Against Nature, Pt. 13

VILLAGER #1: We have found a witch, might we burn her?

CROWD: Burn her! Burn!

BEDEMIR: How do you know she is a witch?

VILLAGER #2: She looks like one.

BEDEMIR: Bring her forward.

WITCH: I’m not a witch. I’m not a witch!

BEDEMIR: But you are dressed as one.

WITCH: They dressed me up like this.

CROWD: No, we didn’t… no.

WITCH: And this isn’t my nose, it’s a false one.

BEDEMIR: Well?

VILLAGER #1: Well, we did do the nose.

BEDEMIR: The nose?

VILLAGER #1: And the hat — but she is a witch!

CROWD: Burn her! Witch! Witch! Burn her!

BEDEMIR: Did you dress her up like this?

CROWD: No, no… no … yes. Yes, yes, a bit, a bit.

VILLAGER #1: She has got a wart…

Monty Python and the Holy Grail¹

About a third of the way through our texts, we have arrived at what seems the last necessary background for each: Eden introduces us to Adam and Cathy’s infant twins – one of whom, Caleb, will become the novel’s main protagonist, and Demons introduces us to its chief antagonist – Caleb’s counterpart,² Petrusha.

Petrusha, the leader of a powerful radical society, is a ruthless man of great cunning. The scene that introduces him³ shows him smoothing over a potential scandal when letters are circulating that Nikolay had impregnated Marya; he portrays Nikolay as instead chivalrously trying to protect the abused, handicapped young woman. This positive vision of Nikolay remains with most of the witnesses even after Shatov, seeing through the deception (if only vaguely), punches Nikolay in the face – more about Shatov later.

I mentioned earlier that Cathy is intended to represent Marya⁴ and that Eden introduced her as a “monster”.⁵ Now that Demons has introduced its charming psychopath, Petrusha, I should fill in a little background I had skipped earlier. The first anecdote Eden’s narrator tells about the antagonist starts with her, at 10 years old, going out to the barn with two boys. After seducing them, she manages to tie her own wrists together before her mother arrives. Then, for a long time afterwards, she displays signs of shock and does not speak, making her mother and doctor believe she was just saved from being raped. The second tells of her, at the age of 14, killing her Latin teacher, making the death look like a suicide (and implanting the idea that he had “trouble in Boston.”) The third tells of how, at 16, she refuses to go to school to finish earning the teaching degree toward which she has been working. She makes her father angry enough to threaten her, and she runs away. After he found and whipped her, she “opened up,”⁶, cleaning the house without being asked. Some other ways in which she helped were:

She … stuffed papers all around the edges of the foundation to block the draft. When the kitchen door squeaked she oiled the hinges and then the lock that turned too hard, and while she had the oil can out she oiled the front-door hinges too. She made it her duty to keep the lamps filled and their chimneys clean. She invented a way of dipping the chimneys in a big can of kerosene she had in the basement.6b

She also learns from her father how to run his tanning business and the combination to his safe. The house soon burns down with her parents in it, and she leaves clues that she has been kidnapped or killed.

She runs away to Boston and becomes a whoremaster’s courtesan, controlling the “master” until he gets her drunk. She is then unable to control her own fundamental ugliness, and he threatens her into taking “a little trip” ^6c with him – He plans to take her from town to town, whipping and pimping her until she is “of no use anymore.”^6d He is too angry to control himself, however, and beats her savagely with a rock. He then abandons her body, believing he has killed her. She then revives enough to drag herself to the doorstep of Charles and Adam, who save her.

Skipping to the chapters I have read lately, after she escapes Adam, Cathy (now “Kate”), joins a whorehouse. The madam, Faye, quickly comes to see Kate as a daughter. She soon invites her to her room for a “surprise”, and shows her she has left everything in her will to Kate. Pressuring her “daughter” to drink champagne with her, Faye tells Kate she doesn’t want her to work anymore. Kate’s reaction to alcohol again brings out all her ugliness, and she talks cruelly to Faye and reveals plans she has for the house. Faye balks, and Kate drugs her.

Besides both Cathy and Petrusha being psychopaths, I found an interesting parallel between them that got me curious. After each interview with his son, Petrusha, Stepan “spent the whole day lying on the sofa with a handkerchief soaked in vinegar on his head.”⁷ He also exhibits a marked personality change at these times. Kate, after having drugged Faye, soaks a handkerchief in ammonia and holds it over Fay’s nose and mouth.^6e

This parallel motivated me to ask Google AI if there were any others. I’ll post the reply as is:

...Critics and literary scholars have drawn multiple striking thematic parallels between the two figures.

Several key narrative devices and character traits signify this conceptual link:

+ Destructive Masterminds: Both Pyotr Verkhovensky and Cathy Ames function as brilliant, hyper-rational manipulators who orchestrate the psychological and physical destruction of those around them simply to prove their power or satisfy their intrinsic sadism.

+ The "Soaked Handkerchief" & Sadistic Exertion: In Demons, Pyotr Stepanovich uses a moistened handkerchief to disorient, poison, or control his victims. Similarly, in East of Eden, Cathy utilizes manipulation, extortion, and secret substances to control men and destroy their lives.

+ Engineering Chaos and Rumor: Both characters rely heavily on spreading rumors, lies, and paranoia to control the masses. Pyotr manipulates the fragile psychology of the townspeople to incite a radical, nihilistic uprising, while Cathy weaponizes local gossip to blackmail people and ruin reputations.

+ Emblematic of Pure Evil: Both authors created these characters to embody the concept of pure, unadulterated evil. Cathy Ames is frequently analyzed as a representation of innate malevolence, just as Pyotr Verkhovensky represents the destructive, godless nature of 19th-century Russian nihilism.

+ Isolation from Humanity: Neither character possesses normal human empathy. Cathy views ordinary human beings as things to be used, and Pyotr treats his followers as pawns in a grand geopolitical chess game.8

In the last section of Eden’s part 2, Samuel has struck the protagonist, and in this case⁹ awakened him to his duty as father to his – until then – unnamed boys. The three men discuss the Biblical story of Cain and Abel philosophically and work to undo the damage that love for a bad woman has caused.

The information in this entry would lend further support to two of my theories: Steinbeck, in transferring all the evil of Dostoevsky’s male character to a “crippled” woman (in Eden, of course, a spiritual cripple), promotes the “genes over memes” argument (here, innate malevolence vs. philosophical nihilism) as well as the idea that a woman is only worthy of love to the extent she supports the continuance of (Arian) succession.¹⁰

I thought the below clip would lighten the mood:

¹¹

¹ Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) Transcript from Internet Sacred Text Archive. Accessed 6/5/2026.

² The link is to this blog’s “Against Nature, Pt. 9”, that hypothesizes which main characters in the older novel are meant to represent the newer one.

³ The link is to this blog’s “Against Nature, Pt. 12”, that summarizes Petrusha’s narration of this event.

⁴ The link is to this blog’s “Against Nature, Pt. 10”, that first mentions this suspicion.

⁵ The link is to this blog’s “Against Nature, Pt. 8”, that first discusses Cathy as the only major female character in East of Eden.

⁶ Steinbeck, John. East of Eden (1952). Published in Penguin Books 1979. On Internet Archive website, accessed 6/6/2026. ^(a) p. 67 (I should note here that, in Chapter 25, Cathy/Kate says that she made the Latin teacher commit suicide. – Viola 7/17/2026)
_. ^b “…basement” ibid, p. 68; ^c “a little trip” ibid, p. 78; ^d “of no use anymore.” ibid; ^e “nose and mouth.” ibid, p. 191.

⁷ Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons (1871-72). In standardebooks.org. Part 2 Chapter 1 Section 2. Accessed 6/5/2026.

⁸ Google AI answer accessed 6/4/2026, 2:22pm, EST. (I should note here, after having read all of Demons, that I don’t recall Petrusha using a soaked handkerchief to disorient anyone. If any of my readers find one, I’d appreciate a citation. – Viola 8/8/26.)

⁹ The other case of striking the protagonist was Shatov’s expression of disappointment in Nikolay in Demons. (See above.)

¹⁰ I know the Hamiltons are “Irish”, but it seems clear that Presbyterian Liza is Scotch-Irish, a nationality which is the chief enabler of the “supreme” Anglo/Aryan race. This blog has an entry on this relationship here.

