Weekly Readings #37 (10/17/22-10/23/22)

American epic, American berserk

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

This week I read and wrote about a seasonally-appropriate visionary historical horror novel by the now perhaps neglected Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer:

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Satan in Goray

And for my weekly creative writing post, I sent out a prose-poem originally written in the ISIS-obsessed year of 2015 about fanatics wreaking havoc in a museum; even as I type these very words, however, it is being reported that two more youths, deranged by the apocalyptic eco-fascist cult now ascendant on the left, have hurled mashed potatoes onto a Monet (if you thought his landscapes were blurry before…), rendering this fiction still more timely:

"Iconoclasm"

Below I offer two brief essays: one on the question of what is or is not America’s national epic and the other about how American fiction should or should not represent mass shootings.

American Epic: Novel and Nation

Literary social media last week was aflame with a viral Twitter challenge about whether or not America has a national epic (and then about whether or not the other national epics the original poster listed were in fact national epics):

I was surprised at how controversial this question proved. Answers ranged from “no, America’s too young” to the collected cinema of John Ford. Whereas I thought we had wide consensus on Song of Myself and Moby-Dick, with the latter probably winning the day. Doesn’t everybody love those two? They even escape political controversy. They offer overt racial egalitarianism and diversity, an attention to labor, and a general experimentalism of aesthetics and outlook to the left, while the right can appreciate their Cold-War-canonized individualism and can accept that both are gay books since they’re gay in a manly-comradely way.

Whitman meets the criteria for founding bard since every American who writes a poem after him does so in his shadow. But Moby-Dick, with its maritime journey, more readily answers the generic criteria of the epic while crystalizing the two halves of the national character in the easygoing democratic pluralist Ishmael and the God-haunted fanatic Ahab. It also sits by design within the line of epics. As the novelist-critic William Giraldi has explained, Melville with his Satanic captain played Virgil to Milton’s Homer—even as Milton played Virgil to Dante; who played Virgil to, well, Virgil; who was himself, in relation to Homer, none other than Virgil.

Right here on Substack, Henry Oliver thinks we need to pay more attention to the distinction between the Homeric and Virgilian epics. He writes:

Let’s make a dichotomy between Homeric and Virgilian epics. Homeric epics encode cultural values. Virgilian epics are national foundation stories.

Ironically, the balance of Oliver’s post concerns C. S. Lewis, but not Lewis’s speculations on the epic. I have only read one book by Lewis—A Preface to Paradise Lost—and in it the Christian author defines the difference between the Homeric and Virgilian epic with a different emphasis than Oliver does: the Homeric epic was oral and organic to its society, the Virgilian an artificial and belated literary production.

As the Marxist critic Christian Thorne argues, however, later epics—particularly those oral stories retrospectively canonized as epics in the last millennium, from Beowulf to Sundiata—are indeed nation-building ideological constructs promoted by nationalists in quest of a romantic-primordial cultural purity. But the catch is that this purity doesn’t exist in Homer, whose epics are modern narratives relegating myth to the fringe of the Mediterranean and narrating the emergence from the matrix of myth a rational empire. Thorne is here faithful to Adorno, for whom the Odyssey was already Robinson Crusoe. All the way back in the night of time, we find the first bourgeois novel.

For my purposes, I take this to mean that if Homer is already a modern novelist—if there is no primary epic, no collective bardic voice of myth rising out of the ethnic earth—then we should have no trouble considering modern novels as national epics. I am confident, then, in my choice of Moby-Dick.

What about other suggestions? The Searchers is certainly grand, but I rule cinema out. I suspect it will eventually prove, like most popular arts based on visual spectacle and technological infrastructure, evanescent and inaccessible. If I were going to accept a pop-culture answer, it would have to be something more like the Great American Songbook or the Lee/Kirby comics—but these are probably more time-bound than they seemed in the 20th century.

