Careful where you aim that historical allusion

This week for my US History II students I’ve been preparing an annotated copy of William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. Giving the text of Bryan’s speech the kind of close scrutiny required to plop explanatory notes into it has brought two things to mind.

First, whether teaching Andrew Jackson, Bryan, or later populists, I emphasize to my students that populism is an attitude or style, not a set of policy prescriptions. Read “The Cross of Gold” closely and yeah, it’s true. The style, posture, or rhetorical mode of populist movements really never changes. But that’s a blog post of its own for… some other time. Probably never.

Second, Bryan, despite being a “Great Commoner,” was a learned man and could count on his audience to pick up a lot of literary, biblical, and historical allusions. Their density in this six-page speech is remarkable—just based on the notes I added to the text, I count three biblical allusions, two to modern French history, three to American history, and one each to Roman and medieval history. His use of these allusions can be pretty sophisticated, as when he suggests that coastal elites (see point one above) not only feel scorn for the poor but also nurse a blasphemous pride by putting the words of Proverbs 1:26 into their mouths.

But not all of these allusions do the work that Bryan seems to think they’re doing. Two in particular stand out.

Early in the speech, in describing the groundswell of populist support for policies like bimetallism and a federal income tax in the months leading up to the Democratic convention, Bryan says that the Populists “began the conflict with a zeal approaching the zeal which inspired the crusaders who followed Peter the Hermit.”

Peter did attract a surprising amount of enthusiastic support through his preaching in 1095, but his ramshackle following made it only as far as Anatolia before they met a smaller but better organized Seljuq army and were slaughtered.

Then again, maybe popular enthusiasm leading to an unsustainable movement that ends in disaster might actually be a good metaphor for the 1890s Populist Party. Not what Bryan was going for, though.

The other allusion comes in Bryan’s admittedly stirring call to defend the common people from the financial rapine of the elites. After invoking Andrew Jackson as a model, Bryan borrows a comparison from an old speech by Thomas Hart Benton, a comparison guaranteed to get my attention:

If you will read what Thomas Benton said, you will find that he said that in searching history he could find but one parallel to Andrew Jackson. That was Cicero, who destroyed the conspiracies of Cataline [sic] and saved Rome. He did for Rome what Jackson did when he destroyed the bank conspiracy and saved America.

As always, I hesitate to entertain a hypothetical, but I doubt Cicero would be flattered.

As with the earlier invocation of amateur crusading zeal, this comparison does work on a superficial level. Cicero was a novus homo, a new man, a commoner risen to senatorial rank and even the office of consul, and Catiline was a corrupt aristocrat. That’s pretty easily mapped onto American populist prejudices, especially since Cicero was able to detect and defeat Catiline’s conspiracy and preserve the Republic—something Cicero never let anyone forget. But…

Cicero also steadfastly opposed the political machinations of other demagogues who made recognizably populist appeals: Clodius early on and, later, Julius Caesar, godlike champion of the Populares. Cicero’s moderation and constitutionalism, Caesar’s resemblance to Andrew Jackson—a beloved general using his success and his popularity with the masses to flout the constitutional limits placed upon him—and Cicero’s eventual murder at the hands of Caesar’s loyal lieutenant Mark Antony not only complicate Bryan’s comparison but more or less rubbish it. If you know more than Bryan uses to make his point, that is.

A final example. This allusion to modern history would turn out, within months, to be grimly ironic:

Mr. McKinley was the most popular man among the Republicans; and everybody three months ago in the Republican Party prophesied his election. How is it today? Why, that man who used to boast that he looked like Napoleon, that man shudders today when he thinks that he was nominated on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Not only that, but as he listens he can hear with ever increasing distinctness the sound of the waves as they beat upon the lonely shores of St. Helena.

This is, I believe, known popularly as “asking for it.”

Historical allusions are useful, of course, but be sure to think them through. A point worth considering ourselves, since Bryan is often invoked now as a sloppy, imprecise parallel to certain present-day leaders.

YouTube plagiarism

I occasionally dip into the more earnest side of YouTube film criticism through video essays by channels like The Discarded Image, CinemaStix, Thomas Flight—recently recommended by Alan Jacobs here—and Like Stories of Old.

The latter posted an essay earlier this month called “This YouTuber Won’t Stop Plagiarizing,” with an enticing thumbnail of the Dude. After a week or so of YouTube’s algorithm pushing it to the top of my recommendations every day, I finally gave in and watched it.

It’s well put-together and presents damning evidence that a YouTuber calling himself Archer Green has been stealing everything from specific lines of narration to montages from other channels, and it approaches this vexing topic in the most charitable way possible. Certainly more charitably than I would.

While Like Stories of Old does a good job outlining the specific sins of the plagiarist and makes a strong case against such actions, there is one point that deserves more thought but was lost amidst the detail. To judge from the case made against him, Archer Green’s research for his videos consisted entirely of watching other YouTubers’ videos and taking notes on them. I don’t know how deeply Like Stories of Old or Thomas Flight dig when preparing a video, but I’m guessing it’s deeper than that.

