Possible value and possible force. Shakespeare teaches us that personality can have value and can have force, but also shows us personality whose possible value goes unused, personality whose possible force is never realized.

Each person is possibly valuable in themselves, possesses some possible force within a given idea of order. Each of us can make a scale of value and force, but it is always our choice, and we are not guaranteed any sponsorship by outside powers.

Each one is a martyr for the truth they represent, for the value of their own personality, and for the other personalities they choose to value. Each one must accept the cost of their own personality, and of the others they choose.

Enhanced self-consciousness may augment one’s sense of the value of one’s own personality and the personality of others, but it will also augment one’s sense of the cost.

Self-consciousness and consciousness of others. So much occurs in Shakespeare because of misunderstanding, incongruence, sheer inability to bridge the gaps between radically different beings.

Shakespeare is a challenge to our capacity for self-consciousness and consciousness of others. If only we simply had more of that thing called Intellect or consciousness, these gaps could be bridged.

And yet Hamlet despairs that Intellect itself is not enough. One still has to act the thing out. One has to become an actor in order to make use of self-consciousness. There is no such thing as a theatre of mind that would allow us to imagine an act and receive the benefit of it as though we had actually acted it out. Or maybe we should say that Hamlet attempts to realize such a theatre of mind. Maybe he achieves it, maybe not.

No detectable egotism. When we search for Shakespeare’s presence in his plays, he convinces us that he is part of the crowd, just another one of his characters. He is always a passenger amidst a group, and we are too.

Shakespeare is not risked by his creations. It’s not like in the Romantics, like Wordsworth or Shelley. There is never a sense of Shakespeare himself ultimately attaining triumph, of having everything depend on him, or maybe better to say of having himself depend on everything. The cosmos must be in order, or the Romantic will be destroyed. This is not so for Shakespeare. He has no myth of order.

Does the influence of Shakespeare encourage his readers to become more like one of his characters? What would it mean to be influenced not into becoming more like a Shakespeare character, but instead becoming more like the intelligence that wrote the plays, the non-presence behind all the characters? Is that even desirable?

No unity. No knowledge in Shakespeare is granted to us via abstraction — no wisdom, no morals, no metaphysics. If Shakespeare teaches a kind of knowledge, then it is not instruction in a tradition, or the advice of a teacher, or going off alone to consult one’s own Reason to extrapolate general truths.

Knowledge in Shakespeare comes through observation of particulars and experimentation, through observation of experience. We learn by example and contrast. We learn a habit of observation and judgment, with no one end.

Word music. The language will always be difficult, but bad Shakespeare acting usually starts with a mistake about the right manners. Too stiff, or too fast and without emphasis. The worst is an excessively clipping pace, leaping over whole portions of thought and feeling.

Most Shakespeare performances (at least on film) are under-embellished. At times it seems like it is impossible to over-embellish a Shakespeare part, if the embellishment is one of personality. It seems like each character could always be understood as more peculiar to themselves. In Shakespeare, every character is always “stealing the show.”

Everyone is word-crazy in Shakespeare, thinking and feeling in the music of words. Shakespeare characters are intimate with their own speech, intimate in their relationship with words. No word is without thought or feeling, and no use of words is separate from the sound they make. No speech is separate from a character’s revelation of their own personality.

Shakespeare performances should feel vivid, natural, and unrestrained, but according to the nature of each character.

The total effect of the play should be a turbulent diversity of word-drunkenness, of incessant metamorphosis of sound and character. Shakespeare is famously careless about plot and scene structure. He is also careless about the limits of character.

Instead, structure in Shakespeare is in diction, which is orchestrated across the characters in the play. Diction marks the boundaries of the play.

Comedy. In general, Shakespeare performances are not funny enough. He may be more comedian than anything else. Almost every character could be played funnier than they are. Because Shakespeare is concerned primarily with revealing gaps in consciousness, there is little risk in making even a single character funnier.

Stupidity and human deficiency. Many characters are also not played as dumb enough, for example Polonius in Hamlet should be much dumber than he is portrayed. Shakespeare has an acute sense of degrees — in intellect, in wit, in capacity for love, in capacity for action.

These are not distributed evenly among or within people. Some characters are hopelessly stupid, and this does not stop them from playing a major role. Shakespeare is the harshest of all observers of humanity, has the most potent and varied sense of human deficiency, reveals to us countless deficiencies of which we were not previously aware.

But we do not get a sense of his judgment of these deficiencies. He only reveals them, and bears reliable witness.

No Nature. Emerson forces Stoic and Platonist thinking onto the study of Shakespeare, whose work he equates with Nature itself.

Ecstasy in Emerson — standing outside yourself — is too shallow if it just means opening to wider social and political vistas. To contemplate your place within the general aim of Nature in the way that Emerson means, you start by seeing your own life as inhabiting a perspective of the plays.

Emerson wants this new subtlety of self-consciousness to awaken untapped Stoic powers in individuals. If it really is possible to see yourself with the eyes of Nature, as though from the outside, then this new seeing should clarify what actually belongs to your will as you progress toward the perfection of ideals.

But this is Emerson’s demand and not Shakespeare’s. If there is Nature in Shakespeare, is it only identifiable by its absence?

No wisdom. We try to absorb his perspectives, but Shakespeare gives us nothing to do with the enhancements in consciousness we enjoy while reading him. He abandons us.

The problem of making wisdom out of Shakespeare, with which he gives us no help.

Private Citizens is the story of four college friends and their respective lifepaths after graduation in the late 2000s: Cory, a self-loathing activist who works for a San Francisco nonprofit; Will, a software developer with incel style women trouble; Henrik, a university lab scientist who struggles with bipolar; and Linda, a writer whose freewheeling approach to work, love, and the truth both dodges destruction and spreads it.

These characters seem to have been conceived primarily to represent their intellectual, cultural, and professional contexts. Each tries to tame the oppressive mass of life’s materials with their cherished ideas. All four are formidable in their thinking but limited in their psychological mobility. They are bound by their bodies and by markers of identity, and the significance of these markers within systems of power, money, and knowledge. There is an unwilling center in each of them, an inability to overcome their compulsions or some immutable fact about themselves.

Reviewers complained that these characters are unlikable, even “detestable.” I think it is fair to be tired of anti-heroes or of Lena Dunham style self-loathers, but a better complaint would be that they can be tedious. The review in Vulture is right to say that the book’s plotting can be contrived, and this sometimes frustrates our interest in the characters.1

Not unlike Thomas Pynchon, this book is best in fragments, and it has the same talent as Pynchon of deep absorption in setting and subject matter. This makes for dazzling passages in which a specific milieu is drawn up in gorgeous detail, with impressive intellectual agility and loving wit. A business leadership conference led by a self-help guru fluent in TED talk jargon is a high point, or the madcap section about Will’s pornography addiction. The book convincingly summons the particulars of San Francisco hippie co-op living, the comedy and cruelty of internet culture, technical details of computer hardware and software development, and the mundane despair of office life and academic science research labs. It does not have the show-offy obscurity of Pynchon’s habit of picking up esoteric vocabulary, but comes instead from an authentically sociable curiosity.

The book has definitive examples of some classic relics of discourse from earlier decades, like Henrik’s handwringing speeches about the anxieties of the male feminist, or a very funny scene of Linda observing an eggheaded debate at a party on the now defunct question of the "hipster." Will’s introspection about his insecurities as an Asian American male and Linda’s assaults on early 2000s humanities academia are valuable as well.

Though ideas predominate in the lives of these characters, they also have fully realized and distinct personalities. There are surprising journeys into otherness in this book, for example in the long passage about Henrik’s upbringing on the road, under the care of his mad libertarian Vietnam vet dad. The book’s treatment of women characters also should have been praised more. Few authors have this psychological range, or take this many risks in attempting to understand selves other than their own.

Could the characters be read as statements about the possible fates of their respective schools of thought? Cory learns the boring lesson of no longer confusing her activism with her personal problems, like in Christopher Lasch’s discussion of radicalism as narcissistic street theatre. Will suffers a grisly Dante-esque punishment for his inability to overcome his insecurities about his ethnicity and his troubling ambivalence about women. It is a dark anticipation of elements of our incel discourse, and a real dead end. Henrik’s scientific disposition is no match for the “world of solids,” as he puts it, and he learns mostly that he needs to take his meds. (Is he this book’s pat answer to Gen X depressives like David Foster Wallace?). Finally, in her untutored impatience with her education, her edgy self-consciousness as an object of desire, her will to manipulate others, and her autofiction-like commitment to a “militant solipsism,” Linda exhibits some elements of later Millennial heroines, like the narrators in No One Is Talking About This and Fake Accounts. She may prove to be an early example of a durable archetype.

I am ten years late to this book, and in reading it I greeted and then said goodbye to various ghosts of familiar vistas from decades past. But the book’s tone is already wistful, as though a better knowledge of others is no longer possible.

The critic Harold Bloom passed away in 2019, and already that seems like a long time ago.

I was first aware of him as a brand, more or less, when I was in high school in the 2000s. He was the critic who dared to defend the canon, who called for a higher standard of culture amidst rising mediocrity. Before he was an author whose books I read, he was first the very image of the critic, of the serious reader.

Perhaps many of his readers or would-be readers never get beyond this image. He had an illustrious career as a writer for a popular audience, and even after the quality of his books faded (in my opinion things start to go down after The Anatomy of Influence in 2011), the image held. It would seem that he cultivated it carefully, but this seems to have backfired. I find the responses to him are often pillories of his image and not his ideas.

Maybe some of this stems from professional jealousy. I remember the sweeping attacks from an old article by the scholar Carlin Romano reviewing Anatomy, including the casual accusation that Bloom edited hundreds of criticism volumes for Chelsea House mostly for the money.1 Bloom’s eccentric personality and his tendency to harsh judgment are also understandably obstacles for some.

When his ideas are actually confronted, there is an ambivalence in the responses that still surprises me. This goes for both critics and authors — there is a particular kind of perturbing that only Bloom can do. I catalogued some of these responses when I reviewed Joshua Cohen’s novel The Netanyahus.

I think Bloom himself would have relished this ambivalence. He was nothing if not provocative, and provocation is one possible path to strong literature. Make an author anxious enough and they might rise to the kind of aesthetic conflict that Bloom valued most. And yet even the responses I found in works of literature that referenced Bloom and his ideas directly, maybe with the exception of The Netanyahus, sometimes could come off like petty swipes that didn’t quite get him right. Bloom was happy with “misreading,” but often the misreadings of his ideas are too partial, and so of limited use.

This is not wholly the fault of his interpreters. Admittedly Bloom is not a great explainer of his ideas. He organizes his books with esoteric terms and devices, and prefers an experiential, essayistic style to discursive argument. (And I think it is true that the later books degrade into vagueness and repetition). Philosophical and theological readers are frustrated by his books. You won’t find thorough, systematic thought in Bloom.

But all this should encourage us to start thinking more for ourselves, and to take from Bloom what we can use. Bloom’s influence theory is primarily an attempt to explain where great literature comes from. Why shouldn’t we work to make better use of it? In this short post, I’d like to point to some possible ways forward.

According to Bloom, strong authors experience a kind of unconscious imprinting by their great precursors, and they realize their own literary vision by revising and competing with their masters. This might result in the actual sensation of anxiety in the author, but it also might not. Bloom actually meant something more like the “residue” of influence, and he even says somewhere that he regrets the quasi-Freudian term “anxiety,” because it has proven to be misleading. His term is trying to point to the anxiety manifested in the work, and this anxiety is uncovered through close readings and detailed comparisons to earlier authors.

This way of reading is perhaps best suited to poetry. The early books The Anxiety of Influence and its sequel A Map of Misreading are primarily concerned with the British Romantic poets and their readings of Milton. Their figurative thinking, their diction, and the horizons of their imaginative vision are all shown to anxiously revise Paradise Lost.

Bloom offers some fascinating devices for understanding this process of anxious, competitive revision that he calls in these early books “revisionary ratios.” Maybe it’s a good thing that these never became hardened into widely used theories, but it’s strange to me how little these “ratios” have been discussed in subsequent criticism. Maybe it’s the mystical tone of these early books, something too openly Gnostic about them that prevents most readers from warming up to these terms, but they are remarkably subtle accounts of the psychology of artistic creation.

I don’t like writing criticism, and I’ve tried in the essays I’ve written for this blog to speak from the point of view of the artist, which I think is often missing in what I read online. Criticism is supposed to help us in our pursuit of the true and the beautiful, but too often it becomes a thing apart, a tool for careerists or self-deceived philosophy readers, a social game for defining “scenes,” or a ground for ideological battles.

Bloom can be minimized like this too. I’ve seen him discussed as just another critical curiosity, his influence theory a clever academic creation, “one weird trick” to read every book. But I would like to urge readers to get past the idea that Bloom’s work is a tool for critics only.

Why shouldn’t the artists themselves study the enigma of influence, and use what they find to inform their work? Maybe this would go against Bloom’s own wishes. He tends to emphasize the melancholy side of the drama of influence, and says that he does not believe that writers can choose their precursors. These are thrust upon them, by forces beyond their control. You see a similar sentiment in artists too, maybe sometimes unexpressed — the idea that to become too conscious of your own influences would be harmful to your creative freedom.

But isn’t this at odds with many of the ways we talk about art, about poetry or writing fiction? Don’t we often write to become more conscious of ourselves, of our relationships with others, of our place in history? I don’t hear adequate explanations for this misalignment. Again, something about Bloom and his temperament and ideas seems to encourage writers to become needlessly defensive.

We can start to move some of these obstacles aside — for example, Bloom’s term “belatedness.” He uses this term to mean not just the experience of an individual writer who has discovered their indebtedness to past authors, but also as a general description of our position in history. There is something, he says, that starts perhaps somewhere in the early 20th century (or maybe even earlier) that hinders cultural achievement in our time. We feel the weight of the past, and cannot ourselves become truly original. It is more than just an individual psychological fact — it is an atmosphere we inhabit.

I personally find this idea — or maybe better to say this sentiment — to be annoying. Bloom never attempts to justify it with an account of its supposed origins. I don’t recall any explanation of his as to why our time is different than earlier times. And it is at odds with his stance as a critic, which is proudly ahistorical and openly works to free us from time’s prison house.

Another obstacle is Bloom’s interest in Gnosticism. There does seem to be integrity behind Bloom’s readings of the scholars who affected his thinking in this vein — like Hans Jonas and Henry Corbin — but he never disciplined himself enough to offer us a thorough account of it. He finds whole truths about literature and literary knowledge in these scholars, and he even expands them into a provocative theory of American religion. He puts Ralph Waldo Emerson at the center of all this, calling him a prophet and theologian of American religion. It is as though Emerson was a Gnostic without knowing it, and laid the groundwork for the unity of Gnostic knowledge and literary knowledge that Bloom discovers.

This is a grand theory and there is so much more to say — material for another essay, maybe. But in general I would like to encourage skepticism on these topics in Bloom. The link with Gnosticism has become a stumbling block. The theory of American religion is only a starting point, and may need some refinement. The reading of Emerson, like so many readings of him, is partial and possibly increasingly irrelevant (a separate essay on this in particular I think will have to come about).

We should not let one critic’s quirks and his tendency to melancholy impede our quest for new power in writing. There is still so much to do — maybe actually more so in this time than in others. Academic disciplines, institutions, language-worlds are passing away all the time, with only vacuum to replace them. Bloom too should be seen as another vacuum, as an author whose work is incomplete.

Some recent Substack posts are starting what could be a fruitful period of responses to Bloom, like this essay from the writer Blake Smith about Bloom, Spengler, and “belatedness.” Or another more recent post from the writer Matthew Gasda. I think we have a real opportunity here to ask what his work means to us and to find something new.

One large area of opportunity is Bloom’s reading of Shakespeare. Bloom is sometimes mistaken for a cultural conservative due to his interest in the Western Canon, but it’s often missed that his canon is unusual. He puts Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon, over even Homer, Plato, Dante, and the Bible. For Bloom, Shakespeare is the fountainhead of literary knowledge, and the implied skeleton key to his instincts about the unity of Gnosticism and literary knowledge.

Bloom is confident in Shakespeare’s centrality, but I think we have hardly gotten started in investigating, as critics and as artists, what kind of literary work could be produced within a canon centered by Shakespeare. This goes on to another scandalous thought — that our study of Shakespeare himself is very much incomplete. His influence on subsequent work is enormous, and yet it tends to manifest only in parts. As Emerson says, a merit so incessant (and so various), makes responses to it only partial.

If literature is a quest for self-consciousness, an attempt to put self-consciousness to use, then Shakespeare is our master in a thousand ways, and studying literary influence is one path to finding ourselves in him. What would an authentically Shakespearean age in literature look like? For those whose thinking about literature is too caged up in the contemporary this will sound strange, but I think we may stand at the threshold of realizing something like this, if we are willing to put in the work.

The literary legacy of Harold Bloom is yet to be understood. We may even risk seeing his ideas fade into irrelevance. If his work meant something to us, now is the time to discover its significance.

Last year I read Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline for the first time, and then two tried two adaptations — the 2014 feature film starring Dakota Johnson, and the BBC version with Helen Mirren from 1982.1 The Dakota Johnson film was so bad I had to turn it off, but the BBC version was much better, though still uneven.

It’s interesting to note how much different Shakespeare plays are available to us. Macbeth, for example, seems to me in our time to be fairly well-understood. We know how to play it, direct it, put it on film. Maybe because of its short length, or the small cast, the narrow focus of the action, it’s hard to mess this one up. Even when parts are uneven, the play’s themes come through.

There are easy plays and easy roles. I’ve seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing performed many times, without much trouble. These are relatively benevolent, fun to play, easy to understand, not opaque or problematic, have equal parts for men and women, with no oversized roles.

When the roles get bigger, there are characters with popular recognition and widespread understanding, whose personalities come through even when directors experiment. I think the well-known characters from Romeo and Juliet are like this, for example. Even in an experimental treatment of the play like the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, the characters are still familiar to us.

We know King Lear, but he is very hard to play. We know Falstaff, but most of us don’t love laughter enough anymore to play him. I’ve made the case in the past that we don’t play Hamlet well and have inherited an overly solemn and unthinking approach to his play. We are weighed down by the play’s history on film, and by our overfamiliarity with its famous scenes.

Of Shakespeare’s late romances, The Tempest is always popular, and I’ve seen A Winter’s Tale performed a surprising number of times, but I have never seen Pericles or Cymbeline performed onstage.

Judging by the movie versions, Cymbeline is not wholly available to us, but it is a play with a troubled history of interpretation. You go through the commentaries and find the critics at turns frustrated, perplexed, enamored, apologetic. They say many of the same things, and then about a few things they disagree, but most of them come away confused. The films I watched seem confused too.

What would a well-played version of Cymbeline look like? This is my humble attempt to offer some ideas.

Imogen’s Virtue

The first thing to fix about the films is Imogen. She is the central character in the play, and her personality is the play’s ultimate subject.

It is odd that Imogen is not more famous in our time, because she has long been considered one of Shakespeare’s greatest characters, even by commentators who dislike the play. The critic Harold Bloom, who strongly dislikes the play and has some of the milder praise of Imogen, says it is impossible not to love her.2 The superlatives ascend from there. The critic William Hazlitt says: “Of all Shakespeare’s women she is perhaps the most tender and the most artless.”3 The Victorian writer Anna Jameson says she “… unites the greatest number of those qualities which we imagine to constitute excellence in woman,” and calls her an “angel of light.”4 The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne sees Imogen as the crown of Shakespeare’s vision, and ends his book on Shakespeare in rapture —

The very crown and flower of all her father’s daughters,—I do not speak here of her human father, but her divine—the woman above all Shakespeare’s women is Imogen. As in Cleopatra we found the incarnate sex, the woman everlasting, so in Imogen we find half glorified already the immortal godhead of womanhood.5

I like some of the more down-to-earth appreciations of Imogen. Jameson has some nice remarks about her —

In her we have all the fervour of youthful tenderness, all the romance of youthful fancy, all the enchantment of ideal grace,—the bloom of beauty, the brightness of intellect, and the dignity of rank, taking a peculiar hue from the conjugal character which is shed over all, like a consecration and a holy charm.6

— though sometimes she makes Imogen sound more delicate than she is. There is some well-done close reading by an author named George Fletcher7 that, like Jameson, emphasizes specific details of her outward virtues — her fine features, her graceful manners, her melodious voice. This is a woman who renders Iachimo awestruck, who drives the rejected Cloten to infuriated despair, and who is openly loved and admired by the other characters in the play.

But all this is absent from both film versions. At best Imogen is seen as something like another Juliet, but there is a dour aspect to her character in both films. The directors and actors seem to think that Imogen’s story is predominantly one of pain, and that the performance should reflect this. But this is far from what we find in the commentaries on the play.

Imogen’s superior outward qualities must be emphasized, but this barely gets us started. Fletcher is right to say these outward qualities should be understood as being in harmony with her soul —

Her personal beauty is of a character which so speaks the beauties of her soul,—her mental loveliness so perfectly harmonizes with her outward graces,—that it is difficult, nay impossible, to separate them in our contemplation. In this case, most transcendently, do we find the spirit moulding the body, the sentiment shaping the manner, after its own image, even to the most delicate touches. This meets our apprehension at once, even if we look upon her with the eyes of Iachimo, the unsentimental though very tasteful eyes of the elegant voluptary and accomplished connoisseur. It was not her external charms alone, however peerless, that could daunt a man like him; it was the heavenly spirit beaming through them at every point.8

The German critic Georg Gottfried Gervinus has some of the best appreciations of Imogen —

The characteristic feature of this nature, which displays itself again and again in all the strange and most various situations in which the poet has placed Imogen, is her mental freshness and healthiness. In the untroubled clearness of her mind, and unspotted purity of her being, every outward circumstance is reflected, unruffled and undistorted, in the mirror of Imogen’s soul, and at every occasion she acts from the purest instinct of a nature as sensible as it is practical. Rich in feeling, she is never morbidly sentimental; rich in fancy, she is never fantastic; full of true, painful, earnest love, she is never touched by sickly passion. She is mistress of her soul under the most violent emotions, self-command accompanies her strongest feelings, and the most discreet actions follow her outbursts of vehement passion, even when bold resolutions are required.9

…

In this guileless nature evil impressions are not lasting, and she does not torment herself with too much reflection; she is led by the most enviable instinct ... Naturally cheerful, joyous, ingenuous, born to fortune, trained to endurance, she has nothing of that agitated passionateness which foretells a tragic lot, and which brings trouble upon itself of its own creating. At the end of the play, when, shaking off her long sufferings and cruel deceptions, she gives herself at once to the happiest feelings ... we feel that this being, fit for every situation, improved by every trial, has been wonderfully gifted by nature to be equal to every occasion.10

When asked to name great parts for women in Shakespeare, we might say Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Gertrude, Ophelia, Juliet, Portia from The Merchant of Venice, Viola from Twelfth Night, Beatrice from The Taming of the Shrew, Rosalind from As You Like It, Cordelia from King Lear, and so on.

