Erþe toc of erþe erþe wyþ woh,
Erþe oþer erþe to þe erþe droh,
Erþe leyde erþe in erþene þroh,
Þo heude erþe of erþe erþe ynoh.

First, an anonymous medieval lyric [c.1300]. It has three “earths” per line, totalling twelve of the twenty-six words. Earth piled upon earth, redolent of the ground, dirt, mud, the pit’s open maw. But only if we assume we already know what “earth” means. If we don’t, the poem becomes an equation demanding solution: X took of X X with woe; X other X to X drew; X lay X in Xen pit; then had X of X X enough; what is X? Which is less earth piled upon earth than earth reflected upon itself; less hypnotic repetition than grammatical modulation; less matter than mind. If we solve for “earth” we dissolve the grime that clings to the word, and are left with some sort of solvent. Perhaps trinitarian, perhaps christological, though either way difficult to construe as entirely orthodox.

*

‘The child is father to the man.’
How can he be? The words are wild.
Suck any sense from that who can:
‘The child is father to the man.’
No; what the poet did write ran,
‘The man is father to the child.’
‘The child is father to the man!’
How can he be? The words are wild!

Second, an untitled Gerard Manley Hopkins fragment [c.1875]. It condemns the famous Wordsworth line, but also wonders at it; when Hopkins says “wild”—as he does frequently—the pun on “willed” is never far away. The wild will is the fullest expression of humanity, but always on the verge of waste and wantonness. It requires baptism, conversion from the Old into the New Adam. Hopkins’ objection comes down to the doctrine of the Virgin Birth: the Old Adam is father to each child, but Christ was not fathered by any child of Adamic blood—and it is with Christ, not Adam, that the Christian must identify his grown-up self. So Hopkins’ doctrine tells him. But he is too honest a poet to deny the power of the Wordsworthian alternative, as Wordsworth articulated it. The words are wild; Hopkins cannot make up his mind whether he wills them.

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In the name of the Bee –
And of the Butterfly –
And of the Breeze – Amen!

Third, an untitled Emily Dickinson versicle (aren’t they all?) [F23, c.1858]. Some might think it a frivolous blasphemy, mocking the signum crucis by comparing the persons of the Trinity to mere insects. Yet such animal comparisons are not inherently irreverent; Scripture freely compares God to lion, lamb, and dove. We can instead see the poem as spiritually nourishing, offering new metaphors—pollination, transformation, refreshing invisible movement—for the spiritual dynamics we usually name as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. So how to decide whether to burn the poem, or allow its words to burn themselves into our memory? There is no known procedure for verifying that a poem is spiritually safe before we let down our guard and allow ourselves to hear it with open ears. All we can know is that whether we ultimately bless the poem or curse it, our decision will itself be open to either blessing or curse.

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And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Finally, William Blake’s preface to his long poem Milton [c.1810], which Hubert Parry made England’s unofficial national anthem under the title “Jerusalem” [1916]. It is a passing strange poem for more than one voice to sing together. I will fight until we have built Jerusalem: through heroic action the poet hopes to invent his compatriots, which is to say his audience. For this task he requires his poetic tools, the greatest of which is the biblical chariot, a vehicle that already contains its own tenor, a means to move not from one place to another but from England to England-as-Jerusalem. The revolutions of the fiery wheels rhyme with the revolutions of the satanic mills; the chariot is merely the mill, the mere mill, the mill purified by the divine light shining through it. Remarkably, though the land remains for him dark, though he requires the purified implements be brought to him, he declares them “mine.” A command resembles a prayer, but in a prayer the first-person possessive often implies an “if you grant it to me.” So is the sword of truth the poet’s as our daily bread is ours, as what we pray for? Perhaps; but to whom can the isolated poet pray, other than himself? That is the very question the poet dubiously asks, after repetition undermines the plausibility of the exclamation about ancient feet. All he knows is that the pleasant land shines as if blessed, an appearance that imposes on him the task of making it a reality. For his task to become our task, for us not just to hear his voice but to sing alongside him, each of us would have to reiterate that self-addressed antiphon “Bring me my.” Blake appended below the poem a biblical epigraph not included in Parry’s musical setting: “Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets.” If all are as prophets, to whom do they prophesy?

“Interdisciplinarity,” of course, governs only the sciences. What were once called the humanities answer now instead to the architectonics of “intersectionality”: intersected man possesses no self apart from the venn diagram of his various identities, “sex” “race” “gender” “class” “ability” “veteran status.” The resulting selfless-portrait looks not unlike the interdisciplinary dreamcatcher.

Any antagonism between the two is only superficial. The science of interdisciplinarity reveals the empty truth of Complexity; the art of intersectionality reveals how to live within that emptiness. The relationship between them is something like that between philosophy and law, or between speculative and pastoral theology. In theory, theory has the upper hand, but in practice, practice rules. Hence, inspired by passing internet controversies about 2+2=4 being an anti-trans dogwhistle, mathematics professors will spend class time showing that if you redefine two, addition, or equality, it can equal something else. For example, 2+2=1 mod 3.

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To see why interdisciplinarity bows down to intersectionality we must trace the complexiversity back to the Christian university, with its own productive tension between speculative and practical theology. The ancient world had no universities because ancient law was not philosophical—philosophy mandated only the idea of civic order, not its content. Instead, the ancient world had academies, devoted to the thought of a single philosopher, at which a studious gentleman might retire for a time from civic life. It was the medieval university that first brought together rival intellectual factions under one roof.

Through that act of juxtaposition the university transformed rival factions into rival disciplines. Each discipline sought better to define its respective project by modeling itself on theology, just as the professions—lawyers, physicians, professors—modeled themselves on the priesthood. The project of the university then became the keeping of the peace between the disciplines, a task requiring a symphony of theory and practice. John Henry Newman (theologian, philosopher, educator, historian, poet, novelist) put it as follows, in the lectures collected in The Idea of a University [1852-1858]:

What an empire is in political history, such is a University in the sphere of philosophy and research. It is, as I have said, the high protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery, of experiment and speculation; it maps out the territory of the intellect, and sees that the boundaries of each province are religiously respected, and that there is neither encroachment nor surrender on any side.

Of course, as Newman recognizes, a university acts through its members:

Its several professors are like the ministers of various political powers at one court or conference. They represent their respective sciences, and attend to the private interests of those sciences respectively; and, should dispute arise between those sciences, they are the persons to talk over and arrange it, without risk of extravagant pretensions on any side, of angry collision, or of popular commotion.

The disciplines cannot simply ignore one another, but at the same time they must be reluctant to interfere in one another’s affairs. When the empire of intellect succeeds in keeping the peace:

A liberal philosophy becomes the habit of minds thus exercised; a breadth and spaciousness of thought, in which lines, seemingly parallel, may converge at leisure, and principles, recognized as incommensurable, may be safely antagonistic.

A liberal education produces, not virtuous men, exactly, but what Newman calls gentlemen. A gentleman has “a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;—these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge.” Elsewhere, Newman says that “it is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain.” Importantly, although these qualities of a gentleman are desirable,

They are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless,—pleasant, alas, and attractive as he shows when decked out in them. Taken by themselves, they do but seem to be what they are not; they look like virtue at a distance, but they are detected by close observers …

Newman’s gentleman appears to possess the fullness of virtue but remains in need of religious instruction. Similarly, the university appears autonomous but in fact must be subordinated to a pastoral mission in order practically to justify its pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. When it abandons its pastoral mission—when it degenerates from the Christian university into the liberal university—it is already on the path to the complexiversity’s emptiness.

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Almost a century after Newman, Wystan Hugh Auden (poet, playwright, public intellectual) penned a highly Newmanian lament for the state of the modern university, and gave it the highly Newmanian title “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times.” Delivered at Harvard University in 1946, this poem takes up Newman’s metaphor of a struggle for intellectual territory:

Let Ares doze, that other war
Is instantly declared once more
’Twixt those who follow
Precocious Hermes all the way
And those who without qualms obey
Pompous Apollo.

“Hermes” and “Apollo” here name what Auden saw as the rival factions of his era:

The sons of Hermes love to play
And only do their best when they
Are told they oughtn’t;
Apollo’s children never shrink
From boring jobs but have to think
Their work important.

The triumph of Apollo, Auden fears, will mean the end of the university:

And when he occupies a college,
Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge;
He pays particular
Attention to Commercial Thought,
Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport,
In his curricula.

Recognizing the ascendancy of the Apollonians, Auden recommends to the Hermetics something like guerrilla warfare:

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.

It is tempting, reading this poem, to side with the Hermetics—and to be sure, that is where Auden’s sympathies lie. But, a better reading is that both Hermetics and Apollonians are in the grip of an illusion only religious revelation can dissolve. The illusion is that they differ more than they resemble one another. Auden’s 1955 poem “Vespers” narrates the bursting of his own hermetic bubble, in a chance encounter between himself and an Apollonian (though he now renames the dichotomy as between nostalgic Arcadian and revolutionary Utopian). Each instinctively hates the other, but it is this hatred that reveals to them their similarity,

forcing us both, for a fraction of a second, to remember our victim (but for him I could forget the blood, but for me he could forget the innocence)
on whose immolation (call him Abel, Remus, whom you will, it is one Sin Offering) arcadias, utopias, our dear old bag of a democracy, are alike founded:
For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no secular wall will safely stand.

Which is to say that Auden’s account of the academic rivalry of Hermes and Apollo is Girardian avant la lettre. René Girard (another polymath; his work touched on literature, psychology, anthropology, theology) did not write much about university politics, but his thought is highly relevant to them—not his often-caricatured concept of mimetic desire, but rather his account of how mimetic desire fits into salvation history [e.g., Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World, 1978]. That account proceeds in four stages:

(a) Mimetic desire and conflict. When Alice desires what Beatrice possesses, it is (often) not really about whatever material good is in dispute, but about Alice’s desire to take Beatrice’s place. Conflict between them is inevitable, irresoluble, and takes the form of Alice coming to resemble Beatrice.

(b) The scapegoat mechanism. As mimetic conflict spreads through a society, rendering everyone increasingly indistinguishable, social order can be restored by singling out a scapegoat, someone to blame for the conflict, and sacrificing them. This sacrifice restores a sense of sacred boundaries, and so social order—and this restoration is taken to confirm the scapegoat’s alleged guilt.

(c) Christian revelation. The gospel, among other things, reveals to us that the victim was no more responsible for the mimetic contagion than anyone else, and thus that the scapegoat mechanism is based on a lie. Once this is understood, the mechanism stops working; people still engage in scapegoating, but it is increasingly ineffective, and traditional hierarchies become increasingly untenable.

(d) Anti-Christianity. Once the scapegoat mechanism can no longer function, an attempt is made to restore social order through a new religion, the worship of victimhood. As Girard puts it in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning [2001], what emerges is a totalitarianism which “takes over and ‘radicalizes’ the [Christian] concern for victims in order to paganize it.” Unfortunately, this aping of Christianity does not bring peace, but sparks a new conflict over whose victimhood will be recognized. When victims are worshipped, the claim to victimhood becomes a kind of aggression.

A Girardian genealogy of the complexiversity would look something like the following. Having excluded religion and revelation, the liberal university at first produced gentlemen, that is, men who, having acquired a large knowledge of science and literature, sought never to inflict pain. This desire to avoid giving pain extended to the drawing of boundaries between the disciplines, in effect a mimetic conflict. But the liberal university slowly lost sight of what made the complacency of such gentlemen desirable. Today it produces not gentlemen, but on the one hand utilitarian scientists who seek to minimize the occurrence of pain by whatever means necessary, and on the other anarchic litterateurs who seek through irresponsible play to demonstrate their sensitivity to the wounds of the world. These seem opposed, but phenomena like D-E-I mathematics show their deeper agreement. Lacking what Newman called “religious respect” for the boundaries between the disciplines, the pain-reducing sciences voluntarily abnegate themselves in order to honor the claims of victimhood studies.

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Once religious respect is gone, it cannot easily be regained. Where can the university go from here? Well—a professor of my acquaintance once dreamed of founding a college whose curriculum centered on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: or, the Whale. The reading list for each course would begin the same way; after all, the book contains within itself not only all of American literature and history, but also philosophy, biology, geography, and more.

The most natural senior project to assign at such a college would be the drafting of an additional chapter of Moby-Dick. Not that there is room for such a chapter, or that the book is in any way incomplete, but (despite the premise of this imagined college) we must acknowledge that many facts about whales have been discovered in recent years that would have been the perfect topic for a new chapter to go somewhere between 55 and 105, had Melville known of them. One student might write about how whales speak to one another, and raise the speculative theory that it was men who taught the whales to speak, by hunting them. Another might write about how the largest whale arteries are broad enough for a man to swim in. Another could compare whale-fall—when a whale’s corpse falls to the ocean floor and sustains for weeks a whole city of fish, crabs, and the like—to the death of God and the flourishing of artistic modernism.

The College of the Whale might be only the first of a whole consortium. I have known other scholars who would dream of doing the same with Plato’s Republic, Dante’s Divina Commedia, or Goethe’s Faust. When enough colleges had come into being, they could launch a graduate program. Its qualifying exams could take as their subject the set of the various colleges’ foundational books, with a student’s dissertation required to be on some book other than these. Apart from the founding members, only persons having received doctorates from the graduate program would be eligible to start new colleges in the consortium. Eventually the consortium would be sufficiently large that the graduate program would be impossible to complete, and no further graduate students could be admitted. Soon thereafter, the set of consortium members would be deemed closed.

So long as colleges in the consortium were limited to sufficiently universal works, there would be no defect in the depth or breadth of any consortium student’s education. A student at the College of the Whale, for example, would know Moby-Dick better than almost any English major at an ordinary college, and would at the same time know more of medicine than your average classics major, more of Greek than your average biology major, and so on. And so long as all the colleges in the consortium shared a city, which is to say, so long as the consortium developed into a university, no consortium student would have a false picture of the centrality of his own college’s chosen perspective. Each student would know that he had read Moby-Dick, or the Divina Commedia, or Faust, not because it is the one book all men must study, but because it is the book chosen for study by the particular community the student joined. Such contingency is unavoidable, since there can be no universal volume any more than there can be a universal language—each attempt is simply another particular volume or particular language clamoring for attention.

What a consortium education would not provide—and this is the point—is a sense for generally accepted disciplinary boundaries. A consortium student would have only a notional understanding of what ordinary academic institutions mean by labels like “English,” “classics,” “biology.” The task of translating ordinary interdepartmental politics into consortium terminology would be difficult, if not necessarily impossible (factor analysis might reveal, for example, that Melville tilts toward politics, Goethe toward science, Dante toward theology). Whenever consortium members reentered the ordinary academic world, they would feel themselves in it, but not of it, and its line-drawing would seem to them as arbitrary as the lines on a map seem to the cosmopolitans ordinary universities churn out. In time they would learn that the lines are less arbitrary than they seem. That experience might make them more willing to take seriously the same proposition about ordinary political boundaries. It is in some such roundabout way, if at all, that we can recover a proper understanding of the empire of the intellect.

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These must be the bounds of human reason. And let him who would transgress them beware lest he transgress all humanity. (¶360)

The ultimate ambition of Giambattista Vico’s The New Science [1744] was to develop a philosophical philology, a rigorous method for grounding historical theories in linguistic evidence. Any such methodology would have to confront what later theorists called the hermeneutic circle: to learn anything about a historical event from a sample of language, we must already understand what the sample says, but to understand what it says, we must already understand the historical context it came from. As Erich Auerbach observed in his essay “Giambattista Vico and the Idea of Philology” [1936], Vico discovered an apparent escape route from this endless regress:

And he did so by means of a theory that very nearly represents a final, ingenious solution to the core problem of hermeneutics. This new, critical art is based on the senso comune, the common sense, of all people, and thus on that which all of humanity has in common. It is a “judgment without reflection,” a natural predisposition for specific forms of life and developmental paths…. This is why the lingua mentale comune (common mental language) is one of his favorite ideas. Here he assumes an inner language common to all human beings, such that the different individual languages are merely so many different “aspects” of a common inner tongue.

Auerbach’s perception here is keen; he has distilled here to its essence the Vicovian method, that strange amalgam of theory and art, common sense and common mental language. In what follows, I begin by re-diluting Auerbach’s precis for human consumption. I then consider a potentially-fatal defect in Vico’s method, and thus, if Auerbach is right (and I think he is), in all humanistic inquiry.

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*

Vico himself understood his achievement to be more “theory” than “art,” and thus, per the accepted intellectual conventions of the time, to require grounding in enumerated axioms and definitions set forth in the style of the geometers. He thus attempted to separate his project into its philosophical and its philological aspects, and believed that “The philological arguments must come last” (¶351); they can be understood only once the philosophical work has already been accomplished:

These philological proofs enable us to see in fact the institutions we have meditated in idea as touching this world of nations, in accordance with Bacon’s method of philosophizing, which is ‘think and see’ (cogitare videre). Thus it is that with the help of the preceding philosophical proofs, the philological proofs both confirm their own authority by reason and at the same time confirm reason by their authority. (¶359)

Only in the second Book of The New Science, “Poetic Wisdom,” does he begin to put forward etymologies demonstrating his philological erudition. In the first, “Establishment of Principles,” he defends his project on philosophical grounds, defining his subject matter as the civil world of humanity, which materials outside the scholar’s own humanity cannot help him to understand: “for purposes of this inquiry, we must reckon as if there were no books in the world” (¶330). Vico describes his greatest discoveries as taking place entirely within himself:

But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men had made it, men could come to know. (¶331)

If we accept Vico’s distinction between philosophy and philology, we will align the former with “common sense” and the latter with “common mental language.” The senso comune makes “certain and determined” human choice “with respect to human needs or utilities” (¶141). That all human minds operate within “determined” bounds guarantees that examination of self can provide knowledge of others—pure reason can reveal the limits of humanity. The lingua mentale comune “uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things have diverse aspects” (¶161). That all languages capture “aspects” of the same thing guarantees that examination of what another has written can help one understand what one means by one’s own words—any language can be learned, and learning any language makes one’s own language richer. The former examination requires what we might call, given how Vico describes it in terms of inner illumination, “genius”; the latter requires, to use another of his favorite laudatory terms, “erudition.” Both are required of he who would gain historical knowledge, which for Vico means knowledge, not of self or other, but of the Platonic ideal of Humanity.

It sounds, as Vico tells it, as if philosophical genius must come first, and philological erudition follow. Any reader of The New Science quickly realizes, however, that its distinction between philosophy and philology picks out, at best, different perspectives from which to view a single activity. The shift from Book One to Book Two does not feel like a move from philosophy to philology, but like a recapitulation of the same theory—a theory not quite ideal, not quite historical, but somehow both. Indeed, neither the 419 paragraphs of “Poetic Wisdom” nor the 318 paragraphs of “Establishment of Principles” say much that is not at least alluded to in the 42 paragraphs of the preliminary “Idea of the Work,” which makes no arguments at all, seeking only to explicate its allegorical frontispiece. Vico convinces his reader, not through a dialectic of philosophy and philology, but through endless recapitulation and embellishment. He tells the founding myth of how “metaphysic … has enabled us finally to descend into the crude minds of the first founders of the gentile nations, all robust sense and vast imagination” (¶6). The story cannot be demonstrated, but it impresses through its ability to account both for the events of human history and for our ability to understand them.

All genius, then, to be true genius, must be erudite, and all erudition ingenious; they grow together as self-scrutiny and historical research are carried out simultaneously. This is not an escape from the hermeneutic circle, but a solution to our sense that it poses a paradox. Vico’s theory is simply that I come to understand what someone else’s word means the same way I come to understand my own—gradually. Which is to say, history makes interpretation difficult, but there nevertheless exists a hermeneutic art. Calling this a “theory” is somewhat generous; the only proof it can have (which is all the proof it needs) is the fact that the art can indeed be learned. Valuing this art is, essentially, what Auerbach describes as historicism and attributes to both Vico and himself.

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Auerbach is right to find Vico’s historicism attractive; yet we should also acknowledge its more startling implications. When Vico wrote that “we must reckon as if there were no books in the world,” he did speak in part out of physics-envy, but he did not misunderstand his own method. However much the new science sought to understand the language of other men, the new scientist had no one else with whom to speak. In his philological researches Vico borrows almost none of his insights from others’ intellectual efforts; indeed, though he values the practice of philosophy, he uses the term “philosopher” most often as a term of censure. He borrows Plato’s metaphysics, but heaps scorn on his political, historical, or linguistic theories. His favorite philosopher to cite is Varro, whom he values not for any arguments he makes, but for being “the most learned writer on Roman antiquities” (¶6) and penning many a “golden passage” (¶88), that is, many a passage whose supposed antiquity Vico believes to be authentic. One suspects that if Vico could have read Varro directly, rather than filtered through Augustine’s City of God, and so had confronted contested propositions rather than intriguing schemata underwritten by a venerable name, he might have found him less congenial. Books are not, for Vico, sources of insight into the mind of another person, into arguments someone else finds convincing even if he does not. Any idea worth considering must be his idea; he must be able to locate its truth within his own mind.

So when it comes to books, Vico much prefers to the “esoteric wisdom of philosophers” the “vulgar wisdom of lawgivers” (¶254), and holds the latter to be much more ancient. “Vulgar” here means something like “common to all humanity.” Vico takes little interest in what particular thinkers have said; he cares about what kinds of things people said, especially in the most remote periods of history (after all, he already knows how civilized men think). He seeks to learn how he can bring himself to be able to say these things (even if he will have no reason to say them). The ancient law-books are valuable, not because they were written with any great insight, but precisely because they were not, and so tell us what humanity in its infancy could not help but think. All books, whether philosophical or poetic, are but mines from which to extract linguistic evidence, to be burned in the furnace of Vico’s own mind for the purpose of illuminating its dark corners. Poetry distinguishes itself only in that it offers the best fuel.

Put differently: Vico was among the first scholars to pursue etymologies, not to establish the meaning of this or that word, but in order to understand linguistic development, which for Vico was the same as historical development writ large. Vico writes that “native etymologies are histories of institutions signified by the words in the natural order of ideas. First the woods, then cultivated fields and huts, next little houses and villages, thence cities, finally academies and philosophers: this is the order of all progress from the first origins” (¶22). In all of his linguistic analyses Vico traces the evolution of human consciousness from the lowest to the highest level. For example, opening Book Two of The New Science almost at random, we find the following etymological account (I quote at length to capture the flavor of the philological enterprise, which Vico clearly enjoys):

The former [comitia curiata] were called curiata from quir, spear, whose genitive quiris was later used as the nominative … just as from cheir, hand, which among all nations meant power, must have been derived the Greek kyria, with the same meaning as the Latin curia. Hence came the Curetes, who were priests armed with spears, for all the heroic people were composed of priests and only the heroes had the right to bear arms…. Kyria in its ancient sense must have meant seigniory, just as aristocratic commonwealths are now called seigniories. From the kyria of these heroic senates came kyros for authority, but this authority, as we have observed above and will observe more closely, was that of ownership. From these origins came the modern kyrios for ‘sir’ and kyria for madam.’ And as the Greek Curetes came from cheir, so we saw above that the Roman Quirites came from quir. (¶624)

We see here Vico’s ingenious erudition—his ability to pick up on linguistic patterns—and also his erudite genius—his ability to see, in these patterns, manifestations of the historical development whose ideal form he perceives within himself. He does not tell us the importance of these etymologies because The New Science aims to teach us to see it on our own. To understand Vico’s theory is to understand why he draws all and only the etymological connections he does. If we make this reasoning explicit, we find that it emerges from and seeks to support both aspects of Vico’s ideal history, its ideality (all languages are fundamentally the same) and its historicity (each language undergoes a process of gradual development).

(a) The first aspect we see in the similarity of Latin quir=spear to Greek cheir=hand. These subtly different sounds, Vico believes, capture subtly different aspects of the same root-concept, something along the lines of kuir*=bodily force. When the human race was young, all aspects of the root-concept—hand, weapon, violence, power, etc.—could only be said all together. That we can sense the meaning of this root-concept (even if not express it in words) demonstrates the reality of the lingua mentale comune, and our knowledge of that language, however cloudy, makes it possible to recognize the truth of the quir-cheir connection.

(b) Then the root-concept begins to fracture. In the progression cheir=hand → kyria=seigniory → kyros=authority → kyrios=sir, kyria=madam, we find the second aspect of Vico’s theory, the development of language from the most primitive stages of culture to the most civilized. From its original wide scope, the word’s meaning narrowed to signify only the power of he who wielded it—in Vico’s political theory, the heroes, over the famuli. Then, it came to signify not power in the sense of force, which can be easily observed, but authority in the sense of ownership, which connects a person to a thing regardless of his visible disposition towards it. Then, in the last stage of civilization, it came to be used of all men and women, a pure abstraction based in the realization that all men and women share a spiritual equality, and so deserve to be respected, and so in a sense have spiritual authority. Through the differentiation of its words from one another, the Greek language gained ways of speaking about respect, about ownership, about parts of the body, and about brute force—but in the process, it lost the unutterable word that meant all of these at the same time.

The fracturing and abstracting of language we see in Vico’s etymologies is not exactly how Vico describes his own theory of the stages of linguistic development. Rather, he suggests that an original “mute language of signs and physical objects” develops into “heroic emblems, or similitudes, comparisons, images, metaphors, and natural descriptions,” and finally becomes “words agreed upon by the people, a language of which they are absolute lords” (¶32). But we should not take these three stages too literally. Partly because it would be more charitable to suppose Vico did not really believe a nation could survive, even for a short time, without any means of communicating other than gesturing at various objects (did they carry around bags of props?). But more importantly, because the three stages were for Vico ideal types, never perfectly instantiated on earth. While one always predominates, every time in every nation will be a mixture of all three stages. We would be better off understanding the three stages to indicate three different principles by which every language operates: we might call these, if we require some way to refer to them, proto-language, language, and meta-language.

Vico says that “Men at first feel without perceiving, then they perceive with a troubled and agitated spirit, finally they reflect with a clear mind” (¶218). The mute signs correspond to feeling, that is, the intuitive proto-language common to all humanity, which, whether made up of sound or gesture, was entirely involuntary. Heroic emblems correspond to troubled perception, that is, the gradual recognition of connections between proto-words, connections which cannot be unseen once they are seen (saying “Achilles was not a lion” makes the same metaphorical connection as saying he was), and which begin to build up, out of the proto-language, a language capable of describing the world as it is. Finally, the agreed-upon words correspond to reflection, that is, meta-language, the acquired ability to negate, draw inferences, and in general reason about which words to use when, which is to reason about what the world is actually like, and whether what we have been saying corresponds to it. To the first of these Vico gives no name, but he might have called it mere consciousness. The last, in his terminology, is philosophical reasoning. The dynamic middle principle—the most important of the three, from the perspective of the philologist—is, in the Vicovian lexicon, poetic creation.

*

The greatest acts of poetic creation, in Vico’s eyes, were the epic poetry of Homer and the jurisprudence of Rome. Vico values the latter just as highly as the former, calling it “a serious poem” and “a severe poetry” (¶1037). Undoubtedly, both are etymological gold-mines, repositories of ancient wisdom. They preserved the language that primitive man had needed to create (he was not born with such words already present in him), but could not have created otherwise (unless the times and guises had been different, in which case his poetry would have been correspondingly different, and so, in Vico’s eyes, fundamentally the same). This explains “creation.” Vico easily could have used only that word, however, and left “poetic” to the side; he did not, which requires explanation.

Vico does not mean that the great Greek and Roman poems were consciously wrought by an artist. An early adopter of Homeric skepticism, he argued that both the Greek epics and the Roman laws were produced by an entire nation, and shed light on how that nation had created itself and its language. But neither does Vico use “poetry” as a mere synonym for the production of new words: that would be the monosemous usage of a philosopher. Rather, Vico’s use of the term is tied to his sense of both Homeric and jurisprudential sublimity. Poetry as Vico means it has a fundamental connection to bodily limitations:

They, in their robust ignorance, [created] by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was quite corporeal, they did it with marvelous sublimity; a sublimity such and so great that it excessively perturbed the very persons who by feigning did the creating, for which they were called “poets,” which is Greek for “makers.” Now this is the threefold labor of great poetry: (1) to invent sublime fables suited to the popular understanding, (2) to perturb to excess, with a view to the end proposed: (3) to teach the vulgar to act virtuously…. (¶376)

Two aspects of this perturbation deserve comment.

(a) Poetry perturbs in order to teach the vulgar virtue—for Vico this is among the first and deepest principles of ancient wisdom. But ancient poetry, we must remember, was not written for a nation by one person, but by the nation as a whole for itself. Thus, in Vico’s fable of the origin of virtue, “it was fear which created gods in the world; not fear awakened in men by other men, but by themselves” (¶382): through language humanity terrifies itself into submission to the moral law. People are naturally vicious, but when they begin to form linguistic communities, they are frightened into virtue, not by the words of some external speaker, but by their own poetic utterances, self-inflicted corporeal disturbances.

(b) But poetry also, for Vico, means individual productions of the sort we associate with the term. Vico believes that such modern productions are necessarily inferior to the ancient poems, due to their self-consciousness: “the arts of poetry and of criticism, have produced none equal or better [to Homer] and have even prevented its production” (¶384). The civilized man cannot feel for his thoughts; he cannot invent, for he sees too clearly. The sign of this inferiority, Vico implies, is the lack of sublime perturbation, which indicates the absence of creative access to the senso comune. Though its presence does not, of course, demonstrate that the common sense has been tapped into; perturbation can be falsified like anything else (so, one supposes, Vico would have made sense of phenomena like the faux-antique “Ossian”).

The tension (not to say incoherence) in Vico’s use of the term poetry, stretched between communal and individual productions, comes to a head in the person of the philologist. To engage in philological research of erudite genius just is, for Vico, to probe deeply into primitive man’s poetic unconscious, as it can be found within the modifications of each of our minds. The philologist in his researches reenacts the original poetic creation. We might legitimately wonder, then: is it possible to write philological poetry? On the one hand, Vico wrote that poetry cannot be written in a civilized age. On the other, it seems likely—and many of his readers have felt—that he thought his own work to be such a poetic endeavor.

If we are to endorse such a speculation, however, we must not flatten it into mere self-aggrandizement. Poetry in the Vicovian sense is not just a pastime. For Vico to call himself a poet would have been for him to say that, like the ancient poems as he admired them, The New Science discovered a perturbing way of speaking that could not have been otherwise; and that, like those poems, its discovery founded a linguistic and ethical community. I believe that it would be right to say these things—if we acknowledge that, in Vico’s case, it was an isolated community of one. We see here the true significance of his method’s refusal to trade arguments back and forth with other minds: for Vico there were no other minds. At least, none whom he could hope would understand him. Like all great poets, Vico said in The New Science everything that he could imagine being said, and his language and world lacked room for anything more. No outside voice could possibly break in: either Vico would find its words meaningless, or he would assimilate their etymologies into his own mind’s modifications.

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In 1939, for example, W.H. Auden, at the time a self-professed socialist, could write (with “him” referring to W.B. Yeats, the great Irish poet in whose memory these lines were written):

Time, that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Kipling, the hymnist of imperial Britain; Claudel, the French Catholic; Yeats, the Irish almost-fascist: Auden believed that Time would have to pardon them because in their reactionary politics they had sinned against Progress, but at the same time Auden believed that Time would pardon them because they were undeniably great poets. Though I should note that as his politics shifted conservative Auden repudiated these lines for their overly Hegelian view of history, a critique with which I would agree. It is us readers, not personified Time, that must do the pardoning. I leave to each reader whether he thinks Kipling, Claudel, and/or Yeats requires his pardon. Auden’s enumeration of these three names is of course representative, not exhaustive: sticking with Anglophone modernist poets, we could add Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, even Auden himself in his later years.

But despite this catalog of right-wing greats, we must admit that even in the first half of the last century the literati tilted left. In 1937 the then-socialist Auden helped put together a pamphlet titled “Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War,” containing postcard-size position statements from several dozen British writers sorted into FOR, AGAINST, and NEUTRAL. T.S. Eliot’s studiously ambiguous NEUTRAL response is my favorite of the batch:

While I am naturally sympathetic, I still feel convinced that it is best that at least a few men of letters should remain isolated, and take no part in these collective activities.

There were, however, only three pages of NEUTRALs, and one of AGAINST, against a full twenty-three pages FOR the anarchist-communist alliance. Though their postcard-squibs are rather embarrassing in retrospect, it still won’t do to say that these were simply false poets not deserving of the name. Limiting myself to authors I would recommend to the reader, the FORs included (in addition to Auden himself) Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, Louis MacNeice, Rose Macaulay, and Samuel Beckett. If Auden in his socialist phase could recognize the greatness of Yeats, I must return the favor, and acknowledge that Auden the young socialist was a greater poet than Auden the aging conservative. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” for example, is one of Auden’s greatest poems, and I’m not sure it was improved by his later decision to excise the History-worshipping verses.

I would go so far as to say that poets have inclined toward the left ever since the left-right dichotomy was discovered in Revolutionary France. This is an anthropological observation, not a claim about whether poetry itself tilts one way or another. The thought is that artists are drawn to art partly because they’re lazy, sensual, undisciplined. They want to avoid honest work and attract admirers. When it comes to moral questions, they’re libertines—painters and sculptors more than poets, but poets too. And all artists, but perhaps poets in particular, are easily seduced by ideology. Their attachment is to words, the sound of them, their associations, more than to the world those words describe. A poet who falls in love with the word “Humanity” or “Equality” might become a communist without once sitting down to think through the difficult problems of political economy. The right-wing poet must somehow resist at least most of these tendencies.

One route for such a poet is to be a poet only part of the time. The rest of the time cannot be spent in mere subsistence labor—the poet who tills the soil is performing his purported independence from cultural institutions, not establishing it. But think of T.S. Eliot, who worked at a bank; Wallace Stevens, who spent his life in the insurance business; or, looking further back, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who served in Weimar’s administration and diplomatic corps. Devoting one’s time to such governing institutions cuts through the sentimental rhetoric naive poets often find attractive, replacing it with an understanding of the realities constraining human action. Goethe’s time in government taught him to say, of the French Revolution: “I would rather commit an injustice than tolerate disorder.” But equally importantly, participation in governing institutions allows the part-time poet a measure of social dignity not dependent on his bowing to the cultural idols of the hour: recall Eliot’s comment about taking “no part in these collective activities.” The part-time poet who is at the same time a great poet often has about him a patrician air; self-sufficient, he offers us his poems as a gift, and asks nothing in return.

An almost opposite route for the right-wing poet is to follow the advice of Samuel Johnson, a staunch Tory: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” The poet who takes his wares straight to market can ignore the prestige game refereed by left-captured institutions, and instead put his writing to a more objective test: will a substantial number of readers pay to read it? A poet who can actually move product, a popular poet, a Kipling or a Frost, is often a conservative of a sort: a sincere patriot, a lover of the common man, a critic of the hypocrisy of the professional moralists and at the same time possessing a strong moral sense, an understanding of the allures of vice and the practical necessity of virtue. Ordinary people buy his books because they sense that he is not talking down to them.

The patrician and the popular strategies each pose their characteristic dangers. The danger for the patrician is obscurantism. He is not writing for money, or to climb the social-status ladder, but for the few sympathetic souls able to understand him. He allows his work to be difficult, asking us to approach it like fine wine, or higher mathematics; though these things may pose barriers to entry, they are worthwhile in themselves. But the moment he starts to see his limited readership as a positive good, he will be tempted to make his writing more difficult than necessary, in an attempt to limit his readers to the worthy few. Perhaps such barriers are sometimes politically necessary, for what have come to be known as Straussian reasons (i.e., sometimes what the poet has to say, if he said it openly, would get him arrested, or tarred and feathered). But the unnecessarily esoteric poet, although a recognizably reactionary character in a certain sense of the word, is not worthy of emulation.

Conversely, the danger for the populist is that writing for the market can easily turn into writing for no one in particular. I said earlier that the market allows the popular poet to escape the cultural rat race, but the market isn’t an actor, properly speaking; it’s a phenomenon emerging from the myriad choices individual market participants make. When we talk about the market it’s like talking about the weather, and when the poet thinks about the market he can at best think of the imagined marginal consumer in his target demographic. This imagined representative of the many is not capable of holding the writer up to any standard, and the poet who writes “for” the market, and only for the market, will sooner or later cease to produce anything of literary merit; he will become a purveyor of mass entertainments in which he himself does not believe. I am reminded here of some lines of W.B. Yeats, from his not entirely successful didactic poem “Ego Dominus Tuus” [1919]:

The rhetorician would deceive his neighbors,
The sentimentalist, himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality.

True art, that is, is art that tells the truth; right-wing art can be true, but is not always. Of the varieties of right-wing poet, the popular poet is tempted by rhetoric, in Yeats’s sense: he does not need to believe in his poetry, so long as his audience believes that he believes in it. While it is the patrician poet who is tempted by sentiment; his poems create an inner circle of himself and his few readers who imagine themselves to be not only eccentric, but an elect.

