Jennifer spent her 20s and early 30s seeking the perfect man to fill the role of husband and father in her fantasy of married life, a fantasy derived from childhood games played with incredibly ornate, incredibly expensive dollhouses. Ideally, he would be a WASP from the same class as herself. At 35, to the surprise of everyone in her circle, she married Fotis Dulos, who was neither. A Greek born in Turkey, he had emigrated to the United States after attending Brown and Columbia, intoxicated with the wealth and power circulating around him and chasing a fortune that might one day match those of his classmates. In 2004, Fotis was still a member of the striving class. He was also married. On the other hand, he was handsome in the style of George Clooney, charming, ambitious, and willing to have kids right away. He divorced his wife and married Jennifer within months.

The couple moved from Manhattan to the Connecticut town of Canton—a fall down the social ladder for her—and then to the more upscale Farmington. They had five children together over the next few years. The Farber family channeled millions into Fotis’s construction company, which specialized in McMansions not architecturally interesting enough to even be called gaudy. He became controlling and abusive almost as soon as the ink dried on their marriage license. Adopting the typical playbook, he pushed Jennifer’s bohemian friends away, berated her at home, dominated and belittled the children, flirted with other women. Whenever she challenged him, he threatened to “vanish,” to return to Greece and shatter even the thin appearance of a happy home she had been able to maintain. All this while the Farbers kept his unprofitable business afloat with an endless stream of cash.

After thirteen years of marriage, Jennifer discovered that Fotis was having an affair with a woman named Michelle Troconis (an interesting figure in her own right, though we won’t have time to explore her role in the story at much length). Upon confirming the affair, Jennifer initiated filings for what would become one of the most contentious divorces in Connecticut state history. At one point, Fotis represented himself and cross-examined his own wife under oath; at another, he accused her of turning the children against him, of telling them, “Successful people don’t live in Farmington. They live in New Canaan,” the town to which she had moved after the separation. This last detail has circulated extensively among Fotis’s online defenders. Meanwhile, Jennifer’s mother sued to recoup the loans her son-in-law had never intended to pay back.

On May 24th 2019, Jennifer dropped her kids off at school and was never seen again. Fotis was arrested a week later and eventually charged with her murder. He killed himself in 2020, on the day he was supposed to appear in court. Michelle Troconis was tried and sentenced as an accomplice in 2025. Jennifer’s body has never been found.

*

The above is a brief summary of Rich Cohen’s Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story, a narrative assembled from thousands upon thousands of pages of documents—court filings, police warrants, interview transcripts, and emails, as well as Jennifer’s many published writings and private journals. Cohen is no stranger to massive archives; his previous books include histories of the United Fruit Company and the Rolling Stones, as well as biographies of his father (the corporate negotiator Herb Cohen) and grandfather (Benjamin Eisenstadt, the inventor of Sweet’N Low). Still, as he recently told Kevin Canfield of crimereads.com, “I’ve never had access to something like this.” “The big story,” he promises, “is in the minutiae.”

But for all the minutiae jammed into Murder in the Dollhouse, the basic contours of the Dulos story are so familiar as to risk banality in our current media moment, over-saturated as it is with true crime books, streaming series, podcasts, and Youtube channels. Woman killed by husband in small town. Motives include: money, sex, rage, etc. We’ve heard it all before, more or less, even if we’re not familiar with this particular case. Cohen knows this, and he knows that his meticulous account—cast in the Truman Capote tradition, more sociological study than tabloid fodder—will be competing for marketshare with a million amateurs, perverts, and cranks churning out content by the hour, always willing to turn the prurience and speculation up another notch. Add to this the standard challenge for any nonfiction book about a famous killing: How do you tell the story compellingly enough that your readers don’t care that they already know the ending?

It doesn’t help that Cohen’s conclusions about the case are roughly what you might expect from skimming the cover-copy: Fotis was a narcissistic sociopath; Jennifer was a good-hearted but naive child of privilege; bad things happen to decent people; and nothing can really protect you if someone is determined to do you harm. There are plenty of fresh facts here, but no new theory of the crime and no genuine revelations about anyone involved that you couldn’t learn from browsing a few Reddit threads. And as far as the amateur sociology goes, I don’t think anyone reading would be shocked to learn that the residents of the Connecticut Gold Coast are vindictive and status-obsessed.

Maybe the problem is that the Dulos story is just not very interesting. Which begs the question: Is it worse to be bored by a murder, or fascinated? On one hand, the ickiness of fascination is obvious enough, and the tendency of true crime writing to encourage erotic attachment to both killer and victim is well documented. On the other hand, “ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources,” as John Berryman once wrote. Boredom would seem to reveal a lack of empathy and imagination, whereas fascination would imply an excess of the same, such that empathy is transformed into identification and imagination into fantasy. Most readers of true crime have been guilty of both, but in this case I must confess with Berryman “that I have no / inner resources, because I am heavy bored.”

*

So then why did I read Murder in the Dollhouse in a single day, hardly putting it down? And why did I—a person infamous among friends for quitting books after the first 100 pages and turning off movies the second my attention wanders—go on to consume multiple podcasts about the case, and then watch a truly terrible docuseries about an unrelated but similar crime that same week? Why does true crime, even in its most mediocre variations, exert such a hypnotic effect on me and so many others?

From its beginnings, true crime has had a guilty conscience. In a 2007 book, Mark Seltzer notes that the genre, across media, “is always taking exception to itself, always looking over its own shoulder, and by analogy, inviting viewers and readers to do the same.” This self-reflexivity of the text induces a posture of self-surveillance and self-accusation in the reader. Ted Bundy turns to the camera and tells us that we are not so different from him; likewise, Rich Cohen feels the need to remind us every few pages that Jennifer Dulos was a real person—not just a character in a story or a photograph in the newspaper—because he wants us to know that he knows how easily we tend to forget that. Dozens of dry pages loaded with court transcripts and pop-psychological truisms are, perhaps, the penance that the text pays for its brief moments of genuine transgression.

One may be tempted, in a moment of cynicism mixed with righteousness, to say that all the hand-wringing done by writers and readers about the “ethics” of true crime is essentially a bad faith alibi. Of course we all know that this stuff is exploitative, perverse, indefensible—as Janet Malcolm once said about journalism in general—but nonetheless we go on writing it and reading it. As long as the text talks back to me once in a while, I get to have it both ways. I get to listen to a podcast about Jeffrey Dahmer while folding the laundry, have my voyeuristic glimpse into the underworld, indulge my obscene fascinations, and then pat myself on the back for feeling a bit bad about the whole thing and go about my day. Or so the story goes.

And this story is probably true up to a point, but I think it needs a further twist. For most readers who are not pure sadists or pure masochists (and perhaps there has never been a perfect example of either), the primary pleasure of the text lies neither in the obscenity represented nor the shame induced, but rather in the perpetual movement that we make through them. Page by page, book by book, we oscillate between these two poles, traversing a circuit of transgression, guilt, self-accusation, intellectualization, self-absolution, and so on.

Beneath this circuit and driving it is the more basic logic of identification and dis-identification. In Fotis, I glimpse my own worst impulses, my most infantile aggressivity, the extreme consequences of a patriarchal logic that I was lucky enough to never internalize too deeply. In Jennifer, I recognize my own naivety, my capacity for denial, and the fundamental vulnerability that comes with fragile embodiment and life among other people, some of whom would do me harm if they could. Such experiences are obviously gendered, but the reader’s capacity for identification is never and can never by fully constrained by their gender. We have to see just a tiny bit of ourselves in both killer and victim in order to be properly reassured that we are neither.

*

My father, not a religious person by any definition, often repeated a little phrase under his breath: “but-for-the-grace-of-God.” He would whisper it as one word, like a tiny prayer to nobody in particular. I remember him saying it at the kitchen table when a tragedy hit the news, or on the street when passing someone in distress. Once, when I was seven or eight, we found ourselves stuck in a rubbernecking traffic jam, with a brutal multi-car accident on the side of the road. I could tell the lanes were actually clear, and I asked him why so many people were slowing down to look at the wreck. “Because they want to see what can happen,” he said.

I didn’t hear the whole of his little phrase—“there but for the grace of God go I”—until later, after he himself had gone, having succumbed to a combination of bad health and bad luck. It was, I think, his way of making note of “what can happen,” and a reminder to appreciate the simple, absurd fact that it (whatever it might be) had not yet happened to him or to his loved ones. In a world where, as Cohen writes, “we all live on a razor’s edge,” that reassurance, repeated like a ritual in a million variations, is perhaps the best any of us can do.

“The Wave placed her among the outstanding literary figures of our time… The Sound and the Fury should place William Faulkner in company with Evelyn Scott.”

In July of 1929, Evelyn Scott published The Wave—her massive, kaleidoscopic novel of the Civil War—to popular success and critical acclaim. She tells the story of the war through dozens of intertwined vignettes, from the first shots at Fort Sumter to Lincoln’s assassination and its aftermath. Most of the great battles and events appear, but almost always from an individual perspective, what Henry James would call a “center of consciousness.” We begin with Confederate Dickie Ross watching the attack on Fort Sumter from a rowboat, and we conclude with Union mother Mrs. Deering, who has lost two sons at Gettysburg, cheering Sherman’s triumphal parade through Washington. Along the way, we move between North and South, glimpsing the lives of hundreds upon hundreds of real and imagined persons representing white and Black, men and women, officers and infantry, the war-front and the home-front, abolitionists and planters. The war, Scott writes, “was like the Deluge,” sweeping up everything in its path and reorganizing the world irreversibly for all involved.

In the years after its release, many considered The Wave to be the greatest Civil War novel ever written, though it would ultimately be displaced in the popular consciousness by Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and in the critical canon by Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!.

Scott’s publisher, Cape & Smith, sent her a manuscript of The Sound and the Fury in early 1929. Faulkner was at the time toiling in virtual obscurity. She responded enthusiastically to the work of her fellow Southerner, and she agreed to compose an astute critical essay and endorsement, to be distributed with advance copies of the novel. After Scott’s star soared into the literary stratosphere that summer, Harrison Smith appended the above quotation to promotional material for the novel. Scott’s essay did more than drum up enthusiasm for Faulkner’s work—it gave his early readers some critical tools for decoding it.

When asked his opinion on contemporary women novelists in 1940, Faulkner responded, “Evelyn Scott was pretty good, for a woman.” At that point, Scott had spent a decade fading from public consciousness. She would release her final published novel, The Shadow of the Hawk, in 1941 to poor reviews and negligible sales, before passing the last two decades of her life in obscurity and poverty, suffering from acute physical and mental illness, while her novels, poems, essays, and memoirs disappeared from print.

***

Evelyn Scott was born Elsie Dunn in January of 1893, in her family’s antebellum mansion in Clarksville, Tennessee. The Dunns belonged to a ruined and nostalgic aristocracy, embodied in her propriety-obsessed mother, Maude. The family moved continually throughout her childhood, as her father, Seely, sought more lucrative employment. By her teens, Elsie had lived in Russellville, Kentucky; Evansville, Indiana; and St. Louis, Missouri, before finally settling in New Orleans. She was a lonely child but a precocious student. By her mid-teens, she had read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Marx, and enrolled at the Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University as its youngest student ever. Before turning twenty, she had advocated the legalization of sex work in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, completed a draft of a novel (now lost), and became the secretary of the Louisiana Woman’s Suffrage Party. The events of her life have been tirelessly reconstructed by a small group of scholars that includes her two biographers, D. A. Callard and Mary Wheeling White, along with Dorothy Scura, Peggy Bach, and Caroline Maun. It is from their work that much of the following is drawn.

Though not without her blindspots, Scott would remain sharply critical of racial, gender, and class prejudice throughout her life. Robert L. Welker, her literary executor and friend, suggests that this stemmed less from an abstract sense of justice or deep understanding of socio-economic history, and more from a profound personal disgust with hypocrisy. In her 1937 memoir, Background in Tennessee, Scott is candid about the role her complex class status and experience as a perpetual outsider played in her political development: “Perhaps if I had inherited the house I was born in, and tradition with it, I would never have learned to be critical.”

At twenty, Elsie Dunn sought a clean break with Southern propriety. She initiated a whirlwind romance with a Frederick Creighton Wellman, a friend of her father who was forty-years-old at the time and serving as the dean of Tulane’s School of Tropical Medicine. He was also married to concert pianist Edna Willis. For Elsie, Frederick represented worldliness, adventure, and a way out of the stifling Southern society into which she was born. For Frederick, Elsie represented a young, beautiful, devoted woman. Moreover, as he admits in his autobiography, she was the only woman in New Orleans willing to join him on a trip to South America.

Around New Years Day of 1914, the pair eloped to Brazil by way of New York with only a change of clothes, a few hundred dollars, and volumes of Shelley, Keats, and Tolstoy. They even left their names in New Orleans, registering at hotels as “Cyril Kay-Scott” and “Evelyn Scott”. This was as much a practical gesture as a symbolic one; the scorned Edna Willis was contacting newspapers and police departments across the country in an attempt to prosecute her husband under the Mann Act. Headlines from California to London reported the story of the Southern Belle and her Seducer. Scott was deeply insulted by this narrative of the affair. In Escapade, her 1923 roman-a-clef about the experience, she writes, “What I resent most deeply is the attempt to deprive me of responsibility for my own acts.”

The Scotts made it to Rio de Janeiro by February. They registered under their new names with the American consulate and discovered almost immediately afterwards that Evelyn was pregnant. Things got worse from there. Evelyn spoke no Portuguese and was already experiencing the first difficulties of a nightmarish pregnancy, so Cyril had to support them both in various odd jobs: day laborer, bell boy, insect specimen collector, bookkeeper. They moved to Paraiba and then Natal as Cyril looked for better work, boarding in cheap hotels and staying at the homes of Anglo-American ex-pats when possible, surviving on a diet of coarse fish and sandy lettuce.

Scott was confined to her room most days by physical ailments, and when she did leave the hotels she was met by the hard stares of men in the street. Her lack of language skills rendered her completely dependent on Cyril, who was often gone days at a time for work at a sewing machine company. If Escapade is to be believed, her social life was restricted to failed communications with resentful servants, a brief flirtation with a concierge, letters to her mother who appeared to be losing her mind under the strain of social disgrace, and care for an adopted marmoset.

In late October of 1914, Scott gave birth to her first and only son, Seely Creighton Scott—affectionately called “Jig” because he was constantly afflicted by lice and needed to be “chiggered”—under the care of a drunken doctor hired by Cyril. The labor was long and painful, a traumatic end to a traumatic pregnancy. But in Escapade, Scott also describes it as a mystical experience, somewhere between those represented by St. Teresa of Avila and Richard Wagner, in which the boundaries between self and other, life and death, are confused, or elided altogether. In one of the most extraordinary passages Scott ever wrote, we find ourselves between existential abjection and absolute rapture:

In suffering intensely one’s being cannot be reduced. And the worst of it is that I cannot even establish relations with my own individuality. My body fades out and becomes one with dark turmoil…

While I struggle I know it is my own being that I am trying to force out of myself. I am certain that my insides are torn out of me, disintegrating, and I wonder at my head which, as I dimly perceive, keeps alive all to itself.

It has to go on. My mind is white, still, and separate. It is conscious of itself but of nothing outside. The pressure against my spine continues. My mind continues forever, parallel to my hurt but unconnected with it. It is terrible to have such a living mind. I hate it. I want it killed, because it goes on and on so brightly and so meaningless.

A few pages later, she wonders “why the birth of a child appealed so little to the imagination of the artist. Why were all the great realistic novels of the world concerned with only one aspect of sex? This surely was the last—the very last—thing one needed to know before one came to conclusions about life.” Towards the end of her life, Scott admitted to Welker that the love-death—or, as they called it in their correspondence, after Wagner, the Liebestod—was a central theme of all her books, and we can read this childbirth as a kind of Ur-scene in her corpus.

***

Scott was torn internally by the birth and suffered a prolapsed uterus that would not be properly repaired until her return to the United States, five years later. Cyril resented her continued weakness, and compared her brutally to a servant girl who recovered from a birth within days. (The servant’s child died soon after.) Decades later, he would write in his autobiography that “civilized women are biologically incompetent.” Perhaps to prove his own competence, Cyril decided to become a rancher, a profession he knew next to nothing about. He claimed one thousand acres of unregistered land in Cercadinho, a remote valley four hundred miles from the coast.

They made plans to set out for the interior as soon as Scott was back on her feet. But Jig was not the only new member of the household. Maude Dunn, Evelyn’s mother, had recently arrived in Brazil to help care of the child. According to both Scotts, she was far more of a hindrance than a help. Maude adapted to this new world even more poorly than her daughter, insisting on wearing a veil in public and white gloves to dinner.

In a twist worthy of Tennessee Williams, Seely Dunn soon stopped responding to Maude’s letters. He had sent his wife south on a one-way ticket, and promised to mail her money for the return trip when it became available. But after fifteen months of radio silence, she instead received word that her husband had filed for divorce, claiming desertion. A few months later, he married a woman barely older than his daughter. This caused a psychological break from which Maude would never recover. Her periods increasingly compulsive and delusional behavior were now interspersed with days or weeks of near-total catatonia. Having nowhere to go and no money to get there, Maude joined Evelyn, Cyril, and Jig on their trek Cercadinho, where they would share a jungle shack for the next three years.

Predictably, the ranch failed, as did a brief foray into diamond mining. But it was in Cercadinho that Evelyn began to write her first mature work—notes towards The Narrow House and Escapade, as well as imagist verse. Trading on her sensational public image as the Southern Belle who escaped to the jungle, she published a sequence titled Tropical Life in Harriet Monroe’s journal Poetry in November of 1919, alongside work by William Butler Yeats and Malcolm Cowley. Her gambit in these early poems was to apply the calm, clarity, and concision of classical imagistic style to the dynamism and overwhelming variety of life in the Amazon. She met with mixed results, as in the amazing first five lines of “Rainy Season,” and its underwhelming, abstracted ending:

A flock of parakeets

Hurled itself through the mist;

Harsh wild green

And clamor-tongued,

Through the dim white forest.

They vanished,

And the lips of Silence

Sucked at the roots of life.

Evelyn’s health grew worse as her writing grew stronger, and a botched operation at a missionary hospital failed to repair her torn ligaments. The family were finally able to secure emergency passports to seek medical treatment for her once World War I ended. They sailed for New York in summer of 1919, immediately settling in Greenwich Village, then the heart of the American avant-garde. Upon arrival, they gave Maude Dunn a one-way ticket to Clarksville, Tennessee. Evelyn would continue to suffer the after-effects of the childbirth complications and clumsy surgeries for the rest of her life.

***

The Scotts fell in quickly with the Village scene, and Evelyn’s poems found homes in the Dial, the Nation, Others, and Playboy (unrelated to the men’s magazine). Her first published volume, Precipitations, followed in late 1920 to the admiration of fellow poets and a few publications. In the Village, she made up for lost time socially and sexually. She began friendships with Lola Ridge and Emma Goldman, had affairs with William Carlos Williams and (possibly) Waldo Frank, and somehow had energy left over to complete her first great novel, The Narrow House.

With the publication of The Narrow House in 1921, Scott went from emerging imagist poet to serious modern novelist almost overnight. In the New York Times Book Review, Sinclair Lewis called it “an event, one of those recognitions of life by which life becomes the greater.” Ludwig Lewisohn declared it “imperishable.” The impossible-to-please H. L. Mencken said it was superior to Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt in “virtuosity” and “venturesomeness.” But the highest praise, from Scott’s perspective, may have come in a personal letter from D. H. Lawrence, who called it “America’s last word before a cataclysm sets in, or a new start.” Thus began a decade that would see Scott ranked among the great novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries (from Flaubert to Dostoyevsky to Woolf) by the major critics of the English-speaking world.