¹¹ overkill2overdrive. “The Be-Sharps – Baby On Board” (The Simpsons) YouTube. Loaded Feb 18, 2011. Accessed 6/5/2026.

Against Nature, Pt. 12

[I]f the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment
when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

– William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”¹

The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked;
and nobody will come.

– Ursula LeGuin “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”²

Returning to Demons’ “fool”, Marya Timofyevna, whom my last entry quoted, my first impression of the description of her home is that it reminds me of the “Omelas” quote above. Wouldn’t you know it, the next chapter of Eden I read brought up William James, whose above-quoted example inspired the idea for that very story. (This example, in fact, was taken from another novel by Dostoevsky.)

Chapter 17 of Eden mentions James as the author of a book that Samuel tells his son to find – Principles of Psychology.³ (Oddly, a word search for “psychology” in our Internet Archive copy of the text brings up only one other page where this word appears – over 300 pages later – and has nothing to do with the James classic.) Samuel then delivers Cathy’s twins, for which she bites his hand. An infection from this bite makes him very sick, but he tells everyone but Lee that he got hurt “in the tackle” “at the well head”^3b – another of the novel’s references to the evil that water represents (women).

Demons, meanwhile, soon hints at Marya becoming a scapegoat – she apparently had had a child by the “Adam” of Dostoevsky’s novel⁴, Nikolay. He is not only the son of the most prominent woman in town, who wants him to marry the daughter of a wealthy family friend, but is personally charismatic (charisma which my preliminary research on the novel reveals will make townspeople pin their revolutionary hopes on him – hopes which such a connection with a poor, handicapped woman would crush.)

Demons further narrates more of Marya’s background – Nikolay’s (admittedly unreliable) friend, Petrusha, recounts, “She wasn’t quite right in her head” even when they first saw her, but was “very different from what she is now. There’s reason to believe that in her childhood she received something like an education through the kindness of a benevolent lady.”⁵ She had long been abused by her brother, Lebyadkin, who whips her at least daily, abuse from which she apparently suffered much emotional and mental damage. While Nikolay had been living like a tramp, he encountered the young woman and protected her from abuse from one of her roommates. The young woman became enamored of him, and he arranged for her to be cared for in a “nunnery”^5b. Her brother found out the source of this arrangement, took her from her caregivers, and blackmailed Nikolay with scandal if he did not give the money directly to him. He now squanders the funds meant for her care on alcohol, and keeps his sister in the a squalid room where he does not feed her properly, while continuing to abuse and bully her.

I had read earlier that one thing that enrages Lebyadkin is that Marya calls him a “footman”, and “orders” items from him, orders that are only met with blows. Reading now of her youthful education alongside her brother’s sensitivity to being thought uneducated himself, I can infer sibling rivalry on the level of Charles for Adam in our other text. Together with what we have found so far⁶, it appears that Steinbeck took this sibling rivalry theme for his novel and removed all sympathy from the “holy fool”, transferring it to his two jealous brothers.

I thought the below poster might put across Steinbeck’s message more clearly than he would have wanted:

⁷

¹ The link is to this board’s main entry on this 1891 William James essay. For the curious, I’m linking one with additional commentary here. I later found that “Moral Philosopher” is not James’ first philosophical essay, since he had written one, ‘The Sentiment of Rationality”, in 1874 (good thing I had used the word, “perhaps” before that statement.) I link this blog’s analysis of the older essay here. Anyway, I did want to point out here that James seems a bit disingenuous in referencing “Tolstoi” right after raising this dilemma, and never mentioning Dostoevsky.

² The link is to this board’s entry, “Third August Speculation Day,” which entry is a brief appreciation of LeGuin’s short story.

³ Steinbeck, John. East of Eden (1952). Published in Penguin Books 1979. p. 151. On the Internet Archive website. Accessed 5/26/2026. This direction is a bribe to get Samuel’s unwilling son, Joe, to stay and look after things at a worksite while he delivers Adams’ children. Samuel claims that Joe’s mother would be furious if she knew he had spent money on the two-volume text, thus enticing Samuel to consider this a fair exchange. I can also find no further reference to William James in the novel.
_. ^b “…in the tackle” “at the well head” pp. 158-159

⁴ The link is to Part 9 of this series, which tells who in Eden is meant to represent whom in Demons.

⁵ Dostoevsky, Fyodr. Demons. Part 1, Chapter 5, Section 6 in StandardBooks.org. Accessed 5/26/2026.
_. ^b ibid.

⁶ The link is to this blog’s post, “Second Samhain”, which discusses the later rivalry between Adam’s sons, Aron and Cal. It seems that Steinbeck saw this antagonism in Demons and made this idea, an idea recently coined “sibling rivalry” by psychologist David Levy in his 1941 studies, the primary driving force for the action of his novel.

Incidentally, Levy also coined the term, “maternal overprotection” in 1943, not long before the “nuclear family” became prominent in American life; then television became the “babysitter” for most families.

⁷ The Illustration is a poster found in the Wikipedia entry for Aktion T4 propaganda.
_. Accessed 5/26/26, 7:29am EST.

Against Nature, Pt. 11

“I don’t know that it’s a good idea for you to go over there.
Riches and idleness, devil’s tools, and you’ve not a very sturdy resistance.”

– Presbyterian Liza Hamilton to her more Irish¹ husband in East of Eden²

Steinbeck devotes a large portion of Eden’s Chapter 14 to his mother (all members of the narrator’s family are actual members of Steinbeck’s, and, it must be assumed, have the qualities that the author perceived in – or heard about – each of them,) Olive. This character, however, is irrelevant to the plot; her sole purpose could seem to be to contrast her qualities against those of Cathy, the main antagonist of the novel. Looking at the rest of this analysis, though, we can see Olive’s usefulness in warding off the criticism of misogyny. Lastly, she can be seen as an attempt to rival Dostoevsky’s character from Demons – Liza.

Liza enters the narrative warmly greeting the protagonist and inviting him, the narrator, and Shatov³ to her family’s house. Here, she asks for Shatov’s help with a project she had conceived. She wants to publish a series of yearbooks⁴ out of Russian newspapers, yearbooks that would gather important information of its ongoing history into texts that would be interesting to the common reader.

Steinbeck, to set his vision of what women should be against what he perceives is Dostoevsky’s, details the extraordinary challenges Olive must meet as a teacher in a rural county and the qualities that allowed her to overcome them. He also points out her determination to live in a town, to continue to get access to its cultural benefits. In addition to these fairly abstract observations, he offers some cute anecdotes to demonstrate that “her acts were based on feelings rather than thoughts,” but that these feelings were inherently correct (according to the Protestant work ethic.) I would hypothesize that Steinbeck is saying that the proper use of a woman’s talents (which talents he would not think include cultural ideas that would raise an entire country’s awareness of its history) would be to benefit those in her own family – or at least in her gene pool.⁵

Speaking of gene “pools”, after Adam finds that his wife is pregnant, his story, in Chapter 15, turns to preparations for his new dynasty. These preparations include digging enough wells to grow alfalfa and wheat to sell as well as personal flower and vegetable gardens and an orchard of some kind (but not apples – “that would be looking for accidents.”^5b) Learning that Samuel Hamilton (the narrator’s Irish grandfather,) is very good at finding water, our hero sends his inscrutable Chinese servant, Lee, to bring him to the estate to contract for the job. Samuel meets Cathy and instantly knows that something is wrong with her – as if his sense of evil were like his divining rod.

In fact, in addition to water, the other original classical elements⁶ figure prominently in this portion of the book, putting us in mind of Milton’s ordering of them in Paradise Lost⁷. Adam and Samuel discuss the strong wind (air) in their part of the country and how windmills can harness it to power the wells. When Adam describes how meeting Cathy changed his outlook on life from one of shades of grey into one of full color, Samuel says that, as a friend, “‘it is my duty to … kick [this outlook] in the face, then raise it up and spread slime on it thick enough to blot out its dangerous light.’ His voice grew strong with vehemence. ‘I should hold it up to you muck-covered and show you its dirt and danger…’”⁸ (earth). Lastly, when Samuel breakfasts with his own family the next morning, we get a vivid description of his wife’s pancakes being cooked on a griddle as we hear the stern woman’s (fiery) reproaches, reproaches that make Samuel laugh with pleasure.

