Tatyana Tolstaya. The Slynx (2003), Translated by Jamey Gambrell. NYRB classics, 2007. 299 pp.

Do you have any famous cultural or political figures in your genealogy? Were any past achievements lorded over your young adulthood?

Tatyana Tolstaya’s great-grandfather was Leo Tolstoy. Her father’s father, Leo’s son, was the great Soviet SF author Alexei Nikolaevich. That’s quite a literary legacy to live up to!

Her blockbuster novel Slynx does that. The end of the text is dated 1986—2000, fourteen years of drafting, that also traversed the decay and collapse of Soviet social imperialism.

This Substack quietly observed Women in Translation Month this August, and this text was your host’s favorite. Slynx is clever and compelling while staying relatively accessible. And while this work is fabulist in a way familiar with other late Soviet writers, it’s also a product of comparative literature training that remains fluid and imaginative.

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In Slynx, Moscow is a Waste Land. Society has reverted to feudalism with an absolutist or fascist type of police apparatus. Productive forces are rock-bottom: “…the mouse is our be all and end all. It’s food, and clothes you can make from the pelts, and trading at the market for whatever you want.”

The farmers scratching out a living in this post apocalypse are benighted in a terrible peasant mentality. It’s reflected in the conversational, even downright mumbling tone of the prose: the narrator sounds like the gossipy anonymous peasant narrating Brothers Karamazov.

The populace is overwhelmed with superstition, chief of all is a horror, on the protagonist Benedikt’s part, of the Slynx. In this fabled creature the blasted history of science transforms into myth.

The Slynx sits on dark branches and howls a wild, sad howl — eeeeennxx, eeeeennxx, eeenx-a-leeeeeennnxx! — but no one ever sees it. If you wander into the forest it jumps on your neck from behind: hop! It grabs your spine in its teeth — crunch — and picks out the big vein with its claw and breaks it.

The town formally known as Moscow, now named after the chief feudal lord Fyodor-Kuzmich glorybe, is populated with mutants. Nikita Ivanich, for example, can breathe fire, which serves him well in the winter: he can light his bed-stove whenever he wants.

That’s the way it is: whoever didn’t croak when the Blast happened, doesn’t grow old after that. That’s the Consequence they have.

…Whoever was born after the Blast, they have other consequences — all kinds. Some have got hands that look like they broke out in green flour, like they’d been rolling in greencorn, some have gills, another might have a cockscomb or something else. And sometimes there aren’t any Consequences, except when they get old a pimple will sprout from the eye, or their private parts will grow a beard down to the shins. Or nostrils will open up on their knees.

So this Waste Land is the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust or perhaps a megachernobyl. Society has been decimated as well as the inheritance of Russian culture, which in this text survives as arbitrary fragments, lines from Pushkin, Pasternak, nursery rhymes, folk lyrics — with citations at the end of the book.

As a member of what passes for the intelligentsia, Benedikt transcribes the old texts, which are passed off as the original sayings of the chief feudal lord Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe. He and the rest of the cast struggle to make meaning of these texts. What is a “steed”? A mouse?

The main symptom is all the novel words, semantically deformed, like “feelosophy,” “horripilating,” “the right to ass-ocean,” which sound Joycean, but don’t represent a deeper consciousness or something like that, but simple corrosion and spoilation of culture, which can degrade like any artifact.

At some point, for instance, the name Schopenhauer devolved into Shopping Hour, thus they wrestle with World as Will and Representation:

So you think you understood it, Golubchik — then tell us the story: who goes where, who do they see, how’re they gonna do that shopping, what hanky panky do they get up to? Who do they murder? Huh? You can’t?

Amongst the superstition and ignorance is the lingering fear of radiation. Part of the justification of keeping true recorded knowledge under lock and key is the worry that books are radioactive. Apopleptic with fear, our characters chant a prayer to ward off the invisible evil:

…God have mercy and protect me…I’m not sick, I’m not sick, I’m not sick, no, no, no. I won’t get sick, I won’t get sick, no, no, no. Don’t come, don’t, don’t, don’t. The red hoods don’t need to come, knock on wood. I don’t want to be hooked.

The inquisitor-like “red hoods” are the Saniturions, the absolutist secret police force to which Benedikt’s father-in-law belongs.

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But are books radioactive? Benedikt soon gets access to some late in the novel, and comes face to face with the orthography of Cyrillic, letters that look like they have sails and chairs…

He also glimpses the history of modernist art, in an amusing scene:

Then there were colored flowers. A pot, and flowers sticking out of it. Boring. Then everything was all slathered on and mushed around and you couldn’t figure out what it was. That was boring too. He turned some more pages and there was this picture: nothing on it, just a white page, and in the middle, a square-shaped black hole. Nothing else. Kind of like the end of everything. He looked and looked at the hole — and suddenly got scared, like in a dream. He clapped the book shut and dropped it.

Oh, I haven’t even mentioned the Degenerators: they’re beasts of burden who pull the wagons and sleds. But they seem to have human faces, and they can speak. They “never shut up, they keep bugging you…”

Where is all this zany business, the mutant powers, people turning into animals, adding up to? It’s a swan-song for culture at the end of the 20th century, through an anti-bildungsroman: the hero develops himself and becomes integrated, but into a corrupt society, commanded by the “red hoods” of corrupted Soviets (and the Degenerators are like serfs?).

His task in this pseudo-society is to re-organize and reconstitute the knowledge of which he has privileged but fragmentary access. The hope of compassing all of that lost culture into a single organization is hopelessly vain — but we do it anyway: That’s why Slynx is organized like an encyclopedia, with chapters headed by the letters of the Russian alphabet.

A novel by Marguerite Duras. Abahn Sabana David (1970). Translated from the French by Kazim Ali. Open Letter, 2016. 108 pp.

It’s getting dark in the cemetery outside the city. Two militants, a man and a woman, knock on the door of a cabin by the grounds. The man inside, a Jew named Abahn, lets them in.

This guy Abahn is clearly the militants’ assignment: maybe they’re going to shoot him or just take him into custody. But there’s another ‘knock at the door.’

Another man enters, also named Abahn, also Jewish.

Four people in a room: the only development being what happens between them (and one of them falls asleep!): the only duration is the night and cold.

The jacket copy promised a heady discussion of “understanding, capitalism, violence, revolution, and dogs.” Actually it’s just dogs. There are wild dogs outside in the cemetery, and the Party leader Gringo is looking to buy or sell ‘dogs.’ (Or maybe it’s the Abahns that are offering dogs? Are the Jewish guys the dogs??)

The name of the city is Staadt, by the way.

The prose here is so carved down it’s basically a play text. A chamber piece on the tension between captive humans, like Sartre’s No Exit, but also an absurdist piece of pointless anticipation, like Beckett’s Godot.

They are not waiting for “Godot,” but for the local Party cadre Gringo. (Though one of the Abahns says that Gringo’s is not a Communist Party.)

I don’t know if I enjoyed reading it all that much. This text was so minimal it was almost like reading nothing! But there are a lot of odd details that just slip by in this thread of paradoxical speech.

There must be reasons for this nothingness to emerge in France in 1970 that considering the politics of the last decade shouldn’t be hard to find….

Even before Algerian independence and ‘68, the works of Duras (and Beckett) feel marked by the Nazi occupation period. Perhaps that makes the darkness of these postwar French writers (Kojeve and Blanchot, etc.) quite distinct from the darkness of the ‘Dialectic of Enligtenment’ discourse from Germany.

All the same, with ASD your host did not feel the same stilled depths in this paradoxical prose that you tend to find in the work of Blanchot — whom Duras dedicated this book, as well as to her ex-husband Robert Antelme.

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Dorothea Dieckmann. Guantanamo: A Novel (2004), translated by Tim Mohr. Soft Skull, 2007. 151 pp.

It’s time for another short post on a short but compelling fiction. As far as prisoner novels go, I don’t know how well it stacks up against the classic examples, but considering it’s about the atrocious policies of the US at the turn of the century, it stands out as uniquely contemporary.

Suppose a novel confronts us with torture. The lines relay such intense degradation and neuropathic pain, perhaps they generate anxiety in the reader.

Is it wrong to feel whatever effects this scene has conjured? Does it hinge on whether or not the object of torture “has it coming”?

This discourse circulates among audiences whenever horror movies get a cultural crossover moment — which seems to be every few months these days. But this moral question is a non-starter for your host.

Violence and torture appear in art because, like everything else in art, it’s something from the world that strikes our imagination.

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He can’t breathe. The pain is suffocating him. He starts from the beginning again. This is the floor. These are my knees. This is my neck. He swivels his neck. This is my head. Easy now. Nice and easy. He concentrates on the voices from Pesahwar in his head.

These lines come early in Guantanamo by Dorothea Dieckmann, and the sequence from which they’re taken is long and just short of excruciating. Is it significant to know it’s just the second year in the War on Terror, that this prisoner and terror suspect, Rashid, age twenty, who was nabbed in Pakistan while he was travelling.

Rashid is a young man of Indian descent who grew up in Hamburg; he actually didn’t do anything. But we follow him into a prison narrative that is also a descent into hell with a dreamlike resurrection. Like many of the novels posted in the last two months, this is a hybrid of fiction and longform journalism.

I don’t know precisely how the two elements delineate. I do know that the opening scenes in Guantanamo were very funny, in pitch-black humor. The devout inmates turn to toward mecca for prayer: directly in view is the tallest guard tower with a waving American flag.

Every detail is a chance to reflect on degradation. The cells have two buckets, one for water, the other for waste.

Using buckets of the same color means they can use them for either function. Every evening the used buckets are swapped for disinfected new ones. The one with water in it could be the one another prisoner crapped in the night before. Who knows — it could even be his own waste bucket.

