Books

THE ROAD DID LEAD HIM SOMEWHERE:

Evil and Good in Cormac McCarthy: a review of The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy
By Vereen M. Bell (Reviewed by Michael Yost, University Bookman)

Another such asterisk—one that seems to counteract Bell’s thesis of McCarthy the nihilist, the ironic Diogenes of literature—is McCarthy’s novella/play The Stonemason. The play is set in the Louisville, Kentucky of the 1970s. Its action follows the Telfair family as they cope with the death and legacy of their patriarch, affectionately referred to as “Papaw,” a master stonemason. Papaw’s grandson, Ben Telfair, narrates. He is the only member of the family who has carried the fire. His own father abandoned the family trade, but Ben had a close relationship with his dying grandfather. As the play progresses, McCarthy allows Papaw to become an ideal figure, an image of a good man in a world that often lacks integrity. Papaw’s goodness and integrity come from his trade. Ben comments: “for true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch pressed in place by the thumb of God.” This relationship between the “truth” found in masonry and the cosmos alike is reiterated throughout the play. Indeed, masonry sets the moral standard of the play, and the various character’s proximity to or distance from the craft determines their fate. Ben’s nephew, Soldier, joins a gang and becomes a drug addict. His father commits suicide. Ben occupies the center of the story as leader of his sorrowing family and heir to his grandfather’s wisdom. That wisdom is particular, but also cosmic. Ben speaks of his grandfather:

I see him standing there over his plumb bob which never lies and never lies and the plumb bob is pointing motionless to the unimaginable center of the earth four thousand miles beneath his feet. Pointing to a blackness unknown and unknowable both in truth and in principle where God and matter are locked in a collaboration that is silent nowhere in the universe and it is this that guides him as he places his stone one over two and two over one as did his fathers before him and his sons to follow and let the rain carve them if it can.

McCarthy allows, in a rare moment, for the possibility of a connection between the principle of existence and the phenomena of existence. He sees it incarnate in knowledge of the world, in the logic of human craft. Even if the principal cause of the world is “unknown and unknowable,” it is still “silent nowhere in the universe.” From the creator of the demonic Judge Holden, this is an astonishing sentence. It echoes St. Bonaventure, who wrote that “the entire world is like a mirror full of lights presenting the divine wisdom . . . ” But of course, just as we cannot attribute the Judge’s words to McCarthy, neither can we do the same with Ben. However, this sentence is significant precisely because it runs so much against the grain of McCarthy’s broader work. It is as if, having presented his witness to the reality of evil and steeled himself against it. He felt compelled to quietly testify to the primary existence of goodness and its possibility for human beings. It is primarily because of The Stonemason that I believe McCarthy was not simply an ironist. Bell’s thesis may be true as far as it goes, but it still has to contend with the fact that McCarthy chose to represent both evil and good, both demonic vice and human goodness, both life and death in his work.

And ultimately chose light.

CRANK IT UP:

The Scholar Who Inspired a Legion of Cranks (Colin Dickey, JULY 16, 2024, The Chronicle Review)

The publication of The Book of the Damned was a watershed moment in 20th-century culture. Without Fort, there would be no X-Files or Twin Peaks, no Unsolved Mysteries or In Search Of…, no Ancient Aliens or the dozens of similar shows on History and the Discovery Channel. Fort’s book gave space to theories and beliefs that were dubious, unpopular, and problematic; it gave readers tools to push back against biologists, physicists, and historians; and it encouraged people to remain skeptical toward academic orthodoxies. There had been plenty of cranks before Fort’s time: amateurs who’d set themselves up as pseudo-archaeologists to argue for the existence of Atlantis or pseudo-physicists to prove that ghosts were real. Having tried and abandoned that tactic, Fort found success by critiquing the establishment without offering a fully fleshed-out alternative theory. He didn’t need to have the answers; what he instead demanded was that scholars take seriously all that he claimed they had ignored and damned to irrelevance.

