Gun Love was the spring 2018 LARB Book Club pick. To join the Book Club, where we put you in conversation with editors and members and send a copy of the selected title to your door, <a href="https://shop.lareviewofbooks.org/join">become a LARB Friend member today</a>. 
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The searing, unforgettable story of a young girl's resilience, by the award-winning author of Prayers for the Stolen. 
 
Pearl's mother took her away from her family just weeks after she was born, and drove off to central Florida determined to begin a new life for herself and her daughter--in the parking lot next to a trailer park. Pearl grew up in the front seat of their '94 Mercury, while her mother lived in the back. Despite their hardships, mother and daughter both adjusted to life, making friends with the residents of the trailers and creating a deep connection to each other. All around them, Florida is populated with gun owners--those hunting alligators for sport, those who want to protect their families, and those who create a sense of danger. 
 
Written in a gorgeous lyric all its own, Gun Love is the story of a tough but optimistic young woman growing up in contemporary America, in the midst of its harrowing love affair with firearms. 
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<div class="a-section a-spacing-small a-padding-small">Jennifer Clement is the author of multiple books, including Widow Basquiat. She was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship and the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award for Prayers for the Stolen. The president of PEN International, she currently lives in Mexico City.</div> 
<div style="text-align: center;"> 
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To view all Book Club picks, please visit the <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/feature/larb-book-club/">LARB Book Club</a> page. 
 
</div>

“Gun Love” by Jennifer Clement

LARB Quarterly, no. 40: Water

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Melina Moe is the curator of literature at Columbia University’s Rare Book &amp; Manuscript Library.

Melina Moe

“I FOUND IT extremely honest, forthright, and moving in ways I had not expected it to be,” Toni Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist in 1977, “but it is a shuddering book and one that offers no escape for any reader whatsoever.” Still, Morrison, then a senior editor at Random House, liked the manuscript so much that, before responding, she passed it around the office to drum up support. The verdict was “intelligent,” but also “very ‘down,’ depressing, spiritually abrasive.” Whatever the merits of the writing, Morrison’s colleagues predicted, the potent mix of dissatisfaction, anger, and mournfulness would limit the book’s commercial appeal—and Morrison reluctantly agreed. “You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape,” her letter concludes, “but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.” 
 
During her 16 years at Random House, Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters. Usually typed on pink, yellow, or white carbonless copy paper, and occasionally bearing Random House’s old logo and letterhead, these are now filed among her correspondence in the Random House archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book &amp; Manuscript Library. While many of the letters were mailed to New York, Boston, and even Rome, others were sent to writers in more obscure places; some are addressed to “general delivery” in various small towns across the United States. 
 
Regardless of destination, Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism. The letters themselves—generally one, two at most, exchanged with a given writer—constitute an asymmetrical archive. On one end of each communiqué is the ghost of a submitted manuscript (absent from the archive after being returned to the sender, although in some cases survived by a cover letter). On the other is a rejection from Morrison, sometimes brusque yet typically offering something more than an expression of disinterest—notes on craft, character development, the need for more (or less) drama. But also: Autopsies of a changing, and in many ways diminishing, publishing industry; frustrations with the tastes of a reading public; and sympathies for poets, short story writers, and other authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres. 
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Most of Morrison’s surviving rejection letters date to the 1970s, a period that saw rapid changes in New York book publishing. This was especially true at Random House: a decade after going public in 1959, the company used the influx of cash to fuel a wave of acquisitions and two mergers, purchasing Alfred A. Knopf and Then, in 1965, Random House itself was acquired by RCA, an electronics company, only to be sold a few years later to a media conglomerate owned by the Newhouse family. Under this aegis, Random House went on to acquire a slew of imprints that expanded the company’s global footprint and generic range. 
 
In short, like Pangaea breaking up in reverse, the publishing industry underwent the dramatic, global consolidation that produced today’s “Big Five”: Simon &amp; Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. Recently, this would have shrunk to the Big Four had <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/industry-deals/article/85004-bertelsmann-to-buy-s-s-for-2-2-billion.html">an attempt by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann</a> (owner of Penguin Random House, the largest US publisher) to buy Simon &amp; Schuster from its parent company, ViacomCBS, not been blocked by a US federal judge on antitrust grounds. Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/penguin-random-house-simon-schuster.html">celebrated the collapse of the deal,</a> claiming: “The proposed merger would have reduced competition, decreased author compensation, diminished the breadth, depth, and diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy.” 
 
Kanter’s statement may seem grandiose, but the underlying anxiety is and was real; Morrison herself voiced similar concerns 40 years earlier. In her 1981 keynote speech at the American Writers Congress, she warned that the business had already tipped too far away from the work of writers and editors, so that “the vitality in the arts which promoters like to talk about is false. Beneath the headlines of blockbusters and bestsellers, underneath the froth of the book fairs,” she averred, “something is terribly wrong.” 
 
It’s perhaps unsurprising that the conditions of for-profit cultural production tend to reward the precisely honed, predictable commodity. Literary scholar Dan Sinykin recently argued that the conglomerate era in publishing has transformed the fictional works that get acquired, published, and placed (strategically) on store shelves. “Conglomerate fiction,” which is often genre fiction—that is, more or less easily labeled as mystery, romance, or science fiction—is less distinguishable by its formal characteristics than by its origins within a “conglomerate superorganism” of marketers, acquisitions editors, dust-jacket designers, and many others whose jobs are on the line and therefore have a stake in a given book’s success. The shift hasn’t been unique to fiction. If the conglomerate era produced corporate authors, <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=21461">the studio system</a> churned out Hollywood blockbusters, while <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674062092">creative writing programs</a> shaped a distinctly reflexive MFA style. Even so, Morrison’s warning about the state of publishing in 1981 didn’t advocate a return to the solitary, romantic toiler. Instead, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/10/arts/writers-congress-opens-with-calls-for-solidarity.html">her keynote address called for movement building</a>: “We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writers movement—assertive, militant, pugnacious.” 
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Morrison’s letters are unexpectedly forthcoming. Often, she supplements her rejections with diagnoses of an ailing publishing business, growing frustrations with unimaginative taste, the industry’s aversion to risk-taking, and her own sense of creative constraint working at a commercial press (especially in the late 1970s and early ’80s; Morrison left editorial work to be a full-time novelist in the early 1980s). They sketch a “road not taken” in mainstream publishing, as experimental volumes, poetry, and short story collections were increasingly treated as suspect investments of editorial time and publishing house resources. Current market conditions made for “a losing proposition for the publisher and a hopeless one for short story writers,” Morrison informed one author, and unless they were penned by famous novelists, short story collections were “almost like the publication of poetry”—that is, “practically impossible to make a profit from.” In another, lengthy letter from 1977, Morrison outlined how the economics of a book project depended on the mechanisms of distribution. It wasn’t just that casual readers didn’t buy short story collections, but that the major institutions responsible for generating widespread enthusiasm and name recognition were also uninterested: “Book clubs do not make offers for collections of short stories; mass paperback houses do not make offers for collections of short stories by single authors and so we are left with the hope that ten or fifteen thousand people will go into a bookstore and ask for a particular author by name.” The rejection concludes with Morrison’s admission that “[t]here is no point in my being other than honest with you, you should continue to publish in magazines and if you ever decide to write a novel, I’d be delighted to look at it.” 
 
