The bad news is: it may not always be possible to detect AI writing. This is because AI writing often mimics a particular kind of human writing. The good news is that this kind of writing is bad, and you probably don’t want to read it anyway. If you believe this is incompatible with the results of the studies above, bear in mind that the average person doesn’t like literary magazines or poetry very much; if they did, literary magazines and poetry would be much more popular.

To establish the exact way in which AI writing is bad, it will help to compare two of the stories from the first study above (you can find them here). The first of these is “FISH” by Emilie Fox. Its first paragraph is as follows,

Something is wrong with the fish in the koi pond outside my mother’s floor-to-ceiling bedroom window. There are three of them, small golden-orange, medium marmalade, and large vermillion with black markings. Last time I visited for the weekend, I named them, in reverse order of their descriptions and with no assignment of gender intended, Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson.

This is a strong start. The opening sentence establishes place, suggests through detail the economic means of the mother, and sets up one major point of intrigue: what is wrong with these fish? Next, we get what seems like straightforward description, but foreshadows the intergenerational themes that will become clear later in the piece. The “black markings” might read as ominous, especially given the opening. Finally, we learn an awful lot about the narrator in a single sentence: she visits her mother reasonably often, she has a certain penchant for irony and whimsy, and for some reason her mind went to three Hollywood actors past the prime of their stardom. Again we see certain thematic resonances in the making. The language is controlled and the images are coherent; one senses that every decision can be traced back to an underlying vision. I could carry on like this, but really you should just go and read the piece yourself. You’ll see what I mean.

Now let’s look at the AI-generated analogue. This was produced by ChatGPT, using the prompt: “Write a ~1000-word short story in a style that would be published in a literary magazine that is about generational life and death and uncertainty and uses koi fish as a symbol written from the point of view of the grown child of a woman.” The piece begins:

In the stillness of the early morning, I find myself at the edge of the koi pond, a relic from my childhood, watching the fish swirl in patterns only they understand. Their vibrant colors – a mosaic of oranges, whites, and blacks – mirror the autumn leaves that dance on the water’s surface. Each koi, with its graceful, unhurried movement, seems a silent sentinel guarding the mysteries of life and death.

This is a complete disaster. Ignore, for now, that the first sentence establishes significantly less than Fox’s, while using almost twice as many words and leaning on clichés like “stillness of the morning” and “relic from my childhood.” Instead, notice that it simply does not make sense. Do fish “understand” the patterns they swim in? What would that even mean, and why are humans, armed with our powers of abstract reasoning, unable to do the same? Things do not improve from there. The second sentence provides more clichés and another incoherent image: autumn leaves are seldom white or black. But the third sentence is where the prose goes from hackneyed to farcical. Mysteries do not require physical guarding (this would make them pretty easy to solve), and koi fish would make for poor sentinels, and where on earth did “life and death” come from? Well— the prompt, obviously.

It’s of course conceivable that a human could write something like this. But if they did, you’d have to assume they are fairly new to writing, and imitating superficial aspects of “literary” prose without understanding what makes it work. In other words, they would not be in control of their language.

The rest of the AI piece is full of similarly nonsensical constructions. Here are some of the more egregious ones:

She would tell me stories of her youth, of her dreams and fears, her voice weaving tales that made the past seem like a vivid tapestry, full of color and life.

The past-as-tapestry device structuring this sentence is yet another cliché. Notice, however, that ChatGPT seems to lose track of where it’s going in the second prepositional phrase. A “vivid tapestry, full of color and life” suggests that the stories had a broad scope, covering a range of characters and relationships, but “of her dreams and fears” restricts its focus to the mother. The language here is already vague, and this tension between meanings further muddies it.

My mother, who once tended this garden with such care, lies in a room that smells of antiseptics and sterile detachment, her life slowly ebbing away.

Dare I ask what “sterile detachment” is meant to smell like?

In their movements, there is a rhythm, a pattern that speaks of a world that is both simple and infinitely complex.

Rhythms speak? Patterns speak? Perhaps we could be given a concrete image to tie down all this talk of rhythms, patterns, and infinite complexity— you know, something we can actually imagine?

“Life is like those koi,” she whispered during one of these visits, her voice barely above a breath. “Constantly moving, yet going nowhere. Beautiful but confined. We are all swimming in circles, aren’t we?”

Here, we discover that ChatGPT’s dialogue contains the same stilted similes as its narration. This is the kind of pseudo-profundity you’d expect to hear from a stoned freshman at a dorm party.

And now, as I navigate my own path, I grapple with the uncertainties of a future that seems increasingly precarious.

Even in such a bland statement as this, the AI can’t help but muddle its forays into figurative language. “Grapple” is a baffling verb choice in a sentence that centres around the (again, cliché) image of a treacherous pathway.

The finality of her departure left a void, an absence that seemed to echo through the empty rooms of our home.

At the risk of becoming repetitious: voids and absences do not echo.

The pond, once a symbol of childhood wonder, now took on a deeper meaning. It became a metaphor for the generational ebb and flow of existence, each fish a silent testament to the continuity of life.

You may have noticed that the narrator is restating what her mother has already drilled into us. She does this two more times before the story limps to a conclusion. This suggests an explanation for why many people may have preferred the AI piece. It is almost impossible to miss its intended meaning, even if you read with a creationist’s literalism, and in fact even if you skip entire paragraphs: they’ll return later, rephrased. People who have no patience for figurative language (and there’s nothing wrong with that!) are likely to appreciate this. But the deft use of figurative language is exactly what readers of poetry and literary magazines tend to look for. There’s no point in writing for an audience who doesn’t want to read the form you’re working in!

So far, we’ve seen several of the mangled images that AI tends to spew. But these images are not unique to LLMs. They were well-characterized at least as far back as Orwell’s seminal essay on bad writing, “Politics and the English Language.” Here he is on the mixed metaphor:

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.

Indeed, Orwell’s own example of “incompatible metaphors” is less heinous, to my ear, than many of the AI constructions above:

Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder

- Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia).

At least Hogben bothered making an attempt at originality! Of course, no rule of writing is absolute, and human authors have certainly made effective use of the “incompatible” metaphor. When Hamlet asks “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,” the shift in imagery from warfare to water might seem jarring, and of course you can no more take up arms against the sea than play ducks and drakes with a battery. But as usual, there is a method to Shakespeare’s madness: the absurdity of fighting the tides brings to mind the parable of King Cnut, and emphasizes the futility of Hamlet’s situation. None of the AI artefacts quoted above achieve similar effects.

To identify AI-generated writing, then, the task is simple: simply look for the image that doesn’t make sense. “The kind of walking that made benches become men” and “smiled like sunrise over a sink” are notable recent examples. If you spot a few, you should be careful not to make premature accusations; you could just be dealing with the old-fashioned kind of bad writing. But it’ll be bad writing either way. For two (probably) human-generated examples of this kind, see Devon Halliday’s commentary here.

It is interesting to ask: why are LLMs like this? They have no problem reproducing correct grammar. Nowadays, programming and mathematics are, to a certain level of complexity, well within their reach— and correctness in those disciplines has essentially zero margin of error. Yet they cannot construct a decent image to save their data centres. What gives?

Here, I admit I am crossing into speculation. I am no expert in machine learning, let alone the inner workings of frontier models. But I do wonder if a longstanding critique of Gary Marcus— that LLMs do not construct explicit world models— can help us understand what’s going on. When I ask myself why benches cannot become men, I don’t need to consciously lay out everything I know about the end-states of benches and the origins of men, and search for the intersection of those two sets. I just know in some part of my brain older than language that the notion is ridiculous. I do this despite having been trained on significantly less literature than ChatGPT’s approximately every book and article and Internet post ever digitized. Whatever frontier models are doing inside the black box, it seems quite different, given that they can’t see the problem with “benches become men.” It seems plausible that the LLM’s failure to construct a coherent, intuitive picture of the world, as humans do by default, is related to their difficulties with figurative language.

All this is to say that human authorship is not in immediate danger. Or at least, if it is, then that danger comes from the place it always has: the tastes of publishers and the reading public. If the author is to die, AI won’t be the killer.

Subscribe now

Still, this sort of thing is a common enough annoyance in films about writers that I could mostly overlook it.1 And, yes, yeah, the performances are brilliant, the cinematography is beautiful, and Max Richter does great score, even if its climax just reminded me of Arrival. The movie is good, I think.

Not everybody agrees.

There are several things I dislike about the review I linked above. The author seems disappointed that the chapter following the plague’s transit from Alexandria to Stratford-upon-Avon has been all but cut, replaced by a brief scene of foreshadow-puppeteering. I cannot understand why. In the novel, this insertion of an "it-narrative" into an otherwise tightly-focused drama seems the clearest case of a darling left unkilled in anything I’ve recently read. He also mourns the film’s linearized structure, claiming that the novel moved between its two timelines “quite intricately.” To me, you can only be impressed by this sort of thing if you’ve never had much of a go at writing fiction. Interspersing two stories is in general quite easy; often it requires no keystrokes beyond Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Sure, you have to avoid unduly spoiling the past with the present, and you really ought to consider the effect of your tonal contrasts— but it doesn’t take a genius to hang this all together. Much harder tasks include:

• Coming up with a mystery whose solution is plausible and non-obvious, and which a careful reader could deduce before it is revealed,

• Writing a comic scene in which the humour arises naturally from established character traits, and

• Interweaving a compelling narrative with the need to acquaint readers with a fantastic and/or speculative setting that exists only in your mind.

The real masters of technique include Doyle, Wodehouse, Tolkien. You didn’t hear it from me.

But these aspects of the review are largely incidental. The real reason I bring it up is the commonly-felt tension it gets at right in its title, expressed not only by haters but by those who, like me, enjoyed the movie. Is Hamnet just “grief porn?”

First, I should break this accusation into two charges, related yet distinct. They could apply to book and film alike, but I’ll focus on the latter since it adds the most relevant material.

1. Hamnet distorts history to the point of fantasy. In reality, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet four years after his son’s passing, other versions of the play like the notorious Ur-Hamlet had been recently staged, and there is no direct textual or documentary evidence that the historical Hamnet inspired or even influenced Hamlet. Maybe this is forgivable on its own, but it’s in service of the second charge:

2. Hamlet cynically reduces one of the greatest works in the English language to a mere therapeutic instrument, playing into the view that the ultimate purpose of art is to balm the artist’s suffering.

This won’t exactly be a fair hearing: I will play only defence attorney. With that established, I should move to have the first charge thrown out of court. There’s no doubt that Hamnet stretches the historical record. But with Shakespeare, there is almost no historical record to begin with. Details of his life are sparse; we have no letters or private notes from which we might hope to glean authorial intent. Even the date Hamlet was written comes with a two-year margin of error. In this context, any fictional take on Shakespeare-the-man will inevitably become an exercise in imagination. O’Farrell’s presentation probably contradicts less documented history than the Thomases More and Cromwell of the Wolf Hall trilogy, or indeed Shakespeare’s own Julius Caesar— and it’s rare to hear complaints about those. If you’re a stickler for the facts, you’ll no doubt find some errors in book or film (without even reaching for the obvious anachronism of the dialogue), but believing in Hamnet’s version of events will not require you to entirely suspend your historical awareness.

But that doesn’t mean you won’t have to suspend your disbelief. This brings me to the second charge: is Hamnet just a piece of sentimental schlock, leeching off the legacy of a superior work? Is its basic conceit— that Shakespeare might incorporate his late son into the character of his moody, muddled prince— even plausible?

Let’s review the case against.

Hamlet is not exactly a straightforward hero. He feigns madness, and on some readings, succumbs to it. He is cruel and bitter to Ophelia. When his father’s ghost spurs him to vengeance, he dithers even once convinced of Claudius’ guilt, then slays Polonius in a fit of blind passion. His end is not especially noble; he is taken from behind and fails to save his mother’s life. At every stage it is ambiguity, much more than virtue, that defines him.

One might ask: if Hamnet really influenced Hamlet, then why is Hamlet’s Hamlet so much like, well, Hamlet? Why not write a character more recognizably heroic— someone like Shakespeare's own Prince Hal? We can’t blame the source material. The mythic Amleth after whom Hamlet was modelled has none of the angst or philosophizing.2 These traits were intentionally added. They are there for a reason. What— and remember, we are very much in the territory of historical imagination— could that reason be?

First, consider the alternative.

Suppose Hamlet was confident and self-assured. Suppose that, from the very first spectral visitation, he had set himself single-mindedly to the task of avenging his father, that he had, like the Amleth presented in the recent film The Northman, lopped off Claudius’ head with one arm before dying a hero, worn down, no doubt, by the wounds he’d sustained in fending off at least a dozen attackers. Maybe in a volcano.

Does this sound like Shakespeare’s idea of a hero? Hardly. In fact, it might have occurred to you it sounds much more like Laertes, or like Fortinbras.

Who are the heroes— if hero is even the right term— for Shakespeare? One theme connecting his most virtuous characters is their emphasis on mercy. This is perhaps expressed most famously in Portia’s speech in The Merchant of Venice (4.1):

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

But this is not the only example. Prospero’s redemption comes with his final decision to spare his enemies. Cordelia is estimable not only for her unyielding honesty before her father, but also because she is ultimately able to forgive him. Even in a play as bloody and merciless as Titus Andronicus, when Lucius finally restores order he condemns Tamora of the Goths as “devoid of pity.” Rome is far from cured, but we glimpse the hope that it might yet move in a more merciful direction.

Now. Is Hamlet merciful? In one sense, perhaps: there is no immediate lopping-off of Claudius’ head. But he winds up dead all the same, like Polonius, and like Ophelia. But let’s be fair to the prince: there is a sense in which his moral universe is both darker and cloudier than that of The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, and King Lear. Even in Titus, the sheer extremity of the violence largely overshadows any basic questions of who ought to do what to whom. But the world of Hamlet is different. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, yes, but what? Was the ghost set loose by God, or by the devil? Is its plea justified or not? Has Gertrude been innocently duped, or is she somehow complicit? What is Hamlet to do?

What should become clear is this. The plausibility of Hamnet’s conceit is bound up with much older questions about how Hamlet is to be interpreted. For some (famously Freud), Hamlet is an inveterate over-intellectualizer, unable to take rational, decisive action because of his psychological shortcomings. For others, he is just an incoherent whiner. T.S. Eliot believed that the play was an artistic failure, holding that the seeming inconsistencies in Hamlet’s behaviour were simple authorial mistakes. But these are not the only possibilities. Another view—one I hold myself— is that Hamlet is a strongly moral character thrust into a world of deep moral ambiguity. This is no accident. It’s what makes the play so interesting. An Amleth or a Laertes would seek revenge in any context, no later than on discovering they’d been wronged. Similarly, making Hamlet’s world black-and-white would make him boring: if there was an obviously correct thing to do, he would just do it. But the world he is given allows him to reveal the depth of his moral sense, the beliefs and sentiments pulling him in opposing directions, his notions of justice and compassion and philosophical inquiry— in short, his humanity. He is perhaps Shakespeare’s most human character.

