Weekly Readings #178 (06/30/25-07/06/25)

heave and swell

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

My new book, Major Arcana, is America’s controversial cult novel of the summer. Happily, the Kindle edition is on sale this weekend for only $2.99, an 88% discount. You can order it here along with the print and audiobook editions; the print edition is on sale wherever books are sold online. I also remind new readers that an hour-and-a-half preview of the audiobook is available on YouTube here if you’d like an extensive sample of this most explosive fiction.

Meanwhile, distinguished scholars continue to debate Major Arcana’s meaning on Substack Notes, while it’s made its second appearance in Britain’s storied New Statesman,¹ this time courtesy of Substack’s own Henry Oliver, who cites the novel as evidence for his argument that we are living through something of a literary renaissance, despite the literati’s predominantly downhearted mood:

We should also be optimistic about the breadth and variety of what is happening online. Naomi Kanakia, an American novelist turned Substacker, has just had her work profiled in the New Yorker, along with John Pistelli, another Substacker whose new novel Major Arcana is a weird and wonderful account of modern culture.

Meanwhile, literary Substack’s other great Henry, Henry Begler, in a long Note on the state of literature today, had this to say about Major Arcana:

That’s why when I think about an exemplary work produced by this scene I keep coming back to Major Arcana. It’s not that it’s some wild step forward for the novel, though I did enjoy it very much. But what I like about it is that it feels like a cult object. I like that it was passed around by enthusiasts before being traditionally published. I like its sensibility, the faith it has in art and in the aforementioned bohemia, a faith that is almost extinct in the professionalized world of the mainstream novel. It made me think about the wild orgy of discovery that happens in your teenage years and early twenties, when you’re just finding out about David Lynch, or Thomas Pynchon, or The Velvet Underground and all these tried and true countercultural stalwarts. What novel published in the last ten years would you give that kid? Hard to think of many. But I might give them Major Arcana.

Finally, while I won’t make a habit of mentioning one-star Goodreads reviews, the following, from one such populist pan, is funny considering the discourse on the literary internet lately:

The last novel (sic) to which I gave one star, Raymond Carver’s ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,’ was at least readable. ‘Major Arcana,’ on the other hand, is simply awful.

So I’m almost as good as Ray Carver. Gordon (Gordie? Gordo?) Lish, who is still alive, will be glad to hear that What We Talk About When We Talk About Love remains readable. I should see if the Gordster will edit my prose, will lish me, as it were, to the mast, so I don’t succumb to the siren song of maximalism: What Simon Magnus Talks About When Simon Magnus Talks About SimonMagnusself.

Speaking of the Renaissance, The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, just logged its second-longest episode: “Who’s There?,” three hours and 11 minutes exactly on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the endless enigma of his personality, and that personality’s inauguration of the modern self.² It’s one of the College’s headier moments, almost alone worth a paid subscription. Next week, Shakespeare Summer continues with the tragic sublime of King Lear. For episodes on literary topics ranging from Homer to Joyce, please see the the College’s ever-expanding archive. Thanks to all my current and future paid subscribers!

Speaking of maximalism, some thoughts on “purple prose,” mixed metaphors, Shakespeare’s “bad” writing, and more. Please enjoy!

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Sea of Troubles: In Defense of Mixed Metaphors and the Music of Literature

J. M. W. Turner, Waves Breaking Against the Wind (c.1840)

Here are the first four and three-quarter lines of the most famous, widely quoted, and celebrated speech in all of Shakespearean tragedy:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing end them?

Over-familiarity has obscured what any wielder of the red pencil, what any adept of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” would see immediately were this a contemporary piece of creative writing: an obvious and absurd mixed metaphor.

As Ted Hughes has argued, surely Shakespeare meant to write “siege,” not “sea.” “Siege” yields a continuous metaphor: mortal man beset with troubles is like a medieval castle under bombardment (by “slings” in this context he probably means something like a trebuchet). The siege’s victims can only end the bombardment if they come out to oppose the invaders in what is likely mortal combat, perhaps an old-time version of suicide-by-cop, given that self-slaughter is the speech’s theme. But the Bard appears indeed to have written “sea,” not “siege.” In a way, this is an apter metaphor, since myth and legend tell of heroes who fought water (Achilles, Cyrus, Cuchulain) as an illustration of futile human striving. The warriors who fought water didn’t die, so this does not augment the suicide theme—the siege metaphor doesn’t either—but at least it links up as an image with Ophelia’s drowning later on. Taking arms against a sea of troubles won’t end the troubles unless you drown, however; in that case, what was the point of the arms, unless to weigh you down?

These lines really don’t stand up to much scrutiny; one wonders why they haven’t gone down in history as a famous piece of bad writing rather than as the only lines of classic English poetry everyone knows. So the anti-Shakespeare tradition (Tolstoy, Shaw, Wittgenstein, Steiner) has long wondered. Is he really such a good writer? Yes, he uses every available word in the language and then invents the unavailable words, but sometimes it’s as if he’s impressing these coinages at random and debasing the official specie in the process. Are our central poet’s literary vestments true royal purple, or the gaudy and tacky knock-offs of the tasteless parvenu?

