Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account

At fourteen years old, I took a job as a cashier at a Christian bookstore. The owners were Christian fundamentalist-lite, whereas I was coerced by my parents to attend a lukewarm Protestant service every few weeks, but more than happy to put my insider knowledge to use for $6.75 an hour. What I most recall, aside from the ironic epidemic of Christian shoplifters, is the Harry Potter-level enthusiasm for Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's Left Behind novels, a multi-volume morality tale of the people "left behind" after Jesus's Second Coming, when true Christians have been "raptured" into heaven.1

I was only at the store through book three in what is a now-sizable franchise: sixteen novels, forty young adult books, a graphic novel, and a few films, to say nothing of the spin-offs. And yet, with just three novels in the marketing arsenal, the series had a dedicated wall-sized shelf, complete with enhanced lighting, life-sized character cutouts, and colorful posters. Though the (only slightly) more sizable wall of Bibles was also outfitted with dynamic lighting, the Left Behind display held pride-of-place closest to the register.

As nostalgic as I may feel recalling those customers who would drop in for an hour every few weeks, to check a release date or see what other books might be available in the "Left Behind-genre," it's not warm-fuzzies that bring the series back to mind. My recent work on white nationalist fiction has led to many an afternoon spent contemplating some new racist parable in which a heroic white militia violently cleanses the nation (or when they are especially ambitious, the globe) of the calculating Jews and their ignorant brown and black followers. Why do so many of the racist tropes and apocalyptic warnings recall the Christian book series of my teen years? How do devotees of the milquetoast series occupy the same space in my memory as readers of a canonical violent fantasy like William Pierce's The Turner Diaries?^⁠2

The fact that I have fond memories of Left Behind's earliest fanbase has undoubtedly led me to more circumspection in evaluating their beloved series than the rest of my research archive. This caution doesn't represent a resistance to examining parallels with white nationalist fiction where they exist. If calling out a piece of fiction — particularly, Christian fiction — as white nationalist-adjacent is a sort of critical indictment, I find myself exercising more deliberation in making the argument, and assessing my own handicaps in exercising dispassion. It is fair to say that before this research rabbit-hole, my reading list was comprised primarily of writers who gesture at the now-mythologized "Day of the Rope" — the pinnacle Turner Diaries scene in which non-whites and "race-defiling" white women are lynched and mutilated en masse — as the height of wish fulfillment. It may be unsurprising that, with these books at the forefront, I have been less concerned with the critical generosity of my approach. And yet, without treating white nationalist fiction as a substantial literature worth examining and, with some intellectual humility, acknowledging my lack of fluency in the subculture that produced this literature, research on this archive promises to be little more than an exercise in judgment-saturated plot description, written for people inclined to agree with my argument before they read it.

This essay is an account of new formalism, framed as "new modesty," that serves as a strategy for generous inquiry, a way of engaging texts that have the capacity to ideologically and rhetorically overwhelm efforts to discuss them. In short, it is a method for spending hours in racist dystopian prose—or whatever marginalized archive you fancy—without driving yourself crazy. For those who view formalism as a turn away from political discourse at a time when the need to lean in is more urgent than ever, this approach is a crucial tool for formulating a more informed intervention, of either the humble or aggrandizing kind. More specifically, this informed intervention amounts to the kind of dispassionate critical insights that only a certain kind of textually-anchored, language-level analysis can produce. If it sounds embarrassingly simple to propose an examination confined to diction, idiom, imagery, trope, genre, and the like, as theoretical praxis, I would simply say that, depending on the archive, the outcomes and implications of such an examination are anything but simple, revealing nuances that a myopic preoccupation with context shields or obscures. In fact, I would argue that formalism must be a theoretical priority for scholars distressed by the new political norms, committed to adopting evolving frames for understanding the very "end times," pandemic-defined world in which we find ourselves. This means accepting that the modestly intoned pronouncements resulting from formalist inquiry will, to certain peers, read as insufficiently unequivocal in their moral rejection of the "problematic" texts in question (in this case a mild descriptor, however loathe I am to use this most smug of accusations). This also means acknowledging the influence that such anticipated (dis)approval may have over our practices of literary theory in the first place.It is safe to assume that, where they participate in the civic process, the men and women who enjoy white nationalist fiction advocate for social policies that — if I might pause to assert the personal as political — I consider a threat to my safety (as a black woman) and my livelihood (as a member of the demonized professoriate), to say nothing of the increasing precarity of the people I most care about, a preponderance of whom are neither white, nor gentile, nor straight, nor American-born. Asserting that literary criticism has any value in understanding the aesthetic conditions in which these ideas mutate and thrive — ideas that would exclude or eliminate almost everyone in my aforementioned circle — is the definition of public-facing scholarship. Where theoretical praxis remains an impediment for expanding the scope of this kind of literary inquiry, it may very well be the perceived threat of formalism that offers a way forward.