More dark comedy: the food is rotting everyone’s guts. The inmates are prostrate not from devotion, which their attitudes mimic, but from diarrhea.

The food works its way through his body, as inexorably as Allah’s appearances. From dawn to dusk. From wolfing it down to crapping it out. Prayers end with you kneeling; food with you squatting. And whether you are on the ground or on a bucket, you put your hands on your knees in a show of resignation, of monotony, of having digested it all.

Ironically, Rashid doesn’t waste away but actually puts on weight from the food and lack of exercise, and the new layers of fat cushion the blows from his torturers.

And then, with this prison food being slop in every sense of the word, it was hard — perverse as it sounds — not to think of the contemporary media diet while running through these lines:

…Finally the hunger brings him back. Actually, it’s not hunger. It’s the generic desire for generic slop. It’s a dull feeling in his brain and on his tongue. Whenever he finishes shoveling one of the airplane meals in using a spork and his fingers, he hopes he’ll never have to eat again. Every bite makes him more of a prisoner: on the outside the orange outfit, and on the inside his guts stuffed with the taste of the camp.

These indignities are punctuated by interrogations, which eventually start to coerce a false confession from Rashid’s frazzled mind. Flashbacks and dreams blend into long paragraphs of narration.

The emptiness isn’t something he wants to stow inside; but any sudden commotion jerks the feeling back. Only when he’s being interrogated does he feel whole. The questions and the fear of beatings permeate his body and concentrate all the loose fibers of his being into one, compressing his strength and all the time into it as well.

It may have fallen apart for your host by the end, as hallucination and salvation blur together. I should probably read it again, but who ever wants to dive into hell immediately for a second time?

Cristina Rivera Garza. The Taiga Syndrome (2012), translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana. Dorothy, 2019. 121 pp.

An egregious amount of time went by before your host read Cristina Rivera Garza, one of the most awarded authors of the post-Boom generation. (She won the Anna Seghers prize, whose namesake is a certified Silent BFF; most recently won a Pulitzer.)

And even though her work is available in English via the publishers at Dorothy Project (Rivera Garza has lived in the US since the 90s), I dropped the ball in getting to her work — especially considering that Fernanda Melchor is writing circles around us all: Mexican and Ibero-Latin American literatures are killing it.

I’ve had El mal de la taiga on the shelf for years. How would I fair for this noirish, surreal short novel?

I liked it quite a bit. Rivera Garza is very much in the Juan Goytisolo vein: these are texts that combine fiction with autobiography, documentary research, and belletristic criticism.

Why do I like the “hybrid-form” works by these writers, when most hybrid literature in the 21st century has read to me as sterile as hybrid animals? Some quick answers are that perhaps C.R.G. and J.G. present mixtures closer to the modernist art I’m familiar with; and they are mixed more seamlessly.

Taiga Syndrome runs in a narrative prose that, in contemporary style, is a stark and punchy track. There’s an economy of packing as much personality in such a small volume of verbiage.

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Diamela Eltit. Custody of the Eyes (1994), Translated by Helen Lane & Ronald Christ. Sternberg, 2022. 132pp.

We are back with another short and bitter literary experiment from Chilean master Diamela Eltit. This was an impulse buy at the bookstore, because of the striking book design: rounded corners, clean typesetting. The Montana Series from Sternberg Press in the UK is still only three titles deep, and with a handsomely made Eltit as the flagship, that’s a great start.

I thought her novel Never Did the Fire translated by Daniel Hahn was a starkly impenetrable narrative. But Los Vigilantes was well and truly close to opacity. It’s a dark and difficult situation, but I found it more exciting than the chilly and geriatric NDtF.

The Latin American dictatorships may have been transitioning out by the 1990s, but the damage dealt to the social fabric must linger, in the mood of people, the tone of daily life, and habits of the populace. The walls of your home are thin in such places.

That seems to be what the subject of Eltit’s novel is experiencing. But the book’s content is rather oblique. You’ll get the idea best by checking out the book’s preview: it’s not just the monologue, thick with subjectivity and compulsive repetitions, but also those “invasive” words and onomotapoeia, very much like William H. Gass’s books.

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There is a son, who seems to be a monstrous organism, that needs the mother, wants to consume the mother, and can watch with a little jealousy the mother at her writing desk, writing the letters that make up the middle section and main body of the text.

Mama and I are always together in the house. We love each other sometimes in tremendous harmony. Harmony. I look at Mama to relieve my hunger. Mama’s tom-tom heart wants to write some crappy pages… Mama begins to fuse with the page. To fuse. I want to bite her with what few teeth I have, but she doesn’t know it.

After this opening we’re thrown into the mother’s ornery, paranoid letter writing. One moment aggressive, fawning the next, she speaks of “your son,” “your mother,” letting homeless people into the house, taking the son out of school. She says to her addressee, “I’ll kill you.”

What Eltit exploits here about the epistolary novel form is that it forces us into one-sided intimacy. The other perspective is deferred, possibly forever. Who is she writing to? By whom does she feel so frazzled? Is she writing to herself?

Her addressee seems to be the “Custody of the Eyes” of the title. The woman as a city-dweller is under constant ambient surveillance.

Why not give me a reasonable length of time, and I’ll give you an exact description of the homeless people’s every movement inside my house. Allow my memory to improve, think how hard it is for me to go to sleep since you have multiplied your requirements. Give me a little time to rest and you’ll have your report, the report you’ll surely send to each one of my accusing neighbors.

What little we learn of the city, or town, or whatever this strange municipal environment is — the weather is crazy, the mother feels besieged. She’s a kind of native who is so entrenched inside the city she doesn’t represent it fully, even to herself.

This city isn’t fun to inhabit and people-watch — you’re the one being watched. The hellish alternative to the city as a neighborhood is the city as your solitary confinement cell.

Voices can be heard in the streets, noises and movements that confirm the climate’s beginning to change its sign. The oppressive weather is finally drawing to a close.

Previous post on Eltit’s Never Did the Fire.

Fanny Howe. This Poor Book: A Poem. Graywolf, 2026. 132pp.

Fanny Howe, younger sister of Susan Howe, sadly passed away last summer. The book-length poem before us is her posthumous work.

As great avant-garde poets in the US late century, the sisters Howe acquired a certain mystique. They’re disciples of Emily Dickinson (quite consciously in Susan’s case), of lively intellectual verse: there’s a Protestant ethic that involves devotion to craft as well as a willingness to break the rules — the technical term being antinomianism.

By the close of This Poor Book your host’s sense that he prefers Susan’s work on the whole was left intact. Susan Howe’s poetry that we’ve considered for the blog (linked above) may be cold and forbiddingly heady, but it somehow holds my attention more firmly and stays resonant and tantalizing.

It’s possible I’m just not going for all the God business. I can’t remember the last time I felt such a vibe of fideism from contemporary poetry.

Maybe it’s no surprise I first gravitated to Susan Howe’s consciousness of the past: her books are like verbal museums of New England art history. But she is also devotional of course, to the linguistic traces of a vanished God. Fanny Howe’s poetry can’t be mistaken for anything other than lyrics.

They’re very punchy lyrics, and yet they are not brief or momentary by convention. Or rather, they are, but they don’t have titles, and they’re arranged in her books like big unbroken sequences of broken-up verse forms.

Which is the core of the format of This Poor Book and why it works so well.

That is, it takes chunks from many of her recent collections and collages them into a new synthesis that feels autobiographical but reads as very expansive. It works in part because in a sense it’s just an extrapolation of how she’s been composing all along; like a macro-scale, retrospective cento.

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Juan Goytisolo. Juan the Landless (1975), revised edition (2006) translated by Peter Bush. Dalkey Archive, 2009. 163 pp.

Just as Don Quixote had to accept defeat, turn round at Barcelona and go home broken-hearted, Goytisolo’s Alvaro trilogy and its own strange linguistic quest must come to an end. Is this why bébés are brought into the world in tears?

Marks of Identity had our documentarian protagonist affirming his exile through a half-hearted return. Count Julian staged his spiritual revolt against literary and patriotic tradition, as personified to some extent by that mythical-historical figure.

Now, in this final entry, Juan (the author) is truly Landless — call him Johnny Lackland — where Spain as an object has vanished from the subjective fiction world, nothing remains but a “stain.” This kind of diaristic-essayistic-allegorical writing that Goytisolo practices here only expands further, embracing world history, figures like T. E. Lawrence who, imperialist intrigues aside, took genuine interest in Islamic culture as an outsider.

There is a ton in here about excrement and sex, pooping and gay sex, ejaculating and peeing, the philosophical significance of the cloacal physiology down there. I hadn’t seen anything like it outside of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Both of these authors are readers of Norman O. Brown.

But this project is not just goofy but deeply personal. He is still interrogating the marks of identity: race, profession, class, family, nation. Namely, the Goytisolo plantations and rail in Cuba that made his family’s fortune; it’s here that Juan sin Tierra opens.

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After an invocation of the highest level of meditation, putting the reader in the proper mood for this rush of reflections with no discernable plot, we’re invited to picture a sugar plantation worked by slaves, “de-surplus-valued blacks.”

(Why are the slaves “de-surplus-valued”? Because they are not separated from the means of production like wage workers; they are means of production, and this arcane social relation, being plugged into a world capitalist market, was thereby made even worse.)

The occasion is the installation of running-water plumbing: the plantation owner’s wife can now shit like a queen. This technology is as miraculous as the steam-engine. It is theological technology: “who but the devil could relish the sordid and horrible products of animal and human innards”?

