John Pistelli's Blog, page 11

Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m not usually the classics contrarian—all those people on Twitter who think they’ve uttered a bold and forbidden new truth by being the billionth person to remark that they hate The Great Gatsby or whatever—but this really is a silly, gimmicky play. Some hard-boiled types out of a ’30s American noir novel the midcentury French loved so much (the lesbian sadist is a nice touch) arrive in an afterlife ironically modeled on a Second Empire drawing-room, which Sartre would have regarded as emblematic of bourgeois fat and delusion. There they force one another to confess to the sins that landed them in hell (spousal abuse, adultery, desertion, infanticide, suicide, and so on), and it becomes obvious that they will see one another as their worst selves for eternity. Since this hellish drawing-room contains no mirrors, they cannot see themselves except as others see them; since the damned are relieved of their eyelids, they can neither evade the gaze of others nor, more symbolically, can they close their eyes and turn their gaze inward. The moral of the story: when you can only perceive yourself through other people’s perceptions, you reduce yourself to the reductions they apply to you. Hence, in the play’s most famous line, “Hell is—other people!” As an economical symbolic description of a paranoid and morally compromised collective, whether Vichy France (tragedy) or the aforementioned Twitter (farce), No Exit undoubtedly works, but that doesn’t excuse the snidely melodramatic wrangling of the stereotypes. Once you’ve heard the concept, you’ve as good as read the play. Slogging through the period dialogue (“What a lovely pair you make! If you could see his big paw splayed out on your back” etc.) adds little to the premise, the thin realization of which makes the play seem little more than an extended literary trick, whatever its value as a philosopher’s thought experiment.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

15 years and a few months ago, the biggest news story in America, furiously debated for weeks in mainstream media and in the then-novel blogosphere, was “The Case of Theresa Schiavo,” to quote the title of an essay Joan Didion published in June 2005 in The New York Review of Books. Terri Schiavo was a 41-year-old Florida woman who had been living in “a persistent vegetative state”—during the spring of 2005, you could not turn on the TV, open a magazine, or visit a website without encountering this phrase—since she’d suffered cardiac arrest a decade and a half before. She lived in a care facility, was nourished through a feeding tube, and seemed broadly unresponsive to stimuli. Her husband petitioned to have her feeding tube removed to allow her die, which he believed was in accord with her apparent wish, expressed while she was in good health, not to have her life artificially prolonged if no recovery was possible. Her parents disagreed; they claimed that Mr. Schiavo did not have Terri’s best interests at heart and that there was no reason to cut short her life, especially since, in their view, she was responsive to their attention. Courts got involved, and then the familial conflict became national politics, a proxy battle in America’s endless culture war.

For context, this happened shortly after George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. The polls had been close, and many pundits had suspected he might lose; understandably, they cited his failure to win the popular vote in the previous election and the global outrage created by his militarist and millenarian foreign policy after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Bush’s campaign, however, successfully turned out Christian voters with a “values” appeal—opposition to gay marriage was its centerpiece—and Bush won not only the electoral college but also the popular vote. After his triumph, chastened commentators warned of the administration’s attempt to create a “permanent Republican majority” based on activating infrequent white Christian voters who had the numbers to swamp the liberals. The vanguard of opposition to Bush, therefore, shifted from the anti-war sentiments of the early 2000s to an increasingly belligerent rationalism and secularism typified by the New Atheist movement, an insistence on the separation of church and state that accorded public authority to science over supernatural revelation or subjective values—nothing less than a return to the Age of Reason in a time of evangelical fervor.

The Schiavo case offered these forces an opportunity for combat. Bush and the Republicans moralized over the absolute sanctity of every life (give or take an Iraqi civilian), while liberals fulminated over the secular right to self-determination and human flourishing free of imperious religious strictures (never mind the eerie echoes of eugenicists past, with their own rather restrictive views on what counted as a life worth living). There was plenty of bad faith—literally—to go around. As Didion points out in her article, Schiavo’s dilemma was subliminally recast in the public sphere as a sick allegory for abortion, with Mr. Schiavo as the unlucky “mother” forced by zealots to bear the burden of his child-wife, or else Terri as the defenseless bundle of cells nevertheless nascent with the breath of the Lord, a casual miracle unseen to the dead eye of progressive physicians and atheist activists. Now that everything in public life has shifted, the culture war continues, but the battlefield is unrecognizable: the rationalists and the Christian conservatives today find themselves strange trench-mates in a shared war against the woke left-liberals, who have for their part joined with Bush’s other old allies, the bellicose neoconservatives, in a bid to defeat right-wing populism—which just goes to show that if you define yourself by your politics, time will eventually make a fool of you, if you haven’t made a fool of yourself already. I didn’t know that then—I was only 23—so I fought on the side of the anti-Christian soldiers, which is to say that I blogged at livejournal.com, narrowly in support of Mr. Schiavo’s petition and broadly against what I naïvely took to be a burgeoning theocracy.

I also barely knew who Joan Didion was. I’d been an English major, but not one much interested in postwar American letters. It’s possible, then, that the NYRB piece on Schiavo was my introduction to Didion, and I was too self-righteous at the time to allow it to make any good impression. Who was this awful woman? She seemed to side with the conservatives! Her essay, first, discredits Schiavo’s husband—Didion raises the possibility of abuse and generally portrays him as indolent, callous, and self-serving—and, second, disparages the left-liberal view of human life at large:

Yet even if we had managed to convince ourselves that this case involved the right to die, a problem remained. No one even casually exposed to religious teaching believes any such right exists. “So teach us to number our days,” the Episcopal litany asks, “so that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” This is a prayer for the wisdom to accept that death is inevitable, not a plea for control over its timing. “Control” itself, when it comes to the natural processes of life and death, is seen as an illusion, an error we learn through life to relinquish. This is by no means a view confined to Christian fundamentalists. It is a view shared by anyone whose ethical principles or general idea of how life works have at any point been touched by any of the world’s major religions.

When she published “The Case of Theresa Schiavo,” Didion was on the eve of her second coming as a great American writer, this time a popular one: in the fall of 2005, her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, was released and became both a bestseller and an instant classic. Didion writes with her characteristic spareness and economy about the grief that followed the sudden death from a heart attack of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and the benumbed dread caused by a contemporaneous, near-fatal succession of illnesses suffered by their adopted daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, who would in fact die at age 39 after the book’s completion but shortly before its publication.

I didn’t like memoirs—I still don’t, for reasons I’ll explain shortly—so, despite its ubiquity, I didn’t read The Year of Magical Thinking in 2005. The hype did persuade me to pick up Didion’s classic, career-making 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. A few pages of that book, though, convinced me that the Schiavo article was no anomaly: Didion was some kind of stylized right-winger, condescending to hippies and communists, extolling John Wayne, and writing paeans to a “self-respect” every image of which she drew from colonial and settler mythologies:

It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke out about it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. (“On Self-Respect”)

Back then, I was self-righteous enough to be on Twitter, which, thank God, didn’t exist yet. (Self-righteousness compensates for lack of self-respect, as the Twitterati daily demonstrate). We’ll get back to God in a minute, but for now let me say that I wasn’t reading the book closely enough. How did I miss the passages that reveal Didion to be not some holy roller, but an open nihilist seeking a center anywhere she can find one? Of the lost children of Haight-Ashbury, for example, she writes in the title essay:

This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values.

A failure of nerve: what to the advocate of self-respect could be worse? The game is a game, but we still must play.

I found a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking in the neighborhood the other day and decided to read it at last, years after having made my peace with Didion, a peace occasioned by my discovery that, whatever one thinks of her contributions to journalism, Play It as It Lays is one of the great American novels. The Year of Magical Thinking is not a great book—though I’m not the person to ask since, again, I dislike memoirs. I have not yet outgrown this perhaps callow opinion. Memoirs, it seems to me, use all the techniques of the novel—they are formally indistinct from novels—but they prey on readers’ feelings and inhibit critical response with an implicit taunt: This really happened. Are you going to criticize my husband’s and daughter’s deaths? I’ve always felt that memoirs are machines for laundering aesthetic defects through actual catastrophes no one can judge without being thought heartless. We are free to laugh at the death of Little Nell but not at the death of Quintana Roo—quite rightly!—and without imaginative freedom what is the point of literature? This inherent defect of the memoir form is a hard truth, and it would be insulting to the tough-minded Didion to avoid stating such sullen and obdurate verities if one is actually persuaded of them. Then again, Didion is not a realist. Back to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the book I’d rather be talking about, this time from “On Keeping a Notebook”:

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. […] But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.”

This—the belief that the mind makes the world in encountering it—is the conviction not of the journalist nor of the realist novelist but of the Romantic poet, and if a Romantic poet writes a memoir, it might be worth reading. For Didion, anyway, there is no one besides the self that might make the world, being as it is the product of heedless accident. “No eye is on the sparrow,” she twice writes in The Year of Magical Thinking, a phrase that reverses the providential guarantee of Matthew 10:29 and Hamlet 5:2. Drawn to the thought that her dead husband might return, that there was something she might have done to have spared him his fatal heart attack, she is afflicted by the titular “magical thinking,” an affront to her otherwise “cool” acceptance of harsh reality: “She’s a pretty cool customer,” the social worker at the hospital observes after watching her appear to absorb without histrionics the fact of her husband’s death.

Not that Didion’s cool ever came from blithe indifference to suffering; she registers her protest between the lines of her calm and collected prose, her buried, muffled howls at the agonies of chance and the cruelties of society. She is an ironist, registering the gap between what the “I” wants and what the world is, and registering too that the world’s “is” might, even in its disappointments, be little more than a refraction of the “I.” Another conservative moment from the 2000s: her slightly petulant rebuke of the mass youth movement that backed the candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008:

Irony was now out.

Naiveté, translated into “hope,” was now in.

Innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.

[…]

I heard it said breathlessly on one channel that the United States, on the basis of having carried off this presidential election, now had “the congratulations of all the nations.” “They want to be with us,” another commentator said. Imagining in 2008 that all the world’s people wanted to be with us did not seem entirely different in kind from imagining in 2003 that we would be greeted with flowers when we invaded Iraq, but in the irony-free zone that the nation had chosen to become, this was not the preferred way of looking at it.

This was received with scorn and bafflement at the time, but it now seems prescient about the aforementioned wokeness:

It became increasingly clear that we were gearing up for another close encounter with militant idealism—by which I mean the convenient but dangerous redefinition of political or pragmatic questions as moral questions.

Didion thinks that cruelties might be remediated pragmatically and provisionally, but not through the strenuous exercise of collective moral passion, which lead to gullibility at best, and guillotine and gulag at worst. Obama’s favorite living American writer, by contrast, would seem to be that anti-Didion, the pious, didactic Marilynne Robinson, who celebrates the moral fervor of the New England Puritan diaspora that built the Midwest, a spiritual geography rather different from Didion’s, which wryly exalts by contrast the stern libertarian ethic of the “peculiar flawed strain who had cleared Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri” on their way to Sacramento, as she puts it in “Notes from a Native Daughter.” (To his credit, Obama hung a medal on Didion anyway.) One more quotation from Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is “good” and what “evil.” I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. […] Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. (“On Morality”)

Skepticism, necessity, and the social code: that’s all we get down here on earth. As the poet said, “The imperfect is our paradise.” Didion was never anything so banal as an atheist, since atheists tend to think, as Didion does not, that the sterile epistemic hygiene of the scientific method can found an ethic and serve as the basis of a state. Didion is instead a nihilist, which is why she is a conservative in the deepest sense: she does not believe there is any fortification to erect against the storm save tradition and the heroically steadfast and disillusioned passivity—passivity even in activity—it drills in its pupils. That and the discipline of art, whether the art of dressing a table or the art of inditing sentences that feel as if they’d been graved in steel. Now at last I will quote at length from The Year of Magical Thinking:

As a child I thought a great deal about meaninglessness, which seemed at the time the most prominent negative feature on the horizon. After a few years of failing to find meaning in the more commonly recommended venues I learned that I could find it in geology, so I did. This in turn enabled me to find meaning in the Episcopal litany, most acutely in the words as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, which I interpreted as a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away. […] I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then.

The nihilist aesthete becomes an Episcopalian housewife without a hint of contradiction. I enjoyed, if that is the word, The Year of Magical Thinking. It is brisk and moving, all the more moving for the emotion it withholds. I don’t understand how it became a popular success, since much of its effect seems to rely on readers’ knowing enough about Didion’s persona to wonder how she’ll cope with two simultaneous and devastating personal tragedies; perhaps common readers who enjoy spectating at the calamities of the rich and famous are charmed by its air of ruined glamor—Didion lived a life where jetting to Hawaii seemed as easy as boarding a city bus. The point, in any case, is that dread and grief will come to all, rich and poor alike, a theme adumbrated by her surprising self-portrait of the artist as optimistic naïf foiled and fuddled by affliction, not quite the image we get from her other books. I have happily not known the grief as yet, the confusion in the suddenly empty apartment, but I have felt the dread in hospital corridors, and she captures it with grave and terrifying authority. Writing from his own corridors of dread in The New York Review of Each Other’s Books, John Leonard, in an almost senselessly incandescent appreciation (her sentences, he says, “come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, icepick laser beams, or waves”), calls this book The Black Album.

