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.
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.
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.
Katabasis, R.F. Kuang’s latest novel, portrays modern class society primarily through the lens of academic elitism and the commodification of knowledge. The new book marks a departure for Kuang, as her previous work, such as Babel, focused on class and colonialism.
Kuang’s previous work should be approached with both caution and admiration. Her earlier novels, the Poppy War trilogy and Babel, drew considerable attention for their engagement with imperialism, colonialism, and historical violence. Babel examines British colonialism and the exploitation of non-Western knowledge through a fantasy lens. These are legitimate and important subjects.
However, a limitation of this kind of literary-political fiction is that it frames oppression primarily through the lens of race and national identity rather than class. The enemy in Babel is, broadly, “the British empire” understood in racial and civilizational terms, rather than capitalism as a world-historical system that generates imperialism regardless of which nation or ethnic group sits at the top.
Katabasis critiques present-day class society, showing the “ivory tower” as a modern class structure that gatekeeps social mobility behind walls of wealth and power. The core of the novel presents the reader with many arguments regarding class in contemporary society. The first one sees academia as a modern class hierarchy. Kuang frames the university system as an “infernal structure” that mirrors a pyramid scheme rather than a meritocracy. Secondly, Characters like Alice and Peter are depicted as “cannon fodder” in a departmental war, spending their best years doing grunt work to further the prestige of senior academics, barriers to Entry.
The novel also critiques how prestigious universities gatekeep their institutions, making success nearly impossible for those without significant “financial privilege”. The protagonists are so indoctrinated into this class system that they believe their lives are literally “not worth living” without validation from an elite institution.
If the Katabasis theme seems familiar, it is because it invokes the classical literary descent into the underworld (as in Dante, Virgil, and Homer). The novel continues Kuang’s interest in dark, morally complex fantasy. It raises many questions, including whether the narrative’s moral framework reduces social evil to individual wickedness or to ethnic or national conflict, or whether it points towards systemic, class-based contradictions. From a literary and political standpoint, does Kuang’s “descent” have any genuine social content, or is it primarily psychological and individual? Great literature, even in fantasy, illuminates the real social forces that shape human suffering the test for the reader is whether Katabasis reaches that depth.
Dante’s Inferno is perhaps the most elaborate katabasis in Western literature, and it is saturated with class content. The organisation of hell explicitly reflects the social and political contradictions of late medieval Italy popes, usurers, and political enemies are placed in their circles with meticulous class logic. The great usurers of Florence sit in the seventh circle; Dante was writing at a moment when merchant capital was beginning to corrode feudal social relations, and his moral geography encodes that anxiety. The sin of usury (lending for profit) damns early capitalists; the sin of betrayal damns political traitors to the feudal order.
Kuang’s book is not just a history book; her katabasis metaphor, used in modern terms, takes on a different path. The world of the labouring poor, the mines, the factories, the slums, was consistently figured in the 19th and 20th centuries as an underworld into which bourgeois observers “descended.” Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England is, in a sense, a social katabasis, a descent into the cellars and rookeries of Manchester to bring back testimony from a world the bourgeoisie preferred not to see. Émile Zola’s Germinal centres on a literal descent into the coal mines; the underground is the space of proletarian labour and, ultimately, of proletarian rebellion.
This is where the class dimension becomes most politically charged. The bourgeoisie imagines itself above ground, in the light of civilisation and culture; the working class is relegated to the depths. But the katabasis trope, when deployed honestly, always carries the seed of a reversal; the hero who goes down returns transformed, with knowledge the surface world lacks. The revolutionary implications are not hard to see: it is precisely from the “underworld” of capitalist production from the mines, the foundries, the assembly lines — that the force capable of overthrowing the existing order emerges.
As Beejay Silcox observes, “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. Chunks of the novel read like a Rowan Atkinson sketch. And the 1980s faculty politics look deceptively – or perhaps wearily – like our own (a fascinating companion read would be Helen Garner’s 1995 landmark provocation The First Stone). But none of that really matters – especially if you have a score to settle.”[1]
Katabasis is a complex and contradictory work. Kuang is not a Marxist, yet her work enables a Marxist to explain their approach to mythology. Marxists insist that artistic and mythological forms are not autonomous —they arise from and reflect material and social conditions, even as they develop internally. The katabasis is not merely a timeless archetype (as Jung or Joseph Campbell would have it) within a deeply ahistorical, idealist framework. It is a form that takes on different social content in different epochs, justifying imperial class rule in Virgil, mapping the contradictions of feudal society in Dante, and encoding working-class experience in the naturalist novel.
