Weekly Readings #87 (10/02/23-10/08/23)
the absence of a meta-language
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I published “The Trap,” Chapter 1 of Part Three of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. Part Three focuses on perhaps my most fascinating and original character to date, Ash del Greco: the 21st-century teen as alienated heresiarch, as alien angel on this alien earth. If you’re wondering where she, or whatever, got those scars, the next chapter, coming Wednesday, will flash back to an episode from her childhood, one of the strangest and most painful things I’ve ever written. Please subscribe!
For today’s post, a bit of advice, followed by a few thoughts on the question of quotation marks in fiction. Re: the former, I don’t know why anyone is asking me for advice, but I also don’t know why anyone is asking anyone else on the internet for advice either, so I’ve done my best to provide. The post is brief, but, as usual, see the footnotes for more controversial and topical extended commentary. Please enjoy!
Agon Aunt: Advice for Writers
I’m turning into Miss Lonelyhearts. Among the many, many queries I am now receiving on Tumblr—I confess I’ve stopped answering all of them, especially the more-a-comment-than-a-question ones—someone wrote in with the following:
While this doesn’t have to turn into a therapy session (judging by your previous comments, it’s not like you’d participate in one, lol), could you share any artistic or writing mistakes/regrets from your past that you’ve learned from and would like to pass on to students? Anything to avoid, perhaps?
As a certified or certifiable contrarian, I hate to receive advice—it enrages me and makes me want to do the opposite!—so I try not to dispense too much.1 Also, je ne regrette rien, since you need your mistakes as much as your successes to become who you are. Because you asked, however, three words to the wise, the first two based on things I perhaps did wrong, the last based on something I’m glad I did:
—Avoid extremist politics. By “extremist” I mean a way of holding a political position, not any particular position; you can be an extremist of the liberal center as you can of the far left or the far right. How do you know if you’re an extremist? If you find yourself thinking that those people over there, whether on the basis of their class or their race or their beliefs, needs to be physically exterminated or even “formally deprogrammed,” I promise you that you’re on the wrong track.2 As a citizen you have your views, but an artist needs to understand all views, as much of humanity as is possible. This is the spiritual meaning of Cormac McCarthy’s line, “Poets don’t vote.” You can vote, I suppose, but not in your work.
—Learn only as much theory as you need. At this late hour in the history of art, you can’t avoid theory entirely, but too much threatens to reduce your art to a program or even to immure you utterly in thought. How much do you “need”? As much as allows you to explain, after the fact, what you have done—and done, one hopes, in part by instinct, by feeling.3
—Read the classics when you’re young. You can reread them when you’re older to appreciate what only the fruits of experience will allow you to see, but even when you’re in your teens or 20s, you want to get those archetypes, emplotments, and structures deep into your repertoire. I mean “classics” in the broadest sense—anything still read after two or three generations have passed—so you’ll probably want to narrow it down to your preferred forms, genres, traditions, and subject matter, but still: if you write in English, you should read Shakespeare;4 if you want to be a poet, you should read the Romantics; if you want to be a novelist, you should read the Russians; and so on. They are a repository of ideas and of approaches you won’t necessarily find in the work of your contemporaries, the best of whom, anyway, themselves stand on the shoulders of those giants.
“I’ll Quote You That You Said That”: The Question of Quotation Marks
I’m not going to give formal advice on the matter, but I would like to discuss the article, “Why Are So Many Writers Abandoning Speech Marks?” It cites a bevy of trendy writers who produce fiction without quotation marks, and cites modernist predecessors like James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson.
Some writers, including Cormac McCarthy, are quoted as giving “craft” reasons; McCarthy told Oprah, “If you write properly, you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”5 But the other writers, to include Richardson and her quest for what Woolf called “the psychological sentence of the feminine gender,” have predictably grandiloquent political purposes in mind: “to eliminate hierarchies,” to “play with that sense of how subjective everything is,” “to [not] fetishize individualism,” and to subvert English tradition and colonial history.
