Weekly Readings #85 (09/18/23-09/24/23)

names to conjure with

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

This week I published “The World Crosses the Tower,” the most recent chapter of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. There we followed a chastened Simon Magnus, after the domestic catastrophe attending the completion of the gnostic graphic novel Overman 3000, on a suicidal tour of the Continent as the new millennium dawns. This Wednesday, Part Two (of the novel’s four parts) will conclude in the sunset ocean with a chapter about the contemporaneous responses of Simon Magnus’s lovers and collaborators to the same disaster: Marco Cohen, Ellen Chandler, Diane del Greco. After that, with Part Three, we will make a raid on the mysteries and controversies of the present century. Please subscribe today!

Speaking of my fiction, I did notice this week some recent Goodreads reviews of my novels. Written by the Joyceanly self-styled “Old Fartificer” (and if you won’t listen to “Old Fartificer,” to whom will you listen?), the first is a rave for my Portraits and Ashes—

Evil Nathan Fielder starts a Greendale Human Being cult, all are saved by accepting Camille Paglia into their hearts.¹ Something very rare, contemporary literary fiction that is a genuine page turner.

—and the second a seemingly negative review of my real-time-composed pandemic novella, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, faulted for feeling a bit incomplete, which criticism I am choosing to take, and I encourage you to take, as praise for the novella’s stark brutalism of composition—

feels like a half-built house, you can see the pipes and everything. in an attempt to counteract the demand for didactic children’s fiction, may have accidentally looped around to Lois Lowry writing a Batman comic.

Please remember that a paid subscription to this Substack gains you access to a post containing pdfs of both books, along with The Class of 2000. I will also give free pdfs to anyone who emails me with a request in return for an honest² review in a public forum. Print copies are for sale at Amazon and most other online venues.

For today’s post, a two-parter based on the questions readers send in to my Tumblr. The first is a Substack-exclusive answer, a light-hearted rumination on book titles; the second, on the books that have influenced my political thinking the most, is reposted from Tumblr with the addition of those expansive footnotes you’ve come to love so much. Please enjoy!

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The Names: How to Title a Novel

Robinson Crusoe title page, via Wikipedia

A reader wrote to inquire about book titles, following my assertion that Selfie, Suicide, the title of a novel by my fellow independent author Logo Daedalus, is not a very good name for a book:

Jumping off your last post, what are some of the worst and best titles of novels, collections, etc. (I hesitate to say "books," because most non-fiction titles are terrible.)

We tend to remember the earliest novels we still read as bearing the names of characters, more than century’s worth of books including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Pamela, Clarissa, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Frankenstein, Waverley, Emma, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and more. Often, we have reduced to the names of characters what tended in the 18th century to be less the novel’s title, exactly, than its synopsis, what for us would be its jacket or back-cover copy, as in the full title of Robinson Crusoe:

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself.

Even in the modernist and contemporary periods, some novelists continued to name books after their protagonists—Nostromo, Mrs. Dalloway, Herzog, Sula, Suttree—but the practice is no longer as common. In the 19th century and after, the name of the setting, generally an estate or a town, began to rival the name of the hero for the title’s source: Mansfield Park, Wuthering Heights, Villette, Bleak House, Middlemarch, Howards End, Brideshead Revisited.

More consequentially—and, as with the first two options, Jane Austen is here also the canonical pioneer—a taste for the thematic title developed, generally an abstraction or an opposed pair of abstractions: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion for Austen, Great Expectations and Hard Times for Dickens. East of England, we find Elective Affinities, Lost Illusions, The Sentimental Education, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment.

I say “more consequentially” because a version of this naming practice won the day, though the taste for ultra-abstractions died out: first, because there just aren’t that many of them; second, because they tend not to evoke anything very precise (I think of Joyce’s Nietzschean quip to his son that Dostoevsky’s novel contains neither crime nor punishment); and third, because we have become too humble to want to claim the last word on the likes of “Pride” or “War.” Only a postmodern writer as eminent as Toni Morrison would earnestly give novels such titles as Paradise, Love, and Home, and she only dared to do so after winning the Nobel.³ Coetzee, just before his Nobel, offered us the best abstract title in recent memory with Disgrace: the word keeps ramifying in its social, political, and theological meanings the more one thinks of its every possible application to the narrative.

Still, it was the thematic title that prevailed. In place of a grand abstraction, though, writers began to prefer to use phrases borrowed from the Bible, Shakespeare, or other classics: The Wings of the Dove, The House of Mirth, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Tender Is the Night, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Winter of Our Discontent, Pale Fire, Outer Dark, Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men, Infinite Jest. Befitting its “postmodern” status, Pale Fire gently mocks the practice in Shade’s eponymous poem: “But this transparent thingum does require / Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.”

