The Poem and Its World: Labour, Ideology, and the International History of a Manuscript

July 7, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Against the Heritage Myth

The British press’s enthusiastic celebration of a ninth-century copy of Caedmon’s Hymn found in Rome highlights the supposed ‘earliest English poem,’ heralded as the “birth of English literature’ and the “first voice of the nation.’ However, these assertions are not just surface-level claims; they are rooted in ideological perspectives. They tend to conceal the underlying material conditions of cultural creation, the class dynamics of early medieval England, and the international networks that facilitated manuscript circulation long before the rise of modern nation-states.

This article challenges that mythology by arguing that Caedmon’s Hymn should be seen not as a national origin story, but as a result of labour, church authority, and global exchange. Rooted in Marxist materialist historiography, it warrants a more comprehensive examination.

Caedmon and the Social Relations of Early Northumbria

Bede’s narrative situates Caedmon firmly within the labouring classes. He is described as “an agricultural labourer – a cowherd” who lacked the courtly skill of poetic recitation and withdrew from the feast in shame. This detail is not incidental. It reveals the class stratification of seventh‑century Northumbria, where poetic performance was an aristocratic cultural practice, inaccessible to those outside elite circles.

The miracle story—Caedmon’s dream-vision where he receives the divine gift of song—is a well-known example of ideological mystification. It turns a social marginalisation, such as a labourer being excluded from elite culture, into a religious story of divine intervention. However, behind this pious appearance lies a crucial material reality: the oldest surviving Old English poem was created by a worker.

This does not make the Hymn “proletarian literature.” As the document notes, its content reflects “the ideological dominance of the Church in early feudal England.” The Church monopolised literacy, manuscript production, and cultural transmission. The poem survives only because it is embedded within Latin ecclesiastical texts — “the vernacular breaks through, but only within the framework of ecclesiastical Latin.”

This is an important point. In early medieval Europe, the rise of vernacular literature was not a spontaneous expression of national identity but a controlled, clerically overseen process. The Church decided what was written, copied, and kept. Caedmon’s Hymn is therefore the result of effort, but it is also influenced by an ideological framework that shaped its form and content.

Manuscripts as Material Objects Under Capitalism

The manuscript’s history provides a condensed overview of cultural property amidst the evolution of capitalism. It traces its journey from a Benedictine abbey to private collectors and ultimately to the Italian state, with each transfer signifying a change in the social relations surrounding cultural artefacts.

Monastic Production: The manuscript was produced at the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola, a feudal religious community where scribes created manuscripts as part of monastic work. These texts were not viewed as commodities but as instruments of church authority. Post-Dissolution Dispersal: After monastic institutions dissolved, the manuscripts entered private collections via collectors.

It is worth noting that Thomas Phillipps’s vast collection was “a form of nineteenth‑century cultural commodification.” Phillipps illustrates the bourgeois tendency to turn cultural heritage into private property. The manuscript from Phillipps travelled through various hands—first to Martin Bodmer, then to H.P. Kraus, a New York rare-books dealer. During this period, it became a commodity in the international art market, subject to capitalist speculation. Eventually, the manuscript was acquired by the Italian state. However, it remained “virtually unstudied” for fifty years afterwards. Its neglect reflects the austerity conditions of modern cultural institutions, where archival work depends on precarious labour and inconsistent funding.

The digitisation project that eventually made the manuscript accessible is part of a broader, uneven process of democratising archival access. But as the document notes, this process remains “contingent on the funding priorities of state institutions and the unpaid or precariously funded labour of scholars like Magnanti.” Even the most progressive developments in cultural access occur within the constraints of capitalist austerity.

International Cooperation vs Nationalist Mythology

The final section of the document exposes the irony of nationalist uses of Caedmon. The Hymn is routinely invoked as “the beginning of English poetry,” yet the earliest integrated copy was found in Rome, produced in an Italian scriptorium, and identified through collaboration between Irish and Italian scholars.

This fact alone challenges the nationalist story. The manuscript highlights the significance of the English vernacular in the ninth century. Still, it does so via the global networks of the medieval Church, rather than through isolated national growth. The Church was a transnational entity, with its scribes sharing texts across languages and regions.

The material history of culture has always been international, whatever nationalist mythologies later generations construct around it. This is a profoundly Marxist insight. Culture is not the property of nations but the product of human labour operating within global systems of exchange, power, and communication.

Historiographical Context

This argument aligns with a long-standing Marxist historiography tradition emphasising the material basis of cultural production. Scholars like Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, and Christopher Hill have shown that cultural forms are inseparable from class relations and institutional structures. In early medieval England, this involves viewing the Church as both an ideological and an economic entity, monastic scriptoria as sites of labour, manuscripts as objects whose circulation indicates shifting property regimes, and vernacular literature as a product of clerical mediation rather than a sign of national awakening. The rediscovery of the Nonantola manuscript offers an opportunity to challenge nationalist narratives and reinforce a materialist view of cultural history.

Culture, Labour, and the World SystemCaedmon’s Hymn is more than just an old story; it exemplifies the Marxist view that culture is a social construct. A cowherd’s poem persists because ecclesiastical authorities protect it; a manuscript copied by monks becomes a commodity for bourgeois collectors; and a key text in English national mythology is only preserved through global cooperation. Challenging the illusions of heritage narratives, the manuscript’s history shows that culture belongs to humanity, not to nations or markets. Its preservation relies on often unseen labour — sometimes exploited — and its meaning can only be appreciated through a materialist analysis of the world that create

News From Nowhere Diary

June 28, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The past month has marked a decisive turning point in the website’s development. What began as a modest personal archive of historical writing and political commentary has now reached a scale that demands reflection. The website has crossed a symbolic threshold: “over one million hits” since its inception. More striking still, last month alone it received “70,000 hits”, a figure that would have been unimaginable in its early years. These numbers are not simply metrics; they testify to a growing audience seeking rigorous historical analysis and socialist commentary at a moment of deepening political crisis.

This surge in readership coincides with a period of intense intellectual activity. The long‑standing 2003 BA dissertation on Cromwell and the Putney Debates—once a youthful academic exercise—has been “completely rewritten”. The revision is not cosmetic. It represents a fundamental re-engagement with the revolutionary ferment of the 1640s, informed by two decades of subsequent study, political experience, and historiographical development. Alongside this, further work has been undertaken on the Raphael Samuel book, extending the exploration of memory, class, and radical historiography that Samuel himself championed. These projects, dormant at times, have now re-emerged with renewed urgency.