I’ve heard all this before, with reference to Joyce. I quote from my old teacher, Colin MacCabe, in his 1979 treatise, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word:
Joyce’s texts refuse the very category of meta-language and a critical discourse is thus unable to obtain any purchase on the text. None of the discourses which circulate in Finnegans Wake or Ulysses can master or make sense of the others and there is, therefore, no possibility of the critic articulating his or her reading as an elaboration of a dominant position within the text. In Joyce’s writing, indeed, all positions are constantly threatened with dissolution into the play of language. The critic cannot grasp the content of Joyce’s texts, for the texts investigate the very processes which produce both content and form, object-languages and meta-language.
The absence of a meta-language in Joyce’s work is evident in his refusal, a refusal which dates from his earliest writings, to use what he called ‘perverted commas’ (letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 11 July 1924 ). While those sections in a work which are contained in inverted commas may offer different ways of regarding and analysing the world, they are negated as real alternatives by the unspoken prose that surrounds and controls them. The narrative prose is the meta-language that can state all the truths in the object-language(s) (the marks held in inverted commas) and can also explain the relation of the object-language to the world. This relation of dominance allows the meta-language to understand how the object discourses obscurely figure truths which find clear expression in the meta-language. A meta-language regards its object discourses as material but itself as transparent. And this transparency allows the identity of things to shine through the window of words in the unspoken narrative whereas the spoken discourses which clothe meaning with material are necessarily obscure. At all costs the meta-language must refuse to admit its own materiality, for in so far as the meta-language is itself treated as material, it, too, can be re-interpreted; new meanings can be found for it in a further meta-language. The problem of the infinite regress of meta-languages brings us to the heart of the problem of meaning and interpretation.
By contrast with George Eliot’s “classic realism,” MacCabe then elaborates on the way Joyce’s texts eliminate verbal hierarchies, with the effect of eliminating hierarchies of race, empire, nation, gender, and sexuality. There’s only one problem here, and I say this with respect to MacCabe, from whom I learned a great deal: Joyce does set off speech from narration. He just does it in the style of the French novel, with dashes, this as part of his “Europeanizing” program for Irish art. Cosmopolitan, then, but hardly against all hierarchies.
While there can be a politics of form, I don’t think using or not using quotation marks is a specific enough gesture to encode any particular politics. In her amusing review of MacCabe’s book, Brigid Brophy points out that the King James Bible also eschews quotation marks, quotation marks being after all a fairly recent convention in the history of language, and she wonders rhetorically if that renders the Bible a revolutionary modernist text. Similarly, unlike Dorothy Richardson, Cormac McCarthy was not seeking a “feminine” sentence, to say the least—closer to the opposite, if anything—and he arguably wasn’t doing much to de-fetishize individualism either. Using the same technique he uses to opposite political effect suggests that the technique itself has no inherent politics.
Writers who said they eliminate quotation marks to render their fictions ambiguous or subjective make the more persuasive case. But again, if the technique becomes conventional, then it will lose this effect. As for Miriam Toews’s statement, “I didn’t want quotation marks to slow me down,” I observe that what’s likely to slow the reader down is not knowing who the hell’s talking in the book. The reader is likelier to sink into the subjectivity of a literary dream when sliding down the almost invisible rails that are marks made to aid immediate comprehension.
Again, I give no advice. There’s always room for the subverters of language and subjectivity to make their mark—or to subtract marks. My own novels are strange enough on the conceptual level—I play with structure, genre, character, levels of reality—that I think it would be redundant and overly literal to mount a punctuation-level revolution of the word as well. Since I don’t take the conventions of narrative as given, I do, to compensate, tend to take the conventions of English as given. I will, therefore, continue to use what McCarthy calls “weird little marks,” and you can quote me on that.
