Weekly Readings #84 (09/11/23-09/17/23)

spells and the keys to spells

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

This week I published “Against Life,” the 17th and perhaps the most harrowing chapter of Part Two of Major Arcana, my serialized novel for paid subscribers. In the coming weeks, Part Two of this four-part narrative will come to its conclusion with a pair of chapters narrating the melancholy aftermath of Chapter 17 before Part Three leaps into the current century to examine the effects on the next generation.

Over on Tumblr, I also posted a free excerpt from Part One on the occasion of 9/11’s 22nd anniversary. Also on Tumblr, a longtime reader wrote to say, and modesty would otherwise forbid me from quoting this generous paragraph except for the recommendation,

(As always, thank you for everything you do. I genuinely believe that you’ve generously shared over the years, conservatively, 100,000 words entirely for free, and as a dedicated reader, I wholeheartedly encourage everyone to subscribe to your serialized masterpiece on Substack. Alternatively, on behalf of his Stendhalian “lucky few,” or at the very least, on behalf of the fate of the modern novel—who will step up to be John’s Harriet Shaw Weaver?)¹

Who indeed? Noah Kumin recently proposed Grimes as my patroness—from his lips to her surgically elf’d-up ears. In the meantime, please subscribe today!

Anyway, for today’s post, a long follow-up to last week’s brief Hermann Hesse discourse, with a few speculations on his current literary standing in a world seemingly ripe for his revival. Please enjoy!

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The Music of Life: Hesse and Magical Modernism

William A. Edwards, Demian, Bantam Modern Classic (1968)

“Any thoughts on Hesse?” I was asked recently. I decided to acquire some. This week I read or reread Siddhartha, after my high-school perusal, and read Demian for the first time. My motives for reading Demian in particular,² as I wrote earlier, are as follows: 1. it’s the main novelistic inspiration for Moto Hagio’s controversial manga The Heart of Thomas, which I sometimes teach and am teaching again this semester;³ 2. I have a copy of it that was once owned and annotated by the renowned scholar Jack Zipes, a psychedelic paperback from 1968 with his name written on the inside cover.⁴

1968: though revered (and Nobel’d) alongside Thomas Mann among 20th-century German writers, Hesse became popular in America with the counterculture, even as the counterculture itself echoed modernist themes from pre-war Europe interrupted by their disastrous implementation in or perversion as a fascist cult of irrationalism and yet hardly appeased by the postwar period’s deadeningly administered society.

Siddhartha in particular inspired the ’60s generation and their legatees, including my own ’90s generation. It is a parabolic historical novella—“An Indian Poem,” says the subtitle—about a Brahmin’s quest for meaning and identity through long life passages of asceticism, sybaritism, and back again. The narrative enjoins its readers that life itself is an endless quest whose destination is finally having had and having relinquished every type of experience encompassed in the Brahmin’s meditative Om.

Published in modernism’s annus mirabilis of 1922, Siddhartha echoes the half-Buddhist ecumenicalism of Eliot’s Waste Land, and, while narrating a much longer time-span in a much briefer textual compass, even recalls Joyce’s commitment to the sheer kaleidoscopic variety of human experience. Despite its Buddhist coloration, its final Buddhist advocacy of a shining detachment from appetite, Siddhartha, in its dramatization of a man’s attempt to become who he is, finally intimates with Nietzsche that life can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, that the aesthete’s final attitude, too, is one of detached wonder at the mystery of the all. It seems much more meaningful to me now than when I was a teenager—and Hesse, by the way, was four years older than I am currently when he wrote it.

Demian, which Mann in his foreword to the novel compares to The Sorrows of Young Werther for its impact on German youth upon publication in 1919, tells a similar story updated for Hesse’s present. Narrated retrospectively by young Emil Sinclair—Hesse initially published the novel under this name—it tells of a bourgeois youth reared in piety and respectability, yet drawn to what he calls “the other world” (yes, he calls it “the other world”) of sin and transgression. Eventually he meets the titular Max Demian and eventually Max’s mother Eva, a pair of quasi-supernal androgynes who teach him to harness his deep will and access his highest self, and who school him in the gnostic myth of Abraxas, the god who contains both good and evil, this as opposed to Christian orthodoxy’s solely benevolent deity.

