About four months ago now, I was travelling back from Sydney, Australia, where I had just finished a work trip, to London. This is a journey that involves a number of legs, two of them daunting long-haul flights. The first, for me, was a 16 hour flight from Sydney to Dallas. Faced with the prospect of over 16 hours in a Qantas economy seat, I did what I had to do and queued up all three Lord of the Rings movies, which the plane provided on its on-demand service.

My relationship with the Lord of the Rings franchise is complicated. Although I was not allowed to watch the films as a child, I grew up in the 2000s, and achieved consciousness during peak LOTR cultural fervor. As such, my first memories of the famous fantasy series are essentially tie-in related. We used to receive a lot of catalogues, which I would read cover-to-cover, and I remember being captivated by the reproductions of the elven jewelry from the films which for some reason were sold by these dubious direct to consumer companies. I knew the shape of the Evenstar before I knew who Arwen was. My best friend, who was allowed to watch PG-13 movies, owned a collection of LOTR paraphernalia, including, to my fascination, a Lord of the Rings branded Monopoly game, which we played all the time. In my proto-sexual 11 year old brain, I developed a sort of pining obsession with Legolas, to my mind the ideal man, which was mostly channeled through the small figurine which represented him on the Monopoly board, and which I always chose as my player. My friend also showed me pictures of Orlando Bloom as Legolas on the internet sometimes. I was captivated.

It never really occurred to me that these movies and their various tie-ins came from books. I loved to read very much, but had very little interest in classics or stories about adults. When a relative gave me the Lord of the Rings trilogy for Christmas one year (I must have been about 12), I read The Fellowship of the Ring, got upset that my beloved Legolas wasn’t dark and alluring but, in fact, boring and chaste, and felt generally annoyed by the lack of romance and female characters. When the fellowship broke up, I wasn’t able to take the emotional strain, and found myself unable to get through The Two Towers.

All this to say that, by the time I finally saw the movies as a teenager, I had been steeping so long in a landscape of aesthetics shaped by them that they felt essentially familiar. I watched the extended editions back to back with a group of friends who seemed to take them as religious texts. They wore green cloaks with leaf pins to school, and sometimes got together to make ‘lammas bread’. I had the sense that they were showing me a world that meant a lot to them, in its story and its visuals. However, their insistence that we encounter the films as a grueling marathon that would ultimately last until five in the morning did not exactly turn me into a convert. And so I grew up, always touched by the series, but never immersed in it. Then, I moved to England and read the books.

The books surprised me, as they are, like most iconic things, more singular and strange than one expects them to be. What struck me most about them was Tolkein’s unusual use of tone. Especially in Fellowship of the Ring, each new location feels like it belongs to a different story, and the corresponding narratorial voice has a strikingly different tone. The narrative voice of the parts set in Hobbiton, for example, is comic, gentle and slightly winking; the narrative voice of the parts set in Elvish locations gains a melancholic, serious register. This tendency to veer into different registers, as if the books encompass a bunch of different genres at once, continues throughout the series. These varying tones are tied to places and sometimes characters – the Aragorn of Return of the King carries with him a tone that feels quasi-biblical. This use of tone is remarkable because it allows us to feel nostalgic for the quaint and humorous world of Hobbiton even as we are reading the novels – although the hobbits, in their dialogue, always carry elements of this tone, they, like the reader, are thrust into a larger world of breathless horror and distant, intimidating elves. By the final battle and the end of the journey to Mount Doom, this tonal variance collapses and the narrative starts to feel somewhat unrelenting, as if we, like the characters, can only continue to trudge on.

As a reader, these tonal shifts allowed me to feel the richness of the world, as if I were not reading just one series by one author, but instead a collection of books written in different places, even in different languages. However, the grounded and warm perspectives of the hobbits, who are always in at least a little over their heads, allows for a through line that, again, carries with it a constant and painful nostalgia, as none of these new stories will ever feel as cozy and approachable as the first small story of Bilbo’s birthday party. To juxtapose what is essentially a funny little tale of English country life with a series of grander, often colder, often humorless tales is to force us to react to that juxtaposition in some way. This, I think, is why the books captured the cultural imagination and shaped the emergent fantasy genre – the way in which they are written creates an emotionally charged process of exploration for the reader, an exploration that feels almost spatial and involves the negotiation of nostalgia as one encounters new peoples and places. Fantasy as a ‘worldbuilding’ genre has its roots in this story, as well as fantasy as a taxonomical genre which is scaffolded by the sorting of characters into some kind of group based on race, magical ability, even personality.

This collection of places, peoples and tones that is Lord of the Rings undergirds so much of the cultural imaginary I grew up in that it’s almost suffocating. As is probably clear by my reminiscing about playing Lord of the Rings Monopoly, I existed in a cultural world that was defined against what my friends and I perceived as ‘popular culture’, but was nevertheless itself a kind of alternative popular culture, the kind of thing you turn to when you grow up in dull suburbia and don’t really feel like you fit in. I’m not going to call this ‘nerd culture’, because I feel like that’s outdated, and it doesn’t encompass, for example, stoner girls who really love horror movies, or kids who really love David Lynch. Fandom, although a part of this, doesn’t necessarily encompass it either – not everyone who pursues these aesthetics Instead I think of it as a kind of ‘mass alternative’ culture. When traditional structures feel stifling, people turn to fiction as a way of remaking the world and finding community. Across the US, a place defined by its small, homogenous communities, mass alt proliferates. This isn’t a new concept, but it’s a helpful one for thinking about how a huge portion of the American population uses fiction to make sense of their lives.1

Mass alternative culture is defined by the cultivation of a relationship with media, whether an individual piece of IP or a genre. The Lord of the Rings films are a triumph of the machinery of mass alt. In providing a series of distinct places that match the tonal shifts of the books, they essentially achieve a kind of capture of imagination, allowing people who use fantasy to allocate meaning in their lives to draw upon a collection of ready-made images and vibes to do so. It is not an overreaction to say that, for a large group of people, the Lord of the Rings films, and to a lesser extent the books, inform what it means for something to be beautiful, for something to be cozy, for something to be ethereal. They inform what and who we desire and how we imagine the past.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the legacy aesthetics — I mean cottagecore, dark academia, Y2K, the aesthetics that introduced the concept of ‘aesthetic’ as a noun into the mainstream and changed the way in which people conceptualize their relationships with their stuff and the environments around them. It’s not lost on me that a phenomenon like ‘cottagecore’ is downstream of alternative subcultures, but 2020s aesthetics also seem to reflect something else — the taxonomic impulse that characterises Tolkeinien fantasy. Lord of the Rings begat Dungeons and Dragons and now, 50 years later, the impulse to categorize oneself via ‘aesthetic’ persists stubbornly as a pillar of contemporary culture, often critiqued but never eliminated. I think this is because the fantasy genre, as defined by LOTR, provides a sort of scaffolding for how we navigate the imaginary. The films add another layer to this by providing handy images that we can use as anchors in this process. The taxonomic fantasy genre has reached its final form.

When I watched all three movies on my Qantas flight to Dallas, I vacillated between feeling moved to tears and vaguely disgusted. I was suddenly aware that these films worked on me. The music worked on me, the mind-boggling set design worked on me, the performances worked on me. And each scene was value laden to the point of overdetermination, as if my life thus far had set me up to make connections with these images. I remembered time spent with my high school friends. I remembered sitting in my car in the parking lot of my abysmal fast food job, listening to ‘May It Be’ by Enya, before every shift when I was 19. I remembered joking with my boyfriend about how the low ceilings in our English cottage were ‘designed for Hobbits’. What does it mean when a series of blockbuster movies becomes an index for your life?

Coda: I want to look like an elf at my wedding

When I was briefly and ill advisedly engaged some years ago, I spent hours online looking at rings. I became enamored with a certain jeweler who made intricate, fantasy inspired rings, such as the following:

Besides the Tolkeinian name, the architecture of the ring draws on the elfin visual language developed by the LOTR films.² I think I’m not making an overstatement when I say that, for a lot of mass alt fantasy lovers like me, the flowing, art-nouveau inspired forms that the films associate with the elves are pretty much the last word in aspirational elegance.2 Tolkeinian elves, as developed by the films, provide a shorthand for ideal beauty. This is why we would want to look like elves at our weddings. Imagining an ideal space means imagining an elfin space. Weddings are meaning-laden cultural events at which brides are encouraged to draw on fictional aesthetics (i.e. ‘looking like a princess) to realize such an ideal of beauty and luxury. It makes sense that alternative brides would want to feel like elves. Often, on engagement ring forums, I’ll see a line such as, ‘she asked me for a ring that looks like it was made by elves’. Girls just want to be Arwen.

Romance is a space of play, imagination, and possibility. People, especially women, use romance to think about what their life could be like — to negotiate their ideal. The Tolkeinian elf has captured this space. Since the advent of the Tolkeinian elf, people have been empowered to ask, ‘what if elves were sexy?’ This earth-shaking question changed how women fantasize forever. Contemporary vampires are downstream of Tolkeinian elves. So are sexy faeries:

These are the protagonists of ACOTAR. They’re just sexy elves. All fantasy creatures converge towards the sexy elf singularity.

What interests me about this Tolkeinian creep into the world of female fantasy is how the sexy elf vibe essentially dominates a certain kind of romantasy-inflected AI slop. You know what I mean:

This freaks me out because it seems like an extreme end-case of the situation I described above. Romance doesn’t have to be a place of possibility anymore, a place wherein you can negotiate the boundaries of your own life. Instead, the IP can do the imagining for you. A wedding pinterest board full of sexy elf AI slop is the most obvious manifestation of this, but you don’t really even need AI for this to be true. I think, to an extent, it was always true in alternative spaces, where some people seek to replicate fictional places that they feel nostalgia for despite their nonexistence. In a world where the imaginary is prime real estate with real financial stakes, what people are able to imagine is funneled into a few broad tropes, provided for us by behemoth franchises like, yes, LOTR. I don’t know. I still wouldn’t say no to the elf engagement ring.

Something that has bothered me for years is that most objects enter my life as consumer objects. Every object carries a narrative, and the fact that the objects that surround me are generally bought, either by myself or someone else as a gift, means that this narrative tends to be the narrative of the purchase. The narrative of the purchase is this: I am combing through various marketplaces, looking for the right thing. There is the sense that finding the right thing is somehow spiritual, and that if I am able to find it, it will alter my life. Browsing a bookstore idly, or hunting through Vinted for the perfect dress for a wedding – these experiences are pregnant with the sense that the right book, or the right dress, is there for me to be found. This sense of expectation mounts until I find the thing that I want to buy. The purchase, inevitably, is the epiphanic climax of this little plot. All the meaning is concentrated in this moment of purchase and immanence, as a new object enters my life.

The thing is, once the purchase occurs and I put the thing in my home, the narrative is over and the epiphanic charge that the object once carried fades. The object is integrated into mundane life. At worst, the object will become part of a pile. A disturbing experience which, I am sure, is familiar to everyone: a pile of wrinkled clothes sits ominously on a chair, or in a laundry basket. A pile of books sits on the desk, waiting to be donated. There is a deep sadness in this, as all these objects, once charged with meaning, are now part of the undifferentiated mass of stuff.

To me, clothing is the ultimate carrier of the purchase narrative. There is no class of object that is more interwoven into our being than a piece of clothing. Clothing is an extension of the body – we need it to survive, but we also use it to signal who we are, and who we want to be, to others. It is impossible to go out into society, to be a human being, without choosing to get dressed in some way. This means that clothing has a transformative quality which adds extra layers of meaning to the purchase narrative.

Fashion analysis has become especially popular in the past five years. There has been an explosion of interest in ‘personal style’, an elusive quantity which, if discovered, seems to promise a perfect flow of communication between oneself and the outside world. The language of personal style presents it as the conduit for the self – it is important to wear things which are ‘you’, which express who you are. Intricate languages have emerged on the internet to codify elements of personal style, and to help people develop it. Tibi founder Amy Smilovic’s ‘Style Class’, which began during the pandemic as a way to break down principles of good style, has generated innumerable pockets of online community in which people analyse how to wear clothes in an interesting way. Catchy concepts such as Alison Bernstein’s ‘three words’, which advises that, to find your style, you should pick three words that define it and make sure everything in your closet fits these three words, proliferate. Wrong shoe theory. Pop of red. Kibbe. Et cetera.