When the classic-centric practice began to reek of middlebrow aspiration, it gave way to the present most popular practice, which is to choose a somewhat baffling phrase with thematic or imagistic resonance for the novel, in the hopes that it will beguile. Heart of Darkness is a precursor, halfway to the insight, as are The Idiot and Demons, as well as Our Mutual Friend and The Ambassadors. Joyce perhaps both initiated and perfected the idea with Ulysses, a title with no source in the novel, a title that is in fact the novel’s own source code, the key that picks its lock. Mann borrowed the technique effectively in Doctor Faustus. On the other hand, Fitzgerald was luckily talked out of it, giving us The Great Gatsby in place of his first thought, Trimalchio—less effective than Ulysses and Doctor Faustus because Trimalchio is so much more obscure a literary figure, and is now less mythical than Gatsby himself. Successors: Gravity’s Rainbow, Midnight’s Children, Blood Meridian, The Remains of the Day, White Noise, Underworld, American Pastoral, and up on through, if I may, Portraits and Ashes and Major Arcana.⁴ To name an admirable title devised by someone in my generation who isn’t me, I think of Tao Lin’s memorable injunction: Leave Society. Maybe in the next phase of novel-titling, all the authors will, like generals, blare orders at us.

No doubt conditioned by my time, I still think the resonant thematic phrase is our best option. Back in the 19th century, Melville favored protagonist titles, of which Moby-Dick is the worst except that we are so used to it and it’s such a good book, but his best subtitle points the way: I can take or leave Pierre, but I envy The Ambiguities. My favorite 19th-century title, though, is Great Expectations: like Lost Illusions and The Sentimental Education in France, it names its entire genre, i.e., the Bildungsroman, but with more emotional amplitude, combining ambition and irony in one phrase, as the “expectations” are indeed “great,” even as the very word “expectation” connotes uncertainty and a strong chance of disappointment.

In the 20th century, I think Faulkner played the title game best. Unlike his contemporaries Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald, he could pull phrases from the classics without sounding fusty or strained—do we even remember that As I Lay Dying comes from The Odyssey?—just as he could make a regional or idiomatic phrase sound like it derived from Shakespeare or the Bible, as with Light in August, possibly his very best title.

Bad titles are usually too general. McCarthy can be guilty of this: The Crossing, The Road, The Passenger—though they arguably deepen in significance as one reads and rereads the novels (as with Coetzee’s Disgrace). But titles can also be marred by over-specificity to their book. I revere Cynthia Ozick, but I count pretty much only one great title in her corpus: Foreign Bodies. The rest are either too general (Trust, Antiquities) or too peculiar (The Cannibal Galaxy, The Puttermesser Papers, Heir to the Glimmering World).

It’s a tricky balance to strike. The title has to be about the book and about what the book’s about. Which is to say, about the reader, too.

With the exception of The Class of 2000—as a member of the class of 2000, I always knew I’d call a book that—I usually labor miserably over the title of a novel, except that labor doesn’t help, because it has to strike you like a bolt from Apollo. Failing that, if I may switch genres in conclusion, you could always summon from the asphodel the shade of Ezra Pound, who famously crossed out He Do the Police in Different Voices and happily gave us instead The Waste Land.⁵

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Reading for Power: My Top 10 Political Books

Revolutionary Committee of Tianjin Industrial Exhibition Hall, Let Philosophy Be Transformed into a Sharp Weapon in the Hands of the Masses (1971)

A reader wrote in to Tumblr earlier this week to ask me which books influenced the way I think about politics the most.

The worth of the question can be measured by how difficult I found it to answer. On the one hand, far too many books come to mind, reputable and disreputable and in-between, fiction and philosophy, journalism and polemic, comic book and conspiracy theory, plus 20+ years on the internet. On the other hand, there’s no one book, or even several books, I could recommend to demonstrate the way I think about politics; I learned most about politics from watching politics, in the ages first of cable television and then of the internet not primarily a bookish enterprise. And because politics is famously the art of the possible, and because what’s possible changes year by year, neither politics in general nor my politics in particular can stand still. I learn something every year, though not always from books. I don’t mean by this to be cynical; one has one’s values, but they vary in their expression with the affordances of the moment. For me, the deepest hope—not belief, but hope; not yet a reality but an aspiration—is in the potential of human freedom against all totalizing systems. I doubt I got that from a book, though. More likely it came from somewhere else, in early experience, and prepared me to recognize the theme whenever I did encounter it in books. Nor have I been wholly dead to the genuine sublimity of those totalizing systems, given what I have jokingly called my protracted education at the hands of Catholics and Marxists.

