I was googling António Lobo Antunes, just to find some stuff out because I don’t have time to read his books right now (though perhaps if one googled less…o information age!), and I saw this:

Like Faulkner in his great novels of the ’30s, Antunes deploys idiot monologues, garrulous, colloquial voices, superheated atmospherics and dismembered narratives that exalt not-knowing as a prime literary excitement.

To Antunes’s credit, he refuses to take for granted the novel as a form. He writes as if it were a fresh invention, as if the many innovations of the last century – stream of consciousness, for one – were his for the taking. At liberty to annotate his own story’s composition, Paulo praises the nib of his pen: “Clearer and clearer, the scribbling as the metal gets rid of a piece of dirt . . . and the piece of dirt is imprisoned in a blue strain, another way of writing, telling a story . . . what story? Mine too maybe mine or the reverse of mine.”

Does Antunes risk what the critic Harold Bloom calls “belatedness,” that sense that what he’s doing has already been done – and quite well – before? Most likely. It is impossible not to read his dense, difficult prose in the light of his illustrious predecessors. But then most things have been done well before, and that’s hardly reason to stop doing them. The hunt for originality as a virtue in its own right often results in anxious palaver.

What interests me here is that only certain kinds of writing get tagged as belated or derivative, generally speaking. Given that there’s nothing new under the sun and that historical rupture is mostly a myth, people writing today or any other day are doing something somebody else did before. The modernists themselves acknowledged their predecessors and only someone who hadn’t been paying attention could see the innovations of the 1920s as a radical break; pages of Austen’s 1818 Persuasion sound eerily like Woolf’s 1925 Mrs Dalloway, and neither Dickens nor Tolstoy nor George Eliot are as staid as people misremember.

But somehow it’s only adumbrations of high modernist technique that get called out for being unoriginal. Reviews of Jhumpa Lahiri don’t hinge on her belated indebtedness to a century’s perfection of the realist art story, and who worries about Zadie Smith’s belatedness when she carries on in the manner of Forster, or of Forster writing a screenplay anyway? It’s not originality as such that concerns people, because nobody really believes in originality as such; it’s rather the sense that certain representational strategies and artistic visions are superannuated, swept like socialism and Gregor Samsa into the dustbin of history. My point, repeating Z. Smith herself: if you write more or less in the tradition of Chekhov on a boring day (and nothing against Chekhov, I revere Chekhov, go read “In the Ravine” if you can stand it), you will be seen as well within a norm and perpetuating a legitimate style, but if you write in the tradition of Joyce or Woolf or Faulkner at their most outrageous, you will be seen as nostalgic, backward-looking, foolishly out of time.

À propos of this, at Contra James Wood:

Contra Wood, The Savage Detectives articulates the stubborn persistence of a utopia of poetry (poetry in its broadest sense, not just verse but the subversive transformation of daily life by the “marvelous”) in the face of history’s sharpest disappointments. This utopia persists precisely to the extent that it has not appeared; it is the “absent center” of the novel itself. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima are the trägers, the bearers, of “poetry” for young Juan Garcia Madero and many the novel’s other characters, just as, in a kind of infinite regression, Cesárea Tinajero of the original “Visceral Realist” generation is poetry’s träger for Lima and Belano. Yet the pair’s rediscovery of Tinajero leads to her demise, and Belano and Lima themselves fade away. Nobody therefore really occupies “the place of poetry,” but it is this very fact which keeps poetry alive as a radical possibility, as – to switch to a different idiom – une promesse de bonheur. At another level, the death of Tinajero and the play of Bolaño-Belano in the context of the absence from the novel of the alter-ego’s point of view all suggest an effacing of author-as-authority. Could “the author,” even a nominally radical author, really be a kind of caudillo that needs to be displaced? If this is the case, then if anything perishes in the course of the novel it is the elitism that was such a prominent if problematic feature of much twentieth-century aesthetic and political vanguardism, here giving way not to restorationist ‘maturity’ but to an ostensibly more radically democratic and indigenous aesthetic, “from below.” And in fact we can see precisely this sort of working-out of a historical and cultural dialectic in the very form of The Savage Detectives. On the one hand, the novel’s comprehensive, epic ambitions – it is nothing less than the life-cycle of a generation – and its carnivalesque juggling of voices and chronologies call to mind the great ‘high modernist’ novels of El Boom – of Marquez and Cortazar, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes. These novels were the products of a period of Latin American optimism and self-assertion in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Yet Savage Detective’s most fundamental structuring device is the testimonio, the first-person testimonial-style narrative that came to occupy an important place in Latin American prose in the period after the Boom.[3] This was the period not of revolution and self-assertion but of reaction and retrenchment, of dictatorships and death-squads, and its predominant literary mode is correspondingly both more chastened and more populist – a bedrock of fugitive resistance. The Savage Detectives, then, may be read as a Boom novel filtered through, and revised by, the post-Boom testimonial, in the service of creating a new form that includes its own prehistory. It’s a feat of insurgent literary zapatismo.

(This makes me want to finish The Savage Detectives, which I unfortunately never did.)

