Weekly Readings #65 (05/01/23-05/07/23)

what you've done already is a wonderful thing

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

My serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana, continues in text and audio formats. One commenter calls it “a significant and perhaps epochal work,” while another favorably compares it to my first big book, Portraits and Ashes:

the sense I get with P&A is reading something by a peer…whereas with Major Arcana I feel like I’m reading major (no pun intended) work.

This week’s chapter, “Art for Life’s Sake,” saw the conception of the character who kills himself in the prologue, with his mother’s reflections on fashion, abortion, maternity, and men. This coming Wednesday, we will experience the doomed boy’s initiation into the mysteries of love and death.

Meanwhile, in last Sunday’s Weekly Readings, I announced another benefit for paid subscribers: lectures in literature by yours truly, alongside access to communal participation in the form of group chats or video calls. This will begin with Ulysses in June.

For non-paid subscribers, book reviews and Weekly Readings will always be free. Even so, the less I have to worry about money the more illuminating and entertaining I will be, so please, if only for your own sake—I wonder if this kind of pitch works—subscribe today!

Our post for this week comes in two parts. A reader wrote in to request my thoughts on the question of late work in literature, so I first provide a little essay on that. Then I critically consider two recent films, the humanitarian Joyland and the misanthropic Beau Is Afraid, as an inadvertent before-and-after diptych on the worth of liberal capitalism. By the way, if you’d like to share these essays on social media, and you (please) should, note that each division in a Substack post has its own hyperlink.

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Lifting Off at the End: Literature and Late Work

Daniel Mendelsohn with the mute Cavafy’s deathbed mark

In Kerry Howley’s profile of Jorie Graham, the poet, herself facing down illness and old age, dwells on the problem of continued artistic development and the related question of late work:¹

In 1978, eight years after his suicide, she descended the Guggenheim’s spiral at a Rothko exposition; the paintings grew more recent as she went on. Once he hits Rothko, she thought, he does great Rothko. One could see Rothko becoming Rothko, and then … years of the same. At the beginning of the very Rothko Rothkos, it was as if a light exuded from the back and the sides, a bright window whose horizontal shapes occluded the light. But in the late-Rothko Rothkos, “there’s no light coming through anymore,” she says, “as if the blinds have been drawn. He knows he’s trapped spiritually. You can’t be trapped aesthetically and not also be trapped spiritually. If your work is your life, then if your life comes to a point where you’re trapped, you’re like any animal, if you can’t get out, you’re done. If you can’t move forward, you’ve been hunted into a corner, even if you’re the hunter.”

There were the poets who exceeded themselves when time ran short: Elizabeth Bishop, Keats (yes, Keats, at 24, knew the end was coming, the work grew late), and Yeats, especially Yeats, who “lifted off at the end.”

Edward Said’s appropriately posthumous thesis is the canonical critical statement of the matter of an artist’s “late style” so far. For Said, the exemplary late work should not provide a summative resolution and benediction but rather a renewed sense of urgent dissonance, a final statement of life’s irresolution. To quote a poet who didn’t live long enough to have a late period, “Old age should burn and rage at close of day.” Said writes:

Each of us can supply evidence of late works which crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all? This is the case with Ibsen, whose final works, especially When We Dead Awaken, tear apart his career and reopen questions that are supposed to have been resolved before such works are written. Far from resolution, Ibsen’s last plays suggest an angry and disturbed artist who uses drama as an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before. It is this second type of lateness that I find deeply interesting: it is a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness, a going against.

Said followed Adorno, who praised the late works of Beethoven for already anticipating the modernist astringency of a Schoenberg. Musically incompetent, I will have to forego commentary on that example, though the literary analogue in the same period might be the dying Austen’s already sounding like Woolf in the autumnal Persuasion. The austere self under Protestant self-command, the one chastened by the ironies of Sense and Sensibility and Emma, now flames up, if ever so briefly, into sentence-fracturing transports of desire—

Yes; he had done it. She was in the carriage, and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it, that she owed it to his perception of her fatigue, and his resolution to give her rest.

—even if this will not be alienated enough, will be too fluid and florid and all-around “girly,” for our severe German-Jewish philosopher and his Palestinian-American legatee.

