Weekly Readings #156 (01/27/25-02/02/25)
nonsense and nonsensibility
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
I begin my review of the week’s activities with the exciting debut of The Metropolitan Review, the new critical journal founded and edited by Ross Barkan, Sam Kahn, and Lou Bahet. Their bold introductory manifesto speaks for the widespread desire among writers to revive American literary culture, which had frankly seemed moribund a few years ago. I was happy to participate in this project with my essay, “Dream Warrior,” a comprehensive introduction to the unjustly neglected oeuvre of Bruce Wagner. Wagner is among the most significant living American novelists. If you’re not familiar with him, most of his novels are now back in print from Arcade Publishing; my piece will you tell all you need to know about them, including the best places to start. The Metropolitan Review also has a Substack presence—there you can subscribe and support their project, which will eventually expand to print—and if and when the Wagner essay is posted to their Substack I will cross-post it here.
I also resurfaced an older guest post I wrote for the Inner Life Substack two years ago, “Extraordinary Machine,” in response to Henry Oliver’s dispute with The Metropolitan Review editors over their anti-AI stance. My essay optimistically argues—with help from Arthur C. Clarke, Mark Twain, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Dylan, Henry James, and Franz Kafka—that art and literature always find a way to turn the most threatening new technologies to their and our advantage.
This week I also released “Count No Man Happy Till He Dies,” for The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. It’s about Sophocles and Oedipus and Antigone, about whether or not we can know the other, about fate and perversion and the longing for death, about hating life and loving the gods, about Freud and Hegel and Girard. Like Greek tragedy, it’s about everything, and about how we can’t know anything. Next week: Euripides and Aristophanes, low tragedy and high comedy. Thanks to my paid subscribers! I also want to note, since the hot new Substack trend is to read Middlemarch, that I have four long episodes on that novel in the Invisible College archive, the first of which, “The Other Side of Silence,” is available for free in its entirety.
Then there’s my forthcoming novel, Major Arcana, scheduled for release by Belt Publishing in April 2025. I’m pleased to tell you that Kirkus Reviews admires what they call this “rich and enriching” novel and recommends that you “persist through its challenges.” (Good life advice, too! “Affirm and persist,” as the manifestation coaches teach us.) Please pre-order Major Arcana here if you would like to encourage publishers to take risks on challenging fiction, and if you would like to be entertained or indeed “enthralled” on a large scale.
For today, a little rumination on 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century novels. The good news is that it’s short, and that there’s only one footnote; the bad news is that this footnote contains almost 1000 slightly aggrieved words on the novel Dracula (1897), the film Dracula (1992), and the films Nosferatu (1922), Nosferatu (1979), and Nosferatu (2024). Please enjoy!
That’s Why They Call It the Present: The 21st-Century Novel’s Donnée
I was recently perusing Edwin Frank’s illuminating and entertaining Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the the Twentieth-Century Novel. Frank intended, I take it, to provide a historical definition of this critical object as settled as the one we use for its precursor, to make “20th-century novel” roll off the tongue as easily as “19th-century novel.” As Frank points out, this idea of the “century” as unit of time is really a 19th-century development itself, the thinkable but longer-than-lifetime increment of progressive history. Poet Les Murray said there are only two centuries: the 19th and the 20th. I am personally not even entirely sure the latter exists either. To say “the century of Hegel and Darwin” is just to say that there was a “century” at all. If we are not Hegelians or Darwinians—and some still want to be—then we will not think in centuries. After Hegel and Darwin, Wells and Shaw taught us to think in millennia, Joyce and Woolf to think in milliseconds. Such hollowing-out of the middle, annihilation of the stable center, turns out to be what, in Frank’s view, the 20th-century novel was all about.
He ingeniously begins his narrative with H. G. Wells and André Gide, inventors of pop fiction and literary fiction, respectively, disarticulating in their scandalous fictions the union of sense and sensibility, of public and private selves, with which Jane Austen inaugurated the 19th century.
