Weekly Readings #61 (04/03/23-04/09/23)

a vision of life gushing forth in a flood

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

This week, I published in text and audio formats a new chapter of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana: “Parts of Speech.” An anonymous commenter weighed in on Tumblr:

Major work indeed, the newest chapter of MA is brilliant stuff, a very funny but also surprisingly nuanced skewering of certain tendencies within humanitiesworld.

If you would like to experience such brilliant material for yourself, please subscribe today.

The chapter dropping tomorrow is the last to show Simon Magnus’s present-day travails among the academic elect before I move to other parts of the social and historical scene. When I structured the narrative, I must have been thinking of Coetzee’s Disgrace, which begins as an anti-P.C. campus novel before becoming something very different; as my exuberant Dickensian serial is several times longer than Coetzee’s slim and harrowing gospel, there may be no limit to the different things it could become.

For today’s newsletter, two little essays. In the first, I repost with few changes something about literary style that I fear got lost amid all the requests for comment I receive over on Tumblr. In the second, though it seems cruel to write on Easter about something that won’t be coming back to life, I revisit the question of the English department by reviewing a conservative proposal for its revival.

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Exuberance Is Beauty: Lakes, Floods, and English Prose

It’s been almost two years now since I may have accidentally convinced Harper’s editor Lake Micah to take the pronouns out of his Twitter bio, so now may be the time to issue a defense of his much-maligned maximalist prose style. His aesthetic politics, as far as I can tell, remain not really quite mine, but still, we’re speaking about aesthetic aesthetics now. Aesthetically speaking, must everything be streamlined for corporate impact and understated for teenage sarcasm? Dost thou think anybody on the street in 1600s London or 1850s New York actually talked like the characters in Shakespeare or Melville? Isn’t keeping earlier strata of the language in view part of the writer’s mission (the general writerly mission, I mean, not that every individual writer has to do it)?

Isn’t, finally, the plain style a mere ethnic prejudice mistaken for an aesthetic axiom, as in Orwell’s advice to opt for the Anglo-Saxon word over the Latinate one despite the language’s inherently miscegenated quality (speaking of aesthetic politics, here may be the real politics of the English language). The Puritan bard Milton wisely ignored this precept; though he wrote with nationalist bellicosity in his political polemics of the Anglo-Saxons’ “known rule of ancient liberty” (a phrase beloved of Orwell, according to Hitchens), he nevertheless composed the Latinate sentences of a cosmopolitical narrative in Paradise Lost, synthesizing Greco-Roman, Hebrew, Italian, and English precedents into a cyclopedic global-universal epic. Or consider Hegel’s chastisement of what he took from the vantage of Greco-German absolute knowledge to be barbarous Oriental ornamentalism, not that anyone ever accused Hegel, either, of committing the plain style:

With the Latin poets, however, such as Virgil, Horace and the rest, we already feel that Art is to a real extent nothing but artifice, elaboration of effect on its own account. We recognize a prosaic content, which is merely set off with an external embellishment. We find a poet who, in the absence of original genius, endeavours to discover, in the sphere of literary versatility and rhetoric effects, some compensation for that which in genuine power and effect of creation and composition he fails to possess. France too, in the so-called classical period of its literature, has produced poetry very similar, a poetical style to which didactic poems and satires are singularly appropriate. […] The Spanish poets also are not wholly free from the ostentation inseparable from the too self-conscious diction of art. And, as a general rule, Southern nations, such as the Spaniards and the Italians, and previously to them the Mohammedan Arabs and Persians, are conspicuous for a wealth and tedious prolixity of image and simile. With the ancients, more especially in the case of Homer, the flow of expression is characterized by smoothness and tranquillity. With the nations above mentioned, on the contrary, we have a vision of life gushing forth in a flood which, even where the emotions are in other respects at rest, is ever intent upon expatiation, and owing to this expressly volitional effort of the will is dominated by an intelligence which at one time is visible in abrupt parentheses, at another in subtle generalization, at another in the playful conjunction of its sallies of wit and humour.

My emphasis, because life, in art, should be both gushing forth in a flood and dominated by an intelligence. (Cf. Major Arcana.) And someone should pay Micah—preferably not only by the word but by the letter—to write us a new maximalist manifesto before we all expire of laconic ennui. O reason not the need—our beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous!

D. Howard Hitchcock, Halemaumau, Lake of Fire (1888)

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Unreal World: How Not to Defend the English Department

A few months ago, I considered the imminent death of the English department. I concluded by suggesting that we accept and even welcome this demise, since literature—possibly the arts tout court—are in their necessarily unsystemizable and irrational character an ill fit for any of the university’s several secular missions, whether of advancing natural science or of training a rational citizenry and productive workforce in some official doctrine or other. A new essay in the journal Quillette identifying culprits for the discipline’s terminal condition and proposing last-ditch therapies only reinforces my own position.¹

I have referred a few times in these newsletters since the midterm elections to the revival of the conservative politics I remember so well from my youth: a swaggeringly philistine and corpulently insensitive suburban golfer’s inadvertent parody of swashbuckling manliness. From the aesthetic viewpoint if no other, and there may finally have been no other, the Trumpist moment’s avant-gardist break from this coarseness, with its exotic flavors of Wildean aestheticism and Nietzschean vitalism, its vaporwave Futurism, at least fascinated us with its difference, for all that Trump himself was a corpulent golfer. But the philistines are back with a vengeance, as we see in the Quillette essay.

Our essayist, who will remain nameless here, first accuses the English professoriate of destroying their own discipline with “[d]isdain for the ‘real world’”—a phrase he himself puts in quotation marks because all it means is “an unambiguous path to a specific career,” what he later calls the degree’s “market value,” concepts that hardly exhaust the whole of reality, exhausting as they are.

