LOOK INTO THE RED EYE OF YOUR GOD!
A literary reading of Bronze Age Mindset
Commentary about this book tends to engage with it in terms of philosophy or politics, but I have not seen much in the way of attempting to account for its artistic achievement.
The politics associated with it are extreme, it’s true, and there is plenty to argue about when it comes to philosophy. But art is another matter. Why has this book had such an enthusiastic response from its sympathetic readers? What influence might it have on our literature? How might we respond to this book in a literary way? This essay attempts to address these questions.
1: A Controversial Book
I’ve been trying to write about something controversial — maybe you’ve heard of this book, Bronze Age Mindset? It was self-published in 2018 by its author, who uses the online name Bronze Age Pervert.
Given that it comes from the online milieu of the “alt right,” one would think this book would have stayed with its initial small audience, but it has gradually gained more mainstream attention, in politics and in the arts. There was a long piece by the writer Michael Anton for the Claremont Review of Books in 2019 that expressed some caution about the book but urged conservatives to find out what they could learn from it. More recently, rightwing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Chris Rufo have shown familiarity with it. On the liberal side, there was a piece last year warning about the book’s political extremes in The Atlantic, and a longer one on the author’s background in Politico. Finally, the writer John Ganz wrote probably the most pronounced political criticism of the book, calling it “Nazi shit.”
In the arts, literary critic Christian Lorentzen wrote a negative review for The Mars Review of Books in 2022 (this is how I first heard of it). There was also a more evenhanded review in Unherd in 2022 by the writer Murtaza Hussain that mixed political commentary with a more general review of the book. As for more favorable responses, the Red Scare podcast hosts have praised the book and had the author on as a guest last year. Finally, you might be interested in some Substack posts from sympathetic readers of the book — one in the context of Ancient Greek education, the other more personal and aesthetic.
Why are people talking about this weird book? And what should we make of the range of responses?
This book is more central than it may seem at first. It is unpalatable in conventional political and cultural spheres — or at least it has gained that reputation — and yet in the audience that has accepted it, it has engendered uncommon loyalty and enthusiasm. Everyone seems to agree that the book argues on behalf of dangerous ideas — or at least that it has a sense of danger about it — but there does not seem to be broad agreement as to how to receive this sense of danger. In the political responses, the book is seen either as a disruptive vision of energy and promise that could upend dead ideas and dead institutions, or as the manipulative tool of an ideologue on behalf of the worst ideas. In the arts, the positive responses come off as deeply personal, the kind of profound impression on an audience that all artists hope for, but the negative ones dismiss the book as shallow. They explain the book’s appeal as simply telling its largely Millennial-or-younger male readers what they want to hear, and then they wave it away.
But I think this explanation of its appeal is not sufficient. If you stopped there, I think there would remain an abiding sense of puzzlement about this thing. I think the missing piece is that it must be recognized that the book is in fact an authentic artistic achievement. Its literary power is no illusion. What’s been written about it so far has not been able to account for this. The book tends to defeat rational attempts at taking it apart, and yet that’s nearly all we’ve gotten. I think we are overdue, then, for a proper artistic appreciation, and so this is my attempt.
2: An Outline of Its Controversies
First, a little more about the book. It is narrated by the Bronze Age Pervert himself, who presents a dystopian vision of our contemporary world as an “iron prison” lorded over by deranged and decrepit leaders, the “lords of lies,” who suck the life out of the world’s youth and mislead them with hollow moralizing. To escape this prison, his book offers an attitude toward life — a mindset — inspired by Ancient Greece. The book exhorts the reader to awaken to the nightmare of contemporary life, and then points to some ways they could escape this “great ugliness.”
Before I can talk further about this book’s literary qualities, I feel compelled to outline the controversy around it in more detail.
Most of the coverage of the book has read it straightforwardly as a political document. The above-mentioned review by Michael Anton in the Claremont Review of Books mixes some appreciation with a sense of serious concern. Its concluding sentence reads:
In the spiritual war for the hearts and minds of the disaffected youth on the right, conservatism is losing. BAPism is winning.
Taking things further, the writer John Ganz reacts to the book with outright condemnation. He writes in a Substack post:
Suffice it to say, “BAPism” is simply fascism, repackaged and re-marketed. And perhaps not even fascism, but Nazism. Its combination of biological racism, antisemitism, misogyny, celebration of male vitality, embrace of the aesthetics of the brotherhood of combat, conquest and war, demand for "living space,” as well its fusion of bombastic elitism and vulgar populism are unmistakable. It is not even particularly coy or evasive on this account.
This is, then, a useful summary of possible objections to the book, and is a good outline of the shadow of political controversy cast over it. We can take them in order.
On fascism, to clear up any doubt about the author’s personal views, you can refer to a Substack post that’s been cited in the press coverage of the book, where he says of his ideal government:
I believe in Fascism or “something worse” and I can say so unambiguously because, unlike others, I have given up long ago all hope of being part of the respectable world or winning a respectable audience. I have said for a long time that I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.
We have some trouble with this word, “fascism.” If you want to know what the man who coined it meant by it, you can read the very short book The Doctrine of Fascism by Benito Mussolini (co-written with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile). The fascist state, Mussolini explains, is the correct alternative to socialism and liberalism because it produces the right kind of man — healthy, strong, and ready for war — and it is run by the ultimate exemplar of this ideal type of man, a dictator who has absolute power over the government, the economy, and the people. The people are joined not just in material interests but more importantly in spirit — they embody an ideal personality that exerts its will on the world and on history. The people’s perpetuation in history is paramount; the individual is valued only as a member of the collective. The highest praise goes to the individual who sacrifices himself to the state, especially the one who dies in glorious battle. So it is a political, economic, and spiritual tyranny, all with the aim of making a higher militaristic type of man who represents the state, and the state’s primary activity is war.
This word “fascist,” then, should be specific and straightforward, but you seem to hear it used every which way. Often it’s used to talk about just one aspect of the above description — political, economic, or spiritual — or sometimes something more vague. This is, I guess, not a new problem — scholars of fascism have debated the appropriate use of the term since the beginning. When we say “fascism,” do we just mean Mussolini, or does it include Hitler too? What about Franco, or similar figures in Eastern Europe and Asia? Is there such a thing as a generic concept of fascism, something that brings all these figures together, something that could explain why these different political movements developed around the same time? Is there a bigger concept here, or maybe we even need a different word, so that we could include Stalin too? What resemblance would this concept have, if any, to tyrannies from older times? Or is there something distinctly modern about this?
We are disturbed by the thuggery of Mussolini, terrified by the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. How could it have happened, that advanced societies perpetrated these horrors? Is there something we could watch out for, so we could stop something like this from happening again? Could we go searching, like psychoanalysts, for the lurking symptoms of a dormant pathology?
