The Ill-Defined Plot

By John Jeremiah Sullivan

• The following essay is adapted from the introduction to "Best American Essays 2014," which will be published this week.

It is a curious fact that the word essayist showed up in English before it existed in French. We said it first, for some reason, by not just years but a couple of centuries. France could invent the modern essay, but the notion that someone might seize on the production of these fugitive-seeming pieces as a defining mode was too far-fetched to bear naming. Rabelais had written Pantagruel, after all, and people hadn't gone around calling themselves Pantagruelists (in fact they had, starting with Rabelais himself, but the word meant someone filled with nonjudgmental joie de vivre). Had a Bordelais born with the name Michel Eyquem titled his books Essais in the 1580s? Fine—Montaigne was Montaigne, a mountain in more than name. One didn't presume to perpetuate the role. France will cherish his example, but the influence it exerts there is partly one of intimidation. In France the essay constricts after Montaigne. It turns into something less intimate, or at least less confiding, becoming Descartes's meditations and Pascal's thoughts. It's said that even a century and a half after Montaigne's death, when the marquis d'Argenson subtitled a book with that word, Essays, he was shouted down for impertinence. Not a context in which many people would find themselves tempted to self-identify as "essayists." When the French do finally start using the word, in the early nineteenth century, it's solely in reference to English writers who've taken up the banner, and more specifically to those who write for magazines and newspapers. "The authors of periodical essays," wrote a French critic in 1834, "or as they're commonly known, essayists, represent in English letters a class every bit as distinct as the Novellieri in Italy." A curiosity, then: the essay is French, but essayists are English. What can it mean?

Consider the appearance of the word in English—which is to say the appearance of the word—in the wintertime of late 1609 or early 1610, and most likely January 1610. A comedy is under way before the court of King James I of England, at the Palace of Whitehall in London, or maybe at St. James's Palace, where the prince resides, we're not sure. The theaters have been closed for plague, but there must be diversion for the Christmas season. Ben Jonson has written a new piece, Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, for his favored company, the Children of the Whitefriars, boy actors with "unbroken voices," several of whom have been "pressed"—essentially kidnapped (sometimes literally off the street, while walking home from school)—into service for the theater. For most of them it's an honor to number among the Children of the King's Revels. They enjoy special privileges.

January of 1610: James is forty-three. The biblical translation he has sponsored is all but done. John Donne stands there in his late thirties with a pointed beard, holding a copy of his first published book, Pseudo-Martyr. He wants to give it to James, hoping in part to flatter him into forgiving past wildnesses. "Of my boldness in this address," he writes, "I most humbly beseech your Majesty to admit this excuse, that, having observed how much your Majesty has vouchsafed to descend to a conversation with your subjects by way of your books, I also conceived an ambition of ascending to your presence by the same way." Galileo squints at Jupiter through a telescope he's made and finds moons (he can see them so faintly they look like "little stars") that evidently obey no gravity but Jupiter's own, suggesting that not all celestial bodies circle the earth, a triumph for proponents of the still-controversial Copernican theory of heliocentrism, but one that raised an important modification to it as well, for Copernicus had placed the sun at the center of the world, whereas Galileo was sensing that there might be no center, not one so easily discerned. James receives a dispatch about it from his Venetian ambassador. "I send herewith unto His Majesty the strangest piece of news," it reads, "that he has ever yet received from any part of the world," for a "mathematical professor at Padua" had "overthrown all former astronomy." What is opening is what the French thinker Pierre Borel will in another half a century call "la pluralité des mondes"—the vista we see with the Hubble. Sir Walter Raleigh sits in the Tower writing his Historie of the World, begging to be sent back to America, saying he'd rather die there "then to perrish" in a cell. We're at the court of the Virginia Company, which days before has published a pamphlet, a True and Sincere Declaraccion, extolling the virtues of the new colony, that "fruitfull land," and struggling to quiet horrific accounts that are starting to circulate. Across the Atlantic in Jamestown it's what they're calling "this starveing Tyme." Of roughly five hundred settlers, four hundred and forty die during this winter. Survivors are eating corpses or disappearing into the forest.

James draws our notice here not for being king—not as shorthand for the period, that is—but because he plays a significant if unmentioned part in the evolution of this slippery term and thing, the essay. We may imagine him as a stuffed robe-and-crown who gives a thumbs-up to the Authorized Version and fades into muffled bedchambers, but James was a serious man of letters. He fashioned himself so and was one, in truth. Not good enough, perhaps, to be remembered apart from who he was, but given who he was, better than he needed to be. He held scholarship in high esteem, while himself indulging certain sketchy ideas, among them the power of demons and witches. In his youth, in Edinburgh and at Stirling Castle, he'd been at the center of a loose-knit, homoerotic band of erudite court poets, dedicated to formal verse and the refinement of the Middle Scots dialect, his native tongue. Most of what King James wrote was translated into plain English before being published, but one text—because it took for its subject partly the use of Middle Scots for poetic purposes—got published in the original language. It consisted mainly of poems but contained also, in the most remarked-upon part of the book, a nonfiction "Treatise" of twenty pages, laying out "some reulis and cautelis"—precepts and pitfalls—"to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie." The title of James's book? Essayes of a Prentise.

This book was first published in 1584, a full thirteen years before the appearance of Francis Bacon's famous 1597 Essayes, traditionally held to mark the introduction of the essay as a formal concept into English writing. Granted, Bacon doesn't quite hold up as the first English essayist even when we do omit James: some person—we're not positive who, but almost certainly an Anglican divine named Joseph Hall—had published a collection of essays a year before Bacon, titled Remedies Against Discontentment,* and it's likely that one or two of the "later" writers—William Cornwallis or Robert Johnson or Richard Greenham—had already begun writing their pieces when Bacon's book came out. Even so, Bacon is the greatest in that little cluster of late-sixteenth-century English essayists and would seem to possess the clearest claim to the word in English. Yet King James's book had preceded them all by more than a decade. Indeed, when James published his Essayes of a Prentise, Montaigne was still publishing his own Essais (the Frenchman was in between volumes I and II).

The most available conclusion for leaping to is that James is using the word in a general sense. An "essay," we're frequently told, means an attempt, a stab. Perhaps King James had been saying, self-deprecatingly, "I'm a mere prentise [an apprentice] here, and these are my essays, my beginner's efforts." It makes sense. The poet Jérôme d'Avost was using it the same way at the same time in France.

What if, however, King James had Montaigne in mind instead? On the face of it, the idea seems far-fetched. Montaigne's book had been published just a few years before James finished his. An English translation would not appear for another twenty years. Doubtless there existed English men and women who'd already heard about the book, perhaps even seen it, but what are the odds that one of them was the eighteen-year-old king of Scotland?

Rather good, believe it or not. James's tutor in the 1570s, the years during which Montaigne was composing his first volume of pieces, happens to have been a man named George Buchanan, a Scottish classicist and Renaissance giant who'd spent part of his life in France, where his poetry was much admired ("Easily the greatest poet of our age," said his French publishers, an opinion echoed by Montaigne, among others). Buchanan was placed in charge of young James's education and made on his pupil a lifelong impression of both respect and fear, deep enough that decades later, when James saw a man approaching him at court who looked like Buchanan, he started to tremble (Buchanan had drunkenly beaten the hell out of the boy James on at least one occasion).

James was not the only pupil of Buchanan's who never forgot him. There had been another, in France, in the 1530s and early '40s. For several years George Buchanan had taught at the Collège de Guyenne, in Bordeaux, and one of his students there, a young boarder who also came to him outside of class for private instruction, was a local boy named Michel Eyquem. The boy, whose precocity in Latin astonished his professors, was also a talented actor and performed in a few of Buchanan's plays. Buchanan even considered him something of a favorite student and, running into Montaigne at the French court many years later, honored him by saying that their time together had inspired certain of Buchanan's subsequent theories of humanistic pedagogy. Montaigne returned the compliment by praising his former teacher more than once in the Essais. They were well aware of each other, these two men, and remained so. And precisely as the younger was starting to publish in France, the elder became the tutor in Scotland to King James. Who, four years after Montaigne's Essais were published, published his own Essayes.

What was it, then? Could this appearance of two books titled Essays—the first two ever titled that way in any language, and within a mere few years of each other, and written by two men who shared a childhood teacher—really be a coincidence? Or was it the case, as seems vastly more plausible, that the two were connected somehow—that King James knew of Montaigne, or at least knew of his book (but probably both), and was appropriating the word from him? And if that's true, why is James's book rarely, if ever, cited in histories of the essay form, from England or France?

