In terms of major 21st century novels, I think The Pale King is sort of oddly under-discussed - maybe because a romantic ode to the paperclips-and-staplers postwar government bureaucrat doesn't really accord with anyone's ideological presuppositions right now; maybe because people assume that it's a fragmentary mess of scraps or else an antagonistic labyrinth like IJ (it's neither). There are definitely moments to give heartburn to anyone who despises sentimentality, but as an elegaic consideration of the pre-digital world I think it rises far above the typical entrant in that genre. Definitely major, imo, whether or not it's "great".
Anyway, not sure if that really counts as an omission. There seems to be an odd shortage of literary vitality right now, apart from isolated subcultural pockets (I already mentioned Porpentine in your tumblr askbox). Maybe with the current thaw in the cultural world, we'll have more to talk about in ten years.
My deep, dark confession is I love Jonathan Franzen. This was highly disturbing to many in my MFA class. THE CORRECTIONS was the first time I ever read a contemporary book and thought, "This might approach Anna Karenina." He's deeply contemptuous of his characters in a way Tolstoy isn't (which is to say, he is his own writer), but he's also expansive and humane and, unlike every other writer, knows how to structure a long novel so it actually pays off.
Yes, it would be very hard to argue that a contemporary novelist needs to have read Aristotle and Kant and Nietzsche (or even Hume and Adam Smith). I think the main reason I tend to use the Great Books moniker is precisely to push back against the idea that we don't need to read the Old White Men. The canon wars, while they were great in terms of expanding the canon, also added so many non-white people to the canon that you can genuinely be in favor of "classic" literature and be against reading old white men. Somehow I find that idea to be very repulsive. Being in favor of the canon (by which, let us say, we mean every author who has a Penguin Classics book) is a very non-threatening position in 2023: it means you love John Okada and Jose Rizal and Jorge Amada and Ibn Tufayl and a hundred other writers for whom most people will be like, "They're great, if you love them then read them."
But saying someone ought to read Dickens or Austen or the Brontes carries a very different weight. And I can't help feeling, in a way that I've yet to fully explain or articulate, that it _is_ more important to read Jane Austen than to read John Okada (unless, perhaps, you're Japanese-American). That we cannot escape the roots of our own language, and that the foundational texts in our language are always going to be written by these white people. And, yes, a concomitant result of that is that white people will _always_ outnumber non-white people in the greater, more necessary, part of the canon (every author ought to read Austen, but there's probably not and may never be, an Asian-American author that everyone ought to read), and...that's just how it is? I mean people are free to discard my opinion on that, but I don't think it is per se racist, and I think plenty of great Asian-American writers would agree with me (do we seriously think Jhumpa Lahiri thinks her own work ought to be more widely-read than _The Inferno_?)
Agreed on Franzen's structural mastery and its emotional payoff. My complaint would be closer to James Wood's, the frequent slackness of his language—not that it needs to be stylized, just that the restrained clarity of, well, Jhumpa Lahiri would be preferable to the slangy journalismese.
Your thinking about these things in terms of American ethnic/racial groups and the English language instead of general diversity is interesting. There are obviously great Japanese, great Indian, great Italian writers one should read, probably writers of more world-historical significance than the Victorian English novelists, but Japanese-American, Indian-American, Italian-American? (I introduce the latter category simply to include myself in the difficult question. It doesn't wound me to say there's only one great Italian-American writer—DeLillo—or that you should probably read both Dante and Dickens before you read him.)
I know it's considered controversial, but I agree with you that writers need to read foundational books. For pedagogy's sake, one can always play up Dickens's early poverty, the struggles of Austen and the Brontes as women, etc., if it helps. I'm not sure, though, that "there may never be an Asian-American author that everyone ought to read." I don't see why not. I know he's English rather than American, but Ishiguro is as close as a living writer comes to someone everyone ought to read.
In fact—sorry to keep replying—I wanted to include this part of Ishiguro's Paris Review interview in the piece but forgot:
"Because I hadn’t read a lot as a child, I needed a firm foundation. Charlotte Brontë of Villette and Jane Eyre; Dostoyevsky of those four big novels; Chekhov’s short stories; Tolstoy of War and Peace. Bleak House. And at least five of the six Jane Austen novels. If you have read those, you have a very solid foundation."
