#christian lorentzen
The implied equation between being “talented professionals” and having “souls” is a telling expression of current literary attitudes. People’s souls are more likely to be found in the ways they betray each other, their modes of love and hate, than on their résumés. Authorial image management now seeps into the writing of fiction itself. The more readers (and critics) are content to conflate alter egos with authors, the more authors are tempted to idealize their fictional selves: confessional literature cedes the field to the autofiction of self-flattery. Characters in middlebrow melodramas are fine-tuned to avoid the ruffling of sensitivities. Elsewhere villains and victims are flattened so that the readers of contemporary gothic narratives can easily tell them apart. A pseudopolitical moralizing about these issues has crept into more and more of our criticism, and prizes are bestowed on maudlin therapeutic narratives of abuse and recovery. (See last year’s Booker winner Shuggie Bain.) Roth was rarely maudlin, and however much his characters indulged in therapy (analysis, as it was called back then), it never worked.
– Christian Lorentzen, whose output led him to be described as “two of the five best book critics we currently have”
Do I have to join Urbit to get this or buy it in crypto on the blockchain or something? In any case, I want to read it. The manifesto strikes the note of the emerging ideology as it slowly engulfs elite aesthetics, an unlikely balance between the intellectual worlds of the New York literati and the Silicon Valley technorati (and now its Austin/Miami diaspora):
The fact is that language can be holy, at least when it’s used correctly. Every writer who is a real writer and not a mere reporter knows what it is when sound and sense form a feedback loop with one another, and the world itself comes to seem more sinuous and more clear, and the hairs on the back of the neck prickle. It doesn’t work when you cheat on the sound—which is why, for instance, a thesaurus is so handy, and why Flaubert drove himself mad over choosing just the right word. And it doesn’t work when you cheat on the sense—which is why, for instance, Joyce made such obsessive inquiries about the height of the railing Bloom and Daedalus would have to jump over in the Ithaca section of Ulysses.
[…]
Urbit is a software project. But one might suggest that at its core it also implies a different way of looking at the world. The short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which lent the first Urbit company its name, tells the tale of a parallel universe that slowly subsumes reality. It may be that such a parallel universe—one where quality beats quantity, permanence beats a flash in the pan, and a deep concern for human flourishing beats venality—is slowly twisting its way, ivy-like, through the nooks and crannies of our otherwise humdrum world. We’ll have to wait and see. In any case, we couldn’t be more grateful to the Urbit Foundation and its sister organization The Combine for their support in getting this project off the ground, and for the steady belief that something so quixotic might have staying power. However the Mars Review does conclude, we can say confidently that no other project could have provided the necessary premise.
Up-to-the-minute contents: I’m always up for more Angelicism chatter; I’m curious about the the first great work of cyborg literature as I am about the PMC; and you’ll never go wrong reading Default Friend on sex, society, and technology.
For my specific purposes as both a literary man and an observer of The New Conservatism, “Christian Lorentzen on BAP & Logo” is the surprise here. Everything depends on the treatment, but this may be the literary-critical equivalent of Jacob Siegel’s and James Pogue’s relatively sympathetic journalistic treatments of Yarvin and Co. I’ve wondered for years who would be the first critic with ties to the older literary (I first mistyped “libterary”) establishment to take seriously the pseudonymous world of the self- and small-press-published online right or illiberal dissident sphere.
Why take it seriously? A century ago, modernism itself, before it made the canonical cut, was a similar stew of weird little magazines, eccentric small presses, vanity-published projects, and strange urban scenes stalked by all manner of occultists, nihilists, anti-liberal cranks, ultra-reactionary queers, elitist critics, and fascist troubadours. So if Lorentzen can be the Edmund Wilson of the hour, well, somebody has to do it.
I will await our critic’s dispatch from Mars, but, for whatever it’s worth, I’m indifferent to BAP qua literature. As for Logo, I read enough of Selfie, Suicide online to see that it was good, but I suspect his totalitarian turn of mind will inhibit his development—not an eventuality unknown to our modernist precursors either.
Post link
Last week we were anticipating the Mars Review of Books, and now it has arrived over on Urbit. “What is Urbit?” some ask. I don’t know, but stay tuned for the next episode of Grand Podcast Abyss, dropping tomorrow: we will talk to a MarsReview author and general online oracle and hope she can explain. For now, I’d like to consider three other pieces in the publication and what they might mean for our culture.
