性欲简史：亲密生活永不停歇的复杂性

佚名 利维坦 今天

利维坦按：

在西方前现代世界场景中，宗教和哲学都对“性（欲）”有诸多负面的描述，这也不奇怪，毕竟，在一个以二元论为主导的观念演进中，性（欲）与灵魂（精神）似乎是截然对立的存在。不仅如此，当时的观念还左右着医学的某些现在看起来很奇葩的实践，诸如针对女性所谓“歇斯底里”的诊断和治疗。

那么，在宗教相对淡化、哲学退场和医学进步的现今，我们找到了关于性（观念）的适当表述了吗？在本文作者看来，这无疑是一个十分复杂的问题。

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1953年4月初，在戛纳的一片海滩上，18岁的碧姬·芭铎（Brigitte Bardot）现身于全球媒体前，宣传她的新电影《此恨绵绵》【Act of Love，与柯克·道格拉斯（Kirk Douglas）合作主演】，这是世界在性方面迈向现代的一步。

她身穿一套印有花朵图案的比基尼泳衣，而在那之前，这种衣物很少出现在镜头里（在美国，1961年前，荧幕上出现肚脐眼是违法的）——就在此前一年，教皇庇护十二世（Pope Pius XII）曾对比基尼进行谴责，称其容易助长罪恶、有碍道德。

碧姬·芭铎于戛纳电影节，1953年。© Pinterest

1946年，就在美国开始在马绍尔群岛的比基尼环礁进行核试验的数日后，法国设计师雅克·海姆（Jacques Heim）发明了比基尼泳衣。他之所以选择这个名字，是因为他预测自己的发明会像氢弹一样具有爆炸性。虽然直到1953年的戛纳电影节，芭铎才点燃了导火索，但比基尼和它所代表的一切的确开启了一个新时代。世界各地的妇女都脱掉了她们原本的连体式泳衣，与之一同被抛弃的还有过去多种对待身体的态度。

1960年，布莱恩·海兰德（Brian Hyland）凭借他的歌曲《黄色圆点比基尼娃娃》（‘Itsy Bitsy, Teenie Weenie, Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’）大获成功；在1963年的《海滩派对》（Beach Party）和1964年的《比基尼海滩》（Bikini Beach）这两部大热电影中，比基尼都是“主角”。天主教会放弃了反对，电影审查部门和保守派团体也不再抵制。在短短几十年的时间里，比基尼似乎变成了正常生活中早已存在的一部分——也就是“解放了的”生活里的一部分。

2008年北京奥运会上，时任美国总统乔治·W. 布什与身穿比基尼的美国女子沙滩排球队员合影。 © Pinterest

比基尼自然不仅仅是一件衣服。它代表了一种看待身体和性的方式：没有羞耻和罪恶感，没有难堪的、被压抑的过去带来的遗存，预示着洋溢的热情和自如的姿态。比基尼将现代性与古罗马人和希腊人的异教自由联系起来，在古希腊罗马时期，人们知晓如何为身体的美感和运动精神感到骄傲，这在他们的雕塑、马赛克镶嵌画和奥运会比赛中都有所反映。

早期的比基尼：发现于西西里岛卡萨尔古罗马别墅（Roman Villa of Romana del Casale）的罗马镶嵌画。 © Wikipedia

基督教把碧姬·芭铎与罗马人分离开来。数百年来，教会一直在对肉体发动战争，把裸体与亚当和夏娃的原罪联系在一起，我们的羞耻感仿佛成了对我们先祖罪过的惩罚。我们中的许多人看到自己的躯体会感到极度不适，这仅仅证明了有关人类的一个基本事实：我们是罪人的后代。

马萨乔（Masaccio）：《被逐出伊甸园的亚当和夏娃》（The Expulsion of Adam and Eve），1424年。 © Wikipedia

在现代以前，只有极少数人敢于尝试享受一种在性和肉体方面不那么受限的人生，为此，他们不得不把目光投向远在欧洲边界之外的地方。19世纪的法国画家保罗·高更（Paul Gauguin），在距离戛纳几小时车程的普罗旺斯呆了几个月之后，转而前往大溪地（Tahiti）寻求异教信仰的生活，而这无疑是他那谈性色变的祖国所无法给予的。远离欧洲的高顶礼帽和长裙后，他发现这里的人们像在伊甸园一般裸体相对，舒适地坐在热带树木下，显然完全不认为这样露出躯体会造成任何尴尬。

保罗·高更：《怡人之地》（Te nave nave fenua / The pleasant land），1892年。 © Wikipedia

但是到了1953年，人们无需再走那么远了。大溪地来到了法国。 

在后戛纳电影节的时代看来，前现代世界处理性问题的尝试可能会令人痛苦，盖因他们实在太过逃避、谨慎，更有无数的手段。19世纪，出于健康上的原因，医生们开始建议人们去海边旅行，女性为了不向陌生人展示自己的身体，不得不付出了极大的努力，这种努力在技术层面令人印象深刻，在心理层面则荒谬无比。人们用马匹拖动装有轮子的特制小屋进入水中，妇女们可以从里打开一个舱口，下到水里洗海水浴（下图）。哪怕只是朝女性的肘部或肩膀瞥上一眼，都会被认为是卑鄙下流的行为。

© Diario AS

这种扭曲的基础源于这样一种观点：性欲是理智或美好生活之敌。它是一种居于我们内心的疯狂，诱惑、折磨我们，使我们理智的日常生活脱轨，让我们厌恶自己【流传的格言如是说：“交媾之后，立即听到魔鬼的笑声”（Illico post coitum cachinnus auditur Diaboli）】。除了那些非常罕见的、以孕育后代为目的的情境之外，性行为在有尊严的生活中是没有地位的。我们以它的名义所想和所作的都是兽性的。艺术家和哲学家们描述每个善人的内心斗争：一方是欲望，另一方是贞洁。没有人能够从这种无休止的内战中幸免，但我们当中的有德之人知道该选哪一边才能解决问题。 