I was too young to read it in 2005, and maybe I am still too young. But I did read “The Case of Theresa Schiavo” back then, and I also read Slouching Towards Bethlehem, or some of it, and was too young to see what I do see now. When she defends the Christians against the rationalists at the end of the essay on Schiavo, she is only reprising her life-long war with the meliorists on behalf of tradition, less any particular one than tradition as such, the age-tempered alloy that stiffens the spine in hard circumstance. What has changed between 1968 and 2005 comes at the essay’s beginning, not its end. To understand, we have to go back to the start of her literary project. The piece that opens Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” is a withering description of a vulgar, deluded California striver later convicted of murdering her husband, perhaps falsely. Didion pitilessly anatomizes this delusive dreamer’s background:

Of course she came from somewhere else, came off the prairie, in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio. For this is a Southern California story. She was born on January 17, 1930, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the only child of Gordon and Lily Maxwell, both school teachers hers and both dedicated to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church whose members observe the Sabbath on Saturday, believe in an apocalyptic Second Coming, have a strong missionary tendency, and, if they are strict, do not smoke, drink, eat meat, use makeup, or wear jewelry, including wedding rings. By the time Lucille Maxwell enrolled at Walla Walla College in College Place, Washington, the Adventist school where her parents then taught, she was an eighteen-year-old possessed of unremarkable good looks and remarkable high spirits. “Lucille wanted to see the world,” her father would say in retrospect, “and I guess she found out.”

Is this irony or merely sarcasm? These lines are echoed in their cadence but reversed in their meaning by Didion’s 2005 evocation of Terri Schiavo’s life before her brain injury, here rendered, despite its superficial similarity to the lives of Didion’s other tasteless American dreamers, with Tolstoyan sympathy and clarity rather than corrosive Flaubertian hauteur:

Theresa Marie Schindler was born on December 3, 1963, to prosperous and devoutly Catholic parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, in a Philadelphia suburb, Huntingdon Valley. Robert Schindler was a dealer in industrial supplies. Mary Schindler was a full-time wife and mother. They named their first child for Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish mystic who believed the Carmelites insufficiently reclusive and so founded a more restrictive order. We have only snapshots of Theresa Marie Schindler’s life before the series of events that interrupted and eventually ended it. According to newspaper accounts published in the wake of those events, there had been the four-bedroom colonial on the leafy street called Red Wing Lane. There had been the day the yellow Labrador retriever, Bucky, collapsed of old age in the driveway and Theresa Marie tried in vain to resuscitate him. There had been the many occasions on which her two gerbils, named after the television characters Starsky and Hutch, got loose and into the air-conditioning unit in the basement.

St. Theresa: absence of the rational mind may be rapture, not vegetation. Bucky, Starsky, Hutch: every life is worth at least attempting to retrieve. Didion is no politician; she’s not so crass as to alter her fundamental convictions with the year, the decade, or the presidential administration. But the tone has changed, and tone for so dedicated a writer is, if not conviction itself, then the way conviction is held. If she sounds startlingly reverent of life, it is life not in the abstract but the particular: this life, however its “you” or “her” necessarily has to pass through the inventions of the “I” to become intelligible. Despite her memoir’s title, she worries more about “self-pity” than “magical thinking”: “The question of self-pity,” italics in original, is the book’s fourth line. She concludes that self-pity is both inevitable and forgivable:

I remember despising the book Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin wrote after her husband’s death, Leftover Life to Kill. I remember being dismissive of, even censorious about, her “self-pity,” her “whining,” her “dwelling on it.” Leftover Life to Kill was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in which we learn.

The last sentence is a line from Delmore Schwartz, but I think of one of Mina Loy’s Futurist aphorisms, a favorite phrase I’m sure I’ve quoted on this website already: “MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.” This comprising accounts for what had so scandalized me in “The Case of Theresa Schiavo.” The years and the losses taught Didion—not morality, God forbid, and not even exactly “empathy,” that current watchword of the mediocre moralist. They taught her, rather, that every self is grand enough to merit pity, pity in the high and pitiless style, when seen from the inside. The “I” is already “you,” and well worth mourning. Her eye was on the sparrow.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am too old, and I have seen too much, to fall in love with the novel that helped to inspire the #darkacademia trend. Granted, as a student who spent four years reading Shakespeare, Dickens, and Joyce under the high, dim vault of the Cathedral of Learning’s commons room, I had the most #darkacademic experience possible at an urban public research university. But then I spent seven years in graduate school, and seven years after that as an adjunct professor; I have seen the true darkness of academia, and it has very little to do with the Gothic trappings of Donna Tartt’s classic 1992 thriller.

What is #darkacademia, really, but a response to this genuine darkness? Such Poe-like airs as Tartt and her contemporary devotees put on are an attempt to reenchant the life of the mind after its exsanguination and despiritualization by the increasingly rationalized bureaucracies of the contemporary university. Despite attempts to bring the trend in line with social justice, #darkacademia represents a conservative backlash against both academic leftism and corporatist neoliberalism in our time, with these two tendencies’ routinized subversions and mandatory inculcations and profit-seeking administrations. In reaching back a generation to canonize The Secret History as the inspiration of their aesthetic, today’s gloomy ephebes chose wisely, since Tartt’s novel belongs to the last backlash, coming as it did between The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and The Western Canon (1994)—a black blossom between the Blooms—and deriving some of its emotional impetus, however disavowed, from the same sources as those jeremiads against the leveling of humanities education.

The Secret History is a long book—over 500 pages—with a complicated plot, but the basic premise is simple. Our narrator is Richard Papen, a lower-middle-class suburban Californian who matriculates to Hampden, a fictional small Vermont liberal arts college. Once on campus, he falls in with a glamorous quintet of privileged classics students who study under the exclusive tutelage of a forbidding but charming instructor named Julian. Concealing his modest origins, Richard becomes entangled in the lives of the young classicists, a company that includes the chilly genius Henry (the group’s unofficial leader), the beguiling twins Charles and Camilla (Richard falls in love with the alluringly epicene sister), the dashing but closeted Francis, and the boisterous, lovably vulgar sponger Bunny. Richard is drawn more deeply into their troubles when, in an attempt to reenact the bacchic frenzy, they accidentally kill a Vermont farmer. When Bunny, who was not present at the rite, learns about this manslaughter and threatens either blackmail or simple drunken blabbing, the group, led by the mastermind Henry, plots a more deliberate murder. Tartt reveals that the group killed Bunny on the novel’s first page, and the actual killing comes midway through the book; the remainder is a meandering double bill of suspense—will they get away with it?—and meditation on the wages of sin.

In theory, Tartt means to offer a moral criticism of the classics-obsessed mentality, just as pornographers used to preface their works with an assurance that all the fornication to follow was offered merely as a cautionary tale. In practice, just as Mario Puzo succeeded only in glamorizing the mafia, Norman Lear inadvertently turned Archie Bunker into a folk hero, and even Nabokov inspired some number of young girls to don heart-shaped glasses in a misunderstanding of his fable’s import, Tartt has only created a cult around her classicists’ cultus. She bears some responsibility for this ostensible misprision, it must be said.

For example, Tartt tries to have her narrative’s politics both ways. She may mean to criticize or even satirize the dissolution of the privileged, but she makes their freedom and savoir-faire undeniably attractive, partially by ensuring that the novel has no other pole of attraction. The other Hampden students are progressive-school dilettantes, intellectually unserious party animals. The Vermont townies are even worse, a bunch of brain-dead bigots—a basket of deplorables, I am tempted to say—so the collateral death of one such rube in the pursuit of our heroes’ ecstasy is no great loss. The novel’s other designated victim, the nouveau riche vulgarian Bunny, is also the only member of our sextet to be violently bigoted himself, dropping homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs every few pages to offset our regret at his forced tumble down the ravine. Tartt hints early on that Julian himself shares Bunny’s biases—

“We’ll be studying Dante, Virgil, all sorts of things. But I wouldn’t advise you to go out and buy a copy of Goodbye, Columbus” (required, notoriously, in one of the freshman English classes) “if you will forgive me for being vulgar.”

—but she drops it quickly. Our classicists remain mostly untainted by such lapses in political taste, being culturally cosmopolitan and erotically urbane rather than provincial and prejudiced. (Their sexual sophistication, by the way, encompasses both bisexuality and incest, as if Tartt thought these equivalent.)

With these unconvincing feints, popular fiction tries to morally launder the iniquitous and inequitable fantasy of freedom it proffers to readers. Despite poptimists’ charge that critics of Tartt—for her melodramatic plotting, evidenced by this weighty novel’s many empty calories of ersatz suspense, or for her often overwrought prose (“His eyes were magnified and wicked behind his pince-nez”)—are “elitist,” the source of this novel’s popularity is its daydream fantasy about joining the elite. Then again, maybe this moral duplicity is not entirely Tartt’s fault. Truffaut’s famous if apocryphal adage on the limits of cinema—he is supposed to have said, “There is no such thing as an anti-war film,” since movies glamorize everything—might hold true for all the arts and any subject matter. To create an effective work of art about [X] is to fashion [X] into the artifice of eternity, and what could be more glamorous than that? Another temptation is to say that great literature shouldn’t imaginatively fulfill the audience’s wishes, but too many readers want to marry Messrs. Darcy and Rochester or to join the conversation in Joyce’s Dublin and on Mann’s mountain for this to be true. To the endless despair of spartan socialists and other preachers of grayly Mao-jacketed equality, accession to the exceptionality of art is what common readers—and here I count myself among them—have always wanted. We are all Richard Papen.

On that note, one period-specific detail of The Secret History that might ring oddly to today’s reader is Richard’s casual contempt for the radical left. Richard is a morally trustworthy narrator—we know this because he overtly worries about whether or not he is, and he dutifully tells us about all his faults—so when he makes fun of Hampden’s self-styled “progressive” bien-pensance, we know we can take him seriously, especially since such jocular sallies against the further left was a staple of serious fiction from the ’70s through the 2000s—from, let’s say, A Book of Common Prayer to American Pastoral (Tartt is in good company). Now we know that this counter-revolutionary sensibility was at least in part the result of an psychological operation, but even so, at least as far as fiction is concerned, the CIA was only going with the grain of the novel form, which has always, with its slow accretion of social detail and its plenitudes of strongly particularized characters, swamped extremist passions in an abundant flow of temporal experience. As Tartt has told many an interviewer, her hero is Charles Dickens.

The Greek-loving extremists are the main flaw of The Secret History, though, the price Tartt pays for her essential Dickensian moderation. If you are a writer, you will re-write your contemporaries’ novels in your head as you read them, and I just couldn’t and can’t understand why Tartt so neglects the character of Julian. I would have cast him as the novel’s Ahab, the captain of his dark seminar’s doomed crew, a brooding and Byronic central figure; I would have had him present for both killings, masterminding their evasion of law enforcement, and I would even have made him, not Henry, the demon lover of Camilla. Isn’t he supposed to be the inspiration for Henry and Co.’s orgies? If so, he should utter dialogue that rises above a slightly darker version of Dead Poets Society platitudes: “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?” (Richard weakly apologizes on behalf of his author, “it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one,” but many writers from Wilde to Nabokov, both cited alongside Dickens by Tartt as influences, have found a way.) We also learn little about him since he occupies so few of the novel’s pages, and what we do learn makes him sound like a globetrotting fop rather than a menacing mage. I’m sure part of Tartt’s purpose is to cut this arrogant figure down to size, but she fails to persuade us of his grandeur first. As for Henry, the book’s cold and ingenious villain, he is, with his one-note personality and his improbably complete erudition (ranging from Sanskrit to mycology), a cartoon rather than a character; if you’ll suffer another pop-culture allusion, he is Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory transposed from low comedy to high melodrama, but still a bit ludicrous for the metamorphosis. Since Julian fails to convince as human Dionysus and Henry is only a dark Apollo, and a wooden one at that, it’s hard to understand just what drives our protagonists to the brink of insanity.

Tellingly, the second half of The Secret History loses track of the dangerous-classics theme and is all the better for it. As Tartt drifts from her slightly gimmicky premise during the long sequence of Bunny’s funeral, the novel becomes a bittersweet comedy of manners, dramatizing the danger not of intellection but rather of wealth untethered to character or purpose. In these scenes, and in Tartt’s poignant command throughout the novel of the passage of time, the turn of the seasons, I see the young author’s potential to become a novelist of a more conventionally “literary” type, in the manner of Johns Cheever, Updike, or Irving, free to pursue character and mood when unburdened by the straitjacket of the highly artificial thriller convention’s demand that the author generate regular but emotionally escalating episodes of suspense. Such realism, just as much as the literate sensation novel, is a genuinely Dickensian legacy; it is also, ultimately, the key to the novel’s significance.

A critic of no less “elitist” a reputation than the late George Steiner himself is quoted on the paperback’s first page, praising Tartt for “having the arrogant boldness to tell us that it is in abstract, arcane scholarship and mandarin addictions that utter violence can flourish.” Steiner was fond of repeating the observation that the Nazis listened to Schubert and read Goethe while they tended the death camps; presumably, he considered Tartt an ally in his warning that art cannot make us better people. The Secret History, however, does not mount Steiner’s case about the supposed moral treachery of the aesthetic. For Tartt, the art-and-morality question is finally a question of which art.

The closest Tartt comes to a general statement is not about art per se or high art or elite culture, but simply about the fact that Ancient Greece is not a reliable moral model to the modern citizen. At one point, Richard attributes to Julian an excessive love of “Art and Beauty,” while in a later passage he refers to Julian’s “high cold principles” of “[d]uty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice.” But these aren’t really compatible values, and neither of them reflect the quest for Dionysian frenzy Julian’s students undertake following his counsel to embrace the irrational; Tartt’s characters make a mishmash of Athens and Sparta, of archaic and classical Greece, of Apollo and Dionysus; all that matters for their purposes is that they evade the modern, the everyday, the mediocre, the contingent; and this evasion is what “Greece” in all its avatars seems to mean to them. In Richard’s finest literary observation, he contrasts the Greek language with the English, while also contrasting the harsh, fated clarity of the classical sensibility to the errant and contingent copiousness of a disposition he does not name but which we might variously call the Gothic, the Romantic, or simply the novelistic:

How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.

