Weekly Readings #93 (11/13/23-11/19/23)

like points of stars in the dark

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

This week I published “Nullification,” the latest chapter of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. There we followed the development of Ash del Greco and Ari Alterhaus’s high-school cult of two to the very brink of gender. The next chapter, dropping Wednesday, is among the most delirious in the novel—perhaps the most delirious since “The High Priestess,” which is free to read at the link in its entirety for those who want a significant sample of the novel before making the inevitable commitment. This is major American fiction; it says so right there in the title. Please subscribe today!

This week a double post, again based on my Tumblr “asks.” The first is original to Substack, an answer to a bracingly straightforward question I received on Tumblr but which I thought might be of even more interest to my Substack readers. The second is a repost of my reader-requested thoughts on A. S. Byatt, who died last Thursday, with a handful of additions now that I’ve had a few more days to think about it.

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A War Inside Society: Why I’m Not a Marxist

Diego Rivera, History of Mexico (1935), detail

An anonymous commenter wrote in the other day to ask, “Do you consider yourself a ‘marxist’?” I thought the answer was obvious, but apparently it’s not—one well-circulated joke on Tumblr goes something like this: “Sorry, anon, but you’ve misunderstood me; please read all 5385 posts again”—so please allow me to clarify.

The answer is “no.” I won’t attempt to evade the question with some such statement as, “Well, every educated person is a Marxist, in the same way that every educated person is a Freudian and a Darwinian.” Is every educated person really such a thing? I am a Freudian, I admit, insofar as Freud was a Shakespearean and a Romantic poet. Marx, though, is something else. Even Darwinism strikes me a profound work of the English cultural imagination (“eterne in mutabilitie”) rather than the gospel truth.¹

There are true things in Marxism. I believe history and human thought move dialectically, for example. As Blake put it, “Without contraries is no progression.” There are local insights Marxism is capable of producing—into the theory of imperialism or the theory of the novel. There are Marxists who have influenced my thought or sensibility—Lukács, Adorno—largely because I found their seriousness aesthetically preferable to French Theory's strenuous playfulness. But still, I’m not a Marxist.

I don’t think you can call yourself a Marxist unless you believe, at minimum, two things: that base determines superstructure (i.e., the mode, means, and relations of production determine all else, from culture to politics to religion), and that there exists a collective revolutionary subject capable, either in itself or through legitimate representatives of its “general will,” of effecting a revolution that will bring an end to class struggle. At this late date, we have no reason at all to believe the latter proposition; it is simply a secular adaptation for a scientistic age of a religious impulse toward the chiliastic, the messianic. The former is more debatable and not even exclusive to Marxism, but I think the human imagination is more sovereign than historical materialism allows.

Finally, I believe that Marxism is itself an ideology in the Marxist sense: the spuriously universal legitimating rhetoric of one class’s will-to-power over the other classes, in this case, the class of professionals and intellectuals who succeed the old propertied bourgeoisie as socially dominant. As Boris Groys has observed,

The traditional utopian communist ideal was based on a perception that one could take all classes, the whole population as it is, and proceed toward a new social truth. Marx argued that this wasn’t possible. For him, one has to start a war inside society, which involved class struggle. 

To consolidate its power, the expert class has spent the less decade trying the “war inside society” technique of management, with its obsessive racialism and its many variants on gender war and its eco doomer panic, and what do we, any of us, no matter our class position, have to show for it? A procession of the “whole population…toward a new social truth” without internal collective recrimination is a better goal for liberalism. It’s better, too, that the necessary dialectical resistance to this ambitious social totalization be cast in individualist and countercultural forms, rather than collective ones.² Class and its theoretical cognates, race and gender, and we should be clear that “race” and “gender” as used now by the left are unintelligible unless we understand them to be modeled on the Marxist understanding of class, may have been mechanisms of oppression, but they will never be mechanisms of liberation.

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Unreal Things in a Serious, Real World: On A. S. Byatt

Byatt in Vintage International Editions

A commenter wrote in to ask, “Any thoughts on Byatt, on the occasion of her passing?” My thoughts are as follows.