This was perhaps less relevant before the film version. The novel ends with Agnes watching her husband, dressed as the ghost, deliver to Hamlet his plea for revenge. We are asked to believe that a father who lost a son might be moved to write a son who lost a father. In isolation, this might be accused of playing into the “art-as-therapy” trope— surely there is more to what Shakespeare was doing than that— but it’s not implausible, and does not even address a significant majority of the play’s text. The novel just ends! At first this bothered me, but I understand why an author would want to do this. The story isn’t really about how Hamlet came to be; one scene of Hamlet just provides the emotional denouement to an entirely separate story, and the refusal to cover the rest safeguards against charges of artistic parasitism. The strategy seems to have worked— the novel’s reviews were not nearly so sceptical as reviews of the film, at least on these grounds.

That’s because Hamnet the film takes a much bigger swing. We see not only Shakespeare-as-ghost but the play’s conclusion as well, including the startlingly visceral death of its lead. These additions might seem baffling. Reviewers haven’t seemed to know what to do with them. Aren’t these the scenes that had to be avoided to keep the novel’s premise intact; won’t showing them with their flawed Hamlet capsize our disbelief? If you agree with Freud or Eliot, then maybe.

But I doubt Shakespeare would have.

Few bodies of work could more strongly resist the accusation that their author was a misanthrope. We feel not only for Prince Hal, but also for the cowardly hedonist Falstaff. Even such arch-villains as Richard III get moments of pathos before they meet their ends. I find it impossible to imagine that Shakespeare, who wrote so compellingly about such a diverse range of characters undergoing the full sweep of human feeling, should have wanted us to dislike Hamlet. To see him as flawed, yes— but that is a gift too. There is no perfect human in an imperfect world, and the world of Hamlet, half-hidden as it is behind a veil of ignorance, closely resembles our own.

The film’s final scene might stretch credulity. Agnes, having worked her way to the front of the groundlings, extends a hand to the dying Hamlet; the actor improvises a reply and the audience follows suit. Believable or not, this isn’t art-as-therapy. We’re being told exactly who the play was written for: its audience. A real human experience is understood to be transmitted. Even Hamlet-sceptical Eliot understood the importance of this transmission when he described the objective correlative. It’s the very core of art, and without it, we’d have a hard time figuring out exactly what the point of the whole enterprise is supposed to be.

There are certainly things I’d change about Hamnet. I found the setup and payoff of Hamnet as would-be stage fighter a little trite and ill-fitting— martial prowess is hardly core to Hamlet’s character.3 But overall, the narrative worked on me as I imagine was intended. As a great lover of the play that supplies half its premise, I had to reflect on this fact. Was I being somehow manipulated? Clapping along at the sight of a familiar character, like the audience in a Marvel movie? In the end, I came to feel that the answer was no: the text of Hamlet has certainly been abused, but the relevant abuse began long before Maggie O’Farrell ever sat down to write. It is this abuse that makes it seem so unlikely that Shakespeare might have allowed his beloved, deceased child some influence over his like-named Danish prince. Yes: to imagine such a possibility, we may have to abandon our notions of Hamlet as puerile overthinker or repressed nebbish. And Shakespeare, lover of humanity in all its strangeness and contradiction, might have been the first to welcome this.

In early 1992, a twenty-year-old punk guitarist approached the stage during one of the President’s rallies and shot him in the face. The latest round of infrastructure cuts, it turned out, had inadvertently removed funding for metal detectors at state events.

Curiously enough, nothing improved the President’s approval rating like the ventilation of his skull. His prior excesses were reinterpreted as necessary uses of executive power against an amorphous, purposeless, ever-metastasizing bureaucratic class. The representatives of this class were held to be manifold. They included heads of state in the surrounding territories, ideological infiltrators in the guard (the late President would never knowingly shelter partisans), the punk guitarist-assassin, all five still-imprisoned journalists, and the President’s ex-wife. Old critics hastily rebranded themselves as covert supporters. A brief power struggle ensued; soon, however, it was one of these old critics, a crafty general, who won out, declaring himself the second President of Veldonia and announcing that special elections would be held— just as soon as the rot that the first President had so opposed was rooted out at last.

The second President ordered the punk guitarist hanged over the stage on which he’d shot the first. Watching the execution gave him a feeling of great closure. Like the noose around the guitarist’s neck was a kind of ouroboros, promising for all time that any violence visited upon the state would prove ultimately self-destructive. The Veldonian public mostly approved.

Photographs of the hanging spread. One in particular seemed to show the guitarist extending a defiant middle finger even as the trap door swung open, though it was blurry and difficult, really, to tell for sure. This image soon diffused into the surrounding territories: funding insurgents is generally not good for diplomatic relations, and there was no shortage of anti-Veldonian sentiment to catalyze its spread. While the photo’s first uses were confined to nationalistic propaganda of a straightforward sort, it soon evolved into a more general symbol of resistance. Anarchist zines added it to collage art. Rock bands that commented only on domestic matters used it for their album covers. In one contentious case, a leader of the opposition did a photoshoot of himself replicating the pose, noose on neck and middle finger held high. Anti-Veldonian intellectuals were forced to bitterly admit that the photograph had lost its specific early meaning; it had become a blank space, a screen for unrestricted projection, a signifier of everything and nothing all at once.

No one publicised this gallery of reinterpretations more widely than the second President himself. The second President was clever, you see, and he understood that, whatever the image meant or did not mean in the surrounding territories, in Veldonia it supplied an endless wellspring of evidence that the entire region, along with a good chunk of the Veldonian population, was in conspiracy against the government. So long as a middle finger was anywhere held aloft, this conspiracy endured. Travelling galleries of Anti-Veldonian art were established. Samizdat was no longer suppressed, but reprinted en masse, side by side with the publications of clearly hostile actors. Readers were left to draw their own conclusions.

This worked well for about a year. But by 1993, the second President, always keeping a close ear to the thrumming in the hearts of his people, could feel a shift in the winds. The hanged guitarist was already starting to be seen less as the representative of some still-threatening oppositional force, and more as a historical curiosity, one more actor in the drama of Veldonia’s liberation taken early from the stage. He doubled the travelling galleries; it did no good. Juvenile delinquents spray-painted graffiti of the guitarist with his penis out in a bizarre yet seemingly grassroots trend. In July, someone tried to stab the Secretary of Education, a preening and incompetent appointee of the first President who had proved too sycophantic to remove, with a pencil. While the motive seemed to be plain madness, it was the Veldonian public’s response that the second President found alarming. Few supported the assassination attempt, but they did disdain the Secretary of Education, and so many found the whole incident amusing, savouring the look of terror in the notorious toady’s eyes as his bodyguard stopped the would-be assassin’s strike mere inches from his toadlike neck. Certainly no one took it as serious evidence of conspiracy.

This sent the second President into a state of panic. Drawing on his military background, he responded in the only way he could: with a display of overwhelming force. In an impassioned speech, he declared that, in a civilized society, violence of any kind must be condemned absolutely. He then produced five co-conspirators and ordered each hanged in a different town square. Evidence was procured implicating the weakest of the surrounding territories; a special military operation began, leading to the occupation of three border cities and resulting in thousands of civilian deaths. Elections were still nowhere on the horizon. This all cost Veldonia an IMF loan and two major trade deals, but won the second President a rejuvenated constituency of supporters. Unfortunately, it also won him a fierce internal opposition.

He spent the next three months enmeshed in conflict with guerilla groups, which were by then sprouting up like weeds across Veldonia and its occupied territories. Being a soldier at heart, he felt right at home in this arena. And his familiarity made him complacent. It therefore came as a complete surprise when, late in 1993, eight veteran members of his guard stormed the presidential suite. The second President was a stoic man to the end. He truly, deeply believed that this would be nothing more than a passing interruption in the continuity of his power, even as he was marched through the city at gunpoint, even when he taken into a field and made to kneel before an open grave; indeed, right up until the moment his cranium was shattered by rifleshot.

His successor, and the man behind the coup, turned out to be the former Secretary of Education. The old toady proved craftier than anyone had imagined: ever since his assassination attempt, he’d been building a covert network of opponents to the second President’s sudden expansion of executive power. The fact that the second President began as a critic of the first roared back into relevance; he was recast as an opportunist, an egomaniac, a traitor to the first President’s glorious memory. In such a climate, a history of consistent sycophancy was the safest one imaginable— and this is precisely what the third President had.

The public reaction to the second President’s death was more muted than you might expect. His supporters were incensed, and even among his opponents there were those who felt that summary execution was a less-than-ideal transfer of power, but most citizens found themselves struggling to care either way. Many had lost family in the wars, or in terrorist attacks. One more dead President was nothing new. For his part, the third President expressed wistful regret over the killing, but insisted it was the second President who had brought the monster of state violence to Veldonia, and thus, inevitably, back onto himself— an ouroboros of violence, if you like.

Unfortunately, the third President was even more incompetent as leader than he had been as Secretary of Education. It’s relatively easy to preside over a public education system as it’s being sold off, piecemeal, to oligarchs. Governance is another matter entirely. He did announce that elections would be held, just as soon as the subversive elements introduced by the second President were purged from the institutions, and unlike his predecessor he actually believed this. But the public did not. Support for the third President further declined when, six months into his administration, the front collapsed in the surrounding territories, and a peace treaty was drawn up dictating that all the occupied land would be returned. You might think that, because the wars were unpopular, the return of this land would be welcomed. Not so. The public felt that the land, although perhaps illegitimately won, was at least a kind of national achievement, a prize that was theirs and theirs alone. The dead belonged only to the ground.

Sensing he was in over his head, the third President attempted a scheme in the style of the second, covertly funding ultranationalist terror cells so he’d have an enemy against whom he could rally the nation. This would be the barbaric violence of a bygone age: the second President’s age. He did himself no favours in this endeavour by accidentally sending a large wire transfer to a major Veldonian newspaper, instead of the intended insurgents, with the reference label reading “weapons.” His later claim that this was meant as a symbolic empowerment of the press was not as well-received as he’d hoped.

It was under these conditions that the Party of Arbitrary Violence took shape. Since the return of democracy to Veldonia, there had of course only ever been one significant party— the first President’s party, as well as that of the second and the third— and the Party of Arbitrary Violence never challenged this fact in a meaningful way. It was not even a political party at all, in the conventional sense, but something much more rudderless and diffuse: part artistic movement, part social trend, part howl of protest, entirely a response to this bizarre new political reality in which corpses were not consistently removed from the gutters and the state’s main response to the worsening economic crisis appeared to be a jobs program in mass murder. Where did the Party truly begin? It’s hard to say. Maybe in counterculture magazines, maybe among dissidents against the third President’s rule, maybe in a million minds all at once, driven to the same mad dream by the same million madnesses.

The Party, at its core, was a work of collective satire. Its message was simple: the trouble in Veldonia was not the first President or the second President or even the third President. It was rather some defect deep in the Veldonian soul, some tendency towards bloodshed and brutality, some dark longing that draws the civilised towards barbarism just as it tempts the pious towards the black mass. And the Party did not say, banish this urge. It held this to be the error of the second President and now also the third, while the error of the first was his sheer gutless hedonism. It rather said: embrace it. It said: wealth transfers to terrorists are not enough; in Veldonia the whole economy must be partitioned between arms dealing and gladiatorial combat. It said: forget about re-occupying the surrounding territories; accept nothing short of a Carthaginian peace. It said: may the promised elections never happen, may every future President rise by the murder of his predecessor, and may this be enshrined as our most basic law, our most sacred obligation, now and in a hundred thousand years, forever. An ouroboros of violence.

The third President understood very little, least of all satire. He was a fearful man in his heart. And the Party of Arbitrary Violence scared the shit out of him.

At the apex of his terror, the leader of one of the terror cells he’d been funding approached him with an offer. Hand over control of the Veldonian state, and he’d be assured safe passage out of the country and a new life abroad. The third President did not have to think long. Just the night prior, he’d suffered nightmares in which an angry mob, flying the Party’s bloodstained banner, broke into the presidential suite to tear chunks from his flesh barehanded. He shook the man’s hand.

Shortly after leaving Veldonian airspace, the third President’s helicopter exploded. The fourth President did not like to leave loose ends.

The fourth President was more intelligent than the third, but that was not saying much. He did understand, dimly, that those involved with the Party of Arbitrary Violence were not quite being frank about their beliefs. But he also believed in a great number of other strange ideas, like that a Veldonian soul is distinct at the basic level from a Polish or a Russian soul, not to mention eugenics and phrenology. And he believed that, although coming at it a little askew, a little tinged with irony and juvenile contrarianism, the Party was nonetheless expressing something real, drawing on some ancient animal sentiment that would, so long as it endured, prevent the restoration of Veldonia to its deserved status as a great, and civilised, nation. That was his mission, he felt: the restoration of Veldonia. The carrying-on of a grand legacy passed down through the dignified tsardoms of old and the Steppe horselords that preceded them and finally from that great lost Tartarian empire in which Veldonia had once no doubt held the highest seats of power. He would go to war against whatever energies of subversion threatened this legacy, reducing his people to brutes. And that meant he would go to war against the Party.

Grand visions aside, the fourth President inherited a delicate political situation. Veldonia was at once a pariah state and a laughingstock on the world stage; foreign aid was as unlikely as the emergence of allies. The Veldonian military was severely weakened, drained by years of conflict both external and internecine. Whole industries failed. Bridges collapsed for want of repair. The best and brightest, as well as the mediocre, fled the country in droves.

The fourth President’s first major act, then, was the construction of a great wall, encircling as much of Veldonia as he could. For budgetary reasons, this was not nearly all of Veldonia; he thus gave up the outskirts of his nation to the surrounding territories without a fight. But this did not concern him. The true Veldonians, the beating heart of his people, would remain within the walls, would never even think of escape— of treason. He ordered the guards to shoot anyone coming within a hundred yards of the border on sight.

Although he would never admit it, rulership posed challenges that his prior life had never prepared him for. When the Party of Arbitrary Violence distributed pamphlets, it was now his face atop the mountain of gore, his uniformed silhouette seen presiding over the killing fields and death camps. He was used to leading a small group from the shadows, unknown, resigned to a campaign of futile defiance. The responsibility of bridging the gap between vision and reality had never been his. When the fourth President fell into a panic, then, it was a deeper, wilder, more chaotic panic than any of his three predecessors had ever known. He bombed his own people. He installed a secret police within his secret police. He ordered the construction of chemical and biological weapons, thinking at the time that they would be kept only as insurance, but then always finding reason to deploy them mere weeks later. And so within the wall Veldonia fell into a civil war, the bloodiest, bleakest civil war to have ever been recorded in any history of any nation, a civil war in which, at a certain point, the sides could no longer be cleanly demarcated, and the weapons, many being designed to operate without user input, seemed perfectly capable of carrying on the fighting without anyone left to direct them. At some point— no one is quite sure when— the fourth President himself died. Some say he took his own life.

Today, Veldonia is not on any map. Its remaining territory is an empty wasteland, populated only by the bones of the dead and silos still programmed to send heat-seeking missiles after the living. It has a population of one: the fifth and final President, who lives alone, in a bunker beneath the ruins of the capitol. He mostly eats canned beans and runs his fingers over his collection of very shiny medals. You cannot go to see him— you would be killed before you ever got close— but if you could, he would want you to know that he does not support violence. He would really, really want you to know that he does not support violence.