The website’s content growth mirrors this intellectual momentum, marked by a “significant increase in articles,” partly due to the emergence of the World Socialist Website’s Socialism AI. This tool has sped up research, improved cross-referencing, and created new opportunities for combining historical sources with current political analysis. The diary reflects this period of rapid development: it feels like the archive is not just expanding but transforming.

This intellectual renewal is closely linked to the current political climate. The diary notes an upcoming meeting entitled “Your Party’s Collapse – Time to Build the Socialist Equality Party,” set for Sunday, July 12, at Hargrave Hall Community Centre in Archway. The clear directions—“3-minute walk from Archway tube station on the Northern Line”—add a sense of practicality. The meeting’s title highlights the ongoing crisis in political representation and emphasises the need to develop a principled socialist alternative. This event is not an isolated gathering but is part of a larger political shift.

Yet the narrative is not confined to politics alone. It also gestures toward cultural engagement, noting the Japan Society Book Club’s July 13 discussion of Izumi Suzuki’s Set My Heart on Fire. The book’s “stark, fragmented narratives” and its portrayal of women navigating emotional isolation in postwar Japan introduce a different register—one of literary introspection and social alienation. The juxtaposition of this event with the Archway meeting underscores the diary’s breadth: political mobilisation on one day, avant‑garde Japanese literature the next.

This entry concludes with a brief catalogue of recent book purchases—The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Red Card by Jules Boykoff, and Stealing Horses to Great Applause by Paul W. Schroder. These acquisitions are part of the ongoing expansion of the intellectual resources that underpin the website. They hint at future reading, future writing, and future analysis.

Taken together, the diary documents a moment of convergence: rising readership, renewed scholarly work, intensified political engagement, and continued literary exploration. It marks a phase in which the website is not only growing but clarifying its purpose—serving as a space where history, politics, and culture intersect in the pursuit of understanding and transformation.

Carlo Ginzburg (1939–2026): An Obituary of a Historian of the Fragment in an Age of Retreat¹

June 25, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Carlo Ginzburg, who died on June 17^th 2026, at the age of 87, was one of the most influential historians of the late twentieth century—a scholar whose work, especially The Cheese and the Worms, became emblematic of the micro historical turn that reshaped large sectors of the historical profession from the 1970s onward.² His death marks the passing of a figure whose intellectual trajectory expressed, in concentrated form, the political and theoretical disorientation of an entire generation of European intellectuals confronted with the defeats of the working class and the collapse of the revolutionary movements of the post‑1968 period.³

Ginzburg was an exceptionally knowledgeable historian, known for his precise philology and archival skills. However, despite his brilliance, his work was fundamentally limited by a significant theoretical shortcoming: he distanced himself from the analysis of social totality, class relations, and the laws governing historical progress.⁴ His body of work serves as a testament to the intellectual impact of the prolonged decline of the workers’ movement, the fading of Marxism in academia, and the growth of culturalist approaches that prioritized fragments over entire systems, anecdotes over structures, and the idea of the “exceptional normal” over the actual processes of class struggle.⁵

A Scholar Formed in the Ruins of the Italian Left

Born in Turin in 1939 to the literary critic Leone Ginzburg and the novelist Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Ginzburg grew up in a milieu shaped by anti‑fascist resistance and the cultural ferment of postwar Italy.⁶ His intellectual development occurred not during the revolutionary surge of the late 1960s but afterwards, as that movement waned. The autunno caldo of 1969, along with the factory councils and mass strikes that challenged Italian capitalism, was succeeded by the fragmentation of the extra-parliamentary left, the infiltration of terrorism by some intelligentsia, and an overall sense of demoralization within the radical circles.⁷

It was in this context—of retreat, exhaustion, and the abandonment of revolutionary politics—that microhistory emerged as a self‑consciously anti‑totalizing method.⁸ Ginzburg wasn’t a direct participant in these conflicts, but his intellectual focus was influenced by the same circumstances. His shift away from topics like class, modes of production, and the analysis of capitalist development toward the local, the unusual, and the culturally unique was intentional. It reflected the ideology of a generation that had become disillusioned with the prospects of revolutionary change.⁹

The Cheese and the Worms: Achievement and Limitation

Ginzburg’s most celebrated work, The Cheese and the Worms (1976), reconstructed the mental universe of Menocchio, a sixteenth‑century Friulian miller executed by the Inquisition.¹⁰ Through painstaking analysis of trial records, Ginzburg demonstrated that this semi‑literate peasant possessed a strikingly original cosmology, drawing on scraps of printed books, oral traditions, and his own material experience.¹¹

This was a real achievement. Against the Annales School’s depersonalised serial history—what Guy Bois called “a history without people”—Ginzburg insisted that the consciousness of the oppressed was recoverable, complex, and worthy of study.¹² Yet the very category at the heart of the book—“popular culture”—revealed the idealist foundation of Ginzburg’s method.¹³ Popular culture was defined not by class position or the relations of production but by its opposition to “elite” culture.¹⁴

Menocchio’s cosmology—his vision of the world emerging from chaos “just as cheese is made from milk, and worms appear in it”—was rooted in his daily labour as a miller.¹⁵ But Ginzburg’s framework could not account for this material determination. Culture, in his hands, became autonomous, self‑generating, governed by internal dynamics of transmission and reinterpretation.¹⁶

Microhistory and the Flight from Totality

Ginzburg’s microhistory was premised on the intensive study of the “exceptional normal”—the anomalous case that illuminates broader structures.¹⁷ But as a programmatic orientation, microhistory systematically avoided the analysis of the totality of social relations.¹⁸ It substituted the fragment for the whole.

Marxism does not reject the study of individuals or local contexts. The Eighteenth Brumaire is a masterful analysis of individual actors—Louis Bonaparte, the party leaders, the lumpen conspirators—. Still, these individuals are understood as representatives of class forces acting within a determinate historical conjuncture.¹⁹ Ginzburg’s method, by contrast, provided no basis for moving from the village miller to the feudal mode of production, from the Inquisition trial to the role of the Church in the class struggles of early modern Europe.²⁰

The “Evidential Paradigm”: A Retreat from Scientific Method

In “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” (1979), Ginzburg proposed an epistemology based on the hunter’s tracking of traces—the conjectural reconstruction of reality from insignificant details.²¹ He counterposed this to the “Galilean” paradigm of experimental, mathematical science.²²

From a Marxist standpoint, this represented a retreat from the aspiration to scientific knowledge of society.²³ The “evidential paradigm” elevated the fragmentary, the intuitive, and the conjectural into a methodological principle.²⁴