Partly it's that the work consists mostly of poems, so it wouldn't have come into anyone's mind to link it with Montaigne, apart from the title. On the other hand, the book does include, as mentioned, a piece that today (or in 1600) would be described as an essay, the "Reulis and Cautelis" treatise. And that piece—unsurprisingly, given the bare adequacy of the king's poetry—became by far the best-known part of his book. In fact, at some point later in the sixteenth century, the work appears to have been republished (or rebound) not as the Essayes of a Prentise but instead as Reulis and Cautelis, such that its true title could have remained unknown even to one who spotted the work in bibliographies or catalogues.

I wish to argue—or should say, this being an essay, float the suggestion—that something other than either coincidence or appropriation is going on in James's use of the word as a title. Namely, misinterpretation. Or maybe it's more correct to say simply interpretation. James had an acknowledged gift for languages, after all, and the greatest teachers in the world. No one is accusing him of not knowing what essai meant in French. The problem is, it meant lots of things—in French, and already in English by then too—but the king in his title seems to have battened on and emphasized one sense above all others, winding up with a usage of the word that differed slightly from what Montaigne had intended. The choice can be seen to have exercised an invisible but crucial effect on the evolving English conception of the essay.

French scholars have been debating what precisely Montaigne meant by essai for going on half a millennium, and I don't pretend to be qualified to intervene in that discussion. I've read about it, but as an interested and biased practitioner, not a linguist. Rest assured that when the French see us walk up to the front of our classrooms and intone the familiar explanation, "An essay … from the French essai  … meaning 'attempt'  " (as I have watched professors do, as I have done in turn before students), ruthless Gallic laughter is occurring on some level.

You can read about the Latin roots of the word, exagere, exagium, words that come from the context of Roman coinage, which have to do with measuring and weighing. A sense of "drive out" or "swarm" supposedly knocks around in there somewhere (a swarm of thoughts, like bees, fast and done?). There was the phrase "coup d'essay," meaning, according to a contemporary bilingual dictionary, the "maister-peece of a young workeman." And yes, there was also, simultaneously, King James's sense, of "a beginning, entrance, onset, attempt … a flourish, or preamble, whereby a tast[e] of a thing is given." That was undoubtedly present, in both Montaigne's France and his title—but it was not the primary shading, not what Montaigne had foremost in mind (in his ear) when he took that word, essais, as a description of his work.

We know what the primary meaning was not only because it comes first in period dictionaries (though it does), nor because it pops up most frequently in period usages (though it does), but also because it's the sense Montaigne himself, when using the word outside of his title—that is, elsewhere in his books—tends to employ, not in every single case but in the vast majority of them. It's the sense of "a proofe, tryall, experiment." To test something—for purity, or value (going back to coinage; the essayeur was "an Officer in the Mint, who touches everie kind of new coyne before it be delivered out"). There was the essay de bled, the "trial of grain," in which the wheat was carefully weighed, a custom Montaigne may have had in mind when he wrote: "Je remets à la mort l'essay du fruict de mes estudes" ("I put off until my death the essay of the fruits of my studies").

The Rabelais scholar E. V. Telle, in a 1968 essay titled with delightful transparency "A Propos du Mot 'Essai' Chez Montaigne," pointed out that the usage most ready to mind for many of Montaigne's readers would have come from a university context, in which before a candidate's examination for some degree, placards would be posted reading essai de jean marin or whoever it was. The students were tested, probed, essayed, to find out if they really knew their shit. Montaigne was toying with that meaning too—he would essay himself and his own "jugement" (as he repeatedly writes), become his own essayer. Wasn't this his great guiding question, Que sçay-je? ("What do I know?") Which he seems to have meant both literally and in our idiomatic sense (You really think I'm gonna die? "Seems like it, but what do I know?").

This is not to say that Montaigne meant this and not that by Essais, but to understand that the above-sketched polysemia of the word was precisely what he was up to with it, and indeed the reason he chose it, for if a book would be a true mirror, it must always reflect back in the direction from which it's approached. He will leave not one but many doors open to his readers. You may enter him through his likable talkativeness, his confessional, conspiratorial intimacy (he remains one of the few writers in history to have possessed the balls to admit he had a small penis), through his learning, through the possibly unreattained depth of his psychological soundness, through the consolation he offers in times of sorrow—come whichever way you want, the door is there in the writing, and it's there in the title. It could even be said that Montaigne comes to you. After all, we often write that Montaigne invented a form—and it's true—but he did it by adapting others, one of which was the epistolary. For as long as there had been writing there had been books that are presented as a letter to someone, fictional or real, and under this guise, essayistic experiments were perpetrated. Montaigne makes a single bold edit. Instead of Dear Sebastien or whatever, it was Dear Reader. It was you.

Nevertheless, at the center of it all, when you've peeled back every visible layer, there dwells this binary, this yin / yang, this Heisenbergian flickering between two primary meanings, between a stricter definition of the essay (the proof, the trial, the examination) and a looser one (the sally, the amateur work performed with panache, the whatever-it-is). The duality was noticed and articulated by one of Montaigne's earliest and most important readers, François Grudé, or, as he was better known, the sieur de La Croix du Maine. In his influential Bibliothéques, a kind of literary-biographical digest, he included Montaigne and praised him. This was in 1584, when the latter was still alive and writing (also the year in which King James's book came out). Grudé had read only Montaigne's first volume, but on that evidence alone put him into a company with Plutarch. Grudé gets credit for being one of the first people to realize that Montaigne was Montaigne. In 1584, among the lettered, the majority report on the writer was: lightweight, garrulous, and—interestingly for us—a woman's writer.** But Grudé got it, got that there was something very serious happening in the Essais, that here was a man inspecting his mind as a means of inspecting the human mind. Helpfully for us, Grudé gets into the meaning of the word, of the title, just a few years after Montaigne had introduced it (the first thing they noticed about it was the ambiguity!). He writes:

In the first place, this title or inscription is quite modest, for if one takes the word "Essay" in the spirit of "coup d'Essay," or apprenticeship, it sounds very humble and self-deprecating, and suggests naught of either excellence or arrogance; yet if the word be taken to mean instead "proofs" or "experiments," that is to say, a discourse modeling itself on those, the title remains well chosen.

What's marvelous to observe is how this original dichotomy, which existed fully formed in Montaigne's mind, between the looser and stricter conceptions of the essay—the flourish and the finished, the try and the trial—transposed itself onto the one that existed between France and England. If the French will largely repent of the essay's more casual and intimate qualities (and even its name), in the wake of Montaigne, England runs into their arms.*** Something in Montaigne's voice, the particular texture of its introspection, opened a vein that had been aching to pop. Ben Jonson describes a literary pretender of the day, writing: "All his behaviours are printed, and his face is another volume of essays." And notice, it's clear from the start that the definition of essay the English are working with is the looser one, the one having to do with apprenticeship. That original tuning note King James had struck. Or perhaps one should say that the emphasis is on that signification, with the other one, the more serious one, now switching places and assuming the role of subfrequency. It isn't a unified national definition or anything like that; there are many definitions, as earlier in France, but they all strike that apologetic tone. In fact, in the first English attempt to pin down this odd new creature, the essay—William Cornwallis's "Of Essays and Books," from Discourses upon Seneca, published in 1601 (the year in which Robert Johnson defines his own Essais as "imperfect offers")—Cornwallis, with a comedy both intentional and un-, begins by arguing that Montaigne had actually been misusing the term. Whereas the English were using it correctly, you see. "I hold," he writes, "none of these ancient short manner of writings, nor Montaigne's, nor such of this latter time to be rightly termed essays, for though they be short, yet they are strong, and able to endure the sharpest trial: but mine are essays, who am but newly bound prentice."****

From this initial mushroom ring of essayists that crops up on the island around 1600, an infestation spreads. Then comes the Grub Street explosion, and the essay is an eighteenth-century pop form. There are millions of pages of gazettes and daily journals and moral weeklies to fill. The word becomes a blazon for the early Enlightenment. It's the age of what Thackeray will christen "the periodical essayists of the eighteenth century." England becomes a nation of essayists every bit as much as it was ever one of shopkeepers, and the essay becomes … whatever we say it is. In the words of Hugh Walker—whose English Essay and Essayists remains the most lucid single-volume work on the genre a century after its publication—the genre becomes the "common" of English literature, "for just as, in the days before enclosures, stray cattle found their way to the unfenced common, so the strays of literature have tended towards the ill-defined plot of the essay."

But always with that original note hanging in the air, as both counterblast and guiding horn. Not King James's note, Montaigne's. The singularity. The word with its fullest, richest, Tiresian ambiguity, and the example of the writer himself, both his rigor and his cheek. The modern essay–the form we continue to play with—develops not in any one country but within a transnational vibrational field that spans the English channel. It assumes many two-sided forms: trial / try, high / low, literature / journalism, formal / familiar, French / English, Eyquem / Ockham. The vital thing is that the vibration itself be there. Without it you have no "essays," you have only the Essais.

