The Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson, edited and with an introduction by Benjamin Moser

New Directions, 645 pp., $28.95

Clarice Lispector; drawing by Pancho
In Chapter Six of his novel Murphy, Samuel Beckett considered what he called “Murphy’s mind”:

Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without. This was not an impoverishment, for it excluded nothing that it did not itself contain. Nothing ever had been, was or would be in the universe outside it but was already present as virtual, or actual, or virtual rising into actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universe inside it.

In Beckett’s fiction, there is a sense that the spirit of his characters is elsewhere, hidden from their bodies. They may know how to think, but the notion that this leads them therefore to exist is a sour joke. The word “therefore” in the Cartesian equation has been somehow mislaid. Their bodies, in all their frailty and levels of discomfort, tell his characters that they are alive. This knowledge is made more comic and tragic and indeed banal by the darting quality of the minds of many of Beckett’s characters, by the amount of nonsense going on in their heads. They are like hens pecking at memory and experience.

Hens are dear to the strange, bitter heart of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Their general helplessness combined with their persistence, their constant pecking and mindless squawking, seemed to animate something in her spirit. During her childhood in the north of Brazil, according to her biographer Benjamin Moser, “she spent hours with the chickens and hens in the yard.” “I understand a hen, perfectly,” she told an interviewer. “I mean, the intimate life of a hen. I know how it is.” One of her finest stories is “A Chicken,” three pages long, which tells of a bird trapped in a kitchen waiting to be sacrificed for Sunday lunch who decides to make a brief, defiant flight, only to be chased by the man of the house. “From rooftop to rooftop they covered more than a block. Ill-adapted to a wilder struggle for life, the chicken had to decide for herself which way to go, without any help from her race.”

The day is saved, or at least the chicken is, when she lays an egg and it is decided not to cook her, but instead to include her in the household. Thus

whenever everyone in the house was quiet and seemed to have forgotten her, she would fill up with a little courage, vestiges of the great escape—and roam around the tiled patio, her body following her head, pausing as if in a field, though her little head gave her away: vibratory and bobbing rapidly, the ancient fright of her species long since turned mechanical.

Lispector, however, has no interest in allowing this triumph to be more than brief. In a brisk and sudden final sentence, she does away with her brave bird: “Until one day they killed her, ate her and years went by.”

In a later story, “A Tale of So Much Love,” the figure of the chicken will reappear with even more human qualities. It begins: “Once upon a time there was a little girl who observed chickens so closely that she got to know their souls and innermost yearnings.” As the chicken is being eaten by the family, Lispector comments: “Chickens seem to have a prescience about their own fate and they never learn to love either their owners or the rooster. A chicken is alone in the world.”

Lispector also wrote a story, or a meditation, called “The Egg and the Chicken,” in which she ponders the great matter of Being from the perspective of chicken and egg:

The egg is the chicken’s great sacrifice. The egg is the cross the chicken bears in life. The egg is the chicken’s unattainable dream. The chicken loves the egg. She doesn’t know the egg exists. If she knew she had the egg inside her, would she save herself? If she knew she had the egg inside her, she would lose her state of being a chicken. Being a chicken is the chicken’s survival. Surviving is salvation. For living doesn’t seem to exist. Living leads to death…. Surviving is what’s called keeping up the struggle against life that is deadly. That’s what being a chicken is.

Besides chickens, Lispector was interested in rats. In “Another Couple of Drunks,” the narrator conjures up the aftermath of the death of a child:

The household rats take fright and start to race around the room. They crawl up your son’s face, still warm, gnaw at his little mouth. The woman screams and faints, for two hours. The rats visit her body too, cheerful, nimble, their tiny teeth gnawing here and there…. She looks around, gets up and the rats scatter.

In “Preciousness,” the girl recalls that when she was ten “a boy with a crush on her had thrown a dead rat at her.” In an essay on Brasília, included in this book as a story—it is a sort of story, but perhaps, as with many of these stories, it could be better defined as a strange display of sensibility—Lispector writes:

It was built with no place for rats. A whole part of us, the worst, precisely the one horrified by rats, that part has no place in Brasília. They wished to deny that we are worthless. A construction with space factored in for the clouds. Hell understands me better. But the rats, all huge, are invading.

If Brasília has no place for rats, then Rio de Janeiro, where many of these stories are set, has plenty of such spaces. In “Forgiving God,” the narrator of the story, who feels that she is “the mother of God” while walking down Avenida Copacabana,

almost stepped on a huge dead rat. In less than a second I was bristling from the terror of living, in less than a second I was shattering in panic, and doing my best to rein in my deepest scream. Nearly running in fright, blind in the midst of all those people, I wound up on the next block leaning on a pole, violently shutting my eyes, which no longer wanted to see. But the image stuck to my eyelids: a big red-haired rat, with an enormous tail, its feet crushed, and dead, still, tawny. My boundless fear of rats.

If rats then represent terror and chickens innocent striving for something approaching authenticity, humans, for Lispector, are strangely in the middle, often stricken with fear, or handing out terror, but ready also to soar or break loose or achieve some freedom or be fully alert to their fate in a time short enough for one of her stories to be enacted.

Clarice Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920 and taken to Brazil as an infant. Raised in Recife, the north of the country, she married a diplomat and thus spent many years traveling before returning to Brazil to live in Rio de Janeiro. In 1966 she was badly injured in a fire in her apartment. She died in 1977.

By the time of her death, she had become, Benjamin Moser writes in his biography of her, “one of the mythical figures of Brazil, the Sphinx of Rio de Janeiro, a woman who fascinated her countrymen virtually from adolescence.”^* Her looks were often commented on and there was much gushing nonsense written about her. The translator Gregory Rabassa, for example, recalled being “flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” The poet Ferreira Gullar remarked that “she looked like a she-wolf, a fascinating wolf.” And the French critic Hélène Cixous declared that Lispector was what Kafka would have been had he been a woman, or “if Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. If Heidegger could have ceased being German.”

While Lispector did not refer much in public to her family’s origins, they are made grimly clear in Moser’s biography. “The least one can say about the time and place of her birth,” he writes,

is that they were badly chosen…. What befell the Jews of the Ukraine around the time of Clarice Lispector’s birth was a disaster on a scale never before imagined. Perhaps 250,000 were killed: excepting the Holocaust, the worst anti-Semitic episode in history.

It may be too easy to explain the sort of estrangement that distinguishes the work of Lispector as arising from her family’s history and her own early years in Brazil, years marked by her mother’s slow death from syphilis, caused by her having been raped before the family fled Ukraine. Her mother died in 1930 when Lispector was ten. Her father died a decade later.

The peculiar tone of her work takes its bearings equally perhaps from the Brazilian literary tradition itself, from figures such as Machado de Assis (1839–1908), whom she read as a teenager, and her contemporary João Guimarães Rosa (1908–1967), whom she admired. Neither of these writers was concerned with holding a mirror up to Brazilian society, but rather they were involved in breaking the mirror of fiction itself, creating images of estrangement in works that were formally experimental and ambitious, using tones that seemed to have no antecedents, remaking a tradition in their own brittle image. When Lispector began to write, it might have seemed almost natural for her to create stories that were often abstract, unhinged, haunted, highly peculiar, dealing with figures who were isolated, damaged, and, like the mind of Beckett’s Murphy, “hermetically closed to the universe without.”

In her mixture of nonchalance, inscrutability, wit, and knowing simplicity, in her use of tones that are whimsical and subtle, in the stories that are filled with abstractions, she has perhaps more in common with some Brazilian visual artists of her generation than she does with any writers, most notably Lygia Clark, who was born in the same year as Lispector, and also Hélio Oiticica, who both used minimal means and often flat color to create works of considerable intensity and oddness.

Between 1943, when her first book was published, and her death, Lispector produced nine novels, nine volumes of stories, some children’s writing, and a good deal of journalism. In her stories the range is limited; her subject mainly is fearfulness in the lives of women, the fraught interior of the mind, the fragility of the domestic sphere, the ghostliness of the self. Her figures are unnerved by the world, its rituals and regulations; they are often frightened by interaction with others. They ask small questions but there is always the sense that the answers might turn out to be much larger, or more disquieting, than any of her characters have bargained for.

Thus she builds by a system of erasure. Social and political questions do not interest her, or the creation of three-dimensional figures, or characters whose motives make full sense or evoke easy sympathy, or indeed the natural world. In comparing the city of Brasília to “a beach without the sea,” she could be describing the unsettling nature of her own writing, her own use of palpable absences. She works with much that is missing, eschewing the obvious for the sake of what becomes in the best stories a sort of penetrating emotional effect.

Some of her openings are startling. The first paragraph of “Interrupted Story,” for example, begins:

He was sad and tall. He never spoke to me without making it understood that his gravest flaw lay in his tendency toward destruction. And that was why, he’d say, stroking his black hair as if stroking the soft, hot fur of a kitten, that was why his life amounted to a pile of shards: some shiny, others clouded, some cheerful, others like a “piece of a wasted hour,” meaningless, some red and full, others white, but already shattered.

Here she seems more fascinated by the words and the phrases themselves, and by creating a tone, than by any events that will subsequently unfold. She likes stories in which nothing, or nothing much, happens. “Excerpt” begins: “Really nothing happened on that gray afternoon in April.” She also likes creating an opening sentence of direct and startling color, such as the opening of “Temptation”: “She was sobbing. And as if the two o’clock glare weren’t enough, she had red hair.” Or the opening sentence of “The Solution”: “Her name was Almira and she’d grown too fat.” Or the even more vivid and startling opening of the story “Better Than to Burn”: “She was tall, strong, hairy.”

Her women are easily disturbed, thus self-contained by necessity. In “The Imitation of the Rose,” Laura realizes that

she must never again give cause for alarm…. And most important of all was sparing everyone from suffering the least bit of doubt. And to never again cause other people to fuss over her….

Men are often a mystery. In “The Escape”:

Her gaze starts evoking a deep well. Dark and silent water. Her gestures go blank but she has but one fear in life: that something will come along and transform her…. Desires are ghosts that dissolve as soon as you light the lamp of good sense. Why is it that husbands are good sense? Hers is particularly solid, good, and never wrong.

Her women often stay in bed. Home life puzzles them as they venture away from the domestic sphere toward some other realm, almost eschatological in its contours, as in the story “Love”:

When she returned it would be the end of the afternoon and the children home from school needed her. In this way night would fall, with its peaceful vibration. In the morning she’d awake haloed by her calm duties. She’d find the furniture dusty and dirty again, as if repentantly come home. As for herself, she obscurely participated in the gentle black roots of the world. And nourished life anonymously. That was what she had wanted and chosen.

In “The Sound of Footsteps,” Mrs. Cândida Raposo, who is eighty-one, goes to the doctor because she still feels “the desire for pleasure.” The doctor agrees that one solution might be if she “took care of it” herself. “That same night she found a way to satisfy herself on her own. Mute fireworks.” Then the next paragraph comes straight from Lispector’s personal lexicon of disappointment, with its own half-resigned diction: “Afterward she cried. She was ashamed. From then on she’d use the same method. Always sad. That’s life, Mrs. Raposo, that’s life. Until the blessing of death.”

Lispector had no interest in blessing, or happiness for that matter. Rather, she entertained happiness so she could play with it, leave scratch marks on it, wound it as best she could. Thus “Happy Birthday,” one of her finest stories, will deal with a birthday that is considerably less than happy. The woman whose birthday it is—she is eighty-nine—has to cut the cake. “And suddenly the old woman grabbed the knife. And without hesitation, as if in hesitating for a moment she might fall over, she cut the first slice with a murderer’s thrust.”

Slowly, the old lady begins to loathe her children who have gathered with their own families for this festive occasion:

How could she have given birth to those frivolous, weak, self-indulgent beings? The resentment rumbled in her empty chest. A bunch of communists, that’s what they were; communists. She glared at them with her old woman’s ire. They looked like rats jostling each other, her family. Irrepressible, she turned her head and with unsuspected force spat on the ground.

Objects and flowers, in Lispector’s worldview, fare no better than people. “The last light of the afternoon was heavy and beat down solemnly on the objects.” Hyacinths are “rigid against the windowpane.” Even teeth get it in the neck, a mouthful of them being referred to as “the misplaced cruelty of teeth.” And speaking of getting it in the neck, in “The Solution” Almira stabs her friend Alice in the neck with a fork in a restaurant for no apparent reason, or perhaps to make sure that the reader is paying full attention, or perhaps even to allow Lispector to write the next sentence, which sounds beautiful in Katrina Dodson’s translation: “The restaurant, according to the newspaper, rose as one.”

While some stories appear whimsical and read like exercises, and others muse at length and almost absent-mindedly, almost abstractly, on habit and motive, or something that happened, others have an exquisite sharpness, the fruit of a most original and daring mind. In the best stories, something deeply strange is fully visualized by Lispector, as though it had come in a waking dream and it needed to be given urgent substance. “Mystery in São Cristóvão,” for example, begins with the sort of domestic scene that is always ominous in Lispector’s universe. A family is having a meal together. “There was nothing special about the gathering; they had just finished dinner and were chatting around the table, mosquitoes circling the light.”

Then they go to sleep, and from a house on the corner emerge three figures, as though from a James Ensor painting:

One was tall and had on the head of a rooster. Another was fat and had dressed as a bull. And the third, who was younger, for lack of a better idea, had disguised himself as a lord from olden times and put on a devil mask, through which his innocent eyes showed.

As they set about stealing some hyacinths from the garden of the family who have previously been eating together, “from behind the dark glass of the window a white face was staring at them.” It is the daughter of the house. Lispector now moves into a strange, luminous fictional terrain, lifting the drama with ghostly precision high above its own cause. When the moon appears

it was a stroke of danger for the four visages. So risky that, without a sound, four mute visions retreated without taking their eyes off each other, fearing that the moment they no longer held each other’s gaze remote new territories would be ravaged….

The experience briefly ages the girl, but then, in the last paragraph:

The girl gradually recovered her true age. She was the only one not constantly peering around. But the others, who hadn’t seen a thing, grew watchful and uneasy. And since progress in that family was the fragile product of many precautions and a handful of lies, everything came undone and had to be remade almost from scratch….

Some of Lispector’s images are deeply grotesque. In “The Smallest Woman in the World”—originally translated by Elizabeth Bishop, who knew Lispector in Brazil—something whimsical slowly becomes oddly real and disturbing. It includes, as an aside, a story the cook told “about her time at the orphanage” when the girls, who had no dolls to play with, concealed the death of a fellow inmate from the nuns. “They hid the corpse in a wardrobe until the nun left, and played with the dead girl, giving her baths and little snacks, punishing her just so they could kiss her afterward, consoling her.”

In “The Crime of the Mathematics Teacher,” a man buries a dead dog only to unbury the creature in the final paragraph for no reason that is fully clear. The last two sentences read: “The man then looked around and to the heavens beseeching a witness to what he had done. And as if that still weren’t enough, he started descending the slopes toward the bosom of his family.” It is easy to hear the grim laughter here, as though the bosom of his family were somehow more transcendental or more scary than the heavens.

Lispector’s command of tone allows her to be amused gently and with subtlety at times, at other times savagely, and then at other times, in the weakest stories, she creates a story with a throwaway tone, as though she could not really be bothered. In “Via Crucis,” for example, a virgin gets pregnant. In one paragraph, the young woman treats the event as though it is ordinary. “Maria das Dores sent the maid out to buy the vitamins the gynecologist had prescribed. They were for her son’s benefit.” In the following paragraph, the pregnant virgin has another thought: “Divine son. She had been chosen by God to give the world the new Messiah.” And then: “She bought a blue cradle. She started knitting little jackets and making cloth diapers.”

God makes strange appearances in these stories. In “Report on the Thing,” a late story:

God has no name: he preserves perfect anonymity: there is no language that utters his true name….

I am now going to say a very serious thing that will seem like heresy: God is dumb. Because he does not understand, he does not think, he just is…. But He commits many errors. And knows it. Just look at us who are a grave error. Just look how we organize ourselves into society and intrinsically, from one to another. But there is one error He does not commit: He does not die.

In another late story, Lispector invokes the famous image of Christ with his outstretched arms on the hill of Corcovado overlooking Rio de Janeiro: her main character

had the oddest dream: she dreamed she saw the Christ on Corcovado—and where were his outstretched arms? They were tightly crossed, and Christ looked fed up as if to say: deal with it yourselves, I’ve had it. It was a sin, that dream.

And then in her meditation on Brasília, God is also mentioned:

Brasília is artificial. As artificial as the world must have been when it was created. When the world was created, a man had to be created especially for that world. We are all deformed by our adaptation to the freedom of God. We don’t know how we would be if we had been created first and the world were deformed after according to our requirements.

The state of being deformed spiritually or ontologically interested Lispector. She let her imagination range over its fictional possibilities. She dramatized it in some stories by lifting restrictions on her characters to see what they would do. In other stories, she became interested in the thin and brittle nature of the self and in what she called “the destiny of those set loose upon the Earth, of those who don’t measure their actions according to Good and Evil.”

She was, all the time, ruefully aware of the limitations that writing imposed on her. Part of her dark vision included a sad knowledge of the frailty of the very words and phrases she used, the necessary thinness of her own observations and her games with form. Thus the images of the chicken and the rat were useful to her in that they carried more meaning with them, more weight somehow, than many of her images of human striving. In an early story, she allowed her main character to feel this helplessness deeply and articulate as best she could the idea, as Beckett would have it, that she was resigned to fail better, but fail nonetheless:

Something beneath my thought, deeper and stronger, apprehends what happened and, in a fleeting instant, I see it clearly. But my brain is feeble and I can’t manage to transform that vivid minute into thought.

Such a feeling and such failure would have been, oddly enough, deeply satisfying for Lispector, and easy for her to imagine, part of the shadow world she attempted to find pale and unsettling substance for in these stories.

Venezuela is on the edge. In a stunning defeat of the country’s ruling party—the greatest setback in over ten years for the movement created by the late Hugo Chávez—voters overwhelmingly supported the opposition Democratic Unity (MUD) alliance in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. In the early hours of December 7, the election authority (CNE) said the MUD had won 99 of 167 seats, with 22 still to be determined. The MUD, however, claimed 112, which would just be enough to give it two-thirds “super-majority” needed, for example, to convene a constituent assembly.

The outcome, which exceeded the opposition’s most optimistic forecasts, gives the MUD sufficient control of parliament to precipitate a standoff with President Nicolás Maduro and his Chavista supporters. With the country already in economic crisis, this could set off serious political unrest; or it could force both sides into a negotiated transition. Given the ruling party’s tenacious hold on power and extensive efforts to shape the election, how did this remarkable result come about and what does it portend?

For anyone trying to understand the election, a good place to start is the government-run chain of Bicentenario supermarkets that can be found in Caracas and other cities. Take the one in Las Mercedes, a middle-class district of the capital: every day, by 7 in the morning, a line stretches around the block of people simply hoping to pick up some staples—rice, corn flour, cooking oil, and detergent—at government-controlled prices. The lines, which have been lengthening for the past eighteen months wherever price-controlled goods are on offer, are the most visible sign of the economic and social crisis that has spread across the country since Maduro took over as Chávez’s hand-picked successor in 2013.

As people headed to the polls on Sunday, some were still uncertain how to vote, especially public employees who had been told they would lose their jobs if they displayed “ingratitude” or “disloyalty” by voting the wrong way. Azucena, a twenty-four-year-old public-sector bank employee, asked her mother what she thought she should do. “Just vote the way your conscience dictates,” said her Colombian-born mother. “I’m not going to vote for the government,” the daughter replied. “We can’t keep living like this, there’s nothing to buy, something has to change.”

Even for a country that has gone through major upheavals in the recent past, the current situation is daunting. Although the government has stopped issuing statistics, GDP is expected to decline by 7 percent or more this year, having already dropped sharply in 2014. Driven by collapsing domestic production and rising demand as the government increased the money supply, prices are going up at an annual rate of nearly 200 percent (and food prices are rising even faster). Scarcity of basic goods is at record levels, with food, medicine, and other essentials even harder to find in the interior than in the big cities. The homicide rate is among the highest in the world. The situation is described as “bad” or “very bad” by nine out of ten Venezuelans. “In forty years of polling I’ve never seen a 90 percent negative evaluation,” says one leading pollster.

Nor does the government seem to have any idea how to tackle these challenges. Maduro, a one-time far-left labor union activist, was unexpectedly thrust into the top job in 2013, after his predecessor and mentor Chávez died of cancer. Since Maduro’s narrow—and bitterly disputed—election win in April that year, economic and social policies have floundered, thanks to factional differences that came to the surface in the absence of the former leader’s unrivalled authority. Meanwhile, accusations that the government is immensely corrupt and has ties to organized crime have acquired new substance with the revelation that two close relatives of the first lady have been jailed in New York for alleged drug-trafficking.

Still, the scale of the MUD’s victory comes as a surprise, since the regime—the revolution, as it is known to its dwindling band of supporters—has devoted much of its energy to refining the system perfected by Chávez over the past sixteen years in which, while the votes cast are accurately counted, every other aspect of the process is monumentally stacked against its opponents. To begin with, it takes several times as many votes to elect an MP in the big cities—where the opposition vote is concentrated—as in the rural heartland that has long been the core constituency of Chávez’s and Maduro’s party.

Even with a heavily tilted playing field, however, the Maduro government long feared a major opposition victory and resorted to more aggressive tactics to manipulate the outcome. Already in mid-October Maduro spoke of the need to win the election “como sea,” which roughly translates as, “by whatever means necessary.” He warned the MUD’s secretary-general, Jesús Chuo Torrealba, that there was a “nice, modern prison” waiting for him if he questioned the results. This was not an idle threat. There are around seventy opposition figures currently in jail, and many more who have been driven into exile over the past dozen years. Already, the MUD’s most charismatic leader, Leopoldo López of the Voluntad Popular (VP or Popular Will) party, is beginning a fourteen-year jail sentence for inspiring the anti-government protests last year; while the opposition mayor of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, is under house arrest for allegedly seeking to overthrow the government.

Ahead of the elections, several opposition leaders were also banned from standing for office on transparently trumped-up grounds, including for allegedly failing to mention food vouchers when declaring their income and assets. And López’s wife, Lilian Tintori, who in the weeks before the election toured the country to campaign for human rights and support opposition candidates, was the victim of a number of violent attacks at her campaign events on behalf of the MUD, culminating on November 25 with the murder of an opposition activist, hit by two bullets just feet from where she was standing. (Three people have been arrested for the murder, which the government insists was a settling of accounts between criminal gangs.)

The government also ensured that the MUD’s “Unidad” (Unity) ticket on the voting screen was surrounded by pro-government tickets using the same word and similar colors, in a clear bid to induce opposition supporters to vote for the wrong candidates. One prominent MUD candidate even faced a fake “Unidad” candidate with exactly the same name. Meanwhile, the government refused to invite qualified election observers from bodies like the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union to the election.

Despite all this, Venezuelans woke up on December 7 to a commanding opposition majority in parliament—and a new political reality. So what will that look like? The MUD is a mishmash of over two dozen parties, most of them too small to register on the Richter scale. Even the biggest represent just a tiny fraction of the electorate. López’s VP, for instance, has 2.5 percent of voter allegiance according to a recent poll by Datanálisis; Primero Justicia (Justice First, or PJ), the party of two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, little more. Both occupy the political center but are often at loggerheads over tactics. The one-time hegemon of Venezuelan politics, Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, AD) and its offshoot Un Nuevo Tiempo (A New Time, UNT) are social-democrat. Neither can claim as much as 3 percent support.

