Great American Allusions

On John Pistelli's 'Major Arcana'

Simon Vouet, The Fortune Teller, c. 1620, Oil on canvas, Getty Images

Major Arcana is possibly the greatest title of the twenty-first century, depending on how you pronounce it. Major Ar-kay-nuh with an Arkansas accent won’t do, nor will trying to rhyme it with Arkansas, either. And as for the German My-orr, let us bid it a preventative Auf Weidersehen. The only way to pronounce it is Major Ar-caw-nuh, with its deserved fluidity. The novel, however, is in part a pronoun novel, meaning it deals with one of the least fluid grammatical phenomena of our times, but from a playful omniscience beyond popular morality that may very well retire the gender genre. Let us then, already at play in the high celestial geography of the third person, look down first with vertigo at the openwork Gothic cathedral author John Pistelli has fashioned in tribute to the maximal, modernist novel, and let the myopia of post-modern grammar set in later, in the senescence of this review.

Major Arcana is a baroque structure, much in the way that literary talent is baroque today, and literary grandeur an outmoded concept in our late-stage era of the publishing industrial complex. But Pistelli, a fellow nth-generation goomba, scanned the landscape of disposable low-brow-upmarket “literary fiction” and answered instead to the architectural demands of 2020s geography, and to the true motives of literature: marketless, talented inspiration. Major Arcana is thus a novel of rococo intricacies and Old Testament contingencies, wedding neoclassical scale and style with all the seductive originality of the self-taught architect. The novel contains the internet without being enclosed by it. (After all, the internet needs buildings to house its routers, and Major Arcana’s characters are like this church’s stations of the cross.) Pistelli’s Gaddis-like troupe and their tapestries of interlining private details are shepherded through these various chambers, catching the tints and hues of cathedral glass and then darkening into shadow down long hallways, their crescents of profile caught here and there in the novel’s stained glass candlelight. Even its ARC pages are thick and glossy with grandiloquence.

We may imagine that Pistelli took a day to rest before submitting his monumental creation to no response from agents, which will, I think, be seen in the near-future as the ceremonial adumbration of brilliance. Poverty and obscurity have always split the knife edge between genius and frustrated inanity, but in Pistelli’s case radio silence from the publishing world is a portentous sign, the result probably of his heterodox handling of “the gender question,” and the cause of Pistelli’s serializing of Major Arcana on Substack instead, through which he got a deal with Belt Publishing, and now has the attention of the New Yorker. The latter an achievement that even Big Five marketers no longer promise.

My overindulgence of Catholicism heretofore is not from Italian-American camaraderie: Major Arcana teems with churches, Christian eclogues and a campus building nicknamed “The Cathedral.” In fact, the novel begins with a filmed suicide on the doorstep of such a house of God, with college student Jacob Morrow shooting himself in the face and classmate Ash Del Greco recording it for the internet. The gunshot and its mysterious motive rings out over the first three acts of the novel, resounding through the corridors and embrasures of the cathedral-structure of Major Arcana, sending radiations out to its characters and weaving forwards and backwards in time — this nonlinearity being the novel’s central theme. I will perform the reviewer’s curtsy by leaving the elucidation of Morrow’s motive to the final pages of the novel too, letting the gunshot hang unresolved over these paragraphs.

So let us have the characters. Flowing from Morrow’s suicide, the novel moves in backstories of discursive diminuendos and reminiscences: there is Jacob Morrow himself, and his single mother Jessica who sulks through the lonely, dingy corridors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries before giving birth to Jacob and losing him to a self-aimed pistol. There is Ellen Chandler and Diane Del Greco, lovers of comic book illustrator Marco Cohen, who together partially constitute the blurred parentage of Jacob’s suicide filmographer Ash Del Greco.

Then, finally, there is Simon Magnus, the true locus of the novel, the central axis in the romantic quadrangle that gives birth to Ash, and the major arcanum to the others characters’ minor arcana, so to speak. Magnus is a genderless, pronounless human mimetically culpable for both the suicide of Jacob Morrow and the birth of Ash Del Greco. Magnus is something of a crossdressing Judge Holden. He is an inscrutable literary comic book genius who has transcended the staid three dimensionalities of literature by infusing his comic books with the non-linearity of tarot cards, whose transcendence of art over matter influences the private cosmologies and ethics of both Ash, who mistakes him as her genetic father, and Jacob. This is Major Arcana’s other major theme: art’s supremacy over reality, the foundational reality of metaphor. And in practice, the novel is self-referential, or to quote the closing lines of the book, it is an exemplum of quod erat demonstrandum — its ethos is: yes, this is how good writing can be. Or, remember what good new novels were like?