James was sitting there in the theater. It was January of 1610. Donne and Bacon and Joseph Hall and the rest of the gang were in the audience too—they may have been, so let's say they were. And the boys were performing Jonson's Epicœne. It's a lad who is playing, for the first time, the role of Sir John Daw, a knight. John Daw = Jack Daw = jackdaw, a bird that, like a magpie, likes to pick up and collect shiny things, such as classical quotations. Jack Daw may be a satirical representation of Bacon himself—more than one scholar has wondered. In the story, he has just been forced (it doesn't take much forcing) to recite some of his work. The work is ludicrous. But his listeners, meaning by flattery to draw him into further clownishness, tell him that it possesses "something in't like rare wit and sense." Indeed, they say—sounding already like us, when we go on about the essay's origins—"'tis Seneca … 'tis Plutarch."

Jack Daw, in the silliness of his vanity, takes the comparison as an insult. "I wonder," he says, that "those fellows have such credit with gentlemen!"

"They are very grave authors," his little crowd assures him.

"Grave asses!" he says. "Meere essayists, a few loose sentences and that's all."

Essayists: that's when it enters the world, with that line. The first thing we notice: that the word is used derisively and dismissively. And yet the character using it is one toward whom we're meant to feel derisive and dismissive. A pretentious ass, trying to use a fancy French word that a French person wouldn't use. A character, moreover, who may be jibingly based on the inventor of the essay, Francis Bacon. And on top of everything, the moment transpires before the eyes of the very monarch who had imported the word in the first place, initiating this long, weird dialogue. One senses that the king himself has to be implicated somehow in the nesting doll of Jonson's wit.

How could we possibly trust any creature that comes into the world wearing such a caul of ambiguity? That's "essayists." Four hundred and four years later, they continue to flourish.

_____

* The authorship of the Remedies has been wondered about since it was written, and its obscurity depends heavily on our failure to crack its "Anonym[o]us" mask. But a linguist at Princeton, the New Jersey–born Williamson Updike Vreeland, discovered that the book was Joseph Hall's more than a century ago, and published the information in his Study of Literary Connections Between Geneva and England Up
to the Publication of la Nouvelle Héloïse (1901). Vreeland didn't care about Bishop Hall, not much—he was interested in the book's translator, the zealous Swiss Calvinist Theodore Jaquemot, who rendered at least a dozen of Hall's books into French—but Vreeland had gone to the library in Geneva and seen the only known French copy of the Remedies, titled by Jaquemot Remèdes contre les mécontentements, and it read right there on the title page, "Traduit nouvellement de l'anglais de révérend Seigneur Joseph Hall … 1664." Sixteen sixty-four: Bishop Hall was seven or eight years dead by then—Jaquemot didn't need to worry about protecting his friend's identity. Plus, once you introduce Vreeland's evidence, other things line up: Hall, it turns out, favored the phrase "Remedies Against" in the chapter heads of his later books, the ones he claimed; and he knew fairly well the man to whom the book is personally dedicated, Sir Edward Coke, the attorney general under Elizabeth I. The Remedies is all but certainly Joseph Hall's. But Vreeland, not really caring about Hall and maybe not even knowing that the Remedies had long been considered a frustratingly mysterious book, didn't broadcast the discovery, and it's safe to say scant few scholars of English came across his study, so this tiny datum has hunkered there since 1901, waiting for the magic of just the right database and search-term combination to conjure it forth. Well, you might say, who cares? Fair enough. Probably hardly anyone anymore. But sometimes a little fact like that will ignite a constellation of things, the way you can make a strand of Christmas-tree lights come on by replacing one burned bulb. Specifically, this is how it becomes intriguing: Bishop Joseph Hall, though largely forgotten, is major. I won't wear you out quoting four-hundred-year-old accolades. Suffice it to say that his impact and influence in and on his own time were enormous. They called him "the English Seneca." He argued with Shakespeare in taverns and quarreled with Milton in print. He resolved spiritual controversies. He pioneered multiple prose forms in English, among them the satire, the dystopia, the Theophrastian character sketch, and the Neostoical meditation. In the 1650s, when he was old and fallen from power and sick—suffering from, among other ills, "strangury" (painful, constricted urination)—he was attended and his life prolonged by a younger, admiring friend, the writer-physician Sir Thomas Browne, who went on to quote from Hall in his own work. Thomas Browne closed Hall's eyes. Alexander Pope read Bishop Hall. Laurence Sterne knew Bishop Hall's sermons and used them. But most significant of all: Francis Bacon knew Hall, and is highly likely to have read his Remedies. A year later, Bacon publishes his own Essayes. Granted, Hall hadn't used that word in his book. He'd used Discourses. But the formal and stylistic overlap between the two productions is huge. Which means we need to consider the likelihood that Joseph Hall is, if not the father, at minimum a coparent of the English essay. There is more to be learned about him.

** An at-the-time disproportionate-seeming number of Montaigne's earliest readers were female, and he was made fun of for it. He dedicated several of his pieces to women and boasted that he would come to know more about that sex than any man before, because his book would become a tiny Trojan horse that would carry him even into their bedrooms, even into their toilettes. Among his most passionate early defenders, and his first posthumous editor, was the great Marie le Jars de Gournay, whom he called his fille d'alliance (something between a goddaughter and a female apprentice). Good on this topic is Grace Norton's Montaigne: His Personal Relations to Some of His Contemporaries, and His Literary Relations to Some Later Writers, which mentions the "peculiar interest Montaigne has inspired through all generations in women."

*** Read Pierre Villey's Montaigne en Angleterre for both a tour de force treatment
of this subject and an amusing instance of the French attitude to it, which is (or was for a long time) that we English are a little bit weird about Montaigne. Every country treasures him, but England has loved him. In the nineteenth century we tried to claim him, Villey points out, by seizing on a claim he makes, at one point in the Essais, that his father's family was descended from one situated in England and that he could recall seeing, as a boy, English relics in Eyquem family homes. Genealogies were drawn, more wishfully than carefully, tracing Eyquem back to Ockham. That would explain the English fixation on Montaigne, our drive to emulate him. He was really ours.


**** Notice the self-canceling doubleness of even his syntax there. Those other pieces can't be "essays" (looser meaning) because they're strong, and able to endure the sharpest "trial" (stricter meaning). Cornwallis seems to be winking at us there, letting us know that he knows that the whole problem of the word is a linguistic ouroboros. Takeaway being, 1601 and you already have the ironic essay about essays.

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Reality Fiction

Reality Fiction

Tim Parks

Abner Dean

It has long been a commonplace that fiction provides a way to break taboos and talk about potentially embarrassing or even criminal personal experiences without bringing society's censure on oneself. Put the other way round you could say that taboos and censorship encourage creativity, of a kind. But what happens if the main obstacles to free and direct expression fall away?

Eager to find a form of expression for ideas or feelings that would upset a status quo we are all heavily invested in, writers have often invented stories quite different from their own biographies or from the political situation in which they find themselves, but that nevertheless reconstitute the play of forces, the dilemmas and conundrums behind their own preoccupations. "Shall I be incapable, to the end, of lying on any other subject?" Beckett has his aging narrator, Malone, ask himself of himself, as he tries and fails to tell a story that will be the merest escapism.

Consider Dickens's late novels, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, where so many of the characters labor under the psychological strain of keeping a deep secret that can never be revealed. Is Dickens aware that he is reconstituting his own anxieties as he tries to combine the experience of being a very public figure with keeping a young mistress year after year? Probably yes. He had complained to friends that rules of propriety prevented him from talking about large areas of experience. At the end of Our Mutual Friend he puts together an extraordinary series of events to allow a lawyer to marry a boatman's daughter and then to have this unlikely development discussed around a well-to-do dinner table where all but one person present describes the union as grotesque and disgraceful. Close friends of Dickens would have seen he was reflecting on what would happen if he tried to bring his beloved mistress Ellen out into the open.

But Dickens lived 150 years ago. Society has changed. Taboo after taboo has fallen away. People can now boast about coming from humble origins. Homosexuality is no longer something to be hidden; there may even be social and commercial advantages to a writer's "coming out." Love relationships and marriages are no longer conceived of as fortresses of propriety, such that every difficulty or infidelity must be strenuously denied. And in any event it's becoming harder and harder to deny things. Everyone's posting photographs on Facebook, everybody's leaving traces of what they do or say on email and Twitter. Those who suffer abuse of any kind are more willing to speak up. With or without the NSA, the kind of collective reticence and sense of privacy that allowed Dickens to keep his young woman hidden from the public eye for so many years is a thing of the past.

