The Common Reader

To vex the world. Jonathan Swift's Frustrated Humor

Gulliver's Travels is structured so that the more you laugh early, the sharper the turn at the end: Swift moves from hilarity to horror, producing what amounts to frustrated humor. Swift wrote plain prose deliberately (he checked drafts against two servants' comprehension); that plainness shaped Eliot and arguably Adam Smith, whose "truck and barter" butcher-baker-brewer echoes the 1724 Drapier's Letters. The Lilliput book is screamingly funny political satire — parties divided by high versus low heels, religious war over which end to crack an egg. But the comedy darkens: Parliament becomes "Pedlars, Pick-pockets, Highwaymen, and Bullies"; the Laputans' anxious abstraction maps onto Britain's destructive domination of Ireland, with starving people in rags drawn from life. It culminates in the rational Houyhnhnms debating whether to exterminate the Yahoos "from the face of the earth," Gulliver proposing castration. Swift wrote to vex the world; the joke ends as exhortation against colonialism.

Zena Hitz: Gulliver's Travels and the Failures of Human Understanding

Gulliver's Travels is fundamentally about the failures of human perception and knowledge, and Gulliver — a surgeon and would-be "projector" — is the worst imaginable observer, letting us see everything he cannot. The deepest trap is the fourth book: most readers, including serious critics who called the Houyhnhnms Swift's ideal beings, swallow Gulliver's praise of them. Hitz calls this "one of the wrongest opinions you could have," giveaway being that Gulliver leaves on a boat made of human skin and recounts the Houyhnhnms' council debating genocide of the Yahoos without recognizing it — using a phrase from Genesis. We fall for it because we all live in communities like the Houyhnhnms; the council is "horrifyingly familiar" after the 20th century.

Each book stages a different enslavement (Gulliver boxed and chained, the flying island crushing the country below, Houyhnhnms whipping Yahoos), darkening as humor drains away — Swift refuses the joke to force disgust. Much of the savagery pictures English rule over Ireland, a colonial cruelty still under-recognized because the Irish don't "look different." Hitz reads Swift less as anti-philosophy than as hostile to elite intellectual culture that masks suffering — the Laputans study music and math while crushing towns below and their wives flee. The Houyhnhnms force Yahoos into squalor then despise them, mirroring Nazi ghetto propaganda. The genuinely good characters — Glumdalclitch, the sorrel nag ("Fare thee well, gentle Yahoo") — embody humane love needing no theology.

Detours: Iris Murdoch's creative use of Plato; Bernard Williams' "cake mix" ideal of writing (give the reader room versus force-feeding meaning), the analytic-philosophy vice; and the Catherine Project's open seminars, where the goal is liberation from false, secondhand expertise.

What it is like to read Proust

Reading Proust is the experience of being suspended outside time, and learning to read him properly came, paradoxically, through Henry James. Prompted by Helen DeWitt's blog (the gap between French and English is "the difference between musical instruments"), Oliver first tried the original French word by word, abandoned it, then worked through C.K. Scott Moncrieff's translation of Swann's Way in fits across continents and editions. The first sentence — Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure — is synecdochic: time, like the whistling train of the second paragraph, runs one way, but memory runs "now nearer and now farther off." We are caught between living and memory.

The pivot is James's late style. After years of disliking him, The Golden Bowl entranced Oliver, teaching a non-linear reading "like an enthusiastic spaniel" looping over ground rather than advancing. Via Colin Burrow and John Bayley, James's convolutions enact the difficulty of knowing the world. Borrowing Northrop Frye and Borges, the novel is a domesticated Romance whose quest turned inward: where old heroes won the Grail, James's and Kafka's can only hope for defeat. Strether's "Live all you can" in The Ambassadors carries the same train image as Proust — the train that waited unboarded.

Moncrieff twinned Proust and James (Adam Gopnik), and the interior quest links both to Dante, Ruskin, Shakespeare's Sonnet 27, Bunyan, and Larkin's "arrow-shower." The madeleine is really a crumb in a spoonful of tea; truth "lies not in the cup but in myself." Via Within a Budding Grove and Samuel Johnson's "you can never be wise unless you love reading," reading becomes moral formation — discovering a wisdom no one can take for us — not mere page-turning.