But the utopian potential of poetry can hardly be thought through by an extant form of criticism (and the supposedly most liberatory forms of criticism are often the worst at it) because poetry is that usage of language which evades verbal categorization and description even as experience itself does. Literary language is an experience, it is performative, it does not describe something but rather is that something. But it is something I would like to bring into the world, to bring about in the world…

Five years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I had a class on modernist literature that frustrated me and this is what I wrote and on this I rest my case:

Every Monday night we have the same discussion. Is it hopeful or bleak, optimistic or pessimistic? What is (Joyce Eliot Woolf) saying here about life? How do you feel after reading these works as works? is the question we avoid. If we analyze them as texts, certainly we can piece out some meaning, some statement, some prescription. But how do we feel after we read them? Better, does the ending of King Lear leave you desolate, hopeless, disconsolate? I tend to doubt it. I feel exhilarated at the end of King Lear, The Dead, The Waste Land, Mrs. Dalloway, and the thrill hasn’t got a thing to do with any supposed pronouncement on the writers’ parts about the perfidy or the splendor of existence. Listen: “She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him{the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He had made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.” We move into a region where hope and despair are a little irrelevant, where we are free to move about in the world that feels exactly like the world we live in when we’re not thinking about putting on our clothes, talking to the people we talk to, doing the work we have to do. The world inside that is not sole or inviolable, but all that has the ability to connect, over the talk and the signals and that makes the talk and the signals possible. When language goes on holiday: when it stops functioning smooth and workaday, when it bewitches the intellect that is only froth on the surface of an ocean: when everything—philosophy and religion and anti-philosophy at once—fails, everything but the burning certain knowledge that there is a world where we live and cannot talk about, where we share but cannot touch. Is it optimistic or pessimistic? But it’s just life, the life we know best, the one that is present at every second but can’t show its face directly. No, that’s not it, that won’t do. There isn’t a word; at best there are words, but not at their everyday posts, no, there are words only in their best holiday array, and if it’s their very best, tears will fall from our eyes but the taste or touch of them won’t tell us if we’re happy or sad.

“The payoff was considerable.”

I find this sentence in the midst of an academic work examining how modernist writers sought legitimacy and accreditation of their work in the changing social context of capitalism’s shift to a metropolitan consumer culture for which the old bourgeois ideals were no longer useful. The payoff was considerable, then, for not writing Victorian novels in a climate that no longer had any use for them.

Leaving aside the rightness or wrongness of this theory, I want to note that, despite the author’s stated Foucauldian and Bourdieuian commitments to the critique of Enlightenment reason and capitalist ideology, the allegorical hero of Enlightenment capitalism, homo economicus, the rational agent who keeps society afloat by pursuing his material interests, occurs here in the figure of the writer.

Such anti-capitalist critiques tell us that capitalist ideology’s picture of human nature is wrong in all respects—with the exception of writers of imaginative literature, who, for all their own commitments to resisting the absolutist encroachments of an all-commodifying materialism, nevertheless, when you get past all that fussy poetry, represent no values higher than the calculation of their own payoff.

On the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall, John Berger claimed that it was Marxism’s adoption of materialism (capitalist anti-metaphysics) that lead to communism’s practical and moral failure in the twentieth century. A parable for the materialist critic.

Other materialisms exist, of course, ones prematurely swept into the dustbin of history by the triumph of capitalism and its mainstream left-wing heresies. These philosophies find immanent within the material that which cannot be reduced to the material though it cannot be embodied (i.e., cannot exist) in any other way. Viewing literary texts as such material objects would deal a blow to the critic’s shrinking place of power in the university panopticon, but it would have the benefit of doing honor to a more generous vision of our lives than so many “liberatory” theories have allowed for.

John Updike’s controversial review of Toni Morrison’s latest novel, A Mercy, ends with a complaint about what he seems to see as the negativism of a leftist, feminist, multicultural writer like Morrison:

This author’s early novels were breakthroughs into the experience of black Americans as refracted in the poetic and indignant perceptions of a black woman from Lorain, Ohio; as Morrison moves deeper into a more visionary realism, a betranced pessimism saps her plots of the urgency that hope imparts to human adventures. “A Mercy” begins where it ends, with a white man casually answering a slave mother’s plea, but he dies, and she fades into slavery’s myriads, and the child goes mad with love. Varied and authoritative and frequently beautiful though the language is, it circles around a vision, both turgid and static, of a new world turning old, and poisoned from the start.

In other words, Morrison lacks sufficient faith in America; her imaginative vision is of a country without change or hope to offer the citizen, especially if female or non-white. And, to give Updike his due, he’s not simply upbraiding Morrison for a lack of patriotism, he’s pointing to what he identifies as an aesthetic flaw in her work: her pessimism paralyzes her characters and makes her situations pointless because, without hope, why should they or we care what happens to them since we know it will not be good?

On the one hand, Updike has a point. A Mercy is more or less a portrait gallery: six characters are frozen at a moment of crisis—the landed white Jacob at the moment when he purchases the young black girl Florens from a decadent Portugese grandee; Jacob’s wife, Rebekka, after his death from a pox when she too is stricken with the disease and lay between life and death; Lina, her Indian servant, when the responsibility for dealing with the crisis of Rebekka’s illness falls to her; Sorrow, the “family’s” third servant girl, on the point of giving birth to her second child after Lina killed the first one because of Sorrow’s apparent mental instability and promiscuity; Scully, an indentured servant, when he works with his fellow servant and male lover Willard for Rebekka after her recovery from the pox; and Florens’s mother, at the moment when she decides to sell her daughter to Jacob. Morrison gives us, in mostly third-person narration, what led the characters to their moments of crisis and she limns their individual temperaments and worldviews.

The writing is often vivid and memorable: Jacob’s noble disgust at the decaying Catholic aristo, Rebekka’s fevered recollections of travelling over the Atlantic in the company of other transported Englishwomen, Lina’s attachment to the natural world, Scully’s resourceful dispatch of a bear and Florens’s mothers harrowing thumbnail of African and New World slavery all linger in the mind with the best moments of Sula or Beloved. But the narrative moves from character to character rather than following any one of them; this is not the kind of story in which we watch someone’s development, but rather one in which each person is captured at the moment in which they are about to become someone else. The effect is less like a novel and more like a set of dramatic monologues or linked short stories. These are by no means ignoble artistic forms, but they do tend to confirm Updike in his judgment that A Mercy has an immobility at its core. Set in early America, it doesn’t really give any sense of being at the beginning of an ongoing tale, but it seems instead to create a set of ruins in which we all still live—America is nothing other than the wreckage of the household whose decline this novel narrates.