The symbolism can easily be seen as an answer to a passage of Demons, in which the narrator meets this novel’s holy fool, an abused handicapped woman who discusses the “Mother of God”:

‘... the great mother — the damp earth, and therein lies great joy for men. And every earthly woe and every earthly tear is a joy for us; and when you water the earth with your tears a foot deep, you will rejoice at everything at once, and your sorrow will be no more, such is the prophecy.’ That word sank into my heart at the time. Since then when I bow down to the ground at my prayers, I’ve taken to kissing the earth. I kiss it and weep.9

That Eden’s Chapter 15 hints that Lee also senses that Cathy is evil leads to my final observations of the novel to this point: During Chapter 14, Steinbeck compares three people to cats: Olivia, Adam, and Cathy. While I was reading the next one, it occurred to me that, according to his novel, women, foreigners, and those with birth defects (like Cathy and, in his “holy fool” aspect, Adam) have an extra (animalistic) sense that allows them to live together with his superior breed. Could this be because World War II and fascism was still so fresh in his readers’ minds?

¹⁰

¹ The Link is to this blog’s entry “Organic Movements v. Astroturfing, Part 2”, which describes the role of the Scotch-“Irish” in colonizing Ireland, then America.

² Steinbeck, John. East of Eden (1952). Published in Penguin Books 1979. p. 146. On the Internet Archive website. Accessed 5/18/2026.

³ The link is to Pt. 9 of this series, which covers this character as far as I had gotten until now.

⁴ Dostoevsky, Fyodr. Demons. Chapter 4, Part 2 in StandardBooks.org. Accessed 5/18/2026: “…a presentation of the spiritual, moral, inner life of Russia for a whole year.”

⁵ Eden. p. 121. Olive’s “first border was the geography of her family, second her town, Salinas, and finally there was a dotted line, not clearly defined, which was the county line.”
_. ^b p. 136.

⁶ The link is to the Wikipedia entry, “Classical Element”. Accessed 5/18/2026.

⁷ The link is to this blog’s second entry on Paradise Lost, which discuss Milton’s ordering of the elements – with earth on the bottom and fire on top.

⁸ Eden. p. 137.

⁹ Demons. Chapter 4, Part 5.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fyodor-dostoevsky/demons/constance-garnett/text/chapter-1-4#chapter-1-4-1
Note again the reproach of the later authors, Milton and Steinbeck, to the earlier ones, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky – the feminine elements are inferior-to-evil.

¹⁰ From University at Albany “Film Notes” Webpage: poster of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935).
https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/filmnotes/fns07n6.html
Accessed 5/18/26

Against Nature, Pt. 10

LOKAI: …Were we free to be men? Free to be husbands and fathers?
Free to live our lives in equality and dignity?

BELE: Yes, you were free, if you knew how to use your freedom.
You were free enough to slaughter
and to burn all the things that had been built!

LOKAI: I tried to break the chains of a hundred million people.
My only crime is that I failed. To that I do plead guilty.

BELE: There is an order in things.
He asked for utopia in a day. It can’t be done.

LOKAI: Not in a day. And not in ten times ten thousand years by your thinking.
To you, we are a loathsome breed who will never be ready.
Genocide for my people is the plan for your utopia.

– “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”¹

Demons’ plot centers around the murder of a handicapped young woman, a “holy fool”. The trajectory of the two novels we are comparing² makes me suspect that Eden’s main female character, Cathy, is intended to represent this character.

In the first entry of this series, I mentioned Eden’s reference to the displaced (if not decimated) inhabitants of Salinas Valley with the term, “inferior breed”. In Chapter 14, Eden’s narrator says that his grandfather “raised a distinctly superior breed.” Our introduction to Cathy starts with a discussion of “monsters” – describing birth defects and saying they are “accidents and no one’s fault…”

The identification of the two characters thus would suggest that Eden’s main argument against Demons is between what we would call the “genes vs. memes” points of view – For Steinbeck, then, evil in individuals and societies is caused by the former – either by breeding or by a genetic accident; trouble would primarily come from those born physically, mentally, or spiritually inferior. Pulling this opinion together with his “conquest” narrative, his god would be the “survival of the fittest” “principle”.

Eden makes a second argument clear in the beginning of Part 2: “Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music³, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy.” Thus he was another propagandist against the Russians (Soviets) in the second red scare.

Perhaps a third argument can be found in that Steinbeck transferred the role of “holy fool” to Adam⁴. Steinbeck seems to believe that women’s only legitimate purpose is to transfer their husband’s genetic material into heirs, so, with few exceptions⁵, they are a burden when not conceiving, carrying, bearing, feeding, and keeping young children out of trouble – and out of their fathers’ way. Thus, women can only be considered “saintly” if their whole lives are organized around fulfilling these functions for members of a superior breed. Maybe, also, this “holy fool” role is meant to cover Adam’s inability even to hear Cathy’s reasonable disagreements with his wishes, such as when she says she doesn’t want to go to California.

I want to end this post with a qualified retraction. Having gotten an impression through a perusal of the book earlier⁶, I commented on the lack of important positive female characters there. I found, later in the chapter about our narrator’s family, that he does describe the career of his mother, Olive. This subject requires a separate entry. For now I’ll just say that, given what I have found so far, Steinbeck wanted to be seen as fighter for the underdog, thus (subtly – unlike, say, Rush Limbaugh) maintained plausible deniability.

⁷

¹ Lee Cronin, Oliver Crawford, writers. “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (1969). Star Trek: The Original Series. Quote from The Star Trek Transcripts website. Accessed 5/14/2026.

² An interesting coincidence when researching Eden is that Steinbeck’s grandmother, Liza, has the same name as an uptight young woman in Demons. The latter Liza, however, is very attractive and complex, while the uptight teetotaler of Eden, though based on the author’s own grandmother, is a stock character. (The link is to the enotes webpage for Chapter 2 of Eden, accessed 5/15/2026.)

³ Lennon-McCartney, anyone?

⁴ At least, everyone in the book treats Adam as if he is a “holy fool”.

⁵ The link is to the first entry of this series, a post which lists the roles that patriarchs want to ultimately allow females.

⁶ The link is to Part 8 of this series, where I wrote a footnote which contains this comment. See also Steinbeck’s 1966 book/photo essay, America and Americans here in Internet Archive, where he complains of women meeting for lunch in restaurants. It almost seems as if the author thinks that widows are useless and have no business spending their money in public places.

⁷ sapatilha sanjo. “Nudge Nudge Monty Python” (1969). YouTube (Posted 2/17/2008). Accessed 5/14/2026.

Against Nature, Pt. 9

Hedley Lamarr: Now raise your right hand for the pledge.
[Evil Posse members raise their left hands]
Right! [Posse switches hands.]
Now repeat after me. “I…

Posse I…

Lamarr: “…Your Name…

Posse …your name…

Lamarr: [under his breath] Schmucks. [to Posse] “…pledge allegiance…

Posse …pledge allegiance…

Lamarr: “…to Hedley Lamarr…

Posse …to Hedy Lamarr…

Lamarr: That’s “Hedley”!

Posse That’s Hedley!

Lamarr: “… and to the evil…

Posse …and to the evil…

Lamarr: “…for which he stands.”

Posse …for which he stands.

Lamarr: Now go do that voodoo that you do so well! [Cheering and gunshots]

– Blazing Saddles¹

My first entries on these two novels have said almost nothing so far about Demons’ plot (Again, even in this allegorical story, Dostoevsky spends a great deal of time on characterizations.) Now, after finishing a couple chapters, I can at least supply the background.

The narrator and Stepan, his protagonist, are both writers supported by widow/heiress Varvara Petrovna. Varvara had, in a sense, “created” Stepan – who had only ever been a second-rate, liberal poet (who also affects being a man of science.) She gives her attractive beneficiary clothes to make him resemble a famous author she had worshiped in her youth, and she brings him into fashionable and intellectual circles to buttress Stepan’s (and her own) reputation. After trying, and failing, to insinuate him into the literary world of Saint Petersburg, she sends him abroad to “recruit”.² He makes a brief attempt to work in Berlin, then returns to his patron’s estate. Eventually, Varvara gives him his own house, and he gathers a circle of “higher liberals” around him. (One of these is Ivan Pavlovich Shatov, who is key to the plot.) Dostoevsky ends the chapter, through the Narrator’s somewhat partial view, with vividly illustrated descriptions of each member of this circle, and the reputation and dynamics of it.

