Weekly Readings #28 (08/15/22-08/21/22)

welcome to the neotenic revolution

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

I have now numbered the “Weekly Readings” posts for ease of reference, though I continue to wish Substack made tagging, indexing, and searching more convenient. These missives will be longer and more weighty from now on; for that reason, I’ve been neglecting the Grand Hotel Abyss Tumblr and saving my material for the Substack audience—not least because I’ve gained on Substack over half the number of subscribers in six months that I got on Tumblr in 10 years, with regular, linear growth. I hesitate to introduce a paywall but please do buy my books if you like what you read here. (They’re novels—they’re entertaining—you’ll laugh, you’ll cry!) I have also increased and will continue to increase the number of other Substacks I’m recommending in the sidebar. Now let’s review some recent cultural, literary, and political controversies.

---

On the Greatness of Problematic Authors

many…equate having a problematic with being problematic.

—Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel

First, we have that curated chart of problematic authors and their transgressions, and its companion list of less problematic authors of color, that went viral in the bookish precincts of social media this week.

What’s the right way to respond to such an artifact in 2022? Many people mocked it, sometimes crudely. The author claimed to have been threatened and harassed—no surprise, given the cesspit of Twitter. Some said the curator should have been spared any criticism, no matter how respectful, since she’s “young” or even (as someone condescendingly ventured) “a child.” She is not a child; she is beyond the age of majority, about the same age as Keats when he was writing his first book of poems. But more importantly, she speaks with the consensus voice of government, academe, and corporation in the present age. The very earnestness and artlessness with which she in her youthful ardor expressed the mentality of these institutions, especially those holding stewardship over literature and culture, deserves our attention, even if her person does not.

Because this mentality has lost its grip on the actual vanguard of culture—all eyes have been on the new right this year, including mine—it’s easy to forget how powerful and destructive it all remains: a moralistic and censorious approach to the arts, an absolutist and simplistic identity politics, a debased pseudo-egalitarianism empowering not the subaltern for whom it claims to speak but only the expert elite. The hegemony these ideas enjoyed in the 2010s may have slipped, they may in some cases persist only as fossilized in administrative bureaus or superannuated middlebrow culture, but that doesn’t mean we should stop contesting them. To quote Zarathustra: that which is falling should also be pushed.

The replies to the list often fell short, though. I saw many mewling individual-author defenses of the “well, so-and-so’s not that bad” sort. Such ripostes accepts the list’s censorious premise—that we should be warned away from “problematic” art with flat statements of its ideological and authorial offenses—and only argue marginal and often insignificant cases. (Is Neil Gaiman really transphobic because the third-person narrative voice refers to Desire as “it” in the original Sandman comics? Who cares!) We need to attack this form of thought at its root: it misinterprets the purpose of art, which is not simply to ennoble humanity—and when it ennobles humanity, it usually does so through form rather than content anyway—but to explore the inhuman too.

Art is, always has been, always will be, and must be problematic—as problematic as life itself. Adults should not read non-problematic books at all except as light relief, because non-problematic authors are incapable of greatness, perhaps even of insight. Our list-maker nowhere displays this truth better than when she assiduously offered her other list of putatively non-problematic “POC” authors to read in lieu of her mostly (but not entirely) white rogues gallery. The second list’s two greatest authors are, however, completely and almost hilariously problematic: Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. Isn’t it patronizing to say otherwise? 

As Grand Podcast Abyss listeners know from Episode 16, Morrison thought that if a woman has been domestically or sexually assaulted she might well have provoked the attack, and that to deny this possibility a priori is to be complicit in infantilizing women. Hurston, meanwhile, was not just a Republican but the exact type of populist-libertarian Republican who forms the ideological core of Trump’s base today, as I discussed in Weekly Readings #18 . But if Hurston and Morrison hadn’t held such difficult views, how could they have written difficult masterpieces like Their Eyes Were Watching God and Sula, masterpieces that brashly brush past respectable doxa to touch the flaming heart of experience, exactly as non-problematic books, books for children, could never do?

In a great essayistic passage of Sula, Morrison explains why it’s dangerous to try to evade the inherent evil of existence:

In their world, aberrations were as much as part of nature as grace. It was not for them to expel or annihilate it. They would no more run Sula out of town than they would kill the robins that brought her back, for in their secret awareness of Him, He was not the God of three faces they sang about. They knew quite well that He had four, and that the fourth explained Sula. They had lived with various forms of evil all their days, and it wasn’t that they believed God would take care of them. It was rather that they knew God had a brother and that brother hadn’t spared God’s son, so why should he spare them?

