Weekly Readings #172 (05/19/25-05/25/25)

where craft is opposed to art

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

As you can both see and hear above, GooglePlay has posted a very generous preview of the Major Arcana audiobook on YouTube. I trust it will help you decide to buy the novel, which you can order in all formats—print, Kindle, and audio—here and in print wherever books are sold online. If you still need to be convinced, I quote a new review from Goodreads (and encourage everyone else to rate and review on Goodreads and Amazon if you enjoyed the novel):

Pistelli floats between characters and time periods effortlessly, highlighting motifs and archetypes, shuffling his Tarot deck to reveal the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress—each card a new form, a new face, but very familiar. There is something relatable for most readers, I’d wager, but more importantly something disorienting.

[…]

The novel is a labyrinth of ideas: art, identity, magic, and the mess of being alive in this weird time. It isn’t always tidy, but mercifully, it never slips into that canned MFA tone that flattens everything into workshop-speak and is pervasive in breakout hits of Big Literati.

No, Pistelli’s voice is a breath of fresh air: smart, ambitious, a little wild. Feels like the kind of work that might, just maybe, mark the beginning of some new literary period.

More on the “essay” than the “review” side of criticism, I also gratefully acknowledge the profound readings of the novel contributed this week on Substack by Secret Squirrel and Kevin LaTorre. Kevin writes:

More is the default style of Major Arcana. There is so, so much in this novel: towering monologues, parabolic sentences, satirized 2020 political debates, communist Jewish illustrators, chapter-long backstories, fictional cross-dressing rapists, metatextual magic upon the novel’s own plotlines, and even a governmental psy-op. Major Arcana’s capacious intake of everything it sees is certainly audacious.

But is Pistelli’s more too much? Not in a way that mars the novel, and maybe owing to the novel’s serialized structure (which likely required the repetition of characterizations and imagery to consistently reintroduce them across the book’s weekly installments). More can become excess, but only the excess of passion. Pistelli writes—and writes, and keeps writing—with evident glee in the intensity of human feeling and intellect, quite like a certain Russian novelist whose own bulky, breakneck novels of idealists and mayhem thundered across all our mental and spiritual states. If an impassioned and excessive novel, one that is rapacious for the present, one that can render its troubling desires into distinct characters, one that remains engrossing over seven hundred pages, is too much, so be it.¹ Let Pistelli and other novelists write too much, so that Major Arcanae can proliferate and audaciously—crucially—perceive their worlds.

And to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, I posted “Speak and Bear Witness,” an episode on the occult poetry and poetics of Rainer Maria Rilke. We’re coming to the end of the modern western world literature in translation sequence—just Kafka and Borges to go—before we embark on a summer of Shakespeare and Milton and a fall of great American novels from The Portrait of a Lady to Paradise. Please offer a paid subscription today for access not only to these present and future installments but also to the ever-expanding archive of over 60 episodes on great writers from Homer to Joyce. Thanks to all my paid subscribers!

For today, speaking of “that canned MFA tone that flattens everything into workshop-speak,” a slightly self-serving explanation of why I object to “craft”-talk in writing, with most of the intellectual action in the footnotes. I’ve probably said most of this already, but that was likely 1000s of subscribers ago, and nobody ever listens anyway. Please enjoy!

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Anti-Craft: Form, Tradition, and Worldview in Aesthetic Education

Exodus 31:2-8 Bezalel and Oholiab making the Ark of the Covenant, from the Nuremberg Bible (undated)

Here is the crux of the problem, the single greatest obstacle to American literature today: guilt. Guilt leads to the idea that all writing is self-indulgence. Writers, feeling guilty for not doing real work, that mysterious activity—where is it? On Wall Street, at Sloane-Kettering, in Sudan?—turn in shame to the notion of writing as “craft.” (If art is aristocratic, decadent, egotistical, self-indulgent, then craft is useful, humble, ascetic, anorexic—a form of whittling.) “Craft” solicits from them constipated “vignettes”—as if to say: “Well, yes, it’s bad, but at least there isn’t too much of it.” As if writing well consisted of overcoming human weakness and bad habits. As if writers became writers by omitting needless words.
                                                                                     —Elif Batuman, “Short Story and Novel”

Recently The Republic of Letters hosted one of its dueling polemics on the value of the MFA degree—see here and here. I don’t have an MFA, never took a creative-writing class above the high-school level, never taught a creative-writing class above the college level, and am therefore unqualified to weigh in on the value of the degree itself. I just want to focus on one element of the pro-MFA piece: its defense of “craft,” of “rigor and craftsmanship at the level of the sentence,” the MFA’s pedagogical raison d’être.

