Not All Dead White Men by Donna Zuckerberg

The men of the Red Pill use and abuse classical antiquity in a variety of ways.  They have found ample material from ancient Greece and Rome to support their ideology, from Stoic self-help manuals to Ovidian seduction advice to ancient models of patriarchal marriage.  Although their analyses of ancient sources rarely display much understanding of context and nuance, Red Pill writers nevertheless are adept at manipulating ancient sources to make them speak meaningfully to contemporary concerns.  They have appropriate the tests and history of ancient Greece and Rome to bolster their most abhorrent ideas: that all women are deceitful and degenerate; that white men are by nature more rational than (and therefore superior to) everyone else; that women's sexual boundaries exist to be manipulated and crossed; and finally, that society as a whole would benefit if men were given the responsibility for making all decisions for women, particularly over their sexual and reproductive choices.

Why are right-wing nutjobs obsessed with the classical world?  In the New Yorker, Margaret Talbot explains that Greek and Roman statuary were painted, not white, but that the myth of their whiteness is seized on by the extreme right so they might project their ideas of race and racial threat onto them.  What Talbot does (it's a fascinating article, go read it) for race, Donna Zuckerberg does for gender in her book Not All Dead White Men: she traces the way that the alt-right (what she calls the "Red Pill community") uses ancient literature to support their ideas about gender politics.

The book comprises three brief essays.  The first describes how men use the philosophy of Stoicism to bolster claims of male intellectual superiority.  While Zuckerberg claims not to be interested in "debunking" the right's readings of classical literature, she does suggest that they misread, or at least selectively read, Stoic philosophers, ignoring their assertion that women are as capable of virtue as men.  She even suggests that Stoicism, used correctly, could be a valuable philosophical outlook for men who feel dispossessed and estranged.  But in practice, she explains, Stoicism is a way for the right to indulge in anger-based rhetoric while denying that they are angry, claim emotionlessness while projecting heated emotions onto their opponents.

The second essay is about the pick-up community.  (Does anyone remember when Mystery, one of the original pick-up artists, had his own reality show where he taught men how to pick up women?  That certainly seems misbegotten now.)  For pick-up artists, the classic text is Ovid's Ars Amatoria, a mock didactic poem about how to seduce women.  Zuckerberg concedes that Ovid's notion of women's sexual boundaries is pretty permeable, and often Ovid advocates what we would consider rape, even if it's tongue-in-cheek.  But whether pick-up artists read Ovid rightly or wrongly, their use of Ovid is meant to suggest a continuity between the past and the present that validates their own ideas and actions: because Ovid sees women as little more than machines of conditioning, universally receptive to the right stimuli, pick-up artists can claim that all women are "that way" and have always been, to the chagrin of modern feminism.

Zuckerberg emphasizes this point in the final essay, in which she reads modern rape culture through the lens of the myth of Hippolytus and Phaedra.  Phaedra accuses Hippolytus of rape when she spurns his advances, leading to disaster for them both.  While Zuckerberg doesn't find this myth discussed much by Red Pillers, she claims that it illustrates the kind of world in which they want to live: one in which women's sexual boundaries are controlled and mediated by fathers and husbands, like Phaedra's are by Theseus.  Again, the rhetorical claim is one of continuity: Red Pill activists want to return to a system of male coverture like the Roman paterfamilias or Greek kyrios, because its ancientness gives it, and them, legitimacy.  Red Pillers want to position themselves as the inheritors of an old tradition from which modern mores have deviated, rather than the reactionaries they are.

Reading this book meant wading through a lot of really disgusting horseshit.  I imagine it was tough for Zuckerberg, having to read through all the "rape is good" blogs and the "women aren't intelligent enough to make decisions" blogs and distill all of that.  It makes you long for the pre-Elliot Rodger, pre-incel, pre-2016 feeling that all of these folks were fringe crazies with no real purchase in the world.  Zuckerberg's style is pretty academic and dry, and I wish there were a little more righteous fire in it, as there is in the conclusion when she talks about the way that her work in this area has made her the target of sexualized and anti-Semitic threats.  She also spares a last minute zing toward reformers on the left who want to reject and replace classical literature in the university canon for their tacit agreement with Red Pill folks who think that Ovid and Marcus Aurelius and Euripides belong to them.  That'd be a book I'd like to read, the one that shows, in love and detail, how that cultural inheritance is for everybody, not just the fedora-topped rape apologists of the modern internet.

The Complete Plays of Sophocles

OEDIPUS: Good son of Aegeus, gentle son,
only to the gods is it given not to age or die.
All else disrupts through all disposing time.
Earth ebbs in strength, the body ebbs in power.
Faith dies and faithlessness is born.
No constant friendship breathes
between man and man, or city and a city,
Soon or late, the sweet will sour,
the sour will sweet to love again.
Does fair weather hold between this Thebes and you?
Then one day shall ever teeming time
hatch nights on teeming days,
Wherein this pledge, this harmony, this hour
will break upon a spear,
slashed down for a useless word.

