WRB—Oct. 29, 2025

“image mysteries”

Things unattempted yet in ’sletter or blog

Links:

• In Socrates on the Beach, Steven Moore on Carol Hart:

  On the back cover of A History of the Novel in Ants (2010), Hart describes herself as “a freelance science writer with a rusty PhD in English Literature,” but there’s no rust on this tour de force. Like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Hart’s novel is a multigenerational family saga, with two outlandish differences: it concerns ants rather than humans, and progresses chronologically by way of genres of the novel, as announced by the Table of Contents:

  1. Picaresque Ant 1

  2. Epistolary Ant 35

  3. Gothic Romance Ant 55

  4. Manners Ant 83

  5. Literary Realism Ant 109

  6. Point-of-View Ant 147

  7. Stream-of-consciousness Ant 179

  8. Postwar Dystopian Ant 195

  9. Postmodern Postcolonial Ant 237

  10. Magic Realism Ant 277

  Each chapter begins with a page of scholarly quotations on ants and the featured genre, allowing the novel to function as a tutorial on both ants and the historical development of the novel. The quotations from entomologists are especially useful; nowhere is Coleridge’s call for a “willing suspension of disbelief” more necessary than with an anthropomorphized animal story, yet according to those myrmecologists, humankind has more in common with antkind than expected.

  [Surely someone has written a History of the Novel in Aunts. —Steve]

• In The Paris Review, Rachel Cusk’s introduction to a retelling of Sophoclean tragedies by Kay Cicellis (The Way to Colonos: Sophocles Retold, 1961, December 2):

  The contradiction of myth lies in its eternal submersion of knowledge in the face of experience: it is the proof from which we never learn, the touchstone we only recognize afterwards, when we have already lost our way. By applying this tragic formulation to the ordinariness of the parent-child relationship, Cicellis extracts something of greater boldness and truth from the fictional situation. There can, in other words, be no happy resolution, such as fiction is always tempted to offer; the question of how parents and parent-figures gain and retain their power, and what becomes of the child’s illusion of freedom, is already foretold. In “The Return,” the figures of Electra and Clytemnestra are a mother and daughter locked in a vicious dependency: their mutual loathing is not a springboard to separation but the cyclical expression of a need for love of a kind neither can offer the other. Cicellis’ Antigone, in the title story, has become a jaded liar as the consequence of parental control: “having lived under oppression all her life, deception was in the nature of things. . . . The contractions of appearances had ceased to puzzle her. Misunderstanding had become a definite, but unimportant, necessity; she had found it need no longer exclude reality.”

  [Myths are all ordinary too, and when we invoke them we are not so much (to use Cusk’s phrase) “extract[ing] something of greater boldness and truth from the fictional situation” as we are recognizing the power of the situation at hand. If I say about a story “this reminds me of Electra” or “this is doing such-and-such interesting thing with Electra,” I am attributing to the story a mythic power while also dragging the myth down to the level of the ordinary story. Inasmuch as Ulysses elevates Leopold Bloom it is also poking fun at Odysseus, for example. And if a story is tragic, sometimes life is tragic too. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The Baffler, Mina Tavakoli reviews a history of the past 25 years of culture (Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, by W. David Marx, November 18):

  In Marx’s survey, it’s a long way down. His five-point value system governing the rules of the twenty-first century mutate from simple, established concepts—poptimism and omnivorism—into a new, elaborate schemas of social thought. There’s “Entrepreneurial Heroism,” the idea that Zuckerberg and his legion became valorized by an ethos that puts business savvy on par with artistic genius. There’s the “Counter-Counterculture,” the subversive backlash against poptimism as a liberal ideal, followed closely by the clunky “Digital Norm Evasion,” or how, in an increasingly omnivorous, everything-goes landscape, systems of power and profit have increasingly shielded the wealthy by way of staggering advancements in tech.

  [If these are, in fact, “new, elaborate schemas of social thought,” they are also buzzwords. “Entrepreneurial Heroism”? “Digital Norm Evasion”? A five-point value system? Is this a book or a PowerPoint slide? I know the argument that the prevalence of catchy phrases in discourse is a sign of our return to oral culture (more about this in a piece linked to in Critical notes below). But “catchy phrase that can be expanded on by a person talking if necessary” is also a characteristic of PowerPoint culture, which might just be a specific kind of oral culture. And it is expanded on by a person talking, not additional text; the first time I drafted a PowerPoint in the corporate world and showed it to my boss, she told me that my slides had too many words and nobody would bother to read all of them. You have to put something up there that people will remember. —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:

• My paranoid fears about the books people are recommending to me

• I regret to inform you that the WRB is, once again, the Milton Twice-A-Week (Milton Quarterly? Get those numbers up!)

• A Poem by Yeats, the fall, and migratory birds (not “The Wild Swans at Coole,” although I get there, of course)

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. 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 sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]