Bernanos’s independence of mind and spirit and heightened political consciousness were characteristic of many Catholic writers and thinkers during the interwar years, even as many Church conservatives favored disastrous alliances with fascist demagogues. Their reflexive embrace of human fraternity—the solidarity of the hopeful in bleak times—attested to the spiritual strength of Christianity, manifested not so much in ecclesial institutions as in the Gospel message of compassion for the weak and opposition to every form of hatred and cruelty.

Bernanos went into exile. He and other expatriate writers would help prepare the ground for a profound postwar transformation—not only of the Church but also of the wider culture of the West. Jacques Maritain, a leading Catholic intellectual of the era, drafted an antifascist manifesto, criticized “individualist liberalism,” denounced antisemitism, racism, and colonialism, and, in 1948, helped shape the formulation of the United Nations’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His work spread widely, influencing writers and artists—from Marc Chagall, Gabriela Mistral, and Jean Cocteau to Czesław Miłosz and Shūsaku Endō—as well as political and business leaders. The ideals of universal human dignity and fraternity, prominent in the founding documents of the United Nations, would soon resonate in the declarations of the Second Vatican Council, the Church’s decisive opening to the modern world in the 1960s.

In our own era of convulsive breakdowns, the Catholic Church is one of the few global institutions with moral and intellectual authority. The warm reception for Pope Leo XIV across the world is testament to the successful pontificate of Pope Francis (2013–2025), the only major world leader to offer a sustained critique of the final, explosive phase of neoliberal globalization—what he referred to as “a third world war fought piecemeal.”

In his discourse and diplomacy, Francis diagnosed our interconnected global crises—economic instability, social inequality, climate catastrophe, authoritarianism, and war—as failures of moral imagination and practice. He saw nothing inevitable about the worship of wealth and power, the obsession with technology, disrespect for human dignity, and the destruction of the planet. These were human choices, not fate. Francis sought to sanctify the natural impulses of decency and solidarity that spring in all human hearts and to bridge the widening gap between those impulses and our political and economic realities. His 2020 encyclical Fratelli tutti—“brothers and sisters all”—insisted on the moral imperative and practical possibility of advancing our shared human future through fraternity, social friendship, and a “culture of encounter.”

Francis’s ecumenical worldview and his respect for diverse human experiences and convictions enabled him, like Bernanos and Maritain before him, to engage with a broad range of figures and movements. Over the course of his pontificate he interacted not only with religious and political leaders but also with creative writers and other artists. A former teacher of literature, he saw writers—with their power to evoke alternative worlds—as allies in the struggle against free-floating cynicism, organized hatred, and what he denounced as the “globalization of indifference.”

Today art and literature have been absorbed even more deeply into a commercial civilization than when Bernanos proclaimed his furious rejection of the atrocities in Spain. Our perilous world-historical moment challenges writers and artists to unsparingly reconsider beliefs and allegiances formed during a morally complacent era. As in the 1930s and 1940s, this juncture calls for a fresh solidarity of the hopeful—those who neither accept the world as it is nor turn away from it but see it as something to be engaged with and ultimately transformed. It is in this spirit that, since last year, the two of us have been co-convening the Georgetown Global Dialogues, an ongoing event series that gathers writers and intellectuals, many of them from the Global South, to discuss ways forward in a divided world. What follows are brief texts adapted from remarks delivered in Rome this past July at the second installment of the dialogues, which brought together leading writers to engage with the legacy of Pope Francis and was cosponsored by the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education. —Thomas Banchoff and Pankaj Mishra

‘What Am I Doing Here?’

Zadie Smith

Since I was a child I’ve always wanted to say “thank you” to someone who is not around. I have always done that. I’ve always felt ridiculous: “Oh, thank you” if the child comes home safely, “Oh, thank you.” Who am I talking to here?

When I was a baby writer, even before I wrote White Teeth, I read some lines by David Foster Wallace. There was nothing deep about them. In fact, you could put them on a tote bag. Something like: If you worship money, you will always feel poor, and if you worship beauty, you will feel ugly, and if you worship power, you will feel weak. And I remember reading it and thinking: If you worship God, what will you always feel? I realized I didn’t really have an answer to that.

I grew up in what you could call radical atheism. To the point that once, when I was about nine, a sweet English boy—I think he had a crush on me—bought me a Bible for my birthday, and my mother took it and threw it out of the window in front of his face. She grew up in an extremely oppressive church—the Jehovah’s Witnesses— and my mother ran from it in order to survive. I have so many friends who were profoundly damaged by churches. I’m well aware of this bloody legacy—but then, all human legacies are bloody.

And yet from the beginning I was interested in religions as philosophical systems. I grew up among Hindus and Muslims and two different kinds of Christians and the kind of syncretic worship that many Jamaicans have left over from their West African experience. I was always envious and fascinated, going around my friends’ houses and watching people break fasts, seeing people sit seders.

When I was writing White Teeth, the comedy of the novel in my mind was that it was about some very religious people: Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and another, third type of very religious person—rationalist liberals. That was the comedy of it: the third party didn’t think they had a faith, they felt that they were being extremely rational about life, but of course rationalist-liberalism was a philosophical system that dominated their lives and structured their reality as surely as any faith. The thing about rational liberals is they do not know what they do not know. Their map of the world is complete, defended, and impenetrable, and applied to every situation, in every country, and to all peoples. This way of thinking was one of the animating spirits of colonialism, and as comic as it is in White Teeth, in the world its consequences have often been tragic.

So, there’s White Teeth, with its interest in Islam, evangelical Christianity, and rational liberalism. And then The Autograph Man is obviously about Judaism and Buddhism, two philosophical systems I was very interested in at that time. On Beauty is about the secular worship of art and culture. NW for me is an Anglican novel, with its sense of tragic fatalism. Swing Time is about a kind of syncretic African spirituality. And The Fraud is a Catholic novel, in which evil is taken seriously as a force in the world.

I’m now back living in Willesden, north London, in the parish I was born in and the street I was raised on, though in the nice house instead of the estate across the road, and I am once again surrounded by Jews and Hindus, Muslims and Christians. When I moved back to London, I thought: well, like the Jews I don’t have any interest in heaven or hell—I have no metaphysical concerns—and like the Muslims I believe in the concept of human limits, in the act of submission or surrender, particularly to contingency. And like the Anglicans and Catholics I find the story of Christ as a form of socialist gospel endlessly interesting and inspiring, and like the Hindus I seem to have many gods—so what am I doing here?

The local Anglican church is where I used to dance back when I was a kid, and it appears in Swing Time: the two girls who are the main characters in the novel first meet there. It’s a big nineteenth-century church, half of which was sold off and converted into flats in 1987 at the height of Thatcherism. What is left is, I guess, just a tiny corner.

One day I found myself going. I walked in nervous. The congregation is, on a good day, about twelve people. Some of them are unhoused, some are addicts, some are recent immigrants, some are locals of long standing. At least one person is usually there solely so they can put the fact of their attendance on a school application form in a few years. Anyway, that day the vicar hadn’t come—sometimes she doesn’t. Since the vicar wasn’t there, a man stood up and gave a eulogy to his dog. There was a big picture of the dog, and we sat and celebrated his dog and I thought, “What am I doing here? This is crazy.”

I think I had an alibi in my mind. I subscribe to Iris Murdoch’s idea that the good exists as a concept universally and in every culture, no matter what the particularity of that good, or God, is. But it was still an alibi, and I was still in an Anglican church worshiping an Alsatian that recently died.

The extension of this church’s worship is that every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we have a larder, or “food pantry” as you say in America. We show up and feed people in the community, as well as handing out advice on visas, housing, unemployment benefits and gas bills. Since I started showing up, one thing I’ve noticed is the way in which this simple act re-enchants the neighborhood. North West London has gentrified very quickly, and I think when some of my neighbors walk through the neighborhood it is to them a place of fear. But when I walk through the neighborhood, I’m like, That’s not a “meth head,” that’s Dave. Because I know Dave, because he comes and eats at the larder. It is still my neighborhood, but I see it differently than a lot of people do, especially outsiders. To me our neighborhood is not just the middle-class moms with their expensive pushchairs or my writer friend across the park, but instead a place of many layers, where people are going through all kinds of struggle, many of whom I now know personally. The larder makes me ask myself: How do you want to be connected in the world, and how do you want to be in communion with people?

Anglicanism is meaningful to me in that way. I’m not in any way an effective, good, or faithful Anglican. I am at the larder far less frequently than I should be. But I’m interested in the idea that this particular space in Willesden provides something which, at least in contemporary capitalism, seems very hard to find elsewhere. (I cannot speak for Anglican churches elsewhere.) It’s meaningful to me, in the radically local sense Philip Larkin got at in “Church Going,” as a specific place where for hundreds—or maybe thousands—of years, people have gathered for this purpose: to be quiet, to be in communion, to be with one another. These human souls can be abject, they can be lost, they can be rich or poor, hold a great variety of political views or none at all. The door is open.

These reflections are adapted from Zadie Smith’s remarks in a conversation with Paul Elie and Javier Cercas on “The Diminished Dialogue Between Faith and Culture.”

‘The First Thing That Needs to Be Transformed Is Literature Itself’

Tash Aw

One of Pope Francis’s last major statements dealt with “the role of literature in formation.” In it, he set out to defend the value of reading novels and poems for one’s spiritual development. “Literature is often considered merely a form of entertainment, a ‘minor art’ that need not belong to the education of future priests and their preparation for pastoral ministry,” he wrote. “I consider it important to insist that such an approach is unhealthy.” Literature, he argued, offers a particular kind of access “to the very heart of human culture and, more specifically, to the heart of every individual,” a view onto “our concrete existence.”

I was moved by Pope Francis’s vision for literature. It was precisely fiction’s power to capture “our concrete existence” that I felt when I was growing up as a teenager reading Rabindranath Tagore, Yasunari Kawabata, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. It also seems to me that this power is something that we, as writers, have lost. I think that, as we discuss how to transform societies, the first thing that needs to be transformed is literature itself.

How can we reestablish the conditions for literature to offer the possibility of awakening, of transcendence, or however you want to put it? One starting point might be to finally do away with the old, stubborn distinction between Western and non-Western writing. Too often one still encounters the presumption that Western literature is linked to the intellect, to rationality, a product of the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment—and that non-Western literature, by contrast, is somehow inherently “spiritual.”

In my experience, this couldn’t be more wrong. I grew up in a Chinese Buddhist Taoist family and went to a Catholic mission school in Malaysia, a heavily Muslim country, and much of the literature that I encountered growing up had exactly the same aims as its Western counterpart. Many of these aims are not particularly admirable. The literature I read as a child was again and again focused on capturing a sort of nationalism, on defining a national identity, which is then used to define a particular group of people against others. Not only was it not used to offer transcendental experience, it was used to exclude the possibility of transcendence—to exclude the possibility of awakening, the realization of a better way of living, even for the self. It was aimed, ultimately, at reinforcing the nation-state’s authority over the individual. And, again as in the West, by and large it was produced by a small, elite, bourgeois intelligentsia, with their own narrow political interests.

The challenge for us in Asia is to change this state of affairs. What would it take for us to again create something in the spirit of a Tagore or a Kawabata—a literature that restores the connection between the personal and the political and reestablishes a sense of “our concrete existence”? That is my provocation for today.

These reflections are adapted from Tash Aw’s remarks in a conversation with Mohsin Hamid and Ranjit Hoskote on “Literature and the Transcendent in a Global Frame.”

‘A Historian of Emotions’

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Mario Vargas Llosa, writing about the heroes of the chivalric novels before Cervantes, said somewhere that their psychology was as complex as that of their horses. Literature, in other words, didn’t always concern itself with emotional reality. But at a certain point that started to change. Novels started to discover the possibility of revealing the hidden lives of women and men, their contradictions, their ambiguities, their secrets and their secret desires, their demons and their ghosts; novelists started to learn how to fix and study and understand a certain space that is not easily measurable, that is not quantifiable, that has no real existence in the world and cannot be accounted for on a factual level but nonetheless has life-changing importance.

This made novels dangerous. They are accused of immorality, of damaging readers, for which political authorities censor and ban them. I recall a wonderful moment in a book by Madame de Staël, the French novelist who was expelled from France by Napoleon, in part because of his suspicions of novelists—especially hugely successful and influential novelists. I believe she was writing from exile, and she says that she can’t deny the fact that novels cause harm because they reveal too much about what we are. They reveal too much about human beings. She says, and this I find beautiful and problematic: You cannot have a new feeling anymore without realizing immediately that you have just read about it in a novel.

I would like to posit that the novelist is a historian of emotions. We go to Dostoevsky, to Stendhal, to Virginia Woolf, to Austen, to George Eliot and Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa and Toni Morrison because they opened this place where our emotional world leaves a trace.

I’m not talking only about our intimate lives. There is, I think, a sense in which the modern novel’s success at explaining our emotional world helped lay the foundation for other, more directly political achievements. In his extended essay Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera writes that Western democracies are used to thinking about themselves as the inventors of human rights. But before human rights, he seems to argue, first we had to invent the notion of the individual, and to recognize ourselves and others alike as individual human beings.

This would not have happened, says Kundera, without the art of fiction, which teaches us to be curious about the lives of others and to accept truths that differ from our own. Pope Francis comes to a strangely similar conclusion when he writes that literature gives us a language for “the marvelous diversity of humanity,” a language that makes that diversity “not foreign but shared.” To invite us to recognize the full range of people’s visible and invisible lives: that is precisely what novels do.

These reflections are adapted from Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s remarks in a conversation with Nesrine Malik and Kamila Shamsie on “Emotions in Literature and Politics.”

The post The Solidarity of the Hopeful appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

On February 25, 2025, the president of the United States of America posted a video to his socials, an AI-created vision of a postwar Gaza. To enter this Trumpian utopia you first have to pass through a large hole, like the opening of a cave, or the entrance to a mine. On one side of the portal there is war, devastation, mass murder, orphaned children, destroyed homes. On the other, a beachfront resort of palm trees, bread bowls filled with hummus, Vegas-style hotels, and many golden idols of the great man himself. Dollar bills rain down democratically on ragged children and Elon Musk alike. Meanwhile, Donald and Bibi sip cocktails on a couple of sun loungers, in a modified landscape perfectly adapted to their needs and interests. Through it all a single plays:

Donald’s coming to set you free
Bringing the light for all to see
No more tunnels, no more fear
Trump Gaza is finally here.
Trump Gaza shining bright 
Golden future, a brand new light
Feast and dance, the deal is done
Trump Gaza number one.

It was only thirty-three seconds long, this “satirical” video, but it is one of the most comprehensive depictions of what I want to call the American Imaginary that I have ever seen. Within the American Imaginary, there is and always has been a subcategory of people in this world who are not only born to suffer but are habituated to it. They come from the “shithole countries,” as previously defined by the president, during his first term. This region has historically gone by different names. The “Third World.” “The Global South.” “Arabia.” (And it can be extended. It may soon include all of “Eastern Europe,” as President Zelensky is discovering.) In these places live the “wretched of the earth,” as defined by Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist-philosopher who, though he died in 1961, is one of the political thinkers most closely identified with our historical moment. 

Fanon diagnosed all of this, long ago. He understood that in the colonial imagination the wretched are a species apart, a special kind of desensitized people who do not mourn their dead as we do, and look upon their own poverty with the relative equanimity of those who can expect nothing better. Collectively, the wretched possess what Fanon called “crushing objecthood.” They are not sacred humans in and of themselves but rather elements of a stage set upon which the drama of Western power is played. We can’t know exactly what prompt the makers of Trump Gaza Number One fed into the machine, but they might have gotten much the same result if they had used Fanon’s analysis of the French attitude to Algeria:

The Algerians, the women dressed in haiks, the palm groves, and the camels form a landscape, the natural backdrop for the French presence. A hostile, ungovernable, and fundamentally rebellious Nature is in fact synonymous in the colonies with the bush, the mosquitos, the natives, and disease. Colonization has succeeded once this untamed Nature has been brought under control. Cutting railroads through the bush, draining swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native population are in fact one and the same thing.

Before any bomb falls, or any real estate deal can be made, the shithole country has first to be reduced to a conceptual nonexistence, the instrumentalist backdrop to Western interests and pleasures. It makes perfect sense that the video should take the structural form of a tourist ad: for many Americans the wretched are only ever glimpsed IRL during a vacation. Gaza, in this vision, is the same place as Morocco, is the same place as “Arabia,” is the same phantasmagorical place in which Disney set Aladdin. Its defining features are: barefoot urchins, palm trees, and belly dancing. (Although in Trump Gaza Number One the vision is so relentlessly masculinist, even the dancing girls have beards.) That’s all you see while you’re on the resort, and you’ll never leave the resort—if you’re wise. In Trump’s world, this logic can be perfected: there will be only the resort. The other world, the wretched world, has been left on the flip side of the portal, through which gleeful orphaned children run, more than eager to forgive, forget, and frolic on a boulevard built atop the bones of their parents.

That AI should have rendered the portal so that it resembles the ragged mouth of a mine does not feel coincidental. AI itself is a portal technology, appearing as one thing when viewed from “our” side, and quite another by the populations of mineral-rich countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In America, AI is a copyright issue, an uncanny video, a propaganda tool. Through the portal, it is the destructive, extractive and violent contest to get sufficient cobalt and coltan out of African ground. 

Through that self-forgetting portal so much travels and is hidden. Not only the bloody consequences of the wars we fund and the wars we ignore, but also everything our society produces that we don’t want to deal with. Using this same portal, we freshly invade the many formerly colonized, shithole countries with all of our old car batteries, broken-up cruise ships, mountains of old clothes, continents of plastic bottles… That’s what a portal is for. To take you from one place to another, from one world to another, and to maintain the separation. 