I think the Great Books project's claim to universality--these are the books everyone throughout history has always agreed to be important--was a mistake. Situating it as a uniquely American phenomenon always made more sense: what do you tell someone to read if your interlocutor might be any race or ethnicity, but you know they are American, and that they're not necessarily committed to any uniquely American project or national identity. Seen in that light there are lots of Asian writers you can creditably recommend, particularly the Indian epics and the great east Asian novels, but its only in that context that it makes sense to recommend, say, Henry James and the Mahabharata in the same breath. James is a great novelist, while the Mahabharata is the foundation of all Indian literature. Clearly different standards are being applied here, where American writers need merely to be very good, while world books have to be of supreme importance and quality. Few would suggest that every American should read Tagore or Mulk Raj Anand, but they would be very high on any non diasporic indian's reading list.
Right, and in that sense it's defensible and even practical: we should read the books that inform American culture in its multiplicity, along with the important American books. (I think Paglia said that humanities education should be based on reading the world's religious scriptures, a similar idea.)
I think a claim could be a made that we should have a uniquely American classics list. Maybe instead of reading Austen you read inferior American books, like the Sylph and the Coquette. That reading list could be much more ethnically and racially balanced. Like in Italy they don't read Anna Karenina in school, they read The Betrothed. If we were able to embrace a unique American national linguistic identity that would be one thing that would make the Great Books seem laughable. But I just don't know if that would be honest. We simply are not a nation state and won't ever be one
This is already happening in college English departments, as the Brit Lit surveys get squeezed out in favor of American courses. I've taught The Coquette several times, for example. It's fine, though more a social historian's primary text than it is a great novel. I agree with your caveat, especially since pre-20th-century American lit is so dependent on the English canon, especially Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible. (Or The Coquette's reliance on the Richardsonian model of the sentimental novel—also followed in the major female slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs's.) Probably better to lean in to American Literature's global quality.
I sometimes wonder if this should be done- it seems inappropriate somehow to *only* be reading Brit lit for so much of the curriculum as an American- though on the other hand much of it *is* better...
Btw, the non-British-novel-readers I mentioned in my opening anecdote are rough-and-tumble Faulkner-and-McCarthy-reading white men; I have the impression BritLit might seem a bit girly to guys like that. (I think I once told you that all American novelists are men and all British novelists are women in the same way that all dogs are boys and all cats are girls.)
Of course it was disturbing in your MFA class: Franzen is a serious artist. That’s not allowed. Only ideology is allowed in an MFA class. Funny: Most of the serious authors who changed literature (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Salinger, Kerouac, etc) either didn’t go to college at all, or dropped out. Important, quality writing is usually harmed by college. All you need is talent and life experience.
Lol, I did my mfa in 2013 so it wasn't about ideology. Franzen is just kind of basic. He's an Oprah pick. My classmates tended to like Carver, Dennis Johnson, and George Saunders
Great post. On the Hannahia thing: in a way the story might be as much that he got this far without a swing being made as that it was made. I’ve known who he was, even that he was (maybe still is?) a white supremacist for *ages* and the libs are only finding out now? I find the lack of escalation reassuring as well: there’s a place for callouts for past misbehavior (I worry that the tens libs have made it passé to care that someone might be a white supremacist!) there’s a place for defenses and apologies etc, it’s the unending moralist swarms that made life miserable for everybody. I giggled a little at fearmongering about antifa in his response. In 2023! I dug the list too.
Thanks! There's a grimmer interpretation of the Hanania thing, which is that he's considered acceptable (by Yglesias/Smith types) because his biological loathing extends to the "white rabble" Trump leads. If you can plausibly claim to hate the whole of the supposed underclass, you're in with the techno-centrists.
I could see that perhaps. As this was all going down somebody just yesterday was claiming that according to Smith Wesley Yang of all people is a believer in the great replacement, which while totally hearsay would certainly add an interesting wrinkle to his development.
