Bloomsday Notes

And you who wrest old images from the burial earth! The brainsick words of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat standing from everlasting to everlasting.

–Ulysses, “Wandering Rocks”

My father was once playing with his pet cat, and he made an observation that crossed Montaigne with Hobbes: “If I were smaller than this cat,” he said, “She’d kill me and eat me.”  I have come to the same conclusion about all human groups, classes, nations, and races.  That is, my decade spent on the political left has convinced me that all revolutions would return us to the starting point: with privileged and disprivileged classes and groups.

The inevitability of human hierarchy would be tolerable if the wielders of power were frank.  For this reason, I’ve always found the political right refreshing: “We want power and we should have it and we’re going to use it to benefit ourselves,” they say, only claiming that others should support them because they’ll be benefited by accident (since this is largely false, I am not a political rightist either).  But the left pursues power in the guise of humanitarianism and utopic universalism.  Intellectual and activist identity politics is a game of discursive revenge: because the straight white man set himself up as the neutral universal, the unmarked category, he must be ruthlessly marked at all points within the discourse of identity politics.  Hence the “circular firing squad” character of leftist infighting, where everyone fights to be more marked, more disprivileged.

(I say “he,” but in practice, the straight white woman is actually the most reviled figure in identity politics, because she gets to leverage her ambiguous post-feminist social position as both advantage and disadvantage, able to be seen as both a strong G. I. Jane and a vulnerable campus rape victim.  Post-1960s, with the white man indelibly marked as “oppressor,” middle-class white womanhood is the most flexible, subtle, supple identity in modern western society, the new universal.  All that female novel-reading and novel-writing, 300 hundred years worth, was training for this.  Consequently, there are whole activist communities on right and left–the men’s rights movement, the radical women of color or “womanists”–whose entire purpose seems to be tearing down white womanhood.)

All this marking of identities is supposed to produce the ultimate left-wing goal: the most oppressed and exploited among us will recognize the degree of their disenfranchisement and liberate us all by destroying the hierarchy from the bottom up, thus freeing everyone above them as well as themselves.  Here are Marx and Engels in 1848, electing the proletariat to the role:

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

That, of course, did not work out, so other identities were proposed as the universal liberator.  Here, in 1978, is the Combahee River Collective, nominating the black woman for the job:

We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.

Somehow I don’t think that will work either.  Men and women, black and white, gay and straight, organize themselves as groups in order to attain power, not to destroy power relations.  We will never destroy power relations, anymore than birds will stop building nests or cats killing mice.  Because I’ve stopped believing in the strange fiction that, if one social group wins its social struggle, it will liberate us all, I have ceased to care which group wins.  Hence, I can no longer describe myself as being on the political left.

The most we as humans can do, the only privilege, is to escape group identification for as long as we can, in order to attain the pleasure and relief of acting for its own purpose, rather than for the purpose of pursuing power.  I don’t scorn the pursuit of power because I find it immoral–it’s too late for that; rather, I find it inevitable.  But it is coarsening; it blunts the fine distinctions and nuances of life, and destroys the intricate beauty that already exists.  It turns a subtle personality into a droning ideologue or pulpit-pounding moralist.  It exterminates those ways of life those that stand in its path.  It uproots the forest, it razes the old city, it leaves tank treads in the trackless desert.  It destroys the church building because it hates the church ideology, and if the fresco falls, then so be it.  It has no time for the purposeless pursuit of thought and feeling for their own sake, an activity I will call “art.”  Walter Pater, in The Renaissance, writes about the necessary complicity of political indifference with the aesthetic sensibility:

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell, Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals. He thus sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work. His interest is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico’s saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna’s Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. His morality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist.

What does this have to do with Bloomsday, the feast day of modernism, Joyce’s pagan replacement for the holy days of the liturgical calendar?  What is Ulysses actually celebrating?  Pater’s influence on Joyce is a clue.  As is the restriction of the novel-epic’s action to a single day, declining to worship the modern god of progressive History, as Joyce’s Marxist scorners from Radek to Lukács to Moretti have noted.  Ulysses is the utopia of the refusal, a long day, the longest, in which politics are held at bay by the act of paying attention to everything from the sound a cat makes to the development of English prose.  The closest thing we get to a moral is Bloom’s declaration in the pub, which is incoherent and somewhat stupid on purpose–because it is blessedly apolitical:

- Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.

– What? says Alf.

– Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

It’s tempting to spin this into an ideology, its own form of power politics where the sensitive Blooms of the world take over and make us all into gentle half-artists, or to Christianize secular Bloom’s statement as agápē, or, in the Latinate English of Joyce’s erstwhile Church and mine, charity.  But I think instead Bloom’s “love” is what I called “art” above.  That Bloom is an artistic mediocrity perversely proves the point: you don’t have to be a Pater or a Joyce to make your great refusal, to enter into pointless sympathy with the world.  And I think that is the best that can be hoped for in this wretched world.

Weinberger vs. Josipovici

A friend of mine once disparagingly said that a work of academic literary criticism should be re-titled Some Books I Like, implying that the text’s argument was a sham concealing the author’s real intention: to make a set of disparate reflections about some books he found compelling.

Since then, I’ve decided that Some Books I Like is probably my favorite genre of literary criticism.  It beats the hell out of the reigning method in English departments today: sociological nihilism, or the reduction of all authors and texts to chips in a simplistic game of historical explanation.  This method finds its inspiration in the ubiquitous Pierre Bourdieu, a paradigmatic man of resentment whose smug scientism masks his rage against forms of enchantment and charisma that he cannot master, and finds its reductio ad absurdam in the aliterate mapmaking of Franco Moretti, a cultivated and intelligent European decadent whose fine crypto-Catholic contempt for the world and the imagination disguises itself, absurdly, as Marxist materialism.  At least these two are fun to read, in their way, but their successors are truly dire.

To my theme: In the New York Review of Books (and behind their paywall), Eliot Weinberger accuses Gabriel Josipovici of having written not a book that seriously proposes to answer the question What Ever Happened to Modernism?, but instead a set of disparate reflections about some books he found compelling.

Weinberger vs. Josipovici basically represents an intra-modernist dispute between a Poundian who aspires to the unification of past and present through a poetics of the historical image (that would be Weinberger) and a Kafkan who finds history to be a ruse of authority masking the more painful existential dilemma of each individual’s radical singularity or solitude (that’s Josipovici).

I actually find both of these views persuasive on different days of the week; in general, I prefer to read criticism by Poundians, who can tell us interesting things about the Tang Dynasty, the Guelph-Ghibelline feud, the Albigensian Crusade, etc., etc., and fiction and poetry by Kafkans, who do not burden us with mere facts as they limn the raw problem that is simply waking up in the morning.

Given my pluralism, I don’t have a dog in the Weinberger/Josipovici fight.  I appreciated Josipovici’s  book for what it was: a series of essays on why he likes certain books and not others, in addition to an overall essay on the sorrows and pleasures of secularism.  Weinberger is right as far as it goes that Josipovici’s historical explanation is overly broad and his concept of modernism overly narrow, but he can’t accuse Josipovici of not defining his terms.  I think with books like this that it’s best to grant critics their premise and then take their practical critical reflections for what they’re worth, rather than quibbling about boring -ism words, which are usually impossible to define with any precision.

(I do wish, as an aside, that critics would invent more critical categories rather than just manipulating the imprecise ones that exist.  It’s clear enough that Josipovici is only really interested in one current in what’s called modernism or even modernity.  I would have liked the book better had he given that a name instead of insisting on his own definition of modernism, which just makes him an easy target for the historicists.)

Let’s look at two paragraphs from Weinberger.  First, and most disappointingly:

Certainly the lingering reverberations from the Reformation and the French Revolution, the belief in artifice, and the questions about art and self and language are all strands. But it is astonishing that his is a Modernism without the rise of the city, with its factories, crowds, and anonymity; without the devastation of the Napoleonic and First World Wars; without the ideological ardors of communism and fascism, the thrill of speed, the new symbolic language of the telegraph, the international voices of radio, mass migrations, the representational “reality” of photographs and the collapse of time in film montage, anthropological investigations of tribal cultures, or the beauties and terrors of industrial products. His is a Modernism that has no place for one of its rallying cries, that of the enthusiastic William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.”

Again, I concede Weinberger’s last point, which is that Josipovici doesn’t think certain “modernist” works are modernist, based on his special definition of the word. But who cares?  This is pedantry.  What I hate about this paragraph is its heap of narrow-minded historicist cliches that have grown ever more moldy since Walter Benjamin  became trendy.  The city!  The telegraph!  Radio!  Cinema!  Anthropology!  Psychology!   Spare me!  This is the stuff of the New Modernist Studies, and its thesis is pretty much the opposite of Josipovici’s: it holds that people became enchanted all over again at the remarkable new stuff that the turn of the century threw at them.  Modernist Studies really amounts, in my experience, to a form of techno-determinism that Josipovici, with his care for the fragile autonomy of the singular artist, explicitly rejects in his book.  He insists that new media and new technology allowed for a rediscovery of pre-modern forms and pagan insights, but also that they certainly did not cause new art by making artists envy them or unconsciously but mechanically shaping aesthetic decisions.  And if that is what happened, then Moretti is right: we might as well not read the greatest literary works at all.