Ginzburg and Gramsci: A Culturalist Appropriation

Ginzburg engaged with Marxism primarily through the cultural writings of Antonio Gramsci.²⁵ But his use of Gramsci was selective and culturalist. He extracted insights into hegemony while discarding the revolutionary political framework within which those insights were developed.²⁶

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony was not a cultural‑studies toolkit; it was a theory of bourgeois rule and proletarian revolution.²⁷ Ginzburg’s Gramsci was a Gramsci without the October Revolution, without the factory councils, without the Communist Party.²⁸

Legacy: A Historian of the Fragment in an Age of Defeat

Carlo Ginzburg leaves behind a body of work that is often brilliant in its particulars, rich in empirical detail, and animated by a genuine commitment to recovering the voices of the oppressed.²⁹ But his work does not provide an alternative to historical materialism.³⁰ It provides, at best, empirical material that can only be adequately understood through the Marxist method he declined to embrace.³¹

Microhistory can tell us what Menocchio thought; it cannot explain why he thought it, why he was burned for it, or why the society that burned him was destined to be overthrown by the class whose labour sustained it.³² Those questions require a theory of history grounded in the mode of production, class struggle, and the laws of social development.³³

ENDNOTES

For a biographical overview, see Carlo Ginzburg, Il filo e le tracce (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2006).
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth‑Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism (London: HarperCollins, 1996).
Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review I/100 (1976).
Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon, trans. Jenny McPhee (New York: NYRB Classics, 2017).
Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso, 1990).
Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
Eley, A Crooked Line.
Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms.
Ibid.
Guy Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Eley, A Crooked Line.
Levi, “On Microhistory.”
Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms, 4.
Ibid.
Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993).
Ibid.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
Bois, Crisis of Feudalism.
Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” Theory and Society 7, no. 3 (1979).
Ibid.
Alex Callinicos, Making History (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
Ginzburg, “Clues.”
Carlo Ginzburg, “Some Queries Addressed to Myself,” in Threads and Traces (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
Anderson, “Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.”
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Hoare and Nowell‑Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
Ibid.
Ginzburg, Threads and Traces.
Callinicos, Making History.
Ibid.
Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms.
Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire.

The Manufactured Decline of Gordon S. Wood: Liberal Academia’s Ritual Purging of Its Own Past

June 11, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Gordon S. Wood’s obituaries—far from neutral remembrances—served as ideological tools in the modern academic world to dismiss not just a historian but an entire intellectual tradition that no longer aligned with its political agenda. Major news obituaries did not directly attack his character, but they emphasised the strong ideological and scholarly opposition he encountered later in his career.” This reflects a profession involved in a purge rather than a genuine tribute.

The sudden death of Wood gave the liberal media a chance to stage a public auto-da-fé: a ritual denunciation of a figure once seen as a symbol of the post-war liberal consensus. By the end, he had become a liability for the identity-politics-driven academy. Obituary writers, acting as ideological enforcers, focused on the 1619 Project conflict as a key part of Wood’s decline. As noted, “Major obituaries highlighted Wood’s vocal, public opposition to the New York Times’ 1619 Project’ was no coincidence.

It serves as the ideological centrepiece for the wealthy, upper-middle-class elite that now influence the humanities. This initiative is a political endeavour disguised as academic research, aiming to substitute class analysis with racial essentialism and to shape historical interpretation to fit the Democratic Party’s electoral goals. Wood’s opposition—regardless of its limited scope or political ambiguity—was unacceptable. He had breached the new orthodox doctrine.

Obituary writers highlighted the most damaging detail available: that Wood had criticized the project while admitting he had “not read most of” it. This repeated line aimed to completely discredit him. It was more than just an accusation of carelessness; it symbolically reversed everything Wood once stood for. The historian known for his thorough archival work was now depicted as a fringe figure yelling from the sidelines.

The political motive behind this framing is evident. The document claims that obituaries “drew sharp ideological parallels, noting that Wood’s arguments against the project closely aligned with the rhetoric of Donald Trump.” — the ellipsis emphasising the media’s desire to connect Wood with the right wing. The aim was to transform a scholarly debate into a moral condemnation. Wood was to be excluded from acceptable discourse, not because of the strength of his arguments, but because they were perceived to have political implications.

This outlines how academic marginalisation unfolds in the age of identity politics: disagreement is branded as abnormal, dissent is seen as reactionary, and the limits of acceptable scholarship are fiercely enforced. The generational aspect adds further insight. The document states that younger scholars increasingly viewed Wood as the symbol of an outdated establishment and criticised him for downplaying the importance, agency, and suffering of enslaved people, women, and Indigenous groups. This language does not arise from rigorous historiographical debate; rather, it reflects the jargon of a professional elite that substitutes moral judgment for historical explanation. Accusing someone of “minimising suffering” is not a neutral analytical term but a tool used for political purposes.

In the view of this new academic elite, Wood’s true fault was embodying a form of historical writing aiming for coherence, causality, and structural explanation—traits now criticised as “grand narratives” or “totalizing frameworks.” His approach was rooted in the Enlightenment tradition, which holds that history is understandable and that human societies evolve according to identifiable laws. This perspective is exactly what the postmodern-influenced academy dismisses.

Therefore, the methodological critique cited—John L. Brooke’s assertion that Wood avoided interpretative paradox and complexity—should be seen as a critique of clarity itself. Today’s academic environment treats “complexity” more as a way to sidestep explanations, especially those exposing the social and economic forces behind history. In this context, “complexity” acts as a euphemism for avoiding intellectual responsibility.

The obsession with Wood’s supposed “avoidance of paradox” in obituaries is profoundly ideological. It challenges the very idea that historical processes can be integrated into coherent narratives, a crucial aspect of Marxist historiography. As the liberal academic world has moved away from materialist analysis, it now shies away from viewing the Revolution as a complete whole. Wood’s mistake wasn’t in being incorrect but in maintaining the belief that history could be understood and explained.

I want to clarify that Wood’s marginalisation was caused not by scholarly debate but by a political shift within the academic community. The humanities have been taken over by a privileged elite whose interests conflict with any analysis emphasising class, economic exploitation, or the structural aspects of capitalism. The 1619 Project, with its focus on racial essentialism and the omission of class struggle, represents the ideological stance of this group. Wood’s work—grounded in the Enlightenment, republican ideology, and 18th-century social dynamics—was incompatible with this new orthodoxy.

The obituaries served a dual purpose: they not only buried Wood but also the intellectual tradition he stood for. They indicated that the liberal consensus school, despite its flaws, no longer serves the ruling class’s ideological needs. Today, the academy fosters a politics of racial division that divides the working class and hides the true mechanisms of social control.

