Weekly Readings #90 (10/24/23-10/29/31)

er lässt sich nicht lesen

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

This week I published “Notes from Undergirl,” the latest chapter of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. In this chapter and in the next several, I chart a pair of contemporary teens in a cult of two through a late-2010s high-school gender journey like no other. (Among other sociological designations, Major Arcana may be described as an elder Millennial’s fictional take on Gens X and Z in the novel’s dual-generation saga structure.) Please subscribe today!

Speaking of offense and of gender, and in case you missed it, I also participated in the great 2023 Dave Hickey revival with my essay on the 30th-anniversary edition of the critic’s classic The Invisible Dragon: “Dragon, Lady: Capitalism and/as Woman in Dave Hickey’s Art Criticism.”

You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I devote today’s post to a seasonally appropriate commentary on Edgar Allan Poe rather than continuing my last two weeks’ survey of intellectual collaboration in barbarism. The barbarism deepens by the day—Anna K has quipped, “I gotta be honest with you guys I’m not really feeling the Halloween spirit this year”—and yet I have nothing to add to a discourse whose poles, apparently, are now “glory to our martyrs” and “remember what Amalek has done to you.” These are not ethical uses of public language. Not to mention the illiterate scrawl of the signs appearing on the very streets I walk, in whose calls for liberation and destruction I am apparently encompassed in the latter.

The view from here.

So literary horror it has to be. Please, if this is the word, enjoy!

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For the Love of God: Poe’s Counter-Revolution

Back in June, I reported from the Art of Darkness podcast live show. Since then, they’ve been on a roll—visit their site or their YouTube for links to everything mentioned below—with episodes on Milton, Dante, Mishima, and Beckett,¹ all objects of fascination and admiration here at Grand Hotel Abyss.

Even subjects out of this grandly literary sequence have their interest. With a densely contextualized episode on the artist’s life, they forced me to recognize Frida Kahlo as a figure within the broader remit of my artistic tastes despite my reservations about the kitsch way in which her fandom has appropriated her.² Closer to home, their show on the fraudulent Carlos Castaneda—I used to taunt the Deleuzeans in graduate school: “You know, your boy thinks Castaneda was a real anthropologist!”—solved the family mystery of why my late uncle, a Castaneda-reading astrologist, kept empty Mateus bottles as decoration. It also deepened the show’s own secret-history-of-the-20th-century lore, as longtime listeners may gasp aloud when they learn that Castaneda named his fictional guru, Don Juan Matus, not only for the aforementioned wine but also for Anaïs Nin’s incestuous father!

Listening over the last few days to their characteristically thorough Poe episode,³ and thinking as well about Matthew Gasda’s essay from a few weeks back on the Dostoevskean demonism of our time—intellectual collaboration in barbarism after all!—I thought I might say a few words about Poe and the perennial relevance of his widely read and yet widely under-read story, “The Cask of Amontillado.”

In my experience, Poe is a writer you can only appreciate on the cusp of the seventh grade or after completing a Ph.D. If he’s one of your first serious writers, then you will be lost in admiration for the range of his vocabulary and the intensity of his imagination. Once you make your way to Melville or Hawthorne or Dickens or Dostoevsky or Faulkner, though, the narrowness of his vision and the staginess of his effects become clear and intolerable. Many formidable intellects (Henry James, T. S. Eliot) rightly outgrow him—surely you can’t be reading Poe in your 20s—but then never find their way back to an appreciation of his achievement, which is little less to have invented almost the whole of modern literature from avant-garde poetry to pulp fiction, except for its realist middle range, invented by his contemporary, Jane Austen, who also invented the one pulp genre untouched by Poe, romance fiction. As I’ve said elsewhere, Austen and Poe are the two most important writers of the 19th century.⁴

Poe must have the strangest legacy in modern literature: he invented both pulp fiction and the literary avant-garde. While these two tendencies may—in their shared commitments to sensationalism and formalism—be allies in a high-low war against the middle mind (exemplified in literature by the realist novel and the expressive lyric), it is quite a feat to have birthed them both. But Poe codified several important popular genres that would later flourish in the era of mass literacy and mass media (horror, detective fiction, science fiction) and thereby influenced such proto-pulp and pulp writers as Doyle, Stevenson, Wells, and Lovecraft. At the same time, his theoretical insistence on a “pure” (i.e., non-mimetic) literary writing designed to affect the reader through the manipulation of form and surface, not to mention his depiction of disordered psychological states and waking dream-worlds, bequeathed a legacy to modernism and the avant-garde through Baudelaire and the French Symbolists and Decadents as well as such other admirers as Dostoevsky, Wilde, and Kafka.