I read Possession one summer when I was in college and thought it was extraordinary. (Intimidatingly so, which may be why I never read another of her novels, though Possession is generally said to be her best.) I need to read it again. I can’t believe it never came back into fashion with the dark academia trend. Maybe it’s too brainy, or maybe it’s that the (mostly) heterosexual romance lacks yaoi potential à la Dorian Gray, Maurice, and Brideshead Revisited.

For anyone unfamiliar, Possession is about two late-20th-century British academics investigating the lives of two fictional Victorian poets (one loosely based on Robert Browning, the other on Christina Rossetti), and both pairs’ possible love affairs with one another. Byatt narrates in a sprightly comic style with no little lyric potential, derived, I now see, from her great models George Eliot and Iris Murdoch, but she also parodies every other kind of relevant style with Joycean or Nabokovian aplomb, giving us jargony feminist essays, image-jeweled Victorian fairy tales, fulsome 19th-century correspondence, jagged Browningesque dramatic monologues, dreamy Pre-Raphaelite ballads, and more.

The climatic vindication of writing and reading as almost prophetic activities, this against the reductively ideological approach of the Theory era Byatt was writing within and against, should be carved above the lintel of whatever English departments remain:

There are readings—of the same text—that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are—believe it—impersonal readings—where the mind’s eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind’s ear hears them sing and sing.

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.

I was pleased to see a long story by Byatt, “The Thing in the Forest,” in the Norton Introduction to Literature, which I used the one time I taught the class of that name, in the ill-fated spring semester of 2020.³ If you’ve never read Byatt, this story or novelette is a good place to start. It does a lot of what Possession does in miniature, synthesizing witty metafiction, aestheticized fantasy, and moving historical reality into a work of the latter-day Romantic imagination.

I also want to recommend Imagining Characters, an under-discussed book of conversations between Byatt and the Brazilian psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré about six novels: Mansfield Park, Villette, Daniel Deronda, The Professor’s House, An Unofficial Rose, and Beloved. (I’ve still never read that Murdoch, I confess.) This book is probably why I think of Mansfield Park, Villette, and Daniel Deronda as forming a loose trilogy of 19th-century “problem novels” (like Shakespeare’s “problem plays”) that challenge any cheap 20th-century talk about the complacency, sentimentalism, meliorism, or all-around naiveté of “bourgeois realism.”⁴ Plus Sodré and Byatt are superb readers, and it’s a pleasure to “listen” to them in conversation.

The Paris Review unpaywalled their interview with Byatt on the occasion of her death. I’d never read it before. She says much of interest; she even criticizes Kazuo Ishiguro in the same terms as I have, for writing international literature by subtracting specificity, though she later praises The Unconsoled for its insight into the psychology of the artist. She seems ambivalent about realism, constantly invoking fairy tales, even saying this about Murdoch—

I think Iris learned a great deal from the French surrealists, and then somehow went and sat in Oxford and became a slightly less interesting novelist than she would have been if she had stayed in contact with the world of Beckett and Queneau—she would never have gone into Sarraute-like writings. I think she developed a theory about the virtues of Jane Austen that wasn’t all that good for her.

—and this about herself:

If you asked me what I wish I’d written, I would say Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” That is a completely pointless postmodernist structure of total beauty that nevertheless has a profound point.

The interviewer notes her nonconformist heritage, what links her to George Eliot as well as to Lawrence and to Leavis. She acknowledges it, but notes as well another way, even within the deep English Protestant imagination:

There’s a Spenserian aspect of Milton that I love. It’s the exotic. It’s the extraordinary metaphors. It’s the luscious sensuousness of him. It isn’t the stern puritan. I think I made something of Spenser that was the presence of stories about unreal things in a serious, real world.⁵

“The Last Spenserian.” There are worse epitaphs. Now I just need to read more of her novels.⁶

1. I can’t help loving this passage from Renata Adler’s Speedboat, lines that outdo even Didion in self-ironizing sad-girl skepticism:

I do not, certainly, believe in evolution. For example, fossils. I believe there are objects in nature—namely, fossils—which occur in layers, and which some half-rational fantasts insist derive from animals, the bottom ones more ancient than the top. The same, I think, with word derivations—arguments straining back to Sanskrit or Indo-European. I have never seen a word derive. It seems to me that there are given things, all strewn and simultaneous. Even footprints, except in detective stories, now leave me in some doubt that anyone passed by.

