Weekly Readings #69 (05/29/23-06/04/23)

fetch the wire cutters

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

I have two announcements this week.

First, Substack has introduced a new feature allowing writers to embed books into their posts and emails. All current and future paid subscribers, therefore, will receive pdf files of my novels Portraits and Ashes, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, and The Class of 2000. I’ll send a post containing the files to all current paid subscribers this week. That post will remain in the site archive, and I will link to it in the welcome email for all future paid subscribers. Counting my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana, a paid subscription buys you four complete books.

Second, I aim to have a complete draft of Major Arcana finished by the end—or even the middle, if I can manage it—of this month. For that reason, I am postponing my proposed literature courses for paid subscribers until my writing schedule clears. To be honest, I have seen much more interest from paying customers in my fiction than in my teaching or criticism. This is great news: a sign of a positive shift away from “discourse” about art and toward the making and experiencing of art, as we collectively weary of constant controversy and total culture war. I always wanted to be an artist before I wanted to be a teacher or a critic anyway. I’ll keep you updated on future plans.

This week I published the most recent chapter of Major Arcana: “Moral Wilderness.” The next chapter, coming on Wednesday, is among the darkest in the book; it’s also where the novel’s reality begins to shift and warp to accommodate my characters’ metaphysical convictions, not to mention their experiences. At the foundation of western narrative—in Genesis and Exodus, in the Iliad and the Odyssey—we find everyday life side by side with another world: the saddling of donkeys and a rain of fire from heaven, the outfitting of soldiers on the plain and the swirl of naiads in the sea. When commodified as “magical realism” or mocked as “hysterical realism,” such a literary style can fall prey to mannerism or gimmickry. Just because it has been done badly, however, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it at all. Retreating from Biblical and Homeric precedent into narcissistic autofiction or childish fantasy is sheer cowardice. On Wednesday, therefore, Major Arcana rejoins the often occluded mainstream of our literary tradition—the American tradition, too, since the chapter will tell of strange and awful occurrences in darkest New England.

The aforementioned “constant controversy and total culture war” remains at least in part our condition, however, so for this week’s newsletter I wade boldly into the mire again. Please enjoy!

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Fetch the Wire Cutters: Politics and the Avant-Garde

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1620), detail

“Your prick should be removed with wire cutters.” This was the advice I received from an anonymous reader after I reflected briefly on Jason Farago’s much-touted bad review of Hannah Gadsby’s anti-Picasso gallery show, It’s Pablo-Matic. A farrago, indeed. We’ve been told, persuasively, that “surgery is the new sex,” but I still thought it prudent to demur.¹

If you’ve missed the controversy or my reflection, which I want to enlarge below, Farago deemed the show intellectually unserious in a way demeaning not so much to Picasso but to the generations of female artists and art critics Gadsby presumed to array against his monstrousness.

I was fascinated, on the other hand, by a throwaway line in Farago’s piece where he quotes Gadsby’s line about the Spanish artist, ““I really, really want to stick one up him.”² This chimed with Emmalea Russo’s recent essay on the cancellation of her new poetry book by a small press concerned about what it judged her adjacency to “fascists.”

[T]o attempt to declare a writer or work uncontaminated by “fascism” is to replicate the obsession with purity—the purity of race and culture, the purity of party doctrine—that underlies fascism and related authoritarian ideological systems.³

Gadsby’s evident desire to rape the misogynist master echoes the anti-fascist’s fascist desire to cleanse the polity of human pathogens.

It will be objected that I am drawing moral equivalences between unequal entities.⁴ I am doing precisely that. “It’s okay when we do it” obviates the universal ethical appeal of ideologies like feminism and anti-fascism, making them indisputably identical to the cynical power politics they claim to criticize. Russo’s flexibility in discussion across the political spectrum and Farago’s citation of complex and difficult female artists against Gadsby’s moral oversimplifications—these are more faithful to this universal ethical appeal than are the totalizing gestures of those ideologies’ self-styled partisans.

For some readers, Farago’s review—read widely as the New York Times at large’s belated mea culpa for collaborating with 2010s-style social justice—is too little, too late. Friend-of-the-blog Alice Gribbin, for instance, and presumably with prestige-TV addicts in mind, Tweeted,

Re all the many likes of tweeted quotes from a certain exhibit review, I will believe the people are fed up with dumbed-down comfort culture when I see it. (When they start demanding my collected works appear in print)⁵

“Dumbed-down comfort culture” refers to this moment in Farago’s review, citing Gadsby’s reputation-making Nanette:

Most bizarrely, the routine rested on a condemnation of art as an elite swindle, and modernism got it particularly hard. “CUUU-bism,” went Gadsby’s mocking refrain, to reliable audience laughter. (As it is, Picasso’s own Cubist art appears at the Brooklyn Museum through a single 6-by-4.5-inch engraving.) The sarcasm, from a comedian with moderate art historical bona fides, had a purpose: It gave Gadsby’s audience permission to believe that avant-garde painting was actually a big scam. “They’re all cut from the same cloth,” Gadsby told the audience in “Nanette”: “Donald Trump, Pablo Picasso, Harvey Weinstein” — and the art you never liked in the first place could be dismissed as the flimflam of a cabal of evil men.

