Hello readers! I’ve been plugging along. Reading, writing. Some of the stuff I’ve been reading are series that I want to write essays on once I finish, some are stuff for podcasts or other projects that you’ll hear about in time. Fiction is plugging along. I’ve got a link to a friend’s substack, some notes, and essay about G.K. Chesterton and some cultural formations he (probably quite inadvertenly) contributed to! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Friend Link - All Opinions Her Own
Reading Notes: Liu, Della Subin
Review Essay: Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and the House Cliche Built
FRIEND LINK - All Opinions Her Own
Sometimes friends make stuff and I share it! I met Allison during grad school and she writes some pretty good cultural criticism. Take a look at her discussing one of her least favorites (Ron DeSantis) quoting one of her (problematic?) favorites (Leon Trotsky)!
READING NOTES
I recently finished a leading candidate for my favorite fictional work this year, the Penguin translation of the complete fictions of Lu Xun. Lu was a major literary figure in early twentieth century China. He trained as a doctor in his youth and became a political activist, advocating for the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and for further reforms once the Chinese Republic established itself, ending life in 1936 a heterodox but committed member of the League of Left Writers based in Shanghai. His stories reflect both his commitments and his awareness of the human foibles all around him. He wrote of rural China, or what you could almost call suburban China- the villages outside of provincial cities, or sometimes outside of Beijing. Like a lot of people writing from the big victim-countries in that period – China, India, Mexico, Ireland all come to mind – Lu did not subscribe to today’s philosophy, where you want to depict put-upon people as noble strivers. Lu wrote of the inhabitants of these villages as degraded wrecks, put-upon but also eager, typically, to bully or oppress others when they can, mired in poverty and superstition, and getting themselves into all variety of ridiculous scenarios. Probably the best is the “True Story of Ah-Q,” where Lu does his best to give a scholarly biography of a local dumb guy and minor crook who winds up caught up in the revolutionary winds, and doesn’t get much more out of them than he did from his minor schemes. The thing with these older writers about colonized peoples is they depicted their people as fucked up by their situation, but also as indisputably human, dealing with human contradictions in surprising ways. You can see this in Lu’s attitudes towards the Chinese classics. All the activists in countries attempting to modernize in the twentieth century had to figure out how to relate to their long legacies of traditional thought and culture, at a time when it looked like adopting Western ways was the only way forward. Lu, and many of his characters, are conflicted: Confucian thought especially clearly poses obstacles to modernization, especially in the sense of political liberation, but Lu isn’t so dogmatic as to dismiss it, or its importance to a China he wants to see free and prosperous, outright. Clashes between “tradition” (usually, the application of older thought in contexts that were once, themselves, quite “modern” as in contemporary) and “modernity” mostly occur through the agency of rebels who, themselves, more understand modernity as a set of slogans and a promise to unshackle their country than anything else, and who are themselves often rather petty- in no small part because surviving in impoverished rural China brings out the petty, scraping-by survivor in everyone, revolutionaries and scholars included. Lu was close to the Chinese Communist Party but never joined. Still, Mao was a great admirer, even painting the official calligraphy on Lu’s tombstone when he died in 1936, and Lu has been a staple of Chinese school curricula ever since. One wonders how Lu, a stubborn and independent man, would have fared had he lived longer… but we do know whatever else you want to say about him, Mao was a genuine admirer of Chinese literature. I can’t speak at all to the accuracy of the translation by the historian of China Julia Lovell, but it gets a lot of vigor and “vibes” across powerfully. I recommend Lu Xun to anyone who enjoys fiction, basically.
