An Artistic Inheritance: George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research

CULTUREBOT

CULTUREBOT

June 2025

“What do we carry? What do we inherit?” 



On one of the first hot, humid nights this spring, I entered the packed Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research’s intimate loft space on Huron Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for a preview of the revival of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s three-act play, You Can’t Take It With You directed by Katie Devin Orenstein. 



Together with Emma Hart, who plays Essie, the two are bringing “You Can’t Take It With You” back to the stage with a production that feels both respectful of its source material and refreshed for a new audience. Emma Hart, one of three producers of the play, happens to be the granddaughter of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Moss Hart. She and Orenstein met through a series of fortuitous chance encounters, and a creative partnership quickly bloomed. “I graduated undergrad in 2023 and kept bumping into her,” Orenstein recalls, “Back in November, I was in a pinch and needed an actor fast. Emma stepped in and saved the day, and she was brilliant. Around that time, she mentioned this project and asked if I had anything lined up. As soon as she told me about it, I said yes. It wasn’t just ‘Hey, want to direct a play?’—it was more like, ‘Here’s something sacred to my family. Will you help bring it to life?’ It felt like being invited to a Passover seder. A huge honor. My task was to live up to that.” Hart comes from a long lineage of artists involved in theatre. Her father, Christopher Hart, has been intimately involved in the Broadway revivals of Kaufman and Hart’s work, and through her family, Essie grew up immersed in the New York theater world. On many levels, the restaging of this play is an intergenerational reckoning.



Inside BTCR there was the air of an early summer party: the door to the fire escape was open to let in the breeze, and a makeshift bar sold Modelos and seltzer. I had attended Matthew Gasda’s production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in January and now, last winter’s Russian dacha was transformed into a haphazard, idiosyncratically decorated 1930s Upper West Side apartment: A small bugle horn pinned to a wall, lace doilies on the furniture, a mask of Karl Marx, a vase with live goldfish swimming. Otherwise, the production design was  stripped back. There is a refreshing informality at this venue, in part necessitated by the space itself. You have to walk through a kitchen to get to your seat, and there are no curtains separating the stage from the house: I was able to watch as a trio of actors—Emma Hart, Tomias Robinson, and Jakov Schwartzberg—warmed up in front of us, clustered around the piano singing. On the choice of venue, Emma Hart says, “We chose BCTR partly because the space already felt like a living room—it’s what the play needs. We didn’t have to build a whole set. And it adds a homey, welcoming atmosphere.” 



*



Set during the Depression, in 1936, “You Can’t Take It With You” largely follows the eccentric Sycamore family, led by the benign, lovable patriarch, “Grandpa,” played by Tony Triano. His daughter, Penny Sycamore (played by Catherine Lloyd Burns), is a playwright and mother to Essie and Alice. Essie is an aspiring, hopelessly naive ballerina. Alice, the younger daughter and the most “grounded” so to speak of the family, is a sort of Jane Bennett in the Sycamore clan. At the start of the play, she has found a promising new beau, Tony Kirby the boss’ son, at her office. The play roughly follows the arc of their courtship, and the central conflict is the classic dynamic of star-crossed lovers: Alice and Tony’s families could not be more different. Tony’s parents, portrayed by Steve Schroko and Colleen Werthmann, are nearly caricatures of the patrician upper class–stodgy and uptight, with traditional values. Alice, though she loves her family, fears that her and Tony’s love is doomed due to the foundational incompatibility of their families. She delays their families’ meeting for as long as she can, but when they eventually do meet, everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. A comedy of errors ensues, culminating in a raid on the apartment by the FBI. Despite Alice’s best efforts, the Sycamore family’s eccentricity is put on full display, and there’s no going back. The play’s central questions emerge: Will Alice and Tony’s romance survive the gulf of difference that separates their families? And who will Alice choose, her family, or Tony?  



More than just differing lifestyles, Alice and Tony’s families represent two drastically opposed attitudes towards money, and, in particular, a person’s relationship to making money. Grandpa, we learn, has largely opted out of the capitalist grind. His primary occupations are taking care of his snakes and attending commencement ceremonies. Tony’s father, Mr. Kirby, on the other hand, is a poster child of the successful capitalist, and he wants his son to follow the same path. On paper, Mr. Kirby seems successful and fulfilled, but when probed by Grandpa and others, cracks beneath the surface are quickly revealed. Grandpa, while not a productive member of society by any stretch of the imagination (for one thing, he hasn’t paid any income tax, his entire life), claims to be at peace and happy, and by the end of the play, we are inclined to believe him.



In offering these two opposed points of view, the play explores how class impacts our romantic relationships. This topic is especially relevant today, at a moment when so much media displays a preoccupation with money and how it impacts relationships (A few examples that come to mind: Emma Cline’s novel The Guest, the television series “White Lotus,” and articles like this one in The Cut.) By exploring the different ways that class intersects with romance with such candor and humor, the play feels both ahead of its time and utterly contemporary. 



 The play’s contemporary is spark is no doubt a result in part of the edits Orenstein has made to the original script. Consulting a 1964 published edition of the script, I was surprised to find that Orenstein’s production is remarkably faithful; it surprised me how many of the lines remained unchanged. The script has received some necessary updates. Some of the more painfully dated lines, particularly certain stereotypical bits of dialogue and casual racism of the period, have been, understandably, removed: “There were moments,” Orenstein says, “especially around race, where I had to think hard about what would land with a modern audience. Our job was to keep the original intent while making it resonant now.” 



Part of the reason the play feels so current is that we are, whether we are conscious or not, living in an artistic and entertainment landscape fundamentally shaped by Hart and Kaufmann’s work. It’s no exaggeration to say that “You Can’t Take It With You” is a blueprint to the modern sitcom. This lineage was on the mind of Orenstein: “Kaufman and Hart were masters of structure, setting off chain reactions that build comedy. My points of reference are shows like 30 Rock, Frasier, Nora Ephron films, Rob Reiner, even Key & Peele,” Orenstein says, “All of that owes a debt to Kaufman and Hart. Their style is the original sitcom formula—one set, one room.” With this in mind, it’s easy now for me to see all the subsequent shows and films that owe an obvious debt to Hart and Kaufmann. Wes Anderson’s films, “The Royal Tenenbaums” especially, in their twee eccentricity and Rube Goldberg-esque physical comedy, come to mind. 



*



In one reading, combined with a foray into Moss Hart’s own background, the play emerges as a kind of idealized fantasy version of the family Hart wished he had growing up–artistic, eccentric, bohemian–rather than the destitute working-class background Hart emerged from. Born to immigrant Jewish parents at the turn of the century, Moss Hart had a difficult childhood. He grew up, as he recounts in his memoir, Act One, “in an atmosphere of unrelieved poverty.” Reading Moss Hart’s memoir, it is hard not to see Grandpa Sycamore as a kind of inverse of Hart’s actual grandfather, whose presence, according to Hart, was domineering: “My grandfather, whom I adored,” Moss Hart writes, “towered over my first seven years like an Everest of Victorian tyranny.” Describing her grandfather’s childhood, Emma Hart says: “He came from extreme poverty and made it big in a way that I think is nearly impossible now. That kind of poverty stayed with him. Even after he was successful, he struggled with feeling like he didn’t belong.” Theatre was an early form of escape for Hart. He writes, “I have a pet theory of my own, probably invalid, that the theatre is an inevitable refuge of the unhappy child.” But to say this play is simply a kind of wish-fulfillment would be to fail to do it justice, as  both a comedy, and a work that asks thoughtful, philosophical questions.



What do we carry with us? What do we leave behind? These are some of the questions “You Can’t Take It With You” asks, and these questions were on the mind of Emma Hart. As she eloquently puts it: “ What do we inherit—biologically, spiritually, psychically? And what’s possible to leave behind?” The play is existential in that it asks fundamental questions about how we should live our lives, but it’s existentialism that is accessible. This is still a comedy, after all. 



As Orenstein puts it: “Every classic was once radical,” and this play, in its own unassuming, tongue-in-cheek way, is indeed quietly radical, even if it might not appear so at first glance. Perhaps the most radical and resonant aspect of the play is its depiction of someone who has left the rat race and has managed to carve out a life and find fulfillment and community outside of it, with his snakes and his family and his commencement ceremonies.

"Dreadful Freedom": Sartre, Wright, Fanon and Global Existentialism

Pony Express

Pony Express

March 2025

Text available on request.

Visions of Narcissus: On Genet, Freud, and Mark Hyatt’s “Love, Leda”

Cleveland Review of Books

Cleveland Review of Books

March 2025

While he desires to quench his thirst, a different thirst is created. While he drinks he is seized by the vision of his reflected form. He loves a bodiless dream.” 
 Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Never did I try to make of [my life] something other than what it was, I did not try to adorn it, to mask it, but, on the contrary, I wanted to affirm it in its exact sordidness, and the most sordid signs became for me signs of grandeur.” 
— Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal

Love, Leda, the recently published posthumous novel of the late poet, Mark Hyatt, is a picaresque account of urban life in the London demimonde of the 1960s. Published some fifty or so years after its author’s death by suicide in 1972, first in the UK in 2023, Love, Leda is now available for the first time in the US from independent publisher Nightboat Books. A self-professed romantic, its titular protagonist, Leda, is constantly teetering on the edge of living “down and out.” While he manages to steer clear of the total abjection of, say, a Jean Genet novel—prison, prostitution, begging—he is, like a typical Genet protagonist, largely estranged from his family and frequently broke. Mostly, he manages to get by through odd jobs, the largesse of his friends and occasional romantic partners, and his good looks. 

Nearly everything that Leda encounters reminds him of himself. Throughout his wanderings, whether attracted, repulsed, or enraptured by them, the myriad denizens of Leda’s London become reflections of himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to Genet’s Thief’s Journal, writes, “Not all who would be are Narcissus. Many who lean over the water see only a vague human figure. Genet sees himself everywhere; the dullest surfaces reflect his image; even in others he perceives himself, thereby bringing to light their deepest secrets.” The same could be said of Leda: that unabashedly vain flâneur of the demi-monde who sees himself everywhere.

Genet and Hyatt both display an interest in ontological instability, explored via a narrator whose sense of self is highly responsive to their environment and fundamentally unstable. In Love, Leda, Leda’s self is the canvas upon which the novel’s characters fill. Leda’s psyche is porous. He struggles with self-regulation. At one point, he muses, “At this moment I can hardly understand myself, for I am stimulated by my own emptiness and have no idea how to develop the self in me.” And later, he exclaims: “My mind is no good at government. It adopts all.” Here we get a sense of the magnitude of Leda’s vanity, which would likely put even your most self-involved friend to shame.

