Waiting for the Barbarians Read online

  ALSO BY DANIEL MENDELSOHN

  MEMOIR

  The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

  The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity

  CRITICISM

  How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays

  Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays

  TRANSLATION

  C. P. Cavafy: Complete Poems

  C. P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems

  C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS:

  ESSAYS FROM THE CLASSICS TO POP CULTURE

  Copyright © 2012 by The New York Review of Books

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in The New Yorker: “Unsinkable,” “Battle Lines,” “Arms and the Man,” “Epic Endeavors,” “Heroine Addict,” “Rebel Rebel,” and “But Enough About Me.”

  “After Waterloo” copyright © 1999 The New York Times Company.

  “Zoned Out” copyright © 2006 The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

  Cover image: TM & © 2012 Marvel and Subs. All Rights Reserved.

  Cover design: Evan Johnston

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mendelsohn, Daniel Adam, 1960–

  Waiting for the barbarians : essays from the classics to pop culture / by Daniel Mendelsohn.

  p. cm. — (The New York Review collection)

  1. Canon (Literature) 2. Literature—Appreciation. 3. Popular culture—21st century. I. Title.

  PN81.M514 2012

  801′.95—dc23

  2012012240

  eISBN: 978-1-59017-609-2

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  FOREWORD

  I. SPECTACLES

  The Wizard (James Cameron’s Avatar)

  Truth Force at the Met (Philip Glass’s Satyagraha)

  Why She Fell (Julie Taymor’s Spider-Man)

  The Dream Director (Aleksandr Sokurov’s The Sun)

  The Mad Men Account (Mad Men)

  Unsinkable (Why We Can’t Let Go of the Titanic)

  II. CLASSICA

  Battle Lines (Stephen Mitchell’s Iliad)

  In Search of Sappho (Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter)

  Arms and the Man (The Landmark Herodotus)

  The Strange Music of Horace (J.D. McClatchy’s Horace, The Odes)

  Oscar Wilde, Classics Scholar

  Epic Endeavors (Three Novels on the Classics)

  III. CREATIVE WRITING

  After Waterloo (Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma)

  Heroine Addict (The Novels of Theodor Fontane)

  Rebel Rebel (The Poems of Arthur Rimbaud)

  The Spanish Tragedy (Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad)

  In Gay and Crumbling England (Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child)

  Transgression (Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones)

  IV. PRIVATE LIVES

  But Enough About Me (The Memoir Craze)

  His Design for Living (Noël Coward’s Letters)

  On the Town (Leo Lerman’s Diaries)

  Zoned Out (Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone)

  Boys Will Be Boys (Edmund White’s City Boy)

  The Collector (Susan Sontag’s Reborn)

  About the Author

  in memory of my father,

  multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus

  haec accipe multum manantia fletu

  Foreword

  DON’T WORRY. ALTHOUGH the title of this book may seem alarmist, there’s nothing to be anxious about. At least, that’s what the author of the poem from which I borrowed it thought.

  In Constantine Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” the representatives of a very grand and sophisticated culture, unnamed but apparently Rome, assemble at the city gate in great state, from the emperor to his various officials, awaiting the arrival of envoys from the (also unnamed) “barbarians.” The city has fallen into an anticipatory stupor: the senators sit around making no laws, and the orators fall silent, having tactfully absented themselves. (The barbarians are “bored by eloquence and public speaking.”) They all wait from early morning until evening, fidgeting with their embroidered scarlet togas, their amethysts and emeralds, until it becomes clear that the barbarians aren’t going to come. Only in the final line of the poem does Cavafy give the proceedings an unexpected twist: the emperor and the rest, you learn, are actually looking forward to the barbarians’ arrival. “Perhaps these people,” the narrator sighs in the last line, “were a solution of a sort.”

  So the poem is about confounded expectations in more ways than one. There’s the disappointed anticipation of the waiting emperor and his people, of course, but even more, perhaps, there are the oddly thwarted expectations of the reader of the poem, which have been set up by that sonorous, portentous, and now-famous title. Detached from its context, the phrase “waiting for the barbarians,” which has been used as everything from the title of a novel by J. M. Coetzee to the name of a chic men’s clothing store in Paris, seems to be about the plight of a precious civilization perilously under siege by the crude forces of barbarity. And yet Cavafy himself clearly saw it differently. A note he wrote in 1904, the year he published the poem, indicates that for him it was “not at all opposed to my optimistic notion”—that it represented, indeed, “an episode in the progress toward the good.”