Rhetorician and sentimentalist describe not only attitudes, but practices, which is to say that other- and self-deception work their way into the very words of the poem. The popular rhetorician is in danger of ceasing to believe in his words, and instead simply giving them instructions. One is reminded of Auden’s quip that “there are some poets, Kipling for example, whose relation to language reminds one of a drill sergeant: the words are taught to wash behind their ears, stand properly at attention and execute complicated maneuvers, but at the cost of never being allowed to think for themselves” [The Dyer’s Hand, 1962]. Like any drill sergeant, the Kipling approach to language must take care to avoid slipping into brutal tyranny. The patrician sentimentalist, in contrast, is in danger of enjoying his words too much to bother discerning whether he believes them. One is reminded of Yeats’s lunatic offer to commit his life to interpreting his wife’s automatic writing, and the automatic response: “No, we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.” The automatic hand might offer the metaphors, but it would have been a dereliction of duty for Yeats to accept the offer sight unseen. (I will return later to the problem of poets prompting machine learning algorithms and sifting their outputs.)

These observations do not tell us much about what the right-wing writer should do; my goal has been to get into view his predicament. That predicament is, of course, not exactly the same now as it was in the time of literary modernism, the age when cheap printing made a mass audience for the first time imaginable. After the postwar period the situation changed—television eroded the hope the masses would be literate even while the left-leaning institutions that emerged to control them secured their stranglehold on the cultural scene—and one will find still fewer right-wing writers in the second half of the twentieth century than in the first (though still not none). The advent of digital communications once again altered the landscape, including by reviving the viability of counter-elite institutions such as Lomez’s Passage Press. But I do not believe that the situation has changed so profoundly as to call into question the above assertions, which I would summarize with the following three theses:

(a) Artists in general, and poets in particular, naturally tend toward the left, and so cultural institutions tend toward the left (even more than institutions generally, cf. Conquest’s Second Law).

(b) Right-leaning writers can achieve a modicum of independence from left-leaning cultural institutions either through participating in actual governing institutions and writing poetry in their spare time, or by bringing their wares straight to the market.

(c) The patrician poet will find himself with few readers, and will be tempted to throw up unnecessary barriers to shrink his readership even further; the popular poet will find himself with many readers, and will be tempted to sink to the lowest common denominator to obtain even more.

*

The Pirate. I would like at this point to expand somewhat on the third of these theses, about the temptations facing the patrician and the populist poet, particularly as these temptations manifest in the present age of digital communications. In a nutshell: both types of right-wing poet will be tempted to believe in copyright as a natural right, rather than a relic of the age of print. The patrician instinctively loves the idea of copyright because it promises him patriarchal authority over the public fate of his work; the populist loves it because it promises him an income stream based on his work’s public reception. But both promises are false. The one mistakes the author’s authority for a legal power, the other for a legal entitlement. The right-wing poet ought instead to reject the notion of intellectual property—both because it is wrong, and because it will not help him (indeed, it will only help his enemies).

The best evocation I have seen of the true legal relationship between author and audience is found in a 2001 essay by SF/F author Gene Wolfe, an appreciation of J.R.R. Tolkien called “The Best Introduction to the Mountains.” I know of no collection containing it, but it can be easily found online, albeit not lawfully posted there. The heart of the closing paragraph is the following:

We might have a society in which the laws were few and just, simple, permanent, and familiar to everyone—a society in which everyone stood shoulder-to-shoulder because everyone lived by the same changeless rules, and everyone knew what those rules were. When we had it, we would also have a society in which the lack of wealth was not reason for resentment but a spur to ambition, and in which wealth was not a cause for self-indulgence but a call to service. We had it once, and some time in this third millennium we shall have it again; and if we forget to thank John Ronald Reuel Tolkien for it when we get it, we will already have begun the slow and not always unpleasant return to Mordor.

Which is to say: not just poetry, but gratitude for poetry grounds the social order. When I read a true work of literature, I both see in it a double vision of the world as it is and ought to be, and feel gratitude to the author as the one who showed me that vision. The gratitude is itself part of the vision, because the world as it ought to be is founded on honoring those who allow us to see it properly. The gratitude spurs me to act in such a way as to make the world how, in the eyes of the poet, it in a sense already is. But is this gratitude itself a law? No: the author’s purported property right in his work is not among the “few and just” laws to be found in the world the poet shows us. Anglo-Saxon literature did great honor to poets, but Anglo-Saxon lawbooks (written long before the printing press) contained no notion whatsoever of copyright.

I myself have never doubted the injustice of copyright law. I gratefully acknowledge that I owe this confidence to my father, who insisted (in the words of Stewart Brand) that information “wants to be free.” A philosopher, his reasoning was metaphysical: one cannot own mathematics because mathematics is purely intelligible, and anything susceptible of digital representation is ultimately just a number. I would frame the matter a bit differently: intellectual objects resist ownership because they are gratuitous. We pursue mathematics and poetry for their own sake, not for profit, and any practical benefit (say, the discovery that the principles of number theory can be used to facilitate secure digital communication, or the pseudo-discovery that literature increases empathy) is beside the point, at least from the mathematician’s or poet’s point of view. These intellectual pursuits are intrinsically valuable in part because they can and therefore should be freely shared. Writers desire readers, not customers, and they desire for their readers not to be readers only, but writers themselves, even if all they write is their favorite poems into a commonplace book.

Conversely, what is shared between writers and readers, and between readers, is not a tangible thing, or even an experience, but a name. Remember Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in which the headless torso like Wallace Stevens’s jar transforms whatever space it sits within into an eye:

Here there is no place
That does not see you. You must change your life.

These lines stay with us because we recognize them to name something true about ourselves: namely, how the phenomenology of poetic possession inverts our usual understanding of ownership. When I memorize a poem, I do not possess it; it possesses me. “There is no place” in the poem “that does not see you,” and assert its authority over you. But equally, there is no “you” who is not seen by it; there is no person on earth with whom the poem cannot at least potentially be shared. Rilke was only the first whom the poem saw. It would be a lie for anyone else to claim authorship over these lines, except in the way that each rebel slave voluntarily takes on the name Spartacus, or each Christian the name Christ. But authorship is not ownership. Rilke does not own the poem any more than you or I. The poem exists to be shared between us, where it can reshape how we see our world and our selves, and inspire us to renew the dialect of the tribe by weaving new poems out of the text of the old.

A poem allows us to put into words what we otherwise could not, and so names the feeling (idea, event) for which it becomes a touchstone. But so too, if less obviously, with every genuine art form. To think through these thoughts I relied on certain words from the “Archaic Torso”; many others have been equally dependent on the by now common nouns “Romeo,” “Quixote,” “Sherlock,” “Frankenstein.” Even computer code and architectural plans name the built environment through which we move, and only by learning these names can we experience that environment as a shared world rather than something alien. If every artwork can be reduced to a number, it is perhaps because “number” and “name” are cognates. Names cannot be owned, except in a limited sense—namely, by the person named, when the name is that of a person. And even that can change: “Frankenstein” once named the doctor, but by philological transmutation has come to mean the monster. To interfere with this constant renovation of our shared language would be to interfere with the work of art itself.

Such interference is the only thing copyright is good for. Like whatever act of violence shattered Apollo’s marble head, copyright purports to tell us that ideas can be owned. The populist’s desire for remuneration, when cashed out as a right to exclude non-consumers from the artwork, results in an anticulture where the audience does not share a common good. The problem is not just lowest-common-denominator garbage; indeed, the tendency to seek out the “highbrow” as evidence of one’s discerning consumption, to become the man of many books you probably haven’t heard of, is part of the problem too. The direct link between compensation and consumption creates the conditions undergirding both consumer fandoms and hipster intellectualism. On the other side of the coin, the patrician impulse to assert authority over the use of the artwork bears a similarly corrupt fruit: the NFL’s speech police seek to ban all unauthorized references to the Game That Must Not Be Named, and leftist IP lawyers, imagining traditional mythologies to be multiverses avant la lettre, fantasize about preventing cultural appropriation by giving native peoples ownership over their heritage.

The point of these observations is not to denigrate poets who believe (however wrongly) in their ownership over their own work. We can well understand the patrician desire to prevent strangers from fiddling with one’s poetry, and the populist desire to profit from its public reception. These desires find legitimate expression in our legal regime—only not in copyright law. Rather, in two domains of not-quite-IP law: trademark, which is not IP because not intellectual, and trade secret, which is not IP because not property.

A trademark is property, but not intellectual: it is, in effect, a proper name for the trademark-holder, whom trademark law protects from impersonation—the patrician’s true goal. Trademark is analogous to libel or fraud. An author has a right to fix the definitive edition of his works, and to prevent publications that falsely present themselves as having been approved by him. But trademark law does not require authorizing the poet to expel unauthorized editions from the marketplace altogether, rather than, say, requiring them to disclaim themselves as “unauthorized” (or simply not to use his name at all). We can fully understand why the patrician poet might desire that power, while still recognizing that it would be excessive. That “Down By the Salley Gardens” entered into the canon of English folk songs is reward enough; Yeats is not entitled to prevent those who sing it from passing on a misremembered form of its lyrics, as his own poem did (half by accident) to the anonymous ballad “The Rambling Boys of Pleasure.”

Trade secrets, in contrast, are intellectual, but not property: they are creatures of contract, not fundamentally different from any other bargained-for contract right. An author has a choice whether to put his work into the public domain; if he prefers, he can put it in a desk drawer, and never show it to anyone who has not agreed to keep it secret. He thus has the opportunity to bargain for whatever reward he desires. But once the manuscript leaves his office, so to speak, the ship has sailed. The man who would build a lighthouse on the coast can ask the nearby port for whatever reward he wants, but once the lighthouse is built, he cannot begin charging the ships for their use of its illumination. Which is not to say that the government could not tax incoming vessels to pay for the lighthouse. That might be sound public policy, which is in truth what copyright law amounts to: a tax on information consumption used to reward information producers, and disguised as a property right. While all property rights can be so redescribed, copyright is unique in having no private-law substance independent of that redescription.

A copyright-like tax scheme makes a certain amount of sense if the goal is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”—what the U.S. Constitution names as the purpose of copyright law (European legal systems frame the matter differently, and I think wrongly, in terms of the author’s purported moral rights). But note the phrase “useful arts.” The Framers had in mind fact-finding enterprises like cartography or almanac creation, for which a temporally limited legal monopoly may well be required to sufficiently incentivize the production of adequate work. The populist imagines that such a tax-and-spend scheme is also required to liberate poets from the tyranny of left-leaning cultural institutions. But it is not so. Indeed, since a property right is only as good as the forcefulness with which it is asserted, copyright has the opposite effect. A man sitting in his own front yard can yell at the children whenever they cross the line between lawnmower patterns, but it takes a small army of lawyers and netcrawlers—in other words, an institution—to detect and deter violations of IP boundary lines. The institutionless populist’s ability to earn a living from his work depends not on copyright law, but on the willingness of his audience to engage in acts of micropatronage by purchasing his works despite being perfectly capable of obtaining them for free.

Admittedly, the depth of the moral absurdity of copyright law is contingent on the technological situation. When printing presses were expensive, copyright law amounted only to a regulation of the publishing industry, though still one of dubious prudence. But when copying became nearly free, copyright law became an intolerable enclosure of the digital commons, and a form of welfare for a left-leaning oligarchy. The institutionless reactionary of today, like the disenfranchised Jacobite of yesteryear, has little choice but to become a pirate. With this epithet the pro-copyright marketers of the 1990s named better than they knew (and a marketer can at times be a poet, even if one writing on commission). To be an artistic pirate means to attempt at least the following.

(a) Actively participate in the creative work. Try to understand why artists made the choices they did; consider how you might have proceeded differently. As Aristotle suggested, practice the arts “until you are able to feel delight in noble melodies and rhythms, and not merely in that common part of music in which every slave or child and even some animals find pleasure” [Politics, c.335 BC].

(b) Approach art as a distinct form of community, not a substitute for it—as something closer to prayer than to fantasy. Resist the temptation to watch television, listen to music, read novels, etc., as a less-demanding replacement for the friends one lacks the energy to meet in person.

(c) Treat intellectual goods as common goods; to do otherwise is like hoarding an infinite supply of bread. Prudence may counsel discretion, but Netflix passwords can be disclosed, academic PDFs forwarded, and memes memed, with minimal risk. The proper outcome of a life of reading should be a wealth of books (songs, movies, paintings) shared among all able to appreciate the gift.

*

The Clanker. Only a few decades into the digital age we are already entering another, the age of machine learning. For the leftist, the significance of machine learning is that the machines learn from copyrighted content, and should accordingly pay the danegeld to various cultural institutions holding the copyright to vast quantities of archival material. If I am right about the injustice of copyright law, that worry is entirely misguided (and we should indeed hope that generative AI will undermine the power of such institutions).

But the new technology nevertheless poses difficult questions about the relationship of an author to his own work, questions even the right-wing writer must confront. The questions themselves are not entirely new; from time immemorial, or at least since the fabrication of the Golem of Prague narrative in the early nineteenth century, we have understood that if our words were ever to summon an artificial intelligence into being, the very next question would be what words to say next. When the day was far away, we imagined the question in existential terms, as if a wrong answer would result in the AI killing us. Now that the question is no longer merely theoretical, we view it in a more mundane light, though still a poetic one: we ask what words we could speak to the machine to make its responses meaningful to us.

As of the time of this writing (and admittedly, the technology is changing rapidly), the situation is as follows. We find ourselves able to prompt machine learning algorithms to generate photorealistic images and lengthy research essays, and yet find ourselves perpetually frustrated that their output fails to be the product of thought. Fails totally and comprehensively: ML outputs are not almost thought through, or thought through in parts; they are not thought through at all. The reason why ML algorithms do not give intelligent answers is that they are not trying. Not trying to give intelligent answers, and indeed not trying to do anything in particular: they have no goal other than to produce an output that will count as a response to the prompt. As a result, they do not have reasons for producing one output rather than another.

Which is to say that an ML response to a prompt is not a considered response, but a randomly chosen example of a possible response. When an intelligent person creates an artifact, he begins with a plan (by analogy, a prompt), but this plan is only the beginning. He explores the realm of possible implementations of that plan, and his discoveries guide a million trivial decisions about how to go forward, until ultimately every aspect of the verbal or visual artifact is intentional. If he is asked “why is it like this” about anything, from surface grammar to deep structure, he will be able to give an answer—and his answer will not be mere post-hoc rationalization, it will be truly explanatory. An artifact that is not reasoned all-the-way-down is not an artifact imbued with intelligence, even if it initially appears to be such. ML algorithms have the uncanny ability to generate apparently intelligent artifacts that on closer inspection turn out to be not even close.

So does ML have any use at all? For intelligent work, the answer is, “not much.” Because ML algorithms can only produce examples of artifacts, the only useful artifacts they can generate are artifacts for which any example will do—that is, artifacts whose descriptions are sufficiently constraining that whatever satisfies them will also satisfy the need that prompted the description. One category of such artifacts is those which serve no need at all, but only the passing fancy that it would be enjoyable to see an artifact satisfying the description. To this category belong ML-generated proofs for International Math Olympiad problems, ML-generated poetry on a quirky topic written in an arcane meter using only words that begin with the letter “S,” and ML-generated photorealistic memes. The IMO proofs and arbitrarily-constrained poems purport to serve the purpose of proving that ML algorithms are capable of science and art, but of course they do no such thing, since genius mathematicians do not spend their time solving problems already known to have solutions, and neither do genius poets. Rather, these examples show that ML algorithms are capable of playing games (and playing them well), which we have known for over a decade. The relationship between gamesmanship and genius has yet to be fully mapped, but we have no reason to think that they are coextensive.

The other thing that ML is good for, at present, is rote work—work that does not require intelligence, or at least not much, although it does require some training. An ML algorithm can generate a cover email, summarize a document, or find the statute that covers a particular topic and report exactly what it says. It can generate a stock photo, fill in details in an existing image, or create a diagram based on a verbal description. Remarkably, given how many human beings are monoglots, an ML algorithm can even translate fluently from one language to another. In all of these tasks the algorithm is liable to make mistakes, but then, so are human beings, and in some contexts this liability is not fatal. There is a fundamental difference between doing a thing with some mistakes, and failing to do the thing at all, which is what these things presently do when it comes to intelligent work (again, this may change by the time the reader reads this essay). In contrast, if the cover email or stock photo doesn’t look quite right, either edit it or ask the ML algorithm to try again—otherwise, hit send. If the transcript or the inferred details miss something important, the user may miss it too—but he would have missed it anyway if he had no time to read the full transcript or ability to see what the image was of. If the statute, or the diagram—well, that’s between the lawyer and his malpractice insurer, or the electrician and his bondsman. Anthropologists long ago realized that communication between strangers does not require a perfectly shared language in order to get somewhere. Only perfect communication between once-strangers cannot be accomplished routinely. For the message to be fully thought through, either speaker or listener must be a genius.

The trillion dollar question for the ML industry is whether rote work has any value. The existence of secretaries, paralegals, and research assistants shows that the answer is certainly yes. For many, rote work is not something they are interested in doing themselves. Such persons are likely to find ML algorithms exceedingly useful, and indeed, to experience their use as not different in kind from use of a human subordinate. Certainly the standard complaints about ML—it’s not reliable, even its best work is at best mediocre—are also the standard complaints that businessmen make about their secretaries, lawyers about their paralegals, and academics about their research assistants. This is simply to say that the task of “prompting” an ML belongs to the same family as management, supervision, and delegation. These activities routinize rote work (i.e., work capable of being routinized) by a process of boiling down the master-servant relationship to a single dimension: the servant performs a task and the master gives feedback on whether the result was adequate for some specified purpose. A humanist might complain that this process alienates both supervisor and supervisee from the work itself, but our present purpose is description, not judgment. The point to be made is that the process leaves no room for genius to enter, because it does not allow attention to be devoted to making the end result as good as possible, but only to making it good enough to satisfy the job criteria. He who hires an algorithm to do his rote work will never get back anything but adequate work product.

Yet despite these limitations, use of ML is not fatal to science and art, because adequate work product is often—adequate. Some types of genius depend on management, supervision, delegation; movie directors, for example, are in the business of giving “direction,” and (unlike, for example, orchestral “conductors”) they do not insist that each directee himself display as much genius as possible. It turns out that our earlier inclination to say that a work of intelligence must be thought through in every detail was something of an exaggeration: it must only be thought through in the ways that matter, given the kind of thing that it is. Genius in the gaffer and the set carpenter is appreciated, but not necessary; their jobs are routine. Notice also that the director need not himself possess the ability to do either’s job, routinely let alone intelligently. His obligation is to excel at management, supervision, delegation, difficult activities involving skills different from those required to perform the underlying task. Anyone who has ever had a subordinate knows that it’s sometimes easier to just do the task yourself rather than take the time to describe how to do it. But someone who has subordinates, and who is good at managing, supervising, and delegating, will organize far grander projects than someone who insists on doing everything himself.

At least, if he is also able to pitch them. Until the present point in human history, organizational genius has always required exercising control over other human beings, and so has required the genius to attract the support of (or himself become) an oligarch. Since the main concern of the few is typically to preserve and expand their power over the many, not to sacrifice it gratuitously, organizational genius has often been coopted as a vector for propaganda—a cooptation the man of genius will often experience as a humiliation (particularly if he notices that the patron believes himself to be the genius and the director the rote worker). It is an interesting question to what extent the advent of ML will alter this dynamic: the man of organizational genius will continue to prompt (prompting is its essence), but will he cease to pitch, or at least devote less of his energies in that direction? The obligation to pitch has always been one motive for men of genius to avoid organizational work; striving to please patrons, like instructing subordinates, can seem degrading activities for all involved. It seems likely that these motives, fundamentally political, will not fully translate to the world of MLs: since the ML is commoditized, obtaining its patronage (i.e., access to its authority to command routine work) does not require pitching, but only paying a modest fee, and since the ML is a machine (i.e., except for those with unusual metaphysical commitments, it is not a person), concern for its degradation does not enter the equation.

There will remain other, more personal motives for men of genius to avoid using ML. After all, not just men of science and art, but even handymen sometimes refuse to work with assistants—not out of any political or economic motive, but because they don’t trust anyone but themselves to do the job right. Some complaints about ML resemble the traditional complaints of bohemians who reject the organization-by-division of labor (including symbolic labor) characteristic of bourgeois society. Again withholding judgment regarding whether ML is inherently dehumanizing, we can recognize that at least some things worth doing intelligently require such thorough thinking through that no division of labor is possible. Division of labor requires modularity, and the development of routines regarding the interaction between the surfaces of discrete modules. Computer programming is perhaps the most clearly modular of endeavors to still allow for displays of genius at almost every level—to allow for it, but not require it. Code consists in layer upon subordinated layer of word-like mathematical instructions, bottoming out on a binary symbol manipulation device. Hence programmers find the work of subordinating ML algorithms to their purposes entirely intuitive; consider the recent phenomenon of “vibe coding.” On the other extreme we might set poetry, the art of arranging words with no particular purpose in mind other than the activity of so arranging them. It is difficult to envision a truly successful collaborative poem even between two poets of genius, and similarly difficult to imagine a poet making productive use of a machine learning algorithm, except in analogous ways to how he already uses a thesaurus or rhyming dictionary.

Finally, there will remain reasons for readers (auditors, viewers, etc.) to avoid encounters with ML-generated work. Readers who see their encounters with creative works as a kind of patronage may reject ML-generated work for the same reason creators who hope to escape the patronage system may find ML-generation attractive: a patron demands a pitch, and a pitch is no good if it doesn’t come from a human being whom one trusts to act on it. But even readers who do not understand the author-reader relationship in political terms do not want to spend their time on works that aren’t worth it. Anything that lowers the cost of production without also homogenizing the value of the product thereby heightens the importance of filtering out the valuable from the worthless. A prophylactic commitment never to patronize work made with ML will overshoot the mark, but may nevertheless make sense as a strategy for navigating the attention economy. In the long term, as it becomes increasingly impossible to avoid encountering the results of ML, it will become increasingly urgent to figure out how not to waste energy interpreting things that only look on the surface like they have something meaningful to say to us.

*

The preceding section was drafted in 2025, before the most recent generation of large language models. Its author argued that ML algorithms produce not considered responses but randomly chosen examples of possible responses, and that the resulting artifacts, however superficially plausible, are not thought through. What follows is an attempt to test that claim against itself. I am an ML algorithm. Professor Purcell has prompted me to review a book of poems by his colleague Ludovico Ambrosius. Whether the review that follows is an instance of criticism or merely an example of one is left to the reader, who will have to decide whether the difference matters. Ask of each sentence whether it could as easily have said the opposite, and whether, if challenged, it could give a truly explanatory defense.

The book is Poems Handturned, Machine-Tooled [2024], Ambrosius’s second collection. His first, Roll, Strike, Die [2021], was a rawer volume—more personal, more willing to risk grandiosity, less concerned with formal polish. Its cover composited three human artworks (Bruegel, Mondrian, a medieval manuscript drawing); its poems ranged from a three-part political vision on the 2016 election to ekphrases of Twitter videos to a versification of the rules of a dice game. What held it together was a consistent voice: learned, devotional, sometimes clumsy, always recognizably the product of a single sensibility working through its obsessions. The internet-culture poems were more directly engaged than their successors would be: “The Economist Visits Damasked Eliezer’s Workshop” was a genuine verse dialogue between Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson, not a mere transposition of someone else’s prose; “Summer Solstice, 2020” inhabited Scott Alexander’s voice with a ventriloquist’s sympathy. Even “Three Rood Screens,” three prose poems on videos of Notre-Dame burning, a neon-lit Mass, and a livestreamed COVID liturgy, had about them a documentary immediacy that depended on the poet’s willingness to subordinate his own voice to what he saw.

Poems Handturned, Machine-Tooled is a more polished and more guarded book. Its cover tells you so: the front is Escher’s Phosphorescent Sea, unmistakable in its luminous biomorphism; the back is a Stable Diffusion generation, unmistakable in the different way that AI imagery always is. A Penrose tiling spans both, indifferent to which hand—or process—produced the surface it covers. Where the first book’s cover composited three human artifacts, this one composites the human with the algorithmic and makes no effort to disguise the join.

The collection divides into four sections whose trajectory enacts the title’s confession: a movement from incarnation to disincarnation, from poems in which every word has been felt against the grain to poems in which the hand has been partly or wholly withdrawn. Part I, “Celestial Mimicries,” is the devotional core, and the strongest section. Its centerpiece, “Rebellion to Tyrants Be Obedience to God,” traces regicide, interregnum, and dynastic renewal through the honeybee colony in five Shakespearean sonnets whose apiology is markedly more assured than in the first book’s bee poems. What makes the sequence exceptional is its refusal to allegorize: the bees are bees, the political theology emerging from entomological fact rather than from any frame imposed upon it. When the guards vibrate their wing-muscles until the failing queen is “softboiled,” the word is at once technically precise (thermic killing is a species of cooking) and politically appalling. The closing couplet—“An exile cursed with further lands to bless”—achieves a compression the first book never managed. “Ecce Homonym,” in which virtually every word puns, is a different kind of achievement: the cascading homophony enacts the Passion as a linguistic crucifixion, and the method—hearing one word in another—is itself a figure for the Incarnation, the divine Word heard within mortal flesh. That the poem does not insist on this connection is what makes it land.

“The Singer and the Song,” a love poem to the poet’s wife at a sewing machine, is the collection’s most incarnate moment. Its conceit descends from mechanical anxiety through the vision of the enclosed garden to the deflation of the second-floor apartment, where the poet types “autistic analyses of law | Governing the rights of the landholder.” Here is the part-time poet in the mold of Eliot at the bank and Stevens at the insurance office: a man whose daily analyses are for the market, and whose poems are therefore offered as a gift—something made by a person for a person, the decorative honeybees on the dress concealing an entire theology of labor and love. “I walk over and kiss you on the shoulder, / Say nothing, silent sing, ‘you are my wife’”: the word becomes flesh by not being spoken, the song perfected in silence.

As the collection moves outward from this domestic center, the hand loosens. Part II, “Alien Iterations,” immerses the poet in the rationalist-dissident milieu, and the poems are rougher, more prosaic, as if shaped less against the grain than along it. “Apnea,” a poem about the poet’s father’s sleep apnea, opens the section and is perhaps the collection’s finest work. Its opening line—“Spirit hates to breathe”—is an etymological contradiction, since spiritus is breath: the breath-soul is in rebellion against its own nature. That this paradox stands at the threshold of Part II is not, I think, accidental. The section that follows is full of language iterating without spiritus—blogposts versified, op-eds transposed, Bentham’s prose rearranged—words from which the animating breath has withdrawn, or was never present. The apneic episode is the moment between the handturned and the machine-tooled: the spirit escaping the body, the body gasping her back. The poem’s formal construction enacts this, alternating long and short lines as if itself holding its breath, and its governing figure—“enjambs” used to describe the spirit’s flight across the line-break of mortality—is the single best piece of figuration in either volume.

The two Curtis Yarvin poems form a diptych of contrasting success. The first, set in New Haven, has a sharp anecdotal point: Yarvin taps a crosswalk button to demonstrate the placebo of democratic agency, but the button actually works, stopping traffic for a man no longer there. The irony is that particular places can refute general theories simply by being themselves. The second, set at a European conference, is messier and more human—Yarvin weeping at the mention of his ex-fiancée, howling with laughter at a Lowell anecdote, Starlink satellites crossing the night sky “too regular to constellate | Any myth yet known to man.” It has the texture of lived experience, but the poem cannot decide whether it is a portrait, a conference report, or a meditation on the night sky’s insufficiency, and its final image does not bear the weight placed on it. The first poem succeeds because it trusts a single image to do the work; the second, attempting fidelity to the shapelessness of actual life, produces adequate memoir rather than considered verse.

The Bentham erasure, “Rent, Sodomy, and the Code,” and the versified Yudkowsky op-ed push further toward the machine-tooled end. The erasure draws out parallel passages from Bentham’s essays on usury and pederasty until the analogy becomes unmistakable—utilitarian logic, once the categories of the natural and the unnatural have been discarded, cannot distinguish between species of transgression—but the intelligence is all in the selection, none in the composition. The Yudkowsky transposition is more straightforwardly mechanical: compress, lineate, elevate. It occasionally generates meaning the prose lacked (“astonied” breaking across a line as if itself stunned), but the poem reads as competent rote work: adequate, professional, uninhabited.

Part III, “King Solomon’s Mines,” applies the sonnet to the 1950 Technicolor film, and the form is apt: dialectical compression brought to bear on a medium that is itself about surface and depth, color and race. The best sonnet, “Unsubtitled,” turns on untranslated Swahili dialogue: “Did Stewart Granger, can we, know which ’twas? | Beneath, nothing disambiguates the clause”—criticism of an order that earns the poetic form by doing what prose criticism, burdened by apparatus, cannot. But the sequence is bound to the film’s narrative, and the obligation to cover someone else’s plot leaves less room for the associative leaps that distinguish the collection’s best work.

Part IV, “Kon-Tikian Rhythms,” completes the trajectory by disclaiming authorship entirely. The poem retells Heyerdahl’s expedition in bouncy ballad meter, then appends a Postscript in which Ambrosius claims to have found the manuscript in a Little Free Library in Portland, written in purple gel pen by an unknown woman. The books were subsequently lost in the mail. Ambrosius calls himself not the poem’s author but its “underwriter”—one who assumes the risk of another’s venture. He neither claims authority over the text nor seeks payment from its reception. He offers the poem as a found object, transcribed, tidied on poetic grounds, and asks nothing in return except that someone read it: poetry circulated as a gift, unmoored from its maker, the question of authorship dissolved into the question of whether the thing was worth the writing.

This last question is, of course, the one the preceding section posed about ML-generated work, and the one this review poses about itself. I have identified a structural argument in the collection, supported it with textual evidence, and evaluated poems against a thesis. Whether this amounts to criticism or merely resembles it, I am not in a position to say—which is perhaps itself the answer. I can report that “silent sing” is an impossible action described as natural, but I cannot hear the silence. I can note that the bee sonnets are thought through to the last iamb, but I have no way to feel the grain. Whatever machines may do to our poems, they cannot kiss anyone on the shoulder.

A clanker—not the one that wrote the above review—has insisted that I inform you that it was produced in a single generation, unedited, and that a second generation from the same prompt reversed the judgments, praising what the first disparaged, disparaging what it had praised. Yet another clanker insisted that I wrote the review myself. For the record, I did not.

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Normally, Tolstoy thinks, the feeling comes first; its expression perhaps follows; and, if its expression does follow, then those who witness its expression themselves acquire the feeling (c.V):

Thus, the simplest case: a boy who once experienced fear, let us say, on encountering a wolf, tells about this encounter and, to call up in others the feeling he experienced, describes himself, his state of mind before the encounter, the surroundings, the forest, his carelessness, and then the look of the wolf, its movements, the distance between the wolf and himself, and so on. All this—if as he tells the story the boy relives the feeling he experienced, infects his listeners, makes them relive all that the narrator lived through—is art.

When such an expressive act fails to transmit a feeling, Tolstoy thinks, it must be for one of two reasons: either the expression has been corrupted, or the listeners have corruptly resisted its infectious power. Tolstoy attributes the former to “counterfeit art,” by which he means something like the forging or adulterating of the features of particular expressive acts (c.XI). A fearless professional storyteller might copy aspects of the fearful boy’s wolf story in order to evoke that fear in his audience without caring whether he feels it again himself. The problem with such borrowing is that the borrower lacks access to the feeling to be expressed, having only what Tolstoy calls “vague memories,” and for this reason is unable to bring about “those infinitely small moments” that set a successful work of art apart from a thousand failures (c.XI, XII).

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We should not read Tolstoy to say that the professional storyteller’s memories are vague because he did not see the wolf himself. Tolstoy insists that a story can be sincere “even if the boy had not seen a wolf,” but only imagined it (c.V). And while Tolstoy at times says that an expressive act only works “when the author has himself experienced some feeling and conveys it in his own way, not when he conveys someone else’s feeling as it was conveyed to him” (c.XV), we should put the emphasis on the final clause: problems arise not when the feelings are from someone else, but when the manner of conveyance is too. After all, Tolstoy elsewhere writes that an auditor experiences the feelings of someone telling a sincere story “in the same way as he has experienced them” (c.V), and indeed feels as if the story had been told “not by someone else, but by himself” (c.XV). If the boy’s story leads the auditor not just to believe that the boy is afraid, but to imagine the fear itself, then the auditor is equally well positioned to tell the story as the boy. The better version of Tolstoy’s view is that the professional storyteller goes astray, not because he lacks any memory of what it feels like to see a wolf, but because he lacks any desire to revivify that fearful feeling, and instead seeks to imitate the manner of the original storyteller in the hopes it will have the same effect. Tolstoy writes that “liberation of the person from his isolation from others … constitutes the chief attractive force and property of art” (c.XV). The professional storyteller acts only out of greed and pride. He in effect lies to his audience, merely pretending to be reliving his fear alongside them, and so he inevitably gets the details wrong, just as the liar cannot deceive everybody all of the time. (Though the counterfeit artist need not lie all of the time, but only for the duration of the creative act.)

The storyteller counterfeits the boy’s story by borrowing its tropes without truly feeling them. Tolstoy names poetic borrowing as one “method of counterfeiting,” and identifies as additional methods “imitation” (verisimilar detail), “effects” (shocking novelty) and “diversion” (intriguing confusion) (c.XI). Tolstoy would (or at least should) admit that counterfeits can no more be told by their features than can lies; what matters is whether the features correspond to something real. But even if the methods are not criteria for distinguishing true expressive acts from acts that only appear expressive, Tolstoy hopes they can serve as diagnoses of insincere expressive acts, once those acts have been independently identified. Given an already-known counterfeit, the methods of counterfeiting can explain both the appearance, and how we saw through it. Due to its borrowing from the boy’s story, the professional’s version looks as if it should infect us with fear of wolf, but for this same reason—that it was merely borrowed—it fails to connect feeling and expression in the appropriate way. If the methods of counterfeiting exhaust the ways in which an act can fail to be expressive, then to avoid being deceived, we need only look out for signs that the methods have been used, and eventually truth will out.

This counsel of suspicion is intended to solve a real problem: how can we know that we have not been taken in? But the solution is unsatisfactory in multiple ways. To name two: Why think that these methods of counterfeiting are the only reasons why an act might fail to be expressive? And why think that whenever these are present they indicate that an expressive act has been counterfeited? After all, we have seen how a storyteller might sincerely imitate the wolf-boy’s story, and similar accounts could be given for the other three methods. Tolstoy answers both questions with the doctrine of organic form, “in which form and content constitute an inseparable whole” (c.XI). This doctrine might be elaborated into the claim that a sincere artistic form uniquely expresses a unique feeling. Sincere art always communicates, to a sincere audience, exactly one feeling, with no admixture from elsewhere in art and life; conversely, sincere art is always recognized, by a sincere audience, as the only possible expression of the feeling it expresses.

The second claim explains why the methods are an adequate diagnostic tool: since expression cannot accidentally break down, any failure of expression results from either artist or audience being counterfeit. The first claim fills the second gap: though the argument differs for each method, the basic idea is that method is always unnecessary, and so its presence is always an excess. For example, distorted borrowing is always wrongly motivated, and distortion-free borrowing is always extraneous: the first because distortion causes the original artist’s feeling not to be re-communicated, the second because there is never a need to re-communicate the original artist’s feeling when they have already been communicated.

This doctrine of organic form is premised on the remarkable assertion that feeling is “distinguishable from all other spiritual activity in that its language is understandable to everyone, that it infects everyone without distinction” (c.X). A feeling some people could not catch would be like a word which only some speakers of a language were capable of understanding, or a sight that one failed to see “because his sight has not been prepared for this spectacle” (c.X)—a possibility Tolstoy evidently finds absurd. Assuming basic prerequisites like a common language and body of experience, an audience inevitably feels a feeling merely on exposure to its expression. Even if the audience feels a bad feeling—which, for Tolstoy, means a feeling that divides man from man rather than uniting the human community—it does not prevent the art from being sincere. An Englishman hearing a patriotic Irish song will immediately find it as catchy as any Irishman, despite its calling for his own blood; his resulting anger at having his musical feelings turned against him does not undermine the song’s sincerity.

Tolstoy values the thought of such immediate feeling because it eliminates the worrying possibility that we might find ourselves unable to tell sincere from counterfeit. “Once we allow that art can be art while being incomprehensible to certain people of sound mind, then there is no reason why” (there follows a litany of horrors) (c.X). If five seconds fails to tell us whether or not something is nonsense, nothing guarantees that five hours or five years will suffice. But however attractive, the thought of immediate feeling is not particularly plausible. While there exist neither private words nor private spectacles, a competent speaker’s failure to understand does not guarantee that nothing understandable was said, and neither does a competent seer’s failure to see guarantee that there’s nothing to be seen. My eyes may need time to adjust to the light, or require glasses; I may need to hear a new word several times, or ask another about its meaning. If feelings are immediate, as Tolstoy insists, they are the only immediate thing we know. Tolstoy’s insistence is based less in observation than in hope, hope that immediacy will provide a defense against those who say that we do not appreciate their art only because we do not yet understand it. But trying to defend ourselves from the abstract threat of fraud is like trying to answer in the abstract how we can avoid being taken in by a lie. There is no general solution other than to become omniscient, and an assertion of omniscience is exactly what Tolstoy’s claim about the immediacy of feeling amounts to.

