Self-proclaimed “misanthropes” and "antinatalists" who are against abortion make absolutely no sense to me. You’ll sit there and talk about how much you hate humanity, how people are selfish, cruel, destructive, how the world would be better off with fewer of us, and then turn around and argue that every single potential life must be brought into existence? Which is it?
If you genuinely believe people are awful, why are you so invested in forcing more people into a world you clearly think is broken? It feels less like a philosophy and more like contradiction dressed up as depth. You don’t get to romanticize your hatred for humanity while also insisting that everyone else has a moral obligation to create more of it.
A lot of the time, it doesn’t even come off as consistent thinking. It comes off as control. Like the label “misanthrope” is just there to sound edgy or detached, but the beliefs underneath are rooted in telling others what they should do with their lives and bodies. That’s not some dark, intellectual stance, that’s just hypocrisy with a different aesthetic.
If you really think humanity is flawed, maybe the more honest position would be to focus on reducing harm, not forcing existence. Otherwise, it just sounds like you don’t actually hate humanity, you just like the identity of hating it while still clinging to the same expectations you claim to reject.
Encounters with difference: "The Dead" by James Joyce — Part 1
The power of some literary characters is that they are utterly singular but at the same time resonate with a more general human experience. Such is the case of Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of The Dead, whose character expresses a movement of becoming and decentering, a transformation many of us have gone through or still wrestle with: from control to surrender and acceptance; from absorption in one’s own self to connection and opening. It’s the process and movement of love, condensed in a short story of fifty pages and situated in a very specific context: the Dublin of the early 20th century on a snowy winter night.
And what better setting is there to begin the study of a character than a party, where all the anxieties about who we are in the face of others come to the fore? Social gatherings are also a kind of microcosm that displays on a micro level transformations that a society is experiencing as a whole. So the first part of the story takes place in the house full of guests of the Misses Morkan (Gabriel’s two aunts and their niece), during the dance they organize every year, which gives us the opportunity to observe how Gabriel behaves in the proximity of other people, as we follow closely his feelings and thoughts. From there, in the last quarter of the story, we travel by carriage and walking to the hotel where Gabriel and his wife Gretta are staying for the night, and where Gabriel’s famous epiphany will occur—in the intimacy of a dark room illuminated by the light coming from a window, almost like in a mystical Caravaggio painting. And this twofold structure has its purpose. If the story had jumped straight to the last scenes in the hotel room, we wouldn’t be as touched by Gabriel’s efforts to open up to his wife and reach out to someone other than himself. But we have been following him during the previous hours and by now we know how he tends to react when confronted with the unexpected. His memory of the immediate past has become our memory as readers. We too, like him, can recall his previous “riot of emotions” and the entire series of his encounters during the party, which seem to form a curious pattern of disconnection and reactivity.
A curious pattern of reactivity
At a historical time in Ireland when traditional gender roles and gender expectations are beginning to shift, Gabriel faces the challenge to respond creatively and adapt to more egalitarian relations, especially when it comes to women who won’t accept a position of subordination anymore, or who don’t conform to his expectations of how a woman should behave or look like. But Gabriel’s first responses are not proper responses—humble and creative—but reactions and defenses. When we first encounter him at the party, our first impression is that he is a character entangled in the demands of his own wounded ego, oscillating between pride and shame, searching for ways to reassure the frail dominance of his position as a white man of higher education. Women who slightly deviate from traditional gender norms become for him a disruptive other, filling him with self-doubts and a discomfort he tries to dispel by finding refuge in the armor of his own self.
When it comes to his aunts, members of a previous generation, it’s easy for Gabriel to preserve an image of self-importance, because he is their favorite nephew and they assign him all the tasks and symbolic places he needs to secure his position as the man in charge: they let him carve the goose, give the main speech, and sit at the head of the table; they laugh at his jokes, serve him a special dessert, and rely on him to manage the drunk at the party. Whenever he is treated by his aunts as if he were more special and indispensable, his ego feels at ease and Gabriel is especially animated.
Although in his speech he talks eloquently about his aunts’ “hospitality, humor and humanity”, he doesn’t seem to truly care about any of these noble traits, viewing them instead as “only two ignorant old women”, and valuing bookish knowledge above all else. The story shows there is a gap between what Gabriel says publicly to make an impression and the way he tries to feel superior to his aunts and the rest of the “vulgarians” in the party due to his university education and cosmopolitan tastes.