Hers would be a difficult part to play, but Imogen deserves to be included in this list. These appreciations of her should begin to apprise us of how to see her differently.

Rethinking Iachimo

Iachimo, the Italian rogue who wagers he can seduce Imogen, has been unfairly minimized by most commentators. He is actually one of the more intelligent characters in the play, possibly even the play’s most intelligent character, and has not been well understood.

The scene in which he attempts to seduce Imogen merits closer reading. In this scene, he arrives in court and presents himself, and he offers Imogen a fake letter from Posthumus and listens to her read it aloud.

Then he recites this strange and elaborate speech, which seems to come out of him half-involuntarily —

IACHIMO

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Thanks, fairest lady.
What, are men mad? Hath nature given them eyes
To see this vaulted arch, and the rich crop
Of sea and land, which can distinguish ‘twixt
The fiery orbs above and the twinn’d stones
Upon the number’d beach? and can we not
Partition make with spectacles so precious
‘Twixt fair and foul?

IMOGEN

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What makes your admiration?

IACHIMO

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It cannot be i’ the eye, for apes and monkeys
‘Twixt two such shes would chatter this way and
Contemn with mows the other; nor i’ the judgment,
For idiots in this case of favour would
Be wisely definite; nor i’ the appetite;
Sluttery to such neat excellence opposed
Should make desire vomit emptiness,
Not so allured to feed.

IMOGEN

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What is the matter, trow?

IACHIMO

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The cloyed will — 
That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub
Both fill’d and running, ravening first the lamb
Longs after for the garbage.

This is an arresting moment, though it takes time to puzzle through it. It’s puzzling in part because it’s characteristic of the romances’ opaque style, and here the rhetoric gets so opaque that Imogen herself does not understand what Iachimo is saying.11

Upon encountering her, he has become abstracted. Unlike the commentators I’ve read, I read his strange philosophical meditation as sincere, but more on that in a moment. First, what does it mean? He says that mens’ eyes can distinguish between fair and foul, and asks somewhat philosophically what is it exactly that allows them to know the difference. “Fair” here means more than just outwardly beautiful. Imogen’s surpassing virtue, inner and outer, becomes clear to him all at once, and overwhelms him.

He offers a series of negative answers to his own question. It can’t be in the eye, this faculty that apprises men of her surpassing virtue, because apes and monkeys have eyes and would, if I’m reading his phrasing correctly, choose a whore and throw out the virtuous woman. It can’t be in the judgment, because idiots, who lack judgment, would still choose her. And it can’t be in the appetite, because something strange happens to the whoring man when he puts “sluttery” next to “such neat excellence.” He finds that though his stomach is empty that he’s not hungry, and even that he’s repulsed enough to “vomit emptiness.” (Dr. Johnson reads this as disgusted dry heaving at the sight of “sluttery” next to Imogen). Looking on “sluttery,” he loses his appetite — that is, it cannot be in the appetite, as to choose such neat excellence would be due to his appetite having been lost.

Where then, does such a faculty lie? Then he stops, struck: “The cloyed will.” This does not quite fit the more general philosophical way he first asked the question. It’s as though Iachimo has suddenly turned to himself, shocked into self-recognition. Speaking for himself, he theorizes that he can apprehend Imogen’s rarity only because he has toured through all the “garbage” in whorehouses across Italy, and so has, in his strange metaphor, overfilled the tub of his will, even as the faucet keeps running.

He started this journey by first, as he says, ravening a lamb, and it is as though in meeting Imogen he has met that lamb again, but now in his condition of a “cloyed will.” Is he thinking of the first woman he ever seduced, presumably a virgin? Now he sees that virgin anew.

And how strange, to make his career as a seducer a matter of “will.” This is the edge of some deeper insight about himself, and signals a possible change that he might undergo, if only he would allow it. This change has been “charmed” out of him all at once, but he holds it off.

He recovers himself a little and gives his false account of Posthumus in Italy. This is supposed to be the shocking tale of Posthumus the rake, mocking and sleeping around, but again Iachimo involuntarily lapses into brooding over himself —

IACHIMO

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Ay, madam, with his eyes in flood with laughter:
It is a recreation to be by
And hear him mock the Frenchman. But, heavens know,
Some men are much to blame.

IMOGEN

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Not he, I hope.

IACHIMO

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Not he: but yet heaven’s bounty towards him might
Be used more thankfully. In himself, ‘tis much;
In you, which I account his beyond all talents,
Whilst I am bound to wonder, I am bound
To pity too.

IMOGEN

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What do you pity, sir?

IACHIMO

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Two creatures heartily.

“Heaven’s bounty towards him might be used more thankfully.” “Some men are much to blame.” His story is unwittingly a description of himself, and I think when he says he pities “two creatures,” he is partly thinking of himself and his attempt to seduce Imogen, or may even be turning his thinking again to the first woman he seduced. Now he pities her, and even pities himself.

What sudden change! He says in another dense passage that the touch of a woman like Imogen would inspire his soul to oaths of loyalty and would release him from his life as it is, full of “plagues of hell,” and he likens himself to a candle being snuffed out.

All the commentators I’ve read gloss over the content of Iachimo’s speeches in this scene, and they wave away his behavior as Italian “virtuosity.”12 The two film versions seem to read it similarly, though the BBC version at least treats the “What are men mad?” portion as a separate aside before Iachimo’s speech begins. But otherwise he is portrayed as always purposely deceptive and maintaining control.

But I think the correct reading is that he has really lost himself upon encountering Imogen, and that he has to keep recovering throughout the scene. These moments of losing himself must be played as sincere. He should be seen to waver, oscillating between cunning control and being authentically dumbfounded, confusing his schemes with involuntary self-revelation. He should flounder — his actions in the scene are hardly a successful approach to seduction — and be baffled by his floundering. His final throwing himself upon Imogen has to be both an attempt at the climax of his performance of feigned outrage over the supposed infidelity of Posthumus and a barely contained outrage at himself.

Once Imogen has denied him, a cooler scheming tendency returns as he shifts to his alternate plan of infiltrating her room, but already it feels tired, just done out of habit. Iachimo has passion and an active intellect in the scene where he sneaks into her room, but I do not read him as so potently sinister here as some critics.13 His scheme in this scene is executed almost by rote.

Other critics, like Bloom, dismiss Iachimo entirely. I think this is closer to the truth, but it is not because of some smallness of character in Iachimo. Instead I think we should understand him as having been diminished, all in one encounter. He reverts to his old ways, but they suddenly have become stale. It is as though the whole history of his life has been made obsolete.

Posthumus as Anti-Hamlet

It’s possible Posthumus is among Shakespeare’s most unlikable creations. Some critics see him as a noble character and attempt to defend his honor. They emphasize the trials he endures, and they read straightforwardly the god Jupiter’s speech near the end of the play, about virtue needing to be tested in order to be proven.

Other critics see him as a mediocrity, unworthy of Imogen. The responses range from amiable dismissal to full-blown outrage. Harold Bloom is the height of this hostility to Posthumus, calling him a “husbandly dolt.”

He is an orphan raised by the king, and so not of royal blood. Unlike Imogen and her lost brothers, we do not have any aristocratic assurance about his character. How then should we estimate him? It is a frustrating puzzle.

I think it is significant — and not remarked upon enough — that this puzzle is one that is openly grappled with by the characters in the play. The two gentlemen who discuss the state of the kingdom in the opening scene start with perplexing rhetoric on this topic. The First Gentleman is telling the Second about Imogen’s marriage, her rejection of Cloten and her choice of Posthumus —

FIRST GENTLEMAN

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He that hath miss’d the princess is a thing
Too bad for bad report: and he that hath her—
I mean, that married her, alack, good man!
And therefore banish’d—is a creature such
As, to seek through the regions of the earth
For one his like, there would be something failing
In him that should compare. I do not think
So fair an outward and such stuff within
Endows a man but he.

SECOND GENTLEMAN

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You speak him far.

FIRST GENTLEMAN

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I do extend him, sir, within himself,
Crush him together rather than unfold
His measure duly.

This is a peculiar way to describe a virtuous individual — to say that one is “crushing together” the “stuff within” in order to convey the man’s virtue, as if all the inner substance had to be vacuumed up across vast reaches of space into the ultra-dense “stuff,” which could never properly recommend itself but through “unfolding” its “measure duly” (which is actually what happens in the play).

This question of needing to unfold actually suggests an anxiety about what’s within. Perhaps there is no stuff inside Posthumus at all. There is Posthumus’s appearance, which we are easily confident is “fair,” even, we gather, exceptionally handsome, but already there is much hesitating about the essence within. The characters feel there must be something profound about this man that Imogen has chosen for her husband, and yet they are perplexed.

Even when characters aren’t perplexed by Posthumus, there is irony present. I still find myself puzzled as to how to interpret the Frenchman’s estimation of him, when he says: “I have seen him in France: we had very many there could behold the sun with as firm eyes as he.”

This might be the Frenchman’s joke, but I think he is maybe saying that Posthumus is of estimable courage but nothing special.14 Pisanio is also unwittingly ironic in the scene when he describes Posthumus departing on the boat to Italy and says that his soul was slow but his ship was swift. Posthumus does indeed have a slow, lumbering soul. He has a clumsy wit and a poor imagination, and he shows this throughout the play. His first metaphor in his loving farewell to Imogen is quite bad —

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… thither write, my queen,
And with mine eyes I’ll drink the words you send,
Though ink be made of gall. 

He will drink the words of the letter with his … eyes? Even if the ink tastes bitter. Hmm.15 I like the next part, when he says

POSTHUMUS

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Should we be taking leave
As long a term as yet we have to live,
The loathness to depart would grow. Adieu!

His loathness to depart would only possibly be greater if the term of their separation would be for the rest of their lives, and then one word later he abruptly says “Adieu!”. This is his special stupidity on display.

After this Imogen urges him to stay a little longer, and gives him a ring to signify their faithfulness to each other. Posthumus says of the ring —

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Remain, remain thou here
While sense can keep it on. 

This is funny because he will of course very quickly take it off when he agrees to the wager after just one conversation with Iachimo. He is indeed a “senseless” man. Shakespeare makes this clear down to the last scene, when in a final embarrassing moment Posthumus does not recognize Imogen in her disguise as a male servant and throws her roughly to the ground when she rushes to embrace him. Poor Pisanio has an outburst at his master for this, as if he can’t take it anymore.

Harold Bloom among all critics is the most outraged by Posthumus. He complains: “The wonder again is why Shakespeare so consistently labors to make Posthumus so dubious a protagonist, so estranged from the audience that we simply cannot welcome his final reunion with Imogen.”16

Bloom is outraged by Posthumus, and outraged by the whole play. He reads Cymbeline as a work of comprehensive self-parody. Imogen recalls Cordelia from King Lear, as Cymbeline does Lear himself. A scene where Imogen is carried onstage by her brother and she is presumed dead recalls the scene of Lear carrying Cordelia. The Queen in Cymbeline, who Shakespeare doesn’t even bother to name, is like a mediocre Lady Macbeth, and her son Cloten is something like a failed Edmund from King Lear. Their patriotic rhetoric parodies speeches from the history plays. Iachimo, whose name some critics take to mean “little Iago,” is like a faded Iago. And so on.

Bloom cannot understand why Shakespeare would so thoroughly travesty his own work, and ends his chapter on Cymbeline with a note of frustrated incomprehension. It surprises me that this critic who has taught us so much about the subtleties of influence (and, in the case of Shakespeare, of the mind’s influence on itself) did not take things further in his interpretation of the play. He seems poised on the edge of some larger understanding, but refuses to take the leap.

Start with this assertion then — that Posthumus is meant to be a parody specifically of Hamlet. I have seen discussion of Posthumus’s name as indicative of his orphaned circumstances, but I have not found any critic who points out that it could be an echo of Hamlet’s “imposthume,” which Bloom discusses in a chapter of his book Hamlet: Poem Unlimited.17

Hamlet uses this word when he runs into the Norwegian army captain who is marching men across Denmark to claim territory in Poland. The captain says the territory is useless, no good for farming and not worth the effort, and Hamlet responds that such a pointless military expedition is symptomatic of a kingdom with too much wealth and nothing better to do —

HAMLET

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Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not debate the question of this straw:
This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace,
That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies. I humbly thank you, sir.

“Imposthume” means an abscess or cyst, a pus-filled swelling under the skin. Here the infection isn’t drained out but instead breaks inward into the body, killing the host. Hamlet is talking about the corruption of Norway, but he is always multiplying ironies in unexpected ways, and hardly lets an event pass without relating it to his inner life.

Bloom interprets the imposthume as signaling the change of Hamlet’s character in Act V, and as a central metaphor for Hamlet’s consciousness. Bloom also sees this symbol as central to Shakespeare himself. This is the moment when a new mode of dramatic representation begins, in Hamlet and in Shakespeare —

Is The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Shakespeare’s imposthume? The break into inwardness was unsurpassable, and made possible Iago, Othello, Lear, Edmund, Edgar, Macbeth, Cleopatra, Antony, an eightfold whose paths to the abyss were chartered by Hamlet, death’s ambassador to us. G. Wilson Knight first called Hamlet the embassy of death, and once remarked to me that he himself could confront the play only because of his strong belief in immortality. We do not know what Shakespeare believed about the soul’s survival. Before Act V, Hamlet is confident of his soul’s immortality, but I think he is different after his return from the sea, and I suspect he courts annihilation. When the impostume breaks, the man dies, and perhaps the soul with him, for in Hamlet consciousness and the soul have become one.18

More than “inwardness” or “consciousness,” I like better Bloom’s related term “self-overhearing,” which describes when a person listens to themselves as though they are observing a dramatic character. The right kind of listening induces a self-awareness that can change their relationship to themselves. “Inwardness” is the place to which they return, like a theatre in their mind, to reconceive of their relationship to themselves. Hamlet takes this practice of self-overhearing further than possibly any other character.

But Posthumus is incapable of inwardness. This is the great joke of his character, and why he is so frustrating. The whole elaborate machinery of the play’s plot does nothing to prove his supposed virtue, and only proves that he is wholly senseless to the self-consciousness that would allow him to break inward. He can speak a soliloquy and never pass into self-overhearing, and no catastrophe of any magnitude can induce him to change his relationship to himself.

He is a kind of freak Stoic, incapable of internalizing anything. Neither virtue nor corruption manage to penetrate him. He knows only outward action and its fruits. He knows others acting on him, and himself acting on others.

When he contrives his strange penance for the crime of having ordered Imogen killed, which is to don a peasant’s rags and fight on the side of England in the war near the end of the play, he makes a clumsy statement that ends: “I will begin/ The fashion, less without and more within.” He’s repeating the same framing from the Gentlemen’s conversation from the first scene, and this is the joke — that there is nothing within. Underneath his peasant’s rags is his warrior’s body, and this is all he means.

Later on, after Posthumus is jailed by the English army and ordered to be hanged, he speaks with the Gaolers who will serve as his hangmen. The First Gaoler chides Posthumus for being so eager to die, and for being so seemingly confident in his sense of what will happen after death. In a crazy parody of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, when Hamlet longs for a sleep that would “end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” the First Gaoler says:

FIRST GAOLER

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Indeed, sir, he that sleeps feels not the
tooth-ache: but a man that were to sleep your
sleep, and a hangman to help him to bed, I think he
would change places with his officer; for, look you,
sir, you know not which way you shall go.

Posthumus would indeed be free of toothaches after death, but not free of what dreams may come, which, if his present state is any indication, will not be pleasant.

Posthumus believes he is going to face annihilation, that his soul will be destroyed after he passes beyond the threshold of death, but the First Gaoler says that he should not be so confident of this. Again echoing Hamlet and his “from whose bourne no traveler returns,” he says: “I think you’ll never return to tell one.”

It is interesting to go back to Bloom’s explanation of Hamlet and the imposthume. I am not sure if I agree with Bloom’s assertion that after Act V Hamlet no longer believes in the soul’s immortality. Some more detailed analysis may have to be worked out.

But the First Gaoler certainly does not agree with this, or at least he feels that a man should not be so eager to die, and he marvels at Posthumus’s more-than-Roman Stoicism —

FIRST GAOLER

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Unless a man would marry a gallows and beget young
gibbets, I never saw one so prone. Yet, on my
conscience, there are verier knaves desire to live,
for all he be a Roman: and there be some of them
too that die against their wills; so should I, if I
were one. I would we were all of one mind, and one
mind good; O, there were desolation of gaolers and
gallowses! I speak against my present profit, but
my wish hath a preferment in ‘t.

“I would we were all of one mind, and one mind good” — is this Shakespeare admitting defeat? It is as though he has been met with the ultimate example that would resist his universalizing.

When Posthumus wakes up from his dream in Act V and reads the prophecy of his fortune in the book left by the god Jupiter, he says:

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‘Tis still a dream, or else such stuff as madmen
Tongue and brain not; either both or nothing;
Or senseless speaking or a speaking such
As sense cannot untie. Be what it is,
The action of my life is like it, which
I’ll keep, if but for sympathy.

The dream and the prophecy are as senseless as his life. Bloom complains about this at the end of his frustrated chapter on Cymbeline:

Through Posthumus, I hear Shakespeare observing that the action of our lives is lived for us [that is, for ourselves alone], and that the desperate best we can do is to accept (”keep”) what happens as if we performed it, if but for ironic sympathy with ourselves. It is another of those uncanny recognitions in which Shakespeare is already beyond Nietzsche.19

I would respond that this is arguably one of the things that outrages Hamlet most, and is one starting point for his speculations.

But the teachings of Hamlet would mean nothing to Posthumus — his sterling senselessness has proved impenetrable. Only an audience trained in the kind of seeing taught by the previous plays could recognize this for what it is. But such an audience has been silenced and forced to repent, as Iachimo is in the end.

Imogen’s Will

Some critics praise Imogen in general terms, saying she represents a female ideal, but I haven’t found much analysis or appreciation of her specific personality, which would be more useful. Something about this play’s tendency to frustrate readers seems to encourage them to assume she has less depth than she does. I think it is also the play’s tendency to recapitulate Shakespeare’s earlier work that makes it more difficult to see Imogen clearly. Commentators tend to explain Cymbeline in terms of the earlier plays. Jameson says —

Imogen, like Juliet, conveys to our mind the impression of extreme simplicity in the midst of the most wonderful complexity. To conceive her aright, we must take some peculiar tint from many characters, and so mingle them, that, like the combination of hues in a sunbeam, the effect shall be as one to the eye. We must imagine something of the romantic enthusiasm of Juliet, of the truth and constancy of Helen, of the dignified purity of Isabel, of the tender sweetness of Viola, of the self-possession and intellect of Portia ... 20

The critic Harold Goddard has a similar explanation —

Simplicity is the most complex thing in the world, and many rereadings of the role are necessary in order to appreciate the subtlety with which Imogen is characterized. Like Hamlet, she is an epitome, uniting in herself the virtues of at least three of Shakespeare’s feminine types: the naive girl (in boy’s costume part of the time), the queenly woman, and the tragic victim. It is as if the poet had consciously set out to endow his heroine with the finest traits of a dozen of her predecessors.”21

That she has both such variety and simplicity makes things difficult. In the above quote, Goddard also mentions Hamlet because he has just quoted a remarkable statement by Gervinus —

Imogen is, next to Hamlet, the most fully drawn character in Shakespeare’s poetry; the traits of her nature are almost inexhaustible ... 22

At first this seems almost insane, but I think we may need to come around to its truth in order to read Imogen correctly.

One key to understanding her is her virginity. There is some disagreement about this among commentators,23 but I think the play does not make sense if Imogen and Posthumus have already consummated their love. She protects her “treasure,” as she puts it, from the “siege” of Cloten, Iachimo, and also of Posthumus himself.

This last part is suggested in the dialogue, as when Posthumus complains she “oft” refused him.24 We know Posthumus is exceptionally handsome and that he has spent some time in profligate Italy, so he would seem to have had sexual experience and to be used to getting his way. He is also a man of action, as we’ve said, and I think it is Imogen’s refusal of his sexual advances that make him see her differently. This explains his remark at Philario’s house when he says he had a previous dispute about defending Imogen’s honor that he now realizes was “not altogether slight.” Between these two incidents, I surmise that he has attempted to bring Imogen to bed and has been refused. It would seem this is the first time this has happened to the handsome Posthumus. (How absurd, that his exchange with Iachimo is not the first time he’s had a fight about his woman’s honor. Note too that Iachimo, a man of penetrating intelligence, understands Imogen right away upon meeting her, but Posthumus needs to act before he can form his judgment.)

I found a few useful essays on Imogen’s virginity, which is not much discussed in the more general commentaries. The critic Karen Bamford discusses the political significance of Imogen’s virginity.25 Before she discovers her orphaned brothers, any child Imogen would have with Posthumus would be heir to the throne. This is perhaps part of her motivation in withholding from him.

Other commentators go further, and claim to find repressed perversity in both Imogen and Posthumus. The poet Geoffrey Hill writes of her supposed “naivete that wants to be devoured.”26 Hill seems to suggest there is something sado-masochistic in their relationship, as though they get mutual perverse pleasure out of their frustrated relations, but don’t quite realize this. The critic Michael Taylor references Hill’s essay and takes this further, arguing that the scene in which Imogen discovers Cloten’s headless body and mistakes it for Posthumus is a kind of purging of this sexual disturbance, an appropriately grotesque climax for a relationship marred by repression. He claims that this disturbance is lifted in the finale, and that the couple matures, at last ready to consummate their love.27

I find all this invalid — it sounds like something out of William Butler Yeats, and has little to do with Imogen. The same goes for the image of Imogen as a virgin martyr offered in Bamford’s essay. These are eloquent arguments, but we go back to Imogen and can’t find them. Imogen never seems involuntary, never merely a martyr or a victim. She is never reduced by her circumstances, and always recovers quickly. Her will is always strong, simple, and at the ready.

I do not think it provides much insight to see her as suffering from some kind of psychological darkness due to repression. She is certainly not sado-masochistic, although she may have a peculiar psychosexual profile that is hinted at when she says she would change her sex to be with her brothers. This is before she knows they are her brothers, when she first meets them and is disguised as a man. We do not know if she means she would become a man in order to join them as a man or if, already being disguised as a man, she means she would like to be a woman in their company. Bloom chooses the former and says she thus evades the charge of incestuous desire, but I think the ambiguity is hard to avoid, and is on purpose.28

She tells her father she chose Posthumus because they had grown up together. Cloten, though he comes later, is also her “brother,” through her father’s remarriage to the Queen. We might see Imogen as a sheltered girl who is used to the close company of boys. Miranda in The Tempest is similarly sheltered.

