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The Oxford History of Life-Writing:
Volume 7: Postwar to Contemporary,

1945-2020 Patrick Hayes
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the oxford history of life-w riting

Volume 7
Postwar to Contemporary, 1945–2020
the oxford history of life-writing
General Editor: Zachary Leader
1. The Middle Ages

Karen A. Winstead
2. Early Modern
Alan Stewart
3. Eighteenth Century
Jacob Sider Jost
4. Romantic
Julian North
5. Nineteenth Century
Juliette Atkinson
6. Early Twentieth-Century, 1900–1945
7. Postwar to Contemporary, 1945–2020
Patrick Hayes
the oxford history of life-w riting
Volume 7
Postwar to
Contemporary,
1945–2020
PAT R ICK H AY ES
1
1
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In memory of T. A. Birrell (‘Tom’), 1924–2011

Acknowledgements
Many of the ideas in this book were first explored at conferences organized by the
International Association of Autobiography (IABA), and in seminars at a range of
universities. I am grateful for the dialogue that these occasions provided, and I will
confine myself to thanking only a few individuals whose help or comments, how-
ever incidental, have been important either in shaping some aspect of my approach,
or as a spur to some form of creative disagreement. These include Lisa Appignanesi,
Derek Attridge, John Bolin, Terence Cave, Stefan Collini, Jennifer Cooke, Robert
Crawford, Colin Davis, Andrew Dean, Max de Gaynesford, Dan Franklin, John
Forrester, Lyndall Gordon, David James, Zachary Leader, Hermione Lee, Philip
Lopate, Damian Maher, Laura Marcus, Peter D. McDonald, Linda McDowell,
Stephen Mulhall, Jacqueline Norton, Adam Phillips, John Pitcher, and Robert
Young.
This book would not have been possible without the support of staff at the
Bodleian library in Oxford and the New York Public Library. I am grateful to St
John’s College and the Faculty of English in Oxford for granting me some research
leave.
I was lucky enough to have finished the manuscript just before libraries closed
due to the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020, though this did mean that Sarah,
Elizabeth, Thomas, and Lucy had to put up with what must have seemed the end-
less process of editing it into a reasonable length during our lockdown at home.
This book would not have been finished without their forbearance; the writing of it
has been sustained by their love.
The following extracts are reproduced by permission: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra,

‘Genealogy’ and ‘On the Death of a Sunday Painter’, Collected Poems 1969–2014 (New
Delhi: Penguin, 2014); Antjie Krog, ‘because of you’ from Country of My Skull: Guilt,
Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, copyright © 1998, 2000 by
Antjie Samuel. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of Random House,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved; Daljit Nagra, ‘Booking
Khan Singh Kumar’ and ‘Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the
Catch 22 for “Black” Writers’, Look We Have Coming to Dover! (London, 2007), by per-
mission of Faber and Faber Ltd.; Maggie Nelson, ‘Skin’ and ‘Revelation’, Jane: A
Murder, reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press, copyright © 2005, 2019
viii Acknowledgements
Maggie Nelson; Grace Nichols, ‘Wherever I Hang’ and ‘Even Tho’ from I Have
Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010); Eileen Myles, ‘An American
Poem’ and ‘Lorna & Vicky’, from I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975–
2014 (London: Tuskar Rock Press, 2016), copyright © 2015 Eileen Myles. Used by
permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Used in UK and Commonwealth territor
ies (excluding Canada) by permission of Serpent’s Tail Publisher; Denise Riley, ‘A
note on sex and ‘the reclaiming of language’, ‘A Shortened Set’, from Selected Poems
(Reality Street Editions, 2000); Wallace Stevens, ‘Less and Less Human, O Savage
Spirit’ from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace
Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of
Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division
of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Used in UK & Commonwealth
territories by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.; Derek Walcott Another Life (1973) ed.
Edward Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh (London, 2009), used by permission of
Macmillan Publishing.
General Editor’s Preface
‘Life-writing’ is a generic term meant to encompass a range of writings about lives

or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are
composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography,
diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but letters, writs, wills,
written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings (narratio first existed not as a liter-
ary but as a legal term), marginalia, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings,
and digital forms (including blogs, tweets, Facebook entries). Some theoreticians
and historians of life-writing distinguish between shorter forms, conceived of as
source material, and ‘life-writing proper’ or ‘extended life narratives’ or ‘formal
biography and autobiography’; others distinguish between life-writing that is exem-
plary or formulaic, often associated with older periods, and the sort that seems or
seeks to express qualities thought of as modern: authenticity, sincerity, interiority,
individuality. More commonly, at least since the 1970s, theoreticians and historians
of life-writing fuse or meld sub-genres, as in the neologisms ‘auto/biography’, ‘bio-
fiction’, ‘biografiction’, ‘autonarration’, and ‘autobiografiction’ (this last, surprisingly,
the most venerable as well as the most ungainly of coinages, having first appeared
in print in 1906). The blurring of distinctions may help to account for life-writing’s
growing acceptance as a field of study, conforming to a wider academic distrust of
fixed forms, simple or single truths or meanings, narrative transparency, objectivity,
‘literature’ as opposed to writing.
The larger aim of The Oxford History of Life-Writing is to focus and consolidate
recent academic research and debate, providing a multi-volume history of this
newly recognized genre. Constituent volumes will often focus on the lives of w riters,
but they will also consider the lives of non-writers, especially in cases when these
lives have altered or influenced literary life-writing, or when they are by literary
figures. Some attention may also be given to works about forms of life-writing, or
about topics obviously related to life-writing, such as Hume’s Treatise of Human
Nature or Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, or to novels and
plays about real-life figures, or fictional writers, including memoirists, letter writers,
and biographers.
The constituent volumes of the History provide selective surveys of the range of
life-writing in a period, giving extended attention to the most important or influen-
tial authors and works within the genre. The advantages of contextualizing influen-
x General Editor’s Preface
tial works through a broad survey should be clear, but individual authors will carve
out their own narrative accounts of the field, in the process producing discoveries,
obscure or unjustly neglected works and authors, themselves worthy of extended
treatment. Although the primary focus of the History will be on life-writing in
English, when relevant, influential works in other languages will be discussed.
Inevitably there will be variation in structure and approach from volume to vol-
ume (as well as over particulars, including decisions about old spelling or versions
quoted). But all volumes will contain some discussion of the following topics: the
range of life-writing in the period, in terms of different schools, traditions, types,
themes, forms and functions; detailed accounts of those writers or writings deemed
most important or influential or innovative in the period, either by contemporaries,
or by literary history, or by the authors of the individual volumes themselves; the
production and consumption of life-writing in the period, including discussion of
the nature of the audience, the rewards of authorship, the standing of the genre; the
genre’s debt to the wider culture of its period, for example to dominant notions of
personal identity, nationhood, political and religious authority, authorship, creativ-
ity, literary criticism, literary value; some reference, where relevant, to develop-
ments in life-writing in contemporaneous non-English-speaking cultures and to
national distinctions within the English-speaking world; and the accuracy or useful-
ness of influential characterizations of life-writing in the period.
Individual volumes will take clear or distinctive lines and approaches, but the
History as a whole will not, thus avoiding both predictability and authorial con-
straint. Not all volumes will be structured chronologically, but all will make clear
the importance of an historical understanding of the genre. All authors will be
encouraged to consider the needs of a general as well as an academic audience, in
keeping with the comparatively broad-based readership of the most prominent
types of the genre (biography, autobiography, memoir). For similar reasons, strong
narrative will be encouraged, as will the avoidance of abstruse terminology. The
seven volumes in the series are divided along roughly traditional literary-historical
lines, though there may be some overlap between adjacent volumes and some
innovation both in nomenclature and in beginning and ending dates, particularly
in the case of later volumes.
Zachary Leader
Contents
Introduction1
1. Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 12
2. Biographies of the Unconscious 37
3. Self-Knowledge as a Question 65
4. Coming Out 99
5. Feminism’s Lyric Subjects 127
6. Autoethnography 155
7. Intimate Memoirs 191
8. Memory Culture 224
9. Posthuman Monsters 255
10. Literary Biography and Theory 284
11. Celebrity and its Literary Consequences 312
12. Prospect: Human 2.0? 338
Notes 359
Bibliography 419
Index 447
Introduction
The period after 1945 transformed our understanding of what life-writing is, not
least by putting the very term ‘life-writing’ into currency. Translated out of the Latin
biographia, it started to refer to an eclectic range of different literary forms well
beyond the traditional genres of biography and autobiography. But above all, it was
invested with a new level of cultural importance.
Social movements with an interest in recovering the voices of marginalized
people brought a different kind of attention to life-writing from the past. Historian
E. P. Thompson spoke for many when he announced the ambition of rescuing sub-
altern forms of self-expression ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.1
Breaking with academic formalism, literary texts started to be read with more atten-
tion to the kinds of life-experience they disclose, or which they cannot help but
repress. The training in close reading offered by university English courses seemed
to the poet Adrienne Rich an insupportably limited way of responding to literature,
and she emphasized ‘the importance—in the feminist movement of the early
[19]70s—of beginning to find out what in fact had been the lives of our artists, what
in fact had been the lives of our thinkers’.2 Terms like ‘autofiction’ and the ‘non-
fiction novel’ were coined as part of an effort to name the increasingly wide range
of texts that were breaking down the conventional borderlines between fiction and
autobiography.
This growing preoccupation with the means and modes of life-writing was inten-
sified by a publishing phenomenon which became known as the ‘memoir boom’.
Starting in the social tumult of 1960s America with bestseller texts by public figures
such as Malcolm X and Angela Davis, the boom took off in the 1980s and 1990s with
an enormous expansion of life-stories by hitherto unknown people, ranging from
the coming out memoir to narratives about illness and disability, and (especially in
Britain, it would seem) the so-called ‘misery memoir’. A different boom in life-
writing came in the early years of the new millennium when the development of
social media brought a rapid growth in channels for written self-expression, from
tweets and text messages to blogs and Facebook posts. By the end of the period
covered in this book life-writing was no longer something done mainly by important
2 The Oxford History of Life-Writing
individuals who wrote an autobiography, or by sensitive souls who kept a diary, or

