Weekly Readings #160 (02/24/25-03/02/25)

art still has truth

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

This week I posted “The Spirit That Says No” to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. With this first part of a two-episode sequence on Goethe’s Faust, we begin our survey of modern western world literature in translation. It’s a fun episode. After I annoyed everybody with last week’s tirade against reading difficult European literature in translation, I, who contain the proverbial multitudes, got a little militant on the mic about the absurd Anglophone neglect of Goethe in our time—and not even just our time, but for over 100 years.¹ He’s huge; you can’t miss him, or you shouldn’t, and Faust is extraordinary, even in translation, obviously on the level of Shakespeare or Joyce, as any of your favorite 19th-century English and American writers from Ralph Waldo Emerson to George Eliot would have been happy to tell you. (Well, not the part about Joyce. Even I wouldn’t take retrocausation so far.) Many thanks to all my paid subscribers; I gently encourage the rest of you to join them in this experiment in independent education!²

Of my forthcoming novel, Major Arcana, which you can pre-order here before its release on April 22, I am honored and grateful to report that it has received a starred review from Alexander Moran at the renowned Booklist:

Pistelli follows The Class of 2000 (2021) with this deliriously creative tour de force. Originally serialized on his Substack, the novel opens with a public suicide on a university campus in Pittsburgh, which sets off a plot that circles around two characters, the once much-lauded but now much-derided graphic novelist Simon Magnus, who has not written a word for decades, teaches, and has been on a long gender-identity journey, and one of his students, the supremely well-read occultist and practitioner of “manifesting” (willing events into reality), Ashley Del Greco. As Pistelli explores all who intersect with these two people, he outlines a history of comic books, knowingly nodding to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay (2000), and in covering so much wider history, echoes DeLillo’s historical scope in the masterful Underworld (1997). Pistelli superbly depicts the effects of the online world forced upon high-schoolers during the pandemic and throughout explores huge themes of art, magic, philosophy, religion, death, and gender. While dense, the enthralling narrative is also incredibly readable as Pistelli keeps a tight hold on the plot. For fans of expansive, thought-provoking, and challenging fiction, this is a breathtakingly imaginative and enjoyable novel.

For today, I enter a burgeoning Substack subgenre: “reviews of Matthew Gasda’s forthcoming novel”—though, as I explain, it’s really not a review. Please enjoy!

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Every One That Sleeps Is Beautiful: On Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers

In Matthew Gasda’s forthcoming novel The Sleepers, one character asks another: “What could I say that you wouldn’t automatically register as manipulative?” This is the question standing over the entire novel. It’s also, I’m sure, the question standing over this “review,” though I wouldn’t call it a review.³

The novel’s inwardly spiraling recursions of moral self- and other-scrutiny, the novel’s paralyzing and love- and art-obliterating awareness that all we do is on some level—but on what level?—done for advantage’s sake, whether we want sex or status or the simple assurance that we have been beheld, also spirals out of the novel and into the discourse surrounding it, surrounding literature, surrounding this platform and this country and this language.

Are we merely a self-regarding, self-perpetuating, self-promoting clique, inflating each other’s reputations to capitalize on a shift in the political climate? But what separates a clique from a movement, a desire to advance one’s self from a desire to advance the culture? What separates making art for the sake of making art and making art for the sake of attaining status? What separates caressing your lover out of love and caressing your lover to feed your own ego and appetite? For a little under 300 pages, Gasda—Matthew, mon semblable, mon frère—allows his characters to torture themselves with these questions. At least one character—I honestly thought it might turn out to be more—is tortured unto death.⁴