The Narrow House is a slim volume, the first of a trilogy concerning the Farley family. Its title refers to a literal narrow house in an unnamed city occupied by three generations of Farleys. It was also New Orleans slang for a coffin. Taking Scott’s cue, we can perhaps best describe the novel as a kind of gothic melodrama, populated by emotional vampires. Every character is plagued by some deep dissatisfaction, and each finds what little enjoyment he or she can get by inflicting pain on the others, or themselves.

The novel, like many in the naturalist tradition, is punctuated by grotesque meals. It opens with Mrs. Farley purchasing chickens at the butcher for a meal with her daughter-in-laws parents, which she hopes will patch up a feud between the families—a scene reminiscent of Leopold Bloom’s trip to buy a pork kidney in Ulysses, which Scott would review favorably upon its release:

The meat shop was as white as death. It smelt of blood and sawdust and its tiled interior offered a refuge from the heat without.…

[Mrs. Farley’s] vague, rather squinting eyes traveled undecidedly over the big pieces of meat: the shoulders, the forelegs, the haunches, of different shades of red streaked with tallow or suet, that swung on hooks in the shadow against the gray-white tiling of the walls. The fowls dangled in a row a little to the fore of the meat. The feet of the hens were a sickly bluish yellow, and the toes, cramped together yet flaccid, still suggested the fatigue which follows agony. The eyes bulged under thin blue-tinged lids and on the heads and necks about the close-shut beats bunches of reddish brown feathers had been left as decorations.

Under the bright lights of the butcher shop, nothing escapes the gaze of the novelist, and her imagist command of detail is even more hypnotizing in prose. The chickens are somehow between life and death, fecund in their decay, alien but all-too-human. Here, Scott declares herself a writer who will not look away from cruelty or obscenity. What follows is an unflinching study of family psychology and domestic cruelty, a work that does not simply hold up a mirror to the lower-middle class American family but follows its subjects relentlessly with a magnifying glass, or shoots them with a deep focus lens.

Alice, Mrs. Farley’s daughter, hopelessly falls in love with her employer, a radical writer, but cannot bring herself to reveal it to him. Instead, she berates her passive and masochistic mother for staying with an unfaithful husband, and her father for not pursuing proper happiness with another woman. When her longing and self-loathing combine and reach a fever pitch,—Scott describes her, unforgettably, as “hot and futile”—Alice engages in rituals of self-harm, biting at her forearms or stabbing herself with scissors. Alice’s thoughts in these moments transform from litanies of grievance into strange, gnomic statements that represent the most striking lines of the book: “I shall go out of me in dark blood,” she thinks; “Mary had a little lamb. I’m mad. Washed in the blood of the lamb”; “She was suddenly tired, endless, capable of giving birth to endless selves. She was tired. She could not die. She was like a mother bearing herself forever like endless children.”

Winnie, Laurence’s helpless wife, reads like a portrait of what Scott feared she would become if she had remained in Southern society. Desperate for affection, she spends her days wandering the house asking Mrs. Farley, Laurence, and her children variations on the theme, “Do you love me?”, and remains perpetually unsatisfied by their answers. She corners her oldest child, May, in the foyer, and initiates a strange Oedipal drama, but one perhaps not unfamiliar to many readers:

Winnie wanted to make May cry but hated her for crying.

“You must love me, May! I’m your mamma! You must love me!”

“I do,” May said. Her eyes were black with tears, but because she wanted to cry she could not keep her lips from smiling a little.

“As well as you love papa?”

May felt accused of something. She could not make herself speak. She was sorry and wanted her mother to strike her.

“Then you love Papa best? Oh, May, that’s cruel! You mustn’t love him best!”

The most extraordinary scenes of the novel, as in the case of Escapade, concern conception and birth. Winnie and Laurence were told after the birth of their second child that another pregnancy would put Winnie in grave danger. After months and years of abstinence, she and Laurence begin playing sadistic games of seduction, coming ever closer to the act that could destroy her. When they finally do consummate, at the end of a long and painful scene at the heart of the novel, Scott records the profound ambivalence of both parties at this game they have played to the death:

Winnie felt him yield and was glad, but her triumph congealed in agony. She fell away from him. She was cold. She was still. The throbbing of her body came to her like an echo which she could scarcely hear. She had forgotten the meaning of it. Who was this man? She was afraid.

She waited for him to leave her….

Laurence had been frightened by what they had done. She wanted him to be frightened.

Death. If she had a child she would suffer—not he. White and whole, she felt herself a beautiful stillness in the turmoil of Laurence’s cowardice.

Winnie conceives a child and dies giving birth prematurely. Her child survives. The Farleys feel an intense relief at her death, which none of them has the courage to articulate or avow.

***

The Narrow House was a critical smash and a minor commercial success. But by 1922, Evelyn had already fallen into a cycle of debt that would follow her for the rest of her life. The family decamped for Bermuda, then Algeria, seeking patronage and cheap living. Evelyn feverishly completed the remaining volumes of the Farley trilogy, Narcissus and The Golden Door, as well as Escapade. She and Cyril grew apart. He found a younger woman. She began an intense affair with New Zealand watercolorist Owen Merton, and then a life-long partnership with British writer John Metcalfe.

Through the 1920s and ‘30s, Scott would complete two more trilogies: the first a series of novels around the Civil War (of which The Wave was the second and by far most successful volume, artistically and commercially), and the latter about the struggles of the modern woman artist to remain independent, in body and spirit. She reportedly turned down an offer to write the dialogue for the film version of Gone with the Wind on idiosyncratic feminist grounds, arguing that Mitchell was wrong in positioning the brilliant and willful Scarlett O’Hara as an exceptional woman in Southern society.

Through this whole period, she was also working on the book she thought would be her real masterpiece, a massive novel of the French Revolution called Before Cock Crow, the research for which she tried to fund with a Guggenheim fellowship. According to Welker, she completed the greater part of the novel between 1934 and 1942, at which point the manuscript was stolen. She spent another ten years researching and rewriting until, bizarrely, a large portion of it was stolen a second time in 1954, at which point she abandoned the project. Extensive notes and sections survive in university archives, along with another unpublished work called Escape into Living, which she was working on at the time of her death in 1963.

Scott’s health and financial situation deteriorated significantly in the 1930s, as did the quality of her fiction. Sales of her novels lagged, and she came to suspect and blame a communist conspiracy against her. Though a reader of Marx in her youth and a sympathizer (if not quite a fellow-traveler) with Leftist causes throughout the 1920s, she became a violent anti-communist in the ‘30s, publishing articles and making radio speeches against the Party and its supposed grip on American artistic production. She broke off a friendship with Theodore Dreiser, who was one of the nation’s most famous socialists and at the time preparing to publicly join the CPUSA.

Then things started to get even stranger. Without evidence, she blamed the theft and destruction of her manuscripts on communist agents and claimed she was being regularly threatened and framed for various crimes. She wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover himself (as Callard notes, the man whose first order of business as FBI chief was to deport Scott’s longtime friend Emma Goldman), accusing her apartment caretaker of subversive activities. When her career effectively ended in 1941, her political paranoia turned into full-blown delusion and obvious mental illness. She began hearing sub-audible voices that prevented her from working, which she attributed to a communist plot to silence her with some sort of jamming device.

She was, moreover, desperate for contact with her estranged son, Jig, now a painter and writer. He spent much of his youth with Cyril after the divorce before re-entering her life in the mid-thirties and intermittently living with her between 1937 and 1939. When he married, Scott liquidated most of her limited assets to support the young couple and their new child. During World War II, she sent him forty-three unanswered letters. Jig finally cut her off completely around 1949, after a difficult visit in London, and did his best to keep his address secret from her over the following decade. Evelyn, once again, suspected a communist conspiracy keeping them apart.

***

Scott and Metcalfe returned from Europe in the mid-1930s. They spent the next twenty years wandering the United States and Canada, shuffling between various cities and only ever staying in one place for a few months at a time. In 1955, they settled into their last apartment, a studio at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel in New York City. She died there, of lung cancer, in 1963.

In the last years of her life, Scott made contact with Welker, then an enthusiastic graduate student writing a dissertation on her work. He collected her papers and numerous personal items after she died, and gave them to the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in the late 1990s.

In preparation for this essay, I spoke with Paul Jones, a professor of English at the University of Ohio, who was a graduate student at Knoxville when the Welker-Scott collection arrived. He and some others under the advising of Dorothy Scura went through over seventeen feet of files in search of clues to Scott’s life and writing. This produced some dissertation chapters and a 2001 edited volume of essays, but their efforts led to no true resurgence of interest in her extraordinary body of work. Professor Jones left me with an anecdote worthy of a Scott novel: While searching through the disorganized boxes, he noticed something rattling inside a small tobacco tin that had been packed into the trove. He opened it to find the author’s teeth, which had fallen out one by one over the last years of her life.

***

For over a decade, Evelyn Scott was considered one of the brightest lights of her generation by the brightest lights of her generation. The Wave sold over one hundred thousand copies in its first year, and laid the groundwork for future Civil War epics. Like so many writers of the so-called Southern Renaissance, her reputation was dwarfed by the meteoric rise of Faulkner. Her late work saw a steep decline in quality as her mental health deteriorated and she became increasingly consumed by anti-communist paranoia. Though the conspiracy against her was clearly a fantasy, she did manage to alienate nearly every figure in the American literary establishment—publishers, editors, patrons, fellow writers—who might have been inclined to help her recover her career.

Evelyn Scott straddled the line between realism and modernism, between the Southern regionalism that was her birthright and the cosmopolitan Weltliteratur inspired by her lifelong wanderings. Reduced by the end of her life to a footnote in the triumphalist story of Faulkner’s rise to global preeminence, and obscured even further today, she represents not only a missing chapter in the story of American letters, but a crucial hinge point in the global modernist tradition itself.

In a 2018 New Yorker interview, conducted during her victory-lap after completion of the Outline Trilogy, Rachel Cusk made an off-hand remark that has since been cited in nearly every review and examination of her work: “I’m not interested in character because I don’t think character exists anymore.” Alexandra Schwartz, the interviewer, smelled a headline and pushed Cusk to explain herself. What followed was not so much a systematic theory of fictionality, but a series of fragmentary and bracketed reflections on her own recent reading: “It seemed to me that these definitions of character and place in the Victorian novel—the village, the vicar, the woman—or in America—the small town, the woman, the man—those things that root to universality were done with. And saying ‘there’s this man here and you’re all going to identify with him’ didn’t seem right to me anymore. It didn’t seem real.”

For Cusk, character in the classical Victorian realist sense is dead because readers no longer experience themselves as characters, no longer spontaneously “identify” with or believe in the supposedly universal types that populate Austen’s villages or Updike’s towns. We can no longer comfortably and unthinkingly inhabit these social roles, and therefore we encounter them not as deeply felt forms-of-life but as so many costumes to be worn and removed as needed. If a man takes his social role too seriously—if a vicar really believes himself to be a vicar, all the way down, rather than simply a man in vicar’s clothes who does the work of a vicar and writes “vicar” on his census form—we sense something faintly ridiculous, even pathological, about him. He is out of place, out of time, unable to assimilate into a contemporary culture defined not by “real” differences but by a market-mediated principle of substitution and exchange. Cusk’s narrator, Faye, encounters any number of these sad figures across the Trilogy, meeting their stubborn sincerity with an understated blend of pity and envy. “Character” in this older and deeper sense thus indicates what Cusk calls a “dysfunction” of the individual and of the novel itself.

Cusk’s work registers a crisis of representation defined by a collective disbelief in exemplarity, in the belief that any fictional or real person can successfully operate as a type. The decline of typicality—the replacement of the concrete-universal representative of a class and subgroup in dynamic, allegorical relations with other such representatives, such as one finds in Balzac and Scott, with the figure of the “average man” who lacks all such substantial content and can in principle be reduced to a mere statistical figure on one hand and an abstract body on the other—was already diagnosed by Gyorgy Lukacs in his polemics against naturalism and modernism in the 1920s and ‘30s. For Lukacs, it is only through the dramatic interrelation of typical characters that the novel can perform its crucial function of mapping a total historical situation. Whereas certain modernists (one thinks of Joyce and Dos Passos first of all) may have maintained that they were in fact reaching after the representation of totality, only by other means than those prescribed by Lukacs, Cusk and her contemporaries seem to have entirely given up such grand claims to the Whole along with any prescribed strategies for that Whole’s representation.

The decline of belief in authentic exemplarity, the absence of any representational or analytic strategy that can assert a view of the totality, and the search for a narrative form capable of systematically bracketing, undermining, if not outright abandoning, all appeals to the logic of typicality are, I think, the three key developments shaping serious literary fiction today. Any attempt to understand the work of Cusk, W. G. Sebald, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, J. M. Coetzee, and others must take these two intertwined processes into account, grasping them as collective responses to concrete historical processes. I share the broad strokes of this thesis with Timothy Bewes, author of the extraordinary book Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, which I and several of my peers have come to believe is perhaps the single most important and clarifying work yet written on the current state of our global literary situation.

Free Indirect won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2022 and enjoys circulation among academics, but it has not yet made much impact on the “public” critical conversation in book reviews and blogs, or among writers themselves, despite having the full-throated endorsement of Merve Emre, middlebrow critic par excellence of the moment. There are obvious reasons for its muted reception. Bewes not only writes in a complex (and at times overwrought) style that’s been out-of-fashion since Derrida’s passing and the decline of High Theory, he also takes as his key interlocutors the reputed obscurantists Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze, mobilizing concepts from their most difficult texts—Le partage du sensible, The Logic of Sense, Cinema I & II. He assumes familiarity with an idiosyncratic canon of authors from Cusk, Sebald, and Coetzee to Jesse Ball, Tao Lin, and Valeria Luiselli. He blackens pages mediating longstanding academic methodological debates without really clarifying their vital connection to the primary texts at hand. But Fredric Jameson was guilty of all these sins as well, and his books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. So, I’m holding out hope for Bewes’s popular breakthrough.

In order to deal with the unruly texts of this 21st century canon-in-formation, Bewes proposes a criticism that would expose and move beyond three inseparable “aesthetic ideologies” of literary studies that have held sway at least since Lukacs: “the ideology of form (the existence of nameable ideas that are given legible or sensuous manifestation in art and literature), the ideology of the expressive subject (individuals as principal subjects or envelopes of thought), and the ideology of fiction (a fundamental separation between two registers of writing based on the writer’s intentions with regard to the real).” He goes a step further, arguing that the novels he cites are themselves already engaged in the process of “unthinking” those ideologies. The novels all “posit” an unbridgeable gap between any idea and its allegorical depiction in a work of art, between particular person and any universal type, between any given work and the social world in which it is produced. This absolute non-relation, because it amounts to the very impossibility of exemplarity as such, is itself untheorizable and unrepresentable; it cannot be spoken of in any general terms, but only “inhabited” by the novel itself, as the novel’s own impersonal and inhuman form of thought, distinct from the thought of any given author or reader.

Clearly, this is an esoteric and ambiguous discourse. And it must be so precisely because its “object” is not an “object” at all, but an absence. It is moreover an absence we never encounter directly, as in the case of an empty chair that signifies a missing guest. Most often, the only trace of this absence appears as the absence of an absence, the proliferation of details and digressions that dominate the pages of a Sebald novel, or the endless monologues whose function is not really to communicate, but merely to ward off terrifying silence in Cusk and Thomas Bernhard. Characters appear as heaps of commodities and words, obsessions and complexes, whose real function is to declare their own inadequacy to account for the person described or speaking, the impossibility to know or say “how should a person be” (to borrow from Sheila Heti, whose work also fits this mold). Under that mass of material, signifying, and psychological detail, each person seems to cry out, “But this is not all that I am! Beneath and within and across all this I am singular, utterly singular! There is something untouched and unknown and unknowable within me, a dark core of impossible me-ness which I could not give up even if I tried!” Isn’t it pretty to think so?

To paraphrase this claim to singularity, to relate one singularity to another, is of course to enact a certain reductive violence upon it. Singularity as such cannot collect itself into a statement, but is dispersed radically through the sentences of the novel just as subjectivity itself is dispersed through signifiers and signifiers only provisionally collected at the abstract point of the subject-in-some-singular-relation, a relation which by nature of being singular is therefore also a non-relation. Bewes does not cite him, but one cannot help but think at this moment of Heidegger’s figure of the Clearing of Being, in which particular beings appear and disclose themselves, but never do so fully. Likewise, in the contemporary novel, Being is never reducible to Appearing, but only shows itself as that irreducible and unthinkable “other” of Appearance, as that unspoken and unspeakable secret which each being bears within itself.

The refusal of paraphrase, the disavowal of exemplarity, the struggle with and against what Bewes calls the “instantiation relation” in all its nested forms—though he admits that this disavowal can never be complete, only more or less intensely and effectively implied—these are the bedrock ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic principles of the contemporary novel. I think this description holds water, and, since reading Free Indirect, I can’t help but bring its analytical frame to bear on every work of new fiction that crosses my desk. A friend pointed out Bewes’s obvious influence on my thinking after reading my last post on W. G. Sebald, and he was completely correct to do so.

At the same time, however, I think we need to subject Bewes’s analysis to one more dialectical turn of the screw. If the contemporary novel has gone to such great lengths to produce a non-relation between itself and history proper, we must recommit ourselves, as critics, to rigorously historicize that project itself. And we must perform this historicization of the emergence of the reputedly non-historical not as an attempt to reduce all these hugely accomplished works of fiction to a unified (reactionary) movement and a forsaking of the novel’s historical mission (as Lukacs infamously did to modernism in The Destruction of Reason), but rather to deepen our understanding of the texts and of the authors as properly historical subjects, even as they themselves run for the pseudo-cover of abstraction.

What Sartre once said of Paul Valéry in his late masterpiece Search for a Method, we might say of Sebald, Cusk, Coetzee, and others: “Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery.” Only once we grasp the singularity of the text through the total situation of its writing—of which the author as a personal, psychological subject is only one part—can the abstract singularity into which all of these writers attempt to retreat (each in their own way) be decisively transformed into a good universality, one that would not be a mere reification but a dynamic and collective project, perhaps even a project of liberation.

Jon Repetti is a writer and critic. He tweets @pourfairelevide and blogs at fivegoodhours.substack.com

Sebald’s “essayistic semi-fictions”—or so they were once called by his friend Michael Hamburger, and the label stuck—have served as a template for our most recent generation of writers just as the respective work of Balzac, Joyce, and Pynchon did for their own. But it would be difficult to identify any totally new literary invention in the four novels upon which his reputation stands. The inclusion of photographs, the use of obviously autobiographical material and author stand-ins, the associative digressions and ekphrases whose unfolding threatens to take over the text at every turn, the employment of coincidence as a primary motor of what passes for plot in the books: all of these have been features of the novel at least since modernism and were probably with us well before Tristram Shandy. Nonetheless, there remains something unmistakeable about Sebald’s texts when they are compared to those of his honored predecessors (Breton, Proust, Grass), his great contemporaries (Bernhard, Handke, Weiss), or his countless imitators and disciples.

All the above is, of course, common knowledge and well-tread ground. It seems like every essay on Sebald begins the same way, enumerating a precious few facts and terms that have not changed much since 2001, and then reflecting on their total inadequacy to account for the work itself or its effect on the reader. So this is our point of departure: a shared astonishment towards a small corpus, a nagging sense of our collective impotence to say precisely why it is that the work so moves us, and a need to explain how it is that these texts have continued to produce thousands of imitators in dozens of languages every year without yet being superseded.

I have nothing new or insightful to say about the Sebald’s novels, nor about the essays and poetry and fragments that have circulated in the wake of his passing. But I read contemporary literature, and sometimes I try to think and write coherently about it. One day, I’d like to put together a novel. I’m writing about Sebald because I think it is simply impossible to write fiction in English today and be indifferent to Sebald. One must have an account of Sebald and take up a position relative to him. One must see Sebald as a way forward or a dead end, as an ally or an enemy, or as some more complex combination thereof. What Flaubert and Mallarmé, Faulkner and Stevens have been for others, Sebald has been for us these past twenty years: a proper noun raised to the status of an adjective: the aforementioned Sebaldian. He is, after all, the “only novelist with a toehold in the twentieth-first century” to claim that honor, as Ryan Ruby has reminded us. This is my personal attempt to wrestle with the Sebaldian mode and its discontents, though I hope some of my contemporaries might see their own positions in proximity to my own.