(To digress, there’s also the problem of specialization.  I’ve noticed that modernist experts are often going on about the newness of the city–think of Mrs. Dalloway or The Waste Land.  But then so are Victorianists–think of, well, Dickens.  And Romanticists talk about the newness of the city too–or haven’t you read Blake’s “London”?  But then again, your eighteenth-century experts can produce Moll Flanders or some Swift poems to show how new the city was in the Enlightenment.  Wait, though, because your early modern specialists start talking about city comedy and coney-catching ballads and other indications of new Elizabethan urbanity.  Come to think of it, I once read a review of a new translation of the epic of Gilgamesh that talked about how that very ancient poem was all about the novelty of city-living.  It appears that the city never gets old.)

Another paragraph:

In fact, these supposed hallmarks of the Modernists may be found at almost any moment in history. If his worldview were not so obstinately Eurocentric—even the entire Western Hemisphere has only two exemplars: the faux Englishmen Borges and Eliot—Josipovici would have found China, to name only one, full of his kinds of Modernists. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, 2,500 years ago, were talking about the inadequacies of mere words, of a language beyond words. Classic novels such as Golden Lotuses (The Plum in the Golden Vase) or The Story of the Stone (The Dream of the Red Chamber) played games of illusion and reality with the reader as complex as any in Cervantes. And the innovations that he finds in Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich—placing the observer in the scene of nature, and the realization that “vision is always vision at a particular moment, from a particular place, and that though vision may be the goal it does not subsume life but is only one moment, one experience, within life”—seem applicable to nearly the entirety of Chinese poetry and landscape painting.

This rhetorical ploy is really getting old: anybody European or American or “white” or “western” who doesn’t mention any or every other human culture is Eurocentric, and so is implicitly racist and imperialist.  Such a standard is rightly never applied to writers understood to be outside “the West” (when will these Chinese writers stop writing about Chinese people and Chinese history and Chinese literary traditions?).  Thus I could turn it around on the accusers: they assume a kind of Euro-supremacy wherein the western writer is a universal subject, potential master of all traditions.  Moreover, note Weinberger’s eminently Poundian choice of foreign culture to adduce here: China.  His Sinophilia is as American as apple pie.  Finally, it never occurs to good cosmo-liberals that this desire to always be going abroad, seeking out new frontiers, is itself one manifestation of the imperial mentality.  Why should Josipovici be ethically, politically, or argumentatively required to mention Chinese literature and painting?  Its influence on the European traditions that matter to him was relatively negligible.  Josipovici writes about the history and culture of Europe because he lives there and not in China.  Is this so unreasonable?  In any event, Josipovici does not treat Europe or the West as a unified or continuous culture.  His study emphasizes the modernists’ rediscovery of occluded western traditions in the classical and medieval periods, traditions that in their anticipation of modernism were as foreign as Chinese civilization to a Londoner of 1910.

To conclude: I like Weinberger’s essays, but this one is banal, cliched, and moralizing.  While I would have preferred to see Josipovici frame his book less polemically, since I don’t think his historical and artistic generalizations are all that tenable, it nevertheless performs the work of good criticism: it gives the reader an intellectual and affective impression of what it would mean to appreciate the works the critic appreciates.  Of course, the reverse works too, when the critic persuades the reader to disesteem the work; but Weinberger’s critique of Josipovici is too pedantic to be so effective.

For more on Weinberger’s review, see This Space and Conversational Reading.  This Space also has the best summary review/defense of Josipovici’s book online.  My favorite negative review, though it was quite controversial, is Amelia Atlas’s; I agree with her detractors that she’s unfair to Josipovici, but, at the end of her piece, she makes the best possible case for the realist tradition in the novel, a tradition I too esteem equally with what Josipovici calls the modernist.

Tree of Life

The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. There is one only other parallel to this position; and that is the parallel of the life in which we all began. When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say “My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truths that flowers smell.” No: you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father, it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine, to whom this book is dedicated. Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education becomes futile: for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done already, and thank God it is nearly always done by women. Every man is womanised, merely by being born.

—Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Tree of Life is my first Terrence Malick film.  I tried to watch The New World once, on a small TV screen, but it wasn’t going to happen.  So I repaired to the theater to get the widescreen experience of his newest work.

Intellectually, I want to defend Malick’s audacity in showing at length the surface of the sun, asteroid collisions, dinosaur interactions, undersea life, and the processes of cells and arteries. He scales up and scales down toward the beginning of the movie before he finds his temporal and biological focus, the growth and adolescence of young Jack in a 1950s Texas suburb, caught between his religious, sainted, beautiful mother, who counsels him to follow the unselfish path of grace rather than the capricious way of nature, and his tough, resentful, overwhelming father, who teaches him, sometimes through violence, how to transcend himself neither by nature nor by grace, but by will.

The film is largely saved from schematism by Brad Pitt’s performance as the father.  Pitt never lets the man be just a bully or tyrant, though he is that, because he also projects his charisma, his ambition, his thwartedness, his tenderness.  You see that the truly terrible thing about having him for a father or husband would be your genuine desire to meet his standard, to please him, even to protect him.  One reviewer speaks in our pallidly hysterical social-worker ethical parlance about the father’s “domestic abuse,” but all we see him do is lock one kid in a closet and hit another in the mouth; in the only scene where he lays hands on his wife, she hits him first and he restrains her till she agrees to stop.  If anything, I’d imagine the film plays down the era’s lower threshold for physical violence.  No, the real problem the father poses to his sons is the partial truth of life’s ruthlessness that he incarnates.  Malick is no sentimentalist and no moralist: the dinosaurs he shows us also tested each other through violence, and the asteroid that wiped them out wasn’t on the path of grace.  Malick and Pitt are able, in short, to inhabit, albeit critically, the father’s position.

The role of the mother is weaker.  In fact, what struck me about the film’s historical setting was how much of a difference the feminist and sexual revolution has made in people’s actual lives.  I grew up in a much more co-ed world than the one Malick depicts.  When we went on childish treks in the woods, there were always boys and girls both, and the kinds of advice your parents gave you, and what forms of experience they represented, were not neatly divided according to their gender, as it was, or was supposed to be, which can amount to the same thing, in the 195os middle-class domestic retrenchment.  Given the stricter gender binary of the ’50s, given that your mother represented one kind of world and your father another that would displace the first, the overtness of the film’s Oedipal themes rings true.  But the idealization of the mother seems to represent Malick’s perspective as well as Jack’s.

I’m not just making a feminist point here.  Quite the opposite really, since modern vernacular feminism continues, probably inevitably, to trade in many ways on the nineteenth-century feminist idea that women are somehow special or ideal or more moral or more fragile than men–not just different, which may be true to an extent, but better.  (It’s hard to remember now, but domestic ideology was an early form of feminist critique, even though the feminists’ second wave successfully if erroneously redefined it as a creation of “patriarchy.”)  If Malick did grow up in world more segregated by gender, then he has less access to the ways in which women are as complex as men.  For instance, just as the father both feels a resentment at his children for leading him away from the life he wanted and a genuine grandeur in his sense of ambition for them, just as his brutality is mixed in charismatic ways with his aestheticism, so I would imagine that a real woman like the mother would also combine lofty and ignoble traits.  Her religiosity, for instance, would sometimes manifest itself as a passive-aggressive, moralizing way to control these unruly men.  Some complexity does get through.  One of the father’s judgments against the mother is that she “turns the boys against” him.  We never see her do this consciously–in words, for instance.  But we do see her flirtatious aliveness when the boys are teasing her.  They gratify her with a playful form of innocently fleshly attention that she seems no longer to get from her husband.  But in this, she follows, and represents, the path of nature rather than of grace.

Which returns us to the question of the film’s insistence on the cosmic perspective and the geological clock.  Again, I want to admire Malick’s daring, but it feels forced.  Ponderous.  Lacking a sense of the ridiculous (more about that momentarily).  It’s as if a novel’s narrator paused in telling the story to remind the reader that this is Serious Stuff, about God, Life, Love, Sex, Death, etc.  Which novelists sometimes did and do, but when they do, we call it not art-house or avant-garde but middlebrow and kitsch.