Here is Tartt’s truest triumph: this idolator of Dickens has defeated her anti-heroes’ delusions of grandly pitiless Greek tragedy at the level of literary form, by capturing their personalities in the honest but forgiving comic light of homely English fiction. Tartt’s—and Richard’s—antidote to the derangements inspired by ancient aesthetics is not a critique of art but rather the art of the novel. I can’t celebrate #darkacademia, but I can celebrate that.

Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After an apparently peregrine and dissolute period of his early adulthood, Cormac McCarthy sent the manuscript of his yet-untitled first novel to Random House in 1962. It happily escaped the slush pile and reached the editor Larry Bensky. According to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author (2016) by Daniel Robert King, Bensky judged it a “strange and, I think, beautiful first novel in the Southern tradition, which has confused me quite a bit on a quick first reading, but which I think is worth publishing”—a perceptive and generous response to an undeniably promising but sometimes aggressively elliptical novel. Bensky, whose peremptory demand for changes to the manuscript did not endear him to the budding author, eventually left Random House, and McCarthy began his long partnership with one of the 20th century’s legendary editors, Albert Erskine, who also edited Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm Lowry, and more.

Erskine not only gently and genially worked with McCarthy to get the manuscript into its final form—it was published as The Orchard Keeper in 1965 (though Toilers at the Kiln was considered as a title too)—but also nurtured McCarthy’s career through its dispiriting first half, a series of critically lauded and underselling books that culminates in his 1985 masterpiece, Blood Meridian. While not a late bloomer as an author—his first novel was accepted for publication when he was 29 and published when he was 32—he didn’t find popular success until he was almost 60 (with All the Pretty Horses [1992]) and became truly rich and famous only in his 70s (with No Country for Old Men [2005] and The Road [2006]). In his aforementioned study of McCarthy’s career, King attributes the author’s late-life success not only to his own persistence, but to the benefits of a publishing world that no longer exists. I will say more on this subject, and on King’s study, later in this piece, but for now I will turn to The Orchard Keeper, to see where this literary odyssey began.

McCarthy is notorious for having disparaged Henry James in the 1992 New York Times interview that broke his reclusive silence, but it can be as hard to tell what’s happening in his oblique first novel as in anything by late-period James. The novel begins with an italicized parable-like proem about a company of woodcutters who find a piece of wrought iron that has “growed all through the tree,” signifying both technology’s cancerous trespass in nature, on the one hand, and, on the other, nature’s encompassing endurance thereof.

McCarthy pursues this tragic-pastoral motif in the story of the eponymous Arthur Ownby, an old man who lives on the grounds of an orchard in the Appalachian countryside near Knoxville and who resents the encroachment of technology and authority on his land. This invasion is typified by the government installation of a tank in or near the old orchard, “the tank like a great silver ikon,” whose contents are never revealed to the reader, perhaps because Arthur is himself ignorant of them. (Was McCarthy thinking of Wallace Stevens’s “jar in Tennessee”? No critic that I can find has yet made the connection.)

In perhaps the novel’s central scene, Arthur goes out in the middle of the night to blast an X pattern of holes in this mysterious object using a shotgun he’s loaded with “rung shells”—i.e., bullets whose casings have been cut from their bases so that the casing remains attached to the bullet when the gun is fired rather than being ejected from the chamber, which has the effect of making the bullet weightier and more destructive. The novel’s careful description of Arthur’s ballistic surgery—whose significance we are left to infer for ourselves (I had to read gun aficionado message boards to find out)—is McCarthy’s first essay, too long to quote here, in the lovingly minute description of manual labor that will characterize his later work.

Arthur is also guarding a secret in the orchard: a dead body. This corpse is the catalyst of the novel’s main plot, which focuses on the relationship between a bon vivant and bootlegger named Marion Sylder and his relationship to Arthur’s nephew, the fatherless adolescent John Wesley Rattner. When Sylder crashes his car, its trunk full of whiskey, into a lake, John Wesley helps him to safety—the man and boy fleeing the wreck, “looking like the last survivors of Armageddon,” in a prophecy of The Road. After this rescue, Sylder becomes a friend and guide to the boy; he even gives him a puppy. John Wesley’s mother has made him swear vengeance on his father’s murderer, but unbeknownst to him, it is his mentor Sylder who killed his father earlier in the novel—in self-defense, given that the elder Rattner (whom McCarthy portrays as a simple but mysterious “presence of evil”) attacks Sylder with a car jack after the bootlegger picks him up hitchhiking. Sylder dumps the body in a pit in Arthur’s orchard, and Arthur, when he discovers it later, decides simply to conceal it. (Later the body is burned—by whom? Sylder? John Wesley? I’m not sure.)

I’ve related these events out of the order given by the text, but the novel’s style is not linear. Instead of straight, simple storytelling, McCarthy uses a prismatic and mutable third-person that narrates from all the characters’ perspectives without ever quite granting us access to their inner lives, and which is just as likely to dilate for pages on the travels of a cat or the changes in the weather as to advance the ostensible plot. The novel’s final quarter does gather together the story’s strands—the law catches up to both Sylder and Arthur, while John Wesley passes from pastoral innocence to chastened experience—but there is nothing like an explosively revelatory climax. Such an ending had been McCarthy’s original plan; according to King’s study, the manuscript McCarthy submitted to Random House in 1962 concluded with John Wesley’s discovery that Sylder had murdered his father, but the first editor, Bensky, deemed this a “typical end-of-book contrivance,” and the published version artfully leaves the state of the boy hero’s knowledge ambiguous.

All told, there is a long short story’s worth of plot here; McCarthy shows his promise, even his early genius, more in the atmosphere where he sets this story and the language of its conveyance. There is invention just this side of magical realism in the depiction of the Green Fly Inn, a bar perched precariously on the side of a mountain—

At times the whole building would career madly to one side as though headlong into collapse. The drinkers would pause, liquid tilting in their glasses, the structure would shudder violently, a broom would fall, a bottle, and then the inn would slowly right itself and assume once more its usual reeling equipoise. The drinkers would raise their glasses, talk would begin again. Remarks alluding to to the eccentricities of the inn were made only outside the building.

—and in the miniature, doomed voyage of the cat that Arthur seems to think is the reincarnation of the elder Rattner, a cat who takes over as our protagonist for pages at a time:

The rain had plastered down her fur and she looked very thin and forlorn. She gathered burdock and the curling purple leaves of rabbit weed as she went; a dead stalk of blackberry briar clung to her hind leg. Just short of the road she stopped, shivered her loose skin, ears flat against her head. She squalled once, hugging the ground with her belly, eyes turned upward at the colorless sky, the endless pelting rain.

The setting (“dark forests of owl trees, bat caverns, witch covens”) is the novel’s real hero, unless that honor goes to McCarthy’s style, with its combination of precision in sense and music in sound, its sacramental hymn to the creation, however inflected with a heretical consciousness that nature is beyond good and evil and, as well, beyond human understanding:

The trees were all encased in ice, limbless-looking where their black trunks rose in aureoles of lace, bright seafans shimmering in the wind and tinkling with an endless bell-like sound, a carillon in miniature, and glittering shards of ice falling in sporadic hail everywhere through the woods and marking the snow with incomprehensible runes.

The novel’s finest sustained piece of writing is the summative chapter on a season of John Wesley’s boyhood in and around his old mother’s “tall and severe” house (“[s]ome supposed it to be the oldest house in the country”), Southern Gothic mixed with the modernist lyricism of memory. In the scene of quasi-sexual initiation when John Wesley has to remove a leech from the thigh of a girl who’d been trying to flirt with him as she stands above him on a rock in a creek (he spends the event “trying to look up and not to at the same time”) we find the intriguing, embarrassing, fluid, and grotesque textual matrix of the old-time misogyny that marks and mars McCarthy’s canon as a whole.

So gender-regressive an author was securely canonized in 21st-century academe not on the basis of identity politics, however, but rather on those other fashionable political grounds of ecocriticism and the anthropocene. The epiphany that transforms John Wesley from boy to man occurs when he visits Sylder in jail after he’s been arrested and beaten by the police and then visits Arthur in the madhouse where he’s been consigned; then he learns that the hawks he’d trapped earlier in the novel for the reward offered by the county, presumably to keep the predators’ numbers down, are burned by the authorities. He learns, in other words, that all wild animate things finally succumb to the rationalization schemes of man’s arrogantly world-conquering reason, a theme that will be pursued to apocalyptic conclusions in Blood Meridian and The Road:

What all do you do with em? he asked, somehow figuring still that they must be kept, must have some value or use commensurate with a dollar other than the fact of their demise.

Burn em in the furnace I would reckon, she said. They sure cain’t keep em around here. They might get a little strong after a while, mightn’t they?

Burn em? he said. They burn em?

I believe so, she said.

He looked about him vaguely, back to her, still not leaning on or touching the counter. And thow people in jail and beat up on em.

What? she said, leaning forward.

And old men in the crazy house.

This lament for what the novel calls those places “beyond the dominion of laws either civil or spiritual” is almost but not quite the moral of Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution. For Daniel Robert King, McCarthy’s career exemplifies the whole last half-century in publishing. The intimate, nurturant relationship McCarthy had with Erskine—an editor who’d acted as collaborator and friend to his authors in defiance of immediate profit concerns—became obsolete when publishing houses were purchased and consolidated by bigger media enterprises insisting that they see immediate returns on investment: no more midlist geniuses kept on the books for 25 years in hopes they’ll catch on and become bestsellers someday, even though this is exactly what happened in McCarthy’s case and under Erskine’s attentive eye.

Moreover, the old Erskine-style editor’s job has been outsourced to the literary agent, another layer of gatekeeping between writers and publishers and, in my experience, an extremely profit-minded layer at that; McCarthy’s story is also telling here, as he acquired his first agent, the superstar Amanda “Binky” Urban, only when he published his sixth novel and first bestseller, All the Pretty Horses. In this changed context, King’s book implies that it is just about impossible to imagine something as dense and weird as The Orchard Keeper getting into print with a major house today—a novel, moreover, without a “newsy” hook or up-to-the-minute quasi-political theme, and written by an unknown, unconnected, and MFAless author.

King, though, tends to portray McCarthy’s collaboration with the neoliberal turn in publishing—his interest in popular filmmaking, his production of genre fiction, and his greater participation in the marketing of his own image—as a sign of his growing “maturity.” Yet I wonder if the author’s swerve from complex and almost miraculously articulate novels like The Orchard Keeper to much slighter fare like Cities of the Plain and No Country for Old Men—both glorified screenplays—merits such celebration. Maybe his disparagement of semicolons was always a warning sign; they “have no place in literature,” King reports him saying—a reprehensible opinion, as I explain in my defense of the frequently and unjustly maligned mark.

I won’t name names, but I think of another client of Binky’s, a promising young novelist who had her manuscript accepted and published to wide acclaim about 15 years ago. It was a big, ambitious book, an intellectual bildungsroman, definitely flawed but full of psychological and political acuity, its mystery and thriller elements in service to a fascinating conception and a burgeoning style. Already prey to the corruptions of the age, though, this novel achieved great publicity when a notorious gossip blog now misremembered as woke-before-its-time invited a debate on whether or not the young author was actually “hot” or merely “book hot.” Her next novel came over half a decade later, an effective but much less sophisticated and highly gimmicky thriller. Five years later, a YA novel; this is what she does now. It is McCarthy’s career compressed into about 15 years, a more drastic decline in the project of an author two generations his junior. With this telescoping of the narrative we can see that no maturation is involved—we see, rather, a forced fall into puerility, encouraged by neoliberal publishing. Nowadays, they send out even the promising first novels for adults with nail polish. What’s next—Happy Meal toys?

What, anyway, does this shibboleth “neoliberal” mean? Wasn’t capitalism always bad? I am not an economist, but here is how it seems to me: when Random House was a small business in competition with other firms of similar scale, and when its owners and workers felt free to take loss leaders to market in the name of prestige and the patience that rewards good work, that was capitalism. When all publishing houses were subsumed into global media conglomerates and hyperoptimized for immediate and iterable profit, that was something else. This supposed optimization is ironically counter to the very aim of profit—you can’t grow a bestseller, to say nothing of a perennial seller, in a laboratory; sometimes you have to wait a few decades until a 60-year-old toiler-at-the-typewriter finds his moment—but this cannot be explained to the laureates of productivity and efficiency, to ideologues hostile to the very idea of organic development. McCarthy’s famous conservative credo, from the same 1992 interview where he dismissed Henry James, can just as easily be seen as a prophetic cry against neoliberalism as against the left:

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

As I insist on reminding everyone from time to time, even at the risk of repeating myself, Lenin argues in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (a book I don’t claim to understand in every particular) that the monopolization of capital is the necessary and final stage of history before communism. Monopoly represents “a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation”—i.e., let the corporations do the work of centralizing production so that the biggest corporate body of all, the state, can easily assume the economy’s commanding heights. Marxism, therefore, is not really a challenger to neoliberalism but only the loyal opposition. Hence the chief theme of McCarthy’s corpus: how the inherent flaws of humanity and nature, those organic defaults that make the marketplace a necessary evil in both serving and curbing self-interest, immeasurably worsen when magnified to the scale of organized planetary warfare in the very name of their correction by rationality—or, as a pair of unorthodox Marxists called it, the dialectic of enlightenment.