This kind of fashion analysis – even fashion esotericism – is in no way new, but I think the tendency for analytic, insular communities to pop up around fashion right now is indicative of a desire to impose meaning onto the consumer transaction of buying clothing. People sense intuitively that clothing is meaningful, and yet the model of shop à purchase à put in closet destroys this rich potential for meaning. It is natural to want to find a way to break the consumer narrative and turn clothing into something else. However, in the end, there was no fashion analysis that could help me. What helped me was learning to make my clothes.

This began with a desire to be closer to some family members who live far away – my mother knits, so I started knitting. My brother sews, so my boyfriend bought me a sewing machine for Christmas. I’ve been doing yarn crafts (knitting and crochet) now for a year and a half, and just completed my first garment on the sewing machine in June.

Making my own clothes has changed the way I think about objects, commerce, relationships, my environment, my self. I am not exaggerating when I say that there isn’t a part of my life it hasn’t touched. It has been a profoundly empowering and frustrating experience. I have always been an artist, but this is the first time in my life that I have been able to create useful objects with my hands, objects that are not simply decorative, but that move with me throughout the world.

Making clothes helped me reframe my sense of self by disrupting my identity as a consumer. This required that I think through how sense of self is constructed, and the role of objects and environment in the way that we construct this identity. Suddenly, I was thrown into an unfamiliar space where I was encountering objects in a different way, and this made me feel new, too.

This new relationship was built on a whole series of different relationships with other things in my life. I’ll talk about knitting here. When I knit a top, I get to choose how I want it to fit, whereas a retail item is likely not to fit my body very well. Knitting reconfigures how I feel about my body, because suddenly my body is not a problem, or something that can’t be matched to a never-ending parade of off the rack items – it is instead a neutral body in 3D space which provides the set of parameters that dictate the choices I make when I knit my top. Knitting also reconfigures the kinds of purchases I make when I need a new piece of clothing, and the decision making that goes into those purchases. I need to buy two things: yarn and a pattern. In buying yarn, I have learned more about natural fibers than I ever thought I would know, and I have learned that the fiber you use shapes fit and also interfaces with the climate around you. I now think about clothes as the tools that I use to manage my interaction with the climate. This has helped me develop my relationship with the landscape in which I with, as I’ve learned which fibers (often produced in Britain!) are best for a British climate in different seasons. Finally, and most unexpectedly, the process of knitting has reshaped my relationships. I’ve gotten closer to friends and family members who knit, as knitting always provides a pretext for hanging out and something to talk about. I don’t know if I could have finished my PhD without the grounding force of my weekly knitting circle – a surprising amount of my fellow classicists knit! I also feel closer to my mom.

I can’t help but think about this experience in relation to a previous social activity of mine, that of going shopping with family and friends. It used to really disturb me that my relationships were patterned by the rituals of consumption. In university, I made a few of my friends feel very hurt by refusing to thrift with them anymore for this reason. I love to go shopping, but it gave me a chill to realize that so many aspects of my life, both social and private, had been subsumed to the act of making a purchase, acquiring a new object through unmediated commerce. Now, when I want to spend time with someone, I ask them to make something with me.

This is not to say that making clothes does not create a new kind of consumer identity, in that a knitter or sewist is suddenly in the market for patterns, fabric, yarn, tools… there is a ton that you can buy when you get into one of these crafts. The other thing, too, is that the ways in which people make and interact with their handmade clothing are in part driven by the same market influences that dictate what people buy and how they make meaning out of it. Knitters often express a desire to make a sweater that looks ‘store bought’, ‘like J. Crew’, and popular knitting projects are often imitative of items that characters wear on TV and in movies – the Knives Out sweater, the Project Hail Mary sweater, the Rory in Gilmore Girls sweater… what does this mimetic desire mean when it is incarnated through crafting rather than buying? Is it meaningfully different, or a rerouting of the consumer impulse into something which ultimately ends up being exactly the same? On the other hand, trends within the knitting and crochet communities, which have exploded since the pandemic, now cross over into the world of ready-to-wear. I’m thinking of the famous Sophie scarf, a tiny knit scarf which exploded in the knitting community and seems to have pushed the rise of tiny scarfs in the fashion world in general. You can now go out and purchase a ready made Sophie scarf dupe.

In cynical moments, it is hard not to see how the production of handcrafts can become an imitation or even an extension of the fashion industry, which destroys our sense of meaning in clothing by subordinating it to the narrative of purchase. There is something disturbing about churning out a sweater that looks store bought — it makes me feel as if the process of creating has been drained of its potential and made to mimic the consumer relationship, the only kind of object relationship we have been trained to know. But this is perhaps too pessimistic. The wonderful thing about creating something is that the sustained period of making, and then of taking care of the thing once you make it, means that you remain in a sort of dialogue with the fiber and the finished object. There is a lot of possibility in dialogue. I think the special thing is that, when you spend a long time making an object, that object starts to shape you too.

I went to university in Montreal. I spent my summers in Massachusetts. This is the kind of person I was: I loved Twin Peaks and The X-Files. I wore oversized flannel shirts and ironic baseball caps, and a cropped denim jacket with patches that I had bought at the anarchist bookstore stitched on. My friends and I were ‘obsessed with the occult’ and spent a lot of time doing tarot and reading each other’s astrological charts. One time, I went on Craigslist and made a post asking if anyone had any ghost encounters that they would like to share with me. I was on Tumblr and had been for years, and tended to discuss my legitimate mental health problems, which were genuinely pretty frightening, with trite language that I had learned on the site as a teenager. I loved horror movies. I was part of a friend group with an L-word style map of relationships in which people used quasi-legal language to navigate their personal grievances. In two separate cases, with two separate men, I was hurt by a romantic interest and I read him a speech I had prepared detailing the nature of his crimes. I went to shows where nobody danced, and everybody cried.

In summer I drove around in my dad’s beat up Prius between various rural towns and post-industrial small cities listening to Japanese Breakfast or whoever, arriving late at a series of jobs for which I was very badly suited.

My art, I am embarrassed to say, was mostly in the form of journal spreads which I posted on Tumblr, and which looked like this:

All this to say that the person described above is probably familiar to you, because this is a kind of person who has been a sort of cultural joke for years now: the ‘radically soft’ girl, the spooky szn tumblr cryptid girl, the symbol of the late 2010s. The queen of these girls is Phoebe Bridgers, who occupies a strange space in the cultural landscape, simultaneously lauded and vilified. The problem, to me, with Bridgers is that she is, as some say, ‘the voice of a generation’ – it’s just that nobody likes the people who make up that generation, to the extent where people want to argue that there aren’t that many of them, actually, that they don’t even really exist. Even some of those of us who were there, like me, simply do not want to be associated with that kind of thing. But it gets us anyway.

A tendency of American discourse that has intensified since the pandemic is the desire to identify the ‘real’ Americans. These are, of course, not people who live on the coasts, and especially not in New York or LA. They’re not educated liberals; they don’t live in major cities. Perhaps they are not women. They’re rural, salt of the earth, and they engage in conspiratorial worldbuilding. A lot of cultural discourse in recent years has been about identifying or placating or embodying this theoretical real American. I was recently surprised to see that this obsession with such a figure has not really flagged, despite its years long endurance. I recently read Anika Jade Levy’s book, Flat Earth, and was surprised to find how dated it felt – one of its characters is a rich southern girl who travels around middle America, talking to people about their conspiratorial thinking. She makes a film of this material, and it takes off. No one is writing a book about the the radical honesty blue haired liberal. She remains a sort of mythical oppositional figure, consigned to the recent past, and given no interiority.

Listening to Phoebe Bridgers makes me think, though, that the soft girl (who is, by the way, the radical honestly blue haired liberal) is just as much of a quintessentially American kind of person as the Q-Anon rural guy. As I myself realized when I put a stop to my own soft girl proclivities, no one wants to take this person seriously as a perspective or position. Our refusal to engage with the interiority of this kind of person without vilifying them, though, is essentially intellectually dishonest. So many people came of age as this type of person. So many people still are this type of person! And yet there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reflection on the experience of being like this, despite the fact that there is a lot of criticism.

I am reminded of that awful thinkpiece that came out some months ago, American Diner Gothic, in which the author uses a girl that he once dated for two months to crystallize an image of the downwardly-mobile, discord native young people of America. Anime and queerness are mainstream; this is because people are tied to online instead of physical localities. He writes, ‘It’s the emerging ensoulment of Western Massachusetts, not Boston; Buffalo, not Brooklyn; the Inland Empire, not LA... There are lights below — many places with many people, no longer distinct’. To me, one of the many great flaws of this article was that the author presented these mass-alternative people as a horde, an undifferentiated group. This article is interesting because it represents an attempt to collapse the real American and the radical honesty blue haired liberal. It doesn’t work, though, because he refuses to nuance the experience of this kind of person, instead creating another vilified feminine spectre who is all exterior.1

I’ve come to respect Phoebe Bridgers for a few reasons. The first is that I think she is a good pop artist, even though she annoys me a lot of the time. The second is that, despite immense pushback, she continues to embody the kind of perspective I describe above and provides a sort of poetics for dealing with this experience. The third is that I now think it is cowardly to reject the things you like just because you sense the cultural tide turning. If I had been a better person, maybe I would have given Phoebe Bridgers a fair chance from the beginning. There are far worse things, I’ve learned, than being an annoying girl who makes annoying art.

In 2020 Bridgers’ album Punisher came out. I think at the time I was not willing to publicly embrace Bridgers because I saw her as an analogue for a self I was distancing myself from, so I listened to her album in secret, on my runs. I still found her extremely annoying, but I was forced to admit that Punisher was an extremely good album, surprisingly spacious and spare. In it, she developed the cornerstones of her world – Halloween and shlock horror imagery, wandering in a melancholic way through cities, adolescence and growing up, healing and hiding. There are aliens and disguises and frank images of violence. Sometimes she was describing her coming of age, and, I was ashamed to admit, mine too.

The temporality of Punisher is a trauma plot, I think, one of hurt and healing, and healing as a coming of age. The temporality of Bridgers’ new album, Lost Weekend, is a lot stranger. The ghostly, cryptid energy that appeared on Punisher is now foregrounded as the theme. In the album, she seems to be trapped in a weary, suspended adolescence, encountering moments in her past not as parts of a narrative sequence, but instead as hauntings. These hauntings interact in strange ways with the present, offering detours and cul-de-sacs. At one point, she speaks of ‘learning the same lesson over and over again’; the lead single of the album is called ‘Lost Boys’. There is a sense that she wants to hide – at one point, she declares ‘Let’s go missing’, a message that fits with the general tone of the album rollout. She imagines the album as a piece of lost media, herself as someone hiding within it.

More than anything the album made me feel like I was 19 again, driving through the intense lush foliage of central Massachusetts. It made me realize that there is no rejecting that moment in time. Eventually some of us are going to have to come to terms with the parts of our lives that do not reflect who we are now. It’s possible that living through periods of intense cultural backlash toward certain modes of being creates a sense that the past is, indeed, haunted. Past selves with wrong aesthetics or politics or ideas lurk there. They are not a part of our narrative, but they linger in other strange ways. We become fragmented landscapes where strange beings lurk. It is possible to traverse a landscape, to discover long forgotten parts of the territory, without ever feeling like you are moving forward.

I also wonder if, in a culture where previous narratives of what it means to ‘move forward’ in one’s life are fragmented, inaccessible, or undesirable, life feels less like a collective experience of narrative sequence and more like, yes, a haunted house, or a corn maze, or a suburb. I know when I think back on my twenties, I see a strange collection of strange selves and places and events that are hard to string together. But sometimes a memory emerges of driving on a hot day under a canopy of leaves, listening to music. That will never leave me.

I am sorry to report that I was unable to do any such things, and that, if anything, I am more of a judgmental hater than ever before. I hated this movie. I thought it was an ordeal to watch and, frankly, anti-art. I make this claim because, to my mind, art and fiction are good because they are artificial. They are recognizable as being separate from the real. Good art — including Homer’s Odyssey — often reflects on or celebrates the ways in which it is artificial. In doing so, it reflects on the human compulsion to narrativize, to turn every sequence of events into a story with characters and meaning. Not all art has to do this, but the thing about the Odyssey is that it is obsessed with doing this. The poem is constantly thinking about narrative — how to tell Odysseus’ story, and how the story of Odysseus intertwines with the identity of the real Odysseus, the man who has just washed up on the shore of an island and needs to get home. Odysseus has been gone for a very long time. To secure his reputation, he needs to do two things: tell the story of where he was and, in doing so, continue the story of the hero Odysseus, and get the suitors out of his house so that he can retake the kingship of Ithaca. In this way, he fills both the narrative and literal lacunae that he has left by disappearing for so long. Both things are equally as important, even intertwined. The film is not interested in any of this.