As perhaps the archetypal figure of ontological instability, of the unregulated Ego in the extreme, the mythological figure of Narcissus haunts both Genet and Hyatt’s work. In Ovid’s famous account of the Narcissus myth in his Metamorphoses, Narcissus’s tragic downfall is that he is so consumed by his own reflection, unable to distinguish between himself and another, he falls in a futile, all-consuming love with himself, that “bodiless dream.” The motif of Leda as Narcissus is established early in Hyatt’s novel. We follow Leda through a typical morning routine: After a nocturnal tryst, he sneaks into his friend’s empty flat, where he stays occasionally, borrows his clothes, and draws a bath. “I feel flamboyant, undress, and walk around the flat in my nudity,” Hyatt writes. “Nursing my own love, narcissus without fault.” 

And later, in a comedic scene, we stumble upon Leda self-reflexively staging himself as Narcissus, reenacting the myth: 

“I look through a cupboard full of junk and pull out a full-size mirror. Putting it in the bathroom, I first lay it on the floor and stand on it, but being dressed, find no desires for myself. I go back into the kitchen and drink the tea. In the bathroom, I turn off the tap and put a handful of bath salts in the water. I get undressed and stand back on the mirror, looking down at myself. There is nothing of me that I fancy, so I stand the mirror against the wall. I get into the bath, lying out straight and trying to make myself flat. But I can never do it. The mirror is steaming up and reflects nothing.”

In his restaging of the myth, Hyatt’s protagonist is not felled by his self-love. He is not, as Narcissus is, turned by the Gods into a flower. Leda’s immersion in himself is neither total nor complete. The aforementioned scene of onanism is notably a failed one: Leda fails at getting himself off.

In his seminal paper on narcissism, “Zur Einführung des Narzissmus” (“On Narcissism”), Freud outlines two forms of narcissism: primary and secondary. Autoeroticism, for the infant libido, is the crucial component of the former: the child’s centering of their self as the sole object of satisfaction and stimulation. Secondary narcissism is perhaps closer to what we conventionally think of when we think of the stereotypical narcissist: self-centered to the point of delusion, which, for Freud, was often connected to other personality disorders, namely schizophrenia. It would be interesting to hear what an analyst’s diagnosis of Leda would be. He appears to get past the primary infantile narcissistic stage—he does seek out others for erotic pleasure—but whether he would avoid the label of secondary narcissism remains up for debate. 

Hyatt seems to be playing with the figure of the narcissist and the historical usage, as Freud notes, of describing homosexual behavior as narcissistic. I think it is safe to say that while Leda may exhibit some narcissistic tendencies, he does not fully succumb to narcissism’s thrall. He does not, like Ovid’s Narcissus, become lost in his reflection. While he is unabashedly self-obsessed and vain, his narcissism has a specific function in the novel. One of the lesser acknowledged facets of Freud’s theory of narcissism was his recognition of positive aspects of narcissistic behavior. In a paper in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis on Freud’s theories of narcissism, Sergio Benvenuto writes, “Freud spoke of narcissism as a tactic, a libidinal position taken, for example, when a human being is in physical pain. A severe toothache will make anyone narcissistic, because drives will be concentrated on the hurting part of the body.” One can detect this same self-protective tactic in Leda, as a response to the often painful, hostile conditions he lives through. Rather than become paralyzed by self-obsession, Leda’s narcissism functions as a fuel, a balm, a solace. It is his very awareness of his beauty that allows him to survive in the repressive, homophobic society of postwar Great Britain.



The novel follows a rough pattern: Leda does some kind of itinerant, menial work; has a night out at a venue where he does not feel welcome; has a hookup that goes badly; finds refuge at a friend’s place; and receives a good-natured lecture about his lifestyle habits. Then he sleeps, and the cycle repeats.

Although Leda is aimless and adrift, he doesn’t seem all that bothered by this apparent lack of direction, despite frequent admonitions from friends and strangers. Take the following exchange with coworkers at one of the many gigs he works in the novel, in this case, cutting sheet metal:

“Judging by your cards, you haven’t worked for years,” old Bill says.
“That’s true.”
“Then how do you keep on living?”
“I usually find a rich woman and live with her.”
“Don’t you find that degrading?”
“No.”
“Don’t you feel immoral?”
“No, why would I?”
“Well, I would, if I did that.”
“I live sheerly for myself, and not for other peoples’ thoughts.”

Leda’s philosophy towards work might be described as the following: Make enough to get by, but don’t expect spiritual fulfillment from your work. Regarding such ideas as a career or vacation, he is coolly detached, even cynical. Speaking to a friend and occasional female lover, Zara, he says:

“I’ve got to find myself a casual job and put some money in my pockets.”
“That doesn’t pay much, or does it.”
“Half a crown an hour, I think.”
“Twenty-five bob a day. It’s hardly worth it.”
“Twenty-five bob to me is what I call being semi-rich.”
“Then you’re a fool.”

A few lines later, Leda justifies himself:

“I’m happy happy at the moment. I need nothing more.”
“That’s because you’re still dreaming of Daniel.” 
“I know. I love Daniel just for living.” 

Beyond meeting his immediate material needs, Leda’s motivations are largely focused on his ultimate, and ultimately unrequited object of desire: Daniel, an older married man. The central conflict in the novel might be described as Leda’s romanticism clashing against his harsh everyday reality of living in working-class London as a gay man in the 1960s.



Leda’s London is roughly the same one that its author inhabited. It was a London where homophobia was as casual as it was rampant, and homosexuality not just socially condemned, but highly criminalized. In England and Wales in 1954, there were over 1,000 gay men in prison for homosexual acts. Love, Leda was written on the cusp of the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967, a watershed moment for gay rights in the UK that decriminalized male homosexual acts. As Huw Lemmey writes in his foreword, “Love, Leda was written in that strange thawing of the sexual permafrost that came between the 1957 Wolfenden Report, with its recommendation to partially decriminalize sex between men, and its implementation in the Sexual Offences Act some ten years later.” 

This “thaw” in attitudes towards homosexuality lends the novel an atmosphere of pervasive uncertainty. Leda’s position is still definitively on society’s margins, and he is aware that to some his behavior would be considered criminal, but his position does not seem fixed. The novel carries a sense of hope that the future may be different. “Now I look upon the world with optimism,” begins its final line.

The novel had a long, convoluted, fifty-plus year-long path to publication. Originally compiled by Hyatt’s close friend, Lucy O’Shea, the existence of the manuscript was unknown to scholars of Hyatt’s poetry until 2019, when Luke Roberts and Sam Ladkin, editors working on a posthumous collection of Hyatt’s poetry, learned of the novel through O’Shea’s correspondence.Here is a book that can truly be said to have been “rescued” from the archive.

According to Luke Robert’s afterword, certain events in Leda’s life mirror Hyatt’s. Hyatt was born in South London in 1940 and took his own life in 1972. Hyatt likely shared with his protagonist a domineering, violent familial upbringing. Both grew up in poverty and lived an itinerant life. Both would attempt suicide. However, Leda as narrator manages to lift us beyond the cold, bare facts of his life. Love, Leda is, I’d venture, stranger and more fantastical than the life of its author likely was. So while there are biographical similarities, it would be a mistake to read Love, Leda as a straight roman à clef.  If Mark Hyatt wanted to write a straightforward autobiography, he would have done so. The form of the novel was likely more welcoming for Hyatt, the poet. Unlike, say, Robert Lowell’s direct autobiographical style, Hyatt’s poetry, while striking in its emotional candor and vulnerability, tends to eschew explicitly stating personal details.[4] Perhaps the vehicle of the novel allowed Hyatt, via his larger-than-life literary creation, Leda, to depict truths and memories, wounds literal that may have been too painful to depict head on.  

Again I am reminded of Genet. Sartre writes of Genet in the same introduction to A Thief’s Journal: “His autobiography is not an autobiography; it merely seems like one; it is a sacred cosmogony. His stories are not stories. They excite you and fascinate you; you think he is relating facts and suddenly you realize he is describing rites.” I’d argue that Leda can be seen, à la Sartre, as the center of the “sacred cosmology” of the novel. As one reads Love, Leda, it becomes clear that this is no straightforward autobiography. Through a kind of ecstatic solipsism, Leda builds his own narrative of himself, at a remove from the harsh realities of the outside world. “I abandon myself from this sham of a world,” Hyatt writes, “and bury myself deep in the treasures of the heart.” Throughout the novel, Leda constantly invents and reinvents the mythology of himself, as if writing his own hagiography. 

This is not a novel without flaws. I confess that by its end, the repetitive, episodic structure started to wear on me. But given its posthumous publication, I am inclined to assess the novel based on what I think Hyatt attempted to achieve with it, with the understanding that the book we hold in our hands may not be the one Hyatt intended for us to read, if indeed he planned for us to read it at all. It would be a gross reduction to call Mark Hyatt simply “Britain’s Genet.” To do so would be to erase the important differences between the two and neglect the aspects—his self-taught background, his work as a poet, his highly idiosyncratic prose style—that make Hyatt unique. Beyond their similarities on paper, these two rough contemporaries—two gay men writing about the respective underbellies of their milieux in books that were often not traditionally published at the time—do seem to share an aesthetic and philosophical kinship. 

Although they would lead drastically different careers—with Hyatt’s being tragically cut short after his death by suicide and Genet living out his final years to a ripe old age in the Middle East—they can be seen as two sides of the same coin. In both of their work, imagination, or willful “illusioning,” becomes a transformative force that allows a marginalized person—poor, queer, and criminalized—to exist, and at times even to thrive, in otherwise unbearable conditions. The question that Love, Leda seems to pose, with its tragic ending, is how long one can sustain this line of thinking. For Genet, against all odds, and especially when one considers the “occupational hazards” of his lifestyle, his life and career would be long. Hyatt, tragically, would not share the same fate.

Radical, provocative, groundbreaking, controversial: These adjectives could be used to describe Hyatt and Genet to varying degrees. Both writers could be considered radical simply for the fact that, at a time when their existence was criminalized, they chose to document the substance and tenor of their lives in all their beauty and squalor. But beyond any so-called identity politics, even beyond a capital “p” politic, what comes to the fore after spending time with their work is the radical quality of their imagination. Whether dismissed as solipsism, mania, or narcissism, Genet and Hyatt’s work demonstrates the transformative potential of re-imagining one’s reality, especially in the face of a criminalized existence. 