Making Sense Out of Nonsense

In March 2019, The Chronicle of Higher Education printed "Critical Correctness," a version of Bruce Robbins's MLA conference presentation on the genealogy and neoliberal threat of new formalism or, to borrow his use of Jeffrey Williams's term, "new modesty."^⁠3 The story of new formalism, as Robbins outlines it, is troubling, especially in an era when incisive criticism of the prevailing discourse seems more urgent than ever. However, granting his account of its problematic origins and applications, a more expansive understanding of new modesty has the capacity to disrupt cultural discourse — insofar as pointing out a cultural phenomenon can be the height of disruption — more effectively than alternative theoretical approaches may allow.

As a part of his critique, Robbins indicts several theorists who have had the most significant roles in extricating politics from literary theory, among these, Bruno Latour's post-9/11 attack on critique in "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" and Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique, which he calls "the most aggressive manifesto" for a form of political "post-critique" that amounts to "an argument for more positivity."^⁠4 What do these offenders have in common? As proponents of the innocuous-sounding new modesty, they share "an impulse to do away with politics" in theorizing art, excluding even the most "minimal" and "gentle" political "nudges" that any meaningful discussion about literature and culture would require.5 The work of these new formalists operates with greater caché than simple disdain for a politicized humanities, a collective theoretical resurrection of Harold Bloom-reminiscent rants, rejecting the ascendancy of identity politics and the triumphant "school of resentment." Beyond foreclosing the space for even the most modest of political interventions, their version of new formalism, in the "revitalization of the detachment from politics and from any collective belonging," understands the world as a collection of "isolated entrepreneurial individuals."6 This worldview sounds, to Robbins, an awful lot like neoliberalism; in today's humanities landscape, this is a grave charge indeed.^⁠7

Robbins's reconsideration of the political power of formalist theory is timely, though not for the reasons he suggests. An alarmist overstatement of both the vacuum of post-critique and its risks, his pessimistic account of the way that a modest theoretical praxis legitimizes a destructive politics, by the fact of its passive disengagement with the world outside of the text, misses the ways in which, at least for certain archives, this sort of decontextualization is essential to productive intellectual work. With a nontraditional set of primary sources like Left Behind, unapologetically selected for their political relevance, it is perhaps less obvious why a decidedly apolitical mode of critique is called for. However, it is precisely the political nature of the text that calls for modesty in formalist practice as a method of textual encounter, an acknowledgment of the scholar's potential role as a deliberately excluded cultural outsider with an aversive predisposition, willing to suspend taste and expectations in an effort to interpret the aesthetic object on its own terms.Bringing this level of agnostic, open, sincere, and curious close reading to a text—a question of intellectual affect as well as theoretical exercise — is no small feat. If your media consumption habits overlap in any way with my own, simply reflect on the viral outrage inspired by the December 2020 Wall Street Journal editorial, written by the infamously cantankerous Joseph Epstein, in which he implores "Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo" to "drop" the "fraudulent" title of "doctor" because, presumably, it should be reserved for presidential spouses who are medical doctors.8 Can you hear me seething? Did you, or a particularly incensed friend, pause at "kiddo," or stop reading altogether, out of plain outrage? And how likely is it that, given the strength of the aversive response to Mr. Epstein's dismissive opening, the average reader — especially the average "fraudulent" female humanities Ph.D. — could fully receive the message that followed? Consider for a moment that, if a reader's engagement with the body of the editorial became even the slightest bit more difficult after that brief opening, how easily one would lose the capacity for nuanced comprehension if the body of a text were to follow up the diminutive "kiddo" with an imaginative deployment of every epithet for black people, Jews, immigrants, or women the writer in question could bring to mind. One begins to see how difficult it would be for even the most unexcitable political subject to keep an open mind. For these reasons, the most triggering texts — another word I use with some chagrin — demand a more deliberative conception of theory than "formalism" or "new formalism" alone; instead, these texts call for a methodology that, for the purposes of intellectual praxis, counter deep aversion with the ideal of ideological disengagement, an ideal that credits an effort for which a scholar may otherwise be indicted (as neoliberal, politically indifferent, and so on) and, more importantly, acknowledges the productive possibilities of the endeavor itself.