The pressing job of the left right now is to expose this illusion. To insist that this is in fact one world we are living in, one in which universal regulatory measures capable of protecting all human life are still possible. To do this, we need transnational institutions which—however imperfect—persist through time, and can’t be unilaterally destroyed by the group of ideological gangsters presently occupying the White House. Their only concern is “disruption.” There are no universal values in their world, only American ones. In their Imaginary, the cure to the ills of this world is the complete submission of the weak to the strong, and the remaking of all countries in the image of their own. To counter that vision will require political, practical and legislative work but also a philosophical underpinning of at least equal strength to the gold-plated “America First” banality on proud display in Trump Gaza Number One. 

A general concept of the human does not exist for this White House. There are Americans and then there is everybody else. One world that lives parasitically on top of another. But they are aided and abetted in this fundamental deceit when we, on the left, can likewise find no language to insist upon the existence of a single human reality, populated by billions of sacred human beings, to whom some universal laws of protection might be applied. If Fanon is truly the man of the moment, at this point it is an indulgence to applaud a Fanonian call to violent resistance while simultaneously ignoring the equally strong case Fanon made for a radical humanism as the necessary basis of any progressive socialist politics. “What matters today,” Fanon claimed, “the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences might be.” Not us, not them: humanity.

Fanon’s incisive critique of colonial pretensions to universality has been essential. Still, he never despaired of the possibility of a just universe, one in which human beings are no longer treated as mere resources to be exploited. That kind of justice requires a defense of the human qua human. Without it, we are left with a void, a hole, a portal. One which Trumpism is more than happy to fill, aided and abetted by AI. But we can’t let machines do our human accounting for us, nor allow Trumpism to lead the whole of humanity into a binary, Manichean world of number ones versus human zeroes. Of those who matter and those who don’t.

The post ‘Trump Gaza Number One’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

She wondered whether other people were having similar dreams. She started to ask people about their dreams, discreetly: “I asked the dressmaker, the neighbor, an aunt, a milkman, a friend, almost always without revealing my purpose.” She did this because “dreams like this should be preserved for posterity,” and she wrote down hundreds before fleeing to New York in 1939. There she worked as a hairdresser for fellow émigrés, sometimes spending time with her friend Hannah Arendt.

In 1966 she finally brought her collection together, arranging the dreams by theme, offering her own light commentary, and bolstering each short chapter with epigraphs from the likes of Kafka and Brecht and Arendt herself. She gave the resulting slim volume a memorable title: The Third Reich of Dreams. The book had some modest success but never penetrated the American consciousness like the work of Arendt, perhaps because Beradt offers us not a complex hermeneutics of totalitarianism but rather a quite straightforward picture of the psychological effects of propaganda and manipulation upon a populace.

There is nothing submerged or especially Freudian in The Third Reich of Dreams. The dreams sort of interpret themselves:

Goebbels came to my factory. He had all the employees line up in two rows, left and right, and I had to stand between the rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter by millimeter. Goebbels watched my efforts like a play, without any sign of appreciation and displeasure, but when I finally had my arm up, he spoke five words: “I don’t want your salute.” Then he turned around and walked to the door. So there I was in my own factory, among my own people, pilloried with my arm raised. The only way I was physically able to keep standing there was by fixing my eyes on his clubfoot as he limped out. I stood like that until I woke up.

Beradt wonders what to call the factory owner’s dream. The Dream of the Raised Arm? The Dream of Remaking the Individual?

The fact that the factory owner crumbled without resistance, but also without his downfall having any purpose or meaning, makes his dream a perfect parable for the creation of the submissive totalitarian subject.

The book is full of such parables.

How does one become a totalitarian subject? What—aside from the threat of violence—are the necessary conditions? These are questions Beradt’s dreaming people daren’t ask themselves in the cold light of day, but the queries reappear under cover of night. Here is the dream of a forty-five-year-old doctor, a year into the establishment of the Third Reich:

At around nine o’clock, after my workday was done and I was about to relax on the sofa with a book on Matthias Grünewald, the walls of my room, of my whole apartment, suddenly disappeared. I looked around in horror and saw that none of the apartments as far as the eye could see had any walls left. I heard a loudspeaker blare: “Per Wall Abolition Decree dated the 17th of this month.”… Now that the apartments are totally public, I’m living on the bottom of the sea in order to remain invisible.

“Life Without Walls,” Beradt points out, could “easily be the title not just of this chapter, but of a novel or academic study about life under totalitarianism.” As for the doctor, he is perfectly aware of why he dreamed that dream: the day before, in his waking life, the block warden of his neighborhood had come by to ask why he hadn’t hung up a flag. “I reassured him and offered him a glass of liquor, but to myself I thought: ‘Not on my four walls…not on my four walls.’” But when one is a totalitarian subject there is no more “to myself I thought.” A life without walls is a life without privacy, without the ability to consider or even really know anymore what one feels or thinks when not under the eye of the block warden. It is a life in which the burden of thought has been delegated to the collective, and the public sphere is no longer a plurality of ideas but a place where one gets in line. “I was sitting in a box at the opera,” one woman reports.

They were performing my favorite opera, The Magic Flute. After the line “That is the devil, certainly,” a squad of policemen marched in and headed straight toward me, their footsteps ringing out loud and clear. They had discovered by using some kind of machine that I had thought about Hitler when I heard the word “devil.” I looked around at all the dressed-up people in the audience, pleading for help with my eyes, but they all just stared straight ahead, mute and expressionless, with not a single face showing even any pity. Actually, the older gentleman in the box next to mine looked kind and elegant, but when I tried to catch his eye he spat at me.

The same woman also has a book burning dream. She is trying to save Schiller’s Don Carlos from the flames by hiding it under the bed. The storm troopers storm in, find it, and throw it on a truck that is heading for a book burning—at exactly the moment she realizes it’s not Don Carlos but only an atlas. She lets them take it—and still feels immensely guilty. In retelling this dream, she adds: “I’ve read in a foreign newspaper that during a performance of Don Carlos the crowd had burst into applause at the line ‘O give us freedom of thought.’”

In the dreams she has collected, Beradt notices a commonality:

Very different people all hit upon the same code for describing a hidden phenomenon of the environment: the atmosphere of total indifference created by environmental pressure and utterly strangling the public sphere. When asked if she had any idea what the thought-reading machine in her dream was like, the woman answered: “Yes, it was electrical, a maze of wires…” She came up with this symbol of psychological and bodily control, of ever-present possible surveillance, of the infiltration of machines into the course of events…fifteen years before 1984 was even published.

And seventy years before Meta.

In a life without walls, anything you say can and may be taken down in evidence against you by anyone or anything at any time. The Third Reich of Dreams is filled with talking objects spilling secrets: a stove that starts speaking in a “shrill, penetrating voice,” revealing all the bad things people in the kitchen have said about the regime, or a lamp that won’t stop talking “like a military officer…. Again, I felt desperately worried, at the mercy of that shrill voice that never stopped talking, even though no one was there to arrest me.” Rather than wait to be indicted by this “shrill” voice, many dreamers just indict themselves, submitting to the nonsense of the propaganda by embodying it:

I dreamed that I was talking in my dream and to be safe was speaking Russian. (I don’t speak any Russian, and also I never talk in my sleep.) I was speaking Russian so that I wouldn’t understand myself and no one else would understand me either.

And these dreams of autoimprisonment in language, Beradt argues, illustrate

the dark shape that these people’s “consent” takes. They show how people, in blind fear of the hunter, start to play the hunter themselves, as well as the prey; how they secretly help set and spring the very traps that are meant to catch them.

Propaganda posters, megaphones, the radio: such devices appear in these dreams over and over. And such were the paltry propaganda tools Hitler turned to his advantage in spectacular fashion, though they were like crayons on paper compared with what a man like Elon Musk now has at his disposal. Usually, when people are making comparisons between now and then, they are thinking of the message and not the medium—that is, they think of Nazism itself, as a specific political ideology. The Third Reich of Dreams certainly provides many predictable parallels. Take the young woman “with very dark hair” who has a “school dream in which all the dark-haired people formed a group of ‘Disreputables’”:

The rumor was that an official list had turned up with the names of everyone belonging to the “Disreputables” in every grade. The cause of these measures was also written in the document: We had dared to write a letter to the others, the “reputable” blonds, over a book we’d loaned them and wanted back. But that wasn’t our actual crime, it was that we dark-haired people had written to the blonds at all. Then we all fled for our lives. They threw stones at me.

In Beradt’s view, this dream provides

insights into the fact that emphasizing natural differences, creating artificial ones, defining elite groups and inhuman groups and then playing one off against the other are basic principles of totalitarian regimes.

Of course, Beradt was making these conclusions in 1966, when they still felt relatively new. We’ve known for a long time that such fascist politicking is one possible response to economic inequality and resentment, another being the progressive socialist economic populism offered by a candidate like Bernie Sanders. We know all that.

What strikes me, reading these dreams in 2024, is the more structural conclusions Beradt makes about consent, submission, and the manipulation of minds. Any attempt to make an analogy between our benighted political era and fascist Germany will always find itself struggling to assimilate or explain away anomalous data like the significant support of minorities for Trump, or the repulsion, this time around, of the bourgeoisie. (Though in both cases, as the dreams reveal, a surprising proportion of women are apparently compelled by the concept of the political strongman.) The most useful analogy, to my mind, concerns the mediums through which all this ideology was conveyed—that is, the propaganda machine itself, a multipronged process the Germans called Gleichschaltung. The literal translation is “synchronizing,” in the sense of “imposing mandatory conformity.”

Perhaps the biggest difference between the right and the left in the past fifteen years has been in their understanding of Gleichschaltung. In place of the megaphone, the radio, and the printing press, antiprogressive forces are now making excellent use of the greatest propaganda tool ever invented: the algorithm. For while the elites on the right have understood from the outset the ways in which algorithms can be used to “impose mandatory conformity” on a population, the hubristic elites on the left apparently really believed that although they, too, were participating in the exact same global behavior modification experiment, only those other people, the “deplorables,” had been truly affected by it. Other people had been converted to the dark side. Other people had brain-rot or were red-pilled. We meanwhile were just expressing our sincere political opinions.¹ At least red-pilling contributes to the vote count. The dark comedy of it all is that large sections of the left only really successfully applied Gleichschaltung to themselves.

A young student’s dream:

People were attacking my boyfriend and I didn’t help him, and then he was carried off on a stretcher…. But his body was a skeleton, except for one bloody scrap of flesh still hanging from where his neck was…. I said to myself as consolation: “But this is just propaganda, it’s an anti-Hitler poster from before.” (There had been an antifascist poster in 1932 depicting a skeleton.)

This dream, writes Beradt, is

a good example of the process of inversion at work in propaganda…. She began by using her enemies’ arguments “to prevent the worst from happening,” and ended up deciding that atrocities were only counter-propaganda. As we all know, propaganda is subject to no legal or moral restraints—it is capable of almost anything and can make events happen whenever it needs them to happen. It can also, however, as we see here in its early beginnings, infiltrate the people it’s directed at, until here too the boundaries between propagandist and victim of propaganda gradually dissolve, and suggestion becomes autosuggestion.

Autosuggestion occurs when you no longer need a block warden to tell you to hang your flag. You hang it because everybody else has.

A series of dreams in a chapter called “Veiled Wishes, or ‘Destination: Heil Hitler’” illustrates this point. In one, a man is trying not to laugh at a lot of people sitting at a very long table in a train dining car, all of them singing a ridiculous political song for “National Unity Day.” He can’t stop being amused. But being amused singles him out. He wants to remain a part of the collective, so he keeps moving tables to try and disguise his laughter. Then he thinks, “Maybe if you’re singing along, it isn’t so silly, so I sang along.” In another example a man finds Goering’s brown leather vest and crossbow to be utterly absurd until, a moment later, he finds he is standing right next to Goering, and is now wearing the same vest and crossbow, and has at this very moment been elevated to the position of Goering’s bodyguard.

Yet another man dreams the most condensed version of all these accounts: “I dreamed I said: ‘I don’t have to always say No anymore.’”

I cannot improve on Beradt’s interpretation: “This fairy-tale formulation ‘don’t have to anymore’…shows yet again what a ‘struggle’ it is to be ‘opposed’: Freedom is a burden, unfreedom comes as a relief.” (My italics.) We rarely talk about the temptations of unfreedom. Yet we experience them every day. How hard is it not to go all the way to the right (or the left) with your followers and subscribers when they do? How impossible is it to be the lone outlier? How difficult is it not to take any argument to its purest and most rigid conclusion if everyone in your timeline appears to be already there and has already signed the petition?

False flag operations. Disproportionate cultural panics. Disproportion generally. Censorship. Self-censorship. Conspiracies. Deep dives. Doing your own research. Keeping receipts. Putting you on blast. Registering your deafening silence. Living in bubbles. Living in echo chambers. Let that sink in. #Nuance. Team Fact. Team Feeling. For the past fifteen years we have—all of us—been subjected to a truly monumental network of psychological influence that our governments have failed to regulate in any real way whatsoever. Just as it was in the Thirties, our version of the propaganda megaphone is “subject to no legal or moral restraints.” Maybe it’s time that it is?

The Third Reich of Dreams is about to be republished in English, this time with a new foreword written by Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi poet who fled her country in 1995. Here is a writer who has known propaganda, who has known censorship, who has experienced intimidation both psychological and physical. Perhaps as a consequence she writes with the blunt clarity of a woman determined to say exactly what she means:

I Was in a Hurry

Yesterday I lost a country.
I was in a hurry,
and didn’t notice when it fell from me
like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.
Please, if anyone passes by
and stumbles across it,
perhaps in a suitcase
open to the sky,
or engraved on a rock
like a gaping wound,
or wrapped
in the blankets of emigrants,
or canceled
like a losing lottery ticket…²

Poem as bad dream. Speaking of bad dreams, as I type this it is Tuesday, November 5, 2024, and I happen to be on a plane crossing the Atlantic. What exactly am I flying into? There’s no Wi-Fi on this plane, so I am in a Schrödinger’s cat sort of situation—a dreamscape if you will—in which Trump has won and not won, and keeps on winning and not winning, as I sit suspended over the clouds. And even this odd fact is a sort of recurring dream, for eight years ago I went to bed in New York and woke up the day after election day and had to fly to Germany, dumbfounded. What was I flying out of?

On that day, up in the sky, I wrote an essay, “On Optimism and Despair,” mostly because I did not want to be entirely enveloped by the latter emotion, as strong as it was in me at that moment.³ This time it’s different. Optimism has pretty much left the scene. Win or lose, the “life without walls” has become general, no one need shout at us in a shrill voice through a megaphone—we keep the communication channel permanently open in our back pockets—and if our transformation into the passive subjects of a strongman doesn’t happen this time around, it will happen soon. It’s already happened. “We used to have to adjust a few things by hand,” explains the Officer in Kafka’s infamous penal colony. “But from now on the machine will work all by itself.”

But no, that’s not quite right either: I still have a shred of optimism. I still believe that a generation will arrive who will wake us from our digitally modified slumber, at which point we will all climb out of our individual machines, the better to observe them from the outside, walk around them, study their mechanisms and operations, and then decide, collectively, on some regulations regarding their proper use. Sometimes I think that generation is already here.

Recently, in Barcelona, I found myself in a hall addressing four hundred fourteen-year-olds. I was meant to be talking to them about fiction, but every question they asked was about social media. Every single question. And they were in earnest. It surprised me! The tone was urgent. Feeling myself to be in a safe space with walls, I tried something out on them, an idea I normally never say out loud because of how cringe it is. The sort of idea that reeks of utopian optimism and that nobody serious has gone anywhere near in the past fifteen years. And to speak in such a way in front of a hall full of teens? Truly like something from a waking nightmare. But there they all were, sitting in front of me, filled with this surprising and unexpected urgency, so I just said it.

I began as follows: in a hypercapitalist economy—one that has found a way to monetize human attention itself—we are the product. Well, sure, everybody knows that by now, even the fourteen-year-olds. But within this fact does there not lurk the not-so-hidden possibility of a radical and thrillingly simple act of resistance? Think about it (I said, to the fourteen-year-olds). With every other extractive and exploitative industry of the past four hundred years, the process of unraveling and resistance was far more complicated. To end the racialized system of capital called “slavery,” for example, you had to violently revolt, riot, petition, boycott, change minds, change laws, all in order to end one of the most lucrative gravy trains the Western world has ever known. To rein in the unprecedented wealth of the robber baron industrialists at the turn of the twentieth century, you had to regulate their businesses, the banks, and the labor laws themselves, and create the electoral majorities needed to do so. But to seriously damage the billionaire empires that have been built on your attention and are now manipulating your democracies? To achieve that right now? All you guys would need to do is look away. And thus give a new meaning to the word woke.

There’s a bracing moment in The Third Reich of Dreams when Beradt reminds us that “the destruction of plurality” as well as the feeling of “loneliness in public spaces” was how Hannah Arendt characterized “the basic quality of totalitarian subjects.” These are also fair descriptions of the effects of our present algorithmic existence. That of course does not mean that simply by disengaging from the algorithms we will make all our real-world problems disappear. Doing so will not solve climate change, end profound economic inequality, destroy racism and misogyny or bolster reproductive rights, end wars cultural and real, or magically transform the plight of migrants. But it might hasten the end of the misguided belief that self-selecting, yet algorithmically determined, online communities are any decent political substitute for geographic, localized, politically diverse, real-world communities. It might help to reinstate a less manipulated, more public, more shared place of debate, in which the possibility of actually knowing and at least partially comprehending your neighbor and their political leanings (rather than caricaturing and demonizing them) could re-emerge as a real political possibility. Which might in turn result in newly invigorated powers of concession, compromise, and consensus, all of which—whether you like it or not—happen to be vital for any healthy polis. That’s a whole lot of “mights.” But in my dream, it’s worth a try, if only because it would so seriously hobble the most powerful and dangerous political lobbyists on the present scene: the tech bros. In my nightmares, Trump is only the Trojan horse. Musk is the real power. An unelected billionaire whose megaphone reaches every corner of the globe? O give us freedom of thought.

