The Quality to be Tragic

    Elizabeth Hardwick is having a moment — and why not? The last two years have brought The Uncollected Essays, an addendum to The Collected Essays of 2017; Cathy Curtis’ biography, A Splendid Intelligence; and Come Back in September, Darryl Pinckney’s memoir of his writerly apprenticeship at Hardwick’s feet. Like Joan Didion, a very different sort of talent and sensibility, Elizabeth Hardwick was a lion of the 1960s and 1970s (and 1980s and 1990s). Lavishly frank, instinctively original, elegant, intimate, and when she wanted, very, very funny, Hardwick was one of the great critics and great prose writers of the second half of the twentieth century. It is fit and fine that her work and example be forwarded to a new generation of readers.

     

    My own interest in Hardwick is tangled up in a larger obsession with the New York intellectuals, that storied gaggle of talkers and writers — cultural critics, political philosophers, editors, polemicists, controversialists — who bestrode American thought in the decades after World War II. Readers conversant with the group may be surprised to hear this, for of the figures typically enumerated among its members — Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, and a dozen or two others — Hardwick has never been one. It is not because she was a woman: Hannah Arendt was a key presence; Susan Sontag, the youngest of them all, is regarded as a kind of last hurrah. It is not because she wasn’t Jewish, though Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, Hardwick’s best friend, were the only gentiles. It is not because she didn’t share the same milieu. Hardwick lived in New York throughout the 1940s, left for ten years, then returned for good. She went to the parties, holding her liquor and holding her own. She was a mainstay of the journals: Partisan Review, and then, for more than forty years, the New York Review of Books, of which she was among the founders. She was universally esteemed, and not infrequently feared.

     

    It is because she wasn’t, strictly speaking, an intellectual. I don’t mean this as a deprecation; quite the opposite, in fact. Like Henry James, she had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. More than any other critic I’m aware of, Hardwick possessed the ability to speak with great incisiveness about a work, an author, without recourse to general conceptions: no theses, no theories, no larger arguments, oftentimes no arguments at all. “She stayed away from academic criticism, theory, analytic philosophy,” Pinckney tells us, while “Marxism made her distrust ideologies of criticism.” Though her reading was vast, she eschewed comparison, allusion, discussion of genres, movements, genealogies. Instead, she focused like a lover on the writer before her, bringing her entire self to the encounter, which she enacted in prose of incomparable suppleness and energy. She didn’t “review”; she metabolized.

     

    What she shared with the other New Yorkers, though, was larger than her differences. Like them, she came of age at a time when the life of the mind was lived without reference to the university — when the models were Paris and Vienna, not Harvard and Yale. Critics now are academics first: if not professors or disappointed PhDs, then former literature or “studies” majors trained in the accepted points of view. Among the New Yorkers, even those who taught steered free of academic sensibilities, manners, jargon, frames of reference. They eschewed professionalization; they stood on the authority of their own aesthetic experience. Hardwick enrolled in a doctoral program (at twenty-three, in English), but she found her professors uninspiring, and scholarship unappealing, and she soon dropped out to write — to be a writer, to have a different kind of mind and life. “They are critics and have good taste,” wrote Kazin of a pair of academic acquaintances. “I am a writer and interested in everything I can see and read and feel and touch.” Like others among the New Yorkers, Hardwick saw herself, and was, a bohemian — unsalaried and uncredentialed, living hand to mouth on freelance checks and books. Like them, she self-educated, stubbornly and idiosyncratically. With them, she gathered to debate, to individuate, not to align and conform. Like theirs, her style of thought and writing was unique.

     

    Nothing in her background prophesied her destiny. The modal New York writer was a Jew from the outer boroughs, maybe the Lower East Side. The city was their native ground, texts and arguments their birthright. Hardwick was from Lexington, Kentucky, and despite her later reputation for gentility, she grew up working-class, at the wrong end of town. Her father, who didn’t make it past the seventh grade, was a sometime plumber and full-time wastrel. Her siblings, ten in all, would come to include a beautician, a steamfitter, a postal clerk, and a couple of teachers — this last the highest she was meant to reach for. There is simply no accounting for her gifts. She was a unicorn, born among horses.

            

    The only thing that Hardwick ever wanted in Kentucky was to leave. Lexington had scarcely forty thousand people in her youth. Small towns, she would later write, were scenes of a “galling, busy puritanism…moving on the wheels of disgrace and scandal, drunkenness and deceit.” Her ticket out was books. As an adolescent, Curtis writes in her biography, she “read her way through the classics” at the local public library. College, at the state university downtown, introduced her to communism, “European émigré professors,” contemporary literary currents, and “a group of clever young Jewish men from New York.” These last determined her direction. She was, she later said, like a provincial out of Balzac “yearning for Paris.” A year out of college, she turned down a fellowship at LSU in favor of Columbia, boarded a Greyhound, and headed for the Emerald City.

     

    That was in 1939. In 1943, after sojourns in a women’s dormitory, then some nearby rooming houses (the latter an experience she’d call upon in fiction), Hardwick shifted to the Hotel Schuyler, a grotty den of transients and failures — “spotted rugs and walls,” “greasy, smoking ovens,” “people who slept all day in their graying underwear” — a short stumble from Times Square. She stayed for years, sharing an apartment with a gay young man she knew from home, then a call girl and her pimp. Other neighbors included a middle-aged woman, barroom pianist by trade, who borrowed fifty 1940s dollars (more than eight hundred in today’s money), then, by way of repayment, called Hardwick a “dirty cunt.” When the pimp cornered her in the hallway and rubbed himself off on her coat, she decided it was time to leave.

     

    Meanwhile, she wrote: fiction first, then criticism also. Her maiden novel failed to find a publisher. A second manuscript, The Ghostly Lover, appeared in 1945. It was not well received — reviewers called it “removed from reality,” its characters “strangely suspended in air” — but it won the attention of Philip Rahv, the editor of Partisan Review. In general, Hardwick’s fiction of the 1940s and 1950s — some fourteen stories plus a second novel, The Simple Truth, about a murder trial in Iowa City, which she seems to have started as a way of dealing with living, for a semester, in Iowa City — is well-constructed but excessively controlled: stylistically cautious, self-consciously premised and plotted, lacking a genuine pulse.

     

    It was in the essay, starting at Partisan Review in 1945, that Hardwick found her voice, her freedom. She took chances; she had fun; she let it fly. An early piece, on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, begins: “Vassal, slave, inferior, other, thing, victim, dependent, parasite, prisoner — oh, bitter, raped, child-swollen flesh doomed to immanence! Sisyphean goddess of the dust pile!” Her style took shape. There were her famous adjectives. That paragraph on de Beauvoir goes on to offer “madly sensible” and “brilliantly obscure” as descriptions of that landmark tome. Later she will give us “the clamorous serenity of [Frost’s] old age” and “the mournful, expensive defeat of Fitzgerald’s last years,” Plath’s “ambitious rage” and “the sumptuous, taciturn resonance” of Bartleby’s “I prefer not to,” the “aggressive simplicity and shy opulence” of the old New York aristocracy and the “intimidating revelation” of contemporary girls in string bikinis. Hardwick’s adjectives aren’t decorative; they are load-bearing. They create volume. They tell a story in a phrase, and it is always one of life’s impossible conjunctions, its vitalizing oxymorons. 

     

    Then there are her similes. Some are marvelously simple, homespun. A character is “as dry as an old lemon rind.” An account of Dylan Thomas’ disastrous, drunken visits to America is “as flat and true as a calendar.” The names of old Boston worthies such as William Ellery Channing “remain in one’s mind, without producing an image or a fact, as the marks are left on the wall after the picture has been removed.” Others draw upon her eye for social types. Boswell hung about Johnson’s coattails “like an insurance salesman after a policy.” The owners of jazz clubs, always changing, quickly failing, “started out with the embezzler’s hope and moved swiftly to the bankrupt’s torpor.” The most brilliant of Hardwick’s similes crystallize a situation in a single image. Delmore Schwartz, in his last, mad years, was “given by paranoia to the shedding of friends and wives, angrily plucking them off like flies on the worn threads of his jacket.” A pair of poor, aging women who roam the streets of her neighborhood “wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind.” The naïve and friendless heiress Catherine Sloper, in Hardwick’s dazzling account of Washington Square, “is as alone as an animal in a field.” Morris Townsend, the adventurer who seeks her fortune, “goes for Catherine’s attention with the watchful concentration of the sportsman waiting for the game to fly in the range of the gun.”

     

    Her wit — dry, sly, sticking in the shiv before you even see the flash. Ted Kennedy was “no guardian of his reputation.” Rabbit’s wife in Rabbit, Run “is confused, sore, exhausted, and not sober.” Apropos the O.J. Simpson trial, “It is not easy to imagine Lawyer Dershowitz in discomfort about his life decisions.” Epigrammatic: “the example of the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre.” Deflating: “swapping” was for “wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of life even if it had to be, like pizza, brought in from around the corner.” Just plain wicked: for Truman Capote, the South was “there to be called upon…as a sort of spécialité, like Key lime pie and conch fritters” — this from an essay-length draught of vivid vinegar (“crocodilian celebrity,” “ruins and works of art he declined to get off the yacht to see”) composed at eighty-one, an age at which writers are usually napping or dead.

     

    Above all, her sentences: their moves, their turns, their variety and unpredictability, their sinuosity and steel, the way they gather and release their force.

     

    On Jude the Obscure:

    “Every single character fails and falls, in great pain, each one.” The sympathy is in the syntax.

     

    On the subjects of Frans Hals’ The Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse:

    “The laughing cavaliers perhaps had eaten too many oysters, drunk too much beer and died a replete, unwilling death, leaving the poor, freed by a bitter life from killing pleasures, to shrivel on charity, live on with their strong, blackening faces.” Nearly every phrase, sometimes every word, turns us in a new direction.

     

    On Capote’s Black and White Ball to celebrate the publication of In Cold Blood: “The party at the Plaza acquired the fame of a coronation for the very successful book, still a work of riveting interest for its portrait of the misshapen bodies, language, highway felonies and idiotic plans and dreams of two savage, talkative, rawhide murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.” A syntactic cascade, phrase falling into phrase; a thread that ties the happy famous to the heartland refuse on whose wretchedness the book was built.

     

    And this:

    Updike went on to Harvard and, as a young writer, came under the benevolent paternalism of The New Yorker, married early, had children, moved to Massachusetts, and with an uncommon creative energy wrote stories, novels, poems, essays, and still writes on and on with great success about suburban landscapes or small-town ones efflorescent in observed detail, prodigal in image, and brashly knowing and accomplished in the rhythms of current dialogue and steaming with the orifices and bodily fluids of many fluent copulations.

    Form follows function, a prodigal sentence for a prodigal talent, remaining aloft, with its unexpected “ands” (“and still writes on,” “and steaming with”), like a basketballer torquing toward the hoop, and finishing, like a spent adulterer, in a superfluity of fluids.

     

    There are no flat patches in Hardwick’s prose. Every inch is as detailed and colored as a Renaissance landscape. All is taut, condensed; there is pressure on every word. “She writes like a poet,” said Robert Silvers, eternal editor of the New York Review of Books. “The leaps are so precise and dramatic that they open up the mind.” Yet Hardwick had it tougher than the poets, for as a critic she was more constrained by sense, by the demands of clarity and fact, by the expectations of the form. She had to look before she leapt. Still, it’s no surprise to discover, from Pinckney, that she believed in reading poetry before one sat down to write prose, because it “opened up the possibilities of language in your head.” Nor that she composed like a poet — “line by line,” he says. “She couldn’t go on to the next sentence if the one before it wasn’t right.” Curtis reports that it could take her six months to write a fifteen-page essay. Her dedication to criticism as a high literary calling, an art form of its own, is virtually without parallel.

     

    Was there something too precious about all this, as some have said — a cult of the sentence, of style for style’s sake, for which Hardwick, along with some of her contemporaries, was responsible? I don’t think so. Style, for Hardwick, was an instrument of exploration, a way of pushing language to the point of discovery. Writing, she once said, is “the only time in your life when you have to think.” As both a reader and writer, she possessed an absolute belief in the value of art as a way of knowing: independent of politics, superior to journalism and the social sciences, indispensable for understanding. That conviction, so essential to the New York writers as to not require naming, has over the ensuing decades gradually been submerged — under scientism, under the frivolity of garbage entertainment, under, lately, ideology — and is one of the cultural resources that Hardwick can help us recover.

     

    Hardwick did not enter the New York literary world at a good time. She entered at the best. She raised herself above provinciality at exactly the moment America did. The great nineteenth-century American writers were isolatoes, one-offs: Poe, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson. Then came the expatriates: James, Stein, Eliot, Pound; Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Now, after the war, New York was the center, a city of refugee geniuses and incandescent offspring of working-class immigrants. In the Greenwich Village circle, at cocktail parties at the Rahvs, one can only picture the commotion that Hardwick and McCarthy caused, two brilliant, sexy gentiles from the exotic heartland. “The dull Communist wives,” Pinckney reports, “didn’t like…their double act. They said challenging things, wore bright red lipstick, and were pretty.”

     

    It was at one of those parties, in 1947, that Hardwick met Robert Lowell, a year younger and well on his way to establishing himself as the leading American poet of their generation. The marriage lasted more than twenty years and knew as much drama as all of Aeschylus. Lowell’s endless infidelities were frequently the prodrome to a re-eruption of his mania. Again the mental ward, the verbal abuse, the brave face to family and friends, the false, returning hope — a Sisyphean repetition. “All night I’ve held your hand,” he wrote in “Man and Wife,” “as if you had / a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad / … / and dragged me home alive.” And that was only 1959. Hardwick’s was a deep and wounded love. “I would kill myself if it would cure you,” she wrote in 1965. The good times were extraordinary; his intellect opened up worlds. Five years later he abandoned her for good, taking up with Caroline Blackwood, an aristocratic Englishwoman who’d already burned through Silvers, Lucien Freud, and others.

     

    It was devastating. It was also liberating. Artist couples, Hardwick later wrote, “share in perceptions, temperament, in the struggle for creation, for the powers descending downward from art, for reputation, achievement, stability, for their own uniqueness — that especially.” That especially. She had changed her name when she married, but she hadn’t changed her byline. “Elizabeth Lowell never wrote anything,” she said. But the relationship, particularly as it staggered through the 1960s, cost her as an artist. “I love Lizzie,” Lowell once told Sontag, “but she’s such a good writer. One can’t have one’s wife writing Madame Bovary in the kitchen.” He needn’t have worried: the tumult of their home life made the necessary concentration unobtainable. By the time they split, she hadn’t attempted a novel since The Simple Truth in 1955, hadn’t published a story since 1959. But soon, with Lowell gone, she set out upon the work that would develop into Sleepless Nights, her great accomplishment in fiction. First, however, she produced a volume of essays that represented both “an act of self-rescue,” as Pinckney puts it, and the height of her achievement as a critic.

     

    Seduction and Betrayal, from 1974, is anomalous among her books. Her other collections — A View of My Own (1962), Bartleby in Manhattan (1983), Sight-Readings (1998) — represent the harvest of many years of freelance work, and each covers a wide range of subjects, including, in the first two cases, politics, theater, and travel. The essays that make up Seduction and Betrayal were written in a concentrated burst, during the three years immediately following Lowell’s departure, and on a single theme: women and literature — the Brontës, Ibsen’s heroines, Plath, Woolf, Zelda, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle, and, in the title essay, Tess, Clarissa Harlowe, Hester Prynne, and others.

     

    The list is telling in its heterogeneity. Hardwick’s approach as a critic was to place the characters of fiction on the same plane as real people. She treated them alike, because she was interested in the same questions with regard to both. Questions, precisely, of character, in its twin senses: one’s moral composition, as shaped, in part, by place and family and history (“deforming conditions,” she calls them), and one’s way of facing those conditions. That is, the why and how of action and its consequences. You can call this gossip, as Hardwick sometimes playfully did. It is also an exalted version of the kind of thing that every reader — every “common reader” — does. This is the point of Hardwick’s refusal to read like a specialist. She read for the reasons that everyone reads, or everyone who hasn’t been debauched by learning: aesthetic bliss, and knowledge of our fellow human creatures, who were for her an endless fascination.

     

    In Seduction and Betrayal, those questions of character largely revolve around what might be called the drama of the gifted woman. Charlotte Brontë and her heroines, Nora in A Doll’s House and Rebecca West in Rosmersholm, Thomas Carlyle’s wife and William Wordsworth’s sister: intelligent, spirited figures constrained by the condition of being a woman, by their limited options in life. How did they respond, and at what cost? The autobiographical dimension here is not hard to spot. Hardwick sees Zelda Fitzgerald as someone whose creative potential was sacrificed to her husband’s convenience and ego, and Jane Carlyle as a brilliant intellect and wit who spent her energy, as Hardwick did a lot of hers, on housework. Yet we shouldn’t overstate the parallels. For one thing, Hardwick was looking back, mostly to the nineteenth century. Her own life straddled old and new: born to traditional expectations, she had had the chance to overleap them as Sue Bridehead or Jane Eyre had not. These essays were themselves the proof of that.

     

    For another, she did not believe that conditions, however deforming, were determining. We all face them in one form or another. The question, given that, was what was inside you and what you did with it. Dorothy Wordsworth, Hardwick judged, had the gift of minute observation (as demonstrated in her celebrated journals) but “did not understand meter” and “lacked generalizing power.” Her own poems were “not good,” and her existence as her brother’s sidekick (“she lived his life to the full”) was in fact a blessing. Jane Carlyle, who wrote wonderful letters but never became the novelist we imagine she might have been, “lack[ed] ambition and need — the psychic need for a creation to stand outside herself.”

     

    “Ambition”: a sacred word for Hardwick — it repeats in her essay on Plath — as was “discipline.” She understood the gulf between potential and achievement and what it took to cross it. She also understood the difference between writing — real writing, finished work — and domestic substitutes. She admired Jane Carlyle and she respected housework, but the “truly staggering Victorian energy” that poured four years into Oliver Cromwell, and thirteen into Frederick the Great, belonged to her husband. “This is altogether different from nailing carpets and shaking out curtains.” Dorothy’s contribution to her brother’s poetry — the shared walks and feelings — was an “illusion of collaboration.” “This is the way for gifted, energetic wives of writers to a sort of composition of their own.” Hardwick was, or had been, married to a writer, but she was not a writer’s wife. She was a writer. Ambition, discipline, achievement.

     

    And, in Hardwick’s case, as these examples demonstrate, brutal frankness, a quality for which she was famous and feared — in the parlor, the classroom, the pages of an essay — and that is nowhere more in evidence than in the volume’s title piece. The seduced, she loudly implies, want to be: “guile and insistence are clever at uncovering pockets of complicity.” As for the betrayed, they shouldn’t be surprised. That is love: it goes wrong. For those who merely suffer under their betrayal — Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter — Hardwick feels pity but no respect. Dimmesdale “cannot ask fundamental questions about life.” Hetty “hasn’t the quality to be tragic. Instead she is something smaller and lesser — she is miserable.” The tragic qualities are courage, dignity, fortitude, endurance, and these depend on an acceptance of “the griefs of experience,” “the command of necessity” — the reality of “life.” They mark the difference between the victim and the heroine. Tess is the latter: “She is not surprised by loss and rejection and therefore never degraded by it.” In light of the circumstances under which they were written, those words were an act of self-rescue indeed. “The betrayed heroine,” Hardwick goes on, “unlike the merely betrayed woman, is never under the illusion that love or sex confers rights upon human beings.”

     

    The composition of the essays in Seduction and Betrayal coincided not only with Lowell’s fresh abandonment but also with the heyday of second-wave feminism. Ms. was founded in 1971; the ERA passed Congress in 1972; Roe was decided in 1973. The volume went against the movement’s grain and was received within it less than gladly. Assertions like the notion that Clarissa’s rape “may be a crime, but it is not exactly a betrayal of her expectations” — from the title essay, which was first delivered as a lecture at Vassar, no less — were not designed to flatter the party line. Hardwick’s own view of the movement was dim, seeing it as mostly “bad writing, bald simplicity, and simple-mindedness.”

     

    In retrospect, the limitation was partly hers. Having lived from old to new, or relatively new, she couldn’t imagine the next step, a world of full equality in which Elizabeth Lowells split the household duties with their husbands fifty-fifty (in which Elizabeth Hardwick didn’t have to be Elizabeth Lowell at all). But she also knew things that she saw the movement — and the era’s social utopianism more broadly — as having failed to learn. She knew that human beings, women no less than men, tend to disappoint the roles that ideologies script for them. Women have an erotic relationship to caregiving, she sometimes implies, for example, as men do to power. She also knew that while the tragic qualities may be in short supply, tragedy itself is not a choice. “Flirtation, surrender, pregnancy, misery. This is the plot of existence.” Sex, she told the age of Kinsey and the pill, is not the solution — “the body is a poor vessel for transcendence” — nor even is love, “love with its ancient distresses.” What she mourned was not this, but the loss of a sense of the tragic in fiction and life — the era’s slick mobility, its desperate insouciance. She turned and returned to an earlier age, the great age of the English novel, to find the depth she felt so lacking in the present.

     

    Hardwick realized her own great novel not by emulating traditional forms, as she had in her earlier fiction, but by inventing her own. The true American artist, Harold Rosenberg had written, surveys their situation and “searches for the principle that applies, even if it applies only once.” In Sleepless Nights, it applied only once. The work appeared in 1979, and, in its associative movement, owes something to Renata Adler’s Speedboat (1976) and to Didion’s fictions of the 1970s, Play It As It Lays and A Book of Common Prayer, but it is unique, in Hardwick’s corpus and the world. She never wrote another novel; one feels she didn’t need to. It is one of those books in which a writer states their entire being. It is a novel with no plot, no character development, no resolution. It is a memoir, fictionalized, that avoids discussion of the self. It is largely a series of sketches of people she has known, from Billie Holiday to the woman who does her laundry, interleaved with invisible art. It has no apparent structure, yet its structure feels unshakable, recalling Lily Briscoe’s thought in To the Lighthouse: “on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric [is] clamped together with bolts of iron.” It is all voice, mood, sensibility, address.

     

    She is lying awake — the title’s premise, not explained until the final line but everywhere implied. She is writing “Dearest M” (Mary McCarthy), calling out in thought, composing letters in her head. She is reassembling her life, her self, from fragments of memory glued together by imagination, yet finding that the self does not cohere so much as flow: “On the battered calendar of the past…I had imagined there would be felicitous notations…And myself there, marking the day with an I…And yet the old pages of the days and weeks are splattered with the dark-brown rings of coffee cups and I find myself gratefully dissolved in the grounds as the water drips downward.” She is thinking of others, mostly women, mostly distressed, downhearted, downtrodden. Hardwick’s sympathy for ordinary people was the treasure that she carried with her from Kentucky. That laundress, Ida; bag ladies; a “failed mezzo,” Miss Cramer; a local girl who turned to prostitution out of willfulness or nameless need; her mother — refracted selves, paths she might have taken or could still. It is a book about time, what it does to us.

     

    Much of the novel happens elsewhere — in Kentucky; in Maine, where she summered; in Boston, where she and Lowell lived for much of the 1950s; in Amsterdam, where they spent a year — but it is thoroughly a New York book. Its movement is the movement of memory, of gossip, one story calling forth another, but it is also the movement of a walker in the city, of serial encounters on the sidewalk, figures looming up, fates etched on faces, then dropping back, receding. Hardwick lived on West 67th Street, a few doors down from Central Park, for nearly fifty years. “I never heard Elizabeth Hardwick say, ‘I took a walk in the park,’” Pinckney writes. “What she wanted when she went out were shops, sidewalks, traffic, to be among strangers on Main Street, the small-town girl’s dream.” In fact, the whole book happens in New York, in her bedroom, in the mind of a New Yorker, consciousness sending out feelers, reaching around corners, peering in windows. In the background is “the birdsong of rough, grinding trucks in the street.”

     

    Manhattan, she would later write, “is not a city of memory, not a family city.” People come and go; the city is always destroying itself, “overthrow[ing] the future before it arrives.” She makes a memory for it, gathering an ad hoc family of New York strangers. The final chapter centers on the rooming houses where she passed her early years. Working women, talkative and secretive, some young and transient, some older, defiant, “as if to say: You cannot destroy a ruin.” Solitary New York women, together in “the strange apartment with its peculiar cells for the protection of a vast, overwhelming privacy.” Lives lived apart in close proximity. “Someone is running a bath, someone is listening to the late-night preacher on the radio.” Now, forty years later, the narrator is old herself, is solitary once again, is back to listening to noises from the nearby rooms, the sounds of other lives, which keep her company across the sleepless nights.

     

    The novel changed the way that Hardwick wrote. It was followed by a set of stories that were even more associative in form. “Cross-town,” “The Bookseller,” “Back Issues,” “On the Eve”: set in New York, they read like outtakes from the book, or further thoughts, more New York lives recorded in her loose and brisk notation, colored by her sympathetic irony. But her criticism grew associative as well. She taught herself to make an essay travel like a conversation. This was her late style, which she practiced through her middle eighties. Instead of laying out an argument in sequence, she would hover over points, digress, move on, circle back. Transitions became abrupt, or absent, or occurred within a paragraph. Sometimes paragraphs themselves were mini-essays, related to each other only by accumulation. And yet because she somehow seemed to be able to talk about several things at once — the work, the life, the biography under review — she could always recover from the digression, pick up a dropped thread, move on in whatever direction she chose. She would end with an aside, an evocation rather than conclusion, or with an unexpected point that she had, as it were, just thought of. She had more to say but her time was up, so she was going to say goodbye now, the end.

