Weekly Readings #95 (11/27/23-12/03/23)
rich in a kind of feeling
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week, I posted “November Books,” with thoughts on the Bible, Freud, Yeats, and A. S. Byatt. Don’t miss my long impromptu colloquy about poetry with friend-of-the-blog
in the comments section.I also published “Revision,” the latest chapter of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. There we shared my (anti-)hero(ine) Ash del Greco’s discovery that magic may work, but not always the way one wants it to. This Wednesday, we will follow her deeper into the art. Please subscribe today!
I want to note an endorsement of Major Arcana from fellow Substacker
, whose own writing is well worth your time, e.g., a thoughtful and fascinating recent post about Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch. (Modesty forbids me from even noticing, still less mentioning in these electronic pages, that I am there hailed as “a worthy heir to Sontag.”)
I believe the occasion of this recommendation was Alex Perez’s article for The Free Press, “The Fight for the Future of Publishing,” where I am briefly quoted:1
Today’s post concerns the future not of publishing but of fiction itself, inspired by one final mention of—who else?—me, which I saw online this week. (Don’t miss my critique of narcissism.) Please enjoy!
Half Against Poetry: For a Novel of Character
In a fine circularity, it was Kumin who inspired me to read Wilson’s book in the first place. I agree for the most part with his judgment.
It is probably Flaubert, behind Nabokov, who is ultimately to blame, because Conrad, Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway also come out Flaubert, and we get our tastes from them, sometimes as institutionalized in the MFA, as much as from our butterfly-hunter.
Ironically, James Wood made this point most clearly in his “Half Against Flaubert.” It’s ironic because Wood’s less literate American detractors misunderstand his place in and reading of literary history; they see only a snooty Englishman and not a fervid provincial Evangelical who has more in common with Lawrence, whom he reveres, than with Nabokov, about whom he seems ambivalent. Therefore, these detractors mistake Wood for some kind of aesthete, when in fact, as I’m sure I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the epigraphs to The Broken Estate were from Ruskin and from Lukács, two anti-aesthete moralists of the first order, the latter of whom even called Flaubert, in The Historical Novel, “one of the most important precursors of dehumanization in modern literature.” But to mention Wood, whose fervor for fictional truth led him to foist My Struggle on us, is to be reminded that one can hack in any number of directions away from the Nabokovian aestheticism. At least such aestheticism has the potential to create an integral art-object, a bounded heterocosm, rather than a mere emission of self.
We see our literary culture’s overvaluation of the writer’s self exemplified in Rachel Aviv’s recent New Yorker profile on Joyce Carol Oates. In quest of the novelist’s supposed “secret,” Aviv pathologizes Oates: she calls her writing a “coping mechanism” and wonders in dismay at a long life spent in the pursuit of writing novels, as if following a vocation were a species of mental illness. (Psychotherapy really must be banned before it drives us all absolutely insane.) This would be bad enough on its own, but Aviv even shows up in person to badger Oates with invasive questioning about her personal life, a scene unredeemed by knowing allusions to James’s “Figure in the Carpet”—redeemed only, in fact, when Oates ignores Aviv to mock her puerile psychologizing in playful colloquy with her cats:
I mentioned that Halpern, her main editor for the past twenty-five years and a close friend for fifty, had said that “if Joyce didn’t write, she wouldn’t exist.” It sounded metaphysical to me, I said, and I wondered what she took it to mean.
“Well, none of my friends really know me,” she said. “You know, Dan has to say something. And I think that’s the thing—you have to have some comment. And I probably have told you that I don’t have any strong feelings—I’m neutral. But it’s expected that you have an opinion.”
I asked if there was any emotional valence to that observation: that she was neutral.
“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t have any feeling at all. Why would I have any feeling?”
One of her cats, Lilith, began excitedly rubbing herself against the strap of my purse. Oates’s tone softened. “They really like you because they feel that they have to kind of win you over,” she said. “She’s never done anything remotely like that. Oh, Lilith, what’s happening to you?” The other cat, a Maine coon, had perched itself behind my chair. “She’s saying, ‘Please pet my tummy,’” Oates said, speaking in a sweet lullaby voice. “‘Please pet my tummy, or I won’t exist.’”
Note Oates’s use of her cats as characters, as media through whom she can express differing perspectives from the reductive one Aviv attempts to impose upon her. I will return to this point later.