2. As Geoff Shullenberger anatomizes on X, liberals’ and radicals’ 2010s-era shared commitment to perpetuating expert-class dominance by “starting a war inside society” has come apart, as has the “dissident” coalition ranged against them. With a certain poetic appropriateness, the fissure turns out to be the immemorial and deranging problem in the Abrahamic religious imagination of how to articulate “the Jews” to a theory of universal justice. Marx himself ran aground on the dilemma with his notorious “On the Jewish Question,” an essay in which the supposedly clear division between socialism per se and “the socialism of fools” is not easily detectable as Marx analyzes capitalism as the sublation of Judaism into a universal malady that must be remediated:

An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.

We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development—to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed—has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.

In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

While I don’t agree in every particular with her late-life political stances, this 20-year-old essay by the feminist, socialist, and self-styled “anti-anti-Zionist” Ellen Willis is a reasonably persuasive guide to this derangement, one expressed as well elsewhere, and in more scathing tones, by George Steiner. Willis writes:

I’d argue that no one, Jewish or not, brought up in a Christian or Islamic-dominated culture can come to this issue without baggage, since the patriarchal monotheism that governs our sexually repressive structure of morality, and all the ambivalence that goes with it, was invented by Jews. The concept of one transcendent God has a double meaning: it proclaims the subordination of all human authority to a higher reality at the same time that, codified as “God the Father,” it affirms the patriarchal hierarchy. The Jews, in their mythic role as the “chosen people” destined to achieve the redemption of the world through their adherence to God’s law, embody a similar duality: they are avatars of spiritual freedom on the one hand, patriarchal authority and the control of desire on the other. In relation to Christianity and Islam, the Jews are the authors of morality but also the stubborn nay-sayers, setting themselves apart, refusing to embrace Jesus or Mohammed as the fulfillment of their quest.

3. The syllabus is here. The last few lectures, on the topic of poetry, and encompassing Pound, Eliot, Plath, Heaney, Walcott, Hopkins, Dickinson, Stevens, Yeats, and Keats, are here.

4. Had enough Edward Said around here lately? I can’t help myself; his is, in its way, such an exemplary literary life of its period. Anyway, we all know by now about Said’s famous critique of Mansfield Park, but less familiar is his similarly skeptical approach to Daniel Deronda in the essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims”:

Interestingly, Eliot cannot sustain her admiration of Zionism, except by seeing it as a method for transforming the East into the West. This is not to say that she does not have sympathy for Zionism and for the Jews themselves: she obviously does. But there is a whole area of Jewish experience, lying somewhere between longing for a homeland (which everyone, including the Gentile, feels) and actually getting it, that she is dim about. Otherwise, she is quite capable of seeing that Zionism can easily be accommodated to several varieties of Western (as opposed to Eastern) thought, principal among them the idea that the East is degraded, that it needs reconstruction according to enlightened Western notions about politics, that any reconstructed portion of the East can with small reservations become as “English as England” to its new inhabitants. Underlying all this, however, is the total absence of any thought about the actual inhabitants of the East, Palestine in particular. They are irrelevant both to the Zionists in Daniel Deronda and to the English characters. Brightness, freedom and redemption—key matters for Eliot—are to be restricted to Europeans and the Jews, who are themselves European prototypes as far as colonizing the East is concerned. There is a remarkable failure when it comes to taking anything non-European into consideration, although curiously all of Eliot’s descriptions of Jews stress their exotic, “Eastern” aspects. Humanity and sympathy, it seems, are not endowments of anything but an Occidental mentality; to look for them in the despotic East, much less find them, is to waste one’s time.

