Burning Down the House: Simone Weil's Act of Literary Faith

by

Kathryn Kopple

Bridget Bate Tichenor

One fine evening, while doing the washing up, it gloomily occurred to me: if the French philosopher Simone Weil had her way, there would be no world literature, not in the modern Euro-American sense. Over the course of Weil’s short and tortured life, the fact that so little went her way was hardly consoling. She would draft hundreds of pages but, upon her death at age thirty-four, had not finished a single book of philosophy. Instead, from the 1930s through the early 1940s, she published essays and reviews when her teaching schedule allowed. Despite fragile health, she sought out work on farms and in factories. Committed to real-world change, Weil would use her experiences to blend social critique with Christian Platonism. She wrote for the proletariat and the intellectual alike.

While a student at the Lycée Henri-IV, Weil studied under the philosopher Émile Chartier, widely known as Alain. Chartier’s politics were radical, his theory of the mind Cartesian, and his ethics Spinozist. He was also resolutely anti-Freudian — a position he refines in On Happiness, a series of reflections about joy as an act of will. “All thought is a massacre of impressions… Beware of Cassandras, souls lying down. The real man shakes himself and makes the future.”[i] This philosophy of embattlement, what Chartier called the “heroic game,” finds expression throughout Weil’s writings, most notably in her non-conforming individualism. Of equal significance to Weil was Chartier’s maxim: “Pain throws us immediately into metaphysical conceptions.” [ii] He is quick to remind his readers that these conceptions — because they arise when the mind is most inclined to morbid fantasies — are not rational, nor do they constitute a metaphysics. On the contrary, they are “bad metaphors.” Demons, angels, monsters — these are mere figures of speech. Nature is egalitarian when it comes to suffering; its indifference is absolute.

Ever concerned with matters of the soul, Weil could never resign herself to indifference. Such notions instilled in her profound feelings of emptiness. Weil also worried that secularism devoid of spiritual rigor resulted in moral laxity. By 1938, when Weil turned twenty-nine, she had already distanced herself from her mentor. Instead, she embraced a theology that directly addresses philosophies of indifference: suffering as sacrifice and self-abnegation as redemption. What Weil calls “affliction” is our inclusion in Christ’s Passion grounded in sorrow, brokenness, and love.

In 1940, while living as a refugee with her parents in Marseilles, Weil would publish the first of several articles on literature, among them “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.” The essay represents her most extended Christian meditation on violence in literature. Violence, like the law of gravity, is inescapable, but not meaningless — at least not for Homer. Every character in The Iliad is subject to supernatural caprices (destiny), the blows of nature (misfortune), and the recognition of human failings (epiphany). In Weil’s essay, there is only force against which humans struggle — and sacrifice. Although Weil doesn’t explicitly reference Christ in the poem, her interpretation represents an alignment of the Homeric epic with the theology of the Cross.

Weil’s approach is at odds with prevailing interpretations of The Iliad as a great canvas depicting the full range of human experience. But that is precisely Weil’s objection; it is only through the theology of the Cross that the reader discerns the poem’s true greatness. Without the light of Christ, secular literary works risk becoming blunt instruments; they diminish intelligence and deaden the spirit. Put another way, the books we read are never as great as we’ve been taught to believe.

Does this mean great books do not exist? Weil argues as much when she dismisses greatness in favor of goodness. She was antagonistic toward the former and passionate about the latter. But goodness is, as Flannery O’Connor famously observed, hard to find — a viewpoint Weil also shared. In fact, Weil went further: most of what she read horrified her, beginning with The Old Testament. She argued that we, as readers, should be equally horrified. Should we? There are arguments and there are attitudes, and too often Weil allowed attitudes to get the best of her.

Although I am not Weil’s natural reader, I would never dismiss her out of hand. If obscurity leaves an aura, Weil is utterly steeped in it. She lived as one possessed, writing as if she held all the world’s dismal and arcane knowledge. Her powers of spiritual introspection strike us as cavernous. Susan Sontag once described her voice as forceful, but many writers produce strong impressions. Weil is different. Her signature words — gravity, grace, decreation, attention — emit profound echoes, as though we could subject them to endless repetition and never grow weary.

Writing in the 1960s, Sontag could reasonably suggest that we read Weil too vicariously, treating her as the embodiment of “the extreme in art and thought.”[iii] A life lived in extremis undoubtedly offers innumerable voyeuristic pleasures when experienced at a safe distance. But that moment has passed. Today, we keep Weil close as a philosophical companion and spiritual guide. She has become our new Plato.

Where there is literature, there is Plato. Terms like poiesis, mimesis, allegory, framing, and organic unity form the bedrock of a literary terrain that readers traverse whether or not they are conscious of it. When Jorge Luis Borges titled his 1960 collection The Maker, he invokes poiesis to delineate the idea of writing as craftwork. In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” he disrupts Plato’s mimetic logic by illustrating what becomes of texts when defined as copies of reality. In “The Circular Ruins,” he leads the reader deep into Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” In “Borges and I,” he casts himself as a dramatis persona in a Platonic dreamworld. Structurally, his stories are masterpieces of textual framing and organic unity.

