine youthful rationalized civilization out of chthonic feminine geriatric organic nature. Don’t shoot the messenger, but this is the message of the first complete extant western drama, a message it ingeniously replicates at the formal level¹ by decorating its structure of legal dialectic with grisly and gruesome horror-movie sequences that had the initial Athenian audience vomiting and fainting in the stands even as they were schooled in civilized arts. Thanks to my paid subscribers, and please offer a paid subscription today for access to the extensive archive of episodes on modern British and American literature and to forthcoming episodes on Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus.

I was also honored to have a guest essay, “Literature and Magic: The Marriage of Word and Image,” featured on the Substack of the fearless and forward-thinking Arcade Publishing. It’s about the “dangerous liaisons” among media—word, image, music—and features Scott McCloud, Marshall McLuhan, Richard Wagner, William Blake, Northrop Frye, and Arcade authors Emmalea Russo and Bruce Wagner.² I also did a Substack live about Tarot, magic, poetry, and both our forthcoming novels with Mars Review of Books editor (and Arcade author) Noah Kumin, which you can watch here.³

My forthcoming novel is Major Arcana, originally published on Substack between March 2023 and February 2024. It’s forthcoming from Belt Publishing on April 22, the first Substack-serialized novel to receive a book deal. 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. I will have good news to report about forthcoming reviews very soon, but, as aforesaid last week, even the bad reviews make this intergenerational saga of an American Faust and his (or whatever’s) occultist gender-bending reality-warping possible progeny sound like more fun than should be allowed when reading a mere book.⁴ Thanks to everyone who has already pre-ordered!

For today, a brief rumination on the writer as ideological persona and personality. (It’s a response to a reader inquiry about reader inquiries, published here for the first time.) Please enjoy!

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News from the Delphic Oracle: On Writers Answering Questions

John Collier, Priestess of Delphi (1891)

A reader writes in to my super-secret Tumblr to inquire:

If you could pick any writer to have a super secret tumblr like yours that answered anonymous questions as frequently and in depth as you do, even one from beyond the grave, who would you pick? What would you ask?

I would first like to abuse my inquirer’s allowance of “beyond the grave” to get the secrets of the ancient world divulged, now that I’m remembering all over again due to recent Invisible College episodes how little we really know about Greek literature. Imagine asking Aeschylus on Tumblr, “What were the Eleusinian Mysteries?” I’d also ask Dante if he truly was a secret Cathar, a practitioner of gnostic love religion.

Now when it comes to more recent figures, there are some writers who are “persons of letters” and publish their every stray thought in among the novels, poems, and plays (I am like this), so you wouldn’t need to ask them anything on Tumblr. Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Gore Vidal, Cynthia Ozick, Martin Amis, people like this. What opinion did they leave unexpressed?

Then, as opposed to the publicists, we have the purists, the reticent ones, the ones who leave the creative work to speak for itself, those who either never wrote an interesting essay in their lives or who wrote very guarded and esoteric-seeming ones, those whose letters (if we have them) aren’t even that compelling. James Joyce, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro. Obviously one would like to ask people in the latter category the most questions! But I think this would prove disappointing. I think we would find they had dull and conventional opinions, precisely because they put all their creativity into their fiction. Supposedly Morrison spent her final years watching MSNBC and railing against the orange man; if we found out it was the same thing except from the other side with McCarthy,⁵ would we be surprised? It might be fun to know details about what music they liked or if they’d read this or that book and what they thought of it, but I don't believe they’d thrive in this format.

People of letters attempt to offer fascination on the very level of public controversy as surely as they shape the plots and the sentences of their novels; they (we) are not just tossing off opinions but crafting a public persona as an aesthetic object.⁶ So those whose super secret Tumblrs would be fun are the same people whose essays and letters and media appearances were fun in the first place. Wilde and Shaw would be good on here, as would Woolf and Lawrence, as would Vidal.⁷ And yet, because they overwhelm us with an excess of opinion just as their more diffident colleagues frustrate us through a paucity, we will quarrel about their answers, too—find the publicists, finally, fully as Delphic or Pythonic as the purists, those who answer with a riddling silence rather than a baffling cacophony.

(The only other writer of any prominence—much greater prominence than me—to reply at length to Tumblr asks was, I note, Neil Gaiman; this was part of his general program to “make contact” in an insalubrious way with his audience. But he had dull and conventional opinions behind which he hid his obscene will to power, whereas I have an obscene will to power behind which I hide dull and conventional opinions. Sometimes—not always—bad taste and bad morals really do go together.)

