Weekly Readings #79 (08/07/23-08/13/23)

mountains are mountains, waters are waters

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

This week I published “Oceanopolis,” the most recent chapter of Major Arcana, my serialized novel for paid subscribers. The novel has now moved to the West Coast for the creation of the graphic novel that will help to transform 21st-century popular culture—and nearly destroy its creators’ lives in the process. All this and a psychedelic parapolitical dimension, too! This Wednesday, the collaboration between Simon Magnus and Marco Cohen begins, as the writer and the artist, the mage and the iconoclast, wander where the surf crashes the shore and together, if at war with one another, conceive Overman 3000. If the metatext and the subtext aren’t clear enough, let me spell out that I intend a parallel transformation of the 21st-century novel—one adjusted by love, this to avoid my characters’ Faustian fates. You wouldn’t want to miss that, so lease subscribe today!

For today’s newsletter, a wide-ranging, not to say “rambling,” reflection on whether critics should change their minds and on what’s so bad about the middlebrow. Please enjoy!

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Statues and Critics, Mountains and Waters: Middlebrow at It Again

Should critics change their minds? Despite the frequent attempt to place criticism on the same level as art itself, beginning in earnest (as it were) with Wilde, our outrage when critics prove changeable suggests that we hold critic and artist to different standards.

The artist is supposed to change. I almost wrote “to develop,” but even lateral moves, not obviously assimilable to a narrative of progress, are welcome.

If you knew nothing about Virginia Woolf and read To the Lighthouse, you’d never guess that Orlando was coming next. But even a change as drastic as that seems like exploration, not repudiation. We don’t read Orlando’s rollicking magical realism and imagine that she meant by it to disown the almost static inwardness of To the Lighthouse. We say with admiration that she contains multitudes; we celebrate her for exploring the manifold possibilities of her nature.

The critic receives no such generosity—not even when critic and artist are the same person. Not everybody does welcome the shift from the imaginative, expansive, subtle cultural criticism of A Room of One’s Own proclaiming the advent of the androgynous artists to the more brittle polemic of Three Guineas according to which Nazism is morally equivalent to English domestic life. The one book is a major classic of criticism, belonging to humanity, the other much more minor, the sectarian property of a certain type of political radical.

Critic-turned-artist Susan Sontag amusingly cites the line attributed to Sibelius somewhere in her breakthrough novel, The Volcano Lover, “They don’t build statues of critics.”¹ This is because critics are supposed to be statues already, frozen monuments to rectitude presiding over and shaming the landscape. Criticism’s goal is “the correction of taste,” said poet-critic Eliot—a line so presumptuous it makes me want to throw eggs at the statue.

Protest instead that criticism is itself an art mobile as fiction or poetry, similarly justified as a performance of constant vitality, and you will be lectured about the responsibilities of the public commentator. I discussed this on my Eminent Americans appearance and will in fact be discussing it on an upcoming podcast. I quote from the preface to Against Interpretation and Other Essays:

Before I wrote the essays I did not believe many of the ideas espoused in them; when I wrote them, I believed what I wrote; subsequently, I have come to disbelieve some of these same ideas again—but from a new perspective, one that incorporates and is nourished by what is true in the argument of the essays.

Never mind that this describes the process of dialectical understanding as described by Hegel—if I understand it properly, the Hegelian dialectic at once cancels and preserves all partial truths as authentic moments in the unfolding of total truth—or even recalls Dōgen’s famous lines, lines so famous that even I know them:

Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.²

Never mind all that—can’t the critic just make up her mind? But the peregrination of thought is itself the lesson, rather than any of thought’s temporary resting places.

I raise the question out of self-consciousness. I’ve left a long enough paper trail as artist-critic by now for anyone minimally attentive to see that the accounts don’t quite balance. I could say with Sontag—or with the Woolf who wrote Three Guineas at the outset of the Second World War rather than in the ebullient ’20s, when she wrote A Room of One’s Own—that I had to change as the context changed, that what seemed reasonable in one set of political and economic circumstances no longer seems reasonable in another.³