Wood’s perceived decline, as described in these obituaries, is not just about a historian out of sync with current trends. It reflects a broader shift in the profession that has forsaken its dedication to truth for political convenience. It also signifies a ruling class that no longer depends on the legitimacy provided by liberal consensus myths but instead has adopted politics rooted in resentment, identity, and fragmented history.

In this context, the obituaries do not focus solely on Wood. They highlight a crisis within the American academic world and the ideological breakdown of liberal intellectuals. Wood’s marginalisation is merely a symptom; the real issue runs much deeper.

Gordon S. Wood and the Fate of Historical Consciousness in the Epoch of Decline

June 10, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

I. Introduction: A Historian at the Threshold of a Vanishing World

The death of Gordon S. Wood in June 2026, barely noticed in public life, occurred just before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The obituary carried by the World Socialist Web Site viewed this not merely as the loss of a scholar but as an indicator of a deeper cultural and political crisis. The obituary’s opening remark—“It speaks to the degradation of democratic consciousness, intellectual life and culture in the United States that Wood’s death… has gone largely unnoticed”—is more than a rhetorical flourish; it serves as a diagnosis.

Wood’s life and work illustrate the trajectory of American academic culture from its postwar peak through its later decline into postmodernism, identity politics, and the commercialisation of historical memory. His career offers a perspective on the future of historical objectivity, the Enlightenment tradition, and the possibility of viewing the American Revolution as a global historical event.

This brief article presents Wood’s historiographical legacy not as a mere antiquarian study but as a final, contested safeguard of the Enlightenment’s universalist ideals against the destructive influences of contemporary cynicism and racialist mystification.

II. The Formation of a Historian: Bailyn, the Archive, and the World of Ideas

Wood’s intellectual growth at Harvard under Bernard Bailyn in the 1960s positioned him as a leader in a major historiographical shift. Bailyn’s 1967 book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, argued that the Revolution was more than an elite power move; it represented a profound ideological transformation. Building on this, Wood’s 1968 *Creation of the American Republic* delved deeper into the changing ideas of sovereignty, representation, and constitutionalism. The obituary highlights Wood’s remarkable archival mastery: “He seemed to carry the entire world of eighteenth-century America in his head… the pamphlets, the newspapers, the sermons, the diaries, the account books.”[1]

This encyclopaedic mastery was not just antiquarianism; it laid the groundwork for a methodological belief: understanding the past on its own terms, using its own categories, without being distorted by modern moralism or identity-based reductionism. Wood’s statement—“The past cannot see the future”—encapsulates this approach. It opposes the teleological arrogance of today’s culture, which judges historical figures by standards they could not have known and criticises them for failing to anticipate twenty-first-century sensibilities.

III. Against Anachronism: Wood’s Defence of Historical Objectivity

Wood’s opposition to anachronism was rooted both methodologically and philosophically. He held that history should focus on reconstructing past consciousness, rather than projecting current identities onto the past. The obituary reflects this view: “Such an approach… flattered the present at the expense of the past… and made true historical understanding impossible.”

This constitutes the core of Wood’s historiographical contribution. In a time when history is frequently viewed through a moral lens, Wood highlighted the importance of viewing the past independently. He opposed reducing the Revolution to a conspiracy by white male elites, a view common among identity-centric historians. He rejected the postmodern claim that the Revolution was just a ‘non-event,’ and also opposed racist assertions that a historian’s skin colour affects their historical interpretation. In this way, Wood’s work defends the Enlightenment principles: that reason, evidence, and universal human traits—rather than race, identity, or power—underpin historical understanding.

IV. The Radicalism of the American Revolution: Wood’s Masterwork

Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) stands as the highlight of his body of work. It contends that the Revolution was more than a political separation from Britain; it was a social upheaval that dismantled the vestiges of monarchical society and ushered in a new era of republican equality.

The obituary encapsulates this thesis: “What was at stake was the erosion and eventual collapse of a monarchical society.” Wood’s dialectical argument states that the Revolution dismantled the hierarchical, deferential, patronage-centred world of the eighteenth century, replacing it with a society of autonomous citizens. Nonetheless, this change was accompanied by contradictions. The rise of a “middling type” of democratic politician—characterised as energetic, ambitious, and vulgar—supplanted the Founders’ vision of disinterested republican leadership.

Wood’s tragic sensibility shows in his view of Jefferson: “He always sensed that his ‘empire of liberty’ had a cancer at its core…” This cancer was slavery, the contradiction that would eventually cause the Civil War. Wood’s awareness of this tragedy challenges the notion that he was indifferent to oppression. Instead, he saw slavery as the unresolved tension within the Revolution, not its core.

V. Wood and the WSWS: A Convergence of Principles

The obituary clarifies that Wood was not a Marxist. However, the WSWS saw him as a kindred spirit. Their connection wasn’t based on ideology but shared values: a dedication to objectivity, universalism, and the revolutionary importance of 1776. Wood acknowledged this bond, and in 2021, he told the WSWS, “You seem to be the only historian who understands what I was saying in my Radicalism book.”

This is a significant admission, showing Wood’s recognition that the academic world had moved away from the Enlightenment principles he upheld. Meanwhile, the WSWS viewed Wood as a protector of historical accuracy in opposition to the racialist distortions spread by the 1619 Project.

VI. The 1619 Project and the Crisis of Historical Consciousness

The obituary highlights Wood’s involvement in opposing the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which is key to understanding his significance later in his career. The WSWS describes how Wood, McPherson, Oakes, and Bynum were criticised as “white historians” whose race allegedly prevented them from interpreting American history. The obituary includes the racialist reasoning: Hannah-Jones accused these scholars of being “white historians who could never understand American history…”, emphasising the racial bias used against them.

This runs counter to Wood’s entire intellectual effort. It shifts from universalism to racial essentialism, from evidence to identity, and from historical analysis to moralised tribalism. His collaboration with the WSWS—through interviews, webinars, and public letters—demonstrated intellectual bravery. Even later in life, he defended the Revolution’s global importance against efforts to portray it as merely a conspiracy to sustain slavery.

VII. Wood as the Last Representative of a Vanishing Tradition

The obituary’s closing judgment is comprehensive: “He belonged to a generation of historians who believed that the past could be understood objectively, that ideas mattered, and that significant revolutions changed the trajectory of human history.” Wood’s passing marks the conclusion of an era, representing the last prominent figure from a tradition tracing back to the Enlightenment and earlier twentieth-century historians like Trevelyan, Namier, Bailyn, and Hill, who held that history is a rational investigation into the human past. In today’s intellectual climate—marked by cynicism, identity politics, and postmodern relativism—Wood’s work serves as a counterpoint, emphasising that the American Revolution was a pivotal event in the development of democracy rather than a racial plot or a bourgeois myth.