And, to bring this rumination to an end, I introduce a long quotation I used to cite on Tumblr all the time; it deserves to be immortalized on Substack as well. It’s from Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s book on Conrad, One of Us, and it explains with great dialectical eloquence why only sinners can write books strong enough to pierce the veil of narcissism we use to pretend that every document of civilization is not also and everywhere a document of barbarism:

It is often suggested that a writer’s greatness is independent of his or her unworthy prejudices or deplorable opinions, that literary achievement is a different kind of thing from personal virtue. [Fredric] Jameson rejects such a notion as a mark of a naive liberalism that distinguishes between the primary or authentic artistic work and the contingent details of one’s political convictions. A decidedly nonliberal response to the problem represented by the scoundrel genius would affirm that greatness is inseparable from certain kinds of reprehensibility. A glance at the canon does not disconfirm this hypothesis. Dickens is (found by many to be) sentimental and cheap, George Eliot depressingly high-minded, Hardy clumsy and provincial, Wilde indifferent to suffering other than his own, Joyce inhuman and elitist, Woolf snobbish, D. H. Lawrence obsessed with the phallus, T. S. Eliot cold and academic, Pound bigoted—to name a few. But couldn’t one name them all? Can one imagine a figure of canonical stature—other than, perhaps, Jane Austen and the immensely tantalizing figure of Shakespeare—whose work does not suggest to some the mind of a bounder, a boor, an egocentric, a domestic bully, an ingrate, a sexist, a hectoring puritan, a shrew, a fraud? Isn’t this element of reprehensibility what E. M. Forster, for example, is missing, and why his reputation never breaks the surface of true greatness? Isn’t the problem that, with his sympathetic attachment to women, to the socially and economically stressed, and to India, Forster is simply too enlightened to engage the darker regions of the cultural psyche, and his appeal suffers as a consequence from a certain shallowness? Isn’t—to take the case of Shakespeare—the picturesque image of the immensely prolific playwright-actor living and working among gifted and well-compensated people so unsuited to the company of the canon that many believe the man from Stratford couldn’t have written those plays? Isn’t this image also responsible, for those who believe in his authorship, for the singular position he holds not exactly in but atop the canon? As a man, Shakespeare may be surcanonical, but his work is canonical because, in addition to such happy writerly virtues as intellectual acuity, verbal accomplishment, and fertility of invention, it displays an immense range of imaginative sympathy that extends from the virtuous and the heroic all the way down to evil, despair, perversion, impotence, waste, cowardice, misogyny, and anti-Semitism.

As a canonical figure—the canonical figure—Conrad exemplifies the unsorted mix of attributes, the ambivalence proper to our notion of eminence. Modern, western culture does not revere those who write solely from within the culture, reproducing only narcissistic images of of its best moments or most admirable traits. In Exiles and Emigres, [Terry] Eagleton points out that, at least in terms of the English canon, the weightiest writers are socially marginal people when they are not actually foreigners like Conrad. In British literary modernity, those who, like Bennett, Galsworthy, or Wells, take an identifiably English point of view on life in England follow the very recipe for minor literature. The perspective provided by the outside has this advantage, that it not only confirms the centrality of one’s own culture as an object worthy of attention, but also gratifies a distinctively modern appetite for self-criticism by calling the legitimacy or normativity of the culture’s prevailing customs and attitudes into question. This fairly obvious and conventional point actually entails another, far more problematic one—that the dominant culture of modernity is eagerly receptive to representations of the transgressive or disavowed impulses it has supposedly overcome. Literature is the site of this return of modernity’s repressed, and one of the common threads running through canonical literature is an invitation to identify with that which has been stigmatized as morally or socially unacceptable. Jameson takes this point to an extreme, declaring that “all the works of class history…have all had a vested interest in and a functional relationship to social formations based on violence and exploitation; and that…the restoration of the meaning of the greatest cultural monuments cannot be separated from a passionate and partisan assessment of everything that is oppressive in them and knows complicity with privilege and class domination, stained with the guilt not merely of culture in particular but of History itself as one long nightmare” (299). I would argue instead that “the greatest” monuments of modern culture expand, enlarge, or (better yet) widen the mind by soliciting a full and uncensored act of identification with both the forces of enlightenment and with those extremities of thought, feeling, and action that have been sacrificed to enlightenment.

This goes too far for me. I like E. M. Forster. Anyway, if we’re gossiping, Forster served as the secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas Senior in India in 1921. The monarch gifted the novelist the palace barber-boy to bugger, and the sexually repressed author of A Passage to India, with no little liberal guilt and colonial shame, duly availed himself. So in the annals of depravity we call the canon, even the gentle Forster may take his place.

---

The Devil and the Deep State

Former CIA director General Michael Hayden’s menacing and perhaps even murderous agreement with a journalist’s hyperbolic contention that he has “never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans” sent me back to one of my favorite films, an aesthetically and politically formative moviegoing experience for me in early adolescence: Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995). Nixon is a dizzying extravaganza where avant-garde and Marxist formal techniques (Eisenstein, Vertov, Godard) spin like a whirligig around Anthony Hopkins’s volcanically Shakespearean performance in the title role—all in service of exonerating the 37th president from the left as victim no less of a deep-state coup than of his own tragic hubris.