I am primarily concerned here with an artistic shift, not a political one.⁴ Artistically, I will concede I was once much friendlier to a certain style of European-derived late modernism I now follow the Sontag of The Volcano Lover in seeing as a dead end, at least for the American novel. I was once a greater admirer than I am now of Beckett, of Bernhard, of Coetzee. I once thought it was philistine to object to the limited emotional range or narrowness of technical achievement in such work, whereas now I find it a more substantive charge in the age of anhedonic prose and autofiction. I have even gradually become less ready to use “middlebrow” in the pejorative, or even in the descriptive, given the online leveling of the brow system into nothingness. I have been ready to concede the power of popular fictions from Dune to The Secret History, willing to allow that overt formal experiment is not the only measure of literary worth—or, more precisely, that such experimentation can be found at a conceptual level above the sentence, that “beauty” in a novel is an emergent property of complex design. My tastes haven’t changed that much—I still think certain novels I once scorned as painfully middlebrow, such as Ragtime and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Bone Clocks (more of Mitchell in a moment)—are pretty bad. I still think novels should have enough conceptual power to call into question the received wisdom of the dominant order, at least implicitly, rather than piously enforcing it.

And yet—brace yourselves for the coming contortion by which I may seem to pay myself a compliment in the guise of painful self-criticism—I sometimes find myself in the odd position of wanting to apologize that my novel-in-progress is too readable, too entertaining. As a writer of fiction, I have always sympathized with the Hawthorne who wrote, in the Preface to “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” about the awkwardness of being neither a popular nor an avant-garde writer (he writes about himself humorously in the third person, in the guise of a French writer named M. de l’Aubépine, which translates to “hawthorn”):

As a writer, he seems to occupy an unfortunate position between the Transcendentalists (who, under one name or another, have their share in all the current literature of the world) and the great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude. If not too refined, at all events too remote, too shadowy, and unsubstantial in his modes of development to suit the taste of the latter class, and yet too popular to satisfy the spiritual or metaphysical requisitions of the former, he must necessarily find himself without an audience, except here and there an individual or possibly an isolated clique.

Is this middlebrow problem a universal American condition, well before the digital leveling of culture, a nation in which the beggar in the alley and the CEO in the penthouse are both culturally middle-class? In To the Finland Station, a book meant to introduce Marxism to American readers, Edmund Wilson, himself then a Marxist, explains that this universally middle-class state is why Marxism doesn’t really apply in this country:

What Karl Marx had no clue for understanding was that the absence in the United States of the feudal class background of Europe would have the effect not only of facilitating the expansion of capitalism but also of making possible a genuine social democratization; that a community would grow up and endure in which the people engaged in different occupations would probably come nearer to speaking the same language and even to sharing the same criteria than anywhere else in the industrialized world. […] In other words, Marx was incapable of imagining democracy at all.⁵

For the aforementioned Virginia Woolf—who only achieved bestseller status with the aforementioned Orlando, despite the celebration in the more recondite Mrs. Dalloway of an imminent “shift in” if not collapse of “the whole pyramidal accumulation” that is the social order—the pejorative “middlebrow” named not any particular book but a way of relating to culture as a signal of one’s taste and status, though her epistolary essay on the topic is so complexly tongue-in-cheek that I suspect it’s a reductio ad absurdum of the whole brow scheme, including highbrow paranoia about succumbing the middlebrow:

But all I can say is that when, lapsing into that stream which people call, so oddly, consciousness, and gathering wool from the sheep that have been mentioned above, I ramble round my garden in the suburbs, middlebrow seems to me to be everywhere. “What’s that?” I cry. “Middlebrow on the cabbages? Middlebrow infecting that poor old sheep? And what about the moon?” I look up and, behold, the moon is under eclipse. “Middlebrow at it again!” I exclaim. “Middlebrow obscuring, dulling, tarnishing and coarsening even the silver edge of Heaven's own scythe.” (I “draw near to poetry,” see advt.) And then my thoughts, as Freud assures us thoughts will do, rush (Middlebrows saunter and simper, out of respect for the Censor) to sex, and I ask of the sea-gulls who are crying on desolate sea sands and of the farm hands who are coming home rather drunk to their wives, what will become of us, men and women, if Middlebrow has his way with us, and there is only a middle sex but no husbands or wives? The next remark I address with the utmost humility to the Prime Minister. “What, sir,” I demand, “will be the fate of the British Empire and of our Dominions Across the Seas if Middlebrows prevail?”

But it’s not really the almost criminal addictivity of Major Arcana’s prose that brings on this bout of critical hypochondria; it was, rather, all the talk of David Mitchell last week, talk that’s led me to revisit his work and read what I haven’t read so far (I’m currently on Ghostwritten, his first). I have thought for over a decade that Mitchell might be the most important Anglophone novelist of the 21st century—not the best, but the most important, and the most important because the most representative. This is the subtext of an essay I wrote in 2016 called “Is David Mitchell the William Faulkner of the 21st Century?”—an analogy somewhat distorted by Faulkner’s greater eminence, if not his own typicality.

