grandhotelabyss

[grandhotelabyss]

(Just following on from the Ligotti question… I am writing this separately because I’m worried this contains too much of my own opinions, but wanted to give a bit of context to the question…)

I know that Ligotti claims the same revelation as Lovecraft - he’s described his driving sensibility as some sort of almost Underground Man-type existential resentment that nature forces man to live as a “self-conscious Nothing”. But honestly I’ve just never felt that that’s his draw. Stories like “The Chymist” or “Les Fleurs” aren’t written from the hapless perspective of puppets living through the realization that that’s what they are (the way Lovecraft’s stories so often are), they are written from the perspective of artists manifesting a more vibrant world. The horror comes from the fact that these artists manifest with human flesh.

You are truly one of the most insightful reviewers that I have had the good luck to find. I was very excited when I realised you have read some Ligotti - what do you think is the true horror sensibility animating his work, regardless of what he explicitly states as agenda?

Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you! Your remarks here definitely make me want to revisit Ligotti more carefully. That's a good distinction, which hadn't occurred to me—that Ligotti offers the night-side of aestheticism. This links him back to the very founder of aestheticism, Poe, whose heroes, in "The Masque of the Red Death" or "Ligeia," for example, are similarly making art out of life in a grotesque or terrifying way. (Or, I suppose, Sade.) In Lovecraft, on the other hand, the narrator's viewpoint is usually that of a scientifically detached consciousness breaking down in an encounter with cosmic horror, and the aestheticism is all on the side of the invading old gods (in one of his stories, I don't remember which, they're described as dancing and playing the flute like Dionysian revelers). But I defer to you, because you have read more of this material than I have!

#h. p. lovecraft #thomas ligotti #horror

[grandhotelabyss]

What do you think of Thomas Ligotti’s writing?

Do you think he achieved the “cosmic horror” that Lovecraft (in my opinion) never quite managed to write, possibly because (again just my opinion) the horror of Lovecraftian revelation is usually just… materialist reductionism?

I only read a handful of stories, "The Last Feast of Harlequin," "Flowers of the Abyss," a few more, all from Grimscribe. They were fine: effectively creepy, charmingly mannered. But no, they don't really stick; they don't feel cosmic or abyssal; there is some obdurate quality of kitsch there, as in Lovecraft himself. The true cosmic horror is found in the vastness of Chaos and Old Night in Paradise Lost, the expanse of the teeming ocean in Moby-Dick...even in the novel I just finished reading yesterday by someone who'd read Paradise Lost and especially Moby-Dick, Lawrence's much-maligned but actually very lively The Plumed Serpent, which opens a vista of deep time to swallow up European (over)consciousness. Here is a novel that even does early-20th-century-racism-as-cosmic-horror—except that Lawrence is divided, more than half on the side of the non-white world, however reductively exotified to pre- or sub-conscious life in his vision, a vision that resembles, nonetheless, that of later multiculturalists—than even his contemporary Lovecraft.

#thomas ligotti #d. h. lawrence #h. p. lovecraft #horror #cosmic horror #modernism

[grandhotelabyss]

Not sure why this only just occurred to me, but is there a particular reason why you didn't (from memory, of which mine is not great) cover any of the Brontes — even in passing a la the Victorian sages — for the IC?

No particular reason beyond trying to keep an even pace in a survey, which means not having too many novels. Also a conscious bias toward novels about urban-industrial experience (Dickens, Conrad) since so much of the poetry is about nature. But I could imagine another version where Wuthering Heights serves as a metatext allegorizing the shift from Gothic Romance to realist domestic novel. I'm sure I'll revisit them in the future.

#brontë sisters

[grandhotelabyss]

What do you make of the prominence of various kinds of conservative leftism at present?