Colin Wilson himself recommended science fiction and fantasy as the road out of modernism, not a journey ever further inward. In practice, this advice proves no less problematic, especially considering the Flaubertian and Nabokovian influence on such major writers in these genres as Delany, Mitchell, and Moore. Anyway, Nabokov, whom Wilson dismisses, wrote science fiction in all but name (e.g., Bend Sinister): a “monstrously” recursive aestheticism already implies the fantastic.3
We may have to go back before even Flaubert for the root of the problem, then, as indicated by Kumin’s implied censure of lyric poetry, at least as a model for fiction. Wilson blamed Romanticism for turning the novel’s mental cosmos into monstrous narcissism, and we can blame it, too, for turning the novel to the monstrous aestheticism Kumin observes. In the former instance, consider, if you dare, the married life of the Shelleys, brought to mind for me by the latest episode of Art of Darkness. I’ve covered this ground already myself—see my essay on Percy’s Poetry and Prose and my essay on Mary’s Frankenstein—but, in brief, the radical poet, read least generously, could be said to have left sublime monuments in poetry to his own sensibility, while his more moderate wife wrote an indelible novel about the danger of such a quest for the sublime when pursued without attention to others.4
“Others”—the other. I go in fear of moralism and of sentimentality, but I go all the same. Re: Romanticism’s responsibility for aestheticism, consider Nabokov’s complex judgment on Shakespeare, which echoes Joyce’s line that Ibsen was a better dramatist than Shakespeare:
His verbal poetic texture is the greatest the world has ever known, and immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. It is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play. A genius.
Insofar as this privileging of “verbal poetic texture” passes from Shakespeare to Keats,5 and from Keats to Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, and from Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites to Pater and Wilde, and from Pater and Wilde to Joyce, and, finally, from Joyce to Nabokov, then Shakespeare is the source of the decadence Kumin complains of in our literature. Some of the modernists thought the same. Hence why even Joyce, not to mention Eliot, wished he could prefer Dante, with his directness of statement, to Shakespeare, and why Pound elevated the worldly Chaucer over the hothoused Shakespeare in his ABC of Reading.
Missing from this discussion, however, is Shakespeare’s having created great characters as well as “verbal poetic texture,” characters to rival and almost always to exceed those of Dante or Chaucer. Joyce, who created three of the greatest literary characters of the 20th century, understood this. Nabokov’s neglect of this element of narrative and drama explains why he was so absurdly insensible to the greatness of Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Mann, each of whom created characters even more compelling than the comparatively cartoonish Humbert or Kinbote.6
The novelists who matter most, it seems to me, are the ones who care for character first and “verbal poetic texture” second. (How much did Shakespeare actually care for the latter, by the way? As Ben Jonson said, “He never blotted a line”—far from the Flaubertian agonies over every syllable.)
Speaking of Romanticism and Shakespeare, when challenged about the ethics of his writing fiction from the female viewpoint, Kazuo Ishiguro once responded:
If you look at Wordsworth, it’s difficult to get away from the self: the big subject is Wordsworth. But if you’re in the Shakespeare tradition it’s easier to write from the point of view of character, which involves different sexes, different ages and different classes.7
Similarly, what American writer in the 20th century did “verbal poetic texture” better than Saul Bellow? Yet here is his response to a question about Dreiser in his Paris Review interview:
Dreiser, a realist of course, had elements of genius. He was clumsy, cumbersome, and in some respects a poor thinker. But he was rich in a kind of feeling which has been ruled off the grounds by many contemporary writers—the kind of feeling that every human being intuitively recognizes as primary. Dreiser has more open access to primary feelings than any American writer of the twentieth century. It makes a good many people uncomfortable that his emotion has not found a more developed literary form. It’s true his art may be too “natural.” He sometimes conveys his understanding by masses of words, verbal approximations. He blunders, but generally in the direction of truth. The result is that we are moved in an unmediated way by his characters, as by life, and then we say that his novels are simply torn from the side of life, and therefore not novels. But we can’t escape reading them. He somehow conveys, without much refinement, depths of feeling that we usually associate with Balzac or Shakespeare.
The point is not to exalt bad writing—one should try to write on the word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence level as well as Shakespeare, Keats, Nabokov, and Bellow, not as poorly as Dreiser—but to insist that writing is a medium for thought and affect, and especially for a plurality, an abundance, of thought and affect, and that these are best transmitted in fiction through characters. “A novel must be a house fit for free characters to live in,” as Iris Murdoch ringingly declared. Character, not the self of the writer, whether expressed directly in Shelleyean autofiction or indirectly in Keatsian aestheticism, is the soul of the novel.