(I would of course have chosen Wilde—in my doctoral dissertation about the 20th-century novel, I did choose Wilde—since he parsimoniously contains both Wells and Gide: The Picture of Dorian Gray is The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Immoralist in one, not to mention that Wilde actually appears as a side character in the latter, though not, as Sister Sontag would resentfully have it, “Dorian Gay.” But I don’t dispute Frank’s narrative stratagem and have said myself that we could stand to reread Wells these days for topical reasons. My choice for most representative 1890s pop or pulp fiction, however, is Dracula, less for its over-discussed sexual themes than for its under-discussed media and technology ones.1)
After Wells and Gide, 20th-century fiction, under the historical pressures of world war and urbanization and atomization, will dismantle the stable self of 19th-century realism, primarily by immersing readers in the riotously unruly inner life, but also by liberating the sentence to live a dream-life of its own. I say “after Wells and Gide,” but Frank also includes a prologue about Dostoevsky; there he argues that Dostoevsky invented the 20th century back in the 19th with his feverish monologue Notes from Underground. That’s true too, but the more one thinks about this proposition, the more 20th-century novels from the 19th century multiply. Stable selves, placid prose, a delicate and decorous balance between the inner and outer life: this may describe Jane Austen, but it doesn’t even always describe Jane Austen; it may not even describe Sense and Sensibility, with that barely smothered scream at its heart; and does it describe anyone else? Maybe the Tolstoy of Anna Karenina, but what about The Kreutzer Sonata? Maybe the Eliot of Middlemarch—maybe—but not The Mill on the Floss or Daniel Deronda. Dickens and Balzac are crazy; Mary Shelley and the Brontë sisters are crazy. Poe and Melville? Crazy. (Dostoevsky loved Poe.) Maybe human beings have never known the stability to which the historical imagination, always imagining some paradise we have for better or for worse lost, attributes to it. Admittedly, I’ve never read Trollope; I heard he was sane and avoided him just in case.
But let us, as Henry James (a lot crazier than he looks) would advise, grant our storyteller his donnée. The 19th-century novel narrated the union of inner and outer in stable prose and stable plots; the 20th-century novel tore inner and outer apart, took the inner for itself, and liberated it from stable plot into an anarchically autonomous language. Assuming that we still have centuries, and that we still have novels, what, then, is the 21st-century novel?
As a writer of novels that aspire to 21st-century status, I have tried to answer this question already once or twice—see here, for example—and have mainly concluded that we must take the other side of the putative Austenian binary as our topic. We must investigate not the inner but the outer life, since we all live our inner lives as our outer lives these days, through the very medium by which you are currently encountering my words. Maybe this is why the aforementioned Bruce Wagner, who began writing in the 1990s, had to await the 2020s to be understood. He writes about celebrities’ inner lives, and we’re all celebrities now, all of us dead stars—this must be our donnée—and he does it by making a poetry out of our public language, the way Joyce and Woolf made a poetry out of our private language. The derided internet novels of the present attempt something similar, and should be applauded for the attempt if not the execution. Autofiction, the last decade’s trend, was the last century’s last gasp, not the wave of the future. In the present that is the last century’s future, we are literally streaming consciousness. The 21st-century novel will have to find some way to take advantage of this development first of all.
I saw Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu. It’s an aptly right-wing film for our right-wing era, a classic anti-feminist piece accusing women of hypocrisy in narrating their own desire, as Red Scare anticipates me in observing. Its heroine says Nosferatu, but she means Yesferatu. She cuckolds the gentle good provider with the slavering monster. She in fact invites the darkness she claims to threaten her because she is allured by the very threat. And so the Männerbund of vampire-slayers must step in, implicitly to relieve her of whatever social and political power she may possess—must say to her, “I don’t really care, Margaret Ellen. I don’t want that person in my country.” Eggers isn’t himself a monster, however, so, in keeping with our magical epoch and with his own filmography’s interest in such things, he offers the heroine and the female audience the divine feminine, principle of sensitivity and sacrifice, in compensation for feminism. “In heathen times, you might have been a great priestess of Isis,” Von Franz (the Van Helsing character) tells the fantastically headdressed Ellen, a visual rhyme with The Northman’s Björk, before the final confrontation, the final beauty-and-the-beast tableau.
Ideology aside—and Eggers vaguely summons other themes as well: something about Providence, something about science and the occult—I disliked the film, could scarcely stay awake through its overblown monochromatic montage. Some ethnoreligious recoil on my part, perhaps, from Eggers’s Northern Protestant colorless redaction of Southern Catholic Coppola’s flamboyant Bram Stoker’s Dracula opera of 1992, which I’ve adored since childhood? (Cf. the conflict Pynchon stages between German and Italian opera in Gravity’s Rainbow.) Perhaps, but the modern Dracula myth was already a Protestant nightmare of revenant barbarism, Eastern rather than Southern European in the initial instance.