even by people with interesting problems or adventures to share. It had become a
truly ubiquitous phenomenon, part and parcel of the everyday formation of identity.
Universities responded to these new developments by creating courses on
life-writing, not only within literature departments but also as a locus for interdis
ciplinary research. Journals devoted to the study of life-writing started to be
founded, beginning with Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly in 1978 and soon
encompassing a wide range of academic publications, from monographs on par-
ticular themes to textbooks introducing undergraduates to the rapidly growing
body of scholarship in this area. In 1999 the International Auto/biography Association
(IABA) was founded, holding a large bi-annual conference attended by a global
range of academics. And finally, Oxford University Press commissioned a seven-
volume history of this vast and diverse body of writing, from the medieval period
right up to the present day.
It is worth lingering over the fact that in no other period covered by the Oxford
History of Life-Writing did it seem desirable to commission a history of life-writing on
anything like the scale of this series.3 While there is a tradition of reflection on the
nature and value of autobiography and biography that dates back to the late eight-
eenth century, it is in the period after the 1960s that intellectual interest in this
subject really started to develop apace.4 The approach I have taken in this volume
is in no small part driven by an attempt to understand what has made life-writing
come to seem quite so culturally important.
While the authors of other volumes in this series have been able to navigate their
respective periods by studying changes in the major genres of life-writing (diary, the
confession, letters, biography, and so on), or through discussion of key figures (Izaak
Walton, John Aubrey, Samuel Pepys, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Johnson,
Thomas Carlyle), neither of these approaches could encompass the vast cultural
phenomenon of life-writing in this period. Of course questions about genre still
remain important: Chapter 2 describes the impact of psychoanalysis on biography;
Chapter 10 examines literary biography; Chapter 12 explores concerns about the
devolution of diary-writing into public forms of self-presentation on social media
websites. And there are naturally certain major figures who stand out for the sig-
nificance of their impact. But I needed to bring the social processes through which
life-writing became such a vivid and ubiquitous cultural phenomenon (and which
in turn it helped to enable) directly into the foreground of discussion. For the most
part, therefore, this volume is organized around a range of themes that relate to the
sociology and philosophy of modern identity, and to the changing dynamics of liter-
ary publishing. Most chapters cut across the different genres of life-writing, encom-
passing several literary forms and a range of writers in a comparative way.
Introduction 3
I foreground questions about the kind of lives that became newly possible (or at
least newly visible), alongside even more fundamental questions about what it
might be to discover an authentic self (or create a desirable one).
* * *
Tempting though it is to celebrate this period as bringing about a distinctively mod-
ern conception of identity, liberated from various constraints on self-expression and
newly empowered by innovations in biotechnology, healthcare, and digital commu-
nication, the cultural developments I describe in this book have not been straight-
forwardly positive.5 The phenomenon of life-writing after 1945 is best appreciated
through a wide-angle lens that can take in a properly ambivalent response to its
achievements.
On the one hand, life-writing can be credited with having played an essential
part—for many people, though in unequal ways—in expanding and enriching what
it means to pursue self-fulfilment. With the easing of censorship, including self-
censorship, and the increasing frankness of public disclosure that resulted, it con-
tributed greatly to the broad social process that sociologist Anthony Giddens has
named ‘the transformation of intimacy’.6 Texts as diverse as confessional memoirs,
lyric poems, and therapy manuals brought what goes on inside human relation-
ships to an unprecedented level of public scrutiny, helping to challenge and revise
some of the more egregious imbalances of power. There have been equally clear
gains from the way life-writing has been used to extend recognition, and redefine
what counts as a legitimate and valued form of selfhood. Autobiographies and
memoirs were crucial in helping to grant what Lauren Berlant calls a ‘permission to
thrive’ to marginalized people, providing readers with ‘anchors for realistic, critical
assessment of the way things are’ and ‘material that foments enduring, resisting,
overcoming and enjoying being an x’—where Berlant’s ‘x’ marks the wide range of
identities that have entered into visibility in this period as newly empowered ways
of being.7 The popular dissemination of life-writing has been central to the reimag-
ining of gender roles and the rethinking of sexuality; it has played a part in the
claiming and redefining of ethnic or racial identities, and in revising our under-
standing of what it means to have a disability or an illness. Testimony narratives
became important within various processes of historical redress, raising conscious-
ness and generating empathic connections with the victimized and the oppressed.
Many people have also come to understand life-writing as having a significant
therapeutic potential, in ways that descend from—though which by no means con-
tinue to be defined by—the legacy of psychoanalysis. Ideas about ‘mental health’
became ever more pervasive in this period, and they tended to naturalize the con-
ception of a life as something that has a story, whether written or unwritten.
Learning to identify yourself with a narrative that explains what kind of person you
are, and what kind of journey you are on, became essential to the ethos of empower-
ment which modern ways of thinking about selfhood have tended to enshrine.
But the same processes that have transformed intimacy, redefined possibilities
for self-expression, and started to manage our lives in various therapeutically
improving ways, also possessed a considerable power to reify human experience
into packaged identities and unilluminating moral categories. As the language of
therapy seeped ever further into the everyday, its process of self-scrutiny brought
with it a rationalization of the inner life with every bit as much ability to banalize as
empower. As our intimacies become more visible and better-analysed they could
also become colder, and a slick over-commodified quality started to inhabit certain
kinds of modern subjectivity—a problem that became particularly visible in the
popular forms of memoir writing which emerged in the later part of this period.
The new kind of consumer capitalism that took off in the postwar years played a
major role in creating the boom in life-writing, not least in the form of large market-
ing budgets for multinational publishing houses, and new channels for disseminat-
ing life-stories on television and through the internet. But in doing so it often
encouraged identification and emotionalism as a way of learning about the past
and thinking about social problems, leading to a sentimentalized public discourse
which often distracts and trivializes more than it genuinely informs. Another prod-
uct of consumer capitalism was the multi-media infotainment business, which
started to generate glossy and ephemeral forms of life-writing on an enormous
scale. Modern literary culture became increasingly saturated by the celebrity indus-
try, and serious authors were obliged to find ever more inventive ways of fending off
its power to domesticate and neutralize their work. With the rise of the new social
media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, there emerged an equally new
potential for humans to become completely transparent selves, constituted as mar-
keting objects by their ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’.
While life-writing proliferated in this period, it is therefore likely that self-
knowledge has remained every bit as rare, as compromised, and as difficult of
achievement as ever before. Yet my suggestion in what follows is not that life-
writing passively reproduces the various cultural developments I have just
described. The most compelling texts, I will argue, invite us to revise and reimag-
ine this period’s most familiar and entrenched ways of thinking about selfhood
and identity.
* * *
The date that defines the beginning of this book marks a historical catastrophe
of unprecedented dimensions: the stark coming-to-light of images from the Nazi
Introduction 5
death camps, and the two devastating nuclear blasts that brought the Second World
War finally to an end. In the first chapter, entitled ‘Aftermath’, I explore the period
that one critic has unforgettably named ‘the age of the crisis of man’.8 These are the
years surrounding the Second World War, when a range of commentators—from
individuals such as Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo who had experienced the con-
centration camps, to intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt
who had been uprooted by the war—questioned the optimistic promises issued by
older humanistic traditions, exploring what credulity they might still command.
The final chapter, entitled ‘Prospect’, is located at the far end of the period. It
focuses on the emergence of digital life-writing through social media websites, and
the attempts made by differently positioned intellectuals (from technology gurus to
social psychiatrists) to evaluate this transformative new space. While these chap-
ters thereby frame the book around specific historical moments, each chapter in
between explores a theme that traverses the seventy-five-year period.
The second and third chapters develop questions about human identity at its
most fundamental: they introduce some landmark ideas about the nature of self-
knowledge which the rest of the book will revisit and revise. Chapter 2 examines
postwar biography in relation to the changing status of Freudian thinking, including
its conflict with behaviourism and other forms of experimental psychology. While
psychoanalysis was much- contested, it nonetheless also tended to become
naturalized—almost to the point of invisibility—within everyday forms of self-
description, playing a formative role in the debates about sexual identity (discussed
in Chapter 4) and traumatic memory (the subject of Chapter 8). This chapter
begins to examine one of the major questions that threads through the book as a
whole: namely, what it might mean to write about the self in a way that escapes the
prudential rationalization of experience offered up by the ego. Chapter 3 extends
this question by exploring philosophical treatments of self-knowledge. Here I con-
trast the vulgarized Nietzschean understanding of the self as a series of fictions or
masks—a view that became quite widely held in this period—with a different line
of thinking about identity which descends from Martin Heidegger’s famous ana-
lytic of Dasein. It is in this chapter that I most directly examine changing ideas
about what makes for an authentic or authoritative account of oneself, testing
philosophical theories against some of the most venturesomely experimental
autobiographical writings this period generated, including texts by Jean-Paul
Sartre, Christine Brooke-Rose, J. M. Coetzee, Roland Barthes, and Jeanette
Winterson. Without aiming to settle the necessarily vexed question as to what
counts as an authentic identity, I nonetheless try to give enough definition to this
concept in order that later chapters can examine how it has been extended
and revised.
Having set up the book with three opening chapters about universalizing
approaches to identity and self-knowledge, Chapters 4 to 6 are each devoted to
ways of thinking about selfhood which foreground some kind of difference con-
nected with sexuality, gender, and ethnicity. In many ways these three particular-
isms, which played such a striking role in this period, have significantly deepened
our understanding of what is at stake in achieving authentic identity, not least
because of their heightened emphasis on embodiment and the various worldly
obstacles to self-expression. Yet each chapter also explores various kinds of dissent
from the strongest and most essentializing versions of the emphasis on difference.
Chapter 4 is about the way in which sexual identity has been formed and reformed,
ranging from popular coming out narratives by such figures as Paul Monette, Audre
Lorde, and Jan Morris, to the unsettling reflections on sexuality pursued by Stephen
Spender, Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Juliet Jacques, and Derek
Jarman, among others. Chapter 5 considers the new exemplary lives scripted by
feminist lyric poets as part of a wider enterprise of personal and social transform
ation. Here I contrast second-generation feminist writers such as Adrienne Rich,
with the attempts by later poets such as Lyn Hejinian, Denise Riley, and Eileen
Myles to exemplify more fluid and self- ironizing forms of collective identity.
Chapter 6 turns to forms of life-writing which explore the impact of multilingual-
ism on self-expression. Particular attention is given to writers affected by the experi-
ence of decolonization and diaspora, including Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Wole
Soyinka, Grace Nichols, Michelle Cliff, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and Arvind
Krishna Mehrotra, in order to examine evolving debates about what it means to
connect the ideal of personal authenticity with wider forms of cultural identity.
The next three chapters each explore a different theme which cuts across and
further complicates this period’s preoccupation with sexuality, gender, and
ethnicity. Chapter 7 reflects upon what I call, following sociologist Eva Illouz, the
‘cold intimacy’ which characterizes the highly instrumentalized models of
self-understanding which became so much a feature of the memoir boom.9
Here I explore the impact of figures such as Frank Conroy and Mary Karr in the
development of creative writing (MFA) courses on memoir, placing their rather
tightly managed forms of self-presentation in contrast with more compelling forms
of intimate disclosure, exemplified by the writings of Maggie Nelson and Edward
St Aubyn. Chapter 8 considers the various public roles that testimony acquired in
this period, both in relation to specific forms of legal redress (in New Zealand’s
Waitangi Tribunal and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission), and
as part of the wider enterprise of historical understanding. In particular I examine
the tension between empathic connections generated by popular witnessing
Introduction 7
experiences (including museums and films), and the processual evidence-based

inquiry valued by historians, with reference to such figures as Alex Haley, Antjie
Krog, Lisa Appignanesi, Claude Lanzmann, and W. G. Sebald. Chapter 9 returns to
questions about our fundamental human identity that were posed at the outset
of the book, by exploring how different kinds of writing—from the autofiction of
J. G. Ballard to the essays of Donna Haraway—reality-tested bold projections of a
so-called ‘posthuman’ identity in response to the blurring of boundaries between
humans and machines, and the threat of ecological catastrophe.
In Chapters 10 and 11 I turn to questions about the relationship between life-
writing and literature: first by exploring claims made about the capacity of literary
biography to offer an alternative and superior type of literary understanding to aca-
demic literary theorizing; then by considering the impact of the ephemeral kinds of
life-writing associated with celebrity self-promotion on the wider situation of liter-
ary authorship in this period. While these two chapters might thereby seem to
move the book in a new direction, in fact they bring its sustained focus on the rela-
tionship between life-writing and literature to a culmination.
This claim about the relationship between life-writing and literature is import
ant, and worth underlining at this stage. It is now widely considered that in a period
which saw the rise of so many kinds of experimentation within autobiography and
biography alike, life-writing cannot sensibly be understood as categorically distinct
from fiction and poetry, or as confined to the classical genres. However my under-
standing of what is at stake in this development diverges from much of the current
scholarship in this field. Instead of regarding it simply as a reason to define and
discuss new genres (such as the autofictional novel, or the confessional poem), I
treat this growing emphasis on the literariness of life-writing as a prompt to revise
our way of thinking about the subject as a whole. Rather than pursuing a strictly
chronological or genre-based analysis of the different themes addressed, the shape
of each chapter tends instead to be determined by what I take to be the increasing
literary inventiveness of the texts under discussion. Most frequently I move from
examples that offer a relatively limited conception of what self-knowledge involves,
towards kinds of writing that generate more ambitious and illuminating ways of
thinking about selfhood, through their distinctive handling of form. To put this
point in a slightly more philosophical way, what I wish to avoid is the idea that life-
writing can ultimately be understood as collapsed into, or merely a useful supple-
ment for, the various forms of moral or political discourse about the self that
emerged in this period. Instead I want to explore how, in the most compelling
cases, these texts have the power to revise and recreate the forms of identity which
have been most popularly affirmed in this period. Each of the chapters is structured
so as to reflect this understanding of the potential for literary inventiveness within

life-writing.10
* * *
One of the main challenges any attempt at a generalized account of life-writing
in English in this period must confront is the expansion of English into a global
language, and the consequent globalization of literary publishing. The imbal-
ances of power within this ‘world republic of letters’, as it has been named, are
well-documented: the centres of global Anglophone publishing remain London
and New York, and English-language writers from former colonial countries gain
access to them on unequal terms.11 While the great advantage of a globalized trade
in books is of course the potential for increased richness of human understanding,
in reality the terms of that trade have skewed genuine intercultural exchange by
ensuring that texts circulate in a highly reified way, marketed for their relationship
with various generalized identity themes (‘multiculturalism and diversity’, ‘gender
politics’, ‘posthumanism’, and the like), and shorn of their relationship with local
contexts.12 The approach I have taken in this book is clearly vulnerable to a similar
problem because within any given chapter I move quite freely between examples
of life-writing from across the English-speaking world, including Australia, Britain,
Canada, the Caribbean, India, Ireland, Kenya, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa,
and the United States. (I have also included some French, German and Italian texts
that were particularly influential within Anglophone literary culture.) In taking this
approach my view was quite simply that the intellectual cost of delimiting the remit
of this book to texts produced and consumed in one national space, such as Britain
or America, was much higher than the problems generated by a more diverse con-
ception of what ‘life-writing in English’ might usefully include.
In mitigation I have made the study of reificatory processes, both within the pub-
lishing industry and more broadly, into one of the most sustained themes of this
book. Chapter 6 explores postcolonial life-writing with attention to what Jeff Karem
calls ‘the commodification of difference under the banner of authenticity’: namely,
the ways in which so-called ethnic writers started to become marketed as perform-
ers of an exemplary multiculturalism.13 Chapters 7 and 8 reflect upon the distract-
ing and at times downright misleading ways in which memoir and testimony
narratives are consumed in the public sphere, particularly through the examples
of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a
Wartime Childhood (1996), and above all through Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull
(1998)—her fraught exploration of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
testimonies in South Africa. Krog was alarmed at the success of her book in the
United States, where it ended up being adapted as a somewhat implausible Hollywood
Introduction 9
film starring Juliette Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson. (‘How can they understand a
single word?’ she wondered. ‘It is so South African, so Afrikaans, so white . . . Who
would want to read it? Tell me, would you willingly read a book on Kosovo, and I mean,
willingly?’14) Sharing Krog’s circumspect attitude towards the commercial appetite
for this kind of testimony narrative, my emphasis is upon the ambivalent effects
that life-writing often has within the public sphere. An alertness to its power to
generate facile experiences of empathic connection and highly commodified forms
of self-understanding, which offer to translate all-too-easily between very different
experiences, is precisely the type of critical consciousness I wish to cultivate about
the global circulation of these texts.
In further mitigation of the risks that follow from over-generalizing, it is import
ant to stress that while the various identity themes under review have a very wide
salience, they cannot be considered universal or definitive. Of particular import
ance here is historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s understanding of modernity as made
up of ‘multiple and noncommensurable practices, some of them distinctly non-
modern by the standards of modern political thought’. His related conception of
modern identity as a ‘timeknot’ which brings together, in often unpredictable ways,
a range of different forms of self-understanding—some of which are marked as
‘modern’ and others not—is one that I affirm, and which I hope my various analyses
of contemporary practices will tend to imply.15 For example, coming out narratives
are exemplified in Chapter 4 by fairly high-profile British and American texts:
clearly this theme has developed very differently in other parts of the world, but I
have no space to explore those important differences, any more than I am able to
explore the highly differentiated experiences that take place within the national
boundaries of Britain and America. (Coming out in London or New York is one
thing; doing so in Belfast or Salt Lake City is quite another.) So in considering writ-
ing about queer lives I have had to content myself with outlining major themes that
work at a certain level of generalizability which a more granular form of analysis
would inevitably wish to complicate and qualify. Yet what I am able to bring out is
the dialogue between various influential writers about what is at stake in coming
out, and the disagreements which take place about the nature and value of that nar-
rative, which is therefore in no sense presented as having a single uncontested
meaning.
A final problem is inclusion and exclusion. While this book is wide-ranging, it
does not seek to be exhaustive. It is written in gratitude for, and indeed reliance
upon, the excellent bibliographical and synoptic resources provided by Rosemary
Jolly’s Encyclopedia of Life-Writing (2001), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Reading
Autobiography: A Guide For Interpreting Life-Narratives (2001), and Ricia Chansky and
Emily Hipchen’s Routledge Autobiography Studies Reader (2016). These texts, among a
range of others in this rapidly growing scholarly field, have enabled me to approach
this book in a way that would not otherwise have been possible. Rather than provid-
ing a further series of bibliographical essays in each chapter I have pursued a rela-
tively detailed discussion of particular examples, in order to explore how the
underlying questions within a major theme have played out. This tightening of
focus has enabled me to foreground the literary dimensions of life-writing—its
inventiveness and imaginative power—in the way that I emphasized above.
While I use footnotes to refer readers onwards to other sources and further points
of comparison, my approach has inevitably intensified the problem of which texts
to include. Difficult choices were made in the editing process. In particular I would
have liked to give more attention to the important body of writing on illness and
disability, which is an emerging theme within the scholarship (in Chapter 9 I
briefly touch upon this area in relation to attempts to assimilate it to ideas about
posthumanism). My thematic focus inevitably tends to downplay discussion of par-
ticular genres: while examples of diaries and journals are frequently included
within various chapters, there remains much to be said about the changing poetics
of epistolary writing in a period that was transitioning between handwriting, type-
writing, and emailing. In general terms I have not aimed to create an illusion of
exhaustive coverage, but have instead tried to open up pathways for further critical
reflection on the vast range of texts that are inevitably excluded. This approach is
most starkly evident in the final chapter on digital media, where I confine myself to
discussion of some of the intellectual paradigms which have been used to evaluate
this vast body of material, which is currently the subject of much ongoing research.16
A further question about inclusion relates to the very definition of life-writing.
The decision to structure this book mainly around the cultural and intellectual
themes that have most powerfully reshaped the understanding of identity, rather
than through the traditional genres, has enabled me to be fairly wide-ranging in my
choice of examples. While most of the texts discussed are autobiographies, autofic-
tions, memoirs, biographies, and diaries, a diverse range of other literary idioms are
also featured, including poetry (lyric and narrative), psychoanalytic case studies,
advice books, personal essays, testimonial film, certain kinds of photography, and
social media platforms—all of which now routinely form part of the scholarly dis-
cussion of life-writing in this period. But I also draw upon various theoretical texts
that are not normally considered life-writing at all. Several chapters consider the
writings of philosophers and cultural theorists, from Judith Shklar’s After Utopia
(1957) to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990)—and typically I do so not only to frame
a discussion of works that are more conventionally understood as life-writing, but
also to explore the divergences between the theorization of life and responses to
Introduction 11
lived experience. However this clear distinction between reflection and experience
is not always possible or even desirable to sustain, and at times in what follows the
common- sense boundary between life- writing and life- theorizing necessarily
becomes a little blurred. It was Nietzsche who most tendentiously expanded the
definition of life-writing along these lines, claiming that ‘every great philosophy’ is
an implicit ‘confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and
unconscious memoir’.17 While I have no wish to follow Nietzsche all the way down
this line of reasoning (which he no doubt offers in a playful or even teasing spirit), I
do take the view that the various kinds of philosophical writing about the nature of
the self which circulated in this period constitute an important form of reflection
upon what a life can or should be, which a book of this nature should not exclude.
Yet as I have stressed, my interest most typically lies in using these texts to generate
an exploration of the resistance to theory within life-writing—a theme which runs
throughout the book as a whole.
1
-
Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman
I believe that on that day, I first became aware of the mystery of the iniquity whose exposure
marked the end of an era and the beginning of another. The dream conceived by Western man
in the eighteenth century, whose dawn he thought he had glimpsed in 1789, and which until
August 2, 1914, had become stronger with the advent of the Enlightenment and scientific discov-
eries–that dream finally vanished for me before those trainloads of small children. And yet I
was still thousands of miles away from imagining that these children were destined to feed the
gas chambers and crematoria.
François Mauriac
The above quotation is taken from Mauriac’s foreword to Elie Wiesel’s

