Witches of the World, Unite!

Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

The three Eastwood sisters carry old resentments, and their household witchcraft is fairly lackluster, letting them eke by in 1893 America. But, after seven years of estrangement, they bump into one another in the busiest square in New Salem. Their unexpected reunion corresponds with the emergence of a fortress unseen since the age of myth. The Eastwood sisters must ask themselves: are they the chosen ones to restore American witchcraft?

Alix E. Harrow, who was a professor of American and African American Studies before becoming a full-time novelist, does something similar here to what Susanna Clarke did with her breakout novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. Harrow combines the trappings of modern fantasy with the great, socially engaged novels of the 19^th Century. Harrow’s take is, unsurprisingly, more American in tenor, but it accomplishes the same goals with comparable aplomb.

Harrow creates an alternate America where magic actually exists, and the great witch-hunters of colonial antiquity had a point. (She plays somewhat loose with historical dates, so plan your response accordingly.) The Salem Witch Trials ended in a massacre, the entire village razed to ferret out the relatively small number of actual witches. The survivors hurried to create New Salem, their moral utopia of Christian privilege and mechanized industry.

Into New Salem stumble the Eastwood sisters. Hedge witches from the agrarian hinterlands, they have accepted lives of compromise in New Salem’s patriarchal system. But their forced reunion causes the entire city to glimpse Avalon, the last bastion where the storied St. George purged the last true witches. The sisters attempt to escape what appears to be Fate forcing their hands, but every sidestep draws them closer together.

But a specter looms over New Salem. Gideon Hill, an avaricious political candidate, promises to purge witchcraft, trade unionism, moral decay, and the kitchen sink. His stump speeches combine rhetorical nods to Christianity with a laundry list of grievances for White citizens feeling threatened by rapid change. Taken for himself, Hill is greasy and unpleasant, but not dangerous. Except he’s riding a wave of public umbrage to the mayor’s office.

Alix E. Harrow

In some ways, Harrow writes a standard fantasy narrative. The Eastwood sisters resemble heroes like Frodo Baggins or Geralt of Rivia, true believers who must resist a rising tide of injustice, even when they’ve grown fatigued. Mass-market fantasy loves its beleaguered underdogs. But, removed from Neverland and placed in a milieu American readers will remember from high school history class, the themes become exceptionally poignant for current audiences.

These themes of alienation and moralistic terror could describe 1893 or today. Harrow laces her narrative with allusions to Dickens, Marx, Upton Sinclair, and others, but not fatuously. For Harrow, these writers describe the American experience amid rapid change, an experience that remains unsettled 130 years later. Powerful people resist change because it threatens their authority, and they seek ways to make the populace complicit in their oppression.

Harrow demonstrates that hierarchies of power rely on equal measures of power and deceit. The Eastwood sisters must resist Gideon Hill’s instruments of physical force, but they must also unlearn messages of fear and self-doubt that they’ve internalized throughout their lifetimes. They must fight injustice, even when they’re tired, even when they’re ready to have normal human-scale relationships, because the fight is right, and because there’s nobody else.

We feel for the sisters, in their struggle to liberate Avalon from the patriarchy, because they are human. Yes, the truth of Avalon is vast and metaphysical. But their story is ultimately about people: about the jobs we accept to pay rent, the relationships that make the battle worthwhile. Therefore when the sisters rise up against tyrannical bosses, pietistic politicians, and toxic partners, we undertake that journey with them.

Further, Harrow avoids facile answers to difficult problems. She has at least three moments that, in conventional genre fiction, would’ve signaled the story’s culmination and the sisters’ ultimate triumph. But in Harrow’s telling, there is no grand culmination, no moment of eternal transcendent victory. Instead, the story keeps changing, the conflict evolves to reflect the characters’ complex world evolving with them.

By combining the nostalgia of historical fiction with the splendor of paperback fantasy, Harrow creates a story that readers can immerse ourselves in, with characters who feel like our friends. But she also addresses themes that the great (male) writers of American literature introduced viewed from another angle. We can enjoy this engaging story of complicated characters. Or we can recognize ourselves, and our struggles, amid Harrow’s urgent themes.