These questions have stayed with us, and in recent years have gained a new urgency with new questions like: Is Viktor Orban a fascist? Is Giorgia Meloni? Is Narendra Modi, or Jair Bolsonaro? Will the “far right” ascend in European politics? Does the “alt right” want fascism in America? And will their meme hero Donald Trump be the one to give it to them?
Recently I read a review of a book of essays on the question of Trump’s possible fascism entitled Did It Happen Here?, a riff on the title of Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Could Happen Here, a political fantasy published in 1935 about fascism come to America. The book of essays and its review are still inconclusive on this question. Even after almost ten years of the spectacle of Trump dominating our politics, this still hovers in ambiguity.
So in this time of It Might Not Have Happened Here, But It Could Soon, Maybe, Though Perhaps We Don’t Agree On What “It” Is, it’s disconcerting to meet a figure like Bronze Age Pervert, who is unambiguous. Even though the word “fascism” is actually never used in Bronze Age Mindset, it is indeed difficult to separate “fascism” from this book.
But which “fascism” is it exactly? This still needs some unpacking. There is a little more background here. If you read that Politico piece I linked to above, you’ll learn that Bronze Age Pervert was identified at some point a few years ago as Costin Alamariu, a former professor who earned his Ph.D. in political science at Yale. I am not much interested in the sordid details of “doxxing” scandals — I care about the books — but there’s another book that matters to Bronze Age Mindset published under the author’s real name, called Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy. This is a revised version of his Yale thesis, self-published by the author after his identity was discovered and the thesis was unearthed and commented upon.
Selective Breeding offers an ambitious account of the ancient world. It starts in the time before the Greek city-states, when most societies were “totalitarian democracies,” where nomos — custom — ruled all. This is especially characteristic of agricultural societies, which were often ruled by a council of elders. Loyalty to the elders, to cycles of “mere life” and these cycles’ unity with custom — all these were paramount in “default civilization,” as Bronze Age Mindset will later put it. It is a tribal, terror-stricken world of darkness and superstition, suspicious of anything that violates nomos. In its account of this world, Selective Breeding follows James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
Change comes with the arrival of nomadic warrior bands, pastoral people who herd and breed animals, who conquer the agricultural societies. In conquering and then ruling over the conquered, these warriors become the first aristocrats. Caste systems are devised, breeding laws are maintained, and the rule of the conquerors is preserved through management of the population.
These are precursors to the Greek city-states, which owe their greatness to their rigorous martial training and their cruel and uncompromising breeding laws. Their leaders knew that some people are simply better than others in the eyes of Nature, and in their world, natural strength was all.
The poet Pindar is offered as a record of the height of this worldview in Ancient Greek history. His use of the Greek word phusis in particular is treated at length. This word describes the glorious quality of the bodies of great warriors and athletes — the enigma of their seemingly self-propagating strength, which is likened to the growth of plants. The strength and beauty of superior natural specimens emanates from their bodies and marks them as meant to lead others. Their authority is “manifest” and animalistic. It makes its own laws, and the public assents to it without reflection. This is the essence of Ancient Greek aristocracy.
Jump ahead to Plato’s time and the stability of the old aristocratic order has faded. A new kind of tyrant appears. Selective Breeding gives the example of the Athenian tyrant Critias, a student of Socrates whose belief in his own natural superiority led him to attempt a murderous campaign to conquer Athens from within.
Who were these men who called themselves philosophers? In this book, the ancient rumors of Socrates and Plato being teachers of tyranny are simply true. Philosophers are taught to question everything, including the laws of the city, and they are taught to see themselves as above those laws, even as potential lawgivers themselves. But after the disaster of figures like Critias, Plato cannot teach this openly, or society would turn against him like they did his teacher Socrates. So instead his dialogues have an “exoteric” surface, where conventional public morality is given lip service, and underneath this is an “esoteric” teaching addressed to an elite few, who are instructed to pursue the path of tyranny, but now under the cover of elaborate political rhetoric. The book uses an extensive close reading of Plato’s dialogue Gorgias to demonstrate this.
In a time determined to hide the natural superiority of certain people and their right to leadership, Platonic philosophy teaches its students to pursue their tyrannical ends while professing to be followers of conventional morality. Plato’s teaching is, in this view, an abstracted or “spiritualized” path to aristocratic order. Aristocratic leaders are not recognized by their phusis, but are called to esoterically through Plato’s teaching, and they discover their exceptional nature by learning to question the laws of the city.
The final section of the book turns to the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Selective Breeding claims that the above arguments should be taken as scholarly support for Nietzsche’s instincts about the ancient world and the nature of Plato’s teaching in particular. Nietzsche sees the modern world as having entered a crisis, where the reign of totalitarian democracies is fast returning. Plato’s efforts to hide the knowledge of Nature and the natural superiority of certain people were actually too successful. His political mask prevailed and his esoteric teaching was forgotten, and now Christianity and modern egalitarian democracy have conducted a breeding program of their own. In their worship of the weak and their elevation of the resentful, they have botched the human specimen. Their drive to erase all distinction, all life that stands apart from the herd, threatens the survival of philosophy itself.
Readers of Nietzsche who have learned to qualify his views with literary irony, or who understand his account of “master” and “slave” moralities in symbolic terms, or some other watering down, are simply mistaken. When he calls for what one of his contemporaries terms an “aristocratic radicalism,” he means a return to the Ancient Greek recognition of superior natural specimens. A new class of warriors must rise up, who will rule by their biological strength alone. These men must train themselves for war, and then more of them will be bred.
That’s the book — ambitious, dense, and intricately argued. I am not at all equipped to judge its claims to scholarly authority, but this summary of its arguments should be sufficient for our purposes. Bronze Age Mindset does not spell out these details in the same way, but it is fair to say that it is in large part a literary exhortation on behalf of the academic arguments from Selective Breeding. It wants to shock the reader into a perception of the contemporary world as a nightmare of tyrannical nomos, and to convince them to share Nietzsche’s fears of the world being engulfed in the rule of the weak and resentful. It finds an alternative to this nightmare in its sense of Ancient Greece, which it argues is the same as Nietzsche’s, and it urges the reader to join in seeking that alternative. It calls for the reader to adopt the “Bronze Age Mindset”, to realize the significance of these lessons of the past for the present.
The second part of the quote above from the Substack post —
I have said for a long time that I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.
— should now be a little more clear. This is the heart of Bronze Age Mindset’s fascism. What Selective Breeding offers as disinterested historical analysis, Bronze Age Mindset demands to come true for the present. There is still more to say about how this book addresses the reader and where it hopes to point them, but this is enough for now.
