Weekly Readings #40 (11/07/22-11/13/22)
in the destructive element immerse
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
Strangely, a major publishing event has passed without notice. For the first time, a graphic novel was added to the roster of Norton Critical Editions. This signals the completed arrival of comics as an art form in academe. (An ambiguous development: art and academe do and should contend with one another as well as offering mutual support.) But I am so far—two months since the book’s publication this September—the only person who has reviewed it. No other reviews have appeared, either in legacy media publications or on Amazon, Goodreads, blogs, or BookTube. So please read about it here (and don’t miss my completely baseless speculation about comics-as-intelligence-psyop):
From our newest major literary form to our oldest: I ventured some verse here for my Wednesday creative writing post. I think it was friend-of-the-blog Alice Gribbin who noted that Substack subscribers will immediately unsubscribe upon being sent poetry, as if the very medium had scorched them through the screen. I can now confirm this. In case you missed it, here again is your chance to be scorched by my cycle of lyrics about the Devil and the Virgin Mary hanging out in L.A.:
Below are two small essays. In the first, I return to political punditry to analyze the midterm elections. In the second, I address the literary question of whether books should “love us back.” And then a pop-culture postscript on two recent and interesting essays on horror cinema.
Liberalism Redivivus: Midterm Post-Mortem
America is constitutionally, politically, socially, culturally, and economically liberal. Deal with it.
—Niccolo Soldo, Twitter
Reagan’s heroes were Tom Paine...and then Ralph Waldo Emerson.
—John Patrick Diggins, “Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History”
Donning my Grand Pundit Abyss hat, I judge that America’s inherent and endemic liberalism—or, if you prefer a theological explanation, America’s inherent and endemic gnosticism (per Harold Bloom’s American Religion)—offers the most parsimonious explanation for the midterm elections: both the MAGA Republicans’ underperformance and DeSantis and Co.’s neo-Reaganite blow-out victories, often against “woke” niche political celebrities. We can take the losses of Stacey Abrams and of Blake Masters as parallel cases. The popular rejection of these avatars of “Black Girl Magic” and of “Based Caesarism” suggests that the last decade’s social-media politics are spent as an electoral force.
Some version of populist policy or aesthetics may continue to sway Rust Belt voters; witness J. D. Vance’s triumph over a faux-populist Democrat in Ohio and John Fetterman’s defeat of a slick celebrity Republican in Pennsylvania, two holdovers from last decade’s populist and socialist trends, respectively.1 But the overall evidence—and by “evidence” I as an innumerate aesthete mean mood, affect, and, yes, vibe—points toward a waning of 2010s-style populist-collectivist passions and the reassertion of liberalism in its left and right variants. And commenters as ideologically diverse as the aforementioned Niccolo Soldo, John Ganz, Geoff Shullenberger in Compact, and a whole company of relative centrists gathered by Bari Weiss at Common Sense largely agree on this.
If the Democrats have lately found their liberalism hampered by identity politics and lockdownism, the Republicans failed to meet the moment with a cultural overcorrection too reminiscent of the old religious right.2 The public may be forgiven for splitting the difference. In a fine narrative reversal, the Republicans even won the popular vote while coming up short, at least in the Senate, on structural grounds.
Insofar as Biden was vindicated and Trump discredited by the election, the table seems set for a DeSantis presidency since Trump has a political heir apparent and Biden has a mix of none and too many, Trump’s infanticidal vindictiveness notwithstanding. And despite some MAGA murmurings about permanent Democratic electoral victories by hook or by crook, I would not underestimate the political class’s understanding that its legitimacy rests on the appearance of bipartisanship or its nostalgic appetite for a revived Reagan-like figure. The most poetic 2024 contest would be between Newsom and DeSantis, the simulacrum Kennedy vs. the simulacrum Reagan, all the more ironic for Kennedy’s and Reagan’s themselves having been our first simulacra presidents.
Politics does not follow logic or poetry but human vagary, with all its unforeseen developments, unintended consequences, and illogical actions. Due to these contingencies, I rarely think it’s worthwhile to predict electoral returns. Who knows what potential further economic weakening or foreign-policy catastrophe could mean? By 2024, we could all be dead. Still, commentators should concern themselves with higher and deeper cultural currents than partisan outcomes. I draw your attention, therefore, to two pieces I published earlier this year. In July’s “Is the Anti-Woke Alliance Already Dead?” and in August’s “Back to the Maternal Bosom of the Pantsuited Neoliberalism,” I charted a re-liberalizing tendency in both mainstream conservatism and the avant-garde post-left, particularly after the Dobbs decision. The latter piece is paywalled, but here is a key paragraph from the former:
As with any political movement, their motivation in the end is power. The conflict underlying my examples above, after all, is not really so much about sexual freedom or artistic license but, as Portnoy keenly understands, about economics and the social hierarchy. Whose values should prevail—those of the metropolitan libertine, who cherishes personal liberty and who moreover can afford to enjoy this freedom, or those reputedly traditional ideals of faith and family celebrated by the suburban and rural middle and working classes, with their focus on economic advancement and the discipline necessary to achieve it? In other words, what has anti-wokeness been about this whole time: frontally challenging and displacing the metropolitan elite and the economic system that sustains its power, as the traditionalists would prefer, or convincing it to lighten up on the censorship and identity politics and thereby become the proper steward of an advanced society, as the libertines would surely advocate?