Chapter II introduces the character Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin, Varvara Petrovna’s son and one of Stepan’s former students³. Although handsome and well-mannered, he has a streak of nihilism which moves him to outrageous offenses, including pulling an elderly gentleman by the nose and biting the ear of the governor. He feigns temporary mental illness, and is forgiven by the townspeople. His mother then sends him abroad.

Stepan, in addition to having been like both brother and father to his patron’s son, has a son of his own, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky (“Petrusha”). We find that Petrusha meets Nikolay during the latter’s excursion abroad.

Further, Nikolay becomes intimate with a childhood friend of his mother’s, Praskovya Ivanovna Drozdov, who lives in Paris. He is welcomed as a member of the family, and he and Praskovya’s daughter, Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushin (“Liza”, a former student of Stepan) form a bond. Varvara then visits Paris with her her protégée, Dasha (Shatov’s sister, another former student of our hero.) After Varvara and Dasha return, we find that Liza had flirted with Petrusha to get Nikolay jealous. Since Nikolay did not react as Liza expected – instead making friends with Petrusha – the couple have a slight falling out.

Varvara, apparently fearing that Nikolay had become enamored of Dasha, asks her to marry Stepan, then gets Stepan to agree to marry Dasha – causing him to fear that Varvara suspects he might try to seduce Liza.

By the end of the chapter, we find that Petrusha is expected to come to town to sell his property – property his father had mismanaged, squandering its resources to pay gambling debts. Stepan thus feels that he must marry Dasha so Varvara will rescue him.

I think it’s time to return to Eden before concluding this entry.⁴ Through research, I found that Petrusha, using the ideas his father represents, philosophical ideals made more dangerous by the worsening conditions that these ideas have brought about, will corrupt the town. My guess is that Stepan, as the father/brother of our protagonist, will be the Cyrus/Charles of Demons; Varvara’s son, whose mind Stepan has already affected, will be “Adam”; Shatov, who resists Stepan’s demoralizing liberalism, will be Aaron, Adam’s good son; and Petrusha will be the bad son, Caleb.

My last entry skipped Chapters 6 and 7 of Eden, so I’ll briefly summarize them: We find that Charles misses the brother whose silent endurance of his abuse had “earned” him a place in the cavalry. Charles never married (Despite having been good at everything as a boy, Charles is so shy around girls that he can only interact with women whose services he buys,) his mother dies, and his father moves to Washington, DC. Adam, however, can’t bring himself to return home when through with his tour, and re-enlists. His father then arranges to have him come to Washington – He wants to get him into West Point or to work for him, but Adam says he would rather go back to his regiment. His father therefore ensures he “rots” there for the rest of this tour. When finished, Adam sends word to his brother that he will now come home. Instead, however, he wanders as a tramp⁵ for a few years, then gets arrested in Georgia and put on a chain gang – twice. Finally, he escapes, getting clothes by breaking into a store after hours. Around this time, Charles gets news that their father died, and that he and his brother have inherited a fortune. Meanwhile, Adam telegrams him, asking for money. Charles obliges,⁶ and his brother comes home. In addition to finding out about the money, Adam realizes that he is no longer afraid of Charles. Charles first invites Adam to go to an inn to visit the prostitutes there, then, after his brother declines, tells him suspicions about their father. Although Adam confesses that he had never loved their father, he dismisses his brother’s suspicion that their father had stolen the money he left them, and, despite evidence to the contrary, that their father had lied about his military service. The elder brother then suggests they both move to California. Chapter 7 ends with Charles saying he couldn’t ever leave his home, and Adam saying they should see how it goes.

I’ll leave with a video that gives a sense of my hypothesis about these two novels:

⁷

¹ Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg and Andrew Bergman, writers. Blazing Saddles (1974).

² I think this means gathering more followers to reclaim some prestige, at least in the provincial town where Varvara resides.

³ Nikolay was, of course, Stepan’s main student, but the poet also taught Shatov and others, whom I name further down.

⁴ I feel a bit hasty in stopping here, and encourage my readers to explore this novel themselves. I especially want to point out a great example of effective character development of the narrator here in regard to Karmazinov, a writer of whom he had been a fan in childhood and youth. This section’s discussion of the town gossip, Liputin, is also fun. – Viola

⁵ I should point out here that Adam’s journey is reminiscent (although Steinbeck’s character is more peaceful) of that of Nikolay’s between leaving the army and entering his hometown.

⁶ A nice touch in this section is that, to ensure that the money gets to the right person, Charles must use a password question. He asks what the last birthday gift Adam gave his father was – This gift, a dog, is what had made him so jealous over their father favoring it that he almost murdered Adam.

⁷ beepboopfukcyou “Stock Character Scene – Shaun of the Dead (2004).” YouTube. uploaded Feb 28, 2013. Accessed 5/12/2026.

Against Nature, Pt. 8

Andreev… was nothing more or less than our local shopkeeper, a very eccentric fellow,
a self-taught archaeologist who had a passion for collecting Russian antiquities and
sometimes tried to outshine Stepan Trofimovitch in erudition and in the progressiveness of his opinions. This worthy shopkeeper, with a grey beard and silver-rimmed spectacles, still
owed Stepan Trofimovitch four hundred roubles for some acres of timber he had bought on the latter’s little estate (near Skvoreshniki). Though Varvara Petrovna had liberally provided her friend with funds when she sent him to Berlin, yet Stepan Trofimovitch had, before starting, particularly reckoned on getting that four hundred roubles, probably for his secret expenditure, and was ready to cry when Andreev asked leave to defer payment for a month, which he had a right to do, since he had brought the first installments of the money almost six months in advance to meet Stepan Trofimovitch’s special need at the time.

– Demons’ narrator, explaining Stepan’s lament at how far he has fallen that
“our orthodox clown with a beard, peut briser mon existence en deux”
(“can break [his] existence in two”.)¹

The Narrators of both Demons and East of Eden (“Eden”) are friends of the protagonists, with their own personalities, and both confess ignorance of some aspects of the story. Eden however, from Chapter 2 on, conveys sympathy for its narrator and, from Chapter 3 on, its main characters. Demons, from the beginning, mocks its narrator as well as its protagonist, Stepan Trofimovitch (who, it soon becomes clear, roundly deserves it.) Further, Demons, by Part 3 of the Introductory, presents us with the well-realized, if neurotic and controlling, female character, Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin. The only female character of any importance in Eden² is introduced in Chapter 8 as a “monster” – a psychopath whose highest professional achievement is to become – through murder – the madam of a brothel.

Chapter 3 of Eden does offer some ameliorating facets to the novel’s generally negative portrayal of women, however. First, Adam, eldest son of the Trask family’s “devilish” patriarch, discovers that his stepmother, Alice, can smile, although she hides this expression whenever she thinks anyone is watching. This gives her more dimension than this blog’s previous entry revealed. Second, we discover that Adam’s stepbrother, Charles, is something of a monster himself. However, the aforementioned patriarch, finding that his younger son had, out of petty jealousy, beaten Adam nearly to death, suddenly shows some “wisdom”. Later, Alice, after Charles attacks Adam even more savagely (Adam barely saves himself from his brother killing him with an axe,) is revealed to be almost as dim as she had seemed at her introduction.

Chapter 4 gives us two pieces of information that again made me believe that the author is mocking an unreliable narrator. First, with no sign of disapproval, this narrator says that this second attack, and Adam’s lack of resistance to it, mobilized Cyrus Trask to enroll him in the cavalry – while his son was still in bed, “so stiff and aching that he could not move without a groan.” Second is his reaction to Adam’s pacifism, which pacifism becomes even stronger after having twice been almost killed – We learn that this “pressed” soldier purposefully missed when ordered to fire on “Indians”. The narrator calls this misfiring treasonous and expresses the opinion that the decimation of indigenous populations was necessary for the good of the country.

However, Steinbeck seems too faithful in his portrayal of the narrator’s good feelings toward Adam to mock him.³ Further, the next chapter, one which examines the narrator’s family, reminds us that its patriarch is well-read and inventive – intelligent to the point of arousing suspicion from his neighbors. Lastly, there is too much conspicuous irony⁴ throughout the book to believe Steinbeck would be so subtle in criticizing his narrator’s judgment of Adam.