Neither offers an easy way out. One finds no homilies, no utopias in Hyatt and Genet’s work. This is not the cliche “imagine” of John Lennon, but something necessarily more solitary and inward—the imagination of the exile, the outcast. This is the imagination of the margins, which makes it all the more resilient and remarkable, sustained despite disregard and contempt from mainstream society. Read today, when our world seems to be sliding frighteningly closer to the one Hyatt was writing from, his work provides a kind of solace, a grim hope: No one’s coming to save us, except ourselves.


[1] For a sampling of Hyatt’s poetry, see the following: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/poetry/Mark-Hyatt/


“Nobody:” Absent Fathers, Masculinity, and The Odyssey

The Weasel

The Weasel

December 2024

Photograph of the author’s father, Wichita, KS,  c. 1960

Outis (Οὔτις)
— Greek, meaning “nobody” or no one  

“Cyclops, you asked my noble name, and I will tell it…My name is Nobody. Nobody I am called  by mother, father, and by all my comrades.”
— Homer, Odyssey

I. Homecoming  

I know my father through his absence. His death, just before my fourth birthday, robbed  me of the opportunity of knowing him. I know I am not unique in not knowing my father. Literature is rife with fathers who have left, in one form or the other. Many people know their fathers only through their leave-takings, literal or metaphorical. My statement could be just as easily applied to any of the many absent fathers throughout history, stretching as far back perhaps as the original Absent Father of literature himself: Odysseus, the “man of cunning.”  

The Odyssey is one of our oldest stories. The poem has origins that stretch back further than the first recorded papyri versions from the 8th century, BCE. It is the product of the Greek oral tradition, a story told and retold for generations until someone, conventionally  thought of as a blind poet named Homer hailing from the islands of Smyrna or Chios, thought to  write it down.  

There are only two kinds of stories: man leaves home and man returns home. Homer’s Odyssey is mostly the second kind of story—Odysseus’ winding journey home to Ithaca. But it is also, at some moments, the first. Traditionally thought of as an epic about a hero’s homecoming, the Odyssey is also a story about an absent father and the people he leaves behind. It is a bildungsroman of sorts—the story of Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, who leaves home at the bidding of the goddess Athena in search of his father. 

This second narrative, the story of Penelope and Telemachus, is the one Penelope weaves  each day and unravels, secretly, each  night. Until relatively recently, it was largely neglected by ancient authors and scholars who were generally more interested in the story of Odysseus. This second story, of those stuck at home in Ithaca, is less flashy and more quotidian compared to the swashbuckling adventures of Odysseus. It is the story of Odysseus’s household enduring continual abuse at the hands of the suitors who have descended upon the house like a plague. Theirs is primarily a story of domesticity, grief, and waiting.  

As a boy, the story of the hero’s journey home captivated me. The stories of Odysseus  and the Sirens. Odysseus navigating through sea monsters. Odysseus outsmarting the cyclops.  However, as I grew older and reencountered the Odyssey for a third time, in college, it was this  second plot-line, the “B story”, that captured my attention. [1]

II. Telemachus  

In college, during a required freshman seminar called “Literature Humanities,” I was forced to  see Homer’s epic with new eyes. In that class I had the experience, which I often seek but rarely  find, when a text seems to stare at you directly. Via a form of X-ray vision, the  text sees you, momentarily, in disarming totality. This experience with the Odyssey was one of  the most intensely personal, almost invasive experiences I’ve ever had with literature. I am almost inclined to call it a religious or spiritual one. It was certainly a moment of revelation for me—the text piercing through the self like a sudden bolt of lightning. Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint  Teresa. Bruegel’s Conversion of St. Paul. Or Cyclops’s heat vision in the X-Men series. It was autumn, late September or early October. We had just finished reading the Iliad, the first text all freshmen at Columbia College are assigned to read, and were reading the Odyssey. This particular moment occurred during a discussion of Telemachus as a character. His role is often overshadowed by that of his father, whose shadow he languishes in for most of the epic. The “hero’s journey” is Odysseus’s story. But the Odyssey is also a story about Telemachus’s journey, his quest to find his father, and his struggles with masculinity. Put in contemporary terms, Telemachus’s plotline reads like a “crisis of masculinity.” His journey is motivated by a need to “prove himself” in the context of the masculine conventions of Ancient Greece. He does this first by leaving home to find his father, and later, once his father returns, by helping him to chase away Penelope’s suitors. As a character, he reads like a stereotypical teenage boy. He is stubborn, full of angst, occasionally prone to violence, and eager to prove himself  worthy of the title, “son of Odysseus.”  

The class discussed Telemachus’s masculinity. The discussion focused on how his traits reflect persistent ideas of masculinity that many have now, rightly, deemed to be “toxic.” Telemachus is often patronizing and paternalistic towards his mother. He treats her as incapable, as lacking agency, and as someone needing to be rescued. He can also be interpreted, I argued [2] that day in class, within a larger context, as a product of the patriarchal society he grew up in, one in which women were systematically disenfranchised and men ruled over their households like kings.

Throughout the epic, this mantle of Athenian masculinity weighs uneasily upon Telemachus’  shoulders. He bristles under the pressure of growing up in the shadow of such a father. He is constantly measuring himself up, and being measured against, his father’s legacy.  

In our class discussion, I found myself being critical of but also sympathetic towards Telemachus. More than sympathizing with him, I felt that I understood him on a deep, intimate level. This feeling of identification came to a head when we landed on one particular exchange in Book One. In this passage, the goddess Athena, disguised as the mentor figure Mentes, has arrived as a guest. Telemachus speaks with this stranger over dinner, eager for any news from this man who claims to have known his father. Athena, in disguise, asks Telemachus: “Tell me now— are you Odysseus’ son?”

Telemachus responds (here rendered in Emily Wilson’s translation):[3]

Dear guest, I will be frank with you. My mother  

says that I am his son, but I cannot  

be sure, since no one knows his own begetting.  

I forget my exact reaction when we read this passage that morning. I don’t know if I  spoke or commented. I know I couldn’t voice the intense internal reaction I was having, one  which brought me nearly to tears. I was new to college, an anxious freshman who was nervous  about speaking up in class about something so personal. I had heard my father in these lines, and  through the character of Telemachus, saw my own relationship (or non-relationship) with him. At that moment, I felt that I understood Telemachus intimately. I knew how it felt to grow up in theshadow of a father who is unknown to you. That day in seminar, I felt my father’s absence for the first time in years. 

Telemachus revealed something to me about my own experience with masculinity and the mystery of paternity. Like Telemachus, I knew my father only through the vectors of other people’s memories and stories of him. When people ask me about my father, I give my own variation of Telemachus’s reply to Athena. In Book Nine, when the cyclops Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, Odysseus responds, with characteristic cunning, that he is called “Nobody” (outis). Like Telemachus, I am the son of “Nobody.” My own paternal lineage is uncertain. Likewise, I cannot be certain of my own “begetting.”  

Our fathers, especially the ones who leave us, always remain for us partially obscured.  And for boys, or those of us socialized to be boys, whether we like it or not, we are destined to grow up under the yoke of our paternal lineage. In response, we tend to grow up either fleeing our fathers or searching for some sort of replacement for them. In the absence of a male role model, we construct our own. Like Telemachus, my father is more myth than reality.  

Self-identification—seeing oneself in a text—is traditionally not the most respected form  of literary criticism. It is often seen as naive at best and self-indulgent at worst. However, I  would argue, after having dipped my toes in the other schools of criticism, that self-identification  remains what consistently draws us back to literature, again and again. Although we may deny it,  I believe that we read largely in order to see some version of ourselves, even a highly distorted  one, reflected back at us. Or perhaps we read to see ourselves through another character’s eyes— an alternative version of ourselves, reflected prismatically through the text. For me, the Odyssey has had such a hold on my imagination, throughout all these years, because I find myself in the character of Telemachus. More than sympathizing with him, I experience a form of literary self-identification that becomes, through the operation of reading, a miraculous transposition.

III. Reunion  

When Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, he comes disguised by Athena as an old man. At the home of the swineherd Eumaios, Telemachus, at first, fails to recognize his father. He takes him to be a stranger. After Eumaios leaves, with Athena’s permission, Odysseus finally reveals himself to his son:[4]

I am that father whom your boyhood lacked  

and suffered pain for lack of. I am he.  

Odysseus weeps and embraces his son, but Telemachus, stunned by his sudden appearance after twenty years, doubts that it is really him. The return of his father is both too wonderful and too unlikely. He doubts, because he is afraid to believe such good news. Poignantly, Telemachus exclaims, “You cannot be my father Odysseus! Meddling spirits conceived this trick to twist the knife in me!” [5]

Traces of this scene are later echoed in the Gospels of the New Testament when Christ is resurrected and presents himself to his disciples. The disciple Thomas famously doubts that Christ has returned. He demands proof, asking to see Christ’s wounds so he can stick his finger into Christ’s side. Faced with news that seems too good to be true, he demands tactile evidenceof his teacher’s resurrection. Similarly, Telemachus refuses to believe the impossible fact that his father, long presumed to be dead, has finally returned.  

I too have moments when I believe that my father has returned. I don’t believe in an afterlife, at least in the Christian formulation, but having been raised Christian, some kind of latent spirituality remains buried within me. I believe, at the very least, that the borders between life and death are somehow porous. I find it comforting to believe that the dead never truly leave us, that they persist somehow in a shadowy, non-corporeal form.  

My father rarely visits my dreams, like he does for my mother, but sometimes I find myself catching fleeting glimpses of him out in the world. When I first moved to New York, I experienced repeated episodes of deja vu. These occurred most often in Chinatown, around the Grand Street station. Every tall, thin Asian man I encountered on the street or on the subway platform looked like they could be my father. Mmore somberly, I find my father in the news reports documenting anti-Asian hate crimes. I see his face in the horrific images of bloodied Asian men who have been beaten, stabbed, or murdered.  

In various intangible ways, despite his continued absence, my father persists for me. Maybe this is merely the last remnant of denial. The final stage of grief. Or just a form of wishful thinking. I never actually saw my father’s dead body, or if I did, I have no memory of it. And in my stubborn mind, perhaps this allows me to believe that after nearly twenty years, he has lingered. It is not hard for me to imagine that perhaps he might one day show up, at the house of a stranger or at the threshold of my home, perhaps shrouded in some disguise, so that I hardly recognize him.