What does all this mean for creativity? Readers have become so canny about the way fiction works, so much has been written about it, that any intense work about sexuality, say, or race relations, will be understood willy-nilly as the writer's reconstituting his or her personal involvement with the matter. Not that people are so crass as to imagine you are writing straight autobiography. But they have studied enough literature to figure out the processes that are at work. In fact, reflecting on the disguising effects of a story, on the way a certain set of preoccupations has been shifted from reality to fiction, has become, partly thanks to literary criticism and popular psychology, one of the main pleasures of reading certain authors. What kind of person exactly is Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, and how do the differences between their latest and previous books suggest that their personal concerns have changed? In short, the protection of fiction isn't really there anymore, even for those who seek it.

Naturally, one response to this is the confessional novel, or simply autobiography. Knausgaard's My Struggle is the most recent example: six long volumes of intimate and sometimes scabrous personal minutiae. Arguably Thomas Bernhard's Gathering Evidence, five brief but almost unbearably intense autobiographical volumes, and Coetzee's three volume, third-person novelized autobiography, Scenes from Provincial Life (Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime), are further, though more austerely structured examples. Coetzee insists that his books are "novels" not memoirs, and in fact they have competed for novel prizes; yet the main character is John Coetzee, his early life follows the same trajectory as the author's and he is presented in the most unflattering light: in bed with another man's wife, brushing off a girl who has aborted his child, and so on.

Such "confessions" would have been dangerous a hundred years ago. By calling these books novels you might say that Coetzee is holding onto a fig leaf. More interestingly, I suspect he is telling us that the word "fiction" was always a fig leaf, that literature can always be deconstructed to arrive at a play of forces that is essentially autobiographical, so that in a sense these more candidly autobiographical works are no more revealing than the fiction that came before them. Certainly, rereading Coetzee's great novel, Disgrace, after Scenes from Provincial Life, the continuity between the two projects is obvious.

But another response to the collapse of taboo, censorship, privacy, is for authors to step back from narrative altogether and reflect instead on the whole impulse to tell, or to tell things in a certain way. That is: a young writer may set out by imitating past novelists he loves, but then begin to wonder why on earth they are telling stories in this elaborate roundabout way, fighting so hard to cover things up, when now there is just no need to do so, to the point that borrowing a working method from say, Thomas Hardy, or even Muriel Spark, simply makes no sense today.

Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage is a fine example of this. Torn between writing a novel of his own or a biography of D. H. Lawrence, Dyer at one point admits that he hasn't read all of Lawrence's fiction and probably never will; he has reached a point where Lawrence's life and letters are more interesting to him than his fiction. This shift of focus, which seems to surprise Dyer even as he acknowledges it, is in line with his dwindling enthusiasm for writing a novel of his own, such that every time he tries to start a novel he finds himself preferring to think of D. H. Lawrence, and in particular, D. H. Lawrence in so far as he does or does not resemble Geoff Dyer.

However, since Dyer is not a professional biographer, and has no patience for compiling a traditional work of non-fiction, what exactly is he going to write? The answer is that strange intertwining of fraught memoir, biography manqué and to an extent fiction that is Out of Sheer Rage, a book that suggests that D. H. Lawrence's direct non-fictional statements about himself were more immediately engaging than the fictional works where he found ways of putting his most intimate concerns before the public. Who needs the novels, Dyer asks, if we can get a lively expression of Lawrence's concerns and character in the letters? And why should I create unnecessary fictions if a changed world now allows me to express my own concerns without any reticence at all?

Dyer is determinedly avant-garde, so it's not surprising to find him at the forefront of developments in the literary world. The more traditional novelist David Lodge is a different case also altogether. In his recent Lives in Writing Lodge tells us that as he gets older he finds himself more interested in "fact-based writing" than in fiction and goes on to offer an account of the lives of eleven writers, most of them novelists. Lodge had already written novelized accounts of the lives of Henry James and H. G. Wells and mentions his embarrassment that in the same year he published his novel on James, Colm Tóibín also published a novel on James and in the year he published a novel about Wells, A. S. Byatt also published a novel, much of which was based on the life of Wells. We have a trend.

Lodge explains his new interest in fact rather than fiction in his typically low-key manner, as merely "a common tendency in readers as they age, but it also seems to be a trend in contemporary literary culture in general." Very casually, without any further elucidation, that is, Lodge has suggested that both as individuals and as a culture we can expect to grow out of fiction. It was a phase. All the same, the facts that Lodge turns out to be interested in, when we turn to his recent novels or to Lives in Writing, are the lives of people who wrote fiction—Kingsley Amis, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Anthony Trollope—and what interests him is how these people transformed their personal concerns into novels. That is, he is interested in the phase that he himself seems to be emerging from, or in the process of change that is occurring. Again, as with Dyer, we have the sense that a situation that once made the novel extremely important, as space where difficult questions could be fielded with impunity, has now altered, such that the author brought up on this model is now bound to reflect on what to do with his ambition and creativity.

So has fiction now outlived one of its sustaining purposes? That is the question Lodge, Dyer, Coetzee, Knausgaard, and many other writers are posing (one thinks in particular of David Shields's madly provocative Reality Hunger). It could be we are moving towards a period where, as the writer "gets older"—as Lodge has it, carefully avoiding the positive connotation of "matures" or the negative of "ages"—he or she finds it increasingly irrelevant to embark on another long work of fiction that elaborately reformulates conflicts and concerns that the reader anyway assumes are autobiographical. Far more interesting and exciting to confront the whole conundrum of living and telling head on, in the very different world we find ourselves in now, where more or less anything can be told without shame. Whether this makes for better books or simply different books is a question writers and readers will decide for themselves.

October 16, 2014, 4:30 p.m. 

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Escape from Microsoft Word

Escape from Microsoft Word

Edward Mendelson

David Levine

This post is about word processors, but I got the idea for it from something W. H. Auden once said about political philosophers. In 1947, talking with his learned young secretary about an anthology he was compiling, The Portable Greek Reader, he mentioned Isocrates, a Greek orator whose simple-seeming ideas about relations between rich and poor cities were sane and practical. Naïve-sounding Isocrates had solved problems for which Plato's grand theories had no answer. "Isocrates reminds me of John Dewey," Auden said. "He's a mediocrity who's usually right whereas Plato is a man of genius who's always wrong." Only a genius could have devised Plato's theory of the forms—the invisible, intangible "ideas" that give shape to every visible, tangible thing. But the theory of forms is always wrong when applied to political thinking, as every experiment in ideal, utopian politics has proved.

Auden's contrast between mediocrity that gets things right and genius that is always wrong is useful in thinking about many fields other than politics. Take, for example, the instruments used for writing. The word processor that most of the world uses every day, Microsoft Word, is a work of genius that's almost always wrong as an instrument for writing prose. Almost-forgotten WordPerfect—once the most popular word-processing program, still used in a few law offices and government agencies, and here and there by some writers who remain loyal to it—is a mediocrity that's almost always right. I submitted this post in a file created by the latest version of Word because Word is the lingua franca of publishing. But I wrote it in an ancient MS-DOS version of WordPerfect that hasn't been updated since 1997, because WordPerfect is the instrument best suited to the way I think when I write.

The original design of Microsoft Word, in the early 1980s, was a work of clarifying genius, but it had nothing to do with the way writing gets done. The programmers did not think about writing as a sequence of words set down on a page, but instead dreamed up a new idea about what they called a "document." This was effectively a Platonic idea: the "form" of a document existed as an intangible ideal, and each tangible book, essay, love letter, or laundry list was a partial, imperfect representation of that intangible idea.

A document, as Word's creators imagined it, is a container for other ideal forms. Each document contains one or more "sections," what everyone else calls chapters or other subdivisions. Each section contains one or more paragraphs. Each paragraph contains one or more characters. Documents, sections, paragraphs, and characters all have sets of attributes, most of which Word calls "styles." A section can have its own margin settings; a paragraph can be indented or set in a specific font; a set of characters (such as one or more words) can be italicized, underlined, and printed in red, all by applying a single "style." Even if you don't apply a specific style, everything is governed by what Word calls the "normal" style. To complicate matters, Word also lets you apply what it calls "direct formatting," in which, for example, you italicize a word without applying a separate style to that word alone.

On a typewriter, when you wanted to increase the left margin on the page, you moved a metal lever, then moved it back to decrease the margin again. To type a superscript (as in mc²) you rotated the carriage slightly, typed the superscripted letter, then rotated the carriage back again. In effect, you progressed in sequence from one set of conditions to another. Things changed as you typed.