How does Shakespeare get away with it? I didn’t maliciously cherry-pick a lapse out of 2 Henry VI; this mixed metaphor occurs at the beginning of his most famous single passage. How does anyone get away with it?³ A writer gets away with it when the emotion behind the writing can be felt as the quantum superposition of the multiplied metaphors. I quoted Camille Paglia and G. Wilson Knight on Shakespeare behind the paywall of a recent IC episode on Shakespeare and will quote them again here, from Sexual Personae:

Shakespeare is a metamorphosist and therefore closer to Dionysus than to Apollo. He shows process, not objects. Everything is in flux—thought, language, identity, action. He enormously expands the inner life of his personae and sets them into the huge fateful rhythm which is his plot, an overwhelming force entering the play from beyond society. Shakespeare’s elemental energy comes from nature itself. I think this remark by G. Wilson Knight the most brilliant thing ever said about Shakespeare’s plays: “In such poetry we are aware less of any surface than of a turbulent power, a heave and swell, from deeps beyond verbal definition; and, as the thing progresses, a gathering of power, a ninth wave of passion, an increase in tempo and intensity.” The sea, Dionysian liquid nature, is the master image in Shakespeare’s plays. It is the wave-motion within Shakespearean speech which transfixes the audience even when we don’t understand a word of it.

[…]

Shakespearean language is a bizarre super-tongue, alien and plastic, twisting, turning, and forever escaping. It is untranslatable, since it knocks Anglo-Saxon root words against Norman and Greco-Roman importations sweetly or harshly, kicking us up and down rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. No one in real life ever spoke like Shakespeare’s characters. His language does not “make sense,” especially in the greatest plays. Anywhere from a third to a half of every Shakespearean play, I conservatively estimate, will always remain under an interpretative cloud. Unfortunately, this fact is obscured by the encrustations of footnotes in modern texts, which imply to the poor cowed student that if only he knew what the savants do, all would be clear as day. Every time I open Hamlet, I am stunned by its hostile virtuosity, its elusiveness and impenetrability. Shakespeare uses language to darken. He mesmerizes by disorienting us.

I started writing this to provide “air cover,” as it were, for Vincenzo Barney’s much-misunderstood defense of “purple prose,”⁴ which is in fact really a defense of style in all forms, from the sonic to the figural, as an autonomous force in literature rather than a passive instrument of meaning or a “windowpane,” in Orwell’s famous metaphor. Take this paragraph of Barney’s, the second sentence of which has been charged with mixing scientific metaphor:

I was asked here, the implication was, to defend my style of writing. The style, the color of writing that interests me most, the color that it is my artistic destiny to attempt and defend, is ultraviolet, and its invisible presence and translucent outline I will always stand behind, merrily blurred and curved by the event horizon of its bent light. What I mean is a style of writing that merges on the furthest bleeding edge between pure melodic pleasure and comprehensibility. A demi-impressionistic mode, a style that makes knight-leaps beyond the visible margins of the page where only the frontiers of quantum physics can follow them. Joyce showed with Finnegans Wake that our language could be written in staves, in pure non-representational music. Readers often approach this book incorrectly, with skeleton keys written by bored professors as if it were a very complex crossword puzzle. The novel’s enjoyment, instead, is musical and works by music’s abstract implication alone, revealing through original blends of the English language a hitherto invisible canon of imagery, hidden behind the suddenly sunshot, see-through drapery of the unconscious. Non-representational, remember, does not mean incomprehensible. But any meaning or plot one claims to discover therein one ought to keep to oneself, courteous not to interrupt the performance.

Had I been the editor, I might have queried the choice of “event horizon”—are you sure, I would have asked, you know what this means and are not just thinking about that movie where they take the spaceship to hell?—but, as with Shakespeare, so with Barney, we know what he means. His preferred prose is, as I’ve elsewhere described Joyce’s ultra-precise prose in Ulysses, not opaque but so transparent as paradoxically to obscure vision by revealing too much, more than the unaided eye can see, just as ultraviolet light, itself invisible, discloses hidden bloodstains and fingerprints when shone by the detective.⁵ The Joyce of Finnegans Wake intensifies language’s evacuation-by-repletion by making the words vanish entirely into music, the better to score the human drama under its thundering orchestra. This is close to Shakespeare’s own anti-methodical method: he carries his meaning on tides of sound, even though it scatters the particulars of significance at sea. Virginia Woolf, the most Shakespearean stylist of the 20th century, Shakespeare’s veritable if self-elected sister, agreed when she observed that writing “has nothing apparently to do with words” but rather with a “wave in the mind.”

When, anyway, are metaphors in enough proximity to become truly mixed? A few paragraphs above, I went in two sentences from coins to clothes, but does the period between them establish enough of a boundary? Is the real problem when two metaphors interfere with one another, as the sea floods the middle of the siege? A better question: if “every word was once a poem” (Emerson), if language is “the chaos of a cyclic poem” (Shelley), then how can mixed metaphors possibly be avoided?

