LITERARY THEORY: “Death of the Author” (1986) by Roland Barthes

This is one of those texts that are absolutely inescapable for literature students. Wherever you live, whichever classes you choose, at one point in your academic career you will encounter Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author.” Whether you agree with him or not, Barthes introduced a concept that was truly revolutionary and is still a game-changing read for many first- and second-year literature students to this day.

So let’s blow some minds.

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The structure of Kubla Khan, as sketched by Bill Benzon (referenced here).

‘December’, Western Springs, Illinois, 1970.

Lending Library

How to be a Heroine, by Samantha Ellis

While we’re swinging for the fences, here’s Lewis Lapham pondering the unfathomable immensity of the cosmos: “Isn’t that kind of the fun, the looking into the vast darkness ripe with wonders that will never cease? The limitless expanse of human ignorance … rouses out the love of learning, kindles the signal fires of the imagination. We have no other light with which to see and maybe to recognize ourselves as human … To bury the humanities in tombs of precious marble is to deny ourselves the pleasure that is the love of learning and the play of the imagination, and to cheat ourselves of the inheritance alluded to in Goethe’s observation that he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth. Technology is the so arranging of the world that it is the thing that thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing. Machine-made consciousness, man content to serve as an obliging cog, is unable to connect the past to the present, the present to the past. The failure to do so breeds delusions of omniscience and omnipotence.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

(Image Credit: Autopsy of the First Crocodile, Onboard, Upper Egypt, by Ernest Benecke)

It’s not just that the concept of Western civilization is bankrupt, racist bullshit … it’s that it’s much fresher bullshit than you might think. Kwame Anthony Appiah provides an excellent primer: “European and American debates today about whether Western culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the West … If the notion of Christendom was an artifact of a prolonged military struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of Western culture largely took its present shape during the Cold War. In the chill of battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that premodern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past century democracy was the exception in Europe—something that few stalwarts of Western thought had anything good to say about. The idea that tolerance was constitutive of something called Western culture would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been barred from attending England’s great universities. To be blunt: if Western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

(Image Credit: The Plumb Pudding in Danger, James Gillray)

Chabon, Lethem, Eggers, Saunders, Whitehead: the literary luminaries of the nineties made their names on a fantastical escapism, more determined to entertain than they were to provoke. Now that the world’s gone even more to shit, Sam Sacks wonders if their appeal has worn thin: “the central dilemma of the nostalgist’s aesthetic: Can a novelist both recapture the innocent pleasures of storytelling and at the same time illuminate the complex realities of experience? In stable and prosperous times, truth and entertainment can overlap. But periods of crisis wedge them apart, and being faithful to one compromises the other … I find myself missing ambivalence—a quality that rarely squares with entertainment. There must be precious few readers who don’t already feel well disposed to tales of World War II heroes, fugitive slaves, and Abraham Lincoln.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

(Ilustration: Nathan Fox)

Literature loves a hoax—the Daily itself may have perpetrated one as recently as yesterday, though you didn’t hear it from me. Clifford Irving, who’s responsible for one of the great written ruses of the past fifty years, isn’t given the credit he deserves as a creative liar. Paul Elie tells his story: “Irving, while living in Ibiza in 1971, concocted a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire tycoon. Irving, a Manhattan-born author of three novels that had sold poorly, saw it as a low-risk, high-adrenaline stunt, a kick at the pricks of New York literary society. It was the kind of thing a writer could try and hope to get away with in the days before the Internet laid all—or most—fraudsters bare. That ‘stunt’ turned Irving into the Leif Erikson of literary hoaxsters. (The forged Hitler Diaries would not appear until the 1980s.) Irving got advances upward of $750,000 from McGraw-Hill; fooled the publisher, handwriting experts, and Life magazine’s editors; and stirred the publicity-loathing Hughes to comment—all of which seems to surprise him even now. ‘I was a writer, not a hoaxer. As a writer, you are constantly pushing the envelope, testing what people will believe, and once you get going you say, They believed that; maybe they’ll believe this … ’ ”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

(Image Credits: By Nick Cunard/Rex/Shutterstock (Lehrer), Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images (Albert), Schiffer-Fuchs/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images (Frey), Steve Helber/A.P./Rex/Shutterstock (Erderly), from Bettmann/Getty Images (Irving, Cooke).)