I’m not sure about the etiquette of such things, but I make the following disclosure solely in a spirit of levity and feel nothing but good will for those involved. I was actually pretty extensively interviewed for the article, but I think for various reasons I didn’t furnish a good example of the case they were trying to make—I’m not earning Elle Griffin’s $30,000 a year on this platform, for one thing!—or Major Arcana didn’t. Major Arcana is superficially offensive to the proverbial HR department, I’m sure, but, if I may, I don’t think it’s profoundly offensive, as anyone who’s read this far into it must know by now. (I don’t actually accept the validity of “offensiveness” as a criterion of judgment for art; I just mean that the novel’s underlying metaphysic is, well, mostly not a conservative one.) The novel as a form mocks and relativizes dogma qua dogma, and I demand the right to do that without condition in my novel. But anybody going into Major Arcana expecting some kind of a Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh thing from a book that is partially the consequence of my having read my first Grant Morrison comic at the age of six is going to be pretty disappointed, not that this exhausts the topics Alex covers in his informative piece. I did learn about Heresy Press from Alex’s article, though; my book might be a good fit for a press like that, so if anybody wants to put in a word for me, you have until March or April, which is when I plan to publish the print edition of Major Arcana myself. If it helps, I’m going to defend Joyce Carol Oates later in this post.
One doesn’t want to follow received wisdom thoughtlessly, so I’ll grant that VN has a point or two in both praise and blame. We agree that Milton is a “genius,” that Hawthorne is a “splendid writer,” that Austen is “great,” but also that Finnegans Wake is a “tragic failure,” and probably even that Chekhov had “[t]alent, but not genius.” Sometimes my own “strong opinion” is the reverse of his: as I’ve said already, I think Beckett is a great playwright, a bittersweet comedian of unrivaled stature, but I could mostly do without his fiction—that monument to the writer’s falsely self-abasing but really self-aggrandizing martyrdom to language itself.
Interestingly, in a departure from a formalist or an Aestheticist judgment, Nabokov pronounces H. G. Wells “[a] far greater artist than Conrad.” Aside from being false, this is not even a term of approbation that Wells, who called himself a journalist and scorned the artistes Conrad and James, would have accepted. What must here be Nabokov’s overvaluation of an adolescent favorite is charming, however—an inadvertent confession of vulnerability rather than a willful posture of omniscience.
Speaking of Shelley and Co., somebody this week wrote in to Tumblr to ask me to enumerate my “major disagreements, if any, with Harold Bloom.” I paste in the answer here for my Substack subscribers, followed by a correction:
With the stipulation that great critics prove their integrity by being wrong, and that we should thus welcome their wrongness, I have many disagreements. I often find him an inspiring rhapsode more than a persuasive critic or theorist. Or maybe they’re differences of sensibility more than disagreements. We could talk about local differences of opinion about this or that writer, but sensibility is probably the larger question.
He was endlessly fascinated by the poet’s solitary quest, modeled ultimately on the Biblical prophets, for priority and absoluteness of vision in a degraded cosmos: Alastor on his solitary quest. It’s not that he never question or even censured, in the course of his analyses, the solipsism to which this quest gives rise; he wasn’t stupid; but it was still the most interesting thing to him, even later, when he disciplined this aspect of himself to arrive at his reverence for Shakespeare, a figure who contains this quest—especially in Hamlet—but contains much more besides. Whereas I can only handle so much Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Stevens, etc., before I want to pick up a novel again, a novel or a Shakespeare play.
Though he came to be the public scourge of Theory, Bloom was a theorist himself originally. He was right to challenge both New Critical and then deconstructionist prejudices, with their French formalist paradigms, right to insist that Wordsworth and Tennyson shared the eminence of Baudelaire and Eliot. But he appreciated a very high degree of abstraction, abstraction of rhetoric and abstraction of vision—much more than I can tolerate, much less admire, except in small doses. Like Stevens, he saw the theory of poetry as the life of poetry.
I prefer in contrast a peopled canvas, a richer tapestry. As ideal images of the artist, I like Joyce or Woolf perambulating the city rather than Wordsworth or Shelley alone on their promontories: the novelists are also alone, perhaps, but alone in the crowd, and teaching the crowd how better to be alone, in a communion of our common exile.
He always slights literary form—what other major critic is so little interested in language?—and possibly in consequence misses some dimensions of irony. He saw only the sermon in Dostoevsky, not the disputation. He scanted what was inventive in Poe. He condescended to Keats. He claimed that Beckett, not Joyce, wrote the best English prose of the 20th century. But even when confronted with a solitary different from his preferred solitaries, he missed what was formally at issue: thus he saw Thoreau as only a lesser Emerson rather than as a very different kind of writer than Emerson, one much more attuned to language as material.
