#neoreaction

Neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin makes an extended case for the Oxfordian answer to the Shakespeare authorship question. Or what passes for a case anyway. Mostly this great hater of democracy and populism just demagogues for his presumedly puerile audience, labeling Shakespeare—as in the actual Will from Stratford—a “rentboy” and an “illiterate Ghanian immigrant.” His clever idea is to set up the Stratford thesis as an anticipation of today’s diversity-and-equity critique of the canon.

Then he assails a straw man, the supposed Stratfordian belief that Shakespeare was a “democrat,” which nobody believes. Shakespeare fully expresses his view of “people power” in Julius Caesar’s popular sparagmos of Cinna the Poet. And if Julius Caesar held the early American stage and then became the staple American high school text, it was because the drama celebrates not democracy, which Shakespeare didn’t distinguish from resentful and fanatic mob violence, but republicanism in the tragic figure of Brutus. 

As for Shakespeare’s overall politics, well, it’s always hard to say with a dramatist, who stages conflicts rather than enumerating theses, and this chameleon poet makes it harder than most. Yarvin quotes every reactionary’s favorite passage, Ulysses’s hymn to degree from Troilus and Cressida, but this is the utterance of a single dramatic character. Rosenkrantz—a sycophantic idiot—argues the same case in Hamlet while kissing Claudius’s ring. By contrast, that play’s hero pronounces what I suspect to be closer to the poet’s own political credo: “The king is a thing of nothing.” 

In my reading, Shakespeare is a political nihilist, placing his faith in no institution and no ambitious men. He’s lyrical, where he is lyrical, only about love and private life and nature: precisely the quasi-anarchist (not democratic) anti-politics I find throughout modernity in writers who hail from the lower middle class—Yarvin, like a Marxoid polemicist, abuses the bard with this label too—from Keats to Dickens to Joyce (see my essay on Les Murray for a longer explanation). 

But the strongest argument against Oxford’s claim is literary. Does de Vere’s da-dum da-dum doggerel really “rock” like Shakespeare? I count only one potential metrical inversion: in the first foot of the first line, “is” may be stressed for interrogatory emphasis, mainly because the line is short a syllable. But even if you read all the interrogatives as stressed, which you don’t have to, that’s hardly a poetically surprising reversal. Otherwise, the thing tick-tocks robotically like a metronome. Similarly, “the way he plays with the caesura”—what way? The caesura is precisely where we’d expect it to be in each line, not least because Oxford punctuates six of the 10 lines right in the middle, between two balanced sets of iambic feet. I can only conclude that Yarvin relies on an audience ignorant of his subject.

Ulysses’s speech, by contrast, is in Shakespeare’s general style, or at least his mature style, gnarled and enjambed, bristling less with neat Metaphysical paradoxes than with a careering rush of concrete and mingled tropes. Here is play with the caesura, sound mimicking sense: “And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets...” Likewise, I recall that Frank Kermode thought hendiadys the Shakespearean rhetorical signature, sign of his copiousness and bounty: “Divert and crack, rend and deracinate / The unity and married calm of states.” 

on the topic, this was one of the only good normie-media takes on nrx, imo (from 2015)

Context: a discussion over at the SubStack of my recent interlocutor Default Friend about the is-it-or-isn’t-it? semi-renascent reactionary arts scene. Above is a quote from the essay DF is responding to. According to the editor of the journal that published the essay, we would all take it more seriously if we knew the pseudonymous author’s real name—apparently a name we’d be familiar with. 

I’m getting sick of these sudden intimations everywhere about how behind the scenes all the great ones have gone right-wing now, and it would curl your hair if you only knew who they were... If I, a semi-employed adjunct professor, can publish (admittedly liberal) critiques of compulsory pronoun sharing and land acknowledgements under my own name, then perhaps people whose names are better known (and bank accounts fuller) than mine can somehow seize their courage and say what they mean.

Anyway, Default asks if dissidents want a “right-wing” or an “anti-woke” arts scene to succeed contemporary hegemonic left-liberalism. Here I would like to recall what has historically been the position of Grand Hotel Abyss going back to the dawn of contemporary social justice in 2012, that what we need is apolitical art. Not apolitical in the sense of having no political implications—anything can have political implications—but because it has no predetermined message or motive, no compulsory drive toward moral didacticism or coherence-in-service-of-the-public-good or, God help us, a policy outcome. 

