"I do appreciate the unique aesthetic virtues, the urban pastoral, offered by mini-metropolises of the Pittsburgh or Dublin or Florence type" - yep, midsized metropolises of that type tend to be livable and cozy, with enough going on to keep life interesting.
I'm no doubt a bit Dan-like (look out for *my* forthcoming wither-the-left piece!), but in Dan's defense so is Gasda. Not too literally, but in the ways in which Alice Munro's heroines are versions of Alice Munro: somehow the same type of person in a broad historical sense, from the same generation, endowed with transformed versions of some of the author's own experiences.
It is important to the novel's structure that there's no man Dan's age who is more impressive than Dan. If there were, Dan would be a sort of gargoyle, a Homais style figure. He needs to represent his whole generation for the book to be a "Contemporary Tragedy in the Classic Style." I agree that Dan is too contemptible for this to work. His redeeming features (which probably aren't redeeming enough) are a certain amount of wasted potential—his thesis book is silly but at least he was reading Henry James—and above all an awareness of how pathetic he is. Dan has occasional faint access to the world as seen by the authorial voice. Awareness of how he looks from that perspective is part of why he offs himself, no doubt.
The "-con" bit of both your novel and Gasda's, I think, comes from their both ending with a baby. I was going to contrast that with your shared model, Disgrace (king of the canceled professor novels), which ends with the hero euthanizing a dog. But it occurs to me that Disgrace also has a baby at the end: Lucy is pregnant and going to live with Petrus. However ambiguous your babies are, Coetzee's vision is more grim.
Yes, I mean I'm Dan-like, too, as a social type; I think I meant his ideas are contemptible, or his approach to ideas/culture, and these are never redeemed. There's a naturalist determinism in Matthew's book—Dan follows his mother, more Ibsen than Chekhov—so I assumed the baby wouldn't amount to much and that this was an implicit argument against natalism per se as a solution to cultural sterility. The literally fruitless lesbian couple owns the future at the end, Akari having earned it with her expert eye, which is also what inaugurates the novel. My baby, what with all the Blood Meridian imagery at his baptism and the echoes of Overman, is hinted to be some kind of dark messiah, which is either the most or least grim of these options.
You’re certainly right that Gasda isn’t naively or boosterishly pro-natalist. Still, as I read the book Mariko’s having the baby is a sort of crash into reality from the state of suspended animation she’d been trapped in. Not a beautiful reality, perhaps not equal to her potential, but her fate isn’t tragic.
This is perhaps a sign of my limits as a reader or my need to reread MA, but I sometimes had trouble connecting the Kulturkritik to the ambiguities of the various kinds of dark Magik. As I see it, the magic is art, and art is self-creation, self-creation is religious, but religion must be re-interpreted by romantic poetry. It becomes dark (perhaps as a necessary step in the process of its emergence) when the self-creation or mythologizing or manifesting or transitioning abandons the ethical impulse or the recognition of a debt of sense or whatever that was conveyed by traditional religion. (Although actually going back to traditional religion is inauthentic, thus the satire of Catholic influencers.) This is represented in different ways by Marco Cohen and Jacob Morrow, who are the co-authors of your Old Testament (Overman) and your New Testament (Major Arcana, Ash’s other baby).
The Kulturkritik is that we live in an atomized and administered society (one that’s got this way part because of the death of traditional religion), a society that’s hostile to the more-or-less organic traditions from which art and “transitioning” etc. emerge. Now: what does the evil darkness of the dark magic have to do with what’s going wrong in your America? Some things. You have Simon Magnus sell out by working for an evil corporation and you have him get his LSD from the CIA, who later offer him a special AI assistant. Still, I didn’t fully see where the lines converged. (Mann, to cite another illustrious predecessor, is also less than perfectly clear about what connects dodecaphonic music to Nazism.) Anyhow, I thought that your ending was a very affirmative barbaric yawp, or (to put it in a slightly critical way) that the book doesn’t quite establish why the dark messiah baby would be scary. But I won’t ask the magician to explain his tricks, no doubt if I read more searchingly I’ll see more.