盖拉尔多·迪·乔瓦尼·德尔福拉（Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora）：《爱与贞洁的战斗》（The Combat of Love and Chastity），1475年。 © Wikipedia

文艺复兴时期的哲学家马尔西里奥·菲奇诺（Marsilio Ficino）曾描述过两种爱。神圣之爱（Amor Divinus/Divine Love）将人类与宇宙的创造者联系在一起；感恩、仁慈、无私和对理性的奉献自它而出。但是兽性之爱（Amor Ferinus/Bestial Love）则会将人引向无休止的手淫、疲惫、堕落和歪曲。哲学的目的是说服学生把兴趣从后者转向前者。但是这一挑战无疑是巨大的。

性欲被描绘成一种灾难性的强大力量，足以摧毁最缜密的计划和最深刻的美德。亚里士多德被广泛认为是古代最有智慧的人，在基督教时代，一个流传甚广的杜撰故事是，他爱上了亚历山大大帝的妻子菲利斯（Phyllis），菲利斯为了惩戒他的欲望，便让他嘴里咬着皮绳，赤裸身体、四肢着地爬行——这个故事旨在向疏忽轻率的人证明，欲望能比理性强大太多。

汉斯·巴尔东（Hans Baldung）：《菲利斯骑着亚里士多德》（Phyllis riding Aristotle），1515年。 © Reddit

在基督教时代，罗马文化中的爱神维纳斯的形象并不像她以前为人熟知的那样，是顽皮欲望的迷人化身，而是一个声名狼藉的妖妇，当她施放魔咒时，足以摧毁最坚毅之人的决心。在15世纪早期的一幅油画中（下图，现藏于卢浮宫），自维纳斯私处散发出的光芒使六位伟人同时失明：阿基里斯、特里斯坦、兰斯洛特、参孙、帕里斯和特洛伊罗斯（Troilus）。要把目光移开或许很难，但不做尝试则更加危险。

© Tarot History Forum

对所有教育年轻一代的人而言，他们的首要任务是帮助年轻人在邪恶（几乎总是一个美丽的女人）和美德（几乎总是一个正派但优柔寡断的男人）的战斗之间做出正确的选择。

保罗·韦罗内塞（Paolo Veronese）：《美德与邪恶的寓言》（Allegory of Virtue and Vice），1565年。 © Point of view

但是，即使在看似良善的人身上，也总是潜伏着风险，使他们有可能落入诱人但邪恶的丘比特的影响之下，丘比特不曾远离，时刻准备射出他的箭矢，摧毁我们最好的计划。许多世纪以来，欲望都不是什么值得享受或高兴的东西；它总是一个陷阱，甚至极有可能是一场死刑判决。

帕尔米贾尼诺（Parmigianino）：《丘比特制弓》（Cupid Marking his Arch），1533年。 © Pinterest

在哲学和艺术对欲望的严酷评价之上，19世纪的医学又为之增加了一层令人生畏的判断。在奥地利精神病学家理察·克拉夫特-埃宾（Richard von Krafft-Ebing）的眼中，性可能并不直接是魔鬼或者狡猾的丘比特的杰作，但是它很可能将自身被赋予的邪恶转而施加到了我们的身上，让我们做出种种恶行。

在他里程碑式的著作，19世纪欧洲最有影响力的性主题书籍《性心理病态》（Psychopathia Sexualis，1886）中，克拉夫特-埃宾关注由性引发的各类变态和疾病。尽管这本书的口吻冷静、超然，但无法掩饰它对性之本质的厌恶：“放纵的爱是一座燃烧殆尽的火山：它是一片吞噬万物的深渊——荣誉、物质和健康皆在其列。”克拉夫特-艾宾在序言中如是写道，随即列举了数百个案例研究，说明我们身上的痛苦、反常的冲动正是由我们的性冲动孕育而生。例如：

“案例1：Y先生总是纵情享乐，但也总是在乎礼节，自从他七十六岁以来，他的智力逐渐下降，道德感日益变态。他以前很聪明，表面上是个道德的人，现在却把自己的财产浪费在妓女身上，只频繁光顾妓院，要求街上的每个女人都嫁给他或者和他交媾，因此变得臭名昭著，以至于不得不把他送进疯人院。在那里，他的性兴奋升级为名副其实的性淫狂，症状一直持续到他去世。他不停地自慰，甚至当着别人的面这样做；他只从淫秽的想法中获得乐趣；他认为他周围的男人都是女人，并对他们提出下流的建议。”

“案例59：X是一位道德高尚的模范丈夫，几个孩子的父亲，他有几次——也就是出于突发的冲动——去妓院，挑了两三个最高大的女孩，把自己和她们关在一起。他光裸着上半身，躺在地板上，双手交叉放在腹部，闭上眼睛，然后让姑娘们从他裸露的胸部、脖子和脸上踏过，还敦促她们每一步都用鞋跟用力踩住他的肉。有时他会想找更重的女孩，或是采取其他比这更残忍的行为。两三个小时以后，他体会够了。他给姑娘们买好酒、付了钱，揉搓身上的青紫淤痕，穿好衣服，付了帐，回去过日子。但只过了几个星期，他就会再次给自己制造同样的奇怪快感。”

西格蒙德·弗洛伊德是克拉夫特-埃宾的后继者，他的作品或许没有那么严肃，但在他的作品中，谈及性时的氛围却是类似的：和克拉夫特-埃宾的病人一样，在他的病人身上，性大多是阴暗、强迫性、古怪至极的，它足以破坏我们在一种文明而有德的生活中可能寻求到的一切。 

