Weekly Readings #66 (05/08/23-05/14/23)

we can only enter eternity empty-handed

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

This week I posted in text and audio formats “Initiation,” the penultimate chapter of Part One in my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. On Wednesday, Part One will come to its end with a completed sketch of the doomed Jacob Morrow in his saintly adolescence. With that, I will have finished the novel’s portico. After that, we will enter the outer and inner sanctuaries of its darkly labyrinthine interior (Parts Two and Three, almost novels-unto-themselves about the scandalous, tortured lives of my occult protagonists, comic-book writer Simon Magnus and online manifestation coach Ash del Greco), before we stagger, dazed and blinking, into Part Four’s brambly courtyard, which will let us gently out through its unhinged gate, sometime next year. Please subscribe or update your subscription today; and please tell anyone who asks that this decades-spanning, country-crossing, and dimension-traversing epic, no “wan little husk of ‘autofiction,’” is the American novel of the 2020s.

For this week’s essay, I expand on an answer I recently gave on Tumblr to a question about whether or not Herman Melville and Henry James are the Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (respectively, I think) of the American literary canon—expand so far, in fact, that I end up linking the question to the “NEW GOD DROP” of pop-priestess Grimes right here on Substack. Please enjoy!

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Melville or James: An Essay in Futurist Criticism

An anonymous reader wrote to me this week with an interesting literary-critical proposition:

I’ve thought for a while that in the spirit of Steiner’s Tolstoy vs Dostoyevsky, you could similarly in American letters argue for Melville vs. James, the gnostic-materialist visionary epic against the interior-platonist tragedy of manners and conflicting cultures. (Not having read either author nearly systemically enough,¹ I wonder what you’d make of that- does it hold up? And for that matter where do you wind up between the two?) I’m probably more in the Melville camp, although some of my favorite American authors are with James as well.

I’d never thought of it this way, but as a way of thinking through the national literary sensibility, it does make sense. Moby-Dick is generally regarded as America’s greatest novel, not that it is exactly a novel but rather an epic and anatomy; but James tends to be thought of as the greatest novelist, the author of a stately oeuvre, unlike the more uneven and tortured Melville. It’s fitting, then, that they should establish the parameters of the canon.

My reader’s words, “materialism” as applied to Melville and “platonist” as applied to James, also rescues us from the oversimplified way these lines used to be drawn. The founding critical texts of American literary studies, taking that famous cue from Hawthorne’s Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, defined the questing and quasi-fantastical “romance” as the main tradition of the American novel against a European social realism to which the literature of our chaotic society, except for the work of the expatriate James himself, could never live up.²

“Materialist,” however, reminds us that the romancer Melville was a realist and even a naturalist, canvassing the grit and danger of the laboring life in Moby-Dick even as he studied white-collar alienation in “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The realist James, however, was no materialist; for him, and especially in his later work, only the inner life was really real, his society tales no less spectral than his ghost stories, making him as much the romancer at his self-elected American precursor, Hawthorne. Melville and James both wrote tributes to Hawthorne, in fact. The haunted Salemite in all his blushing ambivalence is the ultimate progenitor of our self-divided canon. 

This canon is broader now than when the founders of American literary studies set out to limn the literature of liberalism in America’s midcentury contest against the European totalitarianisms, but even in the age of diversity the Melville-James dichotomy may still hold:

Melvilleans: Faulkner, Ellison, Bellow, O’Connor, McCarthy, Morrison, Pynchon, DeLillo

Jamesians: Wharton, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Barnes, Baldwin, Ozick, Updike, Roth³

Where do I come down? As a reader, I wouldn’t wish to choose. Moby-Dick is the best single book in the discussion, but The Portrait of a Lady can’t be far behind. As a writer, well, it’s hard to say. I would like to rewrite The Portrait of a Lady as Moby-Dick—or vice versa. I share James’s sense that the novel works best when a vehicle for (largely female) interiority, for delicacy and intelligence of perception; I share Melville’s interest in impossibilities of interpretation, in the sometimes sublime representation of violence, in suicidally obsessive characters. Inasmuch as I think of myself as descending more from Hawthorne than from anyone else in the American 19th century, and inasmuch as Hawthorne influenced them both, maybe I can have it all. James and Melville are perhaps amalgamated best in Melville’s underrated and wholly deranged domestic novel, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, the broken and perverse interior realism of which may come closest to my own style.