Even if Archer Green hadn’t ended up stealing the words and ideas of other people, such a limited, circular, self-referential environment could only end up being intellectually inbred.

Indeed, this is certainly true of other parts of YouTube, where bad ideas or false information are endlessly recycled because, in pursuit of clicks, YouTubers copy and regurgitate sensationalistic material, which other YouTubers copy and regurgitate, which other YouTubers copy and regurgitate, and on and on. Witness this commercial pilot’s frustrated attempt to debunk aviation myths that have been repeated over and over by YouTubers and TikTokers. And that’s not his only video in this vein. Watch this, this, and this as well, and note how often the same misconceptions or outright lies come up.

This is not, of course, limited to YouTube. Check out this recent video—which I’ve already shown students—about a hoax Wikipedia article that was cited by a newspaper, whose citation then became supporting documentation for the fake Wikipedia page’s bibliography. The fake went undetected for over a decade.

If all governments naturally turn into monarchies over time, all online information environments turn into echo chambers or bubbles. Break out. Maybe start by reading a book on a topic rather than clicking the next video the algorithm feeds you.

The Novel, Who Needs It? and The Decline of the Novel

Speaking of the good old days and present decline, this summer I read two books about novels. Or rather, The Novel, in the abstract. The first was The Novel, Who Needs It? by Joseph Epstein and the second The Decline of the Novel, by Joseph Bottum. Though starting from a similar point and assuming both the embattlement and the necessity of The Novel, they are quite different books.

Epstein’s book, which is more of a loosely structured long-form essay on a series of interrelated topics, defends the traditional novel as an essential medium for the exercise of the imagination and the cultivation of moral character. It is quite good, though with its discursive structure and a few other limitations, about which more below, I felt it never cohered into a single compelling argument. So while I may agree with some of the points in The Novel, Who Needs It? more, it was Bottum’s Decline of the Novel that I found more thought-provoking and insightful.

Bottum builds on a thesis from his earlier book An Anxious Age, which looked at the cultural and psychological effects of the collapse of the shared mainline Protestant culture of the US, but narrows his view here to fiction. The novel, Bottum argues, is a fundamentally Protestant form given its interiority, individualism, and concern with personal transformation. Long fictional narratives served to playact the sanctification of souls in individual imaginations. They were a form through which “we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves.”

As such, the novel became the preeminent artistic medium for meaning and self-understanding in the modern world and enjoyed a three hundred-year reign, from the early picaresques and moralistic epistolary novels of Defoe and Richardson to the 800-page potboilers of the 1970s.

But no more. With the decline of a shared culture has come a decline of the narrative form that once fed and shaped its imaginations. Novelists today do not occupy the taste-maker or thought-leader status a John Updike or Norman Mailer once did, nor do the educated need to have read any recent novels to be in the know—what Bottum calls “the Cocktail Party Test.”

In the best chapters of the book, Bottum traces this decline through the careers of four novelists: Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, and Tom Wolfe. Faced with a “thin” or disenchanted world, all four sought to infuse meaning into life through fiction, albeit in different ways. Scott sought meaning in stories of the past, inadvertently inventing—to all practical purposes—historical fiction. Dickens, a generation on, strove to make fiction meaningful as a vehicle for pursuing the truth, for uncovering and exposing evil. But both these ends proved inadequate, giving rise to the modernism exemplified, in Bottum’s argument, by Mann, who made the novel its own point—novels for novels’ sake. It may not provide meaning, but it’s all we’ve got—let’s fuss over the artistry. By the time of Tom Wolfe, who attempted the unblinking truth-telling of Dickens in the realistic modern mode of Zola, narrated with journalistic attention to detail and rendered in frenzied prose, neither he nor his characters had the old “vision of the good life” that could give his shambling novels power and his readers no longer believed in the novel enough to take him seriously. Indeed, Wolfe became an object of scorn among the literati, especially when he dared to tip the sacred cow of the sexual revolution in I am Charlotte Simmons.

Successive failed attempts to find meaning, maintenance of empty forms without belief, and finally disbelief and disavowal—this is a deconversion story, a loss of faith. A “failure of nerve,” as Bottum puts it, but ours, not that of the novel. “The novel didn’t fail us. We failed the novel.”

There’s a lot to this argument, and Bottum argues it well. Certainly much of it jibes with my own observations, such as the way novels now tend to mean more to rabid subcultures than to any broadly shared culture—with one or two important exceptions. But I remain unconvinced by the overall thesis. Something is missing, or simply off. His narrative of disenchantment and decline is persuasive, but not because of the evidence brought forward through Scott, Dickens, Mann, and Wolfe. Since reading it a few weeks ago I’ve continued to puzzle over this.