The post The Dream of the Raised Arm appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In his review of my novel The Fraud [NYR, September 21], Michael Gorra finds that “as nearly as [he] can tell” the link between William Harrison Ainsworth and the Tichborne Claimant is invented. But as the novel itself makes clear, the young Irish poet Edward Kenealy—who spent a few years coming to dinner at Ainsworth’s—eventually became the Tichborne Claimant’s defense lawyer. Some facts are even stranger than fiction.

Zadie Smith
London, England

Michael Gorra replies:

I thank Zadie Smith for that correction. It would have been more accurate for me to write that the interest Sarah Ainsworth takes in the case of the Tichborne Claimant, and hence its prominence as a topic of discussion in her husband’s 1870s household, seems an invention of Smith’s own.

The post Table Talk appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

It is Gen X essayist Zadie Smith’s prerogative to preen about her generation and conceitedly credit it with owning modes of thought and attitude that seem to me rather more universal [“The Instrumentalist,” NYR, January 19]. But she can’t change time itself. If Gen X’s supposedly singular “commitment to emotional resilience” led some to reinvent themselves as art monsters, that may help explain Lydia Tár (b. 1973). But Madonna Ciccone and Prince Rogers Nelson (both born 1958)? Don’t think so.

Steven Sullivan
Long Island City, New York

Zadie Smith replies:

I’m so sorry that you felt I was preening about my own generation, especially when the piece was conceived as a confession of generational failure! Which I absolutely don’t think of as unique. In fact, I think the whole point was to ask whether generational failure is indeed universal—and cyclical—even if the failure has a different flavor each time. I don’t believe and didn’t say that a “commitment to emotional resilience” is anything to be proud of, nor that it is a unique quality of Gen X—only a characteristic one. As for Madonna and Prince, they make a brief appearance as quintessential pop culture icons of my ridiculous generation, but not as members of it. I did however shamefully mis-generate some French philosophers. For though Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes were favorites of many a boomer professor in the Eighties and Nineties, they were of course themselves members of “The Greatest” crowd. Oh, and while I’m here, my friend the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann informs me that the person Schopenhauer pushed down the stairs was not a beloved but rather a (female) salesperson.

The post My Generation appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

We don’t call women astronauts “astronettes.”

Time is the essential piece of interpretation.

You cannot start without me. See, I start the clock.

But Blanchett has it exactly right. She is doing what the talent is always doing at these things: acting. Self-fashioning, repeating witticisms they’ve used many times before, pretending to consider questions long settled in their own minds. After which the talent goes home, to their backstage life.

If the talent is a Cultural Luminary, backstage is likely to be even more glamorous than front-of-house. Pristine Poggenpohl kitchens and $30,000 sectionals and discreetly disguised safes sunk into great expanses of undivided wall. A loft that stretches a city block. Such is the life of Lydia Tár. Her daughter, Petra, attends a bourgeois German private school and her wife, Sharon, is first violin in Tár’s own orchestra, the most prestigious in Berlin. Tár maintains a second apartment in the city, for those moments when she needs privacy.

Cultural Luminaries make a lot of money. Their imperious attitudes and witty bons mots are in demand everywhere—until they aren’t. As Tár discovers the very next morning, while guest teaching at Juilliard. Here her charismatic lone-genius shtick—which so delighted the gray-haired festivalgoers—falls on stonier ground. Tár is now speaking to a different generation. The generation that says things like I’m not really into Bach. Such statements are calculated to bring out the hysteric in a middle-aged Cultural Luminary, and Tár immediately takes the bait, launching into an aggressive defense laced with high-handed pity (for the young man who dares say it) and a more generalized contempt for his cohort.

The young man is named Max. He has a very gentle demeanor and a sweet, open face, and seems in no way to be seeking confrontation. Asked how he felt about Bach, he simply answered. But now, under Tár’s verbal assault, he attempts to expand his critique: “Honestly, as a BIPOC pangender person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously…” The battle lines are drawn. Max is a young snowflake. Tár’s an Art Monster.¹ She’s also a (self-described) “U-Haul Lesbian,” although this aspect of her identity won’t help her much. In Tár, time is the essential piece of interpretation, and there’s an awful lot of time these days between people in their twenties and people in their fifties. Sometimes it feels like the gap has never been wider.

To paraphrase Schopenhauer—who gets several shout-outs in Tár—every generation mistakes the limits of its own field of vision for the limits of the world. But what happens when generational visions collide? How should we respond?

As we learn in her classroom, Tár’s method is direct combat. For she is Gen X—like me—and one of the striking things about my crowd is that although we like to speak rapturously of emotion in the aesthetic sense, we prefer to scorn emotions personally (by way of claiming to not really have any) and also to trample over other peoples’. It doesn’t occur to Tár that sweet young Max may have serious trouble with anxiety—although we in the audience certainly notice his knees bouncing frantically. The power differential between these two means that a rant Tár might launch into around a dinner table in Berlin—to much receptive laughter—is experienced as ritual humiliation by a young man exposed in front of his peers. But Tár is discombobulated also. It’s a long climb down from Cultural Luminary to Contra, and no doubt a great shock to find yourself so sharply reassessed and redefined by the generation below you.² Do twenty-five years of glass-ceiling breaking and artistic excellence count for nothing? It’s enough to pitch a girl into a midlife crisis.

What if Tár had taken a deep breath and tried a different approach? Invited Max to lie under the piano, say, while she played some Bach, then inquired after his feelings about that experience? After which perhaps they could have switched positions, with Max playing and Tár lying down. She might ask him what it felt like to consider the music while simultaneously considering the man who made it. Can an A-minor chord be misogynistic? Is an individual human ever really the sole source of any particular piece of music in the first place? Instead, Tár mounts a familiar high horse:

Unfortunately, the architect of your soul appears to be social media. You want to dance the masque, you must service the composer…. You must in fact stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself.

We of Tár’s generation can be quick to lambaste those we call (behind their backs) “the youngs,” but speaking for myself, I’m the one severely triggered by statements like “Chaucer is misogynistic” or “Virginia Woolf was a racist.” Not because I can’t see that both statements are partially true, but because I am of that generation whose only real shibboleth was: “Is it interesting?” Into which broad category both evils and flaws could easily be fit, not because you agreed with them personally but because they had the potential to be analyzed, just like anything else.³ Whereas if you grew up online, the negative attributes of individual humans are immediately disqualifying. The very phrase ad hominem has been rendered obsolete, almost incomprehensible. An argument that is directed against a person, rather than the position they are maintaining? Online a person is the position they’re maintaining and vice versa. Opinions are identities and identities are opinions. Unfollow!

These opposing sensibilities make perfect sense to those born into them. Both appear moronic and dangerous to the other side. And so Max and Tár really can’t with each other. It’s almost comic how precisely each generation intuits the trigger points of the one before. To the popcorn-eating boomers we must seem like so many parents and children locked in a Jacob-and-the-angel struggle, neither party willing to concede an inch. Yet what if we refused to let go until some form of mutual blessing was conferred?

“You’re a fucking bitch,” Max tells Tár.

“And you are a robot!” Tár tells Max.

Back in Berlin, after a long day bravely combating the youngs and flying first class, Tár falls exhausted into her wife’s arms. Tár is off duty in baseball cap and cashmere, but glamour clings to her, and Sharon, dowdy only by comparison, seems somewhat in awe. And we are certainly curious about this marriage, but in these lean times we are even more curious about the furnishings. The camera takes us on a tour of objects, precisely indexed à la Wes Anderson, but in the subdued European palette of Michael Haneke. Perfectly ordered scores bound in blue cloth with unbroken spines. Immaculate bookshelves. A gleaming grand piano.

But should we pity our scandalously successful Tár, just a little? Some of the frostiness of her onstage life seems to have bled into her backstage interpersonal relations. Even her daughter calls her Lydia. Or maybe it’s just that her family doesn’t see her very much. Cultural Luminaries travel a lot. In their brief spells back home, they have many breakfast and lunch meetings and proudly drive their kids to school three days in a row. In the gaps between work-dates, they try to listen to what their put-upon personal assistant is telling them:

Assistant: I received another weird email from Krista. How should I reply.

Tár: Don’t.

Assistant: This one felt particularly desperate.

Tár: Hope dies last.

Hope dies last. Germany has the best idioms. Americans prefer There’s always hope! which, though cheering, is demonstrably untrue. Everything ends, even hope. But at this point we don’t know what exactly has ended or how badly, who Krista is, what has passed between her and Tár, or who is the guilty party. We are in Tár’s hybrid vehicle, watching her drive Petra to her fancy school. Petra is being bullied by a classmate and Tár is off to do some helicopter parenting. En route, Tár and Petra recite “Who Killed Cock Robin?,” that old nursery rhyme about the attribution of guilt:

Who’ll toll the bell?
I, said the Bull,
because I can pull,
I’ll toll the bell.

In the schoolyard, the offending eight-year-old girl is pointed out to Tár, who bends down to eye level, introduces herself—“I’m Petra’s father”—then goes to town:

I know what you’re doing to her. And if you ever do it again, do you know what I’ll do? I’ll get you. And if you tell any grown-up what I just said, they won’t believe you. Because I’m a grown-up. But you need to believe me: I will get you. Remember this, Johanna: God watches all of us.

An electrifying scene. We are by now used to apocalyptic bad guys with the end of the world in mind, but it’s a long time since I went to the movies and saw an accurate representation of an ordinary sinner. It reminded me of that extraordinary Sharon Olds poem “The Clasp,” in which a woman, angry with her four-year-old daughter, holds the child too hard by the wrist:

she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me—yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeply open eyes took me
in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment
she learned me. This was her mother, one of the
two whom she most loved, the two
who loved her most, near the source of love
was this.

Scene by scene we are learning Tár, much as the poet’s daughter “learned” her mother—and a lot of what we learn is frightening. If poor little Johanna mistakes Lydia Tár for an omnipotent God, she’s not too far off the mark. Conductors are godlike. You can’t start without me. They are the first cause of music. But women as gods, as artists—as first causes of anything—can still be a tricky proposition, especially, for some reason, in recent independent cinema. In the multiplexes, superheroines are busy flexing their much-celebrated biceps, but over in the art houses, the concept of the “independent woman” is being subjected to a little narrative passive aggression. In The Worst Person in the World, a Gen X graphic novelist gets terminal cancer to offset the destabilizing effect of his ex-girlfriend/muse becoming an artist herself. In Triangle of Sadness, the modeling industry is symbolically freighted with all the many sins of late capitalism—perhaps because it is one of the few trades in which women are the first cause of everything.⁴

But Tár is not at all like the convenient symbolic females to be found in those films. She is something far more destabilizing and radical: a human being in crisis. And not just any crisis! The least fashionable on earth: the midlife kind. I write this not as excuse or explanation, only as diagnosis. In any human life there are several overlapping crises, political and collective, individual and generational. It is of course possible to disagree philosophically and politically on their relative importance, but not I think to deny their simultaneous existence. Yet when we are young, how absurd does the midlife crisis seem? Pathetic! What is wrong with these people?

What’s wrong with these people is that they are going to die, and for the first time in their lives, they really know that. In the curious case of Gen X, we seem to be taking this shocking revelation both personally and collectively, maybe because the end of our time and the end of time itself have become somewhat muddled in our minds. Our backs hurt, the kids don’t like Bach anymore—and the seas are rising! As the kids themselves say, it’s a lot. Surely there should be someone to blame for this terrible collision of the apocalypse and our own cultural and physical obsolescence—but who? The millennials? Gen Z? Cock Robin? In Tár, Gen X’s confusion of cause and effect is sometimes too baldly stated. We get that overfamiliar culture war between Tár and Max. We get Tár wondering aloud whether Schopenhauer can still be taken seriously, given that he pushed his own wife down the stairs.

But Tár is at its strongest when channeling its existential dread through other, more cinematic means. When Tár goes jogging through the Berlin woods and hears a young woman screaming somewhere, she stops in her tracks, with a guilty, panicked look on her face—but is unable to locate the source. Who is in pain? And who is to blame? Surely not Lydia Tár? Schopenhauer apparently measured a person’s intelligence by their “sensitivity to noise”—or so a colleague informs Tár during one of her many meetings—and back at the loft she is woken in the night by strange noises she can’t identify. Is it the fridge? The air conditioning? Tearing apart her expensive home, she finds a metronome ticking in the safe. Ticking like a countdown. Tár is a very intelligent woman indeed, but her sensitivities turn out to be limited in certain areas. Yes, for our Lydia, time’s (almost) up. The bell is tolling and it’s tolling for her.

But first, like any bad guy, she attempts to cover her tracks. We watch her e-mailing everyone she knows in the music community to warn them of an unstable young woman called Krista Taylor, who may be spreading untrue rumors about her. Then checking Twitter to see if said rumors have broken out into the world. We begin to get the picture. Krista is a young, aspiring conductor. Tár was her mentor. Also (secretly) her lover—although only briefly. For Tár is one of these middle-aged people attracted to youth and inexperience, the kind who like to be adored but are perhaps less keen on sticking around long enough to be “learned.” We never meet Krista, but from our glimpses of the many pleading e-mails she sends Tár’s assistant, we gather that an affair that proved seismic for Krista barely registered on her older lover’s radar. Now Krista can neither reclaim Tár’s affections nor advance in the music industry. But for Tár, it’s as if it never happened at all. She is already on to the next distraction.

Spotting a hot young cellist, Olga, in the bathroom of her workplace, Tár later recognizes this same young woman’s shoes, peeking out from beneath those screens orchestra directors use to preserve the anonymity of “blind auditions.” Next thing we know Tár has given Olga a seat in her orchestra. Then decides to add Elgar’s Cello Concerto to the program, and to give that prestigious solo to the new girl instead of the first cello. And this move, in turn, allows her to organize a series of one-on-one rehearsals with Olga at that apartment she maintains in the city…There’s a word for this behavior: instrumentalism. Using people as tools. As means rather than ends in themselves. To satisfy your own desire, or your sense of your own power, or simply because you can.⁵

What’s interesting about Tár’s misuse of her own power in the ethical realm is how much it reveals about her aesthetics. Her own refined musical sensibility meant everything when she was arguing with Max, but now that she’s embarking on a new flirtation with Olga, she’s less particular. It doesn’t matter that Olga has no preferred recording of the Elgar or that she only knows the piece at all from watching Jacqueline du Pré play it on YouTube. With Tár, it’s art for art’s sake until it isn’t. Until desire gets in the way.

Why are some older people so attracted by youth, by inexperience? We are offered a potential answer when age and hard experience come a-knocking at Tár’s door. There, on the threshold of her apartment, stands her neighbor: a middle-aged, disheveled, distressed, apparently mentally unwell woman who is in need of Tár’s help. This woman is caring for her own sick older sister, an even more abject and forsaken creature, whom Tár is then forced to witness, half-naked, covered in her own fluids, having just suffered a fall. The old woman clings to Tár, who recoils in horror, rushing back to the curated safety of her own apartment—and into her power shower—to wash away the human stain. Later, when the old woman is taken from the building by paramedics—off to a nursing home so that her younger relatives can sell the apartment—it is Tár who becomes the very picture of human abjection, cowering in the hallway, spooked by this specter of decrepitude. In this moment she is very far from being Lydia Tár, that sophisticated, blasé Cultural Luminary who says things like “Sublimate yourself, your ego, and yes, your identity!” or “They can’t all conduct, honey—it’s not a democracy.” That Tár jogs every day to stave off middle-aged spread, threatens children, and betrays no fear or self-doubt whatsoever, not even when poor abandoned Krista runs out of hope and kills herself. Not even when the board of the orchestra advises Tár to lawyer up.

The old are vampiric. The old hoard resources. They use status and power and youth itself to distract themselves from the inevitable. The young are always right in their indictment of the old. The boomers were right about the Greatest Generation⁶; we were right about the boomers⁷; the millennials are right about us.⁸ Still, one wonders how these same millennials, stuck with a name that seems to enshrine the idea of youth itself, will now deal with the imminent loss of their own. Up to now, when it came to generational combat, they’ve been right about everything, as every generation is in its own way, only ever missing that one vital piece of data about time and its passing: how it feels.

Of course, not everyone who reaches middle age has a crisis or spends their middle years manipulating the young or driving anybody to suicide. But good films are not about “everyone.” They are about someone in particular, and Blanchett’s characterization of this Lydia Tár proves so thorough, so multifaceted in its dimensions, so believable, that it defies even the film’s most programmatic intentions and has reportedly sent many a young person to googling: Is Lydia Tár a real person? She is not one in the eyes of the algorithm, but she certainly is in mine. She captures so clearly the self-pity of a predator, the vanity of a predator, the narcissism of a predator, and in one remarkable scene comes to embody the act of predation itself.

It happens after one of Olga and Tár’s private rehearsals—in which nothing remotely sexual has occurred—and Tár is now dropping Olga outside her building. But Olga has left her good-luck mascot, a teddy bear, in Tár’s car and Tár, realizing, immediately tries to capitalize, hurrying after Olga down an alley, which itself turns out to lead to a filthy, damp, abject apartment complex, about as far from Tár’s real estate portfolio as could be imagined. Olga is nowhere to be seen, and Tár can’t find the right door. Now she is in some kind of bleak inner courtyard. It is suddenly dark. Water drips. I never before thought Blanchett had a predator’s face, but stalking through this dripping, Tarkovsky-esque wasteland with those cheekbones, she looks just like a jaguar—who is now confronted by another predator: a large hound, in shadow, barking at her, a symbol of menace worthy of Kubrick. She runs, falling over onto concrete, smashing that beautiful face of hers. But the dog doesn’t attack. Nobody attacks. Yet she goes home and tells her wife and daughter that she has been mugged.