Not long ago, it would have been embarrassing for adults to admit that they found avant-garde painting too difficult and preferred the comforts of story time. What Gadsby did was give the audience permission — moral permission — to turn their backs on what challenged them, and to ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch.

Signaling the confusions of culture and politics in our time, Gadby’s tirade is a left-wing version of Tom Wolfe’s conservative attacks on modern art and architecture from the 1970s and ’80s (The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House, respectively). 21st-century American literature has been characterized by a version of Gadsby’s complaint since the publication of The Corrections the week before 9/11; Franzen wrote the bestselling novel out of a Gadsby-like hostility to modernist experiment and preference for “story,” though he was a good deal more ambivalent about the implications, as his later contretemps with Oprah would prove.⁶

I’ve written before about how I wish “the CIA funded modern art” hadn’t become such a meme, since it gives philistines of all ideological persuasions a political excuse to dismiss what they don’t understand—as if Pollock or Rothko were not discovering actual latent potentials in the form of painting. On the other hand, I live in the 21st century, too, and I judge some extremes of 20th-century avant-gardism to have been dead ends, to have led to machinic wastelands with no human presence. My own fiction is one attempted synthesis of avant-garde and traditional ambitions: it’s written in standard English and is suspenseful from page to page and from chapter to chapter; it’s also deeply disorienting in its overall conceptual architecture, brandishing contempt for conventional distinctions of mode and genre.⁷

It’s a dizzying and advantageous time to be a writer. As the once-vanguard position of skepticism toward 2010s identity politics infiltrates the mainstream through such venues as the New York Times; as this skepticism’s institutional avatar in the Republican Party return us to late-20th-century religious-right bêtise; as the reactionary avant-garde decays to performances of its own outrageousness, culture-spotters now wonder where the next burst of energy will come from.

For my part, I always regret writing polemics, and I always feel satisfied when I’ve written a fiction (a fiction is more than a story: it is a comprehensive vision). When I began my novel-in-progress six months ago, I believed it would get me crucified by the left, whereas I now suspect, so swiftly is the proverbial pendulum crashing back in the other direction, that it may soon be judged to occupy the leftmost edge of respectable opinion. In such a circumstance, when you can’t hope to appease a culture so furious it refuses to stand still, you can only hope to entertain yourself—and, with any luck, because you are the world in microcosm, the world. To that extent, I can sympathize—only metaphorically, I hasten to add—with my would-be penectomist. Putting it in terms of the Minor Arcana, what has the King of Cups to envy the King of Swords?

Pamela Colman Smith

1. The syntax of my reader’s imprecation interests me. The passive verbal construction leaves the agent of the proposed action unspecified in “mistakes were made” style. From this I conclude that the author suffers the learned helplessness of today’s radical youth, always displacing its own needs and desires onto bureaucratic authority. My organ should presumably be “removed”—note, too, the medical rather than criminal register of this word—by a licensed professional after an expert panel deems this operation sanitary to the body politic. (Admittedly, the grisly “wire cutter” flourish ruins the otherwise white-coated and white-walled utopian imagery; human passions, thankfully, are irrepressible.) This may be unrelated, but I think as well of a recent viral Tweet claiming that 83-year-old Al Pacino’s impregnation of his 29-year-old paramour should be “illegal” because women are “still developing” between the ages of 18 and 30. The Tweet author had no rejoinder to the several replies arguing that women between 18 and 30 should perhaps not be permitted to vote given their apparently protracted juvenility. I surmise this idea didn’t disturb the Tweet author; given her (I think it was “her”) expansive sense of what ought to be “illegal,” she may likewise think it best we were all wards of the state and its administrative agencies rather than self-governing citizens. It’s enough to make a person nostalgic for Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as our emergence from self-imposed minority.

2. I’m not trying to be unpleasant, but I also must ask by what right the nonbinary Gadsby claims to speak for “women.” Are these identities restrictive and ethically binding or aren’t they? If a cis actor must not play a trans role, then by what right does a nonbinary performer play Constance Chatterley? Granted, there is a Theydy Chatterley’s Lover implied in the novel as is, but Lawrence’s no doubt fascistic point is precisely that the titular scion of the progressive left (she is at the novel’s start her era’s equivalent of an elite with “she/they” in the bio) needs to be relieved of this idealism by a working man in touch with the soil. Theoretically, the actor for such a role should be nonbinary at the start of filming and cisfemale at its conclusion. To the possible reply that nonbinary persons alone contain every possibility of gender, I would reply that this is at best ungenerous toward those of us who don’t call ourselves nonbinary and at worst a regression to what I can only call a very binary way of conceiving gender. If I seem polemical in my refusal of “they” for myself, it’s because I have long understood “he,” like “she,” already to contain the universe.