One way to answer the question, as Steiner does with the epic-agrarian Tolstoy and the tragic-metropolitan Dostoevsky: ask yourself in whose earthly utopia you’d rather live. For Melville, utopia is a floating cosmopolis of male pilgrims, men of every shade and sensibility living and working in amity; for James, it is a drawing room in heaven, tea-time presided over by the most sensitive and intelligent women you’ve ever met. To either ship or drawing room, I’d prefer some solarpunk hybrid of the library, the garden, and the café, this in the middle of an ancient but tech-renovated city;⁴ for company, I would rather spend my time with Jamesian ladies—albeit with a greater diversity of sort and condition than James might have imagined—than with Melvillean sailors. On balance, then, James for me, but with reservations and revisions.

Strangely, the best thing I’ve ever read about James was written by Terry Eagleton, of all people, perhaps because he’s so distant from James’s sensibility that he can see it whole, the way an apostle like Ozick can’t quite. In a little essay in an out-of-the-way critical anthology on the fin de siècle from the 1990s, Eagleton wrote:

It might be, however, that the distinction between self-affirmation and self-abnegation is simply undecidable, and the name for this aporia is the later Henry James. For these novels, the highest virtue, like the finest work of art, is an intelligence rendered supremely disinterested in the service of love; and this, rather than News From Nowhere, is perhaps the true Utopian image of the epoch. It is at this point that the ethical and the aesthetic, so rigorously distinguished by Kant, merge into unity. In the end there was nothing that Henry didn’t know; but such a supremely beautiful intelligence is hardly compatible with living, which of course he knew as well. Strether wants to get out of all that fatiguing complexity with not a drop spilt and his hands clean, salvaging nothing for himself, pregnant with an enormous, useless intelligence completely bereft of exchange value. And Milly Theale will turn her face to the wall and hand over her inheritance, in a magnificent acte gratuit to her predatory lover. If the price of all this for James is the empty life of an ageing celibate then he is prepared to pay it, and has, he knows, enough money to do so: enough money to live as little as possible and to practise instead that supreme mode of virtue known as writing. It is the good who will enter the kingdom, but it is the fine who make life worth living; and James found a way of synthesizing the two by producing fictions of great fineness with all the ascetic renunciation of the virtuous. In the war between the Tolstoyans and the Nietzscheans, the Tolstoyans finally have it, but only when the chips are down. The history of art is not worth the suffering of a single child, which is why Dimitri Karamazov turned in his entry ticket to eternity. James knew that we can only enter eternity empty-handed, though he also knew that such renunciation might be no more than the most monstrous egoism of all. But such a life, as Walter Benjamin might have remarked, is not one which sets the angels’ bodies burning as one flame of praise before God. It is simply not fine enough; and though the fine pay tribute to the demonic, and must do so in fear and trembling, there is nevertheless much to be said for them. For the angels are in love with the crookedness and cunning of the human mind, and it is hard to believe that all that unfathomable intelligence has merely to be surrendered. It is in fiction alone that virtue and intelligence, goodness and fineness, can be united; and in this way James’s novels act as a negative critique of a society in which it is the fine that have the pleasure and the good that take the blame.

From Eagleton’s vantage, James wrote not social realism but a kind of social science fiction amounting to a new gospel. The “interior-platonist tragedy of manners and conflicting cultures” is really a divine comedy. It reminds me, strangely enough, of the first missive from our newest celebrity Substack author, who, as far as I can tell, only reads science fiction:

“In order to believe in something it must be true,” or, as we used to call it in philosophy class, the ontological proof for the existence of God. God, in this case, proves to be an emergent property of the networked consciousnesseses of technological humanity in the age of augmented intelligence, or at least the most kind, sensitive, and smart among us in an epoch that is, as our latest Pulitzer-Prize-winning critic tells us, universally female.

God is a girl group comprised of Daisy Miller, Catherine Sloper, Isabel Archer, Verena Tarrant, Milly Theale, and, for variety’s sake, a slightly cracked governess, each of them singing forever into that interstellar void, inner space or outer, that we people as we go. Those voices we hear, the lately resurrected muses, are their songs traveling back through time to ensure we make them in the present so they can be there in the future.