The fear of excretion, the need to hide the act of defecation, conflated with the horror of homosexuality, condensed, in this satirical discourse, in the image of the ‘salacious anus.’

the abyss separating her Charm from your disaster : the salacious anus, the black sewer down which you pour your dung, detritus and diarrhea : from which the devil speaks and the reason why you linger in filthy defecation and shamelessly surrender to the vice of sodomy : … and Our Lord, in His infinite wisdom, has ordained that creatures on earth rise above the animal state and its impure secretions in order to rank according to merit :

This evolutionary contingency: the human seed and human waste product flowing from the same source, becomes the thematic and symbolic impetus for most of what unfolds in this text. One chapter is basically a parodic religious encyclical on poddy training; it’s most of the novel, in terms of pages.

Juan sin Tierra observes the end of the Franco regime, but it also the beginning of the rest of Juan’s literary career, one committed to Joycean puns and the modernist deconstruction of the novel’s conventions.

The first-person and second-person are not stable subjects or objects. The “You” appears to be someone free to identify themselves with a whole host of historical characters. I and You are just “empty substantive shells,” “the shades wandering in your indispensable emptiness…”

The last two novels have been stages in shedding the marks of identity left by an overbearing history of backwardness, imperialism, and religious tyranny. The final stage is to verbally stage the rebellion against Castilian Spanish.

…your body gained sinuous ophidian slipperiness and the mere sighting of enemy fauna stirs up sumptuous images of verbal violence : your contact will be the knife : …ditching face, name, family customs, and country is not enough : ascesis must proceed : each word in your language likewise is out to trap you : from now on you will learn to think against your own language

It is worth the risk of leaving the reader immersed “in an unstable world, prey to a continuous process of destruction : assigning your scattered egos, the different parts in the choir, at the behest of the virtuoso flight of your baton : the pen gently running over the blank rectangle of the page.”

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Your host still isn’t sure why Goytisolo’s writing works so well despite the willful abstraction. Is it because he stays moored to a spirit of leftist rebellion?

These lines toward the close seem as lucid as it can get, when it comes to the formalist revolt against fiction’s conventions, as set by liberal capitalism:

eliminate the last traces of theatricality from the corpus of the novel : transform it into an uneventful discourse : dynamite the worn-out notion of the flesh-and-blood character : replacing the dramatic progression of the story with clusters of text driven by a single centripetal force : organizing kernel of the writing itself, pen fountaining the textual process : improvising the architecture of the literary object not as a tissue of relationships ordered by time and logic but as an ars combinatoria of elements (oppositions, alternatives, symmetrical play) on the rectangle of the blank page : emulating painting and poetry at a purely spatial level :

No matter how surreal or obscure it gets, Goytisolo’s trilogy stays committed to a tension between the author’s creative mind and the structure he had made, but now confronts him. That is, a relative dualism of subject and object.

It’s on those terms that the trilogy closes in a scrambling of languages, a terse envoy for both author and reader, ending in neither Spanish nor English but the Arabic of the Maghreb.

autonomy of the literary object : verbal structure with its own inner connections, language perceived in itself and not as a transparent mediator of an alien external world : via the act of releasing words from their subjugation to a pragmatic order that transforms them into mere vehicles of almighty reason : of logical thought that uses them contemptuously without considering their specific weight and worth : …nonproductive (onanistic) manipulation of the written word, self-sufficient (poetic) exercise in illicit pleasuring

All Goytisolo posts.

The Gravity’s Rainbow post.

Henry James. Watch and Ward (1871). Rubert Hart-Davis, 1878. 238 pp.

The time has come to embark on a long-aspired project of mine: a systematic readthrough of Henry James’s novels, starting with this debut novella, written when the author was 28. Its narrative sounds so absurd to modern ears that it’s practically a psychological thriller.

Your host caught a bug — I think it began around the time of reading Ford’s Good Soldier — for the prose of so-called Early Modernist authors. Longtime subscribers know of the Joseph Conrad project underway, with sixteen books logged and counting; James is another English-language author with one foot in each century (so is Virginia Woolf).

Literary discourse today deploys “modernism” too loosely, so that it means any work that’s difficult or unforthcoming. But the narrow, more precise sense of modernism to me is about foregrounding the medium, yes, but in order to dissolve a specific set of realist conventions developed in Europe over the last four hundred years or so.

As the epoch of liberal capitalism decomposed and monopoly-imperialism started to take its place, so many great artists register a dire need to restructure the way one perceives the world, that will live up to the social restructuring underway. Conrad projected his Anglo-American readers to the fringes of the colonial system that sustained their metropolitan lifestyles, in a style that “elevated” the tropes of imperialist adventure yarns of the Kipling type into a darker and indeterminate realm.

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Surely Conrad’s buddy Henry James, with his trans-Atlantic social climbers and idiots abroad, may be up to something similar. That’s why I want to read his books in chronological order and look at how his style developed.

Watch and Ward’s opening is innocuous at first: Roger Lawrence is on his way to propose to a lady he likes (one-sidedly), and bumps into an old frazzled gentleman in the lobby of his hotel, who asks for a big loan, which Roger turns down. Later that night, despondent after being rejected by Miss Morton, hears the old guy shoot himself in his hotel room, leaving behind a poor little girl.

I summarize these crazy events because of the vulnerable state they’ve put Roger into when he makes this momentous decision. “Lawrence felt the tears rising to his eyes; he felt in his heart the tumult of a new emotion.” Little orphaned Nora has unlocked his heart.

I found it a fascinating choice to start a novel where a more melodramatic one might have ended. Again and again I marveled to myself while reading that this comes only ten years after Dickens’s Great Expectations. It’s a world of big money and big heights to fall, of speedy trains and carriages — but still at the contemplative tempo of early-century realism.

Roger’s decision amounts to adopting Nora as his own daughter, with the expectation of marrying her when she’s older. Needless to say this is insane, like the Pygmalion fable meets Lolita. G. B. Shaw used the myth as the basis for a stage comedy that was turned into the musical My Fair Lady, but at least that plot was mediated by class difference; this is purely a grooming operation!

What is there to say about a man who can regard a child as a cultivation project for romance?

Roger thought of Nora…as a creature of senseless mechanism, a thing wound up with a key, creaking and droning through the barren circle of her graces. Why travel so far round about for a wife, when here was one ready made to his heart, as illiterate as an angel and as faithful as the little page of a mediaeval ballad, — and with those two perpetual lovelights beneath her silly little forehead?

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Roger isn’t completely blind to his actions either, though he takes the edge off through an allusion to the properly neogothic Jane Eyre:

Otherwise, I ought to clip the wings of her fancy and put her on half-rations. I ought to snub her and scold her and bully her and tell her she’s deplorably plain,— treat her as Rochester treats Jane Eyre. If I were only a good old Catholic, that I might shut her up in a convent and keep her childish and stupid and contented!

Later on even Miss Morton — now a widowed Mrs. Keith — enthusiastically supports Rogers’s evil experiment and becomes Nora’s friend. She thinks it’s just the most clever and pragmatic thing a man could come up with.

She has the audacity to criticize Nora when, of course, she turns down Roger’s proposal when it comes, and the revelation that explains her entire life, the shock of discovering the terrible telos imposed on her, right at the moment when she unwittingly “fails,” was a genuine gut-punch.

Nora runs away, as anyone would, but she has condemned herself into a hell where all the other male candidates, Roger’s cousin Hubert and Nora’s cousin George, have their pretensions comically unmasked: they both have other girls on standby.

In this bourgeois society you need to keep your options open, though this is appalling for Nora and Roger. At this point the author has shifted Nora’s controlling archetype from Pygmalion’s statue Galatea to Penelope, in terms of archetype.

The novel’s close — with Nora giving her hand to the chosen suitor — is as contrived as the entire plot has been. Compared to these other two bozos, Roger is the only man “with a heart,” that is, he’s hopelessly romantic in a pure way that inspires disgust in the rest of the book’s worldly-wise cast, but inspires the equally pure Nora.

They’re made for each other — James saw to that!

But there’s some flare to one of the final clauses, for when Nora and Roger reunite, she reads “silently in his haggard eyes the whole record of his suffering.” In a world of false fronts and verbal feints, a moment of “communication” and transparency. Roger may be “on the level” with the social situations of James’s world, but Nora is just as much on the level with reading that world’s multiform messages.

It’s not a great novel (even James knew that, as it wasn’t published in book form till years later and after much revision), but on the sheer level of phrasing and cadence, of literary voice, it’s still better than most of the stuff published today. If it was good enough for The Atlantic magazine as it was 150+ years ago, perhaps it should be good enough for me.

And James’s fiction already includes some chambers of self-reflection: in a great scene between Nora and Hubert, the latter pontificates on the shortcomings of novels.

I very seldom read a novel, but when I glance into one, I am sure to find some such stuff as that! Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination. Common life, — I don’t say it’s a vision of bliss, but it’s better than that. Their stories are like the underside of a carpet, — nothing but the stringy grain of the tissue,— a muddle of figures without shape and flowers without color. When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the dénouement.

The orientalist fantasy he goes on to pitch isn’t great, but his analogy of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel to the monochromatic lines under a carpet is pretty good.

It leads one to wonder what James was searching for, if not to inject romanticist color into the outlines stitched by Balzac and Eliot. He would rather have us peer further into the fibers of interiority, as Nora can read a man through his eyes.

See all Joseph Conrad posts, past and future, here.

Isaac Asimov. I, Robot (1950). Bantam Dell, 2004. 225 pp.

Like many others, I saw an enjoyed the indie-horror crossover hit Obsession. I join the praise of the lead actress Navarette’s audacious physical performance, and there’s something about the cast and the movie’s style that’s speaking to younger audiences very specifically.

However, I did note a glaring flaw. This is a classic monkey’s paw, or “careful what you wish for” story, and yet there was no scene, no narrative beat in which we parse the exact wording of the hapless wish-maker’s wish. Where was the semantic slip-up, the terrible loophole so obvious in hindsight?

