A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
On the one hand, I am still writing a novel—60,000 words so far; no end in sight but serial coming soon—and don’t want to write literary criticism. On the other hand, I may have been too hard on literary criticism in recent posts. So for today’s weekly newsletter, a modest defense of the art, followed by a pop-culture postscriptum. (Did you really think you’d get away without seeing another Grant Morrison panel this week? Go easy on me, please: I’m writing a novel of apparently Tolstoyan breadth—I originally typed “girth,” but my sensitivity reader cancelled the term—about an occultist comic-book writer.) In the meantime, you will want to subscribe to
, since I’ll have a guest essay appearing there later this week.The Defense of Criticism Is the Defense of Poetry: Interpretation vs. Censorship
This week’s literary controversy: the Roald Dahl estate’s collaboration with sensitivity readers to align the author’s work with contemporary sensibilities.1 I’ve never read one word of Roald Dahl—cinema-wise, I remember more or less enjoying James and the Giant Peach when it was the only movie my much-younger brother would consent to watch when he was a toddler and I was a teenager back in the ’90s—and I have no opinion on his books.
In general, children’s literature is always and inevitably didactic, an encroachment of the adult’s concerns upon the child, hence Jacqueline Rose’s infamous argument for what she called the genre’s “impossibility.” For this reason, we simply have to expect children’s literature to be the genre least able to weather changes in moral fashion. But when history overtakes the books, one simply ought to move them from the low shelf to the high shelf—and trust the children, incidentally, to find some way to climb up there on their own. Altering the text of books already classic in the public consciousness, and when the author is long dead, should be considered totally inadmissible, since it so closely resembles the totalitarian regime’s falsification of public records.2
Taking an expansive perspective on the controversy, Zohar Atkins emphasizes the role of criticism in preserving tradition against the corrosive effects of knee-jerk moralism.
Academia used to serve this function for the secular literary canon. Students were taught, whether under the auspices of New Criticism in the ’50s and ’60s or of deconstruction in the ’70s and ’80s, that the texts most worth reading generated a surplus of significance no one interpretation, no one reader, could possibly exhaust. We had, therefore, to go on reading and rereading these texts. Criticism both preserved the texts as irreplaceable treasures of tradition while keeping them open to endless (and sometimes quarrelsome and suspicious) scrutiny.
Even the earlier forms of identitarian critique scrupulously continued to make this double move. For example, a right-wing small press’s Twitter account tried to blame Toni Morrison, and on her birthday no less, for the Roald Dahl redactions, but the charges won’t stick.
Scarcely a word of this is true. Morrison as “editor” did not “comb through” older texts to critique them. She acquired new books and worked with their authors toward publication. In her editorial work, she focused on adding to the range of black authors published, from experimental fiction writers to sports celebrities to political actors. If she ever had anything to say about Roald Dahl, I’ve never seen any evidence of it.
Morrison’s later critical work, moreover, doesn’t resemble the thread’s description. She largely lauds Faulkner, Hemingway, and O’Connor (not to mention Melville and Twain) for the way they use literary form to expose racial ideology. Her two major critical statements on race in literature, the essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” and the book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, almost function as primers for how to go on valuing the dead white men’s canon even after you have absorbed the lessons of critical race theory. She writes at the beginning of the essay:
Resistance to displacement within or expansion of a canon is not, after all, surprising or unwarranted. That’s what canonization is for. (And the question of whether there should be a canon or not seems disingenuous to me—there always is one whether there should be or not—for it is in the interests of the professional critical community to have one.) Certainly a sharp alertness as to why a work is or is not worthy of study is the legitimate occupation of the critic, the pedagogue, and the artist. What is astonishing in the contemporary debate is not the resistance to displacement of works or to the expansion of genre within it, but the virulent passion that accompanies this resistance and, more important, the quality of its defense weaponry. The guns are very big; the trigger-fingers quick. But I am convinced the mechanism of the defenders of the flame is faulty. Not only may the hands of the gunslinging cowboy-scholars be blown off, not only may the target be missed, but the subject of the conflagration (the sacred texts) is sacrificed, disfigured in the battle. This canon fodder may kill the canon. And I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare, or James or Twain or Hawthorne, or Melville, and so on. There must be some way to enhance canon readings without enshrining them. (my emphasis)
Morrison stood uncompromisingly against censorship, including when it came to censoring racist material for children. Her comment on removing Huckleberry Finn from school reading lists suggests what she would think of the Roald Dahl redactions (I quote from an essay collected in the Norton Critical Edition of the novel):
It struck me as a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem, band-aid the solution.
She concludes by praising Twain’s novel precisely for its power to elicit endless commentary, a power she obviously believes to warrant its canonization:
For a hundred years the argument that this novel is has been identified, reidentified, examined, waged and advanced. What it cannot be is dismissed. It is classic literature, which is to say it heaves, manifests and lasts.
Not, it should go without saying, the words of a simplistic canon-smasher. As for her fiction, if reactionaries would trouble themselves to read it, they might find, especially in the bracing early work, which I have several times described as Nietzschean, an ally rather than an enemy. An admirer of Ernst Jünger, as the person behind this Twitter account appears to be, will find much to ponder in the anarcho-reactionary Sula.