Luigi Mangione and Political Messianism

The martyrdom of Luigi Mangione

When accused assassin Luigi Mangione gunned down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week, the initial response was surprisingly bipartisan. Even we who abhor violence as a political instrument, nevertheless acknowledged that the wealthy, protected by law and supported by our political establishment, need consequences. After all, the only thing rich people love more than money, is being alive to spend (or hoard) it.

Mangione represents the latest manifestation of a popular phantom haunting American politics: the yearning for a secular Messiah. Americans long for a unique individual who will, like Jesus before the money changers, sweep uncleanliness from our sacred places and restore the hope we all believed America had in 11^th Grade American Civics class. This powerful unitary individual always seems just across the horizon—and, like the horizon, never quite arrives.

Political messianism has a dual nature: it supposedly galvanizes people around moral principles, but it does so through a singular personality. This may mean the speculation, repeated on basic cable and social media, that Mangione’s actions will galvanize American class consciousness. Or it may mean attributing the kingdom and the power, forever, as QAnon purists believe Donald Trump will purge the halls of power.

This yearning is bipartisan, or perhaps nonpartisan. I’ve written before that both parties look to presidential candidates for deliverance, especially when the other party controls the Oval Office. We saw something similar with what Democrats and dissident Republicans expected from the Mueller Report. In each case, those standing outside the political establishment expected a singular personality to purge “sin” and restore the Eternal Kingdom.

Sometimes this means imputing moral clarity to a conveniently absent figurehead. Political junkies either attribute Ronald Reagan with rescuing America from catastrophic moral decline, or ruining everything with cack-handed mismanagement. Either way, they selectively remember Reagan’s Administration. His adherents elide Iran-Contra, and the fact he left office in disgrace; his critics forget he performed necessary triage on outdated FDR-era programs.

Importantly, political messianism, like the religious variety, heavily emphasizes either the past or the future. Many messianic figures, like Jesus, Socrates, the Buddha, and Confucius, left no written record during their lifetimes; their followers recorded their teachings only posthumously. Likewise, messianic movements, from Hasidism to John’s Revelation to Marx’s Grand Synthesis, await a future where sin is somehow expunged, and humanity made pure.

Sin always exists in the present. The past, whether the Hebrew Eden or the Greek Golden Age or Taoist Pangu, is simple, morally clear, and benevolent. Likewise, the Revolution taught in American creation myths lacked doubt or nuance; it was inarguably good. The emergence of sin corresponds with the emergence of complexity. The more subtlety and finesse necessary to explain doctrine, the more tainted it becomes with doubt and sin.

Against this complexity, religions consistently promise a messiah. Besides Jesus of Nazareth, other proclaimed messiahs include Simon bar Kokhba, Moses Maimonides, and Cyrus the Great. Islam promises the future appearance of the Mahdi, whose military purge will precede the final judgement. Modern Judaism promises not an individual messiah, but a messianic age of moral clarity—which, again, disturbingly resembles Marx’s promised Grand Synthesis.

Whenever somebody promises Donald Trump will “drain the swamp,” or promises that Kamala Harris will “save democracy,” that’s messianic language. Similarly, whenever social media pundits gush over Luigi Mangione’s blows against capitalist resource hoarding, or consider him an emblem of class consciousness, they channel their own moral principles through his person. Sin is abstract; Mangione’s actions are concrete. Violence is harsh, but it at least makes sense.

Such reasoning stumbles, however, in the one messiah whose promise outlasted his person: Jesus of Nazareth. Though his message gave hurting peasants hope during an epoch of imperial conquest, his blows against the empire were philosophical, not militant. Violent uprisings against kleptocrats usually end in crackdowns and purges, and functionally strengthen the status quo. Durable rebellions embrace complexity, they don’t replace it with the simplicity of a gun.

Jesus’ messianic message had a class component. He blessed the poor, fed hungry masses, and prayed to forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors. From a secular reading, Jesus’ teachings underscore messages of class solidarity, especially in Luke’s Gospel. But he acknowledged, at his arrest, that warriors don’t live amid their victory; they die, and others reap the profit. He accepted his death so others could receive the benefit.