We can now address the other elements of controversy. If you go back to the quote above — after “fascism” is “biological racism.” We’ve covered the biological part, but not the race element. Modern readers will find this book’s attitude toward race strange because it is deliberately anachronistic. This is touched upon in Murtaza Hussain’s helpful review in Unherd —
The book alternates between extreme disdain for people of other cultures and races and sympathy or even admiration for them; what’s constant is his extreme anti-feminism … From an intellectual standpoint, simply accusing his work of being racist or misogynist does no good, even if those terms would probably stick in a public debate, because BAP self-consciously writes from the pre-liberal perspective of classical civilisation, where such terms had no meaning.
Bronze Age Mindset judges races according to European aristocratic standards as though it’s still the nineteenth century, making some peoples more “noble” than others. It is not shy about its disgust for what it sees as ignoble. But exceptions are made for Nietzschean supermen of any background — for the great specimens strong enough to found a new people. This makes for a strange effect — this book is racist by modern standards and would be welcomed by those already interested in this way of seeing the world, but the influence of Nietzsche behind its treatment of race is so alien as to make it come off almost like science fiction. In general, though, it is less interested in race and more in general human types. Following Nietzsche, what it dislikes most is the “peasant,” the “shopkeeper,” the farmer, the physically weak and inert. It loves the knight, the warrior, the nomad, the noble.
As for anti-Semitism, when the book mentions the Jews it mostly imitates Nietzsche, whose treatment of Judaism is confusing. On the one hand, for Nietzsche, Jews are the people who originated “slave morality” and led to the monstrosity of Christianity, a religion that worships the weak. And yet Nietzsche is on record condemning the stupidity of the anti-Semitism of his day. Without getting into discussions about “what Nietzsche really thought,” I think it is safe to say that when Bronze Age Mindset has anti-Semitic statements, in general they are following Nietzsche. In my opinion, anti-Semitism is not central to the book.
Misogyny and anti-feminism are more prominent. The nature of women is seen as favored in the “totalitarian democracies” of pre-history, and the political rights and the social prestige of modern women are seen as a return to these feminized societies of the past. We owe Western civilization to the world-shaping power of patriarchy, and we ignore this at our peril. This is similar to the way the critic Camille Paglia talks about patriarchy, but it is a step past her libertarian feminism. To Bronze Age Mindset, older, more anachronistic views are more correct. Like an aristocrat from centuries past, it declares feminism to be a distortion visited upon us by mass democratic politics, and freedom for women an absurdity, an offense against Nature.
Finally, the last part of the above quote —
… celebration of male vitality, embrace of the aesthetics of the brotherhood of combat, conquest and war, demand for ‘living space,’ as well its fusion of bombastic elitism and vulgar populism …
— is straightforward and true, and needs no clarification.
This should suffice as a general outline of the book’s controversies. Ganz calls this book “Nazi shit,” but I think it is more accurate to call it “Nietzsche shit,” though it is indeed Nietzsche as the Nazis read him, and not some later interpreter’s softening of Nietzsche’s views. It aims, arguably, to compel us to receive Nietzsche’s ideas as though it were still the early part of the 20th century.
This might seem like pointless nitpicking, but precision about the book’s controversy matters to the more fundamental questions I would like to turn to now — why are we talking about this book at all? Why is such a book, full of so many radioactive ideas, being covered in mainstream news outlets? Why has it been deemed an event in the world of the arts?
Is it possible to read Bronze Age Mindset without taking it as literal life advice, as a straightforward recommendation for reforming the world that the reader must agree or disagree with? I have seen tweets here and there, for example, saying something like: “I don’t agree with everything in it, but it’s certainly one of the most significant books of the last several years.” If that’s true, why hasn’t the mainstream coverage of the book been able to account for this?
Maybe it’s foolish of me to go after the most politically extreme example, but too often I see books treated as mere containers for information, containers for arguments. Readers are seen as consumers of political discourse or members of audience demographics, and nothing more.
The review in Claremont says: “The young like to shock and be shocked, and Bronze Age Mindset more than delivers on this score.” The Unherd review says the book’s anti-feminism must be what explains its appeal to young men. There’s a similar note in the Mars Review piece, where it’s remarked that younger people these days are always looking for role models. All of this is insufficient.
Why can’t we admit that this book has real literary power, and this is what readers are responding to? It should be possible to acknowledge this while also acknowledging the book’s extremes.
We need to find a way to talk about this book as literature. The Mars Review piece starts by saying:
The most generous and useful way to read Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert, as someone suggested to me, is as fiction.
— and then goes on to argue, more or less, that it’s a mediocre fiction. I would start from the same place, but in my opinion it is in fact a great fiction, a great poetic vision.
In the rest of this essay, then, I will argue:
The book is powerful and inventive in its form and style, its creation of character, and in what might be called its poetic myth of the world.
When read with an eye for how it confronts its influences and how it compares to other books with which it has affinities, the book shows strength and originality as a work of art.
It also might be read as a myth of the internet, which opens up interesting possibilities.
Finally I’ll offer more personal speculations on the nature of the book’s literary influence, and some devices for confronting it.
3: A Myth of the World
We’ve said that in its ideas the book has links to Nietzsche, but it also has the same format of books by Nietzsche like On the Genealogy of Morals or Twilight of the Idols. Its four parts are comprised of a series of short aphoristic passages, anywhere from a couple paragraphs to several pages long, arranged in numbered sections. It also could be said to emulate Nietzsche’s compressed and polemical style, but in a unique voice all its own.
As has been well-covered elsewhere, Bronze Age Pervert writes in what might be called a cavemanspeak voice — a mix of broken English, internet slang, weird words pulled from Nietzsche, and unique coinages. Girls are “grils,” Greek is “Grek,” attack is “attaq,” and so on. This voice is actually not as prevalent as the book’s reputation suggests, and often fades into a more straightforward style, but there is a poetic intensity to the style that never flags — a sense of speed in thinking and perceiving, always forcing its way forward. The arguments are compact and forceful, thoughts and impressions come fast, and subject matter changes quickly. We are rushed onward, and an animalistic freedom grows gradually in the space opened up by the book’s relentless drive to unsettle the material of the world.
Section to section, the reader is kept in a constant state of surprise. The book moves rapidly between arguments, jokes, quick fictional episodes, ecstatic visions of animals and natural imagery, surreal images and glimpses of nightmares, with pauses for longing and romantic moods, and rambling parts that trail off. The range of subject matter is wide, with references to a variety of different periods of history and areas of expertise. There’s Ancient Greece, of course, and the fragments of Heraclitus in particular — and then on to discussions of Darwin, biology and the significance of hormones, questions of religious belief, transgenderism, a theory of modern homosexuality, animal behavior, the nature of scientific revolutions, Christianity, animism, a rant about artificial intelligence, environmentalism, Gnosticism, alternate histories, and more. All this is freely mixed with fragments of self-portraiture offered via confession, bizarre anecdotes, funny asides, and poetic reveries, and yet the book never seems to lose momentum.
