Hello all and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! We’ve got a lot of good stuff, ranging from reviews to a discographies to some cute cat pics (it’s the birthday of one of my most faithful subscribers and the biggest Mithra fan today! Happy birthday!). No need for further elaboration! Consider becoming a Citizen! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister
James S.A. Corey, Persepolis Rising
Discographies
The Doors!
Lagniappe
Mithra Pics: Mithra Awake, Mithra Sleeping
REVIEWS
Leslie Fiedler, “Love and Death in the American Novel” (1960) - This book is rich and filling like a big old German cake. I knew a little about what it said — among other things, had seen Meadow Soprano argue about Fiedler’s read of “Billy Budd” with her mother — but had no idea it would be so wide-ranging and ambitious, or that it would toss off huge statements with a devil-may-care bravado you seldom see in the academy these days (and when you do, it’s by hacks who can’t carry it off). In no wise did I agree with all of Fiedler’s points here, or even his main point, to the extent my historian, no-lit-classes-taking ass can have an opinion. But I was along for the ride, all six hundred pages, and exhilarated throughout.
Fiedler stormed out of Montana State University with a capital-T Thesis! American novelists, high and low, display profound discomfort with love (especially sexually active love between a man and a woman) and seem to much prefer death as a consummation than orgasm in the conventional sense. To make this point, Fiedler writes a history of the novel, its history in English (comparing it to French and German contemporaries), and the American novel, all to end with a chapter apiece on “The Scarlet Letter,” “Moby Dick,” and “Huckleberry Finn,” read in the light of the history and theory he spins out.
My understanding from the cheap seats is that the historiography of the novel and of literature more generally has “moved on” some since 1960, but Fiedler’s points are still compelling, if not always entirely convincing. The English language novel as we know it, Fiedler argues, began with sentimental novels of seduction, ala Samuel Richardson, who wrote “Pamela” (seduction rebuffed, yay!) and “Clarissa” (seduction accepted, oh no!) in the eighteenth century to massive readership and acclaim. More than a literary trend, these books instantiated the Sentimental Love Religion, which fused post-Puritan Protestantism to bourgeois habitus to conflate the Pure White Virgin with Christ and marriage with salvation. Among other things, this represented a break with the aristocratic tale of seduction popular in Southern Europe, ala Don Juan, where seduction was what aristocratic men did to prove their virility and their defiance of convention. Later novels in the grand European tradition might kick against “Richardsonism” and flirt with other models of what love and life should look like, but most often take the drama of the bourgeois family — courtship, adultery, etc — as the basis of the novel of psychological depth.
Despite the huge popularity of sentimental novels in America, Fiedler sees our literature — from the eighteenth century to the time of his writing — as incapable of following the European tradition of relationship-based novels of psychological depth. Both our “great tradition” and our popular novels seem to stream around… what, exactly? Here, Fiedler’s Freudianism comes into play. He does that weird thing you see with midcentury left-liberals (many of the better ones, I’d argue) where he is definitely guilty of “normativity” — of seeing a “genitally mature” relationship between one man and one woman as the standard — while also clearly not having an issue with deviance, seeing it as the spice of life in many ways. We don’t really accept that position now- is that a mistake? Especially given the ways our culture has proven capable of “normalizing” and thereby defanging, banalizing, many forms of difference? Who’s to say? In any event, when Fiedler talks about avoiding love, he means love in a Freudian sense. That’s not great, I grant, but I would say, in Fiedler’s defense, that the American writers he cites can’t talk about any other kind of love — directly — the way Flaubert or Lawrence could write about heterosexual love due to societal constrictions. He doesn’t rule out the possibility that you could write a great novel about queer love- it just wouldn’t, and by his time hadn’t, fit into “the tradition.”
