WRB—Aug. 9, 2025

“degrading vassalage”

The Newsletter the Experts Cannot Do Without

Links:

• In The Paris Review, an essay adapted from Yiyun Li’s introduction to a new collection of Graham Greene’s work (Duel Duet, August 7):

  There are different ways to talk about Greene’s work. We can focus on the amphitheater of history, where wars, revolutions and colonial intrigues play impersonal gods to the mortals. We can scrutinize the mundane settings waiting for major and minor human dramas to happen—the streets and alleyways of Brighton and Saigon, the unaired offices of London ministry buildings, the manicured suburban gardens, the well-lit casinos and much-visited seaside resorts, the jungles and rivers of Africa and South America. We can also step away from those external settings and enter the interior landscapes of many of his characters, some of them with God on their side, others without; some have time on their side, others not; some with friends or loves or even enemies on their side, others not. But all of them have memories and dreams on their side—a blessing, even if it sometimes masks itself as a curse. And all of them, it seems to me, are only half of a duel or half of a duet, their partners sometimes visible and other times invisible.

Reviews:

• In our sister publication Down Under, Joshua Barnes reviews a book about chapters (The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century, by Nicholas Dames, 2023) [One of Yesterday’s books in WRB—Nov. 8, 2023.]:

  Of course, a whole host of other transformations were needed to make such reading possible: the scroll is first divided into the codex; ancient continuous script is split into discrete words, which are themselves separated uniformly into paragraphs only in the early modern period. Transformations like these are usually treated by book historians as a “Babel allegory,” as Dames put it in The Physiology of the Novel (2007), where the historical development of the book as a technology is told as the story of its fragmentation into smaller and smaller parts (which is often a narrative of progress, too: smaller units make reading more accessible and democratic). The Chapter takes this story of fragmentation one step further: part of Dames’ interest is motivated by the chapter’s final dematerialization and its lingering power as metaphor. The chapter has “become a metalanguage” that describes the different rhythms of social life, from clock time to the lived cadences of the body. One speaks of a new chapter in one’s life—not a new paragraph or a new sentence or, indeed, a new clause. But: “If it still works for us this way,” Dames asks, “for how much longer?” Here, we might be prompted to ask: who in fact is left in this us? Viewed in the less generous glare of media history, and from the perspective of a present less and less oriented towards reading of any kind, the answer is doubtful. If the members of an increasingly postliterate society still measure out their lives in chapters, this may only be a matter of mere habit or convention—in the way that a car’s engine capacity continues to be measured in horsepower.

  [“I have measured out my life with chapter spoons.” There is also the Kierkegaard line about understanding life backwards—although in the days of serialization some novelists were putting in chapter breaks before finishing the novel.

  The person who speaks of a new chapter in his or her life is not merely borrowing language from books; they are making themselves the first-person narrator of an imagined novel, deciding to begin a new chapter at a certain point. (At least, I assume it’s a novel; if the person is thinking of a biography that’s a sign of megalomania.) But, even among the current readers of novels, no one automatically assumes that a novel is the best way, let alone the only way, to tell the story of a life. If not for the inertia of clichés perhaps we would hear of beginning a new scene. —Steve]

• Two in the TLS; first, Andrew Hadfield reviews two books about the sea in Elizabethan drama (Shakespeare, the Sea, and the Stage, by Peter Womack, February; and Fathoming the Deep in English Renaissance Tragedy: Horror, Mystery, and the Oceanic Sublime, by Laurence Publicover, January):

  Fathoming the Deep, too, is a perceptive critical study that recognizes the power of images and the need to explain them. In As You Like It, Rosalind expresses her profound love for Orlando in nautical terms: “that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded: my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.” Her words are perhaps a potent mixture of the touching and the bathetic, but the metaphor is apt, the sea reaching a depth of 1,400 fathoms within 40 metres of the coast, an inhumanly terrifying distance given the human dimension of the six-foot fathom. The fathom features in one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated lyrics, Ariel’s song to Ferdinand when he thinks that his father has drowned. As Publicover explains, the lines “Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made” have a beautiful resonance, but they are disturbing, an unsettling taunt as the spirit reminds Ferdinand of his raw grief and forces him to imagine the unthinkable transformation wrought by the sea on dead bodies, as his father’s bones are turned into coral. The deep—five fathoms is not that far down, but it is water that will drown a person—is a frightening thought for a recently shipwrecked prince. Moreover, “fathoming operates as a master-image within plays whose characters are forever peering into the dark, accessing what is, at best, partial knowledge of whatever lies in the obscure beyond.”

  [I mean, yes, but “Of his bones are coral made” has nothing on “Those are pearls that were his eyes.” (I talked about this line in connection with some recent poetry by Dunya Mikhail in WRB—May 10, 2025.) In high school I was assigned The Waste Land before I was assigned The Tempest (for reasons explained in WRB—Jan. 18, 2025), and, while I remember little about those first initial readings for class, I do remember thinking that it was the coolest and creepiest thing I had ever read. (I still think so.) My initial thought was that the eyeballs had, somehow, turned into pearls, looking something like eyes with no pupil or iris, only white. Some time later the image came to me of the skull situated on top of a vast pile of jewels from the shipwreck, all glittering in a thousand colors, and from a certain angle the eye holes of the skull revealed two large pearls. I am not sure which image I prefer. —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:

• I remonstrate with my friends who didn’t tell me just how funny Excellent Women is

• College football preview magazines, the last place the printed word is honored

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

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]