Petra, stricken, looks at her mother’s bruised and broken face and tells her, “You’re the most beautiful person I know.” Sorry, Petra: we beg to differ. But is Lydia Tár the worst person in the world? When Petra, at bedtime, asks her mother to hold her feet to help her sleep, Tár tenderly holds those little feet by the heels, and by now we know that Tár’s own Achilles’ heel is not love, exactly, or even desire, but rather a powerful pride. Where we can just about conceive of a millennial making up a mugging for the purposes of pity,⁹ Tár’s aim is to further demonstrate that she is an Art Monster, who refuses to commit to any arc of trauma. (“You should have seen the other guy,” she tells her orchestra.) Every generation has its fruitful and destructive narratives of self-fashioning. This Gen X commitment to emotional resilience has certainly had its utility—for slackers, we sure got a lot of work done!—but also its hidden costs. How much intimate damage was deflected or repressed when Miss Ciccone became Madonna? When Mr. Nelson became Prince? When Linda from Staten Island refashioned herself into the Cultural Luminary Lydia Tár?

I have this sense that every generation has about two or three great ideas and a dozen or so terrible ones. For example, Gen X nudged forward the good idea that men should be encouraged to be fully involved in the raising of their own children. Also: love is definitely love. We thought that artists (like Bach) were limited (like all humans), but that artworks themselves (like The Goldberg Variations) were limitless—sites of infinite play and boundless reinterpretation, belonging as much to their receivers as their creators. Believing this enabled many a voracious Art Monster to consume many an artwork—and to make a lot of art, too.¹⁰ But “no one should pay for anything on the Internet” needed a little more workshopping, and it turns out fame is not the answer to everything—saving the planet is.

Some generational realizations are world-changing and permanent. They become almost universally accepted and are enshrined in law and custom.¹¹ Others get similarly enshrined but are everywhere ignored.¹² Rightly proud is the generation that manages to get its ethics enshrined in law. (Although history demonstrates that one generation alone is rarely enough to achieve this kind of truly radical change. Generational cooperation across time is crucial.)

There is presently no law that states, “No middle-aged person should use any young adult as an instrument or tool, sexually or otherwise.” But as an ethical imperative this is one of the very good ideas of the present generation, and it would be a good thing, ethically speaking, if Tár adhered to it. (But it would make for a much less interesting film.) Instead, she persists. Suffering from injuries incurred during the “attack,” Tár goes to the doctor and gets a diagnosis she mishears as nostalgia aesthetica. (The actual diagnosis is notalgia paresthetica.) Gen X suffers from aesthetic nostalgia, yes, which itself has its uses and abuses. On the plus side, it sometimes enables us to make beguiling movies like Tár that allude to Tarkovsky. On the negative side of the ledger, we have often been so concerned with aesthetics to the exclusion of all else that we are liable to confuse aesthetic failures (making bad art) or reputational damage (in the cultural field) with death itself.

So it goes with Tár. She is more concerned with the death of her own reputation than with any possible part she might have played in the death of Krista. Her self-love is malignant—catastrophic. But because this is a midlife crisis, she doesn’t change course, and even as her connection with Krista becomes publicly known—and the storm of reputational death engulfs her—she makes an ill-advised trip to New York to give a talk, taking Olga with her. For her own part, Olga meets a cute, age-appropriate guy at Tár’s event and goes out for the evening with him. (The fact that Olga remains completely unaware of Tár’s sexual interest in her provides the few moments of comic relief in this film.) Tár is left in her fancy hotel, alone. Midlife crises are nothing if not delusional. After which Tár has nowhere to go but back in time, to her childhood home on Staten Island. We find her in her old bedroom, feeling sorry for herself, watching VHS tapes of Leonard Bernstein (Greatest Generation) talking ecstatically of music: “There’s no limit to the different kinds of feelings music can make you have! And some of those feelings are so special, and so deep, that they can’t even be described in words.”

On the stairs, on her way out, Tár bumps into her brother. He doesn’t look like a Cultural Luminary; he’s dressed like a man who works with his hands. He regards his famous sister with pity and offers a fresh diagnosis: “You don’t seem to know where the hell you came from or where you’re going!” But he’s wrong about that: Tár’s going home, to face the music. Pictures of her and a young cellist entering a New York hotel are all over Twitter; in the eyes of the public a “pattern of behavior” has been established. In Berlin, her wife, Sharon, is waiting to hear the truth, about Krista, about Olga, about everything: “Because I deserve that. Those are the rules.”

Every generation makes new rules. Every generation comes up against the persistent ethical failures of the human animal. But though there may be no permanent transformations in our emotional lives, there can be genuine reframings and new language and laws created to name and/or penalize the ways we tend to hurt each other, and this is a service each generation can perform for the one before. When Sharon accuses Tár of using her, Tár replies, “How cruel to define our relationship as transactional!” Now, that is definitely an example of gaslighting, and how would I know this without millennials explaining it to me? Similarly, when Sharon shoots back, “There’s only one relationship you’ve ever had that wasn’t, and she’s sleeping in the room next door!”—well, that’s classic Gen X guilt-tripping, and you’re welcome.

The moment I saw the poster for Tár (Blanchett shot from below, conducting, arms outstretched, looking like Christ on the Cross) I knew I would want to write about it, but the film was not quite out yet, so I was sent by Focus Features to a screening of one, in what turned out to be the London headquarters of Google, that great quantifier of everything. As a committed Gen Xer, overly fond of formulating my own aesthetic responses, I went into this movie without consulting that company’s search engines, without reading a word about it—no interviews, no hot takes or counter takes—and so after the credits rolled, I felt very discombobulated, full of emotions I had no words for (yet). Later I messaged some American friends who began to inform me of the general consensus forming around this film online and the various cases for and against it that were being made, but before they could get very far with all that, I asked them please to stop. “Stand before a picture as before a prince,” suggests Schopenhauer. “Waiting to see whether it will speak and what it will say.” A not very democratic piece of advice, perhaps, but, for me, one that remains essential.

Why do female ambition and desire have to be monstrous? Why choose a woman to play this kind of monster when her misdeeds are so common among men? Or, conversely: Isn’t it great that women now get to be just as monstrous as anyone else? I don’t think these questions are without merit but I notice the way such prefabricated talking points function independently of any particular character or film. They don’t seem to quite capture the comical specificity of Lydia Tár’s stealing that pencil, or looming omnipotently over an eight-year-old, or having a manic episode, marching around her apartment playing the accordion, singing, “You’re all going to hell.” (Reputational damage may not be death itself, but it can certainly feel like ego death and even break your brain.) And they don’t come close to explaining or quantifying the beautiful scene very near the end in which Tár, having traveled to an unspecified country in Southeast Asia in search of redemption,¹³ stands in a waterfall and, through a sheet of water, silently watches a couple of happy young people kissing.

For the first time since we “learned” Tár, we see her stripped bare at last, with no theory, no defense. No prefabricated arguments. No witty bons mots. She just has to “sit with it,” as the youngs say. She is old and they are not. Her time has passed. There is no redemption. Nothing to be said or done except feel it. And in this positivist world—in which our friends at Google have indexed everything that is the case—how I treasure any artwork that preserves a silence or recognizes a limit! That gestures to those aspects of the human animal that “can’t even be described in words.”

Tár may feel politically inadequate to those who judge art solely in that fashion, but I found it to be existentially rich. And those among us who prefer our baddies to be properly punished need have no fear of disappointment. In a final scene of pure schadenfreude, we see Tár directing what appears to be a great orchestra once again. But then the camera turns to the audience: she is conducting film music, at some kind of Comic Con–type festival, to a packed theater of people in cosplay costumes and superhero suits. Tár has been relegated to the realm of kitsch, the lowest rung on the cultural ladder, which must mean she has been forced to subject her own good taste, her own fine aesthetic sensibility, to the demands of a financial necessity, i.e., she has “sold out.” And that, for a woman of Tár’s generation—believe me—is truly a fate worse than death.

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Zadie Smith’s interesting review of the artwork of Kara Walker [NYR, February 27] contains a large section on the life and diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, a slave owner in Jamaica between 1750 and 1786. She claims in a footnote that she derived her information from reading three entries in the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood at the Beinecke Library, where Thistlewood’s papers now reside, having previously been at the Lincolnshire Archives in England, where I examined them and obtained a transcript of the diaries.

It is clear to me, however, from the details in her review, that her information about Thomas Thistlewood is derived from my 2004 book, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. The wording of the punishments meted out to enslaved people that she notes follows very closely what I wrote on p. 261 of Mastery and her enumeration of Thistlewood engaging in 3,852 sex acts appears to be derived from my counting of such acts (from the whole diaries, not just the three diary entries noted in her footnote) on p. 156 of Mastery.

The rest of her comments on Thistlewood also seem to have been obtained from a reading of my book. I appreciate that Ms. Smith has found my book a valuable source of information. It would be nice if she acknowledged that she got the information about Thistlewood from work I have done rather than from her own researches. It is possible that Ms. Smith has read the original diaries, but my confidence in her having done so is diminished by her assertion that Thistlewood wrote about Enlightenment matters on the recto side of the diaries while he wrote about his sexual depravities and how he punished enslaved people on the verso side. Thistlewood did not, however, divide his diaries into a recto and a verso side but used both sides of his diary notebooks to write daily entries in which philosophical reflections were mixed with his activities as a slave owner.

I hope that Ms. Smith can make an acknowledgment of her indebtedness to my work on Thomas Thistlewood.

Trevor Burnard
Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation
University of Hull, UK

Zadie Smith replies:

I’m really very sorry for the omission. I placed no footnote at all on those sections when I wrote the essay. The footnotes came at the end of the process, at the request of the magazine’s editors, who asked where they had come from, at which point I told them to check the wording of the quotes in Thistlewood’s diaries. The footnote was theirs. I never claimed to have gone to the Beinecke Library and indeed I never have. I did, however, read Professor Burnard’s excellent book, several years ago—which is when I made notes on it, evidently inaccurately in the case of the recto/verso error—and I would like to take this opportunity to recommend it to the readers of this journal. I found it to be a brilliant and devastating work, and invaluable in developing my understanding of the brutal history of slavery in the Caribbean.

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Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is having the air squeezed out of her by a larger, bare-breasted black woman, who wears a kerchief around her head. To an American audience, I imagine, this black woman could easily read as “Mammy.” To a viewer from the wider diaspora—to a black Briton, say—she is perhaps less likely to invoke the stereotypical placidity of “Mammy,” hewing closer to the fury of her mythological opposite, the legendary Nanny of the Maroons: escaped slave, leader of peoples. Her hand is held up forcefully, indicating the direction in which she is determined to go, but the rope between her and the white woman is pulled taut: both struggle under its constriction. And in this drama of opposing forces, through this brutal dialectic, aspects of each woman’s anatomy are grotesquely eroticized by her adversary: buttocks for the black woman, breasts for her white counterpart. Which raises the question: Who tied this constricting rope? A third party? And, if the struggle continues, will the white woman eventually be extinguished? Will the black woman be free? That is, if the white woman is on the verge of extinguishment at all. Maybe she’s on the verge of something else entirely: definition. That’s why we cinch waists, isn’t it? To achieve definition?

The two women are traced in Kara Walker’s familiar, cartoonish line, which seems to combine in a single gesture the comic brevity of Charles Schulz, the polemical pamphleteering of William Hogarth, and the oneiric revelations of Francisco Goya and Otto Dix. The drawing was made, according to Walker, in “1994ish…when I was 24ish,” which is to say at the very beginning of her career, when her drawings were still largely unknown, and few people knew or could guess at the busy chalk portraits that lurked on the other side of the newly famous—and soon-to-be notorious—paper cutouts. The sentence underneath the image reads: what I want history to do to me. Its meaning is unsettling and unsettled, existing in a gray zone between artist’s statement, perverse confession, and ambivalent desire. The sentence pulls in two directions, giving no slack, tense like the rope. And just as the eye finds no comfortable place to rest in the image—passing from figure to figure seeking resolution, desiring a satisfying end to a story so strikingly begun—so the sentence is partial and in unresolved motion, referring upward to the image, which only then refers us back down to the words, in endless, discomfiting cycle.

What might I want history to do to me? I might want history to reduce my historical antagonist—and increase me. I might ask it to urgently remind me why I’m moving forward, away from history. Or speak to me always of our intimate relation, of the ties that bind—and indelibly link—my history and me. I could want history to tell me that my future is tied to my past, whether I want it to be or not. Or ask it to promise me that my future will be revenge upon my past. Or warn me that the past is not erased by this revenge. Or suggest to me that brutal oppression implicates the oppressors, who are in turn brutalized by their own acts of oppression. Or argue that an oppressor can believe herself to be an oppressor only within a system in which she herself has been oppressed. I might want history to show me that slaves and masters are bound at the hip. That they internalize each other. That we hate what we most desire. That we desire what we most hate. That we create oppositions—black white male female fat thin beautiful ugly virgin whore—in order to provide definition to ourselves by contrast. I might want history to convince me that although some identities are chosen, many others are forced. Or that no identities are chosen. Or that all identities are chosen. That I feed history. That history feeds me. That we starve each other. All of these things. None of them. All of them in an unholy mix of the true and the false…

What I want history to do to me predates Kara Walker’s forays into public art by many years,¹ yet in it we can find the problems with which all public art—all monuments, all visual interventions into our public space—must ultimately wrestle. What do we want our public art to do? The official answer is, usually, “memorialize.” We want our monuments to help us commemorate what has passed: our glories, our sufferings. Yet if you grow up, as Walker did, in the shadow of Stone Mountain, Georgia’s monumental tribute to the “heroes of the Confederacy”—carved into the sheer rock and looming over the majority-black population—you will have many questions. Monument to whom? To what? To whose history? To which memories?

Public art claiming to represent our collective memory is just as often a work of historical erasure and political manipulation. It is just as often the violent inscription of myth over truth, a form of “over-writing”—one story overlaid and thus obscuring another—modeled in three dimensions. In the United States, we speak of this. Discussions of power and erasure as they relate to monuments are by now well under way. The astonishing, ongoing absence of public markers of the slave trade, for example—of landing sites and auction blocks, of lynchings and massacres—is a matter of frequent public discussion, debate, and (partial) correction, albeit four hundred years after the first enslaved peoples landed on American shores. In the UK, meanwhile, we have to speak not simply of erasure but of something closer to perfect oblivion. It is no exaggeration to say that the only thing I ever learned about slavery during my British education was that “we” ended it. Even more extraordinary to me now is how many second-generation Caribbean kids in the UK grew up, in the 1970s and 1980s, with the bizarre notion that our families were somehow native to “the islands,” had always been there, even as we pored over the history of “American slavery.”²

The schools were silent; the streets deceptive. The streets were full of monuments to the glorious, imperial, wealthy past, and no explanation whatsoever of the roots and sources of that empire-building wealth. The English side of my own family lived in Brighton, but when we visited I had no clue that those gorgeous Georgian rows of houses, glistening white, had slave sugar as their foundation. “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” This ancient piece of Periclean common sense gets short shrift in England, where grand monuments to imagined past glories are far preferred to (usually much less glorious) accounts of historical reality. Between official memory and the subjective experience of millions, then, there was a chasm.

Take, for example, the Victoria Memorial, that marble white magnificence in front of Buckingham Palace, with which Walker’s latest piece of public art, Fons Americanus, a huge fountain installed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, is evidently in discussion. As with so many British monuments, what appears to be an act of public storytelling is as least as much about silence as narrative. The self-conceived values of empire are confidently displayed, in the forms of classical figures embodying Peace, Progress, Manufacture, and Agriculture (represented by a woman in peasant dress with a sickle and a sheaf of corn; more to the point would be a black woman holding a stalk of sugarcane with a kerchief round her head). Cherubs abound, and mermaids and mermen and a hippogriff—symbolizing the nation’s nautical domination—but there is of course no representation of the peoples thus subdued by this famed maritime strength, and no tourist standing before this memorial would have any idea that a portion of the money used to build it was in fact raised by West African tribes, who sent goods to be sold, the proceeds of which went to the memorial’s fund. (The people of New Zealand, who also contributed to the fund, are acknowledged in an inscription upon the base.)

How did these West African goods get to London? On the ships of Alfred Lewis Jones—the subject of a few monuments himself—an eminent Victorian shipowner and businessman, remembered, in England, as the “Uncrowned King of West Africa” for his myriad business interests on those shores. In the Congo, meanwhile, he made his mark as Liverpool’s consular representative of King Leopold II of Belgium, and therefore as an apologist and enabler of one of the most brutal colonial enterprises in history, the infamous regime that established the common practice of limb removal by machete. (An abject fact that never fails to come to mind whenever I see Walker’s cutouts of black hands, severed from their bodies, bouncing around a white wall, or falling out of a traditional Mousgoum hut, like a return of the repressed…)

Anyway, into this strange national historical amnesia enters Kara Walker. What lessons can she have taken from her American public art experiences? In the process of making her truly monumental A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, she began, as she often does, with free association, mining both her own mind and our collective consciousness for the many sweet and sour resonances of sugar: “Starting with sugar and molasses, and molasses is a byproduct of the sugar processing.” And then asking herself: “What other byproducts are there?” Walker’s historical researches are never superficial, and her art practice has always included an almost equal amount of reading and writing, from which the visuals emerge. Researching sugar, she found herself once again neck-deep in blood and horror. Slave labor, colonization, land seizure, extractive capitalism, the exploitation of women and children, and then, later, the global cultivation of sugar addiction, a public health catastrophe that can be said to affect most profoundly the black and the poor. “And I got to the end and I was like Ruins!… Ruins!… And I couldn’t just produce ruins.”