In Microsoft Word (as in all other word processors built on the same model, including Apple's Pages), the underlying model is static, like a Platonic idea. In effect, you "paint" a whole section with its own margin settings, and you "paint" a character with the superscript attribute.

I've been vaguely aware of Word's Platonic ideas since I learned, years ago, that I had to create a new section when I wanted to change the page margins. But I didn't realize how bizarrely Platonic Word can be until I started using it to create the manuscript of a complete edition of Auden's prose. At the foot of each essay and review, the edition has a line indicating its source, for example, "The New York Review of Books, 2 May 1965," or "The New Yorker, 27 September 1966." While preparing the file for the publisher, I applied to all these lines a style named "Article Source"; this style arranged the lines so they were aligned at the right margin, and added a line space above and below. I was puzzled to see that when I applied the style, Word sometimes removed the italics from the magazine title but sometimes didn't, for no obvious reason. When I applied the style to the first of my two examples, the italics disappeared; when I applied it to the second, the italics remained.

A friend at Microsoft, speaking not for attribution, solved the mystery. Word, it seems, obeys the following rule: when a "style" is applied to text that is more than 50 percent "direct-formatted" (like the italics I applied to the magazine titles), then the "style" removes the direct formatting. So The New York Review of Books (with the three-letter month May) lost its italics. When less than 50 percent of the text is "direct-formatted," as in the example with The New Yorker (with the nine-letter month September), the direct-formatting is retained.

No writer has ever thought about the exact percentage of italics in a line of type, but Word is reduced to this kind of arbitrary principle because its Platonic model—like all Platonic models—is magnificent in its inner coherence but mostly irrelevant to the real world. In order to make a connection between heavenly ideas and tangible realities, Plato himself was reduced to inventing something he called the Demiurge, an intermediate being who translates the ideal forms in heaven into something tangible in the world. The Demiurge is an early instance of what programmers call a kludge—a clumsy and illogical expedient for dealing with a problem that seems too intractable to solve more elegantly. Word's 50-percent rule for applying styles is a descendent of the Demiurge, and just as much of a kludge.

The inventors of WordPerfect had no grand ideas about the form of a document. Instead they looked over typists' shoulders and tried to find ways of imitating their actions on a computer keyboard. So, when you want to change the margin in WordPerfect, you press a few keys to perform the computer equivalent of pushing the lever on a typewriter. You change the margin, and then, later, you might change it back again. Word's intellectual model is effectively timeless: you paint the text with its attributes. WordPerfect's is active and progressive: you change a setting, continue typing, and then change some other setting. Auden's word "mediocrity" seems too strong to apply to WordPerfect, as it was too strong to apply to Isocrates or John Dewey, both of whom had something very like genius in their clear-sighted, unprejudiced perception of the world as it is.

Despite its underlying idea, Microsoft Word, of course, has evolved over the years so that it lets you work more or less as you do in WordPerfect, turning on italics and then turning them off again. But if you do anything more complex, you still find yourself deep in Word's arcane Platonism, which is too deeply ingrained in the program ever to be replaced.

Intelligent writers can produce intelligent prose using almost any instrument, but the medium in which they write will always have some more or less subtle effect on their prose. Karl Popper famously denounced Platonic politics, and the resulting fantasies of a closed, unchanging society, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). When I work in Word, for all its luxuriant menus and dazzling prowess, I can't escape a faint sense of having entered a closed, rule-bound society. When I write in WordPerfect, with all its scruffy, low-tech simplicity, the world seems more open, a place where endings can't be predicted, where freedom might be real.

October 21, 2014, 12:45 p.m. 

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La Comédie Architecturale by Joseph GiovanniniOctober 12th, 2014 reset - +

La Comédie Architecturale by Joseph Giovannini

October 12th, 2014 reset - +

MY JOURNALISTIC COLLEAGUE and friend Martin Filler and my architectural colleague and friend Zaha Hadid are engaged in an ongoing legal clash as a result of an article, "The Insolence of Architecture," published in the June 5 issue of The New York Review of Books. In his lengthy review of Rowan Moore's Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture, Filler wrote that an estimated 1,000 people had died on Hadid's building site for the Al Wakrah stadium in Qatar, designed for the 2022 World Cup. Citing remarks Hadid made in public last February, Filler accused her of callous indifference to their deaths. Hadid sued. The complaint, Hadid v. NYRev Inc et al, filed in New York State Supreme Court and accessible online, charged that the article was false and defamatory: the stadium wasn't even under construction when Hadid spoke: no one died at a nonexistent construction site. According to the complaint, Filler lifted excerpts out of context. The battle thundered through the architecture world.

A reply by Filler was published on the NYRB website — "I regret the error," he conceded — and the error was struck from the online piece. But beyond acknowledging the mistake, he never actually apologized, and correcting the error in the text did not rise to the level of retraction demanded in the complaint, to be published in the NYRB "with at least as much prominence as the Article itself." In Filler's essay, the issue of her purported indifference became a portal into a broader discussion of her character, which Filler made into an issue: he in fact discussed his view of her character more than he did her architecture. Though he corrected the erroneous basis of his characterization, he conspicuously did not retract the characterization itself, which stands as originally written. The architect is still pursuing her claim against Filler and the NYRB as of this writing.

This review refocuses on Moore's book, and discusses Hadid's architecture, on its own merits, in the context of Moore's arguments.

¤

THE CRITERIA by which architecture critics judge buildings are usually left unstated, slipping beneath the radar of even attentive readers: you must string together a series of articles to construct the underlying belief system. With Why We Build, Rowan Moore — architecture critic for London's The Observer — has crafted a model of transparency: principle by principle, project by project, he builds up his critical apparatus additively, on a case-study basis, to explain not only why people build but also how to judge the results. You end up understanding his perspective; you end up agreeing.

Intellectually ambitious but jargon-free, Moore's book is highly readable and even enjoyable: paced, rich, detailed, sweeping, droll, insightful, unexpected. Like a playwright or novelist, or maybe just because he's English, Moore casts buildings almost as characters, and rolls out his narrative like a play on today's global architectural stage, each building and its architect walking on and off, acting a part, constructing ideas, in a complicated skein of relationships that approximates an architectural version of Balzac's La Comédie Humaine. Buildings and architects migrate with ease through themed chapters — "Power and Freedom," "The Erotic in Architecture," "Form Follows Finance" — reappearing later, so that the reader develops a relationship to each, even a familiarity.

Trained at Cambridge as an architect, and former head of London's Architecture Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for architecture and urbanism, Moore knows about the complexities of putting up a building — too well, in fact, to completely dismiss any one project or architect: even the failures merit analysis.

He starts with three casualties of cultural circumstance: one a city (Dubai), the second a skyscraper, and the third a house.

Led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the gung-ho financiers and boosters of Dubai are positioning the emirate as a global financial center and a transit hub between continents. The capital's astounding, nearly instantaneous skyline resulted from promotional business decisions made in the face of declining oil revenues and high civic aspirations: the instabilities elsewhere in much of the Arab world have opened up opportunities in the Gulf States for regional leadership. Real estate now is the emirate's primary commodity, and architecture is being used as a marketing tool, driving each building to be more iconic, exotic, and sellable than the rest in the increasingly competitive skyline.

Dubai is home to what is currently the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, and also to Palm Jumeirah, a man-made island splaying out in the Persian Gulf in the shape of a palm frond: the kitschy and literal figure is so big that it can be seen from space.

Moore notes in pungent detail how the city fathers rushed to build their Singapore on the Gulf before even working out the sewage system, and how the combination of septic infrastructure and antiseptic structures, built for size and spectacle, reduces the visitor to the role of disengaged Lilliputian spectator, "a passive gawper." The self-contained, self-involved buildings in Dubai, which appear to be "frozen computer games above [our] heads," are formally complete in themselves, allowing little incident and accident, closed "to whatever is around them." Moore faults Dubai as a city for failing to add up to a whole that engages hearts and minds. It's all buildings and little city plan — "the ground plane of highways, barriers, and malls offers little purchase for imagining," he writes, thus introducing one criterion of critical judgment: the ability of a city to engage the imagination. Cold to the touch — overdesigned, overprescribed, overmanaged — the slick buildings seem designed for passing by or passing through. Without granular detail, no there is there. The buildings of this Teflon city are "air-conditioned, controlled, secure, generic, clean, soothing," and, in Moore's memorable word, "frictionless." He says, "Architectural forms on the outside collude with controlled and laundered atmospheres on the inside."

Dubai, 2010

Of course, Moore could be talking about virtually any major new city center in the West, and now even in the East and Middle East, all fast merging into an urban world monoculture. Consider Houston or Beijing, or even Midtown Manhattan, once teeming with brownstones, stoops, and salty language, or of course the Gold Coast in LA, now galloping toward the sanitized, generic South Park.