Consider a representative Sebaldian scene: A man wanders the historical quarter of a European city in which he is a stranger, and stops at a shabby café. A clock chimes on the wall of that café, and it reminds him reminds him of a totally different clock in a totally different café in a totally different part of a different city. He recalls that in the other city, he had been neighbors with a man whose father was a professional clockmaker. This neighbor was not himself a professional clockmaker, but he had an amateur passion for horology and an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the clock-making industry back to the 15th century. The narrator recalls the apartment in which he spent hours drinking lukewarm coffee with this neighbor and talking, talking, talking about the mechanics and history of clocks. Then the narrator recalls, vividly, perhaps for the first time in many years, that one day this neighbor, the clockmaker’s son, disappeared, packed off for another city without saying goodbye. And then the narrator remembers the first meal he had after the neighbor’s disappearance, a tuna sandwich very much like the one he is eating right now, in this very café, where this clock is still chiming, chiming, chiming.

The above is not a scene one can find in any actual Sebald text, but that’s the point. The working of memory—the narrator’s own, that of others, both of particular others (the neighbor) and of whole groups (the clockmakers of Europe)—is simultaneously the content and form of the novel, and the method of its composition. Anyone who’s ever struggled to produce pages on a deadline can see the appeal of this écriture that is seemingly as contingent and abundant as life itself. If Sartre famously admired Husserlian phenomenology because it was a system of thought with which one “philosophize about an ashtray,” Sebald developed an aesthetic program that could in theory produce a whole novel or a whole series of novels about a spoon, or a particular variety of fig.

For us, writing in Sebald’s wake, perhaps the most appealing aspect of his method is that the writer need not even get all of his or her facts straight. So what if the man who invented the mercury pendulum (which helped clocks keep more accurate time in changing temperatures) was born in England and not Switzerland? That’s not the author’s mistake but the narrator’s, or maybe the neighbor’s, or the neighbor’s father’s. Maybe the very indeterminacy of who got it wrong in the first place is part of the point, or the point itself. Of course it is. One can get away with all sorts of things, and achieve all sorts of delightfully destabilizing effects, when writing a Sebaldian text. Described this way, it all starts to sound like a duller version of the self-referential Barthelmean irony that dominated American fiction in the 1980s and ‘90s. And so the mysterious force of the corpus slips from our hands again.

I have no doubt that many writers adopt this method unthinkingly at best and cynically at worst. I don’t blame them. Given the gigantic rate of literary production we’re witnessing today thanks to the proliferation and entrenchment of MFA programs in the cultural landscape, we shouldn’t be surprised that anything resembling a formal innovation—especially a formal innovation with market potential—is immediately picked up by the fifty-thousand twenty-four-year-olds currently toiling in the pages of unread lit mags, and is thereby rendered cliche before the ink is dry. But the sheer quantity and persistence of cheap imitations should tell us that there must be more to the historical fact of this form’s wide-spread adoption than the banally philosophical pseudo-alibi it offers for lazy “research.” (I wrote about all this a few months ago, in a response to Brandon Taylor’s review of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, on the topic of “discursive” or “Wikipedia Realism”).

Wittgenstein says that “a language is a form-of-life.” Cards on the table: I think that the visceral appeal of the Sebaldian mode lies not in the method of composition nor in the style of his novels, but in the form-of-life of which that style is a concrete expression. That form-of-life need not and perhaps could not have been Sebald’s own, biographically, but is rather that of an ideal and idealized Sebaldian subject. In short, the Sebaldian narrator models a mode of being-in-the-world, a way of relating to one’s own life and to the (inevitably tragic) fact of one’s historicity, a mode that is particularly attractive to a certain class of writers today.

I say “one’s historicity” and not “one’s historical situation,” because I want to make the heretical claim that the Sebaldian narrator is not and can never be a properly historical subject—and that this is the case for precise historical reasons that the novels are themselves constitutively incapable of interrogating.

In the first pages of any given Sebald text, while still groping around in the dark for characters and plot and other orienting novelistic features, the reader is immediately thrown into a particular mood. I’m speaking about “mood” here in the phenomenological sense of an attunement to the world in which the categories of subject and object blur into the indistinction of the middle-voice, a porous relationality the precedes both self and world. One might be tempted to define this attunement as a “frame” or a “lens” through which all the (non)events of the novel are filtered, but that would falsely emphasize the visual and intellectual over the more broadly affective and sensory, of which is visuality and intellection are but two modes among many, and not granted priority over, for example, the sonorous, the olfactory, the emotional.

Through his systematic refusal to hierarchize these modes of perception and relation, the Sebaldian narrator makes himself into a kind of machine for picking up the slightest of sensory alterations and memory-traces that stimulate his apparatus, thereby developing a capacity for synesthesia not seen since Proust, but deployed in a far more understated manner and towards different ends. Likewise, Proustian desire—the endless pursuit of the Ideal lover behind each of Her appearances, the humiliating cycle of obsession with, disregard for, and replacement of each beloved—which takes the form of Marcel’s incessant mourning for a primordially lost object (the Mother) and his attempts to regain it, is substituted in the Sebaldian text with an overwhelming, listless melancholy.

Freud describes mourning as a situation in which the subject is unable to detach his or her libido from a lost object, the paradigm case being a dead loved one. But whereas mourning is defined by the loss of an identifiable object, melancholy is defined by the lack of any object at all. Whereas the mourner can enumerate endlessly all the meals and kisses he will never again share with his dead wife—can tell himself a coherent story about what is missing from his life now that the has been cast out of the remembered Garden of his love (however imperfect that Eden may have been in fact)—the melancholic “knows who he has lost but not what he has lost in him.” Even the language here breaks down here into a morass of indeterminability. Has the melancholic “lost” some specific “what… in [the other],” or in “[him]self”? Of course, the answer is “both,” because the melancholic knows on some level that nothing has really been “lost” in the first place. In Lacan’s terms, the melancholic has come into contact with a zero-degree of ontological lack, a void lurking behind every possible satisfaction, something unspeakable at the heart of every narrative.

Melancholy sounds pretty damn unpleasant, but it occupies a privileged epistemological and ethical place in Sebald’s work. The melancholic knows something, and persists in that knowledge. He might suffer for what he knows, but at least he is not duped. This, I think, is how I and my contemporaries encounter Sebald—if not as a great pessimist, then at least as an honest skeptic, a writer who simply cannot accept the infantile compensations of narrative. And so his narrators move through these old European cities in a curiously disembodied way: they are described as hungry and thirsty, feverish and panicked, frantically paranoid or near-catatonic, but they never completely shedding their dignity even in the gutter, never retreat into the arms of a comforting illusion. There is a stillness deep inside each of them, what Virginia Woolf once called a “wedge shaped core of darkness” at the bottom of each self that is untouched by the world, that is the self, that is thereby somehow the condition of possibility for the extraordinary negative capability that these selves exhibit in their self-dissolving journeys through the winding gyre of Memory with a capital M.

Sebald thus offers something like a Hemingway Code for the downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois creative classes of the twenty-first century; he fills a guru-niche for those of us who think we’re too old for Hemingway and too smart for gurus.

Sebald’s narrators are haunted by something, and critics have long identified this “something” with the Holocaust: a historical event that remains absolutely unrepresentable, unassimilable to any coherent historical narrative, even as it demands the practice of a kind of aesthetic negative theology, the constant attempt at representation that always fails and encodes its own failure within itself, of which the latest celebrated attempt is of course the astounding film Zone of Interest. According to this logic, still hegemonic nearly 80 years after Adorno declared it barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, the Holocaust becomes for the late-modernists the dialectical inverse of that other impossible object—History itself, conceived as a total dynamic process without Origin or Telos.

And so the world of the Sebaldian novel, shattered by the Great Trauma, appears as a massive open set of fragments without a whole (lost or otherwise), connected purely by coincidence and adjacency, by a Deleuzean logic of pure conjunction, of the “and.” The narrator is the agent of these connections, which come into their foggy pseudo-being only through his heroic memory, and his unflagging attention to the tiny details of urban European life are cast as a contemporary version of Tiresias drinking the blood and calling up the shades from Hades to say their lines and disappear again. An ontology of coincidence, and an ethics of bracketing, of bracketing the self and refusing to stake out any point of certainty about the Whole, to persist absolutely in melancholy.

What Sebald’s melancholic encounters among these fragments is not History, nor any particular properly historical situation, but mere historicity. He does not live in this time, this place, this life, this moment in medias res, but always in “a” time, “a” place, “a” life, “a” moment, as purely abstract singularities. The details recounted ultimately indicate nothing but the fact of their being “mere” details, reminders to always and exclusively speak of oneself and one’s own with the indefinite article—in effect, self-cancellations.

Finitude, singularity, limitation-as-such are the index of all the Sebaldian subject’s encounters, however infinitely precise his sensory apparatus and however infinitely obscure the facts are that these sensations dredge up in his memory. It was Sebald’s genius to develop from this ontology of finitude the infinite variety of this spiraling and self-reflexive text. The price he paid for that infinity was History itself, which he could only bear after having reduced it to a cabinet of curiosities, stinking of formaldehyde, inert and unredeemed.

The noise is a thin, metallic whirring. The kind that you hear, somehow, in the back of your neck more than in your ears. I’ve spent hours on power-tool Youtube channels, listening to various drills, belt-sanders, and other small machines, trying to find a match for it. Nothing sounds right.

The whirring is neither steady nor rhythmic. It oscillates between high and mid-pitch, between barely audible and a-touch-less-than-loud, seemingly at random.

Just as the whirring itself is arhythmic, so is its occurrence. My neighbor’s work does not correspond to particular days of the week, dates of the month, or phases of the moon. Last week the whirring occurred on Tuesday between 11 and 3:30 and Saturday between 2 and 5:15. The week before that it occurred on Monday (10:30-1), Tuesday (12:15-4), and Friday (1:30-2:30). The week before that it did not occur at all.

The only rule the whirring seems to follow is: “Once it starts, it doesn’t stop until it stops.” There are no breaks between beginning and end, though there are moments in which it is almost sub-audible. I wrote this in a note on my phone the Saturday after Thanksgiving, at 3:38 AM, in a moment of double-relief: relief that it had stopped after a near-record 4-and-a-half continuous hours, and relief that I had identified a single consistency worth recording.

I’ve lived with sleeplessness for long periods of my life. The earliest such period I can remember began with a string of nightmares when I was around three years old. The first is, I think, my earliest memory.

I’m laying in my bed, hugging a stuffed lamb almost the same size as myself, and looking at the window. I look at the window for a long time, convinced that someone or something is going to climb through it. And then, for an instant, I look away, into the black void of my open closet. I turn back to the window and see, standing 6 or 7 feet tall, a man in a filthy, tattered toucan suit. I know it’s a Man in a Toucan Suit because I hear a voice in my head say “It’s a man, a man in a toucan suit.” I throw off the covers, stand up on the side of the bed clutching my lamb by the throat, and the Man in the Toucan Suit disappears. Then I wake up screaming.

Other strange dreams followed—drowning dreams, falling dreams, car crash dreams, chasing dreams, poisoning dreams—almost every night. I never met the Man in the Toucan Suit again, though he was the figure I thought of most often while quivering under the covers. I told nobody about these dreams, and forced myself to stay awake in the dark as long as I could all through that summer. Then, one day, around the time I went to school for the first time, they stopped. I had no nightmares for years, hardly any dreams at all, and no problems sleeping.

There were other periods: the double-whammy of my father’s death and the peak of a late puberty at 14 kept me up at all hours for about 9 months. Sleeping no more than 3 hours a night, I failed two classes and permanently stunted my growth. In my 20s, recurring bouts of hypochondria and paranoia left me wide-eyed and hyperventilating well past midnight, and furiously grinding my teeth when I did manage to fall unconscious. This coupled, predictably, with dreams of teeth falling out, and cancerous pus-filled growths extruding from every inch of my body.

But the whirring comes from somewhere else. It’s neither the repressed returning nor a paranoid fantasy working itself out. It’s a meaningless little chunk of the Real, one that I can neither analyze nor ignore. It demands total attention. The harder I try to tune it out, the more distinctly it impresses itself on my body—my whole body, not just my ears. If I shut my ears with plugs, I can hear it with the soles of my feet, the way that butterflies taste. The feeling is of total exposure.

In his book Time and the Other, a collection of essays drawn from lectures delivered in 1946 and ’47 (coincidentally the same years my house and my neighbor’s house were built), Émmanuel Lévinas invokes insomnia in an attempt to describe the experience of pure, impersonal, anonymous existence, being qua being, what he famously named the “il y a” or “there is.” The paradoxical time of insomnia, he writes, “is constituted by the consciousness that it will never finish—that is, that there is no longer and way of withdrawing form the vigilance to which one is held. Vigilance without end… vigilance without possible recourse to sleep… vigilance without refuge in unconsciousness, without the possibility of withdrawing into sleep as into a private domain.”

Total exposure, absolute vigilance. A vigilance that is not a vigil, not the awaiting for some appointed time, the coming of a holy day or the entrance of a guest. The insomniac is like a Vladimir or an Estragon without a Godot. Or like the narrator of Beckett’s later work The Unnameable—a voice in the tunnel without memory and without hope, without anything to wait for, without even a sense of what it would even mean to wait.

But still, I’ve found it gives some relief to picture the source. Lying awake in bed, I produce an abstract object in my mind, a swirling mathematical vortex of the kind that Schelling may have imagined when he spoke of the formless universe before Creation, the infinite dark expanse of rotary drives in their endless masturbatory circulation. When the pitch or volume changes I picture a corresponding change in the vortex. Each sound has its visual equivalent. I can hold this object in my mind for minutes, sometimes over an hour without interruption.

At first, the internal image is purely reactive to the external noise. The pitch rises, and the vortex spins faster. The volume rises and the vortex ripples more strongly. Vice versa. Slowly, the gap between sound-event and image-event narrows, until the alterations of the image are almost simultaneous with the vicissitudes of the whirring. With practice I feel that I can predict minute sonic alterations in the instants before they occur, though there is still no overarching rhythm or pattern to them.

After a few minutes feeling particularly in sync with my neighbor, I take the absurd step of trying to reverse the causality. I direct every ounce of my will to a single ripple in the imaginary vortex, as if by raising it a single hairs-breadth distance in my mind I might raise the pitch of the whirring just one half-decibel. If I can do that, maybe I can make it stop entirely, bring it to a gentle halt.

Then the synchronicity shatters. The image and the sound separate. The whirring rushes in unexpected directions, and the vortex dissolves, its contours grow hazy and indistinct. Nothing to do from there but wait for it to end. Vigilance. Exposure. Il y a. Il n’y a pas.

I found out that Gary Indiana died while crossing 3rd Street in Philadelphia, mid-bite in a pork roll, egg, and cheese. A splatter of ketchup and yolk ensued, and I spent the rest of the day scratching at the crusted stain on my shirt while scrolling through a Twitter feed full of remembrances, tributes, favorite passages. I had known him mostly as a chronicler of AIDS-era gay life, a vicious critic, and as a fixture of the Village scene—one of the last of the old guard to actually hold onto his apartment. Even Lou Reed died on Long Island, but Gary went out within spitting distance of Stonewall.

I didn’t know his fiction beyond Horse Crazy, and I certainly didn’t know him personally, though it now seems like everybody else did. I saw dozens of people share their favorite “email from Gary,” almost all of them delightfully derisive, in his classic style. The club of Gary’s correspondents was apparently not limited to the Ryan Ruby’s and Christian Lorentzen’s of the world; almost up to the day he died, the man seems to have actually taken the time to write back to schmucky nobodies like me.

I also didn’t know that he wrote true crime, but of course he did. He spent the late-1990s working on a loose trilogy—Resentment: A Comedy (1997), a roman-a-clef satire of the Menendez brothers’ trial, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999), a more traditional work of serial killer reportage, and Depraved Indifference (2001), about the mother-son con artist team of Sante and Kenneth Kimes. I ran over to Lot 49 Books on Girard immediately after work and found an empty space between Ibsen and and John Irving. Somebody had bought up everything but a dog-eared copy of Resentment.

I stayed up with Resentment until around midnight, buoyed along through the thick prose by his spot-on impressions of courtroom legalese, newspeak, and junky slang. It’s more of a novel than I expected. The book focuses mostly on Seth, a cut-rate magazine reporter splitting his time between covering the “Martinez” trial and profiling Teddy Wade, a straight actor playing a gay AIDS patient in his latest film. In the meantime, he crosses paths with dozens of recognizable LA characters, almost none of whom come off well. Indiana insists in an author’s note that “these people exist solely in the pages of this book, even if they evoke a superficial resemblance to people glimpsed on a city bus or a television screen.”

Though we can read the above as a bid for legal cover or a fit of postmodernist perversity, I prefer to take the author’s word for it. He’s not writing a novel with a “key,” but presenting “a narrative in which stray threads of reality reinforce an imaginary tapestry of the era’s psychic life.” He wants to tell the story of the trial and the media circus as it might be remembered and recounted “in a hundred years,” when “time has boiled reality down to a ball of ambiguous myth.” In this, Gary Indiana sets himself in an American tradition of documentary realism stretching from Dreiser and Dos Passos up to James Ellroy and Tom Wolfe.

The rough splitting invoked here between referent and text, history and myth, reality and image persists throughout the book. In the hands of a lesser writer, this kind of thing would quickly devolve into a kind of navel-gazing dorm-room solipsism: “Bro, even if we are in the cave, does that make the shadows less real?” Indeed, this is precisely what happens during the "Martinez” trial itself, as lawyers turn each dispute over facts into an amateur debate about epistemology. In the novel as in the courtroom, Indiana insists that what matters in such cases is not what actually happened, but what we do with the stories that survive and get told, the meta-stories that we tell ourselves about the facts themselves.

There’s a scene early in the novel where Indiana works this out by contrasting two perspectives on the Menendez case—that of Jack the former-student-radical-turned-conspiracist-cab-driver and Seth the writer.

“Everyone agrees there is something monstrous and awesome about the Martinez case, but some people have different reasons for thinking this than others. Jack hasn’t given it much thought at all. In Jack’s mind, the Martinez case figures among a dozen current events buzzing in the zeitgeist, things you hear about without really wanting to, Jack believes that events can be tricks to keep your mind off some unchanging structural flaw in human organization, circus acts designed to numb critical scouting. Something hidden, a conspiracy, or some sinister condition of things. Jack’s forever trying to figure such things out, attach a diagnosis, settle a meaning. Jack things that everything that happens hides something else. Since losing faith in dialectical materialism, Jack’s inclined to analyze things in occult terms, flirting with the belief that thirteen men control the world, that planetary configurations determine random-looking events, that each person has an astral double whose actions are unseen, metaphorical, the true text of his life. In his dreams he is a butterfly that dreams of being Jack.

“Seth believes the Martinez case resembles a large underwater rock, magnified by immersion, with something wriggling underneath it: blind albino fish, possible, or eyeless eels that have grown to unbelievable length, or prehistoric flint heads encrusted in mossy crud. He thinks the Martinez drama probably illustrates something but doesn’t mean anything, that you couldn’t use it, for instance, to figure out the kinship system of the primitive Bororo or extract from it the chemical steps to enrich uranium. But you could turn it into a Mardi Gras float or a tableau vivant in a wax museum, serialize it into Stations of the Cross, fashion it into topiary or embroider it on exotic underpants. Seth believes it is always better for something to happen than for nothing to happen, he likes it when life speeds up and propels him through a lot of stuff he can’t make heads of tails of at the time, arranging it later into complicated stories, yarns, fables, fairy tales, poems, jokes, verbal sculptures of any sort that bend in his mouth like putty.”

