Weekly Readings #58 (03/13/23-03/19/23)
packed in ice and salt
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
Can you feel it? No, not the beginning of spring, nor even, for the zodiacal among you, the new moon in Aries. Instead, you are only one (1!) day away from the premier of my novel, Major Arcana. This will be a weekly serial (text + audio1) for paid Substack subscribers. This week I published a Preface to the novel that explains all the details, from the paywall logistics to an anticipatory defense of the novel’s aesthetic and ideological character:
I want to thank dearly those who have already subscribed. I will give a free subscription to anybody who requests one—you can contact me at the email address in my bio—but there is a price: in return you really need, if I may resort to meme language, to be Pistelli-maxxing, to be reviewing my work on the big platforms and dropping my name to the general public as well as in all the right places. Is Kendall Jenner still reading imaginative literature or did she get a new publicist? If she is, you must get this to her. Grimes would be good too; please encourage her to subscribe on her non-invasive brain-computer interface. By the time I’m done here, I want that tattoo on Lana Del Rey’s arm to read “Nabokov Whitman Pistelli.” I saw a Tweet this week from an artist who said he desired his name to disappear, his ideas to be plagiarized and stolen and disseminated anonymously, prolifically, with no author attached. I was moved by the nobility and high-mindedness of this beautifully post-egoic wish. But I would like intelligences made solely of light, on a planet circling a distant star, to flicker my name in their luminous language two billion years from now. Some of us are saints; some are sonneteers.
If you find the above somewhat excessively “poppy,” what follows is a rumination on the inner unity of culture in the diversity of its manifestations, with reference to Nymphet Alumni, Roberto Bolaño, Ernst Jünger, and Three-Body.
Hardcore Worldcore: Planetary Humanism in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture
Urged by several of you, I’m finally reading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. I’m a little more than halfway through by now, approaching the middle of the notorious “Part about the Crimes.” When the novel was published in English in 2008 to a seismic shock of hype greater than even Knausgård, Ferrante, or Fosse would later enjoy, I avoided it on the premise that my natural contrarianism would have made a fair evaluation impossible. Now that half a generation has passed and the novel retains, more or less, its eminence, it has proven to be more than the marketing department’s confection or the sensation of the moment. This allows a post-facto reflection not only on the novel but on the moment itself.
Relevant criticism is where you find it—not always, maybe not even often, among the peer reviewers. I have, then, been catching up with the perhaps alarmingly titled Nymphet Alumni podcast. Its premise: three female Zoomers’ resolutely post-ideological and post-Red-Scare analysis of pop-culture trends. I first discovered this trio because, like me, they appeared on Katherine Dee’s show; I rediscovered them this week because of their recent episode on “Spiritual Bimboism,” a topic relevant to Major Arcana, with its exceedingly non-bimboesque manifestation coach anti-hero(ine).
But I also found the key to the Bolaño phenomenon qua phenomenon in our culture vultures’ episode on what they call “Global South-core,” especially this gritty and cosmopolitan aesthetic’s mid-2000s intersection with the contemporaneous “indie sleaze” vogue. Now that I’ve given these phrases, I’m sure a lightbulb has appeared over the heads of every Bolaño reader, for what glib marketing terms better describe our posthumous exilic late-modernist anarchist Latin American phenom than “indie sleaze Global South-core”?
I’m not trying to be glib, however. I am trying to name why Bolaño’s work works, especially 2666, despite the snide and condescending pseudo-omniscience into which a historicist approach always tempts the critic. I have generally believed that powerful new aesthetic phenomena are created from the combination not only of disparate but of immiscible precursors. What makes 2666 disorientingly powerful is its submergence of the liberal-cosmopolitan global concern suggested by “Global South-core,” thematized in the novel’s obsessive interest in the Juárez femicide, within a modernist and thus highly literary variant of “indie sleaze” fashion consciousness.
The most prominent negative review of the novel on Goodreads somewhat self-righteously faults it on feminist grounds for replicating the misogynist murderers’ cold indifference with its own aesthetically monumental and therefore unfeeling approach to their crimes. This delegitimizes a “masculine” approach to moral outrage from a perhaps too-totalizing “feminine” perspective, but, more importantly, it also neglects the way the ethical tends most effectively to appear in serious literature, at least after the failure of Victorian sentimentalism to forestall the 20th century’s horrors: not as assertion but as indirection. “All that is personal soon rots,” Yeats famously wrote; “it must be packed in ice or salt.”
