Weekly Readings #64 (04/24/23-04/30/23)

make it new

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

Since regular scheduling demanded I double up on posts for a second Sunday in a row, I will post today’s Weekly Readings late and keep it brief to let my other work of this weekend breathe: April Books. In the course of exploring the strangely related motifs of 2666, On the Marble Cliffs, A Voyage to Arcturus, and others, this list-become-essay culminates in what may be a spiritual secret of some significance.

This week also saw the latest chapter in text and audio of Major Arcana, my serialized novel for paid subscribers. We are more than halfway through the novel’s perhaps #indiesleazecore sequence on Millennial Bildung. Then my epic quadriptych will be prepared for its central panels: two almost freestanding short novels on the lives of occult comic-book writer Simon Magnus and online manifestation coach Ash del Greco. Finally, another and slimmer panel will unite and conclude the narrative. I hope to have the whole novel written by midsummer at the latest, if I can rally myself to write my way through the present obstacle, the liebestod of Ash del Greco and Jacob Morrow.

This week, I want to talk generally about the prospects for creating and preserving culture outside the institutions once charged with this task now that they are officially committed to an iconoclasm no culture can survive. More narrowly, I will say what that means for this Substack’s next steps.

Novel Curriculum: Rebuilding the Literature Course Outside the University

The Invisibles 2:6

We’ve heard much talk in the last few years about rebuilding online the institutions once responsible for producing and conserving culture. The pandemic revealed the fragility of these institutions before the force of global technocracy as the professoriate and the literati showed themselves more obsequious than almost anyone else toward the unaccountable bureaucrats Hannah Arendt identified as model totalitarians.

Concurrently, the stewards of these institutions accelerated their long-term commitment to the last-ditch legitimating ideology of the expert class: a philosophy of endless revolutionary iconoclasm according to which experts retain their authority not by preserving nor even by renovating but rather by purging the human heritage and replacing it with simulacra tailored according to the sanitary ideals of the post-national state and the post-profit corporation.

The most important word in the previous sentence is “renovating.” While we would want to undo the specific type of damage caused by classics departments that no longer teach Greek, we’re not conservatives exactly, or at least I’m not. Mere repetition is not the order of the day.

The point, as the reactionary Eliot said, is to win tradition by laboring for it, not passively accepting whatever is handed down; the radical Adorno customarily went further by adding that one had to internalize tradition to be able to hate it properly.¹ I’ve alluded here before to Robert Pogue Harrison’s ideal of juvenescence, the synthesis of mature wisdom and youthful energy by which the old is made new again. Iconoclasm destroys the old before it can be revivified, but its mummification rather than resurrection is no better option.

For obvious reasons, even though their rebellion makes it a paradox, those struggling to build outside the now-officially revolutionary institutions have a conservative disposition. This shows itself less in their avowed ideologies than in their focus on philosophy. For the last few years, I have seen what I take to be a search for master-thinkers: Lasch, Bataille, Girard, Foucault, Deleuze, McLuhan, Illich, as well as old standbys like Plato, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. This isn’t by itself a problem, and I spent those years studying some of the same figures with admiration, too.

If I may adapt a notorious line from that red-flag film Fight Club, however: we’re a generation of artists educated by theorists; I’m wondering if another theorist is really the answer we need.

I may have mentioned this before, but I once studied with a famous radical postcolonial Marxist theorist; despite his political commitments, he usually devoted his graduate seminars to the great books of the western canon: The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Faust, Sentimental Education, The Brothers Karamazov, and the like. He explained his choice this way: “I teach in a cultural studies department where the students and the professors only read theory. But the theorists were educated on these books.”

Imaginative literature is prior to philosophy and theory, even or especially where the latter shows hostility to the former. Plato comes out of Homer, Hegel out of Sophocles, Heidegger out of Hölderlin, Freud out of Shakespeare, Lacan out of Joyce. Culture, said Vico, is founded by the poets.

Hence the continued study and the continued composition of literature can never become irrelevant: the most up-to-the-minute functional illiterate is ignorantly living out the utopia or dystopia of some long-dead scribbler, knowledge of whose actual words would, I believe, prove more empowering than smug nescience. “The novel’s dead, bro. Get with the times!” No. Sans such knowledge of literature, and sans the ability to produce some of one’s own, one is actually doomed to remain behind the times. So why do the most forward-thinking of the para-academics always study philosophy and never poetry?