    The World as an Institute

    In August 1990, the recently retired Dutch ethnologist Johannes Jacobus Voskuil had a dream: he lay in his coffin and was carried to his grave while a song he had heard hundreds of times — Sidney Bechet’s rendition of “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out” — played in the background. He heard the crunch of gravel under the pallbearers’ feet. After a while, the soft swaying over others’ shoulders stopped, and he felt himself being lowered to the ground. As faint murmurs arose, and the footfalls died away, he lifted the lid of his coffin and sat up to watch the attendees depart. Those at the tail of the funeral train he didn’t know; those at the head were now too far away to recognize. Lying back, letting the lid settle over him again, he remained awake, “overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless sorrow.” 

    A month later, Voskuil began work on Meneer Beerta (Mister Beerta) an autobiographical novel chronicling eight years in the life of his alter ego, Maarten Koning, at the Bureau for Dialectology, Folklore, and Onomastics in Amsterdam. By July 1991 he had moved onto a sequel, Vuile Handen (Dirty Hands). He would continue writing at an average pace of around four pages a day, until by 1995 he had finished the longest novel written in Dutch, and one of the longest novels ever written, entitled Het Bureau (The Office or The Institute) which appeared in seven volumes from 1996 to 2000.

    On its surface, the premise is anything but promising: a not-quite-young man in need of work looks up a former professor, who offers him a job as a researcher for an Atlas for Folk Culture, investigating such topics as beliefs about the kabouter, a sort of leprechaun or gnome. Maarten accepts the post against the spirited protests of his wife Nicolien, because he must have a job, and because he feels that, of the two of them, he will better tolerate steady employment. For five thousand pages, he goes to work every day, produces an exhaustive record of petty squabbles, malingerings, and the vicissitudes of his field of volkskunde — commonly translated as folkloristics or ethnology, though neither term fully encompasses the breadth of the Dutch, especially given the transformations volkskunde underwent in Voskuil’s time. Well over half of the novel consists of dialogue: transcriptions of committee meetings, domestic arguments, conversations with barbers or shopkeepers, and a decades-long exchange with a psychologically disturbed friend named Frans Veen. As transformations overwhelm his workplace, the former Bureau for Dialect, Folklore, and Onomastics, known from 1979 onward as the A.P. Beerta Institute, Maarten chooses to take early retirement, only to find that the backdrop of his life has disappeared, and he is “adrift like a balloon in the sky.” 

    He returns to the office periodically, to finish a few lectures and essays; his colleagues greet him first with tolerance, then indifference, then hostility; finally, his desk is taken away and his papers piled up in the corner. He never believed in his work, and had described himself and his coworkers as “belonging to a reservoir of superfluous intellects society no longer needs, who must be given some pointless task to keep them off the street.” What had kept him going for thirty years, he believed, was solidarity, but he now realizes that it was a mirage. “Despite his skepticism, and against his better judgment, he had wanted to believe, deep in his heart, in his people, as like Gideon’s band of three hundred. Only now, with the slow passage of time, did he realize he had knowingly deceived himself.”

    There is no sex and no romance, there is scant adventure only apathetically described, there are no noble heroes, no dastardly villains, no deathbed penitence or hidden treasure. Yet Het Bureau has gained a hold on the Dutch imagination comparable to the fever caused elsewhere by Harry Potter or Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. It has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, is perpetually out at the libraries, has inspired a radio play and a graphic novel adaptation; for a time the Meertens Instituut, the real-life counterpart of Maarten Koning’s office in the novel, offered guided tours, and there was even an exhibition at which institute employees mentioned in the book stood at their desks, ready to converse with fans. There have been reports of Dutch office workers nicknaming their colleagues after those they most resemble in the novel. More than one person, chronically ill, sought special permission from Voskuil’s publisher to see proofs of the novels later volumes before release, in order to die in peace, knowing how Maarten’s story ended. 

    In my own experience, mention of the book among the Dutch gives rise to an almost conspiratorial sort of amity like that which once brought together fans of The Wire in the United States, but with an added note of gratitude, because the Netherlands is a country that outsiders rarely bother to learn much about. The untraveled and uncultured can trot out stereotypes about snooty Frenchmen, lusty Latins, stolid Russians, and orderly Germans, but how many under fifty have any sense of the proverbial frankness and frugality that inspired the terms “Dutch uncle” and “going Dutch”? Neither in Europe nor in the United States have I had the sense that Dutch culture matters much to anyone: Rembrandt, sure, or the diary of Anne Frank, or Cees Nooteboom or Gerald Reve for the really well-read, but these references run out soon, and pale in comparison to the significance of Amsterdam as a budget airline destination for the cannabis-and-sex-tourists who have made much of its historic center almost uninhabitable. For these reasons, and perhaps because of the relatively scant attention received by Gerd Busse’s heroic translation of the entirety of Het Bureau into German, critics have debated whether there is something specifically and irreducibly Dutch about Voskuil that would impede his success in other languages.

    This is nonsense. Het Bureau is a masterpiece almost unique in its accessibility, dense with humor and sorrow, and ecumenical in its concerns. It is the sort of book you live with, feeling sorrow as the pages turn, and in the weeks since I finished it I have more than once felt maudlin, wondering when my copies of Voskuil’s diaries would arrive so that I can get another fix. Even now, reopening the first volume to check something, I was consoled by the recollection that it was still there, and I could start over whenever I wished.

    Frequently remarked upon is Voskuil’s capacity to show the interest in boring things, the interest even in boredom itself. In volume four of Het Bureau, his protagonist, Maarten, tells one of his closest colleagues, Ad Muller, about his research into threshing techniques. Ad replies he could get excited over a simple farming implement, and Maarten counters, “When you immerse yourself in something, it becomes interesting as a matter of course.” Het Bureau depends on this principle of immersion, and its form is intended to frustrate readers who imagine they can skim and still get the point. On this, Voskuil was categorical:

    A book should be thick, a book should be detailed, a book should be “tedious” for those who are not my true readers. If you are able, you should scare readers away. Then, you’ll be left with those you can trust.

    [All translations are mine throughout.] 

    This principle is nicely illustrated by Maarten’s minute observations of his bête noire, Bart Asjes, a fellow researcher whose variations on the phrase “I have serious objections” have a rhythmic Bartlebyesque insistence. At first one forgives his peculiarities, before growing frustrated with his finickiness and finally beginning to sense something sinister in his supposed probity, the lone effect of which is to stall or derail every possible initiative, while offering no constructive alternatives because, as he never wearies of reminding Maarten, that is his responsibility. Their relationship at times takes on a morbid quality, with Maarten’s attention to him a form of tormented distress, as Bart’s every movement is subjected to surveillance in anticipation of discord in the wings:

    Bart returned from the card catalogue room. He greeted Ad, sat at his desk, and began to type with short, hard strokes. “Hey!” he said every time he made an error. He then erased the incorrect letter and typed the right one in its place.

    The moment is mundane, the prose is lacking in ornament; what gives it its bizarre power (and this is true of Het Bureau as a whole) is the patient reprisal of related incidents, like the inexorable lapping of waves, that gives shape to a character not as a pendant to the protagonist’s story but as a quantum of his life.

    Voskuil shows, like Natalia Ginzburg or Chekhov, that syntactic virtuosity is often a matter more of self-regard than art, and may introduce an air of contrivance that is detrimental to real pathos. At some point in the discussion of any long novel, you have to get it over with and talk about Proust, so I may as well say it here: weepy as I get when Bergotte dies on a settee at an exhibition of Dutch paintings after admiring the “patch of yellow wall” in a Vermeer, the scene strikes me, if I’m honest, as flowery babble, and almost dishonorable in its sponging of religious principles in pursuit of aesthetic rapture. There is no “world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice… which we leave in order to be born on this earth,” and since it does not exist, we will not return there, and Bergotte inhabits no ether where the precepts of his heart reign, he is just dead and rotting in a coffin. 

    Contrast with this the death of Maarten Koning’s father, a disillusioned old socialist and newspaper man, who in retirement continues to write editorials every morning that he then tears into tiny pieces and throws away. He grows grumpier, his gait slows, his mind wanders; one day he is taken to the hospital; he despises the doctors’ cluelessness, and the nurses telling him when to drink, when to eat, when to piss, asking him patronizingly whether the flowers his son brought him aren’t nice. When Maarten wishes to know whether he is afraid of dying, he responds, with unsettling honesty, “I’m not… But of course I don’t know whether I will be afraid when the moment comes.” “God, what an end,” he says elsewhere amid interminable bedside conversations crowded with bromides, insipid gossip, medical trivia, words uttered to pass the time. One day Maarten’s wife tells him that she thinks his father wants to hold his hand. Maarten does so gingerly, but realizes that the old man is asleep, and the couple goes home. An hour later, Maarten’s brother calls him to tell him their father is gone.

    A similar tenderness is evident in Voskuil’s portrayal of Nicolien’s mother’s dementia, which begins with an untoward crying fit when Maarten and his wife change residence and ends with her in a nursing home, unsure where she is and who is who, constantly repeating “Oh, yes,” as though understanding were still possible, as though she could yet hold onto all the facts needed to retain a clear picture of the world. It is there, too, in rare moments of joy, as when Maarten recovers his pipe the day after the bowl detached from it and rolled into the waters of the bay as he was knocking it against a stone bollard. The pipe has no history; it is not a prized inheritance from a favorite uncle, a keepsake from a long-lost friend, a costly indulgence or a reminder of happier days. It is just something Maarten likes, a piece of his world, and when he lies in bed holding back tears because he thinks it gone, Voskuil doesn’t coddle the reader with explanations why. 

    I might remark here on the contrast with another, more famous, comparably massive fictional project: the six volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. At the peak of Knausgaard fever in America, one had the sense that this was something unprecedented, but even within European literature My Struggle already formed part of a tradition of long novels that struggle between the competing tendencies of radical intimacy and radical objectivity in the search for autobiographical truth. Exemplary in this regard are Gerhard Roth’s Archive des Schweigens (Archives of Silence), Peter Kurzeck’s Das alte Jahrhundert (The Old Century), and De harde Kern (The Hard Core) by Voskuil’s friend Frida Vogels, who appears in Het Bureau under the name Henriette Fagel. Knausgaard shares with some of these older writers, and certainly with Voskuil, what Frederic Jameson has called the “itemized” approach to description. Knausgaard distinguishes himself from them through the consciously metafictional nature of his endeavor: My Struggle cannot be separated from the public and private scandals around it, which form much of the material of the later volumes. It also evinces a confidence in the author’s analytical powers, with regard to autobiographical memories and even with the thoughts of others, that has more in common with the omniscient first-person of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel than with the hesitancy to explain that characterizes both Het Bureau and the projects mentioned above.

    This hesitancy is essential to Het Bureau’s effect, which combines a feeling of profound familiarity with bafflement, even despair at why things happen as they do. Voskuil shuns the mantle of creator: he is instead a chronicler (he repeatedly insists that nothing in the book is invented and that conversations are recorded verbatim) whose concern is to intrude as little as possible on the transcript of events. Though in all aspects Maarten Koning’s life resembles his own, the third person that Voskuil employs is unusually opaque: even his most private thoughts, in the form of diary excerpts, are artifact rather than proof. Voskuil strives for a representation of a single subjectivity in the most objective possible terms — a subjectivity that is also subjection to the myriad realities, some material, others impalpable, that define an individual self, but of which that self is never master.

    Het Bureau is a self-contained story, but Maarten Koning exists elsewhere — in the novel Bij nader inzien (Upon Closer Inspection), written in 1963, and in Binnen de huid (Within the Skin), written between 1964 and 1968 but published a year after Voskuil’s death. Both books show a protagonist at odds with the world: in the first, he is a radical university student taken with the illusion that he and his friends might live together, true to their values, forever, and who stands by in disappointment as they marry, get jobs, and adapt to the demands of convention. (Not immune to the allurements of revenge offered by the roman-à-clef, Voskuil used Bij nader inzien to send a message to his comrades: “This is what you said, and this is what you did.”) Binnen de huid is an account of Voskuil’s own capitulation in turn. In it, Maarten is married to Nicolien, and his friend Paul is married to Rosalie. Maarten and Nicolien disdain her — she is the one, they think, who turned Paul from a Francophile would-be poet to a teacher and paragon of bourgeois conformism. Yet Maarten falls crazily in love with Rosalie, and Nicolien begins a relationship with Paul. Neither affair leads anywhere, and Maarten learns that he, too, lacks the courage of his convictions: “I began to suspect that betrayal was the only way of staying alive, and that all I’d done thus far was postpone the execution.” 

    Ironically, Maarten becomes a teacher himself — briefly — in Groningen, in the north; he quits this job just before Het Bureau begins. I hasten to add that there is no need for pious distinctions between biography and fiction, or boring reflections on auto-fiction, in the case of Voskuil. He is quite straightforward: in interviews, he refers to himself and his protagonist interchangeably; in histories of the Meertens Institut, more than one writer has mistakenly referred to real people by the names Voskuil assigns them in his novel; and in Binnen de huid, when Paul comments on the mistake of confusing an author with his main character, Maarten chides him, “That is the only way you should read.”

    Those acquainted with the earlier novels will recall Voskuil’s contempt for science — wetenschap in Dutch, which, like Wissenschaft in German, describes not just the hard sciences but the systematic pursuit of scholarly knowledge in general. Maarten’s willingness to make an exception for volkskunde is partly a result of his indolence — he needs to do something, daydreams of being a farmer, or a baker like his grandfather, but seems to sense that fate has marked him to be an urban intellectual — and partly of his impression of the disreputable nature of the field. Dominated, since the mid-nineteenth century, by a search for what used to be called “the genius of the people,” Dutch folkloristics had long placed special emphasis on supposed continuities among Germanic peoples in a way that dovetailed with the Nazis’ racial thinking. Several significant figures in Dutch folklore studies and ethnology were prominent supporters of the Nazi occupiers, and the broad rebuke to the discipline after the end of the Second World War led to a more discreet approach, with a focus on documentation to the detriment of grand theories. For Maarten, this means the opportunity to labor in the dark: to send out questionnaires, conduct field research, clip newspaper articles, and fill out file cards free from the obligations entailed by institutional prestige. 

    Maarten pursues his work under the auspices of Anton Beerta, a fussy and aloof gay man who drops frequent, tacit hints about his sexuality while at the same time scorning what he calls “homos.” The Atlas for Popular Culture, which he hires Maarten to work on, is “a Dutch-Flemish initiative that dated from the time before the war, when Beerta, like so many of his persuasion, was an ardent believer in the idea of the Greater Netherlands,” that is, the unification of Dutch-speaking territories severed during the Eighty Years’ War into the Dutch Republic and the Catholic Netherlands — precursors to the modern Netherlands and Belgium, respectively. Beerta’s enthusiasm has vanished by the time of Maarten’s arrival, and his chief passion has become the joining of as many committees as possible. Maarten looks to Beerta as a paragon, “the living proof that it was possible to shield oneself from the world so much that one became untouchable.” To his friend Klaas and to his wife, who would have preferred that he become a postman, Maarten explains:

    If Beerta hadn’t offered me the job, I wouldn’t have sought it out. I accepted it because we were out of money and I think Berta believes in nothing, just as I do. He has built the perfect alibi for himself, and in its shadow he can live a life of his own. At present, I feel that’s the only solution. At least if you don’t want to hold your hand out and beg.

    Nicolien suspects from the first that Maarten’s employment in the office is a mistake. Her interminable, hysterical grousing is one of Het Bureau’s high points; it is impossible not to laugh at her limitless indignation as Maarten cowers, and is scolded for cowering; clams up, and is scolded for his silence; protests, and is exposed to infernal fury. That so little resentment ensues from their fights is due to Nicolien’s role as Maarten’s conscience: she knows that he won’t stop at being a researcher, that papers and lectures will follow, that a late evening at the office or a Saturday spent polishing an essay are not fleeting obligations, but harbingers of a future in which he will commit himself rigorously to a respectable role in a society he has always claimed to despise.

    Some of the novel’s greatest moments of humor are owed to the tension between Beerta’s outsized pretensions and Maarten’s indurate skepticism. After Beerta promises the Commission — Voskuil favors such vague designations as the Office, the Main Office, the Commission — that the Atlas of Folk Culture will be completed by his retirement, he asks Maarten how long it will actually take. Reminding Beerta that he has worked for twenty-five years on the yet-to-be-published first volume, or better twenty, subtracting five years for the war, and that the Atlas is projected to run to twenty volumes, he arrives at the figure of four hundred years. “But I was the only one here,” Beerta tells him. “And now I have you.” “Fine, two hundred years,” Maarten replies.

    In fact, the Volkskunde-Atlas voor Nederland en Vlaams België, edited by P.J. Meertens and Maurits de Meyer (Anton Beerta and Jan Vanhamme in the novel), which began to appear in 1959, met a somewhat ignoble end, ceasing publication after four volumes. It was criticized for the superficial nature of its analysis, its haphazard selection of themes, and a lack of rigor in its approach to the diffusion of folk customs. Volume IV, Het ophangen van de nageboorte van het paard (The Hanging of the Afterbirth of the Horse), written entirely by Voskuil, consists of a hundred-page commentary on a single map showing where, in Belgium and the Netherlands, the afterbirth of horses is traditionally burned, buried, thrown on a dung heap, or hung from a tree. In Het Bureau, Maarten is proud enough of his work on the subject, which represents the first time the Bureau has managed to locate one of the cultural boundaries that are in principle essential to its labor, that he scolds Beerta’s failure to recognize its “historical significance.” But Maarten himself cannot well say why this difference exists, and eventually, he will forsake the geographical method, abandoning the idea of fixed cultural tendencies in favor of a study of processes whose relationship to tradition is rarely reducible to practices persisting across time. 

    Were the years not marked — these are the only chapter divisions in the book — readers of Het Bureau might struggle to situate it in time. History intrudes overtly only when it affects Maarten Koning’s life: the Vietnam War appears twice, once as Maarten’s justification for voting for the Pacifist Socialist Party, and once when he and his wife attend an antiwar demonstration. The most significant mention of apartheid occurs when Maarten turns down an offer of collaboration from a professor at the University of Stellenbosch and must defend himself to the Bureau and the Commission. Yet there are aspects of history that ought not be ignored. The fate of the Bureau, for example, is dependent on economic developments in the Netherlands: political shifts and GDP growth as high as eight percent per annum from the early 1960s to the late 1970s encouraged massive social spending in a climate in which, as one historian put it, “a successful minister was defined as one who could get a larger share of the pie.” 

    In this context, the bureaucracy expands vertiginously, leaving Maarten to fight for resources with his colleagues in Dialectology and the Music Archive. (Onomastics, the preserve of Beerta’s successor Jaap Balk, seems barely to exist for him.) A symbol for this expansion is the card catalogue that Maarten maintains, which by 1976 has reached one million cards and continues to grow at around fifty thousand entries per year, recording the sleeping attire of informants in the countryside, details about threshing practices, the text of press clippings, the titles of books, and cross-references to superstitions involving the severed fingers and hands of thieves. So long as things are flush, no one bothers asking whether this endless notation has a point, and when Maarten’s staff asks he gleefully tells them there isn’t one; but with economic stagnation, austerity measures make their appearance in 1980, along with the new managerial language of productivity measures, self-evaluations, efficiency, and output.

    Before this happens, however, Maarten has a revelation about his work. It comes in volume five, En ook weemoedigheid (And Melancholy, Too), which takes its title from the penultimate stanza of the modern Flemish writer Willem Elsschot’s haunting poem, “Marriage,” in which a husband dreams of beating his wife to death, setting fire to his home, and running away:

    But bludgeon her he didn’t, for between dream and deed

    Stand laws and practical objections,

    And melancholy, too, which no one can explain,

    But comes in evening when we go to sleep.

    At conferences for the European Atlas of Folk Culture, one of the many obligations that he has piled on himself in the course of his career, Maarten comes to condemn the geographical method favored by Beerta and, previously, himself, and casts doubt on the very idea of culture and tradition. Already in volume four, he tells his staff that volkskunde stands at a crisis point: the idea that the distribution of customs contains clues to a distant past has been disproven, and a new basis must be found if the science is to move forward. This new basis he finds in a psychological approach to ethnology. Traditions, he believes, respond to psychological needs; he will later describe them as remission points in historical processes that address anxieties about changing identities. 

    Illustrative of Voskuil’s thinking here is his essay “De weg naar luilekkerland” (“The Road to the Land of Milk and Honey”), described in Het Bureau with characteristic dismissiveness as his “bread research.” Voskuil begins by noting the longstanding stereotype of a north-south divide between rye and wheat bread consumption that was dispelled when he mapped informants’ responses about bread consumption for the Meertens Instituut in 1974. He did find a clear geographical divide, but it was between east and west, which was logical given the appropriateness of the two grains to the clay soils of the southwest and the sandy soils to the east. He explains anomalies in this general pattern with reference to rinderpest, which forced a transition from cattle breeding to grain cultivation; the importation of wheat from the Baltics; and eventual improvements of infrastructure, which flooded the Netherlands with cheap American wheat and eliminated availability as a factor in dietary preferences. He attributes the persistence of a partiality to rye bread to “a rapid expansion of the intellectual elite.”

    The new intellectuals are a product of the provinces and the lower middle classes, and much later of the working class. They enter a milieu where they find it difficult to adjust and have problems with their identity. To compensate, they may attempt to adapt fully to their new environment; on the other hand, they may adopt a defiant posture based on the ideal image they hold of the class they proceed from. This representation will be ideal because they are psychologically cut off from the values of their elders. This may manifest itself in coarse manners, coarse clothing, coarse food, coarse language, and (if their numbers are large enough) in a change in prevailing norms.

    Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of the paradoxes that produce, say, the mixologist who keeps his ice saw in a leather tool belt while making high-priced tiki drinks for hedge funders, or tech millionaires in hoodies and jeans, or the class ambivalences that inspired Nordstrom’s Barracuda Jeans with their artificial mud coating and Balenciaga’s eighteen-hundred-dollar “super-destroyed” sneakers.

    Het Bureau presents few indications of Voskuil’s theoretical forebears, and given the contrast between his narrow research interests and his fundamentally literary inclination, it is hard to say which of his ideas are borrowed and which he hit upon independently. He mentions Tristes Tropiques. He must have been aware of Georg Simmel. The most prominent thinker he cites is Norbert Elias, who resided in Amsterdam for the last decade of his life and whose book The Civilizing Process provoked heated debates among Dutch sociologists beginning in the late 1960s, when the revised German edition appeared. Maarten’s first mention of him is contemptuous, but increasingly his own research will similarly renounce broad-brush conceptual explanations (the German sociologist Peter Gleichmann referred to Elias’s approach as “concept avoidance”) in favor of a model of social change rooted in alterations in the self-interpretation of individuals when their habitus, that is, the practices that define them as members of a given social group, must react to novel circumstances.

    Strange here is the total absence of Voskuil’s near-contemporary Paul Feyerabend, the philosopher of science who was a convinced positivist in his early years but became one of the most trenchant critics of established science. In his paper “The Problem of the Existence of Theoretical Entities,” Feyerabend controversially subverted the distinction between objects observable to the senses and those present only to the mind. With the phrase “all empirically observable entities are theoretical entities,” he both furnished a sensory basis for theoretical constructs and introduced radical uncertainty as to the possibility of any one perspective establishing priority in its understanding of the world. 

    To the extent that Het Bureau embodies a kind of ethnology of the office, its observational rigor is aligned to an almost solipsistic adherence to a single perspective. This gave rise to objections among those portrayed in it, not only privately but in the press and on television. Ton Dekker, the model for Ad Muller, has mounted a particularly vigorous rebuttal of Voskuil’s portrayal of him. Responding to his critics, Voskuil was at once blithe and peremptory: the novel was not about other people, it was about his experience of other people. Moreover, “they should be happy to finally hear how I experienced them in all these years. After all, you never really hear what someone thinks of you.”

    Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that with time, the control of bureaucracies inevitably passes from the hands of those devoted to the ends for which the bureaucracy was conceived into the hands of those devoted to the perpetuation of the bureaucracy itself. Maarten sees this in action as the long arc of Het Bureau draws to a close. Anyone who has worked in Europe and seen the absurd psychology of institutional-legitimation-through-English will roll their eyes when a new director comes on board with the ambition of transforming the Bureau into a “Center of Excellence,” while higher-ups at the Ministry float the proposal that the Bureau’s yearbook, concerned exclusively with Dutch dialectology, onomastics, and folkloristics, be published in English to give their research an international reach.

