BookTok, Gene Wolfe and T.S. Eliot
Books teach you how to read them. But you have to be willing to learn.
Behind everything some further thing is found, forever; thus the tree behind the bird, stone beneath soil, the sun behind Urth. Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts.
I’ve been posting on TikTok as a way to promote this newsletter. I’ve encountered a number of baffling debates on that app. While it’s generally useful to see any internet debate as industrial conflict between rival small advertising firms, the ways people talk on TikTok about books (Red flag books, books I’d block someone for liking, why you shouldn’t read problematic writers, etc. etc.) matter because BookTok has become one of the strongest marketing forces in publishing. It has the power to get books pulled, to turn mediocre works into bestsellers, to turn nobodies into stars, to end authors’ careers and to worsen the conditions of production for all working writers.
There’s nothing wrong with reading light books and a lot of criticism of BookTok verges on misogynistic in its outlook (do journalists bring the same disdain for the business-brained manosphere slop and fascist tacticool ripoffs of ripoffs of Juenger that they bring to feminine coded genres like romantasy?). But there is something wrong, deeply wrong, in a culture that fetishizes a shallow level of intellectual development and invents excuses for closed minded anti-intellectualism.
Yes, it is undeniably true that millions of Americans are never taught to read beyond the sentence level. We cannot change that individually. In the absence of a Cruzada Nacional de Alfabetización, the best way to become a better reader is to read things that are difficult. This is especially important for writers, because reading is part of our craft, the same way that for carpenters or tailors an apprenticeship is part of the craft.
I say this because once, not too long ago, I was that sort of close minded anti-intellectual illiterate. When I first started taking writing seriously in the early part of this decade, I got all my advice from the wrong places: Brandon Sanderson’s podcast, screenwriting books, popular discourses of reading. Books should have morals! These sources say. Books should be didactic! The trouble with writing a didactic novel is that it sucks ass, at a stylistic level and as an experience. It’s wearying to think “What would a virtuous person do here?” No room for drama in that question.
Even at my most puritanical, however, I was reading books that shook that dull, dull, dull framework. Journey to the End of the Night, The Book of the New Sun, Wore Negari (one of the great books about cowardice and self-deceit), Caliban and the Witch, The Honourable Schoolboy, and especially All the Kings Men. Reading those books and others like them, alongside essays by Brandon Taylor and RS Benedict’s classic “Everyone is Beautiful and No one is Horny,” challenged me to reconcile my enjoyment of fictional cruelty and vice with what I thought I believed about the process of writing.
You can write as clearly as you want, it won’t stop a bad reader (like me from four years ago) from misreading you. This is because art, as an aesthetic object, is vested with its meaning by the beholder. There are right (i.e. textually supported) interpretations, and there are incorrect interpretations—authors are frequently their own worst interpreters, at least consciously. But I think readers have a duty to try to find readings that take in the whole of the text.
And I think writers have a duty to intervene in the discourses that shapes reading. Public spaces are too important to be left to anti-intellectuals and freelance advertising firms (influencers). Stepping into the public sphere helps refine one’s own critical and artistic views. I think it will eventually produce better writers and better readers.
To that end, this essay is my first intervention in the discourses of literacy.
A text tells you how to read it:
Midway through Citadel of the Autarch, the fourth volume of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, Severian, the protagonist is laid up in a hospital. Over the preceding three novels Severian, a boy thrown out from a torturers guild, has progressed through a series of challenges and tests on his way to becoming Autarch of the Commonwealth (South America) and also Space Jesus. The current Autarch is waging war against the Ascians (A term derived from Greek meaning Men without shadows,) a group from the region around and north of the equator.
Severian is wounded before reaching the front and must recover in a field hospital. While recuperating, Severian and several other soldiers compete with each other for the favor of Foila, a woman soldier in the hospital. Foila makes them tell stories. After all her countrymen have spoken, Foila lets a captured Ascian special operations fighter tell a story.
The Ascians practice a form of quasi-Maoist social organization, complete with a language shaped self-consciously for political ends extending even to their names — the soldier is called Loyal to the Group of Seventeen.
The italicized quote at the top of this essay is taken from the Ascian speech. Parts of it are repeated throughout the Ascian fighter’s story, meaning something different each time. The Ascian idiom is indecipherable to Severian’s countrymen, but Foila, who has worked in military intelligence, can interpret.
The story that Loyal to the Group of Seventeen tells is “The Just Man.” I will not discuss it here, but I have taken the trouble to collate it below in a footnote* in its original Ascian dialect, without Foila’s interpretation.