Indeed, though the opposition drew about two-thirds of the vote on December 6, only around 10 percent of the electorate identifies with the MUD as a whole, according to pre-election polling. The opposition, in other words, is much bigger than the MUD. That carries with it the danger that neither a disintegrating government nor an until-now fractured and unconvincing MUD will be able to handle the wave of popular discontent that threatens to overwhelm Venezuela’s fragile and compromised institutions.

For the moment, broader unrest seems to have been avoided, at least in part, by the prospect of an electoral solution to the country’s misery. But one possible consequence of the election is gridlock, with an opposition-dominated legislature stymied by the government’s control of all other branches of state—including, crucially, the Supreme Court. The MUD, for its part, could find itself once again divided between confrontationalists, led by the jailed López and his allies, who favor moving rapidly against Maduro, perhaps by organizing a mid-term recall referendum, and moderates like Henrique Capriles, who favor a negotiated transition. If the new MUD majority in parliament prioritizes the political struggle over social issues it could rapidly lose the support of the electorate. As opinion polls have clearly shown, voters are concerned above all with practical issues like food and public services and want peace and tranquility rather than conflict on the streets—such as the months-long demonstrations in 2014 that left over forty dead.

For its part, the executive could also try to precipitate open conflict with parliament. Before the election, Maduro had threatened to “take to the streets” in the event of an opposition victory and to govern, “with the people and the civilian-military union.” The nature of the revolution, he declared, would change if the opposition were to control parliament—a hint that the government would seek to press ahead with the creation of a so-called “communal state,” for which legislation already exists: this would replace “bourgeois democracy” with popular assemblies dominated by the ruling party. But there is considerable doubt that a president who has just suffered such a blow to his prestige and political authority can really carry out the threat, despite the fact that millions of people (especially among the urban and rural poor) still support the revolution. To “radicalize the revolution” against the wishes of the majority might well require the use of armed force, and there is no guarantee that the military could be counted on if asked to fire on demonstrators.

In televised comments Monday morning, Maduro accepted the results and appeared subdued. But he also alleged that an “economic war” waged by the opposition and its foreign allies was to blame; and he has the ability to obstruct parliament in serious ways if he chooses. As president, Maduro can veto any law coming from the National Assembly. Should that veto be over-ridden, his Supreme Court can declare any of parliament’s actions unconstitutional, while the president’s control of the state oil corporation, PDVSA, the source of 96 percent of the country’s foreign earnings, means he may lose little sleep over the prospect of the MUD vetoing his budget—even with oil at just a third of its average 2014 price. Erick Malpica Flores, a nephew of Cilia Flores, the first lady (“first combatant” in revolutionary jargon), is treasurer of PDVSA and national treasurer to boot. But Maduro’s hold on power may not be so firm in reality as it is on paper.

The biggest challenge could come from within the ranks of the revolution itself. Not only has Maduro squandered the enormous political capital he inherited from his charismatic mentor and plunged Venezuela into its worst economic crisis in modern times, his own immediate family is under suspicion of involvement in drug trafficking. Two other nephews—one reportedly brought up in the Maduro household—are in a New York jail charged with conspiring to import 800 kilograms of cocaine into the United States. Neither Maduro nor Flores have commented, and the government has tried to keep the matter under wraps. But the scandal, which is a hot topic on social media, although newspapers, radio and television barely mention it, is sapping the enthusiasm of even hard-core supporters. The large volume of evidence reportedly accumulated by US authorities relating to links between senior regime figures and organized crime complicates prospects for a peaceful transition, since some important members of the ruling party may have too much to lose by ceding power.

It is not just the opposition that wants Maduro out; rumors suggest that many within the government itself would like to see him go. Their problem is that there is no obvious successor—at least, not one that could win a presidential election. If Maduro can hang on at until late 2016, the constitution mandates his replacement by the vice-president (an appointed figure who can be replaced at any time) for the remainder of his term. That might prove a more palatable option for critics within his own party.

Meanwhile, with a shrinking economy, reserves running out, and multi-billion-dollar debt repayments pending, the prospect of a chaotic default cannot be ruled out. Pressures at home and abroad will mount. Until now, for example, though it is unpopular in the US and elsewhere, the Maduro government could count on the support of a majority of countries in the region, thanks not only to political ties but to the distribution of cheap oil. But this may be changing. Argentina’s presidential election, for example, has brought to power a politician, Mauricio Macri, who had called for Venezuela’s suspension from regional organizations on human rights grounds (though he withdrew the threat following Maduro’s election concession). For Maduro, it seems likely that hanging on to power “como sea” is likely to become much harder.

The evidence that race still matters in twenty-first century America is overwhelming. It includes the police killings of Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, and countless other young black men; the passionate student movement for racial justice that is sweeping college campuses; the continuing glaring racial disparities in employment, income, incarceration, and life expectancy; and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s much-heralded account in Between the World and Me of the extent to which American institutions have helped to create and perpetuate these inequities. At the Supreme Court, however, there is growing ambivalence about whether race may even be taken into account to redress these problems. That question will be front and center on Wednesday, when in Fisher v. University of Texas, the Supreme Court once again considers the constitutionality of affirmative action.

“The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” This view, espoused by Chief Justice John Roberts in a 2007 decision invalidating Seattle’s effort to maintain integrated public schools by taking race into account in making pupil assignments, looms large this week as the Court, for the second time in three years, reviews the constitutionality of the University of Texas’s affirmative action plan. Two years ago, the Court vacated a lower court decision upholding the plan, reasoning that the lower court had been too deferential to the university. That the Court has taken the Texas case again, after the lower court upheld the program once again, is not a good sign for affirmative action proponents.

Most court watchers expect the Court to overturn the lower court’s decision, and question only whether it will do on so on broad grounds, calling into doubt all affirmative action programs, or on narrow grounds specific to the Texas case that will permit other affirmative action to survive—at least for now. Either decision, however, would be at odds not only with the underlying purpose of the Equal Protection Clause, but also with fundamental conservative values.

If race continues to matter, then ignoring it will not solve the problem. Yet that is precisely what Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito read the Equal Protection Clause to require. According to Roberts’s vision of equality, in which a color-blind society can apparently be willed into existence by simply closing one’s eyes to race, any affirmative action plan is invalid.

Thus far, this vision has been a minority view on the Court when it comes to university admissions, but just barely. The Court has upheld affirmative action in university admissions, generally by 5-4 votes, as long as: (1) the university considers race-neutral alternatives; (2) avoids quotas; and (3) treats race as only one modest consideration among many in assessing an applicant. The Court upheld such a plan most recently in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger, a challenge to the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action program.

The specific issue in the Texas case is whether, having achieved a degree of black and Hispanic enrollment through a race-neutral “top 10 percent plan”—in which every student in the top 10 percent of his or her Texas high school class is automatically granted admission to the University of Texas—it is also permissible to consider race in deciding whom to admit of the remaining applicants. About 75 percent of the Texas class gets in through the 10 percent plan. Texas argues that in order to ensure a truly diverse student body, it needs to take race into account in selecting the remaining 25 percent, though only as one of many attributes that weigh into its decision, just as Michigan Law School did. In fact, Texas’s program, which was created in 2004, was designed to mimic the Michigan Law School program upheld in Grutter.

Because so many of Texas’s high schools are racially segregated, the 10 percent plan results in the admission of not insignificant numbers of black and Hispanic students. (Paradoxically, the 10 percent plan’s achievement of minority enrollment depends upon the existence of segregated high schools, and would not have this effect in states with integrated high schools). The entering class in 2004, when UT employed the 10 percent plan without any additional consideration of race, was about 21.5 percent black and Hispanic. The challengers argue that this should be deemed sufficient, and that any consideration of race is therefore unwarranted. (The state population is about 50 percent black and Hispanic).

The university replies that while the 10 percent plan admits some minority students, it does not produce the range of students necessary to realize the full educational benefits of diversity. The bulk of the black and Hispanic students admitted under the 10 percent plan attended racially segregated schools and grew up in segregated neighborhoods. Other black and Hispanic applicants, who live in integrated communities or attend integrated schools, might offer distinct perspectives. Moreover, because the 10 percent plan considers only class rank, it allows for no consideration of a student’s full contribution to campus diversity. The school maintains that it has an interest in attracting a wide range of students of every race with distinct interests, talents, and backgrounds. Such “diversity within diversity,” it argues, helps counter the stereotypes that continue to plague American culture.

When the Texas case first came before the Court, in 2013, the Court waited an inordinately long time after argument before issuing its decision, suggesting that there was some difficulty in reaching consensus. In the end, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a very narrow decision for seven justices, making no new law and merely sending the case back to the court of appeals for reconsideration. According to the majority, the lower court had applied too deferential a standard of review to the question of whether the Texas program satisfied the “strict scrutiny” that the Court requires for race-conscious official action. Only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented. (Justice Elena Kagan was recused, because she worked on the case while earlier serving in the Justice Department.)

In 2014, the lower court, applying more stringent review, once again upheld the program. It found that while the 10 percent plan provided some measure of diversity, it did not achieve the “critical mass” that the university had determined necessary to obtain the educational benefits of diversity. The lower court stressed that the admissions office’s consideration of race, as in the Michigan case, did not employ quotas and was part of a holistic review of applicants in which race was only a modest factor.

There are several reasons why the Court might be reluctant to issue a broad decision ending affirmative action now, as uncomfortable as the conservative justices are with the practice. For one, in the 2003 Michigan affirmative action case, the Court said that while it may need to revisit the question in twenty-five years, affirmative action of the modest kind employed by the University of Michigan Law School (and today by the University of Texas) would be appropriate until then. To reverse that decision now, just midway through the period explicitly set down by the Court itself, would upend settled expectations, as virtually every institution of higher education employs an approach styled on that upheld in Grutter.

Second, to declare an end to affirmative action now, as racial controversy permeates American life, on campus and off, and as videos increasingly capture the unfortunate reality that race still very much matters in America, would be remarkably tone-deaf. It would also likely drastically reduce black and Latino enrollment at many of the nation’s best universities—even as those universities themselves, including Yale and Brown, are acknowledging they need to do more to encourage diversity. Does the Court really want to mandate an all-white-and-Asian Ivy League? Is that what the Equal Protection Clause, enacted to protect the newly freed slaves, was meant to accomplish?

Third, the American establishment is fully behind affirmative action. Friend-of-the-court briefs supporting Texas have been filed by the nation’s best universities, most successful businesses, the American Bar Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and an impressive group of retired generals and admirals, all attesting to the continuing need for affirmative action. Will the conservative justices be willing to buck such a consensus?

Thus, a narrow defeat of the Texas plan seems more likely. But even a narrow decision to overturn would be deeply problematic. If it was constitutional for Michigan Law School to consider race as a modest factor for all of its applicants, why should it be unconstitutional for the University of Texas to do the same for only about one-quarter of its applicants? Should the university be penalized for having adopted a race-neutral admissions plan, even if it finds that it was insufficient to achieve meaningful diversity?

Moreover, to hold that the 10 percent plan achieved “enough” diversity because it produced a class that was 20 percent black and Hispanic is to do exactly what the conservatives most condemn when they object to racial quotas. It reduces the issue to raw racial numbers. The fact that there are 20 percent black and Hispanic students does not necessarily mean that the school has achieved the quality of diversity that furthers its educational mission. The university makes a strong case that a more comprehensive consideration of those applicants who do not get in under the 10 percent rule, including consideration of race, is necessary to achieve effective diversity.

Finally, to remit the University of Texas, and presumably other schools as well, to programs like the 10 percent plan would be perverse. No admissions office would adopt a 10 percent plan except for the fact that it increases minority enrollment where many of the state high schools are segregated. Otherwise, it’s a terrible way to make admissions decisions, as it reduces students to one number—their class rank—at the expense of all other attributes, including test scores, extracurricular activities, essay writing abilities, special skills or experiences, leadership qualities, hardships overcome, and the like. There is no reason to believe that a high school senior in the top 10 percent of her class is more deserving, or would add more to the university community, than another student who was in the next 10 percent but overcame significant hurdles, was president of her class, editor of the school paper, or a fantastic gymnast who devoted thirty hours a week to practice. The 10 percent plan reduces students to numbers—and one specific set of numbers at that.

The Court’s affirmative action jurisprudence has always been predicated on the importance of considering the whole person. Notwithstanding the Court’s deep divisions on the ultimate issue of affirmative action, everyone, conservative and liberal alike, agrees that each applicant deserves to be considered holistically. To strike down Texas’s program would be to substitute the judgment of five justices, based on nothing more than raw racial numbers, for the academic assessment of a university grounded in the importance of considering its applicants fully, in all their glorious diversity.

I am a member of a martial arts group that performs at annual temple fairs around Beijing. Half of our group are children, and almost without fail they meet at a park on the west side of town at around three in the afternoon to practice fighting with staffs with our teacher, a bear-like thirty-seven-year-old bus driver named Mr. Zhao. His personal motto: “Life is but a dream; keep smiling all the time.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Zhao wasn’t smiling. Around two, one of the children sent out a message on China’s most popular social media site, WeChat, asking if anyone was going to the park. Mr. Zhao sent out a quick reply: “None of you are to go to the park! The air is poisoned! Stay home! Wait for clearer air toward the weekend.”

This was a change. Over the past years our group has always practiced, no matter how bad the air. The city’s first major “airpocalypse” was in 2013, when Beijing’s Air Quality Index hit 755 on a scale of zero to 500. In an infamous Twitter post, the US embassy called it “crazy bad.” But it wasn’t so crazy that Mr. Zhao cancelled martial arts practice. Last month was no different. On November 30, it reached 611 but they practiced. On some of these days I would make excuses and not show up. On others I would wear a face mask and then take it off before I arrived–no one else, of course, was wearing a mask and I self-consciously felt like the foreign know-it-all to show up with one on.

So what is different this time? I think the answer is a gradual awakening to the fact that becoming the world’s factory has made people richer, but poisoned the environment. Think of it as another example of China’s slow-motion rising consciousness—the cumulative effect of better education, more money, and more awareness. The government can gloss over rights abuses. It can conduct secretive trials of prominent activists. But it cannot easily hide this kind of air, or blame it on foreigners. And it realizes that if it is seen to be dealing with the issue, the political fallout will be minor.

These were drastic measures but sensible—and in complete contrast to how the government has handled previous air crises. When the US embassy began monitoring air quality and posting its results on Twitter, the government’s Xinhua news agency criticized it as “inaccurate” and “unlawful.” During the late-November attack, a local Greenpeace activist wrote an article criticizing the local government for not issuing the red alert. If 600 wasn’t enough, then what would it take?

The article circulated widely on WeChat, but was soon erased. And yet the government seems to have gotten the message this time and implemented the strict policy. This reflects what appears to be a growing awareness by Chinese officials that this is a real issue for ordinary people.

This awareness began to result in concrete policy changes. By late 2012, the government had set up its own monitoring stations across China. Two young Chinese app designers came up with what I think is still the best app for measuring air quality, China Air Quality Index. It has measurements for 411 cities across China, allowing one to watch, in almost pathological detail, pollution clouds sweep across the country.

Around that time I talked to the developers. They said that most of the downloads were probably from foreigners, but they noted that more and more Chinese seemed to be downloading. This feeling was reinforced in 2013 when I spent a couple of weeks in what was then China’s most polluted city, the steel city of Handan. The dubious distinction has since moved slightly north to Baoding, but both cities are similar for lying in the middle of the highest concentrations of steel production in the world, all powered by coal. As I wrote in an article then, discontent was growing even among steel workers—the people whose jobs were on the line.

I was especially struck by an official I met from the local Communist Party school. She told me that the party realizes that discontent is growing and is instructing officials to make sure that factory pollution controls really were being used—and not just purchased and switched off to save money and increase production.

Does any of this have relevance for the Paris climate talks? I think so. The (overwhelmingly) men who run the Chinese government may be authoritarian, but climate-change deniers they are not. They are too technocratic for that; for them, it has always been a very hard-nosed political calculation: burning less coal and shutting down industry is costly and potentially destabilizing. If you—the West—want this done, you help us pay for it. It matters more to you than to us.

This is still China’s position, but the wave of pollution sweeping through the capital makes it harder for Chinese negotiators to play hardball. If the negotiations are seen to fail because of China’s intransigence, that will filter back to Beijing through the haze of censorship and, slowly, create resentment. It won’t lead to a political code red, but will be another cause for dissatisfaction in a country where the economy is already slowing. As perverse as it might be, the Chinese capital’s airpocalypse may be in its best long-term interests.

Twenty-one Greek museums and four North American museums have cooperated to collect over five hundred artifacts from Ancient Greece in an extraordinary exhibition called “The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great.” The show went first to Canada (Montreal, then Ottawa), where it had 280,000 visitors. It is now on view at the Field Museum in Chicago, in a series of superbly lit rooms, and will continue to Washington, D.C., in May. The Greek museums were able to make good choices of a variety of important items to lend to the exhibition, including many works that had never been outside Greece. Richard Lariviere, the president of the Field Museum, told me he was glad to see the Greeks coordinate their effort without a need for him to negotiate with twenty-one different institutions.

After a few fertility-goddess figurines from the Cyclades, the show begins with a bang from Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations of sixteenth-century BC Mycenae, and it ends with a bang in the fourth-century tomb of Alexander’s father Philip II of Macedon at Vergina. The finds revealed a spectacular prosperity in both periods—not only in the profusion of gold artifacts but in the training of large numbers of craftsmen executing intricate designs. An elaborately sculptural vessel for sacrificial libations from Mycenae is as full of interactive curves as a Frank Gehry building, but it is carved from one solid block of alabaster.

From the twelve centuries between the Mycenae and the Vergina findings, we are treated to well-selected vases, jewels, and statues. There are two kouroi from Boeotia—life-size nude statues of stylized young men, imitated from Egypt and teaching Greek sculptors how to carve large figures. There is also a kore—life-size young woman stylishly dressed. The vases include a black-figure lekythos that shows Achilles dragging the body of Hektor around the walls of Troy, and a red-figure kylix from Athens that shows Herakles defeating Antaeus by holding him away from his restorative earth.

Much of this material, most telling the finds from Mycenae and Vergina, remind us that we learn a great deal about Greek art by being grave robbers. The immensely privileged eased themselves into the afterlife with much of the booty that had cushioned their time on earth. It seems they aimed at taking along enough symbols of power and wealth to get whatever passes for honor in the underworld. Greek and Roman rulers and victors wore wreaths more often than crowns; so we find gold imitations of the rich foliation of crowns made from different tree branches. Phillip II was buried in an underground miniature temple wearing an oak leaf wreath made with stunning realism by his little army of goldsmiths. That wreath is not in the show (they must keep some things for tourists at the stunning archaeological museum at Vergina, which my wife and I visited not long after it was opened to the public). But this show has the gold myrtle wreath worn by his queen Meda, who was buried with Philip. It has scores of minutely accurate branches, buds, and blossoms, in a miracle of craftsmanship—enough to teach us why so many Renaissance artists began as members of the goldsmith guilds.

Queen Meda removed her treasures from all sight of the living, and her prizes stayed hidden until 1977, when Manolis Andronikos and his team discovered the underground building where they were buried. This was a spectacular achievement, in the archeological tradition that began two centuries earlier, when Heinrich Schliemann unearthed the great Mycenaean tomb sites and found a gold death mask he took to be Agamemnon’s (from the Iliad). The world press made this discovery famous, though Schliemann later found a more artistic mask and transferred to it the honor of being Agamemnon’s (both guesses were off by centuries from the period presented by Homer).

That first mask has jumbled features that are pressed down, as if melting into the flat disk. It is an angry-looking image. Gilbert Chesterton said that the hero of his 1907 novel The Man Who Was Thursday was frightened as a child by an image of the mask, and he later sees a face resembling it swell out to fill the cosmos. The current show marks the first time this mask has left Greece, and it is not hard to share Schliemann’s thrill at what seemed a way of digging down into the very drama of the Iliad. The second mask, which Schliemann promoted as the “real” Agamemnon, is in the exhibition, but in a fine nineteenth-century replica—it has delicate chasing for details of eyebrow, mustache, and beard.

The other treasures from Mycenae show the same combination of disciplined craft and immense privilege. A certain grave contained not one gold ornament in the form of an octopus but fifty-three of them (perhaps for use on garments or draperies?). The classical scholar Gregory Hays, in a recent article in The New York Review, reminds us how false was the old Edith Hamilton view of Greeks as models of all greatness. Later and better scholarship has pointed out the inequities and evils in Greek cities—built on slavery, on the oppression of women, on selective glorification of pederasty that could denigrate adult homosexuality (exactly reversing our own moral precepts). Hays is clearly right, but this show reveals how hard it is to write history “from the bottom up” when poor Greeks could mostly not read and certainly not write (an expensive undertaking, in its materials, reproduction, and dissemination). There are no slaves here to tell us how they were buried, no women here but those who, like Philip’s Meda, wore signs of their husbands’ power. The privileged, taking up residence in their lavishly prepared last homes, thought they would be privileged forever, and they were partly right.

The promotion of this show stresses that things like democracy and philosophy make us one with the Greeks—and we get a few symbols of those things (bronze tokens used to vote in Athenian trials, a Roman copy of a marble head of Plato). But what makes the Greeks we encounter here most like us is the great social and financial inequality in both cultures. The equivalent of much that is seen here are the multiple homes, yachts, and private jets of our Donald Trumps. The great difference is that their Trumps had better taste.

The easy-to-carry catalog of “The Greeks” has helpful maps, time lines, and photographs of the works on view, but it is short on information. Dimensions are not given. The statue of Alexander the Great as the god Pan, used to promote the show, could from the catalog picture be anything from a miniature to life-size. Seen in the Field Museum, inside its vitrine, it seems not much more than a foot high. Other information is missing. Under the image of the second “mask of Agamemnon” there is no notice that it is a replica, not the original. Of a Mycenaean war helmet, made from serried ranks of boar tusks, we are not told that its leather basis had to be recreated. But the catalog is helpfully organized around the plan of the show itself, which keeps us aware of period and place as we go through it.

One hopes the exhibition will raise some money for a financially straitened country and that it will encourage more tourism to it. It would be wonderful if the Greeks’ rich forebears should help the poor Greeks of our day—which is a different riff on history “from the top down.”

“The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great” is on view at the Field Museum in Chicago through April 10, and will continue to the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C., in May.

Among the virtues of Todd Haynes’s new film, Carol, is the delicacy, the patience, and the sheer amount of screen time that it lavishes on the experience of falling in love: the hesitations and doubts, the seemingly casual exchanges freighted with meaning and suppressed emotion, the simple happiness of being together. In so many films, especially Hollywood films, love either sets the plot in motion (Bonnie and Clyde meet and rob banks) or provides the punch line: after ignoring the obvious for two hours, the contentious pair finally embrace just as the credits roll.

But in Carol, which tells the story of how Carol, a wealthy married woman, meets and then falls in love with a younger woman in 1950s Manhattan, love is the plot. The narrative takes its time, inching its lovers toward a mutual recognition of the passion that thrums beneath the surface without fully declaring itself until late in the film. It’s not as if we are waiting to find out whether Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) and Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) will have sex, which we assume they will. What engages us is the fact that neither is entirely certain that the other loves her back, and that Carol has important reasons for not wanting to fall in love with the much younger sales clerk and would-be photographer, Therese. Ramping up the drama is the fact that we are never permitted to forget the social pressures and restrictive mores of the mid-twentieth century.