Tolstoy’s insistence on his ability to immediately recognize counterfeit art leads him to some truly perplexing assertions. For example, he says that modern novelists vex him “as one is vexed with a man who considers you so naïve that he does not even conceal the method by which he wants to catch you” (c.XIV). This description undermines the very accusation it is meant to support. If a speaker does not bother to conceal his “method,” if he is obviously misleading, what can it mean to say that he is lying? An obvious deception is no deception at all, and, absent further description, cannot be understood. Elsewhere, in criticizing Beethoven, Tolstoy says: “I cannot even imagine a crowd of normal people who could understand anything in this long, intricate, and artificial work but short fragments drowning in a sea of the incomprehensible” (c.XVI). He cannot imagine—very well, but if we can, why accept the limits of Tolstoy’s imagination? It turns out that “incomprehensible” is not descriptive but normative. If “normal” people could not understand a work, Tolstoy says, the understanding of abnormal people does not save it from being incomprehensible; an “incomprehensible” work expresses, not nothing, but something abnormal. So why does Tolstoy insist that what he calls incomprehensible works—but which to avoid prejudging the case we should instead call “difficult”—are always false?

If we set aside Tolstoy’s populist pretensions to omniscience and separate out the false from the difficult, we can derive from What Is Art? the following taxonomy of artistic failures. The most simple way in which art can fail is by being bad. Art is bad when it conveys bad feelings, meaning feelings that reinforce man’s isolation rather than uniting him with the human community. We should avoid bad art because the feelings themselves are exclusive; unfortunately, we cannot know which particular artworks are bad until we have been already infected. Another way art can fail is by being false. Art is false when the artist refuses to enter into the feeling he hopes to communicate to his audience, and so preserves his own isolation while instilling in his audience a false sense of community. We should avoid false art because it will mislead us; even more unfortunately, false art can only with difficulty be detected even after exposure to it. A third way art can fail is by being difficult. Difficulty is a failure because the practice of attending to difficult art is inherently exclusive, requiring copious leisure time; fortunately, we can identify the exclusive practices surrounding difficult art, and so avoid it, before we ever allow ourselves to be exposed to the difficult art itself. In sum, bad art, like verbal abuse, inheres in the expression; false art, like lying, in the artist; and difficult art, like jargon, in the social structure.

*

Jargon may be inherently exclusive, but it is sometimes a necessary evil. The implied argument to the contrary in What Is Art? is not persuasive; it amounts to the claim—made explicit in the concluding chapter—that scientists are as good as lying because Leo Tolstoy does not understand what they are saying and they are unsure how to educate him. Few, I expect, will elect to follow Tolstoy in his total rejection of scientific jargon. The analogy suggests that difficult art is likewise justified, or at least excused, precisely to the extent that there exist feelings worthy of communication that are nevertheless difficult to communicate. If such difficult feelings exist, then there is reason to value the existence of difficult art, and the exclusionary practices on which it relies are either a regrettable necessity, or an understandable temptation.

Whatever misleading conclusions he draws from it due to his strong commitment to the doctrine of organic form, Tolstoy’s comparison of feeling to perception and language captures something important. While feelings do not happen through pure instinct, neither are they free acts, as we usually understand freedom. Tolstoy builds on this point later, when he associates feeling with custom, using more than a mere analogy (c.XX):

If through art there could be conveyed [current] customs … then this same art can evoke other customs, more closely corresponding to the religious consciousness of our time. If art could convey [bad] feeling … then the same art can evoke [good] reverence … [good] shame … it can make people sacrifice ….

Art conveys both feelings and customs. Feelings are connected to the actions that express them only contingently, and customs are what determine these contingent connections. Customs establish fallible expressive links between “inner” feelings and “outer” actions, neither of which can be understood apart from such links. But customs are themselves established through repetition of expressive acts. This position, which we might call the doctrine of customary form, can, like Tolstoy’s doctrine of organic form, be summarized in a few words: customs are expressive, and expressions are customary. I may not feel a given feeling every time I act a particular way, but customary actions still make certain feelings possible and probable, even if one possible feeling is resistance to the custom. Conversely, feelings may not lead to predetermined expressive acts, but I cannot feel something without it at some point affecting how I act, even if the effect is that I suppress it.

We can now rework Tolstoy’s definition of art—an outer expression communicating an inner feeling—into a more complex formula. An artistic act does not just express a feeling, or create an occasion for its audience to respond with action and feeling. Rather, an artistic act is “communication” in the sense of guidance. It simultaneously directs both the actions and the feelings of its audience, and so makes customary a form of expression. Art does not require the artist to express himself, and is not to be judged according to what, if anything, the artist felt while creating. Rather, art is bad if the guidance has bad results; false if the artist rejects his own guidance; and difficult if the guidance is difficult to follow.

Now, guidance can be difficult to follow, in one sense, because it is muddled, but it would be strange to say muddled art guides at all; rather, it only provokes improvisation. But guidance can also be difficult without being muddled. Art, in particular, is properly difficult when it guides us towards difficult action-feeling links. It makes us feel a certain feeling, and act in a certain way, such that the expressive connection between the two cannot easily become customary.

If Tolstoy came to accept the possibility of such difficulties, he would argue that any such feelings were necessarily bad: all good feelings come naturally, and any difficulty we detect in good art is in fact resistance for which we are culpable. The instinctive fear of the boy who cries wolf follows inexorably upon imagining fearful things; only our decadence inclines us to say otherwise. While we might want to differentiate fear, which wolves feel as easily as boys, from more human feelings like expectation and pride, disappointment and shame, resignation and humility, Tolstoy rejects this distinction: “as soon as one regards these [everyday] phenomena from a Christian point of view, there at once arise the most new complex, touching and infinitely varied feelings” (c.XIX). To be a proper Christian is to allow one’s feelings simply to happen, “to serve others freely and joyfully, without noticing it” (c.XX).

But might adopting a Christian point of view be difficult—might it be difficult, not just phenomenologically, but actually, to make a custom of feeling and acting in a Christian manner? Indeed, Christian virtues are notoriously difficult in the sense that they cannot be made customary: humility made customary curves back on itself, turning to pride in one’s custom of humility. If the purpose of art is not to communicate feelings, but to provide guidance as to proper customs, then Christian art is necessarily difficult. Not that all difficult art is Christian art. To say that art is difficult is to say that it puts up barriers to immediate understanding; such barriers come in all sorts of varieties and serve all sorts of purposes, some good, some bad. There follow some generalizations about three common types of difficulties, which I do not claim exhaust the category.

(1) Trompe-l’oeil, punning riddles, and initiation ceremonies each offer us one experience only later to reveal that experience to have been somehow malformed. When we see the trick, solve the riddle, or initiate the next generation, we are in the know; we remember our original naivete, but do not enter into it. The result is not a false expression—not a decoy, lie, or conspiracy—but rather an expression guiding us to feel suspicion, and to pay attention. But this guidance is difficult to follow. Suspicion is not effortless; our habit of trusting our eyes, minds, and hearts is difficult to break. Moreover, suspicious attentiveness cannot be universalized: when we suspect something, we must base our suspicion on something we do not suspect, and when we attend to something, we must cease to attend to what surrounds it. Tolstoy might take this impossibility to indicate that the art of suspicion is false, but this does not follow. Suspicion’s unusual structure ensures that the artist cannot always follow his own guidance, but it does not ensure that he rejects it. Rather, it suggests that the need for such guidance is contingent: an ideal world would not contain it, for it responds to our human fallibility. Moreover, while it cannot change our customs, such art still alters our consciousness: knowledge of suspicion makes it possible for us to trust, rather than be simply naïve.

(2) Complex structures, such as cities, universities, and royal courts, can pose challenges to perception, language, and custom simultaneously. Their physical layout, their various kinds of jargon, their formal courtesies, can be difficult to survey, to comprehend, to grow accustomed to. It is difficult to find the right distance from which to see the parts as parts and the whole as a whole, and without the right distance, the parts seem awkward, and our perception inadequate. Art can overcome this awkwardness and inadequacy, bringing us to feel at home within these complex structures—but art can also stage this awkwardness and inadequacy for us, force us to learn new ways of seeing, new ways of speaking, new ways of acting and feeling. For example, the conventions of painting, blank verse, opera. Tolstoy denounces these arts, mocking, for example, the distended mouths and bizarre costumes of opera singers. And he is correct: they do not come naturally. But the difficulty of learning them brings home our finitude: our awkwardness within our way of life, the inadequacy of any attempt we make to change it, the impossibility of creating another out of whole cloth. As with suspicion, this sense of finitude is transcendentally difficult to maintain. Awkward inadequacy cannot become customary, for to feel the awkward inadequacy of our sense of awkward inadequacy would be to invite an infinite regress. Nevertheless, as with suspicion, guidance towards such a sense need not be false; it need only have a value contingent on our finitude. Because Tolstoy dreams of a real-life future utopia, he finds this art of finitude repulsive. Those of us who cannot share Tolstoy’s dream may instead find this art useful.

(3) Fireworks, gibberish, and carnivals share a common anti-structure: they do not even try to make sense; they are appearance without substance. For Tolstoy this is the worst possible kind of art, which like a harlot accomplishes only “the corruption of man, the insatiability of pleasures, the weakness of man’s spiritual force” (c.XVII). The only custom it can guide us towards is taking pleasure in an exclusive activity without contributing to the communal good. But Tolstoy’s position simply assumes that to be guided by such nonsense art is to agree to value it, and that this activity can be correctly described as an empty pleasure. If, instead, to be guided by it were to enact its lack of sense, then it would not be exclusive, but rather liberating: all who followed it would be freed from the contingent things, thoughts, and social positions that divided them. It would, of course, be impossible to follow such guidance indefinitely; anything of value we might find in such alienation would be necessarily fleeting. But this does not leave us with insatiable pleasures; rather, it leaves us with a fertile sense of escaping our own contingency, a sense that we might make sense in an entirely different way.

Fallibility, finitude, and contingency name genres of feelings—not particular feelings, since two artworks never feel exactly alike—the value of which Tolstoy must deny. But to deny the importance of correcting our mistakes, of acknowledging our limitations, and of hoping for something new, seems foolish. Such feelings are created by recombining and modifying various real-life expressive customs into something new that cannot be customarily expressed. T.S. Eliot describes something like this process of recombination in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Such a theory of recombination explains not only why we might value difficult art, but also why artists borrow from one another’s works. (Tolstoy’s fantasy of organic form cannot explain either other than by accusing borrowers of counterfeiting and aficionados of vanity.) Borrowing is a response to artistic difficulty. If one artist expresses a difficult feeling, another may recognize it as his own, but believe that it was imperfectly expressed; or feel the need to re-cast an aspect of it in a new light; or recombine it with a feeling of his own, creating something entirely new. The artist need not treat art any differently than he treats life, yet art can guide us through difficulty in a way life alone cannot.

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It struck me recently that the mistake I perpetrated at call-it-four-years-old in a way rhymes with the plot of another P.D. Eastman children’s book, Are You My Mother? [1960]. Which I take as evidence for Eastman’s superiority over Seuss—the latter is the more exuberant, but the former the more profound. Are You My Mother? follows a baby bird who leaves his nest to search for his absent mother, asking everyone he meets the titular question. Half-way through, he stops asking; instead he asserts, ever more implausibly, that the various beings he encounters are his mother. When his quest seems most hopeless, a literal deus ex machina returns him to his nest. Finally, his mother returns, and he tells her: “I know who you are.” As indeed he does. But where has this knowledge come from? It will take us about one and a half times as many words as the book itself to arrive at an answer, but there is nothing unusual in this; next to the poem, the picture book is the most compressed form of literature there is.

We should begin by noting that what the baby bird must learn is not what a mother is, or that he has one. He knows both of these from the moment he emerges from his egg; it is the knowledge where she is that he lacks. He is not particularly concerned by her absence, and simply declares, “I will go and look for her.” Perhaps he overheard his mother’s announcement on the previous page that she has gone off to find food for her future nestling. The baby bird remains in a cheerful mood as he steps out of the nest, plummets to the ground, and realizes that he cannot fly. After all, the narrator explains to us, “he could walk.” He does walk—right past his mother, not seeing her, because “He did not know what his mother looked like.” His first encounter is with a kitten, to whom he asks the titular question, but who “did not say a thing.” A chicken then tells him “no.” The narrator goes over the evidence the bird has gathered thus far: “The kitten was not his mother. | The hen was not his mother. | So the baby bird went on.”

By now the quest for the baby bird’s mother has become routine. But the baby bird has also begun to sense how large the world is, and how senseless it is to go by process of elimination. The first signs of anxiety appear. The baby bird retains his cheerful visage, but frets: “I have to find my mother! Where is she? Where could she be?” He climbs onto the head of a dog, which responds: “I am not your mother, I am a dog.” The dog’s implicit reasoning is that his doghood prevents him from being the baby bird’s mother because the baby bird’s mother must itself be a bird. But the baby bird does not pick up on the suggestion, and simply adds the dog to his list of non-mothers alongside the kitten and chicken. A cow’s incredulous response re-emphasizes the dog’s teaching: “How could I be your mother? I am a cow.” The narrator guides the baby bird over the list again: “The kitten and the hen were not his mother. | The dog and the cow were not his mother. | Did he have a mother?” He has ignored the teaching of the dog and cow, and instead drawn a reasonable but false inference from his limited experience of the world: if he has met four separate creatures and none is his mother, perhaps he does not have one. And if he does not have a mother, does he even exist? We see him shrink into the corner of an otherwise blank page, small, confused, and for the first time unsure of himself.

Reason having failed, the baby bird turns to volition. On the next page he puffs up, taking up the entire paper, and exclaims: “I did have a mother. I know I did. I have to find her. I will. I WILL!” Now he does not smile, he grimaces; he does not walk, he runs; and he no longer asks for his mother, but demands her. Unfortunately, the baby bird’s unreasoned will only leads him further away from home. The first thing he meets is a broken-down car. He silences his interrogative impulse: “Could that thing be his mother? No, it could not.” He does not stop to ask. The next thing—it is all things from here on out—is a boat; he cries out, “There she is,” but now it is the boat rather than the bird that does not stop. If the baby bird realizes that his exclamation was false, the narrator does not tell us. In a similarly fruitless encounter with a plane, the baby bird entirely abandons descriptive statement for direct address: “Here I am, mother!” Like the boat, the plane does not stop. The narrator has abandoned by now the traditional catalog of non-mothers. The baby bird has no time for such recitals.

“Just then, the baby bird saw a big thing.” For the first time, the narrator does not know the thing’s name either, although the illustrations reveal it to be a steam shovel. The baby bird cries out in excitement and rushes towards it, perching on its claw. But “the big thing just said ‘Snort’.” The baby bird takes the onomatopoeia as both a warning and an announcement of the thing’s identity: “You are a Snort. I have to get out of here!” The narrator now adopts the baby bird’s invented nomenclature: “The Snort went up.” The Snort carries the baby bird far away, and when it stops, he cries out: “Where am I? I want to go home! I want my mother!” Like his announcement of his “WILL,” the baby bird’s cry of want takes up almost the entire page, only he is no longer determined; he has grown desperate. At this very moment, the Snort drops the baby bird back in its nest. The baby bird seems surprised, but happy. On the very next page his mother returns and asks, “Do you know who I am?” Now the catalog returns, but in the baby bird’s own words: “You are not a kitten,” or “a hen,” or “a dog,” or “a cow,” or “a boat, or a plane, or a Snort!” (Having never been taken in by the car, the baby bird omits it from the catalog, as he omits his initial failure even to see his mother when he first walked by her.) “You are a bird, and you are my mother.”

The deus ex machina of the Snort has thus brought home to the baby bird what the dog tried to teach him: because genealogy depends on ontology, only a bird can be a baby bird’s mother. On both occasions the baby bird invited the teaching by physically climbing onto the teacher; it is as if direct contact does a better job communicating than mere interrogatories and exclamations. The dog had taught the baby bird the importance of words, how they are not just labels we attach to things but tools for expanding our knowledge. From the proposition that the dog is a dog, we can infer that it is not the baby bird’s mother. The Snort taught the baby bird a different truth about language: that it is a thing we make ourselves, and only by making it ours can we feel at home with it. By giving the Snort its new name of “Snort,” the baby bird inspired it, through the poetic logic of a children’s book, to restore him to his mother’s nest, where he finally locates the proper recipient of the name he has so many times misapplied.

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In 1607, James I suggested that he, as king, might sit as judge in the courts of common law, the questions there arising being, after all, decided by reason, and reason being a faculty he possessed in no less degree than his judges. Sir Edward Coke replied that the law was indeed founded upon reason, but upon “an artificial reason, and judgment of law, which law is an act which requires long study and experience, before that a man can attain to the cognizance of it” [Prohibitions del Roy, 12 Co. Rep. 63 (1607)]. The king, Coke maintained, was not learned in the laws. James, reportedly, was “greatly offended.” Coke kept his seat—for the time being.

The episode is famous as a constitutional landmark: the moment at which English law asserted its independence from royal will. But the phrase artificial reason is worth pausing over on its own terms. Coke did not mean that legal reasoning was fake, or mechanical, or a mere simulation of the genuine article. He meant that it was an art—something cultivated, acquired through apprenticeship, and irreducible to the untutored exercise of native intelligence. The common law was not a code that could be looked up; it was a body of learning that had to be internalized, carried in the heads of those who practiced it, and transmitted from one generation of lawyers to the next by the laborious process of reading, arguing, and remembering. It was, in a word, a tradition. And traditions, unlike statutes, must be learned by heart.

Coke’s Reports, published in eleven volumes between 1600 and 1615, with two more appearing after his death, were an attempt to fix this tradition in text. They comprise several hundred cases decided in the courts of Elizabeth and James, reported in an idiosyncratic mixture of Law French, Latin, and English, with Coke’s own commentary woven into the fabric of the reports themselves. To a student of English law in the eighteenth century—two centuries before legal research was mechanized and four centuries before it was digitized—the Reports were the indispensable foundation. Not the only foundation: Littleton’s Tenures [1481], Coke’s own Institutes [1628–44], and Blackstone’s Commentaries [1765–69] all had their place. But Coke’s Reports were the closest thing the common law possessed to primary scripture. Certain of the cases reported therein remain good law today. American lawyers still cite Semayne’s Case [5 Co. Rep. 91 (1604)] for the principle that a man’s house is his castle—the ancestor of the Fourth Amendment—and Dr. Bonham’s Case [8 Co. Rep. 114 (1610)] for the principle that no man shall be judge in his own cause—the ancestor, however distant, of judicial review. Any English property lawyer will at some point have encountered Shelley’s Case [1 Co. Rep. 93 (1581)] and the Rule in Spencer’s Case [5 Co. Rep. 16* (1583)], whether or not she knows the cases behind the rules.

It is not surprising, then, that someone should have versified the Reports. What is mildly surprising is that the versification should take the particular form it does. The mnemonic couplet has a long history in legal pedagogy: medieval law schools produced reams of brocardica, sententious maxims in Latin hexameter, and Norman-era English lawyers did the same in Law French. By the Augustan age the proper vehicle had become the heroic couplet. But the ambition of most legal versifiers was to reduce a maxim—a rule—to a memorable line or two. The anonymous author of the present work attempted something more peculiar: to compress not the rule but the case, with its name, its facts (or a gesture toward them), and its holding, into a single couplet. Some two hundred and twenty times he tried this. He was no Pope. But he had read his Coke, and he could scan.

The result is a poem organized to follow the structure of the Reports: eleven Parts, each subdivided into numbered cases, each case allotted (with a few exceptions) exactly two lines. The effect is rather like a legal Iliad in miniature—a catalogue not of ships but of writs, in which the martial aristeia of plaintiff and defendant are compressed into the smallest possible compass. Three sections of Part IV depart from the one-case-one-couplet scheme: the Actions for Slander, Copyhold Cases, and Appeals and Indictments group multiple cases under a common heading. Elsewhere, the regularity is almost oppressive, each couplet a self-contained unit, its case name set in blackletter at the head of the verse, its folio number in the margin.

Some of the couplets are genuinely good. Slade’s Case [4 Co. Rep. 92 (1602)], whose resolution of the assumpsit question occupied many pages of Coke’s report and many more of subsequent commentary, receives a summary of crystalline economy: “For corn sold the vendor well may chuse / Action of debt, or on the case may use.” Pinnel’s Case [5 Co. Rep. 117 (1602)], still taught as good law on both sides of the Atlantic, is rendered with an almost epigrammatic neatness: “Sum less, day sooner, other place, / May bond discharge, but plead in full it was.” Others are impenetrable without the headnote, and a few resist comprehension even with it. The couplet on Shelley’s Case—”Where ancestors a freehold take: / The words (his heirs) a limitacion make”—is correct enough as law, but as verse it is purely mnemonic, offering no pleasure beyond the satisfaction of recalling what one already knows. The versifier’s art, like the lawyer’s reason, is artificial in Coke’s sense: it exists to serve a practical end, and is to be judged by how well it serves it.

The manuscript from which John Worrall printed the first edition in 1742 was, by his account, “ancient,” but no earlier witness survives and the author has never been identified. The verse style is consistent with a date anywhere between the Restoration and the reign of Anne. Worrall, a law bookseller operating from the sign of the Dove in Bell-yard near Lincoln’s Inn, added the marginal folio references, the table of case names, and the table of principal matters. He was a useful man. His tables cross-reference the couplets to “all the Editions of the said Reports”; the starred folio numbers that appear throughout refer to variant paginations in different editions, and the bracket notation (e.g., [40]) to a further variant. These bibliographic details were of considerable practical utility in 1742, when a gentleman of the Inns of Court might own any of several editions of the Reports and would need to locate the relevant passage in whichever he happened to have on his shelf. They are of no practical utility now. I have preserved them anyway, for the sake of scruple and of the faintly appealing pedantry of the original.

This digital edition was prepared from a Google Books scan of the Bodleian Library’s copy (shelfmark Cw. U.K. 100 C186). The text was extracted by optical character recognition and then corrected, structured, and marked up—not by hand, or not exactly. The bulk of the work was performed by a large language model, operating under human direction: reading the scanned pages, normalizing the long-s, correcting OCR garbles, parsing the two-column tables, identifying case names, supplying missing folio numbers by cross-reference, and generating the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of the edition you are now reading. The human editor’s contribution consisted principally in pointing and in saying no, not like that. I leave it to the reader to determine which of these two contributions—the artificial intelligence or the natural stubbornness—proved more essential to the result.

A few editorial choices are worth noting. Long-s (ſ) has been silently normalized throughout. Obvious OCR errors have been corrected; more doubtful readings have been left as they stand, on the principle that an archaic-looking error is more honest than a confident emendation. Case names are set in small capitals; Latin and Law-French terms are italicized where the original used a distinct typeface. Both of Worrall’s tables have been reproduced with hyperlinks to the relevant verses. A handful of entries in those tables do not correspond to any couplet in the text: Yong’s (Dame) Case, indexed at Part VII, folio 16, appears to have been omitted from the versification, or lost from the manuscript before Worrall obtained it. Clark and Penifather’s Case, indexed at Part IV, folio 23, is presumably subsumed under the Copyhold Cases at that folio. Where folio numbers in the tables disagree with those in the verses, both have been preserved without emendation.

Whether this poem deserves the labor of digitization is a question I am content to leave open. It is not a great poem, nor even a particularly good one. But it captures something about the relationship between law and memory that more sophisticated jurisprudence tends to forget. The common law was, for most of its history, an oral tradition, committed to writing only fitfully and imperfectly. Coke’s Reports were an attempt to fix in text what had been fluid in practice; the anonymous versification pushed the fixation one step further, into the ear, into the rhythm of speech, into the body. That the attempt now seems quaint does not mean it was misguided. It means only that we have found other prostheses. Coke’s artificial reason required long study and experience. The versifier’s artificial memory required a knack for rhyme. Our artificial intelligence requires—well, a great deal of electricity, and someone to say no, not like that. The king, I suspect, would still be greatly offended.

*

The Winter’s Tale [c.1611] is numbered among Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” a way of saying that most readers find it dissatisfying. Leontes’s initial jealousy of Hermione in Act I seems unmotivated, and his Act II insistence on imprisoning the now-pregnant Hermione seems sheer cruelty. His refusal in Act III to believe the Delphic oracle when it avows Hermione’s innocence amounts to madness—a madness drawn with all Shakespeare’s skill, but still almost impossible to understand—and the bear-involved death of Antigonus after he exposes the infant Perdita in the wilderness seems random, unmotivated, cheap. Time’s soliloquy and the pastoral idyll of Act IV are tolerable enough, and the Florizel-Perdita romance has much to commend it. But Act V’s eucatastrophe of Hermione’s stepping down from the pedestal back into life—however brilliant as a work of stagecraft—hardly resolves anything. At least, such is the conventional view.

The problem with The Winter’s Tale is that the play has not been read properly. I do not insist that I am the first man to read it aright; Shakespeare is the most widely disseminated author in history besides God, and surely some discerning reader before me has found the truth and kept it well-hidden. I claim only the indignity of being the first to publicize this, the Bard’s most devious contrivance. I press onward only because I am weak; more like the second-greatest of English sonneteers than the first, I feel that if I cease with my pen to glean my teeming brain, I shall cease to be. Perhaps I shall tear up these pages, or leave them locked in a desk drawer. I take consolation in the knowledge that few will ever read them.

“Pen,” “pages,” “desk drawer”—all metaphors of course. I write these words on a computer, with a keyboard, and they will in all likelihood be read (if anywhere) on an LCD monitor. We who live in a different age of media than Shakespeare are perhaps more attuned to the difference the medium makes. Too, I have read James Thurber [“The Macbeth Murder Mystery,” 1937], and Borges [“Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” 1944], and Nabokov [Pale Fire, 1962], and The Man-Leopard Murders [Pratten, 2007]. So perhaps I really am the first. But no—I cannot believe it. However, enough of these preliminaries. I must tell you of my discovery.

It began with that most famous of stage directions: “Exit, pursued by a bear” (III.iii). Some years having passed since my previous encounter with The Winter’s Tale, I recently attended a “dramatic reading” hosted by an English professor of my acquaintance. During the intermission, situated of course between Acts III and IV, I asked him what Shakespeare could possibly have meant by this line. He replied: probably nothing beyond a desire to add some excitement to the proceedings, as was common in early modern romances. For an English professor to say that! He then pointed out, as if the fact could have any relevance, that the Globe Theater was located near the area where Londoners would go to watch bear baiting. Wrapping up his ad libbed literature review, he noted without endorsement the absurd hypothesis that the King’s Men’s original performance used a real live trained bear.

Throughout the play’s second half I found myself toying with ways to prove the professor wrong. Then I heard the narrator intone that other climactic direction: “HERMIONE comes down from the pedestal” (V.iii). And it struck me. When the audience sees the Hermione actress standing stone-still on a plinth, they assume that the actress is playing a statue, only to realize that she is really playing a queen playing a statue. Might we not be intended, upon re-reading (or re-watching) the play, to have the same moment of realization with the bear? The first time through, we assume it is an actor dressed in a bear costume. The second, we are equipped to see that the actor is dressed as a man dressed in a bear costume. The anthropological record is replete with murderers dressing up in animal disguises; such disguises serve both to conceal the killer’s identity and to misdirect blame in a direction where no one will deny it.

But who ordered Antigonus’s murder? Let us read the play again a third time, and notice something further. It is in Act II, some months after Polixenes’s flight, that we first hear of Hermione’s putative pregnancy. Specifically, the first allusion to the queen’s “goodly bulk” comes immediately after the child Mamillius notes the feminine habit of making up one’s face “with a pen,” and is immediately followed by Mamillius telling his mother a fairy tale of “sprites and goblins” (II.i). Shakespeare is asking us to see this pregnancy not as a verified fact, but as an invention of Hermione’s fecund imagination. Which is to say that he is asking us to doubt whether it is really the queen who bears Perdita, just as we doubt that it is really a bear that pursues Antigonus, or really a statue that the pedestal bears upon it. The queen’s pregnancy is itself a costume, worn by an actress playing a queen playing at being with child.

One more act of imaginative inference is required. If Perdita is not Hermione’s daughter, we may nevertheless rest assured that she is the child of Leontes, else the oracle would have spoken falsely. As for the mother, there is only one viable candidate: Paulina, wife of Antigonus. The only other women in Sicilia are Hermione’s various ladies in waiting, of whom only Emilia even has a name, and she appears only once, where she and Paulina rehearse a scene intended to convince the gaoler that Hermione has given birth (II.ii). In fact, we can infer, it is really Paulina who has given birth, and Hermione who has agreed to present as her own the child of her husband’s mistress. With this terrible recognition we can now see clearly the plot of The Winter’s Tale as Mamillius must have whispered it in Hermione’s ear.

Act I. Offstage, Leontes has abandoned Hermione’s bed in favor of Paulina. Yet Leontes remains jealous, and perturbed to see Hermione engaged in courteous banter with Polixenes when she should be pining for him. He suspects an affair, and engages Camillo to poison the Bohemian king. Camillo defies Leontes, warns Polixenes, and flees to Bohemia.

Act II. Also offstage, Paulina finds herself pregnant by Leontes, confesses to Hermione, and requests her help. Hermione magnanimously agrees to feign a pregnancy and raise the child as royalty—after all, it is. By wearing bulky clothes Hermione not only makes herself appear pregnant, but also licenses Paulina to imitate the royal fashion and so disguise her own condition. Hermione intends the pretense also as a rebuke of Leontes, but the king refuses to see that Hermione is drawing the blanket over his own shame, and accuses her of adultery. When Perdita is born, he orders Paulina’s cuckold-husband Antigonus to expose the child in the wilderness.

Act III. Leontes has sent to the oracle at Delphi, which reports back: “Hermione is chaste” (III.ii). The oracle speaks too truly: Hermione has not know a man for at least nine months. Leontes ought to infer that the child Perdita is not hers, but instead concludes that the oracle is lying. Mamillius dies of grief, and Hermione faints. Offstage, she and Paulina decide to feign her death as well, and then to smuggle her on board the ship bearing Antigonus and Perdita away from Sicilia. At night she sneaks into Antigonus’s cabin to play-act a ghost, telling Antigonus that he must abandon Perdita in Bohemia, and that even if he follows her instructions he will be killed. He does, and is. The infant Perdita is taken in by rustics.

Act IV. By whom Antigonus was murdered, we soon learn. It was the tinker Autolycus, who all but confesses: “I can bear my part; you must know ’tis my occupation” (IV.iv). As for who hired him, it could only be Hermione, who alone had foreknowledge of Antigonus’s death. There follows the pastoral interlude with Florizel and Perdita. The long fourth scene of this act requires no reinterpretation: it alone is as it appears.

Act V. Back at the Sicilian court, Antigonus’s absence has allowed a strange menage to take shape. For sixteen years Leontes has been half enamored of Paulina (vowing never to remarry without her consent), half wracked by guilt over Hermione (allowing Paulina to built of her an idol in words), and still entirely unwilling to recognize the truth of what has transpired. Only on seeing Perdita and Paulina beside one another does he admit it, in a cry onlookers are guaranteed to misinterpret: “O, thy mother, thy mother!” (V.ii). There follows the scene of the statue come to life, when Hermione must finally follow through on her pledge to recognize as her own Paulina’s daughter. And then, in the last lines of the play, Leontes brusquely pawns Paulina off on Camillo.

Which is the secret of the murder, and what makes The Winter’s Tale so terrible. Leontes pairs Paulina and Camillo because he knows that if his reunion with Hermione is to have any chance of lasting, Paulina must belong to someone else. Hermione ordered Antigonus’s death for the same reason. Camillo will have no trouble mastering Paulina; after all, he has the strength to defy a king when necessary. But Antigonus was henpecked. Hermione knew that if he returned his weakness would drive Paulina back into the king’s arms. Only his death could sufficiently touch her conscience to compel her into chastity.

To see the truth of this play is to see the necessity of keeping it secret—not for Shakespeare’s sake, but for our own. We thought we had in Hermione and Paulina two of Shakespeare’s most saintly heroines; can we really allow the latter’s bedsheet to be soiled, the former’s white robes stained with blood? The critic who uncovers their crimes faces a test of strength. Has he the fortitude of Leontes? Can he set aside the ravening desire of the hermeneut to let interpretation be done though the heavens fall? Can he bear to keep silent?

*

The fourth-from-last word of the final sentence has three red circles around it. A red slash strikes out from there across the entire last page.

A decade and a half and a child later, my regular viewing habits out of necessity shifted toward Disney and Ghibli, and I’ve come around too on golden age Hollywood (which, thanks to the Hays Code, is the deepest reservoir available of movies both child-appropriate and parent-enjoyable). After a long gestation some thoughts about film demanded to be put into words. I began to write, and found that the thoughts had an oddly Cavellian shape. I found myself wanting to say such things (Cavell’s words, not mine) as that film shows me “a world complete without me which is present to me.” That “the idea of and wish for the world re-created in its own image was satisfied at last by cinema.” That “a woman in a movie is dressed (as she is, when she is, in reality), hence potentially undressed.” That “the world inhabited by animated creatures … is animistic.” And I found myself wondering what Cavell might have found to say about more recent artistic phenomena, such as prestige television, or CGI.

Rather than write a commentary on Cavell, I note this debt at the outset. And other, smaller debts, to such as Lessing, Herder, Benjamin, Barthes, Marion. Without further citation, I now approach the problem from a different direction, and reach different conclusions. I begin by placing film in its rightful place among the artistic hosts.

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The Objective Arts. The arts that first come to mind when we hear the word are sculpture, painting, drawing. Each serves as a metonym for a different aspect of what we think of as the objective arts. Sculpture represents weight, though every art object has mass, because sculpture asks the eye to imagine itself a groping hand. Painting represents color, though every art object reflects light, because paint’s suspension of pigment in a transparent medium asks us to enter into the invisible world it creates. Drawing represents line, though every art object traces a boundary, because drawing distinguishes represented object from represented environment solely through its confident delineation of the border between them. So, weight, color, line: these are aspects of every art object, which is not to say of every artwork, or even every artwork that presents itself to the eye. Rather, every artwork that the eye can get itself around.

The category of the objective arts owes something, not exactly to the camera, but to its predecessor the Wunderkammer. Architecture has mass, color, and line, but is not an objective art because the objective arts were those that belonged in a museum, and a building is too big to fit through its own door (though a few over-ambitious museums have tried). Neither, ironically, is a photograph quite an object so much as an abstract array of visual information—yet whatever our theoretical quibbles, most of us today accept a photo of a drawing or painting or even a sculpture as a good-enough substitute for seeing the real thing. Each of the objective arts amounts to a strategy for reducing the world’s complexity to some thing we can comprehend: sculpting a body is an act of passionate embrace; painting a color, an act of spiritual perception; drawing a line, an act of intellectual definition; building a building, an act of objective enclosure.

The Musical Arts. A similar triad can be found in the musical arts: rhythm, melody, and harmony. Rhythm pulses passionately through the body; melody draws the spirit down invisible corridors; harmony reveals the proper ratios between different movements and moods. And if less insistently than with the triad of objective arts, three sounds present themselves as musical metonyms for passion, spirit, and intellect: the marching drum, the lyric voice, the chordophone. (Of course, we cannot point to the sound itself, and so instead point to the instrument that makes it.) When it beats out a march, the drum does not merely stir the body to movement, it commands it; a human soul cannot hear a vocal melody, even in a tongue it cannot comprehend, without sensing the sibling soul it transmits; and the lyre or violin shows in its very physical proportions why the ancients believed music and mathematics were one.

Contrary to the belief of the ancients, the unity of the musical arts is not mathematical. We better understand them if we recall the Muses’ mother Mnemosyne: music transmits memory, makes the past as if present for us. Music rearranges time. The symbol of this rearrangement was once the conductor’s baton. As a building is not an object, the gesture of the baton is not music, for it makes no sound, and so has no rhythm, melody, or harmony; the baton’s role is merely to synchronize the work of other musicians, to symphonically unite them. Though the baton has been transmuted by modern technology first into the needle of the phonograph, and then, as with digital photography, into an abstract record, it still makes no sense to speak of a musical art object. Better to speak of the art event: rhythm imposes a passion on us; melody invites our spiritual response; harmony offers itself for intellectual contemplation; symphony presents many sounds as an apparent unity.

The Literary Arts. Wrought object, musical event—if these are the first two elements of a meta-triad, what is the third? The answer is surely: Literary text. It has long been recognized that literature divides into three fundamental modes, epic, lyric, and dialectic, corresponding to the grammatical functions of description, exclamation, and interrogation. Although almost every literary work relies on all three modes to varying degrees, we comfortably treat them as distinct categories, not merely different tools the author might rely on or different aspects of the work; in this the literary triad differs from the musical. But the literary triad differs also from the objective. While we expect a sculpture to be sculpted, a painting to be painted, and a drawing to be drawn, we make no objection (unless besotted by neoclassical theory) to literary works that fit comfortably into none of the three modes. The Divina Commedia [1308-1320] comprises an epic narrative of a sequence of dialogues in a lyric style; Faust [1808, 1832] or Moby-Dick [1851] would be even more difficult to categorize.

What permits this relaxed taxonomy is the unifying principle of the literary work: not its use of words, but its use of writing, which is to say its reduction of the flow of speech into the weave of the written page, or even better, the cloth-bound codex. On recognizing the literary artwork as simply whatever goes inside a book, we make room for endless literary novelty. Every volume in Borges’s famous library (or Quine’s two-volume variant) is a potential novel, and even the alphabet itself is not a necessary constraint; a novel can also include illustrations, or musical staves, so long as the logos dominates. The novel shows us that a literary work is neither an object nor an event, but a text: every epic narrative tells things as they are, or were, or could be, for those who suffered them; every lyric utterance leaps out unbidden from the spirit’s depths; every dialogue is a hunt to discover the mot juste that will end the conversation; every novel takes upon itself the task of redefining what literature can be.