I went into the MFA locked and loaded against any Iowa-fication of my fiction, leading me to this suspicion: a lot of MFA-haters might be good candidates for admission to MFA programs.

My writing wasn’t sanitized, pre-packaged for mainstream consumption. I just learned techniques and values that simply made my non-pre-packaged material better. I had a professor (David Gates, who wrote the novel Jernigan, which everyone should read) who marked up my stories, line by line, with astonishing precision. He’d learned to edit from Gary Fisketjon, who’d worked with Cormac McCarthy and Bret Easton Ellis. When I applied the edits, I was amazed to watch these sentences get better. I edit myself now. Watching a sentence level-up in real time is a thrill tantamount to blasting raw ideas onto the page. As advised, I’m especially hard on my adverbs.²

[…]

Trust me, I get it. I used to hate the notion of craft. I railed against literary conformity. But I was just a kid then.

I am probably older than the author but have never stopped hating and railing, so let me explain why. A change of art forms might, moreover, clarify my general point.

For a long time I’ve taught courses in comics and graphic novels in the liberal arts department of an art school that offers a studio arts degree in comics. As the students understand the situation, they go to their studio arts comics classes for craft and to my liberal arts comics classes for history and theory. I don’t always know what the students learn from this experience, but I’ve learned to formalize what had been an inchoate objection to “craft.” I often present examples to the students of classic comics that violate the craft rules they learn in their studio courses. They object, for example, to these panels and other panels like them from Hergé’s Tintin in America:

While the politically aware will complain that Tintin comics are (putting it simply) racist and (putting it more complexly) invested in a sort of Third-Positionist critique of the modern for its inorganic and devitalizing ethos—and don’t worry, my students also always get around to noticing that!—those aware of craft will observe first that Tintin and his co-stars in the image above are standing on or otherwise interacting with the bottom border of the panel. From the perspective of comics craft as taught in America, this is forbidden. Their studio teachers order our shared students never to show their characters interacting with the panel border in any way. Doing so calls the reader’s attention to the 2D picture plane and therefore disrupts the illusion that a panel offers a window onto the story’s 3D reality.³ It’s like banging a pot when you should be lulling the reader to sleep. It’s against the rules!

But, as I always tell my students, there are no rules. There are only traditions, forms, and their standards; these exist to transmit a worldview. Sometimes a tradition and its formal standard work against its apprentice artist’s own worldview. In the case of Hergé, I observe, he invented and then mastered a tradition for which the production of a seamless illusion—the attempted merger of art and reality—was impossible. The very linework created by artists in this tradition⁴ defeats the trompe l’oeil effect of indicating depth and volume that American mainstream comics art came to favor over the course of the 20th century. You could never mistake Tintin for reality; it’s always insisting that it’s a text. For that reason, I suggest, it consistently interrupts its own propaganda effect, jocularly reminding readers that, to quote other Francophone experimentalists, “this is not a pipe” (Magritte) and “it’s not a just image; it’s just an image” (Godard).⁵

The complex, dynamic, mutually supportive or mutually destructive interaction of form and worldview, I would hint, is the proper object of criticism, not a scorecard of craft rules observed or violated. The knowledge of form and worldview should also be the artist’s own horizon and telos. Artists should know their traditions and how to work with them, should be as aware as they can be of what worlds they’re projecting. Sometimes innovating within a tradition—or attempting to subvert one tradition with another when the latter holds hegemony—will just look stupid, like not knowing the rules, like not having been taught craft. Craft then turns into a club the critic can use to beat the rebellious artist.