His “anxiety of influence” theory is relevant to the strain of visionary, prophetic poetry he prefers, but is it a generally applicable theory of (or standard of value for) poetry, literature, or the arts in general? As Joyce Carol Oates remarked somewhere in her published journal of Bloom, writers are influenced by what they ate for breakfast and read in the news, too. (Novelists more than poets, perhaps.)
This is more minor, but he was also hypocritical on the identity politics question, demoting Dostoevsky and Eliot for their anti-Semitism while wondering why anyone would want to demote, say, Milton for his misogyny or Stevens for his anti-blackness.
The best way to sum it up: this year I finally read David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, the fantasy novel Bloom loved so much that he wrote (as his only published work of fiction) a sequel or fan fiction. I found Arcturus hideous, quasi-unreadable, a nasty and punitive fable; I found it as unwholesome as Bloom finds Dostoevsky and Eliot. In this post, I try to explain this whole divide between Bloom and myself with reference to Lindsay’s book, while also praising his Nietzschean-Kafkan vitalist-ironic reading of the Bible, a book I (how can I say this without sounding “Reddit”?) have trouble with, trouble Bloom explains and helps to allay. I may agree with Bloom about the Bible more than I agree with him about anything else.
After all that, though, he was right about what matters most: our very sense of who we are and of what it is to be who we are has been shaped by a smaller number of writers than we may want to admit, and we will therefore not even know ourselves if we don’t read them—read them critically, of course, but read them.
(Erratum: “Alastor” is not the name of Mr. Shelley’s wandering poet but of the daemon that drives him on. Bloom observes that this error in nomenclature, also made by Yeats, is exactly akin to calling Mrs. Shelley’s monster “Frankenstein” rather than the doctor.)
To advance my thesis, I am going to be a bit unfair to Keats. With his theory of the “chameleon poet,” however, he anticipated my own argument. Who knows if he wouldn’t have produced dramas or epics of Shakespearean amplitude had he lived past 25? Even his greatest lyric, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” is about the self’s encounter with the other of the artwork.
Confession: I haven’t read Ada. Must I?
By the way, I second Ishiguro’s reading recommendations for the budding novelist in his Paris Review interview (except that I’ve never read Wilkie Collins; like Nabokov and Colin Wilson before me, I appreciate science fiction, but I am more lukewarm toward mystery and detective fiction):
INTERVIEWER
You are, in fact, a fan of Dostoyevsky.
ISHIGURO
Yes. And of Dickens, Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins—that full-blooded nineteenth-century fiction I first read in university.
INTERVIEWER
What do you like about it?
ISHIGURO
It’s realist in the sense that the world created in the fiction is more or less akin to the world we live in. Also, it’s work you can get lost in. There’s a confidence in narrative, which uses the traditional tools of plot and structure and character. Because I hadn’t read a lot as a child, I needed a firm foundation. Charlotte Brontë of Villette and Jane Eyre; Dostoyevsky of those four big novels; Chekhov’s short stories; Tolstoy of War and Peace. Bleak House. And at least five of the six Jane Austen novels. If you have read those, you have a very solid foundation.
Yeah Ada is worth reading if for nothing else than for being the apogee of Nabokov's Nabokovness. Also the late chapter on the nature of time is extraordinary.
Literary history, literary personalities, literary criticism: you've melded them all here and somehow it makes inevitable sense that you should have. Well done! (I read a very unfortunate pseudo-manifesto for "Universality and Prose" from a Substack alt-lit novelist which never once mentioned the greatness of character in railing against auto-fiction. I read that essay three times in disbelief before deciding that any combat-by-comment wouldn't be worthwhile).
I'll confess my own very soft spot for Nabokov, which is like my soft spot for Franz Liszt (pray this analogy lands): I admire the technical brilliance and the sense of play, the virtuosity as the ultimate point of the playing. But when I want to hum along or tap my foot or sing it to myself later, I go for Tchaikovsky or B.B. King or the Arctic Monkeys or Ella Fitzgerald or Elvis Presley. The former is akin to Nabokov; the latter, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Faulkner, all the rest of the novelists whom the arch-aristocrat Sirin dismissed. And yet, I feel I need all of them as styles and visions to plunder as I need. They were personally and aesthetically opposed to each other, but they don't feel in opposition to me as a reader: they look like a banquet spread.