Weekly Readings #88 (10/09/23-10/15/23)
eclipse season
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week, I posted “Brutta Faccia,” the latest chapter of Major Arcana, my serialized novel for paid subscribers. There we learned how Ash del Greco acquired the spiral scar on the right side of her face. In the next chapter, we will learn of Ash del Greco’s school days, her distaste for novels, and her discovery of the gnostic comic books, mysteriously kept among her non-comics-reading mother’s possessions, written by Simon Magnus. Please subscribe!
I also published for the Substack audience a post containing both my 2020 reading diary of Louise Glück’s Poems 1962-2012 and my 2021 YouTube lecture on her work in memory of our most recent American Nobel laureate, who died on Friday. As I was rereading my piece, which doubles as a reliquary of Glück’s best lines, I found myself most moved by this passage from the poem “Nest,” the bare credo, whether we like it or not, of all belated writers, writers at the end of their genres, at the end of their ages, of all writers in the autumn, in the very October, of life and literature:
It took what it found after the others
were finished.
The same materials—why should it matter
to be finished last? The same materials, the same
limited good.
Some people do adversarially ask me why I’m writing a novel at this late date—why not a manga, a video game, a meme? Ash del Greco would ask, and I take Ash del Greco’s questions seriously. My answer is that there is some honor, some limited good, in being finished last.
People ask me all sorts of things. It’s getting harder to know what to say. It is, our astrologers tell us, eclipse season. In our eclipse, then, a post adapted from a recent Tumblr entry, expanded, revised, and with added footnotes. Please enjoy!
Dead Silence: Literature and Violence
In his Compact essay, “The Crisis of Therapeutic ‘Decolonization,’” Geoff Shullenberger identifies the double paradox of the contemporary university at work in its trainees’ now notorious endorsement of the slaughter of noncombatants:
Here we find an indirect clue as to the true nature of the “decolonization” project that has become a prominent part of higher education: Like much of what now takes place in elite institutions, it is ultimately a therapeutic enterprise. Battles over land and sovereignty are displaced onto the psyche; the demand for territorial restoration has become a metaphor for internal struggles over identity and belonging for which universities serve as a staging ground.
But intellectual history suggests this therapeutic function isn’t as easily detached from the concept’s violent implications as university administrators might like. The Afro-Caribbean philosopher Frantz Fanon, who is generally regarded as the originator of much contemporary thinking on decolonization, was also a practicing psychiatrist. In his 1961 manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argued that violence was essential to the defeat of colonialism for psychological as much as for practical reasons: Without a bloody struggle against the colonizer, the colonized can’t heal the psychic wounds imposed on them by colonialism. Out of this crucible, he prophesied in the early phase of decolonization, a “new man” would be born. For Fanon, decolonization was therapeutic only insofar as it was also real, material—and violent.
The desublimation of intellectual contest back into physical conflict first equates language to violence and then legitimates violence itself, since violence, on this theory, was already tantamount to language in the first place.1 The former allows for the rise of the therapeutic bureaucracy to manage and police academic speech given its potential for purely discursive terror, while the latter allows that same bureaucracy to cheer on literal and material terror as an authentic means of advancing an argument with which they already agree.
Bringing the world into the text undoes the text’s imaginative ability to alter the terms of the world; textualizing the world, meanwhile, becomes a license to redact persons, places, and things as easily as you’d redact a written document.
The hostility of late-20th-century literary theorists to 19th-century novelists is illustrative here. With a faith not so much that beauty but that dialogue would save the world, those novelists were among the first to accomplish the sublimation of violence into argument the later theorists wished to undo in the name of a more urgent justice.
Nancy Armstrong,2 for instance, complained in Desire and Domestic Fiction that Jane Austen transforms what would in earlier centuries have been an open political conflict between aristocrat and bourgeois into an erotic quarrel of wits establishing the quiescent non-revolutionary ideological poles of liberal and conservative in the middle class:
In Emma, more so perhaps than in Pride and Prejudice, the struggle between male and female modes of representation is clearly not a struggle between two social classes. Of all the characters in this novel, Mr. Knightley and Emma are the most closely affiliated. And because they belong to the two oldest and best-propertied families in Highbury, their disagreement seems to be more a matter of personal differences—age, sex, and disposition—than one of politics. At the same time, they disagree about how individuals should find their appropriate place within the community, and their disagreement involves everyone in that community. Theirs is, in other words, precisely the issue distinguishing Tory from Whig during the eighteenth century. But when contained within a domestic framework and subjected to the outcome of courtship procedures, this political difference, as Austen imagines it, becomes one between the nineteenth century liberal and conservative positions. No longer does the sexual contract constitute the terms for a conflict of classes so much as it identifies the poles of opinion within only one—literate—class.