Taylor is right to emphasize the irony and grotesquery of the scene of Imogen embracing the headless body of Cloten. When she runs her hands along his body, mistaking it for Posthumus, I think Shakespeare is calling attention to her virginity (and to the arbitrariness of her choice of Posthumus), and might even be understood to be attempting to humiliate her. The whole “siege” of her virginity throughout the play might be seen this way. But I think we will not read her correctly until we see that Shakespeare has failed to humiliate her.

Gervinus is basically right about her, and Bloom is right about Posthumus. The correct reading of the play would merge these two views. This might seem like an impossible combination of tones, where Imogen is the most gorgeous of ideals and Posthumus an absurd mediocrity and a parody of Hamlet, but I think it is what Shakespeare intended.

Imogen says early in the play that she envies those who have their “honest wills.” This is far from Hamlet’s puzzled will, Iachimo’s “cloyed will,” and of course has nothing to do with Posthumus’s misogynist rant, when he says he hopes that promiscuous and dishonest women will “have their will,” spreading vice throughout the world.

Imogen might be said to be the cause of virtue in others rather than vice, and the unwinding of the virtuoso plots around her is a demonstration of the supremacy of her will. The long concluding scene where all these plots are undone, where all the deception and misunderstanding comes to light and the wrongdoers are easily forgiven, represents this. It is the realization of what Iachimo witnessed all at once in the seduction scene, but refused to accept. What Imogen would have resolved at high speed has taken her corrupted companions five acts to come to terms with. She is the “harmless lightning” in Cymbeline’s phrase, and the rest of the characters are “crooked smoke.”

I do not accept discussions of Imogen as having been worn out by the action of the play, like in Bamford or Granville-Barker.29 The predominant emotion in the end is relief, and Imogen confidently goes off alone with her father at the beginning of the scene, as if she knows what’s coming. When Posthumus mistakenly throws her to the ground she forgives him right away, and responds with remarkable humor, strength, and eroticism. It is the same “conjugal tenderness” she had at the start.

With respect to Shakespeare’s body of work, her will is to do away with Hamlet and the tragedies. The advent of Imogen has made them obsolete. Unless we accept this we will remain incredulous, outraged that Shakespeare would discard even the phase of artistic achievement that gave us Hamlet and King Lear.

Posthumus does not have an audience like Hamlet does in Horatio, and he has no book to drown like Prospero does. The book of his life belongs to Jupiter, which Jupiter lays on his chest at the end of his dream. He is ultimately a tool of the gods, a tool of history, and a tool of Imogen’s desire. This is his strange fate — to be blessed with the favor of Imogen and Jupiter without the ability to transmute that favor into any deeper knowledge of himself. No action he could undertake, not even what I assume to be his dissipation in Italy after his misogynist soliloquy, delivers him any insight into himself. Iachimo’s fate is similar — he cannot overhear himself in his “charmed” soliloquy in front of Imogen, and though he is relieved to be forgiven in the end, he also seems baffled. It would seem that this earlier mode of Shakespearean self-knowledge has been rendered inaccessible.

Imogen is a miracle of feminine beauty and inner virtue combined with an imperious willpower — a rare being. In her play, there is nothing to be done but to surrender to her will, which is indeed not a painful matter at all.

Cover image credit: Folger Library Imaging Department

Commentary about this book tends to engage with it in terms of philosophy or politics, but I have not seen much in the way of attempting to account for its artistic achievement.

The politics associated with it are extreme, it’s true, and there is plenty to argue about when it comes to philosophy. But art is another matter. Why has this book had such an enthusiastic response from its sympathetic readers? What influence might it have on our literature? How might we respond to this book in a literary way? This essay attempts to address these questions.

1: A Controversial Book

I’ve been trying to write about something controversial — maybe you’ve heard of this book, Bronze Age Mindset? It was self-published in 2018 by its author, who uses the online name Bronze Age Pervert.

Given that it comes from the online milieu of the “alt right,” one would think this book would have stayed with its initial small audience, but it has gradually gained more mainstream attention, in politics and in the arts. There was a long piece by the writer Michael Anton for the Claremont Review of Books in 2019 that expressed some caution about the book but urged conservatives to find out what they could learn from it. More recently, rightwing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Chris Rufo have shown familiarity with it. On the liberal side, there was a piece last year warning about the book’s political extremes in The Atlantic, and a longer one on the author’s background in Politico. Finally, the writer John Ganz wrote probably the most pronounced political criticism of the book, calling it “Nazi shit.”

In the arts, literary critic Christian Lorentzen wrote a negative review for The Mars Review of Books in 2022 (this is how I first heard of it). There was also a more evenhanded review in Unherd in 2022 by the writer Murtaza Hussain that mixed political commentary with a more general review of the book. As for more favorable responses, the Red Scare podcast hosts have praised the book and had the author on as a guest last year. Finally, you might be interested in some Substack posts from sympathetic readers of the book — one in the context of Ancient Greek education, the other more personal and aesthetic.

Why are people talking about this weird book? And what should we make of the range of responses?

This book is more central than it may seem at first. It is unpalatable in conventional political and cultural spheres — or at least it has gained that reputation — and yet in the audience that has accepted it, it has engendered uncommon loyalty and enthusiasm. Everyone seems to agree that the book argues on behalf of dangerous ideas — or at least that it has a sense of danger about it — but there does not seem to be broad agreement as to how to receive this sense of danger. In the political responses, the book is seen either as a disruptive vision of energy and promise that could upend dead ideas and dead institutions, or as the manipulative tool of an ideologue on behalf of the worst ideas. In the arts, the positive responses come off as deeply personal, the kind of profound impression on an audience that all artists hope for, but the negative ones dismiss the book as shallow. They explain the book’s appeal as simply telling its largely Millennial-or-younger male readers what they want to hear, and then they wave it away.

But I think this explanation of its appeal is not sufficient. If you stopped there, I think there would remain an abiding sense of puzzlement about this thing. I think the missing piece is that it must be recognized that the book is in fact an authentic artistic achievement. Its literary power is no illusion. What’s been written about it so far has not been able to account for this. The book tends to defeat rational attempts at taking it apart, and yet that’s nearly all we’ve gotten. I think we are overdue, then, for a proper artistic appreciation, and so this is my attempt.

2: An Outline of Its Controversies

First, a little more about the book. It is narrated by the Bronze Age Pervert himself, who presents a dystopian vision of our contemporary world as an “iron prison” lorded over by deranged and decrepit leaders, the “lords of lies,” who suck the life out of the world’s youth and mislead them with hollow moralizing. To escape this prison, his book offers an attitude toward life — a mindset — inspired by Ancient Greece. The book exhorts the reader to awaken to the nightmare of contemporary life, and then points to some ways they could escape this “great ugliness.”

Before I can talk further about this book’s literary qualities, I feel compelled to outline the controversy around it in more detail.

Most of the coverage of the book has read it straightforwardly as a political document. The above-mentioned review by Michael Anton in the Claremont Review of Books mixes some appreciation with a sense of serious concern. Its concluding sentence reads:

In the spiritual war for the hearts and minds of the disaffected youth on the right, conservatism is losing. BAPism is winning.

Taking things further, the writer John Ganz reacts to the book with outright condemnation. He writes in a Substack post:

Suffice it to say, “BAPism” is simply fascism, repackaged and re-marketed. And perhaps not even fascism, but Nazism. Its combination of biological racism, antisemitism, misogyny, celebration of male vitality, embrace of the aesthetics of the brotherhood of combat, conquest and war, demand for "living space,” as well its fusion of bombastic elitism and vulgar populism are unmistakable. It is not even particularly coy or evasive on this account.

This is, then, a useful summary of possible objections to the book, and is a good outline of the shadow of political controversy cast over it. We can take them in order.

On fascism, to clear up any doubt about the author’s personal views, you can refer to a Substack post that’s been cited in the press coverage of the book, where he says of his ideal government:

I believe in Fascism or “something worse” and I can say so unambiguously because, unlike others, I have given up long ago all hope of being part of the respectable world or winning a respectable audience. I have said for a long time that I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.

We have some trouble with this word, “fascism.” If you want to know what the man who coined it meant by it, you can read the very short book The Doctrine of Fascism by Benito Mussolini (co-written with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile). The fascist state, Mussolini explains, is the correct alternative to socialism and liberalism because it produces the right kind of man — healthy, strong, and ready for war — and it is run by the ultimate exemplar of this ideal type of man, a dictator who has absolute power over the government, the economy, and the people. The people are joined not just in material interests but more importantly in spirit — they embody an ideal personality that exerts its will on the world and on history. The people’s perpetuation in history is paramount; the individual is valued only as a member of the collective. The highest praise goes to the individual who sacrifices himself to the state, especially the one who dies in glorious battle. So it is a political, economic, and spiritual tyranny, all with the aim of making a higher militaristic type of man who represents the state, and the state’s primary activity is war.

This word “fascist,” then, should be specific and straightforward, but you seem to hear it used every which way. Often it’s used to talk about just one aspect of the above description — political, economic, or spiritual — or sometimes something more vague. This is, I guess, not a new problem — scholars of fascism have debated the appropriate use of the term since the beginning. When we say “fascism,” do we just mean Mussolini, or does it include Hitler too? What about Franco, or similar figures in Eastern Europe and Asia? Is there such a thing as a generic concept of fascism, something that brings all these figures together, something that could explain why these different political movements developed around the same time? Is there a bigger concept here, or maybe we even need a different word, so that we could include Stalin too? What resemblance would this concept have, if any, to tyrannies from older times? Or is there something distinctly modern about this?

We are disturbed by the thuggery of Mussolini, terrified by the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. How could it have happened, that advanced societies perpetrated these horrors? Is there something we could watch out for, so we could stop something like this from happening again? Could we go searching, like psychoanalysts, for the lurking symptoms of a dormant pathology?

These questions have stayed with us, and in recent years have gained a new urgency with new questions like: Is Viktor Orban a fascist? Is Giorgia Meloni? Is Narendra Modi, or Jair Bolsonaro? Will the “far right” ascend in European politics? Does the “alt right” want fascism in America? And will their meme hero Donald Trump be the one to give it to them?

Recently I read a review of a book of essays on the question of Trump’s possible fascism entitled Did It Happen Here?, a riff on the title of Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Could Happen Here, a political fantasy published in 1935 about fascism come to America. The book of essays and its review are still inconclusive on this question. Even after almost ten years of the spectacle of Trump dominating our politics, this still hovers in ambiguity.

So in this time of It Might Not Have Happened Here, But It Could Soon, Maybe, Though Perhaps We Don’t Agree On What “It” Is, it’s disconcerting to meet a figure like Bronze Age Pervert, who is unambiguous. Even though the word “fascism” is actually never used in Bronze Age Mindset, it is indeed difficult to separate “fascism” from this book.

But which “fascism” is it exactly? This still needs some unpacking. There is a little more background here. There’s another book that matters to Bronze Age Mindset called Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, an academic work recently published to revise and publicize the author’s PhD thesis.

Selective Breeding offers an ambitious account of the ancient world. It starts in the time before the Greek city-states, when most societies were “totalitarian democracies,” where nomos — custom — ruled all. This is especially characteristic of agricultural societies, which were often ruled by a council of elders. Loyalty to the elders, to cycles of “mere life” and these cycles’ unity with custom — all these were paramount in “default civilization,” as Bronze Age Mindset will later put it. It is a tribal, terror-stricken world of darkness and superstition, suspicious of anything that violates nomos. In its account of this world, Selective Breeding follows James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

Change comes with the arrival of nomadic warrior bands, pastoral people who herd and breed animals, who conquer the agricultural societies. In conquering and then ruling over the conquered, these warriors become the first aristocrats. Caste systems are devised, breeding laws are maintained, and the rule of the conquerors is preserved through management of the population.

These are precursors to the Greek city-states, which owe their greatness to their rigorous martial training and their cruel and uncompromising breeding laws. Their leaders knew that some people are simply better than others in the eyes of Nature, and in their world, natural strength was all.

The poet Pindar is offered as a record of the height of this worldview in Ancient Greek history. His use of the Greek word phusis in particular is treated at length. This word describes the glorious quality of the bodies of great warriors and athletes — the enigma of their seemingly self-propagating strength, which is likened to the growth of plants. The strength and beauty of superior natural specimens emanates from their bodies and marks them as meant to lead others. Their authority is “manifest” and animalistic. It makes its own laws, and the public assents to it without reflection. This is the essence of this early phase of Ancient Greek aristocracy.

Jump ahead to Plato’s time and the stability of the old aristocratic order has faded. A new kind of tyrant appears. Selective Breeding gives the example of the Athenian tyrant Critias, a student of Socrates who attempted a murderous campaign to conquer Athens from within.

Who were these men who called themselves philosophers? In this book, the ancient rumors of Socrates and Plato being teachers of tyranny are simply true. Philosophers are taught to question everything, including the laws of the city, and they are taught to see themselves as above those laws, even as potential lawgivers themselves. But after the disaster of figures like Critias Plato cannot teach this openly, or society would turn against him like they did his teacher Socrates. So instead his dialogues have an “exoteric” surface, where conventional public morality is given lip service, and underneath this is an “esoteric” teaching addressed to an elite few, who are instructed to pursue the path of tyranny, but now under the cover of elaborate political rhetoric. The book uses an extensive close reading of Plato’s dialogue Gorgias to demonstrate this.

In a time determined to hide the natural superiority of certain people and their right to leadership, Platonic philosophy teaches its students to pursue their tyrannical ends while professing to be followers of conventional morality. Plato’s teaching is, in this view, an abstracted or “spiritualized” path to aristocratic order. Aristocratic leaders are not recognized by their phusis, but are called to esoterically through Plato’s teaching, and they discover their exceptional nature by learning to question the laws of the city.

The final section of the book turns to the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Selective Breeding claims that the above arguments should be taken as scholarly support for Nietzsche’s instincts about the ancient world and the nature of Plato’s teaching in particular. Nietzsche sees the modern world as having entered a crisis, where the reign of totalitarian democracies is fast returning. Plato’s efforts to hide the knowledge of Nature and the natural superiority of certain people were actually too successful. His political mask prevailed and his esoteric teaching was forgotten, and now Christianity and modern egalitarian democracy have conducted a breeding program of their own. In their worship of the weak and their elevation of the resentful, they have botched the human specimen. Their drive to erase all distinction, all life that stands apart from the herd, threatens the survival of philosophy itself.

Readers of Nietzsche who have learned to qualify his views with literary irony, or who understand his account of “master” and “slave” moralities in symbolic terms, or some other watering down, are simply mistaken. When he calls for what one of his contemporaries terms an “aristocratic radicalism,” he means a return to the Ancient Greek recognition of superior natural specimens. A new class of warriors must rise up, who will rule by their biological strength alone. These men must train themselves for war, and then more of them will be bred.

That’s the book — ambitious, dense, and intricately argued. I am not at all equipped to judge its claims to scholarly authority, but this summary of its arguments should be sufficient for our purposes. Bronze Age Mindset does not spell out these details in the same way, but it is fair to say that it is in large part a literary exhortation on behalf of the academic arguments from Selective Breeding. It wants to shock the reader into a perception of the contemporary world as a nightmare of tyrannical nomos, and to convince them to share Nietzsche’s fears of the world being engulfed in the rule of the weak and resentful. It finds an alternative to this nightmare in its sense of Ancient Greece, which it argues is the same as Nietzsche’s, and it urges the reader to join in seeking that alternative. It calls for the reader to adopt the “Bronze Age Mindset”, to realize the significance of these lessons of the past for the present.

The second part of the quote above from the Substack post —

I have said for a long time that I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.

— should now be a little more clear. This is the heart of Bronze Age Mindset’s fascism. What Selective Breeding offers as disinterested historical analysis, Bronze Age Mindset demands to come true for the present. There is still more to say about how this book addresses the reader and where it hopes to point them, but this is enough for now.

We can now address the other elements of controversy. If you go back to the quote above — after “fascism” is “biological racism.” We’ve covered the biological part, but not the race element. Modern readers will find this book’s attitude toward race strange because it is deliberately anachronistic. This is touched upon in Murtaza Hussain’s helpful review in Unherd —

The book alternates between extreme disdain for people of other cultures and races and sympathy or even admiration for them; what’s constant is his extreme anti-feminism … From an intellectual standpoint, simply accusing his work of being racist or misogynist does no good, even if those terms would probably stick in a public debate, because BAP self-consciously writes from the pre-liberal perspective of classical civilisation, where such terms had no meaning.

Bronze Age Mindset judges races according to European aristocratic standards as though it’s still the nineteenth century, making some peoples more “noble” than others. It is not shy about its disgust for what it sees as ignoble. But exceptions are made for Nietzschean supermen of any background — for the great specimens strong enough to found a new people. This makes for a strange effect — this book is racist by modern standards and would be welcomed by those already interested in this way of seeing the world, but the influence of Nietzsche behind its treatment of race is so alien as to make it come off almost like science fiction. In general, though, it is less interested in race and more in general human types. Following Nietzsche, what it dislikes most is the “peasant,” the “shopkeeper,” the farmer, the physically weak and inert. It loves the knight, the warrior, the nomad, the noble.

As for anti-Semitism, when the book mentions the Jews it mostly imitates Nietzsche, whose treatment of Judaism is confusing. On the one hand, for Nietzsche, Jews are the people who originated “slave morality” and led to the monstrosity of Christianity, a religion that worships the weak. And yet Nietzsche is on record condemning the stupidity of the anti-Semitism of his day. Without getting into discussions about “what Nietzsche really thought,” I think it is safe to say that when Bronze Age Mindset has anti-Semitic statements, in general they are following Nietzsche. In my opinion, anti-Semitism is not central to the book.

Misogyny and anti-feminism are more prominent. The nature of women is seen as favored in the “totalitarian democracies” of pre-history, and the political rights and the social prestige of modern women are seen as a return to these feminized societies of the past. We owe Western civilization to the world-shaping power of patriarchy, and we ignore this at our peril. This is similar to the way the critic Camille Paglia talks about patriarchy, but it is a step past her libertarian feminism. To Bronze Age Mindset, older, more anachronistic views are more correct. Like an aristocrat from centuries past, it declares feminism to be a distortion visited upon us by mass democratic politics, and freedom for women an absurdity, an offense against Nature.

Finally, the last part of the above quote —

… celebration of male vitality, embrace of the aesthetics of the brotherhood of combat, conquest and war, demand for ‘living space,’ as well its fusion of bombastic elitism and vulgar populism …

— is straightforward and true, and needs no clarification.

This should suffice as a general outline of the book’s controversies. Ganz calls this book “Nazi shit,” but I think it is more accurate to call it “Nietzsche shit,” though it is indeed Nietzsche as the Nazis read him, and not some later interpreter’s softening of Nietzsche’s views. It aims, arguably, to compel us to receive Nietzsche’s ideas as though it were still the early part of the 20th century.

This might seem like pointless nitpicking, but precision about the book’s controversy matters to the more fundamental questions I would like to turn to now — why are we talking about this book at all? Why is such a book, full of so many radioactive ideas, being covered in mainstream news outlets? Why has it been deemed an event in the world of the arts?

Is it possible to read Bronze Age Mindset without taking it as literal life advice, as a straightforward recommendation for reforming the world that the reader must agree or disagree with? I have seen tweets here and there, for example, saying something like: “I don’t agree with everything in it, but it’s certainly one of the most significant books of the last several years.” If that’s true, why hasn’t the mainstream coverage of the book been able to account for this?

Maybe it’s foolish of me to go after the most politically extreme example, but too often I see books treated as mere containers for information, containers for arguments. Readers are seen as consumers of political discourse or members of audience demographics, and nothing more.

The review in Claremont says: “The young like to shock and be shocked, and Bronze Age Mindset more than delivers on this score.” The Unherd review says the book’s anti-feminism must be what explains its appeal to young men. There’s a similar note in the Mars Review piece, where it’s remarked that younger people these days are always looking for role models. All of this is insufficient.

Why can’t we admit that this book has real literary power, and this is what readers are responding to? It should be possible to acknowledge this while also acknowledging the book’s extremes.

We need to find a way to talk about this book as literature. The Mars Review piece starts by saying:

The most generous and useful way to read Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert, as someone suggested to me, is as fiction.

— and then goes on to argue, more or less, that it’s a mediocre fiction. I would start from the same place, but in my opinion it is in fact a great fiction, a great poetic vision.

In the rest of this essay, then, I will argue:

1. The book is powerful and inventive in its form and style, its creation of character, and in what might be called its poetic myth of the world.

2. When read with an eye for how it confronts its influences and how it compares to other books with which it has affinities, the book shows strength and originality as a work of art.

3. It also might be read as a myth of the internet, which opens up interesting possibilities.

4. Finally I’ll offer more personal speculations on the nature of the book’s literary influence, and some devices for confronting it.

3: A Myth of the World

We’ve said that in its ideas the book has links to Nietzsche, but it also has the same format of books by Nietzsche like On the Genealogy of Morals or Twilight of the Idols. Its four parts are comprised of a series of short aphoristic passages, anywhere from a couple paragraphs to several pages long, arranged in numbered sections. It also could be said to emulate Nietzsche’s compressed and polemical style, but in a unique voice all its own.

As has been well-covered elsewhere, Bronze Age Pervert writes in what might be called a cavemanspeak voice — a mix of broken English, internet slang, weird words pulled from Nietzsche, and unique coinages. Girls are “grils,” Greek is “Grek,” attack is “attaq,” and so on. This voice is actually not as prevalent as the book’s reputation suggests, and often fades into a more straightforward style, but there is a poetic intensity to the style that never flags — a sense of speed in thinking and perceiving, always forcing its way forward. The arguments are compact and forceful, thoughts and impressions come fast, and subject matter changes quickly. We are rushed onward, and an animalistic freedom grows gradually in the space opened up by the book’s relentless drive to unsettle the material of the world.

Section to section, the reader is kept in a constant state of surprise. The book moves rapidly between arguments, jokes, quick fictional episodes, ecstatic visions of animals and natural imagery, surreal images and glimpses of nightmares, with pauses for longing and romantic moods, and rambling parts that trail off. The range of subject matter is wide, with references to a variety of different periods of history and areas of expertise. There’s Ancient Greece, of course, and the fragments of Heraclitus in particular — and then on to discussions of Darwin, biology and the significance of hormones, questions of religious belief, transgenderism, a theory of modern homosexuality, animal behavior, the nature of scientific revolutions, Christianity, animism, a rant about artificial intelligence, environmentalism, Gnosticism, alternate histories, and more. All this is freely mixed with fragments of self-portraiture offered via confession, bizarre anecdotes, funny asides, and poetic reveries, and yet the book never seems to lose momentum.