“Global South-core” may have threatened to melt, in the first decade of the present century, amid the messianic fervor of Obama’s cosmopolitical first campaign with which the novel’s English publication coincided, into “the New Sincerity”—cf. the post-nymphets’ pod on “Twee, or ‘The Gentle Revolution.’” But 2666’s decadent Baudelairean “oasis of horror in a desert of boredom,” the high-literary equivalent of “indie sleaze,” provided a preservative for the author’s indeed sincere ethical and political concern.2 Without it, we might remember 2666 in the same breath as “the Brooklyn Books of Wonder.” Even the best and most sophisticated of the New Sincerity novels, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, itself not innocent of “Global South-core” coloration, looks preachy and pallid by contrast.
The aforementioned Goodreads pan of 2666 usefully links to every other bad review the novel received upon its English-language publication. Whether or not there’s any quarreling with taste—of course there is, or why bother with criticism?—most of them see only the “indie sleaze” and miss the “Global South-core.” The best remembered might be n+1’s “so what?,” written in that journal’s customarily smug house style, but Sam Sacks’s opening gambit in his Open Letters Monthly review is unequalled for the generous and imaginative eloquence of its skepticism:
Imagine you’ve traveled to an art museum to see its most famous work. This piece de resistance is immense—it fills a room—but it’s quite unlike other paintings you’ve gone great distances to see. There’s nothing of the detailed majesty of the Sistine Chapel or the jumbled vivacity of El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz; it’s not entrancingly lovely like Monet’s Water Lillies and it doesn’t salute you with a harsh shout of anger the way that Picasso’s Guernica does. What you find is a dark room. Not only are the walls painted black, but the ceiling is as well, and so is the floor save for some dim lighting fixtures set into the ground. For the first extremely disconcerting moments you can make out nothing at all but the wide swathes of black paint. Gradually your eyes adjust and you realize that there are figures on the wall and ceiling, silhouettes of people drawn in thin tracery. Hundreds of these figures cover the walls. They outline men and women of all different shapes and sizes, differently dressed and coiffed, but each one seems to face you with an identical expression. When you look even closer you realize that this is because their eyes, what Leonardo da Vinci called the “windows of the soul,” are all blank.
Which is right, except that your ears need to adjust as well as your eyes: the figures are screaming, however quietly. Bolaño’s attempt to attune us to this subsonic wail seems to me as legitimate an aesthetic aspiration as the more overt and more overtly self-congratulatory cry of sincere literature that, to quote Death of a Salesman, “attention must be paid.” It’s not just that writers should be permitted to descend from Kafka as well as from Dickens, it’s that Kafka also descends from Dickens.
Somewhat in the manner of the late physiological Nietzsche of Twilight of the Idols, whose own brain was just then being gradually obliterated by a neoplasm, Sacks reads 2666 as the literary expression of physical decay: the novel as necrotic effluvium of Bolaño’s failing liver. With this in mind, we can forgive Bolaño for the less overt congratulation his dark mode does indeed confer—a little less but not that much less than sincerity’s light mode—upon its author.
What’s the alternative? Let us consider two, high and pop. Thomas Meaney in Harper’s evaluates the forbidding Ernst Jünger under the rubric of kitsch:
The British rock critic Ian Penman has aptly described Jünger’s prose in the novel as “humid.” But the charge of kitschification is surely just, especially if kitsch is understood as the result of trying to jam an antic, mothballed sensibility into a historical moment that refuses to reciprocate. The residual power of the novel is that it’s a kind of historical gamble: a bid to represent the avant-garde in a German Europe, or at least another Europe that did not come to pass, one where Kafka would have been banned forever and in which different aesthetic standards would have applied.
“Kafka” here is a dense synecdoche for something one doesn’t want to be too casual in naming more explicitly, but “Jewish irony” would, I presume, not be too far from the mark, in something like the sense Bloom means when in The Book of J he claims that the poetic Yahweh of the Torah’s Kafkaesque non-priestly sections is the principle of irony itself. “We are here to be insulted,” as Philip Roth is supposed to have told Bloom on the phone.3 I appreciate the delicate precision of Meaney’s stern judgment in an age of breathless moralism. Yet he goes on:
But even at the height of his irresponsibility as a figure in history—“Some people had dirty hands, some people clean hands, but Jünger had no hands,” quipped Cocteau—his perspective never quite abandons that of the single individual in thrall to its own subjectivity. He is not a writer of the actual New Men, whether utopian-communist like Andrei Platonov, or fascist like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. He came to believe that individual acts were pointless.