Weil never read Borges, of course. Nor can we portray them as philosophical companions, despite their interest in classical literature. Weil’s Plato is ethical and spiritual. Borges’s Plato is individualistic and imaginative. Unlike Weil, Borges never identified as a Christian. When questioned about his beliefs in a 1971 New York Times interview, he responded: “Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.”[iv] Weil would find his response disappointing, but not because she found agnosticism abhorrent. She spoke of her nontheistic upbringing as instrumental to her spiritual growth. Raised in a home where no sacred text was taboo, she was free to read across spiritual disciplines. At one point, she taught herself Sanskrit in order to be able to read The Bhagavad Gita in the original. Krishna greatly inspired her, and she often used his name interchangeably with Christ. But, whereas Borges remained a lifelong agnostic, Weil regarded agnosticism as a stage of spiritual development. Here she diverges completely from the Argentine writer. Weil could never accept, as Borges did, the universe as the playground of the imagination. She would regard it as a moral failing

It is necessary to understand the degree to which Weil rejects imagination, and not simply in literature. Imagination, like sin, leads straight to oblivion. She is the antithesis of Borges, who considered imagination the foundation of all human experience. And yet, Borges, no less than Weil, was profoundly affected by authoritarianism — and, like Weil, he developed an abiding distrust of political parties, statism, and nationalism. Neither writer falls easily into left versus right politics. Nor did Weil wish to be pigeon-holed. She rejected oppositional binaries as a nexus of delusional thinking. But, where Weil sees intractable problems, Borges finds opportunities. In Weil’s ideal library, there would be no place for Borges.

Always sensitive to suffering, Weil constantly subjects literary works to human-cost analysis. Not surprisingly, the odds for literature are not in its favor; a book is never worth more than a life. She makes this point adamantly clear in several essays, and most famously in The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Toward Mankind. Weil drafted her declaration while living in London and working for the Free French Resistance. Published posthumously, it was not well-received, particularly by those for whom liberté, égalité, fraternité constituted the Republic’s imperishable and sovereign framework. Weil had no wish to restore the Republic — or rather, return to a country where political institutions went hand in hand with force. Any law that owed its existence to violence must be met with the greatest skepticism — a position that Weil held with regard to France’s judiciary, which operated under the auspices of rights.

Whenever speaking of human rights, Weil insists, we must listen to ourselves. Do I, as a literary specialist and translator, use the language of human rights to inflate the importance of my arguments? How many times, over the course of my long education, have I described literature in terms of agency, empowerment, and liberation? What is it that I am protecting when I argue in defense of literature? And, by literature, I refer to forgotten, maligned, or censored authors. The answer is that I have done so extensively, if not voluminously. My critical vocabulary is replete with defamiliarization, subversion, and transgression. I am schooled in artifice and affectation. I am on familiar, if uneasy, terms with Isidore Lucien Ducasse’s Les Chants de Maldoror. One of my operative assumptions underscores how old, queer books add meaning to our lives. I also believe I am precisely the kind of literary advocate Weil refers to when she observes: “Isn’t it high time it were proclaimed that every discernible crime is a punishable one, and that we are resolved, if given the opportunity, to punish all crimes?”[v]

At first glance, Weil seems to invoke the Napoleonic penal code of outrage aux bonnes mœurs, or affront to public decency. Under the laws, writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire were subject to censure, fines, and stigmatization. Weil, however, would have gone further, condemning any literary work as criminal that involves a crime against the intelligence. “Generally speaking, all problems to do with freedom of expression are clarified if it is posited that this freedom is a need of the intelligence, and that intelligence resides solely in the human being, individually considered.”[vi] Reading these words, I imagine Weil looking on in satisfaction as I am carted off to prison.

On matters of prestige, Weil is equally uncompromising. In The Need for Roots, she describes prestige as conquest and theft masquerading as honor: “All oppression creates a famine in regard to the need of honor, for the noble traditions possessed by those suffering oppression go unrecognized, through lack of social prestige.”[vii] Literature is not an innocent bystander. Either a literary work stands for intelligence, or it does not, and by intelligence Weil hopes to suppress imaginative excess. Is there any role for the imagination in literature, then? Weil’s response: “In no matter what circumstances (but sometimes at the price of how great a degradation!) imagination can fill the void. This is why average human beings can become prisoners, slaves, prostitutes and pass through no matter what suffering without being purified.”[viii]

Literature is not spiritually pure, nor can it be. Weil, however, is never above asking us to make impossible choices. Either we engage in radical sacrifice or subject ourselves to hapless attempts to fill the existential void. Any aesthetic mischief in a world of agony is obscene — a point she makes in “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.” The essay offers a stunning defense of Greek “genius” if not literature. She is also at her most stringent when advocating for scraps of literature while she castigates Rome together with The Old Testament. In “Simone Weil, a Friend of Job,” Mark Larrimore strikes at the heart of the problem: “Weil is unsparing in her condemnation of language’s inability to convey the good.”[ix] Larrimore accepts this as a “terrible fact.” Must we?

Facts do, of course, matter; they mattered to Weil. She grew up in Paris, the epicenter of the manifesto, slogan, and advertisement. While Trotsky could defend Bolshevik propaganda with catchy phrases like “all revolutions are verbose,” Weil would not. She too witnessed chaos firsthand: Dadaists and surrealists churning out manifestoes in their sleep (literally), and littering the streets of Paris with them while commerce-driven magazines treated literature as disposable content. The sight of a poem by Paul Valéry side by side with an advertisement for beauty cream disgusted her. She detested violent rhetoric and its power to incite. We forget how young she was, only twenty-two, when she met Georges Bataille, one of the head priests of transgression. He would not be the first to write her into a novel. And he, like so many who passed her way, instilled in her a visceral and abiding sense of moral outrage. So, she spoke out.