But his aunts are not so unidimensional as it may seem if we had no access to any other perspective but that of Gabriel’s. Fortunately for us, Joyce introduces his short story through a different perspective: the point of view of Lily, the caretaker’s daughter. We inhabit inside her subjectivity for only two pages, but it’s enough to make us aware that there are different ways of looking at the same characters. If it wasn’t for that first entrance through Lily, we as readers would have been trapped with Gabriel in his self-absorbed way of looking at things. But this is modernism and now there are different perspectives which filter the world. And what each character chooses to pay attention to is very different according to who they happen to be and what their position is in the social structure.
As a young woman of a humble background, Lily is able to see things very differently. She is able to appreciate the Misses Morkan as three independent woman who work and earn enough money to rent a decent apartment and eat well, despite two of them being already quite old. She seems to see them with a kind of respect; perhaps they are a model to her, in that they show her that it is possible to be a woman and have a good passing without relying on a man—all three of them are single. Although during the party the aunts overact their dependence on Gabriel to flatter him, in fact they don’t need him for daily subsistence. They only need Gabriel’s help for minor tasks on that special occasion and with the house full of guests, something he will come to understand at the end of the story, when power relations are inverted in his perspective and he begins to see himself merely as the “pennyboy” of his aunts—falling from pride to shame, as if he couldn’t accept an equality of relations and had to feel either more important or degraded.
As far as we can get a glimpse of their dynamic, the relationship with his wife has also contributed to sustain Gabriel’s image of self-importance, not posing any real threat until the last discoveries in the hotel room tear the thin fabric of the “reality” he built for himself. Though affectionate, their marriage seems to have been based on a superficial relation, a “dull existence together” with clear-cut gender roles: she is the housewife and he is the breadwinner, this last fact apparently allowing him to decide where to go or not to go on vacation, which his wife accepts as if she were his child. In many passages, Gabriel likes to see Gretta as frail, naive and in need of protection—“country cute”, like he didn’t want his mother to call her—, which in turn makes him feel “valorous” and in control. Sex can be for him an opportunity to “crush” and “overmaster” her, this beautiful possession he feels proud of. In that famous scene in the staircase, when Gabriel gazes up at her, his wife stands for him as an object of aesthetic contemplation of the most generic type, her face hidden in the darkness. Through his view, Gretta lacks any density of her own and can easily be converted into a symbol. But what about Gretta as Gretta? Has he ever seen her in her singularity, in her uniqueness? Has he ever listened to her musicality?
When Gabriel reviews in his memory their life together, all he comes up with are moments of distance. Some barrier always interposes between them, preventing them from touch and close connection: the envelope of a letter, a gloved hand, looking through a grated window, words in a letter he sent to her. But where is Gretta? She is lost behind the layers of projections he surrounds her with, her figure receding behind the misreadings he makes of her body signs so that they match his own desires and needs.
But with other women in the party things don’t go as smoothly as with his wife and aunts—or as with Mrs Malins, to whom Gabriel doesn’t even bother to listen. Lily and Molly Ivors, both of them single women of a new generation, behave and talk in a way that takes Gabriel by surprise, disorienting him and making him speechless, unable to know in which way to respond. His encounters with them form those micro-moments in social life where things move slightly away from the habitual scripts, where the seed of larger transformations and new ways of being could be planted if the actors involved were able to go patiently through that first moment of confusion and respond in a creative way. But the moment is not ripe for Gabriel yet. Not at this point in the story, not without the help of love. So he feels ashamed, attacked in his self-image, and reacts in a defensive way, trying to restore the statu quo and his familiar position of privilege. His physical gestures are eloquent in this sense: first he blushes, then he tries to discharge his discomfort through energetic actions, finally he rearranges his clothes as best as possible, as someone looking at himself in a mirror and trying to restore his lost composure after suffering a few blows. (And it cannot be omitted here that whenever he needs to find strength, he travels outdoors with his imagination to where the Wellington Monument is standing, that obelisk, the phallic symbol par excellence).