With other projects, Morrison tried to tap into available marketing networks. She wrote to Good Housekeeping in the hopes they would select Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976) for their book club, as well as to dozens of Black cultural organizations to see if they would organize reading clubs for Angela Davis’s autobiography. Despite being met with middling success, these campaigns—as well as Morrison’s work on the genre-bending Black Book (1974)—fueled an increase in queries from West Coast, experimental voices. Morrison was humane even with the most hopeless of proposals, like those she received from aspiring crossover academics. In 1978, Morrison told a Berkeley professor that the “commercial requirements of Random House are such that literary research and criticism does not figure in its plans.” Still, Morrison’s letter suggests that she’d read the entire manuscript, providing suggestions and the consolation that “unless you have some very ‘hip’ (and probably inaccurate) sociological view to tag on to the literary criticism, it is received with very little enthusiasm.” Similarly, Morrison wrote an apologetic note to Wayne Daniels and Ishmael Reed after passing on a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/01/archives/four-yardbirds-the-guest-word.html">Yardbird</a> reader in 1974, explaining that “the financial crisis that has swept the country has now gripped everybody in publishing and any project on which there is a modicum of risk is heavily discouraged.” She nonetheless offered to “do whatever [she could] to promote it,” asking for copies she could use to “generate some enthusiasm on this coast.” 
 
Morrison was keenly aware that the publishing world, like other areas of business, is a place where it helps to have friends and connections, industry contacts and people who may owe you (or someone you know) a favor. To that end, she occasionally ended a rejection by offering her name as a kind of passport with which hopeful authors might navigate the borders erected by other cultural gatekeepers. In 1977, she advised one young writer to find an agent and directed him toward the legendary literary agents Georges Borchardt and Peter Matson, adding, “When you write to them you may say that although I could not take your manuscript myself, I was very much in love with it, and I’m willing to put it in writing.” She pointed another young radical in the direction of Jules Geller, a former colleague of Morrison’s who went on to work at the Monthly Review, and sent yet another to Charles Harris—a Black editor who overlapped with Morrison briefly at Random House before leaving to become a founding editor at Howard University Press. Even in her rejections, Morrison was building a network of Black writers and editors who might, one day, work to redraw the contours of commercial publishing. 
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Above all else, Morrison’s rejection letters focus on craft—that is, on the experience of reading a work under review. In one 1978 rejection of a modern Western, she wrote that “it simply wasn’t interesting enough—the excitement, the ‘gut’s, just weren’t there. I am returning it to you herewith.” This sustained desire to explain her rejections elicits a decades-long, fragmentary discourse on style, on how to advance a plot, on when a manuscript’s structure needs to be more unexpected, or—more commonly—on when it needs to be simplified. Readers are needy creatures, Morrison’s letters suggest, demanding both drama and organization, the space and information to make discoveries themselves yet a clear enough path so as not to feel lost. In 1975, she described one manuscript as “put together in a way that made it difficult to enjoy. The scenes are too short and packed too tightly. Motives were lacking.” She forestalled any possible rejoinders about the virtues of avant-garde abstraction by professing her awareness that “the subject itself is about disorder and confusion” but maintaining that “the book should create order for the reader, to help him understand more than simply what happened. He needs to know why.” In other words: Attempts to capture the condition of modern life are no excuse for leaving readers miserable, directionless, or bored. 
 
Editorial advice often boils down to show don’t tell, and literary critics like Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, and Sinykin have argued that the language of sensory and embodied perception sets fiction apart from other genres, like biography. Morrison’s letters often bear this out. In 1979, she informed one writer that their “story is certainly worth telling,” but they “describe people and events from a distance instead of dramatizing them, developing scenes in which the reader discovers what kind of people they are instead of being told.” Vivid scenery and precise details offer readers room to maneuver, a way to discover a world that resonates. A couple of months earlier, she gave similar advice to a young Bebe Moore Campbell (who went on to become a best-selling author). And, addressing one colorful character who had evidently dropped by the Random House offices unannounced to pitch their memoir, Morrison warned about conflating an eventful life with a well-crafted story. “Your manuscript was no less interesting than you were,” she noted; however, to make it publishable, “you would have to add the artifice (or art) that you said you decidedly would not do.” 
 
What Morrison repeatedly stressed, trusting her exceptional acuity as both a reader and writer, is that writing is a skill of its own—one that doesn’t automatically follow from intellectual brilliance, nor from simply being an interesting or important person. She told one young writer that his ideas were good, but warned that concept was the first and lowest hurdle he would face: 
Your work needs force—some manner of making these potentially powerful characters alive and of giving texture to the setting. Giving details about the people—more than what they look like—what idiosyncrasies they have, what distinguished mannerism—and details about where the action takes place: what is in the room, what is the light like, the smells, etc.—all of that would give us texture and tone. 
Characteristically, this detailed rejection ends with encouragement, as Morrison told the author, “I hope you are able to work on [your manuscript] to give it the vitality it certainly deserves.” 
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Morrison left Random House in 1983. In the years leading up to her departure, she sought to make more time for her own writing by commuting to the office only once a week. Yet she continued to read unsolicited submissions. She apologized to one author for responding almost a year after her manuscript landed on her desk. (She found the submission “messy and disjointed” and had “no idea what or where a novel might be,” but nevertheless concluded that “there is such power and grit and a funny kind of lyricism that I have to tell you to try to make something of it”—and instructed the author to send it back to her when she had.) To an unpublished writer from South Webster, Ohio, Morrison observed that “there is a great deal of vitality in your writing and a freshness that is welcoming,” though, she warned, “it needs a lot of work with structure and dialog.” Even so, she promised to “give the entire manuscript a reading” if he finished. 
 
Remarkably, this was an offer Morrison extended repeatedly, to unpublished, unknown writers—some of whom had sent only a handful of what she believed to be promising pages. Unsurprisingly, her rejection notes are a practiced repertoire of graceful ways to say “no” and “goodbye”: “Enclosed herewith”; “I decline”; “Please accept my genuine regrets”; “Best of luck”; “With regards and regrets.” But they’re an archive of Morrison’s faith in and sheer love for the written word—and of her kindness. 
 
Throughout her career, Morrison balanced her literary commitments, her commercial responsibilities, and her concerns about the industry overall. The increasing friction between these likely contributed to her eventual decision to leave publishing entirely. Morrison’s rejection letters represent perhaps her clearest articulation of this tension, often for the benefit of young authors who had no claim on her attention other than throwing a piece of writing over the Random House transom. Such writers, she warned, faced uphill battles to get their words into print. “The material is interesting,” she concluded in one letter, “but not the writing: it needs a lot of work to give it the energy a story must have.” 
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Featured image: Alfio Giuffrida, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wandtoepfe_A-exp11_Alfio_Giuffrida-AG_Sinnwerke.jpg">Wandtöpfe A-exp11</a>, 2020, is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en">CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed</a> by the creator. Accessed February 26, 2024.

There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters

Evan Thompson is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia Vancouver and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author or co-author of five books in cognitive science and philosophy, including The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991).