In “Literature and Morals,” Weil argues against everything for which the avant-garde stood. The essay’s exemplary first paragraph can be traced to St. Augustine: “Nothing is so beautiful, marvelous, ever new, ever surprising, so full of sweet and continual delight, as the good.” Weil then follows Augustine’s argument straight to God, who is pure Good. Literature, on the other hand, is impure; it is mixed with evil and, therefore, offers us at best a mixed image of the good. As for attaining pure good, literature can only fail. But that hardly excuses an author from seeking out the good in its purest earthly form. To do anything less is to risk immorality. “Writers and readers for their part will passionately cry out that immorality is not an aesthetic criterion,” Weil argues. “But here they need to prove, which they have never done, that one should only apply aesthetic criteria to literature.” She goes on: “… it is impossible that literature should exempt itself from the categories of good and evil under which all human activities are subsumed.”[x] Worse yet, literature functions in the service of evil by making the good dull, unappealing, even ridiculous. The best literature, she argues, must turn our minds towards God, if only to illuminate the suffering caused by the absence of the good.


Safe to say, Weil was not a casual reader. Where faith is concerned, she read as if her soul depended on it. Weil revered George Herbert’s “Love (III).” The poem’s tenderness awoke within her a presence previously absent in her life: caritas Christi. Other literary works had a similar — if not mystical — effect on her: The Divine Comedy, The Bhagavad Gita, Prometheus Bound. Weil’s tastes were specific, but she was not unique. Literature often strikes us as transcendent, as something other and difficult to put into everyday language. Paradoxically, this thing called literature, which is after all made up of utterances, has the power to leave us speechless. It is that power that causes Weil to describe true literature as a form of prayer. The same could be said of Ducasse’s Maldoror. It’s hard to read the book and not want to go down on one’s knees. If there is a Weilian angle here, it is that we should all pray for more salubrious books.

Weil may have been enough of a heterodox thinker to allow writers certain freedoms in their pursuit of their God, but not the good. What admirers call her “Christ-haunted” rhetoric is not at all haunted, nor is it fair to describe her as such — as though she were a character in a Flannery O’Connor story. Weil was Christ-centered, even Christ-obsessed. If anyone haunted her, it was Marx. We can always argue that Weil set only the highest standards for literature, and that what she yearned for in literature she yearned for in herself. Still, literature cannot survive her — not the literature that emerged from the heavy weight of industrialization, modern warfare, and technocracy. Much of what Weil detests in literature tasks the reader to question core principles of idealism, a philosophy she held dear. To argue otherwise is to willfully ignore Weil’s insistence on eternal values and their absolute role in human affairs. It is to subject ourselves to endless readings of George Herbert’s “Love (III).” This reader couldn’t survive it, and by refusing to go along she risks being told she simply hasn’t suffered enough, that she has left the “terrible fact” of literature untouched. But then, that would be true for most anyone who disagrees with Weil. She is a formidable opponent. She deserves the seriousness she elicits. Who else but Weil could so eloquently hold our feet to the fire?


NOTES


[i] Alain, On Happiness, translated by Robert D. Cottrell and Jane E. Cottrell, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1989

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Susan Sontag, “Simone Weil,” The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963, accessed July 2, 2026.

[iv] Israel Shenker, “Borges, a Blind Writer With Insight,” The New York Times, April 6, 1971, accessed July 2, 2026

[v] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. Arthur Wills, London: Routledge, 2002, digital edition.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, Routledge Classics, 2002.

[ix] Mark Larrimore, “Simone Weil, Friend of Job,” Public Seminar, December 7, 2016, accessed July 2, 2026.

[x] Simone Weil, “Literature and Morals,” in Late Philosophical Writings, ed. Eric O. Springsted, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davis, Benjamin P. Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.

Pétrement, Simone. Simone Weil: A Life. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.

Plato. Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.

Weil, Simone. Late Philosophical Writings. Edited by Eric O. Springsted. Translated by Eric O. Springsted and Lawrence E. Schmidt. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.

Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills. London: Routledge, 2002. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. Routledge Website.

Astral Weeks: A ‘guide’ that perplexes

by

Ed Park

The late Douglas Adams’ unstoppably popular 1979 novel, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (HG2G), is about, among other things, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” “one of the most remarkable books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor,” an idiosyncratic interstellar how-to for those interested in hitching rides on spaceships and generally surviving on 30 Altairian dollars a day. What does it mean when a book about an extraordinary book itself becomes an extraordinary book?

The astonishing success of Adams’ novel is both understandable and surprising. (How astonishing? Try 20 million copies astonishing.) He based the first two books (the second is the even better “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” published a year later) on his successful BBC radio series, and there’s something about that medium’s disembodied vocalizing that gets carried over into the text, a voice-of-god vibe that allows for gently ironic, smoothly cosmicomic zoom-outs that comment on and complement the various adventures of its main characters: Arthur Dent (seemingly the sole human to survive the destruction of Earth), Ford Prefect (“roving researcher” for the “Guide”), Zaphod Beeblebrox (two-headed, triple-armed president of the galaxy and all-around spaced-out sybarite) and Trillian (née Tricia McMillan, the other persevering homo sapien).

Adding to the addictive fun is the “Jabberwocky” approach to alien names and linguistics (most potently in the sample of Vogon poetry -- the third worst in the universe), and last but not least Adams’ uncanny ability to mint T-shirt-ready phrases, dream up unforgettable metaphors: The Babel fish (a creature that, when put in the ear, allows you to understand any language, as the thing feeds off incoming brain waves and excretes information into your brain); “Don’t panic” (the HG2G’s motto); the importance of carrying a towel; the cosmic import of the phrase “We apologize for the inconvenience”; 42 (the surprisingly terse answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything); Deep Thought (the supercomputer built to calculate the question to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything); and a handful more.

I love how the description of the Guide itself, 30 years on, sounds infinitely less fantastic:

“[Ford Prefect] had a device that looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. . . . The reason why it was published in the form of a micron sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.”

This description, written back when a line about humans being “so amazingly primitive they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea” would feel au courant, now easily conjures a hand-held device, something like a Kindle crossed with a Blackberry.

