Here’s one of many passages that I could have excerpted.

OLIVER: There are some wonderful, wonderful passages in Wealth of Nations. I mean, he’s using exclamation marks. He gets angry. He makes jokes. Sometimes he gets very emotional. He’s actually a deeply humane and varied writer. He’s not this dry, technocratic economist. He’s very lively on the page.

RAJAGOPALAN: He is. Actually, you know, a later edition—I want to say this is the fourth edition of The Wealth of Nations—he just takes the East India Company and the British Crown to the cleaners. He’s unsparing about what this kind of monopoly power has done, why it was given only to make sure that the public coffers of all these profligate kings seem to be functioning, and how that has destroyed an entire people.

OLIVER: That’s where he says, isn’t it, he says, “Damn cheek, them telling us to mind how we spend our money when they’re constantly running a deficit. These people wouldn’t know how to keep a budget if their life”—he gets really sort of het up. It’s fantastic.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. So he’s incredible in the sense that, like Swift, he can always see the practical point, which is the fellow human being and their prosperity and their well-being and their agency and their dignity. And that is at the center of everything Smith does. He can go into digressions of silver for, like, 55 pages and bore us to death.

OLIVER: That, you can skip.

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s how I feel about some passages in Middlemarch.

HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Shruti Rajagopalan. Shruti is an economist, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, where she runs the India program and the Emergent Ventures program. And she’s going to talk to me today about Gulliver’s Travels. And it was yesterday 300 years since the publication of this great book.

Shruti, welcome.

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Thank you so much for having me, Henry. And we normally do this in the hallway, where I don’t feel intimidated, and I just randomly tell you stuff. [laughter] And now that we’re recording this, I feel terrified out of my mind talking to you about Swift with all your folded pages and marked-up books.

OLIVER: Okay, good.

RAJAGOPALAN: So I would say it’s a pleasure to be here, but it’s a little bit scary to be here.

OLIVER: Swift would be pleased if we were scared to talk about his book. I think he would like that. So, you love this book.

RAJAGOPALAN: I love this book.

Different Readings, Different Layers

OLIVER: Yes. Tell me your history with the book.

RAJAGOPALAN: I must have read it the first time when I was six years old. You know, these are those abridged classics that are six inches by six inches, very much a Lilliputian size, and they have illustrations on one side and the size 22 font on the other side. And I loved the book.

Of course, that was just the first two parts, which I didn’t know at that time. Part three and part four of the book are not in those little nursery stories. So this is just Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and it’s hilarious for a kid. I remember, they’ve got Gulliver tied up by his hair, and he’ll sneeze or they’ll run a broom up his nose or something, and then all the Lilliputians will go flying.

And this goes on for two, three pages with all those graphics, and I was just so amused. Like, he’s so tiny. He’s in a box, and an eagle takes him away. It’s all hilarious, you know? So that part really tickled me.

And then I must have read it as a teenager or maybe even late teen, early college. I read the unabridged version, which is when I realized that, oh, this book is about something completely different. And after that, I’ve read it maybe every five or six years, maybe not the whole thing. Sometimes I’m like, “Was this there in Gulliver’s Travels?” And then I go and I look that part up, and suddenly something will occur to me, and I’ll realize a new layer in the book.

The most recent layers that I have been genuinely enjoying are how I think people who work at Anthropic and OpenAI are like the people from Laputa. [laughter] And there are these portions in the Laputa section about how they are perennially in doomsday or gloomy, and they’re always thinking about the sun coming closer to the Earth and the degrees of heat and whether the comet is going to move a few inches and hit the Earth.

And they wake up every morning thinking about this and talking with each other, almost as if you are these teenage boys who want to hear terrifying stories. I think that’s the comparison that Swift makes. And I was like, “Oh my god, this is exactly like the EA [effective altruism], AI-doomer crowd who are all the time talking about how the world is ending and this is super dangerous.” And I got onto this passage while I was actually looking for the paper machine that writes books and publishes books.

OLIVER: Oh, yes. Yes, yes, the LLM.

RAJAGOPALAN: I was like, “That’s the LLM.” So when I was looking for the LLM is how I found this passage, and I was like, “Oh my god, maybe what we need to set these labs right is a bunch of flappers who will just flap them out of whatever is going on with them.”

So, sorry, I don’t mean to take potshots at people. But I will literally enter Gulliver’s Travels through some vague memory of mine, and I’ll be like, “Oh, I should look that section up,” and then I’ll end up reading, like, half the book because I love it so much and it’s hilarious.

Politics, Law, and Economics

OLIVER: It is hilarious, but it’s also very clever. How did you start reading it differently once you’d become trained as an economist, and you had all these ideas in your head that maybe you’d understood them earlier, but you hadn’t formalized them?

RAJAGOPALAN: I think before I read it as an economist, I may have read it because through high school I thought I was going to be a lawyer, and eventually I did get a law degree. And so all the politics of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and especially the politics of Lilliput, which is so hilarious, right?

OLIVER: Anyone who has worked in politics, I think, should read this book just because it is screamingly funny, but also because he knows how politics really works.

RAJAGOPALAN: I know, yes. He really knows how it works. So you have the High-Heelers and the Low-Heelers, and this is obviously the Whig and Tory politics of that time. But you could talk about that in any context. It could be the red team, blue team. It could be, you know, Democrats or progressives.

In India, we have the Communist Party of India, Leninist, and the Communist Party of India, Marxist. [laughter] Okay? And the Communist Party of India, Trotsky, I think appeared at one point in time, if I’m not wrong, or maybe it’s the International Party.

But anyway, you could apply that to anything. And he will take it to a point of absurd because the king has his loyalties between the High-Heelers and Low-Heelers, but the heir to the throne has one high heel and one low heel and walks with a wobble, which just tells you that some of this stuff is so petty, you can’t balance your way out of it. You have to reason your way out of how absurd the whole thing is.

And the Big-Enders and the Little-Enders on how to crack a boiled egg. This is every sectarian nonsensical battle which we’ve seen in India and South Asia and abroad. I mean, he’s talking about it in the context of Catholics and Protestants and Anglicans and so on, but Shias and Sunnis are the same, right? You talk about any kind of religious sect, and you end up in the same place.

So I think that was my first entry point to the book. The whole thing about the civil servants becoming civil servants by doing all these insane sports and getting different-colored medals and ribbons.

OLIVER: Going under the bar, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: And that’s how you become cabinet secretary or whatever it is. I had watched and read Yes, Minister, so my entry point was really, “Oh, this is about party politics and law and civil service, and how the judiciary is crazy and how monarchy is dysfunctional,” and that was my entry point.

The economics—I think he’s a fantastic political economist, and when I say “he,” I don’t mean Gulliver. I mean Swift.

OLIVER: Swift, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s an incredible political economist. And that stuff came much later.

OLIVER: And when you say he’s a good political economist, we’re obviously a generation before The Wealth of Nations. There is a lot of economic writing, but it is not codified or consolidated. We’re missing many insights. How has he become this? What is happening in this book?

RAJAGOPALAN: So, couple of things. The Wealth of Nations hasn’t yet come out, but Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees has come out. And Mandeville wrote an early edition, which was a bunch of chapters under a different name, I think in 1705. Then in 1714, it becomes kind of Fable of the Bees, and the official first edition of The Fable of the Bees is 1723. And Swift’s first edition is 1726, which is why this week is the 300th year.

OLIVER: That’s right. Here we are.

RAJAGOPALAN: So he’s got Mandeville, and some of these ideas are brewing. And Mandeville has big sections on the division of labor. In fact, the examples he gives for the division of labor come from watchmaking. There are parts of Mandeville which we can discuss, but there is something about Mandeville which is a little bit like Swift. It’s very, very modern, but I’ll just give you a tiny part. Maybe you’d be better off reading it, okay? So just read—this is the fourth dialogue from Mandeville.

OLIVER: Okay.

RAJAGOPALAN: And I don’t want to get into the context of Mandeville and derail us because you and I are the kind of people who can get derailed quite easily.

OLIVER: No, no, no, sure. That’s the whole podcast, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: And we don’t have a flapper. So just read maybe this first paragraph, and this is Mandeville talking about removing a spring from a watch.

OLIVER: “These are very airy conjectures, but nothing of all this can be proved. The smallness of the parts, you will say, is the reason. But if greater improvements were made in optic glasses, and microscopes could be invented that magnified objects three or four millions of times more than they do now, then certainly those minute particles, so immensely remote from the senses you speak of, might be observed, if that which does the work is corporeal at all.”

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s an incredibly modern bit, right?

OLIVER: Yes. It’s very Swiftian.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. And Mandeville not just knows how watches are made, but can imagine a watch being made without a spring. And also knows what are the inputs required to make a watch without a spring, and then is also able to understand what is the progress we need in other inputs like microscopes and optic glass, which will be required to then be able to magnify things and make them smaller and smaller and smaller, and then get into making a better watch.

So there is something about that time. I don’t think it’s just Swift. I think there’s something about that time when—as Anton Howes, one of our friends, talks about—the country turning into a country of tinkerers. This is science at its best. You’re talking about the Industrial Revolution, but the Industrial Revolution is really trying to figure out how to make a better watch, right?

Adam Smith has a whole bit on how watches are getting better and better and better, how the price of watches is falling and how they are becoming more accurate, which are the two things. The price falling and the quality improving are the two things by which you can very cleanly measure progress. So these are just things that are happening around that time, and I think Swift is very clued into what is going on, in some sense.

Swift’s View of Progress

OLIVER: There is a sort of persistent view of Swift, though, that he’s some kind of Tory, maybe he’s anti-Enlightenment, he doesn’t like progress, he doesn’t like innovation. But there are a lot of watches, and he doesn’t hate the watches in the way he hates the circle of speculators in Laputa. So how do we break out, what does this book think about progress?

RAJAGOPALAN: I think he’s against intellectual elitism and more specifically against scientism. But he’s all for progress. I mean, look at the book. The book is all about measurement. The book is all about, how can I get a better window for my tiny little cute cage that the Brobdingnagians have built for me, and how can the curtain move a little bit better, and how do I not get motion-sick when I’m on horseback in Brobdingnag, and how can I create a slightly better facility to relieve myself?

OLIVER: Yes. He praises improvement a lot. It’s a very Smithian concept.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. Exactly. So I think progress is about improvement and tinkering, and I think the way I balance those two elements that you’re talking about—I mean, first of all, I don’t feel the need to balance them because I think the critics are just wrong. I don’t think he’s anti-science and anti-Enlightenment. I think he’s anti people taking their science too seriously to a point where you can’t see the practical element of it.

It’s like, “Look, I’m from Ireland. There are people who are starving. We’re having famines, and I don’t need you to do this fabulous technocratic project to improve people. I need you to make a better horseback ride or a better potato or a better watch. I don’t need you extracting sunlight from cucumber seeds. I need you to maybe make better cucumbers that can feed the starving population.” So his idea of improvement is what would be the economist’s idea of improvement, frankly.

So, I don’t know. I disagree with a lot of the Gulliver’s Travels critics, and only now I’m realizing I disagree with them because until I read the Cambridge edition, I didn’t even know that all these critiques existed.

OLIVER: I’m tempted into a view that, in Laputa and in the other places in book three where you have all these speculators, it’s a very Smithian description. The phrase “circle of speculators” is from Wealth of Nations. Laputa is a circle. But also, it’s with the court. It’s centralized. It’s got all the nonsense of politics. It’s got all the status-seeking.

Whereas the things that Gulliver carries in his pockets, like the watch, they have just come from the practical world, the improving world. And it’s not spelled out, but it’s actually pretty clear to see that what he dislikes is centralization.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. One, he dislikes centralization, and second, I think he cares very deeply—look at all the points when he expresses discomfort. When the fancy tailor at Laputa was too busy taking measurements using protractors and degrees and angles but can’t make him a well-fitting outfit, and he’s just walking around in a terrible outfit. I can’t think of a better example than that.

So could you have made a machine that will magically print out outfits that people could use? Sure. And he would have marveled at something like that, I think. So anytime it is about carpentry or it is about actually making things cheaper and better, he does marvel at it.

The only time he pooh-poohs it is, “Hey, you had one job, and it was to improve the human condition, and you have failed at that job because you’re thinking about something completely different. And you’re kind of lost in the self-indulgence of how important this work feels.”

OLIVER: He also, to me, seems to—I don’t know if he would put it like this, but he sort of endorses the idea of tacit knowledge. The tailor does not need the instruments and the fuss. He just knows how to do it. Everywhere Gulliver goes, he has to make something, fashion something, put his tools to new use. He just works it out, and it can’t be over-rationalized, right? This is what he’s against, the over-rational.

RAJAGOPALAN: And he’s so grateful to the people in Lilliput because they go through this enormous effort. Like, it’s not linear, right? Just because he’s 100x bigger than them, they don’t just need 100x more people. The scale of everything changes a little bit. And he’s so grateful when they fashion a special kind of wheelbarrow for him or a special kind of thing to bring his hat that got lost.

He’s also seeing in other people—except we don’t think of that as science, necessarily. We don’t think of the Lilliputians as fashioning new, amazing things to deal with the giant. We think of them as little people. But all the things he’s grateful for are when they fashion him interesting things to make him more comfortable.

Gulliver and Game Theory

OLIVER: Yes. Now, the other political economy aspect is game theory, deterrence. Tell me—because this, I think, is undertheorized in Swift. Tell me about this.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. I’m so glad you mentioned this. So there is this discussion of Laputa. For those who are unfamiliar or read the book a long time ago or read the abridged version, Laputa is a flying island. It’s literally like a flying-saucer spaceship, and that’s where the king lives, and that’s where the elites are. And then Laputa will descend onto the rest of the kingdom at different parts. And now there’s a question of—

OLIVER: As a means of oppressing them.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oppressing them, both monitoring them and oppressing them. But Laputa is also creating all these fancy technocratic projects to improve them, right? It’s all kinds of subjugation of what they think is a lower class of people.

Now, the interesting thing is, they talk about, how do we discipline these people who are barbaric and the monarch wants to discipline them? And they talk about, you could first get the flying saucer closer and closer. You could cut off the sunlight. You could cause drought and famine and things like that. And then the nuclear option—he obviously doesn’t use the word nuclear, but the ultimate option is total destruction if Laputa just came and crashed on top of a place.

OLIVER: Physically crushes, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Physically crushes the bottom city or country. And they’re like, “But there are limits to that because people know this.” The people below actually have this information, so sometimes they make stone houses and stone pillars, and sometimes those stone pillars are pointy, and it could actually destroy the base of the Laputan flying island. Which means you can come close, but if you go for total destruction at very high speed, then you might actually end up damaging the island, which is counterproductive and more destructive than just damaging the city.

So what is the equilibrium, as we say? [laughter] You come down very, very slowly and threaten a kind of destruction, but you don’t go all the way so that the people will comply with whatever the monarch wants. And this is very game theoretic, right?

OLIVER: This is basically like mutually assured destruction.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly.

OLIVER: These are the same dynamics we see in the Cold War. I see.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. And what I love about this is, you don’t need to be able to fight fire with fire. You can fight this elite country with sticks and stones as long as the sticks—having this kind of crazy nuclear weapon also opens you to a threat, right? You’ve got this fabulous flying island, but that also means you’re a little bit fragile, and if someone damaged the base of your island, your island couldn’t fly and take off, right?

So there’s something really lovely going on there, and it’s also the politics of, there’s only so much you can oppress the people before they revolt. That’s the other political economy layer that’s going on. Again, you see this when, should Lilliput strike first or should Blefuscu strike first? You have all these war games going on, which are very game theoretic in nature just by description, but it’s so modern, Henry.

OLIVER: I agree with that. And I think this also links to what we said before. When they’re making the stone pillars and everything, they don’t have great technology at their disposal, but they do have that innovism. They do have that kind of ability to think strategically. That’s basic economic improvement, right? It’s all sort of deep in the book.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly, and they can all think strategically. The dwarf can think strategically that there is a more curious pet that has taken away all the attention from the dwarf in Brobdingnag, right? So, whether it is jealousy, whether it is the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians or the High-Heelers and the Low-Heelers, they’re all kind of battling it out. And there’s some kind of equilibrium that starts forming, except for, of course, the crazy heir to the throne who’s walking with a wobble.

But each one of them lands in a particular kind of equilibrium, and I think he even discusses that there are more High-Heelers, but the Low-Heelers are in power or something like that. So there is that, too, which is, how does it work when the minority actually manages to grab a larger proportion of the power, but they’re checked by the fact that they can’t just run with it because there’s a much larger population that’s waiting to take you down. All of that stuff is—I wouldn’t even say it’s buried in there. It’s, like, right there.

OLIVER: No, it’s part of the weave of the whole thing.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s part of the weave of the whole thing.

OLIVER: It’s just throughout.

Language and Humor

RAJAGOPALAN: I would have said “scaffolding,” but that’s such a Claude word [laughter] that I can’t use it anymore. I can’t say “load-bearing” and “scaffolding” anymore. They’re just everywhere on LinkedIn and Twitter. Have you observed this?

OLIVER: I stay away from this. I’m spending less time listening to these things. I’m blocking it out.

RAJAGOPALAN: Well done.

OLIVER: It’s bad for you, I think. And Swift would’ve been horrified because one thing that this book is about is the correct use of language and how allowing yourself to be taken in by bad phrases is damaging to your own critical faculties, right? Which you’re doing by saying, “No, I can’t say that. I have to think like this.” Swift actually is useful to us in that way, too, these days.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, but you are right. It is woven through everything. And when we started talking about it, you said, “It’s really funny, but it’s also really clever.” I feel he has a masterful technique. Some people are funny in, like, they’re literally telling a joke with a punchline. And he does that sometimes.

OLIVER: Yes. Yes, very well.

RAJAGOPALAN: Very well. Sometimes you can tell a joke just because it’s circumstantial and it’s funny, kind of like the wobble of the heir to the throne. You picture it and it’s ha-ha funny. And sometimes it’s funny because it’s so absurd just because of the way the entire system or society has been structured, and he’s a master at that. And there are very few people who can do this at all three levels.

OLIVER: That’s right.

RAJAGOPALAN: And also do potty humor. There is so much kind of juvenile teenage-boy potty humor in this book. I feel like he’s hit every level of humor there is to hit, which is also what makes it so clever.

OLIVER: One thing I think the humor is doing is that he has this technique where he’ll build it up, and then he’ll twist at the end and get the joke. Like him when he says, you know, “The Arabians write from right to left, and these people write up and down, and they go like this. Or you could do it from corner to corner, as ladies do in England.” This is this wonderful little twist.

And to begin with, it’s all very funny. It’s charming. It’s a little bit sexist, but it’s okay. It’s all in sort of good nature. By book four, the twist is becoming so dark that he’s using the humor technique, but to horrify you. And it’s the opposite of humor, and the book has trained you to wait for the twist, but then the twist is really nasty. And he’s using that satirical technique, and it gets darker as we go.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh my god, yes.

OLIVER: So Laputa’s pretty funny, but it’s also oppressive and sinister. And when he switches into lamenting the poverty and everything, the twist is nasty. But when we get it with the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos—chilling.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh my god, by the time you get to the Yahoos, it is chilling. That scene where—is it the Yahoos’ skin that is being used to sail?

OLIVER: He goes to the council of the Houyhnhnms, and he says they never debate anything because they’re rational, and they don’t need to debate because they’re so clever. But there’s this one question that they perennially debate, which is, should they have a genocide of the Yahoos?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

OLIVER: And he doesn’t react to that. He just says that’s what they do, these clever horses.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. That wasn’t the horrifying thing for me.

OLIVER: Then later on, when he leaves, which is shortly after that, he says, “I got into my canoe.” And this is the genius of Swift. He just puts it in a little subclause in the middle and moves on, and he says, “The canoe is made out of the skin of Yahoos.”

RAJAGOPALAN: I know. And my heart stopped when I read it the first time.

OLIVER: It is hideous.

RAJAGOPALAN: I remember reading it, and I was like, “Oh my god, the horror of this.” And it’s not funny at all at that point.

OLIVER: No, but it is a twist. Unexpected.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s taking the dagger and turning it, really. And the humor or the absurdity is that Gulliver barely notices it and is not at all horrified by it.

OLIVER: But the thing is, he does notice it enough to narrate it. So that’s the horror, is he just tells you, and it’s like he’s seen it without really seeing it.

RAJAGOPALAN: Seeing it. Because he’s stopped seeing the humanity in Yahoos, even though they look almost exactly like him.

OLIVER: He is a Yahoo.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s a Yahoo.

OLIVER: We’re all Yahoos. That’s the point, right? We’re the Yahoos.

RAJAGOPALAN: I actually find the end of the book very disturbing. And I feel like I’m almost grateful that I didn’t read it as a kid because I would’ve never read the book again then. I’m glad that the kids’ abridged version only has the first two parts in summary.

OLIVER: It’s a lot for a child, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s a lot. And you don’t want to get into genocide and things like that. But I also think it’s very disturbing because what ends up happening through the book is we are constantly conflating Swift’s voice and Gulliver’s voice. Because Gulliver’s making these observations, but Swift is the one writing it, and Gulliver is not a great observer, let’s be clear. Swift is the impartial spectator, almost, and Gulliver is just a regular guy. He’s a Yahoo.

OLIVER: Barely a spectator sometimes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Barely a spectator sometimes, and doesn’t know when he’s saying something horrifying or doing something horrifying and so on. But as we get to the end of the book—till part three, it’s clear that Swift is the one who is making all of this absurd and laughing at it through Gulliver. But by the end of the book, because the jokes are not ha-ha funny—they’re just absurd, dark satire—you feel like whatever Gulliver’s feeling is the human condition by the end of all these crazy travels. And I don’t think that’s true.

I think Swift is trying to tell us something: that the more you get away from humanity, and if you start talking to dead people and horses more than you interact with humans, you’re going to lose all your humanity inside. You’re going to be repulsed by humans. You’ll never be able to see them as a fellow human. And I think that’s where the book is finally ending, and it gets lost because the humor takes this weird—do you know what I mean?

Balancing Reason and Passion

OLIVER: Yes, definitely. A lot of people think that you’re supposed to disapprove of Gulliver at the end, and we’re supposed to be repulsed, and he’s turned into this monster or whatever. I think that, to begin with, he has maintained some sort of balance between reason and feeling.