    These institutional changes, which only accelerate as Maarten announces his imminent retirement in 1987, accompany more profound changes in Maarten’s frame of mind. He is getting old. He is scared of foreigners and young people; the constant din of automobiles maddens him; new policies giving women priority at university strike him as absurd. There is a sort of contemporary reader, nourished on writers who use fiction to promote an ideal version of themselves so that their admirers can in turn fabricate ideal versions of themselves, who will find this degree of sincerity distasteful; but I would defer here to Lousje Voskuil, who stresses the central role of accountability in her late husband’s writings. Gerard Rooijakkers writes that for Voskuil “the one freedom a person has is the freedom of (self) reflection: to find out how and why things happened, how people (willingly) misunderstood each other, and, of course, the overpowering inevitability of it all.” And Voskuil was not one to deny himself this freedom simply to look good before others.

    Maarten’s aging has much in common with Jean Améry’s notion of the elderly person as “outmoded in an incurable way,” watching a new era come into being before his eyes at the same time as it recedes from his grasp. He rails against the incursion of the computer into the Bureau, is dismayed when his colleague Ad Muller puts in an order to replace his old, sturdy wooden chair for a “bigshot chair… a jerkoff chair,” a padded office chair. Maarten’s disappointment doesn’t grow with the passing of years, because he has never had the illusion that his life at the office had meaning. In Meneer Beerta, he tells a friend, “With every step I take, I have the feeling I am moving further away from myself.” Five thousand pages later, in Afgang, which I will translate for convenience’s sake as Debacle, he confirms the truth of this intuition, adding that even the pretense that he would know himself better when he was old has failed to hold up. Het Bureau is a novel not of revelation, but of dogged persistence in error and of the refusal to mitigate the gravity of this error by indictments of the malfeasance of others or the cop-out that everyone does the best they can. 

    A commonplace among reviewers of Het Bureau, put forward to buttress critics’ perplexity that a novel so superficially banal should prove so deeply engaging, is that nothing happens in it. But this is not true in the least. What disarms readers, I think, is the lack of hierarchy among its events. In most fiction, there is little doubt about what you must attend to and what you can ignore. In Voskuil, either everything counts or nothing does. There is a sense in which things speed up in the later volumes, but this is a question less of fictional constraints than of time: in Afgang, Anton Beerta, Frans Veen, and Nicolien’s mother all die, because Maarten has reached the age when people start dying. These figures are portrayed movingly, and their end has a clear import, but the undeviating rigor of Maarten’s introspection, and the discontinuity of any given episode in the novel, biases readers in favor of whatever instant is before them, whether it be one of Maarten’s strikingly rendered dreams, the pettiness of a colleague trying to appropriate more room for his department, or the contemplation of a coffee bean on the floor:

    While sweeping the kitchen floor, he found a coffee bean. He went to throw it in the trash with the dust, but changed his mind. A bean like that had been grown in South America, had been plucked, shipped, roasted, and packaged. This is nonsense, he thought, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw it out, and he dropped it into the coffee grinder. When, after grinding, he spilled some coffee on the counter, he hesitated before wiping up, but this time, only as a matter of consistency. Because a ground bean meant nothing to him, no more than a piece of meat in which he no longer recognized an animal.

    At the end of his retirement dinner, preceded by a ceremony at the Bureau with gifts, honors, and speeches, Maarten, walking home with unsure steps, turns to his wife, full of feeling, and tells her, “Anyway, I think they liked me.” When she keeps silent, he continues, “Don’t you think?” Nicolien responds, “I don’t know.” The final volume of Het Bureau, De dood van Maarten Koning (The Death of Maarten Koning), will show how little his life has meant. If earlier he described himself as an ape in a cage, he now struggles with the unmitigated open. He starts repairing things around the home, to Nicolien’s consternation, takes long walks around Amsterdam, rides his bicycle, gives direction to strangers, more an observer than a participant in the world. He has a dream one night that he is back at the office, and Karel Ravelli, Beerta’s longtime companion, calls him. “I thought you were retired,” he says. Maarten tells him he still has a few matters to take care of. “Yeah, that’s what everyone says,” Karel responds. Maarten’s work at the Bureau, which consisted of combing through endless primary sources in order to extract data on abstruse topics for the buttressing of dubious hypotheses, was by its very nature an endeavor not subject to conclusion, but his guiding delusion has always been that its incompleteness demanded redress; and even when he is not compelled to go there, the feeling of things unfinished at the office continues to exert its pull. 

    But there is something more here, something difficult to grasp, related to the perception of time in Voskuil’s writings, which he hinted at in a radio interview in 1996. “The curious thing about working at such an office is that as soon as you turn your back on it, melancholy ensues.” Voskuil then describes the experience of attending conferences, which are an unqualified torment for Maarten and inevitably occasion migraines and fits of vomiting: you are brought together in a small space with people you don’t like, but “you turn your back on them, you go home, and it seems you have left behind an oasis of peace.” This is a small example of the way Voskuil disentangles the perception of the objects of thought in past, present, and future. His great virtue lies in the renunciation of any attempt at reconciling these modes of time, the admission that there is no true and final account of experience. In his arguments with Nicolien, or his attempts to grasp what his life at the office has meant, he concedes that even the act of recollection exerts a distorting effect on the thing being recollected. In sum: his work has been meaningless, and it has also been his primary source of meaning; the office was once purgatory, and now it feels as if it had been a haven.

    Complicating this is an unstated vision of personality as a tension between elemental feelings, which prey upon Maarten independent of his environment. Vulnerability is perhaps the most basic of these: “Maarten felt threatened” is the most frequently repeated sentence in the novel. For nearly thirty years, the threats come from colleagues and rivals in the profession. But when he retires, instead of vanishing, the peril merely migrates: now he worries about nuclear war, surly young people on the train, death, the decline of culture. His essential posture is fearful and defensive, longing for a safe harbor that is always somewhere else.

    Maarten’s initial excuse for returning to the Bureau is to hand in a set of page proofs. By this point, even the colossally irascible Nicolien has thrown in the towel. She asks if he couldn’t just send them; he responds that doing so is a nuisance; she tells him, “You know best.” When he rings the doorbell at the Bureau, an unfamiliar doorman lets him in. Maarten tells him he used to work there, adding pathetically, “Look, there’s my name.” Initially he is received warmly, but there are nefarious doings afoot. Maarten’s replacement is a careerist, “a Catholic tyrant, a brute,” and still worse, “the author of fifty-two articles.” (Maarten has previously declared that if less was published, “it would be an act of charity toward humanity.”) The new head of the Institute, Dick van de Marel, a theoretical linguist who, Maarten suggests, applied for the job only to escape falling victim to budget cuts at the university, pushes out staff and institutes publication quotas, ignoring Maarten’s warning that the quality of research will suffer in consequence. Worst of all, Ad Muller readily connives with both men to destroy Maarten’s legacy. 

    The climax of De dood van Maarten Koning comes at the farewell gathering for Eef Batteljee, an employee in the Music Archive whom Maarten hired a decade before. None of the higher-ups at the office invite Maarten; Eef himself informs him privately that he is emigrating to work in his family’s business in South Africa. When Maarten brings him a gift, Eef reveals the depths of Ad’s betrayal: “Everything changed the very day you left… Everything you stood for has been dismantled and desecrated, and all in the name of a higher production.” On his way out, Maarten sees his former colleagues in the stairwell, taking their cups of coffee to the celebration: one turns up her nose at him, one looks away, one stares at him with a triumphant smile. Later, two remorseful employees visit him at home (a third sends his greetings but stays away, afraid it will be bad for his career). From them, he learns how much he was hated by the people he supported and looked after.

    The Swiss writer Hermann Burger uses the word Grus (in English, offal), a term of art from the tobacco trade for useless leavings that have fallen to the ground, to examine the problem of the superfluous in literature. Ilyusha’s mother’s fascination with the toy cannon in The Brothers Karamazov, the small string of tobacco that lies “coiled like a brown maggot” in The Green Hat — these are a kind of Grus: they have no obvious connection to the plot of the books they feature in, and yet they are things without which fiction has no point. Het Bureau abounds in these sorts of anecdotes, cameos, and finely observed details, and together they make the novel far more poignant and beautiful than anything I can convey here. I am thinking of when Maarten, in Hungary for a conference, asks a peasant woman whether her life has improved under communism, and an interpreter translates her response: “No, because she was young before, and back then her husband was still alive.” Or of the fate of poor Slofstra, an eccentric older man sent to the Bureau by the employment office, whose favorite joke is to walk around repeating the phrase, “Je parle toutes les langues, exceptée la langue française, parce-que c’est une langue très difficile.” Beerta compares him to a robot, but for Maarten he is “authentic,” someone who has arrived at the Bureau because society has nowhere else for him. One day Slofstra brings Maarten a drawing of a farmhouse as a gift, because his wife, whom he met through a marriage agency, has told him that she can’t stand looking at it anymore. When she decides to stick him in a nursing home, not because he is ill but because she is tired of having him around, she calls the Bureau to make sure his internment will not disrupt her collection of his retirement payments. 

    No less touching are the moments of vulnerability, such as the late nights in bed when Nicolien confesses her fears of old age and death. Hers is precisely the “special way of being afraid” that Philip Larkin described in “Aubade,” made doubly bitter by the knowledge that she has gotten so little of the man she loves because he has given his life to an institution. And I have barely mentioned Voskuil’s gift for comedy, which is in evidence on nearly every page: when Nicolien berates him for his audacity at moving a shelf, and his every attempt at fixing the error drives her to further degrees of outrage, I had to wipe tears of laughter from my eyes.

    If we accept the idea that greatness in art partakes of the universal, then here I must come back to Proust and his points of comparison with Voskuil. Most of us never see the drawing rooms of the aristocracy or have an epiphany over a cup of tea, and few of us will glimpse in their involuntary memories a cathedral-like structure whose grandeur justifies our days of pampered idleness; but all of us, rich or poor, at some point in our lives, and many for the better part of our lives, will be made to sit in a chair and do something pointless which we will be told is the height of urgency. None is spared the sense that life, which could be the vessel of so much kindness and beauty, is stolen, frittered away in the need to fill out forms and surveys, make phone calls and xeroxes, attend to correspondence, all in an effort to justify one’s existence on the basis of a job that one would rather have not had in the first place. This exasperation in the service of futility is a defining experience of the modern age, and Het Bureau is its epic.

    Forever Taking Leave

    Roland Barthes asked if we are “condemned to the adjective” when speaking of music, when attempting to put into words music’s special way of pulling heartstrings and twisting guts; and in the case of Gustav Mahler one feels especially so condemned. It is difficult not to rhapsodize about Mahler. The descriptors accumulate on the tip of the tongue; a deluge of feeling engulfs us, and we can only in turn unleash our own deluge — of words. But words are pallid and limp before such beauty. Mahler induced even Arnold Schoenberg to rhapsody, a bit of purple prose to which I will return, while Daniel Barenboim lamented Mahler’s status as “the only composer who is discussed mostly in non-musical terms” (the “only” here is arguable). One associates Mahler with the discourse of sheer feeling, not with “musical terms,” for which we may have Visconti’s Death in Venice happily to blame. And there is worse. Namedropped in Woody Allen films, indexed in Sondheim’s “Ladies Who Lunch,” framed as the preoccupying obsession of a certain Lydia Tár — one further associates Mahler with the glib stuff of urbane conversation, his rough edges sandpapered off in the smoother interests of sophistication and “culture.” One can wearily sympathize perhaps with the anti-Wagnerian critic Eduard Hanslick:

    An intelligent musician will, therefore, get a much clearer notion of the character of a composition which he has not heard himself by being told that it contains, for instance, too many diminished sevenths, or too many tremolos, than by the most poetic description of the emotional crises through which the listener passed.

    And yet one doesn’t wish to dissect music like a cadaver. Bruno Walter, for his part, instructed that “no evaluation in strictly musical terms can be just” when approaching Mahler’s corpus, for “his work was the outcome of his entire inner life… human as well as aesthetic values must enter in.” Mahler himself seemed to invite such grandiose and holistic readings: in an exchange with Sibelius in 1907, he made his immortal remark that “the symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything” (countering the austerity of the Finnish composer, who had declared that “I admire the symphony’s style and severity of form”). It is a high-wire act, writing about music: to call up the aesthetic experience in all its aliveness, to analyze while avoiding death by analysis, one must tread carefully, barely grazing the edges of the thing to leave its integrity, its wholeness, and its separateness from ourselves intact. One must recognize it as an autonomous aesthetic reality even while attending to the overflowing subjectivity from which it sprung. 

    I want here to tread carefully over Das Lied von der Erde, “The Song of the Earth,” the penultimate symphony that Mahler composed. I aim to give a brief chronicle of it, to ask what it means, and to begin to traverse its aesthetic, conceptual, and historical significations. It is a symphony that bids farewell to existence, looks death in the eye, radiates outward in a thousand shades of feeling: therefore I wish also to ask after its correspondence with life. “Nothing beautiful is separable from life,” said Valéry, “and life is that which dies.” 

    Das Lied von der Erde is popularly associated with the sources of acute grief that occasioned it. There was the death of Mahler’s beloved daughter Maria; the revelation of his own congenital heart condition; the kindling of antisemitism in Vienna and the political maneuverings of his colleagues, culminating in his resignation from the Vienna Court Opera in 1907. Death in assorted guises had come knocking at the door. Completed in 1909, the orchestral song-cycle — whose full title reads Eine Symphonie für eine Tenor und eine Alt (oder Bariton) Stimme und Orchester (nach Hans Bethges Die chinesische Flöte, or “a symphony for tenor and alto (or baritone) voice and orchestra (after Hans Bethge’s The Chinese Flute)” — was conceived as a setting of Bethge’s collection of loosely translated and paraphrased Chinese poems, published in 1907, the beauty and clarity of which had cut through Mahler’s thick fog of grief at just the right moment. 

    Harmonically, Das Lied’s East Asian influence is clear, particularly in its frequent use of the pentatonic scale. But the piece absorbs disparate influences, opening for instance with a Trinklied or drinking song, in A minor, its repeated refrain more melancholy than raucous: Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod, “dark is life, is death.” The gloomy phrase is pitched, as in the “mein Vater” of Schubert’s Erlkönig, slightly higher in each iteration — steadily raising the stakes of its misery, like a beer-clutching drunkard growing more wretched and hollow-eyed as the party wears on. Yet with its horn fanfares and energetic cross-rhythms, establishing a jaunty mood of festivity, this opening movement is not as passive or bleak as its lyrics suggest. It is also richly chromatic, anchoring Das Lied in the sonic ambiguity for which Mahler’s late style would become renowned. 

    The piece’s middle ranges from the slow second movement to a spirited three-part scherzo, all occupying that same continuum between pleasure and despair, between celebration of life and grief at its evanescence. “The sweet fragrance of the flowers has fled; / A cold wind bends down their stems… My heart is weary” — with its suggestion that fading and fatigue are cruelly inevitable, as harsh winds lay waste to spring’s flowers — is redolent of Keats at his most doleful. We are located in a natural landscape both lovely and indifferent, both alive and withering into decay; we imbibe the sap of life and are face to face with death. 

    These movements alternate between the respective songs of the alto and tenor — the song-cycle form here is fully assimilated into that of the symphony — and coalesce into an orchestral song-cycle or “song-symphony,” as some call it (a form that Mahler did not invent but made his own, as in his Kindertotenlieder of 1904). A song-symphony is a flexible hybrid organism. It coheres into a large-scale whole as a symphony does, but its songs can nonetheless feel self-contained, like set-pieces or vignettes loosely strung together. As legend has it, this was Mahler’s attempt at transcending the fabled “Curse of the Ninth,” a late Romantic superstition owed to the fact that Schubert, Beethoven, and Bruckner all died with their tenth symphonies unfinished. Mahler’s genre-bending Das Lied von der Erde ventured to dodge this fate, the fear of which had apparently preyed on him continually.

    His widow Alma Mahler, who survived him by fifty years, recalled his musing that “no great symphonic writer was to live beyond his Ninth,” though she is something of a bête noire among Mahlerians for her unreliable and often seemingly self-serving narratives — the “Alma Problem.” It was a fate to which Mahler would eventually succumb: following his Ninth Symphony of 1909, also the music of farewell, Mahler died with his tenth symphony incomplete. Schoenberg reflected rather mystically on the phenomenon in an essay on Mahler. “He who wants to go beyond [the Ninth] must pass away,” he intoned. “It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not ready. Those who have written a Ninth stood too close to the hereafter.”

    Das Lied‘s expansive, slow-burning final movement, called “Der Abschied” or “The Farewell,” proceeds lightly, mostly lacking in the Wagnerian thunder of the cycle’s opening. Its orchestration is a feat of naturalism, featuring the gong, the celesta, simulated birdsong, and the tam-tam — the instrument of death par excellence, often brought to bear in funeral marches. Only select groups of instruments are wielded at a given time; no individual instrument’s color is effaced or sacrificed to a wall of sound. Many have observed that this delicate touch lends the movement the feel of chamber music. The piece climaxes with lines altered considerably by Mahler himself and, unlike the often tightly compressed verses of prior movements, his rhetoric is overwhelmingly lyrical. Here we witness the protagonist wandering the mountains alone, seeking an elusive peace.

    A cool breeze blows in the shadow of my fir trees.

    I stand here and wait for my friend.

    I wait for him to take a last farewell.

    I long, O my friend, to enjoy the beauty

    Of this evening by your side.

    Where are you? You leave me long alone!

    I wander to and fro with my lute

    On pathways which billow with soft grass.

    O beauty! O eternal love-and-life-intoxicated world!

    A purely orchestral interlude intercedes — a funeral march of sorts — and at length Das Lied von der Erde concludes with lines written by Mahler alone:

    The dear earth everywhere

    Blossoms in spring and grows green again! 

    Everywhere and forever a blueness lights the distance 

    Forever…forever… 

    “Ewig…ewig…”: it would be the last word that Mahler set to music. Voiced as a falling second, its melody descends two whole steps downward, from E to D and from D to C. Though on one level simply a routine cadence, the interval of the falling second had been associated, ever since Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26 in Eb major (“Les Adieux”), with the theme of parting and farewell; hummed aloud, it has the innocent ring of goodbye. Ewig also hints at self-quotation, recalling the monumental finale of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, with its repeated horn-and-strings-backed cries of “ewig, ewig.” Where the Eighth’s ewig had proclaimed the eternal triumph of love and human creativity, in the final words of Goethe’s Faust, Part Two — das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan, “the Eternal Feminine draws us onward” — the ewig in Das Lied is cast in a decidedly muted palette. The “forever” is repeated, over and over, unfurling like a chant, growing gradually quieter, finally dissolving into an icy, deafening silence. 

    With its irregular cadences and incorporation of silence, Der Abschied has thus far moved centripetally toward this end. But when does the silence really reign? I have seen audiences momentarily freeze, unsure whether the sound waves have merely stopped reaching their own strained eardrums or whether the piece is indeed over. Or the opposite phenomenon: following a performance of the piece recorded for Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, the audience erupts in applause preemptively, before the final bars of music have passed away. When is the alto’s soft intonation swallowed up by quiet, the “forever” engulfed by nothingness? It is haunting to think that the earth and this very song of the earth will one day cease to be. But is the suggested impression that it is not the song that ends, but we who stop hearing it? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter, and so on. “Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on…”

    It was one of the last concerts I attended in-person, in January 2020, before the pandemic overturned and pulverized life as we knew it. The faint whiff of death was already in the air; the threat was still immaterial and our fears still insubstantial. The New York Philharmonic had paired Das Lied with Schubert’s Fourth, or “Tragic,” Symphony. Could there be anything more quintessentially Romantic, I thought, than the impulse to immortalize a communion you fear to be already lost — a “forever” you suspect to be slipping through your fingers like sand, or one whose other name is nothingness? The declaration of “forever” seemed always to contain the recognition of its opposite, of finitude and the pit of non-being. Das Lied‘s misty escape-into-landscape finale, like that of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” features a speaker anxiously awaiting the arrival of a friend — one whose face and voice and fervor would affirm for the speaker the truths that he so ardently desires to believe, the truths he feels receding from him even as he insists on their self-evidence.

    I do not mean through overwrought association to imply that Mahler read Wordsworth or was otherwise influenced by him. I am simply stitching together my own influences and long-accrued associations. Simply to identify Mahler with a Romantic ethos requires elaboration: he is properly regarded as both a paragon of late-Romantic style and a precursor of modern music, a kind of bridge between the two — expanding tonality to its outer limits without collapsing it entirely, only taking up Schoenberg’s injunction to “emancipate the dissonance” so far. And this is not even to acknowledge the distinct meanings of “Romantic” in music and literature. Mahler, at any rate, had his suspicions about the term. In a letter to a friend, discussing Goethe, he had this to say:

    What Goethe says on the meaning of the terms Classical and Romantic is this: ‘What is Classical I call healthy, what is Romantic sick… Most modern work is Romantic not because it is modern but because it is weak, sickly and ill, and old work is not Classical because it is old but because it is strong, fresh, joyful and healthy. If we distinguish Classical and Romantic by these criteria, the situation is soon clarified.’ The inner connection between my argument and Goethe’s should be obvious.

    Mahler leaves ambiguous what “my argument” is. We can only wonder if and how he applied these criteria to his own compositions. Is Das Lied hale and hearty or dour and morbid? Brimming over with hope for renewal or baldly nihilistic? Does it engender in its listener the proverbial desire to take to the sickbed? These oppositions aren’t necessarily useful ones; plainly, music need not do anything, and in the best of cases may do the wholly mysterious. Even Nietzsche, in his polemic against what he came to perceive as Wagnerian sickliness, recognized in it the essence of modernity — “a diagnosis of the modern soul” — and that “there is no way out: one must first become a Wagnerian.” The Nietzschean mandate may be one of health-through-sickness, or, put in modern terms, spiritual inoculation (“sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant”). It was he who remarked that whatever did not kill him made him stronger.

    It is notable that Mahler should have thought along these lines at all, toward the physiological sphere of sickliness and heath, though I suppose one could chalk it up to his reading of Nietzsche or the larger concern of his culture with degeneration and vitality. (Mahler moved in intellectual circles saturated by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; he nearly called his Third Symphony “The Gay Science” and, in its fourth movement, set Zarathustra’s Roundelay to music.) Privately Mahler mused about a potentially despondent audience response to Das Lied, allegedly grilling Walter: “What do you think? Is it at all bearable? Will it drive people to make an end of themselves?” Caustic or impish as the question may have been, Mahler evidently held on some level that his music did do something to its listener, that it bred and reared something considerable in her breast. What is it Das Lied von der Erde effectuates or demands — and if we privately experience it as some sort of call, toward what duty or vision are we being summoned?

    The attentive reader will have noted my relative lack of attention to the symphony’s conclusion, without which such questions are dead on arrival. “Ewig” on its face may bring comfort, and the broader musical structure of Der Abschied, with its progressive tonality, would seem to express uplift; it possesses an affecting, consolatory C minor to C major tonic scheme. Musically we experience a sublime feeling of breakthrough and transformation — a renewal of spring, if you will. But the hard-won release does not feel like a triumph, exactly, nor like what we may call joy. Like the low murmurous adagio of Mahler’s Ninth, this finale breathes a great sigh of resignation, its peace achieved at the threshold of extreme suffering. If this is bliss, it is the bliss of anguish borne and surpassed. It is also perhaps a self-negation in the face of what Buddhist and Hindu texts term upādāna, attachment, a kind of death to the flux of this world. To be sure, Das Lied closes out with a protracted, non-metrical decrescendo that some compare to a slow dying-away of breath, a deadening pulse. Der Abschied begins “schwer,” or “heavily,” and ends “gänzlich ersterbend,” or “completely dying away”: life’s weight has been lifted, the lightness of non-being attained. Yet even this interpretation, with its Schopenhauerian thread, feels only skin-deep. 

    Benjamin Britten would say of the piece’s final chord, “I cannot understand it,” marveling in a letter to Henry Boys that “it passes over me like a tidal wave — and that matters not a jot either, because it goes on forever, even if it is never performed again… that final chord is printed on the atmosphere.” What is this apotheosis “printed on the atmosphere”? The music radiates a mood of gentleness, of pain melting into joy and vice versa: the effect is achieved in part by a final series of arpeggiations, so that the music unwinds itself in horizontal concatenation before gathering itself up into vertical concord. The notes form a blended whole only to unfasten themselves, floating dreamily back into arpeggiated sequence, the cycle beginning once more. 

    And what are those notes? Above the final chord drifts the vocalist’s melody on the E—D—C motive. The melody does not, at long last, resolve to its tonic, C: the final note of the final “ewig” is in fact C’s supertonic, D. It’s as if we have taken a step, expecting once more to feel solid ground beneath our feet, but instead we find ourselves still suspended in mid-air. This may be a farewell, but closure eludes us. And the musical climax here is doubly unresolved. The terminal chord of Das Lied von der Erde is C major (made up of the notes C, E, and G) with an added A, the sixth scale degree of C major; this results in what is known today as a C major sixth chord. The major sixth, in traditional tonal harmony, is a consonant interval, but here the added A forms an extreme dissonance with another chord tone of C major (a second with G). For the interval of the major second, picture two white keys lying side by side, struck in unison; they clash, too close for comfort. Mahler leaves the dissonance unresolved. This was quite a choice: before the twentieth century, before its assimilation by jazz, an unresolved major-sixth chord existed as an acceptable tonic primarily in ragtime and cakewalks. This A sits above middle C, voiced too low in the chord to sound like it’ll slide easily downward to G — a customary resolution — and yet not low enough in the bass to alter the chord’s sonority from C major to A minor. 