“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.
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
“As a vast, solid phalanx, the generations come on; they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is this which they do not detect in each other. It is the one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the labourers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women. –
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Notebooks”
“The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group.”
Henry James 1879 biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
‘Is imagination so fanciful that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true?’
Eduardo Halfon
“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. But sciences analyse, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual [i.e., sensory] nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.”
Aleksandr Voronsky
Eduardo Halfon is part of a new generation of Latin American writers who, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, have seen further than most because they have stood on the shoulders of giants. These giants are well-known. In a recent interview, Halfon was asked about his earliest influences. “Mostly North American writers, and most of them in the short story tradition. Maybe that’s why I constantly go back to that genre. I’m essentially a short story writer. That’s where I feel most comfortable, or least uncomfortable. My technique or approach in constructing a short story is very much based on the North American tradition, much more so than the Latin American one. I feel much closer to Hemingway and Carver and Cheever, for example, than I do to Borges and Cortázar and García Márquez.[1]
Halfon and others are still paying their debt to these greats, but they are also now striking out on a new road. As Halfon succinctly put it, “ My house, then, is built on two pillars. But a writer must begin by destroying one’s house.
Like their earlier counterparts, these writers have to deal with their respective countries’ violent political pasts. In Halfon’s case, the past is the genocidal campaign by the Guatemalan ruling elite against its Mayan and working-class population. Although Halfon clearly is influenced by Guatemala’s great writers such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Augusto Monterroso and modern day writers such Francisco Goldman and David Unger his work is “intensely autobiographical, migratory and steeped in memory” Halfon’s focus on migration, memory and identity can be read as testimony to the real material dislocations produced by imperialism and capitalist restructuring throughout Latin America.
It is worth noting that every single Guatemalan writer or poet of note has been forced into exile due to the distinct possibility of being murdered by their respective dictators. Halfon noted this in an interview in 2015, “For the past century, Guatemalan writers have been writing and dying in exile. Miguel Ángel Asturias, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, wrote his books about Guatemala while living in exile, in South America and Europe. He died in Paris and is buried at Père Lachaise. The great short-story writer Augusto Monterroso, after being detained by the military forces of dictator Jorge Ubico, was forced to leave the country in 1944. He fled first to Chile, then to Mexico, where he lived the rest of his life, and where he wrote most of his stories, and where he’s now buried. Luis Cardoza y Aragón, arguably Guatemala’s most important poet of the last century, suffered a similar fate —he was also forced into exile in Mexico in the 1930s, where he wrote his poetry and where he, too, died. Guatemala’s greatest playwright, Carlos Solórzano, fled the country in 1939—first to Germany, then to Mexico—and never returned. The writer Mario Payeras, a guerrilla commander in the 1970s, also wrote while exiled in Mexico, where he suddenly and mysteriously died (his remains were buried in a cemetery in the southwest of the country, but have since vanished). One of the most important Guatemalan novels of the last few decades, El Tiempo Principia en Xibalbá (Time Commences in Xibalbá), was written by the indigenous writer Luis de Lión, who in 1984 was kidnapped by military forces, tortured for twenty days, and then disappeared. His murder wasn’t confirmed until fifteen years later, in 1999, when his name and number appeared in the now infamous “Military Diary”, a haunting military document that secretly listed the fate of all the Guatemalans disappeared by the military forces between August 1983 and March 1985. Luis de Lión, born José Luís de León Díaz, is number 135. His novel was published posthumously, that most extreme of exiles.”[2]
Halfon’s recurring motifs of displacement, cross-border families, and fragmented memory are not merely personal or cultural; they are literary expressions of material processes driven by the global capitalist system. Halfon is not a Marxist, but he clearly uses these literary expressions in much the same way that the great American writer Phillip Roth did in his work to uncover the past and prepare for future struggles. How else would you understand Roth’s extraordinary prescient novel The Plot Against America?
