Weekly Readings #82 (08/28/23-09/03/23)

writing having happened

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

This week I published my monthly reading round-up, August Books, with capsule reviews of several books of the Bible, Rachel Pollack’s famous treatise on Tarot, and novels by Susan Sontag, David Mitchell, and Thornton Wilder.

I also published “Black Sun,” the latest chapter in my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. Part Two of the novel has four chapters to go: four chapters in which to behold, at the turn of the millennium, the creation of the worlds-destroying graphic novel Overman 3000, the explosion of the love quadrangle comprised of its creators and their lovers, and the disclosure of the secrets of time and space through the use of synthetic drugs distributed by government agents. Then we will rejoin the 21st century to witness these events’ fallout among the younger generation in Part Three of the novel, itself a freestanding novella perhaps best described as “YA fiction qua gnostic gospel.” Please subscribe today!

For today, two pieces: a consideration of a recent call for “pop literature” and a briefer note, previously published to Tumblr, about the ironies of the artistic taste professed by “traditionalists.” Please enjoy!

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Haute Pop: On a New High-Low Literary Alliance

Kyōko Okazaki, Pink (1989)

I draw your attention to a new essay in n+1, a piece longtime readers wouldn’t necessarily expect me to endorse: “Toward Pop Literature: A Polemic” by Olivia Kan-Sperling.

Part of the essay is a review of a novel, Esther Yi’s Y/N, which I’ll probably never read because I am too distant from its subject matter (K-Pop fandom). Part of the essay is a complaint, well-done but familiar, against the “literary novel” of domestic and psychological realism—in this case because its form is not adequate to our media environment and because it is stylistically dull. In place of the literary novel’s dead poetics, Kan-Sperling proposes we turn to the textual heterogeneity, mediatic intricacy, and emotional fervor of fanfiction as our new model of high literature:

Y/N’s metatextual conceit is actually pretty tame compared to the Carollian inter- and intratextual games played out in many fanfictions, which frequently involve characters falling into or out of the books that constitute their “canon”—and sometimes even into other books or movies entirely (this is a “crossover”: Boo Radley marries Snape, for example). Fanfic writers like to augment their stories with even more citations, usually lyrics or quotes (attributed to people like Winston Churchill or “Anonymous”) that are interspersed with the primary fiction as emphatically heterogenous text elements. To take a semi-random sample: the first sentence of what is at the time of writing the most recently updated Naruto story on fanfiction.net, “Cerise 櫻桃” is prefaced by a dictionary definition—“Cerise (sərēs′ or sərēz′) is a deep to vivid reddish pink”—followed by an italicized, centered epigram—“Life is like cherries, sometimes sour, sometimes sweet”—followed by a haiku: “memories of leaves, / stare at the empty cup of / fragrant matcha tea.” The story proper begins with another definition, drenched in the pathos characteristic of the genre—“They named her Hisa. Ever-lasting. Ironic, she thinks, since she is destined to die at such a young age, surrounded by suffering and sorrow”—followed by some Japanese stock images: “A sakura blossom floats in the air, propelled by the oncoming gust of wind, which she catches in her palm, entranced.”¹

Kan-Sperling’s is a classic “Middle Against Both Ends” polemic. I refer to a 1955 essay by Leslie Fiedler about the midcentury moral panic over comic books. In the 1950s, comics were charged with causing juvenile delinquency and were accordingly burned in town squares and investigated by Congressional inquiry. Leading the outcry was Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist, left-liberal, and Frankfurt-School-adjacent German-Jewish critic of impeccable high-culture taste. His own polemic, Seduction of the Innocent,² charged comics, sometimes persuasively and sometimes not, with sadism and cruelty, sexism and racism, a Nietzsche-derived fixation on personal power reminiscent of Hitler, subliminal sexual messaging, and latent homoeroticism.³

For Fiedler, however, such a case, especially when carried by the expert mind-doctor to the popular “slick” magazines and thence to the suburban reading public, represents a middlebrow fear of art itself, one resembling the same mediocre culture’s hostility to experimental high art. Fiedler traces such middle-minded panics back to earlier outcries, like that of the Puritans against Shakespeare’s theater or of various grandees of official culture against the early novel—in both cases, we see instances of shockingly violent and sexual low culture that eventually joined the high-culture canon over the protest of timid souls whose idea of art is too polite and too devoted to what art can do for social order to have much in common with lusty types like Shakespeare or Fielding.⁴

Behind the opposition to vulgar literature, there is at work the same fear of the archetypal and the unconscious itself that motivated similar attacks on Elizabethan drama and on the 18th century novel. We always judge Gosson a fool in terms of Shakespeare; but this is not the point—he was just as wrong in his attack on the worst written, the most outrageously bloody and bawdy plays of his time. I should hate my argument to be understood as a defence of what is banal and mechanical and dull (there is, of course, a great deal!) in mass culture; it is merely a counter-attack against those who are aiming through that banality and dullness at what moves all literature of worth.