In the poem, Odysseus gets shipwrecked and ends up on the island of the Phaeacians after spending years on Calypso’s island. This episode with the Phaeacians is omitted from the film. The Phaeacians are the first semi-normal human beings he has encountered since leaving Troy, although they live on the very edge of the Greek world. A stranger who has not yet revealed his name, he is invited into the Phaeacian royal house and given a feast, during which a bard sings songs about heros and the gods. Many of these songs are about Troy. Throughout the banquet, every time Odysseus hears a song about Troy, he covers himself with his cloak and cries. Eventually, he asks the bard to tell the story of the Trojan Horse. When the bard does so, this happens:

‘But the heart of Odysseus was melted and tears wet his cheeks beneath his eyelids. And as a woman wails and throws herself around her dear husband, who has fallen in front of his city and his people, seeking to ward off from his city and his children the pitiless day; and as she beholds him dying and gasping for breath, she pours herself around him and shrieks aloud, while the foe behind her beat her back and shoulders with their spears, and lead her away to captivity to bear toil and woe, while with most pitiful grief her cheeks are wasted—so did Odysseus let fall pitiful tears from beneath his brows.’ (trans. Murray).

His host, Nausithous, then notices his reaction and asks him to explain who he is and why he is crying. It is that this point that Odysseus tells the story that most people think of when they think of the Odyssey — the island-to-island journey with his men that encompasses the Cyclops episode, the Circe episode, the lotus eaters…

So, when Odysseus hears a story about himself being enclosed or hidden in the horse, from which he emerges, he sobs like a woman whose city is being besieged. But this woman, in her mourning, herself becomes a kind of enclosure through the language of encircling that is used in this simile, which mimics what Odysseus has been doing throughout the book, which is cover himself with his cloak whenever he moans. I bring this up because, through this imagery of enclosing and encircling, the text encourages us to see his revelation of his journey to the Phaeacians as an emerging from an enclosure which mirrors the Trojan horse story. Odysseus’ military might and cunning and his ability to tell his story are two sides of the same coin, the two parts of the hero that we call ‘Odysseus’. The thing about Odysseus is that he’s good at artifice! The Trojan horse and the fact that he is able to keep the Phaeacians rapt for four entire books while he explains where he’s been for the past years are both the same kind of thing. They are expressions of Odysseus’ skill and cunning. His ability to skillfully tell a story is as important a part of his heroism as his ability to sack Troy. And this all takes place in a song culture, where long narrative songs are sources of meaning and information but also pleasure. In telling his story, Odysseus is singing a song which is meaningful and potentially painful, but also pleasurable to listen to for his Phaeacian audience.

Because of this, the poem becomes in part about this kind of artifice, the ways in which a story is built and presented. It is a poem in part about its own composition and telling. It is about how identity and relationship are formed through this kind of telling, as Odysseus, throughout the poem, continually hides and reveals his identity, and this strategic withholding and revelation of self and story is interwoven with his warfare and violence — the Trojan horse, his plot against the suitors.

The Nolan film cuts the Phaeacians and instead has Odysseus tell his story to Calypso. This means that Odysseus’ ability to craft a story is no longer, itself, a part of his story and a part of his heroism. Instead, we are just seeing a movie about a guy who took a long time to get home. Worse — we are seeing a movie that tries to explain away the parts of the Odyssey that feel most artificial. The gods, which in Homer are valuable in part because they expose the mechanisms of the plot, become natural phenomena. Characters are given complicated emotional backstories and motivations, as if the film doesn’t trust the characters to be compelling without this psychological realism. Odysseus’ 10 years away are given a psychological motivation — he couldn’t come home because of his guilt and trauma over the siege of Troy. His tricksiness and prowess as a storyteller, his ability to create interesting artifices, are passed over. Instead, he is slotted into a familiar trauma plot, as if a narrative about trauma is the only realistic narrative that can be told. The eerie effect is that we are watching the Odyssey without Odysseus. It could be any story, any man.

The structure of the story itself shows the film’s unwillingness to engage with what Nolan considers to be artifice or fictionality. One of the strangest things about the way the story was told was that the gods, including the narrative driver Athena, were essentially stripped away in favor of a more naturalistic approach, while a more ‘historical’ undergirding plot about the ‘sea peoples’ was shoehorned in. The sea peoples are an invented confederation of raiders who supposedly brought about the fall of the Mycenaean palaces and the end of the bronze age. From this lens, the film is supposedly about how the Greeks, in sacking Troy, invited in an age of raids from the sea and caused the collapse of the Bronze Age. In contrast with Homer’s Odyssey, which obviously mentions no such thing, the film has a sheen of historicity, as if it is more grounded. However, regardless of how good or bad the hypothesis may be, the ‘sea peoples’ are a 19th century academic hypothesis! It strikes me that Nolan rejects the fantastic, mythic elements of the Odyssey only to turn to a different kind of mythmaking. He uses ‘historical’ elements to structure his story, as if this brings us closer to the ‘real’ and as if this more ‘realistic’ approach is something to be valorized.

I think every adaptation of a popular story has a right to do its own thing without staying faithful to the ‘source material’, but in this case, the ways in which the film diverged from the Odyssey are sinister to me. Can we not trust our audiences to enjoy a blockbuster that reflects on the act of storytelling itself? Is Odysseus, a character whose identity is defined by hiding and lying and making things up, somehow too difficult to represent on screen? Is the purpose of a story to be as realistic and immersive as possible, or is fiction capable of doing other things? I think the Odyssey is reflective of a wider cultural discomfort with artifice and fictionality. Short and long form representations of the real have replaced fiction as the main form of media that people interact with every day. I think this is a shame. Fiction is good because it allows both its creators and its audience to play around with ideas, possibilities, to make new connections. We should all try to be a little bit more like the the great storyteller Odysseus.

I’m not much of an action movie person. I get stressed out when things are too fast paced. I have not historically been into explosions or gadgets. However, I am obsessed with these movies. I am obsessed with them because they are not what I expected, and, at least through a contemporary lens, there’s something a bit odd about their formulaic narrative structure. They aren’t spy stories in the style of John LeCarre (who, of course, was reacting against the formulaic spy story in many ways). They’re romances.

I’ve been thinking that formulaic stories, like the spy story, the detective story, and the romance, are useful in the same way that a certain kind of Ancient Greek community song was useful. This is the kind of song that was performed at major life events – marriages, yearly festivals to the gods, and deaths. Although these were, indeed, major life events for the people undergoing them, they were also repetitive and essentially banal. People get married and die every day. Love and death are both earth-shaking and mundane. But at funerals and weddings, narrative songs would be performed about characters in the mythic cycle experiencing love and grief. These everyday occurrences became occasions for narrativization. What I mean by this is that telling stories about marriages at a marriage allows the couple and their family to contextualize the event as a story similar to these mythic narratives, and to achieve a satisfying sense of narrative in their own lives. Romance novels, for example, seem to do the same thing – to allow people to see their own lives as stories, no matter how mundane. This feels meaningful and is useful because it allows you to reflect on your own actions.

But what about James Bond, the most formulaic representative of the spy genre? In a sense, there is nothing mundane about these movies. They are fantasy to an absolutely outrageous degree. I think, however, that the ones I’ve seen, at least – all released in the 60s during the cold war – take an overwhelming geopolitical situation, one that makes the individual feel rather baffled and powerless, and recast it as a romance story, thus bringing it back into the world of the mundane and perhaps making it easier to metabolize. Nuclear brinkmanship and the possibility of nuclear annihilation are unthinkable things to live with. They are anti-narrative. They obliterate narrative by obliterating the personal.

The quintessential James Bond story, at least from what I’ve observed so far, is about James Bond trying to stop a villain from doing something with or pertaining to a nuclear weapon. This can mean literally using such a weapon, or it can mean trying to push the USSR and the States into dropping the bomb on each other, which seems to be the main goal of the evil organization SPECTRE. Bond generally achieves his aim by seducing women, often enemy women, and getting them to help him stop the bad guys. He almost always seems to function as some sort of honeypot. Everyone at MI6 knows that this is his MO, and that he is good at what he does because all women, without fail, will fall in love with him. The result of this is that, in general, ‘Bond girls’ are structural. Bond films are often quite episodic until they settle into their long final sequence. Each episode tends to be marked by a different woman, until we reach the central love story of the movie. This central love story becomes intertwined with Bond’s mission, to the point where the success of the mission and the success of the love story are the same thing. This is the case in From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball. I’m not going to talk about Dr. No because it’s the first one and doesn’t have the formula down yet, and I’m not going to talk about You Only Live Twice because I frankly hated it.

In Goldfinger, Bond ends up trapped in the lair of the titular villain Goldfinger, who plans to strap him to a radiation device with which he will irradiate the United States government’s entire supply of gold, and therefore kill him. Bond has no way out unless he can use his favorite tool of spycraft – making a woman fall in love with him so that she will help him out of his dilemma. The woman in question is the astonishingly named Pussy Galore (sorry), the leader of Goldfinger’s all-female fleet of jets, and she does, indeed, end up falling in love with him.1 Pussy then does all the legwork to foil Goldfinger’s plan and save Bond. The mission is complete, and the main couple of the movie is reunited. The final shot implies that they will subsequently be having sex under a parachute. Bond is basically a damsel in distress here. The romance solves the problem of his imprisonment and, in fact, all of the problems that the movie presents.

The movies know that this is what they are doing. See the following dialogue from Thunderball, which occurs after Bond attempts to get the female villain on his side by having sex with her:

Bond: My dear girl, don’t flatter yourself. What I did this evening was for King and country. You don’t think it gave me any pleasure, do you?
Volpe (female villain): But of course, I forgot your ego, Mister Bond. James Bond, who only has to make love to a woman and she starts to hear heavenly choirs singing. She repents, then immediately returns to the side of right and virtue. But not this one. What a blow it must have been - you having a failure.

Already, by the fourth installment in the series, the formula is established enough that it can be riffed on in this way.

So suddenly, through James Bond and his romantic dalliances, the Cold War is subordinated to the familiar, everyday romance plot (even the marriage plot – Bond seems to get fake married a lot). These films seem to present the radical thesis that the best way to solve East/West tension is for those in the West to have sex with those in the East. I suppose this is escapist in its way, to imagine that a complex global conflict is as simple as the more knowable dynamic that exists between a single couple. But I also think there’s something poignant about the way that these films allow the un-narrativizable to become narrativized. They’re very silly stories that haven’t aged very well, but perhaps they functioned, at the time, to take a little bit of pressure off people faced with an existential threat that they could do absolutely nothing about.

How does this relate to the escapist media we encounter now? I suppose we could compare these films, on the action side, to the endlessly proliferating MCU films. I’m inclined to say that they are doing different things. The Marvel films, to my mind, encourage the spectator to occupy the ultimate passive consumer role by giving them the fantasy of superheroes that will come in at just the right moment and save the world. Of course, Bond saves the world a lot, but I really don’t think that’s the ultimate fantasy of Bond. I think the fantasy of Bond is that he always gets the girl, and that’s very different. So this encourages us to compares Bond films not to MCU schlock, but instead to romance schlock. My knee-jerk reaction is to say that early Bond is nowhere near as escapist as current popular romances like A Court of Thorns and Roses, Fourth Wing, or Ice Planet Barbarians. These books are about severing yourself from the world and imagining a different life in a fantasy land. This is definitional escapism to me. Bond doesn’t ask ‘what would happen if we had romance in a world cut off from reality’, it asks, ‘what would happen if the things that happen in reality were romances’. This, to me, seems a fundamental difference.

I really love the movie Notting Hill. It is far too self-serious and twee for its own good, and it has an awful soundtrack, but it also has this diffuse alluring quality that I am unable to discount. It is about an everyman who falls in love with a famous actress played by Julia Roberts. She disappears and reappears in his life until finally, pretending to be a journalist, he confesses his love for her at a press conference and they get married and are presumably happy for the rest of their lives.