Another difference I’ve found so far in reading these two novels is that Dostoevsky, even in what I understand is an allegorical story, is more apt to “show” us his characters rather than tell us about them. Even when making judgments, the narrator of Demons begins with examples, and says that these are part of a pattern, so we first hear that Stepan had been so hurt by an audience he had tried to impress that he spent a long train ride compulsively muttering a phrase made from an Uzbek word and, from different nationalities, some proper names.⁵ Our narrator then tells us of his friend’s bizarre mistranslation of a Russian saying into French, but adds that the protagonist was no doubt able to understand and translate it better, and explains that Stepan “did it from a feeling that it was chic, and thought it witty.” We thus learn that the narrator can call some of Stephan’s traits “stupid”, while showing understanding and empathy for his friend.

I thought my readers would enjoy the below clip of Kazakh tourist Borat traveling America with “young scholars,” who display empathy for his grief over the impurity of the woman he had planned to marry.

⁶

¹ Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons (1871-72). In standardebooks.org. Chapter 1-1-7. Accessed 5/5/26.

² Having read up to Chapter 8, I should disclose what might be seen as an exception. In Chapter 5, after describing his uncles, the narrator mentions his grandfather’s daughters, including his own mother. Although most of these descriptions are favorable, these are very brief – the longest is of one whom “he didn’t know much about” except for her “capacity for hatred and bitterness.” Later in that chapter the narrator tells us the careers that his aunts, uncles, and mother follow, but nothing these daughters say is quoted, so we get no sense of their points of view.

³ In contrast to the Eden narrator’s fidelity, The narrator of Demons repeatedly second-guesses his own judgment of his protagonist – to hilarious effect.

⁴ Although unreliable narrators in Atlas Shrugged use irony crudely, the targets in that novel are clearly ones such narrators would mock. As my last entry noted, Eden’s only narrator already expressed his belief that “Indians” were an inferior “breed”, due to lacking the Protestant work ethic. Since this belief matches that of the author’s classic, The Grapes of Wrath, I see no reason not to take his opinion as reflecting that of Steinbeck.
The above link is to this blog’s “Roots and Stems, Pt. 7”, which discusses a scene in which this irony is frequently employed against cultural elites.

⁵ The phrase is, “Vyek, and vyek, and Lyov Kambek, Lyov Kambek and vyek, and vyek.” Kambek is Uzbek for “come back,” Lyov is a slavic proper name meaning “lion”, and Vyek is a surname from Eastern Europe and the Austro-Hungarian region.

⁶ JoBlo Movie Clips (Apr 1, 2025). “Frat Boys Scene | BORAT (2006) Movie CLIP HD” Accessed 5/5/26.

Against Nature, Pt. 7

[T]he Hebrew word, the word timshel – ‘Thou mayest’ – that gives a choice.
It might be the most important word in the world.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden¹

My last entry discussed the use of the term “free will” in Paradise Lost (“Paradise”), a concept that the text only considered relevant to one’s ability to disobey. This concept reminded me of the above quote, which I had used in an entry² comparing Better Call Saul to East of Eden (“Eden”). Since I had only read the Wikipedia entry on that novel, I started to read the original text to write this analysis.

After describing the beauty and savagery of the Salinas Valley, Eden’s narrator tells us of the inferiority of the “breed” who first lived there^1a. Then he describes the increasing greed of the subsequent, white, settlers. This begged the question – Does “greed” make one truly human, or is Steinbeck being ironic here? The story actually begins with the narrator’s grandparents, from Northern Ireland. They don’t seem greedy (not in the usual sense of the word,) and it’s hard to believe that the author of The Grapes of Wrath would define humanity this way. However, Chapter 19 in that book begins with a similar philosophy of history to Eden’s introduction, with the original (Mexican) owners getting “weak and fed”, thus losing the right to their rich farmland to “tattered feverish” (greedy) American conquerors. Wrath’s narrator threatens the descendants of these conquerors, who have come to see land as only a commodity, with losing the source of their wealth to the starving (“greedy”) dustbowl refugees – refugees who have been tricked into moving to California to pick the landowners’ crops to their own further impoverishment, then threatened when they make any attempt to unionize – refugees whom Steinbeck claims view the land as a way to exercise their Protestant work ethic. Thus, neither Mexicans or “Oakies” in Wrath nor “Indians” in Eden come across as anything but fables³ to illustrate the superiority of this ethic. It almost seems as if Steinbeck believes that only white, middle-to-upper-class, male Protestants deserve sympathy.

After the narrator discusses his own family and other scrappy (not-quite-poor) California settlers, he begins the story of the Trask family, who become the core protagonists of the text. We are told that the first of these protagonists, Adam, came west “with money to start a new life.” We then get the history of his New England upbringing. Adam’s father, Cyrus, comes off as ridiculous – although I feel a disavowed sense that we should admire him (as opposed to his wife, whose suicide after he infects her with venereal disease is written as a farce,)⁴ for all his bragging. That the narrator calls him a “devil” raised a suspicion that had been already mounting in me, from the use of “Eden” in the title of the book and the long description of the beautiful flowers of its setting – Could the author be suggesting that members of this family are covert heroes like Satan from Paradise? Could there have been a previous sublimation text which Steinbeck wants to appropriate into his conquest narrative?

I had read The Brothers Karamazov several years ago. It occurred to me that Eden’s family drama, starting with its clownish patriarch, could have been inspired by it. I soon found that Dostoevsky was a main influence⁵ of Steinbeck, and a little more research led to the suspicion that Eden’s “free will” theme may have been inspired by Demons. Unfortunately, this is the only major Dostoevsky work that I have never read.

While I remedy this situation, I thought the below Monty Python sketch would pair well with Steinbeck’s idea of “greed”

⁶

¹ Steinbeck, John. East of Eden (1952). Published in Penguin Books 1979. The linked copy is on Internet Archive. Accessed 4/29/26.
^a Chapter 2, Part 1.

² The link is to this blog’s entry, “Second Samhain.”

³ I thought I should say here that this is the second depression-era text mentioned in this series – The first is Disney’s “Three Little Pigs” (1934).

⁴ Two of the three women we meet by Chapter Three are both described as comically humorless. The third, a 17 year old whom Cyrus marries after his first wife kills herself, is described as having…

... a number of admirable qualities. She was a deep scrubber and a corner-cleaner in the house. She was not very pretty, so there was no need to watch her. Her eyes were pale, her complexion sallow, and her teeth crooked, but she was extremely healthy and never complained during her pregnancy. Whether she liked children or not no one ever knew. She was not asked, and she never said anything unless she was asked. From Cyrus’s point of view this was possibly the greatest of her virtues. She never offered any opinion or statement, and when a man was talking she gave a vague impression of listening while she went about doing the housework

⁵ The link is to the CliffsNotes entry for Steinbeck’s biography.

⁶ Y1MT. “Monty Python – Lifeboat sketch” (first broadcast 22 December 1970.) YouTube (posted May 2, 2011.) Accessed 4/29/26.

Against Nature, Pt. 6

You taught me language¹; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

– William Shakespeare, The Tempest²

My previous entry on Paradise Lost³ (“Paradise”) gave the most blatant examples of the classic as a conquest text⁴. I had started by comparing it to The Tempest (“Tempest”) in their common references to a “new world” and by claiming that Milton’s main argument was with Shakespeare. Having re-read Tempest and a couple chapters of Paradise, I found more support for my thesis.

Tempest, according to The Oxford Shakespeare, was probably composed sometime between late 1610 to mid-1611, when Jamestown – the first town in the “new world” to survive a year, was reinforced⁵. Aside from the “Brave New World” line, Tempest gives us a discussion of the distance^6a from her Father’s land, Naples, that Alonzo’s newly-wed child, Claribel, has moved. We can see this discussion between the play’s conspirators as foretelling the American colony’s (Virginia’s) later rebellion against its mother country. More telling, the play gives us a description of the kind of plantation that another character would run^6b, a plantation that he envisions as a new paradise.