Holocaust memoir, Night (1958). It is one of a number of attempts made by
intellectuals in the postwar years to reflect upon what the Second World War
had in the deepest sense disclosed: not just what the experience of the war was
like, but what its extraordinary atrocities tell us about human nature. Mauriac
testifies to the feeling of an epochal change, in which whatever was left of the
‘dream’ of secular humanistic optimism after the First World War has now
come to an end. In fact the ‘dream finally vanished’, he claims, even before the
full scale of the catastrophe had become clear. Historian Paul Fussell docu-
ments the war’s headcount:
Killed and wounded were over 78 million people, more of them civilians than soldiers.
Close to 6 million Jews were beaten, shot, or gassed to death by the Germans. One million
people died of starvation and despair in the siege of Leningrad . . . If the battle of the
Somme constituted a scandal because 20,000 British soldiers were killed in one day, twice
that number of civilians were asphyxiated and burned to death in the bombing of
Hamburg. Seventy thousand died at Hiroshima, 35,000 at Nagasaki, and the same at
Dresden.1
Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 13
As many have observed, it is hard to find words that truly register the significance of
such terrible facts. Is it really adequate, for example, to say that these astonishing
numbers signal the end of a ‘dream’ named ‘Enlightenment’?
Sitting in ‘one of the dives | On Fifty-Second street’ at the outset of the war, things
seemed different to W. H. Auden. Whereas Mauriac announced the end of an era,
Auden positions himself as one of a number of people in the bar who are desperate
to ‘cling to their average day’, purposefully deflecting from the reality of things:
Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Yet Auden’s poem, ‘September 1, 1939’, ends up being every bit as far-reaching about
what the onset of another war has disclosed. His sense of regression to a more pri-
mary state of childishness resonates with Immanuel Kant’s classic definition of
Enlightenment as humanity’s collective emergence out of its moral infancy—a state
Kant defined as ‘the inability to make use of one’s understanding without direction
from another’. Writing in 1784, Kant was aware of only ‘a few who have succeeded,
by their own cultivation of spirit, in freeing themselves from minority’, and he
warned that the general public will ‘achieve enlightenment only slowly’. But he
nonetheless anticipated an ‘age of enlightenment’ about to unfold in which the
‘spirit of a rational valuing’ would spread, gradually bringing about a whole society
of autonomous individuals who are governed by reason rather than superstition.2
Confronted by the ‘elderly rubbish’ talked by 1930s dictators, Auden recognized a
very different kind of human equality: ‘the error bred in the bone | Of each woman
and each man.’ Yet the hope embodied by a better vision does not, he finally sug-
gested, simply die:
Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.3
With its ambivalent conditionality, Auden makes the barest possible affirmation of
hope in ‘the Just’, in full acceptance of the ‘error bred into the bone’ and his own
immersion in the mess.
As these two texts suggest, the period of the Second World War and its aftermath
was very self-consciously what Mark Greif has called ‘the age of the crisis of man’—a
term that names a resurgence of writing which engaged with questions of ‘funda-
mental anthropology’, as he calls it, and which made a ‘renewed inquiry into the
majoritarian, unmarked human subject itself, to change and reground the rationale
for human moral status and inviolability’. By the 1960s talk of the ‘crisis of man’ had
started to grow stale. Its universalistic assumptions struggled to deal with the new
forms of identity politics which challenged many of the generalizing ideas about
shared human nature; differences based on gender, ethnicity, and sexuality had by
then come to seem more pressing matters to reflect upon.4 But in the aftermath of
the war, as a character in David Lodge’s The British Museum is Falling Down (1965)
wistfully recalls, ‘Everyone was writing books on the Human Condition and pub-
lishers were fighting under their desks for the options.’5
On its most abstract level, discourse on the crisis of man took the form of didactic
writings which bridged between philosophy and cultural journalism, and included
such texts as Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941), Erich Kahler’s
Man the Measure (1943), C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1943), Ernst Cassirer’s Essay
on Man (1944), and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). These thinkers
were often preoccupied by what Greif names the task of ‘re-enlightenment’: the
attempt to re-imagine human dignity in a way that would not seem merely implausible
to a modern world that had undermined the basis for easy faith in such a concept.
The most pre-eminent of these texts was the United Nations’ Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR), which was ratified in 1948 and explicitly framed as a
response to ‘barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’. Yet as
Talal Asad has pointed out, ‘the Universal Declaration does not define “the human”
in “human rights” other than (tautologically) as the subject of human rights that
were once theorized as natural rights’.6 Article One grandly claims that ‘All human
beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason
and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ A
similarly resonant description of human nature was presented in the 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as ‘the natural, inalienable and sacred
rights of man’, but in the UDHR these endowments are positioned as the much
humbler (indeed, rather bureaucratic) ‘common standard of achievement for all
peoples and all nations’.7 In the wake of the Second World War, human dignity
came to be understood less as a natural endowment than as a contingent human
achievement.
Of course the UDHR embodies the optimistic ideal of re-enlightenment in the

necessarily circumscribed language of geopolitics. A more complex line of reflec-
tion on human nature emerged from within what Amanda Anderson has named
the ‘bleak liberalism’ that was adopted by a wide range of intellectuals in the post-
war years, whose characteristic stance involved what she calls a ‘dialectic of scepti-
cism and hope’. ‘On the one hand’, she argues, ‘one encounters bleak sociologies,
sober psychologies, historical pessimism; on the other, commitment to freedom
and equality, to individual and collective self-actualization, to democratic process
and the rule of law.’8 Writings in this bleak liberal mode range from Arthur
Schlesinger’s The Vital Center (1949), which called for a ‘moderate pessimism’ about
an ‘official liberalism’ which ‘had long been almost inextricably identified with a
picture of man as perfectible, as endowed with sufficient wisdom and selflessness
to endure power and to use it infallibly for the general good’, through to Raymond
Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955, trans. 1957), which criticized ‘the illusion of
the orientation of history in a constant direction, of evolution toward a state of affairs
in harmony with an ideal’.9 When it came to the actual dissemination of bleak lib-
eralism, literary texts were often more important than works of theory, and both
Anderson and Greif point to the form of the novel as commanding a new prestige
in the ‘crisis of man’ period, especially in the first two decades after the war.10 But
many of the personal memoirs of the war years were engaged with precisely the
same concerns: the 1961 American edition of Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (1947)
was named Survival in Auschwitz: the Nazi Assault on Humanity, but Levi’s title is more
faithfully rendered by Stuart Woolf ’s initial translation, If This is a Man, which
announces an ambition of humanistic questioning that it shares with several other
major Holocaust testimonies dating from this period.
In this chapter I will consider different kinds of testimony about the widely per-
ceived ‘crisis of man’ across a range of literary idioms, exploring their different ways
of measuring what the years of war had most profoundly disclosed about human
identity. I will consider not only memoir and autofiction, but also texts not conven-
tionally classed as life-writing (including lyric poetry, fiction, philosophical writ-
ings, and even some conduct literature) in order to access a wider understanding of
how questions of ‘fundamental anthropology’ were revisited. In some ways, I will
argue, these varied forms of testimony can be understood as suggesting a bleak
liberalism; but in several telling instances they resist being defined in quite those
terms—most obviously in those texts which emerge out of a Marxist interpretation
of humanism, but for other reasons too. The position in the ‘crisis of man’ debate to
which I will most frequently revert is the one defined by Judith Shklar, a Jewish
political historian who was forced by the Nazis to flee from her childhood home in
Riga, Latvia, at the age of thirteen. In After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith
(1957), Shklar tells ‘the story of the gradual decline of radical political optimism since
the enlightenment’, coolly dismissing what she called ‘future of mankind’ literature,
and defining the postwar world as the terminus of the modern era. ‘The fact is that
it is next to impossible to believe strongly in the power of human reason expressing
itself in political action capable of achieving its ends’, she tersely claimed. ‘The
various theories of historical determinism prevalent since the last century have long
since undermined this hope, and historical disaster has completed the process.’11
Yet unlike François Mauriac, Shklar views the ‘debunking’ of humanism, as she calls
it, as giving rise to a necessary ambivalence: with ‘scepticism’ as the only reliable
guide, she argues, ‘all that our lack of confidence permits is to say that it is better to
believe in it than not’, and her name for this most provisional of beliefs is ‘the liber-
alism of fear’. If she accepts a certain broadly Kantian conception of human identity
as a way of justifying a democratic politics founded on the preservation of individ-
ual freedoms, it is not because this is any longer felt to be a resonant conception of
human nature, but only a form of ‘damage control’, as she puts it. For Shklar, ideas
about human dignity are useful fictions which offer the best chance of protecting
embodied life from the ‘orgies of xenophobia’ which seem to define modern
history—that is all.12
Shklar’s ‘liberalism of fear’ is not easy to like: in certain ways it exemplifies what
the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has pejoratively named, in his Critique of Cynical
Reason (1988), ‘enlightened false consciousness’.13 Yet there is also a certain wisdom
in the way Shklar wishes to hold open human experience as something that might
never be properly named or defended by particular definitions, however well-
intentioned they might be. ‘We would do far less harm’, she argues, ‘if we learned
to accept each other as sentient beings, whatever else we may be.’ In what follows
my suggestion is that the most compelling forms of testimony about the crisis of
man are those which take up Shklar’s challenge for us ‘to accept each other as sen-
tient beings’, in all the understated difficulty of that task.14
* * *
While it was slow to be translated into English, Primo Levi’s memoir of his experi-
ence in Auschwitz has since emerged as the text most often associated with the
affirmation of a ‘bleak liberalism’.15 ‘Can any kind of humanism be sustained in
the light of the historical record of the past century? I think that it can’, claims
philosopher Richard Norman in On Humanism (2004). He positioned Levi’s memoir
as exemplary of a ‘humanism without illusions’, defining it as ‘one of the great docu-
ments of humanism, a humanism as hard-won as it could possibly be’.16
In support of his claims, Norman cites the famous passage from If This Is a Man
in which Levi, at a particularly desolate moment, is cheered by the wisdom of
ex-Sergeant Steinlauf, formerly of the Austro-Hungarian army. Steinlauf ’s view is

that ‘precisely because the Lager [Levi leaves the German word for ‘concentration
camp’ untranslated] was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not
become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want
to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves
to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization’.17 Other
comparable scenes in Levi’s memoir include, for example, his urgent attempt to
remember the ‘Canto of Ulysses’ from The Divine Comedy:
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:

you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.
These lines come to Levi in Auschwitz ‘like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of
God’, such that ‘for a moment’, he explains, ‘I forget who I am and where I am.’18 It
compares to Edwin Muir’s poem ‘Reading in Wartime’, in which the poet turns to
writers such as Boswell and Tolstoy to ‘retrieve the shape of man’ in a time when
‘The individual soul, | The eye, the lip, the brow’ are, Muir fears, ‘For ever gone from
their place’.19 In a short text Levi wrote for an edition of his memoir specially pre-
pared for Italian schoolchildren, he explained that part of what helped him to sur-
vive in Auschwitz was an ‘unfailing interest in the human spirit’ along with ‘the will,
which I tenaciously preserved, to always recognize, even in the darkest days, in my
companions and myself, men and not things, and thus to avoid that total humili
ation and demoralization that led many to spiritual shipwreck’. For this particular
audience of schoolchildren Levi at times sounded more like a representative from
the United Nations than a bleak liberal: he set out his faith in ‘reason and discussion
as supreme tools of progress’, and his conviction that ‘[a]nywhere in the world, if one
begins by denying the fundamental freedoms of Man, and equality between men,
one is heading towards a concentration-camp system’.20 Toni Morrison no doubt
had passages like these in mind when she claimed, in her introduction to Levi’s
Complete Works (2015), that ‘the triumph of human identity and worth over the
pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi’s writing’, and
even that ‘Primo Levi understands evil as not only banal but unworthy of our
insight—even of our intelligence, for it reveals nothing interesting or compelling
about itself.’21
But while Morrison’s gloss might well serve as the kind of thing one says to a
group of schoolchildren, it is misplaced as a general introduction to an edition of
Levi’s work. In the passage that follows on from Steinlauf ’s uplifting advice, Levi
calmly points out that while this good man’s ‘wisdom and virtue’ are ‘certainly good for
him’, his words are ‘not enough for me. In the face of this complicated netherworld
my ideas are confused,’ Levi admits; ‘is it really necessary to elaborate a system and
put it into practice? Or would it be better to acknowledge that one has no system?’22
These questions go unanswered, but they point to the most distinctive aspect of
Levi’s memoir: the process of questioning itself.
Unlike any other ‘crisis of man’ testimony Levi’s title takes the form of an open
question, and it begins with a short poem that insists on the importance of open-
ended wondering. Addressed to all those living safely in comfort, it asks us to:
Consider if this is a man