While I found Demian in its brevity rather thinly imagined compared to the rich exoticism of Siddhartha, it lives on its heraldic images, particularly the two paintings Sinclair makes: one of the androgynous Demian and the other, a dream-image, of a sparrow hawk pecking its way out of a confining world-egg. The latter crystallizes the novel’s gnostic myth of the soul’s struggle to escape the prison of the mundane.

I admire both of these novels—I find Demian in particular to be a rather shocking anticipation of Part Three of Major Arcana, down to the hothouse adolescent friendship, the gender trouble, and the manifestation coaching—and I wonder why they, or at least Demian, aren’t currently as fashionable among youth as they were in the 1960s.

Don’t the kids today love nothing more than a slim, depressing, foreign, existentialist novel from the early- to mid-20th century? We saw the Kafka TikTok phenomenon recently, and I beheld with my own eyes this summer a BookTok display table at a massive suburban Barnes and Noble, with No Longer Human sitting right there in a nest of Colleen Hoover novels (all of these books are pink, but one encourages you in subliterate prose to leave your abusive relationship while the other suggests in stark modernist styling that, actually, you might as well just kill yourself). Kafka and Dazai don’t address TikTok’s other major concern, however, which is how to manifest your desires, the way Hesse explicitly does in Demian:⁵

“What is all this about the will?” I asked. “On the one hand, you say our will isn’t free. Then again you say we only need to concentrate our will firmly on some end in order to achieve it. It doesn’t make sense. If I’m not master of my own will, then I’m in no position to direct it as I please.”

He patted me on the back as he always did when he was pleased with me.

“Good that you ask,” he said, laughing. “You should always ask, always have doubts. But the matter is very simple. If, for example, a night-moth were to concentrate its will on flying to a star or on some equally unattainable object, it wouldn’t succeed. Only—it wouldn’t even try in the first place. A moth confines its search to what has sense and value for it, on what it needs, what is indispensable to its life. And that's how a moth achieves the incredible—it develops a magic sixth sense, which no other creature has. We have a wider scope, greater variety of choice, and wider interests than an animal. But we, too, are confined to a relatively narrow compass which we cannot break out of. If I imagined that I wanted under all circumstances to get to the North Pole, to achieve it I would have to desire it strongly enough so that my whole being was ruled by it. Once that is the case, once you have tried something that you have been ordered to do from within yourself, then you’ll be able to accomplish it, then you can harness your will to it like an obedient nag.”⁶

And yet I searched TikTok for Hesse and found mostly videos in Spanish, some in German and French, but very few in English. The tedious prohibition on “Orientalism”—one sees what Said meant, of course, but the casual wielding of this concept has caused more harm than good, sealed cultures off from one another—probably means that Siddhartha will never again be as ubiquitous as it once was. Still, I propose, mainly as a way of building a taste for Major Arcana, that we hyperstition Demian into a newfound prominence. Let’s get Hesse trending.

If the time when a revived modernism could credibly be paired with a revived socialism seems to have passed, let us try to pair a revived modernism with a revived occultism. And if this strikes you as dubious, please bear in mind that we already have the occultism—that the modernism could only temper its excess, precisely as it does in the stately and immensely dignified tale-teller’s sentences of Siddhartha.

And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.

1. Another reader wrote to ask about how I would recommend my work to readers wary of contemporary literature:

I believe, like many writers, you've written that you often refrain from reading newly published fiction for 5 or 10 years after the initial release to separate the wheat from the chaff, waiting to see what endures and transcends its original context. However, when it comes to your own new work, what message would you convey to prospective readers? What sets your work apart, making it worthy of immediate attention? What is it doing differently with the form, etc.?