Paradise was published the year the English had annexed New Amsterdam⁷(New York) from the Dutch (More about the significance of this colony later.) Of more immediate importance, its author began work on this text in 1658, the year Oliver Cromwell died – the leader of the anti-monarchist parlimentarians – of the parlimentarian movement Milton had supported since 1641.⁸

Seeing that the author’s cause was dying in England (It looks as though abolishing the monarchy had never been the will of its people⁹,) it seems likely that Milton’s text, in which Satan was the rebellious antihero, was a covert appeal to circumvent the restored king’s authority in this distant land. This narrative would counter Shakespeare’s, in which Prospero regains his dukedom and abandons his island.

Book 4, in which Satan first enters paradise, provides a number of examples of where the author counters Milton’s former hero, Shakespeare¹⁰ (at times, even reproachfully.) One fairly pointed example is the narration of Adam and Eve’s sexual encounter (obviously, without marriage.) Here, from lines 741 to 770, Milton wards off possible objections to this narration as a hypocritical defamation of “what God declares Pure” and contrasts it to “Court Amours, Mixt Dance, or wanton Mask”[768]. This looks like a criticism of Prospero’s (Act 4) injunction to Miranda and Ferdinand to wait until the wedding before engaging in “the Rites Mysterious” – an injunction repeated in Tempest’s masque by “Iris” & “Ceres”[107]. (Note this scene’s description of Ceres’ realm[67-77], to which Milton makes a ham-fisted “negative simile”, comparing this and other classical descriptions of beautiful landscapes unfavorably to those of Paradise[268-283]. Note also that Milton explicitly mentions Ceres twice in this Chapter, and refers to “Iris all hues” – emphasis in original [698].) Thus, when Milton describes the beauty of the Angelic song that Adam and Eve enjoy in paradise[680-688], we can see the author competing with that of Ariel’s songs in The Tempest.

Even earlier, in Book 3, Milton gives us a long passage [680-688] describing angelic ass-kissing songs to his Father-God. Reading it in light of the above gives one the distinct impression that he is lampooning how Prospero’s daughter (and, to a lesser extent, Ariel,) treat him. Of course, Milton would have to overlook that his rival was actually being ironic (Prospero can be a bully, though he is much more forgiving than Milton’s God.)

Returning to The Netherlands, I thought I should point out here that they were the most capitalist¹¹ of the European nations at the time – thus, this date could support my contention that the American colonies were the project to remove dignity from work, despite Paradise’s ostensive promotion of the work ethic.

One more thing I want to mention is that, re-reading this chapter, I was again¹² struck by the fact that Milton never loses an opportunity to degrade women-as-women. Whereas his inspiration has the goddesses and Iris blessing and showing benevolence to both Ferdinand and Miranda equally, all goddesses that Paradise mentions are Milton’s reminders to us of the inferiority-to-evil of the gender.

Thus, I feel that Milton’s third goal in this poem is to enjoin his readers to conquer women, stripping them of all dignity – as he thinks they should conquer and “strip” all forms of what he would call, “earth” of their resources^12b

I’ll end my critique with a Saturday Night Live skit that well illustrates Milton’s stance. Unfortunately, this skit is not on YouTube, but it is well worth the extra click to Instagram:

Manly Men
¹³

P.S. I’ve been reading and researching quite a bit for these posts, so the interval between their completion and publishing is shrinking. My next projects will require at least as much, so I’ll be spreading my entries out to one every other week for a bit.
– Viola

¹ The link is to this blog’s entry, “Bohemia, Pt. 5”, which begins with the same quote as this one. In that entry, the quote led to discussion of the Catholic church’s executing those who translated The Bible into some native European languages and of the Protestant changes to various Catholic practices and beliefs – changes which included their initial opposition to the idea of free will. Oddly, Milton’s text re-instates the belief in free will – except that it seems to only be relevant to one’s ability to disobey (i.e., any good one does must be credited only to God.) – So the exercise of this “freedom” inevitably brings on God’s punishment. This interpretation of human “will” is practically spelled out when the narrator, in saying that God sends the angel Raphael to warn Adam of Satan, “fulfilld All Justice” for punishing all humankind for millennia over Adam’s disobeying a command not to eat a piece of fruit from the wrong tree.

² Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. (Per Wikipedia, probably written between1610–1611, Published 1623.) The link is to the Folger’s website for the play.
_. Wikipedia entry accessed 4/15/26, 1:03pm EST. For the play’s dating, the article cites:
Orgel, Stephen (1987). The Tempest. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-953590-3. OCLC 441786012.

³Milton, John. Paradise Lost (1667). The links are to this blog’s entry, “Against Nature, Pt. 4”, and The John Milton Reading Room website to the poem.

⁴ The link is to this blog’s second entry of this thread, which first sets out my “conquest v. sublimation” hypothesis about the Western canon’s oldest literary conflict.

⁵ Per Wikipedia, (ibid) “The Tempest” was probably written in 1610–1611. The first link goes directly to the “Date and sources” section of the article, the section which references The Oxford Shakespeare.
The second link is to the Wikipedia “Springtime Deliverance” section of the “Starving Time” article about Jamestown, the section that records that the fortunes of the colony started to turn when a doctor, food, and supplies arrived in the spring of 1610.
Accessed 4/25/26, 4:37 p.m., EST.

⁶ The link is to Folgier’s website for Tempest. Ibid.
_. a p. 70. b p. 62.

⁷ The link is the the Wikipedia article on “New Amsterdam”, saying that the Netherlands gave up their claim to the island in 1667.
Accessed 4/26/26, 7:18 a.m., EST.

⁸ The link is to the “Civil war, prose tracts, and marriage” section of the Wikipedia article on Milton, Accessed 3/24/26, 4:31 p.m., EST.

⁹ The link is to the “English Civil War” article in Wikipedia. The particular claim is near the top of the article, and the “Terminology” section has the first citation for the article’s material as Blair’s History of the Civil Wars. Google AI (4/26/26, 7:50 a.m., EST) supports my inference that this History did make this claim. (As always, though, I welcome my readers to correct me if this is not the case. – V)
Wikipedia article accessed 4/24/26, 7:29 a.m., EST.

¹⁰ The link is to Milton’s 1630 elegy to The Bard, a text I found on the Poetry Foundation website.

¹¹ The link is to this blog’s entry, “The Prosperity Gospel & False Dialogue, Part 10”, which discusses the “new world” as a capitalist project to remove dignity from work.

^12a The link is to my last entry on this subject, which gives three of the strongest examples of Milton’s preference for Adam over Eve. The ones to which I refer in the current entry further establish his general attitude toward women. In this regard, see also the quote in this linked entry comparing a woman to “earth and fleam [phlegm]”.

^12b I think Milton wants to make Satan (fire) an antihero to supplant earth (the element of Tempest’s traitorous conspirators, as noted in an earlier entry from this blog) as too feminine for a worthy antagonist (if not covert hero.) See, for example, Book 4 [814-819], comparing Satan to a spark setting off nitrus powder. Note also that Book 5 asserts that fire is the highest element – the one that “eats” everything below it – and that Earth is the lowest.[415-418] This might be the strongest argument yet that Paradise is a conquest text competing with the subtle Tempest.

¹³ snlreelz. “The wretched birth, miserable childhood, agonizingly painful adolescence, and appallingly vile and degrading death of Miles Cowperthwaite: Chapter Two: ‘I Am Nailed To The Hull.’” SNL skit with Host Michael Palin. Instagram. Transcript on SNL Transcripts Tonight.

Against Nature, Pt.5

We will call you Cygnus/The God of Balance you shall be

– Rush, “Hemispheres“¹

Before I finish with Milton, I want to explore a book which I think pairs well with this text, in that its protagonist has a desire for conquest that rivals that of Milton’s Satan

As opposed to Paradise Lost, however, this book’s² title, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (“Zen”), is modest, even wryly self-effacing, so I suspect that its author, Robert M. Pirsig, hadn’t intended for it to affect people the way it did – According to Anthony McWyatt, PhD³, it is “the best-selling philosophy book of all time.” I’ve discussed how I had been heavily influenced by Ayn Rand⁴, and it looks as though Zen, despite that its fans don’t have the organization of Rand’s acolytes, has stirred a similar ardor in them. Since I believe Rand had actually been satirizing the “values” her book ostensibly promotes, I feel justified in inquiring into Pirsig’s intentions. I find it especially tragic that, if neither of these authors actually believe in the ideals their followers espouse, the texts are leading our culture on an increasingly self-destructive path.