[…]

This same fear of the instinctual and the dark, this denial of death and guilt by the enlightened genteel, motivates their distrust of serious literature, too. Faulkner is snubbed and the comic books are banned, not in the interests of the classics or even of Robert Louis Stevenson, as the attackers claim, but in the name of a literature of the middle ground which finds its fictitious vision of a kindly and congenial world attacked from above and below.⁵

In other words, the dregs of pop culture and the icons of high modernism are natural allies against the merely respectable self-appointed custodians of institutional art. When Kan-Sperling calls for novelists to ally themselves with fanfictionists against today’s polite literature, with its own class bias toward social quiescence—

Novelists learn to write sentences that seem boring but are actually legible to editors as products of an MFA, like how old-money elites love to buy sweaters that look boring but secretly signal wealth to their peers.

—she updates Fiedler’s argument for our new media environment. Instead of comics, fanfiction; instead of pulp, online—but otherwise a cognate argument.

I find this mostly a welcome argument. The word “pop” may mislead readers into thinking this has something to do with the earlier “poptimism” of this century, when in fact Kan-Sperling’s polemic points in the opposite direction: away from mass-produced and toward homespun forms of popular culture. Poptimism ordered us to join in the mass applause of the already famous;⁶ “pop literature” enjoins us, by contrast, to take already circulating objects of mass desire and fashion idiosyncratic new creations from them.⁷ Kan-Sperling names Flaubert and Proust as canonical precedents, and could just as well have named Cervantes and Joyce. She accuses literary fiction of neglecting our actual culture in all the fractious complexity of its texture, and advocates instead a fiction compendious in diction and rhetoric, animated by love for the manifold beauty of the created world.

The flaw in this argument—or, to say it another way, the argument for the middlebrow—is that our culture is too fragmented for novels animated by niche interests to reach anything like a broader public. As aforesaid, I don’t feel qualified to read a K-Pop novel or even Naruto fanfiction (though, given the environment in which I teach, I move in a sort of all-pervasive atmosphere of Naruto fanfiction and feel I understand it by osmosis). The works Fiedler’s contemporary Dwight Macdonald scorned as middlebrow had in fact an obvious drive away from cultural specificity and toward the universal or fabulist, as in Thornton Wilder’s work or Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea.⁸ I think there is room in the world for such stories, and I have even defended their sensibility in recent weeks.⁹ I also, however, “like being reminded of writing having happened,” to quote Kan-Sperling’s defense of a maximalist and anti-finicky prose, and I share as well her seconding of Elaine Scarry’s theory that beauty inspires its own circulation in a kind of aesthetic-memetics. Serious art has nothing to do, exactly, with good taste.¹⁰

But I am finally interested in this polemic, this veritable manifesto, because I myself have inadvertently written a novel that answers its call, a novel about comic books and aesthetic blogs and YouTube channels, about the media we create and the media that creates us, and a novel more concerned with intensities than with niceties of style.¹¹ I didn’t set out to write “pop literature,” but write “pop literature” I have.

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Pissing in the Wind: A Note on a Traditionalist Folly

Just to review—for anyone who wasn’t following me two years ago—Raffaelle Monti’s Veiled Lady sculpture that traditionalists love so much, is 1. not classical or traditional but a piece of popular late Romanticism from the mid-19th century; 2. was thought gimmicky by critics at the time; and 3. was meant as a political statement in support of the Italian Risorgimento and its Enlightened republican ideals. Duchamp’s Fountain, with its critique of the complacency of the art institution, was by contrast a satirical iconoclastic gesture against the exhausted values of the then-elite. The Veiled Lady’s contemporary avatar is progressive didactic kitsch, therefore, while Fountain’s is the reactionary shitpost (or in this case, pisspost) with its viciously trolling memes.

1. Please note the terms in which this argument is not made: at no point does Kan-Sperling explicitly vindicate anything like a “female-coded” aesthetic or an aesthetic of “cultural diversity,” nor does she explicitly attack anything like a “white” or “male” aesthetic, though these terms are ready-to-hand and might have been the keynote of such a polemic had it been published five years ago. She makes one brief satirical comment on the class character of literary fiction, but otherwise proceeds without reference to identity politics—and I wonder if there really is an immense class divide between fanfictionists and other producer-consumers of literate matter. As with the survival of Richard Hanania as a mainstream commenter—I proposed this as a milestone a month ago—we are well past the peak of left-identitarian thinking. To the objection that it has become hegemonic in official institutions, I reply that this is what “past the peak” looks like for any movement: it has nowhere to go but down. As with yesterday’s fashions, tastemakers outside officialdom won’t be caught dead wearing it.

