Quarterly Volume VII || Spring 2024
Chers amis de L’Esprit,
Bienvenue à our seventh quarterly, Spring 2024! In this edition, we have new original writing, calls for submissions, news and updates, and more. We also have contributor publication announcements and a new Meditation by Editor Dan White, Senseless Ilium: Speedboat and the Amoral Consciousness.
L’Esprit was thrilled to officially launch Issue Four last month, with a reading by our contributors. Thanks to all those who came out, supported, and read!
As always we start, in the tradition of Eliot’s Criterion, with A Commentary.
A Commentary
In the sky last night there was nothing remarkable to see. There had been rumors, all throughout the day, of the northern lights, timed off by some routine cataclysm of the solar system and creeping beyond its usual range. I went to the lake and found nothing, only a dozen people emerging from the darkness with their phones, lined up along the shore with their backs to the skyline as it shimmered off the water, taking solemn photos of nothing. In there, someplace, must be a metaphor.
Lately I’ve been thinking about criticism. About what it is and, more interestingly, what its not. Or, what is not to be counted as such. Last week I read Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Parade, which I’ll be covering for Chicago Review of Books. It’s a remarkable work, perhaps her best in twenty years, a radical re-orientation of the form (yet again). As anyone reading this probably knows, I spend a great of time writing, reading, and teaching Cusk. What has always struck me about her work is the belief she has in the power of art to do philosophical work, in the conviction that criticism need not trace convention.
In this issue, our fourth, we’ve another eclectic range of writing. Alongside several great stories, there’s both criticism and translation, something we hope to continue to find. We’re very excited to feature an original translation of Paul Verlaine’s nonfiction piece Du parnasse contemporain, done by Robert Boucheron, from the French. We also have two debuts, Scarlet and Red, Amber, each being the first published piece by their respective authors. And we’re honored to have Jaclyn Gilbert as the Issue Four Featured Writer, with an extract of her new novel, Pauline, accompanied by a conversation.
We launched Issue Four a few weeks ago with another virtual reading, and also had a second in-person event at Madison Street Books in Chicago, partnered with the UIC Program for Writers and Chicago Review of Books. It was great to see Issue Three contributor Taylor Thornburg and Issue Four contributor Rebecca Fishow, and hear their excellent work. We hope to do more such events, both in Chicago and New York, in the near future.
Issue Four also sees the inauguration of the anticipated treatise by Editor Jessica Denzer, How Not To Write: On Authorial Identity, Creative Morality, and the Female Narrative. This series, which will be released in (approximately) four parts, starts off with her essay to close I4, In the Garden Where the Bones are Buried: Barthes, Foucault, Eliot, and ‘I’. As we have done since the beginning, L’Esprit seeks to add to the compendium of literary thought by both words and deeds, in curating, publishing, and promoting, the best fiction, nonfiction, and criticism and we find. Happily, of late, it seems that last is making itself somewhat more heard.
And it is that critical work that always seems to be the most contentious. I’ve begun to work on my PhD preliminary exam lists, as well as preparing papers for upcoming academic conferences; work that is, for the most part, centered around Cusk. Accordingly I’ve been thinking more about the type of critical work we hope to feature at the journal, and that I try to write myself. We might return to the metaphorical. Much of the academic criticism I read, the peer-reviewed scholarship, is, it seems to me, like a fortress. It sits on its own ground, steady and secure, nearly impossible to dislodge or even to challenge on its own terms. It does not, however, move: it stays where it is, among what it knows, and endures.
We need this work, of course, as we need laws, and rules, and routine. The criticism I find myself drawn to, however—that of Woolf, or Cusk, or Zadie Smith—is more like a raiding party. It moves from place to place, quickly and perhaps at random, striking here and there against ideas or thoughts, worrying little about fixity or surety or sense. It covers ground and upends order, living on chaos and following its own direction. The academics, it is known, do not like this type of criticism. It is the criticism of the novelists; the truth found in the experience rather than the end.
In Paris next month, when Parade launches, Cusk will be giving a talk, and I’ll be there, thinking about criticism. About what it means to think about art, and what it says about ourselves and our institutions that we have so many rules on how to do so. About what might happen if we break them, and the things we could see if we look the other way.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
D. W. White, 12 May 2024
Call for Submissions
L’Esprit is now reading for Issue Five, due out in mid-October.
