Notes
A few days ago I finished ’s novel Major Arcana, my second new novel by a Substacker after ’s gripping The Default World. Two very different novels, but both seeking to differentiate what is real and what is a mirage in contemporary American life, with the recognition that the border between the two is fluid and constantly shifting. A few quick thoughts on Major Arcana:
It seems to me that it’s fundamentally about how to make literary art about contemporary life after the transformation of culture into a set of decontextualized fragments, which began with modernism but entered a new phase with the internet. How, today, to reconnect a symbolic sphere that seems to possess a terrifying autonomy back to the world of concrete, human relationships, parents and children and lovers and friends, that remains the deepest source of happiness and suffering?
If this is indeed what the book is about, I’m all in. I like the complicated-symbolic-game elements of literature too—I work on Andrew Marvell, for god’s sake—but the whole enterprise becomes dull and unreal if it’s completely untethered from the world. At a formal level, Major Arcana is very clever in making this point: the parallelism between life and art, and the ultimate basis of art in life, is a structural and narrative principle, not just a philosophical one.
I did end up with a couple of reflections / questions.
It really feels like modernism is the aesthetic horizon here. Yes, Blake and Shakespeare are important and the novel (as you’d expect if you’re a reader of Grand Hotel Abyss) is beautifully and capaciously allusive. But it feels like the deeper literary past is itself glimpsed through the decontextualizing modernist lens. That seems true to where culture is at now. But modernism derived so much of its own energy from the collision and reinterpretation of cultural traditions that had been thought to be coextensive with human history. We don’t have that. Is there a way of reforming the relationship between culture and human life without a deeper historical sense? Or does it not matter?
Catholicism. It’s a very Catholic novel. I can see the conceptual fit: birth and death, the word made flesh, transubstantiation, etc. But I wasn’t sure if this is meant to be one potential ideology among others for the novel’s aesthetics or if this is THE framework, without which the whole enterprise loses coherence.
Concluding this long note by saying that this is an extremely good novel—so good that engaging with it became more interesting than writing something more review-like.