Hopepunk is dead.
I saw recently that Stephen Markley is still on a book tour promoting his second novel, The Deluge, which came out in January. He received a spot on a late-night show—which I’m told is a coveted get on the book circuit, though I can’t imagine who watches late-night shows—but the reviews of his book are rather mixed. After I read an ARC in August 2022, I wrote a long, horny review of it for Goodreads—the only time I’ve ever reviewed a book there—mainly out of boredom, trying to spur some neurological activity by adopting a weird, semi-woke conservative persona. The result was rather silly:
Markley’s 896-page second novel will no doubt beget comparisons to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. [...] Such comparisons will quickly fall apart, however. Whereas Infinite Jest strove to be good, The Deluge charts its own path. Before I Virgil you along it, I should note right off the bat that the novel is 2.27” thick and 1.28 pounds, making it profoundly sexist, homophobic, and ableist by gatekeeping all those with weak wrists from reading it. Thankfully, I lift—almost up to 225 on bench, by the way—so I, in a profound act of allyship, will put my rough and calloused hands to use as a sensitive reader. (DM me for my Venmo if you’d like to support my allyship.)
The book is about climate change, but it doesn’t belong in any sort of nature writing lineage—say, from Herman Melville to Jack London to Richard Powers. Rather, it’s a political drama, and climate happens to be at its center. The book charts the intersecting ploys of government, nonprofits, activists, and terrorists to address or exploit the problem of climate change. It’s deeply tedious, and I think you can summarize the novel’s actual politics by learning that it ends in a deus ex committee meeting where various stakeholders, branded—I kid you not—the Task Force to Unfuck the World, come together and design policy solutions for climate change. Their recommendations are delivered in text via bullet points!!
You know it’s a bad sign when you put down the novel to look up the author’s FEC donation disclosures to confirm that, yes, he gave money to the Liz Warren campaign.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I was depressed for a solid week after reading the novel—not because of its harrowing depiction of an encroaching climate apocalypse but because it made me lose my faith in contemporary literature and possibly humanity. The book doesn’t even pretend to care about the natural world. At stake, as I wrote in the review, is that “catastrophic climate change would jeopardize the possibility of educated young people [to have] al fresco sex—a fate sadder than a starving panda.” For some people, no matter what sort of convulsions the world goes through, the single thing worth striving for and preserving is brunch. It’s either fascism or bourgeois liberal consumption and sexual freedoms.
I read only one interview from the Markley press circuit, but I’m sure that this question dogged him along the whole path, as it does any writer who engages with climate change: “What gives you hope? <3” I’d rather chop up and snort a blackpill than listen to someone mewl this question into a microphone. All pieces about climate change or other seemingly intractable problems are mandated by editorial law to end with a Gesture Of Hope so everyone can walk away feeling soothed. It seems so infantile. Hopepunk has gone the way of actual punk: it’s cringe and balding and probably like forty. Just listen to The National and accept the melancholy of adult existence rather than maintain this weird anxiety you mistake for political consciousness, or worse, moral conscience.
Before he was recruited by the CIA, Herbert Marcuse wrote a provocative essay in the 1930s, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” on the counterrevolutionary potential of art—a far more persuasive account than his later attempts to show its revolutionary potential. The bourgeois view of art divorces culture from material society, treating them as separate spheres. This view preys on the notion of “humanity” through tragedy and sorrow. We find beauty in the humanity of the destitute prostitute Fantine, striving to protect her innocent child, rather than horror at the society that forces her into such circumstances. The point of culture in this view is the comforting of the viewer’s soul, not the transformation of society. Emotional catharsis is a form of self-congratulation for the bourgeois.
Obviously, what Marcuse writes of tragedy applies equally to hope. I’m not even going to write the rest of this paragraph. Use your fucking head. You’ll get it.
Still godposting in 2023
I would like to draw a distinction between earned and unearned hope, but my problem is that my preference is for unearned hope. No matter how cynical you think I am, I have a Christian streak in me and find a deeply rooted beauty in the idea of deliverance, as in the passage from Joel 2:25 (And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten) and the image from Peter de Potter above.
The actual distinction might be that I have contempt for political hope—rooted in my contempt for politics as such—and find a deep beauty in a sort of metaphysical hope, which I think art, at its best, strives for. No rhetorical Gesture Of Hope comes close to the shiver that runs through my soul when I hear Bon Iver’s “iMi.” Or the most intense and desperate lyric in In an Aeroplane over the Sea: “I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine.” It’s an entirely different kind of hope, one that, as in the latter lyric, puts at stake the possibility of uncircumventable tragedy, yet holds out the possibility of some kind of poetic or cosmic redemption.
For that reason, I have a great respect for Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad—a novel that, thanks to Lauren Oyler (and Egan’s own mediocre attempt at a sequel), has become popular to deflate: Weren’t we all young and naïve back when it won a Pulitzer? Maybe that’s true, but I find something stupidly beautiful about it. The novel is a collection of short stories spaced out across time and feeding into one another through intersecting character arcs. The stories aren’t all “happy,” but there’s a comic element at play, because every character is redeemed in one way or another. Even a man who dies young—so deeply alienated from himself that his story written in the second person—comes into his own as he drowns, his pronouns shifting to “I” in the last paragraph of his story.
Understandably, Egan—as with Ben Lerner in 10:04 and other writers of the new sincerity movement—in retrospect seems to emit an Obama-esque, Audacity of Hope vibe. Unlike other millennials, I was too young and distanced from politics to feel personally betrayed or fulfilled by Obama. But in Egan’s case, I don’t think it applies. In most stories, the characters don’t earn their “second chance,” which seems cosmically given, but they often earn their redemption. It’s a Catholic sentiment—faith and acts—that balances out the pure Americanism of “second chances,” and it’s one I like. A second chance may be an opportunity to sell out, or it may be a chance to redeem yourself, maybe in a way you don’t yourself understand.