What it is like to daydream about Proust

Reading Proust is itself a kind of daydreaming, and the paragraphs we compose in our minds while drifting on a sun-lounger vanish exactly as dreams do — proof that reading leaves a trace that surfaces only when provoked, as Knausgaard found Proust had soaked into him "like water" before he wrote My Struggle. Writing is a method of remembering: we don't know what we knew until pen moves.

The technical heart is a shared craft running from Dickens through James to Proust: holding the reins of long sentences just tightly enough that a latent alternative mood — farce in Proust's breathless waiters, melodrama in Dickens's Pickwick ghost, encroaching madness in James's The Sacred Fount — stays suppressed but felt, building tension without diffusing it (James's "silken rope" image from The Golden Bowl). Edmund Wilson noticed the same lineage in 1928, judging Proust's caricature and mimicry learned from Dickens. All three create not the depicted world but the world of their prose.

Proust's recurring fairy-tale images — angels, ogres, giants — register the impossibility of matching experience to language; the ogre devouring the dying grandmother conveys what literal description cannot, and Proust's glory is getting closer than seemed possible. Waking interrupts memory the way surfacing from a daydream does ("I was asleep").

A long passage recalls reading into a critical career at the London Library — Bakhtin, Lukács, the dullness Woolf scorned, the fear of becoming a Casaubon "researched but not written." A Jack Gilbert poem ("our lives happen between the memorable") fixes the thesis: what survives reading isn't quotations or plot but an unrecoverable commonplace, a mood. Life elaborates and circles toward death; Proust's effect lives in the whole, luminous like a jellyfish, never the extractable part.

Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson's lost years

Samuel Johnson, England's most influential moralist and the writer second only to Shakespeare in the canon, is defined by his contradictions, not his reputation for order. A worshipper of hierarchy who doubted the German-line King's legitimacy and wrote anonymous pamphlets sympathetic to the 1745 rebels; an abolitionist who toasted slave insurrection and left his estate to Francis Barber, a freed Black servant; a moralist whose diary records compulsive masturbation, depression, and terror of madness and hell. He warned that knowledge can be ordered but people cannot, and wrote about the struggle for peace of mind, not smooth outcomes. His hot streak — the Dictionary (1746–55), The Vanity of Human Wishes, the Rambler, Rasselas — ended abruptly around 1760, leaving "lost years" of squalor, drink, and idleness before Boswell, Hester Thrale, and the Club revived him in 1763. The man who counseled "be not solitary, be not idle" had become exactly that.

Loved, Jefferson, Exile, Hermit, Bronte

Susie Boyt's Loved and Missed, in the tradition of Bainbridge, Taylor, and Comyns, is hugely emotional yet balanced by the grandmother narrator's depth of feeling. Three books get abandoned: Burstein's Being Thomas Jefferson (folk psychology dressed as insight), Cottrell's craft-novel Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, and Cowley's Exile's Return, a quick New Journalism account of 1920s American writers that barely stuck. The longest charge falls on Deborah Lutz's Emily Brontë biography This Dark Night, which fills history's gaps with ideological cliché and vapid quiz-style questions. Lutz secularizes Brontë's evangelical home life—citing Thormählen and Lisa Wang, Brontë's "pagan" poems actually deploy Holy Spirit topoi (the Comforter as wind). Working people stay in footnotes until needed for an Engels narrative. Scholar, not critic.

Oliver Traldi: Jane Austen and the Defence of Virtue

Virtue faces a structural problem Austen quietly solves: the moral person, by refusing dishonest means, disarms herself against bad actors who break the rules, so morality looks like self-sabotage. Traldi's essay "Jane Austen's Virtuous Liberalism" argues her answer is that in a large enough society, the disadvantage you suffer in one interaction is outweighed by the standing you gain from being widely seen to act well — the same logic, he notes, as MLK on civil disobedience (keep calm under the bats, and onlookers judge the violent ones vicious). Austen marks her test cases with the word "artless": Fanny Price, Elinor, Harriet Smith have removed "arts" (subterfuge, the Artful Dodger sense) from their arsenal, the limit case of unilateral disarmament, yet flourish.