So who is the Bronze Age Pervert and what does he want? What kind of story does he tell the reader about the world? He is not quite like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the abrupt monk come down from the mountain to teach the people that God is dead, but like Zarathustra he is part teacher, part clown. He comes to tell the reader that the truth is hidden from them by a class of elites who teach subservience to a lower form of life — “mere life,” the life of a bug, the life of yeast, the undifferentiated blob that knows only how to mindlessly replicate itself, that cannot organize itself into higher functions.
The secret they’re hiding is the one the Greeks knew, the one Pindar celebrated in his beloved athletes. Nature has a higher ideal, one that the animal part of ourselves can recognize without reflection, and one that a hidden, “demonic” intelligence in life can achieve through a disciplined harnessing of its will. But this has been hidden from us, and may even leave our world forever.
This is his nightmare — a world purged of the highest specimens of Natural strength, a Natureless world. We know from the previous section how this sense of Nature relates to various categories of thought or experience, or aspects of human life, or possible political hopes. Much already has been written that attempts to meet the book’s assertions about these things on the level of argument. But let’s set the controversies and the arguments aside and ask instead how does this book convince the reader of this dream?
It’s true that Bronze Age Pervert is interested in objective scientific study. He wants to drive the science of biology beyond the mediocre Darwinism he attacks early in the book. He rails against individualistic ideas of Nature and philosophy, says that biology knows only gradations, classes of beings, which must be part of a universal hierarchy and not merely individual. Fine, fine. But his book is not just a series of arguments, or statements made to shock. And he certainly does not stand neutrally outside the crisis he describes — in fact he personally bears its full burden. His urging of these problems onto the reader is inextricable from his personal story.
I don’t mean to nitpick or to paint him as deceptive, but only to point to what sort of literary character he is. He is a man of nervous, nervy physiology. A man given to uncanny perceptions, to heightened erotic intensity. A lover of animals and an animalistic man, innocent and unrestrained like a cat or a dog. A man who never felt at home in the modern world, who was driven to exile by his own nature. He drifts like a nomad across international locales, longs for the open space of unconquered territory, celebrates the wild free spirit he finds in obscure, uncivilized parts of the world. He finds company in schizophrenics and street people, and likes the filthy parts of cities, the districts of whores and mafia men.
He speaks of spirits present in inanimate objects, of his longing to live many lives simultaneously, to become another man or woman, or an animal, or even an inanimate object himself. He worships the mysterious power of hormones (which he spells “whoremoans”), and everywhere he sees the fire in all things, the way Heraclitus did. Beauty to him is a call to transcendence, to metamorphosis, and erotic love a sublime revelation of Nature’s universal will. The very glint in the eyes of lovers is an act of creation, and he says harshly to the reader that in truth they are nothing more than the glint in their parents’ eyes.
So you can see how this wolfish teacher is more than just a partisan of his specific fascist dreams, but also has personal and erotic dreams to tell. The chief object of his own erotic reverence is the perfected male form, and this leads to a now notorious scene where, standing in a museum gazing upon the majestic sculpted male bodies of statues, the Bronze Age Pervert brings himself to autoerotic climax without touching his own body, through force of will alone. The weird hilarity of this scene is characteristic of the book in general, and it has been used in support of the quick judgment that Bronze Age Mindset is a straightforwardly “gay” book. The writer Blake Smith even theorizes that Selective Breeding and Bronze Age Mindset are written in search of a coterie of eager young males with homosexual proclivities, who will be fostered into a new philosophical elite.
This has a certain wit about it, but I think it is too narrow, and distorts the book. To laugh off the statue scene too quickly is to assume that the book is less conscious of itself than it is, and it’s also too literal-minded about the book’s aims. To see the book as Smith does is to be insensitive to its writing style, its literary irony, and the poetic force beneath the words. Like Camille Paglia or D. H. Lawrence, there is a charged intensity in every sentence. It wants to make the reader feel trapped, and then drive them into an erotic frenzy.
I thought of William Blake, for example, who writes against what he sees as disorders of erotic love in modern times, the “dark secret love” that he curses in his poem “The Sick Rose”. Blake has different philosophical influences, readings of history, and religious preoccupations than Bronze Age Pervert, but he is similar in his account of a fallen world and a dream of renewal driven in part by an unleashing of repressed sexual desire. The “increase of sensual enjoyment” that he urges on his readers in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is not unlike what Bronze Age Pervert teaches.
Or what about Walt Whitman, another teacher against repression? Or how about Hart Crane and Percy Shelley, both mythmakers of their own love lives, their struggles against Nature and their fates? I found all these closer to Bronze Age Mindset than what Smith argues.
It’s better, I think, to read the book like we read poets. Shelley’s poem Epipsychidion, for example, has Shelley confronting his feminine ideal, the twin of his soul. She is both the triumph and the failure of his love life. A woman he can never have, or can and will have, but only in a mutual annihilation. This is the work of a writer at the other end of idealistic visions of erotic possibility and devotion to Nature. He is close to answering Wordsworth’s hope in “Tintern Abbey” that “… Nature never did betray/ the heart that loved her” with the severest possible despair.
Bronze Age Mindset is, by contrast, at the beginning of such an idealistic quest. It intends its ideal male as a schematic figure, a fundamental image, a diagram of a hidden higher knowledge in Nature, a fixed constellation always present as a reminder, to drive yet more voyages of will and desire. I don’t mean to be presumptuous but, read this way, it is almost as though Bronze Age Pervert’s personal and erotic history is recapitulated in the poem of the book — contained, ironized, and sacrificed on the altar of this ideal — as though he has accepted that his individual life will only be what it always was, and by doing so transcends himself.
Bronze Age Mindset wants to force this drive to self-transcendence onto the reader, to assert it as an ideal universal in Nature, or at least one universally available to those who are still young. The book is meant as nothing less than a universal myth of youth, of youth attaining their will-to-power. Even if you cannot hear the call of these ideals anymore, the book insists, the young will hear them.
To transfigure your own life into ecstatic vision and then offer it as a universal myth of youth — isn’t this strange, and astonishing? This aspect of the book is the heart of its literary appeal. To think that we had to hack through so much thick foliage to get here!
All this is best suited to the book’s opening sections, especially its “Parable of Iron Prison,” maybe the most literary part, but to stop there is to leave out the book’s confident third section, which heralds the possibility of a new age of heroes, after the iron prison has been overcome.