Fort inspired a legion of acolytes, and they are the subject of Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers (University of Chicago Press, June 2024), by Joshua Blu Buhs. While Fort himself has been the subject of several biographies, Forteans, Buhs writes, are far less understood, “ignored or dismissed as etiolated imitators.” This is unfortunate, he argues, because those who wrestled with Fort seriously “forged a unique response to modernity,” and their influence had a long, if unexpected, tail. These followers set themselves the task of transforming Fort from an outlier — “a magnificent nut,” in Tarkington’s words — to the center of a movement. How, they asked, could Forteanism be made into some kind of discipline, method, or system? Can a positive program be assembled from the facts of the damned? Can one make a science out of the rejection of science?

Perhaps the person most invested in this question was Tiffany Thayer, Fort’s main devotee and the man most responsible for attempting to shape his legacy. During the 1930s, Thayer had been an incredibly successful novelist, his lurid blockbuster Thirteen Men having made him a household name. (The follow-up, Thirteen Women, would be adapted as a pre-Code shocker starring Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne.) Thayer reached out to Fort when the latter’s career was at a low ebb, and helped get Fort’s third book, Lo!, published in 1931. He subsequently helped organize the original Fortean Society in New York City — a collective that would include Dreiser and Tarkington as well as other eminent literary men like the cultural critic H.L. Mencken and the playwright and screenwriter Ben Hecht. The Society’s goal, according to Dreiser, was “to make scientists take Fort seriously — as a thinker, not a crank.” It was a group effort at first, with the various members taking turns editing the Fortean Society’s magazine, Doubt. But gradually Thayer came to the fore, taking over the editorship of Doubt as well as Fort’s archives after Fort died in 1932.

Thayer devoted most of the rest of his career to attempting to shape Fort’s legacy and to establish a Fortean way of doing things, a methodology that could be self-sustaining in the absence of the author’s inimitable literary personality. Think to New Worlds chronicles Thayer’s attempts to create a stable discipline of Forteanism while constantly pushing back against the various ways in which other readers and thinkers tried to use Fort.

In a sense, the Fortean method was simple: Doubt everything, refuse to accept anything on faith, and seek out that which is generally excluded from dominant epistemologies. This radical skepticism was, Buhs notes, a kind of “anti-religion,” and Fort’s books became a Bible for those who’d seen the improbable or believed the implausible. Ufologists, from the start, leaned heavily on Fort’s work. As soon as the pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine shiny, unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier in June 1947 (setting off the modern UFO craze), believers were quick to look to Fort for answers. A Chicago AP writer published a report of Arnold’s sighting alongside various evidence that he had pulled from Fort’s collected works as a means of bolstering Arnold’s claims: The unsigned article, “Rare Book Tells of Freak Discs in the Sky Long Ago,” culled passages from The Book of the Damned regarding “a luminous cloud moving at high velocity” over Florence, Italy, in 1731, “globes of light seen in the air” over Swabia in 1732, an “octagonal star” seen over Slavange, Norway, in 1752, and an event that happened in Skeninge, Sweden, in 1808, where the “sun turned brick red” and “there appeared on the Western horizon a number of round objects, dark brown in color and seemingly the size of a hat crown” that “passed overhead and disappeared on the eastern horizon.” Arnold’s was not, it seemed, an isolated experience: Here was a long, detailed history of similar sightings, alongside rains of frogs and reports of mutilated livestock. As more sightings accumulated and as people began to think governments were hiding something from the public, ufologists increasingly turned to Forteanism to help bolster their credibility.