Halfon does not explicitly examine the growth of Fascism in Guatemala. Rather, evocations in his stories are an indirect examination of the expansion of informal, precarious labour, the restructuring of national economies through neoliberal “adjustment,” and the integration of millions into transnational labour markets, all of which create the objective conditions for mass migration and social struggles.
According to the International Labour Organisation, more than 2.1 billion of the world’s 3.6 billion workers now labour in the informal economy. Platform and casual work are central mechanisms of modern labour casualisation These processes force families to fragment, livelihoods to be uprooted, and memories to be reconstituted around loss, survival and mobility, the precise themes of Halfon’s fiction. It has been said of Halfon’s collective work that it seems to flow into a single ongoing novel.
Chris Power points out that Halfon’s “ other recurring themes include Guatemalan history, the Holocaust, questions of Jewish identity, and the nature of violence. The books recycle stories, such as Eduardo’s grandfather’s experience of Auschwitz and subsequent emigration to Guatemala; the family’s relocation to the States; and Eduardo’s own career as a writer. When a novel’s narrator and its author share a name and identity, it naturally prompts questions about what is true and what is invented. But Halfon’s primary concern seems not to be with establishing facts, as a memoirist might, but to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear.”[3]
Before discussing other things, it is worth commenting on the translations of Halfon’s books, which merit a book in themselves. Eduardo Halfon’s fiction—works such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Lost Boy—explore memory, migration, identity and the tangled legacies of war and displacement. It is important to study the translations seriously and treat them not as incidental “products” but as historical-cultural documents.
For instance, Halfon’s The Polish Boxer was worked on by an international group of five translators who worked in concert with each other to deliver a very good manuscript. These translators understand how translations shape how working people around the world encounter cultures and struggles not their own. Translation determines which voices reach mass audiences and under what political framing.
Halfon and his translators stand on the shoulders of the groundbreaking translator Gregory Rabassa. His translations helped define an international readership’s image of Latin American culture and politics. Understanding these processes exposes the cultural market’s role in commodifying exile, migration, and anti‑imperialist themes and creates a basis for challenging who benefits and who is represented.
Gregory Rabassa’s work, most famously his English translations of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Clarice Lispector, offers a model for studying translation as both a literary and political activity. It is important to learn from Rabassa methodically. The reader should combine a close technical study of his translations with an analysis of the publishing, class and cultural forces that shape which books circulate internationally.
As Rabassa once wrote, “The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all other essentials have already been provided, so he can sit down and write his ass off.”[4]
Eduardo Halfon’s new book is elliptical, memory-driven and obsessed with names, absence and family traces. Still, it is also a powerful entry point for understanding how imperialism and transnational capital shape private lives. Reading Halfon alongside the history of the United Fruit Company (later Chiquita) provides the reader with a powerful understanding of the Guatemalan civil war, fought from 1960 to 1996, which was triggered by the United States at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
The US oligarchy was the largest landowner in the Central American republic. The United Fruit, in collaboration with the US government, sanctioned and organised alongside the Guatemalan ruling elite and its military, systematic kidnappings and murders that were part of the government’s counter-insurgency campaign saw death squads murder hundreds of thousands of political opponents and Mayan people.
The United Fruit Company was not a benign employer but a transnational corporation whose profits depended on control of land, labour, and transport. In Guatemala and across Central America, UFCO backed oligarchic politics, shaped infrastructure for export agriculture, and collaborated with US state power to secure its property and markets. The company’s role in creating the “banana republic” form, where export interests dominated politics and security, helped produce recurrent repression, dispossession and intervention that set the context for the civil war and ongoing violence.
US imperialism’s hand in Guatemala (1954 coup against Árbenz, long-term support for military regimes and counterinsurgency) turned economic disputes over land and labour into matters of geopolitical strategy. The Guatemalan state served as a repressive instrument of the dominant class. In Guatemala, this meant the security forces acting to defend plantation and export interests against labour organising and land reform.
