Weekly Readings #35 (10/03/22-10/09/22)
there is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
The big literary news this week was Annie Ernaux’s Nobel Prize win, which I correctly semi-predicted. (That was a first, I think; I’m not usually good at mind-reading the Swedish Academy.) I’ve never read Ernaux, but on paper you couldn’t design a writer calculated to appeal less to my tastes and interests. Is it not time for a 10-year moratorium on memoir and autofiction? These are evasive, anyway. If you want to bare your soul, you should invent a story. It’s far more revealing than explicit autobiography—it’s like having your dreams in public.
One who understands the importance of public dreaming, not that she’s wholly eschewed memoir either, is Joyce Carol Oates. Following last week’s post, controversy inspired me to try to answer the question, “How good is Oates?” with reference to one of her most celebrated novels, We Were the Mulvaneys. She’s good, I conclude, despite superficial disadvantages in comparison to generational peers like Philip Roth or Toni Morrison:
If you’re interested in my public dreams, I also posted my favorite chapter from probably my favorite (and the longest) of my own books, Portraits and Ashes. Please remember that I don’t currently have any Substack content paywalled; the best way to support my work, if you’d like to, is to buy my books and then to tell other people to read them. (I will also provide a free pdf of any or all of my books to anyone who asks, in exchange for an honest review in a public venue.)
Below are two small essays, one literary and one political. The first is an Oates-inspired rumination on length and perfection in fiction, the second an examination of the controversial new trend “MAGA communism.”
Epic or Novella? Magnitudes of Monstrosity in Fiction
In her 1978 essay on Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (AKA Demons), Joyce Carol Oates complained of critical near-sightedness (add ableism to her list of identitarian offenses) in encountering “loose baggy monsters,” especially in that midcentury period when New Criticism dominated:
It is, in fact, an embarrassing cliche of literary criticism that only short works of fiction, like novellas or short stories, exhibit perfect “form,” and that any lengthy work inevitably suffers from a relative shapelessness. The naive critic tries to compare The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick, discovering the one to be marvelously compact and the other sprawling and structurally unsound. But Moby-Dick is a masterpiece of structure, of a complexity that goes beyond anything Hawthorne would have dared to attempt; and it is to be presumed that the ordinary critic, infused with a myopic Jamesian sensibility, simply cannot see its vast magnificent form.
[…]
The “loose baggy monster” of Russian art is loose and baggy and monstrous only to the critic who confuses his own relative short-sightedness with an aesthetic principle. The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece of organization, but so is The Brothers Karamazov. The Turn of the Screw is deftly and beautifully orchestrated, but so is The Possessed—and The Possessed is an incomparably superior work. Yet Dostoyevsky is routinely accused of being slipshod and critical cliches that cannot be honored if one studies his novels assiduously. (Why, one wonders, do people so readily assume that a large, ambitious work is necessarily any less subtle than a very short work? D. H. Lawrence’s Ursula says, “A mouse isn’t any more subtle than a lion, is it?”)
By contrast, John Sturgis, writing this week in the Spectator, contests fictional gigantism and celebrates a return to shorter books, even to novellas. I think, counterintuitively, that both Oates and Sturgis can be right.
Many years ago, a “meme” in the original Web 1.0 sense—what I think YouTubers now call a “tag”—circulated among bookish denizens of Livejournal (to give you an idea how many years ago I mean) canvassing our literary tastes. One of the questions: Epic or novella? I remember thinking it was a strange questions—why choose between forms so utterly different?—and many years of reading later I still have trouble with the question. But maybe these are the poles of longform fiction, and where its greatest achievements gather. An anonymous commenter asked me on Tumblr this week if I thought perfection was possible or desirable in fiction—and, if so, only in the novella. I repost my answer here:
I tend to agree with the Romantic view that great art always has something odd or excessive about it:
Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen. “There is no exquisite beauty,” says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, “without some strangeness in the proportions.”
The quotation is from Poe and is especially meaningful coming from him, since his own philosophy of composition centered on the achievement of calculated effects through perfected forms. But even the story from which I draw the quotation—my favorite: “Ligeia”—is all out of proportion, too verbosely descriptive, too summary in narration, pantingly melodramatic at the end. Not perfect, only great—and that’s a short story.
What novels approach perfection even so? My questioner is right to point to novellas and short novels, where a limited temporal and spatial setting and a small cast of characters allow for a unity of tone and style in pursuit of a single theme: The Dead and Death in Venice, Mrs. Dalloway and The Great Gatsby, Seize the Day and Sula, are all close to perfect, for example.