McCarthy cares, more than I do, about tools. Maybe tools make the man. There is a picture of the author’s celebrated—and slightly mythical—typewriter, or one just like it, on the cover of Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution. I think of a recent essay by J.H.M. Okthos about the 20th-century grandeur of writing on such a machine:

And then the sound… Like a metal rain. Industrial percussion. […] The great American novel. The declarative philosophies of Europe. The bleak, all-encompassing warnings of Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopias. Of course people would write things so big and bolshy when they were accompanied by the sound of ringing metal, when pressing those keys felt like manual labour, when their words entered the physical as soon as they were constructed.

While Arthur Ownby had his rung shells that offered him only the false comfort of a lead anathema, McCarthy operates a more constructively thundering weapon against the conquest of the wilderness. I’m not a conservative; I don’t think we can go back, not to rural Tennessee and not to midcentury publishing, nor would we want to. The flaws of the past are no just excuse, however, for those whose proposals for the future will only make things worse. We can mourn alongside the narrator of The Orchard Keeper, who concludes with the melancholy observation that his characters’ names are “myth, legend, dust.”

We might also ask, inspired by McCarthy’s love of meticulous craft and his bent toward the elegiac, what tools and what memories we might use to escape from this predicament rather than balefully acquiescing to it, as we congratulate ourselves all the while on having “matured” into querulous indolence before the algorithmic infantilization of a literary culture that once—and in living memory—took for granted the risky or even magnanimous publication of a strange, confusing, beautiful novel by a nobody from near Knoxville. In the meantime, The Orchard Keeper itself now stands for the very loss of the wilder, freer life it elegizes.

Don DeLillo, Americana

Americana by Don DeLillo

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

According to a false and apocryphal story, Hemingway, on the deck of a transatlantic steamer, hurled his first novel into the churning sea. This a parable meaning that no first novel should see the light of day. Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (1971), merits a more generous response. It has its fans in academe, and it has also cast its shadow—if DeLillo’s shadow can be reliably distinguished from those of his contemporaries, Joan Didion and Renata Adler—on today’s fiction. The last few contemporary novels I sampled but didn’t finish sounded just like the first few pages of Americana, from the first sentence forward—a first sentence as memorable as a great line of poetry: “Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year.”

An observer both bemused and superior takes calm stock of his quietly outrageous surroundings, the escalatingly strange paraphernalia and the omni-mediated unreality of postmodern middle-class life. “Opposite a picture of several decapitated villagers was a full-page advertisement for a new kind of panty-girdle.” The disjunction between the narrator’s blasé tone and the mundane bizarrerie observed and articulated generates the irony peculiar to DeLillo. As a character in this novel observes of the effects of advertising on the viewer, “It moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be.” All experience is perceived at the distance created by extreme self-consciousness.

While DeLillo is often paired with Pynchon, they have opposite sensibilities, and their prose seeks opposite effects. Pynchon is less ironist than satirist: he tries to match the scope and breadth of the scandals he describes with the comically vast range of his own style, rocketing as it does up and down the scale from schoolboy scatology to Melvillean and Faulknerian thunder. Like all satirists, he is a moralist. There is no moralism in DeLillo and no satire. He does not belong to the Melville-Faulkner-Pynchon line of preachers in burning cities on hills, men who call the errant republic to holy account. There is only in DeLillo the wry reconstitution of the way things are, with a lingering suspicion that they weren’t always that way, and that some dangerous portal to elsewhere may yet exist. But this portal is not political. We escape not through social transformation, but rather personal transfiguration—a diminution in the self that is so conscious of itself, a private askesis.

Most of this DeLilloism exists in Americana, but, in first-novel fashion, it sits uneasily beside disparate other elements. Paths not taken by the mature novelist still seem open here. In a suitably mass-mediated metaphor, a friend of mine once described reading Henry James’s looser early work as encountering the author “before the Darth Vader helmet got clamped on”—before, in other words, the author was armored by or entombed in his major style. Americana is like that.

For one thing, Americana is remarkably literary. DeLillo’s later work tends to eschew much overt allusion, but this novel is full of big names: Proust, Yeats, Faulkner, Kafka, Keats, Milton. Eliot and Joyce preside, both in flagrant references (“I wanted to be known as Kinch. This is Stephen Dedalus’ nickname in Ulysses, which I was reading at the time”) and quiet verbal reminiscences (“Jackass. Jackdaw. Jackal,” “I was wearing white flannel trousers”), foreshadowing the author’s later career, when his masterpiece, Underworld, will restage Ulysses as The Waste Land at the end of history. The narrator even says at the novel’s conclusion, “I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days,” a comment not made in praise of literature. “Literature” here names a mediation of life, a prior instance of what the novel calls “the image,” which has in the late 20th century replaced reality (“One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of other images”). I don’t mean “reality” in the sense of the STEMwinding anti-postmodern rationalists who always say 2+2=4, but “reality” as primal, primordial experience, in which nothing adds up. Reality is that moment of blankness, of white-out, in the middle of the orgasm.

Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation’s soul.

Americana is divided into four parts. The first is a 125-page New York City-set office comedy about our narrator, David Bell, a 28-year-old TV executive (and son of an advertiser). We are given the absurdist parties of the counterculture-influenced bien-pensant and the pseudo-enlightened musings of those who decide what will occupy the nation’s airwaves. David is alert to how the powers that be appropriate for their own ends the period’s supposed subversions: “the establishment [has] learned that every color is essentially gray as long as everyone is wearing it”—a comment possibly more relevant to the corporatist progressivism of our own time than to the era DeLillo was observing. He scrutinizes late-’60s sexual office politics, as when David refers to “old love letters, rag dolls, and pornographic books” that male bosses had given female office workers “in the spirit of the new liberalism.” This is not midcentury misogyny, but critical consciousness launched from a slightly later era. In the background, or, more precisely, at the foundation, are death and destruction. “The war was on television every night but we all went to the movies.” David reflects on his love life, his ex-wife and mistresses, and his erotic obsession with the experimental artist Sullivan. He also muses on his obsession with “the image,” the media iconography that tells us who we are and should be. His own self and actions, he allows, are determined by the cinematic imago of Burt Lancaster. How to escape “the image” that controls us all? With the alibi of making a documentary on the Navajos, David takes to the road with the aforementioned Sullivan, as well as a Vietnam vet and experimental novelist named Brand and an animal-obsessed old tough named Pike.

Part Two is a long detour. David recreates his childhood of blue-blood privilege. He has a mentally ill mother who dies young of cancer (“It’s in the female region,” his father explains). A series of carefully patterned motifs extending backwards and forwards in the novel from this section hints at David’s oedipal obsession. Earlier in the book, he spits into an ice cube tray at party; in this sequence, he spies his mother as she does the same. Moreover, in the same passage, she only wears one shoe; in the first chapter, he’d seen Sullivan half-shod, which increased his obsession with her. In a probably over-candid 1972 essay excerpted here, DeLillo, dryly writing in the third person, explains himself:

Subtext 1: Patriotism as incest

Much of this survives in the final text. The author evidently constructed two planes of incest in ‘Americana.’ One is based on relations (or near-relations) between the protagonist and his mother. The second might be called political incest—the notion that baseless patriotism is an elaborately psychotic manifestation of love for mother country.

But we can find a subtext beneath even the subtext. In Part Two’s freestanding, highly-lyrical novella-length excursus on a privileged American childhood, is DeLillo not parodying the dominant New Yorker-burnished literary “image” of his time—the fiction of Salinger, Cheever, Updike? Is this sequence not part of the novel’s guerrilla war on dominant representations? Again eschewing midcentury male style, DeLillo is not indulging here in autobiography: he grew up among working-class Italian immigrants in the Bronx and therefore had a childhood nothing like Bell’s. Bell’s childhood comes from books. DeLillo will later abandon this model of fiction and its Freudian assumptions, its depth-psychological journeys back to an explanatory childhood. The most experimental technical feat of White Noise, done so slyly that readers don’t even notice: DeLillo reveals nothing whatsoever of Jack Gladney’s past and background; Gladney exists in an eternal present, with no psychoanalytic strata for the novelist as archeo-physician to excavate.

In Part Three, David pauses on his journey west to abandon his job and to make an experimental film in a small town. The movie, starring “actors” David recruits from the town’s citizenry and wayfarers, recombines what we’ve already seen and know of his life. Here, I think, the novel loses its way, as DeLillo fails to find a literary corollary for cinema. David’s film is merely described. The novel does not take leave of literature, though Americana is as dense with cinematic allusion as with literary. David references Bergman and Kurosawa and Godard and even Nazimova. (Nor does he neglect other popular phenomena: DeLillo alludes at least twice in this 1971 work to the man who will usurp his Nobel 45 years later: Bob Dylan.) David states his own filmic ambition: “The movie functions best as a sort of ultimate schizogram, an exercise in diametrics which attempts to unmake meaning.” But Part Three never accomplishes this feat.

Part Four comes closer. David, having abandoned a love triangle with Sullivan and Brand, takes to the road again. He rides with a Texan named Clevenger, stays for a day and a night with a group of hippies who live with Apache exiles, and then ventures to Clevenger’s place of business, an automotive test track, where a drunken orgy ensues. DeLillo narrates this grotesque debauchery in simple descriptive sentences. Each sentence generates another out of itself as in the consecutional composition theories of DeLillo’s friend, Gordon Lish:

The woman had my cock in her hand and was trying to put me inside her. I pulled her down and kissed her and she let go finally and just lay on top of me, moving from side to side and licking my face. Then she straddled me again and I realized she was pissing all over my belly and chest. She got up finally and sat on the running board and drank some beer. I pushed myself up to my knees and fastened my belt. Then I threw up.

This is as close as DeLillo gets to escaping “literature,” where literature means imposed meaning rather than recreated experience. Of Brand’s failed novel, David reflects,

Brand, of course, as it turned out was a writer of blank pages. That’s how I think of him, definitely a novelist, by all means a craftsman of high talent—but one who chose words of the same color as the paper on which they were written.

The orgy scene’s blandly outrageous writing, like some of that in the early city sequences, achieve such a blank sublimity, much more so than the novel’s descriptions of experimental cinema. The narrative’s conclusion registers the failure at large: in the end, David returns to his life in New York—though not before stopping in Dealey Plaza, another foreshadowing, in this minor novel, of the major novelist its author will become.

As I said, much of DeLillo is already here, and not only the themes. There is the unerring ear for cliché (“Turkey is a blending of several cultures, I understand”) and malapropism (“That’s a mute point”), and the wonderfully skewed eye: “the buses went by in packs, lit up like operating rooms,” “[h]is face was an odd wet pink color, as if a dog had been licking it.” DeLillo’s love of the oracular sometimes succeeds: “It takes centuries to invent the primitive,” David observes, evoking modernism’s archaic revival. But when Sullivan says, “America can only be saved by what it’s trying to destroy,” I don’t know if we should take it seriously or if it’s just a bit of ’60s ideological detritus.

Sullivan is both the most compelling and frustrating character, a shadowy sketch for the great experimental female artists of DeLillo’s later oeuvre. She tells David two stories, one at the end of Part One and one at the end of Part Three. In the first, an old Sioux prophet named Black Knife denounces “the terrible gleaming mudcunt of Mother America” (note the incest motif and the Joycean orthography) and further says, “We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames.” The second story is absurdly long and seems obscurely to imply the origin of America in a primitive oedipal dispute between Catholic Dubliner and renegade Ulsterman, “Shem and Shaun”: “All my rich hatreds and comfortable bigotries come to this. Scotch-Irish! American! (Ineluctable, Mr. Faulkner; coeval, Mr. Joyce.)” Maturer DeLillo will jettison this and other of the novel’s over-influenced divagations into stream-of-Celtic-consciousness, as in the tediously delirious excerpts from the late-night radio show that twice plays in the narrative, “Death Is Just Around the Corner.” About 20-30% of this novel could have been thrown into the Atlantic, but I’m happy to have the rest.

It is interesting that DeLillo, with no major Italian-American forebears of note, had to elect Irish writers as his precursors, presumably because they were the most proximate mad Anglophone Catholics (then again, Ellison and Bellow, too, descend from Joyce). Please bear in mind, in the matter of identity politics, that DeLillo is the only great American novelist to share my and my family’s ethno-religious and class background. But neither he nor I make heavy weather out of it. It’s nothing, in the literary world, to be proud of. We were the first of the white ethnics to make the break with the left, and we made it more thoroughly than anyone else. As I detailed in my piece on White Noise, as Bill Clinton was the first black president and Barack Obama the first gay president, Donald Trump is the first Italian-American president.

As I said to an Irish-American the other day, however, is it Italian-Americans’ fault if we belong to what once was a minority group but which the political left never got around to creating a redemptive positive identity for? Were we left with any choice but to opt for what is tendentiously called assimilationism (a postcolonial scholar once looked me up and down and said to me, “You know, you dark whites will never really assimilate”) but which might better be called universalism? Hence the name of the book: not American Catholica or, still worse, American Italiana, but, and without qualification, Americana. David Bell says, “I wanted to become an artist, as I believed them to be, an individual willing to deal in the complexities of truth.” Amen.

Medium Announcement + Bonus Exclusive Content

This is a brief “housekeeping” post to keep loyal readers informed of a few changes. It will self-destruct within 24 hours. 

In an effort both to diversify and to streamline my Internet presence, I have decided to move the original fiction and poetry I’ve published over the years at this website onto a Medium account (which I’ve had for eight years and have never used). You can find me on Medium here—please feel free to follow!