So who is the Bronze Age Pervert and what does he want? What kind of story does he tell the reader about the world? He is not quite like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the abrupt monk come down from the mountain to teach the people that God is dead, but like Zarathustra he is part teacher, part clown. He comes to tell the reader that the truth is hidden from them by a class of elites who teach subservience to a lower form of life — “mere life,” the life of a bug, the life of yeast, the undifferentiated blob that knows only how to mindlessly replicate itself, that cannot organize itself into higher functions.

The secret they’re hiding is the one the Greeks knew, the one Pindar celebrated in his beloved athletes. Nature has a higher ideal, one that the animal part of ourselves can recognize without reflection, and one that a hidden, “demonic” intelligence in life can achieve through a disciplined harnessing of its will. But this has been hidden from us, and may even leave our world forever.

This is his nightmare — a world purged of the highest specimens of Natural strength, a Natureless world. We know from the previous section how this sense of Nature relates to various categories of thought or experience, or aspects of human life, or possible political hopes. Much already has been written that attempts to meet the book’s assertions about these things on the level of argument. But let’s set the controversies and the arguments aside and ask instead how does this book convince the reader of this dream?

It’s true that Bronze Age Pervert is interested in objective scientific study. He wants to drive the science of biology beyond the mediocre Darwinism he attacks early in the book. He rails against individualistic ideas of Nature and philosophy, says that biology knows only gradations, classes of beings, which must be part of a universal hierarchy and not merely individual. Fine, fine. But his book is not just a series of arguments, or statements made to shock. And he certainly does not stand neutrally outside the crisis he describes — in fact he personally bears its full burden. His urging of these problems onto the reader is inextricable from his personal story.

I don’t mean to nitpick or to paint him as deceptive, but only to point to what sort of literary character he is. He is a man of nervous, nervy physiology. A man given to uncanny perceptions, to heightened erotic intensity. A lover of animals and an animalistic man, innocent and unrestrained like a cat or a dog. A man who never felt at home in the modern world, who was driven to exile by his own nature. He drifts like a nomad across international locales, longs for the open space of unconquered territory, celebrates the wild free spirit he finds in obscure, uncivilized parts of the world. He finds company in schizophrenics and street people, and likes the filthy parts of cities, the districts of whores and mafia men.

He speaks of spirits present in inanimate objects, of his longing to live many lives simultaneously, to become another man or woman, or an animal, or even an inanimate object himself. He worships the mysterious power of hormones (which he spells “whoremoans”), and everywhere he sees the fire in all things, the way Heraclitus did. Beauty to him is a call to transcendence, to metamorphosis, and erotic love a sublime revelation of Nature’s universal will. The very glint in the eyes of lovers is an act of creation, and he says harshly to the reader that in truth they are nothing more than the glint in their parents’ eyes.

So you can see how this wolfish teacher is more than just a partisan of his specific fascist dreams, but also has personal and erotic dreams to tell. The chief object of his own erotic reverence is the perfected male form, and this leads to a now notorious scene where, standing in a museum gazing upon the majestic sculpted male bodies of statues, the Bronze Age Pervert brings himself to autoerotic climax without touching his body, through force of will alone. The weird hilarity of this scene is characteristic of the book in general, and it has been used in support of the quick judgment that Bronze Age Mindset is a straightforwardly “gay” book. The writer Blake Smith even theorizes that Selective Breeding and Bronze Age Mindset are written in search of a coterie of eager young males with homosexual proclivities, who will be fostered into a new philosophical elite.

This has a certain wit about it, but I think it is too narrow, and distorts the book. To laugh off the statue scene too quickly is to assume that the book is less conscious of itself than it is, and it’s also too literal-minded about the book’s aims. To see the book as Smith does is to be insensitive to its writing style, its literary irony, and the poetic force beneath the words. Like Camille Paglia or D. H. Lawrence, there is a charged intensity in every sentence. It wants to make the reader feel trapped, and then drive them into an erotic frenzy.

I thought of William Blake, for example, who writes against what he sees as disorders of erotic love in modern times, the “dark secret love” that he curses in his poem “The Sick Rose”. Blake has different philosophical influences, readings of history, and religious preoccupations than Bronze Age Pervert, but he is similar in his account of a fallen world and a dream of renewal driven in part by an unleashing of repressed sexual desire. The “increase of sensual enjoyment” that he urges on his readers in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is not unlike what Bronze Age Pervert teaches.

Or what about Walt Whitman, another teacher against repression? Or how about Hart Crane and Percy Shelley, both mythmakers of their own lives, their struggles against Nature and their fates? I found all these closer to Bronze Age Mindset than what Smith argues.

It’s better, I think, to read the book like we read poets. Shelley’s poem Epipsychidion, for example, has Shelley confronting his feminine ideal, the twin of his soul. She is both the triumph and the failure of his love life. A woman he can never have, or can and will have, but only in a mutual annihilation. This is the work of a writer at the other end of idealistic visions of erotic possibility and devotion to Nature. He is close to answering Wordsworth’s hope in “Tintern Abbey” that “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her” with the severest possible despair.

Bronze Age Mindset is, by contrast, at the beginning of such an idealistic quest. It intends its ideal male as a schematic figure, a fundamental image, a diagram of a hidden higher knowledge in Nature, a fixed constellation always present as a reminder, to drive yet more voyages of will and desire. I don’t mean to be presumptuous but, read this way, it is almost as though Bronze Age Pervert’s personal and erotic history is recapitulated in the poem of the book — contained, ironized, and sacrificed on the altar of this ideal — as though he has accepted that his individual life will only be what it always was, and by doing so transcends himself.

Bronze Age Mindset wants to force this drive to self-transcendence onto the reader, to assert it as an ideal universal in Nature, or at least one universally available to those who are still young. The book is meant as nothing less than a universal myth of youth, of youth attaining their will-to-power. Even if you cannot hear the call of these ideals anymore, the book insists, the young will hear them.

To transfigure your own life into ecstatic vision and then offer it as a universal myth of youth — isn’t this strange, and astonishing? This aspect of the book is the heart of its literary appeal. To think that we had to hack through so much thick foliage to get here!

All this is best suited to the book’s opening sections, especially its “Parable of Iron Prison,” maybe the most literary part, but to stop there is to leave out the book’s confident third section, which heralds the possibility of a new age of heroes, after the iron prison has been overcome.

It wants a new age of men strong in all the old Homeric virtues, like the heroes from Plutarch, and it dreams that these pirate-like men will cleanse the world of its corruption. It does not state things like I do here, in personal and literary terms. It insists that the crises and the possibilities it witnesses are historic, and that our history can take no other course.

4: Some Literary Comparisons

Bronze Age Mindset’s literary achievement might be better understood by discussing it in light of its apparent influences, and by comparing it to other similar works.

Though it opens many interesting paths into the literary past, the most important connection it has is to the world of Ancient Greece — to Heraclitus and to Homer, in particular. I did not feel confident enough in my own knowledge and reading to provide much insight on this, but in my opinion this book has the power to revitalize interest in the ancient world in a way we haven’t seen in generations. I hope this doesn’t sound like hyperbole — it is simply true.

There are some other authors mentioned in it or implicitly connected to it that I felt I could not cover with much authority — ones I don’t know well like Celine, Junger, Mishima, and H. P. Lovecraft. But I felt more confident to discuss the choices below, and I have not seen them discussed elsewhere.

D. H. Lawrence

Of the authors I knew, Bronze Age Mindset reminded me most of D. H. Lawrence, who apparently had similar influences in philosophy, namely Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. An interesting study might be made comparing the two authors and their different treatment of these influences.

D. H. Lawrence’s novels have similar stylistic effects to Bronze Age Mindset — they both have the same acute perception of natural bodies, the same sense of irritated speed and intensity, of “blood-intimacy.” In both authors, something like a trance is induced in the reader, where an abiding mental calm envelopes an inner turbulence — the reader feels as though they are being continually washed by waves of sexual sensation that suggest higher secrets at the heart of life, communications of a universal will. Abstract morality is swept away, and civilization is restored to its origins — war between the sexes, war between men.

In Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, the Book of Genesis represents a primordial past that lives alongside the characters, present in their instincts. In Bronze Age Mindset this past is Ancient Greece, the world of Homer in particular. The elements are different, but the literary effect is similar.

Camille Paglia

The critic Camille Paglia is most famous for her book Sexual Personae, an extensive general treatment of Western art and culture. It argues that post-60’s Western society has repressed the truth of Nature — something previous ages, especially the ancient world, better understood.

Bronze Age Mindset is the first book I’ve come across to demonstrate an authentic literary response to Paglia. It is a worthy heir of her aggressive, sensational style. In its invention of the Bronze Age Pervert, it has answered what I take to be Paglia’s implicit demand to artists that they create new sexual personae to oppose the all-devouring power of Nature, in her account of it.

I think it is arguably not just an adequate aesthetic response to Sexual Personae, but even could be considered a continuation or a development of it. What might be called sexual dread in Sexual Personae has in Bronze Age Mindset become sexual irritation, which is forced on the reader even more urgently than in Paglia’s book.

There are of course open references to Paglia in Bronze Age Mindset, but I think there is a deeper connection between the two, beneath the level of argument. I am surprised that this has not been more remarked upon.

A Confederacy of Dunces

There is vulgar humor throughout Bronze Age Mindset that is often a great deal of fun. A funny passage that imagines a modern incarnation of the Greek hero Alcibiades who also looks like Mitt Romney has been mentioned by some of the coverage of the book. Bronze Age Pervert always seems to be getting into trouble with nightclub bouncers and mall security, or acting out in public in mundane settings, like a petty conflict with a sinister waitress who takes his cup from him before he can finish his drink. Or there’s a part when he tells a friend he’s going to masturbate in the car while they’re driving and this NPC friend shrugs and says fine with them. Or when he gets felt up by a chad at the gym who’s interested in his fine physical form, or again the already discussed statue scene.

As a hater of the modern world and a starter of petty fights, Bronze Age Pervert sometimes reminded me of Ignatius Reilly from the novel A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s a bit like if you were to let an Ignatius-like figure rant as long as he liked, and took out the other characters who lend him more dramatic context and pathos.

The Morning of the Magicians

There is an enigmatic reference to someone with “green gloves” in Hong Kong in section 41 that can be traced back to a strange book from the 1960s called The Morning of the Magicians. This ambitious book claims that the humanities have fallen behind advances in modern science — that metaphysics and literature have not found adequate language, adequate myths to address the radical revisions of our reality brought on by the scientific discoveries of the early 20th century.

As a reader of Thomas Pynchon and also of James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, this theme was familiar to me, although I had not read Magicians before. Pynchon would seem to have taken the challenge of Magicians to heart, and it seems to me that Merrill followed Pynchon’s lead in this regard.

In the second part of Sandover, Merrill communicates with occult Ouija board spirits who demand of him “POEMS OF SCIENCE”, specifically of biology. Weirdly, the spirits communicate via the trashy popthink of the New Age. They tell Merrill a version of the Fall, which keeps morphing and taking on new tropes every time they retell it. They are spirits who are also bats who are also atoms who are also “Adam” in the Garden of Eden, who may have had contact with aliens or gathered energy at Stonehenge and this might have something to do with who built the pyramids, etc..

I like this part when Merrill makes fun of how the spirits communicate:

VERY BEAUTIFUL all this
Warmed-up Milton, Dante, Genesis?
This great tradition that has come to grief
In volumes by Blavatsky and Gurdjieff?
Nobody can transfigure junk like that …

The “great tradition” he means is the Western esoteric tradition, which was, I guess, more dignified before modern occult writing and the likes of Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and their students, like the authors of Magicians.

The man with green gloves is a Tibetan monk that the authors of Magicians say lived in Germany and who apparently acted as Hitler’s spiritual advisor. This is dipping now into the weird heritage of “esoteric Hitlerism” and its speculations upon the meaning of the Nazis’ interest in the occult. Did Hitler have access to secret occult techniques that he learned from this monk that allowed him to harness charismatic energy and sexual magic to change the course of world history? The reference to the man with green gloves in Bronze Age Mindset implies that Bronze Age Pervert has access to these same techniques, and so another layer is added to this book’s already surprisingly rich literary genealogy.

It would be interesting to attempt to bring together Bronze Age Mindset and Sandover. Sandover is very complex, and the matter of a poetry of biology is treated with subtle and at times inscrutable irony. At times Merrill seems to be saying that if one is asked to write literary myths of the science of biology, then one comes upon terrain of speculation already well-trodden, but not by respectable parties. That is, inevitably one runs into Hitler mythology and New Age mush.

If biology is to be the major science of the twenty-first century and literary writers must write “poems of science,” Merrill seems to be implying that this junk literature somehow must be absorbed into our literary history. And so if Bronze Age Mindset is a literary myth of biology and is also in part a work of esoteric Hitlerism, it is remarkable that Sandover seems to have anticipated it.

Thomas Pynchon

Earlier this year I wrote about Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow and my concerns over its continuing influence. I argued that we must learn to read Pynchon differently if we are to get our literature out from under the shadow of his work. Along these lines, I was struck by what might be called paranoid passages in Bronze Age Mindset, like the passage about the woman from the Rockefeller family in section 41, or the fantasy of hidden nightlife worlds always outside the edge of control of nefarious elites in section 33.

Just as in Pynchon, there is a “They” in Bronze Age Mindset, but with very different interests. Instead of language control, plastics, weapons systems, Faustian obsessions, and decadent sexual perversions, the wicked elites of Bronze Age Mindset want to control our diets and poison us with chemicals, lock us out from the true fruits of science, and turn us into zombies and broken insect-men. They want to desexualize us, neuter us, trap us in our houses, and tell us lies about the real nature of biology, and the nature of the past. This is paranoid mythmaking of a different order than Pynchon’s — on behalf of different politics and a different heritage of thought.

Bronze Age Mindset never mentions Pynchon, but it has a great section that mentions the mathematician and historian Anatoly Fomenko, who wrote a long series of books called History: Fiction or Science?, which take apart the science of chronology and the accepted timeline of world history, asserting, for example, that the Crusades and the Trojan War are actually the same event. This is historiographical playfulness worthy of Pynchon.

The literary diversity of this book, and its ability to absorb and transmute other literary material, has not been discussed enough. Not unlike Pynchon’s books, at times it seems like Bronze Age Mindset could devour any body of work thrown its way. The sense that seemingly anything outside the book could be put to use by its powers as yet more material — this is a rare literary quality.

Nietzsche and American Literature

Often I find myself too finicky and distractible, too sympathetic to every new person, mood, or impression that happens by to hold onto an orderly sequence of rational thought for long. In philosophy the perpetual amateur, always perplexed, always edging away from generalization, preferring the particular at every turn. A mind that chafes at the absolute, that innocently allows each fresh example of a counter-argument to be entertained even long after being convinced otherwise. It falters attempting to reach a final judgment, it strains to see the whole. Thinking not in argument and system, but in image, analogy, and metaphor.

If there is a thinker with whom I feel at home, it is Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is an essayist and poet, and not a philosopher. Emerson’s status as a thinker varies very widely depending on whom you ask, and many commentators seem determined to condescend to him.

But it also happens that among philosophers Nietzsche in particular was a dedicated Emerson reader, and could be said to have taken Emerson as an important starting point for much of his own thinking.

Given this, coming upon a book as close to Nietzsche as Bronze Age Mindset, I found myself to be an oddity. I knew Emerson but I did not know Nietzsche, and so as I read Bronze Age Mindset, I sometimes heard what sounded to me like echoes of Emerson, but with some adjustments. Later on when I read Nietzsche himself — again, largely for the first time — I found that these echoes and adjustments were actually characteristic of the relationship between Emerson and Nietzsche in general.

This topic is enormous, and I can’t pretend to authority on all the detailed and subtle questions at play. The problems of interpreting Nietzsche, whose influence is everywhere in 20th century philosophy and literature, are more than enough to occupy you for a long time, but adding Emerson brings in manifold complications. There is the first problem, which I already mentioned, of whether Emerson is worthy of any estimation as a thinker at all, and then the related question of how exactly to understand his thinking, which turns out to be quite difficult and has produced many contradictory views. We have a Gnostic Emerson, a Puritan one, a social Emerson, an anti-social Emerson, a quasi-fascist Emerson, a democratic Emerson, and so on.

Is he best understood in the terms of religion, philosophy, literature? Does his work have continuity with the past, or is it a break? Is it a break to better, more modern ways of thinking, or merely an interruption, a juvenile phase to be discarded in our progress to higher principles?

You can ask all these questions about Nietzsche too, and Bronze Age Mindset has prompted many discussions along these lines. Selective Breeding openly corrects or derides established views of Nietzsche, for example Walter Kaufmann’s.

If Bronze Age Mindset has opened a moment when we might revise our reading of Nietzsche, given how close these two thinkers are, a contemporary reevaluation of Emerson also may be inevitable. How does his thinking relate to Nietzsche’s? Is it right to group them together? What would Emerson himself have made of Nietzsche’s work? What does it mean to read Bronze Age Mindset as a reader who is sympathetic to Emerson and the writers who came after him?

I found myself to be an interesting test case for these questions. For example, when I first read the early passage where Bronze Age Pervert talks about his “sympathy for mankind” and imagines himself living many lives simultaneously, becoming other men, women, children, even inanimate objects, the first thought I had was: This sounds like Walt Whitman.

Is it right to say that Bronze Age Pervert, in his shamanistic persona, is akin to Walt Whitman? Maybe it’s more correct to say he’s like Lord Byron, or some other similar figure. But it fascinates me that if you follow my proposal from earlier in this essay, the idea that Bronze Age Mindset returns us to how Nietzsche was read in the early twentieth century, then it means that you also stumble into an American Nietzsche from that time, one who was all but equated with Emerson and Whitman.

For example, in his study of Wallace Stevens called The Poems of Our Climate, the critic Harold Bloom makes a persuasive case that Stevens linked Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with Whitman, and that his poetry owes much to both his readings of Nietzsche and to patterns of rhetoric and figurative thinking that Stevens inherited from Emerson and Whitman. For Stevens, it seems, there was little need to distinguish these three figures from each other.1

Or what about my hero Hart Crane, another American poet from that time? He wrote a very short magazine column about Nietzsche that is known to contemporary readers, but I have not seen much criticism discussing him as a Nietzschean writer. Now that I know Nietzsche a little better, I am surprised at how little this connection has been treated. The Bridge is a thoroughly Nietzschean poem, and again here Walt Whitman plays the same role as in Stevens. To Crane, Whitman might as well be Zarathustra, and he is described with openly Wagnerian language. Crane loved the Nietzschean dancer Isadora Duncan, and wrote in part in The Bridge and more directly in his poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” on behalf of a dream of renewed Hellenism in America.2

What is the ultimate significance of Nietzsche for American literature, for the literary tradition of Emerson? How strange that this question would arise again from a book like Bronze Age Mindset!

5: A Myth of the Internet

One reason conventional political and cultural news outlets seem to have trouble receiving Bronze Age Mindset is their refusal or perhaps inability to see the world of anonymous internet trolls and meme posters as a legitimate counter-culture. Selective Breeding even includes a “political detour” in its introduction, where the author rather earnestly recommends Angela Nagle’s book Kill All Normies for background on internet culture and its recent turn to the “alt right.”

This is the world the book comes out of, and I am not exactly the best guide to it, but I feel compelled at least to mention it. How is it that we’ve gotten this far and internet culture still feels like such a blind spot? Has our literature so far been any good at illuminating the internet, its culture and its history? I read an essay about “internet novels” the other day — supposedly we have some of these now …

The internet actually is not much discussed in Bronze Age Mindset, and yet the longer I contemplated the book, the more I grew to see it as an internet myth. It might even be called a culmination of a certain spirit of the internet, or a certain strain of internet history.

For me this history starts in memories of 4chan, the old anonymous image board site, which I first saw when I was in high school in the 2000s. This was my introduction to internet nihilism, meme humor, and the radical commitment to free speech that flourishes in hidden online worlds.

On 4chan, everything up to the extreme edge of depravity is permitted to be shared. A chaos of ugly and forbidden thoughts flows around you unhindered. These thoughts are, in fact, the very raw material of thinking and communicating in this online kingdom of trash. It is the back alleys of the internet, where the sewage gets drained out.

I can still remember how it felt to discover it — the wild and disturbing spirit of online anarchy and transgression, the violent images and deranged jokes, the ugly fixations on race and anti-Semitism and misogyny, obscenity like I had never seen before. This was a place for real misfits, but it was also a place for normal people to play the part of misfits online, in the new online ironic style. I was never more than a lurker, and even then not much, but I learned enough about this online world to understand it.

Back then it seemed to me that the troll took to this culture largely in an unconscious way. They felt they were a reject of the world, or they just liked having fun fooling around online. Troll culture was just the regurgitation of online trash by people sentenced to the junkyard of fate, telling jokes to each other to pass the time, mocking the world. The garbage was just what was around.

When I read Bronze Age Mindset, it felt like I had come back to this online world so many years later to check in, but now I found that a whole city of garbage had been built, an alternate civilization with its own history, and its own principles rationalized out of the chaos.

These days when the general public hears “internet troll,” they just think “alt right,” but the truth has always been more various. If you were interested in causes of internet freedom or online revolutionary politics in the 2000s, you might have read the leftist anarchist political tract entitled The Coming Insurrection, written by a group of anonymous French intellectuals. Or maybe you had heard of Alex Jones, or watched his documentary The Obama Deception. I remember another documentary of libertarian leaning on YouTube by the filmmaker Aaron Russo called America: Freedom to Fascism, which was concerned with the evils of the Federal Reserve, the income tax, and the diminishing of civil liberties after 9/11. I remember being curious about Occupy Wall Street and going to Zuccotti Park to walk around, when it was full of tents and people … I remember seeing Citizenfour, the documentary about Edward Snowden, or the thrill of the GameStop scandal. These are just a few examples of the possible variety. In bygone years, one or another political sensibility would have been most visible online, and now it’s mostly the meme heroics of Donald Trump that carry the day.

I am not much interested in sociological or political analyses of the progress of this change. If you want more history, I like this old book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy about the 2010s hacker group Anonymous. There’s also Kill All Normies, like we said, and there’s another similar book called It Came from Something Awful. Bronze Age Pervert himself even touches on this as part of a published response to the Claremont piece. These all offer accounts and explanations that you can judge for yourself.

More interesting to me are the patterns of internet myths that have stayed, despite the political variety. I would like to assert that Bronze Age Mindset and its parable of the iron prison could be read as an archetypal internet myth. It may yet become the Millennial internet story.