Other reviewers have pointed to The Decline of the Novel’s narrow Anglophone focus, imprecision in how Bottum uses the word Protestant, or over-selective case studies as problems. This criticism has some merit. Here are two reviewers, Darren Dyck at Christianity Today and science fiction author Adam Roberts, who both sympathize with Bottum’s book while raising important questions about his thesis. Both reviews are worth your time for these lines of criticism.

“Ultimately,” Dyck writes in his review, “it all depends on how you define novel.” Whatever other points I could raise, I suspect this is the real problem. The Novel, capitalized, in the abstract, is probably too protean and slippery a form to describe in enough detail to prove a thesis like this.

This becomes especially clear in the book’s final chapter, about popular fiction, in which Bottum points out the way children’s fiction has taken the place of grownup novels as tools of imaginative instruction. Novels do, then, still form part of a broadly shared culture as theatres of moral drama and objects of debate and controversy—it’s just the novels of JK Rowling, not National Book Award or Booker Prize shortlisters, that matter now.

That last chapter works as an important caveat to the narrative that makes up the bulk of the book. It is also one of the several things that make The Decline of the Novel better than The Novel, Who Needs It? For Epstein, popular and genre fiction, which get barely a mention, mostly serve to prepare readers for the exquisite, lip-pursing pleasures of Henry James and Proust. Per Dyck, Epstein’s definition of novel doesn’t seem to include much beneath these delights. Blunter reviewers than I have accused Epstein of snobbery. Though Bottum doesn’t fully explore the implications of his observations in his final chapter, that he meditated on genre fiction at all makes his argument more serious and more open to emendation.

The survival of something of the novel’s function, as Bottum sees it, in however limited and compromised a form in children’s and popular fiction inevitably brought Chesterton to mind. In his early essay “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” Chesterton stuck up for the crude, sensationalistic popular fiction of his own time for precisely this reason:

One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense . . . but it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.

Which means that however much The Novel has declined, as long as good stories set young imaginations on fire and keep them lit, there is reason for hope. The task is to preserve and, when possible, keep writing good stories.

Despite the limitations imposed on it by its author’s standards, The Novel, Who Needs It? offers serious, impassioned support to good fiction, and despite my minor misgivings about its overall argument, The Decline of the Novel is worthwhile as a thought-provoking, incisive look at fiction and the role it plays—or perhaps played—in our culture. I hope, alongside both Epstein and Bottum, for the novel’s return.

Shame vs guilt in Homer

A helpful and important distinction in a chapter on glory and guilt in a “shame culture,” from Robin Lane Fox’s Homer and His Iliad:

Shame differs in two under-appreciated ways from guilt. It is not that guilt is a private, internal response, whereas shame always rests on the reactions of others: we can be privately ashamed of ourselves or secretly feel shame inside ourselves before an imagined onlooker. One cardinal difference is that we can be ashamed of something that is done or said by others to whom we relate, whereas we feel guilt only for what we ourselves have personally said or done. Teachers can be ashamed of what some of their pupils have done, but unless they instigated it, they do not feel guilt for it. Captains can be ashamed of some of their team members’ conduct, without feeling guilt, as they have not done it themselves. There is also a difference of scope and timing. We feel shame about something we might otherwise do and we are therefore inhibited from doing it. We feel guilt and have guilty thoughts only about something we have actually thought or done (or failed to do). The responses involve our sense of ourselves in different ways. When we feel guilt, we accept that we, our full selves, are fully responsible. We can feel shame, however, when we feel we have acted out of character, our true self, or fallen short of our best.

“[W]e can be ashamed of something that is done or said by others to whom we relate, whereas we feel guilt only for what we ourselves have personally said or done.”

As examples, Lane Fox brings forward Hector, who is ashamed of Paris and would be ashamed of himself if he hid safely inside Troy, Priam, who is ashamed of his surviving sons once Hector has been killed, and Achilles, who is ashamed of having let Patroclus die. None of these or any other character in the Iliad expresses what we would think of as guilt: “The Iliad has no word for it, but the absence may not be significant, because people can feel more than they express in words.”

Later in the chapter, Lane Fox answers this modern assumption by noting how, in contrast with some other historical aristocracies in which elites did not care what others thought of them, “Homer's heroes, by contrast, worry frequently what others may say of them, even people who are far inferior to themselves,” like Thersites. As if in answer to a modern assumption about the social aspect of shame, Lane Fox continues:

Are they, then, mere egoists? It is a mistake to regard shame as an egotistical or narcissistic response, as if all that matters in it is what others think of one. Shame is linked to the views of others, real or imagined, but it becomes an inhibition, ‘ashamed to’, or a reaction, ‘ashamed that’, only if these others’ views relate to actions and qualities which the person subject to shame values too.

Shame requires a set of shared virtues and the bonds of community. By contrast, virtually the only social dimension of shame that is recognized now is the act of “shaming”—as a verb—a person for something, which is automatically assumed to be wicked on the part of the shamer. (This, ironically, loads them with unforgivable guilt.) In a world with disintegrating community, the sense of shame imparted by the claims we make upon each other cannot be permitted. The assumption is that shame is a tool of malign control and we must be unbound, totally. And so the world demands shamelessness, with all that that entails.