I will excerpt my answer here for anyone considering a paid subscription. My novels aim, I wrote, for an aesthetic synthesis most novelists seem to have abandoned, a now-rare combination of elements long since precipitated out into divergent marketing categories, however their spiritual union was taken for granted by modern writers from Dante and Shakespeare to McCarthy and Morrison: formal invention, verbal stylishness, unique characters, architectural plots, intellectual provocation, and emotional rapture—all this plus a fearless raid on as much of the present as I can manage in a literary period timidly focused on the mere self, the vanished past, or hollow fantasy.

2. I also mentioned one parasocial reason for wanting to read Hesse in general: I’ve listened to the Art of Darkness podcast a lot this year, largely as a kind of moodboard for my novel-in-progress about a scandalous occultist writer, and I even went to their live event (they’re semi-local) and met them, and the hosts speak very highly of Hesse, and often. I have another parasocial reason, though, which I haven’t mentioned yet.

Foe-of-the-blog Ryan Ruby recently disparaged Hesse as fit only for adolescents. Counterintuitively, this dismissive attitude toward all things that can be stigmatized as “adolescent” has, I believe, helped to drive the “kidult” trend where nominal adults read children’s books, go to Disney World, and generally indulge in jejune pastimes like caring too much about video games and the like. “Adolescence” names the ambition, not yet chastened by brutal reality, to escape childishness, to discover wider and wider circles of meaning, more and more intense forms of experience. I understand the urge to mock the more naive or literal versions of this jailbreak from the playpen, including the ones handed down whole from corporations and intelligence agencies, as for example in profitably vapid youth cultures or in the dubious vogue for “finding oneself,” for the destructive “mid-life crisis,” and such, but to mock it tout court, and in the name no less of some overly language-focused and therefore overly scholastic version of late modernist literature, is to forget what a novel like Siddhartha teaches, namely, that the quest to live fully, that Bildung itself, never ceases on this side of the grave—that adolescence is only the first stage of an ongoing inner transfiguration. Forget this insight you first had when you were 14, and you risk remaining 10 forever; if you kill adolescence, you will be left not with adults but with permanent children.

As for “foe of the blog,” I jest, I tease, I even kid—and yet I think a robust literary culture must have its feuds. Ruby himself has come into conflict with two distinguished Irish critics on Xitter lately and is even said to have driven them both from Musk’s platform. In each case, I was actually on Ruby’s side, more or less—the one was about the merit of fragmentary prose that never gets around to saying anything, the other about the merit of Colleen Hoover—so you see even a good literary feud has its limits.

3. I can’t resist quoting Hagio’s statement on what Hesse meant to her, from this detailed, informative master’s thesis:

As I was reading Demian, Gertrud or Peter Camenzind, etc., invisible particles passed through my eye and filled my whole body profoundly…. Expression is the result of the creation of sensitivity. Whatever my thoughts and emotions are, expression cannot be stopped. If it is stopped, it is deposited and spoiled. It will eventually overflow. Hesse’s book opened up one by one the dams that had stopped up the water…I heard a voice saying “Yes, you can write. Yes, you can express yourself the way you like. Yes, you can exist. Even though if it is harmful and rubbish, it exists and its existence is allowed. You can like anything you want, think any way you want.”

4. You might be wondering how Jack liked Demian. Sorry, Hesse bros, but he doesn’t seem to have liked it all. His annotations include “kitsch,” “kitsch,” “kitsch,” “great kitsch,” “kitsch!,” “farce,” “Jesus Christ!,” and the coup de grâce:

It’s all right to have such an adolescent experience, but is it rewarding to describe it in an adolescent manner?

Zipes, remember, is a Frankfurt School man and so unlikely to be impressed—more likely instead to be appalled—by Germans bearing Nietzschean and Jungian mysticism. The Marxist dialectic, however, can be wielded in both directions: you can use it to demonstrate that a seemingly emancipatory work is oppressive, or you can do the reverse. And so Zipes eventually found his way to translating and editing a collection of Hesse’s fairy tales. His preferred Marxist critic, as I recall, was Ernst Bloch, renowned for finding “hope” and “utopia” in otherwise inauspicious specimens of culture. In common with many who once went to graduate school, I will confess to knowing Bloch only from Fredric Jameson’s précis in Marxism and Form, a bit of whose uncanny eloquence I cannot help but quote:

Mainly, however, the neglect of Bloch is due to the fact that his system, a doctrine of hope and ontological anticipation, is itself an anticipation, and stands as a solution to problems of a universal culture and a universal hermeneutic which have not yet come into being. It thus lies before us, enigmatic and enormous, like an aerolite fallen from space, covered with mysterious hieroglyphs that radiate a peculiar inner warmth and power, spells and the keys to spells, themselves patiently waiting for their own ultimate moment of decipherment.

