Weekly Readings #36 (10/10/22-10/16/22)

notes from the true mainstream in exile

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

I read Superman Annual #11 (“For the Man Who Has Everything”) and Batman: The Killing Joke around the same time, when I was about six years old. Which means that Alan Moore’s has been a voice in my head longer than almost any other barring family members’—a voice introduced to me through the somewhat notorious latter work at full strength, wrestling against a tendency toward nihilism and inexorably fascinated by the destruction of the female corpus.¹ That fiery voice returned this week with the release of Illuminations, a supposed short story collection that is actually and bizarrely a decoy for a full-length novel called What We Can Know About Thunderman. I refused to play along with the strange trick and just reviewed the novel Moore and his publishers so strangely buried within the flotsam of the collection:

Alan Moore, Illuminations

If this isn’t immodest, I’m surprised at the muted reaction to this piece given the controversial things I have to say in it. But I suspect the people to whom it would mean the most—people in the American mainstream comics industry—are in so precarious an economic and political situation that they can’t invite controversy of any sort.

A milieu akin to the mainstream comics industry in its oncoming economic obsolescence and its present political lockdown is humanities academia. This week, for my Wednesday creative writing post, I published for the first time online a short story of mine that has only previously appeared in print in a somewhat obscure journal—a comic tale of the eros of learning and the revenge it may inspire when betrayed:

"Patronage"

My story’s narrator is a man of the working class, implicitly Latino given the story’s setting, who discovers that the life of the mind is not what he’d imagined when he’d set out to live it. This brings us, unavoidably, to the main topic of this week’s newsletter—

Iowa Pariah: Alex Perez and the Reinvention of Literary Culture

—which is the belated blow-up about Alex Perez’s deliberately provocative interview with Elizabeth Ellen in the journal Hobart. Perez’s provocations passed without comment for two weeks until someone took the bait and produced the usual mob-incitement Twitter threads about “harm.” Suddenly, the editorial team at Hobart had resigned and all right-thinking authors had pulled their previously published pieces from the journal.

Even Perez’s fiercest critics have acknowledged that his main point is right, and that they’d even welcome it were it expressed in the bloodless academic tones of official identity politics:

These women, perhaps the least diverse collection of people on the planet, decide who is worthy or unworthy of literary representation. Their worldview trickles down to the small journals, too, which are mostly run by woke young women or bored middle-aged housewives. This explains why everything reads and sounds the same, from major publishing houses to vanity zines with a readership of fifteen. The progressive/woke orthodoxy is the ideology that controls the entire publishing apparatus.

But both the pro-Perez and anti-Perez approaches to the controversy miss its real significance, to wit: I know Alex Perez’s name. I’ve known his name for three years now. He’s not addict-levels of prolific on social media, so when he does a Tweet thread, I pay attention. When I see his byline, I read the article. On the other hand, I don’t recognize the name of even one of his critics, even though they regularly publish in literary journals and in some cases have brought out books with respected small presses or one of the Big Five (or Four or Three or whatever) publishers.

From this fact we can conclude that Perez understands how to play the literary game today, while his critics do not. Trapped in institutions that are increasingly the sole property of the upper middle class, alienated from the wellspring of their own art by these institutions’ hostility to literary tradition, and catechized into a faux-radical anti-individualist anti-humanist politics that upholds corporate technocracy while masking itself as the agenda of the oppressed, the “literary community” has made itself irrelevant to humanity at large. Perez, by contrast, understands how to earn a broad and diverse readership in our changed technological and economic circumstances.

The basic literary unit now, like it or not, is not the journal or the book, but the writer—a self-branded memeplex distributed across the online platforms, attracting attention through targeted interventions into sociopolitical disputes, usually on the side opposite the liberal-technocrat establishment’s. With this understanding, Perez has gone over the head of the communitarian “literary community” to address a wide audience directly by putting on the performance of his irreducible self.

Perez, in this pugilistic manner, aims to restore literary culture’s ties to celebrity culture, as understood by writers across the last century from Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw to Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, all of whom drew eyes and ears by crafting their selves in public as an artwork, loudly flouting polite norms and established doxa.²

As for the gender of Perez’s complaint, it is an old story. We can read its prehistory in one of second-wave feminism’s more controversial books, Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture. In that 1977 treatise, Douglas essentially vindicates Hawthorne’s notorious remark about the stranglehold of “scribbling women” on 19th-century American culture. That culture, Douglas documents, was governed by the genteel conflict-averse moralism of middle-class white women. As much as any gray-bearded patriarchy, they repressed the ruthless criticism and radical change that only difficult, impolite, and anti-bourgeois literature could generate. Accordingly, Douglas celebrates as outcast innovators the proto-feminist Margaret Fuller and the proto-modernist Herman Melville—the latter an obvious model for the “masculine fiction” Perez champions.