    Yes, C major is bound intimately to A minor, the key with which Das Lied begins. A minor is the relative minor of C major, meaning they share the same notes, but differ on their tonics or resolution tones. The faint evocation of A minor through a resounding C major, dissonant though it may be, is an all too effective case of sublation: the opening movement’s essence is at once preserved, nullified, and transcended. This whisper of the original tonic refreshes our memory, reminding us that — on top of the C minor to C major of Der Abschied — the work as a whole possesses a broad-scale progressive tonal architecture, wending its way from A minor to C major and toward its own transformation. 

    The effect of an unresolved dissonance is typically one of infinite ache, and this is no exception. But what is unresolved can by definition seem to be without end. The essential, protean simplicity of C major encircles us, and the dissonant A lingers on indefinitely as a color, an atmosphere, a promise of endlessness.

    This farewell, this leave-taking — what is it? For Leonard Bernstein, Der Abschied is a farewell to tonality: the high water mark of tonal expansion before dissonance would flood it completely, and Mahler’s intensely pained farewell to German Romanticism. “It was Mahler’s destiny to sum up the whole story of Austro-Germanic music and tie it up,” he proclaimed of the end of Das Lied. “And not in a pretty bow, but in a fearful knot made out of his own nerves and sinews.” To be a Romantic in an increasingly post-Romantic age requires negotiation with the death of aesthetic culture as you know it. This is, for Bernstein, what Mahler attempts over and over, unable to loosen his grip without anguish; part of him would cling to a tonal temperament “forever.” Like Hans Castorp humming Schubert’s “Der Lindenbaum” in the corpse-ridden landscape of the Great War, headed toward his own extermination, this is an elegy for Romanticism as an era, a mood, a climate of feeling, and for the music that had once expressed its spirit. That spirit, felt to be ebbing in an increasingly mechanized age of world war and mass culture, had to be mourned. Yet, in what I will call the Bernstein reading, there is a Romanticism that steadily and remorselessly blooms in the soul of twentieth-century man — even as it outwardly might be elegized.

    The Mahler we have today is in a certain sense Leonard Bernstein’s Mahler. He could still remark, in 1960, that “Mahler isn’t one of those big popular names like Beethoven,” and while today we would disagree, it is in large part owing to his influence. Bernstein hardly plucked Mahler from oblivion — Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Jascha Horenstein, among others, had already put him on the map, and Aaron Copland had been a longtime advocate — but Bernstein almost single-handedly mainstreamed the composer in the United States, inaugurating a major revival of interest in his work. His conducting of the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s made Mahler a classic in repertories thereafter; he featured Mahler in his popular televised lectures; and he pulled off the first complete recorded cycle of Mahler’s symphonies. In the United States, certainly, the ubiquity of Mahler — as opposed to, say, Strauss or Bruckner — is partly a function of Bernstein’s gigantic celebrity.

    Bernstein’s cheerleading made for a tangled legacy. One senses in his televised programming a determined overidentification with Mahler: they were both Jewish-born conductors of the New York Philharmonic, though it didn’t bear that name in Mahler’s day; both conductors and composers; both thereby afflicted by what Bernstein called a “double nature.” There was a funny effect whereby the two figures were forever linked in the public mind. Yet Bernstein was not without his critics. He was occasionally accused of conducting at a slower tempo than was typical for Mahler, and for taking infelicitous liberties with his rubato. Pierre Boulez, a great Mahlerian in the concert hall and in recordings, noted in a late interview how frequently Mahler’s tempo markings implore their conductor not to drag. Mahler, he felt, was afraid that his music might sink under the load of excessive emotion. 

    Bernstein was on that basis charged with sentimentalism. Some found his melodramatic public persona in poor taste. He swayed on the podium, eyes closed intermittently, registering an extremity of emotion that looked a lot like ecstasy. The man was possessed: dripping with sweat, almost giddy, his physical charisma tremendous. One wants to watch Bernstein as much as one wants to listen to the music he is conducting. Through him, Mahler became all but synonymous with ostentatious, even histrionic, emotionalism. Bernstein was himself a spectacle, but his innate musicianship, his profound understanding of Mahler in particular, was undeniable — and he had the platform and the desire to propound his grandiloquent thesis. Ever the Romantic interpreter, it was often a Keatsian mood with him: in his personal introduction to Das Lied, recorded during rehearsal breaks with the Israel Philharmonic in 1972, he recites from a touchstone of English Romanticism, Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: 

    Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

    I have been half in love with easeful Death…

    [Bernstein murmuring, “that is almost exactly the quality of the end of this piece.”]

    Was it a vision, or a waking dream? 

    Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?

    [Bernstein, pausing: “That is the essence, that is all, of Das Lied von der Erde.”]

    Yet what might it mean for a composer to part with Romanticism? It will help to first sketch a faint picture of Romanticism in music, concentrating for the most part not on theory but on what all of this sounded like. An admission first: there was perhaps for some a whiff of derision to the term “Romantic” — a sense that it meant surrendering form to feeling, wallowing in emotion, and not living up to the “strong, fresh, joyful and healthy” standards of classicism. Less polemically, one can regard Romanticism as a temporal designation, referring loosely to a kind of long nineteenth century in music. Some variation on the Beethoven-to-Mahler genealogy would suffice.

    The term was first applied to music by E.T.A Hoffman in 1810, in his review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where he alleged that music was in fact the only truly Romantic art. For Hoffman, the term implied expressive triumph. Romantic music was the music of the artist qua artist, responsive to the throbbing dictates of his own soul — overfull, unchained from reason, prevailing over the banal and the finite to bear witness only to the fiercely real. “Beethoven’s music stirs the mists of fear, of horror, of terror, of grief, and awakens that endless longing which is the very essence of romanticism,” Hoffman wrote breathlessly. Hold on to that notion of “endless longing,” which would later become a standard cliche of Wagnerism. Other attributes of the Romantic temperament would be a delight in the natural world, a taste for folklore and the Gothic, and an incorporation of extra-musical material: songs, tone poems, program music generally. But lofty passions and stormy sensations — emotional extremes — remain the calling card of musical Romanticism.

    Formal compositional revolutions whirled alongside the thematic ones. Abetted by the public concert hall and the rise of the domestic salon, the period saw musical works expanding and contracting in scale, tempo, and dynamics, the better to pour out every species of feeling. Romantic music remained perceptibly tonal but moved just as perceptibly toward harmonic ambiguity. The graceful harmonic sequences and well-proportioned melodies of Haydn and Mozart yielded in Schubert, Chopin, and Liszt to a new and mottled sonic universe: chromatic saturations, dissonant intervals, mysterious harmonies, modulatory surprises.

    One cannot breathe a word about Romantic music, of course, without addressing Wagner, though some would position him later in the story, as a late-nineteenth-century neo-Romantic. Wagner’s monumental music dramas appeared at first blush to erode fixed keys, or at least to resolve themselves into unexpected keys, breaking down large-scale durational unity into “brief tonal particles which follow each other in line, connected like links in a chain rather than assembled round a common center,” as Carl Dahlhaus elegantly put it. And beyond Wagner’s generally soupy tonality was his famed Tristan chord, debuted in 1865. The chord — made up of the notes F, B, D♯, and G♯ — was inscrutable, harshly dissonant, and strangely beautiful, impossible to predict in its path toward resolution. Wagner seemingly was not the first to use the chord, but the first to use it as the structural principle of a work: listeners of Tristan und Isolde were made to molder in its ambiguity, seemingly interminably. Wagner eventually rounds off the repeated cadence into ecstatic consonance, but not until the last thirty seconds of an opera whose running time is approximately four hours. The delectable tension is released — so belatedly that release becomes almost an afterthought. There lurks in this dynamic an element of masochism perhaps ever-present in Romanticism’s longing for longing: Schiller, following Kant, had identified the experience of the sublime as at once “a joyous state, that may rise to rapture” and “a painful state, which in its paroxysm is manifested by a kind of shudder.”

    Wagner’s innovation will be better understood against the backdrop of common-practice tonality, developed in the Baroque period through the nineteenth-century. It was poised on the axis of the musical key: in the key of C, C is the tonic or pitch of central interest; the tonic and its chain of corresponding relations form the basic syntax of tonal music. Tonal compositions often depend upon dynamics of tension and resolution: on straying potentially far from one’s tonic chord only to return home faithfully in due course. In such a scheme, dissonance — however seductive — must ideally be annulled or transcended, and can be only a temporary excitement, a roadblock on the path to eventual consonance: an exotic spice sprinkled to enliven but never to overwhelm.

    Dissonance is a nebulous concept whose meaning has evolved over time. Select intervals have been hotly contested, such as the fourth: it was for some an open-and-shut dissonance and for others a quite perfect consonance. (“It is not, therefore, the human ear or nervous system that decides what is a dissonance, unless we are to assume a physiological change between the thirteenth and fifteenth century,” Charles Rosen admonished.) The introduction of the keyboard as we know it had divided the octave into twelve equally spaced pitches, approximations of intervallic frequencies existing in nature; of the intervals on a keyboard, only what we call the octave and the fifth exist as “consonances” scientifically (if you strike a string and hear its reverberations, the ensuing series of overtones naturally includes these intervals). If the understanding of what counted as dissonance was mostly historically contingent, so too was that idea of dissonance itself — but the rigors of tonal scaffolding came to behave like a set of natural laws in the classical period. A momentary dissonance, a chromatically altered C major, at the start of Mozart’s nineteenth string quartet got it branded “The Dissonance Quartet” for the next couple of hundred years. It was such a scandal to its nineteenth-century interpreters that they insisted on doctoring it, overwriting its dissonant early bars at public performances. I have heard it drolly claimed that the “emancipation of the dissonance” dates back to this.

    Broadly speaking, Wagner and his contemporaries undertook to throw a wrench in tonic-oriented musical organization. Wagner disdained what he called “quadratic compositional construction,” the tightly symmetrical and balanced compositions of his predecessors. Whether composers such as Wagner (or Chopin or Liszt) were flouting arbitrary aesthetic calcifications or the very laws of nature — no matter. This was inexorably where music was headed: harmonic ambiguity became its own destination, and desire more desirable than consummation. Well before “modern” music, then, and well before the twentieth century, there occurred a gradual unfocusing of tonal music’s accepted contours — and Mahler had one foot in both camps. 

    The boundaries of modern music are porous. To speak of separate camps is not quite misleading but not quite useful. If modern composers and their tonal murk did not arise ex nihilo in the twentieth century, and were nourishing growths whose roots lay as deep in the soil as Mozart, what accounts for that special modern sound? You know it when you hear it: it concentrates itself around the year 1900 and gains momentum around 1914, spurred to maturity in the crucible of the Great War. One can think as far back as 1889, to Strauss’ Don Juan; to the dissonant, nearly atonal shrieks of his one-act opera Salome in 1905; to the riotous premiere in 1913 of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, with its mammoth polychords and barbed rhythms; to the impressionism, so-called, of Debussy and Ravel. Adorno meanwhile would call Mahler’s Ninth Symphony “the first work of the new music.” 

    In this regard, one man outpaces the others in the minds of many to this day. Arnold Schoenberg was the most controversial composer of his age, striking ire into the hearts of audiences and bewildering those who found his style self-indulgently cacophonous. It is claimed that he secured a definitive break with tonality. Or was he merely playing out the consequences of the Wagnerian upheaval? Schoenberg, to be sure, invented a newfangled system to replace functional harmony. But even his twelve-tone technique can be treated as a late flowering of the process of harmonic expansion already underway. Thomas Mann had called Wagner a “cultural Bolshevik” already “on atonal terrain”; he may have been better describing the father of the Second Viennese School. 

    Schoenberg had been cautiously testing the limits of tonal music as early as 1899. In that year’s masterpiece of a string sextet, Verklärte Nacht, in the ravishing Gurre-Lieder of 1900, and in the chromatically saturated Pelleas und Melisande of 1903, he still moved discernibly in the ambit of Beethoven and Wagner. In 1909, the year Mahler completed Das Lied, Schoenberg was already dabbling in free atonality (or pantonality, a term he seems to have preferred). In his fully formed twelve-tone technique, completed by the early 1920s, no single pitch or key center was to take precedence over another: the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale were to be used equally, without repetition, abrogating the hierarchy of tones necessary to establishing a tonic. The epiphenoena of functional harmony — major chords, minor chords, diminished and augmented chords — were to be left in the dust.

    If you deploy twelve pitches equally and without repetition, treating consonance and dissonance as kindred substances, your music will give the impression of jumping around, of rising and falling too swiftly to sort itself out into a key or assume definite shape. What sounded to some like unfocused, scattershot noise — pitches flitting through the air like so many nameless particles of sound — was in fact a highly structured and purposefully engineered musical ambiguity. “Tonality is no natural law of music, eternally valid”: these were Schoenberg’s fighting words. 

    The appeal to tonality’s origin in nature can be refuted if one recalls that just as tones pull toward triads, and triads toward tonality, gravity pulls us down toward the earth; yet an airplane carries us up away from it. A product can be apparently artificial without being unnatural, for it is based on the laws of nature to just the same degree as those that seem primary.

    Taken side-by-side with another statement of Schoenberg’s — “I have made a discovery that will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years” — one glimpses a curious thought process irreducible to contemporary intellectual frameworks. Schoenberg was perhaps a revolutionary conservative, revolutionary in the service of preserving an unbroken line of “German music”: a chain of aesthetic inheritance in which he placed himself without hesitation and in whose supremacy he believed. One feels as if his twelve-tone technique and the ambiguity it systematized was, at bottom, an attempt to replicate the soul-rattling power of the composers who had enthralled him — a way of realizing their staggering, discomposing beauty for a new age. 

    Schoenberg worshipped Mahler. He arranged Das Lied for chamber orchestra, to be performed in his exclusive Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna. The admiration ran so deep that the first edition of his Theory of Harmony, published shortly after Mahler’s death, bears the following dedication:

    This book is dedicated to the memory of GUSTAV MAHLER. The dedication was intended to give him some small pleasure while he still lived. It was also meant to express reverence for his immortal compositions, and to show that these works, which academic musicians pass by with a shrug of the shoulders, indeed with contempt, are worshiped by someone who is perhaps not entirely ignorant either. Gustav Mahler was denied greater joys than my dedication was meant to provide. This martyr, this saint, had to pass on… now he is dead, I want my book to win me respect, so that nobody can pass by when I say, ‘That was one of the truly great men!’

    What would Mahler have made of the panegyric — and of Schoenberg’s musical novelties, for that matter? To study the convergence of these figures is another way of straining to situate Mahler in the shifting sands of late Romanticism and early modernism, to stamp Mahler and his legacy for good. Music composed in the middle and later nineteenth-century, up until right about 1910, is a no man’s land, up for grabs by those inclined to throw labels around. We would do well to recall Rosen’s advice in The Classical Style: “Every period of time is traversed by forces both reactionary and progressive. Beethoven’s music is filled with memories and predictions… Instead of affixing a label, it would be better to consider in what context and against what background Beethoven may be most richly understood.”

    Against what backdrop, then, is Mahler most richly understood? To suggest that he must be grasped in relation to Schoenberg and the serialists as much as in relation to his Romantic forebears — though on one level patently obvious, and elucidated by many scholars and critics — may grind the gears of some. Labels and camps may be limiting or arbitrary, but the partisan hothouse of twentieth-century musical culture, a culture we fall heir to today, would make their effects actual.

    Mahler certainly hewed closely to Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner, the Romantic luminaries in whose shadow he and his contemporaries composed — and more specifically to the motif of farewell. For Mahler’s Das Lied does more than distill a century’s worth of tonal expansion; as a song-cycle it forms a late entry in the genre of the German Lied. The Lied or art song tradition was where the poetry and the music of German Romanticism merged. The enormous output of Schubert, especially his Winterreise, typifies the genre and looms over Mahler’s body of work. Mahler’s Abschied was not the first of its kind; Schubert had composed scores of Lieder in the leave-taking mode, many with that very title. What is the farewell lyric all about, if we can get a fix on such a thing? If it is true that the human being is chronically contorted in such a pose, so that by our nature and despite our very best efforts we are habitually poised on the axis of farewell — turning, lingering, suspended on one threshold or another — what is the content of this existential orientation? In his Eighth Elegy, Rilke asks a plaintive question — “Who has us twisted around like this, so that/ no matter what we do, we are in the posture/ of someone going away?” — and goes on: 

    Just as, upon

    the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley

    one last time, he turns, stops, lingers — 

    so we live here, forever taking leave.

    How does the composer render this essence musically? Is this essence uniquely Romantic, and how does Mahler’s farewell fit in?

    Let us begin with Schubert’s litany of farewells. They include “Abschied” (D. 578), a farewell to a friend; “Abschied von der Harfe” (D. 406), a kind of farewell to music; “Willkommen und Abschied” (D. 767) and “Auf dem Strom” (D. 943), farewells, in their own ways, to beloveds; and a bleaker consideration of love, “Abschied” (D. 475), among others. It is hardly surprising that most farewell songs concern romantic parting and abound with the tears and sentimentalism of doomed lovers. But there are musical partings with a more contemplative cast, with the end-of-life awareness exhibited by Mahler. There is, for instance, Schubert’s “Abschied von der Erde” (D. 829), with text by Adolf von Pratobevera, composed in 1826, in which we move from a slate of particularized farewells to a sweeping farewell to life. 

    Farewell, beautiful earth!

    I can understand you only now, 

    when joy and sorrow

    pass away from us.

    Farewell, Master Sorrow!

    I thank you with moist eyes! 

    Joy I take with me,

    you I leave behind.

    Be only a gentle teacher

    and lead all men to God; 

    in the darkest nights 

    reveal a little red streak of dawn!

    Schubert’s song is scored for spoken voice and piano, meaning it has no vocal melody and is instead performed like a dramatic recitation. Its score is marked langsam, or slow, but it provides no further rhythmic direction for its vocalist: much is left to the discretion of the reciter in electing where to place dramatic emphasis, if any. It is fascinating that Schubert felt that these words did not cry out for melody or firm pacing — that he wished to impart to them a kind of conversational fluidity, as if the vision of life and death they gave voice to were being worked out in the very act of speaking. The lyric positions its listener in neither supreme ecstasy nor supreme doom: at the moment of farewell, all emotional excess has been drained away, and only a delicate mode of “understanding” remains. The soft red glow of dawn streaks across the sky. Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem “Abschied” partakes of a similar emotional extinguishment. “I may drink with you, all things/ Hate and love be forgotten then,” he advises his beloved. The poet shows his hand, admitting that “to be gone is my wish,” but he equivocates: “Later perhaps one day,/ Diotima, we’ll meet — here, but desire by then/ Will have bled away.” With its soft watercolor palette, its suggestion that parting and death are inducements to ultimate repose — states of nonbeing where extremes, including the exigencies of desire, are nullified and melt away — Hölderlin’s poem feels like the melancholy lover’s mirror image of Schubert. The perfume of renunciation lingers about them both. 

    From Haydn to Beethoven to Liszt, there were musical farewells, but it was the Schumanns who most visibly took up the mantle. Here renunciation is not quite the point. Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen (“Forest Scenes”), a set of solo piano pieces composed in the late 1840s, cycles through a dizzying array of emotional states to examine the ambivalence of man in nature. Its final movement, “Abschied,” is sweetly beautiful, pulsating softly and gesturing toward a realization of peace and uplift in nature. He would take up the Abschied theme again on several occasions, including in his final song-cycle Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart (1852). Its fourth song, “Abschied von der Welt,” features the soon-to-be-beheaded queen embracing death with open arms. She cries out for the cessation of her earthly torments; the joy of death is all that remains.

    Crudely speaking, the respective farewells of Waldszenen and Gedichte reflect perhaps two sides of Schumann’s bifurcated persona in the public mind, as well as the innate doubleness of the Abschied form, brought into bittersweet unity by other song composers. They notably included his extraordinary wife Clara: her song “Beim Abschied,” with a text by Friederike Serre, is a farewell dripping with ambivalence (and one that gently refuses to regard itself as one, even as it bears the traces of the farewell lyric). It opens: 

    A purple glow shines from afar,

    Golden now the bright day sinks… 

    One more greeting, now goodbye,

    No farewell, no departure…

    Notice, as in Mahler, how frequently a soft glow glints in the distance (here it is purple; in Das Lied it is blue). Farewells are linked with archetypical consistency to shifting light: in them light waxes, wanes, dissolves, flickers, tinges, envelops. Morning-glow and evening-glow, standard settings of transition, are images befitting the literal contingencies of parting, but they also suggest the merging of one’s undulating ambivalences with the earth’s eternal cycles. The dim light that the scenes impart also matches their mood of existential pause — their aura of quiet stillness and shadowedness. I like to think of this clustering of images, associations, and resonances as part of the lyrical-musical atmosphere that Mahler absorbed, knowingly or not, almost in the manner of a cultural unconscious.  

    Mahler’s farewell temperament is echoed in a song such as Richard Strauss’s exquisite “Morgen!” (op. 27, no. 4) in 1894: it is not quite a farewell, and not quite about death, but it bears traces of the tradition under consideration. As its title — Morning! — suggests, the song looks toward the morrow. It sets forth an image system by now familiar — “this same sun-breathing earth,” a landscape of “blue-waved bliss,” and so on — and it joins together the sense of an ending with a perception of the eternal:

    And tomorrow the sun will shine again

    And on the path that I shall take,

    It will unite us, happy ones, again,

    Amid this same sun-breathing earth…

    And to the shore, broad, blue-waved,

    We shall quietly and slowly descend,

    Speechless we shall gaze into each other’s eyes,

    And the speechless silence of bliss shall fall on us…

    After completing two identical harmonic progressions in G major, the piece concedes its vocal melody (“and the speechless silence of bliss shall fall upon us…”) over an unresolved dominant chord. After a dramatic pause, the piano picks up where the vocalist leaves off, and music supersedes language: in the ensuing purely instrumental realization of the G major cycle, we can feel the sun breaking through, shining again once more, even as all human presence has left the frame. (I am perhaps alone in preferring the bare piano and voice version to the fully orchestrated one.) This is a restatement of musical material made magical and salutary through simple repetition — and, if you will, a belated resolution to the tonic. It is an evocation of nature resuming its course, operating independently of human will and expression: the subject of Strauss’s song is the aftermath of human departure. He returned to this spiritual terrain many decades later, in the fourth of his Vier letzte Lieder, or Four Last Songs. In these songs I recognize the lineaments of a Mahlerian ethos, clear as day. 

    Thresholds and suspensions are Romantic in nature, are they not? Schlegel, for instance, declared that “the poetry of the ancients is the poetry of possession, while ours is the poetry of longing… the former is rooted in the present, while the latter hovers between remembrance and anticipation.” Recall that Das Lied‘s “hovering,” its suspension, is harmonic and literal. Indeed, I know of no better harmonic language to match these lyric modes than Mahler’s C major sixth. In its resounding C major-ness and intervallic sixthness — the piercing ray of incongruous light imparted by its A — Das Lied‘s musical climax feels both shut and open, both inevitable and impossible, the sort of farewell that cuts you to the core. 

    In Mahler’s leave-taking mood, we find an affirmation of death as life’s precondition and vice versa — but not the Romantic-Wagnerian longing for death as completion, consummation, or redemption. Der Abschied bleeds out anticlimactically, while Schubert’s “Abschied von der Erde,” one of its closer analogues, lacks vocal dynamism. The Strauss pieces simmer but never boil over; they are slow, steady, wistful, reconciled. Contrast these subdued forms of yearning and fulfillment with the soaring raised stakes of the Tannhäuser and Lohengrin preludes, or the achingly sweet and long-awaited consonance of Isolde’s Liebestod — a harmonic release both sacred and sexual, one that coincides with the expiration of the human body onstage and of the music itself. Baudelaire’s famous account of being ravished by Wagner’s music is barely distinguishable from the logic of orgasm. Orgasm is, of course, perennially coupled with self-extinction, as Elizabethan puns on the word “die” and the French “la petite mort” suggest. But death is not orgasmic or glorious in Mahler, nor is extinction construed necessarily as a deliverance or refuge into “holy night” (as in Tristan). From such nocturnal fantasies, from such voluptuous death-addled aestheticism, Der Abschied’s lyrical voice departs decisively. It decouples death from the claustrophobia of eros and opens up onto a plane of fresh mountain air, infinite space, and brightening horizons. To grasp death unblinkingly in the bright light of day is quite a different matter than to lust after it in the dark.      