Evan Thompson

Adam Frank is the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester and a winner of the Carl Sagan Medal. He is the author of Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth (2018).

Adam Frank

Marcelo Gleiser is the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth, the 2019 Templeton Prize laureate, and the author of seven widely translated books, most recently The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future (2023).

Marcelo Gleiser

The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience

Robert P. Crease is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. He writes a monthly column for Physics World on the historical, philosophical, and social dimensions of science. In 2021, he won the Lord Kelvin Medal and Prize for “describing key humanities concepts for scientists and explaining the significance of key scientific ideas for humanists.” His latest book is The Leak: Politics, Activism, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory (with Peter Bond; MIT Press, 2022).

Robert P. Crease

THIS BOOK’S AMBITION is breathtaking. The three authors of The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (2024) argue that it is urgent to change the science-shaped worldview that permeates our political, economic, and social systems. “[O]ur collective future and human project of civilization are at stake,” they warn in the book’s opening sentence. 
 
Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser are eminent physicist-astronomers, and Evan Thompson is a prominent philosopher and cognitive scientist. They take us through several fields, from relativity and quantum mechanics to cognitive and planetary science, outlining the spectacular progress that scientists have made in these areas of study, along with the intractable puzzles they have encountered—puzzles that spring from the scientific picture that guides our thinking, according to which the world is fully describable in objective terms. 
 
The Blind Spot turns the tables on the scientific worldview by insisting that experiencing the world precedes being able to practice science. “We must live the world before we conceptualize it,” the authors say. Recognizing this does not mean that science loses its authority—rather, it gains its “proper footing.” The discussion is so clear, well paced, and witty that I’d be tempted to describe it as a breezy read if that didn’t risk coming across as a slight. Nonscientists will appreciate sparklingly clear accounts of seemingly forbidding concepts such as phase space, quantum mechanics, and the integrated information theory of consciousness. The authors guide us through conventional understandings of scientific concepts to illustrate why they feel so powerful methodologically to scientists—to the point that the concepts come to substitute for experience and replace the world with our intellectual reconstructions of it. Scientific concepts and theories effectively get a grip on the workings of nature, but the “Blind Spot” occurs when these are taken to be more real than the experience on which they are based. The book doesn’t fit any existing genre; it’s not an academic or popular book about either science or philosophy but draws from each genre to make its argument. 
 
Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson take as their jumping-off point philosopher Edmund Husserl’s remark, in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), that the West has both flourished because of and been afflicted by the “surreptitious substitution” of theories and ideas for the world itself. We bifurcate the world into what is “out there,” and thus objective, and what is “in here,” and thus subjective, regarding the first as what’s real and our experience as a mere glimpsing of it. This problem has only gotten worse, the authors claim: scientists can act like compulsive cartographers caught up in a Borgesian quest to map not only the world but also their own mapping of the world—a task that eventually creates Escherian impossible objects if it tries to avoid the Blind Spot. “[Y]ou cannot be a mapmaker if you cannot see what you are mapping,” they write. Their book points out where and why scientific mapping breaks down, and the dire consequences of this. “Husserl’s crisis,” they say, “is still our crisis.” 
 
The authors use “Lived Time” versus “Clock Time” to show how surreptitious substitution works. You are living time’s flow, right now, in the process of reading these words. That’s an illusion, say some prominent physicists; time is a variable in equations, a series of measurable instants, and while this series is highly unlikely to go backwards (other equations tell us why), it potentially can. If time seems like a forward flow to us, it is because our imperfect mental and bodily instruments blur what’s really happening. The authors, however, show that our experience of time is primordial. A clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration enables us to recognize this as a succession. Timekeeping devices do not measure time by themselves: a person uses clocks to mark out the temporal duration that the person is already experiencing. Clocks don’t tell time; people do. Nobody pulls out a clock to know what time is, only what time it is. 
 
The authors then train their lens on problems elsewhere: the “twin paradox” in relativity theory, in which two siblings age differently because one takes a trip in a rocket; “Loschmidt’s paradox,” on the impossibility of proving time’s irreversibility; and the various paradoxes that fill the “opulent basket of weirdness” that is quantum mechanics. In each case, the authors show how these paradoxes result from either trying to avoid talking about experience or trying to turn it into an object. In biology, the authors point out the impossibility of the attempt to begin with mechanistic conceptions and end up with the categories of life, a method that conflates physical dynamics with living. “Biology presupposes life’s experience of itself,” they say, for “it takes life to recognize life.” In cognitive science, the authors demolish an entire series of attempts to treat thinking as a form of computing. 
 
Many of The Blind Spot’s arguments and positions are not new. Philosophers since Immanuel Kant—especially Husserl, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead—have demonstrated the fundamental role of the mind in our picture of the world. Despite these thinkers’ efforts, though, the “Blind Spot worldview” has so deeply saturated Western thinking that their arguments have barely dented our natural attitude. We might come to understand the philosophical arguments but then return to our habitual assumption that experience is ephemeral, or at least irrelevant to real science. What’s innovative about The Blind Spot is that the authors focus on the problems that scientists create for themselves by such an assumption. 
 
The authors return, again and again, to the notion that experience is fundamental but cannot itself be made an object, making the discussion a little repetitive. The phrase “surreptitious substitution” occurs over four dozen times. Yet the repetition is helpful: the Blind Spot worldview has been cemented by four centuries of extraordinary successes, and practices such as defining human intelligence as mere cognition. Recently, after a head injury, I was given a test to see if my mind had been adversely affected. Yet the test didn’t check my intuition, my ability to grasp metaphors or appreciate the meanings of texts; instead, my mind was pronounced sound because I could predict what shapes fit where, sort through simple logical problems, and come up with a certain number of words that began with “g.” 
 
The authors navigate the difficult task of drawing our attention to direct experience—what allows things to appear and makes the world available to us—without turning it into an object or explainable thing itself. The awkwardness involved sometimes leads them to appeal to wonky terms such as “mindful meta-awareness” and “suchness,” making the book at times sound metaphysical or even mystical. But this struggle to bring the role of experience to light is precisely the point; it clashes with the human urge to explain rather than experience. 
 
The book’s most ambitious punch comes at the very end, when the authors link the Blind Spot with the inability to recognize and deal with climate change. Their position is counterintuitive: one would think that refusing to admit climate change (and do anything about it) amounts to rejecting science based on ignorance, self-interest, or political hypocrisy. All of that is a sideshow, according to the authors. The failure to address climate change is actually driven by a view of the Earth as consisting of objectifiable things and of human action as driven by quantifiable values, amplified by the codependence of Western science and capitalism. That’s why it will take more than geoengineering and carbon caps to save the planet. 
 
The Blind Spot uses philosophical arguments to resolve scientific puzzles that threaten the integrity of science itself. We philosophers have long dreamed of finding a way to demonstrate the interdependence of the sciences and the humanities. Well, here it is.

What Scientists Can’t See: On Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson’s “The Blind Spot”

Frank Bergon is a novelist, critic, and essayist whose writing focuses primarily on California and the American West. He has published 12 books, most recently a memoir about his Basque American heritage, The Toughest Kid We Knew (2020). His novel Jesse’s Ghost was selected in 2024 for The New York Times’ “Best Books About California.” He is an emeritus professor of English at Vassar College.