Let us remind ourselves where this all started. I had been observing what I was calling “The New Conservatism” for about a year on my super secret Tumblr when Matthew’s play Dimes Square began to attract attention in early 2022. He put the script online for five dollars, and, imagining it would be some kind of unserious exercise in shock-jockery, I told my audience I’d write a funny review if somebody bought the script and sent it to me. But Matthew saw my post and sent it to me himself, and I read it and wrote the review that was for a long time the most-read post on this Substack. There I judged the work almost morally serious to a fault, a pursuit of human self-deception in Girardian mode⁵ to a hellish level of self-consciousness. Despite other reviewers’ invocation of Chekhov,⁶ I thought rather of Endgame or No Exit. I was impressed by the thoroughness of the moral inventory, but nevertheless gently suggested some mitigating beauty unmediated by contamination by the mimetic will to power might well be in order,⁷ like the beauty present, I soon found, in Gasda’s earlier novel, The Blue Period.⁸

The Sleepers answers my mandate Dante-wise, by going all the way through our human hell rather than backing out. It follows four characters, elder Millennials in Brooklyn on the eve of the 2016 election, through the dissolution and catastrophes of their romantic, familial, and professional interrelations. The central figure is Dan, a leftist adjunct professor who writes for n+1 and the like, a man immured in unearned self-regard and delusion, worsened by unintegrated grief over the suicide of his mother. We also spend time with his longtime lover Mariko, an aspiring actress worried her relationship with Dan has sapped her best artistic and erotic years; her sister Akari, a hip cinematographer whose DeLilloesque survey of mass-mediated urbanity strikingly opens the novel; and Eliza, a privileged, depressed, manipulative, and befuddled student whose seductions may prove Dan’s downfall. Meanwhile, all the characters are caught in the net of their phone and internet addiction, the hijacking of their receptors by a machine designed to flatter their lust and narcissism, to keep them prisoners of their basest impulses.

The Sleepers is clearly a playwright’s novel in part. I don’t remember the last time I was as thoroughly discomforted by fiction as I was by Gasda’s second chapter, an endless near-breakup argument between Dan and Mariko, every single word each one says the wrong word, with no way for either to get to genuine care or kindness or grace unmolested by the will the power. I know this is fearless writing because I am too afraid to write this way. Gasda brings his dramatic power to the heart of the novel here in the use of dialogue to wound, obfuscate, expose. Other scenes are as powerful, as appalling.

But it is also a novel. In flight as so many in our generation are from outdated writers’-workshop show-don’t-tell prescriptivism, Gasda channels Tolstoy and Lawrence in the use of flat, almost awkwardly declarative statements about his characters, sans free indirect discourse. This is about Akari and Mariko from the first page:

For their entire adult lives, the sisters had sustained a cordial, functional relationship, which indefinitely forestalled any deeper engagement with long-gestating resentments. They would end phone calls with “I love you”—but the love they referred to was a kind of perfunctory, false love and not the real, almost primitive feeling of kinship that they both understood was supposed to be there. Love was a signifier that they both used to shore up the insecurity around the issue of their estrangement from each other.

Even if Matthew weren’t recently arguing on the Substack TL about Women in Love, I still would have been reminded of Women in Love. Gasda also uses the privileges of the third person to bring up those moments of poetic beauty I missed from his breakout drama, as here—

Across what was left of the waterfront, Manhattan leapt and licked at the sky, like a Van Gogh cypress, or a city in the Bible: hallucinatory and raw.

—or here—

They could feel the slow century moving over them like water.

—or here:

Data was rising into the air like smoke from a battlefield.

He also does what no dramatist can by immersing us in his characters’ bodies. This is a novel of the flesh and its frailty. The excretory functions loom large. Menstruation—touchingly, the nearly estranged sisters, living on opposite coasts, are synched—goes mentioned, as does the easily startled male member in all its notorious sexual unreliability. We aren’t meant, as in Whitman or Joyce, to revel with good humor in what we most share, however, those lowest common denominators in and around the body’s center; I suspect we are rather more traditionally meant to be disgusted by them, by our birth between urine and feces.

The problem for this largely anti-tech novel⁹ is this: the machines to which we have surrendered ourselves work so effectively on us because they are precisely calibrated to answer the desires of the animal we are. Nature offers no liberation from technology since they are in perfect tandem:

She saw human animals eating pink, grass fed burgers. She was in the forest, the jungle, of modern man.