Anyway, the spirit of the question calls for a list, so I’ll provide one. It’s a narrative list arranged chronologically by my age when I read the book in question with a little summary of what it taught me. I’ve avoided the temptation of pretending that canonical political philosophy has taught me more than it did: with respect to Plato, Hobbes, Marx, Mill, Foucault, and the like, mostly I read that material in too abstract a mood for it to matter or too late for it do more than confirm what I’d already learned elsewhere.⁶

—Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (read age 12) - The world is comprised of systems in dynamic interaction with individuals and ideologies; art may replicate this in significant form; the proper attitude of the artist is an implied sardonic skepticism, albeit open to apolitical spiritual rapture and cosmic consciousness.

—William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (read age 14) - The political winds can shift like that, between the acts; when power is at stake, you can’t depend on personal loyalties; a smooth speech is better than a good cause; the crowd will always kill the poet; those who plead their freedom often have, beneath their own awareness, an envious resentment of power; the artist can manipulate the audience’s political sympathies for pedagogical purposes.

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (both read age 15) - The modern problem is the reconciliation of individual and collective such that neither is enslaved to the other, the populace starved by the rich, the citizen trampled by state and society; the novel (unlike nonfiction forms) is almost unlimited in its ability to examine this theme, encompassing fantasy and naturalism, sermon and treatise, journalism and prophecy.

—Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (read age 18) - We are ruled by darker forces than we know, especially if we refuse to know it; the whole complex problem of sex and sexuality is primordial, infinitely more fundamental than the comparative superficies of race and class that political philosophers and pundits prefer to discuss; art and politics both are contra naturam—sex, by contrast, is the tragic collision of art and nature—and therefore under the sign of beauty; the critic’s sensibility should be cosmic and unyielding, itself a mark carved hopelessly into nature’s loam.

—Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (read age 21) - Empire is the primary political fact, inescapable even for artists and angels; the most powerful move a critic can make is to ally art to empire, the more improbably or counterintuitively the better, this to establish the critic’s own cultural empire; the critic may rhetorically take the side of the oppressed in a suave rhetoric the oppressed could never master, and charisma will dispel (almost) the consequent air of fraud.

—Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (read age 27) - Our genius is our tragedy: the laws we codified to escape and then to master nature have enslaved us precisely because we identify them with nature; we have strangled everything spontaneous and tender in ourselves—and have projected out of ourselves and “other” and slaughtered that, too—in the name of this conquest, necessary to progress as in fact it was, with consequences even including the modern reduction of culture to the machinic product of industries consecrated to entertainment propaganda.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons (read age 32) - Liberalism is not innocent; in destroying every metaphysic but freedom and utility it has cleared the path of psychotic anarchy and brutal tyranny; the artist must understand every inch of this dilemma from the inside.

—Albert Camus, The Rebel (read age 35) - The urge to rebel against tyranny and its dialectical concomitant in the urge to become a tyrant in turn are structures of human consciousness traceable through the whole of human culture from ancient myth to modern art, with political philosophy in between; the artist’s abundant vision may teach the moderation that preserves the impulse to freedom and holds in abeyance the drive toward tyranny.

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (read age 39) - The enemy is the reduction of the human to a calculus, any calculus, with whatever alibi (liberal, fascist, communist; race, class, nation); the solution is collective creativity.

Finally, for a wild card:

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (read and reread between ages 15 and 40) and Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of the Scarlet Letter (read age 25) - This is how American politics in particular works: it doesn’t; it is sublimated as a cultural conflict about the limits of freedom and necessity waged over open-ended and contested symbols, including Hawthorne’s own text; the proper ambition of the American writer is to write a text of such permanently productive ambiguity.⁷

1. Once I sorted out the pop-culture references here, I decided this might be the best one-sentence description of Portraits and Ashes ever written.

2. “Honest” doesn’t mean “good.” As you can see, I am prepared to turn even the most vicious attack on my faults into a wise notation of what makes my work unique. Quoth Zarathustra, “He, however, has discovered himself who says: ‘This is my good and evil.’”

3. Her oeuvre also conversely illustrates the danger of a certain specificity: Tar Baby is her least discussed novel, despite what I judge to be its significant literary quality, not only because readers may find it ideologically distasteful, but also because no one wants to say the title out loud.