3. This echoes Jacques Derrida’s defense of continuing to read Paul de Man after the revelation of the latter theorist’s own literal Nazi collaboration. To strike de Man from the canon or curriculum, said Derrida, is “to reproduce the exterminating gesture.”

4. Neoconservatives before and during the Iraq War used to decry the “moral equivalence” made by the then-anti-war left when this left pointed out that actions like unprovoked invasive aggression, the killing of civilians, and the use of torture threatened to make the U.S. the mirror image of the enemies it deemed unequivocally “evil.” The migration from the neoconservative right to the identitarian left of such arguments—according to which actions are legitimated not by their nature or by their effects but only by the identities of the actors—proves the sad unity of 21st-century American culture. Neoconservatives and identitarians have of course since joined forces against the populist threat.

5. I do demand Alice’s collected works in print. I also remind you that paid subscribers will receive free pdfs of my three previous novels. You’ll have to print them yourself, but printing is free at many public libraries these days.

6. Franzen inadvertently signals the way a bow to popular demand conceals a contempt for the populace in the opening paragraphs of his essay on Gaddis, “Mr Difficult”:

For a while last winter, after my third novel came out, I was getting a lot of angry mail from strangers. What upset them was not the novel — a comedy about a family in crisis — but some impolitic remarks I'd made in the press, and I knew that it was a mistake to send more than bland one-sentence notes in reply. But I couldn't help fighting back a little. Taking a page from an old literary hero of mine, William Gaddis, who had long deplored the reading public's confusion of the writer's work and the writer's private self, I suggested that the letter writers look at my fiction rather than listen to distorted news reports about its author.

A few months later, one of the original senders, a Mrs. M—, in Maryland, wrote back with proof that she’d done the reading. She began by listing thirty fancy words and phrases from my novel, words like “diurnality” and “antipodes,” phrases like “electro-pointillist Santa Claus faces.” She then posed the dreadful question: “Who is it that you are writing for? It surely could not be the average person who just enjoys a good read.” And she offered this caricature of me and my presumed audience:

The elite of New York, the elite who are beautiful, thin, anorexic, neurotic, sophisticated, don’t smoke, have abortions tri-yearly, are antiseptic, live in lofts or penthouses, this superior species of humanity who read Harper’s and The New Yorker.

The subtext seemed to be that difficulty in fiction is the tool of socially privileged readers and writers who turn up their noses at the natural pleasure of a “good read” in favor of the invidious, artificial pleasure of feeling superior to other people. To Mrs. M—, I was “a pompous snob, and a real ass-hole.”

One part of me, the part that takes after my father, who admired scholars for their intellect and their large vocabularies and was something of a scholar himself, wanted to call Mrs. M— a few names in reply. But another, equally strong part of me was stricken to learn that Mrs. M— felt excluded by my language.

Time has played many jokes on this passage from over 20 years ago. Nowadays I’m sure we’d have no trouble execrating Mrs. M— because she presumably voted for Trump—“antiseptic” is a prescient pre-2020 complaint about the left-liberal elite—even though the anti-Trump position is in effect the middlebrow and even philistine position of the last decade, as witness the rise of metropolitan avant-garde conservatism in Manhattan. More to the point, however, if Franzen had actually respected this woman, he would have told her to leave him alone and buy herself a fucking dictionary. That he didn’t proves his actual judgment that she’s a hopeless dullard incapable of self-government. Patronizing this imagined audience of charity cases has not done much, I believe, for his literary style.

7. There are syntheses available here, then, but none of them involve taking some spuriously politicized pride in our own ignorance. I am somehow better about resolving these crises in my fiction than in my criticism, so I will give you, for free, an excerpt from a late chapter of Major Arcana:

“I’ve learned a lot, you know. ‘That Diane, what a dumb slut’—I’m sure that’s what you all used to think. Christ, even Ashley thinks that half the time. People are going to think whatever they want. Fuck ’em, that’s what I say. I’ve been painting every single day since Ashley went to college, and I’m starting to learn what the whole thing is about. When Ashley saw that last one”—here Diane del Greco pointed her paintbrush at the canvas to the right of the door, the hot colors in their sea of black—“do you know what she said? She said, ‘Mother, you’ve seen to the end of painting.’ It was the first time in her whole life she ever sounded impressed with anything I’ve done. It scared me, to be honest. I’ve seen to the end of painting? Does that mean I should stop? I thought about it, though, and I realized that I could keep painting if I carried the lessons from the end back to the middle. At the end of painting—whatever she meant by that, she really is the strangest girl, Ellen—I stopped wanting to paint a picture of anything. I just wanted to push the paint around, see how the colors looked next to each other. That’s the end, but it’s also the beginning—a little kid smearing food or dirt around with her fingers to see how it feels, see what develops. In the middle, you want to turn it into a picture of something real. I said to myself, what if you try to keep the two feelings together: the feeling where you want to smear the colors around and the feeling where you want to make a picture of what something looks like. You know I didn’t go to college, Ellen, I’m just ‘that dumb slut Diane,’ but I believe this is called romantic realism. Now hold still.”