A lot of people will tell you that the romance genre is escapist for them, as in, romance books and movies are tools that help them escape from their dreary lives for the duration of the fiction. However, something that I’ve noticed during my recent period of watching lots of rom coms is that they’re not just escapist, they’re also about escapism. Love in these films is often marked by artifice or fictionality — there is an unreal sheen that elevates it above the otherwise mundane lives that the protagonists live. We all know that desire and narrative are associated with each other, and to engage with romance is to engage with ‘the marriage plot’, but this, to me, seems like another angle — that love brings some element of artifice into the banal world, and that artifice itself is what redeems this world.

In Notting Hill, Julia Roberts is an actress, someone associated with an elevated, artificial sphere. She moves through the film as if she has a halo, bringing a soft glow to Hugh Grant’s rather unsuccessful life. We never lose awareness of her celebrity, and there is an element of grace to her presence, as if, just by bringing this celebrity into the mundane world, she makes it a little bit more bearable. All of the small and large disappointments which mark the lives of Hugh Grant and his friends are eased by the simple presence of beautiful celebrity Julia Roberts, the entrance of a salvific artifice into their world. If melancholy everyman Hugh Grant is connected to beautiful celebrity Julia Roberts, then he gets to be a part of a story bigger than himself, his life has meaning, and he will be happy for the rest of time. The film implies that this happiness will indeed be the outcome, as the two get married and we see some softly-lit shots of them being in love in a park.

The Nora Ephron films You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle literalize this idea that artifice will save you from mundane life even further.1 The ‘love stories’ in the two films are honestly pretty flimsy; it’s the artificial that is strong and seductive. Sleepless in Seattle features a frustrated Meg Ryan essentially stalking a man who she heard talking about his love for his ex wife on the radio. She builds up a love story based on this stylized, not-real-life radio clip. In real life, her fiance is allergic to everything and snores. The man on the radio promises romance in that he promises something other than real life: a story. At one point, Meg Ryan’s friend tells her this:

That’s your problem. You don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.

Well, exactly.

The film ends with Meg Ryan and the man on the radio meeting in an extremely contrived situation and falling in love immediately. Hyper-stylized movie love has triumphed over the mundane. You’ve Got Mail has a similar plotline, as two people fall in love through their AOL personae, while hating each other in real life. The dreamy artifice of the online world eventually triumphs over the harsh reality of the two leads’ business rivalry. None of this is about being in love, really: it’s more about being swept away by the tropes of romantic fiction, and finally achieving happiness once this fiction has entirely overcome the unjust banality of everyday life. I found the Ephron movies kind of annoying, but I think, along with Notting Hill, they express a pain that is really too pathetic and mundane to be expressed, and that is that everyday life can be unbearable, in its little indiginities and constant repetition, in the fact that nobody is ever going be able to make any of it ok. In light of that, it can be terribly satisfying to see characters elevated out of daily life, into a stylized world in which artifice reigns and things happen like they do in fiction. They’re like modern day saint narratives. Hugh Grant, after suffering the simple indignities of being alive, is given the grace of getting to live with beautiful celebrity Julia Roberts, who embodies the glow of the movies, forever.

II.

You’ve Got Mail, like many other rom-coms, is a very loose Pride and Prejudice adaptation. Pride and Prejudice has had a long afterlife and could probably be considered one of the founding texts of the romance genre, although it doesn’t really resemble its imitators. People are obsessed with ‘enemies to lovers’ because of Pride and Prejudice.

Pride and Prejudice is relevant to this particular essay because of its stakes. If Elizabeth and Jane do not get married, they will eventually have to live out their lives in genteel poverty. Darcy and Bingley literally save them from the drudgeries of everyday life by attaching them to massive fortunes, beautiful homes, and lives of leisure. It seems to me that this economic crisis that the Bennet sisters face has been hollowed out by later adaptations and repurposed as an existential crisis. The Bennets’ lack of financial security becomes a lack of meaning. Love gains a spiritual quality as it becomes the thing that imposes narrative and meaning onto the lovers’ lives. To live without love is to live like Hugh Grant in the Julia Roberts-less part of Notting Hill — watching the seasons pass, taking the same walk to and from work everyday, enduring as your life and the lives of your loved ones succumb to age and entropy.

There is, however, a kernel of this salvific power of artifice in Pride and Prejudice. When Lizzie sees Pemberley, Darcy’s huge mansion home, her view of him changes decidedly for the better, and she begins to imagine what it would be like to be his wife. We could read this as a purely mercantile impulse — Lizzie wants to be very rich — but I think what this scene really shows is Lizzie’s first encounter with Darcy’s taste. His well-decorated rooms, naturalistic park, and sister, raised lovingly into a respectable young woman by him, all show that Darcy is not, like her own family, painfully crude. By marrying Darcy, Lizzie enters a world of good aesthetics, where she is less exposed to the tiresome and foolish. On a literary level, her family is marked by farce and satire. As Darcy’s wife, she gets to exit the biting farce that is daily life at the Bennets’. Her life is given more dignity, and more meaning.

To be a piece of media that references Pride in Prejudice is to heighten the sense that a meaningful story is playing out in these characters’ lives. I think this is part of the reason why the romance genre is so defined by its tropes, because it’s not the love of the other person that saves the protagonist, it’s the ability to live out the Romance Story, the inherently meaningful story that will dignify their entire life. It’s an inherently self reflexive genre, and at its best, it plays with this. At its worst, it does provide pure escapism, allowing the reader to block out the everyday and imagine, for a moment, that they, too, get to live this inherently meaningful story which has nothing to do with the mundane passage of days.

III.

The true fantasy of this kind of romance is that everything is going to change for you, that you’ll be swept up into the artificial and that everything will be ok. Maybe, like Meg Ryan flying to New York, or Hugh Grant chasing Julia Roberts around London, you can take some kind of meaningful action that will change everything in an instant. Or maybe someone else will be there to take that action for you. What I’ve realized, though, is that willpower is kind of a murky thing. It’s really hard to act a lot of the time. It’s even harder to change. Narrative tends to feature a series of actions and crises that build to a conclusion, but everyday life is marked by repetition and frustration. Often, change involves doing the same thing over and over again, and desperately trying not to do that thing, until something comes along that finally makes it click, finally allows you to make the change that you need to make.

Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray is about this. This is a difficult film to watch. The protagonist, Delphine, is very depressed, and has recently broken up with a boyfriend. She tries multiple times to go on vacation and have a good time, but she ends up crying, or feeling isolated from others, or leaving early. She can’t escape herself, and as the film goes on her frustration with her inability to change her state becomes palpable. She overhears a group of people talking about ‘the green ray’, a line of green light which supposedly appears as the last ray of the sun when it is setting over the ocean on a very clear day. The green ray, someone in the group says, portends love. She meets a young man whom she clearly has chemistry with, and, with a sense of immense intensity, takes him to the beach, where she watches for the green ray and starts to cry. She sees it, shouts in triumph, and the film ends.

The green ray is arbitrary, but it allows Delphine to let go of her isolation and sadness and, we hope, start to connect with people again. We can see in the film how desperate Delphine is to narrativize her life — she knows that bringing in a little bit of artifice will help her act like an agent again, and finally change. I wonder if romance presents the fantasy of entering into an elevated narrative because, in real life, a little bit of artifice can help us convince ourselves to do things differently, or to move on from things that are difficult. I was in Cape Cod recently, visiting my family, and I think I saw the green ray as the sun set over the water. It was barely a flash — if I hadn’t seen the movie, I wouldn’t have noticed anything. I’m half convinced that I made it up. Still, it felt important, and I remembered Delphine’s narrative, and wondered if I might be able to move on from my own frustrations and repetitive self-destructive behaviors. I think that what romance gets right is that artifice can give us a moment of grace, a moment when we might imagine things differently. That moment, however, is only a moment, and where the romance protagonist gets to luxuriate in it forever, for us it departs as soon as the sun goes down.

Last year I spent a lot of time thinking about the ethical implications of escapism. The conclusion I came to was that engaging with media in an escapist manner — using it as a way to avoid engaging with the world — was wrong. I think I was too cruel and black-and-white in my characterization of ‘escapist’ readers. Media can certainly be used to dull one’s experience, but I’ve started to see this as a reaction to a feeling of overwhelm more than anything else. I’ve certainly spent a lot of time escaping this year, and whenever I’ve encountered something that has pulled me back into the world, I have remembered that media and art can be so good, that at their best they exist in a continuum with ‘the real world’ and even shape it — there is no real division here, art and life flow into each other.

The most striking example of this that I’ve encountered has been the Cosmic House, the intricately designed former private residence of a postmodernist architect in London. I was overwhelmed by the warmth radiated by the space, which was playful and comfortable in equal measure. Despite the heady theoretical underpinnings of the space’s design, there was no sense of stark abstraction — the house is filled with rooms which invite one to lounge with friends, or to sit alone with a book for hours. Tongue-in-cheek touches like a ‘cosmic loo’ or dizzying optical illusions do not serve to dispel this feeling — instead, the house becomes a space where esoterism and grand ideas intertwine with everyday comforts. It was so easy to imagine living in the space, or growing up in it.

What struck me most about the house was the evidence of design, of the human hand, in everything. For me, it centred the joy of design and the joy of encountering good design. I felt as if I had been hit over the head by this joy. So often I notice bad design — a shoddy new build, a space designed for cars and not people, my evil tiny bathroom — and I have started to focus on these terrible things as if they are a sort of scum on top of something clean, whether that’s the earth or an imagined more beautiful past, I’m not sure. An imagined sublime beckons — something that would take me outside of myself, outside of this body which trudges through space and time and collapses the mundane experience of having to live.

This imagined space where everything is beautiful, and which the hand of the contemporary person has not marked, can be pretty unpleasant, even repellent, when you actually encounter it, though. A few years ago, I went to the Pyrenees, then Iceland. There were so many good things about those trips, but, sitting down to eat at the top of a waterfall in the Pyrenees, I started to feel a creeping terror of the stark mountains that looked like unreal cutouts against the sky. There was no reaction I could have to them that wasn’t ‘wow, that’s beautiful’. There was nothing to hold onto, no warmth. When I arrived in Iceland, left Reykjavik, and moved further north, this sense of dread intensified until it was near unbearable. The treeless landscape, which barely gave a foothold to human life, instilled in me a deep fear. I felt that I was dissolving, that the horrific sublimity of the mountains and fjords left no space for my identity, desires, plans, life.

It took me a long time to think through these experiences and realize that sublimity is only an imagined escape. There is nowhere to live in it, nowhere to move forward. Dissolving one’s identity in the face of something greater might feel nice in the moment, but it doesn’t really provide any solution for the difficulties of living day to day. Good art and design does, though, things made by people with an eye to the pleasure of other people. There is no ‘real world’ that is somehow more meaningful than a world shaped by people. The most meaningful version of the world emerges when art and design shape the flow of everyday experience.

Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller encompasses this maxim to me. Please read this if you haven’t already. Its frame narrative is told in the second person, and follows a reader who sits down to read Italo Calvino’s new novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. We then encounter a first chapter of this imaginary novel within a novel before our reader protagonist realizes that there’s been a printing error, and that the rest of the book just repeats the first chapter. He goes to the bookstore to replace his copy, and instead finds himself with another book, which has also, mysteriously, been wrongly printed. This search for the original book leads the reader to some bizarre and delightful places, and his search is interspersed with chapters from imaginary books which all speak to each other, and the frame narrative, in wonderful ways. What strikes me most about this book is that it’s a narrative about the desire to read a good book, and it shows how this desire interplays with the satisfaction of an enjoyable reading experience to create character and relationships. The narrative emerges out of the experience of encountering media, and reminds us that this is not a passive experience — we take the things we encounter in media into our lives, and use them as tools to make meaning, to socialize, to find a way forward.

Rereading this wonderful book, and encountering the Cosmic House, have led me to revel in the places in which art and design touch my life, shape my movements, and allow me to articulate my identity. This has been a surprisingly life-affirming process, and collecting these moments has allowed me to fight the always-encroaching depressive haze. It’s funny to me that both the book and the house are artefacts of the much-maligned postmodern. Maybe reflecting on what it is to make and encounter things can be very beautiful, actually! Perhaps reflection on the made world, instead of reflection on the self and especially instead of reflection on the sublime, is the way forward, at least for me.

All this to say that I find the dark months, December and January, very difficult. This is the kind of agony that is so banal that it is sort of embarrassing to talk about, but I think the banal — in this case, the shortening of the days; in other, more extreme cases, death and other catastrophic losses — is the temporality in which agony resides, in which we actually have to deal with it.

In Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell books, the dark months are when the title character remembers the people he has lost. We know that the historical Cromwell’s wife and two daughters died in the same year of the mysterious ‘sweating sickness’ that was at that time epidemic in England. Around the same time, Cromwell’s patron Cardinal Wolsey fell out of favor and died. In fiction, this amount of loss stretches the boundaries of believable narrative. Reading Mantel’s account of Cromwell’s life at this point is shocking — surely, he won’t lose nearly his entire immediate family? Not Wolsey, too?

What struck me when I read this part of Wolf Hall is that this degree of staggering loss feels unreal. It pushes fictionality to its limit; it takes the reader out of the story. Cromwell, too, is dazed and unbelieving at first, but what the series shows so well is the granularity of his having to… just live with it. As the plot moves on, Cromwell suffers, sublimates his pain, and remembers his wife and daughters in winter, imagines them haunting the house when the days are dark. After many years they start to feel less present, but they always emerge when the house prepares for Christmas. Loss, like the rhythm of the seasons, is the most banal thing of all.

I have been teaching the Iliad this term, another text in which shocking amounts of people die. Upon this reading, what has struck me most about the text is Achilles’ ultimate identification with humanity as a whole, and his radical construction of a community of suffering mortals, who must mourn throughout their lives for loved ones and must eventually face the prospect of their own deaths. In Book 24, Priam, king of Troy, visits Achilles and begs him to return the body of his son, Hektor, which Achilles has kept and mutilated after killing Hektor on the battlefield. This was in revenge for Hektor’s killing of Achilles’ foster-brother and ‘beloved companion’, Patroklus, but even killing Hektor has given Achilles no peace. He finds himself unable to eat, sleep, or integrate back into the community of the Achaean camp, instead laying awake, pacing by the sea, and occasionally dragging Hektor’s body around from the back of his chariot in an attempt to finally feel better.

Priam, at great personal risk, enters the enemy camp and approaches Achilles at his hut. Then we have this scene (sorry for making you read 50 lines of the Iliad, I tried to condense where possible):

And Priam, supplicating him, said:
’Godlike Achilles, remember your father,
old like me, on the deadly threshold of age.
And I think it likely that his neighbors,
around him on every side, worry and weaken him —
there is no one to defend him from war and ruin.
But when he hears that you are still alive,
he rejoices in his heart, and hopes every day
to see his beloved son, coming home from Troy.
But me — everything is painful to me,
because I was father to the best sons in broad Troy,
and, I tell you, not one of them is left alive.
There were fifty, when the sons of the Achaeans came…
furious Ares cut them all down at the knees,
and the one that was left to me, Hektor, you killed him.
Now I come to the ships of the Achaeans for his sake,
to ransom him from you, and I offer untold wealth.
But have respect for the gods, Achilles, and pity me,
remembering your father. But I am far more pitiable,
for I have suffered what no other mortal in the world
has yet suffered: to stretch my hand toward the face
of the man who murdered my sons’.

Thus he spoke, and stirred up desire in Achilles
to mourn for his father.
Grasping the old man by the hand, he gently pushed him away.
And the two remembered — the one, crumpled at Achilles’ feet
cried aloud for man-killing Hektor, but Achilles
cried for his father, and sometimes for Patroklus.
Their sound of their grieving filled the house.
But when godlike Achilles was satisfied with mourning,
and longing had gone from his body,
then he leapt up from his chair, and raising the old man by the hand,
pitying his grey head and his grey beard,
he spoke winged words:

‘Ah, miserable man, you have borne so many terrible things.
How could you stand to come alone to the Achaean ships,
to look the man in the eye who has killed your sons in battle?
Your heart is iron. But come and have a seat,
and let us endure the pain in our hearts, though it is agony.
It is no good to mourn. The gods have woven life for wretched mortals,
that we might live painfully, while they themselves live without a care.
Two jars sit on the doorsill of Zeus. One dispenses good, the other, evil.’1

Achilles has spent the entire epic up to this point resisting community in some way. Yet here, with his enemy, with whom he has no interests in common but his own mortality, he grieves that mortality. Achilles and Priam are both doomed to die, and they both know this. When Achilles grieves for the father he cannot protect, he grieves himself, as he will die before he ever sees him again. When Priam grieves for the sons who cannot protect him, he grieves for himself, seeing his own death that will come when his city falls. In grieving with Priam, Achilles reconstrues community and value. Previously, he has desired love, honor and wealth within the context of the community of the Achaeans at Troy; now he desires only life, like any other mortal, and he cannot have it, and neither, in the end, can anyone else.

At the very end of the Iliad, we see the women of Troy lament for Hector. The final lament is from Helen, who mourns Hektor because he was one of the only one of the Trojans (besides Priam) who was ever nice to her. He made her daily life a little better. What she loved in Hektor was the stuff of the banal — his words of kindness, his everyday attention to her. This is the sort of thing I think about in winter — the people who still haunt my quotidian life, the loss of moments of sunlight, the Achillean community of mankind whose only recourse is to mourn the smallness of life together.

I’m sorry if this comes off as gloomy, melodramatic and scattered. Entering December is never easy, this year perhaps more than most for various reasons. If you, like me, find this time difficult, I do especially recommend the Iliad (and lots of Sophocles as well) for this part of the year. It’s bleak, but it really helps.

What’s strange about these arguments is that the value of the humanities is latently present in culture, everywhere you look. Everyone would be a writer, if they could. This is almost universally acknowledged as an aspirational thing to do. Parents have to discourage their children from taking English degrees instead of going into computer science. On the other side, everyone loves their favorite show, or fantasy book series, or video game. Narrative worlds matter to people, whether that’s a science fictional universe or a representation of the historical past, delivered through podcast. Art sits at the core of people’s lives, to the extent that, culturally, we have to discourage them from focusing too much on it, whether that’s by discouraging them from getting a PhD in Art History (or whatever) or telling them that they shouldn’t watch too much TV. It’s as if a culture that doesn’t encourage robust attention toward and investment in the arts has to constantly reinforce itself. It is turning away from the arts that is artificial, not pursuing them.

The obvious argument against this is that artistic production doesn’t need the academic humanities to go on happening. I am not going to concede this. Sure, they’re not strictly necessary, but the academic humanities provide incredible tools for people who wish to produce art, and many academics are also artists. A separation between the humanities and any kind of narrative art is essentially artificial. Sure, we could abolish universities, but that would mean abolishing archives that help artists make good art, spaces that encourage and fund artists and writers, and (yes) research that changes the ways in which people make art. Concerns in theory and concerns in popular art often mirror each other, and this is to the benefit of both.

So I don’t feel much of a need to defend the humanities, when the arts create and designate importance for, I would say, the majority of people. What I would ask, instead, is why we have learned to artificially devalue the things that we all acknowledge make life worth living and are the most fun things to do. To me, the issue seems to be that the constant cultural messaging against humanities and the arts, the idea that these are essentially selfish pursuits, has created a phenomenon not of lessening interest in the arts, but of worse audiences. People are encouraged to reject the humanities, and so they do not get what the humanities can offer, and so they become bad readers who don’t know how to select for good writing (or any writing at all!) or bad watchers who don’t know how to select for good visual media. Add to this online life, which is an uncanny facsimile of both narrative art and social interaction, and you have a downward spiral, alienating people further and further from meaningful artistic experience.

Today, I finished Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel. The Cromwell trilogy was incredibly popular, at least in Britain. I think I’ve seen people reading Wolf Hall at the beach. I lent that latter book to my mother, not an academic type by any means, who today texted me, ‘I love Thomas Cromwell!’. Mantel’s trilogy was a phenomenon that generated a popular TV series and, probably, lots of interest in the Tudors, which I must assume then generated more media about the Tudors. This all, I imagine, made lots of people lots of money. None of it was possible without the academic sources that Mantel drew from to write the books.

There is nothing inherently outdated, unprofitable, or out of touch about the humanities. I’m sick of seeing people in my field act like their work is selfish or useless. We have to have some confidence and bravery, and at least try to defend what we know is important.

apologies for posting twice in one week, and for posting what is essentially a rant, but i’ve been meaning to write something about this for a while and today: 1) i had a conversation with my mother about Hilary Mantel; 2) i had a conversation with another PhD student about the fact that the heating in the faculty of classics is essentially broken, and there don’t seem to be any plans to fix it. This latter point made me feel kind of incensed, so i figured it was a good time to write.

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

-Archaic Torso of Apollo, Rainer Maria Rilke trans. Stephen Mitchell

This is an English translation of one of my favorite poems. Every time I read it, I feel a bit as if I’ve been hit over the head. For me, there is intense force in this idea, that an ancient, fragmented statue (or any piece of art) manifests its own positionality, its own gaze, a gaze that demands something from the viewer. The simple mandate of the final line is painful, yet it feels to me as if it forces open a window — an invitation into a different state of being.

Something about art has been bothering me. There is so much of it, we are surrounded by abstraction and mimesis to an absurd degree, and yet there is no condemning or embracing it. Sometimes art brings you into a closed loop, or a dead end — there is nothing available but the story, it leads nowhere. On the other hand, sometimes art asks something of you, sometimes it brings about clarity, and there is a sudden sense that you have managed, with this work of art as your tool, to cut through the noise and see something real that you wouldn’t have seen without it. To have a piece of art look out at you and ask you to change is an extraordinary experience. Yet to spend time with art that nullifies and soothes is to forfeit time and to forfeit life.

People talk about work as something that steals and colonizes one’s time and this is true. I think it is important to acknowledge that art — let’s say, any piece of media that relies on some degree of abstraction or fictionalization — can also steal your time. Especially now that media platforms are designed to keep us engaged, to keep us streaming or bingeing, it seems to me very high stakes to engage with cultural output. There is the possibility that we are buying into systems that are stealing our time, funneled into narratives or artistic experiences that lead nowhere. To be well read, or to know a lot about film or television — are these virtues? Is erudition being warped, repackaged, and sold back to us as omnivorous consumption?

I worry that even the experience of discovering clarity in art has become misaligned. Recently, I read Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth. Like the Rilke poem, this book demands something from the reader, in this case seriousness in the face of despair. Hjorth frames despair as a kind of isolation borne of looking away from the immense pressure that being alive puts on the individual. She articulates flatly, and thrillingly, that life is something to live up to:

… I fell and I hurt myself, but I got up again and now I was here. A mere mortal, but perhaps that was enough? Might life be a serious business that required something of you, a daunting enterprise? The thought, however, wasn’t oppressive but liberating because it’s good to have a purpose, to be given a purpose, it’s a declaration of trust because you don’t entrust a task to someone you don’t respect. It was almost as if I, too, was standing on the bottom step of a dark staircase and could see dawn creep under the door at the top, and I was filled with great faith that I would make it all the way up and step out into the bright ground floor.

-from Long Live the Post Horn!, Vigdis Hjorth trans. Charlotte Barslund

Hjorth and Rilke both tell me that I am not enough, but that this is a good thing — that being alive asks something immense of me. But when I finished Hjorth’s book, after sitting for a moment with the most important thing that I have always known, that being alive is ‘serious business’, I thought, ‘I should read more Vigdis Hjorth’. My energy was funneled away from the insight, and towards the bookstore. In the end, if I have read as much as possible, does this mean that I am erudite and wise, or does it mean that I have turned away, time and time again, from an invitation to wisdom in order to fulfill my role as a consumer of fiction, a role which means nothing to me but has nevertheless structured my entire life?

I don’t think there are easy answers to this, like, ‘get out into your community!’ or, ‘make something!’ or, ‘be more mindful!’ Community, making, and peace of mind are three things that are fetishized because a lot of people lack them, not because they are always and inherently good. I have no desire to push away abstraction in favor of some life in the ‘real world’. Art reflects and shapes the real world. This is something to take seriously, too.

What I do think, though, is that I should be conscious of moments when art seems only to be pointing me towards more art, especially on any sort of ‘platform’. Maybe we should all rethink this impulse to engage further, not in the sense of rejecting anything beyond what we already like, but in the sense of asking: where is this leading? What do I want the end point of this artistic experience to be? Is it more novels on my shelf, or more shows in the queue, or is it something else, something more exciting? For myself, I am thinking now that art should make me want to write, but this is only a first step.