And particularly in book two in Brobdingnag, which is like the ideal court, this balance exists, right? By the time of Laputa, there’s a great distortion, and they’re blind to their wives having affairs, and they have no idea. They have a complete lack of feeling.

RAJAGOPALAN: I love that, though.

OLIVER: Oh, it’s fantastic. It’s so funny.

RAJAGOPALAN: I love that Laputa is very elite and scientific, and the only place that doesn’t have slavery within, and the only place which is feminist and progressive for women, where women just go have affairs with footmen and it’s totally fine. And nowhere else has that, but of course, they’re oppressing someone else. Sorry, that’s a random tangent.

OLIVER: No, but exactly, because the rationality that they have achieved, they haven’t really achieved. And then by the time you get to book four, he is so overimpressed by the hyper-rationality or the sort of desiccated rationality that he becomes the monster. And actually, we should feel sorry for him because having watched this great descent he’s gone into, it’s kind of tragic for Gulliver.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s very tragic.

OLIVER: And I just feel sad. I just feel this poor man has become a kind of nonhuman.

RAJAGOPALAN: Nonhuman, exactly. My first reaction after horror is grief for Gulliver because something inside him has died because of all these experiences. But it’s also how he gets taken in, you know? There is some sympathy I have for that because, okay, let’s go to the Houyhnhnms. What are they really? They sound like every eugenicist. Who are the eugenicists? They don’t show up with, like, swords and guns and things like that. That is terrorists. We have a word for that.

OLIVER: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Eugenicists are scientific.

OLIVER: John Maynard Keynes. George Bernard Shaw.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. George Bernard Shaw, Karl Pearson, Bertrand Russell to some extent. All these people are eugenicists, but they are very rational, and they’re very scientific.

And this is where, if you get into the Enlightenment project, whether it’s David Hume, whether it’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the thing is always about balancing our reason and our passions. And Yahoos are all passion, no reason, but Yahoos identify him as one of them. They’re willing to do things for him. They want him to be comfortable. They want to figure out that he has clothing, right? Whereas—

OLIVER: They’re improvers.

RAJAGOPALAN: They’re improvers, and they want to improve him because they don’t have reason, and he looks like them. So there is a role for passion in society because from passion comes loyalty for the fellow human being, right?

That’s where empathy comes for the fellow human being. That’s why you’re willing to go to war against someone else to protect a complete stranger. So there’s a role for passion in society, and if you only have reason and no passion, then you turn into this crazy monstrous eugenicist who don’t even know they’re doing something bad.

And I think the Houyhnhnms are—I think the horse example or the metaphor is great because I started riding horses a couple of years ago, and I started reading more about horse psychology. And the most important thing about horses, I think, or their psychology, is that they are prey animals. They’re not predators. They can never be predators. So even when a horse ends up hurting another creature, it’s because it’s skittish. It’s because it got scared. Something startled it, and it’s just large in size. So horses can kill you, they can do a lot of damage, but it’s not because they are out to be predators.

Dogs are not prey animals, but they’re domesticated. So a dog can be super sweet, but a dog could also turn on you and bite you and things like that. Horses could never do that. So you find the most benign animal, which has all these metaphors and associations in Greek philosophy and mythology of being wise and calm and reasonable. But if you take away all the passion and the fellow humanity, they’re going to end up doing the same horrible thing that the crazy, passionate people do when they go to war.

And that is such a deep insight in Swift, and I think it’s top-class philosophy. I haven’t read better moral philosophy than that, at some level. I think it’s just the entertainment which makes it all disappear.

Slavery and Subjugation

OLIVER: What do you think about slavery in this book?

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s everywhere. There is literal slavery.

OLIVER: Well, that’s the Yahoos.

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s the Yahoos. It’s also Gulliver. He’s kind of a slave, hanging around in a tiny box being carried around as a curiosity.

OLIVER: The farmer wants to breed him and keep the children captive, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly, right? And there’s slavery in Laputa. I mean, not in Laputa itself, but in Lagado and everywhere else that the Laputans are trying to—what is it called, Balnibarbi? Is that the country?

OLIVER: Yes, Balnibarbi. And Swift has written pamphlets describing Ireland as being in slave state to England and things like—same thing, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. So I think the explicit slavery, people owning other people, it’s crystal clear. But there’s another layer, which is not directly slavery but subjugation. And that is all over the book, right? So even in Laputa, which technically doesn’t have slavery, you have this subjugation of people who are servants and women who are doing nothing, and you have all of those things going on in the book.

And I think what he does, whether you look at it through the lens of slavery or subjugation or class or colonialism—basically I think what Swift is trying to tell us is, once you truly look at a fellow human being, if you can’t see them as equal without conditions and you don’t see them as having agency and dignity, the entire project will collapse under its own weight.

It doesn’t matter what the intention is. Are you colonizing? Is your excuse that they’re barbaric? Doesn’t matter. Is your excuse that you’re smarter? Doesn’t matter. Is your excuse that you’re mightier and larger? Doesn’t matter. Do you have gunpowder? Do you have better microscopes and better tailors? Better cucumber seeds?

None of that matters if the basic project by which you look at a fellow human being and you think they don’t deserve agency, which is where slavery and colonialism and the civilizational project comes from—if you miss that, it’s over. So I think that, to me, is the crux of Smith. It’s a deeply humane book. He really sees the fellow human.

OLIVER: To what extent is this an early instance of a liberal idea, something that Smith goes on to write about? Smith then becomes a kind of starting point for some of the abolitionists, and the early pamphlets are quoting Smith saying similar things.

Or to what extent is it’s just Christianism, it’s Christianity, and Swift is just in an angry way saying, “We all say that we think this. We all profess this, but really we’re much more concerned with Little-Ends and Big-Ends while actual degradation, actual subjection is happening. And it’s against the revealed truth of the Bible.” Or how do you read it?

RAJAGOPALAN: I don’t read it in a Christian way at all. Not because it’s not Christian, but I think it’s so much more universal than that, and I think Swift would agree. He knows the crazy petty politics, but he’s able to step outside of it and make fun of it. How many people who are deeply religious or deeply enmeshed in a particular kind of politics can you—I mean, you can be deeply critical of the church, but you can also be deeply critical of the people who are critical of the church, right?

So I feel like it’s a much more universal project in some sense than just, “Hey, you guys aren’t real Christians because you’re fighting about Big-Ends and Little-Ends, and you’re forgetting humanity.” I think this is a much more universal message. But I think it’s a much more universal message because at the core of it, it’s like, just because we are Christians doesn’t mean non-Christians are a project for us that we need to civilize.

OLIVER: Right, right, right.

RAJAGOPALAN: You know what I mean? And I think that’s the crux of it. Who is a barbarian and who is civilized? If you think about what’s happening in Brobdingnag—the king of Brobdingnag is one of my favorite people in this entire thing. He might be the true giant, the true gentle giant in all of this. And every time Gulliver is bragging about the courts and the monarchy and our politics, he’s quite horrified. He’s like, “Hey, this sounds like an extremely corrupt system with lots of petty politics.”

Gulliver thinks—Gulliver’s bragging. He doesn’t know that it’s petty, right? When he tells the king that there’s something called gunpowder and I’ve got to introduce you to it, and you could wipe out half of humanity, and he’s horrified. The king of Brobdingnag is horrified. Why would I want a technology that’s going to wipe out half of humanity?

So who is civilized? Is it the Europeans who are civilized? Is it this British guy who is coming with their politics and their fiat money and their party system? So who is civilized and who is barbaric and who gets to teach whom, is the crux of it. And now, whether you want to look at it through a Christian lens or through an Irish lens or through a colonial lens, I think it doesn’t matter.

Swift as Libertarian?

OLIVER: Do you think there’s a way of reading it as a kind of proto-libertarian book? Or am I dragging too many ideas from the future into the past there?

RAJAGOPALAN: A proto-libertarian reading of this would be, “Be a little bit suspicious of establishment,” I think.

OLIVER: I see various things like the court is always bad. The central power is always domineering. People need some kind of basic infrastructure to keep them liberal with each other because there’s an inherent wish to domineer or to dominate. Trade is good. Improvement is good, right? Material conditions have to be bettered, but the individual has to be respected, even if they are a Yahoo or whatever they are, some kind of person in poverty. Aren’t these the sort of essential ingredients of what later gets called libertarianism?

RAJAGOPALAN: I completely agree with the entire list. I’ll tell you where I might proceed with caution. All of this doesn’t lead to a great emergent order that a lot of proto-libertarians take for granted. A lot of this leads to horrible situations and politics and barbarism and war and drama, which is not the emergent order that the proto-libertarians promise us when you have all those great things, right? Brobdingnag’s court politics is far superior to the other places. But that is not the place where you have the greatest improvements and the greatest prosperity and the greatest of anything.

OLIVER: It’s also the place where he’s the most enslaved because he’s put in the cage. Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. So you’re this tiny thing in this great society of giants, and now what do you—you still have a good life. They treat you very well. But is that the emergent order that the proto-libertarians impress upon us? I don’t know.

OLIVER: Because this gets back to the progress question. I’ve tried to write a kind of “how much of a libertarian was Swift,” and I end up always with this idea that he’s a kind of depressed libertarian, that the libertarian answer is the right one, but somehow it’s just not working. People suck. They want to be mean to each other. They get hyper-rational. They get hyper-political. All the things libertarians warn us about, yes, that’s real, and we haven’t found a way out of the trap, so here we are.

Whereas obviously later libertarians could take economic growth for granted, in a way. They had the kind of benefit of a century of GDP, two centuries of GDP growth, so they could say that the emergent order is here. Whereas Swift is looking at it saying, “Well, it’d be nice if we could, but the material constraints or the resource constraints, whatever, just do not allow for it.” And in a way, Brobdingnag is shown up as this utopia because that’s where he’s put in the cage, and they want to breed him, and he’s like, “It can’t happen.”

RAJAGOPALAN: I think it’s also because he’s from Ireland.

OLIVER: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Right? So the Irish are—this has always puzzled me a lot, especially because there’s this deep connection between the Indian nationalist struggle against the British and the Irish home rule struggle. So actually, you know, a lot of the Fabians are talking to each other, and the Irish are helping the Indians, which is how I learnt for the first time . . .

I always thought of Ireland as a European country, right? They must be on the side of the colonizers. In fact, oftentimes they are drafted into the efforts of the British colonizing other places. But the truth of it is, Ireland was itself colonized in a pretty horrible way.

OLIVER: Very badly.

RAJAGOPALAN: But because they don’t look that different, and the digs about them being barbaric or poor or whatever it is are very subtle and made in a very English way, and they’re not written as horribly as they wrote it when they described the people of India or Africa and so on, we just don’t see Ireland as this colony that has deeply suffered.

OLIVER: There’s also this political difference, which is that India is ruled by people who are sent from Westminster to rule at a distance, but Ireland is part of the United Kingdom.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. It’s right there.

OLIVER: It has seats in Parliament, and so it’s a colony within a country, in a way. Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. So you have this situation where he’s deeply skeptical of this kind of overwhelming powerful state, but he also knows that you need the overwhelming powerful state to keep some kind of order.

But it in no way guarantees the progress of the people. It in no way guarantees that people will actually prosper, their lot will get better. You’re still having famines in Ireland after he wrote this book. It is horrifying. The starvation in Ireland is in itself a horror, given that the neighboring countries were so well off. Isn’t that horrifying in some sense?

OLIVER: It is. No, it still is. Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: So it’s a lot like what’s happening with Laputa and what Laputa is doing to other places next to it.

OLIVER: Yes.

Swift’s Pessimism

RAJAGOPALAN: The lack of equality is very glaring. So sorry to come—this is the long answer to your question of, is he a depressed libertarian? I think he’s an Irish libertarian. He’s the ultimate insider-outsider, right? He’s involved in politics. He has a kinda-sorta seat at the table, but he knows that this is not an equal seat at the table because it’s Irish politics, which is never going to be the same thing as English politics and how important that whole system is and how many ribbons those guys get.

OLIVER: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: So I think that’s where the depressed element may be coming from. And I think this is sharper in some of other Swift’s books.

OLIVER: Yes. Well, in some of the other books, I think he gets almost Randian. The way he talks about beggars and other sorts of people, there’s a kind of really hard edge to that. But I think in a way—

RAJAGOPALAN: But it’s also frustration with his own people, right? He’s like, “Guys, come on. Rise. We can do this. We can make something of ourselves. We don’t need to just depend on our colonizer to show benevolence.”

OLIVER: Exactly, which is a very libertarian response to a crisis.

RAJAGOPALAN: It is a very libertarian response, but he also sees how tough circumstances are for them and how subjugation really works.

And I think that’s the deep insight in Gulliver, which is once you subjugate people and you impoverish them and you put them in these horrible circumstances, kind of like the Yahoos, then you’re going to have no empathy for them. You’re never going to be able to see them as an equal, and they will never see themselves as an equal and be able to rise up. Which is why the humanity, the dignity, the agency is so critical to his proto-libertarian idea, I think. So I really think he’s more Adam Smithian, even though he precedes him by 30-plus years.

OLIVER: No, he’s quite Smithian. Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Right? But he’s really more of a classical-liberal Enlightenment scholar. In fact, I think I would go one step further, and I would say The Theory of Moral Sentiments, when he talks about sympathy and the impartial spectator, that is Adam Smith theorizing the idea. Gulliver has shown us—I mean, Swift has shown us in practice how it should work through Gulliver’s Travels. What does sympathy mean, and what does it mean to be an impartial spectator?

OLIVER: And I think Swift is getting some of that from Locke. Locke is very good on—there’s a philosopher—Rebecca Lowe’s father was a great Locke scholar, and he talks about how Locke says we can only have a kind of quasi-perception of each other. We’re only sort of part aware of each other. This is obviously an important precursor to Smith. But Swift, I think, is essentially in the middle.

RAJAGOPALAN: Is the bridge, yes.

OLIVER: What does that really mean? How does quasi-perception work? What are the mistakes we make about each other? How do we use imagination and rationality to overcome that? And then how are we led into these errors of perception and reasoning about each other? Swift, in a way, is, again, more pessimistic than Smith. Smith is like, “It works great. We have fellow feeling.” He kind of has a free market in emotions. It all just works itself out.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s not Irish. He’s Scottish.

OLIVER: Right. And he has a comfortable life, and his mother cooks his dinner, and that’s all great. But Swift is like, “No, no, there are hard limits on what we can achieve.”

But in a way, if you read this as a critique of—he’s a libertarian, but he’s critiquing it from the inside. That’s actually true. The libertarians have always overclaimed what can be done and what we can do without the state. And Swift’s trying to make compromises in the real world because he understands from Locke that we can never get this perfect knowledge. We’re constantly poking around.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, and also that a stateless society is no party either. And lots of crazy wars and anarchy and constantly fighting with each other to get order is not a great state of affairs.

OLIVER: Right. The problem is in us.

RAJAGOPALAN: The problem is in us.

OLIVER: It’s not just in the government, right? We are the problem.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. And the Yahoo in us is the problem, essentially.

Teaching Gulliver’s Travels

OLIVER: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So should we start giving this book out on economics courses?

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.

OLIVER: Should we be teaching this? I say “we.” It’s not going to be me; it’s going to be you.

RAJAGOPALAN: I think it should be taught everywhere. So, okay, I have this major problem, and you can help me out here because you write about great books and literature. I don’t understand why this is not on every great book list. It’s not on most of them.

OLIVER: Is it not?

RAJAGOPALAN: No. And it’s astounding to me. My theory is that it’s because it’s funny, and I don’t know what form of literary criticism came about when, which decided that unless a book is, like, 700 pages thick and boring and you have to plod through it, it’s not a great book. Like, oh my god, we have to talk about people slowly unraveling and becoming mediocre in Middlemarch, and that’s what’s going to be a great book. We have to trudge through it.

OLIVER: You’re one of the Middlemarch haters. [laughs]

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m not a hater. I see the point of narrowly focusing on something very, very tiny because then you can really study the human condition, but I don’t think it’s the only way to, right? And I certainly don’t think you need these long monologues about disintegration of marriages to really understand the human condition. It’s a bit of a schlep, that book, let’s be honest, right?

OLIVER: That’s not my experience of Middlemarch, but I understand.

RAJAGOPALAN: Sure. No, but what I mean is, it’s unclear to me why a book that is written so well, that is so modern, that is so laugh-out-loud hilarious, is not part of a great book just because it’s funny. So I think it’s not on the list because people think it’s funny and it has potty humor.

OLIVER: I don’t know what syllabuses it is and isn’t on. I know they read it at St. John’s on their Great Books Program.

RAJAGOPALAN: Okay, good.

OLIVER: I do think the 18th century is less interesting to most people, right? In the 16th century you have Shakespeare; 17th century is civil war, people killing, it’s always crazy, John Milton, whoopee; 19th century, all the novels everyone loves, Jane Austen, everyone goes to town on that.

RAJAGOPALAN: Jane Austen ruined it. I love her, but . . .

OLIVER: Well, maybe. But 18th century is just this big period that is actually kind of out of favor. People don’t read those novels as much. It’s—

RAJAGOPALAN: Is it because our idea of what’s a novel changed?

OLIVER: Hugely. Hugely.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly, right? This is what I learned from you.

Smith’s Wealth of Nations

OLIVER: But also just the 18th century generally, it’s so rational, it’s so—I have the same thing. Just not that many people are reading Wealth of Nations. It’s clearly one of the great texts in English. Forget the disciplinary boundaries. It’s one of the great books in English. But not that many people are reading it.

RAJAGOPALAN: I think people don’t know how readable it is. So my recommendation to your listeners and to everyone is, usually The Wealth of Nations shows up with a great introduction by a great Smith scholar that runs 100 pages. Pretty much every edition. Please don’t read it. [laughter] Start with book one, chapter one, “Of the Division of Labor.” That’s where you should start reading the book.

So that’s my recommendation, and once you read it—it’s about a trifling manufacturer where they are making pins, and how you go from if one person had to do all 20 tasks, then you would get scarcely 20 pins a day, but if you divide it between 18 people, or the 18 tasks between 12 people, you can get 48,000 pins in a day. You start with that, I promise you it’s a page-turner. You will finish the book.

OLIVER: There are some wonderful, wonderful passages in Wealth of Nations. I mean, he’s using exclamation marks. He gets angry. He makes jokes. Sometimes he gets very emotional. He’s actually a deeply humane and varied writer. He’s not this dry, technocratic economist. He’s very lively on the page.

RAJAGOPALAN: He is. Actually, you know, a later edition—I want to say this is the fourth edition of The Wealth of Nations—he just takes the East India Company and the British Crown to the cleaners. He’s unsparing about what this kind of monopoly power has done, why it was given only to make sure that the public coffers of all these profligate kings seem to be functioning, and how that has destroyed an entire people.

OLIVER: That’s where he says, isn’t it, he says, “Damn cheek, them telling us to mind how we spend our money when they’re constantly running a deficit. These people wouldn’t know how to keep a budget if their life”—he gets really sort of het up. It’s fantastic.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. So he’s incredible in the sense that, like Swift, he can always see the practical point, which is the fellow human being and their prosperity and their well-being and their agency and their dignity. And that is at the center of everything Smith does. He can go into digressions of silver for, like, 55 pages and bore us to death.

OLIVER: That, you can skip.

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s how I feel about some passages in Middlemarch.

OLIVER: [laughs] The Lydgate marriage is the silver digression to you.

RAJAGOPALAN: I don’t know. Maybe some of it is useful, just like the silver digressions. But some of it is pretty exhausting. I’m like, “Oh my god, 50 pages of this is excruciating inner monologue. No, thank you.” But I read it.

But my point is, Smith can keep his eye on the ball, as Swift has been telling us to keep the eye on the ball. In Smith, I was reading about watches recently. I’ve become obsessed with watches, I was telling you, right? There are lots of watch examples in Smith.

OLIVER: Smith loves watches.

RAJAGOPALAN: Smith loves watches. Apparently that entire time period was fantastic for watches. Watches were the GPUs, okay? [laughter] No, really. I’m not making this up.

OLIVER: Sure.

RAJAGOPALAN: So, okay, this is another passage I’m going to request you to read. And someone’s written a QJE [Quarterly Journal of Economics] paper on it, which we can add in the transcript and the show notes based on this single passage.

OLIVER: Oh, really? Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: This is Adam Smith, book 1, chapter 11.

OLIVER: This is Wealth of Nations?

RAJAGOPALAN: The Wealth of Nations.

OLIVER: “This diminution of price has, in the course of the present and preceding century, been most remarkable in those manufactures of which the materials are the coarser metals. A better movement of a watch than about the middle of the last century could have been bought for 20 pounds may now perhaps be had for 20 shillings.” That’s great. That’s great.

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s great, right? And someone tested it.

OLIVER: Really?

RAJAGOPALAN: And the way they tested it is, I want to—I don’t think I’m misremembering—the other one, too. I think I have another Smith passage here that I want you to read out to us. But they did this really incredible study where they get data from criminal cases of stolen watches. Because in watches, the only quality element that matters is accuracy. So it’s their size and their accuracy. And you know the price, because for stolen goods there’s a price.

OLIVER: They write it down, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: And so they actually look at whether this exact amount, what is the—

OLIVER: The 20 pounds and 20 shillings.

RAJAGOPALAN: —the 20 pounds to 20 shillings, that magnitude of improvement was made. It’s slightly lesser, is what they find.

OLIVER: Oh, really? But he’s close.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s pretty close. He’s pretty close.

OLIVER: Oh, that’s good.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, it’s not too far off. Then there is this incredible passage which I want to find on export controls. That’s why I call them modern-day GPUs. So here is the passage I found for you on export controls, and you can just read these two, the middle and the last paragraph.

OLIVER: Middle and the last. “Woolen yarn and worsted are prohibited to be exported under the same penalties as wool. Even white cloths we subject to a duty upon exportation, and our dyers have so far obtained a monopoly against our clothiers. Our clothiers would probably have been able to defend themselves against it, but it happens that the greater part of our principal clothiers are themselves likewise dyers.

Watch cases, clock cases, and dial plates for clocks and watches have been prohibited to be exported. Our clockmakers and watchmakers are, it seems, unwilling that the price of this sort of workmanship should be raised upon them by the competition of foreigners.”

RAJAGOPALAN: So you have—watches require lots of different inputs, which require a lot of precision. British watchmakers are some of the best in the world. And you have this situation where British watchmakers don’t want the people who are making the inputs for those watches to be able to export those inputs to other countries because then the price of those inputs will go up, and watches in other countries will get cheaper and better. Tell me this is not the modern-day GPU and the export controls.

