Weekly Readings #75 (07/10/23-07/16/23)

2+2=5

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

This week I appeared on Daniel Oppenheimer’s Eminent Americans podcast for the episode “The Souls of Wesley Yang,” where we discussed Yang’s career, the literary danger faced by writers in and on politics, the online rise of the intellectual independent of academe, and my own academic and ideological background. I also wrote a guest post for the Inner Life collective, “The Novel’s Only Morality,” about the death of Milan Kundera and the political and artistic fate of the novel.

Finally, I posted “The Fool,” the latest chapter of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. The episode narrates the further development of occult writer Simon Magnus’s career with a scandalous graphic novel I place in the moral history of the superhero comic book, especially vis-à-vis the calamity of European history in the American century. This Wednesday, we will return to late-20th-century suburbia for the adolescence of Diane del Greco—the novel’s pivotal character—a tale redolent of incense and marijuana, cruelly concealed charity and scarcely uttered sapphism, a bit of ashes, a few portraits (I do have my motifs). Please subscribe today!

This week’s newsletter will be in the mode of l’esprit de l’escalier as I revisit some topics raised in both the podcast appearance and the Kundera post and collate them with other inquiries, from ancient times and from a few days ago, into the overlap or non-, the crossroads or parallel roads, of literature and politics. Please enjoy!

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An Expression on the Human Face: Right or Writer?

After the Eminent Americans podcast appearance linked above, Wesley Yang Tweeted that he was “not troubled” by “the friendly-ish critique” Dan Oppenheimer and I launched; he then said he would be “vindicated fully in due course” as he is “right about everything.”

“Unbothered. Moisturized. Happy. In My Lane. Focused. Flourishing.”

Just to clarify the point of my critique, however, I didn’t intend to aim directly at Yang’s views as such but rather at a certain way of holding them: a conviction of righteousness performed through what Kundera called “apodictic and dogmatic discourse” that forfeits literature’s unique contribution to political thought. Because Yang has a powerful literary imagination and can make such a contribution, as The Souls of Yellow Folk demonstrated, his becoming just another polemicist seems a loss.

On the other hand, Kundera used the phrase I quoted above in a book called The Art of the Novel, not The Art of the Essay. In my Inner Life piece on the late novelist, I quoted Geoff Dyer to suggest that Kundera might have been a better essayist than a novelist—except that for Dyer this indicates both his fidelity to the novel and the novel’s kinship to the essay. Both the novel and the essay at their best embody

the normative virtues of the intellect (its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims; the rights it accords, alongside passion, to tentativeness and detachment).

I quote here from Susan Sontag’s quarrel with Adrienne Rich. Diametrically opposed to Yang in politics, Rich also knew she was “right about everything.” Sontag, without quite even disagreeing with Rich’s politics, had to remind her that being right about everything was not the only game in town.¹

I referred to Yang in the podcast as “Orwellian.” I had in mind the Orwell who called for prose to be “transparent, like a window pane,” who claimed in Nineteen Eighty-Four that, “Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4.”²

On the first point, however, words are not the world. The “arbitrariness of the signifier,” i.e., the non-resemblance of the word “table” to any conceptual or phenomenal table, is not an idea invented by French pedophiles intent on destroying the west. A transparently referential theory of language is a recent development in human history. It’s the product both of the scientific revolution (valuing clarity of empirical observation the better to understand and manipulate nature) and of Protestantism’s approach to scripture (requiring for its transmitted truth no priestly intermediary).

The wild freedom of the early novel Kundera celebrated in Cervantes, Rabelais, Sterne, and Diderot is the freedom novelists enjoyed before the historical and realist novels of Scott and Balzac subjected even imaginative writers to scientistic criteria of plausibility and clarity. Go back before the early novel, and you find Dante and Chaucer writing metafictions as recursive as any postmodern novel, not because they’re anarchic atheists à la perverted postwar French philosophers but because they understand the distance between God’s truths and ours. So much for prose like a windowpane.³

As for 2+2=4, I was introduced to a mistrust of this indeed apodictic-seeming statement by my 11th-grade physics teacher. He told us that physics was a permanently unsettled science: “Half of what I teach you is wrong, I just don’t know which half.” Numbers, he said, possibly constitute a purely self-referential system that never meets the outside world—the same case the poststructuralists made about language—and he wrote an airtight proof on the chalk board demonstrating that 1+1=1. He was a gruff old man—dead now, alas—and if he didn’t vote Republican, I’ll eat my hat. But he had thought things through to their limit.