Anyway- subliterature, in Fiedler’s take, avoids Big Love because it just repeats cliches, Richardson without the stakes (Fiedler goes to bat for Richardson and his seldom-read-these-days novels — they’re huge, corny, and weirdly indirect — with a touching fervor). But capital-L big time literature seemingly can’t take relationships with women seriously, either. Men wrote the vast majority of the American novels Fiedler discusses as real art (interestingly, he includes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” on that list, which a lot of critics wouldn’t- more on Fiedler and sentimentality anon), the usual suspects more or less: Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, with visitations from Poe (despite Poe never having finished writing a novel), Dreiser and Howells representing American “realism,” and some then-new writers like Saul Bellow. And none of them — not one — can relate to women (how’s that for a listicle!) or convincingly depict passion between men and women in a convincing, psychologically complex way. Even in stories of adultery (“The Scarlet Letter”) or longing (“The Great Gatsby”) love is never the subject: death, or escape, is.
In many respects, escape is more the subject than death, here, maybe because it’s generally more interesting. The closest thing to an ultimate theme to American literature, Fiedler declares, is escape from domesticity (represented as feminine) into the frontier or, anyway, just generally away. Even when writers clearly thought domesticity was a good thing, their subconscious (there’s that psychoanalysis again!) told on them, none more clearly than James Fenimore Cooper, cozened landowning fuddy-duddy in life and fantasist of western escape in writing. Fielder seems to sympathize- domesticity can, indeed, be a drag, especially if you don’t “swing that way” (as Melville, Whitman, and others assuredly didn’t). But these novels can’t attack domesticity directly (to the extent American literature can, it’s in various “gothic” traditions of horror and pornography). So you get this weird, occluded literature, that almost generates more power by not saying what it means to say than it could by just being like “yo, all these petticoats and all this elaborate furniture kills my vibe, fucking off with my dudes to kill whales, PEACE” directly, than it might otherwise.
You can argue that it both all fell apart, and continued on apace, after Fiedler published this in 1960. Did we ever get that great American bourgeois love novel? It seems guys like Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides have tried. I despise the former and dislike the latter but I probably am looking for other things in literature anyway (more on this below). As for great work coming out of men going their own way… well, the phrase and it’s contemporary connotations says it all, doesn’t it? Do you figure Norman Mailer read Fiedler? Or Bukowski? My understanding is that this book made the rounds outside the academy. Did this inspire every midcentury dude writer to lamp out for the territories, and hate women, in ways much more intentional and affected than Melville and Twain? I don’t know, but I know that shit doesn’t play like it used to.
One question I had was, how much does Fiedler believe that the Freudian version of heterosexual love is THE major topic for “great” novels, and how much was he questioning why a tradition didn’t get translated to the American context? Clearly, he thinks pretty highly of American literature even as he presents it as weird, illuminating little-known corners like the works of George Lippard and Charles Brockden Brown for our weird literary roots. He was also an early “serious” critic to take scifi seriously, though I disagree with some of the points he makes about it here. He’s not a traditionalist. But he does seem to take this Freud stuff seriously enough to think that without Freudian normativity, something is missing. What would his critiques look like if he had the depth of vision and bravado Freudian surety lent him, but without the normative baggage?
This book provoked a lot of thoughts in me. Like I said, Fiedler spun off systems of classification and analyses of complex works like it was nothing. I especially liked his take on Hawthorne and Melville (arguably maybe Twain too) as “Satanic,” “Faustian” writers, not so much rebuking the Sentimental Love Religion in any direct way (you know how those midcentury critics feel about didacticism… or anyway, anyone other than themselves being didactic) but through presenting a world where the characters make the choice to defy salvation and heavenly (whether understood as God’s heaven or that of sentimental domestic writers) order to follow a way and pursue knowledge. Especially given how many shitty edgelords I have to read who fancy themselves “Faustian” (and also somehow “natural,” as though that makes sense), seeing the real deal is inspiring.
There’s also the issue of sentimentality, which I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Untrained critic that I am, I usually use Oscar Wilde’s definition of sentimentality: the desire to have a feeling without paying for it. Fiedler, and I’m guessing a lot of other critics, use it differently- something like “intentionally provoking and cultivating sentiment, that is, more-or-less officially-approved feeling. So back in the day, a sentimental novel could encourage various feelings like empathy for the heroine, sadness, even anger at the bad guys, but not, say, horniness, or even much in the way of laughter. It could be a useful definition for interrogating what feelings are permissible in polite society and what aren’t. I still think my use (and Wilde’s) is important, but I might rethink some critical projects involving sentimentality that I’ve had in mind.