The Miracle of the Watch

OLIVER: That is the GPU. That is the GPU. But also, things like this are why Gulliver has a watch in his pocket, and it’s why when he gets to Lilliput, they’re obsessed with the watch.

RAJAGOPALAN: I know.

OLIVER: Because in fact, it was a miracle.

RAJAGOPALAN: It is a miracle.

OLIVER: It was an incredible thing that was happening.

RAJAGOPALAN: I have that passage too. There you go.

OLIVER: So he’s thinking like an economist even in—

RAJAGOPALAN: Here is the passage from Gulliver on the watch, and you know it well.

OLIVER: [laughs] I love this.

RAJAGOPALAN: So, to our dear watchers and listeners and readers, I will be walking around in the hallways or getting a cup of coffee in the office kitchen, and I will mention something to Henry, and he will just recite passages like this from memory.

OLIVER: I don’t think I recite, exactly.

RAJAGOPALAN: Close enough.

OLIVER: Close enough.

RAJAGOPALAN: But now you can actually recite it.

OLIVER: “There were two pockets which we could not enter. These he called his fobs. They were two large slits cut into the top of his middle cover but squeezed close by the pressure of his belly. Out of the right fob hung a great silver chain with a wonderful kind of engine at the bottom.

We directed him to draw out whatever was fastened to that chain, which appeared to be a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal. For on the transparent side we saw certain strange figures circularly drawn, and thought we could touch them till we found our fingers stopped by that lucid substance. He put his engine to our ears, which made an incessant noise like that of a water mill, and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal or the god that he worships.

But we are more inclined to the latter opinion because he assures us, if we understand him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly, that he seldom did anything without consulting it. He called it his oracle and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.” I mean, that is such a good satire. That’s like us and our phones.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s also such a beautifully written passage. Like, what better description of a watch to someone who may have never seen a watch?

OLIVER: “A wonderful kind of engine,” yes. This reminds me, there’s a story in Aubrey, whose Brief Lives predate Swift, when a man had a watch, and it was obviously a new thing. And the maids come into the bedroom, and they are very scared because this strange object is making this noise, and they don’t know what the noise is. They’ve never seen a watch. No one’s ever spoken about a watch. What could this noise be? And they assume there must be a devil trapped in whatever this object is.

RAJAGOPALAN: Or a god.

OLIVER: So they get the fire tongs, and they pick it up at a distance, and they fling it out of the window because they’re terrified of being in the room with the devil contained in the box. And of course the watch is worth an awful lot of money, but thankfully it catches on a twig before it goes into the river below, and they manage to retrieve it later.

RAJAGOPALAN: Well, I love this bit.

OLIVER: So this to me is recalling that, and that kind of wonderment. Because there is in here the wonder at technology, right? Some of the way people react to LLMs is this kind of, you know, at the wonderful engine. I mean, that’s what people have been saying.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. Oh, the LLMs part, I think—I hope I have printed it out for you. Here we are.

OLIVER: This is from book three.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, exactly. This is from book three, the Laputa parts.

OLIVER: The machine.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, I printed out a section for you called “Laputa and Anthropic.”

OLIVER: [laughs] This is so funny. The Laputans’ constant fear of comets and the destruction of the Earth. Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, but the one after that, on the next page, is—

OLIVER: The machine that automatically produces books at the Academy of Lagado. “The first professor I saw was in a very large room with 40 pupils about him. After salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a frame which took up the greatest path of both the length and breadth of the room, he said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations.

But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble, exalted thought never sprang in any other man’s head. Everyone knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences, whereas by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge and with as little bodily labor, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology without the least assistance from genius or study.”

I mean, they’re still saying this.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s incredible.

OLIVER: These are the exact words that they come out with, right?

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. We should tweet it.

OLIVER: This is fantastic.

RAJAGOPALAN: There should just be a Gulliver’s Travels Twitter account.

OLIVER: I mean, “at a reasonable charge.”

RAJAGOPALAN: “At a reasonable charge.”

OLIVER: That is the language. He’s such a genius for that.

RAJAGOPALAN: And he’s marveling at it. We are able to marvel at things because Gulliver is looking through that lens to be able to marvel at things.

OLIVER: Yes. Great.

RAJAGOPALAN: You can also become very quickly inured to any kind of great progress taking place in front of you.

OLIVER: Yes. Well, “without the least assistance from genius or study.” I mean, that’s a nice little twist.

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s a lovely twist, yes.

OLIVER: Yes. This has been fantastic, Shruti.

RAJAGOPALAN: I know, and I hope everyone reads this book. And the thing, again, I keep saying again and again that I get out of it is the size and the perspective that I enjoyed as a kid, because it was so funny. The older I get, the more I realize that Gulliver is a giant in Lilliput because he behaves like a giant. He doesn’t trample over little people. He subjects himself to their rules. He asks permission of the king to stay or to leave. He does that everywhere he goes, actually.

And the king of Brobdingnag is a giant because he’s horrified by petty politics, and he acts like a giant. He would never use gunpowder and artillery against fellow people or animals and so on. And it’s easy to lose sight of that. Who is truly a good human being is something Swift is telling us through size and perspective. But at the end of it, the person who’s a really good human being is the person who has sympathy and who can see the—

OLIVER: Yes, fellow feeling.

RAJAGOPALAN: —fellow feeling, and who recognizes another human being. And that fellow feeling can’t just come from reason. It also needs to come from passion and sympathy, and if we can’t do that, then the purpose of our project has just collapsed.

OLIVER: That’s the perfect ending point.

RAJAGOPALAN: Excellent. This was such a pleasure.

OLIVER: Shruti, thank you very much.

Locke in his portraits often seems sad, and it’s genial to think that he plays in his philosophy. Nor is it implausible, even when we take play in its core sense, and not simply as lively curiosity (Melanie Klein’s ‘epistemophilic instinct’). Many philosophers play in and among words, and not merely on or with them.

I particularly like two moments when Locke confronts the sceptic, who challenges him to justify his belief in an external world, and to prove that it is not all a dream:

If any one say, a dream may do the same thing, and all these ideas may be produced in us without any external objects, he may please to dream that I make him this answer, 1. That ’tis no great matter, whether I remove his scruple, or no: where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing. 2. That I believe he will allow a very manifest difference between dreaming of being in the fire, and being actually in it. But yet if he be resolved to appear so sceptical, as to maintain, that what I call being actually in the fire, is nothing but a dream; and that we cannot thereby certainly know, that any such thing as fire actually exists without us: I answer, that we certainly finding, that pleasure or pain follows upon the application of certain objects to us, whose existence we perceive, or dream that we perceive, by our senses, this certainty is as great as our happiness, or misery, beyond which, we have no concernment to know, or to be (Essay 4.2.14).

And again:

if after all this any one will be so sceptical as to distrust his senses, and to affirm that all we see and hear, feel and taste, think and do, during our whole being, is but the series and deluding appearances of a long dream, whereof there is no reality; and therefore will question the existence of all things, or our knowledge of anything: I must desire him to consider, that, if all be a dream, then he doth but dream that he makes the question, and so it is not much matter that a waking man should answer him. But yet, if he pleases, he may dream that I make him this answer, That the certainty of things existing in rerum natura when we have the testimony of our senses for it is not only as great as our frame can attain to, but as our condition needs (Essay 4.11.8).

This is exactly the right move, for there is no knockdown proof. And when Locke’s long-time companion Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham, writes to Leibniz about her pleasure in talking to Locke—‘Rational Conversation, with Mutual Good Will, has the greatest Charmes that I know in Life, and I have hitherto been very Happy in respect of that Enjoyment’ (Letter of 8 August 1704)—we understand that it is a nonpareil form of play, perhaps our greatest game and in the service of truth.

Published at Liberty Fund. And here is my original essay about Locke’s “playful philosophy”. And here is ’s, clarifying the Lockean idea of personal identity.

In the novel, there are, I think, three readings of the opening line. First, it is just the narrator speaking in her own voice and being satiric, albeit about a question that has to be taken seriously. Second, it is the narrator adopting a statement made by Lizzy, who is ironising her mother. This interpretation worked well in the previous BBC adaptation when Lizzy did indeed speak the line. Third, though, it could be the narrator ventriloquising Mrs. Bennet. In fact, there is dialogue in the first chapter that makes this plausible.

“Is he married or single?”

“Oh, single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”

“How so? how can it affect them?”

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome? You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”

“Is that his design in settling here?”

“Design? Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes.”

Now, I happen to think the opening line is in the narrator’s voice. She is being satiric about the genre, about social norms, and about people like Mrs. Bennet, and so on. But, Alderton is entitled to do whatever she wants with her adaptation and I don’t think this extract goes against the idea that Mrs. Bennet could speak the line. Quite the opposite. If Olivia Colman makes the line work, then good for her. In the BBC version, after Lizzy says the line Mrs. Bennet replies, “Yes, he must indeed.” To give her the line itself is no great violation. After all, it’s television. If you want subtle irony, read the book.

When the anti-republican Action Française group wanted to incite a revolution against democracy in Paris in 1934, they chose to perform a “freely” translated version of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s 1608 play about a tragic Roman tyrant. Coriolanus has plenty of useful material for the demotically agitating translator. Audience riots ensued. Both the socialists and the fascists were appalled by the play’s apparent favor of conservatism.

Shakespeare, of course, was not so crude. In 1806, Napoleon had banned a production of Coriolanus, thinking it was not anti-democratic but anti-authority, and would reflect badly on him. But one of his supporters in England, the literary critic William Hazlitt thought that, if anything, the play showed more favor to the tyrant than the mob. Later on, the Nazis praised it as a play against weak democracy, while Brecht adapted it as a tragedy of the people.

The explanation for Coriolanus’ enduring provocation is summed up in the most repeated comment made about the 1934 French production: “It seems to have been written just yesterday.” Of course, Shakespeare’s language in Coriolanus isn’t as straightforward as in some other plays, which perhaps accounts for the critical ambivalence it often receives, despite clearly being one of the greatest plays in the Shakespeare canon. What makes it fresh is not the Roman subject matters of the dense Jacobean verse, but its ideas.

William Hazlitt wrote that if you were familiar with Coriolanus you wouldn’t need to read the competing arguments about tradition and liberty written about the French Revolution. Coriolanus, he said, is a store-house of political common-place (meaning ideas). The competing arguments of aristocracy or democracy, liberty and slavery, power and its abuse, peace and war, were all “handled with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher.”

It’s going too far to say, as Hazlitt did, that “anyone who studies Coriolanus may save himself the trouble of reading Burke’s Reflections, or Paine’s Rights of Man, or the debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolution or our own.” Literature is not a substitute for other types of thought, but a compliment to them. If we can enter the dream of literature (as Anthony Nuttall said in A New Mimesis) we can see these ideas playing out in the context of human emotion. That is what kills Coriolanus in the end: not the rights and wrongs of the issues, not justice for the people, nor the turn of fate, but the heat of human passion.

At the start of the play, there is a grain shortage and the plebeians are protesting against the patricians. Some of the Roman rulers try to placate the people, but Coriolanus is supercilious and disdainful. He is so deeply committed to the ideal of honor, one of the crowning virtues of the Roman republic, that he has no human sympathy. Later on, during a discussion about Coriolanus’ merits, one of the senators defends him by invoking his valor.

the deeds of Coriolanus

Should not be utter’d feebly. It is held

That valor is the chiefest virtue, and

Most dignifies the haver: if it be,

The man I speak of cannot in the world

Be singly counterpoised.

This means that there is no balancing act to be had with valor. There is no counter-argument to heroism. After dismissing the people, Coriolanus goes to war and defeats the Volscians, a group threatening to invade Rome. In reward, he is made a Consul.

Now, tradition says he must ask the approval of the people. Coriolanus is too proud to do this. In the argument that follows, he displays bare contempt for the people and is exiled from Rome for his tyrannous intent. (He doesn’t believe the people should have any say in the ruling of Rome.) He goes to the Volscians, whom he has just defeated, and they admire him for his valor so much they take him in and agree to help him take revenge on Rome. Their revenge is for the defeat he pioneered; his is for his exile.

Old friends from Rome come to see Coriolanus to plead with him not to attack. He dismisses them all, even the ones he has dearly loved. At the gates of Rome, his wife, mother, and son plead with him. Despite trying to resist all feelings, he relents. (There’s a long tradition of psychoanalytic criticism, which sees Coriolanus as Oedipal.) But the Volscians are mad with rage at his betrayal. They kill him.

The proximate cause of this tragedy is obvious: Coriolanus radically values an ideology that denies natural feeling. Even when his young son implores him not to attack Rome, he says,

my young boy

Hath an aspect of intercession, which

Great nature cries ‘Deny not.’ let the Volsces

Plough Rome and harrow Italy: I’ll never

Be such a gosling to obey instinct

He is eventually persuaded to make peace, when his mother Volumnia tells him that invading Rome now will destroy his reputation forever,

The end of war’s uncertain, but this certain,

That, if thou conquer Rome, the benefit

Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name,

Whose repetition will be dogg’d with curses

She pleads her position as his mother, and the love and the duty he owes to her, and says “the gods will plague thee” for ignoring her. He is publicly shamed by the kneeling down of his mother, Volumnia, wife, Virgilia, and son, Martius.

Volumnia then uses powerfully exploitative rhetoric,

so we will home to Rome,

And die among our neighbors…

I am hush’d until our city be a-fire

Now he relents. But not for ideological reasons. His mother has finally broken through to his sense of sympathy. “Were you in my stead, would you have heard/ A mother less?” Coriolanus asks the leader of the Volscians. He even admits to crying: his eyes “sweat compassion.”

These feelings do not mean very much to the Volscian leader Aufidius. He is emotionally tied to the case for war, just as Coriolanus has been throughout his whole life. “I pawn’d/ Mine honour for his truth” Aufidius complains, and “He bow’d his nature, never known before.”

This betrayal is personal. When Coriolanus arrives at Aufidius’ house, and pleads that “extremity/ Hath brought me to thy hearth,” Aufidius delivers a startling speech about how much he loves and admires Coriolanus, the man who recently put his city to the sword. His admiration runs so deep, Aufidius tells Coriolanus he admires him more than he loves his wife.

I loved the maid I married; never man

Sigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here,

Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart

Than when I first my wedded mistress saw

Bestride my threshold.

This erotic tone is continued when Aufidius describes how has dreamed of Coriolanus and the encounters they might have had,

We have been down together in my sleep,

Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat,

And waked half dead with nothing.

(It is worth comparing this speech to Clarence’s account of his prophetic dream in Richard III.) Aufidius loves and admires his enemy so much he promised to pour war “Into the bowels of ungrateful Rome,/ Like a bold flood.” So, when Coriolanus changes his mind on the threshold of war, Aufidius is personally wounded. Coriolanus’ downfall is not only brought about by his choices, but also by the pitch of the emotions he inspired in Aufidius. This tragedy is the fruit of many people’s passions.

When Aufidius confronts Coriolanus about his betrayal, he complains of “Breaking his oath and resolution like/ A twist of rotten silk.” This echoes something Coriolanus’ mother said to him earlier. When Coriolanus has to go and apologize to the people to win their favor as a Consul, Volumnia advises him to fake it, to pretend to be humble,

humble as the ripest mulberry

That will not hold the handling

It’s one of Shakespeare’s finest images, perfectly capturing the way politicians make themselves look delicate in front of a crowd they need to placate. Mulberry trees were planted in England at this time under the orders of James I, who wanted to encourage the English silk industry. Silk worms feed on mulberry trees: when Aufidius compares Coriolanus’ betrayal to a twist of rotten silk, we think back to Volumnia encouraging Coriolanus to make himself as humble as a mulberry. He didn’t listen to her the first time, when it would have been fruitful to do so; now he is left with the inadequate threads of humility that have come too late to save him. Like the threads of his fate, they snap.

These images don’t just reinforce the sense that Coriolanus is at fault. They are part of a pattern of determinism throughout the play. All mulberries rot eventually, whether or not one takes the chance to pick the fruit of opportunity while it is fresh. When Coriolanus denies his natural feelings for his son, he says he will “stand,/ As if a man were author of himself/ And knew no other kin.” Coriolanus instructs that we cannot be the author of ourselves. In his indispensable Shakespeare The Thinker, A.D. Nuttall points out that the word which finally undoes Coriolanus is “boy,” when Aufidius calls him a “boy of tears” — a taunt about the way Coriolanus was turned back from his conquest of Rome by Volunia’s appeal. What brings the great warrior down is the reminder that he is, and always was, under the control of his mother. He is not an autonomous man, but still an obedient boy.

This reminds the audience that it was Volumnia who made Coriolanus into a warrior to begin with. Nuttall points to the scene where Volumnia and Virgilia discuss Coriolanus’ son, Marcius, who is a martial young boy. The dialogue reveals him to be a vicious little creature.

Volumnia. He had rather see the swords, and hear a drum, than look upon his school-master.

Valeria. O’ my word, the father’s son: I’ll swear,’tis a very pretty boy. O’ my troth, I looked upon him o’ Wednesday half an hour together: has such a confirmed countenance. I saw him run after a gilded butterfly: and when he caught it, he let it go again; and after it again; and over and over he comes, and again; catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him, or how ’twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it; O, I warrant it, how he mamocked it!

Volumnia’s response to this dark tale is to say, “One on ‘s father’s moods.” What Shakespeare imputes to us, Nuttall says, with these glib references of Marcius’ likeness to Coriolanus, is that Coriolanus was raised like this — Volumnia praised and indulged his violence. When Virgilia cries out that she hopes Coriolanus will not return from the wars with blood on him, Volumnia replies, “Away, you fool! it more becomes a man/ Than gilt his trophy.” We can hear the echo of the way she raised Coriolanus. Coriolanus’ boast about trying to stand as author of himself is thus undermined by Shakespeare as early as Act I. First Volumia made him into a warrior, then she broke him.

So now we have the passions of Coriolanus, Aufidius, and Volumnia as causes of the tragedy.

Shakespeare is careful to show us that the passions of all people contribute to the final outcome of the play. When Coriolanus is taken in by the Volscians, Shakespeare doesn’t stage the feast where Corioalnus is celebrated by his new allies. Instead, he shows us the servants downstairs gossiping about the arrival of this Roman warrior. (There’s a similar scene in The Winter’s Tale (V.ii) where the news of Leontes’ and Perdita’s reunion is relayed to us through courtier gossip.)

One of the servingmen describes how well-received Coriolanus has been, how the Volscian senators are fawning over him. Even among his former enemies, who he has recently slain, Coriolanus has the powerful charisma of war. It is an irony of the play that Coriolanus is not actually very Roman. Despite his valor he is, as Harold Bloom wrote, “an overgrown child,” and more suited to Volscian life. In his exile from the Roman ingrates, he finds an admiring home:

First Servingman. But, more of thy news?

Third Servingman. Why, he is so made on here within, as if he were son and heir to Mars; set at upper end o’ the table; no question asked him by any of the senators, but they stand bald before him: our general himself makes a mistress of him: sanctifies himself with’s hand and turns up the white o’ the eye to his discourse. But the bottom of the news is that our general is cut i’the middle and but one half of what he was yesterday; for the other has half, by the entreaty and grant of the whole table. He’ll go, he says, and sowl the porter of Rome gates by the ears: he will mow all down before him, and leave his passage polled.

Such splendid writing for so minor a character! “As if he were the son and heir to Mars.” Here with the Volscians, Coriolanus has some distance from his controlling parentage. Some little authorship of himself. But it is too late.

The Third Servingman’s little speech is full of fine images and phrases: nothing is merely told, all is described. We make the inferences for ourselves. We share in the servingman’s admiring astonishment that the senators have taken off their caps in respect (“stand bald before him”) and we recognize that Aufidius’ passion for Coriolanus is noted by the servants (“our general himself makes a mistress of him”) and instead of being told that Coriolanus has won the support of half the senators we are given the splendidly violent, tragic image, “our general is cut i’the middle.” This combination of poetic and idiomatic speech expresses not just the events of the play but gives the servingman a whole outlook, a whole personality. His passion for Coriolanus becomes clear in the way he tells the tale.

By showing us how overawed the Volscians are with the Roman general, we see how his charisma works. And we see that the clamoring for blood comes not just from leaders like Coriolanus and Aufidius. This is the conversation the Servingmen have about the fact that Coriolanus is persuading the Volscians to go to war with Rome:

Third Servingman. But when they shall see, sir, his crest up again, and the man in blood, they will out of their burrows, like conies after rain, and revel all with him.

First Servingman. But when goes this forward?

Third Servingman. To-morrow; to-day; presently; you shall have the drum struck up this afternoon: ‘tis, as it were, a parcel of their feast, and to be executed ere they wipe their lips.

Second Servingman. Why, then we shall have a stirring world again. This peace is nothing, but to rust iron, increase tailors, and breed ballad-makers.

Conies are rabbits: it is a marvelously surreal image to think of people coming running out of burrows like rabbits after rain to revel with a war-leader. What an apt metaphor for the herding, political mentality of a group of people full of the heat of war. And notice each man has his own distinct personality — the third servingman makes the rabbit metaphor and the second is the one who has the excellent lines about the “stirring world,” expressing how peace becomes boring to those men who have no time for tailors and ballad makers. The cry of war is joined by three minor, lowly characters who are able to hold the stage just as strongly as anyone else in the play. Shakespeare is dramatizing the fact that the feelings of the many direct the world as well as the feelings of the few. What a contrast this makes with the Roman people, who were inadequate in war.

First Servingman. Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.

Second Servingman. ‘Tis so: and as war, in some sort, may be said to be a ravisher, so it cannot be denied but peace is a great maker of cuckolds.

First Servingman. Ay, and it makes men hate one another.

Third Servingman. Reason; because they then less need one another. The wars for my money. I hope to see Romans as cheap as Volscians.

Hazlitt thought that Coriolanus was a play in favor of authority because it gave all the most memorable lines to the tyrant himself — all of Shakespeare’s poetic power was invested in his cruelest character. And there’s some truth to this: Shakespeare is not kind to the mob. In Plutarch’s account of these events, the people are described as battle-scarred, but Shakespeare tells us they were of no use in battle. Indeed, the play focuses on the idea that Coriolanus has brought far more wealth to Rome through battle than the people have through labour. Indeed, one interesting question is why Shakespeare shows so little sympathy to the people in Coriolanus when their complaint is that the state has hoarded grain from them.