I will take the example nearest at hand: myself. When I wrote Major Arcana, I wanted to blow up the narrow craft-driven novel and replace it with a grander vision of the form. The “craft” in question is a series of rules codified largely from the practice of Henry James, who wanted to discipline the unruly novel with the tidier structural model offered by drama, and who wanted as well to enshrine the observer over the actor as the vehicle of narrative.⁶ Chief among the rules of the craft-driven novel: each visibly demarcated segment of a third-person novel, such as a section or chapter, or even the whole novel, should be narrated from within a single center of consciousness, focalized through a particular character, just as only one actor onstage speaks at a time. James judged Tolstoy’s novels to be “loose, baggy monsters,” not only because they’re long, or because they break out into essays, but presumably also because Tolstoy’s narrator roves around in the characters’ minds at will, within chapters as well as between them. In one scene of Anna Karenina, he even tells us what a dog is thinking for a paragraph or two; James, by contrast, restricts the whole of The Ambassadors to the protagonist’s POV, this to the point of confusion, and no dogs allowed.⁷

I decided, as my novel’s stylistic premise, to create a more active and restless omniscient narrator than the Jamesian/MFA one, and to grant this narrator a distinct voice, the voice of my critical essays,⁸ since these had, up until Major Arcana’s success, proved more popular with the public than my fiction. I wanted both to capture the vertiginous proliferation of viewpoints in our time and to inhabit an intelligence able to act as a guide through this chaos rather than an only half-articulate register of its effects, a bewildered observer in the mode of James’s Strether.

While this ambition may not have been worth realizing, and while I may not have realized it well, I attempted it deliberately, not because I wasn’t any better instructed. We could point to cognate attempts, moves away from ossified notions of “craft,” among the sociologically kindred fiction of “Substack Summer,” from Gasda’s morally assertive narrator in The Sleepers to Kanakia’s move in the short story from the realistic to the parabolic: both reject James’s “dramatize, dramatize” and its successor in the MFA’s “show don’t tell.” To criticize this development as a lapse in “craft,”⁹ rather than as an attempt to craft a fiction of the future, is to cling to a past the present has already made obsolete.¹⁰

1. The self-published edition ran to 700 pages, the Belt Publishing edition runs to 350, but the word count is almost the same. It’s all about margins, spacing, and the like.

2. The tedious stricture against the adverb as enervating the verb or evading concrete description betrays MFA pedagogy’s origin not only in the Jamesian cult of perception, as I am about to argue, but also in the Hemingwayesque cult of action. Forms and traditions harbor worldviews, not inert rules for objective performance. You might entomb action in adverbs with full artistic legitimacy if you want to contest Hemingway’s attitude. Then there’s the putrid prejudice against the semicolon; I wrote a whole manifesto about that; if it were entirely up to me, if I made no concession to the audience, I wouldn’t put a period in any of my novels until the end of the final sentence; all the full stops between the first letter and the final period would be semicolons; the semicolon is the most beautiful of the punctuation marks.

3. In the image, Tintin’s feet are on the same level as the base of the lamppost behind him; both are flush with the border. Pictorial depth is under-emphasized. A comic-book artist in the American mainstream tradition, which privileges pictorial depth (cf. Kirby), would draw Tintin’s feet below the lamppost’s base to indicate his closer proximity to the reader.

4. It’s called ligne claire, or “clear line” drawing, which Hergé partly invented. The ligne claire artist often foregoes the suggestion of depth created by varying the line-weight among foreground, midground, and background, and furthermore tends not to use textured effects like hatching and feathering to indicate the volume of figures or objects. The ligne claire artist renders all figures and objects with the same outline and then fills them in with flat colors, also disrupting any potential 3D illusionism. Hergé innovated this style for his children’s adventure comics, likely with the idea that its simplicity would absorb the young reader, but as the wiki article tells us, the later artists who adopted ligne claire tended to do so for purposes of postmodern subversion, precisely because its flattening of the page is metafictional, combined with its nostalgia value as signature of an always already compromised innocence. Chris Ware is the most prominent American example.

5. One more turn of the interpretive screw brings us around to Hergé visual irony as superficial “it’s just a joke” pseudo-exculpation to normalize the ideology it conveys more than a sincere presentation would, since a sincere presentation invites a sincere riposte, not an acquiescent shrug. But I am more interested in the critical method than any particular conclusion. The method—let’s borrow the late Fredric Jameson’s term for it: the poetics of social forms, where “social” indicates the idea of collectively and historically assembled traditions, forms, and their concomitant worldviews—is the highest secular academe can reach. Beyond it lies Plato et al., which is to say forms not exhausted by social explanation. If you want to be a great writer or artist, you have to go there, too, but you can’t expect secular academe (on either the MFA or Ph.D side) to take you. Maybe after Trump shuts down Harvard and RFK Jr. decalcifies the pineal gland, we will re-open the Platonic academy.