Thayer fought back against this tendency, doing his best to keep Forteanism from becoming synonymous with ufology. Doubt had long solicited reports from its readers, but by the early 1950s Thayer’s mailbag was swamped with UFO sightings, which he tried to keep out of the magazine as much as possible. He had begun to doubt the doubters, and wondered whether the whole thing was only a hoax concocted by the CIA. The credulity with which the public embraced UFOs bothered him, and the ways in which the UFO community wanted to reduce all examples of Forteana to visitation by aliens enraged him. In 1953 he wrote to a friend, “I am now killing every man woman or child who says ‘saucer’ to me.”

Another contingent of Forteans could be found among science-fiction writers, who consistently mined Fort’s work for ideas. As John W. Campbell, author of Who Goes There? (the basis for John Carpenter’s The Thing) and editor of Astounding Science Fiction, wrote of the 1941 Thayer-edited omnibus The Books of Charles Fort, “It probably averages one science-fiction or fantasy plot idea to the page.” Fort had offered up nothing but a litany of the weird, the unusual, the thought-provoking, and the impossible — precisely the kind of things that science-fiction writers loved. H.P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness begins with a textbook Fortean element: newspaper reports of odd and inexplicable things of unknown organic matter (“pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be”) found in the wake of a historic flood. An early Robert Heinlein story, “Goldfish Bowl,” features two Fortean investigators whose inquiry into a pair of mysterious water spouts (a favorite anomaly of Fort’s) leads to revelations of disturbing alien intelligence. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, mentions Fort by name in his story “Rat Race,” and in Stephen King’s novel Firestarter (which is about pyrokinesis, a staple Fortean topic), a man reads Lo! to his daughter as a bedtime story.

Thayer tolerated the science-fiction writers more than he did the ufologists, but not by much. Despite his own success writing commercial potboilers, Thayer remained far more interested in modernism and the avant-garde: “Science fiction was too conventional, too hackneyed, and boring,” Buhs explains. Thayer dreamed of Fortean dance, Fortean music, whatever that might possibly look like. But he found it impossible to guide Doubt’s readership away from science fiction and weird tales.

Swapping one crank science for another is not skepticism.

WHO WILL STOP THIS SENSELESS SLAUGHTER?:

Woman in a Red Raincoat (Clellan Coe, July 10, 2024, American Scholar)

In William Trevor’s story “A Meeting in Middle Age,” such a reversal almost happens. The story is about two strangers, a woman and a man. She is an unhappy wife wanting a divorce, which in mid-20th century Ireland meant supplying evidence of adultery. He is a lonely bachelor who, for a fee, agrees to play the part of the co-respondent by spending the night with her in a hotel room. As planned, they meet up on a train, then spend the evening visibly together, first in the hotel bar and then in the grill-room, before retiring to the room for the night. She, Mrs. da Tanka, is the more worldly one. “You must not feel embarrassment,” she tells him early on. “We are beyond the age of giving in to awkwardness in a situation. You surely agree?” Mr. Mileson doesn’t know how he feels.

During the evening, someone makes a wrong comment, someone is impatient, someone is rude, and, little by little, anger builds, bickering erupts, and personal remarks are made by these two strangers. They insult each other. Through the night it continues. Facing each other the next day in an empty carriage of the train, it goes on. Mrs. da Tanka taunts him with his solitary life. “When you die, Mr. Mileson, have you a preference for the flowers on your coffin? It is a question I ask because I might send you off a wreath. That lonely wreath. From ugly, frightful Mrs. da Tanka.”

Mr. Mileson, who has tried on other occasions to imagine his funeral, is taken off guard and answers. “Cow-parsley, I suppose.”

“Cow-parsley?” she echoes. She is surprised. She remembers cow-parsley from her happy childhood days. She remembers sitting in the sun amid bunches of it. “Why did you say cow-parsley?” she asks him, twice. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t answer. She tries to say something, but after the night they have passed, she can find no words that fit. She looks at him, imagining a different outcome to their meeting. She pictures them strolling out of the hotel, arm-in-arm, discussing and agreeing which direction to turn. On the train, he senses something and wants to speak, but his suspicion of her is too strong, and the words die on his lips. The two go on in silence. They leave the train together at their stop, then separate. The love affair that might have developed never gets a start, both people having joined in to ruin a chance.