VIII. Conclusion: Wood’s Legacy and the Future of Historical Understanding

The obituary ends with a prediction: “It will be read long after the racialist falsifications and postmodernist evasions… have been discredited.” This is more than just a tribute; it’s a declaration of faith in history. The Enlightenment tradition that Wood championed is not dead. Although under attack, it persists wherever scholars, workers, and students strive to understand and consciously change the world.

Wood’s legacy extends beyond academia, belonging to the future and especially to the working class, whose fight for emancipation depends on a clear grasp of the revolutionary past. It also belongs to all who oppose the degradation of historical awareness and believe in the possibility of truth.

[1] A tribute to Gordon S. Wood (1933-2026), historian of the American Revolution-Tom Mackaman and David North 9 June 2026-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/06/10/nbsd-j10.pdf

Podcast Episode: This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz Bloomsbury Continuum‎

June 2, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Pip: A Yorkshire clergyman's daughter, writing in secret on scraps of recycled paper, produces one of the most socially explosive novels in the English language — and we're still arguing about what it means.

Mara: That's the territory freerein61 maps out across this episode: a new biography of Emily Brontë, the social roots of Wuthering Heights, and what it costs to read the Brontës without a class framework.

Pip: Let's start with the biography itself, and the question it raises about how we understand where great literature actually comes from.

This Dark Night: biography, class, and the Brontës

Mara: The central tension here is methodological: Deborah Lutz's new life of Emily Brontë is richly researched, but does focusing on biography risk reducing a major novel to a reflection of its author's inner world rather than its social conditions?

Pip: The post anchors its argument in Paul Bond's reading of Wuthering Heights, setting it up this way — the novel reveals "an almost organic expression of this devastating personal impact which has definite social roots in property relations."

Mara: That phrase does real work. It means Heathcliff's rage, Catherine's choice, the whole machinery of revenge through mortgage and marriage — none of it is psychological backstory. It is the social structure of mid-nineteenth-century England made flesh.

Pip: And Lutz's earlier scholarship actually gets close to that. Her "Paperwork" essay traces the cost of paper in the 1830s and 1840s, the rag trade, the tax on paper not lifted until 1860 — connecting Brontë's tiny, concealed handwriting to genuine material scarcity. That is not romantic mythologization; that is the economic base showing up on the page.

Mara: The concern is that Lutz's broader framework — thing theory, material culture studies, haptic reading — focuses on objects and their meanings without fully exploring the social relations behind their production. The post notes that collectors and workers gathered raw materials processed at early industrial sites, and that the Brontës' difficulties were not merely personal.

Pip: Charlotte worrying that her Professor manuscript might end up as butter-barrel lining is either a charming period detail or a precise illustration of how intellectual labour sits inside capitalism — and the post is firmly in the second camp.

Mara: The post also takes on Terry Eagleton's Myths of Power, which it calls arguably the most comprehensive Marxist analysis of the Brontës to date. Eagleton reads Heathcliff as a symbol of the contradictions capitalism produces: brutalised as a foundling, he then exploits the logic of property and inheritance to exact revenge on those who degraded him.

Pip: High praise, followed immediately by a precise complaint — Eagleton's Althusserian framework ultimately treats texts as systems of signs and ideological conflicts, pushing the actual historical context, the Chartist movement, the condition of the working class in Yorkshire, to the background.

Mara: The post then turns to the SWP's coverage of the Brontës, described as reducing three of Victorian England's most significant writers to symbols supporting a modern identity-politics agenda. The argument is that reading the sisters primarily as proto-feminist figures misses the broader social and historical forces that give their work its depth and its staying power.

Pip: Emily's concealed poems, written in a script "meant to conceal even as it revealed," get read here not as personal eccentricity but as the direct consequence of what Victorian bourgeois society permitted educated women to be.

Mara: And the post closes by asking whether Lutz's biography meets a specific standard: does it situate Brontë's inner life within the tangible context of Victorian England — class conflict, treatment of women, economic instability among the educated poor — or does it indulge the myth of a solitary genius communing with nature?

Pip: The answer is left open, which is either admirably honest or a very long way to say "read it and find out." Either way, the framework for reading it has been thoroughly constructed.

Mara: That framework extends naturally to the other Brontë sisters — and to Jane Eyre's particular version of independence, which is where the argument about class and women's labour becomes most direct.

Pip: What stays with me is the butter-barrel problem: intellectual work produced under material constraint, circulating in a market that doesn't care about its value.

Mara: That tension hasn't resolved. The Brontës wrote it into their novels, and it's still the right question to bring to any biography that follows.

Podcast Episode: Katabasis by RF Kuang is published by Harper Voyager (£22).

May 22, 2026May 23, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Pip: A descent into the underworld — and we're not talking about the academic job market, though the novel makes that comparison explicit. freerein61 has been reading R.F. Kuang's new book, and the review turns into something considerably wider than a book review.

Mara: That's right. We're covering Katabasis, Kuang's novel about academic elitism and class, and the post uses it to open up the katabasis tradition across Dante, Zola, and Engels. Let's start with what the novel is actually doing.

Katabasis and the Class Descent

Pip: Katabasis is R.F. Kuang's departure from the colonial framework of Babel toward something more directly focused on class — specifically, the university as a structure that reproduces hierarchy rather than dismantles it. The question the post is asking is whether the novel's metaphor of descent has genuine social content, or whether it stays psychological and individual.

Mara: The post sets up the stakes with a quote from critic Beejay Silcox: "Katabasis is far from perfect. There's a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand mythologies collide and compete. But none of that really matters — especially if you have a score to settle."

Pip: So the imperfections are acknowledged and then set aside, because the novel's real work is settling accounts with a system — the ivory tower as an infernal structure, in the post's phrase, that runs more like a pyramid scheme than a meritocracy.

Mara: The post is specific about how the novel builds that case. Characters like Alice and Peter are described as cannon fodder in a departmental war, spending their best years doing grunt work for senior academics. And financial privilege is named as the real barrier — the protagonists are so absorbed into the system that they believe their lives are literally not worth living without validation from elite institutions.

Pip: Which is where the katabasis frame earns its keep. The post traces the tradition from Dante's Inferno — where the circles of hell encode the class contradictions of late medieval Italy, usurers damned alongside political traitors — through to Engels descending into the cellars of Manchester and Zola sending his characters into the coal mines of Germinal. The underground is consistently the space where the bourgeoisie prefers not to look.