6. Nick Ripatrazone in The Metropolitan Review gives us an appreciation of James’s criticism. Jejune James’s brutal hatchet-job on the master Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend is the first exhibit. Because literary history moves in cycles, James’s assault on Dickens foreshadows in our own time James Wood’s censure of hysterical realism, which arguably brought us to the present pass. James accuses Dickens of the same charge Wood brings against DeLillo, Pynchon, or Morrison: exalting a merely formal vitality over the more subtle representation of felt life. (Between James and Wood falls Leavis and The Great Tradition: child of the one, father of the other.)

What a world were this world if the world of Our Mutual Friend were an honest reflection of it! But a community of eccentrics is impossible. Rules alone are consistent with each other; exceptions are inconsistent. Society is maintained by natural sense and natural feeling. We cannot conceive a society in which these principles are not in some manner represented. Where in these pages are the depositaries of that intelligence without which the movement of life would cease? Who represents nature?

Literary history moves in cycles because every initially exciting development exhausts itself in the end. We have to allow every field to lie fallow in rotation. Our Mutual Friend is a great novel, but the Dickensian as a mode was on its way out; the elements in Middlemarch that look back to Dickens are the weakest, for example, while those looking forward to James are the strongest. And Sebald’s gravity and decorum can be refreshing if you’ve lived too long with Pynchon’s bawdry and scatology, as Wood evidently had. To everything its season. In this season, though, I think it’s time to risk hysteria again, lest we die of boredom. James’s anti-Dickens broadside is a legitimate use of the hatchet-job: as a revolutionary manifesto. Otherwise, a reviewer who refuses the minimal sympathy with a serious novel’s premise required for appreciation—what James called granting the writer’s donnée—should find some better way to spend time than by writing a review. A true critic must pass through this initial sympathy on the way even to the most devastating immanent critique; without such sympathy, critique cannot be immanent, but just querulous carping that “[X] is against the rules,” or, worse, that “it’s not the way I would have done it.”

7. For the fine and relevant distinctions, I quote from Abrams and Harpham’s authoritative Glossary of Literary Terms, 11th edition (2013), which I used to teach from in the introductory course on literary analysis described here:

point of view: “Point of view” signifies the way a story gets told—the mode (or modes) established by an author by means of which the reader is presented with the characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and events which constitute the narrative in a work of fiction. The question of point of view has always been a practical concern of the novelist, and there have been scattered observations on the matter in critical writings since the emergence of the modern novel in the eighteenth century. Henry James’ prefaces to his various novels, however—collected as The Art of the Novel in 1934—and Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1926), which codified and expanded upon James’ comments, made point of view one of the most prominent and persistent concerns in modern treatments of the art of prose fiction.

Abrams and Harpham then enumerate different possible points of view, one of which is that extolled in late James and then in the MFA:

The limited point of view. The narrator tells the story in the third person but stays inside the confines of what is perceived, thought, remembered, and felt by a single character (or at most by very few characters) within the story. Henry James, who refined this narrative mode, described such a selected character as his “focus,” or “mirror,” or “center of consciousness.” In a number of James’ later works all the events and actions are represented as they unfold before, and filter to the reader through, the particular perceptions, awareness, and responses of only one character; for example, Strether in The Ambassadors (1903). A short and artfully sustained example of this limited point of view in narration is Katherine Mansfield’s story “Bliss” (1920). Later writers developed this technique into stream-of-consciousness narration, in which we are presented with outer perceptions only as they impinge on the continuous current of thought, memory, feelings, and associations which constitute a particular observer’s total awareness. The limitation of point of view represented both by James’ “center of consciousness” narration and by the “stream-of-consciousness” narration sometimes used by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others, is often said to exemplify the “self-effacing author,” or “objective narration,” more effectively than does the use of an unintrusive but omniscient narrator. In the latter instance, it is said, the reader remains aware that someone, or some outside voice, is telling us about what is going on; the alternative mode, in which the point of view is limited to the consciousness of a character within the story itself, gives readers the illusion of experiencing events that evolve before their own eyes.