The left's old critique of liberalism—that in its commitment to the constraints of the market and the rule of the owners it doesn't go far enough, per Marx's 19th-century Prometheanism, and that after The Revolution true freedom will be realized for all—was discredited over and over again, first by the proletariat's failure to stage said Revolution and then by the actually-existing revolutions' transformation into illiberal statist dystopias. In consequence, the leftist critique of liberalism increasingly absorbed the reactionary critique of liberalism (as culturally deadening, de-vitalized, inorganic, deracinated, etc.) over the course of the 20th century, especially since leftists and reactionaries, considered as social types, were both basically intellectuals looking with revulsion on the spectacle of mass culture. From the reactionary point of view, far from being enemies, liberalism in social life and capitalism in economic life seem to be all of a piece: to use my preferred example, the usurers and the sodomites in the same circle of Dante's Inferno because both equally contra naturam. Jackson Hinkle or whoever is an attenuated and admittedly risible consequence of these 20th-century developments in both theoretical and practical Marxism, whether the Frankfurt School's essentially Romantic critique of reification or the Maoists' quasi-fascist (self-)loathing of the metropole and cosmopolis. (The Compact type of thing, on the other hand, is just Catholics being Catholics, vide my Dante reference above; the explanation for them requires no detour through Marxism per se.) On the other hand, contemporary liberalism itself, as it turns the economy over to a tiny handful of corporations functioning effectively as sovereigns, also more and more attempts to secure the rights of its citizen-subjects with state protections against even slights to their feelings (e.g., hate speech laws) or threats to their very agreement with liberal consensus (e.g., misinformation control): liberalism itself, therefore, becomes its totalizing and totalitarian opposite with each year that passes. Combine this with the fact that the reactionary critique of liberalism was not 100% wrong and subtends most of the great art of the 20th century—I may only be saying this because I've been immersed for three weeks in Yeats and Lawrence for the most recent and the forthcoming IC episodes—and the joke, finally, is on everyone.

#leftism #liberalism

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on Percival Everett?

Never read him!

[grandhotelabyss]

What question would you most like to get from one of these anonymous asks? (And then — answer that question)

There's no one question I want. I'm flattered when people who have obviously read my fiction ask me something about it; that's probably my favorite type of question. I also figure I will be asked about the latest dead writer, and I usually am (I was mentally preparing for that Vendler question for 24 hours before I got it). I am wary of the questions meant to pin me down on a political topic. I don't always answer all the questions about internet personalities, but sometimes they're fun and let me indulge a knack for gossip. Finally, I like the kind of general literary inquiry—what constitutes effective dialogue in a novel or play, what do you think about science fiction, etc.—that makes for a good Sunday Substack post if I don't have anything else to talk about that week!

[grandhotelabyss]

What do you think of the Wide Sargasso Sea type novel?

I think it's too literal: anti-fan fiction. Wide Sargasso Sea suffers the closer it gets to Jane Eyre until it becomes fatally abstract, whereas the earlier chapters, the Caribbean girlhood, are so much more vivid. And Coetzee's Foe, to take another example, stops even pretending to be fiction and just becomes a critical allegory. I prefer the more general approach taken by Season of Migration to the North or Beloved, which contest and in their primacy of vision supplant whole cultural archetypes rather than rewriting individual texts. Or else the application and consequent revision of an archetypal emplotment in a new context, as in Ulysses and Omeros, which aren't filling some interstitial gap in Homer's political awareness but introducing his paradigm into a new circumstance.

#jean rhys #postcolonial literature

[grandhotelabyss]

Why do you call Nordic social democracy "half-fascist"?

It was a jocular reference back to this.

#social democracy

[grandhotelabyss]

Any thoughts on Terrence McKenna?

See here.

[grandhotelabyss]

RIP to Helen Vendler, dead at 90, on the day of Shakespeare's birth and death. Any thoughts on her work?

She was undoubtedly brilliant, a critic of tremendous care and patience; I always enjoyed her essays as they appeared in venues like the NYRB and LRB. I never got into her books. This is not a critique of her—it's a critique of me!—but I found poems to dissolve under the scrutiny of her professional-scholarly gaze, as if the readings were somehow too close, like an ant burned to char under a magnifying glass on a hot summer day. (She would dispute my terms and my simile, rightly enough.) I in my novelistic indiscipline, my slovenly preference for the broad and operatic gesture and the vagary or errancy of a certain style of genius, tend to read literature as image and emotional rhythm rather than as the exact use of language, though of course it is that too; it's ideally everything. I appreciated her rare and usually tasteful polemics, as for instance her defense of an "articulated curriculum" or her controversial review of Rita Dove's Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century of American Poetry with its more pages devoted to Melvin Tolson's agitpropish "Dark Symphony" than to anything by—well, Vendler said Wallace Stevens, but we could just as well say Robert Hayden or Gwendolyn Brooks. (I used to teach from that anthology, including Tolson's historically sympathetic but artistically dubious poem.) See here for the moving deathbed rapprochement re: this last case, and thanks to the longtime correspondent who sent it to me.