Whether pulp fictioneer or avant-garde poet, Poe is the founder of a literature concerned with the production of forms (well-constructed generic tales or abstract sound-surface lyrics) rather than of truth or meaning. Neither a thriller nor an avant-garde poem can really be read as one is supposed to read Keats or Hawthorne, whose texts are dense entanglements of allusion and implication; thrillers and avant-garde poems are rather absorbed as intellectual structures and interpreted as sensational events. In this sense, Poe is one of first writers who, as in the German critical judgment that opens his story “The Man of the Crowd,” does not permit himself to be read.

A war on the middle mind and its preferred literary forms is also a war on the middle class. With that, we can turn to Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” That’s the one where Montresor reminisces about the time he walled up his ex-friend Fortunato in the family catacomb one carnival season years ago.

You’ve read it, probably in middle or high school, where I suspect it was presented as 1. a study in morbid psychology, the juxtaposition of a mind at once deranged by a passion for revenge and yet capable of exquisite rationality and logic, recalling, like a number of Poe’s stories, Chesterton’s aphorism that madness is not a lack of reason but reason’s excess; and 2. a demonstration of dramatic irony, full of grim comedy arising from the double meanings of both victim and executioner, unintended on the former side (“I shall not die of a cough”) and intended on the latter (as when he drinks “to your long life”).

The story’s poem-precise formal arrangement and carefully calibrated effect of ironic comedy matches what I was saying above about Poe’s mix of the pulp and the avant-garde. Is there any point, then, in looking for a deeper significance? A few allusions suggest that there is, though not the psychological significance favored by all those 20th-century critics who wanted to put Poe on Freud’s couch.

Consider the situation. Montresor tells us that he is a man of an old and distinguished family, now fallen on hard times, but still in possession of a coat of arms and of ancestral property in the form of the palazzo with its catacomb and wine cellar. Avenging what he describes as an “insult,” he is motivated less by passion (he has enough equanimity to overlook what he calls “the thousand injuries of Fortunato”) than by obedience to a code of honor. Montresor, in short, is a downwardly mobile aristocrat.

We meet Fortunato, by contrast, at the carnival, drunk and garbed as a fool. Montresor lures him to the catacomb by playing not on his aristocratic pride in lineage but on his individual pride in accomplishment—in this case, his connoisseurship in wines. He discloses in the catacombs to an initially uncomprehending Montresor that he is a Freemason, that sect associated in the conspiratorial mind with bourgeois revolution. Fortunato, as befits one reading of his name, then, is a fortunate man, an accomplished hedonist: a parvenu, an arriviste.

Hence the irony that crowns his fate: this Freemason is masoned into the catacomb in requital for his social advancement by a vengeful representative of the old regime. Montresor’s family motto, “Nemo me impune lacessit,” was also the motto of the Stuart dynasty, rendering Montresor, plausibly, a Jacobite. Finally, the two men’s concluding exchange—

For the love of God, Montresor!”

“Yes,” I said, “for the love of God!”

—hints darkly at a religious difference, presumably Catholic vs. Protestant, with the former on the side of the old regime, the latter on the new. All the better if this murder takes place during carnival, for carnival promises to turn the world upside down for a day, to dress the beggar as a king and the king as a beggar. Modernity has let carnival get out of hand, Montresor must think, or is nothing other than an extended, permanent carnival. So, in a fantasy of restoration, he turns the world right side up again, with the “selectively bred” on top and the upstarts underground.

“The Cask of Amontillado,” then, is an American manifesto for counter-revolution. But it doesn’t take place in America: for America has no old regime, no time-zero or status quo ante to which the revolution might be turned back. America just is revolution. The fantasy, therefore, remains a free-floating and empty one, a mood, a vibe, an attitude of attractively meaningless hatred vended by Poe as titillation to the literate and democratic middle classes, particularly to its female members—the story first appeared, amusingly, in Godey’s Lady’s Book—who were always the biggest readers of fiction.

I doubt I have to belabor this hollow revenance’s persistent relevance to the politics of our culture. Gasda writes of our demons (and please remember that Dostoevsky loved Poe):

Downtown’s scene politics might be an image of future politics—a simulation of what America might look like if people have to choose between the social practices of traditional liberal democracy and the social practices of Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok (or whatever inherits them). Can people continue to see themselves as human, morally equal, deserving of rights and due process? Or will future politics be organized like the podcast “Red Scare” and its fandom: celebrity trolls at the top, followers—alternately worshipful and angry—arguing amongst themselves, at the bottom?

In post-pandemic New York, a new liberalism of the spirit has failed to put down roots; by and large, a troll mentality is ascendent. Clownishness provides a cover for rhetorical extremism. No one is ever quite serious, so you’re not supposed to get worked up when you hear someone, including former leftists, recalibrate their politics in unfathomably dark, highly racialized terms.⁵ As a result of this deceptive use of irony, it can be hard to gauge what’s really happening, hard to substantiate the unsettling intuition that people aren’t OK anymore.