One can feel this ethos in almost every sentence. Campus colonnades in pring are overhung with “branches burst into autumnal flame or wetly budded pale green.” Wetly budded! This is the type of supposedly obsolete poesy that constitutes Pistelli’s tenor and mode. But Major Arcana is what they used to call a complete work, meaning two things in this case. The first is that the world and its colors and its weather and its times of day are described. This, after all, is what writers with metaphorical intelligence do, and what tenured mediocrities and high-ranking style monopolists inanely decree is against the “rules” of writing, for, incapable of mixing melody with translucid association themselves, it is emotionally and professionally important that their flaws be unattemptable and that another writer’s misguided undertakings of the same are rewarded with the bleating dismissals of a trained supermajority of bland conformists.

Let us catch our breath. This metaphorical intelligence means that some days are “storm-darkened.” (Yes, with a modernist hyphen.) Some characters “stare out across the grass, the hollows in the green bright with wet snow.” Heat is “liquescent.” Enwombed and overdue infants are “trapped sideways in the amnion.” Mirrors “desilver,” and lacy garters press “inflamed spirals and arabesques into the pale flesh of thighs.” Simon Magnus’s first adolescent love, whom he meets “in that very forest into which Simon Magnus had always looked up from Crime and Punishment or Vigilante Comics to await some dark revelation’s emergence,” leads Magnus up to her bedroom that very night where she “dropped herself to the carpet in a blossom of pink tulle.” Proustian paragraphs swelling between parentheses engorge themselves with the maximalist self-enchantment of such language and such artistic languor. This is a novel which isn’t concerned with the metrics of speeding a reluctant reader through it as fast as possible like an advertisement, but with the unique spacetimes of its own prism. It is concerned about creating a world with its own cosmology and allowing the reader, a guest in this world, the courtesy of relaxing within it. It is a total artwork one can rest their legs in. (Speaking of such artistic ethos, someone’s been reading Nabokov, for homonymy is used as a synonym for synonymous.)

The second sense in which Major Arcana is a complete work is that it teems with Magnus’ apocrypha, bibliography, critical biography, his incandescent influences and influence, the romantic lineages that inspired his female characters, press clippings, quotable interviews, and Balzacian essayistic asides on comic book history, culture and gender politics. There are books within the book — Major Arcana, like Remembrance of Things Past, is the book Ash Del Greco decides to write in its closing pages. Speaking of gender politics, Magnus, who begins wearing dresses after the suicide of his first love, starts a campaign from Iagoic motives to enforce they/them pronouns on everyone at the college where he teaches, before taking his argument to its logical conclusion and declaring the non-existence of pronouns altogether. Simon Magnus therefore has no pronoun: he is SimonMagnusself. (No, this is not a typo, but the maximalist dressage which Magnus sports throughout the novel, with any instance of Simon Magnus’ pronoun replaced by Simon Magnus’ name, like so. It is the kind of stylistically conclusive Joyceanism that put blooms and lilies off limits for entire generations of writers, and will I think be a point of envy for other novelists attempting pronoun definitude.) This, Pistelli insinuates, is feminism taken to its logical conclusion by academe, in the same way women’s studies have slowly evolved into gender studies in an Overton window of logical decline that — and I think this is one of Pistelli’s other insinuations — misses the mark of the true phenomenon of transgender reality, which Simon Magnus also exhibits despite manipulating. This is the satire hiding so successfully in the novel’s outer poignancy that it transmutes into it.

But let us draw toward our final theme, the transgender, through the libido first. Some novels have definite libidos. Harlot’s Ghost, for instance, possesses the libido of sodomy, Amis novels that of amorous heterosexuality, and Lolita . . . . But Major Arcana has an egalitarian libido, meaning its prose is pansexual. Meaning, to put a finer point on it, that in the pantheon of its attractions and trysts it is drawn equally toward the transgender or genderfluid as it is to the heteronormative. Ellen Chandler, Simon Magnus’ girlfriend, is attracted to Magnus’ crossdressing, and later to the erect penis coming out of the folds of a dress of a vagrant in her passenger seat. That lacy garter I quoted earlier presses inflamed spirals into Magnus’ leg. Where the novel interrogates and refutes the internet-inspired absurdity of entropic pronouns and the American addiction to medical lancets to solve spiritual dilemmas, it is also imbued with a sensual and a romantic love for all schools of androgyny. It is in love with the human. To quote one of the novel’s own oft-repeated quotes by Aleister Crowley, “Love is the law.” In so doing, it reroutes the metaphysical path of transgender reality back to its original path before it got diverted by technofeudal algorithms. This is Simon Magnus’ doing.