Frank Bergon

APRIL IS NATIONAL Poetry Month, and on April 23—celebrated as National Talk Like Shakespeare Day in honor of the dual anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and death—we’re encouraged to speak like the Bard and his characters. This playful task becomes both challenging and illuminating in face of perhaps the most puzzling speech in all of Shakespeare’s plays, typically heard as gibberish except in a few places, like rural California. 
 
Shakespeare toys with numerous European languages throughout his work, including Italian, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Often, these are spoken in thick accents, with comedic pronunciation. The same holds true for his use of the various British dialects—Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Irish—heard in scruffy taverns or high courts. In Henry V, soldiers fracture the King’s English while the king himself and a French princess descend into a comical Franglais courtship. Yet, no matter how garbled the speech, playgoers can usually identify distinct languages and dialects—that is, until they bump up against what scholars have called the “invented language,” “unintelligible gabble,” and “‘Boskos thromuldo boskos’ mumbo-jumbo” in his comedy All’s Well That Ends Well. 
 
Here’s the situation: seeking to fool a potential traitor, a French lord and some soldiers make what seem to be nonsense sounds, as though speaking a foreign language only they can understand. While the possible traitor, Parolles, “hath a smack of all neighboring languages,” he’s unable to make sense of the lord and soldiers’ conversation, and mistakenly concludes that his captors are Muscovite mercenaries speaking Russian, which he doesn’t know. He wishes a soldier would use German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, or French so he’d be able to understand: 
 
ACT IV 
SCENE I. Without the Florentine camp. 
Enter Second French Lord, with five or six other Soldiers in ambush. […] 
Sec. Lord. Throca movousus, cargo, cargo, cargo. 
All. Cargo, cargo, cargo, villianda par corbo, cargo. 
Parolles. O, ransom, ransom! do not hide mine eyes. 
They seize and blindfold him. 
First Soldier. Boskos thromuldo boskos. 
Par. I know you are the Muskos’ regiment; 
And I shall lose my life for want of language: 
If there be here German, or Dane, low Dutch, 
Italian, or French, let him speak to me. […] 
First Sold. Boskos vauvado: I understand thee, and can speak 
thy tongue. Kerelybonto […] 
Par. O! 
First Sold. O, pray, pray, pray! Manka revania dulche. 
Sec. Lord. Oscorbidulchos volivorco. […] 
First Sold. Acordo linta. […] 
Exit, with Parolles guarded. A short alarum within. […] 
SCENE III. The Florentine camp. 
Enter the two French Lords and some two or three Soldiers. 
First Lord. Hoodman comes! Portotartarossa. […] 
First Sold. Bosko chimurcho. 
First Lord. Boblibindo chicurmurco. 
Some of these invented words in the play may correspond to actual neo-Latin words from Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish, but these are few. Yet several phrases strike the ear as Basque, a language I grew up hearing in the San Joaquin Valley. 
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In Shakespeare’s time, Basque was spoken on both sides of the Pyrenees, as it is now in four provinces of Spain and three in France. It survives today as the oldest language in Europe, with no connection to any other language in the world. Basques call their language Euskara; a speaker of Basque is called an Euskaldun. 
 
Like many Basque Americans, I came late to a clear understanding of my heritage. I knew from a young age my ancestry was Basque, and published a short story in my high school magazine about a Basque sheepherder who lost his band in a San Joaquin Valley flood. I’ve since written four novels about Basque American characters. In a book of essays and a memoir, I wrote about Basque friends, as well as my own Basque family—in Nevada, where I was born; in the California ranch country where I grew up; and in the Basque Country itself, where I continue to visit and keep in touch with relatives. 
 
Still, a broader understanding of Basque history and culture eluded me until recently, and my awareness continues to expand with ongoing discoveries. Just as a recent genealogical test interpreted my DNA as 98 percent Basque, archaeologists in 2015 discovered that <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509851112">some modern Basques share DNA links with ancestral Basque farmers</a> buried 3,000 years before the Roman Empire. When Romans encountered these ancient people in the first century, they identified them with Latin terms like Vascones or Vasconum. (I didn’t know why the Romans came up with these names for the inhabitants in my grandparents’ ancestral homeland until I started work on my memoir. Then, I dusted off my high school and college Latin and Greek to discover that early Roman historians were phonetically reproducing what the local inhabitants called themselves.) 
 
Two thousand years ago in his Geography, the Greco-Roman historian Strabo recorded the earliest surviving names of these pre-Roman people as Οὐασκώνων and Οὐάσκωνας. The Roman historian Livy called them “Vasconum.” In the next century, Ptolemy wrote “Ouascones”; others wrote “Vascones.” Despite differences in appearance, the words have similar sounds if we remember that v in Latin was probably pronounced like a soft w or ou. Both the Greek (Ouaskonas) and Latin (Vascones) become close phonetic spellings of what an early 20th-century Basque woman like my grandmother might have called herself in her Markina dialect: “Ouskunan,” or “Euskunan,” meaning someone who speaks Euskara. 
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Even now, the survival of this ancient language remains as mysterious as its origin. As recently as the summer of 2021, archaeologists discovered the oldest authenticated writing in the language of ancient Vascones <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/words-etched-into-an-ancient-bronze-hand-hint-at-the-mysterious-origins-of-the-basque-language-180981153/">on a flat bronze hand</a> probably hung from the door of a house 2,100 years ago. The artifact was inscribed with approximately five words; the first word, “sorioneku,” is a forerunner of “zorioneko,” spoken by modern Basques to mean “good luck.” Except for a few other surviving fragments of early writing in the form of letters, songs, charms, and proverbs, Euskara remained primarily an oral language for centuries. The first book in Basque, a collection of religious and secular poems by Bernard Dechepare (Bernat Etxepare in Basque), was published in 1545, only 19 years before Shakespeare was born. 
 
During the 16th century, Basques were known less as writers than as Europe’s earliest whalers, who taught the skill to the English, Dutch, and Danish. Basques fished for cod as far away as the Newfoundland coast and maintained tryworks for processing whale blubber in Labrador. In 1534, after the French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and claimed the “New Land” for France, he encountered natives who knew Basque words and expressions. Most ships sailing across the Atlantic from Spain to the Americas were built in Basque shipyards. Iron mines and foundries south of the Pyrenees, especially those of Bilbao (Bilbo in Basque), had long been the main European suppliers of metal for shipbuilding, as well as for nails, anchors, farm tools, firearms, and swords. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare uses the Basque word “bilbo” to denote the famous sword of flexible steel. In Hamlet, iron shackles are called “bilboes.” 
 
An early comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost, takes place in the Basque areas of Basse-Navarre and Béarn. The main characters in the play are based on historical figures—namely Henri of Navarre, later King Henry IV of France, whose mother, Jeanne d’Albret (Joana Albretekoa in Basque), not only had the New Testament translated into Basque for her subjects in 1571 but also tried to institute Euskara as the region’s official administrative language. 
 