Poe’s avant-garde and pulp sensationalism would slot easily enough into the rhetorical place filled above by “Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok”—if it weren’t for the active, critical reader Poe summons to decrypt his tales from the crypt. The effort of reading he requires in spite of his own war on the middle range of meaning resuscitates the humanity his plot otherwise immures. Neither he nor anyone else can be read at all in a culture that has abandoned the study of the humanities. (One of the first search results for “Cask of Amontillado” is a version at a .gov site in simplified English.) It bodes ill for our collective future. Happy Halloween.

1. Beckett is the only one of those writers on whom I haven’t commented extensively online in the last decade. I go back and forth on Beckett. (Mostly on the novels. The genius of the plays—of Endgame, of Krapp’s Last Tape—I would never dare question.) There’s something there, in what might be characterized as the extreme Protestantism, that gives me pause. Or a worry that using impoverished means to depict impoverished life can amount to complicity in impoverishment. There is such a thing as too much excess—e.g., Finnegans Wake—but also such a thing as too much lack. I am a Joycean at the end of the day. My doubts about Beckett always dissolve, though, when I read him, because when I’m not reading him I am liable to forget almost the most important thing, which is that he’s very funny. Someone asked me about Beckett recently and I replied with a very old academic essay I wrote on Molloy, one that remains relevant, if not quite in the way I intended.

2. I should have liked her more in the mid-’90s, when I believe she had a vogue, given the otherwise Lilith Fairish coloration of my tastes at the time, centered on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman—which I’m teaching, at students’ own request, this semester—and its inevitable Tori Amos soundtrack. I hope I will not be misunderstood if I say that these adolescent tastes (Poe also figured in heavily) are the merely personal subtext for my reflection on the precise figure of the “faggot” in the Dave Hickey piece.

By the way, if you’ll tolerate a footnote to this footnote, I can’t help but notice that, after treating us to a meditation on Garfield last month, The Atlantic—a magazine founded in part by Emerson and Longfellow—now weighs in on the urgent matter of Snoopy. (Who’s next? Heathcliff? Marmaduke? Or perhaps a lateral move: “What a World at War Can Learn from Beetle Bailey.”) Snoopy, we are told, is “an unexpected avatar for the ‘internet sad girl.’” I find this particularly unexpected because I myself have always most identified with Snoopy’s archetypally “lit-bro” travails.

Qtd. in Robert K. Elder, Hemingway in Comics

What train of thought carried me through the last two paragraphs? My favorite song on Boys for Pele was always the Peanuts-alluding “Not the Red Baron.” As a teenager I devised an interpretation of the lyrics as a conceit linking the deaths of young men in the Great War and the deaths of gay men from AIDS (I took the “red ribbons” to be an AIDS reference, and gay men to be indicated by the “Judy G” allusion; give me a break, I was in 10th grade), but it turns out she wrote it for her straight male crew members whose heartbreak at the hands of callous women she found herself sympathizing with despite her feminism. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now what any of that has to do with “Charlie’s wonderful dog.” I mostly just like the piano.

3. They promise a forthcoming seasonal episode on Mary Shelley. While you wait, you might read my essay on Frankenstein and my essay on Percy’s poetry and prose—also, taken together, a double essay on the limits of the radical imagination. My judgment on P. B. is almost too severe:

Shelley portrays himself as the inoffensive innocent wanderer, a gentle porous soul whose appetites can be reconciled to the universe without remainder, as if because he can envision a world in which no one is ever hurt he can deny that he himself might hurt anyone. “Weep not for me!” the speaker of “Epipsychidion” cries, but I was never in any danger of doing so. The verse is eloquent, the verse is visionary, but it is an aesthetic judgment on this and other utopian poems, not an ethical or political one, to say that there is something here verging on the contemptible.

4. The next two paragraphs are self-plagiarized from my essay on Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. As the remainder of that essay demonstrates, I am untroubled by the most fraught political legacy of Poe: his work’s racism. It is an elementary critical move to turn this racism inside out, to rank Poe with Melville (and opposed to Lovecraft) as against “white” and on the side of “color,” whatever it is he thought he was doing as a would-be Southern gentleman. (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as maritime philosophical romance and as Antarctic Gothic anticipates both Moby-Dick and At the Mountains of Madness.)

5. Gasda’s piece was published just before the Hamas attack and the extensive moral rot it disclosed in the American left. In an accompanying podcast appearance with Geoff Shullenberger, he went as far as to declare both the radical right and the radical left “evil.” I suspect he had in mind Hannah Arendt’s label for totalitarian politics, whether right or left, as “radical evil,” because they annihilate the very idea of the free human being who is not a means but an end.