As always we’re especially interested in getting more critical work (be it book reviews, literary criticism, autotheory, or craft essays), and writing in translation. We have a Submittable project dedicated to essay proposals, as well.
See our Submission Guidelines for more details on all of the above.
Submittable
L’Esprit is on Submittable!
Find us here.
Publication Announcements
L’Esprit is once again happy to share a few recent publication announcements and other news from past contributors!
“One Shoe On,” by Richard Risemberg in October Hill Magazine
“An Ugly Little House,” by Richard Risemberg in Big Wing Review
Richard’s noir novel, My Turn to Die, has been accepted by Rock and a Hard Place, with publication expected early next year.
“Brushing Sand” by Ryan F. Love in NewMyths
“The Prairie’s Song” by Emily J. Weisenberger in Tales to Terrify
At the university graduation, a family looks by Karen Walker in Bending Genres
“Case Study” by Kat Meads in A Thin Slice of Anxiety
“Disturbed Houses” by Kat Meads and Philip Rosenthal in Gone Lawn
“X Marks the (Landing) Spot” by Kat Meads in Miracle Monocle
“Becoming Inanimate” by G. M. Monks in The Medical Literary Messenger
“A Simple Misdemeanor” by G. M. Monks, finalist in New Millennium Writings Awards 56
“You Never Know What Helps” by G. M. Monks, shortlisted in Lascaux Review
“Realism” by KK Fiorrucci in La Piccioletta Barca, which has been awarded the La Piccioletta Barca Prize 2024.More can be found at kkfiorrucci.com.
Tyler Ayers will be teaching English on a Fulbright Grant in Taiwan for the 2024-2025 school year.
And finally, the novella “All According to Norm” by Beatriz Seelaender!
Félicitations à tous!
Félicitations à tous!
Le Traité
Editor Jessica Denzer has begun her multi-part treatise exploring the intersection of writing, the writer, and the world.
Read the first installment of How Not To Write: On Authorial Identity, Creative Morality, and the Female Narrative in Issue Four.
In The Garden Where the Bones are Buried
And be warned.
Issue Four at Le Magasin
A reminder that we now offer print and digital editions of all full issues alongside our current online versions. Find everything on the dedicated section of the website, Le Magasin.
Issue Four is now available in print and digital editions!
All previous issues are also available in all three formats.
Thanks to everyone for your support of fearless writing!
Editorial Meditation Six Original Work
For the first time in a few Quaterlies, we have an Editorial Meditation by Dan White, touching on Didion, Cusk, teaching, point-of-view, and consciousness en route to a discussion of narrative amorality in Speedboat.
Find an extract of Senseless Ilium below, and find the full essay here.
Senseless Ilium
Speedboat and the Amoral Consciousness
In the English language, there are tricks. Following these tricks are clues—hints and whispers of reason, sense, method to the madness, as one great moralist said of a rather unscrupulous protagonist. Polonius, of course, was referring to Hamlet’s words, and the insouciance with which he used them. Insouciance, from the French, comes approximately to sans souci, a quintessence of trick—no worries. Another tricky word, at least for me, is morality, which often as not I find to have typed out as mortality, that slippery little T, audible for us, forming at once a jeu des mots and inciting incident for this very paper. Indeed, to read the novel as it stands today, the moral and the mortal are not so very distinct at all.
It is another Shakespearean epicenter who kicks off Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, as Maria, speaking for a moment in her own voice, candidly approaches evil, picking it up like a stone and examining it: “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.” In his Introduction to the novel, David Thompson especially admires this moment; it strikes him as notable, that a heroine of a major novel knows of this thing called evil—“I think it’s true of the modern novel, and perhaps the novel as a whole, that it does not often speak of evil.” On first glance it is a rather odd comment from a major literary critic; how could one contend that novels (and we can take Thompson to mean literarynovels—the categorical angst over Capote’s In Cold Blood comes to mind), could avert so foundational a component of lived experience? But he’s not wrong, indeed far from it. More it seems than any other art form, it is the novel which is made to traffic in the ethical, the righteous, the right and the wrong. The, in a word, moral. What might account for this demand? Perhaps it is due to the medium; language has a way of achieving an elucidation that is at once more intimate and less expansive than, say, artwork (had we but time, Horatio, we might speak here of Wittgenstein)—there is simply not as much room, in a novel, for the audience to maneuver through the shadowed Acheron of interpretation. What is said, is said: it is indicated, pointed towards, called into being. And because we as a species think very highly of thinking very highly of ourselves and our opinions, what is allowed to be exposed in so stark a manner must, of course, be good.
