A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
Shortly after Katherine Dee advertised my essay “Back to the Maternal Bosom of the Pantsuited Neoliberalism” as “the last thing you’ll ever read on this topic” came another essay in The Point on just this topic, one its own editor proclaims the “genre’s apotheosis.” I thought it was okay. I didn’t learn much that was new. I detect a certain rank-pulling, a snide demonstration that the tech-lord will never be cool—can you even pronounce “Aramaic,” bro?—alongside, inter alia, a social-democratic critique of liberalism presumed more than argued, with little felt recognition of the infrastructural forces impelling the phenomena our author witnesses. Just in case anyone’s wondering what I think! But I share Katherine’s exhaustion with this topic and will in today’s newsletter move on to other matters.
Not national matters, though. I understand that I write on a day my own nation consecrates to commemorative mourning even as the mother country elegizes its fallen monarch. It would be pointless to dispute the evident power of collective feeling in these moments—I have felt it myself—so I will not write a manifesto against the idea of “national trauma,” though I have sometimes been tempted. But I do reserve the right to address other topics in other moods. I offer below two little essays on modernism’s unfinished business in our age of identity politics and artificial intelligence.
Edgelord Eulogium: In Praise of Poetic Arrogance
From poet and critic Vidyan Ravinthiran comes “T. S. Eliot, Edgelord”—an essay censuring Eliot for universalizing his private anger and alienation into a comprehensive social critique. Ravinthiran derides as well this gesture’s fallout in later British poetry, not to mention its supposed resonance with white male anger today, as crystallized in the online figure of the “edgelord.” Ravinthiran, on the other hand, claims to write from the margin, a position that imposes limits to the poet’s ability to express anger unchecked or imagine that his own anger might be a condition shared by all. Ironically, calling Eliot an “edgelord” is itself an edgy and attention-seeking online gesture—one that worked, since I hadn’t heard of Ravinthiran before. This essay, however, merits skepticism and scrutiny:
Harold Monro described ‘The Waste Land’ as ‘at the same time a representation, a criticism, and the disgusted outcry of a heart turned cynical.’ Poetry culture has too readily accepted, legitimised, and even venerated the leap from ‘disgusted outcry’ to ‘criticism’, claiming for outbursts of vindictiveness the status of civic commentary. When men who can’t build relationships affect to disdain them, they build systems instead, over-explanations granting them illusory, purely verbal victories over those whose existence they interpret as an affront. Much literary theorizing resembles, in its fact-neglecting ferocity, the misogynistic screeds of incels penning essays on Reddit, explaining exhaustingly why women are responsible for all the world’s problems.
This is the same self-help psychobabble that marred Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work. Sontag, like Eliot, stood accused of prophesying and systematizing instead of properly loving; unlike Eliot, she could not be called straight or male, though for Moser she had essentially internalized these subjectivities. Yet how specific to the vile “cis-het white man” are these intellectual and artistic gestures, really?1 Can anyone read Virginia Woolf or Richard Wright or Frantz Fanon or Adrienne Rich or Amiri Baraka and think only the straight white man ever systematized anger and alienation into a comprehensive social theory? And why shouldn’t they?
I spent two weeks last month reading Salman Rushdie. Like Ravinthiran, he was, when he wrote Midnight’s Children, marginalized several times over: an unbeliever among Muslims, a Muslim in India, an Indian Muslim in England. That this should forestall an art designed to find in private anger the interpretive fulcrum of a global experience, however, seems not to have occurred to Rushdie. Like Eliot, he was a migrant in London who ambushed and then assumed literary centrality when he metamorphosed his angst and rage into a vast, teeming, grotesque, syncretic, macaronic fresco of world-historic import. Whether it correlated with any inability to “build relationships,” we will have to ask his four wives; but I was not his wife, only his reader, and in that role I treasure his ambition.
Poetry or prose that doesn’t aspire to universalizing force should be left in a diary—I certainly don’t want to read it. An artist without the open arrogance of world-storming ambition is wasting our time. As for the so-called virtue of humility, it is only arrogance’s most cunning ruse, a crazy-making command that attention be paid by a figure affecting indifference. (Humility centers the ego as humble; it has nothing to do with the patient receptivity by which the artist allows the vision to come through from elsewhere.) Explosive creativity, an eruption of sights and insights we all can share, justifies the artist’s confusion of self and world. A mewling pretense not to care, a murmured apology for existing uttered paradoxically as that existence’s moral apologia—these, by contrast, are worthless, and to me they are even disgusting. When this predatorily false show of weakness becomes an aesthetic trend, we get the novels-without-style that afflict us today, and we get a crude and stupid political cartoon appended like a vandal’s scrawl to one of the most beautiful novels in the language.