In one scene, the bewildered Therese asks her even more clueless boyfriend Richard (Jake Lacy) if he’s ever heard of a woman falling in love with another woman. It’s an innocent, almost comical moment, as it is in the novel on which the film is based: The Price of Salt, which Patricia Highsmith, the marvelous writer of literary thrillers, published in 1952 under a pseudonym, Claire Morgan. What makes the scene work so well is the hapless clumsiness with which Therese interrogates the well-meaning Richard, who wants to marry her and take her to Europe; he’s the sort of man Virginia Woolf so uncharitably called “such dead, though excellent, mutton.” In the novel, Therese asks if he’s ever heard of “two people who fall in love suddenly with each other, out of the blue. Say two men or two girls.” Has he ever been in love with a boy? Of course not, says straight-arrow Richard. In any case, his response hardly matters, because Therese doesn’t love him, and she already knows and doesn’t know the answer to her question.

In the film—which has just been nominated for five Golden Globe awards—we learn early on that Carol has had an affair with her best friend Abby (Sarah Paulson); in the book, Therese doesn’t discover this until much later. Thus the film audience is more likely than the novel’s protagonist to imagine that Carol’s interest in Therese might be erotic; this is in part because we know something about Carol’s history, and in part because we are watching the film in 2015, when the idea of a lesbian relationship no longer seems aberrant or exotic. In Highsmith’s book, Therese can think rhapsodically about Carol and want only to be with her—and still wonder whether she is in love.

The novel is written from Therese’s point of view, so it is easier for Highsmith (and her readers) to regard events through the prism of the young woman’s genuine confusion and warring emotions. During her first lunch with Carol, Therese is at once aroused and baffled by the older woman’s presence:

Once the backs of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese’s skin there felt separately alive now, and rather burning. Therese could not understand it, but it was so. Therese glanced at her face that was somewhat turned away, and again she knew that instant of half-recognition. And knew, too, that it was not to be believed.

The voice of the novel tells us everything that Therese thinks, which we cannot know in a film. But the talented Rooney Mara makes us feel as if we do, playing Therese as young, intelligent, hopeful, inexperienced, but not entirely naive. At their first lunch together—in theory, a friendly occasion, but shimmering with yearning—Carol asks Therese what she wants to do with her life, and Therese replies that she can’t even decide what to order for lunch. Carol orders spinach with eggs on top and a martini, a (we may feel) unappetizing combination that Blanchett/Carol manages to make sound like the most delicious, sophisticated lunch in the world. Unsurprisingly, Therese tells the waiter that she’ll have what Carol’s having.

Todd Haynes—whose previous films include the brilliant Safe, in which Julianne Moore played a woman deathly allergic to nearly every chemical substance common in modern life, and Far From Heaven, with its lush 1950s beauty and its Douglas Sirk-like focus on the snakes lurking in the gardens of the Edenic suburbs—knows how effective it can be to set a scene in a milieu that is at once attractive, inviting, and creepy. Therese and Carol first meet in the toy section of Frankenberg’s, a Manhattan department store where Therese works as a temporary Christmas-season sales girl, and where Carol has come to buy a gift for her daughter Rindy. It’s pleasant to be guided by the camera through the glittering holiday paradise, even as Frankenberg’s toy department reveals itself as a hive buzzing with female anxiety, and as a place of enslavement for Therese.

As Therese labors anxiously under the watchful eye of her supervisor, we realize just how stressful selling dolls can be. No wonder she focuses on the deceptively placid, radiantly beautiful Carol, swirling through aisles in her mink, so confident, so entitled, so rich that she doesn’t have to deliberate or, heaven forbid, ask a price. With Therese’s help, Carol requires only a few moments to decide what to get for her young, school-age daughter. (In the film, Therese suggests a train set.) Carol arranges to have the gifts sent to her home in New Jersey and uses the time she has left at the sales counter to seduce Therese forever with a look, a few words, a brief expression of interest, and a fleeting smile.

Wisely, on the part of the writer—Phyllis Nagy has done an excellent job of adapting the novel for the screen—it’s Therese who makes the next move. (In the book she sends Carol a card; in the film, she has a “better” reason for communicating, returning the gloves that Carol has left on the counter.) The seduction is mutual, as it will be throughout. One of the women is older, one younger, but neither is a child—or a predator. Surely, Carol has lot more to lose from following her desires. Contrary to what one might expect, it’s Carol, not the waiflike Therese, who is the princess in the tower; her house in New Jersey, to which Therese pays several chaste but desire-saturated visits, resembles a medieval castle.

What’s at stake is Carol’s beloved daughter, Rindy, the subject of a fierce custody dispute in Carol’s divorce from her wealthy, powerful husband, Harge. Setting the film (like the novel) in the 1950s means that Therese and Carol’s forbidden love must be kept secret in ways that would be unnecessary now, at least for American women of their class, race, and region; one can imagine a contemporary judge awarding Rindy to the two loving moms rather than the bullying, homophobic Harge, who reveals his bad character by hiring a seedy private detective to follow his wife and Therese on a cross-country road trip and record their private motel-room conversations. Harge (Kyle Chandler) is something of a monster, so enraged at having lost control of his beautiful wife that he will stop at nothing to cause her pain, even if it means that their daughter will suffer.

Cate Blachett’s astonishing skill in creating a woman who is so nuanced, intense, and full of contradictions (controlled and helpless, anguished and amused) raises this admirable film to an even higher level. We may not know Therese’s every thought, as we do in Highsmith’s novel, but we do see what Therese sees: the troubled, appealing, nearly irresistible Carol. In a distressing sequence that shows off the range of Blanchett’s gifts, Carol, undergoing psychotherapy for Rindy’s sake and trying to fit back into the role of Harge’s wife, endures a family meal with Harge’s parents. It’s alarming in much the same way as the homecoming scene in John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence, though Carol is more decorous and repressed than the woman played by Gena Rowlands. Still, the tension we feel is the same: the building pressure of the authentic self about to erupt from behind the ill-fitting mask of propriety and good behavior.

The Price of Salt was the only one of Highsmith’s books that appeared under a pseudonym, apparently because the lesbian writer was warned away from putting her name on a novel about lesbians. Like Haynes’s film, the novel’s depiction of sexuality is at once romantic and perfectly clear (it’s impossible not to understand what the woman are doing) without being graphic. “Her arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else, of Carol’s hand that slid along her ribs, Carol’s hair that brushed her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought could follow.” Of course, a passage such as this would have seemed far more scandalous in the 1950s than it does today.

Often the film suggests an homage to the movie stars of the period. Mara has a gamine-like quality reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn. At one moment, Carol may remind us of Kim Novak as Madeleine in Vertigo, at others of Grace Kelly or any of the frosty blondes of whom Alfred Hitchcock was so fond.

It’s no wonder that Alfred Hitchcock was the first to make a film out of a Patricia Highsmith novel. Both artists shared, among other things, an uncanny ability to evoke the panic of being falsely accused—and cornered. In Hitchcock’s 1951 adaptation of Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, its hero (Farley Granger) is undone by a pact he’s made with a sociopathic stranger (Robert Walker). Most often Highsmith’s heroes are trapped by the consequences of quasi-accidental but convenient murders, by their own impulse crimes, by their warped obsessions, and by the suspicions of others. In Carol, the threat is not that someone will be found guilty of murder, but that intolerance may keep the lovers apart. The crime of which they stand accused is that of having found one another and wanting to be happy.

One can also understand why the ferociously private Highsmith might have hesitated to publish, under her own name, the most personal of her novels. It’s the only one of her books in which her protagonist is ensnared, obsessed, and ultimately freed not by murder or paranoia but by the equally risky and suspenseful awakening of love—a process that Todd Haynes and his marvelous cast capture so movingly on screen.

Todd Haynes’s Carol is playing in select theaters.

The United States—mother country of new religions—has always been prone to new forms of sacred architecture, in purpose as well as style. This has been demonstrated by Shaker meeting houses, Mormon tabernacles, Christian Science reading rooms, Scientology celebrity centers, and another very American manifestation: the evangelical Christian megachurch. This last phenomenon arose in Southern California with such examples as Brook Hawkins’s Angelus Temple of 1922-1923 in Los Angeles, a large circular arena with an unsupported concrete dome and twin radio towers that transmitted the ecstatic sermons of the faith healer Aimee Semple McPherson.

A later, more architecturally ambitious incarnation of the megachurch was Richard Neutra’s Garden Grove Community Church of 1959-1961 in Orange County, California, with its drive-in “sanctuary” where the faithful could receive the word of God from the evangelist Robert Schuller as they sat in their cars during his “Hour of Power” telecasts. Schuller followed the Neutra design by commissioning Philip Johnson and John Burgee to build the glitzy Crystal Cathedral of 1977-1981. But his ministry eventually went bankrupt, and in 2012 that huge mirror-glass structure was sold to the Catholic Church, which is turning it into an actual cathedral.

The spread of megachurches—there are now some 1,650 of them, each with 2,000 or more people attending weekly—is typified by their downplaying of religious symbolism and traditional ritual, with an emphasis instead on scripture, self-actualization, an all-pervasive informality, and a domestic rather than institutional atmosphere. In addition to worship services and Bible study, megachurches generally offer a host of secular activities (exercise classes, weight-loss programs, day care, job counseling, and the like) that make them service-oriented community centers more than havens of contemplative devotion.

Now we have perhaps the inevitable next step in this evolving concept: Grace Farms, a smaller, upscale version of the evangelical Christian megachurch, which opened to the public in New Canaan, Connecticut, in October. With structures designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Japanese office SANAA (which recently won the commission for the new National Gallery and Ludwig of Contemporary Art in Budapest) and landscaping by the American firm Olin, it exhibits far better taste and loftier cultural aspirations than the big-box spiritual supermarkets of the Sun Belt.

Set amid a verdant, gently rolling eighty-acre former horse farm, Grace Farms is described on its website as “a welcoming new place…for people to experience nature, encounter the arts, pursue justice, foster community, and explore faith.” That is quite an idealistic agenda, and only the most cynical are likely to see this impressive undertaking as anything but a potential boon to contemporary society.

In choosing SANAA, known for its barely-there Minimalist aesthetic, Grace Farms’ benefactors signaled their desire for an architectural presence that would nearly vanish. The firm’s 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan (1999-2004), a low, circular structure with glass walls, is similarly approachable from all directions and lacks a strongly emphasized main entrance. The New Canaan scheme—called the River for the way it seems to flow naturally down its hillside site—is as transparent as its Japanese precursor, but looks even more ethereal thanks to its thin, extruded, meandering form and astonishingly fine (though low-key) materials and details. Appropriately, it is not far from New Canaan’s most famous landmark, Philip Johnson’s Glass House of 1949-1950, another obvious prototype.

That there is considerable money behind this endeavor—$120 million is the estimated total cost of both the land and construction—stems in no small part from a taxation system very favorable to hedge funds, to say nothing of tax-exempt foundations and religious institutions. Grace Farms’ principal backers are Robert P. Prince, co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund (Forbes has estimated his income for one recent year at $70 million) and his wife, Sharon Prince, a former US president for an Icelandic outerwear company called 66 Degrees North, who serves as president of the Grace Farms Foundation, which was established in 2009. They and three other families founded the nondenominational Grace Community Church in 2001, and several of those friends are involved with both entities.

The connection between the two organizations is left vague by their adherents, who insist that Grace Farms is not a church. In keeping with this braoder mission, the complex includes a library (which focuses on five themes–“Faith + Meaning,” “Art + Beauty,” “Justice + Ethics,” “Nature + Environment,” and “Community + Relationships”), a restaurant, tearoom, offices, and sunken indoor basketball court; there are also classrooms, meeting spaces, performance and art studios, and more offices in two nearby converted stables. At the River, it could well be said, in the words of the Randy Newman song, that “human kindness is overflowing.” However, the so-called Gold Coast of Fairfield County, which includes New Canaan, ranks sixth in the US in per-capita income and presumably is not in dire need of more libraries, sports facilities, or parkland.

The new complex also contains a seven-hundred-seat auditorium for religious services called the Sanctuary. This amphitheater-like configuration, wrapped with window-walls that afford panoramic views of the bucolic property (“Nature is the most expensive wallpaper,” Johnson jokingly said of similar vistas from inside his nearby retreat), is alternatively used for secular programs such as concerts and lectures, and thus is devoid of religious imagery. A simple cross is brought in for Sunday prayer meetings.

This space’s capacity is much smaller than a megachurch, yet soon after its opening Grace Farms welcomed 2,500 people on a single day, well within megachurch range. Although visitors thus far have included curious locals as well as the culturally aware (including art-collecting New York friends of ours who invited us to join them on their second visit there), many others are certain to be faith seekers attracted by the outreach of Grace Community Church’s senior pastor, Cliffe Knechtle. His evangelical Sunday morning “television ministry”—a show called Give Me an Answer—airs on a Connecticut station and radio channels in the high-income broadcast markets of New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Beyond any quibbles of definition, Grace Farms is an exquisitely realized exercise in integrated architectural and landscape design. A series of five biomorphic, flat-roofed pavilions of different dimensions and joined by sinuous covered open-air walkways cascades down a voluptuously contoured terrain—which was doubtless given extra encouragement by bulldozers. Yet this reshaping has been so flawlessly accomplished that everything appears to be of geological origin.

Indeed, the composition conveys its elevated aims with a quiet perfectionism and elegant restraint that many will see as divinely inspired. Only Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, and Oscar Niemeyer among modern masters have melded the natural and the man-made as seamlessly as this. There are no bad views at the River, though during the winter it might prove difficult to proceed from one part of the ensemble to another, since the units do not connect internally and one must go outdoors to move between them.

It is ironic that despite these self-effacing design qualities—ego-loss on an environmental scale—Grace Farms is certain to become an architectural pilgrimage place. This is SANAA’s pinnacle achievement to date, owing in large measure to a budget big enough to ensure the high level of craftsmanship on which Minimalism so greatly depends. (The firm’s Rolex Learning Center of 2007-2010 in Lausanne, Switzerland, is marred by its far-from-perfect execution, surprising for a project commissioned by a Swiss watchmaking concern.)

Grace Farms plans to present a wide range of cultural and educational programs free of charge to the public. It has thus far commissioned five site-specific artworks by major international figures. Among them are Olafur Eliasson (whose textile multiples, Mat for multidimensional prayers, are intended for use on the Sanctuary’s floor during what Grace Farms’s public relations firm describes as “an open unstructured quiet time,” if not outright prayer) and Thomas Demand (whose Farm 56, a large, collage-like photo of the project’s many study models, hangs in the library.) Most admirably, Grace Farms aims to address difficult social problems. Its “justice initiative” focuses on the rapid spread of sexual trafficking, subject of a program recently held there to bring together regional law enforcement officers and national security experts in order to devise practical strategies for direct action.

It is not yet clear how much these efforts will contribute as a force for good. The extent to which religion gives shape to Grace Farms’ overall ethos may or may not be of overriding significance. But for all the thoughtfulness that has gone into its creation, one wonders—especially during the pontificate of Pope Francis I, present-day apostle of the poor—whether the expenditure of such immense sums, in the midst of almost unimaginably concentrated wealth, is the true path to a state of grace for those who would alleviate the sufferings of mankind.

We’re always hearing about the ends of eras, but the recent death of the great actress Setsuko Hara really is the end of an era—the era of the classic Japanese film, of the directors Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse, Kurosawa, and Kinoshita (to name only the best-known here in America), and of the period’s dominant actresses—Kinuyo Tanaka, Hideko Takamine, Isuzu Yamada, Machiko Kyō, and Hara herself. Her death at the age of ninety-five, more than fifty years after her voluntary retirement from the screen—and from all public life—still comes as a shock. There’s now no one left of this astounding constellation of talent; and that she was by far the most emblematic figure of the era makes her disappearance reverberate even more strongly.

In the West, most of us first encountered her in 1972 when Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 masterpiece, Tokyo Story, was released here. I had never heard of Ozu, although I had seen and admired international award-winning Japanese films like Rashomon, Gate of Hell, and Ugetsu. Ozu had obviously been considered “too Japanese” for Western consumption, and it was greatly due to Dan Talbot, who ran the Upper-West-Side movie house the New Yorker Theater, as well as an important film-distribution company, that he finally emerged here. Beginning with the moment when Tokyo Story first reached us, Ozu’s fame and influence have grown and grown to their current towering stature.

I remember reading the Times’s ecstatic review of it and dragging myself and my wife, Maria, to upper Broadway on the hunch that we would love it. In the Seventies the New Yorker was the place to go for the city’s trendiest film-lovers, of whom I was not one. My passions were books and dance; I had no background in cinema history or aesthetics. I watched movies the way I read novels, for story and character, and a vision of life. Almost from the first moment, Tokyo Story seemed to me different from any movie I had ever seen—as true to life and as moving as Chekhov. By the time the movie was halfway over, I realized that the sophisticated audience was in tears—as I still am when I see it, and I’ve seen it more than a dozen times.

An old couple leave their distant seaport town in the south to visit their grown children in Tokyo, and return home a short time later, disappointed but not embittered. Their doctor son is preoccupied with his middling career and his family; their daughter, who runs a beauty parlor, is grasping and callous. Only their daughter-in-law—whose husband, their middle son, died in the war—welcomes them with a full heart. She lives alone in a respectable but shabby room and supports herself with an ordinary office job, casually taken advantage of by her late husband’s family.

Her name is Noriko, and she is played by Setsuko Hara—a classic grave beauty with huge eyes and an exceptionally wide smile, and an actress of extraordinary restraint, across whose mobile face flicker emotions that reveal a woman of deep feeling and extraordinary generosity. Noriko’s nobility of character, together with her unbreachable modesty and tact, make her final revelation of loneliness and unhappiness—and her unvarnished perception of humanity—all the more anguishing. She embodies Ozu’s vision: people die, families dissolve, life disappoints. Accept it and endure.

Noriko is the quintessential Hara character, and in her other Ozu roles she suggests the same spiritual yet down-to-earth qualities. She worked for other directors as well, of course (including, atypically, for Kurosawa in his unsatisfactory version of The Idiot), yet always in a narrow range of roles. She is inescapably refined, sensitive, well-born, and almost always modern—she’s the archetype of the post-war young woman. Yet she also embodies the virtues of the traditional Japanese woman: loyalty, self-sacrifice, suffering in silence; she’s the perfect daughter, wife, mother. She was utterly real, yet she represented an ideal…the ideal. It was the revered novelist Shusaku Endo who said of her, “Can it be possible that there is such a woman in this world?”

Hara was born in Yokohama in 1920, and it was an uncle, a director, who eased her way into the movies when she was fifteen. Two years later she was playing central roles, her fresh beauty and charm irresistible. But it wasn’t long before her inner depth and strength had manifested themselves. There would be no hiccups or longueurs in her thirty-year career.

She was famously and completely private about her life, never marrying, never linked with anyone romantically, although many people believe that she and Ozu had an affair: he, too, never married, living with his mother until she died only two years before his own death on his sixtieth birthday in 1963. He was buried in the seaside resort town of Kamakura, just outside Tokyo, and it was to Kamakura that Hara, in her early forties, retired shortly after his death, living out her long life in her family house, making no public appearances, shunning interviewers and photographers, mostly seeing family and her old classmates from school. The one thing she did reveal to her countless admirers, in her final press conference, was that she had never enjoyed making movies, and had only done it to help her family financially. Then, fifty-odd years of silence. To avoid fuss, she had arranged that her death, which occurred on September 5, not be made public until more than two months had gone by.

Setsuko Hara has frequently been called the Garbo of Japan not only because of her unique beauty and mysterious spiritual quality but because of her early withdrawal from public life. Garbo, however, flirted with the idea of a comeback, and her retirement to the Upper East Side of Manhattan was hardly equivalent to Hara’s ruthless self-imposed isolation. Hara really did want to be left alone. (If she resembles any Western star it is Lillian Gish, whose radiant beauty also masked indomitable strength, whose ambiguous relationship to D.W. Griffith echoes Hara’s to Ozu, who never married and was hardly ever the subject of gossip and speculation—a foreshadowing of Hara’s renown as Japan’s “eternal virgin.”) And yet she retains her powerful grip on those of us who have been under her spell from the start. I remember Dick Cavett telling me that on a trip to Japan he had found out where she lived, made a pilgrimage to Kamakura, left a bouquet of flowers on her doorstep, rung the doorbell, and then scurried away, chagrined at the idea that he had trespassed on her privacy.

And to Susan Sontag she was a sacred icon—whenever a Hara film was being shown at Japan Society (on East 47^th Street), Susan was there in the front row. I had arranged for a private screening at MoMA of one of her greatest films, The Ball at the Anjo House—a postwar version of The Cherry Orchard that was the Japanese critics’ choice as the finest movie of 1947—and Susan, of course, was on my list, and overjoyed to be seeing it. Unfortunately, she had to leave halfway through: it was opening night at the Met and she was due there. But we had found out that the following week Anjo was going to be shown, once only, at a film festival in Boston, and Susan made her own pilgrimage. How not?

On a more personal note: in the fifty-odd years that I’ve been seeing movies, plays, operas, and ballets with Maria, the screening at MoMA was the only time she ever broke into audible sobs. As for Tokyo Story, in 2012 it was the number-one choice of the world’s leading directors as the greatest film ever made. It has my vote too.

Loving Day

by Mat Johnson

Spiegel and Grau, 287 pp., $26.00

The importing of human beings into the US from Africa to be sold as slaves was outlawed in 1808, after which the slave markets of the southern states traded in black people born in America. The rules of New World slavery decreed that a person’s status was derived from that of the mother, not the father. A slave owner’s children by an enslaved woman were, firstly, assets. Neither Frederick Douglass nor Booker T. Washington considered himself mixed-race, because of the one-drop rule that determined how much black blood made a person black. They loathed the thought of their slave-owning white fathers. Douglass never saw his mother’s face in the daylight, because she was always going to or coming back from the fields in the dark.

What outraged white southerners about Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not only that Harriet Beecher Stowe asserted that black people were better Christians than white people; she was also frank about the immorality of the white man’s relations with the black women in his power. But Stowe had as much trouble as Lincoln in imagining the social destiny of mixed-race people who were pink enough in fact to pass for white (a problem central to Mat Johnson’s brilliantly satirical new novel Loving Day).

In his book The Negro in American Fiction (1937), Sterling Brown called James Fenimore Cooper’s Cora Munro in The Last of the Mohicans“the mother of all tragic mulattoes.” The landfill of American literature includes numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels and plays—by white authors—sometimes condemning, but mostly sorrowing for those racial outcasts who don’t fit in with the black masses but won’t ever be accepted by white society either. “Miscegenation” and “mulatto” are terms of denigration, and the beautiful, doomed mulatto—usually a woman—typically dies after she is exposed before the unsuspecting white man who is about to marry her.

William Wells Brown wrote his fugitive slave narrative and went on to publish in London in 1853 the first novel by an African-American, Clotel; or The President’s Daughter. Clotel is the child of Thomas Jefferson by his mulatto housekeeper, a suggestion of the gossip about Sally Hemings in historical black America. In Brown’s first edition, Clotel leaps to her death in the Potomac rather than be taken back into slavery and concubinage. However, her daughter is reunited in France with the blue-eyed black man she had loved when they were both in bondage. In the edition of Brown’s novel published in 1867, Clotel turns down marriage to a white man in order to become a nurse for Union troops.

Brown named the three possible fates for the mulatto in American literature: death, exile, or renunciation. In the novels of Frances E.W. Harper and Pauline Hopkins, late-nineteenth- century black writers, the black heroines with rosebud mouths who could have passed for white are proud to choose service to their race as teachers over marriage to white men. Black writers were reinterpreting stereotypes.