But if the quote above from our pseudonymous reactionary—code name: Aeneas Tacitus Minor (sunt lacrimae rerum!)—is anything to go by, the new reactionary art will be be as moralistic and philistine as what it proposes to replace. You want non-progressive art? Find me a less progressive 20th-century major play than A Streetcar Named Desire. What is the social virtue of this play? What is the political message? Where is the positive LGBTQIA+ representation? Instead, it makes Othello look like Arthur Miller. You see in my lectures (here they are for our audiovisual Monday: part one, part two) how I soften it for the kids, but the meaning of the drama is the illicit pleasure in watching a fatal collision of masculine modern democracy with feminine archaic aristocracy, in watching Williams battle it out with himself, the sadomasochistic pleasure he takes in imagining his wailing, poetic anima raped, his ambitious animus doing the job, all on the rancid mattress of the postwar South. He is Blanche and Stanley, the violator and the violated. Is Williams both woman-obsessed and secretly misogynistic? Yes—a frequent phenomenon with male writers, whether straight, gay, or in-between—but these are neutral descriptions of the drama’s inner wellspring; their censorious use as moralistic terms of reproach, whether wielded by the neoreactionary or the social justice warrior, is irrelevant to the art.

Streetcar is apolitical art. He wrote freely and with a discipline of his own against the mind police who show up at the drama’s end, the ones who lobotomized his sister. Art back then could be more of a refuge from such enforcers. You could write that way when you weren’t expected to project public-health slogans on the proscenium; you could express and even resolve your complicated psychosexual tensions (we all have them) in huge public image-metaphor complexes—back before today’s enforcers, who have invaded art itself, the “mental health” awareness advocates and the academo-bureaucrats of theory and the cultish vigilante youth cadres they recruited online, who locked us all inside pronoun prisons and fake diagnostic labels and demanded adamantine identities and positive representations, rather than the high art of tragedy: beautiful Apollonian tableaux of terrifying Dionysian flux, whether we like it or not. 

Here’s a podcast if you need something to listen to on the day before our audiovisual Monday. Why the above, the most recent episode of Alex Kaschuta’s Subversive? Because it draws together two recent themes here at Grand Hotel Abyss, the gnostic subtext of modernity and The New Conservatism, particularly the apparent open entrance of neoreaction into the corridors of power. 

Kaschuta is the interviewer extraordinaire of everyone who’s anyone against the liberal consensus, whether post-left, old left, old lib, paleocon, neoreactionary, alt-right, alienated theorycel, etc., and her show’s archive is perhaps the best resource we have for investigating these currents (though not for the ideologically timorous). 

Her most recent guest, Wolf Tivy, is the founder of the NRx-adjacent magazine Palladium, which has just announced its partnership with the World Economic Forum, thus signaling a tectonic shift in the governing world elite’s tactical allegiances. It’s urgent, then, to hear Tivy’s thoughts on the irrelevance and harmfulness of democracy, on the necessity of merging the Christian and scientific worldviews to prepare for an inevitable transhumanism, and on a future humanity waging nuclear war across the heavens (a positive development in his eyes). You can tell she’d been skeptical of his rather patronizing and millenarian performance by the ironical episode title.

When Kaschuta hesitates at his, yes, gnostic prophecies like Chesterton paling before Blake and John 2:4, he asks her, like some Cormac McCarthy villain, “Do you identify with the flesh or with the principle that animates it?” When she asks him his favorite subversive writer, he rejects the framing of the question with his own assertion of the True Mainstream in Exile attitude and then offers Henry David Thoreau.

We’ll have to talk at length about Thoreau someday. I was taught to read him as an esoteric writer the meaning of whose texts is the opposite of what is popularly construed from them. My teacher, a brilliant generalist scholar who also specialized in Thoreau, was one of the only openly right-wing professors I ever had in my protracted journey through academe. Thoreau, gentle nature-lover? Not quite: “Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome” (Walden).