One character, Florens, gets to tell her own story, to hold the stage for half of the book in alternating chapters, and she seems to get the kind of Bildungsroman which the other characters are denied. She goes from being a helpless, feckless teenaged lover of the beautiful, a girl who needs someone to love her to tell her who she is, to being made aware, first, of the racial difference with which her countrymen and -women will mark her, and second, of the dangerous servility her unwise dependence on the love of a man inflicts on her. She learns, in short, that she cannot rely on the world to help her but must call upon vast reserves of inner resources. At the end of the novel, Morrison reveals that Florens has indited the narration we’ve been reading not on paper but on the walls of the vain mansion her late master had built just before his death. The allegory suggests that this country is a white man’s hollow folly enlivened only by the voices of those whose labor he exploited and whose lives he stole.

So far, so hopeless.

But this is only a partial reading of the book, as if Updike were hearing only what he expects to hear from a black, female, left-wing writer. The book is called A Mercy, after all, and the mercy of the title is Florens’s mother’s sale of her to Jacob. In her concluding monologue, she explains why she regards this as merciful:

There is no protection but there is difference. You stood there in those shoes and the tall man laughed and said he would take me to close the debt. I knew Senhor would not allow it. I said you [Florens]. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight.

Jacob—the mercantile Protestant settler of America—is different. But from what? The novel gives an astonishing answer: he is different from the disgusting ruling class of Old Europe, embodied in the gross Portugese, and he is different from the cruel patriarchs of Africa, described by Florens’s mother as engaged in barbarous and pointless tribal warfare that enabled slavery. Jacob is not idealized, but the early pages of the novel, in which he confronts the Senhor, powerfully conveys Morrison’s sense of the newness, the unsettledness of America, a place where people can indeed become different. This corrupts Jacob and leads him to pursue riches at the expense of community, a decision which causes the other characters, black and white, master and servant, similarly to turn inward and start down the road toward institutionalized black slavery, Civil War, Jim Crow etc., but the mother’s monologue concludes with a lesson which may still be learned:

In the dust where my heart will remain each night and every day until you understand what I know and long to tell you: to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

No static and turgid vision of a doomed country would end on this note of moral prophecy and possibility—this note, frankly, of American exceptionalism.

Let me recur to the theme of Fiction and History: I strongly suspect that some of this novel’s darkness was born in the horrors of the Bush years, while the surprising emergence of the old imperialist American myth of the city-on-a-hill owes something to the desire for national greatness and pride that led to Obama’s election.  Updike has it all wrong: Morrison’s agreeing with him! She believes in America which has most of the same letters in it as A Mercy after all.

Fiction and History is the topic of the hour: the dire Benjamin Kunkel (not as dire as his buddy Gessen, I admit) surveys with the customary literary-historical myopia of the n+1 set the apocalyptic literature/genre hybrid and its disturbance of several Trillingesque commonplaces; relatedly, the excellent Biographia Literaria examines the biases behind Newsweek’s search for the definitive Bush-era fiction and its odd choice of The Corrections, a novel which is, as everybody ought to know, completely about the ’90s. 

I think that one will quickly go astray if one looks for evidence of ’90s or ’00s fictionalization just in material that takes the headlines on directly.  Case in point: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, which this year had its twenty-year anniversary.  Not a word was mentioned in Sandman about the Clinton scandals, the Contract with America, the Rwandan genocide, the siege of Sarajevo, the dot-com bubble, the rise of the militias, the expansion of the internet or the End of History, and yet it’s difficult to imagine a piece of fiction (with the possible exception of The Corrections!) which more clearly enters a number of conversations about ethics and aesthetics that were going on in the ’90s.

For a plot summary of Sandman, see the Wikipedia. I had a very typical reading experience with the book: I read it in collections in the mid ’90s; I began reading with Dream Country when I was 12 or 13, and I was 15 when the final collection, The Wake, came out.  All through high school, I loaned the books out to people, mostly women.  In her interview in this month’s Rain Taxi, Sandman’s editor, Karen Berger, stated that she was most proud of the fact that the series had become a literary rite of passage, something that teenagers read, a millenial Catcher in the Rye or Slaughterhouse-Five (which, come to think of it, I never did get to).  Sandman certainly worked that way for me, and, as one of the most allusive teenage rite of passage books, it sent me directly out of comics and sf/fantasy to Homer, Shakespeare, Keats, Milton, Joyce and Faulkner, and is probably among the reasons I am a graduate student today (if you are reading this, Mr. Gaiman, that last bit isn’t exactly meant to strike a note of gratitude!).    

Recently, however, I undertook a sequential re-reading of the series, in my old trade paperbacks with the original Dave McKean covers, each a depiction of a face.  Life intervened and I only made it through Brief Lives, but I was struck first of all by the coherence of what had initially seemed to be a meandering series, and also by the thematic cohesiveness.  And, honestly, the book could never mean as much emotionally as it did when I was 15, but I had no idea how richly it repaid a reading at the age of 26 (close to Gaiman’s age, after all, when he began writing it).  What seemed to have been an elaborate allegory about the emotional weather of high school actually turns out to concern the decisions one makes about how to be an adult, and the options Gaiman presents have a distinctly ’90s inflection: it may be Gen-Y’s gateway drug to high literature, but when considered in the company of Slacker, Before Sunrise, Reality Bites, Nevermind, Vitalogy, Wonder Boys  and, yes, The Corrections, it’s every inch a Gen-X book, a compendium of slacker lassitude, dot-com ambition, Starbucks ennui and battle-0f-Seattle fury. 

Sandman asks this ethical and political question: Is it better to accept that the world is the way it is and its constant awful tumult will never change, and thus either do your work to the best of your ability or drop out and do your own thing on the fringes; or should you refuse to accept the reality principle and hew to ethical absolutes with the purpose of making the world better than it is?  Other options besides these are presented, of course, including the enactment of absolute evil (The Corinthian), the self-enslavement to addictive forms of fantasy (Barbie, Rachel), etc., but the two choices above seem to be the two ethical foci around which the ellipse of the text turns.