On the political purport of apodictic equations, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, almost a century before Orwell, raises 2+2=5 as the only banner of freedom, since making 2+2=4 the final word will only empower a scientific clerisy to rule the immeasurable human soul with a totalitarian calculus:

all human actions will then be calculated according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered into a calendar; or better still, some well-meaning publications will appear, like the encyclopedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions and adventures in the world.

A century before Dostoevsky, Swift mocks the same propensity for science to totalize and tyrannize the world in Gulliver’s Travels, noting especially the complicity of a desire for transparent language in this will to power:

An expedient was therefore offered, “that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on.” […] [M]any of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things; which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us, who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave.

I offer these examples not to endorse them in every particular—I will mostly take Orwell’s politics over Dostoevsky’s, for example—but only to suggest that many ideas attributed to “postmodernists” or “French Theory” are very old, solidly canonical, and politically and religiously heterogenous.⁴ This is even before we get to the topics of sex and gender, where, for example, nobody can stay male, female, or even human for more than two pages in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

When we begin to think about the complexities involved in these ideas, we become much less certain that we could possibly be right about everything, even if we might be right about this or that policy. But “this or that policy” is not really what this conversation is about. It’s about this sentence from Orwell’s great essay on Dickens:

What [Dickens] is out against is not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, ‘an expression on the human face.’

An essay I wish I’d had the presence of mind to recall on the Eminent Americans podcast is Stefan Collini’s review of Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens. The review is significantly titled “‘No Bullshit’ Bullshit” and just as significantly begins, “Winning is very important to Christopher Hitchens.” In it, Collini laments the decay of an essayist, even a combative essayist, into a simple polemicist.

The sight of Hitchens view-hallooing across the fields in pursuit of some particularly dislikable quarry has been among the most exhilarating experiences of literary journalism during the last two decades. He’s courageous, fast, tireless and certainly not squeamish about being in at the kill. But after reading this and some of his other recent writings, I begin to imagine that, encountering him, still glowing and red-faced from the pleasures of the chase, in the tap-room of the local inn afterwards, one might begin to see a resemblance not to Trotsky and other members of the European revolutionary intelligentsia whom he once admired, nor to the sophisticated columnists and political commentators of the East Coast among whom he now practises his trade, but to other red-coated, red-faced riders increasingly comfortable in their prejudices and their Englishness – to Kingsley Amis, pop-eyed, spluttering and splenetic; to Philip Larkin, farcing away at the expense of all bien pensants; to Robert Conquest and a hundred other ‘I told you so’s. They would be good company, up to a point, but their brand of saloon-bar finality is only a quick sharpener away from philistinism, and I would be sorry to think of one of the essayists I have most enjoyed reading in recent decades turning into a no-two-ways-about-it-let’s-face-it bore. I just hope he doesn’t go on one hunt too many and find himself, as twilight gathers and the fields fall silent, lying face down in his own bullshit.

Perhaps, however, I am just being naive. What frivolity—to value literature over public policy, over the common good! For this perversity, the fascists will have you disappeared, the communists will send you to the gulag, and even the liberals and conservatives, though they may not hurt you directly, will still decide you might deserve to starve in your gay little garret.

“I’m winningly naive!”

Luckily,

Alice Gribbin

rose up this week in Tablet to remind us that art is older than politics, prior to politics—an autonomous drive pre-dating the state. From this she concludes that art therefore can’t contribute much to politics with a capital P—“Rarely does art treat political subjects with the complexity found even in quality journalism”—and that even outward-focused art forms like the realist novel only explore the small-P politics of “moral and social issues,” which she pointedly refuses to call politics at all. Leaving aside the semantic debate about what does or doesn’t count as “politics,” I agree with her argument almost entirely; but I draw a slightly different conclusion from the priority of the aesthetic over the political.