Yeah I saw that. I wonder...the problem with "the great replacement" is that libs do sometimes claim to be doing something like that, so I don't know what it means to be a believer in it. (As a child of the Reagan Democrats, I myself assume an equilibrium-setting number of immigrants' children will eventually become conservative, so I don't think there can be any such "replacement" in a political sense.)
Aug 6, 2023·edited Aug 6, 2023Liked by John Pistelli
I think in the strong form, that the technocratic elite encourage immigration to build up their political base, it makes no sense, because establishment dems could do a LOT more to encourage immigration. Obama deported 2.5 million people! He didn't need to do that. All those people would've given birth to voters.
I don't think anyone is long sighted enough to do that. And if they were they would find ways of directing the flow of immigrants to a small number of red states. Within twenty years, Wyoming would be blue!
In it's mild version, which is the idea that liberals are pleased that demographic changes might make the map harder for Republicans, it might be true that it's what some people want, but it's not backed up by policy, then what does it matter?
I hear you on that, although I think the libs usually claim that the kids of people who are already here will be doing the replacing (it’d probably be better if they didn’t make those claims, but I see the temptation.) If it’s true I wouldn’t have seen it coming with Yang, but then I didn’t see his gender critical turn coming either, I figured if anything he’d be one of those guys who’s just a bit too credulous about how incels and manosphere guys describe the “sexual marketplace” today.
Young people no longer read, except contemporary ideology and short online news clips. Certainly they rarely read anything serious. Am I over-generalizing? Yes. Am I mostly right? I think so. Even when I belonged to a writing group in Manhattan a couple years ago when I asked people under 25 what they read they usually smirked and said ‘Read? I listen to podcasts.’ If more people read the classics (which all foretell our current dumb time) we wouldn’t be in the quagmire we’re in. Sad but true.
Thank you! I've heard mixed things about that one (Susan Sontag: "the greatest novel written in our time"; Michael Hofmann: "Proust? Ha!") but will keep it in mind.
It has the Sontag quote on the back, haha. I would say Sontag has a bias, which I share, towards central Europe. I don't know enough about Hofmann to judge, but perhaps he has the opposite (this is far too neat). I think it's the kind of novel in which you know by five page if it's going to upend your life or feel like a derivative version of Proust. For what it's worth, it is utterly visceral, utterly embodied and violently sensory (I think this is a characteristic of central European writing), which I think, despite certain appearances, is fundamentally unProustian.
Nothing like ludicrous honesty. You did also mention the best of reading selfishly: finding the stylistic eye of others and adapting it for your own prose also.
As to Burton: I was underwhelmed, though not enough to read her other novel whose name escapes me. Partly I don’t dig NYC socialite stories, and partly the novel felt too Ripley-derived. Mythic allusions gestured more than informed, which was disappointing (her religious themes via nonfiction are my primary interest). That said, she might have anticipated the downtown reactionary-aesthete vibe you can never seem to escape, which is a curiosity.
Thanks, I'll probably skip her novel (never even read Ripley, though I did see the movie...) As for the reactionary stuff, I like (though obviously I also disavow) the wholly baseless conspiracy theory that she's part of the movement secretly behind it:
I appreciate how this essay pins together the paradox of artistic arrogance versus artistic humility. Writers (I think) need a certain base level of arrogance, not only to believe their work is good but also to decide what should inform it (what you call "justifiably not read any number of the infinitude of books in the library of Babel"), what their work should reject, and which influences should fill his/her limited reading time. And to this attitude, you add that the canon does have writers who became the source that informed all those subsequent—writers who deserve the examination of their descendants. That's a literary humility, to understand forebears even if (especially if) your work might upend them.