The johnpistelli.com posts moving to Medium are these:

Original Poetry: The Mary VariationsXeriscapes of the Heart: A Brief Hiatus, a Long ExcerptManifesto, Advertisement, and Excerpt: Introducing The Class of 2000Original Short Story: “The Embrace”

They are not all there yet, but they will appear over the coming days and will disappear from this site. I will also delete some of the prefatory material in those posts for their Medium appearance, particularly the polemic that introduces The Class of 2000, so if you’d like to save that material to use against me later, you should do so while you can.

I’m starting my Medium journey by debuting two texts that haven’t appeared before. First is a full chapter from my pandemic novella, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House. Second is a short story called “Sweet Angry God” that was published in a now-defunct literary journal in 2015 and has never appeared anywhere else. It might be my perverse favorite of all my stories. It could possibly offend everybody for one reason or another, but I think it is also, if I may, very beautiful.

Finally, as a bonus just for being a loyal reader, here for your exclusive enjoyment and for a limited time only are private YouTube links to two lectures I recorded in the spring for my Contemporary American Literature class once everything went online due to the pandemic. I’ve been toying with the idea of posting all the spring lectures and the upcoming fall ones to YouTube as an experiment in public education and multimedia literary criticism. I haven’t decided yet—perhaps you prefer me as a solely alphabetical presence. (I think of my aunt, who used to say when I was a child, if I happened to sing along with the radio, “We don’t need it in stereo!”) Don’t hesitate to get in touch and let me know! The links:

Jennifer Egan, “Black Box”Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs

Regular posting resumes tomorrow or the next day, with a piece on Don DeLillo’s first novel. This post will disappear before then. Thanks for reading!

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Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician

Mario and the Magician by Thomas Mann

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“What is fascism?” one sometimes wonder. Scholars and historians can’t agree, but the Twitterati knows for sure. I sometimes see them post memes with slogans like “the original antifa” superimposed over grainy photos of American GIs in the Second World War. I am old enough to have had elder relatives and friends-of-the-family who fought in that war, though, and I don’t think I ever heard them, when they presided over my childhood at the end of the American century, use the word “fascism.” They tended instead to characterize their old enemies as “Krauts” and “Japs.” As the racialized language indicates, their overall political views, not that any of them were especially political people, would likely be characterized by the aforementioned Twitterati not as anti-fascist but as, in fact, fascist. Isn’t that how their children—my parents’ generation, if not my literal parents—famously thought of them circa 1968?

Can the fiction of the fascist era help us to understand this conundrum? Maybe some of it, though probably not the works of Thomas Mann. The better fiction is, the stranger it is, hence its dangers if used as a primary source for the historian. The strongest novelists are demiurgic, creating their own world more than they are simply reflecting this one. That principle holds especially true for Mann’s famous 1929 allegorical novella of fascism, Mario and the Magician. Among this story’s many ironies is a depiction of fascism that the contemporary reader can’t help but regard as itself fascist.

The story is simple. Its narrator is a stately paterfamilias of a bourgeois German family who reminisces over a terrible holiday in Italy. First, the family was assailed by the newly nationalist spirit of the Italians under Mussolini. This national pride leads to the German family’s being exiled from their hotel’s veranda, unofficially reserved for citizens, and then expelled from the hotel itself at the behest of a fellow resident paranoid over one of the children’s lingering croup, as if foreigners as such were a kind of viral invasion (the contemporary meme-lover will laugh knowingly: “In the fullness of her feminine self-confidence she protested to the management…”). When the same child bathes naked in the sea, the fascist Italians, swelled with a self-important moral puritanism, denounce the family and force the father to pay a fine. An advertisement for a conjuror and magician named Cipolla soon appears, however, and the children’s excitement over this entertainment promises to redeem the vacation.

The rest of the novella is set at Cipolla’s show. The entire town turns out for the performance and duly finds itself ensorcelled by the strange magician. Despite his unpropitious appearance and behavior—he is a chain-smoking alcoholic with bad teeth, a spinal deformity, and yellow skin whose speech is full of pity for himself and insults toward the audience—he exerts a hypnotic power over the assembled townspeople. He forces a man to writhe in pain by the power of suggestion; he has another man laid like a plank over two chairs and sits on his outstretched body like the incubus in Goya. He mesmerizes a man’s wife until she nearly follows him out of the theater. When a native of Rome stands up to him, he shortly forces this resistant to dance. At the story’s climax, the magician confronts his co-eponym, Mario, a waiter at the hotel whom the narrator’s children have befriended. Cipolla hails the stocky Mario ironically as Ganymede and then makes the waiter kiss him “near the lips.” The unmanned Mario then breaks the spell and shoots Cipolla dead. The narrator and family abscond with their bad memories just as police arrive, and with this equivocal liberation the novella ends.

On the one hand, what could be clearer than Mann’s political allegory? Fascist Italy is in thrall to a talented demagogue who manipulates the citizenry into sympathizing with him until they do his bidding. Cipolla theorizes this people/leader fusion, in a passage surely meant to echo fascist rhetoric:

The capacity for self-surrender, he said, for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will and to command. Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.

Fascism, then, is overgrown nationalist pride wedded to the person of the ruler, who unites in his suffering body the miseries and powers of the populace construed as ethnos. So far, so good—this reflects what most people think about fascism, despite the disagreements and nuances of the scholars. For instance, though I am no scholar, I do think many believe that fascism may be an epiphenomenon of mass media, a political form impossible without cinema and radio. How strange, from this point of view, that Mann, in anticipation of his medievalizing composer in Doctor Faustus, should represent fascism as an almost pre-modern matter of stage magic, even having his narrator remark, “Perhaps more than anywhere else the eighteenth century is still alive in Italy, and with it the charlatan and mountebank type so characteristic of the period.”

The narrator’s emphasis on the particularities of Italy is not limited to the above passage. He attributes many of the difficulties he encounters to the “southern” temper, to “the emotionalism of the sense-loving south.” He complains of Italy’s weather in these terms: “The heat—if I may bring it in evidence—was extreme. It was African.” He further states that such a climate does not satisfy “the deeper, more complex needs of the northern soul.” Writing during Mussolini’s reign, but before Hitler’s, our German narrator if not our German author seems to understand fascism as an excess of the proximally savage Italian character. Cipolla’s own countenance exhibits, he says, “a primitive melancholy.” (That my aforementioned older American relatives who regarded their WWII enemies as “Krauts” were Italian by ethnicity is amusing in this context.)

Mann’s portrayal of the magician, though, draws from a different ideological tradition than that of reprehending Italy as Africa’s European beachhead. The sallow mesmerist, with his “long yellow fingers” and his ability to seduce the youth, with his charlatan’s cynical lust for profit and his derisive intellectual power lodged in a grotesquely material and deformed body—who is this but Svengali, and what is this but an anti-Semitic archetype? Furthermore, this magician’s climactic act is not only one of seduction, but of implied pederastic seduction, almost of Mario’s forced feminization.

Fascism for Mario and the Magician, then, is not only an absolute ruler’s claiming to embody and thereby control an ethno-national population, despite Mann’s acute observations of that phenomenon. In this novella, fascism is also the invasion of the complex and rational European soul—of the bourgeois father—by irrational energies that are southern and eastern, Oriental and African, queer and feminine. To borrow from yet another meme: you know who else worried about such an invasion?

I don’t raise these objections to the novella’s obviously failed “anti-fascism” to impugn Mann. The essence of his art, famously, is irony, and I doubt he lacked awareness of this novella’s ironies. If the bourgeois author was himself a devoted husband and father, a stolid German, he was also fatally attracted to the east and the south, he also recognized the appeal of the world’s Ganymedes (or Tadzios), and, as a popular novelist, he was also an entertainer enrapturing his public. In other words, Mann was as much the queer, southern, crypto-Jewish and crypto-African Cipolla as he was his novella’s northern-souled narrator. Levi B. Sanchez notes at the Modernism Lab:

Biographical details suggest that Mann turns this critical lens towards himself in Mario and the Magician. Biographer Anthony Heilbut notes similarities between Cipolla and his creator. Besides the obvious fact that the Mann children’s nickname for Thomas was the “Magician” (450), Heilbut observes that “…Cipolla shares many traits with Mann, including a bad case of artistic insecurity and a hopeless love of young men.” […] Another artist and manifestation of Mann, the narrator artificially manipulates the narrative to keep the reader’s interest in an almost identical fashion to the sinister Cipolla.

By giving us a narrator who complacently warns of fascism as an incursion from without, Mann is really warning us—and warning himself—of a fascism from within. I might compare this German-authored narrative of authoritarian magic in Italy with an Italian-authored narrative of authoritarian magic in Germany. In his 2018 reimagination of Suspiria, Luca Guadagnino portrays fascism less as a specific ideology or characteristic of any one group of people or political faction. It is rather the ruthless, loveless pursuit of identity and power per se, as apt to manifest itself in a coven of female artist-magicians as in a patriarchal right-wing political party. So we don’t miss the point, Guadagnino sets his story against the backdrop of the 1970s, when a wing of the radical left, more children of 1968, became increasingly authoritarian and terroristic.

It is an old problem: how not to become what we behold, how not to transform into one’s enemy—how to be sure anti-fascism doesn’t become fully indistinct from fascism itself. Given our psychology, with its tendencies toward projective and dichotomous thinking, and given political realities, which often make violent confrontation seem fated, this may be an insoluble problem. Perhaps every “anti-[X]” is doomed by the occult law of similarities to become [X]; perhaps our time is better spent just not being [X] rather than defining ourselves against and therefore by [X]. The strongest fiction, if it is too complex to serve as historical evidence, succeeds in its world-making complexity by making us alert to just these flaws inherent in the soul—the human soul, northern, southern, or otherwise.

John Banville, Shroud

Shroud by John Banville

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Shroud (2002) has a slightly misleading reputation as a roman à clef on the Paul de Man affair; it is really more of an audacious variation on that scandal, with added themes from the life of another notorious theorist, Louis Althusser, as Banville allows on the novel’s “Acknowledgements” page.

(Paul de Man was an influential deconstructionist literary critic, revealed after his death to have written anti-Semitic articles for a collaborationist newspaper in his native Belgium during World War II; Louis Althusser was a major French Marxist theorist who strangled his wife. Both de Man and Althusser are renowned for anti-humanist theories stressing how we and our works are determined by the impersonal operations of language and other structures. Critics have linked their transgressions to their ideas, which seem to remove moral responsibility from individuals.)

Shroud is also Banville’s favorite of his own novels, at least as of his 2009 Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER

If you don’t want your book reviews to be remembered, is there a single novel that you would like to be remembered for, more than the others?

BANVILLE

Perhaps Shroud. It’s a dark, hard, cruel book. It’s the novel in which I got closest to doing what I aimed to do at the start of writing it. That had only happened once before, with The Newton Letter. Everybody hated Shroud—even, I think, the people who admired it. It was favorably reviewed, but it was not and is not a book a reader could readily love. Shroud is my monstrous child whom I cherish but who horrifies others. The odd thing is that, for all its harshness, it’s a love story of sorts. I never thought I’d write a love story—what an idea!

That sounds appealing, at least to a bad person such as myself, who believes literature is often at its best when it confronts the hardness and terror of the actual, rather than, well, shrouding these in moralism. Unfortunately, there is no actuality, no reality, in Shroud, and consequently no real cruelty, and no real love either.

There is page after page of perfect prose. Banville can describe the things of this world with words so apt—apt both to our own experience of those things and to the themes and motifs of his novel—that there is hardly any point in anyone’s describing them again:

A window streamed with rain, and opposite in the room a patch of wall rippled like dark silk.

He moreover creates the sound effects—alliteration, consonance, assonance, sibilance—that allow prose to merit the admittedly overused honorifics “lyrical” and “poetic”:

I flared my nostrils and snuffed up a draught of the room’s deadened air, seeking to savour again the civet smell of her sweat.

Can a novel, of all literary forms, live on language alone? Banville does supply an impressive plot upon which to drape his supple style, improving the de Man affair with two unpredictable if implausible twists—one revealed in the middle of the novel, one at the end, in the expert manner of the thriller writer.

The plot is this: Axel Vander is a celebrated and elderly European literary theorist who has settled in California. An imperious, brilliant, womanizing, alcoholic, and often cruel man, he has just lost his wife, Magda, apparently to dementia, though we receive intimations that he may have killed her himself. Then a letter comes from a mysterious graduate student claiming to know about his dark deeds during World War II. Vander takes an invitation to speak at a conference in Turin, on the 100th anniversary of Nietzsche’s going mad in that city, where he plans to confront his accuser. At the conference, he meets his old rival, Franco Bartoli, and a former lover, now dying, Kristina Kovacs, and also witnesses or hallucinates a series of odd characters stalking him through the city: a flower seller, a woman struck by a car, a strange red-haired man. Then he faces the student who had written to him: a fragile Irishwoman named Cass Cleave. Cass suffers from seizures and other symptoms of mental illness (hearing voices, missing time), not to mention the legacy of a quasi-incestuous relationship to her domineering actor father. These two damaged people begin an affair, and, when Vander is felled by his alcoholism, bedridden in a hotel room, he narrates to her the true story of his past.

The novel’s second part, comprising Vander’s narrative flashback, now begins. Yes, he allows to Cass, he appears to have written an anti-Semitic article during the war for a newspaper in occupied Belgium. The truth is that he is not Axel Vander, the scion of a cultivated bourgeois gentile family. He was rather reared in a poor Jewish household, but befriended the wealthy Vander family, despite their own haughty anti-Semitism. It was his best friend, Axel Vander, who wrote the anti-Semitic article. This real Axel Vander dies in mysterious circumstances (was he, as rumor had it, a secret resistance fighter?), after which our own nameless antihero is called by a mysterious benefactor from his home to be spared a Kristallnacht that claims his family. Without family or identity, he assumes the mantle of Axel Vander, and under these false colors travels to America—but not before having a protracted affair with a aristocratic and dipsomaniacal demimondaine in London—where he meets Magda and begins his storied academic career.