--Oedipus at Colonus


Though he lived well into his nineties, writing and producing plays from his twenties, only seven of Sophocles' 123 plays remain to us, a fact which seems appropriately tragic. In his time, Sophocles was regarded as the greatest that Greek tragedy had to offer, a dramatic Homer, and he won the first prize given to the best dramatist at the Athenian Dionysia twenty times. It is left to us to wonder whether the Greeks of Sophocles' time saw what we see in his plays--a persistent timelessness and depth of spirit--and whether it existed to the same degree in the 116 plays we have never seen.

Each of these seven is great in its own right: Ajax is the story of a warrior driven mad by jealousy, and mocked by the indifferent gods. Philoctetes is about a man who was abandoned by Odysseus on a desert en route to the Trojan War because his terrible snakebite made him irritating, but now Odysseus and Achilles' son Neoptolemus must return and convince Philoctetes to give them his bow, which never misses, so that they might use it to defeat the Trojans. The Woman of Trachis is about Deianeira, Heracles' wife, who struggles to love her husband in the face of his infidelity. Then there is Sophocles' take on Elektra, which to me is the least interesting of the seven, especially when placed next to Aeschylus' and Euripides' versions.

But the best plays here are the Oedipus plays, one of which I wrote about already (although Roche's translation improves on it significantly). It can't be said that Oedipus the King can't be understood without reading the other two in the "trilogy," because they were written at vastly different points of Sophocles' life and were never truly meant to create a unified whole, but I think they're vastly more interesting when read together

In Antigone, the first written, I think that you can see Sophocles' youth in Antigone's headstrongness and willingness to martyr herself. Antigone's brothers (Oedipus' sons) killed each other on the field of battle, one fighting for Thebes and the other against it, and her uncle Creon, the king, refuses to let the latter be buried properly. Knowing that it means she will be punished by death, Antigone buries him anyway, and commits suicide before Creon, having been enlightened by the prophet Teiresias, can come to pardon her.

On the other hand, Oedipus at Colonus was clearly written by a man reflecting upon his own age and mortality; it was one of the last plays that Sophocles wrote. It takes place between the events of Oedipus the King and Antigone, when Oedipus, having blinded himself, wanders with Antigone into the Athenian suburb of Colonus where they are welcomed by Theseus, the King. A prophecy has just told that whoever has Oedipus' favor will win the war for Thebes, and so King Creon and Oedipus' rebel son Polyneices have come to make amends, but Oedipus is too dignified to accede to their demands and for Theseus' warmth and kindness, Oedipus basically ensures Athens' dominance over Thebes in the decades to come.

Oedipus at Colonus is a pleasant reminder that Greek tragedy really isn't as rigid as Aristotle thought it should be, and that happy endings did exist. At the end of their lives, there is something appropriate about the way that Sophocles allows Oedipus--synonymous, for us and for Aristotle, with the spirit of tragedy--to be buried in dignity and love, and to be able to show the justice of a king in his final acts. Oedipus' words to Theseus, which I've copied above, affirm the inconstancy of the world, its chaos, entropy, and inevitable change, but without corrupting their basic truth, Oedipus is able to defy them as much as any human being is able. And though Sophocles could not have known this, the fact that Oedipus' story has survived for 2,500 years as an essential parable of downfall and redemption must temper his words as well.

Oedipus the King by Sophocles

The story of Oedipus is well-worn: Boy meets girl. Boy saves girl's city from riddle-obsessed monster. Boy discovers that he's actually girl's son, and that he killed his own dad years ago without knowing but it's too late because they've already boned. It's almost cliche.

To be more specific, Oedipus is the king of Thebes, a position he inherited when, wandering from his home in Corinth, he encountered the Sphinx, who was eating any Theban who could not answer his riddle. Oedipus answered it, and saved the city, and now has married its queen Jocasta, the former king being recently murdered. A plague has struck the city, and the oracle of Apollo says that it will only pass when the former king's murderer is put to justice. With the help of the prophet Teiresias, Oedipus discovers that he is the murderer, recalling a fight in which he killed an unknown man years ago, and that he is really Jocasta's son, expelled from Thebes as an infant because of a prophecy that said he would do exactly what he ends up doing.

But it is, of course, the essential work of ancient Greek tragedy. It is the most oft-used example Aristotle gives when he outlines tragedy for us in the Poetics, suggesting that shows remarkable purity of genre. All the elements are there: a hero is neither a great man nor a villain, but the bearer of a fatal flaw that eventually leads to his downfall. There is a startling revelation (peripeteia), a sudden reversal of fortune (anagnorisis), and an ending so bleak and ruinous that you might call it a catastrophe (catastrophe).

Of course, it is also the basis for Freud's theory of the Oedipal complex, making it one of the most essential texts in the development of Freudian criticism and literary criticism as a whole. In this way, its relevance spans a vast stretch of time, and it is an excellent illustration of the way that we regard literature differently than our predecessors.