As in so many recent essays in this genre of race-and-gender iconoclasm, Ravinthiran must pragmatically pretend that it’s still the middle of the last century, that arguments urgent and novel when Achebe or Said made them still hold the exact same relevance 50 to 70 years later, long after “difference” as value has been assimilated into the way our ruling classes rule. As if people currently in their middle age and younger had not been assigned to read Plath, Hurston, Baldwin, Salih, Silko, Kingston, Ishiguro, and, yes, Bechdel in school; as if there were nothing untoward in receiving a high-handed lecture in “marginalization” from someone with an M.A. from Cambridge, a Ph.D. from Oxford, and tenure at Harvard; and above all, as if we were not wise by now to the way those who exercise authority at empire’s very heart legitimate with a spurious rhetoric of powerlessness the very power they wield.
The expert class’s subaltern masquerade reverses Eliot’s adopted posture of English and European mastery, but not in any pragmatic way his ambitious ascent from margin to center. In a final irony, the Harvard professor, in psychologizing the online incel’s savage ways, subjects this population to the very anthropological gaze postcolonial and feminist theories were designed to contest as such—as a reductive, dehumanizing imposition. It’s an old song: “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss.” Holding hierarchy as a constant in human affairs, however, the question becomes not “how can we do away with bosses?” (evidently, we can’t) but “is the art produced by this or that inevitably hierarchical society any good?” In our case, an authoritative critical demand that the poets be timid bodes ill. Critics like docile poets for obvious reasons—easier to read, easier to diagnose—but why should the poets comply?
Waiting for the Messiah Is the Messiah: The Text Reads Us
I place the following here partially as a reminder to read a whole book by Joshua Cohen soon (I read some of Book of Numbers, some of Attention), but I appreciate his remarks in this interview with critic Leo Robson right here on Substack:
When I was young and exploring Kafka, I admit that I didn’t quite understand all the piles of prose, of criticism, about the meaning of Kafka. I took it for granted already that a thing that is written has its literal meaning, its allegorical or anagogical meaning, its comparative or contextual meaning, and its mystical meaning...and probably, almost certainly, more... This is all part of the apparatus of Biblical interpretation, of Talmudic exegesis. And I took it for granted that these meanings, or that this pursuit of meaning, existed in every tradition. ‘Does The Castle represent heaven or hell? ‘Is The Trial about the fact, or emotion, of guilt?’ It seemed mindless to me.
[…]
The answer to me was – it’s a heuristic, it is there to teach you how to read.
What it’s about is whatever you have learned from it in terms of how to read the sentence that comes next. The primary meaning of any text has to do with whether and how it’s become a mechanism or tool for you to better understand the ur-text that is the world. That’s why the deferral of an answer to me was the answer. The waiting for the Messiah is the Messiah.
Medieval Catholic writers like Dante also adopted a version of the Jewish interpretive tradition Cohen cites. But it was eclipsed by Protestantism, with its more one-dimensional allegories that implicitly eliminate the literal in favor of the moral, and by Enlightenment, with its disparagement of all but the literal in its empiricist fixation on controlling nature.
This unproductive contradiction is the dual heritage of the realist novel. Its earliest major practitioners (e.g., Defoe and Richardson) tended to produce sometimes tedious records of the everyday meant to impart a moral lesson, often arbitrarily or in bad faith. I don’t discount the importance of Richardson’s attending seriously to the inner life of a female servant—realism at its best really was a revolution—but is the moral of Pamela really “virtue”? Or does the exoteric moral in all its tendentious rigor conceal the esoteric draw of a less salubrious sexual fantasy and economic imperative?2 Whereas, to quote Adorno, “Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.”
Modernism and post- (I don’t take the supposed distinction between the two very seriously in art and literature; insofar as it exists, it’s a question of emphasis) return us to the earlier and more expansive critical frame. Modernist writers compose texts that call for interpretation beyond and encompassing the literal and allegorical, that aim for the highest mystical or anagogical level in which, instead of just showing us images and/or hectoring us with a lesson, the text reads us. Cohen cites Kafka. I would add Joyce, who in Ulysses produces what he himself considered a re-writing of the realist allegory Robinson Crusoe into a widened universe of signification explicitly envisioned as a Catholic-Jewish hybrid.
The literal-allegorical war on the pedagogy and discipline of creative reading continues without respite today. Told that his portrait of Gertrude Stein looked nothing like her, Picasso replied, “It will.” The literalist-allegorist aims to strike down this textual capacity to generate future significance in and through the ongoing work of interpretation. The literalist-allegorist wishes only to seduce or command, each a reduction of the human: to produce not art but pornography and propaganda—to engender, above all, the pacified consumer.
Right-wing, Christian, anti-Semitic—Eliot makes such an easy a target. But it would be more than possible to mount the exact same critique of the left revolutionaries Blake and Shelley, even of the gay democrat Whitman, except that we find their politics more congenial. In my own criticism, I judge Blake’s inner world insufficiently universalized in his later epics and Shelley’s universalism scarred by his need to adopt the very posture of humility Ravinthiran enjoins.
I borrow this argument from “Some Thoughts on the Rise of the Novel” in Gabriel Josipovici’s The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction (1971). Per the chapter title, Josipovici disputes Ian Watt’s pioneering The Rise of the Novel (1957), which describes and implicitly endorses the democratizing force of early English fiction’s Puritan and capitalist ideology.
Would love to read you on Cohen!