Quivering Towards Warmth

I was not surprised when death came for Cormac McCarthy. It had to come, dragging along, cross, a tatterdemalion through the sagebrush and panicgrass. Cormac was a creator of a literary West that was both recognizable to those of us who, like him, lived in the sparsities of New Mexico, wrenched from indigenous hands and corralled by the quilted fencing for overshot missiles and sandfusing bombs in the atomic age, and also a construct of an unfamiliar language that relinquished authenticity for a kind of topological liturgy. What I am surprised by is how distant the literary works of his era seem now: Joan Didion’s reckless and shapely California; Don DeLillo’s fetishized consumerism; Thomas Pynchon’s endless array of clauses slouching towards sentences. Each produced shockwork against the conventions of modernism. There were so many others, too, from Hawkes to Plath to Roth to Amis. But the aloof distance is what hits me now. The striving to construct an artifice. I want to go back to before vernaculars loosely re-encoded, before the scandal of showing-without-telling, to where the writer was explaining his or her thoughts the way we all think them, with insight and articulation, with depth and that incomplete glow of everyday awareness. Even Mr. Sammler’s Planet, in the stern assumptions in gray-toned introspection, seems hard and callous here in the 21st century.

There was an unexpected reduction in crime across America and Western Europe in the 1990s. No one is sure why. But there is a sense in the literature that predates that change that people were perhaps less civilized on average, more prone to instrumentalize one another, more willing to exact revenge. Cold warriors debated realpolitik.… Read the rest

The Great Crustacean

little-lobster-costumeDavid Foster Wallace’s Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky in Consider the Lobster is worth reading for nothing else than the following two paragraphs:

The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we—here, today—cannot or do not permit ourselves. Joseph Frank does an admirable job of tracing out the interplay of factors that made this engagement possible—[Dostoevsky]’s own beliefs and talents, the ideological and aesthetic climates of his day, etc. Upon his finishing Frank’s books, though, I think that any serious American reader/writer will find himself driven to think hard about what exactly it is that makes many of the novelists of our own place and time look so thematically shallow and lightweight, so morally impoverished, in comparison to Gogol or Dostoevsky (or even to lesser lights like Lermontov and Turgenev). Frank’s bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit.

Part of the explanation for our own lit’s thematic poverty obviously includes our century and situation. The good old modernists, among their other accomplishments, elevated aesthetics to the level of ethics—maybe even metaphysics—and Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.

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Politics is Religion

Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy has steadily distanced itself from Continental Philosophy for many reasons, but the defining difference must be with respect to the correlation of meaning with textual intent. Continental Philosophy deconstructs (at least in recent years) and as a phenomenon there is cultural significance to the motivation to tear down the assumptions that we have carefully nurtured from the Enlightenment through to Modernism. Meaning disconnects from words. It slurs. And reinvention is the only persistent motivation.

Arguably, though, it is only Continental Philosophy that cares about politics and culture, which makes it less abstract and irrelevant than the thumb twiddling of the analytic strain. Modern culture and our claims about significance are the lambs for the slaughterhouse. I thought of that voting in one of California’s ever-present elections today. Simon Critchley carried the water for me with his recent argument that politics is essentially religion (side-note: check out his discussion of Philip K. Dick in the New York Times recently; nothing really new to anyone who has read the VALIS books, but the facts concerning Dick’s later years and death are worth understanding). How is it religion? Because it is easy to redraw the semantic map in Continental Philosophy. Words mean what they are positioned to mean and the positioning is highly variable. The only solidity is in faith-based attachment to a theory of meaning, and politics exemplifies that in a way that is passingly second to religion itself.

We can see the effects of this religion in the defining political conflict of our era. The Pew Research Center’s new report, Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years, shows this political religion at work.  On a majority of issues, the study shows, among Americans who self-identify as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, there has been a steady increase in the disparity between opinions.… Read the rest