WRB—Aug. 23, 2025

“the people’s fates”

I am on a lonely road, and I am managing, managing, managing, managing
Looking to edit, what can it be

Links:

• In The New Statesman, Ella Dorn on a recent wave of female cannibals in literary novels:

  Cannibalism is a welcome intrusion. But when our heroine gets down to business we realize her bloodthirsty anger is just another bit of the literary furniture, a convenient “trope” around which to hang a novel. There is “rage” and then there is “female rage”—one of the latest, and also most condescending, literary buzzwords.

  Penguin Random House offers an online listicle of books that “explore the depths of female rage, offering catharsis and understanding in a disturbing world.” Their female characters lash out at colonialism and domestic abuse and the expectations of motherhood; Kim’s protagonist Ji-won is only driven to pluck out white men’s eyeballs because of constant background racism. We get the picture: women are only allowed their explosive excesses of sex and violence if they have some outside justification to feel particularly angry. Nobody placed the same expectation on Sade, who went about spanking and pontificating as he liked. There are few female fetishists in literature; the entirety of A Certain Hunger (2020), with its qualifications and get-out clauses, proves how difficult it is to murder and eat for the joy of it.

  [You see something similar in the past decade or so of horror movies in which the villain is an obvious metaphor for trauma. Some of these are good—I quite like The Babadook (2014), whose titular monster is straightforwardly postpartum depression—but on the whole they smack of English classes that assume reading literature is about identifying symbols, and the more important the symbols the more literary it is. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Katie Kadue reviews Alan Jacobs’ biography of Paradise Lost (Paradise Lost: A Biography, June) [An Upcoming book in WRB—May 31, 2025; we linked to an interview with Jacobs about it in WRB—May 14, 2025.]:

  Jacobs describes the effect of that jarring “Erring” as being “pulled up short by a zinger of an enjambment” (the line break, preceded by a comma, is not technically an enjambment, but the error is innocent enough). The spell of the gently swaying lines is broken by a loud incorrect buzzer as Milton rectifies beauty with truth, and in so doing establishes his own poem’s priority—“for he with this rebellious rout / Fell long before”—over that of the Iliad, despite coming nearly two millennia later. Pretty words—Homer’s, Satan’s, even Milton’s—are not to be trusted. That so many of these comeuppances come as we move down from one line to the next makes for a kind of formal pun, replaying the trauma of the Fall in miniature as we suddenly fall from the meaning we expect into the one we deserve. Later, in the section of the poem set in Eden, Milton apparently offers us access to a prelapsarian paradise only to remind us, by again pushing us off the battlement of a line of verse or sneaking a lustful double meaning into an apparently innocent word (Eve’s “wanton” curls are only physically loose—or are they?), that we can’t have it.

  [No canonical work has ever had worse readers than Paradise Lost, in part because (as Kadue mentions) many of them seem not to have made it past Book 2, but even those who finish it frequently make statements about “John Milton, author of Paradise Lost” without checking to see whether those statements are also true of such figures as “John Milton, author of Comus,” “John Milton, author of Lycidas,” “John Milton, author of Areopagitica,” “John Milton, author of Eikonoklastes,” John Milton, author of Paradise Regained,” and “John Milton, author of Samson Agonistes.” (Areopagitica also has legendarily bad readers; it is not in any conventional sense a defense of free speech or freedom of the press. Jacobs had a good blog post about this a few months ago.) Paradise Lost more than any of those other works relies on its readers’ ability to hear that loud incorrect buzzer sounding over and over without tuning it out, and the source of most bad readings of it is a neglect of how Milton undermines his own work in order to undermine the reader.

  Paradise Regained doesn’t use this trick. It almost reads as though someone told Milton that a century from now people would argue that Satan was the hero of Paradise Lost, to which he responded by writing a poem in which it was extremely clear that Satan is not the hero. There are several comparatively subtle moments in Paradise Lost that get turned into flat declarative statements by the Son in Paradise Regained. The idea of pagan art and rhetoric implicit in the passage about Mulciber appears again in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, when Satan’s speech persuading Eve that she will not die if she eats the fruit is introduced with this epic simile:

  As when of old som Orator renound

  In Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence

  Flourishd, since mute, to som great cause addrest,

  Stood in himself collected, while each part,

  Motion, each act won audience ere the tongue,

  Somtimes in highth began, as no delay

  Of Preface brooking through his Zeal of Right.

  The connection of this speech of Satan’s to pagan rhetoric raises questions, but the poem doesn’t answer them; instead it asks the reader to determine what sort of thing pagan rhetoric is and how it should be treated in light of this.

  Paradise Regained doesn’t bother with any of this. There, Satan offers to instruct the Son in pagan poetry, art, philosophy, and rhetoric, to which the Son replies in part:

  Remove their swelling Epithetes thick laid

  As varnish on a Harlots cheek, the rest,

  Thin sown with aught of profit or delight,

  Will far be found unworthy to compare

  With Sion’s songs, to all true tasts excelling,

  Where God is prais’d aright, and Godlike men,

  The Holiest of Holies, and his Saints;

  Such are from God inspir’d, not such from thee;

  (Earlier in this speech the Son also claims that all pagan poetry is the result of imitating the Bible, which makes the suggestion of priority in the passage from Paradise Lost about Mulciber explicit.) All the subtlety of Paradise Lost about art and rhetoric is gone. Instead the poem states its argument bluntly; since the underlying content is incorrect and immoral, any attempt to dress it up is merely “varnish on a Harlots cheek” and must be seen through. And people talk about Paradise Lost as if Milton never wrote stuff like this. —Steve]

• In Commentary, Joseph Epstein reviews Zachary Leader’s biography of Richard Ellman’s biography of James Joyce (Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker, May) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 30, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—May 3, 2025.]:

  Biography has no Poetics. No Aristotle-like figure has come along to lay down the law on how a biography ought to be written. Such law would set out what criteria ought there to be for who is or isn’t qualified as a subject. It would take up the question of whether chronology is always the best organizing principle for biography, and how important should one consider domestic, not to say, sexual life, in the formation of character. These and so many other questions about biography have never received anything like serious consideration, or even discussion. The genre has been left to proceed on its own without a strong theoretical foundation.

  At a minimum, a biography ought to report what the world at large thinks or thought about the subject of the biography, what his or her family and friends thought about him or her, and what he or she thought about him- or herself. But that minimum doesn’t cover anything like all that is needed to write a good biography. A good biography needs somehow to get inside its subject, discover what impressed him, what disappointed him, what pleased, what frustrated him. Through imagination, the great novelists can decipher and display personality and character, and touch on human nature. The biographer, like the detective in the old Dragnet television show, is restricted to “just the facts, ma’am.” He hopes that the facts, brought together and smoothly elided one into the other, like a giant puzzle, will end in supplying the truth of the life he is writing about.

  [I discuss a failure to turn the facts into the truth in What we’re reading below. All these lengthy biographies make me think of the titular character in Barry Lyndon (1975) reporting endless irrelevancies to the Prussian Minister of Police and his nephew so that he can seem to be useful to them without telling them anything of value: “It would be seen that the information he gave was very minute and accurate—though not very important.” Or, more to the point, “if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot.” —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Prying into the life of Joni Mitchell

• Nut grafs: are they good or not?

• K. T. on a Poem by Claudia Emerson and shadows

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by telling your friends about us. —Steve]