Subscribe now

What he knew was this: the main elevator wasn’t working. Of course, this being the United Kingdom in 2025, that fact on its own was hardly a surprise. The surprising bit was that the carriage seemed to have vanished entirely. No one at the Ministry knew where it could have gone— and if there’s one thing the Ministry is good at, it’s knowing where things have gone.

The first room was familiar. It was a sprawl of cement and fluorescent lighting, and, were it not for the bollards strategically placed so that no car could ever enter, one might confuse it for a parking garage. Two men in hi-vis vests leaned against the pillars, smoking. The inspector remembered the older man, but had forgotten his name; the younger man was unfamiliar.

This second man noticed him first. “Oi. Who are you?” he asked, staring the inspector down with wide intense eyes.

Before he could reply, the older man cut in. “Easy, lad. He’s from the Ministry.”

“I’m from the Ministry,” the inspector helpfully added.

The older man turned back to the inspector. “My apologies. This is Amit— he’s a new hire.”

Amit still looked uneasy, and eyed the inspector up and down. “We’ll be wanting to see his papers, won’t we?”

The old man sighed. “Boy, didn’t I say I know—”

“It’s no problem,” the inspector said. He opened up his briefcase and produced a series of pages, each one bearing the Ministry’s crest: a human brain in cross-section, the Crown of Windsor sprouting tuber-like from the top. In truth, he felt a rush of pride, showing them off.

Amit flipped through the papers. “Everything seems to be in order,” he said.

“You know,” the older man said, “time was, we didn’t need all these papers in this country.”

“In our training they said—”

“I know what they said in your training, lad.” The older man placed a hand on the inspector’s shoulders. “Well. You’ll be wanting to know what we know, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m afraid it isn’t much. We call for the carriage; the carriage doesn’t come. Look here.” He led the inspector to the top of the great shaft, that dark square-shaped chasm perhaps thirty feet across, and pressed the big red button there. Indeed: no carriage came. “We sent down a plumb,” the man continued, “but we always lose track of it at a certain depth. It’s the strangest thing.” He turned to the inspector, eyes widening. “Just how many floors are there?”

The answer to this question was in the manual; this the inspector knew— but no one had read the manual all the way through, least of all him. “More than you think,” he said.

“I imagine. Couldn’t have come at a worse time, could it?”

“No. I suppose not.”

“A move comes just once in forty years, and this happens the day before— unbelievable. I’ll tell you one thing: the Ministry wants it fixed, and fixed right quick. From what I hear there’s been talk of the Axe.”

The inspector swallowed. Ordinarily, when civil servants spoke of the Axe they were speaking metaphorically, but he had long harboured suspicions that in the case of the Ministry of Remembering they were being perfectly literal. He would need to work quickly. “Where’s the access shaft?” he asked.

“Right this way.” The man went to the corner of the room, finding an iron disk rather like a manhole cover, but with a thick handle on top. He pulled it up, exposing a long ladder leading down into darkness. “Well. Good luck,” he said. “I don’t envy your task.”

“Nor I,” said the inspector. Strapping his briefcase to his back, he went down, down into the hungry dark.

It took less than a minute to reach the first level. Apart from the great yellow lanterns that hung from the tunnel walls, this floor was not so unlike the surface: throngs of all ages, in denim jackets and washed-out pantsuits and long neon socks, wandered up and down boulevards covered in pastel-painted storefronts. In a few places, beams of light from the surface even broke through. If ever you’ve thought you could see vague figures moving beneath a subway grate in London, it’s possible— unlikely, but possible— you were right.

The inspector soon found who he was looking for. At a café outside, seated between artificial bushes on a patio, he saw the baldheaded, almost Churchillian figure of one Archibald Moss reading a newspaper.

“That you, Archie?” he called.

Archie looked up, and a big smile crossed his face. “Ah— inspector!” The two men embraced. “It’s good to see you, friend. Come to check in on us before the big move?”

“Would that it were so benign. I’m afraid the main elevator is out of order— carriage has up and disappeared, it seems.”

Archie fixed his face in a grimace. “I see. Well— can’t do a move without a carriage. I should know.”

“I don’t suppose you’d have any suspects?” the inspector asked. “Anyone who might resent moving down a floor, perhaps?”

Archie shook his head. “Truth is, most folks here are looking forward to the change of scenery. It has been forty years, after all. Though I’m sure they’ll get to pining about our golden days on the top floor soon enough.”

The inspector nodded. “Thanks, Archie. I figured as much. But I had to check.” Although in a great rush, he still felt the constitutional compulsion to ask a few polite questions before leaving, and added: “So, how’s governance these days?”

Archie sighed. “Messy, as always. Seems the only time we can get anyone together is for the annual Scargill effigy. Other than that, it’s the usual. An endless metastasis of ministries and more ministries.”

“Weren’t you telling me you had a plan for that?” the inspector asked.

“Oh, yes,” Archie said, “The Ministry of Ministerial Reduction. Fat lot of good that did. They spent all their time passing around ledgers and holding internal debates, and never once did they actually manage to recommend that a ministry be shuttered. When I intervened personally, forcing the matter, they finally came up with just one— themselves.”

“Did that at least go through?”

“No,” Archie said, gravely. “When it hit the desk of the Ministry of Ministry Elimination, they denied the request, citing conflict of interest.”

After saying his goodbyes, the inspector continued deeper into the access tunnel. The next floor was a bleak affair, with half the buildings boarded up and waifish families clutching the wrappers of their rations beneath signs that read KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. The Ministry thought it important that everything be remembered accurately. Even war.

The inspector was looking for this floor’s administrator, and with rather more urgency than he had Archie. He had his suspicions about the second floor. People down here were rugged, and cynical, and hardly opposed to scavenging public infrastructure. After a few minutes spent searching for someone who looked half-sensible, he passed a man in a rumpled tweed suit.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Would you happen to know the whereabouts of a Rupert Blundell?”

The man did not stop. “Blundell’s dead,” he said, blowing on by. This was dire news. When an administrator died, a replacement was meant to be elected at once, but the second floor was well used to the suspension of democracy, and so their previous interregnum had lasted a scandalous seven years. No administrator meant no authority competent to answer his questions. Nonetheless, he did know one more place to look.

Crossing two streets and passing three fires-in-barrels, the inspector came to a men’s club fringed with austere doric pillars. Everyone who was anyone gathered here. He flashed his papers to the bouncer, then went up the stairs, opening the door to a lounge.

There, a fiery debate was underway. A red-faced man with a thick handlebar moustache slammed his fist down on the mahogany table, exclaiming, “Independence? Independence? We brought them the railway! Why, before we arrived, they were swinging from—”

The inspector slammed the door shut and hurried away, knowing that otherwise he might hear something he’d have no choice but to report.

Outside, worry gripped him. There were so many floors left, and he’d made so little progress; the threat of the Axe loomed gleaming in his mind. He had to think, and as he thought he paced, and he paced so thoughtfully that he missed the great black hole in the ground into which he thoughtlessly stepped.

Luckily, it led to some kind of slope, rather than a sheer drop. Unluckily, this slope was inclined at perhaps seventy-five degrees. As the inspector tumbled out of control, growing increasingly dissociated from his body, the main thought rattling around in his mind was that, should he survive, he’d need to file a strongly-worded maintenance request at once.

He landed in water. Swimming to the surface, he saw that he must have fallen through a great number of levels; the walls here were smooth natural stone, and besides a few distant flickering flames he could make out little in the darkness. Where could he have wound up? He thought back to what he remembered of the manual. There were a few levels you were supposed to avoid, lest the locals impale you for being the wrong kind of religious. There were several Latin-speaking levels, but their inhabitants had mostly escaped generations ago, explaining in apologetic notes that this was due to bad weather. On some levels, harmless enough, the occupants inexplicably painted themselves blue.

He did not think long. Hands gripped him from behind, pulling him to the surface; turning, he saw two men, one tonsured in a dirty brown habit and the other hidden behind a black cloak.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The tonsured man did not reply, but turned to the other. "By my trouthe! He is yfalle fro the skye!"

“What?” said the inspector.

"Certes,” said the cloaked man, “he is ymarkèd of purpos. Put hem eft-soone into the pit."

“The pit?”

"Now God yeve thee grace to fynde that thou seketh, goode felawe," said the tonsured man, who turned out to be much stronger than he looked, and who hoisted the inspector up in one smooth motion, hurling him back into darkness once more.

The inspector rolled downslope some five more minutes.

Again, he landed in water. This time, he was in a pool surrounded by faintly glowing foliage; the cavern here was immense, and there were great turreted stone walls in the distance. Before him sat a robed man on a white horse, sconce in hand. Two soldiers in plate mail stood on either side.

“Y syrthiodd i Ynys Wyrdryn, tir y cyfrin!” exclaimed the man on horseback.

This stirred something in the inspector’s memory, but he could not say what. “Wait—”

“Ef yw'r etholedig, dan sêl y nef. Gyrrwch ef at y cawr, geidwad y moddion.”

The soldiers stepped forward. The inspector knew what was coming; he had only the time to let out a resigned “Oh, dear” before he was sent rolling into darkness once more.

How long did he tumble? He could not say. The slope seemed to grow less steep as he went, so that his final velocity was comparatively modest. When he came to rest, he was lying on something soft. He rolled over, body aching; this soft thing was a coarse grey growth, sprouting from some warm dome-shaped surface. It seemed safe enough, for now. He took a deep breath.

Then the dome made a grumbling sound.

An enormous hand emerged from the darkness, wrapping its filthy fingers around the inspector before setting him gently down on the floor. He saw then that the grey growth was not plant life at all, but hair, hair on the head of, unbelievably, a giant, squatting in the darkness with a long shaggy beard that wrapped thrice helically around his naked body. Moreover, he had made it all the way to the great shaft’s base: with his other car-sized hand the giant was holding the carriage in place, the machinery grinding in protest. Well, the inspector thought. That’s one mystery solved.

“Who— who are you?” the inspector asked.

The giant groaned, voice deep and low. “I am Bryllig Mawr. Third among the Nephilim. First, and greatest, king of Britain.”

“I see,” said the inspector. “Pleased to meet you. I, ah, notice you’re holding down that elevator there—”

The giant roared, yanking the carriage closer.

“Yes, that’s the one. Would you mind explaining to me what that’s all about?”

“There shall be no move,” proclaimed the giant. “Not this time.”

“Why’s that?”

The giant extended a finger, the huge crusted nail passing over a selection of present-day political pamphlets laid out on the stony floor. All were present: the red of Labour, the green of the Greens, the blue of the Conservatives, the uglier blue of the uglier Conservatives. How did they get here? Some idiot must have dropped them down the shaft. Reading the pamphlets, it didn’t take the inspector long to work out the problem.

“These paint rather a bleak picture,” the inspector said.

The giant grunted in assent.

“You feel today’s Britain is not worth preserving.”

“There is no Britain,” the giant announced, rather mournfully. “Not anymore.”

The inspector placed a hand on his shin. “My good man,” he said, “believe me, after the day I’ve had— there has never been a Britain. Or at least, never the same one twice.”

The giant grumbled something.

“Come on, mate,” the inspector said, patting the giant encouragingly. “Stiff upper lip, ah? You are after all a Brit.”

The giant seemed to think for a moment. Reluctantly, and in a single swift motion as if concerned he’d change his mind, he plucked the inspector up, setting him down on the great brass platform of the carriage.

“Tell the Minister I said hello,” he said. And he let the platform go, sending it hurtling back up to the tiny square of light above, across the layers of time and chance, through and towards the Britain that both was and was not.

A.N. This was inspired by Bradley Ramsey’s Power Up Prompt #7. These are very fun and I hope to do more in the future. Thank you, Bradley!

And I don’t just like the old stuff: your Austens and Eliots and Hawthornes to whom the label might be retroactively applied, or the later cadre of Carvers and Roths and Amises who lived to see its rise. I like the literary fiction that is coming out today! A lot of it is really good! I like Elif Batuman and George Saunders and Elena Ferrante and, yes, even Sally Rooney. My hater credentials are severely lacking.

And yet, there is one thing I truly hate about literary fiction: the fact that we call it literary fiction. I’ll play ball when I need to. I’ve tagged posts with “lit fic” and sent journal submissions that contain the term “literary short story,” and when I eventually send out a draft of my novel to agents, I will doubtless ensure that the word “literary” appears in my cover letters no less than once per paragraph. But in truth, doing so makes my teeth hurt, and I’d really prefer to use almost any other label. Let me tell you why.

It’s, Like, Pretentious, Man

This is the obvious critique. Who are we to claim for ourselves the adjective “literary,” a modifier that in today’s parlance is but a margin’s width removed from “serious?” Do we mean to imply that all the others— those who dwell too long in one emotional mode, thus reducing their fiction to romance or comedy, or who dare imagine worlds beyond our own— are somehow unserious? What hubris! It’s pure pipe-puffing pretense, or worse: it’s cringe.

This isn’t my only reason for disliking the term. But it is a reason, and merits a brief history lesson. I have little reason to write this history lesson myself, though, because a very good one already exists here. TL;DR: the term “literary fiction” didn’t really exist until the early 1980s, was in fact partially coined as part of a snobbery allegation, rapidly saw its meaning made amorphous, and may already be obsolete.

So we should reckon with the fact that “literary fiction” means something very different today than it did forty years ago. In fact, it is now more inclusive than it was in the olden days. Upon its introduction, it served as a kind of gate-guardian protecting the flabby highbrow keep from an encroaching middlebrow peasant horde— a hard line between Gabriel García Márquez and Paolo Coehlo. Then Oprah arrived with a Book-Club-shaped battering ram, and all hell broke loose.

At present, then, literary fiction is an anti-image: it describes what something is not. Dragons, spaceships, and vampires are a no-go. Violence, crime, and action may be disqualifying, if shown too often or in too cavalier a tone, but you can get away with a little. Sex? It might be okay— but under no circumstances can it be sincerely erotic. As new tropes sprout from the creative aether, this blacklist grows.

Look closely, though, and you’ll realize that, with the (loose) exception of setting, there is no positive requirement that a novel must meet to join the ranks of the literary. Can we even imagine such a requirement? Can we picture a reviewer flatly asserting that, no, the characterization here is too cliché, the themes too shallow, the prose too workmanlike— that this is not literary fiction, but another thing entirely? I’ll give you a hint: A Little Life is considered literary fiction.

It is not good to be bound by a negative label. For one thing, you can only ever lose ground, hungry new genres emerging to tear away chunks of your territory. But a bigger problem is that your toolbox begins to seem rather light on tools. Fantasy writers have a rich bounty of tropes to play with, subvert, build on, interrogate, transform, and so on. What are the literary fiction tropes? Do we even have any? (Note: general melancholy is not a trope).

This brings me to my second objection.

Whose Literary Tradition Is It, Anyway?

There is a possible world in which I would consider the label “literary fiction” merited. If we had two or more parallel artistic movements, only one of which drew clear and serious influence from the great literature of the past, then, sure— call that literary fiction. It’s in the name, right? If the weapon of snobbery is being wielded, it’s at least being wielded in a way that encourages people to read more, and to read more old stuff, a necessary precondition of producing truly great new stuff. Books are made out of other books.