Two perspectives—Jack’s and Seth’s—on two relations: (1) the relation between the event of the trial and the total world in which it occurs, and (2) the relation between the representations of the trial that circulate and their “meaning” with regards to the fundamental truths of that world. Neither cares much about the facts themselves that are debated in the courtroom: Were the brothers really molested by their father? Did they really “lay in wait” to commit the crime in such a way that would constitute a charge of “first degree murder with special circumstances” and add years to the sentence? These questions are written off from the jump as more or less unknowable, more or less irrelevant to the real stuff of the trial.

Both are set apart from Indiana’s derogatory “everybody” for whom the trial is “monstrous,” exceptional. There’s nothing exceptional about it at all, for Jack, just one more example among many that points directly back to that “unchanging structural flaw in human organization,” a flaw he would have once identified with the class-struggle but now articulates through more mystical concepts—actions of an occult conspiracy or manifestations of a primordial principle. Either way, the trial appears as a little expression of some deeper truth underneath the quotidian world, or as concrete variations on an unalterable, abstract theme written in some Beyond that would constitute the “true text” of the Everyday. Jack sees something Evil at the heart of the world, but he carries on within that world without unduly agonizing about it. In this he is like so many conspiracy theorists who are too sensible to allow their supposed beliefs to impact their daily lives. One imagines the Puritans at the Salem Witch Trials, returning home to milk cows and argue over housework after 8 hours hearing about their neighbors signing Satan’s book in blood. The real wonder isn’t that so many people believe in QAnon, but that more of them don’t commit horrible acts. Disavowal is a hell of a drug.

Seth, for his part, asserts a cynical-secular view on the trial. Until proven otherwise, he does not accept it as one of the facts that “mean” something. Mathematics and chemistry mean something, Lévi-Straussian symbolic systems “mean” something—because they have real effects, and through these effects they organize human experience in a basic way. The Martinez trial is not of this order of primitive, structural fact, but on the order of illustration—not a monstrous exception, nor one example among others offering a direct line to the Truth of Things, but one more spectacle in the triumphal carnival of the 1990s. Not even a real event but already the representation of an event, not even tailor-made for this purpose, but off-the-rack. It presents itself immediately as amoral raw material, pure evental happening and gelatinous putty that can be shaped into narrative. As the novel progresses, the aloof journalist will find himself drawn into the scene, libidinally invested and thereby determined by it in ways he cannot easily recognize—as the protagonist of noir always is—though HE will continue striving towards the above as an ideal orientation. Disavowal by other means, in other words.

The author ultimately sides with Seth over Jack—better that there be a world and things happening in it, better that we live to tell the tale and that others live to listen, better that we see it all for what it is with the clearest eyes we can bring to it, and try to find the most adequate forms for its expression.

The form to which Gary Indiana returns most often when pursuing this goal is a kind of naturalistic simile. “The Martinez case resembles a large underwater rock, magnified by immersion, with something wriggling underneath it: blind albino fish, possible, or eyeless eels,” he writes here. Elsewhere he tell us that “up close, Bill Clinton looks like he’s covered in fresh fetal tissue.” These sorts of comparisons are not just his most memorable lines, but the sentences that give us the deepest sense of his outlook and his work as a whole, the nuclei of the corpus.

Gary’s writing is an art of the flesh, like Cronenberg’s films and Bacon’s paintings. But in his hands sex and murder alike are stripped of the essential obscenity and therefore of the transcendence they still maintain in for the latter artists. He refuses the romantic gesture at all costs, emphasizing the clumsiness and banality of both violence and orgasm. “Deflationary realism,” Christopher Glazek called it. The goal of the writer, for Gary, is not to uncover the disgusting creatures under the rocks of everyday life and show the world its obscene truth, but to get familiar with one’s own disgust, intimate with it—and thereby to know the difference between the merely disgusting and the truly despicable. To know that we are alone in this world, and to know that therefore we can make alterations, even if only at the margins. We cannot live just as we choose, of course, but we almost always have more freedom to dissent to the external order of things than we want to believe.

Sartre began Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr as an introduction to Jean Genet’s collected works. But as he reread Genet’s books, spoke with the man for days at a time, and consumed quantities of stimulants that would kill the average horse, the book grew from a brief essay into a 625-page monument. Though it has been displaced as the definitive critical statement on Genet’s corpus since its publication in 1952, Saint Genet nonetheless remains perhaps the greatest work ever published by one major writer on another—the dialectical product of Sartre’s total immersion in Genet’s work, and of Genet’s total absorption into Sartre’s thought. Neither figure proves ultimately reducible to the other, and in the end we find that the logic of their encounter is not “Sartre or Genet” nor “Sartre and Genet,” but “Sartre with Genet,” bound and unreconciled.

Each man emerged fundamentally changed by this experience of agonistic symbiosis. Sartre finally broke with his early philosophy of radical freedom as articulated in Being and Nothingness and set definitively down the Marxist path that would produce his late opus, the Critique of Dialectical Reason; Genet found it almost impossible to write after being so thoroughly seen by another writer, and was forced to transition from novels to plays, which offered new possibilities for his craft. Each found in the other the closest thing either would ever have to a friend.

Saint Genet is often called an “existential biography”—perhaps the only true and complete existential biography ever written—but it is not a biography in the usual sense. Sartre’s “research” was limited to his reading of and conversations with Genet. He reports Genet’s life as Genet tells it, though he admits on every page that his subject is one of the great liars of the twentieth-century. There are precious few facts at all about Genet’s life contained in this massive tome. That rich and varied life is in effect boiled down to a few scenes to which Sartre returns again and again, just as Genet would return to the same motifs and symbols within and across his own works. Little Jean’s unwanted birth, the moment he was first caught stealing at the age of 10 and labeled a thief, the day he was arrested and outed as a homosexual when the police find vaseline in his pockets, the day he composed his first poem and begins writing Our Lady of Flowers in prison.

We circle these moments again and again, each time activating a new significant detail which changes everything before and after. We might imagine this circling reflects the form of their conversations. It recalls also the endless repetitions of the analysand on the couch, rehashing the significance of a few flashes and scraps from childhood, some real and some imagined, to which psychoanalytic discourse always returns. Sartre justifies his method by declaring that he is not interested in “causes” at all—the specific connections between specific facts—because he does “not conceive an act as having causes. I consider myself satisfied when I have found in it not its ‘factors,’ but the general themes which it organizes; for our decisions gather into new syntheses and on new occasions the leitmotif that governs our life” (427-8). This is life as an aesthetic object of the highest order, in which causes are not traced but expressed, articulated, patterned as the interwoven leitmotifs in a Wagnerian opera.

The primal scene from which all else follows, the scene which Sartre recounts in the first pages based on a story told to him—over and over, we must assume—by Genet, is that of the first time he was named a thief, the first time he came to identify himself as a thief. An abandoned child fostered by a provincial couple, Genet learned to steal from a young age both out of innocent need and a naive ignorance of property. His thefts were at first natural, unreflecting, guiltless. But one day, “A voice declares publicly: ‘You’re a thief.’ The child is ten years old.”

“That was how it happened,” Sartre tells us, “in that or some other way… It does not matter. The important thing is that Genet lived and has not stopped reliving this period of his life as if it had lasted only an instant,” what Sartre calls a “fatal instant,” a moment of “transition that is going to determine his entire life” (17-8). The child is not only called a thief in this moment, recognized as a thief by his foster parents and their whole provincial community; he comes moreover to understand that he is a thief, that he has always been a thief, that he was born a thief and that he will die a thief. (It’s worth noting, for those keeping score, that Sartre wrote this scene almost 20 years before Louis Althusser’s famous account of interpellation.)

It will become the great project of Genet’s life not to explain away this accusation and thereby reject his identity as a thief—to critique the society that created the conditions that drove him to criminality, to analyze the psychological factors of his early life to show how his thieving was a form of “acting-out”—and in so doing to declare his innocence. Genet is not innocent. He does not want to be innocent, and he refuses any account of himself that would exonerate him for either his empirical crimes or his essential criminality. He and Sartre both conceive this early moment of accusation, exclusion, becoming-Other as a moment of salvation, because it laid the foundations for his break from the bourgeois world.

Genet will from this moment forward not only be a thief; he will be The Thief—the very image of criminality, degradation, abjection. He will pursue these images relentlessly across all of Europe, in every bar, hotel, bathroom, and prison. It will become his life’s work to contemplate that image of himself (as his characters do their own images in the mirror), and in so doing to make others see a tiny bit of him in themselves. It is Genet’s premature damnation that made him a saint.

Genet has the audacity to choose himself. His “choice” is not an act, but the concrete affirmation of an external determination. He was given a name and he will be what he has been called. He lives criminality as a “vocation”—a calling—and when he becomes a writer he will produce art on the model of crime. This is writing-as-crime not only in the legal sense, as in the eyes of the censors who want to burn his obscene books. It is writing as an act of violence against language itself: an attempt to produce a truly non-communicative speech, an onanistic refusal of communication, of recognition, of relation.

Genet does not speak to his readers; he speaks to himself as they listen, and as they mishear him again, and again, and again. Each reader is lured in to watch his performance as at a bordello, and in the process they are infected with Genet though he remains untouched by them.

The existential biography is the story of one subject’s fatal instants and determinant choices. For Sartre the philosopher of radical freedom, concrete free choices are surprisingly few and far between. If they come at all in the course of a life, they appear at the very moments when we are least equipped to make them. Genet’s great choice was not between two alternative actions but between two absolutely distinct perspectives on his life: between endless equivocation about and unqualified affirmation of what he understands to be his essential criminality. In choosing the latter, he makes a break from the bourgeois world. Genet transforms his determination into a choice, and transforms that choice into a project, the project of a life.

In the conclusion of Saint Genet, Sartre lays bare his motivations for writing. Genet the singular man disappears for a moment and becomes the ideal of singularity, the case study that proves by example that such a thing as freedom can be at all:

“I have tried to do the following: to indicate the limits of psychoanalytical interpretation and Marxist explanation to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality; to show this freedom at grips with destiny, crushed at first by its mischances, then turning upon them and digesting them little by little; to prove that genius is not a gift but the way out that one invents in desperate cases; to learn the choice that a writer makes of himself, of his life and of the meaning of the universe, including even the formal characteristics of his style and composition, even the structure of his images and the particularity of his tastes; to review in detail the history of his liberation.” (584)

Genet, the dialectical unity of Thief and Saint made concrete in a single life, the Existential Man of the twentieth-century, testifies to the reality of freedom by his entire life, by his act of becoming-free in every passing instant through a ongoing project faithful to a primordial choice, at once a radical abstraction and a total concrete situation. And he reminds us that to write may still be an act of desperate invention, of escape, of courage.

Jane and I spent the first 2-and-a-half years of our relationship basically inseparable—first splitting our time between my isolated suburban Jersey apartment and her rented room in Massachusetts, then sharing a 2-room, 550-square foot apartment. We adjuncted a couple days per week and wrote on the other days, her poetry and my dissertation. We spent most days home on the couch, reclined head-to-foot with our laptops opened and headphones in, interrupting the silence mostly to ask “what’s for dinner” 16 times a day.

Everyone said we would drive each other crazy living like this, in such close quarters, without a break from one another. But we never did. I even spent half a dozen sessions agonizing to my analyst about how disturbingly un-crazy it felt. “Is this codependency? Am I repressing something? Is it healthy for two people to spend this much time together?”

The days when Jane left town, I was never sure what to do with myself. I slept 12-hours a day, wandered in and out of our two rooms, drank 8 cups of coffee (as opposed to my usual 6), smoked her cigarettes, kept podcasts on at all times. I was lonely. I missed her presence, her smell, her eyes on me and her uncanny ability to know, moments before I knew, that I was getting antsy, hungry, in need of a walk, whatever. When I worked up the courage to tell her how badly I missed her after only 36 hours apart—which at the time felt like the most embarrassing admission I’d ever made to anyone—she said she had felt the same.

What I missed most in our periods apart wasn’t her touch, but the all-but-physical sensation of her gaze. To be recognized by a loved one, to be seen as loved and to be reminded that one is lovable, at least in the eyes of one person in the world. To be grounded by the other’s gaze. I’m wondering how I could have lived without this experience, this gaze and this grounding, for such long stretches before I met her. I’m grateful, infinitely grateful, that I may never have to live without it again.

But those reflections, worked through on my analyst’s couch and then later in notebooks, led me back to a question: How is it that I came to stake my being, to ground my identity, to support this fragile thing I call myself with the strange non-object of Jane’s gaze? Why do I trust her judgment so deeply and intensely, why have I elevated her to this position of power which I’ve never allowed anyone else to occupy? And why can’t I, no matter how hard I try, imagine it any other way?

I think psychoanalysis teaches us about two kinds of love, two different structures through which we organize our experience of love. Both of these are dependent on the fact that we never fall in love with the “whole” of the other person in any rigorous empirical sense—the being we love is neither the signifier that we call other’s legal name nor the assemblage of carbon and water that we call the other’s body. We encounter the other in pieces, traces, gestures, codes, legible or illegible.

The first kind of love we might call, without meaning in the least to denigrate it, transference-love. In transference-love, we love the other because and insofar as they occupy a given position within a given fantasy structure. Freud discovered transference in the early days of his clinical work, when his patients—male and female both—would come to express intense erotic feelings for him. Freud’s hypothesis was that this love had nothing to do with himself as an empirical person, but with his position in relation to the patient. Patients turned him into the father whose approval they had always sought, into the betrothed who abandoned them in their time of need, even at times into the mother or aunt or servant girl who took up the role of confessor for the child—the one to whom they once spoke their sins and in speaking recovered some of the enjoyment of the sinful act itself, in sublimated form.

From this, Freud developed a theory that transference love is always dependent upon a fantasy-structure into which the various players (always at least three) could take their appointed places and become more than the sum of their parts. Jacque-Alain Miller tells of a patient named Hector who came to analysis after a series of failed relationships, each one with women whose faithfulness he could never know for sure (one a married woman with whom he was having an affair, one a sex worker, and so on). Miller was able to reduce Hector’s fantasy to a basic structure, developed during his earliest childhood, during which his mother was often unavailable because she was taking care of his ill father: “She is looking after a man other than me.” From this simple sentence, this basic structure, was born the many combinations of possible desires and failures through which Hector passed throughout his life.

To say that love is dependent upon fantasy is not to claim that love is merely an illusion, a lie, unreal, but rather to say that for any given subject the possible set of love-objects is not at any given time infinite. This limit on our love is the product of individual upbringing, social mores, and so on. It is fantasy that simultaneously makes it possible or us to love anyone particular at all, but at the same time it is fantasy which provides the scaffolding for us to love several different people over the course a life.

Freud, hard-nosed rationalist that he was, may very well have believed fantasy to be the beginning and end of love. Structures and roles, transcending our quotidian lives and organizing them, connecting us not only to our personal history but to the history of humanity as such (hence the great poetic power of the Oedipus complex). What would be so bad about that?

But Lacan, whose readings of Freud always conclude with a dialectical twist, suggests another kind of love, inseparable from the first but defined by a minimal difference that makes all the difference in the world. He takes us from the fantasy to the symptom, from the logic of transference to the logic of singularity, of non-identity. In short, he insists that the beloved is never reducible to their position in my fantasy, that they are always also necessarily Real, and it is this Real that sustains the fantasy structure itself.

Yes, my fantasy places fundamental determinations on my object choice; it makes certain people and certain scenes desirable and lovable, while it renders others (which might be perfectly desirable for someone else) indifferent, grotesque, or unthinkable for me. But to reduce the other purely to this role would be to play the impossible role of Pygmalion—making something out of nothing. Love begins not with me, but with the other, with the little eruption of the Real that I experience in the other, with the symptom in its pure form.

When I met Jane, I knew her only from pictures. In all of these, her mouth was closed, her lower lip emphasized in a totally enticing, cat-like expression, somewhere between a scowl, a pout, a smirk. That expression was one of the sexiest things I had ever seen. Desire: activated. Props to her.

But when I met her in person, after a couple weeks of talking, I saw her laugh. The first time she laughed—really laughed, not the nervous chuckle of a first date but a full-mouthed, full-bodied laugh, I think at one of her own jokes—I saw her teeth for the first time. A chip in her front tooth. I learned later how she got that chip, how it came to function as a synecdoche for some of the darkest part of her life, why she tried so hard to hide it. But in that moment, and all the moments after (even after I learned its story), I loved that chipped tooth and I loved her for it.

These tiny imperfections, the little eruptions of the real into the fantasy of the other, are what make up the real substance of love, what Lacan would call after Socrates “the agalma” of the other, their “hidden treasure.” A chipped tooth, a crooked little toe, a snorting laugh. (Jane wants me to emphasize that the second two are examples! Not herself!).

There’s a passage from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves that I’ll never be able to shake, because it gave words to this phenomenon for me before I had any deep knowledge of psychoanalysis, and sometimes I think that all my interest in Freud and Lacan has been born out of a desire to build a whole system of thought around the searing truth of these lines. It moved me to tears and continues to. I wanted to read it at the wedding (a symptom of mine: always wanting to read a little longer than is polite. I hope Jane loves me for it), but the events of the day kept me away from the microphone. Here it is, in its crystalline perfection, saying more than I can or should:

“You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character. I find marks against all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate nature, a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass. You thought, as you drew your pencil there, ‘I too throw my cloak off like that. I too snap my fingers in the face of destine.’ Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea it spills over. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your handkerchief. That is not Byron; that is you; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years time, when we are both famous, gouty, and intolerable, it will be that scene: and if you were dead, I shall weep.”

Here’s to love, and all its strange and obscure causes. Here’s to the little eruptions of the real into the round of our quotidian, predictable imaginings.

In case you somehow haven’t heard, Brandon Taylor panned Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, in last week’s London Review of Books. And when I say “panned,” I mean that the review was titled “Use Your Human Mind!” and last sentence of the first paragraph reads: “Why did you even write this?”

Discourse circulated for days on whether Taylor—one of the most successful American novelists of his generation thus far—understands the difference between a character’s opinions and the author’s beliefs. And, to be fair, he earned some of these ad hominems when he asked whether Creation Lake is “a smart person’s idea of a stupid book or a stupid person’s idea of a smart book.” (Sure, he’s not technically calling Kushner “stupid,” but it’s hard to imagine he didn’t anticipate how that one would go over.) The whole thing started out nasty and got embarrassing, making everyone involved look pretty bad—except for Kushner, who famously has the good sense to stay off social media.

It seems clear to me that what Taylor’s article is less a review than an attempt to take stock of some contemporary trends in literary fiction, and to differentiate his own work from them. In the process, he bulldozes the details of the text at hand and uses it as a platform to develop his own concepts and justify his own preferences. Many such cases! And especially common among Taylor’s own greatest influences: Zola, Henry James, and other fin-de-siecle realists and naturalist. But now that the dead horse has been thoroughly beaten and the dust has cleared, it may be a good time for an autopsy of those concepts.

The paragraph from the review that circulated most widely is something of a thesis statement, a gauntlet thrown down against a form of writing that we might describe as “Wikipedia Realism”:

“A friend once described the Lehman Trilogy as ‘Wikipedia in play form’. I’ve thought of this description often, when reading recent novels which seem to confuse looking things up for erudition. I thought of it again, keenly, reading Creation Lake. The effect of ploughing through paragraph after paragraph about Neanderthals and geography and economics and evolutionary psychology was not that of encountering a great mind at work. Rather, it was as though someone had assembled some facts, given their sheaf of papers a shuffle and put them all into a novel so that some unsuspecting critic would hail it as ‘discursive’. This shoddy pseudo-thought is a blight. Shallow, rapidly swirling narrative consciousness has come to define the refugees of the Attention Span Wars, those writers whose capacity for concentration has been so compromised that they leave us not with a fragmented form—which might still ache something to offer readers—but with the fragmentation of concentration itself.”