What is the meaning of the internet, for Millennials? It is a virtual realm of pure intellect, where we escape to be free. A speakeasy or a clubhouse, where forbidden knowledge is shared. A new historical or political perch, from which the crimes of the powerful can be seen in ways previously not possible. And lastly, a place to dream of utopian alternatives to a corrupted world.

Millennials are prisoners of a corrupt political system, a corrupt economic system, a corrupt system of knowledge. Some forbidden insight into all this is being kept from them, but it cannot be held back much longer … Bronze Age Mindset has claimed this story for itself.

I like this bit at the beginning of the introduction to the book edition of The Coming Insurrection —

Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode.

The book ends with longing for the destruction of Paris, capital of corruption and global crime —

Rage streaks across this desert of fake abundance, then vanishes. A day will come when this capital and its horrible concretion of power will lie in majestic ruins … All power to the communes!

This kind of sounds like Bronze Age Mindset! Bronze Age Mindset represents the explosion about to come as the Ancient Greek spirit of Nemesis. Its dream of revenge is not of revolutionary anarchist communes, but the coming of a new warrior elite, the pirate brotherhoods who will cleanse our corrupted world. The politics are different, but the same spirit is there, and the same myth of hidden knowledge, discovery, banding together, and rising up. A flood of revenge come back to the real world after time spent away from it, where you learned the truth. How many more internet myths could we count in this group?

It’s still an open question as to what will happen to dreams like this — dreams of revenge nursed anonymously online. The story of our generation is not yet finished, but our peculiar use of the internet may not survive us. Bronze Age Mindset may even mark its ending, or at least it could be taken as a warning that things may not always be this way. So far, our memories of a time before the internet may have lent us a certain complacency about the stability of the real. Does part of us feel that online we may go as wild as we want, that there always will be firm ground to come back to? Or is that starting to slip away? This is about more than just a few online freaks now, a few subcultures.

This question haunts all of internet culture — of what happens when a virtual thought tries to become real. I think we will continue to see this theme develop in our literature, and it is important that we deepen our sense of its influence on our lives.

If Bronze Age Mindset is a myth of the internet, then the book has joined the internet with the spirit of Nietzsche. Internet trolls are Nietzscheans, nihilists emptying the worlds’ signs of their power, testing how divorced from the real world the signs have become. The user looks up from the stream of ghostly images on their phone and perceives the order of Nature again: a primordial field of natural bodies — a sensational, almost psychedelic world of living organisms pulsating with their genetic heritage, the enigma of life mutating itself by force of will alone. What happens next is open.

Anyway, how do we exit the labyrinth of this section? I think back to the old internet trolls in Hacker, Hoaxer, for whom Hitler was the ultimate prank image online, the swastika a taunt at reality-bound normies to mock them for thinking the internet was “serious business.”

If you had told these trolls in the early 2000s that a book written in cavemanspeak by a lunatic reactionary just on the edge of Nazi sympathy who calls himself “Bronze Age Pervert” would inexplicably gain a wide readership outside its niche online milieu and go on to be denounced by outraged political commentators in mainstream news publications, it would have been … the funniest thing they could think of.

6: History and Metempsychosis

A book this fearsome and comprehensive, with such intellectual depth and variety, and such unflagging poetic energy, has the power to induce an intense anxiety in the reader, indeed to make them feel like a cockroach struck by the harsh glare of a flashlight. The reader needs to summon all their inner powers, all the knowledge they possess for themselves, to meet such a book.

If you’re looking for some help with this, you might turn to Selective Breeding, where you can find much of the source material for the intense prophecy of Bronze Age Mindset, but offered dispassionately.

I found myself going back to Emerson. Even after reading this book and then Nietzsche after that, ultimately I still feel closer to Emerson. I think this goes beyond any suggestion about mere political disposition. Maybe this is more about personality, or personal need.

Or maybe this difference could be elucidated by my taking up deeper of study of Plato — this is, maybe, about different kinds of Platonists. But it also points to the general importance of studying Emerson more carefully. If he is a Platonist, then he has fused his reading of Shakespeare with Plato. He says, weirdly, in his essay on Plato in Representative Men —

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and ‘tis the magnitude only of Shakespeare’s proper genius that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent of his school.

To find out what he means by that remark, in detail — to find out the consequences of that statement — would be very useful. Or, at least it would be useful for me.

Another device for containing the vehemence of Bronze Age Mindset in a wider literary setting that I found myself coming back to was to remember Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. I don’t know Mann’s other books, but I come back to this one when I feel too trapped in the present. It’s the story of Hans Castorp, a young German man who in the years leading up to World War I goes to visit his cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Alps. The trip is meant to be only a couple weeks long, but it turns into several years, as Castorp somehow gets sick too and so ends up becoming a patient himself.

Time is stopped on the mountain — history is stopped — and the patients there are free to be sick, and free to get better. But Castorp is free above all to be educated. During his stay, he is attended by a few different teachers, but there are two in particular who dominate most of it, and who stand as representatives of two European political traditions.

On one side, there’s Settembrini — a disciple of the Enlightenment, a teacher of reason, a partisan of democracy and egalitarian social reform. And on the other is Naphta, a Jesuit, a reactionary, a man with all the old aristocratic views.

These two fight and fight over Castorp’s soul. Each hopes to claim him as a disciple. As the book goes on, you get to know their arguments, and you also get to know them, and you learn to see them as pieces of history.

There is a moment I like near the end when Castorp dismisses them both —

I’m rather fond of you [Settembrini]. You are a windbag and a hand-organ man, to be sure. But you mean well, you mean much better, and more to my mind, than that knife-edged little Jesuit and Terrorist, apologist of the Inquistion and the knout, with his round eye-glasses—though he is nearly always right when you and he came to grips over my paltry soul, like God and the Devil in the medieval legends … I will hold … not with Naphta, neither with Settembrini. They are both talkers; the one luxurious and spiteful, the other forever blowing on his penny pipe of reason, even vainly imagining he can bring the mad to their senses. It is all Philistinism and morality, most certainly it is irreligious. Nor am I for little Naphta either, or his religion, that is only a guazzabuglio of God and the Devil, good and evil … Pedagogues both! Their quarrels and counter-positions are just a guazzabuglio too, and a confused noise of battle, which need trouble nobody who keeps a little clear in his head and pious in his heart.3

Consider this an incantation for warding off all gurus and would-be lawgivers! Though I personally would replace “pious” here with “self-reliant.”

In The Magic Mountain the teachings of Bronze Age Pervert would have been only one part of your education, and then you’d come down from the mountain to re-enter history. You must confront your own place in history — you have no other choice. Your face may wear an ideological expression, a visionary one, even an ironic one, or something more mundane, but it will be yours. Take Bronze Age Mindset as shock treatment, like the hectoring teachings of Naphta, and then come down from the mountain. Then you must live and find out what portion of your fate belongs to Nature, and what portion belongs to you.

More philosophical readers might complain that these are all literary additions that I’m bringing to the book, but if my history is to be my own then I have no choice but to read this way. There’s a note from an early draft of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo that I like, where he praises Emerson —

Emerson, with his Essays, has been a good friend and someone who has cheered me up even in dark times: he possesses so much skepsis, so many ‘possibilities,’ that with him even virtue becomes full of wit.4

For me, the summoning of that atmosphere of skepsis is the essence of literature. How might we summon such an atmosphere for ourselves, in our time? This is where I find myself going when trying to respond to this fearsome book.

***

I have tried throughout this essay to give an honest account of my experience of this book. I recognize its controversies and its capacity to offend. I felt that I had to treat this book carefully, but I do not want to appear to condescend to it. As a literary work, I am happy to honor its erotic intensity, its poetic style, its inventiveness and exuberance. I like best to read it as a fiction — like a Percy Shelley poem or a D. H. Lawrence novel — and I believe its status as poetic vision of Eros could stand apart from the scandal around it, or any debate about its arguments or its implications for politics.

More artists should read it, and work to find out what it means to them. The artists whom it has found have been wounded by it in the way that only poetry can wound. They will not remember its ideas or its controversies, but its voice and its images — the harsh heat of the volcanic core of Mount Aetna; the mad charge of the horses, or the frenzy of birds at the waterfall; the pitiful animals trapped, like the jaguar at the zoo, or the terrier trying to dig through its city apartment floor; the nightmare world of the Iron Prison, and the piratical men who escape it. They will remember the Bronze Age Pervert himself, this exile who speaks with a suggestion of the high cost of his becoming, who tells them of his dreams and of a time in which “everything is ending.”

It is strange that I came to write about this book, but hopefully you can see why I felt compelled. That an online troll who has declared “I believe in Fascism, or ‘something worse’” who hails from a corner of the internet full of Hitler memes, racist tweets, male “fizeek” pics, and anime girls has also turned out to be an authentic liberator of Eros, the rare writer with a philosophy background who actually understands the view of the artist, and that he has produced a real artistic achievement — this is a calamity that will have to be reckoned with.

My title is a line from James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, at the end of Mirabell’s Books of Number.

This poem combines references to the W. B. Yeats poem called “The Statues” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “Uriel.”

“Caryatid” and “atlas” here are terms for statues sculpted into the columns of buildings, female and male respectively. You are invited to take them as allegorical figures.

A tableau vivant is a group of people arranged in a scene as an art piece — people pretending to be statues.

— AR

I

Caryatid affixed in unconquered guile
Whose lips the live faces of men disturb in their sleep, 
Whose ideal heat the atlas at the other end entreats
To hold up the world — you both of calculated face 
A measured man sculpted into place, 
Said “Look! This!”,
Something about Pythagoras, 
And published a poem about it in a book. 

Each reads the other’s look, 
Live ones you are, and later on 
Again in the street I see you, tableau vivant,
Bemused and naked -- naked but you do not touch,
Each an arena alone amidst centripetal thrust
That vibrates and asks like an unread book. 

Alone in its field across magnetic bounds
Each adamant hurries in aphoristic frenzy to break,
Or else wastes itself on living too long,
And then an evil arrives to take its place. 
This is each one’s most wicked face, 
But only wicked if you know where they started. 

They said, a little wounded, they were waiting to strike 
When Zeus hit them hard with a bolt. But I for one 
Would have thanked him for such merciful rupture,
That baffles all measure in deserted seizure,
And shocks you out of your blood. 

Instead the statues stand here at the end
And cannot bear their lust.
They gaze across the mathematic gulf
And pretend to will, to love, stand still.

II 

At night I see Mount Olympus go out — 
Aphrodite’s displays, Dionysus in doubt —  
And the clothes they wear out in the world,
Take off at home ... Each encircles the other
In a unit’s universal embrace ... For each 
The other lovingly curtails its face ...

Shadow of a world not ours,
They are still out-of-doors. 
We called it obscure heaven 
Or the open road, but it’s hard to tell.

Nemesis then struck up its star 
And shook the clouds, said looking down:
“All is evil; all will go well.”

One of the first reviews I wrote for this blog was of Lauren Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts, and I wrote it because I wanted revenge. I felt tricked by that book! It seemed to me to be the ultimate book reviewer’s trap — full of apparently human content but actually secretly empty, a perfect emptiness in which nothing happened and no one changed, in which the artifice called “autofiction” was mocked and the larger one called “fiction” was nullified. Its busy emptiness was designed to lure reviewers to project their own feelings onto it, to get them talking long enough for them to expose their secrets — their fantasies and pet theories, their blind spots, their bad taste.

The more I looked through the other reviews of the book, the more I felt perplexed. What exactly was everyone discussing? This thing had no substance, it didn’t exist. Or, it had been written to exist only as much as it was talked about, and it was talked about a lot. I felt sure of this, and the only way I found I could write about it was to politely refuse its invitations to interpretation. “I will not read myself into this thing,” I said, “I suspect I am being fooled.”

I found at least one other convincing way to read the book, but I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by what I took to be its aggressive metafictional self-awareness. And so how could I turn to this new essay collection, No Judgment, and not feel wary?

I also tend to be skeptical of essay collections by a single author. Did it really need to be a book? Why couldn’t these essays just have been published as magazine pieces? Are we meant to read each essay on its own, or should we expect the collection to come together as a whole?

The introduction of No Judgment offers the multiple meanings of its title — judgment of art, judgment of each other, judgment of ourselves — as the center that brings these pieces together. Seems like a natural theme for a critic. The critic’s judgment comes from taste, which is cultivated from experience, and they work this judgment into authoritative writing that demonstrates the value of art and its relevance to our daily lives. The critic persuades us with carefully reasoned arguments derived from principles, in a concise and lucid style. The critic teaches us how to pay attention, and this is vital in a time when our attention is often captive to meaningless distractions and the careless opinions of the uninformed masses, especially when we’re online. This has gone so far that many people wonder whether we need critics at all. You seem to hear it all the time — that it’s a tough time to be a serious critic. So a book taking up this theme should be a defense of the art of criticism, it should remind us all of why we need it.

Some negative reviews of the book— one in the Washington Post and another in Bookforum — have argued that it fails to achieve this standard, and I found myself sympathetic to some of their complaints. I agree that some of the statements made in the book can come off as predictable or too easy. I see also how someone could become frustrated with the informality of the writing style or the overly tricky sentences that sometimes don’t land, and I appreciate careful critical reading of diction and the picking apart of mixed or mediocre metaphors.

But I would dissent from these reviews in that I don’t think the book is best read as a failed defense of criticism. I think this actually mistakes the spirit of the book. It is not an attempt to erect a fortress of well-built arguments supported by evidence, superior to mere flimsy feelings and preferences, as the reviews assert. It is rather a letting down of the drawbridge, an opening of the castle gates to let in the crowds of feeling, opinionating, judging humanity. It implies that we have no other choice now, especially when we’re online.

In public, readers (and other writers) will judge, and they will do so in waves of book reviews, blog posts, forum discussions, Goodreads rankings, tweets, video essays, Instagram posts, and Book Tok clips. They say what they say because of arguments and evidence, yes, but also because of feelings, preferences, foibles, anxieties, obsessions, resentments, professional calculations based on real or illusory apprehensions of market demands, social media cliques, restrictions enforced by their business relationships, or opportunities for self-promotion.

Public ironies also flow into private ones, which are more universal. People may say one thing in public and another in private. The thing said in private may leak to the public, and their public face then must be adapted to the accident of their gossip becoming news. In this world, everyone is in some degree dishonest, except (hopefully) with themselves.

What is the role of the professional critic, the writer who works to hone her opinions into the authority of judgments, in a landscape in which “judgment” has such metamorphic uncontrollability? How to judge in a realm where seemingly no reliable, consistent judgment is possible? And can the critic be trusted to judge themselves reliably, and in public? Do they get better at it as they get older, or worse?

The best answers this book offers to these questions are not its explicit arguments, but its implicit ironies. It is more interested in suggesting a dramatic context in which many different attempts at judgment are offered and compete with each other. The motives for these judgments are often questionable, and the fruits of their competition uncertain.

I found myself congenial to this open, metaphorical approach. I think if you can relax your expectations based on the perceived image of “this notable critic has gathered together their most authoritative jottings from recent years on a variety of subjects just for you in a new published volume,” then you may find yourself surprised by the effects this book achieves when it succeeds. Frustration with its diffidence and incessant half-joking, which can seem at first like an abdication of critical authority, can give way to an unexpectedly useful openness, a knowing that you may be being deceived, or may be deceiving yourself. It makes you more alert to how a critic, a writer, a reader, or a loud voice online may be deceiving you, or themselves. It is a reminder that one day we may come to know the value of our own judgments and their consequences (the same goes for others’ judgments of us), but only after we allow ourselves to surrender to them.

But this only comes through when it succeeds, and I think it has to be admitted that this book has a peculiar unevenness that it can’t quite shake off. It needed more time to be shaped to perfection as a whole, for maximum effect. Again you have the annoying point that the “essay collection” format can just refuse to form a perfect whole, but it would have made No Judgment a better book if it had tried harder to make these pieces fit together and to develop its central theme.

The introduction sets the stage for a theatre of “no judgment,” where we can watch the world’s characters attempt to judge others and themselves. We are meant to feel a sense of dramatic irony growing as the judgments accumulate and each person is forced to reckon with their public and private identities. This is a winning setup, and it is pulled off to real effect in the opening essay on gossip, which is the best in the book. It successfully mixes journalistic reporting, cultural commentary, joking anecdotes, and autofiction-style personal reflection. It persuades us that the last several years of gossip journalism have been absorbed back into literature, and this apparently specialized topic is magnified to universal significance. The personality of the author herself is offered as the best symbol of this significance, and it is convincing. This transcends the complaint from the Washington Post review, which said the book amounts to “self-advertisements.” I think this is something more like “self-repletion,” an assertion of the value of personality itself, and a celebration of literature’s power to liberate us from mere political, cultural, and personal history.

But after this success, the essays on Goodreads and autofiction are a diminishing. They are similar in their attempt to enclose reporting, criticism, and autofiction into the theatre of an essay in the approach I’ve sketched, but they succeed at this only in parts. Unlike the confidence of the gossip essay, their atmosphere is closer to the sour and anti-social feeling of Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts. On these, the negative reviews are mostly right. Whenever these essays exit dramatic storytelling — which do they well — and turn to thinking, they falter. Why don’t they work? Something about the terms of their thinking, the over-simplicity. Who cares about the finer meaning of star ratings in book reviews, or the difference between “populist” and “elitist” visions of culture? These are empty abstractions, petty material from the real world, that literature is meant to play with and mock, and to make human again. I took Fake Accounts as knowing this and successfully thrusting these illusions aside, but these essays seem to have forgotten this lesson, or they should have been reworked to make the triumph over the material more complete.

They are instead too intent on jousting with generalities. There’s a moment at the end of the Goodreads essay where Martin Scorsese trashes Marvel movies and then later relents, an accomplished artist in mediocre retreat from the rabble of online culture. How to be a critic in a world where even the director of undisputed classic films throws up his hands and admits that his sense of art is just another opinion? This should have been a high point, but something in the delivery, the essay’s insistence on descending back into abstract arguments and simplistic terms, stops this from having its full dramatic effect.

The essays on Berlin, anxiety, and vulnerability are more straightforward personal essays, and would have made amiable magazine pieces. They are allowed to wander longer than most magazine pieces, and then they end on a note of personal epiphany. You’ll like these if you’re interested in the subject matter, but you’ll wonder why they were in this book and not just in magazines or online. My complaint with these is that the moments of epiphany, which should have been opportunities to flesh out the private side of the book’s theme of “no judgment,” are not developed enough. In general, the “public” essays are too unfocused and experimental, and these “private,” more personal ones are not experimental enough.

The introduction of the book mentions that a new novel is in the works, and at times the essays in this book seem more like experiments preparing for a larger work of fiction. I think a novel could more convincingly bring together this book’s various perspectives and writing styles. Its dramatic atmosphere would persuade us more than any mere critical argument. The forthcoming novel’s theme is apparently “revenge.” For the revenge to be complete, these knives must be kept sharp!

Cold sun it snarks the seagulls leave,
I'm on the peninsulitic vista having brought in the new year.
Brown leaves, and a little dog with its man astir 
On the road to fitness, the beach side path, with mother
Peach pink and gray with a black liedown stroller,
Sweet child within, sleeping beneath the takeoff planes 
And a flag of fifty states — rock gray, rock brown, small city.

Someone says: "Going to the pharmacy,"
Someone's eyes touch mine and I don't speak,
I'm nervous — it must have been the smell of the trashcan,
It must have been poor parking lot planning, something is off,
Something I hadn't seen, something I haven't seen yet.
I am overcome. The year ahead a long car ride home.

These panoramas exchanged in mind-mobbed circles
Of private moments will arrive back in the mailbox
A few months from now, as soon the absent existent 
Adrift in slouch-walk — the employee, the "mailman" —
Drops them off. I'll think: "Soon this all might be done by drones,
Who will apportion out automated prophecy on time. Their warehouses
Of dread and joy unpacked at intervals, and no need to see it 
Coming because it will already be here." Machine-perfect, this coming year.

At home the cat leaps not at toy or game 
But surprise the oddly unavoidant creature
Extends his arm, sharp claw-fingers stretched,
In a strangely human gesture over my stomach — 
He asks for a warm spot to rest, the beast previous
Now that time has passed — how long has it been? —
Admits himself at last domesticated success.
Or, almost — he still can scratch. Already the house is in
For crawling ant-life at the start of the season, 
Which happened overnight — it's Spring, 
The real start of the year. It begins.

Image source

Last February marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, and it was interesting to read through the tribute pieces.1 Coming off of the previous year’s centenary of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which felt like a victory lap, I was struck by a sense of uncertainty or even ambivalence in the pieces about the book.

Gravity’s Rainbow is famous for being difficult to read. It is the quintessential postmodern “doorstop” novel — more than eight hundred pages of obscure subject matter treated in dense and forbidding prose. The characters are flat, and there is no unified “plot” like in traditional fiction, though it keeps playing at having a plot. In fact, one of the book’s themes is the impossibility of plot, even the danger or the pathology of needing a plot.

There are some incidents in the book that could be called central, but the nature of those incidents and their significance are often ambiguous or are even openly debated by the characters. This makes it into a kind of monument to entropy and uncertainty — a monstrosity of aimless, disconnected episodes, a massive garbage dump of uninterpretable information, a big pile of “plots” that fail to cohere as convincingly unified stories in themselves or in relation to each other.

Dense writing style, flat characters, obscure subject matter, enormous length, and stubborn plotlessness — all this makes the book difficult to read and difficult to write about, and makes it difficult to estimate its artistic merit and its significance in literary history. It seems destined for a small audience, an in-group of devotees in-the-know.

And yet, as the tribute pieces show, we can’t seem to get away from it. One piece in Wired even says that our world is now indistinguishable from the world of the book — that we all live under the book’s rainbow, whether we know it or not. A similar note is struck in a piece for Esquire, where the real world and all of us are just now catching up with Pynchon’s work.

I have to admit that I chafe at this! Maybe it’s just the writer in me, but I think we should be protective of our autonomy in determining the meaning of our lives. I’ve written about this before — this need to seek out your own meaning, and not to take it from somewhere else. If a book has read you and your reality better than you can, then there must be some pride in you that resists. This resistance is for the sake of possessing your own life’s meaning, but also, if you happen to be a writer or an artist, for your ability to make something of your own.

I think we should learn to be alert to those moments when we are too passive, when we let strongly written books from the past do too much of the thinking for us. As soon as I hear someone claiming that a book has taken up all the available imaginative space for our time — that we can’t escape it, even that we live inside it whether we know it or not — a Captain Ahab in me says it’s time to get a crew together to hunt the white whale.