Fredric Jameson, American literary critic, marxist theorist and philosopher

The shocking fact that there are people who still root for Walt gave me an idea for a book.

I’ll save you the click: as we know, women were once the marked category in contrast to the universal category, i.e., men. But the marked category has been universalized in elite spaces as the new elite status (albeit with its elitism cynically disavowed) to replace the universal status previously enjoyed by men qua men. Men, she therefore argues, must now read and write as marked, which is to say, as “women”—on this account, frail, humble, domestic, and unambitious, since the antonyms of these words have been deemed by our new elite permanently elitist (patriarchal, fascist, imperialist etc.) 

Humility is the final guise of a killing hubris, my very least favorite of all the available impostures: “He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.” And whoever writes without immodest ambition, without a healthy measure of arrogance, is not worth reading for a single second. Such writers are straightforwardly lying to you about what it takes to write a book (intense self-trust) and the motives involved (an immoderate design on the public’s mind and mood). 

What these matters have to do with sex and gender is infinitely complicated and finally unresolvable, as the mystery of what men and women mean to each other always is, despite the simplistic solutions offered by every political faction, feminist or masculinist. Consider the problem posed for the above argument by the well-known fact that men invented the sentimental novel. In my essay on Yukio Mishima’s own masculinist testament, I did consider the likely unpleasant consequence of expelling men from the arts unless they conform to some inverted gnostic conception of mutilated female virtue; but then the sad truth about mainstream publishing (likewise academia and journalism) is that women have inherited a kingdom in decline, while men have piratically taken to the roads and the seas to seek life elsewhere, everywhere from the digital utopia of the blockchain to the new right-wing demimonde. I assume when she says “men need to read more novels,” she doesn’t mean Zero HP Lovecraft or even Delicious Tacos, but that’s where we are.

I am interested in the folly and grandeur of those men and women who wanted to take on the cosmos in their works, the Herman Melville who said that to write a mighty book you need a might theme and the Toni Morrison who answered the old desert-island question by saying she would write her own fiction to read if ever she found herself a castaway. Or the much-misunderstood Virginia Woolf, who correctly preserved for literature male and female as categories both marked and universal, and who therefore wrote this:

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

—A Room of One’s Own

Right-wingers in the replies are insisting “all fiction is political,” just like the left-wing academics I knew for 20 years. And yes, all fiction is political: if you write a story about more than one person, you’re implying something about how you think people should live together in a society. But it’s only good art when the political perspective is immanent to the form. Or, in less academic terms, when it’s implied. Jane Austen doesn’t write a political treatise to exhort the professional class to marry into the nobility, she just has Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliott slowly realize that they “complete each other”—an emotional and erotic transaction able to be enjoyed on an emotional and erotic level even if you miss or are indifferent to the political implication. And let’s not lie to ourselves about the canon: great authors have marred their works with sermonizing, as in Dickens, Tolstoy, Lawrence. The closer the work gets to outright didacticism, as in the novel of ideas, the more the best writers immerse us in the concrete sensory and affective situation from which the ideas emerge, as in Crime and PunishmentorThe Magic MountainorHerzog. Utterances of ideological stature are then experienced—as they aren’t in formal philosophy or political science or op-ed writing—as issuing in a fragile voice from a suffering body: here, speaking of Didion, I think of Play It as It Lays. Otherwise, the authorial voice had better be itself a pleasure to listen to: George Eliot comes to mind. I don’t expect anyone, I don’t even expect myself, to expend the effort of writing a whole book without some thesis in mind, but the pride and the humility of fiction is to make the thesis beautiful—complex, sensual, eloquent, ironic—so that the beauty will remain when the occasion for the thesis has evaporated. Hence my recurrent territorial rebuke to the political philosopher, which I issued again last week and renew today: the Republic sits at the head of my tradition, not yours.