Like Penelope, my mother holds out hope for a reunion, if not in this life, then in the next  one. Like Penelope, after twenty years, she has maintained her faith. She has never remarried or  even dated another man. She claims, and I believe her, that she still loves him, despite— or perhaps because of— his continued absence. In some form or another, we both, I believe, possess a lingering hope. A hope that perhaps everyone has been wrong this whole time, and that my father, after twenty years on a far-flung journey, will someday return.


[1] My first encounter with the Odyssey, as a child, was via an episode of the animated children’s show Arthur which spoofs the 1 epic. My second in freshman year high school English in graphic novel form. Thirdly, during my freshman year of college, in its  entirety.

[2]  See, as one example, Book One, lines 350-360.

[3] Odyssey, Homer, Emily Wilson, lines 205-206, pg. 111.

[4] Odyssey, Book Sixteen, tr. Robert Fitzgerald, pg. 295. 

[5] Ibid.

Paying Attention: A Review of Srikanth Reddy’s Unsignificant.

Antiphony Journal

Antiphony Journal

October 2024

In a letter to her friend Joë Bousquet, the philosopher Simone Weil wrote: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” while elsewhere, she writes, “Attention taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”

Reading Srikanth Reddy’s recent collection of essays, Unsignificant (Wave Press, 2024), I often found myself thinking often of Weil’s work, and in particular, her beautiful, often opaque writings on attention.“More often than not, as any analyst will tell you,” Reddy begins the titular opening essay, “the background is as important as the foreground in looking at things.” From this opening line, we are given a guiding philosophy of sorts that informs Reddy’s approach to looking at art, whether it be the paintings of Rembrandt, Cy Twombly, or Bruegel, or the poetry of Emily Dickinson or Gertrude Stein.

Reflecting upon his preoccupation with the “background” in a work of art, and the apparent dearth of books on the subject, Reddy poses the following questions “What is a background? Is it just a figure suffering from low self-esteem? What are we missing when we disregard those unassuming little figures—birds, clouds, unmanned military drones —in the offing? Can paying attention to what’s going on in the background make you a better person?” Like Weil, Reddy is interested in the ethical implications of our attention, i.e. that there are always ethical ramifications when we choose to pay attention to one thing over another.

In the three wide-ranging, yet tightly controlled essays that comprise this collection, Reddy considers the implications of the way we focus our attention towards works of art. The collection provides a series of case studies in generous, attentive engagement with art. Reddy is especially interested in which aspects of a work of art compel our attention, the division between foreground and background, and how certain works of art subvert our expectations by drawing our attention from the foreground and towards the oft-overlooked margins.

In this vein, it is telling that the first work of art Reddy invites us to closely examine is W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” itself an ekphrastic account of the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The poem, written in 1938, in the aftermath of Auden’s first-hand experience of the horrors of the Sino-Japanese War, is, in Reddy’s reading, a poem about human suffering. He writes, “‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is not so much a poem about a particular painting as it is a meditation on the suffering that goes unnoticed in the background of ordinary experience.”

What follows is the collection’s first, delicate, approachable exercises in ekphrasis: Reddy “looks” at Auden’s poem which itself “looks” at a painting, namely Bruegel’s Landscape With The Fall of Icarus. Auden’s poem isolates its attention on the solitary figure of the ploughman, noting “how everything”, including the ploughman, turns away from the “disaster” that is Icarus’s plunge into the sea. The ploughman turns away because for him it is not “an important failure”—meaning one that impacts him directly. Auden’s poem is interested in the painting’s economy of attention, and namely what it has to say about the larger world’s failure, in Reddy’s words, “to register the suffering of others.”

Reddy is an enviably nimble explicator of both visual art and poetry, and in the case study of the Auden poem/Bruegel painting nesting doll, he moves our gaze smoothly, seamlessly, between painting and poem, as if adjusting a long telescopic lens. He is an ideal art historian for poets. Perhaps owing to the fact that these essays originated as a series of lectures, his conversational tone and the complete lack of pretense to his prose, serve him well, here and elsewhere in the collection, as he moves on to tackle more obtuse, less literal material.

In part two of the second essay, “Like A Very Strange Likeness And Pink,” he provides a close reading of Gertrude Stein’s disorienting 1923 poem, “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” Destabilizing the very notion of representation and the genre of portraiture, Stein’s nominal portrait of her close friend Picasso, as Reddy goes on to demonstrate, rapidly disintegrates into a scattered series of disparate associations and images, stretching our concept of likeness and representation to its limits. As Reddy puts it, “Stein’s experiments in resemblance show us how different things are not unlike.”

Perhaps the most wide-ranging piece in the collection is the final essay on “wonder.” Here he acknowledges the slipperiness of his subject: “wonder, I’d venture, is always already a fugitive affair.” Whether Reddy succeeds, in this last essay, in achieving his goal of bringing us a bit closer to “wonder itself” is up for debate. As an emotion or experience, wonder, is slippery, and highly subjective. But I can attest that the way in which Reddy attempts to locate wonder within poetry, namely in the examples he discusses such of shield of Achilles in the Iliad and the erasure poems of Ronald Johnson, is compelling and entertaining. One reads these essays, not necessarily for the satisfaction one takes in watching Reddy pin down his subject, like a lapidarist netting a butterfly, but for the joy and vivacity Reddy clearly takes in getting there: the confident, associative leaps he makes from Achilles’ shield, that “impossible object” in the Iliad, to Milton’s Paradise Lost, to the brilliant, evocative absences of Ronald Johnson’s erasure poems made from Milton’s epic.

“Pure, intuitive attention,” Weil wrote, “is the only source of perfectly beautiful art, and truly original and brilliant scientific discovery, of philosophy which really aspires to wisdom and of true, practical love of one’s neighbor.” Weil’s theory of intuitive attention has much in common with the practice of attentive viewing and aesthetic engagement Reddy performs across the essays of Unsignificant.

Thinking of Weil, while reading these essays, and especially the last essay, I couldn’t help but think of the kind of sustained, open minded engagement with art Reddy practices as a form of prayer. Perhaps it is exactly through the kind of intuitive, prayerful attention that Weil describes and that Reddy demonstrates in these essays—a paying attention to what is often overlooked, to the trivial, the quotidian, the marginal—that is what allows us to open ourselves up to the possibility of wonder.

The superstructure behind Yiyun Li’s fiction

Document Journal

Document Journal

September 2023

In elegiac, lyrical, wry, snarky, and wonderfully plain-spoken prose, the author crafts characters through conversational pairs

In sociology, the term “dyad” refers to a significant relational pair. Husband and wife. Brother and sister. Parent and child. Across Yiyun Li’s prolific career—10 novels, two story collections, and a memoir, as well as several works of criticism—this structure surfaces again and again. The stories in her most recent collection Wednesday’s Child teem with pairs: a mother and her deceased daughter (“Wednesday’s Child”), an elderly nanny and her client (“A Sheltered Woman”), a pair of friends (“Hello, Goodbye”), a woman and her former teacher (“A Small Flame”), an octogenarian former etymologist and her middle-aged caretaker (“Such Common Life”). In Li’s work, the dyad often becomes the locus or node around which a story whirls.

Perhaps the most common set up for a Yiyun Li story: Two people—whose relationship’s contours have yet to be defined—speak to each other. Her novels often play out in the form of extended conversations, with interludes of action and reflection. There is frequently an element of philosophical debate, where characters—with varying degrees of candor, irony, and humor—pose fundamental, often existential questions about how one should live, given the certainty of continual suffering. But if any of this implies to the unfamiliar reader that Li’s writing is academic, professorial, or didactic, rest assured it’s the complete opposite.

Across her books, Li’s writing is versatile and protean. Her prose can be elegiac, lyrical, wry, snarky, and wonderfully plain-spoken. If characters are dispensing hard-won pearls of wisdom, the writer is generous—if sternly attentive—to the psychological faults and deficiencies in their interior logics. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, Li’s characters tell the truth but they tell it slanted. She never quite lets anyone off the hook, including herself, as in Where Reasons End; its narrator, Li’s fictive stand-in, is often described as “gormless” and is chastised by her son for being imprecise, lazy, or—that cardinal sin—cliché in her use of language. If a character says something that smacks of certitude or “wisdom,” we sense Li behind us, gently prodding a closer look, to scrutinize, to re-examine.

Li’s most frequent dyad is that of the storyteller and the listener. Her protagonists often find themselves drawn to characters—despite their various foibles and flaws—for their captivating ability to tell tales, to turn the most minor of life’s dramas into narrative. In Wednesday’s Child, Li writes: “Nina liked to be told stories, and Katie was good at telling stories.” And then again, in The Book of Goose: “I never made up stories, but I was good at listening to Fabienne.”

Often, Li’s ostensible “plots” seem to be a pretext for the real meat of the story: that same ongoing dialogue. At the center of The Book of Goose, her most recent novel, is the dynamic, complex friendship between Fabienne and Agnès. The major events that unfold in Agnès external life—her ascension to literary celebrity, her departure from her rural home to attend boarding school, her isolation, and her eventual expulsion—feel, at times, like incidental episodes. It is easy to imagine another writer mining these same plot beats for their full, melodramatic potential, producing a pulpier, less interesting novel in turn. Li chooses the riskier route. She lets the continual conversation between Fabienne and Agnès occupy center stage.

One essential feature of the dyad is its dynamic of attraction and repulsion, compellingly fueling many of the relationships depicted in Li’s work. We see it in Agnès’s all-consuming dedication to her friend Fabienne, against the external forces that are determined to pull them apart. When the dyad encounters a third person, it must adapt in order to endure.

“How do you grow happiness?” Fabienne asks at the beginning of the novel. The girls are 13, but they feel that they are older. Growing up in impoverished, postwar rural France, their lives are far from idyllic. Already, they have experienced more than their fair share of toil, drudgery, and death. But the two have also managed to carve out a shared, private world, an Eden of sorts, sustained through language.

Of course, it cannot last forever, and their fall is inevitable. When the two girls hatch a plan to begin to co-write books, outside forces enter their world. First, their “mentor” M. Devaux, the neighborhood postman harboring failed writerly aspirations, who capitalizes on the potential he sees in them, eventually resulting in scandal. And later, much more potently, in the form of Mrs. Townsend, the headmistress of the English boarding school Agnès attends, as she attempts to undermine her epistolary correspondences with Fabienne. The novel can be read, ultimately, as a story of the evolution and eventual dissolution of this fraught pair.

In Where Reasons End, Li’s 2017 semi-autobiographical novel (although neither of these terms really do the book justice), the dyad goes from an essential plot mechanism to become the plot itself. Put another way, the structure becomes superstructure. Very little actually happens. The entire plot could be summed up by a single sentence: A woman and her dead son talk to each other.