Some writers can carry this effect of compression into longer forms: Kazuo Ishiguro might be the reigning master here, though even he felt he had to cut loose with The Unconsoled, a willfully baggy and bizarre book. Other authors preceded Ishiguro in deliberately letting go of perfect forms early in their careers to attain a new maturity: for example, the long, loose third novels of both Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, both of which followed two compact and assured short novels. Similarly, as the critic Leo Robson has shown, some 20th-century writers made almost a fetish of slovenly, large forms to throw off the dead hand of Flaubertian or Jamesian modernist perfection-seeking: Iris Murdoch, Joyce Carol Oates—and, before them, D. H. Lawrence.
Comparing the perfect short novels to the imperfect but greater long novels of major novelists is instructive here: The Dead in comparison to Ulysses, for example, where Joyce’s virtuosity becomes undeniably excessive, positively wearisome in places, but in search of a bigger quarry—arguably, all of western culture—than in the earlier, shorter work. And the same goes for Mann (Death in Venice vs. The Magic Mountain)—or Melville (Benito Cereno vs. Moby-Dick) or Eliot (Silas Marner vs. Middlemarch) or Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground vs. The Brothers Karamazov).
But we wouldn’t want to confuse literal magnitude with greatness or deny that shorter works can be more appealingly odd than longer. Take Conrad, for example: Heart of Darkness is probably greater and stranger than Nostromo, despite its being a third or a quarter of the length. Or we could just return to the opening example of Poe, progenitor of all whose achievement centers on the short story, often attaining the most shapely forms without spilling a drop of the necessary oddity and excess: Hawthorne, Chekhov, Borges, Kafka, O’Connor.
In summary: perfection is more achievable in short forms, desirable insofar as it amplifies a single theme, but for that very reason sometimes inferior to works of greater complexity and variety, which are often though not always longer.
Red Alert: Notes on “MAGA Communism”
I don’t want to lose my reputation as a political trendspotter, so let me now say a few words about “MAGA communism.” This Compact article is a good introduction to the topic, almost generous to a fault, if you’ve never encountered it before. This video—a confected debate between Haz Al-Din, the “thought leader” of MAGA communism, and Tarl Warwick, a MAGA libertarian and occultist, both of them influential YouTubers—is also useful. (That video isn’t an academic seminar or an HR-monitored workplace, so be aware that those men express themselves quite rudely.) And then, if you are halfway fluent in Hegelese and not repelled by invocations of “the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism,” there is Haz’s own Substack manifesto. It takes 62 minutes to read, according to Substack:
I wouldn’t deny that this essay contains a number of real insights into our current world order of the kind communist intellectuals always produced, as for instance here:
For liberals and leftists, only Nazism is real. Politics, left to its own devices, flows and bends in the direction of Nazism. The political spectrum, for them, is defined by gradations of resistance toward this fatal, primal, and vital conclusion. If we suspend the liberal-democratic institutions, and the consciousness corresponding to them (political correctness, formalism, moralism, etc.), we fall into the ‘Nazbol vortex,’ sucked in by the gravitational force of Nazism.
[…]
Nazism, of course, is the repressed founding sin of this globalism. Nazism was the chaos out of which this system founded its order upon. Nazism was the final loose-end that had to be cut before the thousand-year-reich could really be established. And yet their victory came to haunt them. And so all those who came to resist this global system would be declared Nazis, because they reminded liberals that they didn't cut all their loose ends. They didn’t defeat Nazism, they inherited it. They projected this fact onto others, because others reminded them of this.
Liberalism of the crudest sort is now so hegemonic in our intellectual culture that these paragraphs—which, for the literary among us, furnish little more than a paraphrase of Gravity’s Rainbow—are usefully scandalizing. I myself have speculated on “the Nazification of the American liberal.” But later in the essay, when Haz develops an alternative I only halfway understand—something about the restoration of humanity’s true history based on tillage of the soil in the world’s great land empires—I lose the (presumably Duginist) thread.
