I went only to the convenience store today. The laundry went undone, and a trip to the bank did not happen, only a lot of sleeping. Today has been a repeat of Wednesday with less pain, and far less nauseousness, but still sinus problems, a low-grade headache, and a lack of energy. What has taken up my time was working on this post. I started around 9:44 PM, and it is now 1:32 AM. If I am to get to church tomorrow, I need to sign off now.
Christopher Harding's The rebel cult of Murakami: He rejected Japan's literary establishment (UnHerd) reviews the latest Murakami novel with an overview of the writer's history. If you want to understand what literature can do, read Murakami. There is the strangeness of life in his books.
You may think, why should I read a Japanese writer, I'm an American? You are a human being. Furthermore, you will find plenty in Murakami - as in the best writing - that you will understand as a human being.
It is safe to say that Murakami’s new book, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, does little to address these criticisms. We are once again inside the head of a gently unsettled, faintly nostalgic male narrator, who discovers that the boundaries between his world and another can be diaphanously thin. In Japan, where Murakami remains a big deal — albeit never accepted into the country’s literary establishment — the book has received mixed and occasionally slightly confused reviews. But the Murakami magic remains intact. Re-immersing myself in his dream-like pacing feels like slipping back into a warm bath. The old images and emotions return, some of them heightened now that I have enough years on the clock to share Murakami’s bewilderment at the passing of time.
Fortunately, for those of us who find ourselves using fogeyish phrases like “back in the Nineties”, Murakami suggests that “truth is not found in fixed stillness but in ceaseless change and movement”. This reads to me like an encouragement not to remain too long in Murakami’s signature nostalgia mode and instead to embrace what is around us now — with the possible exception of J-Pop. Fresh consolation, then, from an old master.
While on UnHerd, I saw this link: Michel Houellebecq is literature’s Lucifer. I have read about Houellebecq for what seems like decades without having read him. What I could make out about him inspired my first version of "Love Stinks" - two unpleasant characters dealing with life.
It’s tempting to contrast France and applaud its history of transgressive writing: Rabelais, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mirbeau, Colette... Some parallels do exist in English literature, but they’re relatively scant. The Earl of Rochester was no Marquis de Sade. And when Oscar Wilde was destroyed by the British establishment, and partly himself, where did he go but Paris? In France, the “liberty” part of their revolutionary inheritance remains strong. The French tradition demonstrates it’s often only on the outer reaches of decorum, only when we are brutally honest about our deepest desires and worst impulses, that we can truly know ourselves. There’s a nobility in such aims, even if the means appear ignoble, or even diabolical. And this is Houellebecq’s realm.
The demonic power of Houellebecq’s writing comes primarily not from what he’s creating, but rather what he’s feeding off: the hypocrisy of Western neoliberal society. He’s not, however, a moralist. Houellebecq makes little attempt to rise above the fray. If there is a ship of fools, as medieval artists used to portray the corruption of civilisation, the author is on board, smoking below deck. Houellebecq’s references to himself in his prose and interviews are fairly disreputable. The fact he sees himself among the wretched and the doomed is telling.
The writer, I think, is right about American writers - we cannot go that far into madness. Consider the problem of Céline that is set out in Céline’s War by Michael W. Clune (The Point).
But War is different. Although Ferdinand on several occasions refers to characters from the same imaginary chivalric romance that the Ferdinand of Death uses, here these images are inert, epiphenomenal. The chivalric names “King Krogold … Wanda … Joad” spool out of him in a kind of stutter of the imagination. They are never brought into significant contact with the scenes and images of reality. Nor is the chivalric replaced by some other version of the ideal, as in Journey. In fact, there is no trace of idealism of any kind in this book, beyond instances like the purely farcical, automatic shout “Long live France!” that Ferdinand utters before passing out.
***
I think the best way to understand the relation of texts like Trifles to Céline’s dark-comic works is to suggest that in the former the attitude tries to work itself up into a state of delirium on its own, without reliance on the dark and uncontrollable energies of the inhuman source of delirium—a source revealed most distinctly and terrifyingly in War.
My "Love Stinks" is more of a comedy of two damaged people trying to survive their injuries by indulging their eccentricities against the world. Even my "Chasing Ashes" does not go far enough. I can tell within myself that I am too American not to think we can do better than we have, be better people than we are, for all that I see the ugliness of how people treat one another, the inherent fascist tendencies in this country, and, yes, the hypocrisy of Americans.
But American writing and thinking may not be as clear-cut as we have been taught: “To Eat This Big Universe as Her Oyster”: Margaret Fuller and the First Major Work of American Feminism ( Randall Fuller; The Public Domain Review).