Where Reasons End takes a question—what would it be like if we could speak to those who have died?—and lets it play out in the form of a book-length conversation. The narrator, a mother (also a writer and a kind of sly stand-in for Li) addresses her son, Nikolai, who died by suicide and now speaks to her from beyond the grave. Their conversation is a unique, meandering thread, chatty and cutting in turn, somber and joyful, existential and quotidian, without an apparent destination or clear purpose. Their discussions drift from etymology, to music, to baking, to Wallace Stevens’s poetry, to time, emptiness, to grief.

In Where Reasons End, stripped down to its barest essentials—with setting and character reduced to the nearly incidental—we can see clearly how the dyad functions as a narrative container. The novel poses the implicit question: In the absence of a conventional plot, what is left? What breathes life into these characters? The answer, at least according to Li: conversation.

As with Agnès and Fabienne in The Book of Goose, and many of the pairs in Wednesday’s Child, the format of the dialogue between Nikolai and his mother provides a stage upon which Li makes her characters’ thinking legible. They unveil their pasts, lie, write and rewrite their personal histories; they display faulty logics, glaring omissions, self-deceits. Across her work, Li seems particularly fascinated with the kind of shaping—of oneself, of the future, of the past, of others—that happens when two characters speak, in agreement or in argument.

Where Reasons End recalls foundational texts in the history of Western and Eastern literature and philosophy: the Analects of Confucius, Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, and the dialogues of Plato. Like Plato, Li uses dialogue as a vehicle for the development of characters’ thoughts, a staging ground for ideas, a platform upon which beliefs can be argued and defended. Like Socrates, Nikolai is inquisitive, challenging, skeptical. Written while Boethius was imprisoned by the Gothic Emperor, The Consolation of Philosophy—like Where Reasons End—is narrated from a position of isolation and despair. In both, their narrators find comfort and companionship with a ghostly interlocutor who appears to them all of a sudden, miraculously.

For Li, though, unlike Confucius or Plato, the aim isn’t as clear cut as a pursuit of knowledge. The dialogues are not a simple means to an end. Nikolai teases his mother for sounding like “a mediocre self-help book.” There are no easy solutions given here, in the end, but the talking was worthwhile.

At the very end of Where Reasons End, the narrator tells us: “For days and weeks after Nikolai’s death, I had spent much of my time in his room, knitting, unraveling, knitting, unraveling.” Like Penelope in the Odyssey, weaving and unweaving each night, awaiting her husband’s return. The conversations we witness between Li’s dyads mimic a similar linking and unlinking—a repeated thesis, antithesis, synthesis. As characters speak, consensus forms and is broken; ideas are rebuffed, solidified, re-wrought. Each story, each pair, each conversation, a link in a daisy chain, continuing ad infinitum.

“What Would Weil Do?”: Philosophy as Work

The Gadfly

The Gadfly

December 2021

“You could not have wished to be born at a better time than this, when everything has been lost.”

— Simone Weil

The first time I read Weil, I was a senior in high school. I was given a copy of Gravity and Grace by my older, much wiser friend who was in college and who seemed infinitely more advanced than me. Weil had become, for her, a kind of spiritual and intellectual mentor. For years, she carried her dog-eared, heavily annotated copy of Gravity and Grace with her like a pocket King James Bible. The epigrammatic, koan-like Gravity and Grace reminded me of the austere architecture of a Roman cathedral—something both lofty and utterly removed from daily life—or of the uncanniness of medieval Christian portraiture. There was something alien to her writing, something simultaneously recognizable as human while also appearing to exist primarily outside of our world. On my first read, I’ll admit that I found Weil, cold, impersonal, and opaque. As someone who was raised Christian but who has since lapsed into a vague spiritualism, her intense devotion was initially off-putting to me. It often felt, while reading her, that she was speaking another language. Nevertheless, I sensed that there was something to her, a reason why my friend and so many others were consistently drawn to her life and work.

In the fall of 2020, as the world reeled from the pandemic, I, like everyone else, was spending a lot of time at home and alone with my thoughts. I I decided it was time to give Weil another try. After acquiring an anthology of her writing, I began working my way through it, and instead of finding her writing dour, discomforting, or off-putting, I felt as if I were being led by a warm, firm, steady hand. I took comfort reading her during the dark winter months of 2020, finding something reassuring in reading a thinker who could write with such moral clarity during another uniquely calamitous time in history. 

Weil lived during a time filled with ethically fraught, high-stakes decisions. Although the circumstances were different, the pervasive feeling that one’s daily decisions had grave, large-scale consequences, is common, I think, to both Weil’s lifetime and our own. Weil was living through an ethically convoluted environment similar to the one that myself and everyone I knew faced as we attempted to navigate our lives during a global pandemic, where daily decisions could have literally life or death consequences. Weil’s writings on living ethically during fraught times resonated deeply with me. I found myself asking, only partly ironically, when faced with challenging day-to-day choices and attempting to calculate what would cause the least amount of harm: “What would Simone Weil do?”  

One way, out of many, to read Weil’s work and life, is to examine how she applied her ethical philosophy to her own actions. This is the kind of reading I will attempt here—looking at the way theory and praxis merged in the particular instance of Weil’s engagement with labour throughout her work, following some of the twists and turns in the development of her thinking on the topic of work, both in an abstract and a literal sense. The site of this engagement was most often the factory floor. During her short career, the factory, like the lycée, was a place where Weil engaged in philosophy, among her peers and her fellow workers. It was a fertile breeding ground for Weil, and, especially early in her career, a place where some of her most well-known theories—notably her theories of “attention” and “affliction”—were first sketched. 

Simone Weil lived a short and intense life bracketed by two world wars. Born in 1909, a few years before the outbreak of World War I, she died in 1943 from a combination of tuberculosis and self-imposed malnutrition. In her short life, she produced a prolific amount of work on everything ranging from classical literature, mathematics, psychology, science, and religion to, of course, philosophy. In a short time, she managed to live a remarkable amount of often contradictory lives, and part of the joy and difficulty one encounters reading her work is how to make sense and reconcile the starkly different “Weils” that one encounters. Weil was, at various points in her life: a Frenchwoman, a mystic, a Platonist, a philosopher who labored among factory workers, a Jewish-born convert to Roman Catholicism, a pacifist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a revolutionary who was skeptical of revolution, and (according to André Gide) the “patron saint of all outsiders.”

Having lived through three wars and participated in two (the Spanish Civil War and World War II), her short life during this intense historical period gave her a unique amount of opportunities to put her ethics to the test. Unique among her contemporaries is the narrow distance between the values she espoused and the actions she performed. Although she contradicted herself over her career, and her actions were sometimes misguided and even unhelpful (see, for example, her absurd proposal to parachute unarmed nurses onto the Allied front-lines, or her botched attempt to fight in the Spanish Civil war, which ended after she accidentally burned herself with oil) Weil was, above all else, deeply committed to all of her beliefs. 

I.

One of the first causes the young Weil pledged herself to was the plight of the workers. Like many other French intellectuals of her period, she was attracted to Marxist ideas and from a very early age expressed an interest in labor relations. Where Weil differs significantly from her French intellectual contemporaries, however, is how she applied her concern for the worker’s conditions. She was not simply an armchair Marxist, teaching about dialectics in a university somewhere: she made concerted (if sometimes ridiculous) efforts to meet the workers where they were, to tutor them in the cultural education she felt them to have been robbed of, and to engage with them on their own terms. Weil was not, despite her bourgeois class position, writing about labor from an idealized, comfortably removed position. Rather, Weil wrote from the perspective of someone who had intimately acquainted herself with physical work and who knew both how soul-crushing and how fulfilling it could be. 

While teaching at a small lycée in Roanne, an industrial city in southeast France, Weil applied to work at the Alsthom factory in Rue Lecourbe. Slight, clumsy and plagued by migraines, she was certainly a poor candidate for hard labor. But despite these deficits, she persisted in her search for factory work, finally convincing the factory director to take her on in 1934. While teaching her half-dozen students philosophy at the lycée, she worked during her off-hours at a machine press on the Alsthom factory floor. It was obvious that she was not well-suited to the work: she often missed her quotas (once damaging an entire quota’s worth of metal components), frequently burned herself, and, wracked by migraines and fatigue, finished most of her work days weeping. 

Despite not being a very capable manual laborer, her experience at the factory proved fruitful intellectually, as is documented in the “factory journal” she kept during her time at Alsthom. To read her journals from this period is to watch her distilling her physical experiences with labor into philosophical theories in real time. At the factory, her experience with the mind-numbing, repetitive, painful experiences of physical labor was essential for the development of her ideas, especially her writings on affliction and attention. Work, as Weil’s thought develops, becomes an especially intellectually dense locus within her broader philosophical system. This sphere of activity is a meeting place where many of the ideas Weil explored are staged. In her later writings, as will be shown, work acquires for Weil spiritual implications that are latent in the earlier “factory journal” entries.

When work is done under nonideal conditions it produces the kind of acute mental and physical suffering Weil experienced herself on the Alsthom factory floor. This affliction is both physical and psychological: it reduces those that endure it (the workers) to the status of things—dehumanized, non-thinking things. To paraphrase Weil, affliction reduces its victims to slaves. Writing about inhuman labor conditions and affliction, Weil often sounds like Marx writing on the alienation of the worker from his labor. 

In an essay written a few years later in Marseille in 1941, “Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour,” we find Weil writing again about the negative effects of work done in inhumane conditions, but this time from the vantage point of someone who was undergoing a spiritual conversion. She begins the essay by stating that ​​in all manual work and all work done out of the need to survive, there is an element of constraint: “it means exerting effort whose sole end is to cure no more than what one already has, while failure to exert such effort results in losing it.” Anyone who has had to work for a living—to pay rent, support their family or themselves, and put food on the table—will understand the kind of experience Weil describes vividly: “the unit of time is a day and [workers] oscillate like a ball bouncing off two walls, from work to sleep, working so as to eat, eating so as to continue to work and so on ad nauseum.”

For Weil, the condition of working simply to subsist produces “revulsion.” All workers, but especially those who work under inhumane conditions, are the most susceptible to revulsion. The connection to her earlier notion of “affliction” is explicit. Revulsion, it seems to me, is an instantiation of Weil’s theory of affliction that applies specifically to workers. In this state of revulsion for the worker where all “effort is survival,” the Good is notably absent. As Weil puts it, “necessity is omnipresent, good nowhere.” Weil’s intellectual debt to Plato, her deep love and allegiance to his philosophy, is especially evident here, and is indicative of her moral philosophy at this later stage in her career. 