Luigi Mangione might yet engender such a messianic legacy, but I doubt it. No individual will save us from the conditions we’ve created collectively for so long.

Knowledge That Died in the War

Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch: a Novel

Young ConaLee comes from a part of West Virginia hill country where people don’t need, or know, one another’s last names. Therefore it isn’t strange that she doesn’t know hers, or her mother’s Christian name. When the aggressive interloper that ConaLee knows only as Papa (though he isn’t her father) tires of ConaLee’s family, he deposits them at the lunatic asylum in Weston, ConaLee must maintain the illusion of post-Civil War respectability that she’s mastered.

Author and professor Jayne Anne Phillips’ novels focus on lonely souls wandering an America they don’t understand. She won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, which focuses on the loss of knowledge that follows war. Phillips’ characters spend the story pursuing information, and the healthy closure that come with it, and several times come perilously close to finding it. They never know how close, though, because unlike we readers, they have only a limited perspective.

Yanked out of the only life she’s ever known, ConaLee wants to protect her mother from more harm than she’s already experienced. ConaLee blames herself for her failure to ward of Papa, a Confederate deserter and sexual predator. This self-blame is certainly unfair, since she’s only thirteen. But the wider world ConaLee experiences at the Weston lunatic asylum [sic] makes her realize how small and uninformed she is, leaving her desperate for any momentary understanding.

Her mother passes as Miss Janet, a well-to-do who keeps her secrets zealously. Glimpsed from her perspective, though, the story changes. Her husband, ConaLee’s father, enlisted at the start of the Civil War, believing that valorous service would grant him status. They ran from ignominious beginnings, after all, and live in constant fear of capture. Service would grant both of them a legal name and freedom from the hunt. Sadly, he just never came back.

John O’Shea, the asylum’s Night Watch, knows that isn’t his real name. Wounded at some distant battle, he lost all memory before the War. He earned a pseudonym and discovered a talent for helping those who, like him, lost mental capacity through trauma or abuse. He continues searching for his past identity, feeling the gnawing sensation that someone, somewhere, waits for him. We know, as readers, who that is, but his wounded memory remains slippery.

Jayne Anne Phillips

Overseeing everything is Dearbhla (pronounced “Dervla”), a patient watchwoman who is half doting grandmother, half Irish swamp witch. She longs to restore ConaLee’s sundered family and exorcise Papa’s damage, but without better skills, she remains an observer. She wanders throughout the Virginias, seeking the lines of knowledge which war severed, always one step removed from finding it. Readers see how close she comes, always doomed to mishear a valuable clue or to miss something important.

Phillips’ narrative might meet the criteria of “postmodernism,” since it deals with the finitude of human knowledge. Her characters stumble blindly, always just barely failing to glimpse the truth, because they don’t understand their place in the narrative. Because they don’t know it’s a narrative. We readers understand we’re reading a novel, and therefore we grasp the importance of the many missed clues. But meaning is something readers impute, not something these characters naturally have.

Novels like this turn on degrees of disappointment. Characters are condemned to repeat the patterns of dancing right up to the precipice of understanding, then dance away again, never realizing how close they came. We wait on tenterhooks to see when the characters will realize what’s obvious to us, knowing that when they do, some other form of disappointment will follow. The limits of human perspective, and the fallibility of human memory, keep them blind.

The narrative voice reads more like a prose poem than a novel. Or like several braided poems. ConaLee, home-schooled on the books her mother can afford, mostly Dickens and the Bible, speaks in a lyric voice which differentiates her from more pragmatic characters, like the asylum doctor. O’Shea, a complete tabula rasa, has a plainspoken patter, a strict noun-verb voice bereft of ornament. War has changed how characters speak, leaving them with outdated, peculiar voices.

Human beings, Phillips implies, exist within a broader tapestry. But seen from inside, we never grasp the part we play, the thread we leave behind. Meaning comes only when we view the story from outside, which individuals can never do. Knowledge is something we create, not something that exists. And, as characters change names like shirts, even our identities come from our actions, not our beings. Someday, looking back, we’ll glimpse what it all meant.