1. This would be the beginning of a reply to Naomi Kanakia’s compelling argument against close reading as sophistry. Close reading, I might say, isn’t about intuition but about an investigation of how form is related to theme, one that has to be practiced through a survey of available forms and themes. And according to readers as controversially distinguished as Nietzsche, Harold Bloom, Richard Rorty, and possibly—if I understand him; I don’t—Jacques Derrida, the Sophists were the good guys and Socrates and Plato the bad guys in the first place, at least from the dizzying vantage of a Nietzschean modernity or Derridean postmodernity when no one can believe any longer in the bodiless rationality of capital-t truth. Furthermore, close reading is a method devised to handle modernist texts, texts contemporaneous with Nietzsche, not the whole corpus of literature, and can only be applied by an act of epistemic imperialism back on (e.g.) Aeschylus. Aeschylus meant to be didactic, not ironic. Whereas Scott Fitzgerald, deeply in the thrall of modernism, wanted to be read closely, as his models Conrad and Joyce and Eliot demanded to be, and so he forced the form-theme conjuncture with symbols so obtrusive one is justified in ignoring them—reading them simply as text rather than subtext, like the wise student in Naomi’s fable. Which is to say I partly sympathize with her critique, but also don’t really understand how to think, read, or write in any other way. As I wrote years ago here, much of what we called woke was an anti-expert revolt in the humanities against close reading. Because close reading teaches irony—the disjunction as well the conjunction between form and theme—it is intended as an inoculation against readers’ credulity before totalizing discourses. But just as anti-vaxxers believe the poison to come through the inoculation, so the social-justice-oriented critic suspected that these totalizing discourses would be conveyed through the very irony meant to dispel them. (Ironically, woke is now under government proscription by anti-ironists and anti-experts of the opposite camp.) Thus, the willfully naïve reader believes Heart of Darkness and Lolita, once their screws of formal irony have been turned all the way around, to end by legitimating imperialism and pedophilia in the guise of ironizing them. But the most sophisticated readers probably believe this, too, if they’re being honest. Most people know Romeo and Juliet doesn’t really caution against immoderate desire, Fight Club doesn’t really caution against extreme masculinity, but that the surface-level “caution” issued by these texts is an excuse to indulge in an extensive dramatic spectacle of the proscribed content. Shakespeare is probably the first writer consciously to use irony in this way and therefore to demand close reading, which is what a sophist means by saying that he “invented the human”—invented us as creatures actuated by an inner interplay of desire and repression expressing itself in a fundamentally broken rhetoric that cries out for the reparation of (psycho)analysis.

2. Re: Bruce Wagner, my brief reference to his work in the Arcade piece may be taken as a prelude to a much more extensive essay forthcoming very soon, sooner even (and more extensive even) than you may be prepared for.

3. In our conversation, Noah confided to me that the New Critical practice of close reading grew out of occult and Kabbalistic practices indulged in by the Southern Agrarians. How one applies this knowledge to footnote 1 above, I’m not sure. We all await The Mystagogues.

4. “When middlebrow reviewers deplore ‘morbidity’ in our best writers, they only paraphrase the outrage of those who found the Brontës repellent.” (Gore Vidal, “Novelists and Critics of the 1940s,” United States: Essays 1952-1992.)

I found the above quotation this week—and it’s probably good I didn’t find it last week!—while perusing United States for the 1000th time due to this corner of Substack’s evident desire to bring Vidal back to mainstream literary awareness despite his (to say the least) ideological unreliability. I was searching in particular for a vaguely remembered line in “Monotheism and Its Discontents” that I thought would be useful to wield polemically against both the increasingly regnant Christian moralism of the right and the rumblings I already hear to bring back New Atheism on the left. (The Christian moralism of the left isn’t great either, though, and, as for the bitter vicious neo-New Atheism of the racist right, I’ve criticized that many times as well. I’m pretty much impossible to please!) Anyway, the phrase I was looking for turned out to be a small part of a sentence denouncing Christian imperialism, but still, there’s something in the words italicized below to consider, maybe something (vide Brother Kumin) Robert Graves-ish, which has the added benefit of redounding even against Aeschylus and Plato:

Inspired by a raging sky-god, the whites were able to pretend that their conquests were in order to bring the One God to everyone, particularly those with older and subtler religions.