Eoin Colfer’s slackly titled “And Another Thing . . . “  (Hyperion) is the authorized continuation of the series. In theory, it’s altogether fitting that the so-called Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, which had self-consciously overflowed to five titles by the time of Adams’ sudden death in 2001, should live on. After all, nothing is impossible in the HG2G universe. Death and destruction need not be permanent: The titular eatery in “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” is “built on the future remains of an eventually ruined planet . . . projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe” -- the ultimate dining experience, at once unique and endlessly repeated.

But whereas Adams could make the verb tenses involved with the restaurant’s existence a cause for laughter-induced panting, Colfer starts his installment promisingly but ultimately can’t match Adams’ brilliant insouciance or his knack for memorable inventions.

It’s a tall order, of course, and Colfer, author of the “Artemis Fowl” books, tries hard to keep the atmosphere antic. A welcome off-the-cuffness greets the skeptical Earthbound reader, returning to this fictional world after many years. (The last Hitchhiker book Adams wrote, “Mostly Harmless,” came out 17 years ago.) Colfer frames “And Another Thing . . . “ by asking the reader to imagine scrolling through the legendary “Guide,” now equipped with all sorts of audiovisual bells and whistles, and then clicking onto the text-only appendix. “This is the story of that appendix,” he writes, in a nice anticlimactic flourish.

But as this book wore on, I started to question not only the whole idea of having another hand (albeit a game and successful-in-his-own-right one) adding to the universe of a beloved author, but also why the parties involved didn’t think, as it were, outside of the book.

“Mostly Harmless” was published well before the advent of e-books, and while I’m as anxious about this new technology as the next paste-and-paper devotee, I can’t help but wonder whether Douglas Adams, the technophile, would have tried to utilize the electronic platform to reimagine what a book -- specifically, a Hitchhiker book -- could be. (Among other medium-bending exploits, Adams authored an Infocom text-game version of HG2G, as well as a more complex computer game called Starship Titanic, which I still don’t quite understand.)

“And Another Thing . . . “ punctuates its increasingly tedious story line with entries from the “Guide,” some of which show a glimmer of Adams-like spark. What if Colfer had let Arthur, Zaphod and company rest in peace and, instead, given us some approximation of the “Guide” itself? Rather than follow the pesky rules of plot, Colfer might have created something truly anarchic, in the spirit of the original, but in a form Adams could only dream of.

A book consisting only of discrete entries might sound daunting, but, in fact, the structure would be liberating. And any time the reader got confused, a button could be depressed, and those two beautiful words -- DON’T PANIC! -- would come swimming out of the e-ink ether.

Credits:  Ed Park is a founding editor of the Believer and the author of the novel “Personal Days.” Astral Weeks appears monthly at latimes.com/books.  This essay was originally published in 2009 and culled from https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-nov-01-la-caw-astral-weeks1-2009nov01-story.html

Code GCzero22…n

by

Peter Cowlam

Michael Whelan, Conference in the Clouds

The meeting broke up shortly after five, and I still did not know what I could and could not say. As I pulled from the parking lot the sun, a dazzle in my windshield, had touched the summit of the distant Mt Naganui. Its snowy peak was a momentary gold corona. The guard at the gate, with a brush of fingertips to his temple – that was the standard salute – nodded me through, and lifted the bar. I drove to the foot of the mountain, then up its winding road, a metalled way that soon gave out where the gravel began. 

An orange haze settled itself and was quickly absorbed into the shadow of mountain ferns, palms and pines, that whole vista precipitate as I looked from the edge of the trail, where in places the barrier had broken. I refixed my gaze on the track ahead, with little sense of its safety, and motored on in that cloak of darkness. That tense monotony was broken only when I met a lone car coming down, its headlights bobbing towards me. It killed its beam as it passed, edging slowly, tentatively round. I dipped my headlights likewise. Then I was truly alone, upwards into the wilds of Naganui’s mountain bush – rockfalls to the nearside, a dizzying gorge to the other. I hugged the inside curve.

But I got there, up near the summit, where it was cloudy, starless. I circled round and began my descent to the mountain’s other side. At that point I thought a lone star had come out, low on the horizon, in hue a gem-like silvery magenta, bright against the sooty backdrop of the night sky. The thing got bigger as I approached, showing itself gradually as not a heavenly body, but a machine with rotating lights – silver, magenta, in a regular beat and pattern – little points of spinning strobes – mesmeric. 

I got within thirty metres and knew it as a UAP, static above the track. It cast a cone of tawny reddish light on the gravel and surrounding vegetation. In that shimmer and corrugation of unnatural light I made out a figure, in the dazzle of the suit it wore – again, a silvery magenta. It was Homo sapiens-like, striding towards my car, where I had stopped, with the engine running – a gentle purr. As it got closer, a looming, ghostly, other-worldly being, my engine spontaneously cut. The electrics went haywire. The lights dimmed before they extinguished completely. The radio crackled, and fell silent. The figure – more cyborg than organic – came up nonchalantly and stood menacingly at my driver door. Slowly, deliberately, it extended one of six digits on the hook of its hand and touched my window, miraculously activating enough of the car’s electrics that the window wound down. The thing had difficulty speaking English. ‘You will go,’ it said, and then, in a series of staccato instructions, with great effort described a beach residence not far distant. There I would find one of the country’s former premiers and deliver a simple code – a string of alphanumerics, too long to reproduce here, but in shorthand GCzero22…n. 