Never a particularly orthodox Marxist, it is Weil’s unique conception of work as it relates to the Good that I would argue distinguishes her among other philosophers similarly concerned with labor relations, forms of oppression, and revolutionary politics. Breaking ranks with Marxist orthodoxy, Weil claims that Revolution is not a cure-all for this state of revulsion, but rather like a “drug”; it is an illusionary form of compensation. Revolution “as a revolt against the injustices of society” is right, according to Weil, but “as a revolt against the essential misery of the working condition it is misleading, for no revolution will get rid of the latter.” If revolution is only a partial solution, what does Weil suggest as an alternative?

II. 

As “Prerequisite to the Dignity of Labour” continues, Weil makes a turn, revealing her hand. It is here, as her thought begins to ascend to a loftier, spiritual plane, where Weil begins to lose me. What workers need most of all, Weil argues, in order to fill their miserable and empty lives, is beauty. “Only one thing,” Weil writes, “makes monotony bearable and that is beauty, the light of the eternal.” What is not needed for workers is bread so much as beauty in the form of poetry—but not poetry’s “closed inside words,” as we would conventionally assume—poetry in the form of religion. “Such poetry can come from one source only, and that is God,” she writes. Religion fulfills what workers are fundamentally lacking in their lives: purpose. Interestingly, for Weil it is the worker who is in a social and economic position most well-suited to receive God: “Nothing separates them from God. They have only to lift their heads.”

The very work that they do, which was also the medium for much of their misery, becomes also a vehicle for their salvation. Although in the workplace “all thought is dragged down to earth,” the tools and material of the workplace contain, for Weil, the cure. The workplace, as Weil enumerates, is full of reminders of God. For these workers, “the very work which paralyses, provided it be transformed into poetry, will lead to intuitive attention.” 

Work is the ideal medium for the practice of Weil’s notion of “attention,” a crucial, loaded term in her philosophy, traces of which can be found in her early factory journals, although it wouldn’t become a fully fledged concept until the final years of her career. What then is Weil’s theory of attention? It is hard, given limited space, to summarize her concept fully. Nevertheless, here is an attempt. 

Contrary to the conventional understanding of attention as a kind of intense mental effort, Weil separates attention into two categories: inferior attention (mental exertion or “mental gymnastics”) and intuitive intention. “Pure, intuitive attention,” she writes, “is the only source of perfectly beautiful art, and truly original and brilliant scientific discovery, of philosophy which really aspires to wisdom and of true, practical love of one’s neighbor.” Attention is also, for Weil, a form of prayer, one that, if practiced correctly, promises a direct link with God. Like prayer, it involves a great amount of patience, and it requires us to leave ourselves open to the possibility of being awed. 

Weil’s practice of attention is also intimately connected with the Good. It is here where we see Weil’s particular flavor of Platonism in full force. She writes, in Gravity and Grace: “If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.” This kind of orientation towards the Good, through the practice of attention, involves a particular form of self-abnegation—the suppression (or even destruction) of the Ego. However, in Weil’s case, this detachment does not result in a hands-off, cloistered kind of noninvolvement, but instead a particularly charged form of ethical engagement with the world. 

At first, this statement seems to be, like many of Weil’s theories, a paradox. Here, understanding a little about Weil’s thinking on the relation between perception and ethics is helpful. For Weil, in contrast to other theories of phenomenology, perception and value judgement are coterminous. Thought, she argues, occurs simultaneously with discernment: we perceive and we judge simultaneously. Thus, for Weil, acting morally is contingent on “seeing” the other properly. Attention, in Weil’s unique formulation, is therefore able to take the form of an ethical precept. Especially when the subject of our attention is another human and their suffering, the act of attention takes on pronounced ethical dimensions: “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it.”

Attention, when its object is another human being, can be described as a conscious attuning to the sacredness inherent in the other regardless of their status, their behavior, or their identities. Proper action towards another human, for Weil, can only first emerge when this inherent sacredness of the other is properly apprehended. 

III. 

With all this in mind, what can studying Weil, both her work and her life, teach us today? What if we do not agree with all of her views, especially those concerning God? What if we are unbelievers? I’ve struggled with this often while reading Weil, as I find myself torn between being drawn to her strongly and almost inexplicably despite rejecting (or at least severely doubting) many of her fundamental religious beliefs. As a spiritually curious, lapsed Christian, there is much of Weil that I disagree with. Still, I can’t stop reading her. Reading gives me a glimpse of the kind of clarity and surety that having such devout belief can bring to one’s life. It is this feeling, of being awed by such a display of devotion, that is part of the reason I return to Weil, again and again. This, and the fact that she seems to have something important to say about nearly everything. As one of her translator’s, Richard Rees, puts it in the introduction to her First and Last Notebooks: “There is probably not a single fundamental problem of our age, in any domain, that is not resolutely faced and examined somewhere in these pages.” She is a thinker who, I believe, rewards continual, long term engagement. In other words, Weil rewards our attention

Unfortunately for her readers today, Weil’s work will not provide a simple compendium of answers to common ethical questions. A reader looking for a “self-help” style guide on how to live will come away frustrated. Her writing does not provide any easy answers. It will not, for example, tell us how to solve climate change, who to vote for, or whether you can buy from Amazon and still consider yourself a good person. Even the more direct answers that she does give to moral problems may prove equally unhelpful, at least initially. But do I believe that a sustained engagement with her work does serve to train us to be better at thinking “ethically”—at interrogating our beliefs, and our motivations, and our ideals, so that when we do act, we do so with great intention and moral clarity. 

In a general sense, I think Weil serves as a model of someone who lived a committed life, held firm ideals, and thought and lived rigorously until right up until her death. She is a model for a version of the philosopher: the philosopher as a thinker who is also engaged in daily life—a model of philosophy not as a solipsistic retreat, but as continual re-engagement with the world. It is not only Weil’s theories that are worthwhile to study today, but her particular way of thinking through them.

 It was Weil’s thought as a verb and not as a noun that ultimately proved the most rewarding takeaway during my year of reading her. By reading, in her journals and essays and lectures, Weil articulating simultaneously her experiences “doing” work and “doing” philosophy, I began to understand the intimate relationship the two possessed for her. Philosophy, for her, was not something detached from one’s daily, banal existence but something fundamentally inextricable from it. After spending a year with Weil, I believe that she has much to teach us about what it means to be a thinking person in this world and how thinking itself is a morally fraught action. Weil is something of a philosopher’s philosopher: she writes lucidly about the role of a philosopher, and what doing philosophy means at all.

At her very best, Weil is a kind of moral exemplar in the sense that she encourages us to think more critically about our thought processes (and the actions that spring from them) and to commit ourselves more deeply to what we believe in. As she writes in her notebooks, “philosophy is exclusively an affair of action and practice. That is why it is so difficult to write about it. Difficult in the same way as a treatise on tennis or running, only much more so.” This is both a wonderful, succinct definition of her conception of philosophy and a useful way to approach her own philosophical practice. For Weil, thought was action, although it was not a complete substitute for it. Even if her attempts to enact her ideals were sometimes flawed in execution, there is much to admire in a person who is willing to live and die by their beliefs, a person whose ethics are so enmeshed in their life, that it is nearly impossible for them to separate ethics from existence

It took me a long time to come around to Weil. I felt intimidated, uncomfortable, and a little guilty reading her. It is easy, when reading Weil, to feel ashamed. One feels that they are continually falling short in her presence. I am reminded, every time I read her, that I am not doing enough for the causes and ideals I believe in. I think that, especially today, this feeling is not a bad thing. As one of her earliest friends and later her biographer said of her, “Who would not be ashamed of oneself in Simone’s presence, seeing the life she led?” Shame, I think, should only be our initial feeling reading her. For if we get past the shame, the richness of Weil’s teachings are unveiled to us, and we are given the immense privilege of bearing witness and giving attention to her beautiful, luminous mind.

"Nuanced Portraits: On Brandon Taylor’s “Filthy Animals” "

Los Angeles Review of Books

Los Angeles Review of Books

September 2021

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor. Riverhead Books, 2021. 288 pages.

“POTLUCK,” THE FIRST story in Filthy Animals, may just be the perfect encapsulation of a Brandon Taylor story. It reads a lot like a miniaturized version of Real Life, Taylor’s debut novel, released last year to widespread critical acclaim (it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and included in The New York Times’s “100 Notable Books of 2020”). All the ingredients of a Taylor story are here: an outsider protagonist, a dinner party, an explosive romantic encounter, and a microscopic examination of the violence lurking under even the most benign encounters. Taylor’s unique gifts are all on display in this opening story, which forms the first in a quintet of linked tales featuring recurring characters (the 11 stories in the collection all influence one another in various ways).

Taylor is uniquely adept at capturing the discomforting feeling of being out of place at a social gathering. For anyone who’s ever had the painful experience of standing around awkwardly at a party, hovering on the fringes of conversations hoping to be admitted, this collection will surely resonate. See, for example, this moment early on in “Potluck”:

“The conversation was difficult to catch. Everyone was talking in extended references to other moments, other events, other parties, and each reference, instead of drawing two things into relation, was instead the whole of the idiom, the entirety of the gesture. […] He had no way of getting inside the reference, the system.”

This quality of being “outside,” in one way or another, is one of the recurring themes of Taylor’s writing. In both Real Life and Filthy Animals, Taylor is preoccupied with various categories of estrangement — whether among friends, among peers, or even among one’s own family.

Perhaps it is Taylor’s scientific background that allows him to anatomize social interactions so effectively (he left a graduate program in biochemistry to pursue a writing career). As in the above quoted passage, Taylor treats human interaction schematically without being overly clinical. For anyone worried that a scientific background might lend itself to a stilted, lifeless prose, I can assure you that the stories in this collection pulse with life. Neither cold nor detached, these stories are suffused with a warmth and humanity that recalled for me the uncanniness of Raymond Carver, the empathy of Alice Munro, and the meticulous irony of Chekhov.

There is indeed much of Chekhov in these stories — in their revealing details, in the way events gradually build and unspool, in the author’s close observation that plumbs the depths of human behavior. As if cheekily noting the connection, one character in “Potluck” even makes passing reference to the Russian author: “Is your heart’s desire to interrogate strangers at a dinner party like a Chekhov character?” In Chekhov’s stories, we are often given a one-dimensional portrait of a character at the beginning, which is further complicated and revised as the tale progresses, so that by the end our initial expectations have been undermined.