© Pinterest

相较之下，碧姬·芭铎是多么令人耳目一新啊！和那两位伟大的奥地利医生的阴暗分析相比，和文艺复兴时期画家的指责警告相比，和哲学家的可怖告诫相比，她是多么遥远啊！她代表着轻松、天真——以及重返伊甸园。现代化让我们得以在空中飞翔，治愈小儿麻痹症，并拨通打向其他大陆的电话；它也将帮助我们在床上感到自然和快乐。身为现代人，我们终于从数百年令人遗憾的难堪、恐惧、忧虑和悲伤中“解放”了出来。 

现代社会把自己想象成一个对人类大有裨益的时代。毫无疑问，穿着比基尼在沙滩上打排球听起来比在妓院里被践踏要好得多。但可以说，现代化并没有缓解我们与性的关系，反而使其变得愈发复杂。

旧世界清楚知道性是棘手的。它毫不犹豫地承认，性可能会令人尴尬，它可能会使人做一些令自己后悔的事情，它与某些有尊严的理想站在对立的立场上，它可能会与爱发生冲突，也许会引发自我厌恶，人们或许会想要采取明智的预防措施，以免被激起性冲动，或是激起他人的性冲动，因为其后果是众人不想见到的。这些都是公认理所当然的基本真理，尽管它们确实令人忧郁，但在许多方面，它们同样创造了一种“背景”，以帮助我们每个人借助它引导并消减自己的性冲动。 

比基尼所代表的性观念，虽然完全是出于好意，但可能反而会让我们对在性冲动的伴随下生活的种种现实准备不足。这种性观念发现，它很难承认，在某些时候，对于我们大多数人来说，性可能会和一切看起来干净、善良和快乐的事情站在直接对立的立场上：它可能会激发我们心中鞭笞、贬低、侮辱、被粗暴对待的欲望，以及说出、做出与理性的自我形象直接相悖的事情的欲望。这种积极阳光的观念暗示性应该是“正常的”，但这反而会让我们更加孤独，更加困惑，更加不正常，尤其是在某些时候，性活动显然不是坦率的，我们发现自己——多数人都会这样——渴望那些在被认定为合乎理智的人类本性中毫无立足之地的行为，它们虽然不是“有罪的”，但肯定是阴暗而特殊的。

当面临欲望与爱的分离，以比基尼为代表的现代性观念也不能足够恰当地帮助我们理解这一情境的存在；一段时间后，你爱的人很有可能不再是你想睡的那个人；有太多陌生人，甚至可能是你讨厌或不喜欢的陌生人，会让我们忍不住冒险相约，而在我们的欲望得到纾解的下一刻，我们便会对此后悔不已。

对于那些不合时宜的性活动这种阴暗常态，现代的性观念并没有向我们给出任何令人安心的叙述。它不曾像那些严肃的奥地利医生所做的那样，暗示所有的性都略带疯狂，我们应该在自己的大喜之日就对此做好充分的准备，而不是在这种复杂性生发时将它当作某种独特的个体性痛苦，因为在寻常的一夫一妻制关系中，这种复杂性会不可避免地显出身形。

旧世界使得人们很难讨论性问题。现代社会则使我们能更轻易地拿它们开玩笑；我们乐于分享我们猎艳和欲望的细节。但是，在提及真正不常规的方面时——罪恶感，恋物癖，极度下流的想法——我们并不比旧世界做得更好。事实上，我们所处的境地可能更糟，而这恰恰是因为我们理应已经被解放，我们理应已然克服了尴尬和恐惧。我们理应是干净、精力充沛、快乐的现代人。然而在我们的内心深处，我们中的许多人正悄悄地因为性痛苦和性体验而失去理智，它们带来的感受就和中世纪僧侣可能经历过的一样超乎常规。 

性永远会是一种过于强大、过于激进的力量，无法合乎所谓的“正常”。它天生就是逾越的——而其结构本身也决定了它必须如此。最明智的态度或许是假定我们无法重返伊甸园，并对任何讲述无忧无虑或人类堕落之前的欲望的故事持高度怀疑的态度，不管它们来自大溪地还是古罗马。

行之有效的假设应该如是：性必须是棘手的，它也许不是罪过，但肯定是一个非常沉重的待解决项：它是一种动力，与我们正在努力做的其他一切明智的事情都不一致，比如完成一份事业，抚养孩子，或者仅仅是善意并尊重地爱某个人长达几十年。性的未来不在于想象它可以变得简单而纯洁，而在于承认它有着不可避免的古怪之处，并积蓄勇气和黑色幽默来面对它。丘比特并不直接向我们射箭，以此让我们误入歧途，但是在我们的内心深处有一种驱动力，它会把我们带往远到惊人的地方——远远偏离理智掌控一切时会把我们引向的地方。我们需要一种新的语言，在这种语言中，我们能够承认性是多么古怪而可怕，多么迷人又邪恶，现在是这样，将来也会一直如此。那才是真正的解放。

文/佚名

译/苦山

校对/兔子的凌波微步

原文/www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-ongoing-complexities-of-our-intimate-lives/

本文基于创作共同协议（BY-NC），由苦山在利维坦发布

 

Reading about Sylvia Plath, I understand we should all reserve the right to lie about ourselves

It used to be that only celebrities were subjects of biography, but life online has changed this.

By Megan Nolan

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None of us is truly alone in this world. Even those lives which are paralysed by loneliness have come into their state as a result of interactions with other lives. We are all authored by other parties, and cannot be the sole author of our own lives. Who, then, can be an expert on our lives? Who can say they know who we are and what we have done and, more meaningfully, what those doings add up to, what sort of a person we really are?

I read The Silent Woman lately, the brilliant Janet Malcolm book on Sylvia Plath’s biographers and their array of hostile or laudatory approaches, highly dependent in most cases on the author’s relationship to either Plath or her family. Who is entitled to authority on another person’s life? In Plath’s case, it seems, more or less anyone who ever spoke to her for five minutes.

Once you arrive at a level of celebrity or notoriety, it becomes commonly accepted that the facts of your life are available for general consumption. There is no way to be successful and avoid this. Even the lives of those who actively choose relative hermitage, like JD Salinger, are known to a fairly invasive degree. The only way to avoid prurient cataloguing of one’s existence is to be exceptionally boring, neutrally moral, to lead a life extraordinarily lacking in event.