I take Death to represent the get-on-with-your-work position; her motto might be Wallace Stevens’s line, “The imperfect is our paradise.”  She stands for the local amelioration of suffering, the valorization of being-here-now and of personal responsibility.  She is genuinely kind, which goes a long way toward explaining the popularity of a character who so represents the ethos of the service industry.  Ray Mescallado long ago noticed that she was cute, but not exactly sexy; this is because, unless you are Hemingway, you will not generally wish to fuck your nurse.  Death is a prudent, Gen-X pragmatist, Winona Ryder’s character in Reality Bites.

Destruction is similar to Death in his common sense and insistence that each individual take responsibility for him- or herself, but his mode of responsibility is not the pragmatic performing of necessary tasks in an imperfect world, but rather the disengagement from a world he knows to be unjust.  A more romantic, Rabelaisian figure, Ethan Hawke but less somber, he stands for a kind of anarchism, but he’s an aesthete and an independent craftsman, a burly localvore dropout Hobbity anarchist rather than a brick-thrower.

Both of these characters, as well as some others (Rose Walker, Hazel and Foxglove, Hob Gadling, Lucifer, Matthew, Emperor Norton, Ben Jonson, etc.), stand for what came in the popular mind to be called postmodernism.  They have no ethical or metaphysical universal to which they would submit the world because they know the world’s watchword is “change” and that it’s no use trying to step in the same river twice.  That’s why Death “sees everybody,” as she always tells us, and we presume that she finds it futile to judge any of them except on the scale of their own ability to accept the world’s impermanence.

Dream, on the other hand, and not just Dream but also Orpheus and Delirium and Lyta and Remiel and Duma and Haroun al-Rashid and Robespierre and Wanda, cannot go with the flow.  To the postmodernists they reply that some things are too important simply to accept as impermanent, that our lives may be brief but that for them to be worthy they must hang on a strong nail of meaning.  Dreams’s duty, Delirium’s openness to all experience, Orpheus’s sorrow, Remiel and Duma’s God, Haroun al-Rashid’s Baghdad, Robespierre’s revolution, Wanda’s female gender, cannot be cast on the flowing waters and said a mere good-bye to.  Identity is what we refuse to give up; I can only change so much before I am no longer me.  And if I go to work at a job I hate, I cannot be me; but also if I quit the job that I hate I cannot just decamp to the country with my dog and paint pictures, I must still engage with the world on my terms.

I gather teenagers love this book because they have just had their hearts broken by their first love and they have just fought with their parents about their futures, and this first experience of adult loss and adult conflict, which they cannot just bounce back from, puts them in the camp of the absolutists, insisting on the primacy of their own ethical and emotional directives.  But then they find those perfect friends, Death and Destruction, to talk them down, to tell them that there are other fish in the sea and that college won’t be so bad and that, after all, you only get a lifetime and so you might as well make the best of it rather than moping around in the rain all day like Dream does.  The book is cheering to the heartbroken 16 year-old because it communicates the lesson you need to hear at that age, which is that it’s compromise or suicide, and compromise is more fun.

It’s a different book at 26, however, because you’ve made your compromises, you’re up to your ears in your compromises, and suddenly Death and Destruction’s encouraging voices no longer sound so friendly.  Dream’s pig-headedness unto death (or Death) seems more attractive.  

Note Gaiman’s exemplary intellectual honesty here: the valorization of change for its own sake is ultimately the valorization of death and destruction.  Hence, what prompts Destruction to quit his post is the invention of scientific ideology in the Enlightenment, that intellectual movement which will spread the pro-change mantra, in techno-capitalist and techno-communist forms, to the four corners of the globe.  But his retreat is reactive and self-serving, a personal lifestyle politics that doesn’t attempt to intervene in the world it finds so oppressive.  Sandman’s earth-toned color palette, its atmosphere of wooden furniture, green-glass wine bottles and old libraries indexes what change and death and destruction are taking away from us; it reminds us, at the End of History, that “progress” comes at a great price.

However, Dream rejects the postmodern insistence on impermanence, hybridity, pragmatism and openness; he cleaves to his ethical absolutes, to his duty, and what happens?  All of the bad things that postmodernists warn us about: not to put too fine a point on it, Dream oppresses women, and, in the worst case, he enslaves a woman of color.  He reminds us that western empire is not just change, but also a plan to put the world under one rule, and when Nada will not agree to live in his world he consigns her to hell.  The absolute and the unyielding exact a toll, just as change and the acceptance of impermanence does.  

The book never really chooses sides, but exhibits admirable negative capability.  It’s up to us to decide how we wish to act in this most imperfect world; Sandman does not answer our ethical questions, nor should it, but it asks them with great wit and intensity.

What makes it a superb work of literature is the fact that the ethical quandary expresses itself at the formal level, for generically Sandman is a taut Shakespearean tragedy attenuated within a cantering, leisurely magic-realist novel, as if Macbeth were pieced out like breadcrumbs through a Rushdie tale.  In other words, the two forms, the pre-modern one made to describe the unyielding soul’s crushing encounter with resistless fate, and the post-modern one that embodies multiple perspectives, colliding communities, and ultimately meaningless but celebratory metamorphoses, coexist uneasily, as the text’s two worldviews jostle each other.  It’s as if Gaiman, realizing the triumph of the postmodern, the reign of change and of acceptance-of-death, wanted to write one last tragedy.  That is a greater ambition than most other writers showed in the same period and, strange as it seems, Gaiman managed to get that period into a work which looks like it’s about every time and no time; and, if I may venture a severe and absolute judgment, that makes it a book for all time.