Precisely because art goes further back, reaches deeper down, and shoots higher up than the political, art may contribute to political intelligence (only “may”—I’d never claim it had to). It may contribute by vividly showing us, for example, why our neighbors want things we both don’t want and don’t think they should have. It may demonstrate to us what it would feel like if we wanted those things ourselves, because some part of us may very well, especially if we care very much about it.⁵

Art uniquely discloses the affects and appetites, the tides and drives, behind and before the political, the currents in the otherwise lightless depths a mile or two beneath the swells, the otherwise invisible force that impels the breakers to scatter their foam so violently at our feet.

I’m not talking here about “empathy,” which, whatever it originally meant, has become safe and patronizing, has launched a thousand sentimental novels, “wouldn’t you feel sad if you were an immigrant” or whatever (though a Fourth-of-July week spent in suburbia did recently remind me that some people may need even this remediation).⁶ I’m thinking more, for example, about Harold Bloom’s line that Macbeth is frightening not because the audience fears it may be murdered but because the audience begins contemplating a convenient murder or two of its own.

Reality is radically contingent, the iridescent surface of an immeasurable sphere. “I” is another, or at least always could be. Literature sees this, while polemic remains in the dark. The name of the game is not being right but being a writer.

1. That Rich was a poet and polemicist and Sontag an essayist and novelist would no doubt have caught Kundera’s eye. He saw the poetic sensibility itself as a source of totalitarian politics, as he wrote in Testaments Betrayed:

After 1948, through the years of Communist revolution in my native country, I saw the eminent role played by lyrical blindness in a time of Terror, which for me was the period when “the poet reigned along with the executioner” (Life Is Elsewhere). I would think about Mayakovsky then; his genius was as indispensable to the Russian Revolution as Dzherzhinsky’s police. Lyricism, lyricization, lyrical talk, lyrical enthusiasm are an integrating part of what is called the totalitarian world; that world is not the gulag as such; it's a gulag that has poems plastering its outside walls and people dancing before them.

More than the Terror, the lyricization of the Terror was a trauma for me. It immunized me for good against all lyrical temptations. The only thing I deeply, avidly, wanted was a lucid, unillusioned eye. I finally found it in the art of the novel. This is why for me being a novelist was more than just working in one “literary genre” rather than another; it was an outlook, a wisdom, a position; a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group; a considered, stubborn, furious nonidentification, conceived not as evasion or passivity but as resistance, defiance, rebellion. I wound up having some odd conversations: “Are you a Communist, Mr. Kundera?” “No, I'm a novelist.” “Are you a dissident?” “No, I'm a novelist.” “Are you on the left or the right?” “Neither. I'm a novelist.”

2. Has anyone ever dealt more harshly with Orwell qua novelist than Milan Kundera himself? Kundera allows that we might expect him to sympathize with Orwell as a fellow anti-totalitarian, but no, the art of the novel comes first. I quote again from Testaments Betrayed:

That Kafkan poetry reminds me, by contrast, of another novel that is also about an arrest and a trial: Orwell’s 1984. the book that for decades served as a constant reference for antitotalitarianism professionals. In this novel, which means to be the horrifying portrayal of an imaginary totalitarian society, there are no windows; in it no one glimpses a frail young girl filling a jug with water; Orwell’s novel is firmly closed to poetry; did I say novel? it is political thought disguised as a novel; the thinking is certainly lucid and correct, but it is distorted by its guise as a novel, which renders it imprecise and vague. So if the novel form obscures Orwell’s thought, does it give something in return? Does it throw light on the mystery of human situations that sociology or political science cannot get at? No: the situations and the characters are as flat as a poster. Then is it justified at least as a popularization of good ideas? Not that either. For ideas made into a novel function no longer as ideas but as a novel instead— and in the case of 1984, as a bad novel, with all the pernicious influence a bad novel can exert.

The pernicious influence of Orwell’s novel resides in its implacable reduction of a reality to its political dimension alone, and in its reduction of that dimension to what is exemplarily negative about it. I refuse to forgive this reduction on the grounds that it was useful as propaganda in the struggle against totalitarian evil. For that evil is, precisely, the reduction of life to politics and of politics to propaganda. So despite its intentions, Orwell’s novel itself joins in the totalitarian spirit, the spirit of propaganda.