I don’t know if it’s fair that one should be obliged to abdicate privacy in exchange for public renown, but what seems clearly wrong to me is to be fooled into thinking that even the most scholarly and thorough of biographical approach can ever really capture a person’s life. This is not to say I disregard the worth of biography, a form I read and admire an inordinate amount. Rather, that it disturbs me to think of anyone reading biography in whatever form it takes (be it the usual literary sort, or all the other kinds that exist more casually in culture) and believing they’ve come away with anything other than an inevitably partial and subjective view of a life.

This struck me when reading about Plath: that the search for absolute truth about the facts of a life can often serve to flatten the life itself. Facts, no matter how accurate, are not only incapable of accounting for the essential truth of a life, but can actually undermine that truth. There is a part of one Plath biography, Bitter Fame by Anne Stevenson, in which a letter of Plath’s to her friend, the poet Richard Murphy, is quoted. She is making the case for her ability to withstand the harsh solitary conditions of rural Ireland, and writes to him: “I have wintered in a lighthouse.” Stevenson not only points out that Murphy disbelieved that Plath had ever spent a winter living in a lighthouse, but also assures the reader that Murphy was correct and that she had, indeed, never spent significant time in a lighthouse. Why must we be so tediously literal? Is it really necessary to fact-check this rather beautiful aside in a bit of personal correspondence?

I often observe that women are punished for speaking metaphorically, or generally, or not-literally, while men who are creative are more likely to be given the assumption of artistry which need not adhere to the particulars of lived fact. When an Updike-type character opines some characteristic of women, it is assumed by the reader he is speaking fantastically and with the cloud of a subjective perspective – that the author has, basically, a sense of humour and that we may trust he does not believe what he is saying applies literally to every woman on Earth. Meanwhile, generalisations made by women are met with fact-checking and pointless accounting, even if, when a woman says “Men are forever talking over me”, she clearly doesn’t mean that all men speak over her at all times.

Facts cannot account for the irreducible and overwhelming fullness of a life. There is no single truth to anyone’s life, as everyone will die with secrets and things about themselves that nobody else knows – whether these are only internal (the dark thoughts of dashing the baby’s head on the mantle, or fantasies of sleeping with the neighbour while the husband is away), or if they are real, carefully contained second lives. When we forget this, we lose the right to self-invent, to be creative with ourselves. To put it bluntly, we lose the right to lie about ourselves, which is an important right. And, as any psychoanalyst will tell you, what we choose to lie about and to whom is just as revealing as factual truth. It comes down to a simple and endlessly complex question: how is it that we come to know another? We observe, but we also listen to what the other tells us directly, and these lies are part of the telling. She has wintered in a lighthouse.

It used to be that only celebrities were subjects of biography, but life online has come to mean that many of us are expected to maintain an unnatural degree of narrative fidelity. People my age – who were not yet adults when the opportunity arrived to make formal and apparently coherent digital presentations of ourselves – have been infected by the false belief that it is possible to create a singular curated image of ourselves, and feed it to the hungry world. It was never true, of course, and the fault lines in the image seem pathetically vivid when I look back on old social media posts now: embarrassingly transparent attempts to perform a happy, successful self.

We have no control over how others interpret us, and we must accept they have the ability to take the facts of our lives and do what they want with them, and even to offer their own subjective inventions of us as fact. We must accept this, and that our own perceptions of others are always fundamentally incomplete and wrong in deep and often comical ways. Once we do, once we try to know one another less literally, the business of living and of knowing each other becomes something different: indefinable, shifting, and altogether more fun. 

 

The realism of magic

Human beings have always needed something to leaven the effects of science and religion. 

By John Gray

"In the 18th century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think along the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think anyone who has pored over the contents of the box he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and the Sumerians, the last great mind who looked out at the intellectual and visible world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

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Probably not very many people could identify the author of this passage. In fact it was John Maynard Keynes, ­writing in an essay from the late 1930s, “Newton the Man”, which was read as a lecture some months after Keynes had died in April 1946 by his brother Geoffrey Keynes. Based on a study of Newton’s papers, which Keynes was the first to see before some were sold in 1936, the 20th century’s greatest economist described the founder of modern science as a magician.

A practitioner of astrology and alchemy, immersed in numerology and the decoding of hidden meanings in biblical texts, Isaac Newton belonged in a time in which science and magic were indistinguishable. When Keynes described Newton’s “deepest instincts” as being “occult, esoteric”, he was defining a turn of mind found in many European scientists from the Renaissance onwards. A key figure in the so-called  “scientific revolution”, the early modern astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was also an astrologer who promoted a cosmology derived from Plato in which the heavens embodied harmony. Magic and science were not at odds but inextricably intermixed.

Keynes showed how Newton ­continued the magical thinking of earlier times. But is it true that Newton represented the ­beginning of the end of magic as a ­formative influence in the way human beings live? Was he followed by an age of reason? Not if Chris Gosden, in his bold, gripping and arrestingly readable universal history of magic, is right.

For Gosden, magic is one of a “triple helix” of ways of thinking that have shaped human life. Science distances human beings from the world, removing them to a point where they can gain an abstract understanding of physical processes. In religion the primary human relation is with gods or a god, mediated through priesthoods and places of worship.  Distinct from both, and preceding them in its development, magic works through participation in the universe, which is conceived not as purely mechanical but as being animate, even sentient. Magic in Gosden’s account is pre-eminently practical, serving the needs of human beings struggling to survive and prosper. Each part of the triple helix increases or decreases in importance according to historical and cultural conditions, but these three modes of interacting with the world ­– magic, science and religion – are coterminous with the human animal.