  Why, you wonder, should the imminent advent of the barbarians suggest positive progress? Here it’s important to remember a bit of biography. Cavafy had come of age in the late nineteenth century, the era of the flowery and highly perfumed Decadents, and only when he was around forty—the time he wrote “Waiting for the Barbarians”—did he set about stripping his work of all derivative artifice, transforming himself into an idiosyncratic modernist. So the poem may well be a parable about artistic growth—the unexpectedly complex and even, potentially, fruitful interaction between old cultures and new, between (we might say) high and low; about the way that what’s established and classic is always being refreshed by new energies that, at the time they make themselves felt, probably seem barbaric to some. As Cavafy knew well—he was, after all, a specialist in the marginal moments of ancient history, the era in which Greece yielded to Rome, when paganism met Christianity, when antiquity made its long and gentle slide into the early Middle Ages—there rarely are any real “barbarians.” What others might see as declines and falls look, when seen from the bird’s-eye vantage point of history, more like shifts, adaptations, reorganizations.

  The meeting of the ancient and the contemporary worlds is one theme that connects the twenty-four essays in this collection. Some of the pieces here are dedicated to the classics themselves: for instance, an essay on a new translation of the Iliad, collected in the section called “Classica” (a rubric I owe to my longtime flea-marketing companion Bob Gottlieb, who thus christened a vast category of household knickknacks). And a number of them are concerned with the “waiting for the barbarians” phenomenon: they consider the ways in which the present, and especially popular culture, has wrestled, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, with the past. Julie Taymor’s Spider-Man musical tried and failed to adapt ancient myths of metamorphosis to modern comic-book sensibilities; it’s interesting to think why the two genres don’t really mix. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones owes a major debt to Aeschy
lus’ Oresteia. No fewer than three significant novels published in 2010 took classical myths as their starting points, and their adaptations, as always, tell us as much about the present as they do about the past.

  But by far most of these essays are concerned with contemporary popular culture and its products: television, movies, plays, novels, memoirs. Nearly all were first published over the past five years—since 2007, that is, when the manuscript for my first collection was submitted. (The remaining handful, with one exception, were all published within the past ten.) A recurring theme in that collection, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, was the effect of the September 11 attacks on pop culture in the first half of the first decade of the new century. It’s now clear to me that in the second half of that decade (and since), I’ve been preoccupied with what I think of as the “reality problem”: how the extraordinary blurring between reality and artifice that has been made possible by new technologies makes itself felt not only in our entertainments—the way we create and experience movies (Avatar) and Broadway shows (Spider-Man, again)—but in the way we think about, and conduct, our lives. Certainly one side effect of the ongoing erosion of the boundary between the inner and the outer self, itself made possible by new technologies and media that allow us to be private in public (smartphones, iPods, blogs, Facebook, etc.), is a profound alteration in our sense of what is truth and what is fiction: readers of a good deal of contemporary writing must ponder the difference between (as one memoirist has put it) “real reality” and “my reality.” (This is the subject of my New Yorker essay about the memoir craze, “But Enough About Me.”) These various erosions have broad and fascinating ramifications. Not the least of these is the way we think about, and re-create, the historical past in our various entertainments: Mad Men, novels, Titanic, autobiography. The reality problem is, I think, the preeminent cultural event of our day, and references to it crop up more than once here.

  The present volume is organized in four sections, each representing a special interest of mine. The title of the first, “Spectacles,” shows traces of the career I had embarked on before I started writing and reviewing: as a graduate student in classics, I was particularly interested in Greek tragedy, specifically in the relationship between public theatrical displays and the life of the wider society, its social and political values. Then comes “Classica” (thanks, Bob!); then “Creative Writing,” containing a number of pieces on novelists and poets, both contemporary and “classic.” Some of these are well known, and what I have to say about them (The Charterhouse of Parma, for instance) very likely amounts to a statement about what my standards for the novel or for poetry might be; for others, such as the novels of Fontane or Sepharad, the underappreciated masterpiece by the contemporary Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina, I am happy to advocate. Finally, there is “Private Lives.” As someone who has published two memoiristic books myself, I’m keenly interested in how private life ends up represented on the page; the essays in this section ponder that vexed question in various ways.

  All of these pieces were written for periodicals, and nearly all appear here more or less as they did when first published. The only cases in which the versions here are substantially different are the essay on Edmund White’s memoir, which here takes the form it had before I made a last-minute (and, I now see, unhelpful) structural change; and the piece on Jonathan Franzen’s autobiographical essays, which appeared in print at half the length of the original draft. (My fault: I wrote too much for the assigned space.) As for the rest, I have, for the most part, refrained from editing them, apart from a few cases of smoothing out and sharpening; they are, in the end, pieces of journalism, and as such reflect the moment in which they were written.