Almost every shift in literary culture and even culture at large is encapsulated in Mitchell’s work, not just taken one work at a time but in its own shifts over the years: the total collapse of the hierarchy between realistic and fantastical fiction; the trans-Pacific centrality of Japan and Korea to western popular media; the Anglophone novel’s awakening to its place in a network of global translated fiction as well as of mass- and multi-media narrative; the literati’s moralized obsession with imminent environmental apocalypse; and the broad shift from a postmodern skepticism of all grand narratives to a posthuman grand narrative where networked knowledge resists evil. He’s missed only the autofiction, though even here, he did write an autobiographical novel (I haven’t read it yet) after three highly stylized epics, almost as a joke on the typical progress of a writer from autobiographical first novel to more expansive later work. Moreover, the exceedingly well-read Mitchell is provocatively middlebrow, as he announced in his Paris Review interview:

We studied Our Town at school when I was fifteen. It was one of the first works of literature that moved me. It implanted a distrust of the distinction between high-, middle-, and lowbrow books. For me, the distinction between excellent and engaging and the less so is more useful.⁶

The subtext here is that Our Town was one of Dwight Macdonald’s chief exhibits of middlebrow art in his famous “Masscult and Midcult” essay of 1960:

Our Town’s combination of quaintness, earthiness, humor, pathos, sublimity (all mild) is precisely Rockwell’s, and the situations are curiously alike: puppy love at the soda fountain, wives gossiping over the back fence, decent little funeral directors under the pines, country editor, family doctor, high-school baseball hero, all running in their well-worn grooves. What gives the play class, raising it into Midcult, are the imaginary props and sets and the interlocutory stage manager, devices Mr. Wilder got from the Chinese theater (he always gets them from somewhere). Brecht used similar devices to get his “alienation effect,” to keep the audience from being hypnotized by the stage illusion—an original and hence shocking idea. But Mr. Wilder has nothing artistically subversive in mind…

To announce your love of Our Town in the Paris Review, epicenter of CIA modernism, is like a person polemically DoorDashing some Olive Garden into Le Bernardin.⁷ To return to one’s teenage love of Our Town: is this what it means for mountains to once again be mountains, waters to once again be waters? “The Midcult mind aspires toward Universality above all,” Macdonald announces with jeering capitalization; in his famously globe-spanning universality, then, Mitchell thus finally anticipates serious fiction’s acceptance of its mission to preach universal values to the laity rather than following its own genius even to ambiguous or straightforwardly anti-social extremes (Woolf, on the other hand: “We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like,” no aspiration to universality involved).

Like Woolf sauntering and simpering among the cabbages, then, I can’t help but worry about my own conviction that, to save itself in our time, the novel should go big again. Don’t we risk what Macdonald would scorn as vapid universalism, the high-handed crypto-polemic of the condescending liberal preacher? (Woolf to the lowbrow: “how can you let the middlebrows teach you how to write?…how dare the middlebrows teach you how to read?”)

On the one hand, Macdonald’s deference to Brecht is almost touching. I expect no revolutionary effects from art of any sort, or no positive ones anyway, so I have no fear of falling into mere liberalism, as if this were not always the fate of an English or American writer anyway (it’s probably better, with Sontag, just to leap into that volcano). On the other hand, Macdonald’s point about risking quaintness tricked out with surface effects borrowed from those with less compromising visions⁸—this bears keeping in mind, and explains, I believe, the transition from a book like Cloud Atlas to one like The Bone Clocks. The mountains and waters are mountains and waters—but not exactly the same mountains and waters. If they’re the same mountains and waters, you’ve done something wrong.

How my own work will be received is not finally up to me; I would only ask those who find it suspiciously readable to keep in mind, as I said above, that a novel’s aesthetic significance, that its very beauty, arises not primarily from this sentence or that one, but from the totality of its architecture. Out of many a humble stone, I may turn out to have raised the most monstrous of cathedrals.

1. I may have hallucinated this because I can’t find the reference even with a pirated ebook, so file it under “too good to check.” The original quotation, by the way—“Never pay any attention to what critics say. Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!”—is from Jean Sibelius. Sibelius is apparently one of David Mitchell’s favorite composers: he said to an interviewer once, aptly admitting the failure of his own critical intellect in the presence of great art, “Why does Sibelius’s Andante Festivo just, whoosh! do that to the hairs on my forearm—no idea, but it does” (Contemporary Critical Perspectives: David Mitchell, eds. Wendy Knepper and Courtney Hopf [2019]).