Both animal and machine are therefore together the problem—thus, as Philip Traylen points out in his review, the frequent phone-toilet conjuncture. The novel makes some gestures toward endorsing a salvific awareness of our common animal need—

In a perverse way, Mariko thought, it was like you couldn’t really appreciate a person until you could properly peer beneath the ego-layer, and just see them as a raw being, a raw creature.

—but the keynote of grotesquery, the prose’s rotten bouquet of all the excretions, sebum and semen and shit, tend to provoke another question entirely: in this waste land, this fecal screen kingdom, where shall the soul be found?¹⁰

The soul remains a difficulty at the strictly narrative level. Traylen is also correct that Dan is too slight and brittle a reed to sustain Gasda’s killing examination. (Perhaps he might have been a less now-discredited, now-reprehensible social type: “He was more of a Calvinist than a Marxist: he believed that he was among the elect.”) His self-contempt and the novel’s contempt for him can be difficult to disentangle—

There was no self, only this confusion of forces. He, this, was just this signal interference in the cortex, this jumble of electrical impulses crying out for coherence. Even his own name: Dan. A short, jabbing sound. A burst of neurological static. Was this the basis for the belief in the soul? Is this what literature and philosophy and politics depend on: this crazy notion that internal noise could be bound together with a name, and thereby become coherent? Whole?

On the other hand, what did it matter what you labeled your internal experience as? Soul or self or brain or Dan or nothing? The name could alter the experience, but couldn’t alter you, unless you let it.

—while in the proto-#MeToo plot, his behavior is so bathetic as to cancel out the novel’s frank appraisal of his student’s manipulations, which are, in any case, opaque enough to herself to solicit our sympathy, especially given her youth.¹¹

“Unless you let it”: how, then, does Gasda “let it,” how does he let the soul in? The secret is in the aforementioned narrative stance, the narrator capable of assuming any distance from his characters, whether the total remove of objective description or the habitation of their very bowels.

Our author takes his title from a poem of Whitman’s, a dream vision in which the democratic bard appraises his sleeping comrades (i.e., us) and enters their lives and their dreams. The title, then, does not simply condemn the characters for wasting their lives in moral slumber,¹² but serves also as the author’s ars poetica, his moral mission to include himself, for all his social criticism,¹³ in the same infernal city to which his characters remain, even in the end, somewhat condemned, albeit perhaps on their wayward way to purgatory, or paradise. The novel’s hero is the novel itself: an act of generous self-abnegation before every last inch of the characters’ otherness, art the act of grace the characters can’t allow each other and that we struggle to allow ourselves.

I swear they are all beautiful,
Every one that sleeps is beautiful, every thing in the dim light is beautiful,
The wildest and bloodiest is over, and all is peace.

1. I still don’t exactly understand why this happened. Several sources I consulted said it was due to Germany’s imperial rivalry with and enmity toward England and then America from the late 19th century through the world wars, especially since German nationalism had claimed Goethe as “national poet” despite his cosmopolitan humanism. But Japan and Russia were also our enemies, and people in the ’50s and ’60s were still up to their necks in Dostoevsky and Zen, so it can’t just be that. Perhaps Goethe was displaced by Nietzsche, who claimed the polymathic poet as his Übermensch forerunner, the anti-John to his anti-Christ, and perhaps also the classicism of Goethe’s later sensibility is too remote for us, we who remain capable only of adolescent Sturm und Drang. Still, Goethe is a foundational figure for our 19th-century classics, an inspiration both on Romanticism and on the reaction against it. I quote Matthew Arnold’s “Memorial Verses”:

When Goethe’s death was told, we said:
Sunk, then, is Europe’s sagest head.
Physician of the iron age,
Goethe has done his pilgrimage.
He took the suffering human race,
He read each wound, each weakness clear;
And struck his finger on the place,
And said: Thou ailest here, and here!

He look’d on Europe’s dying hour
Of fitful dream and feverish power;
His eye plunged down the weltering strife,
The turmoil of expiring life
He said: The end is everywhere,
Art still has truth, take refuge there!