Indeed if you actually listen to Houellebecq, rather than reactively dismiss him, he’s insightful. Forget capitalism for a moment — he also redirects our attention to political correctness as a tool of evasion and/or destruction. He is strong, too, on the theme of ageing, and on the loss of innocence. Part of his callousness, perhaps, is a survival mechanism; he switches off his emotions. How to remain romantic when faced with entire industries dedicated to debasing all that is good?
“Those who love life do not read,” Houellebecq claims. “No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.” Elsewhere, he has asserted, with more than a hint of gallows’ humour, that writing is “like cultivating parasites in your brain.” This is immensely refreshing to hear, as the contemporary literary world often congratulates itself that literature is a saintly act of empathy. The implication is that writers are innately good, indeed better, people. Writers are good, it naturally follows, because “good” is what you declare — not what you actually do. Anyone who points out the falsity of this joins the list of the forbidden. There’s no greater sign of goodness, after all, than the occasional necessary witch-hunt or search for the devil’s mark, sifting through the digital dirt, on the accused. Houellebecq has no such delusions. “We are both rather contemptible individuals,” is how he opens his dialogue with Bernard-Henri Lévy in Public Enemies. He prefers to be a circling vulture than a cuckoo in the nest.
What might be made of crime fiction? The most recent Times Literary Supplement has some examples.
Mud, blood and booze by Nicholas Clee:
A Case of Matricide has closure of sorts, and ends with a line about pieces of a puzzle falling into place. But it is not the kind of closure, or the kind of puzzle solution, that crime novels usually provide. Followers of this remarkable trilogy would be disappointed otherwise.
Death comes to conference by Andrew Motion:
One of the many pleasures of reading Jonathan Coe derives from his skill in organizing a large cast of characters, whose activities can sound congested in summary, but never seem so on the page. The Proof of My Innocence, Coe’s fifteenth novel, is an excellent example. The prose strides along with a mature confidence, combining level-headed analysis and droll satire with a strong narrative drive as it both celebrates and investigates distinct fictional genres. The result is an intriguing whodunnit that marries literary/philosophical speculations about the nature of reality with a condemnation of recent right-wing shenanigans.
The author uses his protagonist as the means of delivering this. As it occurs to Phyl that she might defeat her post-graduation boredom by writing a novel, she identifies three kinds of fiction to explore: cosy crime (think “Death in a Thatched Cottage”); dark academia (think “The Secret History”) and autofiction. Initially Coe avoids telling the reader that the three central sections of his novel, which develop the narrative by creating examples of these three types, are in fact “written” by Phyl, but there is never any doubt that this is the case. And it means we read them as satires of a kind, while also realizing that Coe is asking straight-faced questions about the best means of establishing the truth.
Exploring seems to be best adapted to detective fiction. What did Dorothy L. Sayers do in Gaudy Night but explore life in a woman's college and the idea of intellectual integrity? Walter Mosley explores the life of the Black community with his Easy Rawlins novels. Ross MacDonald delves into history and class with Lew Archer. Crime transcends class. Crimes arise from history. Not all crimes can be found in the law books; others appear only from a different perspective.
I learned from William James that truth depends on perspective. That is, for me, the problem with an omniscient narrator. We are not all-knowing, our understanding is contingent and bound by perspective. All that can be done in an over-arching way is to collect all the evidence and create a narrative that explains the facts collected by the detective.
History is another version of the detective story. Right turn, another TLS review, this one written by Kyle Burke, discusses the rise of right-wing populism in America. What has puzzled me and some of my friends is why people are attracted to Trump. We do not find him a very persuasive conman. Neither do we find anything convincing in his message - other than another rich man trying to steal by promoting resentment over the very policies that have made them rich.
Buchanan and Perot, Rothbard and Francis, Duke and Limbaugh – each grasped and helped to guide the politics of resentment bubbling up across the country. They glimpsed the future, even if they were unable to manifest it themselves. Perot, despite his strong showing, never came close to winning the election. Buchanan ultimately gave up his bid for the Republican nomination, urging his supporters to carry the torch of radicalism into Bush’s camp. Bush, of course, lost to the Democrat Bill Clinton, who himself faced insurgent forces within his party. But Clinton managed to co-opt and contain those on the left calling for more inclusionist and redistributive policies. He also managed to ride the broader wave of discontent into the White House, even as he continued, as John Ganz notes, “many of the same Reaganite policies that contributed to the crisis in the first place”. Under Clinton’s leadership the crisis grew and, with it, the sense of resentment and alienation that had propelled the nascent right-wing populism of the early 1990s. Thirty years on, and with Trump now looking forward to a second, consolidating term, it is growing ever stronger.