Oof.

I don’t really care whether or not this “shoddy-pseudo thought,” confusion, and factoid-piling is attributable to Kushner herself or her characters. In any case, plenty of other “discursive” writers catch strays here: Stefano Massini (playwright of the Lehman Trilogy), Benjamin Labatut, Jenny Erpenbeck, others. But of course, realist authors have been accused of merely piling up factoids since at least Robinson Crusoe. Gyorgy Lukacs’s most famous attack on Taylor’s own beloved Zola was that Zola describes instead of narrating or dramatizing, proffering “eternal descriptions” in the place of either psychological depth of character or genuine socio-historical analysis of setting. Zola responded to such critiques by saying that in order to give anything approaching a complete account of human subjectivity—the ultimate task of the novelist—we must “interrogate all that is.”

Fair enough. But your analysis isn’t likely to get anywhere if that “all” is conceived merely as the aggregate of millions of atomic facts, rather than a finite set of functions and modes organized into coherent structures. Taylor’s beef with Kushner here seems to me to be roughly analogous to Lukacs’s critique of Zola: you give us the facts, but you give us only some of the facts (as Taylor points out, the details of how labor is carried out on the commune are curiously absent), and moreover you give us those facts without a compelling structural account of how they hang together or why they hang together in the way that they do. Cue the handwaving that Kushner “blames capitalism,” and so on. Sure she does! So did Zola, and so did Céline for that matter. But “blaming capitalism” does not amount to a structural diagnosis.

Discursive writing, factoid piling, “Wikipedia Realism,” whatever you want to call it. We’re talking about more than matters of taste here. We’re talking about the capacity of the novel to represent and interrogate the Real, about the strategies that it deploys to do so, about the mission of the novel and of the novelist in the 21st century. We are at least talking about the level at which the Real is registered by the novel: as the missing link between the aggregate of factoids. For the “hysterical realism” diagnosed by James Wood a quarter-century ago in Thomas Pynchon’s novels that Real was registered as conspiracy, a conspiracy so infinitely complex that even the principle conspirators themselves can’t grasp it. It seems we’ve fallen quite far from even that degraded epistemological confidence, which seems deeply optimistic from our decentralized vantage. Who really believes in conspiracies anymore? But what has emerged in their place?

There’s another sacred cow of contemporary literary culture who goes surprisingly unnamed in Taylor’s takedown, perhaps the most plotless and “discursive” of the bunch. I’m talking of course about W.G. Sebald. I recently reread Vertigo, Sebald’s first novel, and came across a passage that we might read as a kind of program. The unnamed narrator reflects on the few surviving works of the Quattrocento fresco painter Pisanello:

“What appealed to me was not only the highly developed realism of his art, extraordinary for the time, but the way in which he succeeded in creating the effect of the real, without suggesting a depth dimension, upon an essentially flat surface, in which every feature, the principles and the extras alike, the birds in the sky, the green forest and every single leaf of it, are all granted an equal and undiminished right to exist.”

Pisanello gives us a world of facts in a state of radical equality. Pisanello’s world is perfectly flat; it never presumes to stand-in for the real world; it does not pretend to possess the depth of perfect Renaissance perspective as rediscovered by Brunelleschi. We might say that Pisanello’s “effect of the real” is metaphysical rather than aesthetic, produced out of the perfect distinctness he accords each figure, granting them an equal sense of “reality” within the picture. This is the world as Augustine’s God might see it, the God who occupies the universe as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Each being the center of the world, treated with infinite care. In Pisanello, Sebald’s narrator finds something like a model for his own representative practice—a description that lingers with the facts, notes their connections but attempts first of all to preserve them in their crystalline distinctness, speaking them as if painting with a brush made from a single hair.

If the medievals gave us a rigid hierarchy of Being with God at the top, they also gave us a God-infused world in which to live was to live one’s appointed place in that hierarchy, and in which each place could live itself “well” and in accordance with the whole. This justified all manner of domination and atrocities, but it made all of that psychically bearable by providing a structure through one could orient oneself in the world. At least, that’s the story of the Middle Ages as it comes to us from European historians of the 19th and 20th centuries. And it’s a story that has stuck especially well with writers. Sebaldian vertigo, like Sartrean nausea, implies the loss of this justification without the loss of the immense richness of the whole and all its parts.

And perhaps this is the key difference between the Sebaldian novel and the specter of Wikipedia Realism that Taylor finds not only cynical but immoral. In the “flatness” of Sebald’s prose, we are still struck by the weight, the almost infinite gravity, of each fact—they strike us not so much as atoms or grains of sand, but as black holes. We encounter them as the narrator does, or at least we try to—he functions as a model for a certain mode of experiencing the world. We aspire to the narrator’s ecstasy upon encountering Pisanello, his hysteria when meeting two twin boys who resemble Kafka, his paranoia when running into the same two men (or are they the same men?) twice in two different cities, his despair and terror at a snippet of incoherent conversation overheard in a decaying café.

Each fact in Sebald confronts us like the Face of the Other in Lévinas, or the Address of the Thou in Martin Buber: enigmatic but irrepressible, absolute like God’s call to Abraham. And perhaps the most famous “factoid” in realist literature is to be found in Zola’s own Germinal, which Taylor cites advisedly. When Étienne Lantier sees a horse deep in the depths of the mine, he asks how the miners got it down there. He learns that the horse is brought down only once, that it goes blind in a few years, and that it is buried in the mine when it has been worked to exhaustion. We can only judge for ourselves if Kushner’s work (or Massini’s, or Labatut’s) lives up to that legacy.

Like almost everybody who cares about the uncertain, entangled futures of art and education, I’ve spent the past few days reading and reflecting on Ted Chiang’s “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art” essay in the New Yorker. Like most, I was glad to see a full-throated rejection of AI-boosterism in a major liberal publication. Tides seem to be shifting towards a healthy skepticism among the professional class, and that is an unambiguously a good thing. But like many, I was underwhelmed by Chiang’s specific arguments, which hinge on what I take to be a naive voluntarism about the art-making process.

To quote one of Chiang’s most-shared passages:

“Art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-AI program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices. If an AI generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all the choices that you are not making.”

This is, of course, true in the most vulgar sense. Each word we write is written instead of every other; it’s pulled out of the great chain of signifiers. Each has its own etymology, its own effect on the rhythm of the sentence, its own homophones and homonyms, its own singular way of relating to the story as a whole. We can illustrate this with a famous example from science-fiction: rather than “the door opened,” Heinlein writes “the door dilated.” In doing so, he produces an estrangement effect, conjuring by the sheer power of metonymy a world both like and unlike our own, one whose landscape we explore sentence by sentence only by learning to suspend our expectations of how that world works. This is an atomic example of the literary choice in its clearest sense.

But “the door dilated” becomes legible as a choice only against the background of a shared and assumed world, only insofar as it is different from “opened,” and insofar as it contrasts with our expectation of the sentence.

Deleuze, in a book on the painter Francis Bacon, lays bare the faulty assumptions behind the voluntarist account of art-making when he writes that the painter never begins with a blank canvas. The canvas (seen through the painter’s eye) is always-already inscribed with centuries of cliché, with the gravity of tradition that pulls one towards a generic expression. It takes decades of work and more than a little luck to overcome this gravity and achieve something like escape velocity. Likewise, the aspiring avant-garde jazz musician first learning to improvise has to unlearn the pop-music tendency to come in on the fifth and return to the root, has to hear different rhythms and new combinations of sounds, and to savor them.

In art, we don’t begin from choice, but from cliché, from a position of determination and dependency. And every actual choice we make in the production of an artwork is achieved by consciously cultivated tactics of resistance to cliché. In Bacon, one such tactic was actually the restriction of his subjective “choice” in the process of painting: the introduction of chance into the making of the work, the use of materials that did not easily respond to the painter’s hand, the defacing of the face in his great portraits.

A radically “chosen” artwork, an artwork that is actually composed entirely of free “choices” made by the artist, is inconceivable. We begin with our given materials, our shared language, our common history, and the overdetermined conditions of our socialization into that history. Only within and against that background of this shared meaning, only by knowing it well enough to navigate the many traps and alleys that may first appear as lines of flight, can we strike out on our own and invent something new—which if we are lucky will integrate itself into the tradition and perhaps even one day become a cliché of its own for others to overcome.

A defense of art-making in purely humanist-voluntarist terms will collapse under its own weight when placed under scrutiny, especially when we consider the extent to which so much writing produced by human beings, with human hands and human minds, is as automatic as that of LLMs. I’ve been hesitant to confront students about suspected AI-use because I simply cannot tell if the generic quality of their arguments and phrasing is the product of algorithmic flattening or of the quotidian automaticity of college-writing that has been around at least since Aquinas led disputations at the University of Paris.

Chiang’s best moments come not when he speaks about art but when he writes on education:

“As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.”

I’ve long been an advocate of the unoriginal student essay—of the highly specific prompt that simply asks students to articulate the steps of an argument of some text, or to analyze the system of values represented by a given character. The job of an undergraduate is not to produce original scholarship, but to gain enough knowledge and skills proper to a subject-area that they might one day, with great effort, be able to produce something reasonably new. In other words: we are training them to maneuver self-consciously within a tradition of thought. We provide a map of the territory (composed over decades of debate and refining) to assist in that maneuvering, and we give students the time and space to wander around for themselves, to linger at certain forks in the road, follow certain paths and retrace their own steps.

I believe Chiang is right to describe college-writing and college-reading as a work-out routine, a way to build cognitive fitness. But I think we need to be more precise about where cognitive-exhaustion comes from. In my experience, students rarely feel tired simply from the act of focusing on a text, but from the overwhelming confusion that the text induces in them. Without a tradition to help them navigate, they don’t know what to focus on. The text rushes past them in a huge wave of signifiers, each as important as the next. The experience is like being lost in the woods at night, never sure which rustle in the trees is a bear and which is just the wind. Or like walking around a foreign country where you have just enough knowledge of the language to pick up on a few floating signifiers drifting past your ears, but never enough to follow the train of a conversation without serious effort.

Anxiety, frustration, panic follow. An essential part of our job as educators is to train students to tolerate greater quantities of frustration.

But at the same time, as anyone who’s ever taught a freshman creative writing class has seen, these same students, even as they may be ignorant of specific names and dates that make up the heart of our narrative tradition, are still intensely determined by it. They live amid the tropes and clichés and structures that have circulated through their heads since they were first introduced to cartoons. The blank page leads directly down a few basic narrative paths, structures borrowed from popular media that they flesh out with barely concealed autobiographical details that repeat year after year—the awkward party encounter, the dead grandpa essay, the childhood friendship disintegration arc, (or, one I’ve seen a surprising amount of from both men and women in workshops: the kidnapping fantasy. Creative writing teachers will know what I mean.)

So we might better think of this cognitive “exercise” not in the sense of weight-lifting but in the sense of musical exercises, the études that many of us have drilled into our ears and fingers from childhood piano, violin, guitar lessons. We progress through this early apprenticeship in order to become self-conscious of it and eventually to work, strategically, against it. ChatGPT short-circuits this absolutely necessary process of internalizing the tradition, but in doing so it makes students ever-more dependent upon that same tradition. The past is accumulated in the LLM as a mass of others’ dead labor (and moreover, their stolen labor), rather than as a living process in which each new writer might strive to play an active part.

It seems obvious to me that the goal of every major AI company is to induce this kind of dependency, to induce it not just in individuals but in corporations—to embed their parasitic systems so deeply within the infrastructure of the internet that they become too big to fail, which means the tech giants will be forced to spend billions to keep them afloat. We are quickly approaching a global hostage situation, and it must be resisted.

As above, so below—infrastructural dependency is the longterm technical goal, psychic dependency is the goal at the level of the individual. Already, we’re seeing reports of students typing first-day ice-breaker prompts into ChatGPT, because they don't trust themselves to formulate a response on their own to “What animal would you be?”, or “What movies did you watch this summer?”. This is a crisis in self-confidence as much as it is a crisis in knowledge and literacy.

It is not theoretically or practically productive to think along the voluntarist lines that Chiang lays out—between “choice” and “non-choice,” or between different quantities of choices. The better distinction is between abject dependency upon the machine and the relative autonomy achieved by the cultivation of knowledge and skills. We need to create room to maneuver, to create the possibility of a creative life that isn’t utterly parasitized by these tools. For the artist and the critic, this begins with hard-won intellectual discipline, with a long apprenticeship that is the prerequisite to overcoming the master.

“The pleasure of the Text also includes the amicable return of the author. Of course, the author who returns is not the one identified by our institutions; he is not even the biographical hero. The author who leaves his text and comes into our life has no unity; he is a mere plural of ‘charms,’ the site of a few tenuous details, yet the course of vivid novelistic glimmerings, a discontinuous chant of amiabilities, in which we nevertheless read breadth more certainly than in the epic of a fate; he is not a (civil, moral) person, he is a body…

Were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to ‘biographemes’ whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion…”

—Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola

I first heard that the author was dead in my second or third week of college. His demise was mentioned offhandedly, at the end of a meandering seminar monologue, by a junior literature major with whom I was already miserably in love. We’ll call her B. I don’t remember which author was killed on that September afternoon, but I remember waiting for B outside the classroom afterwards, staring at a stain in the carpet while she chatted with the professor. I remember the way my voice cracked (actually cracked) when she came through the door, and I asked “Wha-at did you mean by tha-at? Do you really believe intention doesn’t ma-atter?” And I remember watching her perfectly scuffed Doc Martens appear and disappear under the hem of her skirt as we walked from the Humanities building to the Dining Hall and she taught me to roll the r’s in “Roland Barthes.”

By the time we reached the all-day omelette station in the cafeteria, B had mentioned no fewer than 6 times that she had a boyfriend, and I had decided to take French. I was furious when I found out that the essay from which the phrase “death of the author” came was only about 6 pages long. “You can’t just throw out thousands of years of common sense in 1500 words.” She wasn’t interested in arguing.

Still, Roland made some good points. Maybe the author really was a “modern figure,” a joint product of the Reformation, British empiricism, French rationalism, capitalism, and English teachers. As a Catholic School Boy at a Small Liberal Arts College (TM), I already knew that none of the above could be trusted. I was more skeptical of the claim “Mallarmé was doubtless the first to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it,” because I had never heard of Mallarmé, and this seemed like too important an event for me to be unaware of it. If the author really was dead, and somebody named Mallarmé had killed him, and nobody ever told me about it, that would be like if every high school in America had conspired to cover up World War I.

Next stop: office hours, and a very patient Assistant Professor who was definitely not teaching this Introduction to Poetry course by choice. He offered the rough explanation that I’ve since repeated to dozens of my own students: The Author is not the causal agent of the Text. It is wrong to see the source the Text in the personal life of the writer, in his Unique Experience or in his individual “Genius.” As critics, we ought to think of the Author as really just the point through which various social discourses pass; he or she assembles words on the page, in a certain order, according to certain unconscious rules of syntax and narrative, within the limits of what is thinkable by a given social milieu. “Sure, sure. Okay. Makes sense. Sure. But isn’t the author intending to connect these words in a certain way?”

Luckily, this Assistant Professor did not want to spend the rest of the semester arguing about free will and determinism with a teenager. Story old as time. “Look, the ‘death of the author’ is a kind of slogan. It’s an analytical strategy, it just means that the intentions of the author aren’t the relevant object of analysis. Your job isn’t to imagine how Faulkner or O’Connor felt when they said this, or why they believed it. Your job is to tell me what the text says, and how it works. The rest is biography.”

“The rest is biography.” At the time, I took that to mean that biography was a lesser art—not even an art, more like a kind of journalism—an embarrassing and vaguely seedy practice of accumulating gossip about Hemingway’s mistresses and Duras’s drinking problems. I was resentful, too, because I only had days before come up with the brilliant idea of becoming a biographer, after realizing that my lack of imagination meant I was never going to be much of a novelist. “The story’s already there, you just need to tell it,” I had written in a notebook. “More money in it too, maybe.”

About six months later (and this will surprise nobody), I was enrolled in an independent study on Derrida and Blanchot with that same Assistant Professor, while also preparing for a summer language course in France. Post-structuralism is a hell of a drug, especially when mixed with teenaged longing.

I tell this story because I think it’s a near-universal experience of self-serious English Majors who came of age between the ‘90s and the ‘10s. I probably caught the tail end of it, thanks to being at a small college with a large French department and a lot of Gen X professors who had been raised on structuralism and its discontents. They were, I will note, uniformly suspicious of these new-fangled “Digital Humanities” and “New Materialisms,” the Big Ideas of which all seemed to have been simultaneously formulated and debunked by Derrida and Foucault already anyway.

The experience I’m talking about is the experience of Theory, with a capital T—the first encounter with some grand philosophical claim, the evisceration of common sense, the rush of a run-on sentence collapsing into a stream of semi-colons and neologisms; the frisson of finally grasping the sense of one of those neologisms, not after 3 careful re-reads of the sentence but on the very first try; the sense not so much that the Big Questions had been answered, but that new ones could be asked and that I suddenly had permission not to be burdened by them anymore, to bracket them, or to simply leave them behind like friends at a party.

My enthusiasm for post-structuralism would ultimately lead me through Marxism, through psychoanalysis, through Lukacs and Sartre and Frankfurt and Althusser and Jameson, as well as to somewhat embarrassing but no less formative detours of Mark Fisher, Zizek, and a certain kind of Deleuze (you know the one I mean). But it started, for me as for so many of my “contemporaries”—a term I find myself using more and more often as I get older and some of those classmates and dorm-mates make real names for themselves while I dither around on Twitter—with Barthes.

And when I think of Barthes, I don’t lose much sleep anymore over the ontological consequences of his account of the subject, or whatever. I think of his sentences, of how reading them at first felt like peeling the skin off a clove of garlic with wet fingers, the way that phrases would stick stubbornly to my brain and slip away at the same time.

I think of how, when I came across the concept of “marking” I thought not of the signifying chain but of the scuff marks on B’s Doc Martens. I think of how, when Barthes imagines a few inconsequential details of his life traversing the void of his death and swerving deliciously into the consciousness of some future reader like Epicurean atoms, he remains too modest (and too clever) to enumerate any of those perfect, crystalline details for us.

Laplanche’s early career as an analyst passed, like that of so many others, under the shadow of Jacques Lacan. His relation to the master followed a path not uncommon in that circle—from analysand, to collaborator, to apostate. Without recounting the court drama that followed Lacan wherever he went, we can say that Laplanche’s allegiance was never as strong as Jacques-Alain Miller’s, who would famously go on to marry the king’s daughter and take sole responsibility for the publication of his seminars. Nor was his break as dramatic as Guattari’s, who would join Deleuze and Foucault in shattering the intellectual grip that Oedipus held on the ’68 generation of French intellectuals.

Still, I’m tempted to argue that Laplanche was the most profoundly Lacanian of all Lacan’s high-profile critics, save perhaps Kristeva. More than any analyst of his generation, Laplanche heeded Lacan’s call to return to Freud, to linger with the words of Freud’s text as one would with the words of an analysand in the throes of breakthrough, and by an explication du texte to become more Freudian than Freud himself, to uncover and develop the radical insights that the founder could not avow. Jean and Jacques were, we might say, interlocutors in the proper Lacanian sense: two subjects knotted together in dialogue, such that an adequate reading of either requires that one trace the topology of the knot that they make, in which the points of closest contact are also those of highest tension.