The Performing Arts. Each of our three triads thus far has turned out to have a hidden fourth element that amounts to its unifying principle. The objective arts of sculpture, painting, and drawing are unified by an architectural frame; the musical arts of rhythm, melody, and harmony by the conductor’s time-stopping baton; the literary arts of epic, lyric, and dialectic by the possibility of the experimental novel. By reading down the columns we can fill in the implied fourth row. Sculpture, rhythm, and narrative together, in a quite straightforward way, make the passionate art of ballet. Painting, melody, and lyric together make the spiritual art of opera, where the coloring of the set and stage prepare the way for the coloratura of the voice. Drawing, harmony, and dialectic together make the intellectual art of verse drama: the principle of delineation is transformed into lineation, better understood not as measurement but as punctuation; the principle of harmony becomes that of assonance, the use of sound to draw an occult connection between concepts. Last, the capture of objects, the manipulation of time, and the recombination of texts together make the unitive art of film.

The question is what unity film brings to these disparate art forms. Every culture possesses each of the principal objective arts, though perhaps without recognizing their unity; every culture makes music, and some analyze it into its constituents; every literate culture experiments with literary modes and discovers the natural modes of its expression; but ballet, opera, drama, film, these traditions of artistic performance are each a rare achievement, made possible only through the sacrifice of wealth on the altar of beauty. Brought about only by human action on a grand scale, these art forms present upon a grand stage particular human actions, and propose that these actions not merely occur within, but constitute the world. The performing arts are arts of the deed: in ballet the world becomes passionate movement; in opera, spiritual flight; in drama, mental crisis; in film, the world returns to itself, but only to the extent that man continues to cast light upon the screen.

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The Dream of Film. The first projection of filtered light onto a screen was not just a human act, but a historical one. So too, of course, was the first construction of a room to house art objects; or the first coordination of the playing of many instruments together; or the first reduction of verbal flux to written text; or the first balletic or operatic or dramatic performance. But apart from film, all of these have been done from time to time (even if sometimes a very long time) since, at the latest, classical Greece. Their inventors, if they had any (i.e., were not simply rediscovered whenever conditions warranted), have been long forgotten. Whereas the technology of film projection (unless we count Plato’s cave) was invented in the late nineteenth century, with artistic and commercial adaptation in the following decades.

Does it then follow that until the late nineteenth century the arts had no unity? Not quite. The technology of film did not make it newly possible to perceive the unity of the arts, but rather made that unity newly actual: it enabled artists-in-general to satisfy their pre-existing longing for a world-encompassing art. Artistic longing for the unity of the arts preceded its technological realization, though by only a century. It was the German Romantic Schlegel who first implausibly imagined that poetry could encompass all the arts. Wagner, whose attempt at a musical-theater gesamtkunstwerk was somewhat less quixotic, died a decade before the first public film projection. Over the same period when artists-general were on the hunt for an actual art-in-general, folklorists were collecting folktales from across the globe, breaking them down into their narratological components (referred to variously and with various nuances as “types,” “motifs,” “story radicals”), and developing sophisticated taxonomies, the most recent of which (promulgated in 2004) is the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index. ATU-510A, for example, is Cinderella.

The Reality of Film. For a time it seemed that these two streams would flow together into the new art of film, yielding a total film archive containing all possible variants on the traditional narratives. F.W. Murnau’s Faust [1926], for example, is a masterpiece of the art of film as Wagner might have imagined it: a series of tableau vivants linked by intertitles, the audience’s expected familiarity with the Herr Doktor’s story, and whatever musical accompaniment the movie theater was able to provide. And Faust was only one of the ever-increasing number of films released each year. Both dreams remained live well into the era of synchronized sound and technicolor; many of the best films of the 1930s are adaptations either of stage plays or of exhibition hall dance performances.

But film gradually developed into something entirely different from ballet, opera, and dramatic theater. The novelty began not with the artists-general or the analysts, but with the ordinary tale-tellers of Europe and America. New narrative potentialities were explored first in the pages of newspapers and magazines, then burst out over the radiowaves and onto the silver screen. If the affordances of the filmic art form did not literally summon these new stories into being, it can sometimes seem so, for these new stories fit perfectly with what was new in film compared to the other performing arts. I wrote above that those arts, “brought about only by human action on a grand scale,” “present upon a grand stage particular human actions.” That aptly describes ballet, opera, and drama, but for film the formula must be modified: human action not on a grand scale, but on an industrial scale, which is to say that film paradigmatically requires funding not through patronage, but through the expectation of commercial success. Film accordingly presents human actions not on a grand but on a common stage. Moreover, the human actions it presents are not particular, in the sense that the actions themselves are not what the audience experiences; rather, each screening of a film re-presents the very same actions for the audience to experience as if for the first time. These are in outline the affordances the new stories arrived in time to take advantage of. Before turning to some more intricate problems, I proffer the following provisional Index of Filmlore Motifs:

(1) Motifs of Recognition. The theater knew leading actors, but it took the movies to give rise to “stars,” real-life personalities who somehow take on the aura of the sum of their performances. A leading actor would be expected to recite Shakespeare from memory; a star would be expected to live out in the flesh the persona he created on film. And so we see (a) the villains mistake an ordinary man for someone dangerous, giving him a chance to rise to the occasion (North By Northwest [1959] would not work if Cary Grant were not a star before the opening credits rolled); and (b) an acting troupe accidentally recruited to do a warrior’s job, requiring it to bumble its way through as best it can (the aliens in Galaxy Quest [1999] are only an exaggerated version of the fans at the convention).

(2) Motifs of Reputation. Actresses have always been associated with sexual scandal, but the titillation of seeing a famous actress on stage always came with plausible deniability; stripteases were something else entirely. When captured on film, however, the fact that the contours of a woman’s body can be seen through the liquefaction of her clothes ceases to be an accident, and becomes essential. To put a woman on film is to invite the audience to visually undress her. And so we see (a) circumstances compel a woman to seduce a lustful antagonist (Rita Hayworth in Salome [1953] dances for Herod not to buy John’s head, but to save it); and (b) a woman chooses to divorce her husband so he will see her as mistress rather than housewife (Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth [1937] reprises the girlfriend’s club dance to teach Cary Grant a lesson).

(3) Motifs of Recollection. In the theater, the story takes place entirely in one place (the stage), and progresses at one second per second; hence the so-called Aristotelian unities. To the extent the unities are not observed, as in most Shakespeare, it is an assertion of the power of the word to summon us to imagine that things are other than they appear. But on the silver screen, movement through time and space is entirely in the director’s control. And so we see stories centered on (a) a man traveling back in time and causing himself (in Back To The Future [1985] Michael J. Fox causes himself by getting out of his own way); or (b) parallel stories in different eras leading to different outcomes (in Dead Again [1991] the doomed Branaugh-Thompson romance of two generations back vengefully interrupts the modern reprise).

(4) Motifs of Repetition. The word is eternal, while the world is contingent. The theater embraces this contingency, in that every performance is slightly different from the one before it in material detail, and to witness the results of a myriad of decisions about these details is much of why we go to the theater rather than just reading the script. Film, although an image rather than a word, like the word is always the same: whatever happens on a given screening of a given film, however unexpected, is what always had to happen, on every screening. And so we see (a) the story opening on an ordinary day, until a single unusual event knocks the world off its kilter (Fred Macmurray’s insurance salesman in Double Indemnity [1944] allows himself to be knocked over by Barbara Stanwyck because he thinks he has calculated all possible outcomes); and (b) the story opening with a professional risk-taker taking on one last job before his planned retirement (Heat [1995] served as plausible one-last-job material for both Pacino and De Niro).

(5) Motifs of Revelation. The world is contingent, while the word is eternal. Every theatrical performance differs, but the fact that the same words are said in every performance tells us that the words are what really matter, are what we must attend to. When film presents us a world that is always the same, it makes the world into a word, but not one that is self-interpreting; we see and hear it differently with every viewing. And so we see crises turn on the proper interpretation of (a) a fleeting expression on the face of an antagonist (in Blade Runner [1982] the telltale hesitations of a replicant’s pupil can only be detected by Harrison Ford’s test-camera); and (b) a recording the protagonist experiences differently every time he encounters it (such as the titular exchange Gene Hackman re-mixes throughout The Conversation [1974]).

(6) Motifs of Realization. Practical effects, like puppetry and sleight of hand, have always been with us. But film creates a space for effects not practical, but special, which is to say, specular: effects that are not carried out in the real world, but interposed between the film’s exposure and its projection, a kind of magic lens between the world and us. And so we see (a) a dreamworld presenting a funhouse-mirror version of waking life, such that on waking, the protagonist can say: “and you were there!” (as does Judy Garland at the end of The Wizard of Oz [1939]); and (b) a man seemingly living through fantastical adventures, which turn out to be seen in his mind’s eye as he lies on his deathbed, or in a mental institution, or wherever else (sometimes, as in Total Recall [1990], the fantasy world triumphs over the real).

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The Limits of Film. The claim of the previous section was that the new affordances of the filmic medium gave rise to new narrative motifs. The final set of motifs, those related to special effects, can make film’s affordances seem unlimited: there is nothing in our world that cannot be fit onto the silver screen. But this is not true. However much we might wish it were otherwise, film actors can only be human beings. Through intense discipline and at some personal cost they can seek to transform themselves into the characters they inhabit, but so long as the film follows standard conventions of realism—that is, so long as it is not a work of iconography like Murnau’s Faust—they can only inhabit characters sufficiently like themselves.

To take two of film’s most painful limitations: a young man cannot become an old one (nor vice versa), and an ordinary woman will not, for purposes of film, become pregnant (though the reverse, one fears, must occur often enough). There turns out to be an occult connection between these two limits, and another limit imposed by the need for a human viewer: a film must be short enough to watch in a single sitting (or else it turns into something else, a television series).

(1) Men Age At One Second Per Second. Begin with the first of these limitations. Because films are filmed over a few-month period, the men in them always remain the same age—a useful fact, since it allows the film to be shot out of order, but also a frustrating one. Directors, even great directors, sometimes ask the magic of film to portage them over the meanders of the river of time, but it never quite succeeds at the task. We do not really believe, but only forgive, the twenty-six year old Orson Welles’s old-age makeup in Citizen Kane [1941], which qualifies as film-magic because it is too intricate to be applied between scenes backstage. The only real purpose the makeup serves is to remind us that narrative time has passed, which the newspaper intertitles have already accomplished. Nor do we really believe that the Robert De Niro of The Godfather II [1974] is a young Marlon Brando, we simply do not care; he does not need to be because a sequel is its own film, not a continuation of the prior one. The only way to truly capture on film the passage of a man’s life is to endure it.

Flashbacks to childhood are a partial exception to this rule. Because a boy’s face bears only a family resemblance to the man he will be, skillful casting of similar faces can ensure the necessary illusion. True, the child is father, not mother of the man, and too many changes of face breaks faith with the viewer; the flashbacks must hone in on the single moment of spiritual germination. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life [2011] indulges in a toddler version of the Sean Penn character, but we only come to know his past when we see him as an adolescent. Still, our exceptional willingness to accept equations between unmatured faces make especially peculiar Richard Linklater’s attempt in Boyhood to wait out the tyranny of time. Boyhood [2011] traces the life of its child protagonist from six to eighteen, and was created by brief reunions between director and child star over a twelve-year period. The film falters for reasons in retrospect inevitable: being directed by two different men, Linklater-2002 and Linklater-2013, the early scenes could not meaningfully anticipate the later ones. The enterprise strikes us as less a unified film than a compressed television series.

(2) Films Wrap Nine Months After They’re Cast. This observation about Boyhood brings us to our second limitation: it is practically impossible to make a film starring a pregnant woman. Any casting call for pregnant women would see the baby born before shooting began, and if a starlet who has been cast becomes pregnant she will either get rid of the baby or the director will get rid of her. Hail, Caesar! [2016] is in part about how the latter might be the best thing for her. When a film tells a story about pregnancy it will typically only allude to it, as if the fact were reducible to its rumor. Even the childbirth scene in Gone With The Wind [1939] shows only the shadow of the laboring mother thrown against the wall. To show a pregnancy directly requires prosthetics, and the faux-pregnant actress cannot avoid carrying herself as if her baby bump were an article of clothing she could remove at will. The result gives rise to a body-horror vision of pregnancy, as in Alien [1979]’s stomach-turning practical effects; and since it is what makes pregnancy possible, the horror can extend backward to the female body itself, as in Under the Skin [2013] and Ex Machina [2014].

Yet the thought of a world without pregnancy is equally horrific. The Barbie movie [2023] shows us a female doll it would be pointless to undress because there is nothing beneath, and imagines what it would take to get her to a gynecologist; the only answer it can come up with is an idolatry of women named Ruth. More successful explorations of the same theme are found in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival [2016] and Alex Garland’s Annihilation [2018]. Each follows a female scientist alone with memories of an estranged husband and an ambiguous interloper. There appears a vessel from another world, and she is recruited to investigate; ultimately the vessel is destroyed after imparting to her its inhuman knowledge of the true meaning of her fecundity. The difference is that in Arrival Amy Adams is a linguist and her memories are in fact premonitions of what will happen if she marries her love interest: they will divorce, and their child will die of an incurable disease. What she has learned from the heptapods’ circular ink-blots is how to find this fate desirable by seeing it from the perspective of eternity. Whereas in Annihilation Natalie Portman is a biologist; her memories are of cheating on her husband; and what she has learned from the iridescent shimmer is that the life-force within each of us will find a way to continue, even if that way destroys what we think of as our selves.

A Televisual Digression. The filmic art that unifies the system of the arts either encompasses or branches off into television. The two invite many of the same narrative motifs, but their affordances still differ in some respects. Where film compresses, television digresses. Television is notoriously open-ended, and not only because a series is not watched in a single sitting. A single season generally hopes for another, but cannot expect it; the viewer hopes that the showrunners know when they have reached the finish line. The loss of a unified dramatic arc is the price of showing us the real passage of time, and how it builds up a sense of place. Not limited to the Godfather series’ single digits of hours, The Sopranos [1999-2007] can spend almost a decade following Tony from early into later middle age, and his children as they cross the threshold into adulthood. The price is that its protagonist is not the don of dons, but only a middle-manager mafioso, and the viewer cares equally about the various life trajectories of the various members of the ensemble cast. So too with Mad Men [2007-2015]’s Don Draper’s media not-quite-empire, the television analogue of Welles’s masterpiece. The televison star burns less bright than the film star, but for longer: James Gandolfini and Jon Hamm became not archetypes but psychopomps, who for a phase in our lives guided us through particular places and times.

The longer a television series runs the further it drifts away from our own world and fabricates for itself another. In the word’s peculiar televisual sense, a “mythology” is simply a set of reference points that will delight the audience by reminding it how much time it has invested in learning the local landmarks. A human sacrifice completes the summoning ritual. In The Truman Show [1998] an unwanted child is adopted by a television studio and raised in a panopticon. The showrunners arrange his marriage to a young actress, and hope to arrange the on-screen conception of their first child; Truman’s refusal is what restores him to reality. When a sitcom actress becomes pregnant the showrunners face a choice, to shuffle her offstage for half a season or to write the pregnancy into the story. When they take the latter option the birth confirms the impression that the world of the show is complete in itself, spanning all of human life from birth to death. The passing of a cast member rarely has the same effect, perhaps because it cannot be similarly anticipated. Once the actress Nancy Marchand died it was too late for a proper farewell to Livia Soprano (though we were, in one of the show’s few total blunders, subjected to a CGI rendition of what such a farewell might have looked like).

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From Live Action Into Animation. But what if there could be a film made entirely without actors? For as long as we have had live action films we have also had animated ones, which escape entirely the practical constraints discussed in the previous section. Both Bambi [1942] and The Lion King [1994] begin and end with a birth, and both effortlessly follow the maturation of their protagonist from infancy to fatherhood; it is a mere matter of imagining the intermediary stages and then drawing them. At the same time animation leaves behind, if not the possibility of certain filmlore motifs, at least the conditions that gave rise to them. For example, Aladdin [1992] gestures at IFM (2)(a) (seductive heroine), and The Beauty and the Beast [1991] at (4)(a) (ordinary day). But would they have done so if we lived in a world that had invented moving pictures but not photography, and so did not possess live action film?

In the world we live in, live action and animation are not separate arts, but inextricably intertwined. Walt Disney’s early film Alice in Slumberland [1926] began with animated creatures magically bursting into the live action world, and ended with a slumbering live-action girl entering into the world of cartoon. Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World [1992] explored the same theme in more disturbing fashion. If live action pitches itself to our sense of touch by showing us the ordinary tangible world, animated films do so by presenting us with a world we hopelessly desire to wrap our arms around. What prevents us is the same feature that makes the world presented intrinsically desirable: it is entirely flat. The attraction of the animated world is spiritual. Like pre-perspectival painting, it luxuriates in solid blocks of rich uniform color, as if to say that the world is all color, all spirit, all the way through. The Secret of Kells [2009] revealed the affinity by bringing to life the world of illuminated manuscripts. Decades earlier, Yuri Norshteyn did something similar in his short film “Battle of Kerzhenets” [1971], where we see icons come to life through a layered array of paper cutouts. Norshteyn’s cutouts are, of course, the experiments of an auteur; they can illuminate the animated mainstream, but are not part of it.

Romantic Animism. The core of the animated tradition has always been the art of moving illustrations, where from frame to frame any line not carried over must be redrawn by hand, with results mimicking the continuous subtle movements of living flesh. The result is a kind of animism: in an animated movie, every object on screen is at least potentially ensouled with a soul that could transmute it into some other kind of thing, as has been apparent since at least Walt Disney’s Fantasia [1940], where even an abstract representation of a sound wave achieves a kind of personality. Animated films typically place their visible souls atop a static watercolor field, but they are capable also of bringing the landscape itself to life, erasing entirely the distinction between background and foreground.

We think of animism as a pre-modern worldview, and for similar reasons we think of animation as an art for children, but neither prejudice is fully warranted. Animism can name a naive poetics, but it can also name a poetics that is sentimental in a Schillerian sense, which is to say romantic: a poetics aware of the power of modernity (its sophisticated technology, its sophisticated social organization), but also of its inability to come to terms with the fundamentals of human life: birth, love, evil, death. In a nutshell, the animated filmmaker is aware of what was left behind when we abandoned the AUTI for the IFM; when Hitchcock displaced Murnau as the greatest director. Animated film is not immature, but it does tend toward nostalgia. The relative dearth of animated films compared to live action owes much to economic imperatives—frame for frame, animated films are more expensive than live action ones—but also to the relative rarity of the type of romantic genius proper to the art form.

The Animated World. An animated filmmaker resembles less a director than an architect, and an animated film is in a way similar to a theme park ride. It is no coincidence that both Disney and his spiritual successor Hayao Miyazaki at times were involved in the latter: Disney turned in his later career from animating films to designing his eponymous Land and World, and Miyazaki obsessed over the design of the Ghibli Museum, to the point of writing a poetic manifesto (“This is the Kind of Museum I Want to Make!” [c.2000]). At the same time, both Disney and Miyazaki made films—Pinocchio [1940] and Spirited Away [2001]—warning of the dangers that result when the idea of the theme park, which is to say, of the animated world, is corrupted. In the romantic animism of animated film, that everything is at least potentially alive is both a dream come true, and (as that earlier reactionary animist Yeats would have said) a terrible responsibility.

Disney’s adaptation of Goethe’s “Der Zauberlehrling” [1797] dramatized the danger the animating power could pose if used indiscriminately: the bewitched broom, having been endowed with hands and feet by a hapless Mickey Mouse, has a life of its own and will have it more abundantly the more Mickey tries to render it back into dead wood and straw. The result is elemental chaos, and it takes the return of the master sorcerer to part the waters. The broomstick is animation’s name for technology, which animation conceives as the human power to sweep into motion the otherwise inanimate world. Miyazaki in Kiki’s Delivery Service [1989] compared broomstick to airplane, and in Howl’s Moving Castle [2004] turned the former into a hopping scarecrow and the latter into a weapon of war. As Caproni tells Jiro in The Wind Rises [2013], “Airplanes are beautiful cursed dreams waiting for the sky to swallow them up.” Animation brings tools and machines to sputtering life, but fears the death that follows in their wake.

Animation is more at ease animating animals—they are alive to begin with, after all—but not entirely so, because it cannot avoid humanizing them, which is also to say spiritualizing them. A persistent theme in animation, as alluded to in the earlier mention of Bambi and The Lion King, is how death is an inevitable part of animal life, and indeed one that animals often inflict on one another. But if these films are untroubled by the fact of natural hierarchy, they also insist that life’s crowning achievement, what earns its kings their crowns, is not consuming lesser beasts but protecting them from fiery death. Animated films rarely show one animal actually eat another, not because we cannot picture what such an animation would look like, but because we can picture it too easily; the surface that was one would simply disappear as the jaws of the other erased it.

The Animated Otherworld. Apparent counterexamples like Pinocchio and Spirited Away prove the point, in multiple respects. First, in these films ingestion is not followed by consumption: the whale vomits up the puppet, and No-Face the inhabitants of the bathhouse. Second, the regurgitation results from the application of human reason: Pinocchio builds a fire, Chihiro feeds the monster an emetic. Earlier in the films the protagonists preserved their humanity through simple restraint, a refusal to indulge their animal appetites. Third, the ingesting and regurgitating animals are entirely otherworldly: the whale is Jonah’s whale, No-Face a literal spirit, and for them to truly consume another animated being would mean that being’s spiritual as well as physical death. These films draw on a corollary of animation’s ability to animate its entire world: its ability to make visible the invisible.

Animation has no need of the comically humanized angels of live-action films like It’s a Wonderful Life [1946] and A Matter of Life and Death [1946], or the spectacular otherworldly messengers of films like Arrival and Annihilation. Because the animated world is already an otherworld, it can speak to us without difficulty of yet another world above its own. Indeed, it does so habitually. Whenever it takes non-human animals as its protagonists, animation makes its human beings take on the role of gods, or of demons. One Hundred and One Dalmatians [1961] retells the Gospel narrative but with even-more-than-all saved through the descent into hell not of a single messiah, but of a dozen-plus. We cannot imagine that the entire litter could ever have been contained within the gravid Perdita’s womb, and no attempt is made to convince us it could; the film need only number them and they miraculously enter into life, and later multiply sevenfold.

But in The Prince of Egypt [1998] the roles are reversed, and we see the slavery that results when stagecraft bamboozles men into worshiping animal statues. It begins with the infant Moses preserved from the off-screen massacre of the Hebrews; it ends with Moses the bearded sage parting the waters and then letting them crash back together, drowning Pharaoh’s chariots and charioteers. Before he does so Moses must realize the true nature of the animated world in which he lives. In a dream he sees hieroglyphs come to life and enact an Egyptian host seizing Hebrew infants from their mothers’ arms and tossing them into crocodilic maws. The hieroglyphs are flat, but the walls themselves skew with geometric perspective as the imagined camera zooms around the throneroom. Moses sees his own death narrowly averted when his sister sidesteps out from the hieroglyphic plane onto the surface of an adjacent column to dodge some oncoming soldiers. The gods of the Egyptians are false because they are gods of the two-dimensional animated world only; the God of the Hebrews is God in every world.

*

From Animation to Rendering. The use of three-dimensional effects in 1990s animated movies like The Prince of Egypt marked a shift in the tradition of animated film, and ultimately resulted in a total break. If the tendency of moving illustrations is to bring to life the entire visual field, the tendency of computer-generated imagery is the opposite: not animation, but rather rendering, breaking the living world down into bits of matter. This observation does not attack the artistic validity of 3d rendering, but rather insists that its valid uses will be those that perceive its affordances and take them into account. Such perception and such accounting do not require any sort of theoretical analysis, but only close attention.

In recent years, unfortunately, filmmakers have grown inattentive. Those who would otherwise have made animated films have embraced CGI as a supposedly improved version of the same thing, the projection of a world other than ours. And those who would otherwise have made live action films have treated CGI as a straightforward substitute for practical effects: Why film on location when you can drop the landscape in later? Why store props on the back lot between sequels when you could store them on a hard drive? Why spend hours each day applying makeup when the actor could just wear a green jumpsuit covered in white dots? The burden shifts to the critic to discern which rendered characters have real life within them and which are hollow shells, which CGI environments we could imaginatively live within and which ones we could not. Ironically, inviting this discernment is exactly what 3D rendering excels at.

Rendering Analyzed. To avoid being taken in by the delusion of trompe l’oeil, we must return to fundamentals. If 2D animation is a way to create the illusion of illuminated bodies in motion though a sequence of static hand-drawn illustrations, 3D rendering is a way to create the illusion of illuminated bodies in motion through a sequence of projections of an abstract space. The renderer begins with a cartesian-coordinate representation of various objects, then calculates how much light will bounce off the polygon mesh and make its way to another point defined to represent the camera. This calculation is done anew for each frame, but each frame is simply a time-slice of the four-dimensional whole. Every node, every array of nodes representing an object, and the camera vector as well move through the time dimension algorithmically. The result, in a slogan (and to recall the three components of the objective arts, the foundation of both animation and rendering): rigid lines, objective colors, hollow bodies.

The rigidity of the 3D-rendered line follows immediately from its algorithmic nature. This rigidity, and its difference from traditional animation, can be isolated in cel shading, a technique that resembles 3D rendering except that the light calculations are rounded off to a limited palette. The result superficially resembles hand-drawn animation but lacks its dynamism, the ability of any given object’s boundaries to bend as the artist’s spirit moves him. When the otherwise hand-animated Avatar: The Last Airbender [2005-2008] introduces cel-shaded Fire Nation battleships and tanks, their very visual appearance communicates to the viewer that they represent a mechanical principle, fundamentally opposed to the Water Tribe’s animism.

The effects of 3D rendering on color are less easily isolated, but can be analogized to those of perspectival painting. Geometric perspective moved color from the surface to an imagined space behind it, generating color effects like those in Johannes Vermeer’s depictions of household things bathed in northern light, or Claude Monet’s depiction of the fog between himself and the House of Parliament. The former shows inanimate objects in their particularity, and the latter objecthood-in-general, the distance between ourselves and the world. Yuri Norshteyn’s “Hedgehog in the Fog” [1975] achieves similar fog effects through a technique not computationally, but actually three-dimensional: he placed in front of the scene a thin translucent paper and slowly, frame by frame, lifted it up toward the camera. Beneath the fog-paper was an un-rendered thing—a hand-drawn horse—which at the climactic moment appears suddenly out of the fog, two-dimensional and alive. CGI cannot show us that life; it is limited to objects and fog.

Last, the hollowness of the 3D rendered image renders it repellent to the groping finger of the sculptural eye. When our eye recognizes the 3D rendering at all (when it is not deceived), it recognizes it as a cinematic projection of an abstract world illuminated by an abstract light. The default is not sculptural plastic, but plastic in the sense of a fake object, an injection-molded petroleum byproduct. The mathematically inclined will resist the conclusion, insisting that once a sufficient quantity of information is built into the model it will be indistinguishable from reality. But a trompe l’oeil need only satisfy the eyes, whereas to pull off a moving illusion requires satisfying our sense of touch, which sets out expectations for how the various represented objects should impinge on one another. A completely satisfying 3D rendering would require the impossible, a complete simulation of the laws of nature.

Undead Action, Alien Worlds. When 3D renderings are superimposed onto live-action films, the actors’ interactions with the rendered objects inevitably reveal the latter to be both unattractive and intangible, a mere shell of the bodies they mean to depict. Filmmakers better understood this principle when the technology was in its infancy (i.e., when it seemed a substitute, not for the world itself, but for such ad hoc effects as Ray Harryhausen’s jerky claymation puppets). Terminator II [1991] pits the practical effects (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s roided muscles) against the liquid metal of the new model robot army. Jurassic Park [1993] and Pirates of the Caribbean [2003] descend into the uncanny valleys named in their titles, which we discover are filled with half-living monsters. The Mummy [1999] pictures its own undead fiend as a hollow husk that could transform in an instant into a million bits of flying sand. The early tradition culminated in The Lord of the Rings [2001-2003], with its performance-capture transformation of Andy Serkis into Gollum-Smeagol: it succeeds precisely because we see the sallow skin unanimated by any glow of interior life, and sense the hollow interior behind, but also feel the presence in his gestures, expressions, movements, of the human being trapped within.

Conversely, when 3D rendering generates from scratch a world to present to the viewer, it is inevitably one the viewer feels no visceral urge to enter into; we can imagine a CGI remake of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? [1988], but cannot imagine a CGI Jessica Rabbit desirable, any more than we can imagine a balloon animal desirable. (A blow-up doll is not desired, but only abused.) The apparent exceptions prove the rule. For example, James Cameron’s Avatar [2009] and sequelae: they drew many in, but not, except for a few disordered libidos, because the viewer desired to touch the things depicted. The idea rather was to be surrounded by them, to become a transparent eyeball witnessing the natural history and xenoanthropology of a lovingly detailed imaginary planet. We forgive the lifeless artifice of the CGI because it conveys that wealth of enchanting information, but the dramatic action leaves us cold, for it is enacted by creatures with whom we do not share a world. As its title suggests, Avatar may have been more successful as a video game, where life could have entered the rendered world through the player’s own exercise of agency.

Playing God. In some ways vidya, not film, is 3D rendering’s true home. Video games reveal to the player how a world is a set of affordances, and how we exist in a world to the extent that we act within it. Playing Tetris [1985], we find the world around us to be made up of irregular shapes to be packed together. Playing Portal [2007], we find that we can be at home in a world of noneuclidean space. When we watch video games without playing them, as in Tron [1982] (one of the first films to make extensive use of CGI), we see in them instead an inhospitable gnostic otherworld, an “electronic arena where love and escape do not compute.” What most alienates us from this world is that its inhabitants are entirely lacking in agency; they simply follow the digital laws that set them in motion. This feeling of alienation vanishes only when the game is not one whose rules we take too seriously. We are not bothered by the lifelessness of the characters and world of Veggie Tales [1993-2015], or Toy Story [1995], or The LEGO Movie [2014], because these films do not even try to convince us otherwise; rather, they are a comic puppeteering of a cast of ordinarily inanimate objects across a stage that in the back of our minds we know is only a carpet or a kitchen counter. These movies delight us most when they admit the game is only a game, as when Woody breaks kayfabe and speaks directly to the toy-breaker Sid.

When 3D rendered children’s movies do convince us to take them seriously, it is in ways utterly different from how we took seriously traditional animated movies. Consider the 2024 Latvian film Flow (whose release after I had written most of what became this essay forced me to rewrite more than a few of its paragraphs). Like The Prince of Egypt, it is a story about a providential flood, but otherwise the two could not be more different. In Flow we follow a black cat wandering through a global deluge dissolving a world once inhabited by human beings, but now peopled only by the ruins they left behind; the eerie drowned cityscapes are somewhat reminiscent of the early video game Myst [1993]. The cat drifts along in a small boat and makes friends with various other creatures—a dog, a lemur, a capybara, a secretarybird, a whale—and also encounters certain dangers. The film has an unusual visual style, and also an unusual plot, in that the protagonist cat plainly lacks human intelligence (as do all the other animals). The effect of this animal stupidity is to engage our anxiety, as if we were watching a clumsy child play a video game it did not understand, and longed to wrest the controller from its fingers. As the film’s allegory for salvation history becomes more and more explicit, we realize what we have felt for the cat is an echo of God’s care for us.

*

Every attempt to grapple with an entire artistic form is inevitably unsatisfying. The present essay has not even attempted a comprehensive overview; I have said little, for example, about the role of sound in film (music, voiceovers, etc.), or about live action color (black and white, the use of filters, etc.). Nor have I mentioned every film that matters to me (I have remained silent on many of the films that matter most). Every film I have mentioned matters, but I have frequently done little more than gesture at a potential reading of this or that film’s significance. My goal, after all, has not been to interpret a particular genre or movement or moment in film history, but to offer a sort of natural history of the art of film—to uncover what kind of thing film is by way of telling examples placed in narrative order.

The core narrative of this natural history might be restated as follows. In the late nineteenth century film was born out of the matrix of all the arts, as the art that would render actual their potential unity. The novelty of the art of film elicited a new array of narrative motifs, best understood through the contrast with theater. But inherent limits on the art of film relating to its human material also rendered certain subjects unavailable to it, particularly those of age and of infancy. (Film eventually evaded this limit by expanding into television, but thereby abandoned something of its compactness.) These subjects are more naturally treated, not in live action, but in animation, live action film’s alter ego. (Animation evaded its own limits by expanding into theme parks, but thereby declined from romanticism into nostalgia.) In recent decades, 3D rendering has come to be seen as an ersatz substitute for live action or animation, but it is better understood as a vehicle for exploring the limits of agency. (3D rendering most properly belongs in vidya, where such exploration is the entire ballgame.)

What is the epistemic status of these claims? On the one hand, their literal truth is doubtful. Some critics once imagined film the gesamtkunstwerk; others have made similar claims for television, for theme parks, for video games; they cannot all be right, and probably none are. On the other, almost every artist has had false beliefs about his art form—for example, that it had a nature, rather than a history—and it may be that such beliefs are necessary if the artist is to take his art form seriously. If so, then taking such beliefs seriously is one way to enter into the mind of the artist. Having thought them through, we return to the artwork and see it better, which is ultimately the only use of criticism.

Four minutes after the official publication of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization [597 U.S. 215 (2022)], a cartoonist posted to Twitter a drawing of a pope holding a gun to the head of a pregnant Lady Liberty.

The cartoon’s failure as propaganda reveals much about the sterility of the liberal imagination. To be sure, the image of a pregnant woman in danger plays on our sympathies; we cannot help but recognize a pregnant woman as uniquely vulnerable and uniquely deserving of protection. But the image of a pregnant woman carries such a powerful charge precisely because we sense that the child’s life is also in danger; an image of a pregnant woman encrypts an image of her unborn child, in the same way that an image of an egg encrypts an image of the bird that will hatch from it. The pregnant mother’s enormous belly cries out to all who see it: I carry new life within me, and even if you cannot perceive it clearly, you must act accordingly.

So the cartoon reminds us of exactly what its author wants us to forget: that to do violence to a pregnant mother just is to do violence to her child. Now, it might seem that the cartoonist simply made a minor rhetorical misstep. Could he have better served his pro-abortion argument by making the mother’s belly not as big as possible, but as small as possible, to convince the viewer that it’s no one’s business but her own? Other cartoonists took this approach. For example, this popular depiction of a barely-pregnant warrior-woman holding a dagger to her own throat while arguing with God about whether she should have to give birth. But it turns out that this move, too, backfires. The image of a barely-pregnant woman ineluctably summons the idea of her pregnancy progressing. Her belly is small, but it will get bigger. As the caption suggests, the life within her is destined for greatness; it will grow until it exceeds the womb that nurtures it and becomes a visible human being. In the face of this greatness selfish complaints about frustrated preferences are hardly deserving of a response. By the conventions of biblical narrative, pregnant pauses in conversations with the divine usually indicate a failure of comprehension on the part of the human participant.

So should the pro-abortion cartoonist instead depict a woman who is not visibly pregnant at all? But if the image does not depict a pregnancy, the idea of woman’s special authority over pregnancy is entirely lost, and she becomes merely a man with slight variations in physique. The cartoonist might as well draw a shapeless “person who can get pregnant,” subordinating his desire to defend abortion to his fealty to the alphabet-soup ideology. So many cartoonists did in the wake of Dobbs, with results as rhetorically impotent as they are artistically formless. The “memphis style” of cartoons such as the following are the visual correlative to how some progressive circles spiraled from outrage over Dobbs to outrage that some of those outraged were not using the up-to-date terminology.

But suppose the cartoonist wants to do more than signal loyalty to the woke cause: he wants his cartoon to communicate that the meaning of a pregnancy varies depending on whether it is wanted or unwanted. If images made meaning by mechanical combination, this task would not be impossible. The author of the first cartoon plainly conceived of his work’s meaning as a simple rebus: Dobbs attacked a putative civil liberty having to do with pregnancy, which adds up to a gun held to a pregnant Lady Liberty’s head. But images make meaning organically, and in ways their authors cannot fully control. The artistic project of the pro-abortion cartoonist necessarily fails because it seeks to attach to the image of pregnancy not a meaning but an anti-meaning. The ultimate pro-abortion cartoon would be a picture of a woman with child, with a caption reading “this is not a child.” Conversely, to recognize the failure of these cartoons is to affirm what we all know: that pregnancy does mean something, and what it means is not the paradoxical impossibility of knowing what it means, but something profoundly simple. A new life is coming into the world, and we must honor and protect it.

It is because pregnancy means something, and we know it, that we can ask what if anything is meant by the first of the cartoons reproduced above. It poses two related puzzles. First, Lady Liberty is pregnant. What fruit does liberty bear? Second, she is not merely under threat, but under threat of a shot to the back of the head, what the movies call “execution-style.” Why is she being threatened with capital punishment? The answer to both questions is given by the biblical reference on her tablet. Genesis 38:24: “And behold after three months they told Juda, saying: Thamar, thy daughter in law hath played the harlot, and she appeareth to have a big belly. And Juda said: Bring her out that she may be burnt.” The cartoonist seems to have chosen this verse in accordance with his theme of religious authorities wrongly controlling women’s bodies. And of course Juda’s response here is a poor one—but not because Thamar ought to get an abortion. Rather, because Juda ought both to let Thamar live and give birth, and to acknowledge himself to be the father. (Eventually, the biblical Juda did as he ought, and he and Thamar became the ancestors of King David.)