I listened to Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine, by Anna Della Subin. I could tell there would be a certain soft-focus, NPR-ish tone to the whole thing, but what I didn’t think of was that listening to it as an audiobook would only reenforce that impression. Essayist Della Subin tells the stories of various figures who, without their calling themselves or even hinting that they were deities, were turned into divine figures by various people. The first chapter, on Haile Selassie, the last Ethiopian emperor and a man regarded as divine by the Rastafari religion, is by far the best one. The Rastafari are an interesting bunch, and while a serious lack of information about the world outside of Jamaica clearly informed their worship, as a liberator of Africa and Africans, of a man who actually held slaves and did not see himself as black, we can’t say that they’re ignorant or stupid (I’m willing to say they’re wrong about some things, which Della Subin is more or less unwilling to do about any of her subjects). Della Subin’s narrative of Ethiopianism, the idea of a religious-political liberation movement stemming from Africa, as it developed in the Atlantic world is quite solid and she covers aspects of the story I didn’t know before. She also shows the ways in which the Rastafari in later decades developed ingenious schemes of interpretation and exegesis to, all at once, address the inconsistencies in their version of Selassie, update their ideas a little, and not grant to skeptical onlookers that maybe said onlookers had a point about their messiah figure. I can sympathize, a lot of the bad press they got and get is racist, so… anyway, the book gets less compelling as it goes on. Among other things, Della Subin, good liberal, insists that godliness can mean many different things to many cultures, and therefore imbuing an anthropologist, General MacArthur, a mean French colonial cop in Niger, or Prince Philip (as you see in Vanuatu) with the godhead is perfectly consistent with differing ways of understanding divinity and redefining it according to the spiritual needs of people undergoing oppression, etc etc. All true and fine points! But, good liberal, she feels no need to turn this back around, and understand that the relationship between the Abrahamic god – and, whatever else Rastafari is, it is definitely a branch on the Abrahamic tree – is also unique and has characteristics that, you know, make it different from how her other case studies look at these things. The peculiar inflexibility of who is and isn’t God is important to the Abrahamic religions, even if clearly not immutable and constant, so it makes sense why the Rastafari case is a bit more charged than the case among Hindus, who have a more flexible idea of divinity and a tradition of apotheosis, or those who basically don’t have any separation between the divine and the natural in their worldview, who have that organizing grid imposed on them by western scholars. Basically, the whole thing is kind of less compelling if calling the “wrong” thing or person God, in a given culture, isn’t a ticket to the madhouse, the scaffold, or at least near-universal ridicule. This isn’t a bad book. Della Subin is a decent writer, if a little cute, a little credulous in front of the claims of postcolonial theory, but the limits of her criticality are also, for me at least, the limit of this book’s enjoyability, and it comes quick and hard.
REVIEW ESSAY - Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and the House Cliche Built
I’ve identified what are maybe the most ominous and damning words in my critical vocabulary: “I wanted to like this.” I never say this when I had wanted to like a book and then… did! I wanted – some part of me still wants – to like the work of early twentieth century Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton. I read a number of the “Father Brown” mysteries, and they were… ok. I found chain-reading them – going through the big anthology – to be an exercise in diminishing returns. The first few you read at a time, where little Papist Father Brown figures out mysteries in a pointedly anti-Holmes manner, not through scientific deduction but through philosophical induction, are fun. But then the schtick, where the dude just inverts common sense and figures the situation out, gets old, fast, for me at least. At least part of the reason why I wanted to like Father Brown is due to my despising Sherlock Holmes, but this anti-Holmes also raises my hackles (Raffles, gentleman thief, is also supposed to be anti-Holmes, and I can enjoy his stories, even with their xenophobic overtones).
I also want to be able to enjoy Chesterton’s non-fiction writings, for a few reasons. First, if I’m going to read something, I might as well enjoy it. I’m not totally immune to the appeal of the “hate-read,” but hate-reading a whole book… well, I’ve read whole books, long ones, that I hate, but not to enjoy the hate. Second, perhaps vainly, but I do fancy myself someone who can enjoy a well-constructed work from a perspective I don’t share, or even actively oppose. It shouldn’t be too hard for apologetics. I’m not religious or spiritual (to use these two categories I guess we’ve decided we’re all using), but I have been at times in my life, and people I know and respect are religious and/or spiritual. I have enjoyed religious writing before and anticipate I will again.