Closer to Fanon’s own conflicted territory, and to our own, Edward Said3 in Culture and Imperialism famously lamented that Austen did not explicitly bring her moral scruples to bear upon the slave trade her fictional ambit not-quite-silently encompasses.
I have tried to show that the morality in fact is not separable from its social· basis: right up to the last sentence, Austen affirms and repeats the geographical process of expansion involving trade, production, and consumption that predates, underlies, and guarantees the morality. And expansion, as Gallagher reminds us, whether “through colonial rule was liked or disliked, [its] desirability through one mode or another was generally accepted. So in the event there were few domestic constraints upon expansion.” Most critics have tended to forget or overlook that process, which has seemed less important to critics than Austen herself seemed to think. But interpreting Jane Austen depends on who does the interpreting, when it is done, and no less important, from where it is done. If with feminists, with great cultural critics sensitive to history and class like Williams, with cultural and stylistic interpreters, we have been sensitized to the issues their interests raise, we should now proceed to regard the geographical division of the world—after all significant to Mansfield Park—as not neutral (any more than class and gender are neutral) but as politically charged, beseeching the attention and elucidation its considerable proportions require. The question is thus not only how to understand and with what to connect Austen’s morality and its social basis, but also what to read of it.
Take once again the casual references to Antigua, the ease with which Sir Thomas’s needs in England are met by a Caribbean sojourn, the uninflected, unreflective citations of Antigua (or the Mediterranean, or India, which is where Lady Bertram, in a fit of distracted impatience, requires that William should go “'that I may have a shawl. I think I will have two shawls.’”) They stand for a significance “out there” that frames the genuinely important action here, but not for a great significance. Yet these signs of “abroad” include, even as they repress, a rich and complex history, which has since achieved a status that the Bertrams, the Prices, and Austen herself would not, could not recognize. To call this “the Third World” begins to deal with the realities but by no means exhausts the political or cultural history.
While tastefully defending Austen against a crude “rhetoric of blame” that would dismiss her consummate artistry as “white, privileged, insensitive, complicit,” Said nevertheless surmised that her almost-silence on empire, or else the casualness of her reference to it, implies her consent.
“Your uncle is disposed to be pleased with you in every respect; and I only wish you would talk to him more. You are one of those who are too silent in the evening circle.”
“But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?”
“I did—and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.”
“And I longed to do it—but there was such a dead silence!”
The counter-position—that her scant allusion, her calling attention to the “dead silence,” might count as a subtle judgment, meant to send her humane ethic rippling out across the Atlantic and into the Caribbean waters—was equally available. Such a redemptive argument, however, would leave the artist’s authority intact, in the very seat of cultural command the critic wished to appropriate4—and which, we now know, would finally be occupied not even by the critic but by the administrator.
Not beauty, not dialogue, and not even critique will save the world, but only ideological management. That this ideological management now displaces its own colonization of artistic and intellectual life onto a rhetoric of “decolonial” atrocity only crowns the irony.
The rival possibility—formalized however inchoately, however initially compromised by class and national allegiance, in Jane Austen’s novels or in the Bildungsroman at large—is the possibility of an art that subsumes social division by providing an alternative to violence in and as the process of subject-formation. Such an art alone justifies the corps of critics and administrators who batten on art, to include the universities themselves. This possibility—that, after a manner of speaking, beauty really will save the world, at least in the long run5—seems not to have occurred to anyone in a long time. Which is a terrible thing, because if all we’re here for is to hang garlands on torturers and executioners, any torturers and executioners, then we might as well be mercenaries—might as well not even encumber the earth at all.
John Stuart Mill is notorious for his restriction of the free speech principles of On Liberty to a group we may, if we’re reading too hastily, understand to be “whites” or “Europeans.”
Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.
As I have argued elsewhere, however, if you collate this passage with the rest of the book’s philosophy, there is neither a racial nor a civilizational argument at work. He didn’t believe anyone essentially incapable of sublimating dissension as dialogue. He believed that this capacity was a fragile attainment that any civilization may gain or lose—and worried his England had never entirely gained it and was already in the process of losing it. An anecdote by way of illustration. One day, when I was teaching this class, we were considering T. S. Eliot’s literary criticism. Given Eliot’s historicization of English poetry centered on the 17th-century “dissociation of sensibility,” this involved us in a discussion of the English Civil War, Puritanism, the Catholic-Protestant split, Eliot’s anti-Semitism, and other such topics. It was a measured historical discussion. After class, a student approached me. He was an older man, probably older than I was at the time, who had come to the U.S. to study math and engineering; he was in my class only to fulfill a humanities requirement. He told me he was impressed that American students could sit so calmly discussing the gravest matters of religious difference—that we could somewhat casually, even with humor, converse about Catholic-Protestant-Jew—without some kind of conflict breaking out. (I am reminded of when Borges was moved to discover a street in the United States across which a Catholic and a Protestant church peaceably faced each other. It’s not something we should take for granted.) “We can’t do that in my country,” he lamented. That was 2015, perhaps the last time I would ever be sure that we could do it in mine. There is an argument that we shouldn’t, by the way, or several versions of such an argument—that we shouldn’t consent to live in a museum when there is more to be won on a battlefield—and maybe those making that argument are correct, are more serious, are more alive. I ask only that they form the advance guard; I will bring up the rear.