The essays of Laplanche’s long middle period (1967-1992) are collected in The Unfinished Copernican Revolution (1992). There, he articulates the consequences of the seduction theory for the practice of analysis, and for our conception of the subject as such. In the title essay, he takes up Freud’s statement about the three great narcissistic wounds that modern humanity has inflicted upon itself: Copernicus’s discovery that the earth is not the center of the cosmos; Darwin’s discovery that man does not hold a special place in nature; and Freud’s own discovery that man is not master in his own house—that the conscious mind is under the sway of the unconscious, subjected to the obscure workings of an internal other. To these three we might add the discovery of quantum theory and the elements of uncertainty that were thrown into the orderly Newtonian universe by Schrodinger and Heisenberg, those elements which so disturbed Einstein.

In what sense, then, is the Copernican Revolution unfinished? For Laplanche, the heliocentric model represents not simply a change of center (from the earth to the sun), but the possibility of a universe without a center, thus opening up "a world of quasi-infinite distances,” a “decentered and infinite world.” This is the universe of infinite distances that so terrified Pascal in the Pensées, invoking the image of man as a speck of dust in the cosmic wind. “But,” Laplanche writes, “the Copernican revolution is perhaps still more radical in that it suggests that man, even as subject of knowledge, is not the central reference-point of what he knows… that man is no longer the measure of all things. Thus the decentering and the infinity of the universe would herald an infinity of knowledge, as well as an epistemological decentering much harder to accept.” Within the Copernican insight, then, is contained all the subsequent revolutions.

So the revolution is unfinished both in the sense that its consequences have not been (and perhaps cannot be) fully developed, and in the sense that even its adherents are constantly attempting to close the wound that it once opened, to retrench themselves in the comforts of a finite cosmos of one kind or another. Just as the ancient astronomers who had to keep adding epicycles to the orbits of planets in order to synthesize the geocentric universe with their minute empirical observations, Darwin retreated (especially in his later years) from his own non-teleological account of evolution to a distinctly teleological Lamarckian position, when it suited his religious sensibilities. Einstein was, perhaps, more intellectually honest; when presented with the evidence of quantum indeterminacy, he did not presume to draw some new epicycle himself but simply held out hope that a causal explanation would emerge. “God does not play dice.”

According to Laplanche, the great Freudian project gets properly underway in Sigmund’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess, exchanged between 1887 and 1904. In this correspondence, particularly in the mid-1890s, Freud dares to name the unconscious in its true Copernican radicality as “das Andere, the other thing in us: this is the unconscious as it is discovered before 1897 and as it will re-emerge at numerous points in Freud’s work.” Laplanche’s most crucial intervention is to develop the early Freud’s suggestion that this other thing is put into me—indeed is “in” “me” before there is even a “me” to speak of, before the emergence of interiority and exteriority as such and certainly before what Lacan would call the mirror stage and the formation of I-function—by the other person in the scene of seduction.

Let’s take a step back. In his letters to Fliess, Freud reported memories surfacing in his hysterical patients of sexual abuse suffered at a very young age, often at the hands of parents or caretakers, and he traced their psychic symptoms to this origin point. According to the standard narrative, Freud first attempted to confirm the external fact of this abuse but, failing to do so for reasons that might be assumed, he began to conceive of the seduction as a fantasy, a shared fantasy among hysterics, and a purely internal event. This tale was a flashpoint of the so-called Freud Wars, in which the Great Charlatan was accused of covering up real abuse (perhaps even in exchange for bribes) by obscuring it behind a wall of impenetrable jargon.

Laplanche, following Lacan, rejects both the purely exterior and purely interior accounts of the seduction scene. For him, “seduction” in the analytic has almost nothing to do with adult genital sexuality, though he of course admits the common reality of abuse within the household. He locates the source of seduction and its ensuing trauma, rather, in the vagaries of signification. “Can one affirm here, with Lacan, the priority of language?”

Language begins, for Laplanche as it did for Lacan, for Freud, for Rousseau, and for countless others, with the cry:

“Unable to provide on its own for its needs, the nursling organism is faced with an unbearable build-up of tension, comparable to the rising level of a reservoir… What characterizes helplessness is precisely the infant’s inability to undertake for itself the action which could empty the reservoir in a lasting way. All it can do is cry, and its cries are themselves, moreover, nothing but the purely mechanical expression of a non-specific overflowing. It is the cries which arouse ‘foreign aid,’ the mother’s activity, which first of all consists in the offering of nourishment.

“What then follows is a specific sequence of satisfaction: a series of acts of feeding leading to a prolonged relaxation. But just as important as this, according to Freud, are the anemic traces, the inscribed images…”

The hungry infant’s cry is itself a purely mechanical reflex-activity and not an act of consciously attempted communication—not a cry “for” the mother, but a pure overflowing of tension—nonetheless summons the mother (or the caretaker), who provides milk (or nourishment). But, as Klein will teach us as well as Skinner, the mother does not simply provide milk. She brings the breast. The warmth of the caretaker’s body, the skin-in-skin contact that the behaviorists found so crucial to early development, is bound up inseparably with the experience of eating. But Freud, Klein, Skinner, and even Lacan do not go far enough when they paint this primal scene, because they fail to see that the breast is not all the mother brings. She brings her desire, her fantasy, her unconscious into contact with the infant.

In feeding, in play, in bathing, in all the acts of care that pass from parent to child, the desire of the parent is always present as a supplement. In the body of the parent, the child encounters signifiers for the first time—though not, at this point, as signifiers. Tremors when the child latches onto the nipple, unexpected roughness in play or in bathing, the sudden departure of one or the other parent, and eventually words and glances exchanged between parents distinguished from the forest of confused sensation that defines earliest infancy. All of these are signifiers. For Laplanche, the child finds itself addressed for the first time when it encounters the parents as desiring beings. I become “me” for the first time when the other wants something of me. I become a subject only through the mediation of the other’s desire.

“But Freud is never to suspect this idea—that the primal scene only has its impact because it bears a message, a giving-to-see or a giving-to-hear on the part of the parents. There is only the reality of the other ‘in itself,’ forever unattainable (the parents and their enjoyment) together with the other ‘for me,’ existing only in my imagination; there is also—primordially—the other who addresses me, the other who ‘wants’ something of me.”

As Freud discovered, a trauma requires two moments: the initial event, and then a later invent in which the original event is re-inscribed as trauma. Hence the case of Emma, described to Fliess, who at a young age was assaulted in a shop but only began experiencing neurotic symptoms years later, when she overheard an obscene conversation in another shop and came suddenly to simultaneously recognize and repress the initial assault, which until that moment had not held any meaning for her. Such is the retroactivity of trauma.

Laplanche paints another scene, one which may seem strange to us today. He recounts an event probably common in the countryside of Freud’s time and of Laplanche’s own childhood: the young child of 3 or 4 is taken out into the field by a parent and made to watch animals copulate. Freud recounted such scenes in his study of the Wolf-man and others, but he missed their key meaning. The spectacle of animal coitus is not the primal scene itself, but the second scene, which activates the trauma of the first seduction. The content of the act itself is clear enough even to a child, and cannot be traumatic on its own. Rather, what disturbs the child and provokes symptoms is the mystery of the parent who has presented the act as “a making-see, an exhibition.” The child asks, “What is it this father wants of me in showing me [this]?”

The exhibition in which everything is laid bare reactivates and rewrites the earlier mysteries—the strange sensations associated with care in the fourth-trimester, the affective intensities that traverse the bodies of parent and child in the act of breast-feeding, written about so beautifully by Klein and Irigaray. It it rewrites them, for the first time, as signifiers—but it rewrites them precisely as enigmatic signifiers, the meaning of which is unattainable.

In addition to the classical Freudian structure of repressed event and retroactive signification, (what Lacan would call S1 and S2), Laplanche posits the necessity of third term, the message. The message consists in its own unknowability, in nothing but the sense that the other is trying to tell me something, that the other’s unconscious is “speaking” to me, that there is something in excess of the meanings I apply to the act, and furthermore in excess of the other’s own conscious meaning.

The encounter with the other is primary. This is true not simply in the sense that the parents were there first, or that the infant is primordially helpless in those earliest months of life. Laplanche is not interested in platitudes (such as those indulged by Nancy, for example) about the need for reciprocity, or whatever. There is no reciprocity in this scene. There is something like mutual infection. The adults who care for the child, simply because they themselves bear an unconscious within them as well, give the child an unconscious through their address, which necessarily says more than they mean it to.

The address bears not only a signification but a “message,” and that message always reaches its destination. But it reaches that destination as an enigma, an enigma that the child cannot metabolize like it metabolizes milk, extracting the nutrients and passing the rest out as excrement. This enigmatic signifier instead sticks in the child’s throat like a bone. In order not to choke, in order to relieve itself of the unbearable pressure of the enigma, the child represses it. This act produces the unconscious, and it rips the child from a purely biological existence into the life of the human subject. I am a subject only insofar as I desire, and I desire only as an effect of the address of the other, which always passes just over my head.

Confusion is at the heart of the analytic experience. Think of the patient who suffers from symptoms that destabilize his or her tenuous sense of self; the analysand who utters a profound slip on the couch and cannot despite all conscious effort trace out its meaning; the successful men and women of the world who have achieved everything they set out to achieve, but still feel an intense sadness for which they cannot account. Laplanche’s key insight is that every such scene of confusion throws us back into that original Hilflosigkeit, helplessness. But after the child’s introduction into language, this helplessness is linked indissolubly to a question: “What do you want from me?”

The question is fundamentally unanswerable, but the child and the adult nonetheless spend their lives formulating answers in the form of fantasies, the function of which is to repress the original and originary enigma, which never stops erupting back into the present.

Of course, this is not the experience of the majority of American college students. Most of them do not attend 4-year full-time universities. Most of those that do work part-time or full-time jobs on top of their responsibilities as students. I worked 15 hours a week, and had friends who regularly put in 20 or 30 hours, sometimes across 2 or 3 gigs. That’s 51 hours of work for me, and 66 hours for those on the high-end of the spectrum. While those numbers add up, the college years start to look less like the period of pastoral leisure that liberals romanticize and right-wingers resent; for many serious students, it will be nothing short of grueling.

Of course, 50 or 60 or 70 hours per week is an unsustainable pace. Exhaustion creeps in, physical and intellectual. Time gets cut, mostly from those precious 24 hours of independent study. Readings are skipped, writing is outsourced to ChatGPT, problem set answers are shared or found online, exams are crammed for at the last minute. With each shortcut taken, students learn less. Whatever information they retain tends to come not from the primary texts, but from the lecture hall and the seminar room, through the mediation of a professor who is as exhausted as his or her audience.

In my recent experience teaching, many students have openly asked me why they’re expected to do readings at all. Won’t the important points be covered in class? Why are we reading a full 200-page novel this week if we’re only going to talk about a few themes and threads within it? Won’t the exam only cover what was on the slides, anyway? So why can’t we just read the slides? By the way, will the slides be posted online? “Thanks for understanding!” The assumption here is that the lecture exhausts the value of the text, or at least exhausts anything that’s worth the student’s time.

You can pass a literature or philosophy course without doing the readings. This has probably been true since before Aristotle lectured in Athens. But mastery of a subject area comes from independent thought, from working-through, from those hours outside the classroom spent reading and writing and thinking.

Put simply, homework is not optional. It is, in my view, the single most important part of a college education, because it is the site where the student is forced to rely on their own resources, where they cannot depend on the passive absorption of the teacher’s words. But anecdotal experiences and empirical studies suggest that students are spending less and less time doing coursework outside of class, and that the time they do spend is of lower and lower quality. Those 2 hours recommended per hour of class time are often passed with the book open on the table, next to two or three screens all drawing the students’ attention in different directions. Before they know it, they have to go off to work waiting tables, bagging groceries, walking dogs, staffing Amazon warehouses, driving Ubers, and so on.

I simply do not believe that it is possible for the average student to become genuinely and deeply educated under these conditions.

Conversations about college-for-all tend to emphasize graduation rates. CUNY, like many other public systems, loves to announce that they have conferred degrees upon this many students from these particular class and racial backgrounds. And those degrees demonstrably improve students’ lives, in ways that have been well-documented—as long as students don’t take on massive amounts of debt to attain them. These working class students are highly driven and highly intelligent, moreso than many of the wealthy kids with whom I went to 4-year liberal arts college. But they are for the most part not given the resources that I had and that many of my peers had.

The most precious of those recourses is time. The time to needed comb through a few pages of Kant, or a few hundred pages of Balzac, without distractions or worries or exhaustion, without having to rush across town to a minimum wage job and without the guilt of spending the afternoon in the library instead of at home caring for a loved one who depends on them. College-for-all means homework-for-all. It names a struggle over the working day, a struggle to reclaim the time we need to educate ourselves; to take back that time not only from our employers, who could not care less about our literature courses or psychology exams, but also from the addictive apps and websites that steal the few good hours we have left after a hard day at work.

As I’m approaching 30, a quote from Marx’s 1844 notebooks has taken on new relevance. It makes the rounds on Twitter every month or so, but that shouldn’t cheapen its theoretical and practical importance:

The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.

As the public university is turned into a job-training facility where the only real requirements for graduation are class-attendance and a pulse, Marx lays out quite clearly the terms of the bargain we have all made. The paradigmatic acts of leisure that Marx describes, the great joys of life and of college life as we’ve known it, at least since WW2—thinking, loving, art-making, athletic competition—are all being absorbed into the machine of capital. This is an act of class-warfare, an attempt to dispossess the working class of those few tools they have left to fight that war: their minds, their bodies, their joys.

We must defend not just the right to a college degree, which has been reduced to a certificate that licenses its holder for, perhaps, a slightly higher paying job, a job in which said holder may even get the chance to exploit someone just below them in the organizational hierarchy. We must defend the right to an education, a real education. This begins by defending the time it takes to read, to think, to fail, to work, to work-through, to become educated.

Kelly Erin Gray is a writer and English PhD candidate at Boston College. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Maudlin House, The Shore, Up The Staircase Quarterly, and The River. She can be found online @kelly_erin_.

Time moves like heat in the summertime, at once both weather and metaphor. You don’t notice the incremental changes so much as you bear witness to the waves, and you can only see it through a slanted gaze—as a mirage, lifting up from sweating asphalt. As June settles in around us, it carries with it this uncanny understanding: time holds us throughout all its cycling seasons. It’s there even when we don’t see it as a slow simmering. It’s all coming back again though, now. It’s the summer of 2024, but I could be convinced otherwise.

Soon, it’ll be election time. And, right on schedule, we’re back to witnessing livestreamed atrocities at night from our tilted screens, as wide as our eyes and as narrow as our attention spans. And, then, scrolling away. Scrolling past bloodshed in the same breath as we do advertisements. Watching till our eyes dry out in their sockets like frayed wiring in outlets or till we get bored, replace a small screen with a larger one, or split the blank screen of our minds between two at once, playing subway surfers over casualty counts written in the passive voice. It’s easy to feel beaten down by it all. It even feels bad not to feel bad.

How, then, do we endure? What do we do with the monotony of our days, the rhythm of our lives, when we know very well what lies behind the veil of our averted gaze? Bright Eyes’ 2002 album LIFTED Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground not only reckons with but reels from this question, veering wildly between the death drive of nihilism and the euphoria of existentialism. It’s an album that calls out to lift the veil, lift your voice, lift out of darkness and or into the clouds. In its repeating and self-referential lyricism, LIFTED also cycles through options for its title’s meaning, as if it could ever get it right or mean just one thing. Though I listened to this album for my five good hours this week, I feel as though I’ve probably spent closer to five hundred hours with it over the years (the 10-minute-long closing song “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved)” was in my most top 5 most listened to songs on Spotify last year – much more on this song later). Still, holding it close this week has lifted something new in it and within me. What has crystallized most for me in this cycle of listening has been how contemporary this album remains, both as a meditation on our endless moment and as a means of making it through to the next one, come what may.

Conor Oberst is no stranger to this struggle. For all the endless war in the Middle East, Oberst seems to have written endless political songs in protest. Beyond LIFTED, Brights Eyes has released many other works under the Bush administration, including the explicitly political single “When The President Talks To God” in 2005. Here, Oberst responds directly to Bush’s claim to speak to God every night by asking “does he fake that drawl or merely nod?” And, in the same year, their album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning explores what it means to live in the West against this backdrop of war in the Middle East in songs like “Land Locked Blues.” The cognitive dissonance of everyday life manifests best in the tender moments this song shares: “We made love on the living room floor/ with the noise in the background of a televised war/ and in the deafening pleasure, I thought I heard someone say, “If we walk away, they’ll walk away.”” The band has written so many political songs as to even become a source of parody. In a 2020 skit on CONAN, for example, Oberst plays a production assistant who cannot stop singing to this same tune: “Start a new war each time that you’re bored/ George Bush sent our boys to die in the war.” In response, a writer on CONAN yells back at him, ““George Bush is not even the fucking president anymore, Conor!” Though satirical, this joke raises a valid question. Why continue listen to Bush era music when Bush is not even the fucking president anymore?

After listening to the album on repeat as much as I have, I’ve found that LIFTED lifts above its own circumstances. It’s not missing the forest through the trees; it’s keeping its ear to the ground to learn the historical fault lines as a way of rising above them. In other words, this album carries in it a dialectical understanding that the path toward the universal is marked by the particular. And, here, this universal truth comes in the form of struggle. When the album first begins in “The Big Picture,” Oberst teases this truth, though it’ll take the full album for him to arrive at it himself. “But I’ve seen the day of your awakening, boy/ and it’s coming soon.” He’s speaking to himself as much as he is to us here, as he at once warns of and promises a coming revelation. Even more, this truth is repeated: “It’s the course of history, your position in line/ you’re just a piece of the puzzle/ so I think you’d better find your place.” In the album arc that follows, however, Oberst struggles to assume his own position in the very world he questions. The structure of fantasy is at work here. As Freud notes of the fetishist, one is able to hold two competing truths at once in both believing in a fantasy while also understanding that it is nothing more than that: a fantasy. Or, as Žižek puts it, a paradoxical logic follows: “I know very well, but nevertheless.” In our tired time, Oberst’s struggle with and against nihilism mirrors our own, resting as we are somewhere in the purgatory between no longer believing in the fantasy and understanding what to do now. Only through listening to the full album can we emerge from out the other side.

In keeping with its uncanny lesson, LIFTED then foreshadows a larger truth in its second song. In the first verse, Oberst speaks again toward history’s repetitions: “There is no beginning to the story/ A bookshelf sinks into the sand.” This is a struggle that he knows “goes on and on and on and on.” The title of the song, “Method Acting,” suggests the presence of fantasy, as we struggle against ourselves in knowing very well that our day to day world is radically contingent in all of its constructed meanings but nevertheless having to carry on living within it anyway. As Oberst proclaims in the bridge, “We have a problem with no solution/ but to love and to be loved.” Sound familiar? This lesson will be repeated in the title of the closing song on the album and identified as “the mystery” of life itself. Even though he mentions it in this early song as a solution, he will first engage with it as a problem. This is the minimal but absolute difference between the existentialist asserting that life has no inherent meaning and the nihilist embracing the same.

In the songs to follow, Oberst renders himself as a flawed protagonist. The fourth song “You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will.” enacts his internal struggle even on the formal level, as listening and reading the lyrics offer different ways of interpreting their meaning. At large, it’s a song about a wavering relationship wherein his partner tells Conor to go out and “explore those other women, the geography of their bodies.” Still though, she has faith that he will come back as a “boomerang” and return to her. When I would first listen to this song, I didn’t hear the question marks. Though the repetition betrays the shaken faith that “you” ever actually “will,” I still took the refrain away as an anxious affirmation that “you will, you will, you will” come back. We have Freudian slips all the time when we speak, it’s less often we get to experience them when we don’t; but, this reading surely reflects the way I put myself into the meaning I make. In the written lyrics, Oberst instead insists on an ambiguity. Even more, he places the question marks after “you” rather than “will,” thereby revealing the way he also inserts himself into the ways he reads others. Rather than reading his partner’s words for the assertion she presents him about himself, he instead cannot help but question her as his “you.” He confesses also that he’s now writing letters that she’ll never read, meaning that he either did not return to her or has not returned yet. He’s still seeking out the right person to fulfill him as the means to an end; however, this is a struggle that will stretch on endlessly.