A somewhat related point: Fiedler kind of leans on the term “gothic” a lot. Gothic is in many ways the opposite of sentimental, in his system. Gothic involved officially-unapproved-of feelings like terror and murderous rage. The sentimental novel traditionally probed the psychology of its characters in an attempt to illuminate (one reason why “subliterary” pre-romance fiction doesn’t count according to Fiedler), whereas Gothic shrouds things in mystery. Fair enough. I think Fiedler stumbles some when he insists that pretty much all American genre fiction, including scifi and crime, is Gothic. Comes from Gothic, in some genealogical sense, I could buy. But I actually think one of the strengths of much of genre fiction is precisely that it runs orthogonal, not (always) directly opposed to the systems of emotional classification (and regulation) that backstops much of literary fiction. It has its own concerns- sometimes concerns as deep and esoteric as any literature “bringing the torch to the back of the cave,” sometimes geeking out over spaceships and guns, sometimes both! I’m curious to read some of Fiedler’s later scifi criticism to see what he says.
Quibbles, even fundamental disagreements, didn’t stop me from loving this book, if anything they added to the experience. I hope to write something like it someday, if I can ever conjure the time and the focus and if they let me. I’m not sure who all among my readership would enjoy this as much as I have, but if you think it might be you, give it a look. *****
Anthony Trollope, “The Prime Minister” (1876) - I read about one Trollope a year. He’s probably my favorite Victorian novelist. I like the (relative) frankness with which he deals with his society. This is the fifth of six novels in his Palliser series, all having to do with Plantagenet Palliser, fabulously wealthy aristocrat and politician troubled by conscience. There’s always a lot going on in a given Trollope novel, though, at least the big ones (this one is big) - some politics, some marriage biz, a crime or two. “The Prime Minister” is no exception, with two main plots. As the title would lead you to expect, Planty (can't remember if anyone calls him that in the books, but I do) becomes Prime Minister, in this case, of a coalition government, trying to ride herd on both Liberals and Conservatives. He’s a bit of a drag, possessed by notions of duty and a simple desire to be useful- all of his fabulous wealth and power means nothing to him, you see. It’s up to his wife, the Lady Glencora, to play the social game that could make the whole thing work. She overdoes it; he underdoes it; it doesn’t work well.
Then there’s the plot involving Emily Wharton and who she should and shouldn’t marry. She’s the daughter of a rich solicitor from a respectable family, who’s in love with Ferdinand Lopez, a financier in the City. Her dad doesn’t like it, because Lopez is foreign (Portuguese!), possibly a Jew (not a lot of Portuguese Jews, in Portugal anyway, circa 1876 but ok) (also he converted), and his parents weren’t gentle-folk. Various people prevail on Daddy Wharton to see past his prejudices and so they get married. But it turns out the old man was right! Lopez is a scoundrel. He seems nice enough for the first third of the book. But he reveals himself, once he marries Emily, as something worse than crooked (which he also is): he’s pushy. He talks about money in indelicate ways, even with ladies and Dukes! He gets his, in the end, and Emily marries a nice English gentleman.
Those of you who know me know I don’t apply a political or moral litmus test to what I read. I don’t really think Trollope was a ravening anti-semite: I think he was a Little Englander. To my mind, a Little Englander is someone who prefers English flaws to foreign virtues, on the idea that God or nature or whatever has made England and the English such that they can only really be happy and settled with each other. This doesn’t answer why they then sail around the world bothering other people so much, but no one ever said English bigots were consistent. That said, I think if there’s any type of novel to judge on a moral basis, it’s the Victorian triple-decker, and I do think this one’s a little bullshit. Among other things, the smugness — that the crusty old Englishman’s bigotries always wind up correct, even when (especially when?) he hasn’t got any good reason for them — turns the whole thing into a protracted sadistic morality play, watching Lopez descend further and further into cringeworthy servility and lying, the opposite of Trollope’s bluff, independent, somewhat stupid English gentleman, the height of creation.