Who toils in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for half a loaf
Who dies by a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
With no hair and no name
With no more strength to remember,
With empty eyes and a womb as cold
As a frog in winter.
Ponder that this happened:
I consign these words to you.23
Contrast these lines with Tamiki Hara’s poem about Hiroshima, titled ‘this is a
Human Being’:
this is a human being

look what an A-bomb has done to it
the flesh swells so horribly
and both men and women are reduced to one form
‘Help me!’ says the faint cry
leaking from the swelled lips, the terribly
burned mess of a festered face
this, this is a human being
this is a man’s face24
Both poems explore the enigma of the human image that is, to recall Muir, gone
from its place. But Levi pulls apart from Tamiki Hara in his insistence on consider-
ing and pondering rather than asserting and defining. If a woman can be returned
to an entirely animal condition, ‘with empty eyes and a womb as cold | As a frog in
winter’, and yet in some sense remain nameable as a woman, then perhaps, the
implication runs, that which is human is not, after all, to be discovered in the
idealistic fictions that human rights enshrine; perhaps it is connected with something
at once humbler and more elemental, some kind of involvement—as Shklar sug-
gested—with the sheer sentience of embodied life. Yet where does that thought leave
our more normative conception of humanity as differentiated from animal life?
‘Ponder that this happened’, Levi instructs us: do not lose yourself in anger about it,
and do not distract yourself with talk about ‘the triumph of human identity’. Instead
remain within the question: ‘Or may your house fall down’, the poem shockingly con-
cludes, ‘May illness make you helpless, | And your children turn their eyes from you.’25
Richard Norman was right to consider Levi’s memoir an exemplary text, but
what is exemplary about it is precisely Levi’s capacity to hold readers to the act of
‘pondering’, while holding open the puzzling quality of what his experiences have
disclosed. When he was captured by the Nazis in December 1943, Levi recalls, he
was still a naïve rationalist fresh out of university ‘with a definite tendency . . . to live
in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phan-
toms.’26 He was first interned in a camp at the Italian town of Fòssoli, from which he
and many others were to be transported to Auschwitz. It was late in the war, and
rumours abounded as to the fate that awaited those who were put on trains bound
for the East. On the evening before they were to be removed, as night set in, Levi
recalls that ‘it was such a night one knew that human eyes would not witness it and
survive. Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither Italian nor German, had
the courage to come and see what men do when they know they have to die.’ To see
with merely ‘human eyes’ would be to deflect from what came the next morning:
With the absurd precision to which we later had to accustom ourselves, the Germans held
the roll call. At the end the officer asked ‘Wieviel Stück?’ The corporal saluted smartly and
replied that there were six hundred and fifty ‘pieces,’ and all was in order. They then loaded
us onto buses and took us to the station at Carpi. Here the train was waiting for us, with our
escort for the journey. Here we received the first blows: and the thing was so new and sense-
less that we felt no pain, in either body or spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one
strike a man without anger?27
Again opening out onto a question, here as elsewhere Levi’s ‘amazement’ achieves
a powerful but troubling philosophical reach. We are asked to ponder the enigma
of the Germans’ hyper-rationality, which has turned into an ‘absurd precision’ that
organizes human beings into pure objects of exchange. Violence merges with an
oddly efficient process, such that now it somehow starts to take place without any
actual anger being involved. Can human beings really become as detached as
machines? Or could it be that in some sense their very capacity for reason has
made them equivalent to machines, rather than (as before) animals? And if that is
the case, what does it say about the long tradition of understanding human dignity
as bound up with the gift of reason? As we shall see, the most ominous questions
raised by this scene were elaborated by thinkers of the Frankfurt School (especially
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno) into much more schematically applied
anxieties about the collapse of rationality into a self-defeating will to power. But Levi
does not take it in quite that direction. To do so would be to foreclose ‘pondering’ in
its most radically open form, and thereby to rescind the possibility of hope, however
marginal such hope might be.
* * *
‘Human eyes’ might well offer only a deflective form of vision, but if we could
learn to see in some kind of non-human or posthuman way, what would that
enable us to become? With some very notable exceptions, this question tended
to disturb writers of the ‘crisis of man’ period, rather than—as was sometimes
the case with later writers—exciting them with possibility.28 It is explored by
Charlotte Delbo, in her trilogy of memoirs Auschwitz and After (1965–71), with a
mixture of grim fascination and terrible pathos. Delbo was captured by the Nazis
and imprisoned at Auschwitz, among other camps, as a result of her involvement
with the French Resistance. She wrote much of the first two volumes of the trilogy
in the immediate aftermath of the war, but left them unpublished. In the third
volume she traces out, in a form akin to oral history, the lives of those inmates
of Auschwitz who survived. When put together, this sequence of texts explores
the curious and unnerving way in which the devastating experience of the Nazi
concentration camps seemed at once to have changed everything, without really
changing anything at all.
Delbo’s account of Auschwitz offers one of the most vivid and disturbing depic-
tions of the way in which human beings can come to be, even while still alive, com-
pletely undifferentiated from nature. At the end of the first volume she contrasts
two different types of memory: in the former there is a ‘remembrance of streets with
echoing cobblestones, of the fifes of spring played on the benches of the fish and
vegetable market, of the shafts of sunlight on the light parquet floor seen on awaken
ing, the recollection of laughter’; the latter is a memory of the ‘otherworld,’ as she
names it, which moves to a very different temporality. ‘Here, outside of time, under
a sun before creation, eyes dim. Lips lose their blush. Lips die. Words have all faded
since time immemorial.’ Otherworld memory is what the daily torment of
Auschwitz generates, and it is gleaned from difficult acts of undeflective looking,
which Delbo ambivalently both urges upon her readers and at times urges them
to resist. It includes the following recollection of a woman being dragged away to
her death:
Her trousers—men’s trousers—are undone and drag inside out behind her, fastened to her
ankles. A flayed frog. Her loins are exposed, her emaciated buttocks, soiled by blood and pus,
are dotted with hollows.
She is howling. Her knees are lacerated by the gravel.
Try to look. Just try and see.29
Delbo does look, does ‘try to see.’ The image of a woman as a ‘flayed frog’ differs
from the woman described in Levi’s poem, with ‘a womb as cold | As a frog in win-
ter’, only by its palpable sense of horror, which threatens to overwhelm his steady
pondering.
The product of this kind of looking is a dehumanized insight which, in a poem
Delbo places at the end of the second volume, she describes as ‘useless know
ledge . . . born from the depths of despair’.30 And when she begins, in the third vol-
ume, to describe how the lives of other survivors turned out, it becomes painfully
apparent quite how ‘useless’ this knowledge is. Abandoning the Communist com-
mitment which led so many into the Resistance, most ended up after the war try-
ing, in a state of traumatized bewilderment, to make some approximation of the
life-story modelled by the middle-class Bildungsroman: the attempt to find a variety
of work and marriage that might be fulfilling, along with the rearing of children to
continue this version of the human story. The volume ends with Françoise, whose
experiences resemble Delbo’s, recollecting how her militant husband Paul was shot
by the Nazis without trial. ‘When I’ll be dead,’ she muses, ‘who will remember the
fire he wanted to set to the world that a new dawn might rise from its ashes? I’ve lost
my taste for that new dawn.’ The ‘useless knowledge’ of that otherworld spoils hope,
without opening a space for any other meaningful vision of human possibility.
Another woman, named simply ‘Mado’, takes shelter in bourgeois domesticity, not
out of any sense that it is a particularly meaningful way of life, but merely as a ref-
uge, or a form of ‘damage control’, as Shklar put it. ‘I’m not alive’, Mado bleakly
insists:
I look at those who are. They are vain, ignorant. Probably that’s the way to be in order to live,
to reach the end of one’s lifespan. If they had my knowledge they’d be like me. They wouldn’t
be alive.31
It would be a profound discourtesy to use Peter Sloterdijk’s conception of ‘enlight-

ened false consciousness’ to describe these women’s lives, even though it does cap-
ture something important about them. Theirs is a ‘useless knowledge’ which the
most contented—or at least the most pacified—have tried to overcome or even for-
get, clinging instead to ideals of human becoming that command no authenticity.
The possibility of forgetting was equally tempting to Jean Améry.32 Captured

while working for the Belgian resistance, tortured, and incarcerated in Auschwitz,
no survivor has written more powerfully than Améry about the way in which the
‘law of enlightenment’, as he calls it, and the wider values bound up with mature
human cultivatedness, were first rendered powerless and then debunked by the
Nazis. Through torture and forced labour he was forced to learn, in the most vis-
ceral way, what Freud had already taught about the supposedly higher powers of
the mind, namely: ‘that for the greatest part the intellect is a ludus and that we are
nothing more . . . than homo ludentes. With that’, Améry recalls, ‘we lost a good deal of
arrogance, of metaphysical conceit, but also quite a bit of our native joy in the intel-
lect and what we falsely imagined was the sense of life.’ He describes how
intellectuals incarcerated at Auschwitz ultimately came to accept the death of ‘the
Word’, meaning the idea of reason itself: ‘And we were not even left with the feeling
that we must regret its departure.’33 Yet what Delbo portrayed as the merely ‘useless
knowledge’ of humanity in a state of nature briefly emerges for Améry as the pos-
sibility of calm resignation, achieved through the unlearning of an illusion. It entails
an escape from the ‘arrogance’ and ‘metaphysical conceit’ bound up with a
debunked humanism, and a release from a false ‘sense of life’, albeit at the cost of a
certain ‘native joy in the intellect’.
However Améry was finally either unable or unwilling ever finally to relinquish
the ‘law of enlightenment’. In a later essay named ‘Resentments’ he considers the
newly reconstructed West Germany, which ‘offers the world an example not only of
economic prosperity but also of democratic stability and political moderation’. He
finds himself unable to join in with ‘the unisonous peace chorus’ which ‘cheerfully
proposes: not backward let us look but forward, to a better, common future!’34 The
reason for his resentment is not because he is trapped, as were some of the survivors
Delbo described, in a traumatic reliving of the ‘otherworld’ to which he was
exposed. It is because the vision of justice held out by the intellectual culture which
formed him is one that he cannot, after all, either unlearn or disavow, due to his
piercingly clear understanding of the moral consequences. ‘Whoever lazily and
cheaply forgives, subjugates himself to the social and biological time-sense, which
is also called the “natural” one’, he observed: ‘Man has the right and the privilege to
declare himself to be in disagreement with every natural occurrence, including the
biological healing that time brings about.’35 But this distinctively Kantian idealiza-
tion of humanity’s vocation to transcend nature had become, for Améry at least, a
decidedly Faustian bargain. Holding on to a righteous anger at the stout pride of
the new Germany for having ‘made it once again’ entrapped him in a self-destructive
sense of rage and shame at what, after all, humanity has proved itself to be.
The danger of succumbing to disgust at life itself was of very great concern to
Primo Levi. After Améry’s suicide in 1978, Levi wrote an essay named ‘The
Intellectual in Auschwitz’, in which he warned that Améry’s vision of absolute
justice ‘led him to such severe and intransigent positions that he was unable to find
joy in life, in living.’36 Levi also criticized his conception of intellectual life as exclu-
sively bound up with so-called humane learning—namely literature, history, and
philosophy—and ignoring the alternative ways of thinking that modern science has
made possible. These disparate thoughts were joined together in Levi’s master-
piece, The Periodic Table (1971), an autofictional text that can be read as another, albeit
implicit, critical reply to Améry.37
Levi was a chemist by profession, and The Periodic Table explores various passages
of his life, both before and after Auschwitz, under the heading of different elem
ents, from Argon to Carbon. While it is a complex book that (as with most of Levi’s
writing) cannot be straightforwardly aligned with any one idea or purpose, running
through it is a sustained interest in how the supposedly ‘useless knowledge’ which
caused Delbo such horror, and Améry such shame, might be transvalued. Levi’s
very chapter headings, each named after a different element, signal an anti-
anthropocentric impulse in the book as a whole, and a willingness to entertain ways
of thinking outside the terms of ‘metaphysical conceit’. In the opening chapter Levi
playfully compares certain of his ancestors to the ‘inert gases’, and in doing so he opens
up a way of understanding humanity as, like Argon itself, being without any clear
properties or predictability, but instead as an oddly unusable presence in the wider
atmosphere. In a later chapter, ‘Iron’, Levi portrays himself as unlearning the thin
enlightenment ideology he was taught at school, with its high-flown talk of the ‘nobility
of Man’ as the ‘master of matter’. Instead he quietly starts to encounter, through walk-
ing trips in the nearby mountains with his friend Sandro, the ‘silent, contagious happi-
ness’ that comes from being immersed in an undifferentiated natural state. Experiences
of the sublime are here reframed, in an anti-Kantian direction, as wonder at bare mat-
ter itself, and at the rewarding self-estrangement that comes from apprehending one’s
participation in it. These experiences form ‘a new bond’, Levi marvels in the ‘Nickel’
chapter, ‘more authentic than the rhetoric of nature learned in school, with the bram-
bles and the rocks that were my island and my freedom’.38
The development of this anti-anthropocentric form of wonder enables Levi to
qualify, though not entirely escape, the self-destructive shame that Améry came to
feel at the very fact of being human. In the penultimate chapter of The Periodic Table,
named ‘Vanadium’, he recounts the story of his chance encounter with one of the
German chemists who had supervised his work at the Buna rubber factory in
Auschwitz during the war—a man named Karl Müller. Without in any sense forgiving
Müller, Levi responds to the chemist’s evasions and lies by accepting that he was,
after all, a ‘typically grey human specimen’. Any residual shame is then transformed
through the inhuman sublimity of the final chapter, ‘Carbon’, which was written, as
Levi explains, ‘so that the world would understand the solemn poetry, known only
to chemists, of chlorophyllous photosynthesis’.39 Müller’s nauseating effort at self-
justification is placed against the wondrous life of a carbon atom in its voyage
through rocks, leaves, a muscle-fibre in a human thigh, and finally into a Lebanese
cedar. ‘This, on the human scale,’ Levi concludes, ‘is an ironic feat of acrobatics, a
juggler’s trick, an incomprehensible display of omnipotence and arrogance, since it
is from this constantly renewed impurity in the air that we come: we animals and
plants, and we human species, with our four billion discordant opinions, or millen-
nium of history, our wars and shames and nobility and pride.’40 In this way Levi
beautifully illuminates Shklar’s hope that the debunking of humanism might help
reattune us to an acceptance of ‘each other as sentient beings’. What might it be
like, his text more pressingly asks, to unthink the falsifying moral hierarchies that
have bestowed such power on men like Karl Müller?
* * *
For another kind of mid-century intellectual the advent of a second disastrous
world war, and the dismaying spectacle of the Holocaust, only confirmed a long-
standing suspicion of the type of humanism I have thus far been discussing.
The idea that human identity can be grasped in a now-and-forever way as a self-
determining individual who is endowed by ‘nature’ with the right to ‘life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness’ was one of Karl Marx’s foremost examples of reifica-
tion.41 While this kind of ‘bourgeois individualism’, as Marx called it, may have
come to feel naturally human, he famously reinterpreted it as a naturalized ideol-
ogy generated by the competitive individualism upon which capitalist economies
depend. By contrast, Marx understood Communism as the effort to realize what
he called a ‘fully developed humanism’, which can only emerge through a social
transformation that lays the ‘conflict between existence and essence, between
objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between indi-
vidual and species’, finally to rest. Human identity is therefore not, in the Marxist
conception, an abstract set of properties that individuals are held to possess, but
something that must be achieved collectively within a renewed social totality, the
creation of which is understood to be nothing less than ‘the solution of the riddle of
history’.42 From this standpoint, the rise of fascism and the carnage of the Second
World War could be—and often were—rather neatly explained by Marxists as the
logical inevitability of an already-dehumanizing economic system, which pits indi-
viduals and nations against each other in a self-destructive fight over resources. But
testimonies by Marxist intellectuals of any real seriousness, such as David Rousset’s