More writing advice from Lewis

Years and years ago I collected lists of writing advice from three authors—CS Lewis, George Orwell, and Elmore Leonard—and shared them here, both for my own reference and for anyone else who might benefit from them. The Lewis advice came from two separate sources, a letter from the 1950s and his final interview in 1963, and came to eight interrelated points about clarity and precision.

This morning I came across the following, from a 1959 letter to an American schoolgirl collected in Letters of CS Lewis. I own this book, so I don’t know how I’ve missed this set of writing advice before, especially since it may be the best and most systematic that I’ve seen from Lewis. I reproduce it here in full:

It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt.

(1) Turn off the Radio.

(2) Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.

(3) Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You shd. hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.

(4) Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about. . . .)

(5) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he wants to know—the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his.

(6) When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.

(7) Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.

(8) Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.

Excellent, generally applicable advice. I’d say his attempt succeeds. A few of my own glosses:

#1 is a good caution against technological or media distraction. Most of the advice from the last few years will have something about staying off Twitter or putting your phone in another room while writing. Same principle.

#2 is evergreen but perhaps even more important now thanks to the exponential proliferation of trash reading material on the internet. AI-generated textual “content” will only aggravate the problem. Read old books of a wide variety.

Speaking of Elmore Leonard, he’s a good illustration of #3. His dialogue always sounds natural and his third-person narration is so effortlessly conversational that one is not conscious, after a while, of reading it. Great writers can achieve this effect in a variety of ways, not necessarily Leonard’s.

My worst experience with #5 is simply leaving a detail out. Attentive readers of Griswoldville might note the word musketoon in the glossary at the back, though the word appears nowhere in the novel. Well, it was supposed to. One character, a cavalryman who encounters the narrator just before the climactic battle, rests a musketoon on his thigh in my head, but that detail either never made it onto paper or was trimmed and never reinserted in a better place. Fortunately this omission affects nothing in the scene negatively, but it has always bothered me—and cautioned me to make sure I know which details I’ve actually written.

This is where revision and having other people read your manuscript proves most helpful. When writing The Snipers, I had a clear, concrete picture of all of its locations in my head, but I didn’t effectively describe all of them on paper. JP Burten (whose second novel has just come out, by the way) pointed out that the geography of one early scene was totally unclear. I worked hard to fix that, and it strengthened that scene.

#8 has been on my mind a lot recently thanks to YouTube. Listening to—rather than watching—a lot of aspiring YouTube documentarians (I have specifically American YouTubers in mind) has made me wonder whether they know how English works or what words mean. Malapropisms abound. Most often they misuse words as they strain to sound more serious and intellectual than necessary. Basic attention to meaning is sacrificed for a pretentious (or portentous) tone. Which becomes self-defeating, in the manner of Michael Scott trying to use big words.

The mercenary aspect of seeking views by producing videos on the same handful of sensational stories—how many Dyatlov Pass documentaries does a man need?—also plays a role. Per #4, someone who isn’t interested in material for its own sake will not take the care over it that Lewis’s advice requires.

Bold old voices

This week’s episode of John J Miller’s Great Books podcast covers Casino Royale. An instant must-listen, as you can probably imagine. In answer to Miller’s standard opening question, “Why is X a great book?” guest Graham Hillard replies:

“1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as 21st-century American literary fiction.”

I think it’s great for two reasons: it inaugurates one of the iconic characters in post-war literature, without dispute, and it is surprisingly excellent in its literary virtues, and by that I mean pacing, characterization, even sentence construction. I think I joked with you in an e-mail that Casino Royale would win a National Book Award if it came out today—that’s a slight exaggeration, but there really is something to the idea that 1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as twenty-first-century American literary fiction. I absolutely think that if Casino Royale came out today, it would occasion massive coverage of the “bold new voice” variety.

Like the first sentences of Casino Royale, which Miller and Hillard go on to unpack, this is a solid opening. I’ve written about Bond creator Ian Fleming’s craftsmanship as a writer before, including at the basic level of sentence structure back in May.

But what struck me in this introduction was Hillard’s point about the generally high quality of mid-century British genre fiction. Having read Fleming for years and a bunch of Eric Ambler (crime and espionage thrillers) and John Wyndham (science fiction) over the last year, I had noticed this as well—author after author turning out brilliantly structured, beautifully and strongly written novels in accessible genres. What was in the water back then? After finishing Epitaph for a Spy and The Kraken Wakes this summer I set each down and considered what it must have been like, in the 1940s and 50s, to have books like these coming out regularly. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

Two things occur to me to complicate my nostalgia:

First, high literary quality in genre fiction was not new at the time. If anything, the Flemings and Amblers were carrying on the good work of the Buchans who came before. Good writing is good writing regardless of whether or not it appears in a highbrow form. Respect it wherever it appears. (If anything, I increasingly like good genre writing more because in addition to good writing the author of a thriller, for instance, has to excite the reader.)

