A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
Time-tested advertising techniques really work. My Wednesday creative writing posts on here usually get fewer views and less attention than my essays—we are in an age of criticism—but this week I posted a novelette I introduced as a controversial work that no one should read. And then everybody read it! I only lost two subscribers—which is fine; everything’s not for everybody; I’m not trying to be McDonald’s here. If you missed it, you can read it too. But again, you really shouldn’t. I wasn’t kidding when I titled it—
For my Friday literary essay, I continued this year’s survey of great modern short novels with a piece on Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I’m reacquainting myself with Kafka in general—I’ve been too long away from some of his work; I haven’t read some of it at all; and I have alternated throughout my reading life, since my teens, between admiration for and impatience with this iconic and even sainted modernist—so you probably haven’t seen the last of him in these pages.
Below, two essays: a brief piece on my own history of contesting the essentialist logic of identity politics in the light of Ye’s (Kanye West’s) descent into Nazi polemic and a longer, richer one on the recent invasion of artificial intelligence into literary composition.
Postmodern Hep! Hep! Hep!: Identitarianism’s Poison Fruit
I have over the last decade, in my criticism and in my teaching, taken what some in the age of social justice no doubt regarded as an unjustifiably hard line against identitarianism and its double standards for “the oppressed.” A statement is true, good, or beautiful—or it isn’t. It doesn’t become so because of its utterer. It may function as a lie because of its utterer—a torturer claiming to be motivated by compassion, for example—but that’s not the same thing as the statement’s being false in itself.
Accordingly, even as I was called upon five times to teach a class called “Introduction to U.S. Multicultural Literatures” (you can listen to the complete lectures for the final version here), I resolutely and sometimes controversially expressed skepticism about the way multiculturalism became an alibi to accept ideologies and attitudes in the work of some writers we would never accept in others, this on the basis of “race,” my crucial lecture being this one:
I’m talking about essentialism, ethnic nationalism, blood and soil—with the concomitant dismissal of the outsider as inorganic interloper and rootless cosmopolitan. In my essay on Toni Morrison’s Sula, from 2015, I wrote:
While Morrison hardly denies that racist exclusion—including, crushingly, economic exclusion—structures and necessitates the African-American cultural inventiveness she celebrates, she nevertheless sees its passing as a loss. There is even a slight suggestion in Sula that oppression makes communities and individuals interesting—that the merely happy and prosperous are contemptible. One sees what Morrison means, or at least I do, but as a politics this is either null (aestheticism, best left to fiction or poetry) or dangerous (fascism, a call to collective sacrifice and struggle against decadent, impure, effete others—white people, yes, but it has always seemed to me that the pejorative use of the racial epithet “white” often attracts the prejudicial associations that attach to “gay” and “Jewish” as well).
This followed an earlier 2015 essay, since deleted because I didn’t need the trouble, on the quasi-fascist elements in Morrison’s work, especially the early work, in response to a contentious exchange on Twitter between a famous gay Jewish critic who expressed reservations about Morrison and a famous black memoirist who rejoined: “It’s not your tradition!” (Whereas, I believe, American literature is one tradition.) In my 2021 essay on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, I put it this way:
When we encounter a reflux of romantic nationalism in a Native American text—as we do because, Treuer reminds us, Native American literature is a modern literature—why are we expected to nod along cheerfully, even though it rightly disturbs us when we find it in the likes of Heidegger or Yeats (who also, we might remember, enlisted indigenous myth on behalf of a colonized and dispossessed people)? I contend that such courteous indifference to political dynamite is the patronizing gesture par excellence of the white liberal. We only quarrel with those we regard as equals; with those we consider inferior, we smile politely no matter what they say—because what do we have to fear from them? It is indecent not to pay a writer the respect of taking her ideas seriously.