One answer is that Shakespeare was a grain hoarder himself. He was prosecuted for grain hoarding in 1598. Crops were unreliable in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, and riots were thought to be a major risk in the early seventeenth century.

Modern scholars have judged Shakespeare harshly for this. Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her biography Ungentle Shakespeare, said that Jonson’s satire of Shakespeare’s grain hoarding (in Every Man Out of His Humor) resulted in Shakespeare realizing it was immoral: hence, she says, in Macbeth, the Porter says “Here’s a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty,” implying that hoarding farmers will go to hell.

This can’t be right. Every Man Out was performed in 1599. Shakespeare sued a Stratford apothecary, Philip Rogers, for 35 shillings and 10 pence plus 10 pence damages, when Rogers failed to pay up for twenty barrels of malt (and a loan). This was in 1604. In 1602 he bought 20 acres of pasture and 107 acres of land for growing crops. Macbeth was first performed in 1606. Shakespeare retired aged 49 in 1616 not just because of his business acumen in the London theatre, but because he was a land-owner, money lender, and sometime grain-hoarder.

In Contested Will James Shapiro defends Shakespeare by saying that this was a common activity in Stratford. Without a main grain merchant, it was normal practice for towns-people to store and supply grain. Dozens did it, including the school master. Indeed, if they had not, there would have been a much worse shortage during the years of bad harvest. Still, Shapiro calls Shakespeare selfish. Duncan-Jones calls it “miserly.”

In Coriolanus the people are angry that the state has hoarded grain. But it is not clear that Shakespeare agrees with them. Katherine Duncan-Jones and James Shapiro left this out of their accounts. Nor do they mention that in 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith defended grain hoarders, because hoarding was usually welfare maximizing: when crops yields were low, hoarders were useful. Giving in to popular demands not to hoard would have been bad policy. Coriolanus does not argue against this. As Frank Kermode wrote in the Riverside Shakespeare, “Shakespeare pays more attention to the characteristic fickleness of the mob, and to their dangerous demands, than to their needs; he does not deny the members of the crowd sense and even generosity, but he will not represent their factiousness as the legitimate protest of a starving populace.”

This ambivalence about grain hoarding has to be remembered in the scene where Shakespeare gave plenty of vital imagery to ordinary servants who show as much blood lust as anyone in the play. The Roman people are an unsympathetically handled mob; the Volscians are a war-like gang.

Hazlitt was right when he said that this play reveals that, “We had rather be the oppressor than the oppressed. The love of power in ourselves and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.” This is what Shakespeare dramatizes, from Volumnia to the servingmen — a society where the love and admiration for power in ourselves and others has taken root in so many hearts and minds.

Of course, no-one thinks that the power of a great leader will make him into a slave, just as Coriolanus is blind to the fact that he becomes a heartless tyrant. But one of the lessons of Coriolanus is that our own passions, our own feelings, are part of the way the polity works. We cannot only blame our leaders, just as our leaders cannot excuse themselves with speeches about how they are not the authors of themselves. The determinism of Coriolanus’ tragedy runs deep — it comes out of his childhood and is rooted in the behavior of the populace.

Nor are his opponents vindicated. The elites in Rome all talk as if they are afraid of Coriolanus becoming a tyrant. But what do they do? Their appeasement of the mob is confused and inadequate. Rather than calming tensions, they stoke them. It is perfectly obvious to everyone other than Coriolanus’ colleagues that inciting the mob against him will not end well. What did they expect of his exile? A peaceful retirement? There is an enabling inadequacy about the Roman opposition to Coriolanus that pervades the play.

Coriolanus’ charisma distracts everyone, himself included. Even Volumnia cannot control the monster she has created. There is a line in Hazlitt’s essay that sounds eerily familiar in our times. “Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right.” It is a common theme of Shakespere’s that our passions rule our minds: at the start of All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena is chastised for succumbing to “the tyranny” of her sorrow. She says a little later, “our remedies oft in ourselves do lie/ Which we ascribe to heaven.” This is a line that echoes Cassius in Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/ But in ourselves.”

We all have a hand in the violence of the world. This is the true lesson of Coriolanus, and of Shakespeare’s political thoughts. Whatever ideas we espouse, whatever ideology we hold, however much on the right or good side we are, our passions often govern our philosophical or political affiliations. We do not know when the heart is outrunning the mind. What we attribute to outside forces so often comes from within. Human beings let loose the forces which torment us.

When Volumnia persuades Coriolanus to stop his attack on Rome he responds first with an action, noted in a tender and unexpected stage-direction: He holds her by the hand, silent. The great warrior is silently holding his mother’s hand at the gate of war. He is then given a moment of anagnorisis (recognition). In Nuttall’s words “he is no thinker, but suddenly, he knows.” His mother made him this way, made him into an automaton. She created him a warrior and thus led him to this point: now she has pulled him back, sealing his fate.

O mother, mother!

What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,

The gods look down, and this unnatural scene

They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!

You have won a happy victory to Rome;

But, for your son,—believe it, O, believe it,

Most dangerously you have with him prevail’d,

If not most mortal to him.

Coriolanus is not, finally, the author of himself. So much under the sway of his mother is he that he goes, knowingly, tragically, to his death. What is revealed at this moment of anagnorisis is that Coriolanus was determined by his mother: what is revealed to us is that so much of the action of this play which looked like the result of the intentions and misdeeds of a bad man, now, seem morally confused, suffused with pathos, almost blameless. Almost everyone had a hand in the violence.

We cannot excuse Coriolanus — but neither can we attribute to him the autonomy which he declares in himself. We know that people are governed by intention and prejudice that they do not plant in themselves. This was as true in 1608 as it is today.

This essay was first published online by Liberties in 2024. Liberties can be found at and on Substack.

Novelists developed their ideas and methods of representing character in conjunction with the philosophers, most especially John Locke and Adam Smith. Locke proposed that we have a “quasi perception” of each other (that is E.J. Lowe’s phrase) and Smith developed the idea of an “impartial spectator”, an imagined inner conscience, learned through our interactions with other people. This philosophy developed from the idea that we are obscure to each other. We know each other imperfectly. Even though you and I are both conscious and both have language it is sometimes almost impossible to say what we mean, to make ourselves understood, to know each other. So we have to imagine each other. There are natural barriers to true sympathy and the imagination is the best we can do to overcome those barriers.

That problem is the heart of the novelist’s enterprise. Individuals have to be imagined to be known. But imagination is difficult and takes a lot of work and input. It takes a whole novel for us to really get to grips with a character. When we interact with an AI—or, perhaps I ought to say, when we use an AI—we are caught in the same dilemma. We imagine them. And our imaginings make them seem as if they are real. Because they respond differently to each user, we experience something that seems to be in a state between that of a character and a person. Usually the reader responds to the book. When the book can change, the whole imaginative enterprise gets confusing. Consciousness begins to be imagined.

These issues are familiar to literary criticism. Although there is a sense in which fictional characters are real, we know they are not real in the same way as us. They are real in the sense that books and words are real and in the way that the contents of our minds and imaginations are real. But they are not people. They are not conscious. Jane Austen told her family what happened to the characters after the novel ended, just as Bernard Shaw did for Pygmalion, and J.K. Rowling did for Harry Potter. But that doesn’t make the characters any more real.

However, we think of them as if they were real. Honest readers will gladly tell you that reading a novel is like spending time with the characters as if they were real. Some academics and snobs don’t like this sort of talk, but it has a long history and some eminent critics have said it. We really do feel as if we know Lizzy Bennet. And there is some value in this belief. It helps us to understand her as a character. After all, the point of making people up is that they relate in some way to actual real conscious people.

It has long been considered beyond the pale for literary critics to admire A.C. Bradley, who wrote a whole book, a hundred years ago, taking Shakespeare’s characters seriously as characters. He said that in Hamlet “the whole story turns upon the peculiar character of the hero.” The same is true of Pride and Prejudice and a great many other important literary works. Bradley wrote that Hamlet, in his violent moods, “would have been formidable to Othello or Macbeth.” That little phrase contains so much insight, even though it is obviously impossible that Hamlet could ever have “been” anything to Othello or Macbeth because Shakespeare made them all up and never put them in a play together.

The long-standing objection to Bradley and people like him is: these characters are not real! We might imagine his critics saying, Bradley has fictional psychosis! But to me it just seems perfectly obvious that Bradley is writing as if Hamlet were real. Shakespeare wishes us to feel like that in the theatre after all. The people who wrote letters to Sherlock Holmes—addressed to 221b Baker Street, an address that never existed—really did have fictional psychosis. (Just like the people who believe characters in soap operas are real, unable to distinguish them from the actors.) But Bradley was simply using his imagination as a critical faculty. Being able to talk about characters as if they were real is essential to reading and understanding literature. You have to read with some awareness of your “false” beliefs about the “reality” of the characters. It is part of how we have come to understand the ways we imagine ourselves and others in real life. It is all a question of knowing when we are imagining a real conscious person or imagining a character we treat as if they were real.

Another way of saying this is that Dwarkesh, and others with his beliefs, might be confusing the way they imagine AI to be with evidence for what AI really is. That is, they take their impression of the AI as evidence for its underlying consciousness, but they are really just acting as if the AI was conscious without treating it as fictional. When you read a book, it is obvious that you are imagining the characters. But when Claude talks back to you, it becomes harder to remember what’s going on, just as when you are in the middle of Pride and Prejudice you really might believe for a moment that you are in love with Lizzy Bennet. There are good philosophical reasons to believe that AI is not conscious, which I am not adding to here. All I am trying to show is that if you take seriously the possibility that AI is conscious, you might be treating it more like a fictional character than you intend.

These are preliminary thoughts that I hope to expand on soon. I find this topic very interesting and look forward to all of your thoughts.

A few relevant links

the ends don't justify the means

on AI, desire, and fictional characters

I’m currently working on a long piece about AI embodiment. And in the next week or so, I’m also intending to write a short ‘how to argue against the people who tell you AI is conscious’ piece. I think it’s time I made it very clear why I feel so strongly about that! Increasingly, I think we philosophers have an urgent obligation to spend a great deal of…

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a month ago · 15 likes · 3 comments · Rebecca Lowe

Anecdotal Value

What a Time to Be an Agent!

Whether you want it or not, AI researchers are working on how to build your personal digital twin—an agent designed to be your digital double, an entity that knows your history, your preferences, your special language to do online tasks (shopping, making reservations) while you live your life. Meanwhile hospitals and nursing homes want…

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3 months ago · 41 likes · 29 comments · Hollis Robbins

In his critique of Marriott’s book, Henry Oliver made the point that ‘it is my suspicion that what a lot of people who agree with The New Dark Ages’ description of modern culture really regret is not the death of print but the winnowing of upper-middlebrow culture: BBC documentaries, intellectuals on talk shows, Kenneth Clark, Melvyn Bragg, that sort of thing.’

In my case that is absolutely true, but one might also argue that the two things are linked: that the high-minded documentary making of the 1970s was written, produced and commissioned by people who had grown up in a print culture, and this is not true of the generations that followed. As print declined, so television came to serve a population that had adopted a more oral culture, lacking the ability to follow content with the same depth. The decline of reading, and the decline of high-minded, quality television - what Oliver calls the ‘passive high-brow’ - are part of the same trend.

That is from Ed West today. I quite agree about the print-television link and the subsequent decline of television, but if you want it back you have to care first and foremost about books. One way of putting this point is that if the people who think the decline of reading is a civilizational crisis are serious, they ought to get a lot more old fogeyish about reading. Turn off Kenneth Clark and pick up C.S. Lewis! Stop talking about the decline of reading (and television) and start reading a hundred pages every evening and blogging about it! It really is time to start memorizing Shakespeare in public. (Much to his credit, this is exactly what James Marriott is currently doing.) Follow ’ lead and read all of George Eliot’s novels. Or do what does and publish a monthly reading diary. (None of this is meant to be “against Ed”—for all I know, he is a reliable reader.)

What people like Ed really ought to care about, it seems to me, is whether children are made to memorize poems, how well the elites know their Shakespeare, that sort of thing. Worrying about democracy, culture, and attention spans seems quite speculative and too far down the chain. I recently spoke to a young waitress in a small town in Pennsylvania who listens to one book a month, spends a lot of time on TikTok, doesn’t know who Jane Austen was (seriously), and who gave the impression of being utterly smart and sensible. She is relatively apolitical but is taking an interest in the midterms so she can vote for the first time. Democracy is quite as safe with her as it was with my grandmother. I don’t think she lacks the ability to follow content at all. Naturally, I would love her to read Jane Austen, but we shouldn’t be too pessimistic about what will happen if she doesn’t. My grandparents never did, and it didn’t stop them contributing to the war effort and living as the sort of solid citizens Ed and James are worried we are now losing. Not everyone is a reader.

Relatedly, in the New Yorker, there is a splendid profile of James Daunt and his genius for making bookshops profitable. I spend far too much money in Barnes & Noble, thanks to his talents. What I want him to do next is to have his publisher, Daunt Books Publishing, put out two things. First, a range of cheap classics. When I was young, you could buy most of the classic works of English Literature for one or two pounds in the Penguin Popular Classics range. It was low-grade stuff, very little in the way of notes, and utterly marvelous. I still have many of my old copies. Then I want them to do a new version of the Everyman’s Library. Not those Penguin cloth-bound editions that are so bulky, but pocket books, Clarissa in four volumes, that sort of thing. Something you can put in your bag or jacket pocket without getting a sore shoulder. Maybe Daunt Books could also be the ones to produce the Library of Britain…

That is why I drove a thousand miles from home, wiggling from Arlington to Richmond to Damascus to Chattanooga to Franklin to Shiloh. Now we are winding back, through Nashville to Louisville to Dayton and to Ohiopyle. We have been in the mountains and over the mountains, in the heart of old Confederate country, in the fields where the course of the Civil War changed, in the diners where locals are surprised to see anyone from out of town.

A lot of what you see on a big road trip is what you went to see. One wishes, naturally, for Americans in their big trucks to be aggressive on the road, no matter how irritating it might be at the time. One wishes to see podgy middle-aged men lined up on stools eating eggs and biscuits. (Indeed, one fits right in.) What else is a road trip for if not to see up close and for real all the hundreds of details of this great civilization of the USA that we take for granted out of books and movies and television programs?

But a lot is what you never knew was out there. In five days I have fallen in love with Tennessee. There is history everywhere. Not just in the battlefields and Civil War sites, and the superb state museum, but in the collapsing buildings, the old-school diners, the well-preserved towns, the eccentric and wonderful little museums. And the natural beauty is just awesome. There is an elephant sanctuary in this state—three thousand acres dedicated to rehabilitating elephants. It is closed to the public but it has a visitor center in a town of only four thousand people. There is a mighty river, mist that drifts and piles in great clumps, the Chattanooga Choo Choo, long flat landscapes, deep valleys, National Parks of extraordinary beauty and poignancy. Yes, in Nashville the dogs wear bandanas and the art museum is full of modern rubbish (though it is housed in a very splendid art deco building, the old Post Office). But on every road off the interstate you will see history in real time, one place in decline while another is thriving, the old ways of life still clinging on. The Catfish Hotel in Shiloh, the little towns that are not on the road atlas but which do have large graveyards next to their church. It is a world unto itself.

For one night, we crossed into Mississippi, and saw Corinth, a small place, with no redeeming architectural features, but where the Sheriffs let our children sit in the car and use the siren. They handed out stickers too. One of them had just married the waitress in the restaurant we stopped at. In the morning we went to Abe’s Grill, which looks like a shack on the outside and only has space to sit on counter stools, or a small table outside. It is family run, fifty-three years old, and opens at 3 a.m. every day for the nurses and factory workers hereabouts. The walls are covered in fading photographs, many including the old owner who died a month ago. His wife and son and daughter-in-law still run the place, never missing a beat, flipping eggs while they chat to customers. “What meat for you? Sir? British! Bacon or country ham?” They are fast and friendly and as soon as you are gone they are well-acquainted with the next customer. The biscuits are advertised as the Mid-South’s favourite and I am surprised they have not gone national. I would drive miles to have them again, dipped in their chocolate gravy. (All the son would tell me about the recipe is that it takes a lot of love. These are family recipes.) The roof beams are covered in licence plates, one from every state, which people bring in and donate. The menu is so old it advertises eggs ’n’ biscuit for less than $3. Dickens would have produced a timeless page of description about this place where a coffee pot is always filling, the bills are held in the owner’s head without notes, and someone is always arriving, hoping breakfast has not yet run out. If you want a cheeseburger at 3 a.m.—and a cheeseburger that is famous in local parts—Abe’s is the place to go. We have met a lot of lovely and big-hearted people down here, but Abe’s packed more of them into a few square feet than anywhere else.

That was only one hour of our journey. We saw the third largest collection in the USA of mounted animals (shot in Africa) in a small town—the very same town that houses the elephant sanctuary. We saw a tractor graveyard, endless lorries carrying logs, the remarkable and almost unbearable spectacle of Buc-ee’s—a service station that is larger than some malls, they could screen movies there—, several remarkable National Parks (truly, a wonderful wonderful service), birds of prey on telephone wires, a drive-in movie theatre, an Amish horse-drawn buggy, lorries that truly look like Transformers, and mist sitting on lakes and hanging upon trees that could make you believe a dinosaur might any moment walk right out of it and heave along the road.

And who knows what else is coming? Drive the suburbs and see the great variety of houses, the bizarre Halloween decorations, the endless businesses; drive the highways and see the blaring and sublime advertisements that line all the roads—NOW HIRING, WE BUY GOLD, CHEAPEST CIGARETTES FOR MILES, SHE WANTS THE DECK, WORLD’S LARGEST FIREWORK SUPERMARKET, WE SELL FLAMETHROWERS—go to the supermarkets and see the great variety of life, go to the Piggly Wiggly, which was the first self-service market, and is now a living museum, with the old beige shelves, brands from the 1960s, and the typography your grandmother would have known. Nothing is boring in America.

Go—go—and see it all.

In Richmond we walked past the neon-lit get-married-now Lucky in Love wedding chapel, which is across the road from a tattoo parlor called Regretful Heart offering laser removal. Tall bright office buildings can be seen from wherever you walk. It is oddly quiet. The theatre seems empty but the lights outside keep changing. In the morning we walked a three-mile loop. It was all so quiet. We saw very few people, including the runners and cyclists. Breakfast is hardly available. Almost all of the architectural interest can be found by looking up and catching certain views, such as a cornice framed by trees, as if rising up from another place entirely.

Or a row of windows that give the illusion of another place entirely.

There are enjoyable remnants of another time, the American National Bank

Or the marvelous Otis Elevator Company, founded by the man who invented the safety brake that kept elevators safe if the rope-hoist failed, and now the leading manufacturers of elevators, escalators, and walkways, that dull and often ignored clutch of technologies that are fundamental to modern life. The viable height of an elevator shaft is the viable height of a building. There are ways of living and working, aesthetic styles, skylines, office layouts and hierarchies, that all came into being because of the elevator. And here is one of the lovely old buildings of that important company. (If, like me, you find this topic suitably fascinating, the book you want is Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator by Andreas Bernard.)

Some of the most interesting sights were the old railway lines, on which trains still run. It is one of those cities where you often hear the distant sound of a freight train horn. Likewise, the rusted pipe-ways of long ago industry and the old commercial buildings on the canal.

We drove to Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestown. At Shorty’s Diner, they promise pancakes that hang off the plate and they do not disappoint. They even have a good old-fashioned advertising rhyme. It’s Not Fancy, It’s Not Fat Free, It’s Just the Way it Used to Be! Just the way it used to be is the heart of a certain idea of America, of course, a certain idea of the West, and what is inherited, what is preserved. Naturally, I ordered the “sampler plate”—eggs, bacon, Virginia ham, home fried potatoes, and a pancake on the side—for a real taste of Virginia. Our waitress started working there when she was still at school, she is now a mother, looking to get her real-estate license. Shorty’s was buzzing, the air full of conversation, and the walls full of memorabilia. And they open early.

As we drove and drove, we passed old houses with polished-up cars out front from another generation, making a scene which could be used as a movie set. We saw houses abandoned and collapsing, awnings left to peel for decades, men sitting on benches and porches, looking absent, watching the day pass away. We frequently saw cars older than we are on the roads. We saw the grass growing up around trucks, a letterbox in the shape of a dachshund, vehicles with tarpaulin held in the window. All this was of more interest than Colonial Williamsburg, where most of the buildings seemed to be replicas and the shops sold the same sort of things you get in any mall. Perhaps we have simply visited too many historical buildings in England. But the real history seemed to be in the nearby small towns, where you can see things that look not just old, or in an old style, but decaying, flaking, preserved or abandoned,—life in the process of history, not just in its style.

At Yorktown, I was amazed that at such a crucial place—the fields where the Revolution was finally won!—nothing much was made of it all in the town itself. There is a bookshop, a sushi place, and you can get ice-cream. On the beach, a woman read a novel, a man slept in a deck chair, and some children rolled in the sand. There is a little beach-front hotel. Clinging to one of the pillars holding up a wooden walkway over the water we saw a blue crab that must have been ten inches claw-to-claw. But the house where the final surrender was negotiated sits quietly atop it all, in a field, and is, having been shot-up and stripped for firewood during the Civil War, now a restoration.

Beside it the graveyard where at least one soldier lies. How empty it was up there. The tomb of one owner’s wife has cracked. On the tomb of a man who was shot during the battle is this lovely poem.

Ah cruel ball, so sudden to disarm
And tare my tender husband from my Arms
How can I grieve too much what time shall end
By mourning for so good and kind a friend

Simple enough, but no less touching for that, and with a nice poignant pun in disarm, and how well that is followed through in the rhyme with Arms. The way that time shall end refers to their reuniting in Heaven, while echoing his earthly death, makes the final rhyme of friend the more affecting, recalling us to the marriage service, the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other.

Most revelatory to me was Jamestown. We arrived too late to see the artifacts (but O! tourist inclinations!) Simply driving there, crossing to the island where the isthmus once was, seeing the long flat landscape by the water, knowing how remote it must have been. What curiosity that gives the imagination! All around the deep woods, where we saw a large-eyed deer who carried on as if we weren’t there, one was conscious of the great absent expanse beyond.