What is the correct response to a ruinous history? What, if anything, is the artist’s “duty” here? Should ruins always and everywhere be “reclaimed”? Should ruins be consciously rebuilt into something “positive”? If not the representation of ruins, then what? Walker:

Up until that point I had been thinking of finger-wagging doom-laden things about the history of slavery and sugar and America. It didn’t take into account what people wanted to look at. When I came up with the idea and made it, it reminded me of wanting to do the cut-outs, that sense of giving people something they wanted to look at, working with their attention span in a way.³

Walker’s particular mode of engaging with our attention spans—her visual and conceptual provocations—have often caused furor, first from the generation above her, now not infrequently from the generation below. For when it comes to the ruins of history, Walker neither simply represents nor reclaims. Instead she eroticizes, aestheticizes, fetishizes, and dramatizes. With the consequence that she is accused of an unnecessary or inappropriate cultivation of the grotesque, of a prurient interest: “salaciousness.” As if Walker’s manner of aestheticizing ruin, so that our attention may be kept upon it, was a unique scandal in the history of art (or, at least, as if no black woman artist had a right to take up the tools Walker assumes as her inheritance and her right).

But this mode of relating to the ruins of the past is hardly without precedent. Approaching Walker’s Sugar Baby that summer in Brooklyn, first one passed a series of melting child figures, dripping molasses, holding in their arms or on their backs the kind of baskets field laborers use. They looked like those heartbreaking child “blackamoors” you spot in the corners of eighteenth-century paintings, carrying sweet delights for the pleasure of Milady. (Though to me they were the very picture of the Liberian child laborers I once saw tapping hot gum out of the trees, intended for the American tire market.) But there was an older echo, too: in their arrangement, lining the path to the main event—to the Sugar Baby herself—they recalled the Stations of the Cross, one of the most familiar sequences in Western art, the culmination of which is the crucified Christ. Like Walker’s Sugar Baby, he is usually oversized, at the back of a long room, and we approach him, as we approached her, as a figure of worship, a subject of pity, of mournful contemplation, of sadomasochistic erotic interest, not to mention as the embodiment of an infamous historical crime.⁴ All over Europe, in church after church, we encounter the same fascinating admixture of the sexual, the sadistic, and the sacred. The real scandal in the Domino factory, perhaps, was the identity of the object thus occupying our attention: not white and male but black and female.

If we had to choose an ur-Walker image—the one that comes to mind when we think of the artist—it would be Slavery! Slavery! (1997), shown in her blockbuster gallery show “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” in 2007–2008. The images themselves—violent, scatological, sexual, hateful, loving—exist in an unholy mix, like the show’s title. They are given no hierarchy, moral or otherwise. All elements are presented simultaneously.

It was this early work that famously prompted the older artist Betye Saar to label the young Walker “a black artist who obviously hated being black,” whose work was for the “amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.”⁵ Two statements that represent a terrific double bind—a rope thrown by one black woman to constrict another, that surely ends up constricting them both. (In 2019 MoMA, certainly a temple of the “white art establishment,” bought forty-two drawings by Saar and celebrated her with a hugely successful solo show.) Such condemnations amount to an all-too-familiar injunction, directed at minority artists perennially and in all mediums. Your success, runs the argument, can only mean you are “playing up to” or “displaying our dirty laundry in front of” the majority audience. (The implication being: What else could account for it? Itself a sly depredation.) Under this logic, you are either unconsciously giving “them” what they want (self-hatred) or you are consciously doing so (self-and-community-betrayal). That the black artist might be following their own nose—pursuing their own preoccupations and obsessions—is here given no credence. The white viewer, in these debates, is really the only thing on a black artist’s mind.

More recently, the injunction has taken on a new flavor: now work is condemned for being insufficiently empowering, stuck in a regressive negative, neglecting to provide, for a black audience, some necessary form of “self-care,” which is considered especially vital now, during this desperate political moment. But uplift is not the only role of black art. It is possible to both admire the witty and righteous reclaiming of caricatures—like that of Saar’s excellent own The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972)—as well as the more recent, idealized, “positive” black stereotypes of queenly black women presented by Simone Leigh, and still urgently desire to stand enclosed in a Walker diorama (which, in my experience, includes few “amused” viewers, white or otherwise).

Walker operates on the premise that when you make history truly visible, both your own and that of your people or nation, there exists a challenge to show all of it, the unholy mix, the conscious knowledge and the subconscious reaction, the traumatic history and the trauma it has created, the unprocessed and the unprocessable. If you manage this it will be, by definition, de trop. But then again, too much for whom? The very idea that Slavery! Slavery! is an exaggerated or extreme or unnecessarily salacious image is to me strange, given the history through which it consciously tumbles.

Consider, for example, the case of one Thomas Thistlewood. Thistlewood was from Lincolnshire, England. He died in 1786, forty-seven years before Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833. There are no monuments to him in England, but he is notorious, among Jamaicans, for his 14,000-page diary, documenting his time as a plantation owner on our island. A lower-middle-class man, he was an autodidact, and the recto pages of his diary are filled with a meticulous account of his enlightened interest in medicine, horticulture, religion, political theory, and much else. The other half—the verso pages—records the 3,852 acts of sex he had with his slaves, and the regular vicious punishments he doled out to them, baroque in their sadism and perversion. Once, after a particular slave had run away and been caught, Thistlewood gave him “a mod[erate whipping], pickled him well, made Hector [another slave] shit in his mouth, immediately put in gag whilst his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours.” Apparently pleased with this novel punishment, he repeated it on many others. Often he flogged slaves and then “wash’d and rubb’d [them] in salt pickle, lime juice & bird pepper.” To punish the aforementioned Hector for losing a hoe, he whipped him and then “made New Negroe Joe piss in his eyes &mouth.” In addition to forcing men, women, and children into the backbreaking work of cutting sugarcane, sometimes he used a byproduct of sugar for the purposes of torture: “Put him in the Bilboes both feet; gagged him; locked his hands together; rubbed him with Molasses and exposed him naked to the flys all day, and to the mosquitoes all night.”⁶

Lest it be thought Thistlewood was a lone sociopath, his diary reveals how he was often allowed to rape the slaves of neighboring overseers and let them rape his slaves in exchange. And, through it all, Thistlewood maintained an intimate, thirty-three-year relationship with a slave called Phibbah, with whom he had his only son, “Mulatto John.” They were apparently warm and affectionate with each other, Phibbah and Thomas. Once, Thomas brutally flogged his son for refusing to work. Once, Thistlewood found one of his slavedrivers, Johnnie, in competition with Thistlewood’s own visiting nephew—they were both in the habit of raping the same slave, “Little Mimber”—and so Thistlewood warned his nephew off and then viciously beat Little Mimber as punishment. Once, a fellow plantation owner sent Thistlewood the head of a runaway slave as a present and Thistlewood put it on a pole on his estate so that all might see it. In his will, Thistlewood called Phibbah his “wife,” freed her, and left her money and two of his own slaves.

What is the correct artistic response to history like that? Which aspects should be obscured or tidied away or carefully contextualized to protect the viewer’s sensibility? In what relation do we stand to our ancestors if we insist we cannot now even stand to hear or see what they themselves had no choice but to live through? Is not the least we owe the sufferings of the past a full and frank accounting of them? The word “salacious” withers before the historical truth. Salacious: having or conveying undue or inappropriate interest in sexual matters. What is the appropriate level of interest in the interrelation of sex and violence in our history?

Caricature and stereotype are not Walker’s flaws—they are her sharpest tools. She treats them as the DNA of history, the building blocks of our social reality, “scripting” for us, informing and affecting our behavior, and posing the greatest risk not when they are made explicit but rather when they are allowed to sink into invisibility, to appear “natural” or “inevitable.” It is then that they become most firmly entrenched as ideology. It’s then that we find ourselves abiding by them unconsciously, without knowing why. “I have always responded,” Walker has said, “to art which jarred the senses and made one aware physically and emotionally of the shifting terrain on which we rest our beliefs.”⁷

A striking example of this came in 1998, when Walker traveled to Austria, answering a commission to create a “safety curtain” for the Vienna State Opera. The results were manifestly unsafe. Allowing, once again, for free association without self-edits or self-consciousness, Walker wickedly conjured the Austrian African Imaginary: little black “Turks” in fezzes holding out cups of coffee, with gold rings in their ears and Aladdin shoes; dancing girls in grass skirts, in banana skirts, stark naked, the whole exotic black Kabaret; black bodies inscribed into academic zoological studies, or placed in actual zoos, or made out of porcelain, eternally holding out an ashtray or a serving dish, or sweating underneath paladins carrying Arab kings, or cooling European royalty with those huge feather fans…

In Safety Curtain, the monograph that accompanied her Austrian experiment, she places, in the same visual frame, a shocking nineteenth-century physiological illustration intended to demonstrate the closeness of the black man to an ape, with an equally poisonous contemporary news photo of Mike Tyson, biting the T-shirt of a blond toddler who screams in terror. She offers, too, a “before and after” picture—the type of beauty advertisement still common in the 1990s—in which a childhood picture of Oprah is the “before,” and a blue-eyed blond is the “after.” That is, she makes explicit the logic of so many of our contemporary media images: she reveals their DNA. The animalistic black man. Whiteness as purified blackness. Walker shares Warhol’s genius for caricature and stereotype, and what she has said she admires in his work—“simplicity and [the] strange mute ability to distil a culture into a single image”—we find also in hers. Like Warhol she is never subtle, even when making a “subtlety.” From her “Notes from a Negress Imprisoned in Austria”:

I am and shall continue to be the monster in your closet. Prodding at your tightly wound arsenal, your history.

Let Me Out.

And. You. shall. seek. to. put. me. back. in.

And together we will: in and out and in and out together HAHA!⁸

Which is to say, images have intercourse with each other—they fuck each other. They’re incestuous. They spawn. And it is when this process is subconscious and invisible that it is most insidious. So much of what was written about Mike Tyson, in the 1990s, had a long and deadly cultural history, and every time we looked at or thought about him, some of that history came along for the ride. Walker sees and makes visible so many of these kinds of historical exchanges, substitutes, echoes, and reoccurrences, but claims no external, objective vantage point on them. “I don’t think that my work is actually effectively dealing with history,” she has said: “I think of my work as subsumed by history or consumed by history.” The difference between Walker and so many of us is that she knows it.

Walker: “When you have monuments or commemorative things that just exist, they sit there and they disappear.” Walker’s monuments never simply sit, they never stand apart from history as something finished or finalized—and they crave movement. Over the years her cutouts have become animated, and her walls have turned circular, dioramic, and even those notorious “amused” white art patrons have found themselves backlit and cast as shadows, implicated and involved in the art they came merely to view.

In 2018 Walker brought her dynamic vision of the past to Algiers Point, New Orleans, once a holding area for slaves. A small, inadequate plaque marks the spot. A steam-powered calliope was Walker’s typically unsubtle intervention, a catastrophic caravan that took the sentimental organ music of the Mississippi and recast it in a monstrous carved box of black steel, through which steam poured and history seeped. To let off steam, as a calliope must do, is visually cathartic, and the music was black resistance and uplift combined: “negro” spirituals, “We Shall Overcome,” “Down by the Riverside,” etc. But the sound each pipe made was somewhere between scream, off-key wail, and—thanks to the huff and puff of the steam itself—a hellish and industrialized machine of torture. The effect was dreadful, in the ancient meaning of that term, and too provoking and active to be called, exactly, a monument. Monuments are complacent; they put a seal upon the past, they release us from dread. For Walker dread is an engine: it prompts us to remember and rightly fear the ruins we shouldn’t want to return to, and don’t wish to re-create—if we’re wise. Dread is surely one of the things we want history to cause in us, lest we forget.

But to talk of Walker’s art this way, as if history were its only concern, and our “opinions” about that history its only content, is to traduce the art itself. Much has been written about Kara Walker, too much—journalistic debates about her often threaten to subsume any real attempt to see this work in all its strangeness.⁹ (Or to allow it the intimate psychology we simply assume with an artist like, say, Tracey Emin, whose engagement with feminist ideas and feminist art history in no way precludes our noticing the personal.) Walker:

The illusion is that it’s about past events…simply about a particular point in history and nothing else. It’s really part of the ruse that I tend to like to approach the complexities of my own life by distancing myself and finding a parallel in something that’s prettier, more genteel.¹⁰

These complexities have included some masochistic sexual relationships, a long romantic history with white men, a mixed-race child, and inconvenient psychic attractions to “heroic” white figures like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind that leave her “wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.” In art school she was tormented by the sense that she was “going to put my foot in my mouth if I was honest about my own failings as a black woman,” and in one early interview she recalls a slogan on a popular 1990s T-shirt, It’s a Black thing, You wouldn’t understand: “It inspired a whole way of thinking for me. Because, obviously the ‘you’ in the saying is Not Black…. So what does this mean to the person who is black and still doesn’t quite understand?”

These uncollegiate expressions of failure and incomprehension in Walker’s retellings reveal—like the border between her black cutout edges and her white backgrounds—something significant in the contrast. For of course you can’t fail as a white woman qua white woman; whiteness is not formulated as a test. A white thing is, by definition, whatever a white person does. Whereas blackness is nothing but test. So many things can threaten a black woman’s blackness (in the eyes of white people, black people, herself) that the fear of this threat can constitute an entire shadow identity, if one allows it to do so. The wrong kind of art, the wrong kind of husband, the wrong kinds of interests, the wrong kind of curiosity, the wrong kinds of desires, the wrong kinds of confessions. Confessions like this: “If the work is reprehensible, that work is also me, coming from a reprehensible part of me.”

One gift an artist might give to other artists is a demonstration of how to make work without shame. Without being cowed or terrified by the opinions of others. As Walker’s cousin, the novelist James Hannaham, once said of her, “She has the hermeneutic idea of the role of the artist in society—a person who is strong enough to withstand projection and then can project ideas back to the people in such a way that their minds change. Or not.”¹¹ What kind of shameless black woman imagines a “negro” boy with a hole in his chest through which a bird has just bust through, stealing his heart? Kara Walker. What kind of shameless black woman imagines a little white boy sucking on the tip of an African girl’s banana skirt as the girl also suckles herself? Kara Walker. What kind of shameless black woman imagines rape and chaos while a tiny Abraham Lincoln saunters by? Kara Walker.

The shame is meant to be the shame of being multiple. Of not understanding what the (notably singular) black “thing” is or should be because, in Walker’s work, blackness is so many things:

I was looking at the identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s and thinking the idea of a single identity—the militant black woman, or whatever—wasn’t enough. At any one moment I felt like 13 different characters piecing themselves together. Some of it was coming out of bizarre lived sexual experiences I’d had with people who will go unnamed, some of it was, like, I don’t know, reading Gone with the Wind. The feeling I was left with was that it was probably my job to gather all those pieces back into one room. They were all pieces of me and they were unruly. ¹²

Into one gigantic space, then, the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, Walker now gathers all her pieces. At the time of writing, this work was still in process, and I had access only to drawings and fragments, scraps and ruins and partial models, but I saw a monument rising, a “water feature,” not unlike the Victoria Memorial just down the road, featuring waters that seem to flow directly from the Middle Passage—or else from that dreadful stretch of sea between Libya and Lampedusa, currently swallowing up black people at a terrifying rate. I saw a monument in sketch, surrounded by small boats in trouble, that once again suggested to me not only the old trade in humans but the more recent arrival of African bodies to European shores, no longer slaves but still the desperate subjects of a capitalism red in tooth and claw. That catastrophic caravan of history, circling again.

And atop her fountain, I spotted a typical Walkerian figure of resistance—a spectacular “negress,” spurting water from her nipples—and this reminded me of all her soaring birds smashing through slave bodies—as if the urge for freedom could be animated and embodied—and her magnificent swans, lending their wings to the oppressed, and her flying black cherubs and pig-tailed “Topsys” who can often be seen shooting into the sky, propelling themselves above ruin and chaos. Such repeated figures are the not-so-secret glory hiding in plain sight of so many Walker images, obscured by the endless chatter of journalism about her “salaciousness,” but not unwitnessed by those who have eyes to see. In England, where so many people still consider it bad taste even to mention Britain’s long and complex history with the people of the African diaspora, a Walker monument is a thrilling intervention. I imagine awe at the scale. I imagine accolades and protests. I imagine the usual palaver that Walker has already imagined and described herself:

Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media. Parents will cover the eyes of innocent children. School Teachers will reexamine their art history curricula. Prestigious Academic Societies will withdraw their support, former husbands and former lovers will recoil in abject terror. Critics will shake their heads in bemused silence. Gallery Directors will wring their hands at the sight of throngs of the gallery-curious flooding the pavement outside.¹³

I hope Walker is never ashamed to be the wrong kind of artist/woman/black person, or ever exhausted by our endless projections upon her. Twenty-five years after she exploded into the art world, I hope it continues to be her self-defined job to gather all the ruins of her own, and our, history—everything abject and beautiful, oppressive and freeing, scatalogical and sexual, holy and unholy—into one place, without attempting perfect alignment, without needing to be seen to be good, so that she might make art from it. And thus stand up for the subconscious, for the unsaid and unsayable, for the historically and personally indigestible, for the unprettified, for the autonomy of an imagination that cannot escape history, and—more than anything else—for black freedom of expression itself.