Basque regions again play a role in All’s Well That Ends Well when the heroine, Helena, shadows her runaway husband from France to Italy. The fanciful plot of Shakespeare’s folkloric source requires Helena to be in Florence, disguised as a barefoot penitent. The source doesn’t mention, yet Shakespeare does, that she’s purportedly on her way “To Saint Jacques le Grand” at Compostela in Spain—that is, the Camino de Santiago and its trails through the Basque Country to the shrine of Saint James the Apostle. In the mid-12th century, the French cleric Aymeric Picaud circulated a travel guide for pilgrims and recorded in his journal the earliest known glossary of what was, in his censorious view, the “barbarian language” of Basques as opposed to “Christians.” By the time of Shakespeare’s birth, pilgrims had encountered Basques for seven centuries on their way to what had become the most visited shrine in Europe. 
 
Meanwhile, north of the Pyrenees for 250 years until the mid-15th century, Basque ships and sailors from Bayonne hauled wine from Gascony to England. (The words “Gascons” and “Vascones” share the same Latin root.) Gascon merchants and Basque shippers stayed at ports and fairs in the cities of Bristol, Sandwich, and especially London for up to three months to sell wine and salt before sailing home with grain and hides. Despite English suspicions about aliens and their unintelligible tongues, the lucrative wine trade allowed “Gascon-speakers” to stay longer than other foreigners—and to live where they wanted. By Shakespeare’s time, some remained permanently as “Gascon émigrés.” 
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Until now, the mystery of Shakespeare’s “gibberish” has gone unsolved in part because it doesn’t look like Euskara. For starters, the Basque alphabet doesn’t use the letters c, q, v, w, or y. Transcribed into the Basque alphabet, though, the babble in the play begins to look like misspelled Euskara: 
 
Troka mobutzus, kargo, kargo, kargo. 
Kargo, kargo, kargo, biliando par korbo, kargo, 
Boskos tromuldo boskos. 
Boskos baubado. 
Kerelibonto. 
Manka rebania dultxe. 
Otzkorbidultxos boliborko. 
Akordo linta. 
Portotartarotza. 
Bosko tximurtxo. 
Boblibindo txikurmurko. 
I sent the original passages to native speakers, professors, and translators in the Basque Country and in the United States. Everyone confirmed that, while they couldn’t hear any actual Euskara words, they did hear its sounds. At Mondragon University, Professor Monika Madinabeitia read the lines to six colleagues and 10 students from places in the Basque Country with differing dialects. The professors noted nine places in the reading that sounded Basque. The students agreed, particularly on those with the tx-sound of ch. “Euskara is a very sibilant language,” Monika emailed, “and there are loads of [z] [s] [tz] [tx] sounds. These are the ones that sounded like Basque to my students.” Amaia Gabantxo, a translator of several Basque books, summed up the consensus of my various respondents by observing that “some of the syllabic progressions in those ‘words’ do sound like Basque to someone who doesn’t understand or speak it. It would seem that it is an attempt at something that sounds like Basque.” 
 
For me, the clincher is the way Shakespeare emphasizes the word “Boskos.” From Latin came the words “Vascos” in Spanish and “Basques” in French and later English. Their similarity in sound is apparent when we remember that v in Spanish is pronounced much like b. Growing up in rural California, I regularly heard those of my ethnicity called “Bascos.” In All’s Well That Ends Well, Parolles, “the manifold linguist,” thinks the soldiers are Russian-speaking “Muskos.” But he’s wrong. Their shouted response implies the correction: No, we’re “Boskos.” And, in case we miss the phonological significance of “Muskos” and “Boskos,” Shakespeare repeats the word four times: “Boskos […] boskos […] Boskos […] Bosko.” 
 
I think he knew what he was doing: capturing the sound of a rare, ancient language, surviving nearly intact today—the speech of Basques. On National Talk Like Shakespeare Day, it might be best to listen. After all, Shakespeare had a good ear. 
¤ 
Some context has been adapted from Frank Bergon’s The Toughest Kid We Knew: The Old New West (2020), <a href="https://unpress.nevada.edu/9781948908641/the-toughest-kid-we-knew/">available now</a> from University of Nevada Press.

I Understand Thee, and Can Speak Thy Tongue: California Unlocks Shakespeare’s Gibberish

<h4 class="tb f173">David Hering is a critic, novelist and senior lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Guernica, The Point, The London Magazine, and others. He is currently writing a book on haunting in contemporary culture.</h4>

David Hering

A MAN IS being murdered outside a child’s window. A prisoner of Auschwitz, he was caught fighting with another captive. As punishment, he’s being drowned in a river. We can’t see the incident, but the child can. He moves over to the window and looks out beyond our field of vision. Almost immediately, he withdraws back into the room, and utters a gnomic phrase: “Don’t do that again.” 
 
To viewers watching this scene, it’s unclear to whom this is directed: to the prisoners, to the toy soldiers with which the boy has been playing, or to himself. If it’s the prisoners, he has inculcated the values of the murderers who live in his house; he is the son of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, whose home lies on the other side of the camp wall. If it’s the toys, his revulsion at the murder has been redirected to miniature avatars of those outside his window. Most likely, he is talking to himself, and the thing he must not do again is look at what’s happening next door. Better to stay indoors, on the other side of the wall, and withdraw into the make-believe narrative of his toys. The window, as so often occurs in The Zone of Interest (2023), the film from which this scene is taken, is a blinding white square covered by a gauzy curtain. Something awful we cannot see is happening, just out of sight. 
 
The Zone of Interest focuses on the everyday lives of the Höss family. We never see what happens inside Auschwitz, which appears only as a backdrop. Its towers loom above the concrete garden wall, the smoke from its chimneys spreads upwards into the sky, and human bones are washed downstream into the nearby river. We hear sounds of gunfire, screams, barked orders, and machinery, all of which play out over the Höss family’s domestic lives. Each day, Rudolf Höss leaves his house, murders countless prisoners, and comes home to read his children a bedtime story. There’s a word we might use for this juxtaposition of the domestic idyll and the death camp: “obscene.” But the word captures more than the camp’s utter depravity. It derives from the Greek, “ob-skeen,” which means offstage or out of sight, and Glazer’s film relies as a structural principle on a strict division between what is on- and off-screen. There is no on-screen act of violence in the film. Instead, its mise-en-scène is suffused with the horror of the systematic genocide taking place just out of sight, and Glazer uses the dramatic language of the “ob-skeen” to view the Holocaust—a historical obscenity whose visual depiction has been fraught with difficulty—from a new position, one in which viewers are unavoidably enmeshed. 
 
The titular zone, in the 2014 Martin Amis novel that Glazer adapted, is a space that incorporates the Höss residence and the death camp. However, as with his 2013 adaptation of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), Glazer has reworked the source material into something only tangentially similar. The film, most of which takes place in the Höss house, is viewed in mid and wide shots, and the focus on interpersonal relationships in Amis’s novel is abandoned in favor of a surveillance aesthetic. During filming, Glazer covered the house set with cameras, Big Brother–style, some hidden, some visible in every room. The actors moved around the house, aware they were being filmed but not which cameras were filming them. As a consequence, viewers feel as if they’re watching secretly. While the events taking place in the death camp are obscured from view, the house and garden are subjected contrapuntally to a radical visibility—everything the family does is on show, the very opposite of “ob-skeen,” hyper-visible. 
 