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. 

I linked a few times last year to Michael Sugrue’s Great Books lectures from the 1990s, which have become a sensation on YouTube. Sugrue’s channel also now features lectures in the same series by the historian Darren Staloff. The most recent upload, above, is Staloff’s lecture on the “outlaw Marxist” and sociologist of intellectuals, Alvin Gouldner. 

Everyone with any interest at all in the recent debates about the “post-left” should listen to this lecture, which, despite being almost three decades old, speaks with appalling clarity to the present.

In Staloff’s summary, Gouldner turns the Marxist lens on the Marxists, accounting for the veiled interests of this ideology’s exponents. These exponents, despite their meretricious claim to represent the working class, tend to be educated professionals. 

After noting that class struggle usually takes place not between owners and workers but between declining and rising elites, Gouldner uncovers two apparent flaws in Marxism that, considered together, are not so much errors as productive historical misreadings that empower Marxism’s elite partisans.

First, Marxism lacks an account of non-ownership classes, that is, classes not defined by the holding of material wealth. This prevents them from grasping the intelligentsia (to include what in premodern contexts would be called the clerisy, the mandarinate, etc.) as an independent social class—a class that is perhaps, alongside the peasantry, the oldest class in human history. Second, Marxism’s conviction that the state serves the owning class rather than being an autonomous bloc with its own interests makes it unable to properly account for state power as in itself oppressive.

Combine these two Marxist errors, says Staloff glossing Gouldner, and it’s no wonder that actually-existing Marxism produced Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot—and, I might add, our incipient new regime (supported by most left-wing parties in the west and by the left-wing intelligentsia) of global corporatist managerialism. The political unconscious of Marxism, a further development of Plato’s Republic, is a totalitarian state overseeing a social stasis managed by intellectuals. And if Platonism itself emerged to challenge Athenian democracy, a polity in which intellectuals were not in charge, then Marxism arose to battle modern capitalism and democracy, systems that likewise empower non-clerics in state, economy, and civil society.

How might we apply these ideas to the present? For one thing, to be post-left is to be a member of the intelligentsia who rebels against its power, either because it has in some way abused us or because we are not members of this class by birth and so do not owe it our primary loyalty—or both, as in my case. None of this cogent analysis, unfortunately, can solve that problem whose contemporary names are Donald Trump and Peter Thiel: the problem that the intelligentsia’s elite rival today is a somewhat decadent and attenuated alliance between the old capitalism (both owners and workers, as in Trump’s vaunted base) and the rising tech barons, themselves a new clerisy with authority premised on a different form of knowledge from the old intelligentsia’s. 

How badly has the left-wing clerisy misused its power that some of us could look with even a modicum of sympathy at this rival elite and its troubled alliances? So badly that I think back with nostalgia on last summer’s advocacy for permanent lockdownism. Two weeks ago their bright idea was self-immolation, while this week they’re celebrating “withdrawals of gestational labour-power,” which I take to include not only abortion but infanticide. Again I ask you: what are we without tenure supposed to do? I could think of all sorts of ideal phenomena to which I would prefer the present post-left, but thisleft—a death cult at either end of life, from “queer” infanticide to “green” suicide, with an intellectual career of “misinformation” policing and God knows what biological mandates in between for anyone who manages to live and to think—is the actualalternative.

Before Staloff’s lecture, I knew Gouldner dimly as a name in the bibliography of my doctoral advisor’s book, which I’ve cited here before. She wrote an incipiently post-left sociological critique of the high modernists for professionalizing literature in the interests of the expert managerial class and thereby confiscating culture from its prior superintendent: the much (and on this account unfairly) maligned Victorian matriarch, domestic woman, the so-called angel in the house. I found and still find this overstated as an objection to the likes of Woolf and Joyce, as opposed, say, to Marx and Freud. (My own dissertation ended up being a riposte to my advisor’s thesis, not the customary extension. And people wonder why I don’t have a career in academia! Actually, no one wonders.) 