So how does this actually work, asking and answering formalist questions to satisfy such high falutin' claims? As an illustration in miniature, I'll take the original volume of the robust Left Behind universe as an example. As the apocalyptic rapture draws near, journalist "Buck" Williams finds himself on assignment in New York City. Buck's "political editor wants [him] to cover a Jewish Nationalist conference in Manhattan that has something to do with a new world order government . . . [and the] religion editor has something in my in-box about a conference of Orthodox Jews also coming for a meeting."9 This two-pronged assignment is complicated by two more simultaneous city-wide gatherings: the United Nations is meeting to discuss the "international monetarist confab coming up," with aims on finalizing plans for a single global currency, and another ecumenical "conference . . . among leaders of all the major religions . . . [is] talking about a one-world religious order."10 This brief passage, a defining moment in the foreshadowed apocalypse, borrows its diction and imagery from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: where forces are orchestrating a multi-pronged assault on international sovereignty, the specter of faceless global Jewry represents the insidious forces operating behind the scenes, a narrative fulfillment of events foreshadowed in The Protocols and alternatively imagined in The Turner Diaries.

The kind of Jews depicted in Left Behind, characterized as "haggling over the Dead Sea Scrolls . . . [and] giddy over the destruction of Russia," share the DNA of the "big Jews in New York" described in William Pierce's novel. The Jews of Turner Diaries lack the euphemistic veneer of those in Left Behind; one of Pierce's more rough-and-tumble Israelis, for example, exits the metropolitan embassy where a "Council [of] Jews" plot world domination, "running out of the crumbling building with a submachine gun, his clothing in flames...shrieking out his hatred in guttural Hebrew . . . [and] open[ing] fire" on the surrounding crowd.11 While this "guttural Hebrew" sounds different than the aforementioned "giddy" "haggling," we effectively find, in both novels, the same kind of meeting happening in the same kind of building located in the same kind of city, effectively precipitating the same apocalyptic-level disruptions — bullet-sprays, self-immolations — that characterize a world at the end times. Who knew that a novel said to have inspired the Oklahoma City bombing could share such a meaningful plot element, aesthetic atmosphere, and existential antagonist with a work widely dismissed as the pinnacle of saccharine Sunday school fiction?My aforementioned disclosure of how my personal is political means that I don't need to be convinced how and why these books and their implications matter: destructive cultural trends, trends in desperate need of incisive criticism, make those calling for a totalizing "post-critical" theoretical practice seem a bit tone-deaf. However, new modesty works as a data-mining practice, reading white nationalist (and other ideologically marginalized) literature for what it reflects about the interior logic and mythology of a movement that would at a minimum relocate brown people and Jews, and at worst would brutally annihilate them. For anyone exhausted with self-congratulatory op-eds and social media posts (yes, even and especially from our academic peers) that castigate white nationalist politics without accounting for their embedded nuances and teleologies, an earnest formalism may very well lead away from the utopia of "post-critique" to a moment of "informed critique," a familiarity with the language and imaginative eccentricities of the opponents in question.

Embracing a theoretical practice that represents a modest generosity to ideologically repugnant texts isn't a means of exculpating the writers and readers themselves. Rather, it is a question of intellectual honesty in the counter-attack, whether the new formalist herself chooses to pursue a more explicit political argument once the data is gathered, or if her discussion of white nationalism ends with the literature full-stop. The fruits of a modest engagement with a white nationalist literary archive has value to anyone looking to participate in related conversations, whether personally or academically, without having to spend time on (for example) the white nationalist message board Stormfront to find a recommendation for the latest in contemporary serial race war fiction.12 Whereas participation in this kind of conversation used to represent a discourse off the beaten path, the Stormfront-demographic plays so central a role in shaping mainstream political conversation that some fluency, of the sort that can be excavated through formalism, is almost required.

