Seth Greenland on Adaptation

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. 
¤ 
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.” 
¤ 
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. 
¤ 
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.” 
¤ 
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.” 
¤ 
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

Melinda Cooper is a professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. She is the author of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (2017).

Melinda Cooper

Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance

Sarah Brouillette is a professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of three books: Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007), Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford University Press, 2014), and UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford University Press, 2019).

Sarah Brouillette

A Tax Haven in a Heartless World: On Melinda Cooper’s “Counterrevolution”

<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”

Christopher T. Fan teaches at UC Irvine. He is also a co-founder of Hyphen magazine.

Christopher T. Fan

The Red Shredding: On Netflix’s “3 Body Problem”

Mary Beard is the author of the best-selling The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (2008) and the National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations (2013) and SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015). A popular blogger and television personality, Beard is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. She lives in England.

Mary Beard

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World

Edward J. Watts holds the Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and is professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. The author and editor of several prize-winning books, including The Final Pagan Generation (2015), he lives in Carlsbad, California.

Edward J. Watts

THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE of classics has had a rough couple of decades. Classics as we now understand it took shape in the 19th century as Northwestern European and Northeastern American scholars defined a canon of literary works written in Greek between the eighth and fourth centuries BC and in Latin between about 100 BC and 100 AD. They taught these works to the elite and aspiring elite in prestigious secondary schools and universities for more than a century and asserted that classical learning was a prerequisite for a person’s understanding of high culture. Well into the 1940s, embedded classical references animated everything from the plays of Albert Camus to the abstract art of Mark Rothko. That moment of cultural centrality passed long ago, however. For much of the second half of the 20th century, classics slowly retreated from its position near the center of university and high cultural life until it became a small, somewhat sleepy subject that emerged into popular consciousness only when a Hollywood blockbuster like Gladiator (2000) or Troy (2004) appeared. 
 
Classics is no longer sleepy. The legacies of ancient Greece and Rome have reemerged as key cultural battlefields fought over by everyone from left-wing scholars to gun rights advocates. Among classics’ critics are university administrators keen to eliminate majors that do not lead directly to employment, and groups of scholars frustrated by the discipline’s historical exclusivity and Eurocentrism. Its champions include scholars fascinated by antiquity and its enduring influence, as well as tens of thousands of undergraduate students who sign up for classics courses each year, not to mention the many people who, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/09/14/roman-empire-trend-men-tiktok/">social media has recently revealed,</a> think about the Roman Empire at least once a day. Classics has never been more popular. Nor has it been more endangered. 
 
This is, then, a moment when classics desperately needs another book by Mary Beard, the Cambridge scholar whom The Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/25/mary-beard-emperor-of-rome-interview-the-last-thing-id-want-is-a-world-in-which-we-all-agreed">once called</a> “the world’s most famous classicist.” Better than anyone else in her generation, Beard has mastered the ability to explain to 21st-century audiences why the ancient world is interesting, instructive, and useful. She has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/fashion/mary-beard-against-internet-trolling.html">waged social media battles</a> against misinformed people of all political persuasions who seek to use the Roman past to make ill-founded judgments about our contemporary world. Her <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/13/mary-beard-to-host-tv-version-of-radio-4s-front-row">work</a> on television and radio has introduced millions of people to the art, literature, and architecture of a beautifully complicated Roman world. Her essays challenge people to think in new and exciting ways about women, slaves, peasants, and other figures whose contributions to the ancient world have long gone unacknowledged. And Beard’s books, including her masterpiece SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015), prompt readers to consider the complexity of the Roman world that fascinates them. 
 
Her latest book, Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World (2023), showcases many of the attributes that make her earlier works so appealing. Emperor of Rome tells the story of the lives, labors, and love affairs of the 26 men who ruled Rome between the reign of Augustus (27 BC–14 AD), Rome’s first and most famous emperor, and that of Alexander Severus (222–35), the mostly forgettable and largely forgotten child emperor with whom Rome’s fourth imperial dynasty concluded. Beard wisely decided not to make the work a chronicle of the life and deeds of men that most readers have never heard of and even fewer particularly care about. She says little about the short reigns of Galba (68–69), Pertinax (193), and Macrinus (217–18) while treating readers to long discussions of more famous rulers like Caligula (37–41), Claudius (41–54), and Nero (54–68). She is also well attuned to the need to make modern readers comfortable with the many unfamiliar names that pop up in her discussions. The book begins with a cast of characters in which images of Roman rulers are shown alongside regnal dates and a brief note describing how each man took power and died. It concludes with a short appendix that explains how Roman emperors got the names by which they are now known. These extremely useful tools help orient all readers, regardless of their familiarity with Roman history. 
 