2. I wrote about Seduction of the Innocent here. I also fictionalized it—and somewhat heightened its context, argument, and rhetoric—in one parenthetical paragraph of Major Arcana. I present the paragraph here as a preview for anyone considering a paid subscription:

(Quips and raised eyebrows among the youthful readership aside, the accusation of superheroic pederasty was first made in public by Dr. Felix Aaronsohn in the book that incited the moral panic against comic books in the 1950s: Altar to Moloch. Felix Aaronsohn was a German-Jewish psychoanalyst who’d been reared in the kultur-worshiping assimilated haute bourgeoisie, his sensibility shaped by Goethe, Schiller, and Heine, by Mozart, Bach, and Mendelssohn. From the shameful safety of America, where he’d gone to complete his doctorate, he witnessed the vaporization of his natal society in an orgy of sadistic irrationalism—three uncles, two aunts, and four cousins dead in the camps; his parents only just escaped to Australia. He thought, this fastidious and bespectacled doctor with a white mustache and a bronze bust of Goethe in the corner of his office, that he recognized intimations of the same psychopathic imago in the lurid and misspelled little stapled pamphlets his disturbed young patients carried with them into his clinic, carried in their sticky little dirty-fingernailed delinquent hands. Horror stories rife with mutilation and rotting ghouls, crime tales whose gangsters drove hot skewers into stool-pigeons’ eyes, and even the superficially folkloric hero-legends connoting the morass of terror from which the world had only just in the years since the war emerged—from which half his family had not emerged. Overman? Where had he heard that before? Ratman’s dandling his little red-suited Ganymede on his knee was small fry compared to what the overmen would do—had done—to the undermen, but this perversion didn’t escape his notice either. Hadn’t Goethe’s Mephistopheles exhibited the same pathic desire? Hence Altar to Moloch and all that followed: the comic-book pyres in the small-town squares—Felix Aaronsohn had to admit, if only to himself, that he’d seen that before, too—and the congressional inquiry and the publishers’ self-censorship, a censorship only beginning to lift until, years after Felix Aaronsohn’s death, Simon Magnus tore the whole decorous curtain down out of the proscenium’s high reaches with The Fool’s epochal act of sodomy. An interviewer asked Simon Magnus what Simon Magnus thought of Felix Aaronsohn once. “The trouble with a psychologist,” Simon Magnus had replied, “is that evil isn’t only all in our heads. It’s out there somewhere, too. If it were only all in our heads, there would be some point in not talking about it, but since it isn’t, it’s more obscene to ignore it than to show it. Art is one of the few places left in our society where it can be shown.”)

3. The anti-racism and anti-sexism next to the homophobia will puzzle contemporary readers, but it was in line with the Freudo-Marxist leftism of the midcentury, according to which homosexuality represented a pathic turn from normative desire brought about by capitalism’s distortion of the human and leading to fascism’s overcompensation for masculine insufficiency. For the canonical expression of this left-homophobia, see the aphorism “Tough Baby” in Adorno’s Minima Moralia:

In Oxford one can differentiate between two kinds of students: the “tough guys” and the intellectuals; the latter are equated almost without further ado to those who are effeminate. There is a great deal of evidence that the ruling class polarizes itself according to these extremes on the road to dictatorship. Such disintegration is the secret of integration, of happiness of unity in the absence of happiness. In the end the “tough guys” are the ones who are really effeminate, who require the weaklings as their victims, in order not to admit that they are like them. Totality and homosexuality belong together.

Whether such contradictions exist in enlightened thinking today, I will leave to your own judgment, except to say that some—I do not say all—instances of the medicalization and surgicalization of gender-nonconforming youth probably partakes of a similar bias toward an unttainably perfect order in the realm of eros: an expert wish on behalf of inexpert youth to have their gender sensibility and their sexual identity in total alignment.

4. A good example of Wertham’s middling insensibility to the cruelty and sadism of high culture, one Fielder doesn’t mention, is the good doctor’s famous objection to what he calls “the injury-to-the-eye” motif in comics:

The injury-to-the-eye motif is an outstanding example of the brutal attitude cultivated in comic books—the threat or actual infliction of injury to the eyes of a victim, male or female. This detail, occurring in uncounted instances, shows perhaps the true color of crime comics better than anything else. It has no counterpart in any other literature of the world, for children or for adults.

In that last sentence, our Freudian analyst has startlingly repressed his memory of two of the most famous plays in world literature: Oedipus Rex and King Lear.