In the face of the amorphous language of digital humanities, I hesitate to use words like "data" and "excavation" as descriptors of new modesty. However, along with the term "new modesty," I borrow Jeffrey Williams's summary of its articulations, described in equal parts as "'surface reading,' 'thin description,' 'the new formalism,' 'book history,' 'distant reading,' [and] 'the new sociology.'"^⁠13 Taken together, these overlapping practices produce an amalgam of information that is precisely that: data. Where white nationalist subculture exists as an alien and unfriendly landscape, new modesty can pull out the hidden macro-narratives that make sense out of seeming-ideological nonsense: Why did racial xenophobes mobilize the increasingly influential white nationalist base on behalf of the Asian, long-shot presidential candidate Andrew Yang?^⁠14 How has an online community of people identifying as "involuntarily celibate" crafted a pathway into the extremities of white nationalist ideology? Or in the aforementioned example: How does Sunday school-veneered blockbuster fiction (Left Behind) rhetorically legitimize white nationalist fiction like the novel that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing (The Turner Diaries), while resurrecting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the Evangelical set?

If new modesty was, in fact, limited to the possibilities outlined by Williams and Robbins, I would share the former's disappointment in what such a critical approach represents: "the shrunken expectations of . . . the humanities, and a decline in the social prestige of literary criticism."15 (And yet, I can't fail to comment upon some slight skepticism, matched with delight, at the novel idea that "social prestige" in literary criticism was widely understood to exist.) However, applying new modesty to an alternative archive creates an opportunity to shrink one set of expectations (ie., the literary critic's authority to intervene now in the cultural and political sphere) in order to replace it with an equally urgent, if less flashy, set of expectations: the literary critic's expert ability to extract cultural tropes that can inform an intervention (by the same critic or an inheritor) down the road. This is the difference between the negative critique with which some new formalists (like Felski) are exhausted, and the informed critique that modest formalism makes possible.

Demystifying New Modesty

This essay is my attempt to draw attention to the under-explored possibilities of a deliberately modest formalism, and challenge assumptions about the archives served by its applications. New formalism is no less political than the literature it brings into relief, and no more celebratory than the moral integrity or aesthetic polish of the text allow. Formalism applied to The Turner Diaries, however modestly, will never produce a reading sanitized of politics or promoting critical appreciation. Finally, this argument for new modesty isn't an effort to undermine the relevance of a methodology that would consider a more traditional or savory canon, nor is it an effort to pollute the last bastion of scholarly non-partisanship and agitate for its exclusive use as political praxis. Rather, for those determined to join me in abandoning a more palatable, highbrow archive for the ideologically distressing alternatives, no matter the theory, I would suggest that new modesty can access a subculture that America's present rhetorical landscape makes increasingly difficult to understand.

In an effort at anecdotal symmetry, I'll close with a more recent story that gets at the need for formalism now. After a presentation on Thomas Dixon's The Clansman a few years ago, I mentioned in passing that I was considering co-editing a white nationalist reader, pulling the foundational primary (fiction and non-fiction) sources together for anyone looking to understand the complex beliefs that fall under this generalizing label.^⁠16 Despite its irrelevance to my main argument and the fact that I introduced it as undeveloped embryo of an idea, discussion was immediately side-tracked and, for a full twenty minutes, an interdisciplinary cohort of campus colleagues expressed different levels of anxiety (and for a few, outright disgust) at the possibility of making this kind of reader available. How could I be confident that I would sufficiently curate each selection, so as to ensure that the impressionable reader isn't drawn in by these corrupting ideas? Wouldn't this simply be an endorsement of white nationalist interests, having a legitimate academic publisher spread vile ideas on their behalf?

My mistake was in thinking that colleagues, who otherwise take for granted the pedagogical promise of a curated reader on Nazi journalism or a collection of American lynching postcards, would bring this same rationale to a more proximate body of cultural production. But after an amalgamation of similar encounters since then, I'm no longer astonished at what strikes me as uncritical intellectual hysteria. My colleagues' shared anxiety is symptomatic of a more prevailing mystification of white nationalism. In the absence of any substantial information, this literature, and white nationalist news and social media sites along with it, have come to occupy an outsized place in the political outsider's imagination, as if their words and ideas are imbued with the power to suspend the taste and logic centers of a person who would otherwise know better than to become enthusiastically racist. Although I wasn't framing it as such at the time, in retrospect I understand that with this imagined volume, I wanted to make it possible for the concerned and curious fact-finder to perform their own modest excavation of a white nationalist archive. What better evidence for the repugnance of white nationalist ideology, and its encroachment into mainstream conservative discourse, than allowing the ugly facts to emerge from the page?