2. Last week I mentioned some possible alterations to the schedule. I still haven’t updated the pdf yet, but my plan right now is simply to swap Coriolanus for Othello in the Shakespeare section. The will give us four sets of two matched plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest as Shakespeare’s original fantasies, early and late; As You Like It and Measure for Measure as pastoral and problem comedy; Hamlet and King Lear as the two greatest tragedies; and Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus as two late Roman tragedies. I probably won’t tinker any more with the schedule—except for the nagging sensation that I should pair Ibsen and Chekhov as I paired Shaw and Wilde last year instead of just treating Ibsen alone. I may try to find a way; maybe I’ll do one play each by both men on a single episode.

3. A review is a consumer report. It tells you if X product is worth spending your money on. That’s why a review has to obey certain rules—not spoiling the end, for example—inconsistent with genuine criticism. Reviewing also demands an ethical code to bar conflicts of interest. You’re not supposed to review people whose success is in whatever way bound up with your own, a custom honored in the breach, to be sure, but still a custom. (You also shouldn’t write your own raves anonymously or pseudonymously, a rule notably broken by Whitman and Pound.) People in the same clique or movement (whichever term you prefer) who write about one another’s work are then in violation of the reviewer’s ethic. Yet if one dispenses with the consumerist framing of the question, one will see this ethic for the unrealistic expectation it is. We appreciate what the writers of the past had to say about each other in all their friendship and enmity, in all the ambivalences of proximity and distance, in all the warinesses and admirations of emulous rivalry. And unless one is a pure opportunist or idiot, one doesn’t end up in a clique or movement with people whose work one didn’t already admire in the first place; it’s not like sitting down at a random high-school lunch table. This isn’t a review, then, though I will obey the prohibition on spoilers, because a certain merit to the work is not asserted but is rather simply assumed—or else I wouldn’t write about it at all.

4. These aren’t exactly my own questions, I admit. I am a sort of sincere cynic or earnest ironist in these matters, an Emersonian or indeed (yes) Trumpian sensibility capable of identifying my own interests with the good of the universe; as I mean well, I tend to imagine my self-advancement will work out well for all involved. Or as the Crowleyan comic-book writer Alan Moore once said somewhere, in a line I meant to steal for Simon Magnus in Major Arcana but forgot to, and I quote from memory, “I believe that what I do is moral because I am the one doing it.” This could be a dangerous indulgence to allow oneself, but since I am, as a devoted John-hater has several times pointed out on here, extremely lazy, I don’t get up to much evildoing.

5. On Girard, from Gasda’s review of the new Penguin Classics collection:

Girard’s core teaching is that we should seek to escape, through Christianity, cycles of (often violent) competition. For Girard, mimetic grace—Jesus is a scapegoat who knows he is innocent but allows himself to be sacrificed anyway—is the only way to break the ancient cycle of mimetic violence.

A properly critical essay on The Sleepers will someday work through whether or not this is the redemptive meaning of Dan’s story in the novel. I doubt it, actually, but am still thinking about it. Maybe I would like it better that way, like it better than what otherwise seems to be the novel’s naturalist drift—the explanation is just bad genes.

6. On Chekhov, from The Sleepers:

There was a humility and gentleness to everything in both Chekhov’s life and work, a touch of deep humanism that had faded from the world.

7. The petit-bourgeois parvenus trespassing in the realms of gold—Keats led us here—betray their (our) bêtise in all sorts of ways. For some it is the unavoidable eructation of vulgarity. For others, and I am among them, it is just the opposite: a preference for loveliness and decorum so exaggerated as actually to be vulgar and déclassé, cf. Trump’s bathroom chandelier and gilded toilet. Thus I am always averse to reading novels with titles like Blue Lard or Fuccboi or Nutcrankr or The Pussy (I deliberately range from respectable NYRB “literature in translation” to the self-published vanguard). You’re supposed to use a nice resonant phrase (like Major Arcana) or something from a poem (like The Sleepers). I know, I know: “Back to the shop, Mr. John!”