Platonov probably and Marinetti definitely would have been improved by a greater application of irony, but, in irony’s absence, contemplativeness, stillness, the mute appreciation of the aesthetic, of the natural, works just as well. Or not just “works just as well” but literally serves irony’s same ice-and-salt function of preserving the ethical in an arrest of its totalitarian will-to-power. Jünger is named early in 2666, by the way, as an author cited merely for cool points by hip urban literati. I await the novel’s final part to see if he might appear in the flesh—no spoilers, please.
What are the prospects for a world pop humanism today, a “Global South-core” of our (northerly) own? In answer, I recently finished watching the Chinese TV epic Three-Body, adapting Liu Cixin’s beloved and Obama-approved science-fiction novel. In part a deliberate showcase for CCP propaganda on the world stage, an assertion of centralized technocratic leadership that repudiates at once “western decadence” and the old-model communism of the Cultural Revolution, Three-Body nevertheless culminates in a veritable humanist manifesto against totalitarian alien invaders incapable of love and art—and against, as well, these extraterrestrials’ fifth column on earth, pointedly depicted as doom-saying, misanthropic environmentalists.
A mixed bag here.4 Noble and even gentle as it’s shown, I’ll pass on the STEM-worship and on what the series unashamedly presents as the glory of STEM-assisted unilateral military command. But the repudiation of anti-human eco-miserabilism and the bald assertion that love and art are what science exists to protect and to extend—these offer at least a faint hope that the “world-spirit,” whether south or north, east or west, will not submit absolutely to the machine.
I’m providing the audio as a public service to assist Harvard English majors in their apparently addled comprehension of the complex sentence, since their official preceptors have elected to cultivate their “other capacities” instead. In my anticipatory defense of Major Arcana’s aesthetics, I forgot to link to Gerald Murnane’s “In Praise of the Long Sentence,” perhaps the only artistic priority Murnane and I share, myself less consistently than our Australian eminence.
I long ago stopped trying to decide beforehand on the length or the shape of any sentence, leaving these matters to be decided by a force that for me is nameless but for Virginia Woolf was a wave breaking in the mind. Having said that, as they say so often nowadays, I must admit that I prefer long sentences to short sentences, and I feel confident that if someone undertook the thankless task of calculating the average sentence-length of 100 or even 500 living writers of English, then my sentences would be found to be among the very longest. Of course, the person undertaking the task would need to know more about sentences than Thomas Pynchon or Frank Kermode.
Bolaño buries his anticipatory riposte to critics of his superficial darkness and nihilism deep in “The Part about the Crimes,” in a digression about an herbalist and psychic who would be at home today in our world of “spirituality”-fueled participatory media. She concludes
that if it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion.
Friend-of-the-blog Matthew Hunte’s excellent essay on Bolaño as author of the blues—in the Albert Murray sense—also applies.
If you google what Bloom had to say about Bolaño and vice versa, you will find an almost decade-old Reddit post according to which the two men shared a correspondence initiated by the novelist. Bolaño, who mentions Bloom in 2666, called him “probably our continent’s best literary critic” in the essay collection Between Parentheses. Bloom, no doubt wary of Bolaño’s immoderately influence-anxious aggression against acknowledged masters like García Márquez and Paz, was reticent in his own verdict on the novelist: “There's something there, we'll see soon enough. We had our differences…” As far as I can tell, no one has unearthed this correspondence or done any work on it. If any graduate students are reading this, you know what you have to do.
Nick Richardson, reviewing Liu’s novels, which I haven’t read, in the London Review of Books, pronounces them “neoreactionary”—
Inferring a novelist’s political position from their work is always problematic, but politics is one of the central preoccupations of the Three-Body Trilogy, and its ideological underpinning complements contemporary neoreactionary thinking. This gives it a very different feel to most current Western sci-fi (China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood and others), which is largely pro-left. It’s not just the books’ portrayal of revolutionary groups and the state’s economic role. In the novels, the world hundreds of years in the future is still organised cladistically: America is a power run by Americans, China a power run by Chinese people. Indeed, the trilogy can be read as a parable about the perils of inviting into your country foreigners whose ethics have been forged in more violent circumstances. The feminised men of the prosperous era, who are indistinguishable from the women, with long hair, slender bodies and make-up, are shown to be completely inadequate to deal with hardship. As soon as Luo Ji hands over responsibility for the button to a woman, the Trisolarans attack, because they don’t believe she’ll have the balls to press it – and they’re right.
—which is at odds with the more tender-hearted humanism I detect in the TV series.