February 25, 2022
A few days ago, a former student, an English major just graduated in December, wrote to me asking a question I am repeatedly asked, and for 33 years have felt more or less like a failure in answering: what should I do with my life, and how did you decide what to do with yours? The totally reasonable assumption seems to be that around about her age—she wrote to me on her 23rd birthday—I came up with a plan and methodically worked at realizing it over the years. However, I am afraid that the real answer is summed up by an episode of the old cartoon Fractured Fairy Tales, the one retelling the story of Rapunzel. What I remember is one image: the prince, or whatever he is, at one point gets his hat pulled down over his face so that he cannot see, and spends a long time blundering through the forest bonking into the trees. It does not occur to him to pull up his hat. That was me all right.
By synchronicity, I recently read a story by one of the truly great writers in the history of literary fantasy, John Crowley. The title, “Anosognosia,” is a psychiatric term designating the inability to recognize that one is suffering from a delusion, even when confronted with proof, a characteristic of such illnesses as schizophrenia. It is immediately evident that the story is a tour de force, because the main character’s name is John Crowley, who, when he was a boy, slipped on a pencil and fell down the stairs, suffering a head injury that produced a personality change. The new John is proactive, entrepreneurial, and does all the things young people are supposed to do in order to dress for success. He actively constructs his life, whereas the old John was a dreamy fellow with a lot of imagination but utterly clueless about how to manipulate reality. He does not make his life: life happens to him. I have no doubt that the old John corresponds to the actual John Crowley, and he is also a fair description of me. Portrait of the artist as a young loser, the ugly duckling who has never heard of a swan.
The viewpoint character is the new John, and much of the narrative consists of sessions with his therapist. His delusion—if that is what it is—turns on the currently fashionable notion of a multiverse. At the moment of the accident, old John was not replaced by new John: instead, their lifelines branched, and the two versions of the same self went on to live very different lives. However, new John is convinced that he has somehow been given the option of choosing between his two selves and the lives they have lived. He can trade a successful, glamorous, and affluent life, yet ultimately empty, life as a film writer for the quiet life with family lived by his original self. The therapist regards this as a case of anosognosia, of an unshakeable delusion. Like the speaker of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” we are left with regret about the option we didn’t choose, but the decision, once made, is final. For better or worse, we have chosen to become who we are, and to live the life we have lived. The end of the story, however, leaves the outcome in suspension.
I have written before, in the newsletter for last December 24, about what Yeats called the interplay of chance and choice in the formation of human identity, and even brought the multiverse into the picture. But such basically mythical themes are inexhaustible, with new contexts opening up new aspects of them. Here, my student’s emails have made me thoughtful because they confirm the truth of a phenomenon I have been seeing articles about for some time: the intense pressure, exacerbated by social media, to be self-creating and self-promoting, to be visibly successful at an early age. There is a fear that everyone except you is going to achieve a lifestyle full of visible achievements, posted on Facebook and Instagram. The dubious fascination with figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg lies in their instinct for self-invention, which has made them objects of envy despite their serious character flaws. Many people aspire to emulate them on a smaller scale. We seem to have invented an electronic form of the peer-driven “shame culture” postulated by some social scientists, which I spoke of in a previous newsletter. Yet there is more at work than external social pressure. People want, in fact hunger, to create both a self and a successful life. Self-help books give hope: they promise that it is possible to do so, and they provide a plan for achieving success for readers who wonder how such a magic trick can be accomplished.