There is a crime here. Worse may be the crime to come. Who benefits from the coming right-wing populist revolution? What replacement(s) will it bring.
Englesberg Ideas brought me Adam Smith: the first anti-capitalist? by Emma Rothschild. I have only read Smith's Jurisprudence, but I try to make up by reading what I can of his economics books. What I have come to think is that Smith is more than the myth foisted on us. Americans have taken to Smith against Marx without considering the details of Smith's system. I cannot recall how long ago, I understood Smith's capitalism meant globalization, or that he did not have much love for the congregation of merchants. Until now, I did not know he was so anti-slavery. We raise a businessman to another term as President because Americans think he can make the economy run better than it is. The populist message is that the government should fix the economy for their benefit, rather than the elites. Only the people who they have given power are the very people who benefitted from the economic system that oppresses the populist masses. Go figure that out. Seems Adam Smith was already aware of this class:
But the conflict between commercial and other virtues was far more general, in the view of Smith’s early critics. The free exchanges of commerce required good rules, including rules of competition and rules for the security of property, and they also required good values or good norms; the disposition of merchants to compete by mild and moderate means and for economic rather than political advantage. The profound difficulty of the Smithian system, as it was interpreted by his followers, was that the course of free commerce – and the celebration of the virtues of self-interest – had the effect, over time, of reducing respect for rules and changing the norms of competition. The commercial society was founded on uncommercial values and its tendency, eventually, was to consume its own foundations.
Smith undergirds The fragile equilibrium of technology, liberty and power by Paul Tucker (also Engelsberg Ideas).
Third, whereas the possible political hazards of network-based economic power come from the top, the new technology also brings bottom-up risks to liberal democracy. It is a familiar point that the rise of full-franchise representative democracy during the 20th century owed not a little to the emergence and growth of a white-collar clerical class. These were people who, in their many millions, had in just a few generations moved from tied agricultural roles through heavy labour to sitting in offices. They were the backbone of civil society, and contributed to civic virtue by their high propensity to vote. As has been obvious for some time, those jobs are in decline, replaced by local automation or by relocation to lower cost, poorer countries. If the lower-middle and middle-middle classes feel threatened or alienated, what are the prospects for democracy? Since electing political office holders functions partly as a check on administrative power, that possibility should worry those liberals who prefer the ‘liberal’ aspect of liberal democracy.
The point of those examples is to paint a crude picture of how recent technological changes have contributed to souring our politics without yet delivering the marvellous productivity improvements associated with earlier economic revolutions. So far, the innovations have gone, most notably, into consumer products rather the production process itself. That might only be a matter of time, of course. But if we need time for the true goodies to come through, releasing resources to help address our many problems, we will have to hope the new technology does not strike a more direct blow to our way of life, including via tipping the balance of power in the world.
Crudely put, the spectre is the surveillance society, where Bentham’s nightmarish pantechnicon — total visibility in four dimensions — becomes a reality. Research conducted by Harvard’s David Yang and co-authors on the People’s Republic of China has shown that not only does increased state surveillance reduce protest, but also that the prevalence of protest increases state investment in cutting-edge technological developments. Unsurprisingly, authoritarian states have been importing facial-recognition technology and AI from China. Crudely, the surveillance state has incentives to push out the frontier of surveillance technology. This is the nightmare scenario of technical progress and authoritarianism becoming mutually reinforcing.
The same source provided me with Future proof by Francis J. Gavin.
Whether or not the world is at a reordering moment, there is little doubt that future trends in international relations are more uncertain than at any time in the past. One can tell a dark story of the return of intense geopolitical competition and the threat of great power war. One can tell another story of a world politics dominated by complex transnational challenges which overwhelm legacy governing institutions. There are also powerful, if silent, systemic forces upending the very nature of the human experience which will no doubt play a critical role in how world politics takes shape in the decades to come. While the answers are not entirely clear, many of the questions are, and we owe it to ourselves to pursue them vigorously, innovatively, and honestly.
How does that work with the right-wing populism of Trump's America First ideology? I am not even sure how it works with capitalism with its need for global trade. Making money means selling stuff to other countries.
Bringing us back to the original discussion of fiction, the detective, and philosophy. Where is there not an investigation into how these ideas affect people living here and now? I doubt I have the time or the intelligence to do the job, but what about you?
A fellow I once knew, Larry Sweazy, told me once that crime fiction's purpose was to restore order to the world. I beg to differ. Order is contingent, temporary, and waiting for the next crisis. Like the novel reviewed in Mud, blood and booze, there can be indeterminate endings. That is life. Raymond Chandler left unanswered who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. We have had uncertainty for a long time in detective fiction.