See also my essay on The Ambassadors for the limitations of the limited point of view, especially when restricted to one character over the course of a whole novel:

But James, despite the turn to formalism marked by his self-congratulation in the Preface for having used one of the novel’s main characters solely as a plot device, still wants to write the type of moral drama he perfected in the 1880s. There is not enough information in The Ambassadors for it to work as a moral tale, however, even an ambiguous one. There is no solid ground in the Jamesian stream of consciousness from which readers may judge the novel’s events as just or unjust, common or aberrant. It is all irony or no irony, neither fully modernist nor fully realist, and unsatisfying as an example of either mode.

When fiction is properly ambiguous, we are given all relevant information and left to make up our own minds. The Ambassadors is improperly ambiguous because its restricted viewpoint leaves us uncertain about even some basic facts of the narrative—uncertain about the world beyond Strether’s consciousness—and thus unable to render any judgment at all, beyond our judgment that the novel is eccentric. (Exaggerated eccentricity is the basis of James’s youthful attack on Dickens. Every successful revolution installs a new regime and will need to be overthrown in its turn.) “But that’s the way the modern world feels,” you will answer me, “and so you shouldn’t fault James for representing it that way.” It would be a fair reply if later novelists—under the tutelage of James’s example, of course—didn’t represent the same modern impasse in structures less ambiguous. We know Leopold Bloom and his world, Clarissa Dalloway and her world, and can compare one to the other. To represent confusion confusingly is a lapse, not a technique, which the James who wrote the less craft-bound middle-period masterpieces (The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians) understood. A comparison between the severe restrictions of The Ambassadors and their terminus in the contemporary novel, in which, as Brother Gasda argues, “a solipsistic protagonist…narrates her own phantasmagoric breakdown,” almost makes itself. There have been great novels written entirely in third-person limited from a single character’s perspective, but a writer needs a good reason to do this rather than “craft.” I think of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which takes the Jamesian innovation down to the phoneme by only using the language the POV character can use at any moment in the narrative, or Disgrace, where the POV character’s limited perspective is the ethical theme. Their ancestor is Emma, about which I wrote admiringly and ambivalently here. Austen’s own ancestors were the epistolary novel and (returning to James’s motivation) the drama. Nothing comes out of nothing.

8. The sociologist of literature might argue that this critical persona of the narrator is in continuity with the personal writing of the autofictionists I was otherwise at pains to reject. Both call attention to the person of the writer. We have not yet escaped the age of the “personality,” nor its dangers. On the topic of these dangers: Harmony Holiday’s essay in the new Harper’s, a filmography of James Baldwin, demonstrates how the image swallows the word, the icon devours the writer, in an age of essentializing spectacle, but also how the uniqueness of the writer’s being may burn through the screen and escape the prison of capitalized stardom:

When the career of a writer is reduced to diagnosing his society with pathologies, he can become addicted to catastrophizing, to the drama and friction of social dysfunction; it’s good for business; he thrives under it. This turns his creative mind reactionary and a little dull, until he’s transcribing instead of recounting stories, because we know what’s coming next in the plot. We put a coin in the juke and it sings the song we choose. So Jimmy was groomed to play the same literary jazz and gospel standards that he wrote ad infinitum, to sing for his supper, to take requests for his greatest hits. On camera we see him break with that regime in some scenes; we see him playing the most compelling hero in his own story. Jimmy wanted to be an actor, a star, and wrote these roles for himself. His filmography is an autobiography in images and just as harrowing as his writing. The camera loved him more than the streets did, more than the tabloids, more, even, than readers and editors, more than hopeful sinners, more than he knew how to love himself. Rather than asking him to tell your fortune or reprimand you, you could just observe and listen to how he walks, exhales impressive plumes of smoke, sighs, and ask yourself whether he might be a little fatigued or depleted by having been cast as a savior and spokesman among the wretched of the earth; ask yourself, might he have burned his sermons and saved the celluloid and Giovanni and no one else? The child star never retires; we retire him when that boyish charm expires and force him to remain whatever age or cross-section of ages that is forever. On film Jimmy occupies that purgatory until it bends to his whims and possesses us.