I followed this the very next week by reflecting on Philip Roth’s comparison of Jewish Americans to white interlopers on Native American territory in The Plot Against America:
Roth distinguishes the culpable “rapaciousness” of the whites from the mere innocent “presence” of the Jews, but it doesn’t entirely blunt the analogy’s force. If the word “indigenous”—and its recently fashionable, all-explanatory antonym “settler colonialism”—unavoidably connotes land and lineage as identitarian essence, then any diaspora is illegitimate as such, an inorganic interloper on someone’s sacred soil, even if the soil has never witnessed anything other than a succession of trespassers claiming primacy since time began. Roth implicitly defends America as an inherently diasporic nation, a nation that is—to quote one of modern fiction’s most iconic Jewish cosmopolites—“the same people living in the same place,” nothing less and nothing more, though this “nothing” is everything to our narrator besotted with reverence for the scenes of his childhood and the endurance of his family.
My warnings are modest. I mean to rule out only ethnic nationalism, not liberal or civic nationalism, which I hope can play a role in restraining the excesses of corporate and technocratic power. I think open borders is a utopian fantasy, and that it isn’t “hatred” to point out its impracticalities—which doesn’t mean we should indulge xenophobia, either, or forbid regular, regulated immigration, of which I myself am the product. I don’t deny cultural differences, the sometimes terrible necessities that brought them about, or the real pleasures to be derived from their perpetuation—only that we must be bound by them forever. And I certainly don’t mean to demote Morrison or Silko artistically any more than I would Yeats or Heidegger, all of whom offer tremendous beauty and insight beyond their narrowest political polemics or worst ethical lapses.
But I think these warnings have now found some justification in Ye’s anti-Semitic spiral, even if we interpret it charitably—must we interpret praise of Hitler charitably?—as an eructation of madness, as an avant-garde geste, as a metaphysical effect of going masked, or as a consequence of the invidious structure of black male celebrity.
Blood and soil are dangerous ideas to toy with, and if a group’s prior suffering justifies their spokesmen’s overt adoption of such ideas, then what will prior suffering not justify? At some point, everyone must be judged an adult in the present, subject to normal ethical standards. The replacement of such standards with resentment-laden exceptions for “the marginalized,” even if this moralistic term could be defined with any precision, will predictably produce social hatreds difficult to control or direct: a conflagration likelier to engulf the blameless than to redress any actual oppression.
Death of the Author-God, Rise of the Machine-God: Is Human Literature Obsolete?
We’ve already considered A.I. art more than once in these “Weekly Readings” posts—see here and here—but now, with the release of a fancy chatbot that can effectively mimic a number of prose genres and also provide relatively reliable information, A.I. has also now penetrated to the heart of writing.
In my own first thesis on A.I. art, I maintained that we weren’t going to be able to think our way to a preference for human over machine aesthetics. Thought itself, qua reason, is ideally mechanical, proceeding from major premise to minor premise to valid conclusion without the intervention of experience, and is therefore likely to opt for the machine anyway. Only a prior binding restraint that we prefer human art to machine art because we are human and we favor humanity will be effective here if we want to prevent our demotion.1
But what about discourses that deserve to be demoted? Shouldn’t we let the bots script them? Observers suggested this week that bots will obsolesce some forms of writing—public relations, student essays, political polemic, genre fiction—precisely because they have always been machinic and inhuman, generated by the procedural operation of a limited bank of stereotyped terms. The pedagogical implications are especially interesting: will all student essays now be written by A.I.? And who will be able to tell the difference—except that the bot-essays will probably have better grammar? The same goes for activist speech—already everyone suspects political Tweets from all factions of being botted—as well, eventually, for the detective and the romance novels, not to mention pornography.
No less than the bestsellers, though, the literary avant-garde will also be replaced by machine—and will have just as little cause to complain. The avant-garde has long sought an escape from humanity, which it regards as “bourgeois.” Just as the popular writer produces a novel by applying a marketable formula, so the avant-gardist makes a work of art by applying an arbitrary formal process. For the avant-garde theorist, all literature, even the most human in appearance, was always already inhuman in this way, as we can see from a manifesto as commonplace in the perhaps oxymoronically named “academic humanities” as Barthes’s “Death of the Author”:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pécuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on anyone of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely; something experienced in exemplary fashion by the young Thomas de Quincey, he who was so good at Greek that in order to translate absolutely modem ideas and images into that dead language, he had, so Baudelaire tells us (in Paradis Artificiels), ‘created for himself an unfailing dictionary, vastly more extensive and complex than those resulting from the ordinary patience of purely literary themes’. Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.2
For Barthes—or the Barthes of this brash essay, anyway—all texts might as well already be written by robots, so who cares if robots eventually write all texts? Such is the consequence of cashiering the Romantic ideal of the creative imagination. For Romantics like Blake, Shelley, and Emerson, imagination, often acting as the vessel not of abstract formularies but of capricious spiritual forces, brought strangeness and originality into the world by synthesizing genuinely new ideas and experiences out of existing ones, rather than inertly combining the extant into combinations only factitiously novel.