Second, is there a form of survivorship bias at work here? If we read only the good stuff left over from a period, it’s not because no one wrote junk at the time. After all, I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. And yet…

And yet, the gap in quality between the good genre fiction of Fleming’s time and ours is, in my experience, vast. Insuperable. Whatever it was—a more demanding public, tougher editors, skilled authors willing to use their skills simply to entertain, deeper education on the part of writer and reader, a lack of pretension among both—something is missing now.

The Kraken Wakes

One of my favorite discoveries last year was John Wyndham, an English author of sci-fi thrillers and an uncommonly skillful writer. Back around Christmas I read two of his most famous novels, The Day of the Triffids, in which a worldwide medical disaster turns into an apocalypse thanks to man-eating plants, and The Midwich Cuckoos, in which a small English village slowly figures out that it is the incubator of an otherworldly species’ young. I found these so brilliantly constructed, so subtle, and so absorbing that I got several more of Wyndham’s books with a Christmas gift card or two. I finally got to one of these last month: The Kraken Wakes.

This novel begins, like the other two, with an odd minor incident that the characters only realize later is the first forewarning of catastrophe. Mike and Phyllis Watson, young newlyweds and both reporters for the EBC, an upstart rival to the BBC, are honeymooning on an Atlantic cruise when they sight strange red dots in the sky. The brightly glowing vessels, which can’t be described in any particular detail by any witness and seem to radiate heat, draw closer to both the ship and the ocean before plunging into the water and disappearing. Mike and Phyllis report it as a curiosity, a brief notice to round out the evening news.

Then more of the lights appear. And more. They come out of the sky, dive under the ocean, and no witness ever sees one come back up.

By dint of having been there for one of the first sightings, Mike accidentally becomes a sought-after commentator on the flying red lights. A friend from the Admiralty shows Mike a chart of recorded sightings, which cluster over the deepest parts of the world’s oceans. Whatever this is, it’s not random. Scientists weigh in—and argue, and attack each other. Despite the controversy, no one knows what the lights are but after sightings all over the world, they stop. With their novelty and even their utility as the object of worry used up, the red lights become old news and the public moves on.

Then strange things start happening to the ocean. Vast clouds of mud from the ocean floor—specifically from the abyssal deeps where the glowing red lights had disappeared—cloud the major currents and disrupt fishing. Submarines and bathyspheres lowered to take a look are lost with their crews. Naval vessels explode and sink, and soon cargo ships and passenger liners start sinking. Most disturbingly, small settlements on out-of-the-way islands are found abandoned, their populations never to be seen again.

Mike and Phyllis, through the ups and downs of their journalistic careers and personal lives, witness much of this. And after joining the research team of a controversial scientist whose theories about the origins and goals of the undersea invaders are widely mocked but turn out to be correct more and more often, they become the first people to see and survive whatever is causing coastal populations to disappear. This scene—vividly rendered for the cover of the old Penguin paperback edition (see below)—is one of the most chilling and horrific in any of Wyndham’s books.

Finally, and seemingly too late, the world’s governments fight back. The coastal attacks stop. And the ice caps start melting.

While we haven’t lost our appetite for imagined apocalypse since Wyndham wrote in the 1950s and 60s, some threats have become passé. The large-scale alien invasion seems to be one. If any vision of the end of the world is bound to a former period of our culture, that one—with its fleets of flying saucers, desperate human armies, scientists fretting in labs, generals sweating in bunkers, and “Take me to your leader”—seems utterly inseparable from the early Cold War.

With The Kraken Wakes, which was published in 1953, Wyndham seems to have already sensed this emerging cliché and dodged it. His aliens are never seen and never once communicate with mankind. Their objectives can be inferred only after the fact, based on what they’ve already done, and don’t align with any understandable human goals. They remain alien throughout.

All of which keeps The Kraken Wakes surprising and original. These aliens prove canny and unpredictable and seem to have the upper hand until the very end.

But what keeps the novel’s story engaging, and is one of the most unusual things about it, is Mike’s narration. Wyndham presents the novel as Mike’s account, written down for a readership he may never know, of the catastrophes of the last several years and how and why society has collapsed into isolated bands hiding among islands that used to be hills. Technically, the overwhelming majority of The Kraken Wakes is told through exposition. But Wyndham structures these lengthy histories with crucial scenes of Mike and Phyllis’s work, travels, and personal life, and all of it is plausibly imagined and vividly written. The Watsons’ voyage from a flooded London to the Cotswolds by motor boat, finding their way using half-submerged steeples as landmarks and sleeping in the dry upper stories of abandoned houses, is an outstanding piece of post-apocalyptic writing all by itself. It’s a brilliant miniature of what Wyndham does at novel length in The Day of the Triffids.