What I think is interesting is the commentary that follows the Ascian’s story. Severian offers three lessons from the story, the first on the usefulness of stock phrases:
First of all, how much of our speech, which we think freshly minted in our own mouths, consists of set locutions. The Ascian seemed to speak only in sentences he had learned by rote, though until he used each for the first time we had never heard them. Foila seemed to speak as women commonly do, and if I had been asked whether she employed such tags, I would have said that she did not—but how often one might have predicted the ends of her sentences from their beginnings.
The second, on the plastic nature of speech:
Second, I learned how difficult it is to eliminate the urge for expression. The people of Ascia were reduced to speaking only with their masters’ voice; but they had made of it a new tongue, and I had no doubt, after hearing the Ascian, that by it he could express whatever thought he wished.
And another on the question of meaning:
I learned once again what a many-sided thing is the telling of any tale. None, surely, could be plainer than the Ascian’s, yet what did it mean? Was it intended to praise the Group of Seventeen? The mere terror of their name had routed the evildoers. Was it intended to condemn them?
They had heard the complaints of the just man, and yet they had done nothing for him beyond giving him their verbal support. There had been no indication they would ever do more.
Book of the New Sun, and these particular lessons, offer an important insight into the nature of literature. Stories are mysteries. Each is constrained by the possibilities of its time: the words its writer knows, the stories he loves, the ones he hates. What Wolfe does here, quite self-consciously, is give the reader the analytical framework necessary to read Book of the New Sun.
Severian performs miracles, he resurrects the dead and heals the suffering. He is born without a father. He undergoes a series of trials and symbolic deaths/resurrections. He has a godlike omniscience; he never forgets. His story is a Jesus story. None, surely could be plainer than this?
Behind everything some further thing is found, forever.
Severian is a golden-age sci-fi/fantasy protagonist. A boy of low origins, born to a prisoner, who, through his superior perception and everyman good heart, bests magic and technologies we cannot fathom. He fights bats made of darkness, glowing mutants, a fire salamander that eats children, a playwright and a puppet, a madman revolutionary who eats the brains of his acolytes. He befriends magic nuns and dashing spies, a stranded robot spacefarer and inter-dimensional aliens. His story is an adventure story.
Thus the tree behind the bird, stone beneath soil, the sun behind Urth.
Severian is a mass-murdering rapist. A torturer by trade. A traitor to cause and friend. A man who beds his own grandmother. An aristocrat who marries the last daughter of a dying house. He is the restored King of an exhausted empire, pledged to endless war against democracy, against the forces of desire. A flame, a guttering flame, on a dark night—an impious symbol of man’s dominion over nature holding all the defiance and cruelty of his species. His story is a cry of the heart against the ceaseless march of rivers to the sea, a reactionary’s lament.
Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts.
Wolfe constructed Book of the New Sun out of recontextualized pieces of Catholic theology, Golden Age sci-fi, mythology and history. How much of his novels, so fresh and original, consist of set locutions, of the pieces of a genre young readers learn to know by heart, the set tags of masculinist fantasy? All of it? None of it?
The story interlude is a game and Wolfe is playing with you, asking you to find the sun behind the earth.
Book of The New Sun is a fairly obvious example, then, of the maxim titling this section: A text tells you how to read it. Other books that give you explicit directions for reading and interpreting them include: Lolita, The Blind Assassin, The House of Leaves, Hearts in Atlantis, Julian and The Alexiad of Anna Komnene. To talk further about Komnene’s work, The Alexiad is one of the last works of self-consciously Greco-Roman history. The formalism of classical texts, like the formalism of stories within stories or of epistolary novels, creates catch points where an observant reader can start to take apart the text line by line; Alexios Komnenos was not Alexander the Great, so what does Alexander’s invocation tell us of Alexios’ time and of Anna’s purpose?
I believe this is the logic of all complex, literary texts. I don’t mean here the sort of lazy, redditarian listing of tropes and decoding them according to ‘alternate’ (read: Illiterate) interpretations. I mean that every text worth reading possesses meanings on multiple levels and that the text gives you the requisite symbolic and rhetorical language with which to find those levels.
The first step is to read it with an eye for repetition and for emphasis, not just literal repetition either, but emotional repetition. Which moments bear the same weight? Which feel self-consciously too small? Which are curiously absent?
