Over the last year we have witnessed that occasional literary phenomenon, the birth in negative critique of the sort of genre label opaque to all but we who read and scribble. The most famous instance of this sort of thing is of course the term “hysterical realism,” by which the august critic James Wood, writing in the old New Republic stigmatized the big, rowdy novel of the late 20th century at the dawn of our own. The new genre of the 2020s, canonized in the last year by Federico Perelmuter at the now-besieged LARB, is Brodernism, and the descriptor has captured the imaginations of at least a part of the population.
the phenomenon I reference—call it brodernism, with apologies for yet another portmanteau—doesn’t end with translated literature. It expands toward works described as “maximalist,” “difficult,” “avant-garde,” “epic,” “excessive,” “oblique,” “speculative,” “experimental,” “modernist,” “postmodernist” and “post-postmodernist.” Though men are not its only practitioners, male writers dominate the corpus, and a tendency for phallic competition underlies the formation’s core texts. These include William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (2015), William H. Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories (2005), Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (1983), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard (1999), Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men (1987), Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh (out later this year), Miquel de Palol’s The Troiacord (2001), Jon Fosse’s works, Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982), Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–43), Mark de Silva’s The Logos (2022), David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy (2006–09), and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971).1
I am in general not positively inclined toward this term, which manages to combine two major pet peeves of mine: the neotenous, everyone-is-12 cutesiness of millennial and gen z mass aesthetics, and the style of criticism in which sociological concerns, namely irritation with a type of guy (guy here meaning persons male female or other, this is not a gender slop blog) who reads these texts replaces actual engagement with the art object on its own merits. Henry Begler once commented that this negative polemic seems aimed at “like six people,” and this captures much of my discomfort with it. Substack’s own John Pistelli has surveyed this trend on several occasions, throwing strays at Clarice Lispector as he goes.2
a kind of athletics of reading long, hard experimental European fiction, and not the exquisite Proustian and whimsical Steinian kind either, but whatever is grimly-ironically historical and annihilatingly metaphysical.
I would perhaps add to the cloud of discussion around this execrable coinage a new moniker: “post-brodernist.” The obvious objection to this appropriation of Pistelli’s elaboration might be that to engage in the flurry of naming is to dignify an aforementioned variety of hyper-sociological categorization of literature to which I am not fond, but oh well.
Post-brodernism might be conceptualized as the “second generation” of postmodernism, works composed by authors for whom the novelty of the demise of a tangible somethingness has entirely vanished. Dismissed by Perelmuter as “rather too mainstream and easily read” by comparison to the enormous phallic edifice of the block quote above, David Foster Wallace’s mammoth Infinite Jest is perhaps the iconic post-brodernist work. Actually much of what I at least instinctively think of as “lit bro” literature is really more post-brodernist than anything else.3 In any case the point of all this discourse is that Mark Z. Danielewski is a quintessentially post-brodernist author, & House of Leaves and Only Revolutions definitively post-brodernist works.
I have found Only Revolutions deeply frustrating as I continued with it. If House of Leaves isn’t quite a novel, and this is the grain of truth to virtually every negative review of the book, I still read it in a week and found it fascinatingly fun in the same way as a very good comic book of roughly the same period, such as The Sandman, Enigma or The Invisibles.4 Only Revolutions on the other hand seems less obviously worthy at this point. After the first 100 or so pages the novelty has fully worn off, and the residue that remains is a sense of irritation at an all-consuming gimmick. When I pick it back up and read it, the book is fine, at times compelling, but when I regard it sitting on my shelves or on the passenger seat of my car I want nothing to do with it.
In the cycles and months since we last kept up with them, Sam & Hailey have wandered into something closer to modernity, engaging in similar antics to that which were surveyed last time. Further down the spiral now, on page 128 and cycle-well I’ve lost count frankly, the highlights of the segments were running from the creep, a hostile interaction with what appeared to be early 20th century hobos or perhaps high schoolers, and Hailey being hospitalized for (I believe?) alcohol poisoning.