I will leave readers to discover the novel’s third part for themselves, except to say that it is marked less by Vander’s fear of exposure than by Cass’s spiraling madness, Kristina’s oncoming death, and by a final revelation that puts the second part’s plot twist in a different and more disturbing, if also ambiguous, light.

My recitation of this narrative misleads insofar as it does no justice to Banville’s narrative method. Vander retrospectively narrates most of the novel, though intervals focused on Cass’s inner life are given in the third person. This discrepancy is never explained, though we are teased throughout with questions about who really narrates:

“Perhaps,” I said, “you really should write my biography. […] You could write it in the first person,” I said. “Pretend you are me. I give you full permission. I grant you the rights to my life.”

[…]

He, I, saw again the empty bottle on its side, the mauve pills in my palm. I closed my eyes. I listened to the wind washing over the rooftops. The girl rose and came forward and knelt beside the bed and took my hand in both of hers and brought it her lips and kissed it. I.

Also, given that Vander is often drunk and Cass often hallucinating, the novel’s events have the mysterious, riddling, unclear—should I say shrouded?—air of a dream or vision. Images of veiling and reflection, of mist and submersion, recur. Not only did Nietzsche go mad in Turin, but it is also the home of the eponymous shroud bearing the image of Christ, which our characters discuss but never manage to see. Consider the deconstructive paradoxes of Turin’s shroud: a covering that reveals, a fake revered as holy truth. Do we ever see what is real? Or is what we cast out of our psyches onto the outer world the only reality we can know? Can Vander and Cass really love one another, as they claim they do despite the manifold abuses of their relationship and the derangement of their whole situation, or do they only love what they have projected onto each other?

Banville raises these inquiries, impressively reminiscent of Paul de Man’s literary theory, at the level not only of narrative form but of literary allusion: Shroud is a sustained pastiche of literary modernism. Verbal, descriptive, or narrative references to the masterpieces of the movement can be found on every page. The novel’s first sentence is “Who speaks?” which is pure Beckett. There is an excursus on how Cass might treated in a sanitarium that evokes The Magic Mountain. The two Vanders give us the doppelgänger motif of Poe and Dostoevsky, while their contrasted domiciles and Jew/gentile rivalry recall the divergent “ways” in Proust. The language of the novel resounds with echoes of Yeats, Stevens, and above all Eliot (“mein irisch Kind,” “[t]he city looked unreal,” “voices from a farther room,” “spawned in an estaminet”). There is a hint of Eliot’s and Joyce’s mythic method, with asides throughout that suggest Cass and Vander are enacting the Harlequinade, not to mention that Vander resembles the countenance of Christ on the shroud. The exaggerated and disturbing affair between the dissolute old professor and his young and incapacitated charge can’t help but remind us of Lolita, especially since Vander sounds so much like Humbert Humbert. He brandishes his macaronic erudition with defensive irony at the reader-jury, pleading genuine love and guilt all the while. Banville also masters Nabokov’s technique of hiding a secret narrative behind an overt one through slips and hints and potential misprisions:

“I know you killed your wife,” Franco Bartoli said. I coughed, spluttering grappa. “What?” I croaked, gagging. Kristina Kovacs patted me solicitously on the back. “He says,” she said, “you dropped your knife.”

This pastiche is the novel’s chief pleasure, not its tastelessly twisty plot or the fairly standard late-20th-century philosophical divagations on the impossibility of truth. If George Steiner characterized 19th-century bourgeois Europe as “the garden of liberal culture,” then Shroud, with its dissolving and unreal twinned cityscapes of Turin and Antwerp and its dying, despairing intellectuals, takes place in that garden’s gorgeous ruin. It is, to go from the sublime to the Insta-ridiculous, an anticipation of #darkacademia.

It is not, however, as academic as we might expect. I called the novel’s plot “tasteless” above because of its over-the-top play with real events that Banville, on the “Acknowledgements” page, shamelessly trumpets as his inspiration. Do we really need a story in which a stand-in for Paul de Man is revealed to be secretly Jewish? What, moreover, are the ethics involved in Banville’s embroidering the de Man scandal? Vander is a womanizer who sleeps with students and colleagues and regularly beats women, while de Man was known for a monastic temperament even in the atmosphere of male professors’ sexual entitlement that notoriously characterized the ’60s and ’70s. De Man also helped to launch the careers of two of the most prominent academic feminists of their generation, Barbara Johnson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (He was a bigamist, which is explicable not by excess sexual appetite but by political opportunism: he abandoned one family in Europe to start another in America, where having a native-born wife would help him with his immigration status.) All novelists paint from life, but most don’t name their traduced models in the acknowledgements. By what right does Banville exercise his speculations on fiction and reality at the expense of a named man’s real life, other than that the dead can’t sue for libel?

As for Vander’s literary theorizing, it is hardly discussed. He insists on “the simple lesson that there is no self,” which is vague and common to most postwar radical Euro-intellectuals. Another character attributes to him the belief that “every text contains a shameful secret,” the type of vulgar Freudianism that de Man and Althusser distinguished themselves by rejecting. Vander also makes the hoary insinuation that Nietzsche, one of the novel’s tutelary presences, is to blame for Nazism, which presumably arraigns linguistic skepticism and modernest aestheticism for fascist indifference to suffering:

Aestheticise, aestheticise! Such was our cry. Had not our favourite philosopher decreed that human existence is only to be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon? We were sick of mere life, all that mess, confusion, weakness. All must be made over—made over or destroyed.

This is a commonplace of commentary not only on Nietzsche but also on the de Man affair (see David Lehman’s absorbing Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man); to my mind, such an accusation tells the story too neatly, as if the Nazis were pyrrhonists rather than essentialists. Nevertheless, in the novel, Vander carries this fascism into private life when he aestheticizes Cass rather than recognizing her reality. “She would be my Beatrice, my Laura, my Trilby,” he exclaims. The first two names evoke medieval idealism, while the third, in deflationary reference to George du Maurier’s bestselling late-Victorian Irish grisette, makes of Vander a mere monster, the Svengali of the anti-Semitic imagination. Is the name “Trilby” in the absurdly august company of Beatrice and Laura Banville’s own tacit admission of guilt?

And what resistance does the novel itself offer to Vander’s imposition? Cass, too, is supposed to be a graduate student, an intellectual, but we hear little of her ideas, and what we do hear strains credulity. She is a paranoid who believes everything is connected, and seems, as well, to believe literally in the conspiracy theory described in Foucault’s Pendulum: “Cathars. The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. The revocation of the edict of Nantes. Freemasons.” Banville pathologizes Cass; he subsumes her characterization under her mental illness, a fictional schizophrenia-like condition called Mandelbaum’s Syndrome. That she appears in an earlier Banville novel, Eclipse (2000), is no justification, since nowhere does Shroud advertise itself as one in a series. If the terrible genius of Lolita is the real little girl immured but crying audibly within the prison of Humbert’s rhetoric, Banville, by contrast, leaves his heroine as hollow as his antihero. Vander concedes as much—

There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text. I have manufactured a voice, as I once manufactured a reputation, from material filched from others.

—but his concession, while it explains the novel’s faults, cannot excuse them. That the faults are almost overwritten by the precision and music of Banville’s prose and the addictive unreality of his atmosphere is the measure of his great gift. All the same, what can we call a pastiche of modernism with no sense of modernism’s actual stake or pathos? A postmodern novel, I suppose, and in the worst way—a beguiling shroud with nought beneath.

Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A strange series of coincidences, difficult to dismiss as chance, recently convinced me that I had to read Foucault’s Pendulum. First, the book itself appeared, “unbidden,” as the literary novelists always say. A few weeks ago, I found a hardcover in good condition inside a Little Free Library that usually boasts only children’s books and pop fiction. The LFL in question is, by the way, shaped like mailbox: was Someone sending me a message?

The mystery deepened only a week after I’d plucked the book from the box. I had been re-watching Chris Carter’s downbeat conspiracy-themed late-’90s TV series Millennium for the first time in many years, on the theory that the deliriously psychedelic conclusion to the controversial second season, in which an outbreak of the Marburg virus threatens to decimate America, might be newly relevant in “the age of coronavirus.” A few episodes before that apocalyptic finale, however, comes a tale that caught my paranoid eye. An episode titled “Anamnesis” is about gnosticism, matriarchal cults, and black madonnas; scripted by a female writing duo, it’s the only episode in all three seasons not to star the main male protagonist, featuring instead a team-up between his wife and his female sidekick; “Dancing Barefoot” plays, and “Thunder, Perfect Mind” is recited. Longtime readers of my work will know what I was thinking: that this episode, aired about a year after the novel’s publication, was inspired by Toni Morrison’s gnostic and female liberationist fantasia Paradise.

A bit of Internet sleuthing, though, demonstrated to me that no one had made the connection, and that the writers didn’t claim such an influence. On the other hand, I discovered that all the elements I’d associated with Morrison were there in Foucault’s Pendulum, precisely the novel I had found by chance just days before. Since Morrison has several times mentioned her admiration for Eco, it’s not out of the question that he influenced her or, perhaps more aptly, moved her to a counter-statement on some of the same themes. It’s also likely that this conspiracy-soaked occult novel affected the writers of Millennium, among many other late-20th-century gnostic revival works.

Finally, canvassing the Wikipedia entry on the novel before I read it, I found that among the endless occult paraphernalia Eco packed into the text was “[a]n obscure one-time reference to the fictional Cthulhu cult through a quote from The Satanic Rituals—‘I’a Cthulhu! I’a S’ha-t’n!’. The words closed a ritual composed by Michael Aquino.” Aquino was a high-ranking Satanist and a psychological warfare expert for the U.S. military; he co-wrote the notorious Pentagon position paper “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory”. Understandably, he recurs again and again in the annals of American conspiracy theory: the politically paranoid on the right abominate him for his Satanism, while those on the left loathe his anticommunist and militarist commitments. Through a vector I’m not at liberty to disclose, I am only two of the proverbial degrees of separation away from Aquino, though I have obviously never met him or had anything to do with him or even discussed him with anyone who has. I imagine conspiracy theorists will promulgate this curious fact widely on the Internet to discredit me whenever I finally become as famous as I deserve to be, considering that I am one of America’s great writers. (Megalomania and paranoia: like horse and carriage.) Two days after I made the Aquino-Eco-Millennium connection, it was announced on Twitter that Aquino had died. Yes, Someone was trying to tell me Something: I dutifully took up Foucault’s Pendulum and began to read.

Eco’s bestselling 1988 novel (translated from the Italian by William Weaver) has an unearned reputation for difficulty, as if it belonged on the same shelf with Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow (and Eco, a medievalist and semiotician, was also a Joyce scholar). Most of it, however, reads exactly like the four paragraphs above, which is why I indulged in such personal paranoia. If you had fun reading them, you’ll have even more fun with Eco, who is both zanier and more learned than I am.

The novel does raise a high barrier to entry, as if Eco wanted readers to consider his work forbidding. The first chapter is prefaced with a block of untranslated Hebrew—a little research reveals it to be a quotation from Isaac Luria—and proceeds to the narrator’s lengthy meditation on the resemblance between the history of science and the history of magic as he walks through Paris’s Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, where the eponymous pendulum is housed, and where he intends to rendezvous with a mysteriously endangered friend, Jacopo Belbo. After this rough start, though, the novel settles into being a perfectly companionable, fast-paced, highbrow bestseller not unlike others of its time (e.g., Possession, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle).

The narrator, pregnantly named Casaubon to evoke both an early modern hermetic scholar and George Eliot’s dried-up aspirant to The Key to All Mythologies, narrates retrospectively. It is a few days past the climax in the Conservatoire; Casaubon has broken into the aforementioned Belbo’s computer, Abulafia (so named for an early Kabbalist), read his files, and come to understand his story. The story is as follows.

Casaubon is a level-headed scholar who embarked on his studies shortly after the abortive revolution of 1968. Too high-minded for radicalism, this antiquarian instead writes a thesis on the Knights Templar, the fabled Crusading order of the 12th through 14th centuries, whose reputation for sexual transgression and spiritual esoterica outlived their disbanding. Then Casaubon meets an older man, Belbo, a native of the Piedmont region whose childhood was marked and marred by Italian fascism. Belbo works for a Janus-faced Milanese publishing house, half small academic press and half vanity publisher, that often brings him into contact with “Diabolicals,” i.e., believers in conspiracy and the occult. Belbo is accordingly fascinated by Casaubon’s Templar research, and is all the more fascinated when a Colonel Ardenti brings to the publishing house what he believes to be a long-lost coded Templar communiqué, portending the order’s continued existence through the millennium and their plan to conquer the world. When Ardenti disappears—as if he were stricken by shadowy forces for having revealed too much—Casaubon and Belbo have their first taste of hermetic danger.

Casaubon then goes on a sojourn with to the homeland of his Brazilian lover, Amparo, and in the Latin American country he encounters not only the syncretism of New World religion—Candomblé and Umbanda, syntheses of Catholicism with Yoruba and indigenous American practices—he also meets Agliè, an occultist who claims to be an immortal count. Once back in Milan, he becomes a research consultant and again encounters Belbo. By this time, the fashionable leftism of the late 1960s has given way to the fashionable New Age spirituality of the late 1970s as the left’s material defeat inspired a metaphysical turn in the radical chic. Belbo takes Casaubon on and—along with the publishing house’s other main employee, Diotallevi, a devoted Kabbalist, albeit of ambiguously Judaic heritage—they decide to capitalize on the trend and publish a series of occult books.

