Ironic points of light
Saturday's tea leaves
I take my title from W.H. Auden’s most famous poem, “September 1, 1939,” which has been making the rounds again; it achieved something as close to total media saturation as a poem can in the days following 9/11. It seems we are always looking back at “a low, dishonest decade,” only revealed to be so after a shock. For Auden, of course, the Nazi invasion of Poland revealed the fecklessness of Europe’s statesmen in the face of Hitler’s threat. After September 11, 2001, the 90s stood revealed as a decade equally fatuous, inflated by the narcissism of a society for which the OJ Simpson trial and a blowjob in the Oval Office were the great scandals, even as the consequences of imperial geopolitics churned under the surface, erupting pitilessly in a spectacle of fire and blood. And now the 45th president will be the 47th president, only this time elected by a majority, however scant, of my fellow Americans. The dishonesty Auden spoke of now seems to refer to the delusion shared by me and millions of other left-liberals that Trump was an aberration, rather than what he’s been revealed to be: the World Spirit in a hairpiece.
On a Saturday morning we are awakened, as usual, by the cries of Walter, our cat. One of us gets up and feeds him and turns on the coffeemaker before returning to bed. When the coffeemaker gasps its last, the other gets up and fetches mugs of coffee and we sit in bed for a while scrolling. My in-box is full of goodies: the weekly digest of the New Statesman—lots of interesting book chat this week—the Washington Review of Books, the New York Times’ “Read Like the Wind” newsletter, and a few stray Substacks (today it’s Phil Christman doing a better job than I could ever do of post-morteming the election post-mortems, though I also recommend John Ganz in The Nation). While digesting all this I skim the front page of the Times app, which is a horror show over the fold, in which we get to play the game, Which of Trump’s cabinet picks will do the most harm? My money’s on RFK, Jr. What’s under the fold seems preoccupied by gender, whether it’s the lusterless hypermasculine display of the Tyson-Paul fight, the buzzy periodical return of Lysistrata-like handwringing to the Style section (aka “heteropessimism”), or this heartbreaking essay by a girl exactly my daughter’s age on the post-election divide between boys and girls.
Certain points flash and churn, and it’s hard to remember who wrote what. Who said that not the least of Trump’s advantages over Kamala Harris lay in his grasp of aesthetics? (The garbageman and McDonald’s worker cosplays; the bloody ear and raised fist.) It wasn’t Christman, though he does point out that too much liberal-left content relies on an earnestness bordering on preachiness. Picking up on these seemingly random convergences makes me feel a little like Ozymandias with his Nam June Paik array of CRTs, discerning patterns, feeling the world. To cite myself citing William S. Burroughs in the epigraph to my second novel: The first step in re-creation is to cut the old lines that hold you right where you are sitting now.
How Long Is Now was my attempt at autofiction, and another article served up by my array of metaphorical TVs muses on that literary form as an attempt to render the literary novel’s traditional task of representing The Way We Live Now. Connor Truax’s “Against Autofiction: Two Paths for the Internet Novel” (its title riffing on one of Zadie Smith’s most influential essays) draws on Deleuze and Guattari to contrast the aborescent novel centered on the author’s persona with rhizomatic novels that operate more like hypertexts, sublimating the authorial persona into a merely narrative function. I am not particularly interested in “internet novels”; my love of novels is rooted in an experience entirely the opposite of looking at the internet. We scan the internet, as I’m doing here; we read novels, and for me there are few greater pleasures than being immersed in a novel’s voice. This is even or especially true of dialogical novels that combine multiple voices; I’ve been listening to the Aubrey-Maturin series on audiobook (again), marveling at how completely Patrick Tull inhabits the novels’ narrative voice, which contains multitudes: lower-deck slang, the Latin of naturalists and medicos, Addison-and-Steele urbanity, and of course the impenetrable seaman’s jargon that lays a fine finish of verisimilitude over the fictive dream of perfect synthesis of yin and yang, masculine and feminine, Enlightenment and romance.