I note with sadness the death of John Leonard, last or near-last of the great public critics. See Mumpsimus for a wonderful memorial. Like Matthew Cheney and a lot of people, I would wake up early on Sundays to watch his commentary on the otherwise irritating and pious CBS Sunday Morning. I was in high school, and had gone from kids comics (Superman and Batman) to science fiction (Heinlein and Harlan Ellison) to “adult” comics (Watchmen and Sandman) to school classics (Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway), but it was Leonard—and on TV!—who pointed the way to contemporary fiction, who was the reason I read Beloved, Paradise, The Satanic Verses and Underworld during the summer before senior year.

In tribute, I place here the first four paragraphs of his New York Review of Books essay on DeLillo’s The Body Artist, written in his splendidly mordant stuff-filled style:

After a Divine Comedy, why not haiku? So The Body Artist is seven hundred pages shorter than Underworld. Don DeLillo deserves a breather. Since Underworld, the best English-language novel of the Nineties, somehow failed to win either a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award, he may even deserve a free pass. When I suggested to one of the NBA fiction jurors that maybe her panel had been blitzed on dopamine, she insisted that all five of them felt Underworld could have been cut by at least two hundred pages, somehow.

“Somehow,” thinks Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist. “The weakest word in the language. And more or less. And maybe. Always maybe. She was always maybeing.” (Doesn’t this sound like Joan Didion? It often seems that DeLillo and Didion are crouched on the same fault line, alert to the same tectonic tremor, full of the same nameless, blue-eyed willies.)

But which two hundred pages? A writer goes on for as long as it takes to finish what needs saying, more or less. All DeLillo did was to dream the whole repressed history of American cold war culture, from J. Edgar Hoover to AIDS. If you are too lazy for nomadic wandering in such a brilliant maze, stick to stock quotations. And now he is likely to be punished for this starvation diet. Where are the politics? Where are the conspiracies? Still, some breathers are also a gasp. We have been wonderstruck often enough by the minimal—a Mondrian or Sung scroll.

Anyway, DeLillo’s back. Each of his eleven previous novels has been a far-flung language system, where the gravity is variable. Each includes the prose equivalent of an action painting, a Godard film, a jazz chorale, and an explosive charge like Semtex. They have been witty in turn about motels and supermarkets, movies and television, football and rock-and-rock, baseball and atom bombs, advertising and organized crime, science fiction and the stock exchange, intelligence agencies and terrorist sects. But they are also full of dense light, black bees, deserts, caves, and cults; of prophets and pilgrims. And these pilgrims, as hungry for meaning as Greek goats, are forever chewing through slick packaging, surface chatter, static cling, coded circuits, and layered film, past numbers, letters, and ideas, to “the fallen wonder of the world.” Since he is smarter than we are, better informed, and a lot more sensitive to beauty and dread, trust him.

The keyword in the title is “infinite.”  Eight years ago, Grant Morrison began the final issue of his sci-fi super-hero hypersigil saga The Invisibles with the words of a young woman in 2012, the year human consciousness will pass through some sort of singularity and emerge transformed.  “I grew up with the Gnostic straight-edgers,” she wrote, “anti-sex, anti-death ,we imagined ourselves to be perfect simulations. [...]  The universe [was] a program inside a Manichean murder machine.”  Now, four years until 2012, a teen film comes along that begins to make good on Morrison’s prognostications.

Michael Sera plays Nick, the only straight boy in The Jerk-Offs, a queercore band without a drummer.  He has recently broken up with his girlfriend Tris, a know-nothing, malicious bimbo.  Still hung up on her, he compulsively makes her mix CDs, though she resents his pitiful attentions and tosses them in the trash can at her Catholic school. There, her acquaintance Norah, the daughter of big-deal record producer Ira Silverberg, fishes the mixes out of the trash and fantasizes about Nick.  Serendipitously, she encounters Nick at a Jerk-Offs show while searching for a secret performance of his and her favorite band, Where’s Fluffy?  Meanwhile, Caroline, her pathologically stupid alcoholic best friend, gets fall-down drunk, and Tris shows up with her new boyfriend.  Norah, not realizing that Nick is Tris’s ex-boyfriend, pretends to be his girlfriend to deflect Tris’s mockery of her.  This makes Tris jealous, which motivates her to get Nick back, but Nick’s bandmates loathe her and devote themselves to setting up Nick and Norah.  They volunteer to take Caroline home so Nick and Norah can spend the night together, but complications ensue: a drunken Caroline gets lost and staggers and pukes her way through the city; Norah reunites with her ex-boyfriend Tal who seems only to be using her to get a record deal from her father for his anarcho-Zionist band; and Tris returns to reclaim Nick’s affections.  It all works out in the end, though, as our straight-edge hero and heroine escape the fools who would weigh them down.

Perhaps the quickest way to come to the point about this film is to evaluate how it treats its New York setting.  Not the seething, dangerous multicultural metropolis of seventies and eighties film, the city is a sedate archipelago for the cultural affairs of the privileged.  But this, which perhaps only reflects aspects of current reality, does not tell us enough. 

We must first notice the complete absence of African-American culture. Black people turn up in a few token roles, but they are dismissed most thoroughly in the film’s non-diegetic indie soundtrack and its diegetic willingness to live without drums.  For when people call indie music “white,” they mean primarily that it lacks rhythm—and this film goes so far as to dismiss half of the rhythm section.  Without beats, music is too slippery to dance upon; it becomes ethereal, purely melodic, disdaining the body and striving toward the realm of the spirit as in nineteenth-century Romantic composition, before the Afro-Latin revolution in western musical convention.  Indie music generally, and this film specifically, attempts a flight away from that body, the color of which in acoustical culture is black.