But Dubai alone suffices to make Moore's point: no need to drag in Donald Trump, who is now globalized and an obvious target. The 163-story Burj Khalifa, a needle in the sky, has no earthly reason in this sprawling desert emirate to be so tall, other than to declare its status as a semaphore of status. Though it has a terrifying elegance, the tower is as much a raw advertisement for Dubai as it is the tallest building in the world, at home mostly on a postcard or website, a billboard of itself.

¤

In a wide-ranging book that spans continents, Moore then sweeps the reader to Atlanta, Georgia, to Dean Gardens, a 32,000-square-foot home built for a software entrepreneur that, in its earnestness for greatness, leaves no style unturned —

the Moroccan Rooms, the Egyptian Suite, the Oriental Suite, the Hawaiian Art Gallery, the Game Room got up as a 1950s diner, the Malachite Bathroom, the Silver Suite, the raspberry-coloured kitchen, the Old English Bedroom […] a compendium of lootings across history and geography. […] It was oysters in ketchup, double-fudge-caviar-and-Tabasco ice cream.

Amused but not amused, Moore manages to forgive the excess as he empathizes with the interior designer, the 21-year-old son of the owner. "With the benefit of hindsight one can guess that Chris's designs were an unconscious commentary on the state of his parents' marriage."

With this and other examples, Moore establishes "the triumph of look" as an overriding problem in design today. Buildings compete visually with their neighbors, going shoulder to shoulder as icons. Marketing and the pervasive influence of advertising, aided and abetted by photography and the voracious computer screen, have so privileged image that buildings become, effectively, two-dimensional objects. "A brand is essentially a thing of sight," he writes, and building silhouettes have become logos tattooed on the skyline, branding space. "The eye is engaged," he writes, "but not the body."

No city is immune. Close to his home, Moore singles out the London City Hall, designed by Sir Norman Foster and built as part of a larger market-based project by developers. Its striking, postcard-perfect profile as a leaning, striated sphere does little to enrich the life of its sanitized surroundings. Isolated in a "well-finished, well-detailed, well-maintained world of grey granite, grey steel, and grey glass, through which well-made grey suits can come and go as they please," City Hall exists only "in the zone of sight." It does not engage the city or the visitor, and any "excitement can only be had by a passive spectator, looking." City Hall had fallen into the pockets of the developers who created this urban vacuum.

London City Hall

Advocating an interactive, participatory architecture and a friendlier, even messier environment that engages both the site and the occupant, Moore uses a Heideggerian term, saying that City Hall is not a place in which to "dwell." "This book explores the ways in which these concerns of the living interact with the dead stuff of buildings. […] [T]hings get interesting […] when desire and built space change each other, when animate and inanimate interplay." This interplay is absent in London City Hall, as it is in Dean Gardens and Dubai.

Beyond the practical purposes of architecture, Moore finds intangibles, such as emotion and desire, to be forces necessary for bringing buildings to life. He argues, counterintuitively, that buildings are unstable, even after their builders leave, susceptible to changes of use, configuration, and perception. They are not, and should not be, fixed. Moore devotes a whole chapter, "Eternity Is Overrated," to the need for mutability rather than timelessness. Change is the constant, and it is even desirable, for buildings, and should be allowed and cultivated.

Moore reaches into architecture history. He details the way Gothic cathedrals connect with people. They are not just feats of spectacular engineering but work like movies as immersive environments: "rich in content, sensorily engaging, animated by light." Their stone vaults carry "stained glass, sculpture, and painting, and […] house music, performance, and ritual. Their arches, ribs, and buttresses were means to the end of enabling more light."

He reaches into literature. Citing a 1777 book by Vivant Denon, Point de Lendemain, Moore describes the seduction in a chateau of the willing young hero, who, "astonished, delighted," entered into a wilderness of trees, "which seemed to stand and rest on nothing," the hero says. "In truth, I found myself in a vast cage of mirrors." He wends his way through a series of ever more enticing interiors, in an environment that recalls Moore's descriptions of Gothic cathedrals. "Space is an accomplice to seduction. […] It stimulates the senses," Moore writes:

Light sources are mysterious and concealed, there are incense burners, a flame on an altar, flowers and garlands, statues of Cupid and other deities, a temple of light-hearted design. […] At one point the hero confesses that "it was no longer Mme de T — whom I desired, it was the little room."

Throughout, Moore challenges received wisdom, upping the ante of his book. Few critics would take on a sacrosanct priest figure like the lovable engineer-architect Buckminster Fuller, who always asked what a building weighs, and once pronounced, "If you can do it, it's natural." But Moore does challenge the guru. He critiques Bucky's geodesic dome — which enveloped the greatest volume with the least amount of material — as mute to its surroundings: its fixed form, consistent and perfect, was "rigid and indifferent to the contingent, specific, and temporal." The sphere couldn't really adapt to the irregularity of a site or a brief. It could only span, not stack. The geodesic dome was a pure form allowing no exception, no impurity, and ended up a dead end, exhibited at theme parks like Disney's Epcot, as though in a zoo.

Moore visits the High Line in New York, which, like a geodesic dome, is a raw and efficient piece of engineering. Several years ago the abandoned and elevated rail line snaking through Chelsea was appropriated and designed as a linear park: thousands now stroll on the instantly beloved structure every day with no purpose other than the pleasure of seeing and being seen, as on a paseo in Spain.

The designers, James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, set wood and native grasses among the existing rails, weaving new and old, mixing straight paths with pockets of landscaping in a materially rich and tangible environment. A combination urban beach and hiking trail threaded through the city, the walkway offers previously undiscovered views of the streetscape and skyline, turning Manhattan into an architectural exhibition seen from unexpected vantage points. The city responds: singers perform from their fire escapes overlooking the High Line; developers have rushed to build adjacent to this new public amenity. "Through time, redundancy, and adaptation it has also become habitable, by both body and imagination," writes Moore.

High Line, New York City, 2012

With its low design profile, the park does not really offer an iconic "look" but establishes instead a receptive, casual environment in which pedestrians somehow make themselves at home in public on strolls. The design offers experience through its pockets of greenery, while woods and steel engage the eye (and mind) as they constantly evolve along the promenade. The experience is strong and sensuous without being overpowering.

¤

In the midst of his disquisitions on architecture's triumphs and failures, Moore introduces his muse, Lina Bo Bardi, an Italian-born Brazilian known primarily to cognoscenti, who practiced primarily in São Paulo after World War II. She ducks and drakes across the book in Moore's analyses of why her buildings succeed. Critics can be judged by the architecture they admire, and Moore likes her straightforward structures, which can hardly be accused of formal narcissism: they are clean-lined, simple armatures intended to host and nourish the life their occupants bring to the buildings. When she conceived her own Glass House in sketches, she drew and defined the house by depicting people, furniture, plants, pictures, even a black dog, in the spaces inside and out, the house almost disappearing altogether in favor of the life it supported.

The house was "an instrument that enables other events and experiences to happen," says Moore, using the word "immersive" to denote a house that was lived in and experienced rather than viewed. Glass walls and open verandas fostered an interaction between the residents inside and Brazil's abundant flora and fauna outside. Over time, the spare house invited the lush nature to envelop its form, and it kept changing over the years. Unlike other modernist structures that are valid only when pristine, Moore says that her Glass House does not "embarrass" with the passage of time but instead thrived: "You want buildings to stimulate, give cues, propose, provoke, engage, give evidence of human presence, reveal," he writes. With Bo Bardi's work, Moore establishes other criteria of architectural judgment: a building's ability to engage the occupant's senses and emotions, and its ability to encourage interactions with occupants over time.

Casa de Vidro, Morumbi, Brazil

The modernism that Bo Bardi practiced escaped the totalizing formality that other Modernists, like Austrian architect Adolf Loos and German-American architect Mies van der Rohe, inherited from classicism. In the chapter "The Inconstant Horizon," in which he treads bravely into the minefields of gender in architecture, Moore discusses the 15th-century writings of Leon Battista Alberti, who believed that harmony was desirable in a building, as in life, and that it resided in the correct ordering of parts to the whole — a.k.a. "classical ordination." As in Alberti's hugely influential writings, and da Vinci's drawings of the figure of man inscribed within a circle and a square, Renaissance thinkers associated the male principle with geometric order. Moore itemizes the architectural consequences in his characteristic lists: symmetry, order, fixed over mobile, repetition, axiality, porticoes, pediments, domes, colonnades, volume over surface, form over ornament.