The successor firms to United Fruit have continued the pattern of corporate power shaping violence and act with impunity. Contemporary cases, such as Chiquita’s payments to Colombian paramilitaries and the company’s light legal consequences, illustrate how transnationals use force and collusion to secure profits and suppress labour, often with the tacit protection of governments.
Eduardo Halfon’s fiction, memory-driven, autobiographical and formally inventive, provides a vital entry point into understanding how class, imperialism and genocide shape subjective experience. To study Halfon in relation to the Guatemalan civil war means reading literature as historical testimony: to connect aesthetic form and private memory with the social forces that produced mass murder, displacement and the long-term campaign of state terror.
Understanding Halfon together with the historical record helps expose the continuing rule of the oligarchy, judicial impunity and US influence, factors central to contemporary struggles over land, indigenous rights and militarisation.
Halfon rarely offers direct economic history; instead, his stories register the aftershocks: absences, silences, disrupted families, migrations and the odd conjunctions of identity that result from capitalist domination. Where Halfon evokes a vanished aunt, a rented house, a childhood street, those private traces map onto structures of class power: plantations that displaced communities, export economies that enclosed common land, and states that protected corporate assets rather than popular needs.
To read Halfon politically is to read the gaps as social symptoms: the inability to name perpetrators, the sense of illegible history, the recurring motif of “not knowing” where a relative went or why a place changed. These are not merely aesthetic devices but the subjective remnant of forced migrations, economic coercion and political terror produced by export capitalism and imperialist intervention.
Like most Guatemalan writers, Halfon learned to write as if his life depended on it. For most readers of his books, it must be hard to understand that writers like Halfon are in constant fear of assassination because of what they write and uncover. A prime example of this is Francisco Goldman. His book The Art of Political Murder nearly got him killed.
In an interview with the Guardian, Halfon recounts feeling paranoid about being followed. My understanding of the political situation in Guatemala is that Halfon is not paranoid. Given Guatemala’s track record of killing writers and journalists who get in their way, it is a real threat, not just paranoia.
It is worth quoting in length from Halfon’s Guardian article. Halfon believes that many things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about.
“ Just after I published my first novel in Guatemala, in 2003, I had a beer with the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, who was living there at the time. We met at an old bar called El Establo. As soon as he saw me walk in, he raised his bottle of beer, congratulated me, smiled a crazy man’s smile, and then warned me to leave the country as soon as possible.
Guatemalan writers, and Guatemalans in general, have lived for almost a century now in a climate of fear. If anyone dared to speak out, they either disappeared into exile or disappeared literally. This fear is still prevalent, woven deep into the subconscious of the Guatemalan people, who, over time, have been taught to be silent. To not speak out. To not say or write words that might kill you.
The first consequence of this, of course, is overall silence. Certain things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about. The indigenous genocide in the 1980s. The extreme racism. The overwhelming number of women being murdered. The impossibility of land reform and redistribution of wealth. The close ties between the government and the drug cartels. Although these are all subjects that almost define the country itself, they are discussed and commented on only in whispers or from the outside. But a second and perhaps more dangerous consequence of a culture of silence is a type of self-censorship: when speaking or writing, one mustn’t say anything that puts oneself or one’s family in peril. The censoring becomes automatic, unconscious. Because the danger is very real. Although the days of dictators are now gone, the military is still powerful, and political and military murders are all too common.
It was at a bookstore called Sophos. I was browsing some books on the table when an elderly man came over and introduced himself. He was dressed in a coat and tie. He said he had read my novel and talked for a few minutes about his impressions. He then shook my hand again and, still holding on to it, said it had been a pleasure to meet me, that I should take care, be careful. I asked him carefully about what. He just smiled politely and went on his way. I considered it strange, but didn’t give it much thought. Maybe he was just being nice? Maybe I misinterpreted his greeting (usted cuídese, you take care)? Anyway, I had almost forgotten about it until several weeks later, when I received a phone call. The voice on the phone said I didn’t know him, but that he was calling as a friend to warn me about my enemies.”[5]
Suppose you make the effort to read Halfon’s work; it is a joy. His work opens questions about the culture of migration, the commodification of memory, and the role of literature in representing displacement.
“It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. It is very true that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or to accept a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But the beauty of Marxism is that it alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.”