I have written many posts analyzing Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged (“Shrugged”), in a series that begins (as far as Shrugged is concerned) here⁵. To support my hypothesis about Zen probably⁶ won’t take such a detailed analysis.

I’ll start with the protagonist/narrator’s (and his alterego, Phredrus’s) chosen isolation. In Chapter 10, we find that he considers himself one of the scientists, described by Albert Einstein, who seek “escape from [their] noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.”^2b Whatever we can say for Einstein’s intelligence, wouldn’t a celebrated genius’ praise for this desire lead to alienating scientifically-minded young people from the society that their studies are supposed to help? Note that the world creeps ever closer to nuclear war, a danger not lessened by the desire of these geniuses for isolation. The sense of danger from Einstein’s speech increases when we think about the later passage: “The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or lover.”^2c One in this zealous state would be as likely to bring on a world-destroying apocalypse as any far-right Christian. We find more evidence of Phaedrus’s alienation from the following passage:

His wife and family seem to have suffered the most. His wife says those who tried to go beyond the barriers of his reserve found themselves facing a blank. My impression is that they were starved for some kind of affection which he never gave.

No one really knew him. That is evidently the way he wanted it, and that’s the way it was. Perhaps his aloneness was the result of his intelligence. Perhaps it was the cause. But the two were always together. An uncanny solitary intelligence.

This still doesn't do it though, because this and the image of a laser beam convey the idea that he was completely cold and unemotional, and that is not so. In his pursuit of what I have called the ghost of rationality he was a fanatic hunter.2d

Observe also the distance the narrator shows toward even his close friends. Early in the book, he leads them to drive their motorcycles through freezing weather, then (slowly) through extreme heat. He is so caught up in his own obsessions that he can show no sympathy for their discomfort or anger. Further, by Page 97, The protagonist has come to show less and less empathy for his son, Chris, the only one for whom he had shown any real care. The eleven-year-old boy hurts his ankle during their hike, and his father feels only contempt for what he calls his “egotism” in not telling him right away. He doesn’t show any concern that Chris might have a sprained or broken ankle that might need professional treatment. Later, when Chris starts to feel better and wants to continue the hike, our hero gets frightened (There is no indication that he is frightened for the boy any more than for himself,) and he cuts the walk short. Lastly, the few times the word “love” (or “lover”) is ever used positively is towards “forms”.⁷

The protagonist’s general isolation is especially conspicuous regarding women. The only female character of any importance to the narration is fellow-traveler Sylvia Sutherland, wife of the narrator’s friend, John, and she says almost nothing substantial. Although we know that the protagonist is also married, he uses the term “my wife” to refer to her only twice, at the very beginning of the story, and never quotes her (i.e., gives her her own voice.)

The narrator’s ostensive goal is to conquer the “ghost of reason,” a reason that, in the western mind, is separate from art. He is consumed by the idea of combining objectivity and subjectivity into a concept he calls “Quality,” an idea which he concludes must underlie the whole of reality^2f (yet also be a synonym for “the good”). In pursuit of this goal, he longs to conquer aestheticians (those who theorize about the nature of art) so they “have to shut up.”^2g He explains the power that “a real understanding of Quality” would give him: It “captures the System, tames it, and puts it to work for one’s own personal use, while leaving one completely free to fulfill his inner destiny.”^2g He later says that “irrational elements [religion and art] are crying for assimilation.”^2h Lastly, he confesses, “I’m not basically interested in what’s new in [the art world, and John] probably knows it and for that reason never talks about it to me. Just the reverse of the motorcycle maintenance situation. I wonder if I look as glassy-eyed now as he does when I talk about rods and pistons.”²ⁱ Thus, his most likely desire is to conquer art.

We find yet more support for this hypothesis looking at what he considers one of the insights he attains in pursuing his goal. The narrator finds in the work of a scientific theorist, Jules Henri Poincaré, a principle of what recognizes Quality – the “subliminal ego”. ^2J,8 The name reveals this principle to be an appropriation of what Freud called sublimation^8a, a process of managing pain through the creation of something that benefits one’s society. This process is what underlies the feminine principle⁹. Poincaré (and our Narrator) remove the process and pain, describing the recognition as “a true esthetic feeling which all mathematicians know, … but of which the profane are so ignorant as often to be tempted to smile.” The narrator specifies that Poincaré is speaking not of beauty that appeals to the senses, but the “classic” sense of the “relation of things that results in the universal harmony that is the sole objective reality.”^2k The rest of the book further associates this sense and “Quality” with technology, attacking the separation between the fine arts and science & technology and minimizing the former to confer all merit to the latter.

I’ve mentioned Star Trek a few times on this blog – I wonder if my summary of Zen and description of its protagonist’s drive to assimilate reminds anyone else of the Borg¹⁰. In any case, I hope I’ve made a good case that its author had not intended his fans to see his narrator as the icon they made of him.

When finishing this entry, the Monty Python Life of Brian (1979) clip below occurred to me immediately…

¹¹

…But, perhaps more importantly, we should remember the Dr. Who quote below:

¹²

¹ Link is to the Wikipedia article on the song series, “Cygnus X-1,” by the rock band Rush. The link goes directly to a summary of “Book II” of the series, on the album, Hemispheres. There are conflicting interpretations to this piece, so the full lyrics are on genius.com (here) for anyone who wants to explore further.

² Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974). uploaded from The Arvind Gupta Collection on June 22, 2016 to Internet Archive.
_.^2b & ^2c p. 50, ^2d p. 40, ^2e p. 94, ^2f 113, ^2g p. 99, ^2h p. 117, ²ⁱ p. 69, ^{2j & 2k} p. 121 (See also fn. 7 below.)

³ McWatt, Anthony, PhD. Robert Pirsig & His Metaphysics of Quality. Philosophy Now (2017). McWatt gets eight total hits on Google Scholar – almost exclusively closely related to his 2004 thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy.
Google Scholar results Accessed 4/9/26, 7:44 am EST.

⁴ Links are to three of this blog’s posts about Ayn Rand’s influence on my development:
. The first, “Message Board Personal Archives, Pt. 2,” explains how I was introduced to her ideas.
. The second, “Historical Analysis and Literature, Part 6, shows the connection between my brother’s abuse (and his enrolling my younger sister as his ally) and my attraction to and perseverance in following her philosophy
. The third, “Historical Analysis and Literature, Part 8,” goes deeper into why I believe that Will attacked her so often over the years.

⁵ Link is to this blog’s “Roots and Stems, Pt. 3” post, the first post that states the aforementioned hypothesis. This title has 22 parts, for anyone interested in a very deep dive.

⁶ If I get enough questions or disagreements, I have more backup, though I’m hoping what I wrote here is sufficient.

⁷ Positive examples of “love”: Toward the “exquisite” coastal country (p. 159), science (p. 50), “Plato’s soaring generalities” (p. 166), and “everything” (p.53).
_. Neutral examples: When Aristotle’s Rhetoric discusses it as an abstract concept (p. 162), and when Plato “pretends to try to understand” it (p. 167) or delivers a discourse on it in his “Phaedrus” dialogue (p. 172).
_. Negative examples: “The system loves you” when “you learn not to do ‘just what you like’” (p. 104), and rhetoric as “forms and mannerisms … loved by the worst” (p. 171).

⁸ Poincaré, Jules Henri. Science and Method (1908). Internet Archive. p. 57. Accessed 4/1/26, 4:58 pm EST. I also checked the Google Books version, Accessed 4/1/26, 4:56 pm EST.
Both versions use the term, “subliminal ego.” Pirsig uses the term, “subliminal self.” Note how Pirsig changes the term and ignores Poincaré’s phrasing to mislead the reader in Zen’s narrative on the scientific theorist. The narrator claims that Poincaré “hypothesized that [the selection of facts that exemplify likenesses hidden under apparent divergences] is made by what he called the “subliminal self,” an entity that corresponds exactly with what Phaedrus called preintellectual awareness. However, Poincaré, in his book that defined the subliminal ego, had implied that the phrase had already been coined, which coining was likely by Sigmund Freud, since the psychological theorist had published texts discussing sublimation in 1905 and the ego in 1910.^8a Further, according to the National Library of Medicine^8b, precursors to the psychoanalytic ego concept were used in “Freud’s Project (Freud, 1895) and his earlier topographic theory (e.g., [The Interpretation of Dreams], 1900).”