Mara: And the post draws out the reversal built into the trope: the hero who descends returns transformed, carrying knowledge the surface world lacks. As the post puts it, it is precisely from the underworld of capitalist production that the force capable of overthrowing the existing order emerges.

Pip: The post is careful to note that Kuang is not a Marxist — but argues her work gives a Marxist critic exactly the material needed to demonstrate that mythological forms take on different social content in different epochs, rather than being timeless archetypes.

Mara: That's the test the post leaves with the reader: whether Katabasis reaches the depth of great literature that illuminates the real social forces shaping human suffering, or whether its descent stays at the level of individual psychology. The post holds the question open rather than closing it.

Pip: From the underworld of academia to the forces that built it — the class logic runs deeper than any single institution.

Mara: The through-line here is the question of what literary form can actually carry — whether a descent narrative points toward systemic contradiction or stays inside individual experience.

Pip: Dante mapped feudal anxiety. Zola mapped the mines. The question for next time is what the present moment maps onto.

Podcast Episode: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick, SF Masterworks 1968

May 22, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Pip: "If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others." Philip K. Dick said that, and honestly, it reads less like a warning and more like a dare.

Mara: That line opens a piece by freerein61 that uses Dick's 1968 novel as a lens for thinking about alienation, commodification, and what capitalism does to the idea of being human. That's the territory we're covering today.

Pip: Let's start with the novel itself — and why its central question still has teeth.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Dick, Capitalism, and the Empathy Problem

Mara: The post frames Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as one of the most philosophically ambitious science fiction works of the twentieth century — and its central question is precise: what truly defines being human amid a heavily dehumanised world?

Pip: And Dick's answer isn't comforting. The society that hunts androids for lacking empathy is itself building a world where genuine empathy barely exists.

Mara: The post puts it directly: "Dick's irony lies in the fact that the society which hunts androids for their lack of empathy is itself creating a world where true empathy is absent." The Voigt-Kampff test measures instinctive concern for others' suffering — but the humans administering it are emotionally hollowed out by the same system.

Pip: So the test for humanity is being run by people who are failing it.

Mara: The post connects this to Marx's theory of alienation from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — the worker estranged from their labour, from other people, from their own human potential. Dick's androids, manufactured for exploitation and destroyed when they escape, are described as capitalism's ultimate product.

Mara: The novel's other details carry the same weight. Owning a real animal is a status symbol because most are extinct. Deckard's electric sheep is a source of shame — a private emotional life that feels counterfeit. Mercerism, the communal spiritual practice, turns out to be a televised fabrication.

Pip: Fake religion, fake animals, fake empathy — and the commodity form so embedded in daily life that real and simulated become genuinely indistinguishable.

Mara: The post then turns to the adaptations. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner gets credit for its visual power — Roy Batty's final monologue is called "profoundly impactful" — but the post argues it simplifies Dick's social critique, letting spectacle crowd out the analysis of the Tyrell Corporation as a capitalist entity built on enslaved labour.

Pip: And Blade Runner 2049 fares no better. The post quotes Carlos Delgado's review: "aside from a brief scene in a child labour sweatshop, Villeneuve appears uninterested in depicting the conditions faced by workers, whether human or artificial."

Mara: The conclusion drawn from that review is stark — "bleakness without understanding, the work of artists who perhaps sense an impending social catastrophe but lack the tools to identify its source." That's the post's diagnosis of contemporary dystopian art more broadly.

Pip: An aesthetic of crisis with no theory of the cause.

Mara: The post also examines Dick's 1977 Metz speech, where he explicitly names surveillance states — theocratic, fascist, or capitalist — as systems that must be overthrown. His novels, from A Scanner Darkly to Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, are read as artistic expressions of genuine social contradictions, not mere paranoia.

Mara: But the post draws a firm line. Dick's perception of a falsified, alienating reality is described as extraordinary — and then immediately limited. His answer to what the post calls the "black iron prison" is divine reprogramming, not collective action. Liberation through cosmic intervention, not working-class organisation.

Pip: Brilliant diagnosis, metaphysical prescription.

Mara: The post frames this as the characteristic form social despair takes in a petty-bourgeois intellectual cut off from the working class. Dick registered the horror with real sensitivity but displaced the solution into Gnosticism and personal mystical experience. The post's final word on him is generous but clear: his questions — what does it mean to be human when humans are treated as commodities — are practical questions, and Marx approached them from a materialist perspective where Dick could only approach them through a restless artistic sensibility.

Pip: The surveillance state, manufactured consent, the commodification of consciousness — all of it more recognisable now than in 1968. Dick saw it coming; he just couldn't tell you who to organise with.

Mara: The questions Dick posed about alienation and what capitalism does to genuine human connection haven't aged out. They've sharpened.

Pip: Next time — more from A Trumpet of Sedition on the ideas that refuse to stay in the past.

Review: Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang. Harper Voyager, 2022. 560 pages.

April 7, 2026April 9, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“I heard a traveller from an antique land….” (Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias” (quoted in Kuang 147)

“She learned, in fact, that revolution is always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential”

R F Kuang’s-Babel

“The historical significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consists in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture that is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.”

Leon Trotsky

‘What is art? First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader ‘good feelings.’ Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. However, science analyses, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.’

Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky,

R.F. Kuang’s Babel through a Marxist lens

It takes a brave and gifted writer to play fast and loose with British history and get away with it. However, the writer Rebecca F Kuang, who has a master’s and two PHD’s, manages to pull this off with an erudition that belies her tender years.

R. F. Kuang’s “speculative fiction” is an attack on capitalism, or to be precise, British imperialism. In Babel, she quotes Frantz Fanon: “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence”.

Of course, Kuang is free to quote whom she pleases, but Fanon is not the most healthy of anti-imperialist writers. Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, anti-colonial theorist and participant in Algeria’s war of independence. His major works, most notably The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, combined clinical experience, existential-philosophical reflection and militant polemic to expose the psychic and violent dimensions of colonial domination.

Fanon remains indispensable for understanding the brutality of imperialism, the profound psychological injuries inflicted on colonised peoples, and the legitimating role of national liberation as a political response to colonial oppression. However, his work tends to express an overemphasis on the peasantry and the “national” element. Fanon’s analyses sometimes valorise “the people” and guerrilla insurgency in ways that underplay the historically decisive role of the industrial working class as an emancipatory force.