Perhaps it's a mark of my naïvety but, given the lack of subtlety in the larger genre, I'm unworried that the average reader would miss, or be attracted by, the unifying narrative foundation: to reach the sentimental promised land, good men and women of European extraction must kill the calculating Jews and their ignorant brown minions. The more time I spend with these novels, the less I'm convinced that the average text's inelegant, bloody prose hides the supernatural ability to seduce the faceless impressionable undergraduate. Take, for instance, the vivid "Day of the Rope," the climax of The Turner Diaries: The infamous Los Angeles afternoon "started . . . with the Jews using transistorized megaphones to whip up the crowds...eggi[ing] them" on, and ended with the white militia's counter-attack, in the form of "many thousands of hanging female corpses," each with a "bloated, purplish face . . . her eyes wide open and bulging, her mouth agape."17 Perhaps I undervalue the power of academic publishing, but I'm skeptical that even a force so great as Oxford University Press can take an edited volume filled with vignettes selected for their genocidal nationalism and, by some unwitting alchemy, seduce scores of twenty-something college students to bring their own rope-filled fantasies to life. On the other hand, with these collected sources in hand, the most superficial, dispassionate reading discerns the ways in which, in the cross-section of white nationalist literature, scenes of brutality are predicated on the instigation of loud-mouthed, well-organized Jews, and that these Jewish enemies paradoxically operate as existential, yet emasculated, threats, conniving in their success, yet fated to lose (in this case, to the rope). For the average concerned citizen, the white nationalist elevation of a Jewish threat, the nature of the perceived threat, and the prevailing dismissal of any such orchestrated black or brown threat is new information.The absence of such information leads to fundamental misunderstandings of white nationalist ideology, of the sort expressed in a Washington Post article about the viral Unite the Right rally chant, "Jews will not replace us." Yair Rosenberg's explication of "debates about whether Jews are white" misses the point entirely. ¹⁸ The Jews of Left Behind and The Turner Diaries and The Protocols, alike, are the true subjects of the chant in question, the kind of schemers who meet behind closed doors and, from on high, boot out virtuous white Christians and replace them with undeserving non-whites. In other words, the chant is about the Jewish orchestration of white displacement with black and brown people, not the replacement of white gentiles by Jews. When so influential a source as The Washington Post, in an article written by an author we can reasonably assume is the object of this enthusiastic antisemitism, can get it so wrong, it is time to acknowledge that we, outsiders to this discourse, may require a fresher, less conclusion-ready approach.

The mystification of white nationalist text and its embedded narrative, the kind of mystification that freaks out colleagues and erases important ideological distinctions, has infiltrated even the most educated and (presumably) least gullible of minds, creating a vacuum of information that a formalist mapping of this cultural landscape has the capacity to fill. Perhaps this is leaning too far into the decidedly non-theoretical and undervalued realm of "engaged scholarship," but I would argue that directing our expertise outward, in selecting the objects of our critical attention and in modulating the accessibility of our conclusions, is precisely what scholars and educators are — or at least, should be — in the business of doing. I understand Bruce Robbins's concern at a move toward positivist post-critique, particularly in a "new normal" where a sitting American president calls white nationalist rally-goers "fine people," tells four American congresswomen of color to "go back where you came from," and sues to retroactively disenfranchise black-majority counties in an effort to overturn the results of a presidential election.¹⁹ But it is in fact these same conditions that signal the urgency to think creatively about the applications of literary scholarship, and re-envision the possibilities for even so challenged an approach as new formalism.

 

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Danielle Christmas is Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature and Endowed Delta Delta Delta Fellow in the Humanities at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With affiliations in both Jewish Studies and American Studies, Danielle teaches on a variety of topics including slavery and the Holocaust in American fiction and film, lynching in American literature and culture, and white nationalist culture and gender. She is currently finishing a book, "Plantation Pimps & Nazi Monsters: Labor, Sex, and Madness in American Holocaust and Slavery Fiction," and starting work on "The Literature of Blood & Soil: White Nationalism and a New American Canon."  These projects have been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as University of North Carolina's Provost and Institute for the Arts & Humanities.

 

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In This Issue

Part 1

Introduction: Formalism Unbound
Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore

Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
Florence Dore

On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
Yi-Ping Ong

"Now can you see the monument?" Some notes on reading for "form"
Gillian White

Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Francisco Robles

The Sight of Life
Sarah Chihaya

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
Amber Jamilla Musser

Part 2

Form contra Aesthetics
Timothy Aubry

Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking
David James

Queer Formula
Joan Lubin

Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
Danielle Christmas

Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Benjamin Widiss

Notes on Shade
C. Namwali Serpell

Afterword: Form Now: as Limit and Beyond
Dorothy J. Hale

 

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Banner image by leebryandj licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. Image has been altered.

 

References