My Modern Library paperback describes The Kraken Wakes as “an ingenious early example of climate fiction,” which is a modish thing to say but exactly wrong. The real, pervasive concern throughout the novel, as exemplified by Mike and Phyllis’s work for the EBC, is not climate change but journalism and public opinion. Reporters and governments live in a constant struggle not only with the submarine aliens but with a distracted public whose attention can only be attracted for more than a few minutes by novelty, outrage, or crisis.

Alexandra Kleeman, in a passage of her introduction blurbed on the back cover, is more perceptive. Focusing on a side character named Petunia, who has her own insistently held opinions about the aliens (it’s a Russian ploy), Kleeman suggests that Wyndham offers prescient insight into “anti-vaxxer disinformation and QAnon conspiracists.” Sure, maybe. But if so, Wyndham also correctly shows that this distrust cuts both ways. The government and military repeatedly attempt to control the flow of upsetting information and manipulate—some might say nudge—the public into compliance and approved opinions. But public opinion proves fickle, unpredictable, and intractable. Efforts to control it and save face for embarrassed governments and overconfident scientists don’t go well, something that will come as no surprise after the last few years.

There’s much more to The Kraken Wakes than its excellent writing and thematic insight. I haven’t even mentioned its humor, which is both wryly ironic and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Wyndham has great fun poking at Soviet pomposity, anti-capitalist paranoia, and Lysenkoism, among many other targets. And Wyndham, a master of the slow burn, uses his skill in building dread and foreboding to maximum effect.

But what is most important about The Kraken Wakes is that it is vividly imagined, thrilling, and surprising. Tastes in apocalypse—aliens, zombies, viruses, climate change—will shift and the literary establishment will politicize old books, but a good story well told will outlast both trends and politics. And the survival of storytelling beyond these and the apocalypse, as Mike’s narrative survives the floods, is a real reason for hope.

Vindicated by Dr Johnson

Back at the beginning of the summer I briefly meditated on great books that I’ve tried to read but simply can’t. I wrote in some detail about The Grapes of Wrath but also mentioned Paradise Lost, which I have started many times and never finished—a fact I always feel a little ashamed of.

Well, this week I started reading Joseph Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel, which is excellent so far, and in the introduction he included this passage from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets:

“‘Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

This has been precisely my experience, and if Samuel Johnson could say the same—with much more besides—I can feel a little better about this gap in my reading.

Addendum: Having read the portion of Johnson’s life of Milton in which Johnson assesses Paradise Lost on the merits, I find some of his criticisms precisely accurate and insightful—the allegorical figures don’t work, Adam and Eve’s situation is literally unimaginable, and Milton has set himself the impossible task of describing at length things that can’t be described—while others are more specious. Maybe what will finally propel me through Paradise Lost is the need to make up my own mind about these controversies. To justify the ways of Dr Johnson, that is.

On tunnels

Nada and Frank discover the alien tunnels under Los Angeles in They Live (1988)

Over the weekend I finally got a chance to watch They Live, John Carpenter’s 1988 action-comedy-thriller about a working man unmasking the alien domination of the world. It was a delight. Carpenter presented his vision of the concealment of the true nature of the world by a powerful malevolence exploiting the ignorant masses brilliantly, and made it funny, creepy, and exciting in equal measure. It was also deeply paranoid.

That’s the point, of course. Rowdy Roddy Piper’s famous bank heist—a heist in which he steals no money—and the film’s climactic TV station shooting spree wouldn’t be nearly so enjoyable had the film not made the aliens’ domination so palpably real in the first half. But two things in particular struck me about They Live’s paranoid view of the world.

First, its vision of manipulative elites and passive, cattle-like masses is broadly applicable. They Live provides a template for just about any critique of the way society is run. The obvious target, and the one Carpenter intended, is the consumerism and haves-and-have-nots dynamic of 1980s America. But one could apply it to just about any menace you care to pick. In fact, the image of a hidden, rich minority of foreigners using the media to control the masses for profit suggested itself strongly enough to certain groups that Carpenter himself spoke up against the misuse of his story.

For myself, the aliens of They Live reminded me of nothing so much as latter-day tech CEOs: manipulating people, selling garbage, flogging unrealistic standards of luxury and beauty, clouding minds with useless information and busywork, justifying their existence through convenience, and—just occasionally—suppressing people they don’t want talking too much.

Second, and even more striking to me, were the tunnels. Following our hero Nada’s epiphany and initial, impulsive shooting spree, he falls in with a more organized resistance which is almost immediately destroyed by the foot soldiers of the alien overlords. Nada and his only friend, Frank, manage to escape using one of the aliens’ own wristwatches, which allow them to disappear in emergencies. Nada and Frank find themselves in a maze of tunnels under Los Angeles, the secret infrastructure supporting the aliens’ domination.

The tunnels are an interesting feature of the plot because they pop up in so many other paranoid visions of the world. Pizzagate, QAnon, the Satanic panic—all feature tunnel systems as prominent parts of their narratives. Even the rescue of twelve soccer players from a cave in Thailand has been spun in conspiratorial directions.