This outcome certifies the online dissident right’s status as new counterculture (if the natural food fixation—often reasonable enough—weren’t a clue). The old counterculture never scored any electoral victories either; they flourished in the social interstices of the Reagan imperium and didn’t get routinized and professionalized enough (and thereby drained of critical force) to produce a president till Obama. These reactionaries’ comfort, however cold, can be that apothegm of the woke—i.e., the old counterculture’s bureaucratized final form—that you can see much from the margin wholly imperceptible to the center. I suspect power, however, would be far more comforting than a compensatory valorization of its lack.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Literature and Lineage
“A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht wahr?…No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. […] And yet it is true—it is true. In the destructive element immerse.”
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
But books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer. In that capacity I have to place enormous trust in my ability to imagine others and my willingness to project consciously into the danger zones such others may represent for me. I am drawn to the ways all writers do this: the way Homer renders a heart-eating cyclops so that our hearts are wrenched with pity; the way Dostoevsky compels intimacy with Svidrigailov and Prince Myshkin. I am in awe of the authority of Faulkner’s Benjy, James’s Maisie, Flaubert’s Emma, Melville’s Pip, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—each of us can extend the list.
—Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
Above is the literary world’s controversial Tweet of the week. As the responses to the claim indicate, the division here is not racial but a matter of readerly attitude or readerly desire. I confess I don’t really understand the lament myself. The only canonical author who ever said he loved me, or at least liked me, was Walt Whitman. I never had the impression the rest saw me coming or would have cared much if they did.
I don’t necessarily advocate cold-heartedness in the face of this sentimentality, something like Lenin’s refusal of Beethoven, though this is probably necessary as a phase of literary education. In my Marxist mid-20s, I would have scoffed at literary love. Bourgeois ideology! Love plays a role in the end, though, as it played in the beginning, when we first discovered literature.
In my experience, readerly love is more like love of a place than like love of a person. I don’t need the book—or the authorial sensibility—to love me back, only for it to leave me enough room I may call my own. And gradually domesticating the alien or hostile can be a deeper pleasure than slipping right into the most familiar of comforts.
The “person of color” formulation often obscures relevant differences and similarities beyond the skin; it’s not as if the literary canon has never hit me with any version of this scenario despite my nominal whiteness. But I still can’t imagine why knowing Henry James was vexed to see my ancestors come ashore should dim my (critical) appreciation for his achievement. Shouldn’t I, by contrast, take satisfaction in being so unexpected an heir to his cultural wealth?3 Whether I should or not, I certainly do. Later in the thread, our author quotes James Baldwin lamenting of European literature, “this was not my heritage.” By contrast, Nobellist Louise Glück wrote in her essay “Education of the Poet”:
I read early, and wanted, from a very early age, to speak in return. When, as a child, I read Shakespeare’s songs, or later, Blake and Yeats and Keats and Eliot, I did not feel exiled, marginal. I felt, rather, that this was the tradition of my language: my tradition, as English was my language. My heritage. My wealth.
To tie this aesthetic essay into the political one above, Glück’s Emersonian position—that heritage and wealth are to be made anew in every generation, are not the property of one biological lineage or settled class—is the liberal one, as is a fascination with what is alien, different, other, even superficially hostile, rather than with what is the same, the customary, the repeated. Whether liberalism’s revival in politics will be mirrored in literature remains to be seen.
Pop-Culture Postscriptum
Since this week’s newsletter began with the academic absorption of popular culture, I must note—even though Halloween was two weeks ago—a recent pair of lucid commentaries on the Halloween horror film franchise. First is Emmalea Russo with “Vicious Cycle” in Return, a Girardian reading of David Gordon Green’s trilogy, and one notably alive to the aesthetic-sensuous pleasures of Halloween Ends, though the film itself isn’t great and Girardian readings are often dry and schematic. Next and right here on Substack is Chris R. Morgan with “The Endless Samhain,” which reads that most neglected of films, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, as an Irish-American Black Panther, a Hibernofuturist curse and curio. For my own take both on Halloween III and on the central film of Green’s trilogy, Halloween Kills, please see here.4 Now we just need the Norton Critical Edition.
I am descended from suburban swing-voters in Western Pennsylvania. One of the them, a Boomer who voted for Trump in 2020 and Fetterman in 2022, gave me the explanation that Oz would cut social security if given the chance. Take that anecdote for whatever it’s worth.
Speaking of graphic novels, Libs of TikTok is now worried that teenagers might read Craig Thompson’s Blankets. Who the hell is supposed to read it then? I can’t imagine an adult wading through that schmaltz! More seriously: keeping grad-school sex-and-gender ideologues away from the pre-pubescent set is not to my mind wholly unreasonable, but, as a non-believer in YA, I think teens, who are not children, should be reading adult books.
We sophisticated present-day readers/writers should concede that we have more in common with the literary elites of past centuries than we have with our disprivileged ancestors those elites dominated. In 2022, I am culturally and socially in the Henry James position, not the position of my great-grandfather. No mystifying, sentimental invocation of race or ethnicity can change that.
Many of these films are ridiculous, throwaway slasher schlock, but not all of them. Maybe because John Carpenter’s original Halloween was the first movie we watched in my college Film Analysis class, I associate the empty signifier known as Michael Myers with academic approaches to popular culture. The professor of that class wrote a book on horror cinema and national trauma. Later in my college career, he hosted a screening of George Romero’s then-recent Bruiser followed by a Q&A with the legendary Pittsburgh horror auteur. At one point in the Q&A, the professor said to Romero, in the best academic-moralist style, “You’re not really romanticizing violence…” to which Romero in the best aesthetic-amoralist style replied, “Yes, I am.”
The poems were good though!