The post What Do We Want History to Do to Us? appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The word museography properly refers to the systematic description of objects in museums, but it might also do for the culture and ideology surrounding that dusty old figure of legend, the artist’s “muse.” If her aura is fading now, anyone educated during the twentieth century remembers when she played no small part in our curricula, both formal and informal. (The male muse, back then, existed only in the homosexual realm.) To avoid her, you had to spend a lot of time in libraries seeking evidence of her opposite: not the sitter but the painter; not the character but the author; not the song but the singer. And a few women did appear to have avoided the state of muse-dom: Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Patti Smith. In fact, such women could be said to have acquired muses themselves, or to have been involved in a mutually beneficial muse-ology with other artists (Vita Sackville-West, Alice B. Toklas, Langston Hughes, Robert Mapplethorpe). But it was slim pickings.

Meanwhile, in the annals of museography, you could discover a celebrated parade of handmaids to the genii, “legendary beauties,” ladies with salons, chic ladies, witty ladies, ladies with inspiring ankles, faces, breasts, voices, clothes, attitudes, houses, and inheritances; women whose brilliant conversation had been entombed in various novels; women whose personal style had prompted whole fashion houses into production; women whose tenure as girlfriend or wife usefully demarcated the various artistic “periods” of the male artists with whom they’d been involved, even when those women were also, themselves, artists. The Yoko Years. The Decade of Dora. Accounts of the muse–artist relation were anchored in the idea of male cultural production as a special category, one with particular needs—usually sexual—that the muse had been there to fulfill, perhaps even to the point of exploitation, but without whom we would have missed the opportunity to enjoy this or that beloved cultural artifact. The art wants what the art wants. Revisionary biographies of overlooked women—which began to appear with some regularity in the Eighties—were off-putting in a different way (at least to me). Unhinged in tone, by turns furious, defensive, melancholy, and tragic, their very intensity kept the muse in her place, orbiting the great man.

Celia Paul’s memoir, Self-Portrait, is a different animal altogether. Lucian Freud, whose muse and lover she was, is rendered here—and acutely—but as Paul puts it, with typical simplicity and clarity, “Lucian…is made part of my story rather than, as is usually the case, me being portrayed as part of his.” Her story is striking. It is not, as has been assumed, the tale of a muse who later became a painter, but an account of a painter who, for ten years of her early life, found herself mistaken for a muse, by a man who did that a lot. Her book is about many things besides Freud: her mother, her childhood, her sisters, her paintings. But she neither rejects her past with Freud nor rewrites it, placing present ideas and feelings alongside diary entries and letters she wrote as a young woman, a generous, vulnerable strategy that avoids the usual triumphalism of memoir. For Paul, the self is continuous (“I have always been, and I remain at nearly sixty, the same person I was as a teenager…. This simple realisation seems to me to be complex and profoundly liberating”), and equal weight is given to “the vividness of the past and the measured detachment of the present.” You sense both qualities in her first glimpse of Freud, in 1978:

His face was very white, with the texture of wax. It had an eerie glow as if it was lit from within, like a candle inside a turnip. His gestures were camp. He stood with one leg bent and his toes, in their expensive shoes, were pointed outwards. He sucked in his cheeks in a self-conscious way and opened his eyes wide until I looked at him, and then his pupils, which were hard points in his pale lizard-green irises, slid under his eyelids and I could only see the whites of his eyes.

In the head of the muse were the eyes of a painter. At the time, she was at her easel, watching Freud enter the basement life-drawing class at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he was a visiting tutor. He liked to make a dramatic entrance. In Paul’s case, it all happened with unseemly speed. In a moment he is beside her; she shows him some drawings she has done of her mother; a painting of her father. He touches her back, suggests they go for tea, and after that tea, they get in his car:

As we drove west the low autumn sun was blinding. He took my hair and wound it around his fingers and started stroking my throat with a soft rotating movement. I felt his knuckles on my throat through my hair. He stared at me fixedly and told me I looked so sad. He asked me for my phone number.

At his flat, more tea:

As I was drinking it, he came and stood behind me. He lifted up my hair and buried his face in it….

He pulled me gently but insistently into a standing position. I watched him kissing me and my mouth was unresponsive. I saw the whites of his eyes and he looked blind. His head felt very small and light as eggshell. I was frightened. I asked him what he thought of my work. He said that it was “like walking into a honey-pot.”

Talk about Freudian! Though I wonder if they’re thinking of the same honey-pot? For a muse, the sweet temptation is validation: you want to know what the great man thinks of your work, even if the great man wants something else first:

He started to kiss me again, but I was insistent that I had to go back now. I told him that I had arranged to meet up with a life model, who I hoped would be able to sit for me privately.

In museography, art and sex struggle with each other, intertwine, become finally indivisible. But when the muse happens also to be an artist, the struggle is existential, because to submit entirely to musedom, to being seen rather than seeing, would be to lose art itself:

As I was leaving I noticed a beautiful unfinished painting by him…. It was of a woman with her head resting on one side in a dreamy reverie. Her mouth was half-open. The image was full of love. When I was halfway down the stairs I heard him calling after me in a gentle voice, “Thanks awfully.”

Paul, young or old, does not scorn the idea that gratitude can exist between muse and artist, and move in two directions: love lessons becoming art lessons, and vice versa. But she does not romanticize the price of entry, and from the start knew to be cautious. Rather then meet Freud the following week, she avoids the Slade, preferring to stay at home, drawing. He starts calling. She agrees to meet him in Regent’s Park, where he spontaneously begins kissing her waist (“I felt very sad, also unnerved”). She meets him the following day, at his insistence. The moment she arrives at his door he presses her against the wall and starts kissing her again. In an attempt at “winsome prevarication,” she tries reciting Yeats’s “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” but he “seemed rather irritated” by it and soon leads her to bed. “I felt that I had sinned and that something had been irreparably lost. I felt guilty and powerful. I felt that I’d stepped into a limitless and dangerous world.” She was eighteen. Freud was fifty-five. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

So ends the section called “Lucian” that opens the book. It is directly followed by “Linda,” a chapter concerning the artist as a young girl, and within which Paul makes clear that it was her own childhood—rather than her encounter with Freud—that made her a painter. Inspired primarily by the Devon landscape in which she was raised—“I found objects on my walks through the woods and on the beach…and I arranged them to form still-lifes. I painted obsessively”—a little later she had a creatively significant “intense relationship” with a girl at her boarding school. Her name was Linda Brandon.¹ Their relationship was nonsexual, urgently creative, extremely competitive, and centered around the art room of their school, to which both girls had been given a key by their art teacher. Each worked secretly, separately, late at night, inspired by envy of the work left behind by the other. Paul was “astonished” by Linda’s drawings, experiencing surges of jealousy so sickening “I thought I was going to pass out.” They match each other picture for picture, until, after one summer holiday, Paul comes back with a “huge amount of work,” while Linda has completed only one “half-finished drawing done in heavy black pencil of a dried sunflower head…. I sensed, with relief, that her passion for painting was beginning to fade.” Linda, vanquished—although still loved—takes up a place at a normal sixth-form college. Paul is put forward for the Slade. Lawrence Gowing, a professor there (and friend of Freud’s), took one look at her portfolio and immediately approved her application, even going so far as to write an encouraging letter to her “reluctant” father. (Including the memorable line “Pictures unpainted make the heart sick.”) If this chapter reads like a foundational myth of female “becoming,” ripped from the pages of Charlotte Brontë or Elena Ferrante, it’s no surprise. Girlhood seems to be one of the few periods of a woman’s life where her creativity can exist wholly without shame: unbound, feverish, selfish.

In adulthood, things change. Female creativity finds itself in conflict with traditional feminine responsibilities:

One of the main challenges I have faced as a woman artist is the conflict I feel about caring for someone, loving someone, yet remaining dedicated to my art in an undivided way….

It was a conflict of desire that I suffered at first with Lucian…. He spoke admiringly to me of Gwen John, who had stopped painting when she was most passionately involved with Rodin, so that she could give herself fully to the experience. I felt that there was a hidden reproach to me in his words.

Not so hidden.

There is a tension between seeing and being seen. When the young Celia Paul first sits for Freud, she is “very self-conscious, and the positions I assumed for him were awkward and uncharacteristic of the way I usually lay down. I was never naked normally.” She ends up covering her face with one hand and cupping one breast with the other. (“‘That’s it!’ he said. I knew that it was the way the skin of my breast rumpled under the touch of my hand that had attracted him.”) It’s when he paints her breasts that she’s most aware of taking on the role of object: “I felt his scrutiny intensify. I felt exposed and hated the feeling. I cried throughout these sessions.” The painting is Naked Girl with Egg, because Paul’s breasts reminded Freud of eggs. He also painted two actual eggs in the foreground of the picture—in case, perhaps, the connection was obscure. One effect of the eggs is to emphasize how much the flesh looks like meat beside them, and the material under Paul like a tablecloth, as if she herself is part of the meal.

By contrast, when it’s Paul’s turn to do the seeing, consciousness of objectification and its consequences became part of her process. Her first satisfying life-drawing experience is with an Italian model called Lucia, with whom she feels a special connection, because, “unlike the other life models who never showed their feelings,” Lucia weeps, and describes feeling degraded by the filthy mattress at the Slade, by the students who never speak to her. Paul began to develop a different understanding of what it means to see and be seen:

I couldn’t understand the principle of life drawing. It seemed so artificial to me to draw a person one didn’t know or have any involvement with…. I needed to work from someone who mattered to me. The person who mattered most to me was my mother.

Throughout her career, Paul has painted only people and places she knows well: her son, her four sisters, her father, and especially her mother, over and over again, using her own emotional relation to them as an aesthetic principle: the portraits “were necessary because I loved [my mother]. Their necessity gave them their force.” In her view, “the act of sitting is not a passive one,” and can be noticeably different for women and men:

I have noticed that the men I have worked from are interested in the process of painting and in the act of sitting. The silence, when I am working from men, is less interior. Women, in my experience, find it easier to sit still and think their own thoughts, and they often hardly seem to be aware that I’m there in the same room. For this reason I usually feel more peaceful when I’m working from a woman, and more free.

In the case of her mother, who was religious (Paul’s father was a bishop), this stillness had the added dimension of faith, for she was often silently praying during the many hours she sat for her daughter:

She entered into the silence with her soul. Her face assumed a rapt expression. My painting was raised to a higher level, too, because of her elevated state. The air was charged with prayer. She was always ecstatic if she felt she had sat well.

With his own sitters, Freud liked to talk and be listened to. Paul records some of this conversation in a letter she wrote home: “He said much more, like how the Greek sun seems to preserve the colour in cloth and furniture so that a regency chair is startling but that women start to go downhill at an avalanche pace from the age of sixteen etc. etc.”

Freud painted the visible: flesh, breasts, eggs. Paul’s work is a visionary account of ineffable qualities, like love, faith, silence, empathy. All of which can be made out in what she calls her “first real painting,” Family Group (1980; see illustration above). Gowing called it the best painting done by a Slade student. Freud admired it, too, as Paul does not omit to mention:

He said, “I’m thinking of your painting.” He started to think about doing a big painting involving several sitters, and he ordered his biggest canvas yet to be stretched…. On this canvas he was to conjure up “Interior W11: After Watteau.”

One of the subtle methods of this crafty book is insinuation, creating new feminist genealogies and hierarchies by implication. Is Interior W11, for which Paul posed, after Watteau—or after Paul? There are the similarities in the composition: the resting hand, the averted eyes, the cramped space, and the rectangular escape-hatch—for Paul a mirror, for Freud a door, but in both cases opening onto a different view, like a release valve from the intensity of family life. But to imply a mutual influence between these painters is also to highlight the differences in approach. In Paul’s painting, wavelike brushstrokes surround the family and seem to connect them, like auras, radiating most intensely around their heads, as if the mental conception of familial love were a sacred substance itself, that paint might render visible. (Paul is present in the mirror’s reflection, thin and spectral, a benign spirit watching over her clan.) “The whole composition,” Paul writes, “is lit with an inward glow.”

In Freud’s painting, Paul—the new lover, at far left—must contend with her lover’s children and step-children, as well as the ex-lover, Suzy Boyt, who had four children with Freud after also meeting him at the Slade, twenty-five years before Paul. This improvised family group sits together in a room of little warmth—rusting pipes, peeling paintwork, half-rotten greenery—against which they are each sharply outlined, like anatomical examples of their kind. Under their skin, Freud uncovers his familiar butcher-shop pinks, his blues and grays—suggestive of veins, arteries, and organs—which are then echoed in the meaty shades of the exposed walls, and likewise make the case for inevitable decay.

“The forms grew bigger as he progressed,” writes Paul of the construction of Freud’s painting,

so that we appear to be squashing up next to each other. Despite the physical proximity, each figure seems locked into her or his private world and there is no emotional empathy between us. We look lost and isolated, like sheep huddled together in a storm.

The storm, of course, was Freud himself, father of fourteen acknowledged children with six women. Traditionally, museography has considered critiques of such arrangements tediously puritan. (Although, by the time Freud died, in 2011, a grudging shift was taking place. You can hear it in some of the posthumous profiles: “As raffishly bohemian as these arrangements may sound, it was no easy road for the women and children involved.”) Interior W11 aestheticizes the complex family romance Freud liked to cultivate around himself. (He seemed to require, Paul delicately suggests, an “undercurrent of jealousy…as a stimulus to his own affairs.”) It’s less a group portrait than a staged drama about power, depicting five atomized people tethered to a central figure not pictured. They are all there for Lucian, only for him. Of course, this is true of all portraits—the sitters always appear at the artist’s bidding—but few painters have put as much emphasis on sitting-as-subjection. (The youngest child looks less like a child reclining than a rag doll, destined to remain wherever you drop her.)

A year into their relationship, Paul discovered that Freud had several young lovers at the Slade. Devastated, she cautiously expressed her pain to Gowing, he of the kind letter about unpainted paintings. But by now, Celia was a muse, so a different kind of advice was in order: “He says that he has known Lucian since he was sixteen and knows that he just doesn’t commit himself to one single person—not through unconcern but just because this was the stony cold mode of living that his art flourished on.” Paul records her subsequent suicide attempt with surreal British restraint, in five sentences, never to be mentioned again:

Everyone at The Slade was gossiping about Lucian, and they delighted in telling me about all the people he was having affairs with. I became severely depressed. One night I swallowed a packet of Veganin [a painkiller], washed down by a bottle of whiskey. This landed me in hospital. I went home to recover.

After this she remains with him. Anyone who has ever waited for a text or an e-mail from a lover—but never known the pain of the landline or the postal service—will marvel at the old ways, when a woman could find herself constrained to the house for days, awaiting a sign. And he remains promiscuous. Sometimes he gaslights her about it (“You’re crazy”). Sometimes he defends it (“It doesn’t alter what I feel for you”). Sometimes he claims the bohemian’s license (“I don’t know if it’s right and I don’t know if it’s wrong”). Sometimes he forgets what he said before and has to adapt:

“You lied to me.”

“When did I actually lie to you?” He is very gentle to me.

“When I asked you if you were going with anyone else you said—of course not.”

“Oh yes,” he murmurs. “You know I almost always tell you the truth.”

Sometimes her teenage diary displays the same cool insight that distinguishes Self-Portrait as a whole: “He does not love me.” More often, she proved a child at sea, caught in the eye of Storm Freud:

His mood is brittle gentleness. I say one careless foolish word and he flings a hundred back at me, so angrily, so full of hatred, and then the ice-cold kindness seals the crack again and I am left feeling completely humiliated. Soon I lose my voice, my thoughts are covered in mist.

When the mist clears, it turns out that aside from the many girls, there is also one particular, special girl, whose name Paul finds in his open diary. At this point, the reader is wont to judge harshly, while the museologist will argue that those were different times. They certainly were:

I go to The Slade. A tank of tropical fish is on the table in the space next to mine and my friend is painting diluted watery shapes…. I think she doesn’t look too absorbed in her work so I tell her all about my jealous suspicions.

She says, “Would you like some heroin?”

But after this little pick-me-up—“I feel the emptiness and misery desert me and instead I am completely at peace and full of love for everybody”—Paul, walking through Soho, bumps into the named girl, who confirms the affair and the fact that, as far as teenage hearts are concerned, some things never change: “It’s as though she held all my life, my trust, my self-respect, like a little glass paperweight in her hand which she now let fall, and only I perceive the tragedy of the shattered fragments.”

Broken? Not really, never entirely. If male artists sometimes stage dramas of power, it is not unknown for female artists to make a performance of masochism. Neither performance should be entirely trusted:

Always when you turn to go
There is grace in your turning
So that I would call you back
But I know
That it is the coldness of your going I crave
And not your returning.

So run some lines of Paul’s teenage poetry, and they offer a hint of the uses of masochism, as creative prompt, as inspiration. Real masochism would surely mean unpainted paintings, unwritten poems. Whereas Paul’s work gets done, through everything, as if to prove that classically feminine principle enshrined in the ideology of the housewife: of “making do,” through pain, through lack, using whatever is to hand, which, in Paul’s case, was usually her own mother:

I read a story about St Brigid in a book of women saints that I had. St Brigid had performed the miracle of giving a blind woman her sight for a split-second. The blind woman had seen fields with cattle grazing in them. The scene was so beautiful to her that she said the split second was all she needed, and that the memory of it would light up her life for evermore.

Paul will go on to use this sanctified tale of female masochism as potent inspiration to envision her mother as Saint Brigid, with the Yorkshire Moors behind her, cattle grazing in the distance. She’s painted lying down, apparently deep in meditation or sleep, unaware of an observer, with one hand flat on her chest and the other resting naturally in her lap, as a real woman might unself-consciously position herself. Freud said once that Paul’s people resemble landscapes, and so it is here: her mother’s olive-green sweater melds with the moors; her face, even with eyes closed, looks mobile and stormy, like weather. (“My mother is dreaming up her own protective world.”) She seems not a person so much as a first cause, being the foundation of, and reason for, Paul’s own existence. (And isn’t this, for better or worse, how we think of our mothers?)