As the fourth song ends with a promise to no longer have a future, the fifth song follows in his refusal of love. “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” is one of the more famous songs off this album; and, separated from its context, it presents a vision of absolute defeatism. Oberst is here seeking out exactly what the title claims: a lover he doesn’t have to love. Unlike his counterpart in the last song, however, the woman here shares in her own self-destructive tendencies. When he asks for her name, she asks for the time. It doesn’t matter who they are because they are both only filling in the place of what the other actually wants: “You didn’t care to know, who else may have been you before.” Whereas in “Method Acting,” Oberst presents love as a solution, he instead is method acting as “bad actors with bad habits” alongside his counterpart in this later song, an inverse of what came before. What lies beneath his desire for a lover he doesn’t have to love is then the fear of loving anything at all.

But it’s not that simple, is it? On the next song, Oberst explores exactly this question while wishing life was but a still life painting of a “Bowl of Oranges.” This tonal shift from the brooding “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” to the almost twee tune here is intentionally jarring, as Oberst begins to sing about what it means to grow through pain. In the most tender part of it, he tells of encountering a doctor in poor health and not knowing how to help him. In response, the doctor asks him to just sit with him and hold his hand for a while. Afterwards, the man thanks him, “I think I’m cured/ In fact, I’m sure of it/ Thank you, stranger/ For your therapeutic smile.” From this, Oberst takes away “the lesson/ that everyone’s alone.” While repeated often online in the sort of “you’re born alone, you’ll die alone” school of nihilism, Oberst’s mention of it here strikes me as being more complicated than what it claims to be. For one, he isn’t alone. In the narrative he’s painting out, he’s instead communing with a total stranger in an entirely intimate moment shared by both. To me, this irony betrays his internal struggle again. Everyone may be lonely, but no one is alone. In fact, that’s the rub of it. We’re not alone, though we may wish otherwise. It would be easier to have a lover you don’t have to love than to confront the reality of what we owe one another in this life. As the song progresses, Oberst then describes how we might be able to see the beauty in life if it were but a still life painting, hanging on the wall. But life, of course, is not still. His wish to distance himself from life and to render it as something he can view as a painting apart from himself is revealed to be just that: a wish to be alone. This is how we can understand the prolonged silence that follows this song, as the album asks us to sit in the desire he professes for what it would actually entail.

As much as he tries, Oberst cannot go on believing that we are alone for long. As the album nears closer to its end, his denial gives way to anger. This is when the political context is brought back into focus, as if we’re zooming out on a digital rendering of the world so fast it that the computer processing system lags behind. Nothing he has tried to do to deny the world has succeeded: no amount of drinking, loveless love, or sitting alone has worked. As Oberst himself puts it in the seventh song “Don’t Know When But a Day is Gonna Come,” things are going back to the way they were before. Listening to this album now in 2024, I’m reminded of the summer of 2020 when I felt a similar despair as well as all the summers Oberst had spent prior in the same state, so many cycles back: “it’s hard to ignore all the news reports/ they say we must defend ourselves, fight on foreign soil/ against the infidels, with the oil wells/ God saves gas prices.” Following this, “Nothing Gets Crossed Out” marks a moment of bargaining. Oberst sings of waiting for a hand to come down and lift him up from where he’s been. In another instance of repetition, he calls out, “don’t want to lay here no more/ don’t want to lay here no more/ don’t want to lay here no more/ don’t want to lay here no more.” In looking to be lifted up, he speaks for the album at large in wanting to be lifted out of these repeating cycles.

Finally, what we’ve all been waiting for: a goddamn song for all us goddamn people. LIFTED comes to a close with the ten-minute-long “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and To Be Loved).” This song works overtime in compressing the entire emotional journey of the full alum into this one piece, covering first the despair he finds in witnessing the world around us and then the ways he turns that anger inwards in how he inflicts it upon himself. Now reserving his judgement for all the “cowboy presidents,” Oberst proclaims that we “must stumble blindly forward/ repeating history” under the new slogan “red-blooded, white-skinned, oh, and the blues.” But, then, the world contracts. He finds himself “weak from whiskey in pills in a Chicago hospital” with his father sitting at his bedside, and he can only whisper back to him his regrets, “so sorry, so selfish.” In response, his father cuts him off and assures him he loves him regardless, “and there’s nothing you could do/ that would ever change this/ I’m not angry, it happens/ but you just can’t do it again.” And his father is right; it does happen. When faced with all the hurt in the world, it only makes sense that we try to flee in whatever ways we know how. This has happened before, and it will happen again. He speaks at once to the cycles of life and history at large here, reaching out from where he stands in 2002 to our present now as well as to our future to come. When our eyes also start hurting from staring too long at the screen, we must catch ourselves from blurring over into bitter resignation. These are the seasons under empire that we weather. The wisdom to be gleaned here importantly comes in the form of struggle. Oberst was right to call upon us to assume our place in history at the beginning of the album, and that place is hand in hand. Though these cycles will continue, LIFTED insists we’re not alone and never have been. We’re all we’ve got, let’s just hope that is enough.

The narrator of Anne de Marcken’s first novel, It Lasts Forever and Then Its Over, which won the Novel Prize and was published simultaneously by New Directions, Fitzcarraldo, and Giramodo in 2024, has lost an arm. She carries it with her for a while, caressing it in bed like a lover, before cremating it. She finds a crow in the street, wraps it in a Juicy sweatshirt, and sews it inside herself. The crow speaks to her, a series of concrete and abstract nouns without any obvious connection. “Apple. Arm. Ink. Crown.” And so on. We experience this parataxis as alternately oracular and nonsensical, each word exerting a kind of spooky causality on all the others that mirrors and intensifies the dream-logic of the novel’s plot. She and we cannot help but feel addressed by the crow, and she will ultimately come to believe she has interpreted some message from the static, though we never learn its content.

Things accelerate once the narrator decides to stop eating. She has killed a teenaged girl and experienced something like a shock of recognition. But the decision to stop eating is not moral. It’s more like an attempt to bow out of the game she’s been playing since arriving at the hotel. “We are just like the living. Hunger is only ravenous hope. A mirage. Always receding. The black swarm behind my teeth. There is no bottom to this well. No dark place to wait it out. Nothing will ever touch this craving for you. How long before we let ourselves know what we know?” Hunger is hope because each meal offers the false promise of final satisfaction, the return of the lost object that we know but cannot admit will never return to us, will never make us whole.

Over the course of the novel, we gain little insight into this “you” addressed throughout. A lover left behind, the paradigm for a lost object, inflated into a totem that constitutes the narrator’s primary connection to her old life. If hunger is hope, and hope is satisfaction, and satisfaction is a dream of return to something ever-receding, then the narrator’s longing for this “you” is coextensive with her violence towards the living. Each victim is a stand-in for the lost object. She must give up one to give up the other.

What little we do hear of the you is recounted in fragments of encounter, experiences the two shared. One recurs throughout the novel, the sight of a swam of bees in a tree:

“It was solid and liquid and crawling and black and shimmering. iT was the body of one thing made out of the bodies of other things. One animal made out of other animals. It was a shimmering black octopus made of bees. Dripping bees. It kept reshaping itself into a new octopus. Bulbous head and webbed body and tentacles. It was horrifying and beautiful. That’s what’s inside of me. Only instead of an octopus, it is hunger. Instead of bees, it is made of nothing. Hunger is an animal made of nothing.”

Shades of Sartre’s great passages in Nausea, describing the gnarled root of the chestnut tree—its “soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a fright, obscene nakedness”—and Roquentin’s decisive identification with that obscenity, that disorder. Says Roquentin: I, like this tree and like every object in the world, am strange, unlikely, disordered, subject to contingency, thrown into the world and hurled out of it. “We were a heap of creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there… And all these existents which bustled about this tree came from nowhere and were going nowhere.” And my only comfort is that I too am nothing, that my coming from nowhere renders me both one with the world and radically apart from it—engulfed within it, but nonetheless absurdly free.

De Marcken’s narrator assumes her own freedom by refusing the game of hunger—choosing simply to suffer the pangs without satisfying them, no matter how extreme they become. But she does not give up on her experience, on the continuation of her undead life. One fellow-undead, named Marguerite, tries to end her suspended existence by burning herself in a pyre, an act which may or may not end up destroying the world. A dark void opens up and swallows everything it can, while the narrator runs beyond the hotel, beyond the city limits, out towards the West, trying to reach the dunes where she once made love.

On this journey, it becomes clear that her object is no longer a reuniting with her lover, not a rediscovery of the object lost, not an act of hope. It is, instead, a dream to return with a difference to the scene of a single perfect day, a year before her death. The lover is reduced in her memory to the memory of that day, shared between without mutual intrusion, but with a gentle intensity and something like an aesthetic perfection. She finds her friends from the hotel, reborn somewhere in the midwest and wearing Pirates jerseys, with new names, different but the same. She is captured, beheaded, and crucified by a post-apocalyptic cult—then released by an old woman who takes pity.

She walks the rest of the distance to the ocean, holding her head in her hands, an acéphalic embodiment of drive. The entire novel is dripping with more psychoanalytic imagery—Lacanian and Bataillean in equal measure—than I can unpack here after a single read. Her body walks into the sea while her head remains on the shore, and the final reflections take on the enigmatic-orphic power of the crow’s initial words:

“When you have arrived at the thing itself, then all you can do is compare is to something else you don’t understand. A rock, a crow. The only things that remain themselves are the ones you can enter reach. The things that are too big or too far away or move too slowly to detect. Smooth. Feathered. Loved. Already lost. They will always be only what they really are, and you will never know what name to call out to them.

I am on the ocean, I am on the shore. I am trying to remember or to see.

The space between me and me is you. This is a mystery.”

The things of the world are what they are—massive, simple, singular. Comparison belongs to language, and the recognition of language’s inadequacy cannot stop the human need to compare, to explain, to think one thing in terms of another. The meaning is therefore never in any particular object but in the space between the thing and its other, in the comparison itself. What meaning there is for us belongs to metaphor, but every metaphor is itself an attempt to abolish the metaphoric. Death is the great Thing that is not a thing, and therefore the paradigm case of the Thing. A site of non-being that we can never experience but can only think as an accumulation of absences—a world without a world.

But I too cannot be myself, I too am what I am and—tragically, miraculously—what I am not. There is a space between me and me: between the totality of my experience (my memory, my history, my absences) and that which I am, that which not only bears the first me on its back like a turtle but which is the condition of possibility for any me at all. Life consists in the relation between them, and that relation is nothing but “you.” You, the other, my particular other, the loss that is my own, addressed and absent, grieved without hope, as much a mystery to yourself as you are to me.

In 2017, I graduated college with a 104 degree fever. I was on the 3rd week of what would become a 2-month case of mono, and the 2nd day of an 11-day stretch in which my tonsils were so swollen I couldn’t swallow solid food. My two main food groups in this period were apple sauce and vanilla pudding. All told, I lost about 20 pounds, plus a bit of my hairline. It is, by far, the sickest I’ve ever been.

On this particular morning, I was still about a week short of the peak, and was able to get out of bed, put the robe and pants on over my pajamas, and walk the quarter mile procession to pick up my diploma. My extended family had flown in from across the country, so I think my mother would have carried me up to the lectern Weekend-at-Bernie’s-style if she had to. I passed out almost immediately after reaching my seat, flickered in and out of consciousness throughout the ceremony. I remember that John Lewis gave the commencement address, and I think he told a story about killing a chicken with his bare hands?

I went home to live with my mom and grandparents the next day, sleeping 18 hours and waking up to chug gatorade, force down applesauce, and groan. I think I managed to shower about once every 3 days in that first month, which gave my mother an opportunity to change the sweat-soaked sheets. There are few things more wonderful than scrawling directly back into a cool, dry, fresh bed after a hot shower.

As I began to recover and was finally able to organize my experience into a more-or-less continuous stream of discrete events again, I listened to hundreds if not thousands of hours of true crime podcasts. Last Podcast on the Left, My Favorite Murder, Small Town Murder, Serial, S-Town, Up and Vanished, Criminal, and probably a dozen others I’ve since lost track of. I got into this ecosystem right at the beginning of the True Crime boom, but (as I recall at least) before the major streaming services started dropping hyper-exploitative mini-docuseries every other week. This trend is reaching its postmodern apotheosis with Season 2 and the planned Season 3 of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, which even I can’t recommend in good conscience.

These podcasts filled the silence in my childhood bedroom, and gave me something external towards which to direct my mind, as my body went through its daily cycles of chills, hot flashes, pain, nausea, jitters, and exhaustion. When the fever finally broke, I got more discriminating about the content, and gravitated towards the more research-heavy shows, especially LPOTL and STM, and the higher-end works of journalism like the first season of Serial and the work that Payne Lindsey was producing at Tenderfoot.

I had just graduated with no full-time job and no plan. I had vague notions of working part-time, living rent free at my grandma’s in NYC, reading all of Shakespeare and Tolstoy, “writing a novel.” I told everyone that whatever I ended up doing, I wanted to “be a thinking person,” to organize my life around that goal. I had no idea, at the time, how hard it would be to pursue an intellectual life, at 21, without institutional support or the basic structures of the academic year. I woke up every day of the next year searching the library for something to read. Often, I even found and read that something, but the reading itself was directionless and slippery. In one ear, out the other.

At night, I listened to true crime. The long bout of mono had destroyed my sleep schedule, so I was up at all hours of the night and napping in the afternoon. True crime kept me company until 3 or 4 or 5 AM, usually interspersed with episodes of Hogan’s Heroes or Columbo on my grandma’s cable TV. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I remember more facts about John Wayne Gacy and Ed Gein than I do about Henry V and Anna Karenina.

It is possible to maintain a rich intellectual life outside the university, but it is not easy. This is especially true for the group most likely to try: college-educated 20-somethings who have always had someone else assigning deadlines, offering direction, awarding gold stars. Many of us give up trying, either sucking it up and going to grad school, or taking the kind of all-consuming mind-numbing job we once swore we’d never even consider.

As far as distractions go, I could have done worse than the golden age of true crime podcasts, which at least featured a lot of thoroughly-researched history and genuinely excellent reporting. This was all funded mostly be the podcast advertising bubble (thank you Stamps [dot] com and Squarespace!), which I’m told is currently deflating.

We can read NYRB, LARB, The Baffler, Cleveland Review of Books, and a few other publications that still manage to put out good work. We can keep an eye on the latest European modernists in translation, and follow the steady drip of excellent indie books. We can mooch on our friends’ institutional JSTOR subscriptions and our parents HBO/MAX accounts. We can get access to the content, establish disciplined routines to consume it, argue about it online—or even in person if we’re very lucky or live in one of 4 or 5 major cities!

But even then, many of us will still struggle to live an integrated intellectual or artistic life, one where all that reading amounts to more than the simple consumption and recapitulation of ideas and references, a postmodern haze where the events of War and Peace aren't encountered with any more depth or genuine understanding than the biography of Jeffrey Dahmer, whispered into a microphone by an influencer peddling online therapy.

In my darker moments, I wonder if my brain is broken more or less permanently by the endless flood of content I’ve consumed in my first three decades of life—if there’s just no room left for things worth saving in between facts about the 2008 New York Mets and the life of Aileen Wuornos (and, sure, the occasional John Berryman or Marianne Moore poem).

But then I remember that it’s also a question of institutions: the formal ones we apply to and which might even pay us a stipend, and the informal ones we build ourselves. If we can’t save the former, how can we build the latter? I don’t have any good answers today. But I’m ready to admit that what I have, personally, is still not enough.

The canon of American folk music can be mapped on a spectrum between two poles: homesickness and wanderlust. For every road that leads home, there’s a highway that promises escape. Gillian Welch, an artist so deeply embedded in the tradition that it’s easy to forget she’s currently touring and producing new music, knows that better than anyone.

Today, I listened to Welch’s early-career masterpiece, “I Dream a Highway,” for five hours straight. Along the way, I became convinced that she is doing more than channeling these classic themes and oscillating nimbly between them. She is also making an implicit argument for their unity. Welch has always been a songwriter of life’s implacable contradictions and those who try to navigate them. In “I Dream a Highway,” she takes on that role herself, reckoning with her predecessors and reimagining her heritage so that she can move beyond them.

When dealing seriously with a songwriter like Welch, who is always one step ahead of the critic and one record deeper down the rabbit hole, we can’t really begin without recounting the history she takes as her medium.

The paradigm for homesickness was set for better or worse by Stephen Foster, who penned the 19th-century mega-hits “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Swanee River” for performance in antebellum minstrel shows. Foster was a white man from Pennsylvania who had spent minimal time in the South, but he wrote the former after being deeply moved by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The original lyrics were written in the voice of Tom, who was sold “down the river” from his childhood plantation and separated from his family when his owner came on “hard times.” Frederick Douglass actually praised the song in 1855 for placing deep feelings in the mouths of Black characters, a gesture that could “awaken sympathies” in white listeners.

After the Civil War, the character of Tom and Foster’s song were co-opted from their well-intentioned but questionable politics-of-sympathy, and redeployed by reactionaries as nostalgic figures. In the Jim Crow South, Tom no longer longs for his own family, his own home up the river, but for an imagined time before the War when slaves lived happily with their slavers. Homesickness may be a universal human emotion, but its pairing with white nostalgia in the American canon has persisted and infected it. The decontextualized version of Foster’s song that spawned countless imitations, of which “Sweet Home Alabama” is only the most egregious, and “Take Me Home Country Roads” the pinnacle of pop-achievement.

Nonetheless, against Foster’s hegemonic minstrel tradition of homesickness, we can oppose an authentically Black American lineage, that of the Sorrow Songs collected by W. E. B. Du Bois. These are traditionals and religious songs without known authors, though Du Bois shows his own early tendency towards nostalgia in The Souls of Black Folk, when he traces them back to “primitive African origins.” The most famous is “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” where the speaker is carried off by a host of angels and the prophet Elijah. Across these songs, the only true home is heaven (which may or may not resemble Africa), and the only way there is death. Their existential depth is paired with a fatalism that Du Bois ultimately recognizes as a great aesthetic achievement but diagnoses as a political dead end. He exchanges the Sorrow Songs thirty years later in his book Black Reconstruction for the apocalyptic and collectivist strains of “John Brown’s Body,” a call for liberation in this life which he presents as proto-Marxist.

These two distinctly American forms of homesickness occupy the center of a larger ecosystem that includes the soldier-song (often the plaint of a troop abroad for his lover at home, in the lineage of the Revolutionary War era tune “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” sung in both the Redcoat and and Continental Army camps), the prison-song (Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” is the example closest at hand), and all varieties of the mournful parting-song, an address to the beloved in their last moments together loaded with the anticipation of homesickness. To stretch the category a bit further, we can also include the song of unhappy return so popular in the blues tradition—the return to a home that is no longer home. Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House,” which is so deeply embedded in that tradition that it’s to forget it’s a Hendrix original, sums up the latter: “Wait a minute something’s wrong here, / the key won’t unlock this door. / I have a bad, bad feeling / my baby don’t live here no more.”

For every road that leads home, there’s a highway that promises escape. When I talk about the American song of wandering, I’m emphatically not referring to the song of Manifest Destiny, the frontier-song, which I read as expressing another distorted form of homesickness (though in this case for a home that’s been promised but yet to be found). The utopian promise of “Home on the Range” for a lush and depopulated West is nearly identical to the nostalgic fantasy of “My Old Kentucky Home” for a harmonious plantation, except the “possum and coon” of the latter are exchanged for the “deer and the antelope” of the former, and the contented slaves singing in the cabin are swapped with the (white) cowboys around the fire. The wander-song, I think, is a genre that only really came into its own after the frontier had “closed,” when those who may have dreamed of journeying further and further West exchanged that urge for a circular journey around the country’s vast interior. I’m talking about the tramp-songs, the hobo-songs proliferated by the Wobblies at the turn of the century and Woody Guthrie in the Dust Bowl.