We’re back to the aesthetic, which as my Saturday survey suggests is never as far from politics as one might suppose, or wish. The task of re-creation, renewal, or maybe just plain survival can’t be separated from the aesthetic, particularly in a world in which vibes—a truly rhizomatic form—trump the old hierarchical narratives that a slim majority of the American people are no longer buying. Neoliberalism is dead; now is the time of monsters. As it happens, next week in my graphic novel course I’m teaching Book One of Emil Ferris’ autofictional epic My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, in which Universal monster archetypes like the Wolfman and Frankenstein do metaphorical battle with the M.O.B. (Mean, Ordinary, Boring) in late-60s Chicago. In Ferris’ book the monsters—queer, disabled, non-white, or all at once—are the good guys, struggling for something like solidarity in the face of violent repression. Survival, for Ferris’ heroine, is rooted in her ability to look at, discuss, and create art. That’s my instinct as well.
Phil Christman’s answer to the old question, What is to be done?, overlaps curiously with Truax’s, and Ferris’. Christman urges leftists and liberals to create podcasts: “of the New Media Possibilities that the internet opens up,” he writes, “the podcast form is the healthiest, by which I mean the one that is closest to reading. It’s reading with the possibility of a stronger parasocial attachment.” Meanwhile Truax argues that the appeal of autofiction, at least in its Sheila Heti/Karl Ove Knausgaard iterations, is rooted in persona: we don’t so much read these books as engage imaginatively with their authorial personae. The internet personality is clearly the dominant cultural figure of our age; the parasocial relationship is the most vibrant (and also the most poisonous) zone of 21st-century aesthetic experience. The alternative Truax offers is rhizomatic fiction; he cites Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (episodic narraticules featuring multiple protagonists in various mostly European settings) and Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (500,000 words of diaries with the sentences rearranged alphabetically rather than chronologically). Such fiction hearkens back to the central gesture of 20th century art, collage, which gives the reader the imaginative task of assembling the whole. It’s kind of the opposite of the systems novel—the missing third in Truax’s account of novels about the way we live now.
Whither, then, the Rarebit Fiend? I am not too interested in starting a podcast or putting myself on camera, but in my small way I am constructing a persona, building upon my old blog and my now-extinct Twitter feed, intertwined with my poetry and fiction, all of it (thus far) of the small-press variety. Half or more than half of my readers are people I actually know, or have met; a small but growing percentage of you enjoy a purely parasocial relationship with me. Is this something to grow, to turn into an instrument that might widen my influence, aesthetically and otherwise? Novels, at least literary novels, have never been less influential or meaningful to the culture, much less the larger society. Maybe that’s why I’m now drawn to genre writing. There’s a new science-fiction novel that my agent will be submitting soon, and my Jack Ruby/Barney Ross project is fundamentally historical fiction. I’ve been stymied in that project by various distractions, but also by indecision about its form. Maybe something more rhizomatic—the novel as an assemblage of documents and testimonies—is the answer. Or maybe I need to lean into the thriller elements, avoiding the pitfalls of the over-literary, or as Naomi Kanakia sarcastically describes the award-winning literary novel, of the merely boring. The systems novel is probably beyond me, even as I write a book that stands in the long shadow of Don De Lillo’s Libra. Could I ever attempt anything even remotely like what Patrick O’Brian accomplished? Nay—there I think I am happy to remain a reader. A reader is always the happiest thing to be.
I am not looking for aesthetic solutions to political problems, but I am looking for an aesthetic solution to my artistic problems, because that’s the only way I know how to go on living in the darkest timeline. And I have, grandiosely, some notion that I do have things to say of value about the Way We Live Now, but I can only fully explore and present them in a story about a teenage werewolf navigating a collapsed AI-dominated society (Skin & Bone) or in a story about the temptations of messianic violence (The Last Words of Jack Ruby). We go to war with the army we have. I have no claim to call myself one of “the Just,” but I’ll still end this post with the last stanza of Auden’s poem. It still s(t)ings:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