Theorists of Modernism, such as Loos, perpetuated these underlying attitudes in their pure white cubic structures; Mies translated temples into steel; Le Corbusier sculpted fixed and solid buildings that Moore calls "wholesome, sunlit, manly." Le Corbusier also devised the Modulor, based on a studly six-foot-tall guy, as a standard of architectural measure, and cast the outlines of his figure in concrete on his facades. Man, as mankind, was the measure that gave buildings their proportional system, and the norm to which they were built.

For architects practicing in this tradition, the horizon is fixed, immutable, and implicitly male. Moore, however, advocating the desirability and inevitability of change, proposes what he calls the "inconstant horizon." Bo Bardi's architecture is again his example, receptive and subordinate to the life it supports; she embraces such intangibles as the memories stored by a building over time as it ages and changes use.

His list of the qualities of a softer architectural otherness includes illusion, shadow, reflections, surface, artificiality, and the erasure of fixed boundaries. He advocates ambiguity, which multiplies the ways in which a building can be used and perceived. Eschewing labels, he never refers to post-structuralism, but post-structuralist theory insinuates itself nonetheless into his arguments: his "inconstant horizon" recalls Jacques Derrida's "moving center," which releases geometry, and meaning, from fixity into relativity.

It makes sense then, that as director of the Architectural Foundation he hired Anglo-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid to design its London headquarters, which he describes in his chapter "Form Follows Finance." Hadid is in some ways the sequel to Bo Bardi in that she represents the next generation of the inconstant horizon, though in radically evolved form.

Hadid started her career by pursuing the unrealized Suprematist theories of the early 20th-century Russian mystic painter and architect Kazimir Malevich, who sought to intensify feeling through his work. Malevich aspired to a fourth spatial dimension in his often otherworldly paintings, and Hadid imported illusion into real buildings by deploying painterly devices, such as forced perspective, used since the Renaissance. In her first built major structure, the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany, she streamlined several blocks of the building in forced perspectives that did not converge on the same vanishing point. The eye splayed in different directions: perceptually, she split space. The plays of perception tricked the eye into thinking that the space in her buildings was divergent and even accelerating. Her buildings, though abstract, physicalized and intensified experience: they engaged the body through the eye. The concrete Fire Station seems weightless, and the illusions take you on a virtual ride. They zoom.

Vitra Fire Station. Photo © Christian Richters.

First painted and then built, her hyperspatial visions caught the attention of admiring professionals and curators, and it was catnip to a public fascinated by an architecture that manifested such strange otherness. After she completed a handful of buildings, including the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati and a sweepingly curved ski jump in Innsbruck, she won the coveted Pritzker Prize, architecture's Nobel. Though there were only a handful of buildings in her portfolio, the prize was prescient: she has gone on to build one of the most successful practices in the world, working on four continents, realizing remarkable designs that have become international sensations.

The term "starchitect," often applied to Hadid, among others, disserves her reputation because it implies hollow celebrity rather than the consistent quality and inventiveness of her work, which constantly renews her career.

Before her international success, Hadid had toiled in the trenches for years, an Arab in England and a woman in a man's field, proposing what seemed unbuildable structures. But gradually, critics and clients like Moore acknowledged the validity of her vision: in hiring her to design the Architecture Foundation's headquarters in 2004, he was practicing what he stood for as its director. He understood her unusual work — "charged with seismic energy." He also got her zany eccentricities, describing a handbag tossed on a table: "white and gold and tsarist, Fabergé in its intensity of ornament, but also futurist."

For the Foundation, she designed a structure composed of galleries lifted on two inclined legs, all edges converging in forced perspective. The structure looped through space like a deformed paper clip, and offered galleries not only on its upper floors but also in its inclined legs, with a vast glazed hall beneath, all on a small site. The design "was a series of ideas about the interaction of inner and outer life, of exhibitions and street, resolved into daring and confident form," Moore writes. Its figural shape staked out its claim as a landmark in the city and would have reified the Foundation's promotional mission by lofting forward-looking architecture and urbanism into public awareness.

Architecture Foundation Competition Submission

But it was not to be. Throughout his book, Moore embeds architecture as a discipline in broader social circumstances. And very often, it's tough out there, starchitect or not. In one of his most personal and searching chapters, Moore tells the story of how, with the best of his intentions and the best of her designs, the Foundation project nonetheless failed. The circumstances that had enabled the commission in the first place — Moore had secured a site slated for a commercial development required to have a cultural component — came with what proved a fatal flaw: the developer, after initial enthusiasm, finally wanted to build the structure at the price of conventional construction, which would have meant an art warehouse. Moore recounts how Hadid's office offered another, simpler design that should have been less expensive, but inexplicably even that design went up rather than down when priced by the developer. The developer basically stonewalled the project, and it died.

Moore stops short of blaming either the architect or the developers, but the title of the chapter, "Form Follows Finance," implies that any project depends on a financially willing client. In this case, the objectives of the developer did not align with the aspirations of the Foundation: Moore wanted to build the design that exemplified the most advanced work in the field, but the financial basis of the project was commercial, not cultural — there was a mismatch of expectations. The design was a casualty of the same market-driven planning that had compromised the drab new gray district around London's City Hall.

Hadid has seen other projects in Great Britain dissolve mysteriously, including the Cardiff Opera House in Wales, a commission she won twice in successive competitions in the mid-1990s. She now has a keen nose for when she's not wanted, and she warned Moore in the middle of their shared dilemma: "They don't want me." He should carry on with a different architect. She was not being coy or self-pitying or teasing him to sign on, but forthright. And, as it happened, she proved to be correct. There are many quiet English ways to bar admission to the club.

Moore might have gone on to cite other projects where Hadid's nimble office adapted a design to a budget, as in her brilliant design for the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. There her office adapted one iteration of the winning design for another, in order to meet the budget. (I served as the competition adviser on the project, and so witnessed how her office recast the design that brought the building in for the desired cost.) Hadid, often accused of being a diva, generously lent the project a million dollars as her office worked for months without pay to satisfy the brief and its cost limits. The building is now the pride of the university, the city of East Lansing, and its principal donor, Eli Broad, famous for watching the bottom line.

She does not make a display of her philanthropy. Last year she came to New York at her expense to speak at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gratis, at a sold-out benefit lecture, on the occasion of an evening dedicated to Iraq and the opening of the new Islamic galleries.

Despite obstacles in her career, especially in England, this member of architecture's radical left earned her way to the top of her field. She won Japan's Praemium Imperiale award for architecture, conferred by Prince Hitachi in 2009. Queen Elizabeth named her a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2012 at a ceremony in Buckingham Palace.

Success on this scale breeds envy and backlash. Comments she made in public last February, when she was asked about the deaths that have occurred at construction sites in the Gulf, have been distorted, especially by people who just don't like her work and use para-architectural issues to attack the architect and her architecture.

Martin Filler's NYRB article claimed that Hadid had said, "I have nothing to do with the workers. […] It's not my duty as an architect to look at it." The cherry-picked abridgment suggests a chilling and nonchalant indifference. The complaint sent to the New York Supreme Court, however, fills in the ellipsis: "I have nothing to do with the workers. I think that's an issue the government — if there's a problem — should pick up. Hopefully, these things will be resolved." Asked if she was concerned about the issue, Hadid added: "Yes, but I'm more concerned about the deaths in Iraq as well, so what do I do about that? I'm not taking it lightly but I think it's for the government to look to take care of. It's not my duty as an architect to look at."

In the fuller quote she regretted the deaths, stated that it's a government issue, doesn't take it lightly, and basically clarified that the contractors, not the architect, are formally and legally responsible for worker safety. In other remarks during the same response she implied that the same and similar problems occur elsewhere. (China especially comes to mind, where worker safety has actually been a problem for millennia, dating from the construction of the Great Wall.) On a personal level, she said that she was greatly concerned by the ongoing situation in her native Iraq, but that she was equally impotent to right that situation: "so what do I do about that?" Her rhetorical question does not imply she doesn't care, but that she is not in a position to solve the problem.

There is an even larger context to the full quote. Though Hadid is well known for speaking her mind, she is surprisingly guarded when it comes to politics. She grew up in a political family — her father, Mohammed Hadid, member of a wealthy Mosul family who trained as an economist at the London School of Economics, was the leader of Iraq's Progressive Democratic Party and, previously, vice president of the National Democratic Party, which fought for democratic reforms in the country. He served as the country's minster of finance and industry during the country's brief republican period: he helped decolonize its economy from Britain by industrializing Iraq. But politics in Iraq are dangerous, as history has shown, starting with the brutal assassination of King Faisal II and members of his family in 1958. After a coup in 1963, Mr. Hadid was imprisoned, for political reasons, and deprived of his assets. Hadid has said that early on, as a girl, she learned from her parents never to say anything about political issues in public. Her comments about politics are always reticent, even among friends, as the most casual remarks could prove dangerous. She in fact has little record of political statements made in public, and although she has lamented the loss of life in Iraq in public, she has rarely, if ever, commented about the politics of the Iraq invasion itself, which set off a chain reaction causing hundreds of thousands of deaths — and counting.