If I can turn my bloviating fire onto myself, I try to read well and widely both, if possible. But it is currently guided by the "self-contained aesthetic system" of the novel I'm writing, a system I expect will change in the future as I work through different projects. The current system is ever-more eclectic, as the novel expands: the works of Andrew Krivak, "The Gamekeeper" by Barry Hines, Faulkner, Barry Hannah's "Airships" collection, "God's Secret Providence" by John Calvin, "Henry von Ofterdingen" by Novalis, and a veritable seminar of Appalachian ecology. And then, for sheer pleasure, "Invisible Man," "Social Creature" by Tara Isabella Burton, and "Suttree." The novel becomes in part the spur to read.
Is this how you've read for/through/around Major Arcana?
Thanks! Yes, I agree on the interplay of arrogance and humility—you earn the arrogance when you know what you're talking about, not that anyone ever fully does.
My reading is ludicrously disorganized and always has been. I can't honestly even claim to have "researched" my doctoral dissertation, let alone a novel! I tend to pick up whatever book seems to be next for whatever reason. The only deliberate reading I did for Major Arcana was to reread a bunch of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore comics, which were helpful in creating the oeuvre of my fictional comics writer. I also read most of Colin Wilson's The Occult: A History, but, other than learning Tarot, I mostly "downloaded" the novel's occult content from YouTube, to be honest.
As far as stylistic models, reading 2666 this year—and Lawrence's Rainbow and Women in Love and (to an extent) Midnight's Children by Rushdie last year—were great helps, mostly by reminding me that there is no necessary conflict between realism and...whatever we want to call it, the other thing, the mythic, the supernatural, the magical. That there's really nothing the novel can't do. The good narrative parts of the Bible—Genesis, Samuel, Job—also helped with this. You can also learn it from Dickens, but not, alas, despite her other virtues, from Jane Austen.
I need to read that Novalis book—that and Penelope Fitzgerald—they're definitely on the endless list. How's Burton's novel? I find her nonfiction—I read some of Strange Rites and a bunch of her online articles—tepid prose on hot topics, but perhaps that's unfair, or perhaps she's a fiery novelist anyway.
In terms of major 21st century novels, I think The Pale King is sort of oddly under-discussed - maybe because a romantic ode to the paperclips-and-staplers postwar government bureaucrat doesn't really accord with anyone's ideological presuppositions right now; maybe because people assume that it's a fragmentary mess of scraps or else an antagonistic labyrinth like IJ (it's neither). There are definitely moments to give heartburn to anyone who despises sentimentality, but as an elegaic consideration of the pre-digital world I think it rises far above the typical entrant in that genre. Definitely major, imo, whether or not it's "great".
Anyway, not sure if that really counts as an omission. There seems to be an odd shortage of literary vitality right now, apart from isolated subcultural pockets (I already mentioned Porpentine in your tumblr askbox). Maybe with the current thaw in the cultural world, we'll have more to talk about in ten years.
Thanks—never read it myself, nor even finished IJ, but I see what you mean. Agreed on the lack of vitality, and on its potential alleviation.
My deep, dark confession is I love Jonathan Franzen. This was highly disturbing to many in my MFA class. THE CORRECTIONS was the first time I ever read a contemporary book and thought, "This might approach Anna Karenina." He's deeply contemptuous of his characters in a way Tolstoy isn't (which is to say, he is his own writer), but he's also expansive and humane and, unlike every other writer, knows how to structure a long novel so it actually pays off.
Yes, it would be very hard to argue that a contemporary novelist needs to have read Aristotle and Kant and Nietzsche (or even Hume and Adam Smith). I think the main reason I tend to use the Great Books moniker is precisely to push back against the idea that we don't need to read the Old White Men. The canon wars, while they were great in terms of expanding the canon, also added so many non-white people to the canon that you can genuinely be in favor of "classic" literature and be against reading old white men. Somehow I find that idea to be very repulsive. Being in favor of the canon (by which, let us say, we mean every author who has a Penguin Classics book) is a very non-threatening position in 2023: it means you love John Okada and Jose Rizal and Jorge Amada and Ibn Tufayl and a hundred other writers for whom most people will be like, "They're great, if you love them then read them."