In rejoinder, I assert that literature in modernity offers both an alternative to and a redoubt from the reign of quantity implied by the conferral of “market value” upon everything. Our essayist will reply that I must consider the plight of the lower-middle-class student whose parents haven’t been to college—except that I was and am this student, with an immigrant mother to boot. Yet I have never had and I do not now seek “an unambiguous path to a specific career”—what I have is an artistic vocation—and it’s never occurred to me that the arts per se should be razed due to some economic disadvantage I suffered. That kind of thing is called ressentiment and should be avoided by anyone who aspires even to minimal dignity.

There’s a practical reply on “market value,” too, which is that a good education in our tumultuous techno-epoch probably shouldn’t prepare you for a “specific career,” since careers may prove changeable; it should rather provide solid habits of mind and foundational values that may be carried within and between many careers. Even so, you see the ill fit of literary study in a world that can’t see beyond “market value.”

Next, our essayist charges the professors with “[d]isdain for objective standards of value”—i.e., abandoning the canon—which might be fine if he hadn’t already revealed “market” to be his synonym for “objective,” which has nothing to do with the canon, a corpus wrought largely by people who were, “objectively” speaking, marketplace losers like Keats, Melville, Dickinson, Kafka, and Joyce. Short-term losers anyway: this short-sightedness is a persistent defect of the market mentality since it allows visionaries and prophets no time for their visions to ripen or their prophecies to be proved.

He obviates the argument anyway by next and contradictorally mocking the scholars for their “[l]ove of literature and disdain for the practical.” On this theory, they should teach practical writing and publishing skills. There’s certainly a case to be made here. My own utopian proposal for the reform of the English department would be to merge literature and creative writing as disciplines, ditch the humanly irrelevant “college essay” as the pedagogical telos of literature instruction, and have even literary-historical survey courses culminate writing-wise in the student’s composition of a creative work. Our essayist, however, simply means to deprive the petit-bourgeois strivers he claims to champion of a true liberal education by reducing humane letters to remedial vocational training.

I will pass over his fourth point—“[d]isdain for the rules of writing”—since most of what he says there is true but is a problem that ought to be solved by reforming the criminally derelict public K-12 education system, not by devoting university classes to what we who went to Catholic school learned in the second grade, namely, English grammar.

Fifth, he arraigns the professors for loving theory: “Works from thinkers like Foucault, Judith Butler, Kant, and Gloria Anzaldúa are not uncommon in undergraduate syllabi.” Kant, he says—so much for the canon!² But as long as theory does not supplant literature—and it has threatened to do so—and as long as figures like Foucault and Butler are not taught as gospel—and sometimes they are—then what is the harm in knowing about it?³

Theory’s inaccessible style is shared with many works of serious literature—pretty much all of them by definition before the 19th century, and many of the best on principle after—because the democracy our author presumes in common with the radical left he mocks has not generally been presumed by the literati, even such a literatus as myself, who hails from the hoi polloi but still thinks the republican regicide Milton had a point in refusing to condescend by seeking “a fit audience…though few.” As Flannery O’Connor commented in the mid-20th century on high-school (!) pedagogy,

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

Or, if I may quote a dreaded theorist, I’m reminded of Adorno’s lines from Minima Moralia:

Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination.

More evidence, I’m afraid, that literature doesn’t really accord with the university’s pragmatic “market value” mission, even if I believe we have not even really tried to make that fit audience as large as possible. I certainly wasn’t born into it, so why should anyone else have to be? Our essayist’s proposal for reform—

Syllabi could be reformulated to include only texts that are genuinely accessible for a student body that is largely unprepared for serious academic work—readings that, while demonstrating a mastery of textual expression, also discuss topics that immediately relate to practical concerns in their lives

—decamps from this mission as well, leaving us true-believing English majors where he found us: in the wilderness.

1. Quillette, though stigmatized as “Nazi” with the usual weaponized imprecision of the institutional far left, was and remains an “Intellectual Dark Web” venue, devoted, against current hegemonic left-liberalism, to the kind of rationalism associated with the New Atheists. The journal lost a lot of political capital among its dissident constituencies when its Australian editor defended her homeland’s draconian, not to say totalitarian, pandemic policies, thus revealing the obvious limits of a rationalist politics, at least for anyone skeptical of unaccountable technocratic governance.

2. With the ludicrous sandwiching of Kant between Butler and Anzaldúa, it becomes obvious that he objects to the teaching of literature as such. For all that he quotes Matthew Arnold, Arnold knew Kant, as did Coleridge and Carlyle before him and Pater and Wilde after. British and especially American Romanticism were forged in the crucible of an encounter with their German precursors. Can it hurt an undergraduate to know this? Granted, Kant is difficult to read, harder than Hegel, and not to be compared as a potential source of literary pleasure to a belletrist like Anzaldúa, whatever one thinks of the latter’s insurgent multicultural politics. A graduate student in philosophy once told me I shouldn’t bother reading Kant since it would take a month for me to extract from the text what I could get in an afternoon from a lucidly written encyclopedia entry. I have found this to be the case. I do not, however, think an academic discipline died because some its disciples assigned in a senior seminar those few famous pages on the sublime and the beautiful from The Critique of Judgment.

3. I assume Kant is often assigned to be assailed for his idealism and racism, while Anzaldúa, with her New Ageish La Raza cosmology, is introduced to be patronized as morally worthy but not quite intellectually serious. Of the names on the list, I myself have assigned only Anzaldúa. You can hear my lecture on her celebrated “La concienca de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness” below (start around minute 35). And you can be the judge of how well I made her ideas clear without oversimplifying them for students in an intro-level literature class (please excuse my Spanish pronunciation as I attempted to negotiate her polemical macaronics).