There are Jews in Nick and Norah, beginning with Norah herself, but the treatment of Judaism falls right into line with the film’s themes. Norah’s father is the wealthy culture-industrialist of anti-Semitic caricature, while her Zionist ex is, predictably, a smarmy money-grubber.  Thus all of the film’s Jews but Norah are attached not to the dancing body, like the African-Americans of stereotype, but rather to gross stuff like money and land. How does Norah escape this imputation?  Well, as she later tells Nick, her own favorite part of Judaism is the concept of tikkun olam, or repairing the world.  While this phrase and concept have a place in mainstream Judaism, they have special significant within the occult and neo-Platonic tradition of the Lurianic Kabbalah, in which tikkun olam refers to the rejoining of the divine sparks which have been lodged in the dross of this bungled world, created not by God, but through his withdrawal.  We must resist this world to reach to him.  Nick immediately understands, replying that “we are the broken pieces,” thus taking the entire story back to the Platonic myth of eros.  The only worthwhile Judaism this film will countenance, then, is one which pictures the world as a Manichean murder-machine and which encourages its devotees to become gnostic straight-edgers.

The film’s queer characters are ministering angels to our cute spiritual couple.  What else is a gay man in this kind of story but a quick signifier for pure Platonic love, love—even sexual love—without participation in nature and its reproductive cycles?  “Mirrors and copulation are abominable,” say Borges’s gnostic hieresiarchs, “for they multiply the number of men.”  It is through this aphorism that Nick and Norah’s gay guardian angels are best understood.

Perhaps no one gets the shortest end of this film’s stick than white women, represented by Tris and Caroline.  Pornified sluts addicted to all manner of consumption, filthy bodies who are vomiting when they aren’t binge drinking, or orally fixating on gum and sandwiches, or making out with strange men, they would drive any poor pure soul too unfortunate to be gay to be “anti-sex” instead.  When Tris wants to seduce Nick again, she caresses his soulful, spiritual head with her foot, the body’s lowest member, condemned to tread in the dirt.  Little wonder that he abandons her for his Kabbalist co-gnostic.

Finally, we learn that Kabbalists and Platonists do it better, at least with each other.  At one point, Tris taunts Norah with the knowledge that she (Norah) has never had an orgasm.  Tal, her greedy Jewish boyfriend, did not satisfy.  At the film’s literal climax, however, Nick brings her to orgasm in a heavy-petting session in her father’s recording studio.  Like good gnostics, our hero and heroine never even remove their clothes.  A microphone picks up Norah’s cries ofjouissance, thus converting their love into pure electronic sound, pure spirit, which it always was anyway.  As you might well imagine, Nick and Norah go off into the sunrise after their wild night.  In the film’s only miscalculation, they kiss on the escalator down into Penn Station. Actually, they should have been going up and into the light, like Tim Robbins at the end of the similarly-themed but differently-genred Jacob’s Ladder. 

In some ways, this film is just what one might expect in a period of civilizational calamity.  Gnosticism itself emerged as the Roman Empire declined, and Kabbalah became prominent during a period of medieval and early modern anti-Semitic pogroms.  Threatened communities and collapsing empires often seem to desire nothing more than transcendence, and often too they recoil in disgust from the materialism which they had enjoyed during their eminence.  There have been assertions that our own ruins will bring forth a renewed populist fascism; already a Marxist resurgence can be seen among intellectuals, with the Hegelians Zizek and Jameson achieving newfound fame.  But this film suggests that indie dissident youth won’t have it.  Grant Morrison, who foresaw this all, said that by 2012 they’d be hippies again, seeking cosmic consciousness and escape from the prison of the world.  What can a Hegelian offer the gnostic straight-edgers?  Hegel’s motto, after all, was, “Essence must appear!”  And they don’t want to appear, but rather to disappear—“completely,” as Thom Yorke put it. Tired of time and motion, space and bodies, sex and death, they wish to become angels.

1. Find an agent. This has become easy to do, because nowadays every agent has a blog or a MySpace or a Facebook page chronicling their daily slog through thousands of queries. More importantly, these online venues allow agents to announce to the world and to the demoralized unpublished writer their wretched philistinism and illiteracy, their preferences for gripping yarns, tales that will make you laugh and weep, something that grabs you on the first page, a text that doesn’t tax the brain with excessive density or seeming digressions or any metaphysics above the level of Dan Brown, something if not conventional then adolescently clever. Once you’ve found some potential agents, you can move on to the next step.

2. Write your query. Your query will consist of a cover letter in which you demonstrate your skill in the literary genre of marketing. It’s not enough, you see, that you’ve written a creative work, you must now suggest how it may be advertised to sapheads who may not necessarily be willing to part with their proverbial beer money on any experience different from the last hundred or thousand experiences they’ve had. In short, you will have to assure your potential agent that your text can take its place somewhere in the market, that, while it may be just singular enough to stand an inch above the general level of its niche, it is nevertheless not singular enough to escape from that niche entirely. You probably also have to produce a plot summary, a barbarous invention of televisual intellects for whom the Russian fucking Formalists and their fabula/sujet distinction lived in fucking vain. And then, if your agent is enterprising and merciful, you might also have to hand over the first ten pages or three chapters, and you’d better hope they prove attention-getting, oh-so gripping and suspenseful.

3. Here my list perforce becomes more impressionistic as I’ve never made it to number three, hence my bitterness (which bitterness does not, necessarily, imply incorrectness of analysis, and only a saphead would think that it did). I imagine at the next stage you send in your complete manuscript to the agents who request it and they either reject you—perhaps with a polite letter explaining that your yarn didn’t quite grip enough, or that your vocabulary unfortunately strayed too far beyond the verbal warrens of the average Salon.com article—or accept you and begin the process of selling you to the three publishers left after the consolidation of all major media into the hands of a few totalitarian corporations in our era of Stalinist capitalism.