9. In “The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism,” a 1999 essay arguing for a more comprehensive aesthetics in “genre” fields like science fiction, mystery, pornography and comics, Samuel R. Delany inveighs against “craft” as the alibi of the entertainment capitalist’s cheap sensationalism. Viewed that way, the concept should not have been allowed to creep into higher-level literary discussion at all. I think of this whenever even a serious novel is disparaged as “digressive” or “needing an editor” or the like:

We see this concept of craft—where craft is opposed to art—constantly at work. […] We see it marring the artworks we are presented with whenever a science fiction writer or a mystery writer or a writer of pornography excuses his or her failure of taste, of invention, of skill, of insight, or simply of intelligence in thinking through the various ramifications of his or her story by reaching for the excuse that paraliterary criticism keeps ready: “I’m a craftsman—not an artist.” We see that concept at work in every incoherent movie in which motivations are absent or unbelievable and nothing makes sense or registers with any import, because, failing to understand the intricate ways in which coherence , believability, and interest must interweave to produce a satisfying story, one or another producer has told a writer, “Do it this way because it'll be more exciting,” or, “Leave that out because it’ll be dull,” all of which basically translates: “Do it this way because I’m paying you.”

Inasmuch as craft is algorithmic, an iterative formula, this should resonate in the age of AI as well. Not that empty rule-breaking will do the trick either. There must be a dialogue with tradition; only a dialogue with tradition can produce a genuinely novel reply, as Delany argues elsewhere (see footnote 10 below).

10. Here I fling back the charge of mere canon-worship that the essay in question also brings, against (I assume) this corner of Substack:

And you might want to stop harping on Dostoyevsky and Melville and Middlemarch, romancing literature from over a hundred years ago (it’s not coming back). Meanwhile, there’s much to be mined from late twentieth and early twenty-first century authors.

As Eliot, Woolf, Borges, and Bloom each argued, innovation reshapes rather than rejecting tradition. A novel about superhero comics, internet occultism, and genderfluidity written on the model of Middlemarch will be weirder for the contrast and therefore more innovative than yet another work mindlessly obeying the “craft” rulebook. We go forward by retracing our steps to a path not taken. Henry Oliver’s new essay on Woolf’s Johnsonian criticism in Liberties emphasizes Woolf’s wide reading to make the same point:

All taste is the product of knowledge, and few have been as well read as Woolf. Like Johnson, erudition allows great latitude in how she treats a subject. She is not beholden to any external measure. She can delight in Elizabeth prose writers or Defoe’s novels without worrying herself about their suitability for modern ideals.

In The Common Reader Virginia Woolf, the great modernist, the great acerbic, the great snob, wrote affectionate, traditional, old-fashioned belles lettres. She is constantly fresh, always surprising us. Who expects her to be an admirer of Moll Flanders? Everyone knows she called Middlemarch “perhaps the only novel written for grown-ups” (one of her few patently incorrect pronouncements), but she also wrote, “The compositions of Addison will live as long as the English language.” We know about her knowing (or not knowing) Greek, but she also knew enough to compare the lesser known Elizabethan and Victorian dramatists.

Though we could just quote Woolf herself on her debt to tradition, from the preface to Orlando. No fear of “romancing literature from over a hundred years ago” here; the modernists were all classicists as well as revolutionaries, revolutionaries because they were classicists.

Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater,—to name the first that come to mind.

In his “Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student,” collected in both About Writing and Shorter Views, Samuel R. Delany—see footnote 9 above—gives the ephebe the best creative writing advice of all. I’ve quoted it before, and I will quote it again:

You need to read Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola; you need to read Austen, Thackeray, the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy; you need to read Hawthorne, Melville, James, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner; you need to read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, Gogol, Bely, Klebnekov, and Flaubert; you need to read Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Edward Dahlberg, John Steinbeck, Jean Rhys, Glenway Wescott, John O'Hara, James Gould Cozzens, Angus Wilson, Patrick White, Alexander Trocchi, Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Vladimir Nabokov; you need to read Nella Larsen, Knut Hamsun, Edwin Demby, Saul Bellow, Lawrence Durrell, John Updike, John Barth, Philip Roth, Coleman Dowell, William Gaddis, William Gass, Marguerite Young, Thomas Pynchon, Paul West, Berthe Harris, Melvin Dixon, Daryll Pinckney, Daryll Ponicsan, and John Keene, Jr.; you need to read Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Richard Powers, Carroll Maso, Edmund White, Jayne Ann Phillips, Robert Glück, and Julian Barnes—you need to read them and a whole lot more; you need to read them not so that you will know what they have written about, but so that you can begin to absorb some of the more ambitious models for what the novel can be.

For Delany, a black queer Marxist poststructuralist, there’s no such thing as a great writer who has not appropriated and transfigured the energies of the canon.