    I have situated Mahler amid eclectic and freely overlapping traditions, against a broader backdrop of Romantic forms — staging a musical and lyrical scene and populating it with definite, though gauzy, shapes and figures. This context brings Mahler’s aesthetic-cultural source material into sharper focus. But it should be noted with equal emphasis that Mahler’s posture was not strictly a backward-looking one. Mahler was also a curious and cautious enthusiast of the “new music.” He welcomed the young Schoenberg as a disciple of sorts, keeping up the correspondence even after the latter’s style had begun to perplex him. Though sometimes irritated by Schoenberg’s arrogance, he stood resolutely by the younger composer, and apparently had to be restrained from attacking hecklers at the premiere of Schoenberg’s First String Quartet. Legend has it that when Mahler told the audience they had no reason to protest, someone replied: “I hiss at your symphonies too!” The exchange hints at the continuity and the likeness that the composers possessed in the minds of many of their contemporaries, for whom they signified all that was modern. (Mahler’s modernized re-orchestration of Beethoven’s Ninth provoked a backlash in Vienna as early as 1900. One critic called it “barbarism.”)

    Schoenberg’s full embrace of serialism may have baffled him, but Mahler was himself headed in an expressionist direction late in life, flirting with atonality in his final symphonies. There is a point at which late Mahler’s and the early Schoenberg’s styles seem close to converging, though Mahler died before the dynamic could play itself out. In 1909 he wrote to Schoenberg: “I have your quartet with me and study it from time to time… But it is difficult for me.” The letter concludes movingly, if cryptically: “I’m so terribly sorry that I cannot follow you better; I look forward to the day when I shall find myself again (and thus find you).” 

    Mahler completed his Ninth Symphony that same year — his final symphony, composed shortly after Das Lied, and a critical document of his “late” style. Its first movement is a little ghastly, touched by bitterness. Though it opens in D major, this D major is in troubled waters, wrestling with D minor for dominance throughout and easily swamped by dissonant explosions. These clashes are eerie, even nightmarish, and stray far from the relatively smoother surfaces of Mahler’s earlier works. The work’s final movement, like Das Lied’s, has been interpreted as expressing a kind of death drive: in its final bars a high A♭ voiced whisperingly by the first violins, trickles away until it is swallowed up by a closing D♭ major triad, and with an icy silence. Both Das Lied and the Ninth are farewells, but the Ninth terrifies in its utter opacity. Explicit hope of renewal, of an abiding “ewig,” seems less of a sure thing. I hasten to add that not everyone would agree with such a reading: Bruno Walter, who conducted the piece’s premiere in 1912, described its final movement as a “peaceful farewell; with the conclusion, the clouds dissolve in the blue of heaven.” I think Schoenberg gets a little closer to capturing its fearsome power: “[Mahler’s] Ninth is most strange,” he writes. “In it, the author hardly speaks as an individual any longer. It almost seems as though this work must have a concealed author who used Mahler merely as his spokesman, as his mouthpiece.” 

    This eclipsing or emptying out of the self, this surpassing of merely personal expression, could help to explain the tendency among some Mahler enthusiasts — I share it — to explain away his late drive toward maximal dissonance and disintegration. Such sonic violence must be Mahler’s intimation of a future to be mourned: political catastrophe, civilizational decline, aesthetic decay. As if someone had forced Mahler’s hand, as if he had looked straight into the maw of fascism and were crying out in prophetic sorrow. Bernstein claimed that Mahler’s symphonies “foretold all,” referring to the horrors of the twentieth century. Is this really so? Is all bleakness in early twentieth-century art a prophecy of historical catastrophe to come? There can be a curious mental block in considering that what sounds demonic in Mahler is being expressed not as commentary but for its own sake, or for a sake otherwise unknown to us. 

    And there is his unfinished, often atonal-sounding Tenth Symphony to consider, beside which the tempests of the Ninth may appear quite consonant, though the cobbled together version we possess bears an uncertain relationship to Mahler’s original intentions. When one contemplates the arc of his late output, one wonders where Mahler would have gone musically had he lived past fifty — had he lived even a few more years. In its form and tonal contours Mahler’s Ninth, especially its first movement, has always seemed to me to be blood brothers with Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, composed within the same decade, and with Anton Webern’s Passacaglia in D Minor, Op. 1, composed one year earlier. To pigeonhole Mahler as a mournful bookend to the Romantic age, as a late Romantic grieving a vanishing world and clinging to the last scraps of tonality available to him, would be to paper over his compositional range and evolution — and to neglect his flesh-and-blood immersion in his space and time. Tonal dissolution gripped Mahler, mystified him, and unnerved him; he gestured toward it increasingly. One wonders, in other words, what terrible storms Mahler could still have called forth. 

    After the Second World War, tonalists and serialists waged their own battle. “The compositional currents of an age shed light on the way it interprets past music, and vice versa,” Dahlhaus remarked. “It would distort their place in music history if we neglected to analyze the overlap between post-serial music and the Mahler renaissance.” Dahlhaus is in turn somewhat scathing on the term “late Romanticism,” seeing in it a blinkered “failure to take seriously enough the age’s sense of its own identity” — and worse:

    “Late romanticism” is a pejorative and polemically loaded term used in the 1920s by adherents of neo-classicism and the Neue Sachlichkeit [the New Objectivity] to separate themselves from the immediate past… [Turn-of-the-century modernism] saw itself as a fresh start in a new direction. It was the next generation that turned it into a historical denouement, a dead legacy, using terminology as a means to commit, as it were, historiological patricide.

    It is doubtless difficult to picture a composer sitting down to write “late Romantic music” or regarding himself with this vocabulary of overripeness; it smacks too much of historical hindsight. We do not like to think of ourselves as latecomers, artists least of all. It seems plausible rather that a composer would identify with what is newly brewing within and around him. But Dahlhaus touches on what makes the question a difficult one, namely its “pejorative and polemically loaded” dimension — its considerable political proportions. The mood of the twentieth-century musical scene was indeed feverishly political.

    Composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg held that functional harmony had atrophied: it was no longer enough to seize on dissonant chords and intervals, scramble tonal boundaries, or modulate into tonal nether regions as Wagner had done. An attack at the root was in order. Serialist theories, or variations on them, would become dogma thanks to some of Schoenberg’s more rabid students, to the René Leibowitz-descended school from which Boulez emerged, as well as to the serialist catechisms of Adorno. Popular audiences never quite caught up with the modern sound, finding it less than beautiful; it was incomprehensible noise to many of them, and they thirsted for music they could understand and adore. Later composers such as Milton Babbitt did not conceal their utter contempt for audience tastes. A chasm was widening between aesthetic factions who regarded each other with near-venomous enmity. The Mahler Renaissance bloomed in this era of ideological ferment. 

    And then there was the matter of Mahler’s Jewishness. The Third Reich had famously embarked on a scorched-earth campaign against modern art and modern music, inveighing against the jazz influences coursing through Weimar culture and nearly banning atonal music altogether (it was felt to possess a distinctly Jewish effluvium). The art historian Henry Grosshans writes that for Hitler “modern art was [seen as] an act of aesthetic violence by the Jews against the German spirit.” While it embraced and exalted the machinery of modern warfare, Nazism was on some level a neo-Romantic movement. It expounded and exploited the eminently Romantic longing for a pre-alienated past — a past that is always hypothetical and out of reach, but that one senses deep in one’s gut, buried but perhaps recoverable. This is the private imaginative soil upon which fascism preys.

    A particularly potent strain of antisemitism identified Jews with all that was discomfiting about modernity, including its critical spirit: modern art was too brainy for those Germans “who thought with their blood,” as Peter Gay put it. Jews were Oswald Spengler’s “decomposing element” in culture, and more broadly, a perfect stand-in for the early twentieth-century sense that art and life had grown disenchanted, fragmented, and drained of innocence. The twisted Otto Weininger, himself a Jew, had argued as much in his explosive tract Sex and Character (“inner ambiguity, I repeat, is absolutely Jewish,” he wrote, and “simplicity is absolutely un-Jewish”). This was a people fated to wander, foreigners in every land and yet mysteriously intellectually dominant therein. Jews were the ur-types of existential alienation, “rootless cosmopolitans” detached from the Volkskörper upon which they could only be parasites. The sickness of modernity was in essence a Jewish sickness and it could be fumigated with poison gas. That such an animus would abet the hypermodern death machine of the Third Reich is one of history’s most pitiless ironies. 

    Mahler, of course, was Jewish, born in 1860 to a petite bourgeois family in Kaliště and raised in Iglau, a small village on the Bohemian border. His family were German-speaking Jews in a sea of mostly Czech-speakers. After a stint of conservatory training and a slew of conducting appointments throughout Central Europe, Mahler arrived at the Vienna Court Opera in 1897, the same Vienna in which the famed antisemite Karl Lueger had recently been elected mayor. Mahler would convert to Catholicism in the year he took up the post, a conversion of the sort that Heine famously described as the “ticket of admission to European culture.” Lingering antisemitic feeling among his colleagues and resistance to the maestro’s severity would cause him to be driven out in 1907, and he accepted an appointment at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

    It was a tenuously assimilated Viennese milieu in which Mahler moved. It was also, as is well known, a climate of Jewish intellectual preeminence; the man who towered over it all was that skeptical and ambivalent and idiosyncratically proud Jew, Sigmund Freud. Hitler reported in Mein Kampf that his teenage immersion in Vienna cured him of his formerly Jew-friendly politics. The enlightened secularism of turn-of-the-century Jews was less than irrelevant to the Third Reich: conversion was an empty facade to those for whom Judaism was a race, and for whom race was deeply metaphysical. Despite Mahler’s conversion and thoroughgoing secular assimilation, and despite a substantially tonal body of work, his music would be effectively outlawed in Germany following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 (though Richard Strauss, as onetime president of the Reich Music Chamber, had advocated for the continued performance of his symphonies). A bronze bust of Mahler’s intensely expressive face, sculpted by Rodin in Mahler’s final years — and Alma’s gift to the Vienna State Opera in 1931 — would be destroyed by Nazis. Mahler’s niece, a virtuosic violinist and a baptized Protestant, would be deported in a cattle car to Auschwitz in 1943. The concepts and the vocabularies of the political sphere may leave art itself, not to mention the very notion of aesthetic quality, untouched — but the same is not true of artists, who may be silenced, crushed, and destroyed. 

    In the ashes of the postwar age there sprang up among some a desire to recover, and to honor, the “degenerate art” that the Nazis had loathed. The Third Reich had, to put it mildly, politicized music: who could blame those who politicized it in return? Ernst Krenek, who fled to the United States in 1938 and was himself briefly married to Mahler’s daughter, once explicitly claimed to write twelve-tone music to steer clear of fascist tastes: “My adoption of the musical technique that the tyrants hated most of all may be interpreted as an expression of protest.”(His jazz-opera Jonny spielt auf, which became a European sensation when it premiered in 1927, would be banned by the Nazis and in caricatured form became the poster image of the “Degenerate Music” exhibit in Düsseldorf in 1938.) After the Nazi conflation of Jews, modernism, and degeneracy — and their heralding of Beethoven and Wagner at official state events — it was difficult to simply get on with the usual programming. That unbroken chain of inheritances, Schoenberg’s “supremacy of German music,” was felt to be rotting from within. Some seemed to flinch from the beauty that once delighted them. Perhaps there was even a suspicion of the sweeping quality of Romantic music, its appeal to unreason, its sonic pull away from all limits and toward the infinite. Atonal music, by contrast, may preclude instinctual submersion, the annihilation of the self. It is a series of interruptions and roadblocks, defamiliarizing itself at every turn, forcing its listener moment by moment to begin again. Every successive sound punctures and slices up the silence anew.

    The Mahler revival flowered in this charged historical moment. Serialists and tonalists warred. Accusations of wrongthink abounded. Popular taste and conservative opinion shrunk from modern music, while universities and composition departments by and large embraced it. (It was difficult in some cases to get a faculty position as a tonalist in the later twentieth century, which yielded perhaps its own aesthetic sclerosis). Bernstein, a hero of this story, admirably tried to split the difference. He posited in his Norton lectures that two trends would define music in the coming century: the Schoenbergian break and the Stravinskian expansion, with Stravinsky personifying the maximization of harmonic ambiguity within tonal bounds. Mahler was a paragon of tonal expansion, in Bernstein’s eyes; on this he and Boulez agreed. Bernstein, though himself a tonalist inclined toward the Romantic, and though a bearer of incomplete theses, ultimately eschewed the dogma that insisted he take a side. He was comfortable declaring Mahler to be the very peak of German Romanticism and happy to acknowledge Mahler’s link to the modern school, in his embrace of tonal puzzles. Bernstein apprehended Mahler’s wistful backward glances but never denied his unflinching forward ones. Mahler was lucky to have had such a level-headed champion.

    Alma Mahler left a recollection of her husband’s final moments, and though it may be a little too good to be true, it is worth reproducing. 

    During his last days, while his mind was still unclouded, his thoughts often went anxiously to Schoenberg. “If I die, he will have nobody left. Who will protect him from the mob?” Then the end. Mahler lay with dazed eyes; one finger was conducting on the quilt. There was a smile on his lips and twice he said: “Mozart!”

    There it is, in all its poetic symmetry. 

    Upon completing Das Lied, Mahler had only four years to live; he was never to hear his work performed, and Walter would conduct its premiere in the wake of its creator’s untimely death. Death marked the work’s gestation and it would mark the work’s reception. This seems altogether fitting: the song of the earth is after all a song of death, and life and death, death and re-birth, constitute our notion of what a cycle is. Mahler’s song-cycle dies with “ewig” on its lips and leaves us rattled with paradoxical emotion. We hunger for resolution but it is denied us; we strain against the necessity of the end, but the end comes. To pinpoint the decisive moment would be impossible: we are not up for the task, and we imagine its arrival either too late or too soon. It is mysterious, the moment this beautiful dissonance slips into silence, like the moment the sun recedes from view — leaving the world strangely bright for a while, until suddenly it goes dark.

    Testimony of Sleep

    Past the fences of beds

    we are movie sheds

    of sleep.

     

    We can’t stamp

    or clap.

     

    At best

    we shriek in monkey speech,

    our old dialect,

    about the latest things.

     

    And then we 

    truly live through

    our own civilization. 

     

    Translated by Clara Cavanagh and Michal Rusinek

    Nights of Inseparation

    1.         Night.

          The bridge’s scent.

          The fence lets in roots.

          Water shines for the earth.

          A listening stone.

          A hair sings.

     

    1.     Night.

          Road.

          Your own knees lost in suppositions.

          There is no separate green.

     

          A different epoch of the hand,

          a different time of swaying.

     

          Moths and stars

          watch each other;

          they point crosswise

          to night’s rims of horizons

          a glass jar.

     

    1.     Night.

          Now we all grow together, we rotate,

             potatoes people dogs roofs . . . 

             Who’s going?  Who’s breathing?

             You above me and farther up—

             a branch, let’s shake on it,

             we won’t tread on one another,

                    oh my stony leg,

          oh bark oh fish

          speak say whatever . . . 

     

          you feel how our heart beats

                         under scales under shells

          oh, that anxiety

                    let’s get rid of it —

                    we die together

    Self-Verified

    A chair stands:

    article of truth

    sculpture of itself

    tied into one knot

             reality’s abstraction

     

    It broke.

    That’s a form too

             yes — candelabra

             yes — bull’s face.

     

    A chair’s abstract calling

    now summons

    whole crowds of reality

    ties them in one knot

    inside the stockroom of truth

             reality’s abstraction.

    My Jacobs of Weariness

    To Artur Sandauer

      Higher 

                  reveilles of shape

                                   habitations of touch

                  all weathers of the senses . . . 

     

    Lowest — I

             the staircase of reality

             rises from my breasts.

     

    And I feel nothing.

    Nothing succulent.

    Nothing colorful.

             I’m not only not

             a testament hero

    I’m worse than a flounder

             glued to the river’s deathbed

             with bunched balloons of breath

             fleeing upwards

    worse than a potato mother

             who sprouted vast antlers of roots

             herself wizened

             almost gone

    Smite me

    oh construction of my world!!

    This apartment can be inspired

    the window’s wing

    I’m in my nook

    my ears hum

    weeds carried on Noah’s line

    in the painting, it’s incomplete,

    old brown greens fluttering

    for three hundred years

    and an angel’s bent elbow

    ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 

    what is this art

    when centuries fly

    interplanetarily

    us knocking at our own doors

    all will dissolve

    still something calls for

    a gesture

    seeking

    an angel’s elbow

    Gray Eminences of Rapture

    Oh how I rejoice

             that you are sky and kaleidoscope 

             that you have so many artificial stars

          that you glow in a monstrance of brightness,

                         when I place your perforated

                         half-globe

                         over my eyes

                         under the air.

             How unstrained in abundance,

             oh colander spoon!

     

    The stove too is beautiful:

    it has tiles and chinks,

    it may be grizzled,

                   silver,

                  gray—even drowsy. . . 

    but especially when

    it shuffles its glints

    or as it sets

    and through the whole rhythm of its imperfections

    whitely poured

                  in charred bells

    it flows into elements

    of monumental bedding.

    Artless Art

    The Lamb

            Little Lamb, who made thee?

            Dost thou know who made thee? 

    Gave thee life, and bid thee feed 

    By the stream & o’er the mead,

    Gave thee clothing of delight,

    Softest clothing, wooly, bright,

    Gave thee such a tender voice,

    Making all the vales rejoice?

            Little Lamb, who made thee?

            Dost thou know who made thee?

     

            Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,

            Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee;

    He is callèd by thy name,

    For he calls himself a Lamb.

    He is meek, & he is mild,

    He became a little child.

    I a child, & thou a lamb,

    We are callèd by his name.

            Little Lamb, God bless thee! 

            Little Lamb, God bless thee!

        

    William Blake

     

    Nothing is harder to comment on than a piece of art which successfully pretends to artlessness, to be “merely” transcribing what a voice utters — or seems to utter: in real life nobody actually converses in rhyme, but readers of rhymed or rhythmic poetry accept the pentameters of “To be or not to be” as Hamlet’s “natural” way of speaking, just as audiences of opera accept the convention that whatever Rodolfo is “saying” to Mimi will be conveyed in song. In the rhyming lines of William Blake’s “The Lamb,” we hear a single voice speaking, in rhyme; there is no narrator, no editorial comment, no concluding summary. And no self-revelation by the artist-author.

    Although Blake was fiercely concerned with politics, and within a few years was to write long poems called The French Revolution and America, his little illustrated booklet called (and I imitate the original typeface) SONGS of Innocence, which appeared in 1789, offered poems of a simplicity that was hailed then (and sometimes even now) as “pure,” “childlike,” “transparent,” “sweet,” and of course “innocent.” The Songs utterly baffled me — as the productions of a grown man — when I first encountered them in high school, and I set them aside in favor of any poem (from Milton’s “Nativity Ode” to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”) which seemed properly and deeply reflective in thought and language. (Poems are meant, said Stevens, “to help us live our lives,” and in high school that was what I wanted from them.) 

    Later I decided, before even entering a doctoral program, that I wanted to write a dissertation on W. B. Yeats, but I knew that I had first to understand Blake. Yeats, in his twenties, had co-edited Blake’s works, and derived from them aspects of his own theory of poetry. When I entered Harvard’s graduate program, seeing that no course was addressing Blake in detail, I asked one of my professors to direct a semester-long “reading course” on Blake for me. Since he generously agreed, we met every week and read all of Blake’s poetry. My teacher tolerated our initial pursuit, but when my later papers began to concern Blake’s long “prophetic books” — mythological, obscure, and stormy fantasies about weirdly named people (“Oothoon”) living in weirdly named places (“Golgonooza”) — he groaned and said, “Helen, the awful things you are having me read!” But Yeats, following Blake’s declaration that “I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s,” indeed developed his own erratic mythological system, called A Vision, and my (imperfect) absorption of Blake gave me an entrance to writing on it. (My dissertation on Yeats became my first book, and I am still grateful to that reluctant teacher.) 

    Blake’s long poems, composed, like oratorios, of arias and choruses, are accompanied by his stunning but mysterious illustrations. (They may be found online in The Blake Archive.) They puzzled me, but I was still more puzzled by the ostentatious simplicity of “The Lamb” and other poems in his Songs of Innocence. Was there more to this artless art than I could see? I had faith in the sincerity of Blake’s promise to his readers in Jerusalem, composed between 1804 and 1820:

                           I give you the end of a golden string,

                           Only wind it into a ball,

                           It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate

                           Built in Jerusalem’s wall.  

    But how to find the golden string? An unforgettable lyric usually startles by some original feature, some conceptual or linguistic thread calling attention to itself. With intuition and investigation, the clue glows, the golden ball is wound up, and the poem assembles itself into an intelligible structure. But I could not find, for many years, any such golden string of entrance into “The Lamb.”

    BC Before introducing “The Lamb,” and explaining my dissent from the usual readings, I must add something about the origin and form of Blake’s two lyric sequences, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Even before he issued his engraved Songs of Innocence — with its appealing title page, elaborately designed, minutely populated, and beautifully colored — Blake had composed, as we know from his notebooks, dark poems, shocked and shocking, centered on female betrayal and male jealousy. In 1793, with Songs of Innocence completed, Blake published some of those despairing notebook poems with other lyrics in a collection called (I reproduce the text-format) SONGS of Experience, emphasizing the difference from the earlier sequence by repudiating the italic font of Innocence in favor of roman for Experience. He released only four copies of this booklet because he had changed his mind about the actual relation of the two sequences to each other. They should not, he realized, be presented as opposites but as complements. The following year — and ever after — he published the two sequences together, inextricably twinned in a single volume which bore an expansive and informative title page, cunningly expressive via the fonts ROMAN and italic, changing even the small introductory word “of” in its first two appearances to expose the contrast in the sequences: SONGS of Innocence and Of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. At the foot of the title page lie the prostrate figures of Adam and Eve wearing fig-leaves after their expulsion from Eden. 

    In spite of Blake’s blunt assertion that his poems convey “the two contrary states of the human soul,” readers persisted in identifying Innocence with Childhood and Experience with Adulthood, identifying the two “Contrary States” as successive life-periods rather than as fluctuating emotional and intellectual moods. If the two states of the human soul (“the” restricts them to only two) are recurrent from infancy to death, they might more accurately be designated Naïveté and Knowledge. They can in fact be two equally true renditions that allegorize a single event, as in, for example, the paired poems about the birth of a child, “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow.” In Innocence, under the title “Infant Joy,” a young mother imagines a virtual dialogue with her newborn but as yet unbaptized child. “Infant Joy” could more properly be called “A Mother’s Joy,” since it describes her state of mind. The speechless infant (Latin infans, “unable to speak”) seems to be requesting that the mother confer on it a pre-baptismal “human” name in lieu of the ecclesiastically required saint’s name:

    “I have no name:

    I am but two days old.”

    The mother immediately responds, deferring to the baby’s implied wish,

    “What shall I call thee?”

    The infant names itself (or, rather, the mother, once again, imagines what she would like to have the baby say):

    “I happy am, 

    Joy is my name.”

    And the mother offers a hopeful prayer for her child:

    “Sweet joy befall thee!”

    The baby’s “self-chosen” name, perhaps imagined by the mother (as Leo Damrosch suggests), as the capitalized female name “Joy,” is thus made identical with its hoped-for fate (a lower-case “joy”) and the elation of reciprocal exchange (“Joy” from the infant, “joy” from the mother) in the (imagined) dialogue begins to be felt. 

    The baby’s original “self-chosen” adjective was “happy,” and the mother in the second stanza, where dialogue ceases, provides the second of her own two adjectives (she has already uttered “sweet,” necessarily true of the abstraction “Joy”). Now, gazing at the bodily form of her infant, she chooses “pretty,” an aesthetic characterization, suitably small:

    “Pretty joy!

    Sweet joy but two days old,

    Sweet joy I call thee:

    Thou dost smile,

    I sing the while,

    Sweet joy befall thee!”

    The young mother addresses her silent baby in Blakean baby-talk, cooing in repetition her “pretty” and “sweet,” while recording the mutual and simultaneous happiness of mother and child. “I call thee sweet joy,” says the mother, caroling a series of praises in her delusion that she understands what her baby is “saying” and that it understands what she is “saying back.” It is actually her own upbrimming joy that the singing mother projects into the “smile” of her infant in this “innocent” ventriloquial, alliterating, and rhyming companionship: “Thou dost smile, / I sing the while.” 

    By his conclusive title-page-twinning of Innocence and Experience in 1794, and by characterizing the two nouns as “Contrary States,” Blake is embodying the law he had announced a year earlier in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Without Contraries is no progression.” He now asks himself to enlarge his perception by imagining a Contrary to maternal joy, expanding from Joy to Sorrow as he holds contrary moods in his mind at the same moment. While the fond mother is preparing her soul to dote on her child, what must be the state of soul of the actual newborn infant? 

    “Infant Sorrow,” the baleful song of Experience corresponding to “Infant Joy,” is an enraged monologue from the infant as he (who is ungendered in the poem; I use “he” for convenience) recapitulates the ignominy of his birth. With three paralleled verbs (“groan,” “weep” and “leap”) he fuses his tortured and unarmed birth-leap into dangerous Infant-Experience with the simultaneous dismal fall into Parent-Experience of his appalled mother and father. He pipes his birth-cry as his mother groans in agony and his father bursts into tears:

    My mother groan’d! my father wept,

    Into the dangerous world I leapt:

    Helpless, naked, piping loud,

    Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

    Who is thinking that the baby, with its unintelligible scream, is arriving like a monstrous “fiend hid in a cloud?” Its mother, of course, as we know from Blake’s draft of a different poem, “A Little Boy Lost,” in which a child — a truthteller like Lear’s Cordelia — says that it cannot love its parents more than itself. Hearing that reasonable assertion, the mother cries out in revulsion, “O that I such a fiend should bear!” (That Blake ultimately transfers the word “fiend” to a sadistic priest who burns the baby alive in “a holy place” does not erase, from the mind of the modern reader who knows the draft, Blake’s initial impulse to let the demonic epithet emerge from the mother.) 