A bit tendentious at the end there! For a riposte to Said, a vindication of Eliot’s “almost Byronic…fellow-feeling for Armenians, Jews, gypsies, Bohemians, and all the others,” see Christopher Hitchens’s “In Defense of Daniel Deronda.” For a critique of the novel from the other end of the spectrum, as it were, I give you Batya Ungar-Sargon’s “Why ‘Daniel Deronda’ Is a Radical Failure,” an “Everybody’s Protest Novel”-style complaint about Eliot’s well-meaning sentimental liberalism (Eliot corresponded with Harriet Beecher Stowe while working on the book):

Don’t get me wrong. After centuries of Shylocks and Fagins and Jews of Malta and vampires (thinly veiled caricatures of Jews in the 19th century, with their Old World traditions and foods, Transylvanian accents, and that whole sucking blood thing), it’s nice to read a book in which someone is longing to find out they are Jewish, especially since he is the handsomest and the nicest and the smartest. This fantasy, however, must surely fill any Jew with disgust for its sentimentality, its abnegation of the novelist’s job to produce complexity and reveal truth.

I need to reread Daniel Deronda. It’s a long and unfathomably strange novel. I read it in graduate school with the idea of juxtaposing it to Ulysses as divergently encyclopedic novels (realism vs. modernism, sentimentality vs. irony, female author vs. male author, English author vs. Irish author, the 19th century vs. the 20th century, the gentile-imagined Zionist Jew vs. the gentile-imagined diasporic Jew, the proper but unhappy marriage vs. the improper but happy marriage, etc., etc.), but nothing came of it, and I still even need to read many of the early Eliot novels besides Silas Marner. I summoned from the digital archive my grad-school essay (I wrote it for a seminar on “The Victorian Long Poem” or perhaps “The Long Victorian Poem”) about Eliot’s little-read dramatic poem (also about nationalism) The Spanish Gypsy, but I see I was in over my head with Eliot’s historical erudition, and the essay has only one good sentence: “The way out is not epic memory, but lyric forgetfulness.” With your indulgence, I’ll quote a bit from my elaboration:

Poetry is the only institution in The Spanish Gypsy that contains these possibilities, that can embrace all different types of people and enunciate in their voices; every other institution—religion, nation, tribe—excludes or forecloses.  Moreover, poetry, while it can exist within the law, can also exist without it, or within its own transhistorical law of openness to others, its eternal commitment to communities not defined primarily by arbitrary mechanisms of closure. […] In The Spanish Gypsy we find in the end not an apology for nation, collective or history, but rather a defense of poetry.  

Whether this applies to Daniel Deronda as well, I’m not sure. Probably not. Probably Eliot did use Zionism, the way some Americans use Zionism and other Americans use “Palestinianism,” as a prosthetic nationalism, a kind of political “strap-on,” if I may, since they are unable to feel aroused any longer by the thought of their own patria, unless being aroused to contempt or hatred counts. I don’t think Said, alas, ever wrote about Villette or even Jane Eyre. I must direct you to my own nine-year-old essay on Villette, which does have something to say about this ultra-Protestant novel’s “Oriental idiom.” The canonical postcolonial critique of Jane Eyre comes from friend-of-the-blog Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.”

Let us consider the figure of Bertha Mason, a figure produced by the axiomatics of imperialism. Through Bertha Mason, the white Jamaican Creole, Brontë renders the human/animal frontier as acceptably indeterminate, so that a good greater than the letter of the Law can be broached. […] [N]ineteenth-century feminist individualism could conceive of a “greater” project than access to the closed circle of the nuclear family. This is the project of soul making beyond “mere” sexual reproduction. Here the native “subject” is not almost an animal but rather the object of what might be termed the terrorism of the categorical imperative.