Emperor of Rome is not just about these emperors, however. Beard also introduces the wives, lovers, family members, household attendants, senators, slaves, and courtiers who made the professional and domestic lives of Roman emperors possible. We observe these people as they travel with the emperor across the vast world he controls. We trace the rise and fall of their fortunes as they labor to please their sovereign. And we dine with them at parties where the imperial host could be entertaining, terrifying, or outright bizarre. Sometimes, as when the emperor Elagabalus (218–22) served flamingo brains to diners and then allowed his pet leopard to wander around the couches on which his drunk guests had passed out, the parties could be all of these things at once. 
 
Beard is at her best when she overlays the testimony of Roman authors with her interpretation of the archaeological remains of the structures they describe. She meticulously reconstructs the various imperial palaces of ever-increasing size that consumed more and more of the Palatine Hill in the course of the first century AD and devotes considerable attention to the villas, vacation homes, and private islands where emperors relaxed outside of Rome. Beard brings readers into the Sperlonga grotto on the western coast where the emperor Tiberius (14–37) dined surrounded by priceless sculptures. She uses photographs, plans, and vivid literary descriptions to uncover the structures and artworks that once comprised the massive villa complex built on the orders of Hadrian (117–38) in the Roman suburb of Tivoli. And she encourages us to look anew at the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus as places where the emperor and his subjects interacted in a fashion that simultaneously reinforced Roman social hierarchies and permitted the people to speak freely, as a group, to their emperor. 
 
Most of all, though, Emperor of Rome offers a series of interesting vignettes presented by a masterful storyteller with a perfect sense of dramatic and comic timing. Beard knows how to introduce the lives and work of unfamiliar characters in a fashion that concisely provides both general historical background and intricate detail about their actions. She has arranged these stories into thematically focused chapters about things like imperial dinner parties (Chapter Three: “Power Dining”) or the imperial court (Chapter Five: “Palace People: The Emperor in His Court”), but Beard has also stacked each tale so that it introduces a character or idea that she often returns to later. This economical narrative style ensures that readers feel they are always walking on firm ground as they journey deeper into the world of Rome’s early emperors. 
 
Despite the excellent qualities of this book, and it has a great many, I fear that Emperor of Rome represents something of a missed opportunity to speak more broadly to the crisis the field of classics now faces. Although it claims to be a history of Roman emperors, Beard herself acknowledges, in both the work’s introduction and its epilogue, that she has been quite selective in the range of emperors and the span of time the book covers. Emperor of Rome covers a little more than 15 percent of the 1,500 years that emperors ruled the Roman Empire, a situation that would be akin to writing a book called President of the United States and stopping with John Quincy Adams. 
 
Beard acknowledges that “there was an unbroken succession of Roman rulers down to 1453,” when the Eastern Roman Empire finally collapsed, and explains her decision to stop her profile of Roman emperors when she does because, “[w]ith the death of Alexander, the job description began to change” and “what it was to be a Roman emperor shifted dramatically” between 235 and the reigns of Diocletian (284–305) and that of Constantine (306–37). This empire of the later third and fourth centuries was, she writes, “a strange and unfamiliar place.” It was also very different from the period Emperor of Rome covers, a span of time during which, Beard claims, “not much changed on a grand scale for over 250 years: the Roman empire hardly grew in size; it was administered in more or less the same way; and political life in Rome itself followed the same broad pattern.” 
 
While it is true that the Roman Empire in 337 was quite different from what it was in 235, there were also significant differences between the empire when Augustus took power in the 20s BCE and when Severus died in 235. Augustus assumed control of a Roman state that had yet to define the Rhine and Danube as its northern frontiers. Large parts of coastal northwest Africa, Asia Minor, and the Middle East sat outside the emperor’s direct control; these were under the authority of a constellation of allied states and client kings. Rome had not yet conquered Britain, Dacia, or Arabia. Perhaps as little as 10 percent of the 50 million or so people living within Rome’s boundaries were Roman citizens, and the senate was almost exclusively drawn from Italy. 
 