It is a foundational assumption of this newsletter that underlying social phenomena are mythical patterns working themselves out in new forms. The ideal of self-creation is a new form of the old “work ethic,” which always involved more than just a dedication to hard work and a commitment to quality and craftsmanship. The exemplars of the work ethic were the self-made men of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—the robber baron capitalists who are the direct ancestors of Musk and Zuckerberg. Such men became millionaires not just by working hard but through a willful self-invention founded upon more literal inventions, either technological innovation, as with Henry Ford, or the invention of monopolies like Standard Oil. The central insight of sociologist Max Weber’s famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904, 1904, although not translated into English until 1930) lies in the word “Protestant.” Weber’s thesis remains controversial among social scientists, but I think his intuition landed on something central. The work ethic was never just a form of materialism: it was a religious virtue. In the Puritan culture out of which it arose, economic success, achieved through self-invention combined with hard work, signified that one was a member of the Elect, the people upon whom God chooses to bestow his grace, enabling them to triumph in this world, presaging their eventual salvation. This conviction tended to produce a personality type that regarded itself as not only superior to the general population but chosen, and therefore beyond the business and moral rules that apply to lesser people. This kind of superiority complex is just as common among the big-time entrepreneurs today as it was among the robber baron capitalists. It has been secularized, as it is in the novels of Ayn Rand, but that has only led to what Jung called psychic inflation, the blowing up of the ego to megalomaniacal proportions. Instead of merely being God’s favorites, today’s entrepreneurs are regarded, and regard themselves, as godlike. The common rabble depend on them, for they are providential “job creators” who also rain down from on high the various gifts—new technologies, new services—that the general population finds indispensable.
The history of Protestant Christianity is paradoxical. Protestantism actually began with Luther’s rejection of the Catholic doctrine of “works”—the idea that doing good works could aid in salvation. God, Luther argued, does not care for our works: we are saved by “faith alone.” Calvinism took that even further by a strict interpretation of Paul’s doctrine of predestination: we are only saved by faith if God grants the grace that makes us capable of faith. If God withholds grace, the heart is hardened and incapable of both faith and repentance for sins. Originally, worldly success merely signified that God had bestowed the grace that made it possible. However, gradually the idea took over that hard work and entrepreneurial ingenuity were in themselves salvational, so that the belief system was totally reversed: utter dependence on God was replaced by an ideal of self-fashioning.
Protestantism was not a unitary phenomenon. On the far left wing of Protestantism, Milton minimized predestination and emphasized the freedom of the human will, but his brand of individualism was quite different. In it, God allows humanity to participate in the process of salvation by choosing. Every one of Milton’s major works turns upon the theme of temptation. Starting with Adam and Eve, all human beings are given the freedom to choose between good and a tempting form of evil, and we have been given the power of reason by which to tell the difference. “Reason is but choosing” is a line that occurs both in his prose work Areopagitica and Paradise Lost. In Milton’s theology, God gives everyone the grace enabling them to make the right choice: we are “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” as God the Father puts it in the third book of Paradise Lost. To that degree, we are self-creating: we build an identity and a life for ourselves through a series of right choices, through a series of temptations resisted.
In the twentieth century, existentialism attempted to provide an atheistic version of human identity created through a free act of choice. Although there is no divinely sanctioned moral code, existentialists cannot escape the terrifying freedom of the human will. Those who collaborated with the Nazis could not say they were helpless to do otherwise: they chose to do so rather than resist. That does not mean that existentialists were in denial about the constraints of reality. In his first book, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus made the Classical myth of Sisyphus a parable of the human condition. Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll an enormous boulder uphill, only to have the boulder roll down the other side, so that the labor was perpetual. There are no gods in existentialism: the task simply represents the resistance of reality. It does not cheer up my students when I tell them that the boulder is your day job: you spend all week pushing that boulder up the hill, only to have to start all over again on Monday. Welcome to what existentialism calls the absurdity of human life. But Camus’ point is that although Sisyphus cannot be free of the external constraints of what Freud called the reality principle, he can be free internally if he chooses. Therefore, Camus concludes, Sisyphus has to be counted as a happy man. He is free in the way that Milton’s Satan claims to be free after his fall, proclaiming that “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” A popular, or once popular, expression of the same sentiment is William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus,” in which the speaker thanks God for his “unconquerable soul.”