My fellow citizens, though, are apparently crying out for guidance to anyone who offers to help. In the new Exorcist movie, the climactic rite is carried out by a Catholic priest, an ex-novitiate of the Catholic Church, two Protestant pastors, and a HooDoo priestess. Richard Hanania, I’m sure, will blame civil rights law for this absurd excess of clerics. It felt more like a joke set-up than a horror movie, lacking only a rabbi and a duck. I was willing in previous years to make a measured defense of David Gordon Green’s Halloween films, but the best I can say of his Exorcist outing is that it’s better than The Exorcist II: The Heretic, one of the worst movies ever made. I’m not, by the way, saying that “wokeness” ruined The Exorcist, just that unintentionally comic incoherence did. Revising and simplifying the busy screenplay in my head as the final act endlessly unfolded, I made it more, not less, woke: the ex-novitiate and the HooDoo priestess should have been the same character (the former’s abortion arc transferred to the latter), the exorcism should have been carried out by her alone, and it should have been a syncretic rite blending Catholicism and Afro-Caribbean practice in a circular reprise of the blessing in the film’s well-done Haitian prologue. All in all, the film would have been better had it not gone out of its way to be “diverse and inclusive” of white Protestants! It was nice to see Ellen Burstyn again, though, who at age 90 seems lively and with-it enough to be elected president.
Extremist politics:
Apparently, “decolonization” is a rape-and-murder spree among civilians, likely enacted as part of a cynical scheme by an outside power using your cause as a catspaw, and all but guaranteeing a reprisal that will set your cause back a century rather than advancing it an inch. I remember a time (in academia, I mean) when this discussion, whichever position one adopted, tended to take place within the remit of Enlightenment politics, however flawed those were, when the humanistic shade of Said still lingered—when one spoke of international law and the responsibilities of statehood, of curtailing rather than enjoining violence, with Fanon relegated to the role of penetrating psychologist and not as guide to brutal action—but in the face of this nihilism from our writers and intellectuals, one is justified in dismissing outright the “decolonial” enterprise and its accompanying ideological paraphernalia, especially the incoherent “settler-indigenous” dyad, which now appears, in its pragmatic dissolution of the combatant-noncombatant distinction, little more than a warrant for universal slaughter. (I’ve defended “both-sidesism” as a form of moral hygiene, a way of making sure that one applies one’s principles consistently; I could, then, find discourse as egregious on the other “side,” and I have, but I found none that justified itself with reference to traditions in which I myself have participated, so I don’t feel obligated to disavow it personally.) I make this aside in the context of “advice for writers,” so I will only remind you that the last century’s greatest novel, its scene laid in an occupied city, did set such a politics of slaughter aside in favor of a comic utopian humanism attentive to diversity but attentive as well to “the word known to all men.”
This week, I saw a fight on social media and an editorial in Time, both about whether high-school English students should be taught formalist literary analysis. There are roughly three camps in the argument: 1. anti-formalists who think literary studies should emphasize lessons in diversity, democracy, etc. rather than form; 2. anti-formalists who think the extensive analysis of tropes and techniques kills a love of literature in young people before such love even gets started; and 3. formalists who think students need to learn that literature is not “magic” or merely inspired but is instead the deft, intelligent manipulation of language. I dismiss the first group out of hand. The last thing we need is more political dogma everywhere, for one thing, and, for another, a struggle with the ambiguity of literary form is the most advanced training ground for democratic deliberation we have. A = Ambiguity, remember? The problem with groups 2 and 3 is that they’re both right, and I don’t know how to reconcile them. In my own life, I can’t separate my love of literature from my need to understand how literature is made. Can you really love poetry if you aren’t interested in the way the halting meter of Hopkins’s line, “All things counter, original, spare, strange,” mimics the meaning, its sounds themselves metrically strange? (And the same pertains to the study of popular art as to the classics: I’ve made many a classroom pore over the no less metrical nine-panel grid of Watchmen.) On the other hand, poetry is magic, or else the meter doesn’t matter. Anybody can learn rules, and probably should, but art isn’t just about following rules. I have no solution to this problem; I just thought, in case you didn’t have enough problems, that I’d bring it to your attention.