I consider Armstrong’s view of Emma at length here. I assume that the internal and unspoken politics of the English and comparative literature departments are of limited interest to Substack readers, though I persist in introducing them here because with them I am able to provide a level of detail and nuance missing from our larger culture-war debate about how the transformation of the postmodern university’s humanities departments has transformed society at large. In my Merve Emre post, for example, it occurred to me to chart Emre’s and my own slightly divergent institutional genealogies, since she got her Ph.D. so shortly after I did. In the interests of not boring everybody to death, I didn’t do it, and I will say only here, and let those who have ears to hear listen, that Nancy Armstrong was my advisor’s advisor and Walter Benn Michaels was her advisor’s advisor. Neither of us pledge fealty up the chain in this kind of matter—that’s not how it works—but these two details may do something to explain why she is a socialist and a formalist while I am…well, I’ll leave it to others to label me. Let’s just say mostly not a socialist and not exactly a formalist. The quickest and most relevant introduction to Michaels’s thinking on aesthetics and politics is here. For Armstrong’s, see here. I’ll quote a passage from the latter that briefly sums up the whole of her oeuvre and will leave you to consider the ways in which I have or have not been faithful as a critic and as a practitioner to this particular mandate for the novel as a form:
The captivity narrative served as a foundational fiction by legitimating the British defense of hearth and home in a “wilderness,” thereby owning and privatizing what was someone else’s land. In doing, so it gave the British a form of novel they could use to claim cultural superiority over a licentious aristocracy, as well as to the native populations they colonized. In a period when whole populations are on the move across the globe, as well as in Central America, however, the concept of disposable labor is rapidly displacing unpaid domestic labor. Today’s corporate culture depends on this invisible labor force to maintain, tear down, remake, clean, and supply the depersonalized spaces that many of today’s salaried professionals consider home. To acknowledge this general disavowed partnership between dislocated populations and the international corporate culture ultimately responsible for dislocating them, recent novels refuse the traditional obligation to perform the heterosexual negotiations composing the marriage plot in order to demonstrate the involuntary interdependence of the migrant and the men and women of the new professional-managerial class. As early as the novels of Octavia Butler that inspired Donna Haraway’s figure of the Cyborg, novels had begun to think in earnest that it was not their job to reproduce the modern bourgeois family as both the model and basic unit of a national community, and a whole range of novels from Don DeLillo’s classic Underworld, to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Underground Railroad, and my personal favorite, Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room make it impossible to imagine such a community taking shape.
I also found myself making measured defense of Edward Said this week, against a social media post that rather ludicrously called him “an all time great entrant in the performative victimhood genre.” I will reprise my defense with expansions and revisions here. In a later footnote to this post, I quote Northrop Frye quoting Matthew Arnold. Let me here quote Matthew Arnold, from “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” paying tribute to Edmund Burke for his ability to contradict himself, to make allowances to the adversary, even in the urgent heat of political polemic:
That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the finest things in English literature, or indeed, in any literature. That is what I call living by ideas; when one side of a question has long had your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all round you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steam engine and can imagine no other,—still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam, to be unable to speak anything but what the Lord has put in your mouth.
Said was a humanist, a scholar, and in his way an aesthete. In the idiom of his beloved Conrad, he was “one of us.” Politically, he was a tragic figure. Places of Mind, the recent biography by an old professor of mine, a biography rather grandiloquently dedicated “To the Palestinian people,” makes clear that if the benighted Arafat had heeded Said’s counsel behind the scenes in the ’70s and ’80s—including his advice to abandon as discrediting, ineffectual, and unethical the path of romantic revolutionary terrorist violence and to abandon anti-Semitism as well—it’s quite possible that none of this (I refer to the news) would be happening. He died quoting Kafka, suspecting (I believe) that his utopian cause was lost. (I don’t ask you to agree in this moment—a moment not too unlike that moment almost exactly 20 years ago, except that ours is worse—with even one of his words at the link, and I’m well aware of every argument that could be made against them, having read them when they were first published. [I am not an expert on this subject, but neither am I newcomer to it. I don’t, however, wish to debate it in the comments to this post.] I ask you only to consider the honor in the concessions—“of course it is terror,” he writes of the then-common practice of suicide bombing, as opposed to the Yale professor today who tells us, “Settlers are not civilians”—that his would-be young “decolonial” followers in the present will not make. They own the streets and will therefore soon own—or rather, decolonize—the politics of every major city in Western Europe and North America.) He loved the classics; he loathed “political correctness”; he befriended Camille Paglia, who compared him in turn to Walter Pater. The best catalogue of his political and aesthetic faults was provided by his paramour Dominique Eddé in her “novel” of their romance, which I reviewed here and further discussed here. She thought he was too credulous about radical politics, and so do I. She thought he ought to have taken the anti-totalitarians Camus and Orwell more seriously, and so he ought. Finally, I agree with her that preferring Conrad to Dostoevsky is a kind of spiritual flaw, one related to the excessive politicization of literature in which his “secular criticism” sometimes indulged. But none of this has anything to do with crude allegations about his largely non-existent “performative victimhood.”