A World Apart (1946), and Robert Antelme’s The Human Race (1947), tended to find
their own idealistic yearnings at the very least tested by experiences of the war. The
emergence of parallel totalitarian regimes in Germany and Russia, and the signing
of the Hitler–Stalin pact, had, after all, brutally foregrounded the destructive capacity
of any political ideology with totalizing ambitions.
Antelme’s memoir, which recounts his long history of victimization at the hands
of the Nazis, is in certain ways resistant to any totalizing political vision.43 Humiliated
by the all-encompassing power of the SS and the extreme hatred of difference
manifested by Nazi ideology, Antelme is frequently drawn to an appreciation of
life’s resistant ‘thingness’, which he starts to figure as a certain kind of refuge, and
even—most remarkably—as a hidden source of dignity. Amid his brutalization he
looks upon seemingly ordinary objects with a sense of their wondrous singularity:
‘A railroad car that is railroad car, a horse that is horse, the clouds coming in from
the west—all the things that the SS cannot contest are regal things’, he defiantly
claims. ‘Things for us are not inert anymore’ is how he glosses this moment:
‘Everything speaks, we hear everything, everything possesses some power.’44 But
while Antelme develops a rich appreciation of non-commensurability, even the
brutalized master-slave relations of the concentration camp offer continue to offer
intimations of Marx’s ‘fully developed humanism’. In one passage he catches sight,
through the fence of the camp, of a German bystander, who is in turn witnessing
Antelme’s incarceration:
[I]f he sees us behind the fence, if somehow the idea just enters his head that there are other
possibilities in nature than being a man who walks freely along the road, if he launches off on
some such train of thought, then it is very likely he will soon feel threatened by all those
shaved heads, by all those figures not one of whom he has the slightest chance of ever getting
to know, and who are for him of all things on the earth the most unknown. And those men
themselves will perhaps contaminate for him the trees that in the distance surround the
fence, and this passer-by upon the road will then risk feeling himself smothering [sic] within
the whole of nature, as though closed shut upon him.
The reign of man, man who acts or invests things with meaning, does not cease. The SS
cannot alter our species. They are themselves enclosed within the same humankind and the
same history.45
Through the camp’s imprisoning wire Antelme glimpses Marx’s understanding of