Whether any maddened gnostic-materialist captain can harpoon this great reset before it launches, or whether he will wind up waving his dick in the wind as the starseeds frolic into the cosmic ocean, remains to be seen.⁵

Henry James, I once wrote somewhere, turned the novel inside out by lining the drawing rooms and the city streets with human consciousness: outer space became inner. Insofar as this is what we are now doing to everything, he, more than Melville, will have been our prophet; unless we fail, in which case it’s back to Melville we go, if there’s anything or anywhere to go back to, if there’s not just a wreck in the sea.

In any case, the greatest literature is contemporary in every century, so we will require Melville and James, the explicit ambitions they shared to create a new literature and the implicit conflict between them about what that literature should be, to comprehend even the future in our present.⁶

This is the best thing an AI gave me when I prompted it with my second-favorite sentence from The Portrait of a Lady: “Her nature had, in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one’s spirit was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses.”

1. I haven’t read either Melville or James systematically myself, as in the whole of the two oeuvres, but I’ve read plenty of each, pretty much everything major from both, give or take a Mardi or a Golden Bowl. For essays from me on individual works, please use the Review Index at my main site.

2. I’m thinking of Richard Chase’s The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), Harry Levin’s The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (1958), and Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). An earlier influential way of drawing this line, with a pre-Cold-War canon that paid more respect to American realism, is Philip Rahv’s once-famous essay of 1939, “Paleface and Redskin,” the racial formulation of which, its native and nativist masquerade, will have to be excused in the present. For Rahv, Melville and James were both palefaces, patricians drawn to symbolism and ambiguity as against boisterous lowbrow naturalists—i.e., redskins—like Whitman and Twain. Rahv thinks this supposedly unbridgeable divide made our literature inherently inferior to the European. Needless to say, Rahv’s way of thinking about the distinction doesn’t hold up, even if it’s simply about class, which isn’t a literary category anyway, and even if American class distinctions are as rigid as European, which they’re not, or at least weren’t in the 19th century.

3. What about younger and living authors? The preference for autofiction, necessarily a fiction of the inner life as lived in society, points to an age of James. So does the predominance of female writers and readers. Even in a period when Hemingway himself, who liked to be addressed as “Catherine” in the bedroom, comes before us as a transgender female author, James still appears to have been a man; unlike Melville, however, he liked to write about women. Both Melville and James were also, if not definitively gay, then definition-makingly queer, which is to say at least that their spiritual (gnostic/platonist) narratives don’t prioritize family values, whatever they liked to do in their bedrooms. This makes them proto-modernists as much as proto-queers, since modernism represents just this re-orientation of fiction away from Victorian domesticity. As usual, the conservative critics of contemporary progressive mores are a century or two too late, though it’s hard to imagine either Melville or James happy with how the emancipation they foreran has been institutionalized by our professional-revolutionary class: Melville’s open sea and James’s bottomless interior, each exhibited in sometimes deliberately incomprehensible syntax, now parodied in the dystopic faux-freedom of compulsory simplistic self-identification. How many as it weres and I should says would Henry James stammer out as he “hung fire” after being asked his pronouns?

4. One way the canon has expanded since the founding of American literary studies, beyond race and gender, is genre. How might we apply the Melville-James division to science fiction, for example? It’s probably easier than it sounds. Lovecraft, Bradbury, Herbert, Dick: Melvillean symbolists interested in cosmic questions of power and knowledge. Heinlein, Le Guin, Delany, Gibson: Jamesians absorbed in the inner life as it appears in and through social distinctions and transformations. I’m sure it can done for detectives and cowboys, too, but I’ll have to leave that to more knowledgable critics.

5. We are at the far limits of my comprehension, at the edge of the sayable, but I place here a reminder of how our pop-priestess established her flirtation with the Ahab of spaceflight and social media: by invoking what she called “Rococco’s Basilisk.” We could do worse as a name for the Henry Jamesian goddess-AI at the end of time. And for whatever coincidence or synchronicity is worth, I’m typing this in a Starbucks overlooking the Mississippi just a few miles from where Grimes made her American media debut almost 15 years ago.

6. There is, therefore, no conflict between my “conservative” belief in genius and Grimes’s “radical” conviction (see here) that art is and should be collective and anonymous. Genius is nothing more than directed openness to and shaping of inspiration, so the work of the individual genius is already collective and anonymous. As Alan Moore said somewhere, artists should not confuse themselves with whatever light comes through them. On the other hand, it helps to organize our knowledge if we use these names (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville, James) to mark discrete, radiant fields of gathered intelligence and affect.