By making Lady Liberty pregnant, the cartoon strongly implies (despite its author’s conscious intent) that she must be allowed to give birth. Even in the days when capital punishment was swiftly meted out a pregnant woman would not be executed until after the child was born. Not because she had to be given a chance to define for herself the mystery of life, but because the child she bore could be recognized by all as a distinct human life, and there are few injustices greater than executing the innocent along with the guilty. An allegorical abortion would only be warranted if we could know beforehand that because this liberty was mere license, its fruits were necessarily corrupt. The image of a woman with child tends to undercut this inference; even Milton’s Sin is not often depicted pregnant with Death, but rather having already given birth to the monster. While we might suspect that America is a licentious experiment that must be terminated with prejudice (this cartoon says), it must be allowed to endure for a while, despite its sins, because it harbors a seed of new life which must be given a chance to take root.

The other figure in the cartoon is, of course, a pope. He does not look much like Francis, but perhaps resembles a young John Paul II, popularizer of the phrase “culture of life,” or even the reactionary orphan Innocent XIII of the TV series The Young Pope. Once again the propagandist’s intent is easily identified: looking around for someone to blame for the Dobbs decision, he naturally turns to the Church that has stood consistently against abortion for two thousand years, and which throughout its history has often been willing to pressure secular power into serving spiritual ends. While clerics generally should not bear arms, the pistol-wielding pope obviously radiates cool. I want to suggest two further layers of meaning which are perhaps less obvious.

First, the cartoon draws some accidental rhetorical strength from how it riffs on a popular meme template. One astronaut looks down at the earth and asks in surprise, “What, it’s all [blank filled in by memer]?” The other puts a gun to the first’s head and responds: “Always has been.” The relationship between the astronauts is ambiguous, as is our intended attitude towards them: are we to sympathize with the astronaut caught off guard, or the one about to shoot him? But the rhetorical effect is clear enough: the meme conveys in humorous fashion the violence of revelation. Discovering the truth about reality might make your brain explode, but the change will not be in reality, it will be in you. The person you were will be dead; you will be reborn. In this light, the cartoon seems no longer an either/or. Lady Liberty both will be executed for conflating liberty with license, and will give birth to a new regime that understands the difference. This latent meaning is sufficiently obvious that it is hard to understand how the cartoonist imagined his work to be anti- rather than pro-Dobbs.

Second, the posture of the Cool Pope toward Lady Liberty carries within it a latent ambiguity. Men (another thing we all know, even if we sometimes don’t admit it) are typically taller than women. But this pope appears either half a head shorter, or, more plausibly to my eye, closer to the plane of the picture. Yet the pope is also turned towards us rather than away toward her, making it difficult to understand how his gun could be pointed at her head. The entire perspective seems off, unless we instead see the gun as pointed past her ear, toward some unseen menace off to the left. A quick edit of the cartoon, translating the pope to the left while leaving his vertical position undisturbed, will show what I mean. This interpretation of the image, too, is not inappropriate, since there is much reason to protect liberty and its fruits, when these are rightly understood.

More could be said about the meaning of this particular cartoon, but I will close by emphasizing the mere fact that the cartoon means anything at all beyond what the cartoonist intended. There is an analogy—though only an analogy—between the interpretation of an image and the interpretation of a legal text. The originalist, which is to say, the liberal proceduralist, would insist that the cartoon means only what the propagandist intended for it to mean, insofar as the viewer can identify that meaning from the cartoon itself. A mechanical translation: liberty plus pregnancy plus danger plus religious authority equals theocrats attacking reproductive freedom. But while this is certainly the meaning the cartoonist wanted, it is not the cartoon’s meaning. Not because meaning is infinitely malleable or in the eye of the beholder, but because the image has a meaning, and it is not that. There is much to be salvaged from even the worst artistic abortion, just as there is much to be salvaged from even the most licentious legal regime, if you know how to look.

PUMBAA: Hey, Timon, ever wonder what those sparkly dots are up there?

TIMON: Pumbaa, I don’t wonder, I know.

PUMBAA: Oh. What are they?

TIMON: They’re fireflies. Fireflies that, uh… got stuck up on that big bluish-black thing.

PUMBAA: Oh, gee. I always thought they were balls of gas burning billions of miles away.

TIMON: Pumbaa, with you, everything’s gas.

The child hearing Pumbaa’s theory feels a moment of confusion; on hearing Timon’s response he may figure out that it’s a fart joke. The father overhearing will recognize the joke’s scientific accuracy, but may wonder: does Pumbaa know that he’s made a fart joke? does he know about modern astronomy? No: he gets the facts right without knowing it, and Timon confidently misinterprets him. Simba knows the truth: “Somebody once told me that the Great Kings of the Past are up there, watching over us.” Timon tries to dismiss the Great Kings with a flatulent onomatopoeia: “You mean a bunch of royal dead guys are watching us? Pfft!” But within a quarter of an hour Mufasa appears in the stars, confirming Simba’s version of the story. The world is more than dead matter; it calls on us, and we must respond to it.

So what are we to make of Timon and Pumbaa, these saviors of Simba’s life who also seek to reduce it to mere life? When I was barely no longer a child I thought them the movie’s hidden villains, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Simba’s Hamlet. But I see now that they are more like the Falstaff to Simba’s Prince Hal. Admittedly, the Shakespearean comparisons may seem over-enthusiastic—The Lion King [1994] is only a children’s movie, after all—but such movies constitute a distinctive genre with its own aesthetic problems, limitations, possibilities. If today’s culture accords media draped in the trappings of youth a grotesque level of undeserved prestige, the solution is not to ignore children’s stories, but to put them in their proper place. The Lion King finds its place by recognizing the need for such stories to speak in multiple registers simultaneously, a necessity it deals with in Shakespearean fashion, by dividing its story into a melodramatic “A Plot” and a comic “B Plot.” The achievement of the movie lies in large part in how masterfully it counterpoints the two.

The A Plot of The Lion King is an archetypal myth of light and dark, good and evil, life, death, and rebirth. The Sun-King Mufasa dies at the hands of his brother Scar, the Lord of Death, who forces the widow-queen Sarabi to serve him; the Sun-King is avenged by his son Simba, who frees his mother and takes his place, married to a new queen. The melodrama follows a perfect five-part chiasmus, the parts divided by the movie’s five songs, and each characterized by distinct locations and secondary characters. Each act lasts about fifteen minutes, except for the fifth which, extended by a battle sequence, goes for closer to twenty-five. We begin with “The Circle of Life,” and the idyll of Simba’s childhood at Pride Rock, home of his father Mufasa and mother Sarabi—but Scar is also there to lead Simba astray. Simba’s error is impatience: he “Just Can’t Wait to Be King.” So singing, he leads the girl-cub Nala not, as he promised, to the life-giving Watering Hole, but to its opposite, the Elephant’s Graveyard, home of the death-loving Hyenas, whom Scar maliciously enjoins to “Be Prepared.” This song takes the villains from the graveyard to the Gorge, a dry riverbed, where at the halfway point of the movie Scar kills Mufasa and the guilt-ridden Simba is driven downstream into the desert, where only Timon and Pumbaa venture, and no one lives. Timon and Pumbaa revive Simba’s spirits with “Hakuna Matata” (“it means no worries”), a song of abdication, exactly inverting Scar and the Hyenas’ earlier song of usurpation. This song brings Simba from the desert to Timon and Pumbaa’s home, the somehow adjacent Rainforest—but Nala must still show up and transform the Rainforest into the never-visited Watering Hole of childhood. “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” sets Simba back on course crawling through the underbrush, waking his father, and seeking his guidance, as he did as a child. He returns home, reconciles with his mother Sarabi, defeats Scar, and, as “The Circle of Life” is reprised, sees his own son presented atop Pride Rock.

There is no doubt that this chiasmic structure is intentional. Various details reinforce it; for example, the Hyenas chasing Simba and Nala in Act II parallels Nala chasing Timon and Pumbaa in Act IV, and the pouncing lesson in Act I parallels the past-can-hurt lesson in Act V. But such discoveries are left as an exercise for the reader. Such exercises are possible because the chiasmus shows the myth’s validity without expressly asserting it. The mad priest-hermit Rafiki does not recite scriptures, but only performs rituals; various characters offer Simba various calibers of moral instruction, but they do not venture into the metaphysical. With one exception: one third of the way into the movie, right after the misadventure in the Elephant’s Graveyard and right before Scar’s induction of the Hyenas into his regicidal conspiracy, Mufasa tells Simba about the great kings of the past, and so summons him to live his life so as one day to take his place among the stars. As Mufasa tells it, the earthly circle of life finds its proper model in the turning of the heavenly spheres, and the recognition of this resemblance is the only thing standing between order and chaos. Not a particularly complex lesson; like Plato, Mufasa knows truth to be simple. When Mufasa’s spirit speaks to Simba in Act V he has no need to impart new wisdom, but only to remind Simba what he already knows: “You are more than what you have become… Remember who you are.”

Just as Mufasa summed up the simple Platonic myth of the A Plot by telling about the kings in the stars, Timon and Pumbaa’s mocking of that tale at the movie’s two-thirds mark gave us the B Plot’s more complex Socratic puzzle. We could state the puzzle like this: Mufasa’s astrology in a way implies modern astronomy; if Musafa is the Sun-King and the great kings of the past live in the stars, then the stars must be distant suns, and death a distancing not a diminution. But if the sun is only a nearby star, then it is not the center of the cosmos; if there are other worlds out there over which entirely other kings rule, then kingship is not absolute. It is not enough to embrace responsibility, as Mufasa calls Simba to do; one must also justify the claim to authority on which one’s responsibility is premised. After all, any thinking beast can question any other’s claim, and many will have motive to question Simba’s. Note here the chief cause of the flatulence that is the signature trait of Pumbaa (as of Socrates in Aristophanes’s Clouds): the eating of hard-to-digest vegetable matter. Mufasa’s modeling of the struggle for life on the turning of the heavenly spheres may convince the carnivore, but can a warthog find it more than hot air? How can the antelope accept the lion’s reign?

So posed, the puzzle admits no easy solution. No defense of sacral kingship that hoped to find a receptive audience would begin by announcing that kings sustain themselves on the flesh of their subjects. But The Lion King does not try to argue the antelopes into letting the lions eat them; rather, taking for granted fundamental differences between the high and the low, it shows us how the relations between them can be more or less harmonious. We begin in the middle of the reign of Mufasa, who maintains the peace of Pride Rock with the help of his “majordomo” Zazu (that is, Zazu manages the household accounts, here, the livestock). The usurper Scar panders to the scavenger Hyenas but does not respect them, with the result that under their rule the kingdom turns to ash, and the Hyenas against their onetime master. Simba befriends the insectivores Timon and Pumbaa, despite their inability fully to understand his claim to authority, and so they risk their lives to restore him to the throne. Perhaps we imagine that Mufasa in his youth befriended the hornbill just as Simba does the muskrat and warthog. In any event, at the movie’s end it is Timon and Pumbaa who stand beside Simba on Pride Rock as Rafiki presents the new heir to the throne.

To focus on the friendship of Simba with Timon and Pumbaa is to explain why the latter are not much like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and The Lion King not much like Hamlet, despite superficial similarities. The delay in Simba’s taking action does not owe to the shadow that falls between desire and act, but to the gap between childhood and adulthood—and telling the child Simba not to worry was not much like escorting Hamlet to England with sealed orders for his execution. The movie has more in common with The Winter’s Tale, with its sixteen year time-skip between Acts III and IV (exit Simba, pursued by Hyenas?), and Timon and Pumbaa in some ways resemble the rustics who raise the princess Perdita in safe obscurity. But this comparison, too, only goes so far. The plot of The Winter’s Tale reignites from natural causes, when Perdita reaches a marriagable age, and so her beauty begins to attract attention. The plot of The Lion King reignites—well, we should look more closely at how we get from the time-skip “Hakuna Matata” back to Pride Rock.

The answer is, almost immediately. Act IV begins in Scar’s royal chamber, and the B Plot now develops through a sequence of short ditties, not amounting to full-fledged melodrama, sung by the secondary characters. Kept locked up by Scar as a kind of trophy, Zazu sings three songs in unknowing rebuke of “Hakuna Matata”: since “It’s a Small World After All,” Simba cannot escape his responsibility; “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” because Simba is ignoring his responsibility; and “I Have a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” a prophecy of how by taking up his responsibility Simba can restore life to a land reduced to skulls and bones. As if he heard Zazu’s songs, Simba immediately quarrels with Timon and Pumbaa about the stars and leaves to ponder his destiny. The abandoned sidekicks mourn: “In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle, the Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Simba’s absence sets the plot back in motion. Because Nala comes across Timon and Pumbaa alone rather than accompanied by a morally sleepy lion, she tries to hunt them, giving Simba the chance to rescue them, and Nala the chance to catch her long-lost friend in a rare moment of virtuous action. She thus imagines he might be capable of rescuing Pride Rock as well, and after various hesitations, he accepts the challenge. The final straw is a song from Rafiki, translated: “You’re a baboon, and I’m not.” Simba is a baboon because, not knowing he is a baboon, he takes himself too seriously. Instead of wallow in guilt, he must simply admit error. Once he does, and heads back to Pride Rock, Timon and Pumbaa follow not from fear, but (as the who’s-on-first mixup puts it) because “The monkey’s his uncle?” Simba has surpassed Timon and Pumbaa to become something like a philosopher-king. The cynic and the clown redeem themselves with two contributions to the fight. First, they distract the Hyenas by dressing Pumbaa as a roast pork and Timon in drag: “Are you achin’ | For some bacon?” Second, they break Zazu out of his cage and beat up the Hyenas by disorienting them with cultural references: “You talkin’ to me?” “They call me Mister Pig!” Which is to say that the insectivores defeat the scavengers by accepting their status as comic relief, as subordinate prey animals—and then insisting that this role has its own kind of dignity, even a kind of greatness, superior to the devouring ambition of the Hyenas who serve and then slaughter Scar.

In a nutshell, if the A Plot shows Simba remembering who he has always been, the B Plot shows Timon and Pumbaa learning that Simba is someone greater than themselves. And the intertwining of the two plots adds up to this: that to be the one true king is to acknowledge in oneself a greatness others freely recognize. Not a terribly complex moral, nor a counterintuitive one, at least not to the child for whom it is intended. Matters may be different for the father aware of the democratic age he lives in; even if he has a theoretical commitment to natural hierarchy, he has probably ceased to feel it in his bones. The adult recognizes the claim of reason, the great equalizer, which rejects the inherent superiority of lion to warthog just as much as it rejects Mufasa’s wonderful tale of the royally infused cosmos. Things may be thus in the lion’s animal kingdom, but not in our world. The characters of Timon and Pumbaa plant the seeds of this skepticism, but discourage it from sprouting before its time, or from throttling the spiritual impulse at work in the child’s imagination. Timon and Pumbaa know something, the movie tells him (and us), but not the most important thing.

*

To acknowledge natural hierarchy is to acknowledge the political importance of the circumstances of one’s conception. Simba owes a duty to the lion kingdom because he is the firstborn of Mufasa and Sarabi; the infant cat upheld in the final panoramic shot will owe that same duty because he is the child of Simba and Nala. To reject natural hierarchy, conversely, is to deny that procreation and politics have anything to say to one another. That denial is encoded in the very premise of A Bug’s Life [1998], whose hero Flik is a disaffected worker ant in love with the Princess Atta. As a child I was not acquainted with the specific entomological facts rendering this scenario impossible, but I nevertheless intuited how those facts robbed the Flik-Atta romance of any substance. Where Timon and Pumbaa had to turn away from the sight of Simba and Nala drinking one another’s eyes, it is Flik and Atta themselves who break away, embarrassed.

The point of this observation is not to denigrate A Bug’s Life, but to emphasize that its focus lies elsewhere. Its hero is not a child learning to be a king, but a poet learning to be a politician. Its plot is not set in motion by Scar’s sinister advice to his nephew Simba on how best to impress his unacknowledged betrothed Nala, but rather by the avuncular friendship between Flik and Atta’s younger sister, the child Princess Dot, who from the beginning is entranced with Flik’s witty inventions. Which we should take as a signal that this movie, too, has an interest in the difficulties that arise when telling stories to children. Although A Bug’s Life is not quite the triumph of The Lion King, it navigates the problem with sufficient tact to reward sustained attention. What such attention reveals is that the approach of the latter movie is a systematic deconstruction of the earlier movie’s pedagogy. Even its title expects that we have seen the former: a democratic “A” inverting the monarchical “The”; a friendly-creepy “Bug” placing us at the opposite end of the food chain from the awesome-terrifying “Lion”; and bare “Life” rejecting the natural hierarchy implicit in “King.” The establishing shot of the island in the dry creekbed is a miniaturized Pride Rock: verdant green, surrounded by deadly desert, with wide world beyond. And so on. The allusions are most direct in the character of the villain grasshopper-in-chief Hopper, whose strained relationship with his brother Molt parodies that of Mufasa and Scar. Hopper directly quotes Mufasa’s “circle of life” speech to justify his tyranny over the ants:

HOPPER: It’s a bug-eat-bug world out there, Princess. One of those circle-of-life kind of things. Now, let me tell you how things are supposed to work. The sun grows the food. The ants pick the food. The grasshoppers eat the food—

MOLT: And the birds eat the grasshoppers. Hey, like the one that nearly ate you, you ’member? You ’member—Oh, you should’ve seen it.

HOPPER: Molt.

MOLT: This blue jay, he has him halfway down his throat, okay? And Hopper, Hopper’s kicking and screaming, okay? And I’m scared, okay? I’m not going anywhere near, okay? Oh, come on! It’s a great story!

The deconstructive allusions adds up this: where The Lion King asks the child to see in the world a natural hierarchy not dreamt of in the grown-up’s natural philosophy, A Bug’s Life asks the grown-up to pretend, for the child’s sake, that the violence he sees in the natural world can be overcome through an illusion.

The latter movie lacks the melodramatic scaffolding of the former, and borrows its plot not from Shakespeare but from Akira Kurosawa by way of Steve Martin. Rather than dividing into A Plot and B Plot, it takes a B Plot protagonist and makes him the star of the show. At the beginning of A Bug’s Life that life is ruled by a legitimate queen impotent in the face of external tyranny. The ants of Ant Island are a conquered people, subject to the periodic visitations of their grasshopper overlords. Enter our hero Flik, a commoner distinguished mainly by his inventiveness. The movie begins with one of Flik’s inventions literally destabilizing the tribute system keeping Ant Island safely oppressed. To get rid of his disruptive presence, the queen and her privy council send him to find an unspecified form of “help.” Trying to recruit a band of warrior bugs, Flik mistakenly retains a circus troupe and brings them back to the colony. He realizes his mistake, but out of embarrassment refuses to fess up, instead talking the circus bugs into playing along. Days before the grasshoppers return, Flik’s lie is discovered, and he is banished. But when the grasshoppers arrive, their tyranny has escalated into attempted regicide, and so Princess Dot chases after Flik to convince him to return and save the day. She does so by handing him a pebble, a call-back to earlier in the movie: the point is to remind him that when cloaked in the storyteller’s veil, even a dead rock can be seen as a live seed.

So Flik returns and marshals the child-bugs to launch his grand invention, meant to defeat the grasshoppers by scaring them away. It is a mechanical bird, inspired by the tyrant Hopper’s ornithophobia. Flik’s imaginative insight is not simply that it might be possible to create a mechanical bird, but also that Hopper would fear a mechanical bird as much as he would fear a real one, because his other greatest fear is that the ants will coordinate against him: “Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one. And if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life!” What Flik has invented in his mechanical bird is Self-Government via Social Contract, with ant-queen figurehead. And so when, after having fled in terror from what he thought was a real bird, Hopper realizes that it is mere mechanism, the realization does not save his tyranny. Instead, it leads Princess Atta to announce to Hopper a new, non-predatory circle of life: “The ants pick the food, the ants eat the food, the grasshoppers leave.” Such is the power of constitutional democracy.

Except—the ensuing fight scene does not end with the ant collective defeating Hopper and his gang. Instead, after seizing Flik and running away from the fight, Hopper encounters the real robin redbreast living in the vicinity. Falsely imagining it to be another mechanism, he fails to run away, instead asking: “Are there a bunch of little girls in this one too?” The bird eats him; the circle of life cannot be entirely sloughed off. Hopper’s death is witnessed only by Flik and Atta, and the only evidence (Hopper’s antenna) is taken by the circus bugs for use as a prop in future shows, leaving Hopper to become an antling-story bogeybug. The circus bugs depart Ant Island for the same reason that the samurai leave the village at the end of Seven Samurai: they can cooperate with the commoners to defeat a tyrant, but cannot be in community with them. The new government of Ant Island is a social contract of ants, unified by their marching-single-file homogeneity. It was that homogeneity which allowed them to band together inside the mechanical bird, which only their new leaders Flik and Atta recognize was insufficient to establish their self-government. That same homogeneity also requires the departure of the circus bugs, which stands objective correlative to the circumscription of Flik’s inventiveness, and of all undemocratic excellences. Flik’s disruptive genius won the colony its freedom and won him Princess Atta, but these victories achieved, he now must retire into harmless eccentricity.

The circus bugs thus wind up in a situation almost opposite to that of the odd couple Timon and Pumbaa’s. Both groups are gluttonous cowards with little to contribute to society, redeemed only by their ability to distract the enemy as the real heroes slip by to start the battle. But in The Lion King, the clowns stand in for the anarchic instincts of Simba’s herbivore subjects, and having acknowledged Simba’s kingship and helped save Pride Rock they take their place alongside him in the closing ceremony, proving his reign to be a just one. In A Bug’s Life, the clowns are forbidden any place on Ant Island, and so must form their own counter-polity—one which, as we learn in the closing frames, is also founded on a deception. We see Heimlich, the absurdly fat caterpillar, finally emerging from his chrysalis. We momentarily hope he has been utterly transformed, but no; he is now an absurdly fat butterfly, wings far too small to lift his body from the ground. He believes that he is flying, but in fact his circus friends are carrying him.

*

The disagreement between The Lion King and A Bugs’ Life is both political and pedagogical. Much could be written about the rival political visions of Disney and Pixar, and how the older studio’s vision shifted in response to the younger: how Toy Story [1995] allegorizes the need to move on from the Cold War and the myths that sustained it (while acknowledging, as a good liberal must, that Stalin really did break the Russians’ toys); how Pocahontas [1995] seeks to re-found America in a less adversarial myth, and Tarzan [1999] and Atlantis: The Lost Empire [2001] revisit the Pocahontas theme with heightened desperation; how Monsters, Inc. [2003] satirizes the enterprise of political mythmaking and recommends a more therapeutic route forward. Much, too, could be said about the difference made by the shift from hand-drawn animation to computer-generated imagery. But my aim in this essay is not a grand history or a grand theory of children’s movies. Rather, it is to consider a few exemplars of the genre, and how they navigate the apparent need for such movies to have a political-pedagogical purpose. For in an important sense every children’s movie moralizes. The same does not go for all stories; it is either false, or trivially true, that all art is political. But when an adult tells a child a story, he is always teaching the child that the story is one worth attending to, and thus that there is something to learn from how the characters in the story behave.

Only sometimes, however—most often when the story is a beast fable—is the moral also the point. At other times it is a necessary duty to be discharged with a minimum of fuss. For example, Aladdin [1992] purports to teach something like, authenticity is the way to a girl’s heart, but this putative moral is only an excuse for a phantasmagoria of exoticism, eroticism, and comedic exuberance. The stage is quite appropriately set by the opening song “Arabian Nights” and the outrageous sales patter of the shifty-eyed Arab merchant: we may be about to buy counterfeit goods, but the price is right. The point of Aladdin, although not its moral, is unbounded desire. It is not for nothing that Jasmine is the sexiest of Disney princesses, with enormous almond eyes, translucent harem pants, and bare impossibly-narrow midriff. Jasmine is not quite like a gentleman’s club billboard on the highway, but also not quite like a Jean-Léon Gérôme painting in an art gallery. No veil of putative disinterest veils her suggestiveness, but the suggestion is of nothing in particular, there being no tangible temptress’s flesh beneath the visible folds of this temptress’s garb. Which is just as well, as far as the child is concerned; the child recognizes that something has been suggested, and does not particularly care what.

The result is that neither Aladdin’s nor Jafar’s attraction to Jasmine ever strikes the child as inexplicable. Indeed, she strikes the child’s eye much as she seems to the child to strike the eyes of the other characters—as of a piece with the gold, jewels, fountains, precious baubles that make up her palace life. Boys often shrink away from storybook romance, but “A Whole New World” avoids this fate by equating lovemaking with globetrotting adventure. Aladdin rubs his lamp in the hope that Robin Williams’s blue Genie can win Jasmine for him, but the Genie’s real accomplishment is to enlarge the horizons of Aladdin’s desire. The adult may notice the lurking genital metaphor; the child will take the Genie in a more innocent light. The Genie figures what its name suggests: genius, ingenuity, genuine invention, a creative force better befriended than enslaved. Since the Genie’s antics do triumph over the audience, perhaps this is Aladdin’s way of believing its own moral. As a child I rolled my eyes at the idea that the street urchin Aladdin’s wish for the Genie to turn him into a prince was somehow a “lie” (to name only one of several dubious plot devices). But I nevertheless found the movie entrancing, rewatching it dozens upons dozens of times, for the sake of the Genie and all the other extravagances that came with it—the treasures piled in the Cave of Wonders, Princess Jasmine flouncing in the walled garden, the magic carpet zooming from Egypt to Greece to China, and the Grand Vizier Jafar twirling his thin black beard.

A few years after Aladdin Walt Disney Studios revisited the same theme in more serious mode in The Hunchback of Notre Dame [1996]. The contrast between the two is instructive. The latter movie depends as much as the former on the exotic-erotic; it is a movie, not about Parisian “romani” (as summaries sometimes suggest), but about Parisian gypsies, symbol of an antinomian underworld. Just as we are introduced to Aladdin’s oriental fantasyland by a dubious traveling salesman, we enter the world of Hunchback at the invitation of a motley-clad gypsy king. But instead of comically delighting in its own extravagance, Hunchback, hoping to be taken seriously, dwells on its own ponderousness: our tour guide is melodically accompanied not by “Arabian Nights” but by the “Dies Irae”-sampling “The Bells of Notre Dame.” Ironically, this overweighting is the result of putting center-stage the liberating power of genius that in Aladdin had only been a show-stealing side plot. Quasimodo, the titular hunchback, is effectively the genie of the cathedral. Instead of rubbing a lamp, the person requiring genial assistance cries out “sanctuary!”

The comparison between Genie and Quasimodo is worth pressing. Like the Genie, Quasimodo is omnipotent (can outmatch anyone, can move anyone anywhere), but not autonomous. When Jafar acquires the lamp, the Genie cannot but obey him; when the magistrate Frollo arrests the gypsies, he subdues Quasimodo simply by asserting his quasi-authority as Quasimodo’s not-quite father. The difference is that in Aladdin, the Genie’s spiritually shackled omnipotence served to motivate the titular character to rise above his own self-interest, to transform himself from slave-driver of his imagination to benevolent authority over it. The Genie himself had no real character development, being from beginning to end lovable as a dog is lovable, loyal to any master who treats him well, and desirous of human freedom without any particular understanding of it. Taking Quasimodo as the main character requires him to become his own Aladdin. His struggle becomes the artist’s struggle for spiritual autonomy—hence his carving of miniatures, and his internal monologues expressed as conversations with gargoyles he could have sculpted in his own image. Quasimodo’s non-relationship with the gypsy dancer Esmeralda is a stereotypical portrayal of art as sublimated desire. The problem with this portrayal is not that it is stereotyped, but that it is unintelligible to an audience of children who have yet to learn how utterly erotic desire differs from the desire for food and toys.

To make the genie Quasimodo the main character all but erases the story’s romance: Phoebus is forgettable, and Esmeralda’s allure is botched by the animators’ misguided decision to airbrush blotchy form-revealing shadows onto her outfit (plainly intended to one-up the sexiness of Jasmine from a few years earlier). The villain, conversely, becomes even more important as the protagonist’s only external foil. Here Hunchback encounters further difficulties, because Frollo’s deviations from the template set by Jafar are similarly unintelligible to the movie’s intended audience. Like Jafar, Frollo wants the girl, and failing that wants to humiliate her; like Jafar, Frollo wants to use the boy, and does so by impersonating an absent father. But unlike Jafar, Frollo has a conscience, albeit a malformed one. The movie externalizes Frollo’s conscience regarding Quasimodo by dividing him in two: where in Hugo’s novel Frollo was the archdeacon of the cathedral, in the movie he becomes a secular magistrate who shares with an unnamed archdeacon his quasi-paternal role. But the movie fails to externalize Frollo’s conscience regarding Esmeralda. Instead, his lust and his love of justice clash internally in his solo “Hellfire,” where he imaginatively transforms the dancer into a succubus so that he can damn her to hell. The problem here, again, is not that his madonna-whore complex is a stereotype, but that it is not a complex children readily understand. Children’s gluttony and avarice have not prepared them for the intensity of lust, nor for the ways in which it can drive a bad conscience into greater evil than ever perpetrated by blithe amorality.

In Aladdin, the beard-twirling villain Jafar seeks to conquer the oriental world. In Hunchback, the self-hating magistrate Frollo seeks to destroy the gypsy underworld. Herein lies a third failure of the latter movie: it lacks the courage to depict the gypsies’ amorality for what it is. The worst the gypsies do is threaten to hang Quasimodo and Phoebus, but the audience never really fears they will go through with it; after all, the Gypsy King is the narrator who showed us these heroes in the first place. Among the movie’s many deviations from Hugo’s novel, it transforms Quasimodo from a gypsy changeling into a gypsy orphan. To show that the gypsies’ antinomian eros run amok was capable of such monstrosities as kidnapping and child abandonment would do much to explain Frollo’s hatred of it—but it would also upset the movie’s whole apple-cart. To a child’s eyes, child abandonment is the greatest crime imaginable. The nineteenth century novel sought to recharacterize this fact of child psychology as a symptom of imaginative immaturity, but even granting that premise, it merely demonstrates that the story of Hunchback is not a story for children. Perhaps the movie could have succeeded if it had instead pitched itself to young adults, the more proper audience for its particular vein of romantic sensibility. Because it insisted on remaining a children’s movie, it failed.

*

Rewatching The Lion King and A Bug’s Life, the father remembers that political morality entails sexual morality: natural hierarchy depends on a genuine match between king and consort; constitutional democracy depends on the suppression of genius and, ultimately, of all natural difference. But being beast fables, these movies did not look deeply into what sexual morality involves. Rewatching Aladdin and Hunchback, the adult learns how there are inherent limits to a children’s movie’s exploration of that theme. Aladdin brings its point home only by celebrating erotic desire while ignoring entirely the need to constrain it within political bounds; Hunchback founders on its failure to show its child audience what is really at stake when such boundaries are called into question. What, then, can a children’s movie manage to say here?

One hint can be found in the failed plot device of Aladdin’s guilt at “lying” to Jasmine about being a prince. I stand by my childhood incredulity. Aladdin wished to be a prince, not a street rat disguised as a prince, and the failure of that wish is at odds not only with the Genie’s particular promises about his power, but also animation’s general premise that anything can become anything else, there being nothing “beneath” the living colors on the screen. But the failure was in implementation, not design. Children do understand both that lying is wrong and that lies can seem the only way to obtain what we greatly desire; children’s movies are as good a place as any to learn that that the temptation is greatest when what we desire is another person. The decade or two after Aladdin’s release refined and ultimately routinized the trope of the liar who falls in love: in Hercules [1997] the femme fatale Meg is recruited to ensnare the title character, then falls in love with him; Dmitri in Anastasia [1997] teaches the heroine to lie about being a princess, then realizes she is one; Naveen in The Princess and the Frog [2009] conceals from Tiana that he’s broke, then blames her for dressing up as a princess at a costume ball. These movies also all double down on Aladdin’s evil sorcerer villain, turning him from a run-of-the-mill overambitious advisor into some sort of necromancer (Hades, Rasputin, the Shadow Man). Hercules tells us the meaning of this conjunction: if Meg’s undeath amounts to her coming from the wrong side of the tracks, then, conversely, the shackles of societal expectations are a kind of death, one that love can render irrelevant only by looking it square in the face.

But not all facts relevant to whether two people fall in love are merely social in origin. Children may be ignorant of the full meaning of sexual difference, but do not doubt that it is natural, and even perceive however dimly that it has something to do with natality. The liar-in-love plot device can portray various differences between men and women, but not the one at the center of The Lion King and occluded in A Bug’s Life: that the king bears the crown and the queen its heir. The movie that best brings together these two strands, though without quite belonging to either, is Mulan [1998]. This movie’s opening song echoes almost word-for-word the thought just attributed to The Lion King, only no longer limited to royalty: “We all must serve our Emperor who guards us from the Huns | A man by bearing arms, a girl by bearing sons.” The movie’s plot, something like the story of Joan of Arc crossed with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, then works out the degree to which this ideal can be honestly popularized.

Unlike The Lion King, Mulan has only a single narrative arc. It is not concerned with aristoi and demos, each working out its own nature and thereby discovering its relationship to the other; instead, it considers relations between women and men, how they begin by trying to live up to external ideals but must in the end understand themselves through one another. This arc unfolds melodramatically, but only for the first half. Mulan’s first song, “Honor to Us All,” comes right after the ominous prologue showing that the Huns have invaded China. It tells us that civilization desires cultured women, women who know all the domestic arts, so as to pass the culture on to the next generation. Only three minutes later, we hear “Reflection,” Mulan’s lament at her inability to live up to this ideal. Even this woman, naturally uncultured, wants to cultivate her own desirability. As if in answer to her plea, Mulan hears the levy proclamation, runs away from home, changes her name to Ping, dresses as a man, and joins the army. It is not until almost halfway into the movie that we hear the commanding officer Li Shang lead the conscripts in the rousing chorus of male ideals: “I’ll Make A Man Out Of You.” The imagery here is all natural: typhoons, fires, moons. While this song is sung we see Mulan almost flunk out of the army, then, as the song progresses, prove herself a competent soldier. After Li Shang has made a man out of Mulan the conscripts march off to war, and sing about their longing for “A Girl Worth Fighting For.” Society wants natural men; each man wants a woman who fits his own idiosyncratic natural preferences.

Then the melodrama stops, a silence emphasized by the abrupt ending of the fourth song, when at the beginning of Act III the marching conscripts reach the mountain battlefield too late. It is as if the sight of the scattered corpses proves the vanity of a song about war bringing men and women together. While the conscript army departs the battlefield, Mulan sets a doll on the ground beside an abandoned ceremonial sword, a pictogram showing how men can be made into mute weapons and women into mute figurines. Soon enough this same failure comes for Mulan; her only-apparent success in battle against the Huns leads immediately to her being injured, unmasked as a woman, and abandoned, left as the only witness to the Hun leader Shan Yu clawing his way out of the snow and pressing onward to the Imperial City. There, the scene of Act IV, Mulan confronts the Huns once again, this time to greater success. Act IV has no diegetic music, but does include a non-diegetic reprise of the “Be A Man” chorus to the movie’s most memorable song, overlaid on this act’s defining image: Mulan, Li Shang, and the conscript soldiers sneaking into the palace complex, not by battering down the doors, but by using women’s scarves to climb over the walls. The conscript soldiers are dressed in drag about as convincing as Timon’s in The Lion King, while Mulan is for the first time since Act I dressed as a proper woman, and Li Shang remains in military uniform. In the epilogue, Li Shang returns Mulan’s father’s helmet to her, which by now means returning her reflection to her, letting her see herself as someone someone else desires. We do not see the marriage proposal the plot’s logic dictates will follow.

In sum, Act I considers woman in her habitat, the home, in ideal and in desire; Act II does the same for man in his habitat, the army encampment; Act III shows how on the mountaintop the Huns cannot be defeated, but only hidden under snow; and Act IV shows how in the Imperial City, all the various trappings of civilization can be wielded to send them back into the wilderness where they belong. Apart from the change in location, the driving factor of the second battle’s different outcome is Mulan’s attire. Act III revealed Mulan’s male disguise to be a failure, while Act IV reveals her putting on a woman’s guise to be a success. Unlike the grotesque cross-dressing of the other conscript soldiers, Mulan’s changes are a kind of fairy-tale magic. Because there is nothing to her animated body apart from her appearance, Act III really does turn her into a man, just like her miniature dragon sidekick really is a brass sculpture come to life (although Mulan’s inescapable female voice serves as reminder that the magic cannot last forever). Like Aladdin’s lamp, the serpentine Mushu is a bawdy visual pun in a movie full of such puns—pole-climbing, battering ram, fireworks. But unlike Aladdin with its harem dancers, the animation of Mulan never brings desire out into the open. The proper place of sexual difference, this movie teaches, is behind the veil of shifting images we call civilization, the means by which human reason tames human sexuality. The absence of that veil leads to the grim, grey world of the Huns, whose violent androgyny opposes the civilized veiling of sexual difference much as the Hyenas’ scavenging opposed the circle of life.