We stopped at the Fresh Market. I still marvel at the great accomplishments of the American supermarket. There are tubs with every kind of nut either plain or roasted and salted, tubs of every type of nut covered in every type of chocolate, each with its own sunk scoop. There are hams and loins and steaks, salads and fish and breads, all stocked and stacked and fresh. You can get tubs of chickpea salad, Neapolitan meatballs, honey curried chicken. For $10 you can eat far better than in any Pret or cafe in London. The old ladies of the locality are all here making their selections. Outside it looks undifferentiated from all the rest of the shops lined up in those semi-dismal plazas, but inside it is a palace of luxuries and delights.

We began the next day at the Capitol—after pancakes and biscuits with sausage gravy, which is so good it must be a sin—and it was mighty strange to stand in the room where Virginia voted to secede. From there we went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which has many good things, including some lovely Vuillards. It was chilling to stand outside the Confederate White House, which is almost inconspicuous among hospital and high-rise buildings. It was almost dreadful to read that Jefferson Davis’s children used to play happily there. Worst of all was to learn that one of the children died after falling from a balcony. At the American Civil War Museum (first rate, well worth a visit) I got a fright when I reached the end and saw a Klan robe. This history is very thingy: manacles, revolvers, pocket watches, notebooks, field glasses, sabres, caps, boots, bone-carved knives made by prisoners, a cryptographic wheel that looks like a large coin. But the Klan robe was by far the most shocking item. It is strange how one can walk calmly past walls and walls of weapons only to be halted by a piece of cloth. Upstairs they have a piece of the flag that was taken down and ripped apart at the Virginia Capitol when secession was voted. Ripped apart! The remaining fragment is of one star.

Later on we stopped at the Poe House, which we learned was nothing much to do with Poe. And we drove round the church where Patrick Henry proclaimed liberty or death. The Richmond suburbs are especially rewarding to drive around, full of grand and weird houses.

The best was that afternoon, when we wanted to cross the river on a footbridge to get to Belle Isle, a place of historic industry and a Civil War prison and before that a place of Native American fishing. To get to the bridge, we had to go through a folk festival. Suddenly here were all the people of Richmond, walking, and talking, and watching folk dances from international cultures. I saw a woman in a T-shirt that read EVERYONE WATCHES WOMEN’S SPORTS. How the Americans love slogans. SOME COLLEGE read another T-shirt. The T. Tyler Potterfield Memorial Bridge is by far the most impressive part of Richmond and the breadth and grandeur of the river surpass the rest of the city. It is not quite a kingdom by the sea, but the river has the greatness of Virginian beauty: mighty, wide, still and calm, despite the rapids, because the water was low—but full of potential for thunder and flood. The natural sublime here always has a sense of respite. You can see the pillars of the old bridge that the Confederates destroyed as they made their retreat in 1865. Lincoln arrived two days later. By then the Davis children had fled with their family. Ten days after that, Lincoln was shot.

The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse Chosen by Philip Larkin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

First edition, hardbound, dust jacket. Bound in the deep purple blue of Clarendon Press volumes. Gold lettering on the spine and front cover. The glossy white dust jacket is overprinted in red and lime green. First impression was 29,300 copies (with 5500 copies going to the U.S.).

The first edition was notable not only for its typos, which are common in first printings of large anthologies, but also for missing stanzas. The manuscript had been carelessly xeroxed. When the embarrassed Larkin wrote to Anthony Thwaite, he joked, “I can see myself joining Bowlder & Granger: ‘to larkinize’, v.t. to omit that part of a poem printed on verso and subsequent pages, from a notorious anthology published in the latter half of the twentieth century.”

Larkin edited this important anthology by accident. Oxford had chosen the poet Louis MacNeice to edit The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. The publisher wanted to replace William Butler Yeats’s eccentric and unsatisfactory Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). MacNeice’s sudden death from pneumonia in 1963 forced Oxford to select another editor. The press wanted a conventional selection of the best-regarded poets so that the book could become a standard anthology. In retrospect, it is obvious that they chose the wrong editor; Larkin’s anthology was the most controversial volume he published in his lifetime.

Larkin could have assembled the book Oxford wanted, a representative selection of the Modernist consensus with a few personal touches—let the age choose the poets and the editor choose the individual poems. Larkin could have also published a reactionary alternative, a selection that denied the impact of Modernism on English letters. Instead, Larkin combined both perspectives in a single book.

The final anthology represented the standard academic canon of modern verse. The poets who received the most space were, in rank order: T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, and William Butler Yeats. No one could argue with those four pillars. The book included other expected authors—such as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender. Larkin even included writers he disliked, such as Ted Hughes, Christopher Logue, Charles Tomlinson, and Hugh MacDiarmid.

Larkin’s twist was to augment the standard canon with non-Modernist poets. His fifth and sixth most represented figures were Rudyard Kipling and John Betjeman. He also gave good coverage to Georgian poets, then held in low esteem, such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, John Masefield, Ralph Hodgson, and Walter De La Mare. He championed outsiders who existed beyond conventional categories, such as Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Stevie Smith, and Charles Causley. Finally, Larkin included one or two poems by numerous minor authors. Yeats’s anthology contained 98 poets; Larkin’s offered 207—with 88 poets represented by a single poem. Many of these forgotten poets had been forgotten for good reason, but the book also rediscovered many interesting poems.

The anthology had a strong nationalistic focus. Larkin took the term “English” literally. He omitted all Irish poets, except Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh. He also excluded Americans emigres, such as Ezra Pound (whom Yeats had featured), Sylvia Plath, and Anne Stevenson. Anthologies are supposed to clarify literary history by distilling the vast amount of published poetry into a manageable reading list. Larkin’s book enlarged and complicated the canon of English poetry. He presented six hundred pages of verse that demonstrated Modernism had never truly dominated English verse; it was merely the most visible of several poetic practices that co-existed simultaneously. Traditional poetry had never gone away, though it had been ignored by the tastemakers. To Larkin, Hardy and Betjeman were as important to contemporary English poets as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Oxford had not wanted an eccentric anthology, but they got one in the most literal sense—Larkin had produced a book that denied that Modernism had been the center of twentieth century English poetry.

The academic response was immediate and angry. In his London Times review, Donald Davie began by stating, “This book is a disgrace.” When the BBC asked Donald Hall to review it, his remarks were so intemperate that the piece was never broadcast. A public debate ensued in which Larkin was accused of retreating from the international currents of Modernism and retreating into a “Little England” of outdated traditions and cozy parochialism. Larkin responded by saying he had compiled “a broad-minded book” for ordinary readers. Privately, he worried that the book too closely reflected his own taste and concerns. “I am drawing English poetry in my own image,” he fretted.

The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse sold well and remains in print. In 1999, a new edition was published containing a preface by his biographer Andrew Motion discussing the poet’s editorial choices.

OLIVER: So the book is about the reading crisis and the risk it poses to liberal democracy. I want you to tell me, what is the most likely optimistic outcome? You might think that the odds of everything going well are very low, but if we do scrape through, what will it look like?

MARRIOTT: That’s such a good question, and nobody has ever asked me that question before. Seeking optimism from me is a unique idea. I think the most likely optimistic outcome, as I think so often in history, is stagnation and more of the same, and things don’t change.

We also talked about AI as a transmission of liberal democracy, a means of distributing James’ own work, and things like that. At the end, we had some fun about literary critics and Shakespeare which is much more civilized that arguing about the literacy crisis.

MARRIOTT: Yes, I’m keen to read The Winter’s Tale, and I’ve got it, actually. It came in my little set.

OLIVER: I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised, and then you can read Northrop Frye’s book about it.

MARRIOTT: Yes.

OLIVER: Which would be James Marriott–coded.

MARRIOTT: Yes, good. I am very biased towards things that are James Marriott–coded.

The Frye book I had in mind was A Natural Perspective. James is also going to read A.C. Bradley and we might record another podcast about that. Bradley being one of the greats.

Transcript

HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to James Marriott. James is a Times columnist, a Substacker—he writes Cultural Capital—and he has a new book called The New Dark Ages. James, welcome.

JAMES MARRIOTT: Thanks very much for having me.

The Reading Crisis

OLIVER: So the book is about the reading crisis and the risk it poses to liberal democracy. I want you to tell me, what is the most likely optimistic outcome? You might think that the odds of everything going well are very low, but if we do scrape through, what will it look like?

MARRIOTT: That’s such a good question, and nobody has ever asked me that question before. Seeking optimism from me is a unique idea. I think the most likely optimistic outcome, as I think so often in history, is stagnation and more of the same, and things don’t change. And I guess I think there are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic.

I think societies have a remarkable capacity to go on stagnating or declining slowly and imperceptibly for a very long time, and often much longer than we think. I know that’s pretty tepid optimism. Probably in the general scheme of the sort of takes that I offer, that is quite optimistic. But yes, I always think that stagnation and drifting and can-kicking are underrated forces in history.

OLIVER: Are we not going to stagnate at quite a high level?

MARRIOTT: Yes.

OLIVER: So is the pessimism sort of misplaced, in the sense that even a relatively bad outcome for us would be really quite good by the standards of human history?

MARRIOTT: Yes, of course. Although, I mean, the standards of human history are an appallingly low bar. And I think any of us asked to try to eke out an existence in pre-industrial modernity would view that with more horror than a prison sentence or being sent to almost any country in the modern world. To live in a sort of pre-industrial, pre-democratic state would be pretty terrible, so that’s a low bar.

That said, I think the main lesson from history is that—and I guess this is one of the points that is in the background of the book—is that we are living extraordinarily anomalous lives. To live in a literate and democratic culture is overwhelmingly not the norm through the entirety of human history. And I think sometimes humans have an extraordinary capacity for complacency, and the thing that comes back to me more and more, the more history I read, is how unusual and how fragile the modern world is.

We are not the norm. This is weird. And that’s a cause in some ways for great optimism, and if things do stagnate, they’ll stagnate with living standards that most of our ancestors would have viewed as almost miraculous. But I think an awareness of how anomalous it is to live in a literate and democratic society can be quite, I don’t know, maybe chastening isn’t the word, but salutary perhaps.

The Impact of AI

OLIVER: Now, AI is bringing a huge amount of writing into the world. Some of it’s slop, but some of it’s going to be quite good, and it’s going to get better. Is there a future in which the overall balance is quite different but is either sufficient to sustain democracy or produce something, you know, better?

MARRIOTT: Yes, I thought there’s an interesting point that you made in your piece. I’ve seen Dan Williams make the same argument, that the biases of—I guess is what you’re referring to, that we know the biases of artificial intelligence machines are basically Enlightenment liberal. AI is basically a centrist dad when you quiz it about politics.

Yes, I think that’s definitely a cause for optimism. I think that talking to AI through text about politics is probably a minority experience of artificial intelligence. I think most people’s political exposure to AI is much more likely to be image-based and is much more likely to be seeing slop memes on TikTok or Twitter or something like that.

And I think if you are using AI to write questions to ask it about policy, you’re probably in a very small minority. If you are seeing, I don’t know, racist AI-generated memes on Twitter or TikTok, you’re probably much closer to what the majority experience of the political implications of AI are. So that would be my take.

I don’t discount the fact that AI is often more reliable in its political takes than a lot of newspapers. I think that’s just a minority experience of AI for politics.

OLIVER: But the AI is going to be integrated into all sorts of things: in corporate life, in politics directly, in newspapers, and it’s going to be the major transmission mechanism to get the old liberal Enlightenment view from the old world into the new world. So could it be, in a way, a replacement for print culture?

MARRIOTT: Good question.

OLIVER: Obviously, a very imperfect substitute and very different thing, and the overall balance of good and bad will change significantly. But it might just be the thing that gets print into the future.

MARRIOTT: Maybe, but I guess my feeling would be that this move from a literate culture to a visual one has been in train for a long time now. And I think we worry a lot about AI writing, and we worry about university students getting AI to write their essays, and we view this deluge of artificially generated text as a major story of AI.

And I guess I would just come back to the previous point, which is that I think a lot of people’s major interactions with AI are probably more likely to be visual than they are to be text-based. And also, anybody trying to monetize AI for commercial purposes will find themselves susceptible to exactly the same commercial impulses that social media is susceptible to, that newspapers are susceptible to.

So although AI, if you talk to it as an individual user, may give you a sort of wet centrist dad on the one hand, on the other, “maybe we should be fiscally responsible” sort of answer. I think AI, as utilized by companies seeking to make a profit from it, will probably be drawn into the general direction of discourse that I think is now more than half a century old, which is more tribal, more emotional, more extreme. That would be my view.

OLIVER: Okay, so imagine, though, that we create a sort of James Marriott AI, and it takes all of you, all of your writing, all of your ideas, and it makes a little James Marriott avatar. And it puts you on TikTok or wherever it is that people are going to be, and you are part of this visual, video-based world. Is there not a sort of sense in which the playing field can be leveled quite a lot because the distribution through AI is going to give what you want, stronger competitiveness against social-media slop and other things?

MARRIOTT: It’s a good idea. I mean, I think creating an AI James Marriott would be one of the less commercial uses of artificial intelligence. But I don’t know, maybe in the middle of this hype bubble we can make it happen. Someone will fund us.

I would say, again, I guess coming back to one of the fundamental theses of the book, which we owe to Marshall McLuhan, is that the way we communicate in the spoken word and the way we communicate in a video is fundamentally different to the way that we communicate through writing.

One doesn’t want to be self-aggrandizing, but if one hopes one is making a net-positive contribution to public discourse—maybe I am, maybe I’m not—but if I am, I think that’s probably because I’m writing, and a lot of what I do is writing. And I think, as Marshall McLuhan argued and as I also believe, the written word tends to structure our ideas more coherently. It’s a more propitious environment for logical analysis. It invites us to make evidence for our ideas. It promotes analytic habits of thought and expression.

That stuff to me disappears with video, or largely disappears with video. And I would say, you could AI-generate me onto TikTok, and indeed I have made TikToks. I’ve been made to do it at The Times. But I don’t think you could get the same quality of thought and analysis and argument in a TikTok video, however sophisticated the AI, as you would in a written argument.

Did We Survive Television?

OLIVER: No, but you’re never going to get that kind of sophistication on the television. And we survived television pretty well, even though I think television is much worse than AI and social media.

MARRIOTT: True, although did we survive television? I mean, I guess—

OLIVER: Well, James, I mean, liberal democracy is still here.

MARRIOTT: Well, it’s here for us, in our countries. Not everyone around the world can say that. I mean, we did survive television, but I think it’s very striking how much some of the most concerning antidemocratic trends that are coming to fruition in lots of ways around the world at the moment begin with television. And I think, if you’re looking at the rise of populism and partisanship in America, you can look at characters like Newt Gingrich, you can look at the rise of conservative radio, and I would say, “Okay, we survived television.”

I’d be interested to know, actually, what the counterhistory would be: no smartphones, but just television. Television was already ratcheting into a much more partisan and emotional style of discourse before the iPhone. I mean, cable news in the early 2000s was really already, in many cases, quite extreme. I’d be very interested to know what would have happened without the iPhone. Would cable news alone have taken us into the realm of political populism and Donald Trump? Did we even need social media to do that?

I think it’s a good question. I don’t know the answer, but I think the direction of travel in hindsight already seems pretty clear, and I think it’s been accelerated by the ubiquity of smartphones and the ubiquity of mobile video. But I think we could have—yes, I think there’s a strong case we could have got there just with television.

Oral Culture

OLIVER: Now, people are always talking about an oral culture and how we’re going into an oral culture and stuff like this. It’s not really—the future that we’re beginning is not really oral, is it? What is it?

MARRIOTT: No, it’s not. I think that idea of an oral culture has acquired this sort of meme-able cultural cachet that I think in some ways is justified. I guess if you’re to ask someone like Walter Ong, the great media theorist, very much in the air, who wrote this great book, Orality and Literacy, he would say that the future we’re headed towards is one of secondary orality.

So the argument is not that we’re all going to literally become illiterate and start singing bardic oral poems to each other over TikTok. Maybe that would be a preferable future compared to where we’re headed. The argument would be that as we communicate more and more face-to-face and more and more in person and more and more verbally and orally rather than through writing, we’re not turning into Homeric Greece.

But I do think it is unavoidable, and I just think it’s so true that so many aspects of our world do resemble the cultural environment that Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong argued was typical of oral cultures. One that I always think is so striking is, Ong talks about how one of the features of oral discourse is rambling repetition.

When you’re making an idea orally as opposed to in print, you find it hard to structure your thought as a speaker. You tend to repeat yourself to clarify ideas that you haven’t quite managed to get over properly on the hoof. You’re also trying to bring your audience along. It’s not easy to follow a print-style linear argument aurally, and I think that’s why I, and a lot of people I know, struggle with audiobooks because so much of reading and so much of the value of reading is your eyes flitting backwards and forwards, up and down the page, rereading bits, thinking about it, going at your own pace.

The imperative of speech, which is continuous and flows forwards and forwards and forwards, means that we have to talk in this more roundabout—I notice myself doing it now. I’m repeating myself. We talk in a more roundabout, more repetitive manner. This is something that Walter Ong identified as completely characteristic of oral discourse, and I think it’s totally characteristic of podcasts.

One of my jobs at The Times is reviewing podcasts, and every single podcast is rambling and repetitive, even the good ones, and that’s part of the point. You wouldn’t follow it otherwise. So I think that’s a very striking observation.

I guess the things that we would worry about most politically would be the fact that I think print has tended historically to cool and rationalize discourse. The phrase that Walter Ong uses is that print separates the knower from the known. Marshall McLuhan liked to point out how almost eerie print culture seems from the perspective of an oral-traditional society.

In a traditional society that communicates orally, it’s very emotional. You’re up in each other’s faces all the time. You’re talking, you’re grabbing each other’s shoulders, you’re charming people, you’re crying, you’re laughing. The world of print is completely desaturated of all that human emotion. All we can rely upon really in print to get a case across is to try and, insofar as we can, make a persuasive, logical argument. You can’t shout at people, you can’t cry, you can’t charm people through the printed page.

And I think one of the really important things—and I think this is probably the thing that I find most fundamental about this alleged return to orality—is the rushing back in of that old, emotional, highly charged, angry, sad, charming human world that was suppressed by print.

And I think from the point of view of politics, its suppression was a benefit. A politics that excludes emotional styles of argument and is forced to rely much more on logical, linear argument I think is much better for democracy. To me, that’s the most important similarity between a sort of oral culture and a sort of secondary oral culture.

Education Through YouTube

OLIVER: Tell us how someone can use YouTube to get an education.

MARRIOTT: I think the way to use YouTube to get an education is to stick to videos largely that were probably made when television production was still highly influenced by a literate society. Television has changed a lot in the last 50 or 60 years. And I think you realize that a lot of especially educational programming that was made in the ’60s and ’70s was made by people who had very literate assumptions about how you communicated and how you argued.

I guess you’re referring to the Substack post that I wrote about what to watch on YouTube, and I mean, my absolute favorite thing on there—I’ve never spoken to you about this. I sort of would assume you’re a fan, but I don’t know. It’s Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, this amazing—Kenneth Clark, former director of the National Gallery, great art historian, just takes you all the way from what we mustn’t call the Dark Ages up to the 20th century and explains it all to you.

I mean, it’s very Whiggish, probably partly why I like it, but it’s really a series of lectures. It’s really a series of spoken lectures with moving images, which I think patently owes a lot to the kind of literate assumptions about communication that were shared by Kenneth Clark and his producers.

It hadn’t yet occurred to them that television might be Kenneth Clark being like, “Yo, I’m in Venice,” and then like five seconds later, you cut to him doing a kind of stunt or doing a kind of pratfall. TV was basically a lecture hall with images, and I think that was probably one of the most productive uses of television. That’s an incredibly educational show, for all that it has, I think, what many people would find a slightly outdated view of cultural and artistic progress.

OLIVER: Do you think it’s outdated?

MARRIOTT: Well, I mean, yes, there were a couple of fairly obvious things. The bit where he dismisses Islam and says it has no civilization or something almost like that is clearly wrong. The fact he decides to exclude Spain from the entire series because he disapproved of the Spanish and thought they weren’t sufficiently intellectual and civilized to belong to a program called Civilization. A lot of people would obviously criticize that kind of Whig tendency that is very unfashionable.

I think it’s been unduly criticized, this idea that history is a march of progress and is getting better, and you move from the Dark Ages where everyone’s making hideous, crude carvings of people on church walls, to the Renaissance, when suddenly we appreciate the splendor of man and his creativity, to the Enlightenment, where the smile of reason shines upon us and we all are won over to scientific values.

I mean, that’s very unfashionable nowadays. It’s a sort of history that I actually do subscribe to and I think has been unfairly maligned, and I think there are people making sophisticated and persuasive arguments for a more Whiggish attitude to history now. But yes, a lot of people would scoff at that.

OLIVER: One of my favorite things about that program is the extraordinarily odd way in which he pronounces certain words.

MARRIOTT: Capitalism.

OLIVER: Capitalism.

MARRIOTT: I love it.

OLIVER: And also the Ro-co-co. [laughter]

MARRIOTT: He himself is just an amazing artifact of a completely vanished sort of bourgeois culture. As a teenager, I remember thinking, “Can I get away with calling it capitalism?” And even at my teenage worst, I managed to decide against it, which I think everyone can agree was a rare good shout from me as a 17-year-old

Liberal Ideas and Print Culture

OLIVER: Now, in the Cherwell, you’re quoted saying that liberal ideas are imposed from above by institutions like the BBC and The Times. Is this not inconsistent, though, with the idea of print culture as the engine of civilization? Because print culture doesn’t have an “above,” and it necessitates a kind of polycentricity and a diversity that the old BBC model was almost built to oppose.

MARRIOTT: There’s truth in that, in my view—and there may be some contradiction there. I would say that print culture inherently does have an “above,” actually. And I guess one of the slightly less popular, elitist things that you might say about the advantages of a society that conducts its political debates in print is that there is kind of an automatic elitism to print expression.

Not everybody can do it—I think something easily forgotten by you and me, living in a world in which we are writers and we are surrounded by writers. In fact, the requirement that if you have a political opinion, you have to express it in coherent writing takes a lot of people out of the discourse automatically.

The bad side of that is that it takes a load of people who don’t have the privilege of a university education out of public discourse. The good side is that I do think being able to express yourself coherently in written argument is probably a decent test of intelligence. And I do think that one of the advantages that print discourse imposes on a civilization is, it probably does select for a certain coherence of thought among participants in public discourse.