It is in the wake of his high school girlfriend’s suicide that Simon Magnus begins to wear a dress. The insinuation, by Ellen Chandler, that this habit develops as a way of inhabiting the female, the true flesh of nature, is met by violent rebuke in Magnus — a punch in the mouth. Magnus is a complication. He is not a good person in the sense that his ethics are laid solely at the feet of higher artistic callings. Morally incorrect, he happens to be right about pronouns. Of the “students seduced by politics, seduced, as far as Simon Magnus could see, through a screen,” adverse to pain, Magnus thinks:

They should . . . be made to suffer. Suffering must be the passkey to any and every more unusual style of individuation, not to mention any serious achievement in the arts. Most people ought not even attempt to transgress, first, because the world requires its preponderance of normal natures to replicate the species and sustain civilization, and, second, because most will botch it with their incorrigible bad taste. These brevetted brats with their pronoun stickers, they — they/them! — were not the losers but the winners of the social game, the game of power, a game for which Simon Magnus always at least tried to have, yes, contempt.

Contempt for the game of power notwithstanding, Magnus’s ensuing public declaration of they/them pronouns nullifies feminist critique of his comic books’ “putative homophobia . . . transphobia . . . misogyny.” He also announces to his college that he is going by these pronouns and moves to make compulsory the use of they/them pronouns for every individual on campus. Two warring Shakespeare scholars join forces to oppose him — an aging New Critic (male) and a second-wave feminist (lesbian). The first is forced into retirement, the second placed on administrative leave by a queer theorist, her intellectual usurper. Then, in a Machiavellian fit of ecstasy, and “inspired by that apocryphal student of Heraclitus’ who’d surpassed the master by arguing that you couldn’t even step into the same river once,” Magnus “hastened for a mandate” that eliminated all use of pronouns, resulting in Simon Magnus’ use of Simon Magnus’ own name, Simon Magnus, as Simon Magnus’s sole pronoun. Colleges across the country adopt the measure, it becomes the focal point of the culture war, it achieves virality. Thus, Magnus uses the internal logic of gender pronoun theory to completely undo it.

But this Iagoic madness leads Magnus to a logical contradiction, himself:

Simon Magnus became aware of a contradiction in the very argument Simon Magnus had used to win the argument for the “they/them,” a logic which redefined the human as at once an aggregate plural mass and a teeming and inwardly diverse individual. Simon Magnus asked SimonMagnusself: “Well, which is it? In theory, it could be both — anything can be true in theory — but which was more authentic to experience? If an individual was already a “them,” then the crowd could only oversimplify and reduce this aggregate. Just because the aggregate could be disassembled by analysis did not mean it should be assumed prematurely into an abstract whole. Analysis proved only that . . . .

People should have to say your name every time, and your name moreover should be some unutterable constellation of multisensory stimulants. When they say your name they should have to dance to paint, to cry and compose a cantata, Simon Magnus argued. . . . My pronouns are the insides of cheeks gripped between my teeth and the flanges of flesh between my toes, the tingling sensation in my perineum when I look out from a great height and the languid heat of my head on an endless winter weekend afternoon reading abed. There are no pronouns. Call me Simon Magnus or call me nothing at all.”

The novel, in a sense, is an attempt to do just this: categorize Magnus through its artistic totality, dialectically resynthesize the identity of the individual. We, if I may claim parity with all readers, end up landing with a foot in these two realms: identity is something far beyond the myopia of a pronoun — it is also something far beyond the far-sighted categories of gender. One of the many achievements of Major Arcana is that Pistelli, a college professor, is able to take this gender question, of which we’ve all been awaiting its novelistic treatment on a fictional campus (this is it folks!), and reassuringly enclose it within a very gentle paradox. It is the pronoun novel — or, better put, MajorArcanaself.

So is Major Arcana, perhaps, “the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century?” as Ross Barkan proposes on the novel’s front cover? Such an attempt at vaunted implication deserves an attempted answer. I think it is more the allusive great American novel of our century, now firmly entrenched in its quarter-life crisis, not knowing which direction to go. Major Arcana is that direction. It is a minorpiece as opposed to a masterpiece, pointing with great upward wisps of diaphanous cloud-work toward the lost, watercolor touch of true literature; it is the sun breaking through the thunderhead of upmarket fiction in dark, modernist iridescence. In this sense it is a work of major Americana, exuding the built-in weathering of the lost twentieth-century form, written in modernism’s alluringly de-silvered prose. It’s like a Gothic cathedral erected in modern times, its stonework trimmed with built-in chip marks and crumbling intricacy to show the history that stands behind it. Major Arcana is a novel whose design patterns of anciency, its stone corridors worn to silk by its characters’ heavy foot-traffic, lead to the collapsed threshold of an arch, a feat we make ourselves Dark Age fools by considering lost.

Vincenzo Barney is a writer and Vanity Fair contributor. He is working
on a book about Cormac McCarthy and his muse Augusta Britt, a story he
broke last year. Barney graduated from Bennington College in 2018.