But to see how much juice you can actually squeeze out of such verbal gimmicks, we must turn from supernatural horror to the popular literature of SF’s golden age. Isaac Asimov spent the 40s and early 50s dashing out stories about Robots, and stories taking place in Foundation, a utopian civilization based on mechanical Marxism, and whose historiography is loosely modeled on Gibbon’s narrative of Rome’s fall.

Your host admits to finding the Foundation books extremely dry and boring. The Robot stories, on the other hand, are delightful and interesting takes on the genie story. For what is a robot but a rationalized wish-fulfillment device?

Asimov’s book is so famous it was a surprise to learn that he didn’t even like the title, which the editors ripped off from an earlier 1939 story by the Binder brothers. He sold these pieces to Astounding, edited by Campbell — who exerted some influence on the Foundation plot.

The stories bound here center on Dr. Susan Calvin, a ‘robopsychologist’ who narrates the history of turn-of-the-millennium robotics to a journalist. There’s also the duo Donovan and Powell, who feature in the earlier stories before Dr. Calvin assumes the lead.

But the main characters here, arguably, are the Three Laws of Robotics.

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Juan Goytisolo. Count Julian: A Novel (1970), translated by Helen Lane. Dalkey Archive, 2007. 204 pp.

Julian, the Count of Ceuta, ruled a certain fortress in the Maghreb under the Visigothic kingdom. When the Arab chieftains extended their domain to the East African coast, in the seventh century, Count Julian’s forces initially pushed them back. But Julian was betrayed. His king Rodrigo sexually attacked Count Julian’s daughter La Cava — or maybe they eloped, there are different versions of the story.

Julian became a renegade to his Visigoth Spanish world and facilitated the Umayyad conquest of the peninsula. For US readers, Count Julian is the “Benedict Arnold” of Iberian history.

That’s why Julian would be in need of a vindication by Juan Goytisolo, in this, his middle book in his Álvaro Mendiola Trilogy, and in my eyes a masterpiece of essayistic fiction.

The previous volume was Marks of Identity (1966), which was challenging in its broken-up structure. But compared to the abstraction that comes into play with Julian, that novel was transparent as water: it even had characters and a plot.

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Not since Szentkuthy’s work have I written about a novel for this Stack that managed to sustain narrative prose for so long, while avoiding all the specificity of events and personalities of narrative literature. It feels strange to even give this trilogy the heading of Álvaro Mendiola, for he has virtually disappeared, unless this text takes place in his mind, in a state between tucking into bed and falling asleep.

Marks seemed to close north of Spain, in Paris among cosmopolitan and aggrieved political emigrants. Julian opens down south, in Tangiers, where the objective “you” gazes across the mediterranean to the “enemy coast.” I thought this “you” was Álvaro, at first, then maybe a discursive incarnation of Julian, but pronouns are used as fluidly as genres and modes.

So much of the early sections feel like a plunge into an exotic market town (it’s what the narrator of Joyce’s story “Araby” had in mind, probably), but it is a thick, dream-like urban environment. Really, it’s a certain consciousness presented as an ancient type of city. This is where Julian is going to re-stage his renegade betrayal of Spain, which was in fact a great thing to do.

Once you click into the discursive prose, you see a thrilling project mounted by Goytisolo, both politically charged and aggressively formalist: the text departs narrative grounding, to posit “true” existence in the forms that empirically exist: the words, arranged in baroque structures connected only by colons, as if it were a long track of endless elaborations.

This is the literary experience offered by J. Goytisolo in pill form:

penetrating deeper and deeper: wandering farther and farther into the quiet, cottony atmosphere, by way of the twisting, turning paths of the urban labyrinth: as in the hall of trick mirrors at a fairground, unable to find the exit, with the rubbernecks standing watching outside on the sidewalk laughing their heads off every time you take a wrong turn

Within the labyrinth is a project of revolt done in linguistic terms. So the novel Count Julian is like a performance of betrayal and renegade-ness in language. At stake is a personal relationship with Castilian Spanish as well as Spanish literature, from Cervantes to the Generation of ‘98.

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There aren’t just poetic prose and critical musings — the text is also made of cut-up passages from an array of sources, from Unamuno and Buñuel to almanacs and encyclopedia entries. (There’s a two-column list at the end.)

Despite its esoteric character, Goytisolo is just as denunciatory of Spain as in Marks. The campaign of Christian reconquest of Spain drove out Muslim and Jewish peoples and cultures. A reactionary regime thrived ever since, going from the humiliations of the late 19th century to the fascist nocturn of the middle 20th century.

And in their chauvinism, they attributed the initial fallen state of the Muslim conquest to a scapegoat, traitor. For if Count Julian’s betrayal hadn’t taken place, Iberia’s Christianized culture would have to invent it — and by most accounts it appears that it did!

We know from Marks that the appearance of bullfighters in Goytisolo’s work is a bad sign. Here the turn of the century celebrity toreadors like Manolete are conflated with stoic philosophers like Seneca (born in Cordoba when it was part of a Roman province).

the stoic acceptance of the fate of the nation is the prime trait characterizing the Hispanic attitude toward life: the Hispano conceives of history as a slow process of self-purification, a never-ending ascetic exercise in self-perfection: in the depths of the Iberian soul there is an indestructible residuum of stoicism which, acting in intimate conjunction and perfect harmony with Christianity, has taught the men of the Meseta to suffer and endure: it has made them a breed with a rough, dry, gnarled look about them, a breed of solemn, sober men, perfectly adapted to the region’s inclement skies and harsh climate: the landscape itself, that great vista so dear to our hearts, seems to be permeated with ethical and stoic emanations, as the masters of the generation of ‘98 so rightly observed, immortalizing this land in pages cast in a silken, fluid, solemn, reflective style of expression, with a sort of stern tenderness that would appear to have been bred into their very bones

Julian expands the interrogation started by Goytisolo in Marks, moving from an individual’s inner wrestling with his conscience to a dislocated world of Hispano-Iberian literary history. It’s an ironic, perverse (and perverted) questioning of the heap of backward feudal and bourgeois literature. (Goytisolo had extra contempt for Unamuno’s cooptation of Don Quixote, something I need to look into further.)

I feel more bashful every day throwing around labels like modernist or late modernist (what will they think of next…). But Goytisolo’s work strikes home at my idea of “late modernism,” of foregrounding the medium while also acknowledging somehow that the project of modernist aesthetics has been interred since Beckett. It’s literary modernism as a state rather than an aspiration.

Looking over the epigraphs again, there’s a long quote from a Chronicle written by King Alfonso X.

Accursed be the fury of the traitor Julian, of which we were long the victims; accursed be his wrath, for it was cruel and evil; his rage was boundless and his hatred intractable, his madness precocious; he was incapable of loyalty, respected no law of the land, and scorned God;…

Part of Goytisolo’s stylistic revolt is to parody this medieval prose, these gilded chains of clauses, but this time to unmask the self-aggrandizing myths rather than dress up a history of wars and colonialism in pretty words.

Joyce Carol Oates. Fox: A Novel. Hogarth, 2025. 649 pp.

Joyce Carol Oates will be ninety in a couple years, and you have to be a strong eighty-eight to still be publishing as prolifically and regularly as she has, and be the reigning champion of Twitter posting.

Her latest novel, published last year, was a pretty entertaining doorstop, if extremely formulaic. It made me realize JCO is halfway between Stephen King and Iris Murdoch. Her literary crime stories are low art souped up with some high cultural detailing.

She’s halfway on the shaggy scale, too. The King books read for the stack have been invariably padded, while Murdoch’s long novel Green Knight was ultimately very tidy. Fox needed some pages of redundant conversation shaved off here and there.

It’s still a suspenseful gothic murder mystery, the stuff of TV melodrama: the body of a well-liked schoolteacher is found in the wetlands. Foul play is suspected, and the investigation is going to rake up all the muck a small town can keep. Indeed, this beloved English teacher Mr. Francis Fox was an incorrigible serial pedophile and a shameless manipulator. (Do we even want the police to collar the perp?)

[I don’t know why child sexual assault has kept turning up in the fiction read this summer. It wasn’t planned! — Ed.]

JCO’s writing voice is pointy and fragmented, which is not my favorite kind of prose to read, but I hung on every turn of phrase for all their wrenching sharpness.

The real standout element of FOX was the sense of place. The township of Weiland, in South Jersey, is between the famous Pine Barrens and infamous Atlantic City.

My all-time favorite New Yorker contributor was John McPhee, and like fellow Princeton faculty JCO, he wrote with great care and interest about the local surroundings: the experimental aircraft flown in a Pennsylvania airstrip to the foragers of the Pine Barrens, or the builders of dams and nuclear power plants, or small farmers trucking their produce to the greenmarkets in New York. It was a pleasant surprise to visit these same environs, only now dripping with gothic darkness.

It’s why the opening chapters, where Fox’s body is discovered, or nearly missed, in its pieces, are so strong, with our characters milling around the wildlife preserve pond, seeing turkey vultures, hearing red-winged blackbirds. There is even a set piece of a dog’s world of scents and sounds, just like in Sirius and Green Knight.

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Robert Coover. The Cat In the Hat for President: A Political Fable (1968). Foxrock, 2018. 69 pp.

Theodor Geisel illustrated humor books and political cartoons in the interwar period, before he created a pseudonym for a children’s book author that also referred to the alternate timeline in which Geisel had finished his doctorate.

Robert Coover, just as fabulous an author as Pynchon or Barth — and arguably funnier than both — came to know of Dr. Seuss by reading the books to his children. (“My kids wanted to know why you couldn’t see the Cat’s peenie…”)

The “Beginner Books” symbol, with the slogan “I can read it all by myself,” to Coover “looked remarkably like a campaign button, and, by changing one letter [the r to and l], it was one.”

