Weekly Readings #34 (09/26/22-10/02/22)
where are you going, where have you been?
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
The headlines sent me to G. K. Chesterton this week. I’d been there before, but I hadn’t read his most famous novel, so I did. Then I wrote an essay explicating that strange work as best I could, while also trying to account for Chesterton’s simultaneous marginality—a parochial Catholic conservative writer, maybe even a fascist—and his worldly renown as an influence on figures as ideologically, aesthetically, and demographically diverse as Kafka, Borges, Gaiman, Eagleton, and Žižek. Here it is if you missed it the first time:
My Wednesday fiction post saw an excerpt from my pandemic novella, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, a radical nihilist’s monologue written out of the Dostoevskean depths of March 2020:
This week, I have two mini-essays for you: one on the solidaristic obligations or non-obligations of the novelist (with reference to Joyce Carol Oates and Marilyn Monroe) and one revisiting the question of whether or not history has ended (so far, it still seems like it has).
Hot or Not: Literature and the Conviction of Solidarity
This week, the stupidest of literary controversies broke out where else but on Twitter. Following the poor reception of Netflix’s Marilyn Monroe extravaganza, Blonde, based on Joyce Carol Oates’s 2000 novel of the same name, the memoirist Terese Marie Mailhot now infamously argued as follows:
Many observers, including me, saw this claim as the absolute nadir of 2010s-style literary identity politics—the point where, in fact, it transformed into its opposite: the 2000s mode of cultural crassness it sought to displace. The ensuing argument about whether or not Oates is or was hot—I won’t weigh in except to say that I came of age in the mid-’90s amid a cultural vogue for skinny neurasthenic goth girls—reminded me of a notorious Gawker article from 2006. It claimed that Marisha Pessl, then making her somewhat precocious debut with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was not hot per se but only “book hot.”
We should give Mailhot’s argument its due, however. I haven’t read the 1000-page Blonde, nor do I know anything about Marilyn Monroe, but all you have to do is read Oates’s most famous short story—the anthology and classroom staple “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”—to see how she might be animated by a resentment toward the conventionally pretty and popular, how her work might exhibit an un-feminist fascination with what she depicts as such women’s complicity in their own destruction:
Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn’t much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. “Stop gawking at yourself Who are you? You think you’re so pretty?” she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.
This the first paragraph of a modern folk tale about how the vain Connie, unlike her dutiful and homely sister, is carried off by a pervert in a flashy car, presumably to be raped and murdered. How different is the implied set of values, however, from the acres of fiction men have written exalting sickly and sensitive intellectual males as morally superior to the strong, successful brutes who surround them? Oates has claimed Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, and Women in Love as among her favorite novels: is her implicit judgment on pretty, popular girls much different from the verdict Joyce hands down against Mulligan, Boylan, and the Citizen, Faulkner’s elevation of Quentin over Jason, or Lawrence’s of Rupert Birkin over Gerald Crich? Her work is therefore attentive to psychological and emotional complexities the proper political attitude can’t encompass except by peremptory denunciation, a moralism that subtracts rather than adding insight to the world.
Identity politics in literature derives from the Marxist commandment of solidarity among the oppressed. Oates, therefore, must sympathize with the Connies and Marilyns of the world, both admiring the reserves of agency and intelligence immured in their sexualization and indicting the world that locked them in their bodies as in a prison. Portraying them as complicit in this process is betraying female solidarity, almost siding with the variant of female oppression they endured. (Joyce, for that matter, could be and has been said to have traduced Irish nationalism in the same way.)
Another literary ethic of solidarity exists, however. It was defined most famously by Joseph Conrad in the Preface to an 1897 novel whose title reigning standards of decency prevent me from typing out. Conrad writes:
The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.
For “not dependent on wisdom” we can substitute “not dependent on politics,” “not dependent on identity,” and “not dependent on local standards of morality.” This rival conception of solidarity, existential rather than political, enabled the merchant and investor Shakespeare to sympathize not only with Shylock but also with Richard II, Rosalind, and Caliban, across boundaries of class, position, gender, and even species. And it allows Oates to sympathize with the complicit victim as a complicit victim—and not as a thwarted genius or saint or heroine, or, in other words, as a woman politically worthy of our pity.
The “literary non-hottie” may have better access to this literary non-wisdom than those born luckier. Then again, an emphasis on success or failure in provoking this version of solidarity—the solidarity of all life in the face of death—will allow us to redirect the “hot or not” question to its proper object: not to the person of the author, whether in 2000s Gawker-style or 2010s identity-style, but to the literary work itself.
Right Here, Right Now, Reprised: Why History Remains Over
Back in March, less than a month into the war in Ukraine, I took the unusual step of actually reading Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man. (I wrote an essay and recorded a podcast about it at the time.) Like most people, I had for most of my adult life casually referred to this book’s thesis without attending to the author’s lengthy exposition.