REBELLING AGAINST THE BEAUTIFUL REQUIRES EMBRACING THE UGLY:

Dune: The Perfect Deathwork: How the thought of Philip Rieff illuminates a modern epic. (William Batchelder, June 26, 2024, Modern Age)

To reengage fully with the dark myth at the heart of Dune, it is best to turn to the work of one of the most pessimistic of our contemporary social theorists.

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) offers an effective theoretical framework for interpreting Dune as deathwork and dark myth. Rieff made his early reputation as an interpreter of Freud. At the heart of his later work was a historicist interpretation of Western civilization, which he divided into three “cultures.” The first culture was the culture of paganism; in all such polytheistic cultures the gods themselves emerged from a “metadivine,” a source of power prior to and greater than the gods themselves. This source of fathomless power above even the gods Rieff called the “primacy of possibility.” Charged with the “constant energy of menace,” the primacy of possibility can turn men monstrous or destroy them. First culture man understood the primacy of possibility through myth; his relationship to it was mediated by unfathomable, amoral, and relentless fate. To keep his distance from its menacing power, he observed taboos.

Rieff’s second culture is that of the Abrahamic faiths. There is no metadivine; nothing stands above the God of Israel. In place of the taboos walling off the primacy of possibility there are the “interdicts”: directly commanded thou-shalt-nots declared by the God who reveals Himself. Man’s relationship to this God, the final authority, is characterized not by mysterious fate but by faith. The second culture sinks the interdicts into each individual beginning in a preconscious foundational process that builds individual character.

The third culture is the culture of modernity. It rejects God and the interdicts. Rieff believed that, because there can be no culture without either tabooed prohibitions or the character-shaping interdicts, the third culture is an “anticulture.” This third culture was ushered in by an “officer class” of intellectuals and artists. Nietzsche, Weber, and of course Freud were the most important theorists of the officer class; Joyce, Duchamp, and Wallace Stevens its artists par excellence. Rieff observed that this officer class, while godless, feels itself perpetually “god-threatened.” These intellectuals are compelled to address themselves to the God of the second culture in endless artistic acts of defacement and mockery. Rieff called such works of art the “deathworks”: intellectual and artisticassaults on the old, now disestablished, second culture.

To Rieff, the closest this modernist officer class can come to the affirmative creation of culture is to create deathworks that negate the second culture of faith while also attempting an unbelieving return to the “primacy of possibility”—the source of power beyond even the gods themselves—that marked the first culture. Of course, a skeptical modern cannot approach the primacy of possibility as a first culture man did. Instead, third culture imaginations invoke the oceanic power of the primacy of possibility self-consciously, even ironically. To some moderns, this primacy of possibility returns as atheistic invocations of what Rieff called “the Nothing,” which serve as a kind of anti-creed best expressed in endless hostile parodies of the second culture. Rieff cites as an example Joyce’s mockery of the Old Testament and his sneering “Woid” (void) in place of the “Word.”

To fill the emptiness, other third culture imaginations have embraced, or even self-consciously invented, some supra-human power echoing the ancient primacy of possibility. Moderns have embraced everything from the Trotskyists’ “permanent revolution” to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy. Wallace Stevens, in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” demanded the angels keep silent while the poet creates a self-conscious pseudo-religious abstraction as a substitution for the Trinity: “It must be Abstract. It must Change. It must give Pleasure.”

Dune is a perfect third culture deathwork because it offers an eloquent address to the Nothing and a invokes a fictive primacy of possibility almost profound enough to approach again the slopes of myth.

The constant need to define themselves in opposition to God is a confession. Richard Dawkins recent admission to being a cultural Christian was particularly hilarious.