I protested. What did it mean? And why me? I was a roving reporter, trying to keep intact my blog behind a paywall – not more than a hack really, who owed his living to Grub Street. Nevertheless, I had a reputation for the fantastic twist I gave to my stories, which always proved credible. This presence at my window seemed to know all about that, perhaps telepathically aware that I had come to this attractive island nation looking for a scoop. I considered that no Western authority would ever believe, as I believed, that Naganui was on the brink of manoeuvring itself into a brokerage for peace. Did it not have a lesson to teach the warring militias of the north? In fact did it not have something to say to all of us slave to the world’s warmongers? The answer was probably yes, though by now much had unravelled, and had not gone as planned. The premier here was about to lose the election, and had learned a lesson from us, from the West, and threatened a coup. I had soon discovered that in fear of retribution no one in Naganui wanted to talk politics, so I had failed with the story I’d come for. Except now I had this cyborg, with the hook of its hand gripping my doorframe. Again, it had difficulty speaking, with its robotic, clanking voice—

‘The ex-premier…’ it stuttered.

 

I worked out, with careful, close attention, that those of a distant star had observed how politicians here on planet Earth were able to speak sense only after retiring from politics, when the rhetoric of party loyalty – or key to career advancement – was no longer necessary. My mission was to approach Naganui’s previous and now ex-premier, Esala Lau, and deliver what the cyborg said was the GC code Lau would have carried with him during his time in office. Perilously, this was the only sequence to bring about a de-escalation, and put a stop to the coming nuclear exchange. It was madness, yes, but the outcome hinged on General Rockefeller Blitts, who controlled and filtered all intelligence in the north’s grabs and counter land grabs, his theatre of manouvres. Blitts had already hinted to his president and commander in chief that a nuclear first strike was his only viable option. In all probability, preparations were already under way. Code GCzero22…n – a sequence known to only three persons on the planet – constituted the one countermanding instruction, the one vital piece of information whose utterance would prevent a global conflagration. 

‘You must contact Mr Esala Lau. He is to make the presidential phone call. He knows the number. He knows the GC code.’ The world would burn without his intervention.

‘How will I know this – what is it – this beach property?’ I asked.

I wasn’t to fret. My satnav had been reset, I was told. Vicarious as my authority was, I could be sure of its recognition in relating that GC code to Naganui’s former leader. That’s all I had to do. The cyborg ambled back to its craft, where in a blinding light it levitated, with a jerking motion, up to a door that slid open. That UAP as it hung in the sky increased the repetition of its lights – silver, magenta – and in an instant disappeared, leaving behind a patch of blackened gravel, and a withering of bronzed pines and palm fronds. My engine restarted. The lights came up. The satnav spoke, resetting its destination. I drove. I careered along a stretch of shoreline, where the beach had been fenced off and put into private hands. Across the drive of my intended address was an iron gate, between two enormous marble pillars, each inscribed with an initial: a G, a C. The gate was locked. I spoke into the intercom, and got for reply a slurred voice, background laughter, the chink of glasses, other voices, a party going on, a hint of roaring surf, and saw in the distance a well-lit glass and timber chalet. I explained my errand. ‘No gatecrashers,’ I was told. This was a private party, and the intercom went dead. I buzzed and buzzed. No reply. I stepped back, and saw on the whole north horizon a terrific flash of silver and magenta, and a mushroom cloud as that took shape.

About the Author:  Peter Cowlam is a poet and novelist. He has won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction twice, most recently in 2018 for his novel New King Palmers, which is at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates. His latest novel, That Was Hugo Blythe MP, published earlier this year, is a satire on English politics and political life. His latest collection of poems, Ghosts in the Machine, brings together original poems in English alongside their translations into Italian, translations by Angela D’Ambra. His novella, A Forgotten Poet, has been produced as an audiobook, narrated by the noted operatic baritone and voice actor Charles Johnston. Peter Cowlam is the Literary Editor at Ars Notoria (aneditions.com).

Juicy As a Pear: Wanda Gág’s Delectable Books

 by

Alice Gregory

Last month, a couple I’m friends with had their first child. She is small and red and cute. This fragrant, strange, round-eyed creature has sent me searching for the books I loved as a kid, even the half-remembered ones, so that I can buy them for her when she comes of age. I’ve done a lot of inelegant Googling in the past few weeks: “elephant roller skates baby brother” turned out to be a weirdly effective search. “Candied fruit wedding cake immigrants children’s book” was not.

The book that my younger sister and I read the most, though, isn’t one I’ll ever forget. Out of print, with only one library copy in circulation where I grew up, Wanda Gág’s “The Funny Thing” had, for my sister and me, an air of exotic pleasure. We’d check it out, renew it as many times as the library allowed, and then wait a month before requesting it again. My father finally took “The Funny Thing” to Kinko’s and had a spiral-bound version printed especially for us.

“The Funny Thing,” published in 1929, is, like Wanda Gág’s other books for children, fairy-tale familiar but also strange and unforgettably specific. It tells the story of “a good little man of the mountain” named Bobo, who lives in a cozy, well-appointed cave and spends all his time cooking customized, delicious-sounding meals for the local animals: nut cakes for the squirrels, seed puddings for the birds, cabbage salads for the rabbits, cherry-sized cheeses for the mice. One day, a haughty, evil-seeming, dragonlike entity named the Funny Thing—a self-described “aminal”—appears and requests a meal made of doll heads, his staple food. Bobo, aghast, refuses, and instead offers him what he feeds the other creatures.

The Funny Thing pooh-poohs it all. Bobo, pitying all the children who would be deprived of their dolls if he did what was asked of him, comes up with a solution. Mixing together a pantry of ingredients, Bobo rolls a motley dough into something he calls a “jum-jill.” He offers it to the Funny Thing, saying it’ll make his tail longer and the blue spikes on his back more beautiful. The Funny Thing, as vain as he is hungry, wriggles his tail “with a pleased motion,” looks down modestly, and rolls “foolishly” on the ground. He agrees to eat the jum-jill, finds it delectable, and smacks his lips with satisfaction. The personalized treat effectively gets the Funny Thing to quit eating doll heads, and the story ends with him sitting atop a mountain, spiky blue tail curling down “contentedly,” eating jum-jills that are delivered to him, one at a time, by a procession of small birds.