In the ferment of the student protests and the presidential race of 1968, Coover drafted this “fable” of anarchic politicking. Ever forward-thinking, he vainly submitted it to Random House, Dr. Seuss’s publisher, in hopes of some cross-brand synergy. Too bad they hadn’t realized the value of IPs yet.

The narrator of this Political Fable is Mr. Brown. You can say he has gone to town, for he’s a senior party boss in Washington, and his plans for the primary nomination are tossed overboard by the Cat.

The Cat is not such an easy romantic metaphor for Nixon or LBJ — if anything, he is eerily an analogue for Trump, complete with a red and white hat, decades before Trump’s manifestation. As if Coover’s phantasies weren’t unsettling enough as deranged ceremonies for insanity, now his dream-time narratives may be threatening to reach into the future.

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Every politician has a handler. For the Cat in the Hat, it is Clark. In One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Clark is the “luminous pear-shaped mass” that the two children find “in the park, in the dark.” “He will live at our house. He will grow and grow. Will our mother like this? We don’t know.”

I don’t remember this one bit!

He’s the Cat who knows where it’s at!
With Tricks and Voom and Things like that!

“Voom” becomes an inane refrain. Perhaps it refers to nuclear weapons. Clark himself offers a Talmudic reading of Dr. Seuss’s texts as an encoded satire of the Cold War detente. All of his books, not just Butter Battle.

…the two stories are parables of the foibles of diplomacy, the first being about the effectiveness of air power, followed by technological recovery, the second about the eradication of the, uh, Red menace by atomic power.

But of all the anarchic gags of this fiction, best of all I think are the lists. Take this early one of nicknames for the nominee of the rival party.

…the Opponent would have been a tough man to beat. Born in a small Midwestern town of middleclass parents, reared and educated in the Southwest, known to have considerable holdings and influence in the Eastern Establishment, a poker buddy of several Southern Senators, progressive and city-oriented yet bluntly individualistic and rural in manner, rugged, shrewd, folksy, taciturn yet gregarious, a member of everything from SANE and the NAACP to the American Legion, Southern Baptists, and the National Association of Manufacturers, a chameleon personality who could project the faces of Chairman of the Board, Sheriff, Sunday Duffer, Private Eye, Young Man on the Go, Crackerbarrel Philosopher, Liontamer, Dad, Quarterback, Country Gentleman, City Lawyer, Good Sport, Field General, Swinger, and the Guy Next Door, all in one three-minute TV sequence, the Opponent was, in short, a natural.

Like the original Cat in the Hat book, the mess made by the Cat gets cleaned up in the nick of time. It’s that the mess could occur in the first place that keeps the poor humorless souls like Mr. Brown up at night.

Poul Anderson. The Broken Sword (1954). Open Road, 2014. 229 pp.

Nineteen-fifty-four. ‘Twas in the summer of this year that Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings.

But did you know there was another novel of epic fantasy that year, by an American of Danish extraction who studied physics at the University of Minnesota? This too was a tale of aristocratic warriors of the iron age, a fey world of elves, dwarfs, and giants. And an infamous blade of evil’s bane, now broken, must be restored to win a new war against evil.

It was early in his career as a pulp writer, but Poul Anderson whipped up a crackling narrative that — its most visible concession to science fiction — instead of building a secondary world like Middle Earth, takes place definitely on our planet. The gods and demons of the world’s cultures all literally and simultaneously exit: from the Norse Aesir to “the White Christ.”

The implications of this situation are effortlessly taken to their logical conclusion within the plot. Speaking of, as opposed to Tolkien’s scrupulous rendition of a military campaign, Anderson uses familiar tropes to build a handy adventure plot: a quest in the realm of frost giants to mend the broken sword, and grand medieval battles.

Swords and axes rose and fell and rose streaming again, metal cried out and sundered, a rain of spears and arrows clouded the sky — horses screamed and trampled the rolling corpses under their hoofs — warriors shouted and fought and sank to earth.

At the archetypal core is a tragic Sigfried-Brunhilde love story of incest. In this versions their names are Skafloc and Freda.

Best of all is the increasing moodiness, as the characters become more war-weary, more grief-stricken, hastened to face up to their fates. This is dark, grubby, squelching fantasy, laden with a sinister weird tales energy.

There is much else to tell, of the dragon and his gold hoard, of the burning mountain and the bottomless chasm and the quern of the elemental giantesses. It should be told of their fishing in the river that ran from hell, and of what they caught there. The story of the everlasting battle and of the witch in Iron Forest and of the song they once heard the aurora hissing to itself in the secret night —

If one had ever searched for a perfect halfway point between Robert E. Howard and postwar epic fantasy, it’s right here. And if contemporary science fiction and fantasy had even a granule of the zest, excitement, and quick polish of Anderson’s prose, we wouldn’t have a problem!

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László Krasznahorkai. A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (2003), translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet. New Directions, 2022. 130 pp.

He may have won the Nobel last year, but Don László hasn’t stopped, and neither have we. In a rare episode of clairvoyance, your host blogged through the main cycle of novels by this Hungarian maestro. In particular, Melancholy of Resistance (1989) has proven to be the most popular post on this stack by a significant margin.

Now the time has come to examine Krasznahorkai’s interest in East Asia, the refinement of handicraft traditions, and the wisdom of the ancients. Earlier this year we posted a letter on his travelogue book of China, Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens (2004).

With his two main Japan books, Seiobo There Below (2008) and the book under review today, L. K. explores a devotional mood, but instead of a (lost) Confucian piety in millennial China, it’s the mysteries of Zen Buddhism. This atmospheric novella follows the “grandson of Prince Genji” as he wanders through a immense monastery on a mountain slope outside Kyoto.

He’s alone, no one else is there, he doesn’t even have a retinue like a typical Japanese nobleman. It’s like a feudal liminal space. The tracing of his path through the grounds and the chambers holds us in a place of unseeing and unknowing, as emphasized in the man’s prayer to the buddha sculpture.

And then he said within himself: We do not know what you thought about the world. We misunderstand every one of your words. We are utterly lost.

“Obscurity” is the put-down of choice against fiction that smacks of modernism. And while LK’s prose can be difficult at the level of syntax, the exciting thing about Mountain is how the narrative is largely about obscurity itself.

The very first piece of resistance involves the obscuration of sight. The grandson of Prince Genji can’t see anything beyond the monastery wall, as he stands outside the complex.

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Hopefully it doesn’t sound too crude to offer a national take, but in Mountain, despite its Far Eastern subject, Krasznahorkai seems to be leaning toward the West, in terms of technique. His fiction here is more “German” than “Russian,” more like Kafka and Mann than Gogol and Dostoevsky.

For one thing, we are wandering around and exploring the depths of an immense, exquisite structure, reminiscent of the fragments of weird architecture you find in Kafka’s notebooks, that almost anticipate point-and-click videogames.

But then there’s a highly constructed rhetoric, a public intellectual kind of posture, and even a Dickens-like word repetition that makes the style, despite LK’s long arcane lines, remarkably more accessible:

…the exact dimensions of this second double-roof construction, because it was large, it was enormous, and it was colossal as it floated down from the air, and in this floating, just as with the first gate, it too remained in the air, and yet at the same time these dimensions that were larger, more enormous, more colossal, were accompanied by a nearly inexpressible weightlessness, moreover, this weightlessness, as it were, permeated every single column and brace, it permeated every element…

The narrative is so minimal, the environment so abstracted, but the author seems more accommodating to the audience than he’d ever been in his fictions on Hungary. One subtle trick to help “sell” this surreal quest and to keep our interest is to have Prince Genji’s grandson be a sick traveler.

Permanently nauseous and dehydraded, he’s too busy racked by his own constitution to reflect on what he’s doing. He explores this temple the way one should go through a museum, very leisurely, almost enough so that you take periodic naps in the rock garden in your semi-exhausted state:

— but he did not fall asleep, he merely lost consciousness. The blood rushed out of his pale, refined features within a moment, and his body slipped to one side of the column. His head knocked down forcefully onto the terrace flooring, and he rained there,… the silk handkerchief, until then clutched in his hand, slipped out from the opened palm, fluttering away, falling into the dust of the garden.

When I read these lines I thought the poor man had died.

Between the chapters of the man’s wanderings are chapters, perhaps from deeper in his reflective mind, of all the materials and labor that went into this wonderment of a structure.

…entrancing harmonization of the work, not the carving of the Buddha with his head turned to one side…and not even the monastery itself as a dazzling whole when it was finally completed and consecrated so that it could embark upon these one thousand years in the eternal love of the Buddha…

There are asides on the care and effort put in working the wood, the stone, the bamboo. And beyond the craftsmen and builders were devotional experts like the tree census taker, who

…must industriously and intensely count and measure, draw and draw again, his main task was to observe the trees, and truly he did nothing else for long, long years, …he observed, circumspectly, the development of the hinoki cypress trees on the mountain…

…he needed to know how the sun shone upon the hinoki trees in the summer, how they withstood the monsoon’s long rains, and so the miya daiku lived with the trees, literally, he knew each one separately as if they were all members of one colossal family…

This is an immersion in slow effort, maybe not unlike what it takes to write and read serious literature.

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It’s notable that we almost can’t be further away from the iconoclasm of avant-gardism or even the modernist interest in pre-modern abstract art. We are dilated on a very specific feudal culture in an island country that isolated itself as a matter of national policy in the early seventeenth century.

Japanese culture endlessly fascinates in great part because of the weight and persistence of feudal remnants, or what is more affectionately called tradition.

the most consistent procedures and masters, and finally, a simple trust in the presence of tradition…

Is this also the road to great art? To a civilization that appreciates and sustains high culture? Are we better off without mass-produced goods made by union-contracted workers and with guildsmen hiding the knowledge of their trades instead?