This feminized culture didn’t exercise its authority directly over literary institutions the way the 85%-female publishing industry and 70%-female English department does today, but the effect is the same: in the name of comity or safety, the repression of novel literary power; and in the guise of political reform, the suppression of subversive political critique.

Which doesn’t mean I agree with everything Perez says or would express myself the way he does. For one thing, from the floor of my mother’s beauty shop to the seminar tables of the aforementioned English department, I have spent my whole life in female-dominated institutions. I can therefore negotiate female society’s complex politesse, which only appears peaceable on the surface and is able to absorb more controversial ideas than one might imagine provided they’re couched properly. (As every aesthete knows, tone and style matter more than content.)

My literary preferences tend, predictably, not to run especially “masculine,” though I don’t think of them as “feminine” either, aside from the paradoxes of such a designation (for example, if we’re playing this game, Flannery O’Connor is a masculine writer, Henry James a feminine one). I tend to agree with Woolf that the ideal literary imagination is androgynous, which is to say, universalizing. Perez’s heroes—Hemingway, Carver, Denis Johnson—are fine, but I prefer writers, even restricting my list to men, with more textured styles and overtly philosophical concerns: Faulkner over Hemingway, Updike over Carver, DeLillo over Denis Johnson. My favorite living “masculine” writer—in the sense Perez means—is undoubtedly Cormac McCarthy; I admire him as much for his erudition and stylishness as for his work’s rugged subject matter and male cast of characters.³

But when he protests the elimination of the explicitly masculine perspective from the arts, and the ideological and affective imbalance this creates, Perez is entirely correct. That we should write this perspective off in its entirety as “toxic” is a deluded prejudice—and, Perez rightly insists, more a class prejudice than a gender one, as anyone who has ever traveled between or among classes well knows. Going to the opposite extreme of dismissing the explicitly feminine perspective the same way is also a mistake, though, the persistent indiscretion of many an anti-bourgeois cultural campaign of far right and far left. Edith Wharton is a better writer than Ernest Hemingway, even if, by the same token, on strictly aesthetic grounds, Herman Melville is also superior to Harriet Beecher Stowe.⁴

Back in that flaming summer of 2020, I first quoted Alex Perez—his great debut essay as a cultural critic, “Philip Roth and American Manhood”—in the context of reading Mishima. In that piece, Perez wrote:

The great danger of shipping the great masculine writers to the cultural wasteland is that intellectual young men in search of answers will seek out far more dangerous writers and ideologies online, as I surely would’ve done if it wasn’t for Philip Roth and the literary landscape he granted me access to. I would like to think that I wouldn’t have gone down the road so many young men are going down these days, but in all honesty, during the peak of my baseball-induced instability, it would’ve probably only taken a slight push for me to have embraced some of the more dangerous elements of masculinity being peddled on Twitter and YouTube. The denigration of traditional manhood, ironically, will create a far more intersectional toxic masculinity, as the boys who don’t emasculate will set aside superficial differences such as skin color or country of origin and band together as alienated young men.

Mishima is one such writer more dangerous than Roth. A culture that functionally forbids any masculine role in the institutional arts, I joined Perez in warning, “may produce more Mishimas, and more of Mishima’s online fandom.”

We ought to celebrate Perez, then, and not execrate him, for carving out a space for the literary imagination online that is paradoxically more universal and inclusive than whatever is offered by the “literary community,” a “community” whose alienating rituals of inclusion are increasingly those not only of a members-only upper crust but of a gnostic death cult that regards the human race per se as an infestation on this planet.⁵ If there’s one statement from Perez’s interview that I wholly endorse, it’s this humanist manifesto:

What connects people isn’t color or creed or gender or stupid political taxonomies, but the existential despair that comes for us all. How do you respond to that despair once it comes for you? I never feel closer to a person than when they share a piece of their despair with me, and rarely, if ever, does it have anything to do with politics or ideology. It’s always about loneliness or heartbreak or loss, etc. It’s about life. The best art reflects that despair we all face back at us; it doesn’t separate us from other people.