And since the Paris Review has freed up their interview with Vendler, let me quote this fascinating exchange on the difference between poetry and fiction/drama and the divergent types of readers they appeal to, one seeking access to universal experience, the other seeking validation of particular experience. I don't agree with this—I think novels do in their own way offer access to universal experience rather than just confirmations of the reader's identity—but still, she puts it well:

VENDLER

I don’t believe that poems are written to be heard, or as Mill said, to be overheard; nor are poems addressed to their reader. I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem. You stand behind the words and speak them as your own—so that it is a very different form of reading from what you might do in a novel where a character is telling the story, where the speaking voice is usurped by a fictional person to whom you listen as the novel unfolds.

[...]

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel confined as a female critic in any way?

VENDLER

No, I don’t think the mind is gendered. I know that’s not a popular position these days, but I never felt the mind to be gendered and perhaps that may be because I always read poetry. When I was a young girl reading and the page said, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense,” or, “So are you to my thoughts as food to life,” it never occurred to me that these thoughts were not available to me because they had been uttered by an author who was male. I didn’t care who had uttered them. They seemed good things to say at a given moment. Now, I know women who’ve had very different experiences when they were young; I’ve heard many people say, I never found myself responding until I came to . . . And it might be Jane Eyre, or it might be Wuthering Heights, or it might be Emma. I finally realized that those women were novel readers, and what they were looking for was a story like their own story, or a story in which they could imagine themselves playing a role. Of course, if you are a girl reading Oedipus Rex, there is no role for you to play as hero. So if you have a naturally fictional imagination, you might say, That’s not a story into which I can walk. But I didn’t have a fictional imagination, so I didn’t run into that particular difficulty.

And, when asked her motto, her citation of Stevens: "God and the imagination are one." So yes, RIP to Helen Vendler—and, while we're at it, to the modernist doyenne Marjorie Perloff, too, whose essay on Yeats I was just rereading for the upcoming Invisible College episode on our Irish bard.

#helen vendler #american literature #literary criticism

[grandhotelabyss]

Will you be doing a Shakespeare birthday post this year?

No, didn't have time this year.

[grandhotelabyss]

are you a TERF

No. Picture the political spectrum as a circle. The TERF occupies a dot where a determinist version of the materialist left, according to which one's consciousness flows entirely from one's class (or in this case sex-class) position, meets the leftmost wing of a conservatism according to which it is too dangerous to destabilize supposedly long-settled social categories. Now picture a dot on the circle positioned 180 degrees from the TERF dot, where the postmodern (or whatever) left, with its conviction that discourse precedes and constructs (though never seamlessly) identity, meets the Nietzschean right, for whom identity is an aesthetic artifact crafted by the aristocratic personality. I occupy that dot, more or less. Opposites resemble each other, as we know, so people sometimes think I'm "gender critical" because I have expressed reservations about handing gender nonconformity entirely over to the doctors and the experts, as if one needed in every case the imprimatur of the lancet to transfigure one's self, and because I have scrutinized certain linguistic interventions, the "they/them" convention in particular and compulsory pronoun-sharing in general, on the grounds that they act in practice as bureaucratic reifications of the identity they promised to emancipate from absolute definition. I don't mean to say no one should seek gender medicine (this is America, not some half-fascist Nordic social democracy, so you should get whatever procedure you want and can afford) or that there are no politics to pronouns (I have in fact defended on aesthetic grounds neopronouns, the abolition of pronouns, and the deliberate rendering-illegible of "he" and "she" as alternatives to "they/them" with its unavoidable hint of a stable third sex)—just that the point of all this agitation, as I understood it in my youth, was to free up the complexity of the human psyche and its possible outward expression from the trammels of top-down socio-techno control. Which means, again, that my position is opposite the TERF one: some people have seen TERF ideology in the utterances of at least one character in my latest novel, and I don't see why one character out of many characters in a large fiction shouldn't articulate an ideology if that ideology is appropriate to her sensibility or context, but I invite you to consider two phrases used without irony in the objective third-person narration: "her penis," "the girl's penis." I've admittedly never read a J. K. Rowling novel, but I don't think you're going to find those phrases in one.

#gender #gender politics

[grandhotelabyss]

Using spring recess to catch up on Invisible College reading/podcast, and I wondered if you’d ever read Carlyle’s French Revolution. I attempted it a couple years ago, got maybe 75 or 85 pages in (this is *after* I’d listened to Mike Duncan’s very approachable 45-ish episode podcast on the French Revolution) and Carlyle’s prose and the sheer density of era-specific references utterly defeated me. When people say things like “the internet/podcasts/meme culture” or whatever is the literature of our time, this reading experience is what I think of….