GNOSTICISM IS ALWAYS A HOAX:

A Book Club of Two: The Time I Started a James Joyce Reading Group in College (Kristopher Jansma, June 14, 2024, LitHub)

Our professor seemed unsurprised that we weren’t getting into it, even after he gave us a schema that explained the themes and explained that Joyce’s contemporaries had been similarly puzzled, until he’d given them this guide. We settled in with these charts that paralleled the chapters back to Homer’s Odyssey, and perused the maps with the paths of the characters throughout Dublin on the day—June 16th—now known as “Bloomsday” in honor of this wonderful novel. He brought out a big green Gifford annotation and had us read it alongside the original text so that we could see all that was wrapped up inside.

But I couldn’t get into it. An international holiday was nice, I conceded, but what the hell is the point of a 768-page book that even the author’s closest friends needed to read with a cheat key?

it’s a fascistic exercise in an author controlling rather than entertaining his “readers’. (No one has ever actually read it)

SIC SEMPER JOYCE:

Reading dies in complexity: Online news consumers prefer simple writing (HILLARY C. SHULMAN, DAVID M. MARKOWITZ, AND TODD ROGERS, 5 Jun 2024, Science Advances)

Over 30,000 field experiments with The Washington Post and Upworthy showed that readers prefer simpler headlines (e.g., more common words and more readable writing) over more complex ones. A follow-up mechanism experiment showed that readers from the general public paid more attention to, and processed more deeply, the simpler headlines compared to the complex headlines. That is, a signal detection study suggested readers were guided by a simpler-writing heuristic, such that they skipped over relatively complex headlines to focus their attention on the simpler headlines. Notably, a sample of professional writers, including journalists, did not show this pattern, suggesting that those writing the news may read it differently from those consuming it. Simplifying writing can help news outlets compete in the competitive online attention economy, and simple language can make news more approachable to online readers.

Good writers communicate with the readesr, not themselves.

CHARLOTTE’S CROSS:

CHARLOTTE’S WEB REVISITED (Alexander Riley, 6 . 4 . 24, First Things)

The paragraph in which Charlotte dies—and particularly its second sentence, which is so beautifully constructed that it should be carved into a monument somewhere—still staggers me with both its literary perfection and the unbearable metaphysical weight of what it conveys:

She never moved again. Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.

It is true that there is a theme of defeating death in the novel, in Wilbur’s rescue from the holiday dinner table and his continued tie to Charlotte through her children. But even as a child, I knew this was insufficient. Death remains unconquered in the message of the passage on Charlotte’s death. The crushing solitude of those words—the heroine of the novel, a noble and selfless character, is alone in the deserted fairground, to disappear forever—left me with a feeling that lurked in the background of my life for years. It was that universal feeling of unease, anxiety, and trepidation in the face of this terrible thing that can seem to have no solution.

There’s only One Story.

SHARDS:

Tolkien’s Secret: Tolkien’s tale reminds us that we ourselves are part of the Great Story. (Robert Lazu Kmita, June 8, 2024, European Conservative)

People cannot live without true stories, without sacred texts, without myths. Here is, in a nutshell, my shortest answer to the question I posed at the outset: being woven from stories themselves, people give preference to those authors who help them, as best they can, to remember the essential story that is hidden in the anonymity of their gray lives. This is, in my opinion, Tolkien’s secret (if he indeed had one).

Reading Tolkien’s stories, the characters with whom we are primarily invited to identify are the hobbits. Neither the lives of the majestic, immortal elves, nor the harshness and grandeur of the lives of kings like Aragorn or Theoden, nor the wisdom of a Maia like Gandalf are accessible to us. Instead, the little hobbits, with whom Tolkien himself happily identified, possess all those traits that any of us, the readers, would be glad to have: hardworking and disciplined; lovers of comfort, fun, and peaceful living; joyful in friendship; prudent and reserved when it came to foolish adventures; and wise, brave, and steadfast in serving a worthy cause. In short, they have noble souls hidden beneath the mask of humor and friendliness, just as we would (and could) wish to be.