What’s more, I’ve been thinking about ebbs and flows in terms of literary style and expression. I realize this might be somewhat controversial, but I do think we have entered an ebb tide of quality writing, and have arguably been in one all my life. I don’t think I’m inclined to nostalgia, and I realize that there is selection effect at work. But I have also read a fair amount of work that has not been selected for me by the usual channels, including unpublished archival materials of various kinds, and while I don’t think writers from previous eras were necessarily better people or even smarter, I do think educated people focused on the art of writing and expression in a different way than educated people in the English-speaking countries do now. People admire Chesterton as a writer as much as, if not much more than, a thinker. He also seemed like kind of a fun guy. Big fat nerd (avant la lettre, of course), swanning around with a sword cane he never used, palling around with other men of letters of various positions, you can see the appeal, especially if you can turn a blind eye to periodic attacks of antisemitism (the kind that dislikes Hitler and supports Zionism, which bamboozles some people but shouldn’t, these days) and other bad ideas.
I wouldn’t say reading Orthodoxy shook my notion of earlier eras as better times for writing (I also don’t think this pattern goes on forever, and older means better going back to cuneiform or something). It might be a matter of expectations disappointed, in that I read this supposed master of English prose and argument and came away annoyed and vaguely sugar-sick. But, there’s a wrinkle there, too. I strongly disliked reading Orthodoxy and found it not convincing in the least, much less convincing than, say, similar works by C.S. Lewis or even the introduction by whichever seminary product introduced the book for some Christian publisher desperately trying to keep the intellectual-Christianity blimp in the air. But I can’t say it’s badly-written, as such. But, and again perhaps this is vanity, I think the particular way it irritated me might point towards the ways in which writing from a century later also leaves me cold. Maybe this old opinion-monger was part of the genealogy of the hack writing of the neoliberal era!
I guess I should talk about what this book actually is, huh? Well, I’d call it a mid-career book by an author known for his prolific production of popular books in an age where the written word was still, arguably, king, in terms of mass communication. By the turn of the twentieth century, enough big English writers, and enough of the educated public that read them, were turning away from “orthodox” religiosity, here not meaning the Eastern Orthodox churches but whichever the mainline church of their area was. Chesterton would eventually convert to Catholicism, but I think by the time he wrote this he was still an Anglican. In many respects it seems to matter less to Chesterton which specific denomination of Christianity one belonged to, as long as it was small-o orthodox- believed in the literal truth of original sin, virgin birth, resurrection, heaven and hell, etc etc. Chesterton says someone dared him to write a book defending his “orthodox” Christianity, and a guy who wrote as much as he did needs much less reason than that to get busy.
Chesterton used to be called “the prince of paradox” and boy howdy, is that present in spades here. This is no plodding Scholastic theology, though you can see the influences in the thought but also in the general pattern the arguments take. Aimed in no small part at other writers he shared the British magazines with, like his frenemy George Bernard Shaw, Chesterton gleefully spews out one oxymoronic declaration after another. The truest act of intellect is to limit the intellect, rationality is actually insanity and vice-versa, “haughty visions . . . are the creations of humility,” orthodoxy is the path of true intellectual daring and radicalness. On, and on, and on, and on, for a few hundred pages.
A little bit of this kind of thing goes a long way, and this is more than a little bit. Most argumentative writers use paradox to make points sometimes. I’d go further, and say most writers who really like making an argument rather delight in a good paradox, meaning, a show-off piece that also shows up some enemy. Chesterton “keeps it topical,” as a features editor today might ask of him, by specifically aiming at then-fashionable intellectual trends, from a hazier, more “spiritual” Christianity, to the worship of the will you see in Shaw and Nietzsche, to social Darwinism, etc. A lot of his paradoxes ultimately rest on the stereotypes English readers would have been familiar with of what the lives of followers of such ideas live. In most of these, Chesterton positions himself as a hearty, lively, self-effacing, balanced sort of fellow, versus the neuroses-laden and unhappy followers of one or another variety of intellectual imbalance. As it happens, a lot of these stereotypes haven’t traveled that far, in the intervening hundred-plus years. If anything, our depiction of intellectuals – neurotic, resentful, bad skin – has probably changed less than our picture of the religious… efforts to make them out to be especially non-neurotic or chipper usually have a tinge of desperation to them. If nothing else, we know some pretty happy nihilists and hedonists, I’d say, or anyway examples that are only as miserable as everybody else.