In James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a black man who has succeeded in passing for white his entire life, a widower and successful businessman with children, writes his confession, because denying his true racial identity has cost him his soul. In Nella Larsen’s bleak comedy of manners, Passing (1929), the decision to pass is understood as an individual solution to a mass problem, racial discrimination; but the black woman looking at the reckless acquaintance whose white husband does not know he is married to a black woman does not give her away. Larsen, herself something of a tragic mulatto, had sophistication, but passing as a subject in popular culture was the stuff of melodrama. “Once a Pancake,” Sterling Brown called his review of Fannie Hurst’s best seller Imitation of Life (1933), which was twice made into a film.

By that time passing seemed obsolete. The carnage of World War I undermined Social Darwinism; fear of racial mongrelization seemed extremist as a theme. After all, not every mixed-race person looked white; not everyone was desperate to be white; and much Harlem Renaissance writing stresses the varieties of blackness, the different skin tones on display in the ghetto streets. If either you or the law said you were black, then blackness was a shared condition, no matter how light-skinned you were.

Nevertheless, in 1935, Langston Hughes was hopeful of Broadway success with his play Mulatto. That old southern problem: What does a white man do with his black son by his beloved mistress now that his son has grown up and refuses to accept his place as a black man? The son kills his father and his mother holds off the lynch mob as her son prepares to kill himself. In novels and plays about passing, effortful attempts are sometimes made to say that these unions had been loving, if socially impossible.

But the unions that produced the unhappy offspring have already taken place, offstage. There is a reason Faulkner’s mulatto characters are silent men. Hughes included stories about passing in his collection The Ways of White Folks (1934), but he also dealt with interracial romance, which was daring. Then the Communist Party brought interracial sex into American literature in a way that the libidinous Jazz Age had not, apart from the writings of Jean Toomer. In 1934, the Party’s Harlem branch sent its white male comrades to dancing classes so that the black women would have guys to dance with at Party socials, because the black men got so busy with the white women comrades.

Richard Wright, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry—the immediate postwar generation of black writers, some of whom had served their literary apprenticeships at Party publications—and white novelists such as Lillian Smith and William Styron assaulted the ultimate taboo, writing fictions that concerned interracial intimacy, as a way of challenging the existing social order. To write about interracial love was considered one of the triumphs of American realism; it was seen as telling more of the truth about the black side of things. But for the succeeding waves of black novelists, from James Baldwin and Paule Marshall to Cecil Brown and Andrea Lee, the interracial love affair became a problem of black identity. This happened before black feminist theory in the late 1970s proclaimed the difference between the experiences of black women and white women and therefore helped to usher in the era of identity politics.

Black conservatives in the 1990s presented themselves as brave dissenters from a juggernaut black-militant, ghetto-determined definition of blackness. They complained about the conformism of black unity; they demanded that blackness be privatized, so to speak, because what they really didn’t like was the liberalism of a black voting bloc. But they were exploiting a crisis of black youth in integrated classrooms. Who you were supposed to be as a black person in these classes seemed too restrictive of what many felt they now contained.

The mixed-race children of the civil rights era and the Second Reconstruction of the 1970s have come of age. Stories about multicultural upbringings and dual heritages have been written for a while now, as autobiography and fiction. The target this time around is not the fantasy of Anglo-Saxon purity, but rather assumptions of black identity. The concerns are sometimes the same as those in the literature about being black and middle-class. What constitutes authentic blackness and who is entitled to say? Race is an unasked-for existentialism.

In Loving Day, “racial patriotism” is just one of the torments that Mat Johnson’s mixed-race narrator must confront. After a considerable absence, Warren Duffy has returned from Wales to his hometown, Philadelphia. Duffy’s mother was black. She died when he was a child. His white father, of Irish descent, has recently died, leaving Duffy a historic but derelict house on seven acres in Germantown, since the 1970s a depressed, mostly black neighborhood.

Duffy, who looks white, can sound black when he needs to. “People aren’t social, they’re tribal. Race doesn’t exist, but tribes are fucking real.” He left behind in Wales a failed marriage and a failed comic book shop—he drew comics himself. He must renovate and sell the Germantown property in order to pay off his former wife, but he also needs a home for the teenage daughter he never knew he had. If he can get her through her last year of high school and into college then he might begin to redeem himself in his own eyes.

The girl, Tal, has been passing for white without knowing it, brought up by her Jewish grandfather. Her mother has been dead for years. Duffy hadn’t seen her since they met as high school students. He stopped calling her and never learned she’d gotten pregnant. Tal’s fatally ill grandfather discovers that Duffy is back in Philadelphia. He hands over his granddaughter, who looks less like her maternal cousins the older she gets. “So, I’m a black. That’s just fucking great. A black.”

In Wales, Duffy had “never felt blacker.” “I don’t like feeling white. It makes me feel robbed. Of my heritage. Of my true self. Of my mother.” Tal enrolls in an ultra-hippie school for mixed-race students, the Mélange Center, a collection of trailers squatting in a public park. Duffy, with no prospects as a comic book artist, ends up teaching at the Mélange Center, which he calls “Mulattopia.” He is skeptical about its biracial cultural indoctrination of embracing all of one’s ethnic makeup. “Oreos” are black on the outside and white on the inside, but “Sunflowers” are yellow and light surrounding a black core:

There are mulattoes in America who look white and also socialize as white. White-looking mulattoes whose friends are mostly white, who consume the same music and television and books and films as most whites, whose political views are less than a shade apart from the whites as well. They ain’t here. Those mulattoes whose white appearance matches up with the white world they inhabit, those mulattoes aren’t coming to Mulattopia. The world already fits well enough for them.

Those mulattoes who look definitively African American and are fully at home within the African American community—they aren’t here either. Those mulattoes who look clearly black and hang black and are in full embrace of black culture—nope, they’re not here, nowhere to be found. If they were they would denounce this lot of sellouts. I know I would. I can hear them from the place they have in my consciousness.

Duffy carries a torch for the black woman who turned him down and married a black policeman instead—until he embarks on a passionate affair with his daughter’s dance teacher, a free spirit, a high yellow like himself. When Duffy meets her other boyfriend, he thinks:

He’s probably one of those white guys who think they’re enlightened just because they’ve realized the obvious fact that black women are beautiful. He’s probably one of those white guys who think poking their pink members in black women will somehow cure racism. I don’t trust interracial couples. I don’t even trust the one that made me: I think of who my father was, who my mother was, and have no idea why they first hooked up, let alone fell in love. I don’t know if I’m the by-product of a racialized eroticism or a romantic rebellion of societal norms. I’m fine with mixed-race unions that just happen, are formed when two people randomly connect. But there are other kinds of interracial couplings with suspect motivation, with connections based on fetishizing of black sexuality, or internalized white supremacy.

The other woman pulling Duffy into the unknown is the older Jewish director of the center itself, “the great matriarch of the new people.” The loopy faculty and other mixed-race students become less like a substitute family for his daughter in Duffy’s eyes and much more like a cult that will derail her life. He plots a desperate act to save her during celebrations of what the school proclaims as the national holiday of mixed-race Americans, “Loving Day”:

In 1958, eighteen-year-old Mildred Jeter got knocked up by her boyfriend, Richard Loving, a family friend six years older than she, and they decided the best thing to do next was get married. They drove up from Central Point, Virginia, to Washington, D.C., because Richard was a white guy and Virginia had a law called the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that said white people and black people couldn’t get married.

Soon after they got back, the police raided their home in the dark of night, hoping to catch them in the act of fucking, because that was illegal too—which is really ironic when you reflect that the God of Virginia is Thomas Jefferson. They were sentenced to a year in prison, but allowed to have that downgraded to probation as long as they agreed to leave the state and never come back. Six years later, sick of not being able to see their family and broke in D.C., they decided to sue the State of Virginia. It took three years for the Supreme Court to rule in their favor, but it did unanimously, and Loving v. Virginia became the case that decriminalized interracial marriage in America.

Warren Duffy is irresistible in his masculine vulnerabilities, a seductive loser. The appeal of Loving Day is largely in his tone, the fluency of his despair, his flair as an analyst of race and of himself. “Half-European. Whiteness—that’s not really something you can be half of. That’s more of an all or nothing privilege, perspective thing.” But the black woman he used to love is someone who has made up her mind about what race is. Any discussion of it would be an attack on her reality. “Apparently not just black and white people are sleeping together,” Duffy says of the new mixed-race combos possible in America today. He tells her that black people get uncomfortable when they don’t get to have the final say on race in America, and she warns that he is lost in some “crazy Oreo shit,” because “quitting blackness” is of no help in a time of crisis, when black boys are being used for target practice by white cops and the prisons are “overflowing with victims of white judgment.”

Mat Johnson was born in Philadelphia in 1970. His first novel, Drop (2000), relates a young black commercial artist’s attempt to escape Philadelphia and make a life in England. Johnson himself is of mixed-race parentage. In his second novel, Hunting in Harlem (2003), he tried his hand at mystery writing, his hero an ex-con. In his third, Incognegro (2008)—a graphic novel that he created with the artist Warren Pleece, and based perhaps on the experiences of the head of the NAACP, Walter White—a black reporter in the 1930s light enough to pass for white investigates lynchings down South.

Johnson wrote a long, lively essay on the brutal suppression of a suspected slave rebellion in eighteenth-century New York, The Great Negro Plot (2007). His previous novel, Pym (2011), is an ambitious response to Edgar Allan Poe’s weird 1838 novel that has black people inhabiting the South Pole, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

Johnson is able to interrogate black history. In Loving Day, the one-drop rule is being undermined, shown to be anachronistic; nevertheless he makes it clear that all black people ought to abide in the ship, as black anti- colonialist societies in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century opposed to emigration to Africa urged. You could think of Mat Johnson alongside Wesley Brown, Paul Beatty, Colson Whitehead, John Keene, or Percival Everett. To call them black satirists or humorists wouldn’t quite cover it. In their ease with genre and their consciousness that the language they’re after is literary, they descend through the allegory of Ralph Ellison, not the realism of Richard Wright. But they have inherited Wright’s social vision, not Ellison’s. “I know you’re beige, but stay black,” a friend says to Warren Duffy.

Duffy’s father’s house is haunted. At first, Duffy thinks crackheads are trespassing, but soon Johnson makes it clear that Duffy and a few others have seen the ghosts of the black man and the white woman floating in the air, fucking, “the first interracial couple.” In the end, Duffy isn’t afraid of them. He sees what they are, were. “Just lovers. Just people.”

In 1857, Frank J. Webb, a black writer from Philadelphia, published in London The Garies and Their Friends, a novel about the fortunes of two families, one interracial, the other black. A white planter and his mulatto mistress move for the sake of their children from Georgia to Philadelphia, where racism can be just as violent as in the South. The son who passes for white dies of shame, rejected like a tragic mulatto heroine. His sisters who marry black survive.

Gustav Mahler

by Bruno Walter, with a biographical essay by Ernst Křenek, and an introduction by Erik Ryding

Dover, 236 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes

by Thomas Peattie

Cambridge University Press, 220 pp., $99.99

Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas

by Seth Monahan

Oxford University Press, 278 pp., $45.00

In May 1911, Gustav Mahler, the most famous conductor in the world and an important but controversial composer, was dying of a bacterial infection of the heart. As he passed in and out of consciousness, he was heard to murmur “Mozartl”—an affectionate diminutive of the composer’s name—and “Who’ll take care of Schoenberg now?”

The words encapsulate Mahler’s Janus-like position, perched at the turn of the last century. His essential sound is unmistakably nineteenth-century and places him at the end of the great line of Viennese symphonists—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Bruckner. At the same time, his sensibility and his determination to push the symphonic form to its breaking point make him a kind of proto-modernist. The seminal atonal works of the following Viennese generation—Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—sound nothing like Mahler’s, but these composers worshiped him and were deeply influenced by his example. He in turn worked hard to encourage them, in Schoenberg’s case providing significant financial assistance.

Still, in the decades after his death, Mahler’s music was overshadowed by the flourishing of modernism as well as by his much-longer-lived contemporary Richard Strauss. The story of Mahler’s neglect and rediscovery has become an unavoidable part of any discussion of his work. The symphonies were dismissed as Kapellmeistermusik, the kind of music that conductors often produce—deftly orchestrated but lacking a voice of its own. It didn’t help that Mahler was Jewish; an anti-Semitic strain in criticism of his work was already well established in his lifetime and under the Nazis his work became unperformable in Germany and Austria.

But around 1960, things started to change. Conductors championed him, notably Leonard Bernstein, and the advent of the LP record enabled listeners to assimilate these gargantuan pieces through repeated listening. Then, too, in the postwar era, the music came to speak for a vanished Europe. Theodor Adorno even claimed that it was possible to hear that “the Jew Mahler scented Fascism decades ahead.” Adorno’s monograph on Mahler, published in 1960, was vastly influential. Before it, critics could be divided into those who saw Mahler as squarely carrying on the symphonic tradition and those who found his music blemished by trite material, overblown handling, and a neurotic vacillation between irony and sentimentality. Adorno, ingeniously, played the two views off against each other. He claimed that Mahler was subverting tradition from the inside, deliberately showing up the limitations of the materials and procedures he had inherited. Mahler, like a good Marxist, was heightening the contradictions. (Mahler did in fact harbor lifelong sympathy for socialism but was not politically active.)

After Adorno’s essay, Mahler’s overreaching maximalism and his fondness for banal melodies stopped being an embarrassment and became instead his core achievement. He emerged as a far more sophisticated artist: the works, tuneful enough to please the average concertgoer, were now also difficult and ambiguous enough to absorb the cognoscenti.

Mahler advocates before Adorno had to adopt a proselytizing tone. A recently republished volume contains two works of this kind: a reverent appreciation from 1936 by the conductor Bruno Walter, an acolyte of Mahler’s, who premiered the symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony after his death; and an essay from 1941 by the composer Ernst Křenek. Křenek was briefly married to Mahler’s daughter Anna, and worked on completing two movements from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, left unfinished at his death. His essay is brilliantly perceptive and anticipates Adorno. Mahler’s symphonic edifices are old-fashioned, he writes, but “the cracks in the structure herald the future.”

Today Mahler is no longer a cause and critics must seek out unexplored aspects of a composer who has become a fixture of the musical landscape. Two recent academic studies, by Thomas Peattie and Seth Monahan, are complementary opposites: Peattie focuses on evocative moments of orchestral writing, Monahan on the long-range narratives created by Mahler’s use of sonata form.

Among composers, Mahler was never fully eclipsed: Britten’s Spring Symphony and Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony show an obvious debt to the way he grafted the cantata and the song cycle onto the symphony. And his example was particularly important to composers of the postwar avant-garde. Karlheinz Stockhausen, in a preface to the first volume of Henry-Louis de la Grange’s mammoth Mahler biography in 1973, expressed the mystical view that “should a higher being from a distant star wish to investigate the nature of earthlings in a most concentrated moment, he could not afford to bypass Mahler’s music.” The famous third movement of Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia” (1968–1969) takes the entire scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony and fills it with a cacophonous array of spoken text and musical quotations from Bach to Boulez. The collage-like homage is apt, because Mahler’s works are themselves so compulsively capacious. “The symphony must be like the world,” Mahler told Sibelius in 1907. “It must be all-embracing.”

Contemplating the popularity of Richard Strauss in 1902, Mahler wrote, “My time will come.” Because he was right in the long run the words now sound quietly confident, but at the time his self-belief was compromised by doubt and by frustration with the course his career had taken. His outlook was closer to that of the imagined protagonist of his First Symphony who, he said, “as often as he lifts his head above the billows of life, is again and again dealt a blow by fate and sinks down anew.” Mahler’s anxiety about his reputation and legacy is written into the music, which—in its extremes of emotion, volume, and sheer duration—is determined to assert itself in spite of everything.

Born in 1860, Mahler grew up about halfway between Prague and Brno, in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a distiller and innkeeper, and Mahler grew up loving the sound of village bands and other popular music. His talent was recognized early. At four, he could play on the accordion folk songs he heard Czech servants singing. At six he composed a polka that had a funeral march as an introduction, a foretaste of incongruities to come. Synagogue chants and other Jewish music quite probably left a mark too, though specific influences are elusive. Adorno argued that “what is Jewish in Mahler does not participate directly in the folk element, but speaks through all its mediation as an intellectual voice”—a sense of instability and otherness permeating the work.

At fifteen, Mahler went to Vienna, entering the conservatory—his teachers included Bruckner—and taking an eclectic variety of courses at the university. Like just about every other young man of the era, he read Schopenhauer, became obsessed with Wagner, and thought he might become a poet. His friends included the composer Hugo Wolf but the pair fell out over an opera they both wanted to write. Another friend was Hans Rott, a composer who is one of the great what-ifs of music history. He died insane at twenty-six—he had tuberculosis and probably syphilis—leaving a single remarkably Mahlerian symphony that predates all of Mahler’s and that contains several themes that later appeared in Mahler’s Second Symphony.

As a student, Mahler was known mostly as a song composer. Friends called him “another Schubert.” But his ambitions went beyond small forms and he looked for ways to turn this talent to greater account. It’s no accident that songs provide fodder for his first four symphonies—that is, for the first two decades of his composing career. The First Symphony is largely built around the early song cycle Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), and songs constitute entire movements of the next three symphonies.

Given Mahler’s interest in narrative and in vocal writing, it’s surprising that he never attempted an opera—the more so since opera became the focus of his conducting career. In his mid-thirties, with three symphonies written, he told a friend that “we are now standing—I am sure of it—at the great crossroads that will soon separate forever the two diverging paths of symphonic and dramatic music.” His ambition, he explained, was to enrich symphonies with the innovations of Wagner, just as Wagner had enriched opera with “the means of expression of symphonic music.”

But this is a retrospective rationalization, and the early years reveal him struggling to decide what combination of the vocal and symphonic would suit him best. In its astounding intensity the third song of Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen is effectively a Wagner opera condensed into three short minutes. Parts of the first two symphonies were performed as tone poems and, before them, his first piece of note was a dramatic cantata, Das Klagende Lied (Song of Lamentation), completed when he was twenty. The cantata, a revenge story with a fairy-tale setting, is full of undigested influences but extremely impressive. Mahler’s voice is already completely distinctive—with pulverizing climaxes, passages of otherworldly softness, and dizzying contrasts of earnestness and kitsch.

Pleased with Das Klagende Lied, Mahler entered it for a prestigious award presented by Vienna’s leading music association. The jury was conservative—Brahms was a member—and the piece didn’t win. Mahler took the setback better than Rott had done in the same circumstances a year before; Rott had been committed to an asylum after brandishing a gun on a train and saying that Brahms had packed the carriages with dynamite. Still, Mahler was deeply marked by the failure and later claimed that, had he won, “my whole life would have taken a different turn.” Winning, he believed, might have let him devote himself exclusively to composing instead of to conducting. This isn’t strictly true. Mahler had embarked on his conducting path before the great disappointment; after years as an impoverished student, he knew he had to earn a living. But the sense of a missed opportunity haunted him.

Mahler began his conducting career in a series of provincial opera houses. The musicians were so bad that he preferred to conduct music he disliked, rather than defile masterworks. But his perfectionism got results and he quickly progressed to larger cities—Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, and Hamburg. His ambition was the directorship of the Vienna State Opera, the most important musical post in Europe. He eventually got this job in 1897 and stayed for a decade amid ever-escalating political and administrative squabbles. (Taking up the post required baptism, which doesn’t particularly seem to have bothered him.)

Mahler was known for his physical conducting style and unerring theatrical sense. Count Albert Apponyi, a crucial ally at the Budapest Opera who had been a friend of Liszt, noted, “His eye ranges over the whole production, the decor, the machinery, the lighting.” Bruno Walter recalls that Mahler never “hesitated…to subordinate the musical to the dramatic point of view.” He was also a forceful administrator, just as likely to upbraid an usher who let in latecomers as a singer who disobeyed his directions. Small but very strong, he was a completely commanding figure. Walter writes that he had never dreamed that a mere word or gesture “could frighten and alarm others and force them into blind obedience.” The composer and suffragette Ethel Smyth recalled that dealing with Mahler was “like handling a bomb cased in razor-edges.”

Mahler’s schedule in these years was punishing—260 performances in two seasons in Kassel—and his determination to keep progressing as a composer required superhuman exertion. In 1895, he prepared the premiere of his Second Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic while maintaining his day job at the Hamburg opera. Each evening, after the curtain fell in Hamburg, he would board a night train to Berlin. There he would direct a morning rehearsal of the symphony, lay down his baton, and get the train back to Hamburg for that evening’s performance. Composing his own work had to be squeezed into tiny gaps in his daunting schedule. From 1893 he established a pattern of a month’s summer vacation in a series of mountain and lakeside retreats—Steinbach am Attersee, Maiernigg, Toblach—which he would spend locked away in a little cabin sketching the next work at high speed. The rest of the year was left for working out orchestration and other details. He called himself der Sommerkomponist—the summer composer.

Biographical readings of Mahler’s music are popular and probably justified. Most of these relate to his later years: his marriage to Alma in 1902; the birth of their children and the death of their first-born daughter; Alma’s affair with the architect Walter Gropius; the diagnosis of a life-threatening heart condition. Thus we have the famous hammer blows in the last movement of the Sixth Symphony, which, according to the always unreliable Alma, show him felled “as a tree is felled.” Thus the halting rhythm at the start of the Ninth Symphony that Leonard Bernstein—persuasively but on no basis at all—said recorded the irregular beats of Mahler’s weakened heart. But although Mahler clearly sought to cram his life into his music, the vicissitudes of his later years merely provided him with material and deepened his perspective. They didn’t form his aims and technique as a composer in the way that earlier, less melodramatic struggles did.

Mahler, above all, is music’s first true workaholic. Earlier composers may have worked just as hard, but—Bach’s Kapellmeister duties notwithstanding—they chiefly worked at composition. Mahler, however, had a job. It kept him from the work he felt he should really be doing but he made no effort to quit. (Leaving the Vienna opera, in 1907, heralded a more relaxed schedule, but he soon found a way to overexert himself in the next phase of his career, in New York.) Křenek shrewdly writes, “It is quite obvious that Mahler immensely enjoyed his theatrical work no matter how often he claimed to loath it” and that “he needed ever renewed proof of the limitations of this world in order to retain the feeling of terrific tension which is so characteristic of his music.”

At times, Mahler told himself something similar. “In art as in life I am at the mercy of spontaneity,” he wrote. “If I had to compose, not a note would come.” While he might not be able to produce as much as “the current matadors of the concert hall” (he surely meant Strauss), a man with so little time had one advantage: “His inner experience concentrates in one work.” He might have added that, though his conducting career limited productiveness, the scale of his symphonies was the natural counterpart of his careerist will to power.

Mahler sometimes longed for a completely different existence. “There are times when I am disheartened and feel like giving up music completely, thinking of ultimate happiness as an obscure and tranquil existence in some quiet corner of this earth,” he wrote. “How free and happy man becomes as soon as he leaves the unnatural restless bustle of city life and returns to the tranquility of nature.” The joy that he experienced in rural surroundings, especially on solitary hikes during his summer retreats, is manifest in his music from the very beginning of the First Symphony, with its clarinet cuckoo calls and quotation of a song about walking across dewy fields in the morning.