I predictably discovered that Fukuyama is much misunderstood—and not only because he is less complacent or triumphal about liberal democracy than he is reputed to be (in fact, he worries that its comforts have drained the very wellspring of aspiration from our lives), but also because his case is far more persuasive than it seems on the surface. Every time something bad happens—9/11, the financial crisis, the rise of Trump, the spread of wokeness, the pandemic, Putin’s war—people crow about Fukuyama’s naïveté without realizing the conditions that would have to be satisfied for his claim to be disproved. He never said liberal democracy wouldn’t face internal challenges, nor that other ideologies wouldn’t resist it; instead, he claimed that no novel and universal ideology was likely to rise up against it, answer the cravings it both stimulates and satisfies, and therefore exceed it in adherents, as fascism and communism had threatened to do in the 20th century.
Now, as we enter the final quarter of 2022, more than one unlikely observer finds the end of history thesis more persuasive than ever. Testimony against interest is always the most compelling testimony of all. For example, Richard Hanania, a political scientist and erstwhile Twitter troll affiliated with the political right, has pronounced it “The Year of Fukuyama” right here on Substack, much to the chagrin of his anti-liberal audience, and in defiance of his own instincts and preferences.
With Russia mired in a morally and pragmatically discrediting imperial war and China lost to a paranoid techno-totalitarianism that repulses much of the world, America’s model, for all its internal instability, seems to remain viable. (Though Hanania says disappointingly little about the role a potential European collapse might play in future events.) While Hanania probably regards the meliorist-centrist liberal Noah Smith as a witless naïf, and while Smith probably regards Hanania as (to borrow a phrase) a “semi-fascist,” do they really disagree on their interpretation of the facts?
As a litterateur and not a political scientist, I would like to add to this conversation a sharper aesthetic appreciation for how liberalism retains its poise even as it always appears to be on the verge of collapse. This happens to be the real theme of what has generally been regarded as the first great novel written in America, The Scarlet Letter, that most radical and most conservative of Great American Novels.
In Hawthorne’s allegory of allegories, written just over a decade before the Civil War, history is shown already to have ended in the middle 17th century. In the novel’s fictionalized Massachusetts Bay Colony, a gang of Puritan theocrats, thinking illiberally to define the individual by her gravest sin, only succeed in branding her with what proves to be an open-ended and aestheticized symbol: a mysterious work of art around which the polity can convoke and about whose meaning the polity can quarrel ad infinitum, a quarrel renewed every time the book is read again, every time the reader finds that Hawthorne withholds the titular letter’s literal meaning and instead offers, in place of the expected stable referent, an efflorescence of potential other significances (A = able, angel, apostle, art, amor, antinomian, Anne Hutchinson, America).1
The polity, therefore, is held together and perpetuated in time by its inner conflict over aesthetic representations of its own significance. We are, you might say, not divided but united by our culture war—even pacified by it, the 1860s and 1960s notwithstanding. This is why in practical politics, and to the despair of the extremist intellectual, some inner boundary seems set to prevent full fascism or full communism from ever arriving here, even though the left and the right hurl these imprecations at each other. And it’s why as well we find Hawthorne’s spirit carried on in American literature even after the waning of his own ethno-religious fraction’s power in this country, why his legatees far exceed New England WASPs to include Southerners white and black, Catholics and Jews, Hispanics and Asians, and more.
This understanding of liberalism implies that we need periodic corrections to left and right for the paradoxical sake of stability. Antinomian America is always liable to stray toward outright anarchy—too far right (in economics) or too far left (in culture)—while the corrections themselves may go too far toward repression in each area. Another recent Substack post reminded me of this moderation, the lament of one who still hasn’t found what she’s seeking after patient explorations of both right and left.
But this essayist’s own ability to take the fluid marrow from these orthodoxies and discard the rigid bone suggests the political flexibility Hawthorne’s literary form encourages. Hanania worries that liberalism triumphant means “wokeness” triumphant, while Smith pleads against his own inclination for conservatism to be accommodated. I predict that the latter development will check the former—and then overcorrect, requiring further revision. To take the most controversial example, Hanania says,
While Democrats may be in favor of allowing “gender affirming care” for minors and Republicans might oppose it, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell wouldn’t dare misgender a trans adult.
But these positions may be complementary, not contradictory. We may conclude that antinomianism has gone too far and has even transformed into its opposite when it claims the right of redaction over every child’s body—for what child is a perfect gender conformist?—but that liberalism still demands respect for adult self-definition. It’s hard to say right now; we’re still arguing about it—and should, in defiance of all censors, be allowed to argue about it. Hawthorne would no doubt be surprised at the content of this particular question, but not by its form.
I pretty much only listened to one episode of one podcast this week—because it was six hours long. But everyone should listen to it. The untrammeled conversation it records is a model of consensus in dissension. The participants are host Brian Chau and journalist James Pogue, who came to fame earlier this year with his Vanity Fair report on the new right.
I wonder if their very ability to hold such a colloquy doesn’t argue against the despair it often articulates. Host and guest propose violent disunion and managed decline as the likeliest outcomes of the American present, and I wouldn’t discount either possibility. On most days, it certainly feels like we haven’t got long. But what if we just keep arguing past the graveyard?
Glad to see another appreciator of Emma Collins's fine and moving essay. A sharp writer, a distinctive sensibility, rightly insisting on its freedom.