I have a theory about Said’s occasional brusque handing of literature, a handling I am at pains to criticize above, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone propose it, presumably because it’s not “sexy”—not about Israel and Palestine, not about identity politics. I think his first and last love was music. (Among his early piano teachers in the Cairo of his youth was the Polish Jewish Romantic pianist Ignace Tiegerman.) I think some part of him resented literature for tearing him away from music. It was in the field of music, not of literature, that he stood up for a Schillerian view of art, the kind I’m outlining in this post, as capable of healing the divisions in the polity, of convoking the polis around a shared object of ludic contemplation. I refer to his founding with Daniel Barenboim of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. I read an academic paper 20 years ago denouncing Said for the “Kantian” frivolity of this gesture—for imagining that art, not revolution, was the answer! Such is the bankruptcy of our “humanistic” intellectuals. But Said, the self-styled “secular critic,” put his faith in music, not literature. Like his other beloved, Adorno, he had a profoundly conservative temperament forced by circumstance into revolutionary sympathies. Or not so “forced”: I note that his favorite novelist Conrad, no less essentially conservative and no less an exile than Adorno or Said, was not so tempted.
The ideal I am describing has perhaps best been described by Northrop Frye in the conclusion to his Anatomy of Criticism, which I will quote at length:
The body of work done in society, or civilization, both maintains and undermines the class structure of that society. The social energy which maintains the class structure produces perverted culture in its three chief forms: mere upper-class culture, or ostentation, mere middle-class culture, or vulgarity, and mere lower-class culture, or squalor. These three classes are called by Matthew Arnold respectively, in so far as they are classes, the barbarians, the philistines, and the populace. Revolutionary action, of whatever kind, leads to the dictatorship of one class, and the record of history seems clear that there is no quicker way of destroying the benefits of culture. If we attach our vision of culture to the conception of ruler-morality, we get the culture of barbarians; if we attach it to the conception of a proletariat, we get the culture of the populace; if we attach it to any kind of bourgeois Utopia, we get the culture of philistinism.
Whatever one thinks of dialectic materialism as a philosophy, it is certainly true that when men behave or pretend to behave like material bodies, they do behave dialectically. If England goes to war with France, all the weaknesses in the English case and all the virtues of the French case are ignored in England; not only is the traitor the lowest of criminals, but it is indignantly denied that any traitor can be honestly motivated. In war, the physical or idolatrous substitute for the real dialectic of the spirit, one lives by half-truths. The same principle applies to the verbal or mimic wars made out of “points of view,” which are usually the ghosts of some kind of social conflict.
It seems better to try to get clear of all such conflicts, attaching ourselves to Arnold’s other axiom that “culture seeks to do away with classes.” The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is the reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of imagination. The imaginative element in works of art, again, lifts them clear of the bondage of history. Anything that emerges from the total experience of criticism to form part of a liberal education becomes, by virtue of that fact, part of the emancipated and humane community of culture, whatever its original reference. Thus, liberal education liberates the works of culture themselves as well as the mind they educate. The corruption out of which human art has been constructed will always remain in the art, but the imaginative quality of the art preserves it in its corruption, like the corpse of a saint. No discussion of beauty can confine itself to the formal relations of the isolated work of art; it must consider, too, the participation of the work of art in the vision of the goal of social effort, the idea of a complete and classless civilization. This idea of a complete civilization is also the implicit moral standard to which ethical criticism always refers, something very different from any system of morals.
The idea of the free society implied in culture can never be formulated, much less established as a society. Culture is a present social ideal which we educate and free ourselves by trying to attain, and never do attain. It teaches, with the endless patience of the book which always presents the same words whenever we open it, but it is not possessed, for the experiences and meanings attached to the words are always new. No society can plan for its own culture unless it restricts the output of culture to socially predictable standards.
That's an interesting theory about Said, and an understandable resentment if it's true. I sometimes feel the same way, and I'm not even a classical person like (I assume) Said was!