    Just as he had “channeled” in “Infant Joy” the young mother’s delusion that she and the baby are in dialogue, so, as he continues “Infant Sorrow,” Blake “channels” the resentful baby’s angry thoughts as he announces the elements of his state, binding them by alliteration — he struggles, strives, and sulks:

    Struggling in my father’s hands,

    Striving against my swaddling bands,

    Bound and weary I thought best

    To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

    Although the infant writhes to escape the constraints of both nature (his father’s grip) and culture (the binding swaddling bands), he finds himself helpless, and sinks back, with no “Infant Joy” at all, to sulk upon his mother’s breast. And since Joy and Sorrow are two contrary states of the human soul, the allegorized Joy (in a mother) and Sorrow (in an infant) can arrive simultaneously on the poet’s page. The mother’s idea of the joyous internal state of her baby is pathetically naïve, while the baby’s infernal idea of itself — from its first horrible Experience — is entirely credible. 

    It must not be forgotten, in reading such songs as “Infant Joy” and “The Lamb,” that every single poem in Songs of Innocence has been written by an adult being who knows exactly what Experience always brings. The reader’s consciousness of the concealed adult author of Innocence must figure in any account of Blake’s art in the artlessness of “The Lamb.” I differ from earlier readers in believing that the poem “The Lamb” is — when we look at its companion poem in Experience, “The Tyger” — composed by the author-as-Tyger looking back with pity, on its deluded childhood state. The Tyger, accustomed in his early life to being a docile Lamb, has suddenly awakened in a wholly unfamiliar body, burning with the inner flame and armed with teeth and claws. We must see the nature of the child-speaker through the Tyger’s lens, because we too are Experienced (as well as perpetually Innocent), passing constantly, in each episode of life, from Ignorance to Knowledge, from naïveté to awareness. Throughout our life, if we do not refuse perception of our soul-states, we continue to undergo successive falls into Experience. In Blake’s long poem Vala, one character (speaking, we understand, for Blake himself) sums up the price of the soul’s repeated passage from ignorance to awareness, from error to wisdom, from hope to desolation:

    What is the price of experience? do men buy it for a song?

    Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price

    Of all that a man hath, his wife, his children.

    Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,

    And in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for bread in vain. 

    What, then, are we to make of “The Lamb?” It was sometimes carelessly thought that Blake was speaking in his own voice to the Lamb, but the single line, “I a child, and thou a Lamb,” establishes that Blake has created a fictional child, who speaks to an equally fictional Lamb. The two initial questions put to the Lamb by the child seem innocent enough, since they reproduce the first question in the Christian catechism as adapted for children: “Who made you?” (This calls up its answer, “God made me.”) Any churchgoing Christian of Blake’s day would recognize the child’s Biblical allusions: from Psalm 23, “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters”; and from Psalm 114, a metaphor of nature expressing lamb-like joy: “The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs.” There seems nothing here to “interpret,” once one recognizes the Christian references echoed by the churchgoing child-speaker: he knows that God made the Lamb; that John the Baptist called Jesus “the Lamb of God” and that Jesus applied the epithet to himself; that God (as Jesus) became a “little child”; and that Jesus said “Learn of me, because I am meek and lowly of heart.” The Christian reader would also know that the child has sung Charles Wesley’s two hymns for children (published in 1742): “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, / Look on me, a little child,” and “Lamb of God, I look to thee; / Thou shalt my example be; / Thou art gentle, meek and mild, / Thou wast once a little child.” It seems that the child is now charmingly conveying his religious knowledge to a “little lamb,” met in the meadow. The invisible author of the poem is presumably delighting in his vignette of a young child as innocent “teacher.” 

    The child makes his first departure from religious echo-paraphrase into unconscious originality as his attention turns — with no feeling of impropriety — from received doctrine to his bodily senses of touch and vision. Lambs in the meadow are to him huggable pets, and as he recalls embracing them, he imagines a God who has bestowed on the Lamb his unBiblical “softest clothing, wooly, bright.” In fact, Blake reproduces the “hug” in Innocence via the poem called “Spring,” in which the child-speaker converses (in wholly sensuous terms) with a Lamb: the child has not yet been brought under the Vicar’s indoctrination.

    Little Lamb

    Here I am,

    Come and lick

    My white neck.

    Let me pull

    Your soft Wool.

    Let me kiss

    Your soft face.

    I propose that Blake knowingly composed “The Lamb” as an ironic text. Because the poem has a child-speaker, Blake has decided on stylistic simplicity in its stanza form, rhyming, rhythm, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and two-stanza structure. Critics have had very little to say, therefore, about “The Lamb,” preferring by far to expatiate upon its paired Experience poem, “The Tyger.” 

    Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

    In the forests of the night,

    What immortal hand or eye

    Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

    The speakers of the two poems seem like wholly different personages, and the animals they address could hardly be less alike: the child-speaker of “The Lamb” seems to have fellow-feeling for the Lamb, while the speaker of “The Tyger” is terrified by the predator that has appeared before him. The Creator of the beast is imagined as an immortal and inscrutable artist, using both physical force (“hand”) and conceptual design (“eye”) to inaugurate an unprecedented visual symmetry, not the familiar symmetry of beauty but one of fright and fear. Since selections in anthologies have reinforced the notion that Blake composed Innocence about childhood and Experience about adulthood, the “paired poems” of the two sequences are examined for difference rather than for resemblance. Yet one must arrive at some view considering the Lamb and the Tyger as Contrary States rather than Opposite Animals. 

    An ironic reading of “The Lamb” arises from our scrutinizing the little drama between child and lamb. Under what circumstances did the child learn the truths that he is teaching the lamb? We deduce that the child has just begun attending the lessons in Christian belief offered to the youngest children of the Infant Class at Sunday School. On the child’s first day, the Vicar has humiliated the newcomer by omitting any kind of welcome such as “Little Child, I greet thee, / Little Child, I greet thee”, which would match his closing “professional” dismissal: “Little Lamb, God bless thee! / Little Lamb, God bless thee!” Instead the Vicar situates his little student at a disadvantage by putting to him the first question in the catechism — “Who made thee?” — to which the child, not knowing the answer and feeling ignorant, remains dumb. Refusing to reveal the correct answer, the Vicar once again exhibits the child’s vacancy of mind, insisting a second time on the question, this time revealing the child’s lack of knowledge: “Dost thou know who made thee?” The child hangs his head in embarrassment. Having established the child’s inferiority, the Vicar finally, in the second stanza, offers the missing answer. “Little child, I’ll tell thee,” he says, then grandly repeats his intention with “Little child, I’ll tell thee,” implicitly boasting of his own superior knowledge and demonstrating the child’s earlier inadequacy of response. 

    We find ourselves asking, as we think about the poem, why the child has chosen to address a lamb, but as soon as we raise the question, we realize that every local child who has preceded Blake’s child in the Infant Class surely knows the answer to the opening question, so that the only available creature younger and more ignorant than himself is the Lamb. The whole drama now presents itself to us as a role-playing drama arranged by the child, in which he is playing the Vicar and the Lamb is cast as his own first-day self. When he, imitating the Vicar, poses the question in its variant form as a determiner of the child’s cognitive capacity — “Dost thou know who made thee?” — the Lamb is helplessly silent (as the child himself had been). The Lamb, questioned, is satisfactorily speechless, and now the child, addressing the “ignorant” Lamb, can take on, in the second stanza, the satisfactory (if evil) role of the twice triumphant Vicar: “Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee, / Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee.” 

    The Vicar, as we deduce from the poem’s reflection of his Infant-Class teaching, has been carefully selecting and sanitizing the portions of Christian belief purveyed to the child. The Vicar’s lessons never mention the vengeful God of Isaiah and the Psalms, nor the violent Jesus who drives the moneychangers from the temple, nor why Jesus calls himself a Lamb (metaphorically anticipating the Passover when he will be slaughtered). In fact, although the child has been told the Christmas story (“He became a little child”), the tragic story of the Passion and Crucifixion remains concealed from him, as does the divine virtue of violence in moral condemnation, defamation, or exclusion. 

    When a child hurting from a visit to the dentist replays the visit with a younger child, the former victim must become of course the pain-inflicting dentist: the whole point of the role-playing is for the child to reverse the roles, to take on the triumph of the victor and thereby triumph over his past passivity. We become spectators of the child’s “innocent” sadism as he humiliates the Lamb (thereby revealing the way in which he was himself humiliated by the Vicar). And our heart sinks at how much the child will ultimately have to learn about the life of Jesus — above all, the harsh tragedy of the Crucifixion. The implicit cruelty of the child, as, unaware of his own ignorance, he complacently and proudly dominates the Lamb, represents his first step into Experience as he (by design) defeats the hapless Lamb, his ideal (because language-less) victim. 

    Even before composing “The Lamb,” Blake understood that there never has been, nor could there ever be, a time of entire and sinless Innocence. In a marginal inscription in the manuscript of The Four Zoas (never illustrated, never published) he writes:

    Unorganized Innocence, An Impossibility.

    Innocence dwells with Wisdom but never with Ignorance.

    BC The animal Blake chose as the contrary to the “innocent” Lamb is the Tyger. And the poem, in its short-form lyric drama, recounts, in my view of it, the frightening passage into Experience as the (male) adolescent undergoes it. The little child, formerly clothed in the soft white garment of the docile Lamb, wakes up overnight to sexual power and aggressive physicality as he discovers himself metamorphosed, with no warning, into a Tyger. He has become a predator whose substance is flame and whose habitation is darkness. Apprehensive questions, as rhythmic as the anvil-strokes of the Maker at the forge, burst out of the adolescent as he becomes the protesting witness of his own overnight transformation — by some unseen and apparently malevolent agent — into an unrecognizable and “evil” creature.

    This Beast is the result of a Blakean seventh day of Creation. God has already said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And since a man was indeed created in the image and likeness of God, according to Genesis, can it be that the Tyger is another image and likeness of the divine? And since God has pronounced his creations good, did he smile in approbation as he contemplated his creature of savage strength, the Tyger? The angelic Stars, seeing the Tyger, regard its creation as a catastrophe, because it reveals that human erotic desire and human lust for aggression must be understood as aspects of God: “Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Later, in his illustrations to the book of Job, Blake gives his definitive answer to the adolescent’s frightened speculation. The divine “voice out of the whirlwind” represents himself to Job as the creator of two monsters, Behemoth and Leviathan, praising their nature and their powers. In Blake’s engraving, the Behemoth of land and the Leviathan of sea, both magnificently hideous, share a single design: inside a circle, Behemoth stands above on land and Leviathan twists below in the sea. The design bears as its subscribed title God’s own words to Job: “Behold now Behemoth, which I made with thee.” “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Yes, the voice has implied, and he made you, Job, and with you Behemoth and Leviathan, the sacred monsters who are as holy as any other creature. “For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life, /Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.” With those two lines in his America, Blake entered his fundamental creed in 1783, even before he twinned Innocence with Experience. 

    The adolescent investigating the burning state of his soul knows, as he frames his questions to the Tyger, that there are two fires in nature: the celestial fire of the sun and the volcanic fire underground. Where did the maker find the molten raw material for the Tyger? “In what distant deeps” (of Hell) — and then he must extend the boundaries of the question to the alternative — “or [celestial] skies” — “burned the fire of thine eyes?” He answers his own question by admitting the need to search out the fire by ascent into the air: “On what wings dare he aspire?” The fire lives with God: the human soul would be incomplete without sexuality and aggression, lust and war; otherwise the soul would find itself permanently arrested in the Contrary state, the naïveté of Innocence. 

    The mild appearance of the Tyger in Blake’s engraving accompanying the poem has often been criticized, even mocked. But because this Tyger is an image and likeness of God, we must see him as one of the transfigured predators in “the Peaceable Kingdom” prophesied in Isaiah 11: 6-7, in which not only does the Wolf dwell with the Lamb, but the carnivores are transformed into herbivores:

    The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them…. And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

    Blake had once thought (in “Night” in Innocence) that this transformation could take place seamlessly, in a final heavenly phase of the predators’ existence: after the predators have massacred the herbivores, the “mild spirits” of the sheep inherit celestial new worlds. The lion, weeping tears of gold, joins them there as the guardian of the sheepfold, who tells the lamb, that he, the lion, newly herbivorous, can follow him in grazing:

    “And now beside thee, bleating lamb,

    I can lie down and sleep;

    Or think on him who bore thy name,

    Graze after thee and weep.

    For, wash’d in life’s river,

    My bright mane for ever

    Shall shine like the gold

    As I guard o’er the fold.”

    In this transcendent state of “Organized Innocence,” Innocence is no longer ignorant and Experience is no longer destructive. 

    But Blake found no relief in castrating the Tyger (or the Lion) into a herbivore cohabiting with the Lamb. Instead, in the apocalyptic Four Zoas, he constructed a Last Judgment in which the roaring Lions regain all their strength. The ninth night has come, the grapes of wrath are being trampled, and the harvest grape-wagons are brought to the winepress by “ramping tygers” and “furious lions”: 

    Then Luvah stood before the Wine press; all his fiery sons

    Brought up the loaded Waggons with shoutings; ramping tygers play

    In the jingling traces; furious lions sound the song of joy

    To the golden wheels circling upon the pavement of heaven, & all

    The Villages of Luvah ring.

    Blake, without dismissing individual sexual emotions, aged into despair over collective evils. He declared love to be, and declared Love to be the true religion of Jesus, and preached peace by the forgiveness of sins and the eternal brotherhood of man. He ended his last and longest “prophetic book,” the Jerusalem of ninety-eight illuminated engravings, in visionary prophecy of a redeemed time. In its grand rhetoric, he has come farthest from the concise art and artlessness of Innocence and Experience. 

    Does it make any difference to represent “The Lamb” as a poem constituted by irony instead of by innocence? Yes, if it renders a truer account of Blake’s representation of Innocence. If the art concealed by its artlessness enlarges our view of Blake’s capacity for moral subtlety, then we may see, among his thousands of vigorous lines, more such subtleties. It is not until we have the two poems before us that we perceive the Lamb’s four-beat verse-speech to be technically identical (as trochaic tetrameter rhyming couplets) to that of the Tyger, establishing their indivisible continuity of being. Only in the Vicar’s word-for-word repeated formal “staging,” opening and closing each stanza of “The Lamb” does the child imitate the Vicar’s original words “Little Child, who made thee?. . . Little Child, God bless thee!” (The child merely substitutes “Lamb” for the Vicar’s “Child.”) Only the lines reproducing the Vicar’s “professional” speech are written in three-beat form: this is the Vicar’s ungenerous rhetoric. But as soon as we move into the Lamb’s hazy recollections of church-instruction, we see that he, by contrast, speaks in four-beat lines, ampler than those of the Vicar. The Lamb’s utterances are “smooth,” with “sweet” rhythms, even though their metrical signature of successive downbeats is not usually a mild music. The four-beat equally trochaic lines of “The Tyger,” with their truculent “anvil-beats,” reproduce the “grownup” form of the Lamb’s four-beat mildness. We take no particular notice of the meter as we read, “Gave thee life, and bid thee feed / By the stream & o’er the mead”—but who could fail to notice the distortion of sentence-form and the hammering percussive questions in the heated, equally trochaic, downbeats of “The Tyger? 

    What the hammer? What the chain,

    In what furnace was thy brain?

    What the anvil? What dread grasp

    Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

    Keeping the same meter, Blake “acts out” for us the metamorphosis from placidity to terror as Innocence discovers itself mutating from ignorance into Experience.

    The art of the artless tempts every artist: its “vitreous finish” (Heaney on Yeats) repels explanation of its effect. It can be childish (as in “The Lamb”) or unbearable (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”). In music it is idyllic (the shepherd’s pipe), in art confounding (“This is not a pipe” accompanying a pipe). It grounds theology (“I am that I am”) and establishes morality (“Thou shalt not kill”). It can be the quintessence of sublimity: at the heavenly banquet Herbert’s final words are “So I did sit and eat.” It can have a deadpan humor: “What do you read, my lord?” “Words, words, words.” But it is in tragedy that the art of artlessness reaches its greatest eloquence: Desdemona, dying, when asked “O, who hath done this deed?” replies, “Nobody — I myself.” And the broken Lear, bending over the dead Cordelia, comes to the end of language: 

                            Thou’lt come no more. 

    Never, never, never, never, never.

    After an unbearable death, nothing comes to mind but Lear’s five-word line.

     

    The Shape of a Question

    A fragile creature that cannot be broken is confounding, and this juxtaposition of delicacy and strength renders it freakishly powerful. Isabelle Huppert is so constituted. This is evident from almost every one of the dizzying number of films in which she has appeared. Her aura is incongruously encased in an exceedingly slim frame. Animated by the whirling of an inhuman engine, she provokes awe, disgust, lust, and adoration. She has said that the art of acting requires a peculiar combination of passivity and power, and passive power is precisely what she exudes. It emanates from her with unmistakable and inexplicable force. Huppert is just over five feet tall, and thin in a way that would be grotesque if she were slightly taller. If you held her with your hands on each of her hips, pressing your thumbs down along the slope of her hip bones, you would feel as if you could break her in half. She would look you dead in the eye and invite your violence.

    It is impossible to identify which combination of her physical characteristics confers beauty — she is slightly too pretty to be plain and not by any conventional standard sexy enough to justify her undeniable physical magnetism. Huppert burns even when she is icy. She always does — every variation of her, in all of the hundreds of films and plays in which she has been serially reincarnated. Some believe that it is an actor’s job to camouflage herself so that the person playing the part seeps entirely into the character and disappears. For some, that is what is meant by “acting.” Huppert thinks otherwise. In all of her roles she is always also herself. This is especially remarkable because of her subtlety, her utter lack of interest in “pulling focus”; she is not always Isabelle Huppert in the way that Al Pacino is always Al Pacino and Vanessa Redgrave is always Vanessa Redgrave. She says that her filmography is a kind of autobiography, which is to say that she has been hundreds of women, and all of them are charged with her electricity, her passive power, her sex and heat and frigidity. 

    Annick Huppert, née Beau, gave birth to her fifth child on March 16, 1953 in Paris’ sixteenth arrondissement. She and her husband, Raymond, named their baby Isabelle and raised her in Ville d’Avray, a suburb seven and a half miles from the center of Paris. (It is the setting of the movie Les dimanches de Ville d’Avray, which won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1963, as Huppert proudly repeats.) Raymond was a Russian Jew who married a Catholic, and the Hupperts sent all their children to the St. Cloud Gymnasium, a Catholic school which Isabelle attended until she was sixteen years old. (Her parents married directly after the war. She has never spoken publicly about how her father made it through that catastrophe, or how being the daughter of a Jew who survived the Nazi occupation hardened, softened, or in any other way altered her.) 

    Encouraged by her mother to pursue a career in the arts, she enrolled at the Conservatory of Versailles, and then earned a BA in Russian Literature from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales before studying at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in Paris. Her teachers were Jean-Laurent Cochet and Antoine Vitez, who furnished French cinema with the next generation’s Milky Way, producing stars such as Gérard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart, Fabrice Luchini, and of course Huppert. When asked what she learned at the conservatory, Huppert insists she learned nothing at all. She either never absorbed or willfully purged its teachings. She attended the school because it was where young people who wanted a career in theater and film taxied before takeoff. She and her peers took part in the ritual of knocking on the doors of directors they admired looking for work, a rite of passage among young theater students. 

    In this way she won her first film role in 1972. She achieved national recognition five years later as Pomme in The Lacemaker, a tragedy about a shy girl driven insane by her own timidity. For this part she won the BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer. Claude Chabrol, a director whose temperament and philosophy of cinema were preternaturally compatible with hers, cast her as his lead in Violette Nozière in 1978. If a director agrees to work with Huppert, he must be prepared to cede significant freedoms, since her film style is unique and immovable. She changes the ether of the movie. Chabrol didn’t mind: her ether enriched his. The two would go on to make seven movies together. (He died in 2010 while their eighth collaboration was incubating.) 

    Violette Noziere recounts the true, gory tale of a Parisian murderess who, in 1933, poisoned both her parents and incensed all of France. She was the Lizzie Borden of the French petit-bourgeois, only without the acquittal. The film earned Huppert the first of her two best actress awards at Cannes, and is the earliest instance of a stereotypical Huppert part: severe, disturbing, mysterious, riveting, somewhat opaque, and deepened by a feral intelligence. Throughout the 1980s she worked with some of the greatest directors in the world, including Jean-Luc Godard (Every Man for Himself, 1980, and Passion, 1982), Joseph Losey (La Truite, 1982), Diane Kurys (Entre Nous 1983), Andrzej Wajda (The Possessed, 1988), and of course Claude Chabrol (Une Affaire de femmes, 1988). 

    Today Huppert is considered one of the greatest actresses alive, in both theater and film. A.O. Scott has called her the world’s greatest actress, and in The New York Times list of “The 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century,” published in 2020, Huppert came in second behind Denzel Washington. This status was secured over a long and frenetically busy career, but it was cemented most powerfully in 2001 by her unforgettable performance as Erika Kohut in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. She played an emotionally stunted, self-mutilating pianist who lives in a small apartment with her monstrous mother. Erika, who has been capable of experiencing passion only through music, suddenly discovers to her horror that she has fallen in love with one of her students. Driven by a ferocious appetite that she cannot constrain, she begs him to engage in sadomasochistic sex. His compliance and subsequent disgust are equally devastating to her. Early in the film she slices inside her own vagina with a razor blade; in the final scene, she plunges a kitchen knife into her shoulder while walking out of a performance hall. Her self-contempt is excruciating to witness.

    2016 was the most impressive year of her film career to date. She received her first Oscar nomination for Elle, a movie about a rape victim who seeks out and seduces her rapist, and L’Avenir, a film about a middle-aged professor, was heralded as one of the best movies of the new century. The similarities between her characters in the two films have been noted, but the differences between them are profound and significant. In the public imagination Huppert is caricatured as a perverse exhibitionist. Michèle, the protagonist of Elle, is the kind of role that viewers assume she would choose to play because it is known that her characters are often weirdly sexed. But that is hardly what is most interesting about Huppert’s character in Elle. Michèle is hypnotically complicated. We witness her struggle in every realm of life: as a mother, a daughter, a businesswoman, an erotic being, and a victim. That complexity is what drew Huppert to the role. But the role of Nathalie in L’Avenir, a professor attempting to make sense of her life after a series of personal and professional catastrophes, is equally Huppertian. She doesn’t choose roles because they are edgy. Edginess is just another familiar category, but Huppert is not governed by familiar considerations. For her even the edge is too close to the center. Her art takes place on another plane.

    Huppert’s relationship to her medium is strange, and not only for the obvious reason that she often plays similarly discomfiting, unpleasant, and unusual people. She is doing something uncommon through acting, and whatever this strange project is it defies articulation. Huppert’s belief in the limitations of language is mystical. It is symptomatic of a sophisticated lack of faith in human reason. She is impatient with ordinary human trust in language’s communicative capabilities, and with the common intolerance for mystery that language is often enlisted to dispel. She thinks that human behavior is chronically incomprehensible, and she makes films which reflect such a conception. Her films do not tell their viewers how to interpret them. As she puts it, she makes movies “in the shape of a question, not in the shape of an answer.” She vivifies characters without fully understanding them, and she chooses characters who thwart transparency and defy explanation. She is certainly uninterested in cultivating the kind of intelligibility that viewers crave in movies and people crave in life. Huppert does not harbor those cravings. She has remarked that “we always feel slightly misunderstood and misjudged in life. We should gain strength rather than weakness from it. I always feel misunderstood, and yet that is what I seek.” She does not analyze her roles, she feeds herself into them, syncopating herself to their rhythms or mixing their rhythm with hers. 

    There are actors and directors and viewers for whom cinema offers the opportunity to present coherent narratives made up of legible characters who do the things they do for discernible reasons. Sometimes these reasons and the actions that they precipitate are morally reprehensible and sometimes they are morally sound. Sometimes they are both these things. Rarely are they wholly bewildering. For the kinds of actors and directors who make films which broadcast who is good and who is bad — and they are the sort whose products sell at the box office — the characters in their movies respond to stimuli the way people have been taught to think they ought to respond. “Cinematic” here means, among other things, comprehensible, transparent, even obvious. When horrible things happen to them, the characters get upset. When a character commits horrific crimes, the viewer knows why she does it and so does the character herself. Villains are unattractive unless it is made clear to the audience that they are somehow contrite, or at least victims themselves. A great actress is expected to know precisely why the character she plays so much as cocks an eyebrow, and to communicate this understanding to the audience so that the audience acquires the same knowledge, and learns, if not to like the character, then at least to understand her. Understanding is paramount. Bafflement, mystery, irrationality— all endemic to the human experience — are not seriously treated. One of the illusions upon which we have come to depend in film is that, as Jean Renoir imperishably instructed, everyone has his reasons.

