Interview with John Pistelli

Belt talks to John Pistelli, author of Major Arcana

Initially, you self-published Major Arcana in a serialized way on your Substack. Tell me about that decision and experience. 

It didn't start out high-mindedly; I was looking for a way to monetize my Substack since many writers were starting to do really well on the platform. Then I thought about the role serialization played in the history of the novel. Everyone knows that Dickens and other 19th-century novelists wrote serially for the magazine market, but even some experimental modernist novels, most notably Joyce's Ulysses, were serialized in that movement's small-press journals. Something about the novel as a form lends itself to this type of publication—at least a novel written on a big enough scale, whether Dickensian or Joycean. I had also long been interested in writing a novel that would preserve the complexity and ambiguity of serious fiction but also bring back the large-canvas conceptual design that the autofiction trend, with its minimalist aesthetic and private concerns, had leached out of the form since the days not even of Dickens or Joyce but of more recent writers like DeLillo, Morrison, or Pynchon. Serialization seemed to be a promising way to see if I could reinvent this grander type of novel. 

As for my experience of serializing Major Arcana, it attracted a small but dedicated audience who would ask me questions and make observations even as I was still writing, forcing me to clarify my choices and emphases. But a lot of readers said they were waiting for a print version to read it. (Statistics about stagnant ereader adoption, as well as the recently announced expansion of Barnes & Noble, suggest that print remains many if not most readers' choice of media when it comes to fiction.) It wasn't until the novelist and journalist Ross Barkan read my self-published print edition of the novel and wrote about it on his Substack that it attracted Anne Trubek of Belt to want to publish it. Despite its eventual destiny as a print book, though, the novel's roots as a serial can still be detected in my commitment to making each chapter a symbolic and aesthetic unit of its own that nevertheless provokes suspense and advances the plot. Some readers have even compared each chapter to an individual Tarot card—appropriate to the novel's Tarot motif.

Covering fifty years, this is a maximalist novel on all fronts. Talk to me about density and how much scale you needed to tell this story of cultural shift. 

I wanted to write about cultural change and continuity over generations. So much contemporary fiction is restricted to a single perspective or a single season in a character's life, and that can yield beautiful and insightful explorations of the everyday, but the novel also has the power to take a wider historical perspective. I was particularly interested in how the growing hegemony of certain forms of pop culture, particularly comic books and superheroes, had unexpectedly broad social effects on areas that seem distant from such genres. What is the connection between superhero stories and individualism, between superhero stories and magical thinking? Therefore, I created my own fictionalized version of a real-life archetype: the occultist or occult-adjacent comic-book writer who turned superheroes "dark" in the late 20th century and in so doing became a pop celebrity in his own right (e.g., figures like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, and others). Then I followed the effect of this writer's creation on a young person in the 21st century, an effect that includes social media influencing, pop occultism, and the fluidity of gender identity. While these connections have been neglected by cultural commentators, a novel is not cultural commentary, so I had to immerse myself in the (fictional) reality of three generations and their experiences from the 1970s to the 2020s. Readers will note that I don't use dates—I wanted the novel to unfold in a slightly dreamy atmosphere, just as I use comic-book-style names for American cities—but historical references, particularly to mass traumas like 9/11 and the pandemic, will serve to anchor the story securely in time.

(I should say that I am theorizing about all this after the fact and making it sound like a neat process from idea to execution, as if I'd devised a story to illustrate a theme, when in reality the story and the theme all came to me in an undifferentiated flurry when I started writing, and I had to sort it out as I went. My favorite description of what it feels like to write a novel, because it captures the conflict between precision work on sentences and paragraphs and the emotional rush animating the whole effort, is Faulkner's: "It's like trying to nail together a henhouse in a hurricane." I've never tried to nail together a henhouse in a hurricane, but it sounds difficult!)  

One of your main characters, Simon, is a comic book writer. Why are comics as a medium important to this novel?

Aside from my specific interest in the late-20th-century figure of the celebrity occultist "dark" comic-book writer as discussed in my previous answer, I was more broadly fascinated by the differences and similarities between the novel and the graphic novel. Prose and comics as forms of media are very different, almost directly opposed. Prose lends itself to narrative, to logical development, to the passage of time, to detailed description and patient attention. There is something inherently progressive in prose's developmental logic; it may be no coincidence that the two millennia of prose's dominance coincided with the dominance of progressive ideologies like Christianity, liberalism, and Marxism, all of which call the individual or society to advance in time. But comics, because it is a spatial representation of time as a grid of panels on a page, represents time as static and simultaneous, similar to a magical worldview in which the magician ascends beyond the fourth dimension to behold it as we would behold a cube in three dimensions. It shows progress, we might say, to be the illusion of those trapped in the merely temporal. Comics also lend to a more visceral spectacle than prose can create, but they can't go as deep in analysis and portrayal; comics work with archetypes, prose with characters. In short, these two media imply very different worldviews and aesthetics. So I wanted to force them to confront each other as opposed forms of media. While the confrontation takes place in a prose novel rather than a graphic novel, I hope I suggested the merit of both. 

Your other main character, Ash, is a Gen Z influencer living in internet world as a virtual manifestation coach. Will you talk about this book as an "internet novel"? And what's the relationship between the book's engagement with the internet and its engagement with the occult?

To answer the second question first, the internet encourages magical thinking because it allows us to think of ourselves as disembodied, as avatars in the data stream. This separation of self from body naturally makes us think of ways to force the body to conform to the true, unbounded self we unfold online—to make our IRL identity conform to our online one. We may begin to act in our everyday lives in conformity to subcultures we adopted on the internet, or, more dramatically, we may seek to use occult means to translate the ideal into the real. (This isn't a criticism of online living and occultism as against real life and secularity, by the way. As with the prose novel vs. graphic novel conflict above, there are merits on both sides of the argument, which I intended Major Arcana to demonstrate.)

As for the internet novel, I do find some entrants in this genre too literal. They try to replicate the internet in a novel, with the actual depiction of web pages or text messages or tweets and other social media posts. Just as I used prose to describe and narrate passages of the comics created in the novel, I also used prose to describe and narrate the characters' experiences of going online. Why should the novel cede its authority to these other forms? Instead of turning a novel into online discourse, I turned online discourse into a novel.