Art’s polysemy and irony make it available to multiple classes or none—even to the individual in existential confrontation with life below and above all social contexts. Matthew Arnold and Northrop Frye were right: true art, true culture, does away with classes. Art is what Marxism only pretends to be. 

The proof? Look no further than Plato’s Republic itself. Primordial manifesto of the totalitarian intelligentsia or prose-poem, closet drama, and novel of ideas meant as ironic therapy for this intelligentsia’s will-to-power? In other words, philosophy or poetry? The latter, the latter, the latter.

Sure, you could pay to read the New York Times, or take an extra minute out of your day to blow through their paywall, but for free[*] you could be getting the good information about John Stuart Mill that was just dropped at johnpistelli.com. There’s plenty of nuance in his almost legalistic prose, I promise you, as he heroically tried to synthesize the Enlightenment with Romanticism. An excerpt from my new essay:

How is the infrastructure of free speech to be erected and sustained? Through a proper education, one in which students are allowed to hear a diversity of views from those who hold them. Citing precedents in intellectual history from the Platonic dialogues (in which philosophy is conducted as an argument between multiple personae) to the legal practice of Cicero (who learned the opposing counsel’s case better than his own) to the process of Catholic canonization (which invites the “devil’s advocate” to speak against the candidate for sainthood), Mill argues that students must be prepared to defend their own positions against counterarguments they themselves are able to reconstruct from the inside: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” Otherwise, people will hold even their own opinions lazily, unfeelingly, and without really knowing why—a state of intellectual torpor that bodes ill for the polity.

Precisely the situation in which once-august and now-bathetic institutions like the Times sadly find themselves.

I don’t even know why I started reading or rereading On Liberty the other day, nor do I remember if I’d ever read the whole thing before or just excerpts in college. I do remember reading all of The Subjection of Women in a Western Civ class, and then answering a final essay exam question in the same class where I was invited to imagine and write out a debate between Mill and Hitler. I recall having some fun with the stage directions: “Mill lifts both eyebrows in startled alarm” and the like. The professor would no doubt be fired today. 

Anyway, I think I went back to Mill because George Bernard Shaw had me wanting to revisit the Victorian sages (and indeed to expand my knowledge of some of them beyond the Norton Anthology)—nothing to do with the news. But current hegemonic left-liberalism has of course abandoned Mill’s liberal ideal of free speech without even seeming to understand its rationale—they appear as well to be in the process of abandoning any theory of mind whatever, ironically returning to a fully infantile state—so On Liberty remains pertinent. 

Two things I didn’t get to discuss in my essay since I try to keep these things short enough for Goodreads:

1. Mill was a Malthusian who thought the state should seize control of breeding. He disfavored “a woman’s right to choose,” to use an obsolete phrase from my youth, to opposite effect as does the religious right today: he might not outlaw but mandate abortion, for generally eugenic reasons. This seems to me inconsistent with the broad principles of On Liberty and premised on a flawed and zero-sum idea of humanity’s relationship to nature and economics.

2. I quoted but did not elaborate on Mill’s beguiling sentence, “It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either.” I first encountered it before I ever read any Mill at all as the epigraph to James Wood’s paralyzingly eloquent essay against Thomas More, “A Man for One Season.” Wood’s idea is that More was no better than Knox, a religious sectarian, and therefore not a fit Periclean hero for a liberal, secular society. But is it really better to be John Knox than Alcibiades? It’s a case of two extremes, an unenviable choice. I confess I haven’t read any Thucydides since my first year of college, but I do recollect that Athens’s golden boy (and Socrates’s boy-toy) was an unreliable man, to say the least. Still, would I want to found Scottish Presbyterianism or hang out with Socrates? I swing sexually the other direction, but Al seems to have enjoyed primarily female company anyway, among all his wild and dangerous political intrigues. Wherever you come down, it’s certainly a thought-provoking sentence.

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[*] While I have been “playing real good for free,” like the “one-man band by the quick-lunch stand” in the Joni-Mitchell-via-Lana-del-Rey ballad, if you like it and if you’re able, you might please send moneyorbuy a book to keep the operations ongoing. Thank you!