Notes
1. The Purest Form of Writing, the Most Intimate Form of Reading-Eduardo Halfon, in conversation with his translators Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, with Avinoam Patt, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_60.3Halfom/index.pdf
The UN Historical Clarification Commission, “Guatemala: Memory of Silence”) and forensic anthropology studies on exhumations.
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? Francisco Goldman Atlantic Books Paperback – 1 Feb. 2010-
Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings 1911-1936 Paperback – 1 Jan. 1998by Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky (Author), Frederick S. Choate (Translator)
5. Mastermind, by David Unger -AKASHIC BOOKS Paperback – 19 May 2016
About The Author
Eduardo Halfón (born 1971) is a Guatemalan novelist and essayist whose compact, often autobiographical works probe memory, identity, migration, and Jewishness in Latin America and the United States. His books — including titles translated into English such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Book of Owners — use fragmented narrative, irony and personal testimony to interrogate how individual life is shaped by history, displacement and cultural inheritance. His latest book is Tarantula.
Making Space is a beautifully crafted 32-page eBook. It is essentially about a childless couple who take in a mysterious boy in a dark and foreboding short story about the responsibility of parenthood, self-sacrifice, and how we perceive the future. It is also what happens to a person’s soul when they sell it to the devil. Although different from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, there are striking similarities.[1]
R. F. Kuang’s Making Space is part of The Time Traveller’s Passport. It is a collection of stories about memory, identity, and the choices we make in life. New York Times bestselling author John Joseph Adams edited the book. It is a little surprising that Amazon would snare an author of Kuang’s stature. The book is currently only available on Amazon, and a printed version has not been released yet. Review copies appear to be sanctioned by Amazon through NetGalley.[2]
Although the short book genre is new to Kuang, she handles it superbly, serving as a testament to her intellect and experience. The dark and not-unsurprising ending is typical of Kuang. Her main narrative is beautifully crafted, delving into the complexities of human relationships and social responsibilities. However, it is a little disturbing that Kuang makes far too many concessions to the right-wing #MeToo campaign.
I am not saying that Kuang is an ardent supporter of the #MeToo movement. However, her work on Making Space makes it difficult to turn such narrow, selfish concerns of Jess into great, compelling drama.
As the great G. V. Plekhanov wrote, “I know that an artist cannot be held responsible for the statements of their heroes. But very often he, in one way or another, indicates his own attitude to these statements, and we are thus able to judge what his own views are.”
And writing an observation that would not look out of place in today’s world, He writes in the same essay, “in present-day social conditions, the fruits of art for art’s sake are far from delectable. The extreme individualism of the era of bourgeois decay cuts artists off from all sources of genuine inspiration. It renders them completely blind to what is happening in social life, condemning them to sterile preoccupation with personal emotional experiences that are entirely without significance and marked by the fantasies of a morbid imagination. The end product of their preoccupation is something that not only has no relation to beauty of any kind, but which moreover represents an obvious absurdity that can only be defended with the help of a sophistically distorted idealist theory of knowledge.”[3]
While there is nothing wrong with using the internet to publish books or short stories, it does contain certain dangers. Kuang has been accused of using AI to write her books on TikTok. But as one reader succinctly puts it, “Sadly, AI is so common now that talent is suspicious! Would you accuse Sanderson or Stephen King of AI? Or is ‘too articulate’ a critique only reserved for female authors?”.
In defence of Kuang Varika Rastogi writes, “Kuang—in no small part because of the role TikTok has played in her rise to success—is also deeply aware of the Internet being the ‘realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, and she deploys this (Yellowface) novel as a means to assess how it can both heal and harm projects. A significant portion of Yellowface is represented through Twitter discourse and Goodreads reviews. By placing us in the shoes of the targets of its vitriol and negativity, the author attempts to make us privy both to the mental impact such harassment can have on a person, as well as to the fact that “allegations get flung left and right, everyone’s reputations are torn down, and when the dust clears, everything remains exactly as it was.” However, if nothing changes, it is also because someone is making a profit”[4]
Making Space is still a superbly written book. Kuang is to be commended for her recent efforts in the field of battle against the racialisation of literature, and her defence of the fundamental right of an author to write about whatever they want without fear of their books being burned or pulped. However, Making Spaces is a dangerous concession to the #MeToo movement. Her new book, Katabasis, which is already a best seller, will be reviewed at a later date.