Another literary controversy of the week: do “Bayesian priors” (whatever those may be; please don’t tell me, I don’t want to know) invalidate the widely held conviction that Shakespeare is our greatest writer? I do in my contrarianism want to point out that both Melville and Whitman expected American democracy by its nature to produce writers greater than Shakespeare because, they argued, Shakespeare wrote without modern freedom and equality. Here is Melville, anticipating an objection that he should not compare Shakespeare to his own mere American contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne:
Some may start to read of Shakespeare and Hawthorne on the same page. They may say, that if an illustration were needed, a lesser light might have sufficed to elucidate this Hawthorne, this small man of yesterday. But I am not, willingly, one of those, who as touching Shakespeare at least, exemplify the maxim of Rochefoucauld, that “we exalt the reputation of some, in order to depress that of others”;—who, to teach all noble-souled aspirants that there is no hope for them, pronounce Shakespeare absolutely unapproachable. But Shakespeare has been approached. There are minds that have gone as far as Shakespeare into the universe. And hardly a mortal man, who, at some time or other, has not felt as great thoughts in him as any you will find in Hamlet. We must not inferentially malign mankind for the sake of any one man, whoever he may be. This is too cheap a purchase of contentment for conscious mediocrity to make. Besides, this absolute and unconditional adoration of Shakespeare has grown to be a part of our Anglo Saxon superstitions. The Thirty-Nine Articles are now Forty. Intolerance has come to exist in this matter. You must believe in Shakespeare’s unapproachability, or quit the country. But what sort of belief is this for an American, an man who is bound to carry republican progressiveness into Literature, as well as into Life? Believe me, my friends, that men not very much inferior to Shakespeare, are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio.
Don’t tell Chris Rufo that we are “bound to carry republican progressiveness into Literature, as well as into Life”! I’m not sure about that myself, but Herman Melville did write it. I would rather say with the Emerson of “Uses of Great Men” that Shakespeare’s eminence is good as long as it is inspiring, a goad to our own achievement; but if it is rather depressing, a reproach of our mediocrity, than it’s unhelpful. The problem with surpassing Shakespeare is not surpassing him in any one area; in each area where he excelled, I agree with Melville that “Shakespeare has been approached.” The problem is surpassing him in every area where he excelled. The best of Hawthorne rivals Macbeth; the best of Austen rivals As You Like It; the best of Dostoevsky rivals Hamlet; Moby-Dick can stand with King Lear and Middlemarch with the Henriad; Milton and Joyce are as accomplished writers of English line for line, maybe even more accomplished; Dickens populated a canvas as vast, and Tolstoy created characters as deep. But is there anyone who can do everything he could do? There I’m not sure. I even wonder, against Melville’s faith in modernity, if that definitive modern tendency toward specialization impairs our ability to challenge the Renaissance Man. For that reason if for no other, Shakespeare remains the champion.
McCarthy is remarkably unfaithful to Faulkner here. Faulkner had an almost Victorian sense of visual maximalism, albeit less cluttered. He wanted different sections of Benjy’s narration in The Sound and the Fury to be printed in different colors to indicate distinct time frames. (The state of printing at the time could not accommodate this wish.) As I’ve already observed, he follows a highly un-Joycean system in Light in August, using typographical devices to mark different levels of narrative discourse: double quotation marks for dialogue, single quotation marks for conscious thought, and italics for subconscious thought. In the present state of media, especially for those of us publishing onscreen as well as in print, I think we should consider Faulkner’s path as well as McCarthy’s. Less is more? No, more is more.
I hadn’t read that Melville quotation before. I appreciate your footnote on Shakespeare. Thank you.
Guess you won’t be responding to my ask rating waifus (I jest, although some of those recent asks have been close) great work as always