Oddly enough, the Irish, or anyway Phineas Finn, hero of previous novels in the series, come out ok, standing up for his buddy Plantagenet even after old Planty gets in trouble because his silly wife trusts Lopez, if anyone’s keeping score at home. Finn knew his place, Lopez didn’t. “Knowing your place” does not for great literature make. There’s still enough enjoyment in Trollope’s writing and wide-scope depiction of Victorian Britain to make this not totally terrible, but it’s not one of the better Trollopes in my opinion. ***
James S.A. Corey, “Persepolis Rising” (2017) (read by Jefferson Mays) - This is the seventh Expanse novel! There’s one more currently out and another coming in November. Might as well finish them!
This one was better than the previous two installments, which entailed the Coreys (it’s a house name for two dudes) putting their world of a few-centuries-hence solar system settlement through the wringer. It’s not as good as some of the other, earlier novels. It’s thirty years after the last book! I guess there’s access to anti-aging drugs, because except for a rueful thought and allusions to graying hair here and there, most of the characters established in the series are still doing pretty good. Perspective-dullard Jim Holden and his Strong STEM Woman ladyfriend Naomi are about to retire from the adventuring life and let their remaining friends take over the “Rocinante,” the “Millenium Falcon”/“Serenity” of the series, but we know that means shit is going to hit the fan.
When the Coreys blew up their world in the previous two novels, there were two main culprits. We spent most of our time with the radical Asteroid Belters of the “Free Navy.” Their friends, a faction of the Mars Space Navy with an inscrutable agenda and took off through a series of alien interstellar travel rings to a faraway system. It’s those folks, now called Laconians after their new home, who come back thirty years later to ensure Holden can’t retire. It turns out they’re led by a megalomaniacal space admiral, Duarte, who has a plan to unify humanity into a big space empire. They come out of their space gate and start throwing beaucoup high tech space weapons around, and capture the space station where Holden and crew are waiting to go their separate ways.
Here’s the thing with the Laconians: the Coreys humanized them until they really didn’t seem that bad, and all the fighting really did seem pretty pointless. This is something of a problem with their worldbuilding in general and, I think, with the view on humanity they peddle in this series. They basically seem to think that political ideas are bunk, cover for “tribal” power conflicts and a desire for power embedded in “human nature.” It’s funny- in midcentury, you summoned the power of the thought of (real or purported) high minds, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, the Founding Fathers, to end discussions, now you do it with the power of things beneath the mind- human nature, pathology, etc…
Anyway! The Laconians think they should be in charge of humanity because Duarte has a genius master plan to expand across the stars and because they’ve got good military discipline, they’re rational. Those aren’t great claims on the loyalty of a species, I’ll grant. But nobody else has a great claim, either, in Expanse-world, and I think that’s due to a combination of mediocre writing on the Coreys part, and their mediocre thinking about what drives human loyalties. The closest they came to anything sensible were the Belters, a sort of proletarian nationalism ala Sorel developed among the asteroids and space station habitats. Even that is weakly developed and contingent, especially thirty years after Holden brokered a deal that granted the Belters a lot of power in the solar system. There’s some allusion to a “Martian Dream” of terraforming planets and with it, redesigning society, but it doesn’t seem to mean much and also seems to have mostly upped sticks to Laconia. What the Earthers are up to other than cruising along due to inertia (and the dreaded welfare state!) and almost being apocalypsed in previous books by the Free Navy is hard to say.
So, when the Laconians come in and start taking stuff over with a minimum of violence, stated intentions of including everyone in their project, and seemingly overwhelming force… why do people care? Why bother resisting? I can almost hear nerds sputtering “but… but World War Two!!” Well, what about it? The Nazis had an agenda, one that really didn’t work for people other than them. Even then, most of the resistance came from people who had a belief system that motivated them: either a belief in a special relationship between their nation-state and the eternal that getting conquered by Germans would tend to traduce (DeGaulle, Churchill, etc) or else a belief in some humanistic order that the Nazis utterly opposed (mostly Communism, to a lesser extent liberal democracy). And even then, and even with all the provocations the Nazis, some of the worst (both in the sense of wickedness and the sense of incompetence) occupiers in history, most people didn’t rebel.
