Why I Decided to Destroy Modernism, Part 1

A New Path Forward for the Literary Arts (My Ultimate Aim)

• In addition to explaining my literary aims, this post begins to explain the Lil Skribblers project. Lil Skribblers will be minting this coming week. Join the Telegram group so you’re the first to hear the exact date.

• The Mars Review of Books White Party is coming up. There are only a few VIP tickets left, and I have to take them off the market this Wednesday. Buy here.

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What this post is about

I wrote the following on X.com a few weeks ago, and it got more of a reaction than I expected:

It’s nice that people cared. That post was a tweet-length condensation of many different ideas in my head. I’m at work on a lot of different things right now—editing the Mars Review of Books, running the business end of the Mars Review (come to our event!), the Lil Skribblers art project, edits on my first novel Stop All the Clocks (Arcade, 2025), and my first book of nonfiction, The Mystagogues (Arcade, 2026), which is about five 20th century writers who smuggled perennialist ideas into their writings.

I think a lot of talented people can be satisfied in the process of working on a diverse array of projects. But I’m not really happy unless everything I do—including what I do “for fun”—works in concert toward one unified, ultimate goal. “My object in living is to unite / My avocation and my vocation, As my two eyes make one in sight,” as Robert Frost put it.

So in this series of posts, I’m going to explain my ultimate aim. Perhaps it seems a bit deranged have an ultimate aim at all, but that’s alright. In any case, the explanation is going require zooming out a bit, and beginning with a rather broad question. Namely:

What is art?

The problem

Art is not subjective, as our age so arrogantly believes. Nor, on the other hand, is it synonymous with “beauty” or “harmony”—although those two concepts play a role. What is art?

Let’s answer that question by explaining why both of the two prevailing theories—the subjectivist approach favored by the ‘left-wing’ and the ‘beauty’ approach favored by the ‘right-wing’—are both false.

Art is not subjective

The subjectivist approach is wrong because life is not subjective. Every object has its true meaning and true name. So too does every color, sound, and letter. Art consists of the intentional stringing together of colors, sounds, and letters for the purposes leading one’s audience toward the numinous. Let us take letters, for example. Letters are not arbitrary. Each letter reveals a secret about existence; when placed in the proper order, letters reveal the true meanings of words.

This is more true of a language the more ancient it is, but the practice of understanding the true meaning of words can be done even in modern languages. To quote Antoine Fabre d’Olivet’s The Hebraic Tongue Restored: “Particular tongues are only the dialects of an universal tongue founded upon nature, and of which a spark of the Divine word animates the elements.”

It can be demonstrated that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet correspond, in some form at least, with the major arcana of the Tarot, with the Zodiac and seven major planets, and with the principal plot points of what might be called the “one true story”—i.e. the death and resurrection of the Sun King. It is more difficult to do this with modern languages, but with a little etymology, one can get down to the true meaning of any word in contemporary usage. Below is an excerpt, once more from Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, in which the author goes step by step to provide the true meaning of the perfectly mundane French word emplacement (which translates to site or location).

(If the above argument above seems too abstract or unfounded, I very much recommend reading this excerpt. It should at least clarify the method for determining that there are true meanings of words.)

Fabre d'Olivet examines the *true* meaning of the French word 'emplacement'

Art is not about ‘beauty’

I would be among the first to agree that there are timeless ways of creating in music, architecture, and poetry; and that timeless concepts serve as a better guide than the subjective emotionalism of our current era. However, this is not to say that there is a straightforward formula for the creation of visual art or literary fiction in any given age. This is because each age and place calls for its own particular permutation of that which is timeless; on a macro level our universe is affected by our passing through successive ages (termed Golden, Silver, Iron, Bronze by the ancients), and on a micro level we are affected by the particular conditions of existence that we individually experience, and we must use these conditions as the raw material that we alchemize into art.

To make this more concrete: Around when Tolstoy was writing Anna Karenina, the creation of a train service between St. Petersburg and Moscow was considered traumatic, because it altered conceptions of space and time, so that the train became an essential symbol for his novel. Obviously, one could not construct a novel today in which train travel plays such a role. The novelist’s most solemn purpose is to act as a shaman and to incorporate that which is new and potentially destructive in a society into an artistic whole such that the new social phenomenon has been de-fanged and the correct social order—with God at the top—might be restored. The fact that today technology moves much faster than novelists can write about it is one key reason the novel has lost its effectiveness: It has become insufficiently shamanistic.

To create art is to act in both space and time. A successful creation is like a dance, in which one’s dance partner is the spirit of the age. This is why the calls of ‘dissident right’ for art to be beautiful again—to depict beautiful healthy bodies and rural landscapes—are not only gauche but impossible. Art is a ritual for the incorporation of the society one actually lives in into the numinous whole; to imitate the art of past ages is to dance with a corpse. This point can be expanded beyond art, to the field of every human action.

What is to be done? (What are Lil Skribblers?)

The Lil Skribblers project intentionally jumbles the faces, sartorial accessories, texts, and symbolic calling cards of western authors from ancient Athens until today. From a macro perspective the purpose this serves is to underline the metaphysical unity of our species—one of the essential truths of existence, which has been known from time immemorial, and which it will serve us well to recall from both a moral and an artistic standpoint. When we look at a droplet of water, we consider it a part of the whole; the droplet is not separate from water, but is rather an instance of it. Similarly an individual person is but an instance of the category person. I realize this sounds rather vague and kumbaya, but the scientific field of epigenetics amply demonstrates the idea, by showing that a person sometimes contains knowledge not accumulated in his or her own lifetime.

From a micro perspective the purpose of this artistic jumbling is to destroy the literary practice of modernism, which is, in a phrase, the immense overvaluation of individual subjectivity in literary art. This practice has led literature to a dead end, and it will take a ruthless critical attitude toward the modernist tendency in order to clear the brush and move forward. Lil Skribblers seek to spread themselves through memetic warfare and financialized fandom; having done so, they simultaneously form an egregoric financial, aesthetic, and publicity vehicle for the Mars Review of Books, and virtually embody the criticism that lays the groundwork for a new literary movement.

This work clears the way for a new literary artistic method, which prizes the play of ideas across time and space (Lionel Trilling said that the aim of the novel was to make ideas concrete) and the reemergence of perennialist truth. Without being conscious of it, I made groping gesture toward this aim with my first novel, Stop All the Clocks, which will be published by Arcade in 2025. But there’s much more work to be done.

My next post in this series will take you on a stroll through literary history. We’ll look at the birth of literature, the birth of the market for novels, and the journey from Romanticism to Realism to Modernism. Eventually we’ll answer the question what should the novel of tomorrow look like?

Until then,
Noah