Going further, they begin to compose their own ultimate conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theory of all conspiracy theories, encompassing the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, the Elders of Zion, and all other protagonists of the paranoid imagination, whom our trio assign the task of trying to control the (hollow) earth by harnessing telluric currents with menhirs and obelisks from Stonehenge to the Eiffel Tower. In the course of composing this meta- and master-fantasy, they become convinced that everything in the world is connected, everything a symbol for everything else, and all united in what they call “the Plan.” This hoax draws them deeper into the world of the occult; they attend mysterious rites in remote mansions, and Agliè inevitably reappears to serve as guide to hermetic histories and as a romantic rival to Belbo for the affections of the mysterious and volatile Lorenza Pellegrini.

Casaubon eventually marries and has a child, and his wife, Lia, attempts to talk some sense into him: Ardenti’s supposed Templar plot was a merchant’s list of wares, not a ten-point program to conquer the planet, she convincingly argues. Diotallevi, meanwhile, slowly expires of cancer, convinced he contracted the illness as a poetic punishment for trifling with the fabric of the world, for irresponsibly generating a metastasis beyond all boundaries of spiritual and political meaning.

Whereas Casaubon and Diotallevi are chastened, Belbo is by contrast consumed with sexual jealousy and drunk on his own imaginative power. He tries to revenge himself on his erotic rival, Agliè, by convincing him that the Plan is real, that he has some secret knowledge the self-proclaimed immortal cannot access. Agliè and his occult associates, however, actually seem to aspire to the power Belbo has attributed to the Templars et al., and they lure him to Paris, to the Conservatoire, to Foucault’s Pendulum, to pry the knowledge out of him, not realizing that his knowledge was never more than a fiction. By fictionalizing the Plan, in other words, our protagonists brought the Plan into reality. I’ll leave you to discover the conclusion on your own.

What does all this arcana signify? Luckily, our author-semiotician is happy to expound, in and out of his novel. Americans of the Internet age are familiar with Eco’s 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism” because it has gone viral during the administrations of our last two Republican presidents. Eco’s thesis is that “fascism had no quintessence,” was an incoherent ideology justifying power to a resentful populace, which perhaps explains why the liberal literati can apply it to such opposed figures as Bush and Trump. Two related characteristics of fascism, Eco explains, are syncretism and traditionalism:

One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.

The reader of Foucault’s Pendulum will immediately recognize the Plan in this description of fascism, since all the texts and authors Eco mentions (save Gramsci) come up in the novel. To posit a unified tradition out of disparate elements is to think like a fascist; Belbo, Casaubon, and Diotallevi may have set out to spoof fascism, but they became ensorcelled by it. As Casaubon notes,

We consoled ourselves with the realization—unspoken, now, respecting the etiquette of irony—that we were parodying the logic of our Diabolicals. But during the long intervals in which each of us collected evidence to produce at the plenary meetings, and with the clear conscience of those who accumulate material for a medley of burlesques, our brains grew accustomed to connecting, connecting, connecting everything with everything else, until we did it automatically, out of habit. I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.

Why are these men prey to these beliefs? In their own eyes, they were born too late for their historical moment. Belbo was too young to be a partisan, and Casaubon was too young to be a soixante-huitard:

To enter a university a year or two after 1968 was like being admitted to the Academic de Saint-Cyr in 1793: you felt your birth date was wrong. Jacopo Belbo, who was almost fifteen years older than I, later convinced me that every generation feels this way. You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

Belbo became an editor rather than a writer because he conceded that he would always be a spectator and never a protagonist, while Casaubon—one of whose early meetings with Belbo ended with their running from police during a street demonstration—seems to fear they are both cowards. Having missed their rendezvous with history—even though, as Belbo knows, we all do—they seek extrahistorical alternatives in delirious theories of eternity. And anyway, Casaubon explains near the novel’s conclusion, occultism and conspiracy theory mean that we are never at fault for own failures:

There can be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr.

Because Eco is weak on female characters, Casaubon’s wife Lia hardly exists in the novel except to spout hard-headed wisdom at her husband to counter his magical thinking. Three-quarters of the way through the massive book, she delivers a long speech summarizing the moral of the story, fascism’s antidote, to its narrator, (she calls him “Pow”):

“Pow, archetypes don’t exist; the body exists. The belly inside is beautiful, because the baby grows there, because your sweet cock, all bright and jolly, thrusts there, and good, tasty food descends there, and for this reason the cavern, the grotto, the tunnel are beautiful and important, and the labyrinth, too, which is made in the image of our wonderful intestines. When somebody wants to invent something beautiful and important, it has to come from there, because you also came from there the day you were born, because fertility always comes from inside a cavity, where first something rots and then, lo and behold, there’s a little man, a date, a baobab.

“And high is better than low, because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your brain, because feet stink and hair doesn’t stink as much, because it’s better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for worms, and because you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above—you really have to be in an attic—while you often hurt yourself falling. That’s why up is angelic and down devilish.”

In other words, there are no mystical symbols uniting all of matter and history into a divine or diabolical master narrative. There is only the imagination’s beautiful projections onto the universe of what it finds nearest to hand: the body and its sensations. Eco vindicates materialist humanism against idealist obscurantism.

This thesis brings us to the novel’s political subtext. Though Eco cautions against allegorizing, it is clear that the Foucault of the title is not merely the Léon Foucault whose 1851 pendulum demonstrated the earth’s rotation, but also Michel Foucault and his generational cohort—the poststructuralists, the philosophers of “French theory”—whom Eco holds responsible for turning the left toward conspiratorial thinking in politics and mystical thinking in language. A pointed allusion to Harold Bloom is made; a minor character is a clear burlesque of Jacques Lacan. Diotallevi delivers a deathbed speech blaming his cancer on his indulgence in what students of late-20th-century literary theory will recognize as “the slippage of the signifier”:

“Have you ever reflected that the linguistic term ‘metathesis’ is similar to the oncological term ‘metastasis’? What is metathesis? Instead of ‘clasp’ one says ‘claps.’ Instead of ‘beloved’ one says ‘bevoled.’ It’s the temurah. The dictionary says that metathesis means transposition or interchange, while metastasis indicates change and shifting. How stupid dictionaries are! The root is the same. Either it’s the verb metatithemi or the verb methistemi. Metatithemi means I interpose, I shift, I transfer, I substitute, I abrogate a law, I change a meaning. And methistemi? It’s the same thing: I move, I transform, I transpose, I switch cliches, I take leave of my senses. And as we sought secret meanings beyond the letter, we all took leave of our senses. And so did my cells, obediently, dutifully. […] I’m dying because I convinced myself that there was no order, that you could do whatever you liked with any text. I spent my life convincing myself of this, I, with my own brain. And my brain must have transmitted the message to them. Why should I expect them to be wiser than my brain? I’m dying because we were imaginative beyond bounds.”

As if to annoy Susan Sontag, Eco posits metaphor as a metaphor for cancer, and through his trio of conspiracy conspirators, he accuses Foucault, Derrida, and Co. of carcinogenesis in the academic body, akin to their hermetic precursors in the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, and the rest, all of them in flight from matter to fantasy, or (since the novel is structured according to the sefirot of the Kabbalah) from Malkuht to Keter.

This crypto-academic polemic against the postmoderns is ironic, in that Foucault’s Pendulum bears most of the hallmarks of a postmodern novel. It is a complicated metafiction, a kind of gargantuan Borges parable, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” grown to Ulysses length. It is moreover dependent for its structure and effects on popular literature; Casaubon compares himself again and again to Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, while the Sherlockian Eco borrows his expository technique from Conan Doyle. Metafictionally enough, Belbo and Casaubon discuss just this issue:

“Proust was right: life is represented better by bad music than by a Missa solemnis. Great Art makes fun of us as it comforts us, because it shows us the world as the artists would like the world to be. The dime novel, however, pretends to joke, but then it shows us the world as it actually is—or at least the world as it will become. Women are a lot more like Milady than they are like Little Nell, Fu Manchu is more real than Nathan the Wise, and History is closer to what Sue narrates than to what Hegel projects. Shakespeare, Melville, Balzac, and Dostoyevski all wrote sensational fiction. What has taken place in the real world was predicted in penny dreadfuls.”

“The fact is, it’s easier for reality to imitate the dime novel than to imitate art. Being a Mona Lisa is hard work; becoming Milady follows our natural tendency to choose the easy way.”

Casaubon makes the latter comment, and we are, I think, invited by the novel’s general ideological drift to agree. Conspiracy theory is trash fiction; quality fiction deals with reality, and transfigures it responsibility rather than transforming it crassly and “beyond bounds.” As Lia, again a fount of wisdom, says,

“Your plan isn’t poetic; it’s grotesque. People don’t get the idea of going back to burn Troy just because they read Homer. With Homer, the burning of Troy became something that it never was and never will be, and yet the Iliad endures, full of meaning, because it’s all clear, limpid. Your Rosicrucian manifestoes are neither clear nor limpid; they’re mud, hot air, and promises. This is why so many people have tried to make them come true, each finding in them what he wants to find. In Homer there’s no secret, but your plan is full of secrets, full of contradictions. For that reason you could find thousands of insecure people ready to identify with it. Throw the whole thing out. Homer wasn’t faking, but you three have been faking.”

Yet Eco’s awareness of the problem can’t save him from it. His self-amused luxuriation in subject matter he himself disparages, and his self-conscious adoption of a literary form he himself understands to be aesthetically inadequate, inevitably undermines the novel. Eco devotes appallingly long passages to eye-glazing and extremely un-limpid expositions of the Plan. Seduced by his own erudition—why would he criticize these wild theorists so ardently if he didn’t see himself in them?—Eco gives us much, much more than we need to get his fairly simple point. This tedious exposition, along with the sensationalist thriller structure, diminishes the novel’s dealings with reality, even though “deal with reality!” is the novel’s main counsel. As Belbo said, “Great Art” should project a better reality, not a worse one.

Belbo’s recollections of childhood during the war are detailed and powerful (“Ur-Fascism” suggests that they reflect Eco’s own biography), but the Brazil sequence, in which Eco vents his spleen against syncretism in general on Afro-Brazilian religion, is high-handed and arrogant, an imperial perspective. So, come to think of it, is Eco’s argument against conspiracy theory as the last philosophical recourse of life’s losers. While Eco is right to warn against mystical theories that explain everything and that moreover scapegoat whole populations for social problems, preaching academic reason at the poor or ill-educated is destined to breed resentment, especially when anyone can see powerful people conspiring to retain and extend their power in plain view every day. The novel’s genuine political insight comes when the occultists, a company of believers drawn from the social elite, fall for Belbo’s Plan: the powerful themselves are often the biggest conspiracy theorists of all. But doesn’t this rebut the idea the idea that conspiracy theory is the socialism of fools? The novel’s narrative is at odds with its stated thesis, which is not dialectic but confusion.

That these contradictions and over-simplicities are wrapped in an overlong upmarket airport paperback makes the whole enterprise distasteful. Is Eco exploiting an audience he thinks of as naive, just as his publisher-heroes intend to do? Despite its peacock-displays of empty erudition, Foucault’s Pendulum is the furthest thing from difficult. It is complicated, but not complex. It is too easy—and bizarrely self-satisfied in its own disinclination to strive for greatness.

In her Secret Life of Puppets, a brilliant 2001 study of late-20th-century neo-gnosticism, Victoria Nelson considers the novel. (She also begins her essay by recounting a series of bizarre coincidences that convinced her to reread it; maybe this is as obligatory a way to open an essay on Foucault’s Pendulum as is “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” when writing on Pride and Prejudice.) Nelson allows that she enjoyed Eco’s narrative for its thrilling rendition of hermeticism and conspiracy, but she finally judges it to fall short of literary merit:

Eventually, however, five hundred pages of any sort of parody begin to wear thin, and the escape from seriousness produces in a reader its Hegelian opposite—the desire to escape from unremitting fun. […] We feel not that that we have penetrated to the heart of a philosophical labyrinth but rather that we have been left stranded in the middle of a cold, fancy game of virtual reality purchased from the computer store. And such gamesmanship and emotional distancing are somehow more disturbing coming from a deeply intelligent and erudite sensibility than they would be from a cheerful hack.

Anthony Burgess, in his New York Times review, comes to a similar conclusion:

You may call the book an intellectual triumph, if not a fictional one. No man should know so much. It is the work not of a literary man but of one who accepts the democracy of signs.

Eco does not accept this democracy or even accept that it is a democracy—he thinks it is fascist syncretism and has Diotallevi liken it to cancer—but he ironically cannot contest it in a novel so besotted with its author’s fantasy. Eco has, like his own tragic heroes, been consumed by his own parodic plan. Maybe this was his intended point, but he pays too high a price for it. If Someone was trying to tell me Something by depositing this book in the Little Free Library and hedging it with just the pop-culture coincidences that would get me to read it, then the message must have been this: when faced with the mysteries of the universe, skip the dime novels and stick to Great Art.

Plato, Republic

Republic by Plato

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Plato’s Republic is an ironic novel of ideas, a satire designed to mock the pretensions of reason, and an ingenious exposure of its narrator’s unreliability, with intermittent flights of utopian lyricism that make its critique of utopian thought all the more poignant. It is usually seen as the foundational text of political philosophy in the west, and many subsequent canonical political concepts can be found somewhere in this book, from Hobbes’s social contract to Rousseau’s general will to Wollstonecraft’s feminism to Hegel’s statism, not to mention that the whole argument might be read as a reply to Nietzsche avant la lettre. But what if we can’t understand the Republic until we learn to see it as the ancestor not of any later political treatise, but rather of Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels, of Moby-Dick and The Magic Mountain, of Lolita and Herzog?