Unlike The Odyssey, I find Oedipus the King wanting for emotional heft to complement its academic fecundity. All tragedies are meant to act as funhouse mirrors in which we see ourselves, but Oedipus' basic humanity is less apparent to me than Odysseus', whose longing for his home and his wife is truly affecting. One issue may be the translation, which I feel is a little banal. See the way that this translator, Benard Knox, renders Oedipus' opening address to the priests who are gathered in supplication to the gods:

My sons! Newest generation of this ancient city of Thebes! Why are you here? Why are you seated there at the altar, with these branches of supplication? The city is filled with the smoke of burning incense, with hymns to the healing god, with laments for the dead.

Contrast Sir George Young:

Children, you modern brood of Cadmus old,
What mean you, sitting in your sessions here,
High-coronalled with votive olive-boughs,
While the whole city teems with incense-smoke,
And paean hymns, and sounds of woe the while?

Knox's translation, besides committing the terrible sin of being in prose, is awfully clumsy and plain, isn't it? Not only that, but you get the impression a lot of the syntax is lost here--see how Oedipus' statement about the incnese is subordinated in Young's translation, suggesting that Oedipus is asking about that as well as the priests' presence, and in Knox's it is presented as a flat statement unconnected to anything. Stupid.

But whatever. One benefit of Oedipus is that it's literally one-tenth the size of The Odyssey, so in my class we can really pick it apart and deconstruct it. I wish it were made of better stuff, but what can you do?

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer,
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

--W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"


Things Fall Apart has been likened to a Greek tragedy. Its hero, Okonkwo, is an honorable man with a fatal flaw: a kind of hypermasculinity that feeds on anger and violence, seeing only weakness in others. Okonkwo lives in a time and place that match his character, an Ibo village in nineteenth-century Nigeria, but even in the midst of a clan that values tradition and war he is dangerously unbending. And as in all Greek tragedies, it is this flaw which proves his undoing, and smaller undoings along the way. Early in the book, when his adopted son Ikemefuna is put to death by the decree of the article, he refuses the advice of the village elders and helps to murder him, to show others--and himself--that he is not weak. When his pistol explodes at a funeral, killing a boy and sending Okonkwo into exile, it isn't his fault, but it is symbolic of the lightness of his own personal trigger--or perhaps is the result of his affront to gods regarding Ikemefuna's death. When white missionaries descend upon the Ibo, Okonkwo's righteous anger is aroused and his fate sealed.

And yet I am uncomfortable drawing too strong of a parallel between Okonkwo and Agamemnon or Oedipus because the Greek tragedy is a fundamentally Western tradition and Things Fall Apart is ultimately a rejection of Westernism. As the Ibo culture values community over the individual, so the real story in Things Fall Apart is the unraveling of a local culture, and the story of Okonkwo just one bead in a string. His story is tragic, but it is only the tragedy of his people
writ small, Okonkwo's flaw is the flaw which does in an entire society.

We see literature as an exercise in character, but is character as we know it a Western tool for reading Western literature that fails when it contacts non-Western literature? It seems to me that to some extent Achebe wants to have it both ways, but at the same time is telling us, "This is the best I can do; my mode of storytelling is corrupted in the way that this culture of mine has long been corrupted."

Like his novel, Achebe himself cannot be extracted from white influence; he grew up in a Protestant home and attended school in London. His decision to write in English has been controversial among African writers who wish to reject the forms imposed on them by colonization; so Things Fall Apart is by its nature a tacit admission of the grim success of European colonizers. It is easy to imagines those critics as Okonkwos, proud and resolute against invading forces, but ultimately the ones who pay the most for immutability.

While I found Things Fall Apart, as I did in high school, a little dull--as a stylist, Achebe rivals the greatest textbook writers--I also think that it is impossible to appreciate it without reflecting on what it represents merely by existing. When Okonkwo's tragic downfall is considered beside the contradiction that is the world's greatest English language African novel, then, and only then, can you recognize how powerful it is.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex tells the story of Cal(lie) Stephanides and his family, several generations of it. Cal is a hermaphrodite, a person with both male and female sexual characteristics, and the book traces the gene that made him what he is.

From his grandparents' unusual courtship and exodus from Greece in the wake of Turkish Invasion, to his parents' taboo pairing, I found the stories of Cal's family very interesting, and it's a good thing too, since Cal's actual story only takes up about one-third of the book's nearly 530 pages. A lot of the reviews I read complained about this, but it didn't bother me, probably partly because I knew nothing about the book before starting it except that I liked the cover and Eugenide's previous book, The Virgin Suicides.

As you might expect, there's some pretty hosed-up stuff in the book, from some horrific violence during the escape from Greece to the dryly medical explanation of Cal's condition. His first sexual encounter, the growing sense of dread that someone will eventually learn his secret, the anticipation of when Cal himself will realize he's different—all of these combine to make the book compulsively readable.

The ending is very well done and quite affecting, and I think Middlesex probably ranks as one of the best modern novels I've read this year. If you're not too bothered by disturbing imagery and you don't mind sprawling narratives, check it out.

Edit: I'm finally caught up. Take that, Nathan.