Kuang was born in China but grew up in the United States. Aged 29, she has already written five books, has a list of impressive book awards and survived graduate work at both Oxford and Cambridge. Kuang’s first three books comprised a trilogy: The Poppy War (2018), The Dragon Republic (2019), and The Burning God (2020). Yellowface was published in 2023, and her latest Katabasis has just been published.[1]

Poppy Trilogy

Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy is not a moral fable but works as a social document. In Kuang’s world, the countryside supplies labour, food and recruits. Peasants are dispossessed by landowners, corvée, and military levies; they are often the immediate constituency of insurgent movements. Urban workers, miners, artisans and the conscripted soldier class appear as the concentrated sites of industrial labour, political organisation and military potency.

In the novel, local merchants, industrialists tied to foreign capital, and landowning elites who broker deals with imperial powers function as a comprador class—they defend property, seek stability for capital accumulation, and will sell national sovereignty to protect their interests. The novel’s bureaucratic and military apparatus—police, generals, intelligence organs—is an embodiment of the state as an instrument of class rule. They administer repression, manage economic concessions and mediate between imperial interests and local elites.

To her credit, she warns against relying on nationalist elites or petty-bourgeois adventurism to carry out democratic or social reforms. In semi-colonial settings, the proletariat must assert independent leadership—organise urban workers, factory committees, soldiers’ committees, and alliances with the poor peasantry, rather than subordinating itself to comprador regimes.

Despite her tender age, Kuang possesses a verbal brilliance and erudition probably unsurpassed by any novelist of her generation. She has mocked many sacred cows. In Yellowface, she attacks the right-wing MeToo# movement. She hates contemporary identity politics, which typically originates in petty‑bourgeois layers with ambitions inside the cultural and professional hierarchy of capitalism. Kuang came under heavy attack for writing Yellowface. The public dispute over the book’s accusers that an author has appropriated or misrepresented Asian experience cannot be reduced to questions of individual taste or moral purity. It is rooted in the concrete class relations and economic imperatives of the publishing industry.

At the surface level, the row frames itself as an ethical debate about representation. However, its intensity and public amplification are products of a crisis in cultural markets. Publishing has become an arena of intensified competition for scarce positions — advances, awards, media visibility — driven by conglomeration and profit-maximising behaviour. Large publishers, retailers and tech platforms compress cultural diversity into marketable identity niches, while promotional narratives and outrage cycles are monetised. The HarperCollins one‑day strike and workers’ testimonies show how publishing workers face low pay, expanded workloads, and corporate cost‑cutting even as firms seek cultural “brands” to sell; this creates an environment in which status and visibility are disproportionately valuable to authors and gatekeepers alike.

As the dispute over Yellowface shows, a writer does not write under conditions of his/her choosing, and artistic greatness is not something merely willed. Some periods are more favourable to genius than others. I am not saying Kuang is a genius, but the limitations of American intellectual life during the recent epoch will have shaped her. With a fascist gangster in the White House, it will be interesting to see how much she curses and kicks against the confines.

As the brilliant Marxist writer Leon Trotsky once wrote:” If environment expressed itself in novels, European science would not be breaking its head over the question of where the stories of A Thousand and One Nights were made, whether in Egypt, India, or Persia.” To say that man’s environment, including the artist’s, that is, the conditions of his education and life, finds expression in his art also, does not mean to say that such expression has a precise geographic, ethnographic and statistical character. It is not at all surprising that it is difficult to decide whether certain novels were made in Egypt, India or Persia, because the social conditions of these countries have much in common. However, the very fact that European science is “breaking its head” trying to solve this question, as these novels themselves show, indicates that these novels reflect an environment, even if unevenly.

No one can jump beyond himself. Even the ravings of an insane person contain nothing that the sick man had not received before from the outside world. However, it would be an insanity of another order to regard his ravings as the accurate reflection of an external world. Only an experienced and thoughtful psychiatrist who knows the patient’s past will be able to find the reflected and distorted bits of reality in the ravings’ contents. Artistic creation, of course, is not a raving, though it is also a deflection, a changing and a transformation of reality, in accordance with the peculiar laws of art. However fantastic art may be, it cannot have at its disposal any other material except that which is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower world of class society. Even when the artist creates heaven and hell, he merely transforms the experience of his own life into his phantasmagorias, almost to the point of his landlady’s unpaid bill”.[2]

Babel-Or the Necessity of Violence

Babel is set at 1830s Oxford University. Despite being labelled a historical novel, Kuang is adamant that it has lessons for today’s readers. In an interview, Kuang called her book “ a dark text of academia, saying, “ I love campus novels, dark academia novels. Moreover, I knew that when I finished the Poppy War trilogy, I was going to move on and do something in that genre. That is the setting in which I am most comfortable and familiar. Those are the interpersonal dynamics that I observe and most enjoy writing about—between students and rival students, students and teachers, etc.[3]

Roger Marheine writes “ Kuang pulls no punches in her scathing critique of Oxford professors who are either overt imperial agents of war (e.g. Robin’s father, Professor Lovell), willing dupes of imperial platitudes especially as they practice their daily craft within the very privileged confines of Oxfordian splendor, or specialists blissfully unaware of empire’s greater crimes as they live in academic cocoons and grasp only their own silo of knowledge. One of Oxford’s professors, Jerome Playfair, represents Kuang’s satirical comment on the British gentleman’s code of conduct, as they ruthlessly assert their global dominance.”[4]

Marheine is a pseudo-leftist and, like many on the radical left, echoes the Socialist Worker Party’s sentiment that Kuang’s book is a “goldmine of revolutionary politics.” While I am loath to downplay Kuang’s radical stance, she is not a Marxist, and this is not a socialist work of historical fiction. Some have argued that the book lacked nuance in its treatment of how characters from different marginalised backgrounds intersected with the imperial centre. There is a distinct lack of characters of a working-class background.

However, Rebecca F. Kuang’s fiction (notably The Poppy War trilogy and Babel) offers rich material for Marxist study: imperialism, ethnic division, bureaucracy, mass mobilisation, culture, and the politics of memory recur throughout her work.

Kuang’s critique of knowledge as imperial plunder in Babel does deserve a Marxist class analysis. Kuang’s Babel dramatises how the production, translation and curation of knowledge are woven into imperial accumulation. Her book shows that texts, languages and librarianship become commodities and instruments of state power. The novel makes visible several features of that process that are vital for organising library, academic and translation workers.