I still have more reading to do to back this up, but for years now my instinct has been that the work of Thomas Pynchon is the foremost obstacle to literary originality in our time. (I am talking about ambitious literary writing in English). You go back to the recent literary past and you keep running into him. His work is so all-devouring, and so difficult to approach that we seem doomed to be dwarfed by him, and doomed to repeat him. This is what I hear behind my own ambivalence about Pynchon’s work — a fear that it may not be possible to fully comprehend it, and a fear that it may already contains ours.

We need new ways of reading Pynchon, and we need to start identifying pitfalls that unwittingly make our literature sound too much like his. If we can turn aside from the view of Pynchon as literal prophet, then we may begin to see through his rainbow’s dazzling surface. I wish I had heard more thinking in this direction in the anniversary pieces, and so this is my contribution to last year’s discussion.

Here are my topic headings, then, for getting past the influence of Pynchon —

1. Confront themes and deep influences, not trivia

Pynchon is known for his proclivity for the esoteric. It’s not uncommon to see a description of one of his novels start with an awed listing of the range of subject matter it manages to absorb, something like: “A rock ‘n’ roll mad motorcycle ride to the outer reaches of the twentieth century and beyond, showing equal confidence with the poetry of Rilke, organic chemistry, superhero comics, regional accents, Nazi occultism, and yes, pigs! From London during the Blitz to Germany’s African colonies in the early twentieth century to Dutch expeditions in the New World — with episodes in central Asia, German V-2 rocket factories, casinos and cruise ships, and places only visitable in dreams — this novel knows no bounds … ”.

All this rings true, of course, but I think this tendency to get lost in trivia is an annoying obstacle to getting a handle on the books. Every other word in a Pynchon book is from some esoteric sub-discipline, some technical usage only specialists would understand. He talks about “scumbling” paint and railroad “spurs,” and then you have to go look it up. You chase down the definitions, the historical context, you speculate endlessly about the meaning of these minute details, and you’re made into a Pynchon encyclopedist until the end of time.

If you pick up the habit of reading literature with an ear for how books echo previous ones, then you learn to pay close attention to diction, as it can often signal how previous authors have influenced the book you’re reading. Sometimes deliberate and sometimes more unwitting, these echoes are like trail markers that point to the author’s own deep reading experiences. This goes beyond mere source hunting. If you follow these trails far enough, you can make a map of the book’s deeper connections to the past.

Seen this way, all that technical jargon in Pynchon’s work can begin to seem like a strategy to avoid producing any recognizable echoes of the literary past. They always set us off on the wrong trail. Instead of discovering his deeper influences and how his books relate to previous ones, we get lost in the noise.

Instead of trivia, we should talk more about the deeper currents of artistic and philosophical influence that Pynchon’s work has swallowed up. For example, years ago I tortured myself and reread Fredric Jameson’s book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Whenever I could extract something lucid from Jameson’s tangle of unreadable prose, I found that the best artistic reference point for the “postmodern” mood he was attempting to sketch was always Gravity’s Rainbow. Materialist critics like Jameson tend to explain changes in art and culture as emerging from historical crises or technological change or some kind of “media environment” or whatever, but I had to ask myself — would we have anything like our sense of “postmodern” art without Gravity’s Rainbow? How much of our cultural atmosphere was originated by it? What thinking is embedded in the novel that we now simply take for granted?

And what about “autofiction”? This thing everyone seems to want to talk about these days. I remember the feature in the magazine The Drift a couple years ago where the editors surveyed the state of literary fiction, asking What comes after autofiction? Well, what came before? It was this thing called “metafiction,” and Pynchon is king of metafiction.

After the covid pandemic, they claim, literary writing is about to break into a new change. But what if that break only leads to more books that, when we look backwards, are found to be subordinate to Gravity’s Rainbow? Where is the writing that is not the product of ideas Pynchon has already treated better, and more comprehensively? Are there other influences we might invest in, to make something new?

2. The surface is various, but the myth is always the same

Infinite trivia can suggest infinite variety, but the deeper you dig in Pynchon books, the more things are the same. Sex and psychology in particular are painfully static, heavy and immovable.

It’s always the same three figures:

1. The ineffectual hero — passive, sexually timid, a clumsy schlemiel, a universal scapegoat. Benny Profane in V., Mucho in Lot 49, Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason in Mason & Dixon, Zoyd Wheeler in Vineland, Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice, and Maxine’s ex-husband Horst in Bleeding Edge.

2. The big bad fascist psychopath — psychologically remote, death-obsessed, monomaniacally focused, fatally and universally attractive to women. Blicero in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, Pierce Inverarity in Lot 49, Brock Vond in Vineland, Mickey Wolfmann in Inherent Vice, and the soldier guy whose name I can’t remember in Bleeding Edge.

3. The woman torn between these two men — either remote and death-haunted, or more down-to-earth and closer to the reader. For the former, there’s the title character in V., Katje in Gravity’s Rainbow, Rebekah in Mason & Dixon, Frenesi in Vineland, and Shasta in Inherent Vice. For the latter, there’s Oedipa in Lot 49 and Maxine in Bleeding Edge.

These figures are similar to the ones in William Blake’s prophecy Visions of the Daughters of Albion. It’s also, weirdly, the same pattern as the tiresome “pickup artist” discourse, where the beta males always lose to the chads.

What does so static a myth of human sexuality indicate about Pynchon’s work? And what is the deeper story of its development across his career? From book to book, how do the permutations of this pattern change?

Are we repeating our own similar patterns in contemporary writing? If so, how do they compare to his? How might we refute what’s implied in his?

3. Pynchon is actually two distinct authors

Pynchon has published nine books — eight novels and one short story collection. Here they are in order of publication —

V. (1963)

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Slow Learner (1984), collection of previously published short stories

Vineland (1990)

Mason & Dixon (1997)

Against the Day (2006)

Inherent Vice (2009)

Bleeding Edge (2013)

His first novels, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, were reviewed with interest alongside other promising American novels of the 60s, and then Gravity’s Rainbow arguably marked the height of his work’s acclaim and controversy. Then Vineland came out a long time after Gravity’s Rainbow, and was largely dismissed by critics. Pynchon seemed to be taking a detour into lighter fare, inexplicable for a writer so ambitious. Mason & Dixon, in turn, was hailed as a return to form, a worthy successor of Gravity’s Rainbow. Against the Day, his longest book at more than one thousand pages, continued along the same lines, and was seen as an established Great Author continuing to do his thing. Then in Inherent Vice the lightness anticipated by Vineland was fully embraced, and the same goes for Bleeding Edge. Reviewers called these late books “Pynchon Lite.” It was still recognizably him, but the style and the subject matter had been made less relentlessly obscure, and the themes less ambitious, less morbid, and less all-encompassingly apocalyptic.

Read chronologically, the story of his writing career is curious. V. is one kind of book, then Lot 49 is surprisingly shorter and seemingly less ambitious. He even somewhat flippantly disavows it in a later essay. He seems to pick up what he started in V. in Gravity’s Rainbow, but then after that takes a surprising detour into the lighter style of Vineland. Then he seems to double back to the old style again in the other books, and then again returns to the detour in a full conversion to “Pynchon lite” at the end.

Scholars picking through his papers eventually might give us a more accurate chronological sense of all this, but I remember reading somewhere that he was writing multiple novels at the same time for years, that there was not necessarily a strict chronology in the writing behind the scenes. I guess this isn’t surprising for a writer so inclined to discontinuity, who stubbornly refuses the unity of plot and linear history in his own books.

Along these lines, I would like to propose we shuffle the books around to make them easier to interpret as a whole. This is my wholly artificial scheme — the idea of a “trilogy,” for example, has never been offered by critics or by Pynchon himself.

I propose —

JUVENILIA

Slow Learner (1984) — (or perhaps these could even be called lost episodes of V.?)

V. — TRILOGY, EPILOGUE & APPENDIX

V. (1963)

Gravity's Rainbow (1973) — “V.-2”

Mason & Dixon (1997) — “V.-3”

Against the Day (2006) — An epilogue to the V. trilogy

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) — An appendix to the V. trilogy

PYNCHON LITE

Vineland (1990)

Inherent Vice (2009)

Bleeding Edge (2013)

You can see this scheme has no regard for order of publication, but I think it makes the books cohere thematically and stylistically in a way that makes his body of work much more readily understandable.

The two main points here are:

1. The chronology is a stumbling block, and we should feel free to throw it out.

2. Throwing out the chronology will allow us to make connections between the books that aren’t usually offered by critics, and will allow us to better account for his development as a writer.

It was easy for reviewers to notice how much things had changed in the transition to “Pynchon Lite,” but I have never seen an in-depth discussion of the substance of that change. What happens to his stance as a writer after he becomes this other author? Why did this need to occur? There are deeper reasons that could be offered, or more subtle things to say than what’s been said (or at least than what I’ve come across).

To use some references that might be a little obscure, why did he start out as an author who could be compared to the Romantic poet Percy Shelley and then later morph into something closer to Shelley’s friend, the satirist Thomas Love Peacock? His stance goes from predominantly visionary, apocalyptic, and morbid to more equanimous, satirical, and even Epicurean, with some elements kept the same.

How was this change brought about? Why? What is its deeper meaning? And what are the consequences of this change for contemporary writing?

4. What can we learn from his imitators and heirs?

When I reviewed the novel Fake Accounts a few years ago, I was surprised by how much that book’s plot resembled Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The Fake Accounts protagonist is like an emptied-out version of Pynchon’s paranoid detective. In Lot 49, Oedipa’s paranoid searching through the evidence of hidden histories she finds in her dead ex-boyfriend’s financial dealings parallels her implied search for the meaning of this old relationship. The Fake Accounts protagonist has a similar dead ex-boyfriend scenario, but the book mocks any playing at paranoid meaning making. It also refuses the metafictional game that would identify the reader with the searching protagonist.

Unlike the ending of Lot 49, which implies that the ex-boyfriend may not be dead after all and may be about to reappear (though the book stops before we can see), Fake Accounts does have the ex-boyfriend come back to confirm his death was indeed a hoax. Protagonist and reader are left baffled, and truly “nothing happens” is the best summary of the book. There are other ways to read Fake Accounts, and other influences present, but read this way it’s like a cry of freedom. Pynchon’s metafiction game is contained, transformed, and escaped.

For another example, when I looked at some authors who rose to prominence in the 1990s, Pynchon’s shadow was there too. It might sound strange, but I have some suspicion that Tim O’Brien, author of the Vietnam war book The Things They Carried, struggles to hold off the influence of Pynchon in his work. And when I reviewed another 90s book, Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen, which is a very different sort of book than Pynchon’s, I noticed it at least had to nod to narratives of paranoia.

Or what about Sally Rooney? If she were to make her books more openly political — let’s say one of her privileged First World Millenial couples joins an anarchist movement to become real live political revolutionaries — how much would the romance plot, the sado-masochistic themes, the bruised alienation and the sense of captivity to historical forces infinitely larger than the characters could ever hope to influence — how much would this all start to sound like similar episodes in Pynchon? How would Rooney’s thematic treatment compare to his?

And one final example. I am not so well-read in Gen X authors, and I know only vaguely the famous “hysterical realism” critique leveled by the critic James Wood at authors like Zadie Smith or even casually at Pynchon’s own Mason & Dixon (though not in much detail). He complains about the inhumanity of these authors’ work, about their empty imitations of vitality and their fumbling attempts at writing fiction at a global scale. “Hysterical realism,” as he tells it, is a hollow genre of writers stretched to the limits of their ambition. He tries to offer the influence of Dickens as central to explaining this, but I’m not convinced. Doesn’t his argument actually amount to something like: “you have tried to imitate and surpass Gravity’s Rainbow and have failed?”. This, to me, is the real story behind “hysterical realism.”

5. We must escape from passive theories of art

I complain about this a lot, but I think we need badly to do away with the “writer-as-seer-of-technological-change” paradigm. To say, as some of the anniversary pieces did, that Pynchon wrote literal prophecy of 2023 way back in 1973 because he saw farther than everyone else into the coming technological changes is to assume a kind of passivity in history that borders on mechanistic.

What is a writer, anyway? Just a stenographer of historical crises? An economic subject, a product of “social forces”? Where does the writing come from, exactly? Do we have any choice in what we write? How would we read Pynchon’s work if we were less beholden to the stiffness that seems to have taken hold over our sense of history?

I was reading a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay recently, one of the lesser known ones, called “Spiritual Laws,” and I noticed at the end of it some phrases that were unmistakably allusions to Shakespeare, specifically to Hamlet’s famous “To be, or not to be” speech. I wanted to attempt to explain how he reads Hamlet in light of these allusions, but Emerson is subtle, and I did not quite know where to begin.

It occurred to me that one prerequisite would be to decide how I myself read the famous speech. I find the traditional reading of it to be puzzling — I do not think that “To be, or not to be” is Hamlet contemplating suicide. I thought this viewpoint was interesting enough to write a whole post about it, and so here you are.

Hamlet is a character in whom everyone seems to see a different thing, and so I hope I won’t sound crazy when I say that I’ve never seen the character adequately performed, in film or on stage. I am not perfectly well-read in the history of Hamlet performances, but we seem to have picked up an overly solemn Hamlet somewhere along the way. Maybe I can casually blame Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud. I like the Olivier film — how could you not? — but, yeah, I feel like so much is missing.

One important missing element for me is Hamlet’s clownishness. I hear him as infinitely funnier and wilder than anyone I’ve seen play him. They always make him heavy and stiff, when he should be like a wicked gargoyle, craning his neck and mocking himself.

Another important missing piece is his self-conscious theatricality. No one seems to play him like this, but I think he is a kind of rancid self-parodist, an involuntary theatricalizer. He is disgusted with the necessity of speaking and acting out one’s own identity, and is disgusted by the distance between the pure world of thought and the corrupted world of the flesh, which is no better than the most contemptible theatre. Every act of speaking is a descent into a wretched world of bad performers — insincere and hypocritical performers, yes, but worst of all to Hamlet performers who are bad at acting.

It is established in Hamlet’s gossiping with the Players who come to visit that he is an inveterate theatregoer, and I join Harold Bloom in saying that Hamlet is certainly obsessed with the theatre.1 In a weird way, I think you could say that the theatre would seem to make up a major portion of his life experience. It’s as if he’s spent all his time growing up watching imitations of Nature instead of living amongst actual people.

He is a theatre critic, an actor, and a director. You have to imagine that he inhabits the court of Elsinore as if he’s stuck in a bad play, and he treats everyone around him as if they are bad actors in a bad play. It’s actually kind of terrifying to imagine a real person acting this way — treating everyone around him like he’s real and they’re theatre — but it gets weirder to make a play about someone acting like this. His play is an imitation of someone who thinks everyone else’s imitations of Nature are inadequate.

One more element before we get to “To be, or not to be” — his incessant mutability. I have never seen him played this way, but I read Hamlet as never sounding the same way twice when he’s speaking. His lines surge with poetic energy that cannot sit still, and this energy constantly creates and adjusts and abandons new theatrical affects from speech to speech. His affect will change on a dime — from bizarre morbid joking to high philosophical seriousness, from the most absurd exaggerated melodrama to menacing violence and cold eloquence, from the heights to the depths, and onward into regions unknown. He is always acting out the part of himself and observing himself acting and changing as he goes.

Anyway, let’s stop there. Three missing elements, at least, from every Hamlet performance I’ve seen — clownishness, self-conscious theatricality, and heightened mutability of affect.

Now for the famous speech. It comes at the start of Act III. The last time we heard Hamlet speak, in the previous scene, he has just resolved to put on a play he calls “The Mousetrap,” which tells the story of a wicked uncle murdering a king. This is his plan to catch his uncle Claudius. He explains that if the performance affects Claudius enough and makes him act guilty or upset, then he can be sure that the Ghost who told of him of his father’s murder wasn’t lying. He claims that the Ghost could be a devil trying to trick him. This speech is also very funny, but let’s leave that aside for now. Suffice it to say that right before his “To be, or not to be” speech, Hamlet has resolved to direct his own play.

There are some brief lines from other characters when the scene opens, and then Claudius and his adviser Polonius hide themselves behind a curtain to watch Hamlet. He emerges by himself and says this2:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

To be, or not to be, that is the question,
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

So what does this mean? Here is my glib summary of the traditional reading:

“The greatest question of life is whether to live it or to just kill yourself. Life is long and miserable, and we could easily kill ourselves if we want to. But we don’t kill ourselves because we’re afraid of what might come after death – this makes us cling to the life we have. But after we resolve to kill ourselves and then decide not to because we’re afraid of what comes after death, we live in a degraded state, where we think too much and don’t take action anymore.”

Can this really be it? I thought this was supposed to be one of the greatest works of Western literature. This all sounds too easy.

One problem to address first is readers’ distrust of Shakespeare’s language. I remember when I first started reading Shakespeare that the language could seem so obscure or even pointlessly ornamental that I was apt to throw out anything that I didn’t understand or seemed not to fit. This is, I guess, also the assumption behind those summaries of Shakespeare that “translate” him out of his weird old speech into plain modern English. The sense is that he is saying pretty simple things but using a lot of extra words, and you can just skim over obscurities if you get the gist.

Maybe you can afford to do this in a plot-heavy scene or a scene with minor characters, just for expediency. Not absolutely every word has to matter for every kind of reading. But in my experience it’s important to learn that every word was indeed put there to mean something, not just to be ornamental. If something seems not to fit at first, you can trust that Shakespeare has a reason for it. In general, you can trust him.

Anyway, I think the traditional reading of “To be, or not to be” breaks down when you puzzle through it slowly and try to read it as if it’s never been read before. The speech is so famous and repeated so often that we have been conditioned, I think, not to listen that closely to it.

The main theme of the traditional reading is the terror of what comes after death. This is why, apparently, Hamlet does not commit suicide — because he does not know what would come after death and that scares him. If this is true, why doesn’t he say that the sleep of death could bring everlasting torment, or torture, or infinite pain? Or why doesn’t he talk about his terror of the unknown more? No metaphors of great empty abysses, no great dread of annihilation. No, his example of what is apparently so terrifying is “dreams,” and the awful, terrifying thing these “dreams” will do to us is “give us pause.”

If you really wanted to take this image further, then maybe you could say that Hamlet is musing on the question of the immortality of the soul. His image of dying is one of the soul being ripped out of the body and being delivered not to the sweet relief of sleep but to an eternal world of non-stop thinking. This doesn’t sound like any fun, but it’s a little funnier than the grand existential melancholy we’re used to.

It gets even funnier when you realize that he is actually revising something he said previously (a constant habit of his) in Act II Scene II, when he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

These two, his old college roommates, have just arrived on their covert mission from the king to spy on Hamlet. They are playing the part of his old chums, telling jokes about women’s privates and starting sparring exchanges of classroom philosophy, but he sees through them right away and is clearly annoyed.

This quip of Hamlet’s is in the context of a discussion of Denmark being like a prison, and so it is an image of the melancholy Hamlet who would be content by himself were it not that he is stuck in the bad dream of Denmark, but I think it’s also an ironic jab at his two friends. In this case, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the bad dreams who won’t leave him alone. But this is a weird anticipation of what later becomes very grand in the “To be, or not to be” speech.

You can go back even further to the Ghost in Act I Scene V, who is the first character in the play to use the word “prison.” Here’s what he says about what it’s like to be dead:

But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison-house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:

This image of the afterlife offered by the Ghost sounds a lot like the traditional reading of “To be, or not to be.” I have to admit, though, that I find the imagery kind of silly. In my mind’s eye, I see those quills standing up cartoonishly high on the little porcupine who has indeed been made “fretful.”

The Ghost is also someone who is always played too solemn. He is actually very funny because he is such a bad actor. Hamlet is impatient with him too, and thinks the whole thing is stupid in how obvious it is.

The Ghost is quite arrogant about his ability to tell a scary story and get a revenge tragedy going. I like the part when he says:

I find thee apt; And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, Wouldst thou not stir in this.

I am not the most learned when it comes to Ancient Greece, but I am not sure I remember a “wharf” ever being mentioned on the river Lethe, famous for its power to induce forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is also an odd thing to emphasize when you’re apparently being visited by the ghost of your father. The Ghost picks this up later when he repeats “Remember me” several times, and Hamlet’s reactions clearly show him exasperated with such mediocre dramatic conception. How could any son possibly have trouble remembering their father, or being visited by the ghost of their father? But I like most when he says that Hamlet would have to be duller than a “fat weed” not to take this bait for revenge.

Anyway, Hamlet knows he has been met with an actor — the Ghost is probably an agent working on behalf of Norway, and happens to be a guy who, like Hamlet, has been to the theatre too damn much. The Ghost’s lines sound like lame revenge tragedy, and Hamlet knows it.

The Ghost calls the land after death a prison-house, and Hamlet revises this into the prison of Denmark, then into the prison of the nutshell in which he would be not king of Denmark but “king of infinite space” if not for his bad dreams, with a funny nod to his annoying old friends being the bad dreams. Then when you turn back finally to “To be, or not to be,” the dreams become something else altogether. This movement of figurative thinking — from disgust with someone else’s metaphors to theatrical expression of moody contemplation regarding his own melancholy to clownish joke to sublime poetry — is very characteristic of Hamlet.

To get back to the speech — what then is the meaning of that sublime poetry? For one thing, how should Hamlet’s voice sound when he says those words? It’s always played as despairing, as ascending higher into colder and colder mountains of inexpressive grandeur, but I think this is all wrong. I think the speech should be read as an almost malevolent triumph. It is the announcement of Hamlet’s self-election as theatre director.

Recall that in the previous scene, he has just resolved to direct “The Mousetrap” so he can catch Claudius. He does not seem conflicted about this — in fact, he is downright excited. This resolve comes after a series of lines with a very different tone, where he calls himself a muddy-mettled rascal for supposedly not being motivated enough by the “cue” he’s been offered to avenge his father’s death. He calls himself a “coward,” and falls to cursing.

This is a mocking performance — Hamlet is pretending to be a character in a revenge tragedy while ironically discussing how he can’t seem to get the revenge tragedy going. He stops performing after he says “About, my brains!”. Then he gets to what he actually cares about — the play he’s going to put on, which will catch the “conscience” of the King.

Hamlet does not care about the revenge tragedy he’s been forced into, and as a great theatre critic, actor, and director, he resents that his life has been determined for him by the stupidity of his context. He is determined to redirect this botched play into a drama with enough range and scale to accommodate his vision of theatre, and he will force the audience to go with him on this journey. This is a journey beyond the realms of religion and philosophy, and beyond the mere imitation of Nature on stage. This is theatre that, like the work of Shakespeare himself, has the power to modify Nature, to add to it.