I think your reading is persuasive, especially the synthesis of magic and religion, each incomplete without the other, and neither at home in the atomized and administered society. The link between dark magic and this society is the way the administrators have harnessed it, or tried to, not necessarily with the magic itself. The dark messiah baby would be scary insofar as the imagery aligns him with "the cleansing force" in Overman, but this is open to interpretation.
As is everything else! I don't want to make it sound more like a treatise than it is. One sets out to do a certain amount of Kulturkritik but a novel ends up leading one almost of its own will through its gallery of images. You could try to force it back into your preferred track, but that's probably not a good idea! You can write a 1984 that way—I like 1984—but not a Doctor Faustus. I assume something similar happened to Mann, though he had the built-in irony of the more "normie" narrator whose word we perhaps don't have to take for the meaning of the events. I wrote an essay on DF years ago, not sure how well it works as a gloss on MA:
That is a good point! Brodernism was (and remains) a powerful fandom--one with an indie quality too, nurtured by and nurturing small journals and small presses.
Yes, brodernism is totally a fandom. I like it more now that I've started thinking about it in those terms. The competitive aspect—you've read a 1300-page Romanian novel set inside of an Ottoman jar? well, *I've* read a 1600-page Latvian novel narrated by a Nazi duck—is endearing when seen as competitive fan behavior.
Thanks for taking my caricature in good humour! The proper attitude to the parts of nature not fashioned by human consciousness is one that still bugs me. I'm not prepared to agree with Tao Lin's online persona that nature always knows best (even when the baby dies of diarrhoea), but it also appears that many of those who turn against nature end up seeking something higher than the human to worship (Huysmans being the canonical example).
You're welcome! I agree, nature doesn't always know best, or if it does, per the Shakespeare line, it does so through our consciousness and reflexivity, which is in theory (unless one is a hardcore gnostic) part of nature. We shouldn't brutally despoil the natural environment, obviously, and should "collaborate" with it, so to speak, but appeals to the idea that humans are a cancer, a disease, an encumbrance, and concomitant "degrowth" political ideals, leave me pretty cold.
Thank you for reading my essay/review (I think I agree with you that it's more of the former, even if I started it intended for it to be more of the latter). I ended up talking more about character than I also probably intended to, but I was trying to figure out why that part of the book just didn't quite work for me. It's probably because I've never been a youtube/instagram/tiktok person---I can barely stand podcasts, let alone video---and a lot of the second half of the book is about that kind of consumption. The plot and setting are post-pandemic, and it's a time when everyone's staring at screens all the time, and ADG is kind of caught in the plot. I liked her more when she could be online on Tumblr and wikipedia than when she was living in video land, and I'm also probably generally suspicious of novels set in the last ten years. I like some some distance.
ADG is an accurate rendering of the consumption habits of some very smart teens and twentysomethings these days; I have a specific recent student in mind whose resemblance to them is uncanny. There's probably something of my late Millennial self in ADG too, but I'm prouder of the self that emerged in my mid-to-late twenties (aka, actually finishing novels) than the one who spent hours on Wikipedia trying to figure out Lacan and Althusser and Deleuze in my late teens and early twenties.
You're welcome! I enjoyed it and have now listened to the album too. I'm kind of the opposite re: setting; I worry novels not set in the last decade are being evasive. Though you might enjoy my Class of 2000, set in 1999, if I may self-promote! Yes, ADG was in part based on observations I've made of students, not one in particular of course, just the whole generational way of being.
Your book is probably not that good if you're overly obsessed with accolades, and are interested in essays that may or may not talk about you (for you, in terms of you).