human identity, albeit through an image of its radical incompleteness. The reason
the bystander’s life is ‘contaminated’ is because his own freedom is falsely grounded
on the wider denial of freedom to others, who are nonetheless involved in ‘the same
humankind and the same history’. Clearly this is a contrasting thought to his earlier
conception of ‘regal things’, which are simply themselves, and the significance of
Antelme’s writing lies in the way he tries to bring together the different threads of
his experience: both the insistence on singularity, and the yearning for a renewed
identity. In doing so, he develops a chastened understanding of Marx’s ‘fully-
developed humanism’, which he never ceases to respect, by putting it in tension
with a rigorous exploration of domination and close attention to life’s untoward con-
tingencies. He opens a path to what could, to borrow Amanda Anderson’s phrase,
be called a ‘bleak Marxism’.
For other Marxist intellectuals the war brought about a break with long-held
ideals rather than a qualification of them.46 In Scum of the Earth (1941), a memoir that
describes the French internment camps set up to contain political prisoners just
prior to the Nazi occupation, Arthur Koestler describes coming upon a remnant of
the International Brigade that had fought against fascism in Spain, now imprisoned
in a camp in the Ariège:
The heroic horde was but an unconscious tool of power politics and when it had played its
role was sacrificed in an immense holocaust, the memory of which would linger on for cen-
turies and make any appeal to ideals or lofty aspirations stink in the nostrils of the common
man [. . .] They had done nothing but put into practice what we [the ‘European Left’] had
preached and believed; they had been admired and worshipped, and thrown on the rubbish-
heap like a sackful of rotten potatoes, to putrefy.47
Koestler had at one time been a Communist activist, and was arrested by the French
authorities at the onset of the war for that very reason. While he ultimately man-
aged to escape to Britain, his experiences robbed him of faith not only in Marxist
political hope but in any of the other official definitions of human dignity; instead
he was drawn to a much more minimal affirmation of the power of laughter to
disturb any and all straight-faced ideologies. In the open letter to a certain ‘Comrade
Blump’ (the counterpart to ‘Colonel Blimp’) with which he concludes his memoir,
Koestler disavows any hope of a renewed social totality, describing his ‘unique and
ultimate war aim’ as being ‘to teach this planet to laugh again’.48 His stance com-
pares to the equally minimal and negatively framed humanism to be found in
George Orwell’s essay of the same year on the smutty seaside postcards of Donald
McGill. These ribald images of fat women and hen-pecked men superbly offer,
Orwell claimed, to blow a ‘chorus of raspberries’ at all the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’
that are competing for the human soul.49
A very different rift with Marxist humanism, which had no interest in the liberat-
ing power of laughter, was opened up by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; rev. 1947). Published while Horkheimer and Adorno
were in exile together in the United States, it combines a resolutely Marxist analysis
of the dehumanizing effects of capitalist modernity with an equally firm rejection
of the renewed social totality envisioned by the Marxist understanding of identity.
While it is not easy to define exactly what triggered their pessimism, it is hard to
imagine that the experience of the Hitler–Stalin pact, total war, exile, and the sui-
cide of close friends such as Walter Benjamin were any less important factors than
specific intellectual influences—which range from Horkheimer’s longstanding
interest in Schopenhauer’s scepticism about human rationality, to Adorno’s
emphasis on how Freudian thinking debunks the ‘myth’ of human unity, as he
started to call it.50 In any case, the Dialectic is a profoundly witness-bearing enter-
prise, written very specifically as an attempt to ‘explain why humanity, instead of
entering into an ever more truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of
barbarism’.51 Turning against Marx’s own optimism about the capacity of technology
to bring about a liberation from nature, Horkheimer and Adorno stressed the
ways in which humanity now found itself becoming nightmarishly ensnared by
the technological adventure it had embarked upon with such optimism, arguing
that enlightenment rationality has become exposed as catastrophically ignorant of
its relationship to power.52
The paradox within Dialectic of Enlightenment is that while Horkheimer and
Adorno point to the very deepest ‘crisis of man’, they do so with such a profound
distrust of rationality that any attempt to specify the true picture of human nature
from which the depth of the crisis can be properly measured, let alone redeemed,
is disqualified in advance. In acknowledgement of this problem Adorno developed
a form of cultural analysis that he named ‘negative dialectics’, in which a positive
conception of identity might be intuited indirectly, through the negation of a nega-
tive state. Musical and literary forms particularly interested him in this regard for
their capacity to stand in a parodic relationship to their own conventional (or ‘bour-
geois’) expectations. Poems such as Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ (1948), he later argued,
testify to the ‘more truly human state’ they refuse to delineate in and through their
disruption of traditional kinds of literary satisfaction.53 But Adorno was also inter-
ested in more mundane forms of life-writing, and perhaps the most striking version
of his negative dialectics is found in Minima Moralia (1951), which engages with the
profoundly bourgeois genre of the ‘advice book’.
As Jakob Norberg has pointed out, Adorno took an unusually keen interest in this
somewhat downmarket literary form. He was attentive to the popular horoscopes
in American newspapers and was certainly aware of the wider tradition of middle-
class conduct literature, which ranges from Samuel Smiles’s collection of inspiring
tales of self-reliant individualism in Self-Help (1850), to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win
Friends and Influence People (1936). Minima Moralia is self-consciously positioned in
relation to the kind of advice offered by such texts: here we find Adorno engaging
with questions about everyday postwar realities and how to deal with them in a
series of short aphoristic commentaries on the nature of what he called ‘damaged
life’. It was favourably received in West Germany, where it formed part of the wide-
spread revival of conduct literature in the postwar years—selling a remarkable
120,000 copies to a German reading public anxious to adapt to radically changed
circumstances.54 But Minima Moralia is an unsettling negation of the bourgeois indi-
vidualist preoccupations of this genre rather than a smooth instantiation of them. In
a short preface Adorno justified his interest in writing from the perspective of what
he calls ‘the old subject, now historically condemned’, by explaining that there is at
present—in the painful process of postwar reconstruction that was taking place in
occupied Germany—a window of opportunity in which the bitterness and pain felt
by the bourgeois individual in the aftermath of Nazism might be exploited for the
critical purchase it offers.55
Some passages in Minima Moralia turn quite straightforwardly against the ‘old
subject’ as a botched reification of human nature that is once more in danger of
turning nasty. In the section entitled ‘Le bourgeois revenant’, which was written with
memories of the rapid adoption of Nazism by the German lower-middle class fresh
in mind, Adorno bleakly claims that ‘Whatever was once good and decent in bour-
geois values, independence, perseverance, forethought, circumspection, has been
corrupted utterly.’ He explains that ‘while bourgeois forms of existence are trucu-
lently conserved, their economic pre-condition’, in the rubble and ruin of postwar
Germany, ‘has fallen away. Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always
secretly was, and with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now min-
gled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and
better.’ In such circumstances, he suggested, ‘the bourgeois live on like spectres
threatening doom’.56 But other passages use the figure of the ‘bourgeois revenant’ in
a more subtly dialectical way. In ‘Refuge for the Homeless’ Adorno starts to inhabit
the perspective of the bourgeois individualist, building up a characteristically
middle-class complaint about the lack of privacy afforded by the ‘functional modern
habitations’, which were being hastily assembled in the postwar reconstruction. These
new homes were ‘manufactured by experts for philistines’, he sourly reflects, and
they afford insufficient space to allow for that older and richer sense of what a ‘private
life’ means. Given that this is so, ‘[t]he trick is’, Adorno advised, ‘to keep in view, and
to express, the fact that private property no longer belongs to one. But’, he added:
the thesis of this paradox leads to destruction, a loveless disregard for things which necessar-
ily turns against people too; and the antithesis, no sooner uttered, is an ideology for those
wishing with a bad conscience to keep what they have. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.57
This passage works on the principle that the negation of a negative generates an
implied positive—with the negative being the nostalgic yearnings of the middle-
class sensibility Adorno is performing. While the advice with which he crowns this
passage—‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’—might seem, on a practical level, to be
singularly unhelpful, its purpose is to hold open a trace of utopian possibility in and
through its negativity. Adorno confronts his readers with the minimal understand-
ing that contemporary life, in which the ‘bourgeois revenant’ somehow keeps limp-
ing on into the future, must not be mistaken for a fully human one.
But while Adorno never ceased to regard the ‘bourgeois revenant’ as a reification
of human nature, he came to regard it as rather more concretely valuable than
Minima Moralia tends to suggest. In a late radio broadcast, entitled ‘Education after
Auschwitz’ (1967), it becomes difficult to distinguish Adorno’s bleak post-Marxism
from Judith Shklar’s ‘liberalism of fear’. ‘The premier demand upon all education’,
he argues, ‘is that Auschwitz not happen again’; yet the same ‘societal pressure’ that
generated the Second World War ‘still bears down’, he maintains, adding only that
‘the danger remains invisible nowadays’. Adorno now argues that the greatest dan-
ger confronting contemporary society is the re-emergence of the kinds of herd
mentality and manufactured consent that overtook the German middle classes in
the 1930s, and this brings him back in a new way to the ‘bourgeois revenant’, the ‘old
subject’ which valued ‘independence, perseverance, forethought, circumspec-
tion’.58 Yet the difference with Minima Moralia is that the distinctively Kantian enter-
prise of ‘critical self-reflection’ and ‘general enlightenment’, which enabled that ‘old
subject’ to exist and indeed to understand itself as human nature as such, is now
being valued as the main bulwark against modern forms of barbarism, rather than
as the starting-point for a negative dialectics. The ‘single genuine power standing
against the principle of Auschwitz’, Adorno now argues, ‘is autonomy, if I might use
the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not co-
operating.’59
* * *
‘One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly’: this is one of Adorno’s best-
known adages, but he didn’t hold to it in a very rigorous way.60 Far from hating the
‘bourgeois revenant’ properly, Adorno ends up in a not dissimilar position to the
survivors that Charlotte Delbo described in Auschwitz and After: robbed of any
capacity to articulate utopian possibility, taking refuge in a reified bourgeois iden-
tity as a form of ‘damage control’, as Shklar put it. But while Adorno’s route back to
the ‘bourgeois revenant’ was circuitous, his interest in a negative dialectics that
upends the literary forms which helped to enable and sustained that view of human
nature was by no means an isolated one. As I mentioned at the outset of this
chapter, the form of the novel has long been understood as important to the articu-
lation of a suitably ‘bleak liberalism’, and it was a key feature of the crisis of man
discourse, ranging from such texts as Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After (1952) and
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) through to Saul Bellow’s Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970).61
However, the postwar years also witnessed the revival of another more disturbing
kind of novelistic text which was more interested in disrupting and reshaping,
rather than reaffirming, longstanding paradigms through which the nature of a
human life was understood.
In The Rise of the Novel (1957) the literary critic Ian Watt claimed that Daniel
Defoe’s ambiguously fictional tales of survivors had taken on a new resonance ‘in
the past few decades’, and that ‘the novel, and its associated way of life, individual-
ism, seem to have come full circle’. Defoe’s tales of isolated individuals locked in a
struggle for survival with nature (as in Robinson Crusoe) or with society (as in Moll
Flanders and Roxana), were the starting point, he argued, in a long process of formal
development in the history of the novel. Whereas later writers such as Fielding,
Austen, and Eliot, would reflect in ever more complex and subtle ways on the indi-
vidual’s relationship to, and integration with, a broader social whole, Watt defined
Defoe as a ‘welcome and portentous figure’:
Welcome because he seems long ago to have called the great bluff of the novel—its suggestion
that personal relations really are the be-all and end-all of life; portentous because he, and
only he, among the great writers of the past, has presented the struggle for survival in the
bleak perspectives which recent history has brought back to a commanding position on the
human stage.62
Watt knew these ‘bleak perspectives’ at first hand: he had served in the British
army in the Far East, and survived internment and forced labour in a Japanese
POW camp following the fall of Singapore in February 1942. The kind of text which
suggests that ‘personal relations really are the be-all and end-all of life’ is of course
one that assumes that a fruitful relationship between the individual and the wider
social process is possible—as opposed to the necessarily dissonant relationship
(‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’) to which Adorno pointed in Minima Moralia.
And if Watt’s argument about the redundancy of the social novel resonates with
Adorno’s rejection of Marxist identity theory, this is not least because Watt had
taken courses on sociology and anthropology under his direction at UCLA directly
after the war.63
In emphasizing the salience of Defoe’s survivor-fiction, Watt referred his readers
to texts by Albert Camus and André Malraux, who had also hailed Defoe’s signifi-
cance as an ‘early recorder’ of the ‘triumphs and degradations’ of individualism.64
He may additionally have had in mind the testimony narratives describing the
effort to survive the camps and—as in Primo Levi’s The Truce (1963)—the chaotic
aftermath of the war in Europe. But as Marina MacKay has pointed out, Robinson
Crusoe was the inspiration for several postwar novels that were ‘portentous’ in exactly
the way Watt identified.65 William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) replayed the
island shipwreck story, though what emerged from this study of a marooned group
of schoolboys was very far from Defoe’s vindication of the self-governing individual.
Golding’s novel, which had an obvious though unstated resonance with recent his-
tory, presented a Hobbesian view of human beings as driven by a herd mentality
and menacingly aggressive drives that run wild once the brakes of social discipline
are removed. Over the next few years Golding would continue to call ‘the great bluff
of the novel’ in a series of fictions which focused with grim obsessiveness on the
antisocial violence and rage within ordinary humanity, which he had witnessed at
first hand in his own wartime experiences in the British navy.66 The English novelist
J. G. Ballard matched Golding in his enthusiasm for the ‘Robinsoniad’ form. In his
memoir, Miracles of Life (2008), Ballard mentioned his love for Robinson Crusoe as a
child, and his fiction repeatedly focuses on solitary figures learning to encounter a
devastated landscape. The Drowned World (1962) is set in a post-apocalyptic future in
which global warming has caused most of the earth to become uninhabitable; ‘The
Terminal Beach’ (1964) describes the attempts of one individual to decipher the
bunkers and blast residuum on Eniwetok, the Pacific island used by the United
States for the testing of atomic bombs. But most famously, Ballard’s Empire of the Sun
(1984) tells the story of young Jim Ballard’s own struggle to survive in a Japanese
internment camp outside Shanghai.
Empire of the Sun was based in no small part on Ballard’s own wartime experi-
ences as a teenage boy, with the main difference being that the character named
Jim is separated from his parents following the Japanese occupation of Shanghai,
and is thereby, as Ballard explained, ‘forced to live like a sort of young Robinson
Crusoe’.67 Yet while it is instructive to think about this text in relation to Defoe, it
takes on greater resonance if it is read more specifically as a disorientation of the
kind of middle-class life-story told by the Bildungsroman, in a way that compares to
Adorno’s disruption of bourgeois conduct literature.
In its classical form the narrative arc of a Bildungsroman typically describes the
journey of an individual from a state of social alienation (or, more positively, from an
asserted independence), to a reconciliation of some kind with the wider social pro-
cess. Often, and especially in texts featuring female protagonists, this would be sym-
bolically sealed by marriage, though in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
(1795–96) it takes the more directly allegorical form of the hero’s induction into
membership of a higher cultural authority.68 In Empire of the Sun Ballard portrays
Jim growing up in a society of rich European and American expatriates, who subsist
exploitatively on the margins of a much larger and (to Jim at least) very alien
Chinese cultural space; with the onset of the war he starts to realize that the ‘fifty-
year-long party that had been Shanghai’ is coming to an end.69 Much of Jim’s
puzzlement about his life derives from his growing awareness that the civilization
which formed him, and which continues to presume upon his loyalty, is in the pro-
cess of losing its worldly power and its moral authority in equal measure. At the end
of the war his rather grand upper-middle-class home on the outskirts of the city has
become a decidedly uncanny place: the war ‘left things the same in odd and unset-
tling ways’, he observes. ‘Even the house seemed sombre, as if it was withdrawing
from him in a series of small and unfriendly acts.’70 He is now looked upon differ-
ently by the Chinese, as if the civilization he embodies has, in the aftermath of
Hiroshima and the departure of the British fleet, in some sense been seen through—
as if these ‘bourgeois revenants’, as Adorno named them, really have become ghosts.
This civilizational change is most brutally crystallized at the very end of the novel,
where Jim witnesses a group of American and British sailors relieving themselves
on the steps of their Shanghai club:
Fifty feet below them, the Chinese watched without comment as the arcs of urine formed a
foaming steam that ran down the street. When it reached the pavement the Chinese stepped
back, their faces expressionless. Jim glanced at the people around him, the clerks and coolies
and peasant women, well aware of what they were thinking. One day China would punish
the rest of the world, and take a frightening revenge.71
As he matures Jim reaches a lucid awareness that the fragile colonial world he occu-
pies, and the middle-class conception of human flourishing it upholds (albeit only
for the wealthy), is becoming redundant, and that the future will be marked by an
ever-escalating drive towards domination between rival superpowers. Yet this
insight ruins the maturational process of Bildung in its more conventional sense,
because it dooms his life to the art of survival, as an atomized individual, in a cul-
ture that he no longer believes in—but which is nonetheless his only protection
from the ‘frightening revenge’ he predicts will come from the people it has long
exploited.
In Steven Spielberg’s family-oriented film adaptation, Empire of the Sun was
read into a Hollywood version of ‘ bleak liberalism’: at the end Jim is gratefully
restored to his family with a sharpened awareness of the fragility of the civilization
they embody. But there is another much stranger form of Bildung narrative
that runs through Ballard’s story, though not Spielberg’s film, in which Jim starts
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“She didn’t like it.”
“No ... she thought the boys stupid.”
“They’re very much like all boys of their age. It’s not an interesting
time.”
Sybil frowned a little. “Thérèse doesn’t think so. She says all they have
to talk about is their clubs and drinking ... neither subject is of very much
interest.”
“They might have been, if you’d lived here always ... like the other girls.
You and Thérèse see it from the outside.” The girl didn’t answer, and Olivia
asked: “You don’t think I was wrong in sending you to France to school?”
Quickly Sybil looked up. “Oh, no ... no,” she said, and then added with
smoldering eagerness, “I wouldn’t have changed it for anything in the
world.”
“I thought you might enjoy life more if you saw a little more than one
corner of it.... I wanted you to be away from here for a little time.” (She did
not say what she thought—“because I wanted you to escape the blight that
touches everything at Pentlands.”)
“I’m glad,” the girl replied. “I’m glad because it makes everything
different.... I can’t explain it.... Only as if everything had more meaning
than it would have otherwise.”
Suddenly Olivia kissed her daughter and said: “You’re a clever girl;
things aren’t wasted on you. And now go along to bed. I’ll stop in to say
good-night.”
She watched the girl as she moved away through the big empty hall past
the long procession of Pentland family portraits, thinking all the while that
beside them Sybil seemed so fresh and full of warm eager life; and when at
last she turned, she encountered her father-in-law and old Mrs. Soames
moving along the narrow passage that led from the writing-room. It struck
her sharply that the gaunt, handsome old John Pentland seemed really old
to-night, in a way he had never been before, old and a little bent, with
purplish circles under his bright black eyes.
Old Mrs. Soames, with her funny, intricate, dyed-black coiffure and
rouged cheeks and sagging chin supported by a collar of pearls, leaned on
his arm—the wreck of a handsome woman who had fallen back upon such
silly, obvious tricks as rouge and dye—a vain, tragic old woman who never
knew that she was a figure of fun. At sight of her, there rose in Olivia’s
mind a whole vista of memories—assembly after assembly with Mrs.
Soames in stomacher and tiara standing in the reception line bowing and
smirking over rites that had survived in a provincial fashion some darker,
more barbaric, social age.
And the sight of the old man walking gently and slowly, out of deference
to Mrs. Soames’ infirmities, filled Olivia with a sudden desire to weep.
John Pentland said, “I’m going to drive over with Mrs. Soames, Olivia
dear. You can leave the door open for me.” And giving his daughter-in-law
a quick look of affection he led Mrs. Soames away across the terrace to his
motor.
It was only after they had gone that Olivia discovered Sabine standing in
the corridor in her brilliant green dress watching the two old people from
the shadow of one of the deep-set windows. For a moment, absorbed in the
sight of John Pentland helping Mrs. Soames with a grim courtliness into the
motor, neither of them spoke, but as the motor drove away down the long
drive under the moon-silvered elms, Sabine sighed and said, “I can
remember her as a great beauty ... a really great beauty. There aren’t any
more like her, who make their beauty a profession. I used to see her when I
was a little girl. She was beautiful—like Diana in the hunting-field. They’ve
been like that for ... for how long.... It must be forty years, I suppose.”
“I don’t know,” said Olivia quietly. “They’ve been like that ever since I
came to Pentlands.” (And as she spoke she was overcome by a terrible
feeling of sadness, of an abysmal futility. It had come to her more and more
often of late, so often that at times it alarmed her lest she was growing
morbid.)
Sabine was speaking again in her familiar, precise, metallic voice. “I
wonder,” she said, “if there has ever been anything....”
Olivia, divining the rest of the question, answered it quickly, interrupting
the speech. “No ... I’m sure there’s never been anything more than we’ve
seen.... I know him well enough to know that.”
For a long time Sabine remained thoughtful, and at last she said: “No ... I
suppose you’re right. There couldn’t have been anything. He’s the last of
the Puritans.... The others don’t count. They go on pretending, but they
don’t believe any more. They’ve no vitality left. They’re only hypocrites
and shadows.... He’s the last of the royal line.”
She picked up her silver cloak and, flinging it about her fine white
shoulders, said abruptly: “It’s almost morning. I must get some sleep. The
time’s coming when I have to think about such things. We’re not as young
as we once were, Olivia.”
On the moonlit terrace she turned and asked: “Where was O’Hara? I
didn’t see him.”
“No ... he was asked. I think he didn’t come on account of Anson and
Aunt Cassie.”
The only reply made by Sabine was a kind of scornful grunt. She turned
away and entered her motor. The ball was over now and the last guest gone,
and she had missed nothing—Aunt Cassie, nor old John Pentland, nor
O’Hara’s absence, nor even Higgins watching them all in the moonlight
from the shadow of the lilacs.
The night had turned cold as the morning approached and Olivia,
standing in the doorway, shivered a little as she watched Sabine enter her
motor and drive away. Far across the meadows she saw the lights of John
Pentland’s motor racing along the lane on the way to the house of old Mrs.
Soames; she watched them as they swept out of sight behind the birch
thicket and reappeared once more beyond the turnpike, and as she turned
away at last it occurred to her that the life at Pentlands had undergone some
subtle change since the return of Sabine.
CHAPTER II
It was Olivia’s habit (and in some way every small action at Pentlands
came inevitably to be a habit) to go about the house each night before
climbing the paneled stairs, to see that all was in order, and by instinct she
made the little tour as usual after Sabine had disappeared, stopping here and
there to speak to the servants, bidding them to go to bed and clear away in
the morning. On her way she found that the door of the drawing-room,
which had been open all the evening, was now, for some reason, closed.
It was a big square room belonging to the old part of the house that had
been built by the Pentland who made a fortune out of equipping privateers
and practising a sort of piracy upon British merchantmen—a room which in
the passing of years had come to be a museum filled with the relics and
souvenirs of a family which could trace its ancestry back three hundred
years to a small dissenting shopkeeper who had stepped ashore on the bleak
New England coast very soon after Miles Standish and Priscilla Alden. It
was a room much used by all the family and had a worn, pleasant look that
compensated for the monstrous and incongruous collection of pictures and
furniture. There were two or three Sheraton and Heppelwhite chairs and a
handsome old mahogany table, and there were a plush sofa and a vast
rocking-chair of uncertain ancestry, and a hideous bronze lamp that had
been the gift of Mr. Longfellow to old John Pentland’s mother. There were
two execrable water-colors—one of the Tiber and the Castle San Angelo
and one of an Italian village—made by Miss Maria Pentland during a tour
of Italy in 1846, and a stuffed chair with tassels, a gift from old Colonel
Higginson, a frigid steel engraving of the Signing of the Declaration which
hung over the white mantelpiece, and a complete set of Woodrow Wilson’s
History of the United States given by Senator Lodge (whom Aunt Cassie
always referred to as “dear Mr. Lodge”). In this room were collected
mementoes of long visits paid by Mr. Lowell and Mr. Emerson and General
Curtis and other good New Englanders, all souvenirs which Olivia had left
exactly as she found them when she came to the big house as the bride of
Anson Pentland; and to those who knew the room and the family there was
nothing unbeautiful or absurd about it. The effect was historical. On
entering it one almost expected a guide to step forward and say, “Mr.
Longfellow once wrote at this desk,” and, “This was Senator Lodge’s
favorite chair.” Olivia knew each tiny thing in the room with a sharp sense
of intimacy.
She opened the door softly and found that the lights were still burning
and, strangest of all, that her husband was sitting at the old desk surrounded
by the musty books and yellowed letters and papers from which he was
compiling laboriously a book known as “The Pentland Family and the
Massachusetts Bay Colony.” The sight of him surprised her, for it was his
habit to retire punctually at eleven every night, even on such an occasion as
this. He had disappeared hours earlier from the ball, and he still sat here in
his dinner coat, though it was long after midnight.
She had entered the room so softly that he did not hear her and for a
moment she remained silently looking down at him, as if undetermined
whether to speak or to go quietly away. He sat with his back to her so that
the sloping shoulders and the thin, ridged neck and partly bald head stood
outlined against the white of the paneling. Suddenly, as if conscious of
being watched, he turned and looked at her. He was a man of forty-nine
who looked older, with a long horse-face like Aunt Cassie’s—a face that
was handsome in a tired, yellow sort of way—and small, round eyes the
color of pale-blue porcelain. At the sight of Olivia the face took on a
pouting expression of sourness ... a look which she knew well as one that he
wore when he meant to complain of something.
“You are sitting up very late,” she observed quietly, with a deliberate air
of having noticed nothing unusual.
“I was waiting to speak to you. I want to talk with you. Please sit down
for a moment.”
There was an odd sense of strangeness in their manner toward each
other, as if there had never been, even years before when the children were
babies, any great intimacy between them. On his part there was, too, a sort
of stiff and nervous formality, rather quaint and Victorian, and touched by
an odd air of timidity. He was a man who would always do not perhaps the
proper thing, but the thing accepted by his world as “proper.”
It was the first time since morning that the conversation between them
had emerged from the set pattern which it had followed day after day for so
many years. When he said that he wanted to speak to her, it meant usually
that there was some complaint to be made against the servants, more often
than not against Higgins, whom he disliked with an odd, inexplicable
intensity.
Olivia sat down, irritated that he should have chosen this hour when she
was tired, to make some petty comment on the workings of the house. Half
without thinking and half with a sudden warm knowledge that it would
annoy him to see her smoking, she lighted a cigarette; and as she sat there,
waiting until he had blotted with scrupulous care the page on which he had
been writing, she became conscious slowly of a strange, unaccustomed
desire to be disagreeable, to create in some way an excitement that would
shatter for a moment the overwhelming sense of monotony and so relieve
her nerves. She thought, “What has come over me? Am I one of those
women who enjoys working up scenes?”
He rose from his chair and stood, very tall and thin, with drooping
shoulders, looking down at her out of the pale eyes. “It’s about Sybil,” he
said. “I understand that she goes riding every morning with this fellow
O’Hara.”
“That’s true,” replied Olivia quietly. “They go every morning before
breakfast, before the rest of us are out.”
He frowned and assumed almost mechanically a manner of severe
dignity. “And you mean to say that you have known about it all along?”
“They meet down in the meadows by the old gravel-pit because he
doesn’t care to come up to the house.”
“He knows, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be welcome.”
Olivia smiled a little ironically. “I’m sure that’s the reason. That’s why
he didn’t come to-night, though I asked him. You must know, Anson, that I
don’t feel as you do about him.”
“No, I suppose not. You rarely do.”
“There’s no need to be unpleasant,” she said quietly.
“You seem to know a great deal about it.”
“Sybil tells me everything she does. It is much better to have it that way,
I think.”
Watching him, it gave her a faint, warm sense of satisfaction to see that
Anson was annoyed by her calmness, and yet she was a little ashamed, too,
for wanting the excitement of a small scene, just a tiny scene, to make life
seem a little more exciting. He said, “But you know how Aunt Cassie and
my father feel about O’Hara.”
Then, for the first time, Olivia began to see light in the darkness. “Your
father knows all about it, Anson. He has gone with them himself on the red
mare, once or twice.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Why should I make up such a ridiculous lie? Besides, your father and I
get on very well. You know that.” It was a mild thrust which had its
success, for Anson turned away angrily. She had really said to him, “Your
father comes to me about everything, not to you. He is not the one who
objects or I should have known.” Aloud she said, “Besides, I have seen him
with my own eyes.”
“Then I will take it on my own responsibility. I don’t like it and I want it
stopped.”
At this speech Olivia’s brows arched ever so slightly with a look which
might have been interpreted either as one of surprise or one of mockery or
perhaps a little of both. For a moment she sat quite still, thinking, and at last
she said, “Am I right in supposing that Aunt Cassie is at the bottom of
this?” When he made no reply she continued, “Aunt Cassie must have
gotten up very early to see them off.” Again a silence, and the dark little
devil in Olivia urged her to say, “Or perhaps she got her information from
the servants. She often does, you know.”
Slowly, while she was speaking, her husband’s face had grown more and
more sour. The very color of the skin seemed to have changed so that it
appeared faintly green in the light from the Victorian luster just above his
narrow head.
“Olivia, you have no right to speak of my aunt in that way.”
“We needn’t go into that. I think you know that what I said was the
truth.” And a slow warmth began to steal over her. She was getting beneath
his skin. After all those long years, he was finding that she was not entirely
gentle.
He was exasperated now and astonished. In a more gentle voice he said,
“Olivia, I don’t understand what has come over you lately.”
She found herself thinking, wildly, “Perhaps he is going to soften.
Perhaps there is still a chance of warmth in him. Perhaps even now, after so
long, he is going to be pleasant and kind and perhaps ... perhaps ... more.”
“You’re very queer,” he was saying. “I’m not the only one who finds you
so.”
“No,” said Olivia, a little sadly. “Aunt Cassie does, too. She’s been
telling all the neighborhood that I seem to be unhappy. Perhaps it’s because
I’m a little tired. I’ve not had much rest for a long time now ... from Jack,
from Aunt Cassie, from your father ... and ... from her.” At the last word
she made a curious little half-gesture in the direction of the dark north wing
of the big house.
She watched him, conscious that he was shocked and startled by her
mentioning in a single breath so many things which they never discussed at
Pentlands, things which they buried in silence and tried to destroy by
pretending that they did not exist.
“We ought to speak of those things, sometimes,” she continued sadly.
“Sometimes when we are entirely alone with no one about to hear, when it
doesn’t make any difference. We can’t pretend forever that they don’t
exist.”
For a time he was silent, groping obviously, in a kind of desperation for
something to answer. At last he said feebly, “And yet you sit up all night
playing bridge with Sabine and old Mrs. Soames and Father.”
“That does me good. You must admit that it is a change at least.”
But he only answered, “I don’t understand you,” and began to pace up
and down in agitation while she sat there waiting, actually waiting, for the
thing to work itself up to a climax. She had a sudden feeling of victory, of
intoxication such as she had not known in years, not since she was a young
girl; and at the same time she wanted to laugh, wildly, hysterically, at the
sight of Anson, so tall and thin, prancing up and down.
Opposite her he halted abruptly and said, “And I can see no good in
inviting Mrs. Soames here so often.”
She saw now that the tension, the excitement between them, was greater
even than she had imagined, for Anson had spoken of Mrs. Soames and his
father, a thing which in the family no one ever mentioned. He had done it
quite openly, of his own free will.
“What harm can it do now? What difference can it make?” she asked. “It
is the only pleasure left to the poor battered old thing, and one of the few
left to your father.”
Anson began to mutter in disgust. “It is a silly affair ... two old ... old....”
He did not finish the sentence, for there was only one word that could have
finished it and that was a word which no gentleman and certainly no
Pentland ever used in referring to his own father.
“Perhaps,” said Olivia, “it is a silly affair now.... I’m not so sure that it
always was.”
“What do you mean by that? Do you mean....” Again he fumbled for
words, groping to avoid using the words that clearly came into his mind. It
was strange to see him brought face to face with realities, to see him grow
so helpless and muddled. “Do you mean,” he stammered, “that my father
has ever behaved ...” he choked and then added, “dishonorably.”
“Anson ... I feel strangely like being honest to-night ... just for once ...
just for once.”
“You are succeeding only in being perverse.”
“No ...” and she found herself smiling sadly, “unless you mean that in
this house ... in this room....” She made a gesture which swept within the
circle of her white arm all that collection of Victorian souvenirs, all the
mementoes of a once sturdy and powerful Puritan family, “...in this room to
be truthful and honest is to be perverse.”
He would have interrupted her here, angrily, but she raised her hand and
continued, “No, Anson; I shall tell you honestly what I think ... whether you
want to hear it or not. I don’t hope that it will do any good.... I do not know
whether, as you put it, your father has behaved dishonorably or not. I hope
he has.... I hope he was Mrs. Soames’ lover in the days when love could
have meant something to them.... Yes ... something fleshly is exactly what I
mean.... I think it would have been better. I think they might have been
happy ... really happy for a little time ... not just living in a state of
enchantment when one day is exactly like the next.... I think your father, of
all men, has deserved that happiness....” She sighed and added in a low
voice, “There, now you know!”
For a long time he simply stood staring at the floor with the round, silly
blue eyes which sometimes filled her with terror because they were so like
the eyes of that old woman who never left the dark north wing and was
known in the family simply as she, as if there was very little that was
human left in her. At last he muttered through the drooping mustache, as if
speaking to himself, “I can’t imagine what has happened to you.”
“Nothing,” said Olivia. “Nothing. I am the same as I have always been,
only to-night I have come to the end of saying ‘yes, yes’ to everything, of
always pretending, so that all of us here may go on living undisturbed in our
dream ... believing always that we are superior to every one else on the
earth, that because we are rich we are powerful and righteous, that because
... oh, there is no use in talking.... I am just the same as I have always been,
only to-night I have spoken out. We all live in a dream here ... a dream that
some day will turn sharply into a nightmare. And then what will we do?
What will you do ... and Aunt Cassie and all the rest?”
In her excitement her cheeks grew flushed and she stood up, very tall
and beautiful, leaning against the mantelpiece; but her husband did not
notice her. He appeared to be lost in deep thought, his face contorted with a
kind of grim concentration.
“I know what has happened,” he said presently. “It is Sabine. She should
never have come back here. She was like that always ... stirring up trouble
... even as a little girl. She used to break up our games by saying: ‘I won’t
play house. Who can be so foolish as to pretend muddy water is claret! It’s
a silly game.’ ”
“Do you mean that she is saying it again now ... that it’s a silly game to
pretend muddy water is claret?”
He turned away without answering and began again to pace up and down
over the enormous faded roses of the old Victorian carpet. “I don’t know
what you’re driving at. All I know is that Sabine ... Sabine ... is an evil
woman.”
“Do you hate Sabine because she is a friend of mine?”
She had watched him for so many years disliking the people who were
her friends, managing somehow to get rid of them, to keep her from seeing
them, to force her into those endless dinners at the houses of the safe men
he knew, the men who had gone to his college and belonged to his club, the
men who would never do anything that was unexpected. And in the end she
had always done as he wanted her to do. It was perhaps a manifestation of
his resentment toward all those whom he could not understand and even
(she thought) feared a little—the attitude of a man who will not allow others
to enjoy what he could not take for himself. It was the first time she had
ever spoken of this dog-in-the-manger game, but she found herself unable
to keep silent. It was as if some power outside her had taken possession of
her body. She had a strange sensation of shame at the very moment she
spoke, of shame at the sound of her own voice, a little strained and
hysterical.
There was something preposterous, too, in the sight of Anson prancing
up and down the old room filled with all the souvenirs of that decayed
respectability in which he wrapped himself ... prancing up and down with
all his prejudices and superstitions bristling. And now Olivia had dragged
the truth uncomfortably into the light.
“What an absurd thing to say!” he said bitterly.
Olivia sighed. “No, I don’t think so.... I think you know exactly what I
mean.” (She knew the family game of pretending never to understand a
truthful, unpleasant statement.)
But this, too, he refused to answer. Instead, he turned to her, more savage
and excited than she had ever seen him, so moved that he seemed for a
second to attain a pale flash of power and dignity. “And I don’t like that Fiji
Islander of a daughter of hers, who has been dragged all over the world and
had her head filled with barbaric ideas.”
At the sight of him and the sound of his voice Olivia experienced a
sudden blinding flash of intuition that illuminated the whole train of their
conversation, indeed, the whole procession of the years she had spent here
at Pentlands or in the huge brownstone house in Beacon Street. She knew
suddenly what it was that frightened Anson and Aunt Cassie and all that
intricate world of family. They were terrified lest the walls, the very
foundations, of their existence be swept away leaving them helpless with all
their little prides and vanities exposed, stripped of all the laws and
prejudices which they had made to protect them. It was why they hated
O’Hara, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic. He had menaced their security.
To be exposed thus would be a calamity, for in any other world save their
own, in a world where they stood unprotected by all that money laid away
in solid trust funds, they would have no existence whatever. They would
suddenly be what they really were.
She saw sharply, clearly, for the first time, and she said quietly, “I think
you dislike Thérèse for reasons that are not fair to the girl. You distrust her
because she is different from all the others ... from the sort of girls that you
were trained to believe perfect. Heaven knows there are enough of them
about here ... girls as like as peas in a pod.”
“And what about this boy who is coming to stay with Sabine and her
daughter ... this American boy with a French name who has never seen his
own country until now? I suppose he’ll be as queer as all the others. Who
knows anything about him?”
“Sabine,” began Olivia.
“Sabine!” he interrupted. “Sabine! What does she care who he is or
where he comes from? She’s given up decent people long ago, when she
went away from here and married that Levantine blackguard of a husband.
Sabine!... Sabine would only like to bring trouble to us ... the people to
whom she belongs. She hates us.... She can barely speak to me in a civil
fashion.”
Olivia smiled quietly and tossed her cigarette into the ashes beneath the
cold steel engraving of the Signing. “You are beginning to talk nonsense,
Anson. Let’s stick to facts, for once. I’ve met the boy in Paris.... Sybil knew
him there. He is intelligent and handsome and treats women as if they were
something more than stable-boys. There are still a few of us left who like to
be treated thus ... as women ... a few of us even here in Durham. No, I don’t
imagine you’ll care for him. He won’t belong to your club or to your
college, and he’ll see life in a different way. He won’t have had his opinions
all ready made, waiting for him.”
“It’s my children I’m thinking of.... I don’t want them picking up with
any one, with the first person who comes along.”
Olivia did not smile. She turned away now and said softly, “If it’s Jack
you’re worrying about, you needn’t fuss any longer. He won’t marry
Thérèse. I don’t think you know how ill he is.... I don’t think, sometimes,
that you really know anything about him at all.”
“I always talk with the doctors.”
“Then you ought to know that they’re silly ... the things you’re saying.”
“All the same, Sabine ought never to have come back here....”
She saw now that the talk was turning back into the inevitable channel of
futility where they would go round and round, like squirrels in a cage,
arriving nowhere. It had happened this way so many times. Turning with an
air of putting an end to the discussion, she walked over to the fireplace ...
pale once more, with faint, mauve circles under her dark eyes. There was a
fragility about her, as if this strange spirit which had flamed up so suddenly
were too violent for the body.
“Anson,” she said in a low voice, “please let’s be sensible. I shall look
into this affair of Sybil and O’Hara and try to discover whether there is
anything serious going on. If necessary, I shall speak directly to both of
them. I don’t approve, either, but not for the same reason. He is too old for
her. You won’t have any trouble. You will have to do nothing.... As to
Sabine, I shall continue to see as much of her as I like.”
In the midst of the speech she had grown suddenly, perilously, calm in
the way which sometimes alarmed her husband and Aunt Cassie. Sighing a
little, she continued, “I have been good and gentle, Anson, for years and
years, and now, to-night ... to-night I feel as if I were coming to the end of
it.... I only say this to let you know that it can’t go on forever.”
Picking up her scarf, she did not wait for him to answer her, but moved
away toward the door, still enveloped in the same perilous calm. In the
doorway she turned. “I suppose we can call the affair settled for the
moment?”
He had been standing there all the while watching her out of the round
cold blue eyes with a look of astonishment as if after all those years he had
seen his wife for the first time; and then slowly the look of astonishment
melted into one of slyness, almost of hatred, as if he thought, “So this is
what you really are! So you have been thinking these things all these years
and have never belonged to us at all. You have been hating us all the while.
You have always been an outsider—a common, vulgar outsider.”
His thin, discontented lips had turned faintly gray, and when he spoke it
was nervously, with a kind of desperation, like a small animal trapped in a
corner. The words came out from the thin lips in a sharp, quick torrent, like
the rush of white-hot steel released from a cauldron ... words spoken in a
voice that was cold and shaken with hatred.
“In any case,” he said, “in any case ... I will not have my daughter marry
a shanty Irishman.... There is enough of that in the family.”
For a moment Olivia leaned against the door-sill, her dark eyes wide
with astonishment, as if she found it impossible to believe what she had
heard. And then quietly, with a terrible sadness and serenity in her voice,
she murmured almost to herself, “What a rotten thing to say!” And after a
little pause, as if still speaking to herself, “So that is what you have been
thinking for twenty years!” And again, “There is a terrible answer to that....
It’s so terrible that I shan’t say it, but I think you ... you and Aunt Cassie
know well enough what it is.”
Closing the door quickly, she left him there, startled and exasperated,
among all the Pentland souvenirs, and slowly, in a kind of nightmare, she
made her way toward the stairs, past the long procession of Pentland
ancestors—the shopkeeping immigrant, the witch-burner, the professional
evangelist, the owner of clipper ships, and the tragic, beautiful Savina
Pentland—and up the darkened stairway to the room where her husband
had not followed her in more than fifteen years.
Once in her own room she closed the door softly and stood in the
darkness, listening, listening, listening.... There was at first no sound save
the blurred distant roar of the surf eating its way into the white dunes and
the far-off howling of a beagle somewhere in the direction of the kennels,
and then, presently, there came to her the faint sound of soft, easy breathing
from the adjoining room. It was regular, easy and quiet, almost as if her son
had been as strong as O’Hara or Higgins or that vigorous young de Cyon
whom she had met once for a little while at Sabine’s house in Paris.
The sound filled her with a wild happiness, so that she forgot even what
had happened in the drawing-room a little while before. As she undressed in
the darkness she stopped now and then to listen again in a kind of fierce
tension, as if by wishing it she could keep the sound from ever dying away.
For more than three years she had never once entered this room free from
the terror that there might only be silence to welcome her. And at last, after
she had gone to bed and was falling asleep, she was wakened sharply by
another sound, quite different, the sound of a wild, almost human cry ...
savage and wicked, and followed by the thud thud of hoofs beating
savagely against the walls of a stall, and then the voice of Higgins, the
groom, cursing wickedly. She had heard it before—the sound of old John
Pentland’s evil, beautiful red mare kicking the walls of her stall and
screaming wildly. There was an unearthly, implacable hatred between her
and the little apelike man ... and yet a sort of fascination, too. As she sat up
in her bed, listening, and still startled by the wild sound, she heard her son
saying:
“Mama, are you there?”
“Yes.”
She rose and went into the other room, where, in the dim light from the
night-lamp, the boy was sitting up in bed, his pale blond hair all rumpled,
his eyes wide open and staring a little.
“You’re all right, Jack?” she whispered. “There’s nothing the matter?”
“No—nothing. I had a bad dream and then I heard the red mare.”
He looked pale and ill, with the blue veins showing on his temples; yet
she knew that he was stronger than he had been for months. He was fifteen,
and he looked younger than his age, rather like a boy of thirteen or fourteen,
but he was old, too, in the timeless fashion of those who have always been
ill.
“Is the party over?... Have they all gone?” he asked.
“Yes, Jack.... It’s almost daylight. You’d better try to sleep again.”
He lay down without answering her, and as she bent to kiss him good-
night, she heard him say softly, “I wish I could have gone to the party.”
“You will, Jack, some day—before very long. You’re growing stronger
every day.”
Again a silence, while Olivia thought bitterly, “He knows that I’m lying.
He knows that what I’ve said is not the truth.”
Aloud she said, “You’ll go to sleep now—like a good boy.”
“I wish you’d tell me about the party.”
Olivia sighed. “Then I must close Nannie’s door, so we won’t waken
her.” And she closed the door leading to the room where the old nurse slept,
and seating herself on the foot of her son’s bed, she began a recital of who
had been at the ball, and what had happened there, bit by bit, carefully and
with all the skill she was able to summon. She wanted to give him, who had
so little chance of living, all the sense of life she was able to evoke.
She talked on and on, until presently she noticed that the boy had fallen
asleep and that the sky beyond the marshes had begun to turn gray and rose
and yellow with the rising day.
CHAPTER III
When Olivia first came to the old house as the wife of Anson Pentland,
the village of Durham, which lay inland from Pentlands and the sea, had
been invisible, lying concealed in a fold of the land which marked the faint
beginnings of the New Hampshire mountains. There had been in the view a
certain sleepy peacefulness: one knew that in the distant fold of land
surmounted by a single white spire there lay a quiet village of white
wooden houses built along a single street called High Street that was
dappled in summer with the shadows of old elm-trees. In those days it had
been a country village, half asleep, with empty shuttered houses here and
there falling into slow decay—a village with fewer people in it than there
had been a hundred years before. It had stayed thus sleeping for nearly
seventy-five years, since the day when a great migration of citizens had
robbed it of its sturdiest young people. In the thick grass that surrounded the
old meeting-house there lay a marble slab recording the event with an
inscription which read:
From this spot on the fourteenth day of August, eighteen
hundred and eighteen, the Reverend Josiah Milford, Pastor of this
Church, with one hundred and ninety members of his congregation
—men, women and children—set out, secure in their faith in
Almighty God, to establish His Will and Power in the Wilderness of
the Western Reserve.
Beneath the inscription were cut the names of those families who had
made the journey to found a new town which had since surpassed sleepy
Durham a hundred times in wealth and prosperity. There was no Pentland
name among them, for the Pentlands had been rich even in the year
eighteen hundred and eighteen, and lived in winter in Boston and in
summer at Durham, on the land claimed from the wilderness by the first of
the family.
From that day until the mills came to Durham the village sank slowly
into a kind of lethargy, and the church itself, robbed of its strength, died
presently and was changed into a dusty museum filled with homely early
American furniture and spinning-wheels—a place seldom visited by any
one and painted grudgingly every five years by the town council because it
was popularly considered an historical monument. The Pentland family
long ago had filtered away into the cold faith of the Unitarians or the more
compromising and easy creeds of the Episcopal church.
But now, nearly twenty years after Olivia had come to Pentlands, the
village was alive again, so alive that it had overflowed its little fold in the
land and was streaming down the hill on the side next to the sea in straight,
plain columns of ugly stucco bungalows, each filled with its little family of
Polish mill-workers. And in the town, across High Street from the white-
spired old meeting-house, there stood a new church, built of stucco and
green-painted wood and dedicated to the great Church of Rome. In the old
wooden houses along High Street there still lingered remnants of the old
families ... old Mrs. Featherstone, who did washing to support four sickly
grandchildren who ought never to have been born; Miss Haddon, a queer
old woman who wore a black cape and lived on a dole from old John
Pentland as a remote cousin of the family; Harry Peckhan, the village
carpenter; old Mrs. Malson, living alone in a damp, gaunt and beautiful old
house filled with bits of jade and ivory brought back from China by her
grandfather’s clippers; Miss Murgatroyd, who had long since turned her
bullfinch house into a shabby tea-room. They remained here and there, a
few worn and shabby-genteel descendants of those first settlers who had
come into the country with the Pentlands.
But the mills had changed everything, the mills which poured wealth
into the pockets of a dozen rich families who lived in summer within a few
miles of Durham.
Even the countryside itself had changed. There were no longer any of the
old New Englanders in possession of the land. Sometimes in riding along
the lanes one encountered a thin, silly-faced remnant of the race sitting on a
stone wall chewing a bit of grass; but that was all; the others had been
swallowed up long ago in the mills of Salem and Lynn or died away, from
too much inbreeding and too little nourishment. The few farms that
remained fell into the hands of Poles and Czechs, solid, square people who
were a little pagan in their closeness to the earth and the animals which
surrounded them, sturdy people, not too moral, who wrought wonders with
the barren, stony earth of New England and stood behind their walls staring
wide-eyed while the grand people like the Pentlands rode by in pink coats
surrounded by the waving nervous tails of foxhounds. And, one by one,
other old farms were being turned back into a wilderness once more so that
there would be plenty of room for the horses and hounds to run after foxes
and bags of aniseed.
It had all changed enormously. From the upper windows of the big
Georgian brick house where the Pentlands lived, one could see the record of
all the changes. The windows commanded a wide view of a landscape
composed of grubby meadows and stone walls, thickets of pine and white
birches, marshes, and a winding sluggish brown river. Sometimes in the late
autumn the deer wandered down from the mountains of New Hampshire to
spoil the fox-hunting by leading the hounds astray after game that was far
too fleet for them.
And nearer at hand, nestled within a turn of the river, lay the land where
Sabine Callender had been born and had lived until she was a grown
woman—the land which she had sold carelessly to O’Hara, an Irish
politician and a Roman Catholic, come up from nowhere to take possession
of it, to clip its hedges, repair its sagging walls, paint its old buildings and
put up gates and fences that were too shiny and new. Indeed, he had done it
so thoroughly and so well that the whole place had a little the air of a
suburban real estate development. And now Sabine had returned to spend
the summer in one of his houses and to be very friendly with him in the face
of Aunt Cassie and Anson Pentland, and a score of others like them.
Olivia knew this wide and somberly beautiful landscape, every stick and
stone of it, from the perilous gravel-pit, half-hidden by its fringe of elder-
bushes, to the black pine copse where Higgins had discovered only a day or
two before a new litter of foxes. She knew it on gray days when it was cold
and depressing, on those bright, terribly clear New England days when
every twig and leaf seemed outlined by light, and on those damp, cold days
when a gray fog swept in across the marshes from the sea to envelop all the
countryside in gray darkness. It was a hard, uncompromising, stony country
that was never too cheerful.
It was a country, too, which gave her an old feeling of loneliness ... a
feeling which, strangely enough, seemed to increase rather than diminish as
the years passed. She had never accustomed herself to its occasional
dreariness. In the beginning, a long while ago, it had seemed to her green
and peaceful and full of quiet, a place where she might find rest and peace
... but she had come long since to see it as it was, as Sabine had seen it
while she stood in the window of the writing-room, frightened by the
sudden queer apparition of the little groom—a country beautiful, hard and
cold, and a little barren.
2
There were times when the memories of Olivia’s youth seemed to