The novel Dracula, written by an Anglo-Irish Londoner, begins with the feint of disparaging the New Woman only to enshrine her at modern culture’s seat of power. “Our Lady of the Telegraph,” as a colleague of mine once called Mina Harker, dispels the reeking, grotesque Old World threat—no romantasy here!—with her alliance to and command of modern technology. Stoker, an admirer of Walt Whitman, offers not a conservative but a liberal discourse, a minutely verisimilitudinous naturalist-documentary neo-Gothic—profoundly racist, yes, but liberalism may very well be profoundly racist due to its utopian fantasy of obliterating every last trace of cultural and human difference to make everyone liberal, lest anyone’s rights be trespassed upon. Coppola’s ironically titled film, by applying contemporaneous fin-de-siècle visual aestheticism and introducing a metempsychotic love story to the narrative—as if Wilde, not Stoker, had written Dracula, as if Stoker had been dragged out of one or several closets—reverses Stoker’s purport on behalf of Romanticism and on behalf, as well, of the repressed itself.
Coppola was anticipated in his redaction by the modern myth’s two German cinematic detours at the official base of Eggers’s adaptation, Murnau’s film of 1922 and Herzog’s of 1979, both of which not only transpose Stoker’s story to a small German city but also relocate it in time from Stoker’s late-19th-century “present” to the Romantic past of the 1830s, thus obviating the vampire-hunters’ claim to ruthless modernity. Eggers borrows Coppola’s addition of the love story between Ellen/Mina and Nosferatu/Dracula in service to his erotic agenda, but otherwise tracks Murnau and Herzog closely. (I think. I only sampled Murnau to get his movie’s flavor but in my stubbornly philistine way find silent films a little bit unwatchable.)
A comparison between Eggers’s Nosferatu and Herzog’s devastatingly reveals the former’s artistic limitation, however, and that of our own time. Herzog is capable of more than one tone, more than one visual texture, and so when the uncanny irrupts, it has a convincing idyll to subvert. Does Eggers for all his video-gameish sturm und drang let a single image breathe with the comically eerie power of the rats devouring the feast in Herzog’s film? You can’t “world build” everything. You have to let some of the unbuilt world into your art, or the artistic world you build will be so much less than the world of our experience that we can’t endure it. Herzog allows the pathos of Kinski’s outcast Dracula and the integrity of Adjani’s incorruptible Mina to subsist in their mutual confrontation; his Dracula is all the more redeemed for being erotically rebuffed—in his homoerotic approach to Harker as well—and yet Herzog also allows Mina’s own refusal to stand, whereas Eggers mocks and derides it in adolescent gross-out mode with body-horror antics he imports from The Exorcist and from Adjani’s later performance in the overrated and now hopelessly memefied Possession.
(I’m not a Herzog fanatic, by the way. In an earlier moment of “online,” he was as memefied as Possession would later become, so I almost avoided him, aside from Aguirre, the Wrath of God. But his Nosferatu has convinced me there’s something there. See also Art of Darkness pod co-host Kevin Kautzman’s recent invigorating essay: “his work’s most consistent motif is that the recurring urge for barbarism might just save us as it makes civilization’s pretense significant.” Kautzman also writes of “Herzog's determination and belief in the human will's mystical power,” which adds to my longstanding motif here of artists as master manifestors.)
While I retain my personal childhood preference for Coppola’s Italianate epic, the 1979 Nosferatu is the best film under consideration here because it gives equal voice and stature to each side in the now perennial confrontation between bourgeois modernity and the primal and primordial history it represses—a free artistic exploration rather than a drubbing polemic for either side. (As if any of us knows how to want either side with our whole hearts!) I had never seen Herzog’s film before and watched it only after I saw Eggers’s, and I simply felt relief to behold bright green trees overlook the glassy canal in the opening sequence, trees not filmed through some kind of grayish-blue filter, made to look somehow artificial, verging on AI. Intensive stylization can be powerful and legitimate if it heightens feeling and responsiveness—it does for Coppola, and it may yet for some future AI artist—but not when such aestheticization only serves as a paradoxical defense against the unpredictable and multifarious powers of art.