Or is our modern world just that broken, compared to this elevated one?

The longer we dwell with the grandson in this derelict monastery, the more the structure comes to feel like an analogy for the fiction’s construction. It’s a classically surrealist palace of consciousness. And it is also the receptacle for sacred, ‘obscure’ knowledge.

Generally speaking, the sacred sutras of a given order’s temple were always kept in a distinguished place, most frequently the back section of the main altar of the Golden Hall, in cabinets of fine workmanship burnished to a fine surface, finely varnished and well-guarded by locks, and here too this is what occurred, here too, those sutras, which were among the most important, most valuable, and most ancient, bearing particular ritual significance, were guarded in locked cabinets built into the wall behind the altar…

And it ties into the motivation we finally get: the man is on a quest for a secret garden that he’d read about in a book.

…he simply could not chase it from his mind, he continually saw the garden in his mind’s eye without being able to touch its existence, he saw the garden, and after a while, self-evidently, he wanted to see it in reality as well, namely he gave out the mandate for the garden to be found…

Your host has a notion of what this secret garden, supposedly sequestered somewhere in this wooden compound. It’s the ideal of aesthetic autonomy, of a (European-modernist) artwork that would be as independent of the world and society as the material world is independent of the mind.

Could the secret garden be in the innermost chamber of the monastery? No, it’s the private room of the abbot, and its objects disappoint.

…a pile of sake glasses, books and illustrated magazines on the floor, a large American film poster on the wall, an unmade bed, and facing the bed on a shelf affixed to the wall, a primitive television set fitted with a V-shaped antenna,…

This sacred space, this “private empire,” secluded from the rest of the world, and it’s just a bachelor pad!

And in this room is a book, a mathematical treatise by Sir William Stanely Gilmore, The Infinite Mistake, which writes out the real numbers, on and on until some zeroes beyond googolplex. The author means to prove that infinity does not exist beyond the mind; not as long as there is space between fundamental particles.

At the very end of his book, there is a brief Note, in which the author, with coarse words of varying strength and of varying registers, but in every case accompanied by extraordinarily obscene expressions, curses the following mathematicians, in the first place a certain George Cantor, then Bolzano, Dedekind, Frege, Zermelo, Fraenkel, Brouwer, Whitehead, and Paul Cohen all get what’s coming to them, so that then the author, with the harshest of words, tears into a certain David Hilbert, where in nearly every sentence there figures such expressions as “fuck you,” “your mother,” “shit,” and other similarly crude expressions…

Why would this completely fictitious Sir William Stanley Gilmore and his work make an appearance in this innermost chamber? (And why does that name sound so familiar?)

He strikes your host as an image of the romanticized genius, too eccentric for the mainstream or professional consensus, the artists of high modernism — only transposed to math. The same sort of text that inhabits such tranquil yet disquieting emotions, that impresses such knowledge and sensuality, is also just as easily the screed of a crank.

It’s the risk of making the obscure the subject matter of art, trying to make one regard the unseeable.

Margarita Karapanou. Kassandra and the Wolf (1974), translated from the Greek by N. C. Germanacos. Clockroot, 2024. 130 pp.

This debut work by Karapanou is genuinely terrifying and disturbing to the core to read and reflect upon.

You have probably guessed from the title that we are in a childlike, fairytale kind of environment. This space is filled with nursery rhyme imagery as well as dark, bewildering surrealism. It’s like Angela Carter or Rikki Ducornet.

But it’s arguably harsher, scarier, more willfully chaotic, and with a clipped minimal style that is unbelievably precise in the English translation by Germanacos. In exchange, the book is episodic — closer to vignettes — and is clever enough to stop before its wicked energy is fully spun out.

I still know very little about Margarita Karapanou. She was given the same name as her mother’s, just like Kassandra in her novella. And similarly, her family was part French and her cultural upbringing was on a Paris-Athens axis.

She was part of a cohort of Greek writers — largely women — who came of age after the Civil War and during the Junta of ‘67 to ’74.

This heavy context manages to touch even the feverish imagery of Kassandra’s narration: the upper-class household is traversed by the Civil War, with the house maid openly sympathetic to the Leftists!

This novella is so light that I had planned to take up the conceit of the wonderful Book for Ants Substack and send a letter under 200 words. But I’ve hit that limit just now and haven’t even gotten to the text.

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Kassandra is a prepubescent child, and her imagination fills in for the things that escape her understanding.

“Does it hurt, Mother?”

That afternoon a bee had stung her under her nightgown, on her belly.

…

She took off her nightgown, went to the bottom of the garden, sat on a rock, naked, facing the sunset, and rubbed her swollen belly. She gazed out to sea.

Is her mother’s belly swollen because she is pregnant again, and little Kassandra has supplied a bee sting to explain the transformation (that’s why her words are in the past pluperfect; she hadn’t witnessed it)? Her pose out in the garden mirrors a picture Kassandra drew of pregnant Mother Mary.

Kassandra talks about masturbating in bed at night.

Faster and faster; I was going to burst. Candies like weights, like sugared almonds, rose from my soles to my belly, and I was filled with syrup. Thick honey trickled from everywhere, and I was drowning in sweetness.

And this same wonderful prose relates multiple episodes of sexual exploitation, assuming that’s what’s happening with apparently every encounter Kassandra has with an “older gentleman,” or Peter the house servant.

It could be a child’s fantasy, but then again why does Kassandra have a stutter (assuming it’s not just a mythological echo)? Why does she have to be committed to “a house with rooms” for what sounds like years, even though the vignettes then proceed as normal?

These chapters are so brief, so precise in their imagery and language — but what in the world is going on in this house?

It’s the novella that is like a “house with rooms,” chambers of imagination, or the efforts of a child’s mind to encompass everything that is happening to her.

Olaf Stapledon. Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord (1944). Gollancz, 2011. 194 pp.

Considering the golden age SF novels recently programmed for our subscriber-only letters, from the lyrical anarchic comedy of Lafferty to the neo-Voltairian ludic thoughts of Sheckley, my appreciation for the satirical and philosophical roots feeding twentieth-century science fiction. All of these pulp magazine writers now seem like so many Borgeses.

SF is, in Stapledon’s slogan, Histories of the Future. It’s the news from nowhere (William Morris). The “harder” iterations of SF read as pastiches in the form of scientific reports, and what dry reporting it can be, especially with this author.

Probably because Olaf Stapledon was a trained academic, PhDs in philosophy and psychology, before writing best-selling novels. These books, like Last and First Men (1930) or Star Maker (1937), concern universal history at such a cosmic scale as to effectively found a new mythos.

These long durée projections trace their roots in English utopian socialism, as cherished and continued by the Fabian Society, of which Stapledon was a member. The likeness comes to mind in particular because of Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah (1922) on the future evolution of humans.

Stapledon had an optimistic evolutionary vision, that was really a mechanical materialism: the ‘survival of the fittest’ applies to society as well as nature, and evolution will produce a Nietzschean Übermensch who will guide the masses to socialism.

The vision is more than a bit unfortunate, though it was a large part of turn-of-the-century petty-bourgeois socialism. This naïve or accidental proto-fascism is a necessary hurdle to reach a prose that, while dry like I said — dry enough that it took a couple attempts to get through the book — it’s still well-written.

And it’s funny yet appropriate that Stapledon’s novel about a talking dog will be, according to Brian Aldiss, his most human of stories.

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Juan Goytisolo. Marks of Identity (1966). Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. Serpent’s Tail, 1988. 352 pp.

It’s been a long-awaited pleasure to get immersed once again in the work of Juan Goytisolo, one of the great untouchable modern novelists. Reading Makbara (1980) many years ago was an internally explosive experience, and to this day I maintain him as an underrated author despite his prestige.

Now your host turns to the trilogy of novels that announced J. G.’s turn from neorealist allegories to the aggressive and demanding forms that became the trademark of this Cervantes prize winner.

The first of which, Marks of Identity, was certainly free in its composition. If you’re not careful, you’ll lose track of the four H’s and the one W — though I never felt lost for too long.

In fact, this trilogy of fiction (so far) is proving much more accessible than the free jazz linguistics of Makbara. This work is still accessible, which comes from its journalistic quality. It is bracingly personal — Juan himself was a young Communist and an expatriate from the violence of his national and family history.

The core of the book is the journey of our hero, Álvaro Mendiola, a documentary filmmaker and political exile of Franco’s Spain, back to his homeland, his home city Barcelona. We find him rifling through old photographs, letters, and surveillance reports by fascist spies.

All of these memories and documentary pieces flow by in a non-linear mingle. Marks seems bound together only by the strength of a colorful second-person narration, part memoir and part travelogue.

What you can never say about Goytisolo’s work is that it seems written by AI. You can glean that just from the opening passage, an unpunctuated mass of chatter that nevertheless tells you, in its content along with its buzzing energy, how torturously divided Álvaro feels.

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There’s a lot of hurt to deal with here: the pain of defeat, with Francoism still in power, searing contempt for the conservative Catholic values of Álvaro’s aristocratic upbringing, frustration with his fellow Leftists who spend more time bickering in coffee shops and conference rooms than they do trying to make a difference.

This collage-like, quasi-documentary novel is a traditionally excoriating work to be sure, but it is also more literally an excoriation. The text reads like compulsive skin-picking, ruminating over and over on the failure of the Spanish left as well as the heavy shame (which is rage turned inward) regarding Spain’s backwardness, its bull fighting and other arcane practices.

Spain is a dusty place, even when the environment is dust-free. I relished the vivid prose relating Álvaro’s revisiting of the country:

The sun had suddenly gone into hiding and from the landing of the stairs you watched the rapid flight of a tern that was skim ming, slashing the curly surface of the sea, accompanied by the fine spray. Hundreds of gray gulls were swarming about the sewer openings. The clouds were coming together over you, clumsy and muddy-colored. The wind was shaking the hoods of the cypresses and transmitting a winged tremor to the tiny leaves of the willows. Everything was saying that a storm was imminent.