And this isn’t limited to recent theories: the anti-Catholic paranoia of the 1830s included fraudulent stories like that of Maria Monk, who claimed that tunnels permitted priests access to nunneries at night and convenient burial places for the children born of these unions, who were strangled at birth. Like its more recent counterparts, this hoax prompted investigations. Like those more recent investigations, it found no evidence that the stories were true.

So I’ve wondered more than once: what is it with tunnels?

If I were a Jungian—and I’m not, for reasons I intend to unfold here at some point—I might suggest that tunnels have some subconscious archetypal power that forces them to recur in our fears and anxieties and, inevitably, our stories. A little closer to reality, I find it interesting that tunnels make common conspiratorial metaphors literal. The image of the underground, the underworld, the subterranean, the hidden is always ready to hand in conspiracist rhetoric.

More to the point, I think tunnels keep popping up in paranoid narratives for two practical reasons.

First, tunnel systems really exist, and they’re not hard to find. Major cities, theme parks, malls, factories, and public works often have elaborate underground infrastructure, and that’s not even taking account of things like mining and military use. Even my undergrad college campus had a legendary tunnel network that was the subject of much rumor in the early 2000s. (One wonders how the rumors have morphed since.) These often vast systems are real, but they’re there for maintenance or logistics.

Not that the mundane has stopped paranoid speculation in the past. Look at any “abandoned places” video on YouTube and you will see two sets of people in the comments: people who have worked in maintenance tunnels and know what they’re for and try to explain it, and people who think all underground spaces are used solely for human trafficking and won’t change their minds.

Second, and perhaps more important psychologically, if something happens out of sight it is not falsifiable in the way something is that happens out in the open, potentially under observation. Conspiracy theories need tunnels because tunnels allow the conspiracy to unfold both here and somewhere else at the same time. And a good paranoid vision needs that, not just for atmosphere but so that the theory can perpetuate, unproven and impossible to disprove. Just look at all these tunnels!

John Carpenter used those trappings brilliantly in They Live. But in real life, living like Nada and looking for their tunnels will only lead you further away from reality.

Song of Songs and particularity

I’m finally finishing Peter Kreeft’s Three Philosophies of Life, the final section of which is a 26-point meditation on love as described in Song of Songs. Here, Kreeft considers the particularity or specificity of love:

“The object of love is a person, and every person is an individual. No person is a class, a species, or a collection. There is no such thing as the love of humanity because there is no such thing as humanity. If your preachers or teachers have told you that the Bible teaches you to love humanity, they have told you a lie. Not once does the Bible say that; not once does it even mention the word humanity. Jesus always commands us to love God and our neighbor instead.”

If, as I’ve often argued here, particularity is the key to good literature, it is fundamental in love. Sine qua non. If it’s not particular, it’s not love.

Particularity is also important philosophically, as Kreeft makes clear in the next paragraph:

“How comfortable ‘humanity’ is! ‘Humanity’ never shows up at your door at the most inconvenient time. ‘Humanity’ is not quarrelsome, alcoholic, or fanatical. ‘Humanity’ never has the wrong political, religious, and sexual opinions. ‘Humanity’ is never slimy, swarmy, smarmy, smelly, or smutty. ‘Humanity’ is so ideal that one could easily die for it. But to die for your neighbor, to die for Sam Slug or Mehetibel Crotchit—unthinkable. Except for love.”

To paraphrase Edmund Burke: Abstract humanity is not to be found; “humanity” inheres in specific people. Each of whom is more important than the abstract category, I would add.

Compare the people who talk a lot about “the planet” or “our species” but not about our families, friends, neighbors, communities, hometowns, countries, and nations. The people who love those things love them very specifically for themselves, flaws and all, and not because they are part of a whole too big for any honest person to grasp. Abstractions, “thinking in categories” as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, are dodges—or, increasingly, solvent.

The one spot where I’ll disagree with Kreeft—provided he isn’t being ironic, and I’m more inclined to think so the more I reread this passage—is when he calls humanity an abstraction “so ideal that one could easily die for it.” I’m not sure that actually happens. Soldiers, famously, die for each other far more readily than for democracy or freedom or big-picture geopolitical objectives. (See the Chesterton quotations here.) Likewise martyrs, whether religious or political. Stories of far-seeing men approaching the gallows with the class struggle on their lips smack of Soviet propaganda, not reality.

No, your neighbor—whether the person singing off-key in church or the dipstick you have to share a foxhole with—are easier to die for than “humanity.” Because they’re easier to love. After all, we’ve been commanded to. ‘humanity’

Here’s some of what Kreeft had to say about Job in the middle section of this book. I’ve written about particularity in storytelling several times: with regard to John Gardner here, in a short note on what novels are for here, in much more detail with regard to James Bond and Honeychile Rider in Dr No here, and in memory of Cormac McCarthy here.