Applying this taxonomy, Gosden takes the reader from the end of the last Ice Age, some 40,000 years ago, through ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt; China from 20,000 BCE to the present; the Eurasian Steppe from 4,000 BCE; Jewish, Greek and Roman magic; the magics of Africa, Australia and the Americas; to medieval and modern European times and the present. This is a path-breaking study of a pervasive and strangely neglected phenomenon.

The great strength of Gosden’s book is its rejection of the primitive evolutionist ideology that dominated the study of magic in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its weakness is his failure to examine how science became a channel for magical thinking. It is impossible to understand the convulsions of the past 100 years, or take the measure of the present time, without grasping that movements that claimed to apply science in politics and society were expressions of magical thinking. “Rumours of the death of magic,” Gosden writes, “have been constantly exaggerated.” In fact, magical thinking is flourishing as much as it ever did.

Rightly, Gosden targets the British anthropologists EB Tylor (1832-1917) and  JG Frazer (1854-1941) as representatives of the evolutionist ideology. According to them, magic was a relic left over from the archaic mind as modern Europe advanced while other peoples languished in ignorance and superstition. The colonialist provenance of this cod-Darwinian claptrap is obvious, but that is not its most interesting feature. More to the point is how these ideologues imagined themselves driving out magical thinking. Tylor designated anthropology as “an emancipatory science” that would exorcise the human mind of its demons. But for these late Victorian and Edwardian sages science was itself a type of magic, whose purpose was to anathematise other cultures and exalt the enlightened civilisation that was supposedly emerging in the West in the early years of the 20th century.

As Gosden notes, Frazer’s monumental study of magic The Golden Bough (1890) “had huge effects on literature and thought”. The belief that human thought progresses through a succession of definite stages remains enormously influential.  It shapes the sacred history of secular humanism – a tissue of legends more resistant to facts than the myths of old-fashioned religions, which have long since come to be regarded by many believers as symbolical or allegorical in nature. Yet this crude ­theory has little if any place in anthropology ­today and is impossible to square with the ­findings of neuroscience, which show ­continuity and stability in the physical structures that underpin the human mind.

Gosden begins by rejecting the evolutionist model, and throughout the book repeats that all three strands of human culture are equally important. But his typology is too simple to capture their complex interactions. He defines religion in terms of belief in deities or a deity, but there are many religions in which gods are not fundamental. Hinduism and Buddhism have large and varied pantheons; their gods are not ­regarded as ultimate realities, however, only consoling or fearful appearances in a world of illusion. At the bottom the ­universe is godless, impersonal and inconceivable. Like the distinction between nature and the ­supernatural, the belief that religion is about gods is a relic of monotheism.

Gosden’s over-simple understanding of religion has another and larger defect: it cannot properly acknowledge secular religions. Describing Nazism and communism as religions, along with much of liberalism, is not a metaphor. Like older faiths, these ideologies provided a world-view that made sense of human events and rendered the chaos of history into a meaningful pattern. By making their practitioners part of a larger story that would outlast them, they assuaged the fear of death. They contained authorities that determined the interpretation of the faith. And like older religions, they licensed their followers in persecuting unbelievers.

But these secular religions were not hermetically sealed off from science or from magic. A commonplace tale has Nazism as an outbreak of counter-Enlightenment  irrationalism; but the Nazis grounded  their ideology in “scientific racism”, a current of thought whose pedigree is in Enlightenment thinkers like the Victorian eugenicist Francis Galton. Even before the hocus-pocus of dialectical materialism, Marx and Engels claimed scientific authority for their account of history: communism was “the riddle of history solved”. From  Herbert Spencer to Francis Fukuyama, liberal ideologues have represented  their own societies as the end-point of  social evolution.

If secular religion has always been supported by claims to scientific authority, it has also been infused with magic. It is often noted that the science that supported anti-liberal movements such as Nazism and communism was bogus, and so it was. Less often recognised is the fact that the science underpinning the belief that the world was converging on liberal values was equally counterfeit. Only a few years ago, prestigious think tanks in Washington, DC, were holding unending seminars on how China was slowly but inexorably approaching a Western-style economy and mode of government. Even today, some insist that Xi Jinping’s China is merely a passing deviation along the way. The fact that the  imagined destination – US democracy – is tearing itself apart is passed over.

This kind of liberalism is not science, or even religion, but magical thinking. A defining feature of magic, Gosden tells us, is the belief that the human mind and the cosmos are in some sense one and the same: “Through magic we can explore  mutuality: how we are joined to the rest of the universe and the manner in which we can affect things around us through ways of participating, which have as a central  element a set of moral concerns.” But  history shows that human events are not linked with the human mind in any such magical mirror.

The weakness of Gosden’s analysis is shown in his account of magic in the 19th and 20th centuries. Starting with the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons in the 16th century, he provides intriguing snapshots of organisations and movements such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1887-1903), the Ordo Templi Orientis (circa 1908 to the present), wicca and neo-paganism. There are also vivid portrayals of self-styled modern magicians, notably Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), a professed Satanist, and Carlos Castaneda, a UCLA doctoral student who claimed to have been apprenticed to a Yaqui magus called Don Juan Matus, and produced a global bestseller, The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), that purportedly recorded his experiences.

What is striking in Gosden’s account is what is left out. There is no mention of Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), the German doctor, astronomer and theorist of “animal magnetism” who created the prototype of later attempts at “scientific religion” such as Ernst Haeckel’s cult of Monism and  Julian Huxley’s “evolutionary humanism”. Unlike Crowley’s and Castaneda’s concoctions, these cults were widely influential among scientists. Although Gosden insists that magic remains a powerful force in society, he effectively confines its recent manifestations to the cultural margins.

Gosden also misses how science has been deployed as a tool of magical thinking. The extrapolations of liberal evolutionism were like the dialectical transformations of Marxism-Leninism: alchemical formulae, not scientific hypotheses. Pretty well every-one expected post-communist Russia to be more like the liberal West, not – as has proved to be the case – more different from it. Now, the liberal West is itself becoming history. Instead of human events mirroring the human mind, they are becoming increasingly surreal and unintelligible.