But saying someone ought to read Dickens or Austen or the Brontes carries a very different weight. And I can't help feeling, in a way that I've yet to fully explain or articulate, that it _is_ more important to read Jane Austen than to read John Okada (unless, perhaps, you're Japanese-American). That we cannot escape the roots of our own language, and that the foundational texts in our language are always going to be written by these white people. And, yes, a concomitant result of that is that white people will _always_ outnumber non-white people in the greater, more necessary, part of the canon (every author ought to read Austen, but there's probably not and may never be, an Asian-American author that everyone ought to read), and...that's just how it is? I mean people are free to discard my opinion on that, but I don't think it is per se racist, and I think plenty of great Asian-American writers would agree with me (do we seriously think Jhumpa Lahiri thinks her own work ought to be more widely-read than _The Inferno_?)
Agreed on Franzen's structural mastery and its emotional payoff. My complaint would be closer to James Wood's, the frequent slackness of his language—not that it needs to be stylized, just that the restrained clarity of, well, Jhumpa Lahiri would be preferable to the slangy journalismese.
Your thinking about these things in terms of American ethnic/racial groups and the English language instead of general diversity is interesting. There are obviously great Japanese, great Indian, great Italian writers one should read, probably writers of more world-historical significance than the Victorian English novelists, but Japanese-American, Indian-American, Italian-American? (I introduce the latter category simply to include myself in the difficult question. It doesn't wound me to say there's only one great Italian-American writer—DeLillo—or that you should probably read both Dante and Dickens before you read him.)
I know it's considered controversial, but I agree with you that writers need to read foundational books. For pedagogy's sake, one can always play up Dickens's early poverty, the struggles of Austen and the Brontes as women, etc., if it helps. I'm not sure, though, that "there may never be an Asian-American author that everyone ought to read." I don't see why not. I know he's English rather than American, but Ishiguro is as close as a living writer comes to someone everyone ought to read.
In fact—sorry to keep replying—I wanted to include this part of Ishiguro's Paris Review interview in the piece but forgot:
"Because I hadn’t read a lot as a child, I needed a firm foundation. Charlotte Brontë of Villette and Jane Eyre; Dostoyevsky of those four big novels; Chekhov’s short stories; Tolstoy of War and Peace. Bleak House. And at least five of the six Jane Austen novels. If you have read those, you have a very solid foundation."
I think the Great Books project's claim to universality--these are the books everyone throughout history has always agreed to be important--was a mistake. Situating it as a uniquely American phenomenon always made more sense: what do you tell someone to read if your interlocutor might be any race or ethnicity, but you know they are American, and that they're not necessarily committed to any uniquely American project or national identity. Seen in that light there are lots of Asian writers you can creditably recommend, particularly the Indian epics and the great east Asian novels, but its only in that context that it makes sense to recommend, say, Henry James and the Mahabharata in the same breath. James is a great novelist, while the Mahabharata is the foundation of all Indian literature. Clearly different standards are being applied here, where American writers need merely to be very good, while world books have to be of supreme importance and quality. Few would suggest that every American should read Tagore or Mulk Raj Anand, but they would be very high on any non diasporic indian's reading list.
Right, and in that sense it's defensible and even practical: we should read the books that inform American culture in its multiplicity, along with the important American books. (I think Paglia said that humanities education should be based on reading the world's religious scriptures, a similar idea.)
I think a claim could be a made that we should have a uniquely American classics list. Maybe instead of reading Austen you read inferior American books, like the Sylph and the Coquette. That reading list could be much more ethnically and racially balanced. Like in Italy they don't read Anna Karenina in school, they read The Betrothed. If we were able to embrace a unique American national linguistic identity that would be one thing that would make the Great Books seem laughable. But I just don't know if that would be honest. We simply are not a nation state and won't ever be one
This is already happening in college English departments, as the Brit Lit surveys get squeezed out in favor of American courses. I've taught The Coquette several times, for example. It's fine, though more a social historian's primary text than it is a great novel. I agree with your caveat, especially since pre-20th-century American lit is so dependent on the English canon, especially Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible. (Or The Coquette's reliance on the Richardsonian model of the sentimental novel—also followed in the major female slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs's.) Probably better to lean in to American Literature's global quality.