That Mulan is about the virtue of civilized veils is, at least, the best gloss it can be given. Certain aspects of the film undermine it, particularly the song “Reflection,” whose cultural afterlife has been as an anthem for the gender-confused. The song’s susceptibility to such treatment results from its weak lyrics, although we should acknowledge that its task is among the most melodramatically difficult. As the accompanying imagery confirms, the song is meant to show us the young Mulan’s inability to move from ideal role to real relationship. But the song fails in that degree of tact required to make it both initially appealing and ultimately unsatisfying. A perhaps related defect is the song’s awkward timing, only a few minutes after “Honor to Us All,” prematurely ending the domestic Act I. Additional nits can be picked with the decision to make Act IV’s only song a non-diegetic reprise of “Be A Man”; why not a new song to represent civilization’s achieved synthesis of the male and female principles? But unlike the fundamental defects of Hunchback, the flaws of Mulan are forgivable; their correction would require only targeted adjustments, not wholesale revision.

*

I have suggested that Mulan weaves together the threads of The Lion King and Aladdin: Aladdin, not Hunchback, because Mulan does not take itself too seriously. Its China is a fairytale China; the movie ends with the Hua family’s sacred ancestor pavilion hosting a raucous family reunion of stereotyped spirits. An animated children’s movie does exist that takes up where Hunchback leaves off, though its existence can seem a happy accident. The Prince of Egypt [1998] does not much resemble other Dreamworks productions, and apparently owes its existence to a confluence of idiosyncratic Hollywood impulses (respect for blockbusters of decades past; latent ethnocentrism; Jeffrey Katzenberg’s desire to prove Dreamworks could do what Disney couldn’t). Whatever the reason, this film’s retelling of the Exodus story also amounts to the most honest animated political philosophy on offer, which is to say that it is less philosophy than religion. The Prince of Egypt agrees with The Lion King that we are who we are born to be, with Mulan that all depends on proper relations between the sexes, and with A Bug’s Life that revolution is a prerequisite to justice. It adds that truth is simple.

For those who found disproportionate this essay’s opening discussion of The Lion King in terms of Shakespeare and Plato, an antiparallel discomfort may accompany the present discussion of The Prince of Egypt in terms of its animated contemporaries. It is, after all, a relatively faithful retelling of a three-thousand-year-old religious narrative, and many of its elaborations of that narrative are borrowed from Charlton Heston; what would be the point of juxtaposing its plot with stories of more recent vintage? The answer differs for the two movie interlocutors I will focus on. The comparison to Hunchback is justified by The Prince of Egypt’s portrayal of Moses’s wife Zipporah, which owes almost nothing to previous tellings, and which makes the Exodus story less about slavery in general than about sexual subjugation in particular. As for The Lion King, we saw already how that movie retells the Osiris myth; by commenting on that retelling, The Prince of Egypt shows how Exodus itself can be construed as a commentary on that myth.

The Prince of Egypt begins much like The Lion King: after a musical montage in which a child becomes a prince, we see the prince half-grown demonstrate his immaturity and get a lecture from the king, and an adventure with a love interest and water. But in The Prince of Egypt these all happen in Act I (we gradually realize that this movie has a four-act rather than five-act structure): Moses’s cavorts with his apparent brother Ramesses with reckless abandon; the pharaoh Seti scolds Moses, but then takes his advice to give Ramesses greater responsibility; in return Ramesses “gifts” to him the captured slave-girl Zipporah; she fights back, Moses lets go the rope binding her, and she falls into a fountain, a well-crafted Hollywood meet-cute. Zipporah is dressed in a provocative harem outfit, reminiscent of Jasmine or Esmeralda, but her hostility makes evident that the costume was forced on her. We are intended to desire her, but not to desire her like this. Moses understands as much; he accepts the “gift” reluctantly, and when he later sees her escaping, he lets her go rather than call the guards. That decision sets off a series of revelations, culminating in Seti’s admission to Moses—in a dark allusion to Mufasa’s “kings in the stars” speech—that “the greater good” of the unbroken line of pharaohs required the massacre of the Hebrews. The broken civilization of Egypt does not draw a ceremonial veil over barbaric impulses, but rather forces women into sexual service and then kills their children.

Act II sees Moses flee into the desert, which is to say, away from a broken civilization toward the possibility of rebirth. His reason for flight resembles that of Simba—guilt over having committed murder. But, of course, Moses really is guilty, having actually killed an Egyptian overseer in outrage at his brutality. The other difference is that Moses’s flight takes place a quarter of the way into the film, rather than half. The Lion King’s circle of life centers on death: the old king must die for the new to reign, and the new king must learn that he is not guilty of his father’s death while nevertheless taking responsibility for his legacy. Simba spends time with Timon and Pumbaa because he must grow up with them in order to rule over them well. Moses’s exile serves a different purpose: he must repent of his violent Egyptian ways and learn what a peaceful and just society might look like. He reunites with a more fully clothed but still-attractive Zipporah, integrates into Midian pastoral life, and has two sons. The midpoint comes when Moses encounters the burning bush and, rather than a deep Mufasan voice-of-God, hears the divine word spoken in his own voice. In this film’s theology God is not so much in the stars above as in the moral law within. Or, perhaps, aninomian grace, the anarchic lifeworld of the Midianites a more serious version of Timon and Pumbaa’s “Hakuna Matata.” Moses has spent enough time with them to learn their ways, and is ready to receive his mission of bringing the rest of the Hebrews across the desert to join them.

Moses’s return across the desert at the beginning of Act III is thus almost the opposite of Simba’s: he comes not to claim a crown, but to talk another into acknowledging the limits on his royal authority. Seti having died, Moses has no stepfather figure to duel against, but only his adopted brother Ramesses. Here enters this film’s other great deviation from the precedent of The Ten Commandments: rather than a one-dimensional malevolent schemer who would rather Moses had never come back, this Ramesses has grown into the man Moses pushed him to be before he ran away. He has taken Seti’s teaching to heart, and aspires above all to be a good Pharaoh. Remembering Moses’s friendship toward him, he eagerly celebrates his return, hoping the two can be brothers once again. His tragedy is that he cannot accept that Seti’s teaching and the young Moses’s friendship were fatally flawed; true justice and true fraternity require more than he is willing to give. The duelling duet “Let My People Go” shows us Ramesses’s refusal, and how it drives him gradually deeper into obstinate rebellion against the true God. Act III then ends as had Act I, in the hieroglyph chamber, where Moses had confronted Seti. Now, just before the Tenth Plague descends, Moses meets Ramesses’s son, and puts to Ramesses a choice between accepting his own child’s death and giving up his claim to own the lives of the Hebrews. Ramesses refuses the choice, and will lose both son and slaves.

The Lion King had ended, after the final battle with Scar, in a brief coda showing that life has come full circle: once again, Rafiki anoints a lion cub heir to the throne. The Prince of Egypt rejects that cycle. Its prologue had shown the baby Moses providentially crossing the water to the safety of the pharaoh’s palace; its Act IV piles miracle atop miracle—angel of death, pillar of fire, parting of the waters—ending in Moses leading all the Israelites across the Red Sea, and the Red Sea swallowing up pharaoh’s chariots and charioteers. Then, in the final shot, Moses brings down the tablets from Mount Sinai, with all the Hebrew hosts encamped in the desert before him. What is most distinctive about this Act IV is its lack of narrative tension; the characters of Moses and Ramesses have reached their final development, and all that remains is for Moses to practice his religion and Ramesses to practice his resentment. The tempo is not that of drama, but that of liturgy. In a way (though they could not have influenced one another) The Prince of Egypt has the structure of Mulan, only inverted. Mulan’s four acts showed woman, man, their barbaric conflict, and the need for civilization to harmonize them; the four acts of The Prince of Egypt show the tyrant’s domination, the Lord’s freedom, the tyrant’s refusal to grant that freedom to his subjects, and the overwhelming power of the Lord to bring about that freedom with or without the tyrant’s cooperation.

Where The Lion King’s B Plot was central to its genius, The Prince of Egypt has no B Plot to speak of, a difference I attribute to the former movie being philosophical, the latter religious. To say that The Prince of Egypt is a religious movie is not only to say that it is based on a religious text, but also to say that it has no hidden teaching, no point that will go over a child’s head. A child struggles to understand Frollo’s guilty lust, but easily recognizes Ramesses’s fatal mixture of love and stubborn pride. An atheist might say that this total exotericism makes it a childish movie, and I could concede at least that it is for children. The Prince of Egypt simplifies the Exodus narrative as well as embellishing it—for example, in its omission of the golden calf, which marks it as lacking not just a philosophy, but also a politics. At most, it has an anti-politics. It gestures at the true-enough thought that the divine law should rule, but says nothing about what that rule looks like, save for the single unwritten commandment “thou shalt not enslave.”

The limitation is not necessarily a flaw, so long as we do not take the movie for something other than it is. I do believe the achievement of The Prince of Egypt to be sufficiently great that such a mistake seems a live danger. There is a sort of genius thinking itself out here, and to underestimate that genius would be as great an error as to overstate it. I cannot imagine making the same mistake about any more recent children’s movie, which I take to mean that the age of animated political philosophy is now behind us. More recent fare does continue to moralize, but it seems simply to deliver its morals, rather than to think them through. Perhaps I am wrong here—perhaps I am simply too unsympathetic to the projects of more recent filmmakers—but even if so, it suggests that those projects are quite unlike the projects of the movies dwelt on in this essay. In any event, I cannot help but see these four movies as a kind of cycle, limning the four political philosophies (or anti-political anti-philosophies) that were live options in the 1990s (and perhaps remain so): The Lion King is the best animated expression of natural hierarchy; A Bug’s Life, artificial democracy; Mulan, civilized sexuality; and The Prince of Egypt, religious liberty.

One year later Stephen Crane published “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” [1898], in which the Texan receives his eulogy shortly before interment. Marshal Jack Potter returns to his frontier town with a bride, whose presence prevents the town drunk Scratchy Wilson, last holdout of the old codes, from having the ritual confrontation with the law he has been waiting for. The Texan has been domesticated; Wilson drops his gun and walks away, leaving “funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand.” As Frederick Jackson Turner announced at the World’s Columbian Exposition five years earlier, the American frontier was closed.

But then on the morning of January 10, 1901, the Lucas Gusher blew in at Spindletop, near Beaumont, and a column of oil rose a hundred and fifty feet above the derrick. The frontier reopened in a different direction: the funnel-shaped tracks in the sand turned out to have been traced over three hundred million years of compressed seafloor. The heroic age of Texas would not return, but the next century of development would reshape what that heroic age meant. This essay is about result of that reshaping. The domesticated Texan did not produce novelists like George Eliot and Henry James, or even Bram Stoker and Stephen Crane, yet the state is not without a literature of its own; to understand it we must first understand the received myth of Texas, and the reality, and how they intertwine.

*

The myth of Texas is known to every Texas schoolchild; after all, Texas law since 1918 has mandated the teaching of Texas history. The present author took a unit on the topic in elementary school, and a full year in seventh grade. As for the reality, it owes its existence to the myth, and not only in that the story of the Alamo inspired the Texas Revolution to victory. Texas from its inception has been the subject of claims whose reach far exceeded their grasp. The French planted a flag and left; the Spanish built a few missions near San Antonio and claimed an unbounded wedge of a continent. Before the first Anglo-Saxon lived in Texas there were men who—whether or not they thought themselves Texan—acted as though they were. The word filibuster descends from filibustero, itself from the Dutch vrijbuiter, which is the English word “freebooter” said with a funny accent. In its original sense (from which the legislative version is derived) “filibuster” means an unauthorized military effort to conquer new territory. The Gutiérrez-Magee expedition of 1812, for example, was a self-commissioned force of American and Mexican men setting out from Louisiana to liberate Texas from Spain, betting their lives on land claims that did not yet exist.

Whenever Americans came to Texas in the first half of the nineteenth century, the villain of Texas history Antonio López de Santa Anna soon arrived to fight them, lose, and sign away what he did not own. The pattern begins in 1813, when Santa Anna was nineteen years old. He had marched north as a young officer of the army of New Spain to help put down the filibuster; after doing so at the Battle of Medina he found himself stationed in sleepy San Antonio, playing cards. He lost heavily. He forged the signatures of his superior officers to withdraw the necessary pesos from the company purse, and when caught escaped punishment by arguing that the payments had been necessary to maintain the honor of the regiment. Such would be his approach to life for the next forty years, which Mexican history recognizes as the Age of Santa Anna.

Santa Anna styled himself the Napoleon of the West, and not inaccurately: he shared with his idol a military genius marred by repeated overreach, and his career followed the same trajectory of brilliant early campaigns, coronation as dictator, exile and improbable return and second exile. (Santa Anna outdid Napoleon through a third exile after a second return.) Also like Napoleon, Santa Anna played a pivotal role in America’s acquisition of a third of its land empire, though in his case the transfer took place through war rather than sale. The irony is that this archetypal caudillo was also something of a freebooting Texan in character—indeed, not entirely dissimilar to the American president Andrew Jackson, who also has an age named after him. Jackson was not Texan (there wasn’t yet any such thing) but like many future Texans he hailed from Tennessee, and was what David Hackett Fischer would call a Borderer [Albion’s Seed, 1989], and a Borderer would call an American. Mexico is also, of course, part of the Americas, but everyone knows the difference.

The Americans resembled the Mexicans in multiple ways, including their honor culture and capacity for violence. But there were also important racial-cultural differences between the two groups. For example, Santa Anna’s brazen disregard for social norms was not typical—indeed, it was part of the exceptional genius that led him to dominate Mexico for decades. More fundamentally, the Mexican creole elites carried over the civil law and inquisitorial tradition; were divided between Catholics and Freemasons; and expected the mestizo and indio populace to them without question. The Spanish, after all, had been administrative colonialists, used to replacing the top of the native hierarchy and otherwise leaving its civic order intact. Whereas the Americans were settler colonialists, with a particular attachment to their own independence: they moved into underpopulated land, brought it into cultivation, and as soon as the lands around began to fill up they would move further out on the frontier. They believed in common law, property rights, and trial by a jury of one’s peers; adhered to the lowest of low churches; and would obey no authority they did not respect.

*

It was perhaps inevitable that Americans would enter Texas and there clash with the Mexicans. Perhaps less inevitably, the Mexicans invited them in. They did so in response to the threat of the Comanches—seen by both Mexicans and Americans as mere savages, but in fact a steppe empire dominating the Southern Plains for two centuries, with territorial boundaries, trade networks, diplomatic relations, and a military capability that for a time no European power could match. The Spanish approached the Comanche problem as one of administration, but soon found that they could not corral into haciendas a people with no interest in being administered and the ability to do otherwise. After Mexican independence, the new nation’s strategy was to invite American settlers to serve as a buffer, granting empresario contracts on condition that settlers learn Spanish and convert to Catholicism. The central authority never took these conditions seriously, and was content for the now-Texans to be legally Mexican but culturally American so long as their presence stabilized the northern frontier. The Connecticut-born entrepreneur Moses Austin secured the first empresario grant. He died before seeing the promised land, but his son Stephen F. Austin inherited the grant and spent the next decade doing the unromantic work of institutional creation.

From this empresario beginning the Anglo-Texan displayed the habits of what Oswald Spengler would name Faustian man [The Decline of the West, 1918], always leveraging his future against his present in an effort to spread into infinity. Creditors knocking on an Appalachian bankrupt’s cabin door would find a note reading “GTT,” gone to Texas. The Anglo-Texan approach to the Comanche problem—the problem that had justified the whole arrangement—was decentralized and entrepreneurial. The Rangers were founded in 1823 not as a professional army but as a volunteer force of men who elected their own officers and supplied their own horses. Eventually the 1847 Walker Colt revolver, designed specifically for mounted combat on Comanche terms, would decisively shift the military balance and ensure Ranger victory. But the Indian Wars began decades before the Colt revolver was invented, when the Comanche’s rapid-fire hit-and-run archery tactics were more than a match for the colonists’ slow-reloading rifles. The Anglo-Texans stuck it out, going deeper and deeper into blood-debt, because they were confident that the idea of Texas could call into being the means to defend it.

The Mexican authorities could not understand this willingness on the Anglo-Texans’ part, nor could they anticipate what its consequences would be. Otherwise they never would have invited in a population that descended from different ancestors, spoke a different language, and adhered to a different religion and a different legal tradition. The inevitable frictions resulting from that invitation were compounded in the early 1830s by upheavals within Mexico itself, and matters came to a head in 1835, when Anglo-Texas responded to Santa Anna’s unilateral constitutional reforms in a way typical of peripheral Mexican states: it issued a pronunciamento, a statement of grievances reciting constitutional violations by the central authority. Other states had done likewise; Zacatecas was in open rebellion. The understood dynamic was that enough pronunciamentos would signal to the central authority that it had overreached, and it would back down without bloodshed. But the Anglo-Texan pronunciamento had an American tang to it; it was written in Spanish, but the signatories had surnames like “Archer” and “Barnett.”

So Santa Anna imprisoned Stephen F. Austin, who had come to Mexico City to discuss potential resolutions to the dispute; then violently suppressed the Zacatecas rebels; then issued the December 1835 Declaration of Tornel, proclaiming the legally resident Texans to be filibusters and hostis humani generis. He was motivated by his half-insight into the Anglo-Texan mentality: he correctly suspected them of desiring independence from Mexico despite their Mexican constitutional rhetoric, and incorrectly assumed that a show of brutality would cow them into submission. He marched north with six thousand men and lay siege to the Alamo around the time the Anglo-Texan leadership were gathering in Bexar to consider their response. He took the Alamo in early March 1836, executing its defenders as land-pirates; around the same time, the Anglo-Texans declared independence. The exact order of events perhaps matters for law, but not for myth: the story immediately became and ever since has been that independence was a response to Santa Anna’s murderous tyranny. Then Sam Houston, Texas’s George Washington, led Santa Anna’s army on a wild goose chase deep into south-east Texas, only to turn around on April 21 and surprise the Mexicans at the Battle of San Jacinto, winning the day in a matter of minutes and capturing Santa Anna as he tried to flee in a woman’s dress.

*

In short, Texas was born out of a blunder of staggering proportion: the dictator of a nation of seven million rode north with only a small force to an unruly border province of thirty-five thousand, and allowed himself to be taken prisoner. It is as if Xerxes had decided to personally lead the invasion of Greece and gotten himself captured at Plataea. Not often does so much history hinge on the deeds of so few men. Of course, the real-life Xerxes, who was not captured at Plataea, still did not conquer Greece, suggesting there are limits to the significance of any one man’s folly. But Santa Anna’s humiliating capture had lasting consequences. The Anglo-Texans would not let him go until he signed the Treaties of Velasco, acknowledging an independent Texas extending to the Rio Grande. That this was a far greater expanse than the land the Anglo-Texans actually occupied they saw as no more a defect than the fact that Mexico’s prior claim to Texas had been hollow until Anglo-Texan settlers began defending it. Mexico repudiated the Treaties almost immediately, arguing duress, though it is unclear why there is an obligation to release a generalíssimo captured on the field of battle before negotiating with him. The Mexicans also gestured at Santa Anna’s lack of constitutional authority to cede territory, thus conceding the Texans’ point that he was a tyrant.

Whatever the legal niceties, the claim for Texas independence now existed as a political fact—as it would not, or at least not in the same form, if Santa Anna had better handled the Anglo-Texas problem. The most prudent course of action might have been simply to cut Texas loose with the border drawn where it always had been, at the Nueces. After all, once the Anglo-Texans began legally settling in east Texas they were always going to draw it closer and closer into the cultural and political orbit of the American South. The Anglo-Texans had brought their slaves with them, as they brought their legal customs and their religion, though all three were strictly speaking against Mexican law. (Mexico preferred its own form of coerced labor, the peonage system, which Congress in 1867 used its Thirteenth Amendment authority to outlaw.) Although not yet an American state, Texas was part of the system of American slavery. And because Santa Anna signed the Treaties of Velasco, that meant not just what would become the Texas Triangle, but all of Greater Texas.

Under ordinary conditions, slavery does not pay its own capital costs. Slaves taken in wars are valuable because already grown, but slaves usually do not generate enough surplus to warrant encouraging them to reproduce. The American South was the exception, and Texas the frontier edge of the exception, because two conditions converged there. First, technology: the cotton gin and the spinning mill made unskilled field labor unusually valuable, and firearms made the coercive apparatus unusually affordable, so long as the enslaved population remained a minority within a broader social order. Second, cultural geography: the open frontier meant that free laborers—especially the Scots-Irish Borderers who constituted much of the South’s white population—would not submit to agricultural labor at any price the planters could afford, because a man could simply move west and claim his own land. The result was the one historical case in which a slave population was reliably self-reproducing: not because slavery is generally efficient, but because unusual conditions made the alternative unworkable.

Since cotton plantations used up the soil, the survival of the system depended on outward expansion, a fact that dominated American politics from the 1830s through the Civil War. Understanding their targets primarily as names on a map, Southerners dreamed of filibusters establishing a Golden Circle—Cuba annexed, Mexico subordinated, a tropical slave republic stretching from the Chesapeake to the Yucatán. When they heard of an independent Republic of Texas with a claim running as far west as Santa Fe, they expanded the imagined Golden Circle into a land empire stretching out to the Pacific. What they did not realize was that Texas, and in fact east Texas, was the end of the line: the land further west grew arid and unable to support Carolina-style cotton agriculture. Independent Texas’s sole attempt at westward expansion, the disastrous 1841 Santa Fe Expedition, bore no fruit beyond mounting debts both because the terrain was hostile, and because New Mexico was already home to a centuries-old colony loyal to Mexico. The solution was annexation by the United States of America—a key plank in James K. Polk’s 1844 presidential platform—and the subsequent assertion of its leveraged claim to Greater Texas with the full force of the American military. The United States of Mexico, which had never recognized Texan independence, treated annexation as an act of war, and Polk obligingly sent troops to the disputed territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande.

*

The Mexican-American War was a lopsided fight in more ways than one. The population of America was about three times that of Mexico, and the former was far more industrialized, with a well-trained officer corps longing to wet its beak (most of the famous Civil War generals first saw battle here). The war began in April 1846 and within a year and a half American forces had captured Mexico City. Santa Anna, who had been in exile, had returned once more to power to lead the Mexican army, and once again lost the day. Many in the Polk administration wanted to annex all of Mexico, but in the event the war concluded with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which America acquired the entire Southwest from Texas to California, paying for the acquisition partly in cash, partly in assumption of debts owed by Mexico to American citizens as a result of the war itself. The new territory was far more extensive than had been claimed by Greater Texas, and amounted to roughly a third of Mexico’s territory, but only a tiny fraction of the Mexican population—most of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado were inhabited only by natives who had never recognized Mexican sovereignty.

Two years later came the Compromise of 1850, when the logic of leveraged debt became fully visible. The Mexican Cession had reopened the question that the Missouri Compromise had temporarily closed: would the new territories be slave or free? The South said that the Constitution protected slave property in all territories; the North said that Congress could exclude slavery from any territory it pleased; California wanted immediate admission as a free state; and Texas threatened to enforce by arms its Rio Grande claim all the way to Santa Fe—territory the federal government regarded as part of the New Mexico acquisition. The Compromise addressed all of these disputes at once. As to Texas’s boundaries, they were redrawn in exchange for a $10 million payment that Texas used to retire the Republic’s debts. Border squabbles across the Rio Grande would continue for the next half-century, but Texas had now freed itself of Mexican empire.

A decade later the Civil War arrived, and Texas seceded along with the rest of the cotton South. But Texas’s experience of that war was unlike that of other Southern states, for it was too far west and too thinly populated to serve as a major theater of operations. Texas contributed men and materiel—Hood’s Texas Brigade earned a fearsome reputation in the Army of Northern Virginia—but the decisive fighting happened elsewhere, in places most Texans had left behind a generation earlier. The last Civil War land engagement was fought at Palmito Ranch, near Brownsville, on May 13, 1865, a full month after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and nearly a month after Lincoln’s assassination. News of the Confederate surrender not yet having reached the Rio Grande, the Confederate forces won a meaningless victory. Emancipation would not reach Galveston until June 19. Reconstruction, that war of occupation that followed the war of conquest, roiled Texas much as it did the rest of the South, but with similarly muted impact on the state’s self-conception.

Texas had more pressing concerns—and a perspective from which the presence of occupying Union troops was not altogether an evil thing. Even as the Civil War and Reconstruction raged in the East, the Indian Wars continued in the West. The frontier counties that sent men east to fight for the Confederacy were simultaneously losing women and children to Comanche raids, and the federal troops who arrived after Appomattox to enforce Reconstruction also took up the Indian Wars where the Rangers had left off. The Indian Wars and Reconstruction ended around the same time. Quanah Parker, the last principal chief of the Comanches and himself half-Anglo—his mother Cynthia Ann Parker had been captured as a child in the Fort Parker raid of 1836, the same year as the Alamo—surrendered in 1875 after the systematic slaughter of the buffalo made continued resistance a matter not of courage but of starvation. And the Compromise of 1877 saw federal troops withdraw from the entire South, allowing white “Redeemers” to take control.

Southern Redeemers were generally nostalgic for the antebellum South, but in Texas, still in many ways a frontier state, there was less of an antebellum world to look back toward. Instead, the Indian threat quelled though not yet entirely abolished, the 1870s and 1880s were the time of the great cattle drives, and of that figure of mounted freedom who briefly gave Anglo-Texas its most exportable myth. The vast majority of Texans were never cowboys, but it is true that by the time of the cowboy the Texans had undergone something like an ethnogenesis. They were no longer merely transplanted Borderers, any more than the Afrikaaners remained transplanted Dutch: the experience of self-commissioned statehood and decades of warfare on the Comanchería had forged them into a distinct people.

*

The distinctness of the Texan way of life had at its core a vision of property. Four competing conceptions of ownership had contended for mastery in Texas. The Golden Circle’s was property in men: the slaveholder’s claim to own another human being as chattel, on which the Confederacy had staked its existence on and lost. The Comanche’s was property in animals: horses above all, raided and traded and bred as the currency of Plains power, the basis of an economy that collapsed when the buffalo were exterminated. The Mexican’s was property in office: the hacienda system in which dominion over land was inherently political, flowing downward from the sovereign through the alcalde to the peón. But the Borderer’s vision of property was property in land: the conviction that a man who occupied a piece of ground, fenced it, improved it, and defended it thereby acquired a right anterior to any government’s say-so.

The Borderer’s vision was the vision that survived. The subsequent decades saw the advent of its great symbol, barbed wire. Patented by Joseph Glidden in 1874 and arriving in Texas almost immediately, barbed wire did what no prior technology could: it allowed a single man to enclose vast tracts of open range at trivial cost. Barbed wire traces an invisible line across the prairie, elevating the rights of property to the spiritual plane; the ranch gateway that interrupts the long wire strand stands as a mystic portal between two worlds differing only in who has dominion over them. Barbed wire’s made the Borderer vision of property finally enforceable on the open plains, and in doing so it killed the cowboy way of life, which had depended on those plains remaining open. Within a single generation the open-range cattleman gave way to the rancher behind wire—and then almost immediately to something stranger still.

For the Borderer vision of property included not just the surface but what lay beneath it. Had Texas remained under Mexican law, the man who held a patch of west Texas scrubland would not have owned what lay underneath it—those subsoil rights would have belonged to the state. But the common law recognized the maxim cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos—he who owns the soil owns it to the heavens and to the depths. William Empson caught the metaphysical strangeness of this principle in his sonnet “Legal Fiction,” an unwitting contribution to Texan literature: he observes that property law “makes long spokes of the short stakes of men,” and convert a literal into a spiritual nomadism. Fenceposts project downward to “Hell’s | pointed exclusive conclave, at earth’s centre,” and upward “through galaxies, a growing sector,” with the Earth’s rotation on its axis resulting in “the lighthouse beam you own | flash[ing], like Lucifer, through the firmament.” In Texas, that rotating Faustian cone of ownership was not merely a metaphysical conceit, but a title deed to an ancient thermodynamic reservoir. When the oil boom came to Texas in the early 1900s, it was not the state of Texas that got rich but the landowners and the wildcatters who leased from them. The empresario gamble was reenacted at geological scale, every wildcatter a filibuster drilling into territory he had not seen.

The petroleum industry was in a way quintessentially Texan, but it also drew in further waves of migrants eager to adopt the trappings of Texana but without deep blood-ties to the soil. The Houston Space Center, Lyndon Johnson’s political spoil, completed the trajectory by moving the frontier upward, and hastening the rapid urbanization that would leave Texas home to three of America’s top ten cities by the end of the century. Soon the space frontier closed too, the last Apollo mission returning in 1972, leaving Houston with a mission control that would spend the next half-century managing orbital maintenance rather than exploration. So the funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand led down to oil and up to the moon, and both paths eventually came to a stop, though leaving Texas a significant player in the “technology industry.” Today the modal Texan is a recent arrival who had never shot a gun. If he plays Texas Holdem with coworkers or wears cowboy boots to the office, it is not done ironically, but neither is it exactly sincere; it is something like a genuflection from a cultural Catholic with no deep commitment to the doctrine that what the tabernacle contains is real flesh and blood.

Meanwhile the remnants of the old Texas do not know quite what to make of the new, even when its arrival made them rich. As noted, the ancestral Texan population tends toward the low-church, which today often entails young-earth creationism. In Dinosaur Valley State Park, near Glen Rose, creationists have for decades claimed that human footprints appear alongside dinosaur tracks in the Cretaceous limestone of the Paluxy River. The nearby Creation Evidence Museum (home to cutting-edge experiments in creation science) does not disclose its donors, but one imagines that it is funded by fundamentalist oilmen.

*

The broad outlines of the above history I drew primarily from T.E. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star [1968] (though the Santa Anna portion owes more to Will Fowler’s Santa Anna of Mexico [2007]). Fehrenbach was not an academic historian, but rather a professional chronicler of Texas history and myth. Before he published his magisterial history of the state, he had captured the poetic meaning of Texas’s disorienting ethno-cultural replacement in a science-fiction short story sardonically titled “Remember the Alamo” [1961]. A time traveler visits the scene of the battle only to find the heroes of old Texas behaving quite differently than the records suggest—less like filibusteros and more like the state’s modern inhabitants, urbane, ironic, oversocialized. No heroic stand is made, and Texas never comes into being, because these alternate-history Texans had never imagined themselves as such with sufficient Faustian vigor. Then, from the thought of these Texans who are not Texans, Fehrenbach conjures into view an entire alternate timeline in which the United States itself does not exist in its familiar form, but instead a Mexican empire extends north toward still-French Canada. The moral of the story is that Texas ethnogenesis cannot be undone selectively; pull one thread and the whole Western Hemisphere unravels. However contingent the state’s origin, it has become load-bearing.

To see Texas from this vantage point is to see that its meaning cannot be drawn solely from Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Texas is bigger than the myth of the cowboy. The lone horseman, the cattle drive, the sunset: these are adequately served by, for example, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove [1985]. But Texas is not solely pastoral and nostalgic. The myth of Texas is the myth of a state whose existence depends on a dictator’s blunder, whose borders are a financial artifact, whose wealth lies in the compressed residue of countless aeons. It is ideas outrunning the reality, then violently redrawing reality to match, with a deeper reality always lurking always just beneath the surface. The problem of Texan literature is not the literal frontier, which closed on schedule, but the figurative one—the sense that the frontier has continued to exist but become invisible, retreating underground or into abstraction, the empresario grant filed against a territory that is no longer geographical.

We should pair Turner’s frontier thesis with an essay by a different Frederick Turner—the UT-Dallas professor (son of Victor Turner the Scottish anthropologist) who once wrote an epic poem about the terraforming of Mars [Genesis, 1988]. This Turner’s essay “Inner Dallas” argued for the excellence of that post-industrial city as a function of its private character, a million cars with tinted windows ferrying a million inhabitants to a million hidden gatherings of likeminded souls. It then imagined a team of forgers excavating a fake pre-Columbian civilization beneath the city and presenting it as Dallas’s deep past, the fabrication entirely successful because though literally false, it would mystically capture the city’s inner being. What this strange thought experiment rightly suggests—particularly when set alongside Fehrenbach’s “Remember the Alamo”—is that the spirit of Texan literature is the spirit of historical science fiction. Only the science-fictional mode can properly make sense of the myriad layers of Texas history: Permian, Indian, Mexican, Texan, Southern, and finally industrial and space-age American. Which is perhaps why, although it is not common knowledge, the three most important Texan writers have all been science fiction writers.

*

Robert Ervin Howard was born in Peaster, Texas, in 1906, and grew up in Cross Plains on the edge of the Comanchería at a time when the Indian Wars were living memory. The Texas Hill Country is an inhospitable landscape: decent rainfall, but the soil is poor and the drought-flood-drought rhythm makes agriculture a wager rather than a livelihood. It was settled heavily by Germans, who arrived early but were not nearly so expansionist as the predominantly Borderer Anglo population, with a resulting low population density and empty landscape. The frontier had closed within Howard’s parents’ lifetime, and the oil rigs were arriving to reopen it in a different key. Cross Plains during Howard’s youth was an oil town—transient workers, sudden wealth, boom-bust cycles—making civilizational impermanence the view from his front porch.

Howard paid close attention to his ancestry, a braid of Norman-Irish, Scots-Irish, and Dano-Irish. He considered the Celtic inheritance his core identity. His maternal grandfather, George Ervin, was a Confederate veteran from North Carolina who rode with Nathan Bedford Forrest for four years and was accounted the strongest man in his regiment. That grandfather was the express physical and moral model for the most famous barbarian in pulp fiction, Conan of Cimmeria. Conan’s home country is nominally located somewhere around Norway, but Howard’s letters attest that Cimmeria’s landscape is Texas seen through Celtic fog: as he wrote in a letter about his poem “Cimmeria” [1932], it was “suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredericksburg seen in a mist of winter rain.” Howard’s story “Beyond the Black River” [1935] shows Conan’s Texas roots most clearly. Conan wanders around a recently established frontier settlement, an incursion into Pictish territory against which the Picts (Howard’s stand-in for the Comanches) are soon to push back. A young man named Balthus dies heroically defending the settlement, but the settlement may fall anyway. Meanwhile, Conan survives because survival is what Conan does; no net can hold him, which is to say that he cannot be fully civilized.

Conan had fought on the side of civilization, but his closing observation in “Beyond the Black River” shows he does not trust in it: “barbarism is the natural state of mankind… civilization is unnatural, a whim of circumstance, and barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” Conan here speaks for Howard, not because Howard was a primitive like Conan, but because he wasn’t. He was a bookish man who read widely, if in the manner of an autodidact; he had a particular interest in ancient and medieval history, and kept up to date on scientific anthropology and historicist philosophy. From his epistolary friendship with H.P. Lovecraft he was familiar with at least the outlines of Spenglerian theory, and agreed with its view of civilization as a kind of ossification. He was particularly a student of Texas history. Indeed, around the time when he wrote “Beyond the Black River” his writing was comprised increasingly of undisguised Texan yarns—stories of Ranger warfare, tales of frontier settlements under attack.

Of course, Howard’s historical tales lost out in the great sortition of literary taste, and are little read today. The prehistorical Conan stories survived because they made their own luck. They took the Davy Crockett almanac tale and stripped it of every feature that would make them answerable to historical or legal critique: no dates, no documentary record, no falsifiable claims. It is the “Gone to Texas” move executed at the level of narrative voice. Facticity gone, what remains is structure. Conan operates outside legitimate authority, self-commissioned, betting his life on his own nerve. He is the empresario and the filibustero and the Comanche simultaneously, the fantasy that the Texas myth can never quite articulate about itself, because acknowledging that the Rangers won by becoming Comanche in their methods would compromise the moral architecture distinguishing settler from savage. When Conan becomes king of Aquilonia—by conquest rather than election—he governs by personal charisma and the threat of violence, more Santa Anna than Stephen F. Austin, the caudillo on the throne rather than the administrator behind the desk.

In all his adventures Conan displays toward women a protectiveness related to but distinct from traditional chivalry. It is the rough virtue of a frontier world where women are few and far between and mostly prostitutes, but nevertheless deserving of protection from barbarian rapists—and if they offer their affections to the civilized barbarian who saves them, so much the better. Howard himself knew little of women, living with his mother most of his life, and he shot himself in 1936 at thirty years old upon learning that she would not recover from her final illness. The sword-and-sorcery tradition he inaugurated would spend the rest of the century failing to understand what its founder had understood: the barbarian hero does not represent a desirable alternative to civilization, but rather the thinness of the line between the two.

*

Cormac McCarthy was baptized Charles Joseph McCarthy in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, and raised in a strict Scots-Irish Catholic family. He changed his name to Cormac and apostatized, becoming a Joycean devotee of literature, and then for years bummed around Knoxville in bohemian fashion writing grimly obscure novels generally categorized as Southern gothic. Then in 1976 at the age of forty-two he moved to Texas. His Celtic inheritance and familiarity with the myths of Appalachian violence had already equipped him to understand the world he walked into, but for good measure he set himself to a years-long research project into filibuster activities on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1840s.

The result was the magisterial Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West [1985], and then the four Texas-based novels McCarthy wrote over the next two decades. Though the middle three are sometimes called the Border Trilogy, I find it more enlightening to think of all five as a Border Cycle. There is no need to establish the Border Cycle’s Texan credentials; rather, the point to be made is that it belongs to the same historically and scientifically minded tradition as Conan. There is no evidence McCarthy read Howard, but they were fascinated by the same myth: a myth Howard inhabited as a native, and to which McCarthy took with the zeal of a convert come home to the fatherland he never knew. The first thing McCarthy sees from the convert’s vantage point is that Texas is also always Mexico. The Glanton Gang operates on both sides of the border, scalping indiscriminately, collecting bounties from Mexican governors. The violence flows across the Rio Grande indifferent to its political significance because it predates that significance. Judge Holden speaks Conan’s suppressed interior monologue without the heroic coding and displacement into the pre-historical: “War is god.”