A similar kind of magical thinking can be observed in oppositional movements. Here again Keynes, in 1938, is illuminating:

I still suffer incurably from attributing an unreal rationality to other people’s feelings and behaviour (and doubtless to my own too). There is one small but extraordinarily silly manifestation of this absurd idea of what is “normal”, namely the impulse to protest…  I behave as if there really existed some authority or standard to which  I can successfully appeal if I shout loud enough – perhaps it is some hereditary vestige of a belief in the efficacy of prayer.

What Keynes identified as a relic of ­religion can just as well be described as the living presence of magic. By participating in the world, members of social movements believe they are reshaping it according to a model in their minds.

At the end of the book Gosden mounts an extended defence of magic as a benign force. The belief that we inhabit a sentient universe may help us deal with the environmental crisis, he suggests. But as  he says himself, magic is nothing if not practical, and the sad truth is that it doesn’t work. Lead was not turned into gold, the prophecies of astrologers are not borne out by events and the visions of communist and liberal ­ideologues have melted into air.

Yet in many ways magical thinking is flourishing. The belief in Silicon Valley that death can be avoided by uploading our minds into cyberspace is the purest magical thinking – a fantasy that ignores the fact that cyberspace relies on a material infrastructure, which can easily be destroyed in wars, revolutions and natural disasters. For those who reject religion, techno-magic offers a pseudo-remedy for the human condition.

Magical thinking will remain a powerful force in human life. What this shows isn’t the potency of magic, however. The true meaning of magic is that the human mind cannot bear very much reality. 

The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present 
Chris Gosden
Viking, 512pp, £25

 

WhatI Learned From the Worst Novelist in the English Language

Robert Burrows was once the subject of a devastating book review. He was also much more than that.

Illustration by Sally Deng

Some time ago, after several years on the job market, I landed a professorship at a small university in Wisconsin, a little moon of the state system orbiting the more recognizable institution in Madison. Like any newcomer to an unfamiliar workplace, I spent those early months treading lightly through the corridors, trying to suss out the English department’s fault lines (academics are famously antagonistic) and to acquaint myself with the bureaucratic processes on campus. Mercifully, the gossip was thin, and everyone was supportive. But one thing I couldn’t help noticing was the delinquent moroseness of the other writers, many of whom had all but given up on generating new content. Possibly this was owing to the colossal heft of our workload—four classes a semester, plus the unfun spadework of committees—but something darker hovered over their resignation, a ghoul of artistic inertia that seemed less the corollary of unfavorable circumstance than the furtive stranglehold of a curse.

These suspicions were confirmed one morning after a department meeting when a colleague of mine offhandedly mentioned “the story of Robert Burrows.” He said this with a gothic theatricality, as though holding a flashlight under his chin. Clueless about Robert Burrows at the time, I pumped this colleague for details, but, with an inexplicable brusqueness, he demurred and shuffled backward out of my office, mumbling something about picking up his kids and nearly tripping over a trash can. It was as though by merely asking him to recount the lore of Robert Burrows, I was urging him to commit a crime or invoke the wrath of a ghost.

Naturally, I googled Burrows, worried I might discover that he was a Satanist or something, a Howard Hughes-like figure who peed in empty coffee cans or tortured cats in his garage. Imagine my relief in finding that he was an emeritus professor at my university, that he and his wife Marion lived in a retirement home only a few blocks away from campus. But then I stumbled across other references, ones that seemed more in keeping with my coworker’s odd and halting reluctance. In a book called Weird Wisconsin: Your Travel Guide to Wisconsin’s Local Legends, Burrows’s name was listed under a chapter called “The Worst Novel Ever Published in the English Language.” Maddeningly, the Google Books preview would not reveal the offending passage, but soon I located a Washington Post article that explained the whole entanglement.

Here’s what happened: One morning in February 2003, Burrows, aged 79, heard the telephone ring in his home in Whitewater, Wisconsin. On the other end of the line was Gene Weingarten, a moppy-haired humor columnist for the Washington Post, calling about Burrows’s recent self-published novel, a slim political satire called The Great American Parade. Flabbergasted to hear from such a venerable paper of record, Burrows wondered at the purpose for the call, at which point Weingarten laid out his gruesome Faustian bargain: He would agree to review The Great American Parade but only on the condition that Burrows allow him to say that it was “the worst novel ever published in the English language.”

In a crowning moment, Weingarten unleashed a stinging verdict: “I think The Great American Parade is a wretchedly terrible product that shames the American publishing industry.” 

A silence came over the line. Like some sort of Beltway Mephistopheles, Weingarten reminded Burrows of the Post’s two million readers, at which point you could almost imagine Weingarten rubbing his hands together with the oily truculence of a Bond villain.

Fatefully—some might even say tragically—Burrows accepted the offer.

As you might expect, the review was a hatchet job, one that would make today’s most dexterous knife-wielders—Patricia Lockwood, say, or Andrea Long Chu—stand up for unbridled applause. Strafing his way from one literary offense to the next, Weingarten lampooned the book’s premise (“you write very badly”) and lanced the verisimilitude of several of the central characters (“[they] don’t seem to have personalities”). In a crowning moment, he unleashed a stinging verdict: “I think The Great American Parade is a wretchedly terrible product that shames the American publishing industry.”

It bears noting that in the weeks before starting this job I’d been toiling away at my novel, generating fresh pages at a Joyce Carol Oates–like clip. The book was a send-up of our post-truth climate, replete with a computer program running for president and an evangelical Christian kid who accidentally kills his parents. Think George Saunders meets Marilynne Robinson. Think Jamie Quatro meets William Gaddis. Like many first-time novelists, I was laboring under the delusion that I had something urgent to say about America, that the voltage of my dramatization might propel the reading public into a more expansive sense of justice. If there are any sins for which we can still forgive the young, one rather hopes they include idealism and hubris.