So, yeah, Chesterton owning his enemies and frenemies with cheap paradoxes, most of which amount to “think exactly as much as I think, and no more,” that’s not my cup of tea. Glee for Chesterton is not glee for me… even if it is, for thee! Sorry. I can see the appeal, especially to, and I mean this in a mostly value-neutral sense, nerds. Like Chesterton, most nerds appreciate a certain amount of humor, erudition, and adventurousness- and it is precisely that “certain amount” that makes the difference. You can make an argument that there have been periods when nerd culture was more adventurous, but I think the definition of the whole vibe today is less where nerds will go in their imagination than where they stop, and part of me thinks that’s where the telos was always going. Most modern nerds would put the boundary past which one shouldn’t think or create somewhere other than where Chesterton does, but Chesterton would be well within most of the smarter nerds’ boundaries for what’s acceptable, and they’d find his wit amusing. And the wit and erudition is there, even if the products of that wit get old fast and the erudition goes mostly to waste.
From the perspective of his imagined province for cloistered scholars, Castalia, existing centuries in the future from when he was writing, Hermann Hesse in The Glass Bead Game called his own time “The Age of the Feuilleton.” Feuilletons were what they used to call the half-clever essays, light fiction serials, and “talk of the town”-type segments which ran in popular newspapers and magazines for the self-satisfied petty bourgeoisie, and for increasingly-literate (or increasingly-intellectually-complacent) other strata of the population, too. The feuilleton represented, in Hesse’s mind, the appetite for the light and contingent blotting out interest in any kind of higher truth that did not wax and wane according to popular taste or the logic of the market.
Chesterton was in an interesting position relative to this mode of writing- very interested in the “highest” truths and ideas regarding God and man and their relationship and so on, clearly conversant in a wide range of scholarship, but writing for a popular audience. I don’t think he was doing this in a mercenary way, either, I think this style, with his half-clever, half-funny paradoxes and extractions of supposedly eternal truths from stereotyped pictures of how believers in this or that idea supposedly lived (or failed to), was what he really wanted to write. And you have to figure, given the heavy self-seriousness of earlier generations of writers for the broad literate public, like the Victorian sage writers (Arnold, Carlyle etc), who could be ironic or humorous but only with the rhetorical equivalent of a ground crew of dudes with flags and flares carefully guiding their humor into their essays like a house-truck backing into a tiny parking spot, that Chesterton’s lightness had an appeal.
Truthfully, it’s not the lightness that bothers me. I’ve been accused by one or two people in my life of hating fun/levity/humor/cuteness/whatever. These are typically people who aren’t very good at taking a broad or nuanced view of the people and things around them (or else are just making casual fun). P.G. Wodehouse is one of my favorite authors, Adventure Time is one of my favorite TV shows, my social media feeds are full of pictures of cute animals because the algos know they delight me, and I’ll tell you what else- forced heaviness or darkness sucks even worse than forced levity.
That “forced” is doing a lot of work. Chesterton may not have been forcing himself to make this discussion of the basic moral structure of the world a festival of paradoxical versions of common sayings – he was happy as a pig in shit or a certain kind of nerd in front of any audience – but I do think he contorts the tone and structure of the argument around a subject matter it doesn’t fit, and which to some extent he knows doesn’t fit. In Orthodoxy he is building a wall of cliches to keep the bad thoughts, the things that might leak out from the patterns of thought he chortingly insists should mostly be condemned to the madhouse, from getting in. Moreover, he depicts this as an act of courage, of accepting that the commonly accepted is, in fact, correct… as long as you flip it a little first (he’d probably be the last to come out and say he was brave, but if you somehow managed to call cowardice the bravest thing of all first…). In a paradox worthy of Chesterton, the levity becomes heavy when it’s called upon to bear a load, in this case, that of a defensive bulwark to keep the uncomfortable thoughts of a vast horde of dimly-conceived enemies, from Nietzsche to Marx to the biblical critics to garden-variety Unitarians, at bay.