The answer to this, no matter how prescriptive, can only be disguised autobiography. In one of the only “scientifically” useful things I ever posted to this website in 10 years, I recalled to the best of my ability what I was actually assigned to read in high-school English in a massive suburban public high school in the mid-to-late 1990s. I thought posting actual information would be better than the crude generalizations people (including me) usually make on this subjects. I was 17 between 11th and 12th grades, so you can see from the list what I read in school: 20th-century American literature at the end of 11th grade and a very selective world-literature curriculum in 12th grade consisting mainly of Sophocles, Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare.

Extracurricularly, I think of the summer between 11th and 12th grade—so the summer of my 17th year—as one of the most important in my reading life. This was where I made the final break with childish things. I had read comic books and genre fiction (not always but often very good: Ray Bradbury, Alan Moore) and a smattering of popular realism (Johns Steinbeck and Irving for preference) until then. But in that late spring and early summer, partially in school but mostly out of it, that I read not only Hemingway and Fitzgerald but also Melville (“Bartleby,” Billy Budd), Faulkner (As I Lay Dying,The Sound and the Fury), Morrison (Beloved,Paradise), Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet,The Satanic Verses), and DeLillo (Underworld). 

These novels—along with the poetry I enjoyed (Keats, Eliot) and the monumental example set by Shakespeare (above all HamletandLear)—ruined me forever for both fantasy and realism in their popular forms. I made instead a compact with the broad modernist tradition, which I can explain using that ever-“problematic” form/content distinction. Literature’s proper content is experience, life, history, reality, “a shout in the street,” not a wholly fantasized invention, not some other world that you “build”; form is your true arena of invention, the place you transfigure the real with your own sensibility and give the audience something new. This is what I learned on that magical, torrid, stormy summer; as I’ve recalled elsewhere, a storm put the power out for three days in July, so for three sweaty days in July I read Underworld by candlelight. 

In this period I also began reading literary criticism seriously. The Western Canon was useful encouragement—I don’t buy Bloom’s theory overall, but he was always good to me as a rhapsode—and, more importantly, Sexual Personae, though I might have discovered that one at the beginning of my 18th year, I don’t quite remember the winter month. If the modernists from Melville to DeLillo shaped my commitments and concerns as a writer, I would say Paglia in concert with Morrison determined my social and political sensibility. They assured that I would never properly be right-wing or left-wing: the one side consisting of metaphysicians who would bar whole categories of person from the universe, the other side cultists of the demiurge who believe there is no limit whatsoever to reason’s design on nature and the spirit. 

Now would I recommend that course of reading to a 17-year-old? Not any one book in particular, though in my years teaching in an English department, often to high-school students taking college courses, I introduced Shakespeare, Melville, Morrison, and DeLillo to many a 17-year-old (see my syllabi here and my online lectures here). More important is the level of reading; I hate when teachers patronize students, giving out what are essentially children’s books, or, worse, crude political polemics, in the first year of college. 

The replies to the Tweet are dire in this regard—so many recommendations of the wretched Vonnegut. I couldn’t stand him as a teen and only forced my way through one of his books a few years ago so I could cogently explain why I hated it. His homespun nihilism and smug pseudo-naive prose make me vomit. I didn’t care for Salinger or Kerouac as a kid either. I came to appreciate them later but suspect at this late date they require a historical sensibility to enjoy. The world might be too different now for their styles to register to youth as immediate critique or relevant vitalism. For that kind of thing, I imagine today’s teens rely on online schizoposts. I like those too; just make sure you get to Hamlet eventually; hell, he schizoposts four or five times in that play.

The version of this magnificent, awful essay collected in The Modernist Papers (2007) omits the dedication. I wonder why. In general, I find Jameson both loathsome and impressive, loathsomely impressive, impressively loathsome. How both? Because of the inimitable frisson he creates by casually endorsing not just a civil rights movement but what was in effect a terrorist paramilitary campaign, which he conflates in true Leninist style with the will of “the people”—this in an essay about a quasi-pacifist skeptical of nationalism no less—before calmly assuming his customary perch on the peak of absolute knowledge from which all culture can be surveyed and measured. 