The time frame appears, if the sidebars throughout the book can be trusted, to be the 1930s, evoked by the occasionally intruding transients and a passerby telling Sam that no work is available. More than that I am having difficulty trying to write. One of the problems with this type of episodic novel is that it is very easy to put a book of this kind down and not return to it for weeks, months, sometimes much longer. Roughly two years separated my readings of the first and second halves of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, which is a considerably more conventional novel than Only Revolutions! I recognize that I have been derelict in updating this series (and my blog in general over the last month) but I hope to turn around the later installments of this series significantly more quickly. I hope to see you all then!
It is worth noting how much of a history there is to this sort of thing- one of my next projects after this one wraps up is going to be a blogging-through of the novel The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis. Bawdy, hilarious and frightening, this occult picaresque of the Roman era strikingly anticipates aspects of Don Quixote & Tristram Shandy, not to mention the whole Joyce-Barth-Pynchon-DeLillo axis of the late modern novel. It also offers a vital because so early example of the dialectic (of which Ulysses is the modern paradigm) between superficial misogyny/locker-room sex jokes and subterranean Goddess or Das Ewig-Weibliche worship which runs through many of the great modern texts, and as Pound and Graves argued in different ways, perhaps esoterically through the millennia of Abrahamism. My own religious commitments preclude an endorsement of the Goddess-cult, but between reading the Chaldean Oracle fragments and Sarah Illes Johnson’s Hekate Soteira I am increasingly open to the idea that it reflects at least a local, if not universal reality in parts of Anatolia, and subsequently in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the classical world as a whole. Walter Burkert’s brief mention of the probable antiquity of the worship of Cybele or Magna Mater in his magisterial Greek Religion is interesting as well in this regard.
The most intriguing, most impressive and most unambiguous discoveries are those from Çatal Hüyük. The Early Neolithic town here contains a series of sanctuaries, specially equipped chambers in the many-roomed houses: their distinctive features are secondary burials of the dead, cattle horns set into benches, figurative wall paintings and, most strikingly, wall reliefs of a Great Goddess with uplifted arms and straddled legs - clearly the birth-giving mother of the animals and of life itself. A female statuette is found accompanied by a boyish consort, another fulsome female figure enthroned between leopards is giving birth to a child, and a wall painting shows men masked as leopards hunting a bull: the association with the Asia Minor Great Mother of historical times, with her leopards or lions, her paredros, and with the society of men and bull sacrifice is irresistible. Here we have overwhelmingly clear proof of religious continuity over more than five millennia
I wrote about Lispector several times during the early days of this blog. I’m a big fan, as they say. John is not entirely wrong about the books everyone goes gaga for-there really is an unpleasantly Nabakovian God-as-author’s-jaundiced-eye-self-indicting-itself--by-contempt-for-its-subcreations quality to Hour of the Star and to a lesser extent Breath of Life. Those books are great, in a certain way (the same friend who provided the opening quote for this series once described them as “so evil”) but any indictment made on the basis of the late novels must nonetheless miss the mark as an overall assessment of Lispector. The earlier work as exemplified by Near to the Wild Heart is straightforwardly high modernist along the Woolf-to-Joyce axis, while the great novels of her middle period from The Passion According to G.H to Agua Viva fit firmly into what Pistelli memorably describes in his review of Don DeLillo’s Underworld as the tradition of the (north and south) American novel as “weird prose poem.”
I’ve spent so much of the last two years stuffing my head full of continental philosophy that I find myself forgetting just how very much I cared about literary theory when I started this blog.
One of my swirling possibly-for paying subscribers ideas for this year has been reading through The Invisibles together. I did revisit Morrison’s epic in December, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it, finding the comic the same but myself changed in the intervening few years. We’ll see. I like the idea of using this space to read long poems that I might otherwise let fall by the way.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.