Entwined with the local color are recollections of adolescence — including a weird dalliance with a buddy’s mom which also comes to signify Spanish backwardness in Álvaro’s world. But then we enter moments of political unrest, even before the Civil War of 1936—1939.

There was a worker uprising in the town of La Graya, agitated by a dam-building project, which is suppressed by the Civil Guards, or the Spanish gendarmerie. This body would fight on both sides of the Civil War.

When the first shots ring out, there is a movement of panic. The peasants try to grab the rifles away from the Guards and they attack them with their sickles and knives. While the main body of the crowd breaks up, the more audacious men struggle with the Civil Guards and join in a violent hand-to-hand battle with them. A peasant manages to get the gun away from one of the detachment and fires at him. The Guard, Pedro Dominguez Requena, raises his hands to his cartridge belts and takes them off soaked in blood. When he falls, a peasant sinks a peavey into his throat. The delegate from the Yeste town hall, Andres Martinez Munoz, first assistant to the mayor and head of the employment office, uselessly begs for a cease fire.

Not far off the heels of this harrowing set piece is the verbal description of footage of a bull fight, which somehow reads as equally traumatic.

Suddenly the young bull and the oxen turn around and head uphill, preceded by the beating of the cowbells and the running of the young men, the barbarous howl — a hybrid mixture of terror and ecstasy — of the aroused multitude. The people on foot go into the doorways, cling to the human clusters in the windows, flatten out motionless against the ground. The farmhands grip their forks, sticks, stakes and as soon as the animals go by, they run after them and beat them savagely on the back, the rear, the hocks, the flanks. In a few seconds the street is empty of people.

But the shame easily absorbs all this bloodshed.

And it’s a confusing bloodshed: some of our hero’s interlocutors can’t remember or keep straight which side of the war they had fought on — you’d think the contending ideologies and social systems involved would count for more.

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Alongside the dust, flies, and white buildings of Spain is the somewhat off-kilter emigrant scene in Paris. They gather at Madame Berger’s cafe, and the different generations of exiled Spaniards are heaped up like geographical strata:

The first time they set foot in Madame Berger’s cafe, the elements of the top and most recent layer felt themselves obligated to explain to the others what had happened in the country up to the very moment of their departure before they realized that their stories not only were of no interest to anyone, but that they also constituted a very serious lack of tact, excusable, it is true, in a novice exile, still ignorant of the subtle rules and regulations that governed the rigorous scale of age.

The one antidote to the shame of the odious Hispanic heritage and to the agonies of exile is the Other Spain — of the Moors, of Islam, and the historic influence of the rest of the Mediterranean basin

The old men who were dying without families, the workers maimed by their own tools, the Arabs and Negroes who, allah yaouddi, moaned in a language you did not understand, had shown you the path along which, some day or other, you would have to pass if you wanted to give back clean to the earth what in purity belonged to it. You should look for your salvation there, in them and in their obscure universe, just as instinctive and without anyone’s apprenticeship, close beside them, you had looked for love: breaking away, little by little, from everything that you had received as a loan; the privileges and facilities with which your people had attempted to win you since your childhood.

Stressing the ties between Iberia and northern Africa is part of how the novel’s hero searches for a “rebirth” or at least a wiped slate. He desires to be “without a homeland, without a home, without friends, pure uncertain present…simply Álvaro Mendiola, with no marks of identity.”

How this project, of rebirth and of “betrayal” of one’s past, could work is taken up in the sequel, Count Julian (1970), set in Morocco. I must drop everything and ship out.

Robert Sheckley. Mindswap (1966). Ace, 1978. 213 pp.

Robert Sheckley, Korean War veteran, started publishing pulp stories in the late 1950s, while studying at NYU on the G. I. Bill. It’s his stories that solidify his claim to science-fiction fame; the novels, like this one, are episodic, meandering, and basically feel like a bundle of short stories, perhaps as many as thirty.

But boy, are they zany, as fun and funny as anything by Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas Adams. Sheckley’s prose is stuffed with clever ideas that never bog things down, since he can translate everything into a punchy, amusing voice.

The writing isn’t just witty but goes abstract to an audacious degree. I can’t think of another fiction writer willing to get this abstract except Mark Leyner. How would you picture the escalating actions related in these lines?: “Seizing the dwindling moment of opportunity, Marvin and the saddlebum [actually a member of an alien beetle species] sprinted out the door, leaped around the corner, broad jumped across the street, and polevaulted to freedom.”

At the core of Mindswap (first serialized in Galaxy in 1965) is a journey through a plurality of worlds. A world can resemble ours except for a single discrepancy: an ordinary soda shop from the 1950s in upstate New York — except they serve LSD frappes.

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V. S. Naipaul. Half a Life: A Novel. Picador, 2001. 228 pp.

Initially, your host wondered what to say about Naipaul. A crankish aura seems to have grown around this Nobel laureate’s reputation. Was he a pro-colonial reactionary and an orientalist? Edward Said thought so, but then again who wasn’t in his eyes?

Vidiahar Surajprasad Naipaul’s parents were Indian indentured servants were had immigrated to Trinidad where he was born in 1932. From there he went to Oxford for his studies, and the following life of writing and travel. His most well-known text is probably A Bend in the River (1979). His life’s story reflects, in part, the trajectory of the protagonist of this late (next-to-last) novel.

Half a Life is a picaresque — reminding me of Barry Lyndon — through a world that is both colonial and post-colonial. It is the height of the Cold War.

But on the personal level, the anti-hero Willie “Somerset” Chandran is branded from birth with intolerable dualities. He is the product of an impossible cross-caste union: a Brahmin father and a Dalit — or “backward” in this text — mother. It was the father inserted the name of that famous English writer, who had once come to visit.

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The opening section is actually a first-person recounting by the father to Willie, and his own life story is both dim and impetuous. He gains a bureaucratic career after India’s independence, but screws over the local peasantry without qualm.

It was the first of my promotions. It didn’t matter how badly I did my job, how much I sabotaged, they continued to promote me. It was like civil disobedience in reverse.

Poor Willie doesn’t have an ideal model in his father: he’s quite self-centered. Even coming upon one of the stories young Willie has been writing is experienced as an odd betrayal:

Willie didn’t take the book directly to his father. He left it on the table in the verandah overlooking the inner ashram yard. His father had coffee there in the morning.

He read the composition. He was ashamed. He thought, ‘Lies, lies. Where did he get these lies from?’ Then he thought, ‘But is it worse than Shelley and Wordsworth and the rest of them? All of that was lies too.’

And Willie feels the lack of acknowledgement. He has a chance to leave the messiness of his parents and sister Sarojini behind by studying at Oxford: he can reinvent himself as a bohemian student in the party scene of 1950’s London.

It’s an exciting mileux, at least at first, with a bunch of West Indian diaspora characters, people who introduce him to sex and culture. Willie writes scripts for the BBC radio. A friend of his, a lawyer named Roger, who gives him writing advice, invoking Hemingway: “…if you think about it, life isn’t like that. Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end. Life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should all be there.”

Which is itself the structure of this leisurely novel, whose familiar continuity and wanderings across the colonial spheres of Britain and Portugal, jumping along an axis across three continents, from India to England to East Africa.

But Willie’s London period also confronts him with his own parochialism. He realizes how little he knows beyond the here and now, due to the current events in the Middle East of the mid-50s (the Suez crisis would be main signal of the turnover from British to American imperialist dominance).

But in Willie’s mind neither his school geography nor Suez was strictly real. Neither had to do with the here and now; neither affected him or his family or his town; and he had no idea of the history of the canal or Egypt. He knew the name of Colonel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, but it was only in the way he knew about Krishna Menon: he knew about the greatness of the man without knowing about the deeds. At home he had read the newspapers, but he read them in his own way. He had learned to shut out the main stories, the ones about far-off wars or election campaigns in the United States that meant nothing to him and went on week after week and were slow and repetitive and then ended, very often quite lamely, giving, like a bad book or movie, nothing or very little for much effort and attention.

These passages indeed feel journalistic and Hemingwayesque. There’s no extra color in these reports. They get straight to the point when it comes to Willie’s reflections. Take these ironic thoughts of the Brahmin-like customs of British universities that bring Willie back to his haunting dualities:

And because the college was like Oxford and Cambridge it was full of various pieces of ‘tradition’ that the teachers and students were proud of but couldn’t explain.

Yet something strange was happening. Gradually, learning the quaint rules of his college, with the churchy Victorian buildings pretending to be older than they were, Willie began to see in a new way the rules he had left behind at home. He began to see — and it was upsetting, at first — that the old rules were themselves a kind of make-believe, self-imposed. And one day, towards the end of his second term, he saw with great clarity that the old rules no longer bound him.

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Willie isn’t consumed by literature; stories are just things he finds in the external world — again quite journalistic. His early work is allegorical, but they conceal his childhood pain. His development as a writer involves inverting this setup, to get more personal by writing about the outer world instead of the inner world.

To Willie’s surprise, it was easier, with these borrowed stories far outside his own experience, and with these characters far outside himself, to be truer to his feelings than it had been with his cautious, half-hidden parables at school. He began to understand — and this was something they had had to write essays about at the college — how Shakespeare had done it, with his borrowed settings and borrowed stories, never with direct tales from his own life or the life around him.

Willie publishes a book of short stories (an amusing arc involving a radical-chic publisher looking for progressive post-colonial cred), which realistically doesn’t bring sudden fame and fortune. However, it brings in a “fan” letter from a reader named Ana, who comes from a Portuguese planter family in colonial Mozambique.