When he says “To be, or not to be,” he is telling the audience that he is now in charge of that question. The question is whether it is nobler in his mind, to let a thing be or not. The dreams that come in this undiscovered country of pure theatricality would give each audience member “pause,” like when he says in the previous speech:

I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been strook so to the soul, that presently They have proclaim’d their malefactions:

This is an extraordinary development from the Ghost’s silly porcupine. We go from the porcupine “fretful” over spooky stories, to “guilty creatures” listening to a play who might be called “cowards,” to a transcendent realm beyond all this, where the scary stories are now “dreams” orchestrated by a great conductor, who will give you “pause” as he chooses. This is something, he taunts, that you could do by yourself if only you were a good enough actor — you could your own “quietus make with a bare bodkin.” But no, you are now afflicted with a “puzzled” will. Your “conscience” has been caught by Hamlet’s play, which will make all of you into “cowards” who will “lose the name of action.” This is just like the melancholy Hamlet who is so much of a “coward” that he can’t seem to get started on his revenge, but by now Hamlet has transmuted “conscience,” “coward,” and “action” into utterly different meanings than when he started. In truth, he never seems to use a word the same way twice, and you can better understand what he means by reflecting on how the meaning has changed the next time he uses it.

He himself has also become something else. To the extent that this speech still superficially resembles his previous self-parodies of a melancholy protagonist tortured by the thought of “self-slaughter” being against God’s “canon” (as if Hamlet ever cared about God!), it shows just how confidently he has gained control over the dramatic representation of his own identity. This speech signifies a turning point in his passage out of incessant self-parody, and a breaking off of his addiction to theatricality.

When it comes to Hamlet, there is always more to say. But in short, after this speech, the play belongs to him.

Hamlet image source

I first came upon this novel in a post on another Substack called Book Brat. That post is one of the few things written about it to welcome the spirit of the book. Otherwise most of the reviews haven’t done it justice and have, in some cases, really gotten it wrong. The below is my contribution!

I found this interview with the author helpful, and this podcast had a good discussion of the book.

By day I read the saint and at night the nightmare, a book called The Doloriad, the first novel by Missouri Williams. Doloriad is for Dolores, one sister in a family that could be Earth’s last, or, if you ask the mother known as only as “the Matriarch,” Earth’s first in her dream of repopulating the world.

After a war some kind of cataclysm has exterminated all animal life and left only the Matriarch, her brother, and their children, born of incest. There’s also a man they call the Schoolmaster, who keeps the children occupied during the day with half-asleep lectures on texts from the pre-cataclysm world. In an early scene he quotes the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas:

In the first age of mankind the body was subject to the soul and nothing could happen in the body that would be contrary to the good of the soul, neither in its being nor in its operations.1

And further:

A diverse dignity of souls. It is necessary for the soul to be proportioned to the body. As form to matter, as mover to moved …2

These are from Aquinas’s commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the famous medieval theological textbook.3 The issue at hand is the serpent’s temptation of Eve. She was made not from the dust of the earth but from a rib out of Adam’s side; she has an inferior body and so a weaker soul, and thus is a better target for the serpent. Wasn’t the soul fully in command before the Fall, above the body’s weakness? Aquinas answers that even before the Fall woman was weaker. He abides by Aristotle’s sense that the soul is always proportioned to the body.

This is the backdrop of this novel’s vision of grotesque bodies and depraved souls. As if in direct response to Aquinas’s explanation, it shows us a humanity deformed in the extreme, in a new Garden of Eden at the end of the world. Bathed in a sickly white light, its characters are in thrall to the “unholy lethargy” of their bodies, to an incessant hunger for mindless violence and cruelty, and to a rapacious drive for sex.

This last point is actually encouraged by the Matriarch, who in her monomania wants her teenage children to couple with each other. To keep them sexually excited she shows them a TV show about — who else? — Thomas Aquinas. The saint the church calls the Angelic Doctor, who in his infinite patience and ox-like diligence could solve any problem, is called in by the show’s tagline “GET AQUINAS HERE!” to help people through different scenarios of demented sinfulness. The first we see is of a cheerleader who happens to be impaled by a metal pole interrogated by her school therapist about possibly losing her virginity to a jock named Brad. There are salacious and overwrought warnings about the pains of sex, and the children squirm with excitement — except one, that is, another sister named Agathe.

There is something in the young woman that resists the Matriarch’s control. Her mother sees her as

... a changeling from a dead city, a stone baby sent to the encampment by a god splitting his sides with laughter to parody the Matriarch and her dreams, a termite in the Ark.4

Like Dolores, Agathe has kept her virginity, but maybe it's also that she’s given to seizures, during which she’s delivered visions that she recounts afterwards in her halting speech. The Matriarch has never had a vision herself, and so when she claims to have had a premonition of another family on the other side of the woods, we may surmise that her anxiety over Agathe is behind it. This false vision, for which she commands Dolores be left in the woods as an offering to the other family's men, marks the end of the Matriarch's fragile control over the children.

It should be mentioned that because of a “poison in her” poor Dolores has no legs, and so has to be brought out to the woods in a wheelbarrow. Her body is huge and ungainly, with enormous breasts, a slackened jaw, pale skin, and round earnest eyes like a pig’s. Agathe’s speech is halting, but Dolores can’t speak at all. She only moans and clings to her family like a child, seems to long for physical closeness, as if all she knows is bodily experience. She is said to have no awareness of time. Her docility and her innocence make her a favorite of the Matriarch’s, but her siblings hate her, and they regularly insult, beat, and torture her. We don’t see Agathe join in the torment, but she in particular is repulsed by her sister, even as they seem to have a certain kinship. Their unlikely bond turns out to be a major theme of the book, though it is understated.

Though the book is named for Dolores, its central consciousness is Agathe’s. In addition to her visions, she has a certain mobility of perception that allows her to be in many places at once and even inside the thoughts of others. Dolores is said to have no experience of time, but to Agathe time is a map that she involuntarily traverses:

… even when she was in their world Agathe was flickering, unstable, and found it hard to collect her thoughts. She was aware of the disordered nature of her mind, the connectedness of substances, the extreme similitude of objects, the thin boundaries between times and places, so easy to get lost between, and she remembered the phrases their uncle had whispered when she'd told him those things: associative loosening, cognitive drift. It was the light that dizzied her, or the smell of the trees at night; these things unraveled her, and whatever was left was free to go places that the others could not because they were single points on the map, but she, Agathe, was the map herself.5

This doubles as a description of the novel’s style — it’s less a stream of consciousness and more a field, but one’s agency in this field is limited. We drift from one mind — or perhaps mindlessness — to another.

Reviewers have rightly praised the book for its poetic language, but they should have added praise for its humor. Once you get used to the gruesome violence and cruelty, a winning absurdist voice comes through, impish and harsh. Flat, funny lines like “The Matriarch turned to look at her youngest daughter with coldness in her pale eyes and thought about lack”6 or the poster on the wall in the Aquinas TV show that reads "If your dreams don't scare you they aren't big enough!” show the range of this book’s tone. The Schoolmaster in particular, who is accumulating a giant moth-infested mound of woolen clothes from which he plans to emerge as man-moth-God after another apocalypse, drives the book to hilarity. There are also disarming moments of humanity — impressive for a book so stylized and surreal — like when the Matriarch hugs Dolores close to her and thinks, Everybody else is dead and I'm all alone!7

The novel seems to delight in deranging its sources — you can throw different books at it and watch as they’re absorbed into the Schoolmaster’s hideous mound of woolen clothes, festering with moths. Comparisons with other post-apocalyptic fiction do little to illuminate it, and the science fiction elements are mostly tongue-in-cheek anyway. This means we can put aside Cormac McCarthy as well, even though the comparison on the level of style is reasonable at times.

If McCarthy gets his sense of doom regarding men and women and Western society in general from Faulkner, then The Doloriad has morphed the influence of Faulkner into something more strange. Dolores could be compared to Benjy, the lonely and disabled brother from The Sound and the Fury, and Agathe to Darl, the brother given to uncanny perceptions in As I Lay Dying, but to transpose those characters into a hyper-violent work of parodistic not-quite-science-fiction that uses depictions of grotesque bodies and harrowing cruelty to critique ideas found in Thomas Aquinas is to travel far afield indeed. The harsh humor and the link to Aquinas puts this book closer to Flannery O’Connor, who responded to readers’ accusations of nihilism over the violence in her books that she was no nihilist but in fact a “hillbilly Thomist” who wrote to shock the reader into an apprehension of grace, but O’Connor would not have been so audacious as to insert the saint himself as a character in her fiction, let alone an Aquinas attended by cartoon sheep.

In his preface to A Confederacy of Dunces, Walker Percy calls that novel’s protagonist, Ignatius Reilly, “a perverse Thomas Aquinas,” and I suspect Reilly, who longed for the philosophical unity and cosmic determinism of the Middle Ages, would have welcomed a slogan like “GET AQUINAS IN HERE!”. The Doloriad is no less knowing than Dunces regarding its medieval source, but is more combative.

Perhaps it would have found company with another medievalist, the American historian Henry Adams, who before his more famous autobiography wrote an idiosyncratic book on medieval architecture, history, and philosophy called Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Adams may be said to have been the first to look at the modern world and shout “GET AQUINAS IN HERE!”, but his treatment of Aquinas is ambivalent. He marvels at the cathedral-like architecture of Aquinas’s thought and praises its sense of unity, but he deplores too much accommodation of rationality into the church. He emphasizes the importance of simple faith, which he sees embodied in the saints and in the Virgin Mary, and largely absent from the modern world.

The characters in The Doloriad have hardly enough mind to be rational — Aquinas’s careful constructions are to them empty phrases — but Dolores, in her innocence and simplicity, is something like a saint upon whose love a new church could be built. Its prophet would be Agathe, who might be the only one absorbing anything from the Schoolmaster’s lessons.

If I could offer one more point of comparison, a turn to Thomas Pynchon, who found a starting point in Henry Adams, may bear some fruit. Starting in his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon elaborates a symbolism of light as a malevolent force — first as key to scientific discoveries that unleash an obsessive drive to impose rational order on Nature; then in its whiteness or non-color light becomes an emblem of European colonial empires; and lastly it is, at a cosmic scale, the Lord’s fiat of death, a destructive element innate in Creation itself. Pynchon’s characters are either possessed by the self-destructive belief that they can return to the light and so transcend Nature’s drive toward entropy, or they learn to flee it for realms of a more “feminine darkness,”8 closer to the Earth.

In The Doloriad the post-cataclysm light is omnipresent, a sickening glare that’s made everyone lethargic and violent. Perhaps it’s not unlike the light of our smartphone screens, illuminating the faces of a stupefied horde of young people, against which elders like the Schoolmaster can only rant and curse. Like a good Pynchon character, the Schoolmaster dreams of a cave of darkness into which he will huddle, but the dream is perverse, and the urgency of this escape is lost on the children, who are already acclimated to the glare of the light. This is maybe a bit of an interpretive stretch, but I think a revealing one. In reading The Doloriad with an eye for its possible influences, you will begin to feel its wish, as the Matriarch puts it, to be “free from the past and its language.”9

This book stands ambiguously at the threshold of the future. The “stone baby” of a pregnancy at the end of the novel is either a symbol of the departed past, emptied of life, or a repetition of the same metaphor used to describe Agathe’s alien hardness at the start of the novel. It would be, in the second reading, a defiant celebration of the power of the artist to dissolve all received authorities, church and family alike, and reform them into something new. It gathers together its materials and permutes them into hieroglyphs that read like threats of a new time to come.

If you liked this review, you might like others I’ve written about contemporary books:

• The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

• Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler

• Normal People by Sally Rooney

• Dimes Square by Matthew Gasda

I wrote these poems after listening to a Lana Del Rey album I had never heard before. I remember “Video Games” from when it came out ten years ago. Feels like a long time …

Anyway, this blog is nothing if not eclectic … But these things are kind of clever, don’t you think?

— AR

NFR LDR, Moments After

Moments after I said it
I must have been in a car 
On my out. She had said it 
And so here we are, did not crash car. 
Here we are so she said it, 
LDR, Norman fucking Rockwell, 
Crashed car did not, on my way out.
Moments after it must have been 
I had said it, I felt, 
Norman fucking Rockwell, LDR
Outstretched to did-not-crash.
I did it she did not, when I heard it,
I said it she did not, on my way out.
The hand outstretched, she had said it,
Here we are, she had sung it
Until today in my car I hadn't heard it,
Hadn’t been ten years, hadn’t, 
Moments after I had been in my car.
How strange, the hand outstretched,
A different face, moments after …

Love Song For Son

I had been in the room
When you'd come home,
Computer dumb, code
Recursed to explode,

But opted only to close
It and set it down in the heart
Of some blanket mess and go
To see you, so the day could start.

It would have been five o'clock
And I'd been working since eight.
It was getting dark and the clock 
Would stop at a minute's height

And you'd come rushing down
Through the door like the hallway
Was steep slope of mountain, though
It was flat floor, and say 

What you'd done with your day,
Say and dance and run off.
The house is to run and to crash, way 
Forward and way back, have

To take a photograph
To keep it from running off ...

Glass Man In Front Yard

Suburban Zen:
My meditation cushion's
Still good to sit, though I don't.

Suburban God:
Jewel and robe
Had decorated upper wealth,
Hope you have help.

Suburban Spring:
Lawn to be mowing —
No, but right now dead,
Only green in my head.

Suburban Form:
Platonic plant
Insensitive to sun,
Nowhere grows 
But still lives,
On little water.

I have only my self now to alter,
As the earth's tilt adjusts to love.
What was it I was thinking of?
A car comes round the corner.

Letter Cluster In Praise Of The Future

For Mariah

Place-names, flower-loops,
Body-promises in echo caffeine,
Held hard drives in bouquets,
Wire-dreams, this skein of home
Seethes, this steam saves.

Dinner of a thing 
Called spaghetti with sauce 
On plates, this theme
The house relates — a little sleepy,

But it's late. I haven't gotten
Good sleep, I who love sleep,
Who love you and the years, 
And the kids, but this ASCII art of a rose
Set best in text to beep across as screen-blip
Prepares atomic saying as sign:
The future, a world-emblem astir. 

There’s a famous Kafka quote that maybe now we can agree is a bit worn out — that a book worth reading is like an axe for a frozen sea inside the reader. The good books “wound and stab us”, says Kafka, like an axe busting through the hard layers of ice to the flood underneath.

But who is this fearsome axe holder, and why do they swing the heavy blade so hard now overhand and down to slice at the ice of a whole frozen sea? Can you freeze a whole sea? And if you did find it frozen, a whole sea, why exactly would you want to hack through it with an axe? To get flooded, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Maybe the story is just incomplete or poorly told, and the axe holder is only hacking open a little hole, down which they can put a line for ice fishing. They’ve brought something to sit on and a book to occupy the time while they wait for a bite, which then will mean dinner.

I like this a bit better, but “we should only read the kind of books that wound and stab us like a hungry ice fisherman in search of a dinner” doesn’t quite sound the same. And life isn’t really like that, at least not anymore, or perhaps not yet. We are not old enough to play at being Montaigne in his tower, retired from the world, free to read at our leisure, but neither are we young enough to read of tragedy and say to ourselves: “At least this part of life hasn’t quite come for me yet. I still have some time.”

No, we are in the midst of it, this flood of significance, and the waves of the events of the world come crashing. Each one is a judgment, a deeming come to test us to see whether it will hit and then wash, or will shove us under.

Books are like this too — they are waves in which we float or drown. And maybe I’ll say — if only to get away from the metaphor — that a good critic sits on the beach at ease under an intelligible sun, free from water, blessedly dry.

Go no further with this and stay here with me on the beach. I’m glad you didn’t drown in the book.

We read books and they read us. Ask always what it would have made of you, had you walked into it. Is there a place for you in it? Where would the book have put you? Which character in the book are you most like? Would you have loved as the protagonist loved, would you have hated? Does the form of the book’s tragedy find a counterpart in your own life? Is that consoling, or not?

In opening a book we risk the terror of being read better than we read ourselves, of finding our own life story better told than we can tell it. Or worse, our life story mocked and contained, made ironic. You write your own life like a book and find upon stumbling into someone else’s that your own is insufficient. Your actual lived life, a less worthy piece of writing than pieces of writing you come upon. Humiliating.

A book of which we haven’t yet made sense but which in our guts we feel has made too much sense of us is an offense, an object of disgust. It should not be able to interpret us better than we can it. We are more than ink marks and typeface. We must always be fighting our way out of that. Reading books then is like combat, like war — to the death!!

Maybe metamorphosis is better than war. Let’s say instead that the reader reads in search of shapes to shift into, and that the human is not a book, and so has no first or final shape.

To be transfixed by a shape is to become it, or rather you wake up from the transfixing as yourself and find that in the act of perceiving the shape of another human there, through the book, that you have now become something else. You write then to articulate that something else, so you can see it clearly, so you can see how you’ve been changed by the book.

After you have given it form, do you then cast it off and yourself become formless again? Is there ever such a thing as coming back to your one self, finally and for good? No. But who am I if I have no shape like the shapes that I find in books?

But try the other thought — it shouldn’t be so bad, taking on so many forms. Why be afraid? Through you many voices speak. Your self is something else, the silence before the speaking begins, and after it’s over. You need not be at war; only allow yourself to be changed.

Far off is a book I’m journeying toward, final resting castle for the never-resting mind. It will be finished when I am.

Image sources:

1

2

3 and 4

Dec 21

More TV! I make popcorn. I’ll eat the whole bag myself. The room is dark except for the Christmas tree. I take off my watch and take my phone out of my pocket. I get my snacks, my drink, the TV remote, and I set up my things on a little blue foam block, a toy for the kids that at night gets used as an end table. I sit on the couch and lay out the blanket, turn on the TV. Soon the cat has jumped up and settles in. Ah.

Lately I’ve been watching the Netflix show The Last Kingdom, with which I’m so enamored I can hardly explain. I watch and imagine that I myself am the show’s hero Uhtred, that I was born in 9th century England before it was even England to Saxon parents in the north, at the great fortress of Bebbanburg, before the surrounding land was attacked by Danish invaders, before my father was killed, before I became a Danish slave. I am only twelve but one of the Danish leaders comes to like me, he admires my courage. Eventually I am adopted as his son and he raises me as his own. I have a warrior’s spirit, it turns out, and the Danes teach me to cultivate it.

I live like this until some years later all is lost again in blood feud. My adopted Danish father is killed by another warlord as revenge for having taken out that warlord’s eye, which was a punishment for his having attempted to rape my adopted Danish sister, who now has been kidnapped by the one-eyed offender, who returned after being banished for his crime, which he committed as a teenager — but now he’s older and he wants his revenge.

So I am left lordless again, and I flee with my friend and sometimes lover Brida, who like me was born a Saxon but was raised Dane. She feels she is really all Dane, and so when the world opens up and takes our family away from us, she goes to where she knows is home — with my other Danish sibling, my brother Young Ragnar, who will become a warlord himself.

I on the other hand am conflicted. There must be something masterless in my heart. Neither Saxon nor Dane, I am destined, I feel, to reclaim the fortress of Bebbanburg, which now through a series of complicated reversals I can no longer recall is occupied by my wicked uncle, who connived to steal it from me after my father died. Though I was the rightful heir to the fortress and its lands, I was a boy at the time, and could do nothing. How was it my uncle came to occupy the fortress? There have been too many battles since for me to remember. My life feels like one long saga of shield walls and foolhardy charges, last-minute plans and triumphant escapes.

I tried a few years ago to watch the PBS show Poldark, which is about a man come back to England after having fought and lost in the American Revolution. He endeavors to restore order to his family home, and there’s something about a woman he loved before he went off to the war that I can’t remember. They were engaged but now not anymore? She gets entangled with some new weasel suitor, but then Poldark comes back, and they have scenes together with little gasps and close-ups — sir — sir, you’ve returned…

Anyway I had to stop watching because the show made me dizzy. Poldark’s life was just endless up-and-down, but rapidly, rapidly, in the course of an hour. He’d start the episode poor and destitute, make a fortune by the thirty minute mark, and then by the end go bankrupt again in a new investment scheme gone wrong, having made new enemies in the process. Local earls or merchants or shareholders, men with wigs. It became a joke between me and my wife — I’m poor! I’m rich! Haha! I’m poor again!

The Last Kingdom is a story of endless reversals too, but it’s better than Poldark, I think. Maybe it’s because the stories are presented as memories, and so it doesn’t seem strange when we look up and everything has changed. The boy who had his eye taken out is suddenly a man. He has land now, and men who follow him. He thirsts for revenge. Depending on when he comes looking for me I might be about to wage a great battle on behalf of my lord, or instead be out of favor with the same lord and on the run. Maybe I’ve gone back to my wife and our lands, or maybe my wife has fled to a nunnery because she hates my pagan ways, which I won’t give up even after two baptisms. Or maybe I’ve just been baptized again and I have a son now, who is Christian because the aforementioned angry lord sent him away as a plan of revenge against me for the time I held a knife to his throat because he tried to trap me into staying loyal to him again, because I am always still lordless deep down in my heart and so have to be coaxed into these things. I’m just about to be the lord of a whole kingdom myself, which if you watch a few minutes more you’ll see me give up.

Life after hours and hours of this becomes one wide kingdom of reversals. In my memory and right now, constantly, I am in that state — the state of reversal. My life is in the hands of fate, which is the caprice of the gods.

Dec 22

I’d like to give myself up to them, Odin and Thor, and the other ones. I please and displease them. I give myself up to them. I try, in my own way, to find some virtue, to pursue their favor.

What’s a man who doesn’t take care to attend to them? Nothing. He wanders the house with the phone stuck to his face — he can watch TV on it too, during the day. His kids are asleep, it’s nap time, and he feels on this average afternoon that he can’t summon any organizing virtue, that it must be that his fate has yielded at last to some crisis that’s happened up the street. There’s been a revolution, or a large purchase has been made. Revenge has been had or someone’s love has gone missing. This is all happening somewhere down the street, afar, but in its river-winding way it finds him on a winter afternoon not unlike the ones that came before. But now all is changed.

Suddenly he’s older. He’s worried about staying in shape. The cat is throwing up. He once was a “man to follow”, but now his mind is failing. He thinks: “If I keep watching this TV show I might catch it, the secret that will bring me back in their favor.” But he receives no sign.

Dec 28

I want it never to end, even though I know it will. But I see now that I could just loop back around and start again at the first season. I hardly remember any of it anyway. TV could make a life like that: one wide agglomeration of episodic views. A new hair style every season. Love interests, subplots, parts played better or worse. Sometimes you do what you can with the part you’re given. Sometimes you play the same character so long you start introducing your own little touches into the formulaic scripts. Quick, before the next reversal, which we’ve seen before — a last minute escape after loyalties shifted, the script hangs over a cliff — quick — get a joke in! One you wrote yourself.

