Weekly Readings #71 (06/12/23-06/18/23)

utilized for the commonweal

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

This week I posted in memory of Cormac McCarthy my 2020 essay on his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. There I examine the arc of McCarthy’s career through the change in publishing over the last half century from capitalist pluralism to neoliberal monoculture. Since this development diminished the previously heroic role of the editor, the essay may also also be read in memory of Robert Gottlieb, the last of the hero-editors, who died only a day after McCarthy. For Bloomsday I also posted a previously print-only review of Alfonso Zapico’s comics biography of Joyce; I headed the post with a guide to my eight years’ worth of prior Bloomsday pieces.

In “Cosmopolis,” the latest chapter of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana, I introduced a new character—reluctant comic-book editor and literary connoisseur Ellen Chandler—and began the phase of the novel about the gender-bending occultist and graphic novelist Simon Magnus’s calamitous career. The next chapter, coming Wednesday, introduces Simon Magnus’s collaborator Marco Cohen and the fierce inner conflict between his preternatural artistic gift and his aniconic commitment to absolute truth and social justice. You won’t want to miss it; please subscribe!

For today, an essay on the libertarian politics, or anti-politics, of the literary imagination. Please enjoy!

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Live Free or Die: On the Irony and the Appeal of Literary Libertarianism¹

Craiyion

With a sly self-mockery that may or may not mitigate the gesture, writer Debbie Nathan² took the opportunity of Cormac McCarthy’s death to recount the time she went through his garbage. She gives as her justification the writer’s lack of civic engagement:

Still, I thought, the most famous literato in America was sucking his mojo—his descriptions  of the landscape, the cowboy English, the Mexican Spanish, the horses!—from the borderlands. Yet he contributed nothing to his borderland community’s library. He was practically a natural resource, but he was going to waste. Could we utilize him for the commonweal without making demands on his time?³

At the phrase “utilize him for the commonweal,” I reached for my gun—except that I don’t own a gun. A bookish rather than cowboyish type, armed only with knowledge, I actually thought about a passage in historian Daniel Immerwahr’s article on the politics of Frank Herbert’s Dune:

It’s easy to imagine that this socialist-raised, Native American-sympathizing young man would become a leftist. But for Herbert, commune living and Indian Henry’s backwoods lessons firmed up a hostility to the federal government. He came to oppose “any kind of public charity system,” he explained, because he “learned early on that our society’s institutions often weaken people’s self-reliance.” So, rather than following the trail of cooperative socialism to New Deal liberalism, he tacked in the opposite direction. Herbert became a Republican.⁴

After quoting this in my own essay on Dune, I quipped, “Academics, being bureaucrats, are natural socialists, and are therefore surprised and disappointed to learn that un-academicized artists often tend toward libertarianism.” Herbert’s science-fiction classic is at once an epic and a mock-epic. It gratifies the desire for—at the same time as it cautions against—messiahs and totalizing politics; it warns about what happens when “religion and politics travel in the same cart.”

For the conservative imagination, from Edmund Burke’s reproof of the Jacobins’ assault on church and civic society to Eric Voeglin’s censure of those who would immanentize the eschaton, such a messianic and totalitarian politics is all the left could ever offer, given its posited union of theory and praxis in the supposedly people-empowering authority of the state. McCarthy’s only overt political statement, from his 1992 New York Times profile, takes its place in this anti-revolutionary tradition:

“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy says philosophically. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

There are good reasons for the writer qua writer to adopt this libertarian disposition. Lest you think it’s only white men like Herbert and McCarthy who think this way, since we all know what rotten bastards white men are, I give the example—I’ve given it before—of Zora Neale Hurston:

Their touted “significant socially conscious” literature is a steal from the old morality plays. Authors and other artists must cater to the Kremlin as they used to do to the Medicis. Their labor arguments pre-date the machine age. The worker must own his own tools in this highly mechanized age indeed! If that is kosher, then the very next time I go on the air, I’m carrying off the mike. They are still waging a war against “the masters,” somebody who has been dead and gone too long to talk about. All in all, the commies carry on exactly like they have been in a trance like the Sleeping Beauty since the days of Ghengis Khan.

She was a Cold War Republican, you will protest. Less easy to dismiss—though a leftist professor of mine did once dismiss it, in print—is Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture, a lecture delivered by a woman of the left after the fall of the Berlin Wall:

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed.⁵

The writer fears the state on two grounds: its need to disseminate propaganda on its own behalf and its need to censor information and ideas that challenge its authority. The state corrupts the ambient language from the top down, introducing la langue de bois to shroud its goals and practices in a fog of euphemism and abstraction, whereas writers consider themselves the rightful vanguard of linguistic innovation. Past examples of such Newspeak come readily to mind; I will cause no controversy if I mention them. But if I offer a very recent instance—e.g., the alteration of the dictionary so that an experimental and broadly untried prophylactic therapeutic could be re-baptized a “vaccine,” with all the latter term’s connotation of outright illness prevention⁶—my fellow citizens, loyal to the state’s aims, and perhaps rightly so, might very well object.