Wrote a comment about Werner Herzog and vampires in response to one of John Pistelli's footnotes. It got very long so I though I'd share it on Notes.
It is so funny how reading different academic books gives you a different impression of what is canonical. I read enough film studies stuff that I have the impression that “everybody” agrees that Dracula is a trashy novel that people only care about because it inspired Murnau’s film. That is one point of convergence between the two foundational, divergent academic texts on Weimar cinema: Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (which gives the Frankfurt School view) and Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen (which came to be seen as a riposte). Kracauer argues that the themes of the great expressionist German films of the Weimar era like Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet prefigure the irrationalism of Hitler and his regime. Eisner, trying to sell Weimar cinema to a French audience, instead connects it to Expressionism and to German romanticism, implicitly but forcefully claiming that there was a break between this tradition and what succeeded it.
This sounds like a rather academic issue to trouble the Invisible College comments section about, but Werner Herzog has sometimes presented his whole oeuvre as a sort of intervention in this debate on Eisner’s side. He famously walked from Munich to Paris in order to visit Eisner while she was ill and present her with The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. When he arrived, she helped persuade him to remake Nosferatu. The remake was, Herzog said, an effort to reconstitute “legitimate German culture,” reviving the legacy of the 20s in order to overcome both the trashy mediocrity of postwar German filmmaking and the long shadow Hitler cast over German traditions. The phrase “legitimate German culture” caused enormous offense on the German left, notably to the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Herzog would definitively leave Germany for America after protestors disrupted the premier of one of his best late films, Lessons of Darkness. It is a documentary fantasia about the beauty of the exploding oil rigs Saddam Hussein had set on fire by Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait during Gulf War I, set to music mostly by Wagner (one of the more questionable purveyors of legitimate German culture).
In my opinion Herzog in the 1970s was on one of the artistic hot streaks of the century: everything he touched turned to gold. This ended with Fitzcarraldo, which isn’t as good as its famous making-of documentary. His career since then has been a series of only occasionally successful attempts to re-capture the old magic: he’s sometimes still excellent, but people do him no favors by overpraising his recent work. Like David Lynch, he’s also adopted the persona of a weird uncle who tells you to pursue your dreams. I find it grating.
I also think that the new German cinema movement of which he was a part (with Wenders, Fassbinder, Syberberg and Reitz) is one of the most neglected major artistic movements of the 20th century. (Don’t take it from me! According to Susan Sontag, Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film From Germany is the greatest movie ever made. Both the New Left Review guru Perry Anderson and Stanley Kubrick agreed that Reitz’s TV show Heimat was the major European film of the end of the 20th century: those two are often wrong but would they both be wrong about the same thing? Herzog, Fassbinder and Wenders have cheerleaders in the US, but they are always considered separately and out of context.)
Why are these great artists so neglected, particularly in their home country? (There is one excellent monograph, New German Cinema, written by Thomas Elsasser, who spent a decade co-teaching German cinema courses with W. G. Sebald.) Well, their politics are, as we’ve learned to say, problematic. Alexander Kluge and the quaffably liberal Wenders are exceptions, Wenders now making documentaries about Pope Frances etc.. But even Wenders gets in trouble for collaborating with canceled Nobel laureate Peter Handke. (Fassbinder is rightly celebrated as a pioneer of gay cinema and his reflection on the Third Reich are very powerful, but he managed to get himself canceled from his avant-garde theater for an allegedly antisemitic play in the very permissive 70s. Also, any interesting gay art from the 70s is problematic today if you feel like reacting to it that way.) Habermas denounced Wenders and Handke’s Wings of Desire as a neoconservative work of art in an article the title of which one could freely translate as “The New Intimacy Between Politics and Vibes: Theses on the Enlightenment in Germany.” This sort of art, Habermas claimed, tempted Germans to abandon the unfinished project of Enlightenment for a spooky new romanticism. (Herzog’s quest for “ecstatic truth” sounds just like what Adorno would call “the jargon of authenticity.”) The neoconservative Germans had fallen under the influence of artists and thinkers who had been canceled because of their proximity to the Third Reich, but who remained alive and influential in a sulphurously tempting way up to the 1970s and after, figures like Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Arnold Gehlen and (for filmmakers) Leni Riefenstahl. Syberberg and Herzog, who were admired by Michel Foucault, were much further beyond the pale for somebody like Habermas than Wenders was. When Habermas first met Foucault in Paris, they evidently didn’t discuss philosophy at all but instead spent a whole evening arguing about Werner Herzog’s politics.