Anyway, my main interest in the essay is his assessment of Ulysses’s class character:

Now for a certain conservative thought, and for that heroic fascism of the 1920s for which the so-called ‘masses’ and their standardised city life had become the very symbol of every­thing degraded about modern life, gossip— Heidegger will call it ‘das Gerede’—is stigmatised as the very language of inauthenticity, of that empty and stereotypical talking pour rien dire to which these ideologues oppose the supremely private and individual speech of the death anxiety or the heroic choice. But Joyce—a radical neither in the left-wing nor the reactionary sense—was at least a populist and a plebeian. ‘I don’t know why the communists don’t like me,’ he complained once, ‘I’ve never written about anything but common people.’ Indeed, from the class perspective, Joyce had no more talent for or interest in the representation of aristocrats than Dickens; and no more experience with working-class people or with peasants than Balzac (Beckett is indeed a far sounder guide to the Irish countryside or rural slum than the essen­tially urban Joyce). In class terms, then, Joyce’s characters are all resolutely petty-bourgeois: what gives this apparent limitation its representative value and its strength is the colonial situation itself. Whatever his hostility to Irish cultural nationalism, Joyce’s is the epic of the metropolis under imperialism, in which the development of bourgeoisie and proletariat alike is stunted to the benefit of a national petty-bourgeoisie: indeed, precisely these rigid constraints imposed by imperialism on the development of human energies account for the symbolic displacement and flowering of the latter in eloquence, rhetoric and oratorical language of all kinds; symbolic practices not particularly essential either to businessmen or to working classes, but highly prized in precapitalist societies and preserved, as in a time capsule, in Ulysses itself. And this is the moment to rectify our previous account of the city and to observe that if Ulysses is also for us the classical, the supreme representation of something like the Platonic idea of city life, this is also partly due to the fact that Dublin is not exactly the full-blown capitalist metropolis, but like the Paris of Flaubert, still regressive, still distantly akin to the village, still un- or under-developed enough to be representable, thanks to the domination of its foreign masters.

This is clever, very, but then if colonialism plays the role he here attributes to it, what was Dickens’s excuse for also creating petit-bourgeois utopias in the heart of Victorian London (Orwell on Dickens: “the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle bourgeoisie…a dream of complete idleness”)? What, for that matter, is the class character of The Waste Land, with its clerks, typists, and (Phoenician) merchants? I mostly got this from my own dissertation advisor, and she mostly got it from Rita Felski, but I want to run with it to the end of the line: modern literature is the paradise of the lower middle class.

—Anne Fernihough, “Introduction,” The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (Penguin, 1995)

I didn’t have room to quote the above in my essay, just published yesterday, on Lawrence’s The Rainbow, but you can take it as my epigraph. In my treatment of the subject, I first suggest that a paradigmatic female modernist like Woolf, insofar as she was a modernist, was no less a partner in this “suppression…of political movements” (and the same goes for Stein, Barnes, Moore, Loy, and more, to varying degrees all non-leftists or even in some cases rightists). Then I go so far as to defend the instinct that won out here: the higher politics of the aesthetic over the low politics of mass movements with their designs on state power. Needless to say, this is a very timely prior instance of the same decoupling of bohemian from activist, of aesthetics from militancy, that we see today.