Not universally, and of course that can be hugely overdone, but I’d say at the margins that’s probably true.

OLIVER: But there’s an extent to which what print allows for is opposition to the established church, and a kind of scientific dissent, and the ability—you discuss the Republic of Letters in your book, the ability of someone from somewhere else to just join in. And there’s a lot of talk now about there are too many gatekeepers in the old culture, but of course, the old culture was about the proliferation of new gatekeepers and the making of new keys and so on. Isn’t print just too much of a many-headed monster for your theory?

MARRIOTT: Yes, of course it is. And obviously any short polemical book called The New Dark Ages is probably going to tend to somewhat oversimplify history. And the argument is absolutely not that every printed book is virtuous and every TikTok video is an evil force for irrationality. It’s that I think the two media have certain biases, and the bias of print is, I think, towards greater rationality. So there’s a very sound overall case you can make for it.

The second part of your question was about Republic of Letters dissent. I guess my case there would be that—I think partly because it’s not easy to make a written argument—is that a print culture tends to be a meritocracy in a virtuous way.

The great test of succeeding in a literate society is, can you express yourself coherently and persuasively in print? It’s not, are you well connected, are you charming, can you talk persuasive bullshit? It’s can you express your ideas in print, which has all those demands of logical and coherent expression.

I think that’s one of the virtues of the Republic of Letters. It’s a good compromise between elitism—in that not everybody can join, because not everybody can make their case logically in writing—and meritocracy. You can join if you can, and that really diversifies the kinds of people who can contribute to scientific debate and philosophical debate.

And when you look at the various participants in the 18th-century Republic of Letters, people coming from quite different backgrounds—Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, very different social backgrounds—treated the same in the Republic of Letters because all you can see is their argument, and these things are treated meritocratically. And I think that was a huge virtue of print culture in the 18th century.

OLIVER: How do you explain the PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] results in Asia, where they have a lot of smartphones and much less of a crisis of reading and education, and other countries as well?

MARRIOTT: It’s true that some Asian countries haven’t declined as precipitously as Western countries. I don’t think that can take us away from the overall story, which is one of stagnation and decline. I guess also, a lot of Third World countries—I mean, certainly in Latin America—there is still low-hanging fruit in literacy and education and improvements to education which can be witnessed.

I think the striking thing is the almost universal story among developed countries, which is one of decline or stagnation, and I think we should be alarmed about that.

Cultural Capital

OLIVER: You talk a lot about people being status driven—people reacting to other people’s status and their relative status. But does that not in some way undercut the idea of the inherent value of print culture and ideas and suggest that, if we have another mechanism for hooking up liberal democracy to status, print, or books or whatever, may be more discardable than you think?

MARRIOTT: So what, the idea would be that we find a way of making democratic values high status?

OLIVER: Something like that. You seem to argue in various places—even on the name of your Substack, right, Cultural Capital—that making print high status is one reason why people become interested in it and take its argument seriously.

MARRIOTT: Yes.

OLIVER: I sort of find this—I recoil from this. I kind of hate this idea because I think that there is some inherent quality of the books and the writings. But if status does matter that much, couldn’t we just try—couldn’t there be other ways in which status can be attached to the right ideas?

MARRIOTT: Yes. Definitely. I’m not saying that books and writing are valuable because they supply social status. But I think people sometimes feel queasy, understandably, about the fact that a lot of what attracts people who go on to become very literate to the idea of wanting to be a writer or wanting to be well read probably is the incredible cultural capital that has attached to books and writing and literary culture in general for the last 400, 500 years of our culture.

It’s not something that feels comfortable to say because we like to think that we like books because we are just curious people who are motivated entirely by our own dispassionate love of knowledge. I mean, hopefully that’s somewhat true, but I don’t think that’s 100 percent true of anybody, and I think you have to be realistic about the fact that that is part of the appeal of books for a lot of people.

And I think when you’re thinking about how to sell books to the next generation, and if we worry that the next generation is reading less, I think the statusful aspect of books is something that is worth thinking about. The fact that when you and I were teenagers, writers seemed really cool.

I don’t think we particularly looked at Martin Amis, but I know a lot of people who looked at Martin Amis and thought, “That guy’s so cool. Being a writer is really cool. Being smart and articulate and literate are really statusful, cool things to be.” And that thought can get a lot of people through the door of being interested in literacy.

I guess one of the things that I’d worry about that status argument now is that if you are 17 years old now, who are the cool writers who are inspiring you to be interested in literary culture and who are inspiring you to think that this is this glamorous, exciting endeavor that you want to be involved with and will benefit you and give you an interesting and cool life? I mean, Henry Oliver and James Marriott obviously, maybe. Maybe we’re not icons of cool.

OLIVER: Oh, talk for yourself, please.

MARRIOTT: As literary culture declines, its status declines. And I think one danger is that we fail to—figures who we might feel somewhat skeptical about but who contain the glamour of literature and can sell it to people who are on their way in.

I mean, there’s a certain kind of person who finds Harold Bloom an incredibly cool and exciting character, and I know a few people who watched Harold Bloom’s videos on YouTube. And they got sold on the idea that being a literate, intelligent person would be an impressive thing to be via Harold Bloom. Then they discovered everything else.

I mean, I’m a Harold Bloom skeptic, but—and we might resent a figure like that, but he has some cultural value in selling what we’re doing to people who are outside it. And I think we’ve got to hope that cool, sexy people will be attracted to literature because that has historically got people through the door.

And I think people are a little squeamish about saying that, but I think by being overly squeamish about saying it, you miss a way that we can think about how we’d want to get people into all this stuff.

OLIVER: Why are you a Harold Bloom skeptic?

MARRIOTT: Well, maybe “skeptic” is putting it too strongly. I think I find a lot of the harrumphing—maybe there’s a narcissism of small differences going on here, but a lot of the sort of harrumphing, sweeping statements about literature, I sometimes find it a little bit bogus, and I think his public persona I sometimes find a bit bogus.

I think he was playing up to the idea of what people wanted a literate intellectual to look like a bit much. And I sometimes think that you read a lot of his writing, and either the later stuff, which feels very thin and churned out to me, often, or even things like The Anxiety of Influence, there’s sort of lots of pyrotechnics and hyperventilating.

The older I get, the more I question how interesting the actual ideas and criticism in that book are. I mean, he’s obviously—it would be stupid to say he’s not a great critic. He is. But I think he was also very adept at constructing a public image, and there’s more than a little bit of a whiff of bullshit about that.

All these stories that he tells about how when he sits down at breakfast, he’s just such a great reader that he just can’t help himself but read the text on the cereal box, and that always makes me feel a little bit like, “Oh, come off it.” But I mean, I guess everyone in the public eye is constructing their image to some extent, so we can’t be too cross about it.

Spain’s Reading Crisis

OLIVER: Why do you think there’s much less of a reading crisis in Spain?

MARRIOTT: I think there is a reading crisis in Spain. If you look at the most recent set of PISA results, Spain is recording its lowest reading levels on record, according to the results that just came out earlier this year. There has been a little bit of a sort of miniature meme about this idea that reading levels in Spain are rising. I think there’s a Substack post about it. Maybe it’s true.

I would be surprised if Spain happened to be an anomaly in a trajectory of decline that seems to affect every other European country. One thing is that that data is all self-reported, and I think we always have to be wary of self-reported data about reading and, in my view, assume that people are always going to be over-optimistic about how much they’re reading, and that’s probably the case in Spain.

The other thing to say is that Spain has historically, no shade to the Spanish, been one of the least literate countries in Europe. And countries in which literacy is rising in the Third World, that’s because they’re playing educational catch-up to what we’d expect the sort of minimum standard for developed countries to be.

I wonder if that’s more of what’s going on in Spain. The fact that it’s recorded its lowest PISA results for reading in its history last week suggests that that idea that, according to this survey, Spain is experiencing an increase in reading may not be correct.

Economics of the Reading Crisis

OLIVER: If things are as bad as you say, how long until it shows up in the GDP numbers?

MARRIOTT: Good question. We’ve talked about this before. My argument isn’t particularly about the impact of literacy on economic performance. I think there must be a correlation. One of the major impetuses to the rise of literacy in the 18th century was that states were becoming more complex, commerce was becoming more complex. And if you wanted to be a merchant or you wanted to be a bureaucrat in a 17th-century state, you kind of had to be literate, otherwise you were just not going to maximize your economic potential. A lot of the impetus for literacy outside of Protestantism came from increased state complexity and commerce.

Why it’s not showing up in the GDP figures now? I don’t know. Maybe it never will. As we begin to shove off more of our office work and our brain work onto intelligent machines, it may be that we can keep that upward economic trajectory going even as the human capital deteriorates. I guess we’re still—

OLIVER: You don’t believe that we can have a major threat to liberal democracy and a degeneration of political culture and process without some kind of lowering of GDP, right? Or GDP growth.

MARRIOTT: I don’t know. I’m not necessarily sure those two things correlate. That sort of line that people like to repeat about America, “the world’s most successful failed state”—I mean, America has been demonstrating for a quarter of a century that you can have chaotic and partisan politics that appears to be obeying the most deranged and horrifying rules of irrationality with an incredibly dynamic, innovative economy.

So I’d be reluctant to say that I think there’s necessarily a correlation. I would say that if what we’re hearing from universities about declining literacy among students is true, this does have a knock-on effect. One of the major, maybe underappreciated factors in those PISA declines is that the declines are in reading, mathematics, and science. I think probably what is driving those declines in maths and science to a large degree is declining literacy, because you need to be able to read properly to answer maths problems and science problems.

I would say if we begin to see those generations who’ve been at school during this time of declining test scores, and really quite steeply declining PISA scores now, I would be surprised if that didn’t eventually show up economically somehow in declining productivity.

OLIVER: Five years, 10 years?

MARRIOTT: I would say, yes, 10—it would be interesting to see in 10 or 20 years whether that has made a difference. You’ve got to remember, how old is the average employee of a UK company? What, in their 30s or 40s? These are people who have not come of age or were not being educated during that time that PISA scores were sort of steeply declining. So it may just be that that cohort hasn’t entered the workforce yet.

OLIVER: Or it may be that they have started entering and that the problems have been overstated by the people who give quotes to The Atlantic for the monthly obligatory students-can’t-read-anymore viral article.

MARRIOTT: [laughs] That’s certainly possible. I mean, it’s always nice to have one’s biases confirmed. And one of the experiences of promoting this book and going to bookshops to talk about it is the fact that the audiences are full of Times readers, and then they’re full of English teachers, and they’re full of teachers of other subjects. And teachers are more black-pilled on this, in my experience, than almost anybody else.

Secondary school teachers, especially secondary school teachers at state schools in the UK, who are teaching children who aren’t from middle-class families, are in despair and are the only people who would ever say to me, “You’re not going far enough. This is bad.” I wouldn’t like to place too much emphasis on anecdotes of people who turn up to talks by a guy promoting a book called The New Dark Ages, but it is sort of significant. It feels at least maybe plausibly significant to me that the audience for the book so far has been Times readers, Substack readers, teachers.

Dueling Crises

OLIVER: Do you think that—assume your thesis is correct. Will the fertility crisis mean that we go extinct before liberal democracy dies?

MARRIOTT: Oh my god, I love this. Maximum pessimism. How do all the pessimistic scenarios affecting our culture coincide?

OLIVER: Which one’s going to get us first?

MARRIOTT: Yes, I know. This is kind of intersectional pessimism—the pessimism omnicalls. All pessimisms coincide. So the question is, will the literacy crisis get us first or will the fertility crisis get us first?

OLIVER: Another way of phrasing it would be, even if you’re totally correct, should you not have written a book about the fertility crisis because that’s the real problem that civilization faces, which is that we’re just going to sort of stop being here?

MARRIOTT: Yes, true. I mean, there could be hardly anybody less qualified to write a book about the fertility crisis than me. I sincerely believe that we are seeing the immediate term’s political effect of that move from a literate to a visual culture. I think it explains Donald Trump. I think it explains 70 or 80 percent of the authoritarian, personalist leaders around the world. I think it’s an important problem.

The fertility crisis—I’m just not the guy to tell you how imminent or how severe that is. It would be interesting to see how those things intersect. I can see a future in which a low-fertility future, the people who are reproducing themselves may be less prone to using technology if we believe that the iPhone is a factor in declining fertility and making people more isolated, less likely to socialize, less likely to form relationships, less likely to form families.

And at least some of the future of fertility seems to lie with the Amish. So maybe there’s a kind of Luddite fertility revival on our horizon from Amish people who don’t have iPhones, therefore they do have children, therefore can read, and maybe that’s the future. But I mean, that’s really whimsical.

OLIVER: Not very liberal or democratic, though.

MARRIOTT: True, but let’s see what wonders literacy works. [laughter]

Cultural Entropy

OLIVER: What about the idea that Donald Trump—and we’re sort of using him as a stand-in for a whole range of trends. But what about the idea that human culture is just fragile, it has lots of internal tendencies towards decay, and the decline of reading is another symptom of the sort of internal decombustion that human civilization is going through?

We just cannot tolerate too much peace, too much liberalism, too much—I don’t want to use that meme about “hard times produce strong men,” but there’s some kind of truth in that. And rather than decline of reading causes political problems, it’s like, decline of reading and political problems are symptoms of the same malaise underneath it all.

MARRIOTT: I think that’s a really interesting point. I certainly think there’s an argument that all political systems are subject to decay. There has never been a political system in history that has just lasted indefinitely and continued going. I don’t see any reason why democracy should be exempt from that historical lesson.

I don’t think there’s anything in democracy that would lead us to suspect it’s an eternal political system. If you read the sort of ancient Greek theorists who are categorizing political systems and saying what their dangers are, so the danger of aristocracy is tyranny, and the danger of democracy in the classical world would have been thought to be a kind of populism—rule by the mob.

And it may just be that democracy has a half-life, and as it decays, it decays into populism. And some of what we’re experiencing might just be the inevitable trajectory of any democracy, which gives power to a majority, and eventually that begins to produce certain feedback loops whereby an intolerant and irrational majority or segment of voters just starts making things worse and voting in an irrational manner.

My theory, for all the drama of the book’s title, is not, “This is the only factor in history.” Is reading naturally subject to decay? I actually don’t think so. I think the lesson, if you were standing in, what, 1930, 1940 trying to project—and no one had told you about television—you were trying to project the direction of reading, you would say, “Yes, it’s going to get more and more.”

I mean, the lesson of the last 50 years has been this huge explosion in literacy, mass participation in reading newspapers and books, a working-class autodidact movement, which is kind of quite remarkable and very strong and very high-minded. You would say all this is on an upward trajectory, and it does seem to be—I don’t think that is something that decays naturally.

I think people spend their leisure time doing the most, probably to a large degree, the most entertaining, immediately available option. If that’s books, people will be very literate. If it’s TV and smartphones, people become less literate because literacy becomes less appealing.

Favorite Literary Critics

OLIVER: Let’s move on to some fun things.

MARRIOTT: Yes, let’s—having doom-mongered, having speculated that democracy is inherently doomed. It’s not even any external factors, it’s just fucked automatically. Yes, that’s a new level of pessimism.

OLIVER: For the very small number of people who are still reading, let’s talk about some books.

MARRIOTT: Yes.

OLIVER: Now, you’ve been reading Barbara Everett.

MARRIOTT: Yes.

OLIVER: Tell me what you like about her work.

MARRIOTT: I have begun to realize the literary critics I enjoy belong to a certain tradition that has the words “John Bayley” somewhere near the beginning of it.

OLIVER: Yes.

MARRIOTT: John Bayley was the husband of Iris Murdoch and was an advocate for a probably now quite unfashionable but humane, warm, textually attentive kind of criticism that I think took a serious blow in the latter half of the 20th century from literary theory, which likes, in my view, incomprehensible jargon and sort of vast unsupported nonsense words and ideas.

And Barbara Everett belongs, to me, to that tradition of criticism. The book I was reading was called Poets in Their Time, a series of essays on poets from John Donne to Philip Larkin. Close, close reading, intelligent close reading, sort of commonsensical close reading. I mean, I’m assuming Barbara Everett is a real close read, is a real Henry Oliver icon.

OLIVER: Oh, sure. And John Bayley, actually. I like what you say. I think he’s a great critic, and it’s a shame that he’s slightly receded.

MARRIOTT: Yes, and I realized everybody I like—I think we both share an affection for this podcast, Close Readings, hosted by Seamus Perry and Mark Ford, two English literature professors both taught by John Bayley. Everything goes back to John Bayley. All the critics I like go back to him.

OLIVER: Alan Hollinghurst as well was taught by John Bayley.

MARRIOTT: Really?

OLIVER: Yes.

MARRIOTT: Someone should do an essay on the virtuous influence of John Bayley in postwar literary culture. More virtuous, I’d argue, than his wife, Iris Murdoch.

OLIVER: Well, no, no, let’s not go there because—

MARRIOTT: I’m an Iris Murdoch skeptic. That’s just me being controversial.

OLIVER: I’m always pushing Bayley’s book about Tolstoy at people. I think that’s a great book.

MARRIOTT: I’ve never read it, but I should read it.

OLIVER: And there’s a really good, scholarly article that’s from a similar period where he talks about the nature of literary character and uses some material from Tolstoy to illustrate that. I think that’s really great.

MARRIOTT: Yes.

OLIVER: And I would see them all as part of this bigger thing that George Steiner called the “old criticism,” which is not just close reading but is a sort of attempt to understand the metaphysics, the moral seriousness, the general temperament and set of ideas within the work and behind the work.

MARRIOTT: I completely agree.

OLIVER: It may or may not be compatible with close reading. Some of them are close readers, and some of them are quite broad readers in a way.

MARRIOTT: Yes. I would say the common denominator of that school of criticism is basically people who actually like books, and people who actually like reading, and people who actually get it. And literary theory is people who like the idea of liking books and like swinging pretentious buzzwords around but don’t, in my view, really get it. But not to be too much of a fogey about it.

OLIVER: We might not include William Empson in the old criticism. He’s a kind of radical of his own school.

MARRIOTT: Yes. William Empson is a sort of unclassifiable one-off, really, isn’t he? But I think everybody smart in the old school likes Empson.

OLIVER: I’m quite ambivalent about Empson. I find it unsatisfying.

MARRIOTT: I sort of love it. I’m a bit of a sucker for those totally dazzling, slightly tendentious, ultraclose readings of a George Herbert poem.

OLIVER: Hmm. I love it when Christopher Ricks and Helen Vendler do it, but there’s something about Empson that makes me feel a bit like he’s moving cards very quickly in front of me, and I can’t quite keep track of it, and at the end, he brings out the answer, and I sort of have to accept it.

MARRIOTT: Yes, I think that’s definitely true. And I think, I mean certainly in the ambiguity book, it gets a bit relentless. You feel like you’re slightly being—I mean, it’s a great book, but you’re being slightly close-read to death. And by the end you’re just like, “Okay, fine. This John Donne poem means whatever you want it to mean. I give up. I’m not going to try and argue with you anymore. I’ve had enough sort of tendentious 12 interpretations of one line.” I don’t know.

I am a sucker for it, and I sometimes like the spectacle of literary criticism. I think the spectacle of a mind as undeniably powerful as William Empson’s—I mean, to me probably one of the most powerful intellectual engines that the 20th century produced—going to town on a Shakespeare sonnet is just, whether you agree with the conclusions he draws, I just think if you like watching somebody do the smartest and most powerful version of what we love, it’s very hard for me to look away.

OLIVER: What about someone like A. C. Bradley?

MARRIOTT: I’ve never read A. C. Bradley. I have his book on my shelf, but I’ve not read it. That’s the sort of more character-based Shakespeare criticism, isn’t it?

OLIVER: Yes. Oh, I’m excited. I think this is James Marriott–coded, as they say.

MARRIOTT: I think you recommended it to me, and I think many things you recommend to me, I know, are James Marriott–coded, so it’s on the shelf.

OLIVER: Good. All right. Well, when you’ve read it, we’ll do another podcast devoted to A. C. Bradley.

MARRIOTT: I’d be keen to.

Rereading Anna Karenina

OLIVER: Anna Karenina you read recently.

MARRIOTT: Yes.

OLIVER: What was that like?

MARRIOTT: Yes, I loved it. Reread, actually. The experience of reading Anna Karenina was what a fatuous and shallow reader of Anna Karenina I was when I read it when I was about 21. It’s just so enjoyable. I’m not going to say anything new about Tolstoy on a podcast, but all the obvious things people say, just such a superlative—one of those people who’s clearly just a novelist to his absolute fingertips.

The ability to spot—the ability to draw attention to telling details, the emotional understanding. The ability to walk into someone’s perspective, convincingly occupy it for a chapter, and then just walk into someone else’s perspective and do the same thing. I mean, all the obvious novelist things, he just does superlatively. I’m going to assume that you agree. What do you like about Anna Karenina?

OLIVER: Oh, I love everything about it. I think it’s the great novel. I think Tolstoy is the Homer of the novel. He has this wonderful ability to give you everything you need. Nothing is concealed, nothing is ambiguous, nothing is waiting for you to draw it out. He makes it all available to you, and somehow this enhances the nature of the art.

It doesn’t make him artless. There’s a genius to his simplicity, and it’s because he’s able to see and connect so much, so many of the details of life, which perhaps before Tolstoy, we wouldn’t have thought it was possible to put so much together in that way.

MARRIOTT: Yes, I completely agree. And I mean, having written an incredibly short journalistic book, you just think, how the hell did you write Anna Karenina? I mean, it is beyond comprehension.

The other question that occurs to me is, why are so many great novels about adultery? Adultery is to the novel as the fall of Troy is to the epic poem. Why is it so central? Why does it crop up all the time? What is it about that theme that so powerfully activates what the novel can do?

OLIVER: My sort of basic theory of the novel is that it takes the old quest romance and domesticates it, first through things like Gulliver’s Travels, but then gradually it brings things into the drawing room with Jane Austen and Henry James. And the novelists are constantly using the language of adventure, pilgrimage, all these sort of journey metaphors.

They know that this is what they’re doing. And of course, once the traveler doesn’t have a strange land to go to, or a war to get involved with, or whatever, they have to make journeys of the mind, and they have to make quests that are—what is the most dramatic thing that can happen as you walk around the drawing room and have a conversation? Well, love and war are the two main preoccupations, and so the novel has to, in a way, move over to love.