The mores of Zorro

Yesterday during a quick day-trip to see my parents with my older kids we listened to a great favorite: The Mark of Zorro, a radio drama starring Val Kilmer. I reviewed it here a few years ago. It’s great. Give it a listen.

Something that struck me upon this third or fourth listen was the character of Don Diego de la Vega’s public disguise. Like his most famous imitator, Bruce Wayne, Don Diego adopts a foppish, ineffective persona to prevent his alter ego’s detection. But his playacting goes well beyond providing cover.

Almost all of the other characters have flaws, most of which are characteristic of their class. The old aristocrats of the caballeros fuss over pedigree, protocol, and inheritance. The young caballeros are idlers eager for any ruckus so long as it’s diverting. The merchants and traders care only about money, whether honest businessmen like the tavernkeeper, who is sincerely anxious about being paid by the drunken soldiers who frequent his bar, or swindlers like the hide dealer who tries to defraud a monastery. Low-class soldiers like Sergeant Gonzalez are characterized by pride, braggadocio, and pointless cruelty, while officers like Captain Ramón are pragmatically ruthless and ambitious. And the actual rulers of Alta California are either openly corrupt or easily misled by lying subordinates.

These are recognizable types—all too familiar, I’d say—and understandable. They have all given into the besetting sins of their social station.

But Don Diego’s public weaknesses go much further. Not only is he a weakling and a dandy, he is indifferent to the customs and community that usually incentivize men like him to stand up for others. Nothing has a claim on him. He “abhors violence” of any kind, views marriage as a mutually beneficial economic arrangement, pooh-poohs honor for making men “thin-skinned” and quarrelsome, and is not interested in “being a man” as he prefers simply to be “a human being.” He is a parody of modern culture.

All of which, tellingly, places him beneath contempt. Even the rapacious Captain Ramón despises him. Justifiably.

These themes are present in Johnston McCulley’s original Zorro novel, but the radio adaptation plays them up to great effect. It’s well worth your time to listen to, and think about.

Ready to spew

Trigger warning: This post contains untranslated French words and phrases. Appropriately, as you may be able to infer.

After some internationally public tableaux generated predictable—and, I think, entirely intentional—online outrage, I saw some equally predictable condemnations of the outraged for doing the thing all the kindhearted internet bien pensants love to condemn: “spewing hate.”

If a cliché is a “dead metaphor,” spewing hate must be the deadest of them all. But where most clichés are merely overused word pictures or verbal shortcuts, this one is also dangerous. J’accuse!

Spew is a very old word, almost unchanged in pronunciation from Old English spíwan and having retained both literal and figurative senses for its entire history. But what’s striking to me about spew is that as vomit or throw up or even puke have become far more commonly used for its literal meaning, its metaphorical use has been whittled down to almost the single expression spew hate. It’s rare now to see spew without hate tagging along behind it.

This is a relatively recent development. Here’s Google’s Ngram viewer for various versions of the phrase:

This particular combination of words originated in the 20th century but has taken off since 2000, especially in its most common form, spewing hate.

This jibes with my observations. I first noticed this phrase during college, when it became the de rigeur description of Mel Gibson’s drunken rant following his 2006 DUI arrest. (The unbroken climb in frequency for spewing hate in the chart above begins in 2005.) Given Gibson’s state of intoxication and what he had to say during his arrest, this was an almost accurate description.

But then I noticed that the phrase wouldn’t go away. To my increasing annoyance, within a few years the advocate of every bad opinion and every person caught saying something mildly rude on camera would inevitably be described as “spewing hate”—regardless of whether they could be described as “spewing” or whether what they had said was hateful. As Orwell and CS Lewis observed, words that get stuck within easy reach of popular use soon become yet more synonyms for something one either does or doesn’t like. They become clichés.

And this cliché isn’t just lazy, unimaginative, or gauche. Given the political and cultural valence it usually has, spewing hate also functions as a thought killer. This is where the metaphorical image does its nastiest work. Someone spewing hate is not communicating, they’re just vomiting, and what they have to say is vomit. It needs no consideration or engagement, just a mop and a man to hustle the sick person out the door.

This makes spewing hate a handy phrase for shutting down debate and preventing argument. And a cliché being a cliché, it is, of course, overused.

Its overuse makes it especially dangerous, for two reasons. First, it prevents legitimate argument. With regard to the events that prompted this post, lots of people have legitimate concerns and complaints, and describing them simply as “spewing hate” is an imperious culture war dismissal. Leave us, hateful paysan. Second—and more insidious—any openminded person who sees through this cliché, who investigates someone accused of “spewing hate” and finds them a reasonable person offering measured argument over legitimate concerns, will be more open to people who actually are in the hate business. It’s not only annoying and thought-killing, it’s self-defeating.

As always with clichés, avoid this one. Don’t use it. Don’t share material that does. Make yourself think about your words. And, in this case, just maybe, you’ll be able to consider someone else’s opinion, too.