All societies are forced to posit free will, or people could not be held morally responsible for their actions. The modern legal system recognizes the effect of a harsh or abusive upbringing, or of heredity in the form of mental illness, on people’s actions, but only as possibly extenuating circumstances. However, constraints upon the freedom of the will, and the relativizing of moral responsibility that they imply, have always been recognized. Homer’s Iliad, about which I have just begun speaking in the Expanding Eyes podcast, grapples with this issue in a way that may seem confused and inconsistent, but which might also be regarded as a way of representing the irremediable ambiguity of the human situation. On a day-to-day practical level the people of the Iliad hold one another responsible for their actions: Achilles shouts in Agamemnon’s face that Agamemnon’s decision to take away Achilles’ war prize, the girl Briseis, is arrogant and wrong; the people of Troy despise Paris and Helen for an adulterous affair that has resulted in a war that has lasted for ten years. And yet, in both these crucial instances, the characters insist that they are not to blame: their will has been overpowered by the will of the gods.
Both Agamemnon and Helen are unreliable: Agamemnon shows himself time and again to be a weak and irresponsible leader, and in Book 3 Helen gives in to Paris’s invitation to bed immediately after telling Aphrodite that she has lost all respect for him and regrets her decision to run off with him ten years ago. When both these people blame the gods instead of their own bad choices, it is easy to dismiss their speeches as self-interested, manipulative whining. Nonetheless, when Agamemnon claims that he was possessed by a supernatural power, Ate, “ruin,” a spirit of destructive delusion, his claim is plausible within the belief system of the Iliad. And Helen has been ordered in no uncertain terms by Aphrodite to go to Paris. Aphrodite’s command can be interpreted literally, yet it can also be read psychologically, as a metaphor for possession by the force of erotic passion, which is what Aphrodite is. If that is the case, Helen would be neither the first woman nor the last to go to bed with a man against her better judgment and even her feelings because she was in the grip of a sexual passion more powerful than her will. Sometimes the gods intervene externally, as when Athena seizes Achilles by the hair and orders him to stop drawing his sword on Agamemnon. But even that can be read psychologically as a conflict within Achilles himself, for no one else sees or hears Athena. Nonetheless, whether the gods represent external constraints or internal compulsions, the narrator seems to endorse the idea that, in the end, we are only their pawns: the induction to the Iliad ends with the statement that “the will of Zeus was moving towards its end.” And fate or destiny, moira, overrules even the will of the gods. Zeus has to watch the death of his son Sarpedon because Sarpedon is fated to die.
So what determines human life: fate, free will, or the will of the gods? I think we should be careful about dismissing the Iliad as simply muddled. Ambiguous is not the same as muddled: it may be the only way to represent the way that reason breaks down into a series of paradoxes in a boundary situation. We are not very consistent either when pushed to extremity. When someone is hit by a car and killed, some of us may consider it bad luck, blind chance; others may ascribe it to human free will (the victim made an unwise decision to run out in traffic and paid the price for it); still others may ascribe it to the will of God; and a fourth group might vacillate among these views. Our society does not have a consensus view about such a tragedy, which in the end remains a mystery.
Fate and the will of the gods are ways of expressing the feeling that humanity is subject to powers greater than the human will to create its own identity, its own life, its own fate. A book that has rather fallen out of sight but deserves to be looked at again is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973), written while its author was dying of cancer while still in his 50’s. Becker’s earlier books, as I remember them (it has been a long time) were expressions of utopian hopefulness, akin in some ways to that of Abraham Maslow, about the possibility that the social sciences might lead the way in the recreation of human society. The Denial of Death is a partial recantation, a powerful expression of Freudian pessimism about what Becker calls immortality projects, or, adopting a traditional phrase, causa sui projects. Causa sui means “cause of itself,” and is accurately applied only to God. Human beings, in order to deny the terror of death, are driven to devise “immortality projects,” would-be heroic ways of giving meaning and significance to life. An immortality project gives life purpose while we are alive, and partially cheats death by leaving behind some kind of legacy, tangible or intangible. Depression is the feeling that our immortality project has failed, or that we lack the capacity to create one. It is here that we circle back to the dilemma of my graduated student. It is surely significant that she is an admirer of Sylva Plath, who stands in the line of Romantic and post-Romantic poets, going back at least as far as Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” for whom the vision failed. The subject of such writers’ late work indeed becomes the failure of the vision.