Overtly totalitarian states conscript writers to produce propaganda or else jail, disappear, or murder the ones who won’t, censoring their works in the process. The flexible liberal state has more subtle strategies of recruitment and even, until recently, has tended to favor more subtle propaganda—so subtle that many great writers (Morrison, for example) have been able to conclude that the aims and methods of the liberal state dovetail with the writer’s own innate commitment to pluralism. Even so, the writer—and still more the American writer—has tended to fear state authority over culture. Even Hemingway, despite sympathizing with the left, wrote,

I cannot be a Communist now because I believe in one thing: liberty. First, I would look after myself and do my work. Then I would care for my family. Then I would help my neighbor. But the state I care nothing for.

A more extreme example is Philip K. Dick, though its extremism only takes to its logical conclusion an instinct shared by many of Dick’s peers. In a startling quotation I found in a compendious communist polemic against Nietzsche and his influence, Dick once wrote,

Although appearing left wing my training is really Fascistic—not “Fascistic” as Marxist rhetoric defines it but as Mussolini defined it: in terms of the deed & the will, with reality de-ontologized, reduced to mere stuff on which the will acts in terms of deed. Since few living people correctly understand (genuine) Fascism, my ideology has never been pejoratively stigmatized by the left, but those to whom I appeal are in essence the core-bulk of latent masses, the fascist mob. I speak of & for the irrational & the anti-rational, a kind of dynamic nihilism in which values are generated as mere tactics. Thus my real idol is Hitler, who starting out totally disenfranchised rose to total power while scorning wealth (aristocracy) plutocracy to the end. My real enemy is plutocracy; I’ve done my (Fascistic) homework.[…] My fascistic premise is: “There is no truth. We make truth; what we (first) believe becomes objectively true. Objective truth depends on what we believe, not the other way around.” This is the essence of the Fascist epistemology, the perception of truth as ideology imposed on reality—mind over matter.

One is tempted to sputter at the invocation of Mussolini and Hitler and dismiss this as the raving of a madman, but the latent paradox in this passage is worth thinking through carefully. Dick calls himself a fascist but says he’s trying to teach the fascist worldview to the masses—in a word, to humanity. But since the fascist worldview involves subjecting reality to one’s will—he cites Mussolini to this effect, but it could be Nietzsche or Crowley or for that matter Emerson, and in any case Mussolini admired William James—then fascism for everyone, what Dick calls “genuine” fascism, is just anarchism, i.e., anti-fascism. It has to be anti-fascism, since for Mussolini—as we’ve seen—fascism was nothing if not anti-individualist, a collectivist cult of the state, rather than a billion proliferating micro-realities.

The political spectrum of the literary imagination, then, runs not from left to right—at bottom, left vs. right is a quarrel about what our archons should do with the power of the modern state—but from anarchist to fascist—with the understanding that both terms may cut across left and right commitments as conventionally understood.

While I share this sensibility by reflex—I’ve joked that I never read Ayn Rand because I’m afraid I might like her—I am schooled enough in the intricacies and ironies of the political, as well as those of the literary, not to valorize it uncritically. Cormac McCarthy had the opportunity to voice his libertarian credo in the New York Times in 1992 because he was just then benefitting from the largesse of a newly corporatized publishing world after having written his then-most commercial novel, the bestselling All the Pretty Horses (a novel I intensely admire, by the way). In other words, as the institutions in control of disseminating literature fell prey to a modern totalizing process, his libertarian rhetoric could be said to have provided cover.

Daniel Oppenheimer—host of the Eminent Americans podcast here on Substack, on which a special someone may soon be making an appearance—published a book in 2016 called Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century. Despite the dramatic spectacle offered by lives like those of Whittaker Chambers and Christopher Hitchens, the most tragicomic chapter in the book may be the otherwise somewhat out-of-place one on Ronald Reagan.⁷

Drifting from the New Deal and working-class politics of his father, of his childhood, toward a distrust of the overweening state, Reagan nevertheless received his final push from left to right by his collaboration as spokesman and goodwill ambassador for the General Electric corporation. Oppenheimer writes of G.E.’s midcentury modus operandi, in the wake of an effective postwar labor strike:

For every difficult question the workers had, there was a manual that had an answer that had been carefully composed to address their concern. For every executive who wanted to know how to change the behavior of his workers without provoking a reaction from the union, there was a five-point plan. There was a steady stream of surveys given to the workers to assess their state of mind, and more handouts produced in response to what the surveys found. There was a company-wide newspaper, plant-specific papers, an executive-only newsletter, a monthly glossy magazine, and a quarterly journal on issues of foreign policy and defense. There were three thousand specially trained employee relations managers (ERMs) who roamed the plants, solving workers’ problems and reassuring them that the company was on their side. There was even a company college, with its own campus, that enrolled thousands of employees in its courses every year.

