Visionary madness, Godless novels!?, Modernism’s cultural drift, Is culture stuck?, Complicated Odysseus, Can't read: won't read, Knausgaard and Scott and good bad writing, BBC bathos, Towards Zero

The irregular review of reviews vol. X

The next Western Canon book club is about Turgenev, October 17th. The next Shakespeare book club is on October 13th.

In case you missed it, here is my review of the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo.

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Visionary madness

Ted Gioia’s piece about muses, madness, and visionary artists reminded me of my favourite passage in Frye on Shakespeare,

Perhaps Lear’s madness is what our sanity would be if it weren’t under such heavy sedation all the time, if our senses or nerves or whatever didn’t keep filtering out experiences or emotions that would threaten our stability. It’s a dangerous business to enter the world of titans and heroes and gods, but safer if we have as a guide a poet who speaks their language.

Godless fiction

The New Statesman’s review of Intermezzo is another fine instance of the philistine supremacy being in good working order. The people in charge aren’t taking literature seriously enough.

I don’t know whether Rooney believes in God – but Intermezzo certainly seems to.

In artistic terms, this is a problem. Why? As the critic Ian Watt argued in his influential 1957 book, The Rise of the Novel, the novel was incubated in the ideas of Enlightenment philosophy, which shifted the balance of moral responsibility from the Church towards the individual’s conscience. Novels only make sense in a world of ethical autonomy in which characters are free to make consequential choices and readers to judge them for it (“NOOO, Charlotte, don’t marry repulsive Mr Collins!”). A secular society needs fiction more urgently than a pious one.

Consider the spiritual career of George Eliot…

Yes, yes Charlotte and Mr. Collins. What about Fanny Price marrying a clergyman? Considering George Eliot would be a good idea. Why don’t we start with Adam Bede? And then we could consider Jane Eyre (“for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing”!!), The Scarlet Letter, Stowe, Tolstoy, Trollope, Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead, for God’s sake, a novel about “the operation of divine grace”!), C.S. Lewis, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Gilead, Piranesi… the list is too long.

Is it too much to expect that critics know about determinism in the post-Darwinian novel (Thomas Hardy!), Methodism, the Reformation, the question of free will in Milton, and so on? (I made him just and right,/ Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.) The sentence “A secular society needs fiction more urgently than a pious one” is not just myopic but absurd.

It’s just not serious to publish reviews like this; it perpetuates an unliterary attitude to criticism.

Modernism’s cultural drift

…the “modernism” cultural movement was full of folks who felt united by a feeling that they couldn’t trust their prior inherited culture, and needed to search for replacements. They succeeded at achieving artistic creativity and innovation, and high status, but not so much at finding trustworthy cultural replacements.

I told Robin Hanson that I think this is not really true and he responded like this: “Rejecting the previous generation’s culture has been a normal artistic practice since then, but was not the usual practice before then.” I am interested in his “cultural drift” thesis, but the idea that modernism was a rejection of previous norms in the way that, say, Romanticism, wasn’t, seems way off to me. Robin doesn’t see that those changes are also about “norms and status markers” as opposed to what he (incorrectly in my view, and a little glibly) calls “just changing some elements of artistic style.” Were Goethe and Coleridge merely “changing some elements of artistic style”? I say not!

Culture is not stuck

It’s a mistake to dismiss TikTok as the “dancing app” or “digital fentanyl” or a machine for political brainwashing. Yes, it’s true that many viral TikToks aren’t worth their minute-long (or longer, as is now the case) runtime. But there is a lot of innovation on TikTok — particularly with comedy. 

TikTok sketch comedy is in the same lineage of theater. It invites a suspension of disbelief from the audience, creators often play multiple characters, rapidly switching between roles with nothing more than a change in voice, facial expression, or camera angle. And importantly, it’s funny. When the whole feed is taken together, it’s almost digital vaudeville: a song, a short sketch, a physical feat, slapstick, animal acts and satire, one after another, in a personalized variety show on your phone.

Katherine Dee writes about how modern internet culture is just fine. I agree with what she writes, but I think her comparison to vaudeville is instructive. The people who are worried about culture are worried about the lack of high culture. Shakespeare and Dickens were both high and mass culture, as were the great directors of classic Hollywood. That is what seems to be lacking today—that and a lack of interest in the culture of the past. Sure the novel will never be as culturally central again as it was in the nineteenth century, but where are our acknowledged great artists of the internet? Culture is fine; art may not be.

Complicated Homer

I am delighted that Emily Wilson has joined Substack. I subscribed immediately. In this piece she goes through the details of why Odysseus is described as a many of “many-turns”, or, in her choice, as a “complicated” man.

Most Homeric characters have a small number of standard epithets, which can fit metrically with the name in different positions in the line.  Achilles is "swift-footed" and "son of Peleus".  Agamemnon is "lord of men" and "son of Atreus".   Odysseus has more formulaic epithets than most, and a great many of his epithets have to do with his multiplicity.  He is a man of "many strategems" (polymechanos), "much wiliness" (polymetis), "much-enduring" (polytlas), "much-smarts" (polyphron).  He's also "city-sacker" (ptoliporthos), an epithet shared with several other warriors, "resplendent/ glorious" (dios), "related to Zeus" (diogenes), "godlike" (theoeides, theoeikelos) and "son of Laertes", and more.

You will learn so much from reading this Substack. And it is doing much better work for modern culture than the next article…

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

You’ve read this sort of thing before. But I just don’t believe that people can’t read books anymore. The problem is that they won’t. After all, the so-called decline of the humanities means the rise of something else—something that involves reading. Obviously college students turn up having read a lot less these days, but there is a giveaway paragraph in this piece which gets at the real issue.

Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

I want people to read the classics, and I advocate for such. But the perspective of this piece just isn’t right. The worst part is the closing paragraph, which is about the Percy Jackson series, a set of children’s books that recombines various elements of Greek myths into adventure stories.

I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

If leading publications cannot make a better case for literature than this then no wonder young people are going elsewhere! No, Percy Jackson is not a preparation for a college course. Get real! My eight year old reads those books. No, spinning adventures is not the purpose of Greek myth! No, we do not read The Iliad so that all we have to say about it afterwards is that we “understand the human condition.” Is Homer worth such small, banal cliches?

The Iliad stood in relation to Ancient Greece—one of the peaks of human civilisation—in something like the manner that the Bible stood to the Christian civilisation of the Renaissance and the age of Shakespeare. How pathetic that we are more interested in pretending young people can’t read than in telling them how important Homer is. Homer was the source of the great tragedies of Athens. The poet of whom Samuel Johnson said every other poet tried to surpass and failed. He is the great writer of the pity and the terror of war, of the conflict of pride and ambition, of the sorrows of age and the merciless command that status has on great men. The Iliad is one of the most gripping stories ever told. It has survived thousands of years because of all of this and more. To reduce that to “understanding the human condition” is to replace the actual worth of Homer with the sort of thing children put in essays that they do not want to write.

For as long as we treat Homer this lightly while telling people that, yes, actually, reading Percy Jackson is good preparation for college(!), then of course we can expect to see very little change in attitudes. Young people are attracted by those who take their work seriously. If the Atlantic truly gave a hoot about the decline of people reading Great Literature that’s what they would do. Instead, we get this.

Good bad writing

This paragraph from Lola Seaton’s review of Megan Nolan,

Knausgaard may have also been a liberating influence on Nolan because he is not known, even among his fans, for the overwhelming splendor of his style: Fredric Jameson described his prose as “undistinguished,” Ben Lerner found it “sloppy,” James Wood noted its “flatness” and “prolixity,” Patricia Lockwood conceded that his sentences “are not always interesting.” Knausgaard himself has said that “there is a lot of bad writing” in the series, much of which he wrote quickly. He is an “extremely fast” reader, too—“good sentences have been wasted on me”—and is more interested in being immersed than impressed. “Admiration is of no use,” he once said in an interview, “and what I want instead is to disappear completely into the work, to lose my sense of the self.” This is how he “read as a kid, disappearing completely into other worlds.” Nolan—or the narrator of Acts of Desperation—identifies: “When I was small, before drinking and men and the rest, books were the thing that could absorb me entirely and let me forget myself.”

reminded me of what Virginia Woolf said about Walter Scott, in her 1924 essay about The Antiquary,

The first charge that is levelled against Scott is that his style is execrable. Every page of the novel, it is true, is watered down with long languid Latin words—peruse, manifest, evince. Old metaphors out of the property box come flapping their dusty wings across the sky. The sea in the heat of a crisis is "the devouring element”. A gull on the same occasion is a "winged denizen of the crag". Taken from their context it is impossible to deny that such expressions sound wrong, though a good case might be made against the snobbery which insists upon preserving class distinctions even among words. But read currently in their places, it is difficult either to notice or to condemn them. As Scott uses them they fulfil their purpose and merge perfectly in their surroundings. Great novelists who are going to fill seventy volumes write after all in pages, not in sentences, and have at their command, and know when to use, a dozen different styles of varying intensities. The genteel pen is a very useful pen in its place. These slips and slovenlinesses serve as relaxations; they give the reader breathing space and air the book. Let us compare Scott the slovenly with Stevenson the precise. “It was as he said: there was not a breath stirring; a windless stricture of frost had bound the air; and as we went forth in the shine of the candles, the blackness was like a roof over our heads.” One may search the Waverley Novels in vain for such close writing as this. But if we get from Stevenson a much closer idea of a single object, we get from Scott an incomparably larger impression of the whole.

This is one of the major critical divides, which, in my view is simply a matter of temperament that pretends to be a matter of aesthetic principle. Either you are able to explain and appreciate the Scott/Knausgaard style before you judge it or you are not.

BBC bathos

A very good piece of reviewing from Will Lloyd about the “pure, uncut bathos” of John Sopel’s new book.

Sopel’s arched eyebrow over Trump’s America, especially on the BBC’s Americast podcast, won him many fans in Britain. But did it add to their understanding of what was happening there? His 40-page rehash of the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol building in Strangeland (a book, remember, that is supposed to be about “Britishness”) is telling. He calls it “the most shocking day of my journalistic career”. The day ended with Sopel tweeting a picture of a glass of red wine to tell his followers he was “fine”. 

Meanwhile, ITV’s Washington correspondent Robert Moore, producer Sophie Alexander and camera operator Mark Davey were inside the Capitol — the only Brits who bothered following the rioters into the building. It says a lot about the way journalism works now that the startling, unsettling footage ITV captured probably got as many likes on Twitter as Sopel’s post about wine. 

And this.

Forty years ago, when Sopel was a wee hack at BBC Radio Solent, Britain had writers like VS Naipaul and Martin Amis sending awesome dispatches back from the US. Until recently we had Sopel. That change is a bigger sign of British decline than the ones smugly reheated in Strangeland. 

Towards Zero

Fully agree that Towards Zero is one of Agatha’s best.