There are scholarly versions of such visionary recantation as well, such as the later books of the critic Harold Bloom, who in mid-life renounced his faith in the Romantic vision about which his earlier books had spoken of so eloquently, postulating instead an “anxiety of influence,” characterized as the inevitable slow decline and fall of the imagination in the course of literary history. The Denial of Death is itself such a late work. While still feeling the pull of the heroic creative impulse, Becker describes the causa sui project as a quest for what Nietzsche called “life-giving illusions” that deny the horror that lurks beneath. (One begins to see why H.P. Lovecraft looms as an important modern writer despite his quirky mannerisms and his hideous racism). A life-giving illusion, however, is still a lie, however noble. A revolutionary Romantic like Blake transvalues the terms. To Blake, it is the reality principle, a question-begging term if there ever was one, that is the lie, and imagination’s immortality project that is real, even if we have to be careful to distinguish it from the inflated ego’s attempts to build monuments to its self-proclaimed magnificence.
Many of the students I have admired the most, for reasons quite other than their grade point average, yearn for an immortality project to give life meaning, but are balked by two problems. One is the difficulty of finding such a project, such an abiding passion—you cannot simply will one into being. The other is bafflement about how to combine the quest for meaning—for an immortality project is a quest—with paying the rent. The fact that the artist starving in a garret has been a cliché for several centuries does not make the problem any less painfully real. It is in advising students about the second problem that I sometimes feel inadequate. I grew up in the 60’s, whose affluence and security—at least if you were white and middle class—provided a safety net that permitted all sorts of quests and projects, some of them more immortal than others. You could reject your parents’ American Dream and its work ethic, and if you needed the rent you could always deal dope, or give blood, or sleep on somebody else’s floor. Or, failing that, at least smoke dope. Meanwhile, your real energies went into a project—a novel, a rock band, a commune, social justice activism. The Social Darwinism that repressed the idealism of the 60’s has put an end to that kind of lifestyle, and the gentler young people who are not aggressive enough to become dogs eating other dogs are left directionless, depressed, and still living with their parents. Young people are told, even by the educational system, that nowadays there is no alternative to playing the dress-for-success game—which is why enrollment in humanities majors has been plummeting for at least 15 years.
Moreover, the humanities themselves have offered little but disillusionment. The 60’s are often remembered as a brief moment of hopefulness, but the intellectual disciplines of the time were moving in the opposite direction, led by movements in philosophy and literary theory that are roughly characterized as “post-structuralist” or “post-modern.” These terms are over-simplifications, but it is commonly accepted that the prominent thinkers of the time, while disagreeing in any number of ways, shared what was called a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” hermeneutics being the science of interpretation. Over-simplifications are dangerous, yet sometimes indispensable, and it is probably fair to say that what the so-called “theory wars” of the 70’s and 80’s bequeathed to our time was a modern equivalent of the will of the gods and fate. The gods are the global elite of the world of “late capitalism.” Like the gods of the Iliad, they can be seen as both objective figures of power and inward forces of ideological conditioning.
As the latter, they shade over into our present version of “fate,” the idea that the people who seem to run the powerful institutions that oppress ordinary people—the global corporations, the banks, the investment firms, the heads of social media—are themselves caught up in vast, impersonal, interlocking systems of power, which in the end are one big system, which, like the old medieval definition of God, has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. In the radical vision of a writer like Foucault, individuals do not even exist: human identity is a construct of power systems, working through various forms of conditioning. Such a bleak vision had been foreshadowed by Kafka’s novels The Trial and The Castle. The task of thinkers and writers is to work against oppressive systems, but while cultural studies score valuable local successes fighting against racial, gender, and religious prejudice, there seems little hopefulness about systemic change, even as the system increasingly seems to be breaking down.