“Canceled Lives tells the whole sad story and the personal pain Bailey suffered. His publisher had no right to do what they did to him. This book, about accusations of terrible behaviour and their effect on a book and its author, goes beyond memoir and reveals the profound harm such assertions can cause. It deserves a wide and discerning audience.”
Martin Garbus, Prominent First Amendment Lawyer
“I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. However, I am also anxious about the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. As a civil libertarian, I am anxious because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.
Philip Roth
“The history of my discontent, as I remember it”
Philip Roth
“The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs up against establishment public opinion can be denounced and dismissed in like manner.”
David Walsh
When Blake Bailey’s excellent 900-page biography of the writer Philip Roth was published in 2021, it should have been the standard work on Roth’s life for some time to come. Unfortunately for Bailey, we were already amidst the #MeToo movement’s vilification of Roth, his work and worldview. Roth was cognisant of the fact that some women had been abused, saying, “I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. But I am also made anxious by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. I am made anxious, as a civil libertarian, because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.”[1]
Bailey became a casualty in this war against Roth for essentially defending Roth’s right to his worldview. Bailey fell afoul of his publishers’ “morals charge” after accusations of sexual abuse were levelled at him via social media. Some of Bailey’s former eighth-grade students at Lusher High School in New Orleans came forward with allegations that he had groomed them for sex. Two women, including one of his former students at Lusher, subsequently accused him of rape.
Although no formal charges were made against Bailey, it did not stop his so-called friends in the literary scene, who “fell over one another”, disassociating themselves from Bailey. His biography was then pulped by his publisher, W.W.Norton, an act that is akin to book burning carried out by the Nazis in the 1930s.
As David Walsh wrote, “ In a significant act of censorship, with chilling implications for democratic rights, publisher W.W. Norton has announced its decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of American novelist Philip Roth (1933–2018) from print. Several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual wrongdoing, including rape, dating back to 2003. None of them has come forward with any evidence to back up the claims. Bailey’s 880-page book, well-received critically and considered one of the essential works of the year in its field, will be pulped. Norton also reported its dropping of Bailey’s 2014 memoir. In a statement dripping with hypocrisy, Norton’s president, Julia A. Reidhead, asserted that “Mr Bailey will be free to seek publication elsewhere if he chooses.” Overnight, Bailey has become a “non-person.” he has ceased to exist.[2]
Most of Bailey’s friends and fellow writers stayed silent when he was made a “non-person. It was not until the World Socialist Website marshalled some resistance that people started to speak out. Several prominent writers, historians, and film people contacted by the WSWS condemned W. W. Norton’s treatment of Bailey. Novelist, memoirist and short-story writer James Morrison wrote, “Even if Blake Bailey were charged, tried, and convicted of a crime, it would still be indefensible for W. W. Norton to pulp his book. Can American readers not have the option to think for themselves? The “#MeToo movement” might have accomplished something if it had facilitated the prosecution of cases involving harassment or assault. Still, it has resulted in something like its opposite: a bizarre spectacle of social panic, moral shaming, and public burning, based on unfounded accusations in the media. Norton’s cancellation of Bailey’s book is not the action of a free institution in a democratic society. It is the procedure of craven functionaries deep in a politburo.[3]
Author, editor and blogger Kathleen Spaltro said, “Thomas Aquinas clarified that the aesthetic value of art has nothing whatever to do with whether the artist is a good person. The artist may be a good person, or not, but that is the moral question faced by the artist as a person, not as an artist.
Film critic, film historian and author Jonathan Rosenbaum: Cancel culture, perhaps the most poisonous and befuddled offshoot of “political correctness,” is a totalitarian expression of impotence, not any real exercise of political power. It’s a way of saying that because one can’t defeat racism or misogyny or abuse in the real world, at its sources, one can pretend to defeat it symbolically, by canceling words, sounds, images and other forms of communication, thus pretending that the people and communicators one disapproves of can be “canceled” (i.e., ignored and suppressed). It’s an insult to the principles of free expression that can only be practised by defeated bigots who’ve given up on free expression and democratic processes, and by gamblers who prefer to cheat.”