Guthrie’s road songs fall into two strands that rarely meet: the refugee-songs from the proto-concept album Dust Bowl Ballads (based on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath) and the happy tramp-tunes of his other work. The long dusty road traveled by the Joad family is a hard one, but they walk it knowing that they can never turn back: “I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.” The hinge on which these two strands of Guthrie’s work turn is the way that his characters relate to that thesis: When there’s nowhere to settle, where can I go and who will I be? For every weary, “Lonesome Hobo” longing for release into a heaven whose main attraction is that is admits no policemen, there’s a “Gypsy Davy” dancing from town to town and activating a longing to wander, to go astray, in women and men alike.

There’s surely a bit of the devilish Pied-Piper in Gypsy Davy, but the latter is a profoundly ambivalent figure—expressing and enacting his own wanderlust, and authorizing it in others. His closest relatives in the American scene might reside closer to literature than prose: Ishmael taking to the sea to drive off the spleen and keep from knocking off people’s hats in the street, Huck Finn rafting up the river with Jim, Whitman singing the praises of the Open Road and heralding a community to come of men and women traveling together into an undetermined future, open to encounters as they may come.

Whitman’s dream of the open road was taken up by the Beat Poets and lefty folk-singers of the ‘60s, and its undisputed masters were Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Between Freewheelin’ and Desire, Dylan explored just about every variety of the parting-song and character, from the lonely rambler (“Down the Highway”) to the rakish tramp (“I Shall Be Free”), from the vicious kiss-off (“Like a Rolling Stone,” “One of Us Must Know,” “Idiot Wind”) to the Irish goodbye (“One Too Many Mournings”), from the desperate plea (“Boots of Spanish Leather,” “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” “Sara”) to the absurdist acceptance of a love run its course (“Girl from North Country,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Simple Twist of Faith”). Everyone in Dylan’s world is either walking away or getting left behind, and either way both parties are likely to find themselves back on the road before long. True to character, he’s spent the past 60 years on the Never Ending Tour.

Joni Mitchell came into her own as a self-conscious practitioner of these forms, shuffling along the spectrum from song to song, verse to verse, line to line. On Blue, she’s coming home to California one minute and wishing she had a river to skate away on the next. In the first track, all she wants is to wreck her stockings in a jukebox dive; by the last she’s ventriloquizing a disappointed romantic grown cynical and drunk in the back of a dark café.  On Hejira, she catalogues a decade of motel trysts from the transcendent to the earthly, while analyzing her own inability to take refuge anywhere but the road.

Against Dylan’s superhuman energy and velocity, Mitchell’s corpus models a practice of ruthless self-disclosure, analysis, and forgiveness. To properly inhabit her best albums is to sit inside a diamond, seeing all its faces reflected and reacted. Her motto might be these late lines by Yeats: “Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! / When such as I cast out remorse / So great a sweetness flows into the breast / We must laugh and we must sing, / We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is blest.”

This is the tradition that Gillian Welch inherits and channels on Time (The Revelator). She wrote and recorded the album with her longtime collaborator David Rawlings, who also produced. It was the pair’s third record, following Revival and Hell among the Yearlings. The debut and sophomore efforts leaned hard on their roots, and the songs sound more at home in the 1930s than ‘90s. Welch disappears into character-driven lyrics, drawing on murder ballads, union hymns, drinking dirges, and sorrow songs. Even the cover of Revival features Welch in a Dust Bowl-style dress, posing for a photograph that might have been taken by Walker Evans. Critics praised both early records, but still leveled charges of antiquarianism and inauthenticity against Welch personally.

In an interview, Welch spoke about expanding her artistic ambitions on Time, and compared the record to Dylan going electric. The songs grew longer and more complex, both melodically and thematically, though the instrumentation remained as sparse as ever: the only credited musicians are Welch and Rawlings on acoustic guitar and harmonies. Rawlings proved himself a tasteful and restrained guitar player on the earlier records, but his technical skills take a massive leap forward here as he experiments with dissonant runs against Welch’s steady rhythm and arpeggios up and down the fret-board. Sonically, the pair push the limits of what can be done with two guitars and two voices, while remaining within the familiar verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus form.

The thematic pallet expands even more than the sonic pallet. A few songs aspire to the condition of the old standards (“My First Lover” comes to mind, as does “Red Clay Halo”), but the centerpieces of Time tend to recall the road-epics of Dylan’s high period. “April 14th Part 1” and “Ruination Day Part 2” form a pair, touching on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Black Sunday Dust Storm of 1935.

But Welch doesn’t remain in the past here, narrating these scenes from a point of respectful remove as she might have on Revival. Instead, the song returns to contemporary, personal, but un-narrated “ruination day”: “Ruination day / and the sky was red. / I went back to work / and back to bed. / And the iceberg broke / and the Okies fled / and the Great Emancipator / took a bullet in the head.” Clearly, someone has hit bottom, but the details of that fall are lost in a rush of details that evoke a mood without conjuring a scene. What we get instead is the aftermath to a disaster, and the implication of someone’s stubborn need to carry on, weighted with the burden of history but relieved of the dangerous naivety of hope.

The history of folk, country, and rock n’ roll music recurs throughout the record. Welch’s love for the history of her craft is on display, but her relation to that history is thematized in a far more explicit way than it had been previously. The character-song “I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll” looks for a compromise between revivalist Christianity (never practiced by Welch as far as I can tell, but a constant theme of her work) and the lusty teenaged pleasures of the earth. “Elvis Presley Blues” features a speaker closer to Welch herself, trying to square the image of Presley shaking it like a Harlem Queen on the Sullivan show with his lonely death on the toilet. “Everything Is Free,” the closest Welch has ever come to writing a fully autobiographical song, is a ballad about Napster and the seismic shifts in the music business. It’s a sad goodbye to the post-war music industry that made an artistic life possible for Welch’s heroes, and a reaffirmation that the music is worth something—worth everything—whether anyone will pay for it or not. “If there’s something that you wanna hear / you can sing it yourself.”

Welch has called “I Dream a Highway” the coda to Time, a recapitulation of themes and images from the 9 previous songs, and she has assured her fans that we don’t really need to listen to it if we don’t have the patience for it. It proceeds at a snail’s pace—the second slowest song on the record besides the opener—and is built on an endlessly repeated three-chord sequence. Welch’s melody is cyclical, each verse looping back around to the root-note on which it started. Her one-two-one-two strumming pattern falls like waves on a California beach, slow and relentless, occasionally rising and falling in volume but never giving ground rhythmically. Under this, Rawlings plays a constant, quiet accompaniment of every riff and arpeggio he’s ever learned. He weaves in and out of Welch’s vocal line, almost like he’s trying to coax her out of her trance-like singing.

On my fifth of sixth time through the song, I’m struck by the clarity of each note. Welch’s rhythm playing never grows muddy, even as she begins to strike the chords harder around minutes 10 and 11. There’s an integrity to each steel string on the duo’s guitars, ringing out on its own among the others, that one would expect more from the nylon materials favored by classical and flamenco players. Even when Rawlings plays up around the 12th fret on the high end in the outro, his notes never lose their fleshy warmth. He uses some well-placed string-buzz and dissonance to produce tension at key moments, but these gestures never feel out of place. Instead, they weave themselves into the skeleton of the main song, tugging at its body like the moon at the tides, or like a new lover at the hem of your shirt. His occasional solo runs between verse and chorus are tasteful but undeniably seductive, enacting a kind of approach-and-retreat that begins playful, grows desperate, and finally accepts its place in the song’s greater orbit.

“Orbit” might be the best word for the journey that Welch narrates here. From the perspective of each individual verse, she’s following the winding ribbon of the highway, driving just above the speed limit and on the right side that band of gold in its center. One town after another passes out of her rearview, one brief encounter after another slips away as she pursues the lost love she addresses. But at the same time, each verse ends in exactly the same place—back on the road, alone again, restless and breathless after the long-sustained notes that close the refrain. We move from scene to scene and reference to reference (Johnny Cash, John Henry, Jack of Diamonds, Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons, to name just the first few that emerge) without getting any closer to the lover, and without developing any deeper sense of who the speaker is or what she is pursuing. Each verse is another pass at a massive but absent center, which holds the speaker like the sun holds the earth or the earth holds the moon. We’re circling the drain.

Welch asks the key question herself in the second verse, and offers a cryptic answer: “Which lover are you, Jack of Diamonds? / Now you be Emmylou and I’ll be Gram. / I’ll send a letter, don’t know who I am / I dream a highway back to you.” In the folk lexicon, the Jack of Diamonds is a figure for bad luck, “a hard card to play” as the Civil War era gambling-tune calls him. Play him and you’ll end up on the street without your shoes and shirt, and walking down the road. He always appears before a loss, but you play him anyway because he’s all you have.

Then Welch answers her own question, transforms the lover (or wishes to transform him) from Jack to Emmylou, and casts herself as Gram Parsons. Parsons mentored Harris, featured her on his last record, and probably loved her before dying of a morphine overdose. After 8 or 9 listens I can’t help but hear Welch emphasizing “now” of that line along with the names and pronouns, like she’s calling for a role-reversal. Once, he was Gram and she was Emmylou. As in the sorrow songs and afterwards, death is a homecoming but it’s also a departure. Online the sorrow songs, she won’t let herself imagine meeting him on the other side, but only switching places. The separation remains. We start to question whether the speaker wants to find her lover in the first place, because after all that would end the journey.

If his identity is vague, hers disappears almost entirely—a flood of references exploding onto the world, barely sticking to the objects they reach after. Writing only makes it worse, reminds her that she doesn’t know who she is. What identity she can maintain is the dream, the highway, the fantasy of a relation that would be shattered if she ever really made it home.

What we’re talking about here is a subjectivity defined by not just by loss (which would be a simple act of mourning), but by exile (and its correlate, the world-dissolving experience of melancholia). Welch assumes her exile in good humor: casting herself as as the serpent in the Garden, banned along with Adam and Eve: “I think I’ll move on into Memphis / and thank the hatchet man who forked my tongue.” She assumes the burden and honor of her wound. She puts it on display. But the other is wounded, too. She knows this, and she wants him to know it, too. In another transformation, she turns him into Lazarus risen from the grave, and demands: “Let me see the mark death made.” Let us be wounded together, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

This experience shared mutilation reads to me, after 4 hours, as the greatest act of love available in the shifting world of Welch’s odyssey. It is, perhaps, a compromise formation: to find the beloved would be to come home, and to come home would be to dissolve what little identity I’ve managed to form, an identity which is nothing but the journey itself, the orbit of one absence around another absence. But the beloved is as lost, as unstable, as ungrounded, as impossible as I am. He is not home and he cannot be home. Even if I were to find him again he would not even be himself—even “the Grand Ol’ Opry’s got a brand new band,” after all.

As in “Ruination Day,” we glimpse the possibility of a journey without hope but also without the bad naivety that engenders hope, that which not only makes disappointment more painful but turns love to hate. “Step into the light poor Lazarus,” don’t just show me your wound, show it to yourself, assume your wound as I have. Join me, perhaps, on the road, not as my home but as my companion.

The latter half of the song is dominated by images of exhaustion—“porcelain lights” on hungover mornings, a lonely diner staffed by a Biblical angel: “I watch the waitress for a thousand years. / Saw a wheel inside a wheel, / heard a call within a call, / and dream a highway back to you.” The speaker has spent so much time on the road, so long with herself and with her heroic consciousness of loss, that those everyday folk who stay in one place feel as alien as angels, as other. As Rilke said, “Every angel is terrifying.”

Welch closes the song on an image that might have come out of the Sorrow Songs. The speaker has found her love, or maybe she hasn’t, and there’s nothing left to do but ask him to join her on a final journey: “Walk me out into the rain and snow,” let us dissolve together in the winter, let us go home to you-know-where. If we are already mutilated, let us finish the job. Let us become truly nobody, as we always were. And so the song finds its solution to the problem of desire in death, in the same place as so many others have.

We can’t expect a happy ending from Welch. She is a songwriter who refuses romantic compensation as much as she refuses easy answers, but we don’t need to let the final line hold the last word. A song like this could in theory go on forever. Leonard Cohen famously claimed to have written 80 verses for “Hallelujah.” If we take seriously Welch’s thesis throughout the song—that the end remains out of sight even when it’s reached, that our fundamental, existential woundedness must be lived lucidly and courageously—then we cannot but take this easy, fatalist ending as a kind of red herring.

Welch’s question here and elsewhere remains the question asked (perhaps even unconsciously) by the entire American folk-song tradition: not “How to get to my home,” but “How to inhabit my exile?”

Taking into account advances in hydration since the 1840s, and considering also the likely prevalence of UTIs in the days before penicillin, we guessed that a “sitting” in Poe’s time was probably just about equal to our own—two hours, give or take.

The idea of a weekly blog came to me, composed of essays about fiction and poetry read in one sitting. After reflecting on a conversation with my former mentor, I decided to expand that to cover film, music, and art. I took a long walk through my FIL’s suburban neighborhood, then wrote up the first post, anticipating total silence. For whatever reason, it got a quick and enthusiastic response from friends, strangers, and people whose opinions I deeply trust and respect.

I will now be super embarrassed if I don’t follow through with this idea. So I guess I have to actually do it now. Thanks a lot, everyone.

My fiancée and I are dealing with some (thankfully minor) health issues today, after a long night in the Emergency Room. Hospital papers say we checked in at 8:58PM and left at 4:03AM, in case anyone’s keeping score. I’m running on 3 hours of sleep and the remains of a cold coffee that I found next to our bed this morning but do not remember purchasing.

Things got scary for a while last night, especially after Jane went in for a second round of testing and I was left alone in the waiting room. To calm my head and to remind myself that there was still a life on the outside of this hospital and a future on the other end of this situation, I spent the early hours of the morning putting together our wedding playlist. We’re having the ceremony in September, at my uncle’s farmhouse in North Jersey, so the vibe is something like “Lefty Americana”—lots of Springsteen, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, and the Stones in their country-western-adjacent era, plus the usual 2010s hipster fare.

Around 3AM, Jane fell asleep in a triage bed and I turned up the volume to tune out the hospital sounds—beeping, groaning, screaming, dry coughs, wet coughs, and everything in between as patient after patient piled into the ER and filled every available inch of floor space. In the middle of that overwhelm, I managed to find some calm. I rediscovered the greatest love song of the 21st century so far.

I am talking, of course, about Gillian Welch’s 14-minute epic “I Dream a Highway,” off her 2001 album with David Rawlings, Time (The Revelator). I listened to it continuously to calm my rising panic, until we got news that surgery would not, after all, be necessary. Jane and I played it in the car on the dark drive home, and we realized that it might just be the perfect object to open this project—and maybe the perfect first dance song, we’ll see.

If all’s well by tomorrow, and it looks like it will be (fingers crossed), I’ll have the first post up by Sunday.

Thanks to everyone who reached out last night with love and support. Good hours feel more precious than ever. If you’re interested in writing a guest essay, please reach out to me here or on Twitter @pourfairelevide.

I speak with this friend—let’s call him G—once or twice a month, more often when classes are out of session. Our calls have fallen into a pattern over the years. We trade academic gossip, talk shop about essays and syllabi, mourn our respective last-place fantasy teams. And then I ask, apologetically, for advice. And then he, somehow even more apologetically, gives far better advice than I deserve.

On this call, I told him about my bouts with the Sunday Scaries. My fiancée calls it “seasonal depression,” my graduate school friends call it “burnout,” my analyst calls it “malaise,” and my all-male group-chat of friends from high school call it “being a bitch rn.” I don’t want to dismiss the feelings or give them any more credence than they deserve, so I call them the Sunday Scaries.

I told my friend that the Sunday Scaries had lately been stretching backwards into Saturday and forwards into Monday. One more day and I’d be surrendering the majority of my week to this feeling: unable to write, uninterested in reading, incapable of finding anything worth watching even on my father-in-law’s Criterion subscription. But at the same time unable to sleep, unable to sit still, unable to identify any reasons for the unease. But mostly, I just felt unable to think, unable to follow a single train of thought longer than a few seconds before it dissolved.

G paused for a moment on the other end of the line. In the background, I could hear him slowly, steadily chopping vegetables in his upstate New York kitchen. “It’s not that you can’t think. It’s that you’re struggling to attend to your own thoughts. You’re struggling to attend in general. It’s a problem of attention.”

G has been thinking about attention for as long as I’ve known him. His signature gesture in the classroom is to spend 3 hours on a single poem, usually a sonnet or shorter, on the first day of class. He’s one of the few professors left who takes a hard line against cellphones and laptops at the seminar table. He teaches, every year, a 7-hour course on Friday mornings in which students have to hand in their phones and read silently for hours. It is, I regret to inform you, a pedagogical model that actually works.

So I wasn’t surprised when G brought up attention. I got defensive anyway, of course. But he cut me off before I could take recourse to all those words everyone else in my life had used—depression, malaise, burnout, and so on.

“On our best days, most of us only get about five good hours. Five good hours where we can more or less perform as the serious, thoughtful people we aspire to be. And that’s only if we get a decent night’s sleep and a good breakfast and the exact right amount of caffeine in the morning. Most days it’s more like 2 or 3 hours, if that. Maybe once in a while you get a Wordsworthian epiphany and make it up to 7 or 8. Flaubert hardly ever made it past 90 minutes. Dickinson probably got about one half-hour per day in between chores. Virginia Woolf talked about a room of her own, but once you’re in that room you still need to write.”

“Virginia Woolf learned Russian in 9 months.”

“And she probably did it with 5 good hours a day.”

“What about, like, surgeons?”

“It’s a scary thought, but they probably get 5 good hours a day, too. My point is, you have to protect your time. Especially your good hours. Your time is the only thing in life that’s really yours. And good hours are fragile. We are sensitive machines.”

6 months later, I think G is right about those 5 good hours. I have no scientific proof of it, though I know that Attention Studies is a growing field in psychology and neuroscience. I’m positive that there are dozens of trade books in the world advertising quick fixes to maximize your focus, stay on that grind, eke out another 15 minutes so that you can get better at trading crypto, or whatever. I haven’t read any of them, and I don’t plan on it.

It comes down to discipline. I know that anyone who read a few excerpts of Foucault in college will tell you that “discipline” is a dirty word, but I don’t know what other word to use. It takes discipline for me to not waste my five good hours doom-scrolling on Twitter, rewatching the same 15 movies and shows, or (the grad student special) reading a bunch of third-rate articles that mark the same point over and over again, just to feel like I’m “working.” It takes discipline to not fall into the same ruts over and over again. To teach yourself to want better things, to want in a better way.

I’ve spent half a decade as an analysand, so I’m skeptical of the idea that we can ever exorcise all of our self-destructive impulses. I’m enough of a Marxist to be suspicious of anything that sounds like the Protestant Work Ethic. I’m not talking about the grindset, about biohacking, about anything like that. I’m talking about opening a gap between myself and the endless flood of stimulants and distractions, to take back those five good hours and use them, consciously. Maybe I’m really talking about the working day, or our modern version of it.

Pour faire le vide: idiomatically, “to empty,” but literally “in order to make the void,” to open up a minimal space between oneself and the world, a crack out of which something new can emerge.

The idea behind this blog is somewhere between a gimmick and a spiritual practice. Five good hours, every week, to sit with a single text and write about it. A novella, a poem, a film, a record. Poe said that no piece of writing should take longer than a single sitting to read—about 2 hours, or however long the average American bladder can hold out. This was obviously somewhere between a joke and a provocation, but Henry James almost certainly had Poe on his mind when he said that the novella is the perfect literary form for the very same reason.

I want to center the scene of reading and writing under constraint, and see what can happen in that space, if it’s well-protected. Five good hours.

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