EMOTION ALWAYS MISLEADS:

What would Thucydides say?: In constantly reaching for past parallels to explain our peculiar times we miss the real lessons of the master historian (Mark Fisher, 5/07/24, Aeon)

Thucydides was unusual among classical writers in stating directly what he hoped his readers would gain from his work. He would be content, he says, if History of the Peloponnesian War was deemed ‘useful’ by those who wanted ‘to scrutinise what actually happened and would happen again, given the human condition, in the same or similar fashion’ (my translation). The description nevertheless leaves readers wanting. How exactly such knowledge should prove useful is underspecified, and scholars have long disagreed over what Thucydides expected the utility of his text to be.

Most assume that Thucydides tried to offer his reader a type of foreknowledge that could potentially translate into active control over the politico-historical process. Taken to its extreme, this ‘optimistic’ interpretation reads History of the Peloponnesian War as a sort of ‘political systems users’ manual’, as Josiah Ober put it, capable of creating expert political technicians. Recognising regularities in the historical process, it is thought, should lead to predictive capacity, which in turn allows for political mastery. Proceeding in this fashion, Thucydides takes himself to be training master statesmen capable of solving the fundamental problems of political life.

Others detect a more pessimistic outlook in Thucydides’ stated ambition. They suggest that the lessons on offer are insufficient to produce control over events even if they can help the reader detect regularities in the political process. Unexpected events will often upset our expectations, as the plague did in Athens, and the ignorance of non-experts will often disrupt the translation of technical insight into effective policy. This problem will be particularly acute within a democratic context, where a popular eagerness to apply bastardised versions of such insights may even make matters worse. In this interpretation, Thucydides is ‘useful’ to the extent that he can temper the ambitions of those wishing to impose rational order onto political life. The best we can hope for, it seems, is to minimise our self-harm.

At issue between these two interpretive poles is the basic presumption of applied social science: to what extent can the recognition of recurring patterns translate into effective political policy? Yet, Thucydides was not writing social science as we know it. To the extent that his text articulated anything like fundamental laws of political behaviour, it did so through exemplary instances and carefully curated parallelisms. The Peloponnesian War served as a paradigmatic event for Thucydides: a particular instance that revealed general truths. It served this representative role, however, not because it was typical. Rather, it was exemplary because it was uniquely ‘great’. The war would prove useful, in other words, not because of history’s strict repetition, but by the pregnancy of similarity and the reader’s ability to parse analogies effectively.

Thucydides schools his readers in just how difficult such acts of analogical interpretation can be. A series of carefully considered verbal parallels, or what Jacqueline de Romilly has called fils conducteurs (‘guiding threads’), extend through Thucydides’ narrative like a web, ensnaring the reader in a constant and, at times, overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Sometimes, repetitions point towards important explanatory insights. But they also suggest likenesses that can lead the reader astray. Time and again, Thucydides confounds the expectations he has created. Even upon rereading, one can feel an internal tension between what one knows to be the case and what one is nonetheless led to expect will happen. Whether it is your first or your 15th read, you can still catch yourself thinking: this time surely Athens will win.

The evident lesson behind all of this is that we must learn how to choose the right parallels if we are to judge well in politics. But Thucydides also knew that we did not have full control of the analogies that shape our deliberations, especially in public life. Our analogical vocabulary is woven directly into the cultural fabric, a product of the contingencies that shape collective memory. We choose them no more than we choose the language we speak. (Once again, Marx: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’) Some events, such as the Persian Wars in Thucydides’ day or the Second World War in our own, simply loom too large to avoid, and we are easily held captive by the emotional weight of their cultural significance. Thucydides measured this gravitational pull also in terms of ‘greatness’, a concept that he identified closely with the production of collective trauma.

The danger inherent in this, of course, is that emotional resonance is often a poor guide to explanatory power.