Who is Hegzog’s Nosferatu? He isn’t Hitler—Nosferatu resembles Hitler even less than Aguirre does—but he isn’t exactly not Hitler either. Hitler looms over all the interesting German movies of this epoch. This is particularly true of Nosferatu, which remakes a film that Kracauer and many others had interpreted as a sort of premonition of the catastrophe to come. (Only Syberberg, to Sontag’s delight, dared to make a New German Cinema film where the Herzogian hero is actually Hitler.) Most of the leading characters in Herzog’s films of the 70s are either almost-inhuman supermen who stand above and outside of society because of their grandiose and unreasonable desires, basically their will-to-power. Or else they are cripples or misfits who can seem almost subhuman, but effectively find themselves in the same position as Herzog’s supermen (Nosferatu is both at once). Either way, they attempt to realize desires that are not quite human and, of course, they fail. Yet this failure produces the images of ecstatic truth that give life its meaning. Now, as Settembrini says of music in The Magic Mountain, this sounds politically suspect! (None of this is to suggest, even if you buy the perspective of his critics, that Herzog is some kind of crypto-Nazi. Herzog is far too much an admirer of the outcast and too much of an individualist. It is Syberberg’s Wagnerian interest in the shared irrational myths of a people that is really politisch verdächtig.) Herzog’s implicit response is that you ignore the irrational vibes that ground our rationality at your peril. If there is a critique of both Nazis and of Germany’s left-wing extremists of the 70s implicit in his work (cf. the hilarious short “Precautions Against Fanatics”), it is that revolutionary efforts to remake society are doomed to fail. Yet if even the failure of an irrational project, when sufficiently grandiose, can give rise to great images, this seems like cold comfort. But perhaps it is a mistake to look to art for political edification.
I see why you think that the vastly inferior Eggers movie is misogynistic, and I agree. (Its real limit, as you say, is visual.) Ross Douthat amusingly tweeted that it’s about a notionally Christian society that has lost faith in the power of the Church to combat evil. Naturally, when inexplicable evil overtakes them, they resort to human sacrifice! But Eggers’ Nosferatu thinks it is a feminist film, and the reasons for this are interesting. I guess the movie’s premise is that taboos around female sexuality are connected to the mysterious forces that the rationality available to the people of Wismar cannot control. The film indulges in Victorian (or I guess Biedermeier) stereotypes about women being treated for hysteria when their real illness is sexual repression. Our heroine needs to be sacrificed, but the sacrifice is necessary because her society represses the feminine instead of worshipping it. Most importantly, the sacrifice works: she has great sex with Dracula (we shouldn’t kink shame I guess) and then all the demonic energy that the repression of her sexuality has summoned is dispersed. In the Herzog film, the sacrifice fails (although it has deep nobility). Sensitive Klaus Kinski gets to rest, but Jonathan becomes a vampire and rides off into the storm. There isn’t even the horizon of a happy reconciliation of the dark desires which the vampire represents.
Another brilliant weekly essay, John! You simply cannot miss.
Though Coppola’s use of Wagner is understandably the most famous, my favourite, oddly from the same year, is Herzog’s use of the prelude to “Das Rheingold.” It embodies what you describe as giving “equal voice and stature to each side in the now perennial confrontation between bourgeois modernity and the primal and primordial history it represses.”
As the lush, triumphant landscape of Wagner's arpeggios rises, Herzog's visions of mountains and mist descend ever deeper into sinister night—a brilliant disjunction that confronts, unsettles, and compels. And that’s to say nothing of Kinski’s eyes throughout the film: somehow drowning in a human sadness never to be his own, slipping beneath the surface toward the oblivion he craves, never fully submerging, caught in the endless, choking tedium of existence.
Eggers recently said he refuses to make contemporary movies because the idea of having to “photograph” a cell phone is “just death.” But when his audience rightly wonders whether he’s run every second of his droning, metronomic bore through a VSCO filter, and when his final, pale tableau of intertwined lovers seems designed for Tumblr or a One Perfect Shot account on X, it’s clear he’s already succumbed to the same flattening tendencies he claims to resist—the lifeless, glassy logic of the screen.