Above is Christian Lorentzenpraising Selfie, Suicide by Logo Daedalus. Our critic isn’t naturally effusive, so it’s not quite a blurb, but the force of the judgment—which consigns corporate publishing to the artistic irrelevance of the Paris Salon circa 1863—is only strengthened by the understatement. (Now if you want more fiction that hasn’t been choked to death by the five fingers of MFA stultification, generic constraint, Netflix-brained agents, profit-fixated publishers, and Maoist sensitivity readers, you know where you can find it…) Lorentzen also considers Bronze Age Mindset, and I’m glad to see he came to the same judgment I did about BAP’s silly playpen politics even though I didn’t bother to read the book.
Another piece relevant to our concerns here is Anika Jade Levy on the mysterious Angelicism01, whom we’ve discussed on the blog and the pod a few times. Levy’s concise summary of what I’ve called “The New Conservatism” that forms the backdrop to Angelicism’s literary performances:
Within legacy institutions, the intellectual elite have dug their heels in, doubled down on identity politics, Roe vs. Wade hysteria, and neoliberal consensus. But elsewhere, in New York art world circles and in underground online communities, the vibe has shifted into a post-ironic deep right politics, watered-down Catholicism, and acceptance of socially conservative values.
More startlingly, Levy breaks a taboo that still stands even on much of the post-left: in practical political discussions you must finally disown and disparage the right. The praise of Trump as a singular figure we do hear on the post-left doesn’t violate the taboo because it remains on the aesthetic level as a quasi-ironic appreciation for his carnivalesque persona and crude wit without reference (or without non-ironic reference) to politics per se. Whereas Levy just tears the Band-Aid off and wonders aloud if he weren’t a better president than Obama and Biden, even venturing that his “xenophobia might have proven useful.”
And finally, as if to give a world-historical explanation for what could motivate such heresy, is Matthew Gasda on the professional-managerial class. Gasda makes short work of socialist anti-PMC discourse since socialism itself will by its nature be a technocracy run by expert bureaucrats and is therefore, no less than PMC rule under our nominal capitalism (really statist corporatism), anti-art, anti-religion, anti-nature, and above all anti-culture. And this, for the playwright Gasda, is the real stake of the argument, which naturally leads him to sympathize with what he calls the 19th century’s “romantic conservatism” and its resistance to the totalitarian society heralded by the French Revolution:
Prior to the 20th century, life was not standardized; agriculture, education, medicine, commerce, and language were more varied, localized, and historically determined. Daily life had more risks and fewer guarantees—but the state had less power, and less will, to mold individuals and small communities. Romantic conservatism—a constellation of thought which valued the rural, the quasi-feudal, and the traditional—was politically tenable; the resistance to modernization and homogenization was a mainstream position. The French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, for example, faced considerable headwinds in the 19th: a century in which many major writers, thinkers, and statesmen expressed considerable skepticism towards the notion that the complex dynamics of society could be mastered by rational, top-down political schemes.
[…]
The aristocratic spirit of the 19th century—not just of Metternich and Bismarck, but of Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche—lost its vote on the direction of society; the civilization of the 20th century borrowed little from War and PeaceorOn the Genealogy of Morals.
Conversely, in the 20th century, Kafka’s horror at systems of control and punishment, or simply the boredom of office life, or Zweig’s deep disgust at having to carry a passport after 1918, were symptoms of the gradual death of the old world, and the ascendency of the new. The mechanized, scientized 20th century was decidedly grim. “The tragedy of today,” D.H. Lawrence wrote, “is that men are only materially and socially conscious. They are unconscious of their own manhood, and so they watch it be destroyed. Out of free men we produce social beings by the thousand every week.” Lawrence, in his own inimical way, spoke literally of what Kafka expressed allegorically: Human beings were caught in the net of systems that they had built; something had gone badly wrong.
Too romantic? Too conservative? Maybe if you come at these questions politics-first and therefore think it’s reasonable to drub artists over the head with the tomes of Gramsci and Bourdieu and castigate them as a proto-fascist lumpenproletariat rabble. But if you’re expecting such artists—serious artists, I mean, not actual or would-be academic experts—to see the light and cite sociologists, trust experts, and praise bureaucrats forever rather than quoting Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Kafka, and Lawrence in defiance of all “rational, top-down political schemes”—well, you obviously have another thing coming.
Now whether or not “the heresiarchs of Uqbar,” or rather Urbit, can satisfy this romantic longing remains to be seen.
Post link