Other novels? Invisible Man and Blood Meridian are great works of the proper epic dimension, but both are successors to Moby-Dick—Virgils to Melville’s Homer, as it were. Huckleberry Finn is too limited in scope and perspective; I must reread both, but I am always tempted to agree with Jane Smiley’s emblematically ’90s-era “PC” contention that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the greater novel. The Grapes of Wrath, likewise, has too narrow a national horizon, even if it is a better book than critics sterner than I am will allow.

Walt called America “a teeming nation of nations.” Might not our sub-nations need their own epics—The Adventures of Augie March for Jewish readers, Ceremony for Native Americans, mayhap (Marianna Torgovnick has made this argument almost outright with surprisingly persuasive force) The Godfather for us Italians? And will these be epics at all if they refuse the blandishment of nation-building?

Morrison’s Song of Solomon, for instance, is an undeniably great novel, epic on its quest-narrative surface, but one that deliberately and systematically reverses the national-epic intent of Invisible Man. With whatever allowance we must make for irony, Ellison’s north-south journey faithfully follows the Homeric itinerary from brutal myth to rational empire, culminating in the narrator’s patriotic avowal of postwar American democracy. Morrison reverses the journey from north back to south and rebukes the American dream by resubmerging her black Odysseus in the maternal matrix of African diasporic myth. As with Virginia Woolf’s female artist staying ashore to have her vision while the patriarch takes the family To the Lighthouse, we have here an anti-epic.

Is epic exclusively a male or masculinist genre? Possibly—but then the arch-masculine Blood Meridian subverts with its frontier slaughter the nation-building epic qua genre fully as much as Song of Solomon does, and we could say the same for much of Hemingway’s most notable work with its traumatized irony toward official or public modes of heroism.

And yet the Odyssey, as we said, was always already a modern novel, itself crossed and recrossed by irony, delectating in the myth it was meant to subdue. So the epic and the anti-epic were in one another’s arms from the very start.

As a postscript to the foregoing, I am also interested in Henry Oliver’s discussion—in the same Substack post linked above—of what should count as England’s national epic, possibly a more vexed case even than the American. Oliver dismisses Beowulf, and I agree: Beowulf was lost or untranslated for more than half of English literary history and is therefore not a permeating literary or social influence. In his list of contenders, I think Oliver severely underrates The Faerie Queene—a presence in the work of every major subsequent English poet from Shakespeare forward—which would get my vote, though cases could be made for The Canterbury Tales (too heterogeneous) and Paradise Lost (too sectarian). I am, however, more than half persuaded by his case for Middlemarch, which, in its concluding pages, casts itself paradoxically as a “home epic,” thus synthesizing feminine anti-epic with masculine epic to create what we must judge, after all, the ultimate English novel. That Middlemarch and Moby-Dick are probably the two greatest novels in English in their century—and thus balance one another out perfectly—only crowns the argument.

Bill Sienkiewicz, Classics Illustrated: Moby Dick (1990)

American Berserk: Novel and Nightmare

Writing in The Point about the literature of mass shootings, or its absence, Sam Kriss issues a challenge to the American novelist:

In a country where the random slaughter of children is so common that it’s been integrated into the structure of ordinary life, literary culture simply has nothing to say on the subject. It will talk about awkward interactions and sexual confusion and learning to love yourself in the face of trauma, but it’s afraid to touch this thing that seems to sum up the entire experience of modernity. The American novelist is standing in the middle of a charnel house, with blood dripping off the walls, writing little autofictions about the time someone was rude to them in their MFA.

As friend-of-the-blog Paul Franz implied on Twitter, part of Kriss’s purpose here is to reinvent the essay as a form capaciously “irrational” enough to outdo the novel on its own territory of imaginatively capturing and contesting the social. We should recall here an older essay by Kriss half-lamenting Marxism’s incapacity for traditional forms of imaginative literature and half-defending its adeptness at accusation and invective—a superficially callow and unpromising premise that Kriss does seem to be shaping more and more into serious art with one un-missable essay after another in a bewildering array of venues.