But one of the most arresting points in Thomas Peattie’s new study is that even Mahler’s bucolic idylls were conditioned by his busy life. The resorts where he went were fashionable and increasingly crowded. Good rail connections linked them to the major centers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, making them “microcosms of the very cities from which the composer so often claimed to take refuge.” The experience was more like Davos than Caspar David Friedrich. Mahler’s love of nature was predicated on his separation from it.

There’s a history to this situation. The first movement of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony bears the heading “Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the countryside”: evidently the implied protagonist is an urban creature. But the contradictions are particularly acute in Mahler’s case. Peattie quotes letters that he wrote to Alma as he admired picturesque landscapes on trains: “What a shame that one can’t get out and wander outside.”

Once you start looking, almost nothing in Mahler’s scenic writing is quite what it seems. A good example is the inclusion of cowbells in the Sixth Symphony. When Strauss uses cowbells, in his Alpensinfonie, there is no mystery: Alps, ergo cowbells. But Mahler’s Sixth, known as the “Tragic,” isn’t really alpine; it’s one of his most classical and least pictorial works. The sense of something alpine materializes only briefly and is then subsumed into other, unconnected impressions. The oddness of this was not lost on contemporary reviewers. “How should these offstage cowbells be taken in music that is neither programmatic nor operatic?” asked one. Another joked, “The many cows in this ‘tragic’ symphony have been the cause of particular amusement.”

The cowbells are typical of the way Mahler uses effects that hint at meanings but whose significance remains unfixed. Peattie emphasizes Mahler’s frequent use of offstage instruments. This had almost no precedent in symphonic music, though it was a commonplace in opera—an approaching military band in Così fan Tutte, receding hunting horns in Tristan und Isolde, and so on. Mahler used the effect right at the start of his First Symphony, in a sequence of offstage trumpet calls; these come first from two trumpets placed, according to the score, “at a very great distance away,” then from a third placed merely “in the distance.” The moment recalls the offstage trumpet in Fidelio that tells us help is approaching for the unjustly imprisoned hero Florestan. But in Mahler’s symphony there is no clear narrative logic. Why is one trumpet closer than the other two, and what are these instruments doing offstage in the first place?

Peattie thinks we should hear such effects not programmatically but “as sonic events in their own right.” Seen this way, the episodes foreshadow the more extreme spatial experiments of later composers, such as the three separate orchestras of Stockhausen’s Gruppen (a piece that, as it happens, was written during a very Mahlerian alpine retreat). But Mahler’s sound worlds are not purely abstract. They carry connotations that are clear often to the point of cliché: there are horn calls, gay waltzes, funeral marches. Křenek writes that Mahler, by creating assemblages of music ripe with associations, “anticipates the basic principle of surrealism to an amazing extent.” Adorno, more famously, saw Mahler as music’s answer to the realist novel: “Pedestrian the musical material, sublime the execution.”

Mahler’s juxtaposition of disparate sound worlds made him a master of heightened, transfixing moments—the guitar-and-mandolin serenade in the Seventh Symphony; the colossal brass fanfare that tears apart the first movement of the First; the posthorn solo in the Third that seems to reach us from the other side of a valley. The inevitable problem, though, was how to make heterogeneous worlds speak with concerted, cumulative force. Seth Monahan’s new study argues that Mahler does so by engaging with classical structures—in contrast to the many critics who assume that he saw them either as mere conveniences or else as archaisms to be subverted. Monahan’s formal analyses, though necessarily very technical, are persuasive, but it’s worth noting that one of Mahler’s most radical innovations in the establishment of long-range unity was surprisingly simple: putting the slow movement last.

It’s a solution he approached in the choral finale of the Second Symphony but which achieved full expression in the Third. This symphony was his longest and the most various; he envisaged it as encompassing “the world, nature in its entirety.” Perhaps for this reason, it was the one that he had most trouble bringing to its final shape. He spent years playing with several versions, first with seven movements then with six, during which process the slow movement gradually slid from a conventional position in the middle of the work to the end.

There was almost no precedent for this (Tchaikovsky’s near-contemporaneous “Pathétique” is the one great exception) and Mahler evinced surprise at where he’d ended up, writing that he had done it “without at the moment knowing why, and contrary to custom.” He later reused the idea of a slow finale to stunning effect in Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony and he seems to have been planning something similar for the unfinished Tenth.

In a sense, Mahler’s symphonies are questions about coherence—about how much experience a piece of music can contain before it bursts apart. The finale of the Third is a slow D-major chorale that seems to take stock of the five disparate movements that have gone before. It proves to be an inexhaustible font of melody and counterpoint, never exactly repeating itself and always disclosing new inner parts and descants. “In the Adagio everything is resolved in the calm of existence,” Mahler wrote. The culmination of the symphony comes not with an active climax, as in the classical symphony, but in the discovery of a new mode, passive and contemplative. The discovery of this mode, a triumph of instinct over technique, is the key to Mahler’s nature as a composer.

Recently, TheNew Yorker published a profile of Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who runs the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and is on the scientific advisory board for the Future of Life Institute. Reading the article, however, I wondered whether it might more accurately be called the Future of Death Institute, since its work has to do with imagining various scenarios in which humankind is wiped out—by artificial intelligence run amok, or by a runaway chain reaction of dark matter that consumes the known universe. These are exotic speculations, but they extrapolate a mood of profound anxiety about the future that is shared by just about everyone in the twenty-first century. For seventy years, humanity has lived with the prospect of nuclear war, which could extinguish civilization in a moment. Just as the end of the Cold War caused that prospect to recede, its place in our imagination was taken by climate change, a different kind of self-inflicted, slow-motion annihilation.

What’s notable about these fears is that they depend on, and foster, a profound suspicion of technology—the very technology that has visibly improved human life in so many ways. When we think about the power of science these days, we are more inclined to dwell on drones and fracking than, say, bypass surgery or antibiotics. (Indeed, one common doomsday scenario envisions the evolution of deadly superbacteria, thanks to the overuse of antibiotics.) The more we take science’s victories for granted, the larger its threats loom in our collective unconscious. Thus people who have grown up in a world without polio now refuse to vaccinate their children against polio, as if the cure had somehow become more threatening than disease. In general, to predict that technology will solve all the problems it has caused—that we can innovate ourselves out of global warming, for instance—today seems childishly, intolerably optimistic.

It is exactly that kind of unfashionable, childlike hopefulness that animates the writing of Paul Scheerbart, a German writer whose name is only now becoming familiar to English readers, a hundred years after his death. Scheerbart, born in 1863, was never a major figure in German letters. He was, rather, a literary bohemian—“a mainstay of cafe society” in Berlin, according to Christopher Turner, writing in the recent University of Chicago anthology Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!: A Paul Scheerbart Reader. Alcoholic, eccentric, and prolific, supported mainly by his wife, Scheerbart produced “over thirty major works and hundreds of minor works of staggering diversity.” But he had little commercial or critical success, and only a small audience appreciated his speculative science fiction or his wildly imaginative, futuristic manifestoes. These works—at least, the ones that have been translated into English so far—are driven by a technological utopianism so extreme, and yet so apparently earnest, as to make them tantalizingly strange.

Scheerbart often reads like an apocalyptic mystic out of the Middle Ages who was somehow transported to the age of railroads and telegraphs. He returns again and again to the idea that existence—our own, or those of aliens on other planets—can be transformed into a paradise inhabited by beings who are like gods. In the introduction to a small new Wakefield Press volume, Rakkóx the Billionaire & The Great Race, the translator W.C. Bamberger recommends Scheerbart to the reader with the imprimatur of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, both of whom liked his work. And it was surely this oddball utopianism that so appealed to Scholem and Benjamin, each of whom was in his own way obsessed by the messianic. Scheerbart, Benjamin wrote, seemed “never to forget that the Earth is a heavenly body”; science fiction was a way of forcing the reader to see humanity in a cosmic, celestial perspective.

Yet the agency of earthly renewal, in Scheerbart’s work, is not divine—at least, not directly. It is, rather, the power of human ingenuity, operating with hitherto unimaginable tools and techniques, that will literally remake the face of the earth. Scheerbart is a mellow Marinetti; his faith in modern technology is not suffused with Futurist aggression, but with a dreamy aestheticism. Here, for instance, is the architect Stummel, speaking to his patron, the title character of the short story “Rakkóx the Billionaire” (1901):

The rulers of the world have always documented their existence by way of colossal buildings. Therefore, it would be in your best interest to create colossal architectural works. The former rulers of the world were too poor to work on the grandest scale. However, your riches, Mr. Rakkóx, allow you to tackle the grandiose—and, yes, the adventurous and the magical…. Perhaps, Mr. Rakkóx, if you are willing on a one-time trial basis, you could transform not merely pieces of rock, but rather an entire cliff from top to bottom into a work of architectural art? That truly would be a great thing, and would encourage coming generations over the course of the next millennium to convert the entirety of the Earth’s surface into a great work of architectural art.

The idea of the globe itself turned into an artwork is the ultimate Faustian arrogance—the power of man exalted above nature, once and for all—and so it is no surprise that Stummel’s plan goes awry. After Rakkóx, a mega-tycoon with a private army, goes to war with the Allied States of the Globe, he is captured and his body is sliced into two hundred pieces, which are then “packed neatly into two hundred enamel boxes” and distributed to his foes. (This kind of hyper-literal yet surreal detail, narrated by Scheerbart in matter-of-fact prose, is one of the things that make his fiction sometimes read like proto-Dadaism, or automatic writing.) The cliff-art Rakkóx had sponsored is allowed to decay, and finally it is blown up by an American mining company. This dark ending seems to suggest that the forces of militarism and greed—which Scheerbart knew well, living in Wilhelmine Germany—are more powerful than “the adventurous and the magical” elements of the human spirit.

Yet in other works, Scheerbart envisions what the world had not yet learned to call a “synergy” between humanity’s technological might and its artistic dreams. This is especially the case in the two mock-manifestoes for which he is best known: The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, published in 1910; and Glass Architecture published in 1914, just months before the outbreak of World War I. (Both are included in the Scheerbart Reader, and The Perpetual Motion Machine was earlier published by Wakefield Press in a different translation.) At least, they seem to be written with tongue in cheek: how else are we to interpret Scheerbart’s claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine—by his own description, a rudimentary contraption made of weights and cogs—or his call for all buildings in the world to be made of colored glass? And yet Scheerbart’s prose, so calm and almost naive in its extremism, doesn’t seem to be in on the joke. This was, after all, an age of wild artistic demands and commands—Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” was published in 1909, Pound’s “A Few Don’ts” in 1913—and the difference between these canonical texts and Scheerbart’s Glass Architecture may be only a matter of degree:

We live for the most part in closed rooms. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is to a certain extent the product of our architecture. If we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged, for better or for worse, to change our architecture. And this only becomes possible if we take away the closed character from the rooms in which we live. We can only do that by introducing glass architecture, which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass—of colored glass.

Most relevant to Scheerbart is Adolf Loos’s architectural polemic “Ornament and Crime,” first delivered in lecture form in 1910. To Loos, living in Vienna, the Austrian love of surface decoration—as apotheosized in Art Nouveau—was a form of deceit, a cover-up for a corrupt society. His essay looked forward to the austere, functional aesthetic of Bauhaus and the International Style. Scheerbart, on the other hand, is fanatical about decoration. The key to glass architecture is that it is supposed to be made of colored glass; it is not moralistically transparent, but synesthetically indulgent. As he writes, “I should like to resist most vehemently the undecorated ‘functional style,’ for it is inartistic.” Scheerbart writes enthusiastically, almost incontinently so, about every kind of surface decoration, anything that conceals and adds color: “Wherever the use of glass is impossible, enamel, majolica and porcelain can be employed, which at least can display durable color, even if they are not translucent like glass.” He mentions Tiffany approvingly, and a Scheerbart world would be one in which everything—walls, doors, heating systems, towers—is made of Tiffany glass.

The comedy of Scheerbart’s manifesto lies in its deadpan refusal to distinguish between the fantastic and the pragmatic. What might seem like a dream vision, or a psychedelic trip, is treated by Scheerbart as if it were the sheerest common sense. He insists that buildings made of glass are not only pretty, but durable, economical, and clean: “That in a glass house, if properly built, vermin must be unknown, needs no further comment,” runs one section of Glass Architecture. He even argues, counter-intuitively, that a glass building would resist aerial bombardment better than a brick one: “A glass tower, when it is supported by more than four metal piers, will not be destroyed by an aerial torpedo,” he assures us.

Yet at the bottom of all these recommendations is not pragmatism, of course, but a poetic vision of the world transformed into an artwork: “After the introduction of glass architecture, the whole of nature in all cultural regions will appear to us in quite a different light. The wealth of colored glass is bound to give nature another hue, as if a new light were shed over the entire natural world.” This vision of a new heaven and a new earth is religion transposed into the key of technology.

The same thing happens in The Perpetual Motion Machine, which purports to be the record—complete with diagrams—of Scheerbart’s attempts to invent this uninventable device. Naturally, no model he builds will actually work, but this doesn’t detain him; for what really interests Scheerbart is not engineering, but his fantasy of a world in which energy is free and unlimited.

Soon enough, he stops writing about how cog A fits into wheel B, and starts rhapsodizing about the Eden to come:

As long as humanity has existed, labor has always been very highly valued. And the laborer has always been very proud of his drive and activity; the inactive artist and the impractical poet have always been treated with great condescension by the true laborer. This is now going to change completely. The laborer must realize, unfortunately, that all of his dull and arduous labor is completely superfluous, that indeed the Earth—all by itself, through its perpetual labor of attraction—takes care of all our needs.

Here is the revenge of the cafe intellectual on the world of work and money, politics and power.

Scheerbart’s utopia is impossible to take seriously—as impossible as the perpetual motion machine itself—and yet, like the machine, it seems as if it ought to exist. One flash of insight, one clever invention, and we will all be redeemed. Of course, history let Scheerbart down: he died in 1915, during a war he vehemently opposed, and rumor had it he had starved himself as a protest. Writers greater than Scheerbart have devoted their work to this same hope of redemption, but perhaps none have done so with the same combination of humor, pragmatism, fantasy and faith.

Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!: A Paul Scheerbart Reader is published by the University of Chicago Press. The Perpetual Motion Machine and Rakkóx the Billionaire & The Great Race are published by Wakefield Press.

If Stars Wars is remembered today as one of the original Hollywood blockbusters, its fair to say that The Force Awakens, its latest iteration, is one of the first films to attain that status before a single regular viewer—or even reviewer—had seen it. Weeks before its December 18 nationwide debut, the new film—directed for the first time in franchise history by a new director, J. J. Abrams, had already sold enough tickets to make it one of the year’s most watched films.

It would be hard to imagine a sharper contrast with the launch of the original movie—the one now pompously known as A New Hope—which I saw as a teenager back in the summer of 1977. It was called, simply enough, Star Wars. While the first trailers (amusingly clunky by today’s standards) certainly made it look entertaining, no one at the time—least of all George Lucas himself—had any inkling that his new creation would colonize our minds the way it has.

I can still remember how the initial moments of Star Wars bowled us over: the slow, vanishing-point text crawl that gave way to the descent, from the top of the frame, of the impossibly enormous imperial star cruiser. The opening amounted to a sort of visual manifesto. It signaled that we were about to see something resoundingly different, a combination of old-fashioned storytelling (that floating text like a 1920s silent-film title) and smashing new special effects (the dazzling model-work of that first huge ship).

Perhaps most radically of all, there was good and there was evil, and you knew who was who. I’d certainly never seen anything like it: an outer-space frolic with knights and monsters and damsels in distress. And light sabers? A conceit so nonsensical that you just had to love it. There was a coming-of-age story for the plucky young hero, a villain entirely encased in black, and a pirate captain with a yeti for a pal.

And Alec Guinness! My father was a lifelong fan of Guinness, the magnificent British character actor who, in his autobiography, recalls how silly and incomprehensible he found Lucas’s project—until the director rather haphazardly offered him a percentage of the box office for what amounted to a few days’ work. (The gift made him fantastically rich for the rest of his life.) My father had worshiped Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. And now here he was, playing a swashbuckling religious mystic with a bunch of robots and crazy aliens and guys in white plastic armor.

I have an indelible memory of my father chortling when a deadpan Guinness delivered his most immortal lines: “Mos Eisley Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” My dad got it immediately. “This is space opera,” he whispered. “Like what we watched when we were kids.” Afterwards he explained it to me, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and the rest. And this, as we know now, was exactly what Lucas was going for.

But the success of Star Wars also had a lot to do with the simple fact that it was unlike anything else in Seventies cinema. What a lot of the current rumination about the history of the franchise tends to miss is just how radically the original movie stood out from the rest of the filmmaking of its time.

This impression was especially strong for me because going to the movies was such a big part of my life. I was growing up in Midland, Texas, where there wasn’t much else to do. My parents had divorced in 1970, and for most of the decade my relationship to my father had been structured around his weekly visits. They followed a reassuringly regular routine: dinner and a movie each Thursday night.

Usually we’d eat first at Luigi’s, our favorite Italian place. (I’m not sure that any actual Italians were ever involved in its operations. The owner was the ebullient Lou Hochman, one of the vanishingly tiny Jewish community in our town.) It was over the red-and-white checkered tablecloths of the restaurant that my father undertook my second education. He was a civil engineer by profession and a zealous amateur historian by choice, and as we ate our pizzas and spaghetti he would tell me about the Mongol composite bow, or the inverse square law, or the evolution of the Indo-European language family. (He had a penchant for explaining these things even to people who could not have cared less; luckily I was only too happy to listen.)

And then it was off to the movies—usually the Howard Hodge Theater, just down the street from home (and across from Conner’s Barbecue). One movie a week for at least seven years straight: if loyalty programs had existed then, we would have been in for a lot of free stuff.

Film scholars will tell you a lot about the cinema of the 1970s, but the movies they dwell on aren’t necessarily the ones I remember. I didn’t see A Clockwork Orange (1971) or Taxi Driver (1976), two of the decade’s big highlights, until much later in life; when they first appeared my parents regarded them as too much for a kid in his early teens. I did manage to wheedle my way into Dirty Harry (1971) and The Godfather (1972), both rated R (perhaps because there was less sex and more good old all-American violence). And we definitely saw Jaws (1975) and All the President’s Men (1976), both quite a big deal. We got a particular kick out of George C. Scott’s rich portrayal of Patton (1970), the general my father had served under in World War II. Needless to say, we also saw a lot of highly forgettable movies.

But there was one genre that we were always particularly keen on: science fiction. My dad was a nerd avant la lettre. He owned a collection of issues of Astounding Science Fiction (later renamed Analog) that went back, without a break, to the 1930s. He introduced me to the great sci-fi writers, and I ended up learning far more, it seemed, from Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke than I ever did from the Texas public school system. As my father proudly noted, science fiction fans in the 1930s were already well-informed about atomic energy at a time when most Americans had no clue. (In 1944, Astounding’s legendary editor, John W. Campbell, had received a visit from the FBI after publishing a story about an “atomic bomb.” Investigators let Campbell off the hook once it became clear that he didn’t know a thing about the still-top-secret Manhattan Project.)

Hollywood had a big thing for sci-fi in the 1970s. By the time I became a regular moviegoer, the turmoil and fervor of the Sixties had percolated through pop culture, leaving behind a generalized sense of disquiet and dread. To an extent that’s hard to appreciate today, this was the first big era of the anti-hero. Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan responded to social breakdown by becoming almost as much of a punk as the criminals he hunted. Charles Bronson’s character in the Death Wish series took vigilantism to a creepy new level. Robert de Niro’s Travis Bickle was a nut case trying to do the right thing in a world so twisted that you couldn’t really figure out if goodness was possible anymore.

I was especially fond of Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson (1972), the story of a solitary mountain man who wins the West through a chain of vicious man-to-man fights with Indians. The seemingly autistic Johnson—the movie goes for long stretches without a single word—offers a startling counterpoint to the bombastic cowboys of an earlier era. It was a movie that brilliantly blurred the line between heroism and psychopathy.

But sci-fi movies were even better at capturing the sense of malaise. Logan’s Run (1976) offered a dystopian parody of Sixties youth worship by positing a future society in which everyone over the age of thirty is automatically killed to save resources. Soylent Green (1973), starring the craggy Charlton Heston, posited a Malthusian near-future (2022, to be exact) in which overpopulation has filled every nook and cranny of the planet with people; humankind can survive only by reprocessing the dead into food. (It was apparently the—bizarre—inspiration for the Soylent meal replacement beverage now popular with Silicon Valley types.) Heston also starred in TheOmega Man (1971), later remade as I Am Legend with Will Smith, in which he played one of the few intact survivors of a bioweapon that has zombified most of the human race. This was the Cold War, after all, and anxiety about weapons of mass destruction was everywhere. Heston had gotten his start as a sci-fi hero in Planet of the Apes (1968), set in a world where human civilization has nuked itself out of existence.

People could fall prey to extraterrestrial microbes (The Andromeda Strain, 1969) or to pleasure robots run amok (Westworld, 1973). One of my favorites around this time was a made-for-TV movie, starring a young and wonderfully unhinged Bruce Dern, called Silent Running (1972). Dern plays an environmentalist who is tending earth’s last forests, which have been placed in safekeeping in outer space until the sullied planet can be cleaned up enough for their return. When the crews of these giant orbital hothouses receive the order to destroy the ships and return home, Dern goes off the rails, killing all of his colleagues in order to save what’s left of terrestrial nature (and probably inspiring a future generation of eco-terrorists).

Given the similar mindset of all of these films, my father and I couldn’t help feeling intrigued when we first began to hear about Star Wars. George Lucas’s earlier foray into sci-fi, THX 1138 (1971), had been a bit of a chore, a standard-model cautionary tale about a benumbing future of shiny white surfaces and mandatory sedative consumption. American Graffiti (1973), a nostalgic coming-of-age tale set in 1960s California, was pleasant and unremarkable. So what was Lucas up to now?

In its exuberant escapism, the original Star Wars seemed, on some level, to be aggressively rejecting any form of social commentary—but even so there was an unmistakable whiff of conservatism about the whole thing. What Lucas wanted to recapture from the old-time space epics (aside from their outlandish fun) was their fundamental sense of optimism. As he recently explained in an interview with The Washington Post, he wanted to conjure up a world with clear values and sharp dividing lines between bad and good: “The last time we had done it was with the Western. And once the Western was gone, there was no vehicle to say, ‘You don’t shoot people in the back’ and such.”

The trick, though, was that you couldn’t really do that while staying in the demoralized 1970s. So why not just create an alternate reality, “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”? Lucas, aiming to give his stories a grand, mythological scope, simply conjured up his own version of Olympus or Valhalla, a place big enough for his demigods and gods to romp–and big enough to accommodate many sequels.  It all attests to the original creator’s genius at combining a simple core of narrative principles (the Republic’s good Jedi versus the Empire’s evil Sith) with an infinitely flexible frame (the Galaxy and all its worlds).

Today Star Wars has become such an integral part of our pop culture status quo that it’s hard to recreate just how revolutionary—or counterrevolutionary—it felt at the time. (Nowadays fans speak, quite appropriately, of the “Expanded Star Wars Universe,” a cosmos fleshed out by countless novels, comic books, fan fiction, and animated TV series, which has the advantage of allowing for all sorts of satisfying doctrinal disputes. Many hardcore fans dismiss the three subpar prequels Lucas released between 1999 and 2005 as heretical offshoots of the “canon.”) When we first saw it, of course, we had no way of knowing that it would pave the way for the special effects-driven “summer blockbuster,” or the slow triumph of Nerd Culture, or a parade of senseless memorabilia on a scale to buoy up the economic fortunes of several Chinese provinces. All we knew was that we’d just seen something amazingly fresh, and we left the theater feeling mysteriously liberated. It’s a sensation that I can vividly remember today. One wonders if Abrams will really be able to recapture it.