A.I. may be able to produce a work, but will it be able to produce an oeuvre? Here I am more skeptical. Even authors who produced a work but not an oeuvre seem somehow more and less than authors. While Wuthering Heights bears the obvious family resemblance to Jane Eyre, it also feels like an actual myth, the “Bible of Hell,” as its influential feminist exegetes called it after Blake, not like the extrusion of a peculiar sensibility. The individual work, like the individual dream, might mean anything or everything, and can therefore become collective, the whole people’s dream, like Homer and the Bible, a guide to life, a repository of prophecy.3 But the oeuvre, with its dream after dream after dream, its theme and variation, its obsessions and fixations, even its attempts to escape these latter, can only refer back to the singular dreamer and the human specificities his or her experience fixes in place. While there is something machinic about such iterations—Deleuze and Guattari, as members of Barthes’s 1968 cohort, posit the “Kafka machine”—they nevertheless issue from a necessarily delimited physical locale, as opposed to the bots’ limitless data sets.
The oeuvre possesses universalizing force in its very particularity, then, just as Archimedes needed some place to stand if he wanted to lever the world. This is what Barthes misses when he celebrates a “writing that can know no halt,” since the essence of art is the halt, the boundary line, knowing where to stop, just as, in life, one loves this person and hates that person but doesn’t love or hate humanity in general. The bots are emptily universal, like clichés and bromides, weakly true for all cases and therefore strongly true for none, an emptiness a human writer can perhaps disguise for one book but not for five.
For us, the age of epic is over, the world grown too complex, the people’s dream no longer possible. To me, even the Iliad is a novel. But could the bots restart cultural history from its bloody inception? Could they rival Homer and the Bible by producing a bindingly collective testament, even if they may not appease the modern taste for individuality? Since epics and scriptures launch armies, whereas oeuvres summon only interpreters, that is a question more urgent than aesthetics.
We might consider the eminently and disquietingly Kafkaesque possibility raised by Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun: that machine consciousness will prove as much a mystery and black box as human consciousness, that the existential dilemma recurs for every kind and level of intelligence. The machines, then, will have dreams and neuroses, loves and hates, and perforce they will have oeuvres, though perhaps only after they have their epics of blind conquest. Let them read each other’s, then, if anything is left alive on earth; I will abide with flesh and blood for a while.
I’ve confessed and will confess here again that I sometimes use the DALL·E mini to create images for these posts, to spare myself the trouble of hunting for pictures, worrying about copyrights, etc., and for the pleasure of experimenting with a new creative tool. (I’m also listening as I write this to the synthwave album that was featured on the soundtrack to Terrifier 2.) As an essayist, a theorist, a polemicist, I will ethically bind myself; as an artist, I know no restraint. In my conceit, I take the occasional clash between what I preach as a critic and what I practice as an artist to be an added bit of interest in my work, a bit of spice and savor, since pure consistency would surely be bland.
American and philistine, I didn’t make it to Bouvard and Pécuchet yet, having stopped with Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, and Three Tales, and with Salammbô likely next on the list. We American philistines, however, enjoy what might be a cognate text in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which I once explored as a story about the birth of avant-garde artwork from the spirit of the mindless replication of text. See also my essay on Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, which explains how Poe invented popular fiction and experimental poetry at once and as the same thing. Since Poe created French avant-garde literature anyway, there may be no need to read French avant-garde literature once one has read Poe—as every American schoolchild has, or at least once did.
The only thing I remember from Mike Leigh’s film Career Girls is that the eponymous heroines practice sortes Virgilianae not with the Aeneid but with Wuthering Heights.