As his prime literary examples, Said strangely gives Cavafy and Lampedusa. Some other and presumably counter-Nietzschean thesis about the multicultures of the Mediterranean and the worth of belatedness seems to be at work here, and I don't think Said, then dying himself, had time to gather his thoughts: to join, that is, the theory of late style to the theory of Orientalism.² Witness, in this connection, not only his half-hearted criticisms of the Sicilian Lampedusa as “anti-Gramsci” and of the Alexandrian Cavafy as incognizant of modern Arab civilization, but also his half-confessed parenthetical fear that the late Adornian negativity he’d adopted as his own had effectively destroyed Marxism, progress, activism, humanism—had destroyed, we might say, the hope of Palestine as utterly as it had the image of Zion. Here is Said’s own late irresolution:

(My reading of Adorno, with his reflections about music very much at the centre, sees him as injecting Marxism with a vaccine so powerful as to dissolve its agitational force almost completely. Not only do the notions of advance and culmination in Marxism crumble under his rigorous negative scorn, but so too does anything that suggests movement at all.)³

As Jorie Graham observed, the canonical example of late work in Anglophone poetry is Yeats, whom Said construed as a political poet meditating on power in the colony. It was the young mage who sought reconciliation and redemption in the Celtic Twilight and the bee-loud glade, but the dying animal, deserted by his gods like Cavafy’s Antony, ambivalently abjures the magic.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Except for its formal finality—that last ringing couplet—this famous valediction proves the lines from Adorno that Said quotes in his essay:

The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art.

With novelists, late work is harder to judge, despite my invocation of Austen above. In general, novels take so much longer to write than lyric poems and require so much more energy and concentration: you can’t really write a novel on your deathbed the way you can a poem.

Still, examples come to mind. Dickens famously obviously darkens as he goes, the labyrinthine corruptions of Our Mutual Friend a far cry from the middle-class redemption of Oliver Twist. There’s Melville writing Billy Budd in his twilight, a tag from Schiller taped to his desk—“Keep true to the dreams of thy youth”—as he imagines the beautiful boy-mariner lost in an almost unreadable labyrinth of irony and destroyed by the rotten world of law and order. Of George Eliot we might ask: did the Wordsworthian pastoralist of Silas Marner envision the domestic disillusion and cosmopolitical messianism of Daniel Deronda? Is the heroism of the eponymous Hadji Murad, in Tolstoy’s last novella, a Nietzschean recanting of his late polemics’ punitive Christian ethos?

Many novelists slowly fade rather than flaming up a final time, however. This is the consensus on Conrad and Faulkner, for example, though I’ve tended to avoid their later material on the strength of that consensus, justly or unjustly. Hemingway, too: I am not alone in finding the insistent humanism of The Old Man and the Sea—a self-conscious attempt at the late work as serene valediction—labored and unpersuasive.

Closer to our own time, fewer novelists seem to drink themselves slowly to death, so late work has more of a chance to flourish. In American fiction’s last great generation, for example, I find DeLillo’s Zero K and The Silence and Morrison’s God Help the Child to be late works in Said’s sense, as are the brittle short novels of Roth’s last decade. McCarthy’s recent diptych of The Passenger and Stella Maris might be the supreme example of Saidian late work, as John Jeremiah Sullivan argued in the New York Times, except that he’d supposedly been writing those books for 40 years. The Road, by contrast, written when the author was elderly but (as it happened) far from death, strikes me as McCarthy’s Old Man and the Sea.

Leaving aside McCarthy, then, Ozick’s last decade of fiction, encompassing Foreign Bodies and Antiquities, written with a clear mind in her 80s and 90s and still furiously unresolved about art and magic and religion, about whether or not a Jew can make art or belong to western civilization, might be the purest case. I suspect, moreover, that these works were written consciously or not in a hidden dialogue with Said about the east and the west—Said, whom Ozick appears to loathe for superficial political and ethnic reasons that don’t touch the deepest questions of the spirit, the places only art can reach.

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Before and After: Joyland, Beau Is Afraid, and Liberal Capitalism

Joyland trailer

I recently saw an interesting pair of new movies, more interesting as a pair than either would be alone, even though they seem to have absolutely nothing in common: Saim Sadqi’s Joyland and Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid.