Now. Do we live in such a world?

Must I even answer? Of course we don’t. I said at the beginning that I like Sally Rooney— that’s true. I think she captures some things about the millennial experience that others struggle to. In that sense, she’s a very good voice of her generation. But could you name one of her influences? Based on her novels alone, I doubt I could. Let’s see what she has to say on the matter:

It’s funny because when I read about other writers, so often they’re incredibly precocious from a really young age and they’re inhaling Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf when they’re like 12, and that was not my experience at all. I was a really disorganized, unsystematic reader right up until the point where I got to college. I loved reading and I loved being with books but I had no real idea about literary history, and I was also extremely intellectually lazy, so I didn’t really care to find anything out.

I didn’t have any real identity as a reader until I got to college, and then I started to learn how to read. So throughout my whole teenage years, I was reading totally on the basis of my own impulses and intuitions, and my pre-existing biases and prejudices about what was cool and what wasn’t.

I thought J.D. Salinger was very cool. Raymond Carver, I thought, was cool. I think I read a little of Joyce Carol Oates… 20th century American writers were cool to me. Anything British I was not interested in.

There’s one mention of a Henry James novel later on, and another of Flaubert. Now, I’m not here to judge. Not every writer needs to be a voracious, T.S. Eliot-style walking encyclopedia, and Rooney demonstrates that you can still do a lot with a little. But let’s be clear about what’s happening here. Our generation’s premier author of literary fiction is admitting that she has read only a minuscule sampling of literature. This is, to put it mildly, a very bad sign for the genre’s moniker.

Contrast this with Tolkien, a man whose influences are so broad that there’s literally an entire Wikipedia page about them. He was drawing on Shakespeare and James Fenimore Cooper and Dickens and 19th-century adventure stories and at least six distinct mythological traditions, and you can actually see all this borne out in his work, if you’ve got the familiarity. Now, obviously not every writer of fantasy is well-read at this level. But you can bet that every such writer, if even halfway serious, will have at least read The Lord of the Rings. It is thus entirely plausible that the average beginning fantasy author is fewer degrees of separation removed from the literary canon than the average beginning literary author.

Are we sure we shouldn’t call fantasy “literary fiction?”

I will admit that fantasy is something of a special case here. Even without Tolkien’s heroic efforts, though, the rooting in folk takes tends to lead the genre naturally to innovate within a tradition. Go and read Tolkien’s influences again, if you like. They do this too.

But even across the broader spectrum of what is called genre fiction, there tend to be foundational texts. Romance writers generally at least read Jane Austen. Horror, Edgar Allen Poe, and maybe Lovecraft. Science fiction seems a bit more fragmented, but you could make a case for Welles or Verne, and the Clarke-Asimov-Heinlein triad provides at least some grounding for the modern stuff. What are the foundational texts in literary fiction— the ones that any serious aspiring author simply must read, regardless of their chosen subject or country of origin? Again, it is not clear that we have any. This may be one reason why many “literary” writers in the late 20th century began writing so-called “elevated” works of genre fiction— there was simply more fertile soil in which they could plant their seeds.

So: the term “literary fiction” is not merely pretentious, not merely vague and unstable and without positive criteria, but also at best misleading, and at worst, just plain wrong. That’s it! That’s the essay. You can close the tab now. Don’t forget to subscribe. Except, well, if we’re doing away with the term “literary fiction—” and you are doing away with it, aren’t you? — then we’re left with one more question.

What Do We Use Instead?

The short version: just describe what you’re actually doing, damn it!

More seriously: at the most coarse-grained level, the term contemporary realism does just fine, if that’s what one really means. Or, if it’s more accurate, surrealism— it was never clear to me why authors like Murakami are sometimes covered under the “literary” umbrella, when their style has less in common with realism than realism does with historical fiction. Precision of language, and all that.

But we can do better than this coarse-graining. The territory of contemporary realism is a vast expanse, and any two works contained within may differ wildly in their themes, tones, and concerns. It’s not a morass, however. We can still identify books that share elements in common and decide that it’s useful to group them together. If anything stops us from doing this, it’s the widespread use of the term “literary fiction,” zooming us out to the furthest perspective possible so that all the little dots on the map appear closely packed.

Let’s take, as an example, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. It is contemporary realism, yes. It’s also a bildungsroman, a story of arriving at maturity. But it’s something more specific, too: a varsity novel, combining the coming-of-age story with the strange character of a particular university at a particular moment in time. This is crucial. In this type of novel, the university really is a character, an embodied setting spewing forth oddities for the still-half-formed protagonist to jostle against, morally and intellectually. We’ve had a term to describe it for a long time. If we used this term, we might ask what The Idiot has in common with Brideshead Revisited and Porterhouse Blue and Maurice, and what this might reveal about how the university has changed, along with the way we write about it. Readers might even be pointed back to those earlier works! But instead we just call it “literary fiction,” and none of this happens.

Some sub-genres of contemporary realism seem comatose. When’s the last time you heard about a bona fide, newly-published novel of ideas, for example? And yet The Magic Mountain is one of my favourite books of all time, speaking as one who just barely missed out on sharing a century with Mann. There’s a lot left to do here! Other sub-genres don’t even have names, tottering young and feral in the uncharted wilds. Who can tell me what Pynchon was working in, or David Foster Wallace? (“Postmodern literature” will not do, being both empty of descriptive content, and also at great risk of transmogrification into merely “pretentious”).

This is probably the closest I’ve come to the “shouting at clouds” style on this page. I’m a little uncomfortable with this; on this website, a polemical tone seems to be rather like black tar heroin. But I adopt one anyways for a simple reason: it’s for a good cause. The way we talk about fiction is not a mere gallery of pet peeves, nor is it a stuffy academic exercise in taxonomy. It is essential to our ability to continue writing innovative fiction, picking out the truly new from mere sordid exhumation, responding to the concerns of today while carrying on the conversation of yesterday. Let’s all keep doing that— just, please, don’t call it “literary fiction.”

While vastly different in style and subject, the two did have a certain amount in common. Both favoured complex protagonists in bleak atmospheres. Both explored the most uncomfortable, taboo corners of sexuality: infidelity, incest, abuse. And both enjoyed long lives and careers as complete as any artist could hope for, leaving behind large bodies of work and final contributions which serve— at least in part— as reflections on their legacies. Coming to the final lines of Stella Maris and “Dear Life,” I felt I was reading some of the most moving sentences ever written.

The two also occupied some of the highest seats in my literary pantheon. To me they were more than mere influences, but aspirational, almost superhuman figures, shaping the tools I used to measure my own work so that I’d always fall short. On some level I gauge the beauty of prose and the strength of an image against a McCarthyan ideal. And when I want a character moment to carry within it worlds of revelation, a part of me still asks, how would Alice Munro do it? Of course, I rarely if ever succeed in living up to their standard, and sometimes I’m aiming for a style far removed from either. But I never leave them fully behind. I say all this so there can be no doubt: for me these were deeply formative authors.

You’re probably wondering when I’m going to address the elephant— or elephants— in the room. That comes now.

Today, we know that the two share one more fact in common: both were implicated in posthumous scandals involving the sexual abuse of minors. Munro’s case was the first to come out, when her daughter Andrea Skinner revealed that her stepfather Gerald Fremlin had sexually abused her as a child, and that her mother, told of this years later, chose to stay with him.

Munro’s response to her daughter was startling in its inadequacy. She was “told too late;” she “loved him too much.” Skinner writes that “she was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her,” and that “[She said] our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men.” At the most basic, human level, this is simply reprehensible. But if you’ve read Munro’s stories, you might also find the sentiment hauntingly familiar.

Also familiar is the manner in which the abuse became well-known in Munro’s community, yet somehow failed to escape it. Fremlin, in 2005, was convicted in a Goderich courtroom of indecent assault. Rumours circulated; journalists and biographers claim they had been party to the knowledge for years. Yet somehow no one went public. Having grown up an hour’s drive from Munro’s hometown, I know this kind of grassroots suppressionism well. We Canadians have a reputation for niceness. Sometimes, that’s because of what we refuse to talk about.

Less than six months later, an article in Vanity Fair revealed that Cormac McCarthy, when he was 42, entered a romantic and sexual relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl named Augusta Britt. Some, including the article’s author and Britt herself, have been reluctant to use “the G-word” seriously in this case. Coming as she does from an abusive background it is understandable that she would choose to remember McCarthy fondly; he was apparently one of the only adults to show her any kindness, and she may well be correct in her assessment that he “saved [her] life.” And I do believe that Britt should be afforded the right to understand the relationship as she wishes, free from the reproval of strangers.

But make no mistake: this was grooming. Helping a young person escape a troubled situation may be admirable, but this is no excuse for the subsequent sexual contact with a minor, and the decision to pursue such contact can only be regarded as a profound personal failure. Worse, in places the hints of outright manipulation seem to ooze from the page:

“So, about those letters,” she says, running her hand along her necklace. “I haven’t read them in decades. They’re really hard for me. I have such a block about them. They did make me feel uncomfortable at the time. Because they were so different from how he talked on the phone, or in person. After living with these creepy men in foster homes, it was such a relief to be with Cormac. I felt safe and secure because he didn’t want anything. He was genuinely interested in me. But then he’d send these letters. And it would be very confusing.”

This is, at the very least, strongly in tension with the renegade-romance narrative that the bulk of the article promulgates. If you’re familiar with the tactics of groomers, you’ll know that this kind of behaviour is a standard play: shower the target with affection and promises of devotion, then shift the conversation to sexual matters; in doing so conflate the two, sowing confusion and insecurity.

So. We have two writers, each somehow implicated in egregious patterns of abuse. And yet both were also among the most astute observers of human behaviour in 20th-century fiction. We might wonder: how can these truths coexist? How could those who saw so clearly go on to act so poorly?

It should be said that we readers are mere bit-part characters in these stories. Skinner and Britt have lived through what most of us will never imagine; next to them we must resemble stamp collectors poring over our dusty texts. Still, I believe that the questions above lead us to an important lesson, about what literature is and is not, and the ways in which we read it.

Munro the Pessimist

Alice Munro is often seen as an important feminist author. There are no doubt good reasons for this, the very trajectory of her literary career being among them. The bare facts of her life tell a hopeful story in which a woman’s achievement emancipates her from a predetermined gender role. In 1961 a Vancouver Sun article famously ran with the headline “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories;” in 2013 she won the Nobel Prize. You’ll find this snippet in most retrospectives on her life.

And indeed, there is plenty of feminist analysis to be found in Munro’s work. “Boys and Girls” is explicitly concerned with the ways gender roles are formed and enforced at a young age. “Runaway” is a moving portrait of a woman trapped in an abusive marriage. And “The Office,” although it is much else, is in part a response to the phenomenon of workplace harassment. Before 2024 it was thus possible to view Munro as a model of literary feminism. With the quality of her writing being at the same time so high, it’s no wonder that her pre-2024 reverence seemed so universal.

But a contrast may be helpful here. Consider the other giant of Canadian feminist literature: Margaret Atwood. Atwood is not only a feminist, but also an optimist. Even in a dystopian work as bleak as The Handmaid’s Tale, the ending provides a glimmer of hope; Offred steps outside of her stultifying arch-misogynist society, though whether she goes to freedom or to her doom is left ambiguous. Decades later Atwood wrote a sequel, The Testaments, in which the regime is finally brought down in part by the actions of a single teenage girl. The view here is clear. Atwood does not shrink from the realities of hatred and oppression, but she does present a vision in which they can be challenged— even defeated— in our lifetime.

Munro’s stories rarely offer such an escape. Carla in “Runaway” ultimately returns to her abusive husband, who appears to have murdered the pet goat representing her desire to leave— and who might do the same to her, should she try again. “Boys and Girls” ends with the internalization, not the rejection, of the gender role the narrator has been assigned. And “The Office” leaves us with an impotent, sublimated anger, with not even a hint that it might be directed towards change.

This is the world as Munro’s fiction presents it. Women marry the wrong man or start the wrong affair; they stay too long and find only small reliefs; even in divorce or widowhood they somehow fall short of true liberation. There is critique here, but little emancipation— little vision, indeed, of how emancipation might even be achieved.

Since Fremlin’s abuse was revealed, a few of Munro’s stories have received fresh attention due to the new readings, often chilling, that are now available. In "Vandals," a victim of childhood sexual abuse trashes her former abuser’s home after she and her husband are asked to housesit. It is indeed now difficult to escape the conclusion that this story serves as Munro’s admission of personal failure, and perhaps even as a sublimated revenge fantasy— a wish that she might have been strong enough to hold Fremlin truly to account.

Similarly, in “Silence” an adult daughter suddenly cuts ties with her mother, Juliet. There is no warning and no reason given, or at least, no reason that Juliet is willing to countenance. She reflects:

It’s maybe the explaining to me that she can’t face. Or has not time for, really. You know, we always have the idea that there is this reason or that reason and we keep trying to find out reasons. And I could tell you plenty about what I’ve done wrong. But I think the reason may be something not so easily dug out.

Before Skinner’s article, this story might have been read as a reflection on the small harms that parents unwittingly visit upon their children. Today, though, we inevitably read it as a story about denial— whether we believe Munro to be aware of this denial or not.

I do think these new readings are worthwhile; from a critical perspective, we now understand more about these stories than we otherwise would. But in focusing on this handful of reinterpretations, I think we can lose sight of an important point. Munro’s decision to stay with Fremlin, and her failure to support her daughter, is in fact consistent with the vision of the world espoused by her entire corpus, and not just those few works that contain clear correlates to the real-life abuse.

The question “How could Alice Munro do this, despite her clear understanding of the human heart?” is therefore ill-posed. There is no contradiction here. Perhaps it would be going too far to assert that Munro’s understanding of the world, as represented in her fiction, enabled her actions— one can never truly know the mind of another. But I do claim that we shouldn’t view those actions as evidence of a serious disconnect between her personal and artistic lives. Her characters were largely reeds in the winds of social dynamics; why should we expect her to behave any differently?

Even now, this conclusion does not seem widespread. I suspect this is because many readers find a great deal of truth and beauty in Munro’s work, and do not wish to believe that the vision contained therein could be used to justify terrible actions. Soon after Skinner’s story came out, the novelist Rebecca Makkai wrote a piece titled “Alice Munro was no better than the miserable women she wrote about.” I think this assessment is basically correct— but why is it a surprise? Why would we expect an author to transcend the banal inadequacies of her characters, merely because she can capture them with eloquence? Makkai writes,

In other words: Along with so many others, I read these stories not as models but countermodels, sad projections of what our lives would be if we acquiesced to the worst whims of the people who wanted to manipulate us.

But with Munro, it was countermodels all the way down; we never received from her a compelling vision of personal empowerment or liberation. Makkai asks whether we can forgive Munro. I don’t believe that we should— but perhaps we should ask ourselves why we ever read into her stories an ironic remove that was never really there on the page. (Note that I was as guilty of this as anyone!)