This complaint may be churlishness or fastidiousness on my part.  More importantly, does the cosmic perspective allow for grace?  Does cinema allow for grace?  It strikes me that perhaps grace is invisible, un-representable.  It certainly isn’t much evoked by Malick’s ambiguous ending, where everybody seems to go to heaven, or something.  Maybe grace in the film is in the making of it.  When we see grown-up Jack as an architect oppressed by the artificiality of the city, we follow him as he makes plans and deals with money-men, all the while complaining about modern greed and shallowness.  In short, he may be an architect in the film, but allegorically he’s stands for the filmmaker.  And the filmmaker’s version of grace is to tell the tale, without blame, without complaint, without judgment, without compromise, but only with attention.

The interludes in space or under the ocean might be lapses in attention.  They are complicit in the film’s greatest absence, which is, as I said, any sense of the ridiculous.  A central scene sees young Jack enter a neighbor’s house and steal a dress of hers.  It’s strongly implied that he masturbates into it, because he works hard to get rid of it.  This scene is portrayed like the Fall of Man itself, which it is in some way meant to evoke.  Come on, one wants to say, this is funny, this is Portnoy stuff, and what makes it ridiculous, and therefore aesthetically important, is its power to suggest that our desires are incommensurate with our aspirations.  For Malick, though, this mismatch is a tragedy, not a comedy, and I assume he thinks it calls for a striving toward some transcendent awareness.  Hence his hallowed portrayal of the mother, who is–these affective responses are unprovable, but worth noting–beautiful without exactly being sexy.  Sex is the fall into nature: as the father would say, it decays the will; as the mother would say, it turns us away from grace.

Our particular brand of health-moralism these days calls on us to scorn this devaluing of sex as old-fashioned proto-fascist priggishness, unhygenic for boys and girls.  At the end of the day, I suppose I respond that way too, at least by reflex.  But it’s worth trying to inhabit Malick’s perspective since he’s insisting on spiritual questions that health-moralism (or “biopolitics,” as the academics say) not only can’t deal with, but likes to pretend aren’t really questions at all.

Personally, I was far more offended by Malick’s Koyaanisqatsi-lite anti-urbanism than by his anti-eroticism; that kind of city-hatred is always associated in my mind with totalitarian romantic nationalism–the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge–which I fear and despise.  But even here, the film is more complex.  What is a city but the apotheosis of human will–the father writ large, in all its mingled brutality and love?  But to see this takes not will, not desire, but grace.

Chesterton’s living Church, like one’s living relationship with one’s family, is a source of endless instruction.  Malick’s attempt is to make a movie–which is by its nature more like a city than a tree–that goes to the root of life.  It’s backhanded praise to admire the ambition more than the result, but then we live in a time that worships results and defines ambition in strictly quantitative terms.  I don’t believe in Chesterton’s Church and I can’t believe either in large parts of Malick’s Tree, but neither will I dismiss them as pernicious idealisms best consigned to the dustbin.  The film, from the epigraph forward, evokes the problem of Job.  If we think that problem has gone away just because we have science or progressive politics or some such, then we’re a lot stupider, and therefore more dangerous, than the idealists we scorn.

Forget YA

Meghan Cox Gurden on whether or not YA novels are too rough:

Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care.

[...]

At the same time, she [a bookseller] notes that many teenagers do not read young-adult books at all. Near the end of the school year, when she and a colleague entertained students from a nearby private school, only three of the visiting 18 juniors said that they read YA books.

The reason many teenagers do not read the types of YA fiction Gurden discusses is that it’s full of headline-grabbing and chimerical “issues” that adults like to have moral panics (or, as Gurden has it, “care”) about.  The adults then rationalize and colonize more and more of actual teenagers’ experiences based on the phony information gleaned from trashy novels.  If teenagers want to learn about sex and drugs and violence and racism and the rest of it, they should learn not from some pious middle-class middle-aged scribblers full of “concerns” for their “problems,” but from writers who don’t have some statistically-troubled teen in mind.  The problem is not that kids are reading about these things, but that they’re being encouraged to read about them in sanitized form.

(I’m tempted to say something like, “Real writers don’t consider their audience.”  That wouldn’t stand up to history; even Shakespeare had James I in mind for Macbeth, probably worse than writing to teens.  But I do think that after the Romantics, after the Moderns, real writers don’t consider their audience, due to the general collapse of public metaphysics that secularization brings about.  “We all live as we dream–alone.”)

When I was a teenager, I never read things officially directed at teenagers, and neither did anybody else I knew, because that was one way to ensure that you were being lied to.  Instead we read Shakespeare and Faulkner, Hemingway and Joyce, Alan Moore and Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison and Grant Morrison, Steinbeck and John Irving, Keats and T. S. Eliot, none of whom were advertised as just for teens, though some surely are, and none of whom wanted to save me from whatever overblown sex-and-drug problems the media cooks up to distract parents from the fact that the real threat to their children is a war-exsanguinated economy administered by crazed ideologues and coarse louts.