The central scene, a freestanding set piece sadly omitted from the theatrical release, comes when Nixon confronts CIA director Richard Helms, Stone’s embodiment of Satanic evil. In this metaphysical showdown between the Dicks, the deep state turns out to be hell on earth, to which almost any embodiment of popular sovereignty—yes, even a Nixon, even a Trump—is preferable on the grounds that at least he will be human. Bureaucracy, by contrast, is headless and heedless growth that leads inevitably to death, “wrong as cancer,” as Burroughs said (problematic: wife-killer, pederast, neocolonial sex tourist).

---

Iconoclasm vs. Juvenescence in American Politics

In the New York Times, law professors Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn propose to abolish the Constitution on the grounds that present societies should not be restrained in their legal self-making either by transcendent values or by transhistorical institutions. The University of Virginia student newspaper’s editorial board has similarly called for the school, founded by Thomas Jefferson, to disassociate itself from his legacy given his slaveholding and racist ideology.

I am not a legal scholar, historian, or political scientist, so I will leave the specifics of these arguments to their specialists (not that anyone trusts specialists much after the last few years). From the cultural critic’s perspective, though, this looks like a classic contest between iconoclasm and juvenescence. I borrow the latter term from Robert Pogue Harrison’s excellent 2014 book of that title, which I reviewed here. To quote from my summary of his argument:

Cultural renewal comes about by synthesizing the brash ambition of youth (which Harrison calls “genius”) with the custodial stewardship of age (which Harrison calls “wisdom”), so that every genuine renewal—a “neotenic revolution” in Harrison’s vocabulary—preserves the past by revivifying it and making it live anew. Juvenescence, or the strong capacity for neotenic revolution, may be the hallmark of the modern period, beginning with Dante’s reinvention of the Classical past.

Juvenescence requires neither a mindless worship of tradition nor its equally brusque dismissal, but rather its ongoing creative transformation—which demands its continuing presence in our lives, however altered or criticized. We are in no danger of overly venerating the past; we have learned that lesson almost too well. But Harrison warns that our amnesiac culture does risk severing our tie with history entirely, an act of iconoclastic destruction as deadly to polities as to poetic traditions.

I don’t doubt that constitutional law involves creative misreadings left, right, and center, or that Jefferson was and remains a disturbingly ambiguous figure. I do doubt that a country can long persist if it abandons entirely its founding personae and the compact they made. Forgive me if this is too melodramatic, but history furnishes more than one example of iconoclasts proclaiming Year Zero as the prelude not to paradise but to a massacre.

---

Visionary Politics, Visionary Poetry

One great theorist of juvenescence was T. S. Eliot in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where he argues that the neophyte poet must absorb the totality of tradition precisely so he can convincingly reorient it around his own novel contribution. In a Harper’s review of a recently completed two-volume life of Eliot, Christopher Tayler addresses an equally enticing problem: the individual talent in relation to the work.

Tayler sharply opens the essay with Shelley, whose biography, when the Victorians discovered it, virtually introduced the “how do we separate the art from the artist” question. In Eliot’s own terms, how can we distinguish “the man who suffers and the mind which creates”?—though the moral question obsessing us today concerns the man who inflicts suffering. Tayler writes:

A key concept in Eliot’s criticism was “impersonality.” Romantic individualism left him cold, which was one reason he had it in for Shelley. Slathering your emotions across the page while crossing your fingers about the versification was what bad readers expected and what bad poets did. Emotions needed to be bottled up, put under pressure, tested against “tradition”—another key concept. In Eliot’s use, this didn’t mean adherence to past practice, but the total system of verbal models stored in a writer’s memory, which, ideally, would encompass all previously existing literature. Behind the argument’s flashy turns was a simple point: storms of passion count for nothing if you don’t write well, because the only emotion a reader is going to see is “in the poem and not in the history of the poet.”

This still seems unanswerable to me. But the life of the poet is never uninteresting, especially when it clashes with the work: the utopian Shelley creating domestic dystopia for all the women who loved him; the bigot Eliot allowing every modern voice to have its say in his verse.

Shelley and Eliot both inflicted suffering—as have I, as have you—and Tayler is wise to compare them. We consider them to hold opposite positions in certain long-standing political quarrels of the western poetic tradition: Shelley the Romantic revolutionary, Protestant, Promethean, anarcho-communist; Eliot the neoclassical reactionary, Anglo-Catholic and obsessed with hierarchy and order. But the dueling parties to this quarrel from Dante and Milton forward have more in common with one another than any does with a politician or activist, even when they acted as politicians or activists, as some did. All aimed to transform our common life with the high cultural tradition’s imaginative values, a goal to which the modern left-right distinction does not always quite apply.

In an essay on Eliot, Peter Dale Scott referred to the canonical poets’ stance as “visionary politics.” He contrasted this with the materialist left’s approach, represented by our problematic-author list above, of subordinating the visionary and the poetic to immediate political aims. Again: iconoclasm vs. juvenescence. I know where I stand.