What happened next is so banal that I almost don’t want to disclose it. I froze up. The pen stalled in my hand. Whatever spell of optimism and self-delusion is necessary for sustained artistic creation seemed to have abruptly vanished, leaving me bereft and more than a little ill-tempered. I moped on sofas at home and, at work, snapped at recalcitrant students. Pitifully, I torched whole notebooks, melodramatically sparking my Zippo and watching as entire plotlines crackled to cinder and ash. Animating these little festivals of self-sabotage was my deepening conviction that even if my book was lucky enough to garner editorial attention, upon publication it would be swiftly consigned to the literary dustbin, panned as yet another bloviation from a twentysomething writer (which probably would’ve been accurate). After all, I was now a professor at the same university—in the same department even—as someone who’d been dubbed the worst novelist in history, and the proximity of that verdict haunted me, infecting the very air of campus like the whiff of bad cologne.

This was how I found myself biking over to the library in lavish sunshine and bloodhounding around the stacks in search of the Burrows novel. Surely it couldn’t be as bad as Weingarten had said it had been. Surely it possessed some redeeming merit.

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The Great American Parade is set in the aftermath of the 2000 election, when George W. Bush claimed victory after an opera of judicial nonsense. The Great American Parade imagines that, in order to rally the country around the abolition of the estate tax, Bush secretly plans a parade for the wealthiest Americans, a garish jamboree of gold-plated luxury sedans inching down Pennsylvania Avenue and monolithic balloons of Bill Gates and George Soros floating over the capitol. Once wind of the ridiculous spectacle reaches the newspaper staff at the University of Wisconsin, a cohort of college students “embark on a crusade to reawaken America” and attempt to stage a mammoth counter-protest. Across the book’s final chapter, some Swiftian hijinks ensue, culminating in a showdown between Bush’s obscene pageantry and the tactics of the student protesters, the latter of whom ultimately win the media war by holding aloft giant balloons that say things like “BUSH = PAWN OF BIG OIL!” and “KILLING THE ESTATE TAX KILLS DEMOCRACY!” 

In the refrigerated darkness of my library carrel, I read the book in one sitting. And while Weingarten surely overstated the case in calling this the worst novel ever written, it’d be wrong to suggest that the book doesn’t give the reader much to wince and groan about—aborted plotlines, a confected love story. Because so much of the book’s argument depends on the reader understanding the intricacies of the estate tax, the characters are often pressed into delivering wonkish ad hoc lectures, which makes them sound like the test-tube babies of Thomas Frank and Slajov Zizek. “America suffers from an intense fever of greed,” one character says,

…a characteristic of our society that become rampant during the Civil War and has flared up repeatedly since then—as evidenced by the Age of the Robber Barons and the excesses of speculation during the 1920s … But those shameful episodes of our history pale beside the excesses of today, dramatized by the recent Enron scandal which a former vice president of that infamous corporation attributed to the ‘greed that was at the heart of its corporate culture,’ a greed seen especially in the notorious limited partnerships, set up in various Caribbean islands, in which those in corporate hierarchy made such killings as $2 million in two months by two partners on an investment of $2500 and $4.5 million by another on his investment of $25,000 in the same sixty-day period.”

Apparently, when Burrows reached out to Warren Buffet for a blurb, the billionaire explained to him that he didn’t think a novel was the best vessel for his ideas.

Elsewhere the book’s dialogue reminded me of the saccharine moralism found only in afterschool specials. For instance, when the book’s heroine witnesses the events of 9/11, she turns to her friends and says, “What an almost unbelievable tragedy! It will take great resolve to overcome this terrible blow.” 

Such a review would have sent me to the ledge of a tall building—or would’ve at least occasioned some pillow-muffled weeping. How had he managed to overcome that label? How did a person go on?

Of course, these are forgivable blunders for a first-time novelist—and a self-published one at that. Indeed, at the distance of two decades, Weingarten’s review doesn’t just strike me as featherheaded and mean (which it is) but also smacks of coastal elitism, the same sort of flyover disdain that, even despite the 2016 election, still animates civic attitudes in this country. Plus it dismisses the humor of the book, containing as it does a wonderful burlesque of the 43rd president and an uproarious caricature of Dick Cheney. And I can think of no other satire from that era that offers a more accurate premonition of Trumpian politics. Given the 45th president’s propensity for gaudy theatrics—the Kremlin-esque jingoism of the Rose Garden press conference, the gold curtains in the Oval Office—the gilded sedans of The Great American Parade seem to anticipate the tawdry spectacles of the Trump administration. There were even whispers and murmurs, earlier in Trump’s term, that the president was planning a massive parade, one that would celebrate America’s military strength, as well as its supposed moral greatness.

Still, I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to Burrows, how he might’ve endured this annihilating pejorative. Such a review would have sent me to the ledge of a tall building—or would’ve at least occasioned some pillow-muffled weeping. How had he managed to overcome that label? How did a person go on?

The Fairhaven Senior Services building is a scant half-mile from campus, and one sun-drenched afternoon two years ago, I visited Burrows in his apartment. In advance of my trip, I spoke with his wife, a razor-witted person named Marion, who explained that “Bob” was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and it was unclear whether I could interview him.

I found Burrows in bed, his complexion sheet-white and cadaverous, a quilt pulled up to his chin. There was something regal, something monumental, in his bearing, and though I knew otherwise, I found myself thinking, “There he is. The worst novelist in the English language.” Marion had received me at the door, and while she explained that Bob wasn’t in a place to discuss the book right now, she still wanted me to meet him. I approached the bed watchfully, and when his eyes latched on mine, he sprang to his feet with a gymnastic abruptness, hastening to shake my hand. “What can I do for you today?” he said, not out of colloquial reflex, it seemed, but with a spirit of genuine service. I must have faltered, stammering something about being a fellow writer, until Marion swooped in and said, “He’s gonna chat with me about The Great American Parade. Why don’t you lie down again, hon?” Wordlessly Bob obeyed her, turning to the side and revealing his greyhound thinness, while Marion escorted me by the elbow, saying that he had good days and bad. Lately he’d taken to rereading Mark Twain, she said, one of his favorites, and though it was unclear whether he retained the content, the habit of reading remained.