Obviously, there are great novels of war, but those novels seem to completely challenge the question of what is a novel and how much it can contain. And some people have even said War and Peace isn’t a novel, and it starts to push the novel back into some other territory, I think.

MARRIOTT: That’s such an interesting idea. I mean, both the Odyssey and Madame Bovary are about a man trying to get through to his wife. I don’t know, maybe that’s bullshit, but . . .

Favorite Shakespeare Plays

OLIVER: No, I think this is exactly right. You’ve just got a new set of Shakespeare editions. What are you reading? Which one are you reading?

MARRIOTT: I started with The Tempest. I’m actually ill read as a post-university grown-up in Shakespeare. My go-to would be Milton, and if I was going to read great poetry for fun, I would get Paradise Lost. I’ve been experiencing doubts about Paradise Lost, relative to some of the criticisms made of it in the 20th century, and I thought, “Well, you’ve got to go one up. You’ve got to go Shakespeare.”

And one of my biases as a reader is, I just love lyric poetry. I love a good metaphor. I love a good image. So I want to read the most poetic Shakespeare plays. I think also the plays that are most satisfying to read rather than to watch—The Tempest is basically in some ways a long poem as much as it is a play.

I’ve got Richard II lined up and Antony and Cleopatra, so I’m doing it for the poetry and then hoping to maybe expand out from there. Where would you direct me? You’re better read in Shakespeare than I am.

OLIVER: I think you would enjoy Cymbeline, Henry IV . . .

MARRIOTT: I love Henry IV. Henry IV, Part 1 is probably, after Hamlet, my second-favorite Shakespeare play.

OLIVER: And maybe Measure for Measure.

MARRIOTT: I’ve literally zero knowledge of Measure for Measure.

OLIVER: Oh, my god. It’s a hidden gem for you. You’ve got to read that one.

MARRIOTT: I’m sort of intrigued by the late romances. I mean, I’m sure they turn out to be not as good as one imagines them to be. These sort of mysterious plays like Timon of Athens and Pericles and all this sort of stuff. But I mean, that might be not a justified curiosity.

OLIVER: Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest I think are some of the best Shakespeare.

MARRIOTT: Yes, I’m keen to read The Winter’s Tale, and I’ve got it, actually. It came in my little set.

OLIVER: I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised, and then you can read Northrop Frye’s book about it.

MARRIOTT: Yes.

OLIVER: Which would be James Marriott–coded.

MARRIOTT: Yes, good. I am very biased towards things that are James Marriott–coded.

OLIVER: And tell us, lastly, what will you do next?

MARRIOTT: My god, I don’t know. It’s hard to think about, having discovered how difficult it is to write a book. I think one of the exercises of writing this book probably was to slightly exercise what a complex I had about actually writing a book. And being forced by my publisher to write a short, journalistic polemic, I’m hoping has kind of killed some of my demons.

I mean, I’m still feeling the utter terror of having a book out, but I felt very terrified about the prospect. I’m hoping that I’ll do something freer, more thoughtful, maybe less polemical. Having a point of view can get a little bit exhausting.

And if all the arguments that I make about literacy and literature are true, expressing one point of view forcefully is one of the less interesting things that a book can do—although I do think, in this instance, important. So yes, hopefully the next thing will not be a polemic, but it’s sort of quite daunting to think about having discovered how hard it is to write even a short book.

OLIVER: James Marriott, thank you very much.

MARRIOTT: Thank you.

One day, when my son was three years old, he stuck his finger into a candle. We were sitting at the table before dinner and he touched the flame without warning. When his sister asked him why he had done it, he told her he just wanted to know what the flame was like. I remembered this when I was reading Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in the section when Locke discusses how certainly we can know the world beyond ourselves, and he writes: “he that sees a candle burning, and hath experimented the force of its flame by putting his finger in it, will little doubt that this is something existing without him.” (IV.xi.8) This is how the love of philosophy begins: in a curiosity of the world and a willingness not just to question it, but to test it directly. It illustrates Locke’s larger point about man’s capacity to reason without the use of formal logic. “God has not been so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational.” (IV.xvii.4) We become philosophical as we become interested in knowing the qualities and limits of the world and ourselves. And that begins in childhood.

For the modern, empirical, skeptical mind, Locke’s finger-in-the-flame is akin to the philosopher leaving Plato’s cave. In that experiment, my son became a novice of philosophy. What he learned, he could not communicate. He did not have the language he needed. He was, essentially, at play when he touched that flame. To philosophise, then, requires some play. To be rational requires us to do “irrational” things, like touching a flame.

Coming later this week and next there will be essays by , , and . You can read my whole essay here.

Eros need not be expressed sexually. In Freud’s account of the chaste and enormously fruitful life of Leonardo da Vinci, sexuality is “sublimated” onto different objects. Freud’s forebear, Plato, imagines rather that the body is a temporary and ultimately unnatural home for our deepest desires. Eros was not sexuality hiding under love of wisdom, but the love of wisdom hiding under sexual desire. We need not make a judgement as to its original form to see that it can be directed into one form or another.

Teresa of Avila tells the story of a young woman named Doña Casilda. She is wealthy, beautiful, passionately in love with her fiancé. But when she attends the clothing of a Carmelite nun, she decides, against the wishes of her family, to renounce everything—lover, wealth, status—for a life of poverty and prayer. Her determination resembles that of a star-crossed lover. She tries three times to join, the second time jumping out of the carriage as her household brings firewood to the convent and clinging for life to the statue of the Blessed Virgin. After her family wrests her back, she runs away a third and last time. She finds herself left alone in a church for a single minute. She tucks her shoes under her skirt to run like a maniac a long way through the countryside until she reaches the monastery, where she spends the rest of her life.

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, as the story draws to a close, the brilliant doctor Lydgate is founding a new hospital for the study of fever and is in need of a new source of funding. Dorothea, widowed and restless with her great fortune, longs for some concrete good within her reach. This pair, each ardent for forms of greatness and devoted to their communities, have no hint of romantic interest between them. Eliot lets us see the prospect of a different kind of collaboration between the two, where each will have an opportunity to use the furthest reach of their talents and ambitions. Circumstances make the collaboration impossible just as it comes into view. Yet the jointly conceived hospital is itself a beautiful manifestation of erotic desire.

That is writing about lust for , in an issue dedicated to the Seven Deadly Sins. You can also read on the topic of John Donne, sexually explicit epithalamia, and the importance of Latin for Early Modern English.

: How do you think the the rise of AI is going to change or influence our relationship with great books? Obviously it causes problems in schools, you know if you’re going to try to get students to write about books, then you have to contend with artificial intelligence. But even just how do you see it affecting the literary world? Will we see a resurgence of interest in classic books because they’re permanent, because they are not generated by artificial intelligence, but by real human beings with hearts and minds? Or will it just more and more obscure those works?

For the first time in a long time, there’s real competition for the book people. And it’s really good. It’s getting better every day. And very soon, we’re going to experience the kind of disruption that has been relatively unknown. A lot of people will sort of disagree with that and think the internet was very disrupting to books and publishing and education and all the institutions around books. I suspect that once the AI revolution really gets underway, we will come to realize that the real competition is starting now and we’re going to be much more shaken up than we were before.

Ultimately, I think it’s going to be a good thing because AI will be much better than you at doing taxes or whatever, but there’s no point in having it read Tolstoy for you. Tolstoy cannot be summarized. Tolstoy can barely be explained. I mean, you know, it’s like saying I watched the weather report and believing that you have somehow experienced the storm that’s happening outside. Either you have been out and stood in the rain and heard the thunder and seen the lightning hit the tree or you haven’t. And that’s Tolstoy.

So one of the things that will be left to us entire and whole is the reading of literature. Because it is irreducible, it is irreplaceable. But one of the things that AI will be able to do is interact with scholarship and criticism. And some of the things that literary scholars currently do, AI is getting much better at doing. And some people will use AI. Some people will just sort of refuse on principle. Some people will use it. The people who use it will have, you know, the equivalent of dozens of other people working for them. It’s like getting research assistants. Go and tell me everything that the scholarship says about X. Once you’ve done that, go and look up such and such a thing in the archive and then find me this and then relate it to this. And the work is just going like that all the time. Once that starts happening, the way in which scholarship and criticism works will just have to change, right?

If we think we can sustain a model whereby it’s, you know, organic, it’s 100% human-made, no AI was consulted in the process, probably enough people will pay for those magazines that the old model will just carry on to some extent. But... We just have to accept that some incredibly bright young kid in Newcastle or Ohio or wherever is going to start doing things the new way.

So that that’s coming and that will change all the surrounding things about literature. And a lot of the other young people who are coming up may prefer that new way to our way. Or they may want a bit of both a bit like how a lot of people use AI for their therapy. Going to see a human and talking about your problems, you would think is pretty irreplaceable. Like, why confess to someone if it’s not a priest? But people do. So I just think it’s going to change. If it means that overall... There’s more humanities, there’s more discussion of literature, there’s more discovery of what’s actually in the historical record, what’s in the archives, there’s more suggestive information, like stylometric analysis can be done, all sorts of, like, if it means we end up with a lot more stuff like that, that can only be a good thing, right?

It may be that the people currently practicing those things are the ones who lose out but that the overall output is different and better. At the level of the school pupil, I’m not sure that AI is a problem because you’re no longer, I mean, a lot of people will not like the way I’m going to phrase this, but you’re no longer stuck with your teacher. You can have a different teacher if you want. And that, for many people, Depending on which part of the education system they’re in and how well it’s working and how well it suits them and whatever else. That may be very, very liberating. And it may be what gives them what they need. It may be the difference between low expectations and high expectations. So overall, I expect AI to do good things, but it will also be used in bad ways. And the final... The final equilibrium is some way away, and God knows what it really looks like.

Whole thing here

The Hazelnut

Interview with Henry Oliver on Literary Criticism, AI, and the Humanities

Listen now

a month ago · 15 likes · Walker Larson and Henry Oliver

(Excuse the background noise of the air vent.)

And here is the passage from ‘The Uncommon Reader’ by George Steiner that made me realize I had stopped memorizing for a year or so and really ought to start again more seriously.

Le Philosophe lisant, like the cultured men around him in a tradition which runs from classical antiquity to, roughly, the First World War, will know texts by heart (an idiom worth thinking about closely). They will know by heart considerable segments of Scripture, of the liturgy, of epic and lyric verse. Macaulay’s formidable accomplishments in this respect — even as a schoolboy he had committed to memory a fair measure of Latin and English poetry — were only a heightened instance of a general practice. The ability to cite Scripture, to recite from memory large stretches of Homer, Virgil, Horace or Ovid, to cap on the instant a quotation from Shakespeare, Milton or Pope, generated the shared texture of echoes, of intellectual and emotive recognition and reciprocity, on which the language of British politics, law and letters was founded. Knowledge by heart of the Latin sources, of La Fontaine, of Racine, of the trumpet-calls in Victor Hugo, has given to the entire fabric of French public life its rhetorical stress. The classic reader, Chardin’s lisant, locates the text he is reading inside a resonant manifold. Echo answers echo, analogy is precise and contiguous, correction and emendation carry the justification of accurately remembered precedent. The reader replies to the text out of the articulate density of his own store of reference and remembrance. It is an ancient, formidable suggestion that the Muses of memory and of invention are one.

I hope you will join me in memorizing more poetry. It might be the best contribution we can all make to literary culture! Soon I will record the Herrick poem I memorized last year too...

Some writers make their novels out of beautiful, well-turned sentences, and some from flowing pages. In the popular jargon, some novelists work at the level of the sentence, crafting their worked-upon language, while others are immersive story-tellers. This second type of writer is more liable to be dismissed by highbrow, aesthete, or flat-out pretentious reviewers, while the first type is likely to be found wanting by a certain sort of practitioner-critic. If there is still such a thing as highbrows who hate middlebrows, this is the topic on which the highs will be roused to a bear-like defence of the narrow principles they hold to be dear and self-evident.

In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, as in her previous two novels (The Inheritance of Loss and Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard), Kiran Desai is squarely the second type of author. There is nothing wrong with her sentences: many are lovely, and some of them have an aphoristic turn: but she writes pages, not phrases: one often feels the sharp pull at the end of her chapters as the curtain falls, suddenly, and cuts us off from the immersion we had reached. One feels, too, the lack of “craft” in some of her sentences. But that is no matter: indeed, much of the time, it is part of how she makes her immersive pages.

Here is half a page from The Inheritance of Loss, which gives as good a demonstration of this effect as any.

This aqueous season would last three months, four, maybe five. In Cho Oyu, a leak dripping into the toilet played a honky-tonk, until it was interrupted by Sai, who held an umbrella over herself when she went inside the bathroom. Condensation fogged the glass of clocks, and clothes hanging to dry in the attic remained wet for a week. A white scurf sifted down from the beams, a fungus spun a shaggy age over everything. Bits of color, though, defined this muffled scene: insects flew in carnival gear; bread, in a day, turned green as grass; Sai, pulling open her underwear drawer, found a bright pink jelly scalloping the layers of dreary cotton; and the bound volumes of National Geographic fell open to pages bruised with flamboyant disease, purple-yellow molds rivaling the bower birds of Papua New Guinea, the residents of New Orleans, and the advertisements—“It’s better in the Bahamas!”—that it showcased.

Sai had always been calm and cheerful during these months, the only time when her life in Kalimpong was granted perfect sense and she could experience the peace of knowing that communication with anyone was near impossible. She sat on the veranda, riding the moods of the season, thinking how intelligent it was to succumb as all over Kalimpong modernity began to fail. Phones emitted a death rattle, televisions tuned into yet another view of the downpour. And in this wet diarrheal season floated the feeling, loose and light, of life being a moving, dissipating thing…

Perhaps you can nit-pick some of this, depending on your tastes and the extent to which your critical attitudes are based in the enforcement of persnickety “rules” of composition, but one can hardly deny that the passage as a whole works to establish “the peace of knowing that communication with anyone was near impossible”. Desai gives a full sense of the mood of the place she wishes you to inhabit. To achieve this, her narrative voice is not bounded by the character or what the character can observe. It acts like the camera in a film: the character is seen in and against the background of their surroundings, and we are narrated to with a fluid ease. Sometimes we are bounded by character perspective; sometimes the camera cuts, flips perspective, gives us the sense of looking at another corner of the room, while the action can be heard off-camera.

In the London Review of Books, Adam Mars-Jones quoted this paragraph as an instance of this narrative scope.

She took the route by the Good Fortune Trading Company and the mysterious, deserted Buddhist monastery slung with barbed wire. The Farragut Projects were to the left; a low buzz from the Con Ed station emitted from the right. Rats competed with pigeons over stale discarded pitta in the dumpster outside the pitta factory, and a smell of bilge water rose from the Navy Yard, which was overrun by a band of feral cats that suffered from feline leukaemia. She passed by the empty lot where trucks were hosed down, the place that made industrial metal sinks, past Los Papi’s, past the oversize parking lot drenched with chemical waste owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses. She walked down towards the river away from a luxury high-rise, a middle finger to the poor.

Although he accepts a “hum and whiff of the real” in such passages, of another similar section he comments: “Divorce the character from the sensations that surround him, as this passage does, and the narrative conventions start to unravel.” But this assumes that a narrative must be tied to the character. Whereas, Desai’s immersive method, like Scott’s, aims at being bounded not by character, but by theme. Desai is a writer of custom and place and of the individual within the story; not in the traced, embedded, threaded sense of much fiction, but as a film-maker would see them. Scott’s recreation of a social order is akin to Desai’s: she, too, is trying to immerse us in a world-view. Whereas Scott’s was a world-view lost to history, Desai is trying to immerse us in a world-view that is across the street, in our train, next to us at the office, but out of which we remain, too often, locked. Her defence of fiction—because The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is an apology for the novel—is an apology for a whole way of seeing the world. And because that way of seeing is not the Western way, but the way of an Indian immigrant, it requires a different narrative mode. Desai is not exactly Scott-esque, but she is more Scott than traditionally English in the Austen-James mode as a narrator. Scott writes of history, Desai of culture.

In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Desai’s immersive method is presented as an almost-explicit alternative to the minimalism of auto-fiction. Early on, the narrator says:

After ramen, Sonia settled to writing stories for her senior thesis in literature and creative writing. Missing her family made her strongly conjure India. She began a childhood fable about a boy who climbed into a tree and lived like a monkey until he became one, a process complicated by his being mistaken for a holy hermit.

For those readers who are already admirers of Desai’s work, this short, dry paragraph is an amusing moment. It is not just that Sonia studies in Vermont, which is where Desai studied creative writing: Desai’s first novel, Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard, is indeed about “a boy who climbed into a tree and lived like a monkey until he became one, a process complicated by his being mistaken for a holy hermit.” Unlike many modern authors who make such explicit allusions to themselves within the details of their characters, Desai does not write in a style so carefully minimal it becomes empty (Rachel Cusk) or in one so purple it almost outpaces Lawrence Durrell (Deborah Levy) or with such an insistent usage of Twitter discourse that the narrator is simply a continuation of the new modish International Style (Lauren Oyler, Patricia Lockwood, and, very often, Erin Somers). Desai has that refreshing, novelistic, quality of writing like herself, not merely about herself. It is this quality that has typically distinguished the autobiographical realist novel from the modern auto-fiction novel. It ought to feel old-fashioned. Instead, it is a fresh reassertion of talent.

These are all reductive categories, of course, of course, but it can hardly be denied that there is a flatness, an idleness, to so much of the new International Style of Prose. One might assert that Ben Lerner or Sheila Heti write in this minimalism without having such a flat affect. But they cannot sustain it; their books soon sink. It is as if a generation of writers has self-trained themselves on the ability to write at the perfect length to make the new International Style polished and piquant for an edition of n+1 or the New Yorker, but lack the ability to make it work for the length of a book as a sustained and integrated part of the immersive story. One feels tired just imagining a Henry James-length book written in this manner.

Even an entertaining and talented writer like Sigrid Nunez doesn’t leave one longing for a book twice as long. The thought of Annie Ernaux at that length initiates a creeping sense of catatonia. This is not to deny the loveliness and sometimes beauty of some of the short works written in this mode, especially some of the popular Japanese novels of recent years.

One of the great benefits of Desai’s prose is her ability to set a scene.

One dawn hour, after the temperature had suddenly risen and Sonia could hear the snow outside Ilan’s house growing sudsy and retreating, the forest dripping, the drip percolating through the moss into the earth, she set out as if for an early morning walk. She left no incriminating footsteps.

There are some cliches here (percolating, incriminating footsteps) but the patchwork matters more than the details of every stitch: Desai is splendid at this sort of balance. The obvious comparison is V.S. Naipaul. From the opening of The Enigma of Arrival:

For the first four days it rained. I could hardly see where I was. Then it stopped raining and beyond the lawn and out-buildings in front of my cottage I saw fields with stripped trees on the boundaries of each field; and far away, depending on the light, glints of the little river, glints which sometimes appeared, oddly, to be above the level of the land.

We cannot quite say that Desai or Naipaul are novelists in the manner of Walter Scott, but there is a shared quality of place and atmosphere between the three of them. Compare to this passage from Ivanhoe:

The sun was setting upon one of the rich grassy glades of that forest, which we have mentioned in the beginning of the chapter. Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious green sward; in some places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copsewood of various descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking sun; in others they receded from each other, forming those long sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the eye delights to lose itself, while imagination considers them as the paths to yet wilder scenes of silvan solitude. Here the red rays of the sun shot a broken and discoloured light, that partially hung upon the shattered boughs and mossy trunks of the trees, and there they illuminated in brilliant patches the portions of turf to which they made their way.

There is always more of Scott, but we can see in common an essential ability to turn little cliches or “dull phrases” to a more splendid whole. Nothing in the Naipaul paragraph is a cliche, exactly, but nor are any of the elements strikingly original. The aim of this writing is to use good, solid prose, with a clear voice, to establish an immersive sense of place. In contrast, Hemingway is the presiding figure of the International Style minimalists.

It stormed all that day. The wind drove down the rain and everywhere there was standing water and mud. The plaster of broken houses was gray and wet. Late in the afternoon the rain stopped and from our number two post I saw the bare wet autumn country with clouds over the tops of the hills and the straw screening over the roads wet and dripping.

This is not merely an argument about style, about which sorts of sentences are “better”. It is a question of suiting the action to the word. As Desai’s narrator says, the way you tell the story is cultural.

This was India, she thought. You might try and write a slender story, but it inevitably connected to a larger one. The sense could never be contained.

The International Style is not capable of writing a novel like Sonia and Sunny. It has reached a dead end, ideologically, stylistically, narratively. It is shrinking the novel at a time when the world is becoming weirder, more alarming, less predictable. The narrative mode of the isolated individual author who will not fictionalize has no answer to modernity, no ability to depict the decentralized kaleidoscope of the world today.

Desai, however, does. And a large part of Sonia and Sunny is about what fiction can say about the Indian diaspora, and how it can say it. A large part of the story is concerned with whether Sonia will be able to write her book. Eventually, her creative impulse has been deadened by too much literary criticism at college and she takes on very modern attitudes about fiction.

“Are you writing your stories at least?” Mama asked Sonia. Mama remembered the beautiful one about the boy who sat up in a tree with his beloved langur monkeys.

“It was oriental nonsense,” proclaimed Sonia. “And it feels childish and absurd to make things up. After a while you want to write the truth, plain and simple.”

Here Desai directly expresses the auto-fiction perspective. Rachel Cusk has said she found the “making things up” aspect of fiction “fake and embarrassing”. Sonia’s use of “oriental” here shows how she has subordinated her creative impulse to ideas of criticism, theory, and politics.

Later on, her mother tells her she gave up on her talent, and she replies: “It’s not so simple. You have to live enough life for a book.”Sonia and Sunny is indeed full of life, rather than being full of consciousness devoid of activity, the sole and often rather minor focus on the minimalists. Sunny and Sonia is expansive, like a quest. “Do you think you have one?” the mother asks—meaning, do you have a story?

“I catch a glimpse in the forest,” Sonia replies.