  As any working writer knows, the large part of what’s successful in a piece of writing is the work of the editor. This collection owes its existence in particular to the three editors whom I’ve been enormously lucky to work with over years: Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books, a figure who needs neither an introduction nor my accolades, and to whom in many ways I owe my career; the indefatigable Leo Carey at The New Yorker, by now a great friend; and, in many ways hovering over all these pieces although he only actually edited one, Charles McGrath, with whom I worked so often at The New York Times Book Review and who, you might say, has been my Chiron. He was particularly great about helping me think through this book and what should be in it. It goes without saying, once again, that Bob Gottlieb has had an enormous influence on nearly everything I’ve written from the start, a debt I doubt I’ll ever be able to repay (among so many).

  The person who got all this into book form (following the welcome suggestion by Rea Hederman) is Michael Shae at New York Review Books, whose patience, good sense, and generosity toward me, during an especially trying time, made this collection possible. Lydia Wills shepherded it through with her usual grace and common sense. To all of them, as Bob S. would say, “great thanks”!

  I. SPECTACLES

  THE WIZARD

  TWO HUGELY POPULAR mashups—homemade videos that humorously juxtapose material from different sources—currently making the rounds on the Internet seek to ridicule James Cameron’s visually ravishing and ideologically awkward new blockbuster, Avatar. In one, the portentous voice-over from the trailer for Disney’s Oscar-winning animated feature Pocahontas (1995) has been seamlessly laid over footage from Avatar, in which, as in Pocahontas, a confrontation between dark-skinned native peoples and white-skinned invaders intent on commercial exploitation is leavened by an intercultural love story. “But though their worlds were very different … their destinies were one,” the plummy voice of the narrator intones, interrupted by the sound of a Powhatan saying, “These pale visitors are strange to us!”

  The other mashup reverses the joke. Here, dialogue from Avatar—a futuristic fantasy in which a crippled ex-Marine is given a second chance at life on a strange new world called Pandora, and there falls in love with a native girl, a complication that confuses his allegiances—has been just as seamlessly laid over bits of Pocahontas. In one, we see an animated image of Captain John Smith’s ship after it makes its fateful landing at Jamestown, while we hear the voice of a character in Avatar—a tough Marine colonel as he welcomes some new recruits to Pandora—sardonically quoting a bit of movie dialogue that has become an iconic expression of all kinds of cultural displacement. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he bellows, “you are not in Kansas anymore!”

  The satirical bite of the mashups is directed at what has been seen as the highly derivative, if not outright plagiaristic, nature of Avatar’s plot, characters, and themes; themes that do, in many ways, seem like sci-fi updatings of the ones you find in Pocahontas. In the film, the ex-Marine, Jake Sully—wounded in a war in Venezuela and now a paraplegic—begins as the confused servant of two masters. On the one hand, he is ostensibly assisting in a high-tech experiment in which human subjects, laid out in sarcophagus-like pods loaded with wires that monitor their brain waves, remotely operate laboratory-grown “avatars” of the indigenous anthropoids, nine-foot-tall, cyan-colored, nature-loving forest-dwellers called Na’vi. All this technology is meant to help the well-intentioned scientists to integrate and, ultimately, negotiate with the Na’vi in order to achieve a diplomatic solution to a pesky colonial problem: their local habitation, which takes the form of an enormous tree-hive, happens to sit on top of a rich deposit of a valuable mineral that the humans have come to Pandora to mine.

  The problem is that Jake’s other master—for whom he is, at first, secretly working, infiltrating the Na’vi with an eye to gathering strategic reconnaissance—is the mercenary army of Marines employed by the mysterious “Company” that’s mining the precious mineral. (Anonymous, exploitive corporations are a leitmotif in the movies of this director.) It’s clear from the start that both the Company and the Marines are itching to eschew diplomacy for a more violent and permanent solution to the Na’vi problem. The dramatic arc of the movie traces Jake’s shift
in consciousness as he gradually comes to appreciate Na’vi culture, with its deep, organic connection to nature (and—the inevitable romantic subplot—as he comes to adore a lovely Na’vi princess bearing the Egyptian-sounding name of Neytiri). Eventually, Jake goes over to their side, leading the native people in a climactic, extremely violent uprising against their thuggish oppressors.

  So far, it would seem, so politically correct. And yet most of the criticisms that have been leveled at the film since its premiere are, in fact, aimed at the nature of its politics rather than at the originality (or lack thereof) of its vision. Many critics have lambasted Cameron’s film for what they see as the patronizing, if not racist, overtones of its representation of the “primitive” Na’vi; the underlying hypocrisy of a celebration of nature on the part of a special-effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster (to say nothing of the film’s polemic against technology and corporate greed); and the way it betrays what David Brooks, in a New York Times Op-Ed column, derided as the movie’s “White Messiah” complex:

  It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.