It wants a new age of Classical man, strong in all the old Homeric virtues, like the heroes from Plutarch, and it dreams that these pirate-like men will cleanse the world of its corruption. It does not state things like I do here, in personal and literary terms. It insists that the crises and the possibilities it witnesses are historic, and that our history can take no other course.
To attempt to refute its sense of historical crisis invites you to do something like start an argument about your own personal fate — indeed this book never lets you forget yourself — and so we will stop here.
4: Some Literary Comparisons
Bronze Age Mindset’s literary achievement might be better understood by discussing it in light of its apparent influences, and by comparing it to other similar works.
Though it opens many interesting paths into the literary past, the most important connection it has is to the world of Ancient Greece — to Heraclitus and to Homer, in particular. I did not feel confident enough in my own knowledge and reading to provide much insight on this, but in my opinion this book has the power to revitalize interest in the ancient world in a way we haven’t seen in generations. I hope this doesn’t sound like hyperbole — it is simply true.
There are some other authors mentioned in it or implicitly connected to it that I felt I could not cover with much authority — ones I don’t know well like Celine, Junger, Mishima, and H. P. Lovecraft. But I felt more confident to discuss the choices below, and I have not seen them discussed elsewhere.
D. H. Lawrence
Of the authors I knew, Bronze Age Mindset reminded me most of D. H. Lawrence, who apparently had similar influences in philosophy, namely Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. An interesting study might be made comparing the two authors and their different treatment of these influences.
D. H. Lawrence’s novels have similar stylistic effects to Bronze Age Mindset — they both have the same acute perception of natural bodies, the same sense of irritated speed and intensity, of “blood-intimacy.” In both authors, something like a trance is induced in the reader, where an abiding mental calm envelopes an inner turbulence — the reader feels as though they are being continually washed by waves of sexual sensation that suggest higher secrets at the heart of life, communications of a universal will. Abstract morality is swept away, and civilization is restored to its origins — war between the sexes, war between men.
In Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, the Book of Genesis represents a primordial past that lives alongside the characters, present in their instincts. In Bronze Age Mindset this past is Ancient Greece, the world of Homer in particular. The elements are different, but the literary effect is similar.
Camille Paglia
The critic Camille Paglia is most famous for her book Sexual Personae, an extensive general treatment of Western art and culture. It argues that post-60’s Western society has repressed the truth of Nature — something previous ages, especially the ancient world, better understood.
Bronze Age Mindset is the first book I’ve come across to demonstrate an authentic literary response to Paglia. It is a worthy heir of her aggressive, sensational style. In its invention of the Bronze Age Pervert, it has answered what I take to be Paglia’s implicit demand to artists that they create new sexual personae to oppose the all-devouring power of Nature, in her account of it.
I think it is arguably not just an adequate aesthetic response to Sexual Personae, but even could be considered a continuation or a development of it. What might be called sexual dread in Sexual Personae has in Bronze Age Mindset become sexual irritation, which is forced on the reader even more urgently than in Paglia’s book.
There are of course open references to Paglia in Bronze Age Mindset, but I think there is a deeper connection between the two, beneath the level of argument. I am surprised that this has not been more remarked upon.
A Confederacy of Dunces
There is vulgar humor throughout Bronze Age Mindset that is often a great deal of fun. A funny passage that imagines a modern incarnation of the Greek hero Alcibiades who also looks like Mitt Romney has been mentioned by some of the coverage of the book. Bronze Age Pervert always seems to be getting into trouble with nightclub bouncers and mall security, or acting out in public in mundane settings, like a petty conflict with a sinister waitress who takes his cup from him before he can finish his drink. Or there’s a part when he tells a friend he’s going to masturbate in the car while they’re driving and this NPC friend shrugs and says fine with them. Or when he gets felt up by a chad at the gym who’s interested in his fine physical form, or again the already discussed statue scene.
As a hater of the modern world and a starter of petty fights, Bronze Age Pervert sometimes reminded me of Ignatius Reilly from the novel A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s a bit like if you were to let Ignatius rant as long as he liked, and took out the other characters who lend him more dramatic context and pathos.
The Morning of the Magicians
There is an enigmatic reference to someone with “green gloves” in Hong Kong in section 41 that can be traced back to a strange book from the 1960s called The Morning of the Magicians. This ambitious book claims that the humanities have fallen behind advances in modern science — that metaphysics and literature have not found adequate language, adequate myths to address the radical revisions of our reality brought on by the scientific discoveries of the early 20th century.
As a reader of Thomas Pynchon and also of James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, this theme was familiar to me, although I had not read Magicians before. Pynchon would seem to have taken the challenge of Magicians to heart, and it seems to me that Merrill followed Pynchon’s lead in this regard.
In the second part of Sandover, Merrill communicates with occult Ouija board spirits who demand of him “POEMS OF SCIENCE”, specifically of biology. Weirdly, the spirits communicate via the trashy popthink of the New Age. They tell Merrill a version of the Fall, which keeps morphing and taking on new tropes every time they retell it. They are spirits who are also bats who are also atoms who are also “Adam” in the Garden of Eden, who may have had contact with aliens or gathered energy at Stonehenge and this might have something to do with who built the pyramids, etc..
I like this part when Merrill makes fun of how the spirits communicate:
VERY BEAUTIFUL all this
Warmed-up Milton, Dante, Genesis?
This great tradition that has come to grief
In volumes by Blavatsky and Gurdjieff?
Nobody can transfigure junk like that …
The “great tradition” he means is the Western esoteric tradition, which was, I guess, more dignified before modern occult writing and the likes of Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and their students, like the authors of Magicians.
The spirits are inhuman and impolite, speak of populations used and experimented upon by an entity they call “God Biology” or “GOD B.” GOD B treats the Earth like a lab and seeks to forge souls of newer, “atomic” power, souls who could withstand an atomic age. This has something to do with a class of superior souls called The Five, who preside over cycles of reincarnation and periodic apocalypses at various stages of human history. Poets are meant to be scribes working on behalf of The Five, and they perform a function the spirits call “V work.” This is what Merrill himself is called upon to do in the poem, and this all has some higher purpose that I’ve forgotten … But you get the idea.
The man with green gloves is a Tibetan monk that the authors of Magicians say lived in Germany and who apparently acted as Hitler’s spiritual advisor. This is dipping now into the weird heritage of “esoteric Hitlerism” and its speculations upon the meaning of the Nazis’ interest in the occult. Did Hitler have access to secret occult techniques that he learned from this monk that allowed him to harness charismatic energy and sexual magic to change the course of world history? The reference to the man with green gloves in Bronze Age Mindset implies that Bronze Age Pervert has access to these same techniques, and so another layer is added to this book’s already surprisingly rich literary genealogy.