Now for the real question: why do so many adults read YA books?  Probably a mix of delusional nostalgia, declining literacy, and, of course, public-spirited concern for the welfare of “our children.”  Also, identifying with put-upon kids is a way of remaining a victim all your life.  Those bullies, you know, they’re still out there.  But what do I know?  I still read about Batman.

Who Cares If the Author is a Goddamn Fascist?

A few weeks ago, I had a mind to write a post defending Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s superb All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, which I recently read and loved–for its comic audacity, its loopy lyrical rhythms (as if Miller were writing dirty poetry in some old French verse form that required repeating lines at intervals), its gargantuan self-parody, its quick slides into sentimentalism.  It reminds me of novels written before people knew how to write novels: like Don Quixote, the first ludicrous grotesque self-mocking super-hero story.  Once writers like Flaubert and James and Conrad got into novel-writing, they provided the form with economy and architectural sophistication; everything in a novel would henceforth have an organic motivation–it must, said Conrad, “carry its justification in every line.”  Ironically, Miller, along with Alan Moore, was the one who brought this kind of aestheticism into comics in the first place with their truly novelistic “graphic novels” of 1986.  In All-Star Batman, Miller undoes all that, as if James, late in life, decided to explode like Cervantes instead of composing novels of increasing involution.

While browsing in the library, I discovered Batman Unauthorized, a Dennis O’Neil-edited anthology in which Geoff Klock, author of my favorite critical work on comics, How to Read Super-Hero Comics and Why,* writes the pro-Miller essay I wish I would have written.  You can preview it at Google books: “Frank Miller’s New Batman and the Grotesque.”

Klock treats the matter aesthetically, as I think is wise.  I used to believe (around the time of the film 300) that it made sense to go after Miller for what Klock honestly labels his fascism, but now I do not care.  I used to be a good little grad student who subscribed to Gramscian and Frankfurt School theories of hegemony, ideology, etc., which blamed comics like Miller’s for promulgating imperialist, right-wing, sexist, fascist views in society.  In fact, comics’ favorite censorious critic, Frederic Wertham, believed in such stuff; he was not a right-wing moralist but a left-wing psychoanalyst.

But I now think that art needs no defense.  Even if it did, I’d say that we should have fascism in our art so we do not perish of it in our politics.

What could be more ironic, indeed grotesque, than to watch good liberals tear themselves apart over whether or not they should continue to read V. S. Naipaul since he made his sexist remarks?  They don’t seem to realize two things:

1. Naipaul lives to offend them.  They are the people his remarks are directed to.  He wants them to freak out, to question themselves, to get all offended and self-doubting.  That’s why his remarks are so thoroughly stupid: Jane Austen is not, as he claims, sentimental; in fact no canonical female novelist (with the only partially-canonical exception of Harriet Beecher Stowe) is sentimental.  As for women’s literary talent, Middlemarch is the greatest novel in the English language, and Mrs. Dalloway the greatest English novel of the twentieth century.  But this is to fall into Naipaul’s trap by arguing with him.  If he were making remarks to a right-wing group, he might have had to justify himself with rational claims–conservatives love plenty of women novelists, including Austen and Eliot, along with Willa Cather and increasingly Zora Neale Hurston, whom they’re coming to recognize as one of them.  But to offend liberals, Sir Vidia’s only interest, he just needs to spout off.  Read Naipaul’s books, ignore his remarks; they’re a bit of social game-playing, and why should you, good liberal, play his game?  The politics of being offended and morally pure cannot consciously deal with realpolitik.  Which fact Naipaul uses as a weapon.

2. This brand of culturally right-thinking liberalism, which gets all exercised about the conservative views of good writers or the troubling tropes of popular media, exists to screen from view the monumentally conservative realpolitik that American liberals support in practice.  What is more right-wing: enjoying the hell out of the books of Frank Miller and V. S. Naipaul, or voting for a President who bombs the fuck out of Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan?   Increasingly, I notice that cultural conservatives have less appetite for military adventurism against people of other races and religions than do purist liberals who won’t allow un-PC authors to taint their bookshelves.  After all, there’s a word for moral purism when it’s found in international relations: imperialism.

*My second favorite critical work on comics is Peter Y. Paik’s From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe.  Some of the points made above are borrowed from Paik’s lucid critique of the academic left.  The blogs of both Klock and Paik are well worth a visit.