But whatever I agree with or don’t in Perez’s discourse, I take pleasure in hashing it out. We find no such pleasure in the “cancel” mentality, the all-the-editors-resign and please-pull-my-story mentality, which, to be frank, merits only contempt from anyone who ever wanted to live in a free or pluralist society. A literary journal in the internet age is not a workplace and should not be governed by workplace rules. A different opinion than your own, even pungently expressed, doesn’t endanger you. And if official literary institutions continue operating this way, they only hasten their probably inevitable irrelevance.

Their irrelevance in there and our relevance out here is the point, until out here and in there trade places. I never wanted to be marginal. The margin is no place of honor. I operate in the wilderness the better to capture the citadel in time. My motto is “the true mainstream in exile”—however long it takes. They called Melville crazy and even succeeded in expelling him from official literary culture, because the alternatives to official literary culture that exist now were almost unimaginable then. Even at that disadvantage, he won in the end. They said he ought to be locked up, but he’s the one we read now. As for them, we don’t even know their names.

1. I was coincidentally teaching Watchmen this week when Illuminations was released. Abraded by the bitterness and cruelty of the novel the collection conceals, I told my students that I preferred Moore’s early work—written, I said sentimentally, “when his heart was purer.” I meant this in a way almost opposite to how it sounds. The early work is as nasty as the later, filled with blood and rapine, but back then—before his conversion to occultism and his consequent turn to the didactic—he was still an earnest seeker, too consumed with his own quest to sit for very long in judgment on others. Now we must endure sermons, moral lectures from a hypocritical hierophant concealing his own sins in the many folds of his vestment.

2. In our moment, Joyce Carol Oates superficially appears to be the older generation’s last adherent to this 20th-century model—except that she never had Mailer/Vidal-level fame in her heyday and has only attained Perez-style 21st-century literary notoriety in her ninth decade by shitposting on Twitter.

3. Perez has also gotten in trouble for his jocular celebration of Junot Díaz despite the latter’s #metoo-ing:

Being Hispanic, Junot Diaz, of course, was revelatory. You could write about fucked up Hispanic shit and white people would eat it up! If you’re out there, Junot, come back! Don’t let those angry ladies who begged you for blurbs run you out of the game. No seas pendejo. Would Yunior be such a little bitch…

Amusingly, I once had lunch with a group of fellow adjunct professors after Díaz’s defenestration for sexual misconduct. All the male teachers at the lunch had jettisoned him from their syllabi and replaced him with one of his accusers, Carmen Maria Machado. The female teachers, by contrast, shrugged and said they kept Díaz in their courses, since, if they were obliged to get rid of handsy sexists, there’d be no male writers left to teach. Díaz, by the way, resurfaced this week with a very good New York Times review of what else but Alan Moore’s Illuminations. (I stole the word “hierophant” in this context, two footnotes above, from that review.) There, considering Moore’s approach to the comics industry, Díaz writes with mollifying imprecision:

I wish [Moore] had taken more seriously the industry’s racial and gender inequities, which he adumbrates but never really explores, a failing that threatens to reproduce the very cruelties he condemns.

Whereas I, perhaps blindsiding my readers from the left, all but called Moore’s book a piece of anti-Semitic misogyny in so many words—because that’s what it is. I never pledged fealty to any ideology; I only promised to call it as I see it.

4. I have heard that ranking and list-making is a masculine trait. If so, it’s a good and necessary one, the opposite of toxic. Truly “toxic”—though I hate this psychobabble word—is a bland and dishonest we’re-all-friends-here aesthetic egalitarianism, which evades a difficult truth: we need to know what the best is, so we know what to aim for.

5. I refer to a host of issues and practices on which bien-pensance has converged in recent years: an obsession with impending environmental calamity, despite such false prophecies having long been a stalking-horse for Malthusian eliminationism; a loathing of America’s liberal cultural and republican political traditions, as crystallized in the “land acknowledgement,” which ostensibly delegitimates the polity in the name of the land’s prior inhabitants, but, since no one proposes giving it back to them, actually refers it for governance to unaccountable activist-academic expertise; the compulsory pronoun go-round, with its implicit dis-civic and discriminatory demand of universal agreement to one and only one theology of the body; and now—still!—the pandemic-era obsession with social hygiene, treating human beings solely as disease vectors and regarding as holy writ, no matter how many times they lie, the self-serving pronouncements of unelected bureaucrats and pharmaceutical executives. Because those who will the ends must will the means, I won’t sugarcoat what it’s going to take to dislodge these tendencies: a thorough electoral rout, probably more than one, of the Democratic Party, which alone has the power to demand reform from the left at large, across the public and private institutions the left controls.