sharpen suddenly and sweep in upon her, overwhelming all sense of the
present, times when she wanted suddenly and fiercely to step back into that
far-off past which had seemed then an unhappy thing, and these were the
times when she felt most lonely, the times when she knew how completely,
with the passing of years, she had drawn into herself; it was a process of
protection like a tortoise drawing in its head. And all the while, in spite of
the smiles and the politeness and the too facile amiability, she felt that she
was really a stranger at Pentlands, that there were certain walls and barriers
which she could never break down, past which she could never penetrate,
certain faiths in which it was impossible for her to believe.
It was difficult now for her to remember very clearly what had happened
before she came to Durham; it all seemed lost, confused, buried beneath the
weight of her devotion to the vast family monument of the Pentlands. She
had forgotten the names of people and places and confused the days and the
years. At times it was difficult for her to remember the endless confusing
voyages back and forth across the Atlantic and the vast, impersonal,
vacuous hotels which had followed each other in the bleak and unreal
procession of her childhood.
She could remember with a certain pitiful clarity two happy years spent
at the school in Saint-Cloud, where for months at a time she had lived in a
single room which she might call her own, where she had rested, free from
the terror of hearing her mother say, “We must pack to-day. We are leaving
to-morrow for St. Petersburg or London or San Remo or Cairo....”
She could scarcely remember at all the immense house of chocolate-
colored stone fitted with fantastic turrets and balconies that overlooked
Lake Michigan. It had been sold and torn down long ago, destroyed like all
else that belonged to the far-off past. She could not remember the father
who had died when she was three; but of him there remained at least a
yellowing photograph of a great, handsome, brawny man with a humorous
Scotch-Irish face, who had died at the moment when his name was coming
to be known everywhere as a power in Washington. No, nothing remained
of him save the old photograph, and the tenuous, mocking little smile which
had come down to her, the way she had of saying, “Yes! Yes!” pleasantly
when she meant to act in quite the contrary fashion.
There were times when the memory of her own mother became vague
and fantastic, as if she had been no more than a figure out of some absurd
photograph of the early nineteen hundreds ... the figure of a pretty woman,
dressed fashionably in clothes that flowed away in both directions, from a
wasp waist. It was like a figure out of one of those old photographs which
one views with a kind of melancholy amusement. She remembered a vain,
rather selfish and pretty woman, fond of flattery, who had been shrewd
enough never to marry any one of those gallant dark gentlemen with high-
sounding titles who came to call at the eternal changeless hotel sitting-
room, to take her out to garden parties and fêtes and races. And always in
the background of the memory there was the figure of a dark little girl,
overflowing with spirits and a hunger for friends, who was left behind to
amuse herself by walking out with the Swiss governess, to make friends
among the children she encountered in the parks or on the beaches and the
boulevards of whatever European city her mother was visiting at the
moment ... friends whom she saw to-day and who were vanished to-morrow
never to be seen again. Her mother, she saw now, belonged to the America
of the nineties. She saw her now less as a real person than a character out of
a novel by Mrs. Wharton.
But she had never remarried; she had remained the rich, pretty Mrs.
McConnel of Chicago until that tragic day (the clearest of all Olivia’s
memories and the most terrible) when she had died of fever abruptly in a
remote and squalid Italian village, with only her daughter (a girl of
seventeen), a quack doctor and the Russian driver of her motor to care for
her.
The procession of confused and not-too-cheerful memories came to a
climax in a gloomy, red brick house off Washington Square, where she had
gone as an orphan to live with a rigid, bejetted, maternal aunt who had
believed that the whole world revolved about Lenox, the Hudson River
Valley and Washington Square—an aunt who had never spoken to Olivia’s
father because she, like Anson and Aunt Cassie, had a prejudice against