A handsome book just arrived on my desk. War Is Beautiful the title declares. Surely not! Then I see the subtitle: “The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict.” Ah, irony. An asterisk takes me to some tiny print at the bottom left of the cover: “(in which the author explains why he no longer reads The New York Times).” And who is the author? David Shields, the man who gave us Reality Hunger and many other thoughtful provocations. In fact, I now recall that a couple of years ago Shields, with whom I occasionally exchange an email opinion or two, and who was then on the lookout for a publisher, ran this project past me and although at the time I saw neither the book’s title or its actual photographic contents, I endorsed his introductory essay with the quote: “Absolutely right, to the point and guaranteed to stir things up.”

Basically, as Shields had promised, the book offers sixty-four very glossy war photos taken from the front page of TheNew York Times and arranged thematically: Nature, Playground, Father, God, Pietà, Painting, Movie, Beauty, Love, Death. The earliest picture is dated January 2002, from Afghanistan, the latest October 2013, from Pakistan. The accusation is that the newspaper does everything to make war glamourous and even, in some way, reassuring: “a chaotic world is ultimately under control,” Shields observes. In an afterword, art critic David Hickey shows how consciously the photos reproduce well-known pictorial and painterly tropes:

There is a Magdalene in white clothing nodding onto the edge of the frame as she would in a Guido Reni. There is a Rodin of two kneeling marines in a flat field. There are warriors protecting children that echo Imperial Rome, where war was an everyday fact, as the Times would seem to wish it now.

It’s hard to deny, as you leaf through these photos, that they do indeed very deliberately aestheticize their subjects, and hence anaesthetize the viewer; these are glamour pictures to be admired, rather than documentary images that give immediacy to violence and horror. “Connecticut-living-room trash,” is how Hickey sums it up. In short, we are a long, long way from the more sober black-and-white images that chronicled the Vietnam War in the same paper.

All the same, an objection comes to mind: that this transformation of violence into beauty is hardly the reserve of TheNew York Times. In this regard, consider Luc Sante’s fascinating article on the New York police photos of crime scenes taken in the early years of the twentieth century. These are stark images whose purpose was to provide legal evidence; nevertheless, there is a strong aesthetic element. “Not every one is a masterpiece,” Sante observes, “but all display patient craftsmanship in their framing and lighting, making them seem lapidary, even definitive. Every picture is a tableau, complete unto itself.” Except in very rare cases, it seems photographers and artists instinctively compose images in order to make the experience of looking at them dramatic, impressive, and above all, bearable.

And this has been going on for hundreds of years. Take the ugly subject of beheading. We have all expressed our shock over the Islamic State’s habit of posting YouTube videos of their warriors decapitating hostages. Sometimes it has seemed that we are more shocked by the existence and availability of the videos—the mere fact that they tempt us to become witnesses to such violence—than by the act itself. Yet of course our “civilization” has a long history of depicting beheading. There is hardly a major art gallery in Europe or the United States without a Judith and Holofernes. From Caravaggio to Klimt painters have enjoyed the drama of the beautiful woman hacking off the soldier’s head. Salome and John the Baptist are another popular pair, the Baptist’s head always decorously framed by the (usually silver) plate on which it is presented to the pretty dancer. In another Biblical episode the courageous young David has no qualms about hacking off Goliath’s head, and Donatello delights in showing a cute boy naked with the dead ogre’s beard under his foot. Of course, this is “art,” not documentary, but it creates a habit of viewing violence in a certain way.

Nor is literature any less capable of turning such scenes into “beauty.” “The program of the photos,” Shields observes of the images he has collected together, “is the same as that of the Iliad: the preservation of power.” How can one not be brought up sharp by that claim? If we stop reading the Times in protest at this glamorizing of war, do we stop reading the Iliad? Beowulf? War and Peace? Primo Levi complained that a great deal of Holocaust literature was guilty of making the suffering more palatable by sanctifying the victims. Aestheticizing horror can be a subtle process.

Then how are we to distinguish between images that are rendered with the worst intention—“the preservation of power,” assuming we are agreed that that is not a legitimate aim—and those that are supposedly being used to expose this intention for the hypocrisy it is? Arguably, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon had this element of protest, but in the end it too produced some glamorous images of extreme violence. Likewise the many Vietnam War movies. Even Shields’s book, as I am sure he is aware, invites ambiguous responses. The cover includes a score of quotes besides my own. “Fantastic, engrossing, and gruesome,” says Davis Schneiderman on the back cover of the book. “I love it.” “A work of perilous ambiguity,” Andrei Codrescu observes more soberly. For of course as soon as we have metabolized the criticism leveled at TheNew YorkTimes, we do indeed settle down to enjoy these extraordinary photographs, which the publisher has been careful to present in as lavish a form as possible.

At which point the question arises: Can we ever get away from this transformation that makes a beauty of the beast?

Let’s go back to Homer, since Shields has mentioned him. In the Odyssey, when Helen and Menelaus are back in Greece, Telemachus visits them. All they want to talk about is Troy, the war; in the end Troy is the great focal point of their lives. But it’s too painful. Menelaus will have to remember Helen’s betrayal, Helen her dead lovers, Telemachus his dead friends and missing father, whom he assumes is dead. The truth is too ugly to be comfortable with.

Helen gets up, goes into another room, finds a drug she was given in Egypt and slips it into the wine. It’s a drug, Homer says, “that would allow you to recount your brother’s death with a smile on your face.” And so it is. She and her husband and Telemachus have a wonderful evening going over all the unbearable violence of Troy—the drug has made it noble, glamourous—and then fall serenely asleep. Needless to say, that drug is literary form: rhyme, rhythm, art.

The Inferno does the same with hell.

The many people and their ghastly wounds
did so intoxicate my eyes
that I was moved to linger there and weep.

Dante complains. But his guide, Virgil, insists he keep moving fast: “Let your talk be brief.…We must not linger here.” To stop and really look would be to risk being overwhelmed by suffering; the rapid movement of the terza rima with its ever-reassuring rhymes takes the sting out it all. One can see why Dante’s guide had to be a poet; only art can take you through hell, by making it beautiful. Endless descriptions of punishment and disfigured, mutilated bodies become weirdly attractive. Centuries later, Beckett, a Dante fan to the end, understood the game perfectly and his novel Watt offers a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the Dantesque method:

Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure from beginning to end.

Life’s awfulness is rigidly organized into a nursery-rhyme pattern of chiming opposites. One hardly notices the suffering at all. Such is art, Beckett suggests.

One could list any number of writers who set out to write protests over the horrors of war and ended up glorifying it in their way. Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is emblematic: a stupid communications error in the Crimean War had led six hundred cavalrymen to charge a line of cannons. The carnage was inevitable. Everyone was appalled. But Tennyson’s poem transforms it into beauty:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them,
Volley’d & thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

You might argue that Tennyson still lived in a time that wanted to believe in heroes, willing to acknowledge the bravery of the men despite the stupidity of the sacrifice. But what about the World War I poets? Take Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth”:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, —
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

It’s true this reads like a serious protest; all the same I do not think today’s warmongers would have much quarrel with a poem in which the soldiers’ suffering has been so monumentally cast in poetic diction of the “hasty orisons,” “wailing shells,” and “sad shires” variety.

The truth is that the more apocalyptic modern warfare becomes, the more the opportunity for glamour presents itself. Curzio Malaparte, reporting on the German campaign in northern and Eastern Europe during World War II, saw this very clearly. Beyond any desire for manipulation, he suggests in his masterpiece Kaputt, the very intensity of war, the emotions it arouses and the acts of cruelty and self-sacrifice it prompts, make it impossible for us not to find art in it; if only because so much of our past art has depicted scenes inspired by similar emotions:

I looked at the sky, at the fiery tracks of the tracer bullets streaking the black glass of the night; they looked like coral necklaces hanging on invisible feminine necks… A Jewish Chagall sky.

The raucous voice, the neighing, the occasional sharp rifle shots…seemed also to have been engraved by Dürer on the clear cold air of that autumn morning.

At one point Malaparte describes how Russian cavalry horses flee an artillery barrage by plunging into a Finnish lake on the very night it freezes over for winter. The horses are all trapped, frozen, so that the “lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of horses’ heads. They appeared to have been chopped off cleanly with an ax. Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice … The scene might have been painted by Bosch.”

Is there any way out of this? Is there any way at all to represent war, even to ourselves, that would be free of this aestheticizing process? I’m not sure there is. Guernica is a beautiful painting. It has its wild glamour. But the painting is now more famous than the bombing it depicts and deplores, perhaps because it allows us to feel that being sophis­ticated and pacifist is one and the same. Which is gratifying. But there is no evidence it stopped any bombs.

Perhaps, beyond our immediate anger with the Times for its crass glamorizing of conflict we need to go further and ask ourselves about the deep purpose of all representation of violence and war. Doesn’t it shift our attention from the object itself to the form in which the object has been given to us, inviting a safe savoring of dangerous emotions, with the result that the whole ugly reality can continue exactly as it always has, thanks, at least in part, to the consolatory beauty with which it is evoked?

Leafing back and forth through Shields’s book, considering how right Hickey is when he speaks of the allusions to celebrated paintings, one cannot help wondering whether art in general is not, as artists and art lovers would have it, part of the solution, but deeply complicit with the problem.

David Shield’s War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict, is published by Powerhouse Books.

To the Editors:

Poland has no significant Muslim population. Nevertheless, amid controversy over European refugee policy, anti-Muslim rhetoric emerged as a major feature of the Polish parliamentary election campaign this fall. The victors in the October 25 vote, a populist, nationalist-right party called Law and Justice, promoted xenophobia on a scale unseen in Poland since the fall of communism in 1989. During the campaign, the Law and Justice leader, the former prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński, attacked immigrants for carrying “various parasites and protozoa, which don’t affect their organisms, but could be dangerous here.” Social media and the far right press also promulgated anti-Muslim slogans and images. One magazine cover featured a photoshopped picture of the then Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz clad in a burqa and holding explosives.

Several massive anti-refugee protests followed. Protesters have held marches, burned EU flags, and chanted nationalist slogans. In a number of Polish cities, gangs have beaten up or taunted dark-skinned “Arab” students or tourists; one victim was a Sikh entrepreneur. On November 18, in the city of Wrocław, a far-right group staged an anti-immigrant demonstration and—moving rapidly from one form of racial intolerance to another—burned an effigy of an Orthodox Jew.

Yet neither these groups nor Kaczyński speaks for the majority population. The mayor of Wrocław instantly condemned the demonstration, as did many others. The Polish Catholic Church has called on individual parishes to accept the beleaguered regardless of their religion, reminding Poles of their “Christian duty to help refugees.” Former Polish President Lech Wałesa has denounced the new ruling party’s chauvinism, and asked that Poles do the maximum they can to help the disenfranchised now pouring in from the war-torn Middle East. The attached statement, from the Polish PEN Club, is an urgent protest against the events in Wrocław and, more generally, against the shift in public rhetoric in Poland.

Andrew Solomon
President
PEN American Center
New York City

STATEMENT OF THE POLISH PEN CLUB

Following a long series of physical and symbolic acts of racist violence in Wrocław and other Polish cities, a group of extreme nationalists burned a figure of a Jew in the Wrocław central square. This was a neo-Nazi death sentence in effigie, an attack on the image of an imaginary convict. The main perpetrator of this act was until recently one of the closest colleagues of a member of the Polish parliamentary special services committee, who is the leader of a parliamentary party.

Genocide is not part of the tradition of Polish Wrocław. It belongs rather to the traditions of a different Wrocław, the city that was the most strongly pro-Nazi in the Third Reich. If Wrocław wants to aspire to become a European Capital of Culture, and not a “KuKluxKland,” it must quickly come to terms with this disgrace.

We express our support for the position taken by the mayor of the city of Wrocław, who demanded that law enforcement officials react immediately. We appeal to the highest authorities of the republic to bring a halt to the increasingly open acts of racist violence that are taking place in Poland.

—November 22, 2015

37

When the goldfinch, in his airy confection,
Suddenly gets angry, begins to quake,
His spite sets off his scholar’s robes,
Shows to advantage his cute black cap.

And he slanders the hundred bars,
Curses the sticks and perches of his prison—
And the world’s turned completely inside out,
And surely there’s a forest Salamanca
For birds so smart, so disobedient.

December 1936

In 2003 I wrote in my The New Ruthless Economy that one of the great imponderables of the twenty-first century was how long it would take for the deteriorating economic circumstances of most Americans to become a dominant political issue. It has taken over ten years but it is now happening, and its most dramatic manifestation to date is the rise of Bernie Sanders. While many political commentators seem to have concluded that Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee, polls taken as recently as the third week of December show Sanders to be ahead by more than ten points in New Hampshire and within single-figure striking distance of her in Iowa, the other early primary state.

Though he continues to receive far less attention in the national media than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Sanders is posing a powerful challenge not only to the Democratic establishment aligned with Hillary Clinton, but also the school of thought that assumes that the Democrats need an establishment candidate like Clinton to run a viable campaign for president. Why this should be happening right now is a mystery for historians to unravel. It could be the delayed effect of the Great Recession of 2007-2008, or of economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s unmasking of the vast concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent and the 0.1 percent of Americans, or just the cumulative effect of years of disappointment for many American workers.

Such mass progressive awakenings have happened before. I remember taking part in antiwar demonstrations on the East and West coasts in the Fall and Winter of 1967–1968. I noticed that significant numbers of solid middle-class citizens were joining in, sometimes with strollers, children, and dogs in tow. I felt at the time that this was the writing on the wall for Lyndon Johnson, as indeed it turned out to be. We may yet see such a shift away from Hillary Clinton, despite her strong performance in the recent debates and her recent recovery in the polls.

If it happens, it will owe in large part to Sanders’s unusual, if not unique, political identity. Consider the mix of political labels being attached to him, some by Sanders himself: liberal, left-liberal, progressive, pragmatist, radical, independent, socialist, and democratic socialist. Sanders’s straight talk about the growing inequalities of income and wealth in America has been much written about, notably in a long profile of him in TheNew Yorker in October. But most of this writing has been of the campaign trail genre, and has not gotten very far in sorting out the strands of radicalism that have come together in Sanders’s run for the presidency and that have attracted large numbers of Americans dissatisfied with their deteriorating economic circumstances and with the politics that has helped create them.

Sanders is unusual because he brings together three kinds of radicalism, each with very different roots. First is Sanders’s commitment to bringing the progressive ideas of Scandinavian social democracy to the United States, including free and universal health care, free higher education at state colleges and universities, mandatory maternity and sick leave benefits, and higher taxes on higher incomes. In American political history you have to go back to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society or even to the early New Deal to find anything comparable.

The second strand of Sanders’s radicalism is his excoriating account of contemporary American capitalism, and with this he neither looks nor sounds like a consensus-minded Scandinavian social democrat. Here Sanders is willing to name and denounce the new economic royalists—what he calls collectively the “billionaire class”—in a way that Hillary Clinton, who has relied heavily on their financial backing, has not. These include the leading Wall Street banks and their lobbyists; the energy, health care, pharmaceutical, and defense industries; and the actual billionaires deploying their wealth on behalf of the far right, foremost among them the Koch brothers, the Walton family of Walmart, and the real estate tycoon Sheldon Adelson.

From these great concentrations of wealth and power, Sanders argues, derive multiple injustices: the corrupting of electoral and legislative politics with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling; the steady erosion of the American middle class, which has suffered stagnating income and declining benefits, even as corporations return to profitability and enjoy historically low interest rates; and the emergence of an American workplace where most employees are putting in longer hours, earning less, and suffering from less job security than ever before.

Sanders can support these claims with substantial bodies of empirical data and research. There are the monthly figures put out by the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which show a steady decline in real hourly and weekly earnings of most working Americans since the 1970s. There is the work of the French economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez documenting a growing and overwhelming concentration of income and wealth in the US in the hands of the top 1 percent—and especially the top 0.1 percent—of taxpayers. There is also the research of Jacob Hacker of Yale, showing how the disposable income of middle-income Americans has been further eroded by health care and pension costs dumped on them by their corporate employers, what Hacker calls the Great Risk Shift.

But the challenge for Sanders is not the arguments themselves, which are widely acknowledged (Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was a runaway bestseller last year). The challenge is how to organize those who have suffered in the harsh new economy into a viable political force. In the 1930s and the succeeding decades many of those facing hardship could benefit from the support and solidarity of big labor unions and the Democrats’ big-city political machines. In our own times these networks are largely gone. Those being laid off, downsized, reengineered, or outsourced today are, in comparison with their grandparents and great-grandparents, far more likely to find themselves isolated and alone, especially those from middle-income families, who may be facing a drastic and very visible loss of class identity.

It is here that the third and perhaps least understood strand of Sanders’s radicalism comes into play: his ability to organize a previously unrecognized constituency—one that embraces the shrinking middle class, both white- and blue-collar, the working and non-working poor, as well as young, first-time voters with large student-loan debts. One thing that comes over strongly in interviews of those attending Sanders rallies is their sense that they are no longer alone, that they’re joining with thousands who are in much the same predicament as they are, and that together they can change things for the better.

Sanders’s success in bringing these people together comes from his grounding, as a student at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, in the grass-roots politics of Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the founder of modern American community organizing. Alinsky’s crucial insight was that people at the bottom of the system could fight for local political and economic power by forming alliances with sympathetic community groups sharing many of their interests. From the late 1930s through the 1960s, Alinsky focused on the black ghettoes and white working-class districts of Chicago, Rochester, Buffalo, Oakland, and many other cities. His greatest success—and one of the best examples of his methods at work—was his 1939 campaign to unionize the Armour Company’s Back of the Yards meat packing plant in Chicago.

In the late 1930s, working conditions at the Armour plant still evoked the world of Upton Sinclair: an immigrant workforce toiled long hours for poverty wages, in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. With Chicago run by a corrupt political machine, Alinsky took the lead in mobilizing every constituency he could in the local community against Armour—including the churches and especially the Catholic Church, labor unions, neighborhood groups, athletic clubs, and small businesses.

He brought in John L. Lewis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to advise him, and after a huge mass demonstration in July 1939, Armour agreed to recognize the union. In a 1999 PBS documentary, Ed Chambers, who was Alinsky’s successor as Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, described the tactics that had proven so successful—and that would be repeated in many of Alinsky’s postwar campaigns:  “All change comes about as a result of pressure or threats. But you can’t get social change or social justice without confronting it. Because if you are a ‘have not,’ ‘the haves’ never give you anything that’s real.”

Alinksy is no longer a reference point in contemporary American politics, although his work and influence features in the CVs of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In a 2007 New Republic profile, Ryan Lizza describes the young Obama’s training as an Alinskian community organizer in 1980s Chicago, though Lizza noted that Obama as a presidential candidate-in-the-making was already distancing himself from this past, omitting all mention of Alinsky in his campaign biography, The Audacity of Hope. For her part, Clinton titled her 1969 BA thesis at Wellesley College “There is Only the Fight…”: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model, something she has not cared to mention in recent campaigning.

But it is Sanders who has gone on to put Alinskian methods into practice as both a politician in Vermont and a candidate for president. In a November interview with NPR, Sanders described how his work as a community organizer as a student at the University of Chicago “did a lot to influence the politics I now have.” In fact, Sanders was chair of CORE’s (Congress on Racial Equality) social action committee at the university at a time when the organization, advised by Alinsky, was leading the campaign against segregation in Chicago schools and housing. CORE and its student supporters were fighting the university itself, which upheld segregation through a policy of purchasing vacant homes in its neighborhood to prevent them from being purchased by African Americans. In 1962, Sanders organized a sit-in at the president’s office to protest the university housing policies; the following year, he was arrested while demonstrating against segregation in the Chicago schools.

Two decades later, Sanders’s remarkable campaign for Mayor of Burlington, Vermont as an independent was another illuminating case history of successful Alinskian campaigning at the grassroots, adapted from its Chicago origins to the more tranquil setting of Vermont. Sanders followed Alinsky’s cardinal rule of taking on the city’s dominant business interests and their allies in City Hall with a program that was, for Burlington, radical and progressive: curbing real estate development at the city center and  providing ample public space there, especially on the waterfront of Lake Champlain; building affordable housing; keeping out the mega-retailers and creating  neighborhood associations as participants in city planning decisions. To achieve this Sanders put together an all-embracing, Alinskian coalition of women’s groups, unions, neighborhood activists, environmentalists, even the police patrolman’s association, all of whom saw him as someone who could deliver on his pledge to make Burlington a more affordable and civilized place to live.

There are big differences between Burlington, with a population of 42,000, and the United States, with a population of nearly 320 million. Alinsky himself never tried to reproduce his approach on a national scale. But in Alinsky’s time there were no social media, whose potential Sanders, like the Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012, has deftly exploited. And unlike the president, Sanders has also used social media to rally people behind a truly radical message. Not only has he formed alliances with sympathetic community groups like labor unions, environmental organizations, immigrant advocacy groups, and public sector workers; he has also been able to rely on these groups’ own considerable presence on social media to reach voters.

These efforts may be less attention-getting than Trump’s, but they have proven highly effective in building a strong base of supporters. The Sanders campaign has now drawn more than 2.2 million individual donations in 2015, surpassing even Obama’s record for the number of donations to a presidential candidate in a single year. In the third quarter, he raised four times as much money as Clinton from donors contributing $200 or less.

The columnist Mark Shields has pointed out on PBS’s Newshour that it was no mean feat for Sanders to attract an audience of 27,500 in Los Angeles in August, a city where, in Shields’s words, the typical campaign event is a party at Steven Spielberg’s house hosted by George Clooney. This was an event at which Sanders said, to thunderous applause,

There is something profoundly wrong when one family, the owners of Walmart, own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people. This is an economy which is rigged, which is designed to benefit the people on top, and we are going to create an economy which works for all people.

Sanders has significant weaknesses. His poll numbers have been much lower in the south, where he is far less known. They show Hillary Clinton enjoying strong support among African Americans, who favor her over Sanders by 5–1 or more. But it is surely patronizing to African-Americans to portray them as locked in an unending embrace with the Clintons, impervious to Hillary Clinton’s reliance on big corporate donors, her weaknesses as a candidate, which are still considerable, and the shifting winds of the campaign as it unfolds. Until now, Sanders has largely avoided direct criticism of Clinton.  The big question is whether he will extend his critique of the billionaire class and their corrupting political power to what I’ll call the Clinton system. That system will be the subject of a second article.

In a house in Rafah, at the southern edge of Gaza, I met Sheikh Omar Hams, fifty-one years old, a slender figure dressed in a simple white robe and seated on a mattress on the floor. Hams is director of the Ibn Baz Islamic Institute, based in Rafah, where it also runs a bakery and charity outlets. His mission, he says, is to spread the word of the Prophet Muhammad and to give bread and other aid to the homeless and the poor.

Hams is a Salafist sheikh. “A Salaf means an original ancestor—one of those who lived close to the Prophet and observed his actions intimately, followed his ways and his words literally,” he explains. The sheikh teaches his students how to return to those ways, and they in turn spread the word. Unlike many Salafis, who abhor any rational argument about the literal meaning of the Koran, Hams is open to at least some debate. And though sometimes willing to support violent jihad, he accepts that violence is often not justified, preferring instead to secure a return to original Islam through the use of prayer, study, and preaching.