An immanent critique worthy of Adorno, if only the comparison wouldn’t have made Kundera vomit. This is a step too far for me, in any case. Nineteen Eighty-Four may be minor, may belong to the ranks of what Orwell himself called “good bad books” along with the likes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but aesthetically it’s a thoroughly effective nightmare and politically its unforgettable neologisms may have actually immunized readers to at least some political pathogens. Nevertheless, Kundera’s conviction that the highest fiction works through irony is my own:

Irony means: none of the assertions found in a novel can be taken by itself, each of them stands in a complex and contradictory juxtaposition with other assertions, other situations, other gestures, other ideas, other events. Only a slow reading, twice and many times over, can bring out all the ironic connections inside a novel, without which the novel remains uncomprehended.

I dedicate this quotation to anyone perturbed by what they imagine to be the politics of Major Arcana.

3. On the Nietzschean radicalism of Dante’s poetics, I can’t resist quoting a new passage from behind the paywall of my recent interlocutor Emmalea Russo’s tour through The Divine Comedy (you should give her a paid subscription after you give me one):

On the stereoscopic edge of sleep, dream’s double nuclear energies freak the scene: image and what fucks an image up. This twoness is embodied in the Greek god-mixed elixir for art-making: Apollo plus Dionysus, sons of Zeus (Jupiter).

4. I can’t help but notice that the two young men sitting next to me in Starbucks this morning are deep in an overwhelmingly sincere theological discussion; I’m guessing they’re fresh from church. “There’s no example of a person operating in God’s role who is not an egomaniac,” the one just said. I mention it because this last statement reminds me that I also wanted to quote The Rebel by Albert Camus on the question of which philosopher is to blame for this or that political depredation. Is it Hegel and Marx we should hold responsible for wokeness, or is it rather Nietzsche and Foucault? Surveying the midcentury damage done by communism and fascism, as well as the capitalist and imperialist faults of the western world, Camus found plenty of blame to go around, reaching back to Athens and Jerusalem and encompassing Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. (He wrote before Foucault, but everything he said against the Nietzscheans can be easily applied to our latter-day French immoralist.) He essentially pins the camps and the gulags on Hegel in the end, probably where I came by my own analysis (though please do see Walter Kaufmann on “the Hegel myth” for the possibility that we are libeling a dead man; Kaufmann targets not Camus but Karl Popper). But Camus concludes, much in the spirit of—if in a clearer vocabulary than—the later poststructuralists, that we need to read all these thinkers carefully, to go on reading them, that none should be dropped from the canon or “canceled.” Instead, Camus states, at the book’s conclusion, that “[r]ebellion itself is moderation,” and that we need to read all of the thinkers he has discussed because they will, in our rebellion, “correct one another,” as “[e]ach tells the other that he is not God.” (I quote a bit from my own review of the book.) Even though the hipper type of academic leftist thinks it’s cringe and high-schoolish, The Rebel might be my own favorite book of metapolitics—a literary companion to The Origins of Totalitarianism, itself undoubtedly a great book, and one still relevant to our own age of possibly incipient technocracy, but too political-science-ish and not “aesthetic” enough for types like me.

5. I read the Kundera obit in Compact and rolled my eyes when it culminated in yet another encomium to René Girard, the contemporary Catholic reactionary’s favorite thinker. Yet in my memorial reading of Kundera’s extraordinary book-length essay, Testaments Betrayed, I found the following footnote:

At last, an occasion to cite René Girard; his Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque is the best book I have ever read on the art of the novel.

I can’t agree, as I explain here at length. Girard, it seems to me, has a basically totalitarian conviction that he knows what everybody should want and how we should want it. As a gloss on the lapidary analysis of the passions in Stendhal, his thesis isn’t bad, but imagine applying it to the American novel, where deranged desires have an almost theological integrity all their own—Hester Prynne, Captain Ahab, Jay Gatsby, Augie March, Sula Peace. Kundera’s affinity to Girard explains my own mild distaste for Kundera’s anti-lyrical, rational “Habsburg modernism.” I’m sure

Sam Kahn

is right in his eulogy that my tastes here outrun my critical intellect, just as Kundera would warn the lyricist, but there we are.

6. I sometimes see Tweets from post-left new-right Dimes-Square “metrocon” types that say things like, “Went back home to see family for a week and now I’m a shitlib again.” Many such cases, as the poet said.