    But in life, far more often, no one does. That is Huppert’s creed. 

    Consider the following vignettes from three of Huppert’s most representative works.

    From Violette Noziere (directed by Claude Chabrol, 1978):

    Violette Nozière sits quietly at the kitchen table beside her balding father and watches him with thickly lined, unblinking eyes. He swallows all of the water mixed with his allotment of white powder, which she has told him and her mother the doctor prescribed for all three of them. She had brought the powder home in her purse, carefully encased in three paper packages with one of their names on each. When his glass is empty she raises her own, which she has filled with milk to disguise the fact that it contains no powder, and downs its contents in one gulp. A trickle of white glimmers at the corner of her lip which she curls slightly while looking into her father’s eyes. The red nail polish on the hand grasping the glass complements her deep lipstick and the auburn hair elegantly curled close to her head. She is out of place in the drab, cramped apartment with her dowdy father and mother. Violette replaces the glass on the table and, still unblinking, says that “It tastes better that way.” He turns to his wife and instructs her to add milk to her concoction. “I don’t like milk,” she grimaces before drinking half her own glass. “Oh, it tastes horrible!” She crosses the length of the dining room in two strides, enters the small space which serves as a kitchen, and pours the remaining liquid in the sink. Violette watches with concentration but without apparent anxiety. Then she stands and yawns while her mother mutters over her shoulder, “I’ll fetch the roast. It’s overcooked.”

    Père Nozière rises shakily and tries to tell his daughter to go take a nap, but he cannot fully form the words. “My Vio.. My Viole…” he coughs, clutches the table and then falls backwards onto the floor, wheezing for breath. “What’s the matter?” his wife shrieks, rushing towards him. She simultaneously stoops down and turns back towards her daughter. “Violette, stand up, your father is sick!” But almost immediately her own body begins to contort. She groans, exhales hoarsely, tries to pull herself up off the floor and then looks in horror at her daughter before gasping and falling between the table and the wall.

    Violette waits for silence before kneeling beside her father to see if he is still breathing. She retches and rushes towards the bathroom to vomit, then stumbles back into the dining room, crouches over her mother’s inert body and searches her pockets for the keys to the bureau in which her parents have hidden their savings. She finds it, walks with purpose to her parents’ bedroom, unlocks the bureau and rummages through its contents. She finds the money, which she balls up in her fist. Then she walks back into the dining room, sits at the table set for three, pulls the baking pan with the overcooked roast towards herself, hacks off a large piece, and eats it with her fingers. 

    From L’Avenir (directed by Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016):

    “Salut!” Nathalie calls to her husband while tossing her keys and her bag on the console near the front door. “Oof!” She walks swiftly to the couch, throws herself down, and swings her feet up onto the coffee table and her head back into the pillow. She has walked to and from work in heels. The walls and the upholstery of the small apartment are white, and the sun shines through the glass double doors which open onto the balcony and reflects gently off the lacquered wooden table. Husband and wife are both professors and their walls are lined with tightly packed books whose spines provide most of the color in the room. “I’m exhausted. Aren’t you?” Her husband walks gingerly towards her from the kitchen, his face strangely grim. 

    “What is it? Why so down?” she asks him, still slumped against the cushions. 

    “Nathalie, I must tell you. I met someone.” 

    “What do you mean?” she says, pulling her legs down and leaning towards him. Without changing her tone or expression, she asks, “And why tell me? Couldn’t keep it a secret?” 

    “I’m moving in with her.” 

    “What?” Her voice rises very slightly, and her eyes widen but do not glimmer. He sits down across from her and looks at his feet and then over at his wife’s face. “Are you sure?” she asks him, quietly but firmly. 

    “Yes, I’m sure.” 

    “Has it been going on for a long time?” 

    “A while.” 

    “A student?” 

    “Of course not.” 

    “Who then?” 

    “You don’t know her.” 

    She pauses, looks away, and then mutters to herself, “I thought you’d love me forever… How stupid!” She stands and walks past him towards the kitchen. 

    “I’ll always love you, Nathalie. You know it.” 

    “Oh, stop it,” she murmurs. 

    She spends the next morning grading papers on the balcony, but caps her pen and stands when she hears her husband come home. “Lunch is ready, just warm it up,” she tells him. “You’re not eating?” “Not here.” Nathalie walks past him and out the door.

    From Elle (directed by Paul Verhoeven, 2016):

    A man in a black ski mask forced his way into Michèle’s spacious high-ceilinged living room, threw her to the ground, ripped open her shirt, and raped her. He left his victim on the floor. A streak of blood covers the length of her left thigh. Fragments of glass and china are littered around her head, as she had pulled the tablecloth on which she had been eating to the floor while flailing to escape. A black and blue mark is rapidly materializing over her left eye. She sits up slowly, blank-faced, and dimly notices the debris beside her. She retrieves a broom and dustpan and sweeps the clanking shards up and into the trash. She strips, throws out the dress she had been wearing, and draws a bubble bath. In the tub blood rises to the surface and stains the bubbles above her groin.

    She dries off and dresses, then orders sushi on the phone. “Some hamachi. Two pieces. What is a ‘holiday roll’? … Okay… Thank you.”

    Her son rings the doorbell and apologizes for being late. “How are you?” he asks.

    “I’m ok.” 

    “What’s that?” He gestures towards the bruise above her eye. 

    “I fell riding my bike.” 

    “That thing?” He nods at the bicycle. 

    “Yes.” 

    “Looks like you never rode it.” 

    “And you can see why,” She replies, walking past him and into the dining room. “So, you’ve carefully avoided saying what this job is.”

    He admits he has just started an entry level job at McDonalds. “Mmm.” She grunts, displeased but not surprised. 

    “I bought you a present,” he tells her while rooting around in his bag. He hands her a framed photograph of himself with his arms around a very pregnant young woman. “It was all Josie’s idea, really.” Michèle tells him he looks very handsome and then hands back the frame. He places it on the end table. “Josie has all kinds of ideas about decorating.” 

    “How much money do you want for the apartment?” she asks, abruptly. 

    “I didn’t ask for money.” 

    “Noooo, it was just me hearing voices.” 

    “I planned to ask you for collateral, not money.” 

    “And Josie’s boyfriends? Any of them moving in, too?” 

    Startled, he drops the bit of sushi clenched between his chopsticks onto his pants. “Shit! These were just cleaned!” 

    When she stands to retrieve a napkin from the cupboard, she moves the framed photograph that he has just given her behind a pair of candlesticks. 

    “That girl is clearly dysfunctional. You know nothing about her, except that she was raised in a commune of idiots who never bathe.” 

    “An arts collective!” 

    “Why you? What’s she after?” 

    “What could she be after? I have no money.” 

    “I do!” 

    “What’s with you today?” 

    She looks glumly at him while chewing. After he leaves she rifles through a drawer of tools and finds a small hammer. That night she holds it beside her on the pillow while she sleeps.

    For the entirety of their respective films, each of these women torment viewers with their perplexing behavior. In Violette Noziere, after it has been discovered that she poisoned both her parents, a judge says to her, “I am trying to understand.” And Violette replies, “There is nothing to understand.” Neither Michèle nor Nathalie do anything like poison their parents, but both respond unpredictably, maddeningly, to the things that happen to them. And if similarly probed, both Michèle and Nathalie would have responded just as Violette did: “there’s nothing to understand.” Understanding is emphatically not the point.

    Interviewers — who, like most of us, abhor ambiguity — routinely ask Huppert why her characters make the choices they make, assuming that an actor’s job is to furnish her characters with motivations. If pressed, Huppert insists that bafflement was precisely her objective. She is not being coy. Her acting is devoid of psychological causation. She doesn’t know why Violette poisoned her father and mother, or why Nathalie didn’t scream at her husband when he announced that he was leaving her for another woman, or why Michèle pursues a sexual relationship with her rapist. And Violette, Nathalie, and Michèle do not understand themselves any better than Huppert does. They are in this way exactly like ordinary human beings.

    Another subject about which Huppert is regularly asked is her “process,” since it is assumed that playing complex, emotionally taxing parts requires research, or preparatory rituals, or a litany of exercises. “Did you study the character’s profession?” “Did you read scholarly historical works about the period?” “Did you talk to the director about your character and did you together decide why she behaves as she does?” Huppert has been peppered with these and analogous questions in virtually every interview she has done since Violette Noziere. She has been explaining for just as long that these questions evince a total misunderstanding of how she approaches film. For one thing, her relationship with a director is the most essential element of every movie she makes: she picks her movies on the basis of who is directing them, and she never talks to the directors about her character. In fact, the two directors with whom she has enjoyed working most, Claude Chabrol and Paul Verhoeven, said nothing to her while she was in front of the camera. Their communication was all non-verbal:

    [Verhoeven and Chabrol] never said anything verbally. But there are different ways to communicate between a director and an actress. Cinema is a language in itself and it is certainly more powerful than anything that can be communicated verbally. I think there was direction but it was all about the mise en scène and the camera movements and camera frames and that language was strong enough and eloquent enough that we didn’t have to go through the usual explanations. I think that all questions are indiscreet for a director and I expect a different kind of answer so it doesn’t bother me if Paul [or Claude] didn’t ever say a word to me.

    Enveloping herself in the mise-en-scéne of the role is entirely how she readies for it. “I don’t do any research.” “There is no preparation.” “When you decide to do a role, something starts to grow within you.” 

    Once she has committed to do a part, Huppert’s process is “very technical,” by which she means it is tactile. Among the most important elements are wardrobe and hair and make-up. Costume envelopes her in this new person’s weather. They help Huppert to decide “how she’s going to move, how she’s going to walk,” and facilitate a kind of chemical reaction. She “clicks chemically,” and she does “it more by intuition than reflection.” This strange alchemy creates a new person, an admixture of Huppert and her character, which is among the reasons that Huppert always feels so startlingly present, so immediate, on screen. “[This is] the only way to make [the character] live, which is the ultimate goal. To make it close to life, to the truth, and the only way to be close to life is to impose yourself.” There is no mediation between her and the roles that she plays. No inner program, no “method,” comes between Huppert and her character. 

    It was determined at some moment in recent history that the swiftest way of communicating Isabelle Huppert’s prestige to American audiences was to christen her “the French Meryl Streep.” Insofar as both women command, in their respective countries, an almost religious reverence, the analogy is useful. It is also misleading: Streep’s and Huppert’s conceptions of acting are diametrically opposed. There is no more fruitful exercise for grasping the demands that Huppert makes of her audiences than to compare her approach to film acting with Streep’s. 

    In a documentary about the production of Kramer vs. Kramer that was released in 2001, twenty-two years after the movie it considers, Streep commented that “if there’s anything that runs through all my work, all my characters, it’s that I have a relationship with them where I feel I have to defend them.” (Is there a less Huppertian sentiment?) Joanna Kramer, the part which won Streep her first Oscar, was Streep’s personal cause from the moment that she auditioned for the role. She had read the novel on which the film was based to prepare for her audition — research! — and believed that in the book Joanna was presented as “an ogre, a princess, an ass.” When Dustin Hoffman asked Streep at her audition what she thought of the story, she hectored that they had gotten the character all wrong: “Her reasons for leaving Ted are too hazy. We should understand why she comes back for custody. When she gives up Billy in the final scene, it should be for the boy’s sake, not hers. Joanna isn’t a villain; she’s a reflection of a real struggle that women are going through across the country and the audiences should feel sympathy for her.” Huppert, of course, is totally uninterested in garnering sympathy from her audiences. She scoffs: “I don’t really bother with the idea that a character should be ‘sympathetic’; you know it’s not really my problem… It’s true that I believe in the power of cinema to make a character attractive [but] without being sentimental or without being too much explained.” Kramer vs. Kramer could not sustain such a character. It belongs to a different genre of film.

    The movie is based on a book whose author, Avery Corman, had written it for the stated purpose of rebutting the “toxic rhetoric” that feminists had been unleashing on men, whom he felt were collectively painted as “a whole bunch of bad guys.” Streep considered it her responsibility to give feminists a voice in a movie-length anti-feminist diatribe. She got her chance. During shooting one day, the director pulled her aside and asked if she would rewrite the speech that Joanna gives in the final court scene. This was the opportunity Streep had been hoping for: “I thought [Joanna] was a rat in a maze, you know she had no choice, sick people often don’t have a choice, and I thought she was mentally ill, depressed, out of control… I knew I had the chance at the end to come back and explain who this terribly imploded person was.” Without that speech, the whole movie would have been a meditation on Ted Kramer’s admirable development as a father. Joanna would barely have been in the movie at all, and viewers would have seen nothing of her as a mother. Feminism was on trial, and Streep took the stand to fight for it. This was acting as apologia, acting as politics.

    Huppert would never have done that. She would never have auditioned for the part in the first place. An anti-feminist diatribe is not a movie in the shape of a question, it is a movie in the shape of an exclamation point, and it belongs on a protest sign at a rally, not on a screen in a movie theater. Kramer vs. Kramer takes place in a universe in which every character is campaigning to be the good guy. Huppert could never vivify a character like that: 

    I never try to idealize a story or people. I like to show there is no clear border between the good and the bad… It’s by instinct it’s not a crusade. I’m not trying to defend anybody. It’s just that I like to see myself as the audience by which I mean I don’t like to be told lies. I never thought good feelings made good films, I can’t act any other way. It’s like a scorpion. A scorpion can do nothing but sting, and I can’t act any differently than I do it.

    It would be wrong to deduce that Huppert gives less of herself to her characters than Streep does. On the contrary, Huppert throws herself entirely into every breath that her characters take. Every gesture and every sigh is charged, but none are justified. If you grabbed her character by the shoulders in the middle of the movie, shook her and demanded that she explain herself, she would not be able to oblige with explanations. She would not understand herself well enough to do so.

    And isn’t that how life is actually lived? “There is nothing to understand.” Logic is not an operating principle for the vast majority of the significant actions that human beings take. We have compulsions, and shames, and furies, and appetites, and we act on these things or we resist them. Those acts of surrender or resistance make up who we are. We are the records of what we do. Most of what is significant in human life is not intelligible, cannot be articulated through language or conceived of accurately in our own minds, and so cannot be lucidly grasped and then lucidly communicated. Actions can be accepted or reckoned with, or rejected, condemned, or argued with, but they cannot be thoroughly and satisfactorily understood. 

    This incomprehensibility is a deeply troubling aspect of human existence, and one that we arrange to ignore because to recognize it would be paralyzing. We will never give up the delicious delusion of our own transparency. We constantly ask ourselves why the people we love or the people in power or the people across the street do the things they do. We must believe that they have a reason, and we must believe that we can grasp it. We ask ourselves this question so often that it requires no articulation — and the cleverer we are, the better we get at formulating answers which provide us with partial comprehension. This can be more dangerous than total confusion, since it blocks from view the parts of life that defy reason. There is always more to a person than can be rationally grasped. Huppert knows this, she regularly demonstrates it, and she forces audiences to reckon with it. This is why she is terrifying, and why we are drawn to her and repulsed by her. It is this quality which makes our skin crawl. 

    Trying to convey the fullness of life through language is like kissing instead of loving — something is exchanged but not remotely the desired good. Belief in the incommunicability of certain kinds of knowledge, belief in the existence of knowledge that cannot be commensurate with language, and comfort with those beliefs — all this carries us to the edge of mysticism. Bertrand Russell claimed that Wittgenstein was a mystic because he was happy to discover that there was knowledge that fell outside of language’s purview. In his later introduction to the English translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Russell wrote of its author: “totalities concerning which [he] holds that it is impossible to speak logically are nevertheless thought by him to exist, and are the subject-matter of his mysticism.” Among those totalities are good and evil, which in Wittgenstein’s view subsisted outside the realm of language. “If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.” 

    Suspicion of the power of language is destabilizing, and Huppert is destabilizing in precisely this way. Society, and all the artifices and etiquettes which regulate it, cannot survive this suspicion. A white-knuckled faith in the capacity to express all essential thoughts out loud in words is predicated on the belief that there is no essential knowledge which defies the capability of words. I do not see how such a faith can survive even a little experience in the world. Yet without it we are crippled by fear. This fear propels us to construct fictional universes in which everything of any importance can be verbalized. But “good” and “evil,” squeezed into those four-letter words and safely separated by a coordinating conjunction, are not like this. Most treatments of those concepts defang rather than reckon with them. Huppert has those fangs, and she bites us with them. Look her dead in the eye and invite her violence.

    The Rise of Narrative and The Fall of Persuasion

    I

    “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This must be the most overly admired sentence by the most overly admired writer of our time. It is the renowned opening of Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” a canonical document of high-end alienation, and it long ago achieved fortune-cookie status. Didion was making the unsophisticated point that we abhor incoherence and so we attempt to defeat it by ordering it with interpretation. “We interpret what we see.” Yes, yes. “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We certainly do, though this is still a long way from an interesting view of knowledge. 

    The problem, of course, is that the phantasmagoria keeps shifting. No sooner has Didion stabilized the mental situation than incoherence again rears its ugly head. It turns out that stories may not settle the matter. “I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. I suppose this period began around 1966 and ended around 1971.” There follows her account, so adamantly cool as to be overheated, of the grand convulsions of the 1960s, which in her telling turns out to have been a lot of fun: she is in a recording studio with the Doors (“Manzarek ate a hard-boiled egg”), she hangs out with Eldridge Cleaver, she shops at I. Magnin for the dress (“Size 9 Petite”) that Linda Kasabian will wear at her trial for the murder of Sharon Tate and the others at the house on Cielo Drive owned by Roman Polanski (“[he] and I are godparents to the same child”). She also goes to Hawaii a lot. Didion finds no meaning in any of this, only a vast disorientation, a senseless crack-up. “I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did.” Hers are stories unlike other stories, because they are “stories without narrative.”

    But of course there is a narrative — “a script” — in Didion’s annals of her adventures, which she, like all narrators, has composed according to a principle of selection, a criterion of significance, from among all the incidents of her life in that period. It is the conventional narrative, of which she was one of the primary authors, that the 1960s were history’s epic pivot, that nothing since has ever been the same or will ever again be what it seems to be, that there never were phantasmagoria like those phantasmagoria, that the participants in those convulsions (and certainly their chroniclers) were aristocrats of consciousness, that the highest status is insiderhood and the chief arena of significance is the scene, that Dionysus is an American, that reason is for squares, that it is too late for liberalism, that the entertainment industry stands in some relationship to questions of ultimate importance, that we are living in (and driving through, with the wind in our hair) the ruins of our civilization — the whole helter-skelter-gimme-shelter narrative of the second half of the twentieth century in America. This, too, is a story, an invented version, a constructed tale; it is the tale of breakdown and privilege that Didion peddled, with epicene austerity, in all her writing. She made incoherence chic. Her contribution to the culture of her time was not to warn it about the seductions of story — as per her famous adage, if indeed it is a warning — but to invent a new story for it, a story of storylessness. She was not alone in this enterprise, obviously: her story is an old story. The fracture and fragmentation of experience is one of the cliches of modern culture, the failure of traditional narrative to capture a reality that has allegedly outstripped our powers of understanding and representation. She, too, told herself a story, a calming and fortifying story, in order to live. She, too, could not suffice with what a Muslim thinker once called the incoherence of the incoherence. Maybe nobody can. 

    “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This is a practical view of narrative. We tell stories because we need them. We tell the ones that meet the need. Without them we could not stir, or in any way advance; we would be stranded in the inundation of random occurrences, in confusion and fear. And the stories that we tell about ourselves are ourselves; they create us, which is to say, we create us. The striking thing about this utilitarian view of narrative — and about the larger belief in the supremacy of narrative — is its indifference to the question of truth. Compare Didion’s sentence with another famous one: “We possess art lest we perish of the truth.” Nietzsche made that observation in 1888. It, too, is a practical recommendation, concerned more with the wounding psychological consequences of a perfect lucidity than with the actual substance of what we cannot bear to know. It is odd to hear Nietzsche speak of the truth, when it was he who gave the world “perspectivism” and degraded truth into an expression of power; but at least his formulation comes with the implication that it is indeed truth that may be too much for us, that truth is what we are evading when we accept the embroideries of narrative. We tell ourselves lies in order to live. Yet the alternative to truth that Nietzsche contemplates, the preference for a more pleasing and elevating standpoint, is not merely what used to be called, in Didion’s California, a “coping mechanism.” It is not a shelter for the weak but a value for the strong. He precedes his comment with this: “For a philosopher to say, ‘the good and the beautiful are one,’ is infamy; if he goes on to add, ‘also the true,’ one ought to thrash him. Truth is ugly.” This enlarges and ennobles Nietzsche’s point about the role of illusion in life. The mind in flight from truth is not seeking only to get by, to muddle through, to locate a haven, to get hip; it is ambitiously searching for a place in the heights — in beauty, which philosophically may be no less exalted than truth. As always, Nietzsche’s subject is how to live. But who can live merely to tell stories in order to live?

    The narrativization of reality, the takeover of public and private discourse by story, hardly needs to be demonstrated. Storytelling is now itself a flourishing profession, a respectable career, a revered occupation. Organizations and institutes have vice-presidents for storytelling; the Ancient Mariner is a consultant. The narratorial imperative reaches to the highest levels of power: one commentator on contemporary politics has called this “the Scheherazade strategy.” Reflecting on his first term in office, Barack Obama once remarked that “my biggest failure was not to tell a story,” adding that “the nature of this office is to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism.” In 2017, the People’s Daily in Beijing, praising Xi Jinping as “the master storyteller,” instructed its captive readers that “telling stories has been a common characteristic of celebrated statesmen and thinkers in China and beyond since ancient times, and it is a clear characteristic of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s leadership style.” (He hides his vivacity well.) Emmanuel Macron, who never tires of vividly recounting the past glories of France, was Paul Ricoeur’s assistant at Nanterre when the philosopher was writing Memory, History, Forgetting, one of his grand defenses of narrative. 

    It is story time in the gardens of the West. What these days is not a story? We translate everything into narrative. I once heard a lecturer in philosophy teach his students “the story that Kant tells about reason.” (Once upon a time, there was a manifold of perception…) I have my story, you have your story, we have our story — which is to say, we now regard the entirety of a life and the entirety of a society as a tale, though we may differ about the plot. In politics, a candidate must have a story; in business, a company and a product must have a story; in law, a lawyer and a client and a judge must have a story, until the “narrative turn” in the legal academy became so overwhelming that the study of law and literature became the study of law as literature. Perhaps as a recoil from quantitative social-scientific historiography, from the “cliometricians,” or perhaps out of a more fundamental sense of inadequacy owed to what Henry James described in The Sense of the Past, his last and unfinished novel, as a desire for “evidence of a sort for which there had never been documents enough or for which documents mainly, however multiplied, would never be enough,” the writing of history in our time has become increasingly a summons to the campfire, stories about the powerful and stories about the powerless, riots of color and charm, lively yarns about exemplary lives to serve as prooftexts for sermons about the way we live now, so that the satisfactions of reading history approach the satisfactions of reading fiction or journalism. (If journalism is the first draft of history, history sometimes seems like the second or third draft of journalism.) In journalism, the warm anecdote has replaced the cold fact in setting the tone for reportage, as even breaking news opens in the style that used to be called “feature writing.” (“Jesus, 31, a wandering Galilean with soft eyes and a hard sense of purpose, could no longer stand the incessant clanging of the coins. He had walked this street many times before, but this time the large polished stones that formed the avenue outside the Temple felt different. He was a long way from the verdant banks of the harp-shaped lake in the north on whose peaceful waters he had recently strolled. Romans were everywhere.”) War reporting has yielded substantially to war stories, which have the laudable effect of humanizing the faraway ordeals but do not leave the reader with a strategic or historical grasp of the conflicts. In medicine, cancer now has a “biography” and the gene has an “intimate history” and the cell has a “song”; all of these informative entertainments are the result of the enormous influence of the twinkling Oliver Sacks, who turned case studies into bewitching fables and made medicine safe for Robin Williams. How many readers of these romps through science can judge the methods and the findings that they deftly relate? But the American public likes to be put to bed with a story. 

    Twenty years ago Jerome Bruner, who had previously written an influential essay on “the narrative construction of reality,” began a book called Making Stories this way: “Do we need another book about narrative, about stories, what they are and how they are used? We are so adept at narrative that it seems almost as natural as language itself. Our lives with stories start early and go on ceaselessly: no wonder we know how to deal with them. Do we really need a book about as anything as obvious as narrative?” And then he proceeded to deliver a thoughtful one. But the obvious, of course, can be the most recondite subject of all. Whether or not storytelling, or some kind of fonction fabulatrice, is one of our evolutionary traits, whether or not we are in our essence what has been called homo narrans, it is past time to point out that there are many ways to organize knowledge and to describe feelings, and that narrative is only one of them. However natural the impulse to narration seems, it needs to be de-naturalized, so that we may discover the particular distortions that it, like all arrangements of human experience, manifestly or latently conveys. What follows is a brief catalog of those distortions, or some of them, so as to suggest what may be the highest price that we are now paying for our addiction to stories.