In the February conference, Hadid said that she might make a personal statement about her concern, but her way of addressing a basically political situation is not to demonstrate on the streets or remonstrate from a podium. Her way is to work back channels quietly. Anyone who wants to draw her out politically in public hasn't lived in her part of the Middle East. Cultural differences and personal experience are at play.

The irony of the accusations of her indifference to workmen's plights is that Hadid has an acutely developed social conscience, cultivated from the time she saw her father, a socialist, build up the economy of the country in ways that helped lift large numbers of Iraqis out of poverty: in the 1950s and early '60s, during his most politically active period, the country was progressive. As an architect, she translates those progressive social goals concretely into designs. She consciously cultivates and designs public spaces outside her buildings, with participatory and engaging environments that elevate life in the public sphere. She then brings the public spaces into and through her buildings: her outdoor promenades and plazas function like the High Line, as energy fields that socialize the interior, prompting a collective public life.

At the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, where she brilliantly packed and stacked a multitude of differently sized and finished galleries onto an impossibly tight urban site, she extended the streetscape outside into the interior via what she called "an urban carpet," which rose in the stairwell up through the building. The gesture virtually beckoned the public outside to step inside, and opened this elitist institution to the city: she and her buildings are deeply democratic.

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While she has designed commercial projects, institutional buildings allow Hadid to best realize her social agenda, and the unprecedented scale of a recently completed project, the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan, offered her the most complete opportunity to date to test and put into practice her theories about public space.

The brief was for a public library, concert hall, and museum set on the grounds of a former military complex. Her design is anything but self-contained and formally aloof. The building, a free-flowing form, grows from a large park she designed, organized around an open and public promenade that winds and zigzags through spilling pools and terraced gardens up to an arrival plaza. At the top of the site, the ground lifts like a flying carpet, transforming into the undulating walls and billowing roof of the cultural center — the horizon here is indeed inconstant, as the ground becomes the building, evolving and revolving hypnotically into a Möbius strip of turning form and space. The whole structure, grand but mesmerizing despite its voluminous scale, seems to float like a handkerchief lifted in an updraft. The promenades outside, as engaging as the High Line but in an abstract idiom, continue inside, within a billowing public space that the three venues have in common: here the respective audiences and occupants commingle.

Heydar Aliyev Center. Photo © Hufton + Crow Photographers.

Heydar Aliyev Center. Photo © Hufton + Crow Photographers.

It is hard to describe the spaces without descending into what appears to be exaggeration and adjectival excess. Immersive and experiential, the building incites the "intensity of feeling" that Malevich advocated, the sense of awe described by theorists of the fourth dimension at the turn of the last century. On what Le Corbusier called the promenade architecturale through the public spaces, inside and out, visitors embark on a path of discovery, enticed by shifting vistas and surprising views in what one visitor called a "field of wonderment." The discovery gives visitors a sense of engagement, as though they own the building through their own unique experience. The experiential intensity makes the public building personal.

This is the emotional engagement that Moore recommends, though exponential in intensity and magnitude: the amplitude of the halls, which rivals monumental Roman public spaces, also triggers a collective emotional engagement. The capacious generosity and grandeur qualify the space as a national room. The public owns it as well as the individual. Hadid has given Azeris a building block for the public psyche, as does Grand Central Station in New York or the Mall in Washington.

Heydar Aliyev Center. Photo © Iwan Baan.

Conceptually ambitious, the building is structurally advanced: the sense of sailing form and expanding space is made possible by an innovative adaptation of a space frame very much in the Buckminster Fuller tradition, but applied to a free-form structure that avoids symmetry and axiality, and verges on the organic.

In London, Hadid's Baku project won the Design Museum's Design of the Year Award for 2014, but Hadid came under criticism for building a monument to a repressive regime: critics say she should have turned the commission down in protest, just as she should have voiced outrage to worker abuse in Gulf countries. They demand that she become Joan of Arc.

Were the Baku center less beautiful, perhaps its underlying intelligence and political agenda might be better recognized, but armchair critics are quick to assume a beautiful building is only beautiful — "formalist" is the damning phrase — and therefore one-dimensional and without content.

Hardly. Hadid came of intellectual age as Michel Foucault launched his critique of power and space. Widely discussed at the time was the panopticon, a plan often used for prison design from the late 18th century, with guards positioned at the hub of a wheel for clear views down corridors that formed the spokes. The geometry of surveillance and control from a central point allowed guards to watch all cells and prisoners. The layout was totalizing, subordinating all design decisions to this controlling geometric idea.

Hadid's first buildings, which look like exploding geodes, were based on fractal geometries. Verging on wildness, the basic geometry was liberating rather than controlling. With the advent of the computer, she has since smoothed the fragments into curving shapes and flowing spaces while retaining the freedoms of the early work. It is possible to interpret the free geometries of the Heydar Center from Foucault's point of view, its liquid forms challenging the geometry of power.

The Peak, by Zaha Hadid, 1983

Arguably the design positions the building as a subversive monument within a repressive political culture, just as Dmitri Shostakovich's 9th Symphony stood as a musical response to Stalinism. With sinuous lines and undulating surfaces, her free-flowing building has no center, and no control point. It is also located a short distance away from its spiritual nemesis, the stiff, classicized, overpowering Government House, built for over 5,000 people on Lenin Square in the waning days of the Stalinist regime. Its rigid symmetries and body language, with every detail assigned its place within the larger ordination, grips the surrounding city and avenues geometrically, every line of its fabric dictatorial. It embodies and symbolizes inflexible authority.

Government House, Baku, Azerbaijan

Buildings like Hadid's, as with buildings by Bo Bardi, are "intimate with power," as Moore writes, because they require authority and money for their construction. But their daring imagination and openness, not to mention skill and inventiveness, challenge social control. For anyone doing a close reading of architecture in Baku, Hadid's design challenges and undermines repression. Beautiful it is, but its very posture makes concrete an ethos of political and social liberation: Hadid's way of protesting and expressing her politics is to inscribe her position in the design.

Heydar Aliyev Center. Photo © Iwan Baan.

Though Moore does not discuss the Heydar Center itself, what he calls "the instability of architecture" is "the reason why places shaped with the help of corruption, tyranny, greed, fear, megalomania, or repression — which includes many of the most admired public spaces in Europe — can be beautiful and liberating." Good architecture, even if it is beautiful, can play seditious political roles.

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Why We Build is not a history, not a how-to book, and not even a manual about connoisseurship. Nor is it an earnest or self-righteous manifesto: Moore prefers to amuse rather than scold. Sometimes his tales are even rollicking, as when he chronicles the more libidinous quarters of London that have since settled into paragons of architectural propriety: the history of buildings is itself inconstant. Moore's story exfoliates unpredictably across centuries, continents, cultures, and even down the same street through time, and the complexities and unexpected turns of the book engage the reader in the same way that the complexities of the architecture he prefers engage the people who dwell in them.

Like the buildings, the book is not linear but relaxed in its storytelling and structure and associative in its thinking. He takes detours. He builds his case by layering, again like the buildings he admires. The buildings are not simplistic one-liners, but designs rife with associations, emotions, responsibilities, and above all invitations to the dance. He does not like authoritarian buildings that dictate order in space, and he does not set himself up as a commanding authority, but allows readers to encounter ruminations that gently add up to a soft thesis about architectural quality and appreciation.

His basic points are simple: fixed, consistent, and perfect form is indifferent to the moment, and likely to leave the user uninvolved and uninterested. "Architects expect magic to come from form, but form alone does not mean much if separated from light, scale, making, context, and time."

Architecture is "a thing to be lived," says Moore, and not just looked at, whether it engages the occupant like a trampoline, fostering activity, or, like an oneiric object, cueing reverie. For Moore, architecture that matters is not the methodical production of standardized units: "It is an architect's job to make worlds, and one who brings only indifference or neutrality creates another kind of tyranny."

No wonder he wanted Hadid to design the Architecture Foundation. He quotes the eminent Italian architect Gio Ponti: "Enchantment: a useless thing, but as indispensable as bread." In Hadid's design, it would have been possible to step through the looking glass into another world.

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Joseph Giovannini is a critic, architect and teacher based in New York. Trained at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, he has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Architect Magazine, and Architectural Record, and has taught at Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, USC, and SCI-Arc.

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