I sometimes wonder if this should be done- it seems inappropriate somehow to *only* be reading Brit lit for so much of the curriculum as an American- though on the other hand much of it *is* better...
Btw, the non-British-novel-readers I mentioned in my opening anecdote are rough-and-tumble Faulkner-and-McCarthy-reading white men; I have the impression BritLit might seem a bit girly to guys like that. (I think I once told you that all American novelists are men and all British novelists are women in the same way that all dogs are boys and all cats are girls.)
Of course it was disturbing in your MFA class: Franzen is a serious artist. That’s not allowed. Only ideology is allowed in an MFA class. Funny: Most of the serious authors who changed literature (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Salinger, Kerouac, etc) either didn’t go to college at all, or dropped out. Important, quality writing is usually harmed by college. All you need is talent and life experience.
Michael Mohr
Sincere American Writing
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Lol, I did my mfa in 2013 so it wasn't about ideology. Franzen is just kind of basic. He's an Oprah pick. My classmates tended to like Carver, Dennis Johnson, and George Saunders
Great post. On the Hannahia thing: in a way the story might be as much that he got this far without a swing being made as that it was made. I’ve known who he was, even that he was (maybe still is?) a white supremacist for *ages* and the libs are only finding out now? I find the lack of escalation reassuring as well: there’s a place for callouts for past misbehavior (I worry that the tens libs have made it passé to care that someone might be a white supremacist!) there’s a place for defenses and apologies etc, it’s the unending moralist swarms that made life miserable for everybody. I giggled a little at fearmongering about antifa in his response. In 2023! I dug the list too.
Thanks! There's a grimmer interpretation of the Hanania thing, which is that he's considered acceptable (by Yglesias/Smith types) because his biological loathing extends to the "white rabble" Trump leads. If you can plausibly claim to hate the whole of the supposed underclass, you're in with the techno-centrists.
I could see that perhaps. As this was all going down somebody just yesterday was claiming that according to Smith Wesley Yang of all people is a believer in the great replacement, which while totally hearsay would certainly add an interesting wrinkle to his development.
Yeah I saw that. I wonder...the problem with "the great replacement" is that libs do sometimes claim to be doing something like that, so I don't know what it means to be a believer in it. (As a child of the Reagan Democrats, I myself assume an equilibrium-setting number of immigrants' children will eventually become conservative, so I don't think there can be any such "replacement" in a political sense.)
I think in the strong form, that the technocratic elite encourage immigration to build up their political base, it makes no sense, because establishment dems could do a LOT more to encourage immigration. Obama deported 2.5 million people! He didn't need to do that. All those people would've given birth to voters.
I don't think anyone is long sighted enough to do that. And if they were they would find ways of directing the flow of immigrants to a small number of red states. Within twenty years, Wyoming would be blue!
In it's mild version, which is the idea that liberals are pleased that demographic changes might make the map harder for Republicans, it might be true that it's what some people want, but it's not backed up by policy, then what does it matter?
I hear you on that, although I think the libs usually claim that the kids of people who are already here will be doing the replacing (it’d probably be better if they didn’t make those claims, but I see the temptation.) If it’s true I wouldn’t have seen it coming with Yang, but then I didn’t see his gender critical turn coming either, I figured if anything he’d be one of those guys who’s just a bit too credulous about how incels and manosphere guys describe the “sexual marketplace” today.
This is great stuff John! Keep it up!
Thank you!
Young people no longer read, except contemporary ideology and short online news clips. Certainly they rarely read anything serious. Am I over-generalizing? Yes. Am I mostly right? I think so. Even when I belonged to a writing group in Manhattan a couple years ago when I asked people under 25 what they read they usually smirked and said ‘Read? I listen to podcasts.’ If more people read the classics (which all foretell our current dumb time) we wouldn’t be in the quagmire we’re in. Sad but true.
Michael Mohr
Sincere American Writing
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
The use of footnotes is so bombastically persuasive, love it. For the 21st century, I'd vote for Nádas' The Book of Memories, from 1986.