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The Oxford History of Life-Writing:

Volume 7: Postwar to Contemporary,

the oxford history of life-­w riting

the oxford history of life-writing

General Editor: Zachary Leader

1. The Middle Ages

the oxford history of life-­w riting

In memory of T. A. Birrell (‘Tom’), 1924–2011

The following extracts are reproduced by permission: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra,

General Editor’s Preface

‘Life-­writing’ is a generic term meant to encompass a range of writings about lives

x General Editor’s Preface

1. Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 12

2. Biographies of the Unconscious 37

5. Feminism’s Lyric Subjects 127

7. Intimate Memoirs 191

8. Memory Culture 224

9. Posthuman Monsters 255

10. Literary Biography and Theory 284

11. Celebrity and its Literary Consequences 312

12. Prospect: Human 2.0? 338

2 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

individuals who wrote an autobiography, or by sensitive souls who kept a diary, or

4 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

6 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

ex­peri­ences (including museums and films), and the processual evidence-­based

8 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

so as to reflect this understanding of the potential for literary inventiveness within

10 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

The above quotation is taken from Mauriac’s foreword to Elie Wiesel’s

Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 13

Lest we should see where we are,

Defenceless under the night

14 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 15

Of course the UDHR embodies the optimistic ideal of re-­enlightenment in the

16 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 17

ex-­Sergeant Steinlauf, formerly of the Austro-­Hungarian army. Steinlauf ’s view is

Consider well the seed that gave you birth:

18 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

Consider if this is a man

this is a human being

Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 19

20 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 21

It would be a profound discourtesy to use Peter Sloterdijk’s conception of ‘enlight-

22 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

The possibility of forgetting was equally tempting to Jean Améry.32 Captured

Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 23

24 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 25

testimonies by Marxist intellectuals of any real seriousness, such as David Rousset’s

Through the camp’s imprisoning wire Antelme glimpses Marx’s understanding of

26 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 27

28 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 29

30 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 31

32 The Oxford History of Life-Writing

There were times when the memories of Olivia’s youth seemed to

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the oxford history of life-w riting

the oxford history of life-w riting

‘Life-writing’ is a generic term meant to encompass a range of writings about lives

1. Aftermath: Confronting the Inhuman 12

2. Biographies of the Unconscious 37

5. Feminism’s Lyric Subjects 127

7. Intimate Memoirs 191

8. Memory Culture 224

9. Posthuman Monsters 255

10. Literary Biography and Theory 284

11. Celebrity and its Literary Consequences 312

12. Prospect: Human 2.0? 338

experiences (including museums and films), and the processual evidence-based

Of course the UDHR embodies the optimistic ideal of re-enlightenment in the

ex-Sergeant Steinlauf, formerly of the Austro-Hungarian army. Steinlauf ’s view is