I am bourgeois; I am personal. I do find some of the MAGA communists personally compelling: bathetic, charming, annoying, and precociously learned in the way that the guys I went to graduate school were—guys who no doubt thought of me the same way—this back in the day when every guy in graduate school was knee-deep in Schmitt and Agamben developing a theory about how to overthrow liberalism and replace it with something better, more honest if not more humane.1
He’s new to me, so I’ve been sampling some of Haz’s YouTube streams over the last two weeks. (They’re all five hours long; what’s with commies and five-hour speeches?) I could certainly do without the apocalyptic assertions and calls for destruction in his elegy for Darya Dugina, including his claim that “our enemies are not human,” especially since I may well be one of those enemies; but other moments are endearing if you’ve known the type. In one stream, I don’t remember which or where amid the five hours he said it, he paused to celebrate Boris Groys, who taught him, he claimed, that the most revolutionary thing you can do is be loyal to tradition. I also admire Groys, and I also believe that, though I came to it apolitically through the practice of literature (Milton, Joyce) and the theory of literature (Eliot, Bloom) before I knew or cared anything for Hegel or Marx—and I still don’t care about Hegel or Marx that much.
And of course one has been following Logo Daedalus for years and years, and of course one is always on the brink of unfollowing him—the sheer unwarranted obnoxious arrogance of a preacherly young man who reads too much too quickly to appreciate what he doesn’t know, will never know—but even now he still comes out with a good one, like this, lifted a little from Lawrence and George Steiner, but true and well said all the same:
In the end, though, MAGA communism is a non-starter, as even Haz seems to recognize when he calls for the formation of a working-class party outside the Democrat-Republican duopoly.2 This dream dies hard—I dreamed it myself, back in the Nader days—but it misunderstands the push-pull logic of American politics, which as a literary critic I continue to think is best understood through a reading of The Scarlet Letter, a novel perfectly well aware of the red alternative to liberal pluralism it summarily dispatches. (Will a permanent decline of the middle class alter this logic? Maybe in the long run, but not in time for the next two elections.)
These reds have ultimately mistaken the nature of MAGA in an exact parallel to the liberal center. They are Maddow-brained Boomers in their misunderstanding of Trump, except that they’ve inverted the values: “Yeah,” they say, “he’s Putin’s pal and an Oriental despot—he’s our guy!” Except that he’s not.
The net effect of Trump’s presidency was standard-issue post-Reagan GOP economics, a relative liberalization of Republican cultural politics, and a slight (only slight) tilt back toward foreign-policy realism. The first feature is under-discussed. The second is misunderstood, but ask yourself if a whole range of today’s right-wing luminaries across media and political domains from Blaire White to Candace Owens to Mehmet Oz to Curtis Yarvin to Amanda Milius to Peter Thiel to (see above) Tarl Warwick would have had any role to play in Karl Rove’s conservative movement. We will have a cultural swing back to the center—this is typical in American life, the way the culture war, despite appearances, provides stability—but the pendulum always returns from and to a little further “left” than before (“left” here means expressive individualism and civil-rights thinking as against “tradition”).
The foreign policy element, the threat that inspired his enemies to panic, created hope in other quarters for a post-imperial America. But the administration never dropped the underlying bellicosity toward Russia and China and Iran or the warmth toward Israel and Saudi Arabia—in other words, the whole suite of neoconservative priorities. Trump himself only justified these with a different rhetorical emphasis (“winning for America” rather than “spreading democracy”) and a realpolitik mentality willing to countenance cutting deals with despots; but he still spent his last days in office trying to “bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran.” “That was Pompeo or Jared, not MAGA,” you will object. I reply: listen to Bannon’s War Room for a week. The theme song is, quite literally, “Take Down the CCP.” Recall Bannon’s quarrel with Dugin: Bannon, like Curtis Yarvin, is not a communist but what I’ve called a deep liberal.
Meanwhile, the synthesis of MAGA with the old Republican Party and with the woke era’s disaffected liberals waits in the wings—in the persons of Ron DeSantis, Elon Musk, and others—to take up the mantle of American freedom and prosperity; life, liberty, and property; above all the sanctity of the individual, ever and anon our national religion.
Not me, mind you, my dalliance with Lukács aside. I never did read Schmitt; I thought you had to dance with the girl you came with, so I tried to figure out how to make liberalism a life worth living, an answer found not in political philosophy but in the modern novel—though political philosophy and the modern novel share a common ancestor in Plato’s Republic.
Some of their geopolitical sympathies are hard to swallow too. Even putting Putin aside, or Haz’s apparently Foucauldian approach to the Iranian Revolution, surely China’s neurotic techno-totalitarian zero-covid policies have punctured the CCP’s “based” image as an appealingly illiberal order. Government by an iron-fisted politburo of Argus-eyed Taylor Lorenzes? No thanks! Give me good old American chaos any day of the week!
I appreciate your mention of paraphrasing Gravity's Rainbow here. Could be said of so much else