Joyland descends from reformist Ibsenite realism in the theater; it dramatizes the collapse of a traditionally patriarchal middle-class Muslim family in Lahore due to the younger son and his wife’s eventually tragic inability to conform to the reigning gender norms, the son because he falls in love with a transgender dancer and the wife because she would rather work outside the home in her vocation than bear and raise children.

Beau Is Afraid, by contrast, is an experimental film whose literary antecedent is not Ibsen but Kafka; it shows the absurdist odyssey across a dystopian American of a neurotic middle-aged Jewish man to bury his domineering corporate executive mother.

Why do the two films pair so well? The realist film implicitly proposes that with certain reforms—the universal economic emancipation of women and the cultural recognition of a pluralistic range of gender and sexual identities; in other words, liberal capitalism—Pakistan will become a more humane place to live.

Beau Is Afraid, by contrast, implicitly argues that these precise liberal-capitalist values, which triumphed in America generations ago as symbolized by the monstrous Boomer mother at the film’s core, have turned this country into a sociopathic nightmare, a place without the faintest trace of love or kindness.

The alienating form of Beau Is Afraid, surreally mean-spirited and exhaustingly long, reinforces the point. Aster’s sole portrayal of intact domesticity, when a suffocating and faux-polite family “adopts” the eponymous Beau, brutally spoofs the suburban white middle class; the family’s teenaged daughter eventually kills herself by drinking baby-blue paint in her late soldier-brother’s bedroom, thus folding the War on Terror and the culture war into one hellish image of national decline, the son explicitly killed by imperial war and the daughter implicitly by gender transition.⁴ Otherwise, we’re left with an animated rural-domestic idyll in the middle of the film, the cruel point of which is that it is a fantasy.

Joyland, by contrast, offers an entirely pleasurable viewing experience, albeit one that borrows its leisurely, lyrical warmth on the aesthetic level from the intimacy and rhythms of the traditional family life it is at such pains ideologically to disavow. Its form is at odds with its theme.

Beau Is Afraid’s bitter aggression against America’s dominant liberal order may represent only one man’s pathology, but when read as the social outcome of the emancipatory politics the comparatively humane Joyland recommends, a more disquieting suggestion emerges—one I myself, as a childless and rootless intellectual who goes to see foreign art films at a small urban independent theater, am in no position to endorse.

Joyland was produced by Malala Yousafzai, the girls’ education activist wounded in the head as a child by militants fighting on behalf of traditional society. It’s not too extravagant to imagine her dismissing Ari Aster’s much more figurative wounding in the groin by the castrating humiliations of ascendant woman. But Aster’s broader warning—that society itself, over and above any one man’s neurosis, may not survive the forced obsolescence of organic solidarity—should not be dismissed as casually, even if Aster, in the tradition of the socialism of fools, scapegoats those who are not at fault, in this case, the ready-to-hand figure of the overbearing Jewish mother.⁵

Adding irony to this ideological before-and-after: a woman from the Global South represents what has traditionally been understood both by its celebrants and its critics as the Promethean dynamism and individualism of the West, while a Western man pines openly for communal affection, for the society-arresting village bonds of family and tradition. But the irony, along with both films, eventually dissolves in the waters of the feminine.

Yousafzai has stated, against officials in Pakistan who wished to censor the film, that it’s about how “patriarchy hurts everyone,” including men. I don’t doubt her sincerity, but in my experience this is only good-cop feminism; one eventually meets the bad cop—the aforementioned Andrea Long Chu glossing Valerie Solanas might be the best recent example—advocating the wholesale eradication of the masculine as principle and ideology, and possibly even in the flesh.

Joyland imagines this terminus of feminism in the final image of its hero, Haider, as he immerses himself in the ocean. Considering water’s longstanding symbolic association with the feminine, we might say he consummates at last his evident sexual wish in the film, denied him not only by his cisgender wife but also by his transgender mistress: to be the passive, receptive, and penetrated partner in a physical transaction with woman—to be, in other words, not only not a man but more feminine even than the female.

Sadqi’s Haider swims but Aster’s Beau drowns at the conclusion of his film, his place of death, a kind of pool-theater-courtroom, figuratively understood to be a womb that doubles as the maternally implanted superego, the mother’s corpus where he will be judged; for Aster, this is, however ironically, supposed to be tragic.

Either way, comic or tragic, civilization’s solid hierarchy ends where everything began: underwater.