It would be interesting to attempt to bring together Bronze Age Mindset and Sandover. Sandover is very complex, and the matter of a poetry of biology is treated with subtle and at times inscrutable irony. At times Merrill seems to be saying that if one is asked to write literary myths of the science of biology, then one comes upon terrain of speculation already well-trodden, but not by respectable parties. That is, inevitably one runs into Hitler mythology and New Age mush.
If biology is to be the major science of the twenty-first century and literary writers must write “poems of science,” Merrill seems to be implying that this junk literature somehow must be absorbed into our literary history. And so if Bronze Age Mindset is a literary myth of biology and is also in part a work of esoteric Hitlerism, it is remarkable that Sandover seems to have anticipated it.
Thomas Pynchon
Earlier this year I wrote about Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow and my concerns over its continuing influence. I argued that we must learn to read Pynchon differently if we are to get our literature out from under the shadow of his work. Along these lines, I was struck by what might be called paranoid passages in Bronze Age Mindset, like the remarkable passage about the woman from the Rockefeller family in section 41, or the fantasy of hidden nightlife worlds always outside the edge of control of nefarious elites in section 33.
Just as in Pynchon, there is a “They” in Bronze Age Mindset, but with very different interests. Instead of language control, plastics, weapons systems, Faustian obsessions, and decadent sexual perversions, the wicked elites of Bronze Age Mindset want to control our diets and poison us with chemicals, lock us out from the true fruits of science, and turn us into zombies and broken insect-men. They want to desexualize us, neuter us, trap us in our houses, and tell us lies about the real nature of biology, and the nature of the past. This is paranoid mythmaking of a different order than Pynchon’s — on behalf of different politics and a different heritage of thought.
Bronze Age Mindset never mentions Pynchon, but it has a great section that mentions the mathematician and historian Anatoly Fomenko, who wrote a long series of books called History: Fiction or Science?, which take apart the science of chronology and the accepted timeline of world history, asserting, for example, that the Crusades and the Trojan War are actually the same event. This is historiographical playfulness worthy of Pynchon.
The literary diversity of this book, and its ability to absorb and transmute other literary material, has not been discussed enough. Not unlike Pynchon’s books, at times it seems like Bronze Age Mindset could devour any body of work thrown its way. The sense that seemingly anything outside the book could be put to use by its powers as yet more material — this is a rare literary quality.
Nietzsche and American Literature
Often I find myself too finicky and distractible, too sympathetic to every new person, mood, or impression that happens by to hold onto an orderly sequence of rational thought for long. In philosophy the perpetual amateur, always perplexed, always edging away from generalization, preferring the particular at every turn. A mind that chafes at the absolute, that innocently allows each fresh example of a counter-argument to be entertained even long after being convinced otherwise. It falters attempting to reach a final judgment, it strains to see the whole. Thinking not in argument and system, but in image, analogy, and metaphor. In short: no good for philosophy! and not well read in its history.
If there is a thinker with whom I feel at home, it is Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is an essayist and poet, and not a philosopher. Emerson’s status as a thinker varies very widely depending on whom you ask, and many commentators seem determined to condescend to him.
But it also happens that among philosophers Nietzsche in particular was a dedicated Emerson reader, and could be said to have taken Emerson as an important starting point for much of his own thinking.
Given this, coming upon a book as close to Nietzsche as Bronze Age Mindset, I found myself to be an oddity. I knew Emerson but I did not know Nietzsche, and so as I read Bronze Age Mindset, I sometimes heard what sounded to me like echoes of Emerson, but with some adjustments. Later on when I read Nietzsche himself — again, largely for the first time — I found that these echoes and adjustments were actually characteristic of the relationship between Emerson and Nietzsche in general.
This topic is enormous, and I can’t pretend to authority on all the detailed and subtle questions at play. The problems of interpreting Nietzsche, whose influence is everywhere in 20th century philosophy and literature, are more than enough to occupy you for a long time, but adding Emerson brings in manifold complications. There is the first problem, which I already mentioned, of whether Emerson is worthy of any estimation as a thinker at all, and then the related question of how exactly to understand his thinking, which turns out to be quite difficult and has produced many contradictory views. We have a Gnostic Emerson, a Puritan one, an anti-Puritan one, a social Emerson, an anti-social Emerson, a quasi-fascist Emerson, a democratic Emerson, and so on.
Is he best understood in the terms of religion, philosophy, literature? Does his work have continuity with the past, or is it a break? Is it a break to better, more modern ways of thinking, or merely an interruption, a juvenile phase to be discarded in our progress to higher principles?
You can ask all these questions about Nietzsche too, and Bronze Age Mindset has prompted many discussions along these lines. Selective Breeding openly corrects or derides established views of Nietzsche, for example Walter Kaufmann’s.
If Bronze Age Mindset has opened a moment when we might revise our reading of Nietzsche, given how close these two thinkers are, a contemporary reevaluation of Emerson also may be inevitable. How does his thinking relate to Nietzsche’s? Is it right to group them together? What would Emerson himself have made of Nietzsche’s work? What does it mean to read Bronze Age Mindset as a reader who is sympathetic to Emerson and the writers who came after him?
I found myself to be an interesting test case for these questions. For example, when I first read the early passage where Bronze Age Pervert talks about his “sympathy for mankind” and imagines himself living many lives simultaneously, becoming other men, women, children, even inanimate objects, the first thought I had was: This sounds like Walt Whitman.
Is Bronze Age Pervert another Walt Whitman? It fascinates me that if you follow my proposal from earlier in this essay, the idea that Bronze Age Mindset returns us to how Nietzsche was read in the early twentieth century, then it means that you also stumble into an American Nietzsche from that time, one who was all but equated with Emerson and Whitman.
For example, in his study of Wallace Stevens called The Poems of Our Climate, the critic Harold Bloom makes a persuasive case that Stevens linked Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with Whitman, and that his poetry owes much to both his readings of Nietzsche and to patterns of rhetoric and figurative thinking that Stevens inherited from Emerson and Whitman. For Stevens, it seems, there was little need to distinguish these three figures from each other.1
Or what about my hero Hart Crane, another American poet from that time? He wrote a very short magazine column about Nietzsche that is known to contemporary readers, but I have not seen much criticism discussing him as a Nietzschean writer. Now that I know Nietzsche a little better, I am surprised at how little this connection has been treated. The Bridge is a thoroughly Nietzschean poem, and again here Walt Whitman plays the same role as in Stevens. To Crane, Whitman might as well be Zarathustra, and he is described with openly Wagnerian language. Crane loved the Nietzschean dancer Isadora Duncan, and wrote in part in The Bridge and more directly in his poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” on behalf of a dream of renewed Hellenism in America.2
What is the ultimate significance of Nietzsche for American literature, for the literary tradition of Emerson? How strange that this question would arise again from a book like Bronze Age Mindset!