When Paul was twenty-five, she gave birth to Frank, her son by Freud. Motherhood is the perfect stage on which to perform feminine masochism, but as many new mothers have discovered, it can also be the occasion to confront one’s inner Saint Brigid once and for all. Of the many wonderful images in this book, the one I kept returning to isn’t a painting at all but a photo of mother and child, beaming at each other, locked in intense, joyful relation. (Lucian was nervous about holding Frank, “found it difficult to deal with the fact that I was preoccupied and not so readily available after the birth,” and, despite already having fathered many children, still appeared confused by the process of raising them: he “was disturbed by the milk that had leaked onto my dress: ‘What’s that?’ he asked. I sensed that it repelled him.”) So intense are the joys that Paul experiences her love for her son as a kind of self-submerging, as she notes in her diary, directly after his birth:

I would like to give up everything for him. I would like to be swept away and lost in this powerful tide of maternal love. I would like all my ambition and all my desires to be drowned with me.

But some contrary instinct is working in me at the same time: I must save myself too.

Saving herself—for art, for love—requires “rearrang[ing] the structure” of her life. In order for Paul to continue working, from the time he is three weeks old her son’s “main carer” becomes his mother’s mother, which Paul frames as a defense against artistic erasure: “When I am with Frank I don’t have any thoughts for myself. All my concerns are for him. Therefore I am unable to work when he stays with me.” (This instinct for self-preservation remains: even now, she lives separately from her beloved husband, the poet and philosopher Steven Kupfer, who has no key to her apartment.) She also needed time to continue loving Lucian, and sitting for him, though she senses both roles are different now: “Something in me had changed. I felt more powerful and confident since becoming a mother. I was beginning to have more of a sense of who I was.”

What is so spooky about Freud’s Girl in a Striped Nightshirt (Paul’s sitting for which extended through pregnancy and birth) is that this tremendous shift in her personhood goes unregistered. Still the meek girl-child; still the downturned eyes. Freud had spoken to Paul at that time of “Rodin’s hurt when he no longer had complete control over his lover, Camille Claudel. Lucian said that he understood how painful that feeling is.” Girl in a Striped Nightshirt is a very tender painting, wistful for the continuance of a quality that has already transformed, that perhaps was never there in the first place.

The painting that does try to recognize the end of Paul’s musedom is his Painter and Model (1986–1987), begun a few months later, notably after Paul’s first successful solo show. (Saatchi bought, among other works, My Mother as St Brigid, Dreaming.) In it, Paul is presented as a painter, standing up with brush in hand, fully clothed except for her bare feet, her dress covered in paint. A naked, open-legged male friend reclines on a sofa beside her, limp penis front and center. Paul’s face has lost all its feminine softness, her nose is sharp, her brush is extended, the man is exposed and vulnerable. Paul’s toes look strangely forceful and are crushing a tube of paint on the floor. Paul at once understood the nature of this double-sided tribute, and is honest about her own ambivalent reaction:

I felt honoured that Lucian should represent me in the powerful position of the artist: his recognition was deeply significant to me. But underlying my pride, I felt wistful that I was no longer represented as the object of desire.

Soon after, she found herself supplanted by a new muse: “Without my being aware of it, she was seen by most people as the main person in his life. I had been displaced. In February 1988 I decided to split up with him.”

Finishing this powerful little book, I was prompted into an embarrassing recollection: as a teenager, I tried to write to Freud, to offer myself up as a model. I’d seen his painting of the fleshy woman from the Department of Social Security, and being pretty fleshy myself at the time, I thought he might appreciate me as a subject—validate me as a subject, I suppose is what I mean. (I wrote a similar note to Robert Crumb.) I remember writing that letter but don’t recall sending it. Still, the role of muse-masochist was clearly in my repertoire, as it is in the repertoires of so many young girls. This Freud knew well.

One of the most startling evocations of the muse-masochist is by Freud: The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer (2004–2005).² The girl in the painting is Alexi Williams-Wynn. She was thirty-three years old—relatively old for Freud, but then, he was eighty-three at the time. She sat for him “seven days a week, night and day,” convenient in its way because of course they were also lovers. By that late stage in Lucian’s life, an affair no longer outlasted a sitting (perhaps for reasons of economy, given his age), and after the two paintings he did of her were finished, so was the relationship. Still, being a muse means endeavoring always to see the bigger picture—even through heartbreak—and so it was with Williams-Wynn, for whom the experience perfectly illustrated the ideology that created it: “Being with Lucian made me realize that this is no joke: being an artist, being alive. It also made me understand that selfishness is what it takes to make great art.”

It’s what many of Freud’s children believed—or had to believe—in order to accept the sort of familial relationships mostly conducted through portrait sittings. And it’s what all we students of twentieth-century museography took as our creed. But is it true? Celia Paul is, in my view, also a great artist and a selfish one—by her own reckoning. Selfish with her space and her time, with her need for quietude. But are selfishness and exploitation quite the same thing? Paul’s selfishness seems more a defense against obliteration than anything else. Still, isn’t choosing to give up primary care of a child also a “stony cold mode of living”? And that, the museologist will argue, is exactly what makes a great artist!

This debate is usually posed in the banal form of an either/or. As in: Can I still love X great artist given that he or she behaved in Y way? Or must I shun them? In the case of misogyny, this mode of argument may miss the point. Lucian Freud’s art, whatever its merits, contains within itself the fundamental limitation of misogyny, which is a form of partial sight, a handicap with precise consequences if you happen to be a portraitist whose subjects were often women. For example, the Celia Paul whom Freud believed he saw, whom he set out to paint—that pretty, mild girl with her eyes downcast, “meekly ‘there,’ for him to do whatever he wanted with me”—was not really the person lying before him. This is not to claim that Freud’s portraits of Paul are either “wrong” (whatever such a word could mean in this context) or even bad, but simply that they are notably partial, being blind to so much, indeed, to the essential quality of the subject in question. Freud thought he saw it all, purely, clearly, without distortion—that was his fame.

But, when it came to women, he did not see. Misogyny, whatever else it might be, is a form of distortion, a way of not seeing, of assuming both too much and too little. It was beneath—or beyond—his notice to capture that the pretty, apparently passive body lying naked before him thrummed with painterly ambition, just like his, and intended to save itself for the purposes of art, just as he did. And even when Freud realized, belatedly, that Paul was a painter (rather than a muse or a mere art student), he was blind to the idea that this person, the “woman painter,” might still be a whole human, capable of erotic passion, just like himself, and not a fake man, with a set of violently phallic toes. (Perhaps to demonstrate this, Paul shocked Freud, two months into new motherhood, by having an affair with an eighteen-year-old student she met on a train.) Many years later, after Freud died, Paul painted her own Painter and Model (2012), in which she need make no choices between being a woman and an artist:“I have it all. I am both artist and sitter. By looking at myself I don’t need to stage a drama about power; I am empowered by the very fact that I am representing myself as I am: a painter.”

There was, when Paul began painting, very little in the way of theoretical support for her way of seeing (or paternal support for the raising of children). And she made her life professionally difficult in other ways. Impractically, she has never conflated painterly ambition with size of canvas. And her “attraction to the juxtaposition of the mystical with direct observation” is, as she herself points out, the opposite of Freud, who rarely worked from his imagination and believed in painting exactly what you saw in front of you. Freud was oblivious to those ulterior channels that Paul senses exist between people, above and beyond mere sight. And this emphasis on the ineffable has meant, among other things, that Paul was never called upon to paint, as Freud was, Kate Moss or the queen, or even Jerry Hall, all of whom seem limited as subjects of mystical inquiry. Paul’s canvases do not aim at unvarnished verisimilitude. She has no interest in remaining, like Freud, clinically unfazed in the face of vanity and power. She has no interest in vanity or power as subjects. Freud saw veins, muscles, and flesh where the rest of us tend, sentimentally, to see a human being. But people are not only their bodies.

After her mother died—and Paul and her sisters fell into deep mourning—Paul asked a niece to make all her sisters identical white dresses from old sheets. With her sisters thus begowned, Paul painted them sitting in a half-circle, like figures from some aristocratic realm of the spirit, female bearers of a spiritual expertise that rarely gets seriously considered, never mind painted:

I needed them to sit for me all together because of the supernatural empathy that ran like an invisible skein between them. The silence was powerful and charged with spirit, almost as if we were in a seance, conjuring up the spirits of the dead.

That “invisible skein” between people—this is Paul’s improbable subject, and she sees it exquisitely. But, as with every artist, there are things Paul does not see. She has no sense of the absurd, and no feel for the humor that can arise from acid first impressions. She cannot use paint to deflate pomposity, or ridicule the false auras that surround money or power, as Freud achieved so delightfully in his portraits of the British upper class. She has none of his witty cruelty, in short, which is a painterly attitude perhaps only possible when you don’t love your subjects or even know them—when everybody’s mere flesh to you, even the queen of England.

Paul’s blind spot might be power itself. Yet we should, I think, be careful how hard we bear down on blind spots, seeing as how every artist has them and any artist can fail to see such a myriad of things in this world: men, women, children, nature, animals, class, race, power, love, cruelty, and so on. It should be possible to identify and critique partial visions without putting out both our eyes. But the unusual thing about misogyny is the elaborate intellectual superstructure that has for so long supported and celebrated it, not as blind spot or as pernicious ideology but, on the contrary, as perfect vision. What else will we start to see now the mist of misogyny begins to clear?

Self-Portrait will go some way to clearing that mist from the world of portraiture, and might also act as gentle intervention, intended for the kind of young girl tempted to swap self-realization for external validation. I don’t suppose that muses will ever disappear, but perhaps now they will less regularly take that wearying, inadvertently comic form: old man, young girl. Or always have sex at their center. And perhaps if more women artists during the twentieth century had been as storied, as celebrated, as Lucian Freud, we might all know a lot more about the many musedoms that exist beyond that naked girl: the inspiration of one’s mother, one’s child, one’s siblings, one’s life partner, one’s oldest friends.

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I’ve always been aware of being an inconsistent personality. Of having a lot of contradictory voices knocking around my head. As a kid, I was ashamed of it. Other people seemed to feel strongly about themselves, to know exactly who they were. I was never like that. I could never shake the suspicion that everything about me was the consequence of a series of improbable accidents—not least of which was the 400 trillion–to-one accident of my birth. As I saw it, even my strongest feelings and convictions might easily be otherwise, had I been the child of the next family down the hall, or the child of another century, another country, another God. My mind wandered.

To give a concrete example: if the Pakistani girl next door happened to be painting mehndi on my hands—she liked to use me for practice—it was the work of a moment to imagine I was her sister. I’d envision living with Asma, and knowing and feeling the things she knew and felt. To tell the truth, I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave. That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe. Whenever I spent time with my pious Uncle Ricky, and the moment came for everyone around the table to bow their heads, close their eyes, and thank God for a plate of escovitch fish, I could all too easily convince myself that I, too, was a witness of Jehovah. I’d see myself leaving the island, arriving in freezing England, shivering and gripping my own mother’s hand, who was—in this peculiar fictional version—now my older sister.

I don’t claim I imagined any of this correctly—only compulsively. And what I did in life, I did with books. I lived in them and felt them live in me. I felt I was Jane Eyre and Celie and Mr. Biswas and David Copperfield. Our autobiographical coordinates rarely matched. I’d never had a friend die of consumption or been raped by my father or lived in Trinidad or the Deep South or the nineteenth century. But I’d been sad and lost, sometimes desperate, often confused. It was on the basis of such flimsy emotional clues that I found myself feeling with these imaginary strangers: feeling with them, for them, alongside them and through them, extrapolating from my own emotions, which, though strikingly minor when compared to the high dramas of fiction, still bore some relation to them, as all human feelings do. The voices of characters joined the ranks of all the other voices inside me, serving to make the idea of my “own voice” indistinct. Or maybe it’s better to say: I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.

At some point during this inconsistent childhood, I was struck by an old cartoon I came across somewhere. It depicted Charles Dickens, the image of contentment, surrounded by all his characters come to life. I found that image comforting. Dickens didn’t look worried or ashamed. Didn’t appear to suspect he might be schizophrenic or in some other way pathological. He had a name for his condition: novelist. Early in my life, this became my cover story, too. And for years now, in the pages of novels, “I” have been both adult and child, male and female, black, brown, and white, gay and straight, funny and tragic, liberal and conservative, religious and godless, not to mention alive and dead. All the voices within me have had an airing, and though I never achieved the sense of contentment I saw in that cartoon—itself perhaps a fiction—over time I have striven to feel less shame about my compulsive interest in the lives of others and the multiple voices in my head. Still, whenever I am struck by the old self-loathing, I try to bring to mind that cartoon, alongside some well-worn lines of Walt Whitman’s:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I’m sure I’m not the first novelist to dig up that old Whitman chestnut in defense of our indefensible art. And it would be easy enough at this point to march onward and write a triumphalist defense of fiction, ridiculing those who hold the very practice in suspicion—the type of reader who wonders how a man wrote Anna Karenina, or why Zora Neale Hurston once wrote a book with no black people in it, or why a gay woman like Patricia Highsmith spent so much time imagining herself into the life of an (ostensibly) straight white man called Ripley. But I don’t write fiction in a triumphalist spirit and I can’t defend it in that way either. Besides which, a counter-voice in my head detects, in Whitman’s lines, not a little entitlement. Containing multitudes sounds, just now, like an act of colonization. Who is this Whitman, and who does he think he is, containing anyone? Let Whitman speak for Whitman—I’ll speak for myself, thank you very much. How can Whitman—white, gay, American—possibly contain, say, a black polysexual British girl or a nonbinary Palestinian or a Republican Baptist from Atlanta? How can Whitman, dead in 1892, contain, or even know anything at all of the particularities of any of us, alive as we are, in this tumultuous year, 2019?

This inner voice suspects the problem starts in that word, contain, which would appear to share some lexical territory with other troubling discourses. The language of land rights. The language of prison ideology. The language of immigration policy. Even the language of military strategy. Nor does it seem at all surprising to me that we should, in 2019, have this hypersensitivity to language, given that it is something we carry about our person, in our mouths and our minds. It’s right there, within our grasp, and we can effect change upon it, sometimes radical change. Whereas many more material issues—precisely economic inequality, criminal justice reform, immigration policy, and war—prove frighteningly intractable. Language becomes the convenient battlefield. And language is also, literally, the “containment.” The terms we choose—or the terms we are offered—behave as containers for our ideas, necessarily shaping and determining the form of what it is we think, or think we think. Our arguments about “cultural appropriation,” for example, cannot help but be heavily influenced by the term itself. Yet we treat those two carefully chosen words as if they were elemental, neutral in themselves, handed down from the heavens. When of course they are only, like all language, a verbal container, which, like all such containers, allows the emergence of certain ideas while limiting the possibilities of others.

What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not “cultural appropriation” but rather “interpersonal voyeurism” or “profound-other-fascination” or even “cross-epidermal reanimation”? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even still furious—but I’m certain they would not be the same. Aren’t we a little too passive in the face of inherited concepts? We allow them to think for us, and to stand as place markers when we can’t be bothered to think. What she said. But surely the task of a writer is to think for herself! And immediately, within that bumptious exclamation mark, an internal voice notes the telltale whiff of baby boomer triumphalism, of Generation X moral irresponsibility…. I do believe a writer’s task is to think for herself, although this task, to me, signifies not a fixed state but a continual process: thinking things afresh, each time, in each new situation. This requires not a little mental flexibility. No piety of the culture—whether it be I think therefore I am, To be or not to be, You do you, or I contain multitudes—should or ever can be entirely fixed in place or protected from the currents of history. There is always the potential for radical change.

“Re-examine all you have been told,” Whitman tells us, “and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.” Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally “like” us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did. But I feel no sense of triumph in my apostasy. It might well be that we simply don’t want or need novels like mine anymore, or any of the kinds of fictions that, in order to exist, must fundamentally disagree with the new theory of “likeness.” It may be that the whole category of what we used to call fiction is becoming lost to us. And if enough people turn from the concept of fiction as it was once understood, then fighting this transformation will be like going to war against the neologism “impactful” or mourning the loss of the modal verb “shall.” As it is with language, so it goes with culture: what is not used or wanted dies. What is needed blooms and spreads.

Consequently, my interest here is not so much prescriptive as descriptive. For me the question is not: Should we abandon fiction? (Readers will decide that—are in the process of already deciding. Many decided some time ago.) The question is: Do we know what fiction was? We think we know. In the process of turning from it, we’ve accused it of appropriation, colonization, delusion, vanity, naiveté, political and moral irresponsibility. We have found fiction wanting in myriad ways but rarely paused to wonder, or recall, what we once wanted from it—what theories of self-and-other it offered us, or why, for so long, those theories felt meaningful to so many. Embarrassed by the novel—and its mortifying habit of putting words into the mouths of others—many have moved swiftly on to what they perceive to be safer ground, namely, the supposedly unquestionable authenticity of personal experience.

The old—and never especially helpful—adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane. This principle permits the category of fiction, but really only to the extent that we acknowledge and confess that personal experience is inviolate and nontransferable. It concedes that personal experience may be displayed, very carefully, to the unlike-us, to the stranger, even to the enemy—but insists it can never truly be shared by them. This rule also pertains in the opposite direction: the experience of the unlike-us can never be co-opted, ventriloquized, or otherwise “stolen” by us. (As the philosopher Anthony Appiah has noted, these ideas of cultural ownership share some DNA with the late-capitalist concept of brand integrity.) Only those who are like us are like us. Only those who are like us can understand us—or should even try. Which entire philosophical edifice depends on visibility and legibility, that is, on the sense that we can be certain of who is and isn’t “like us” simply by looking at them and/or listening to what they have to say.