By 235, the Rhine border was well established and the client kingdoms in Africa, Asia Minor, and the Middle East—as well as the independent regions of Britain, Dacia, and Arabia—had all become Roman provinces. Severus directly controlled far more land than Augustus ever had. The nature of the citizen body to whom the emperor answered also shifted. In 235, every one of the tens of millions of free people in the empire was a Roman citizen and nearly every province provided senators to the Roman Senate. These changes made Augustus’s job at least as dissimilar to that of Severus as Alexander’s was to Constantine’s. 
 
The Roman Empire changed continuously across the 15 centuries it existed, and as it did, the job of ruling its lands and peoples changed too. Stopping a study of Roman emperors in 235 because the empire had changed seems arbitrary. It is, however, perfectly in keeping with the way classics has defined Roman antiquity since the 19th century. Many classical Roman historians hesitate to venture beyond the comfort of the early Roman Empire and engage in detail with the other 85 percent of the empire’s history. Beard does better than most by extending her study into the 230s, but there is still a period of over 1,200 years to go. 
 
Roman history did not always work this way. When the Viennese scholar Johannes Cuspinianus wrote his history of Roman emperors for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the 1510s, it stretched from Julius Caesar to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. In the early 18th century, Montesquieu’s history of the Roman state similarly extended into the 15th century. So too did Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which appeared in 1776. Stopping Roman imperial history nearer to its beginning than its end is, relatively speaking, a recent phenomenon. 
 
The brevity of Beard’s coverage is also unfortunate because an exhaustive history of Roman emperors would dramatically change some aspects of this book. Beard’s comment that “[n]o woman in Rome ever had any formal, executive power in the state” would make no sense to the Romans living under the reigns of empresses Irene (797–802), Zoe (1042), or Theodora (1055–56). Eleventh-century visitors to the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople would also be puzzled by her claim that “the ashes of most emperors and their families ended up in one of two huge mausolea” in the city of Rome. These medieval Romans could look around that Constantinopolitan church and see the sarcophagi of more than 50 different emperors and imperial family members interred there between the death of Constantine I in 337 and that of Constantine VIII in 1028. 
 
Expanding Emperor of Rome’s chronological footprint would also have extended its story in ways that could bring classics out of the cul-de-sac in which it currently finds itself. Until she reaches the Severan dynasty (which began in 193 and included emperors of North African and Syrian descent), all of the emperors Beard treats are Europeans from Italy, Spain, and Southern France. They fit quite neatly into the comfortable, 19th-century, Northwestern European ideals about what antiquity ought to be. This is why they, and the empire they ruled, resonated so much with 19th-century Western Europeans and North Americans. But, as Beard acknowledges briefly, many of the emperors who ruled Rome in later centuries came from places outside of Western Europe. They were much more important in shaping the cultural, political, and religious legacies of communities living in the Caucasus Mountains, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and South Asia. 
 
A book that included those emperors could show how the legacy of Constantine I influenced views of Christian monarchy in places as diverse as Axum (an ancient kingdom centered on land now part of Eritrea and Ethiopia), Armenia, and Merovingian France. It could explain why church councils called by Roman emperors such as Constantine and Theodosius I (379–95) provided some of the fundamental legal framework that governed medieval Christian communities in Iraq, Iran, and Kerala. It could reveal that Coptic church services in Egypt still commemorate the orthodoxy of emperor Theodosius II (402–50) and condemn the heresy of his sister Pulcheria and her husband, the emperor Marcian (450–57). It could also describe the painful decision that the emperor Basil II (976–1025) made when he sent his sister Anna off to marry Grand Prince (and later Saint) Volodymyr of Kiev Rus, a decision that many Russian Orthodox Christians believe led to their king’s baptism and their nation’s conversion to Christianity. We could, in short, understand a lot better why Roman emperors still matter so much to so many people across the world—both within and outside Europe. This is a way that classics can simultaneously answer the criticisms that it is too Eurocentric and elitist while retaining the fervent interest of those students and general readers who love ancient Rome. 
 
That is not the book Beard wanted to write, however. Every author has the prerogative to set the terms of their own work, and Emperor of Rome is excellently done according to the terms its author set. Beard has put together a wonderful narrative that enlivens, in brilliant color, the world of a group of Roman emperors that readers already fascinated by a classical version of Roman antiquity will certainly love. It is absolutely not Beard’s fault that classics finds itself in its current troubles. But I do hope that someone of her stature will choose to write the sort of book that might pull the discipline back from the brink.

Seth Greenland on Adaptation

April 2, 2012

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