No, just excerpts to get the flavor of the rhetoric and the basic idea, which is essentially reproduced for the common reader by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities anyway. (Dickens, with his populist touch, doesn't bother us with era-specific references and just presents allegorical social types for his fictional history of the French Revolution. I'm not mocking; it's a good technique!) The only Carlyle book I've read cover to cover is Sartor Resartus, which is difficult in its own way, but not that way. You probably have to know a bit about German Romanticism and Idealism for that book, but not much historical minutiae.

(Speaking of literature, history, meme culture, and our time: a leftist on Xitter said something like what was going on at Columbia this weekend will be better remembered than the contemporaneous Gertrude Stein event. "I'm not so sure," I thought, as I strived—am still striving as we speak—to cram a bunch of Irish history back into my head for the Yeats episode of the IC. Yeats I can remember; the historical context I have to remind myself of every time it comes up. Begorrah, who was O'Leary again? "Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches," wrote Stein inconclusively, as if to say that history teaches nothing. She elevates Picasso's "presently," the permanent present of timeless-untimely art, over Napoleon's "first," the mere successions and usurpations of historical time. She therefore both ventures and cancels the imperious artist's possible resemblance to the emperor. This is her way of agreeing with Aristotle, I take it, that poetry is more philosophical than history, because poetry treats of what might and should happen, while history just tells us, depressingly enough, what did.)

#thomas carlyle #charles dickens #gertrude stein #history

[grandhotelabyss]

what do you think would be a feasible solution to the male loneliness/mental health/ suicide epidemic?

Probably a new religion.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on Yvor Winters?

I'm guessing this question was inspired by my having said I don't understand Hart Crane, given the critic's quarrel with the poet. (That or my skepticism of John Williams's tradition, which includes Winters.) I prefer not understanding Hart Crane to understanding Yvor Winters, however. Here is Winters's credo, quoted from the link:

Poetry…should increase the intelligence and strengthen the moral temper; these effects should naturally be carried out over into action, if, through constant discipline, they are made permanent acquisitions. If the poetic discipline is to have steadiness and direction, it requires an antecedent discipline of ethical thinking and of at least some ethical feeling, which may be in whole or in part the gift or religion or of a social tradition, or which may be largely the result of individual acquisition by way of study.

But he has that the wrong way around, as the likes of Vico, Shelley, and Emerson would explain. Poetry first, then religion and ethics. (This is also how it happens in real life. You read fairy tales before you study ethics—and religions are fairy tales first, before they are theologies, which I mean as praise, not dispraise, of religion.) Hence Crane's gamble to discover new significances, new languages, new visions, seeking what his (plagiarized!) poem calls "Emblems of Conduct," portals through sense to spirit:

By a peninsula the wanderer sat and sketched The uneven valley graves. While the apostle gave Alms to the meek the volcano burst With sulphur and aureate rocks … For joy rides in stupendous coverings Luring the living into spiritual gates.

Orators follow the universe And radio the complete laws to the people. The apostle conveys thought through discipline. Bowls and cups fill historians with adorations,— Dull lips commemorating spiritual gates.

The wanderer later chose this spot of rest Where marble clouds support the sea And where was finally borne a chosen hero. By that time summer and smoke were past. Dolphins still played, arching the horizons, But only to build memories of spiritual gates.

He didn't always win, but it was worth the doomed venture, a venture Winters, with his devotion to what he called "reason," would have proscribed.

#yvor winters #hart crane #literary criticism

[grandhotelabyss]

Apologies if already asked, but any recommendations on where to start with Shakespeare criticism?

I honestly did not study Shakespeare criticism in the abstract systematically. What I did was to read the plays in the Signet Classics or sometimes Norton Critical Editions. They contained famous essays on each individual play, so I absorbed a lot of the criticism that way and got a high-level overview of it piecemeal.

If you want to go in chronological order, though, the classic Shakespeare criticism starts with Samuel Johnson in the Enlightenment and goes on to William Hazlitt and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Romantic period; Tolstoy's denunciation might be the most notable criticism in the late 19th century; in the early 20th century, there's A. C. Bradley and G. Wilson Knight. After that, celebrity theorists: Greenblatt, Kermode, Bloom, Garber. For a wild card, and a wild book, try Ted Hughes's Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. And if anybody comes at you with the Earl of Oxford or something like that, please read James Shapiro's Contested Will.

#william shakespeare #literary criticism

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on Jon Dos Passos?

Never read him! I don't know where he is in the endless to-read queue, but he's definitely below James Merrill.