Capitalism and the Winners’ Society

Jeopardyhost Ken Jennings

I just did something I used to do frequently, but haven’t done for years: I watched a full episode of Jeopardy. Television has lost its allure in recent years, and Jeopardy’s appeal to shallow knowledge of inconsistent topics has become an emblem of modern society. Too many people know surface-level flotsam about nearly everything, giving us all a false sense of expertise on topics where we’re profoundly ignorant.

One player, working with speed and confidence, managed to rack up the largest cash haul on the stage, then he hit a Daily Double. He decided to risk it all on a question about corporate ad slogans. Yes, he risked it all--and lost it all. He went from being in the lead, to having nothing.

American capitalism loves winners. I’ve witnessed journalists, economists, and social media stans tripping over their own packers to lavish praise on billionaire CEOs. It’s often unintentionally hilarious to watch White boys without two dimes to rub together, invent phony narratives to explain why Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are epoch-making geniuses, not just winners of America’s greenback lottery.

Business writers I've reviewed on this blog have lavished praise on society's winners. They will perform seriocomic contortions to justify why, say, Jack Welch or Sam Walton are intrepid adventurers and the epitome of moneyed masculinity. To critics like me, these paragons of capitalism are highway robbers and guttersnipes who hoard the wealth created by others. But their fluttering groupies insist their favorite CEOs generated their wealth by rubbing two sticks together in the woods.

Elon Musk

Among these praises, one seems pointedly recurrent: billionaires deserve their riches because they risked their own seed capital. Risk looms large in billionaire mythology. Michael J. Sandel quotes philosopher Robert Nozick as saying that all wealth is the product of bold risk-taking and unique innovation, the outcome of intrepid individuals who somehow exist in an economic vacuum.

However, even if we accept the risk mythology, it fumbles on one level: we evaluate risks by their success. It's easy to praise Bill Gates or Steve Jobs for their success, when we don't simultaneously evaluate why the founders of Sun Microsystems and Commodore International flopped so ignominiously. When we only look at those who risked and won, it's easy to think risk leads to reward.

But for every world-renowned success, there are uncountable failures. Eighty percent of American companies fail within five years. A handful of actors become million-dollar stars, but most limp along on day jobs before leaving the industry altogether. For every Facebook, there's a bloodbath of MySpaces, Geocities, and Friendsters. Failure, not success, is the usual outcome for risky courage.

Watching Jeopardy, that one player who lost everything didn't give up. He slowly won back the money he lost, then in Final Jeopardy, gambled everything again. He turned out to be the only player to recognize a question about Dashiell Hammett, and finished the game with almost four times as much as the second-place finisher. In under thirty TV minutes, he went from wearing egg on his face, to becoming the reigning champion.

Bill Gates

But that outcome wasn't inevitable. He won, not only because of his own wide-ranging knowledge, but because the rules called a halt to the game before he had a chance to lose everything again. He benefited from writers who corresponded with his backlog of trivia knowledge. And he handled the buzzer effectively--something many past players have said isn't easy.

When Elon Musk and his giddy evangelists call him a self-made billionaire, they overlook the environment that created his wealth. As Giblin and Doctorow write, the monopsony economy that makes Musk's companies possible results from public policy and social order. Regulations written to prevent past economic abuses, become barriers to entry for small start-up entrepreneurs. Inequality festers unchecked.

This doesn't mean risk-takers don't deserve reward. Musk, Bezos, Gates, and others did indeed risk their, or their investors’, seed capital, and could've eaten dust. But that doesn't mean they work alone. They used others’ skills, labor, and time. They benefited from technicians trained in state schools. Many, like Musk, received direct government subsidies to offset the costs which their risks carried.

American rhetoric in support of capitalism emphasizes the goodness of taking a risk. But in practice, our economy doesn't reward those who take a risk, but those who win. And victory is always socially conditioned. Success means what customers pay for, not what billionaires prefer. There's literally no difference between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, except that one guessed right.