4. Let us now imagine that your novel has been sold to the publisher and brought out in a handsome overpriced hardback edition, now to compete in the same two or three bookstore chains with the triple-decker upmarket thrillers and with the spare tomes written by pale male New York intellectuals about their erotic difficulties and with the pink volumes written by pale female anti-intellectuals about their urbane quests for beauty, matrimony and baby. Let us suppose that your novel has really nothing to do with any of this, and moreover that it rather lacks “grip,” that it has an obscure relationship to its ostensible genre, that it indulges in density of language—perhaps of a new kind, one not so easily assimilable to those by-now watered-down techniques of Woolf or Faulkner which have become through repetition readily comprehensible even to newspaper book reviewers. Maybe you receive ill reviews or no reviews or uncomprehending reviews. Your only hope was to have been a dead genius, already so famous in other countries that even the American backwater could not ignore you (cf. Bolaño), but it’s too late for that. Your book doesn’t sell, your agent quits, you become a mid-list author, you fall off the edge of the literary world, you become a high school teacher, a veterinarian, a bricklayer or, in the best-case scenario, a paid-up post-everything academic, in which case you can take out your resentment at art itself for letting you down on all the dead authors and find in the anti-aesthetic the satisfactions that had eluded you in the visionary precincts of poesie.

Let us leave textual criticism to graduate students, formal criticism to esthetes, and recognize that what has been said is not still to be said; that an expression does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives; that all words, once spoken, are dead, and function only at the moment when they are uttered, that a form, once it has served, cannot be used again and asks only to be replaced by another…

—Antonin Artaud, “No More Masterpieces” (1938)

Q. Most reviews of your work, Laura Warholic included, seem to focus on the encyclopedic references as opposed to the complexity of the narrative structure. It is almost as if the reviewers are asking, a la Laura, if it occurs to you, “how deformed it is to know such things.” Is this ineptitude, laziness or willful incomprehension?

A. Curiously, Laura Warholic is one of those novels in which the characters actually read books.You don’t often see this in contemporary fiction. People resent polysyllabic words, find it showing off, never look them up, refuse to play. Words are to a writer what paint is to an artist. I am amazed at how readers refuse to enjoy the out-of-the-way fact, the astonishing detail, the original thought. Style is taken as an affront by stupid and lazy people. Just say it, they say. Sure! Should I die or should I live basically sums up Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy. Why didn’t he just say so!?

Q. The publishing industry is one of many satirical targets in this novel. What should a literate society expect from commercial publishing houses and has the lowest common denominator become the coin of the realm, so to speak?

A. Every publisher is waiting for another Stephen King. They go to lunch and wait. Agents are lazy. Most editors couldn’t tell a good novel from a pile of chimney flashing. I loved Nicholson Baker’s first novel, The Mezzanine, which I knew I would like from a quote from it in a mediocre review. I bought the book, quickly read it, and telephoned him to tell him how wonderful it was. He had sent it to about six or seven publishers who refused it. I sent Laura Warholic to several publishers, paid to copy it, box it, mail it, etc, and got it back unread within the same week. I am not exaggerating.

—Interview with Alexander Theroux (2008)

All the Sad Young Literary Men is the first novel by Keith Gessen, co-founder of the highly (and perhaps wrongly) esteemed magazine of cultural criticism, n+1, and what a self-consciously first first novel it is. The plot concerns three, um, sad young literary men and their journey from college to early adult success or failure, charting the rise and fall and rise again of all of their illusions about worldly success, political or academic or artistic achievement and, most importantly, love, sex and romance.

First, we have Keith, the only young man to tell his tale in the first person, and in an especially ingenuous, lyrical and winning voice. I suppose–I hope–this represents some kind of irony, but even so, it hardly seems necessary. Keith is the Harvard-educated outsider, child of Russian Jewish immigrants, strong believers in the American dream, and he finds in his negotiation of the American elite, both at school and later in the literary-political world, that even those at the top are scored and scarred by loneliness, shallowness and bitterness.

Next we have Sam, straining—and how laboriously, with a generous advance from a New York publisher–to write the Great Zionist Novel, though one unlike Leon Uris. But Sam too has love troubles: he’s dating two women, Arielle—who later dates Keith—and a fiery Israeli named Talia. Eventually, his inspiration and his advance both dry up (along with, in an unconvincing portrait of pomo obsession seemingly underwritten by Don DeLillo, the number of websites a Google search of his name turns up). He makes his way to Jenin shortly after the violence there, struggling to find out for himself what the reality of Zionism is. This after Gessen depicts Sam’s relationship with a shameful caricature of Chomsky, a Professor Lomaski who

was originally a seismologist who’d made a few groundbreaking [seismologist—groundbreaking? is this supposed to be funny?] discoveries in his late twenties before moving on to the comparatively glorious task of protesting American involvement in Vietnam, and then the significantly less glorious task of protesting involvement everywhere else.

Aren’t we young literary men clever, not to say smug? Anyway, in the company of several Palestinians in Jenin, as well as some “useful idiots” from Sweden, Sam eventually disapproves of a suicide bombing, discovers that young Palestinians like to pick up girls on the internet (thus reminding me of Saul Bellow lamenting perceived African-American sexual looseness, while marrying five times himself!) and gets chased by an Israeli tank. His conclusion? After Orwell, though not without some loss of profundity in the paraphrase, he resolves: “The Palestinians were idiots. But the Israelis—well, the Israelis were fuckers. And when Sam saw an idiot faced with his natural enemy, the fucker, he knew whose side he was on.” Gessen’s n+1 colleague Benjamin Kunkel lauds on the back of the book “the classical or Fitzgeraldian excellence to the prose,” and one can see why.

I haven’t even told you yet about our third sad young literary man, Mark, who’s writing a dissertation on the Mensheviks while feeling like a bit of loser himself, particularly in—you guessed it—the sexual arena. I’ll spare you the details; suffice it to say that on a day when he wants to feel like a winner and go to bed with a woman, he asks himself, “What would Lenin do?” Eventually, it’s strongly implied that he will return to his cute, shy, vaguely saintly Russian ex-wife rather than even defending his dissertation, thus preferring Holy Mother Russia to its godless defilers in what is probably unintentional but no less gorge-convulsing symbolism.