5. Fiedler’s objections against timorous censoring school boards and against the conspiracy theory of mass culture, according to which it is foisted on our innocence against our will by the rich, remain relevant as well, the first point against cultural conservatives, the second against a certain style of socialist. In my own view, the school boards have the right, but should generally be mocked, while the problem with corporate culture is less that it’s corrupting than that it’s often uninteresting.

6. She credits “pop literature” with a critical rather than automatically celebratory attitude toward mass culture, answering critics of fanfiction that it upholds consumerism:

It doesn’t necessarily entail an uncritical love of mass culture or consumerism, but it embraces these forms—and art, and writing itself—as vital parts of human and therefore literary experience. The form is ironic in that it hinges on creating a difference internal to its subject, on alienating us from familiar names and images.

Likewise, celebrating fanfiction on stylistic grounds, rather than the customary academic sociological argument about its democratic or anarchic social character, allows the argument to maintain a formalist dignity against credulous political claims that pop is radical.

7. “Poptimism,” along with its antagonist “rockism,” came formally to a conclusion earlier this year with an article in the New Statesman exalting Lana Del Rey as “a great American poet” and heir to Bob Dylan. A pop chanteuse execrated upon her debut (in “rockist” terms) as an inorganic confection of the music industry is now hailed (in similar “rockist” terms) as a bard legitimately expressing the condition of our civilization. Here we find a synthesis: the mutual legitimation of rockist aesthetic standards and poptimist aesthetic objects by their mutual assimilation one to the other. And while I once compared Lana Del Rey, early in her career, to William Shakespeare, it matters more to compare her to Bob Dylan.

8. Kan-Sperling never uses the word “middlebrow.” She does once name her target “organic literature,” in contrast to what David Foster Wallace called “image-fiction,” that is, fiction based on circulating cultural imagery rather than a fantasy of the authentic. I suspect she may also have intended “organic” to connote the fastidious sensibility of the Whole Foods consumer, unwilling to undergo the more general shopper’s inevitable and transformative process of adulteration by inorganic substances. See also Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, whose thesis statement, “Surgery is the new sex,” may be taken as a critique of my final sentence in footnote three above.

9. I was defending David Mitchell, however, who probably answers Kan-Sperling’s call for “pop literature” more than any other important living literary novelist this side of Pynchon. His entire second novel is Murakami fanfiction. Moreover, his novels often include paragraphs of rhyme, as well as wild changes in diction, shameless indulgence in sentiment, and manifest pop-culture influence and allusion. In his public persona, he exhibits cheerful enthusiasm toward all his favorite works and unashamedly concedes his influences. If he is middlebrow, then this more than anything may suggest that the midcentury “brow” system just doesn’t apply to our more heterogenous period.

10. Along with Pynchon, whom Kan-Sperling mentions, DeLillo is another proto-pop-literatus, as Christian Lorentzen reminds us this week in the revived Bookforum, celebrating DeLillo’s now Library of America-enshrined great period (1982-1997) and celebrating especially this period’s first work, The Names, which turns the sediment of imperial language into a language of free creative reinvention:

Language and alphabets are the remnants of conquest, and the old names that go with the cults’ murders are remnants of dead empires. Owen and Frank are similarly transfixed, the one with his memories of plains mysticism, the other as a representative of a counterculture whose antagonism to the system was once without ambiguity. These variations on American unknowing, animated within a book whose tissue is DeLillo’s lyrical descriptions of the Greek landscape and points east, give the novel its power. A character refers to Europe as the “hardcover,” America as “the paperback version,” and India—not yet ushered into the regime of modernity, mass literacy, and the nascent world of computers and telexes, still governed by oral traditions—as “not even a book.” The Names glimpses these contrasts in simultaneous anachronism. It is to Axton and Kathryn’s son Tap that the future belongs. He spends most of his time imagining a lost American past, writing a historical novel about Owen’s prairie boyhood, full of misspellings.

11. I’ll supply some of Kan-Sperling’s missing identity politics. I’ve quoted this passage before, but Hegel, in his Aesthetics, associated a heterogenous and passionate style with points south and/or east of Germany and/or Greece: with the French, Italians, Arabs, and Persians, if not quite with the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, to whom he hadn’t directed his attention:

And, as a general rule, Southern nations, such as the Spaniards and the Italians, and previously to them the Mohammedan Arabs and Persians, are conspicuous for a wealth and tedious prolixity of image and simile. With the ancients, more especially in the case of Homer, the flow of expression is characterized by smoothness and tranquillity. With the nations above mentioned, on the contrary, we have a vision of life gushing forth in a flood which, even where the emotions are in other respects at rest, is ever intent upon expatiation, and owing to this expressly volitional effort of the will is dominated by an intelligence which at one time is visible in abrupt parentheses, at another in subtle generalization, at another in the playful conjunction of its sallies of wit and humour.

As my late grandmother would have said, could she have read Hegel, “O Madonna!”