“The Funny Thing” is not unlike Gág’s other children’s books. “Millions of Cats,” the oldest American picture book still in print, is a macabre story of an old man with dangerous hoarding instincts and a mass of “millions and billions and trillions of cats” who eat each other until there is only one left. “Gone Is Gone” is a proto-feminist fable about a husband who doesn’t want to do any housework; the book’s climax involves the family cow hanging from the roof, choked by a rope, “her eyes bulging and her tongue hanging out.”

Needless to say, I found all this extremely appealing. Like most children, my taste was perverse; I gravitated toward impish protagonists who played mischievous tricks, threw fits, and caused general mayhem. I liked catastrophes, meanness, and terrible messes. “All successful children’s literature has a conspiratorial element,” John Updike wrote in 1976. It’s true: many, if not most, children’s books presuppose a common enemy in the form of the parent, the one who assigns chores and impinges upon fun. The narrator and the child reader are a united front against grownups. Unimaginative parents aren’t the source of conflict in Gág’s books, but I remember her selfish characters, vaguely morbid plots, and almost edibly appealing language lending the impression that to appreciate the books was to be part of a special cabal.

Though the sinister weirdness of her work seems out of step with contemporary children’s entertainment, which is often sanitized and moralistic, Gág’s stories are not without precedent. We all know that the original versions of fairy tales are stunningly gory, filled with self-mutilation, rape, and draconian retribution (a bride is dragged naked through the streets inside a barrel lined with nails; a queen is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes; stepsisters get their eyes pecked out by birds). They were didactic texts meant to be read as cautionary tales.

“We make the assumption that anything violent and dark is necessarily inappropriate for children, but that’s what they often gravitate to,” Leonard Marcus, a historian of children’s literature, said. He included Gág’s work in a recent exhibition he curated at the New York Public Library. “But children have a self-censoring mechanism. They’ll either ignore or blank out items that are too much for them.”

It’s easy to imagine a Bavarian patriarch embellishing the most gruesome local crime stories as a means of getting his beloved daughters to heel closely and stay away from suspicious men. What’s harder to picture is a modern woman named Wanda thinking up stories about animal massacre and masochistic, cave-dwelling hermits. But Gág, as Marcus said, “came from a folklore tradition where that sort of dark storytelling was taken as a matter of course.”

Growing up, I never wondered about Wanda Gág; I just liked her books. But recently it occurred to me to be curious. Who was she? What kind of last name is that? Were my sister and I unusual in liking “The Funny Thing,” or did other kids like it, too?

Wanda Gág, Fairy Story

There were, it turned out, answers. Wanda Gág kept a diary, which she published, in 1940, under the title “Growing Pains.” The story of her life appeals to me today in the same way her books did two decades ago. It reads like a fairy tale, with a wily heroine who lives amidst death and disease, and who handles fiascos with aplomb.

The oldest of five children, Wanda Hazel Gag (the accent was a later addition) was born in New Ulm, Minnesota, in 1893. It was a cold winter, and her parents—immigrants from Bohemia and Germany—were burdened not just with a newborn baby but also by a series of rented rooms, all of which were infested with bedbugs. Gág’s father, Anton, worked as a commercial photographer; her sickly, “birdlike” mother was his assistant.

Despite her destitute childhood—she shared a single sweater with her sister—Wanda wrote in a journal that it struck her, later in life, as “rather ‘story-bookish’ to be poor.” She was creative and resourceful and generally kept herself entertained. Wanda earned the nickname Inky because she was always drawing, and she was such an avid reader that a doctor, worried about her tired eyes, once consigned her to a dark room for an entire week.

In New Ulm, the Gag family lived in an immigrant enclave known as Goosetown, where older members of the community eagerly regaled the local children with folk tales, imported from Europe and embellished with time. In her diary, a young Wanda wrote that listening to such stories gave her “a tingling, anything-may-happen feeling … the sensation of being about to bite into a big juicy pear.”

From an early age, Wanda entered and won local art competitions, and earned extra money illustrating place cards for local society ladies to put out at dinner parties. Despite having to drop out of high school after her father’s death, she went to the University of Minnesota to study art, her tuition paid for by a pair of supportive patrons. She stayed for a few years, but her mother grew ill and became an alcoholic, thanks to a doctor who prescribed her a daily tonic of beer, and once again Wanda was forced to interrupt her education. She worked for a time as a schoolteacher, piling her hair on top of her head to appear taller and more authoritative to her small pupils.

Life didn’t pick up for grown-up Gág until she won a scholarship to the Arts Students League in New York City. She moved east, lived in a boarding house, and obsessively went to all of Manhattan’s best museums. She cut her hair into a glossy modern bob and added the European-looking mark to her surname. While studying in New York, she took on commercial work: painting lampshades and doing fashion illustrations, mostly of “stylish stouts” (the nineteen-twenties equivalent of sketching for Lane Bryant), whom she preferred to the thin, flapper-era “artificial females” who she alternately referred to as “simpering misses” and “fashionable ghostlings.”