To amend this omission, I’m going to begin to offer courses on literature this summer for paid subscribers. I haven’t work out all the details yet, but my rough plan is to provide weekly recorded lectures along with optional access to private fora for discussion such as Zoom calls and group chats.

I’ll give a “scholarship”—i.e., a comped subscription—to anyone who asks, but I have the impression that Substack is veritably crawling with deep-pocketed benefactors hungry for a renewed culture. I say to them that this will be a good investment. If I get 10 more paid subscribers, I’ll even buy a fancy microphone.²

What will the curriculum be? One of the perversities of my experience in academe, which coincided with the long, slow death of the English major, is that I almost never got to teach my on-paper specialties. My dissertation covered British and Irish literature from 1885 to 1925—Pater, Wilde, Joyce, Woolf—but I only taught the modern British literature survey twice. Once a staple of the college English curriculum, good old Brit Lit II, along of course with Brit Lit I, is now an essentially moribund course, regarded as offensively irrelevant, no matter how imperially foundational, to the cause of global English. On the other hand, I did enjoy the American literature classes I was always asked to teach; after European modernism, my places-and-times of interest also include the American literature of two periods: the 1850s and ’60s and the 1980s and ’90s.³

These topics will be the focus on my courses, with a bias toward organizing around major authors, whom I regard not as master-thinkers we must obey but as representative men and women in the Emersonian sense: prisms or Borgesian alephs disclosing in all its complexity, and for us to adopt and adapt, the spirit of their and our times.

Accordingly, I will start with Joyce. As we enter Ulysses’s second century, I want to substantiate my claim that, despite his paucity of actual readers, “it’s Joyce’s world; we’re just living in it,” especially as his native Ireland begins more and more to resemble the cosmopolitan post-nation he prophesied, with whatever degree of irony, not to mention the online world his texts formally foretell. Joyce also foresaw and foreordained his novel’s capture by academe:

I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one’s immortality.

Many if not most of the people who enjoy Ulysses studied it in a class devoted entirely to it, including me, even as such classes become harder and harder to offer in the place the university has become. So I will offer that class here. I’ll be in touch with the schedule, but right now I’m planning to start in June with two weeks devoted to Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, followed by about two months spent on a patient chapter-by-chapter reading of Ulysses.

Following Joyce, I’ll take polls and surveys to see what else people are interested in, but I’d probably like to spend some time on other favorite authors, from Hawthorne to Morrison, from Woolf to Ishiguro. Long books: Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, maybe Gravity’s Rainbow. Poetry would be good, too: Keats and Stevens, Dickinson and Yeats, Paradise Lost and Omeros. Are we thinking enough about drama in these days of universal performance? Shakespeare, of course, but there’s a class to be taught on Wilde and Shaw, two Irish showmen who preceded Joyce in founding so much of our modernity. Literature in translation, if I dare: Goethe and Mann, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Our endeavor can even become less a course and more a club when and if my correspondents wear me down and convince me to read for the first time such long books as The Lord of the Rings. Who knows, maybe I’ll finally finish Infinite Jest.

Let me know in the comments what you think of this plan, if you have any suggestions, and what more I could do to entice you.

1. Re: Eliot’s un-conservative sense of tradition as a work ever in progress, I quote from “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.

Adorno, despite his continued progressive bona fides, made the more offensive, elitist, and even racist remark in his Minima Moralia, lines that never fail to scandalize your correspondent, a petit-bourgeois cultural parvenu of the first order:

There is to be found in African students of political economy, Siamese at Oxford, and more generally in diligent art-historians and musicologists of petty-bourgeois origins, a ready inclination to combine with the assimilation of new material, an inordinate respect for all that is established, accepted, acknowledged. […] One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly. […] It would be poor psychology to assume that exclusion arouses only hate and resentment; it arouses too a possessive, intolerant kind of love, and those whom repressive culture has held at a distance can easily enough become its most diehard defenders.

2. Those of you who have already subscribed for Major Arcana will have access to the courses, and those who subscribe for the courses will gain access to the novel. Weekly Readings and book reviews will always be free to all subscribers.

3. If you’re interested in my teaching record, you can peruse almost my complete archive of syllabi here and listen on YouTube to the pandemic-era lectures for two complete courses: Introduction to U.S. Multicultural Literatures and Contemporary American Literature.