Taylor’s gift for close, empathetic observation can be found especially in the linked stories in this collection. The dancer Charles, for example, whom we first encounter in the opening story through the limited vantage point of Lionel, is given greater depth in the third story, “Flesh.” Here, we inhabit Charles’s perspective as he explores his relationship to dance and to his body, the fragile vehicle for his livelihood, as well as his complicated relationship with Sophie. This relationship, the linchpin of the linked stories, is fractured by a sexual encounter with Lionel in the opening story, only to reach a kind of tentative resolution in the final story in the collection, “Meat.” Charles, who in the first story is an enigmatic antagonist and romantic interest, is eventually afforded the same narrative attention as Lionel, and as a result our initial view of him grows more complicated. He is no longer just a minor character but a flawed and interesting human being in his own right.

As characters appear and reappear across stories, we are given richer, more nuanced portraits of each of them. Encountering them again and again, we experience some of the readerly joys one is accustomed to in a novel. Indeed, the hybrid form of the collection places it somewhere between a gathering of individual stories and an episodic novella. Not all the stories are explicitly related, but they all share similar settings, preoccupations, and themes. Most concern the lives of students or young people engaged in creative professions, most are set somewhere in the Midwest, and many feature characters who are estranged in some way from their families. Almost all feature a character who is on the “outside,” often due to their race or sexual orientation.

Although the stories are successful as individual units, I found myself most compelled by the ones that follow Lionel, Sophie, and Charles. These linked tales, stitched throughout the collection, allow the characters, and thus the author, more room to stretch out and breathe. This added depth and resonance sometimes made the stand-alone stories feel leaner by comparison. This isn’t to say that such tales as “Little Beast” or “As Though That Were Love” aren’t well crafted in their own right, but as stand-alone pieces they made less of an impact on me compared to the richer, more three-dimensional portraits we get in the linked stories. Taylor is proficient at narrative compression, a skill showcased in the shorter pieces, but he shines most, I think, when given the leisure to revisit characters and their interpersonal dynamics, usually from different vantage points, to apply additional layers of perspective to relationships we thought we understood on first sight.

Events in one story have repercussions, later on in the collection, in another. The effect is a bit like watching a chain reaction occurring in slow motion. By and large, the stories in Filthy Animals are patient and quiet — until they’re not. These stories are not flashy, there are no postmodern tricks, just a masterful grasp of pacing that gradually builds tension toward an inevitable eruption.

Reading the 11 stories, I found myself thinking of the painter Paul Cézanne. I thought of the way he would approach even the simplest of still-life subjects — a bowl of apples, say — with a meticulous, almost obsessive desire to render it as faithfully as possible. Taylor’s portraits exhibit the same kind of attention to quotidian detail, the same solidity and fullness and depth. Taylor is rarely content to allow one perspective to dominate in his writing. He considers his characters from multiple viewpoints, from all angles, meticulously layering brush stroke on brush stroke, returning, like Cézanne, to the same themes, the same dynamics, the same subjects, again and again.

Revolution and the Body: A Close Reading of William Blake

Acumen: Issue 101

Acumen: Issue 101

September 2021

Text available on request.

"Speaker of the Dead: On the Ethics of Memory "

The Gadfly

The Gadfly

May 2021

CODY BENFIELD



“How I wish I could name them all,

But the list, confiscated, cannot be found.

— “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova

I. Introduction

The masthead of the recently created COVID Memorial website reads, “Not forgotten. Not just a number.” The website, created sometime this year during the COVID-19 pandemic, functions as a digital graveyard of sorts to commemorate some of the more than 2.5 million (at this time of writing) lives that have been lost during the pandemic. The site allows families to post brief obituaries of their loved ones along with a photo. Scrolling through the seemingly never-ending stream of posts commemorating parents, children, friends, and lovers who have died from the coronavirus, the sheer scope of collective grief is staggering. The United States recently surpassed the grim milestone of 500,000 COVID-19-related deaths since the pandemic began. One of the pressing questions we now face is how, while still in the midst of a pandemic, we should honor those we have already lost and the thousands more who will die in the coming months.

The FAQ page of the COVID Memorial website describes its raison d’être:

“People around the world are realizing that COVID-19 is much more than statistics and graphs […] These are the faces and lives we have already lost.”

Browsing this website, one gets a sense of the moral impetus underpinning this memorial. As evidenced by these posts, many have not been granted the simplest dignity of being allowed to see their loved ones on their deathbeds. A reoccurring, heartbreaking detail in many of these obituaries is that their loved one died alone. 

Websites such as this one exist, in part, because of the nature of the pandemic and our measures to contain it: In order to stop the spread of the virus, we have been forced to grieve its deaths largely in private. If any funerals and memorials are held in person now at all, they are small, private affairs. The pandemic has deprived us of public opportunities to mourn. We have not been fully allowed to grieve. In response to the reduction of the victims of this pandemic to mere statistics and the lack of public opportunities for mourning, people have invented new ways to give these deaths the individual dignity they deserve. 

If it is true, as Joseph Stalin is famously reported to have said, that “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,”how can we prevent these deaths from becoming mere statistics?Whose obligation is it to hold all these deaths in memory and give each their due? This dilemma prompts the question: Do “we”, in a collective sense, have a moral obligation to remember the dead? 

II. An Obligation to Remember 

Much has been written, in philosophy, about how one ought to be, and much has been written about memory, but far less has been written about the interstices between these two —a domain we might call the “ethics of memory.” This concept may at first seem counterintuitive, since we usually think of memory as more related to forms of knowledge than to actions and ethics as being the domain of our actions. However, as Paul Ricoeur argues, it is possible to speak of an ethics of memory:

“Memory has two kinds of relation to the past, the first of which […] is a relation of knowledge, while the second is a relation of action. This is so because remembering is a way of doing things, not only with words, but with our minds; in remembering or recollecting we are exercising our memory, which is a kind of action.”

 I want to emphasize Ricoeur’s observation of memory’s relationship to action, remembering as “a way of doing things.” We might call this voluntary memory. There are countless examples of voluntary memory in our everyday lives, actions we take to shape how and what we remember. Think, for example, of the student who writes out flashcards to study for an exam, or someone who employs a pneumonic device to remember a phone number. By pointing out the dual aspect of memory as both knowledge and action, Ricoeur helps us become more attuned to the agency we possess in the act of remembering.

If there is such a thing as voluntary memory, it becomes possible to speak of “acts of memory”, the same way we speak of “acts of service”. On a grand scale, these acts of memory are enacted through memorialization. For what is the memorialization if not the act of committing something to collective memory? Many of our rituals surrounding death deal with this idea explicitly. A memorial service frames a person’s life and ultimately shapes how we will remember them. A discussion of the ethical concerns of memory, on a large scale, must therefore eventually turn into a discussion of memorialization.

One significant recent scholar on this topic is Avishai Margalit. His book, aptly titled The Ethics of Memory, is an instructive source to turn to when considering the questions of memorialization and memory. Margalit, building on existing discourse on collective memory, is concerned both with microethics, the ethics of individuals, and macroethics, the ethics of collectives. In the book’s introduction, he lays out explicitly his aims: “The topic of this book is the ethics of memory, with a question mark:Is there an ethics of memory?”

Margalit begins his investigation by first distinguishing between morality and ethics, two terms which are often conflated, but that he believes refer to fundamentally distinct concepts. These two terms, in Margalit’s view, are distinguishable by the kinds of human relations they refer to. Ethics tells us how to regulate our thick relations with others, usually people we are in close emotional proximity to. Ethics, on this account, is broadly concerned with ideas of loyalty and betrayal. Morality, on the other hand, governs our thin relations—our relationships with strangers and acquaintances—and is more concerned with themes of respect and humiliation.

This distinction is important, both for Margalit’s project and for our current discussion of memorialization because memory, Margalit argues, usually falls under the domain of ethics, meaning it is a concern of our thick relations. Care is at the core of our thick relations, and care, Margalit argues, is only possible if we ‘remember’ the person we are caring for. 

Communities of memory, with one example being the family, Margalit says, are the foundation of ethics. Memory is a prerequisite for our thick relations and is thus under the domain of ethics. Consequently, this means that by Margalit’s original definition, memory doesn’t extend beyond the ethical borders of our intimate circles. However, there are some instances where Margalit argues that the imperative to remember becomes relevant to communities of thin relations—the domain of morality. Margalit gives the Holocaust as one example of an event that extends beyond the typical ethical borders of memory, and, as I will argue, the COVID-19 pandemic also falls into this category.

The Ethics of Memory is interested in situations where the moral imperative to remember extends beyond our inner circle. Margalit goes on to advocate for a “moral community of memory.” A moral community of memory, for Margalit, would be tasked with remembering certain “radical evils,”a term Margalit borrows from Immanuel Kant. These “radical evils,” according to Margalit, include “crimes against humanity, such as enslavement, deportations of civilian populations, and mass exterminations.” I would like to extend Margalit’s definition of “radical evil” to include another large-scale recent tragedy: the COVID-19 pandemic. The scale of death in the US alone rivals that of World War II, making this pandemic a tragedy on the same scale as the other kinds of mass suffering that Margalit describes. Additionally, although the deaths from the pandemic are from so-called “natural causes”, and thus not intentional in the same way as the other atrocities Margalit describes, an argument can be made that the rampant, uncontrollability of the pandemic is also the result of poor decisions made by human actors such as politicians and world leaders. The pandemic’s staggering death toll is the result of a pathogen, but also the result of the action (or inaction) of individuals. A recent study by Lancet found that 40 percent of COVID deaths in the US were preventable.

I argue that this pandemic, as a large-scale traumatic event, would fall under the purview of Margalit’s “moral community of memory.” It is an event that “we,” in a broad sense, have a moral obligation to remember. Once this obligation has been established, the question becomes, What do we mean when we say “we?” Who exactly is responsible for this remembering?

III. Who Should Remember? 

In pre-modern times, the role of remembering important cultural events would likely fall to that of the storyteller—the bard, singer, orator, or griot who learned a repertoire of stories to pass them on to future generations, not only for the amusement of an audience, but for the transmission of cultural memory. Today, most modern societies have dispensed with the tradition of the oral storyteller. With the advent of modernity, asWalter Benjamin laments in his famous essay “The Storyteller”, the role of the storyteller has declined until it has become virtually nonexistent.

