Weekly Readings #38 (10/24/22-10/30/22)

all necks are on the line

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

The big literary news this week was the release of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger. Reviews have been mixed—it’s a return to McCarthy’s late-modernist manner, a swerve from the page-turning “genre” mode of No Country for Old Men and The Road—and Laura Miller in particular took a lot of heat for her bad review in Slate. I disagree with Miller but don’t find her argument entirely unreasonable or unworthy of a serious response. A serious response begins here: with McCarthy—as with such modernist precursors as Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, Eliot, and Beckett—you have to hold in mind both the occasional bleakness of their worldview and the exhilarating and therefore life-affirming way they arrange this Weltschmerz in words.¹ I wrote about The Passenger, little more than a first attempt to wrestle with its complexities. The novel’s Santa Fe Institute-inspired interest in math and science is a bit over my head, though I enjoyed Seven Brief Lessons on Physics a few years back, so I focused instead on myth and history, gender and sex, incest and mariolatry:

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

For my Wednesday creative post, I put up the first chapter of my 2012 novella The Ecstasy of Michaela, an appropriately autumnal and eerie vision for this time of year:

"The Burial" from The Ecstasy of Michaela

Below I offer two small essays on literary topics: the first on literary exceptionalism, the second a riposte to the petitioners demanding that Penguin Random House not publish Amy Coney Barrett’s forthcoming book.

Lonely at the Top: For Literary Exceptionalism

In Public Books, Howard Rambsy II and Kenton Rambsy undertake a digital-humanities investigation of the New York Times to substantiate the intuition, first articulated by John A. Williams, that “‘only one’ or a few Black writers are elevated by white publishing outlets, while many other authors are ignored.” Their charts and graphs sort of prove the point—there was James Baldwin; then there was Toni Morrison—and I would never quarrel with anyone recommending that we ought to read Samuel R. Delany or Charles Johnson or Gayl Jones or Octavia Butler or Ishmael Reed or Alice Walker (please see my site for essays on all of the above). One of their charts caught my eye, however, because it intriguingly demonstrated more than their thesis:

Evidently, it’s lonely at the top. Updike, Roth, and Morrison leave the competition in the dust, with only Oates nipping at their heels. Leaving Mailer out of account since he belongs to the prior generation, there can be only one Jewish novelist at a time too, i.e., Roth, while in Updike we find our lone Protestant. Morrison does triple identity-duty as black, female, and Catholic. Oates is the sole white woman; religiously, I believe, due to a mixed-confessional heritage, she may count at once as a Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant writer, albeit raised Catholic in childhood and volubly atheist in adulthood. Nowadays we would probably want to adjust this hierarchy. I like Updike, but most readers today would not rank him over McCarthy, DeLillo, and Didion, to say nothing of Morrison and Roth. (And where is Pynchon? Also, Atwood doesn’t count: she’s Canadian.)

What I want to defend, however, is not this or that reputation but the concept of the reputational hierarchy itself. We carry political concepts like democracy and solidarity too far when we carry them into artistic reception. Art isn’t a democracy—nor is it an ethno-state, where we owe our primary allegiance to the race. Greatness is thinner on the ground than we want to admit. The inescapable fact is that Toni Morrison and her few peers in “adding strangeness to beauty” are orders of magnitude better than even the estimable writers with whom we might compare them—whether we compare Morrison with E. L. Doctorow or DeLillo with Alice Walker.

But the motive for promoting literary democracy is self-regard, not other-regard, yet more selfishness wrapped in moral rhetoric, a hallmark of our time. If we are writers, we fear the idea of exceptionality because we fear we won’t make the cut. So we devise collectivist strategies to shield our individual persons—apologias for our identity category or pleas for state subsidy—on the theory that we may survive better when bundled in a fasces than as one snappable twig. But the scythe of time is brutal and ruthless. The only defense with a credible record of success against its assault has been to become singularly unforgettable. The democrat rightly fears exceptionality in political life, where all must submit to the people’s law. But in artistic life, only the exceptions matter.

Morrison herself, like any complex and changeable person, vacillated on this question. She once called for “a heroic writers movement,” disparaging in the process the legends of lonely heroism that attach to such names as Joyce and Hemingway: “We don’t need anymore writers as solitary heroes.” Then again, they once asked her what book she would take to a desert island, and she said she would have to write it herself.