But I am not a Marxist accuser, only a petit-bourgeois belletrist, one whose fictions are saturated in violence, so why no mass-shooter novel from me? Not only haven’t I written one, but my novel The Class of 2000, set just after Columbine, goes out of its way to avoid that particular plot. Early in the novel, one character says of my protagonist,

“What if there’s something wrong with him after all this? What if violence runs in that family? You know, think about those two little shits out in Colorado.”

200 pages later, another character wonders of him,

What if Jack’s serious, furtive, troubled son had finally snapped, gone on the full Dylan and Eric ride, and set fire to a house in which he had never been happy? She liked that about the kid, though—she could never predict what he would do. He might do anything. It added a bit of excitement to her life.

But no, this is not that story. A presumptuous adult moralist, not an aggrieved adolescent nihilist, incites most of the violence in my story. Partially, I think that is the more typical case and therefore the more promising, because less already-sensationalized, novelistic material. (Speaking of Marxist critics, did not Lukács enjoin the novelist to focus on typical cases?) We dwell on the most exceptional symptoms, the outrageous eruptions that make the news, at the risk of missing the normal everyday horror: not evildoers doing evil but good men and women making the world a worse place in the very act of trying to realize their ideals.

The mass shooter, as Kriss also notes, comes politically pre-digested. It would take an enormous amount of annoying work, shadowboxing with stereotypes, to treat the subject in a way that doesn’t immediately activate the boilerplate arguments of this or that faction, blaming incels or guns or public schools or lackluster mental health care or toxic masculinity or whatever.

Moreover, if you don’t share Kriss’s Euro-leftist fixation on the gun thing, the mass-shooter archetype is actually prominent in mass culture, thus effectively pre-empting the novelist. What is the onscreen Joker, whether Ledger’s or Phoenix’s, but a post-Columbine figure sowing chaos either from an ideological commitment to nihilism or as revenge on an indifferent society? Or the 21st-century post-serial-killer Michael Myers?—in Rob Zombie’s grindhouse Bush-era treatment, where the killer emerges from a morass of social alienation and first threatens his classmates, and still more in David Gordon Green’s recent Halloween Ends, where the killer accepts a bullied and harassed young man as his murderous protégé.

The mass-culture portrayals of the archetype invite guilt-free audience pleasure in the mayhem under the aegis of fantasy. A serious novel, by contrast, must inculpate the reader as co-responsible for building the society where these things happen. The novelist must, therefore, both solicit identification with the mass shooter and critical consciousness of that very identification. I would strongly advise against the patronizing “kindness” approach—poor child, driven by right-wingers to kill—of the oleaginous, overrated George Saunders, expertly skewered in Compact this week by Valerie Stivers. I would choose one of two approaches if I were to write a mass-shooter novel:

• A first-person narrative in the crypto-glamorous Chandler noir vein, presenting the killer’s world persuasively in his own seductive voice as a stew of vicious corruption so that by degrees and before we know it we are led to sympathize with his plan to rain justice in lead and fire

• A Faulknerian-Morrisonian whirlwind of multiple viewpoints around the already completed act, itself never narrated as such, just as the dead killer’s mind is never entered; we hear instead exclusively from the women who loved, reviled, and feared him—grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, teacher, ex-girlfriend—and therefore get to know all that was lovable, repulsive, and fearful in him in the aftermath of the apocalypse he wrought

As I said, however, I find the topic too well-rehearsed in mass media to be very tempting. What, for that matter, can we add to Crime and Punishment or Demons, to The Red and the Black or The Secret Agent? Dare I say Hamlet? We know why superfluous young men, alienated in and by modernity, kill, and we have known for a very long time. I appreciate Kriss’s challenge, and I don’t rule anything out, but I am finally more interested in more pervasive and more novel phenomena.