Waiting for the Barbarians

DON
’
T WORRY. ALTHOUGH
the title of this book may seem alarmist, there’s nothing to be anxious about. At least, that’s what the author of the poem from which I borrowed it thought.

In Constantine Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” the representatives of a very grand and sophisticated culture, unnamed but apparently Rome, assemble at the city gate in great state, from the emperor to his various officials, awaiting the arrival of envoys from the (also unnamed) “barbarians.” The city has fallen into an anticipatory stupor: the senators sit around making no laws, and the orators fall silent, having tactfully absented themselves. (The barbarians are “bored by eloquence and public speaking.”) They all wait from early morning until evening, fidgeting with their embroidered scarlet togas, their amethysts and emeralds, until it becomes clear that the barbarians aren’t going to come. Only in the final line of the poem does Cavafy give the proceedings an unexpected twist: the emperor and the rest, you learn, are actually looking forward to the barbarians’ arrival. “Perhaps these people,” the narrator sighs in the last line, “were a solution of a sort.”

So the poem is about confounded expectations in more ways than
one. There’s the disappointed anticipation of the waiting emperor and his people, of course, but even more, perhaps, there are the oddly thwarted expectations of the reader of the poem, which have been set up by that sonorous, portentous, and now-famous title. Detached from its context, the phrase “waiting for the barbarians,” which has been used as everything from the title of a novel by J. M. Coetzee to the name of a chic men’s clothing store in Paris, seems to be about the plight of a precious civilization perilously under siege by the crude forces of barbarity. And yet Cavafy himself clearly saw it differently. A note he wrote in 1904, the year he published the poem, indicates that for him it was “not at all opposed to my optimistic notion”—that it represented, indeed, “an episode in the progress toward the good.”

Why, you wonder, should the imminent advent of the barbarians suggest positive progress? Here it’s important to remember a bit of biography. Cavafy had come of age in the late nineteenth century, the era of the flowery and highly perfumed Decadents, and only when he was around forty—the time he wrote “Waiting for the Barbarians”—did he set about stripping his work of all derivative artifice, transforming himself into an idiosyncratic modernist. So the poem may well be a parable about artistic growth—the unexpectedly complex and even, potentially, fruitful interaction between old cultures and new, between (we might say) high and low; about the way that what’s established and classic is always being refreshed by new energies that, at the time they make themselves felt, probably seem barbaric to some. As Cavafy knew well—he was, after all, a specialist in the marginal moments of ancient history, the era in which Greece yielded to Rome, when paganism met Christianity, when antiquity made its long and gentle slide into the early Middle Ages—there rarely are any real “barbarians.” What others might see as declines and falls look,
when seen from the bird’s-eye vantage point of history, more like shifts, adaptations, reorganizations.

The meeting of the ancient and the contemporary worlds is one theme that connects the twenty-four essays in this collection. Some of the pieces here are dedicated to the classics themselves: for instance, an essay on a new translation of the
Iliad
, collected in the section called “Classica” (a rubric I owe to my longtime flea-marketing companion Bob Gottlieb, who thus christened a vast category of household knickknacks). And a number of them are concerned with the “waiting for the barbarians” phenomenon: they consider the ways in which the present, and especially popular culture, has wrestled, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, with the past. Julie Taymor’s
Spider-Man
musical tried and failed to adapt ancient myths of metamorphosis to modern comic-book sensibilities; it’s interesting to think why the two genres don’t really mix. Jonathan Littell’s
The Kindly Ones
owes a major debt to Aeschylus’
Oresteia
. No fewer than three significant novels published in 2010 took classical myths as their starting points, and their adaptations, as always, tell us as much about the present as they do about the past.

But by far most of these essays are concerned with contemporary popular culture and its products: television, movies, plays, novels, memoirs. Nearly all were first published over the past five years—since 2007, that is, when the manuscript for my first collection was submitted. (The remaining handful, with one exception, were all published within the past ten.) A recurring theme in that collection,
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken
, was the effect of the September 11 attacks on pop culture in the first half of the first decade of the new century. It’s now clear to me that in the second half of that decade (and since), I’ve been preoccupied with what I think of
as the “reality problem”: how the extraordinary blurring between reality and artifice that has been made possible by new technologies makes itself felt not only in our entertainments—the way we create and experience movies (
Avatar
) and Broadway shows (
Spider-Man
, again)—but in the way we think about, and conduct, our lives. Certainly one side effect of the ongoing erosion of the boundary between the inner and the outer self, itself made possible by new technologies and media that allow us to be private in public (smartphones, iPods, blogs, Facebook, etc.), is a profound alteration in our sense of what is truth and what is fiction: readers of a good deal of contemporary writing must ponder the difference between (as one memoirist has put it) “real reality” and “my reality.” (This is the subject of my
New Yorker
essay about the memoir craze, “But Enough About Me.”) These various erosions have broad and fascinating ramifications. Not the least of these is the way we think about, and re-create, the historical past in our various entertainments:
Mad Men
, novels,
Titanic
, autobiography. The reality problem is, I think, the preeminent cultural event of our day, and references to it crop up more than once here.

The present volume is organized in four sections, each representing a special interest of mine. The title of the first, “
Spectacles
,” shows traces of the career I had embarked on before I started writing and reviewing: as a graduate student in classics, I was particularly interested in Greek tragedy, specifically in the relationship between public theatrical displays and the life of the wider society, its social and political values. Then comes “
Classica
” (thanks, Bob!); then “
Creative Writing
,” containing a number of pieces on novelists and poets, both contemporary and “classic.” Some of these are well known, and what I have to say about them (
The Charterhouse of Parma
, for instance) very likely amounts to a statement about what my standards for the novel or for poetry might be; for others, such as the novels of Fontane or
Sepharad
, the underappreciated masterpiece
by the contemporary Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina, I am happy to advocate. Finally, there is “
Private Lives
.” As someone who has published two memoiristic books myself, I’m keenly interested in how private life ends up represented on the page; the essays in this section ponder that vexed question in various ways.

All of these pieces were written for periodicals, and nearly all appear here more or less as they did when first published. The only cases in which the versions here are substantially different are the essay on Edmund White’s memoir, which here takes the form it had before I made a last-minute (and, I now see, unhelpful) structural change; and the piece on Jonathan Franzen’s autobiographical essays, which appeared in print at half the length of the original draft. (My fault: I wrote too much for the assigned space.) As for the rest, I have, for the most part, refrained from editing them, apart from a few cases of smoothing out and sharpening; they are, in the end, pieces of journalism, and as such reflect the moment in which they were written.