Speaking of all that, while mainstream elite culture is having a D. H. Lawrence moment, I’m surprised he’s not more present in the online extremist countercultures. He has that same Mishima quality, anticipating extremely-online male social outcasts, of being somehow perfectly poised between trans and Nazi, now dipping toward one side, now to the other, but somehow always keeping a precarious balance, in the art if not the life, the would-be mail-fisted fascist as tremulous adolescent girl. I think of how John Carey, in his roll-call of modernist fascism The Intellectuals and the Masses, pauses to exonerate Lawrence of his more troubling tendencies on the grounds that he was, in the end, just a sensitive soul who read Neech too early:

It must be stressed that Lawrence, for all his Nietzschean debts, was not like Nietzsche. The range and subtlety of his imagination went far beyond Nietzsche’s. The Nietzschean warrior ideal, and countenancing of cruelty, could only have seemed disgusting to Lawrence, who turns his characters not into warriors but into flowers. […] To cite such passages—and there are hundreds of them in Lawrence—and to contemplate the impossibility of Nietzsche having written them, is not just to emphasize that Lawrence was a poet and that Nietzsche was in some respects a desperately restricted and unfulfilled human being. It is also to contend that, for Lawrence, the stance of natural aristocrat, with its presuppositions of isolation and alienation, was adverse to all the promptings of his sympathetic imagination, which taught him to fuse and integrate.

The Rainbow is too long, but someone please make the NEETs read “Medlars and Sorb Apples” or “The Prussian Officer” at least. (Why does Mishima get all the attention? Strange that even fringe culture is dominated by the annoying presumption that if it’s translated it must be better.) In my essay I quote this passage from The Rainbow:

She never felt sorry for what she had done, she never forgave those who had made her guilty. If he had said to her, “Why, Ursula, did you trample my carefully-made bed?” that would have hurt her to the quick, and she would have done anything for him. But she was always tormented by the unreality of outside things. The earth was to walk on. Why must she avoid a certain patch, just because it was called a seed-bed? It was the earth to walk on. This was her instinctive assumption.

Here is my official comment, perhaps too Bloomian in its excited swoop through the canon:

Here we remember that Lawrence is the Englishman who put the gnostic-individualist literature of American Romanticism on modernism’s map. Ursula might be the daughter of Hester Prynne and Captain Ahab, her adventures chronicled by a prose Whitman.

My unofficial comment is that this is possibly my favorite paragraph from the novel because it expresses (I confess!) exactly how I felt as a child.  

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.

—Matthew Crawford, “Covid Was Liberalism’s Endgame”

If I may reassert my old theme: to achieve this goal we will have to restore the aesthetic education that co-evolved with liberalism to prevent its decay into the Hobbesian reduction Arendt saw at the origin of totalitarianism. 

This education tends to reinforce both through its content—works of the imagination—and its form—exploring the plurality of interpretation these works provoke—an anthropology for which the human being has flexible imaginative sovereignty over the social rather than being its ward or toy. 

And while we’re familiar with conservative challenges to such a curriculum, the more novel threat has come from today’s illiberal left-liberalism. For these partisans, texts without transparency are elitist, while pluralism is the alibi of the malefactor, even the fascist. So the only appropriate material for instruction, they conclude, is didactic children’s literature. 

This superficially surprising development is rooted in the natural or structural totalitarianism of the intellectual class going back to Plato, generally a left-wing phenomenon in the modern era. But we should recall that the leftist-Platonist Shelley replaced the philosopher-king with the poet-legislator to supplant a ruler with a representative and an issuer of authoritative images with a provider of open-ended ones. 

To whatever extent we can read our way out of the present dilemma in which liberalism has become total rule by the expert class, we will need to read more than the philosophers. For an image to meditate on, here’s the banner I put on the first page of my Brit Lit II syllabus over a decade ago, the first year I decided contemporary syllabi needed illustrations:

C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953)

A great part of this book was written on Ellis Island while I was being detained by the Department of Immigration. The Island, like Melville’s Pequod, is a miniature of all the nations of the world and all sections of society. My experience of it and the circumstances attending my stay there have so deepened my understanding of Melville and so profoundly influenced the form the book has taken, that an account of this has seemed to me not only a natural but necessary conclusion.

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature. Moreover, such knowledge assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular “Americanness” that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence. There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States. This agreement is made about a population that preceded every American writer of renown and was, I have come to believe, one of the most furtively radical impinging forces on the country’s literature. The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.

These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature—individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell—are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence. It has occurred to me that the very manner by which American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity exists because of this unsettled and unsettling population. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence—one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness. And it shows.