In absence of the storyteller as our receptacle of memory, Margalit’s concept of the “division of mnemonic labor” provides a potentially useful alternative. Building off of the economic concept of “division of labor”, Margalit adapts this term to refer to the way that the burden of collective memory is distributed throughout a society. He goes on to explain:

“In traditional society there is a direct line from the people to their priest or storyteller or shaman. But shared memory in a modern society travels from person to person through institutions, such as archives, and through communal mnemonic devices, such as monuments and the names of streets.” Who then, does the responsibility for preserving and transmitting cultural memory fall to? We all, in a sense, have free rein in determining what gets remembered. Each of us, for example, will hold our own unique memory of this pandemic. But in practice, cultural memory today is usually constituted by the exporters of mass culture: the press, politicians, artists, writers, etc. 

As Margalit points out, the most enduring transmitters of memory are nonhuman. It is rather physical objects, the communal mnemonic devices—monuments, art, artifacts, and memorials—that are “responsible, to a large extent, for our shared memories.” In this way, I argue it will be our artists, writers, and architects who are the best suited for tackling this task of remembrance. They are the ones who, in the coming months and years, will face the unique burden of preserving the cultural memory of this pandemic and the countless lives that have been lost.  

IV. The Ethics of Memorialization 

The task of memorialization is always a complex process, deeply fraught with ethical considerations. An ethics of memorialization seeks to lay bare these ethical questions. It is especially concerned with rhetoric—the way that memorials convey their historical message or content. Recently, we have seen the kind of controversy that memorials can spark with the recent debate around Confederate monuments in America. The story of the justifiable backlash against these monuments is a case study in failed attempts at memorialization, failures which an ethics of memorialization seeks to interrogate. 

There is the ever-present threat, in memorialization, of distorting history to serve the needs of a regime or ideology. In the case of Confederate monuments in America, there has been a recent resurgence of scrutiny and outrage at the ideological connection between many of these monuments and white supremacy. The outrage and controversy around these monuments has only grown in the past year, resulting in the removal and destruction of many Confederate monuments around the country. In just the past year, after the killing of George Floyd this summer by a police officer, nearly 100 Confederate symbols were removed in the United States, “either by local decrees or forceful protesters.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on Confederate monuments is an example of an ethics of memorialization in action. An ethics of memorialization seeks to ask questions about how memory is being constructed, and whose story is being told. The report, which features an exhaustive list of the nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments in the United States and a compelling argument for their removal, frames this ethical question explicitly in its title “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy.” Its heading further lays out the ethical stakes of this particular case of memorialization: “Our public entities should no longer play a role in distorting history by honoring a secessionist government that waged war against the United States to preserve white supremacy and the enslavement of millions of people.” 

As the example of Confederate monuments in America shows, failed attempts at memorialization can distort history and reify violence, rather than providing reckoning, closure, or healing. Even events as ostensibly “apolitical” as a global pandemic can still be inadequately memorialized. Events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which are simultaneously “universal” in their reach, but highly unequal in their impact, have an arguably greater potential to leave voices out or to come across as incomplete or one-dimensional. This doesn’t mean we should shy away from the task; it simply calls for a tremendous amount of care and attention to be paid to any attempts at memorialization. 

It will require a great deal of creativity and ingenuity to properly account for all the collective loss we have experienced since the pandemic began. Our old models of monuments and memorials may not serve our needs this time around. They may be instructive in some ways, but it is imperative not to repeat their mistakes and shortcomings. This pandemic is a unique tragedy in many ways and any attempts at memorializing it will have to rise to meet the unique demands of the current moment.

The COVID Memorial website is an early, triaged attempt at memorialization. It satisfies an urgent need, providing an outlet for those who have lost loved ones during the pandemic and are looking for a public space to mourn. However, it is more a product of necessity—simple, utilitarian—than a carefully-crafted piece of artistic expression. These memorials will come later, either while the dead are still being counted, or in a few years when we finally have a moment to look back and take stock of all that has been lost. These new memorials will likely have to invent new ways of articulating grief for a post-pandemic world. This may mean utilizing new technologies, new mediums, or perhaps even inventing a new language of grief, in order to properly speak of our dead.  

Review: Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler

The Columbia Review

The Columbia Review

April 2021

Editor Thomas Mar Wee reviews Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts. 

In the opening pages of Fake Accounts, the recent debut novel by Lauren Oyler, who is better known as a critic, the narrator describes her intentions (and the novel’s intentions) in telling the story of the dissolution of her relationship with a man named Felix who, she discovers, has been secretly operating an extremely popular conspiracy theory account. The narrative is structured in six parts and plays out roughly over the course of the beginning of Donald Trump’s Presidency.

The narrator believes, as she states, that she is the most interesting character in this story, a belief that reflects both the narrator’s self-obsessive personality and alludes, slyly, to the inherently self-obsessive nature of writing a story about oneself. She goes on to say that she is writing this story in order to better understand herself and also in order to “enchant an audience, promote certain principles I feel are lacking in contemporary literature, and interpret events both world-historical and interpersonal.” This is a bold agenda for any novel, especially a debut. And it means that we are perhaps inclined, as we read, to place the novel under greater scrutiny than usual. We are invited to hold the novel to the demands it sets for itself and especially to its promise to rectify some of the purported defects of contemporary literature.

Debut novels, especially by critics, invite a certain amount of (perhaps undue) criticism. They are a tempting target for other critics, especially if the author is known for being devastating in their critiques of other people’s writing. As someone who went into reading Fake Accounts unfamiliar with Oyler’s criticism and who has a soft-spot for debut novels, I am perhaps more predisposed to searching for moments of promise and potential in Fake Accounts rather than to relishing places where the novel and its author fail to meet the daunting standards they have sets for themselves.

However, if I had to evaluate Fake Accounts on its own criteria, I would say that it occasionally entertains while not quite managing to enchant, and that it successfully melds the world-historical and the interpersonal in the way that it captures a larger historical moment through the observations of its protagonist. Whether it succeeds in rectifying the ills of contemporary literature remains a matter of debate, one that is predicated on an agreement about the merits or deficiencies of contemporary fiction in the first place.

There is perhaps an argument to be made that the novel sets itself up for failure. Only the very best novels manage to be simultaneously enchanting, grand and personal in their scope, all while reinventing literary trends. One can, I believe, appreciate the moxie of a novel’s ambition while still remaining skeptical about whether it ultimately succeeds in its aims. Time will tell how this novel will be remembered within the history of early 21st-century literature. What can be said about Fake Accounts at this point in time is that it appears more to reflect the trends and attitudes of contemporary literature rather than subverting them.

Although not unique to them, the kind of relentless hyperawareness and self-analysis characterized by the novel’s narrator seems particularly endemic to the Millennial and Gen-Z generations. This wry, cynical, slightly disinterested, critical tone combined with varying degrees of self-awareness seems indicative of many of the novels that have emerged over the years out of a loose cohort of Millennial writers (the narrators of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation come to mind in particular).

Oyler, who self-identifies as a Millennial, has written a white, Millennial-aged female narrator who seems to be representative of a particularly contemporary form of Internet-addled self-awareness and self-obsession. The narrator, who blogs for a Buzzfeed-esque website, is plagued by a hyperactive pattern of thinking which she at one point refers to as the “neurotic minute-taker of my thoughts.” In grand terms, this attitude of constant criticism of others and the self, of constant risk assessment and the mental tallying of scores, and of a sense of life as something lived under the constant threat of public scrutiny, could be called the malaise of our postmodern condition. In humbler terms, the narrator’s attitude will be intimately familiar to anyone raised on the Internet or who spends too much time online.

This novel’s strength at accurately reflecting the common thought patterns of a generation bred on social-media-fueled self-scrutiny is also often its downfall. The experience of reading Fake Accounts is one of recognition and tedium. Reading Fake Accounts, I was reminded of another novel that similarly attempted, through the neuroses of its narrator, to reflect a certain cultural moment—in this instance, 20th century modernity filtered through the lens of existentialism. I am referring, of course, to Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, considered his major success as a novelist and the only novel of his that most people still bother to read today.

In both novels, I was impressed by the author’s ability to report the experience of living in a particular cultural moment and by their accurate portrayal of the interior psychological states of their protagonists. Both novels feature a protagonist, who by their very ordinariness, becomes in some way representative of the social conditions of their milieu. For both novels, however, the reading experience was as frustrating and claustrophobic as it was illuminating.

The strength of Oyler’s writing comes primarily from her apt observations. Like a novelist of manners, she is highly attuned to the different ways people perform in social situations, both online and offline. When there is comedy in this novel, it is observational. Perhaps due to her background as a critic and culture writer, her prose lends itself to aphorism. There is a satisfying flash of recognition in reading Oyler’s narrator describe a specific emotion, personality type, behavior, or way of interacting online that is familiar to us but seldom described.

This strength quickly becomes, when repeated throughout the novel, tiresome. The tedium of Fake Accounts comes in part from its bloated structure, frequently bland descriptions, flat characterization, as well as its questionable tendency to report events and conversation indirectly. The protagonist’s inability to escape the deluge of her thoughts, coupled with the narration’s lack of compelling description, ultimately results in a novel that feels trapped within itself.

In the spirit of being generous, this tedium may be more the result of the novel’s exhausting subject matter than the result of its faults or failings. It is often tiring and redundant, even nauseating, to read a portrait of the historical moment one is living in, even if that portrait is a faithful one. If, as Stendhal famously said, the novel is a mirror on a high road reflecting life back at us, perhaps there are some experiences that simply don’t benefit from being thrown back on a contemporary reader. The mirror may be spotless, but we may be tired of seeing ourselves and our current moment reflected back at us.

A person’s experience reading Oyler’s Fake Accounts will likely be predetermined by what they look for in the books they read. Recently, I find that I need to be thoroughly convinced to read a contemporary novel that only offers, at most, an accurate reflection of our times. I find it exhausting enough just to live through our alienating, late-capitalist, postmodern Internet Age, and this has led me more often to seek out books that either report a novel experience, offer a perspective that is different from my own, or suggest alternatives to present circumstances.

In many ways, Fake Accounts is a faithful mirror. It presents a believable, if extremely unlikable narrator with all-too familiar neuroses. It reflects our hypermodern condition of perpetual estrangement, paranoia, and anxiety. A reader will likely find many eerily resonant moments in this novel. The question becomes as to whether the world that this novel reflects is one a reader wants to spend any more time in. Perhaps this will be one of those books that is deemed mediocre upon its initial publication, but years later, when future readers are curious to see what life was like during this period in history, it will gain relevance and stature for its accurate portrayal of our tedious historical moment.  

Fake Accounts / Lauren Oyler / Catapult, 02/2021 – $26 (Hardcover)

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