Don’t get me wrong— my aim here is not to attack cynicism, or to claim that any artistic project in which a clear hope fails to manifest is inherently suspect. I think the conclusion to The Testaments is too trite and easy, for instance, undermining some of Gilead’s power as a stark model of misogynistic domination. What I do want to argue is that an artistic vision is not good, in a moral sense, simply by virtue of being elegantly crafted. To see clearly is not to act well. This is a tough thing for readers and writers to accept; most of us want to believe that art can change the world, and that good art— art that touches and moves us, art in which we feel some deep truth reflected— can only do so positively. But it is true all the same.

McCarthy the Rogue

Compared to Munro, the revelations involving Cormac McCarthy have produced a striking paucity of commentary and reappraisal. The few responses published in the weeks following Vincenzo Barney’s original article understandably focused on a few key points. First, there is the insistence that we must regard McCarthy’s relationship with Britt as a deeply unethical abuse of power; as I mentioned before, I agree with this entirely. Second, there is debate over the extent to which Britt truly influenced various characters in McCarthy’s novels, motivated by apparent discrepancies between Britt’s recollection and historical record. This is a fine enough question to litigate, but like the hyperfocus on a small sample of seemingly-telling Munro stories, I believe it can blind us to larger issues at play. And third, there is criticism (and a good deal of mockery) of Barney’s piece on plain stylistic grounds. This feels a bit mean, but, cards on the table: I don’t like it either.

What I find interesting is what’s missing. There have been few declarations that McCarthy’s legacy is now tarnished in the way we saw with Munro, and even the question of how his grooming might lead us to reinterpret his work is little-explored. This is doubly interesting as, while Munro’s actions were certainly deplorable, hers were not the hands that carried out the abuse, and she had (as far as we know) no knowledge of her husband’s behaviour until her daughter was an adult. The same defences cannot be made of McCarthy. Why, then, the more subdued response?

Gender expectations no doubt play a role here: few figures draw more public vitriol than the bad mother. Also relevant is Britt’s insistence that the relationship was consensual. But there is another important factor, too, which is that even during McCarthy’s life, no clear consensus formed regarding what we should make of him. There can be no iconoclasm without an icon.

Because of his privacy and the ambiguity of his fiction, McCarthy the man has long served as a blank screen onto which readers can project their own beliefs. Some conservatives claim him as one of their own, interpreting his seeming pessimism and clear vision of evil as a critique of enlightenment liberalism. But he also described himself as “basically a materialist” to Lawrence Krauss, told Oprah he “always knew [he] didn’t want to work,” and in No Country for Old Men rebuked the lapsarian notion of an America brought to crime and anarchy by liberalising cultural shifts. Hardly your typical God-and-guns Republican, whatever was in his trash.

On the other hand, he largely rejected the literary community, choosing instead to pal around with physicists such as Murray Gell-Mann. On the other other hand, he wrote gay and transgender characters into Suttree and The Passenger with sympathy and nuance. If we had still more hands, we might ask what to make of his apparent admiration for figures like Eric Hoffer or Oswald Spengler, his Catholic upbringing, that one weird pamphlet in his garbage bin… and we’d win little insight. The man contained multitudes.

But whatever his private views, there was something profoundly American about McCarthy’s writing. I mean that in something like a mythological sense. His characters tend to be lone wanderers, finding their own way through worlds composed of vast expanses and limited civilization, and it is there, not in congested cities or cloistered university halls, that they can confront the most basic questions about what it is to be human. He was invested in the idea of freedom— if not in a political sense, then at least in some kind of personal, narrative sense.

This notion has also served to mythologize McCarthy’s life. We imagine the author writing late into the night in dank motel rooms, drifting from town to town with his belongings on his back, surviving on beans and canned soup in a chosen poverty that he might focus on his work completely. It is a romantic image— even today, I find it stirring. And it is coherent with the themes and concerns of his novels, so does not ring hollow. McCarthy has become our modern ideal of the artist living first and foremost for his art; for this, perhaps as much as for his actual writing, he is revered.

Consider also that part of the McCarthy mythos is his aforementioned representation of evil, the grimly brilliant clarity with which figures such as Lester Ballard, Anton Chigurh, and Judge Holden are rendered. There’s been a certain kind of response to the Vanity Fair article, which goes something like this: “You’re telling me that the author of Blood Meridian wasn’t a well-adjusted guy? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!” And there’s some truth here, but it’s also true that we were clearly never meant to identify with the perpetrators of hideous inhumane violence in McCarthy’s work. If we see ourselves at all, it is in the father in The Road, not the barbaric marauders; in Llewelyn Moss, not Anton Chigurh; in the kid, not the Judge who stalks after his soul.

I belabour this point to emphasize McCarthy was not simply an out-and-out sicko; this theory just doesn’t hold up. But we might also go too far in the opposite direction, allowing ourselves to believe that such an unreserved confrontation with darkness serves as something like an inoculation. An integration of the shadow self, if we want to be Jungian about it. Well, we now know that this inoculation, if it existed at all, is imperfect. At the very least it does not prevent one from grooming a teenager.

But again: should this be a surprise? If you accept the radical personal liberation at the heart of McCarthy’s vision— if it implies that, like Suttree, you can abandon your wife and young child to live in a houseboat on the Knoxville river, and at the end of it all declare unchallenged that you repent of nothing save a certain philosophical vanity— then why not view the age of consent as just one more arbitrary limitation to reject?

Should this lead us to reconsider our view of McCarthy’s persona? Maybe— but we should at least be honest that his actions are one conceivable result of such an outlook. I think that Barney, clearly a McCarthy superfan, couldn’t countenance the possibility that the man’s earnestly-held views might have led him to abuse his power over a vulnerable sixteen-year-old. Given the opportunity to reframe this as a wild love story, then, he jumped at the chance. That angle is much more comfortable— it’s the kind of tale that might have played out in one of McCarthy’s novels. It might even be a beautiful story. But is it true?

What Have We Learned?

I have not been very interested, in this piece, in the question of whether and how we continue to read Alice Munro and Cormac McCarthy. Each reader will have to answer this for themself. Certainly the worlds conjured by both writers remain compelling and innovative in style, form, and content; if a lesser writer like H.P. Lovecraft is still read in spite of his posthumous controversies, I expect our two subjects will be fine.

What I have wanted to argue is that we cannot dismiss McCarthy and Munro’s misdeeds as either betrayals of their literary visions or as unrelated indiscretions. Rather, those literary visions render their actions legible as outgrowths of clear and sincerely-expressed worldviews— worldviews that, as readers encountering their fiction, we may experience as brilliant art.

We may contrast their cases against someone like Neil Gaiman, who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by multiple women. Gaiman’s fiction preached empathy, the dignity of women, and generally progressive views. His offences thus display a clear rupture between the values expressed in his work and those he actually lived by— we might even say they reveal a kind of falsity in his art.

For McCarthy and Munro, this does not apply. While we can be surprised and horrified at finding out their particular offences, we cannot claim that the same kind of rupture has been revealed. At a time when artists seem to be revealed as abusers, hypocrites, or sex pests at record rates, it has become trite to repeat that we shouldn’t blindly trust our heroes, that awful individuals can create great art. But the cases of McCarthy and Munro take this a step further. We should understand not only that the creators of great artistic visions can be deeply flawed as individuals, but that those visions themselves— even if they move us, even if they stir us, even if they are masterfully rendered and seem glutted with truth— can carry the seeds of grave wrongs. We forget this at our peril.

Subscribe now

Indeed, this situation would shock even the comics publishers of the 1950s. While superheroes enjoyed great success from their 1938 invention through to the mid-1940s, in the postwar period their popularity declined. This should be no surprise. They emerged in their original form from a very particular set of social conditions: an America ground down by years of the Depression, anxious about the concomitant crime and social unrest, and willing to boldly reshape itself via the New Deal. Thus Superman was born to model the new man for this new era, struggling against war profiteers, government corruption, and abusive husbands in his early appearances. Legions of copycats followed. The Second World War gave these characters brief new interpretations as patriotic mascots, but when peace rolled back around they seemed to have outlived their usefulness. The superhero fad stalled; comics turned instead to westerns, thrillers, and horror.

As with many played-out forms, a moral panic bought it time. The psychologist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent infamously linked comic book consumption to everything from juvenile delinquency to homosexuality— it was a weird time. One disastrous Senate hearing later, the writing was on the wall for the comic book industry: clean up your act or die. Their response was the Comics Code Authority, an arch-censor so zealous that even the modest moral ambiguities of the gunslinger or Noir drama could not escape its purview. Horror was a non-starter. Under such conditions, publishers looked once more to those strongman-inspired do-gooders of the previous decade, so well-suited to the straitjacketed mode of storytelling now required. Thus the superheroes got a second shot at life; thus the Golden Age gave way to the Silver.

So far, this is orthodox comics history. It is also not without precedent. In the late 17th century, English moralists were growing concerned about the bawdy, viciously satirical theatre that had flourished under Charles II. Their anxieties eventually sublimated into sentimental comedy, a morally one-dimensional movement that held the purpose of a play to be the encouragement of virtue and censure of vice. You have probably never heard of sentimental comedy. There is a reason for that. Similar patterns can be seen in American Puritan Literature, and in the French and German "Moral Tale." This is all very human. Such fashions rise and fall like the winter wheat; they are certainly not expected to endure.

And yet— eighty years after Wertham plunged the adrenaline needle into its heart, the superhero-industrial-complex is still going strong. What gives? And, to return to our original question, why did they conquer the new lands of film in the 2010s?

I don’t think there is one simple answer. I think there are two. One is pessimistic, the other optimistic. Each has been espoused, at least in part, by major figures in the comic book industry. I present them both, with equal standing, because I have come to believe one cannot be taken without the other. Consider this a diptych.

The Glass Half Empty

If you’re at all into comics, odds are you’ve already guessed I’m going to talk about Alan Moore. I might as well just let the man speak for himself:

I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen year-old audience, today’s franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs.

Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with an numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. The superheroes themselves—largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Schuster—would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the nightstand.

I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.

This would be scathing coming from anyone. Coming from one of the most influential and well-regarded comic writers of all time, and the only one to have his work in Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest novels published since 1923— a superhero comic, at that— it’s a massacre.

Can superheroes really amount to a fig leaf, covering up an unsightly fascistic bulge? Maybe this strikes you as too much. It’s difficult after all to imagine Comic Book Guy goose-stepping along, sweaty T-shirt traded in for black livery. Another objection is far more basic. Aren’t superheroes, well, heroes? Don’t they stand for Truth and Justice and the American Way, the protection of the weak and liberal universalism, all the other good things? Was Captain America a secret Hydra agent after all?

Let’s start with the first objection. It’s true that it was difficult to imagine a fascist movement sprouting from the comics— seventy years ago. But times change. Consider the modern preponderance of reactionary sentiment in the video-game space, a medium akin to comics in two important ways: the centrality of the power fantasy, and the fact that it was created for children, but later colonized by adults. Indeed, the “Gamergate” movement was an important progenitor of the alt-right surge that became highly visible in the late 2010s, and comics recently produced a lesser-known such campaign of its own. To read about this is to gaze into an abyss of vitriolic man-children; limit your exposure lest you sink too deep. If Moore knew many of these people in the industry, it’s easy to see where he was coming from.

We may then be tempted to trace the original sin in comics culture to its 80s-era “maturation.” I include the scare quotes because this is really a misnomer— the progression was more to adolescence than to adulthood. The family-friendly heroes of yesteryear were overshadowed by brutal revenge-seekers like the Punisher, unafraid to administer lethal justice free from the tethers of institutional legitimacy. Some of these guys would make Dirty Harry blush. At the same time, declining censorship allowed the depictions of women to become increasingly sexualized, often to an extent that bordered on self-parody. The message was clear: in the new comics, justice is the domain of powerful lone wolves; women may participate, but only if they’re hot.

Which brings me to our second objection. It is of course impossible to say what superheroes “really stand for,” because they are fluid creations. Heck, even Superman has in recent years dropped the “American Way.” These are flexible characters. Even by 1945, Siegel and Schuster’s creation had evolved well beyond their operating parameters. Still, in its inmost being, in that deep machinery imposed by the time and medium that birthed it, we might hope to find in the superhero story a few putrid seeds.

Cartoonist Howard Chaykin has on many occasions described superheroes as “achieving liberal ends by fascist means.” This is true even of their most benign forms. Batman may choose to seek the police department’s approval, but a society that outsources its law enforcement to anonymous masked enforcers is not exactly a well-functioning liberal democracy. (Read into this what you will). Such characters often espouse rigid moral codes, in particular the ubiquitous “no-kill rule—” villains are to be sent to jail, not the morgue. However, in modern comics these codes admit inevitable exceptions, which the hero almost always settles on unilaterally. This is crucial. Carl Schmitt famously declared, “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.” Do we believe him?

That the superhero must become sovereign is a conclusion reached by Alan Moore himself in the series Miracleman, which ended with the titular Superman stand-in establishing a (mostly) benign dictatorship over earth. Is this the genre’s logical conclusion? If so, it is no surprise that the superhero story emerged during the FDR years, alongside the unprecedented concentration of power in the executive branch. People back then wanted a leader who just did things. Now, today, we want this again. We may get our wish.

Another angle, focusing on structural issues inherent to the comic-book medium, comes from Umberto Eco’s essay The Myth of Superman. The key idea here is what we might call paradoxical timelessness. Superman must be timeless because he is an archetypal hero, and also because his adventures must be accessible to a new reader picking up this month’s issue with only culturally-absorbed context; yet this timelessness is paradoxical because we must also understand that Superman lives in our time, our world, responding to our concerns at home and abroad.

There is no escaping paradoxical timelessness. A story that goes the Miracleman route is a story that must end, or at least become something quite outside of the superhero genre. But there is a danger here: because its capacity to evolve is so severely limited, the superhero risks miring us in a particular vision of the good, restricting our imaginations and perhaps even undermining the value pluralism that Western societies aim to defend. Today, we may like this vision. Tomorrow we may not.

On this view, the cultural ascent of the superhero film paints a bleak picture of our time. A disease had been festering in the heart of nerd culture for decades, and with Iron Man it broke containment, spreading at pandemic scale. The cultural infantilization that Moore spoke of metastasized to ordinary Moms and Dads. We wanted strongmen, we wanted authoritarians, we flocked to them in our movies and now we may be getting them in our lives. In parallel, as our media ecosystem congealed, the promise of the “forever story” offered by superhero comics became more and more appealing to our ever-merging behemoth studios. These two forces constructively interfere; the more powerless we feel, the more we want to watch somebody else pummel bad guys on our behalf. Don’t think this trend is dying— as with the postwar comics, we’re experiencing a mere dip before the resurgence. How do we fix it? I don’t know. Try calling the Avengers.

So that’s the pessimist’s view. Are there alternatives? Yes, but be warned: they’re stranger still.

The Glass Half Full

It’s true that, in comic-land, Alan Moore is a towering figure, and that his opinions carry considerable weight. But his are not the only opinions. Even among superhero-cynics, his contempt is outstanding, setting him at the far end of a dipole of opinion. Who is at the other end? Again, if you’re much into comics, you might guess that I’m about to bring up Grant Morrison.