5: A Myth of the Internet
One reason conventional political and cultural news outlets seem to have trouble receiving Bronze Age Mindset is their refusal or perhaps inability to see the world of anonymous internet trolls and meme posters as a legitimate counter-culture. Selective Breeding even includes a “political detour” in its introduction, where the author rather earnestly recommends Angela Nagle’s book Kill All Normies for background on internet culture and its recent turn to the “alt right.”
This is the world the book comes out of, and I am not exactly the best guide to it, but I feel compelled at least to mention it. How is it that we’ve gotten this far and internet culture still feels like such a blind spot? Has our literature so far been any good at illuminating the internet, its culture and its history? I read an essay about “internet novels” the other day — supposedly we have some of these now …
The internet actually is not much discussed in Bronze Age Mindset, and yet the longer I contemplated the book, the more I grew to see it as an internet myth. It might even be called a culmination of a certain spirit of the internet, or a certain strain of internet history.
For me this history starts in memories of 4chan, the old anonymous image board site, which I first saw when I was in high school in the 2000s. This was my introduction to internet nihilism, meme humor, and the radical commitment to free speech that flourishes in hidden online worlds.
On 4chan, everything up to the extreme edge of depravity is permitted to be shared. A chaos of ugly and forbidden thoughts flows around you unhindered. These thoughts are, in fact, the very raw material of thinking and communicating in this online kingdom of trash. It is the back alleys of the internet, where the sewage gets drained out.
I can still remember how it felt to discover it — the wild and disturbing spirit of online anarchy and transgression, the violent images and deranged jokes, the ugly fixations on race and anti-Semitism and misogyny, obscenity like I had never seen before. This was a place for real misfits, but it was also a place for normal people to play the part of misfits online, in the new online ironic style. I was never more than a lurker, and even then not much, but I learned enough about this online world to understand it.
Back then it seemed to me that the troll took to this culture largely in an unconscious way. They felt they were a reject of the world, or they just liked having fun fooling around online. Troll culture was just the regurgitation of online trash by people sentenced to the junkyard of fate, telling jokes to each other to pass the time, mocking the world. The garbage was just what was around.
When I read Bronze Age Mindset, it felt like I had come back to this online world so many years later to check in, but now I found that a whole city of garbage had been built, an alternate civilization with its own history, and its own principles rationalized out of the chaos.
These days when the general public hears “internet troll,” they just think “alt right,” but the truth has always been more various. If you were interested in causes of internet freedom or online revolutionary politics in the 2000s, you might have read the leftist anarchist political tract entitled The Coming Insurrection, written by a group of anonymous French intellectuals. Or maybe you had heard of Alex Jones, or watched his documentary The Obama Deception. I remember another documentary of libertarian leaning on YouTube by the filmmaker Aaron Russo called America: Freedom to Fascism, which was concerned with the evils of the Federal Reserve, the income tax, and the diminishing of civil liberties after 9/11. I remember being curious about Occupy Wall Street and going to Zuccotti Park to walk around, when it was full of tents and people … I remember seeing Citizenfour, the documentary about Edward Snowden, or the thrill of the GameStop scandal. These are just a few examples of the possible variety. In bygone years, one or another political sensibility would have been most visible online, and now it’s mostly the meme heroics of Donald Trump that carry the day.
I am not much interested in sociological or political analyses of the progress of this change. If you want more history, I like this old book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy about the 2010s hacker group Anonymous. There’s also Kill All Normies, like we said, and there’s another similar book called It Came from Something Awful. Bronze Age Pervert himself even touches on this as part of a published response to the Claremont piece. These all offer accounts and explanations that you can judge for yourself.
More interesting to me are the patterns of internet myths that have stayed, despite the political variety. I would like to assert that Bronze Age Mindset and its parable of the iron prison could be read as an archetypal internet myth. It may yet become the Millennial internet story.
What is the meaning of the internet, for Millennials? It is a virtual realm of pure intellect, where we escape to be free. A speakeasy or a clubhouse, where forbidden knowledge is shared. A new historical or political perch, from which the crimes of the powerful can be seen in ways previously not possible. And lastly, a place to dream of utopian alternatives to a corrupted world.
Millennials are prisoners of a corrupt political system, a corrupt economic system, a corrupt system of knowledge. Some forbidden insight into all this is being kept from them, but it cannot be held back much longer … Bronze Age Mindset has claimed this story for itself.
I like this bit at the beginning of the introduction to the book edition of The Coming Insurrection —
Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode.
The book ends with longing for the destruction of Paris, capital of corruption and global crime —
Rage streaks across this desert of fake abundance, then vanishes. A day will come when this capital and its horrible concretion of power will lie in majestic ruins … All power to the communes!
This kind of sounds like Bronze Age Mindset! Bronze Age Mindset represents the explosion about to come as the Ancient Greek spirit of Nemesis. Its dream of revenge is not of revolutionary anarchist communes, but the coming of a new warrior elite, the pirate brotherhoods who will cleanse our corrupted world. The politics are different, but the same spirit is there, and the same myth of hidden knowledge, discovery, banding together, and rising up. A flood of revenge come back to the real world after time spent away from it, where you learned the truth. How many more internet myths could we count in this group?
It’s still an open question as to what will happen to dreams like this — dreams of revenge nursed anonymously online. The story of our generation is not yet finished, but our peculiar use of the internet may not survive us. Bronze Age Mindset may even mark its ending, or at least it could be taken as a warning that things may not always be this way. So far, our memories of a time before the internet may have lent us a certain complacency about the stability of the real. Does part of us feel that online we may go as wild as we want, that there always will be firm ground to come back to? Or is that starting to slip away? This is about more than just a few online freaks now, a few subcultures.
This question haunts all of internet culture — of what happens when a virtual thought tries to become real. I think we will continue to see this theme develop in our literature, and it is important that we deepen our sense of its influence on our lives.
If Bronze Age Mindset is a myth of the internet, then the book has joined the internet with the spirit of Nietzsche. Internet trolls are Nietzscheans, nihilists emptying the worlds’ signs of their power, testing how divorced from the real world the signs have become. The user looks up from the stream of ghostly images on their phone and perceives the order of Nature again: a primordial field of natural bodies — a sensational, almost psychedelic world of living organisms pulsating with their genetic heritage, the enigma of life mutating itself by force of will alone. What happens next is open.
Anyway, how do we exit the labyrinth of this section? I think back to the old internet trolls in Hacker, Hoaxer, for whom Hitler was the ultimate prank image online, the swastika a taunt at reality-bound normies to mock them for thinking the internet was “serious business.”