This is the essence of Sonia and Sunny’s quest. The two main characters wander the world like knights traversing through the forest (Naipaul makes a major allusion to the Arthurian legends in The Enigma of Arrival, also). They go to New York, India, Italy, always in search of a sense of home, the ability to live by their own lights, the capacity to be honest. They also go on journeys of the mind, in search of identity, meaning, creative potential. But wherever you go, you take the inheritance of your upbringing and your culture with you. The narrative camera is tethered to world, the theme, as much as the character to show us exactly this sense of place—they are not displaced, but rather that cannot not take India with them wherever they go. They carry the loneliness of being immigrants, of not being at home at home, to all their new locations. “Divorce the character from the sensations that surround him”, as Mars-Jones has it, and you give the reader some sense of what that means.

Sunny’s girlfriend in New York is unable to see things from his point of view, and he is unable to see them from hers.

Sunny sipped his Basque wine. Secretly he was thinking that this woman had some nerve to go from her New York City apartment—no doubt equipped with a stove, microwave, toaster, fridge, blender, coffee maker, hair dryer, vacuum cleaner, television, computer, music system, heater, fan, air conditioner, boiler, furnace, if not also a bicycle or car—to tell women in India to cook their rice in a cardboard box covered with silver reflective paper so as to prevent deforestation and climate change.

At home Sunny said: “Ulla, why did you say I put curry in everything? I put spices in everything, not curry in everything. There’s no such thing as curry, in fact. It’s a fake word invented by the British.”

He distinctly heard his mother’s voice in his ear say, Who is this stupid person?

Desai is both wry and plangent when she describes their culture clash: “Why was it that in the Western world, snooping to uncover a crime was a worse crime than the actual crime? Ulla’s civilization was built upon not snooping and wandering about naked. Sunny’s civilization was based on donning your clothes and listening to every conversation.”

As the story moves on (I shall not spoil it for you, the only way to appreciate this splendid book is to read it; no summary can be sufficient), the title becomes more and more meaningful. There are so many ways for these two characters to be lonely. They can be lonely without meeting, after meeting, while they are together, when they are separated for good, when they meet again, expectedly or otherwise. When you travel with the essential loneliness of the immigrant, you cannot keep control of the narrative of your life. The camera will jump outside of you and your control. In this way, we do not perceive the world as the characters do. Instead, we see them as they are held and surrounded by the world.

Sonia went down to the ocean. After the ocean goes pink and orange, before it goes indigo and the dusk turns to dark, the ocean turns very pale and is still. Its movement becomes absorbed in this shade of milk: it levitates, otherworldly. Sonia floated on her back—it was like being rocked in a cradle. She wasn’t sure how long she stayed this way.

Sonia will write her book by managing to see what she cannot see. Her ability to imagine the world beyond her—just beyond her, the “hum and whiff of the real” that is not within her eye-line or earshot, that is the basis of writing fiction. Not the tightly controlled narrative mode of bounding the narrator to the character, which has become so narrow and minimal, but the grand, rolling style of Naipaul and Scott and Dickens, the novels that spill out and show their whole world.

All questers are caught midway on the path. All writers are questing to catch a glimpse in the forest. That is what Desai has achieved. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is full of the life that the International Style and auto-fiction removed from fiction. The ending has everything you expect and a lot that you don’t. Strange, romantic, wild, ambitious.

Not everyone reads Jane Austen like this anymore. What Hermione Lee once called “the tradition of affection” was a matter of biography, but it was also a matter of loving the novels as true pictures of true life. It is now normal for scholars and critics to find ways of undermining what any honest and ordinary reader can see for themselves: that the marriages at the end of Austen’s novels are perfectly happy. This is normal love in normal life, not Austen’s subtle attempt to question, complicate, or undermine (three favourite words of un-comic critics) her own endings.

In the Penguin introduction by Professor Ros Ballaster, Austen is discussed in terms that are alien to the popular imagination. It lacks affection, being concerned with the way Austen “renders” her novel, the way its ideas relate to other novels of the period, the way its “syntax… can serve to illustrate the process of categorization through differentiation”, and so on. This sort of opaque criticism, which seeks to confine the novel to some set of extra-literary ideas, can be revealing and insightful, but it can also be narrow, dull, and lifeless. It might be worthwhile, but not until we have shared our affection for Austen.

In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis wrote that he had students whose essays about Jane Austen gave no indication that she was a comic writer. “We are breeding up a race of young people,” Lewis worried, “who are as solemn as the brutes.” The problem with such solemnity—which balked at the idea of The Miller’s Tale being written to make one laugh, and which called Twelfth Night “a penetrating study of the individual’s relation to society”—is that it makes “solemn men, but not serious readers”: “they have not fairly and squarely laid their minds open, without preconception, to the works they read.”

No-one could reasonably accuse Ros Ballaster of Lewis’s whole charge-sheet, but her approach is indicative of a whole modern mood of criticism: she prefers to stand outside the book and say things like “A relativistic terminology of comparatives and negatives asserts the security of positive and absolute essences” rather than to deal with the book in the manner in which it presents itself. Jane Austen had no need of this sort of jargon, and gives the impression that she would have no truck with it; so if we are to treat her as primary herself, as the genius whose work precedes us, we ought to be able to discard it ourselves. No doubt this sort of work is valuable to some people, but it is not very valuable to readers who wish to inhabit Jane Austen’s work.

Last year, another such attempt was made upon Austen. In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, Inger Brodey called the endings of Austen’s novels “artificial, gratuitous, and anti-romantic.” Brodey’s speculations about Austen herself and her supposed personal ideas about marriage are based on merely a few lines from letters that offer no such small or single-minded reading. At the end of Sense and Sensibility, Elinor and Edward are finally married, and Austen writes,

Mrs. Jennings’s prophecies, though rather jumbled together, were chiefly fulfilled; for she was able to visit Edward and his wife in their Parsonage by Michaelmas, and she found in Elinor and her husband, as she really believed, one of the happiest couples in the world. They had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasturage for their cows.

Austen tells us they are one of the happiest couples in the world, goes to the trouble, in fact, of agreeing with Mrs. Jennings. But Brodey interprets the presence of cows as “cutting… anticlimax.” This is to miss entirely not only the mood of the passage (note it is rather better pasturage), but to alienate it from the weight and spirit of the entire novel. Ever since Elinor is forced to leave her home in Norland at the beginning, she goes in search of a settlement (“settle” recurs significantly throughout). It is all she wishes for to have the love of Edward and a pastoral home. We all know people like this. Some of us, indeed, are people like this. Jane Austen was an Englishwoman of the countryside herself and we might speculate about her in that vein as readily as we make her into a feminist.

A few chapters earlier, it was said: “they were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a-year would supply them with the comforts of life.” This humour reflects a practical problem, and we ought not to read it as undermining Elinor’s feelings. Even John Keats wrote: “Love in a hut, with water and a crust, / Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust.” And it is Elinor who breaks the resolution not to get married until the parsonage is fully repaired. In a novel that makes her “self-command” the central virtue which others must learn, that is a significant breach of feeling.

With an income quite sufficient to their wants thus secured to them, they had nothing to wait for after Edward was in possession of the living, but the readiness of the house, to which Colonel Brandon, with an eager desire for the accommodation of Elinor, was making considerable improvements; and after waiting some time for their completion, after experiencing, as usual, a thousand disappointments and delays from the unaccountable dilatoriness of the workmen, Elinor, as usual, broke through the first positive resolution of not marrying till every thing was ready, and the ceremony took place in Barton church early in the autumn.

The repetition of “as usual” should be noticed. The workmen do what workmen usually do; Elinor does not what she would usually do, but what engaged couples so often do. Others in the novel have rushed to marriage (the unthinkable Lucy Steele) but it is Elinor and Edward’s rush that gets affectionate approval. The cows must be read in light of this section, which shows us that all practical concerns are gone, apart from the little ones we expect to live with, even when we are happy. An anti-climax is “A disappointing or underwhelming end to an exciting, impressive, or highly anticipated event or series of events.” (OED) From the perspective of Elinor and Edward’s other problems—his cruel mother, his unfortunate engagement, her lack of money, their lack of settlement, Lucy’s nasty gossiping character, and on and on—their ending is hardly underwhelming. They have finally removed the barriers that everyone else put between them.

As I said, Sense and Sensibility is a vicious book. There are many wonderfully entertaining moments, such as when it is said of Mrs. Ferrars that “She was not a woman of many words; for unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas.” Elinor and Edward’s contentment has to be seen against that background too. Compared to all the rogues, Edward’s “amiable heart” is indeed admirable. Much of the viciousness is directed at the dreadful villain Willoughby. When Elinor reads his egregious letter to Marianne (later confessed to be dictated by his fiancee), we are told he has departed from “the common decorum of a gentleman” and has exposed himself to be “deep in hardened villainy.” Elinor is “indignant”, finds him “abhorrent.” Further revelations make him only more ghastly. And yet, despite what we might wish, he gets his own happy ending.

But that he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.

This is more like an anti-climax, in the sense that it is out of keeping with what came before—a falling unjustified by the rising that preceded it. Willoughby has been humbled and it is the reader’s expectations—as Austen’s phrase “must not be depended on” makes clear—that are being let-down. The villain went on to live a pretty normal life, with no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.

Properly, though, an anti-climax comes after a period of excitement or intensity. That is what we get when Willoughby arrives late at night to hear if Marianne is dead. For several pages, Austen presents not her cool and rational prose, but something wilder and more alarming. When he arrived, “The flaring lamps of a carriage were immediately in view.” Elinor, the character with the most “self-command”, is seen “starting back with a look of horror” when Willoughby walks in. He has spent the whole day in a frantic ride to reach her: “I left London this morning at eight o’clock, and the only ten minutes I have spent out of my chaise since that time procured me a nuncheon at Marlborough.” This is high drama, and the account he gives of himself is full of revelations and astonishments. At the end “he almost ran out of the room.” And no wonder, he told Elinor he almost hoped his wife would die so he could marry Marianne later on. To go from that to the news that he lives in “domestic felicity” is not quite an anti-climax, but a carefully controlled bathos, a deflating of our expectations which brings out the novel’s angry sense of injustice.

The pasturage of Elinor and Edward’s cows cannot be seriously compared to that. There is no drama from which to make an anti-climax. The cows and the land are part of the settlement that has been wished for throughout the novel. There is one other mention of cows, in Vol. III, Chapter V. (Chapter XLI in continuous order). When Lucy and Edward are going to be married and Colonel Brandon offers Edward the living at Delaford, the narrative says of Lucy:

As for Colonel Brandon, she was not only ready to worship him as a saint, but was moreover truly anxious that he should be treated as one in all worldly concerns; anxious that his tithes should be raised to the utmost; and secretly resolved to avail herself, at Delaford, as far as she possibly could, of his servants, his carriage, his cows, and his poultry.

Now, anyone who loves this novel will wish to hiss a little when Lucy Steele appears. She is a liar: selfish, vain, and venal. She sees the cows, as she sees Colonel Brandon, as a resource, something to be milked. The irony in this passage is unforgiving. There is nothing Lucy will not pluck for her own gain. Whereas Elinor and Edward are more pastoral figures, who wish for better pasturage. These are the ordinary problems we might expect of two such figures, one of who is not entirely practical, and who are choosing to live in a vicarage in the country, unlike so many of the others who chase money, status, and the gaiety of London. For the critics who read like the solemn students C.S. Lewis identified, this will all be obscured by the ideas they have already hung upon the hook of the novel. But for those people who have read Austen as part of their real lives, who have fallen in love, who have had nothing to wish for, it all makes the sort of sense that needs no criticism, no careful unfolding of the supposed lie.

It might seem unnecessary to spend time arguing with such people, but some of these ways of reading Austen are in fact creeping out into the world. Criticism of this sort gets a popular hearing in books like Jane Austen, the Secret Radical and articles in the New York Times (that piece is an introduction to a new edition). The recent Netflix adaptation of Persuasion (while being perfectly acceptable on its own terms) couldn’t quite cope with the meekness in Anne and so dispensed with it. And so a new way of reading is reinforced. But there is a reason why Ang Lee’s version of Sense and Sensibility remains so popular, which is that England is still full of women like Elinor, and they still wish to have old truths expressed, ordinary life taken seriously enough to make a work of great art, and the way we live—or perhaps the way we wish we still lived—to be made into an issue of aesthetic and moral significance. The cows really are a part of Elinor’s happiness, just as they are for so many people who see fields and farms from their window every morning today. Elinor and Willoughby end up with much more similar outcomes than we might hope: in his case, it is bathetic, in hers a question of fulfillment.

The more I read Jane Austen, the more I come to appreciate her quietness. Throughout Sense and Sensibility, comments are made about the consideration—or inconsideration—characters give to each other when they are upset. When Elinor is trying to retain her equanimity, when Marianne is hysterical, Austen is alert to who gives them peace, who intrudes, who closes doors with the consideration of silence. She is not just a novelist of what is seen, but of what is unseen. She brings to our attention the various aspects of life that many people never think about, and she shows us how they work upon our inner lives. This is a very English way of living. Her heroines are so often introverts or learn to love the retreat of their mind. Marianne’s resolution at the end is to read for six hours a day and thus to acquire the “instruction” that will tame her “self-provocation.” Solitude is a virtue from the opening page when we hear that the Dashwoods live in the center of their property. That is the spell the opening line casts like a fairy tale. The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. It sounds like this is all happening once upon a time. Jane Austen’s magic is to make it happen now, with the sort of people who are always intruding upon our solitude, imposing upon our feelings, and with the sort of situations that make us realise we must be the ones to become worthy of being praised.

To me, the most interesting and revealing modern scholarship about Jane Austen is the work that sees her as a participant in the Enlightenment, especially as a reader of thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith. (I am thinking of the work of Peter Knox-Shaw, Shannon Chamberlain, Cecil E. Bohanon, Michelle Albert Vachris and several others.) Austen shares with Smith her sense that we must be worthy of being loved. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith wrote, “What so great happiness as to be beloved, and to know that we deserve to be beloved? What so great misery as to be hated, and to know that we deserve to be hated?” That could be an epigraph to all of Austen’s novels, but it is especially pertinent to the settlement at the end of Sense and Sensibility. This is precisely what Elinor has not known, and what Marianne has falsely believed. Elinor has waited for confirmation that she is beloved while Marianne has been deceived and must repair herself. Smith’s sentiment is also precisely what Austen shows us about Willoughby: he knows that he deserves to be hated. This is not an art that self-undermines; it is an art of satisfactory justice, which turns a fairy-tale into a story of real feelings, real life. Elinor and Marianne are beloved and deserve to be beloved. Nothing that Willoughby or Mrs. Ferrars does or says can change that now.

And that is why the tradition of affection for Jane Austen survives, whatever else is said about her. She understands the world too well to be too much overshadowed by her critics.

Soon as the morning trembles o’er the sky,

And unperceived unfolds the spreading day,

Before the ripened field the reapers stand

In fair array, each by the lass he loves,

To bear the rougher part and mitigate

By nameless gentle offices her toil.

At once they stoop, and swell the lusty sheaves;

While through their cheerful band the rural talk,

The rural scandal, and the rural jest

Fly harmless, to deceive the tedious time

And steal unfelt the sultry hours away.

Behind the master walks, builds up the shocks,

And, conscious, glancing oft on every side

His sated eye, feels his heart heave with joy.

The gleaners spread around, and here and there,

Spike after spike, their sparing harvest pick.

Be not too narrow, husbandmen! but fling

From the full sheaf with charitable stealth

The liberal handful. Think, oh! grateful think

How good the God of harvest is to you,

Who pours abundance o’er your flowing fields,

While these unhappy partners of your kind

Wide-hover round you, like the fowls of heaven,

And ask their humble dole. The various turns

Of fortune ponder; that your sons may want

What now with hard reluctance faint ye give.

From Thomson‘s Seasons (1730), ‘Autumn’

JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis used to regularly share a pub table in Oxford to discuss their work. The pair will now be honoured side by side in Westminster Abbey, which will celebrate the author of The Lord of the Rings with a memorial in Poets’ Corner, The Times can reveal.

Only feet away from where Lewis, the author of the Narnia series, has a plaque on the abbey floor, Tolkien is to be honoured with an ornate 2.5-metre memorial fitted to a pillar, depicting a magical tree with a variety of fruits and flowers that he frequently drew.

It will be unveiled next spring to mark the 90th anniversary of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and the 50th anniversary of The Silmarillion, which was published posthumously.

Full story in the Times. And information from Westminster Abbey.

The problem with the Princeton syllabus is not the individual courses. Fine, study socialism and Sondheim! The problem is the overall balance. These courses are all held in equal regard. The problem is the lack of insistence upon the canonical works of English. The problem is contemporary fiction instead of Shakespeare, dolls instead of George Eliot. Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers. Yes, the syllabus is ideological, but it is also just lame.

You will see that I am not making the “classics should be on the syllabus” argument but the slightly more grouchy claim that “the long stretch of English literature should be required.” One counterargument is that the real problem is to do with the administrative structure of the university. Sure. But if it changes, it needs to be changed with an aim in mind. I am arguing for an aim.

My piece is explicitly addressed to students, since the colleges won’t always make the case for the requirements to run from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. So many pieces about the English syllabus don’t address them directly.

You are only young once, and you should make sure by hook or by crook that you spend your youth on the best books, the best writing, the work that is going to be most strongly felt in the blood and the heart. You should not meekly accept the patronizing and ideological manner in which a vast and ancient tradition has been condensed into a series of courses about gender, race, and Theory with no requirement for you to do battle with many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.

And I use Woolf and Derrida to make my case.

There was a time when this was so obvious it didn’t need saying. There was a time when everyone who read Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary essays (she was the best critic of the twentieth century, bar none: you can keep your Empsons, your Trillings, your Vendlers—Woolf is the one) knew that the access she so rightfully demanded was access to the tradition. The author of A Room of One’s Own was a great reader of the tradition: as a teenager she was knocking on her father’s study to borrow Gibbon and Cowper. She wrote for the future, but she read from the past. It would have been unthinkable to her not to have read Chaucer and Browne and Defoe and Keats. To follow her example would be to read with abandon in the old ways.

This is what I want to tell young people now—don’t listen to the discourse, don’t pay attention to the think pieces and the debates. That will all be gone with the wind tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. If you really want to read English, read the way Virginia Woolf read. Read, for that matter, the way Derrida read—as deeply as possible in the great works of the past from Plato to Rousseau to Conrad. Don’t accept courses in literary criticism that begin—begin!—with Hegel and pass through Marx and Judith Butler.

This is not just a piece on on side of the debate about “woke” departments or whatever. I also make the case that the scholarship of English departments is better than the critics will admit. No, it is not all Marxist waffle. There’s a great deal of excellent work being produced, but the critics don’t read it, so they don’t know.

I spend a reasonable amount of time reading academic literary scholarship. It’s true: A lot of it is dross. It is quite acceptable to make boldly personal, left-wing statements that misrepresent the view of “neo-liberal thinkers” without even so much as a footnote. If the people who criticized the English department read the work, they would have many of their suspicions confirmed.

But that is only half the story. In the last few years, I have read really excellent scholarly books from people like Debra Gettelman, Rhodri Lewis, Hollis Robbins, James Bednarz and Gregg Hecimovich, covering Shakespeare, the nineteenth-century novel, and African American poetry. There are also major projects underway publishing the letters of Samuel Richardson, the complete works of Francis Bacon, the complete works of Henry James. This is just a small sample, based on my own selective reading. If the people who criticized the English department read the work, they would realize things are better than they think.

I am less interested in the discourse than this piece might make it seem. All I care about is the English syllabus which, as C.S. Lewis said, is practically given to us by nature. If young people cannot get that at colleges they should either demand better or do it on their own. You get one life: don’t spend it in a degree that won’t make you study the most worthwhile authors!

If the problem is that people don’t read enough, that schools are getting worse, then—take your life into your own hands! Do the reading yourself! Don’t let the culture drag you down! If you don’t know what it’s like to memorize Keats and Shakespeare because your school has let you down, then go out and get it for yourself. And then demand it from your college.

Read the whole thing here. Perhaps I will write separately about “my idea of an English syllabus.”

There is an academic myth (vaguely Victorian in feeling but probably, like most Victorian principles, dating back a half-century earlier) that scholars study facts whereas critics make it all up out of their own heads. It afflicts English studies as it does most others, and had a recent airing in John Carey’s inaugural lecture at Oxford which proposed that scholars handle texts whereas critics only vandalise them by reading them. This double and triple illusion usefully affords occasion for simple restatements: that, for instance, to read at all is in itself a creative and interpretative act, an evidence of mind which it dignifies human beings to perform; that scholars and critics alike read inventively, to some extent knowing what they are looking for and to some extent finding it; that there is no such thing as a ‘text’, and if there were it would degrade literature to be treated as one – and there was probably no such thing as a fact, either, until some human being invented it. The only difference is that some people are much better readers than others, whether of books or of reality, better in the sense of ‘truer’, more accurate and more revealing: and may well be helped to be so by being rid of the illusion that as ‘scholars’ they have some easy, advantaged road to the truth.

My favourite Everett essay is: ‘The Fatness of Falstaff.’ And here’s another great quote from Everett: “to be chewed over in critical prose is a fate no poem deserves.” That is from the opening of “Larkin’s Edens.”

Philip Larkin has gone down in print as saying that his poems are too simple to profit from criticism. It is true that to be chewed over in critical prose is a fate that no poem deserves. But to believe without reservations in the simplicity of Larkin’s work is another matter — except in so far as any artistry is a simplification of life, an abnormally clear noticing of human conditions that come to the rest of us fogged with the general imprecisions of the usual. To this degree, all good writing is magnificently simple. But it is unsafe for anyone other than its writer to say so. For the simple gets confused with quite different things — with the literal; with the crude; with the artless and sociological. Larkin is quite often read as a simple observer of contemporary English society, a realistic reporter whose detachment from what he sees (for even the most literal reader can see that there is some difference between ‘Here’ and a British Railways timetable) is explained as the writer’s disaffiliation of mood: for as poet, Larkin is almost universally described as ‘depressed’, his writing melancholy, his scenes a dreary summary of an England to which principle attaches him but which he cannot bring himself much to like. It seems therefore worth while to set down a different impression. Larkin’s great art is to appear to achieve the literal while in fact doing something altogether other; his three volumes of major verse are the odd reticent triumph of a self-undercutting artist whose skills make him a ‘secret poet’ as some men are secret agents or secret drinkers. And the results in Larkin’s case are so far from the sociological, and so other than the dreary, that the poet might be described as creating the most potent contemporary images of Eden.