Meanwhile, she cultivated her own artistic practice. Her drawings from this period are of humble objects—chairs, stoves, frying pans—as well as of bucolic scenes. Despite the familiarity of her subject matter, her artistic sensibility seemed sui generis. Her lines were wiggly; her compositions appeared to sag in a way that made them look almost hallucinogenic. In 1925, a gallery owner saw her work, bought it en masse, put it on display, and sold it all. Gág used the windfall to rent a farmhouse in Connecticut, where she created a body of new work that was given a solo show and met with rave reviews. The New York Post called her perspective “delicious”; in The New Yorker, a writer remarked that “when you see Wanda Gág’s [work] you will jump.”

At the same time Gág began having success with her art, publishers were beginning to set up separate divisions for illustrated children’s books. In 1928, Gág was offered a contract for her “cat book,” a story she wrote and illustrated with the blackest ink she could find, using two cats named Snoopy and Snookie as models; her brother did the lettering. When “Millions of Cats” was published, in September of that year, it sold well, and continuted to do so throughout the Great Depression. Gág never had to worry about money again.

Two years earlier, the English painter William Nicholson had published “Clever Bill,” a wildly popular children’s book about a little girl forced to pack up all her toys. Its success primed the industry for visually sophisticated books for children. In the years after the First World War, there was a burgeoning sense that America needed to stop relying on the United Kingdom and Europe for its art. Simultaneously, libraries were creating children’s reading rooms, where librarians specially trained in children’s literature organized story hours and helped young readers find books. This new trend furthered demand for the genre.

In 1929, Gág published “The Funny Thing,” which also sold well, especially for the time. But when her publisher asked for another book, she refused. Gág thought of children’s books as commercial work, and she didn’t want to get trapped in a cycle of churning them out. Half a decade later, Gág was lending money to family members and going on book tours; her art hung in museums, and newspapers were writing stories about her. She wrote a few more books and began translating Grimms’ Fairy Tales, importing her characteristic specificity. In her translation of Cinderella, the stepsisters, in preparing for the ball, “plaster their pimples and cover their scars with moons and starts and hearts.” They wear “bells that tinkled” and “little birds’ wings” and “jeweled darts.” When, in 1937, Disney made “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” Gág was disappointed. She found it too saccharine. Her own fairy tales, she insisted, were “not baby stuff.”

Although Gág lived with her partner for most of her adult life, she didn’t marry until the age of fifty, and then only because her husband’s career demanded it. Shortly after the wedding, Gág died of lung cancer; her ashes were scattered along the path to her studio.

The best children’s books aren’t the ones that impart moral lessons. The best children’s books are the ones that plant indelible memories and teach by way of detail: Madeline’s removed appendix; the “grisly” pigeon that Eloise yells at until he flies over to the Sherry Netherland. Who knows what a young reader will glom onto and why; a growing mind is populated arbitrarily. Great children’s-book authors seem to intuitively understand this, and they lace their work with minutia. Gág’s stories are written and illustrated with precision. I learned the word “homely” from “Millions of Cats,” and, thanks to “The Funny Thing,” I grew up desperately wanting a manual egg beater. Compile enough of these tidbits and you get a sensibility, a vocabulary, a certain set of predilections. This is what I think about when I imagine how much fun it will be to ply my friends’ new baby with books. Will she remember the same things I did? Will she live her life curious about nut cakes, too? Probably not. But I’ll give her a complete set of Wanda Gág books. She’ll read them, and hopefully ferret away some strange thing to remember, years later, with delight.

Note:  This article appeared in April 2014 in The New Yorker.

Rosh Hashanah 2024

by

Zakayah bat Sarah v'Yosef

I became a member of a small, progressive synagogue in June 2023. Already, I identified as a person of Jewish heritage. My father was Jewish. I spent much of my childhood visiting my Jewish relatives. I spent most Saturdays with my Jewish grandmother. It was through them that I absorbed the culture, history and aspirations of Jewish life.

Nonetheless, many years would pass before I sought to formally convert to Judaism. I was inspired to do so by my eldest daughter. In her final year of college, she embarked on her own Jewish journey. I assumed that, being young, she might be experimenting. All these years later, she has proved me wrong. My daughter is Jewish in body and soul. When I was struggling with my decision to convert after October 7th, it was my daughter who said to me, Judaism is your birthright. It is a beautiful thing.

Marc Chagall, The War

In a world devastated by war, beauty is a privilege. Recently, my youngest child came to me and asked for a list of books on the history of antisemitism in Europe. Tears welled in her eyes. I asked her if something had happened. Tragically, something had happened. Someone dear to her was grieving a friend who had died in an Israeli airstrike. He was sad and angry. He had very little context for Israel’s actions. The history of the Jews in Europe was not something his family talked about; nor was the scope of antisemitism taught in school. He wanted to understand. I told my youngest to tell her friend that I would keep him in my prayers.

I then drew up the list of books, though I found doing so deeply troubling. What in those books could help that boy? If the world were other, I would not tell him about the 1946 Kielce Pogrom. I would share with him everything I have learned on my journey from being a person of Jewish heritage to a Jewish person. The great joy we take in creation and renewal–and a life in which we make a conscious, many times difficult decision, to commit each and every day to gratitude and service even in the darkest of times.

Note:  Having completed a year-long conversion process, the author was asked to give a brief presentation about what it was like to enter into covenant with the Jewish people after October 7th.  

Line Boil: The Sad and Beautiful World of Don Hertzfeldt

 

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

 

 

With latex-covered fingers tugging hard at my tired mouth, the dentist informed me I had chipped a front tooth. Strange. I hadn’t noticed. So much had happened. COVID happened. We went into lockdown. My mother passed away. My marriage was frayed—and there were my children. My eldest child was a teacher and risked infection every day on the job. I watched my youngest struggle through year one and two of college masking, blood testing and isolating in her cellblock dorm room. A slightly chipped tooth was a blip in comparison, though it did provoke my dentist to say, “I can fix that for you.” I declined. I forgot.