    The great challenge of the rush of experience is to make order out of it, to find some way to bring its endless welter under mental control by giving it form. Our lives are shapeless until we decide to do something about it. The most common method of unifying the bedlam of sensations and relations and occasions is to translate it into narrative. For every life many narratives are possible — many lines can be run through it, and many threads; we choose the one that we prefer, usually on unexamined grounds, and we give it our names. Some professors call this “self-fashioning.” The stories that we choose need not be simple, but they must be intelligible. They need not be linear, but they must show a pattern, and the pattern must show movement. The storification of a life, or of anything, is an account of how it went from here to there. Storytelling, by means of memory or imagination, is a shaping exercise. For this reason it leaves us confident and even consoled. (The wise Frank Kermode used to speak of “the consoling plot.”)

    But how many years does one have to live before one recognizes the specious nature of this confidence, and of the clarity upon which it purports to be based? Every shaping exercise is an editing exercise; stories are created by what they leave out as much as by what they leave in. (In some instances the omissions can be responsible for cruelty, symbolic or real, toward the excluded.) There is no such thing as the whole story, or the story of the whole; there are only the products of selectivity. The transparency about experience to which stories aspire is a deceiving ideal. Unlike stories, experience does not possess a beginning, a middle, and end, except of course the end that abruptly terminates it all; and many religious traditions have been spun to make the end of endings, the final ending, itself into an episode in a narrative, posthumously within reach of coherence and continuity. The notion of the immortality of the soul represents a spectacularly stubborn commitment to narrative form. 

    Moreover, the temporal structure that a story imposes upon experience can interfere with, well, the experience of experience. The forward propulsion of narrative, its controlling structure, does not adequately capture the way moments and hours and days are actually lived. If verisimilitude of some kind is the aim of narrative representation, we should beware the total erasure of the commonplace chaos. A story is an exchange of the here and the now with the there and the then. It is a displacement, a means of transport; it abolishes time and place to create another time and another place; and it traps the present between the past and the future, and encourages us to regard the present developmentally, historically, as a stage and a station. In this way it flattens and diminishes the present even as it sets it within a framework of meaning.

    But historical meaning is hardly the only meaning there is. The present deserves to be protected against the hastenings of narrativity. It may be ephemeral, but it may be beautiful. Precisely because it will soon slip away and become the past, the present should be lingered in, prepared for, relished, cultivated. It is the most vulnerable temporal mode of all, not least to contemporary busyness, to the frantic blur of our efficient existences, which were conceived in part to save us from the sensual and spiritual challenges of a particular moment in a particular setting, of finding what we seek where we happen to be found. Pleasure, for instance, happens only in the present. For the way we live now, however, there may be nothing more impossible than a non-utilitarian and non-historical understanding of the immediate. 

    And who believes, really, that we heroically fashion ourselves? Indeed, there is something positively unheroic about identity. Surely it is more plausible to think of the self as an inflection of its givens, a revision of its inheritances. The inflection may be radical and the revision may be heterodox; but much can be accomplished without the silly conceit of self-creation. We do not begin in emptiness, though if we are not careful we may end in it. The eighteenth-century English poet erred: we are never, at any moment in our lives, wholly originals or wholly copies. I am always more than the story I tell about myself, and always less. The story that I tell you about me may be a fabrication; I may be posing as me, not least for the rewards of the tale. No man is the final authority on himself. And no man is an inevitability. The élan of narrative, the assurance of the storytelling spirit, confers an impression of inexorability upon what it recounts, which is one of the reasons that children like to hear the same story over and over. They enjoy the foreknowledge, the ceremonial disappearance of uncertainty. But adults, too, are not immune to the thrills of teleology. The appeal of both religion and science is owed in part to their power to make contingent lives feel like inevitable outcomes, and thereby liberate people from accountability for their fates; and both religion and science, which have ideas at their core, are received by most people as stories. 

    Storytelling is designed to inculcate certain responses, certain mental stances, in the listener. They are passivity, credulity, and wonder. All of them are stances of surrender. A storyteller desires nothing so much as a rapt audience upon whom a spell may be cast; there is an element of mesmerism at work in narrative. “You could hear a pin drop.” I have always been partial to that impudent pin. Wonder is an easily cheapened emotion; it is often the consequence of manipulation. In our time the greatest exponent of narrative and its magic is Salman Rushdie, whose novels have become so saturated in exotic conjurings that in other hands they would be decried as Orientalism. He refers to stories as “wonder tales.” He sees in them nothing less than a mark of our species: “We were born wanting food, shelter, love, song, and story.” It is a somewhat arbitrary list, but his point is that “man alone is the storytelling animal.” Never mind that there are also other pursuits and activities that are characteristic only of humans. About the universality of story there can be no doubt. Rushdie supplies a definition: “Story is the unnatural means [even if this is our very nature?] we use to talk about human life, our way of reaching the truth by making things up.” I will return to the question of the relation of story to truth. Rushdie adds that “fantasy is not whimsy” and that “the fantastic is neither innocent nor escapist.” But that is hardly the rule. Three cheers for whimsy! I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s remark that “anyone who has never been bored cannot be a storyteller.” 

    Rushdie writes in praise of fairy tales and folk tales and myths, many of which certainly are repositories of wisdom and ingenious pedagogical tools, though this begs the question of how pertinent the message is to the form and its enjoyment. The justification of narrative should not be achieved by transforming stories into parables, by making them into allegories of “truth.” Rushdie argues ardently for narrativity in part because it “is pretty much out of fashion these days,” since “we live in an age of non-fiction.” Clearly we see the cultural situation differently. He defends fabulism under the impact of his deep love for the stories of his childhood, which arouses in me an old suspicion that wonder tales are a technique of infantilization.

    This set me to pondering the stories of my own childhood. I was not raised upon the infinite richness of the South Asian storybook, of course; nor did I grow up with Hans Christian Anderson or the Brothers Grimm. I never even read The Phantom Tollbooth. The wonder tales of my youth were the stories of the Hebrew Bible, except that we were emphatically discouraged from regarding them as stories. The record of God’s words and the words of His prophets was not a storybook; it was a revelation of the truth. There was nothing playful about hearing it or reading it. Still, owing in large measure to the endless narratological imagination of the ancient rabbis, for whom the scriptural tales were exasperatingly elliptical and could not sate their appetite for the sacred past, we had many stories. I remember warmly, for example, the legend of Ashmedai. He was the lord of the demons. When King Solomon was building the Temple, he needed to find a rare insect (or bird) called the shamir in order to cut stones from the local quarry, since the Torah had explicitly prohibited the use of iron tools in the creation of the altar in the Tabernacle. The shamir had the strange power of splitting stone, and only Ashmedai knew where the shamir was. The king dispatched his chief warrior to capture the demon, and equipped him for the quest with a ring inscribed with God’s true name. The warrior cleverly succeeded in his difficult mission and after a rather colorful journey brought Ashmedai to Solomon. Ashmedai divulged the location of the shamir, and it hewed and split the stones, and the Temple was built — but Solomon made the mistake of imprisoning the demon, who tricked him, the wisest king who ever lived, and contrived to take his place on the throne. Ashmedai sent Solomon into exile, where he wandered for three years in humble poverty and learned many lessons. (Those episodes now put me in mind of the jataka stories.) Eventually the king returned and routed the evil pretender, though the sight of the wrathful and defeated demon so terrified him that he never again slept a night without a company of guards. 

    As a boy I kindled to all the extravagant details of the story. I even grasped the moral in some of its moments. When I grew up, I learned that scholars call the demon Asmodeus, and that the main contours of the tale are in the apocrypha and the Babylonian Talmud, and that the tale was marvelously embellished in many ancient and medieval sources. (In kabbalistic legend, Ashmedai was the spawn of a night that King David spent with the roof-dancing she-demon daughter of Lilith!) I also discovered that the study of the tale pleased me more than the memory of the tale. I lost interest in child-like wonder because I am no longer a child. Adult wonder is another matter, to be sure, but it is as scarce as the shamir, and generally it has not been given to me, when it has been given to me, by stories. The ethos of storytelling prides itself on its primordiality: it harks back to earlier and therefore more authentic times — indeed, as Walter Benjamin put it in one of his many tributes to narrativity, it restores us to “the absolute power of the authentic.” There is something brazenly anti-modern and pre-modern about the enterprise, a magical extension of the oral tradition, of the romance of the archaic. “Experience that is passed from one mouth to the next is the source from which all storytellers have drawn,” Benjamin writes ruefully. I say ruefully, because he is certain that “the art of storytelling is dying out.” It has been usurped by the novel — “the demise of storytelling in the rise of the novel” — in which narrative is mercilessly trapped inside a book. 

    Storytelling has also been overthrown by a “new form of communication,” which Benjamin presciently calls “information.” Information, he writes, “is valuable only for the moment in which it is new,” whereas a story “does not use itself up.” That is a very timely distinction. All this is in keeping with Benjamin’s larger theory of the depletion of experience by modern capitalism, and also with the anti-bourgeois hunger of his Weimar generation for atavistic, non-rational, subterranean energies. A book, in his view, is not an experience, though he certainly lived as if it is. (His anger about the destruction of story leads him to cite Paul Valery’s defense of patience and craft in his exquisite little essay “The Embroidery of Marie Monnier,” a text that should be required reading now.) It is hard not to sympathize with Benjamin’s scorn for the accelerations of modern life, even when it issues in philistine pronouncements such as this one: “We have even managed to abbreviate stories. We have witnessed the development of the ‘short story,’ which has withdrawn from the oral tradition and no longer allows for that slow accumulation of thin, translucent layers which offers the most fitting image of the process in which the perfect story is revealed through the stratification of numerous retellings.”

    There is, then, an anti-intellectual temper in the cult of story. Scheherazade is not particularly interested in explanation; credulity and wonder are not the states of mind most conducive to thought. The specificity of an event, which is the storyteller’s strength, the savor of the particulars, defeats the generalizing impulse about human behavior that is the beginning of philosophical and historical reflection. A narrated sequence of events gives an impression of causality where causality has been invented, not confirmed: that is a part of its magic, of its storiness. The charm, or the fascination, or the horror, of a story lies in the subsequence and the succession of its incidents. Every story is definitive, but only for itself. Benjamin praises Leskov’s stories for “the chaste brevity that eludes psychological analysis,” so that even opacity of character counts as a virtue. The more folkloric, the better. 

    The advocates of storytelling always champion its relationship to wisdom, but wisdom is not the same as understanding, or explanation, or critical inquiry. Perhaps this is what Benjamin inadvertently reveals when he writes, “we know only how to moan and complain, not how to tell stories.” I am not suggesting, of course, that stories should be anything other than stories; only that their contribution to our comprehension of the world may be limited by their form. A story may be a world but it is never the world. And a story is not an analysis, just as you cannot tell a joke point by point. To be sure, the tyranny of analysis would be as partial and misleading as the tyranny of narrative, but we are not suffering from the tyranny of analysis. After all the paeans to the suspension of disbelief, it is time to say a few words on behalf of the suspension of belief. 

     

    II

    The aesthetic and emotional satisfactions of narrativity should not delude us into accepting its techniques as the most useful or illuminating method for the exposition and the resolution of the problems that we face. If we tell ourselves stories in order to live, we also challenge stories in order to live. It is wonderful, therefore, to discover the beginnings of a backlash to what Peter Brooks has denounced as “the mindless valorization of storytelling.” (His recent book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, which meticulously exposes “the pervasive narrativism that dominates our culture,” is the best backlash of all.) Some of the dissents are old, such as Lawrence Stone’s castigation in 1979 of “the revival of narrative” in the writing of history. “The narration of a single incident or personality can make both good reading and good sense,” he observed. “But this will be so only if the stories do not merely tell a striking but fundamentally irrelevant detail of some dramatic episode of riot or rape, or the life of some eccentric rogue or villain or mystic, but are selected for the light they can throw upon certain aspects of a past culture.” There are realms, in other words, in which stories are not enough, in which they demand too little. There are questions that cannot be answered by a narrator, reliable or otherwise.

    In legal discourse, it may be that narrativity is inalienable: aren’t “fact patterns” stories? But in law, too, there have been dissenters. Martha Minow, who otherwise approves of narrativity as a method for advancing legal analysis, has some doubts. “Stories do not articulate principles likely to provide consistency in generalizations to guide future action,” she warns, and her warning is good not only for law. She rightly adds that “stories on their own offer little guidance for evaluating competing stories.” Should the criteria for such an evaluation be literary, then? But this is a narrative domain in which literary criteria are beside the point. 

    In law, the most formidable indictment of the limits of narrativity has been made, not surprisingly, by Catherine MacKinnon. Cautioning against the epistemological dead-end of Rashomon and its pile-up of versions, she asks: “Are all stories equal as long as they are stories?” She, too, is concerned about the deception that may be perpetrated by a calm recitation of a series of events: “Maybe only one thing did happen, just not the one we were told.” MacKinnon recognizes what we might call the humanistic advantage of stories — “the breath of human life animates stories as it never did facts”, and one of its effects is that “empathy is encouraged” — but there are inquiries (and not only legal ones) that require more than empathy, more than the sage recognition that everybody has their reasons.

    Most importantly, MacKinnon makes the stark and unsentimental point that stories are inadequate as instruments of justice. “The form itself is certainly no guarantee of a view from the outside or the bottom.” This goes against the grain of the present-day culture of justice-warrioring: a recent contribution to the progressive literature, for example, is entitled We Need New Stories. MacKinnon asserts that “storytelling as method originated in powerlessness and can bring a fear of power with it. Instead of telling power it is wrong, tell it a story.” More, “storytelling can be a strategy for survival when one dare not argue.” Anyway, “how do you counter the appeal of a story that power wants to believe? A story on the other side, of which there are many, has not been enough.”

    It may be that MacKinnon is too dismissive of the cultural basis for political change, but she is right that a story about politics or for politics must not be mistaken for politics itself. For MacKinnon, and here we come to the heart of the matter, the fatal weakness of narrative in the context of society and politics is that it may be false. “Lies are the ultimate risk of storytelling as method.” Such a worry is undergirded by MacKinnon’s splendid and militant belief in what has become perhaps the most contested idea of our time: that politics must be based on truth. Stories may have many winning qualities and still be rankly untrue. “Stories can be powerful, evocative, resonant, death-defyingly influential, yet cover up the most relevant possible facts.” (Consider this dictum from the unlamented Sean Spicer in the White House press room: “I think we can sometimes disagree with the facts but our intention is never to lie to you.”) The imagination may be necessary for a vision of justice, but there is nothing imaginary about injustice; and a vision of justice, which may be communicated unforgettably by stories, is not a remedy for injustice. 

    Rhetorically and methodologically, the antithesis of narrative is argument. I propose that the popularity of story in American life has something to do with the fact that we are living in a society that is beyond argument. I would even suggest that as the fortunes of narrative rise, the fortunes of argument fall. A society in flight from evidence and logic does well to seek shelter in the telling of tales. The proper methods of persuasion — reason and a skeptical examination of emotions — are too onerous for Americans now. An empiricist readiness for discovery, even the most rudimentary sort, is a bridge too far. The democratic torment that we commonly decry as “polarization” comes down to this: What do you do in a political order designed for persuasion when persuasion is no longer possible? 

    An open society is based upon the malleability of opinion, so that its members, when presented in good faith with information and argumentation that contradict what they believe, will change their beliefs; but behold, beliefs in America do not change. We are a republic of the unrevised and the unreconstructed. In the practice of politics, this petrification of belief has led to a conceptual innovation: the “persuadable,” the coveted voter whose mind is not yet made up or whose made-up mind is still hospitable to new “input.” There was a time, not too long ago, when the burning question for political strategists was whether to win with the base or the independents, whether to hunker down or reach out. But the prospects of reaching out are no longer very promising, and so the hunt is on for the unicorns that graze between the elephants and the donkeys, for the rare citizens in an environment of fevered partisanship who can still be convinced. Indeed, they may hold the honor of democracy in their hands. 

    But how to persuade the persuadable? Dare we reason? I fear not. I will give an example. At a pastoral summertime gathering of people with ideas and people with money to pay to hear the ideas, there recently appeared a representative of an admirable national organization that was created in the belief that “growing partisan animosity is the crisis of our time” and therefore convenes meetings of people who disagree with each other for the purpose of recovering a common sense of humanity. It is an unimpeachable objective; when people have asked me what to do about polarization, I have always advised them to go out and make a friend of someone whose views they despise. But I have a nagging feeling that these breakthroughs in goodwill will not solve the problem but only dodge it, and also abrade some of the toughness that is required for serious politics. When the representative of this organization addressed the gathering, she said: “If you actively want to get to truth, the thing you have to build is trust, and the way you build trust is not by getting stuck on the conversation about what’s true, but by making progress on the conversation about what’s meaningful.” I heard in her words a melancholy acknowledgement of the difficulty, and even the futility, of engaging in discussions about true and false and right and wrong. 

    As a practical matter, trust will certainly help, especially when it is founded on the realization that the apotheosis of trust occurs between people who are significantly different from one another. And yet I wondered whether this trust is not just a way of softening the blow of a contradiction that cannot be eliminated. One of the oldest techniques for treating the pain of contradiction is to stay away from the question of truth. And the preference for meaning over truth is really just the postponement of a reckoning, of the dreaded hour of verification. Listening to the good woman offer her approach to social harmony, and nodding in agreement that we should indeed wish “to get to truth,” I pondered whether you can fight the contempt for truth with the suspension of truth, however temporary and tactical. My hunch is that those eclectic and compassionate conversations will never get to the work of argument, that the friendships sweetly coaxed out of the reds and the blues will be based on the avoidance of the substance of genuinely momentous disagreements. (As Lyle Lovett sang, “Baby, I just judge the distance, not the words I hear.”) I was not surprised to learn, when I went to her group’s website, that the first rule of its convenings is to “emphasize storytelling.” 

    In politics, and in business too, the tension between story and belief goes almost unrecognized, and instead narrative is cheerfully included among the tools of persuasion. Here is a typical passage from one of the many books addressed to executives who are confronted with the problem of “convincing others when facts don’t seem to matter”: “All success, in life and in business, is based on the skill of persuasion. Put simply, you can have the best product, the best plan, the best policy, but if you’re not telling your story in a way that connects and resonates with your audience, none of that matters. You will not persuade people to choose your company or follow your lead.” It is all a question of narrative skill — an affair of rhetoric and theater. “What is more important,” our executive coach asks, “having a good story to tell or telling your story well?” She does not deny that quality is an important factor in making the sale, but she grimly points out that “the best product [does] not always win in the marketplace.” And so we must avail ourselves of the black arts of non-rational and not-factual influence. 

    But what kind of persuasion is accomplished by storytelling? I fear that many people confuse being moved with being convinced, and mistake susceptibility for a fair mind. Being moved, even by tragedy, is always welcome, especially by people who like to exercise their inwardness; but fictions, and tendentious depictions of human experience, can also be profoundly moving. The sophistry of emotional athleticism is no better than the sophistry of intellectual athleticism. I hope that you are shaken to your core by a visit to the Holocaust Museum, but I will not expect your visit to persuade you of my views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The National Museum of African American History and Culture rattled me deeply, but I still do not concur that this country was founded in 1619. The stories in those institutions are overwhelming, but they are not the final word on their respective subjects or a sufficient foundation for political opinion and political consensus. Tears are not proofs. In the difficult task of distinguishing the true from the false, emotions should have no place, even if they will never be completely banished. One of the conditions of the mind’s work is that it resist the heart, at least if it seeks a conclusion that will be acceptable to people with different minds and different hearts. 

    The problem of other hearts is just as decisive for the achievement of social agreement as the problem of other minds. I cannot expect you to agree with me because of what is in my heart. If you do not feel what I feel, there is nothing I can do about it — and there is nothing you can do about it either, which is why, in a dialogue in which it is my intention to convert you to my opinion, I will not offer my emotions as a reason for you to accept my thoughts. And if your refusal to accept my opinion is based on your feelings, then I must lower my expectations of our encounter: my feelings cannot refute your feelings, just as my story cannot refute your story, and at some point the discussion of our difference of opinion must arrive at the harsh business of refutation, especially if our difference is a contradiction and both of us cannot be right. Attempting to change somebody’s mind by changing somebody’s heart is the definition of demagoguery. 

    The most urgent question for our riven politics is how to proceed from contradiction — more specifically, whether compromise can be extracted from contradiction without a loss of intellectual integrity or a betrayal of group solidarity. The road from contradiction to compromise is Madison’s road, the high road, the American road, and it is premised on the possibility of partial agreement, which is to say, on the possibility of mental flexibility. And here the problem becomes thornier. After all, “uncompromising” is also a term of praise. Compromise can denote weakness and infirmity. We sometimes admire mental inflexibility, since it signifies genuine conviction and strong belief. Shouldn’t we hold strong beliefs? They are certainly preferable to drifting between worldviews as between brands, and to acquiescing to ideas that are in vogue. There is dignity in partisanship. The real task, then, is to hold strong beliefs undogmatically.

    But how? Psychologists have for a long time recognized that — in the words of Lee Ross, Mark H. Hepper, and Michael Hubbard in 1975 — personal impressions and beliefs “become relatively autonomous from the evidence that created them.” They call this problem “impression perseverance” or “belief perseverance” — perseverance beyond the reach of reasons, which is one of the symptoms of the death of persuasion. More recently the taxonomy of bias developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky addressed the same perplexity. The classic study of this phenomenon appeared in 1956 in When Prophecy Fails, an almost cinematically riveting account by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter of a small community of millenarians in the American Midwest whose expectation that the world would end on December 21, 1954 did not come to pass, but whose disappointment did not damage or alter their orientation. Their experience of “disconfirmation” had the opposite effect: they simply chose another eschaton. Their mental framework was irrefutable. They stuck to the story.

    The phenomenon of “disconfirmation” and the strategies of recovery from it is familiar to historians of religious and political messianism. One cannot base a faith on circumstances and keep it for long, since circumstances change. But one can keep a faith forever by insulating it from circumstances. There is nothing so wonderful as unfalsifiable encouragement. Like all victims of eschatological disappointment, the dejected adventists in Festinger’s, Riecken’s, and Schachter’s account resolved to secure against history their belief about history. These are the opening words of the book:

    A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

    We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks.

    But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocable and undeniable, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. 

    Out of this mental predicament, this refusal to be permanently disconfirmed, Festinger developed the concept of cognitive dissonance, which he introduced a year later. Cognitive dissonance is the mental pressure caused by a discrepancy between one’s view of a situation and the situation itself. Insofar as this inner stress represents, at least in part, a concern for validation by the world beyond oneself, cognitive dissonance is a kind of tribute to the tenacity of the empirical attitude. It signifies that one has not been completely swallowed up by subjectivity, and that subjectivity has not been deemed to be adequate for establishing a sense of reality. 

    Cognitive dissonance, in other words, is the distressed state of awareness that precedes relief and reconciliation. What America needs now is a pandemic of cognitive dissonance. Everybody’s story is too satisfying; everybody’s view is too invulnerable. We need a season of wavering and wobbling, if we are to enjoy the rewards, and not just the costs, of strong conviction. As J.B.S. Haldane once said, “a little more thought and a little less belief.”

    There is a certain irony to the process of persuasion: one goes from being persuadable to being persuaded, and then from being persuaded to being unpersuadable. Once one is satisfied that something has been properly verified, one becomes mentally unavailable to further contributions to the subject. Out of the working of an open mind comes a closed mind. When one has been persuaded by evidence and by argument, dogmatism can seem rational. Yet we cannot be content with such a conclusion, and not only because dogmatism is the problem and not the solution. The process of persuasion does not usually work, alas, in a rational manner, as I have just described it. The unconvinced mind is not a vacant mind; it is already stocked with opinions which it asserts firmly even though it may not have justifications for them. The reasons for an opinion generally do not precede it. Contrary to rational procedure, they follow it. The American sense of reality is now marred by an overwhelming preponderance of opinions that are held in the absence of reasons. 

    Are we, then, to give up on reasons? Is narrative our best bet? I hope not, though there are grounds for gloom: the psychology of opinion-formation is not truth’s most reliable ally. Instead we should take a closer look at what it means to hold strong beliefs undogmatically. We might begin, for example, by adjusting our standards for certainty. They should be higher than doubt but lower than dogma. The purpose of such a mitigation is not only to avoid the intellectual and political pitfalls of the absolutist mentality; it is also to acknowledge that the supply of evidence and argument never dries up, so that perfect certainty is never warranted. As long as there is life, there is surprise. The quest for inductive knowledge, for learning from the phenomenal world, is never over, because conditions change and there are new things under the sun; and rational discussion is never over, because in such a discussion a rigorous and well-wrought intervention is forever welcome. (That is why we still debate with Aristotle but not with Ptolemy.) In the sealed world of perfect certainty there are always the escape hatches of empiricism and reason, however small or hard to locate they are.

    Intellectual honesty demands not only intellectual open-mindedness but also intellectual open-endedness, even when we are properly satisfied that we are on terrain sufficiently solid to allow us to proceed. Any belief that is thrown into crisis by the possibility that one day it may have to be revised is an overweening belief. This is true even of religious faith, if one cares about its intellectual integrity. Our politics, which is now a war between perfect certainties, must become a war between sufficient certainties; between strong believers, not true believers; and certainly not between reeds in the wind and the wind.