Etymologically, for example, “metaphor” is from the Greek for “to carry over.” The metaphor behind the word “metaphor” is physical: moving an object from one place to another. Hence the customary separation of a metaphor into its “tenor” (the concept) and its “vehicle” (the image conveying the concept), since a “vehicle” (from the Latin “to carry”) is a convenient means of transport.⁶ “Mixed” is from the Latin for “to blend,” a figure borrowed from fields like construction and cookery, where one might blend the ingredients for mortar or for garum. The phrase “mixed metaphor” is itself a mixed metaphor, in which, for example, a cart is whipped into a sauce. Any two words even in the most customary or logical juxtaposition will, when inspected under the ultraviolet light of etymological investigation, stand revealed as an equally surreal image.

With some uses of language we want to be perfectly clear: when writing textbooks, recipes, instructions, news reports, laws. (But as the famous opacity of legal language may prove, you can be so clear you become obscure again, as if you’d clouded water with soap in trying to clean it.) Literature, on the other hand, has nothing essential to do with being clear, even if a writer may wish to be clear on occasion for musical effect. I will go further—I have gone further—and say that literature is not a use of language at all but rather an attempt to dissolve language back into pictures, sounds, and movements; is not communication but incantation; is not rulebound ritual but each novel sorcerer’s chaos magic.

1. As aforementioned, this is my second appearance in The New Statesman this year, after George Monaghan’s article last month. I’m glad there are no hard feelings about my remarks on the Fabian Society in the Invisible College’s George Bernard Shaw episode.

2. The Invisible College’s first longest episode, at three hours, 11 minutes, and 33 seconds, is on Dickens’s Hard Times, with many remarks inter alia about Thomas Carlyle and the twin birth of fascism and socialism in the 19th century, to which totalizing twosome Dickens’s sentimentalist proto-crypto-aestheticism remains a viable alternative. The third longest episode, at three hours, one minute, and 41 seconds, concerns the (anti-)Shakespeare chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, with much talk of conspiracy theorizing and the politics of modern culture (I memorably recorded it a little over a year ago, literally during the Trump-Biden debate). Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce: if we understand them, we will understand the world they made, which is the world we live in, for better and for worse.

3. Not everyone gets away with it all the time, of course. Due, I think, to Mark Fisher’s once prominently quoting it, I used to see the following sentence from a Fredric Jameson book I never read circulated as evidence of his underrated prose mastery. It’s always seemed to me, on the other hand, like either bad writing or an inadvertent confession. When I google it, I find innumerable citations, but the source is Valences of the Dialectic:

From time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays of light from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces are possible.

The first thing that makes me twitch my red pencil in my fingers is the dangling modifier: he can’t mean “we” are “like a diseased eyeball.” He wants “as when,” not “like.” But leaving that pedantic objection aside—and it really is pedantic, since we know what he means despite what might count as his slight misjudgment—we are given a choice of metaphors, one of them incomprehensible (what “baroque sunbursts”? where? when? in a sci-fi novel?) and the other downright frightening (eye disease), through which he means to convey the positive (in both senses: extant and affirmative) reality of his desired political arrangement. Communism, we are given to understand from this hodgepodge, is at once science fictional and like going blind. Did a member of the John Birch Society write this? Score one for Orwell, both aesthetically and politically.

4. He offers no defense of “purple prose” as such but rather identifies “purple prose” as a malicious pejorative wielded by those who disparage any stylized or heightened language at all in prose. This category of misreading is identified by a metaphor so venerable as to have disappeared into a commonplace: missing the forest for the trees.

5. Someone in the comment section assails Barney with Joyce, saying the Irish master, the self-styled scissor-and-paste man who never made anything up, would not have misused words like Barney does. Barney misuses words in pretty much the same way Shakespeare did: by moving them into novel and inappropriate contexts, e.g., using “nonchalant” to describe a well-known fact itself rather than a person’s feeling in the face of a well-known fact, which is a non-customary but instantly intelligible use of the word, or “cavalcade of water-pistols,” a reverse-synecdoche (whole for part substitution) since “cavalcade” is generally reserved for the cavalry at large rather than its weaponry, and cf. such Shakespearean bizarrerie and catachreses as “sugar o’er the devil himself” (is the devil potable, edible?) or “goodness, growing to a pleurisy, dies in his own too-much” (the person dies, not the pleurisy). Of course, Shakespeare didn’t have rules to obey, and we do, but are we sure we must? It’s a question of taste. If he asked, I might tell Barney to play a few more quiet passages between all the loud ones, but his essential instinct seems sound and healthy to me. Anyway, Shakespeare might have gotten “event horizon” wrong, and Woolf might have, too. Joyce would have gotten “event horizon” right, but so what? One is tempted just to skip right over passages like this in Ulysses, which were functionally written with ChatGPT, at least until the end, when the Shakespearean (or, really Biblical) music kicks back in and we realize we needed the scientific music to lead up to it, whether the science was correct or not:

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

6. “Tenor” is from the Latin for “to hold” in the sense of holding course in navigation, however, so it, too, is a metaphor, by which I mean it is a vehicle. This ride has no ending: it’s metaphors to the end of the line. (Mea culpa: I changed my vehicle from boats to trains.)