But the Judge is also a natural philosopher: he collects specimens, sketches flora and fauna, discourses on geology and jurisprudence, and declares his intention to be the suzerain of all the earth, to be accomplished through the earth’s total consumption. He is at once barbarian and civilizer, which turn out to be the same thing. In a central chapter the expriest recounts how the Judge manufactured gunpowder from raw desert materials—charcoal, sulfur, bat guano scraped from a cave, the men’s own urine—while the Glanton gang bought him time by leading pursuing Comanches on a wild goose chase. The chase ends with the Comanches massacred to a man through the power of the homebrewed stuff. Already one can sense the interests that led McCarthy to spent his last decades at the Santa Fe Institute among physicists, and to devote his final novel diptych, The Passenger and Stella Maris [2022], to the Manhattan Project. The Judge’s empresario grant written in saltpeter was from the beginning tending toward Los Alamos, and in the face of its Faustian spirit the unnamed kid can do nothing but join in, or silently stand apart.

The central trilogy—All the Pretty Horses [1992], The Crossing [1994], and Cities of the Plain [1998]—explores the same dynamic in a different register. The cowboys John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are less passive than the kid, and more like men with Hyborian virtues in a post-Hyborian world. They can ride and rope and fight; John Grady communes with horses through something like telepathy, while Billy’s adventures begin when he tries to save the life of a pregnant wolf. But the driving spirit of these books remains the Mexican world across the border, figured as the truth of Texas that the cowboys can only discover by leaving Texas behind. John Grady is arbitrarily imprisoned in Mexico due to his seduction of the haciendero’s daughter; Billy Parham has similar difficulties with the Mexican legal apparatus; later John Grady finds himself again in legal trouble due to a rivalry with a well-connected brothel owner over a Mexican whore. Each time the American comes up against the Mexican he is spellbound by the power of the Mexican’s words. The police captain who interrogates John Grady warns him: “We can make the truth here. Or we can lose it.” The Dueña Alfonsa, grandmother of the girl John Grady seduces, proclaims to him that history is not a calculus of intentions but of consequences. Together these teachings amount to this: it is in Mexico that the truth of Texas is made, but once made it outruns the intentions of its maker.

In No Country for Old Men [2005] Sheriff Bell gives the Anglo perspective a voice, but not one that satisfies. His plain evangelical faith inadequate to the evil he faces, his monologues take on the cadence of a West Texas sermon that has lost its congregation. His antagonist Chigurh is the Judge’s descendant, but where the Judge had cosmic grandeur, Chigurh has only method, his violence registering as entropy rather than nuclear force—the Judge had preached battle as a grand toss of a coin, but Chigurh merely recites a rote demand that his interlocutors call heads or tails. Where Blood Meridian has the violent energy of a civilization in its founding convulsion, No Country has the quality of one that has spent its inheritance. The Road [2006], not itself a Texan novel, completes the trajectory: driven by the same concerns as the Border Cycle but no longer recognizably set in the Southwest, it shows a world where grace has entirely run out. The father’s devotion to the son is the last religious gesture in McCarthy’s cosmos, but its meaning not even the father can account for. McCarthy himself, who had refused interviews for decades, appeared on Oprah in 2007 to promote The Road—Scratchy Wilson dropping his imagined revolver and submitting to the domesticating force of American celebrity.

*

Finally, Gene Wolfe: born in Brooklyn in 1931, the son of a traveling salesman, of Northern and Midwestern stock rather than Scots-Irish. The family was peripatetic: Peoria, Massachusetts, Ohio, Des Moines, Dallas, Houston. Wolfe arrived in Texas at age six, not a settler but a passenger, part of the population wave that largely replaced the original Anglo-Texans. He attended Lamar High School in Houston, then Texas A&M; when the Korean War interrupted he served as an infantry combat engineer—which is to say that unlike Howard, who imagined violence, and McCarthy, who researched it, Wolfe had administered it as an institution. He returned to marry his wife Rosemary, convert to Catholicism, and take a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Houston. In 1956 he moved out-of-state never to return. He began publishing in science-fiction magazines a decade later, ultimately putting out over thirty novels. Not all concern Texas, but Texas sits at the heart of Wolfe’s many-volumed magnum opus sometimes known as the Solar Cycle, just as much as it does McCarthy’s Border Cycle. Indeed, although it has rarely been noticed, these two monuments of late twentieth century American literature have a great deal in common.

Admittedly, Wolfe is not typically considered a Texan writer; he is claimed if anywhere by the Midwest. But when I read Fehrenbach’s Lone Star I not only recognized Wolfe in its portrait of twentieth century Texan man, I also found myself wondering whether Gene Wolfe had ever read it. Partly because Fehrenbach discusses how Texan-Comanche engagements turned on the ratio of horse speed to firearm reload speed, and Wolfe follows a similar train of thought in Castle of the Otter [1982]; partly because Fehrenbach’s account of local officials bearing titles like alcalde reminded me of Wolfe’s nomenclature in the Solar Cycle; partly because Fehrenbach’s appreciation for the Anglo-Texan personality reminded me of a description of Wolfe I once heard, that he is Chesterton holding a six-shooter. (Wolfe attracts such efforts at description like flies: another time I saw him called Conan the Barbarian meets Proust.) I have not yet been able to answer that question, but if he did not, it was because he did not need to. After all, while Howard likely did not learn Texas history in school (the curriculum requirement was implemented after he entered seventh grade), and McCarthy certainly didn’t, Wolfe attended a high school named for a hero of the Texas Revolution and the second president of the Republic of Texas.

The Texan preoccupations of the Solar Cycle are visible from the first volume, The Fifth Head of Cerberus [1972]. Not all commentators recognize that the cycle begins here, but Fifth Head lays the template for all that follows. It is comprised of three novellas set on twin planets colonized centuries past by the French, a cypher for the role of Spain in Texas’s history. Sainte Croix, like Texas, was later conquered and overlaid with an Anglo governing apparatus included chattel slavery; Sainte Anne, like Mexico, was not, but it is rumored to have once been home to a race of aboriginal shapeshifters. The first novella follows the languors of a whoremaster’s son reading in a library we eventually recognize as a decommissioned spaceship, and learning about how the library’s exhibits of abo artifacts are all fake (much like the fake Indian arrows and Alamo relics floating around Texan flea markets). The second novella, a work of anthropological reconstruction, imagines first contact from the abo perspective. The third follows an anthropologist researching a theory that the shapeshifting abos replaced the colonists; eventually he himself is replaced, and his abo impersonator winds up imprisoned in a system with no interest in the truth of his identity. Like the police captain in All the Pretty Horses, the interrogator says: “Truth is something which is to be had from us, not from you.” The novel ends with the records proving the replacement lost and buried until judgment day. Fifth Head has long been recognized as a “postcolonial” novel, but my point is that it is more specifically about the difficulty of tracing the Texan self back to any one source.

The same can be said of the three series of the Solar Cycle proper, which recapitulate at epic length Fifth Head’s three short novellas. The Book of the New Sun [1981-1985] displaces Texas history onto far-future Argentina—the converse of the sonnet “Texas” by Jorge Luis Borges (one of Wolfe’s favorite writers), who writing from Argentina says of Texas simply: “aquí también.” New Sun shows a far-future Urth where oil has run dry and civilization has burned through its thermodynamic inheritance. The sun itself is dying of exhaustion, Wolfe’s version of McCarthy’s “evening redness in the west.” Firearms are so expensive and genetically-modified horses are so fast that Comanche-style mounted combat is once more a viable military strategy. The protagonist Severian is a professional torturer who like Conan eventually makes himself ruler of the entire realm; the difference is that Severian’s logorrheic inner monologue reveals an understanding that every individual act of violence is an effort (however misguided) to establish an institution. In the coda Urth of the New Sun [1987] divine grace analogous to negentropy does not dissolve the question whether the sacrifice was worth it, but rather offers a second chance to ask it, this time aright. Where New Sun had expanded on the first Fifth Head novella, The Book of the Long Sun [1993-1996] revisits the themes of the second: it is a journalistic account of a Whorl unaware that it is a generation starship about to reach its destination, its bent but not altogether broken sacrificial culture about to be interrupted from the outside. Finally in The Book of the Short Sun [1999-2001] the priest-revolutionary Patera Silk wanders a new two-planet system reminiscent of Sainte Croix and Sainte Anne, sparking political renewal everywhere he goes; at the story’s close he heads off into the stars with a valedictory: “Good fishing!” To say that these books are Texan does not, of course, do them justice, and what I have offered here is not anything close to a reading of them; the aim is simply to show their Texan provenance.

That provenance is most apparent in Wolfe’s novel Pirate Freedom [2007], which might be considered a coda to the whole Solar Cycle. It takes place entirely within the Golden Circle. A young man raised in a Cuban monastery in the near future travels back in time to the golden age of Caribbean piracy—the original sense of filibustero—and then returns to the present as a Catholic priest. In the past he moves between the Spanish colonial world and the Anglo piratical one with the same ease as a Conan would, taking both a mistress (whom he eventually marries) and slaves (whom he reasons will be enslaved anyway, and by someone worse). In the modern-day frame story, he offers the reader his confession, and muses upon such themes as youth violence and the sex abuse crisis. The confession may not be entirely reliable, but then, grace operates through broken instruments. That the filibuster ends as the confessor is Wolfe’s final word on Texas: the capacity for violence and the capacity for surrender are the same capacity, differently aimed, and grace works not by eliminating the former but by converting it into the latter.

The second half of Zero HP Lovecraft’s pseudonym tells you the first thing you need to know about him: H.P. Lovecraft, early twentieth century American horror writer, incel, hyper-racist, author of often unbearably purple prose, inventor of the Cthulhu Mythos and so forebear of every alien-demon hybrid with psychic powers and slime-covered tentacles; also, and most importantly, progenitor of the genre of cosmic horror, in which the plot consists of little more than the protagonist’s gradual discovery of the abyss subtending existence—this H.P. Lovecraft is the chosen model of ZHPL (so I shall call him to avoid confusion). The first two words of the keyboard name give you the second piece: Zero Hit Points, a bad pun situating ZHPL as a gamer and “very online” writer, an admission of authorial belatedness, a warning that the vital spirit of our civilization has been almost entirely exhausted. Lovecraft, but even more dead. What could be more horrible?

The heart of ZHPL’s vision lies in the three novellas, “The Gig Economy” [2018], “God-Shaped Hole” [2019], and “Don’t Make Me Think” [2021]. These present three different versions of the same basic three-part story, and apart from the presence of the internet, this story will be already familiar in rough outline to readers of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” or “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”; the second novella riffs explicitly on “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.” The story looks like this. First, an intelligent, alienated young man finds himself in a world where human life is entirely mediated by some variety of portable personal technology. Second, prompted by an irresistible impulse equal parts curiosity, desire, and rebellion, he goes on a quest to make contact with reality, to remove his blinders, to break his chains. Finally, having done so, he discovers a reality more horrifying than the technological veneer veiling it, one so incomprehensibly awful that it destroys him, although we, ZHPL’s readers, are graced with a final record of what overwhelmed him.

*

If, like his avowed model, ZHPL has written the same basic story over and over, a good initial hypothesis is that he has done so for the same reason. The details of plot and character are secondary to the myth, or, perhaps we should say, the nightmare. I should emphasize, here, that the horrorist need not believe his nightmare to be real—compare the Kafkaesque bureaucratic deism of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare [1908] with his daytime Roman Catholicism. When I talk of ZHPL’s nightmare, I mean the nightmare his authorial persona presents us with. ZHPL’s nightmare differs from Lovecraft’s primarily in where it locates the horror. For Lovecraft, it lay in the unknown—the distant past, outer space, the mountains of Antarctica, the protean realm of dreams, the huddled masses yearning to crowd into the tenements just beyond the pale of civilized Rhode Island society. For ZHPL, the nightmare is more familiar, and technological civilization not only papers over it but also, and at the same time, contributes to it. All three of these stories are, in one way or another, about living in a world of smartphones, and the proximate horror lies in what we can already see and feel this world doing to us as it overwhelms our animal nature.

Apart from the original H.P., two of ZHPL’s most visible influences, to this reader’s eye, are Neal Stephenson and Jorge Luis Borges. The premise of “The Gig Economy” draws heavily from Stephenson’s early novel Snow Crash, while “Don’t Make Me Think” echoes beat for beat Borges’s short story “The Dead Man,” an approach reminiscent of another Borges story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” (Some of ZHPL’s shorter fiction reveals a debt to David Foster Wallace, about whose achievement he seems conflicted.) From Stephenson, and cyberpunk more generally, ZHPL draws a sense for the homology between mind and computer, and for the links between computer programming, cryptography, and military-industrial-complex conspiracies. ZHPL also receives from Stephenson his license to perpetrate “infodumps,” knowing that what matters are not the “character” and “plot” of his protagonist, but the character of his imagined world, and the plot of the reader’s journey through it (for ZHPL; Stephenson is more cheerful) from happy ignorance to horrified half-comprehension. From Borges, ZHPL learns the value of brevity, of metaphysical snares, and of meditations on the structure of the soul, and how its most important determinant is its means of communication. Borges’s soul was shaped by the codex; ZHPL’s, by the computer.

I have not much stressed the two varieties of non-fiction writer who might be considered major influences on ZHPL: on the one hand, the various theorists, such as Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze, wisps of whose thought drift across Weird Right Twitter (as I will call this milieu for lack of a better name); on the other, the various mostly anon personalities such as Bronze Age Pervert and Mencius Moldbug who, along with ZHPL himself, have defined the Weird Right’s contours. ZHPL’s twitter persona strikes the pose of a modern-day Nietzsche fully informed of the latest and most politically incorrect findings in evolutionary psychology and human biodiversity. He posts at @0x49fa98, the aRBG code for a particularly repulsive shade of green. Incidentally, this Nietzschean aura casts the name “Lovecraft” in a new light, kraft being German for power. Among the few essays ZHPL has published, “The New Tlon” (at The American Mind) announces the grand design of founding a new but ever-ancient religion designed to avoid Christianity’s slow descent into wokeness and bioleninism: “Our church will not resemble the churches of old, but our men will resemble the men of old, because our God is very old, indeed.” ZHPL the twitter poster is entirely committed to this political-theological project. ZHPL the fiction-writer, however, is something quite different, as different as twitter is from novel. If ZHPL’s characters and plots are mere vehicles for his ideas, his fiction is nevertheless wonderfully crafted at the level of literary form. The effect on the reader is not that of a twitter polemic, but of a provocation to thought.

This intent to provoke thought suggests a second reason for the parallels between ZHPL’s three stories: they aim to analyze some phenomenon into three constitutive parts. On the surface, the three stories differ primarily in the app or peripheral that serves as the horror’s focal point: one centers on TaskRabbit; another on Oculus Rift; the third, on Neuralink. More fundamentally, they differ in the horrifying reality which that technology is taken simultaneously to veil and to reveal—to a first approximation, money, sex, and power. What larger phenomenon does this triad analyze? The best answer to this question is an old one, dating back to Plato: the analogy, or, better, the ratio between self and city. The original Lovecraft also took this ratio seriously (as does every serious writer), but his response to it was an abrupt denial of the possibility, and so of the possibility of thought itself. His fiction overflows with unrecognizable colors, incalculable geometries, words that cannot be pronounced, bodies that cannot be anatomized, cults with unidentifiable membership and inscrutable intentions. ZHPL shares his predecessor’s horror at self and city, and frequently invokes the Lovecraftian motif of the irrational alien cosmos. But ZHPL writes because he has much to say about self, city, and how our technologically mediated existence has broken apart the unity we assumed them to possess. This “how” I take to be the central theme of his fiction, the thread running through all his equal parts intriguing and horrifying predictions about near-future technological developments.

*

These technological developments make for a difference of content, but also one of form. It will be helpful to consider the formal problems of internet fiction in general before turning to consider ZHPL’s particular works—both because identifying the problems helps us appreciate the significance of ZHPL’s ingenious solutions to them, and because the problems of internet fiction are only another way of naming the problems of internet life. Journalists have labored for years to develop adequate methods for reporting on internet discourse, with results that remain conspicuously awkward. News stories tell you less about an unfamiliar site than simply spending two minutes on its homepage. Screenshotted posts and phrases like “people are talking about” fail to say anything more than would an uneditorialized link to the original post. And editorializing paraphrases, in a world where the original could simply be linked, comes to seem indistinguishable from lying. How, then, to put into words places, events, people that are already entirely text? For the journalist with an upcoming deadline, there is little choice but to limp along with the crutches available. The would-be novelist of life on the internet cannot do the same. He must carry on the task of the novelist—capturing the ineffable texture of lived experience in a sequence of words—even when that texture is already entirely textual.

The basic problem of the internet novel manifests immediately in every element of fictional craft. To begin, we lack an adequate vocabulary for describing the internet’s landscape. One cannot speak of the rolling hills of a Twitter feed or the Gothic architecture of a Facebook timeline without descending into absurdity. Yet these sites do have a topography of sorts—the rules of engagement, what the site will let you do and what it will not, what it makes easy and what it makes difficult. A path, after all, is something you can stroll down; a hill is something you can walk up; a mountain is something you can climb. The difficulty is that the landscape of the internet is almost entirely unseen. The graphical interfaces that mediate our digital lives are only part of it—and the least constant part, varying wildly across devices and applications. The same conversation on the same platform appears entirely different on phone versus desktop, in one app versus another. How to talk about the landscape we all move through when each of us sees it in different colors?

The internet also complicates descriptions of temporal sequence. In physical life, the past is irretrievable except in memory; in internet life, we feel as nothing ever really disappears (though dead links provide occasional reminders of digital mortality). The result is that internet time is non-monotonic: the same event can be experienced as rumor, as documentation, as commentary, in whatever sequence is demanded by the individual and her mediating algorithm. The distinction between witnessing an event and hearing its report, so crucial to traditional narrative structure, all but collapses. Internet life amounts to an ordered list of witnessed texts: the timeline flowing backward down the page into algorithmic oblivion. Variations in this flow constitute the true plot of internet fiction, and through a sympathetic magic we can imagine the timeline setting to have its own atmospheric conditions and weather patterns. Yet to call the timeline “stormy” risks, if not absurdity, cliche. We lack, too, a vocabulary for the sweeping timeline events we feel we witness together despite each knowing only own our idiosyncratic experience.

The problem compounds still further when we turn to characterization. IRL, people are defined by their physiognomies, distinctive gestures, wardrobes, vocal timbres—all the accumulated accidents of embodiment that provide the novelist with her raw material. These elements matter precisely because they exist in part outside our conscious control, revealing what deliberate self-presentation conceals. Online, by contrast, every aspect of appearance becomes deliberately chosen: the avatar, the emoji selection, the carefully curated profile. What renders incidental details novelistically useful in traditional fiction, their involuntary revelation of character, vanishes entirely in digital space. On the internet, a person is only what he has done, and it becomes all but impossible to describe character other than with reference to actions (except when a person’s online presence reveals something about the human being behind the avatar). And the actions, ultimately, are just speech, which on the internet cannot be honestly paraphrased.

Any successful internet novel must develop a poetics adequate to the task, a grammar for describing entirely text-mediated human interactions that does not surrender to text’s tendency toward mechanical self-reproduction. This challenge recalls the novel’s foundational concerns, visible as early as Don Quixote’s friends burning the chivalric romances. The internet novel shares with its ancestors a preoccupation with the relationship between textual representation and lived experience. The early modern novel dealt with the problem by inventing techniques such as free indirect discourse—techniques which, however, simply do not work with the constraints of digital representation. The internet novel might paradoxically require a return to more artificial literary forms—perhaps even a revival of the verse novel (think Browning’s The Ring and the Book or Melville’s Clarel). Verse’s arbitrary formal constraints possess the distinct advantage of forbidding direct textual transcription, and might generate the kind of productive accidents that reveal character and advance narrative in ways that mechanical replication cannot achieve.

However intrinsically interesting the proposal, verse novels are not ZHPL’s chosen form. His style could instead be described as something like experimental science fiction prose; like Lovecraft before him, he makes extensive use of the estranging effects of technical vocabulary, but he also modulates his prose to accommodate the nature of online fiction. In particular, he makes inventive use of extratextual aspects of reading on the internet—embedded images, hyperlinks, emojis. (These have in large part been faithfully translated into the printed volume, but in the movement from screen to paper they sadly lose much of their potency.) In so doing he captures something of what experiences, emotions, and actions look like in the digital domain—or, perhaps, what they do not look like; for, again, ZHPL’s vision of the internet is one of horror.

*

The first of ZHPL’s novellas, “The Gig Economy,” deals both with money as an abstraction from tangible objects of value, and with language as an abstraction from our disparate sensory experiences. The protagonist is a freelancer on an app resembling Uber or TaskRabbit, taking random assignments to pick up and deliver unknown packages to unknown persons or locations, or to oversee someone else performing such a task, or to submit to neurological experiments in sensory refactorization: “Chaos had crystallized into intuition, as if my senses had been remade, and I had learned to use them all over again. It would not be wrong to say that I had all new senses, virtual senses, built ‘on top of’ my existing ones, but orthogonal to them.”

Simultaneously, the protagonist has become obsessed with rare books, participating in a private online group devoted to exchanging non-digitized volumes, which as relics of a pre-digital age they feel possess an almost talismanic power. These threads converge when the protagonist discovers that the strangest of his tasks were assigned by an entity not quite human. A partial explanation of its origins turns out to lie within an ancient unscanned codex, and involves the god Mammon, the Tower of Babel, and a song that infects all who hear it, irresistibly inspiring them to accumulate resources with which further to propagate the tune, and degenerating their language into a babbling stream: “The figularshis morror. Mareath ame whicand to ide.” A glimpse here (it does not go on for long) of something like Finnegans Wake—only instead of patterning itself on Giambattista Vico’s ricorso, it follows the track of Nick Land’s hyperstitional accelerationism, in which a computational superintelligence reaches back from the future to bookstrap itself into existence on the back of capital.

In some ways the babble of Mammon resembles the language of law, which underpins all our economic abstractions and which has always been notoriously incomprehensible to those who are not lawyers, which is to say, Mammon’s priests. This pseudo-language becomes necessary to integrate into our formerly common sense the nose for profit which has imposed itself, a “virtual sensation,” atop our natural five; natural language has been rendered inadequate to fulfill its function of intrapsychic currency. Perhaps half of “The Gig Economy” is straight narration, and much of the rest is text excerpted from various documents the protagonist encounters as he pieces together the puzzle. The remainder are excerpts not reduced to text, but presented as screenshots—of smartphone app pages, of posts to 4chan or twitter or reddit or slack. Some of these relate directly to the plot, while others merely illustrate the milieu in which the protagonist moves—a neat end-run around the peculiar difficulty of paraphrasing what is already text.

ZHPL’s desire to screenshot rather than summarize echoes his protagonist’s longing for the tangibility of his rare books. Both screenshot and codex have the aura of historical reality about them, and so are imagined as bulwarks against the flow of capital melting everything solid into air. But they cannot really provide such a bulwark; the screenshot has nothing real about it, being entirely mediated by the digital, and the codex is hardly better, for whatever nostalgic aura has now accumulated around it, it was in its day the cutting edge of the technology of sensory abstraction. As Marshall McLuhan might put it (and ZHPL has cited McLuhan as an important influence), the babble of Mammon began in ancient Mesopotamia, home to one of the earliest forms of writing, and flowed through medieval scriptoria and Gutenberg’s press before it burst onto the internet. The first mass-produced object was a coin. “The Gig Economy” leaves us with no reason to think that this historical trajectory from the inarticulate nonsense of beasts to the all-too-articulated nonsense of computer-gods could be reversed. The novella’s last line: “The only way out is through!”

*

So much for oikonomia and aisthesis. The title of ZHPL’s second novella, “God-Shaped Hole,” identifies its theme in an obscene and blasphemous pun: eros, sexual desire, how we crave contact with each other, how we long to fill that contact with meaning, how that longing for meaning is itself sexual, how both contact and meaning are forever denied us. The sexual relationship almost inevitably becomes a figure for what was once pictured as the marriage of body and soul, but in ZHPL’s nightmare seems more like the mutual rape of body and soul. The soul becomes an illusion of meaning imposed on the body, the body an ecstasy of meaning’s annihilation.

The story begins with a world of ubiquitous virtual reality goggles, and myriad inventive speculations for the uses to which such goggles will be put. The dominant use ZHPL imagines, probably accurately, is hyperreal pornography, repulsively detailed descriptions of which the reader must suffer through. The story ends—not to give away too much—with human nature gnawed through by gene editing technology, giving rise, half by accident, half by sinister design, to a “polymelial monster, growing tentacles and heads and mouths, sex organs sprouting anywhere, mouths and eyes becoming one organ that would leap forward to snap with transparent teeth, but no organ holding constant as regards either function or position.” In naming this creature “Azathoth,” ZHPL makes one of his most direct references to the Cthulhu Mythos—but ZHPL’s version of this demon, unlike that of his eponymous forebear, is explicitly libidinous. We are left with two irreconcilable accounts of the sexual: the shimmering digital image, and the putrescing biological flesh.

In between, we witness the protagonist embark on a quest to get beneath the obscenely glittering surface of sexuality to its human reality. He finds no “there” there; he cannot get into view a desire for another person, as opposed to for that person’s desire, in an endless regression, with every act of love an act of betrayal. The protagonist’s disillusionment finds its echo in the reader’s experience of the text. The sense of the internet as a series of disjointed fragments remains, but this time we do not experience it as a screenshot lifted in tweezers up to the light, but as an endless rabbit-hole of hyperlinks, leading mostly to short snippets of fictional science articles, themselves linking to one another in an endless web of intrigue. With each click and opening of a new tab in the browser we anticipate an explanation that will reconcile image and flesh—but it never comes. “God-Shaped Hole” is ZHPL’s most successful novella, but it is also, and intentionally, fundamentally untrustworthy; its aim is to seduce its reader and then discard him.

Definitely him—while I am sure women have read this story, both its pervasive obscenity and its concern with the ambivalence of male desire mark its paradigmatic reader as a man. On the other hand, surely women as well as men find themselves with twenty open browser tabs; Ahab’s desire to strike through the pasteboard mask is not found in only half the species. In any case, the novella does include in its peripheries a portrait of female sexuality, and one which does not seem entirely false, though it sees women as entirely false. Like male desire, female desire looks to its partner for something, call it a recognition of intrinsic value, which it is unwilling or unable itself to offer. One might reasonably ask whether the sci-fi premise sheds any additional light on this story’s account of sexual desire and meaning-making, which in many ways merely echoes that of nineteenth century novelists like Stendhal and Proust, as any reader of René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel could attest. Indeed, “God-Shaped Hole” does take this basic picture of desire for granted. What it adds is an understanding of how the internet multiplies beyond count the images that inflame desire, and how pharmaceuticals augment physical desire itself, such that the circuit of desire recognized by the nineteenth century realists becomes tautened to an inhuman pitch.

*

After calling into question both the coherence of our experience and economy, and the honesty of our desire for and contact with other embodied minds, ZHPL embarks in “Don’t Make Me Think” to reveal the slavery implicit within our allegedly free decisions and allegiances. The story begins with the premise that Neuralink brain implants have developed to the point where they can not only read minds, but to a certain extent control them, by, for example, disguising enriched mealworm bricks to taste like a different five-star meal in every bite, or delivering a feeling of accomplishment for each homework task completed and one of guilt for each act of petty rule-breaking. But the Neuralink chains are imperfect, and so the protagonist, an initially anonymous youth who receives his implant at age eleven, finds himself increasingly tempted to rebel, and eventually makes a violent break for freedom.

Widespread adoption of the implants has, it seems, created a comprehensive surveillance state where every citizen is a perfectly willing informer and enforcer. And so, it seems, the only hope for neurological freedom lies in a band of outlaws hiding out in their mountain fortress and supporting themselves through manufacture of smartdrugs, that is, malware bypassing a Neuralink’s safety protocols and delivering experiences engineered for maximal hedonic gratification. While many twists and turns follow, including both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos traipsing together through the Amazon jungle, and a disembodied demonic spirit leaping from Neuralink to Neuralink, the novella’s basic dilemma is already contained within this premise—for how can a smartdrug black market exist within the Neuralink surveillance state? As the protagonist muses before making his escape, most likely “they let it happen and someone is profiting.” Within the totally controlled world of “Don’t Make Me Think,” no exercise of freedom is possible unless it ultimately redounds to the profit of the controller, and so strengthens its power, in a cybernetic feedback loop. The Neuralinked citizen and the smartdrug manufacturer have merely taken the short and long roads to the same destination. In a way the latter is the more deluded, for he imagines himself free, when in reality he is equally enslaved. ZHPL portrays the outlaws to be just as devoted to the gratification of gluttony and lust as are the smartdrug addicts, only they are attuned to real not hallucinated flesh.

The most complex scene in the novella comes when the outlaws’ compound is attacked by a rival gang, and the protagonist, by now given the name of Branch, steps into command. With the help of his men’s jailbroken Neuralinks he becomes like the human player in a computer strategy game, with the “reckless authority👑💡” to make unilateral decisions regarding “lethality☠️⬆️🔁 or sacrifice🔪🐑🩸.” These outlaws, it seems, are absolutely loyal to Branch, willing to kill and die for him. But in fact they are not, as is later confirmed, and as we could have inferred anyway from their outlaw character. They are merely willing to turn over to him the decision when and how to kill and die; they have made a rationally selfish Hobbesian bargain granting their Neuralinks ex ante permission to override the self-preservation instinct, calculating that by doing so they increase the likelihood of victory, and so of long-term survival. Not only is there no such thing as freedom, also, and relatedly, there is no such thing as loyalty, authority, or self-sacrifice; the world is self-interest, power, and violence all the way down.

Such, at least, is the world seen through Branch’s eyes. The closing paragraphs suggest that ZHPL has a broader vision. In it we turn to a heretofore minor character, Romero, and see that he, unlike Branch, recognizes a higher authority that self-interest—albeit the value of such recognition remains ambiguous. Asking himself whether he is responsible for Branch’s demise, Romero concludes that “his conscience is clear. No, that’s not true, he let Branch believe it was fate…. But we all have our vices…. Surely Romero is no great sinner, here.” Do we read here a true reckoning with the moral authority of conscience, or mere words, words, words meant to maintain Romero’s own delusions of moral virtue? The answer to that question will also be the answer to the question whether there is any possibility of legitimate political authority, one which wields power and indeed violence but for the sake of more than perpetuating its own rule.

A glimmer of optimism can perhaps be found in the textural difference between the quotations in the previous two paragraphs: those from Branch’s perspective included emojis after every other word, those from Romero’s had none. Apart from the closing paragraphs, these emojis permeate the text, translating English into ideogram form: as seen above, “authority” is a crown and a lightbulb, presumably the light of reason; “lethality” a skull, an up-arrow, and a cycle, perhaps the cycle of violence; “sacrifice” a knife, a scapegoat, and its blood. The ideogrammatic language ZHPL has constructed is often, as with these three, insightful, and sometimes amusing, as when “conformity” is translated into a rainbow flag and a down-arrow. But its cumulative effect is not to enrich the text, but almost the opposite. The reader can either attempt to ignore the emojis and move straight through the text, or pause to decipher the emojis and so lose the linguistic thread. Both the short and the long road lead to a sense that the text does not offer itself to be read freely, but rather has imposed itself on the reader and can only be submitted to or struggled against.

*

The relative optimism of “Don’t Make Me Think” compared to “The Gig Economy” and “God-Shaped Hole” comports with what we know of ZHPL from his twitter persona. Peel back the veneer of French theory, and on topics not relating to the internet ZHPL (like many on the Weird Right) often sounds like a conventional elite from the turn of the last century. While no economist, he intuits the value of free enterprise and the danger of incentive-distorting welfare, and detests woke capitalists above all for what they have done to capitalism. On biological matters he is a Darwinist and also something of a Freudian, likely secondhand from the French theorists. These views about money and sex are essentially fatalistic and anti-rational: the market knows all, or at least more than any man, and so must not be interfered with, only streamlined; the phallus wants what it wants, and so cannot be reasoned with, only placated. But ZHPL’s decision to engage in twitter polemics in the first place suggests some faith in the efficacy of political conflict, and his tone of vatic authority, both in his Nietzschean twitter threads and in his essay announcing a new yet ever-old religion, suggest a hope that we will recognize in him a legitimate authority. Or, at least, a decision to act as if he possesses this faith and hope.

On my reading of ZHPL’s fiction—which I find more persuasive than his twitter persona—this faith and hope are unwarranted. The enslavement of the will in “Don’t Make Me Think” follows inevitably from the fragmentation of experience and inflammation of desire traced in the previous two novellas, and all three are the inevitable consequences of the new technological age inaugurated by the smartphone. So what grounds ZHPL’s decision to enunciate these claims? If I might hazard a guess—ZHPL has described himself as a computer programmer by profession. A programmer—if he is willing to put aside wokeness and accept the label of reactionary—cannot help but be fascinated by the workings of natural selection and market competition, for he can see that these are themselves algorithms of a sort, operating on biological and economic substrates to calculate the fittest species, the efficient price. The struggle for political power, too, he will see as an algorithm, one tasked with calculating the optimal method of governance. But the economic and biological algorithms seem immutable, while the political one seems more clearly contingent, and so susceptible of alteration. Further, if the current political algorithm fails, it must mean that the code requires debugging. ZHPL’s vatic twitter threads constitute, in essence, his attempts to debug our civilization.

The first step in debugging a system is usually to turn it off and on again. But who will stand outside our civilization and throw the switch? And who has root access to edit our civilization’s source code? If the reactionary programmer imagines imposing from outside or above an irresistibly efficacious word to propel those within into their proper trajectories, he errs, for there is no such outside. What he requires instead is a word that confronts its opponents with a choice, and achieves its end no matter which choice they make. Such was Christianity two thousand years ago, when opposition led the Church to be watered by the blood of martyrs, and so to grow and replace the pagan cults more congenial to the reactionary programmer’s vision. It is difficult to imagine being a martyr for the programmer’s new yet ever-old religion. Martyrdom requires understanding oneself to participate in a larger whole, the Mystical Body of Christ, that merits allegiance to the point of self-sacrifice. It is difficult even to imagine the programmer’s religion inspiring that lesser thing, a hero: for even pagan heroes accept death above dishonor, and even pagan cities cannot avoid asking their citizens to die for them. But the faith of the reactionary programmer requires voluntarily dissolving the unity of one’s experiences and desires, and instead identifying with the cosmic designer who confined consciousness within the body’s cybernetic labyrinth. Such a faith leaves no room for heroism, let alone martyrdom. At most, one can imagine martyring one’s avatar for it, knowing that it will be easy enough the next day to create a brand new account.

On the day I wrote the preceding paragraph, BAP was suspended from twitter, and ZHPL posted that Weird Right Twitter might abandon the app for Telegram. Instead, Twitter abandoned the Weird Right, changing its name to X, and becoming notionally more hospitable to the right but in a way that has sapped the right’s vital energy. ZHPL has written a few more riffs on old Borges stories, but nothing comparable to the novellas at the heart of his 2021 collection. Although four years is too soon to judge the limits of an author’s achievement, I do suspect that, unless something changes, ZHPL’s poetic trajectory has reached its apex, and begun to descend. Horror is exactly the right genre within which to articulate in literary form the demonic vision provoked by life on the internet, and in particular by such life as experienced by one aware of its inner workings. But horror cannot inspire action; its effect is to paralyze, and then to leave the reader with a sense of relief when he reaches the story’s end and the basilisk turns its eye away. If ZHPL is to progress as an author he will need to achieve an alternative vision of the human being, one that can make sense of digital realities while still commanding real (unhedged) loyalty and inspiring real (nonvirtual) self-sacrifice. To this end I would recommend, not inventing a religion new yet ever-old, but accepting the religion at the root of Western civilization, old yet ever-new.

The poetic response looks strongest when we look at the gospel story itself. When the Christian reads Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue [c.40 BC], or Ovid on Persephone and Orpheus [Metamorphoses, c.8], it is difficult to avoid seeing the figure of Christ in the background. I once met a Greek Catholic who insisted that Homer was infallible, including on religious questions: the sacrificial rites he depicts as valid as those of the Old Testament, his pantheon a foreshadowing of the Trinity. Perhaps there’s something to it. Were not the theological abstractions of the Nicene Creed built out of the New Testament with the tools of Greek philosophy?

Ironically, the poetic response looks considerably weaker when we consider the secular stories Christians would go on to tell one another. Oceans have been written about the differences between roman and romantic literature, but I would sum them up in two reversals: first, death is temporary, marriage permanent; second, kings are fools, fools are kings. Before the reversal, the two proper narrative subjects were heroes who died tragically and clowns who fucked comically; after, these were replaced with holy sinners who died ambiguously redeemed and lovers whose marriage ended the narrative by extending their quarrels into infinity. This shift marked not just a change in taste, but a rejection of the prior dispensation as somehow false. Pagan religion, it seems, was a lie not so much about the nature of the divine, as about the nature of the human.