There is also science fiction to consider. Something I read towards the end of the past week was Whose Future Is It Anyway? Jess Maginity reviews Jordan S. Carroll’s “Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right.” (LARB)
Carroll reminds us that our future is contingent. Fascists have a vision for the future that excludes most of humanity, but fascists can be defeated. The future is for everyone—if we make it that way.
I cannot say I am a fan of autofiction. My autobiography may excite some, and it might even provide some sort of dramatic frisson, but to me, it is a long stretch of dullness. Reading Against Autofiction: Two Paths for the Internet Novel by Conor Truax (Spike) gives me even more reasons to find that genre inadequate to what I see as possible for fiction.
In the arborescent, then, there is no free movement for the reader to transcend the limits of the author’s persona, nor can the writer break free from this tangled root of narcissism. The effect of the tyranny of persona is a broader literary culture that substitutes the difficult work of understanding a text and, as a consequence, the person described in a text, by deferring to first judgments of their persona; first judgments from which none of us in life are otherwise spared, and first judgments that literature ought to have the unique capacity to challenge.
When will a narcissist recognize the society around them? I say never. Watching Donald J. Trump, I expect the narcissist to destroy the society surrounding them whenever and wherever that society encroaches on their self-interests.
However, the essay does offer a glimpse at a viable option:
What Alphabetical Diaries achieves is maintain the (para)social function that satisfies readers’ desires to connect with the author, without lapsing into a critical voyeurism of the authorial persona; instead, the reader is enlisted to assemble the novel’s fragmented structure. Whether in the novel, gripped with two hands, or in the purlieu of a computer screen, the synthesis of both autofictional and database elements is what holds the reader’s focus on the broader world as related by a single narrator, rather than the persona related through an ever-distant world. In turn, the world is brought closer to the solitary reader, and the solitary reader closer to life.
I expect I am too old and too middlebrow for writing that sort of novel. What I am left with is John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy, which merits a name check in the essay.
What seems like science fiction is the aforementioned Chinese security state, even See Me like a State by Mason L. Wong (Public Books) drags the comparison into its discussion of the Chinese surveillance state.
It is against this discourse that Pei’s The Sentinel State positions itself. Pei’s argument is quite digestible: He contends that the endurance of autocracy in China is less a function of technology than it is of human labor in the form of informant networks, labor-intensive domestic spying, and heavy policing. Pei is not a denialist when it comes to Chinese authoritarianism, nor is he interested in downplaying the extent of China’s surveillance state. But he is keenly aware of the ways in which today’s Chinese autocracy looks more like the past than not, and he is wary of the extent to which this story of technological tyranny obscures important realities of the situation on the ground in China.
Though Pei does not make this case forcefully in his book—instead choosing to focus on the empirical details of China’s surveillance apparatus—The Sentinel State helps shine a light on how the idea of techno-authoritarianism serves as a kind of totalizing narrative: one which has pernicious effects on our ability to understand the political situation in China.
As stories about flashy new technologies eclipse more measured coverage, it becomes easy for foreign audiences, particularly those in America, to lose track of the actual harms inflicted by China’s surveillance state. Put more simply, this narrative of techno-authoritarianism takes a difficult-to-summarize situation filled with diverging interests and mundane realities and flattens it into the language of the American cultural imagination, inflected with lurid Cold War fantasy and as contemptuous of complexity as it can be.
Literature takes arms against this state:
It is not by coincidence that one of the most incisive depictions of state and society in China comes from a literary figure. As noted by the critic and social theorist Nan Z. Da, close reading and other techniques of linguistic and literary analysis have long been key tools of Chinese surveillance. Such techniques date back to at least the Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which Mao invited intellectuals to candidly express their views of his regime before subjecting their writings to careful inspection for signs of punishable dissent. Chinese writers, Da observes, therefore have an understanding that surveillance can often take the form of “technical hairsplitting” or the “combing [of] text for minor, semantic transgressions.”
What does American literature do?
Ted Gioia's The 6 New Rules of Communicating seems to me offer a hope for literature. The novel is not a one-way communication, but one between the writer's words and the reader's imagination. It is a conversation that does not take place in real-time. The writer put down his words long before the reader finds them.
Here are the six new rules of engagement—for politicians, broadcasters, and all aspiring experts, decision-makers, and leaders.
You gain more trust when seated, not standing.
Don’t speak at people—speak with them.
An informal tone is more persuasive now. Even leaders must adjust to this.
Conversations have more influence than speeches.
Spontaneous communications delivered from a personal standpoint are considered more ‘real’ than a script created by a team or speechwriter.
Soundbites and talking points are less impactful than storytelling, humor, and off-the-cuff comments.
Rules 2–5 seem to have applications to writing, particularly fiction.
Go for it.
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