^8a Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).
Freud, Sigmund. The Psycho-Analytic View of Psychogenic Disturbance of Vision (, 1910e, p. 213.)

^8b Boag, Simon. “Ego, drives, and the dynamics of internal objects.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 5 666. 1 Jul. 2014, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00666
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4076885/#B34
Accessed 4/2/26, 8:15 a.m., EST.

⁹ I discuss my definitions of “masculine” and “feminine” in this blog’s “Essential Concepts” post here. I believe the definition of “feminine” reasonably puts sublimation under the feminine principle. I would be interested if any of my readers disagree with this deduction.

¹⁰ Link is to the Wikipedia article on the “Borg”. Accessed 4/14/26, 12:06 p.m., EST.

¹¹ lucasbeer. “Life Of Brian – ‘You are all individuals’” YouTube, (posted 11/21/2014)
Accessed 4/14/26.

¹² This is a Dr. Who quote I used in this blog’s “Grower’s Kabbalah” series. The illustration originally came from “Know Your Meme.”

Against Nature, Pt. 4

To the [chief leaders of his legions] Satan directs his Speech, comforts them with hope yet of regaining Heaven, but tells them lastly of a new World and new kind of Creature to be created, according to an ancient Prophesie or report in Heaven…

– Paradise Lost, Book 1, The Argument¹

O, brave new world that has such people in’t!

The Tempest²

I wanted to explore the first book quoted above – one I had read as part of my Western Canon reading program³ – from the “Conquest vs. Sublimation” perspective I formed in Part 2 of this series.

Paradise Lost’s (“PL’s”) first verse, calling on God himself for inspiration in its writing, establishes the poet himself as the narrator. Milton’s ostensive rivalry, as also shown in this verse, is with Dante⁴, a pagan-inspired “Papist”. Looking at his text from this board’s new perspective, however⁵, I would say that his main argument is with Shakespeare.

Our story begins soon after God the Father has cast his conquered rebel angels into “bottomless perdition.” Here, Satan convinces the rest to continue their rebellion by subtler means: “As being the contrary to his high will/Whom we resist. If then his Providence/Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,/Our labour must be to pervert that end,/And out of good still to find means of evil; [ 165 ]”

Soon, God creates the first humans. In the passage where He creates Eve, Milton immediately informs us of both her inferiority to Adam⁶ and of the first man’s infatuation with her. When he eats the apple, although some argue⁷ that Adam’s reasoning makes him a greater “sinner” than Eve, Milton is obviously presenting our first father as the admirable, noble one – Our first mother (thus the only female in the story of any importance) is just a narcissistic fool.

Milton’s blatant preference to the “absolute ruler,” Adam, irked me, even though I was still hanging on to my Objectivist⁸ (i.e., man-worshipping) “values” when I read this text. The author’s preference is especially glaring in three passages – in:

Book 4, where I got the quoted adjective above: “[Their maker placed] true autority in men; though both [ 295 ]/Not equal, as thir sex not equal seemd;/For contemplation hee and valour formd,/For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace,/Hee for God only, shee for God in him:/His fair large Front and Eye sublime declar’d [ 300 ]/Absolute rule…”

Book 8: Adam, talking with the Archangel Raphael, first wonders why Nature grants the earth such “nobility” that countless stars exist just to light it. Raphael essentially tells him not to bother with such questions – to leave his thoughts “to God above, him serve and feare”. Then Adam narrates his first day and God’s instructions – instructions including that he can eat from everything in the Garden except from the tree of knowledge. After naming the animals and being told they are all far beneath him, he asks for a consort with whom he can talk, and God creates Eve. Describing his feelings for this companion, Adam says that either “…Nature faild in mee, and left some part/Not proof enough such Object to sustain, [ 535 ]/Or from my side subducting, took perhaps More then enough; at least on her bestow’d/Too much of Ornament, in outward shew/Elaborate, of inward less exact.” This musing seems to parallel the one from the beginning of this Book, the one that I mention about Nature’s excesses. Raphael warns our first father not to take his consort too seriously – “Oft times nothing profits more/Then self esteem, grounded on just and right/Well manag’d; of that skill the more thou know’st,/The more she will acknowledge thee her Head…” and,

Book 10: God’s son reproaches Adam for the gallant choice of sharing Eve’s sin and punishment,⁹ reproaches him by saying that this first man’s “perfection far excell’d / Hers in all real dignity … Adorn’d / She was indeed…”

Looking at Wikipedia,¹⁰ I found information about Milton’s life which provided a clue to the attitudes I see in his writing. It said that, at 34, he married a 17-year-old girl, that he “found her intellectually unsatisfying,” and that she initially refused to consummate the marriage and soon returned to her parents. She came back in 1645, when her family was bankrupt^b and after Milton had courted another woman. Finding that a highly-educated 34-year old man would have expressed disappointment in his uneducated 17-year-old wife’s conversation a bit suspect, I looked at the tracts he wrote on the need for more lenient divorces¹¹ and found the following passages¹²:

The sobrest and best govern'd men are least practiz'd in these affairs; and who knowes not that the bashfull mutenes of a virgin may oft-times hide all the unlivelines and naturall sloth which is really unfit for conversation...

[I]f he be such as hath spent his youth unblamably, and layd up his chiefest earthly comforts in the enjoyment of a contented mariage, nor did neglect that furderance which was to be obtain'd therein by constant prayers, when he shall find himselfe bound fast to an uncomplying discord of nature, or, as it oft happens, to an image of earth and fleam, with whom he lookt to be the copartner of a sweet and gladsome society, and sees withall that his bondage is now inevitable, though he be almost the strongest Christian, he will be ready to dispair in vertue, and mutin against divine providence...

I found another clue to his attitude as well as to his setting Dante as his ostensive rival, a clue in Wikipedia’s quoting the poet about his enjoyment of Florence, and the “friendly intercourse” he had with the learned gentlemen there.¹³

I’ll write more on this topic. Until then, I’ll leave you to enjoy your anticipayaytion…

¹⁴

¹Milton, John. Paradise Lost (1667). The John Milton Reading Room.
Accessed 3/22/26

² Shakespeare, William. The Tempest (1610–1611)
This blog has a series on the development of the North American “new world,” a series that draws from this play. I’ll link the first part here.

³ Links are to this blog’s posts, “Historical Analysis and Literature, Part 13” and “Message Board Personal Archives, Pt. 2,” which describe why and from where I selected books to familiarize myself with this canon.

⁴ Link is to the Wikipedia entry for Dante Alighieri.
Accessed 3/25/26, 3:35 p.m. EST.

⁵ Link is to this blog’s “The Divine Comedy, Part 13” which would likely put Dante on the “conquest” side. For my conclusion of this series, click here.

⁶ Link is to this blog’s first entry of this “Against Nature” series, where I narrate my realization of our country’s patriarchal leaders’ final goal.

⁷ Link is to the Wikipedia entry for the Synopsis of Paradise Lost. Accessed 3/25/26, 4:10 p.m. EST.

⁸ Link is to this blog’s “Message Board Personal Archives, Pt. 2”, where I tell of my introduction to the philosophy and how my abusive brother’s condemnation of Ayn Rand’s work led me to immerse myself further into it, remaining a fairly uncritical admirer far longer than I would have been otherwise.

⁹ This chivalry directly contradicts The Bible, in which Adam immediately blames Eve for giving him the apple.

¹⁰ Link is to the Wikipedia entry for John Milton. Accessed 3/22/26, 3:36 p.m. EST.
_. ^b Although the bankruptcy of his wife’s family is not mentioned here, from my research it seems to be common knowledge, as does her (relative?) lack of education. As usual, I would be happy to hear from my readers if either of these assertions is incorrect.

¹¹ van den Berg, Sara. “Women, Children, and the Rhetoric of Milton’s Divorce Tracts”. Early Modern Literary Studies 10.1 (May, 2004): 4.1-13 on Sheffield Hallam University website.
Accessed 3/24/26. I’m using this text to bring attention to the relevant quotes.

¹² The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce The John Milton Reading Room
Accessed 3/24/26.

¹³ Link is to the Wikipedia entry for John Milton. (ibid.)

¹⁴ Bionic Disco. “Heinz Ketchup ‘Anticipation’ Commercial (1977)”. YouTube.
Accessed 3/25/26.