The main thread running through the book is that knowledge labour is expropriated and monetised. Kuang has clearly studied this barbaric practice because her book shows how scholarship and translation produce useful intellectual commodities, annotated corpora, glossaries, and archival order are appropriated by imperial institutions for political and economic advantage. The unpaid or underpaid labour of native speakers, archivists and junior scholars supplies content and expertise that enriches metropolitan libraries and universities, while the material rewards (funding, prestige, job security) flow to imperial centres. This mirrors the contemporary university’s transformation into a profit-generating arm of capital, in which millions of dollars in tuition and research funding are extracted. At the same time, adjuncts, librarians and translators remain precarious and low-paid.

Kuang is not overtly a Marxist; she does not mention Marx by name, but she does strive to present a materialist analysis of capitalism and empire. It would be very interesting to review her work in, say, five years to discover the extent to which it reflects the growth of fascist tendencies within world capitalism and how a growing radical working class can tackle this. Adopting a Marxist approach would give her already stunning work an even sharper edge, along with a much wider readership than this great writer has achieved so far.

[1] keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/07/review-yellowface-by-rebecca-f-kuang.html

[2] The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism-Literature and Revolution Leon Trotsky http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch05.htm

[3] www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1570.R_F_Kuang

[4] Book Review: Babel by R. F. Kuang-mltoday.com/book-review-babel-by-r-f-kuang/

Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund, Verso £10.99, 144 pages

April 2, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Once a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Czeslaw Milosz

“The relationship between mother and son and mother and daughter is different, because the mother is a mirror in which the daughter sees her future self and the daughter is a mirror in which the mother sees her lost self.”

Is Mother Dead

“What do we do with our despair if our lives are too small to contain it?”

Long Live the Post Horn!

“The relationship of a work of art to reality is uninteresting; the work’s relationship to the truth is crucial; the true value of the work doesn’t lie in its relationship to a so-called reality, but in its effect on the observer.”

― Vigdis Hjorth, Is Mother Dead

Vigdis Hjorth occupies a prominent place among contemporary Scandinavian writers. Her novels examine family conflict, memory, gender and legal institutions through psychologically acute, often fractured stories. Hjorth is extremely well known in her native Norway and throughout Scandinavia. She began writing in the early 1980s. She started writing children’s books and moved on to fiction for adults. She is a prodigious writer with some forty books under her belt. It is a safe bet that if more of her books were translated into English, she would be a far bigger writer. All her English books have been translated by the excellent Charlotte Barslund. Four of her books in English are variations on a story of family rupture and estrangement, with more or less the same cast of characters.

To understand Hjorth and the broader landscape of Scandinavian fiction, the reader must study the political-historical context of Hjorth’s work and examine the social functions performed by literature in a petty‑bourgeois milieu. Hjorth’s fiction often explores the fractures of bourgeois family life, individual trauma and the legal and cultural institutions that sustain property and social standing. On a deeper level, her work shows how “personal” suffering is shaped by class relations—inheritance disputes, cultural capital, gendered social labour, and the moral vocabulary that deflects systemic critique into private pathology.

While you would be hard pushed to describe Hjorth as a left-wing writer, her novels do make an ideal entry point for politicising cultural debate. Her focus on family law, inheritance, trauma and testimony intersects with current social conflicts over housing, social care, gender violence, and access to justice. She reveals how “private” disputes often reproduce material inequalities and legitimise social hierarchies.

Hjorth’s fiction is heavily influenced by other Scandinavian fiction, which also often depicts welfare infrastructures, gender norms and small‑property relations that appear “progressive” yet conceal new forms of commodification, household debt and petty‑bourgeois aspirations. Hjorth, like other Scandinavian writers, both male and female, frequently recycles sets of ideological strategies that hide class antagonisms while channelling popular grievances into non‑class answers.

Perhaps the master of this genre is Soren Kierkegaard, whom Hjorth greatly admires. Kierkegaard is a crucial figure in the genealogy of modern bourgeois ideology: his subjectivism and rejection of reason helped lay philosophical groundwork for existentialism, postmodernism and the anti-scientific tendencies of contemporary ideology. Kierkegaard’s turning away from reason anticipated the modern cult of subjectivity, the delegitimisation of science, and the promotion of personal mysticism as an alternative to collective political solutions. Hjorth has to be very careful not to get too close to him; her writing will take on a very reactionary turn.

In her latest book, Repetition Hjorth goes over familiar ground. As Elaine Blair points out in her critical review, “Hjorth has been returning to this material for more than two decades, offering different perspectives on the constellation of prodigal daughter, ambivalent siblings, convention-bound mother, and tyrannical father. Her novels have spanned different periods of time, some focusing on a limited period of months or years, others pulling back to tell the whole story. It’s as if she’s asking: Where is the story? What is the best way to tell it? In a sense, Hjorth’s narrators did not experience the crucial events of their lives in chronological order. An ordered timeline is true to the abusive father’s perspective (he alone knew what happened and when) but not to that of the daughter, whose experience of abuse, with its repressed and resurfaced memories, defies the schema of linear time. The abuse was happening to her, then it hadn’t happened to her, then it had happened to her, a long time ago.”[1]

Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Repetition, although only 144 pages, is a psychologically acute, formally inventive exploration of memory, trauma and personal alienation. The reader needs to understand it as part of the broader social and historical fabric, and not to study it not only as individual psychology but as a social product whose form and themes are shaped by class relations and institutions.

Hjorth’s Repetition locates trauma and interpersonal breakdown inside the family, legal procedures and therapeutic institutions. Far from being purely personal failures, these institutions appear in the novel as mediators that translate social distress into individual pathology. This depiction is symptomatic of the wider neoliberal transformation of social life in Norway and globally. Under neoliberalism, governments and employers have shifted costs and responsibilities onto households and individuals. In Norway, this has taken the form of tightened welfare provision, market pressures on municipal services and an expansion of private providers alongside public services. Internationally, the same logic prevails: health, social and legal services are re‑organised to be “efficient” for budgets and profitable for providers. At the same time, the working class and small proprietors pick up the bill.

Hjorth’s portrayal of family collapse, court proceedings, and therapy mirrors these transformations: families are expected to absorb economic and emotional strains; the law is increasingly an instrument for adjudicating private disputes in ways that reproduce social inequality; therapy becomes a form of individualised management that treats symptoms rather than social causes.

Why do Hjorth’s novels matter, and what can we learn from them? They are important now because they dramatise the individual consequences of social atomization under neoliberalism: privatised suffering, judicial and therapeutic institutions that individualise social injury, and cultural narratives that valorise personal authenticity over collective remedy.

Notes

A closer look at Kierkegaard-Tom Carter-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/04/kier-a17.html

Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, by Joachim Garff, translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse. 867 pages, Princeton University Press, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/04/kier-a17.ht

[1] Where Is the Story? Vigdis Hjorth repeats herself-harpers.org