Just as Morrison made canonical works by white male writers newly available to radical critics, so her own works might be similarly reappropriated in turn by the reactionary critic. This process of struggling to make a great work one’s own is criticism at its most productive. Dismissal and censorship, by contrast, and for whatever ideological reason, leave everyone poorer and weaker.
Pop-Culture Postscriptum: Dreaming in Public
I don’t really care about pop culture, what the Marxists usefully used to call “mass culture” to stress its status as industrial product before they got their heads turned by the Gramscian faith that they could use the stuff to move the masses their own way. Pop culture is only interesting when it meets high culture on the fringe of comprehensibility and respectability: when it functions as counterculture.
I took last week off from using this newsletter to manifest my appearance on the Art of Darkness podcast, but I’m back at it this week since their latest episode explores in admirable depth the life and work of experimental filmmaker and voodoo priestess Maya Deren. While I’ve been aware of Deren for a while—here as elsewhere, I received my education from the allusions made in the comic books I read in my adolescence, for which see the end of this post—the episode made me want to examine her ideas much more closely.
When Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles surprisingly topped Sight and Sound’s decennial poll of all-time greatest films last December, usurping the place customarily reserved for either Citizen Kane or Vertigo, a typical debate ensued over whether or not identity politics motivated the change. I haven’t watched Akerman’s film because I have no reason to expect I’d appreciate its extensive exercise in meticulous social realism—this genre can work well enough in prose fiction, but, speaking for myself, I need cinema to have a visionary element. The more I thought about it, though, the more convinced I became that an airtight case could be made—independent if not incognizant of the director’s gender—for Deren’s famous 1943 surrealist short Meshes of the Afternoon as all-time greatest film.3 (It comes in at #16 in the Sight and Sound poll.)
Is cinema not the collective dream of the 20th century? And who did dreaming on film better than Deren, complete with a recursive interest in mirrors, looks, delusions? In a culture of compulsive identification, of patent oversensitivity to only the most literal meanings, Deren’s oneiric elusiveness may be a lesson to us all.
Among social media reactions to the Dahl news, I noted indie author Delicious Tacos’s statement, “The publishing industry should not exist.” He may have a point. As I explored years ago in my essay on Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, serious literature and the publishing industry have largely if not entirely parted ways. The very brief 20th-century interregnum during which major publishers could be trusted to disseminate work of the highest merit has decisively ended; it ran from the end of literary censorship in the 1950s to the formation of media monopolies in the 1980s. Though the end came decades ago, we only see the conclusion so vividly now because the authors brought to public attention during that interregnum are sadly dying off, to be replaced by committee-written, over-refined, and sales-calculated “product,” most of it in service to the narrow ideology of a single class. We are now re-learning the lessons of the authors who lived before the interregnum: Blake and Whitman self-published, Woolf owned her own press, the modernists and postmodernists, everybody from the Imagists and the Vorticists to the Black Arts Movement, started their own magazines, printed their own pamphlets, and published their own books. As Ted Gioia argues, the American arts in fact are booming, as my soon-to-be-serialized-on-Substack novel will surely prove. Only the legacy institutions have collapsed—ironically, from a self-inflicted double-barrel shot to the head of both capitalism (pursuing profit to the exclusion of all other values) and communism (submitting individual imagination to collectivist ideology), thus proving these supposedly opposite Enlightenment ideologies to be terrible twins. We will have to replace the legacy institutions eventually with a recentralized system, however, since subscribing to 100 Substacks, patronizing 100 podcasts, and paying for 100 streaming services isn’t very economical. In the meantime, though, artistic life thrives outside the moribund, over-administered publishing houses and universities.
Censors never fail to made a fool of themselves, though, by indecently exposing their own fixations and biases in the very act of trying to suppress others. Mina Loy once quipped, “The worst kind of sex maniac is the censor,” which we might adapt for the present as, “The worst kind of sociopath is the sensitivity reader.” I was amused to see this particular revision to Dahl’s work, as quoted in the Guardian:
In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the Centipede sings: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.”
Both verses have been removed, and in their place are the rhymes: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.”
Is there a better illustration of progressive empire’s ethos than this alteration? “You may deserve to be exterminated, but it will never be okay to invalidate your identity.”
Meshes of the Afternoon, like much of the greatest art, exists at once in the elite and the popular consciousness. While I was made to watch it twice in academe—once in an undergraduate class called Film Analysis and once in a graduate seminar called Modernism: A Primer—I also appreciate its decisive influence on the killer video at the heart of my favorite 21st-century Hollywood horror film, The Ring.
Weekly Readings #54 (02/13/23-02/19/23)
I'm the author of the book that the American Library Association named as the most banned and challenged book from 2010 to 2019, and those attempts to ban my book have only increased in the last few years. So I'm struck hard by Zohar Atkins' notion about Midrash, and the lack thereof, being a cause for book banning, maybe even being the primary cause. So now I'm pondering Midrash as I think about a theme in my book that conservative readers can't see and that the left might ignore because it too complicates both sides' narratives. That theme: My novel stars a liberal, sometimes profane, hilarious, artistic, rebelious Native American kid who finds love, friendship, acceptance, and success in a small white conservative Christian town—the kind of town in real life where the book often gets banned and the kind of town that often gets vilified by the left. Does my book get banned because its text is presented, studied, taught, and vilified in simplistic and unexamined ways?
So much to admire here, John--with special love of footnote #1. Hear! Hear!