1. For a longer reflection on this profile as a piece of fine and adroit writing, please see my Tumblr post. I perhaps ungenerously couched the post as a request for someone to explain to me Jorie Graham’s merits, since the few times I read her poetry I came away unmoved, and unmoved in a way I find typical of contemporary American poetry: over-intellectualized, ideologically predictable, and averse to beauty or energy.

2. I refer to Nietzsche’s disparagement of Alexandrian culture in The Birth of Tragedy. As Nietzsche saw it, third-century Alexandria, not in spite but because of its learning and cosmopolitanism and vaunted library, made a poor successor to fifth-century Athens’s Dionysian energies, even if it was a consequence of the fifth century’s nascent Socratic rationalism. The modern world, Nietzsche further argues, is essentially Socratic and Alexandrian, culturally belated and neutered by scientism:

The whole of our modern world is caught in the net of Alexandrian culture and takes as its ideal the theoretical man who is equipped with the highest powers of knowledge, works in the service of science, and whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates. […] [The contemporary artist] still remains eternally hungry, the weak and joyless ‘critic’, the Alexandrian man, who is basically a wretched librarian and proofreader blinded by book dust and printer’s errors. (Trans. Douglas Smith)

The immensely appealing figure of Nietzsche’s younger contemporary, Cavafy, a poet synonymous with Alexandria, redeems Alexandrian man for modernism, turning what Nietzsche saw as weakness into literary strength: the belated “librarian” as wry elegist of all former glories, global and local, from the Hellenistic fragmentation of the Greek culture to the loss of eros to time in the private life. Said treats Cavafy’s whole corpus as late work, no surprise given that even a poem as chastening as “The City” comes early in the established oeuvre. But in this lecture on his own translation of the poet, Daniel Mendelsohn describes Cavafy’s trajectory from the “perfumed” fin-de-siècle lyricism of the early work to the austerely understated and gravely ironic lines of his great period—in other words, roughly the same 1890 to 1930 poetic journey from passionate aestheticism to disillusioned modernism taken by Yeats. Despite his reputation for mortifying ironies, my own favorite Cavafy poem might be “The First Step,” a one-page pick-me-up that practically counts as self-help:

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
“I’ve been writing for two years now
and I’ve composed only one idyll.
It’s my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I’m standing on now
I’ll never climb any higher.”
Theocritus retorted: “Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it’s a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.”

(Trans. George Barbanis)

As for Lampedusa, please see my essay on The Leopard as a postcolonial novel.

3. Adorno’s all-or-nothing philosophy of “anti-totality” did not prevent his taking a pragmatic political stance wholly counter to Said’s, as elaborated here (I link for evidence’s sake, not necessarily to endorse the article’s thesis nor indeed its vocabulary):

[I]n 1956, he co-authored an article with Horkheimer in defense of the imperialist invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France, which aimed at seizing the Suez Canal and overthrowing Nasser (an action condemned by the United Nations). Referring to Nasser, one of the prominent anti-colonial leaders of the non-aligned movement, as “a fascist chieftain […] who conspires with Moscow,” they exclaimed: “No one even ventures to point out that these Arab robber states have been on the lookout for years for an opportunity to fall upon Israel and to slaughter the Jews who have found refuge there.”

4. Further to my point, the family says several times that the brother was killed in action not in any Middle Eastern or Central Asian locale but rather in Caracas. By implication, 21st-century America’s real enemy has not been Islamism but socialism.

5. “What about his father?” those who have seen the film, remembering the attic-bound penis-monster, will ask. In the surreal logic of the psychodrama—I take the entire film to represent Beau’s consciousness—the penis-monster isn’t his real father but the only way the reality of a paternal figure could appear to him beneath his mother’s lie that male sexual potency is too dangerous to indulge. A penis-monster is all a father could be when seen through the lying lens of feminism, according to the filmic subtext. Compare the treatment of the penis in Joyland. Our trans heroine Biba still has hers intact, we are explicitly told, but is saving up to have it surgically redacted. When Haider invites her to put her penis to use to penetrate him, she angrily throws him out and calls him a “faggot,” a slur for which the film’s otherwise scrupulously ethical narrative as a whole has no answer. Again, before-and-after: Joyland looks forward to the eradication of the penis, Beau Is Afraid shows the neurotic fantasy of the penis-monster rising to strike down the male psyche in the aftermath of this eradication.