Having admitted that I am short of practical advice to students (or anyone) about long-term plans for paying the rent, I can still offer a few convictions that have come of my own life experience. The first is that self-making and career-making by may not in the end be a matter of an act of will, at least beyond a certain common-sense point. If you are a humanities major with an analytical cast of mind to go with your verbal skills, you can consider law or IT. But if, like me, you are hopelessly right-brained, you may have to accept a quest that begins with a certain amount of blindly bonking into trees. To put it a less demoralizing way, you may need to set aside your anxiety and develop a trust that there is something deeper than your own frail and frightened ego, something deeper than all the power systems, deeper than common sense and practicality, deeper than plans.
Hopeless as I was at coping with the so-called real world, I had a sense of this when I was very young. Northrop Frye’s book on Blake gave me a name of it, the imagination, but I cannot remember a time when the intuition of it was not there. In different ways, my book and these newsletters show how the imagination manifests itself to me: as a power of seeing deeper connections beneath the ordinary surface of things. This is not some mystical escapism. The imagination perceives reality: what is commonly called the real world is the illusion, even if it is one that we have no power simply to dismiss or defy. Moreover, the imagination is not just perceptual: it is an active power of transformation capable of decreating and recreating both our personal identity and our world. Contrary to the common-sense view, we do not control it: it speaks from the depths of the psyche, and we choose how we will respond to its voice, a still, small voice that is far more than a conscience, which may be no more than a function of our social conditioning.
In A Study of English Romanticism, Frye defined the basic Romantic myth as a descent quest in search of a gnosis, a knowledge that is not just information but revelation or epiphany, a quest into the realm of the imagination itself. Know thyself: and to do that you need to descend into yourself, as Christ did for 40 days in the wilderness in the Temptation story. It is an apt analogy, for what Satan offers Jesus, as Milton makes clear in his retelling of the Temptation story in Paradise Regained, is quite literally career counseling, especially in the temptation of the worldly kingdoms. The Jesus of the Temptation story is a nobody fresh out of Nazareth: he has not yet embarked upon his public ministry, and he is debating with himself how to go about it. Enter the devil, who tempts him with possibilities of self-invention. Says the devil: you could be a great conqueror, leader of a warlike state, symbolized by Parthia. Or the Caesar of a civilizing empire, symbolized by Rome. Or a retired contemplative living the English major’s dream of a life of books, symbolized by Athens. All you have to do is make a little deal with me. Christ rejects them all, even the passive escapism of Athens, trusting instead to the voice within him. True education, especially in literature and the arts, is a discipline of learning how to listen to that voice and interpret what it is saying. That was the real reason you got your degree in English, or philosophy, or art history. It is the reason you need to keep reading, and thinking, and writing, after graduation, even if you have to discipline yourself to do it after your day job and on weekends.
The Romantic tradition identified the creative power within as the imagination. A Christian may choose to identify it as Paul’s “spiritual self” in contrast to the ordinary “natural self.” Jung spoke of it as the Self, an identity far more comprehensive than the ego. Taoism calls it the tao, and says, rightly, that it cannot be defined. Taoism also stresses receptiveness and balance over active striving, allowing yourself to grow into who you are over active self-fashioning. Likewise, Abraham Maslow counseled listening to your “impulse voices.” Joseph Campbell said to “follow your bliss” and got mocked for it because after all isn’t that just so corny and narcissistic-sounding, especially when it is being yelled by a surfer dude as he dashes into the water seeking the perfect wave. I have never surfed. Yet I can imagine what it might feel like to be lifted by this awesome natural phenomenon that is also a tremendous energy, keeping one’s balance forty feet in the air, carried by a power that is beyond the self. It is actually a vivid symbol of the human relationship to the imagination, even if, once again, we have to resist the temptation to an inflation that would result from identifying oneself with or dissolving oneself into that power. Campbell also said that if you follow your bliss, doors will open where you didn’t even know doors existed. There is no guarantee of that: there is no guarantee of anything. But I can attest that it can happen, because it happened to me. And I can testify that “bliss” is after all not a bad word for it.