"I do appreciate the unique aesthetic virtues, the urban pastoral, offered by mini-metropolises of the Pittsburgh or Dublin or Florence type" - yep, midsized metropolises of that type tend to be livable and cozy, with enough going on to keep life interesting.
I'm no doubt a bit Dan-like (look out for *my* forthcoming wither-the-left piece!), but in Dan's defense so is Gasda. Not too literally, but in the ways in which Alice Munro's heroines are versions of Alice Munro: somehow the same type of person in a broad historical sense, from the same generation, endowed with transformed versions of some of the author's own experiences.
It is important to the novel's structure that there's no man Dan's age who is more impressive than Dan. If there were, Dan would be a sort of gargoyle, a Homais style figure. He needs to represent his whole generation for the book to be a "Contemporary Tragedy in the Classic Style." I agree that Dan is too contemptible for this to work. His redeeming features (which probably aren't redeeming enough) are a certain amount of wasted potential—his thesis book is silly but at least he was reading Henry James—and above all an awareness of how pathetic he is. Dan has occasional faint access to the world as seen by the authorial voice. Awareness of how he looks from that perspective is part of why he offs himself, no doubt.
The "-con" bit of both your novel and Gasda's, I think, comes from their both ending with a baby. I was going to contrast that with your shared model, Disgrace (king of the canceled professor novels), which ends with the hero euthanizing a dog. But it occurs to me that Disgrace also has a baby at the end: Lucy is pregnant and going to live with Petrus. However ambiguous your babies are, Coetzee's vision is more grim.
Yes, I mean I'm Dan-like, too, as a social type; I think I meant his ideas are contemptible, or his approach to ideas/culture, and these are never redeemed. There's a naturalist determinism in Matthew's book—Dan follows his mother, more Ibsen than Chekhov—so I assumed the baby wouldn't amount to much and that this was an implicit argument against natalism per se as a solution to cultural sterility. The literally fruitless lesbian couple owns the future at the end, Akari having earned it with her expert eye, which is also what inaugurates the novel. My baby, what with all the Blood Meridian imagery at his baptism and the echoes of Overman, is hinted to be some kind of dark messiah, which is either the most or least grim of these options.
You’re certainly right that Gasda isn’t naively or boosterishly pro-natalist. Still, as I read the book Mariko’s having the baby is a sort of crash into reality from the state of suspended animation she’d been trapped in. Not a beautiful reality, perhaps not equal to her potential, but her fate isn’t tragic.
This is perhaps a sign of my limits as a reader or my need to reread MA, but I sometimes had trouble connecting the Kulturkritik to the ambiguities of the various kinds of dark Magik. As I see it, the magic is art, and art is self-creation, self-creation is religious, but religion must be re-interpreted by romantic poetry. It becomes dark (perhaps as a necessary step in the process of its emergence) when the self-creation or mythologizing or manifesting or transitioning abandons the ethical impulse or the recognition of a debt of sense or whatever that was conveyed by traditional religion. (Although actually going back to traditional religion is inauthentic, thus the satire of Catholic influencers.) This is represented in different ways by Marco Cohen and Jacob Morrow, who are the co-authors of your Old Testament (Overman) and your New Testament (Major Arcana, Ash’s other baby).
The Kulturkritik is that we live in an atomized and administered society (one that’s got this way part because of the death of traditional religion), a society that’s hostile to the more-or-less organic traditions from which art and “transitioning” etc. emerge. Now: what does the evil darkness of the dark magic have to do with what’s going wrong in your America? Some things. You have Simon Magnus sell out by working for an evil corporation and you have him get his LSD from the CIA, who later offer him a special AI assistant. Still, I didn’t fully see where the lines converged. (Mann, to cite another illustrious predecessor, is also less than perfectly clear about what connects dodecaphonic music to Nazism.) Anyhow, I thought that your ending was a very affirmative barbaric yawp, or (to put it in a slightly critical way) that the book doesn’t quite establish why the dark messiah baby would be scary. But I won’t ask the magician to explain his tricks, no doubt if I read more searchingly I’ll see more.