Glazer originally trained in theater design, but despite his stated dislike of films that simply stage drama, theater-like, in front of the viewer, the mise-en-scène of The Zone of Interest insists upon the formal idea of the stage, with Glazer calling the house an “arena.” The film is not stagy; rather, it’s acutely aware of the limits of its frame, and of the tension that derives from our awareness of what lies beyond it. Take the Hösses’ garden, a well-kept area directly next to the death-camp wall. The obsessive planting and cultivation of the space has a sickening counterpart in the unseen ethnic cleansing yards away; an early sequence has Rudolf Höss looking over plans for a circular incineration chamber, whose carefully delineated areas recall visually the garden’s layout. 
 
The Höss house and the death camp participate in a larger dynamic of putative cultivation. The film is well aware, to recall Walter Benjamin, that “[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” But it resorts to a curious formal literalism when delineating its so-called civilized and barbaric spaces, one which becomes bound up with the psychological well-being of the Hösses, and the form of the film itself. When Höss is summoned back to Germany in the second half of the film for possible relocation, we find ourselves transported from a scene of mass murder to the scene where that murder is planned. Despite the acclaim that greets him, Höss appears uncomfortable in Germany, and his wife, Hedwig, who lives unfazed alongside genocide, is distraught at the prospect of leaving her house and garden. The closer Rudolf Höss gets to the original scene of the Holocaust’s conception, the weaker he gets physically. He sees a doctor for an unspecified medical problem; he stumbles around retching; he sits alone in his room. It’s as if the stability of the Hösses is reliant on the scrupulous maintenance of their home in Poland. At times, the form of the film itself can appear on the verge of collapse when its scenic integrity is under threat. As Hedwig Höss tends to her well-kept garden, a shot of a flower—one of the film’s few close-ups—is suffused suddenly with the color red, which obscures the entire screen. The sounds of murder and terror from behind the wall increase, and Mica Levi’s soundtrack judders abruptly in and out, as if coming in on the wrong cue. It’s as if someone has put the film in the wrong gear, and we can hear the grinding of the mechanism as it tries to reassert itself. Sure enough, a few seconds later, the original mis-en-scène abruptly returns. 
 
Glazer’s use of the obscene here occurs within a broader question of what one should or shouldn’t show when depicting this particular historical moment. Concerns about dramatizing the Holocaust on film have regularly come up against at least two objections. Firstly, that no dramatization can do justice to the scale of industrialized mass murder, and secondly, that to use the tools of cinema to dramatize Nazi genocide is to become implicated in the cinematic propaganda that was, of course, a key tool of those who propagated that genocide. Should these films embrace a therapeutic humanism, as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) does? Should they assiduously avoid the dramatic in favor of spoken testimony, as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) does? Juxtapose contemporary documentary footage and wartime images, as with Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), or more recently Steve McQueen’s Occupied City (2023)? Or go beyond the camp wall, but keep most of the horrors around the protagonist out of focus, as in László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015)? 
 
Critics of Holocaust films often cite Theodor Adorno’s admonition that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. But after watching Glazer’s film, I’ve been thinking about his later reconsideration of that statement: 
[I]t may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz [one] can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz. 
The Zone of Interest adopts this position, specifically Adorno’s alignment of “bourgeois subjectivity” with both the perpetrators of Auschwitz and the position from which one moves on from it, looks back on it, views it. One of the most troubling elements of Glazer’s film is that the viewer is not allowed to withdraw from the film’s radically circumscribed scene. Much of what disturbs us in the film comes from our preexisting knowledge of the Holocaust, with which we fill in the information that takes place out of shot. We can imagine the death camps because we have already seen what happened inside them. But The Zone of Interest follows Adorno’s line further. It makes bourgeois subjectivity, which elides both survivors and perpetrators, the necessary frame from which “we” view the film itself. What a horrible prospect, this indivisible position. And it’s this horror that suffuses so much of the film, the idea that the bourgeois cultivation of the scene, and the unspeakable ob-scene, are somehow inextricable, one the obverse of the other, with the viewer the bloody thread that connects them. 
 
I was struck by this sense of indivisibility during two scenes that take place at night, depicting a young Polish girl, a neighbor of the Hösses, discreetly leaving food for the prisoners by secreting apples in the trenches where they labor during the day. These scenes are shot without lighting and in infrared, so the girl’s body appears as white against the sheer black of her surroundings. It’s a startling, uncanny reversal of the daytime scenes, and the only act of compassion we witness in the film, which must necessarily take place out of sight. It’s hard here not to be reminded of the famous scene in Schindler’s List in which Schindler sees a young child visually distinguished from a crowd of people, her red coat the only color in an otherwise black-and-white scene. We learn nothing about the child as a person, but this is the point. She could be anyone and stands for everyone. In Spielberg’s film, the gesture is fundamentally humanistic. By isolating one individual through the subjectivity of the film’s “hero” as he views the scene, Schindler’s List centers a viewer’s understanding of common humanity, one fulfilled dramatically by a moment of human success: Schindler’s climactic rescue of Jews from the death camps. Aligned with Schindler’s vision, viewers ally themselves with humanist action: I view like him, and I would do as he does. With The Zone of Interest, we’re not permitted this position. As the illuminated girl plants apples equal distances apart in the dirt, we realize what we’re viewing is an inversion of the planting of Hedwig’s garden. One scene is the twin of the other. The implication in these matched, intertwined gestures—that good and evil are qualities of which any human is, in the right circumstances, capable—is considerably more discomfiting than Spielberg’s assumption of the viewer’s separation from the atrocities taking place on-screen. 
 
These night sequences are made more discordant by the soundtrack that plays under them. The film has no music other than at the opening and closing credits, but during these infrared scenes, the action is accompanied by a loud guttural sound, almost like a belch but deeper and less identifiably human. Watching these scenes, I felt as if I was hearing some vast repressed thing erupting, pushing up and out and into the world of the film. It’s a deliberately incongruous noise, clearly not coming from anything on-screen. It’s messy and untidy; it’s at odds with the scrupulousness of the mise-en-scène, and it appears when things oppose or undercut Höss’s vision. Later, these noises, which initially accompany only the night-vision scenes, increase in frequency and recur when a clearly uncomfortable Höss is in Germany. He’s examined by a doctor, and their dialogue suggests that his problem is digestive, that something is not breaking down properly, is threatening to explode out of Höss’s body. It feels as if the film is moving not toward resolution but cataclysm, eruption, and breakdown. 
 
Sure enough, in the final sequence of Zone, this tension cracks the film open. Höss, drunk and stumbling out of a party, walks down a stairwell. When he reaches a landing, he starts to physically retch, but doesn’t vomit. He walks down another set of stairs to an identical landing, and dry-retches again. He looks down the corridor and sees a tiny point of light in the darkness. A door opens, flooding the room with light; we’re in Auschwitz, 2023. For 10 minutes, we see workers entering and cleaning the museum that now stands on the site of the camp. The effect is startling, uncanny. That tiny point of light is a portal through which we see the future, a scene out of time. This breakdown of time and space is the eruption that’s been coming, and for the first time, we find ourselves on the other side of the camp wall. We view this scene through a different mode: documentary. The sequences in the museum play out in long fixed takes. We see the ovens being cleaned, the gas chambers being swept, piles of clothes and shoes from dead prisoners, and a corridor lined with photographs of those murdered in the camps. What has been concealed from us, the ob-scene, is now visible. The cleaning and cultivation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum creates a new scene, one of remembrance and testimony, in which the lives of those millions murdered are brought into sight. 
 