We sat in a modest office lined with books, family photos, and assorted oddments, talking for a long time. It quickly became clear that while Bob’s memory had disintegrated, Marion was capable of crisp and pixelated reminiscence, recalling not just the minutiae of their European travels but the names of Bob’s old students. I couldn’t imagine the awesome loneliness of that talent, of having to serve as the custodian to a marriage that your spouse no longer remembered.

It turned out that apart from his stint as a novelist, Bob had been heavily involved in local politics, a Robespierre of the prairie, not only serving in teacher unions but also writing op-eds for several area newspapers. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Bob had been a stalwart proponent of the antiwar movement, going so far as to defy the orders of the university administration, who wanted him (when he was serving as chair of the English Department) to fire professors who were holding teach-ins on campus. Bob refused, and as retribution, the administrators evicted him from his office. So beloved was Bob by his students, they promptly organized a rally for him, assembling by the thousands and demanding his restitution. Marion painted a scene in which throngs of students crowded on the quad lawns, wielding placards and chants, and yelling over and again, “BRING BURROWS BACK!”

Only in light of this anecdote did I recognize the submerged poignance of his novel. Because blistering attacks on the Bush administration aside, what The Great American Parade is really about is the hopefulness of a younger generation, about a small band of committed citizens taking action against an oligarchic government. Burrows’s faith in that generation seemed animated by nothing else but the memory of his students.

It was getting late, and the office glowed nostalgically with the amber of early evening. I found myself dancing around the question of why I came, not only because of its inherent awkwardness (can you tell me about your husband’s greatest failing? here, let me turn on my tape recorder) but also because I had grown to like Bob through the spiritedness of Marion’s telling. He had become more than a grim caricature, and the fullness of that personhood had exposed to me the mercenary greed of my visit. I saw that I had come here not because I wanted to recuperate Bob’s image, but because I wanted to be assured that I wouldn’t end up like him, that I could finish my novel in full confidence that my destiny would not follow his. Nearly two decades had passed since the Weingarten business, and now here I was with my notebook and my questions, wanting to drag the corpse of that incident out in front of him.

Nearly two decades had passed since the Weingarten business, and now here I was with my notebook and my questions, wanting to drag the corpse of that incident out in front of him.

At some point while Marion was telling me about her sons, both of whom adored their father, I asked about the Weingarten call.

“Honestly, I don’t remember,” Marion said. “Ancient history.”

This was the type of person who, I sensed, could rattle off state capitals while completing a crossword puzzle. There was no way she didn’t remember.

“Because if it had been me, if I had gotten a review like that,” I said. “I don’t know that I would’ve recovered.”

“I can tell you he didn’t go into a deep funk or anything,” she said. “But he was disappointed because he’d invested so much time in it. And you can’t undo something like that. But we just moved on. That’s all you can do.”

A mangled copy of The Great American Parade was resting forlornly on the carpet, and Marion noticed me looking at it. “You know, it’s funny,” she said. “Bob starting reading it after you called. He says he doesn’t think he wrote it.” She smiled. “He looked at the cover and saw his name, and said there must have been a mistake. He thought that I wrote it.”

Her laughter was booming and sonorous, but I confess I found his amnesia strangely moving in that context. After all, he couldn’t remember that he had once been called the worst at something he so clearly and forcefully loved. But in a moment Marion showed me the narrowness of my fixation.

“It’s really awful to be robbed of your memories, Barrett. So what I do with Bob is try to talk about the places we’ve been, but I don’t know how much of it really sinks in. You know, we’ve lived such a rich life. We’ve lived a year in Australia, a year in South Korea. Bob doesn’t remember any of that. So try to keep the memories as long as you can.”

Before I left, Marion wanted to give me something, but she needed help in fetching it. On tip-toe, I felt around the top shelf of a closet, looking for a cardboard box whose mustiness I could smell even before I saw it. Bringing it down to eye level, I saw that it was a manuscript, its lid scrawled over with livid red marker. “STATE COLLEGE, USA,” it said. “Final MS. 1973.” It was about his experiences as a professor during the antiwar protests, and Marion wanted me to have it. Since both of us worked at the same university, she wondered if I might learn from it.

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A few weeks ago, I got an email saying that Bob had died from complications due to Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t until this moment that I decided to crack open the manuscript. Once again I was confronted with evidence that Bob of course wasn’t the worst novelist in the English language but, in fact, struck me at times as a keen and enviable stylist, as in this passage, early in State College, USA, when he describes a young professor and his wife taking their dog for a walk through campus (clearly stand-ins for him and Marion):

It was a beautiful September night. The air was cool and fresh, and above the richly leafed maples and thinning elms, the sky was strewn with bright stars, across which the path of the Milky Way was visible. The lights of the large old homes on Main Street fell softly on the sidewalk, reducing the dark interstices between the widely spaced street lamps. As the Westons strolled through campus, they heard the faint rock music from the upper rooms of the dormitories and saw couples, a few neighbors, and several clusters of students.

If all we are when we die is how we exist in other people’s memories, then it is the duty of the living to properly remember our dead, to cautiously draw the contours of their nuanced and many-edged existence. As it is, I’m left reading State College, USA, in which Burrows describes, in glistening detail, the landscape of my campus. It’s in these pages I begin to see the measure of a man who tried to do right by his students, an amateur novelist unfairly reviewed in a national newspaper, a husband whose dedication never wavered. And it’s through the book I can begin to understand the sentiment expressed by his students, some fifty years ago, when they gathered on the quad lawns to demand his restoration, yelling, with hopeful voices, “Bring Burrows Back!”