There is also the matter of the voice.
The novel speaks in a voice, and again due to language this is done in a manner far more directly than elsewhere; there is an unmistakeable—indeed foundational—dialectic feel to a novel, that conversation between reader and narrator, be it heterodiegetic or homodiegetic (outside the story or in—in the third person the first). We simply don’t seem to like it when presented with the sensation that we are engaged in colloquy with a morally ambiguous creature, be it narrating entity or protagonist. As Thompson says of his experiences in recommending Didion’s masterpiece, “And sometimes people come back with a hurt look: the book is very…sordid, isn’t it? And tough—by which they mean not a tough read, but hard-hearted. Sometimes people flat out say the story is bleak and unpleasant, and in the end they couldn’t like Maria enough.”
And in the end they couldn’t like Maria enough. That, it seems, gets us to the heart of things. The novel as a form, certainly of the twenty-first-century vintage, dislikes what Thompson calls “evil” and we might call immorality—somehow, in the contemporary cultural landscape, with its censorious (dare we say rather Victorian) aspect, art and particularly literature are to revert back into (often obvious) celebrations of whatever might be the latest word on righteousness. This caprice is essential to the problem as trends change rapidly, and what was yesterday’s cause célèbre is tomorrow’s bête noir. (That all of this is driven by the blind cynicism and sheer avarice of capitalism is left to go unremarked). The burden, too, falls unevenly: female protagonists (and authors) navigate a more morally demanding marketplace than their male counterparts—one needs only to look at the receptive reputations of Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgård, most notably in the United States, to appreciate the disparity.
In our class on Cusk and the Self, I give this example to my undergraduates, highlighting the ways in which the label “autofiction,” in particular (a concept which they tend to find exceedingly alien), is frequently used to denigrate the artistic accomplishments of novelists such as Cusk. In trying to teach them the ways in which a novel might be dissected, to separate and comprehend its discrete functions, we talk about the linear narrative, and how it is used to reify morality via the prism of female characters. They are freshman, nearly none of them English majors, and the methodological approach we must therefore take to literary analysis is by their deliberateness illuminating. As we come by degrees to realize, there are levels of graduation to this requirement of morality in fiction. Readers of the mainstream novel (at any rate, the ideation of them in the minds of publishing executives) especially do not like a narrator who is not sufficiently averse to the darker side of life—or at least does not receive a final judgment—and thus morality is more obviously a question in the first person. And, finally, the audience very especially does not like female characters who break the rules; the morally objectionable female narrator is, more than anyone, persona non grata.
This dynamic is, of course, at the heart of those twenty-first-century responses to Play It As It Lays; as a heroine, Maria Wyeth is many things—alluring and mysterious and precipitous and sad—but she is certainly not “moral,” whatever that may mean. And, as Thompson shrewdly observes, Didion’s switch to a close third person impacts the book’s orientation towards morality; Maria exists in a fairly coherent linear narrative, rendering her amorality intra-textual, i.e. within the progression of the fictive concern. In this way the book is closer to Cusk’s Arlington Park, with a heterodiegetic narrative entity crafting a cogent storyline but refusing to evaluate its protagonist on moral grounds. But there is another elaboration of narrative amorality, one born of a homodiegetic mind that so comprehensively reduces the idea of the linear narrative as to construct a fictive world of pure thought and observation, idiosyncratic and self-perpetuating, where questions of morality appear at turns quant, preposterous, and unimaginable. From Elizabeth Bennet onwards the traditional female narrative inhabits a linear plot which leads to and itself embodies morality; thus when it is ruptured, the break is often total—Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Duras’ Emily L. Through this declension we come to Speedboat and the amoral consciousness of Jen Fain.
Au Revoir
We hope you’ve enjoyed our Spring Quarterly, and keep in touch for some exciting developments this summer!
Thank you for your support of fearless writing, and à la prochaine.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
L'Esprit Literary Review 