Until, after many years, I went to see It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012) by Don Hertzfeldt. I left a sold-out screening at the Bourse in Philadelphia in a semi-hallucinatory state to wake the next morning with an overwhelming urge to write Don about my tooth. Only Don, one of our pre-eminent independent animators, could do my tooth justice. He had the vision, the uncanny ability to take a chipped incisor and mine it for all it was aesthetically worth: health, age, appearance, neglect, pain, loss, money… the list ballooning, my tooth floating off into space where Don would turn it into a star, a planet, a flash of radiance. Perhaps the rest of my body would follow. Or as often happens in Hertzfeldt’s films, I remain earthbound, where I grow less round, more ragged—a boiling outline of myself. 

The line boil is one of Hertzfeldt’s signatures. Creatives across the internet go off in search of tutorials to give their animations that “Hertzfeldt look.” A line boil, to get technical, appears when animation frames are imperfectly aligned causing the image to quiver, wobble, stray. Hertzfeldt uses the line boil to give his hand-drawn stick figures a certain aura, an impression of existing in an energy field that could decimate or dissolve at any moment. Mortality is the uncomfortable truth where Hertzfeldt dwells, though never resigned to fate. Operatic comes to mind. His other mode consists of absurd shorts such as Wisdom Teeth, a film best described as male bonding of a tortuous, oral nature.

Where mortality looms large, say adios to innocence. Hertzfeldt’s characters stumble from frame-to-frame straining to keep their wide-eyed childhood selves from being crushed underfoot like a bug. The small-child-vast-universe trope has earned him comparisons to Franz Kafka, most notably by Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle in the article “Beautiful Bitter.” “Hertzfeldt's films have always been weirdly affecting creations, Kafka-esque odes to our fragile human condition… Watch enough of Hertzfeldt's animated existential angst grenades, and you're likely to need a good, stiff drink and a hug from your mom.”

True enough. As we drove home after seeing It’s Such a Beautiful Day, the mood in the car was solemn. I distracted my daughter by talking about a conversation I overheard. Three friends in the row behind us passed the time before the movie discussing cereal. Favorite flavor? Dried strawberries and yogurt clusters. What about chocolate? Yeah, absolutely. Granola? Only when in the mood. One of the friends remembered being rushed to the hospital because he had choked on Cheerios while watching either Fantasia or Moulin Rouge at age four. The banter was silly, but oh so serious. My youngest shrugged. “They are cerealists. Nothing wrong with that.” A generous appraisal given she finds cereal disgusting.

Hertzfeldt’s humor leans hard into anti-comedy. His student film Billy’s Balloon (1998) is a send up of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 Le ballon rouge. Lamorisse’s film centers on a boy named Pascal and a magical red balloon; together they transcend the terrors of the Parisian playground. Boiled down to its basic components, the film is a love story. In Billy’s Balloon… well, let us say the balloon takes no prisoners: it is a punching bag bent on revenge. Of course, that is my take. Viewers have seen in the film a story about everything from child abuse to an “anti-pollution campaign.” Other audiences have found serious humor in the film’s resistance to grand interpretations. Dreadful things happen “just because.” It is the “just because,” a version of Kurt Vonnegut’s catchphrase “so it goes,” that kicks the film into the chasms of the absurd.

For all his merrily, dark pranksterism, Hertzfeldt isn’t solely after laughs. Trauma begets trauma begets trauma. Or, in Hertzfeldt, black and white footage of waves crashing against the rocks. The relentless trauma cycle can make Hertzfeldt tough going even for someone such as myself—a viewer steeped in the dark, twisted arts of surrealists, absurdists, futurists (you name it). I keep a copy of The Theatre of Cruelty by Antonin Artaud on my bedside just in case I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. I have written long, tedious essays on Isidore Ducasse, the infamous Lautremont, whose Maldoror belongs on the shelf marked “depraved” if ever a book did. Still, it becomes too easy to push Hertzfeldt in Lautreamont’s direction. He is cast as the epitome of “outsider” art, which is a euphemism for mad as a Hatter on multiple anti-psychotics. Hertzfeldt’s storytelling, though, is equal to his vision—and the same world in which we suffer and die is also the world in which we live, love, and love more. As one of his most quoted lines from the acclaimed World of Tomorrow (2015) goes: “Now is the envy of all the dead.” If you have ever felt helpless during a pandemic with a chipped incisor and brain fog from dowsing everything in chlorine, being the envy of the dead is as good as it gets.

Note:  This review first appeared in Ars Notoria thanks to the very talented author and editor Peter Cowlam.  Peter is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and prose.  

The Grand

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

Jacek Yerka

I am still a child without a piano.
My sister is a piano without ever being a child.

Without a piano, I would be exactly what I am,
not my sister, who does whatever a piano does.

My father actuates as a piano,
otherwise, he would be only a father.

My mother wants that piano to go out
and not come back till it finds a higher paying job.

To think, thousands of tusks once stream this way
from the coast to the factories of Connecticut.

One tusk for every hundred keyboards
bleached and lathed to create dazzling bridges.

Pianos look a lot like elephants, all heft
and grace and great round tops.

The one in our house rubs its back against the wall,
and out of its maw the glazed sounds

I hear every day my sister must conjure
her destiny, though she must stare far

into my father’s past to find it, as he imagines
Beethoven flogging the piano till it weeps

for joy, becomes Ode, exploding Glorias!
till the house can’t take anymore.

There’s no living with him when he’s like this,
my mother says and looks at me.

Hovered at my sister’s shoulder, my father says,
This is how you become immortal, beloved.

Credits:  "The Grand" first appeared in issue 47 of Sands Hill in 2003.