What all these books have in common is that we read them together, for each other. They are interwoven into our relationships and the shared world we make. This is a mode of media engagement that foregrounds sociability over things like enjoyment or taste. Our reactions to books may be different — we may argue about them, critique them, or use them as touchstones to talk about our own lives. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that, at the end of the day, these books turn us continually toward each other. The integration of the books into the social scene prevents them from being escapist. It’s not the books that dictate whether or not they fit the ‘escapist’ category — it’s the way we read them.

Escapism, as I described in this post, is a way of engaging with media. No book or film or whatever is inherently escapist — the way we read or watch it makes it that way. I think escapism is a very prevalent way of engaging with media. I often see people (online and irl) say things like, ‘It’s a book/film/show, it’s not that deep!’, or, ‘I love this fantasy book because it’s pure escape’, or, ‘In a difficult world like this one, why wouldn’t I read to escape?’ The escapist mindset cuts off the real world from the fictional, allowing flight from the former to the latter. Escapist media consumption is often justified as a way to unwind or de-stress.

To sever fiction from reality is to render oneself an entirely passive consumer when one engages with fiction. It also collapses the possibilities of what fiction can do: if fiction is an escape, it can only ever be a temporary ease or distraction from real-life boredom or pain. It’s not a problem to do this occasionally — sometimes I’m so exhausted that all I want to do is sit down in front of a silly, absorbing movie. What bothers me is the idea of escapism as an ethos, or a logic that undergirds media consumption as a whole. There are so many ways to be a passive consumer of media right now. I would argue that the escapist mindset is encouraged by most of the platforms on which we encounter media. Audiobooks, podcasts, tv shows on streaming platforms — it is so easy to set up a constant stream of whatever world I’d like to immerse myself in.1 I can put on a show and keep an eye on it while I do laundry, thus alleviating the banality of the chore. I can put on my headphones and listen to an audiobook while I run unpleasant errands. If I have an unpleasant day, I can come home and scroll through substack or twitter or instagram (social media, to my mind, is mostly a form of interactive content consumption, and it takes a lot of work to turn it into person-to-person interaction that is unmediated by this consumptive model). This is an obvious point, but the technology that marks all of our lives encourages us to do this. No platform or streaming service makes money off of my going for a walk, or talking with my friends, or slowly reading a book that someone has lent me.

If fiction is cut off from reality, then the best interaction with fiction that one can hope to have is this one of passive, easy consumption. The world of fiction doesn’t touch the ‘real world’, but instead becomes a kind of pale simulation that one can fall into. The sad thing is that this mode of consumption leeches color and joy from the ‘real world’, which becomes something to flee from. To be an escapist is to be nostalgic for unreality.

During the pandemic, without really thinking about it, I became used to doing just that — finishing a podcast episode and letting the next one play automatically, finishing a book and immediately wandering over to the shelf to pick out another one. I was alone and unhappy and I desperately wanted to escape the small room that had come to contain my life. I assume that lots of people have had similar experiences, but what worries me is that these habits have lingered, and can keep us isolated and passive. I don’t want that for anyone. I encourage everyone to ask how what you’re reading and watching could point back to the ‘real world’, and even become a part of that world. Could it push you toward the people around you, or help you imagine a future that is somehow better than the present? Or is the end point of the thing you’re consuming just another scroll through audible/netflix/twitter/etc?

i recently read julia armfield’s private rites, which was published recently and has a lot of buzz right now. i have a problem with julia armfield. her writing is fine, and her characterization is decent — private rites included a particularly good depiction of difficult relationships between sisters — but she uses her science-fictional worlds as backdrops for rather traditional emotional plots. the setting is more romantic than truly science-fictional. these are landscapes that mirror characters’ interiority. no efforts are made to really explore the implications of living with strangeness. the premise of private rites, which is set in the near future, is that the climate apocalypse is here, and it’s pretty drab. it’s raining all the time, and everything is slowly falling apart. and yet still — still — this near-future world is really just a reflection of the characters at the center of the book. it might as well be cathy on the moors.1

this is in many ways not a problem — it’s even good writing. i’ve written before about how narrative and setting should inform each other. what gives me pause is the proliferation of this kind of narrative in the science fiction genre. armfield’s novels are essentially realistic explorations of grief that use their settings to enhance a sense of desolation, of everything winding down. reading her fiction feels like visiting a death doula. to read science fiction and feel as if i am visiting a death doula is a pretty bleak experience.

this gets at the heart of my issue — this trend of popular apocalyptic sci fi doesn’t feel speculative. instead it feels like an anxious reinforcement of the idea that we are, as a society and a species, moving toward death. there’s no afterlife after the end this time, just slow breakdown, entropy. even the millenarians of the early modern era imagined a better world to come. now, the cultural atmosphere is one of lethargy. private rites (a lot of this also applies to armfield’s other book, our wives under the sea, which i hated) is a tired book. even a book of this sort that i really enjoyed, the incredibly nasty doloriad, uses the same plot structure of winding down into extinction. these are books without the energy to imagine a future beyond this near, entropic vision.

to be speculative is to have the energy to question what happens if [insert question here]. i truly think that this is an important thing for fiction to be able to do. fiction shapes the realm of the imaginary, it tells us what it is possible to think about. i understand being afraid of the future — i am extremely afraid of the future. i also think it takes courage to look at what seem to be portents of great change and suffering and try to think through possibilities other than ‘apocalypse!!!!’ the most difficult thing to acknowledge is that life will go on, for a lot of people. they are going to have to figure it out. what will that look like for them?

i also recently read driftglass, a collection of short stories by samuel delaney. what strikes me most about delaney is that what he is, to some degree, is a writer of utopias. he imagines utopian worlds and then populates them, makes them realistic, asks what the problems of people living in these worlds might be. this seems almost unthinkable now, but i’m curious to see how a similar project would look in 2024. dystopia and apocalyptic are overwhelmingly popular genres right now. is it possible, in the contemporary world, to imagine a utopia? what does this look like?

it alarms me immensely that the world of speculative fiction right now seems divided between entropic apocalyptic and escapist dreck. if anyone has read anything written in the past couple of years that takes a different approach, please tell me and i will read it! i don’t want to seem like i am trying to turn my head away from ‘real life’ problems. i just think that there is something kind of grotesque of producing literature that essentially functions as a death bloom.

The strangest moment of the symposium came at the end of the first day, when we were given some lines from the Bacchae and left alone for ten minutes with the instruction to tap into our ‘primal energy’ and produce a short performance of the text. This was chaos. We had spent all day giving academic papers and were suddenly tasked with theatrical participation — worse, theatrical participation that was supposed to spring from some emotive, immediate space. Suddenly, the distance between ourselves and the text had collapsed — or it was supposed to. I have to admit that we were not particularly successful in accessing our primal energies. The group started squabbling. Most people stood around in a state of suspended animation, wanting to move but unsure how, unsure whether it was all right to touch each other or make too much noise. Someone got on the ground and started chanting ‘run’. I insisted that we needed to find a way to simulate violence. A small group detached and started running around aimlessly.

I bring this up because, throughout that day, I had been thinking about fictionality. Catherine Gallagher writes that fiction, as the familiar conceptual framework that we know it as today, was ‘discovered’ or ‘invented’ in the 18th century.1 What she means by fiction isn’t general tale-telling, but instead the establishment of a fictional world which exists parallel to reality, and divorced from it, in which characters do not correspond with real people and, on the other end of the spectrum, are not archetypes, and which mimics reality without actually intervening in it. Gallagher links the rise of this kind of fiction with the novel. So, the novel as a detached, portable story, which tells realistic narratives about realistic people who nevertheless do not exist, constituted an innovation in fictionality.

This idea of fiction as detached and portable has been haunting my thoughts lately, alongside the idea that there have historically been other ways to access stories that are not quite real. Of course an invitation to participate in a spontaneous performance, like the one we were encouraged to produce during the symposium, would baffle and even upset me. I am used to encountering fictional stories as things that are discrete and packaged, mediated by screen, or text, and always by genre. This is not to say that storytelling is not woven into my experience of everyday life — I’ve written before about how social media sites function as collective texts — but fiction is always demarcated as a separate space. The rise of the novel, of course, is paired with a slow decline in live performance. In a pre-novel society, live performance often provided a space for fictional text and audience to interact with each other. The performance of myths or satires did not create a decontextualized fictional space, but instead one that reached out toward history and the present. Audience could heckle actors or groan in sympathy. Metatheatricality — which we now associate, above all, with the Brechtian mandate to detach oneself from the text, and to reflect and analyze — reminded the audience that it was a group of spectators watching a play, and encouraged the audience to make connections between the structure of theatrical space and the structure of ‘real life’.

This is not a call to return to tradition or anything like that. I will never be a 16th century audience member shouting at an actor at the Globe Theatre, and I will never be an Athenian, with years of choral experience behind me, watching a Sophoclean premiere. I grew up with the novel and with movies, with portable narratives that one sits quietly to read or watch, and this has formed me just as it has formed my notion of what fiction is. But I have always wondered what it would mean for fiction to leak out of its novelistic form — to intervene in some meaningful way. It’s easy to fall into platitudes about how much books matter, and I don’t want to do that. So, for now, I have no answers to this question that satisfy me, but I’m certainly thinking about it. In the meantime, let me sketch out three models of fiction-audience relationship that have been on my mind lately.

1. Fiction as Escape

This feels like the dominant way that people interacted with fiction when I was growing up. It’s still very present, especially, I think, for people even slightly older than me (I’m 27). This is the ultimate conclusion of the detached novelistic form. Here, fiction provides an alternate reality that one can slip into when one needs a break from one’s own life. There’s an acceptance that fiction is so detached from reality as to be almost arbitrary — in fact, the power of this model comes from the fact that fiction and reality do not interact. Like all fiction-audience interactions, this insistent separation of fiction from reality creates a worldview. I’d call it a fact-based worldview: there are things that are true and there are things that are fictional. People with this worldview are not very well equipped to deal with other peoples’ heavy narrativization, so they probably feel very confused and alarmed about some currents in the contemporary cultural and political landscape. I think this model is in its late stage.

2. Fiction as World

So many people have written about this already, so I just want to emphasize that it fits into this history of audience-fiction interactions. With this model, fiction becomes immersive and intertwined with the rhythms and logic of daily life. What’s crucial about this is that it’s not an equal life-fiction exchange — instead, one imports fictional structures and ideas and superimposes them onto ‘reality’. This necessitates a more active audience member than the escape model — the reader/watcher discovers and mobilizes information in their text of choice. The text constellates around the reader. Examples of this are: getting really into open world video games, getting obsessed with celebrity (or any other kind of) ‘lore’, conspiracy mindset, and being the kind of fantasy fan who loves sprawling series with really developed ‘worlds’. What is important about this is that the boundaries between the real and the fictional start to erode. I don’t think that this is necessarily a bad thing — in fact, I think it’s quite unnatural to hold fiction at such a severe remove as the escape model necessitates — but I do think that, at its core, this model is derived from the escapist model. This means that it’s not about negotiating the real and the fictional together, as an interwoven sort of inner landscape, but instead about rejecting the real for the fictional so much that the fictional obscures the real.

3. Fiction as Intervention?

And so we are back here. I guess what I’m trying to do is imagine a way out of the sharp reality/fiction binary that, I think, really isn’t healthy for anyone. Fictional stories can help people build community, and express and allocate meaning. They help to organize the material of raw experience, and designate what is valuable in that material. I’d like to be able to talk about fiction in a way that maps this process and imagines new ways for it to happen. Again, I don’t have any answers, so I’ll just share an anecdote.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to reread one of my favorite books, The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe. I was surprised, when I opened the copy on my bookshelf, to find that it wasn’t actually my own copy, which I had long ago lent to my brother, but instead a copy that my friend had annotated for me. I had shelved it and forgotten about it.

Reading this annotated book felt like reading a favorite novel, yes, but it also felt like reading a letter from a friend. The annotations gave the book another layer of context. Something so grounded in my physical and emotional reality could not be an escape of any kind. I’m still thinking through this experience, but when I finished the book, I had a strong sense that some agency that existed between Gene Wolfe and my friend Alana had intervened in my life, at least in my week. The book gained meaning and presence, and I’m still thinking about the experience.

I’m not saying that the solution is to annotate books and send them to friends — that’s a very nice thing to do, but it’s one thing, so to suggest it as a cure-all would be trite. but the experience has me wondering — what kind of intervention was it? what other sorts of things can be interventions? what other possibilities are there for interactions between the ‘fictional’ and the ‘real’? what are some useful tools to complicate that binary?