Thank you! I've heard mixed things about that one (Susan Sontag: "the greatest novel written in our time"; Michael Hofmann: "Proust? Ha!") but will keep it in mind.
It has the Sontag quote on the back, haha. I would say Sontag has a bias, which I share, towards central Europe. I don't know enough about Hofmann to judge, but perhaps he has the opposite (this is far too neat). I think it's the kind of novel in which you know by five page if it's going to upend your life or feel like a derivative version of Proust. For what it's worth, it is utterly visceral, utterly embodied and violently sensory (I think this is a characteristic of central European writing), which I think, despite certain appearances, is fundamentally unProustian.
Nothing like ludicrous honesty. You did also mention the best of reading selfishly: finding the stylistic eye of others and adapting it for your own prose also.
As to Burton: I was underwhelmed, though not enough to read her other novel whose name escapes me. Partly I don’t dig NYC socialite stories, and partly the novel felt too Ripley-derived. Mythic allusions gestured more than informed, which was disappointing (her religious themes via nonfiction are my primary interest). That said, she might have anticipated the downtown reactionary-aesthete vibe you can never seem to escape, which is a curiosity.
Thanks, I'll probably skip her novel (never even read Ripley, though I did see the movie...) As for the reactionary stuff, I like (though obviously I also disavow) the wholly baseless conspiracy theory that she's part of the movement secretly behind it:
https://grandhotelabyss.tumblr.com/post/723322715902181376/how-bronze-age-pervert-built-an-online-following
I appreciate how this essay pins together the paradox of artistic arrogance versus artistic humility. Writers (I think) need a certain base level of arrogance, not only to believe their work is good but also to decide what should inform it (what you call "justifiably not read any number of the infinitude of books in the library of Babel"), what their work should reject, and which influences should fill his/her limited reading time. And to this attitude, you add that the canon does have writers who became the source that informed all those subsequent—writers who deserve the examination of their descendants. That's a literary humility, to understand forebears even if (especially if) your work might upend them.
If I can turn my bloviating fire onto myself, I try to read well and widely both, if possible. But it is currently guided by the "self-contained aesthetic system" of the novel I'm writing, a system I expect will change in the future as I work through different projects. The current system is ever-more eclectic, as the novel expands: the works of Andrew Krivak, "The Gamekeeper" by Barry Hines, Faulkner, Barry Hannah's "Airships" collection, "God's Secret Providence" by John Calvin, "Henry von Ofterdingen" by Novalis, and a veritable seminar of Appalachian ecology. And then, for sheer pleasure, "Invisible Man," "Social Creature" by Tara Isabella Burton, and "Suttree." The novel becomes in part the spur to read.
Is this how you've read for/through/around Major Arcana?
Thanks! Yes, I agree on the interplay of arrogance and humility—you earn the arrogance when you know what you're talking about, not that anyone ever fully does.
My reading is ludicrously disorganized and always has been. I can't honestly even claim to have "researched" my doctoral dissertation, let alone a novel! I tend to pick up whatever book seems to be next for whatever reason. The only deliberate reading I did for Major Arcana was to reread a bunch of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore comics, which were helpful in creating the oeuvre of my fictional comics writer. I also read most of Colin Wilson's The Occult: A History, but, other than learning Tarot, I mostly "downloaded" the novel's occult content from YouTube, to be honest.
As far as stylistic models, reading 2666 this year—and Lawrence's Rainbow and Women in Love and (to an extent) Midnight's Children by Rushdie last year—were great helps, mostly by reminding me that there is no necessary conflict between realism and...whatever we want to call it, the other thing, the mythic, the supernatural, the magical. That there's really nothing the novel can't do. The good narrative parts of the Bible—Genesis, Samuel, Job—also helped with this. You can also learn it from Dickens, but not, alas, despite her other virtues, from Jane Austen.
I need to read that Novalis book—that and Penelope Fitzgerald—they're definitely on the endless list. How's Burton's novel? I find her nonfiction—I read some of Strange Rites and a bunch of her online articles—tepid prose on hot topics, but perhaps that's unfair, or perhaps she's a fiery novelist anyway.