5. I use McCarthy as my example for the stereotypical value of a curmudgeonly old white man, but I don’t think we know his politics for sure, though we may surmise. Of our octogenarian and nonagenarian writers, Cynthia Ozick is the documented Fox watcher and Republican voter, partly for reasons Vidal would be quite rude (or worse) about, leaving aside the merits. Though there’s nothing Trumpian about her persona; our most Trumpian elderly writer, opposites having an occult tendency to converge, is of course shitposter extraordinaire Joyce Carol Oates, who issues her social media proclamations in the same tone of outrage-provoking ingenuously hyperbolic irony as her enemy president.

(By the way, there’s an omnibus edition of Ozick’s stories and essays dropping in March from Everyman’s Library. If any of the editors reading this would like to commission a review from me, please DM or email.)

6. I think this question is the unofficial sequel to an earlier inquiry I received about the fate of the public controversialist. I’ll repost question and answer here:

Could it be that the so-called right-wing avant-garde, which emerged around lower Manhattan and the now overly clichéd Dimes Square scene, along with Red Scare, loses its edge by aligning itself explicitly with Trumpist populism? While it’s evident that these figures will not be part of the regime in any meaningful sense, could they, in a way, be seen as regime-aligned podcasts and for that reason deeply uncool?

Fashion cycles always apply, in politics and art and everything else, and the saying-gay-and-retarded thing is obviously past its sell-by date, but the “contrarian provocateur” model of “right-wing arguments made by radicals” public intellectual they follow suggests it is possible to stay relevant. Paglia and Hitchens were at their most popular at the height of their regime-adjacency (the Clinton-era early ’90s for the former, the neocon mid-2000s for the latter) and still retain their broad audience today. The argument could probably be extended to other such figures, from Vidal to Didion to Žižek. The work of Nietzsche, the paradigm of the “contrarian provocateur” intellectual, even survived his regime-adjacency to the Nazis! It’s also very American, though; part of Emerson and Thoreau’s agenda was to shock and provoke their fellow Concord libs with edgier ideas, lest their liberalism sink into sentimental irrelevance or cultural paralysis. I believe the key, beyond a certain ineffable sincerity beneath the irony, is avoiding an excess of social conservatism that would align them with such endemically uncool people as Evangelical pastors. (Trump himself succeeded by skirting this line. Would he have won the last election if he hadn’t opportunistically cut off the pro-lifers?) If they want cultural longevity, though, they will have to become more than podcasters. If they remain podcasters only, and if the podcast qua genre is formally heir to talk radio, then they will have the longevity of Rush Limbaugh. Not none, exactly, but not perennial relevance either. They will have to leave some literary or artistic legacy. Look at how Vincenzo’s defense of Red Scare depended on something Anna wrote—in 2018! I also parasocially believe Anna would feel better if she wrote a book. I always feel better when I write a book, or after, anyway.

7. And, bringing everything back to footnote 1, they (we) are probably best defined as sophists, powerful rhetors educating the public for pay, their (our) rhetoric ineluctably shifting with the zeitgeist, truth trimmed to the size of audience and occasion, not to mention for decorative purposes. As a latter-day tragedian once observed, writers are the last people anyone should ask anything:

The trouble with literature is that writers have to be the ones who write it. It’s always partial; it’s always partisan, and it’s always incomplete. When I say that writers have to be the ones to write it, I mean that in order to generate the energy to create a big novel, a big play, an involved poem, one has to be a species of fanatic. You have to think that that is really the only thing worth doing. Otherwise, you can’t generate the intensity to do it well. And to that degree, by generating that intensity, you are blinding yourself to what does not fit into some preconceived pattern in your own mind. There’s no doubt about that to me, and I think that probably lay behind Plato’s prohibition of the artist in society, He was right in the sense that the artist doesn’t know what he is doing, to some extent. That is, we pretend, or like to believe, that we are depicting the whole truth of some situation, when as a matter of fact, the whole truth is, by definition, made impossible by the fact that we are obsessed people. I don’t know of a first class piece of work written by what I would call, or a psychologist would call, a balanced, adjusted fellow who could easily be, let us say, a good administrator for a complicated social mechanism of some sort. It doesn’t work that way. We are not constituted that way; so consequently, to be sure, it will have to be partial. The impulse to do it is obsessive; it always is. One of the fairest, most just writers was Tolstoi, who was, to make it short, quite mad. (Arthur Miller, “Morality and Modern Drama: Interview with Phillip Gelb,” Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism, ed. Gerald Weales.)

Someday, when we achieve the beloved republic, we sophists will have to be dealt with, but I think society is probably stuck with us for now. As long as the zeitgeist rolls its crashing tides, as long as we can’t arrest it permanently for the sake of the true and the good, we’ll need people who know how to pilot the cultural barque through the rapids.