In other words, Reagan switched his allegiance not from the state to the individual, or from the state to the people, but from the state to corporation, just then perfecting itself as a total system of its own. An analogy with a contemporary of Reagan’s as far-flung as William S. Burroughs—inventing a counterculture that would go from definitely forbidden to nearly mandatory in less than 100 years—suggests itself.

We must be careful, then, that a purely rhetorical libertarianism does not just become the propaganda apparatus of another kind of state. “The state,” like “the individual,” is probably more a state of mind than a phenomenon, which is why, from the perspective of freedom, some states are worth defending and some individuals worth avoiding. As Grimes has recently said, “all the laws are on one side, and all the poets are on the other.” If we take this seriously, we shouldn’t underestimate the difficulties embedded in that first “all,” and even the second. If Dick ironically expressed anti-fascism in claiming himself a fascist, we should be especially on guard against accidentally walking the same path in the other direction.

1. This essay is inspired by a discussion that followed from a Tumblr post noting Compact editor and my erstwhile group blog colleague Nina Power’s receipt in the mail of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1970 novel I Will Fear No Evil. One of the replies to Power’s Tweet about getting the book—a pretty forthright fantasy of autogynephilia, supposedly finished by the author’s wife, presumably about to be held up as an exemplar of gender-critical feminist theory— characterizes Heinlein ideologically as “a 60s hippie and a fascist right-winger at the same time,” not quite the contradiction it sounds, as the philosopher Power, no doubt a student of Heidegger and Jünger, does not need to be told. When I was first reading Heinlein as a child, my father explained the controversial science-fiction author’s politics to me this way: “He went so far left, he came out on the right.” I am always attracted to formulations in this style; I also appreciate phrases like “Tory anarchism” and “left conservatism.” This essay explores the sensibility such phrases imply.

2. “Debbie Nathan, that sounds familiar,” I thought. It turns out she’s a villain on the conspiracy-theory left for writing a book that denied widespread Satanic child sexual abuse among the capitalist elite. I must have encountered her name on the old Rigorous Intuition message board, a gathering-place in the early and mid 2000s for left conspiracists. I waver on the prominence of this phenomenon. I am wary of moral panics, especially of sexual moral panics, which tend to be a pernicious tool of social control. Cormac McCarthy implies that his arch-villain, the Judge, is a pedophile; but then again, his beloved Santa Fe Institute was in receipt of Epstein money. Toni Morrison’s under-discussed final novel, God Help the Child, concerns itself with just this subject. There, Morrison hints that the oppression (mostly sexual) of children by adults is the major form of oppression in the world, exceeding those of race, gender, and class, precisely because all races, genders, and classes abuse children in this way.

3. In McCarthy’s garbage, she found an empty jar of Saw Palmetto capsules and a Texe Marrs pamphlet; despite her overt disavowal in the latter case, I take the whole essay to be an excuse for these two details, suggesting both the author’s impotence and his far-right crankery—though, as Marrs hated Catholics as well as Freemasons and Jews, I find it hard to believe McCarthy was a devotee. He was probably just amused by conspiracy theory qua aesthetics, the way Don DeLillo is, or I am. More interesting is the detail that McCarthy was “dating a judge.” “What’s she a judge of?” the reader of Blood Meridian will wonder.

4. I became fascinated by Immerwahr after reading his Dune essay, though, and a follow-up perusal of his 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire, and his academic article on the origins of American sociology in Confederate apologetics made me think he might be more a libertarian than strictly a leftist himself. If so, I retract my gentle mockery.

5. While supporting the values expressed in this passage overall, I must reject Morrison’s claim, which became almost proverbial in the last decade among the social justice left, that oppressive language is violence. Such a claim is dangerously illiberal, since, if taken literally, it will prevent the sublimation of civic violence into cultural contestation, as we’ve seen with the left’s “punch Nazis” initiative, with everyone to the right of Mao defined as a “Nazi” legitimately subject to physical force.

6. See this “fact check” for the details and for a semi-persuasive defense of Merriam-Webster’s state-aligned decision. It’s persuasive in that the connotation of “vaccine” as an always-sterilizing injection was never quite right; it’s only semi-persuasive in that political control over this connotation, not strict scientific accuracy, is obviously what was at issue in the choice. If the government and scientific establishment had said re: the mRNA shot, “We need to take this risk together,” it would have been a million times more convincing than the unbearably and at times threateningly haughty approach they took, which has led something like half the politically engaged citizenry of the U.S. to distrust on its face almost any high-handed expert claim. See also almost the whole corpus of modern philosophy from Kant forward on why there’s no such thing as a “fact check.”

7. Ronald Reagan, mon semblable, mon frère: I was born on his birthday, one year into his administration. Some say I was named after his would-be assassin John Hinkley; a conflicting report, however, maintains that I was named after Reagan’s great friend and anti-communist ally, Pope John Paul II, instead. See here for a little reflection on another unlikely pair, Reagan and Eugene O’Neill. O’Neill, America’s first great dramatist and also an anarchist, himself eventually “exited right.”