Traldi reads Austen as a philosopher: novelists who do morality well grasp living rightly better than ethicists lost in epicycles, even without meta-ethics. Her precision is what draws philosophers — Edmund's break with Mary Crawford turns on her criticizing an affair as imprudent rather than immoral, a blink-and-miss distinction between prudence and morality. Self-command (shared with Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments) anchors Sense and Sensibility: Marianne measures herself not against Willoughby but against Elinor's restraint. Emma works as a half-detective who misreads clues planted in word-games; the reader, wearing her blinkers, misses them too — life's normal condition.

Threaded throughout: commerce carries traditional virtues (trustworthiness, the Yelp-review problem of judging character before transacting), running Smith through Austen to Eliot. Integrity is worth holding even when adjustable. On the great-books debate (Greer favoring Middlemarch as "bigger"), Traldi defends Austen's domesticity as genuinely great — Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park belong on any syllabus. Both praise the 2005 Pride and Prejudice as scenery, not interpretation.

Was Mill anti-traditional?

Against Cass Sunstein's reading of Mill as a constructivist rationalist whose Harm Principle "cuts like a knife through traditions," Mill rejects custom only "in this case," not per se. The Subjection's blacksmith passage and "common arrangement" concede inherited gender roles may persist; Chapters on Socialism prefers gradualist Owen/Fourier, and "sudden effects are superficial" sounds Hayekian. Hence Hayek's irrational dislike of Mill may be Batean "belatedness"—recognizing his own ideas already anticipated in Book V.

The link between art and life

Great art is both surprising and traditional, working in echoes and tropes shared between texts: Shakespeare is the most unpredictable of writers yet surprises through familiar images, like the recurring "ears" of spy-ridden Hamlet. Building on Qureshi, art's power lies in Elizabeth Bishop's "timing"—an amalgamation of sound, sense, and moral calling that links a work to lived experience. AI cannot have experiences, yet Gwern's LLM-assisted poems might pass blind tests, so judgments may shift.

Something understood. How to read poetry.

Not understanding a poem is not a failure but the proper starting point: enter the dream before analyzing. Elizabeth Bishop's 'Filling Station' models this—the speaker arrives disgusted ("Oh, but it is dirty!"), but looking again at the dog, doily, and embroidered marguerites, moves toward sympathy, concluding "Somebody loves us all." Herbert's 'Prayer (I)' stacks metaphors ending "something understood." Citing Thoreau ("We are as much as we see"), reading poetry is travel: we learn to see strangely, half-way between experience and understanding.

You have no idea how many legends have walked these halls and what's worse, you don't care.

The Devil Wears Prada is The Godfather for Millennials: Andy, an innocent, learns her inner steel and becomes herself rather than escaping corruption. Miranda Priestly is no devil but a dedicated priest of her art; her name is indicative, not ironic. The film's "code-obeying" gestures—the sulky boyfriend, the return to "real" journalism—are concessions, like Hollywood's old morality rules. Fashion is genuinely art (Halston, Lagerfeld, De La Renta), and Andy's friends dismiss it from snobbery. Excellence and judiciousness outrank kindness; ambition, not comfort, wins.

Marilyn, Transcendence, Durham, Novels, Dulles, Amis, Proust, Lost Lambs

Madeline Cash's Lost Lambs typifies "discourse fiction": novels that can't escape their author's echo-chamber and merely repeat its op-ed language rather than imagine character — Cash's Catholic priest, late-capitalism riffs, and ™-laden corporate parody channel left-wing Dimes Square positions, not fictionalized people; her voiceless "house style" betrays the copywriter. Kingsley Amis (Ending Up modest, but underrated above Martin) turns sentences better than his son. Clare Carlisle's Transcendence for Beginners, reading Spinoza's "Who/What am I?" through being-in-God, is excellent. Hensher's 600-page novel history delivers; Sewell's Dulles biography asserts without sources; Crowther's Marilyn and de Botton's Proust disappoint less or more than expected.