8. I reproduce here some lines I wrote about The Blue Period on Tumblr when someone asked if I’d read it: The Blue Period is an “autotelic asyntatic” day-in-the-life interior monologue in fine modernist form of a young metropolitan writer in mourning and planning to compose a narrative on the death of Paul Celan that would in fact be “a turbine not a novel.” I admired it: a work of integrity and at times raw Joycean beauty of phrase: “emotion brightwarm like rawlight suddenly.”

9. They ran out of physical galleys, by the way, so I had to read The Sleepers on my phone and laptop. Isn’t life funny?

10. In literary terms, the question is what to do when and if Romanticism becomes impossible, as Dan reflects in the novel:

Whatever the differences between Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Dan reasoned, their characters had in common the search for, the willingness to search for, God. Great writing was never really nihilistic. Even Thomas Hardy had believed in Fate. And even for a postmodern writer like Pynchon there was the mysticism of The System.

The long phase known as Romanticism always left room for belief or at least ecstasy. But now, Dan reasoned, the Romantic subject was passing away and something new was evolving.

Along with Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Lawrence, Robert Musil also hovers over the novel, but there I am at a disadvantage, because I have not yet had the pleasure.

11. The novel’s overall appraisal of male sexuality is in line with radical feminism, which conjugates with its gnostic motif:

The brain couldn’t dissolve itself into the body it was attached to, the brain couldn’t sever itself, and float free. There was constant tension between body and mind, she thought. The mind kept trying to jettison the body, transform itself into spirit.

And there is no contradiction in observing that The Sleepers also participates in the aging Millennials’ conservative turn, the dawning awareness that we have not so much removed Chesterton’s proverbial fence as blasted it into the sun, and this perhaps rather prematurely. (Speaking of Goethe’s classicism, see Gasda’s appreciative essay on the “radical moderation” of mid-19th-century post- and anti-revolutionary European leaders.) For all that, I admire the novel’s avoidance of facile pro-natalism in its conclusion, which concedes that reproduction is as likely to reproduce the problem as anything else.

(Further pursuant to the perhaps controversial #MeToo theme, and at the risk of distaste in belaboring the scatological, I also note in passing that Gasda chivalrically allows Dan’s youthful paramour to void her bowels between paragraphs, while Dan’s evacuation is described in some detail as to number and texture. Here is perhaps the text’s clearest statement that Dan is in the wrong when he trespasses upon her corpus. Her ambivalent invitation is non-mitigating; at some invitations even the omniscient narrator demurs.)

12. Though we could find an implied allusion, appropriate for this novel of “quiet desperation,” to a famously punning passage in Thoreau’s Walden (“sleepers” was a term for rail ties):

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irish-man, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.

By the way, who would I be if I didn’t tell you that even Whitman stands accused, on the grounds of this very poem, of exercising the will to power in his omnivorous sympathy, per our beloved provocatrice in Sexual Personae. Truly, no escape:

In class, Milton Kessler spoke of The Sleepers’ “ghoulishness” and “prurience.” The poet makes “a magical godlike gesture” over the sleepers, who are “like fetuses”: “He creates them. They are all helpless before him.” Whitman’s sympathy and identification are based on aggression and invasion. The poem has a skopophiliac tyranny: the omnipotent eye forces passivity on its objects, denying them personal consciousness. Whitman, normally the Dionysian enemy of hierarchy, spreads all mankind before him from horizon to horizon, in abject postures of subordination. The sleepers are matter awaiting the impress of his mind. His criminal trespass, a violation of their dreams as well as bedrooms, has a hushed erotic excitement. The poem is a psychosexual breaking and entering, and Whitman is the vampire who walks by night.

13. The anti-point of the novel’s eve-of-election 2016 setting seems to be that it genuinely doesn’t matter, that politics doesn’t go that deep, that there is no political solution, nor even exactly a political problem: “Politics had nothing to do with a luminous heart.”