So the underground resistance angle that animates much of the story really doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. The rulers of the space station the Laconians trap most of our characters on are basically the Spacer’s Guild from “Dune” minus the freaky bits. Even Drummer, the viewpoint character who runs the organization, admits it’s not much as a political motivating force. Why does anyone care, especially enough to risk their lives? It kind of makes sense for Holden, he’s always doing dumb shit. And from there, it sort of makes sense for his crew. But they all act like it’s a no-brainer! I get that granting anyone power gives them the ability to abuse it. I just don’t see what power the Laconians tried to seize that the spacers guild or one of the planets didn’t already have, especially considering the harsh rules that space habitation necessitates?
Even after people start killing Laconians, the response isn’t that harsh. The Laconians commander, Singh, is one of the more interesting characters, but also raises questions. He’s pretty weak! He vacillates between harsh and lenient responses to provocation, but even his harshness isn’t that harsh by normal conqueror standards, let alone conquerors on a delicate space station. Why did the Laconians put this guy in charge? There’s various tantalizing hints about Laconian culture, a brutal utilitarianism under a veil of philosophical rationality, but we don’t really get enough to understand their motives. I guess I’m supposed to think it’s just “human nature” again?
Anyway, this book wasn’t bad. It had some cool battles, both fleet actions and underground guerrilla space station stuff. The characters feel more broken-in, even the new ones- the Coreys elegantly convey how the bonds of the “Rocinante” family changed and deepened over the decades they skipped over. The Laconians are the closest thing to a good idea the Coreys have had for a while, and it’s linked to their other good idea, the protomolecule, the ancient alien weapon/engineering tool that makes stuff all weird and eldritch but also powerful. It seems the Laconians rampant use of protomolecule stuff might be summoning up whatever killed off the protomolecule-masters long ago. This is kind of a weird transitional book, leading to the last two, but it wasn’t all bad. I just wish the Coreys either got better ideas, or didn’t lean so hard on their mediocre ones. ***’
DISCOGRAPHIES: The Doors!
The Doors have gone through a few reputational changes in the time I’ve known them. The first time I remember hearing about them was in a fourth grade music class, when the teacher played “Riders on the Storm” and gave us streamers to wave around and told us to move around the room and wave our streamers as we felt the music. I always hated music class — hated being made to sing, hated trying to learn instruments I could never make sense of, and despised the mean, shitty old boomer burnout who was my last music teacher — but in retrospect this wasn’t such a bad exercise. Of course, being little wiseacres, none of us took it seriously. Late-era Morrison’s crooning wasn’t for us, nor the tinkly effects nor the lyrical themes nor streamer-waving.
I got into The Doors about four or five years later, as I was a teenager looking for new music after alt rock started sliding into nu-metal (yes, I’ve noticed the attempt of various Internet scribblers — some who are ok, many who are obvious phonies and carrion eaters — to redeem nu metal. I’m not playing that game). Some of the older boys at my school listened to classic rock — mostly the harder rocking/(pseudo)intellectual edge, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Doors — and I basically entered a classic rock cul de sac for some number of years. I don’t really know what The Doors reputation was outside of my weird cultural bubble at the time. When I started poking my head out of it, people my age seemed to think of the band in general and Jim Morrison in particular as a symbol for Baby Boomer pretense, self-indulgence, and general nonsense. There was a vaguely political soupçon- Morrison was bad to women, The Doors (like most classic rockers) were cultural appropriators of black music (and in Morrison’s case, Native American spirituality), blah blah. This was an era when pop-punk met up with just plain pop to dismiss rock music more or less entirely, as music and certainly as an ethos.
I don’t know. I think we’ve seen what American baby boomer nonsense has meant for the world, and I’m not convinced it’s much like what Jim Morrison had in mind before he died at age twenty-seven in 1971. There’s a certain through-line of antinomian rebelliousness, a refusal of the rational in the name of something like personal fulfillment (Morrison was dead well before Boomers started using “fulfillment” language but what’s a little anachronism between tastemakers?). Are we just going to lay all of our collapsing society at the feet of any Baby Boomer, or anyone who doesn’t follow rationality and morality as understood by bloggers from the 2010s? Seems foolish and ahistorical to me.