How long can I keep missing out on sleep, letting the show run on into the night? They must have constructed it just for me, the enclosed archons of this dimming time, this nightworld lit up in nice consecutive dreams, that I run to, made just for me, couch potato and safe. Safe from the surge of the batteries’ polar switching, love vehement into hate and back again. Worlds witnessed and worlds destroyed.

Two spirits make the world:
One called sleep, the other fire, 
Which is a word for which we lack 
Other better blither choice, 
One that more might trace each vice 
As matter burns, sun is spun,
Earth is still and so is time.

Time is still because space,
Earth is still because love, 
Burning is balanced on
Mute remembrance of place,
Which is all, as when as test 
The burning coal is held 
And then dispersed, 
As Ezekiel saw angel do as told. 

When you hold, fire burns and hurts, 
Which a girl from Amherst 
Named Emily well knew. 
She could take a book and call 
It hell, and then when held 
It was that, burned clear like a vice 
Of place not yet expelled for love of voice.

Space unmade time, voice
Then unmade place, and gave back 
To her what she called bliss.
Bliss is blithe as lark's flight
When circumferential trace 
Is marked as the heads
Of the city people were 

By the angels in the same book 
We mentioned — Hard blot, 
To say the ones not to kill, 
While slaughtered the rest
Ordered angry lord, only pure ones left.

Emily could do all that, but in a word, 
But you don't meet people like that 
Often. If you can stand the sleeping 
You can still hear voices, love faces —
A more private fire only singes. 

Best for when you're alone in the house, 
These blisses, she knew it well — 
Burning angels bring healing hell.

Image source

When I first thought of writing something about Peter Carey’s memoir Wrong About Japan, a few chapters in, my working title for the review was “The Worst Book of All Time?”. No book that I could recall had anything like what I saw at the time as Carey’s pretension and dullheadedness. What was the point of this book anyway?

Here’s the premise: on finding his twelve-year-old son Charley developing an interest in anime and manga, Carey, though skeptical at first, soon joins in Charley’s enthusiasm. They search the comic book shops for rare Akira manga volumes together, they watch Grave of the Fireflies. Before long, they’re planning a father-son trip to Japan.

Carey is a successful novelist, a two-time winner of the Booker prize, and so through his publishing connections he arranges for interviews with the manga artists Charley likes, as well as some other famous figures. Charley is excited to get autographs and pictures to show to friends at school, but Carey sees the trip as a chance for a more intellectual investigation into Japanese culture. He’s been reading up on Japanese history and art, and he relishes the chance to test his pet theories about Japan with experts in their fields. Each chapter of the book, then, is either an interview or a tourist experience, and each demonstrates this perplexity of purposes between father and son.

This setup is a little odd. Is this just something successful publishing world people do — travel and presume they’ll get access to other famous and successful people? Or is there something we’re missing? We could speculate that Carey proposed this trip to his publisher and got them to pay for it, promising a book would come out of it, but we’re never filled in.

We start to find that the book is always reticent like this: events and exchanges come across as contrived even as they play at straightforwardness. Whose idea was this, really? Who liked Japan first? Do father and son get along, are they close? They both seem to be there for love of the same thing, they share ideas and recommendations, and yet at other times Carey seems not to “get it” at all. He seems worried, distracted by something almost alien in his son, something he feels he has to watch over and interrogate.

When father and son get to Japan, they meet Charley’s online friend Takashi, and so a real alien arrives —

… I saw, by the wide doorway to the lane, in front of the antique calligraphic banner and beside the picturesque sake barrels, the most singular boy…

This must be Takashi, I did not doubt it.

In Tokyo’s Harajuku district one can see those perfect Japanese Michael Jacksons, no hair out of place, and punk rockers whose punkness is detailed so fastidiously that they achieve a polished hyper-reality… His eyes were large and round, glistening with an emotion that, while seemingly transparent, was totally alien to me…

Takashi is fifteen, a few years older than Charley. He loves anime and manga like Charley does, and Carey complains about Charley texting him too much. Takashi likes to show them around and give them advice about Japan. He even begs to come along to the interviews with the artists and celebrities, but Carey never lets him.

Whenever Takashi appears, Carey gets blocked out from his son, starts getting befuddled. “Who is he? … What is he?” he asks a publishing colleague who joins them for a later part of the trip, and he even says at one point: “Is he gay, do you think?”. And so maybe my review title should be I Think My Son Is a Weeb, And I’m Worried1, with accompanying smallminded concerns about manliness, etc.. Carey seems to be saying to himself: “The long road of dorkdom beckons for Charley! What's a father to do?” Or, at least, this is one implication hovering in the book’s restrained atmosphere. It's hard to tell how to take it.

This gets stranger after some easy Wikipedia research — Takashi, it turns out, is fictional2. This helps explain his unreality, or maybe we should say his "hyper-reality", and so resolves some of the weirdness of his presence. He never seemed plausible anyway, and is better understood as an anime character come-to-life amidst real people. Carey never lets on that Takashi is a fake, even though he does come off as somewhat shoddily conceived and so you might suspect it anyway. But then, if Takashi is a cartoon, what’s he doing in a memoir?

The real story of this book, then, is one of a father watching over his son’s passage out of adolescence, but told through stoic travelogue and oddly mute comic scenes, mixing real and fake, telling and not telling. There is a riddling quality to what Carey chooses to divulge or not. Why tell us so exhaustively of his baffled attempts at interviewing a master swordsmith, getting every question wrong, and then leave out almost every detail of the final interview of the book, which might have been the most important?

We are merely allowed to be present as the events pass on, and we watch father and son in each chapter. Sometimes they are close and the son is recognizable as a continuation of the father, and then other times they look askance at each other and hardly know what to say. “You are a different species”, he says to his son half-jokingly, and Charley replies that he has indeed “mutated”.

I never quite found the book funny, but my early dislike of it started to wane somewhere around the interview with the writer “Mr. Yazaki” (another fake?), whose story of a childhood in wartime Japan is probably the longest episode in the book. Even in this quiet book, this is something even more quiet and difficult — especially alongside anime hairdos and space robots — but it’s something Carey feels his son must know. Charley’s reaction to the story is omitted.

The rewards of this book, then, are surprising, and in its curious way it grows more estimable as we proceed, and then more so in retrospect. Beneath the wandering interviews and the awkward exchanges, Carey gathers talismans of inscrutable epiphany whose meanings are hidden by the book’s enormous reserve. Somehow he manages to write a mundane and fairly unfunny travelogue that on a second look is seen to be loaded with symbolic richness.

In casting himself as so bumbling, Carey reaches at something essential about encountering a foreign country — perhaps Japan especially — but also about parenthood. He arrives in Japan full of knowledge and insight from his reading, has many questions and is peskily forward with his interview subjects. But all his meetings are oblique, all his discoveries only whisper. Wisdom is found only in meandering and silence, and then all this is made stranger the more we wonder which parts, if any, really happened.

In the book’s climax, they watch My Neighbor Totoro with Carey’s architect friend Kenji. Through some travel accidents, they end up watching the movie in Kenji’s office, and the book more or less describes its purpose and technique in a throwaway description:

“Perhaps,” Kenji said, “we could watch it in my office,” but I could see he was worried about this too, possibly because this venue might appear less hospitable than he would like.

In the end, however, this is exactly where we found ourselves, although the “office” hardly describes a space so conspicuously empty of anything that would identify itself as such. I don’t mean to suggest it was minimalist, only that it was unusually large and there was nothing much in it. Was there a mystery here? I seriously doubt it, although this is how it is with travelling — the simplest things take on an air of great inscrutability and so many questions arise, only to be half born and then lost as they are bumped aside by others. The most mundane events take on the character of deep secrets.

This is to prepare for their interview with the great Hayao Miyazaki, which will be the crown of the trip.

But once they get there none of the interview is actually described. Carey only shows us Miyazaki sharing flipbooks and drawings with father and son, with no language between them. That’s all. The scene lasts for just a few paragraphs. Did it even happen? It is yet another quiet moment of technical daring in this deceptively simple book.

The book is wise about an obliquity in parenthood, which has a mystery into which we are constantly inquiring, or seem to be stumbling around. Child and parent meet, and in this first meeting they are already overdetermined. They are so stubbornly themselves that, as time passes, they seem only to go further down their own paths. What the other does makes no difference — and yet they live through each other. Though silent, the interdependence is absolute.

Each can only say what the other needs to hear at a diagonal, and it is somehow always this way even when they both recognize this is so. It is always this way because it is like this right now, and it will be the same tomorrow, when everything will have changed.

I have earthly superiors but then also other ones from somewhere else. This is addressed to them.

— AR

I

Dear masters,
I up til now have kept 
My prudence in case of disaster,
But too much in the sun or under the stars,
Going to work and driving my car,
And programming for purposes far 
The computers run for local overlords
Has made me rude.  
 
I cannot occlude 
My own solitude 
With another insincere smile.  
I am a hostile now, and happy to be,
Or at least as I'm saying this
I see that it's key
That I say that I am.  
 
I am! I really am! 
The conversations we've had
Are going public now
If you'll permit me to allow
The world's charitable gangsters
The attempt in purchasing a share.
 
I admit to the open air 
That even if not hostile I insist
It better to be, I persist
In the vicious zest
Of knowing the dull dish
Of life kills us as we're bowing
To the infernal spring, 
Damnation summer, 
Crucifixion winter and fall,
The ruin in and around us all.  
 
Give not another lecture
On the brokenness of nature;
Settle not another sober eye
On the broken home or the world outside;
Beg not another sentinel spy
See safety coming far away
Or hint of war in barbarian eyes.
 
For it is you and I who are war and hell and ruin,
In whom lives the horrid force
Of a mind coerced against itself;
And in whom, if we are willing,
Is the word to stop the life in us from killing
More life in a world we can't see.
 
It’s still inside you and me --
To call it old is not to call it gone.
And I'll lapse, I'm sure, into oblivion
Again, and lose my nerve, 
And when I do, please say to me:
 
"Lie then and pass away,
Non-entity and coward,
We've no use for you!
Go to your room and sleep
And hide your teeth!
And when you dream,
A half-remembered scene
Mixed up with hopes
And half-remembered friends
Will extend upon waking
To conviction that's breaking 
As the book that read and wrote us
Expands the angriest lotus 
A world at peace has seen,
Light the unwelcome guests to usher in."

II 

That anomalous guest, 
Subtle confident time, 
The leaf aflame, deep-speaking,
That inhabitant of smoke, 
Who does not arrive or offer, 
Does not look backward, does not
In drum center of rhythmic plot
Approach rhythmic thought, 
Does no appreciating, does not disdain, 
Does not storm or study but is 
As the fact is -- rain, trees, 
Rocks -- all these -- 

It knows it's not that there's no inception, 
Just that it's definitely done.  
There was a beginning now that's over -- 
There was a lamplight crossing over 
A mirror's shoulder that's now hanging on the wall -- 
You in it could see a god 
Now stepping down, 
Whose requiem embrace
Announces release
For a child in chase
For a word we'll replace
With necessity's knowing
That now innocent, attentive, and alive
A lamp now shines on it.

It now must know that it's a mirror -- 
I am a mirror now those just arrived
See the world in as they live. 

I am right and wrong, weak and terrible, 
Stubborn trunk, certain stone. 

I am a pattern of hard return
Who those in conversation burn
To keep the cold out, who know naught of me
Except that I am not cold -- 
Which we want out -- 
Until they know I am 
And so they can -- if so, 
If willing, if ready -- 
Keep others warm.  

III

But who is the god that sleeps
And falls from far-off probes
In once-warm beds or coffins cold?
Who sleeps beneath steeps, shapes,
Ground organization and real estate,
Conversations open or closed, 
The image and the account of those
We call ourselves, that fraud called Nature,
Ice, the arrangement of earth?

Who is judge of birth, 
The miracle of birth we know,
And the real changes in recognition? 

Who judges the end
When it's seen to come,
Or is known to've come already?
Are they the same that we see now -- 
The heroes all out from the past 
Out past the Pacific, the peaks, the plains,
Trails, streets, halls, cares,
Who come to the office upstairs 
To tell us as only a word of theirs
Could assure that the end is here,
Is in fact already done,
Or rather that it's one 
Of a number we should not have assumed?

It has not ended because it has not begun,
Which is what we mean when we say we're done beginning.
And so we assume the end invisibly,
As invisible protest for gods that are gone.  

Love's end is here; time's end is here. 
This spirit fades; its replacement is none. 

IV
 
A guest most unwelcome thus
Is this emptiness, and all across
The vesselled houses where home cooks
Cook with butter, I lie and say 
I like it better being nothing,
Stand with empty hands a little stunned --
Say nothing, am nothing, am not recognized by friends.
 
I am a candidate for public office,
And I’m running my marathon 
For the sins of empty people.
I love the romance of the local steeple
And how when anybody sits on the steps
Of the church with a local bagel 
They’re winningly able to be a member of fables
They’ll be notified about as soon as they’ve opted in.
 
I have here in this information bin
Facts and feelings and stand-ins 
To cast proper magic 
For someone in your demographic.

I see a cyclical strain
As the life in us drains,
And I don't love myself
Because it seems strange
To love nothing.

– That said, I’m not hating nothing either,
Which is some relief for this ether-burdened
Seeming – this renter, debtor, mortgagor, drone –
Who, no longer alone, bends down to his son
And bends up to his wife and cat and home.

I still transcribe songs 
From out past the sphere of the moon
But, masters, I no longer question their form,
That being the impostor of function,
Which is something I was told a long time ago
But only now that time is gone 
Am I that fact among.

Computers are ... stupid –
In the sense that they have no sense 
And so no opposites open.
No better than one closed, we say,
Who with a little time the opposite shows,
And after much cloistered striving
Arrives at no longer arriving, contriving,
Contending – exposed –
Naked ideal of old
Saved, bestowed,
Given up, vacant gold – 
Idle head, empty heart,
No self to assert, 
No mind to disclose – 
Free, alive.

Over and over again I seem to forget how exhausting biographies can be, so I stupidly keep getting new ones.

Do we really need another “tome” about Winston Churchill or General Grant? Who are these books for anyway? Seven, eight, nine hundred pages of the most careful scholarship, with the footnotes to prove it — but the story must be rousing, the style must be “magisterial”, the work must be “monumental”. It must tell us all we need to know about its subject and their time, and it must give us insight into our time too. It must be entertaining, informative, instructive, and not too speculative, not too tendentious, not too “dense” or “plodding”. We suspect it will take some dramatic license somewhere, but it better not be too obvious. We must be assured of the strictest adherence to the facts, but please, don’t make it too academic either. We don’t want it to feel like a research project, with evidence and arguments strewn about. We should hardly notice the footnotes — but they should definitely be there. We want a good yarn from an authority on the subject, dammit, one that starts with birth and ends with death, that we learn something from and can put on the shelf afterwards!

All this is to say that the challenges of the genre are so myriad and vexing that great biographies are, in my experience, exceedingly rare, and biographers of consistent genius rarer still. So I come to any assessment of one with some apprehension. I’ve seen how difficult it can be. But it’s painful for the reader too, if the book really fails. All those endless hundreds of pages and you could still come away frustrated.

David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom was universally well-reviewed and won the Lincoln Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2019, but it is one such book. This is a difficult judgment to render because there are things to like and respect about it. As far as I can find, it is the most thoroughly researched and referenced full-length biography on Douglass ever produced. It is written with deep empathy for Douglass and for other figures in his life, especially his first wife Anna. It is nobly committed to recognizing the trauma of slavery in America, determined to see the horror plainly. All in all it carries the reader through seven hundred fifty pages fairly well. We learn what we need to know, from an attentive and reliable observer.

But once we pass from observation to those other biographical duties — portraiture, interpretation, meaning-making — the book falters. Its central image of Douglass, its argument of how we should interpret his life, is inadequately developed, and the moments of bad writing are so poor as to be shocking. It makes for jarring reading, as the book at its best is eloquent and capable. Why wasn’t it trimmed down? It should have played to its strengths and calibrated its ambition accordingly. Instead we get an end-product that is a frustrating mix of success and failure, and so is not easy to judge.

It would seem to be difficult to find a center for Douglass’s long and varied life. His times changed around him and so did he. He apparently is also yet another meme for the culture war to fight over, and has been claimed for every reductive political label. Blight admits Douglass is a “malleable figure”, but he wants to stop right-leaning groups from claiming Douglass too completely. Yes, his most popular speech was “Self-Made Men” and he did his share of scolding about “personal responsibility”, but he was a radical social reformer all his life. What matters about Douglass, says Blight, is the prophetic intensity of his public voice, his relentless drive to awaken the American conscience.

This seems reasonable to me, but “prophet” as center for the book ultimately just makes the point about his enduring radicalism and not much more. It captures the voice in Douglass’s speeches and his autobiographies, but otherwise its potential is squandered. We might think that it could throw some light on Douglass’s religious convictions, but they are inadequately explained. He has a conversion experience as a teenager, his early speeches are said to be characteristic of the Christian millennial sensibility of the time, but later in the book Douglass is just a Bible-quoting speechmaker with penetrating social insight, with no apparent religious dimension to his views. It can be assumed that something in Douglass changed, but it is never addressed. References to scholars of religion or the prophetic tradition are brief and without elaboration.

When the book tries to deepen the “prophet” framing and discuss the Bible’s influence on Douglass’s autobiographies, the writing gets sloppy. For example:

In his brilliant depiction of slaveholders’ psychic unease about the evil system they practiced on the Wye plantation, we can feel Douglass’s cadences even as he names his text. “This immense wealth,” he wrote, “this gilded splendor; this profusion of luxury; this exemption from toil; this life of ease; this sea of plenty; aye, what of it all?” Douglass loved repetition. … Douglass intones with his trademark contrasts … Then he simply gives Isaiah and Jeremiah the last word in this oracle about the woe in history’s plan for slaveholders … Thus for Douglass style and argument flowed together in the same torrent of words.1

It took me a while to figure out that “even as he names his text” at the end of the awkward first sentence refers to the title of the second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. Then we have awkward phrases like “the woe in history’s plan for slaveholders” or “his trademark contrasts”. But the worst is “Douglass loved repetition,” the most forehead-smackingly obvious observation about the writing style of the King James Bible. Style and argument apparently “flow together,” and so shape Douglass’s view of the world. But no deeper analysis is offered other than some offhand quotes from Jeremiah and pointing out repetition in the rhetoric. This is the fullest account we’re given of the Bible’s influence on Douglass’s writing! And yet Douglass as prophet is supposedly central to the book.

The other half of the book’s formula, “freedom”, is bland and poorly delineated. Douglass is said to have “captured the multiple meanings of freedom”, but what this really means isn’t made clear. Instead we get a somewhat blank image of a hero of the past whose quest for freedom is of universal significance for Americans and for the world, but any attempt to pull together that significance into a coherent statement falls flat.

Take for example Douglass fighting back against Edward Covey, the vicious overseer made famous in his autobiographies. This early scene in Douglass’s life is central to his self-mythology, and so is a great time to reach at higher meaning. This is what we get:

… this place would be the “tyrant’s home”, the “dark night” of a strong young teenager broken and rendered a “brute” by a totalitarian regime ruled by one savage man. Ishmael found his Ahab, the ultimate tyrant whose obsessions could never be tamed, and by whom the world could be wrecked and taken down; Douglass found his Covey, who would bludgeon and wreck the young slave, but against whom the sufferer would resurrect himself through violence and will and find another reason to live. … Douglass left a good deal of blood in the soil of that archvillain’s farm, while also extracting a story he would one day make almost as immortal as Herman Melville’s whaling ship. Douglass’s great gift, and the reason we know of him today, is that he found ways to convert the scars Covey left on his body into words that might change the world. His travail under Covey’s yoke became Douglass’s crucifixion and resurrection.2

Here Douglass is a “strong young teenager” who is somehow both Ishmael from Moby-Dick and Christ, and Covey is an odd version of Captain Ahab, who is taken as the leader of a “totalitarian regime” whose quest to kill the white whale is equated with the madness and brutality of the slaveholding South. And out of this struggle Douglass “extracts” a story “almost as immortal” as, uh, the ship from Moby-Dick. Hmm. Moby-Dick is brought in to make the point that Douglass’s story deserves status as a classic in the American canon, but there’s no larger idea here, and the clumsy writing only makes it worse.

Maybe it’s a little unfair to attack these particularly bad paragraphs — they might be the worst in the book — but they show the weakness of its foundation. I noticed them on my first read-through, but they were amidst largely competent history writing, so I moved on. But the lingering impression after finishing the book was too irritating to ignore. Something was lacking — I felt I knew all the facts of Douglass’s life but could make only poor sense of him. Who was this person, really? How should I understand the meaning of his life? When I looked back, I found that whenever the book needs to go deeper, to justify intellectually its organizing ideas, it breaks down. This was why I couldn’t make sense of Douglass even after reading so much about him.

I see the book as a failure of ideas and also of energy. The intense demands of the biography genre seem to have defeated it. Even when there are no bad analogies to bash, the style has moments of real tiredness. The word “intrepid”, for example, is used to describe no less than eight different people, with seven of those usages in the first one hundred fifty pages. Douglass’s wife, his friend Julia Crofts, his mentor William Lloyd Garrison, his friend and lover Ottilie Assing, the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, two different scholars of Douglass’s life, and Douglass himself (twice) — are all described as intrepid or having done intrepid things. It starts to ring in your ear, you hear it so many times.

Repetitive writing like this makes for bad biography. Events are described, figures come and go, insights are offered, but no one is distinct or alive. Blight is concerned about modern-day conservatives claiming Douglass as their own, but the right counter to that would have been to give us a living, many-sided Douglass, in his own context. Instead we get an inconsistent patchwork, a reaching at meaning that never coheres.

At times it seems like Blight doesn’t quite know what to make of Douglass. When he cringes at Douglass’s crass jokes about the Irish, the Native Americans, and even his own race; when he seems perplexed about Douglass’s “Horatio Alger” self-mythology from his later years; when he depicts Douglass as something close to a victim in his own extramarital affair, clearly wishing Douglass’s lover would go away, assuming Douglass felt the same; when he quotes a cheesy Obama speech about “buttoning up our Union blues” and meeting Douglass’s “leonine gaze” and then fails to offer anything sufficiently coherent to meet said gaze — all this gives us a Douglass who comes through as more puzzle than person. He is forbidding, elusive, a bit too nineteenth century for us, and we never fully take him in.

Still, there is a good book in there. The history writing is well done and will take care of itself. Just cut or rewrite the introduction, which is deceptively wide in scope and promises a synthesis the book doesn’t attain. Then back away from any auxiliary disciplines — religion, literature, political science, etc. — and be careful when reaching toward higher meaning. Lean into the book’s commendable focus on empathy and faithful documentation. Make quick vivid sketches and move on. Then it will be a passable biography backed by sound scholarship. But as it is I can’t recommend it.

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