At last we come to an epilogue in which Keith narrates his life in the present as a liberal commentator, suddenly blindsided by the possible pregnancy of his much younger girlfriend (and Mark’s ex-girlfriend and student) Gwyn. He goes out to play some football–all three of our sad young literary men are athletes, as if anything less would be somehow girly—and then realizes that Gwyn could have gone off for an abortion in the time he was gone. He rushes back to his apartment, and here the novel ends:

…it wasn’t over yet, I thought, remembering my friends at Debate [Gessen's thinly-veiled version of Dissent magazine], my gentle social-democratic friends—there was still work to be done. A cabal of liars and hypocrites had stolen the White House, launched a criminal war, bankrupted our treasury, and authorized torture in our prisons. And now it was too late, as I have said—but also, you know, not too late. We had to live. And there were enough of us, I thought, if we just stuck together. We would take back the White House, and the statehouses and city halls and town councils. We’d keep the Congress. And in order to ensure a permanent left majority, Gwyn, we’d have many left-wing babies. My love.

I turned the corner finally, unlocked the door, and bounded up the stairs.

If this is a joke, it’s not very funny: after all, it’s suggested that Keith has narrated this entire book, surveying his past from the position of present enlightenment. If the puerility of this last paragraph is any indication, however, he has no enlightenment; he and we have learned nothing and may never learn anything—unless the open ending, which is by now just a genre device of the literary novel, indicates that all enlightenment waits in the future, in which case the novel was still a waste of time.

If this isn’t a joke, if Gessen means us to take this as a serious thought, then it is foolish as politics—a lot of gentle social democrats who write for Dissent supported the criminal war, and there’s no indication that a Democratic president and congress would not launch further imperial wars—and also morally retrograde, positioning women as child-bearing kitchen bitches for the revolution, or, in this painful case, for the reform.

All the Sad Young Literary Men is a narcissistic novel that thinks joking about its narcissism will mitigate the aesthetic and political offense. I would not argue that those of the upper classes write worser fiction than those of the lower classes—Tolstoy, after all, was a landed aristocrat—but I will say that certain books get published because their upper-class writers have connections that the talents among the hoi polloi cannot afford to make. This is a sad book in more ways than one.

Today I finished J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K. This is the second Coetzee novel I’ve read, the first being the harrowing, controversial Disgrace. I’ve also browsed around a lot in his later criticism, that collected in Stranger Shores and Inner Workings.

I would say anecdotally that he is a major figure for my generation of writers and intellectuals. Why? Ezra Pound in his ABC of Reading wrote of those authors whose works the ephebe was safe in reading an hour before he or she took up the pen. Coetzee is such a writer. His style is one, in Joyce’s phrase, of scrupulous meanness. The scrupulousness, not the meanness, makes him an essential figure in an age of cant and bombast. Whatever his other virtues and vices, the knowledge of the value of words for which he praised Defoe in one of his essays makes him appealing after an orgy of the vatic/phatic in international novels and high theory.

In Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee describes the journey of a hare-lipped Coloured man from Cape Town to the country and—after passing through several labor and re-education camps—back again during a civil war in South Africa. The first and longest part of the novel gives K’s journey, first with his mother and then with her ashes, up through his sojourn in the re-education camp in attentive, descriptive, quiet prose through K’s eyes. This section reaches its climax when, after escaping a labor camp back to the abandoned farm where his mother may or may not have been born, he grows his own pumpkins by dark of night while hiding out by day in a burrow. In these pages, Coetzee recalls Defoe in his careful descriptions of tools and labor, and attains an unanticipatedly high register in his evocation of K’s attunement to the earth and its cycles.

Eventually, he is captured by the army, who suspect him of guarding supplies for rebels. They send him to the second camp, and his stay there occupies the novel’s second section, narrated this time by the doctor in the camp, an educated white man of liberal sympathies. The imprisoned, starving K refuses to eat, telling the doctor that after the pumpkins he has grown, no other food tastes good. The doctor’s confrontation with this refusal, and with K’s seeming freedom from all teleologies, prompts him to what amounts to an eloquent paraphrase of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (AKA “Theses on the Philosophy of History”). It’s hard to say whether we’re meant to sympathize with the doctor’s reading of K’s life as an allegory for how meaning can erupt into a system without being claimed by the system’s terms. He wants so badly to be K, but can only describe him—largely in the terms of other systems, which perhaps lends more aesthetic credibility to the echoes of Kafka and Benjamin. It reminds me a bit of Lewis Carroll’s parodies of Wordsworth, in which the latter’s “egotistical sublime” was reduced, justly or unjustly, to sheer moral obtuseness.

In the brief final section, K returns to Capetown and meets up with some shady characters: a man demonic in his sense of fun, accompanied by his sisters, who may or may not be merely his whores. One of them gives K a blowjob, an experience that brings him shame, before he returns to his mother’s small room to rest, fantasizing about finding company on his journey to freedom from all the “camps” springing up to claim human beings.

This aspect of the novel famously disturbed Nadine Gordimer’s admiration for it back in the mid-’80s. She found K’s near-anarchism and political quietism to be a slight against the liberation struggle of black South Africans and an unfortunate derogation of the intellectual’s duty to aid such struggles. She censured him in terms derived from Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, saying that he had failed to provide in his novel the integration of the hero’s destiny with the destiny of his society, which is the primary task of the novel form in an age when the social totality is not immanent. Whether Gordimer still thinks this way, I don’t know. She’s not wrong: Coetzee in this novel is more Heidegger than Lukács (philosophically, I mean, not politically). Now that the particular struggle of South African blacks has ended, Gordimer’s criticism seems off the mark or irrelevant. This discloses a law of literary transmission about which we ought to be ambivalent: posterity doesn’t care whether you served or deserted.