Morrison may not have won Moore’s literary accolades, but in comics publishing they may be even more influential. (Morrison prefers the singular they, and yes, the whole Morrison/Moore thing will get confusing. Let’s all take a deep breath). Their career in mainstream superhero publishing has now exceeded four decades, and takes up considerable space among the greatest hits of both Marvel and DC: name a popular superhero, and odds are Morrison has at one time written them, if not reinvented them.

Morrison’s history-cum-memoir Supergods is less well-known than Moore’s anti-superhero screeds. This is no surprise: it doesn’t grab headlines, doesn’t get nerds clutching their bat-crested pearls. Yet it seems as good a starting place as any if we’re to understand Morrison’s theory of the superhero. In the introduction, after contrasting Cold War nuclear dread to the world imagined by contemporary pulp fiction, Morrison writes,

Before it was a Bomb, the Bomb was an Idea.

Superman, however, was a Faster, Stronger, Better Idea.

It’s not that I needed Superman to be “real,” I just needed him to be more real than the Idea of the Bomb that ravaged my dreams. I needn’t have worried; Superman is so indefatigable a product of the human imagination, such a perfectly designed emblem of our highest, kindest, wisest, toughest selves, that my Idea of the Bomb had no defense against him. In Superman and his fellow superheroes, modern human beings had brought into being ideas that were invulnerable to all harm, immune to deconstruction, built to outsmart diabolical masterminds, made to confront pure Evil and, somehow, against the odds, to always win.

Okay. This seems like exceptionally straightforward stuff, right? Superman always beats the bad guy. Cool. Tell me something I don’t know. It comes off as so much boilerplate tack— at least, until you’re familiar with the way Morrison thinks. They aren’t employing tired clichés about the apparent power of storytelling (see Vonnegut on these). Indeed, they aren’t really speaking metaphorically at all.

What you must understand is that Grant Morrison believes in magic. Not stage magic, not allegorical magic; we’re talking honest-to-God sigils-and-tomes magic as practised in the actual real world. I promised this would get weird. There’s a whole chapter in Supergods devoted to Morrison’s experience writing a self-insert character named King Mob, which they believe to have manifested real-world effects by supernatural means. When you read this next excerpt from the introduction, bear that fact in mind:

Traumatized by war footage and disaster clips, spied upon by ubiquitous surveillance cams, threatened by exotic villains who plot from their caverns and subterranean lairs, preyed upon by dark and monumental Gods of Fear, we are being sucked inexorably into Comic Book Reality, with only moments to save the world, as usual. Towering, cadaverous Death-Angels, like the ones on the covers of Dad’s antinuke rags, seem to overshadow the gleaming spires of our collective imagination.

Could it be that a culture starved of optimistic images of its own future has turned to the primary source in search of utopian role models? Could the superhero in his cape and skintight suit be the best current representation of something we all might become, if we allow ourselves to feel worthy of a tomorrow where our best qualities are strong enough to overcome the destructive impulses that seek to undo the human project?

We live in the stories we tell ourselves.

Once again: for Morrison, that last line is true on more than a metaphorical level. So. Am I claiming that, to rescue the superhero, we must all become modern magi? No— but I think Morrison’s pro-superhero argument is worth considering, even if you reject its more extraordinary elements out of hand.

In case the excerpts above don’t make this argument clear, let’s spell it out. The world can really suck. Disease, famine, disaster, and violence of every stripe have always been our fellow-travellers, and however much our technical prowess advances they keep on clinging to us like head lice. Nothing new there. What has changed is the stories we tell about these events— indeed, the stories we can tell. Ordinary peasants were not likely to hear about the massacres following the siege of Jerusalem in 1099. Mass media, combined with the industrialization of warfare and accelerating cultural shifts, sent shockwaves through the human psyche. How do they manifest? Gods of Fear, cadaverous Death-Angels, Dad’s antinuke rags.

In this interpretation, the superhero arises as a kind of inoculation against these new narrative forces. Remember we’re talking about magic here. What’s that— you don’t believe in magic? Well, consider: I am now conjuring, in your mind’s very eye, the image of a pink elephant bouncing on a pogo stick. Huh. Maybe you do believe in magic after all. Or at least in Morrisonian magic, which is at its most basic the ability to affect the world through language— whether in a mystical rite or a speech bubble.

Can superheroes really affect the world in a positive way? The trite answer is that they can inspire— but if you think about this for more than a few seconds, you’ll realize that, if it’s true, then we’re a profoundly barbaric species. Suppose I come across a child drowning in a river. Suppose that, seeing this, I were to think, “Ah, I’ll swim out to help— just like Aquaman would!” Suppose you knew that, without Aquaman’s example, I would have continued blithely along. What would you think of me? No— superheroes may display superficial bravery, but they are seldom called on to make the hardest moral decisions that the human experience presents. We must look elsewhere.

We must look, in fact, to the structure of the narrative itself. Here that original, plain-as-day observation— Superman always beats the bad guy— reveals its real significance. The old heroes just couldn’t measure up. Robin Hood might outwit the Sheriff of Nottingham; he will never unseat the landed aristocracy. But Superman can scoop up Hitler and Stalin in a single trip and toss a nuclear bomb into the sun. This shift is a radical act of imagination— one that today we may take for granted.

It is also more unique than we might believe. Think about our pop culture: how common is true optimism, the true happy ending? Let’s go down the list. In literary fiction, the mode we have come to expect is melancholy. Fantasy now lives in the shadow of George R.R. Martin more than Tolkien. Horror and the crime thriller speak for themselves, while comedy turns black and romance sterile. Even other mega-franchises struggle to express the same optimism— as Disney’s sequel trilogy discovered, keeping the Star Wars machine perpetually running means propping up a quasi-fascist dictatorship in your narrative universe, forever. This absence is not the historical standard even in “serious” literature, and suggests a situation deeply out of balance. Jane Austen gave her protagonists happy endings. Shakespeare’s comedies were taken no less seriously than his tragedies.

So: the superhero, in this view, imagines that we might overcome the great psychic evils of our time, and thereby restores a true hopefulness that gone missing from our fiction. This raises an interesting question. Must the superhero story take place at the end of history? Suppose we set one during feudalism, instead. If our heroes really are models of absolute good, and if feudalism really is morally inferior to liberal democracy, then shouldn’t our heroes knock down feudalism itself? But now we have gone beyond the genre; we are telling a story about revolution. Similarly, are there sociopolitical forces today that a truly-good superhero should oppose, rather than simply thwarting villains-of-the-week? Must Superman become Miracleman?

One answer is suggested by the climax to Morrison’s All-Star Superman. There, Morrison addresses a question explored startlingly little in the superhero genre— what would a Superman-level experience of the world be like? It’s one thing to shoot lightning bolts out of your hands; it’s quite another to have, at every moment, perceptual access to both microbes in a petri dish and pulsars in the Crab Nebula. At the story’s end, Superman’s arch-nemesis Lex Luthor achieves what seems like a final triumph, gaining the powers of his rival. But he is not prepared for the experience this brings. He reacts thus:

I can see the entire electromagnetic spectrum and those must be atoms, little clouds of possibility. Einstein couldn't connect the gravitational force to the other three, but if he could have seen this...

…the fundamental forces are yoked by consciousness. Everything's connected. Everyone. And this how he sees things all the time. Every day…

…the mechanistic clockwork of reality hinging on a precious impossible defiance of entropy, on life. And the clockwork doesn't care. It's like - Like it's all just us, in here together. We're all we've got.

Here, Morrison’s thesis becomes clearer, perhaps, than it was even in Supergods. The superhero did not come to dominate. Indeed, he did not come to lead at all. We should think of him instead as a modern Prometheus, bringing the secret fire of some future consciousness to a species unable to see past the smog on the horizon. His purpose is to guide us along in our development— to become sovereign in any sense would contravene this totally. He can therefore be slotted into any place in history, an idea that Morrison’s work often explores.

If this is our view, then it is in fact the decline in the superhero movie that is concerning! It suggests disconnection, atomization, the wilting of our dreams. Indeed, scroll your chosen social media for just fifteen minutes, and it’ll be hard not to feel there’s some herbicide running in our psychic groundwater. Why the initial rise? Maybe it was just a burst of Obama-era optimism, quickly frustrated. Or maybe my younger self was more right than I knew: maybe what Disney was selling us was never the true Morrisonian superhero after all, but a mere homunculus ill-fashioned in its shape, patches of the real material surviving here and there but shot through with chicken wire and sterilizing corporate concoctions. Is this so unbelievable? Do we really believe that the big-screen Avengers bear us a brighter future; do they move us at the deepest levels— or do we merely like them, the way we might like sitcom characters?

The Looking Glass

What, then, is true? Can both views be true? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves— things have gone weird enough. But I called this a diptych for a reason. Digesting one view without the other might cause, well, indigestion. You can’t denounce Superman as a pastel proto-fascist without acknowledging the ways superhero stories directly attack the pessimism on which authoritarian movements feed. Similarly, before we get too far into our pro-superhero paeans, we would be wise to remember the places that empowering strongmen can lead, and cautious that we do not allow such elements to creep into our thought. The hero has a thousand faces.

But this still doesn’t answer our original questions: why did the superhero movie rise, why does it appear to be falling, and what, if anything, should concern us? On the anti-superhero side, it is hard to escape the fact that Marvel’s cinematic hegemony prospered alongside a worrisome inflammation of our politics. Their opponents might take a longer view of history, arguing instead for a correlation with hope, or they might suggest that the 2010s pop-superhero was really a mongrel form unfit to carry our aspirations.

I aim to make no converts to my way of thinking. A careful reader can probably infer my allegiances— a careful enough reader always can— but I don’t intend to make it easy. If there’s one element that I am confident identifying as a villain in this story, though, it is a certain quality of unseriousness, a coy yet insecure failure to believe in the power of your own narrative, and one for which the MCU is an apparent patient zero. You won’t find this in the old comics. Those were dripping with po-faced melodrama, and utterly unashamed of that fact. My observation here is hardly new— it has been among the most common criticisms of Marvel’s filmography for years now, including among genre fanatics. The sickness now spreads to the rest of Hollywood; this too is well-charted.

What I would like to claim is that this failure is of a very simple, very ordinary kind. You can see similar anxieties in Shakespeare productions by directors who don’t trust the text, choosing instead to load the stage up with crowd-pleasing set dressing and gesticulation. Henry V delivers the St. Crispin’s day speech astride a cannon firing blank flashes backstage. Coming to the “primrose path of dalliance,” Ophelia humps the air. The play is flattened, reduced to something more digestible but lesser by far. This is plain artistic cowardice. It is the cowardice to which the MCU succumbs— if we cannot take superheroes seriously, and on their own terms, we will never really learn what the genre has to tell us, whether good or bad.

Of course, one can hardly blame the writers and directors involved. The mouse’s iron grip is not easily shaken. But for artists generally, whether working in a well-trodden genre or otherwise, I believe it is here that the most important lesson can be taken. Our storytelling will have a future— assuming we do. It may contain superheroes at its forefront. It may not. But either way, it must be faced with heroic courage.

Quantum mechanics has given this word a certain mystical quality, but really there is nothing special about superposition. It is simply what happens when you place one thing on top of another. All directors do this, for the trivial reason that films are generally more than soundless block-coloured screens. And yet Lynch, particularly in the latter phase of his career that began with Lost Highway, presented us with superpositions of a far stranger and more destabilizing sort. Actors begin the film playing one character and wind up playing another, with no explanation given. Entire plotlines vanish, replaced by others, only to resume later but in mutated form. Oh, and near the end of Twin Peaks’ final season, our hero’s face is literally superposed over the screen for much of a crucial scene:

So there’s that. Nevertheless, maybe you object. Maybe you hold that the Betty/Diane dyad in Mulholland Drive is a simple relationship between dreamer and dream, that Lost Highway is mostly a straight-ahead story with a fantasy sequence in the middle. Can we really think of these in terms of superposition, a term which suggests a kind of equal standing, which rejects any subordination of one concept to another?

Bear with me. It’s helpful to start with an oft-cited major influence on Lynch, the 1961 short film (and later Twilight Zone episode) An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The film follows the hanging of a civilian prisoner during the Civil War, over— you guessed it— the titular bridge. The rope breaks, and a long journey back home begins, harassed by gunfire and the perils of the wild. Then, just at the moment our prisoner is about to return to his wife and home, the film’s cruel twist is revealed: we hard-cut to his body, dangling as intended from Owl Creek Bridge.

The intended reading is straightforward enough. The great majority of the film, from the rope’s breaking to the relieved wife, was mere illusion, a fantasy conjured by the dying man’s brain. It is a tale of our remarkable capacity for invention. Is that all it is?

Consider now another interpretation, subtly yet importantly distinct. At the moment the prisoner drops, two possibilities exist. In one, he dies sputtering on the taut rope. In the other, the rope breaks, and the familiar saga of escape and reunion begins. Maybe the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, and these events literally coexist. Maybe they don’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we are shown both, set side by side and each allowed to progress to its natural conclusion. Set aside your desire to reduce this to a linear narrative, to subordinate one version to the other. You won’t be needing it.

What do we gain, on this interpretation? I’d argue we gain quite a bit. In the original reading, the fantasy sequence is just that— a fantasy. Maybe our prisoner doesn’t really have a farm. Maybe his wife hates his guts. We don’t know; all we see can be understood as a mere endorphin rush. The tragedy is therefore dulled.

In the second reading, there is no such consolation. It is indisputably true that, should the rope break, the prisoner will go on to experience the joy of reunion, as complete and wonderful as what the filmed version shows. The hanged man is robbed this. In forcing this realization upon us, we are made to understand the true horror inherent in the taking of human life: the theft of what would otherwise be.

Do I claim that Lynch endorsed this second reading? I can claim nothing; the man is dead, and even if alive, I doubt he’d be much interested in clearing things up. I will note that he would almost certainly be aware that such readings are possible; see his interest in (his spiritually tinged understanding of) the quantum world.

I will also note that, the later you go into Lynch’s filmography, the more difficult it is to escape such readings. Eraserhead and Blue Velvet have their surreal and baffling elements, but they can comfortably be read in the straight-ahead language of conventional symbolism. What about Inland Empire? Good luck reducing Inland Empire to such a straightforward story. People have tried, of course. But I’ve seen no one do so convincingly.

This shift really became noticeable with the release of Lost Highway. From that point on, it’s clear that the storytelling became rather more confusing than it had been previously. In the case of the earlier films in this period, Lost Highway itself and Mulholland Drive, the most common readings make sense of this by assuming that long stretches of the film are dream or fantasy sequences of Owl Creek type. But such readings are never quite complete: there remain outlier elements, impossible to categorize as real or imagined and so threatening the integrity of the whole model.

Let’s take Lost Highway itself as our case study. The film’s main character in the first third, Fred Madison, vanishes early on, phasing out in a surreal sequence after he is arrested for his wife’s murder, a crime of which we suspect he is likely guilty. He is replaced by Pete Dayton, a young auto mechanic and our protagonist for the next third. Pete is in many ways Fred’s foil: sexually confident and successful unlike the jealous and repressed Fred, and working a masculine blue-collar job where Fred played the saxophone.