Fiction didn’t believe any of that. Fiction suspected that there is far more to people than what they choose to make manifest. Fiction wondered what likeness between selves might even mean, given the profound mystery of consciousness itself, which so many other disciplines—most notably philosophy—have probed for millennia without reaching any definitive conclusions. Fiction was suspicious of any theory of the self that appeared to be largely founded on what can be seen with the human eye, that is, those parts of our selves that are material, manifest, and clearly visible in a crowd. Fiction—at least the kind that was any good—was full of doubt, self-doubt above all. It had grave doubts about the nature of the self.

Like a lot of writers I want to believe in fiction. But I’m simultaneously full of doubt, as is my professional habit. I know that the old Whitmanesque defense needs an overhaul. Containment—as a metaphor for the act of writing about others—is unequal to the times we live in. These times in which so many of us feel a collective, desperate, and justified desire to be once and for all free of the limited—and limiting—fantasies and projections of other people. With all due respect to Whitman, then, I’m going to relegate him to the bench, and call up, in defense of fiction, another nineteenth-century poet, Emily Dickinson:

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes—
I wonder if It weighs like Mine—
Or has an Easier size.

This gets close to the experience of making up fictional people. It starts as a consciousness out in the world: looking, listening, noticing. A kind of awareness, attended by questions. What is it like to be that person? To feel what they feel? I wonder. Can I use what I feel to imagine what the other feels? A little later in the poem, Dickinson moves from the abstract to the precise:

There’s Grief of Want—and grief of Cold—
A sort they call “Despair”—
There’s Banishment from native Eyes—
In sight of Native Air—

She makes a map in her mind of possibilities. But later, as the poem concludes, she concedes that no mental map can ever be perfect, although this does not mean that such maps have no purpose:

And though I may not guess the kind—
Correctly—yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary—

To note the fashions—of the Cross—
And how they’re mostly worn—
Still fascinated to presume
That Some—are like my own—

In place of the potential hubris of containment, then, Dickinson offers us something else: the fascination of presumption. This presumption does not assume it is “correct,” no more than I assumed, when I depicted the lives of a diverse collection of people in my first novel, that I was “correct.” But I was fascinated to presume that some of the feelings of these imaginary people—feelings of loss of homeland, the anxiety of assimilation, battles with faith and its opposite—had some passing relation to feelings I have had or could imagine. That our griefs were not entirely unrelated. The joy of writing that book—and the risk of it—was in the uncertainty. I’d never been to war, Bangladesh, or early-twentieth-century Jamaica. I was not, myself, an immigrant. Could I make the reader believe in the imaginary people I placed in these fictional situations? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the reader. “I don’t believe it,” the reader is always free to say, when confronted with this emotion or that, one action or another. Novels are machines for falsely generating belief and they succeed or fail on that basis. I know I can read the first sentence of a novel and find my reaction is I don’t believe you. And many a reader must surely have turned from White Teeth in exactly the same spirit.

Yet the belief we’re talking about is not empirical. In the writing of that book, I could not be “wrong,” exactly, but I could be—and often was—totally unconvincing. I could fail to make my reader believe, but with the understanding that the belief for which fiction aims is of a very strange kind when we recall that everything in a novel is, by definition, not true. What, then, do we mean by it? In my capacity as a writing teacher, I’ve noticed, in the classroom, the emergence of a belief that fiction can or should be the product of an absolute form of “correctness.” The student explains that I should believe in her character because this is exactly how X type of person would behave. How does she know? Because, as it happens, she herself is X type of person. Or she knows because she has spent a great deal of time researching X type of person, and this novel is the consequence of her careful research. (Similar arguments can be found in the interviews of professional writers.)

As if fiction could argue itself into a reader’s belief system! As if, armed with our collection of facts about what an X type of person feels, is, and does, always and everywhere, a writer could hope to bypass the intimate judgment of a reader, which happens sentence by sentence, moment by moment. Is it this judgment we fear? It’s so uncertain, so risky. You can’t quantify it—it’s not data. It happens between one reader and one writer. It’s a meeting—or sometimes a clash—of sensibilities, which often takes the form, as Dickinson understood, of griefs compared.

What do I have in common with Olive Kitteridge, a salty old white woman who has spent her entire life in Maine? And yet, as it turns out, her griefs are like my own. Not all of them. It’s not a perfect mapping of self onto book—I’ve never met a book that did that, least of all my own. But some of Olive’s grief weighed like mine. Certainly I might turn from a writer like Elizabeth Strout toward a writer like Toni Morrison and find our griefs more closely aligned, for obvious reasons like race and class, which two contingencies do so much to form a person’s experience and therefore their sensibilities. But what passed between me and Olive was not nothing. I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.

But reading seems to be easier to defend than writing. Writing is a far larger act of presumption. Sensing this, we seek to shore up the act of writing with false defenses, like the dubious idea that one could ever be absolutely “correct” when it comes to representing fictional human behavior. I understand the desire—I have it myself—but what I don’t get is how anyone can possibly hope to achieve it. What does it mean, after all, to say “A Bengali woman would never say that!” or “A gay man would never feel that!” or “A black woman would never do that!”? How can such things possibly be claimed absolutely, unless we already have some form of fixed caricature in our minds? (It is to be noted that the argument “A white man would never say that!” is rarely heard and is almost structurally unimaginable. Why? Because to be such a self is to be afforded all possible human potentialities, not only a circumscribed few.)

But perhaps I am asking the question the wrong way round. The counterargument would be that when it comes to presumption, we are in far less danger of error when writer and subject are as alike as possible. The risk of containment is the risk of false knowledge being presented as truth—it is the risk of caricature. Those who are unlike us have a long and dismal history of trying to contain us in false images. And so—the argument runs—if we are to be contained by language, let that language at least be our own.

In an ideal world, one way to mitigate the problem of false containment would be with variety. I can’t imagine the white man who felt, upon the publication of Rabbit, Run, contained or threatened as a white man by Updike’s portrayal of Rabbit Angstrom—but then there were such a variety of portrayals of white men in the culture that no one presentation had to bear the weight of representation of an entire people. Rabbit Angstrom was not the white man. He was just one white man among many, and so Updike’s portrayal of him had no power to distort a white man’s social capital in America. (Meanwhile, the black men in Updike’s books, almost all caricatures, are precisely evidence of grotesque containment.) By contrast, when Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind, there were a vanishingly small number of nontoxic representations of black women in the culture, and therefore the damage Mitchell did with her notorious “Mammy” character was substantial: she placed a fresh dose of an old poison into the culture that still exists and reached even me, aged twelve, in my little corner of London, looking for some form of cultural reflection, any kind at all, but finding only distorted mirrors, monstrous cliché, debasing ridicule, false containment.

Given this history, it’s natural that we should fear and be suspicious of representations of us by those who are not like us. Equally rational is the assumption that those who are like us will at least take care with their depictions, and will be motivated by love and intimate knowledge instead of prejudice and phobia. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writing by women, and by oppressed minorities of all kinds, has wondrously expanded the literary landscape, ennobling griefs that had, historically, either passed unnoticed or been brutally suppressed and caricatured. We’re eager to speak for ourselves. But in our justified desire to level or even obliterate the old power structures—to reclaim our agency when it comes to the representation of selves—we can, sometimes, forget the mystery that lies at the heart of all selfhood. Of what a self may contain that is both unseen and ultimately unknowable. Of what invisible griefs we might share, over and above our many manifest and significant differences. We also forget what writers are: people with voices in our heads and a great deal of inappropriate curiosity about the lives of others.

Most of us have love for, and interest in, our own lives—our “own people.” Our lives are nonfiction. This is my family. My neighborhood. My body. My reality. Fiction, as a mode, shared this love and interest but always with the twist of, well, fiction. It was always interested not only in how things are but also in how things might be otherwise. I once wrote a novel about an imaginary, multihyphenated British-Jewish-Chinese boy. It was love and interest that motivated me, but my love and interest was located in the other. In my case, love of and interest in Judaism and Buddhism—two systems of thought in which I have no birthright. But also deep curiosity about this imagined person, Alex-Li, whose voice I had in my head.

Alex-Li is a weird, nerdy, obsessive, melancholy type of guy. Though you wouldn’t know it to look at him, he’s probably more “like me” than any character I ever created. But the question is: In what does this “like me” consist? He doesn’t look like me. We don’t share the same gods. We don’t share the same race or gender. But he is a part of my soul. And fiction is one of the few places left on this earth where a crazy sentence like that makes any sense at all. Alex-Li is not “correct.” He cannot and doesn’t aim to represent the community of half-Jewish, half-Chinese people. In the spirit of Kafka, he barely represents himself. And so it may be that by his existence he is in fact oppressive, simply because he is “taking up space” where a “real” half-Jewish, half-Chinese fictional character might be. He cannot defend himself from that accusation—and it would be out of character for him to try. All he can say is that he doesn’t mind if he is unread, unbought, unloved. But if even one person happens to come across him and find that his feelings and their own have a similar weight, then he will have completed his absurd fictional role in this world.

Perhaps “containment” and the “fascination to presume” are not that different. They carry the same risk: being wrong. Maybe we only think of it as containment when it goes wrong. The textbook example is Madame Bovary. For over a century, women have profoundly identified with this imaginary woman, created by a man, who himself supposedly claimed an outrageous personal identification with the other: Madame Bovary, c’est moi. I am one of those women readers, and yet there are many moments in Madame Bovary when I feel the presence of a masculine consciousness behind it all, as I do when I read Anna Karenina. Which is to say the mapping of self to other that Flaubert and Tolstoy attempted is not perfect. But it is not nothing. Anna Karenina has meant as much to me as any imaginary woman could.

And I, along with generations of women readers, have wondered: How could a man know so much of us? But the mystery is not so mysterious. Husbands know a great deal about wives, after all, and wives about husbands. Lovers know each other. Brothers know a lot about sisters and vice versa. Muslims and Christians and Jews know one another, or think they do. Our social and personal lives are a process of continual fictionalization, as we internalize the other-we-are-not, dramatize them, imagine them, speak for them and through them. The accuracy of this fictionalization is never guaranteed, but without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all. One of the things fiction did is make this process explicit—visible. All storytelling is the invitation to enter a parallel space, a hypothetical arena, in which you have imagined access to whatever is not you. And if fiction had a belief about itself, it was that fiction had empathy in its DNA, that it was the product of compassion. I could fill a library with self-congratulatory quotes about this belief, but I will choose one I found recently in a memoir by the wonderful Colombian writer Héctor Abad:

Compassion is largely a quality of the imagination: it consists of the ability to imagine what we would feel if we were suffering the same situation. It has always seemed to me that people without compassion lack a literary imagination—the capacity great novels give us for putting ourselves in another’s place—and are incapable of seeing that life has many twists and turns and that at any given moment we could find ourselves in someone else’s shoes: suffering pain, poverty, oppression, injustice or torture.

This was what fiction believed about itself, but like all beliefs not a little of it was always wishful thinking. Has fiction, over the centuries, been the creator of compassion or a vehicle for containment? I think we can make both cases. Fiction was often interested in the other but more often than not spoke for the other instead of actually publishing them. Fiction gave us Madame Bovary but also Uncle Tom. (It’s also given us a marvelous, separate literature that has no interest in human selves of any kind—which is concerned instead with animals, trees, extraterrestrials, inanimate objects, ideas, language itself.) But whether fiction’s curiosity about the other was compassionate or containing, one thing you could always say for it was that it was interested.

By contrast, a prominent component of the new philosophy is a performative display of non-interest, a great pride in not being interested in the other, which is sometimes characterized as revenge and sometimes as an act of self-preservation. (When you feel hatred coming from the other, it’s reasonable to turn from the other completely.) The expression of this pride usually comes in some version of I’ve had enough of, I just can’t with—fill in the blank. And the strange thing is that the people we now cast into this place of non-interest were once the very people fiction was most curious about. The conflicted, the liars, the self-deceiving, the willfully blind, the abject, the unresolved, the imperfect, the evil, the unwell, the lost and divided. Those were once fiction’s people.

What all liberation movements want, surely, is comprehension and compassion. Their members want to be seen and named correctly. To be respected and known. But that is by no means all they want. They also want to be free. They want education and rights and the ability to live in safety. Sometimes, in order to secure these things, an ideology of separatism emerges, because the compassion of the other is in no way available, or has historically never appeared, and it is assumed it never will. Everyone, politically and personally, has a right to the ideology of separatism. It is the hard-won right of the political realist and the student of history. But fiction’s business was with the people, all the people, all the time. This in no way meant that fiction had to be about all the people—it very rarely was—but only that the identity, sensibilities, and feelings of the reader could never be entirely known, controlled, or predetermined.

Toni Morrison wrote for her people primarily. But a variety of readers will be moved by the stations of the cross depicted within. And be surprised to find griefs not unlike their own, just as Morrison found griefs not unlike her own in Faulkner and—if you read her academic essays on American literature—a thousand less likely places. Even if we practice a form of separatism in our fiction—books for our people, our community, our crowd—the infinite variety of selves and experience that lie within whoever claims to be “a people” will overwhelm any fantasy we have of controlling the reactions of our readers. I can still pick up a novel by a woman like me in every particular—same race, class, sexuality, nationality, heritage—read the first sentence and find she is not, after all, “like me.” Our sensibilities are different. Our griefs have different weights. But none of this will make me either put her book aside or read it ravenously. The only thing that can decide the fitness (or otherwise) of a book for me is this mysterious belief, which a writer can’t summon by citing her copious research or explaining to me that all of this “really happened.” Belief in a novel is, for me, a by-product of a certain kind of sentence. Familiarity, kinship, and compassion will play their part, but if the sentences don’t speak to me, nothing else will. I believe in a sentence of balance, care, rigor, and integrity. The sort of sentence that makes me feel—against all empirical evidence to the contrary—that what I am reading is, fictionally speaking, true.

We behave as if we don’t want to be known by one another, but we sometimes seem oblivious to the idea that we spend our days feeding ourselves into a great engine of knowing, one that believes it knows every single thing about us: our tastes, our opinions, our beliefs, what we’ll buy, who we’ll love, where we’ll go. The unseen actors who harvest this knowledge not only hope to know us perfectly but also to modify us, to their own ends. And this essay, too, will no doubt enter that same digital maw, and be transformed from ideas to data points, and responded to, perhaps, with a series of pat phrases, first spotted by the machine, then turned viral, and now returned to us as if it were our own language. “I just can’t with Zadie Smith right now,” or else “This Zadie Smith is everything,” or—well, you know the drill. We’ve gotten into the habit of not experiencing the private, risky act of reading so much as performing our response to what we read, which is then translated into data points.

And the dark joke at the end of it all is that these unique selves to which we feel so attached, that we believe to be nontransferable, and with which some of us hope to write fiction—these spectacularly individualized selves who hold this opinion rather than that, who claim one identity as superior to another—are entirely irrelevant to the second, shadow text that lies behind it all. To the technological monopolies that buy and sell your data—and for whom your daily input of personal information is only raw product, to be traded like orange juice futures or corn yields—you reveal yourself not so much in your views or hot takes as by the frequency of your posts or tweets, their length or syntax, the pattern of their links and follows. They do not care that you are woke or unwoke, patriot or activist. To that shadow text, all you are is data. You are the person who tweets fourteen times in twenty minutes and therefore is needy in some way and vulnerable to a particular kind of political advertising, or else you are the person who moves through a series of lifestyle and news sites, which route will predict, with extraordinary specificity, the likelihood of your booking a vacation in early February or voting in November.

This data version of you is “correct” to the nth degree: it sees all and knows all, and makes the fuzzy knowledge of selves that fiction once claimed look truly pathetic. A book does not watch us reading it; it cannot morph itself, page by page, to suit our tastes, or deliver to us only depictions of people we already know and among whom we feel comfortable. It cannot note our reactions and then skew its stories to confirm our worldview or reinforce our prejudices. A book does not know when we pick it up and put it down; it cannot nudge us into the belief that we must look at it first thing upon waking and last thing at night, and though it may prove addictive, it will never know exactly how or why. Only the algorithms can do all this—and so much more.^*

By now, the idea of depriving this digital maw of its daily diet of “you” has become inconceivable. Meanwhile, the closed circle that fiction once required—reader, writer, book—feels so antiquated we hardly see the point of it. Why have a silent dialogue with an invisible person about imaginary things? Besides, the question of fiction’s utility is, in truth, another ambivalent tale. How many compassionate stories about the other do we need to tell you before you see us as fully human, the way you see yourself? Depending on what you believe, either all those compassionate stories made no difference at all, or they are the foundation upon which all liberation movements stand.

To speak for myself, as a reader, the balance has been on the side of compassion. I have closed novels and stared at their back covers for a long moment and felt known in a way I cannot honestly say I have felt known by many real-life interactions with human beings, or even by myself. For though the other may not know us perfectly or even well, the hard truth is we do not always know ourselves perfectly or well. Indeed, there are things to which subjectivity is blind and which only those on the outside can see. But, frustratingly, there are no fixed rules to regulate this process. We know some representations are privileged and some ignored. Prejudice in these matters must be thought through, each and every time. Is this novel before me an attempt at compassion or an act of containment? Each reader will decide. This is the work of an individual consciousness and cannot be delegated to generalized arguments, not even the prepackaged mental container of “cultural appropriation.”

We can suspect that some people will tell our story better than others. But we can never be entirely certain. Despite the confidence of the data harvesters, a self can never be known perfectly or in its entirety. The intimate meeting between a book and its reader can’t be predetermined. To put it another way, a book can try to modify your behavior, but it has no way of knowing for sure that it has. In front of a book you are still free. Between reader and book, there is only the continual risk of wrongness, word by word, sentence by sentence. The Internet does not get to decide. Nor does the writer. Only the reader decides. So decide.

The post Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction appeared first on The New York Review of Books.