5. Speaking of manifestation, I would be remiss not to take note here, as I briefly did this week on Tumblr and will do so here at more length, of the extraordinary publicity campaign attending master manifestor Alex Kazemi’s just-published novel, New Millennium Boyz. Two weeks ago, I had never heard of Alex Kazemi. Then I started hearing about him literally every day. Suddenly, he’s everywhere, from mainstream outlets like Interview and Vanity Fair to dissident-right-adjacent podcasts (he talks at length on one about his magical practice), not to mention posing for an #indiesleazecore photoshoot in his underwear in what looks like a dingy hotel room with what looks like a female hooker sex worker despite his Wikipedia designation as a demisexual and his generally gay vibe.

More interesting even than this is the tone of the publicity campaign, as he eagerly informs his interviewers that the publishers forced a “content warning” onto the book and that the woke Zoomer girls in the publisher’s office almost staged a walkout over his representation of Columbine. I speculated that this way of advertising the novel reflects a recommendation I made years ago at the height of “cancel culture” when books were frequently being pulled from publication schedules due to social-media outrage campaigns: use the old “Banned in Boston” technique to turn the moral panic to your own advantage. This phrase refers to olden times, when the puritanical authorities in Boston were always proscribing material they found objectionable. Publishers began to hope their products would be “Banned in Boston” since it promised to the public that their contents would be satisfyingly salacious. Kazemi’s campaign, relying on the idea that the book is “dangerous,” suggests that this tactic is finally being implemented by authors and publishers.

The Canadian Kazemi could try a “Banned in Canada” approach since Canada appears set on purging all books except perhaps Anti-Racist Baby from the annals of human knowledge. “Euthanized in Canada” would be good too: “My book’s so dangerous the doctor asked if I wanted to consider MAiD.” Before he inquired who would be my patron, my generous reader quoted above had initially written in to inform me about Canada’s deep politics. As I understand it, and contra American right-wingers, Canada isn’t commie, it’s Tory (in the 1776 sense)—which is, in its practical effect on human freedom, just as bad.

Intriguingly, New Millennium Boyz, though written by an author born in 1994, is set among older teens circa 1999—a basic premise similar to that of my own novel, The Class of 2000, except that I was 17 in 1999 and wouldn’t have been caught dead paying attention to the mainstream pop culture Kazemi’s characters apparently imbibe. I know more about mainstream pop culture now than I did then. Alas, I did not market The Class of 2000 by posing in my underwear, and I published it myself since I figured a conventional press might be too upset by this chapter to want to bother with the book. I obviously need Kazemi’s publicist along with my own Harriet Shaw Weaver. Are we even sure that Kazemi’s publicist didn’t plant this very footnote? I think—to quote a late ’90s chanteuse whose blurb strikingly appears on the back of Kazemi’s novel—I’m paranoid.

6. Note the emphasis on authentic desires. Every mystic writer of this variety, whether canonized like Hesse or disreputable like Crowley, stresses that we can only manifest not from the personal will but from the will in us identical to the highest good of the universe, God, the Over-Soul, or whatever you want to call the manifold-in-union of which we form only an infinitesimal part. Even Crowley sounds as chaste as Kant on this theme in the daemon-dictated Book of the Law: “For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.” On the other hand, to the more orthodox and humble Judeo-Christian sensibility, we are as God’s flawed creatures too limited to be trusted to make this distinction, to project the will into the metaphysical realm at all, hence the words of a wise character in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea: “White magic is black magic.” I leave the final judgment to you.