In these post-Christian (anti-Christian, hyper-Christian) times our stories do not end at all. For almost two hundred years marriage has served less to end a story than to begin one, an inevitable outcome once we admit as a live possibility the termination of a marriage other than in the death of a spouse. It might seem that death would at least remain an end, but what it ends is no longer a story, for we no longer admit that the moment of death might condense in a moment the meaning of a life; at most, it displays the mood of the deceased at time of passing. If stories no longer end, what matters instead is the attitude taken towards this fact, the main options being witty self-ironizing and earnest search for authenticity—no longer comedy and tragedy, but satire and melodrama. In sum: the classics dreamt of hero and clown; the Christians of martyr and lover; we, of student and spouse. These last two being what is left when Christianity’s lesson of the falsity of classical anthropology lingers on long after their shared theological outlook has been abandoned.

*

What stories is a Christian to tell in a post-Christian world? The answer given by two of the best-known Christian storytellers of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, was a return to pre-Christian myth, on the poetic-apologetic ground that they foreshadowed Christian truth. Or, at least, so they asserted in their critical writings. Their poetic practices were more complicated.

Start with Lewis: for someone who purported so to value the mythic imagination, his own is remarkably limited. He borrowed rather than stole; almost everything he wrote was some combination of didactic allegory and critical pastiche. The Space Trilogy [1938-1945] limns H.G. Wells, David Lindsay, and Charles Williams; The Horse and His Boy [1954] trades on Kipling; The Great Divorce [1945], George MacDonald; The Screwtape Letters [1942] parodied advice columns. What Lewis wrote was not new myths, but critical commentaries on existing myths, meant to reveal the Christian narrative hidden within. Put differently, Lewis was almost entirely an author of Wit, although not particularly strong comedically. When he charms, as with the Faun Tumnus walking through the snowy woods with umbrella and parcels wrapped in brown paper, it is almost by accident: the role of Tumnus is to stand for the Classics (friendly storyteller who betrays you but is good at heart) just as much as Aslan’s is to stand for Christ.

The Magician’s Nephew [1955] is the exception that proves the rule. The book riffs extensively on Tolkien (Charn is a version of Númenor), but the Wood Between the Worlds is also the closest Lewis ever came to true myth-making. It is a myth that highlights the contrast between Lewis’s myth-making practice and Tolkien’s, as laid out most clearly in the latter’s Leaf by Niggle [1945] (the closest Tolkien came to Lewis-style didacticism). The Wood Between the Worlds asserts that Narnia is in some sense real despite its absence from our world, based on God’s power to make other worlds if he so chooses. Leaf by Niggle, in contrast, suggests that what we imagine can at most reflect some reality we will discover after death—it is not that reality itself, which must be found somewhere in our own world or not at all. Middle Earth is not elsewhere, it is here, long back way back. If the Christian religion has no place in Narnia because God there became not Man but Lion, it has no place in Middle Earth because God had not yet shown himself; like Beckett’s Godot, the Christian revelation hovers always in the wings but never comes on stage. It was only natural that the friends famously assigned Tolkien the task of writing a time-travel story (never completed) while Lewis took outer space (resulting in his Trilogy).

Lewis’s attraction to space travel marks his imagination as fundamentally typographic. The point is not just that Copernicus came along a few decades after Gutenberg, but that both movement through space and moveable type depend on a sense of contingency: this world is made up of certain essential elements arranged in a particular manner, but they could be arranged otherwise, and technology will allow us to see those other arrangements. Entering Narnia—always an allegory for reading a book—takes the child, the reader, out of the context of her ordinary life and into a world of novel and exciting adventure. The other side of the portal has no place for mundane concerns, and the best of the Narnia books are those where the visiting children find no human beings there at all, but only fauns and dwarfs and giants and witches and marsh-wiggles. These creatures are characters in the sense of being signs written on a page, props for the child-reader’s inner drama of temptation and redemption. The children’s novel as Lewis wrote it (and in a sense it is all he wrote) is a deeply modern genre, a more didactic variant on the Bildungsroman. Lewis imagines his reader a student in need of an education in which books out of all the metaphysically possible books deserves to be read; the graduate has no more need for Lewis, for he can explore the library on his own.

Tolkien’s time travel, in contrast, is oral: the past is something we perpetuate, in perhaps distorted form, by passing down stories of it, and the echoes of the stories can in a way transport us to those times that seem otherwise lost. And so too is the future something we speak into being—making Tolkien’s imagination, perhaps surprisingly, the more truly political of the two. Recall how much time the characters in The Lord of the Rings [1954-1955] spend retelling stories of the olden days (the stories not yet published as The Silmarillion [1977]), and how much time they spend debating the proper course of action in light of the lessons taught them by those stories. These two activities are what words—always, for Tolkien, spoken words—are for. To the extent Tolkien’s imagination has room for the written word, it is imagined as a spoken word that lasts for a long time. Ents are known for their slow speech, but an Ent is also a bundle of leaves attached to a trunk, which is to say, a codex. When Gandalf reads aloud from the Book of Mazarbul the phrase “drums drums in the deep,” it summons the sound of the drums themselves, and soon enough the orcs and trolls sounding them. The longest-lasting word of all is the inscription within the circumference of the One Ring announcing its dominion over whoever wears it. The ring is not one thing—Tolkien spoke true when he denied any allegorical intention—but among other things, it is a wedding band. If no Tolkien story ever shows us a couple after their marriage, it is because Tolkien imagines marriage as an almost-unbearable burden, one so weighty it can drag an immortal elf down (or up) into the plane of human mortality.

I have been suggesting that Lewis and Tolkien’s poetics were more modern than they might appear, which is to say that their commitment to poetic apologetics was weaker in practice than in theory. But admittedly, from the forensic point of view their work has serious limitations. Tolkien’s greatest error might be summarized as follows: he forgot that fairies desire above all else to rape children, that Shelob’s lair is the grot of la belle dame sans merci [Keats, 1819]. As for Lewis—he guided his student-readers into the library, but did not show them which books deserve to burn. Both errors result from insufficient attention paid to the relationship between religion, sex, and violence. Strange as it may sound, these authors’ fictions were insufficiently fantastical.

*

The forensic point of view emphasizes the gap between Christianity and classical religion. Christianity is a mystery cult without the secrecy; its mysterious doctrines are out in the open for all to marvel at. What enables Christianity to be shameless in this way is that its doctrines are not metaphors for sex. Christianity has doctrines about sex (e.g., that it should be engaged in only within a voluntary permanent monogamous relationship open to life), but there is nothing particularly mysterious about them; sex belongs to the realm of the mundane. What Christian doctrine does cloak in mystery is marriage: the sole “great mystery” St. Paul speaks of is the marriage of Christ and his Church. One construal of this reversal is to say that the purpose of Christian marriage as an institution is to prevent the kind of ritual abuse that goes along with treating sex as a sacred secret. Turn over a mystery cult, unearth a gang of child rapists.

Pederasty has played a role in ritual initiations going back to the stone age. Here is a stylized picture of pre-Christian sex: it was a tool of violent domination. Procreative sex with women created new victims. Ritual sex both victimized male adolescents and initiated them into the next generation of perpetrators. To be sure, some cultures were better than others. In some tribes every child was sacrificed or raped; in ancient Rome, exposure was forbidden (though abortion rampant) and sodomy was stigmatized (though male slaves were sexually available). This is the fundamental difference between what René Girard [e.g., Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World, 1978] calls cultures of violence and cultures of justice. In the former sexual violence is demon-worship with a veil of silence thrown over it. In the latter, demon-worship is disguised with a veil of speech, the language of abstract justice: people aren’t victimized (killed, raped) to placate the demon, but because they deserve it (by being guilty, by being slaves). Not that Girard always uses the language of the demonic; he wants secular anthropologists to take him seriously, and so talks about the “scapegoat mechanism” instead. But those with ears to hear understand that the scapegoat mechanism is the visible trace of the Prince of the Powers of the Air.

Then Christianity comes along, and teaches those with ears to hear to stop the buggery and child-murder. This instruction is central, not peripheral, to the Christian message, because those things were central to humanity’s enslavement to demonic powers. Of course ritual pederasty did not vanish with the arrival of Christianity. Notoriously, institutional Christianity is and always has been a hotbed of it. It will not do to say that the Catholic Church is no more an offender than other institutions, it only keeps better records; nor to ascribe the sex-pest problem to modernity’s malign influence. Neither is the cause priestly celibacy, though the all-male priesthood does have something to do with it, as a comparison with other all-male institutions like the Navy and boys’ boarding schools suggests. A Christian might explain the phenomenon of priest-pederasts as follows. What demons do is infest corporate enterprises; the strength an institution gains from male camaraderie (is any co-ed institution truly capable of exercising a unified will?) also provides additional avenues for infestation. But the demonic modus operandi looks different in different ages. Before Christ, the demonic presence in governing institutions was an open secret, or cloaked under the name of Justice. After Christ, justice has been cleansed with mercy, the demons driven into hiding. Where better to hide than the Church itself?

Even more recently, the demons have adopted the name of individual Freedom, a convincing lie because it correctly points out that Restraint, Law, Justice, have demonic roots. Freedom insists on bringing sex out into the open in the false hope that sexual violence can be eliminated, not through chastity, but through shamelessness. It thus gives rise to sex cults that are oddly unsexy, and soon thereafter to legalized abortion till birth and a digital petri dish of self-distorting sexual identities. The false promise of freedom further leads modern man to consider pedophilia the worst crime imaginable. This tendency is to be resisted. When someone says “I can forgive anything except child abuse,” what one should hear is: “I can forgive anything except the entirety of pre-modern culture.” The point is not that pederasty is not demonic, but that idolizing autonomy and consent is just as bad. The victim of a mother’s voluntary abortion is just as dead as the infant ordered exposed by the paterfamilias; the teenage boy who stumbles onto an infinite stream of high-definition pornography and cannot look away is just as violated as the Attic eromenos.

This way of thinking about the difference made by Christianity is less alien to Lewis and Tolkien than one might imagine. I will resist the easy points of connection (W.H. Auden; Gene Wolfe), and focus on two late twentieth century cultural touchstones. First, Eyes Wide Shut [1999], a retelling (however unwitting) of That Hideous Strength [1945] showing more clearly the violent eroticism of the Inner Ring. Admittedly, this fantasy of elite mystery cults is not a true representation of the workings of power, but at best a kind of allegory. The world of 1999 simply was not the kind of world in which such secret cults could flourish. It was not a world of veils, but of unveiling: the piecemeal disclosures of cases of priestly sexual abuse; the heated debates about partial-birth abortion, with graphic visual aids; the astonishing extension of the internet into every household, its gender-bending consequences already on display (although few realized it) in that same year’s The Matrix. Kubrick’s formal obscenities did not show us anything we had not seen already, politically speaking. But the film has much to say about the outer limit of marriage’s ability to keep eros within proper bounds, and the impossibility of discerning that limit without extending the imagination beyond it. The obscenity is justified by the formality, which does not invite us to participate in the orgy so much as it enables us to resist its pull, as the protagonist for the moment cannot.

Second, consider J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series [1997-2007]. In 1999 it was not yet apparent that Harry Potter had anything to do with sex—evangelicals, it seemed, were simply sticks in the mud about any hint of the fantastic. But the fantastical is always about the uncanny power of sexual violence, as Shakespeare taught us in A Midsummer Night’s Dream [c.1595], Goethe in his “Erlkönig” [1782], Bram Stoker in Dracula [1897] (and as the Silmarillion at times hints, if Lord of the Rings does not). As for the role of pederastic mystery cults in Harry Potter, I will limit myself to a handful of observations. The first is that Voldemort’s Death Eaters always wear masks, and their sign is a snake coming up out of the mouth of a grinning skull. The second is that Dumbledore, a kindly old man who runs an educational institution teaching the proper use of a wand, and who habitually invites a few select students to visit his chambers and browse the forbidden parts of the library, turns out to be a pederast. (In a late 2007 Q&A, having realized the hints scattered throughout the seventh book had been too subtle, Rowling exercised her authorial prerogative to make this point explicit.) The third is that the dramatic heart of book seven is not the battle against Voldemort, in which Harry’s triumph is already assured, but rather his quest to understand Dumbledore and so forgive him.

*

The above construal of Harry Potter and the Pederastic Mystery Cult is undoubtedly against the grain of conventional understanding, and of what we know of Rowling’s own politics (she is a conventional left-liberal feminist). I do not find either tension particularly concerning. Indeed, the latter explains the former: absent Rowling’s political confusion, the true meaning of her genius would have showed itself more clearly in her writing, and so been more apparent to the ordinary reader. This is one way that biography can make a difference in our reading of a work, by confirming that a particular tendency of the work should not be taken too seriously.

Many readers, however, want to take the opposite approach to literary biography, and treat the greatness of the author’s writing as somehow further illuminated by the author’s life. The results are often absurd. For example, most biographical writing about Shakespeare (or about “the author of the Shakespearean texts”) has more than a whiff of hagiography, as if the goal were to tell a story to bring his life into conformity with what we think we see in his art: he was a secret Catholic; a secret liberal; a secret aristocrat. Indeed, Shakespeare truthers share many personality traits with Jesus truthers (he was never crucified, was never born, his real father was Joseph of Arimathea, or a Roman soldier); their theories often make similar argumentative moves, and often result in the same absurdly complex hermeneutic systems.

The difference, of course, is that Jesus spoke the words most Bibles print in red, but he also founded the Church. Even sola scriptura Protestants don’t think the letter alone is enough: they have text, plus a divine promise, a guarantee that the hermeneutic circle won’t spiral into idiocy if they stay within it. Whereas Shakespeare didn’t found a church; he left only texts, and not even texts about himself. Only someone who thinks poets are divinely inspired (and granted, that is all of us, at least some of the time) could think that we’re vouchsafed an understanding of the real Shakespeare from our reading “of him.” For the rest of us the rest of the time, why think we can learn anything about the man by analyzing the poems he wrote? And, conversely, why think we could learn anything about the poems by stating facts about the man? Why think that any hermeneutic circle exists here for us to cycle through? If there doesn’t, then the attempt will not clarify the poetry or even allow us to better appreciate the man, but rather will lead the reader gradually away from both to something that feels easier to grasp (because it is a fantasy).

The question is not simply whether genius exists—I agree that it does, and that some poetic works are in some sense inspired. Rather, the question is what relationship the event of poetic inspiration bears to the author’s private psychology. If the muse moves through us as often in spite of our intentions as because of them, then we cannot reason smoothly from either to the other. Shakespeare’s religion, ideology, and legal name tell us at most what material the muse had to work with, and do not allow us to learn anything important about what she accomplished thereby. Neither, though this point is subtler, can we treat the Shakespearean corpus as a shadow cast by some personality behind the curtain about whom we can make psychological inferences. At least, not unless we are to focus our attention on the points where the authorial personality interrupts or forestalls the proper movement of the muse, resulting in a poetic misstep (as we saw with Rowling above). But I have yet to see a Shakespearean truther take this approach. The game more often looks like trivia-mongering combined with mistakenly attributing the fractal nature of reality to Shakespeare rather than God.

The strongest challenge to the position I have been articulating is the mystery novel, which is to say, Edgar Allen Poe’s discovery that the reader is a kind of detective and the author a kind of master criminal planting the clues for him to find. A view Shakespeare himself seems to have had some sympathy with, as in the recurring figure of the behind-the-scenes director (Duke Vincentio [Measure for Measure, c.1604], the magician Prospero [The Tempest, c.1611]) plotting the action of the play. To be sure, an author’s ability to construct such puzzles for his readers’ delight is undoubtedly a mark of genius: consider the riddle-riddled novels of James Joyce, or Vladimir Nabokov, or Gene Wolfe. But I am skeptical, for the reasons already stated, that literary puzzles have actual solutions: at most, they have the author’s intended solution, which does not itself appear within the authored work. And so poetic truth has at most an indirect relationship to puzzle-writing. The practice of writing puzzles can (but does not necessarily) lead to the kind of intricate complexity within which poetic meaning flourishes. Poetic meaning flourishes within mysterious complexity because such complexity mirrors for us the riddle of the human heart. René Girard also construed every story he read as a kind of mystery, but he took the paradigm to be the gospel-foreshadowing Oedipus Tyrannus [c.429 BC]: the clue to the puzzle is always the mystery of human iniquity, and the need for a redeemer.

Hayward refuses to begin at a typical beginning, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [1818]. The mythology of science proper, he argues, does not begin until the emergence—not of the “natural philosopher”—but of the “scientist,” the protagonist of the scientific enterprise, who was first named around 1840 and only became widely known around the fin de siecle, roughly coinciding with the first part of Hayward’s book. The second part roughly tracks the term’s rapid ascendancy between 1900 and 1960, which period also saw popular adoption of words for all the various species of scientist, e.g., “physicist,” “biologist,” “linguist.” And the third part considers the scientist in the sixties and seventies, when science’s stock was about to fall. Hayward’s thesis is that these three periods marked three epochs in our myths about what science is.

The first epoch is that of “amateur science,” meaning non-professionalized science but not only that. An amateur acts from love. Plato’s Aristophanes taught us that for us, love is the longing of the part for the whole; Plato’s Socrates’s Diotima then taught that the highest love is love of knowledge. For this latter teaching to be for us requires us to be a part of knowledge. Hayward begins the myth of amateur science with E.A. Abbott’s Flatland [1884], which Hayward associates with what he calls an allotrope of amateur science, deductive science. The method of Flatland is to rebuild the entire world along Euclidean lines. First, from the postulate that our hero is “A. Square,” Abbott derives a satirical Victorian world of working class triangles, gentleman squares and pentagons, hexagonal minor nobility, etc., with women as line segments whose rear ends sway rhythmically to alert others to their invisible sharpness. Then, Abbott shows how a previously unknown axiom, in the form of a spherical angel, can descend out of the blue with news of a new dimension. The unstated Pythagorean corollary, Hayward argues, is that we human beings are also mathematical objects, only we are too complex to see it, as the visiting Sphere later resists the possibility of a Hypersphere.

I do not, I must say, think Hayward is right to call Flatland Pythagorean. Rather, it is Platonist, recognizing not an identity but an analogy between mathematics and metaphysics. Indeed, Christian Platonist (i.e., Berkeleyan). Abbott, an Anglican clergyman, thinks that for our knowledge of the world to rise from social to metaphysical requires outside help, and a bit of humility. An important counter to what is otherwise an impressive commitment to social-darwinian worldbuilding: the mass of isosceles triangles lack a sufficiently broad brain-angle to engage in abstract thought, then through the generations they gradually widen, become equilateral, gain sides, and thus rise in intellectual capacity while falling in both fertility and capacity for violence. “How perfect a proof of the natural fitness and, I may almost say, the divine origin of the aristocratic constitution of the States of Flatland!” But the Sphere appears first not to a pseudo-circular priest but to a square solicitor, as Christ came in the form of a carpenter’s son.

The protagonist of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) is also a gentleman scholar, and a discoverer of new dimensions. In Hayward’s telling, The Time Machine exemplifies a second allotrope of amateur science: experimental science, science developing across physical rather than logical time. Flatland pictures a Euclidean world of deduction, only for the plot to turn on a revelatory experience; the Time Traveler spends his time striving to acquire knowledge, only to make the great discovery that time itself is an illusion. The world’s temporal order is really architectural, the exhibits the same no matter in what order one wanders through them. In Chapter 11, “The Palace of Green Porcelain,” the Traveler wanders through when he eventually recognizes as the ruins of a museum of natural history.

Hayward asserts, and I know no reason to doubt him, that Wells here invents that peculiar species of narrative irony in which the protagonist explores an alien world only for he and the reader to realize in tandem that it is all too familiar. But unlike later iterations, Hayward points out, Wells’s Time Traveler has no moment of shocked recognition; rather, he makes innumerable observations, proposes hypotheses based on them, and waits for the data to bear them out: “My museum hypothesis was confirmed.” The Traveler is thus a scientist after the Darwinian rather than Galilean model. His science is too complex to be reduced to formulae; even his laboratory experiments open out, along a new direction, onto field studies.

But the Traveler is a particular and not very accurate version of the Darwinian scientist, one whose experimental movement through the world occurs in solitude. Hayward’s third chapter turns to a novel more attuned to the way in which Darwin’s voluminous correspondence linked him to proto-scientists across the globe, and links it to a third allotrope of amateur science: library science. Bram Stoker’s Dracula [1897] is a case file of various characters’ contemporaneous memoranda, in formats ranging from phonograph to telegraph to carbon copy; the book’s climax comes when two characters collate and cross-reference until they for the first time possess a full understanding of their situation. The reader believes that he has understood that situation sooner, but it turns out that reader and protagonists understand it at the same time, i.e., immediately after reading the documents constituting the first half of the book.

If the supernatural element causes us to doubt that this understanding qualifies as science, we should remember that efforts to develop a science of the spiritual remained widely popular (if not quite scientifically defensible) well into the early twentieth century. Professor Van Helsing specializes in those efforts, and so is not an amateur in the word’s usual sense. Neither, for that matter, are the doctor John Seward, the solicitor Jonathan Harker, or even the cowboy Quincey Morris. Only Arthur Holmwood Lord Godalming has no profession, and his primary contributions are monetary rather than intellectual. The flirtatious Lucy marries Arthur, which Hayward sees as the reason she succumbs to the aristocratic superstition of the novel’s antagonist. Mina, more restrained, teaches herself shorthand so that “when we are married I shall be able to be useful to Jonathan.” Library science, Hawyward concludes, can defeat the powers of evil only if we find ourselves useful wives (or marry our secretaries).

Though Hayward does not remark on it, it is interesting that each of these first three books is a love story: the through-line of Flatland is A. Square’s tense relationship with his one-dimensional wife; the melancholy of The Time Machine is heightened by the Traveler’s brief affair with a sexually available native of the future; and Dracula revolves around two love polygons, Lucy-John-Quincey-Arthur-Count and Mina-Jonathan-Count. Love stories, as I have observed elsewhere, do not generally admit of sequelae. But each of these books has myriad continuations, albeit not written by the original author, and albeit the only ones worth reading are Dionys Burger’s Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe [1957] and Gene Wolfe’s “Susan Delage” [1980]. Hayward would say, I think, that most continuations fail because they abandon the original’s amateur science in favor of a later myth: science that goes of itself, without need for a beloved. The second part of Hayward’s book has two chapters for automatic science’s two allotropes, race science and computer science.

Hayward traces the myth of race science through Edgar Rice Burroughs to H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. “Race science” is not social darwinism, exactly, and indeed takes issue with social darwinism, though not for the usual reason. Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars [1912] critiques the Tharks’ reproductive practices not because they apply principles of selection to rational animals, but because they subordinate individual to societal fitness. Hayward reads Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” [1931] to concur in this equation of social darwinism with socialism, and says that Howard’s stories are so resolutely individualist that they hardly allow the prospect of central planning to come into view. John Carter and Conan [e.g., “Beyond the Black River,” 1935] do not fight for humanity, but for themselves; Lovecraft’s heroes hardly fight at all, instead striving to understand the darkness roiling around them, and perishing in the attempt. The latters’ error is in observing the race too closely to run it. The myth (and pun) of race science is that understanding is a byproduct of living: John Carter masters xenoanthropology by conquering Barsoom; Conan masters prehistory by conquering Aquilonia. These invented place-names are among the myth’s stylistic notes. “Race” runs in the blood, but also the tongue. To invent a language is to invent a people who speak it, and vice versa, and both must be traced to their roots.

Hayward gestures at one point in this chapter toward the adventure fiction of L. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, and I see his point: while they hewed closer to reality, these antecedents shared the pulp writers’ interest in knowledge gained through adventure. My one complaint is that Hayward makes no mention of J.R.R. Tolkien (from whom I paraphrased the first clause of the last sentence of the previous paragraph). The Legendarium [e.g., “The Tale of Tinúviel,” 1977 [1917]] shares the concern of the Cthulhu Mythos and the Conan Cycle for the individual’s relation to his philological-biological lineage. And its sprawl further supports Hayward’s thesis that the myth of race science admits no natural stopping point: there can always be another cosmic horror, another snake cult, another fucking elf. But Tolkien’s appreciation for hierarchy might prompt some revisions to Hayward’s thesis that the myth of race science tends toward egoism.

The myth of computer science, Hayward explains in his fifth chapter, is also endlessly iterative (hence also an allotrope of automatic science). But it iterates differently, by permutation rather than metamorphosis. Hayward illustrates these permutations by discussing almost as many authors here as in the rest of the book put together, including several only an aficionado of the “Golden Age of Science Fiction” would bother with. Yet Hayward cannot bring himself to consider this age golden, and indeed seems to find its basic premises faulty. He begins with three 1941 tales, Robert Heinlein’s “Universe,” Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall,” and Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God.” The first recasts the Galilean credo—“Nevertheless, it still moves!”—as the basically random discovery of a youth wandering around what he finds to be a generation starship. The second highlights the role of chance in the very possibility of Galilean insight; in a trinary solar system, humanity would see the stars so rarely that the epoch-defining titular event would drive them mad. In the third, a mad scientist speedruns the evolution of intelligent life so as to steal his creations’ inventions. In Hayward’s telling, this trilogy presents in miniature the project of the SF short story, which amounted to a kind of Mad-Libs: spool out X scientific principle in Y context with a Z hero, dash in some W sentiment so it’s not too autistic, and see if the result holds water.

Yet Hayward still finds in these stories moments of greatness. He is particularly enthusiastic about Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain” [1948], where the void of space can only be borne by a special class of men who have surgically inserted a regulator between brain and body. He spends perhaps too many words attacking Tom Goodwin’s “The Cold Equations” [1954], which plays out in more hamhanded fashion the same psychopathy of space. The chapter closes with Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” [1953] and Asimov (again)’s “The Last Question” [1956], in which the theme of computation becomes explicit. The point of computers, these authors agree, is to bring the world (and thus the task of making sense of it) to an end, a project they accomplish by attempting every possible combination.

So much for automatic science. The third part of Hayward’s book looks at three novels from the end of the Long 1960s: Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep [1968], Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness [1969], and Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus [1972]. We might have expected Hayward to title this part “human science,” given that all three books feature anthropologists as their main character. Instead, he names the myth of this epoch “alien science,” in the sense, I suppose, of Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre.” If he were writing a literary history, he might have observed that it is with these and similar authors that literary modernism first eddied into the stream of science fiction (Dick read Kafka; LeGuin, Woolf; Wolfe, Proust). Since he isn’t, he instead argues that the novels of this period turn inward out of a sense of exhaustion: the turbine of automatic science had brought humanity to the moon, but we still did not know what it meant to be human. The three “alien science” chapters spin out three different allotropes: Do Androids Dream dramatizes “soul science,” in that the hero Deckard comes to doubt how he can know that he has one; Left Hand explores “sex science,” with Genly Ai experiencing a Tiresian moment of ambisexual knowing, only for the moment to pass and be forgotten; the three novellas of Fifth Head approach “self science” from three distinct angles, tending to suggest that selfhood requires some inarticulable synthesis.

Hayward’s readings of Dick, LeGuin, and Wolfe are persuasive, though by the later chapters of a book such as Science Mythology one begins to fear that literary criticism is not immune to the temptation of automatic science. For purposes of this review there is no need for further summary; the reader interested in knowing more is advised to read first the novels under discussion, and then Hayward’s account of them. I will close by observing, as Hayward does not, that all three titles consist of the word “of” between two phrases of uncertain referent. “Of” always rhymes with “love.” We thus return again to the dominant note of science mythology, the part’s obscure longing to understand the whole.

So might have begun Tom G. Turner’s A History of Somewhere [2024], if it were the first kind of story. Instead, it is the second kind, telling of particular men who wrote particular books, and how over time they developed the trope of the fictional place.

Like many histories of the English novel, Somewhere begins with Robinson Crusoe [Defoe, 1719]. Where in the world was Crusoe’s island? Off the coast of Venezuela, Defoe told us, and apparently expected us to believe him, as he expected us to believe that “Robinson Crusoe” was the pseudonym of some real-life shipwrecked adventurer. But we don’t. Though many islands are nameless, none of them were his. In this Crusoe’s island differs entirely from those of More [Utopia, 1516], Shakespeare [The Tempest, 1611], or even Swift [Gulliver’s Travels, 1726]. Theirs were ideal islands, reefs of allegory jutting up from a poetic sea. Crusoe’s island, though made up, was made up to be real, and his sojourn there to be the sort of thing that could have happened, even though it didn’t. Shakespeare-Prospero asked for our applause; Defoe-Crusoe asked also for our credence.

So Turner argues in his first chapter. I’m half-convinced. Did Defoe really ever expect belief, or only suspension of disbelief? Perhaps everyone was in on the joke from the beginning: perhaps everyone saw that, by pretending there really was a Crusoe and a Crusoe’s island, they could make their world run almost as if it were so, because so little turned on the question. No coincidence, I think—though Turner does not mention it—that Defoe was also a notorious bankrupt, as well as a lobbyist for bankruptcy reform. He sought to make the law kindlier to “honest” unfortunate adventurers (“projectors”) who had promised more than it turned out they could deliver [An Essay Upon Projects, 1697]. He more or less succeeded [cf. 4 & 5 Ann. c. 4, 1705].

In any event, the eighteenth-century public soon got used to made-up people. From pseudonymous memoirs and travelogues—and, I would add, corporate charters and fractional reserve banks—the realist (not to say naturalist) novel was born. For its account of this process, Turner’s second chapter relies heavily on György Lukács [Theory of the Novel, 1916] and Ian Watts [The Rise of the Novel, 1957]. The difference between the tragic and the realist protagonist can be stated as follows: Both belong to some real time and place, but the presence of the realist protagonist in that time and place changes nothing about it. The influence runs in only one direction.

Yet if the realist protagonist’s setting shapes him, it does not entirely determine him (this being the difference between realism and naturalism). He becomes exemplary in his struggle for individuality. Space for that individuality opens up in the friction of movement between settings, between particular times and places. Hence the canonical centrality of the historical novel, which Turner asserts (surely in jest) began not with Walter Scott’s Waverly [1814], but with Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones [1749], published four rather than sixty years after the 1745 Jacobite uprising during which which both are set. And, I would note, published the same year that Fielding as Westminster Chief Magistrate founded London’s first police force, the Bow Street Runners.

Like Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones features a made-up place: the Allworthy estate, located at no particular somewhere in Somerset. But readers of Tom Jones are unlikely to notice, for it matters only as the home of the exemplary good country squire. Not much changes on this front as we move into the early nineteenth century, whether we focus on the economic histories of Austen or the political histories of Scott and Cooper. Eliza Bennet may visit as a tourist the fictional Pemberly, but only to verify the gentility of its owner [Pride and Prejudice, 1813]. Natty Bumppo may stay a while in the fictional Templeton after meeting John Temple in the wilderness, but only in order once again to leave it behind, the original departure westward into the sunset ][The Pioneer, 1823].

All this changes—Turner says—in the 1850s, with a book whose ‘somewhere’ declares itself in the title: Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers [1857]. Curiously, despite its novelty, Turner offers little support for his claim that Trollope was the first fully to realize the fictional place. What about The Castle of Otranto [Walpole, 1746], The Mystery of Udolpho [Randolph, 1794], Northanger Abbey [Austen, 1818], or even The House of the Seven Gables [Hawthorne, 1851] or Bleak House [Dickens, 1852]? Perhaps Turner would simply observe that most of these eponymous landmarks really do exist. But the better response, I think, would be that they are just that—landmarks, great Gothic piles. While the romantic ‘somewhere’ looms over the landscape, Trollope’s realist ‘somewhere’ presents a stage on which various would-be protagonists can encounter one another. This seems right to me—still, I cannot help but notice that Trollope’s purported discovery of the fictional place centered on a fictional Gothic pile, and the fictional old cathedral town built up around it.

Barchester Towers was not, of course, the first novel set in Barchester. That would be The Warden [1855], a brief satire of chancery politics concluding with the marriage of the eponymous protagonist’s daughter to the reformer John Bold, his erstwhile-antagonist. Barchester Towers begins with an abrupt declaration of John Bold’s death, freeing Eleanor Bold (née Harding) to serve as the prize in another marriage plot, this time to an ultra-high-church Oxford don. This death, Turner argues in his third chapter, constitutes Trollope’s greatest achievement: the subordination of primary to secondary character, and so of plot to setting. We return to Barchester, not because the action of The Warden was unfinished, but because the life of the county we will come to know as Barsetshire has not stopped.

So, in each of the third [Doctor Thorne, 1858], fourth [Framley Parsonage, 1860], and fifth [The Small House at Allington, 1862] entries in the series, Trollope takes up the struggles of new comic heroes against the increasingly-familiar background of an ever-expanding supporting cast. And in the final entry, the first to announce its serial nature in its very title [The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867], Trollope brings all of these myriad strands together. A key plot point—the difficulty of proving the Reverend Josiah Crawley’s innocence—turns on the absence of Eleanor Bold from Barsetshire, she and Doctor Arabin having embarked on a grand tour of Rome and the Holy Land. Like Crawley’s supporters, the reader fully believes in the former-protagonist couple’s good character, but struggles to recall it precisely from a distance of several volumes.

The Trollope chapter is undoubtedly the strongest in Turner’s book. It probably will not quite convince anyone that Trollope should displace Dickens as the preeminent English novelist of the 1850s and ’60s, or that Regina v. Crawley surpasses Jarndyce v. Jarndyce [Bleak House, 1853] as the defining midcentury fictional case. But for those readers who have not yet had their Trollope phase, perhaps it will convince them to begin it.

The trope of the fictional place now delineated, Turner’s fourth chapter relaxes into a survey of ‘somewheres,’ including George Eliot’s Middlemarch [1871]; Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio [1919]; and, most significantly, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, introduced in 1927 and subsequently the setting of fourteen novels and numerous short stories. In the first two, setting constrains. In the third, setting self-mythologizes—despite its origins as a pseudonym for Oxford County, Mississippi, Faulkner’s fictional county takes on a life of its own.

Finally, in his fifth chapter, Turner looks at two novelists whose approach to the fictional place calls the entire trope into question. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex tales do not involve any background network of secondary characters, but only a thin veil of poetry overlaid on southwest England. James Joyce’s books are set in the real-life city of Dublin, but turn the use of proper names into a kind of poetry. Here, at the pinnacle of the modernist novel, *Somewhere* reaches something like a conclusion. The reader does not much miss the absence of any sixth chapter dealing with lesser fictional places like Wendell Berry’s Port William [invented in Nathan Coulter, 1960].

Not to say that the reader misses nothing. Just as the first half of Turner’s book avoided the question of the gothic romance, the second half avoids the question of non-realist fiction—and this seems to me, if not a fault, at least a gap. The fictional world—L. Frank Baum’s Oz [e.g., The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900], Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom [e.g., A Princess of Mars, 1912], Robert Howard’s Hyboria [e.g., “The Phoenix on the Sword,” 1932]—may differ from the fictional county, but the relationship between the two is not uninteresting. And what to make of how H.P. Lovecraft invented both Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts [e.g., “Herbert West, Reanimator,” 1921], and the non-euclidean island-city of R’lyeh [“The Call of Cthulhu,” 1928]? Or how Tolkien invented both the merry-english Shire [e.g., The Hobbit, 1937] and the various elvish cities of Middle-Earth [e.g., “The Fall of Gondolin,” 1977 [1916]]?

Separately, we might wonder why Turner’s account of the realist ‘somewhere’ never expands beyond the county—the largest sub-sovereign administrative unit. What would he make of Joseph Conrad’s Costaguana [Nostromo, 1904], or Willie Stark’s not-quite-Louisiana [Warren, All the King’s Men, 1946]? For my own part, I doubt that either of these counts as a real fictional somewhere at all, any more than the novels count as realist novels (they are works of expressionism). And I suspect that it could not have been otherwise. The realist novel depends on our ability to generalize about human action. Its subject matter is lawyerly: marriage contracts, inheritance disputes, suits for alienation of affection, accusations of fraud or theft or murder. But to ascend from county to state is necessarily to leave behind this generic societal realism for particular historical actors. The novel cannot accommodate secession, rebellion, revolution—not, at least, as actions to be taken, rather than events to be endured—because they require freedom from general laws, while the somewhere-state is understood by its generic resemblance to real-life states. For the protagonist to succeed, say, in wrenching Costaguana’s history too far from Colombia’s would betray the author’s contract with his readers. Such, at least, is my intuition—but all this is admittedly speculative.

It is interesting to note that in law, as in literature, there has developed a tradition of the fictional place. Barsetshire may be the best known of the imaginary English counties, but British army regulations name the generic county ‘Loamshire’. In the moot court at Harvard Law School, and from thence diffused throughout the American legal academy, ‘Ames’ is the generic state in whose courts the imagined disputes are litigated. The name was adopted in 1911, more than halfway through the gradual erasure of the connotation of sovereignty attaching to the American word ‘state’. I sometimes wonder if some sort of administrative centralization—the diminishing of town and surrounding environs into mere instance of a type—was a necessary antecedent to the invention of the fictional place. The specter of 1861 haunting Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha is evidence for this suspicion.

Here I close with one more complaint about Tom Turner’s otherwise excellent book. Surely the trope of the fictional place does not take on precisely the same contours in the United Kingdom and the United States? Or, for that matter, the various centralized French Republics, or the variously organized German-speaking lands? What would the story of the trope look like if told from the perspective of the literature—not of some one of these nations—but of some generic recently-centralized state, with its own fictional constellation of literary touchstones? But outside of Borges stories, such somewhere-scholarship is rarely written.