If you had told these trolls in the early 2000s that a book written in cavemanspeak by a lunatic reactionary just on the edge of Nazi sympathy who calls himself “Bronze Age Pervert” would inexplicably gain a wide readership outside its niche online milieu and go on to be denounced by outraged political commentators in mainstream news publications, it would have been … the funniest thing they could think of.
6: History and Metempsychosis
A book this fearsome and comprehensive, with such intellectual depth and variety, and such unflagging poetic energy, has the power to induce an intense anxiety in the reader, indeed to make them feel like a cockroach struck by the harsh glare of a flashlight. The reader needs to summon all their inner powers, all the knowledge they possess for themselves, to meet such a book.
If you’re looking for some help with this, you might turn to Selective Breeding, where you can find much of the source material for the intense prophecy of Bronze Age Mindset, but offered dispassionately.
I found myself going back to Emerson. Even after reading this book and then Nietzsche after that, ultimately I still feel closer to Emerson. I think this goes beyond any suggestion about mere political disposition. Maybe this is more about personality, or personal need.
Or maybe this difference could be elucidated by my taking up deeper of study of Plato — this is, maybe, about different kinds of Platonists. But it also points to the general importance of studying Emerson more carefully. If he is a Platonist, then he has fused his reading of Shakespeare with Plato. He says, weirdly, in his essay on Plato in Representative Men —
Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and ‘tis the magnitude only of Shakespeare’s proper genius that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent of his school.
To find out what he means by that remark, in detail — to find out the consequences of that statement — would be very useful. Or, at least it would be useful for me.
Another device for containing the vehemence of Bronze Age Mindset in a wider literary setting that I found myself coming back to was to remember Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. I don’t know Mann’s other books, but I come back to this one when I feel too trapped in the present. It’s the story of Hans Castorp, a young German man who in the years leading up to World War I goes to visit his cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Alps. The trip is meant to be only a couple weeks long, but it turns into several years, as Castorp somehow gets sick too and so ends up becoming a patient himself.
Time is stopped on the mountain — history is stopped — and the patients there are free to be sick, and free to get better. But Castorp is free above all to be educated. During his stay, he is attended by a few different teachers, but there are two in particular who dominate most of it, and who stand as representatives of two European political traditions.
On one side, there’s Settembrini — a disciple of the Enlightenment, a teacher of reason, a partisan of democracy and egalitarian social reform. And on the other is Naphta, a Jesuit, a reactionary, a man with all the old aristocratic views — a teacher not unlike Bronze Age Pervert.
These two fight and fight over Castorp’s soul. Each hopes to claim him as a disciple. As the book goes on, you get to know their arguments, and you also get to know them, and you learn to see them as pieces of history.
There is a moment I like near the end when Castorp dismisses them both —
I’m rather fond of you [Settembrini]. You are a windbag and a hand-organ man, to be sure. But you mean well, you mean much better, and more to my mind, than that knife-edged little Jesuit and Terrorist, apologist of the Inquistion and the knout, with his round eye-glasses—though he is nearly always right when you and he came to grips over my paltry soul, like God and the Devil in the medieval legends … I will hold … not with Naphta, neither with Settembrini. They are both talkers; the one luxurious and spiteful, the other forever blowing on his penny pipe of reason, even vainly imagining he can bring the mad to their senses. It is all Philistinism and morality, most certainly it is irreligious. Nor am I for little Naphta either, or his religion, that is only a guazzabuglio of God and the Devil, good and evil … Pedagogues both! Their quarrels and counter-positions are just a guazzabuglio too, and a confused noise of battle, which need trouble nobody who keeps a little clear in his head and pious in his heart.3
Consider this an incantation for warding off all pedants and ideologues! Though I personally would replace “pious” here with “self-reliant.”
In The Magic Mountain the teachings of Bronze Age Pervert would have been only one part of your education, and then you’d come down from the mountain to re-enter history. You must confront your own place in history — you have no other choice. Your face may wear an ideological expression, a visionary one, even an ironic one, or something more mundane, but it will be yours. Take Bronze Age Mindset as shock treatment, like the hectoring teachings of Naphta, and then come down from the mountain. Then you must live and find out what portion of your fate belongs to Nature, and what portion belongs to you.
More philosophical readers might complain that these are all literary additions that I’m bringing to the book, but if my history is to be my own then I have no choice but to read this way. There’s a note from an early draft of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo that I like, where he praises Emerson —
Emerson, with his Essays, has been a good friend and someone who has cheered me up even in dark times: he possesses so much skepsis, so many ‘possibilities,’ that with him even virtue becomes full of wit.4
For me, the summoning of that atmosphere of skepsis is the essence of literature. How might we summon such an atmosphere for ourselves, in our time? This is where I find myself going when trying to respond to this fearsome book.
***
I have tried throughout this essay to give an honest account of my experience of this book. I recognize its controversies and its capacity to offend. I felt that I had to treat this book carefully, but I do not want to appear to condescend to it. As a literary work, I am happy to honor its erotic intensity, its poetic style, its inventiveness and exuberance. I like best to read it as a fiction — like a Percy Shelley poem or a D. H. Lawrence novel — and I believe its status as poetic vision and myth of Eros could stand apart from the scandal around it, or any debate about its arguments or its implications for politics.
More artists should read it, and work to find out what it means to them. The artists whom it has found have been wounded by it in the way that only poetry can wound. They will not remember its ideas or its controversies, but its voice and its images — the harsh heat of the volcanic core of Mount Aetna; the mad charge of the horses, or the frenzy of birds at the waterfall; the pitiful animals trapped, like the jaguar at the zoo, or the terrier trying to dig through its city apartment floor; the nightmare world of the Iron Prison, and the piratical men who escape it. They will remember the Bronze Age Pervert himself, this exile who speaks with a suggestion of the terrible cost of his becoming, who tells them of his dreams and of a time in which “everything is ending.”
It is strange that I came to write about this book, but hopefully you can see why I felt compelled. That an online troll who has declared “I believe in Fascism, or ‘something worse’” who hails from a corner of the internet full of Hitler memes, racist tweets, male “fizeek” pics, and anime girls has also turned out to be an authentic liberator of Eros, the rare writer with a philosophy background who actually understands the view of the artist, and that he has produced a real artistic achievement — this is a calamity that will have to be reckoned with.
My title is a line from James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, at the end of Mirabell’s Books of Number.
Stevens’s use of Zarathustra, Whitman, and Emerson is mentioned throughout Bloom’s book, but see for example p. 162.
The short column about Nietzsche by Crane called “The Case against Nietzsche” is in Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose, p. 197
This is from the chapter called “Snow”.
I need to re-read The Magic Mountain. You provide new insights.
Great piece, very accurate. BTW the bit with climaxing from staring at the statue is taken verbatim from Sun and Steel.