It took a while for Bailey to understand what had happened to him. Canceled Lives is his attempt to process and collect his thoughts and to answer his detractors. Patrick Mullins describes the new book’s journey: “Originally titled Repellent, it was scheduled to be published in April 2023. Speaking circumspectly, Bailey has explained that the executors of Roth’s estate, Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier, objected to the inclusion of Bailey’s conversations with Roth in the manuscript, arguing that the publication of these exchanges, which supposedly made up the bulk of the book, would violate the agreement Bailey signed as Roth’s authorised biographer. And so Repellent was reworked, becoming Cancelled Lives, and Bailey’s dealings with Roth were transformed into an account of his father’s death braided with chapters narrating Bailey’s disgrace.”[4]
There are many themes running through Canceled Lives. One being Bailey’s sexual activity. Bailey was no angel, and some of his relationships were questionable at best. There seems to be a period in his life where his penis did most of the thinking, but this does not mean he deserved what happened to him.
He writes, “The worst of what I was accused of wasn’t true. I did nothing illegal and nothing vicious. I’m not a rapist, I did not deliberately groom anybody; these were long-time friends. You have enterprising reporters calling hundreds of your former students, hundreds of the people you’ve mentioned in your acknowledgements. People, for various reasons, are eager to get their shots”.
A strong theme of the book is death. Bailey discusses the life and early death of his older brother, Scott, who committed suicide in his early thirties after a life of drug addiction and crime. Bailey harshly describes Scott’s suicide as doing “himself and his loved ones a favour ”. Bailey spent a significant amount of time researching his book on Roth, so much so that he must have ended up with deep feelings for Roth.
He tells how he witnessed Roth’s final moments alongside Roth’s former lovers and closest friends surrounding his hospital deathbed. It is not surprising that the book provides little information about his relationship with Roth. Given how much he had to process in his own life and to come to terms with so many devastating attacks on him. Perhaps it is just as well, as he was while Roth was still alive, unable due to disclosure limitations imposed by the Roth estate on Bailey.
As Walsh intimates in his work on Bailey, most of the attacks on Bailey are less about his sexual proclivities and more to do with the fact that he wrote a perceptively objective biography of Roth and, in the end, defended both Roth and his political worldview against his detractors in the #MeToo movement.
In a recent video call, David Walsh spoke with Bailey about his new book, “The Sexual Witch Hunt,” and democratic rights, as well as briefly discussing the subject matter of his various biographies. Bailey thanked the World Socialist Website for its support, saying, “You could be speaking for me, and you did, after everything blew up. I was enormously grateful for the courage of it. Very few people spoke up. People wrote me private notes expressing their outrage, or at least chagrin, about how viciously and relentlessly I was attacked. But I can’t think of anyone offhand who was as outspoken publicly as you were. And if I didn’t say it emphatically enough before, let me say now that I was very grateful for that.[5]
It is striking that the Trotskyist movement has been left to lead the defence of Bailey and his democratic rights in the pages of the World Socialist Website. The campaign to defend Bailey has cut across the right-wing attack on him led by the #MeToo movement. It is worth noting that the movement has been ably assisted by numerous pseudo-left media organisations that have joined the attacks on both Roth and Bailey. These so-called leftists have shown their support for banning books and removing them from bookshelves. The next logical step for these organisations will be to join the book burning.
Bailey’s new book, Cancelled Lives—My Father, My Scandal, and Me, is a stunning response to his detractors and slanderers, and it deserves a broad audience. Unlike too many of the #MeToo victims, Bailey has decided to fight and set the record straight. This is an entirely welcome and healthy development, a contribution to the cleansing of the cultural atmosphere. Bailey has the right to see the world as he sees fit.
[2] Book-burning comes to America-https:ww.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html
[3] Writers, biographers protest W.W. Norton’s decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth from print-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/04/bail-m04.html
[5] A conversation with Blake Bailey, Philip Roth biographer and author of Cancelled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me: “I said … I’m not going to take this lying down”
A Trumpet of Sedition 