In the case of Lily, who amuses him by mispronouncing his name with her lower-class accent, Gabriel would like to think of her as more innocent than she actually is, perhaps as harmless and sweet as the rag dolls she used to play with not long ago. What other future could a maid have than get married after school and depend on a good man? This is the social order implicit in the question he asks to her, the world Gabriel expects and was taught to find comforting, but the girl has already had other experiences in life and has formed other opinions about men. If we interpret her answer correctly, she finds that men “nowadays” don’t really care about women, but just want to satisfy their own sexual desires through them, and they are willing to use lies and pretexts (“all palaver”) when necessary. Certainly, her answer isn’t what Gabriel was expecting. It is too honest, too dismissive of conventions and social barriers. He blushes, his shame coming not only from having made the wrong assumptions about the complexity of the girl, but also because she has exposed something hidden about who he might be but doesn’t want to think he is. To restore the momentarily threatened hierarchy of class and gender, he gives her a coin and escapes up the stairs.
But Molly Ivors cannot be shut up with a coin, nor with a grandiose remark, because Gabriel considers her equal in terms of their education, both of them university teachers and friends. With humor and warmth, Molly questions Gabriel in his cosmopolitan preferences and his disdain for his own country. And it is true that he seems to consider what comes from the rest of Europe as worthier than Irish customs and land (regardless of whether he is or not a “West Briton”, as she calls him): he wears galoshes because they wear them on the continent, he’d rather go on holidays to France and Belgium than visit Ireland with friends, and he does write reviews in a British newspaper. But instead of acknowledging these contradictory aspects of himself, taking Molly’s observations with a sense of humor, he feels wounded in his ego, resenting her precisely in those traits that make of Molly a woman that can treat him as his equal and joke with him: her education, her frank manners and direct gaze, her political commitments, her disinterest in showing at the party like an object for the male gaze (“she did not wear a low-cut bodice”), all of which make hard for Gabriel to place her in a known and definite feminine category (“…the girl or woman, or whatever she was…”). Full of resentment, he will try to get back at her by introducing in his speech some critical remarks implicitly addressed to her, which actually describe him more adequately than her, with his seriousness and lack of humor. Too bad Molly didn’t stay for supper to hear it!
Due to these encounters, Gabriel ends up so busy and tangled with his destabilized ego, that the others in their radical difference fade beyond his reach, or reach him from far away, like muffled sounds, like “distant music”. In fact, listening and not listening is one of the ways this short story chooses to show us how trapped Gabriel is within himself. We often find him standing behind barriers: the lens of his glasses, the pane of the window where he goes to find refuge; and listening to distant sounds or music through the filter of some obstacle—a door, a ceiling, etc.—though of course the real barriers are not material. It is his self-centeredness functioning as a kind of invisible barrier that protects him from a closer connection with other people, like the galoshes he likes to wear and makes Gretta wear too, that extra layer of protection he puts over his boots so as not to feel on his skin the wetness of the ground, the cold snow below. And she makes the joke that Gabriel would buy her a “diving suit” if he could, the ultimate protection! Self-absorption can certainly be a safe place, but it also comes with a flipside: isolation and separation from life. How could one possibly listen to the voices of others through the noise of one’s own thoughts and self-doubts? Until this point in the story, Gabriel is just a man sunken in his own kind of “thought-tormented music”, full of resentment and hardly capable of really listening to anyone else.
He looked at the pantry ceiling, which was shaking with the stamping and shuffling of feet on the floor above, listened for a moment to the piano…
He waited outside the drawing-room door, until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it…
Gabriel went to the stairs and listened over the banisters. He could hear two persons talking in the pantry.
Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing…
Gabriel hardly heard what she said.
Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little…
Follow the second part of this essay in the next post, where we explore how Gabriel stops reacting and experiences a beautiful transformation, finally able to listen and open up.
The pictures in this post are stills from the film The Dead by John Huston.
In this connection the sayings that the elks and the bears are the pigs and oxen of the ruler of the wood become important and testify to the close connection felt between the ruler of the wood and the wild game.
Anna Birgitta Rooth, "The Conception of 'Rulers' in the South of Sweden," p. 122 (discussing skogsrå)
The spirit animal masters who own and care for these animals (which appear as peccaries to the Runa in their waking lives) see them as their domestic pigs.
A word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.
Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: Why I Write Such Good Books.