For an author, regarding canons, it is very simple: in fifty, a hundred, or more years his or her work may be relished for its beauty or its insight or its power; or it may be condemned for its vacuousness and pretension—and junked. Or in fifty or a hundred years the critic (as canon builder) may be applauded for his or her intelligent scholarship and powers of critical inquiry. Or laughed at for ignorance and shabbily disguised assertions of power—and junked. It’s possible that the reputations of both will thrive, or that both will decay. In any case, as far as the future is concerned, when one writes, as critic or as author, all necks are on the line.

—“Unspeakable Things Unspoken”

Coney-Catchers: Against Literary Professionalism

From Lionel Trilling’s “dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet” comes this news:

Hundreds of Penguin Random House staffers and other literary professionals are calling on the publishing company to cut ties with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and to cancel her upcoming book.

The publishing house came under fire Friday after an open letter bearing 520 signatures was made public. In it, the dissenters call for a better balance of freedom of speech and duty of care, citing Penguin’s $2 million book deal with Coney Barrett as “a case where a corporation has privately funded the destruction of human rights with obscene profits.”

One vomits at a phrase like “duty of care”—the painful obviousness with which it cloaks under layered schmaltz a mail-fisted and censorious will-to-power. But the further implications of this story are fascinating too.

First, we see an almost comically concrete example of current hegemonic left-liberalism’s delusion that you can alter political reality simply by altering political speech—a persistent folly of movements that were either born or have become totalitarian. Amy Coney Barrett is a Supreme Court Justice whether you like it or not, whether you consider the process by which she became one legitimate or not, and whether you agree with her jurisprudence or not. Her writings, therefore, unquestionably merit publication and deserve scrutiny. As for the signatories’ claim that her contribution to the Dobbs decision abridged human rights, that is objectively debatable on several grounds, in that millions of Americans are ready and willing to debate it, which should make the type of public discussion a widely-read book will spark all the more welcome.

Second, we see the perverse paradox of “literary professionals” supporting the suppression of literature. But it’s not so paradoxical when we think through the logic of professionalism, when we consider the rights over private life the professional arrogates to himself (or in this case, considering the gender of most of the signatories, herself), as in the physician’s authority over the body or the psychotherapist’s over the mind. A literary professional, on this model, knows what’s best for the reader, and might as well suppress as disseminate literature, just as the physician may forbid X from your diet and the psychotherapist prescribe Y for your mood. In this “duty of care,” professionals descend from the old clerisy; perhaps the Catholic jurist Amy Coney Barrett will explain the Index Librorum Prohibitorum to them. This clerical-professional model is as opposed to the freebooting ethos of the writer proper, who wants to spread the word as widely as possible and allow the reader the latitude to carry it even further. I am happy to call myself a writer, not a literary professional.

1. See in this connection Greg Gerke’s recent essay, “Faulkner’s Ghost in the American Novel.” I quote Gerke’s quotation of Faulkner’s exegete Andre Bleikasten, glossing Faulkner’s contention, “With The Sound and the Fury I learned to read and quit reading, since I have read nothing since”:

If The Sound and the Fury was a revelation, it was first of all the revelation of Literature, through the sudden (re)discovery of all the major novelists with whom Faulkner had just joined company. True, he had read them before, but if we are to believe his testimony, his first reading had been nothing but consumption without “digestion.” His second reading, on the contrary, was a process of assimilation. Carried to its furthest limits, that is, to the point where reading becomes writing. What Faulkner implicitly acknowledges here is that the relationship between reading and writing is one of reversibility: reading is always a virtual writing, and writing always a way of reading...the process at work is one of radical transformation, a way of displacing and, eventually, replacing its models. The Sound and the Fury, then, may be considered a rereading of Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Conrad—a reading at once attentive and forgetful, fascinated and treacherous, and, by virtue of its very infidelity, creative. The gesture of appropriation is also a gesture of dismissal. 

Gerke aptly laments that “too many books (and certainly most on the major presses) written today don’t have as much presence of the march of literature in them as they should.” Unfortunately, Gerke also falls prey to the ethos of literary professionalism when, in the name of literature’s authority, he high-handedly mocks

today’s armies of egomaniacs who piss on “knowledge of any kind” with the internet and WebMD giving people the crass delusion they can self-diagnose a tumor inside them and maybe just pay someone in the gig economy to take it out because the doctor will make you get a vaccination. 

As if there were no good reason professional institutions have lost their standing today, and as if subversive writers like Faulkner were not themselves eminently willing to criticize such institutions. (Consider only the well-known statistic that iatrogenic illness is the third leading cause of death in the U.S.) I am at pains to reject the ethos of literary professionalism in this post’s second essay.