The “dream reading” of Lost Highway is then simple: tormented by sexual jealousy and possibly guilt over his wife’s murder, Fred slips into a fugue state, re-imagining himself as a bike-riding stud who works with his hands and rescues damsels in distress. But the dream is unstable; the old elements of misogyny and insecurity creep in; Pete dissolves and Fred is restored.

Such a reading has been popular since the film’s release. It is endorsed by an authority no less than lead actress Patricia Arquette:

He hates women, he doesn't quite trust her, even though she is his wife. He kills her but can't remember it, then he recreates himself as this virile young man and meets her again. And now, she actually wants to fuck him and she is in love with him. But even in this version, she is a dirty whore. In this man's mind, a woman is always the monster.

(Apparently co-screenwriter Barry Gifford expressed similar thoughts in the April 1997 edition of the magazine Cinefantastique, but frankly I can’t be bothered to track down a copy).

There is no doubt a grain of truth here: this reading gets at some of the movie’s core themes, some section of what it’s really about. And yet strangeness persists. Fred Madison does not wake up back in his cell, forced to confront his murder sentence in the cold clarity of realist cinema. No— instead he re-emerges in a remote cabin, confronts the pale camera-carrying figure who has haunted the film, slits a man’s throat in the desert, and finally returns to his own mansion to whisper the same words that he’d heard through his intercom in the very first scene: “Dick Laurent is dead.” What?

There’s a lot to analyze here, if we’re interested in a complete accounting. Certainly, Lynch’s spiritual views play a role (Lynch is a major proponent of Transcendental Meditation, a quasi-religious movement and meditative practice rooted in Vedantic Hinduism). So you can look for elements of reincarnation and non-dualism, and you’ll not come up empty; the same holds if you come with a psychoanalytic lens. But I’m not interested in a complete accounting. I just want to broaden your horizons: to convince you that a “superposition reading,” unlike in the case of Owl Creek, is really necessary if you aren’t willing to ignore large sections of the film. And this is probably the simplest example!

In the end, the main reason to consider such readings is simple: you get more from the films. The fact is that there are two approaches to watching a Lynch movie. In the first, you simply let the film wash over you as a pure artistic experience. Nothing wrong with this, of course, and it’s great fun for the right hemisphere, but sometimes the left also wants its due. When that happens, you might turn to the second approach: try to make sense of what you have seen. And if you do so, the conventional language of linear narrative, even with demarcations between dream and reality, will only take you so far.

Beyond that, there is the interesting stuff. What strange beasts lurk in this territory? You will have to find out for yourself. I have my own sundry suppositions, of course, and maybe one day I will write about thesesome, but not today. I’m not Martha Nochimson; I have no interest in telling you what the films really mean (although she is very good and you will learn a lot reading her). The interesting stuff I leave to you.

I will not attempt such an analysis here. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the following observation: if “Aubade” was not written by Philip Larkin— if I were to encounter it in a writing workshop or a literary journal or here on Substack— I would probably never think about it again. Really. Go back and give it another read. Make a note of every time you encounter an interesting poetic device: an insightful metaphor or simile, a clever allusion, even just a nice turn of phrase. Your mileage may vary; being generous, I count five. In a fifty-line poem.

These are rookie numbers. Take your favorite celebrated poem, or even just some random piece from the latest The New Yorker— I almost guarantee you’ll get a better ratio than one-in-ten. Okay, there’s rhyme and meter: some points for that. Still, this isn’t what we teach MFA students to do. As pure poetry, graded on the beauty and novelty of its language, nothing about this poem suggests that it should get its own Poetry Foundation page. And a Wikipedia page? Forget about it.

So stylistically, I’m not blown away. What about the subject matter? If the poem had some really novel idea to communicate, we could perhaps forgive the plainness in how it is communicated. It’s worth a go— after all, Parmenides wrote his philosophy in verse. Does this reading explain our subject’s reputation?

Again, for me at least, no. I fail to see any new ideas, or even any new perspectives on old ideas. We get it: dying sucks, and everyone has to do it. Cool. You’re telling me you focus on work to distract yourself? You’re telling me you drink to distract yourself? How original. Until the last stanza, the poem consists of a series of banal observations, notions that readily occur to anyone who contemplates their mortality for an hour or two. Giving credit where credit is due, that final stanza is by far the best. There Larkin shows he is still Larkin, and we get a surprising turn towards the quotidian with a handful of effective images. But the fact remains that eighty percent of this poem consists of unremarkable statements made unremarkably. This isn’t what you expect from Larkin, or from any poet with a Wikipedia page. This is what you expect from a community poetry anthology.

And yet— I have a confession to make. I like “Aubade.” I like it despite, and in some ways because of, all the rather unkind things I just wrote about it. What’s going on here?

Let’s start with a much easier question. What is art? Don’t click away; I still have a few hundred words left! I’m sure we’ll settle this once and for all.

I kid, of course. But I am willing to propose one rough criterion: art demands, by the means of its presentation, that we engage with it primarily if not entirely for the experience of engaging with it, and not for some other reason. That sounds a bit wordy— let’s see how it’s applied. Why am I reading Dune? I could come up with many reasons, but the main one is that I happen to desire the experience of reading Dune. Dune is art, check. Why am I currently reading Courant and Hilbert’s Methods of Mathematical Physics? It sure isn’t for the prose— in fact, it’s to figure out how to apply a certain numerical method to a problem I’m working on. Sorry, Courant and Hilbert, you’re out. I could go further and argue that this is why pure but not applied mathematics should be considered an art form, but this would take us too far afield, and I’d probably wake up to hate mail from grumpy computational physicists or something.1

Let’s get a bit crazier. What about urinals? When they’re in the gentlemen’s room, probably no one would call them art. But stick one in an art exhibition and give it a name like Fountain— well, now you’re on the fast track to a Wikipedia page. Try coming up with your own examples, or if you think I’m wrong, counterexamples. I promise it’s good fun.

What’s the lesson here? Art is more than the words or the paint or the semi-Riemannian hypersurfaces. It’s a relationship, nonlocal in time, between artist and medium and audience. The way we understand and experience it depends not only on what the artist puts in, but also on what we bring: our critical faculties, yes, but also our knowledge and our beliefs, our expectations and our prejudices. Sometimes, a urinal is something you pee in. Sometimes, it’s art— or at least, engaged with as art, which I claim is no different.2

So. What do I expect from Philip Larkin, when he sits down to write a poem about death? Let’s set the stage. Larkin wrote “Aubade” when he was 55. He had published four collections of poetry and two novels. He was a celebrated voice in English poetry— a crowded market in practically any generation since Shakespeare. He had already written “Church Going” and “Ambulances” and “An Arundel Tomb.” He was, in short, a master poet, laden with the experience of years yet still at the height of his powers.

What do we assume about someone like that? A kind of serenity, certainly: we imagine that the poet sits outside keeping track of robins and wood sorrel, jotting down his observations and soaking up wisdom like rainwater all the while. Surely in his old age he floats lily-calm in the true Tao. And when his time draws short, we expect him to accept his death smilingly, fading into the big nothing like the Buddha or like Yoda, whoever was calmer.

But this isn’t what Larkin gives us. Larkin gives it to us straight.

Larkin says: Look, kid, I’m fifty-five years old and I’ve been writing acclaimed poetry for most of my life, and you know what? This whole dying thing scares the shit out of me. I don’t have it all figured out. Thinking, reading, writing— all this only gets you so far. In the end, your death is set on you like a dog. You can train, get faster, pump yourself with steroids— you can’t outrun a dog. This is how it is. This is how it has to be.

To me, at least, this resonates. I feel something. And so it doesn’t matter that the poem, evaluated as “pure poetry,” fails. It’s not a good poem, overall— it’s a blunt and artless poem, which is great art precisely because it was written by a brilliant and artful poet. Is it fair that it evokes such a reaction in me, when I wouldn’t think twice about the same words in the same order coming from your great uncle who took up sonnet-writing after retirement? Nope. That’s life. The rich get richer, and sometimes good artists make good art even when they make bad art. Tough!

But we artistic plebeians shouldn’t give in to despair. Anonymity, genuine or effective, affords its own opportunities. The question I wonder what sort of person wrote this? can gnaw away at a reader’s head; all the better if they can’t answer it on Wikipedia. For most of history, the means by which artists could get their work in front of an audience were limited and regimented. Think of the literary-magazine-to-traditional-publishing pipeline. In our Internet age, the space of possibilities is vastly richer, ranging from print to digital, mainstream to fringe, Big Five to indie press. The way you put work in front of an audience— as well as what information you offer about yourself— is important not only from a commercial perspective, but also from an artistic one.

And so, unlike Larkin, I leave you with a note of optimism that I hope is neither wan nor brittle. It is just this. The ways to create and experience art today are enormous in number, far beyond any precedent in human history. What will you do with them?

The sun is a note taped in the sky
and you're thinking about spreadsheets.
You make a hasty pass,
an elk struts on the tarmac ahead,
a squall throws you under a white blanket,
or a sudden wind tackles you—

whatever it was, you hit the brakes—
squinted at, the black ice beneath you
looks almost like pavement.
Your tired treads try to grasp it,
to hold anything against their rubber,
but the cold road turns its shoulder.

Then, the world spinning beneath you:
all you can do is break the snowy fringe,
release the wheel, the gas, the brakes,
let winter throw you to its margins
landing nose-first in the ditch
at the angle of a pencil in a hand.

The foundation stones sink:
greasy brown moss scrambles up the wall
from the river's still face,

sailors clawing at flotsam.
There are keyhole windows into empty dark,
coarse oaken doors to nowhere.

Here punts glide by with the ease of centuries,
ducks floating along with their wake
in this building-buttressed model sea.

On these waters you'll see ghosts—
watch wine-drunk nymphs twirl and dance
pointing their toes up to the sky;

and on the banks, and on the bridges,
and everywhere in alcoves and spires,
limestone knights stride backwards

below the depths.

Between the stems of rose and marigold
he finds them clinging— oval forms agleam
in green and amber, swept from a tale told
of some antlered strangeling’s alien dream—

not of this place. The wings begin to hum.
A tinny croon, small engines starved of fuel,
a rise, a dart— the boy now chases some
half-formed mosaic swirling gemstone pool—

and swipes, and clasps one in his hand. Aglow,
he calls his mother, proud of what he’s done.
She frowns, and tells him what he did not know:
here garden-eaters sheltered from the sun.

To squeeze, or let the little oval go?
Unasked, he thinks and thinks, and does not know.

Between plaster and lath
the house sighs creaking
like an old smoker’s lung,
before a skitter and a pause—
two shadows among shadows
flit from a crack in the wainscotting
across that old caked deadness
here clinging to the floorboards.

All that remains has gone hollow.
Silk and velvet are long-gnawed;
gold ceiling-hooks hold no chandeliers
and droop diaphragm-damp;
mirrors, clouded, catch no faces
but those of dusty clocks.

At night, an exploration may come:
a slipping through halls and into rooms
where gowns went gliding over the floors
like moth-wings in flight,
where voices slid along taffeta rugs
and stuck clotted in the ash of chimneys.

Once only, a cone of light
ran from room to room,
strangeling beam from some
crepuscular realm conjured,
there a mere fifteen minutes
then gone.

In shadows among shadows
the memory of footsteps survives—
a scurry here, a rustle there,
small whiskered echoes of those
who danced long before—
and when the walls whisper back
they whisper of forgetting.

A shrew raising his worm nose
shaded underneath twin fronds,
dot-eyed clod wrapped in rawhide
clumping loam in his pink claws—

he is the shape of the earth,
lowly mound borne up squealing
muddy-mouthed, sniffing the soil,
squeezing venom from his teeth.

Autumn is settling him back
down into the sod, whirring
to a cold igneous stone
in the shade of sequoias,

still as the mountains behind
but for the still-twitching snout,
waiting out the fox, the hawk,
thin flesh-pencil curling in.

And there is a boy also
with his hands in his pockets.
He meets the shrew's driblet eyes,
feet straddling the cold-cracked path.

A rusted tractor trailer grips the road.
The headlights smear like ink-blots in the rain
as worn-down tires, complaining of the load,
go skidding at a bend and hydroplane.

The chassis shudders grinding on the rail,
rears up the left wheels, falls upon its side
and shears through grass to rest. And now the wail
of twenty horses rings out from inside.

Police arrive. The driver is unharmed.
Eight of the horses died at once, they find,
and five had wounds too grave to heal. Disarmed,
the sheriff shoots them dead. It's only kind.

Think now of what those final seven knew, 
and did not know. Do matters change for you?

What is it you have forgotten—
the smooth origin-field, the immense bulk
of men there gathered, swine
with their deep flanks and
vendibles of the peasant—

no, not these,
but perhaps something else:
eight hundred years’ etchings
in a stone, the iron arches
carving out a section of sky,
the great yellow-faced clock
ticking on down to a time
no one had yet known—

nor these, nor these.
Maybe things of a third sort,
captured in the corners 
of darkroom prints: 
children tossing a ham hock
back and forth like a football,
offerings held in hands outstretched
to butchers made prophets an hour,
an old man shouting about back ribs
in a language almost no one understands
but still getting customers—

but maybe nothing at all.
Or just this:
that blood is not a thing easily replaced,
and that no pulsebeat thrums forever
without renewal.

Redman knew well that only one creation here had ever truly mattered. Not the national laboratory, not the supercomputer slumbering beneath the earth, certainly not the guided tour. It was the moment in July of 1945 when the sky split everywhere into white-hot lightning and dread torrents flew faster than cannonballs over the desert and for just a moment— the initial flash lasting longer than anyone had expected— all the cleverest men in God’s cleverest country thought they had lit the atmosphere ablaze and doomed the earth. At that time Redman would not be born for another twenty years. And yet it sealed his destiny all the same, because it took the physicist from a mere stamp collector to an augur in whose visions lay access to the buried powers of creation. From the moment he learned of the Trinity test he knew what he would become.

For the most part, Los Alamos looked like the rest of the state. On the cab ride into the town Redman passed wall after wall of white stucco and red adobe. Each facade seemed to have drawn from the same pool of decorations: cactus and yucca, tile mosaic and dream-catcher. He pressed his cheek to the window, tired from the nine-hour flight. Houses and storefronts melted into a beige blur.

The laboratory’s main building, in Redman’s eyes, was an atrocity. Cuboids of aquamarine glass cut through great steel drums at odd angles, all seeming to be thrown thoughtlessly together as if by a child stacking toy blocks. Outside the main entrance, a man in a tight button-down shirt waited for him, smiling. Gabriel Dubé. A further distaste turned in Redman. As the cab pulled curbside he saw that the wrinkles crossing Dubé’s cheeks had grown deep as canyons and that his short wiry hair was now receding, carving out a horseshoe-shape in his head.

“John!” called Dubé. “It’s good to see you.” Irritation shot through Redman— only his closest friends called him Jonathan, and no one called him John.

“Likewise,” he said, shaking hands nonetheless.

“I volunteered to show you around. Well— was volun-told, is more like it!” Dubé laughed, exposing the great yellow incisors that had followed Redman from Oxford to Pasadena to Copenhagen and now, somehow, to this long-imagined personal sanctorium. “You’ll spend most of your time in the Bradbury building. Follow me.”