Here is another place that traces Willie’s drifting life, with another set of vividly drawn characters initiating him into yet another beguiling sexual world in the nightlife of a village during civil war.

Such is the third and final leg of this book’s journey. And like the opening monologue by the father, this last bit is told by Willie in the first-person, to his sister, after the events in East Africa had transpired. And like his father, Willie’s behavior traces an arc of dim, selfish licentiousness.

Naipaul’s narrative raises a deep parallel between exile and “translation” (the heading of the book’s third part), worked out in the details of moving across nations, learning new languages and customs. And, most painfully, coming up against different caste systems, namely the agonizing color line of Portuguese (and Spanish) colonies, with whites on top and mestizos and blacks on the bottom.

Willie and Ana visit a cafe in Mozambique, and see a racially mixed tiler at work:

The tiler was a big light-eyed mulatto man. For some reason — perhaps for not finishing the job on time — he was being abused and shouted at by the Portuguese owner. With us, and his other customers, the owner was as civil as always; but then, switching character and mood, he went back to abusing the tiler. At every shout the big light-eyed man lowered his head, as though he had received a blow. He was sweating; it seemed to be with more than heat. He went on with his delicate work, laying out the thin, fast-drying mortar, and then pressing and lightly tapping each pretty Portuguese tile into place. The sweat rolled down his pale-brown forehead and from time to time he shook it like tears from his eyes. He was in shorts; they were tight over his muscular thighs as he squatted. Little springs and twists of coarse hair were on his thighs and on his face, where close shaving had pock¬ marked the skin. He never replied to the shouts of the owner, whom he could so easily have knocked down. He just kept on working.

I said nothing more to Ana. But whenever I remembered the big sweating man with the abused light eyes, carrying the shame of his birth on his face like a brand, I would think, ‘Who will rescue that man? Who will avenge him?’

Wherever he goes, Willie is haunted by the hierarchies of caste domination and the colonial past.

And yet, for all of his reactionary political tendencies, the flipside of Naipaul’s writing is a steadfast refusal to romanticize all this historical oppression, or its present pains.

Next week, the return of bonus letters on golden age science fiction continues for paid subscribers. Then a novel from Spain that is pretty much the ‘late modernist’ version of this post’s novel.

Jed Esty. The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits. Stanford, 2022. 146 pp.

Well, hello, it is Tony again. Mr. Lanz assigned another book from the academic left-oppositional scene, but this time, mercifully, the text was short. Jed Esty came to our attention as a newer literary theorist in the orbit of Fredric Jameson’s “Marxist” version of cultural studies, with a focus on Anglophone literature after the industrial revolution, and really an emphasis on modernism studies, indicated by the subtitles of his books A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (2003) and Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (2011). Before us now is his latest book, published in 2022 — and how frighteningly long ago that year feels! — and we find the scholar, no doubt reeling to some extent from a certain unprecedented public health crisis, taking a step back from his subject of two decades: American and English literature, as aspects of two national cultures, have a particular likeness — not in their “identical” languages, but in their reflections of their respective decline in “imperial” status. That is, The Future of Decline urges us to face up to the very idea that is now accepted by a majority of Americans, that is the U.S. is in fact a declining power, is essentially in the same position as the United Kingdom in the 1910’s. After decades of taking security, abundance, and economic dominance for granted, the US will irrevocably become a second-rate country. This country’s media and cultural spheres will be digesting this reality for some time. Esty’s book surveys this bourgeois literature of “Declinism,” while comparing British and American cultural-national reflections of declining-power status, and some examples of revisionist history in contemporary US mass culture.

Of course, in 2026, we must not speak merely of American decline but American defeat. We have already editorialized on the US-Israeli war of aggression in the Middle East, considering it as a definitive rupture of the postwar order as engineered by US imperialism. America’s visible defeat against Iran adds another layer. This was no decades-long quagmire in the jungles of Vietnam or the mountains of Afghanistan. It is a plain and simple military miscalculation, accompanied with a diplomatic collapse. This miscalculation will most likely compound into reviving the conflict with the Houthis in Yemen; this heaping failure will not stop the US, however, from committing more aggression, this time against Cuba, whose people are already getting crushed by fuel sanctions. Cuba has been desired as the outpost of Yankee imperialism for the Gulf of Mexico since 1898. The ultimate beneficiary of this Middle East war is the same one as the prior Middle East war. The People’s Republic of China is quietly expanding its maritime control. Granted, the fuel shortages will affect them as well as the rest of Asia, and the country’s growth is slowing, but the heart of the matter is that China is ascending to the number one monopoly-capitalist bloc position in the globalized economy. The rivalry between the two powers is ratcheting up toward what the international relations people euphamistically call ‘direct competition.’ This dire situation is where Esty begins his brief analysis.

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China’s rise and America’s fall is the reality that the so-called Declinists of bourgeois technocratic “thinkers” are in semi-denial about. Esty writes: “By some accounts, the US will cede the title of largest economy to China as early as 2022. By the end of the 2020s, according to Standard Chartered Bank, ‘six of the 10 largest economies could be in Asia’ (Martin). Some experts predict that the US will be number three to China and India before the midpoint of our century. In the last few years, US debt crested up over 100% of GDP. Meanwhile, China in 2020 became the top receiver of direct foreign investment — another measure of its economic eclipse of America.” Declinism comes in many forms and modes: alarmist or optimist, technocratic or moral-aestheticist: but the fundamental character is a dangerous aspect of nostalgia for a superpower status experienced as already lost. Esty reads Declinism (in a chapter made of ten theses) as needing some therapeutic disidentification: detach decline from catastrophe, detach US capitalism from global capitalism, detach US identity with hegemony, detach US identity from white chauvinism, detach from the mythology of rise and fall and rise. It is certainly a healthier way to deal with China’s rise than the deluded Sinophilia of the late Losurdo.

With the grounding material established, the second half of this book considers the cultural reflections of the last two nations to have experienced decline from hegemonic — or “global leadership” position — status, namely Britain (after 1900 and especially 1955) and the US (after 1973). It’s the most interesting part of the book because it contains Esty’s class analysis. He usefully considers texts as ideological reflections — not of one social class taken as a monad, like a “bourgeois” play or a “working class” videogame, but as the articulation of an intra-class alliance: a compact, or even more arcane, a Testament. This thought accounts for the bourgeoisie’s historical fondness for arcane forms from feudalism, which becomes the cementing element of English culture, a society built on class compromise since the 1680s (or the use of Cold War US ideology of Victorian culture). Here is Esty’s description of the inter-class alliance as it was negotiated by the American bourgeoisie at the height of the USA’s hegemon status. “In the US, the political baptism of the nonelites to the hegemonic mission happened in the years between 1920 and 1960. Mass culture in those crucial years paved the way for a patriotic politics built around US military prowess, massive expansion of literacy and lifestyle, the phobias of the Red Scare and Jim Crow, and commercial success across the globe. By the midcentury, anticommunism produced a coordinated ideological effort at cohesion. Elites recruited the political aspirations of working-class and middle-class voters into the cause of American supremacy, framing the export of American consumer capitalism as the triple gift of sacred freedom, true democracy, and general prosperity. The Hollywood studio system picked up the plots of late-Victorian adventure genres, adapting them to the worldview of US supremacy and global centrality.” This is a potent analysis that elucidates the likeness between the polarization and unrest of Britain in the Thatcher years and that of the US since Reagan.

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But the discourse of Declinism is for the most part an immersion in the affect of Nostalgia, which quickly curdles into paranoia: “I would call it phobic hegemony. Phobic hegemony means the fear and anxiety generated by the anticipation of losing global power and privilege. Anxiety has always haunted American power: for those at the very top, change can only mean loss. Phobic hegemony was the dark underside of both Victorian equipoise and Cold War confidence. Paranoid style is not just a feature of midcentury American conservatism. It’s a baked-in feature of superpower political culture.” The way out of the morass of affect offered here unfortunately offers no alternative to the cross-class triangulation mentioned above between the big bourgeoisie (and its pro-aristocratic culture) and the little bourgeoisie. Esty’s main idea here is that the “Culture War” in its contemporary iteration is a “History War” (why not “Historiographical”?). The field of representations must become a battleground for the ludicrous amounts of violence and exploitation inflicted by British and American colonial policy. (This is where intra-class coordination is brutally apparent at the economic level: chattel slavery was a feudal social relation, yet in the American South was plugged into a capitalist market that was itself vaster than the industrial North’s.) The slight Left flavor of the text disappears at this point: it’s all petty-bourgeois pragmatic reform advice, what Marx called recipes for the cookshops of the future: an endorsement of the ahistorical history of the 1619 Project, of “degrowth,” and all the rest of it. “The 2020s history wars ask citizens to reconsider the meaning of American power. British and American publics are learning all over again about the achievements celebrated in—and the damages charged to—their countries’ names. That challenge puts the long history of slavery and settler colonialism at the center of public debate.” There is an interest in salvaging nationalism, of improving our lot under an imperialist, rentier state, that we cannot follow. The working class was pacified in Victorian Britain by low prices for wage goods, and is disciplined in the US by the big bureaucratic trade unions — national culture doesn’t count for the proletariat, who have no country, and in the perspective of the whole includes the fact that nations and national borders will disappear from the earth.

We shouldn’t refrain from participating in this “history war” but we should refrain from picking one of the two sides currently contending — woke and anti-woke are just two sides of contemporary illiberalism and anti-materialism. As for Esty’s short book, or ‘mini-graph,’ the limitations are obvious but the arguments about national myth and intellectual history between the two historically dominant capitalist powers deserve future expansion. Meanwhile I should be resigned to the fact that the “Marxism” of the late Fredric Jameson mainly signifies that his followers are to leave said “Marxism” to him.