2. I don’t know Zen, but I’ve always found this a good description of the process of really coming to know a work of art. It’s commonly claimed that knowledge ruins art appreciation, but this is only the second stage in a three-part process, one the apprentice should outgrow before the age of about 30. You read Jane Austen once and get caught up in the love story; you read her again and discover that she served the imperial interests of the English middle class (or, to cite a different kind of knowledge, discover what she owes to invariable psychological laws of narrative genre); you read her a third time and appreciate all over again with what aplomb she transfigured the limited interests of her class (and the limited conventions of her genre) into world-encompassing art where almost every attentive reader can find some place. The notorious “midwit” is one who gets permanently stuck on the second stage, whining, “Actually it’s about imperialism,” or, “Actually, it’s an artistic illustration of human mating behavior,” at anyone who expresses enjoyment. Such a pedant never arrives back from knowledge to pleasure, like someone hysterically unable to swallow food after having seen a diagram of the digestive system. (More on problems with the mid-range intellect in the main text shortly.)

3. It’s never clear how conscious a calculation such changes are, even at the purely artistic level. Sontag published her popular romance The Volcano Lover in 1992, the same year Cormac McCarthy published his, All the Pretty Horses, and both books allowed both authors to hit the bestseller lists for the first time in their lives, each of them having retreated from a forbidding high-modernist ideal of authorship to accommodate the shift in publishing described with reference to McCarthy here. Is this “selling out,” exactly? I don’t like when artists sell out either, but in practice there’s a thin line between cynically adjusting oneself to the market and earnestly seeking readers.

4. I maintain that there’s been very little shift in my political views, certainly less than there ever was in Sontag’s, who went from “the white race is the cancer of human history” to “I might be called by a certain stretch a liberal imperialist.” What’s shifted is the broader political connotation of both certain political issues and certain political dispositions. But my disgust with imperial technocracy has never wavered from the War on Terror to the pandemic—I connect the two here—even if it means that I was once labeled “far left” and published in far-left venues and am now called “center right” and publish in center-right venues. The left-right labels won’t stick because the axis in this case is the libertarian-to-totalitarian one that cuts clean across the left-right divide. In fact, I’ve maintained a liberal hostility to liberal imperialism precisely because I never let myself get too hung up about race, a fiction effective enough that you can’t totally neglect it but also an engineered mind-virus that will destroy your consciousness if you permit it to dominate your thinking.

5. “What about the culture war?” you will inquire. “Is it not precisely a class war between the cultures of different classes?” First, it’s less a war between classes than a war between wings of the middle class, and, second, as it’s a contest over which culture should prevail as middle-class culture, it doesn’t disprove Wilson’s point. As I once wrote somewhere, we are not divided but united by the culture war—it’s our way of speaking the same language rather than acceding to caste division.

6. I studied Our Town at the same age and was similarly moved, for whatever it’s worth. (I still have to read Mitchell’s favorite, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.) What should students read in high school, anyway? This is the question currently consuming us. As friend-of-the-blog Christopher Lasch’s Angry Ghost observes, the works being ushered out of the curriculum to make way for diversity were themselves brought into the curriculum for their “relevance,” for the very humanism Macdonald scorns: not only Wilder but also Steinbeck and Harper Lee, who now appear to be patronizing white liberals or worse rather than champions of authentic progress. Literary concerns were therefore never paramount in pedagogy; when it comes to education, aesthetics is equivalent to indoctrination. This is probably unavoidable; best just to read books out of school as well as in school. On the other hand, Wilder was a gentle introduction, when I was in the ninth grade, to sophisticated techniques that better writers used with more force. If I hadn’t read Steinbeck, would I have found my way to Faulkner? (Steinbeck is good, by the way—Mitchell also lists him as favorite here. In combining novelistic naturalism with Biblical epic and Transcendental essayism in The Grapes of Wrath, he achieves a genuinely original synthesis not reducible to a middlebrow “classing up” of lowbrow content. It may fall short of Faulkner at his best, but it’s a difference of degree rather than kind. The fact that the novel’s Popular Front leftism now reads to contemporary leftists as very nearly fascistic in its treatment of race and gender should free us up to recognize its aesthetic merit, since, politically, it no longer has any merit at all.)

7. A fancy restaurant in New York. I googled “fanciest restaurant in New York” and of the ones that came up it had the fanciest name. I only eat at low- and middlebrow restaurants myself.

8. Norman Fucking Rockwell, though, was a socialist realist.