Pulling his legs underneath him, the sheikh prepares for questions on how the Prophet might have viewed the methods of Daesh (ISIS)—also Salafists—and on the battle to contain its influence across the world, most particularly here in Gaza.

Since 2007 Hamas has been the de facto government of Gaza, albeit under Israeli rule—a rule implemented nowadays by means of a military and naval blockade by air, land, and sea, which is described by the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, as “a collective penalty against the people of Gaza.” Hamas is itself an Islamist resistance movement, with a resistance “army” called al-Qassem, but Hamas members are seen as infidels by ISIS since they place the nationalist battle for a Palestinian state before the campaign for a caliphate. Hamas’s willingness to negotiate with Israel and to agree to a cease-fire last summer was seen by ISIS as the latest demonstration of its collaboration. ISIS supporters inside Gaza have shown their opposition and tried to break the cease-fire by firing rockets into Israel, thereby angering Hamas and risking heavy Israeli retaliation.

In recent months, Hamas has tried to crush groups of Salafi jihadists in Gaza, some of whom declare open support for ISIS and are in touch with its networks in Syria. As well as rounding them up Hamas has “persuaded” moderate Salafi sheikhs to help convince jihadists that their interpretation of Muhammad’s wishes is wrong. One of these sheikhs is Omar Hams.

If the sheikh had made such an agreement with Hamas, was he not, I asked, aligning himself with the infidel Hamas in ISIS’s eyes, thereby risking his own life? He took a deep breath. “Jihad is allowed under Islamic rules,” he replied. “When Muslims see a danger to their own land or their own families or themselves, it is allowed for them to defend themselves.”

Anticipating the next question, he continued: “On the question of Daesh. In the beginning when Daesh began as an Islamic military group it was fighting the US occupation in Iraq. We agreed with it, as it was an occupation. But after that they behaved in a…”—he paused—“confusing way.”

What did he mean? “They were too easy with the blood. We did not agree with that at all,” he said, which was why he had decided to help Hamas resist ISIS’s presence in Gaza.

Daesh supporters had to be corrected, Sheikh Omar went on. Theirs was not a “pure” interpretation of jihadism. Daesh was a creation of the West and was not therefore “pure inside.” It was created, in his view,

by the thousands of bombs dropped on the heads of Muslims, and by the rejection of democratically elected Muslim governments, such as that in Egypt, and by the support for the state that is oppressing us here in Gaza, and that is Israel. All of this has created feelings of pressure among our youth, leading them to think like Daesh, alienating an entire generation. However, we don’t agree with this thinking and have condemned it. But we should understand the motivations. The Koran urges mercy and peace.

I first went to Gaza in 1993, when I reported for the London Independent newspaper while Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House Lawn to seal the Oslo Accords, which envisaged the creation of a Palestinian state. At that time Gaza, along with the West Bank, was occupied with Israeli troops permanently on the ground as well as at the borders. Under the Oslo Accords, Israeli troops would withdraw totally from both territories, which would be joined by safe passages and transformed into a workable Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. White doves with olive branches appeared on walls as soon as Arafat and Rabin shook hands.

The Oslo Accords foundered, sabotaged by extremists on both sides. More than a decade later, in 2005, Israel withdrew its occupying troops and its Jewish settlers from Gazan soil, but still controlled its borders and much else. As hopes of peace faded, Hamas won power in parliamentary elections in 2006 but Israel and the West refused to acknowledge the victory, calling Hamas a terrorist group. After internecine strife among the Palestinian leadership in 2007, Hamas seized power in Gaza, which Israel placed under a strict blockade, splitting it off from the PLO-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Today 1.8 million Palestinians—including 1.2 million refugees—are crammed into Gaza, just twenty-five miles long and eight miles at its widest. When I returned a year ago to report on the aftermath of the 2014 summer war, it was ringed by walls and fences. Gunboats lay offshore. Drones hovered in the sky.

I first heard the name “Daesh” hours after arriving as I sat under a dripping tarpaulin in Beit Hanoun, a border village. A boy padded through the mud in socks. His father, whose house was one of more than 11,000 destroyed in the war according to UN figures, told me that a man “in Pakistani garb” had been seen near the city’s bombed-out sewage plant. But he didn’t seem concerned, nor did other Gazans I spoke to—all had other things to worry about, such as moving the rubble with their bare hands.

Gazans showed a remarkable resilience in the aftermath of the war, a kind of defiance. Perhaps it was surprise at finding that they had survived when 2,205, had died, including 521 children and 283 women. Raji Sourani, a Gazan lawyer, told me that Israel was to be taken to the International Criminal Court, not only in the hope of securing justice but also “to send a message to the people that we want the rule of law in Gaza, not Daesh.” When I returned over the next twelve months, some Gazans told me they still had such hopes; but as they faded support for Daesh grew.

By last month the threat had become so serious that the Salafist sheikh Omar Hams had come out of the shadows to appeal to the West to change its approach to the Muslim world. An agricultural engineer, Hams, who has never been outside Gaza except to study engineering in Sudan, works on Rafah’s chicken farms, monitoring water purity. But he is happiest with his Salafist students. He is an admirer of Osama bin Laden and passes on crude theories alleging that the US bombing created Daesh.

His central point, however, is incontestable. ISIS is taking root in Gaza among its disillusioned youth; he might not be able to persuade his own students “to maintain peaceful methods,” Omar Hams said. “We are dealing with individual souls. Anyone oppressed can do anything. That is why I issue a warning: to end the suffering of Palestinians, so that…we can influence our people. Otherwise there is no 100 percent guarantee of anything.”

In fact, hardly anyone believes that the suffering in Palestine will end anytime soon. But analysts and politicians have always assumed nevertheless that ISIS would never have strong appeal to Palestinians, who demand a country, not a caliphate. Most Sunni Muslims—about 90 percent of the world’s Muslim population, including Palestinians—reject the activist Salafi approach as too literal and sometimes violent in its methods. Conventional wisdom has it that there are separate strands of Salafism—“peaceful” and “jihadist.” But on the ground in Gaza definitions blur, alliances shift.

The seeds of ISIS in Gaza were sown back in the 1970s when small numbers of Gazans adopted Salafism. Some of them centered their activities on a small charity in Rafah called the Ibn Baz Institute, named after Abdullah Ibn Baz, who, until his death in 1999, was the Saudi kingdom’s highest religious authority. Ibn Baz was so stubbornly literal in his readings of the Koranic texts that he is even said to have insisted they meant the sun revolved around the earth.

By 1999 the Rafah institute named after him was almost defunct. Then in the early 2000s Salafism had a revival across the Muslim world, including Gaza, and in 2002 Omar Hams took over the failing Ibn Baz charity and turned it into a going concern. Today during bad times—war, for example—the charity can secure up to $4 million a year in donations, mostly from Saudi Arabia.

Also around 2002 Osama bin Laden was winning numerous new recruits to Gaza’s Salafist jihadi cause, including a young man named Sheikh Ismael Humaid, now a prominent Salafist leader in Gaza. Humaid, a tall man with a limp, the youngest of ten children, was born in Gaza’s seaside Shati Camp in 1975 and from the beach near his home he could see the lights of Ashdod, the thriving Israeli port where his grandparents lived before fleeing to Gaza in the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel.

Imprisoned several times in the late 1980s and early 1990s for burning buses that were bringing Jewish settlers to Gaza, Humaid dropped out of school, taking odd jobs. In 2002, during the second intifada, he converted to Salafism. “I felt I could be killed any minute. I took this as a sign to turn to God, so I would die a good man,” he said, then turned to me and in his barely audible voice suggested that I convert too as I’d find paradise. There was no hint of irony.

Humaid became an al-Qaeda supporter and named a son after Osama bin Laden. In 2005 he formed the first Salafi jihadist group in Gaza—Jaysh al-Umma. Other groups formed, including one set up by a Gazan clan leader and gangster-turned-Salafist jihadist, Mumtas Dughmush. Dughmush and his gang kidnapped Alan Johnston, a BBC reporter in Gaza, in 2006; Johnston was released after some four months. Humaid also joined the Hamas operation in 2006 to kidnap Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was released five years later in a prisoner exchange involving more than a thousand Palestinians. Another group—Jund Ansar Allah—was led by a fanatical cleric, Abdul Latif Moussa, who in 2009, during prayers at Rafah’s Ibn Taymiyyah Mosque, declared an Islamic emirate there. The choice of this mosque for the declaration had resonance: Ibn Taymiyyah was a fourteenth-century cleric, often regarded as the progenitor of jihad or militant Islam. Hamas’s al-Qassem brigades opened fire on the mosque, killing twenty-two Salafists and losing seven of their own men.

With war escalating in Syria, Ismael Humaid made his way to Egypt, probably through a tunnel under the border, and on to Syria, “to see what I could do to help fellow Muslims.” He did not want to tell me when he went and for how long or whom he met. He denies any contact with Daesh while there and says that Jaysh al-Umma does not support it. Several other Gazans also left for Syria the same way—up to fifty, some say. Many have not returned but those who did, I was told, were inspired to restart jihad. Some of the returnees openly switched allegiance to the ISIS caliphate, calculating that viewed from the rubble of postwar Gaza, the prospect of a caliphate might seem more realistic than a Palestinian state.

Soon after the 2014 war, Egypt’s military rulers closed the Rafah crossing and began flooding with saltwater Hamas tunnels not destroyed by Israeli bombs, in order to stop what Egypt claimed was a Hamas-inspired plot to send Gazan jihadists into North Sinai, giving support to the anti-Egyptian insurgency there. Nevertheless, communication with the “Google sheiks” abroad was fast and simple over social media. Jaysh al-Umma’s Facebook page soon burgeoned with followers, while Ismael Humaid’s personal Twitter following reached about seven thousand, mostly from inside Gaza.

The first ISIS-inspired military action in Gaza happened in October 2014, when an explosive device started a fire at the French cultural center in Gaza City. The French cultural center was attacked again in December 2014 causing extensive damage, and in January 2015, ISIS supporters held a rally outside the center, burned the Tricolor, and defaced the center with graffiti. The rally came twelve days after the attack on the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that had published cartoons of Prophet Mohammed.

Gazans told me that they looked on in astonishment, while Hamas took little action. “At first Hamas didn’t seem to think it was the real deal,” said the head of a Western aid group, who didn’t wish to be named. “We thought maybe Hamas was allowing these guys to do this in a way to show the world—if you don’t deal with us, you’ll get them.”

Not long after, arrests of Salafists began, and in response mortars were fired at an al-Qassem brigade headquarters in Khan Younis. The Salafists were gaining confidence, demanding that Hamas release its prisoners. Then a new group sprang up claiming allegiance to ISIS and fired off a rocket that landed, without causing injury, near the Israeli port of Ashdod.

In the House of Wisdom—a Hamas think tank—Ahmed Yousef, a Hamas moderate, was assigned to consider a response. A well-traveled and affable intellectual, Yousef advised the use of persuasion rather than brute force. Salafist prisoners were visited by a committee of approved theologians who tried to “correct” the Salafists’ misreading of the Prophet’s message on jihad and “reeducated” them. He seemed to be playing down the problem of Salafists, probably for fear of fanning the flame or giving the outside world the impression that Hamas had lost control. For one thing, some of those behind the attacks were former al-Qassem fighters, hence their military skills. Angry about Hamas’s insistence on maintaining the cease-fire and other signs of moderation, they had quit al-Qassem and signed up with the jihadist groups.

Nevertheless, as Yousef pointed out, many new recruits to Salafism were disaffected youth. Hamas had interviewed the families of those who had left for Syria or died there—he could not say how they traveled or how many they were. Yousef had been to funerals—“family events”—of those who’d died in Syria “to look at the faces of relatives and better understand,” he said. “These young people have nothing—no glamour, no hope. Nothing.”

There was certainly no glamour among the bombed out communities of Shujayiya, a suburb of Gaza City, where street after street was obliterated in the 2014 war, and where—a year later—not a single house had been rebuilt. In the summer heat, youths disentangled rods from piles of twisted rubble. It was not hard to believe that ISIS had been successfully recruiting in the community.

A twelve-year-old boy, Abdullah, described how he had lost his grandfather, father, and seven brothers and sisters when a bomb hit their house; their pictures were pasted on the wall above him. The sheikhs at the mosque were supporting him, his mother explained, and had waived school fees.

A twenty-year-old sat staring at his cell phone as his father, often in tears, recounted how he lost a son and daughter as well as his brother and his family—ten in all—when a single bomb hit their house. I asked the son what work he did. “Nothing,” he said. He used to play some baseball but not anymore.

The United Nations refugee agency (UNRWA) and other aid groups as well as local Palestinian NGOs are only too well aware of the urgency of rebuilding Gaza and Gazan lives. If Western donors didn’t find the means to patch up houses and patch up wounds, they said, the jihadist groups would.

Across a wasteland a boy moved through the dusk in a motorized wheelchair. He was paralyzed from the waist down, shot in the back by an Israeli sniper. His wheelchair had been bought by the Salafists at the Ibn Baz Institute, run by Sheikh Omar Hams.

Gaza was “boiling”—a term used widely to describe the rising pressure produced when crossings aren’t open for weeks on end. My fixer, Jehad Saftawi, was “boiling” as he stood high on the blasted masonry of what was briefly Gaza’s airport: “Look at our new airport and it’s already demolished, we’re already destroyed.” He should have been on a flight three weeks ago from Cairo to the US, having been offered an internship as a journalist, but the crossings were all closed and now, he felt, he would never be able to go. Every young Gazan suddenly seemed to be trying to get out somehow. There was talk of escapes—through the razor wire, and by boat.

Nor was it bodies and buildings alone that were being patched up. Hasan Zeyadeh, a child psychologist, told me that the trauma of war, occupation, and encirclement by Israeli forces had been passed from one generation of Gazan children to the next; but this generation, which had grown up after the collapse of the Oslo peace accords, during three Hamas–Israeli wars, was suffering far more than any other:

They have a feeling of helplessness. They can’t trust anyone to help—not the politicians, not their own parents who couldn’t even protect them in the wars or stop the destruction of their homes. And they see in the foreign media that everyone here in Gaza—themselves included—is lumped together as terrorists. We have no answer for them. This creates a sense of helplessness. In these circumstances the young may regress to more primitive levels.

The video posted online by the ISIS media wing in Aleppo on June 30, 2015, and directed at Hamas was certainly primitive. Posing with AK-47 rifles, three ISIS fighters denounced Hamas for dealing with secularist entities. “The point of jihad is not to liberate land, but to fight for and implement the law of God.” They went on: “We will uproot the state of the Jews and you [Hamas] and Fatah [the PLO faction]…and you will be overrun by our creeping multitudes.”

The video caused shock. The Hamas crackdown on ISIS became intense. Hamas sources said as many as a hundred—some say many more—were rounded up in the weeks that followed, and this time for more than “reeducation.” There were reports of torture in the Hamas jails. Tension was evident across Gaza as al-Qassem set up checkpoints, men with beards were stopped, and Facebook pages and Twitter accounts were closed, presumably by the Israelis, who monitor and control all communication traffic into and out of Gaza as part of the blockade.

In July came a response: bombs blew up three vehicles belonging to Hamas and to Islamic Jihad, a smaller Islamic faction. More arrests ensued. Gazans were unsure if Hamas could exert control. By this autumn the tension appeared to have eased again. At the al-Qassem police headquarters in Rafah on November 14, the morning after the Paris massacres linked to ISIS, commanders insisted that the jihadists were crushed. “They have no martyrs,” said an officer with a bullet face and full beard, his torso bulging under a gray hoodie. On a wall above him live pictures from Paris and reports of the hunt for attackers were flashing across the screen.

“They don’t have a real organization as such,” the officer said. “Groups come and go. But they send someone to do a specific job and he coordinates it fast with a number of people. Then he’ll be sacrificed as ‘fire paper’ and someone else will be hired.”

Al-Qassem, he said, had profiles of the culprits. “The typical jihadist recruits had disturbed childhoods and often sexual problems,” the commander theorized, adding that money was a major factor drawing Gazans to ISIS. “Those in Syria often send pictures back home showing large banknotes to lure others out.”

Yet the more he talked, the more worrying the situation appeared. His explanation that the extremists had suffered from disturbed childhoods was particularly unconvincing, for it would apply to practically every young person in Gaza today. But he also made it clear that al-Qassem could not possibly keep track of all these small, fast-moving groups. Rocket firings, he said, were provoked by events outside. “If the Israelis burn some kid in the West Bank and some Salafi guys here get angry and want to fire a rocket, we can’t stop it,” he admitted, referring to the murder of a Palestinian baby named Ali Dawabsheh in an arson attack by settlers near Nablus. Most important, perhaps, was a question he did not talk about: How could he contain support for ISIS among extremists in Hamas’s own ranks? At one point the commander seemed to yearn for a more brutal approach. If al-Qassem had not killed off most of the Jund Ansar Allah group in 2007 at the Taymiyyah Mosque, “we’d be like Syria here today.”

At the end of 2015 the future for Gaza is dark, though how much darker it may yet become will depend on whether ISIS continues to win support there. Nobody knows if the present crackdown by Hamas will succeed. A year ago no one was predicting that followers of ISIS would emerge at all. When they did, Hamas itself was surprised. So were the people of Gaza. If ISIS were to gain strength, the desperate line for visas and exit permits could turn into a mass stampede toward closed gates. The nightmare of being locked inside Gaza with the ISIS monster is worse than all other nightmares the Gazans have faced—even the last war.

Moreover, if Hamas fails to crush the Gaza jihadists, ISIS would have a foothold in the Holy Land, posing new and unpredictable dangers, not only for Gazans themselves, but for Israel, the region, and for the West’s wider war on the Islamic State. In such a sequence, Israel will be expected to find the “solution” and will almost certainly bombard Gaza yet again and with perhaps greater ferocity.

Still, the mood in Gaza could quickly change. The long-negotiated Oslo peace accords seemed to blow up out of nowhere. On the morning of the handshake back in 1994 there was no certainty that Gaza would cheer. Hamas opposed the deal and as the day dawned the air was thick with the smoke of burning tires. But in the few seconds it took for Arafat and Rabin to shake hands the green flags of Hamas receded into a hopeful sea of red, black, white, and green—flags of the PLO and of Palestine. There is a risk today that the green flags of Hamas—the new “moderates”—could yet be engulfed in the black flags of ISIS.

If the stifling Israeli controls were lifted now the atmosphere could change fast. If there was tangible hope of a serious new attempt at peace, Gazans might find ways to win over discouraged extremists. At a conference in New York sponsored by the Israeli journal Haaretz, Robert Malley, the White House official assigned to organize opposition to ISIS, said that a resolution to the Israel–Palestine conflict “would be a major contribution to stemming the rise of extremism” in Gaza and elsewhere. The Western nations, paralyzed by the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, could do worse than open talks with Omar Hams, the radical Salafist sheikh who opposes the violence of ISIS; he is clearly willing to debate and modernize to some degree, and has risked his life to come out of the shadows to explain how things look from a Muslim perspective and warn of what might come next.

Before we talked, the sheikh told me that the only Westerner he had met is a Brazilian Catholic priest based in Gaza who came to see him recently, worried that the Salafists were banning Christmas. “I assured him we had simply advised Muslims not to celebrate Christmas. The priest and I got along very well. We had a good lunch.”

Omar Hams is certainly a courageous man. According to the al-Qassem police, ISIS in Syria has recently condemned both the Ibn Baz Institute and Hams himself as collaborators for dealing with Hamas. When I asked him if he feared speaking out against ISIS, he said that he didn’t believe anyone in the world was “completely safe” and added that there were certainly dangers to speaking publicly. If Daesh “finds Sheikh Omar is putting obstacles in their way,” he said, “they can find ways to get rid of him.”

—December 16, 2015

It’s brave of Tate Britain to mount an exhibition called “Artist and Empire” when we are constantly mumbling apologies for Britain’s imperial past—for wars and slavery, exploitation and looting, religious and cultural oppression. Not that this show is a celebration. By its own account it is rather an attempt to show how artists have responded to the history and ethos of empire over the last five centuries, and to address its legacy “not just in public monuments, but in social structures, culture and in the fault lines of contemporary global politics.” Ambitious, no doubt. But the presentation has an uncomfortable diffidence. I went on a drizzly December day with a clever, sassy friend, who immediately nudged me as we read the first labels, raising her eyebrow at the evasive historical detail, the fudging, politically correct phrase.

This raises the question of how much one can appreciate an individual work of art, or indeed a genre, when the context is so dominant. The first room, for example, is filled with maps, many showing the spread of pink across the globe. It begins with a vivid watercolor diagram of the siege of Enniskillen Castle in 1593, a part of the English campaign to capture the Ulster province of northern Ireland, the beginning of colonization—a land-grab near to home. It feels embarrassing to admire—as I couldn’t help doing—the clever sketches of little groups of musketeers and the beautifully drawn boats with their siege ladders on board, in the knowledge of the centuries of trouble that lay ahead.

Next to this hangs Henry Popple’s huge, ravishingly beautiful 1733 map of the East Coast of North America, from Newfoundland to below the Gulf of Mexico, showing the British colonies. The label tells us that the founding fathers kept this after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 even though it was now “redundant.” We were puzzled—how could such an intricate, careful map be redundant? The colors of possession had changed, but the creeks and inlets, the forests and mountains remained, regardless of politics. And of course they kept it, not only for its beauty but for its reminder of what they had won.

There is another side of imperialism here—a sense of wonder, as the eyes of Europe were opened to the myriad beauties of distant lands, evident in zoological and botanical paintings of new species: a tall, serene crane from India; colorful birds and fish from China; and a spectacular spotted pink fungus from south-east Asia named after Sir Stamford Raffles, the British governor of Java and founder of Singapore.

This is in stark contrast to the powerful issues of meaning and reception provoked by a room aptly named “Imperial Heroics,” where group after group of soldiers appear, braving violence and extremes. These include famous propagandist works: Benjamin West’s TheDeath of General James Wolfe; Elizabeth Butler’s The Remnants of an Army, showing the only survivor of the British army after the disastrous 1842 retreat from Kabul during the first Afghan war; Joseph Noel Paton’s tear-jerking women and children in the “Black Hole of Calcutta.” On one wall a solemn Victoria offers a Bible to a kneeling African prince as The Secret of England’s Greatness; opposite, in Edward Armitage’s Retribution, a huge, muscular Britannia rams a sword into an Indian tiger. These are appalling images in all senses. Yet artists made good money out of such paintings, a reminder of how art is driven by the market: in this case by Victorian manufacturers and provincial corporations rushing to show their pride in empire.

As the history unfolds, we also see the desire not just to relish but literally to clothe oneself in conquest. A striking set of portraits shows British bigwigs garbed in what they regarded as “native dress.” Boy, how these men loved dressing up, putting on a turban or a Native American headdress. And while Marcus Gheeraerts’s ruthless Elizabethan soldier Captain Thomas Lee (1594) is bizarre in his bare-legged stance as an Irish soldier—he had fought in the Ireland campaigns—sometimes they seem to have understood what they were doing. A glowing Van Dyck of William Fielding, probably painted shortly after his return from travels in Persia and India (1631-1633), shows the portly, grey-haired earl wearing a pink, gold-striped kurta and pajamas in a composite British-Indian landscape and looking thoroughly at home.

But what did it mean to be “at home” in these colonized countries? In India in the eighteenth century, before evangelical missionaries and politicians began to demonize Hindu culture, there was considerable fraternization and inter-marriage. The German-born Johann Zoffany (1733-1810) was one of many artists who traveled to India to paint the nabobs, and his joyful, witty paintings catch the spirit perfectly. A century later, John Griffiths lived and taught in Bombay for many years, and his pupils, adopting Western styles, produced haunting portraits like Manchershaw Pithawalla’s The Houseboy (1898). By contrast, African artists looked quizzically at the British officials and missionaries, portrayed in vigorous, comical wooden statues wearing bowler hats, riding bicycles, smoking pipes.