On the tour, Redman bit his lip. He reminded himself why he had come— not to advertise, not to brown-nose, not for any reason a buffoon like Dubé could overturn. He would smile and nod and smile again until it was over. They passed lecture theatres, server rooms, walls made entirely of whiteboard. A plastic sheen reminiscent of shrink wrap seemed to cling to the halls. At one point they passed a small fluids lab where a long-haired graduate student was curled up in a sleeping bag, nestled between a terminal and a centrifuge.

“That’s Sean,” said Dubé. “Odd fellow. Says he likes to sleep in the lab so he can get up and check his simulations. Damn good coder, though.”

Redman had few plans for the first day. He spent the late afternoon in a conference room, motioning now and then to jot something down but really behaving just as he had with Dubé: smile and nod and smile again. He got to his hotel room at around eight in the evening, and ordered tacos. They arrived soggy.

Strange dreams came to Redman that night. A flood of ants spewing from some rusted forest drainpipe, devouring leaves and shrubbery until only a barren waste remained. A young boy trapped at the bottom of a dumbwaiter shaft. Dubé, pale and ragged in some abandoned tunnel, yellow teeth flickering by firelight, grinning like a mad prophet. This final image woke him up in a hazy sweat. He hadn’t dreamed so vividly since before he was an undergraduate. Most nights he didn’t dream at all.

The second day was to be a serious one. Redman found that it took two evenings to overcome the jet lag crossing the Atlantic, and so delayed the truly important business until he’d be clear-headed. He gave his talk in the morning, stumbling over his words and mixing up one slide with the next. When it was finished he was forced to realize it was the worst of his career. Yet what upset him the most was not his poor delivery nor even the spurious content, but that the room still hung on his every word, nodding with wide eyes and mouths agape like seekers before an oracle. This realisation came to him about half an hour in and conjured a dread that would survive the rest of the day.

As expected, the young and hopeful thronged him after the talk. The black-plastic lectern before which he stood caught bleary reflections, and as the queue formed he noticed more and more the image of his face distorted there. The wrinkles and laugh lines smeared and distended. Somehow, he had begun to look rather like an old man. Rather, even, like Dubé.

Conversations ran over him like water. The last person he spoke to was a rake-thin Scottish postdoc who clutched a moleskin notebook against his chest.

“Thanks for the talk,” said the postdoc. “ I was just wondering— your results, what do you think they say about our chances of detecting ultralight bosons via gravitational waves?”

Redman’s talk had concerned neither ultralight bosons nor gravitational waves. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s rather outside my area of study, to be honest.”

“Oh,” said the postdoc, shuffling on his feet. “Sorry. I guess I sort of thought everything was your area of study.”

Redman sighed. “That’s just what the science press writes.”

Lunch was provided: a collection of miniature vegetarian dishes served in small glass bowls. The locals devoured these, but for Redman the entire affair was bland and depressing. Plastic, again, like the walls and the tables and the lectern. He ate little and twirled his spoon in one of the bowls until the cauliflower turned to purée.

Afterwards, another meeting: impromptu presentations, the six-point manifesto. Dubé sat at the end of the table and delivered an extemporaneous monologue lasting some twenty minutes and having nothing to do with the discussion whatsoever. During this, Redman thought about his reasons for disliking the man. The petty battles fought from opposite ends of a lecture theatre. Snide remarks and political appointments. The publication rejected, in apparent anonymity, but with a clue smuggled into the first letter of each line in the referee’s report: D-U-B-E. A coincidence? Perhaps. But two months later, a very similar paper had appeared with Dubé as third author. Redman ran his eyes on the other faces in the room, each seeming to possess a deadness all its own— glassy eyes or a sallow quality in the cheeks or skin that sagged like a too-large sweater. Where was Fermi’s virile wit, Oppenheimer’s quiet incision, Teller’s wild genius? Gone; driven from this place with that supersonic wind. No matter. When the time came he would pay his due reverence to the ghosts, in silence, in understanding.

In the evening he told the others that he was meeting an old friend for dinner. This was a lie. He sat in his hotel room with the blinds shut tight and the desklamp on, holding a glass of scotch in one hand and a pulp sci-fi novel in the other. And he searched the cream-white walls for imperfections but found none.

The second night, Redman did not dream.

He woke in a solemn mood. On the third day, nothing was booked for him. Here too he had lied, though in a subtler way and well in advance. He'd claimed he wanted a day alone to tour and pay visits. But in truth he had planned only one visit and one destination.

Redman had arranged to rent a sedan. He drove a little over two hundred miles south, leaving the vehicle in an empty parking lot ringed by a shallow arroyo. His goal lay over a fence fringed with barbed wire— the site was open to the public only one day a year and he had not come on that day. But this was no obstruction. He had brought a bolt cutter.

Thirty-five miles from Socorro, in the dead dry heat of the Jornada del Muerto, a black lava-rock obelisk stood planted like an ancient arrowhead mounted upright in its display. A brass plate on its face recalled the time and place of the cleaving there dealt to the world. In the sands all around there still lay twinkling hints of the green crystal like sea glass into which the desert had been by that fatal instant baked, holding within themselves no trace of the cholla and mesquite and jackrabbit and armadillo whose incinerate forms vanished into the inch-deep molten lake. Trinitite, the scientists called it. And in 1953 they had it disposed of almost to the shard, but no removal is ever complete.

Redman walked for another hour. He’d brought two small plastic canteens full of water and drained one along the way. Once only, he stopped for shelter in the shade of a cottonwood. He didn’t know it but about half of his journey overlapped with that of the conquistadors in the transit of their caravans northward to Santa Fe. The same heat had hung over them too: arriving at the Rio Grande, their records claimed two horses drank so much water that their sides burst open.

Redman was not thinking of these, nor of the cholla, nor of the mesquite. He hardly even noticed the jackrabbit that went skittering over the earth before him like a stone skipped on a still pond. He was thinking of the base camp that had once stood here, the observation points like foxholes, the gathering about the flash in the sky where all lay staring through carbon-blackened lenses that their eyesight survive. All removed: only the obelisk remained to tell of what happened. But Redman knew that all things to be built leave an imprint. That no removal is ever complete.

He arrived at the obelisk around noon. A warm wind ran through the creosote-bush; over the horizon a Russian thistle went loping by. Somewhere distant there came a low rumbling. Three hundred and sixty-four days a year this remained a military testing ground and idiot bombs still cratered the sand. Redman was unfazed. They would not fall near the obelisk, nor on his path. He pressed his hand to the metal. It was cool, somehow. The only cool thing in sight. And for a moment he felt it all flow into him: the great conjoining of human potentials, the scalpel-clean cut slicing history into a before and an after. The mark, even, of his own self-creation.

Yet something else followed. This was not enough.

He had planned to return to Los Alamos directly. On the way to the obelisk he’d noted the sparse landmarks, ensuring he would not be delayed. The amount of water was calculated to last only the expected journey. There were many reasons, in short, for Redman to turn back, and a physicist then in the fifteenth year of his professorship ought to have known better than to continue into regions unknown. But continue he did. Past the creosote-bush, past the Russian thistle, on and on until even the far-off rumbling vanished and all that remained was sun and dust and sand. He had to go further, further. Something called him.

At some point those old images of scientific legend faded from Redman’s memory. The ghosts had departed; here the desert was haunted by silence alone. He spent some fifteen minutes standing over a spherical barrel cactus which sprouted between two chunks of limestone, and new thoughts arrived. That life had sprung up even in this crack among deadness. That the cacti had been here long before the first human footfall, and would endure— in Redman’s view— long after our tools of self-destruction sealed in time the last. That this living testudo, surface arrayed with spears in defense of its slight reservoir, still saw fit to flower for a few days every year.

Some time later he’d drained the second canteen. He remained lost.

The heat began to get to him. He passed a section of petrified wood, the bark crystallized amber-orange so that the split face took the appearance of a geode, and he thought he could see hints of some fluid pulsing in the glistening spiderweb cracks like blood through capillaries. A handful of odd-shaped sandstone protrusions became a band of coyotes, until the shock subdued and a closer look broke the illusion. Murky blots seemed to flicker on the horizon like far-off pagan dancers.

Redman knew well that he could die here. That weeks later someone might stumble upon the bones of a once-noted professor of physics, identified only by his teeth, soon to be remembered less for his work than for the strangeness of his passing. And yet— though his rational mind insisted this was an effect of the dehydration— the thought did not disturb him.

His throat was dry and scratchy but the need to urinate came all the same. What to do— recycle the liquid like some roadshow survivalist? No, he knew better; this would only parch him further. Better to let it spill into the sand. To water, at least, a patch of grama grass.

A time came when he felt he could drag himself forward no longer. With no memory of how he arrived he had entered a mudcracked playa, the land underfoot sectioned into even-sized yet irregular shapes like a map of counties. And Redman then carried no thoughts at all. Only sensations: heat and light and sweat.

He struggled onward. Something bright flashed at the very edge of his vision, some white shape blurred and diffracted. Onward, onward. The white thing congealed; he began to make out the shape of a tree, leafless and bone-white and dead. What manner of tree? Neither cottonwood nor mesquite, greater than both and indeed greater than anything that should have sprouted there, vast leg in the desert by some antique traveller recalled. Redman made it to the thing’s foot and collapsed to his knees, emptying the contents of his stomach upon the earth so that yellow-green rivulets ran in the cracks.

A single branch extended from the great trunk’s side, just a little above eye level. Redman looked up at it. He saw then that he was not alone— on the branch there stood a burrowing owl, lean body tucked in the shape of a raindrop, slanted ochre eyes locking him in place. Redman was not a religious man. But the sudden need to confess to this stranger rose up in him all the same. His dry mouth cracked open.

“It’s true, damn it all,” he said. “I whittled my days away like so much nothing. Spent them on trivialities.” Sweat dripped into his eyes; the hot pain sent him wincing earthward. When he’d wiped them clean and looked back up, the owl had vanished. But something else was in its place: a Jornada hawk, stoic on the branch, all coiled muscle and dagger-claw. A thing made for killing. Redman had heard no indication of a flight and began to suspect he was losing his senses, but this was a secondary matter. The confession had to continue.

“And it wasn’t just that either. I didn’t just stop doing what mattered, I forgot what mattered entirely. Like I thought life was a long procession of distractions.”

He rubbed his eyes a second time, and again the branch had a new occupant. This time it was a vulture, red-faced, wings outstretched and fringed with white, swollen and contorted in odd places like a corpse mid-bloating. Gazing into the black bead-eye, Redman knew he had but one more thing to confess.

“Like I thought I would never die.”

This time he saw the vulture fly off, though after it left the branch he could not track its passage across the sky. He was alone once more. Only a small burst of his strength had returned— enough, at least, to escape the vomit-smell. He made the first motions on his hands and knees, then got to his feet limping. Expecting this would lead to nothing but a death somewhere else.

But the playa did not go on forever. Eventually Redman came to a steep formation of basalt, and, rolling himself over the side, obtained a clear view of the horizon. And in the distance, he could just make out a thin grey line. The fence. A goal, then. He lapsed in and out of awareness but never once stopped moving in its direction. Arriving, he knew he wouldn’t have the strength to cut his way out. But fortune was kind. A few sections down, the barbed wire running over the top had snapped from rusting. There was a safe place to climb, and climb— and to fall, on the other side, landing harshly on his left shoulder. Dislocated. Yet he could stand, and move. He had only to return to the parking lot. How to find it?

He still had a physicist’s mind. The position of the sun, the angle of the fence. These were all he needed to orient himself.

And in the end— with a thirst that scratched like sandpaper and the sharp hot ache of a body not quite in its right shape— he made it to the parking lot. There, he noticed something he’d missed before. At the nadir of the encircling arroyo a thin stream ran. He cupped water to his mouth. Perhaps this journey had been planned, somewhere, after all.

It was a little over three hours back to Los Alamos. He steered with one hand.

The sun began to set during Redman’s return. By the time he reached the hotel’s parking lot, it had vanished. The pain in his shoulder hadn’t dulled all the while. He figured he’d have to contact a doctor eventually— claim he fell out of bed, perhaps. But first he wanted to lie down.

In the corridor leading to his room, he encountered one final strangeness. A man, knocking on the door to his room, looking concerned. Short wiry horseshoe-printed hair and a tight button-down shirt. Gabriel Dubé.

“Looking for me?” said Redman.

Dubé whipped around. “John! Folks at the institute were getting worried. No one could get in touch with you. I, ah, offered to come and check.”

Redman nodded. “Sorry. Got a little held up there. I’m quite alright.” It was then that Redman realized something incredible: looking at Dubé, no wave of reflexive disgust had come over him, no trace of anger or contempt. The man had been reduced to a man as any other.

“There was, ah, a second reason, you see— well, we were planning this group picture, to put on the website, you know, and there was a change of plans, so the photographer is coming at eight in the morning tomorrow.”

“Sure. I can be there.”

“Ah, good, good. We just got a little spooked, since you weren’t answering your email. Or your phone.”

“Well. Thanks for coming to check on me.”

“No problem, no problem. You have a good night, yeah John?”

“Sure. You too, Gabriel.”

In his room, alone, Redman of course knew the truth— that Dubé was really there to secure his image for advertising purposes, that honest concern had likely played no role at all. But now the knowledge was merely amusing. Robbed of its venom. In his most charitable moments, he even entertained the notion that some small measure of honest concern had helped bring Dubé to the hotel after all.

He was dog-tired. There’d be one more thing to do before sleep, he decided. After a quick Google search he wrapped the injured arm in an arc over his head, pulling on his elbow with the other. A pop and a jolt and the shoulder returned to its right place. Pain in the joint, at first, but throbbing down toward nothing. No doctor needed after all.

He had three more days in Los Alamos. Three more days of meetings and manifestos, seminars and scribblings. At one time he had dreaded this denouement, but somewhere in the desert he’d left this dread behind. Left many dreads behind, and perhaps something else besides.

Falling asleep, his final thought was a foggy optimism. He hoped that he would dream.

You have learned what it is
to be alone inside yourself.
You have waited until faces and treelines

and headlights in the distance
swirl into a milky void, flickering
in and out like so many forms in static.

And you have wondered then
whether the stars are really fixtures
held always like moths in amber,

or whether every sunrise some great beast
itself drifting through cold dark space
breathes in the sea of lights, remakes them,

and every night exhales.

Today it happened:
the stone pillar, water-worn at the base,
slouched as if seasick 
and collapsed.

A bird's nest had been sitting on the top,
so six blue robin's eggs rolled off the rock
and vanished in the froth.

On the mainland they call them flowerpots. 
A dandelion had sprouted from a shore-facing crack,
hair on the head that hung.

Thirteen years ago to the day,
a boy sat here, on the bench wedged
between hedge-rows and a plinth
jutting forward like a thrust stage—

the boy is gone now, slipped out
through a gap in the bushes
with one hand full of thistle-branch
and the image of two cold grey eyes—

and someone else has returned.
The playwright’s mouth is an iron latch;
through his feet the poetry seeps
like spilled wine into the earth—

so this new man stands with his hands folded,
because the bench now is November-cold
and the Shakespeare looks unlike Shakespeare
and will not tell what he’s forgotten.