I think your reading is persuasive, especially the synthesis of magic and religion, each incomplete without the other, and neither at home in the atomized and administered society. The link between dark magic and this society is the way the administrators have harnessed it, or tried to, not necessarily with the magic itself. The dark messiah baby would be scary insofar as the imagery aligns him with "the cleansing force" in Overman, but this is open to interpretation.
As is everything else! I don't want to make it sound more like a treatise than it is. One sets out to do a certain amount of Kulturkritik but a novel ends up leading one almost of its own will through its gallery of images. You could try to force it back into your preferred track, but that's probably not a good idea! You can write a 1984 that way—I like 1984—but not a Doctor Faustus. I assume something similar happened to Mann, though he had the built-in irony of the more "normie" narrator whose word we perhaps don't have to take for the meaning of the events. I wrote an essay on DF years ago, not sure how well it works as a gloss on MA:
https://johnpistelli.com/2019/01/12/thomas-mann-doctor-faustus/
That is a good point! Brodernism was (and remains) a powerful fandom--one with an indie quality too, nurtured by and nurturing small journals and small presses.
Yes, brodernism is totally a fandom. I like it more now that I've started thinking about it in those terms. The competitive aspect—you've read a 1300-page Romanian novel set inside of an Ottoman jar? well, *I've* read a 1600-page Latvian novel narrated by a Nazi duck—is endearing when seen as competitive fan behavior.
Thanks for taking my caricature in good humour! The proper attitude to the parts of nature not fashioned by human consciousness is one that still bugs me. I'm not prepared to agree with Tao Lin's online persona that nature always knows best (even when the baby dies of diarrhoea), but it also appears that many of those who turn against nature end up seeking something higher than the human to worship (Huysmans being the canonical example).
You're welcome! I agree, nature doesn't always know best, or if it does, per the Shakespeare line, it does so through our consciousness and reflexivity, which is in theory (unless one is a hardcore gnostic) part of nature. We shouldn't brutally despoil the natural environment, obviously, and should "collaborate" with it, so to speak, but appeals to the idea that humans are a cancer, a disease, an encumbrance, and concomitant "degrowth" political ideals, leave me pretty cold.
Thank you for reading my essay/review (I think I agree with you that it's more of the former, even if I started it intended for it to be more of the latter). I ended up talking more about character than I also probably intended to, but I was trying to figure out why that part of the book just didn't quite work for me. It's probably because I've never been a youtube/instagram/tiktok person---I can barely stand podcasts, let alone video---and a lot of the second half of the book is about that kind of consumption. The plot and setting are post-pandemic, and it's a time when everyone's staring at screens all the time, and ADG is kind of caught in the plot. I liked her more when she could be online on Tumblr and wikipedia than when she was living in video land, and I'm also probably generally suspicious of novels set in the last ten years. I like some some distance.
ADG is an accurate rendering of the consumption habits of some very smart teens and twentysomethings these days; I have a specific recent student in mind whose resemblance to them is uncanny. There's probably something of my late Millennial self in ADG too, but I'm prouder of the self that emerged in my mid-to-late twenties (aka, actually finishing novels) than the one who spent hours on Wikipedia trying to figure out Lacan and Althusser and Deleuze in my late teens and early twenties.
You're welcome! I enjoyed it and have now listened to the album too. I'm kind of the opposite re: setting; I worry novels not set in the last decade are being evasive. Though you might enjoy my Class of 2000, set in 1999, if I may self-promote! Yes, ADG was in part based on observations I've made of students, not one in particular of course, just the whole generational way of being.
Your book is probably not that good if you're overly obsessed with accolades, and are interested in essays that may or may not talk about you (for you, in terms of you).
Yet here you are, talking about me!
It's called self-promotion, and it's what authors have to do if they want to get even a little attention in this crazy world.