Is this abrupt shift to documentary an admission of the failure of Zone’s dramatic form? No, because the juxtaposition is the point, and in these final moments Glazer opens and extends the scene of Zone to something larger: the visual representation of other historical scenes of mass murder (“It’s about now,” he said of the film in a recent interview at the British Film Institute). This climactic breakdown recalls the endings of two recent films, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), in which a final change of viewing position, a bringing-into-view of something previously unseen, is revelatory to an understanding of an atrocity. Folman’s animated film ends with the simultaneous realization by Folman of his complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, and the removal of the film’s animation filter to show real, uncensored footage of the killing. Oppenheimer’s film ends with war criminal Anwar Congo watching a reenactment of tortures he himself carried out, only now he plays the torture victim. Viewing, Congo appears to undergo a moment of realization, and—exactly like Höss in Glazer’s film—repeatedly retches but is unable to vomit. In these formal shifts, these films acknowledge that the obscenity of the act of mass killing can only be fully rendered through a hybridized way of seeing, one in which the documentary form catalyzes a clarity of vision. What’s unsettling about the end of Glazer’s film, though, is the continuation of that entwining of those preceding acts of cultivation, of staging and scene creation, from atrocity to act of kindness to memorial. The viewer isn’t allowed to step outside of this entanglement. Instead, the film asks, against the abominations of the contemporary world, what do we bring into view and what do we push out of sight? What scene would we make? What scene are we making right now? 
 
But The Zone of Interest doesn’t end there. Instead, it cuts back to Höss, staring down the corridor toward the camera, before he turns and walks down the stairwell into total darkness. It’s impossible to read Höss’s reaction—whether he sees and doesn’t care, or whether he attains some understanding of his actions, of what has erupted into his vision. Ultimately, though, what we witness is Höss leaving the scene. His disappearance into darkness prefigures his infamy and execution, while the lives of his victims are illuminated with ever more clarity. And we watch, implicated. The credits roll, over darkness.

Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”

Edward Said (1935–2003) was one of the most influential thinkers of the last hundred years. A professor in the humanities at Columbia University, he wrote brilliantly on topics as wide-ranging as literature, secularism, classical music, and the politics of the Middle East. Said’s 1978 study Orientalism remains one of the central texts of postcolonial theory. Among other of his highly acclaimed works are The Question of Palestine (1979), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations of the Intellectual (1994), and On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2007).

Edward Said

Songs of an Eastern Humanist: Collected Poems

Manan Kapoor is the author of A Map of Longings: The Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali (Yale University Press, 2023). His work has appeared in Boston Review, The Caravan, and Scroll.in, among others. He is the book review editor at Harvard Review. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a graduate student in English at Harvard University.

Manan Kapoor

IN OUT OF PLACE: A Memoir (1999), Edward Said recalls that after graduating from Princeton in June 1957, he was torn by “differing impulses”: he could pursue a fellowship from Harvard for graduate study or return to Cairo to work at his father’s stationery company. Eventually, Said deferred Harvard for a year and returned to “sample the Cairo life.” Said claimed that he had no interest in his father’s business, and in the memoir, he recalls how he spent his afternoons in his father’s office: “I would either read—I remember I spent a week reading all through Auden, another leafing through the Pléiade edition of Alain […]—or I would write poetry (some of which I published in Beirut), music criticism, or letters to various friends.” Two decades after Said’s death, we finally have access to 19 of these poems, written between 1956 and 1968, which have been compiled and edited by his biographer, Timothy Brennan, as Songs of an Eastern Humanist (2024). 
 
In the introduction to the collection, Brennan notes that Said’s heroes were “essayists, satirists, and novelists, just as his favorite critics were theorists of the novel,” and that “[t]hinking of his comments on poetry, most would draw a blank.” However, despite his well-known criticism of novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Herman Melville, and Jane Austen, Said returns to and draws from several poets, including W. B. Yeats, Mahmoud Darwish, Wallace Stevens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. 
 
Said’s 1988 essay Yeats and Decolonization focuses on how the titular poet “articulates the experiences, the aspirations, and the vision of a people suffering under the dominion of an off-shore power.” In “Reflections on Exile” (1984), drawing from Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” he equates the state of being an exile to “a mind of winter,” a life “led outside habitual order.” And Said’s After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986)—“a searing portrait of Palestinian life and identity”—borrows its title from Mahmoud Darwish’s “The Earth Is Closing on Us”: “Where should we go after the last frontiers? / Where should the birds fly after the last sky?” Elsewhere, Brennan <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/21/unfinished-manuscripts-that-lay-behind-palestinian-critics-stated-contempt-for-fiction">notes</a> that Said would “incessantly” recite Hopkins’s poetry to his second wife, revealing an intimate connection to poetry: “I think he aspired to poetry. That was the secret self. It was a self that was gushier and more vulnerable than the self he would allow other people to see.” 
 
Even in the late 1950s, however, the period when Said wrote most of these poems, Brennan reveals that Said had “doubts about poetry’s social effects.” In a 1959 essay, “The Still Music of Meditative Poetry,” he questioned the purpose of poetry and what poems offered beyond “a vague kind of solace.” Said concluded that poetry “is a concrete expression of a personal desire for permanent, beautiful satisfaction … The politics of poetry are the politics of the heart, for better or for worse.” Given their posthumous publication, however, several questions arise when we first encounter these poems. Said once remarked to the poet David Lehman, his student at Columbia, that poetry requires “not only rhetorical skill and great intelligence” but also “genuine sensibility,” which “was something you either had or you hadn’t.” Was it the lack of a genuine sensibility, we’re led to ask, that led him away from writing poetry? Though Said published some poems in Al-Kulliyah (the American University of Beirut’s alumni journal) in 1957–58, he didn’t return to these poems until later in life. Further, Brennan notes that the poems “exist in more than one form, with subtle variants between the different versions”—he picked those that “appeared to be latest, most complete, or best-expressed.” Given the existence of various undated and incomplete versions, how do we read these poems and their peculiarities? Take, for instance, this untitled poem: 
 
The finest hour of my life 
Was, it was, there is no doubt 
Upon that creaky seat 
In Music Hall. 
On it I heard the flutist blow 
One blast and off they all went 
Some blew, some pulled, some didn’t 
But I was caught in the middle 
And 
Though the final conjunction effects a spectral presence of something left unsaid, we’re led to wonder whether Said simply abandoned the poem. As is the case with most posthumous publications—from the poems of Emily Dickinson to The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin (2012), which includes poems unpublished in his lifetime—speculation rarely offers clarity. While these poems (or the other versions at Said’s archives at Columbia University) might not provide any answers, they are undoubtedly, as Brennan suggests, “psychologically revealing,” for they offer us a glimpse into Said’s formative experiences: “They chart with startling emotion the doubts of a man torn by a native culture with which he is at times disappointed, projecting onto it a modernity whose sophistication lies in resisting the West while acknowledging its guilty attractions.” 
 