Artists and the Schizoid Personality

J.K. Rowling—great artist, bad person

I’m trying to write a vampire novel. It’s a cheap grab for marketable attention, yes, but I need to restart my long-delayed writing career. Therefore I’m trying to overstuff the novel with cultural motifs of capitalist resentment, misplaced sexuality, and status envy, the three benchmarks of mass-market vampire fiction. I find myself facing a problem, though. I simply don’t know enough about nonstandard sexual expression to write about it comfortably.

Sure, I know something about the fear, anger, and desperation which all monsters and their victims share. But since at least Bram Stoker, and certainly since Anne Rice, authors have used vampires as metaphors for sexual appetites so socially repellent that one must squelch them. Vampires are, by nature, dominant, violent, and voracious, preying on trust and innocence—all things I’m not. I’m doubting my ability to finish this project.

I’ve had this problem before. I’m more than competent organizing words in ways that readers find pleasing, and multiple trusted sources assure me I should seek wider audiences. But it’s a writing truism that stories require conflict, and for every protagonist with a goal, they require some antagonist willing to do anything necessary to impede that goal. Somebody must always, from the storytelling perspective, be the villain.

Especially in this age of Marvel craptaculars and Starwoid blockbusters, readers feel dissatisfied with ordinary human-scale conflicts. MFA workshops continue producing countless “literary” conflicts of the Kramer vs. Kramer style, which indie presses publish for prestige, and which seldom get a second printing. To snag enough readers to buy groceries, authors must mass-produce generational traumas, planet-destroying weapons, and truly demented monsters.

Roman Polanski—great artist, lousy person

And to write those monsters with the full dimensionality audiences have grown accustomed to, writers must occupy the monstrous headspace. One cannot write monsters without, at least occasionally, thinking like a monster. After all, truly terrible creatures like Dracula, Iago, and Lord Voldemort aren’t mere mustache-twirling villains in the Snidely Whiplash mold; their evil comes from someplace, and serves some motivation deep within the character.

Crafting fully fleshed monsters, though, means the monster’s thoughts live within the author. We see this sometimes in what authors affirm, or what they deny. J.K. Rowling, for instance, created Lord Voldemort, a thinly coded Hitler analogue. But in creating that character, she also incorporated Churchill-era war propaganda about an assertively fair-haired Britain becoming overrun with foreigners and, ahem, bankers. Then these beliefs spilled into her private life.

Shall I continue? Cinematic genius Roman Polanski wrote, directed, and starred in The Tenant, a thriller about encroaching urban paranoia and isolation, in 1976. In 1977, he was accused of—and confessed to—drugging and raping a minor, and has remained a fugitive from American justice ever since. Knowing what we do about sexual violence, the crime for which he got caught almost certainly wasn’t his first. Personal secrets undoubtedly drove artistic paranoia.

Many of Neil Gaiman’s best stories involve hurting women. Coraline, Stardust, and several Sandman plots all involve women fearing for their lives, going insane, or being held in captivity. Though Gaiman never went the full Green Lantern and stuffed women in refrigerators, he nevertheless motivated many of his best stories by causing fictional women pain. We now know that torture didn’t exist entirely in his imagination.

Neil Gaiman—great artist, terrible person

Art doesn’t emerge from whole, balanced, healthy minds. Like an oyster creating a pearl, the object of beauty begins with irritation and injury. Worse, in order to produce enough content to make a living in this media-saturated world, artists must do more than tolerate the irritation; we must prod it, feed it, and rip previously healed wounds open again. Even when it doesn’t produce literal violence, artists are unbalanced people.

When I describe artists as “schizoid personalities,” I don’t mean in the clinical sense. I mean in the older Greek sense, where the “schiz-” prefix refers to something torn or cut in two. The same prefix used in schizophrenia is the same root used in the word scissors, signifying something thoroughly torn, in ways it can never be completely repaired. Artists must tear themselves asunder to create fully realized conflicts.

And I must ask myself: am I willing to risk becoming torn likewise? Do I love art enough to create those thoughts within myself, knowing that I’m not immune to their lure? What if I create the monster capable of expressing such eloquent trauma—and then, like Rowling, Polanski, and Gaiman, I can’t control it? If artists aren’t unbalanced people when they begin, most will be so before they finish.