Four Novels, One Revolution

Over the past several years I have written four novels. I did not conceive them as a series. They began as separate obsessions: a buried manuscript in a Montevideo café, an ancient massacre beneath the foundations of Western civilization, a novelist whose imagination becomes contested territory the moment it exceeds what the culture can absorb, and a woman whose satire is turned by the man she loves into a political faith.

Only gradually did I understand that each of these obsessions was circling the same buried question.

The question begins in FERADIM. What happens to a civilization after an original revolutionary possibility is violently suppressed and then transformed into something sacred?

That question of revolution, of ordinary people against empire, is the thread that connects all four novels. It is also, I have come to believe, one of the central unasked questions of our time.

FERADIM imagines the original wound: Western civilization founded on a sanctified lie. An atrocity is buried. Power is anointed. A massacre is transformed into sacred history. The revolutionary possibility that might have changed everything is absorbed into the structure of power, consecrated, and made untouchable. The lie becomes the foundation. And the pattern, atrocity followed by sanctification, violence followed by worship, repeats itself across centuries.

The Narcissism of the Sacred asks what two thousand years of living inside that aborted revolution produces. I refer to the psychological consequences. The spiritual ones. What happens to human beings when the sacrifice of what is true for what appears safe has been repeated so many times, across so many generations, that it is no longer experienced as a sacrifice at all? When trading genuine love, freedom, and belonging for symbolic substitutes feels like the natural order of things?

That’s just the way things are.

Then a figure like Galen comes along. He informs us that the chair has no bottom. He refuses to sit in it. He builds with wood instead of air. He is dangerous because he reminds people that the fraud is a choice.

This is a civilization like someone who has never left a bad marriage and has forgotten what a good one feels like. A civilization so habituated to the fraud that it has lost the capacity to imagine the alternative.

In one of Galen’s workshops, he breaks the students into two groups. One is asked to design a utopian space and the other a dystopian one. They work independently. When they come together, they are horrified to discover that their designs are nearly identical. They have grown so accustomed to allowing something else to imagine life for them that they can no longer imagine anything better on their own.

Which is precisely where 001-054 begins.

What happens to a civilization that has lost the capacity to imagine its own healing? What happens when power moves to enclose imagination itself, the one human faculty still capable of conceiving something genuinely different?

Whitman Kessler’s revolt is existential. He comes to understand that his imagination is more valuable than everything the system offers him in exchange for compliance: legitimacy, prestige, safety, the prize. The system understands this too. That is why it moves to harness him with such relentless precision.

Lord Atlas begins when the language of revolution has become available for capture.

Suzanne Dreyfus writes a satirical libertarian manifesto for the man she loves. She means to expose the fantasy of the sovereign individual, the person who imagines himself standing above obligation and owing nothing to the human community that made his life possible.

Garrick Cripps reads her satire as revelation.

He turns it into a political faith. He takes the human longing for freedom, love, meaning, and belonging and offers domination in their place. He builds a movement around the oldest fraud in civilization: surrender your agency to power, and power will make you free.

Suzanne is vulnerable to that bargain because her deepest longing is to belong. Garrick makes power feel like love. She remains bound to him long after she understands what he has become.

Carson McCready has known belonging in another form. His life has been shaped by obligations freely accepted and relationships that ask him to become more fully himself. He does not seek revolution, history, or power. But when Suzanne’s bargain with Garrick becomes lethal, Carson is compelled to act.

The revolution in Lord Atlas has become a struggle over the meaning of freedom itself. Garrick imagines freedom as release from responsibility. Suzanne must recover the agency she surrendered to him. Carson and Laura understand freedom as the capacity to recognize an obligation and accept it freely.

When Laura asks Carson why some people act while others do not, he tells her that heroism may be an evolutionary necessity. Human beings survive because some people continue to act when fear, passivity, selfishness, or power overwhelms everyone else.

Laura answers:

“In that case, we better start evolving, again. I’ll drive.”

Taken together, the four novels form an inquiry into the long afterlife of an aborted revolution. What was buried at the origin did not disappear. It went underground and changed shape. The civilization that buried it changed with it, slowly, across centuries, until the wound became invisible even to the people living inside it. Until the lie felt like truth. Until the chair made of air felt like the only chair there was. Until domination could call itself freedom and be believed.

Julian Weissman, who had been a psychoanalyst before turning to ancient history, identifies the wound and the cover-up in the first novel. Galen’s workshops and Isabel’s reaction to them explore the afterlife of that wound in The Narcissism of the Sacred. Whitman, by the time he reaches the Oregon coast, is still fighting for the right to imagine freedom while an audience of ancient rocks listens, as they listened to the human voice long before the lie was told. Suzanne, Carson, and Laura confront a civilization in which the language of freedom has been captured by people who seek power over others.

The revolutionary possibility was never destroyed. It was buried.

In FERADIM, the original revolution is exposed.

In The Narcissism of the Sacred, it keeps being found, hand to hand, reader to reader.

In 001-054, it keeps being told, in stories, one voice at a time.

In Lord Atlas, it becomes the responsibility to act once freedom has been emptied of meaning and placed in the service of power.

“In that case, we better start evolving, again. I’ll drive.”