For one thing, Plato didn’t write treatises; he wrote dialogues. A treatise takes the form of an argument that advances by the force of logic; it is an impersonal genre, and its author—Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza—does not stage his own personality but rather casts himself as a channel for truth. By contrast, a dialogue by its nature dramatizes its speakers as characters whose situations and particularities come to the surface and interfere with the transparency of reason. A dialogue is set amid the plural claims of this world, no matter that its speakers may argue for the transcendent. The dialogue is the child of the drama and the ancestor of the novel.

When this dialogue begins, our narrator, Socrates, is on a day trip with Plato’s brother Glaucon to the Piraeus for the festival of the huntress-goddess Bendis. He’s not there to worship, but rather “to see how they would manage the festival,” a first-paragraph detail that strikes the dialogue’s keynote of investigating how human communities are organized. Then Plato’s other brother, Adeimantus, waylays Socrates along with some friends and strong-arms him into spending the night.

Later, at the house of another friend, Socrates falls into a discussion first with an old man named Cephalus and then with a bitterly cynical Sophist named Thrasymachus about what might constitute justice. Cephalus defines justice as we might expect a worldly and successful man, a proto-bourgeois who styles himself “money-maker,” to define it: “speaking the truth and paying whatever debts one has incurred.” Socrates quickly dispatches this—sometimes we need to lie for the benefit of our friends, for one thing, a precept that will become important later.

Then Thrasymachus, representing the Sophist position, issues a much more forceful challenge (“he coiled himself up like a wild beast about to spring, and he hurled himself at us as if to tear us to pieces”): “justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.” That is, Thrasymachus anticipates much later critiques by Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault when he claims that whatever we call “justice” is merely a rationalization imposed by the most powerful members of a society on the weakest members to justify the former’s rule. (For the social and political background of this confrontation of Sophist with philosopher, see my essay on I. F. Stone’s Trial of Socrates.)

Socrates logically rebuts this skeptical philosophy to a plainly unconvinced Thrasymachus, who sardonically replies to Socrates’s clinching argument, “Let that be your banquet, Socrates, at the feast of Bendis.” From the Sophist perspective, why should he be convinced? Logic, like a justice, is only a manner of speaking, and isn’t Socrates’s will-to-truth just another form of the urge to dominate? The remainder of the Republic may be read as a full-scale reply to Thrasymachus’s moral nihilism, as Socrates dominates a long colloquy on justice with Glaucon and Adeimantus. They decide that justice is best observed in the macrocosm of a city, from which they will reason backward to the constitution of the individual soul, hence the discussion’s lengthy turn to politics.

The detail and care with which Plato stages this disquisition, with the festival for the divine huntress succeeded by Socrates’s menacing quasi-detention and Thrasymachus’s beastly challenge, which will ring our ears throughout the work, show how novelistic in texture the Republic really is, at least in its opening. This more-than-hint of fiction, with its attendant conflicts and ironies, shadows every conclusion to which Socrates comes through the abstract force of formal logic. Even the shape of the argument itself is pleasantly bewildering. In the crystalline realm of Socrates’s reasoning, the structure of the just city is entailed by the structure of the just soul; but he has to describe the just city before he can form any picture of this soul. The work, as a proof, has to be read backwards, a defamiliarization of fabula by syuzhet that would be the envy of any experimental novelist.

The general ideas that have been extracted from this text are so well known that I will summarize them only briefly and in logical sequence, rather than as they’re given in the dialogue. Socrates comes to believe that the soul consists of three divisions: the rational part, directed toward transcendent knowledge of immutable being, rather than of beings subject to change and decay; the spirited part, which has as its object honor and victory in human society; and the appetitive part, driven with lust and desire toward the mere things of this world, such as food, sex, and material gain. A good person is one in whom the rational commands and directs the spirit and the appetites; otherwise, spirited-directed people will become merely domineering, while appetite-driven people will become squalid and base.

In the soul as in the city, a just society should be dominated by the most rational people, those whose primary desire is for transcendent truth. The just city should be ruled, in other words, by philosophers. The minority of philosophers—such rational people are, like all good things, rare—will preside over the city’s spirited defenders and its appetitive citizenry, whose task as craftspeople will be the physical and social reproduction of the polis.

Socrates allows two exceptions to his belief in hierarchy. First, it does not apply to gender: when it comes to souls, there is no meaningful difference between men and women (“there has been no kind of proof that women are different from men with respect to what we’re talking about”), so female philosophers as well as male philosophers should rule in the city. Second, Socrates likewise states that philosophical aptitude is not inherited; given this, it will be necessary to promote to the ruling classes some of those born in the subordinate classes who are nevertheless fit for command. To keep order in the city, however, it is necessary that all classes agree to the justice of the general three-class division, so Socrates proposes the dissemination of a “noble falsehood” to mythologize and naturalize the prevailing inequality. This falsehood holds that citizens were fashioned by the gods in three classes of metal—gold, silver, and iron—corresponding to their placement in the social order.

The theory of the noble falsehood suggests the importance of education in Socrates’s utopia. Education—training in physical strength, music and poetry, and mathematics—is how Socrates plans to nurture rationality in the philosophical soul and basic self-discipline and self-control in the souls of the citizenry. Socrates, therefore, places restrictions on the curriculum. The music he proposes to teach, for instance, should reflect “the rhythms of someone who leads an ordered and courageous life,” whereas poetry that “gives a bad image of what the gods and heroes are like,” like that of Homer and Hesiod, hardly draws the student toward piety.

Moreover, poetry itself poses a problem for Socrates since it so often takes the form of imitation. In forms like the lyric, the drama, and even the dialogic parts of the epic, the poet aims to represent certain types of characters and their emotional states. These imitative genres are dangerous because, as vectors of emotional contagion, they induce the audience itself to mimic these disordered attitudes and feelings. Mimesis, anyway, is an essentially inferior activity, Socrates argues, since all extant phenomena are themselves only pale reproductions of the rational ideas accessible to the eye of reason alone. The poet, then, produces imitations of imitations, third-order copies, more degraded even than base matter; for this reason, Socrates says that there is an “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy since each orients the soul in a different direction, and a worse one in poetry’s case. Poetry, therefore, should in the just republic be restricted to “hymns to the gods and eulogies of good people,” whereas,

If you admit the pleasure-giving Muse, whether in lyric or epic poetry, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city instead of the law, or the thing that everyone has always believed to be best, namely, reason.

Because all earthly things change and decay, Socrates understands that his own ideal republic will fall. He theorizes, therefore, the “five constitutions”—i.e., five types of state or political regime—and further explains how they collapse into one another in a vicious cycle. The best type of regime is the one he has evoked, with its rational rule by philosopher-monarchs. These monarchs’ spirited children, however, will grow weary of reason, or be incapable of it in the first place, and produce in place of the ideal republic a timocracy, consecrated to love of strength and honor. Their own children will use their strength to hoard wealth (in Socrates’s ideal republic, by contrast, the philosopher-kings lived in a commune, sans personal riches or even private property); the timocrats’ children, therefore, will institute an oligarchy. The vast population dispossessed by the oligarchs will in turn mount a revolution and install a democracy, but democracy, with its chaotic diversity and its lack of all general social standards, will be unable to defend itself when a tyrant seizes it. The tyrant, a man of uncontrolled appetite, battens on the state until brought low by his own paranoia and isolation as a usurper who can’t trust any of his fellow citizens. Presumably, the children of tyranny will grasp the value of philosophy and begin the cycle anew.

The previous six paragraphs summarize, as I said, the political theory that can be isolated from this book, and it is an ambitious theory synthesizing ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. Yet the Republic is a narrative dialogue, not a systematic sequence of axioms, and it is as a narrative dialogue—as the ancestor of the novel—that I propose to read it.

Novels are frequently ironic, and they convey their irony by well-planned disjunctions between what characters say and what they do, and by equally intricate echoes among the different phases of the narrative. For example, aided by Thrasymachus’s eye for the self-justifying hypocrisy of power that frames this whole discourse, can we help but notice how Socrates has imaginatively structured an ideal society that happens to be ruled by those of his own social class and vocation? This is not an anachronistic observation, not a reading of Marx or Foucault back into the text, but merely an application of one part of the text (Thrasymachus’s early speech) to another (the central description of the just city). This is what it means to read the Republic like a novel.

Another way to read a novel is to look for motifs, for patterns of description and incident that suggest a subtextual, implicit significance. One obtrusive pattern is Socrates’s frequent apologetic recourse to “images” to substantiate what we would expect to be merely logical arguments. But this imagery at the micro-level is writ large in the dialogue’s whole structure, for what is Socrates doing but providing an image of the just city and the just soul? He even pleads, around the middle of the book, that he is, like the imitators he scorns, producing a mimetic fiction and is therefore not responsible for proving its possibility:

Do you think that someone is a worse painter if, having painted a model of what the finest and most beautiful human being would be like and having rendered every detail of his picture adequately, he could not prove that such a man could come into being?

While this argument-by-image may be the philosopher’s concession to sublunary necessity—pure logic just isn’t possible down here on earth—it is also a performative contradiction, or a subsidiary aspect of the even larger performative contradiction inherent to the mismatch between Socrates’s argument and Plato’s genre. The Republic is a fiction that argues against fiction. Here is a character in an imitative genre—a narrative dialogue—inveighing against literary imitation, and here is a “fictionalized” philosopher forced again and again to use fictions to make his ideas intelligible. We have already seen his advocacy for the noble falsehood. There is also, in Book VII of the dialogue, the famous myth of the cave that allegorizes the difference between transcendent knowledge of being (as when one is outside in the sun) and immanent knowledge of beings (as when one is confined to a cave, watching a shadow-play on the wall).

Finally and most spectacularly is the dialogue’s conclusion, where Socrates tells the myth of Er to illustrate the ultimate triumph of justice. Er was a man who died and came back to tell of the rewards and penalties of the afterlife. In this text steeped in Homer and Hesiod, alluded to on every other page, Plato here challenges them on their own ground with a literally epic finale that describes in detail the very structure of the universe as seen by souls on their way from one life to another. The tale culminates when the souls of the dead, having enjoyed or endured their just desserts for their most recent lives and having chosen new lives in turn, return to our world:

[T]hey travelled to the Plain of Forgetfulness in burning, choking, terrible heat, for it was empty of trees and earthly vegetation. And there, beside the River of Unheeding, whose water no vessel can hold, they camped, for night was coming on. All of them had to drink a certain measure of this water, but those who weren’t saved by reason drank more than that, and, as each of them drank, he forgot everything and went to sleep. But around midnight there was a clap of thunder and an earthquake, and they were suddenly carried away from there, this way and that, up to their births, like shooting stars.

As Socrates argues in the Phaedrus, poetry is a divine madness, and the poet is inspired in his visions and his rhythms by the very gods. The supposed “quarrel” between poetry and philosophy notwithstanding, this truth holds no less for the philosopher when it comes time for him to fashion images of the just soul and the well-ordered city, to say nothing of the cosmos at large. Mere reason will not suffice.

“[W]hatever direction the argument blows us, that’s where we must go,” Socrates tells his interlocutors at one point, as if he were helpless before some iterative chain of logic to which he bound himself with a premise that is itself not articulated until the dialogue’s second half (i.e., the primacy of reason in the soul). This line hints to me at an argument Socrates can’t make by the terms of his own logic, but which we might discern anyway.

Socrates clearly describes the defects of the soul’s non-rational divisions; by contrast, reason, ordained as it is to apprehend the perfection of the idea, is presumably faultless. Yet I would suggest that Socrates’s forgetting that divine inspiration is the source of poiesis, even as he utters poetry in praise of reason, is a flaw. If the fault of the soul’s appetitive part is an insatiable quest for more and more physical satisfaction, and if the fault of the soul’s spirited part is a desire for victory or conquest without limit, then might we not theorize a parallel danger in the soul’s rational part? And doesn’t Socrates exemplify this danger when he follows the autonomous logic of his argument past all experience, including the poet’s experience of divine inspiration? Socrates himself, obviously pained to lose Hesiod and Homer, of whose verse he can quote line upon line, invites my riposte:

[I]f the poetry that aims at pleasure and imitation has any argument to bring forward that proves it ought to have a place in a well-governed city, we at least would be glad to admit it, for we are well aware of the charm it exercises. […] Therefore, isn’t it just that such poetry should return from exile when it has successfully defended itself, whether in lyric or in any other meter?

Reason leads him to forget what he should have known in the first place, which is the best defense of poetry: neither an apprehension of the ideal nor a philosophical concept can be had or told without poiesis. Poetry, not philosophy, is therefore the true queen of the sciences, the legitimate archon of the city, and the best captain of the soul.

It is a grave mistake, then, to quote the Republic as if it represented “Plato’s philosophy.” In this strange book Plato does not issue any philosophy. Instead, he dramatizes philosophy’s conditions of possibility, its pitfalls, perplexities, and potentials. When we think of this book, do we remember the syllogisms, or do we remember Thrasymachus pouncing like a beast, the benighted citizens bound in their firelit cave, the souls of the dead flying back to life from the riverbank of Unheeding? And when we think of Socrates, do we always recall his arguments, or do we rather remember his ironic diffidence, his cunning humility, his drive for truth? What can we call the writer who shows us such people as Thrasymachus and Socrates, such images as the just city and the myth of the cave, but some term akin to “poet”? As a consummately ironic artist in narrative and dramatic prose, Plato may well be nothing less than the first novelist of genius.