In the poem quoted above, Said’s early inclinations toward classical music come to light. He was a gifted pianist; the author of Musical Elaborations (1991) and Music at the Limits (2007); a music critic for The Nation; and, along with Daniel Barenboim, the founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, named after Goethe’s collection of poems. Said’s lexicon, both in these poems and his later works, is charged with terms from music theory—his concept of “contrapuntal reading,” which he develops in Culture and Imperialism (1993), draws from the term “counterpoint,” a style of Western musical technique that involves two or more musical lines. Poems such as “Wistful Music,” “Requiem,” and “A Celebration in Three Movements” contain obvious references to music; in other poems, we encounter words and phrases such as “modal rounds,” “timbrels and harps,” “cacophony of jumbled sounds,” and “humming dawn.” However, whether or not the poems refer to or borrow from music, there is an inherent sonorous texture in Said’s verse—“Musical imagery is everywhere” in these poems, Brennan remarks, “testifying to how much of Said’s mind in an introspective mood was immersed in the sounds, forms, and fables of Western classical music.” In “Hans von Bulow in Cairo,” where Said imagines the German composer’s final days in the city in the late 19th century, repetition and rhyme drive the poem: 
 
Bulow’s wordless, gleaming fury goes along, along, along, 
Mounting the hot air and spreads, like a burnished gong, 
Across his inner sky, to which the sacred Nile 
With only a muddy-veined delta proffered, homages. 
The West’s “guilty attractions” manifest as the figure of Bulow, and though it reveals Said’s inquisitiveness about Western classical music, it also foreshadows sections from Orientalism (1978) about Europeans—from Napoleon to Benjamin Disraeli to Gérard de Nerval to Gustave Flaubert—in Cairo. The city is central to the collection: while on one hand the book reveals Said’s observations of the daily life in Cairo, it also brings to light his estrangement from the place. 
 
In his memoir, Said describes how, after the 1948 Palestine War, his family fled to Cairo and lived there like “alien residents.” On the same page, however, he claims that Cairo was only city in which he felt “more or less at home.” He <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n09/edward-said/between-worlds">once remarked</a> that he was “an uncomfortably anomalous student” in Cairo: “a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all.” Elsewhere in the same essay, he wrote that—no matter where he was—he always felt he was “standing in the wrong corner, in a place that seemed to be slipping away […] just as [he] tried to define or describe it.” In his elegy “Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading,” Darwish crystallizes Said’s complicated relationship with the notion of home. As Darwish <a href="https://mondediplo.com/2005/01/15said">writes</a> of Said, in Julie Stoker’s translation, “He says: I come from that place. I come from here, and I am neither here nor there. I have two names that come together but pull apart.” In Said’s poetry, there are moments where his estrangement from Cairo is palpable and his archaic vocabulary, a result of his elite colonial education, accentuates his distance from the landscape he is writing about. In several poems, however, he paints a subtle yet vivid portrait of daily Cairene life in the late 1950s after the 1952 Egyptian Revolution and the 1956 Suez Crisis. In this untitled poem, his shift to plural pronouns is significant: 
 
The early morning gently forges our city’s sounds 
Into that attended pitch of gallant diffidence 
That, standing away from studious violence 
Melts its voices in the wave that surrounds. 
The sellers of bread and fruit, of meat and milk 
Merchants on bicycles, carts and camels 
Jingle the clouds, even the sullen sun’s enamel, 
Shakes them to selling, robbing the veil of silk. 
This period was significant in Said’s development, and these poems are brimming with an anti-colonial outlook that later solidifies in his literary and cultural criticism. In a 1957 letter to Princeton, Said <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=jLjiDwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT41&amp;lpg=PT41&amp;dq=%22I+am+more+sure+than+ever+what+in+the+long+run+I+would+like+to+do%22+edward+said&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=rHfYCYxOv6&amp;sig=ACfU3U1Cn7lUOI8aBtc94gZ30vX1rZt_Yg&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjymPmnw8iFAxV-IUQIHWWIChUQ6AF6BAgJEAM">wrote,</a> “I am more sure than ever what in the long run I would like to do: teach … [T]he troubled politics of the Near East have added a new dimension to my thoughts.” Several poems written during this period—along with “Hans von Bulow in Cairo,” given its focus on a European in Egypt in the 19th century—anticipate the sensibility that pervades his later work and reveal, as Brennan suggests, “Europe’s romance with Oriental escape.” This is perhaps most evident in “Retrospect,” which begins: 
 
The world does not tell its time from the east 
Where crashing noises mix with silly bleats 
And the sun’s rays imprison as in modal rounds. 
In the final lines, he reflects on the legacies of Western colonialism and a fractured world trying to sing “destined rounds, refreshed, louder”: 
 
Ours was not a safe view for we clamored for new harmonies 
Carrying in them an opulent new fate, perhaps not ours— 
But who was strong enough for second thoughts, and songs. 
“Harmonies,” “modal rounds,” “bleats,” “songs”—the poem’s metaphors are rooted in Said’s obsession with music and sound. Beginning with a satirical description of the “east” (as a place where “crashing noises mix with silly bleats,” where “sun’s rays imprison as in modal rounds”), he foreshadows the cultural distortions and misrepresentations that he would go on to challenge in Orientalism. 
 
Said remarked on several occasions that he was “no longer the same person” after the Six-Day War in 1967: “The world as I had understood it ended at that moment.” By the 1980s, he had become one of Palestine’s fiercest advocates in the United States—in 1989, following his support for the Palestinian movement, he <a href="https://www.commentary.org/articles/edward-alexander/professor-of-terror/">was labeled</a> the “Professor of Terror” by Edward Alexander in Commentary. Though Said claimed he was politically disengaged before the Six-Day War, we come across traces of Said’s political engagement in its nascent stages in these poems. In light of Israel’s current military assault, which killed more than 25,000 Palestinian civilians over its first three months according to local authorities, it becomes impossible to read several poems without thinking of the ongoing genocide: 
 
We had cried together in conquered fields 
Where no one else had been, 
The morning greeted no one, 
Site of an ancient temple 
Moved our hand linked thoughts, 
For we glided away in tremors; 
One gaiety begged for a caress 
But we heeded not, and 
Down we floated on stark receptacles. 
After spending the year in Cairo—which would also be his last for 15 years—Said joined Harvard’s English Department, where he read and wrote about Joseph Conrad like a “steady groundbass” given the resonance he felt with the Polish British writer who, according to Said, could “never shake off his sense of alienation.” The feeling of estrangement that saturates these poems distills for us Said’s alienation from all the places he inhabited, including Cairo. While these poems shed new light on his relationship with poetry—and an investment in not only reading but also writing verse—it is difficult to ignore the towering shadow cast by Said’s later works on these poems. The collection, at the end, largely underscores the doubts, inclinations, fears, and disposition of the public intellectual we know, allowing us access to a “more vulnerable” side previously unheard.

“Gun Love” by Jennifer Clement

May 5, 2018

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