In all likelihood there’s a simpler answer- Morrison (more than The Doors as an actual band) was/is a symbol, a whited sepulcher (of the type Morrison would have loved to deface- not unlike his gravestone at Pere Lachaise). Millennial and Gen Xer critics wanted to desecrate an idol of their enemies, the Boomers, an old old method in war, and Morrison was an obvious target. I remember an anti-Boomer cartoon, detailing the generation’s failings, which included an image of a syringe piercing through the caricature heads of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, their stoned eyes gazing out with Xes in them, mouths slack (their deaths had a lot more to do with perfectly legal booze than anything you’d get in a syringe but ok). Gloating over the deaths of people whose talent you couldn’t approach in a dozen lifetimes, belittling serious emotional problems, and convincing yourself you’re the good one- ain’t being woke grand?
The easiest way to desecrate a statue of a human is to break off its nose, a sledgehammer blow will usually do it. But in this instance, critics were cutting off their own nose to spite their face. Not only does the music of The Doors by and large hold up, it actually (from the cheap seats) seems to prefigure a lot of the moves of the sort of pop music we’re supposed to like. Some reasonably cool, somewhat younger than me people inform me that The Doors are ok to like again, and that they, in fact, like them! That’s nice. I wonder where their reputation will go next.
The Doors recorded six albums while Morrison lived (they tried to carry on after his death but it didn’t take). One thing the critics don’t get across is the range of looks The Doors presented across those albums. They did fairly standard-issue blues-inflected rock, especially on “Morrison Hotel” (predictably, my favorite). They did some wandering psychedelia, though there was usually more of a songwriting throughline, riffs, beats, tunes, than psychedelia sometimes implies. They did weird stuff on “Strange Days” and elsewhere. But they also, basically, did pop. There’s a reason they were as popular as they were before Morrison died and became a legend- because they wrote catchy pop songs. In many respects, Morrison wanted to be more pop, or anyway less rock, than audiences would let him, as you could see on “The Soft Parade” and in songs like “Touch Me,” with its horn section. I didn’t like that stuff as a rock-addled teen first discovering them. I like them now, and wonder if they feature anywhere in the thought of people who see Morrison as some ur-rockist. You could definitely make a The Doors jukebox musical, if you were so inclined.
I tend to think it’s probably the lyrics (and maybe song length- eight minute hits like “Light My Fire” aren’t a thing now that no one thinks anyone else has anything worth listening to for that long, and are usually right) and attendant performance-of-self that people really can’t groove with past whatever threshold. That’s when words like “pretentious” come out (how many of these people are fans of The Decembrists? Neutral Milk Hotel? The Mountain Goats? Get fucked). “He was a good singer but a bad poet,” I’ve heard said about Morrison. I wonder if it’s not the opposite. I wouldn’t be surprised if Morrison were a “bad” singer in some technical sense only music nerds care about- wild, untrained (and with presence few could touch). I actually think he’s a reasonable poet, in the field of song lyrics, i.e. poetry that people actually give a shit about. “Hello, I love you/won’t you tell me your name?”: lust, as it existed in his time and place, in ten words. His more imagistic stuff works more often than it doesn’t, too. I still think of the line from my favorite lyrics of his, “Texas Radio and the Big Beat,” a lot: “I’ll tell you this: no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.”
Morrison’s lyrics are bold and unapologetically poetic. He tried to be Byron. You probably don’t want Byron for a roommate or a boyfriend or in your intro to poetry class. But I think there’s a place for them, where they invariably go- the arts. Morrison did all that plus was a consummate pop artist, and worked with talented people happy—life-alteringly ecstatic, in Ray Manzarek’s case— to bring that artistry to life. I tend to think if the lyrics of his songs were different, and/or if they were performed by a woman or a man who frantically signaled his harmlessness and lack of charisma like frontmen decided to start doing once charisma became passé, maybe they wouldn’t have acquired a reputation for toxicity… anyway! Sorry to make so much of this criticism-of-criticism. The Doors! They’re good. The end.
Next, on Discographies: a band I’ve always respected but haven’t done a deep dive of until now!
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pics: Mithra Awake, Mithra Asleep
It is what I said