Prufrock is afraid
An exercise is in order. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a poem about desire. While Prufrock has been endlessly dissected, I once memorized the whole of it, so I’m going to write about it a little too. This is a poem about hearing and speaking. In the first draft of this essay I tried to include all the references to speech or speaking, but that ended up being about half the poem, so here are four small examples:
“The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels”
“In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.”
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.”
“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
A close reading of those and other instances of speech/though about speech show Eliot is tying speech to sex: The muttering retreats, the question that can never be asked, the song lethal to hear.
There’s such a powerful fear of sex in this poem, such dread and sadness. Incel-ass line: “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons;/I know the voices dying with a dying fall.” But who has not felt this exclusion from the sphere of speech or the tedious foreknowledge of the end of youth—I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. That gives these moments of speaking-hearing-dying all the greater weight. We know, intimately, our decadence and we know that pleasure and bravery are as fleeting as the spoken word, that ours is the dream world, the ocean of desire. The mermaids sing each to each, and we lose ourselves in song. Then you wake one day, and the song is just the voices of women in the next room talking of Michaelangelo; of men on the sidewalk talking Kubrick, and you know you are not special.
The mermaids do not sing to you. The mermaids do not sing. The mermaids are not.
You are dying a little each day. So hurry man, and ask the fucking question!
This is one example of repeated motifs constructing the meaning, and you can repeat the process with any one of the images in Prufrock. If I were better at reading poetry, I would take this essay an analytical layer deeper and ask what does “yellow smoke,” do in the poem? How does that smoke, nestled between the references to Michaelangelo, turn the poem from the tight specificity of the first two stanzas to the speculative anxiety of the decisions and revisions stanza?
When you find yourself encountering a book or a poem you don’t get, anger won’t necessarily make it click for you. But you can go back, begin again, look for the shadows cast within the text, the things behind the things. If you find yourself reacting with hostility to the surface level of a text, you can choose to discard it, and if you do that you might as well give up the task of reading, altogether. Or you can say to yourself: There is a darkness before me, a cellar where a perceptive reader can find meaning in the subtle relations between these text tags. Behind every thing some further thing is found; forever.
Do you turn back and ascend the stair?
Next Week: Drowning dogs and dying women in Last Days of the Dog-Men.
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* The Just Man: In times past, loyalty to the cause of the populace was to be found everywhere. The will of the Group of Seventeen was the will of everyone.
Let no one be idle. If one is idle, let him band together with others who are idle too, and let them look for idle land. Let everyone they meet direct them. It is better to walk a thousand leagues than to sit in the House of Starvation
One is strong, another beautiful, a third a cunning artificer. Which is best? He who serves the populace.
Let the work be divided by a wise divider of work. Let the food be divided by a just divider of food. Let the pigs grow fat. Let rats starve.
The people meeting in counsel may judge, but no one is to receive more than a hundred blows.
How are the hands nourished? By the blood. How does the blood reach the hands? By the veins. If the veins are closed, the hands will rot away
Where the Group of Seventeen sit, there final justice is done.
Let there be clean water for those who toil. Let there be hot food for them and a clean bed.
No one is to receive more than a hundred blows.
Behind everything some further thing is found, forever; thus the tree behind the bird, stone beneath soil, the sun behind Urth. Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts.
Can all petitioners be heard? No, for all cry together. Who, then, shall be heard—is it those who cry loudest? No, for all cry loudly. Those who cry longest shall be heard, and justice shall be done to them.
So say the Group of Seventeen: From those who steal, take all they have, for nothing that they have is their own
As a good child to its mother, so is the citizen to the Group of Seventeen.
What is foolish speech? It is wind. It has come in at the ears and goes out of the mouth. No one is to receive more than a hundred blows.
Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts.
The citizen renders to the populace what is due to the populace. What is due to the populace? Everything.
It is better to be just than to be kind, but only good judges can be just; let those who cannot be just be kind.
Those who cry longest shall be heard, and justice shall be done to them.
Those who will not serve the populace shall serve the populace.
Let there be clean water for those who toil. Let there be hot food for them, and a clean bed.
No one is to receive more than a hundred blows.
Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts.
Those who fight for the populace fight with a thousand hearts. Those who fight against them with none.
Let no one oppose the decisions of the Group of Seventeen
If their wounds are in their backs, who shall stanch their blood
Where are those who in times past have opposed the decisions of the Group of Seventeen?
Let there be clean water for those who toil. Let there be hot food for them, and a clean bed. Then they will sing at their work, and their work will be light to them. Then they will sing at the harvest, and the harvest will be heavy.