In other words, the native has to be represented as an animal to leave open the possibility that she can be made a person by the spiritual agency of imperialism’s civilizing mission, as with St. John Rivers’s project at the novel’s conclusion. The other two “women’s texts” are Wide Sargasso Sea and Frankenstein. Spivak finds the former’s postcolonial revision of Jane Eyre severely wanting, merely “a novel which rewrites a canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native.” It is Frankenstein that, in deconstructive defiance of chronology, emerges as the redemptive text. Like her mentor Paul de Man, Spivak construes Romanticism as postmodernism avant la lettre. For her, Frankenstein is an admirably self-deconstructing document:

I would now suggest that there is a framing woman in the book who is neither tangential, nor encircled, nor yet encircling. “Mrs. Saville,” “excellent Margaret,” “beloved Sister” are her address and kinship inscriptions (F, pp. 15, 17, 22). She is the occasion, though not the protagonist, of the novel. She is the feminine subject rather than the female individualist: she is the irreducible recipient-function of the letters that constitute Frankenstein. I have commented on the singular appropriative hermeneutics of the reader reading with Jane in the opening pages of Jane Eyre. Here the reader must read with Margaret Saville in the crucial sense that she must intercept the recipient-function, read the letters as recipient, in order for the novel to exist. Margaret Saville does not respond to close the text as frame. The frame is thus simultaneously not a frame, and the monster can step “beyond the text” and be “lost in darkness.” Within the allegory of our reading, the place of both the English lady and the unnamable monster are left open by this great flawed text. It is satisfying for a postcolonial reader to consider this a noble resolution for a nineteenth-century English novel.

Incidentally, speaking of a “war inside society,” Spivak at the opening of her essay describes her ambition in criticizing these three privileged white women’s texts and the feminist critics who have celebrated them:

[M]y readings here do not seek to undermine the excellence of the individual artist. If even minimally successful, the readings will incite a degree of rage against the imperialist narrativization of history, that it should produce so abject a script for her.

Must the critic incite “rage”? Anyway, the thread that binds Mansfield Park, Villette, and Daniel Deronda is that all three are less popular, less perfect, and less optimistic works than their authors’ most celebrated novels (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch). Each is otherworldly, spiritually ascetic, chastening in its picture of human agency. These are 19th-century novels that would not look naive next to Joyce, next to Kafka—or next to Kazuo Ishiguro, whom all three novels influenced. The characterization of Kathy H. in Never Let Me Go owes a great deal to Fanny Price and Lucy Snowe, and his whole narrative technique in all his novels comes straight out of Villette. Meanwhile, Kathy H. even reads Daniel Deronda in Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro has modestly claimed that he meant only to indicate her readerly diligence—that she wouldn’t stop at an author’s most popular novel but also read the lesser lights. Still, there is an unmistakable irony that Kathy H. reads a novel about the visionary emancipation of an oppressed people even as she submits with cheerful docility to her own oppression. Here is another of Ishiguro’s genial Anarch slights of the human world-making endowment, one anticipated in these grave, stern, and mordant 19th-century novels written by women better (mis)remembered as comediennes or romancers or idealists.

5. I found myself thinking about Byatt earlier this year when I was reading David Mitchell since she had so passionately championed his early work as carrying on her own tradition of the historically-minded, outwardly-looking, and often fantastical novel. Re: Byatt as fantasist, in his introduction to her recently published Selected Stories, Mitchell recalls that Neil Gaiman said to him, “Antonia is one of us.”

6. Byatt’s is the fifth major literary death of 2023, following Amis, McCarthy, Kundera, and Glück. With her even more than with McCarthy, an era ends: an era whose authors were steeped in the tradition, including and even especially the poetic tradition, of English-language literature, writers whose lines echo with poetry past, with Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Milton, and the Romantics. The absence of this specific freight is why so much contemporary prose feels so weightless next to the likes of McCarthy and Byatt. I’m reading Byatt’s Angels & Insects in memoriam, and I also want to commemorate the old 1990s Vintage International trade paperback editions (see above) in which her work appeared alongside both McCarthy and Amis. (I’ve previously celebrated these designs by Marc J. Cohen and Susan Mitchell here.) These were books that looked like they carried the weight of history and tradition. When I write a novel, I want to write something worthy of those old Vintage International designs.