We can think of Hesse’s Age of the Feuilleton as really beginning when it occurred to people that the seemingly weightless, capricious products of capitalist cultural production, cultural products meant to fleetingly entertain and then get disposed of, actually could play important cultural roles, and that one of those was a sort of immunization against other thoughts. “It’s not that bubble gum destroys metaphysics,” as Adorno put it, “but that bubble gum is a metaphysics.” Our stock of ideas surrounding the relationship between popular culture and other realms of thought grow increasingly stale- pop as a “distraction,” pop as propaganda, pop as seat of resistance through “resistant readings” (“what if Kirk and Spock were gay for each other, take that, patriarchy!”) and representation… I think it would be worth looking at the ways people actively use popular or light culture to create mental worlds with real appeal… and real limitations, including a tendency towards rejection of ideas outside of the narrow paradigms they create… and, hell, it’s not like highbrows haven’t constructed equally narrow cul de sacs out of supposedly high-brow cultural artifacts and ideas!
One way, I think, past the knotted clot of old debates and cliches that cultural studies have left us regarding the uses of culture is to be both broader in our sourcing and more methodical in how we approach those sources. In this instance, I think it’s useful to look at the longer history of popular instruction through media, and the degree of craft put into it. Chesterton’s work, and that of others we bother to remember from the “age of the feuilleton” (provided it’s actually past!), I think served as inoculation against scary thought… but Chesterton and the others couldn’t hide that they came from the same culture of erudition and thoughtful attention to rhetoric and writing that produced the scary thoughts. Even when he annoys me, it’s clear he has chops, and chops at something other than making a catchy product. The things he said weren’t cliches when said them. But they had the structure of cliches, and the depth of cliches, and ultimately became cliche, even when not overused.
I think it’s possible to run an index of popular essayistic writing from Chesterton’s era to ours, and see that by and by, the degree of thoughtfulness dedicated to any factor in writing of this stamp other than its potential to appeal to a remunerative swath of the population has declined. You only need enough erudition to not appear stupid, and the standards for that continue to decline, you only need enough rhetorical skill to hook a lowest-common-denominator reader. I think there’s a variety of factors here, and I think if we really looked at it, the decline would enter its terminal state around the late 1970s and early 1980s, that is, when it started to become apparent to the ruling classes of the capitalist countries that they were no longer under the sort of threat they thought they were for most of the twentieth century. The elite could relax their standards and not fear revolt.
That said, you also have to figure the process is also cumulative, on some level that doesn’t come down to political economy. If you live mentally in a house made of cliches made to repel scary ideas, and pass that house on down the generations, you’re going to wind up with generations who take the house of cliche for granted, and who are even more terrified, or simply uncomprehending, of the scary ideas they might be able to perceive outside. At this point, many of Chesterton’s own ideas would be scary to his inheritors, though his way of phrasing them would probably sugar the pill some- that seems to be the gamble when “Moody House” (a Protestant publisher, by the way) publishes people like him, and inhabitants of neighboring cliche-mansions wouldn’t let him through the door at all. He could howl outside, “I made some of those bricks!” but the householders would… and here we’ll exit the metaphor. Capitalism is never grateful, and neither, at the end of the day, however many Hallmark specials in praise of gratitude it might produce, is any culture rooted in sentimentality.
I am not sentimental about Mithra. My feelings about her as utterly sincere and vital.
I wasn't sure where you were going with this, but explaining the shortcomings of Chesterton via the shortcomings of yaoi fanfiction is actually kind of brilliant?!!
If anything I (very much a non-Christian) am probably going to keep on loving /Orthodoxy/ because of the way Chesterton makes the heavy philosophical ideas of his time seem familiar and approachable. Just last night I was considering discussing his theory of rationality with a loose acquaintance who seems uncomfortable with the idea of the irrational, and my friend had to talk me down from that because the introduction of such a "heavy" subject into an afternoon's conversation could be interpreted as an attack. It's become harder to confront fundamental ideas now that the Age of the Feuilleton degraded into the Age of the Quote-Tweet, or the Age of Ready Player One.