4. Portraits and Ashes also alludes to three canonical novel titles that borrow painting-naming conventions for fiction: The Portrait of a Lady, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Major Arcana, insofar as I lifted the phrase from the Tarot, may count as taking a title from the classics. I also like chapter and section titles in novels, by the way; the internal divisions of a novel should add up almost to a poem of its own, a litany of enchanting phrase scattered in majuscules through the text. I developed this conviction in my teens, first from the often classics-sourced titles of the individual story arcs in Gaiman’s Sandman comics (Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll’s House, Season of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, etc.) and then from DeLillo’s Underworld, with its mysterious and evocative section titles (“The Triumph of Death,” “Elegy for Left Hand Alone,” “Cocksucker Blues,” “The Cloud of Unknowing,” etc.)

5. I don’t have the space or the expertise to discuss the titles of poems or poetry collections, but my own favorite poem title is Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. It sounds less like a single work than like a life’s work, and less like a life’s work than like the immemorial imaginative labor of humanity itself. So, I believe, did Stevens mean it, for which please see here.

6. This is possibly unfair to the classics, though. Marx, for instance, doesn’t mean that much to me, and I haven’t read that much of him; I find his arrogant Voltaire-like sarcasm unpleasant (I don’t like Voltaire either), anticipating his self-styled “dirtbag” successors today, and I was always more interested in Hegel before Marx and then in the Hegelian Marxists after him (Lukács, Adorno, Jameson). I shouldn’t neglect, however, my first rapt reading just after college of “Alienated Labour,” one of the 1844 manuscripts, in an anthology of political philosophy, and the comprehensive Romantic vista of human emancipation it disclosed to me. My aestheticism is as Marxian as it is Nietzschean, even as I mistrust Marxist solutions to the ugly problem of alienation, and my humanism (or “speciesism,” if you prefer) is more Marxian than it is Nietzschean:

In creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.

Plato’s Republic, likewise, which I’ve read in whole or part several times, can be contemplated endlessly and interpreted like a novel, in many combinations of “with” and “against” its apparent grain, while Mill’s On Liberty deserves our praise for no other reason than that we won’t find a more eloquent and concise refutation of still-popular (and still-spurious) arguments against robust free-speech protections anywhere else.

7. I thought about including one of John Gray’s books in the list. Having been raised in Reagan Democrat suburbia in the Rush Limbaugh era, I was a year or two into graduate school before I understood that “conservative thought” wasn’t an oxymoron; graduate school, with its inchoate and etiolated Maoism, made this insight almost as necessary as breathing. Gray’s Straw Dogs and Al-Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, which I read contemporaneously with Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles, were the first books that opened up conservative thinking to me. I now find Gray’s anti-humanism, his mix of Gaian sentimentalism with Schopenhauerian nihilism, to be if anything somewhat less appealing even than Rush Limbaugh, who was at least a humanist after his fashion, but the mordantly aphoristic literature Gray makes of his disposition will always win my praise.

The Bronze Age Pervert cultus went after him on Xitter this week (“I am homosexual—John Gay,” an actual Xeet I saw, exemplifies the level of discourse there) after he negatively reviewed Costin Alamariu’s surprise self-published hit, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.

(That’s a bad title, by the way. The title of an academic treatise requires a resonant phrase, followed by a colon, followed by a blandly descriptive subtitle, whereas Alamariu has given us only the latter as the title. I didn’t and won’t read this dissertation, though I did skim it once, years ago. If I’d written it, and insofar as I’ve heard the argument correctly by hearsay and understood the relevant Greek terms, I’d have called it Phusis Basileus: Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy. As a fellow self-publisher, I also wouldn’t have made the book itself quite so yellow.)

Gray still seems to think Nietzsche suffered from syphilis—I thought we’d decided it was a brain tumor—but otherwise defends our philosopher from his contemporary champion despite his preference for Schopenhauer’s quietism over Nietzsche’s utopianism:

The adolescent quality of BAP’s ideal is a point of contrast with his intellectual mentor Nietzsche. Whatever his other personal limitations – aside from the commercial sex from which he contracted syphilis as a student, Nietzsche was practically an incel – the philosopher did have a direct acquaintance with war. A medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), he contracted diphtheria and dysentery on the battlefield, permanently weakening his already uncertain health. The experience confirmed his lifelong hostility to militarism, and when he glorifies war it is most often a mental conflict to which he is referring.

He also amusingly accuses Alamariu, who recently went on Red Scare, of suffering from narcissism, of all the spiritual pathologies. Gray’s final paragraph gives his present despairing view of politics, a morass of capitalism and identity politics from which no ginned-up vitalism can save us. Maybe so, maybe not. In the meantime, you can read me on Gray here and here. If I no longer quite count him as an influence, blame his environmentalist misanthropy. It’s legitimate as an aesthetic mood, but, in our age of aspiring technocratic tyrannies legitimating themselves by endless appeals to planetary crisis and doom, it’s also a dangerous politic, too dangerous for me.