Yet the atmosphere surrounding the work of all these artists is ambivalent, uneasy, shifty. And there are moments of real shock. I stood before the case containing the bronzes of royal heads by Edo artists, looted in the “Punitive Raid” on Benin City in southern Nigeria in 1897, and found myself saying out loud, “They should go back.” Many other Benin trophies were sold on the auction circuit, and it was a kind of confirmation to find, in the last room of all, plates from Tony Phillips’s 1984 etchings of these Benin bronzes making the same point. Yet Phillips also suggests—in a quote in the show’s excellent catalogue—how the great bronzes speak to us across the centuries, “even after the plunder, the dispersal, and the re-presentation in alien environments.”

While the curators have tried to show artists inspired by a mixing of traditions, the examples, on the whole, aren’t strong enough. The only major paintings to stand out are two great Sidney Nolan scenes retelling the story of Eliza Fraser’s life with the Butchulla people of what came to be known as Fraser Island off the east coast of Australia, and her “rescue” by a convict. These are canvases that challenge conventional notions of the “primitive,” bringing together the landscape, the history, and the power of aboriginal rock drawings. We have to wait until the final room to see how contemporary artists handle this complex legacy. And in this room, too, women artists come into their own.

The exhibition ends with works that throw the fraught heritage of empire back at us. One is a four-panel painting by Sonia Boyce, Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain so Great (1986). Remembering school history lessons and her “hollow feeling that all these English kings–and fewer queens” were absolutely remote from her life as an east-London girl of West Indian parentage, she adopted a Victorian format, echoing Rossetti’s The Beloved. Within a background of blood-red roses like a William Morris design are cross-shaped monochrome panels, like public memorials of grief: Cape Colony, India, and Australia. These are replaced in the final panel with a woman’s face from the Caribbean, a note of defiance, hope, and change. And hope glimmers too in the dazzling work by the Singh Twins, EnTWINed (2009). With their wit and imagination, the twins, who are British-born Sikhs and the children of migrants, have created a critique of Victorian paintings of emigration and conflict, combining the intricate designs of Mughal miniature art with a dry commentary on tradition and modern life. Everything is here, from soldiers and suffragettes, to football and skyscrapers and Bollywood films.

So—or so it seems—we are supposed to leave these artists of empire on a cheerful note. But as impressions settle, that unease remains. One or two critics have damned the show as static, stuffy, and academic, yet its boldness and ambiguity—reflecting the mix of pride and shame in our imperial past—is mesmerizing. “Artist and Empire” is not an exhibition to “enjoy,” but it is thought-provoking, humbling, and disconcerting. I’m glad I went.

“Artist and Empire” is showing at Tate Britain in London through April 10, 2016.

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens

by Gabriel Zucman, translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan, with a foreword by Thomas Piketty

University of Chicago Press, 129 pp., $20.00

The Price We Pay

a film directed by Harold Crooks, inspired by Brigitte Alepin’s 2010 book La Crise fiscale qui vient (The Coming Fiscal Crisis)

In some circles, “redistribution” of wealth has become a dirty word, and recent efforts to make the tax system more progressive have run into serious political resistance, above all from Republicans. But whatever your political party, you are unlikely to approve of the illegal use of tax havens. As it turns out, a lot of wealthy people in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere have been hiding money in foreign countries—above all, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Virgin Islands. As a result, they have been able to avoid paying taxes in their home countries. Until recently, however, officials have not known the magnitude of that problem.

But people are paying increasing attention to it. A vivid new documentary, The Price We Pay, connects tax havens, inequality, and insufficient regulation of financial transactions. The film makes a provocative argument that a new economic elite—wealthy managers and holders of capital—is now able to operate on a global scale, outside the constraints of any legal framework. In a particularly chilling moment, it shows one of the beneficiaries of the system cheerfully announcing on camera: “I don’t feel any remorse about not paying taxes. I think it’s a marvelous way in life.”

Gabriel Zucman, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, has two goals in his new book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: to specify the costs of tax havens, and to figure out how to reduce those costs. While much of his analysis is technical, he writes with moral passion, even outrage; he sees tax havens as a “scourge.” His figures are arresting. About 8 percent of the world’s wealth, or $7.6 trillion, is held in tax havens. In 2015, Switzerland alone held $2.3 trillion in foreign wealth. As a result of fraud from unreported foreign accounts, governments around the world lose about $200 billion in tax revenue each year. Most of this amount comes from the evasion of taxes on investment income, but a significant chunk comes from fraud on inheritances. In the United States, the annual tax loss is $35 billion; in Europe, it is $78 billion. In African nations, it is $14 billion.

The fractions of wealth held abroad are highly variable. In Europe, it is about 10 percent. In African and Latin countries, it is much higher—between 20 percent and 30 percent. In Russia, it is a whopping 52 percent. It follows that while tax havens hit wealthy nations hardest in absolute terms, they can have especially destructive effects on poorer or developing countries, because such a high percentage of their money is offshore. Zucman does not explain why this is so, but it is possible to speculate that one reason is rampant corruption within both the public and private sectors. The extraordinarily high figure for Russia might be best understood as involving money corruptly acquired or invested, which suggests an important point: all uses of tax havens are not the same. Sometimes government officials are the ones who are evading taxes, and they do not want to stop that evasion.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, you might expect that there would be an international crackdown on the use of tax havens, and as we shall see, international attention is indeed growing. But the numbers demonstrate that no crackdown has occurred. In Luxembourg, offshore wealth actually increased from 2008 to 2012 (by 20 percent). In Switzerland, the increase has been comparable; foreign holdings are now close to an all-time high. Disturbingly, the new wealth is coming mostly from developing countries, which poses a serious problem in light of the severe strains on their limited budgets.

Zucman is the first economist to produce specific numbers of this kind, and to do so, he had to undertake some creative detective work. In order to identify hidden wealth, he focuses on “anomalies”—situations in which international balance sheets show, in aggregate, more liabilities than assets. To see the importance of that inquiry, Zucman asks readers to imagine that a citizen of the United Kingdom holds an American security—say, stock in Google—in a bank account in Switzerland. In the United States, statisticians estimating US wealth overall will record a liability, because a foreigner owns US equities. But in Switzerland, statisticians will see nothing, and for a good reason: Google stock held in Switzerland by a UK resident will be, for Switzerland, neither an asset nor a liability. In the UK too, nothing will be registered, but for a bad reason: the UK has no way of knowing that one of its citizens owns Google stock in Switzerland. From this example, we can see the anomaly: on the global level, liabilities will be recorded as exceeding assets.

Zucman puts it this way: “as far back as statistics go, there is a ‘hole’; if we look at the world balance sheet, more financial assets are recorded as liabilities than as assets, as if planet Earth were in part held by Mars.” For the purpose of producing an accounting of hidden wealth, that is actually helpful, because “money doesn’t evaporate randomly into the ether, but instead follows a precise pattern of tax evasion.” In 2015, for example, the nations of the world reported $2 trillion as mutual fund holdings in Luxembourg; this is the total of recorded liabilities. But Luxembourg’s own statisticians calculated that worldwide, $3.5 trillion in mutual fund holdings were kept in Luxembourg; that is the total of recorded assets. What happened to the missing $1.5 trillion? In global statistics, that amount had no owners. For Zucman’s purposes, the anomaly is a revealing one: the amount by which assets exceed liabilities is a measure of wealth hidden in offshore accounts.

Zucman acknowledges that his measure is only an estimate. He must rely heavily on just two nations, Switzerland and Luxembourg, since both provide useful statistics about assets and liabilities; most tax havens do not do so. To make up for the missing information, he enlists some indirect measures. The technical issues need not concern us here. What matters is that Zucman convincingly argues that his accounting is at least pretty close, and that the grand total has to be in the general vicinity of $7.6 trillion.

How might this problem be solved? Zucman points to several recent efforts. An illuminating failure comes from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which instituted, in 2009, what it saw as a promising “on-demand” system for exchanging relevant information about the nationality and holdings of investors. Under that system, any nation may request information about investors from foreign banks, but only if it can establish a well-founded suspicion that fraud has occurred. The problem is that in order to have a well-founded suspicion of fraud, nations need to have relevant information in the first place. Often they don’t. Even though the 2009 reform has been widely praised, it seems to have had little or no effect, and Zucman denounces it as a “masquerade.” Recall that since 2009, the use of tax havens has increased significantly.

Zucman is also unimpressed by the Savings Tax Directive, adopted with considerable fanfare by the European Union in 2005. That directive imposes a simple requirement. When, for example, citizens of the UK earn interest on French accounts, the French government must automatically inform tax officials in the UK. That sounds like a solution, but it runs into three problems. First, it excludes dividends altogether. Second, it has been successfully avoided by the creation of shell corporations and trusts, which make it hard to know who, exactly, owns what. Third, nations are not treated equally; for example, Luxembourg and Austria are not required to send information automatically.

Zucman much prefers the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which was signed into law by President Obama in 2010. Under FATCA, all foreign banks are required to identify any American citizens among their clients and to disclose to the Internal Revenue Service the amount of their holdings and any dividends and interest paid on them. What Zucman emphasizes, and especially admires, is the automatic nature of the act’s requirements. The IRS need not name names or show grounds for suspicion. Every year, foreign banks are required to comply. If they fail to do so, they face a severe sanction, in the form of a 30 percent withholding tax on gross income (including dividends and interest) from US sources. In Zucman’s account, the sanction appears to be working; foreign banks are meeting their obligations, and some initially skeptical nations (including China) are even praising the new law.

With this precedent in mind, Zucman unveils his principal proposal: an automatic, fully global register, so that every government in the world can know where money is kept, and who is trying to escape national taxes. Under his proposal, the register would record “who owns all the financial securities in circulation, stocks, bonds, and shares of mutual funds throughout the world.” If rich people in the United States or Germany are depositing their money into Swiss banks, the Swiss authorities would have to inform American and German officials of the deposits. Zucman emphasizes that all this should be done automatically, so as to make special inquiries or evidence of suspicion unnecessary.

With the register, tax authorities could tell, essentially immediately, if their citizens are using tax havens. Zucman notes that a global register of this kind could have other benefits, helping to combat the financing of terrorism, bribery, and money laundering; public and private corruption might be added to this list. He notes too (and here he will immediately lose some readers) that such a register could facilitate the imposition of a global wealth tax, of the sort proposed, very controversially, by Thomas Piketty.

To avoid the charge of utopianism, Zucman emphasizes that there is a clear international movement in the direction he favors. With respect to the approach taken in FATCA, some nations are already considering emulating the United States, and importantly, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Switzerland have said that they would agree to automatic sharing of bank information. But he acknowledges some serious obstacles to the current reform efforts. The first is that, with the exception of the United States, nations are not threatening to impose penalties. That is a major problem, because a polite “please” will not do the job, especially since foreign banks have so much to gain from continuing business as usual.

The second obstacle is financial opacity. Many offshore accounts remain hidden through trusts and shell corporations, which makes it difficult for anyone to link those accounts with their real owners, even when information is formally exchanged. Zucman emphasizes the need to promote financial “transparency” (a principal term for him) and to ensure verification. To this end, he calls for serious economic sanctions against tax havens (as in the US approach), potentially including customs tariffs against nations that help “defrauders evade their home countries’ laws.”

Zucman has a final concern: tax avoidance by multinational corporations. As he is aware, this is a quite different problem from tax evasion, because it is typically done without violating a national law. Under US law, for example, American companies have significant discretion to locate their operations where they please, and also to shift their profits to nations with lower tax rates. Even if this is lawful, Zucman thinks that it is a problem. As a result of tax avoidance, US firms are able to save $130 billion annually, contributing to a decline in the effective corporate tax rate from 30 percent in the late 1990s to about 20 percent today.

In response, he wants “a radical reform of corporate taxation.” He favors a kind of tax on global profits, one that starts with the worldwide profits of firms, and then apportions them to each country. If, for example, a multinational company earns $900 billion in global profits in 2016, a formula would be used to allocate that amount among the various nations in which it does business. Each nation would be free to apply its ordinary tax rate to the profits allocated by that formula. Zucman notes that in the United States, corporate taxes within states already operate a bit like this, with national profit calculations followed by an apportionment formula.

On this particular issue, Zucman’s approach seems naive; many tax specialists believe that the apportionment system works very poorly in the United States, and any kind of international formula would produce serious challenges of accounting (let alone politics). Nonetheless, Zucman has produced an important book, above all because of his effort to calculate the magnitude of the world’s hidden wealth. As he acknowledges, his estimates depend on a degree of guesswork, not least because of the absence of reliable worldwide statistics. Even so, he has used the most rigorous methods to date, and he makes a convincing argument that the global figure is unlikely to be much lower than his $7.6 trillion estimate. It might well be higher.

The result is a substantial loss of revenue worldwide, with unfortunate consequences for both public services and deficits. According to Zucman, the United States is losing $35 billion in annual taxes, and some estimates say that the real loss is as high as $100 billion.^* If so, and if those who successfully evade taxes are mostly the wealthiest people, there is a serious problem. By way of comparison, the entire annual budget of the Department of State is in the vicinity of $50 billion.

At the same time, Zucman’s proposed solution raises an assortment of questions. Should nations really want a global institution to keep a register of everyone’s ownership of stocks, bonds, shares of mutual funds, and other financial securities? Might there be a risk to personal privacy? To be sure, Zucman does not want everyone’s holdings to be visible on the Internet. A global institution could be required to maintain privacy. But many people would undoubtedly fear that it would not respect that requirement, and that people with nefarious purposes might be able to get access to it. And who, exactly, would serve as that global institution? Zucman suggests the International Monetary Fund, which is probably the most natural candidate. The IMF has a great deal of credibility in many circles, but hardly in all. Should the IMF be given full access to people’s financial holdings?

These questions might well have answers. With respect to privacy, domestic banks are already required to make reports to the IRS, and the privacy concerns do not seem severe; perhaps the risks could be controlled at the global level as well. Nonetheless, an international effort to negotiate a global register might not be feasible. A less provocative suggestion, in the spirit of Zucman’s proposal, would be that other nations should move on their own toward adoption of the approach embodied in FATCA—by which banks must identify their clients and report their holdings—complete with stiff penalties for noncompliance.

In Europe, which is losing a lot of tax revenue, that approach could prove especially helpful. True, some developing countries might lack the leverage to enforce requirements of this kind, and because of domestic corruption, some nations would be reluctant to impose those requirements. To these problems, the best solution might be an international treaty to uncover hidden wealth, through which participants generalize the requirements of FATCA. That approach might have significant advantages over the global register that Zucman favors.

But there are counterarguments here as well. Zucman largely praises FATCA, but in the United States, the law has turned out to be highly controversial, and some people are loudly calling for its repeal or modification. One reason is expense. Foreign financial institutions are not at all happy with the considerable administrative burdens that it imposes. Another reason involves unintended adverse consequences. Because FATCA increases the costs of having American investors, it gives some foreign banks an incentive not to allow Americans to invest at all (or to charge them higher fees). The law is also a blunt instrument. A lot of law-abiding Americans, living abroad, use foreign financial institutions, and they do not need FATCA to ensure that they obey the law. The same is true of many Americans who choose, for one or another reason, to invest abroad.

But if we keep the size of Zucman’s estimates in mind, these concerns need not be taken as decisive. If the effect of FATCA is to produce major reductions in tax evasion, and to ensure that people pay what they owe, then it might well be worthwhile to incur the costs. Of course foreign banks do not like the law, not only because compliance can be burdensome, but also because it makes it much harder to provide tax havens. That is not exactly an argument against FATCA.

A strong virtue of Zucman’s book is that it puts a bright spotlight on an area in which significant reforms might appeal to people who otherwise disagree on a great deal. You might believe that the tax system should be made more progressive, or you might believe that it should be made less so. But whatever you think, you are unlikely to support a situation in which trillions of dollars are hardly taxed at all.

For the painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet, genuine art was chaotic, unlearned, and driven by “instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.” It was created by those who had no schooling in the arts. “There was more art and poetry in the talk of a young barber,” he wrote in 1945, “than among the specialists in art and poetry.” He believed the best examples were found in the work of the mentally ill, who, he argued, were unafraid of the “ecstasies of the mind,” which served as a private reserve for their work. Dubuffet spent decades collecting examples of this “savage art to which no one pays any attention,” which he called “art brut.” This work, nearly two hundred examples of which are now on view at the American Folk Art Museum, embodied for him a spontaneous and immediate way of making art, an untrained rawness. Art brut was a source of inspiration for his own work, which ranged from primitive-looking drawings scratched into impasto to a totemic figure composed only of two unmodified grapevine roots and a block of slag. But he also advocated tirelessly to spread art brut’s influence as a movement, from postwar France to New York and, in particular, to Chicago. Dubuffet’s greatest contribution to contemporary art, beyond his own work, may have been his validation of an art of instinct and his insistence on what he called an “infinitely diversified expansion” of art history.

Unlike his art brut practitioners, Dubuffet was well versed in cultural history. Born in Le Havre in 1901 into a family of wine merchants, he attended art school and studied the humanities. But academic influence, he felt, took him further from an intimacy with the common man. A stint in the family business and a marriage he described as being perfectly bourgeois did little to help. He read parts of the Austrian physician Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922), a book that had influenced Paul Klee and many other early-twentieth-century avant garde artists whose work was shown in the Nazis’ infamous degenerate art exhibition. The book had a pronounced effect on Dubuffet, as did, later on, the carved wooden sculptures of the French psychiatric patient Auguste Forestier, which spurred Dubuffet to seek out similar works that would eventually form the basis of his art brut collection.

In his quest for rawness and novelty in his own art, Dubuffet passed through many different styles or periods, a progression that the Museum of Modern Art’s recent survey, “Jean Dubuffet: Soul of the Underground,” attempted to outline by drawing on nearly ninety works from its collection. In the 1940s, for instance, Dubuffet liberated himself from the unwanted influences of the academy in part by studying what he called the “thrilling folie-bergère” attitude of the Paris streets and the new metro, both of which offered a direct connection to the vigor and informality of daily life. His paintings and lithographs from the postwar years are a carnival of archaic-looking nude figures and crumbling, graffitied walls.

Dubuffet’s work also drew on cultures that, as he saw it, had developed apart from a Western fine-art tradition. Between 1947 and 1949, he made three trips to Algeria. There he found an appealing strangeness in the indecipherability of the language (despite having studied an Arabic dialect for three years) and in the shifting desert landscape, celebrating what he perceived (with a whiff of ethnocentrism) as being improvisatory and ephemeral. A drawing from 1948, taken from Dubuffet’s Algerian sketchbook, shows the outlines of some two dozen footprints overlapping one another and turned every which way—one footprint disappearing under the lines of another, both dissolving into meaningless, transient marks.

In 1947, Dubuffet introduced stones and sand into his paintings; later, soil, leaves, slag, citrus peels, and wood. For La Piste au désert, a painting from 1949, he used oil, putty, sand, and pebbles to create a pocked, earthy surface that replicates the look of a weathered artifact. Some thought his materials were silly. A headline in Life magazine in 1948 trumpeted, “Dead End Art: A Frenchman’s Mud-and-Rubble Paintings Reduce Modernism to a Joke.” But the notoriously belligerent critic Clement Greenberg, writing in 1949, declared Dubuffet to be “perhaps the one new painter of real importance to have appeared on the scene in Paris in the last decade.”

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland Auguste Forestier: Untitled, circa 1935–1951

MoMA/Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Fund Jean Dubuffet: Wall with Inscriptions, 1945

MoMA/Mr. and Mrs. Ralph F. Colin Jean Dubuffet: Bird Perched on the Corner of the Wall, 1945

MoMA/Mr. and Mrs. Ralph F. Colin Jean Dubuffet: Profile of a Man's Head in Front of a Wall, 1945

MoMA/Mr. and Mrs. N. Richard Miller Fund; Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman Fund; Samuel Girard Fund Jean Dubuffet: The Magician, 1954

MoMA/Mr. and Mrs. Donald H. Peters Jean Dubuffet: Black Earth, 1955

MoMA/Mr. and Mrs. Ralph F. Colin Fund/Philip Johnson Jean Dubuffet: Soil Ornamented with Vegetation, Dead Leaves, Pebbles, Diverse Debris, 1956

MoMA/Mr. and Mrs. Ralph F. Colin Jean Dubuffet: Pavement of Skin, 1958

MoMA/Mrs. Sam A. Lewisohn Fund Jean Dubuffet: Beard of Uncertain Returns, 1959

MoMA/Mary Sisler Bequest Jean Dubuffet: Soul of the Underground, 1959

MoMA/Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Bequest Jean Dubuffet: Beard Wine, 1959

Dubuffet’s work, as art historian Aruna D’Souza has written, is conspicuous as a model for a new kind of art. It affirmed, in part, Abstract-Expressionism’s “vulgar” impulses: in 1947, Dubuffet was showing abstract figures incised into impastoed paint with the wrong end of a paint brush or with his fingers; at the same moment, Pollock was beginning to pour skeins of house paint across canvases that also included nails, tacks, coins, and cigarettes. (In comparing the two, Greenberg faulted Dubuffet for clinging to figuration while Pollock was able to eliminate explicit subject matter from his work.)

While making his own art, Dubuffet advocated on behalf of art brut in famously eloquent pamphlets, speeches, and manifestos. In 1951, he gave a talk at the Art Institute of Chicago called “Anticultural Positions,” which set out his antiformalist, expressive style and his dissatisfaction with Western conceptions of beauty. He rejected the notion that certain objects are more beautiful than others, advocating instead for the idea that “there is no ugly object nor ugly person in this world and that beauty does not exist anywhere, but that any object is able to become fascinating and illuminating.”

At roughly the same time as his Chicago speech, Dubuffet created a series of works that depicted perspectivally flattened tables whose amoeba-like surfaces are crammed with objects. “I am convinced that any table can be for each of us a landscape as inexhaustible as the whole Andes range,” he wrote. Evolving Portrait, a drawing from 1952, depicts a head and torso similarly suffused with a profusion of squiggly marks. His ink-on-paper landscapes from the same year are exploded versions of the same dense, chaotic marks.

By 1960, a thick network of lines fills the canvas in a drawing titled Epidermis, but the marks have become so massed and compact that the view might be microscopic or seen from a great distance. Dubuffet’s primitive impulse became thoroughly notional in Phenomena, a series comprising some three hundred lithographs that mimic the look of natural textures and surfaces. He then cut up these lithographs for use in his collages; they existed as a reserve of imagery much like that utilized by art brut’s practitioners.

Dubuffet was steadfast in his creative vision, and his art is remarkable for the variety with which he explored every aspect of its expression. It reached perhaps its best-known phase with L’Hourloupe, an idiom he discovered in the early 1960s while doodling at the telephone, in which black lines framed cells of unmixed vinyl paint, often red and blue. In later years he went on to create large scale outdoor sculptures and figures made from polystyrene and epoxy.

The trajectory of twentieth-century art history has long been a fairly tidy one, with artists of similar sensibilities herded into neat groups; those who fall beyond these bounds are too often left out of the story, sometimes “rehabilitated” only decades later. But art brut offers a ready example of looking beyond expected lines of investigation into what Dubuffet praised as “new values not yet perceived.”

Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet is on view at the Folk Art Museum through January 10.