Contra Marx, everything happens twice, but first as prefiguration and then as redemption.
To me, the most encouraging line from A Visit from the Goon Squad is a simple, even naïve one: “Sure, everything is ending. But not yet.” It’s fatalistic but holds out a sort of optimism or a faith in the present. It chimes with a famous line from Infinite Jest: “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” In this sense of threat, a higher life can be felt.
Revisiting the standstill
I began this Substack writing about what I called the standstill, which I derived from Fukuyama’s “The End of History” and Yanagihara’s much-maligned To Paradise. I argued:
Calling this standstill depression would be wrong in most of the cases within [To Paradise]. This isn’t a mood disorder. It isn’t, unlike A Little Life, the result of trauma. It isn’t even paralysis. It is a life that has nowhere to go. In the description above, death, though unstated, conditions the narrator’s experience of his life, and yet the standstill is detached from the death drive. As Lacan argues, the death drive might also portend radical change; a breakdown creates the conditions of possibility for something new to emerge to replace the existing order. The narrator has no such faith in such change, so he cannot mention death explicitly—only his indifference to being alive.
We might want to say that the standstill is just the stultifying domain of the bourgeoisie. [...] But much of contemporary life, cutting across class lines, unfolds over the terrain of the standstill. Conversations on dating apps. Careers in the city. Political gridlock. Nothing happens and keeps on happening. Our current spiritual struggle is trying to come to terms with a situation that feels worse and gets worse in proportion to how long things stay the same, which seems to be indefinite.
Yanagihara’s book asks, What if we aren’t standing in the nick of time? We want to believe we are. That everything is possible, that we can force history into motion. But if we aren’t—then what? What does that mean for politics, for creativity, for hope? Do these concepts have any meaning? Are they merely nostalgic? Is our burden to explain or deny their seeming impossibility?
One can’t think of these questions and not come back to the Frankfurt School. At the end of his life, Adorno wrote a short, but compelling, essay entitled “Resignation.” It begins: “The objection raised against us can be stated approximately in these words; a person who in the present hour doubts the possibility of radical change in society and who for that reason neither takes part in nor recommends spectacular, violent action is guilty of resignation.” Adorno attacks the “praxis above all” mentality—“One clings to action because of the impossibility of action”—and goes so far as to accuse such people of being the ones who are actually resigned:
For the individual, life is made easier through capitulation to the collective with which he identifies. He is spared the cognition of his impotence; within the circle of their own company, the few become many. It is this act—not unconfused thinking—which is resignation.
(Cough.)
In the responses to my review of Amber A’Lee Frost’s Dirtbag, I was interested in readers’ exasperation that Frost didn’t offer a road map for leftists, or as I summed it up: “Frost sees no immediate path forward for the socialist left and recommends readers try to recover their energy: disconnect from the media, read novels, and keep vigilant and faithful. In another parlance, she could have recommended that readers practice self-care and go to brunch.” However uninspiring her suggestions were, I'm not sure what answer Frost could have provided that wouldn't have felt out-of-touch or underwhelming, especially given the disconnect, which she never properly addresses, between her insistence in the book that democratic socialism must emanate from the working class—no other substitute will do—and the reality that the reading public in general and her audience in particular are mostly (spurned) bourgeois.
But this desire for Frost to delineate some course of action reminded me of an incredibly lengthy, and unfortunately insightful, piece, in which the writer alleges that what's striking about this moment is that people are “genuinely open to being influenced, open to sincerely participating, even if it’s cringe.” We may adopt cynical poses toward institutions, norms, and current conditions, and yet we also are looking for people to trust and are willing to live our lives differently because of them. There is a tacit, perhaps embarrassed, return to the new sincerity.
One downside of people’s desire to be influenced is that I can’t write anything without fearing that someone will misinterpret my ruminations as a manifesto and hold me accountable for them on those grounds. I don’t have an answer to Frost’s dilemma. I’m not a proper “leftist”; I’m literally a book guy who was forced to read a lot of 20th-century Marxist cultural theory to pass his Ph.D. exams, and if I had hit puberty before my mid-twenties, I would have chosen to be an illiterate internet thot, given my great dick and charismatic personality.
But as a God-fearing man, I would say that I think people tend to seek their redemption. Life has a literary quality, and people do too. Is that just affirmative culture? Maybe so. But it’s not a bad thing to affirm.
In sum
There is no in sum. I considered deleting the paragraphs about “Resignation” in case someone should interpret it as my tacit position on the Israel/Palestine situation, and I considered deleting the whole post in case I came off as too nihilistic and bourgeois (I aim for tastefully nihilistic and bourgeois) or simply over-citational. I’ve just been turning a lot over in my head. I thought that in writing this piece, I could create analytical distinctions—between earned and unearned hope, between hope and redemption, between complacency and resignation, between art and politics—that would bring clarity to what I actually believe and could defend, lest one of you goons tries arguing with me in the fucking comments. But perhaps there’s nothing to parse, because I believe in essentially the same things as the people I dislike. Damn. Sign me up for the Task Force to Unfuck the World.
Anyway, I’ve been writing this mess all day. I was going to sleep on it, but fuck it. I need to go meal prep so I have high-protein, calorie-dense meals to eat at my email job so maybe I can quit it and start an OnlyFans.
Melancholy is such a seductive mistress, n’est-ce pas?