Please do comment if you have any thoughts/answers/examples of encounters with fiction that have felt like interventions!

I. The first is that my agency has increased. I spend most of my time writing and teaching. I receive positive feedback and the sense that I am doing what I need to do to build a career. I have a wider pool of material resources and a stable environment. Whether or not I have good taste in books or art doesn’t have any impact on my stipend, or whether my presentation at a conference is well received, or whether my students get firsts on their exams. It’s true that I need to be a good reader to do my job, but a good reader of Sophocles, not the entirety of mass culture. This sense of efficacy, which is tied to a sense of specificity, is satisfying in a kind of open-and-shut way. I succeed or I don’t.

In this environment, a focus on taste seems to me to be a manifestation of insecurity, a hyperawareness of what one can control. You can learn to be discerning of what movies you watch or what you wear or what books you read even if you lack certainty in your life. I think this is why taste is so important for young people and students, and this is why they situate so much of their identity in their taste. What else can you identify with when you’ve made very little in your life, when you aren’t at all sure of the future and your role in it?

What’s curious to me is the fact that so many people, not just young people, seem to situate their identities primarily in their tastes right now. At the same time, a lot of people have expressed to me that they feel a lack of agency.

II. The second, more slippery reason is, I think, the time I’ve spent exposed to wealthier people. In Paris and at Cambridge I’ve encountered lots of people who are not only wealthy, but ‘cultured’. Before spending time in these environments, I honed my taste because doing so allowed me to map out my aspirations. I was raised middle class in a small town in the States. As I got older, I had the jarring realization that I wanted to pursue classics – a field of study that I hadn’t even known existed for the first 18 years of my life. In my first Greek class, I met people who had already spent a long time with the classics and who were seeking academic careers. When asked why I wanted to study Greek, I said honestly that I had been moved by the Iliad when I had encountered it in one of my first university classes, and that I wanted to understand the language better. A fellow classmate later told me that he thought this had been a strange, slightly embarrassing answer.

At university I started to glimpse another life that I hadn’t even thought possible, and I used my taste to articulate its boundaries. Having ‘good taste’ at that moment felt life altering. This was a different kind of agency – I used narrative and image, the world of figurative language and the imaginary, to explore and concretize a more mundane reality. I think this is the experience of the striver. It’s why something like Brideshead Revisited resonated so much with me when I first read it – Charles’ motivations are essentially driven by aesthetics and tastes, and he uses his taste to imagine a different career for himself than anything that his father would have suggested.

Charles’ aesthetics in Brideshead are, of course, shaped by his encounters with astronomical wealth, and part of the narrative deals with his slow realization that these aesthetic trappings don’t point to anything magical, or more meaningful, but instead just make up the mundanities of his friends’ often frustrating, banal lives. In Paris and at Cambridge I realized that the book under someone’s arm, or the way they dress, or the art exhibitions they go to, don’t tell me much about that person. These things tell me that these people are performing their own class in the way that everyone else around them does. Character is something more evasive. It’s not tied to a style or a propensity for a certain kind of literature – it emerges over time, in quiet moments that are easy to miss.

When I was a child, my favorite band was Coldplay. My favorite show was Glee, which I loved to watch with my mom. I loved musical theater and YA romance. I still wish I had had access to more challenging, compelling things, but I also feel a bit less ashamed of these things. It all makes me wonder if the cultivation of my own taste was always just a way to deal with the fact that I was simultaneously insecure about and fascinated with my growing proximity to wealth and the intelligentsia. I suppose my disenchantment, and my sense that I’m working effectively within the academic sphere, have set me free from my own taste to some extent. It still matters, but I don’t want to agonize over it anymore.

edit: i will still continue to write and think about what is good and what is bad and why that is important. i think i am just trying to find a way to be slightly nicer to myself.

The story ‘The Gothic Society’, which I keep meaning to copy out and tape to the wall above my desk, is perhaps a good entry point here. Only a page long, it details the mysterious appearance of various gothic flourishes in some city:

‘A woman discovered that a bunch of her jewels had faces carved into them, someone else a gargoyle tattoo on their back, and a car was found with three stone kings sitting inside’.

Certain among these gothic excrescences are removed again and again, only to come back, like some growth of mold. We are given no resolution on the identities of the perpetrators, no manifesto for this so-called ‘society’. Only this:

The Gothic Society was compared to zebra mussels, to leprosy, to feral cats and urban foxes. Its members were never identified.

This idea of the flourishes of a historic aesthetic movement as invasive species, or disease, as well as the tenuous connection of these flourishes to human agency that mostly manifests in empty space and unanswered questions, thrilled me when I first read the story. I could imagine the aesthetic markers of the gothic as self-replicating motifs, divorced from context or meaning. The past gets scrambled, it washes up onshore in weird bits, it shows up in decontextualized or dissonant images. It builds up and crowds in, and there is far, far too much of it for sensemaking.

But things get more complicated when people get involved. People in Grudova’s stories are fascinated with the past, mostly through its aesthetic markers. They like the look of green and red Loeb books standing next to each other on the bookshelf. They’re attracted to shops that sell old things. Hemmed in on all sides by detritus, they are still drawn to individual objects:

It was inside the couch that I found the beef can, after removing the cushions and cleaning underneath because the couch sometimes gave off an odd smell. The can had a white animal on it, called a beef. Nicholas became terribly excited… I had encountered the word ‘beef’ in novels before.

The speaker here, in the story ‘Rhinocerus’, is living in some post-collapse landscape where goods are scarce and animals seem to be entirely extinct. The image on the rotted can of tinned beef is an object of wonder for the story’s central couple — Nicholas, an artist, makes a drawing of it so that the two can look at it when they like. This kind of scrounging for meaning and enchantment in a fragmented image of the past always, to my mind, strikes a poignant note in Grudova’s stories. Yet the past itself is never explored as narrative — instead, it is scattered around the characters through these objects and signs. This lopping off of narrative in favor of object feels like a deeply felt engagement with materiality in time to me. Objects sag and rot and discolor — that’s how they register time. People pick out these objects and throw them away, or fetishize them. It’s brilliant that Grudova allows for these two reactions to overlap.

I’ll end with this: in the story ‘The Mermaid’, there is a character who has to choose between studying classics at a top university or marrying the proprietor of an antique shop called ‘Old Time Things’. She chooses the antique shop.

I’m hesitant to draw any kind of history of the novel here, or to collapse the ancient novel with the ones we read now, but I guess one thing that I could say is this: the novel is very well suited to explore how desire interacts with form. Of course it can do other things, but right now, this relationship between narrative and desire feels very important to me — as if it might be easier to assess a book if we can identify how the narrative maps onto various images of or ideas about desire. I’ve been trying for a long time to understand what is so offputting to me about certain books, and what I love so much about others. So consider this to be one attempt — in my quest to figure out how to judge a novel, and from which standpoint, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s important to be able to judge romance novels and novels about love. This has something to do with the fact that desire and narrative are so closely intertwined, in that desire always generates narrative, and style and theme too, in that it tends to reshape the world into a collection of refractions of the object of desire. Being in love feels like being in a novel. On the other side, so many novels are about being in love.

With this in mind, I decided to compare a popular romance novel with a novel that I personally like, and to ask the question: what are the erotic or romantic fantasies that structure these books? Can this tell me something about whether these books are good or bad? For this project, I read the first two books in the A Court of Thorns and Roses series, by Sarah J. Maas. As an anchor point on the ‘books I like’ side, I’ll be using A Green Equinox, by Elizabeth Mavor. 

A Green Equinox is an excellent novel about a woman, Hero Kilhoun, who falls in love with her lover’s wife, and then his mother. Each new infatuation brings about a new style of narration, a new landscape that the protagonist inhabits. What is most striking about this book to me is that Hero’s three infatuated states are used to explore her relationship with the past and the future. In the book’s first scene, she tells us that she harbors an unhealthy obsession with the past, which she shares with her lover Hugh – throughout the book, both characters encounter various new approaches first to the future and then, finally, to the present. Landscape, time, and love are blurred together, to the extent that love is construed as a sort of colonization, exploration or cultivation process across space/time.

One of the things I like most about this book is how situated it is in Hero-as-subject. Her objects of desire move closer to her and then farther away, and it is the directionality of her desire toward these receding objects which allows her to change as the plot progresses. In attempting to achieve her desires, she builds, in one case literally, a new landscape around her. In short, this book is meaningful because of the distance or friction between Hero and the ones she loves. In this gap between subject and object, narrative and character unfolds. In the end, Hero is left alone to act for herself, and this, too, resonates with me – her desire for others mingles with her desire for self-becoming.

I think that love is about reaching, about continually trying to inhabit and understand something which is outside of oneself. This is the sense in which ‘love is attention’. I know I am always talking about A Fairly Honourable Defeat, but there is a scene in that book in which one of the characters, Simon, is reflecting on his experiences of trying to find a good birthday gift for his partner, Axel. Simon has struggled throughout the years to understand Axel’s taste, and how to give him a gift which reflects Axel’s preferences and his own. Although some years he has failed, this year he is satisfied with the subtle floral tie that he has bought for Axel. Even something as simple as buying his partner a tie, then, is an attempt to approach Axel, to understand his needs and tastes, with the recognition that the other man’s mind will always remain separate from his own. Simon has to understand Axel through his own limited point of view, and Axel must do the same for Simon, but the aim of the relationship is to facilitate these mundane, fleeting moments of understanding which characterizes love. 

So, in short, the model story about love on which these two books hang has to do with love as an attempted meeting between two separate people, a continual exploration of the world that has as its goal the attempt to understand the other, but also the self. Understanding is achieved, lost, achieved again. This, to me, feels very true and beautiful. 

On the other hand, I’ve been thinking about ‘romantasy’, a portmanteau for the fantasy romance novels that have become so popular in recent years. My theory is that fantasy romances are especially popular because the fantasy genre allows for writers to push the bond between lovers further, to imagine types of connection that are not possible outside of the fantasy world. This creates a situation that readers seem to really like: a couple that is bonded through some magical facility that allows for true, sometimes uninterrupted, understanding. 

The love story in ACOTAR is structured as a kind of generic bait-and-switch. We start with a fairy tale retelling: a young human woman falls in love with a faerie and saves him from a sinister faerie queen (this story actually engages with the Tam Lin ballad tradition, one of my favorites). At the end of the first book, Feyre, the human protagonist, dies and is resurrected as a faerie. She then goes to live with her hard won betrothed, Tamlin.

Unfortunately Feyre is traumatised by the horrors she went through when she was winning Tamlin back. During the second book, the trauma plot interrupts the traditional romance plot, as we see Feyre leave Tamlin, whom she cannot communicate with in her traumatised state. The rest of the book focuses on her healing process, as she begins to feel like a person again. This is the thing, though – the trauma plot is also a romance plot. Feyre is supported in her healing process by Rhysand whom, through circumstances that I will not describe here, she can communicate with over a bond that connects their minds. The two feel each other’s emotions, and can speak to each other over long distances. This bond is later revealed to be the ‘mating bond’. The two are mates, and therefore, their love encompasses this sort of mind-sharing which collapses distance and makes communication easy. 

The pairing of the trauma plot with this concept of the mating bond is interesting to me for the kind of fantasy it implies – the fantasy of healing alongside a partner who understands you seamlessly, who anticipates your needs because he feels what you feel. This stands in contrast to past relationships which are, by nature, characterized by the mutual hurt of distance and miscommunication. I felt that this was a very manipulative narrative, seizing on the hurts and desires of young women who feel wounded by clumsy first attempts at love that break down through lack of mutual understanding. It takes time and patience to learn that the best ‘understanding’ that we can achieve is a continual process of mutual attention, that there is no moment when a lover will be able to read your mind, forever, for the rest of your life. The idea that it’s ‘hot’ to achieve some kind of partner mind-meld points to a troubling belief, namely, that eroticism, the continual interplay and striving between self and other, isn’t ‘hot’. These books aren’t scorching adult romances, though they’re talked about that way by their fans – they’re fantasies of idealized regression, of a world closer to an infantile state than an adult partnership where the boundaries between self and other don’t exist. But you can still have sex, of course.

I’ve outlined here two types of love narrative which might be associated with two different types of book, the first being literary fiction written by women, the second being romantasy written by women. I’m not sure if my critique of the latter tells me anything about whether those books are good or bad. I’m inclined to think, though, that from a narrative standpoint, the self/other friction that characterizes A Green Equinox provides a path to ideas that challenge the narrative voice, and therefore the reader – to great, surprising reversals in the plot – whereas the hijacking of the romance plot for the trauma plot in ACOTAR collapses this friction and creates a curiously conflict-free atmosphere. I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to unfairly single out ACOTAR – I think a lot of novels in this genre use similar tropes. There are also lots of good works of speculative fiction which use desire as a point of exploration instead of collapse – although it’s more so about friendship, The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin, is one of my favorite encounters with otherness in literature.

Lately I’ve been having a strange feeling creep up on me, a sense of wrongness that comes about when I see sci fi or fantasy in the same space, and judged by the same standards, as literary fiction, or prestige cinema. The first time this happened was when I was reading the book Venemous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beaumann. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but something about the mass of pull quotes that decorated the book, and the design that evoked any number of similar lit-fic covers, brought about this sudden flash of longing: I wished that I was reading the same book, but in the form of a pocket sized trade paperback with some kind of weird watercolor cover art. I wished it looked like a science fiction book. This was purely a response to surface aesthetics, and did not seem very important until the Dune movie brought it out again in a more fleshed-out form. 

I hate the new Dune movies because I think they’re afraid to be truly strange in a way that takes the premise of the Dune series seriously. I would argue that they also refuse to engage with the world of the series as speculative fiction. This is related to their lack of strangeness.

Speculative fiction is special because it launches its inquiry from a place of strangeness. The premise of a sci-fi novel often requires a bit of buy-in. In this sense, there is a barrier for entry – the reader needs to take the novel’s terms seriously and agree to care about the implications of these terms. In the case of Dune, we need to care about genetic engineering and the questions it raises. What does it mean for personal identity if people can also be weapons of mass destruction? When plans are conducted across centuries, how much do individual personalities matter? What would people be like in this world? What about empire-building? The Dune films bypass these concerns entirely, presenting instead palatable, recognizable characters who go through palatable, recognizable moral arcs. Paul and Chani seem like people you might meet anywhere. The discourse surrounding imperialism which pervades the film slots neatly into our own contemporary discourses, shoving aside the fact that the books thematize imperialism within the context of the concerns I’ve enumerated above. 

There is no questioning from a place of strangeness – in fact, strangeness within the film is used to denote threat. The Harkonnens are uncanny and insectoid. They don’t move like humans we know. By contrast, the Atreides and the Fremen move like people you might see at the supermarket. Never mind the layers of strangeness that would separate someone like Paul Atreides from you or me – the long-term genetic manipulation, the Bene Gesserit training, his mentat status, his sense of hierarchy. Would it really be so terrible for audiences to have to encounter a main character who feels alien to them? People who foreground relatability when assessing media might say yes.

If it sounds like I’m just a fan lamenting the fact that the thing I like has hit the mainstream, whatever. But the fact that Dune is a major blockbuster series – the theaters were full when I saw both part one and part two – is emblematic of a wider popular interest in speculative fiction in general, which I’m sure we’re all aware of. Genre elements creep into lots of different things now, and it isn’t weird or uncool to like speculative fiction. I think this is bad because I’m not sure a general audience is willing to make that buy-in that I talked about. Within this model, speculative fiction drifts into magical realism – it’s a way to talk about our world, an elaborate way to use figurative language. That seems like a flattening to me.

Lots of genres are still siloed and doing fine. Romance is judged by its own intra-generic norms, as is crime. I don’t think it’s possible to dial back what has happened to spec fic, but I do think that this can teach us something about the importance of an audience’s relationship with a work or genre. The audience forms the genre. When the audience changes, the genre changes. I just wish that particular truth wouldn’t bring about things like Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.

This came about because I was thinking about the first two books in the Gormenghast trilogy, by Mervyn Peake, which are very much of a piece. To me, this story seems so self contained and complete. The two books, often classified as fantasy by virtue of their taking place in a landscape that is seemingly set nowhere at all, and never explained, operate according to an internal logic that is so enveloping and intricate that it makes the experience of reading almost disorienting. But to experience this world does not feel like a brush with fantasy ‘worldbuilding’. Although there are strange systems at play, we are not fully invited into how and why these systems work/are present. Although the landscape with the immense, crumbling castle at its heart feels more vivid than the settings of most fantasy novels I’ve read, the author's refusal to explain what is is doing there forces the reader away from the edges of the strange world and into the narrative. The narrative feeds the setting, and the setting feeds the narrative — we are forced to mine the strangeness of the world for thematic resonances and motifs that will give the narrative meaning In this way, it feels like it has more in common with gothic literature, or even classical tragedy, than worldbuilding (worldbuilt?) fantasy: its themes weave back and forth through setting and plot, creating a sense of narrative richness that is immensely satisfying. This is what I mean by completeness: Titus Groan and Gormenghast tell an immersive and compelling story in a way that foregrounds Mervyn Peake’s craft. The book is fun to read because of the density and creativity of its storytelling-through-setting. Its narrative strategies are elaborately constructed, very effective, and very apparent.

When I reached the final pages of Gormenghast, I had that feeling of wistfulness that comes after finishing a wonderful book. The story was over; there would be no more engaging with that world and its narrative strategies. As a reader, my relationship with the book was simple and hierarchical: the book tells me the story, I play the game, and when I finish, it’s over (although I get to take its images and themes into my life). I am rather powerless here. That’s fine with me.

To my mind, the kind of reader I am describing above differs from the kind of reader who is thrilled by worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is often extra-narrative and extra-thematic. It situates the reader as a kind of explorer in an open world. Readers who like worldbuilding often like long, sprawling series. When I think of worldbuilding, I think of Brandon Sanderson, who meticulously details elements of his world with the aim of building not a story, not really, but a multiverse. We know almost nothing about the economics of Gormenghast castle. We know quite a lot about the economics of the world of the Stormlight Archive.

The reason that I find this kind of story less satisfying than stories that feel more ‘complete’ is because this kind of story benefits from the de-prioritization of craft. The landscape is by necessity a-thematic — it has a weak connection to the book’s narrative, because it must generate any number of other narratives. This is interesting, because this is the kind of thing that invites fandom, and fan work. The thin, clumsy style of The Way of Kings has not stopped readers from producing so much fanfic, so much art. In fact, I would argue that it probably supports this tendency. Compare Mervyn Peake’s style, which is tyrannical in its idiosyncrasy.

I think the implications of this are that one type of prevalent contemporary reader is the kind of reader that values the worldbuilding experience — something more interactive. This produces more ‘open’ texts on the market which, to me, lack that feeling of completeness. Is a singular work of achievement in narrative fiction better than a vibrant community of fans that produces its own art and writing? I’m not really sure. But it all makes me feel a little bit wistful about the novel, as if that possibility is closing for good.

i am not so curious about the things that i was once curious about. i think i am curious about new things, but i haven’t been able to pin them down — they emerge quietly and then fall away. they are only beginning to take form. in short, i am having perhaps a bit of an identity crisis, so here, as a kind of tentative probing exercise, are five things that i know i enjoy now, and why.

apologies for the fact that this is just a diary post. i’m trying to get myself to write!

1. Deadlifting

   I like lifting as a whole. It underpins my weeks, a kind of surprisingly flexible metaphor that makes me feel a little more reasonable and more patient when I’m doing other kinds of work, or any necessary drudgery. I like the ability to isolate problems that are preventing me from achieving my goals and work on them until I’m stronger overall. I like the feeling that my body is learning, and that the body/mind division is a farce and a hindrance. I also like feeling proud of my lifts. Deadlifting is my favorite because, to do it properly, I have to take such a sturdy stance, which makes me feel like a more sturdy person. I think there is something to be said about different exercises modelling different psychological states. being a runner, a climber, a lifter — each, when repeated enough, makes me feel like a different person.

2. Middlemarch

   This was the best book I read last year. Nothing has come close to it since. It is so funny and perceptive; it is hypnotic, using the rhythms of the characters’ lives to create a sense of immersive temporal setting that is, as far as I know, unmatched; it stages a series of ethical questions by presenting a group of characters that are all trying to ‘do good’ in the context of their community (whatever they think that means), and putting pressure on them; it is sensitive to the interiority of these characters in such a careful, compassionate way. I am afraid to read more George Eliot because I am not sure how any other book could touch this.

3. Reading about Napoleon

   Please don’t laugh at me for putting this on the same list as deadlifting. I wouldn’t consider myself a Napoleon lover, but I’m finding that I can explore some points that I’m interested in through his career: the emergence of the modern state, and how this process interacted with the more varied administrative entities scattered around Europe; how something that seems dated to the contemporary mind (read: early modern artillery and the various ways that it can be deployed) once constituted ‘cutting edge military technology’; the problem of charisma, which has always haunted me; the performativity of war/war as theatre. I’m working on the Philoctetes this year, so I do feel that this last point is especially relevant to me. Maybe this is a long-winded way of saying that I’m enjoying reading history again, something that I have not done a lot lately.

4. Linocut

   I love doing linocut! It is very cool that once you make a linocut, you can print on all sorts of things. The feeling of carving into the lino board is a substantial one; there is a sense of excavation, of real work being done. Reading this list over, maybe I value a sense of effort, slow but visible progress, and concreteness. In any case, here’s an ex libris plate i made. the lino board is a little bent, which is why it looks warped:

   

5. Not speaking unless I feel I have something load-bearing to say

   Lately I’ve been feeling like I don’t know what conversation is for. Perhaps it’s a space of play; that’s fine, but I’d like it to be a more constructive one. I am trying to be a little bit more conversationally decisive, to not have conversations that just fall into the void. A conversation is a series of actions; what could it change?

Thanks for reading!

I have been thinking about the process of coming to meaning or understanding with some irritation and even cynicism. It is a pleasurable process — some potential glimmer of revelation appears on the horizon, a mystery unfolds, one situates oneself in it, seeks to thoroughly map the terrain, then one either fails or (perhaps worse) has to live with one’s new knowledge. Repeat ad infinitum. In previous blog posts I’ve scorned people who orient themselves around utopia or apocalypse without realising that my enshrinement of ‘understanding’ might work the same way. I’ve seen this as I’ve started to write my PhD — things that seemed like untouchable, entrancing edifices to me in the past, like Greek, or narrative, are now workhorses that I use every day with some skill and even expertise. I’m living in my utopia, a paradoxical situation which negates that utopia — now what?

The absurdity of the situation fully came over me during a somewhat frantic phrase during which I read a lot of John Fowles. I read The Magus, A Maggot, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. These are all books about coming into being, about passing over a threshold into a new, more enlightened place — the difficulty and agony of this process. I found these books very enjoyable to read, but in retrospect, I think my obsession with this writer mostly came out of the fact that I wanted to experience this passage over the horizon, this shedding of ego and assumptions which leads one to a better world, over and over again. In short, John Fowles is my YA, and I have indulged in the same impulse that drives adults to read novels set in a supernatural high school.

Fowles is a much better writer than that, though, and to read him without gluttonous, self-serving motivation would reveal that he is not so much preoccupied with the moment of initiation as the laborious and granular everyday activity which truly facilitates the passage into that space of greater knowledge. Perhaps there is some lesson in the fact that his characters vacillate, and are only occasionally able to see the new worlds that they are trying to incarnate. Often, in the moment, their choices are driven not by an ideal but a passing emotion, or societal pressure, or — this is the important one — by personal taste.

Alongside Fowles I have also been reading Mansfield Park. This is a quiet book, audacious only in the fact that it dares to make and thematize a connection between taste and morality. A character will make a judgment of aesthetics or decorum which prefigures a more fundamental capacity to make good or bad judgments in situations with real moral weight. Watching the novel’s plot play out on these terms made me wonder if there is something to this, if taste is a repository of small value judgments made every day. How do these little value judgments interact with the big ones? Can paying attention to taste, the most mundane engine of choice, help me decide what is really important? Could it be a way to escape the seductions of the revelation pattern?

I have formulated a new set of questions which I will try to answer over the next months:

— What ways of experiencing meaning or understanding are there that don’t rely on a coming into being (even coming of age) threshold model? What comes from paying attention to these experiences?

— What is good taste? What is bad taste? Is this a useful concept, or is it too tied to societal norms to be significant?

— Is it finally time to read the Nicomachean Ethics?